Foggy, Foggy Death Page 7

  She tried to move toward the other voice, and tried to answer it, but instead she went on over and over calling the name she could not understand. Then she remembered she was not allowed to understand it; there was a rule she could not remember the name and even by calling it she was breaking the rule—no, another rule. She moved through the fog, with the dead bushes and weeds plucking at her, trying to stop her until suddenly she was free and falling, clutching desperately at the frail trunk of a little tree, but falling still toward the brook and moving toward the brook, now, crawling toward the brook, because Scott was there with his head in the water and if she did not reach him he would—

  She tossed and cried out in her sleep and said, “No, no. No, Scott!”

  The man who was watching her was relieved. She’d just been talking in her sleep, and he hadn’t waked her up. She was quite a babe, too, with the covers half off her and nothing much else on.

  V

  Left to himself in a small room on the third floor, Bill Higgins at first had no ideas beyond eating the sandwiches provided after an hour or so and waiting until he was let out. He was still worried, and still figured that some guys had all the luck, but not Bill Higgins. Here he was in a Caddy, with a fortune in the glove compartment, and he’d be the guy to run through a red light when there was a cop standing there with nothing better to do. Without he’d run through the light, he would have had the Caddy and the jools and he’d have sold the jools—although actually he hadn’t a notion where he’d have sold them, come to that—and gone somewhere, like maybe Florida, Maybe Brazil or somewheres like that would have been better. And a lot of guys got away with it but he said to himself, not you, Bill, nope, not you.

  On the other hand, he could have had worse luck, once you figured on bad luck to begin with. It was a break the Caddy had stood there long enough, and that the ground had been soft enough, to leave the tracks the way it did, which showed the cops he wasn’t lying—not all the way, anyhow. Now that killing had got into it, a guy only needed one kind of luck—not to have the cops getting the idea of hooking him up with that. With all these rich guys around, guys who had drag, the cops would rather hook up somebody like Bill Higgins, who didn’t have a drag, with a killing than anybody. That was the way things were. Bill, having finished the sandwiches, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Began to look like he was catching cold, after all. He shivered.

  This was not because he was catching cold, if he was catching cold, but because he began to realize he was looking rather too optimistically on the brighter side of things. Sure, the cops had found the car had been where he said it had been, and that was all right. But, when you came down to it, you couldn’t trust cops. Not when it was a question of Bill Higgins against a bunch of guys with drag; against somebody like old lady Bromwell. Bill Higgins against somebody with more drag than himself, Al Tyler, say, and then O.K. What the cops found out they figured on. But when it was Bill Higgins against old lady Bromwell, and people like her, you could figure the cops might forget the car was where he said it was, if old lady Bromwell didn’t want it to have been there.

  What you need, Bill, Bill Higgins told himself—growing more worried by the moment—is a lawyer, only to get a lawyer you got to have money, because a lawyer going up against old lady Bromwell and people like that would want to be paid for it, but good. And what you’ve got, Bill, he told himself—and examined his pockets to find out—what you’ve got is two dollars and eighteen cents and back at the place maybe five-ten dollars more. The more you think about it, Bill told himself, the worse it looks. What you need is some jack. It’s what you all the time need, but now you honest to God do need it.

  Normally, Bill Higgins got by, and no more than by, through a seasonal mixture of inefficient labor and minor theft. This brought home the canned beans, if not the bacon. In the spring and summer he raised a few vegetables in soil unsuitable for vegetation—it had a sub-strata of tin cans and part of an old car—and picked up dollars half-cutting people’s lawns, to the detriment of their power mowers. He also spaded gardens, never deeply enough, and sometimes helped other men who were doing work of a not too heavy sort. (He found out what the job was before he agreed to hire on as a helper; if it was something like repairing a dry stone wall, it wasn’t for Bill Higgins.) In the fall, he helped rake leaves and burn them, and this was what he liked best—light work at its most arduous, and for the rest the dreamy supervision of fires which would have got on better by themselves.

