Sally

by Howard Fast

  She took a long look at him now. Her eyes were dark and no longer afraid. They were reasonable. They searched him, and then she nodded and told him.

  “Someone is going to kill me,” she said. “I thought it was you.”

  Gonzalez studied her thoughtfully. Now she noticed how very dark his eyes were, how level his brows. He had a slight tang of something in his voice, and that made her wonder whether he was an American. He was a New Yorker anyway, and that was three-quarters of not being an American—or so most people in her home town would think. New York was a foreign place.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said, very conscious of the soap opera-TV-cliché quality of her words. Gonzalez was also conscious of that same quality.

  “I believe you. I don’t believe you.” Gonzalez nodded. “Too much goes on this question of belief. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter you’re telling the truth. You think someone is going to kill you.”

  “That could also make me a little insane,” she said.

  Gonzalez shrugged and smiled. “As we all are. We’re all a little bit insane, aren’t we?”

  Now she liked him as much as she dared to like anyone, and she was able to smile back at him. They had established something between them—a little thread. At least that was the way Gonzalez always thought about it. You were after a person; you were harassing a person; you were trying to help a person; you were trying to comfort a person. In any case, there had to be a little thread. It was one of a number of things he thought about in terms of his work that he never talked to anyone about.

  “Of course I would like to know,” he said. “Who do you think is trying to kill you?”

  She shook her head.

  “When?” Gonzalez said. “Today? I mean, do you think someone is going to kill you now?”

  She nodded. She was becoming afraid again. Fear took hold of her body and erased its pleasantness, its quietness, the thing in it that appealed to Gonzalez.

  “Is it sitting out here that frightens you?” he asked.

  She stared at him. Her confidence was gone. She doubted him; she doubted everything, and she looked warily again at each person passing by.

  “Easy, Miss …” the detective said. “What did you say your last name is? Dillon?”

  “No, D-i-1-l-m-a-n, Sally Dillman.”

  “All right, Miss Dillman. Suppose you come with me down a block, and then we walk across Sixty-seventh Street and we’re at the Nineteenth Precinct. You know what a precinct is, do you?”

  “Why shouldn’t I know?”

  “Well, you know how it is. You’re not from here. I don’t know where you’re from—maybe where you’re from they don’t have precincts. All I’m saying, a precinct is a police station; it’s a place where you’ll be very safe, where you can feel safe. Do you agree with me? Would you feel safe in a place like that?”

  Still she looked at him with terror.

  “All right,” he said, “let me put it this way. Do you believe me? Do you believe I’m a New York City policeman?”

  Even that was not immediately clear and true to her. She toyed with it. Her eyes eased; their quick movements stopped, and then she said, yes, she believed.

  “All right, then, it’s just a few blocks. We can walk over there or, if you want to, I’ll stop a taxi and we can ride over there.”

  She stood up and shook her head. “No, we’ll walk over there. It’s a nice day. I don’t mind walking.”

  “You feel better?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “All right, then, we’ll walk. Now, whether you’re in danger or not—look, I don’t think you’re in danger, but to you, you feel in danger, that’s the important thing; so stay close to me and, if you see anything—anything that makes you feel this danger is immediate, is right on you—then you let me know. Don’t be shy. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be thinking to yourself that I think you’re crazy.”

  “Thank you,” she said very quietly.

  They crossed over Fifth Avenue and walked the block to Sixty-seventh Street and then turned left. They walked on to Madison, to Park, to Lexington, and then halfway toward Third Avenue on the uptown side of the street where the Nineteenth Precinct was quartered in an old, dirty, red-brick building. All that time Gonzalez watched the street, watched the people they were passing, and watched her. After all, Gonzalez thought to himself, this is a world of troubled people, dissatisfied people, hungry people, people with guns, people with psychoses, people with illnesses, people with death inside of them.

  He shook his head and told himself to be a cop and not to be a philosopher. And he added to himself, “It is all this being a God-damned philosopher that gets you into trouble. Believe me, stop being a philosopher. Like Allan Perez, that smart lawyer, said, ‘You are going to be a credit to your people. So just stiffen up your spine, Gonzalez, and start being a credit to your people.’”

  Once on the way there she panicked. She stiffened because a man was standing across the street and watching her—or a man was standing there and seemed to be watching her. She clutched Gonzalez’ arm and he turned to look at the man.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Just walk along quietly on the inside of me. If he’s somebody you’re afraid of, then I’m between you and him. Right?”

  “Right.” She nodded.

  “All right, then. Quiet and easy.”

  The man did nothing. He remained on the other side of the street, and when Gonzalez glanced back, he was not looking at them any more.

  Gonzalez thought about it a little as they came to the precinct. He thought about someone who lives in a world like this where a murderer is loose—a specific murderer, a single directed murderer—and whether it is a fact of life or a figment of the imagination, he didn’t like it, and he would not trade places with her.

  They entered the precinct. To the right was the big desk with the police sergeant sitting behind it. Gonzalez nodded to him.

  “Is the boss in?” Gonzalez asked him.

  “Upstairs,” the sergeant behind the big desk replied.

