Don't Open the Door

by Ursula Curtis

  “And if murderers looked like murderers there wouldn’t be any crime rate, would there? Your trouble is that you believe the best of everybody,” said Ned Saxon fondly.

  He ate his dinner with appetite, agreeing with Iris that the cheaper grade of hamburger had more flavor; this was a long-established ritual. As always, he insisted on doing the dishes—there could scarcely have been a more thoughtful husband—and he was polishing glasses with his usual careful attention when the telephone rang.

  That was an item soon to be pruned from their budget, thought Ned with ferocious pleasure, and Iris, who was closer, answered it. After listening for a few moments she said, “I don’t know, hon—just let me ask Ned,” and covered the mouthpiece. “Eve Quinn wants to know if I can give her an extra day tomorrow. The little boy’s father is going to pick him up some time this week and she wants to get his clothes—”

  Ned Saxon shook his head. “No.” It was fortunate that he was holding a jelly glass with the label carefully scrubbed off; anything thinner would have smashed under the sudden furious pressure of his fingers. “It’s just too much for you right now.”

  Iris uncovered the mouthpiece again, obediently. “Eve? I’m awfully sorry, but Ned doesn’t think—”

  The courteous feminine exchanges went on for another minute or so. Controlledly, his back turned at the sink, Ned sponged the tiny counter, closed a cupboard door. There was no one to see the dangerous clenched look of his face, a vein beating at the temple with rage; no one, even seeing, could have guessed at the thoughts churning inside: Charity. Have pity on your poor servants, the Saxons, and manufacture an extra day’s work for Iris. Surely you can scrape up enough laundry and ironing, if you look hard enough, and then you can write out a check, Lady Bountiful Quinn, there’s not much labor in that . . .

  But he had spoken too sharply in his refusal, because Iris’s face as she hung up wore a surprise and questioning expression, along with something else which Ned determinedly did not recognize as disappointment. “You know all this has been a great shock to you,” he said tn a mild and reasonable tone. “You haven’t even been sleeping properly. Your health has to be the first consideration . . .” The Saxons owned a television set with a faulty tube that often bent the performers on the screen into astonishing arcs and ellipses, and they watched it every evening with the gravity and unselectivity of children. Ned took his usual chair tonight, but although his ruddy face looked attentive the attention was all inward.

  For a man armored only by his own devouring hatred, he had already been given two surprising assists by Providence. In the case of Molly Pulliam, there had been the unlooked-for diversion of the yardman; in the case of Jennifer Morley there was the undoubted fact that she had spent several hours alone in her brother-in-law’s house and he was very nervous about something.

  The disposal of Eve Quinn, the final erasure of the face-in-the-dirt humiliation, had presented a more delicate problem, ruling out as it would the generally accepted theory that the two women had died because they were sisters, victims of someone from their common background. Even in the depths of his obsession Ned Saxon realized that with the death of Eve Quinn it would be pointed out that there was a common denominator in all these households.

  But Eve Quinn had obligingly been on that open line in the Morley house, and although Ned was quite sure that he had approached the phone without sound it would be natural for the police to assume that the Quinn girl had died because she possessed dangerous knowledge.

  . . . He would begin laying the groundwork for that very soon.

  16

  IN view of the headlines and the columns of type, a somber editorial and a cruel inset of her face in a blurry photograph of the rain-wet outdoor fireplace, there were surprisingly few people at Jennifer Morley’s funeral.

  A selection of Richard’s broker colleagues came, looking like gangsters turned respectable for the day in identical dark suits, and a bare scattering of friends; the vast number of flowers testified to the unease of the absent ones. The Saxons were there, seated firmly toward the back of the church—no one was going to have the opportunity of ushering them out of choicer pews—and a handful of obvious sensation-seekers who stared at the rigid backs of Richard Morley and his brother-in-law and whispered among themselves. The air over the large stretch of empty pews seemed thick with embarrassment and defensiveness. It was a little like the funeral of someone who had died of a terrible and infectious disease.

