The Long Wait Read online

  I said, “Too late, Pop. They’re here now.”

  “Oh, my God, Johnny!”

  “See you later, Pop.” I hung up and opened the door. The bruiser was watching the elevator and didn’t see me come out. The other guy was just getting the clerk’s attention and had the guy reaching for the registry cards when I walked up and stood beside him.

  Maybe he didn’t expect anything like that at all. He was looking at the card with “John McBride” scrawled across the top line, cursing silently to himself, when I said, “I’m not hard to find, friend.”

  Fingers seemed to crawl up his neck under the skin and peel the flesh back from his face. He dropped the card and I saw his hands start to come out slow and deliberately to take me apart right there and I looked down at him some and said. “You put your hands on me and I’ll knock you right on your goddamn ass.”

  His hands stopped halfway to my neck and his eyes got wider and wider until there wasn’t any place else for the lids to go. The bruiser came up on the double with a billy out and ready, looked at me, then his partner while he said, “This the guy?” caught the faint nod and came back to me again.

  “Well, well,” he said.

  I grinned at the both of them. “Don’t let your positions go to your heads, pallies. Take me rough and I bet they carry three people out of here.” I grinned some more and kept my eyes on the billy.

  The guy with the billy worked up a passable smile. “You sure sound tough. You sure do.” He made like it was all a surprise to him, but he put the billy away. The other guy was staring at me in utter fascination. His hands had dropped, but his eyes hadn’t. They were gone, completely gone. They were lifeless without being dead, yet there was death and hatred in them like I had never seen before.

  Then they squinted a little bit shut and his face twisted wryly back into shape. “Move, Johnny. Stay in front of me and I hope to hell you try to run for it. I hope to hell you try so I can break your spine in half with a bullet.”

  I don’t scare easy. In fact, I don’t scare worth a damn. Anything that could ever scare me had already done it and now there wasn’t anything left I’d let push me. I looked at each one of them so they’d know it and they knew it. Then I walked out front and got into the police car and let the bruiser and the other guy squeeze me in. The bruiser grunted to himself a couple of times, a sound that meant he was enjoying himself. The other one just sat and when he wasn’t staring at me, stared straight ahead.

  His name was Captain Lindsey. The sign on his desk said so. The other was either Tucker somebody or somebody Tucker because that’s what the captain called him. Being in the room didn’t happen just like that. There was more to it, a kind of open-mouthed wonder about the whole thing like the janitor who let his broom drop and the desk sergeant who stopped talking in the middle of a sentence to a guy he was bawling out and the news reporter who yelled, “Gawdl” and dashed into the press room for his camera.

  He didn’t get any pictures or any story because Lindsey took me into his room where there was a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. The two of them took the chairs and let me stand there.

  When I stood there long enough Lindsey said, “You’re a nervy bastard, Johnny. I never thought I’d see it happen like that.”

  I pulled out a smoke and took my time lighting it. Now it was my turn. I said, “You sure you’re not making a mistake?”

  The two cops exchanged glances. Lindsey smiled and shook his head. “How could I ever forget you, Johnny?”

  “Oh, lots of people make mistakes, you know.” I let the smoke stream out through my nose and decided to make it short and sweet. “If you’re holding me on a charge, name it or shut your face. I don’t like being hauled into a crummy police station and talked to.”

  Lindsey must have been saving that one sneer up for a long time. “I don’t know what kind of an angle you think you’re playing, McBride, and I don’t give a damn. The charge is murder. It’s murder five years old and it’s the murder of the best friend a guy ever had. It’s a murder you’ll swing for and when you come down through the trap I’m going to be right there m the front row so I can see every goddamn twitch you make and there in the autopsy room when they carve the guts out of you and if nobody claims the body I’ll do it myself and feed you to the pigs at the county farm. That’s what the charge is. Now do you understand it?”

