Dead on the Level (12 page)

“Casey, you forgot the keys!”

That was Maggie’s voice calling from what seemed a long way off, and those were Maggie’s footsteps running down the cement.

“Casey!”

So that’s why the next blow didn’t come. He struggled to his feet in time to see a tall shadow duck back into the rear seat of the sedan and slam the door; and as the motor roared into reverse, he caught one brief glimpse of the driver’s face etched in the glow of the dash light.

“Are you all right?” Maggie was bawling now. “Casey what happened?”

“I’m all right,” he said. “Give me the keys. I’m all right.”

Maggie was trying to help, and he didn’t want her to help; not any more. She was standing before him, clutching his lapels, and not even a coat to ward off the driving rain.

“You’re hurt!” she insisted. “There’s blood on your head—”

“It’ll wash off. Give me the keys.”

“Who was it?”

“Gorden.”

“You’re sure?”

Casey hesitated. Had that giant with the blackjack really been Lance Gorden? Not unless he was awfully desperate. Gorden wasn’t the boy to take that kind of risk himself. But thinking like that was crazy. What was the risk of denting the skull of a nosy intruder if he’d already disposed of Darius Brunner? One thing Casey was sure of. “I saw the man at the wheel,” he said. “I’ve seen him before at Gorden’s apartment, a servant, I guess. Now, for God’s sake, Maggie, let me go. They might come back.”

There was more to it than that, but he didn’t want to get delayed by an elaborate explanation. After the first fright of having Maggie rush up and spoil the party, Gorden, or whoever handled his dirty work, might decide to hang around and follow him. They must have seen the coupé in the driveway; they must know that he was on his way some place. Maggie’s grip loosened, and Casey shook free. He grabbed the keys from her hand and paused only long enough to retrieve his hat from the soggy grass. Outside of feeling as if the top of his head might fly off at any moment, the blow didn’t bother him at all.

“Get in the house!” he yelled as he sprinted toward the coupé, but Maggie was still standing motionless in the downpour as he drove away.

It was that time of evening when nothing has any definite shape or form. The gray of the dusk and the gray of the rain washed the city with a monotone of dripping shadows, but it wasn’t until the first intersection, where he turned north, that Casey dared to switch on the lights. A moment later he hit a busy boulevard and merged with the heavy homebound traffic. If anybody was following now they’d have quite a job on their hands.

But maybe they didn’t have to follow. Maybe they had been doing that all along and knew exactly where to go to find a man who knew no better than to boast about knowing what was in Carter Groot’s missing file. Casey had hoped to give Gorden a prod with that piece of misinformation, but he hadn’t counted on so drastic a reaction. And how did Lance Gorden know where to find him? That must have been the question Maggie was trying to get across when he left her standing in the rain. It was a question Casey didn’t particularly relish answering, even to himself, because the answer was all too simple. He might as well have given Gorden a map marked out in red crayon as to have betrayed, as he did betray in the lawyer’s office, his knowledge of Phyllis Brunner’s runaway. Since it was Gorden who found her at the Erie Street place before, he could only assume that Casey hung out in the same vicinity.

Casey drove carefully, taking a few false turns until he felt sure that he wasn’t being followed. By this time he had decided that Gorden wouldn’t have bothered waiting outside Maggie’s place if he’d known about the apartment, and wouldn’t have waited so long to make a call, either, but he wasn’t taking chances. He drove past the apartment building, parked, and ran for cover under the canopy of a near-by store. From there he watched the traffic until he was sure that no other car had parked in the vicinity, and only then did he go back to the walk-up.

The first thing Casey was aware of as he ascended the stairs to the apartment was the music. It sounded as if Phyllis were entertaining a local of the musicians’ union. He unlocked the door and stepped inside. She was alone, thank God, but she’d gone somewhere or other and bought a table-sized radio that perched on the kitchen cabinet, and she was dancing to something Casey didn’t recognize but figured to be Hungarian. All through the apartment she was dancing, her hair hanging loose again and her shoes kicked off. She didn’t even notice him for several measures, and then she stopped slowly—like a little mechanical doll running down.

