The Edge of Doom (16 page)

“You seem to have a certain amount of influence yourself,” Laurence said, his tone a mixture of admiration and disbelief.

“Only in my world of crime. Big money goes further. I mean no offense,” he added.

“None taken,” Laurence said. “Money had better go far; it’s what keeps the wheels turning.”

It was evidence of Kate’s unhappiness—guilt toward Reed, and worry about Jay—that she didn’t answer Laurence even with a quip.

“The damn thing is,” Laurence said, “and I came here intending to tell you this although I didn’t know you had actually been harboring that man, that I was responsible for some men trying to get in here to see if you were, in fact, harboring him. They couldn’t get in but they became convinced you weren’t. If they were mistaken, I’d like to know.”

“They weren’t mistaken,” Reed said. “He wasn’t here then.”

“Well, I’m relieved to hear that,” Laurence said. “I’ll be off then. Will you let me know if you discover anything else about Kate’s, er, father?”

“Yes,” Reed said. “And may we expect the same from you?”

“Did you in fact come here because you expected to find him here?” Kate asked Laurence as he prepared to depart.

“I have my reports,” he said, rather hastily. “Glad to know I was wrongly informed.”

“At least you got to see where I live,” Kate said, not graciously.

“Rather shabby,” Laurence said. “Just what I expected. I know you could afford to hire a good decorator. Why not ask Janice to recommend one?”

Vastly to Kate’s credit, she did not answer him; his manners seemed to her beyond sarcasm, as she later explained to Reed.

They had, of course, a great deal to explain to one another, and happily Laurence went and left them to it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was . . . an excellent play, well digested
in the scenes, set down with as
much modesty as cunning.

The following afternoon Reed called Ringley at the police precinct to check on Jay’s arrival at the upstate prison facility.

“He’s not there, of course,” Ringley said. “We handed him over to your men; they took him away.”

“What do you mean, my men?”

“They had a note from you, and identification as agents with the Witness Protection Program. They looked official as hell. And your man didn’t make any fuss about going with them. They got in a car and drove off.”

“I don’t suppose they said where they were going?” Reed asked, controlling his anger and frustration.

“They said they’d be in touch with you when they got there. They said: ‘tell Amhearst we’ll let him know as soon as we arrive.’ ”

“Arrive where?”

“They didn’t say. They seemed to think you knew; I assumed you did. Is something wrong?”

“Never mind, Ringley,” Reed said. “Thanks for all you’ve done.”

Reed, who was in his office, phoned home; the message machine told him Kate had not yet arrived there. She was usually home by four on Wednesday afternoons unless she had told him otherwise, which she hadn’t. He left a message for her to wait for him at home; he would be right there.

He had given the police both of his phone numbers. He presumed, however, that the agents, if they called at all, would call him at home. He rushed from the building that housed his office, stopping only to lock his office door. He sped down the stairs, out into the street, hailed a taxi—it was, thank God, the hour when taxis were heading downtown for the end of their shift—and arrived home, there to await Kate’s return.

“You don’t suppose they were agents from the Witness Protection Program?” Kate had asked when she arrived home and learned Reed’s news.

“Of course not. They don’t go trailing after people who have left the program, and certainly they wouldn’t have known or cared where Jay was. But it does indicate that whoever this man is who’s pursuing Jay, and whoever his accomplice is, they’re smooth, they can look federal enough to fool a police officer, and they must have faked their identification badges skillfully. This man is not your ordinary roughneck or criminal; I’d say he’s definitely middle-class and educated, or giving a damn good imitation. No, I’m not being snobbish or classist, I’m being a detective.”

Kate had not yet thought of an answer to this when the telephone rang. Reed picked it up, saying “Amhearst” into the phone, as though he were still in his office. He never answered their home phone that way. Although he had spoken with some calmness to Kate, this was a sign of his anxiety. He did not speak again; he listened. Finally he said: “I’ll have to call you back. No, I can’t say anything before I speak to her. I won’t speak to anyone else. Give me a number where I can reach you.” Reed jotted a number down and hung up the phone.

“What?” Kate said.

“He wants you to meet him. You alone. They’ve got Jay. They say if you don’t meet now, as soon as you can get there, they’ll kill him. I said I had to talk to you. They gave me a number.”

“And if you gave it to the police, could they rescue Jay?”

“Obviously not. It must be the number of the phone where they are, and they’re going to have to tell you or me that anyway if they expect you to show up there. Probably it’s the number of a public phone box near where they are. The police would never get there in time; this guy knows what he’s doing.”

