The Cry of the Owl

by Patricia Highsmith

“Oh, just curious, Wyncoop. We have to fill in the story.” The plainclothesman smiled in a nasty way.

  Nobody was even writing anything down now, Greg saw. They were just baiting him. Then Greg saw three men come in the door, two policemen and one man in ordinary clothes, but with the swaggering walk of a cop. He was a short man in a gray suit with a gray hat on the back of his head. They greeted him as Lippy. So this was Lippenholtz. Now Greg remembered reading his name in the newspapers. He was a detective. The plainclothesman who had questioned Greg was talking in low tones to Lippenholtz, and Lippenholtz was looking at Greg, nodding, as he listened.

  “Yeah, I just left Forester,” Lippenholtz said, and he chuckled. “Forester’s neighbors …”

  The rest trailed off to Greg. Then Lippenholtz said, “Oh? That’s interesting. The ex-Mrs. Forester.”

  “We just tried to get her on the phone. She doesn’t answer.”

  At a signal from Lippenholtz, one of the policemen who had come in with him came over to Greg and pulled some handcuffs out of his pocket.

  “You won’t need those for me,” Greg said, standing up, willing to leave.

  “Let’s have your wrist,” answered the cop.

  The handcuff was clicked onto Greg’s right wrist, and the other on the cop’s left wrist.

  Then there was a long, dark ride to Rittersville. Only twelve miles, Greg knew, but it seemed twice that. The policemen and Lippenholtz were chatting about a ball game somewhere, ignoring him completely. In the Rittersville station, a gloomier, older building than the one in Langley, Greg had the same routine questions put to him. He had expected to see Forester in the station, and was rather relieved that he wasn’t there. Greg was asked again if he had fired the shots into Forester’s house, and Lippenholtz had the dates. Greg said yes to all his questions.

  “What am I guilty of?” Greg said. “Why’re you treating me like this?” He was still handcuffed, seated, with the cop standing beside him.

  Smoke burst out of Lippenholtz’s mouth as he laughed. “Assault and battery, aggravated assault and battery, and murder, if that doctor dies.”

  “Murder? Manslaughter, maybe,” Greg said.

  “Murder. You were trying to hit Forester and you hit someone else who might die. That’s murder, Wyncoop.”

  Greg’s stomach fluttered. “He’s not dead yet.”

  “No, not yet.”

  “He’s not dying from my bullet,” Greg said. “I read the papers. He’s dying from a concussion.”

  “Yeah, he slipped and fell,” said Lippenholtz with disgust. “So when you went to New York, what did you do?”

  “I took a hotel room.”

  “Where?”

  “The Sussex Arms.”

  “Check,” said Lippenholtz, referring to a tablet. “From the seventeenth to the twentieth of May. I understand you received money and—moral support from the ex-Mrs. Forester.”

  “That’s right,” Greg said.

  “Let’s have her phone number.”

  “I don’t know why you have to bother her. She didn’t do anything.”

  Lippenholtz only gave him a bored smile. One of the policemen laughed. There were five or six policemen standing around, listening. “Let’s have the number,” Lippenholtz said.

  Greg gave it.

  This time there was an answer. Lippenholtz took the telephone. “Oh, Mr. Jurgen? Could I speak to your wife, please? This is First Precinct in Rittersville calling. … But it’s quite important. … Yes. Thanks.” He looked at Greg with a confident smile now.

  Greg pulled the policeman’s wrist forward as he reached for another cigarette. He was out of cigarettes, but one of the cops had put a nearly empty pack of Luckies by him on the table.

  “Hello, Mrs. Jurgen. Detective Lippenholtz speaking. We’ve just found Gregory Wyncoop. … Yes. … Well, he was getting on a bus in Langley just a few minutes ago, so he’s far from dead, Mrs. Jurgen,” Lippenholtz said with a smile and a wink at one of the listening officers. “Why? Because he says he’s a friend of yours or you’re a friend of his.” Then, as he listened, Lippenholtz moved the earpiece a little away from his ear.

  Greg could hear her voice from where he sat, but not what she was saying. Lippenholtz shook his head and smiled at his pals as he listened.

