Betrayers(53)

“. . . What do you intend to do?”

“What would you do if you were me?”

“I’d be very careful of my facts before I accused someone of using illegal drugs. Very, very careful. Otherwise . . .”

“Otherwise what?”

“I’m not a litigious man,” he said, “but if you try to sully my name and my reputation with the school board, I’ll sue for slander and defamation. I mean that; I—”

Another car appeared on the street, this one going faster than the last one. Ullman’s gaze went to it, magnetically. Stayed fixed on it until it passed on by and out of sight.

He was really vibrating now. The brown hound’s eyes showed an odd mix of emotions—melancholy, anger, fear. Hunted eyes, I thought, haunted eyes.

“What’s got you so upset, Ullman?”

“What do you think? You coming here, making accusations . . .”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t it enough? You have no right—”

I said, “I wonder if there are fingerprints.”

“. . . What?”

“On the box. Or on the tube.” There wouldn’t be—the surfaces were too rough on one, too smooth on the other, and they’d both been handled too much anyway for clear latents—but I wanted to see what he’d say.

“That’s . . . ridiculous,” he said. “What do you know about fingerprints?”

“Quite a bit. It’s my business to know about things like that.”

“Your business? I don’t . . . Who are you?” The obvious answer smacked him and made him jerk, turned him a little white around the gills. “You . . . you’re not a policeman?”

“I was once. Now I’m a private investigator. And I still have contacts in law enforcement.”

“A private—” He shook his head a couple of times, hard, the way you do after you’ve just come up out of a particularly frightening nightmare and you’re not quite sure yet it wasn’t real. “I have nothing more to say to you. Just . . . leave me alone. You understand? Leave me alone!”

This time he went ahead and slammed the door in my face.

I moved down to the sidewalk and on to my car, taking my time in spite of the night’s chill. The one time I glanced up, I spotted a gap at one corner of the curtained front window, Ullman’s face framed there: watching to make sure I left or looking for whoever he was expecting, or maybe both.

My car was parked some distance upstreet and he couldn’t have had a clear look at it through the churning mist. My advantage. I didn’t waste any time getting in and driving away, but I only went a couple of blocks, around a long curve to where I couldn’t be seen from Ullman’s place. Then I made a U-turn and parked and sat in the darkened car with the engine running. After three minutes by the dashboard clock, I rolled back around the curve, slow, with the driver’s window down and my lights off—not too smart on a foggy night, but the street remained deserted. Fifty yards or so from Ullman’s house, I had a misty view of the front entrance and the lighted front window. He wasn’t looking out now; the curtain was drawn tight at both corners.

There was room to park at the curb on my side. I drifted over, killed the engine. And sat there waiting.

Trust your hunches. The one I had about Zachary Ullman was strong enough to warrant some more of my time. His edginess was only partly due to my unexpected arrival and the conversation we’d had. He hadn’t wanted me inside the house, for one thing. And he hadn’t wanted me there when his visitor or visitors showed up. Why? The only reason I could think of was that he had something to hide, something he didn’t want a stranger and especially a detective to know about.

Time passed. Crept, rather, the way it always does on any kind of stakeout. Passive waiting has never been my long suit. As far as I’m concerned, Ambrose Bierce had it right in his Devil’s Dictionary definition of patience: a minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.

I kept shifting around on the seat, huddled inside my coat, because of incipient leg cramps and because my lower back was giving me trouble again. Getting too old for this kind of thing, sitting alone in cars on cold nights. I was supposed to be semiretired, wasn’t I? At home in the evenings, in the warm condo with my family?

Sure, but this was something that threatened a family member and by extension threatened me. And made me suspicious as well as angry. I didn’t like that son of a bitch in the house across the street; at the very least he was a liar and a cokehead. I’d sit here, never mind the cramps and lower back pain, for as long as it took to see if my hunch panned out.