by Rufus King
Knuckles rapped briefly on the hall door.
“Delilah!”
“Yes, madam?”
“See who that is, please.”
“It’s me, Mother,” Nan’s voice called through the panels.
“Darling—come in.”
She looked like a schoolgirl across the room through the muffled light which the storm gave with its still-falling snow, until she got close to you, and then it was obvious to Lily that Nan hadn’t slept, and Lily thought: She isn’t a child any longer; she’s getting the woman look.
“Did you sleep well, dear?”
“Yes, Mother. And you?”
“Perfectly.”
Delilah was satisfied about the bath. She was laying the gray wool on a chaise-longue, removing its hanger, smoothing its folds.
“The dark oxfords, madam?”
“Please, Delilah.”
Go—go—go—but no, now don’t go, don’t leave me alone with Nan, with this girl stranger who must be waiting just as I am waiting, with a wall of glass between us.
“Shall we breakfast in here, Mother?”
“I think not, dear.” (Just as with clothing, the defensive properties of one of the public rooms would be safer for the blow.) “There’s the extra work, with Mr. Hangaway, with Mr. Parne.”
“I’se can manage, madam.”
“We will breakfast downstairs, Delilah.”
“Yes, madam.”
Delilah went, leaving Nan standing close over by a window with her back turned and with nobody knew what expression of despairing bleakness in her eyes which studied, presumably, the falling snow. Lily slipped on a robe and started calmly toward the bathroom.
“I shan’t be a moment, dear.”
“All right, Mother. Is there, is there somebody else?”
“Yes. A Mr. Hangaway came this morning. Delilah didn’t know—that the sign was coming down, I mean. She arranged for him to stay.” Irresistibly Lily went over to Nan and took her in her arms and kissed her, because she had to feel her and somehow recapture the very fact of their relationship to one another, but the wall was still there, even though her arms went through it. “Don’t worry, darling.”
“Of course not, Mother.” Then Nan did turn sharply. Her face was still in shadow because of the snow glow behind it. “Worry?”
Lily said swiftly, “About the tourist problem, dear,” and went into the bathroom and closed its door.
Lily used no soap, nothing, none of the pleasant array of accessories which Milton had always wanted her to have for leisurely, scented bathing. Just into the water and out, and a rapid drying. There was something wrong, from the very fact that the blow had not fallen before now. Mr. Hangaway’s door to the bathroom might have been bolted on the inside, of course, by Mr. Parne, and Mr. Hangaway might be waiting until his neighbor would be through; might even, in his exhaustion, have decided to skip the proposed hot tub and have tumbled his peaked and tuckered-out body straight into bed. That would be worse, as the waiting would be prolonged.
Only the gray wool now and the oxfords.
“Nan, darling.”
“Mother?”
“Gene Forrest was here. He called yesterday afternoon.”
“Yes?”
“Lorrimer Keith seems to think rather well of him, about his prospects. He thinks Gene has steadied.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Gene noticed the tourist sign in passing. It upset him. He felt the vocal touch about it, the baying of the wolves.” (Keep talking, just talking.) “I reassured him, I hope, that we were still divorced from imminent starvation, and I also felt rather as if I’d underestimated him. I liked him yesterday very much. Well, shall we go down? Popovers, I think, and eggs? Bacon?”
Mr. Hangaway was seated on the lowest step of the broad curved stairway: a gaunt, dark bundle in the hall’s uncertain twilight. He was wearing a stained woolen bathrobe from which his wrists and shins stuck out, pipe-like. His neck was pipe-like, too, and seemed far too reedy for his bony, large head which possessed the merest minimum of flesh. He made no move to get out of their way as Lily, followed by Nan, neared him but sat on, a lonely bundle of spindles, in some remote world of his own.
Lily said quickly, “Go back upstairs, darling. Delilah told me that Mr. Hangaway was—warn out.”
Hangaway’s voice was frightening because of its strength. You were unprepared for such power from that skeleton source. He did not bother to look around.