  Now I was understanding a lot of things including the way Pop’s voice cracked over the phone. They weren’t so pretty. This game was dirtier than I thought and I didn’t know whether I was going to like it so much.

  Murder. I was expected to shake in my shoes.

  Like I said, I didn’t scare easy. They saw it on my face again and were wondering why. This time I leaned on Lindsey’s desk and gave him a mouthful of smoke to let him know how I felt about it. “Prove it,” I said.

  His face was cold as ice. “That’s a crappy angle. That’s real crappy, McBride. The last time you didn’t stay around long enough to know what we had, did you? Don’t mind my laugh. I’m getting a charge out of this. I love every bit of it. I want to see you go right through all the stages until there’s nothing left but jelly. You didn’t know we found the gun and got the best sets of prints you ever saw, did you? Sure, Johnny, I’ll prove it. Right now. I want to watch your face change.”

  He pushed himself away from the desk and nodded for Tucker to get behind me. We went down the hall where the reporter was screaming to be let in on the deal and into another room with a lot of tricky gadgets and a sign over the door that said LABORATORY. Lindsey must have looked at the card so often that he knew exactly where it was. He pulled it out of the file, stuck it in the slide of a projector and switched on the light.

  They were the prettiest set of fingerprints I’d ever seen in my life. Nice and clear with some real tricky swirls in the middle. Tucker tapped me on the shoulder. “Over here, tough boy.”

  Lindsey was waiting at the desk with a brand-new index card in front of him. He squeezed a quarter-inch of printer’s ink out of a tube into a glass plate and began spreading it out with a rubber roller. When it covered the plate the way he wanted it he picked up my hand and pushed the tip of my forefinger in the mess.

  Maybe he thought I messed up the card purposely. He grabbed my finger and did it carefully this time.

  The same thing happened again like I knew it would and he said something foul.

  Instead of a print there was a solid black smudge because I didn’t have any fingerprints.

  I shouldn’t have laughed, but I couldn’t help it. The back of his hand smashed into my mouth and before he could do it again I hooked him under the chin and he and the desk and the junk slammed the floor. Tucker had time to get the billy unlimbered but not enough time to place it right. The thing ripped my coat open all the way up my sleeve and went back for another try. I had him then. I had him so goddamn good I nearly took his gut off. He folded up and never felt his face get turned into a squashed ripe tomato. I had time to see him vomit all over himself before my own head burst open in a blaze of fiery streaks that sent a curse of ungodly pain down into every single little nerve fiber throughout my body and I knew that this was what it was like to die. There was a crazy, violent screaming behind me that came from Lindsey’s contorted mouth and it was the last thing I thought I’d ever hear again.

  It was, for a long, long time.

  Sound came back first. It was a voice that said, “You’re a fool for doing that, Lindsey.”

  Then another voice that quavered slightly. “I should have killed him. Honest to God, I tried. I hope the bastard dies.”

  Somebody else was there too. “Not me. I hope he lives. I’ll work him over like he’s never been worked over before, so help me!”

  I wanted to answer that and couldn’t. My head was shrieking with the pain in it and I felt my legs pulling up in a tight knot. I waited until it passed and made my eyes open. I was on a metal bed in a room that was filled with people. Everything else was whi
te and the air had a sharp, pungent odor.

  There was Lindsey with a lump on his jaw and Tucker still faintly recognizable through a maze of bandages and two other men in dark suits, a flat-faced girl in a white uniform talking to two more white uniforms with stethoscopes around their necks. The last two were looking at a set of films and they were nodding.

  When they reached a decision one said, “Concussion. Should have been a fracture. I don’t know how he got away with it.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, and everybody looked at me. I was popular again.

