Both men laughed sheepishly.
“Were there many anonymous letters after the Heard killing?” Ruddy asked.
“Bushels of ’em—like always,” the captain reported. “And
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filled with the usual tommyrot. Only this time there were accusations that the police themselves had a hand in the killings.
We had those letters carefully analyzed by psychologists, so desperate were we for facts, any kind of facts. But nothing came of that.”
“And were there many voluntary confessions this time?”
“There was not one voluntary confession for the Heard slaying,” the captain pointed out. “It was odd and made some of us think that we were wrong in trying to link all three crimes together.”
“There was no sex angle in the Heard killing,” Ruddy said.
“Maybe that made the psychopaths silent.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s weird,” Ruddy said, sighing, standing. “There seems to be a secret buried out there in Brentwood Park. And, by God, I’m going to try to dig it up.”
“I’m at your service, Chief,” Captain Snell said. “Do you want me to leave these dossiers?”
“No. Ed Seigel ought to be reporting—”
“He signed in just before I left this afternoon,” the captain said.
“Good. Dump these dossiers into Ed’s lap and tell ’im to be ready to give me his impressions in the morning,” Ruddy ordered.
“Yes, sir. Anything else?”
“Nothing at the moment. I’ll be here all afternoon. I’m fagged out. No sleep last night. I don’t want to come into the job half fuzzy-minded. I must get some sleep. I’ll be in in the morning—at about nine.”
“Right, sir.”
“If anything comes up, I’m here.”
“Right, sir. We’re happy to have you with us.”
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“And I’m glad to be with you. Listen, any man on that force has the right to come in and talk to me at any time. I’ll see no politicians sent by officers. I’m straight, regular. No string pulling, no shake-ups. Just straight police work.”
“That’ll get the loyalty of every man on our force,” the captain declared. “Good-bye, Chief.”
“Good-bye, Captain.”
C H A P T E R 1 0
Ruddy felt that his nerves were drained, taut, tired, but he knew that sleep or rest was no cure for what ailed him at that moment. He felt that he lacked exercise—yes, that was it.
He ought to go down to the police gym and have a hard work-out, let pouring sweat empty the accumulated poisons out of his body. But, no. He wanted to think, to resolve all the mass of contradicting facts that had been poured into his mind during the past ten hours. In his office he paced to and fro, like an animal behind bars, staring unseeingly. He had as yet—despite the commissioner’s, despite Tommy’s, and despite Captain Snell’s reports and descriptions—failed to get the “feel” of Brentwood Park. Something was missing, some vital link had not been un-covered, some handle was out of sight—a handle that he had been trained to take hold of and work with. And what was hovering tantalizingly beyond his reach were not the “facts” of the case but a meaningful interpretation of them, an angle of vision from which to see and weigh them.
Had he made an error in allowing Commissioner King to persuade him to accept the chiefship of Brentwood Park? Had he let the commissioner persuade him against his better judg-
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ment? No. Police work was his profession. Yet had he refused, he could have, in a few months, been retired and on his own, fishing, traveling, attaching himself to some private agency at a fancy salary. And he could have had the comradeship of Tommy, who, God knows, sure needed it now. Yes, there was no doubt but that he needed a rest from all the hurly-burly of crime, from all the hordes of killers and thieves; he needed to be around people who were not tracking down crimes or criminals who were trying to escape the meshes of the law. He yearned to see a clean sweep of sparkling blue water and feel a sharp, clean wind blowing on his face. That would do him a world of good.
One got stale facing and probing into the same old problems.
Yet there was something about Brentwood Park that challenged him, whetted his police instincts.
“Ruddy.”
“Yeah, Agnes.”
She opened the door and smiled compassionately at him.
“You’re not sleeping. And you’re not resting,” she chided him.
“I’m not sleepy.”
“Your eyes look tired.”
“I know.”
“Why don’t you lie down?”
“Don’t know. Just restless, I guess.”
“That job has got you by the throat,” she said. “Look, darling, I have a bridge party. . . . When will you want to eat?”
“I’m not hungry, Agnes.”
“But if you go to bed on an empty stomach, you’ll be raven-ous before morning,” she told him. “I know.”
“I couldn’t eat anything now.”
“Listen, I’ll leave you a ham sandwich, a glass of chocolate milkshake, and a slice of pie on a tray.”
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“Good, I’ll take a bite later.”
“Why not go to a movie? It’ll relax you.”
“Say, I might. If I can find something good.”
“Try that, dear.” She kissed him. “Take it easy.”
“Okay.”
When she had gone, he tried to convince himself that he wanted to see a movie, but he knew deep in him that he really did not, that he would have looked at the screen and not understood the flowing sequence of images. Then suddenly what he wanted to do struck him with thunderous force: he wanted to find that girl that Tommy had not married! That was it. Yeah, I’ll find that Marie. He did not know why he wanted to do that, yet he felt compelled toward it. Slowly, thoughtfully, he changed into his uniform, then felt into his suit pocket and found the chief of police badge that Commissioner King had given him, and pinned it on his chest. After he had tilted his visored cap above his large, dark eyes, he surveyed his reflection in the mirror.
