John D. MacDonald

Hit and Run

The stove in the state troopers’ station was turned too high; Carney had a headache. And the crash picture he was examining depressed him. This one had been a carload of teenagers trying to pass a truck on the blind corner out beyond the Rucker turnoff. He sighed and pushed it aside, hearing a woman’s quick, light voice in the hallway, then Tillotson’s rumbling reply.

As the woman came in, followed by the trooper stamping snow from his boots, Carney made a swift appraisal. Middle thirties, attractive, assured, just hesitant enough to indicate that any kind of police setup was a new experience.

“Why don’t you go right over by the stove there, ma’am?” Tillotson said. “This lady’s name is Mrs. Fairliss, Del. Mrs. Peter Fairliss. Pardon me, ma’am. This is Sergeant Carney.”

“How do you do, Sergeant.” The woman was trying to control her shivering. Her lips had a bluish look as she turned, keeping her hands outstretched toward the stove, to give Carney a quick apologetic smile. She was a smallish, neat-figured woman with a smooth young face, short nose, quiet eyes. She had the look of a woman loved and well cared for. Expensive tweed suit, fur jacket.

Tillotson murmured something about snow being unusual this late in the year, early May, think of it, and Carney asked, “What seems to be the trouble?”

“A little after eleven. Del, I turned onto Route 83 over near Verrick, just cruising, and I see this big green ’52 Buick with New York plates parked on the shoulder, with the dim lights on. I go by slow and see tire lady inside, alone, so I went over. She said they’d run out of gas, she and her husband, and he’d started walking up the road to bring some back. She was about froze, being there over an hour and a half with no heat, on account of the heater not working without the motor running. I took the keys and locked up the Buick and brought her along while I went looking. There’s a gas station about four miles up the road toward Verrick, but he hadn’t been there and we didn’t see anything along the road, so I thought I’d better bring her back here to wait.”

“I can’t understand what happened,” the woman said with deep concern. Her teeth were still chattering a little, but her voice was low and controlled.

Carney got up and placed a chair for her near the stove. He said to Tillotson, “Bob, you’re sure there wasn’t anybody walking down the road?”

“We went on and checked the gas stations in Verrick. I went slow, and we watched both sides of the highway, coming and going. Still snowing pretty hard, you know.”

The woman bit her lip. She seemed close to tears.

“Put some coffee on, Bob; then go and look for him some more. Turn your spot on the ditch. Look for anything that might be a man covered up with snow. Sorry, Mrs. Fairliss, but we’ve got to think of a hit-and-run driver, or a heart attack.”

“He’s quite healthy; he just had a check-up recently. And he’s intelligent enough to step off the highway when a car is coming toward him in the snow, Sergeant.”

“Where were you bound, Mrs. Fairliss?”

“Oregon. We left Syracuse early this morning.”

“You came quite a way in weather like this.”

“Peter is an expert driver. I’ve never known him to run out of gas before though. I guess he was watching the weather so closely he forgot.”

“What time did you run out of gas?”

“It was exactly twenty minutes to ten by Peter’s watch. I know because he checked it so he could estimate about how long it would take him to walk to a gas station. He bundled me up in the car robe and a blanket and got some brandy out of the suitcase. It helped a little, but not enough. The car got terribly cold inside.”

“Has he been depressed or anything?”

“Oh, no! I suppose you’re thinking of amnesia, or that he just walked out on me. No, we get along very well. His children are away at school. I’m his second wife; we’ve been married nearly two years now. His first wife died, quite suddenly, four years ago.”

“How old is he?”

“He’ll be fifty his next birthday.” She smiled. “He’s a little upset about that. He says fifty sounds so decrepit.” The smile faded quickly, and she bit her lip again.

“Was he carrying much money?”

“Several hundred dollars.”

“There’s the possibility, Mrs. Fairliss, that he got a ride and whoever picked him up may have taken him somewhere to rob him and leave him.”

“He’d be a difficult man to do that to. He’s quite quick and strong. He keeps himself in good shape, Sergeant.”

He heard the coffee perking and went to turn the flame down. When he came back, she was standing up. She smiled. “I’m just too nervous to sit still, I guess. And I’m warm now. That’s a lovely stove.”

