According to Mrs. Stack, she was at home last night, when she was aroused by a knocking at her door. Opening it, her husband pushed his way into the apartment and began threatening her. He was followed immediately by Lieutenant Rafferty who had been keeping the apartment under surveillance. Stack turned his gun on the officer, who immediately returned his fire; the second shot from the detective killed the gunman.
Mrs. Stack’s story was substantiated by Lieut. Rafferty, and she was released last night after being questioned by the police.
From interdepartmental memo. Lieutenant Feinberg to acting Lieutenant Rafferty, Feb. 20:
SUBJECT: CAPTURE, EDWARD A. STACK
You may not have known it, but Wisconsin offered a $250.00 reward for Stack’s capture. On teletype query, they are still willing to pay it. It’s all yours,
Congrats.
From interdepartmental memo. Acting Lieutenant Rafferty to Lieutenant Feinberg, Feb. 20:
SUBJECT : CAPTURE, EDWARD A. STACK
I didn’t know about the reward. I don’t want it. If Wisconsin pays it, turn it over to our Benevolent Fund.
From interdepartmental memo. Captain Walter Pravata to acting Lieutenant Emmet Rafferty, Feb. 21:
SUBJECT : CONTRIBUTION TO P.O.B.F.
Lieut. Feinberg informs me that you have turned over your reward of $250.00 to our Police Officers Benevolent Fund. As treasurer of the fund, I wish to thank you for it. Also, as your superior officer, I wish to congratulate you on your meritorious conduct and the excellence of the performance of your duties.
From letter of the president of the Inter-Borough Realty Co. to Rose Pauli Stack, Feb. 21:
Dear Mrs. Stack:
Mr. Kizer, superintendent of our building on Park Avenue, has informed us of the unpleasant circumstances which occurred in your apartment on the night of February 18th. We have also read the stories concerning it in the newspapers. And while we feel that you were not directly implicated, and certainly not responsible for the occurrence, unfortunately many of our other tenants in your building do not feel the same way.
Consequently, it is with regret that we return the balance of your check for the first year’s rent, and ask that you vacate the premises by March first. You will note that we are refunding an additional thirty days’ rent to cover your inconvenience.
Sincerely yours,
Howard J. Bellis
President
Chapter Twelve
The drapes were down from the windows, and the rugs lay in tight rolls, neatly tied and tagged. The furniture pulled out from the walls, straggled loosely around the drawing room, and the red lamp shade squatted forlornly by its base. In the bedroom open suitcases ranged the wallboards, and a battered wardrobe trunk yawned openly. As Rose emptied the drawers of the dresser, she crammed the contents into the suitcases without repacking; stopping only when they could be stuffed no farther, and then forcing them shut.
Rafferty walked through the drawing room, avoiding the disarranged furniture, and made his way to the bedroom. Rose did not look up as he hesitated at the door, and silence grew in the room, the sounds of her packing rustling loudly. ‘I take it you’re going somewhere?’ he said finally. She made no reply. Passing directly in front of him, she crossed to a closet, removing an armful of dresses which she hung in the opened mouth of the waiting trunk. ‘Where’re you going?’ he asked. Again she did not reply; however, she stopped packing momentarily and removed a typewritten sheet of paper from her purse on the dresser, handing it to him silently.
Attentively he read the letter from the real-estate company, and his face reddened in anger. ‘They can’t make you move,’ he said. ‘The way rental laws are now, it’ll take him a year to do it!’
‘I was going anyway,’ she replied.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I wanted to get back to you Saturday and talk to you, but I couldn’t. I had to wait until everything had quieted down a little.’
‘I hoped you wouldn’t come back,’ she said. ‘I hoped I’d never see you again.’
He walked slowly to a chair and pushed a pile of clothing to the floor, sweeping it aside with his great hand. Deliberately, he seated himself, opening his coat, pushing his hat back on his head. ‘You’ll see me again,’ he said. ‘You’ll always see me. You’re part of me and I’m part of you. You don’t cut out part of yourself... and throw it away.’
