The Penny Ferry - Rick Boyer (27 page)

"Well, thank God that's all for today. Did I
tell you Mrs. Reubens canceled?"

I brightened. "No, you didn't." I looked at
my watch. It showed three-twelve. I could go home. Or I could go
somewhere else. Somewhere that had been on my mind a great deal
lately and wouldn't let me alone. I called Susan over to my desk.

"Listen carefully," I said. "I've got
some business to attend to up in Lowell. I'm going up there alone for
a few hours and I'm not telling anyone. I'm only telling you in case
of an emergency here or in case I don't come back."

She stiffened; her eyes widened.

"
Don't do that; it's not really that daring. But
I'm afraid I'm going to break the law a little teeny bit. That's one
of the reasons I don't want a lot of people to know about it."

"Not even Mary?"

"Most especially not Mary."

"Oh . . ." There was a hint of accusation
in her voice. "Who are you uh, going to break the law with?"

"What? With nobody else. This is a solo
operation, Susan; I'm going alone."

"Oh. I just thought . . . you know. There was
that woman on the phone and— "

"Well, you thought wrong. Now I should be back
here, or home, by between six and seven. Don't tell anybody where I'm
going, but if something big comes up, give them this number— it's a
bar— and tell them to tell the folks there to come find me around
the corner."

"Okay, Doctor Adams. I'm sorry I thought—"

"Forget it. It's just that certain people, no
matter how sincere their intentions and how noble their character,
can't stay out of trouble. My life is living proof of that. Good-bye;
be sure to lock up when you leave."

I went out into the lot, climbed into the Scout,. and
headed north to Lowell. I'd left Susan the number at the Lucky Seven,
and right underneath it the address of Johnny Robinson's apartment.
Joe said the place was closed and sealed by the fuzz. But I had to
get in there; that's where the hot item was.
 
 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I parked the car a block away from the little gray
house and walked up to it from the front. The day was warm and mostly
sunny; the birds were singing. A gray squirrel sat on a low limb with
a nut in his mouth and scolded me. He flipped his tail and
cluck-clucked. Then he cried
chaaaaww
,
chaaaawwwww!
and went
back to clucking again. I strode up the walk purposefully, opened the
side door, and went briskly up the stairs. At the top Johnny's door
was locked solid and had a Middlesex County Sheriff's Department seal
on it. I walked quickly back down and out to the car where I put on
an old Levi's jacket and a long-billed fisherman's cap that I always
keep in back. I was wearing khaki-type slacks which weren't as good
as jeans but would have to do. I grabbed a roll of friction tape and
an oversized screwdriver from the glove box and returned to the
house. But instead of going in the front, I walked around to the
back. The ladder in the garage made it easier to mount the small shed
roof. But had it not been there I was prepared to climb up. With the
ladder in place I stepped back and gazed at the scene. The back of
the small house was invisible from the neighbors'. I returned to the
front porch and stood at the downstairs door and rang the front bell
twice, stomping around impatiently like a repairman. No answer. Still
vacant.

I was up on that little roof in two winks. In another
two I had crisscrossed the windowpane with tape. I took a final look
around, and holding a thick rag up between the windowpane and my arm,
I swung at it with the screwdriver handle. The window broke with a
low, grinding crackle. It sounded exactly like pond ice breaking
underfoot. With the wind in the trees and the birdsong outside, it
was scarcely audible. I poked the remaining glass away, and it fell
inside in a jagged stringy mess of tape and shards. The tape had
prevented the explosive tinkling sound of glass and had kept the mess
together too. Old Joe had taught me a lot.

I stuck my head in and hollered hello three times,
waiting awhile between each call. I climbed inside. Nobody home.
Except me.

First I made a quick and silent survey of the
apartment. It appeared fine— just as we'd left it almost two weeks
previously. Next I unfastened the front-door lock and opened the
door, thus breaking the seal. I was in triple Dutch if caught, but I
wanted a quick way out. I left the latch on, though, just to buy
myself some time if anyone tried to come in that way. I returned to
the bedroom, went back out onto the low roof, and tipped the ladder
over. It fell back onto the grass, which was tall enough to hide it
from casual view. Nothing looks more suspicious than a ladder beneath
an open window. To hide the broken pane raised the window, then
lowered the top sash into the bottom position. With the shade halfway
down, a passerby would have to look carefully up at the top pane to
see that it was missing. I figured I was safe for the time being. I
had maybe an hour to find what everyone was looking for. Whatever
that was.

I began my search by closing the hall door and
peering out through the peepholes that the killers had constructed in
it. I assumed the lighting would have been about the same the day
that Johnny and the dogs bought it. Through the peephole I could
clearly see the hallway and the front door. I could also see into the
living room, and a large portion of it. None of the lights was on,
and they wouldn't have been that day either. But the light was more
than adequate. I studied the killer's view for several minutes
because it told me something. It told me that Johnny had been in
plain view from the time he entered his apartment. And he had not
gone into the john, or his bedroom, or around the corner of the
living room. Because if he had, then those rooms would've been turned
inside out by the killers in their efforts to find the hot item. The
rooms would have all been ransacked like my house and Sam's office.
After torturing Andy and murdering him, the killers had certainly
returned here, but they had left the apartment alone. Ergo, Johnny
was never out of their sight from the time he entered until he drew
his last breath. Perhaps a total of thirty seconds— probably no
more. Then maybe this errand had been a mistake.

I sagged down in the shoulders and sighed wearily. I
ambled down the semidark hallway and into the living room, where I
sat on the couch. Way to go Adams. You pull a B and E to discover
that he couldn't have hidden the whatever-it-is in his own house. And
sitting there, I was struck by the possible consequences of what I
had done. Breaking and entering. What did it carry? Five years in the
slammer? If I was caught, would the fact that I was a physician and
respectable citizen with a clean I record help me? Maybe not. Would
the fact that I had enough money to get the best defense and grease a
few palms help me? Immeasurably, without a doubt.

