LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

have dinner together,” I said. “Maybe I’d better phone you to make sure.”

      “You don’t have to. But the number is Danford 6–1530. Do you have a pencil?”

      “I don’t need any. 6–1530. I’ll remember it like my own badge number.”

      I went up the crumbling flagstone walk with her. The house windows were dark. She took a key from her bag and put it in the door lock.

      “Until Sunday then,” she said. “Good night, Ralph.”

      “Good night, Manette,” I said.

      She opened the door and stepped inside. The door closed. I stood there for a moment. Then I went back down the walk and got into my car. I looked at the house. A light had gone on upstairs. I saw her come to the window and draw the shade. I started up the car and drove back to the turnpike.

      I drove steadily, not fast. She had left a perfumed scent in the car. I was staring at the road, but I was thinking of the strangeness of her actions. She was like no other girl I had ever known. She had told me nothing of herself. And the more I thought of it, the pickup at the bar didn’t seem like plain luck. It was almost as if she had expected me. And while I was trying to figure things out I missed the blue neon sign that said State Police. I had to go along the turnpike to the next cutoff.

      I drove back, crossed over, went around the arched driveway and into the rear parking area. I put the car away, went in through the garage and up to the first floor.

      It was quiet in the barracks. I crossed the asphalt-tiled, antiseptic-smelling corridor. The guardroom was empty and the television screen was dark. The cellblock and its four cells stood open and vacant. In the communications room I saw the civilian dispatcher. The shortwave radio was mute, but I could hear the rhythmical clacking of the teletype machines.

      I went into the office. The duty sergeant was Stan Maleski. He looked up at me from behind his desk. He wore the pale blue worsted uniform shirt with the dark blue sergeant stripes on the sleeves. The sleeves were sharply creased and at the right shoulder yoke was the State Police patch. His necktie was black silk and fastened to his shirt with the silver tie clip that carried the state shield on it.

      “What are you doing in?” Maleski asked. “Didn’t you go home?”

      “No,” I said, signing in. “I went to Danford and hung around.”

      Maleski stood up and went to the bulletin board. He put up a notice on the clip stand. He was carrying a short-barreled S&W revolver in a hip holster. His trousers were the dark blue uniform slacks with a broad stripe down the side.

      I went over and looked at the bulletin board. “Quiet tonight?” I asked.

      “Pretty quiet,” he said. “There’s coffee in the kitchen if you want it, Ralph.”

      “I’m restless enough as it is,” I said. “Coffee would only make it worse, Stan.”

      He looked at me with puzzled eyes, his square jaw pushed to one side. Then the telephone on his desk rang. He went over and picked it up.

      “State Police,” he said. “Troop E Headquarters. Sergeant Maleski. Yes, sir . . .”

      I left him and went upstairs to my room. It was a bare room. It contained two narrow steel beds, a chest of drawers and a mirror and nothing else. I switched on the light. The bed near the window was mine. It was covered with a squared, taut, dark blue blanket, a white pillow and a six-inch border of the top sheet showing. In the other bed, next to the locked closet, was the huddled, blanketed form of Patrolman Philip Kerrigan. I went over and shook him. “Wake up,” I said.

      He groaned, twisted under the blanket and covered his head. Then his head poked out. He blinked his eyes. “What time is it?”

      “Eleven o’clock,” I said.

      “Dammit,” he said. “I just got in from a patrol and I’ve got another one at six A.M.” He buried his head again.

      I shook him once more. “I met a girl tonight, Phil.”

      “I thought you had a girl named Ellen,” he mumbled.

      “This is a little different,” I said.

      “I know. The other one is sixty miles away.”

      “A beautiful blonde,” I said. “The most beautiful girl I ever met in my life. Her name is Manette Venus.”

      “Hurray for you,” he grunted. “Now breeze off my ear and let me sleep.”

      “I’m going to see her again Sunday.”

      “That’s just peachy,” he said. Then he wrenched himself up on one elbow. One eye opened. He pushed his dark hair away from his forehead. “You tell her you’re a trooper?”

      “Sure.”

      “And she wants to see you again?”

      “Sure.”

      “The girl’s crazy,” he said, subsiding again. “A real psycho.”

      “Listen,” I said. “There’s something funny about it. She acted a little strange–” But his breathing had become deep and steady. I let him lie there. I went into the bathroom and washed up. Then I came back, undressed, locked my gun in the closet, and put out the light. I got into the hard narrow bed and lay there looking out across the dark fields. I could see the shortwave radio tower and the blinking red lights on top of it. I kept looking at them until I fell asleep.

      CHAPTER 2 _______________

      SHE phoned me at the barracks the next evening, Thursday, just after I had come in from a larceny investigation. There was to be a Signal Nineteen, a gambling raid in Lincolnshire, and her call came in as we were getting ready.

      She had a hauntingly husky voice over the telephone. She asked if I wanted to see her that evening. I told her I would have liked nothing better, but I was on duty. I did say I would ride by Staley Woolen the next morning before noon.

      And I did, too. At 11:45 Friday morning I came off Route 138, moved down the valley and into Staleyville. I was driving cruiser 56, a new one, nicely polished and shiny, with a long buggy-whip antenna in the rear. I went past the old white church in the center of Staleyville, over the stone bridge and the mill dam, and onto the two-lane road that led to the factory. Ahead of me I could see the tall smokestacks with their drifting gray plumes, and the moss-covered, ancient, red-brick buildings of the Staley Woolen Company. There was a tall, chain-link cyclone fence, the top of it carrying three strands of barbed wire. I came up slowly. An armored truck emerged from the gate and turned onto the road. As it passed me, the driver blew his horn twice and waved. I waved back. It meant the weekly payroll at Staley had been delivered without incident.

      As I came to the gate, the guard walked out of his glassed-in booth. He was a gray old man in a gray old uniform. He grinned at me and shouted something I couldn’t hear. I waved to him. I was driving by the factory in low gear, at three miles per hour. I looked up at the office building, a two-story structure directly inside the gate. The sun was high in the sky and the windows were shadowed. I didn’t see her.

      I went on ahead, turned onto Route 116 and finished my morning patrol. I kept thinking it was a long time until Sunday.

      But I saw her before Sunday. On Saturday morning I had a routine traffic patrol. I moved out of the driveway of Troop E Headquarters and stopped at the turnpike to let the cars go by. I looked back at the wide, velvet-green lawn. In the center of it were the tall twin flagpoles, the American flag and the white-and-blue Commonwealth flag billowing out in the soft warm October breeze. Beyond was the red-brick Colonial barracks, the high steel radio tower behind it, the evergreen shrubs banked in front of it. I could feel the pleasantness of the warm sun on the back of my neck.

      I turned the cruiser out onto the turnpike. Ahead of me a small gray convertible was parked on the shoulder of the road. Somebody inside it blew the horn three times.

Скачать книгу