‘I do,’ she replied evenly. ‘If it’s not worth keeping... you cut it out and throw it away, and you’re glad it’s over!’ She gathered up handfuls of shoes... delicate, colorful pieces of twisted velvet and thin leather, and dumped them in a drawer of the trunk. Shoving the drawer closed with her foot, she turned to face him. ‘I lied for you Friday night. I said everything you told me to say. I said it word for word... not one word more, or one word less. You’re a free man now, Rafferty... a decent, honored, respected cop. Only one person in this world really knows the truth about you. Me!’ She paused, catching her breath, fighting to control the wavering of her voice. When she continued, it was firm, and quiet. ‘And as for me, I’m going to forget it. Forget you... and everything about it.’
‘What’re you talking about?’ He was puzzled. ‘Why fly off the handle? You’re the one who thought up the idea of finding the seventy-five thousand.’
Her eyes blazed. ‘No!’ she denied it. Then her shoulders dropped despairingly. ‘No,’ she added, ‘I didn’t mean the idea the way you did it. Can’t you see what I meant? Eddie was gone. Somewhere there was that money... and I thought maybe... just maybe... you’d be smart enough to find it. Not... not something out of a nightmare, with Eddie walking the streets and killings and cops and newspapers. Not letters from landlords asking me to move so I don’t contaminate their apartments any more!’ Unexpectedly speech left her, and she sat on the bed and buried her head in her arms. ‘Oh, no... oh, no!’ She was crying.
‘I didn’t mean it that way, either,’ said Rafferty. His voice was dead, empty of emotion. ‘The way I planned it, I was going to do Stack a favor. He was going to get away... free... to South America. You and I were going to have the dough, and we’d be able... to live the way you’d always planned and talked.’ A heavy anger crept into his voice. ‘That goddamned fool!’ he said. ‘That goddamned fool had to louse it up!’
She sat upright on the bed, tears streaming down her face. You didn’t have to kill him,’she said. ‘You murdered him! You didn’t have to do that...’
‘He had it coming anyway.’ Rafferty looked across the room into her face, and she turned her head away.
‘Who’re you to decide that?’ she demanded.
‘He’d already knocked off two guys. One on that bank job in Wisconsin, and he admitted he killed Luke.’
She stirred on the bed, then arose and crossed the floor until she was directly in front of Rafferty, on her face an expression of scorn. ‘The State of Wisconsin didn’t execute him, did it? Wisconsin doesn’t believe in capital punishment, so who’re you to change what a whole state decides to do? As for Luke, what did happen? You don’t know... nobody knows! And now nobody ever will know. Maybe Eddie had to kill him in self-defense. Even if you are an escaped convict, you still got the right to try to keep living...’ She turned away abruptly, and stooping beside the chair where Rafferty was sitting, picked up the clothes from the floor. ‘I knew Eddie,’ she said finally: ‘he wasn’t a killer. Not really...’
After a pause, Rafferty said, ‘You always claimed you didn’t love him, but you talk like you do.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t love him. That’s the truth! But a woman always leaves something of herself... with the past. I felt sorry for Eddie; I never hated him. He wasn’t really vicious or mean. He was... well, he was always fighting things he could never lick, and he had to use what he had... and do the best he could. He was just little and unimportant and I felt sorry for him. So, he was wrong, and I knew he was wrong.’ She arose from her position by the chair, holding the clothes to her breast, and she began to smil
e, discovering for the first time an obvious truth. ‘Yet he was strong enough to beat you, Rafferty,’ she said in wonderment, ‘even with your two guns and your badge, and with the law and the cops on your side...’
Rafferty looked at his two hands. ‘He hasn’t beaten me yet,’ he replied heavily.
‘You took me away from him,’ she continued, ‘and yet in the end... now... he took me away from you, too. Not back to him, not back to anybody... but away from you.’ She regarded him dispassionately. ‘And the money,’ she added, ‘the money which was to buy our happiness, he never gave it up, did he, Rafferty? You never found it.’
