by Craig Rice
“Of what?”
“Auntycide.”
“What do you think?”
“Hell, no.”
“Personally,” Jake said, “I think Helene did it and she’s just trying to confuse us.”
“Do you confuse easily?” Helene asked in a dangerously dulcet tone.
Malone rose to his feet a little unsteadily. “I have things I ought to be doing.”
“Sit down,” Jake snapped. “Don’t leave me alone with her.”
Malone sat down heavily.
“It seems to me,” he said a little severely, “that you two are taking this pretty damned lightly.”
“I always take these things lightly,” Helene told him. “I’m not the romantic type.”
“I’m talking about the murder.”
“Just a single-track mind,” Jake said, digging under the pile of newspapers for the bottle. “It’s over, isn’t it? The old lady’s dead and we can’t bring her back. Personally I wouldn’t if I could.”
“I want to go to the Casino and hear Dick’s band,” Helene repeated.
“In the pajamas?”
“In them or out of them. Let’s toss a coin, like the young man did to decide whether to visit a phrenologist or go to see his girl.”
“What have you got on under them?” Malone asked in a disinterested tone.
“You’re not on a witness stand,” Jake reminded her. “Don’t let him intimidate you.”
“I don’t intimidate worth a damn.” She managed to get on her feet. “But watch this.” She pulled the pajama legs loose from her garters so that they fell gracefully about her ankles, wrapped her coat about her person and stood artfully posed like a debutante about to be photographed at the opening night of the opera, “Do I have on an evening gown?”
“You have,” said Jake. “By God, you have.”
“These pajamas have been everywhere,” she told him convincingly.
She began intensive operations with facial cream, powder, an eyebrow brush, and a deadly looking lipstick. They watched until she folded the contents of a small-sized beauty parlor into her handbag. “Tell me, John Joseph, did Holly do it or didn’t she?”
“No,” said Jake Justus.
“You’re a hopeless minority,” Malone said.
“You damned fool,” Jake said indignantly. “You heard her story.”
“She was alone in the house with the old lady,” Malone began slowly and a bit thickly. “Her brother and the Parkinses are gone. She hated her aunt. Had hated her for years, was afraid of her. The old woman had terrified her, had deliberately terrified this fragile, delicately reared girl. Now she approaches a crisis in her life. Something snaps in her brain and—”
“Save it for the jury,” Jake reminded him.
“Shut up. Anyone looking at what happened last night, seeing it lucidly and coldly and calmly, can see it was the product of a disordered mind. The clocks. The telephone call. Making Glen’s bed and Parkins’ bed. Some deep psychological significance in that. Going up and stabbing the old woman three times. Why three? Opening the window. Why? And then fainting away at the old woman’s feet. That’s where they found her.”
“You forget,” said Jake, “who made her bed. She was in it when she woke up. Who—”
“She says she was in it.”
“Damn you, Malone. We’ll get another lawyer. Who made her bed? Some roving chambermaid on the loose, I suppose. Or she slept on the floor. No, Malone, it won’t wash.”
“I want,” said Helene stubbornly, “to go to the Casino and hear Dick’s band.”
Dick Dayton, at the Blue Casino, led his band with an unthinking, mechanical precision. The music seemed to come from very far away, through a mist, the figures on the dance floor were so many wound-up dolls. In the intermissions he was vaguely conscious of people talking with him, but the words they said could not penetrate the fog that encircled him.
Jake had told him to see it through. Swell publicity, Jake said. Those people out on the dance floor knew what had happened—they knew that his girl, his bride, was held for murder in the Blake County jail. They knew it and they sympathized, and they saw him here in front of his band trying to act as though nothing had happened and not succeeding very well, and it was swell publicity, Jake said. The hell with Jake. He didn’t have the faintest idea what the boys were playing.
Why had she done it? Or had she done it? If he only knew. If he could only talk with her again, if she would only tell him the truth. But they wouldn’t let him talk with her alone. God! Would he ever be alone with her again? If they convicted her, would they allow her an hour alone with him before they led her down the corridor to the electric chair? Christ!