“I’m not worn out. I’m sick. There’s a dead man in the bathroom. Go and take a look if you don’t believe me. He shot himself.”
Lily’s arm was around Nan, pressing her cruelly close and tight. The cue had come so smoothly, with such profound relief.
“Suicide?”
“Yes. The gun is in his hand. His head is over the sill and I might have stepped on it. God, but I am sick!” Hangaway’s head dipped forward until it swung between his knees, a large ripe melon on the thinnest of stems. “Get me a doctor, please. And maybe you’d better do something about the police.”
“A doctor, of course—Doctor Starr—possibly, I mean it’s so difficult to be certain about death—”
“Don’t worry about that. He’s dead all right. Like mutton.”
* * * *
Dr. Colin Starr viewed the morning with distaste. The blizzard had not died with the night, and outdoor movements would be on a level, he supposed, with the popularized version of Balto’s dash (plus serum) to a stricken Nome. A prospect which gave him no pleasure. He stoked up heavily on rashers of bacon, on eggs, having because of his build plenty of bunker space. The early forties became him.
Starr sometimes reflected on the sharper brilliancies of the larger world, of the greater centers, the more rapid tempos of nationally famous minds, and always decided his own puddle to be preferable. His large fine house which his grandfather had built in the solidest tradition of mansard roofs, with its garden and its lawn that faced on Onega Drive, satisfied him completely as a good shelter and a good place for his work.
Starr’s secretary, Miss Wadsworth, came hurriedly into the dining room, looking very upset in her frame of stiff white starches.
“Mrs. Elser has just phoned, Doctor. A man, a tourist, she thinks he is dead. She thinks that he shot himself. Mrs. Elser had decided on taking in tourists, but not any longer. I mean now that this has happened. Oh, I am so sorry for her.”
“Yes, of course. I never realized things were so bad.”
No (while Starr drove his car through the storm), he had not realized that Milton Elser must have left his affairs in such a state. He could not picture Lily Elser as a hostess for uncertain strays. She lacked the metal which such a job required. This suicide business was pretty shocking, especially if the man were dead. Even if he weren’t it was bad enough, even if the man were to pull through. Starr damned the drifts, the ruts, the blinding snow and this dark, vague pall of the ceaseless storm.
An hour after he had reached the house and after he had finished his business with Parne’s body Starr sat with Lily in the living room downstairs. Lily decided that this was going to be tough, worse than the police had been and District Attorney Heffernan, during their brief and polite initial questioning of her when they had arrived.
Lily liked and admired Starr very much because he was solid and kind, and although he, too, had that protective look it was a comfortably general one which encompassed humanity as a lump and not just specifically her. But he knew you so well. No matter what your lips or your face might be saying Lily felt he knew what you were really saying on the inside to yourself.
She appreciated the futility of trying to deceive him. She wouldn’t think of trying it if it were just for her own sake, but nothing, not even his peculiar powers for sensing the truth in you, was going to prevent her from trying because of Nan.
&nb
sp; “I’m terribly sorry that all this should have happened, Mrs. Elser.”
“Was there nothing could be done?”
“Done? Oh no. He died several hours before I got here, somewhere in the neighborhood of four or five o’clock.” (Lily bit her lips sharply to prevent diem from saying: At five, Doctor, because of the tongue.) “We’re arranging to get Mr. Hangaway out of here shortly.”
Lily didn’t care about that. She cared nothing about Mr. Hangaway and his inability to stomach the shock of a look on sudden death. It was of Parne that she wanted to hear: what Starr thought, what the police thought, if they were satisfied that Parne had taken his own life.
“Was Mr. Hangaway so seriously shocked, Doctor?”
“No, it isn’t shock. I’ve sent for male attendants and the ambulance. He’ll be taken to the hospital.”
“Male attendants?”
“Yes. It’s all right for you to know now that the danger is over. The man is an addict. The morphine and syringe, the usual paraphernalia, they were in his bag. You’ve had a lucky escape, Mrs. Elser. You and your daughter.”
