by Evelyn Piper
Dennis was almost at the top of the second flight of stairs and then, although she couldn’t see him yet, he could see her with the gun in her hand, framed in the doorway to Louise’s place. He said, “Blanche! It’s me!”
“I know that. I know it’s you.”
“Then why are you pointing that gun at me?”
“Because I’m going to kill you,” she said, as if he should have known.
“Why, Blanche?”
She said, “Because.”
Like a child. Why? Because. He heard himself, in something between a sob and a laugh, saying, “Oh, Blanche! Because!”
“I stayed there in your bed. I believed you. I trusted you. I let you . . .”
“You can trust me,” he said. “I swear you can trust me, Blanche!”
She said, “Really?”
“I swear it. Where is Louise?”
“Louise is locked in her kitchen. There’s no window there.”
Dennis said, “I’m coming up, Blanche.” He took a step toward her, walking as heavily as he could in his damp stocking feet. “You see, I know you won’t shoot me.”
Blanche snickered audibly. “You’re coming up because she’s locked in the kitchen, that’s why. To save her. She’s the one you want to save. Her and her school! Louise!”
“Blanche . . .”
“You know I’m going to kill her first if you don’t come up. Because you and she . . . Oh, you’ll come up!” she said. “Come up and then I’ll kill you!”
“Let me talk to you, Blanche!”
“I don’t want to hear you. I’m waiting and I won’t wait too long.”
“Dennis,” Wilson whispered.
“Shut up.”
Blanche said, “Hurry. I told you. I won’t wait.”
“Let me talk to you.”
“I know how to shoot. You didn’t know that, did you? I’m a hick from Providence, Rhode Island, but in Providence, Rhode Island, I used to go duck shooting in the fall.”
“I’m coming up to talk to you.”
Wilson whispered, “Coming up talking, is it? Coming up talking, psychiatrist?”
“Blanche . . . you found out about Louise and me . . .”
“Louise and you! If you don’t come up here now I’m going to shoot through the door!”
“Blanche,” he said. “Don’t Blanche! I love you.”
“Louise and me!”
Dennis felt Wilson’s hand on his arm, restraining him. He whispered, “She’s bluffing. I’m going up.”
“She’s going to shoot,” Wilson said. Action, he thought. I learned that tonight, he thought, and, as Dennis began walking up, he suddenly shoved Dennis aside and ran up ahead of him.
Dennis heard the shot and saw Wilson lurch and grab his shoulder. He heard himself say in an amazed way, “You shot Wilson!” and when he looked up she was pointing the gun at him. “You shot Wilson,” he repeated, unable to get it through his head.
“Winged me,” he heard Wilson say. “What do you know? Winged me!” Wilson was clutching at his shoulder. “I’m glad you did, Mademoiselle Blanche! In a nice primitive way, I’m glad you did. An eye for an eye. We’re quits now,” he said.
Blanche kept her gun on Dennis and her eyes on him while she spoke to Wilson. “You shouldn’t have interfered!”
She didn’t mind having shot Wilson.
“Somebody must have heard that shot. Come on and lock the door after you.”
She was finished with Wilson. She meant him. “But he’s losing blood, Blanche, don’t you think I better . . .”
“You better come up!”
“Blanche, I’m no surgeon and even if I were I couldn’t get that bullet out without a probe . . .”
Wilson said, “And anesthesia. You’re no surgeon and I’m no two-time hero.” He reached out to hold Dennis. “And don’t you be, either!”
“I’m going to count,” Blanche said. “One. Two.”
Dennis pulled himself free of Wilson’s restraining hand. “She won’t shoot me.”
“If you don’t get up here by the time I count ten and come in and lock this door after you, I’m going to shoot her first. Three . . . Four . . .”
48
The bullet was in his shoulder and not his leg so he could get down the stairs all right, and since he wasn’t the one who was walking up to meet his executioner at the top (because surely Dennis must have worn through his wishful thinking by now?) he was down the three flights in the time it was taking Dennis to do half of one flight, although it wasn’t easy. But Wilson was pretty sure that right after the shot he had heard a car pull up in the street. He was feeling pretty rocky by the time he got to the front door and if the car had been a mirage, or if somebody hadn’t heard the shot and gone for help, he’d never be able to make it himself.