The baton snapped in his hand. Steve came up, offered to take over, he waved him away.
This was to have been their first night together. Now he was here and Holly was in a cell in the Blake County jail. Holly in a cell. Holly in a cell, perhaps for life. And he going to see her on visiting days. Perhaps after twenty years or so they would pardon her. Half a lifetime off for good behavior. Well, he’d be waiting for her—forever if he had to.
Could Malone get her out of this? Jake seemed to think so. Jake was a smart guy. Malone seemed to think so, too. The trial would be swell publicity, wonderful publicity, marvelous publicity. God, what publicity! Damn Jake Justus. Sure they’d acquit her. Malone knew his stuff. Not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. An acquittal on the first ballot. Hell, yes!
And then would she tell him the truth? Would she tell him if she’d gone up to that room and taken the little knife in her hand and crept up to the helpless old woman and thrust that knife into the withered old bosom, again and again and again?
Would he ever know?
Ah! There was Jake. Jake, and John J. Malone, and that gorgeous, beautiful, magnificent blonde wench. Not in the same class with Holly, no. But terrific. Where the hell had they all been? She looked like a queen in that evening wrap, with just enough of her blue evening gown showing. Blue evening gown hell! Those pajamas!
He began to laugh, too loudly.
Steve stepped up, took the baton from his unresisting hand, and gently shoved him in the direction of Jake’s table. Dick nodded gracefully.
Easy, he kept telling himself, easy. Don’t let them know, don’t let them see. He pretended they were a table of important customers, smiled, bowed, and sat down with them.
“Well, how goes it?” He managed to say it casually, hoping they wouldn’t have any news, no news that he couldn’t bear hearing.
“Going! It’s gone! We know she didn’t do it. Malone isn’t even going to let it come to trial.” Dick didn’t see the warning glance Jake gave Malone.
“Sure,” Helene said, kicking Jake under the table, “she’s practically out of jail right now!”
“Drink, Dick?”
“No, thanks. I’m not drinking.”
“You’d better,” said Malone thickly, “you’d better have one with us, to celebrate.”
“Hell, yes,” Jake added, “you’ve got to celebrate. She didn’t do it. The rest is mere formality.”
“—parts Benedictine, two parts Metaxa brandy, and a dash of orange bitters,” Helene was saying to the waiter. She smiled briskly at Dick. “I ordered that for you, babe.”
“What is it?”
A little invention of my own. I call it the Chicago Fire.”
There was no doubt she had named it correctly.
“Jake, you meant it?” Dick asked after the third Chicago Fire. “She didn’t do it? You’re telling me the truth?”
“You don’t think I’d lie to you about a thing like this!”
Helene interrupted with a question about the orchestra. Then Jake began telling stories; John J. Malone began telling stories. Then a black-haired wench in a bright yellow dress came from somewhere and attached herself to them, especially to John J. Malone. Everything began to get a little dim.
Somehow they all got out of the Casino and into a
taxi. How it was achieved, not even Jake knew. There was Brown’s where Helene won six-eighty-five in a slot machine and spent it on drinks for the house; Lucky Joe’s where the wench in the yellow dress and Helene insulted each other; the Blue Door where Jake lost seven-fifty at dice with the bartender; foe Rose Bowl where John J. Malone got into a fight with a stranger from Rock Island.
Dick was not quite sure what was going on. It should have been a swell evening, a hell of a swell evening. But every time he began to feel a little at home in his surroundings, there was that terrible, aching remembrance of Holly in jail, Holly, his girl. And tonight, of all nights since the beginning of time!
At those times Helene would put a glass in his hand and he would drink it, Jake would remind him that they were celebrating, and John J. Malone would mumble, “Sure, we’ll have her out of there tomorrow.”