“He might have been dangerous?”
“Very dangerous. You never know how a man of that type is going to jump.” Starr smiled at Lily reassuringly, brushing aside with a vague gesture the appalling shock it had been to him when he had realized that Hangaway might have passed a night in the secluded loneliness of the house with Lily Elser and her daughter and with nothing to deter him but the moth-like fragility of two old Negro servants. He kept carefully from showing in his eyes his case-history knowledge of what addicts like Hangaway had done: the sex crimes with their insensate brutality, the lust for instigating and then fanning pain into a tortured death. “Just when did Mr. Hangaway reach here, Mrs. Elser?”
“Shortly before eight.”
“Yes, so Delilah told us. We were interested in having you confirm it.”
“I know it was then, because Delilah woke me at eight and told me he had just come.” (This was leading up to something. You could tell that. Above the still-untasted horror of Mr. Hangaway being an addict there were arrows that pointed toward Parne.) “He told Delilah that he had been driving all night and that he felt worn out.”
“The district attorney was rather hoping he’d come here sooner.”
“Mr. Heffernan? Wondered—why?”
“Yes. He wondered whether there might not have been some connection between the two men under the circumstances.”
This was it all right. You didn’t say a thing like “under the circumstances” if things were smooth and unquestioned and slotted in their grooves.
“Does Mr. Heffernan feel that Mr. Hangaway could have been responsible for Mr. Parne’s suicide?” (A stereotyped plot pattern presented itself and Lily seized it.) “Something of a nemesis, Doctor? Mr. Parne felt that Mr. Hangaway was catching up with him and killed himself rather than face—whatever it was he had to face?”
“No, Mrs. Elser. I hate putting this on you all at once. Mr. Parne was killed. He was shot in the back, just below the left shoulder blade. I imagine from some distance. The bullet didn’t come out.”
Lily shut her eyes for one moment while the betraying weakness swept through her. All of her feverish gestures in the night in that room, born of her sickness and terror, had been a waste and a mocking futility: the fingerprints on the doorknobs and the gun, all of that dragging and lugging of Parne with the feel of his loose, loose limbs away from and then back again to the blood on the floor. Why hadn’t she thought of examining the wound?
Then the concern split into her that the negligee which she had worn while going into Parne’s room was red. Red upon its redness there might well be a spot of blood. Upon something of Nan’s, whatever it was that Nan had worn on her own desperate mission, some touch of the damning carmine might be too.
“It is so incredible, Doctor. It makes me doubt fact. No one was here last night but Mr. Parne and ourselves.”
“Yes, we know. It’s what bothers them. It’s why Heffernan is still hoping that some connection may turn up with Hangaway. It would be so logical if it would, because an addict of Hangaway’s nature wouldn’t have the slightest scruple about killing, no matter how tenuous the motive. Heffernan feels it too coincidental for credence that a potential killer, such as Hangaway, should turn up here just by chance on the heels of a homicide.”
“Can’t they make him talk, Doctor?” (How useless, Lily reflected, this eagerness which she pressed into her voice. Mr. Hangaway could talk his head off, and nothing would efface her withering knowledge of a link between Mr. Parne and Nan, of the fright in Nan’s eyes, of Nan’s picture and of Milton’s own little pearl-handled gun.) “Can’t they find anything in his papers, his things?”
“No, there’s nothing of any value to the police in his papers, and he won’t be able to talk for some time. He had started to get pretty violent. I gave him an injection. Mrs. Elser, these are just the abominable situations which sometimes we have to go through. We’ll take Hangaway off very shortly, and they’re arranging about Mr. Parne. Within an hour or so your house will be your own again.”
A flood of unbelievable relief went through Lily.
“Do you mean that Nan and I—we could go away?”
Starr looked at her curiously. There was something there. Something deeper, of a more violent urgency than a simple desire to leave a house where tragedy had occurred.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t say. That possibility isn’t within my province, Mrs. Elser.”
