Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction Read online

  “How?” said Claire.

  “By sticking to the truth,” said Harve. “That’s pretty plain, isn’t it? That’s what they want to make us stop doing.”

  “I don’t want to do anybody any harm,” said Claire. “I just want to get out of here. I just want to go home.”

  “All right,” said Harve. “We’ve got a lawyer now. That’s a start.”

  Harve called to Lemming, who came in rubbing his hands. “Secret conference over?” he said cheerfully. “Yes,” said Harve.

  “Well, secrets are all very fine in their place,” said Lemming, “but I recommend strongly that you don’t keep any from your lawyer.”

  “Harve—” said Claire warningly.

  “He’s right,” said Harve. “Don’t you understand—he’s right.”

  “She’s in favor of holding a little something back?” said Lemming.

  “She’s been threatened. That’s the reason,” said Harve.

  “By whom?” said Lemming.

  “Don’t tell him,” said Claire beseechingly.

  “We’ll save that for a little while,” said Harve. “The thing is, Mr. Lemming, I didn’t commit this murder they say I did. But my wife and I saw who really did it, and we’ve been threatened with all kinds of things, if we tell what we saw.”

  “Don’t tell,” said Claire. “Harve—don’t.”

  “I give you my word of honor, Mrs. Elliot,” said Lemming, “nothing you or your husband tells me will go any farther.” He was proud of his word of honor, was a very appealing person when he gave it. “Now tell me who really did this killing.”

  “Ed Luby,” said Harve.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Lemming blankly. “Ed Luby,” said Harve.

  Lemming sat back, suddenly drained and old. “I see,” he said. His voice wasn’t deep now. It was like wind in the treetops.

  “He’s a powerful man around here,” said Harve, “I hear.”

  Lemming nodded. “You heard that right,” he said.

  Harve started to tell about how Luby had killed the girl. Lemming stopped him.

  “What’s—what’s the matter?” said Harve.

  Lemming gave him a wan smile. “That’s a very good question,” he said. “That’s—that’s a very complicated question.”

  “You work for him, after all?” said Harve.

  “Maybe I do—after all,” said Lemming.

  “You see?” Claire said to Harve.

  Lemming took out his billfold, handed the twenty dollars back to Harve.

  “You quit?” said Harve.

  “Let’s say,” said Lemming sadly, “that any advice you get from me from now on is free. I’m not the lawyer for this case—and any advice I have to give doesn’t have much to do with the law.” He spread his hands. “I’m a legal hack, friends. That must be obvious. If what you say is true—”

  “It is true!” said Harve.

  “Then you need a lawyer who can fight a whole town,” said Lemming, “because Ed Luby is this town. I’ve won a lot of cases in Ilium, but they were all cases Ed Luby didn’t care about.” He stood. “If what you say is true, this isn’t a case—it’s a war.”

  “What am I going to do?” said Harve.

  “My advice to you,” said Lemming, “is to be as scared as your wife is, Mr. Elliot.”

  Lemming nodded, and then he scuttled away.

  Seconds later, the sergeant came in for Harve and Claire, marched them through a door and into a room where a floodlight blinded them. Whispers came from the darkness beyond.

  “What’s this?” said Harve, his arm around Claire.

  “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to,” said the voice of Captain Luby.

  “I want a lawyer,” said Harve.

  “You had one,” said the captain. “What happened to Lemming?”

  “He quit,” said Harve.

  Somebody snickered.

  “That’s funny?” said Harve bitterly.

  “Shut up,” said Captain Luby.

  “This is funny?” Harve said to the whispering blackness. “A man and a woman up here who never broke a law in their whole lives—accused of killing a woman they tried to save—”

  Captain Luby emerged from the blackness. He showed Harve what he had in his right hand. It was a slab of rubber about four inches wide, eight inches long, and half an inch thick.

