Pick-Up

by Charles Willeford

  “I suppose it’s all right,” he said thoughtfully. “What do you want to kiss her for?”

  “Just kiss her goodbye. That’s all.” I couldn’t explain because I didn’t know myself.

  “Okay.” He shrugged his shoulders and looked out the window. “Go ahead.”

  Walking bent over I crossed to the bed and kissed Helen’s cold lips, her forehead, and on the lips again. “Goodbye, sweetheart,” I whispered low enough so the policeman couldn’t hear me, “I’ll see you soon.” I returned to the chair.

  For a long time we sat quietly in the silent room. The door opened and the room was filled with people. It was hard to believe so many people could crowd into such a small room. There were the two original uniformed policemen, two more in plainclothes, a couple of hospital attendants or doctors in white—Endo got back into the room somehow—Mrs. McQuade, and a spectator who had crowded in from the group in front of the house. A small man entered the room and removed his hat. He was almost bald and wore a pair of dark glasses. At his entrance the room was quiet again and the noise and activity halted. The young policeman saluted smartly and pointed to me.

  “He confessed, Lieutenant,” the young man said. “Harry Jordan is his name and she isn’t his wife—”

  “I’ll talk to him,” the little man said, holding up a white, manicured hand. He removed the dark glasses and put them in the breast pocket of his jacket, crooked his finger at me and left the room. I followed him out and nobody tried to stop me. We walked down the hall and he paused at the stairway leading to the top floor.

  “Want a cigarette, Jordan?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Want to tell me about it, Jordan?” he asked with his quiet voice. “I’m always a little leery of confessions unless I hear them myself.”

  “Yes, sir. There isn’t much to tell. I choked her last night, and then I turned on the gas. It was a suicide pact, in a way, but actually I killed Helen because she didn’t have the nerve to do it herself.”

  “I see. About what time did it happen?”

  “Around one, or after. I don’t know. By this time I would have been dead myself if I hadn’t left the transom open.”

  “You willing to put all this on paper, Jordan, or are you going to get a shyster and deny everything, or what?”

  “I’m guilty, Lieutenant, and I want to die. I’ll cooperate in every way I can. I don’t want to see a lawyer, I just want to be executed. It’ll be easier that way all around.”

  “Then that’s the way it’ll be.” He raised his hand and a plainclothesman came down the hall, handcuffed me to his wrist, and we left the rooming-house. A sizeable crowd had gathered on the sidewalk and they stared at us curiously as we came down the outside steps and entered the waiting police car. A uniformed policeman drove us to the city jail.

  At the desk I was treated impersonally by the booking sergeant. He filled in my name, address, age and height and then asked me to dump my stuff on the desk and remove my belt and shoelaces. There wasn’t much to put on the desk. A piece of string, a thin, empty wallet, a parking stub left over from the Continental Garage, a button and a dirty handkerchief were all I had to offer. I put them on the desk and removed my belt and shoelaces, added them to the little pile. The sergeant wrote my name on a large brown manila envelope and started to fill it with my possessions.

  “I’d like to keep the wallet, Sergeant,” I said. He went through it carefully. All it contained was a small snapshot of Helen taken when she was seven years old. The little snapshot showed a girl in a white dress and Mary Jane slippers standing in the sunlight in front of a concrete bird-bath. Her eyes were squinted against the sun and she stood pigeontoed, with her hands behind her back. Once in a while, I liked to look at it. The sergeant tossed me the wallet with the picture and I shoved it into my pocket.

  I was fingerprinted, pictures were taken of my face, profile and full-face, and then I was turned over to the jailer. He was quite old, and walked with an agonized limp. We entered the elevator, were whisked up several floors, and then he led me down a long corridor to the shower room.

  After I undressed and folded my clothes neatly on the wooden bench I got under the shower and adjusted the water as hot as I could stand it. The water felt wonderful. I let the needle streams beat into my upturned face. It sluiced down over my body, warming me through and through. I soaped myself roughly with the one-pound cake of dark-brown laundry soap, stood under the hot water again.

