Chapter 4

Ironically, Phil Matthews did not discover that his car was missing until much later that night. He was delayed after class by a student who had written a poem and wanted him to read it, so he perched on the edge of his desk while the school slowly emptied of its students, and scanned this new contribution to the world of English literature. The student, a pimple-faced boy of sixteen, stood nervously first on one foot and then on the other, sweating it out while he waited for. Mr. Matthews' opinion.

It was terrible, possibly the worst poem Phil had ever read, and for a moment the dedicated young English teacher struggled with the impulse to tell the bald, unvarnished truth; the meter was off, the words were misspelled and the meaning unclear. But instead he smiled encouragingly and took the trouble to analyze the poem with his student, showing him gently how certain lines might be improved and correcting some of the badly spelled words. After all, he reasoned, when a Ken Central student writes a poem, any kind of poem, then we are making some kind of progress. Next year, maybe, this budding Shakespeare will write a mediocre poem, and the year after that, a good poem. And if that happens, this little session will have been worth the while. No matter what else happened, you could not turn off a sign of real interest from a student; it happened too rarely in a place like Kensington.

"You staying late, Mr. Matthews?" said one of the policemen, sticking his head in the door of the classroom. "We're checking out now."

"Fine, officer," responded the English teacher, actually a little grateful to be handed an excuse to postpone the rest of this discussion. Making an appointment to talk to the budding poet some more the following week, Matthews returned to his office and discovered the note on his door.

He looked at it for a long time, swearing quietly under his breath. For one thing, Matthews considered that Miss Barton was still under his protection, and it irritated him not to know where she had gone, and with whom. Kathy was learning fast, but she still had that college-girl innocence about her, even though she had gotten through her first week better than anyone had ever expected.

Come off it Matthews, he told himself severely. She's a big girl and old enough to look after herself! What's the real reason you're pissed off? You were planning to ask her for a date, weren't you?

Matthews put a few books under his arm, locked his desk and shuffled down the empty echoing corridors, feeling more depressed than he had in years. Another empty weekend staring him in the face! He had taken the trouble to acquire two tickets for a concert on Saturday night, and about half-way through the concert, he would have proposed a picnic in the country for Sunday morning and . . .

"Night, Mr. Matthews," called the other policeman who was preparing to lock the front door.

"So long, Officer," Matthews responded, and he walked down the sidewalk despondently, wondering which student was having a chat with Kathy Burton. One of the girls, probably, wanting some information on birth control. Kathy would have to expect a lot of that kind of thing from now on. Now where the hell had he left the car?

A thought stopped him in mid-step. Perhaps Kathy had taken her student over to the tea room? In fact, where else could they have gone? He could stroll in casually for a cup of tea and some of those cookies the old ladies made, and if Miss Barton just happened to be there, then maybe they could use those concert tickets after all. What a fool he had been not to have gotten her telephone number! But he had been too shy to ask for it.

Matthews crossed the street, dodging through the five o'clock traffic and entered the tea room. One glance told him that he had been shot down again. The place was empty except for one of the little old ladies.

"Ah, good evening, Mr. Matthews!" she called in her shrill old voice. "Just a moment, dear, I have the book right here."

"What book?" questioned Matthews in confusion. Had he left a book here?

"Miss Barton's Book," answered the old croon. "The one she left today when she had her fainting spell. Poor dear, I thought you'd come to get her book."

"What's this about a fainting spell?

"Oh, I'm sure it's nothing to be alarmed about, Mr. Matthews. That nice young man seemed to be quite capable of handling the situation. I imagine he took her to a doctor."

Matthews gritted his teeth with frustration, reminding himself not to shout.

"Which nice young man?"

"Oh, I don't know his name . . . dear me, he's such a handsome young man and he plays on the football team. My nephew, Chubs, knows him, but Chubs isn't here right now."

Matthews nodded dumbly, took the book and wandered back out on the street, knowing that his weekend was now going to be more miserable than ever, since in addition to being lonely he was going to spend most of his time worrying about Kathleen Barton. The young English teacher had acquired a pleasant bachelor apartment in a much nicer section of town than this, but for some reason, he was not quite ready to go home. Almost no one at Ken Central knew this fact, but Phil Matthews had been born and raised less than a mile from the school in the worst section of the slum. Growing up in this harsh, brutal environment, he had learned to survive. Being thinner, smaller and shyer than the others, he had survived more often than not by taking to his heels and running for it whenever a nasty situation developed, and his classmates had long ago called him a coward, and he had accepted the label, staying off the streets at night when the trouble developed and ducking any possible confrontation with the criminal adolescent gangs who ruled the neighborhood. The Black Hawks, the Panthers, the Puerto Rican bunch, the Black gangs, he had ducked them all, staying home in the evenings with his books and studying hard enough to get himself a scholarship to a decent college.