  Two patrolmen walked out past them. Gonzalez glanced at the girl. She was relaxing now. She was studying the plaque on the wall opposite the desk. The plaque gave a brief history of the Nineteenth Precinct. It said that the place had been built in 1887; that a man called N. B. Bush was the architect; and that another man called J. H. Brady was the builder.

  All this evocation of an ancient past, of a Victorian time when they built such buildings as these and they were fresh and new and bright, added to her sense of security. She was reading the plaque and taking comfort from it, when suddenly Gonzalez knew that she was a schoolteacher. How or why he knew it he could not say, but it struck him as a certainty. Perhaps her attention to the plaque on the wall underlined that. Perhaps it was the manner in which, as she relaxed, she examined the premises.

  He could almost see her standing up in front of her class and telling them of this peculiar and interesting incident and describing this strange, dirty, odd place with effectiveness, precision, and perhaps even a bit of humor.

  Gonzalez couldn’t help asking her, “You’re a teacher?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I took a guess. Look, Miss Dillman, I want you to talk with my boss upstairs. That’s Lieutenant Rothschild; he’s the head of the squad. He’s a smart man and he won’t make any quick decisions. Don’t be afraid that you come to a place like this and we’re just going to say you’re crazy. You know we live in a peculiar world. Who’s crazy? Who says who’s crazy?”

  She smiled. It made him feel good that he was able to make her smile now, and as he led the way upstairs, he continued to watch and appreciate the manner in which she was making her own observations. He felt that she was filled with good and healthy curiosity about this place and would be about other places if only she could get over the fear.

  He led her into the detective room. A detective named Burke sat there at his desk, and he glanced up and nodded at Go
nzalez. It was a middle-sized, dreary room, neither large nor small, lit with weak yellow bulbs, furnished with several old desks and a standing supply of dirt and dust. They turned left and went through the door to the office of Lieutenant Rothschild.

  The lieutenant sat behind a plain, scarred wooden desk in a room that was about eight by ten feet and contained two chairs and a filing cabinet. Rothschild was dry, middle-aged, and dyspeptic. His hair was thinning. He looked up at them as they entered and studied them with bleak curiosity, so bleak that the sum of it was an absence of curiosity. He examined them and then accepted them as part of his environment, along with the battered desk, the paint peeling from the walls, and the yellow overhead light. So filthy were the windows that without the light the room would have been dark.

  “You got a few minutes, Lieutenant?” Gonzalez asked him.

  Rothschild nodded and motioned to the two chairs. “Sit down,” he said to Sally Dillman.

  “This is Miss Dillman,” Gonzalez introduced them. “This is Lieutenant Rothschild, Miss Dillman. I met her over by the park and I brought her over here. She’s in trouble.” Gonzalez sat down in the other chair.

  Rothschild continued to stare at her. “What kind of trouble?” Rothschild asked.

  She didn’t reply. She looked at Rothschild and then she looked at Gonzalez, who felt that she was asking herself how she had ever gotten there.

  “Look, Miss Dillman,” Gonzalez said, “you told me what your trouble was. Tell the lieutenant what your trouble is; don’t be afraid.”

  She shook her head.

  “All right, it’s understandable,” said Gonzalez. “It’s hard for her to say it. She thinks someone is going to kill her.”

  She was alert, however, and she observed the exchange of glances between Rothschild and Gonzalez. Her mouth tightened. Rothschild was also observant. He said to her, “Look, Miss Dillman. This is a big world and it’s filled with types. I’m not saying you’re crazy. I’m not saying that nobody is trying to kill you. You want to tell us about it?”

  “I think you got to tell us about it,” Gonzalez said. “I mean, well, that’s what we’re here for. Why do you think someone is going to kill you?”

  Now she looked from one to another of them and she nodded and she said, “If I tell it to you, just plain and short, you can’t believe me. It makes no sense. Do you want me to tell you the whole story?”

  “We got plenty of time,” Rothschild said. “Just tell it to us. Tell it in your own way and don’t worry about wasting our time. Maybe if you were not here, we’d just sit here and bite our nails and do nothing.”

  “It’s possible,” Gonzalez said. “Believe me, I’ve sat here biting my nails, doing nothing.”

  He was pleased again that he had the ability to make her smile. She smiled now. “All right,” she said, “then I’ll tell you the whole story, but you must remember that you want me to.”

  “We want you to,” Rothschild said.

  “Very well.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  AS SALLY Dillman told her story, so did Detective Gonzalez reinterpret it and visualize it for himself. While doing so, he glanced at Rothschild frequently and wondered whether Rothschild also was visualizing her story. It was hard to tell. Rothschild had for too many years cultivated a poker face. There was nothing left to indicate whether he was in empathy or listening mechanically, as a cop listens to the confession of any petty criminal.

  With Gonzalez it was anything but mechanical. He had a gift for making mental pictures and images for himself, and now he was able to see the small upstate New York town, hot in the summer months—almost smoky in its indolence and heat—and somewhere there on Main Street, one flight upstairs, the offices of an old doctor who knew a lot less than he should know. Gonzalez thought of friends of his, relatives, young people out of his own specific jungle, who were now interning in one hospital or another, learning out of the vast, almost infinite fund of knowledge that confronts any doctor today. Dr. Arthur Kaldish, in his office in Timmerville, must have been something else entirely.

