Night My Friend (14 page)

Few people over the years had managed to become his friends, and he lived alone in a little walk-up apartment across downtown from the restaurant. Sometimes, those of his friends who cared would ask him why he’d never married, but the answers he gave to this question were as variable as his places of employment.

The truth of the matter, and perhaps the key to Carley’s entire life, was the fact that he was a waiter. He’d watched his life slip by while he waited, waited on tables, waited for the right girl to come along, waited for buses, waited in line, waited. He’d once gotten his picture in the papers waiting all night to be first into a World Series game in New York.

Carley was a waiter, even when it came to his specialty.

He was cleaning up one night near closing time, after a hectic pre-Thanksgiving week that had left him nearly exhausted, when someone called to him from a nearby bar stool. He saw that it was a plump, balding man who’d been in the business for some years.

“Hello, Mister Sykes, how’ve you been?” He paused in his duties long enough to make the greeting properly polite. He’d never worked at the Sykes place, but he knew other waiters who did.

“I’ve been fine, Carley, but business is terrible.”

“Even with the holidays coming up?”

“Too many people think of my place as a summer spot. Nobody wants to go down to the lake in November. Frankly, I don’t think I can make it through another winter.”

Carley muttered something sympathetic and went back to cleaning off his table. The last of the regular customers had departed and the bartender was snapping off the decorative neon tubes behind the rows of amber bottles. Out in back, Carley’s boss was checking over the cash. “Well,” Carley said finally, when the last of the tables had been cleared away, “maybe I should stop out and see you on my night off. Help your business a little.”

“I wish you’d do that, Carley. Maybe next week.”

“Fine. I’ll be seeing you.”

On the following Tuesday evening, Carley took a bus down Third Street to the lake. Sykes had been right about business falling off with the coming of cooler weather. Although winter had not yet set in, the lakefront was all but deserted. The parking lot behind Sykes’ Steak House held only seven cars, and Carley knew that most of these belonged to employees.

Sykes himself was behind the bar, mixing a martini for the lone drinker, a bleary-eyed young man who looked as if he’d spent the evening there. “Hello, Carley, good to see you,” Sykes greeted him. “What are you drinking?”

“Oh, just a beer, I think. Some of that good imported stuff.”

Sykes set it in front of him as Carley turned around on his stool, refreshing his memory of the place. It was a bit garish, but no more so than the usual location geared for the summer people. Wide picture windows overlooked the beach, and outside lights gently bathed the trees in multi-colored hues. It was still summer—or trying to be—at Sykes’ Steak House.

Presently Sykes came over to make polite conversation. “Gotten to any football games this season, Carley?”

The little waiter lit a cigarette. “Just one, beginning of the season.” He took a sip from his glass. “This is good beer.”

“The best. Nothing but the best for somebody in the business.”

Carley had a second beer and then gathered up his coat. “Got to be going,” he said. The drunken young man was still leaning on the bar with his martini glass empty once more. “I’ll stop by again some time when I have the opportunity.”

Sykes nodded shortly. “Do that. Oh, if you’re going back downtown, could you mail this letter for me? I want it to get out tonight.”

“Sure,” Carley said, accepting the stamped envelope. It was addressed to him. “Be seeing you.”

On the bus he picked a seat far to the rear, and slit open the envelope with his finger, keeping it carefully down out of sight of the driver. There were one hundred ten-dollar bills inside. And a key.

During the remainder of the week, Carley spent his days busily at work in the little apartment. The thing was simple enough, but there was a certain touch to it, a certain technique. He hadn’t earned his reputation for nothing. By Saturday night, he was ready.

His boss said nothing when he left early, a few minutes before the two o’clock closing. Carley was just in time for the last bus, but he didn’t ride it all the way. The final half mile to Sykes’ Steak House was covered on foot, in the event that the bus driver had too good a memory. The parking lot was empty and the place was dark by the time Carley reached it, a few minutes before three. Overhead, the clouds had parted enough to show a scattering of stars. This night even they seemed cold, like drops of ice in a distant landscape.