"Might as well be a teacher," his father had always grumbled. 'The kid ain't got the balls for anything else."

But the old man had only been half-right. Matthews had finished college with brilliant marks, published a few poems, got his Master's degree, and then amazed everyone by applying for a teaching job in the worst school in the city, Kensington Central High, just because he thought there was a job to be done there. Maybe he was a coward; maybe not. Phil Matthews did not fit comfortably into any of the usual categories.

"Dammit," he swore quietly, feeling the heal of early autumn start to gather in the crowded city. There had been a breeze in the afternoon, but it had died with the sunset, and the night would be pure agony for the people who lived in the Kensington slum. His own apartment, far away from here in the university district, was on the top floor, and would be cool and comfortable, but for some reason, he could not bring himself to forget about Miss Barton, find his car, and get out of this hell on earth.

Should he really be worrying about Kathy's safety? Or was he merely angry and jealous because she had gone off with another man, a student at that? All right, he tried to reason with himself as he paced the littered and poorly lit streets in the gathering dusk, you're hung up on the girl, you can admit that much. But if Bud Swift had taken her off somewhere, especially while she was in a weakened condition . . . precisely how far could Bud Swift be trusted? The young ex-convict had come a long way, his scholastic work getting better and better, but he still had far too much of the slum punk mentality, and every so often, he gave into his baser instincts, the way he had that day in the gym. Of course, Kathy Barton was no teenager with loose morals, but if she was having fainting spells . . .

There he was! Matthews stopped in his tracks, instinctively slipping into a doorway the way he had twenty years before as a kid whenever he saw a big bully on the street before him. Swift was walking slowly, a hundred feet ahead of him, his head down and apparently lost in thought. For a moment Phil Matthews debated his best course of action. Naturally, he could just rush up to the student and demand to know where Miss Barton was. It was the obvious thing to do.

But something stopped him. He and Swift had both been born and raised in the slum, and there were some things which kids from the wrong side of the tracks just did not do. Swift was obviously going somewhere, and Matthews decided he would find out where before he took any direct action. Moving carefully, he worked his way down the street behind the meandering gang leader, always keeping a safe distance behind him in case Swift would happen to turn around.

But the ex-convict seemed to be lost in thought, walking doggedly along without paying much attention to his surroundings, and Matthews was able to follow him undetected as he moved deeper and deeper into the slum, eventually arriving at a series of old apartment buildings which had been condemned by the city and were supposed to be torn down. The street lights had been smashed and the sidewalks were covered with broken glass and the only other occupants of the area were the occasional drunks who staggered through the gutter, or sprawled in darkened alleys. It was not a pleasant place to be once the sun had disappeared, and Matthews felt himself tremble with fear as he saw Swift move down a darkened alley, his movements now cat-like and confident.

Allowing a few minutes to pass for the sake of safety, Matthews followed him, feeling his way along a damp wall into a courtyard. For a moment, he could see nothing, but gradually he determined that he was standing in what had once been a school playground. Up on the top floor of the old school building, he could see the unsteady flickering light from an oil lantern. At ground level, one door had been forced and Matthews assumed that Swift had entered there and was now making his way to the top floor. In the parking lot, there was only one car, and the English teacher tiptoed cautiously over to it, wondering why Swift had chosen to walk if he had an automobile at his disposal.

It was his car! Matthews did a double-take and looked a second time, but there was no mistake about it, this was his own automobile, and peering in the window, he could barely make out the wires someone had used to hot-wire the vehicle and start it without needing the key. Very strange things were happening tonight: Kathy's disappearance, the theft of his car, the lantern on the top floor, Bud Swift's strange behavior . . . What did it all add up to?

The answer came a split second later. High, high up above him there came the voice of a woman. It was a scream, at first faint and weak, and no one could have heard it on the street; but Phil Matthews heard it and knew what it meant.

For a moment he froze, trying desperately to think clearly. First, he had to put down the impulse to dash up the stairs and try to stop whatever was going on; it was absurd! There was no way of telling how many men there were up there with Swift, and he could hardly expect to handle even Bud alone in a fair fight, much less a gang of Swift's thugs. Or he could call for the police, but this thought was even sillier. The police would probably take an hour to arrive and then trudge noisily up there with drawn guns, shooting at anything that moved and making enough racket to wake the dead. To dispose of the witness, the gang would toss Kathy out the nearest window and flee across the roof-tops, quickly losing themselves in the sullen slum night. And besides, people in the Ken Central district did not call the police to settle their differences. Little problems like this were worked out on a private basis, and Phil

Matthews knew that he was going to have to handle this one alone.

The English teacher took a deep breath in the dank, humid air of the courtyard, realizing that there were some fights a man could not run away from if he ever wished to call himself a man again. But this was a fight he had to win, and first he needed to balance the odds a little. He walked quietly out the alley and broke into a trot when he hit the street.