The Last Tomorrow (22 page)

He turns away from the glass, steps into his room and grabs his fedora from the bed, trudges downstairs, walks to his car.

He drives beneath an overcast sky, wondering if there isn’t going to be rain today.

Less than fifteen minutes later he’s stepping from his vehicle, walking past two radio cars toward the Shenefield Hotel, a gray block building on the corner of 5th and Grand, in the heart
of the city.

A doorman sees him coming and pulls open the glass door. He gives the guy a nod and makes his way into the lobby. A couch, two chairs, a table with today’s paper on it and an ashtray. At
the back of the room, a desk with a bell on it, and a desk clerk flipping through a magazine.

As he walks he bumps into someone, a young man in a white shirt and a black bowtie with tortoiseshell glasses on his face, and sends the poor fellow spinning. He reaches out and grabs the guy by
the arm to help steady him.

‘Sorry about that, buddy, I
—’

But the sound of something heavy thudding to the floor cuts him off. He looks down at the carpet and there sees a revolver, a black revolver with a long barrel and a wooden grip. He looks from
the revolver to the man standing beside him, the man whose arm is gripped in his fist.

Fear is written across the man’s pale face and guilt flickers in his eyes.

‘What’s with the weapon, son?’

The man yanks away from Carl and runs for the door, pushes through it. He trips over the doorman, hits the ground hard, scrambles back to his feet without slowing down, looks over his shoulder
as he runs.

Carl pulls his service revolver, feeling detached from this moment but having some sense that he needs to act, and runs after the guy. He gives chase, shouting stop, goddamn it, and only caring
because then he could stop running himself. But the man in the bowtie doesn’t stop. He makes a sharp right turn, pivoting off his left foot, and cuts down an alleyway instead, vanishing
behind the brick corner of a building.

About halfway to the alleyway Carl gives up running. He holds his hand to his side and walks quickly, as quickly as he can, breathing hard, feeling dizzy, hating himself. By the time he arrives
at the alleyway it’s empty. Of course it is. Murderer isn’t simply going wait for him, oh, I see you’re out of breath, I’ll give you to the count of thirty before I
continue.

Trash bins line the alley, giving off the stink of old garbage. At the other end of the alley, an empty street. Then a car rolls by.

‘Fuck,’ he says, and leans for a moment on the brick wall to his left.

Once he has his breath again he walks back toward the hotel. He’s no longer a young man in uniform and is apparently incapable of doing the things he once did. It doesn’t matter.
This was not a hoodlum, thug, or gunsel. This was a guy with a job, an address, and square friends who don’t know better than to talk to cops. That was clear by looking at him. Carl will find
him, he’ll track him down to his front door and knock.

That’s what he tells himself, anyway.

He hopes he isn’t lying.

3

Eugene’s shoes pound the sidewalk. He feels scared and upset and absolutely drained. He doesn’t know what to do. He had to abandon his milk truck at the scene, and
a single phone call to the H.H. White Creamery Company will tell the police that truck number twenty-seven is his. A police detective saw him in his milkman’s uniform with the murder weapon,
which even now lies in the hotel lobby, unless it’s already been collected as evidence. And he ran rather than cooperating with the police. Not that he had a choice. They wouldn’t have
believed his story. The obvious answer is often the correct answer, it usually is, and it looked like he killed those men upstairs, so he must have. No amount of protest on his part would have
changed their minds. And every action he took only worked to smear more red across his hands. What he did seemed right in the moment but he finds it hard to imagine doing anything that would have
incriminated him further. But there was no right thing to do in that situation. There was one wrong choice or another wrong choice. That there’s always a right thing to do is a lie you tell
to children.

But now what?

The grand-jury investigation is an irrelevancy. For him it is. He’s now wanted for murder, real murder, actual physical murder, his thumb on the hammer spur, his finger on the trigger, and
one of the victims was a cop. If the police don’t have his name yet they soon will. His only hope is that it takes them a couple hours to put it all together and get to his place. He wants to
gather some clothes as well as a hundred dollars in cash he has folded into a sock.