  Neither the Pulliams nor the Morleys had thought of needing plots so soon, and as a result Jennifer was buried on the far side of the cemetery. It was a windy day, the sunlight with a jeweled coldness and brightness, and when the cedar branches shifted a little it was possible to see, in the distance, a few dim touches of color on that other, earlier grave. Everybody in the small group now whittled down to the two bereaved husbands, the Saxons, and a couple named Harkness, was careful not to look— everybody except Ned Saxon, who lifted his orange head just before they all turned away and sent a long look across the grass.

  Some of this Eve learned from Henry Conlon, who had been quietly at the church but did not test Richard Morley’s control by proceeding to the cemetery. She herself had been unabashedly relieved that there was no one to stay with Ambrose and therefore no possibility of her own attendance. She had sent flowers.

  She would have been shocked by Ned Saxon’s savage appraisal of her motives in asking Iris for an extra day’s help, the more so because it came very close to the truth.

  Her cousin Celia had called from New York, as arranged. With the memory of her own seizure of pure fright out at the clothesline in the dark, while the night rustled slyly around her, Eve had made up her mind that she would—without frightening Celia out of her wits—ask that Roger fly out and collect Ambrose. She did not seriously think of leaving the little house, but she knew that she would have more freedom of action, and far less concern, if she were alone and unencumbered.

  Celia’s first words undid all that. “Eve? How are you?

  We’ve been half out of our minds here. Thank God you’ve got Ambrose—do you think you could stand him just a little longer? Roger’s mother had a bad stroke on Thursday, and the doctor is afraid that if we try to move her to a hospital right now—you know what she’s like . . .” In her agitation Celia had obviously forgotten that Eve had never laid eyes on Roger’s mother. Eve gazed aghast at her kitchen wall, seeing her own plan vanishing like water down a drain.

  “. . . nurse with her, in our room, of course,” Celia was saying distractedly, ’‘and I’m in her room, and poor Roger’s on the couch, and of course everything has to be absolutely quiet.” Her voice did indeed have a harried, hunted sound, as if the nurse might appear at any moment with a finger at her lips. “So if you could possibly keep Ambrose for a few more days, until we get things better arranged here—”

  Eve said of course, because there was no alternative; inquired about Celia’s back, reported on Ambrose, and presently hung up. She did not immediately leave the telephone, because as she talked her glance had fallen on one of Iris Saxon’s meticulous notations of things to be bought for the house: cinnamon, distilled water for the iron, detergent. She had written that on her last day here, when in answer to Eve’s parting thanks she had replied cheerfully, “It’s even nicer that we can eat.”

  What would the Saxons do now, in the interim period before Ned Saxon found work or they supplemented their income in some other way? Eve knew that they were painfully poor and always a few bills behind; she also knew that here in the Southwest, perhaps even more than elsewhere, employment of any kind was hard to come by for people nearing sixty. Iris’s weekly thirty-six dollars had enabled them to eke out an existence, and that had dwindled to twelve. It seemed shocking to relate the deaths of two women in terms of financial loss, but the loss was certainly there.

  Impulsively, Eve lifted the receiver again and dialed. She was not in a position to offer much help, or not over a long period of tim
e, but suppose that right now some immediate creditor were pressing for even a token payment?

  She told Iris about Ambrose’s coming departure—true in a sense, because surely they were not going to grow old together?—and waited. When Ned Saxon’s opinion was relayed she could feel her face flood warmly even though she was alone and unobserved. “Oh, of course. I should have—”

  “I’m all right really, it’s just delayed reaction, I guess. Or maybe old age creeping up,” said Iris, pitiably gay. This was a subject she raised with defiant frequency, as though to befriend the advancing years and perhaps lessen their toll. “When did you say they were coming for the little boy?”

  “Before the end of the week.” All Eve wanted now was to be released from the peculiar humiliation she had brought on her own head, but she was not to be let go so easily. Iris discussed dates anxiously and it was finally settled that she would come a day earlier than usual. “But only if you really feel up to it,” said Eve, and was free at last.