  “I see. But is it true that you gave him some money while he was in New York? … Hm-m. Gave it or lent it? … I see. … Well—” He was interrupted. “I don’t know about that, Mrs. Jurgen. I hope you won’t,” pleasantly. “Mrs. Jurgen, you’ll have a chance to—” Lippenholtz looked over at a cop, shook his head, and sighed. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Boy, this woman can talk.” Then he said into the telephone, “Mrs. Jurgen, that’s all very interesting, but we have specific legal problems here to deal with. It might be better if you came down to Rittersville and—All right, we’ll just have to come to you. … No, I can’t, but it’ll be soon. … It won’t be forgotten, I can assure you. Goodbye, Mrs. Jurgen.” Lippenholtz put the telephone down and looked at Greg. “Some friend you’ve got there, Wyncoop.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She says she gave you money because you were broke, but on condition that you’d go right back to Pennsylvania and tell the police you were still alive.”

  Greg sat forward. “The hell she did! She wanted me to stay on in New York. She’s—she’s scared or something, or she never would’ve said anything like that.”

  “Yeah, you’re damned right she’s scared. She’s aided and abetted—Ah, the hell with it. Well, Wyncoop, I think this time I’m really going to believe you. But she says she’s no friend of yours and she wanted you to go back home.”

  “Hah!” Greg swung his left arm up and his cigarette flew from between his fingers. “She wanted me to stay on indefinitely in New York. But Forester came up to see her and said he thought Nickie knew where I was, so she told me to get out of New York and she gave me some more money.”

  “Hm-m. Not quite the way she told it. She said you were a bum, a beatnik—”

  “Oh, yeah? She slept with me,” Greg said. “Twice.”

  “Oh, she did? That’s interesting. Maybe. But irrelevant.” Lippenholtz strolled toward him, his hands in his back pockets under his jacket. “What’s your relationship with Mr. Jurgen? Another friend of yours?”

  “Yes,” Greg said firmly.

  “Likes you sleeping with his wife, eh?”

  Greg took a second or two, trying to think of an answer, and Lippenholtz turned away from him and started talking to another plainclothesman. Greg was pulled to his feet. They were talking about locking him up for the night. He was allowed to make one telephone call, and Greg thought of calling Nickie, then decided he’d call his parents. He’d ask them to get some bail together.

  Twenty minutes later, Greg was lying face down on a narrow, firm bed in a cell. He was alone. It was dark, except for a slanting triangle of light that came from down the hall, outside the barred door. From a nearby cell, maybe the cell next to his, there was a loud snoring, like the snoring of a drunk. Greg pressed his face into the rough blanket, and the conversation he had just had with his parents repeated itself in his ears. How could you? … Why, Greg? His mother’s shrill voice, after her near scream of relief at hearing his voice, after her questions, “You’re all right, dear? You’re not hurt?” How could you? … Why, Greg? As if he could explain why over the telephone with half a dozen cops standing around listening. They hadn’t even let him use the booth in the station. He’d had to use the telephone on the main desk, which Lippenholtz had talked to Nickie on. I’ve got friends, Ma, will you stop worrying? Greg had shouted back, and the cops had all laughed. I had amnesia! Then his father, in that stunned, formal tone Greg knew so well, that his father always used when he was mad as hell about something, before the leather strop had come out when Greg was a kid and his father’s teeth had bared in fury at him, I’ll see you as soon as possible, Greg. His father was in that kind of mood, but he was going to get
the money together. His father was going to find out how much bail he needed and get it together right away, even tonight, if he could, and he would, Greg thought, because his father thought it was the utmost disgrace to be locked up in jail. Greg writhed, his teeth against the blanket. His boss, Alex, was going to act like a sell-righteous holier than thou, too, Greg supposed. Let them rail at him, let them lecture, what did he care? He hadn’t done anything wrong enough to be clapped in jail for. It was ridiculous. If he was so God-damned much to blame, then so was Nickie. He wasn’t exactly alone in it. Nickie would help him. Nickie liked him, liked him a lot. Greg was sure of that.

  There were footsteps coming along the hall. Some damned guard, Greg supposed. Or maybe his father had done something already about getting him out. How much time had passed? He stuck his left hand into the slant of light. It was only ten of one by his watch.