They both jumped when the phone rang. Carney scooped it up. The dispatcher said, “Tillotson says to tell you he can’t find anything. What do you want him to do?”

“Tell him to look some more. He couldn’t have covered the area thoroughly in this length of time. Can you release anybody to help him?”

“Could be. I’ll check. Want to know?”

“Just do it if you can, and thanks.”

Carney hung up and gave Mrs. Fairliss what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Nothing to report, as I guess you could figure out. Would you mind if I finished a little paper work?”

“Please go ahead, Sergeant.”

He went back to the crash pictures, typing out description slips and pasting them on the photographs. As he typed with two fingers, in slow cadence, he was aware of her roaming restlessly back and forth near the stove. When he glanced over, he saw that she had taken off her fur jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, She stood by the Window looking out at the snow, It was a nice tweed suit, he decided. And she had that square-shouldered, trim-hipped, long-waisted look that made clothes look good.

In fifteen years of duty, Sergeant Carney had gained a sixth sense. He knew now with certainty that something had happened to Peter Fairliss. Something unpleasant, And he guessed that the pretty woman shared that certainty but was telling herself she was being morbid. It would be kind to take her mind off it a little.

“That’s that,” he said heartily, slipping the photos into an envelope, When she turned he said, “There’s always paper work, it seems.”

“Peter’s always complaining about reports to make out.”

“This is what we call a substation. It’s pretty small, and I get stuck with all the paper work. They tell me I’m in charge, I guess that’s to soften the blow.”

“Do you have many men here?”

“Just four.”

“The man who brought me back was nice.”

“Bob Tillotson. He’s coming along. Two years of it he’s had.”

She was looking at him with polite attention, and he felt a sudden unreasoning jealousy of this Fairliss. who at — what was it? — forty-seven had found this woman and married her. It had been a long time since he had felt jealousy toward any man.

She glanced at the wall clock and murmured, “Half past twelve.”

“Mrs. Fairliss, you’ve got to start thinking of what you’ll do if this hunt isn’t ended soon. It seems a little pointless to stay up all night.”

“I couldn’t possibly sleep, Sergeant. Of course if I’m in your way here—”

“No, no,” he said hastily.

“What on earth could have happened?” she said, with the petulant anger of the sorely troubled. Why has it happened to me? Why has God stopped smiling?

The phone rang and he picked it up. knowing at once what the voice on the other end would say. Looking at her, he saw that she knew too. She stood with feet parted, braced almost, the way a child who is expecting punishment stands. He looked away, toward the window.

“Del?” the dispatcher said. “Got a call-in from Bob. He’s found him. Hit and run, it looks like. Dead. Three miles your side of Verrick.” Carney held the receiver tight against his ear so that the hard, casual voice wouldn’t be audible to the woman. “Got the coroner on the job. Wife there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a job I’m glad you’ve got this time, Carney.”

“Get the lab lined up on it.”

“I read the manuals too.”

The dispatcher hung up. Carney replaced the phone in the cradle very gently and stood up. He saw the woman’s hand come up to her mouth, very slowly; saw the fingers go tight across the lips.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Fairliss.”

She turned blindly back toward the chair by the stove and sat down, clumsily. “What happened?” she asked. “He’s dead, isn’t he? I’ve known that for an hour, I think.”

“They think it’s hit and run.”

She spoke as though to herself. “So alive. Laughing. Calling himself a dope for running out of gas.”

Carney removed his glasses, polished them slowly on his handkerchief. Usually it happened over the phone; that was easier because you couldn’t see their faces. The expression on this woman’s face startled him. He was not easily moved by looks of anger; he had seen the lusterless animal eyes of the psychotic-killer type. This was a cold, intellectual ferocity, glistening.

“Hit and run, Sergeant? I want him caught. I want to look at him.”

“Now, Mrs. Fairliss.”

“I mean that. Oh, I’m not going to break down. Not yet. Don’t look at me like that.”

“Every effort will be made to locate the—”

“Find him for me, Sergeant.”

“I will, Mrs. Fairliss,” he heard himself say, and he realized the stupidity of the promise. A through highway, a snowy night. No witnesses. Go ahead and be a big shot, Carney. Find the bad man for the lady.

