I pulled up to the curb. Jim got out of his car and came quickly over to mine. He opened the door on Peggy’s side.
“What is it, Peggy?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Come here,” he said.
By the time I got out of the car, he’d led her to his Cadillac and tried to make her get in it.
“I don’t want to go!” I heard her say, her voice edging on hysteria again.
“Stop it, Peggy,” Jim said. “I just want to talk to you.”
Then she was in. And I came up to the car. I looked in and saw their dark forms. I heard Jim’s muffled voice.
Steig got out of the car and walked around to where I stood.
“This is private,” he said. Guttural. Thick German accent.
“Miss Lister is…” I started to say and found that one of his beefy hands had clamped on my arm. The strength of his grip pressed pain into the flesh.
“Let go of me,” I said, gasping.
“You go,” he said.
He started to lead me to my car. I couldn’t do a thing. He was too big, too strong.
“God damn you!” I said, suddenly raging. “Get your fat hand off me!”
I wanted to call for Peggy but I didn’t. She was in no state to come to my aid. Besides, I felt like a fool being led around like a baby this way. Struggling with teeth-gritting frustration. I was shoved against my car.
Steig stood by the door he had just slammed shut.
“You get out of here,” he said.
“Listen, you ignorant Kraut,” I said, more angry than sensible.
His face hardened, the pig eyes blazed at me. “You get out of here before I break your little neck with my hands.”
He glanced at the Cadillac. Then, under his breath, he said something that covered my flesh with ice water. “If you did not know Mr. Vaughan,” he said, “you would be dead. For snooping.”
I gaped at him, my hands shaking. I saw his brute white face in the light of a street lamp. And I was afraid. No one had ever threatened my life personally. And it comes as a shock to a man to suddenly learn that another individual wants to kill him.
“Get out,” Steig said.
My fingers shook as I slid the ignition key in. They shook on the gear shift. My legs trembled on the clutch and the accelerator. My heart pounded violently as I pulled up the street, afraid to look back.
I got out.
***
I jolted up on the bed with a gasp.
There was a dark figure standing over the bed.
My heart lurched. “No!” I gasped, throwing one arm up to ward off the expected blow.
“Davie, what is it?”
I fell back on the pillow, panting. My throat clicked. I lay there heaving with breaths.
“Davie?”
“You s-scared me,” I said. “I’m… I was dreaming.”
“Oh. I’m… sorry. It’s Albert,” she said quietly.
“What…?”
Then the light was on. She was over at the sink, back. She pressed a wet cloth on my skull. To my surprise I saw her wearing a different outfit. She had a dark pair of slacks on and a tight black turtleneck sweater. She’d taken a shower too. I could tell from the fresh smell of her, from the dampness on the lower part of her hair where it had come out of the shower cap. Her only makeup was a little lipstick.
She looked very calm.
“What about him?” I said.
“When I went in the house tonight,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I… I went to brush my teeth and I met Albert in the hall.”
She paused.
“Well…?” I asked.
“His face was all scraped off,” she said.
“Albert,” I said.
She turned the cloth over with her gentle, unshaking fingers.
“What did you do?” I asked. I wanted to tell her what Steig had said to me but I couldn’t get to it. Things were happening that fast.
She stroked my hair gently. “I left,” she said.
“You took a shower first?”
“No,” she said, “I took that before. It was after the shower that I met Albert in the hall.”
“You came right here?”
“I stopped to call Jim.”
“He didn’t stay with you?” I asked, inanely.
She looked slightly surprised. “Of course he didn’t,” she said, “he just wanted to find out what had happened tonight. He said you called him.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought maybe you were at his house. I thought maybe it was Steig who had…”
***
We drove back to her place in the morning.
“Well, I’ll just tell Jim,” she was saying. “He’ll get rid of Steig if I tell him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course, Davie,” she said, “you’re his friend, aren’t you?”
“I doubt it.”
“Davie.”
Then I said, “I still think you should move out today. Stay with me one more night. But, my God, don’t spend another night there with Albert.”
“I won’t,” she said.
She shook her head then. And her throat moved nervously.
“We’ll just pick up your things,” I said, “You don’t even have to go in the house.”
As we drove up to the house and I parked behind the Dodge, Peggy’s face got suddenly pale.
“Baby, it’s all right,” I said.
I got out. She got out too.
“Baby, stay here,” I said. “You don’t have to go in.”
“No,” she said, “I’ll come in.”
“Well… all right.”
We went up the walk together. I felt in myself that if Albert were there and he said a word to me, I’d knock him down and step on his face. The victimizing by Steig the night before had given me a tight, vicious temper.
The front door was open. We went into the living room.
“Is Mrs. Grady home?” I whispered.
“I guess so,” she said.
We went into the hall. She went into her room and I followed. Then as she turned to close the door I heard her voice sink to a whisper.
“Davie…”
I looked in the direction she was looking. Down at where Albert’s room was. My heart jumped.
