The Cutie by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online Page B

two years in the Army, three years in college. I should have known better.”
    “Was this Ed Ganolese?” she asked me. “The one who saw the accident?”
    “If you mean, did he decide to hold it over me, no, you’re wrong. These guys, three or four of them from the car, they got my wallet, and I guess they saw my student activity card. One of them said, ‘A college kid.’ One of them leaned over me and said, ‘Kid, you’ve screwed up.’ I don’t know, I was shook up and scared and groggy and still half-drunk. I saw one of them wiping the steering wheel with a cloth, and the door handles and the dashboard, and they helped me up and into their car and drove me back to the college. By then, I was pretty much sober, and not so groggy any more. The guy in the back seat with me said, ‘Kid, you were lucky we came along. Go to bed and deny everything in the morning. They don’t have a case on you.’ž”
    “That was Ed Ganolese?”
    “I didn’t know it then,” I said. “All I knew right then was that he’d saved me from a hell of a rough jam. He was on his way back to New York from wherever he’d been. I tried to thank him, but he wouldn’t let me. ‘I con the cops for fun, kid,’ he told me. ‘Besides, you don’t need a rap like that. Go on in and go to bed.’ So I did, and the next day, in the afternoon, a state trooper came for me, and they questioned me down at City Hall. A CID man. I told him I hadn’t gone along with the bet, I was too drunk, I’d gone home and I didn’t know what happened after that. They didn’t believe me—they knew the other kid hadn’t been driving, he went through the right-hand windshield—but they had to let me go, they didn’t have any proof I was at the scene. I was scared, but I wouldn’t change my story.”
    “So you got away with it,” she said.
    “Sure. The law couldn’t touch me. But everybody knew I was there, or at least everybody thought they knew it, and that’s the same thing. The people in school, I mean, the other students and the teachers. The students would cut me dead, and the teachers would give lectures on accepting responsibility, every class I was in. They wouldn’t look at me in particular, but everybody knew what the lectures were all about.”
    “They were trying to help you, Clay,” she said.
    “Crap. Ed Ganolese helped me. He was the only one in the world who helped me. Look, in the first place I was one of the crazy vets going to school on the GI Bill. This was a couple years after the Second World War vets all graduated, and a couple years before the Korean vets began to show up. A vet was an oddball when I was in school, there weren’t that many of us. And we didn’t have the money the teenagers had, going through on their parents’ dough. They were ready to believe anything about a vet. They were down on him because he was older, poorer, and supposed to be wilder. So even though the law couldn’t touch me on the hit-run, everybody on campus had me already tried and convicted.”
    “So you ran away?” she said.
    “I tried to go back to school,” I told her. “I tried to forget the whole thing, I’d had a close scrape and come up lucky. But nobody’d let it die. So I cut classes and packed up. I threw everything away I couldn’t fit into one suitcase, a ratty old black thing with straps, you know the kind. Then I headed into town, for the bus depot. I didn’t know where I was going, I was just going. I didn’t want to go home. My father’d found out about it, and he didn’t believe me either. I passed the hotel, and there was the same car, the guys who’d helped me that night. The car was right out front, with nobody in it. So I hung around for an hour, and then they finally came out and across the sidewalk to the car. I knew which one was the boss, it was easy to pick him out. I went up to him, dragging this damn suitcase, and said, ‘Mister, I’m your boy.’ He looked at me and grinned and said, ‘What can