  In the winters, Bill stole. Now and then, as a result of this, he spent a few months in jail, but these interruptions were infrequent. His thefts, although in the legal sense felonious, were too trifling to arouse to full diligence the State Police—either of New York or Connecticut; Bill was indifferent to state lines—and one needed to be either very careless or very inefficient to be caught at all. That Bill now and then was caught was, on the whole, rather characteristic.

  Bill’s thefts were carried on in small country places—never in the big ones—which were closed up for the winter. Often, the places he raided were very small indeed; weekend cabins deserted from Labor Day to the first of June and, by and large, with very little left in them. They were easy to get into; the locks were frail things and sometimes not even secured; often windows were left open, or were blown open by the wind. In such places, one could pick up—and it was Bill’s habit to pick up—odds and ends of clothing, occasional cans of food and such other small oddments—tennis rackets, cooking utensils—as might without too much risk be disposed of. The windbreaker Bill was wearing when he drove through the red light in White Plains came from a camp near Brewster, which he had reached in the jalopy; the corduroy slacks had come from nearer home, several years before. They had constituted a lucky find; the owner had secreted a five dollar bill in the watch pocket and forgotten it when he went back to town.

  But Bill avoided the big houses, although he knew the pickings would be better. He knew the risks would be proportionate to the pickings, and that the cops would take seriously an act which, when performed on a scale more appropriate to Bill’s skill, they were content to regard as a peccadillo.

  Never before, certainly, had he been in a house like High Ridge, either as guest or in other capacity. His odd jobs for the Bromwells had never brought him nearer the monstrous house than the garden shed and he had not been even that near since early the past summer when, intrusted with a fairly new power mower, he had run it into and partly over a very old, and exceedingly prominent, outcropping of rock. He had never thought of entering the house by stealth and would not have done so even if it had at any time been closed up for the winter. It was one of the houses Bill Higgins tacitly admitted to be out of his class.

  Absently, now he was in it, he did look speculatively around the room in which he had been placed. This survey was, however, almost a reflex and it proved a waste of time. The room was furnished sparsely; it was, Bill correctly decided, a room occupied, when occupied at all, by somebody who worked for the Bromwells. He opened the doors of the chest, again because it was almost a reflex to open anything closed in any strange room in which he found himself. He discovered nothing except, wedged partly into a crack, a long nail file. Not being a person who used nail files, Bill ignored this. He found the closet entirely empty and that, he realized, about did it.

  These actions, being so familiar in pattern, did not interrupt Bill Higgins’s increasingly unhappy ruminations; any number of times as he did his small wanderings about the small room, he said to himself, Bill, he said, but it got him nowhere, except that his earlier optimism entirely vanished. He had been, he realized by the time he found the closet empty—things like that merely emphasized that it was other guys had the luck—a sap to think that finding the car marks would let him out. Even if he didn’t get hooked up with the killing, they would get him for stealing the car, however he argued that he hadn’t really been going to steal it.

  (This last was, in a certain fashion, true. Bill had not
stolen the car in the sense that he thought he could keep the car and much less in the sense that he planned to sell it and pocket the money. He had merely seen something loose and available and picked it up and carried it off—in this case been carried off in it—because that was a habit and because he wanted to drive a Cadillac. He had not got to the point of deciding what he would eventually do with it, before, in White Plains, the matter was taken out of his hands. Probably he would merely have left it somewhere; he might even have driven it back to where he found it, since then he would have had an easy walk home.)