“No, I appreciate that, Doctor. When anyone meets death suddenly—”
Starr said earnestly, “You’ve nothing on earth to worry about.” He felt, after he said it, that his attempt at lightening the situation fell far short from being effective. “Neither you nor your daughter is the type to shoot a stranger. I can assure you that the thought hasn’t even been considered, and that Heffernan, that everyone has nothing but sympathy for you and will get you through the necessary steps as simply as they can.”
“Just what are the necessary steps, Doctor?”
“They’re entirely un-alarming. They’re looking for signs of forcible entry by the killer during the night. They’ll trace the gun. They’ll make an exhaustive search of the house and outbuildings and grounds. Then they won’t bother you here any more. They’ll concentrate on checking Parne’s past.”
Lily’s slender fingers tightened lightly.
“Do you know how they do that, Doctor?”
“I don’t exactly, but they’ve astonishing facilities for it. However, that’s nothing for you to worry about. The only other thing they’ll want you to stay around for will be the inquest.”
“They can’t—they won’t want Nan at that?”
“Perhaps it could be arranged but, frankly, I doubt it. She did meet Parne last night and talk with him. They’re likely to insist on having all the firsthand evidence about the man they can get.” (Starr thought: Here’s a woman who is badly in need of help. Why on earth doesn’t she loosen up and tell me what’s really worrying her? It’s beyond money trouble; it’s beyond Parne. There’s something feral about it, a guarded tigress touch. Good lord, perhaps it’s there: her young.) “About her, Mrs. Elser—about your daughter.”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“I know how this has upset her, but beyond that. It struck me when I talked with her that things weren’t quiet right. As if there were something on her mind.”
“Well”—Lily managed to smile—“she did lose her job.”
“In Detroit, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Nan has been doing free-lance fashion designing. I suppose there was the new broom angle about it, in that her start was such a success. She won a competition which the Detroit Free Press conducted. It gave her a good deal of publicity and brought her in quite a lot of orders. She even had her picture”—the bright smile on Li
ly’s face froze into a grimace—“in the papers, Doctor.”
Starr smiled back at Lily while appreciating the grimace and while wishing he could shake her into being sensible and into getting this incubus off her mind. It was not necessary for him to remind himself that most of his women patients went through initial periods of stubbornness which would have sated a mule.
“Then I suppose,” he said, “that people just stopped being fashionable?”
“Something like that, Doctor.”
“Well, she’ll get over it. The young do. At least she’s at home again, and that’s something for all of her friends here to be thankful for. Will both of you dine with me tonight, Mrs. Elser?” (Gene Forrest—Lorrimer Keith—Gene’s mother—the Tomlinson kids—they could be rounded up.) “Some of your daughter’s friends are coming. I’m sure you’ll both sleep better after a change of—well—scene.”
Quite suddenly Lily started to cry. Not much, but she knew it would be the beginning of a good case of hysterics if she didn’t instantly stop it. Goodness, kindness, they were the things she couldn’t stand up against right now. They turned her strength into water.
“This is stupid of me, Doctor. We’ll be glad to.”
Starr stood up and held out his hand. He ignored her tears entirely.
“Then at eight?”
“At eight.”
* * * *
They removed Mr. Hangaway at eleven.
It took two burly attendants from the psychopathic ward to do so, and even they failed to muffle his strong voice with its initial outpouring of obscenities when they started to force him down the broad curved stairs. Lily heard them, sitting in her private living room with Nan, and talked calmly through them.
Mr. Hangaway was out. Out of their lives forever. Which left simply Mr. Parne. Just herself and Nan and Mr. Parne’s murdered body in between them. It and the wall of glass which Lily insisted on keeping there, because she knew that the moment she let into her full consciousness the first concrete shape, the first absolute fact, she would no longer be a strong protector but would go to pieces. Nothing but complete ignorance of truth could be her safeguard and her armor.
