Deadline (5 page)

There was a scrubby group of trees at the very bottom of the hill, about thirty yards from the damp earth where the little girl was buried. Walker reached it as the last trace of daylight snuffed itself out. The dark shadows engulfed him as he sank back against a gnarled tree trunk. He waited.

S
HE CAME BUT IT
was hours later. Though Walker hadn’t brought a watch, he thought midnight must have come and gone before he saw the first movement in the trees above the hill. She came quickly, surely, as though she knew the way well. She reached the rim and started down the hill, walking down the dirt road toward him without once breaking stride. She stopped near the bottom, her first moment of confusion. A tiny penlight came out of the cloth bag she carried, and she played it first along the ground and then at a copy of that day’s
Tribune.
It took her perhaps five minutes, feeling her way along with the tiny light, to find the place where the little girl lay. In the dark the grave was almost indistinguishable from the earth around it. The dirt had sunk in slightly and was softer there, wet. The woman dropped to her knees in the mud and Walker heard a long sigh, breaking up at the end into a moan of raw grief. She began to sob, then cried violently over the grave for perhaps five minutes. Walker, watching from the trees, felt sad and a little sick. He was an interloper in a drama intended to remain very private. Something he would now make very public, because that’s what he did for a living and it was that kind of story. Real front-page stuff, wherever features were valued as much as hard news, and it didn’t matter much what the woman’s reasons were.

It had the same taste as the Diana Yoder thing, only with this one there was no question of the public’s right to know. It was a police case, an unsolved coroner’s case, and possibly a court case as well. And if this sobbing woman was in fact the little girl’s mother, it was the best possible angle for his story. A hell of a reader. But suddenly, for no good reason other than the woman’s tears, he didn’t want to do the goddamned thing. He was getting soft in his old age. He pushed away from the tree and was about to confront her, when she opened her bag and took out a small but unmistakable gun. She put the gun in her jacket pocket, took out what looked like wire cutters, then reached deeper in the bag and found what she wanted. A cluster of flowers. This she put on the grave, in the center of the pool of water, since she had no way of knowing the head from the foot. She put the wire cutters back in the bag, then the gun, drawing the strings tight and holding it against her legs. For perhaps five minutes she sat like that, soundless, absolutely still. Then, again, she broke down and cried.

Walker didn’t move. He hardly breathed. The gun added a new element. The possibility that the woman was deranged now loomed large and real. Suddenly she stood and came toward him, swinging the cloth bag at her side. He heard her sniff as she came close. He couldn’t see much about her in the moonless sky, other than the fact that she was slim and of medium height. She turned away and started up the long hill. He waited until she was almost to the top before he moved. At the top, he hurried along under cover of trees, leaving the road and cutting through the main graveyard, moving carefully between the tombstones toward the street.

She was just a shadow ahead of him as she neared the caretaker’s cottage and the locked main gate, where she left the road. She skirted the fence until she reached a far corner. There she disappeared for a moment, and Walker had to hurry to avoid losing her. He did lose her, for more than a minute, but then she appeared outside the fence, walking along the street in the general direction of Newark.

He found her escape hatch. She had cut a piece out of the wire fence, just big enough to let her through. He wiggled through and into a ditch. When he stood, he saw her about a hundred yards ahead, getting into an old car that was parked under a streetlight—a Ford of some late 1950s vintage, green he thought, with a white strip around the middle. As he hurried toward it, the car started in a puff of blue smoke. It eased into the street and pulled away, but he got close enough to get the license number.

In the morning he called Donovan.

“I saw your splash last night,” Donovan said. “Same old Walker. Once you get something, you never let up.”

“That sounds like my description of you.”

“Maybe so, twenty years ago. Little too old, too slow now. I can’t keep up with you young guys.”

“I didn’t know you read the
Trib
way over in Brooklyn.”

“You’d be surprised at what we read,” Donovan said. “What’s on your mind?”

“Hell, Al, you called me, remember? I’m returning your call of yesterday.”

