by Rufus King
Keith sat at Lily’s left, and Mrs. Forrest faced her directly across the table. The others didn’t matter. Lily felt the current of these two interests strongly turned on her. She understood Ida Forrest’s perfectly but not so well Lorrimer’s. She found it too accomplished, in the sense of something having been already settled and which she had not been consulted about. It was (except that he was seated at her side) reminiscent of the sort of feeling she had had when dining out with Nan’s father and with Milton Elser. The feeling of being a wife.
It both saddened and annoyed her. Someday if Lorrimer wanted her to, still wanted her to—but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t even right now if he could see the pictures which were chasing through her deadened head. She thought: I’m the mother of a girl whom I love more than I love life, who has shot a man, no matter why, no matter with what justice or driven by what sense of appalling fear, and my hands have washed out his blood. She was connected in some way with that man and with an addict who takes morphine. Some maelstrom trapped her.
There were two rubbers of bridge, while the Capehart muted through the background tones of a group of Debussy, while brandy sodas were served, and the party broke up at eleven. Lorrimer drove them home, still in the manner of a husband driving his family home, still implying with every comfortable word and gesture that that was settled. He stood in the hall for a while, frosty-cheeked, healthy, so implacably sound, prolonged his good night before Sheffield’s visionary eyes and the handsome young cop’s black shoe-button ones.
“Tomorrow, Lily, shall the three of us lunch at the club?”
“Thank you, Lorrimer.”
“All right with you, Nan?”
“I’ll be glad to, Mr. Keith.”
“I’ll call for you. I’ll call for you at one.”
“We’ll be ready.”
“Well—good night, Lily.”
“Good night, Lorrimer.”
“Nan—”
“Good night, Mr. Keith.”
He looked at her dotingly.
“Nan, I’d forgotten that you still curtsy. At nineteen. Not much—but there’s a trace of curtsy still there.”
“I’m an anachronism, Mr. Keith.”
“I honestly think you are. One in wolf’s clothing, but of the very nicest sort. “Good night.”
The heavy front door closed, shutting Lorrimer and all his world out into the snow, closing Lily in tight with Nan. Lily opened her cape and started peeling a glove. She went over to the handsome young cop. He stood up, and she said, “No one has told me your name.”
“It’s Suffolk, Mrs. Elser. Roy Suffolk.”
“I’m worried about your comfort, Mr. Suffolk.”
“Oh, I’ll make out all right.”
“I’d like Sheffield to show you the kitchen and where things are. He’ll leave sandwiches, but you’ll want your coffee when you want it, and you’ll want it hot.”
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Elser.”
“Then good night—good night.”
Lily went upstairs with Nan. They parted on the landing. Nan went to her rooms. Lily went to hers.
The bed looked awfully good. It had never looked better. Turned-down white percale, smooth as glass, the pillows plumped and wanting to be dented, the wool, the folded satin-covered fleece all said: Come along, forget everything. Kill your thinking apparatus and come to bed.
It didn’t work.
Lily understood why. Your body and head could get too tired to be tired. Motorcars sometimes used to act that way, just kept on running for a while even after the ignition had been shut off. From residue, searing heat. Which was sometimes also why they exploded or burst into flame after smashing head-on into a blank wall.
Which were no thoughts to put her to sleep.
They all had to be blanked out: Mr. Parne’s corpse, the morphine addict, Hangaway, two basins of pinkish water, a thick-lensed chemist testing for human blood, Ida Forrest’s bitten, hardened eyes with their defensive frosts and Lorrimer. And Nan’s connection with the whole sickening mess.
By one o’clock the thoughts were still alive and eagerly active in the profound hush of the sleeping house. No, Nan wouldn’t be sleeping, and neither would that handsome young patrolman Suffolk. Well, maybe he would: it was a fundamental rule of the service that every watchman only remained awake when he was not on guard.
Lily turned on the bed lamp. It was still close enough after one not to matter. You could walk, of course; just up and down the room in slippers and a wrapper until you stumbled and tripped yourself-to sleep. Oke. She liked “Oke.” The boy at the filling station used it, and he had a face like a bright red impulsive apple.
She had to see Nan. That was at the base of her not being able to sleep. Right now she had to face her own daughter just as last night she had steeled herself into a determination to face Mr. Parne. Lily stopped short and stared. It seemed that Nan must have had the same thought too.
The hall door of the bedroom was opening. It was the click of the latch which had told her so, strangely sharp and metallic because of the imponderable stillness of the night.
“Nan darling? I’m awake. Come in.”
Mr. Hangaway hesitated on the threshold, looking at her.
Mr. Hangaway stepped softly into the room.
He closed the door.
Chapter 3
Hangaway was in no hurry. He had all of the time in the world and didn’t bother with any further movement after shutting the door but just stood quietly and contemplated Lily with his shiny bright eyes.
Lily didn’t make any move either. She couldn’t. Within the drained and terrible empty feeling of her body her mind suggested several impossibilities. Each held an ultimate conclusion in Hangaway’s death, because that struck her as the only state in which safety lay for any of them: the one sure defense against his glitter.
