After the First Death - Lawrence Block [35]
“I can.”
“Huh? Oh. Well, I’ll make the call, I’ll see what I can find out. It’s Linda, isn’t it?”
“Bight.”
“You have Gwen’s number?”
I gave it to him.
“Should I call you back?”
“I’ll call you. Half an hour.”
I rang him back thirty minutes later, to the minute. He told me what I wanted to know. He was lucky. If he hadn’t had it, I’d have set the police on him. I honestly would have done it. It would have accomplished nothing, it would have hurt me more than it would have helped, but I was in a black and hateful mood, and when you don’t know who your enemies are you have to hate your friends. Any port in a storm.
12
LINDA TILLOU HAMMILL PLIMPTON CRANE HAD A NEW NAME, a new phone number, and lived in a new city, the three of which combined to make it highly unlikely that I could have found her on my own. She had been recently divorced from Plimpton when last I’d heard of her, and I now learned from Gwen via Kay and Doug that she had since married and divorced Crane, in whose Larchmont home she presently lived with Hammill’s son and Plimpton’s daughter.
The Larchmont train leaves from Grand Central and passes through the Hundred Twenty-fifth Street station en route to the Westchester suburbs. I weighed the relative perils of boarding at Grand Central, where cops habitually lie in wait for arriving and departing fugitives, or to be wildly conspicuous as one white face in the black sea of Harlem. Grand Central, moreover, was close enough to walk to, which gave it a decided edge. I did so, and drank coffee until they called a Larchmont train, and boarded it, and bought a ticket from the conductor.
The ride was pleasantly uneventful. Someone had abandoned a copy of the World Journal, and I hid behind it all the way to Larchmont. No one took undue notice of me. There was a gas station a block from the Larchmont terminal. A skinny kid there put down a copy of Road and Track long enough to tell me how to find Merrimack Drive. It took me about fifteen minutes to walk to her house.
A ranch house, red brick with white clapboard trim, set far back on a wide and deep lot, with a couple of postwar oak trees in front. The garage door was closed and there was no car parked in the driveway or at the curb. I checked the garage. A green MGB nestled among a sprawl of kids’ toys. The obvious car for a suburban mother of two. Linda had not changed.
Either she was home alone or she was out with someone, in which case there would be a babysitter watching her young. It was somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven—I had never gotten around to replacing my purloined watch. I lit a cigarette, smoked part of it, put it out, and went to the front door and rang the bell.
There was a peephole in the door. I put my hand over it. I heard someone open the peephole for an unsuccessful reconnaisance, then Linda’s voice asking who it was.
“Bela Lugosi,” I said.
It was the sort of reply usually forthcoming from the sort of morons she was friendly with. The lock turned and the door opened and I got a foot in it, and she said, “You must be some kind of a—” and saw my face. Her eyes cracked and she said, “You son of a bitch,” and tried to slam the door. I put a shoulder into it. It flew open. She backed away, trembling, and I kicked the door shut behind me.
She was on the tall side, taller than Gwen, but as thin and angular as a stiletto. Her hair was cut short and dyed black, then tipped silver. She had large brown eyes punctuated by tiny pupils.
“What are you doing here?”
“I have to talk to you.”
“Did you bring your knife, killer?” She laughed like glass breaking. “Are you going to kill me?”
“No.”
“What on earth do you want from me?”
“Information.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m not.” She was backing away toward the door, and I moved around her to the left to leave her no place to ran. “I didn’t kill that girl I didn’t kill either of them.”
“I only heard about the one Sunday. Did you kill another one since?”
“I never killed anybody. Not five years ago and not now.” She started to