There was a body sprawled on the floor.
I broke into a run and pushed open the half-open door. I heard Peggy behind me.
Mrs. Grady was crumpled on the floor. Her white face was pointed at the ceiling. In her right hand she clutched something. I couldn’t see what it was but the tip was red…
Then my eyes moved suddenly to the bed.
Albert was there. He was staring at us, his eyes were wide open.
Albert was no more. And that was when I recognized the instrument in Mrs. Grady’s hand.
An icepick.
It had been driven into Albert’s brain.
CHAPTER THREE
Lieutenant Jones, Homicide, was a broad man with horn-rimmed glasses. His mood was surly.
Mrs. Grady was giving her version of what had happened.
“I went in to call him for breakfast,” she said. “I found him in there with that—that thing in his…”
“Why did you take it out?”
She shook her head. Then suddenly she twisted her head and pointed a shaky finger at Peggy.
“She did it!” she said wildly. “I know it, I know she did it!”
I sat beside Peggy on the big flowered couch, afraid to look at her.
“That will do,” Jones said.
“Do! My husband is dead. He’s killed! Do you understand that? Are you going to let her get away with it?”
“I know he was killed, Mrs. Grady,” Jones said. “We’re trying to find out who did it as soon as possible. If you’ll just help us and not throw around accusations.”
I sat there numbly staring at him. Listening to the murmur of voices i
n Albert’s room, the muffled pop of flash bulbs, the shuffling of feet.
I kept visualizing Albert lying in there, the icepick hole in his head—and the other. It was almost unbearable to think about the other. Whoever had driven the icepick into Albert’s brain had also taken Albert’s straight razor and made an enormous bloody slit around Albert’s neck. It was long, nearly the whole circumference of the neck. And it was deep. It was almost as if…
As if… and I wanted to be sick.
“Miss Lister?” Jones said.
“Y-yes?”
“You were out last night?”
“Yes.”
“What’s that you said about having trouble with him?”
The way he spoke made me start. As if he were trying to rip away all incidentals and get to the core of everything.
“He was…” Peggy started. She lowered her eyes. “He…”
“Albert tried to rape her last night,” I said.
“Lies, lies!” cried Mrs. Grady. “He was a dear, clean man, a dear, clean man.”
“You’ll have to stop this,” Jones said to her, “or I’ll have to ask you to leave this room.”
She slumped back in silence again, blubbering helplessly, her toothpick shoulders twitching with violent sobs.
I was sitting there, suddenly wishing I’d kept my mouth shut. Because all I could think was that I’d given Peggy a perfect motive. Like a fool I’d practically accused her.
Jones looked at Peggy.
“Is this true?” he said.
She tried to answer but couldn’t. She nodded her head once, jerkily.
Jones looked back at me. “Well,” he said, “what about it?”
I told him about the scrapes on Albert’s face. I told him about Funland and the attack on me and Peggy. My words were punctuated by moans and muffled denials from Mrs. Grady. I didn’t know whether she really doubted me or not. After all, I kept thinking, the icepick had been in her hand. And she certainly had a motive.
“Did you see him?” Jones asked.
“You mean last night?”
“I mean last night.”
“No, I…”
“Why not?”
“It was pitch black.”
“I see,” Jones said. But he really said, in effect, thirty days, next case. It occurred to me that he might even think I did it. The jealous lover. I lowered my eyes.
Jones worked on Peggy again. “You two were together then?” he said.
She swallowed. “Yes.”
“And you went to…” Jones consulted the pad in his hand, “to Newton’s apartment later.”
Peggy looked flustered. “I…”
“What time did you go there?”
“She came to my room about…” I started.
“Will you kindly let Miss…” He consulted the pad again. “Miss Lister answer her own questions?”
“About two,” Peggy said.
“Why did you go there?” Jones asked.
“Because I saw the scrapes on Albert’s face. I didn’t want to…”
“Lies… lies!” Mrs. Grady again. “Murderess!”
Her voice broke off with a choking gasp as two men carried a stretcher into the room, a blanketed body on it.
“Couldn’t you go the back way?” Jones asked sharply.
“Alley’s too narrow,” said a bored cop.
Mrs. Grady was up. Her face was strained and wild.
“I’m going with him,” she said. “I’m going with my darling.”
“That won’t do any good,” Jones said quietly.
“I’m going, I tell you.” Her voice was cracked, her eyes almost glittered.
Jones let her go. He said a few words to one of the cops. While he was talking, I turned to Peggy. “Don’t tell him how you feel about men,” I whispered.
“What?”
I glanced at Jones. “I said,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth, “don’t tell this man how you feel about men. It would only…”
She was looking at me curiously.
“What were you saying to her?” Jones asked me.
“Nothing,” I said instinctively.
Jones looked at me coldly. “No talking,” he said. Then he sat down as the door shut behind Mrs. Grady and her dead husband.