  “This is what I call Captain Luby’s wise-guy-wiser-upper,” he said. He put the piece of rubber against Harve’s cheek caressingly. “You can’t imagine how much pain one slap from this thing causes,” he said. “I’m surprised all over again, every time I use it. Now stand apart, stand straight, keep your mouths shut, and face the witnesses.”

  Harve’s determination to break jail was born when the clammy rubber touched his cheek.

  By the time the captain had returned to the whispering darkness, Harve’s determination had become an obsession. No other plan would do.

  Out in the darkness, a man now said in a clear, proud voice that he had seen Harve hit the girl. He identified himself as the mayor of Ilium.

  The mayor’s wife was honored to back him up.

  Harve did not protest. He was too busy sensing all he could of what lay beyond the light. Someone now came in from another room, showing Harve where a door was, showing him what lay beyond the door.

  Beyond the door he glimpsed a foyer. Beyond the foyer he glimpsed the great outdoors.

  Now Captain Luby was asking Judge Wampler if he had seen Harve hit the girl.

  “Yes,” that fat man said gravely. “And I saw his wife help him to make a getaway, too.”

  Mrs. Wampler spoke up. “They’re the ones, all right,” she said. “It was one of the most terrible things I ever saw in my life. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”

  Harve tried to make out the first row of people, the first people he had to pass. He could make out only one person with any certainty. He could make out the policewoman with the clacking heels. She was taking notes now on all that was being said.

  Harve decided to charge past her in thirty seconds.

  He began to count the seconds away.

  Part Two

  Harve Elliot stood in front of a blinding light with his wife, Claire. He had never committed a crime in his life. He was now counting off the seconds before he would break jail, before he would run away from the charge of murder.

  He was listening to a supposed witness to his crime, to the man who had actually committed the murder. Ed Luby, somewhere behind the light, told his tale. Luby’s brother, a captain on the Ilium Police Force, asked helpful questions from time to time.

  “Three months ago,” said Ed Luby, “I turned my restaurant into a private club—to keep undesirable elements out.” Luby, the expert on undesirable elements, had once been a gunman for Al Capone.

  “I guess those two up there,” he said, meaning Harve and Claire, “didn’t hear about it—or maybe they figured it didn’t apply to them. Anyway, they showed up tonight, and they got sore when they couldn’t get in, and they hung around the front door, insulting the members.”

  “You ever see them before?” Captain Luby asked him.

  “Back before the place was a private club,” said Luby, “these two used to come in about once a year. The reason I remembered ’em from one year to the next was the man was always loaded. And he’d get drunker in my place—and he’d turn mean.”

  “Mean?” said the captain.

  “He’d pick fights,” said Luby, “not just with men, either.”

  “So what happened tonight?” said the captain.

  “These two were hanging around the door, making trouble for the members,” said Luby, “and a dame came out in a taxi, all by herself. I don’t know what she figured on doing. Figured on picking up somebody on the way in, I guess. Anyway, she got stopped, too, so I had three people hanging around outside my door. And they got in some kind of argument with each other.”

  All that interested Harve Elliot was the effect
Luby’s tale was having on the mood in the room. Harve couldn’t see Luby, but he sensed that everyone was watching the man, was fascinated by him.

  Now, Harve decided, was the time to run.

  “I don’t want you to take my word for what happened next,” said Luby, “on account of I understand some people claim it was me who hit the girl.”

  “We’ve got the statements of other witnesses,” said the captain sympathetically. “So you go ahead and give us your version, and we can double-check it.”

  “Well,” said Luby, “the dame who came out in the taxi called the other dame—the dame up there—”

  “Mrs. Elliot,” said the captain.

  “Yeah,” said Luby. “She calls Mrs. Elliot something Mr. Elliot don’t like, and the next thing I knew, Mr. Elliot had hauled off and—”

  Harve Elliot plunged past the light and into the darkness. He charged at the door and the freedom beyond.

  Harve lay under an old sedan in a used car lot. He was a block from the Ilium Police Station. His ears roared and his chest quaked. Centuries before he had broken jail. He had knocked people and doors and furniture out of his way effortlessly, had scattered them like leaves.