While he continued to contemplate her Lily’s mind considered the job in detail: you shot or stabbed or hit when you wanted to kill somebody, and the first two methods were out. As far as that went so was the last. The fragility of bric-a-brac and objets d’art with which Milton had so lovingly bedizened Lily’s room would simply strike Mr. Hangaway as funny and serve as stinging goads to thrill him toward his purpose.
That left her hands. It also left the tigress which Starr had sensed in Lily earlier in the day, crouched and desperate for her cub.
Hangaway seemed satisfied with his leisurely observation and finished with it. “I’m glad you’re being sensible, Mrs. Elser. Screaming women irritate me. That flatfoot downstairs was good enough to let me in. He won’t bother us any.”
The vagueness of his statement chilled her, with its definite demolishment of that bridge of escape, the slender hope that young patrolman Suffolk might have been in the kitchen making coffee and might, under the emergency of a scream, come to their help.
She forced herself to look unflinchingly at Hangaway, thinking: This man is a drug addict. Never, for an instant, let his apparent quietness deceive you. And don’t corner him. Somewhere, Lily reflected, she had picked up the recipe. Because if you cornered them they never hesitated any longer but just struck. Maybe that only applied to maniacs and referred to humoring them. Maybe you couldn’t humor an addict.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Hangaway?”
“Well, I don’t know. I mean I can’t be specific because I’m not absolutely sure myself.”
“Will you excuse me for a moment? I’ll change into a house dress—”
“Just hold it, Mrs. Elser. Sit down.” He nodded sleepily toward a slipper chair and then nodded again with faint approval as Lily sank into it. “Quit figuring out ways for leaving this room, because that irritates me too.”
Hangaway stepped unhurriedly over to the foot of the bed and sat down on it, sticking out his pipe-like ankles and shoving his thin hands deep into over
coat pockets.
“Where’s the girl’s room, Mrs. Elser?”
“Delilah? She and Sheffield—”
“Don’t get smart! The kid.”
“My daughter is spending the night with friends.”
Hangaway sighed.
“Look, Mrs. Elser. Among other things I’ve got a gun. See?” He took a service revolver from a pocket and showed it to Lily, then put it back in the pocket. “I took it away from young Handsome downstairs after I knocked him out. I used a tire iron, so I wouldn’t go expecting him to be bright for quite a while. What you’ve got to realize is that I’ve got something on my mind and I don’t want to be”—he searched thoughtfully for the precise word—“to be brooked.”
“No—of course not, Mr. Hangaway.”
“And don’t humor me. I know what you’re feeling and what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. You’re wrong about what you’re thinking, at least. The kid doesn’t mean a thing to me that way. Not so much as that!”
He snapped skeleton fingers and glittered at her earnestly. Curiously Lily believed him, and a tide of relief flooded through her until she remembered that remark of Starr’s before dinner concerning addicts: It’s one of their main dangers. They lull you with their pleasantries into a false security before, well, the other side of them comes out.
Not that Hangaway’s attitude of abnegation toward Nan was a pleasantry, but it had undoubtedly been offered to put her at ease. This was a thought which forced Lily to stifle a hysterical laugh.
“I amuse you, Mrs. Elser?”
“I assure you that you don’t.”
“You’re lying, but it’s quite all right. You know how repulsive I’d be to your daughter or to you for that matter. No women care for me much, not with any real feeling. It’s because of the way I look. I’ve gotten quite used to it.”
The voice was lulling and held none of the strong strident tones of Hangaway’s morning performances. Rather it flowed reasonably, with reason, and Lily found herself saying with a desperate calmness, “I think you are being unfair to yourself Mr. Hangaway.”
“No. I know. Whenever I want any love I’ve got to take it. It’s never given to me. Nothing’s ever been given to me, Mrs. Elser. I suppose you’ll think this funny but as a kid I had to steal the milk my mother thought I ought to drink. She was a terrible slut. I can’t remember her ever having been sober, except on the night, when she killed the man she said was my father. He was quite a package himself. Was a college professor once. I never did know exactly what they canned him for, but you only needed a couple of guesses after you’d looked at him. They made a great team all right. You mustn’t think I’m asking for sympathy.”
“No, certainly not.”
“I’m too old for it. I was too old for it at birth. The point is just this, Mrs. Elser. I always had to take things. Everything. Now it’s a habit. Which room is the kid’s?”
“My daughter is spending the night with the Tomlinsons, Mr. Hangaway.”
He sighed again.
“I did tell you that I don’t want to be brooked.”
The repetition of the phrase pleased him, but in the light of a practical example of his distaste at obstructions it struck him as rather weak. It left a lack of a proper appreciation of his power. His strong and serviceable power. He got up from the foot of the bed and stepped softly over to the slipper chair and then, still softly, kissed Lily on the lips.
“You don’t like that do you, Mrs. Elser?” He bit her cheek sharply and, with a skeleton hand, almost succeeded in stifling her cry. “Now that sort of treatment you don’t mind so much. Just take it easy. Write it off as a lesson in behavior. You see I understand women like you pretty well. You can take a beating easier than you can take a kiss on the mouth.”