‘No,’ said Rafferty. ‘But I can find it. At least one thing I know... it’s somewhere here in New York. He had to bring it with him to take on the boat. It’s somewhere here in New York...’
‘What good will it do you now?’
‘I’ll find it, and then we can go away... any damned place we please. I’ll resign from the force and we’ll get married... You’ll forget all about Stack.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Rafferty. Can’t you realize that a dozen times the amount of money, if you find it, can’t make me forget what I’m trying to forget, or help me find what I want to find with you. It’s you who’s wrong... wrong for me now, just the same as Eddie was wrong.’ She turned away, finally, carrying the clothes to a waiting suitcase. Memories raced to her mind, flooding her with old shames and tearing open the scars concealing half-forgotten hurts. There would always be Seattle, she remembered. Seattle and the Post Hotel... and a room on the second floor where she had lived with her mother.
On the door of the room was a neatly lettered little sign which said PUBLIC STENOGRAPHER. The room was drab, and painted a light brown. An overhead fixture blazed naked light into the room, and brought into sharp focus the sagging wooden bed with its solid headboard, in the center of which was stenciled a cluster of bright green pine cones. There was a dresser in the room, with a shadowy mirror in a mahogany frame, and a closet where both her mother and she kept their few dresses. In one corner an unpainted table held her mother’s battered Underwood typewriter, and there was a straight-backed chair on which she typed occasional letters. In front of the tall narrow window, overlooking the red-leaded fire escape, was an old-fashioned rocking chair, upholstered in cracked black leather. There was no bath connected with the room, and she and her mother used the public toilet at the end of the hall.
The Post was at best a third-class hotel, patronized by lumberjacks on their visits to the city, by sourdoughs landing from Alaska on their way back to the States, and by sailors whose ships laid over in the port. Many of the m6n were illiterate and occasionally would ask Rose’s mother to write letters for them, paying her fifty cents per page. It was not until Rose was twelve years old that she discovered the true source of her mother’s income. When the antiquated hotel phone, anchored to the wall of their room, would ring, her mother would answer it. Sometimes it would ring all evening, sometimes only once or twice in the middle of the night. Her mother would place the receiver close to her ear and shout into the mouthpiece. ‘Yes,’ she would say, ‘yes, this is the public stenographer. What room did you say you’re in? Room 501? All right, I’ll be up to take a letter.’ She would get dressed, arranging her hair and makeup carefully, and leave the room carrying her dictation notebook and pencils with her. And this might have been the truth that her mother worked day and night, except Rose began to realize after her mother returned from these calls, she never typed any letters or transcribed shorthand symbols from her notebook.
The final memory, however, was the day someone changed the sign on her mother’s door. It no longer read PUBLIC STENOGRAPHER. It now read PUBIC STENOGRAPHER.
Rose shook her head to push back the memories which crowded in... hustling one another in silent pantomime across the years.
Her father was a forgotten name, a shadowy phantom who had started her into life and whom she had never seen. She was large for her age, well developed by the time she was fourteen and ready to work. By lying to the agent, she convinced him that she was eighteen. Possessing a good natural singing voice, although it was entirely untrained, she auditioned in the crooning style of singing so popular at that time. As simply as that, she began singing with Barkley’s Sophisticates. The band toured in a secondhand school bus purchased from a county district, and it consisted of twelve men, in addition to Barkley, the leader, and the girl vocalist. They played one-night stands throughout Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, in Eagles halls, high-school gymnasiums, and granges. No playing date was too small to turn down.
The third night out, after leaving Seattle, they drove all night in the bus, and Rose, unused to liquor, became ill from the cheap bottle of whisky which was making the rounds of the musicians. She was only partly conscious, and too ill to care, when the trumpet player—a thin, taciturn man—seduced her in the back seat of the bus. In the weeks following, one by one, the other members of the band did the same, including Barkley and the bus driver. She submitted to their demands with resignation, looking to each man for some demonstration of friendship or affection to soften her loneliness. But instead of friendship, they expressed only a growing contempt, and one Saturday night, after paying her weekly salary, Barkley fired her.
