“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

His hand crushed the receiver against the side of his face.

Her voice became distant: “Call me sometime, Paul.”

“Take care. …”

“Yes, you too.”

He cradled the phone very gently. And then he wept.

35

IT WENT DARK but he didn’t rise to switch on the lights: he continued to sit passively with his hands folded on the table.

All of a sudden he had a desperate need for company. He couldn’t stand the aloneness. He thought of going out—a bar. Perhaps that bar where he’d met the journalists.

He had his coat and was out the door before he stopped himself. He went back inside, hung up the coat and locked the door. Going to a bar was the last thing he could afford to do. The shape he was in, there was no telling what he’d let drop after he had alcohol inside him.

Out of the same need for companionship he switched on the television. He looked at the last ten minutes of a game show and laughed at the comedians’ jokes. He looked at half an hour of African wild animal footage narrated by a washed-up television actor. He looked at five minutes of a situation comedy rerun and suddenly he was starving.

There wasn’t much in the refrigerator. He made a meal of odds and ends. He hadn’t eaten anything since the night before; he consumed great mouthfuls with the plate balanced on his knees, sitting before the flickering television.

He watched a floor-wax commercial intently as if to memorize every line and camera cut; afterward he carried his empty dish to the kitchen and left it in the sink without stopping to rinse it. He poured three fingers of scotch into a tumbler and went back to the living room to drink it.

Station break: a car dealer offering five-hundred-dollar rebates on new compact cars; a furniture store that was fighting inflation; a supermarket chain marking down specials on turkeys and pot roasts; a shampoo that cleansed while it brightened; sixty great hits of the rock-and-roll years on four stereo albums for only seven ninety-nine. Call this number before midnight. Now here’s tonight’s news.

“At the top of the news tonight once again it’s the vigilante. Two more men were shot in Chicago streets less than three hours ago. We take you now to Roger Bond, on the scene.”

A reporter in a wind-blown trench coat faced the camera under portable floodlights. Behind him flurries blustered in a dreary street; two or three curious passers-by watched him in the background. There was nothing to be seen but the street and the reporter.

“On this King Boulevard sidewalk just a few hours ago another tragedy was acted out by Chicago’s infamous vigilante and his victims. The police say the young man and the teen-age boy were making a connection here. The sale of four caps of heroin was going down when a forty-five caliber pistol roared four times in the quiet grey afternoon. It left the pusher and the addict dead together, their bodies sprawled across one another. We found Captain Victor Mastro at the mayor’s fifth-floor office at City Hall….”

The image cut to a corridor crowded with lights and cameras and reporters. The same reporter in the same trench coat was thrusting his microphone under Mastro’s face. There was a babble of voices, everybody asking questions at once.

“We haven’t had a chance to check out ballistics yet,” Mastro was saying. “But it looks like the same .45 Luger from the other cases. We’ve got a witness who said the shots were fired from a car…. No, it was stopped, it pulled over and stopped before he did the shooting. It wasn’t moving…. What? I can’t hear you, I’m sorry.… Yes, this makes twenty-three all told. Nineteen dead. Eleven with the thirty-eight and twelve with the .45…. I’d rather not comment on what the witness saw, beyond what I’ve already told you. We’re still interviewing him…. Intensifying it? No, we’re not intensifying it. It’s already as intense as it can get. We’ve got sixty officers assigned to this case alone, full time. What? … No, I can’t describe the leads we’re working on at this time. We do have leads, that’s all I can say, and we’re subjecting every one of them to an exhaustive and thorough examination… I’m sorry, gentlemen, that’s all for now.”

The camera followed Mastro’s back as he pried his way through the mob; then it cut to the studio moderator.

Paul switched it off. He crossed to the window and looked out at the lights. A haze brought the sky down low and brightened the city like a stage set.

It was a slim chance, it probably wouldn’t lead to anything. But he had to do it. He had to try.

He went to the phone and searched for Spalter’s home number; he’d written it down somewhere…

Spalter came on the line, cheerful and ebullient. “Hey, Paul, How’re they hanging?”

“Jim, something’s come up. A personal thing, nothing vital, but I’m going to have to be out of town for a couple of days. I won’t be able to start work until the middle of the week. I realize it’s awkward but can you explain it to Childress for me? I’ll report in on Wednesday or Thursday at the latest.”

“You have to go back to New York?”

“Yes. It’s a family thing. My wife’s estate—you know these idiotic legal hassles. But it’s got to be straightened out before it gets any worse.”

“Sure, I know. Okay, Paul, I’ll cover for you with the old man. Hope everything works out okay. I’ll see you Wednesday or so, right?”

“Thanks very much.”

“Don’t mention it, buddy. Have a good trip—give my love to Fun City.”

He rang off and reached for his drink. It was probably a bad hunch. The thing probably was still squatting there under the glass countertop, untouched since he’d seen it weeks ago. But there was a chance. He had to find out.

36

HE WAS OUT and rolling before the Monday morning rush. By seven he was crossing the Wisconsin line. A little while later he left the divided highway and switched off the headlights. Snow lay in deep drifts on the verges: the countryside looked like something in a calendar photograph, sunlight on rolling fields of snow, the occasional farmhouse on a far hilltop. The world was new and clean.

The shop hadn’t opened yet and he sat in the car until restlessness prohibited it; then he walked through town and back while the cold stung his ears and came inside his coat. From a block away he saw Truett limp to the door and unlock the security gate and roll it up. Truett unlocked two or three bolts and perhaps a burglar alarm and finally went inside; two minutes later Paul entered the cluttered shop.

“Morning.”

“Hello there. Mr. Neuser, isn’t it?”

“You’ve got a good memory.”

“Pride myself,”Truett said. His moist eyes peered up at Paul and then he continued on his rounds, switching lights on. “What can I do you for?”

He’d thought of half a dozen lies during the night and rejected them; finally he’d settled on the simplest story and rehearsed it until it was smooth. “I was talking to my brother-in-law about my last visit up here. I mentioned that Luger I saw in your collection. The .45. He got very interested—he’s a gun buff and he served in Germany with the Occupation after the war. Anyway it’s his birthday coming up and I wondered if you still had the thing for sale. I don’t see it here under the counter.”

“Sold that one a few weeks ago. Just a few days after you were here, matter of fact.” Truett still had the folded newspaper under his arm; now he limped around behind the counter and put the newspaper down before he reached up to pull the switch-strings of the ceiling fluorescents.

It was a Milwaukee newspaper. That relieved Paul. If Truett didn’t get the Chicago papers he probably wasn’t aware of the ballistics reports; details that small wouldn’t be printed in Milwaukee papers or reported on Milwaukee television, he was sure.