Hangaway idly observed the tiny blood bead on Lily’s cheek, her tight trembling.
“I know the gun didn’t impress you,” he said, “but I think that that object lesson will. It’s funny how little you realize what worlds we are apart. You in orderly fields and me in a jungle. Oh, I’ve no illusion about myself, none whatever. Your sort of life, love on rose leaves, I’d simply get no kick out of it. I like it to be sordid, illicit, in caves of darkness, obscure corners of a barn. Wipe your cheek off. There’s blood on it. Go ahead. I’ll let you.”
Lily stood up and went to a dresser. She took a handkerchief from a drawer and pressed it to her cheek. There was a nail file with a silver handle among the articles on the dresser. Lily covered it with the blood-spotted handkerchief, looking at Hangaway’s very bright eyes as they stared in reflection at her in the mirror. “I doubt if you’d know where to put it,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The nail file, Mrs. Elser. People have such funny notions about vital spots. They seem to think that all you have to do is to stick something sharp into a man’s body and he dies. Now I’ve seen a man with fifteen or sixteen stab wounds in him before anything happened of any importance. They used ice picks, and even then he almost got well. That wasn’t because he was tough but simply because the job was sloppy. Wait—”
He held up bony fingers and shook one warningly, while both of them listened to the rapping on the door, then to Nan’s voice saying: “Mother, are you all right? Did you call just now?”
Lily did not stop to think, to figure anything out, There wasn’t anything you could figure, beyond trying to block Mr. Hangaway. Surely just the sheer weight of your body would act as an anchor, and you could stick for at least as long as you could breathe. She threw herself at him and clung to him in her great despair, without much to cling to but his overcoat, which bunched softly in her hands and felt slippery.
“Nan darling—run—run—get out of the house—get help—”
Hangaway looked down at Lily derisively and disentangled her arms like threads; then he cupped his fingers tight over her mouth and pressed cruelly and shoved her hard backward, and sent her staggering backward into the slipper chair. He opened the hall door.
“Come on in, Miss Elser.”
Nan stood and looked at him, while her face changed from bewilderment into horror, into the terror of comprehension. She ran past him, straight to Lily, and cowered down on her knees by the chair, while that animal look of fright was in her eyes, the helpless look of stark dread, and her voice shook.
“What’s he doing here? What’s he doing to you, Mother?”
“Nothing—just be quiet, darling.”
Nan said to Hangaway, so weakly that it seemed silly to expect him to hear her, “What are you doing here?”
He shut the hall door and sat down on the foot of the bed again, idly observing the two tense, shaking women, pleased with the picture in its satisfactory presentation of utter rout before his remarkable power. The kid’s voice was as it should be, too: a proper bleat. A very pretty dish. Maybe, if there was time, he’d see how he felt about it.
“Well, as I said to your mother, I don’t exactly know. I tell you what, Miss Elser. We’ll start with Detroit. Just what gave you the first lead?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looked pained. She was obviously going to be irritating. Maybe she would need an object lesson like the one he’d given her mother. Her check was very fresh and very inviting. So was her neck. Sock the old one cold first naturally.
“I’ve gone to some trouble to explain to your mother that I don’t like being irritated, Miss Elser. I’m after information and I won’t be brooked. How did you get wise to Worthby Haines?”
“I don’t know him.”
“Well, this looks like it’s going to be tough. How much did you shake him down for?”
Lily said fiercely, seeing what she saw in Hangaway’s eyes and no longer caring how foul the maelstrom might have been, “Tell him anything. Tell him anything, darling, that he wants to know. You know tha
t I love you, darling. Will always love you, darling.”
“But I’ve nothing to tell, Mother.”
“Why don’t you listen to her, Miss Elser? She’s giving you good advice. You can’t handle this thing right, not alone. Even if your mother’s in on it with you, you’ll both end up short, Haines is hard—as you know. He’d see to it that somebody wrapped you up in cement just as quick as he’d pick a daisy. You’d better turn the proof over to me.”
He stood up suddenly and you hardly noticed him moving, but he was beside them, leaning down with his big bony head, and he reached out and touched Nan’s cheek with a finger.
He said with a stealthy softness. “Did Parne get them last night and hide them?”
His finger went on stroking Nan’s check experimentally, like a fleshless bone making circles on a peach. It felt downy and soft to him, and he thought: Power is everything in life.
Power was way beyond bodily perfection and pretty looks in the things it could get you. He was glad that he wasn’t pretty. Pretty boys never got anything much for themselves because too many people wanted them and they didn’t last. Decay set in quick, and then they were sunk and everybody who had liked them gave them the go-by and looked around for something fresher. Sometimes it even discouraged them into suicide, and they killed themselves as a last grab after the limelight and being important.
He said again, “Did Parne get them, Miss Elser?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know Worthby Haines?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know Parne?”
“No.”
He said with quiet indifference, “You’re a liar, Miss Elser.”
“Oh, tell him, darling—tell him.”
“She will.”
“I can’t.”
Nan’s shaking increased, and sobs suddenly choked her. Lily thought: She is lying about Mr. Parne. That much I know. Maybe I’m the one who’s keeping her from talking. Just by being here.