He hops onto a streetcar at 6th Street and rides it west to Vermont.

In ten minutes he’s back on foot, and back on foot he lights a cigarette and makes his way to New Hampshire. He keeps his eyes on the street, looking for radio cars, wanting to make sure
he sees any cops before they have a chance to see him.

He needs to get out of these clothes; they’re too conspicuous.

He walks up the stairs to his apartment, unlocks the front door. The place is empty but he doesn’t know how long he has so he must hurry.

His revolver, which he’s certain he left lying on the dining table, is absent, as he knew it would be. Evelyn. Goddamn it. He knew she was responsible, at least in part, but even so there
was a part of him that hoped he’d walk in here and find the revolver where he left it. That would at least have cast some doubt on her involvement.

Stop bellyaching, Eugene. There’s no time for it.

He walks to the bedroom and pulls a cardboard suitcase out from under his bed, the same suitcase he used when moving here from the East Coast. He also finds a locket lying on the floor, a small
gold locket with an intricate design etched into it.

With the suitcase in one hand and the locket in the other he gets to his feet. He tosses the suitcase onto the bed, examines the locket. A thin gold chain is strung through it, the chain’s
clasp broken. He thumbs a button on the side of the locket and it opens. Inside, a picture of a teenage girl sitting beside her father. She’s in a dress, he’s in a suit and tie. He
recognizes her despite the fact the picture is probably more than ten years old. He also recognizes the man, though he’s never seen him in person. He’s seen his scowling image on the
front page of several newspapers over the years. A person of interest. Suspected of bribing public officials. Suspected of murder. Connections to the underworld in several major American cities.
Then, months later, a different story on page three. No charges filed. Acquitted. Bad information. Lost evidence. Sloppy police work.

James Manning.

The Man.

Eugene would be willing to bet green money on Evelyn’s last name. When she told him she worked for her father she was telling the truth. She simply neglected to mention who her father was.
Who he is. And
what
he is.

He tosses the locket into the suitcase, then piles clothes on top of it, pants and shirts and underwear. He opens his sock drawer, pulls out several pairs, throws them into the suitcase. At the
back of the drawer he finds a lone sock folded over itself. He unfolds it and removes ten ten-dollar bills, all the money he has in the world. He sets the money on top of his dresser. He closes the
cardboard suitcase, tries to latch it and finds the latch broken. He wraps a belt around it to keep it closed. He changes into a different set of clothes, a pair of khaki pants and a checkered
shirt and a cardigan; fresh socks and a pair of casual two-tone shoes. He grabs the money from the dresser and shoves it into his pocket. He lifts the suitcase.

He has a motorcycle parked in the garage, a Harley–Davidson with a two-cylinder panhead engine. He hasn’t touched it in almost a year. Rode it often last summer, then garaged it and
forgot about it. The milk truck is always right out front.

He hopes he can get the bike to start. He’s about to find out.

Without knowing where he might go, without knowing what he might do, having no idea what might be in store for him at all, he heads out the front door.

1

Seymour Markley sits at his desk in his home office, the door shut and locked. He doesn’t want Margaret to walk in on him, as she sometimes does, offering a snack or
something to drink. He doesn’t want her to see what he’s looking at, dozens of potential blackmail photographs. He’s amazed by how many there are. But it makes sense. None of the
men in these pictures would dare speak up about being blackmailed. If they did they’d have to reveal
why
they were blackmailed, and if they were willing to do that they couldn’t
have been blackmailed in the first place. The numbers added up because no one would reveal himself as a whoremonger.

Seymour faces the same shameful problem. He’d like to use these pictures to some political advantage, but doesn’t want anyone to know he too was photographed.

Of course that evidence is bubbled black film in a trash bin now, and while some of these men might suspect something, he learned many years ago that suspicion isn’t evidence. It
isn’t even close.

So how does he best use these pictures to his advantage? He doesn’t want to blackmail anyone. He wants these men on his side. He wants these men in his corner come a political fight.

