All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [264]
It was Sugar-Boy all right, and I didn’t want to see him. If he should raise his head he would look right at me. Now while he was sunk in the picture magazine I tried for the door. I edged over to one side easy and was almost past his natural area of vision when he lifted his head and our eyes met. He rose from the chair and came toward me.
I gave an ambiguous nod which might have served merely for recognition, a rather chilly and discouraging recognition, or for a signal to follow me out to the hall where we could talk. He took the latter interpretation, and followed me. I didn’t wait just outside the door, but move some distance across the hall to the steps (those newspaper rooms in public libraries are always in a half basement, next to the men’s latrine) which led up to the main lobby. Maybe he would read something into that extra distance. But he didn’t. He came padding over to me, with his blue serge trousers bagging down low of his can and the tops crumpling over his black, soft-leather box-toed shoes.
“How-how-how–” he began, and the face began its pained, apologetic contortions, and the spit flew.
“I’m making out,” I said, “How’re you making out?”
“Aw-aw-aw-right.”
He stood there in the dingy, dimly lit basement hall of the public library with the cigarette butts on the cement floor around us and the door of the men’s latrine behind us and the air smelling of dry paper and dust and disinfectant. It was eleven-thirty in the morning and outside the gray sky dripped steadily like a sogged old awning. We looked at each other. Each one knew the other was there out of the rain because he had no other place to go.
He shuffled his feet on the floor, looked down to the floor, then back up at me. “I-I-I could-a had a-a-a-a job,” he declared earnestly.
“Sure,” I said, without much interest.
“I-I-I-I just didn’t wa-wa-wa-want one. Not yet,” he said. “I didn’t fee-fee-feel like no job yet.”
“Sure,” I repeated.
“I-I-I got me some mo-mo-money saved up,” he said apologetically.
“Sure.”
He looked searchingly at me. “Y-y-y-you got a job?” he asked.
I shook my head, but was about to say in my defense what he had just said, that I could have had one if I had wanted. I could have been sitting up in a nice office next door to Tint Duffy’s office with my feet on a mahogany desk. If I had wanted. And as that crossed my mind, with the momentary flicker of weary self-irony, I suddenly saw like a blaze of lightening and a clap of thunder what the Lord had put before me. Duffy, I thought, Duffy.
And there was Sugar-Boy standing before me.
“Listen,” I said, and leaned toward him in the empty hall, “listen, do you know who killed the Boss?”
The biggish head rolled a little to one side on the little stem of a neck as he looked up at me and the face began its painful twitching. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah–the son-of-a-bi-bi-bitch and I-I-I shot him.”
“Yeah,” I said, “you shot Stanton–” and I thought with an instantaneous stab of Adam Stanton alive a long time back and now dead, and I hated the malformed, sad little creature before me–“yeah, you shot him.
The head rolled slightly and tiredly on the neck, and he repeated, “I-I-I shot him.”
But suppose you don’t know,” I said, leaning, “suppose there was somebody behind Stanton, somebody who framed him to do it.”
I let that sink in, and watched his face twitch while no sound came.
“Suppose,” I continued, “suppose I could tell you who–suppose I could prove it–what would you do?”
Suddenly his face wasn’t twitching. It was smooth as a baby’s and peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.
“What would you do?” I demanded
“I’d kill the son-of-a-bitch,” he said. And he had not stuttered at all.
“They’d hang you,” I said.
“I’d k-k-k-kill him. They couldn’t h-h-h-hang me before I killed him.”
“Remember,” I whispered, leaning closer, “they’d hang you.”
He stared up at me, prying into my face. “Who-who-who