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  Again there was no reaction. She looked neither pleased nor offended by his obvious admiration. She merely ignored him.

  As the couple passed through the rear door, Calhoun rose from his bar stool, scooped up his change, leaving a quarter tip, and raised one hand in a casual salute of good-by to the bartender. Joe glanced at the door by which the couple had left, then raised his eyebrows questioningly. With a slight shake of his head, Calhoun went out the street door.

  Outside, he turned right without hurry. But as soon as he was beyond the range of Joe’s vision through the plate-glass front window, he increased his pace to a rapid walk. A half block up the street he slid under the wheel of a four-year-old Plymouth club coupe and settled back to wait.

  He knew the car containing Cushman and his woman companion would have to pass where he was waiting. The exit from the Haufbrau’s parking lot came out on Court Street, which was one-way here. They would have to turn right, pass the barroom’s front door, and drive past Calhoun’s parked car and at least as far as the next intersection.

  In the rear-view mirror he saw headlights swing from the parking-lot exit and turn toward him. Apparently the driver believed in a fast getaway, for the motor began to roar as soon as the car reached the street. Calhoun had barely had time to switch on his engine when a green Buick convertible swished by him at a speed of at least fifty miles an hour.

  At two thirty in the morning there are usually few people on the streets of Buffalo. With only a half hour left until curfew, most people don’t want to waste drinking time walking from one bar to another, even when a bar is crowded. And tonight was a quiet night. The only person in sight was an elderly and rather shabbily dressed man who was just starting to cross the street a few yards beyond Calhoun. And the only moving vehicle in sight was the green Buick convertible, which streaked past Calhoun down the left lane of the one-way street, just in time to catch the elderly man with its left front fender as he stepped from between two parked cars.

  The old man flew back between the cars he had just walked between to land in a heap on the sidewalk. With a screech of brakes, the green convertible swerved right clear across the street and sideswiped two parked cars.

  The crash was more terrific than the damage. Metal screamed in agony as a front fender was torn from the first parked car and a rear fender half ripped from the second. The convertible caromed to the center of the street, hesitated, then gunned off as though it were on the Indianapolis Speedway.

  But not before Calhoun had seen all he needed to see. The neon signs of taverns along Court Street, combined with the regular street lighting, made the street as bright as day. With the convertible’s top down, he could see the occupants clearly.

  The woman was driving, her shoulder-length raven-black hair flowing behind her. If there were any doubt as to the couple’s identity, her companion dispelled it by turning in the seat to stare back over his shoulder at the motionless figure on the sidewalk, giving Calhoun a full-face view of him. It was Harry Cushman.

  Automatically Calhoun noted the license number of the Buick convertible was 9I-3836. It was a New York State plate.

  The crash brought people pouring from doorways all along the block. A yell of rage from up the street, followed by a steady stream of swearing, told Calhoun that at least one of the damaged cars’ owners had arrived at the scene.

  “Anybody see it?” he heard someone nearby ask.

  Then somebody discovered the old man lying on the sidewalk. Calhoun waited until the crowd began to gather around the injured man, then unobtrusively slipped from his car. Instead of crossing the street to join the crowd, he walked up to look over the two damaged cars.

  Beyond a ruined fender on each, neither seemed particularly harmed. One was a new Dodge and the other a two-year-old Ford. He filed the license numbers of each in his mind, along with the Buick’s.

  Apparently someone in the crowd had thought to call an ambulance and the police, for a few minutes later they arrived simultaneously. Calhoun crossed the street and stood on the edge of the crowd as the police cleared a path for the Emergency Hospital interne who had come in the ambulance. The interne bent over the injured man.

  The man wasn’t dead. Calhoun could hear him answering the interne’s questions in a weak voice. He couldn’t make out what they said, but after a few moments the interne rose and spoke in a louder voice to one of the police officers.

  “He may have a fractured hip. Can’t tell for sure without X rays. I don’t think anything else is broken.”

  Under the interne’s instructions, two attendants got the old man on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance.

  “I didn’t get the guy’s name,” one of the policemen complained.

  “John Lischer,” the interne said. “You can get his address later. His address for a while will be Emergency Hospital.”

  When the ambulance pulled away, Calhoun faded back from the crowd to stand in the light of a neon sign. He took an envelope from his pocket, wrote down the three license numbers and the name John Lischer.

  He stood musing, then recrossed the street and returned to the Haufbrau. It was five minutes of three when he entered the bar. The place was now deserted except for Joe, the bartender, who was cleaning up.

  “Thought you called it a night,” Joe greeted him.

  “Got sidetracked by an accident up the street,” Calhoun said. He laid a half dollar on the bar. “How about a nightcap?”

  Joe leaned his broom against the bar, then went behind it and mixed a bourbon and soda. “I heard the crash and looked out,” he said. “Couldn’t see much from here. Anybody hurt?”

  “One guy, I guess.”

  “You see it happen?”

  The big man shook his head. “Just heard it and wandered up to rubberneck.”

  Joe rang up the half dollar. “Couple of cars, huh?”

  “I don’t know,” Calhoun said. “Couple of banged-up cars were there, but they were parked at the curb. And the injured guy was on the opposite side of the street. Looked to me like maybe a hit-and-runner clipped a pedestrian and then sides wiped the two cars.”

  “Oh? Too bad you didn’t see it.”

  “Yeah,” Calhoun said.

  Without seeming to, he studied Joe’s expression carefully. There was no indication on the bartender’s face that he suspected Calhoun of holding anything back.

  Calhoun was satisfied. He had returned to the bar solely to fix it in Joe’s mind that he hadn’t taken his tip and followed Harry Cushman and his companion.

  There was no point in cutting Joe in if he didn’t have to.

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  Copyright © 1963 by Richard Deming, Registration Renewed 1991

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-4157-4

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4157-5

 

 

 
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