by Steve Fisher
"I tell you—"
"No," said West, "I'm telling you. You weren't smooth enough. Betty reasoned that since her mother was dead there was nothing to hold you back longer. She insisted you pack and run away with her. She wouldn't wait until this thing was over. She was impatient. She didn't understand how a flight at this time would point suspicion toward you. That's how come her bag was packed, not yours. You were trying to tell her that it was impossible to leave. But she was hysterical and unable to comprehend that much!"
"It's a lie!"
The talk had been loud, and now Betty leaped to her feet. "I'm giving all of my money to charity when I get it," she sobbed. "Every penny of it. Roy and I don't want that."
He glared at her.
West picked it up, said to Roy: "It sounds flat, doesn't it? Charity. That wasn't your idea at all, was it?"
"It was," said Roy. "We discussed it."
West turned to Betty. "Did you? Did you discuss it?"
She was blank for a moment. "No, I just thought of it—ah, yes, yes, we discussed it."
"Obviously," West barked.
"Well, we did," said Roy, "whether she remembers it or not. She forgets a lot of things. You're not going to railroad me. Ask Mr. Smyth a few questions if you want a motive for Mrs. Davis' murder. Ask him about the telephone call he received last month from London."
Grant looked up.
"What telephone call?" said West.
"Ask him. Go ahead!"
Grant spoke hoarsely. "He means about my father dying."
"What else?"
"Without money," Grant said. "He was broke?"
"Penniless. Wiped out. He committed suicide. I was ashamed. I didn't tell Betty or Mrs. Davis."
"How did Roy find out?"
Grant shook his head. "I had to tell somebody. I trusted him. I always had thought he was a fine chap."
"You told him then?"
"Yes."
"You see," said Roy, "his allowance was cut off, he—"
Grant said: "Shut up, Roy. I'll damn well kill you if you don't shut up."
Betty looked at Grant. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm so sorry."
West paced the room. Dorothy watched him. He returned to Betty. "You're really in love with—with him?" He nodded toward Roy.
"Yes."
He spoke loudly: "You understood that your mother would never permit you to run away with him? That she would bring you back even if you did run away?"
"Yes, I—"
"That's enough. I have something else to ask you. Have you any recollection of a pair of low-heeled walking shoes belonging to your mother?"
Betty said: "She owned several pairs."
"You don't remember anything unusual in connection with any of them."
"No."
"I do," said Grant. "I found a pair in my closet Monday morning before she went to New York. I had thought Frances put them there by mistake."
"Isn't your room at the opposite end of the hall?"
"Yes."
"How long has Frances worked here?"
"Six months."
"Didn't it seem strange to you that she wouldn't know the house better than to make a mistake like that?"
"Well, I—I say now, I really didn't think about it in that way."
"You have no idea how the shoes got in your closet?"
"No. They were wrapped up. Of course I had no reason then to suspect that anything like this was going to happen. I didn't think much about it."
West said: "You haven't seen the shoes since?"
"No."
"I'd like to find them," said West.
Mike Wiggam's lean face was without expression. His dull eyes contrasted his dead and graying hair. "Ah," he said, "the clue of the shoes."
Sam Tulley sponged sweat from his pudgy face and said tritely: "This is a ghastly time for a joke, Wiggam. Any one of us might be involved in this thing."
Johnny West lit a cigarette. "Mr. Wiggam," he said, "seems to be inspired with something that is even more than a bitterness. Perhaps—"
The telephone rang. West picked it up. "Hello? Yes. No, she isn't in bed. Yes, she's here." He looked up. "For you, Dorothy."
Dorothy moved toward the phone and Clifton turned around expectantly. Dorothy's hands trembled on the receiver. "Hello," she said. She heard Sherry's voice and breathed easier.
"My God. but you're in a jam out there, aren't you?" said Sherry.
"Quite."
"Tough break, honey. But at least you'll get your name in all the papers. Clifton didn't kill her, did he? One night when I told him about Mrs. Davis he said he was going to. But Clifton is always saying things and never getting around to doing them." She laughed hollowly. "Seriously, Dorothy, I'm sorry things have turned out like this. I know how you must feel, and I don't like to frighten you. But I'm in somewhat of a situation myself."
"What?"
"Well, there's a guy here to see you. They haven't got around to printing the name of the house guests out there yet, but it's just a matter of time till he finds out you're in Mamaroneck. He's traced you this far. I don't know what to do. He's violent, and he claims he's got a warrant from Michigan."
"You mean—"
"Yeah. Your godfather. The guy you thought you killed. Henry Myers. You didn't kill him. But he was in the hospital. And he's got cops after you. I mean, I'll do what I can, but—well, be on your guard for him."
"I—I will," said Dorothy. The room seemed to swirl around her, so that all the people in it converged and were one person; and the air that she breathed was so hot that it choked her. "And thanks," she managed to finish, "thanks. Sherry." She hung up, but her eyes were feverish and unseeing, and there was a roar crashing against her eardrums. The telephone dropped from her hand to the floor.
