Free Dead Man by Joe Gores Page A

poor
     old Tom Ewell would have had to strap down his hard-on.
    As the minute hand on the clock a block down from the First Chicago Bank of Commerce leaped forward to 9:23 A.M. , Dain exited the bank. He had traded his leather-bound book for a clipboard. In the guise of a state bank examiner he already
     had talked with the woman who had let Zimmer into the safe-deposit box. She hadn’t remembered him, but her records had: clocked
     in at 9:03, clocked out at 9:22.
    A city-grimed Cicero bus farted past Dain; he made a notation on his clipboard. Behind the bus, a red-headed Irish-faced meter
     maid was chalking tires. Another note for her. Near the corner a postman opened the letter box and began putting the mailed
     letters into a big canvas bag. Dain made a note.
    He crossed the street, stood on the far corner. His eye wascaught by a doughnut truck pulling away from KARL’S KOFFEE KUP KAFE midblock to his right. He scribbled a note, went down
     that way. A boy exited Karl’s with a tippy cardboard tray of coffee in plastic-capped Styrofoam cups. Dain wrote.
    Beyond Karl’s was an alley. He glanced down that way, then stopped, utterly still. Foot traffic flowed around his solid immobility.
     Yes. It was what he’d do. He started ambling down the alley, stopped again. Him, but not Zimmer. Zimmer, alone, just about
     here would be thinking,
still time to turn them over to Maxton
and get his 100-K and live happily ever after.
    As he was passing the back door of a cafe a short-order cook came out to dump some garbage in one of the pails. It went in
     with an ugly wet plopping sound. Dain stopped again, abruptly.
    Zimmer would have given Maxton the bonds, but he hadn’t. So if he’d come down this alley, something stronger than his fear
     of Maxton had driven him on.
    Or drawn him on.
    Belatedly, he made a note on the Hispanic cook as a wino careened past him up the alley. No note for him. Winos saw a lot,
     but their sense of time and reality was elastic, and in hopes of a bottle of muscatel they would tell you not what they’d
     seen, but what they thought you wanted them to have seen.
    He emerged from the far end of the alley, looked around casually. Here is where he would have parked if he’d been waiting
     to pick up Zimmer and the bonds.
    A black teenager had just finished washing and squeegeeing the front display windows of a men’s clothing store. Dain made
     a note and strolled on, noting a florist truck, five secretaries exiting a building for a coffee break, an old woman staring
     down through lace curtains from a third-floor apartment window.
    He quit for the day at the end of the block. Ten minutes max was as long as Zimmer would have been in the vicinity: after
     that he would have walked away, caught a bus, a taxi, driven off himself in a car, or been picked up by someone else.
    For the rest of the week, Dain left the front of the bank each morning at 9:23 to canvass in a different direction until he
     was satisfied that he had covered all reasonable possibilities.
    Records could tell him all about who Zimmer had been up until the day he stole the bonds. Records could tell him Zimmer had
     accessed the Lorimer safe-deposit box at 9:03 A.M. and had left at 9:22 A.M. There the records stopped.
    But Zimmer had kept going. So Dain did, too. He now had his raw data: now he could begin to work it. This was like a chess
     game. The same almost infinite number of choices; the same implacable logic. And it absorbed him to be working someone else’s
     backtrail, so he wasn’t thinking about
    Marie going back and up, mouth strained wide, eyes wild
    Yes, only Dain could work the backtrail. In person. Which was his salvation. Using the computer made him unbearably sad; as
     for chess, even looking at a board, even now five years later, made vomit rise in his throat.
    On the coffee table in Mill Valley was the unfinished game he and Marie had been playing before they had left for Point Reyes
     five years before. He