Carley fitted the key carefully into the front door, but nothing happened. He sighed, removed it, and went around to the back of the place. Here the key worked easily in the oiled lock, and he entered through the dark and forbidding kitchen. All right, he decided, but not here. Through the kitchen, out the swinging door so familiar to all waiters, across the dining room to the bar.

Behind the bar, in that private world he so rarely entered, Carley went quickly to work. He felt along the rear shelf, by the mirror, until he found what he sought—a little opening where the electric cord from the cash register disappeared somewhere to join other cords. In a few moments, with the aid of small crowbar from his pocket, he’d pried away a wall board and located the maze of wiring he sought.

From the pocket of his topcoat he next removed a small newspaper-wrapped package. He peeled back the paper enough to expose a fluffed bit of chemically treated clothesline. With a single match he lit it and watched the spark begin its slow journey down the rope to the match-heads still hidden from view. He checked one or two other refinements and then carefully lowered the whole thing into the wall, resting it on the electric wires. No clocks, no candles, no bottles, nothing left over.

He went out the way he’d entered, through the back room, out the back door. Nothing would happen for an hour, and this was the time to get far away, to establish an alibi. But, because he was Carley, because he was a waiter by profession and by temperament, he never fled from the scene.

Instead, he took up a position some two blocks distant from Sykes’ Steak House. And waited. As he had so many times before.

The thing was foolproof, he knew. Even if, sometime, they saw him waiting, they could never prove a thing. There was no law, yet, against waiting on a street corner—even in the middle of the night.

Fifty-five minutes later, he noticed a thin wisp of smoke, and then a tongue of flame suddenly shattered one of the front windows of the steak house. A block down the street, a light went on in one of the houses. Good. It would be about three minutes before the first engine could get there. By that time…

He watched through it all, until the roof fell in just after five o’clock. Then he boarded a bus for downtown and his apartment. It had been one of his most successful efforts, really, and he knew Sykes would be pleased with the quick execution.

The next evening at work, MacBanter, his boss, was more talkative than usual. He finished checking the menu for the coming week and glanced around at the sparse Sunday night crowd.

“I hear Sykes’ place burned down.”

“Yes,” Carley answered, going on about his business.

“Tough break.”

“It is, just before the holidays like this.”

“Still, I guess he had plenty of insurance, and those lake places never do well in the winter. Maybe it’s not such a tough break after all.”

Carley cleared his throat. “Did you hear what caused it?”

“Something in the wiring.”

“Oh.”

“Ever stop to think how many restaurants burn up in this town every year? Just take this year, for example. I can think of four places—and in every case they said it was the wiring.”

“Old places, I suppose the wiring gets worn.”

“I don’t know. Some of them weren’t so old. You hear stories, being in the business.”

Carley began to fill the sugar bowls he’d carefully collected from the tables. “What sort of stories do you hear, Mister MacBanter?”

“Just stories.” He started to walk away, then added, “I suppose a guy could make a pile of money if he had the right touch, the way the restaurant business is these days.”

The holiday trade at MacBanter’s was brisk, and for some weeks the place was filled every night. The nearby city hall offices yielded up the usual assortment of celebrations for Christmas and the New Year, and Carley’s only problem during those busy nights was managing to pocket the generous tips while avoiding the drunken young men who staggered after giggling office girls.

But with the coming of January, business at MacBanter’s took a sudden, unexpected dive. By the end of the month, the unhappy owner was no longer spending his nights counting the cash. Instead, he was poring over a mounting pile of bills. Early in February, with the outside temperature a business-discouraging three below zero, he came to Carley.

“What am I going to do? January was awful, and February is no better.”

“The holidays were good,” the little waiter reminded him. “Everyone has bad months. It’ll pick up.”

“Will it? With these new tax regulations and now this damned weather and the rest of it? Frankly, Carley, I’ve always had a borderline operation. The holidays saved me for a while, but now I’m close to the end of my rope.” He chuckled and turned away. “What I need about now is a good fire.”