He sighed and went to the phone and called Doris Bell down the road, who agreed readily, as he knew she would, to take Mrs. Fairliss in. He called the dispatcher and made arrangements to pick up the Buick. He got the addresses of Peter Fairliss’ children and laboriously composed wires. Mrs. Fairliss approved them without interest, merely asking that they be signed Linda. When the Buick tame in, he got her suitcase out of the trunk and detailed a trooper to escort her to Mrs. Bell’s for the night. She turned back at the door and took his hand for a moment, unable to speak, but showing by the gesture the sort of breeding that is more than the result of training.

At breakfast Bob Tillotson gave his reconstruction of the accident, drawing on the tablecloth with a horny thumbnail. “Now here’s the shoulder, Del. There were sort of big dimples in the snow about here; that must have been where he stepped off the road to let the car go by. We found them just in time or the county snowplow would have covered them up. He must have seen the car go out of control, because there was a dimple about six feet away, about here, and another one here, like he takes two big running strides, angling for the ditch. Then here there was this big half-circle skidmark, pretty well snowed over. Joe figured it for the rear end of the car swinging; the body was over here, which would fit in if the car skidded and sort of caught him on the rise after those two running steps. If the guy had stayed put back there where he was standing, it would have missed him clean — scared the dickens out of him, but missed him. The coroner said it really bashed him; he couldn’t have lived more than thirty seconds. You know, Del, I get sore at these hit and runs. Now take this guy. How did he know the fella he hit was dead? He could have been hurt just enough to bleed to death over there in the brush.”

“He had to know he hit somebody.”

“I don’t see how he could help it.” Bob sighed. “Tough on that lady, I guess.”

The phone rang. It was the dispatcher with the gist of the lab report.

“They got something this time, Carney. On the sleeve and shoulder of Fairliss’ coat there was some green paint ground in; the spectroanalysis matches it with the factory coat on a ’36 Ford. And on one side of his pants and on the side of one shoe they found some dirt — clay from this area. They figure the dirt came off the right rear wheel. So we look for a green ’36 Ford with the right rear fender bashed and probably a whopping big dent in the panel above the fender.”

“Has Dorrity assigned anybody to the case?”

“Not yet.”

“I’d like to spend a little time on it.”

“What?” The dispatcher was surprised. “I thought you were welded to your swivel chair.” But he put the call through to Captain Dorrity, who reluctantly released Carney to work on the case for four days — no more.

When Mrs. Fairliss came in, deep shadows under her eyes, Carney prepared a statement for her signature. No, she hadn’t particularly noticed the cars that went by as she sat waiting for her husband. There hadn’t been too many. Twenty perhaps? Or thirty? Somewhere in there. She seemed slightly ill at ease. Finally she said to him, “You remember what I said about — whoever did it?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you to think that was hysteria. I meant it. It seems primitive and all that, but I want to see the person who did it. I want to try to understand the... the mind of a person who could do that. Accidents, yes. They happen. But to run away— Are you going to work on the case?”

Carney did not understand why he should flush at that question. “I’ve made arrangements to work on it.”

She took a slip of paper from her purse. “Here is my home address and phone number. As soon as you find him, please call me collect. I’ll come at once, Sergeant.”

He watched her walk out to her car. The morning had turned warm; the freak snow was completely gone from the wet asphalt and the trees dripped. The Fairliss incident was over. He felt a mild irritation that he had condemned himself to pounding around the countryside. Quixotic, he thought, that’s me. You figure you’re old enough and practiced enough and bored enough to be at last forever beyond the reach of any puerile self-identification with the maimed and lost, the casualties of four-lane civilization. And then one sneaks up on you. Linda Fairliss, widow. Thirty-six. Not young, not old.

His replacement arrived and took over. Carney got into his car and headed for the main barracks. He took the long way so he would go by the scene of the accident. It was difficult to spot. He was not entirely certain until he saw, against the green spring grass where the snow had melted, two used flash bulbs.

