Women Crime Writers

by Sarah Weinman

  So now, here’s Towers. A young man, out to “make his fortune” as they used to say in the old stories when he was nine. Out to make his fortune without a dream in his eye. Wangled himself a damn good job on the coast. Pulled strings to get it. Young man on the way up, and gangway for him! Old enough to begin to think, if only obliquely, that he might take a wife.

  So Lyn was on his mind, eh? A dream, there? He pushed her image away.

  So, here was Towers, skipping the whole middle of the country, tomorrow, letting it flow under his plane, not planning to stop and see the family. Why? Oh, business, he’d said. They understood. Not wishing to stop and hear the blind love speaking, pretending he was nine?

  Well, he thought, people probably settled on a pattern that worked, for them, and there they stayed. And if his pattern was shaping up a little differently, why, no use arguing. Dad talked service. Lived it, too, as far as anyone could see. And it worked, for him. Or anyhow, it worked pretty well. It made a kind of guide, a touchstone . . . Jed could see. And mother talked love—was love, dammit. He wished, a little wistfully, that the world really was what they seemed, incomprehensibly, able to assume it was. How come they could hang onto that kind of peace, whatever it was, and make it a shell around them?

  Or did they? Were they besieged by disappointments? Were they only huddled in their shell, like people in a fort? He didn’t see much of them, these days. It was the family tradition to exchange only cheerful news, as far as one could. Did their hearts despair?

  He didn’t want to think so. He supposed you battled through, sooner or later, and came out on the other side of struggle, when you accepted something or other and put the blinders on and just kept them on and didn’t look, any more.

  But when you’re young and scrambling in the market place, you have to watch out. Yeah, out. Not in. That is, take a hard look at the way the world operates. You didn’t want to be pushed around.

  Oh, Towers was a wise one, all right, sitting on the bathtub, behind the door. He knew the score.

  His jaw was tight. Definitely, a detour, this little expedition. Get on your way, Towers!

  Still talking, this Uncle Eddie? Still yammering in there?

  “And so, I thought,” Eddie was saying, “the best idea is for you to start out easy. Take a little job once in a while. The thing is, Nell,” he was expounding his creed, “you do something for somebody else and you do a good job. So they’re glad to pay you for it. Then you’re earning. You’re being useful. You got to get into the idea. After a while, you’ll get so you can do a bigger job or a better job. You’ll get into the idea. You’ll get over being so restless.”

  “You told me all this,” she said. Her ankle was swinging.

  Eddie saw it and silenced himself.

  “Going?” she murmured. Her head fell against the chair. She turned her cheek. Her eyes closed.

  “I’ll take the coke bottles. I don’t think the Joneses are going to be so long, now. Couple of hours, maybe. Tired?”

  She didn’t answer. Eddie rose and the bottles clinked together as he gathered them. She was breathing slowly. “I’ll be in the building,” he murmured. His eye checked over the room. Everything was in pretty good order. Looked all right. He took up the glass from which Nell had sipped her coke.

  Absorbed in his own thoughts, his anxieties, his endeavors, his gains and his losses, Eddie went mechanically toward the running water, which was in the bathroom.

  Chapter 10

  EVEN BEFORE he met, in the mirror, the little man’s shocked and unbelieving eyes, an appraisal of this new situation flooded clearly through Jed’s thoughts. The jig was up, all right. O.K. He rose smoothly. The frightened eyes followed him up, still by way of the glass. But Jed was smiling.

  This could be handled.

  The mind has an odd ability to play back, like a tape recorder, things heard and yet not quite attended to at the time. Jed knew, immediately, that Eddie could be handled. And that it was a way out for Towers, too.

  He knew from what he had overheard that Eddie was by no means sure of his little niece Nell. Eddie had stuck his neck out, getting her this job. Eddie knew she was unreliable, to put it mildly, although he tried, he struggled, to make himself believe everything was going to be all right. All that pitch about his belief and understanding, all that stuff, was a hope and a prayer, not any conviction. Oh yes. Eddie had taken an awful chance here and Eddie was liable.