“I—I got lonesome,” she stammered, seeing the hardness in his eyes. “I didn’t pay very much for it.”

She looked like a kid, a shoulder-high kid who’s expecting a scolding but doesn’t exactly know why.

“I’ve got supper in the oven. The man at the grocery store gave me a recipe.”

Casey walked swiftly into the kitchen and shut off the radio. “That’s fine,” he said. “You must be getting real chummy with the neighborhood. The butcher, the baker—”

“Not the butcher,” she corrected. “It’s Friday and I forgot to ask whether you eat meat on Friday, so I got the recipe for the casserole. Casey!”

He had taken his hat off and she was staring, white-faced, at the blood. Now he had to tell her everything, but first they must go into the bathroom and make a great fuss about washing off the wound.

“We don’t have anything!” Phyllis wailed. “No tape, no gauze, no anything!”

“I don’t need anything!” Casey snapped. “I’m not hurt.”

He deliberately shoved his hair forward over the small cut and gave her the story as briefly as possible. She didn’t say anything at all. She just stood there in her stocking feet, sucking on her lower lip and looking as scared as Casey felt.

“Has anybody been around today?” he demanded. “Anybody asking questions?”

“No—not that I know of.”

“Or has anybody followed you when you went out?”

“I don’t know. Casey, what are you driving at? Nobody knows that we’re here!”

He got up from where she’d made him sit on the edge of the tub and went into the living-room. He switched off the lights and looked out of the window. The street lamp below made a blurred yellow circle on the wet sidewalk, but he couldn’t see anybody but a homebound shop girl with a newspaper over her head and a fellow with a lunch pail who was too tired to care if he got wet. Casey lowered the blind and stepped away from the window.

“I don’t like the idea of staying here,” he announced, “it’s too risky. They saw Maggie. They might go back to the studio and make her tell them where we are.”

“She wouldn’t!”

“She might have to. Anyway, we’re getting out of here.”

“But where, Casey? Where can we go?”

Where? There was only one place left, no matter how much he hated it. He stood there in the semidarkness and looked at Phyllis framed in the lighted doorway. She wasn’t much like the dream he remembered from the Cloud Room; sometimes he could hardly believe that she was the same girl. Now she was just a kid, a crazy kid who couldn’t understand that she had to keep off the streets as much as possible and that she wasn’t to talk to anybody. A crazy kid who could dance with the threat of death hanging over her head and the first rain falling on her father’s grave. He had to take her some place where she wouldn’t get hurt; some place where she could get lost along with thousands of other little people in a city too big to care.

THEY HAD BEEN CALLING the street Pulaski Road for many years now but to Casey, and a lot of other people, it would always be Crawford Avenue. It wasn’t exactly the kind of street they put on colored post cards for mailing to the folks back home; it was just another commercial thoroughfare with streetcar tracks and stop lights, and you could drive north on it until you crossed arteries with names like Fullerton and Diversey and Milwaukee Avenue. Lacing off from these were lesser streets lined with rows of two-flat frames, red brick bungalows with cement porches and cement pots for planting petunias that seldom survived, and, every few blocks, a nest of markets and a school, or maybe a pocket patch of green with a wading-pool for the kids. These streets had faraway-sounding names that reminded you of parks and forests until you looked at them, or else they were named after men everybody had forgotten. To Casey, driving northward through the rain, all of this was familiar. It wasn’t a slum section and it wasn’t a tenement; but it was a place where people could be a lot poorer and probably would be at the rate they were going.

On one of these streets, at a corner where the trackless trolley stopped, stood an ugly yellow brick building with a five-room flat upstairs and Big John Posda’s tavern below. Casey drove past the place once, circled the block, and parked on the side street. By this time he had told Phyllis about all there was to tell about Casimir Morokowski, whose father died when he was nine and whose mother waited tables for Big John at eleven dollars a week until she married him and went off the payroll. Phyllis didn’t say anything. She just sat there beside him, pale and solemn-eyed, with her hair tied up in a green scarf and the collar of her coat turned up about her ears. On the floor between her feet was a small suitcase containing all of their combined belongings, except the radio. The radio she held in her lap.