  I toweled myself with an olive drab towel and dressed in the blue pants and blue work shirt that were laid out on the bench. The trousers were too large around the waist and I had to hold them up with one hand. I followed Mr. Benson the jailer to the special block and he opened the steel door and locked it behind us. We walked down the narrow corridor to the last cell. He unlocked the door, pointed, and I entered. He clanged the door to, locked it with his key. As he turned to leave I hit him up for a smoke. He passed a cigarette through the bars, lighted it for me with his Zippo lighter.

  “I suppose you’ve had breakfast already,” he said gruffly. “No, but I’m not hungry anyway.”

  “You mean you couldn’t stand a cup of coffee?” “I suppose I could drink a cup of coffee all right.”

  “I’ll get you one then. No use playing coy with me. When you want something you gotta speak up. I ain’t no mind-reader.”

  He limped away and I could hear the slap-and-drag of his feet all the way down the corridor. While I waited for the coffee I investigated my cell. The walls were gray, freshly-painted, but the paint didn’t cover all of the obscene drawings and initials beneath the paint where former occupants had scratched their records. I read some of the inscriptions: FRISCO KID ’38, H. E., J. D., KILROY WAS HERE, Smoe, DENVER JACK, and others. Along the length of the entire wall, chest high, in two inch letters, someone had cut deeply into the plaster:

  UP YOUR RUSTY DUSTY WITH A FLOY FLOY

  This was very carefully carved. It must have Taken the prisoner a long time to complete it.

  A porcelain toilet, without a wooden seat, a washbowl with one spigot of cold water, and a tier of three steel beds with thin cotton pads for mattresses completed the inventory of the cell. No window. I unfastened the chains and let the bottom bunk down. I sat down on it and finished half my cigarette. Instead of throwing the butt away I put it into my shirt pocket. It was all I had. Presently, Mr. Benson came back with my coffee and passed the gray enameled cup through the bars.

  “I didn’t know whether you liked it with sugar and cream so I brought it black,” he said.

  “That’s fine.” I took the cup gratefully and sipped it. It was almost boiling hot and I had to let it cool some before I could finish it, but Mr. Benson waited patiently. When I passed him the empty cup he gave me a fresh sack of tobacco and a sheaf of brown cigarette papers.

  “Know how to roll ’em, Jordan?”

  “Sure. Thanks a lot.” I made a cigarette.

  “You get issued a sack every day, but no matches. If you want a light you gotta holler. Okay?”

  “Sure.” Mr. Benson lit my cigarette and limped away again down the hollow-sounding corridor. The heavy end door clanged and locked.

  The reaction set in quickly, the reaction to Helen’s death, my attempt at suicide, the effects of the liquor, all of it. It was the overall cumulation of events that hit me all at once. My knees, my legs, my entire body began to shake violently and I couldn’t control any part of it. The wet cigarette fell apart in my hand and I dropped to my knees in a praying position. I started to weep, at first soundlessly, then blubbering, the tears rolled down my cheeks, streamed onto my shirt. Perspiration poured from my body. I prayed:

  “Dear God up there! Put me through to Helen! I’m still here, baby! Do you hear me! Please hang on a little while and ‘wait for me! I’ll be with you as soon as they send me! I’m all alone now, and it’s hard, hard, hard! I’ll be with you soon, soon, soon! I love you! Do you you hear me, sweetheart? I love you! I LOVE YOU!”


  From one of the cells down the corridor a thick, gutteral voice answered mine: “And I love you, too!” The voice paused, added disgustedly: “Why don’t you take a goddam break for Christ’s sake!”

  I stopped praying, or talking to Helen, whatever I was doing, and stretched out full length on the concrete floor. I stretched my arms out in front of me and pressed my mouth against the cold floor. In that prone position I cried myself out, silently, and it took a long time. I didn’t try to pull myself together, because I knew that I would never cry again.

  Afterwards, I washed my face with the cold tap water at the washbowl and dried my wet face with my shirt tail. I sat down on the edge of my bunk and carefully tailored another cigarette. It was a good one, nice and fat and round. Getting to my feet I crossed to the barred door.