“What is he doing?”

“I mean he’s a clever operator. Of course you can’t go, Kate. The question is, what are we going to do?”

“Do you think he’ll kill Jay if I don’t show up?”

Reed would later say that her question forced him to the hardest decision of his life. If he said no, they won’t kill him, he would have lied to her; when she learned that he had lied, something between them would have been destroyed, perhaps irremediably. If he said what he believed, that they would kill Jay if Kate did not appear, she would probably insist on going; well, at least she would know the facts and be able to make her own decision. With all they had been through since this man, Jay, had entered their lives, his and Kate’s alliance, their love, their marriage, had been tested, had been stretched further than ever before. If he lied to her, he might lose her. If he didn’t lie, he might lose her anyway; she might be killed. With all that rushing through his mind, he never really doubted that the decision must be hers, and that she must decide on the basis of what he believed to be the truth.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m afraid Jay will be killed if you do not go. That seems this man’s supreme aim in life, if we are at all to trust what Jay has told us, and to judge from the man’s voice on the phone, and from his actions, we can hardly mistrust his stated intentions.”

They sat in silence for a period, probably short; minutes pass slowly under such circumstances; time is not fixed. Kate, tasting the silence, thought of Faustus’s plea: go slowly, slowly, horses of the night.

“Faustus didn’t know from slowly,” she said to Reed.

“What?”

“I was thinking about time. Call the man, Reed; tell him I’ll come. I have to, surely you see that. It was probably inevitable from the moment Jay entered Laurence’s office that something like this would happen. Or is that only hindsight? Call him back. And write out clear directions; I’d hate to get lost.”

Reed did not respond at once. He waited for what seemed to Kate another longish period. He wanted to speak to Kate, to say something, that was clear enough, but in the end he didn’t speak. He dialed the number given; Kate could tell that the phone was answered immediately.

“She’ll come,” Reed said. “Yes, she has a car. She needs directions. She’ll be alone; she won’t be followed. But listen, I know her, she’s a good driver but a lousy navigator. If she’s late, it will be because she’s lost. Don’t panic. She is coming and she will be alone. Yes, she’s leaving now. She has to get the car from the garage; it’s two blocks away. Please, don’t panic. Please be reasonably patient.”

Kate turned west from the garage and then onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. Waiting on the street for the light to change, she had studied Reed’s directions yet again; she had read them over and over in the garage while they were bringing her car down in the elevator. She had seemed, she was, impatient, and the garage man grumbled that he hadn’t had any notice, he was getting the car as fast as he could.

Kate was to go from the Henry Hudson Parkway on to the Sawmill River Parkway, then turn off it quite soon. She had been told to take the right-hand road at the exit, and then the first right-hand turn she came to. She would then come almost immediately to a row of abandoned, boarded-up stores. They would be in the first one she came to, the man had said to Reed. She was to drive past the stores, leave the car further up the road, and walk back to the store. She and her car would be watched; they would know if she was not alone.

To Kate’s immense relief, the turnoff was easily found, as was the right-hand turn after that, as were the abandoned stores. The first one, toward which she was to walk after parking the car, seemed to have been some sort of ice cream place. Further up the road—she had no idea how far was meant—she stopped the car; after some thought, she decided not to lock it. True, it might be stolen, but suppose she wanted to get away fast. She vaguely perceived that this decision made little sense, but she stuck by it all the same.

Approaching the boarded-up ice cream parlor, she looked for a door. A man standing at the corner of the building beckoned to her, indicating that she was to walk toward him. She followed him around to the back of the building and through an open door. The room she entered was dark; coming from the bright sunlight, she was for a moment blinded, unable to make out anything at all. During that moment of waiting for her eyes to adjust, she found herself to be, in the odd way (as she later surmised) of deeply introspective people, simultaneously frightened and thinking of how she would describe her fright. It was almost as though her fear were packed down inside her, not making itself evident to her mind or body, just unmistakably there. It was a new experience and gave her a sense of power, even as she knew herself to be, somewhere deep within her, terrified. Perhaps that was how it was with men in battle?

Gradually, her vision returned. There were three men in the room, each seated oddly on a tall stool, probably left over from the ice cream parlor. Jay was one of the men, just sitting there, not shackled in any way, indicating with ominous clarity that he was constrained by the other men, both of whom held guns; only one of the men sat with his gun pointed at Jay. The other man, his gun held in his hand, his hand resting in his lap, was the person in charge. Kate would be asked later why that was so immediately clear. The answer was a class answer: The man in charge was not a hired hand, or a thug, but rather a man like Jay: college educated, urbane of speech, with an air of natural authority. Also, it had been the other man, the man now pointing his gun at Jay, who had waited for Kate and beckoned to her to go around to the back of the building. He was a different sort from Jay and his pursuer the product of a different world. Kate felt apologetic about this explanation, but there it was.