He stood by the car, thumbs tucked in his belt, hat raked back, a heavy, solid man with a deceptively mild, almost scholarly look. Assumption one: The suspect was headed home, through Verrick. Place his home, then, south or west or north of Verrick. Not east. Assumption two: Suspect’s home was on a back road, a farm road; there would be clay on the wheels of his car. Not necessarily on the tire surfaces; the heavy snow of a back road might remove that. But on the wheels, clay nearly to the hubs. An old car, driven too fast on a snow-slick highway. Assumption three: Suspect is a young man. A foolish young man.

Carney slid behind the wheel and drove to the main barracks, where he reported to Dorrity and got hold of the pictures and the complete lab report. He borrowed one of Dorrity’s clerks and set her to work calling up all the garages in the area, asking each one whether a green ’36 Ford had been brought in for bodywork.

He himself got into his car with the list of seventy-seven ’36 Fords Motor Vehicles had reported registered in the county and went to work.

On the fourth day, at a quarter to five, he reported to Dorrity. “There were only four green ones on the list — that is, green ones that hadn’t been repainted. No sign of recent damage to any of them, and the owners were able to satisfy me that they couldn’t have been in the accident area at the critical time. Then I checked all the used-car lots, thinking maybe some kid salesman had borrowed a car. They do that sometimes, using the dealer plates for a little joy-riding. But no lot had a green Ford for sale, or had had one for a long time.”

Dorrity pulled at his lip. He said, waspishly, “So you had a four-day romp. We can assume it was a stranger coming in from outside and going back where he came from.”

“I’m not so sure. Strangers aren’t likely to churn around in that back-country clay. And that list isn’t exhaustive. You can get a license anywhere in the state. I could talk Motor Vehicles into giving me a list of all the ’36 Fords licensed throughout the state; it’s possible our man is registered in another county.”

“You could but you won’t, Sergeant. These things get cold fast. From now on we’ll take care of it from here and parcel out the legwork to whoever happens to be available.”

Carney stood up. “You wouldn’t have any objection to me just poking around on my time off?”

Dorrity gave him a sharp look. “What’s your stake in this?”

“This one got me a little.”

“It’s your time off, I suppose. Don’t let it get to be an obsession. Hit and run is always a nasty bit of work.”

Back at his desk Carney was restless and irritable. On his first day off he spent the whole day driving along the back roads, asking whether there were any green ’36 Fords in the vicinity.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Fairliss called from Syracuse. “Sergeant Carney? This is Mrs. Fairliss. It’s been over two weeks and—” Her voice trailed off.

“Nothing yet, Mrs. Fairliss. Not a thing.”

“You’re still trying?”

“The case is still open. We’re still looking. I want to be frank with you. I’m beginning to think it may have been an out-of-state car. Uh... how are you?”

“I’m well, thank you. But I have that feeling of something left unfinished.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You will call me?”

“Yes. I promised that.”

That night, after he turned off his light, he lay awake a long time, watching reflected headlights sweep across the ceiling. A sixteen-year-old green Ford. With a driver perhaps no older. A car that was close to being a junker. How would you go about hiding a car like that?

An idea nibbled at the edge of his mind. He turned on the light and sat on the edge of the bed — a precaution against falling asleep before the idea was fully developed. It was a trick he hadn’t used for a long time. Not since he had been a young instructor at the State university. Before Chris and the stillborn child had shared a common grave. Before he had so arbitrarily selected a calling as remote as possible from the world that reminded him of Chris.

When you want to hide something, you either hide it where it will not be seen at all or you hide it where it will be seen but not noticed. An old car could be safely disposed of in a junk yard, run in there in darkness, left in the battered, disabled ranks to dream of the potholed grades of long-abandoned roads.

The search took six days. The place was fourteen miles southwest of Verrick, where an eccentric and irritable old man ran a crossroads store. Behind the store ragged ranks of old cars stretched across overgrown pastureland. An old Pierce-Arrow retained a certain amount of disdain, but all the rest looked defeated. Between two and three hundred of them, Carney estimated.

“Look ’em over if you want. No, I don’t sell ’em, and I don’t buy ’em up any more either.” The old man cackled softly. “They was after me in the war to sell ’em off. I told ’em it was a hobby, sort of. Green Ford? How the Lord do I know? Haven’t been up in that pasture since a year ago, I do believe.”

