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

“Thanks,” I said. “For nothing.”

I went down to the office on Cass Street in downtown Tampa to check the mail and the telephone-answering service. There is an outer office with a cracked leather couch and a couple of matching chairs, a magazine rack, and some dusty magazines. The inner office is larger, holding my desk, filing cabinet, beat-up Underwood.

I got some routine stuff out of the way — reports on burglar-alarm systems which we install and service, a contract from a new jewelry store. From now on, the store, like thousands of others across the country, would bear a small brass plaque on the doorjamb reading PROTECTED BY NATIONWIDE DETECTIVE AGENCY.

My mind wasn’t on the stuff for the mail pouch. I kept thinking of Nick. Always before, there had been a little hope dangled before him.

I sealed the printed manila envelope, stamped it, carried it into the gloomy, hot corridor, and dropped it in the mail chute.

Back in the office, I covered the Underwood, stood and wiped sweat from under my chin.

The phone rang.

I picked it up. “Nationwide. Ed Rivers speaking.”

“Ed—” The voice was little more than a whisper. “Ed, this is Helen.”

I eased down on the edge of the desk chair. “Where are you?”

“At a motel out Grand Central. Nick wants to see you.”

“Give me the address. I’ll be right out. Are you all right?”

“As all right as possible.”

“And Nick?”

“The same way.”

I almost moaned with relief. In the back of my mind had been a fear that I hadn’t admitted. The fear that Nick might have taken the one wrong step, the one big mistake that can never be rectified.

“Ed,” Helen said in that soft, strained voice. “Nick wants to give himself up. He didn’t do it, Ed, but nobody in the world will believe it, except you.”

“Just sit tight,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

She gave me the address and hung up. I hit the street, got a cab, and told the driver to hurry.

Traffic was heavy, snarled on Franklin Street. And of course the drawbridge across the Hillsborough River, which slices Tampa in half, was open for a pleasure boat. The baby yacht had a small cocktail party on the aft deck, the men natty in slacks and knitted shirts, the women cool and lithe-looking in shorts. The boat purred on and the bridge closed.

The cabbie fought the traffic out the artery of Grand Central. I saw the sign and jumped from the cab almost before it had stopped rolling.

I paid the driver and hurried down the walkway that led to the cottages. The motel was an old one, built before the city had swallowed this area so thoroughly. The cottages, made of wood framing and badly needing paint, were clustered about a dusty courtyard.

I reached number seven and knocked. The door opened cautiously. Then it swung wider and I slipped inside.

The two-room cottage was close and hot, with the ancient roller blinds drawn. A single lamp with a crumpled spot in the dime-store shade was burning on a table at the end of the studio couch.

For a few seconds nobody said anything. There was Helen, closing the door and leaning against it, a kind of dumb hope in her eyes and the sooty shadows of strain on her face.

She was a good-looking woman, a rather big woman, the breed with long legs, wide shoulders. The features of her face were prominent and strong, normally vigorous. Her glossy auburn hair was touched with a silver strand here and there. She was wholesomely, healthily female, rather than merely feminine.

Nick was sitting on the couch trying to grin at me. He was a tall, rangy man, big-boned, but the sort who would never go to flesh. He had big, square hands, shoulders, face. It was a gaunt face, with lines of suffering at the base of the nostrils and about the strong, full-lipped mouth. The skin was very fair and pale, drawn on its foundation of bone. Yet the face, topped with short-cut blond hair, still held the ghost of a boyishness, like the faint memory of a boy wide-eyed with the joyous wonder of living. What the boy would have done with his life under different circumstances was a question that would never be answered.

“You made good time, Ed,” Nick said. “Thanks for coming.”

“It won’t get you into any trouble with the police, will it, Ed?” Helen asked.

“No,” I said, taking the chair she offered. “It won’t get me into any trouble.”

Helen went over and sat down beside Nick, her hands folded tightly in her lap. If she noticed the heat in the cottage, she didn’t show it. A faint shiver crossed her shoulders.

“Have the police been to see you about me?” Nick asked.

“Yes. A Lieutenant Steve Ivey.”

“What kind of man is he, Ed?”

“Good man. Efficient man. No razzle-dazzle. Just a good man.”

“Is he looking for anybody else? Besides me?”

“No,” I said.

He studied his hands for a moment. “Once I’m in custody, then, he’ll close the case?”

“I guess he’ll have to.”

The heat was like a silent singing in the closed cottage.

“I see,” Nick said.

“There is nobody else to look for,” I said. “No motive. No slightest shadow of suspicion on anybody else.” After a moment, I added, “I wish there were something else I could say.”

“I know.” He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Ed,” he said dully, “I’m tired. I know this is no good, this hiding. They’ll find us eventually. I can’t undergo great activity for long periods of time. I can’t run very far, Ed.”

“Nick,” Helen said, and laid her hand on his.

Nick looked at me. “I can’t ask Helen to do any more.”

Helen looked away from his face. They’d been married a long time. But they’d had so little of marriage. They’d got married about three months before Nick had gone overseas.

“But there is something else I can’t do,” Nick said, a faint tremor trying to needle into the huskiness of his voice. “I just can’t walk into a cell and have the door shut behind me without the faintest hope that it will ever open again.”

“What do you want me to do, Nick?”

“I want you to help me.”

“You know I will.”

“Yes. But right now you’re wondering how, if there is any way to help. You think I did it.”

“I don’t think you meant to do it, Nick.”

“You’re wrong, Ed! I didn’t do it. I liked the Yamashitas, from what little I knew about them. I’m sure they felt the same way about me — us. I used to see them around their summer place there on the Point. The little old man — so quiet and kindly. He always wore a collar and tie, even in hottest weather. The tiny lady was like something off a silk-screen painting, Ed. She was devoted to her husband and home. Sort of old-fashioned. Wouldn’t wear make-up, none at all. Did all her own cooking. We used to pass the time of day, Ed. They were real folks, good folks.”

“And Ichiro?”

“The son,” Nick said, making a complete statement of the two words. “Instinctively, I disliked him. Legally, I guess he was clean. No arrests for reckless driving or public drunkenness, but it didn’t mean he didn’t do those things. Lucky, I guess. Just never got picked up. In my book he was a lecherous whoremonger. A sliminess was inside of him. But that was his business, not a motive for me to kill him.”

The motive was in a bottle of whisky and a deep, deep writhing thing in the darkest recesses of the subconscious. But I didn’t say it.

Nick wiped his palms across his forehead. “I believed like the rest of you, at first, Ed. I thought I’d done it. Drunk. Not knowing what I was doing. Ed — I hope to heaven no other mortal ever has to feel what I was feeling as Helen and I ran away from the Point...