“How sure are you that the dead man is the one who tried to rape you?” Jones asked Peggy.
“I know how I scratched the face of the man who… And Albert had scratches all over his face too. You saw him…”
“I know,” Jones said. “Did you see anyone else last night?”
“My… lawyer,” Peggy said.
“When?”
“When… when we came home from Venice.”
“You told him about the attack?”
“Yes.”
“Did you suspect the dead man of being the one who had attacked you at the time you were speaking to your lawyer?”
“Not then. I told him later that it was Mr. Grady who had done it.”
“You saw him later?”
“I called him before I went to… to Mr. Newton’s room.” Her eyes were lowered in embarrassment.
Mr. Newton, I thought. Murder, the strange impersonalizer.
Then the doorbell rang. Jones got up and opened it.
Jim. He came in and talked to Jones for a few minutes, and then Peggy went to the station with Jones and Jim. I wasn’t invited. As they got into the police car, Jim told Steig to follow them. I felt a tremor in my stomach as the big German eyed me before getting in the Cadillac. I tried to imagine him with an icepick in one hand and a razor in the other.
It was easy.
I tried to catch Peggy’s eye as the police car moved away from the curb. But she avoided my look. I guessed because I’d as much as told her I suspected her.
I watched the two cars go down the street. And I felt sick and empty.
That afternoon, back at my room, I was trying to nap when I heard footsteps on the porch and, looking out the window, saw that it was Jim.
“Come in,” I said when he knocked. He came in and the first thing I asked him was how Peggy was.
“As well as can be expected,” he said, always cryptic.
“What the hell does that mean?”
He took his hat off and looked at me dispassionately.
“If you’re going to tell me that Peggy killed Albert, save your breath. I know she didn’t,” I said.
“And how do you know?”
“I… I know.”
“Hardly a legal defense, David,” he said. “You always did talk before thinking.”
“And you,” I said, “always did destroy what stood in your way.”
A flicker. Gone then. He sighed.
“What’s the use?” he said. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and drew out a rich leather billfold.
He was holding something out to me.
“Well, take it,” he said. He paused for effect. “Are you afraid?”
I reached out a visibly shaking hand and took it. Thinking, imagining… refusing to accept.
“No,” I muttered.
“Read it.”
The clipping was five years old. San Francisco dateline. Picture of a man I’d never seen. And next to him a picture of Peggy.
The headline:
G.I. Student Stabbed
Pregnant Wife Confesses
I sat slumped on the bed staring at the floor. The clipping still hung from my nerveless fingers. Jim still sat in the chair looking at me. His expression was vaguely sympathetic now. He’d made his point. He didn’t have to belabor any more.
“I met Peggy’s father when I was in the Navy during the war,” Jim said. “I was his aide for about a year while he served on the court martial board.
“When the war was over he invited me to his home several times for dinner. That was before I went home to Missouri. I stayed on the coast about three months after I was discharged.
“Lister wasn’t trying to be social. He was trying to make me
join the regular Navy, it turned out. It was at the captain’s house that I first met Peggy.”
He paused and I heard him clear his throat in the silence of the room. I lay there, still apathetic.
“There was no particular attraction,” Jim said, “and when I went back to Missouri, I forgot about her and her about me. She married George.”
Was that bitterness in his voice? I couldn’t be certain. I didn’t explore.
“It was what you might call a shotgun wedding,” Jim said, and that was bitterness in his voice. “Peggy was forced into it by her father. She’d stayed out late one night and Captain Lister accused her of being intimate with George. He said his name was in disgrace. And poor Peggy, too naive to know any better, too shy to argue, married George.”
He smiled without pleasure. I guess he was showing me a little more of his feelings because he figured that his battle had been won.
“George didn’t mind,” he said. “It was all right with him. And maybe Peggy didn’t mind at first either. She hated her father. She still does. I don’t even know all the reasons. They stretch back through the years. At any rate all she thought of at first was leaving her home and how glad she was to do it. Leave the tyranny of her father’s control. If he was anything at home like the unfeeling flint he was on the court martial board, Peggy’s life with him must have been intolerable. Then I saw her one day years later. I’d set up an office in San Francisco. And one day Peggy came in.”
He drew a deep breath.
“I didn’t recognize her, David,” he said. “She was almost… gaunt. Her face was lined. There were dark hollows around her eyes. She looked as though she’d been violently ill for years.”
He paused.
“She had been,” he said. “She’d been married to George.”
I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him. He was looking at the wall, hands still clasped in his lap.
“I won’t go into details,” he said. “Her problems were partly sexual, of course.”
His voice became contemptuous.
“Her husband was completely indifferent to Peggy’s timorousness, her hypersensitive system. And it was killing her. In addition to the fact that her husband was going to college on the G.I. Bill and they were just about living on that income alone. It was actually poverty. And to a girl like Peggy, who’d had every material advantage anyway, this was an even greater torture.”
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