  Things were quiet too long. Lindsey smiled when he shouldn’t have smiled. He came over and sat on the edge of the bed like an old friend and smiled some more. “Ever hear of Dillinger, Johnny? He went to a lot of trouble getting his fingertips cut off too. It didn’t work. You’re a little smarter than Dillinger ... or you had a better job done. We can’t make them out yet, but they’ll come through. Up in Washington they have ways of doing those things, and if there’s so much as an eighth of an inch of ridging left they can prove it if it matches up. You got a little time yet, kid. With Dillinger they had Bertillon measurements and photographs and we don’t have anything like that on you. It’s a cute setup if ever I saw one ... everyone and his brother knows you and we can’t prove it.”

  Tucker made a loud noise behind his bandages. “Hell, you ain’t letting him get away with it, are you?”

  There was no mirth in Lindsey’s laugh. “He’s not getting away with anything. Not one goddamn thing. The only way he can get out of this town is dead. Walk around, Johnny. Go see all your friends. Have yourself some fun because you don’t have much time to do it in.”

  I thought Tucker was going to make a try for me right then. He would have if Lindsey hadn’t put his arm up to stop him. His eyes under the gauze were red little marbles that tried to do what his hands couldn’t do. “Damn it, we gotta hold him! Lindsey, if you let him....”

  “Shut up. We can’t do a thing right now. If I try to book him a lawyer’ll have him out in five minutes.” He turned back to me. “Just stay in town. Remember that. I’ll be one step behind you all the way.”

  Hell, I had to get in my two cents worth. It wouldn’t be any fun if I couldn’t sound off when I felt like it. “You remember something too. Every time you put your hands on me I’ll knock you on your goddamn ass like I did before and that goes for your stooge as well.”

  Somebody choked a little.

  Somebody swore.

  The doctor told them to go and the nurse closed the door. He pointed to the closet. “You can get dressed and go if you want to. My advice is to say here awhile. There’s nothing wrong with you some rest won’t cure, though I don’t know how you got away with it.”

  “I’ll go,” I told him.

  “Okay with me. Be sure to take it easy.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that I reached up and felt the back of my head. ”What about the bandage?”

  “Four stitches in your scalp. Come back in a week and I’ll take ’em out for you.”

  “You’re giving me a long time to live,” I said.

  The doctor grinned at me.

  I got dressed and went downstairs to the window where they took a twenty and gave me back five. My legs were wobbly and my head throbbed, but a good sniff of the night air put me back together a little.

  It was pitch black and the stars were under cover. A worried guy sweating out a maternity call was pacing back and forth the ramp outside the door. He looked up hopefully when I opened it, saw me and went back to pacing. I walked down the ramp, turned onto the sidewalk and headed for the lights that marked the center of town.

  Behind me the glowing tip of a cigarette traced an arc through the air, splattered out in the grass that bordered the gutter and a pair of heavy feet began to match my stride.

  The vigil had begun. Lindsey was behind me all the way.

  Metaphorically speaking, that is. The guy wasn’t Lindsey, but he was all cop. I was beginning to think that they didn’t have any little cops in this town. The one behind me was a barrel on legs weaving from side to side. He was such a good cop that it took me nearly two blocks to shake him.

  When I got to town I stopped at a drugstore and climbed into the phone booth. I dialed the hotel and asked for Jack. When I had him I said. “This is McBride. You remember that barber who worked on me today?”

  “Sure. Name’s Looth. We call him Looth Tooth. Why?”

  “Just curious. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. By the way, where you calling from, Mr. McBride?”

  “A phone booth.”

  “Oh?” He sounded surprised.

  “Why?”

  “You see the papers tonight?”

  “Hell no. I just got out of the hospital. I had my head examined.”

  “Well, you oughta see ’em.”

  He hung up before I could ask any more questions. I picked up a paper at the front of the store and I saw what he meant. It was quite an item. In fact, the whole front page was scrambled because the story that was supposed to go in had been yanked at the last minute. All that was left was a one-column squib squeezed in by an irate compositor who had to work overtime. The heading was: Police Hold Murder Suspect.Under it the item read, “Held in the five-year-old slaying of former District Attorney Robert Minnow was John McBride, tentatively identified by police as a former resident of Lyncastle who fled following the shooting of the District Attorney during the sensational gambling probe of his era. McBride was released after questioning and Captain Lindsey of the Lyncastle Police refused to comment. Since the grand jury returned a murder-guilt verdict against the original McBride, this was the first suspect held in the affair.”

