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CHAPTER 13
We went back to Perry Street. Bogardus was long gone, but otherwise the place was the same. The dishes and silver were all Woolworth’s pride, the upholstery smelled vaguely of insecticide and old sin, and there were seven different water-color views of the same flower pot on the wall, all executed by that color-blind old lady who turns them out for every furnished apartment in the world. Anything Bra
We would have been better off using the time to do pushups. The only item we discovered even remotely co
“Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thank you for calling and please give our number to a friend. This is a recorded response. Hello there, we have a message for you. The gift of God is—”
I passed Bra
“I’m listening.”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I was just remembering a game we used to play on the barn roof, being air aces after the first war. Me and two other kids. The names we always used were von Richthofen, Eddie Rickenbacker and Georges Guynemer. They always stick together in my mind, always in the same order.”
“Too early for me. Tom Mix, Buck Jones and Ken Maynard, maybe. Which one do you want to see first?”
“That Ned Sommers I suppose. Bank Street’s only two blocks up.”
I called Sally before we went out, telling her that Duke had been roped and that she could come home. She had been asleep. It occurred to me that I could probably use some sack time myself, but it had not caught up with me yet. We left the key under the rubber again.
It was pushing eleven o’clock and the asphalt was already the texture of secondhand chewing gum. They had cleared out the intersection up at Seventh. Bra
“You expect to get anything out of these guys?” I asked him.
“Who knows? Some background, anyhow. We’ll take it all back to the office later and sort it out with everything else that comes in. Hell, it’s all routine, you know how it goes.”
“I suppose,” I said.
The address we had for Ned Sommers was a beat-up old brownstone with an entrance below street level. Four chipped slate steps went down past a battered regiment of empty trash cans into a tile alcove. It said Sommers — 1-R, on one of the bells, but the front door was unlatched and we went in without ringing. Uncarpeted steps went up again along the left-hand wall but 1-R would probably be back under them. The hallway smelled like a sanatorium for cats with kidney disorders. We found the door where we expected it to be and Bra
It took a minute, and then the door did not open.
“Who is it?”
“Ned Sommers?”
“Who wit?”
“Sommers?”
It could go on that way until one of them got laryngitis before Bra
“Ned Sommers?”
He peered out at us, furrowing his forehead. He was a sallow-faced man of about twenty-eight, lean almost to the point of being undernourished. I judged him to be close to six-feet-even but he would not have gone in as more than a welterweight. He had wavy black hair which he had gotten cut for his grade school graduation and not since, pale brown eyes and a nose which had been flattened once. It was a nose which might have made another man look belligerent. It only made Sommers look like someone who ought to have known better. He was wearing cord slacks and nothing else, and if he had been dressed there would have been a library card in his shirt pocket.
“I’m Sommers,” he said finally.
One of his hands was on the inside knob and his other was on the door jamb. Bra
Sommers continued to frown at us. “Questions about what? I’m pretty busy.”
We were standing there. Sommers had glanced behind himself, pursing his lips. He turned back. “Let me get a shirt on. I’ll come out.”
“Step away from the door,” Bra
“Oh, now look, a man has a right to privacy in his own—”
He moved aside. He had to, since Bra
She wasn’t quite, but only because the bed wasn’t there. It was along the far wall to our left. She was sitting up in it with the sheets drawn around her shoulders. I supposed she might have ducked into another room if that hadn’t been the only room there was.
One room. It seemed hardly adequate for Sommers’s creative pursuits. The books went from floor to ceiling along two walls. There were enormous piles of what must have been every issue of the New York Times since Harper’s Ferry and Sommers appeared to be reading all of them simultaneously. There were copies of Time with pictures of Neville Chamberlain and John Nance Garner on the covers. There were a hundred different photographs tacked on the two empty walls, and every one of them was of Ernest Hemingway.
The girl’s clothes were scattered among the debris as if she’d been caught in a cyclone without enough safety pins.
She was staring at us, still as cut stone. An adder being held by the back of the jaws would have had the same expression in its eyes. She was a Negro and as beautiful a girl as I had ever seen.
Bra