  All Jed needed to do was use Eddie’s self-interest. Very simple. Jed would apologize. Nothing happened, really. Had a couple of drinks, very sorry, sir, he’d say. I’ll be leaving now. No harm done and enough said. Nobody need say anything more about it?

  Jed would make it easy for the other fellow. He’d ask silence as a favor to himself. Eddie could escape by magnanimity the consequences of his own folly. Eddie would be glad to say “good-by” and only good-by.

  So long, Nell, Jed would say, quietly. And he’d be out of it.

  So Jed rose, smiling, knowing he had the power of charm and attractive friendliness when he chose to use it. In the time it took him to rise and open his mouth, the little man had jerked with a mouse-squeak and backed toward the door, keeping a frightened face toward Jed’s tall figure in the tile-lined gloom. Jed not to alarm him, stood quietly where he was.

  But Nell, like a cat, was lithe lightning across room 807. She had the standing ash tray, the heavy thing, in her wild hands. She swung it up. Jed’s lunge and Jed’s upraised arm missed the downswing. The thing cracked on Eddie’s skull. The detachable portion of heavy glass clanged and boomed and echoed on the tile. And Jed said something hoarse and furious and snatched the thing out of her hands cruelly, and Nell jabbered some shrill syllables.

  All at once, the noise was frightful.

  Only Eddie made no noise. He sank down, very quietly.

  There was an instant when everything was suspended. Then the phone began to ring, in 807, and at the same time Bunny’s voice screamed terror, in 809. And the glass part of the ash tray, rolling off a brief balance, rumbled and at last stopped rolling, unbroken.

  “Now!” said Jed thickly. “Now, you . . .” He squatted beside the crumpled little body.

  Nell turned and walked over to the telephone, which in some freak of time had rung four times already.

  “Hello?” Her voice was fuzzy and foggy.

  Jed touched Eddie’s temple and then his throat.

  “Oh yes, Mrs. Jones,” Nell said. “I guess I must have been dozing.”

  There was a pulse under Jed’s fingers and he stopped holding his breath.

  “She’s fast asleep,” Nell said, blithely. (And Bunny kept screaming.) “Oh no, no trouble at all. Everything’s just fine.”

  Jed, crouching, found himself listening to that voice. It was pretty cool. Just the faintest undertone of excitement. It could pass for enthusiasm. He could feel the child’s cries pierce him, and he shuddered. He looked down at Eddie, feeling a blank dismay.

  “Yes, she did. Went right to sleep after her story, Mrs. Jones. I hope you are having a nice time.”

  Phone to ear, Nell pivoted to see what Jed was doing and one stare was as blank as another. Her hand rose to hover over the mouthpiece.

  The kid was frantic in there! Frantic!

  “Please don’t feel you need to hurry, Mrs. Jones,” purred Nell, “because I don’t mind— What?”

  Her eyes widened as her voice acted surprise. “Noise? Oh, I guess you can hear the sirens down in the street.” Her hand clamped on the mouthpiece. She said, through careful fingers, “They’re just going by. There isn’t any fire near here.” She laughed. “Oh no. You just have a real good time,” she advised gaily. She hung up the phone.

  Her face set.

  “It’s a wonder he’s not dead,” Jed growled. “You little fool!”

  “Isn’t he?” said Nell absent-mindedly.

  She walked into 809.

  Jed’s hand, going about the business with no conscious command from his num
b brain, felt carefully of Eddie’s head. The dry hair crisped on his finger tips. He left the dismayed welter of his thoughts to pay attention, here. Couldn’t tell what the damage was, but there was, at least, no bleeding. Gently, he straightened the body. He lifted it, shifting it all the way over the threshold within the bathroom and, reaching for the thick bath mat, he slid it gently between the hard tile floor and the head. He took a towel and wet it. He washed the forehead gently, the eyes, and the cheeks.

  Eddie’s breathing seemed all right . . . a little difficult, not very. Jed thought the pulse was fairly steady. Knocked out, of course, but perhaps . . .

  He lifted his own head suddenly.

  Bunny was not screaming. The empty air pulsed in the sudden absence of that terrible sound.

  Jed sat motionless on his heels. A trickle of sweat cut a cold thread of sensation down his neck and blurred in the fabric of his collar.