  And that, dear children, is all. Nobody knew from nothing. I was a story that didn’t happen ... yet. Somebody had done a lot of pretty string-pulling in the police lab. I grinned until my mouth ached, remembered what I came after and went back to the phone directory and rummaged through it until I found what I wanted.

  Looth Tooth was listed, but he wasn’t home. Somebody told me the name of a bar where I could find him. I paid a hackie a buck to take me there and when I walked in Looth Tooth had himself an audience of eager listeners and he was telling them in details that never happened how he practically caught McBride all by himself.

  He was doing great until I got into the crowd. I stood there and looked at him until something got stuck in his throat and he couldn’t breathe. He believed everything I told him with my eyes, then Looth Tooth was something with pale blue lips and eyes that rolled up in his head, dropping to the floor in a dead faint.

  I had one beer and left just as they were carrying Looth Tooth out the door. Everybody agreed that it was a pity he didn’t get to finish his story.

  Tomorrow I’d go down for a shave and ask him to finish it for me personally. He was going to be one barber who’d never go peddling his lip to the police again.

  But it was still tonight and I had things to do. The hackie who brought me was still outside and I told him to take me to the railroad station. From where we were we had to go straight up the main drag of town so I had a chance to see what it looked like during business hours.

  It looked pretty good. It looked like everything the newspapers, radio and magazine articles said it would look like. Maybe you’ve heard of the place. A long time ago it started out as a pretty nice town. A smelter turned ore into copper bars over under the mountains and everybody was happy. They were rough-and-tumble boys who built their houses and minded their own business.

  That’s the way it would have stayed if Prohibition didn’t come and go like it did. Lyncastle took the switch in stride, but the three big cities on each side of it voted an option and kept themselves dry, so anybody who wanted a drink simply crossed the river into Lyncastle and got themselves a package. It wasn’t long after that you could get anything else you wanted too. Lyncastle became what is known as a wide-open town. Little Reno. Ten feet off the sidewalk you had crap tabl
es, slots, faro layouts, roulette ... hell, everything. Nobody bothered to work in the smelter any more. The gambling rooms were paying high for bouncers, croupiers, dealers, shills and whatnot.

  I wondered what they’d pay a killer to knock off a D. A. who didn’t like what they were doing.

  The hackie was holding the door open for me. “Here y’are, buster. Buck and a half.”

  “Take two. They’re little.” I slammed the door shut and stepped up on the platform.

  The station was practically deserted. A young colored boy was curled up in a handcart, his head nestling on a pillow of mail sacks, and inside a woman with a baby m her arms was dozing off on a bench. Across the platform a bus, dark and dead looking, was hiding in the end port. Over there was where the bruiser hung out and I looked for something moving in the shadows.

  I waited a long time, but nothing moved. Evidently he only checked incoming schedules. I crossed the platform and stood in the doorway, looked around quickly and stepped inside.

  The old boy was just closing his ticket window when he saw me. His voice was lost in the slamming of the grillwork and the rattle of the shade being drawn over it. A door opened in the side of the booth and he was waving me inside furiously. He was so worked up he hopped around like a toad making sure the door was locked tight before he pulled a couple of benches together.

  “Damn, Johnny,” he said with his head wagging from side to side, “you sure beat all. Sit down, sit down.”

  I sat down.

  “Anybody see you come up here?”

  “Nope. Didn’t matter if they did, Pop.”

  I got the puzzled squint again while he fingered his mustache. “I heard talk an’ I read the papers. How come you’re here and what’s the bandage on your head for? They do that to you?”