Mr. Thorber smiled. “Not quite that bad, ma’am. She was a clerk in the bank that was robbed. We need her as a material witness.”
“A clerk?” Miss Gaines looked disappointed. “You mean she only worked there? But why would she run away and hide here?” A more hopeful look came into her face. “Perhaps she was an accomplice?”
“We’re afraid her running away might indicate that, ma’am. Is she here now?”
“Please tell us a little more about it,” Miss Gaines begged. “You mean you think she—tipped off the robbers, or something like that?”
The detective frowned. “We’re a bit in the dark ourselves, ma’am, just why she ran away like that, from the police. But here’s what we do know. The two robbers stopped between the inner and the outer doors to put on the masks they wore into the bank. Miss Carey was working where she, alone of all the people in the bank, could see into that entryway, and she saw the two men as they were putting on their masks, so she alone can identify them. She admitted that right after the robbery, when the chief was talking to her, just before I got there.
“Then we learned Garvey and Roberts had picked up a suspect called John Brady a couple blocks from the bank and had taken him to headquarters. The chief asked Miss Carey if she’d go around to headquarters to see if she could identify him, see? She said sure, and it was only a few blocks and on account of the excitement and everything she’d like some fresh air, and could she walk? And the chief said sure, because we had some more to do at the bank and weren’t ready to leave. So she never got there.”
Miss Games leaned forward. “She disappeared between the bank and headquarters?”
“That’s it. And she never went home. She has a little apartment on Dovershire Street, but she never went there either. We been looking for her since, and got a tip tonight that led us here.”
Mr. Anstruther, who had been silent until now, cleared his throat. “Is there any reward, Mr. Thorber?”
The detective looked at him. “You’re Anstruther? Well, there may be if it turns out that she is implicated, and this leads to recovery of the money. That’s up to the insurance company.”
“Look,” said Mr. Barry. They looked at him, but he reddened a little and couldn’t think of what to say. “Are you sure? I mean—”
“We’re not sure of anything,” said Thorber. “But I’ll have to take her to headquarters. If she can explain her actions, of course we won’t hold her. And we must have her look at John Brady and either identify him or not. It was lucky for us he had a gun on him, or we couldn’t have held him this long.”
He stood up. “Is she here now, Mrs. Prandell?”
“Yes, her room is just opposite the head of the stairs. She’s up there now, sitting in the dark.”
“Thank you,” said the detective. He stood up and so did Mr. Barry, Mr. Anstruther, Mrs. Prandell, and Miss Games. “Uh—will you all please wait here?”
All of them sat down again except Mr. Barry. He took a step toward the door and his hands clenched at his sides as the detective started up the stairs.
Mrs. Prandell said sharply, “Don’t be a fool, Mr. Barry.”
But a higher power than Mrs. Prandell had already made Mr. Barry a fool. He stood there, glaring at the staircase, until he heard the detective knock at the door upstairs, and then, as though something was pushing him, he started for the staircase, and up.
Had the carpeting on the stairs not muffled the sound of his footsteps, although he had not tried to walk quietly, things might have happened differently. As it was, he was making the turn in the stairs when the door of Miss Darkness’ room opened—to darkness, with a slim, terrified girl silhouetted against it, the back of her hand going to her mouth as though to stifle a scream.
But what propelled Mr. Barry up the last few steps was that he saw both of the detective’s hands come out of his pockets as the door opened, and there was a gun in each of them. There was a flat thirty-two automatic in his right hand and, almost hidden, a smaller fancier revolver—a woman’s pistol—in his left.
There are tunes when one asks questions afterward, and for Mr. Barry this was one of them. Thorber was pushing Melissa Carey back into the darkness and three things happened almost at once—Mr. Barry’s headlong tackle of Thorber’s left hand, and Melissa Carey’s scream.
The roar of the other gun was seconds later, while the others from below were fearfully coming up the stairs, fearfully led by Mr. Anstruther, who might never have reached the top had not Miss Gaines kept pushing him from behind. The automatic roared again, and that was the last shot of the melee, and there was silence in the room of darkness.