They went to Johnny Leyden’s, where John Joseph Malone got into a fight with a perfect stranger from South Bend and lost the collar off his shirt; to the 885 Club where Dick managed to get Holly off his mind long enough to substitute hilariously at foe piano; to Riccardo’s, where Helene sang in a surprisingly good voice to the tinkling guitar; to a black and tan on the south side. Somewhere along the way they lost John J. Malone—they never did find out where.
By that time Dick was aware, now and then, that something was terribly wrong with his world, but it was difficult to remember what it was. Something that had to do with some girl.
They went cruising madly along the drive in a taxi, and he remembered it all suddenly and terribly, and knew that they had been lying to him all along, and there was something he wanted to tell Jake, because Jake was his friend. Then everything became very dim indeed and the interior of the taxi became a deep dark well in which he was being drowned, and he felt Jake’s hand reaching out to catch him as he fell.
“We certainly took care of that situation in a hurry,” said Helene, looking down at Dick. They had driven back to the hotel where, with the help of a bellhop and a taxi driver, Dick had been tucked into his bed.
Helene looked at him for a long moment.
Rumpled and pink-faced, his eyelids swollen, he looked like a small boy who had cried himself to sleep.
“He doesn’t know anything about it,” Helene murmured. “He’ll remember, when he wakes up in the morning. He’ll wake up knowing that something is wrong, but he won’t know what it is, and then little by little he’ll remember until it all comes back to him, all of it.”
Suddenly she bent over the bed and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
Then they went across the hall, to Jake’s room. Jake found two drinks hidden in a bottle tucked away under his clean socks. The room was silent, deathly silent. There had been much noise, much excitement, much disturbance. Now it was very late, and incredibly quiet.
Jake looked at the girl. What did one do under the circumstances? A Miss Brand of Maple Park was a bit outside his ken. This sharp edge of the moment stuff was always bad. What were her views on the subject anyway?
“Tell me,” he said, stumblingly, and again, “tell me.”
For just one moment she was sober, cold sober. Something crossed her face that hurt, that even hurt him, looking at her. He saw the same terror in her eyes that he had seen in Nellie Parkins’ eyes.
“What is it?” he said sharply. “What do you know?”
“Don’t ask that! Don’t ask that again!”
“I won’t.” He meant it.
He looked at her closely. Her face was frozen, her eyes had a curiously jellied look.
“My God,” he said to the empty air, “you’re out as cold as a clam.” He caught her as she fell.
He carried her across the room, deposited her on the bed, wondered what to do about, or with, the blue pajamas, decided to leave them where they were, covered her with a blanket, and began thinking about what Holly Inglehart Dayton had done or hadn’t done the night before.
Sometime later he struggled out of a half doze, looked at the blonde head on his pillow, wondered whose it was and how it had gotten there, glanced at his watch. It was three o’clock.
He sat bolt upright. She opened half an eye.
“Now I remember what it was I wanted to know!”
She muttered a remark that was either highly pertinent or highly impertinent, or both. He didn’t hear it.
“What stopped the clocks?”
And then, peaceably and without another word, he passed silently out.
Chapter 14
For a long time Dick Dayton kept waking up and making himself go back to sleep again. There were brief moments of hot, uncomfortable waking, the thought that there was some reason why he didn’t want to wake up, and then a supreme effort that sent him back into the void.
But the moments of waking grew longer and more uncomfortable, the periods of sleeping briefer, colored with unpleasant dreams.
It was the jangling of the telephone that drove the last sleep from him. He reached for it; spoke into it irritably.
“Well?”
It was the desk clerk. “Mr. Dayton, there’s quite a lot of reporters here who insist on seeing you.”
“Tell them to go to hell. I’m sleeping.”
He hung up the phone with an angry clatter. What in blazes did a bunch of reporters want to see him about. Was one of the boys in trouble again?
Something was wrong with his head. Something was very wrong with his head. It pained and it didn’t belong to him. Somebody happening to go past his bed had had this head along with him and had left it on the pillow. Why would anybody wish such a head on him? His stomach still belonged to him, but he wasn’t sure of its location. It didn’t seem to be in the same bed with him—somewhere in the next room, perhaps. He didn’t want to know where it was. Much better not to associate with such a stomach. Something unpleasant had been happening to it. The less he knew of it the better.
