passed the whole thing over to the policeman.
Ackridge looked at it for a long time. The billfold was small in his
large, hard hands. “First Thunderbird you’ve owned?”
Alex could not see what that had to do with anything, but he answered
the question anyway. “Second.”
“Occupation”‘ “Mine? Commercial artist.”
Ackridge looked up at him, seemed to stare through him. “Exactly what
is that?”
“I do advertising artwork,” Doyle said.
“And you get paid well for that?”
“Pretty well,” Doyle said.
Ackridge started to leaf through the other cards in the wallet, taking a
couple of seconds with each. His sober, intense interest in these
private things was almost obscene.
What in the hell is going on here? Doyle wondered. I came here to
report a crime. I’m a good, upstanding citizen-not the suspect!
He cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Captain.”
Ackridge stopped flipping through the cards. “What is it?”
Last night, Doyle told himself, I faced a man who was trying to kill me
with an ax. Today I can surely face this two-bit police chief.
“Captain,” he said, “I don’t see why you’re so interested in who I am.
isn’t the most important thing-well, going after this man in the
Automover?”
“I always believe it pays to know the victim as well as the victimizer,”
Ackridge said. With that, he went back to the cards in Doyle’s wallet.
it was all wrong. How on earth could it have gone sour like this-and
why had it?
So that he would not be humiliated by watching the cop pry through his
wallet, Alex looked around the room. The walls were institutional-gray
and brightened by only three things: a poster-sized framed photograph
of the President of the United States; an equally large photograph of
the late J.
Edgar Hoover; and a four-foot-square map of the immediate area.
Filing cabinets stood side by side along one wall, breaking only for a
window and an air-conditioning unit. There were three straight-backed
chairs, the desk, the chair in which Ackridge sat, and a flagstand
bearing a full-sized cotton-and-silk Old Glory.
“Conscientious objector?” Ackridge asked.
Alex looked at him, surprised. “What did you say?
Ackridge showed him the selective service card in his wallet.
“You have a CO rating here. ” Why had he ever kept that card? He was
under no legal obligation to carry it with him, especially not now that
he was thirty years old. They had long ago stopped drafting men over
twenty-six. Indeed, the draft was pretty much of a forgotten thing for
everyone. Yet he had transferred the card from one billfold to the
next-through maybe three or four of them. Why? Subconsciously had he
believed that possession of the card was proof that his non-violent
philosophy was based on principle and not cowardice? Or had he simply
given in to that common American neurosis-the reluctance and sometimes
the inability to throw away anything with a vaguely official look to it,
no matter how dated it might be?
“I did alternate service in a veterans’ hospital,” Doyle said, though he
did not feel he needed to justify himself to Ackridge.
“I was too young for Korea and too old for Nam,” the cop said.
“But I served in the regular army, in-between wars.” He handed back the
driver’s license and the wallet.
Alex put the license in the wallet, the wallet in his pocket, and he
said, “About the man in the Chevrolet-”
“You ever try marijuana?”
Ackridge asked.
Easy, Doyle thought. Be damn careful. Be damn nice.
“Long time ago,” he told the cop. He no longer tried to find a way to
get back to the man in the Automover, because he saw that for whatever
reasons, Ackridge didn’t care about that.
“Still use it?”
“No.”
Ackridge smiled. It was the same bad imitation. “Even if you did use
it every day of the week, you wouldn’t tell a crusty old cop like me.”
“I’m telling the truth,” Doyle said, feeling new perspiration on his
forehead.
“Other things?”
“What do you mean?”
Leaning across the desk, his voice lowered to a melodramatic whisper,
Ackridge said, “Barbiturates, amphetamines, LSD, cocaine . . .”
“Drugs are for people who don’t really care for life,” Doyle said. He