Carley was silent for a long time. Finally he touched a careful finger to the silverware on the table next to him. “I work here, Mister MacBanter,” he said simply.

“So?”

“If you had a fire… a
good
fire… where would I work?”

“I’d take care of you, don’t worry.”

“But my job…”

“I’d get you in with a friend of mine. He’s opening a new place out in the suburbs.”

“I don’t know,” Carley said doubtfully.

MacBanter dropped his voice to a whisper. “Twice what you usually get, and I know how much that is.”

“I…”

“I’d do it myself, only I don’t have the touch. They tell me you’re an expert, a specialist.”

“Who tells you?” Carley asked.

“Sykes is down in Florida, relaxing on the insurance money.”

For the remainder of the week even the daytime temperatures rarely rose above zero, and Carley was happy to be occupied indoors. He worked lovingly on his device, putting an extra bit of care into it.

Saturday nights and early Sunday mornings always seemed to be best for his operations, and this Saturday night seemed especially good to Carley. The place was fairly crowded despite the continued below-zero-cold, and the closing hours had the sort of hectic confusion that the bartender and others would remember and testify to, if necessary.

Carley made certain he was not the last to leave, but he waited in the parking lot across the street until he saw the place darken for the night. It was snowing again, that fine, almost invisible fall which came only with extreme cold, but nevertheless piled up in the streets. He bundled up his collar against the wind and headed back across the street.

Once inside, he worked with precise speed. During these past months, the restaurant had become like a second home to him, and even in the dark he knew every turn. This time there was no need to feel around behind the bar. He went at once to the fuse box, traced a main cable to a likely point within the walls, and went to work. The device had a slightly longer fuse than usual, but that was all right. He lit it with a single match, watched the glowing ember for a moment, and then positioned it as he would place a baby in its crib.

He locked the place carefully behind him and walked quickly away. At first he considered waiting in the empty parking lot, but decided it was too open. He chose instead a street corner a block away, where a pile of plowed snow offered perfect shelter from passing cars. It was cold, and the wind-driven snow stung at his face.

Sometimes, in the past, he’d wondered about this strange obsession to remain at the scene, waiting for the first purple burst of flame through the imprisoning wood and glass. He’d even considered the possibility that he was a firebug—a pyromaniac of some sort. Perhaps he was, but he chose not to think about that possibility. He saw himself instead only as a waiter, standing on a street corner looking at a slice of life he was helping to create. It gave him a sense of power, a sense of belonging, and he could hardly be expected to walk away from it, into the darkness that only led back to his lonely apartment.

So this night he waited again, behind the snowbank, feeling the numbness eating away at his face, running his pocketed hands through the evening’s yet uncounted tip money.

He wondered what the temperature was. Below zero, certainly. Possibly ten below. And with this wind… It shouldn’t be long.

It was foolish of him to stand there freezing. He must get inside, under cover, and then return later. But his watch told him a half hour had already passed. Better to stay here, in case somehow he had misjudged the timing of the fuse.

MacBanter would be pleased. MacBanter would pay him two thousand dollars and get a new job for him. He wondered what the new place would be like.

The wind seemed to have grown colder. One hour. But no purple flame… nothing. He shifted his feet, stamping them, trying to warm them.

At an hour and a quarter, he had a terrible fear that something had gone wrong. He must return to the place and check.

But he was so tired and so cold.

Then, yes—a bit of flame flashed behind the window. It was beginning.

His face had lost all feeling now, and his feet were like things apart. He must move, move…

He saw the flames raging up, out of control, saw a passing motorist screech to a stop and turn in a box alarm, heard then somewhere in the far-off distance the birth of a familiar wailing voice.

Smiling, he toppled forward into the snowbank.

“What do you make of it, Doc?” the policeman asked, rolling the snow-crusted body over on its back.

The doctor’s examination was brief. “Exposure,” he said. “He froze to death.”