  Guns had gone off, seemingly right by his head.

  Now men were shouting in the night, and Harve lay under the car.

  One clear image came to Harve from his fantastic flight—and only one. He remembered the face of the policewoman, the first person between him and freedom. Harve had flung her into the glare of the floodlight, had seen her livid, shocked face.

  And that was the only face he’d seen.

  The hunt for Harve—what Harve heard of it—sounded foolish, slovenly, demoralized. When Harve got his wind and his wits back, he felt marvelous. He wanted to laugh out loud and yell. He had won so far, and he would go on winning. He would get to the State Police. He would bring them back to Ilium to free Claire.

  After that, Harve would hire the best lawyer he could find, clear himself, put Luby in prison, and sue the rotten city of Ilium for a blue million.

  Harve peered out from under the car. His hunters were not coming toward him. They were moving away, blaming each other with childish querulousness for having let him escape.

  Harve crawled out from under the car, crouched, listened. And then he began to walk carefully, always in shadows. He moved with the cunning of an infantry scout. The filth and feeble lights of the city, so recently his enemies, were his friends now.

  And, moving with his back to sooty walls, ducking into doorways of decaying buildings, Harve realized that pure evil was his friend, too. Eluding it, outwitting it, planning its destruction all gave his life inconceivably exciting meanings.

  A newspaper scuttled by, tumbled in a night breeze, seemed on its raffish way out of Ilium, too.

  Far, far away a gun went off. Harve wondered what had been shot at—or shot.

  Few cars moved in Ilium. And even rarer were people on foot. Two silent, shabby lovers passed within a few feet of Harve without seeing him.

  A lurching drunk did see Harve, murmured some quizzical insult, lurched on.

  Now a siren wailed—and then another, and yet another. Patrol cars were fanning out from the Ilium Police Station, idiotically advertising themselves with noise and lights.

  One car set up a noisy, flashy roadblock not far from Harve. It blocked an underpass through the high, black rampart of a railroad bed. That much of what the police were doing was intelligent, because the car made a deadend of the route that Harve had been taking.

  The railroad bed loomed like the Great Wall of China to Harve. Beyond it lay what he thought of as freedom. He had to think of freedom as being something close, as being just one short rush away. Actually, on the other side of the black rampart lay more of Ilium—more faint lights and broken streets. Hope, real hope, lay far, far beyond—lay miles beyond, lay on a superhighway, the fast, clean realm of the State Police.

  But Harve now had to pretend that passing over or through the rampart was all that remained for him to do.

  He crept to the railroad bed, moved along its cindery face, moved away from the underpass that the police had blocked.

  He found himself approaching yet another underpass that was blocked by a car. He could hear talk. He recognized the voice of the talker. It was the voice of Captain Luby.

  “Don’t bother taking this guy alive,” the captain said. “He’s no good to himself or anybody else alive. Do the taxpayers a favor, and shoot to kill.”

  Somewhere a train whistle blew.

  And then Harve saw a culvert that cut through the bed of the railroad. It seemed at first to be too close to Captain Luby. But then the captain swept the approaches with a powerful flashlight, showed Harve the trench that fed the culvert. It crossed a field littered with oil drums and trash.

  When Captain Luby’s light went off, Harve crawled out onto the field, reached the ditch, slithered in. In its shallow, slimy shelter, he moved toward the culvert.

  The train that had whistled was approaching now. Its progress was grindingly, clankingly slow.

  When the train was overhead, its noise at a maximum, Harve ducked into the culvert. Without thought of an ambush on the other side, he emerged, scrambled up the cinder slope.

  He swung onboard the rusty rungs of an empty gondola in the moving train.

  Eternities later, the slow-moving train had carried Harve Elliot out of Ilium. It was making its complaining way now through a seemingly endless wasteland—through woods and neglected fields.

  Harve’s eyes, stinging in the night wind, searched for light and motion ahead, for some outpost of the world that would help him rescue his wife.

