Seducer

by Flora, Fletcher

  Turning away from the door, wondering where he could safely wait without being detected, he reached back at the last instant, as an afterthought, and tried the knob. It turned in his hand, the door swinging inward into the room, and he had in an instant an exorbitant feeling of exhilaration, the unlocked door being a sign that everything might, after all, go right instead of wrong.

  But it was only a cruel deception, for terror was waiting for him in the stale litter beyond the door. A light was burning in the ceiling of the kitchen, and Maggie lay on the floor and stared up at the light with blind eyes.

  Her head was askew, her throat bruised and her open eyes and mouth gave to her face an expression of childish wonder, as if she had been entranced in the end by the incredible prospect of death. She looked for all the world like a bit of her own litter, dropped casually and left lying.

  Fixed for most of a minute in a catalepsy of terror, Brad turned at last with a shrill whimper and ran into the hall and downstairs and out onto the street.

  From the dark recess of a doorway across the street, Buddy had seen him come and now saw him go.

  19

  BUDDY HAD LINGERED in the neighborhood at his own peril for no reason except a reluctance to leave Maggie alone. She actually was alone, of course, in her apartment, or wherever beyond the apartment she may have gone, but the aloneness was somehow alleviated in his mind by his presence across the street.

  He felt terribly sorry for her because she was dead, and terribly sorry for himself because he had killed her and would have to live all his life without her. After standing for quite a long time in the dark recess of the doorway, he began to wish that he had taken time after killing her to pick her up and lay her decently on the bed. He regretted sincerely his failure to perform this last small service for her, and he had decided to return and perform it yet, in spite of all hazards, when he saw Bradley Cannon approach the entrance to the building and enter.

  He remained where he was, in the dark doorway, and now in his mind with the dull pain and loneliness there was a new element of slyness, the hard bright malice of a grand idea born whole. He waited until after Brad came running out of the building, which was only a short while longer, and then he left the doorway and walked off down the street until he came, several blocks along, to a service station with a public phone booth.

  In the booth, Buddy sorted the coins from a pocket and found a dime. Dropping the dime in the phone and making his connection, he dialed operator and asked for the police. When his call was answered by a policeman on desk duty, he gave the name of Maggie’s apartment house and the number of her apartment. The police should go there at once, he said, if they wanted to find something that would interest them. When the policeman asked him who was calling, he hung up.

  He had been feeling at an utter loss, with absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to go for any good reason, but now he had started something that needed doing and ending, and it gave him a purpose that would last for a day or two at least, and he felt a little better.

  Leaving the phone booth with a new decisiveness, knowing exactly what he would do and how he would do it, he walked back to the old residence near the college campus where he had a single room at the rear of the second floor. In his room, he undressed in the dark and lay down on the bed.

  He could not sleep, lying on his back and hardly moving as the night passed, but his mind had secured a kind of rest in the birth and beginning of his plan, and finally he did sleep after all, when the night was almost gone, and did not waken until after noon.

  There were still several hours of waiting to be survived, for he could do nothing until the daily newspaper was on the streets, and this would be late in the afternoon, about four o’clock. He remained in his room until almost that time, sustaining his peace in his new purpose. Then he dressed and walked downtown and bought a newspaper. The story of Maggie’s murder was on the front page, and he folded the paper without reading the story and carried it in his hand to police headquarters in City Hall.

  The policeman at the desk asked him what he wanted, and he laid the newspaper on the desk in front of the policeman and said that he wanted to see someone about the murder of Maggie McCall. The policeman glanced down at the newspaper and up at Buddy. It was evident that he was thinking wearily that he had some kind of nut on his hands.

  “What’s on your mind, sonny? You want to confess?”

  “No. I want to tell someone about something I saw,” Buddy said.

  “Saw? Saw where? Saw when?”

  “Last night out at the apartment house where Maggie lived.”

  “You talk like she was an old friend. First name stuff. You know this Maggie McCall personally?”

  “She was my girl once, but she threw me over.”

  “Yes? Jealousy’s a good motive. Were you jealous, sonny? Is that why you killed her?”

  “I didn’t kill her. I only want to tell who I think did.”

  “Go ahead and tell. I’m listening.”

  “Are you in charge of the case?” Buddy queried.

  “No, but I’ve got ears,” the policeman replied.

  “I want to talk to whoever’s in charge.”

  The policeman looked him over and shrugged. Maybe a nut, maybe not. You couldn’t always tell.

  “You want Trajan,” he said. “Wait here while I see.”

  He went out of the room and was gone no more than a couple of minutes. Returning, he resumed his position at the desk.

  “Down the hall,” he said. “First door on the left. You better have something for real if you don’t want to be skinned alive.”

  Buddy picked up his newspaper and went down the hall to the first door on the left. He found Trajan inside with his fat tail hooked over the corner of his desk. He looked sick and sour and mean, and he was all these.

  He had been jerked off the Cannon case by the chief and put on the McCall business, clearly nothing but a sordid little crime of passion, probably committed by some crazy kid, and he resented it bitterly. In his mind, it was just a trick to get the Cannon case shelved.

