Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

“Finishing eating, but Lord, that didn’t take more than a couple of minutes. Then I got up and went to the door and they came in and I turned the TV off and gave them some tea.”

“How long would you say the frozen stew took to cook?”

“Wait just a shack.” The old woman got up and hobbled across her kitchen to the outside door. “This is the one those nice policemen broke,” she said. “I have to get it fixed.”

She stepped out onto the snowy porch, and returned a moment later holding a shiny little carton. “I always keep my garbage back there until collation day. They used to come oop the alley, but now they won’t, and I don’t see why. Anyhow here’s the stew box, Mr. Barnes. I was wrong about the Irish—Hungarian galosh, they call it. I haven’t got my glasses, so you’ll have to read the back yourself. I only wear them when I want to see something. How long does it say?”

Preheat oven to 350 F, Stubb read. Ready in 20 min. “Twenty minutes,” he told the old woman.

“Then it must have been about six when they came.” She filled her mouth with cornflakes and milk.

“Yeah. And that’s about half an hour after Free’s face was on the news. But they wouldn’t have come here—next door—first. First they would have gone to Free’s and poked around a little to see if he was still there, or had maybe left a note for the milkman or something. Say ten minutes for that. They got here in about twenty minutes from wherever they were. Did they have a car?”

Mrs. Baker nodded and swallowed.

“Did they say they had one, or did you actually see they did?”

“There was a car in front of the house when I got the door, and when they left I heard a startup. I saw the lights in my curtain too, now that I come to think. What lights through yonder window breaks, as they say, though naturally they didn’t really break it.”

“When you came to the Consort, how’d you get there, Mrs. Baker?”

“Cab.” Her mouth was full of cornflakes. “Drink your cooco. It’ll be as cold as a cumberbund.”

Stubb took a sip. “You phoned for one and it came? Or did you go to a busy street and flag one down?”

“Phoned.”

“When it came for you, did the driver stop in front of your house, where the two women’s car had been?”

“I believe so, but I can’t imagine where it makes no never blind.”

“It means it’s probably no use for me to look for tracks from the women’s car in the snow. What sort of car was it?”

“Like General Matters, you mean? I didn’t see.”

“Standard? Subcompact?”

“Kind of bewitched and between.”

“That’s a compact. Old or new?”

“New, I think. It looked kind of shinish. But listen here, Mr. Barnes.” The old woman scooped up more cereal. “Suppose I knew just exactly how it was—I don’t, but preposing I did—what good would it do for poor Mr. Free?”

“I don’t know,” Stubb admitted. “Maybe none. But maybe I’d come across that car someplace else and be able to link the two up.”

“If they come again, I’ll look better.”

“Thanks. Write down the license number if you can. Getting back to this time, you said it looked shiny. What color was it?”

“Black, I think, or midlight blue.”

“Could it have been gray?”

She shrugged. “You know what they say—at night all cars is gray. Is that important too?”

“It’s the usual color for cars in the General Services Motor Pool, that’s all. Two doors or four?”

“Four, I believe. Two on the side I saw.”

“You didn’t see the women get out of the car? Or get back into it?”

She shook her head.

“When you saw the car, could you tell if there was anybody else still inside?”

“Not for curtain sure, but I don’t think so.”

“Was it the women who told you where we had gone?”

She shook her head again. “You wasn’t even there already, when they come.”

“Then how did you know? It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours between the time Madame Serpentina checked in and the time you knocked on the door.”

Mrs. Baker sat silent, refusing to meet his eyes.

“If I guess, will you tell me if I’m right? You were sitting in your parlor watching TV, and you happened to overhear—”

“Well, you’re a cushion! That’s what my mother used to say. You make the hard things easy.”

“You did overhear us, then.”

“Not really overhere, Mr. Barnes.” She swallowed, although all her cornflakes were gone. “Mr. Barnes, I guess you’re too much of a gentleman to scald a old lady.”

“I never scold people. That’s not my job.”

“Like you said about overhereing—I would have, you know, just sat here out there and overhered if could have. But only I couldn’t, so I opened the window a little teenie and scrootched down on the floor and dropped just like Eve in the Garden of Edam. I’d been watching, you know, and I saw Ms. Snake come in, and I was overworried about poor Mr. Free.”

“I’m glad you did what you did, Mrs. Baker, and if you were trying to help Mr. Free, nobody can blame you for that.”

“And then later I heard Ms. Girth ask about a hotel, and somebody said the Consort. But I didn’t know you were there until I tapped one of those hoppers.”

Stubb nodded to himself.

“Are you about finished, Mr. Barnes?”

He took a final sip of cocoa. “No, I haven’t really started yet, Mrs. Baker. I want you to tell me everything about those two women. We might begin with the way they were dressed.”

“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch.” Mrs. Baker shook her head in wonderment. “And the Dutch meet the Devil.”

The doorman’s whistle sounded less often now. Most of the businessmen were at the airport, and the hurrying crowds of office workers had thinned to sauntering shoppers. The sun was higher and the blue shadows had gone, but it was still bitterly cold.

The witch wore a ranch-mink coat appropriate to the Consort. It had a hood, and the hood was up, so that her exotic face was framed in soft fur. She walked half a block past the doorman and his line of cabs, then left the sidewalk and stepped into the path of a Cadillac sedan.

The driver braked. Although the street was largely clear of snow and ice, the big car skidded, its rear wheels sluing before it came to a stop with its bumper touching the witch’s mink. She opened the right front door and got in.

“Young woman,” the driver said, “you were very nearly killed.”

“Perhaps.”

“Not perhaps.” He was a man of fifty-five or sixty, with a clipped white mustache. “I almost couldn’t stop. If my reaction had been a trifle slower, you’d be dead at this moment.”

“How fortunate for you that I am not. It would have been most embarrassing.”

He took his foot from the brake and let the car drift toward a dozen others waiting at the light. “You don’t seem much shaken up.”

“It is my nature,” the witch said. “Within, I am seething, often. Outside, nothing.”

“Your legs aren’t trembling?”

“No.”

“Then may I drop you off someplace?”

“Yes. The address is sixteen twenty-three Killdeer Lane. It is in Bellewood. That is a suburb to the north.”

“I’m afraid that’s out of the question. It’s at least an hour’s drive.”

“In this car, at this time of day, it will take no more than forty minutes.”

“I’m afraid I can’t spare that. I’m going down this street to Broad, then turning left on Broad to Nineteenth. I’ll be happy to drop you anywhere along the way.”

“You will take me to the address I have given you,” the witch told him. “Or if you are in a great hurry, you may drive to your destination and give me your keys. I will take care of my errand and return your car there—certainly, I would think, before five o’clock. I will leave your keys beneath the seat.”