Carney took the back row first, the row that could not be seen from the road. And there, near the end, was a ’36 Ford. Green. Carney looked at the back right corner. The fender was completely gone, and there was no rear bumper. In the panel above where the fender had been was a deep dent. But it was the weeds that made him sure he had the right car; they hadn’t grown around it as they had the others. They weren’t entwined in the front bumper, in the fender wells. This car had been put here recently.

He opened the hood, wiped the engine number clean with a pinch of grass, and wrote it down. One day sixteen years ago this car had been driven, proud-shining, new-smelling, from the showroom. New, more powerful, V-8 engine. And, mister, this paint job will really last!

He told the old man to make sure that nobody went into the lot until the other police had come. Back at headquarters, he checked Motor Vehicles and found that the car had not been registered in the state in 1952.

It took Dorrity himself to get the 1951 files checked. But when Motor Vehicles phoned back an hour later they again reported failure. Dorrity persisted. By this time Motor Vehicles was a little annoyed.

“Well... yes, there are files for 1950. Dead files. Basement storage, and hard to get at. Well, in that case, Captain, but you— Oh, no! Tomorrow morning at the earliest.”

The lab men Carney had dispatched to the junk yard returned. They had found three fair prints, not too badly smudged, on the steering wheel. A wrecker had brought the car in and left it behind the main barracks.

“Now,” said Dorrity, “we wait until tomorrow. And if the answer is still no?”

“I’ll try to think of something else.”

“You baffle me, Carney.”

“It isn’t intentional, Captain.”

“This was an imaginative piece of work. I’ve been going over your record. You made your present grade nine years ago, and you haven’t put in for promotion since. You have the educational requirements, certainly. And you handle your men well.”

“I’m satisfied where I am.”

“You do a good job. You’re useful there. But it makes me uneasy. I don’t like waste. I don’t like to see a man in... in a storm cellar.”

Carney removed his glasses, polished them slowly with his handkerchief. “Isn’t it a case of equating effort and need, Captain? An increment of ability over what is necessary to fulfill your needs is, perhaps, surplus baggage.”

“Contented old civil servant, doddering toward retirement?”

“Why not, Captain?”

Dorrity flushed. “Get out of here! What I’ve been saying has been to my own interest. I resent not having anyone here I can talk to as an equal.”

Carney replaced his glasses and stood up. “I’m on duty tomorrow. You’ll let me know?”

“I’ll let you know, and if we’re lucky, I’ll let you make the pickup.”

At eleven the next morning Dorrity’s voice came crisply over the phone. “Take this down, Sergeant. Adolph Clement. R.F.D. three — Box twelve, Cade Center. I’ll send Masterson over to relieve you. Pick whoever you want to go along with you.”

“Yes sir.”

“We found threads caught in one of the tire treads. They match the sample the lab saved from the coat. If you’re successful, bring the man here.”

Carney took Bob Tillotson with him; they parked in front of the general store. Cade Center was in a hilly area of the county, where the farms were submarginal, the people weakened by inbreeding. Homemade liquor, barn-dance knifings, and a cold eye for all strangers.

“Ade Clement?” the clerk said. “Sure. Straight up the road two miles; take the north fork and keep going to the top of the ridge. Place sits in a hollow just this side of the ridge. Painted a sort of yellow. But Ade’s dead. Borrowed the Tell-sons’ tractor couple of years back and it rolled on him. Lived two weeks, though.”

“Who’s up there now?”

“Well, Ade’s old lady married this Brubaker fellow used to work for George Tellson. They’re up there with a whole smear of kids. The older ones are scattered, though. Couple of the boys in the service, and some of the big girls gone. God knows where.”

“Did Ade Clement drive a green Ford?”

“Yes, he had a green Ford. Guess they sold it or something after Ade died. We don’t keep good track of them up there.”

The house was liverish yellow; rusting auto springs and old tires littered the yard. A naked boy of about two sat in the dust, banging intently on an empty beer can with a stick. As Carney got out of the car, he saw a face at one of the windows. A young girl came around the corner of the house and stopped in surprise. She wore a faded-green cotton dress too small for her maturing body, and her face was frozen into sullenness. She gave them a long stare and went back around the corner of the house.

“Head out there by the barn so you can see if anybody tries to take off,” Carney said to Tillotson.