“I still don’t understand all of it,” Mrs. Prandell was saying the next evening at dinner. “And I do wish you weren’t going to leave us, Mr. Barry. I know we all judged the girl wrongly, but after all, she did give a false name and all, and—how could we have known?”
Mr. Barry, with a bandage across his forehead where the chopping blow of a pistol barrel had removed an area of epidermis, looked quite dashing and romantic despite, or perhaps because of, a badly blackened eye.
He said, “My dear Mrs. Prandell, I don’t blame any of you in the least. It is merely that I want to find a room on the other side of town, because—well, because Miss Carey lives there, or will live there again as soon as they release her from the hospital, where she is being treated for shock, in a few days. I am going to see her again this evening and, in fact, if she accepts a suggestion I have to offer, I won’t even need to hunt a room, as she already has an apartment there.”
“You—you don’t mean—”
“No, I don’t mean,” said Mr. Barry patiently. “I merely mean that Melissa Barry would be a very nice name, and there is a shortage of apartments, you know.”
“We all wish you luck,” said Mr. Anstruther. “But I still don’t see why this detective Thorber, bank robber or not, brought the two guns with him.”
“He had to make it look as though she were resisting arrest,” said Mr. Barry. “He had to kill her to keep her from identifying him or this John Brady, because—well, even if she wasn’t able to identify him as one of the robbers, she might have identified Brady and Brady might have squealed.”
“I see,” said Miss Games. “You mean that Thorber, even though he was a real detective, had planned the robbery with Brady, who was a bank robber. Using, I suppose, information he could obtain as a detective?”
Mr. Barry nodded. “And, unluckily for her, Miss Carey was in a position to see them come into the bank entry, without their masks. And after the robbery, when the cops were coming around in droves, she saw Thorber, and thought but wasn’t absolutely sure, that he was one of the men who robbed the bank.” . “But why didn’t she just say so?”
“She wasn’t absolutely sure,” Mr. Barry explained. “And that put her on a terrible spot. Either she had to accuse a man who might be innocent, or else her life was in terrible danger, because Thorber knew by then that she’d seen him and his partner, and that if she identified Brady, he was pretty likely to be sunk, too. The only thing she could think of doing was to hide out until—well, her brightest hope was that the police would solve it without her and leave her safe again.”
“But the two guns—?” asked Miss Wheeler.
Mr. Anstruther said, “I see that part now, Miss Wheeler. He came prepared to kill her, and to make it look as though she had resisted arrest, and that she’d had the smaller gun and fired at him with it first. So he would be in the clear, on self-defense.”
“Oh,” said Miss Wheeler, a bit faintly. “Well, I’m glad, Mr. Barry, that you killed him.”
Mr. Barry colored faintly. “I’m not sure that I did, Miss Wheeler; you see we were fighting for the gun, and it was in his hand and his finger was on the trigger, but I had an armlock on him with the gun pointing diagonally up his own back, and I guess—well, he probably didn’t pull the trigger on purpose at all, just a spasmodic reaction from the pain of his arm being broken. I guess i
t’s lucky I did wrestling in college.”
For a second or two there was silence broken only by the sound of Mr. Anstruther’s celery. And then Miss Wheeler remembered.
“Mr. Barry,” she said. “We still don’t know why Miss Dark—Miss Carey sat in the dark all the time in her room. You talked to her this afternoon, you say. Did she tell you that?”
“Of course she told me. When she ran away from danger that afternoon, she didn’t dare go back to her room, you know. Thorber might have been wailing for her there. She had only twenty dollars with her, and for half of it she managed to buy a cheap case and a few things that would let her get by for a week, and when she came here, Mrs. Prandell, she had only exactly ten dollars left. That’s why she took only breakfasts.”
“You mean that’s all she’s been eating?”
“Of course. She took walks around, right in the neighborhood, so you wouldn’t know that she wasn’t eating. She was too proud to let you know that. Or to borrow or steal fifteen cents.”
