A Ticket to the Boneyard

"I see."



"I made good money on those guns," he said. "But once they were out of the country, well, that was an end to it. I was out of guns, and so I was out of the gun business."



I went to the bar and got another Coke. This time I had Burke cut me a wedge of lemon to cut the sweetness. When I got back to the table Mick said, "Now what made me tell you that story? The gun business, that's what put me in mind of it, but why go on and tell it?"



"I don't know."



"When we sit together, you and I, the stories roll."



I sipped my Coke. The lemon helped. I said, "You never asked me what I needed with a gun."



"Not my business, is it?"



"Maybe not."



"You happen to need a gun and I happen to have one. I don't think you'll shoot me, or hold up the bar with it."



"It's not likely."



"So you owe me no explanation."



"No," I said. "But it makes a good story."



"Well," he said, "now that's another thing entirely."



I sat there and told him the whole thing. Somewhere along the way he held up a hand and drew a short horizontal line in the air, and Burke chased the last few customers and started shutting down the bar. When he started putting the chairs up on the tables Ballou told him to let it go, that he'd see to the rest of it. Burke turned off the lights over the bar and the ceiling lights and let himself out, drawing the sliding gates across but not engaging the padlock. Mick locked the door from inside and cracked the seal on a fresh bottle of whiskey, and I went right on with my story.



When I got to the end he looked again at the sketch of Motley. "He's a bad bastard," he said. "You can see it in his eyes."



"The man who drew the picture never even saw him."



"No matter. He put it in the picture whether he saw him or not." He folded the sketch and gave it back to me. "The woman you brought in the other night."



"Elaine."



"I thought so. I didn't recall her name, but I thought it must be the same one. I liked her."



"She's a good woman."



"You've been friends a long time then."



"Years and years."



He nodded. "When it all started," he said. "Your man said you framed him. Is he still saying it now?"



"Yes."



"Did you?"



I'd left that part out, but I couldn't see any reason to hold it back. "Yes, I did," I said. "I got a lucky shot in and he went out cold. He had a glass jaw. You wouldn't remember a boxer named Bob Satterfield, would you?"



"Wouldn't I though? His fights looked fixed. The ones he lost, that is. He'd be way ahead, and then he'd get tapped on the jaw and go down like a felled steer. Of course you'd never fix a fight that way, but the average man's reasoning powers don't reach that far. Bob Satterfield, now his is a name I've not heard in years."



"Well, Motley had Satterfield's jaw. While he was out I stuck a gun in his hand and squeezed off a few rounds. It wasn't a complete frame. I just made the charges more serious so that he'd draw a little jail time."



"And you trusted her to back you?"



"I figured she'd stand up."



"You thought that well of her."



"I still do."



"And rightly so, if she did stand up. Did she?"



"Like a little soldier. She thought it was his gun. I had a throw-down with me, an unregistered pint-size automatic I used to carry around just in case. I palmed it and pretended to find it when I frisked him, so she had no reason not to believe it was his gun. But she was there to see me wrap his fingers around it and shoot holes in her plaster, and she still went in and swore he'd done the shooting and he'd been trying to kill me when he did it. She put it in her statement and signed it when they typed it up and handed it to her. And she would have sworn to it all over again in court."



"There's not many you could count on like that."



"I know."



"And it worked. He went to prison."



"He went to prison. But I'm not sure it worked."



"Why do you say that?"



"Since he got out he's killed eight people that I know of. Three here, five in Ohio."



"He'd have killed more than that if he'd spent the past twelve years a free man."



"Maybe. Maybe not. But I gave him a reason to select certain people as his targets. I broke some rules, I pissed into the wind, and now it's blowing back in my face."



"What else could you do?"



"I don't know. I didn't take a lot of time to think it through when it happened. It was the next thing to instinctive on my part. I figured he belonged inside and I'd do what it took to put him there. Now, though, I don't think I'd do it that way."



"Why? All because you gave up the drink and found God?"



I laughed. "I don't know that I've found Him yet," I said.



"I thought that was what your lot did at those meetings." Deliberately he uncorked the bottle and filled his glass. "I thought you all learned to call Him by His first name."



"We call each other by our first names. And I suppose some people develop some kind of a working relationship with whatever God means to them."



"But not you."



I shook my head. "I don't know much about God," I said. "I'm not even sure if I believe in Him. That seems to change from one day to the next."



"Ah."



"But I'm not as quick to play God as I used to be."



"Sometimes a man has to."



"Maybe. I'm not sure. I don't seem to feel the need as often as I used to. Whether or not there's a God, it's beginning to dawn on me that I'm not Him."