Perhaps the best move is to simply hand the pictures over to their subjects and suggest they remember the favor. But some of them might not even know the pictures exist. In fact, it’s
certain. The pictures Vivian and her cuckold husband had of him were from over a year ago. They held onto them until they were useful. They were patient. Some of these men with whom he has old
rivalries might even assume he hired someone to get the pictures himself, and that would only serve to make them mistrust him further. It could convince them that he should be buried, and there are
those among them who
could
bury him.

So he’ll be careful. He’ll only give the pictures to those already on his side. He’ll put them in envelopes and hand them over and say, thought you might want these back. If
the fellow responsible for them has been bothering you, that’s finished now. If not, I saved you some serious trouble. The rest of the pictures, he’ll hold on to.

In most cases he’ll ask for nothing in return, not until he needs help.

But there are a few people he needs favors from immediately. He believes he’ll start with Woodrow Selby at Monocle Pictures. He’ll hand the photographs to Selby and mention that
he’s seen this background actor Leland Jones in several of his Western pictures. He’ll say he doesn’t like to recognize background actors, it pulls him right out of the action.
He’ll ask Selby if he doesn’t find it distracting as well.

The telephone on his desk rings. He jumps, feeling guilty, grabs a handful of photographs and throws them into the box, then realizes how absurd that is and lets the others remain where they
lie, spread out across his desk.

He picks up the telephone.

‘Hello.’

‘Seymour. It’s Bill.’

There are only a few reasons Bill Parker would be calling Seymour on a Saturday evening, none of them good. He and the chief of police have a fine professional relationship, but that’s the
only relationship they have. They’ve not spoken a dozen words to one another outside the context of work.

Seymour clears his throat. ‘I’m almost afraid to ask.’

‘It’s your witness.’

‘Theodore Stuart?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s dead.’

Seymour finds it difficult at first to process the sentence, a mere two words though it is. He remains silent for a long time. He stares down at the photographs on his desk. He blinks.

Finally he says, ‘I thought he was under police protection.’

‘His police protection is dead too.’

‘James Manning?’

‘Too early to say. We have homicide detectives on the scene and boys from the crime lab are on their way. We’ll see what we get.’

‘I want to talk with the detectives on the case.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

2

Seymour drives through darkness, his stomach empty and sour. Margaret tried to get him to eat some dinner, but he had no appetite. She wrapped his plate in tinfoil and put it
in the fridge. It’ll be here when you get home. She kissed the corner of his mouth, looked into his eyes. You work too hard.

Be back in a while.

He turned, headed out the front door.

Theodore Stuart’s dead, murdered, and it almost has to have been James Manning behind it. People don’t murder people under police protection without good reason, there’s too
much risk, and Seymour can think of only one man with a strong enough motive to take said risk.

The fact that he could get to Stuart means, too, that Bill Parker’s department has been compromised. That’s the problem with money. It can make even good cops spill. You get in a
little over your head on house payments, or the vigorish on your gambling debt gets out of control, and along comes some grinning mustache with a fat wad of cash, and he doesn’t want anything
from you but a few words, what’s the harm, really?

He pulls his car into the parking structure and brings it to a stop.

3

He looks at the three men sitting across the desk from him, Captain Ellis crisply suited while to his left a couple homicide detectives – Bachman, clothes nearly as
wrinkled as his face; and Friedman, the youngest man in the room by at least a decade – slouch red-eyed after a long day on the job.

Seymour exhales in a sigh.

‘So,’ he says, ‘what do we have on Manning?’

The silence stretches out.

Finally Detective Bachman sits up and clears his throat. He scratches his left eyebrow and looks uncomfortable.

‘Nothing,’ he says.

‘Nothing?’

‘Well, uh . . .’

‘As of this moment,’ Captain Ellis says, ‘it doesn’t look like James Manning was responsible for the murder.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘What do you have?’

‘Our primary suspect is a milkman named Eugene Dahl,’ Bachman says. ‘He was at the crime scene with the murder weapon on his person. He escaped capture, but we’ve just
searched his apartment and found shoes with blood on them and a box of shells. Guys from the crime lab are matching footprints at the scene to the shoes we found in his apartment. The evidence is
solid.’