  “What’s your name, sonny?” he said.

  “Buddy Jensen.”

  “The policeman outside says you claim to know something about this girl who got killed last night. Let’s hear it. Sit down if you want to.”

  Buddy sat down in a high-backed straight chair and covered each knee with a hand. Tousled and not too clean, he had a strained and awkward appearance suggesting a reluctant commitment to an unpleasant duty that he would have preferred to avoid. He even managed to suggest a kind of qualified innocence.

  “Well,” he said, “I’d better tell you first of all that Maggie and I used to be good friends. I was in love with her, to tell the truth, and I thought she was in love with me, but I guess she wasn’t. Anyhow, she got to know this man who was quite a bit older, and she threw me over and started going around with him secretly, even though he was married. She simply wouldn’t listen to me any more, or even see me if she could avoid it.

  “I know it was crazy, but I couldn’t stand never seeing her, or hardly ever, and I started going out to where she lived and standing around across the street just in hopes of seeing her for a minute from a distance when she came or left.

  “That’s how I happened to be there last night, about the time the paper says she was killed, when this man she was going around with came and then left in a hurry a little later. A funny thing about it is, this man’s wife was killed only last month.”

  Trajan had been staring sourly into a corner of the room, his position and attitude an expression of disgust and boredom. Now, in an instant, without moving in the slightest, he was wholly alert and intently listening in utter silence to a voice that only he could hear.

  “What man?” he said.

  “His name is Cannon. He’s a professor at the college.”

  For a long, long minute Trajan was silent again, listening to his voice. Then he slipped off the desk and belched and rubbed his bel
ly. On his face, despite the sour gas, there was an expression of religious exaltation.

  “By God, I’ve got him!” he whispered. “I’ve got the son of a bitch good!”

  20

  AT FIRST Brad had been angry, and then he had been frightened, but now, near the end of the exhausting ordeal of evasions and lies and damning admissions, he was only very tired.

  “All right.” He drew a hand across his forehead, pressing hard against the dull pain above his eyes. “I went there, to the apartment, but I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I arrived. She was lying on the floor, and I could see immediately that she was dead.”

  “Sure.” Trajan’s voice came from shadows beyond the perimeter of focused light. “She was lying on the floor, and she looked dead. So you just turned and left. You didn’t call a doctor. You didn’t call the police. You didn’t do anything an innocent man would have done. You just turned and left.”

  “I was frightened. I’ve told you that. I could think of nothing but getting away as quickly as possible.”

  “Why did you go there in the first place?”

  “I wanted to talk with Maggie. Miss McCall.”

  “Did you go there often?”

  “No. It was only the second time.”

  “But you saw Miss McCall often. Isn’t that true?”

  “I suppose so. Fairly often.”

  “You were having an affair. Isn’t it true that you were having an affair even before the death of your wife? Don’t try to lie. We have the evidence.”

  “It’s true. We were going to be married after a while.”

  “Is that why you killed your wife? So you could marry Maggie McCall?”

  “I didn’t kill my wife.”

  “So you didn’t. You were somewhere else when it happened. What you did was hire someone to kill her.”

  “No. That’s not true. I hired no one.”

  Trajan’s bulk shifted in the shadows. His voice was assured and soft and almost gentle, the harsh dyspeptic hatred apparently having diminished or drained away in its hour of triumph.

  “Well, Dr. Cannon, no matter. No matter at all. You killed Maggie McCall, and that’s enough. You were seen entering the building at the time of the murder, and you were seen running away. We have the witness, and we have you, and motives are a dime a dozen in a mess like this. We could almost take our pick. You get the picture, Dr. Cannon? You’re dead. You’re guilty and you’re dead.”

  Brad’s mind was sluggish, moving uncertainly in a fog of dull pain, and it was only with the greatest effort of concentration that he could think coherently about what he should say or not say, or if there was anything left to be said at all.

  He sat staring at the floor, and one thing, after a while, seemed assured. He had walked blindly into a trap — the littered little apartment where Maggie had lain dead, and there was no escape. No escape for Bradley Cannon.

  He considered dully the possible advantages of confessing the truth about Madelaine’s death, which would reduce him to a conspirator instead of a murderer. This would really accomplish nothing, of course, for he was not charged with Madelaine’s murder, and now that Maggie was dead, could never be. It would help nothing to confess, nothing at all, and in fact it would only make matters worse, for it would give him a damning motive for killing Maggie, whom he had not killed.

  Trajan, and later the prosecutor, would surely take the position that he had killed her, after the murder of Madelaine, because she was a menace to his security. It was ironical, being untrue, but he could not laugh. He was so tired, his head so filled with dull pain, that he couldn’t for the present even care.

  He had acquired in the slow and painful consummation of his ruin a kind of immunity to further fear, and although this would pass and fear return, he felt now only a dumb wonder that Bradley Cannon had come at last to this bad end. He couldn’t believe it. It was surely no more a vivid delusion, a fantastic trick of the mind, and it must be someone else, some other man, who sat here on a hard chair in bright light without hope.