  “Just talked to Mrs. Jurgen again,” said Lippenholtz. “Your friend. I told her you said you’d had an affair with her. Boy, she wasn’t very pleased about that.”

  “No? I suppose she denied it?”

  “Um-hm, and she’s plenty mad at you for saying it. I just came by to tell you she’s coming down to see you.”

  Greg looked at him. “When? Tonight?”

  “Yep. That’s how mad she is. I told her you couldn’t have any visitors tonight, but that didn’t stop her. I called her to tell her we’d be sending somebody to talk to her early in the morning, but she said, ‘I doubt if I’ll be here, so save your energy,’ or something like that, so I told her, ‘Thanks, it’ll save us going up there.’ Sleep well, Wyncoop.” Lippenholtz walked away.

  Greg set his teeth, imagining Nickie’s voice in the front room of the station, demanding to see him—and they wouldn’t let her, of course. She’d have to wait until six or seven or eight in the morning, or whenever his father got the bail money, to talk to him. Then, at least, they could talk in private. He definitely didn’t want to talk to her here in the police station, where a dozen cops were all ears every minute. He pulled off his tie, let it drop on the floor, and tried to relax. Then the thought of Forester hit him like a bomb. He had thought of Forester almost at once, as soon as they picked him up at the bus station, but now, in the darkness of the cell, the thought was worse and made him turn and twist on the hard bed. Forester must know this minute that he was in jail in Rittersville. Forester must be gloating.

  But he’d slept with Nickie twice—yes, twice—and nobody could deny that. Even Ralph knew it, or at least suspected it. Twice, and Nickie would have come to see him a lot more times if he’d been able to stay on in New York. He had a triumphant instant, thinking of that. But the feeling left him at once. He had to prepare himself, prepare his case. He’d say he’d been out of his mind for a day or so. Then when he realized what he’d done, made Forester look like a murderer, he’d been a little afraid to come back. He’d decided to play it for all it was worth. Nickie would certainly have to back him up in that, say she tried to help him and had. Forester not only deserved to be called a murderer, he had actually murdered a man, Nickie said, on one of their hunting trips. A man had come up to their camp and threatened to haul them in for shooting too many deer, and Forester had bashed his head in with the butt of his rifle, and then had buried him in the woods. Nickie had been weeping with emotion when she told him that story, and she said she had never had the courage to tell it to anyone before, because Forester had threatened to kill her if she did. Greg wondered if he should bring that murder up to the police? The trouble was, Greg wasn’t quite sure Nickie was telling the truth, and an untrue story against Forester might do Greg more harm than good.

  25

  Nickie didn’t show up. Greg’s father came at six-thirty in the morning, and he had a certificate or a check that was good for Greg’s twenty-thousand-dollar bail, and he had also brought a green-and-black woolen shirt, an old one of Greg’s his mother had found at home, his father said, and a clean pair of old tan work pants that were too big for him, but Greg was glad to have them, and went back to his cell to change into them. Lippenholtz wasn’t at the station. Things went a little easier.

  His father was stonily silent, even when he and Greg were alone outside the station on the sidewalk. There was a Sunday-morning deadness about the street, as if all the human race had been killed off—except for the police in the station, of course. His father couldn’t remember at first where he had parked his car. Then when they finally got into his father’s old two-door black Chevy and his father had driven about a block, he said, “Where did you want to go, Greg?”

  “Home,” Greg said. “Good God, home.”

  “To our place?”

  “Home. Humbert Corners, Pop. Gee, I’m sorry,” impatiently. “I thought you knew. Naturally I want to get home.”

  Silence for a few seconds, then his father said, “You haven’t been so anxious to get home for the last two weeks, so how do you expect me to know?”

  “Listen, Pop, don’t you start it. Just please, eh? All right?”

  “Do you know what I’ve been through tonight to raise your bail money?” his father said, glancing at him as he drove. “Do you know I couldn’t have done it if a lawyer friend of a friend of mine hadn’t happened to know the judge up here? It’s absolutely contrary to judicial procedure, the judge said. There’re supposed to be five persons present, the district attorney, the prosecutor—”

  “Oh, Pop, you got it anyway. I don’t want to hear all that.”