  “Hey! Mr. Benson!” I shouted. “How’s about a light?”

  FIFTEEN

  Confession

  LUNCH consisted of beef stew, rice, stewed apricots and coffee: After the delayed-action emotional ordeal I had undergone I was weak physically and I ate every scrap of food on my aluminum tray. With my stomach full, for the first time in weeks, I lay down on the bottom bunk, covered myself with the clean gray blanket and fell asleep immediately.

  Mr. Benson aroused me at four-thirty by rattling an empty cup along the bars of my cell. It was time to eat again. The supper was a light one; fried mush, molasses and coffee with a skimpy dessert of three stewed prunes. Again I cleaned the tray, surprised at my hunger. I felt rested, contented, better than I had felt in months. My headache had all but disappeared and the peaceful solitude of my cell was wonderful. Mr. Benson picked up the tray and gave me a book of paper matches before he left. He was tired of walking the length of the corridor to light my cigarettes. I lay on my back on the hard bunk and enjoyed my cigarette. After I stubbed it out on the floor I closed my eyes. When I opened them again it was morning and Mr. Benson was at the bars with my breakfast. Two pieces of bread, a thimble-sized paper cupful of strawberry jam and a cup of coffee.

  About an hour after breakfast the old jailer brought a razor and watched me shave with the cold water and the brown laundry soap. In another hour he brought my clothes to the cell. My corduroy slacks and jacket had been sponged and pressed and were fairly presentable.

  “Your shirt’s in the laundry,” he said, “but you can wear your tie with the blue shirt.”

  “Where am I going?” I asked as I changed clothes.

  “The D.A. wants to talk to you. Just leave them blue work pants on the bunk. You gotta change when you get back anyways.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. I tied my necktie as well as I could with-out a mirror, just as I had shaved without a mirror. I followed Mr. Benson’s limping drag down the corridor and this time I took an interest in the other prisoners in the special block, looking into each cell as I passed. There were eight cells, all of them along one side facing the passage wall, but only two others in addition to mine were occupied with prisoners. One held a sober-looking middle-aged man sitting on his bunk staring at his steepled fingers, and the other held a spiky-haired, blond youth with a broken nose and one cocked violet eye. He cocked it at me as I passed the cell and his sullen face was without expression. I quickly concluded that he was the one who had mocked me the day before and I had an over-whelming desire to kick his teeth in.

  A plainclothes detective, wearing his hat, met us at the end of the corridor, signed for me, cuffed me to his wrist and we walked down the hall to the elevator. We silently rode the elevator down to the third floor, got out, and walked down a carpeted hallway to a milk-glass door with a block-lettered inscription. Asst District Atty San Francisco. We entered the office and the detective removed the cuff and left the room. The office was small and shabbily furnished. There was a battered, oak desk, a shelf of heavy law books, four straight chairs and a row of hunting prints on the sepia-tinted wall across from the bookshelf. The prints were all of gentlewomen, sitting their horses impossibly and following hounds over a field-stone wall. All four prints were exactly the same. I sat down in one of the chairs and a moment later two men entered. The first through the door was a young man with a very white skin and a blue-black beard hovering close to the surface of his chin. It was the kind of beard that shows, because I could tell by the scraped skin on his jaws that he had shaved that morning. He wore a shiny, blue gabardine suit and oversized glasses with imitation tortoise-shell rims. Business-like, he sat behind the desk and studied some papers in a folder. The other man was quite old. He had lank white hair drooping down over his ears and there was a definite tremor in his long, talon-like fingers. His suit coat and trousers didn’t match and he carried a shorthand pad and several sharpened pencils. It seemed unusual to me that the city would employ such an old man as a stenographer. His white head nodded rapidly up and down and it never stopped its meaningless bobbing through out the interview, but his deepset eyes were bright and alert and without glasses.

  The younger man closed the folder and shoved it into the top drawer of his desk. His eyes fastened on mine and without taking them away he extracted a king-sized cigarette from the package on the desk, flipped the desk lighter and the flame found the end of the cigarette perfectly. He did this little business without looking away from my eyes at all. A movie gangster couldn’t have done it better. After three contemplative drags on the cigarette he crushed it out in the glass ash-tray, rested his elbows on the desk, cradled his square chin in his hands and leaned forward.