“Sit down,” the man in charge said. “My name is Charles, not that it matters. I’ve never been called Charlie.”

He pointed to another high stool, across the room from him and Jay, next to his partner with his gun at the ready. Kate clambered up onto the stool and sat, facing the two men. Suddenly she realized, though she could never understand why it had not occurred to her before, that Charles might shoot Jay, or tell the other man to shoot Jay, right before her eyes. Kate might not be able to imagine the man’s reasons for shooting Jay in front of her, but whatever the reasons, they were doubtless a symptom of obsession. The man noticed the look of horror on her face, and reassured her.

“I’m not going to shoot him, not right now,” he said. “Had I wanted to shoot him, I didn’t need to send for you. Shooting a man before his daughter’s eyes is not my immediate aim. It may never be my aim; it all depends on how you conduct yourself.”

Kate, having somewhat recovered herself (“Did you know you can actually feel the blood come back into your head?” she would ask Reed later), looked directly at Jay. Jay tried to smile at her, but his demeanor suggested someone experiencing a profound indifference toward everything.

“He believes me that I will not injure you,” the man said, as though he could read Kate’s thoughts. Well, apparently he could read her thoughts, which under the circumstances was hardly the work of genius. “You’re here to listen. His punishment, whether or not I kill him after you have left, will be to listen as you hear what this noble man, your father, has been up to for most of his life. Are you ready?”

All I could think of, Kate said later, was the children’s game of hide-and-seek: Ready or not, I’m coming. It was clear my readiness was not an issue. Kate nodded all the same, and squirmed a bit on her stool trying to get more—well, comfortable was hardly the word, but less cramped. The man sitting near her raised his gun, positioning himself into greater alertness, but she soon settled down.

“And what has your newfound father told you about our long relationship?” Charles asked.

There was a long pause as Kate searched for words.

“Never mind,” Charles said. “I’ll tell you what he has admitted to you about his past: that he took part in an ‘honorable’ burglary, that I was there, that later he learned I had killed a man during another burglary, that he testified against me and was therefore responsible for getting me convicted. Is that about it?”

Kate nodded.

“Speak up. We’re recording this, the way they do in the police station. You have to speak up so that the machine can hear you.”

“Yes,” Kate said. “That’s what he told me.”

“He suggested I was a cold-blooded killer, carried a gun”—here he waved his gun in the air—“and should have been put away for life.”

“Not exactly,” Kate said.

“But, put a bit more delicately, that was the idea, wasn’t it?”

Kate nodded, then caught herself. “Sorry,” she said. “Yes, that was the idea.”

“Good; at least we’ve got that bit behind us. Would you like to go to the bathroom? I know fright does make one have to go. We haven’t got a proper ladies’ room, but please make use of what we have if you need to.”

Kate did need to. She had been worrying about whether she could ask, and where she could go if she did ask and Charles said yes. “I’d like to go to the bathroom,” she said.

“Fred here will show you where it is. He’ll wait outside the door, but you’ll be private. We don’t mind waiting, do we Jay?”

Fred got off his stool and gestured with his gun for Kate to get off hers. She followed him through a door she hadn’t noticed and down a short hall to a small dirty room with a toilet and sink. “Would you like to make use of the facilities?” a pompous man had once asked her. Why should she remember that now? But at least Charles spoke direct, clear English, neither euphemisms nor that slang now current with the educated classes. Why on earth should she find that hopeful? Did that indicate that he was likely to be more reasonable or less? Villains in literature were often polite.

When Kate and her escort returned to the room, she was offered a glass of water, which she welcomed. Fright induces thirst.

“Good,” Charles said. “Now, shall I begin?”

He seemed actually to be waiting for a signal from her to continue. Kate nodded, then immediately said, “Yes, please begin.”

We might have been in a play by Sartre or someone, she said later to Reed. I suspected and feared that he was lulling me into acquiescence, even into admiration for him, or at least a willingness to hear him out. At the same time, I wanted to hear what he would say. At the back of my mind, as Jay sat on his stool, allowing his head to droop with tiredness, I feared for him. My God, I said to myself, he’s over seventy years old.