Savage Holiday
Page 19
“Well, what happened?” the policeman demanded. “Don’t you remember what you did?” The policeman smiled ironically. “You’re not playing a game are you?”
The word “game” made Erskine start slightly. Involuntarily his left hand reached inside his coat and he touched the tip ends of the four, automatic colored pencils clipped there...Slowly his eyes widened. He no longer heard the policeman’s voice; he was staring at yet another memory from the dusty past, a nebulous memory whose return stunned him even more than had his recollection of that battered doll, for this memory now told him that his previous memory of that battered doll was but the memory of a dream he’d had!
He’d never “killed” the doll, really! That, memory was but the recalling of a shameful daydream of revenge which he had pushed out of his mind! It was what he had angrily daydreamed one day when he’d been playing games with Gladys and her dolls; they’d been coloring paper with colored pencils and he’d drawn the image of a dead, broken doll and he had imagined Gladys telling on him and his mother branding him as bad...He’d pictured vividly to himself what he’d wanted to do to his mother for having gone off and left that night when he’d been ill...He now understood the four pencils!
His lips parted in horror as his memory spanned the void of time and revealed the reality of what he had done. He stared about as though drugged, unaware of the policeman and the barred windows...
“Don’t you hear me talking to you?” the policeman asked.
“Hunh?” Erskine grunted, struggling to orient himself.
“Tell me what happened!” the policeman shouted at him.
How could he ever explain that a daydream buried under the rigorous fiats of duty had been called forth from its thirty-six-year-old grave by a woman called Mabel Blake, and that that taunting dream had so overwhelmed him with a sense of guilt compounded of a reality which was strange and alien and which he loathed, but which, at the same time, was astonishingly familiar to him: a guilty dream which he had wanted to disown and forget, but which he had had to reenact in order to make its memory and reality clear to him! He closed his eyes in despair...still touching the four colored pencils!
“You won’t talk, hunh?” the policeman was asking.
“I’ve confessed,” Erskine mumbled. “Your men will find her body soon. That’s all I’m going to say; it’s all I’m ever going to say...” His voice trailed off uncertainly.
“That’s your right, of course,” the policeman said. “But it’s always better to come clean. You’ve told the most important thing. It’s better for you to tell it all, Mr....What’s your name?”
“Fowler; Erskine Fowler.”
Erskine readily identified himself, his business connections, his church and club memberships; he even tendered his bank book. The policeman gaped.
“Mr. Fowler, you look like a solid citizen to me. Tell me, what’s behind all this?”
“I’ve told you all that I’m going to tell,” Erskine said.
“Was the woman pregnant?”
“Not that I know of...Not by me, at least.”
“How long did you know this woman?”
“Really, only two days.”
“Two days? What happened? Tell me what happened...I can help you, maybe...”
“I can tell you nothing.”
“You’re scared to tell?”
“No.”
“Then you won’t tell?”
“I can’t tell.”
‘Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know...Leave me alone!”
There was silence. The policeman stared at Erskine.
“Empty your pockets on that table there...” Erskine obeyed.
“That’s everything?”
“That’s everything.”
“And you won’t talk?”
Erskine shook his head and mumbled: “I can’t talk.”
The phone rang. The policeman picked it up, his eyes still fixed intently upon Erskine’s face. The policeman frowned as he listened.
“Notify the Medical Examiner at once,” he issued instructions into the phone. “I’m sending over the Homicide Squad right away...Stick close there and don’t let anybody touch anything.” He listened further and then hung up.
“The officers at your apartment have learned that this woman’s son was killed accidentally two days ago,” the policeman said. “Do you know anything about that?”
“I can’t tell you anything,” Erskine said; he bowed his head in his arms.
END
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