  He looked up from the floor to test the delusion, and Trajan’s face was a livid smear against the shadows beyond the light.

  21

  BUDDY JENSEN was neither a philosopher nor a theologian. He had never wasted his time speculating about any life other than the one in which he was enmeshed, and he did not waste it now.

  There was, indeed, very little time left for anything, since he had made up his mind to die, but it was not for this reason that he refused to speculate about his possible future, if any. It was simply that the speculation did not interest him. If he had any conviction along that line at all, it was only that matters could hardly be worse for him elsewhere than they already were where he was. He had his tragic aspects, but he was no Hamlet compounding his despair by anticipation.

  His decision to die had nothing of the character of grim resolution. Dying was something he had to do, and he had neglected to accomplish it sooner because he was simply too apathetic.

  This morning, however, he had wakened with the realization that this was the day, his day for dying, and that there was absolutely no point in hanging around any longer in a world where he was wanted by no one, and no one was left to want.

  He owned a.22 caliber revolver, a small gun he had picked up long ago in a pawn shop, but he had no bullets for it. Therefore he had been compelled to go to a hardware store to buy some, and then he had kept on walking out of town with the gun and the bullets in his pocket, and here he was now, early in the afternoon, sitting on the bank of a small creek.

  The gun was in his hand, and six of the bullets were in the gun. He would only need one, of course, but it seemed neater to fill the cylinder. Now, before shooting himself, he was waiting for a minute or two, taking his time, but he didn’t really know why he was waiting, for there was really nothing worth waiting for.

  There was quite a lot of water in the creek as a result of spring rains. A tree had fallen across the stream onto the lower bank on the opposite side, forming a rude and sharply-inclined bridge. In a field beyond there was a small hay barn. Between the barn and the creek, moving slowly closer,’ was a woman walking.

  The sight of the woman acted upon Buddy as a mild catalyst. Her approach gave him a kind of measure of time — the few minutes it would take her at her present rate to reach the creek — in which he must rouse himself sufficiently from his lethargy to do what he must do.

  And so he sat and watched her come a minute nearer, growing in dimension in the rough field, and then he lifted the revolver and pressed the barrel against his temple and pulled the trigger.

  Cornelia York, the woman in the field, heard the shot but thought nothing of it. It was, after all, not unusual to hear shooting in the country, and she did no more than lift her eyes in the direction of the sound.

  Reaching the creek, she started across it on the fallen log, and it was then that she saw the figure of a man lying on his back on the higher bank. She thought nothing of this, either, for it was a warm May day, and she herself, not long ago, had lain on her back for a while in the sun to watch the clouds.

  Next seeing the ragged bleeding hole in his head and his staring eyes, she still felt no more than a dull shock and a slight quickening of her pulse. Having lived for so many weeks with horror, she had become nearly immune to horror’s effects.

  She had lived, indeed, through two terrible traumas. One was the new and disruptive knowledge of her own character, the deep and deadly malice which had made it possible for her to rejoice in the death of Madelaine, who had been her lover’s wife, and in the ruin of Brad, who had been her lover. The other had been the long and corrosive fear of contamination, the daily dread that her own intimate relationship with a murderer might be discovered in the process of investigation and indictment and trial. This latter trauma was still alive and intense, and anything was now compatible with the quality of her life and expectations.

  She thought, however, that she had better tell someone a
bout the dead young man, probably the county sheriff, and so she hurried away to do so.

  The End

  If you liked The Seducer check out:

  The Brass Bed

  1

  “Maybe,” she said, “we should call it quits.”

  “Sure,” I answered over the telephone. “It would just make things a hell of a lot worse.” But I knew she didn’t mean it. “What do you want anyway?” I asked her.

  So she told me. “YOU.”

  I hadn’t seen her in six weeks, and the six weeks had been hell, especially when I knew she was right around the corner, as close to me as the telephone beside the bed where I was lying. I wanted her with me, wanted her badly, but there was a problem. It may seem to some people that a man and a woman’s seeing each other should not be such a hell of a problem, but it was — because she was married.

  And right now — right now she was probably in some other guy’s arms.

  I waited for the telephone to ring.

  “It’s really very simple. I want you to come over and have a drink with me.”

  “Having a drink with you is not a simple matter. It leads to excesses.”

  Then she said it: “Are you afraid to see me?”

  I took a deep breath. “That’s right,” I said. “I’m afraid.”

  And that summer there was plenty to be afraid of. More, even, than I knew when I talked to her then. And a more terrifying summer than I could have imagined….

  • • •

  The summer that all this happened, I taught a course in medieval history that had something in it about goliards. I didn’t know much about goliards to start with, but I got interested in them. After a while I got the idea that you might be able to write a novel about a goliard that would sell to a lot of people and a book club and maybe to the movies, and so I started on the novel, but it didn’t go very well. It was hot in June and hotter in July, and the students in the class were either very bright kids who wanted to earn a degree in two or three years instead of four, or school teachers who had come in from various places to get revived intellectually and possibly to get also a small raise on next year’s salary for having gone to school in the summer, and all in all, if you want the truth, it was pretty terrible.