Even though it was, thank God, a cop for whom he yanked the heavy front door open, it was drawing it pretty close because he had heard the door to Louise’s place slam and now he heard the lock turn.
“. . . A shot,” the cop said.
Wilson leaned against the wall. “Quick. Gun. Up!” But it was too late now. The cop wouldn’t make it, Wilson thought, groggily receiving the sleeping child the cop thrust into his arms. He’d never make it with that door locked up there.
“Hold it up there!” the cop shouted, but she’d never hold it. She would know that it was The Law and get it over with. Bang. Bang.
Wilson certainly didn’t have the time to remember consciously that Marta had always been able to pick out her own kids’ crying voices anywhere, any time; his good hand, of its own accord, reached for the plump little leg and pinched it cruelly.
Like a living doll, Wilson thought hazily, when he heard the lock up there click, and the door up there being thrown open. Like a living doll! “You should be thankful your children have healthy lungs,” Marta used to say when he had complained about the volume of sound their two could produce. Well, he did thank God. “Thank God,” Wilson said, listening to the lusty shrieks the little girl was now producing. Then he heard Mademoiselle Blanche.
“Bunny! It’s Bunny!”
Wilson closed his eyes because he felt less dizzy that way and heard Mademoiselle Blanche come clattering down, just the way Marta always did when one of theirs bawled for her. Wings on her feet, Wilson thought.
He felt the child being taken from him and gave the leg he had pinched a little pat of farewell. That was the cop taking the child. The cop, Wilson saw, having opened his eyes again, was holding her up in his arms for Mademoiselle Blanche to identify, because he was scared she would break her neck in her headlong hurry to get to the baby.
Would do anything to get to her baby, Wilson thought. Sure would. Mothers, he thought.
Now Blanche sat on the steps cradling her baby tenderly in her arms and crooning softly over it. Wilson looked at that angelic bent face, seeing the ineffably tender curve of her lips, the pure way her soft dark hair fell forward, the exquisite line of her white eyelids, which half hid her eyes.
Now Dennis came down, not quite so fast, rather shakily, Wilson thought, and after him, in a rather floosie robe and nightdress, Louise Benton. Wilson dreamily observed the tableau, the cop in the foreground, the mother-and-child, and, above them, first Dennis and close to him, Louise. All over, he thought, but the shooting. But “shouting,” wasn’t it? All over but the shouting, wasn’t it? But for the shouting, you might say, it would have been all over.
The cop was talking now.
“So we go to look for this Negrito kid and we find him cuddled up in the back of his old man’s store. He denies the whole thing. His old man had kidded him about Mrs. Lake and he couldn’t take it so he ran out on his folks and hung around all day, but he didn’t know anything about the little girl. By that time we didn’t know whether we was standing on our head or our feet. When Mrs. Lake’s mother wasn’t in Providence, we began to think there was something in it, after all. Why wasn’t she where she said she was to you, see, Mrs. Lake?
What was going on with Mrs. Lake’s mother that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be? But then when the Negrito kid says he didn’t take the little girl and there’s not a single thing we can find which says he’s a liar . . . when he says he thought you was a single girl and he didn’t know there was any little kid . . . Well, the lieutenant says we should have listened to the doc here because he knows about such things. I tell you, we didn’t know were we on our heads or on our feet!
“Then, the next thing is, that while he’s giving his statement, the way Negrito tells us is that you were inside the door, Mrs. Lake, and then your mother gives the address to the cabby. First you went away from the door and then your mother gives the address. And that’s why it stuck in Eddie’s mind, because of the way it seemed to him that your mother was waiting until you were out of the way. So it stuck in his mind. What was the big secret where your mother was going?”
Blanche rubbed her cheek against Bunny’s hair. “She went home to Providence.”
