The Road To Ruin

“I–I—forget.”

“You forget?”

“Where I met him,” Flip blurted, as though that’s the question he’d been asked, because in the shaken kaleidoscope that his brain had become, he knew that was the question he would be asked, and that he didn’t have an answer for it. In his mind, he skittered back and forth like a rabbit trying to elude an oncoming truck, trying to figure out how it was that he knew Jay Gilly, and failing to find an answer he could present. Not through a client—the client would deny it. Not through anybody. So, in his panic and desperation, he answered the question that would destroy him before they got around to asking it.

“You forget where you met him?”

“He was just—I mean, I don’t know, we just talked, and when it was on the news, Mr. Hall, I thought, Oh, the police are go

Both policemen looked very interested at that. “Get you, Mr. Morriscone?”

“Because I forget where I met him.” Flip waved arms around, to indicate just how large the planet Earth actually was, with so many places in it where a person might meet a person. “I mean, we just talked, he just talked to me, he told me he trained people to ride horses, and I said, Oh, I know somebody who needs somebody to teach him how to ride a horse, and he said he could do it but he’d bring his own horse, and I said I’ll call Mr. Hall, and he said fine, and I called Mr. Hall, and he said fine, I mean Mr. Hall said fine, and I told this Mr. Gilly, and he said fine, and I thought no more about it, and then it was on the news, and I thought, Oh, they’ll want to know why I talked to Mr. Hall about that man, and where did I meet him, and everything about him, and I don’t know anything, and they’re going to find out I’m mad at Mr. Hall, and they’ll think I did it on purpose, and they’ll lock me up—”

“Mad at Mr. Hall?”

“Oh! No-no-no, I’m not mad at Mr. Hall, did I say I was mad at Mr. Hall? Well, I used to be mad at Mr. Hall, just a little bit mad at Mr. Hall, but I got over all that, I mean I’m not mad at him now, that was just—”

“Why were you mad at Mr. Hall?”

Oh, why did I tell them that? Flip demanded of himself. Now I have to tell them I’m a tax cheat, and they’ll be convinced I’m a hardened criminal, and—

“Mr. Morriscone?”

My mouth has been open a long time, Flip pointed out to himself, and shut it, then opened it to say, “He got me into a little trouble with the IRS. I didn’t know he was going to report what he paid me, so I didn’t report what he paid me, and that’s the only time in my life I ever did anything like that, and I’ll never do it again, and in fact, after I stopped being mad at Mr. Hall, and never was really mad at him, but then after that I was actually grateful to Mr. Hall, because I learned my lesson, believe you me.”

He didn’t want to stop talking, it seemed to hold the inevitable at bay if he kept talking, but all at once he ran out of things to say, and so he just sat there. His mouth was open again. He thought, should I tell them about the time I cheated on the test in high school? No, they don’t want to know about that, they want to know all about Jay Gilly, and I can’t tell them about that, somehow I have to not tell them about Jay Gilly, not the truth, oh, no, not the truth. His mouth closed.

Meanwhile, the talking policeman nodded thoughtfully a while, then turned to the other one and said, “You see what this is, Bob.”

“I think I do,” the other one said, Flip hearing his voice for the first time.

“They talked to people who knew Hall,” the talking policeman said, “looking for that weak link.”

“That’s the story, all right.”

Weak link? Do they mean me?

“Probably met in a bar somewhere,” the talking policeman said, “something like that.”

I don’t go to bars! Fortunately, Flip didn’t actually say that, or anything else.

“So this is another blind alley,” the talking policeman said, “like that foreign embassy.”

Foreign embassy?

“Sure looks like it.”

The talking policeman stood, and then the other policeman stood. The talking policeman said to Flip, “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Morriscone. Here’s my card.”

They’re not going to arrest me! Fortunately again, Flip also left that sentence unspoken. Instead, he got to his quaking feet, took the card without looking at it, and waited for whatever would happen next.

“If you remember anything else, give us a call.”

“Oh, yes.”

“And when we get this Jay Gilly, and you can count on it, we will get him—”

“Oh, yes.”

“—we’ll ask you to come in to identify him for us.”

“Oh, yes.”

“We’ll let ourselves out.”

They did, Flip staring at them in wonder the whole time. It was true! They were letting him go! They weren’t suspicious! He was a weak link!

He locked the door after them, hurried back through the gym to the changing room, and took a long, long shower. Partway through, he took off his clothes.

55

THE FACT IS, almost everybody who uses a power drill releases the trigger just a second too late. You or I, if we drive a long thin galvanized screw through three-quarter inch of plywood into a hardwood window frame, will keep going that tiny bit too long after the job is done, to leave the plywood around the screwhead dimpled, dented, with some few of the fibers of the plywood already torn.

This is what had happened at the window where Monroe Hall, with all the obsessive patience and single-mindedness brought on by total darkness, struggled to lever a corner of plywood away from the window frame. The first part was the hardest, as that first tiny damage to the plywood caused by the power drill was worried and pressed, twisted and stressed. More fibers snapped. Air from the outside world seeped into Hall’s prison room, and then more air.

None of the screws pulled out of the window frame. They were too deeply embedded in solid wood for that. Instead, slowly, relentlessly, they were pulled through the plywood, leaving not quite an inch of sharp-edged screw jutting from the frame, plus a small Etna of splinters that exploded inward from the plywood.

The first to come loose was at the lower-left corner of the window, and then the one a foot above that, and then the one a foot to the right along the windowsill, and then back to the next-higher screw on the side. When the fifth one popped, along the windowsill, he could force one end of his bar into the corner and push the other end up along the complaining face of the plywood until the bar was perpendicular to the building and the plywood was arched backward like a dog-eared page in a book.

Was this enough? Every time he reached over the sill, it seemed, his hands hit either the cutting edges of the exposed screws or the nasty points of the shredded plywood fibers. Also, the tapered opening was still mostly too narrow to permit him to slide through.

So, no; he had to do more. His fingers were bleeding from the work, and the backs of his hands were bleeding from the plywood shreds, but fortunately in the darkness he couldn’t see any of that, though he could certainly feel it. After a very brief pause to breathe in the fresh air, he pulled his lever back in and went on to finish the job of freeing the plywood all across the bottom sill. And when he wedged the lever in to make the dog-ear this time, there was much more room to maneuver.

He remembered there’d been an armchair in the room. Stumbling around, cautious but hitting into anonymous things anyway, he found the chair at last and dragged it over to the window. Standing on it, he confronted an opening he really still couldn’t see, though there was by now the faintest hint of light from the outside world, and he decided the way to go out was feet first.