Chester paused, scanning the crowd for Genie. No luck. She hadn’t been in jail—at least not in the part he had had an opportunity to check. Surely if she were free, she would have come here. Not that it would help. No one could get through that police cordon.
Chester tried hard to think. If only Case were here—or Genie. But unless he could get back to the rug, he’d never see either of them again.
Case would be thoroughly roasted by now, of course, it that had been the purpose of the fire he’d seen—but perhaps that was being overly pessimistic. Perhaps Case was still juggling away, casting anxious glances down the jungle path from time to time, waiting for rescue.
And Genie, being grilled under the hot lights by policemen, who, in spite of their pink coats, were cop all the way through . . .
One of the cops seemed to be looking Chester’s way. He sauntered on, whistling, stepped into the first doorway he saw, found himself in a shop plastered with sale notices and crowded with flimsy tables stacked with gaudily colored merchandise among which bored-looking customers milled, picking over the bargains.
Chester tried to think. He couldn’t just stand around; in time, the cops would be sure to notice him. Perhaps if he tried a sudden dash for the rug . . .
He glanced through the window. The cops were large and numerous, the sawhorses closely spaced, the squad cars ominously ready. He could never hope to penetrate that barrier by a surprise move alone; he would have to do something to distract attention and then slip through quietly.
“Git outa da way, ya bastid,” a corpulent lady with a mustache and runover shoes said conversationally, nudging Chester aside.
“Oh, excuse me, Madam . . . ” Chester moved on to the next counter, found himself nervously fingering a stack of clear plastic bags.
“That’s the two-quart size,” a salesman said to a man on Chester’s left.
Chester picked up a bag. It was good, tough stuff.
“Seals with a hot iron,” the salesman was saying.
Chester felt in his pocket. Hmm. His credit card was no good here, of course. He’d have to—
A large placard caught his eye: don’t ask for credit!
“How do I know what you use ’em for?” the clerk was saying. “You want ’em or don’t you?”
The customer mumbled. The clerk turned away. Chester slipped a two-inch sheaf of the plastic bags from the counter and under his coat and headed for the door. As he reached it, a hoarse voice called, “Hey, you. The guy with the funny pants!”
Chester hurled himself between two matrons in garish prints with uneven hemlines and set off at a run. Heads turned to stare. A whistle shrilled behind him. He rounded a corner, saw a short flight of steps with an iron rail. He took them four at a time, banged through a massive glass-paneled door into a dim hallway that smelled of stale vegetable oil, fly spray and deodorant. Carpeted stairs rose into a canyon of yellowed wallpaper. Chester went up, whirled through the landing as the door below banged open.
“In here!” someone yelled.
“Take the back. I’ll check upstairs!”
The staircase ended three flights up in a narrow hallway leading to a gray window behind limp curtains. Feet were thudding on the stairs. There were three doors with brown porcelain knobs along each side of the hall. Chester jumped to the first on the left. It rattled but held. The second opened and a blat of sound emerged. Chester sprang for the third door, threw it open, whirled and slammed it behind him. In two jumps he was in the bathroom, pulling open a tarnished mirror. He seized a can of shaving cream, blasted a gob into his hand, slapped it across his face, under his chin. In a quick motion, he pulled off the coat, the sports jacket, tossed them aside, grabbled a bladeless safety razor from the cabinet shelf and scraped a swath through the layer of white lather, then dashed for the door and flung it wide.
A cop thundered past, threw a glance at Chester. “Stay inside, buddy,” he bawled.
Chester withdrew, closed the door gently, and let out a long breath. “Who says there’s no point in watching the Late Late Late Show?” he murmured.
* * *
From the windows, Chester looked down on the crowded street. The rug looked pitifully small in the center of the barricade of sawhorses, cops, cars and curious citizens. The distance was, Chester estimated, fifty feet vertically, and an equal distance out from the face of the building. The sounds in the hall had gone away now. He went into the green enameled bathroom, wiped the lather from his face, recovered his shirt from the living-room floor, then checked through the closet shelves, the bedroom and finally the kitchen. He found an electric iron in a cabinet under the sink. The ironing board was propped in a corner. Chester set it up, plugged in the iron, then counted his plastic bags. Forty-two of them. Still, there was no use starting on the bags unless he could work out the delivery mechanism.
A thorough search of the apartment turned up a ball of stout twine, nails, a hammer, a heavy-duty stapler, several hundred back issues of Crude, The Magazine for Male Men, and a small plastic wastebasket. Chester set to work.
Pounding cautiously, he drove two stout nails into the window sill eight inches apart, and a matching pair into the wall across the room at a level four feet higher, then strung heavy twine across between them in two parallel strands. Next he cut the bottom neatly from the wastebasket and nailed the container to the wall above the previously placed nails, with the smaller, cut-out end down. The next two nails went into the right-hand wall, with two more matching them on the opposite side of the room, just under the ceiling. Again he strung cord between the paired spikes.
Chester paused to listen. There was a murmur of sound from the street, the drip of water from the bathroom, the snarl of an engine gunning somewhere. He went to the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, drank half of it and went back to work.
He opened a copy of Crude, stared wonderingly at a double-page spread in full color captioned “Udderly Delightful” and fitted the magazine over one of the cables at the window sill so that the string nestled against the spine, at the center of the thin sheaf of pages. He crimped the other edge of the magazine, folded the creased edge over the other line and stapled it in place to form a shallow trough between the two supporting lines.
The next Crude was positioned above the first. Working rapidly, Chester extended the chute across the room to terminate directly under the bottomless wastebasket.
He stepped back to survey his work. The center of the trough had a tendency, he noted, to droop, the edges of the magazines coming almost together. He went to the closet, extracted half a dozen wire coat hangers and bent them into shallow U-shaped braces, which he fitted between the lines at three-foot intervals. The trough now formed a smooth curve from the wastebasket to the window sill.
Fifteen minutes’ work completed the other leg of the trough, extending from the left-hand wall in a shallow curve to end above the open top of the wastebasket.
There was a three-inch roll of masking tape on the desk; Chester used it to attach extra sheets bearing photographs of shirtless women to the floor of the trough, lapping the joints between magazines.
Back in the kitchen, he finished the beer, then filled a plastic bag with water, used a length of clothesline wire to assist in folding the top edge over evenly, then applied the warm iron, sealing the plastic. He went to the living room, stepped up on a chair and placed the plastic bag of water in the wastebasket. It dropped an inch or two, then wedged tight in the tapered passage. Chester went back to the kitchen, located a pint bottle nearly full of vegetable oil, returned and poured a generous helping around the plastic bag. It eased down, plopped into the trough below, where Chester caught it and set it aside.
He went back to the kitchen and carefully filled and sealed the remaining forty-one bags. Next he used the ice pick to make a hole in each side of the wastebasket, near the bottom, through which he threaded a length of string. He tied a knot at one end, drew it up snug, then looped the other around a large wooden match which nestled against the outside of the wastebasket, holding the string in position, blocking the bottom of the container. He used a chair to reach the top of the upper trough, into which he poured a liberal dollop of vegetable oil, smearing it out well so that the entire surface of the chute was lubricated. He repeated the operation for the steeper lower section.