CHAPTER NINE
The house had quieted, and some of the others had gone to bed. Dorothy was alone on the porch with only the night around her, gaudy now, at one in the morning, strewn with stars, and a moon too faint and white to be real; the soft finger of a breeze moved leaves on the trees, and the warm air was mixed with the dampness of the Sound, so that breathing bathed her throat, refreshing her. She felt as though she had been born in this night of crickets and boat whistles and the whispering tread of tires that swished over the Boston Post Road; she felt as if she was someone new, without experience or memory, and only the soft sweetness of night to which to look forward. It was magic without reality that stripped a suffering human shell from her and left her in naked innocence to a beautiful, dark world, where there was no past and no future, but only the present.
It was profound pretense, but it slipped from her, escaping into space, and she made no effort to recapture it. The old ache took its place, and she knew somehow that it would be with her, in some form or other, for the rest of the days of her life, because she knew there was no complete happiness in life: there was always something to which mortals looked forward, successful or poor, rich or a failure, there had to be something, even if it was only death itself. She accepted the ache with the air she breathed, and she tried not to think too much because there was no answer to the trouble in which she floundered.
There was flame all around her, and it was better to walk through it like something mechanical, instead of looking for the places where the heat was the least, for there were too few of them.
Yet even philosophy could not help her. Until Monday night she had been happy in the struggle for a goal which she was sure she would some day achieve. Now it had been snatched from her. She had been taken from the routine of her life in the theater that was only a laundry, and all illusion had been smashed, because you can fight for something you see tar ahead of you. but once a taste of the glory is in your mouth you can't go back to the old life, even if the glory turns sour on your tongue. She had to keep going forward, but there was no road on which to turn. She could no longer be happy living from hand to mouth in Greenwich Village because through the eyes of Rhea Davis she had seen a career st
retching magnificently before her, and to go back to the Village would be like putting herself in the place of Sherry Moore. It would be defeat. Although she had graduated from the Village in mental illusion, she was really no better off than before. She was sick and confused. She knew no way which she could go. She was caught between rip tide and ebb.
The fact that Henry Myers was in New York looking for her, and looking, too, for vengeance, made it no worse; it only built a higher barrier between herself and the goal she had thought she had seen. The years of her life behind her were suddenly useless, because when she left Mamaroneck she would have to go elsewhere: New York was a thing lost in a broken dream. Not because she was alone and afraid of Henry Myers and his police, but because the life of struggling had been taken away, and she had been given nothing in return.
She felt empty, and irritable. This very house, and the darkness, filled her with physical fear that came as pain on top of pain. It was like having a toothache and earache at the same time. She could still vividly see the shadow of the man (was it a man?) who had entered her room; she could still feel the rawness of her lungs from the screams that had torn out of her, and she remembered the hands at her throat. It was memory that filled her with shuddering nausea. She wanted to run away. She wanted to drift out into the stars and the night and become the nonentity of the soft, sweet air.
She heard footsteps behind her suddenly and stiffened. Then there was Johnny West's soft voice.
"It's all right, Dorothy." He moved toward her through the darkness and stood there, looking toward the Sound.
"How did you know I was here?"
"I saw you when you came out. I had one of the policemen keep watch so that—well, experience wouldn't repeat itself."
"Thank you," she said.
There was silence between them and he lighted a cigarette. She saw his face in the flare of the match, the aquiline nose, the burning brown eyes, the square chin line, the cheekbones that jutted just a little, and his tumbling brown hair. He looked quite human and quite unlike a detective. This might be a country club, a high school prom. They were casual. Murder lay behind them, cloaked in the dust of the minutes while they forgot.
"I wanted to ask you about that phone call," he said.
She was disappointed, but she didn't know why. "It was nothing."
"I must insist." His voice was soft.
"As a detective?"
"Yes," he said.
She laughed bitterly. "I thought I killed a man, and didn't. It was in Michigan. I ran away. He's in New York now looking for me."
"Is that all?"
"It has nothing to do with this case," she said.
He touched her arm, then gripped it. "I didn't think that it did. I wanted to know for your sake. I don't want you to be afraid."
She looked up, a little startled. "I—"
"Nothing is going to happen to you," he went on. "Not if every other person in there is murdered. I'll see to that. Funny—one goes along so far like a machine and then sometimes one suddenly turns human. It's something you can't help. A flaw in the way cops are made. All the efficiency experts in the police department can't iron that out." His voice dropped. "I thought I'd tell you."
She kept looking into his face, faintly light now in the dim beams of the moon. "I'm grateful, Johnny," she said. "Really I am. I can't help being scared. No matter how sane I try to be. And this other. This phone call. Thinking about the man haunted me every day. Oh, I—it was a terrible obsession that—"
"I know. I killed a man once."
"You killed a man?”
"On duty," he said. "He was a criminal. He might have killed me. But he didn't. I killed him. I saw him afterward in the morgue. A cop doesn't forget that either. Something cold and stiff and waxy, as unreal as a big ugly doll, and remembering something with flesh and blood that lived and breathed and talked and maybe shot at you. Remembering eyes that were hard and maybe bloodshot, lips that were thin, a body that was lithe and muscular and intense with life: turned into that bloody wax thing that's as stiff as second-grade clay."
