The remaining bags were still under the stairs, and Dorn wanted them outside before anybody slept. I wanted that myself, but the largest case had Eddie's initials on a brass plate. Carrying it out meant handling his property once more. Leaving it meant giving him a reason to return. Joe lifted one end and waited. My split lip pulled when I bent beside him. Dorn stood with the street door open, holding her skirt clear of the wet sill. “Closed,” she said. “Everything goes out closed.”
We carried the case between us. At the turn, its corner caught beneath the banister and drove my knuckles against the wall. Joe lowered his end before I lost mine. Above us a door opened, then shut. Nobody needed another performance from me. I shifted my grip, took the weight against my thigh, and worked backward until the case came free. We set it on the sidewalk beside two canvas bags. I straightened slowly. My old rooms were lit upstairs, but the light no longer told me to go home.
Curtis came across the street without Eddie. He counted the pieces and said there ought to be another sack. I told him those were the things left in the common passage. He planted a shoe against the threshold. “I'll look.” Dorn kept her hand on the door. I stepped down between him and the opening, though my face still remembered what standing against his friends could cost. “Ask whoever owns it to come collect it,” I said. “You don't go hunting through people's rooms.”
For a moment Curtis watched my hands. Joe came down beside me carrying the last rolled blanket, tied with ordinary clothesline. He laid it across the case. Dorn told Curtis she would keep any further belongings separately until they were claimed. He pulled his foot away and dragged a bag toward the curb. We did not help him load the waiting automobile. We had carried the baggage out of the house; we had not hired ourselves back. When the car left, Dorn shut the door and tried the latch twice.
I collected my suitcase from beside the meeting table. Joe offered floor space where he was staying, but the invitation belonged partly to someone else, and I had done enough living on arrangements other people might have to defend. I thanked him and went out. Eddie was waiting beyond the next corner, alone beside my car. The sight stopped me harder than his voice. He rested one hand on its roof. “There's driving,” he said. “Money tonight.”
He did not apologize or ask after my mouth. That almost made the offer easier to hear. It was work in the old language: get in, keep going, settle the rest later. I could have paid for a proper bed and bought a hot supper. “Would I get the car back?” I asked. Eddie took his hand off the roof. “You'd be driving it.” I looked at the place behind the wheel, then tightened my fingers around the suitcase handle. “No.”
He said my name once as I started away. I kept walking, badly enough that the case struck my knee every few steps. At a narrow lodginghouse near the delivery yard, the woman at the desk wanted cash before she showed me the room. I counted out enough for three nights and watched most of my small reserve disappear beneath her hand. Upstairs, the bed sagged toward the wall. I put my suitcase on the floor and washed dried blood from the collar of my only clean shirt.
By the time the news reached our yard, May 1 had passed. I was unloading a delivery wagon, bracing a crate against my apron while the receiving clerk read from his newspaper. Karpis had been taken into custody in New Orleans on May 1, 1936; Hoover and a team of federal agents had made the capture. The clerk repeated the name as though everybody must stop working. I put the crate down before asking him to say where. That was all I asked.
The driver waited for my next load. I could have gone looking for somebody who knew somebody, found a back room where fear passed for information, and bought my way into the talk with my remaining coins. Instead I climbed onto the wagon and dragged the next crate toward the edge. Its rough boards pressed through my gloves. Nothing in that newspaper had put Ruth's trunk upstairs or made Eddie step aside. Those things had happened separately. I finished unloading, then helped the driver fold the empty tarpaulin.