He thought that over, working on the whiskey in his glass. If it was having any effect on him, I couldn't see it. Nor was it affecting me. The incident in my hotel room that afternoon had been some sort of watershed, and the threat of picking up a drink had lifted for the time being once the bourbon was done splashing in the sink basin. There were times when it was dangerous for me to be in a saloon, sipping Coke among the whiskey drinkers, but this was not one of those times.



He said, "You came here. When you needed a gun, you came here for it."



"I thought you might have one."



"You didn't go to the cops, you didn't go to your sober friends. You came to me."



"There's nobody on the force who'd bend the rules for me, not at this point. And my sober friends don't pack a lot of heat."



"You didn't just come here for the gun, Matt."



"No, I don't suppose I did."



"You had a story to tell. Is there anybody else who's heard the whole of it?"



"No."



"You came here to tell it. You wanted to tell it here and you wanted to tell it to me. Why?"



"I don't know."



"It had nothing to do with the gun. What if I'd had no gun for you?" His eyes, cool and green as his mother's homeland, took my measure. "We'd be here just the same," he said. "Saying these words."



"Why did you let me have the gun?"



"Why not? It was doing me no good locked in the safe. I have other guns I can lay my hands on, if I feel the sudden need to shoot somebody. Why not give it to you?"



"Suppose you hadn't had one. You know what you'd have done? You'd have called around and gone out and found one."



"Why would I do that?"



"I don't know," I said, "but it's what you would have done. I don't know why."



He sat there thinking about it. I went to the men's room and stood at a urinal full of cigarette butts. My urine had a slight pink cast to it, but it was a lot less alarming than it had been lately. My kidney seemed to be mending.



On the way back I went behind the bar and helped myself to a glass of club soda. When I got back to the table Ballou was on his feet. "Come on," he said. "Grab your coat, we'll get some air."



He kept his car in a twenty-four-hour lot on Eleventh Avenue. It was a big silver Cadillac with tinted glass all around. The attendant treated it and its owner with respect.



The city was still, the streets next to empty. We cruised across town, turned right at Second Avenue. As we crossed Thirty-fourth Street he said, "You ought to look at the house he's staying in. As much as you paid for the address, you'll want to know it's not an empty lot."



"That's not a bad idea. The last empty lot I went into didn't turn out so well for me."



He parked in a bus stop and I checked my notebook and walked around the corner to the address Brian had given me. The building was a six-story tenement, its ground floor now occupied by a tailor. A sign, hand-lettered, promised reasonable alterations and fast service. I went into the vestibule and checked the names. There were four apartments to a floor, and the tenant in 4-C was Lepcourt.



"The right name's on the bell," I told Mick. "That doesn't mean Motley's living here, but if my guy was making up a story at least he wove a little truth into it."



"Ring the bell," Mick said. "See if he's home."



"No, I don't want to do that. Watch the street, would you? I want to look around."



He stood at the street door while I got the lobby door open, slipping the lock with a credit card. I walked the length of a narrow hallway, past the staircase, and between the doors of the two rear apartments. One-C was the right rear apartment. All the way at the back was a fire door leading to the rear courtyard. I pressed the panic bar and pushed it open, then wedged a toothpick into the locking mechanism to avoid locking myself out.



My presence in the courtyard alarmed a couple of rats and sent them scuttling for cover. I made my way to the back of the tiny area and counted windows to determine which was 4-C. My view was imperfect, largely obscured by the fire escape, but I would have been able to tell if there was a light on in the Lepcourt apartment. There wasn't. Not in the room with the rear window, anyway.



If you moved one of the garbage cans and stood on it you could reach the fire escape and either lower the ladder or swing up onto the metal stairs. I actually considered this for a moment before ruling it out as too much risk with too little point. I went back into the building, leaving my toothpick in the lock in case I felt the need to get into the building from the back at some later time. I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and looked at the keyhole, and under the door. No light showed through. I put my ear to the door and couldn't hear anything.



I put a hand in my pocket and touched the little Smith, working it with my fingers like a worry stone while I tried to figure out what to do next. He was either in there or he wasn't. If I knew he was home I could force the door and try to take him by surprise. If I knew the apartment was empty I could try to gain entrance by stealth. I couldn't do either unless I knew if he was there, and I couldn't find that out without running the risk of alerting him. And that was too great a risk. My one edge at this point was that he didn't know I had his address. It wasn't much of an advantage, but I couldn't afford to give it away.



When I got downstairs the entryway was empty. Ballou was outside, leaning against a streetlamp, his butcher's apron a vivid white. We went to his car and he said he was hungry and that he knew a place I'd like. "And they'll pour you a drink without checking the clock first," he said. "That's if they know you."