She was silent.
"For that you get a raise and promotion," he went on. "They pat you on the back, and they send you out to do it all over again. It's killing, no matter the reason and the law. If you have illusion it smashes it. It'll make you an old man in five years. You don't look at life like other people. You're like a nurse in an emergency ward. People turn into units. Little units with legs and arms and motives. With defiance you break down with a rubber hose. With thinking machines you have to outthink. Even the men you work with aren't human. You see them on duty and they're your extra arms and extra legs. They make it possible for you to do ten things at once and that's the way you think of them. You are the first person I've seen that was warm and fresh and real. You are like a girl that isn't in that world. The kind of girl that I knew before I became a cop. Only better, more vital."
"Johnny—"
He flicked his cigarette over the side of the porch. "Am I making a speech? Am I crying on your shoulder, Dorothy? I've been trying to think how to tell you this. I wanted to explain it in some way that would sound sensible. But I guess I haven't. You couldn't see it clearly unless you were on my side of the fence. I don't want you to be there."
"But I—I couldn't realize that—"
"I know," he said. "All you've seen and heard of me has been asking questions, and trying to keep from being tough, and trying to get the jump on this thing that's in the house. But even a play has an intermission between acts. You've got to breathe and live sometime. And it's been so long since I've lived as a human being that I broke the barriers. I didn't wait until the case was over. I knew you were out here and I came out to tell you."
"I don't know what to say, Johnny."
His face was expressionless. "You don't have to say anything. Just laugh. They say old detectives are better because they're hard and they've lost their souls. So if it seems to you that I'm wearing knee pants and should have a lollypop in my hand, why—say so. It won't matter, really."
"I don't think that. I think you're—"
He put his hand across to her other arm. "Do you think you—" He took his hands off her and turned away suddenly.
She jumped down from the ledge and put herself in front of him. "I think you're swell," she said, and her voice was throaty with emotion. "I think you're the swellest guy that's ever come along. Do you know what I mean? I've thought so much about a career that I never considered a man seriously. But suddenly—well, you're here. It's as natural as that moon in the sky. As natural as the air and the trees and—"
She was crying, she was afraid of the emotion that pounded suddenly from within her. He took her into his arms and kissed her. They stood there together a full minute, and Dorothy could not stop crying. She was choking now. Everything had pumped up through her suddenly. She clung to his arms, holding him, and said:
"Stay with me. Don't ever leave me!"
"I won't."
"I'm sick of being alone!"
"I know," he said.
"I'm afraid. Even of myself!"
"It won't be like that any more, Dorothy."
"This is crazy, Johnny. You and I, but—"
"Could you live in a small town?" he said.
"Mamaroneck?"
"Yes."
She nodded. "I could live anywhere with you."
"Could you stand the life a cop has to lead? Could you stand one murder investigation after another, and people threatening me, and department jealousy, and lousy politics sometimes, and turning down bribes even when we're broke? Could you live in a cottage on four hundred dollars a month, knowing there wouldn't ever be much more than that?"
"Anything," she said.
"Then you love me!"
"No," she said, "it might be hysteria. So much has happened. We can't be sure. We can't be sure of anything."
"But we're young. We're attracted to each other."
"It's that," she said, "it's that at
least. And maybe it's love. Let's put it that way. Let's say it's wonderful. Let's say we're drunk on this and maybe we'll be drunk on it forever."
"All right."
She wiped the tears from her checks. "Good night, darling." She kissed him, and then she ran across the porch and into the house. The screen door slammed behind her.
She told Clifton in the morning. She brought him to her room after breakfast because she wanted to tell him in private, and she wanted to know what he thought of it. She was too filled with the joy that was in her heart to consider the news as anything but wonderful not only to herself, but to the whole world. Clifton was in flannels with an open polo shirt, and the hair on his head wilder than ever.
"Something wonderful has happened," she said.
He leaned back against the French door of her terrace, putting the sole of his foot gently against the glass, his hands were behind him.
"Has Rhea Davis come back to life?"
"I'm serious, Clifton."
"So am I. That's the only good news you could tell me."
"This is about myself."
He lifted his shaggy eyebrows. "Yes?"
"I think I'm in love."
"Love?" The word was almost foreign to him though he had made mad love to a hundred girls and written it into a dozen plays.
"Yes," she said, "you know. Something that happens to people when they're young."
"Ha!"
"Like with you and Sherry once."
"Sherry was a—a good friend," he sobered.
"From Sherry's standpoint then," she said.
He flushed. "Go on."
"Don't you know the rest? Who he is?"
"Don't tell me it's our fat friend Tulley. He couldn't put you in a play even if he did love you. He's lost his drag. I've been all over that angle with him. I don't miss a trick."
"Clifton—it's Johnny."
"Johnny?"
"Johnny West."
He just stared at her. "Say that again."
"Johnny West."
He rubbed his jaw. "How funny."
"I mean it."
His eyes grew hot. "Then it's funnier. You and West. God, that's funny—damn funny!"
