Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

“No, no, don’t try to excuse me. What kind of a creature am I?”

“You’re a human being,” I said.

“Suddenly I just hated everything, Ed, including myself. The weight of all the years seemed to focus into that one moment and come crashing down on me. I wasn’t thinking very much of Nick, was I?”

“No, you weren’t.”

She sat thinking. She raised her head. “Nick confessed,” she cried suddenly. “It’s all over for him. How can I go on, Ed?”

“That’s the way you were thinking a little while ago,” I reminded her bluntly.

Her hand came to her mouth. She bit her knuckles. “That’s true! I’m scared, Ed. Scared of myself.”

“I don’t think you’ll try it again, then.”

“No, I’m too scared for that.” She stood shakily. My impulse was to help her, but I remained standing perfectly still.

“I’ll have some more coffee, I believe,” she said. She made it to the kitchenette under her own power. Then I helped her into a chair and poured a second cup of coffee for her.

“I’m feeling better now, Ed. You won’t call a doctor or anybody, will you?”

“Do want me to?”

“No. A doctor would have to report what happened. I wouldn’t want Nick to know.”

“Nick will never know,” I said.

Tears came to her eyes. She didn’t say anything. She reached out and touched my hand.

I stayed with her another two hours. We didn’t talk much, and then it was about inconsequential things. During the time, I called a repair shop.

A man came up to fix the broken window before I left. He was a big guy loaded with a lot of belly. Some of the gas smell must have lingered. He sniffed and said, “You got a leaky gas pipe.”

“No,” I said. “A pot boiled over and put out the flame. It’s an old-fashioned stove. Doesn’t have a pilot light.”

Carrying his tool kit, he followed his stomach into the bedroom. He measured the window and started chipping the old putty.

“How’d it happen?”

“I was swatting at a termite,” I told him, “and missed him.”

Steve Ivey knew how to be blunt in his refusal.

He stood behind his desk in the quiet of his office. “No,” he said, “you cannot see Nick Martin.”

“Are you afraid for me to see him?”

“No.”

“Then why—”

“No.”

“Your needle is stuck, Ivey.”

“It won’t be the only thing stuck if you don’t stop trying my patience. Find yourself another case. You’ve done what you can for your client.”

“Life would be simpler if I could think in those terms,” I said, facing Ivey across the desk. “But I can’t help feeling a greater responsibility toward Nick. The only thing I’ve done for him is make the eight ball considerably bigger. Before, at least the state’s attorney had the job of proving him guilty before a jury. Somebody is afraid, Ivey, feeling the pressure. And Nick is worse off than if I’d never entered the case.”

“Any ideas?”

“Plenty. I think Nick did what he did because of Sime Younkers’ visit here this morning. I think Sime put the squeeze on Nick, either with a threat against Helen’s life or a promise that Helen would be given financial assistance. Nick felt he had to take the offer. It was the only way he could protect Helen or provide for her future. After all, what did he have to lose? So far he’s seen no hope of beating this rap. He’d be trading merely the physical wreckage of himself.”

“Proof?”

“I can’t prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but my reason tells me so. I’ve had nothing but my reason to show me anything about this case. It was reasonable that an unknown party went to the Yamashita house the day of the murders — there had to be an unknown if Nick didn’t kill those people. It was reasonable that the unknown intended to kill only Ichiro, since the parents were expected to be out until after dinner. It was reasonable to believe that the parents had been killed with the motive being to shut them up.

“Now, I know Nick and Helen, Ivey. And I know Sime Younkers. Bearing these factors in mind, what I think about Nick’s statement is reasonable.”

“And I think,” Ivey said, “that Sime wheedled his way to Nick to offer his services and dry-clean, via retainers, the Martins of the little money they have.”

“Only one thing wrong with that. If Sime wanted to sell a bill of goods, wouldn’t he have chosen Helen Martin as the more likely prospect? She’d grasp at any straw. She’d be more receptive — and she has that little money you spoke of.”

“You still can’t see Martin,” Ivey said, “and that closes the interview. I’m a mole, Rivers, trying to gnaw through a ten-foot concrete wall of work. Martin’s statement is a matter of record. Proof. Black-and-white proof. Not the rationalization of a bullheaded man.” He picked up a sheaf of papers. “Good day.”

It took me until early evening to get a lead on Sime Younkers. I started with his last known address, a cheap hotel. He’d moved downgrade, into rattraps. On his second move, the lead petered out. The seedy old man at the desk of the flophouse was a new employee. He knew nothing about Sime Younkers. The previous desk man had drifted out of town, no one knew where.

I finally located a woman friend of Sime’s in an Ybor City beer joint. She had a beer-bloated stomach, pouches under her eyes, and hair like tinder-dry excelsior, showing the remains of three or four shades of old dye.

She knew me, and she knew that I wouldn’t be after Sime out of friendship.

She sat across the scarred table from me amid the sour smell of the place and kneaded her knuckles on the table top.

She sold Sime out for a five-dollar bill. She gave me a West Tampa address. When I left, she was building a new hangover on her old one.

The street did not exemplify the best in the American way of life. It was narrow and dark, with trash littering the gutters. Old buildings of brick and wood, scabbed with the dirty remains of old paint, cowered in rows broken by shanties and empty, wood-grown fields.

I parked the rented buggy and took a walk. My heels were loud on the uneven brick paving of the sidewalk. A tired, harassed-looking storekeeper watched me pass from the doorway of his hole in the wall. A few shadowy figures shuffled along the sidewalk. In Ybor City there is at least contrast, famous restaurants around the corner from squalor. In Ybor City there is that undercurrent, that animal zest for the living, like the hot pulsing of Latin blood, that you’ll find nowhere else. Here, there was no contrast, no zest.

I checked building numbers, reached the end of the block, and stopped. I stood wiping my face with my handkerchief. The number the woman had given me didn’t exist.

I moved back along the sidewalk and, about the middle of the block, I saw the shack. It was a small, boxlike shadow in the lighter shadows of night. Set at the rear of a vacant lot where scraggly palmetto struggled for life against rusty chunks of tin and other junk, the shack was half obscured by the rotting brick building that fronted the sidewalk. Coming down the sidewalk, I’d missed it. From this angle, I saw it.

I turned off the sidewalk. A tangled mass of junk wire caught my ankles and almost tripped me as I crossed the lot.

The shack was dark and silent. It had to be the one. The number no longer remained on the post of the sagging porch. My flicking pencil flashlight revealed the tacks that had once held the tin number. The number would have fitted between the numbers of the buildings fronting the sidewalk on either side of the vacant lot.

I moved up the short wooden steps. The porch creaked under my weight.

The doorknob was loose enough to rattle when I touched it. But it finally caught the catch and the door swung open, hinges complaining softly.