A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“His name ain’t Scanlon, he don’t live on Amboy Street, and he’s not in real estate,” I tried to explain. “But he’s the only one of the bunch that didn’t come up here and scrawl his John Hancock. Me and the fat guy were the last ones coming up the stairs. When I left him on the bench he was still alive. When I got up here myself even his wife was up here ahead of me, and all the others had finished their signatures and were on their way down again. Therefore, this guy who tags himself Scanlon was the murderer. Don’t you understand, he never went all the way to the top. He either came up the stairs behind me and the fat guy, or else if he was ahead of us switched into the opening that leads up into the arm, let everyone else go by, and then crept down again to where the bench was — and did his dirty work the minute the coast was clear.”

I took a notebook from him, held it open before me, and did my damndest to try and separate the party that had given me that name from the other ten. I tried to remember some feature about him, some detail, anything at all, and couldn’t, no matter how I racked my brains. There had been too many of them at one time, all getting off the ferry at once, all stopping in front of me just for a half-minute or so. He should have been nervous, just coming away from doing a thing like that, should have been pale, tense, jumpy, anything you want to call it — should have given himself away in some way, if not right then, then now that I was thinking back over it. But he either hadn’t, or — what was more likely — I was pretty much of a wash-out at my own business. I couldn’t even get him by elimination, the way I had gotten his phony name. One or two of the others started to come clear — the father of the two kids, the two other women besides Alice Colman — but not him. I might just as well have written down that name out of my own head for all I could remember of the man who had given it to me.

I took another look at Alice Colman’s regards to the statue and wondered why she hadn’t put her name down with it, and how she had come to be mixed up on her dates the way she had. And why a different address from her own. Of course the obvious answer was that she knew g.d. well what was taking place on that stairway below at the time, and was too nervous to know what she was doing. But she hadn’t acted nervous at all, she had just acted dreamy. So that probably wasn’t the answer at all. And just for luck I transcribed the thing into my notebook exactly as it stood in eyebrow pencil.

4/24/35/4 and then, 254W51. Wrong date, right hour, wrong address, no name.

“I take it all back, Johnny,” I said wearily. “Kick me here — and here. The guy did come up here after all — and right on top of what he did too.”

“But he didn’t write nothing — you looked all over them wind—”

“He didn’t come up here to write, he came to read.” I pointed at it. “He came to read that. Let’s go down. I guess I can keep my promise to General Lafayette down there after all.”

When I got ashore I halfheartedly checked Colman at the Tarrytown Apartments once more. No, neither Mr. nor Mrs. had come back yet, they told me after paging them on the house phone. I didn’t tell them so, but they might just as well have hung out a to-let sign and gotten ready to rent that apartment all over again. He wasn’t coming back any more because he was spending the night at the morgue. And she wasn’t coming back any more either — because she had a heavy date at 4. As for Scanlon’s Amboy Street address, I didn’t even bother with it. Have to use your common sense once in awhile. Instead I asked Information to give me 254 West 51st Street, which was the best I could make out of the tag end of her billet-doux.

“Capital Bus Terminal,” a voice answered at the other end.

So that’s where they were going to meet, was it? They’d stayed very carefully away from each other on the ferry going back, and ditto once they were ashore in New York. But they were going to blow town together. So it looked like she hadn’t had her days mixed after all, she’d known what she was doing when she put tomorrow’s date down. “What’ve you got going out at four?” I said.

“A.M. or P.M.?” said the voice. But that was just the trouble, I didn’t know myself. Yet if I didn’t know, how was he going to know either? I mean Scanlon. The only thing to do was tackle both meridians, one at a time. A.M. came first, so I took that. He spieled off a list a foot long but the only big-time places among them were Boston and Philly. “Make me a reservation on each,” I snapped.

“Mister,” the voice came back patiently, “how can you go two places at once?”

“I’m twins,” I squelched and hung up. Only one more phone call, this time to where I was supposed to live but so seldom did. “I may see you tomorrow. If I came home now I’d only have to set the alarm for three o’clock.”

“I thought it was your day off.”

“I’ve got statues on the brain.”

“You mean you would have if you had a—” she started to say, but I ended that.