  He was in trouble any way he thought of it and was going to need money to get out of trouble. Or else— Bill Higgins sat down on the edge of the bed and considered the alternative. If he told the cops what he knew, which had been a funny thing at the time and now was funnier than ever, would that get him out of trouble? He didn’t like to tell things to cops, not liking cops or their company; you couldn’t ever tell how a cop would take what you told him. Refuse to believe it, most likely; Bill’s experience with cops was that they seldom believed him, even when his stories were at least as plausible as the truth. But suppose he went to this captain and said, “Captain, I’ve been thinking it over and I says to myself, ‘Bill,’ I says, ‘there’s this thing you saw and sort of forgot, see, but you got to thinkin’—’” Bill listened to himself saying this and thought of the police captain, who was a damned funny guy, half asleep all the time, so you couldn’t tell how you were making out. Even if the captain did believe it, maybe all that’d come out of it would be to get this other party in a jam without getting Bill Higgins out of one. Bill rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.

  Bill Higgins was not a man to think fast, and considerable time had elapsed before he reached this point of decision—this point, rather, at which an alternative occurred to him, and decision became something to be made. When the alternative did occur, it immediately frightened him, as he would have been frightened had he unexpectedly found himself breaking into a big, closed-up, country house instead of exercising his moderate skill at felonious entry in its normal milieu. When you did real burglary, as distinct from semi-professional pilfering, you stuck your neck out. If you went up against people like those in this house, really went up against them, you might end by sticking your neck out even farther. This was the sort of thing you read in the Daily News about people trying, and it usually developed that they had indeed stuck their necks out. Bill Higgins’s first thought when it occurred to him that he didn’t have to take what he knew to the cops, but could take it elsewhere, was that he wasn’t up to it. Bill, he said to himself, it’s out of your league.

  The trouble, the recurring trouble, was that he was already out of his league. He had been since he had got into the Caddy, and found the switch unlocked—many people who lived in the country got out of the habit of locking their cars—and stepped on the gas pedal experimentally, having failed to find a starter button, and heard the motor begin to turn over. That would have put him out of his league, or anyhow putting the car in gear and driving away in it would have put him out of his league, even if the car hadn’t had all that joolry stuff in it, and even if Mrs. Bromwell hadn’t got herself killed. Maybe, Bill Higgins thought, his league wasn’t as bush as he’d thought it was. It wasn’t every guy who would just get in a Caddy and drive off. The more he thought of this, the more it occurred to Bill Higgins that he wasn’t such a small-timer after all. (Actually, he had not ever before thought of himself as a small-timer; introspection had never been one of his faults. Circumstances forced him into it; he realized he had been a small-timer all his life only at the moment of deciding he was up to the big time.)

  A guy who would steal a Caddy was probably, Bill thought with increasing confidence, up to a good deal. A small-timer—a guy who would steal an old Ford, say—would be the kind of guy who would go to the police and tell them what he knew, and get a pushing around for it and probably not much else. A guy who would steal a Caddy would go to this party and lay it on the line, make a buck while doing it and—Bill brightened. And put it up to, this party to get Higgins out of the jam he was in. That was the ticket. Bill rubbed his nose hard with the back of his hand, as if polishing it for action. He stood up. Then he thought further and sat down again. There were obstacles in the way of contacting this party. The first of them was that Bill was locked up. The second was: How was he going to get this party in a place where they could talk without cops sticking their noses in? The third was: How was he to find this party at all?

  Bill Higgins was not used to overcoming obstacles; when obstacles of any seriousness presented themselves, Bill—if he saw them; he had not particularly noticed the rock outcrop on which he had wrecked the Bromwells’ power mower—was in the habit of going around or, more often, abandoning the opposed project. Now, confronted by these several difficulties, Bill leaned back on the bed, supporting himself on his elbows, and went to the verge of deciding that the whole thing was beyond him. Maybe, after all, things would work out O.K. Probably he was getting steamed up over nothing. After all, when you got steamed up, it usually turned out to be over something which ended by not amounting to much. Suppose he went to jail for a while? So, he went to jail. That wouldn’t kill him. When you came down to it, nothing ever killed you. Experience taught you that much. It was just kids who got steamed up.

