The Truth of the Matter Read Free Page A

with a dull thunk. He thought of picking it up and throwing it again, then he decided against it and stalked to the door.
    None of his neighbors were in the hall. He walked swiftly to the elevator, stepped inside and pushed the button for the garage. His hands clasped and unclasped on the steel wall rail as the elevator descended seven floors to the basement.
    His black Thunderbird was parked where he had left it, shining jewel-like in the dim basement garage. Thirty more payments , Roebuck thought as he walked toward the car with echoing footsteps. He laughed to himself as he opened the door and settled back in the soft leather upholstery.
    The engine caught immediately as he turned the ignition, and tires squealed as the big car shot toward the closed garage door, then braked to a halt. The power window on the driver’s side lowered smoothly and Roebuck inserted the key with which all the building tenants were provided into the small metal box on the post near the door. The overhead door went up slowly as he twisted the key, and the Thunderbird roared out into the warm evening mist. As he turned the corner onto Twelfth Avenue Roebuck hurled the key out the window and heard it bounce off the wet pavement.
    Roebuck drove idly down Twelfth Avenue, listening to the rhythm of the Thunderbird’s wipers as they swept the mist from the wide windshield. He looked at the dashboard clock. Seven forty-five. Not too early to drive to his meeting with Ingrahm and Gipp. The Crest Motel was way on the other side of town, almost an hour’s drive if he stayed at the speed limit.
    Making a careful left turn on the slick pavement, Roebuck thought of the last time he’d seen Ingrahm. It had been how long…? Almost ten years ago in Little Rock, when Roebuck had been there and on impulse had looked up Ingrahm in the phone book. He hadn’t seen Gipp in over twenty years, but Roebuck remembered him. Gipp was one of those people who stuck in your memory, like a tiny splinter imbedded deep in the flesh of your hand, felt only when you bent a finger a certain way.
    Twenty years…that was a long time. Odd that they even remembered each other, or cared if they did remember. The three of them hadn’t really been friends in the true sense of the word. It was the army that threw them together. The army will do that to people. And the truth was that the three of them were misfits in one way or another, and misfits will band together, especially in the army.
    They were clear in Roebuck’s mind now, Ingrahm, tall, slender, even-featured, with dark hair brushed straight back. Gipp had been a little man, with rimless glasses that were forever catching the light in front of his pale gray eyes. A little man, but with a curious hardness about him, in the sure movements of his square, bony hands, in his walk, in the muscular line of his jaw, but most of all in the way he looked at people. There had been an unyielding directness to Gipp’s stare, as if he were looking at an inanimate object instead of a person.
    Roebuck had known Ingrahm in college, where they were both journalism majors before the army claimed them. They hadn’t known each other well, and in fact from what Roebuck had seen of Ingrahm at college he hadn’t liked him very much. There was a conceited self-assurance about the man, and a slyly depreciative way of talking that in a woman one might describe as cattiness.
    Ingrahm had been like that in the army too, always cutting people down in his subtle, smiling way. The only man who hadn’t fallen victim to his cunning devaluation had been Gipp, and that might have been because Gipp practically worshiped Ingrahm, and Ingrahm needed that.
    Gipp seemed to have admired Ingrahm’s smooth charm, his ease with other people. Gipp himself was a strange type of man, remote. He had wanted to be an artist of some kind, Roebuck remembered, a sculptor. And then later he’d decided to become an accountant. That was damn odd, Roebuck thought, that a man