—Sure, said Townhouse.
I’d felt pretty good when I settled the scores with the cowboy and Ackerly, knowing that I was playing some small role in balancing the scales of justice. But those feelings were nothing compared to the satisfaction I felt after letting Townhouse settle his score with me.
Sister Agnes had always said that good deeds can be habit forming. And I guess she was right, because having given Sally’s jam to the kids at St. Nick’s, as I was about to leave Townhouse’s stoop I found myself turning back.
—Hey, Maurice, I called.
He looked up with the same expression of dejection, but with a touch of uncertainty too.
—See that baby-blue Studebaker over there?
—Yeah?
—She’s all yours.
Then I tossed him the keys.
I would have loved to see the look on his face when he caught them. But I had already turned away and was striding down the middle of 126th Street with the sun at my back, thinking: Harrison Hewett, here I come.
Emmett
At quarter to eight in the evening, Emmett was sitting in a run-down saloon at the edge of Manhattan with a glass of beer and a photograph of Harrison Hewett on the bar in front of him.
Taking a drink, Emmett studied the picture with interest. It showed the profile of a handsome forty-year-old man looking off in the distance. Duchess had never said exactly how old his father was, but from his stories one got the sense that Mr. Hewett’s career dated back to the early 1920s. And hadn’t Sister Agnes guessed that he was about fifty when he’d brought Duchess to the orphanage in 1944? That would make Mr. Hewett about sixty now—and this photograph about twenty years out of date. It also meant the photograph might well have been taken before Duchess was born.
Because the photograph was so old and the actor so young, Emmett had no problem seeing the family resemblance. In Duchess’s words, his father had the nose, chin, and appetites of John Barrymore. If Duchess hadn’t quite inherited his father’s appetites, he had definitely inherited the nose and chin. Duchess’s coloring was lighter, but perhaps that came from his mother, whoever she was.
However good-looking Mr. Hewett had been, Emmett couldn’t help picture him with a certain distaste as the man of fifty who drove off in a convertible with a lovely young girl in the passenger seat, having just abandoned his eight-year-old son.
Sister Agnes had been right when she observed that Emmett was angry at Duchess for taking his car. And Emmett knew that she was also right when she observed that what Duchess needed more than anything else was a friend who, upon occasion, could save him from his own misguided intentions. Whether Emmett was up to the task remained to be seen. Either way, he would have to find Duchess first.
* * *
When Emmett had woken at seven that morning, Stew was already up and about.
Seeing Emmett, he pointed to an overturned crate where there was a bowl, a pot of hot water, soap, a razor, and towel. Stripping to the waist, Emmett bathed his upper body and shaved. Then having eaten a breakfast of ham and eggs—at his own expense—and received assurances from Ulysses that Billy would be watched over, he followed Stew’s directions through a gap in some fencing and down a caged metal staircase, which led from the tracks down to Thirteenth Street. Shortly after eight, he was standing on the corner of Tenth Avenue looking eastward, feeling like he had a jump on the day.
But Emmett underestimated every aspect of what was to follow. He underestimated how long it would take to walk to Seventh Avenue. He underestimated how difficult it would be to find the entrance to the subway, passing it twice. He underestimated how disorienting the station would be once he got inside—with its network of gangways and staircases, and its bustling, purposeful crowd.
After being spun around by the current of commuters, Emmett found the token booth, he found a map of the subway system, he identified the Seventh Avenue line and determined there were five stops to Forty-Second Street, each step in the process posing its own challenges, its own frustrations, its own causes for humility.
As Emmett came down the steps to the platform, a train was beginning to board. Quickly, he joined the crowd that was pressing its way into the car. When the doors closed and Emmett found himself tucked shoulder-to-shoulder with some and face-to-face with others, he had the disorienting feeling of being at once self-conscious and ignored. Everyone on board seemed to have chosen some fixed point at which to stare with precision and disinterest. Following suit, Emmett trained his gaze on an advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes and began counting stops.
At the first two, it seemed to Emmett that people were getting off and on in equal number. But at the third stop, people mostly got off. And at the fourth, so many people got off that Emmett found himself in a nearly empty car. Leaning over to look through the narrow window onto the platform, he saw with a touch of unease that the station was Wall Street. When he had studied the map at Fourteenth Street, he hadn’t paid much attention to the names of the intervening stops, seeing no need to do so, but he was fairly certain that Wall Street wasn’t among them.