He gathered all his strength for one magnificent effort and opened his eyes. The head and stomach promptly returned and announced themselves to be his property.
What on earth had he been doing last night? It had been years since he had gone on a bender. He tried to remember. There was a dim picture of touring Chicago with Jake and some strangers—an untidy little man, a blonde babe in blue—blue what? Oh God, yes. Blue pajamas. Helene—Helene Brand from Maple Park. The untidy little man was named Malone.
He remembered everything in one terrible, overwhelming flood.
Where was Jake? Where was Malone? What time was it? Where the hell was everybody? What was happening?
Suddenly his door opened softly and Helene tiptoed in.
“Oh, you’re awake.”
He felt that he ought to be scandalized at her presence. Yet he hoped that she wouldn’t go away. He had a growing conviction that he was not long for this world, and he wanted company when he died.
“Don’t move. I know how you feel.” She grinned at him. “Just the lady with the lamp. And what a pair of lamps you’ve got this morning!”
He managed a smile.
“Swallow this.” She poked a tablet into his mouth, held a glass of water to his lips. The water tasted horrible.
“What is it?”
“It represents a few hours more sleep. By the time you wake up, everything will be all right.”
“Holly?”
“She’s all right. Shut your eyes.”
He shut them. The darkness felt comforting. She laid a hand on his forehead; it was cool and gentle. He heard her murmuring something about Holly in a voice that faded farther and farther away as be slipped into a dream where Holly waited for him.
After a few minutes Helene slipped from the room, hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and crossed the hall to Jake’s room.
There were blankets and pillows everywhere, cigarette butts everywhere, empty glasses, empty bottles, ashes on the carpet, burnt matches scattered from wall to wall. Jake’s socks on one chair, Jake’s tie on another, one of Jake’s shoes on the w
indow sill, the other unaccountably missing, Helene’s fur coat hanging gracefully from a floor lamp.
“He’ll sleep a few more hours and wake up feeling better,” she reported, looking about the room. “This place seems just a bit on the shambles side.”
“It’s only a shambles in old shambles town,” Jake caroled happily.
“Please, Mr. Justus!” She yawned, stretched, and began intensive cleaning operations. “I’m a naturally tidy soul.”
“A naturally tidy heel, you mean.”
She wiped the accumulation of ashes, spilled powder, and used matches from the dresser, tucked socks and ties into drawers, rinsed glasses and set them in a neat row on the desk, straightened the bed, collected cigarette butts and deposited them in the waste basket along with a set of empty bottles, found one bottle that was half full, set it on the dresser, looked at it, and shuddered.
“You’ll feel better,” Jake told her. “It’s all a matter of time.”
He looked at her admiringly. Her delicate, almost blue-white skin was fresh and clear; her pale hair was smooth and gleaming.
The telephone rang.
“Yes?” said Jake into it inquiringly, and then, “oh. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Oh yes.” He hung up the receiver. “That was Malone. He’s coming to breakfast ”
“Thus carrying away the last driftwood of my reputation,” said Helene thoughtfully.
“John J. won’t care,” Jake said; “he’s ruined more reputations than you ever dreamed of having.”
“I care,” she said, “because I hate to be blamed for things I haven’t done.” “Nobody’s fault but your own,” he told her. “You pass out at the damnedest times. But eventually—” He remembered something he had wanted to do since yesterday-kissed her long and enthusiastically.
There was a delicate knock at the door.
“Damn!” said Jake explosively. He opened the door to admit John J. Malone.
He looked at the little lawyer meditatively, studied the faint pinkness in his round eyes, wondered where he had been and if he had learned the name of the wench in the yellow dress. But he had no chance to ask.
“Of all the damn fool things to do,” Malone said as he walked in. “Of all the damn tool things to do. Do you realize what you’ve done? Do you realize the implications of this? Do you realize the kind of a spot I’m in? Do you know what you’ve let yourself in for?”
