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

“There they were, the little old man, and Ichiro, and the old-fashioned silk-screen lady. Ichiro was in one of the bedrooms, the old man in the living room, the lady draped across the railing of the front porch. All with their heads knocked in, their bodies hacked. The little lady’s hands were hanging toward the ground and the fingers were solid red — as if in death her fingernails had been made up in a grotesque, insane way. The blood had come running down her arms and dried like that.

“She was the one Helen saw. Helen had been shopping in Tampa. She came running to the house. I was asleep on the couch in the living room. I’d — knocked myself out with alcohol. It took Helen a while to get me to understand. Had I been out of the house? Had I seen anything? You see, Helen had noticed that the samurai sword was missing. She couldn’t help noticing. The sword had been taken from its wall bracket and the empty sheath lay on the floor near me.

“I guess we went a little crazy, Ed. There was no sign of anyone having been out there on that small beach that day. We knew how everything would add up to look. We panicked. Ran. Came here.”

Nick stopped talking. Helen sat squeezing herself very tight inside.

“Like rats in a dead-end hole,” Nick said at last. “We couldn’t plan. We couldn’t think. We grabbed some clothes from the cottage and enough money to keep us going for a few days.

“Helen could slip out after dark to buy us food, but I knew I was licked, even if I wouldn’t admit it to myself right away. I started working up the courage to turn myself in. Then, today, I knew there was one hope, Ed. You.”

I sat and waited, while the heavy sweat ran down the sides of my face.

“You don’t have many friends, Ed,” Nick said.

“I guess I don’t.”

“Because the word means something to you. You give a part of a kind of holy thing inside of you when you call somebody a friend. There aren’t many who know it, who would suspect, looking at you. But I know it, Ed, and for the first time in my life I’m going to trade on friendship.” He looked at me levelly, and said quietly, “Ed, I want you to get me out of this.”

“How?”

“That’s your job.”

“You give me anything in the way of evidence,” I said, “you give me one single grain of salt in your favor and I’ll give you everything I’ve got.”

“Maybe a grain of sand will do just as well,” Nick said. He looked at Helen and nodded. She got up, crossed the room, opened the small closet. She came back to us carrying a pair of house slippers that wore a look of newness. She handed the slippers to Nick.

“This wouldn’t stand for a minute in court,” Nick said. “It wouldn’t reopen a case when the only possible suspect is in custody. There is only my word on one point, Ed. It wouldn’t mean much, under the circumstances, to a single person on this earth, except you.”

He turned the slippers in his hand. “I’ve been nagged by the feeling that there was a way of knowing for sure whether or not I went to the Yamashita cottage and killed them. Can a man do such a thing and not remember? There was something I was overlooking, something that would tell me. I couldn’t pin it down. Until today, when I was putting these slippers on.

“They’re a present from Helen, Ed. She gave them to me just last week. I was wearing them the afternoon the Yamashitas were killed, wearing them for the first time.

“I accepted delivery of the whisky wearing them. I went to sleep and woke up wearing them. Helen took them off me when she came home and helped me under a cold shower. In short, I was wearing these slippers during the whole time of the massacre, Ed. Here. Take them. Turn them over. Look at the soles.”

I did as he asked. The soles were of soft, pliant leather, like suède.

I felt a cold, brittle thing form inside of me. A taste came to my mouth as if my teeth had a metallic edge.

I looked into Nick Martin’s eyes and I would have bet my blood to the final drop that he was telling the truth about the slippers.

Then I looked again at the soles of the slippers. If he had walked the distance from his cottage to the Yamashita summerhouse and back again, the soft leather would have been full of ground-in sand.

The soles of the slippers were as clean as Nick Martin’s courage.

In a phone booth at the corner drugstore, I had all the numbers dialed except the last one. I hesitated before I gave the dial that final spin.

The question pulsed in my mind and brought a small feeling of suffocation to the phone booth: Presuming Nick’s innocence, could I do anything about it? A stranger’s life and trust would have been inviolable — and this was Nick. Did I have the right to dial the final number and wait for a phone to ring downtown? Once the steel closed around Nick, everything would depend on me.

I had no starting point, nothing. The slippers were negative evidence. I was the only one who would accept and believe their meaning. At that, they simply indicated that he’d been asleep while an inhuman fiend had slaughtered three people and framed an innocent man without compunction.

I had to start out by believing in the existence of this fiend with no evidence of it.

I hadn’t even the clue to a character pattern to help. His was not merely a criminal mind. He might never have killed before. He might never kill again. He could be a wanderer, a thousand miles away by now. His might be a bland, everyday face on a Tampa street at this moment.

There was an alternative, which I hadn’t mentioned to Nick or Helen. I had connections in Ybor City, some extending to a political refugee or two from a revolution in a Latin country. In swarming Ybor City, the grave gentleman playing dominoes in one of the old men’s clubs might yesterday have been a secretary of state. I knew one man who might help get Nick out of the country. Central and South American revolutions had been hatched over rum toddies in Ybor City. A matter this small could be handled.

With Nick out of the way, the pressure on me would not be so great.

And that gave me the insight to my thinking.

I was thinking of myself, not of Nick or Helen. Flight on Nick’s part would entail hardship and privation. It could cost him his life.

I can’t run very far, Ed.

An old war, like a story of not-quite-real goblins to today’s kids, had taken care of that.

I spun the dial.

After a moment, I got Ivey.

“I have Nick Martin,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“We’ll get to that. There’s a condition.”

“I can’t bargain, Rivers.”

“Want me to hang up?”

“What is it?”

“I know Nick will be treated as decently as possible,” I said. “You’re doing a job that you have to do; you’re not out for blood.”

“That’s right.”

“I want you to understand one thing clearly. I didn’t find Nick. He called me. The surrender is his own doing and entirely voluntary on his part.”

“What’s your condition?”

“Patience, Ivey. One more thing I want you to know. I believe that Nick is innocent. I wish you would too, but I’m not counting on your being able to do anything about it. You’ve got too many official strings on you. I haven’t, and I’m going to act on the belief.”

Ivey said nothing.

“Now we get to the condition,” I said. “Technically, Helen Martin aided and abetted her husband’s flight. Turn your back on all human elements, and you could call her an accessory after the fact. It’s a technicality I can’t stomach, circumstances being what they are. I don’t think Nick could, either. I don’t think he’s thought of it yet. He’s been too busy thinking about the way he fancies he’s dragged her into hiding.”