  How, knowing the Saxons’ polite but iron pride, had she let herself in for such a well-deserved rebuff? It was a pity that a telephone call could not be left overnight in its actuality, like a letter which you might regard with fresh eyes in the morning . . .

  Henry Conlon had kept to his plan; as she poured herself a cup of coffee Eve could see the lights in the other house glowing. Comforted but at the same time reminded, she checked all the locks before she gathered her book and cigarettes, switched off the living room lamps, and went in to look at Ambrose. After all her cutting and sewing he had had, like most children presented with a substitute, no use at all for the artfully fringed and patched cloth; he had simply handed it back to Eve as though it were something of hers. The straw hat had also fallen from favor and lay unregarded on the floor, but even in sleep Ambrose had a firm grip on the spark plug.

  Eve was presently asleep herself, her dreams pricked through now and then by the crisp sleety rustle of fallen leaves around the little house. It had not crossed her mind, troubled as she was by her own tactlessness, that she had received not so much a rebuff as a sharp stinging slap from a hand aching to deliver it.

  Two days after Jennifer Morley’s funeral, the elderly proprietor of a small candy store in the Heights was struck down and robbed only minutes after she had opened the place for business. There were no eyewitnesses, and the victim died of head injuries a few hours later without regaining consciousness.

  Although apart from the common sex involved there was no resemblance between this crime and the Valley murders, an immediate if unstated connection was made in the public mind by the new black headlines, the fresh Page One photographs. The Sheriff had a hasty conference with the city police chief, because while to anyone reading the daily burglary reports it might seen unlikely that there was a single private home in Albuquerque retaining its typewriter or television set, crimes of violence were by no means that common.

  The city police were more fortunate than the Sheriff in having what seemed to be a large jump on their man. Shortly before dawn they had received an emergency call from an apartment eight blocks away from the candy store where, as the result of an all-night drinking party, a youth had been stabbed. The assailant had fled, but one of the two sullen but terrified girls present at these festivities had furnished a description although she could not provide the man’s name. (“Probably telling the truth at that,” remarked the chief grimly.) It was a matter of hours later when a stolen-car complaint came in from the same neighborhood; the complainant said in a confused fashion that he hadn’t reported it earlier because he had assumed that his brother-in-law had borrowed it again. “Anything you don’t nail down that kid takes—except his sister.”

  All of this might fit together as tidily as they would like: on the other hand, the knifing and the stolen car might be fragments that had touched accidentally and would fly off in different directions. As a result, the close of the newspaper account said only that road blocks had been set up.

  Ned Saxon read the story through that evening and then, with greater care, read it again. A lamp might have been lit behind his highly colored features, lending them a look almost of exaltation. In his mind he sifted and weighed the phrases: “Brutality of the blows . . . taken by surprise . . . tenant in the apartment above heard no outcry.” He let the paper drop to his knees, and did not know that he had said aloud in a soft and wondering voice, “That’s the third time.”

  Iris Saxon, preoccupied with the worries that she never let him see, often allowed these commentaries on the evening paper to go by with only an absent “Hmm?” because usually they concerned paving regulations or reapportionment or other matters which she felt vaguely belonged in the male domain. Tonight, caught by his tone, she turned from the stove to ask, “Third time for what?”

  Her back shivered tinily then, because Ned was gazing at her attentively and not seeing her at all. On the other hand he seemed so amazed, even in his blankness, that she put smoothing hands to her hair as though it had sprung on end to surprise him.

  She realized almost at once that the oddity of his glance was caused by the low-watt bulbs they used for economy: somehow the strain of reading newsprint in that had made his richly blue eyes look unfamiliarly black. Ned obviously realized it at the same time, because he twisted in the chair with the groaning spring, tweaked the lampshade, and said quite briskly, “Third holdup of a small independent business in—what is it?—less than a month. It goes to show you what enterprise amounts to, these days . .

  This was familiar ground, and Iris agreed with everything he*said and dealt out the stewed chicken backs and rice, the peas, an exact half of the jelly roll which would, in its remainder, serve them for breakfast.

