All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [237]
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him it wasn’t like he said. You’ve got to tell him that. You know why I did everything I did, you know what happened. Oh, Jack–” and she grabbed my sleeve and hung on, “it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t horrible like that. I tried not to be horrible. Was I, Jack? Was I? Tell me, Jack!”
I look down at her. “No,” I said, “you weren’t horrible.”
“But it has happened to me. It has all happened to me. And he’s gone.”
“I’ll find him,” I said, and detached myself from her, ready to go.
“It won’t do any good.”
“He’ll listen to sense,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t mean Adam. I mean–”
“Stark?”
She nodded. Then said, “Yes. I went to the place–the place out of town we used to meet in. He called me early this afternoon. I went there and he told me. He is going back to his wife.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.
Then I pulled myself together, and headed for the door. “I’ll get Adam,” I said.
“Get him,” she said, “get him. For he’s all I’ve got now.”
As I stepped out the door of the apartment house no the rain, I reflected that she had Jackie Burden, too. At least as an errand boy. But I made the reflection without bitterness and quite impersonally.
Finding somebody in a city in a city if you can’t call in the cops is quite an undertaking. I had tried it often enough back when I was a reporter, and it takes luck and time. But one rule is always to try the obvious first. So I went to Adam’s apartment. When I saw his car sitting out front I figured I had played into the blue ones. I parked my own car, noticed that the driver’s door of his car was open and might get swiped off by a passing truck and was certainly letting the seat get wet, slammed it shut as I passed, and went on into the apartment house.
I knocked vigorously on the door. There was no answer. But that didn’t mean anything. Even if Adam was there, he might not be willing, under the circumstances, to answer his door. So I tried the knob. The door was locked. I went down to the basement and dug out the Negro janitor and told him some cock-and-bull story about having left some stuff up there in Adam’s place. He had seen me around with Adam a lot, and so he let me in. I prowled through the place, but no Adam. Then I spied his telephone. I called his office, then the hospital, then the medical-school office, then the exchange where the doctors left numbers when they weren’t at their usual haunts. It was no go. Nobody knew anything about Adam. Or rather, each one had a pretty good idea where he was, but the idea was never any good. That left all the town wide open.
I went back down into the street. The fact that the car was there was funny. He had abandoned it. Where in the hell did a man go off in the rain, on foot, this time of day? Or night, rather?–for it was dusk now.
I thought of the bars. For it is a tradition that a man, when he has received a great shock, heads for a bar, puts his foot on the rail, orders five straight whiskies in a row, downs then one after another while he stares with uncomprehending eyes at the white, tortured face in the mirror opposite him, and then engages the bartender in a sardonic conversation about Life. But I couldn’t see Adam Stanton playing that game. But I went to the bars, anyway.
That is, I went to a lot of them. A lifetime isn’t long enough to go to all the bars in our city. I began with Slade’s place, had no luck, asked Slade to try to hang on to Dr. Stanton if he came in, and then moved through the other establishments of chromium, glass bricks, morros, colored lights, comfy Old English worm-eaten oak, sporting prints, comic frescoes, or three-piece orchestras. Around seven-thirty I called up Adam