“See how you get in old age? Completely slipped my mind. I wanted you to come by my place, say a week from tonight, for a bit of beef and booze. You’ve never met my wife. We can sit around and talk old times. You can tell her how great I was before I went over the hill.”

“What time?”

“Around seven. Bring somebody if you want to.”

Walker thought of the Yoder girl, and what a strange group they would make sitting in Al Donovan’s backyard. But he said, “There’s nobody to bring, Al. But I’ll be glad to come solo, if that’s okay. And listen, while I’ve got you, you could do me a big favor.”

“Shoot.”

Walker fed him the license number. “Could you find out whose car that is?”

“Is it hot?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Sure, Walker, I’ll help you out. Same rules as before, right?”

“You scratch my back…”

“And you scratch mine. If and when the time ever comes.”

Donovan called back about ten minutes later. The car was registered to a Hal Gunther, whose street address lay in a quiet little community halfway between Orange and Union. Walker checked it against his list of little girls, but there was no one named Gunther and no one of that address. He drove there in just over half an hour, not bothering to wear his tie or check in with the office first. The street was narrow and tree-lined, and at midmorning nearly empty of cars. It was strictly residential, some four blocks west of Sanford Avenue. The kind of neighborhood where he had played stickball as a kid. Raced through backyards in bursts of fantasy and sheer joy. Played circus in a neighbor kid’s yard, swallowed by time, yet in actual distance not far from here. If it still existed at all.

Walker never went back to his old neighborhood anymore, except in his mind. It was always too painful. There was always some motel, or a new Piggly Wiggly, or worst of all a vacant lot, where people had lived in the old days. But Hal Gunther’s neighborhood had escaped the ravages of time. The houses, built in the late 1920s or early 1930s, had held up well. Most were newly painted. What grass there was had been watered and cut, and some of the yards had hedges and gardens. Walker drove past the Gunther house without stopping. The car wasn’t there, but Walker could see a big black oil spot on the driveway where it was usually parked. The garage was closed. Probably full of crap. In Walker’s youth, people had used their garages for their cars. Today they used them for their crap. Junk they wouldn’t ever use again, or think about, or want. It piled up and up until the car couldn’t get in the garage anymore and had to be left on the street or in the driveway.

He went around the corner, parked and locked his car, and started back on foot. He walked lazily up the street, to the casual eye a stroller who had nowhere to go and was taking his time about it. But a second glance at the house revealed nothing new. Curtains were pulled across the windows, and it had the look of a million other houses abandoned for the day by working people. He went on down the block and around, thinking. Somewhere there were pieces missing, things he didn’t know that went beyond the mother’s unknown reasons. Who the hell was Hal Gunther? Somehow Walker hadn’t expected a father too.

He was circling the block, taking the long way back to his car and nudging the pieces around in his mind, when he saw the car sitting in a driveway just ahead. It was the same Ford, same coloring, same license plate—and yes, a shiny oil spot under it, big as a bedpan—parked on a side street about a block from the Gunther house. Most of the houses looked alike. This one differed only in color and a few basics. Like the Gunther place, it was heavily curtained, the garage closed, and the tree out front looked like a dying friend. There was a FOR SALE sign under the tree.

Walker turned in. He would face the elusive lady and play it by ear from there. He could always pretend to be a buyer looking at her house. He rang the bell, but no one answered. He backed away from the steps, and noticed something white through the slit in the mailbox. He opened the top and fished it out. A piece of junk mail, prepared by computer from lists that magazines so unethically sell to anyone who will buy them. The name on the envelope was Mrs. Melinda Baker. The name rang a vague bell somewhere. He had heard it, and recently. He dropped the letter back into the box and hurried around the corner to his car.

He checked the name against his list of missing school kids, and there she was. Robin Baker, age eight, grade three, Robert F. Kennedy Grammar School, about six blocks from there. Robin Baker, daughter of Melinda Baker, who, the record insisted, had taken her daughter and moved to Bakersfield, California.

Robin Baker’s last day of school was Tuesday, the day before the circus fire.