At the time, she wondered hopelessly why Barkley had discharged her. She did not associate her conduct with the men in the band with the loss of her job, particularly as Barkley himself had been one of her lovers. She eventually came to the fallacious conclusion that she had been dismissed because of her voice. Consequently, upon her arrival in San Francisco, she made no effort to find work as a vocalist. Instead, she started working as a waitress in a small steak house. For a while she lived strictly within herself, desolate and withdrawn... spending her free hours in the cheap motion-picture houses which littered the downtown water-front district.
But singing with the band had been fun; she hadn’t considered it work, and at night she would wish she could be near music again. Each day, on her way to the restaurant, she passed a decaying brownstone house, trapped between two unimposing commercial buildings. The windows of the brownstone were a jungle of cardboard signs—piano lessons... VOICE CULTURE... DRAMATICS... SINGING LESSONS—a small, desperate island, despairing in the midst of oil stations, wholesale markets, and trucking firms. One sign, in particular, she remembered: dance instructions. She thought about the sign for several weeks, and one afternoon she reached a decision. Leaving the restaurant for an hour, she returned to the brownstone, and entered the grimy downstairs hall. The glass-paneled door jingled noisily behind her. She climbed the uncarpeted stairs to the second floor, and knocked at a closed door bearing the notice: PROFESSIONAL DANCE SALON.
The door was opened by a slight, swarthy, middle-aged man with intense black eyes and oiled black hair slicked over a balding skull. He hissed gently through his false teeth, and the hissing gave his pronunciation a slightly foreign air. ‘Won’t you come in?’ he said, bowing.
‘Your sign,’ she said in explanation. ‘I saw it in the window. You teach dancing? You know, stage dancing? Could you teach me good enough, so I could get a job on the stage?’
He smiled, carefully drawing his lip down over wobbling teeth. ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘Have you ever danced before?’ ‘Not like that,’ she replied. ‘Just at dances with boys. But I used to be a singer,’ she added proudly. ‘I worked with Barkley’s Sophisticates.’ She paused, and looked at him questioningly. ‘You’ve heard of them?’
‘I... I think I’ve heard of them,’ he lied politely. ‘They’re from Seattle. I’m not with them any more...’
‘Certainly... certainly... won’t you come in?’ Grasping her purse tightly she stepped into the room. It was empty, bare... except for a long mirror on one side of the room, and a bar for ballet exercises below it. A table was pushed against a wall... a long, narrow, four-legged parlor table covered with phonograph albums, and in one corner stood a scarred, handle-wound victrola. �
�I don’t have much money,’ she said. ‘How much do you charge?’
‘Classes a dollar an hour. Private instruction, five dollars.’
‘Oh,’ she replied,’ a class. That would be fine!’ He hesitated awkwardly. ‘I don’t have any classes at present.’ He didn’t add that he hadn’t had three students at one time in the past five years.
She began backing to the door. ‘I can’t afford five dollars,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry... really.’
He stopped her, grasping her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said hurriedly. ‘You can pay me the dollar... and owe me the rest. Some day, when you’re a big star,’ he laughed lightly, ‘then you can repay me.’
She regarded him seriously. ‘Yes,’ she replied earnestly, ‘I’ll repay you... I promise I will!’
He called himself Waldo Zarov, but his real name had been Walter Weiner and he had never been anything other than a chorus boy in the road companies of Broadway shows. He had grimaced and posed and danced, without talent, hidden by the grimaces, poses, and dances of the others around him, until his youth was gone and the casting directors passed him by at auditions. The jobs he secured gradually became further apart, and the shows didn’t seem to run as long. He had lived for the last ten years on the uneasy edge of poverty, and with an utter lack of hope for the future. He no longer fought for a life in show business; he fought simply for life itself.
But Fate, possibly, had done Rose no ill turn in bringing her to Waldo’s door, for Waldo could teach her only the bare fundamentals of the dance. These fundamentals Waldo himself had used successfully; Rose, equipped with the same few necessities, might do the same. Burnished with the bright kiss of youth, she needed to know little.
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