“Fifteen cents?” asked Mrs. Prandell blankly. “For what?”
“For a light bulb,” said Mr. Barry.
I’ll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen
I HEARD THE FOOTSTEPS COMING DOWN the hall and I was watching the door—the door that had no knob on my side of it—when it opened.
I thought I’d recognized the step, and I’d been right. It was the young, nice one, the one whose bright hair made so brilliant a contrast with his white uniform coat.
I said, “Hello, Red,” and he said, “Hello, Mr. Marlin. I—I’ll take you down to the office. The doctors are there now.” He sounded more nervous than I felt.
“How much time have I got, Red?”
“How much—Oh, I see what you mean. They’re examining a couple of others ahead of you. You’ve got tune.”
So I didn’t get up off the edge of the bed. I held my hands out in front of me, backs up and the fingers rigid. They didn’t tremble any more. My fingers were steady as those of a statue, and about as useful. Oh, I could move them. I could clench them into fists slowly. But for playing sax and clarinet they were about as good as hands of bananas. I turned them over—and there on my wrists were the two ugly scars where, a little less than a year ago, I’d slashed them with a straight razor. Deeply enough to have cut some of the tendons that moved the fingers.
I moved my fingers now, curling them inward toward the palm, slowly. The interne was watching.
“They’ll come back, Mr. Marlin,” he said. “Exercise—that’s all they need.” It wasn’t true. He knew that I knew he knew it, for when I didn’t bother to answer, he went on, almost defensively, “Anyway, you can still arrange and conduct. You can hold a baton all right. And—I got an idea for you, Mr. Marlin.”
“Yes, Red?”
“Trombone. Why don’t you take up trombone? You could learn it fast, and you don’t need finger action to play trombone.”
Slowly I shook my head. I didn’t try to explain. It was something you couldn’t explain, anyway. It wasn’t only the physical ability to play an instrument that was gone. It was more than that.
I looked at my hands once more and then I put them carefully away in my pockets where I wouldn’t have to look at them.
I looked up at the intern’s face again. There was a look on it that I recognized and remembered—the look I’d seen on thousands of young faces across footlights—hero worship. Out of the past it came to me, that look.
He could still look at me that way, even after—
“Red,” I asked him, “don’t you think I’m insane?”
“Of course not, Mr. Marlin. I don’t think you were ever—” He bogged down on that.
I needled him. Maybe it was cruel, but it was crueler to me. I said, “You don’t think I was ever crazy? You think I was sane when I tried to kill my wife?”
“Well—it was just temporary. You had a breakdown. You’d been working too hard—twenty hours a day, about. You were near the top with your band. Me, Mr. Marlin, I think you were at the top. You had it on all of them, only most of the public hadn’t found out yet. They would have, if—”
“If I hadn’t slipped a cog,” I said. I thought, what a way to express going crazy, trying to kill your wife, trying to kill yourself, and losing your memory.
Red looked at his wrist watch, then pulled up a chair and sat down facing me. He talked fast.
“We haven’t got too long, Mr. Marlin,” he said. “And I want you to pass those doctors and get out of here. You’ll be all right once you get out of this joint. Your memory will come back, a little at a time—when you’re in the right surroundings.”
I shrugged. It didn’t seem to matter much. I said, “Okay, brief me. It didn’t work last time, but—I’ll try.”
“You’re Johnny Marlin,” he said. “The Johnny Marlin. You play a mean clarinet, but that’s sideline. You’re the best alto sax in the business, / think. You were fourth in the Down Beat poll a year ago, but—”
I interrupted nun. “You mean I did play clarinet and sax. Not any more, Red. Can’t you get that through your head?” I hadn’t meant to sound so rough about it, but my voice got out of control.
Red didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes went to his wrist watch again and then came back to me. He started talking again.
“We got ten minutes, maybe. I wish I knew what you remember and what you don’t about all I’ve been telling you the last month. What’s your right name—I mean, before you took a professional name?”