  Ruth stepped with slow grace out of the phone booth. “Have a real good time.” The phrase rang in her ears. Not the mot juste for such a night as this! This Night of Triumph! A time to keep in the mind for reference, forever. Even now, so soon afterward, it was an hour to live over again, and feel the heart stop, when Peter got up from his chair, and lurch, when he began, so nervously. And pound proudly, because she soon knew that all these politely listening people were warming to the man, who began a little bit nervously and shyly, as if to say, “Gosh, who am I?”

  And then, Peter getting interested, himself, in what he was saying. Everybody feeling that. First, the words, coming out grammatically, properly placed, in full sentences. Then, the thought transcending, and driving the grammar into vivid astonishing phrases that rang just right. And finally Peter in the full power of his gift, taking directly from his mind and heart the things he knew and believed. The heads turning because they could not help it. They must hear this.

  He was still excited (oh, bless Peter!) and he was reaping his reward. Now that his speech was over, now that they were pushing the tables out of the middle of the floor, and music was playing, and people stood in little groups, and he in the middle of the largest group of all.

  Peter was reaping an evening’s worth of praise and glory. But maybe even more. Maybe even the real thing! Was it possible, the Joneses wondered, that some might remember, might retain and refer to some small part, at least, of what he had told them?

  A victory! But the rehashing, the reaping, the wonderful fun of this, might go on for hours.

  Ruth turned her bright nails into her palms. Bunny was fast asleep. The girl had told her so. Everything was fine. The girl had said so.

  But Ruth stood, trembling, in the hall of mirrors, and she knew in her bones that everything was not fine.

  “Don’t be silly!” she gasped to her own image. “Don’t be such a mother! Don’t spoil it, now!”

  Peter’s head craned toward her out of the group, and she gave him a gay little signal of the hand that meant “all’s well.”

  For it must be so.

  But that hadn’t sounded like the same girl. Oh, it was the same voice. But it was not the same manner. The girl on the phone, just now, was neither dull nor passive. She wasn’t stupid enough! No, she’d been too decisive. Too . . . too darned gay! Too patronizing . . . “Run along, little Mrs. Jones, and have your real good time. Don’t bother me.”

  “Don’t you be so silly!” Ruth told herself once more. “Are you going to be mean and spoil Peter’s wonderful night, being such a hick and such a female? What’s wrong with you?”

  She shook herself and walked forward.

  “What’s wrong, oh, what’s wrong where Bunny is?” her bones kept asking.

  Peter was in full flight, amplifying something he hadn’t touched on quite enough in the speech. Men, standing around him, were smoking with very deliberate and judicious gestures, and nodding, and breaking in to quote themselves. “As I said at lunch the other day . . .” “I was saying to Joe . . .” It seemed as if only last week or the other day they’d been thinking the same things Peter thought. They’d been telling somebody, in some fumbling fashion, that which Peter has just told them so well. (Ah, sweet praise!)

  “O.K., hon?” Peter was tuned in on the wave length of Ruth’s bones. Often and often he’d heard what they were muttering. But now, when she answered, smiling, “All quiet. Everything fine, Nell says.” Peter didn’t hear her bones proclaim, “But I don’t believe it.”

  “Good.” He squeezed her, swung her, “Ruth, this is Mr. Evans, and Mr. Childs, and Mr. Cunningham.”

  “How de do . . . how de do . . .”

  “Husband of yours has a head on his shoulders and a tongue in his head, Mrs. O.—uh—Mrs. Jones. Fine talk. Fine.”

  “I thought so, too,” said Ruth in sweet accord.

  “Isabel, come here. Turn around, want you to meet . . .” The women murmured.

  Peter said, “So, a man says to you, ‘Honesty is the best policy.’ You don’t need to look up his antecedents, and if you find his great uncle stole fifty cents thirty years ago, figure what he says must therefore be suspect. What he says you can agree to or not agree to. However, if he claims he is prohonesty, but expects you to rob a bank with him, you can see the difference, I hope. In fact, you had better learn the difference.”

  “Right,” said a cigar.