“We won’t need that,” Casey said as they got out of the car. “There’ll be noise enough inside.”

It was the same as always. The windows of the tavern were painted green most of the way up and John had a new neon sign over the door, but otherwise it was the same. The woodwork was dark, the bar was worn smooth, and opposite the bar a row of wooden booths stretched back to the double doors to the kitchen. Half of the booths were empty, but a couple of gray-haired women were feeding nickels to a polka-playing juke box and there was a fair gathering at the bar. Casey steered Phyllis into one of the empty booths and went alone to the bar. He could hear Big John before he could see him, which was exactly what he had expected.

“Figures!” Big John was booming. “Figures don’t mean nothing!”

And from across the bar, an adversary shouted back, “These ain’t my figures! I give you statistics, government statistics!”

“Statistics!” Big John slapped one hamlike hand against the bar and the beer glasses danced. “Who needs statistics?” he roared. “My business gets bad, I know it. You lose your job, by God, you know it! People can’t eat no damn statistics!”

That was Big John. All the time he argued he would be pouring fresh beers and wiping the bar, or maybe waving the damp towel in greeting to some old friend coming in through the family entrance. But always he was doing something, and always he was loud. Casey helped himself to one of the stools nearest the door and waited. Sooner or later Big John would leave off arguing, roar with laughter over something somebody said in Polish, and then move on down the line to see what the newcomer wanted, which was just what he was doing now.

The towel wiped a shiny spot on the bar in front of Casey before Big John looked up. He hadn’t changed much, except that the gray-brown line of his hair had slipped back a way on his forehead and he’d somehow managed to put a few more pounds of flesh on that hulking frame. He still wore the same style blue-striped dress shirt without the collar; the bright gold caps still glittered on his front teeth; and his small, raisinlike eyes, fixed and expressionless, still had the sum effect of making Casey feel like a scared, skinny kid in tight serge knickers and a tailless blouse.

“So it’s you,” John said. “So you finally come back.”

That was Big John. Always a great one for welcoming the prodigal son.

“How’s Ma?” Casey asked.

“How’s Ma?” The gold caps on those front teeth gleamed for an instant. “What you think, how’s Ma? Nine, ten years you’re gone now. No letters, no cards—”

“Eight years,” Casey said.

“All right, eight years. That’s a long time.”

Casey could feel those little eyes boring through him, and he had to keep reminding himself that he was grown now and could come and go without answering to anybody. He never had liked John Posda; he never thought of him as a father or as anything at all except a big fat man his mother had married because things were tough all over. But Big John had never done him any harm, never laid a hand on him or even scolded much. His own children were grown and on their own when he remarried, and he’d had enough of raising kids. Now he stopped polishing the bar and shrugged his huge shoulders.

“Ma’s upstairs,” he said. “She’s older, like everybody, but she’s still upstairs. Go on up and see her. You’re her son.”

The way Big John made that last statement, he might have been bragging; but Casey didn’t hang around to hear more. To get to the stairs he had to go back through the double doors and turn left, and there was still only one naked bulb lighting the way up. Casey could still remember the hiding he’d taken the day he accidentally broke the frosted globe over the bulb with his baseball bat. That was more than fifteen years ago but nobody had ever replaced the globe.

The upstairs hall led to a door, and the door opened into the kitchen. The kitchen was still painted green with tan figured linoleum on the floor, and Ma was sitting at the enameled table with the newspaper spread out before her and a religious calendar showing on the wall above her shoulder. Her hair was gray, that was the first thing Casey noticed. He wasn’t quite sure what color her hair used to be, but now it was gray. Her hands, resting on the newspaper, were work-reddened lumps, and the face she turned toward him was too tired ever to be rested in this world. She squinted a little—she never would give in to getting glasses—and then crossed herself quickly.

“Hello, Ma,” Casey said. “John said you were here so I came up.”

Her lips trembled. “My God,” she whispered. “I thought you was a vision.”

“No, I’m real enough.”

It was terrible what a lot of silence stood between them; what number of things could never be said and never be told.
This is Ma
, Casey told himself,
but she’s a stranger—or I am. We can’t even talk to each other any more
.