  Bill Higgins reached in the pocket of his windbreaker for a cigarette, found a package, and found it empty. At first he accepted this fact with resignation; a guy was always running out of cigarettes. He wadded the package up and threw it in the general direction of a wastebasket—and then he wanted a cigarette like hell. And then he began to get sore. This, he said to himself, was a hell of a note. The (described) cops shoved him up in this room with no cigarettes, not giving a damn whether he had cigarettes or not, and did these goddamn Bromwells care? And they figured he would just sit there and take it, like a small-time punk you could push around. Downstairs, or wherever they were, they had plenty of cigarettes; they were probably sitting around drinking shots of bourbon, or even brandy, maybe. With packages of cigarettes every way you looked—Camels and Chesterfields and a lot of fancy brands which tasted like straw but were anyway something a guy could smoke.

  “Bill,” Bill Higgins said to himself, “who do they think you are? Some small-time punk they can push around? And you’re the kind of a guy who damn near got away with a Caddy and all them jools. Would’ve if you’d got the breaks.” Bill found he was sore as hell. If this party thought Bill Higgins could be pushed around— If any of them thought that—

  Bill got up from the bed and walked over to the door. He bent down and examined the lock. It was as old as the house, as old as the wood of the door frame. And the door was loose in the frame. Bill had encountered more formidable locks on weekend shacks, and sprung them with a screwdriver. This one—hell, this one you could damn near open with a toothpick. With a pocket-knife—and Bill was reaching for his own when he thought of something better. No use risking the blade of a good knife when somebody had kindly left a long nail file in the top drawer of the chest. Bill got the nail file. He was quite right about the lock.

  Bill opened the door carefully and listened and heard nothing. He looked out and saw nothing and then he stuck his head out and looked the other way. He left the room quickly then and shut the door behind him. He was in a long corridor and it took him a moment to orientate himself. Then he remembered and went, slowly and carefully, toward the stairs. He stopped before he reached them and listened again, and still heard nothing. He went down the stairs cautiously, keeping to the extreme edge, remembering what a guy he had known in jail once had told him: If stairs are inclined to squeak, they squeak less if you stay to the side. (This had not worked out well in practice for the man who passed the information on; a squeaking stair tread had occasioned his capture. This experience, however, dimmed neither his nor Bill Higgins’s faith in basic theory.) The steps down which Bill went from the third floor to
the second squeaked, but only moderately.

  He was in another hall, very like that above, except that the ceiling was higher and the woodwork more substantial, and except that this hall was carpeted. There were doors on both sides of the hallway, which extended in both directions from the central staircase. There was no way of telling which of the rooms held the party he wanted or, indeed, that the party he wanted was in any of them. Still—

  At that moment, Bill heard someone starting up the stairs from the ground floor and, instinctively, Bill retreated part way up the stair flight he had just descended. It was not well lighted; Bill held himself close to the wall, breathed lightly, and waited. The person coming up was a man, from the sound, but Bill had retreated too far up the flight to see him. Bill poised himself for further retreat should the man climb above the second floor; it could, Bill realized, be one of the cops—maybe that extremely tall one, the sergeant. In which case—

  But the climber reached the second floor and turned to his left, which took him away from Bill’s hiding place. Bill crept part way down and peered at the retreating figure. But he had got there late through too much caution, and he was only in time to see a tall person—he could not tell the sex, let alone whether it was the party he wanted—going into one of the rooms. It could be the party all right, and if so, the party was alone. Bill went the rest of the way down to the second floor hall, listened again and heard nothing, and went quickly past the head of the stair flight leading to the ground floor. He thought he knew which of the two possible doors this party had opened; perhaps when he was outside it, there would be some way of finding out whether the party was the right party. It was a help that the corridor was dimly lighted; Bill felt himself inconspicuous, a shadow flickering along the wall.

  He reached the door he thought the right one, held his breath and listened. And he was at once rewarded, although not as he had hoped. He heard a voice, but he was pretty sure it was not the voice of the person he wanted. He could hear it very clearly, however; it had unusual penetrating power.