Yeah, he looked formidable. It was said that some men looked like cops and some did not; and he was one who did, powerfully.
The boys had always said that he looked more like a general than a policeman—well, he was geting there. He was a chief of police now. And when he had his new rank service stripes sewed onto his new uniform, he would look like the nearest thing to a general. He found himself becoming debonair, smiling, slipping into an organized, official mood. As he went out to his car, he realized that he did not know where Marie Wiggins lived. He doubled back to the telephone, lifted the directory, and leafed through the pages. Yeah, he had heard Tommy talking to her many times over the phone, and undoubtedly she had one. Then he saw in fine print, memorizing it as he read it, as he had been trained to do: 6499 Woodlawn Avenue.
Ten minutes later Ruddy was rolling through the April
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twilight. Suddenly the streetlamps flashed on. He drove slowly, his watchful eyes glancing officially about without his being aware of it, noting which cars were obeying or violating the traffic code. He observed a big Buick overtake another car in the crowded traffic and pass it with but inches to spare. “I wouldn’t’ve done that,” he told himself. At a street intersection where he had the right of way, he stopped and waved a woman across—a woman who was pushing a baby buggy. She smiled at him and he nodded. This courtesy was now automatic with him. In the dim past, when he had once been assigned to a traffic detail, that was what he had always compelled other motor-ists to do. As he drove on, he looked up and glanced at his face in the rear-view mirror. Yeah, that was a policeman. On duty.
Alert. On guard to observe if the law was being obeyed. Yes, he was t
he Chief of Police of Brentwood Park, Illinois.
He reached the South Side and found Woodlawn Avenue.
This was a foolish errand. Suppose she was not in? He ought to have called her first. Okay, if she’s not in, no harm’s done.
He saw from the names above the mailbox that Marie Wiggins lived on the fi rst floor. He pushed the bell. There was no answer.
He rang again, long and steadily. A buzzer sounded at the ves-tibule door.
Now that somebody had answered, Ruddy had a momentary doubt about the wisdom of his visit. What could he say to the poor girl? He let himself through the door and saw a dark form waiting for him at the end of the fi rst-fl oor hallway.
“Yes?” a small feminine voice called.
He advanced, trying to see who had spoken, not replying.
“Oh, you’re a policeman!” the feminine voice half-shouted in terror.
“Miss Wiggins?” he asked.
“Yes,” the voice said.
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He could see her now. It was Marie herself. He stopped just short of her and he looked down into her upturned face—a face twisted with fear, a face whose mouth was hanging open.
“I’m Tommy’s father,” he told her. “Ruddy Turner.”
“Oh!” Her voice came low and relieved.
“Could I speak to you a moment?”
“Oh, yes,” Marie said, backing through the opened door and into a dim room.
He advanced after her, sorry now that he had come. Never had he seen a girl in so cringing a posture.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told her.
“You’re not coming to arrest me?” she asked, shaking her head from side to side.
“God, no,” he told her.
She switched on a light. She wore a housedress, bedroom slippers; her hair was in curls. She was much thinner than he remembered her having been, and there were lines from her nose to her lips. They stared at each other for a few seconds, then she burst into loud weeping.
“Don’t be afraid,” he consoled her. “I’m not here to hurt you. I came to see how you were.”
His voice only increased her sobbing. It was as though now she knew that she was not going to be arrested—for what, she had not said!—her feelings were free to give way to sorrow and the consequences of disappointment. He reached out his right hand to take her shoulder to lead her to a chair, but she quickly twisted out of his reach.
“No,” she sobbed.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I know . . . I know that you think I’m poisoned. You’re just like all the others,” she wailed.
He understood now why she had shied away from him. She
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had felt that had he touched her, he would have afterward re-gretted it. Oh, God, she must have been through the mill. Yes, poor Tommy had had his share in making her feel this way.
“Do you feel well enough to talk?” he asked her softly.
“I-I g-guess so,” she stammered, her sobbing letting up a bit.
“Sit down,” he said.
She sat in an old chair and he edged himself upon the side of a bed.
“Are you here alone?” he asked.
“Yes. My family is upstairs. I didn’t want to stay with them.
Papa rented this kitchenette for me,” she related in a sigh.
“How are you?” he asked.
There was a momentary pause, and then she whispered:
“I’m alone . . .”
He had asked about her physical state, and she had answered in terms of what mattered most to her, that is, her state of emotional abandonment.
“Are you seeing the doctor?”
“Yes, yes . . . the police told me to . . . I . . .”
“I understand.”
She had thought that he was an officer coming to check on whether she was having the prescribed treatments for syphilis.