  The television set was more Erratic than usual that night, with events apparently taking place inside a wicker basket, and although Ned said that he would stay up and watch the news, Iris went to bed. The fitful mutter about floor wax and France, Washington sources and flourides, built up a kind of peaceful hum around her, like a protective skin. She slid into sleep, and it might have been the very cessation of sound that half woke her.

  Was it an hour later, or more than that? Iris thought drowsily of asking Ned, but she did not want to bring herself completely awake. Besides, from the silence and the dimness of the ceiling, he was in the bathroom, from which he would presently emerge to turn off the solitary lamp.

  He wasn’t in the bathroom. When Iris turned over in bed to ease her stiff shoulder he was a bulky dark shape on his knees in front of the old armchair with the broken spring.

  She watched him with the idle unreality of someone still partly bound by sleep, accepting his odd posture with a kind of mild interest. Quietly, absorbedly, he was pulling back the length of old blanket which, tucked tightly around the seat cushion, hid the torn upholstery and helped contain the broken spring. He was beginning to probe with his fingers when Iris, growing more alert with every second, asked curiously, “What are you doing?”

  Her voice sounded unnaturally loud in the secret, almost trancelike silence. Ned was totally, fleetingly still before his hand began to move again. He said without turning his head, “I lost that good mechanical pencil you gave me and I thought it might have slipped down in here, but”—he retucked the blanket and rose cumbersomely to his feet—” I guess not. Oh, well, I’ll look for it in the morning.”

  He was spared the trouble. The door of the refrigerator was defective, and when Iris gave it the necessary slam the next morning there was a bounce and a metallic rattle as the pencil hit the floor. Ned inspected it for damage, pocketed it, and drove off for the morning paper, which he would peruse in the car; if there was anything promising in the Help Wanted column—they both clung sturdily to the fantasy that there might be—he would continue straight on and apply. If not, he would return home and work on some of the repairs the apartment always needed.

  When he had gone, Iris dried and put away the few breakfast things. She refrained loyally from wishing
that she were at Eve Quinn’s pretty little house right now, chatting over a companionable second cup of coffee; she reminded herself that although Eve couldn’t be nicer the child was terribly spoiled and had the removed, assessing gaze of a Siamese cat, which was bad enough in something with fur and four legs.

  She also reminded herself that as Ned’s pencil had been found there was no real reason to be bending over the old armchair, pulling the piece of blanket out of its tucking, thrusting her fingers in around the broken spring like a woman who must destroy a spider at once or else retreat from it with the knowledge that, later, it might scurry out of a magazine in her lap or hide in her sweater sleeve.

  But there was nothing there, or nothing but stuffing and lint and the broken spring. Not knowing that she did it, certainly not knowing why, Iris Saxon closed her eyes momentarily and drew in a great breath. Anyone observing might have thought she had found, instead of the dilapidation inside an old chair, a handful of gold.

  17

  AT odd moments of the day and in wakeful hours of the night, Arthur Pulliam took cautious little pulls at the thread which might unravel the nightmare spun about him.

  “We’re both men of the world, Sheriff,” he said rehearsingly to himself, and abandoned that at once. The Sheriff was firmly not a man of the world, and would be outraged at any imputation that he was.

  “Frankly, Sheriff, I have a little confession to make—” But his Pulliam blood writhed at the word confession, and the Sheriff would certainly not consider adultery little.

  Very well, then; what about a rueful “I’m afraid I was badly taken in, Sheriff, by a young girl in my employ—tales of abuse at home, you know the kind of thing . . .” No. They had only to look at Rosalinda.

  But if only there were a way to gain official protection against the Lopezes without bringing about the very exposure it was so essential to avoid. More than forty-eight hours of silence from that quarter had only increased Arthur’s apprehension like mildew. He stepped without pleasure on the thicker carpeting in his new office, noted apathetically that he now had an extra button on his telephone, derived no consolation even from the glossy and formidable plant in its tub. Richardson, after all, had been evicted from the midst of these splendors because of a simple and discreet divorce.