  The train rounded a curve. And Harve saw lights that, in the midst of the rural desolation, looked as lively as a carnival.

  What made all that seeming life was a red flasher at a grade crossing, and the headlights of one car stopped by the flasher.

  As the gondola rattled over the crossing, Harve dropped off and rolled.

  He stood, went unsteadily to the stopped automobile. When he got past the headlights, he could see that the driver was a young woman.

  He could see, too, how terrified she was.

  “Listen! Wait! Please!” said Harve.

  The woman jammed her car in gear, sent the car bucking past Harve and over the crossing as the end of the caboose went by.

  Her rear wheels threw cinders in Harve’s eyes.

  When he had cleared his eyes, her taillights were twinkling off into the night, were gone. The train was gone, too. And the noisy red flasher was dead.

  Harve stood alone in a countryside as still and bleak as the arctic. Nowhere was there a light to mark a house.

  The train blew its sad horn—far away now.

  Harve put his hands to his cheeks. They were wet. They were grimed. And he looked around at the lifeless night, remembered the nightmare in Ilium. He kept his hands on his cheeks. Only his hands and his cheeks seemed real.

  He began to walk.

  No more cars came.

  On he trudged, with no way of knowing where he was, where he was heading. Sometimes he imagined that he heard or saw signs of a busy highway in the distance—the faint singing of tires, the billowing of lights.

  He was mistaken.

  He came at last to a dark farmhouse. A radio murmured inside.

  He knocked on the door.

  Somebody stirred. The radio went off.

  Harve knocked again. The glass pane in the door was loose, rattled when Harve knocked. Harve put his face to the pane. He saw the sullen red of a cigarette. It cast only enough light to illuminate the rim of the ashtray in which it rested.

  Harve knocked again.

  “Come in,” said a man’s voice. “Ain’t locked.” Harve went in. “Hello?” he said.

  No one turned on a light for him. Whoever had invited him in didn’t show himself, either. Harve turned this way and that. “I’d like to use your phone,” he said to the dark.

/>   “You stay faced right the way you are,” said the voice, coming from behind Harve. “I got a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun aimed right at your middle, Mr. Elliot. You do anything out of the way at all, and I’ll blow you right in two.”

  Harve raised his hands. “You know my name?” he said.

  “That is your name?” said the voice.

  “Yes,” said Harve.

  “Well, well,” said the voice. It cackled. “Here I am, an old, old man. Wife gone, friends gone, children gone. Been thinking the past few days about using this here gun on myself. Just looky here what I would have missed! Just goes to prove—”

  “Prove what?” said Harve.

  “Nobody ever knows when he’s gonna have a lucky day.”

  The ceiling fixture in the room went on. It was over Harve’s head. Harve looked up at it. He didn’t look behind himself, for fear of being blown in two. The ceiling fixture was meant to have three bulbs, had only one. Harve could tell that by the gray ghosts of the missing two.

  The frosted shade was dotted with the shadows of the bodies of bugs.

  “You can look behind, if you want,” said the voice. “See for yourself whether I got a gun or not, Mr. Elliot.”

  Harve turned slowly to look at a very old man—a scrawny old man with obscenely white and even false teeth. The old man really did have a shotgun—a cavernous, rusty antique. The ornate, arched hammers of the gun were cocked.

  The old man was scared. But he was pleased and excited, too.

  “Don’t make any trouble, Mr. Elliot,” he said, “and we’ll get along just fine. You’re looking at a man who went over the top eight times in the Great War, so you ain’t looking at anybody who’d be too chickenhearted to shoot. Shooting a man ain’t something I never done before.”

  “All right—no trouble,” said Harve.

  “Wouldn’t be the first man I shot,” said the old man. “Wouldn’t be the tenth, far as that goes.”

  “I believe you,” said Harve. “Can I ask you how you happen to know my name?”

  “Radio,” said the old man. He motioned to an armchair, a chair with burst upholstering, with sagging springs. “You better set there, Mr. Elliot.”