“John Dettman,” I said. “Born June first, nineteen-twenty, on the wrong side of the tracks. Orphaned at five. Released from orphanage at sixteen. Worked as bus boy in Cleveland and saved up enough money to buy a clarinet, and took lessons. Bought a sax a year later, and got my first job with a band at eighteen.”
“What band?”
“Heinie Wills’—local band in Cleveland, playing at Danceland there. Played third alto a while, then first alto. Next worked for a six-man combo called—What was it, Red? I don’t remember.”
“The Basin Streeters, Mr. Marlin. Look, do you really remember any of this, or is it just from what I’ve told you?”
“Mostly from what you’ve told me, Red. Sometimes, I get kind of vague pictures, but it’s pretty foggy. Let’s get on with it. So the Basin Streeters did a lot of traveling for a while and I left them in Chi for my first stretch with a name band—Look, I think I’ve got that list of bands pretty well memorized. There isn’t much time. Let’s skip it.
“I joined the army in forty-two—I’d have been twenty-two then. A year at Fort Billings, and then England. Kayoed by a bomb in London before I ever got to pull a trigger except on rifle range. A month in a hospital there, shipped back, six months in a mental hospital here, and let out on a P. N.” He knew as well as I did what P. N. meant, but I translated it for us. “Psycho-neurotic. Nuts. Crazy.”
He opened his mouth to argue the point, and then decided there wasn’t time.
“So I’d saved my money,” I said, “before and during the army, and I started my own band. That would have been—late forty-four?”
Red nodded. “Remember the list of places you’ve played, the names of your sidemen, what I told you about them?”
“Pretty well,” I said. There wouldn’t be time to go into that, anyway. I said, “And early in forty-seven, while I was still getting started, I got married. To Kathy Courteen. The Kathy Courteen, who owns a slice of Chicago, who’s got more money than sense. She must have, if she married me. We were married June tenth, nineteen forty-seven. Why did she marry me, Red?”
“Why shouldn’t she?” he said. “You’re Johnny Marlin!”
The funny part of it is he wasn’t kidding. I could tell by his voice he meant it. He thought being Johnny Marlin had really been something. I looked down at my hands. They’d got loose out of my pockets again.
I think I knew, suddenly, why I wanted to get out of this gilt-lined nuthouse that was costing Kathy Courteen—Kathy Marlin, I mean—
the price of a fur coat every week to keep me in. It wasn’t because I wanted out, really. It was because I wanted to get away from the hero worship of this red-headed kid who’d gone nuts about Johnny Marlin’s band, and Johnny Marlin’s saxophone.
“Have you ever seen Kathy, Red?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’ve seen pictures of her, newspaper pictures of her. She’s beautiful.”
“Even with a scar across her throat?” I asked.
His eyes avoided mine. They went to his watch again, and he stood up quickly. “We’d better get down there,” he said.
He went to the knobless door, opened it with a key, and politely held it open for me to precede him out into the hallway.
That look in his eyes made me feel foolish, as always. I don’t know how he did it, but Red always managed to look up at me, from a height a good three inches taller than mine.
Then, side by side, we went down the great stairway of that lush, plush madhouse that had once been a million-dollar mansion and was now a million-dollar sanitarium with more employees than inmates.
We went into the office and the gray-haired nurse behind the desk nodded and said, “They’re ready for you.”
“Luck, Mr. Marlin,” Red said. “I’m pulling for you.”
So I went through the door. There were three of them, as last time.
“Sit down please, Mr. Marlin,” Dr. Glasspiegel, the head one, said.
They sat each at one side of the square table, leaving the fourth side and the fourth chair for me. I slid into it. I put my hands in my pockets again. I knew if I looked at them or thought about them, I might say something foolish, and then I’d be here a while again.
Then they were asking me questions, taking turns at it. Some about my past—and Red’s coaching had been good. Once or twice, but not often, I had to stall and admit my memory was hazy on a point or two. And some of the questions were about the present, and they were easy. I mean, it was easy to see what answers they wanted to those questions, and to give them.
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