“Watch yourself, Del.”

Carney walked steadily toward the sagging steps of the narrow porch. A man came out of the house and stood on the porch. He wore stained work pants, a ragged undershirt. He was a big man, big and sallow and black-haired. Through the rents in the undershirt his chest hair showed silky black.

Carney eyed him levelly and kept still. The man shifted his weight uneasily and said, “Something on your mind?”

“Are you Brubaker?”

“Yes. What’s going on?”

“We’re checking on a Ford car. Adolph Clement used to own it.”

The man’s relief was evident. “Sure. But Ade’s dead. A tractor he—”

“I know about that. Where’s the car?”

“Say, you fellas find it? It was stole. Three weeks ago, about.”

“Was it in running condition?”

“Sure.”

“It wasn’t licensed, was it?”

“I can’t afford no two licenses. I got the pickup licensed, and that’s enough.”

“Our records show it hasn’t been licensed since nineteen fifty. Why was it in running condition?”

“Oh, that’s an account of Teddy. One of Ade’s boys. He was always fooling with it. Used to drive it around the place. Of course I wouldn’t let him take it off the place, him having no license to drive and the car not being legal and all. But somebody came up and stole it right off the place.”

“You know what day that was?”

“I sure couldn’t give you the date. But you know that last snow we had? Well, it got took then. Teddy, he kept her parked right over there. Now, the way I figured it, somebody come up and just got in and took the brake off. She’d roll quiet on the snow, and he wouldn’t have to start her up until he was way dawn the hill.”

“Did you report the theft to the police?”

“I was sure going to do that. Betty and me, we talked about it I guess for a week, and I was going to go down and phone you fellas, but I never did get around to it.”

“How did Teddy act after it was stolen?”

“He was what you call put out about it.”

“Is he around? I’d like to talk to him for a minute.”

“Come on around the house. He’s trying to get a little pump going.”

Carney motioned to Bob Tillotson, who moved toward them as they went around to the back of the house. There a boy in jeans squatted by newspapers on which were spread parts of a dismantled pump. He was stripped to the waist; his back was thin and corded, his hair an unruly thatch. Carney saw that he had the square, strong, capable-looking hands of a mechanic.

“Here’s some men want to talk to you, Teddy,” Brubaker said.

Teddy started. The look of the uniforms seemed to freeze him for a moment; then he came slowly to his feet, wiping his hands on the legs of his jeans. Carney, seeing his reaction, felt a tremendous weariness. The boy wasn’t over sixteen.

Teddy licked his lips and then looked down at the pump parts. “Fixing this old pump,” he said in a faint voice.

“They want to know about the Ford car,” Brubaker said.

“It was stole,” Teddy said. His eyes lifted to meet Carney’s, then slid away.

“That’s what I was telling—”

“We’ve been looking for you, Teddy. We didn’t know your name, but we had a good description,” Carney said.

“Nobody saw—” Teddy stopped and bit his lip.

“What is this!” Brubaker demanded. “What’s the boy done?”

Carney was aware of movement behind him. He turned. A woman stood at the back door of the house, with a boy of about seven beside her. The girl they had seen before was behind her, in the shadows. All three had a look of stillness and wariness.

Carney said patiently, “The car wasn’t stolen. Teddy took it onto the highway. He was headed home, back from Verrick, when the car skidded on the slippery highway and hit a pedestrian and killed him. He was too scared to stop and see whether the man was dead. He didn’t bring the car back here. He took it down and left it in an automobile graveyard near Brellville. How did you get back here, Teddy?”

“I didn’t hit anybody. You can’t say I hit anybody.”

“That won’t work, son. We found green paint from your car ground into the man’s clothing, and threads on the car that came from the man’s coat. And you abandoned a car that could have been sold. Bob, go with him while he puts a shirt on.”

Brubaker grunted and hit the boy solidly with his fist. The boy kicked over a kettle as he fell, spilling kerosene and pump parts in the dirt. Brubaker moved toward him again, swinging back a heavy boot.

Carney took a savage relish in expertly pushing Brubaker off balance, hurting him quickly and severely, though temporarily, with his hands — and in a way that would not mark him.