In all his nationwide checking, somehow the coroner had failed to find what had been in his backyard all along. Walker drove around to Hal Gunther’s place and sat across the street, watching. Now he saw that this house too was for sale. Wind had blown the sign around, making it hard to see from the street. His eyes narrowed. He had all the answers now but the last few. Why had it happened? And who was Mrs. Baker’s neighbor, Hal Gunther, who let her have his car as if it were her own?

Walker didn’t go to the office all day. He returned to his apartment for a few hours’ rest, then went back to the Baker house. By the time he arrived, it was dark. The car was gone from Mrs. Baker’s driveway and was now parked at Gunther’s, around the corner. Lights were on in both houses. He parked across from Mrs. Baker’s, sank down in his seat and waited.

She came out about an hour later. She was carrying the cloth bag and wore her hair up, tied with a scarf. Her dress was casual. She walked quickly, and to Walker’s surprise she turned away from the Gunther house and headed east, toward the bus stop. At the corner she waited under a streetlight. Walker went back for his car.

Following a crosstown bus at night was tricky, but when Melinda Baker got off in an industrial subdivision near Elizabeth, Walker was there, able to park and watch her. She crossed the street and went into a bar.

He got out and followed her inside. She was sitting at the far end, sipping a tall drink. Her bag lay on the floor under her stool. Taking a stool near the door, he watched her in the mirror. She looked to be in her late twenties, slender and good-looking. She wore glasses, bifocals, and was having trouble with them. She took them off frequently and rubbed her eyes. She sat there through two drinks. Then a young stud came in and put the make on her.

They left together.

To Walker, sitting about ten stools away, their talk, and especially their body language, was loud and clear. It was obvious that they hadn’t known each other. The stud saw her sitting alone and went right to work. She told him her name. It was so easy it was almost a joke. It had taken less than five minutes for the guy to get to her.

Walker was in no hurry to leave. He thought he knew where they were going: if not to her place, he could at least find her there when he wanted her. He still had some thinking to do about this one. A wrong move could…he didn’t know what it might do. Melinda Baker displayed all the symptoms of a schizophrenic. Her house was for sale and her daughter was dead. She lived in secret and visited the grave at midnight. She carried a gun and she picked up men in dark bars. Obviously she had given thought to leaving town. In her place, he thought, he might too.

W
ALKER WAS A GREAT
believer in the powers of the subconscious, that part of the brain that worked while the rest slept. He slept late the next morning, went into the office around noon and told Kanin he was working on something that might or might not pan out. Kanin wanted to know what, but Walker wouldn’t be pushed. If Kanin knew how close he was to having the Melinda Baker piece ready for the street, he would get that look that all city editors get when they smell a story coming. Then he’d start pushing Walker to get it done. They would ride roughshod over the woman before he could learn what she was about. The tiny details, the little threads of emotion that would make a sensational story something truly fine would be left dangling, hinted at but only half developed.

He drove past the Baker house again. The sign said FOR SALE BY OWNER. There were two phone numbers beneath it, which Walker had copied into his notebook yesterday. An identical sign, with the same two numbers, was posted outside the Gunther house. From a phone booth three blocks away, he tried both numbers. There was no answer at either. He spent his day in the county clerk’s office, looking up records of the property transactions. Hal Gunther and Melinda Baker had bought the houses at the same time, from a single source, and had lived there for five years. Mrs. Baker’s handwriting was clear and quite ordinary. In the late afternoon Walker ate alone and went home to try the numbers again.

He flipped the TV dial while he looked through his notebook for the numbers. NBC was repeating a special on Radio City. Gregory Peck was host, there were appearances by Ann-Margret and Beverly Sills, and a promise of backstage interviews with the Rockettes. He turned the sound down while he made his calls. Melinda Baker answered almost at once.

“Hello.” As Kanin had said, her voice was soft.

“I saw your sign. Is the house still available?”

“Yes.”

“How much are you asking for it?”

“Forty-five thousand.”