  “I claim the truth can come out of a rascal’s mouth, but how can a rascal fool us, if we learn to sort out words from deeds and keep our heads clear?”

  “Just what I said to Isabel. I said . . .”

  “And how old is your little girl, Mrs. O.—uh—Mrs. Jones?” Isabel was cooing.

  “Bunny is nine.”

  “Ah, I remember Sue when she was nine,” said the woman sentimentally. “A sweet age. A darling year.”

  Ruth smiled, bright eyed. She had no voice for an answer.

  Chapter 11

  MRS. PARTHENIA WILLIAMS said, “I can’t help it.”

  “Aw, Ma,” her son said, keeping his voice down in the evening hush of the place where they stood. “Listen to me—”

  “I can’t help it, Joseph, hear?”

  For old Mr. and Mrs. O’Hara in the front suite, the Hotel Majestic had somehow, in the inertia of the years, acquired the attributes of home. Now, Mrs. O’Hara wasn’t very well. She wasn’t ill enough to warrant a nurse, yet they were unwilling to risk her being alone. So Mrs. Parthenia Williams came by day and sometimes, when Mr. O’Hara had to be away, she remained late into the evening. Whenever she did so, her son, Joseph, came to see her home.

  As they stood in the hush of the eighth-floor corridor, Joseph said, “You better keep out of it, Ma. You know that. Don’t you?” He was a thin nervous Negro with an acquiline face.

  “I know what I know,” his mother said.

  Mrs. Williams’s chocolate-colored face was designed for smiling, in the very architecture of her full cheeks, the curl of her generous mouth, the light of her wide-set eyes. Nothing repressed her. Nothing could stop her from saying “good morning,” in the elevators in her beautiful soft voice. She seemed to acquire through her pores bits and scraps of knowledge about all these strangers, so that she would say, in the corridor, “Did you enjoy the boat trip, ma’am? Oh, that’s good!” with the temerity of an unquenchable kindness. Mrs. O’Hara, who was sixty-two and so often annoyingly dizzy, felt at rest on Parthenia’s bosom. She told Mr. O’Hara it was as if, after thirty orphaned years, and in her old age, she were mothered once more. (Mr. O’Hara crossed his fingers and knocked on wood.)

  Joseph knew his mother’s ways and adored her, but some of her ways . . . He tried to protest this time. “Some things you can’t—Ma!”

  “Something’s scaring that baby in there nearly to death,” Parthenia said. “She’s just a bitty girl. She’s in 809 and her folks next door. I spoke to them today. A real nice child. And I can’t help it, Joseph, so don’t you talk to me.”

  Her big feet carried her buxom body down the corridor. “If her folks ain’t ther
e, somebody ought to be comforting her. It’s not good for her to be so scared.”

  “Ma, listen . . .”

  “All right, Joseph. Her papa, he was asking about a sitter and I know they were planning to go out. Now, if her mama’s there, that’s one thing. But I got to ask. I can’t help it. I don’t care.”

  Jed got to his feet. His eyes rolled toward the frosted bathroom window. He unlocked it and pushed it up. Cold air hit him in the face.

  The deep court seemed quiet. He thrust his head through to look down into the checkered hollow. He couldn’t, of course, see all the way to the bottom. He couldn’t see Bunny’s window, either, for it came on a line with this one.

  He could see that old biddy across the way and she was walking. She walked to a chair and held to the back of it with both hands and let go with a push and walked away. And back again. He could see only the middle section of her body, and those agitated hands.

  The fear that hadn’t been verbalized, even in his mind, seeped away, and he wondered why he was looking out of the window. He wondered if the dame over there was upset because she had been hearing things. He wondered, and in the act of wondering, he knew that someone must have heard all that commotion.

  Get out of here, Towers, he warned himself, while you got the chance, you damn fool! Before all hell’s going to break loose. This guy’s not going to die. He’ll be O.K. He’s resting peacefully. Look out for Towers!

  Jed realized that he had a perfect chance, right now. While the wildcat was in 809, Towers could fade out of 807. And Towers would run like crazy away from here.

  What he heard himself growling aloud, as he stepped over Eddie’s body, was, “What in hell is she doing in there?”