361 - Donald E. Westlake [9]
“He lost a wife.”
“It wasn’t me. I come to warn you. I should of stayed away in the first place.”
I said, “Who did it, Smitty? Who killed my father? Who killed Bill’s wife?”
He shook his head. “No. You two are crazy. You’ll go after them, and they’ll trace it back to me. I just come to do you a friendly gesture. Because of your old man. I don’t want to get killed.”
“What are their names, Smitty?”
“They’ll trace it back to me. I don’t talk any more.”
I said, “Bill.”
It was a long night. We kept the drapes shut. Bill knocked him out and I woke him up. But there was somebody in the world who could scare Smitty more from a distance than we could close up. The last time, I didn’t wake him. We dumped him in a closet and locked the door and went to sleep.
Four
In the morning, before we left, Bill wanted to do something nutty like bury him in the cellar or leave him on a side road in his own car and with a bullet in his head from his own gun. “If we let him live,” he argued, “he’ll go right back and let them know we’re coming.”
“No, he won’t,” I said. I looked at Smitty and talked to Bill. “He’ll have to tell them he talked to us. They won’t believe he didn’t give names. So he won’t go back to New York at all.”
“No,” he said. “I won’t.” His words were slurred, because of his puffed lips.
“He’ll go west some place,” I said, “and change his name.”
He caught the quote. He said, “You won’t ever hear from me again.”
After a while, Bill took my word for it, and moved his Mercury out of the driveway. Smitty backed his Plymouth out and drove away. He didn’t pause to ask directions.
Bill had to go into town and say goodbye to his boss and his kid, and get his money out of the bank. I stayed behind and packed suitcases and locked the windows. When he came back, we loaded the trunk and headed for New York.
I was still shaky in the right-hand seat. I tried driving for a while, but it was too hard. Not only the distance judgment, also the right ankle. They hadn’t been able to fix it completely. It wouldn’t bend any more, and made me gimp a little. I had to push the accelerator down with my heel, and it was awkward. So we switched again, and Bill drove the rest of the way. We went down through Pennsylvania, 11 and Carbondale and 106 and the Delaware Water Gap. It was the same distance, and 17 made us leery.
We went down Jersey and over the bridge to Staten Island and across Staten Island and over the new bridge to Brooklyn. Then we went up the Belt Parkway and through the tunnel into Manhattan.
We’d kept Smitty’s revolver. Bill had a Luger that maybe still worked, but no ammunition for it. He’d tried in Binghamton, but neither he nor the clerk was sure what size cartridge it wanted. He was going to try again in New York. Also in the trunk we had two deer rifles.
We got a hotel way up Broadway, 72nd Street, fairly cheap with a garage. Bill had almost four thousand dollars. I had not quite a hundred. The Air Force had sent the second hundred of my mustering-out pay to the hospital. God knew where the third hundred would go. That should be coming soon. Next Monday I’d be out two months. That seemed hard to believe.
It was only a little after two when we checked in. Bill found a bank a couple blocks down from the hotel. He put three grand in a joint checking account. We both signed cards and got a checkbook. They were unhappy. They wanted to give us one with our names on the checks.
After lunch, we went back to the room and sat on the beds. Bill said, “Now what?”
I said, “We go in two directions. The license plate of Smitty’s car is one. But I think that was probably stolen. The other is Dad. He was a lawyer in New York, way back when. He had something to do with the underworld.”
“That’s a lie. That punk was lying.”
“No. It’s something from that time that killed him. They were looking for him, maybe. He figured it was