“She did not! She was right in the Hotel Statler the whole time. Hotel Statler, Manhattan. Eddie gave us that. Funny how things work out, isn’t it? If it wasn’t for this crazy notion Mrs. Negrito got in her head that Eddie had kidnapped the little girl, we wouldn’t have got to Eddie, and if Eddie hadn’t given us the Statler, we’d still be looking for your mother, and then we wouldn’t have got hold of this Miss Ford in Brooklyn, and your little kid would be there yet. Not that she hurt the little girl any. She was sleeping peaceful as an angel when we found her. You don’t need to worry about that.”
Louise Benton put her hand on Dennis’s shoulder. “It was your mother, Miss Lake, exactly as I told you!”
The policeman looked shocked. “If you mean did the old lady know that the Ford woman was going to snatch the kid, she did not! Don’t you go thinking a thing like that for a minute, Mrs. Lake! No grandmother’s going to do a thing like that!
“Your mother told us what happened, Mrs. Lake. She’s not here now because she collapsed the minute we found your little girl safe and sound, and we put her in New York Hospital, here on Sixty-Eighth Street. She’ll be okay there. But what she told us, she met this here teacher in the park the first day she took your little kid there. I think the seventeenth, she said. Your mother didn’t know Ford was a teacher. Got her name first time they talked, but after that Ford didn’t talk about herself at all. She didn’t know much about her and that’s a fact, but that never stopped any lady I know of from spilling anything she’s got on her chest!
“What the old lady had on her chest was about how she had just got to New York City and this apartment you’d sublet, Mrs. Lake, was no place for a kid. How the baby had to sleep in one bed with you, and all.”
Blanche, Wilson noted hazily, did not appear to have any need to say “I told you so.” Admirable Mademoiselle! Just sat cuddling the child.
“You know how dames get to talking. She went on about how you was going to send a little kid like that to school. It wasn’t thanks to you she wasn’t in school this minute. You’d gone to this school, to that school, whatever school you knew about, I guess. No room!”
No room at the inn, Wilson thought. Mademoiselle did look like the Madonna sitting there with the Babe.
“The teacher said your mother was right. She got herself in right with your mother. You know, whatever your mother said was okay by her in spades. The next day she was right there in the park when your mother showed. Your old lady was all up in the air. You’d got a letter, after all, saying your kid could go to this nursery school here.” The policeman waved. “You were going to send her, your old lady said, nothing she could say could stop you. So that was when the teacher says, why don’t your mother make it hard for you instead of helping out, see? All your mother knew, Mrs. Lake, take my word for it, was she was going to make it hard for you instead of helping out. The first day of school she was going to make it just as hard as she could, so maybe you’d see it wouldn’t work out once she was gone. You’d have to get the little girl ready and then get to your job, see? You’d have to give them some excuse on the job so you could go pick up the little girl, leave early and all.
“That was the whole thing, see? The teacher put her up to it: say she got a letter and had to go home. It was what your mother told you about selling her home, of course, but your mother didn’t mean no harm, she didn’t know that was just up the teacher’s alley. Your mother just went to the Statler, and she was supposed to waltz in tomorrow after a good night’s sleep when you’d learned your lesson. She was supposed to say emergencies like that could happen every day the kid had to go to school, and believe me,” the policeman said, grinning, “they do!”
Wilson wanted to ask about the baby’s belongings—no crib, all right, no stroller, okay, but . . . He thought back to when Sandy was there. (You got more stuff with the first child, but even with Betty when they weren’t such suckers for each and every Lilliputian Bazaar ad!) The place had positively been lousy with kid things; what about the rest of Bunny’s appurtenances? It seemed as if the policeman could read his thoughts. (Or had he spoken? He was becoming a bit vague around the edges.)
“Your mother said you’d remember the day she lost her key, Mrs. Lake.”
“Yes,” Blanche said. “I remember.”
“Only she didn’t. The teacher took it. Your mother doesn’t know how but it doesn’t seem hard to me. Your little kid gets into a rhubarb with another kid in the park, or she falls down and goes boom. Grandma runs to pick her up and leaves her pocketbook on the bench with her friend. See what I mean? The teacher gave it back the next day. ‘Your key must have dropped out of your pocketbook.’ Did your mother tell you someone found it the next day?” When Blanche nodded, the policeman nodded, too.