  “You may not, but I think you should. All the trouble I had tonight putting up every asset I possess just so you wouldn’t have to spend a night in jail!”

  The tremor in his father’s voice startled Greg into silence. A night in jail was like a blot on the whole family history, Greg knew. Greg had an older brother, Bernie, who had disappointed his parents by failing in one job after another, by never marrying, and by finally becoming an alcoholic. He was in San Diego, doing what, nobody knew, and he might as well have been dead. His parents had crossed him off, and had fixed their hopes on him, Greg. It was too much of a burden to put on anybody, Greg thought. It made them intolerant of mistakes, any mistakes he might make.

  “And the bail would’ve been five times this, if that doctor were dead,” his father added. “I hear there’s a good chance he will die.”

  “All right, Pop, he—”

  “I can’t understand you, Greg. Neither your mother nor I. We can’t understand you.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you!” Greg shouted. “He killed my girl. Understand? He tried to kill me. He’s a crackpot. He’s—”

  “Who?”

  “Who? Forester! Robert Forester! For Christ’s sake, Pop, do you think I’m off my head or something?”

  “All right, all right. I thought you meant Forester,” said his father nervously, and Greg looked at him.

  He was shorter than Greg by about six inches, and though only in his mid-fifties, he looked ten years older. His tense face, his hunched shoulders as he drove, showed the strain he had been under. And lately he was suffering from some kidney ailment, backaches. Greg started to ask him how his back was, and didn’t. He seemed to have more gray hair at his temples. Already, he had started working part-time, and Greg knew his father had accepted the fact that he was going quickly into old age. His father was district supervisor for a warehouse-and-storage company.

  “You turn left here,” Greg said. They were taking the shortest way to Humbert Corners.

  “Forester tried to kill you? At the river, you mean?” asked his father.

  “Yes. You’re damned right,” Greg said, and lit the last cigarette from the package of Luckies. “Knocked me into the river and left me. I barely made it out. Oh, I told all that to the police,” Greg said, bored with the story, and yet he could feel now that he believed it. He felt he could stand up under any kind of questions, torture even, and stick to that story.

  “So it’s not true that he pulled you out. That’s what the paper said.”


  Greg laughed. “The paper said? That’s what Forester said. Of course he didn’t pull me out. Pop, I met his ex-wife in New York.”

  Then Greg told his father about Forester’s ex-wife, how kind she was, how intelligent and attractive, and how she’d warned him against Forester, how she’d lent him money so that he could hide out, because that was the only way to get Forester—“by drawing people’s attention to him” was Greg’s phrase—since he was the kind of psychopath who didn’t do anything you could actually nail him for, just messed up other people’s lives, as Nickie said. “Witness Jenny’s suicide, Pop. Jesus!”

  “Seems to me,” said his father, “if he deliberately tried to knock you in the river—”

  “He did.”

  “—did knock you in the river with the idea of drowning you, you could just have gone to the police when you climbed out and told them.”

  “The police don’t necessarily believe you, Pop. And I—sure, I went after him that night. I admitted that. I wanted to beat him up. A fair fistfight, you know, man to man. Forester picked up a piece of wood and let me have it over the head. He was trying to shove me in the river the whole time. And once he had me in and he thought I was going to drown, he beat it.”

  “How long were you in?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe just five minutes. When I climbed out and got back on the road, I was still dazed. That’s why I left my car. I don’t even remember seeing my car.” Greg talked on, about his sensations of amnesia, about aiming for New York because that was where Forester’s ex-wife was, and she had been friendly to him over the telephone when he’d called her and told her about Forester stepping in and taking Jenny away from him. Then Greg told his father about the prowling episodes at Jenny’s house, and how Forester had admitted he had prowled around the house. Jenny had said it to Susie Escham.

  His father clicked his tongue and shook his head. “I don’t say Forester was in the right,” his father said, and here Greg interrupted him, because they were at Humbert Corners, and his father had to make a turn. His father had been to his place once or twice, but he didn’t know the way, at least not this morning.