Goddamn . . . He had not wanted to do that to her.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I was not sent here by the police.
I came on my own.”
She lifted startled, disbelieving eyes to him and a tiny relaxation came into her face.
“Everybody hounds me,” she complained in a hopeless voice.
“I’m not here for that,” he said. “You’ve suffered enough, God knows.”
“It was not my fault,” she whimpered. “I swear. I didn’t know I had anything. I-I only s-slept with T-tommy . . .”
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“He told me,” he said.
There was a long silence. Ruddy could hear a rumble of an El train in the distance.
“D-did he g-get it from me?” she asked.
“No, no,” he assured her.
“Aw, I’m glad.” She sighed.
“It was not contagious,” he told her.
“The doctor told me,” she said. “But I was not sure. I’m not sure of anything anymore.”
“You know, you must not let this break you down.” He tried to put some courage into her.
“It already has,” she said, sobbing again.
His instincts told him that she was already beyond any emotional help that he could give her. Never in all of his police work had he seen a criminal more abject than this girl, more claimed by a sense of guilt, more ready to accept all that could be said against her.
“I’m bad,” she moaned. “Rotten . . .”
“No, no,” he spoke vehemently.
“I am! I am! It’s all written down in the medical reports,”
she wailed. “I want to kill myself.”
“None of that,” he rasped at her. “Your life has been shattered, but you must now try to rebuild it. You are taking treatments?”
“Yes.”
“How often?”
“I see a doctor three times a week.”
“Is it expensive?”
“Y-yes . . . you see, they won’t let me work. It’s charity. And what my father can do. My mother . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“How is she?”
“All right. You see, she is convinced that I caught it running
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around with boys . . . men . . . drinking. I can’t make her realize that that’s not true. Then she thinks that Tommy ought to have married me. I told her that it was only with him, you see?
She can’t believe that he didn’t give it to me. Oh, God, it’s all mixed up, Mr. Turner. Nobody believes me.”
“I do,” he said.
“D-did Tommy send you?” she asked timidly.
“No.”
Another long silence. “How is he?”
“Oh, all right,” he informed her. “Marie, you must realize that I didn’t come here to hurt you any more than you are already hurt. But I must tell you that Tommy was hurt too. Terribly. That is why he has never been to see you. He too was caught up in awful emotional reactions. He didn’t blame you. You see, Marie, something happened to both of you that was too big for both of you, and you could not really react to it. You were both hit, you harder than he. And he was just cold and numb. He too felt awfully guilty. He didn’t know what to do.”
“I don’t blame what he did,” she whimpered. “He did what anybody else would have done, I guess.”
Aw, there was a tiny bit of doubt in her voice. She still felt deep down that Tommy should have stood by her. Yet she knew that she could make no claim on him. God, where was the right and wrong in this? Could a boy be blamed for doing something that his most powerful feelings had prompted him to do? The boy had run and the girl knew that it had been her physical state that had set him fleeing. And the girl knew that the world would have sided with the boy had all the facts been publicly known. How much could one ask of another in the act of love?
Could one be demanded to embrace exactly that which turned the impulse of love into loathing?
&nbs
p; “Are you still at the university?” he asked her.
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“No, no,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “They told me to stay away . . .”
“Oh, God.” He sighed.
Her life had been shattered, all right. And whose fault had it been?
“What did the doctor say, Marie?”
“I inherited it,” she said, picking nervously at her dress.
She had said it in a strange tone of voice; she had told him that she was not really guilty at all, and yet she had all the stigma of guilt.
“I’m crucified,” she moaned.
“Oh, no,” he objected feebly.
Yes, she had been. And she still was. His mind leaped toward the future, and he could see no way out for her. Maybe she would be cured and then she could flee to another city, change her name. But even then maybe her past would catch up with her—like the past of criminals caught up with them. And how could she ever really know that all the contamination had been cleaned out of her blood? Maybe she would never know, not until she had had children.
Ruddy rose and walked nervously about. Yes, Marie’s life had been poisoned at the very springs of it. The past had cast its black shadow upon her, and that shadow might well throw itself into the future and fall across the lives of whatever children she might bear.
“Don’t you go out?” he asked.
“No,” she mumbled.
“Oh, you must, you know,” he said. “You look pale.”
Indeed, she looked like those prisoners who spent a lifetime behind bars; there was a greenish pallor about her skin.
“I don’t want to,” she said. She was staring off into space, then began biting her lips. “I hope Tommy’s all right. I hope
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that he’s not too bitter toward me. After all, it was not my fault.
Yet I can’t and don’t blame ’im. For a month I felt dead. I could feel nothing. I tried drinking, but I couldn’t get drunk. I can’t read anymore. I don’t like movies now. I used to play tennis, but I dare not now show up where I used to go. I just stay here.” A sob caught in her throat. “Blind people are not shunned like I am. When I walk down the street, I feel that people are shying away from me. I—”
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