  “My name is Robert Seely.” His voice was deep and resonant with a lot of college speech training behind it. “I’m one of the assistant District Attorneys and your case has been assigned to me.” He hesitated, and for a moment I thought he was going to shake hands with me, but he didn’t make such an offer. He changed his steady gaze to the old man.

  “Are you ready, Timmy?”

  The old man, Timmy, held up his pencils and notebook in reply.

  “I want to ask you a few questions,” Robert Seely said. “Your name is . . . ?”

  “Harry Jordan.”

  “And your residence?”

  I gave him my roominghouse address.

  “Occupation?”

  “Art teacher.”

  “Place of employment?”

  “Unemployed.”

  “What was the name of the woman you murdered?”

  “Helen Meredith. Mrs. Helen Meredith.”

  “What was she doing in your room?”

  “She lived there . . . the past few weeks.”

  “Where is her husband, Mr. Meredith?”

  “I don’t know. She said something once about him living in San Diego, but she wasn’t sure of it.”

  “Did Mrs. Meredith have another address here in the city?”

  “No. Before she moved to San Francisco she lived with her mother in San Sienna. I don’t know that address either, but her mother’s name is Mrs. Mathews. I don’t know the first name.”

  “All right. Take one.” He pushed the package of cigarettes across the desk and I removed one and lighted it with the desk lighter. Mr. Seely held the open package out to the ancient stenographer.

  “How can I smoke and take this down too?” the old man squeaked peevishly.

  “Why did you kill Mrs. Meredith?” Mr. Seely asked me.

  “Well, I . . .” I hesitated.

  “Before we go any further, Jordan, I think I’d better tell you that anything you say may be held against you. Do you understand that?”

  “You should’ve told him that before,” the old man said sarcastically.

  “I’m handling this interview, Timmy,” Mr. Seely said coldly. “Your job is to take it down. Now, Jordan, are you aware that what you say may be held against you?”

  “Of course. I don’t care about that.”

  “Why, then, did you kill Mrs. Meredith?”

  “In a way, it’s a long story.”

  “Just tell it in your own words.”

  “Well, we’d
been drinking, and once before we’d tried suicide and it didn’t work so we went to the hospital and asked for psychiatric help.”

  “What hospital was that?”

  “Saint Paul’s. We stayed for a week, that is, Helen was in a week. I was only kept for three days.”

  “How did you attempt suicide?”

  “With a razor blade.” I held my arms over the desk, showing him the thin red scars on my wrists. “The psychiatric help we received was negligible. We started to drink as soon as we were released from the hospital. Anyway, I couldn’t work very well and drink too. The small amount of money I made wouldn’t stretch and I was despondent all the time.”

  “And was Mrs. Meredith despondent, too?”

  “She always took my moods as her own. If I was happy, she was happy. We were perfectly compatible in every respect—counterparts, rather. So that’s how I happened to kill her, you see. She knew all along I was going to kill myself sooner or later and she made me promise to kill her first. So I did. Afterwards I turned on the gas. The next thing I knew, Mrs. McQuade—that’s my landlady—was hollering and pounding on the door. My—Helen was dead and I wasn’t.” With food in my stomach and a good night’s sleep and a cigarette in my hand it was easy for me to talk about it.

  “I have your suicide note, Jordan, and I notice it’s written in charcoal. In the back of your mind, did you have an idea you could rub the charcoal away in case the suicide didn’t work? Why did you use charcoal?”

  “I didn’t have a pencil.”

  Timmy chuckled at my reply, avoided Mr. Seely’s icy stare and bent over his notebook.

  “Then the death of Mrs. Meredith was definitely premeditated?”

  “Yes, definitely. I plead guilty to everything, anything.”

  “Approximately what time was it when you choked her?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Somewhere between one and two a.m. Right afterwards I went out and got a pint of gin at the delicatessen down the street. It must have been before two or it wouldn’t have been open.”