Wilson thought that the old lady shouldn’t have done that, should have said she’d misplaced it. Blanche might have remembered, when she discovered tonight that the apartment was emptied of all of Bunny’s things, including fingerprints, that the someone who had found her mother’s key could have had a duplicate made of it and gone there today and taken every hide and every hair of little Bunny. Only she hadn’t remembered about the key.
“I don’t think this teacher knew what we’d think when we couldn’t even find fingerprints. What I think is she didn’t want there to be any prints handy to identify the kid, see? The lieutenant thinks so, too,” the policeman said modestly. “I told him and he thinks so, too. The lieutenant says he bets tomorrow we’ll turn up a witness who saw Ford walk in your apartment, or maybe saw her walking out, loaded with your little kid’s stuff. We found a cute little blue bathrobe . . .” He measured his hands in the air to show how small. “She had it in the bathroom, with the little toothbrush, and all.
“You see,” he said to Blanche, “this all happened too quick. For us, for us cops, I don’t mean for you. I can imagine it didn’t seem so quick for you, Mrs. Lake. Why, tomorrow we could have got the facts out of you straight and contacted where you lived with the kid . . .” He was getting out of breath. “And all,” he said. “Well, to make a long story short, your mother didn’t know a thing about the kidnapping. When we told her, she went to pieces. You know, crying and screaming. But she’ll be all right in a couple days.”
Mademoiselle Blanche, Wilson saw, was smiling down at Bunny. “Yes,” she said.
Louise Benton said, “I’m sure she will be, just shock.”
But Dennis, the talking psychiatrist, said nothing. Tar Baby said nothing! Dennis just stood there staring at Mademoiselle Blanche. Then Wilson heard the revived Boston in Louise Benton’s voice. Boston Renaissance.
“You see, Miss Lake? Just as I said. However, that’s water under the bridge and this really is no time for further explanations or recriminations or anything but thankfulness that it wasn’t much worse. I do really think now, Miss Lake, that Bunny ought to be taken home to bed.”
“She’s right, lady, that little kid should be in bed.” The policeman bent toward Blanche to help her u
p.
All over but the shouting, Wilson thought. I can let go now, it’s all over but the shouting. But something was still happening, so he held on. Mademoiselle Blanche, ignoring the policeman, was looking up at Dennis. Asking Dennis to go with her, Wilson decided. And Louise, he thought, seeing her fingers on Dennis’s shoulder, was asking him to stay with her. Dennis, the ci-devant talking psychiatrist, now Tar Baby, was saying nothing and staring at Mademoiselle Blanche.
And who could blame him, Wilson wondered. He blinked his eyes so that he could study the expression on Dennis’s face, noticing that it was complex. Attraction, repulsion? Fear and desire? Then he traced Dennis’s glance and found that he was not looking at that delicious face of Mademoiselle’s, or at the child, either. Dennis’s eyes, Wilson now discovered, were glued to what was in Mademoiselle’s hand at the end of the firm, fondling arm which so tenderly clasped her child. The revolver, Wilson saw, was what was in that hand and the revolver had Dennis hypnotized!
Would she have? Wouldn’t she have? That was what the staring Dennis was wondering. Would she have . . . accurately, trying for the heart, the bull’s eye, and not just down a dark stairway? Not to discharge the accumulated effects of the day and night she had had, but locked in the room up there, with the accumulation already discharged, would she have shot if he, Wilson, hadn’t pinched the baby? Would she have, wouldn’t she have, Dennis was pondering. She loves me not!
Oh, she loves him, Wilson thought, because now she was giving Dennis such a look! And he loves her. He said he loved her, but Dennis had billed the two of them as star-crossed lovers from the moment he had seen how that girl could knock his carefully laid plans into a cocked hat. From the first Dennis had decided that it could not be, which was easier, Wilson decided, than it must not be.
So what now?
The policeman helped Blanche to her feet. “You coming with us, Doc?” He explained, “Look her over, maybe? See if she’s fit to stay without her mother in her place tonight?”
“Dr. Newhouse is a psychiatrist, officer. You better take Miss Lake and Bunny home and then she should see a medical man. It’s quite clear now,” Louise said, smiling at Dennis, “that Miss Lake doesn’t require Dr. Newhouse’s services!”