Brubaker sagged and backed away. “Beating him won’t help anything,” Carney said quietly. He felt ashamed of the pleasure he had taken in this quick and futile release.

“What will happen to Teddy?” the woman asked in a nasal voice.

“Get up, Teddy. How old is he?”

“Sixteen, come October.”

“The case will be handled by the juvenile authorities, Mrs. Brubaker. I can’t say what they’ll do. They judge each case individually.”

“He’s a good boy. He never makes no trouble.”

Tillotson went into the house with the boy; when they came back, the boy wore a white shirt and carried a jacket over his arm. One eye was almost swollen shut. Carney put him in the front seat of the car, between himself and Tillotson. The boy didn’t snuffle. He sat and looked down at his hands.

Had my son lived, Carney thought, he would be a year older than this boy. He said, “You should have reported it, Teddy.”

“I know.”

“You’ve been waiting for us to show up.”

“Yeah.”

“It wasn’t much fun waiting, was it?”

“No sir.”

A few days later Sergeant Carney waited with Mrs. Fairliss in a small anteroom at headquarters.

“He’s just a kid.”

“You’ve already told me that, Sergeant.”

“I was just thinking— You set the scene in your mind, exactly how it will be. But it seldom works the way you think.”

The door opened, and a guard said, not unkindly, “In here, lad.”

The boy came into the room and stopped a few feet inside the door. Carney noted that the swelling was gone, though his eye was still slightly discolored.

“Teddy, this is the wife of the man you killed. She wanted a look at you.” Carney knew that he had spoken too harshly.

The boy looked at Mrs. Fairliss. His eyes widened and his face turned pale. Carney saw his young throat work as he swallowed. “I... I didn’t—” He stopped, unable to go on.

“You didn’t what?” Linda Fairliss asked, with polite interest.

“They didn’t tell me anything about him. I... I—”

Carney said harshly, “The boy is suddenly faced with the realization that it was a human being he killed. Someone with a wife and a name.”

Linda Fairliss gave Carney a startled look. “What will they do to him?” she asked faintly.

“Send him to an industrial school. He’ll learn a trade. He’s good with his hands.”

“I’m going on the train tomorrow,” the boy said, his voice fading out abruptly on the last word. He stared resolutely at the wall above Linda Fairliss’ head.

She stood up and walked toward him. Carney made a half move forward and then stepped back. Linda Fairliss put her hands on the boy’s shoulders, very gently. He looked at her and then quickly away.

In a low voice she said, “Teddy, I want you to be good. I want you to be worth something — as a person. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so, ma’am.”

“Then there might be some sense to all this.” She took her hands from his shoulders and gave Carney a glance that said clearly she had nothing else to say.

Carney went to the door and spoke to the guard. “Okay.”

“Let’s go, lad,” the guard said.

Teddy took a slow step toward the door. Then he turned back and looked down at the floor in the general direction of Linda Fairliss. “I’m real sorry, ma’am.”

He turned again and plunged through the doorway, giving her no time for any response. Carney walked with her out of the building and down the broad, worn steps to the sidewalk.

She looked up into his face, her eyes steady. “I suppose that it’s something to learn. That there isn’t any pattern. That monstrous things can happen, and that all of us, every one of us. is both guilty and innocent at the same time.”

“It’s something to learn.”

“You learned it a long time ago, didn’t you?”

“It’s more something you have to keep learning. We all look for patterns. There is a pattern, probably, but it’s too complex for the human eye — or the human heart.”

“Are you permitted to accept a lunch in return for services rendered, Sergeant?”

“People who eat with uniformed cops are suspected of being in custody.”

“Then I’ll try to look properly furtive. You know my name. Didn’t I hear that trooper call you Del?”

“For Delbert, unfortunately. Del is the preferred form. There’s a pretty good eating place down the street.”

As they walked slowly along, they talked, as though by agreement, of trivial things. It felt good to be with her. Usually when a case was finished, he took a Manila folder out of the active file and put it into the dead file, and eventually it was stored, and the case was over, and that was that. But this time he had gained an oddly warm and personal friendship.

She slanted a quick smile up at him as he held the restaurant door open for her. And as he followed her over to a comer table, he somehow knew that this friendship would continue.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Hit and Run