And again my thoughts got on that trolley track which
clickety-clacked back to the fish peddler and the shoe trimmer. They
certainly hadn't had much money. In fact, one of the first items of
business in the Italian community after the arrest was the
establishment of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, headed by a
man named Aldino Felicani, to raise funds for the trial. The trolley
track kept clicking away. ..I had been over this same path many, many
times in the past two weeks: then why . . . why was the defense
committee even necessary, if indeed the two men had knocked over a
shoe factory three weeks previous for fifteen grand?

And then my thinking went back to the biggest
question in my mind, which revolved around the characters and
personalities of the defendants. Why and how would two working stiffs
like Nick Sacco and Bart Vanzetti— anarchists and idealists, yes,
but guys who had earned their meager livings for over a decade
without any brush with the law— get involved with four or five
other guys, two big cars, armed robbery and murder, and then . . .
and then go back into their drab working class life, with no car, no
big house, no bankroll . . .

No. It didn't fit. Unless they had drunk some magic
Jekyll-and-Hyde tonic the evening of April 14, pulled the job the
next afternoon, then returned to normal,. it didn't fit.

And that was the reason I had entered illegally.
Since it now seemed certain that at least one of them— Sacco—
was guilty, I had to find out what horrendous aberration in the human
personality had occurred to make it so. And I wanted to see the
implication, the proof, in black and white.

A bluejay cawed outside. Through the front windows I
could see the elms and maples Hopping and swopping around in the late
spring breeze. A robin sang. I got up and walked over to one of
Johnny's light posters. I was staring at it when I heard a car
whisper by on the street, and I jumped a bit. I looked down to see a
tan sedan turn toward town. I walked through the rooms once more,
hoping to get a spark, a faint beam of light . . .

In the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, I
thought of it. The thugs had searched the office and Johnny's car and
his person. It was not in the pouch. Therefore he'd ditched it
between the car and the hallway. I went to the door and opened it
cautiously. I crept down the stairs, then stared out the tiny
curtained window at the bottom which looked out to the street. As I
watched, at black-and-white police cruiser oozed by in a crawl. I
nearly fainted.

But they didn't stop, just drifted by ghostlike and
went off down the street. Thank God for the white lace curtains. They
acted like a one-way mirror and I wasn't seen. When I was sure they
were far away I went out and looked at the door. My eyes followed
every shingle, every inch of door-frame molding. I looked up. I
reached up as far as I could and ran my hand along the joints and
crevices. Johnny was shorter than I, so I knew by stretching up I was
overlooking no place he could reach.

The door revealed nothing, so I walked toward the
street and stood on the sidewalk. I walked slowly to the doorway. Now
what if Johnny had a warning, a premonition something wasn't right?
Perhaps a flutter of motion in an upstairs window? Maybe the dogs
began their low growling as they came up the walk? I went over and
looked down at the porch steps and floor. There was no hiding place I
could see or feel. There was not even a crack in the boards through
which a photo negative could be dropped or slipped.

Returning to the enclosed side stairway, I opened the
bottom door and went back inside. Behind me the street was empty and
the birds chirped; the leaves hissed and whispered in the breeze. The
sun came out. I closed the door softly and stared up the dark
stairway.

I crept up, step by step, searching the walls and
wood every inch of the way. I took out my penlight and swept it
everywhere. I grabbed the stair tread boards by their lips and tried
to raise them. I kicked at the risers to see if they were loose. No
dice. The stairwell walls were painted a flat yellow. No cracks.
Lightswitch plate was firm, ceiling fixture too high to reach. Up at
the top I examined the outside door frame with eyes, light, and
fingers. Nothing there. The door was left ajar; I pushed it open and
re-entered, standing near the living-room door. I examined the walls,
the chair rails, the small table under which the lethal bomb had been
placed, the rug runner, everything. No dice.

I reached my hand up and swept it all around the
walls. Same result.

'Johnny, damn you," I whispered aloud in
exasperation, "what the hell did you do with it?"

I trudged back to the living room and stared out the
windows. The faint happy noises of springtime wafted through to me. I
was a fool to suppose that I could uncover the object if the
determined efforts of the professionals, whose handiwork I had seen
firsthand in my own house, had not. I decided I had overstayed my
luck; it was time to depart. But first I went into the john a final
time to take a leak. Had he flushed it down the toilet? I asked
myself. No; the thugs had him in their sight the entire time. I
decided to ask Joe to let me look at Johnny's clothes. Though they
had been gone over by the killers and the cops with a fine-tooth
comb, they seemed the one possibility remaining out of reach of the
competition.

I washed my hands. The water seemed to be making a
rather strange noise: a faint thumping and grating. I thought the
pipes needed fixing; they had water hammer. Put dead-end air-capped
pipe on the feeder line to soak up that water shock and— I looked
at myself in the mirror. I didn't like the look on the face that
stared back; it was afraid. I turned the water off. The grating and
thumping were still there. They were coming from beneath me. When I
got out to the hall I was sure what the noise was.

Somebody was coming up the stairs.

Cops or crooks— either way, Adams was cooked.
Luckily, like any decent burglar, I had an alternate exit route
chosen. I was going to leave via the back window. And quickly.

But it was no go; when I got there and reached down
to pull up the intact pane I saw a rough-looking character standing
in the small back yard. He wasn't looking up at me; he was glancing
sideways, back and forth. He had seen the fallen ladder too. He was
no cop. I went back into the hallway; I heard the double scrape of
feet— faint yet clear, which told me the stairs had been climbed.
My visitor had reached the top landing.