  Gonzalez listened with fascination as she told how they had examined her and how they had run a blood test and how Kaldish, the physician, and Uncle Jerry, the pharmacist, and the nurse, a skinny, dry woman, Rita Saxon by name, had each of them looked at the other, exchanged nods, exchanged doleful faces, and finally agreed that Sally Dillman should come back the following day.

  Then she told them how she had returned and how she had walked up the wooden steps to Dr. Kaldish’s office with increasing anticipation of the doom that awaited her.

  She tried to remember and calmly state her feelings as she awaited Dr. Kaldish’s diagnosis, and she told them then what had happened in the old doctor’s office, how she had been given the first death sentence.

  “Do you understand?” she asked them. “You must understand. I mean, what I did after that makes no sense unless I can make you see how I felt then. But I think that if you see how I felt then at that point, what I did will not seem so insane as it might. That was in September—this past September. I don’t remember very much of September. That month is like a dark omission—something in time snatched out of my existence. I resigned my job at the school. I didn’t do very much more than that. I remember almost an entire week when I just sat in our house on Maple Street and looked at the walls. Sometimes I would turn on the television, but what had happened inside of me made it impossible to look at television or to go to a film or anything like that. There were some boys who asked me for dates, but I couldn’t do that either. I lost some weight. I didn’t want to eat very often or much. I felt very, very rotten and then I just attempted to get used to the fact that I was dying and to accept it. But it is not something you get used to and you never really accept it. And then, toward the end of September, I did something. I sold the house.

  “I guess everyone around knew what had happened to me because, in a place like Timmerville, there aren’t any secrets and people like to talk. It’s not that people are hateful or anything of the sort, but they just like to talk, and word gets around. Then, finally, I went to Spider Maxton—he’s the man who runs the pool hall on First Street. I had never spoken to him before, but I knew about him. I went into the pool hall and I asked for him, and they took me to a little office behind the pool hall that was Mr. Maxton’s office. He’s a tall, thin, very peculiar man. I remember very cold eyes, and he wore sort of Hollywood clothes. At least I think of that style—tight trousers with slanting pockets. I remember someone remarking once that he ordered his clothes from the West Coast. It’s funny that when I think back I don’t remember much more than that about him. So we talked and he arranged things.”

  Gonzalez could imagine how he arranged things. Now she was no longer foreign to Gonzalez. She had connected Timmerville with the Nineteenth Precinct, with New York. Spider Maxton was the connection. He was a constant. Wherever you went, there was a Spider Maxton. He was the little guy at the bottom. He ran a pool hall or he owned a bar or he took numbers or he ran a little book business or he pushed a little dope. He was ubiquitous; he was the connection all over the United States, and in a sense he was also a definition. He was the step that went to the next step and to the next step and to the next, and finally you were at the top.

  Gonzalez was thinking of that with one part of his mind while another part of his mind listened to her words and he visualized her introducing herself to Spider Maxton, telling him she was Sally Dillman, a schoolteacher, and the daughter of a railroad engineer.

  Gonzalez could literally watch her standing there as Maxton said to her, “Well, Miss Dillman, what brings you here?”

  She was astonished, no doubt, at the fact that he spoke her language. She must have expected something more alien. She must have expected a mindless hoodlum. But this was no stock hoodlum; this was a carefully dressed, very small businessman attending to his business.

  And what did she have in mind?

  Then she told him
what she had in mind. And, as she told this part of the story to Rothschild and Gonzalez, they looked at each other quickly and then listened and watched her and again glanced at each other.

  She continued, “I find this harder than anything to say—I mean why I went in there and what was I thinking of. I had decided to get out of Timmerville because I couldn’t live in Timmerville any more. It was just no longer possible for me to live there, and I think you understand that, and I don’t have to explain that in any great detail now. I think when I sold the house on Maple Street and everything that had been my father’s and my mother’s and my family and my past—at that time I made up my mind that I had to leave Timmerville. It’s true I didn’t sell the furniture—not that the furniture is very good or worth anything much—but selling the furniture would have made it too complete. I put the furniture in storage, but that was only a gesture; it did not mean that I was ever coming back for the furniture or that I wanted it or that I put any value on it, and I remember the man at Green’s Storage Warehouse, how he looked at me so strangely. I paid six months’ storage rent in advance, and I think he was at the point of asking me what happens after the six months, but he didn’t do that. Anyway, I had already left Timmerville in spirit. I had taken myself out of there.

  “I had a few months more to live, I knew that. I wanted to go to New York; and at least for a little while there I had the notion of registering at some very great, beautiful hotel and living in the most splendid manner and—oh, you know, going everywhere and, well, doing like someone would do in a Hollywood film. You know. I think I’ve seen it a number of times in a Hollywood film or in TV, where someone is condemned to death with cancer or something else and they know they’re going to die and then they have a great, wonderful time before they die. Of course, that’s a lie; I know it’s a lie. No one has a great, wonderful time before they die, but this is why I went to Spider Maxton, and I went to him and made the request of him.”