The Black Door

by Collin Wilcox

  Yet I wanted to be sure. I decided to compare responses.

  “Did you and your sister get along well, Bobby? As children, I mean?”

  Still staring off, he seemed almost not to hear me. But, finally, he answered in a muted monotone.

  “We got along as well as—as most.”

  “Did you see much of each other at Bransten?”

  He shrugged. Gradually, his answers were coming easier. “We saw each other, but not really often. Every day or two, maybe. Usually at dinner.”

  “Did you eat together at dinner?”

  He shook his head. “No. She had her friends, and I—I had mine.”

  I wondered how many real friends either sibling could claim.

  “Was Roberta happy at Bransten, would you say?”

  “I suppose so. As happy as she was anywhere, I guess.”

  “Were you?”

  Now he looked at me, and a wan shadow of sadness crossed his face as he said, “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.” He seemed puzzled at his own answer. Watching him, I wondered whether or not he were really very intelligent. His voice had a curiously wooden, uninflected quality, as if he were ill or in shock. His eyes were dull, and occasionally he frowned, as if perplexed.

  I had to reach him. I needed something more than his numbed, wooden responses.

  “When did you first hear of your sister’s death?” I asked abruptly.

  Startled, he looked at me, fully now.

  “What?”

  “I said, when did you first hear of your sister’s death?” I hardened my voice.

  “Well, it was—” Still he seemed puzzled, frowning and licking at his lips. “It was sometime that—that Friday morning. They—Dean Johnson, he got me out of class. Geology class.”

  “At about what time?”

  “Well, I have Geology—I had it—at nine o’clock. And the class had just started. So it must’ve been—”

  “What was your first thought when you heard the news?” I interrupted.

  “Well, the first thing I thought was that I’d have to tell Father. I—I knew he’d be—be—” He shook his head, as if baffled. His fingers no longer gripped the chair, but now only fretted, worrying at the fabric. His head sunk down upon his chest.

  “You knew he’d be what?” I prompted him.

  “I knew he’d be sad. Very sad.”

  “Because he’d always liked Roberta so much? Is that what you mean?”

  Unhappily, the lank blond head nodded. Somehow, subtly, he seemed to have surrendered to my questions. With his head down, not meeting my eyes, his words came easier.

  “Dad could never see anything wrong in Roberta, you know. Even when she—even when she did something wrong, he—he—” The words stopped.

  “What kind of things did she do that were so wrong?”

  Silence.

  “Bobby.” I lowered my voice to a note of command. “Tell me. What kind of things did she do? Remember, I’m asking you these things at your father’s request. It’s not just for me. I’m trying to help you. Both of you—both you and your father.”

  “Are you?” He was searching my face. His pale, pitiful eyes seemed to seek the answer to some terrible, urgent puzzle.

  “Yes, I am. I’m trying to help you,” I repeated. “I want to find your sister’s murderer. I need your help.” I paused, still holding his tortured gaze. “You know I need your help, don’t you?”

  Helplessly, very slowly, he nodded.

  “All right, then, tell me: What kind of things did she do that were wrong?”

  As if speaking a part he’d rehearsed very carefully, he answered: “She—she was bad. With men. She—” He began to shake his head, unable to finish it.

  “She slept with men. Is that what you mean?”

  His hands moved to his lap, fretting together uncertainly. His head began to nod helplessly, as if a supporting cord had suddenly snapped.

  “Is that what you mean?”

  The nodding became more decisive.

  “Did your father know about this?”

  “No.” The answer was a whisper.

  “Why not?”

  “She—she never had the chance, at home. Father was too strict. But she—she—”

  “She began when she got to Bransten. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did your father send her to a place like Bransten, if he’s so strict?”

  “It—it’s the best college in the west. Father wanted us to have the best education. He never thought Roberta would do any of the things she did. He could never see anything wrong that she did. Even when she was a little girl, he—” The bowed head began to slowly shake from side to side, hopelessly.

  “He could always see whatever you did that was wrong,” I said softly, “but never what she did. Is that right?”

  “Yes. Always.”

  “But he never knew about what happened when she came to Bransten? About the men?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Weren’t you ever tempted to tell him?”

  No reply.

  “Weren’t you?” I pressed.

  “Yes; sometimes. But I never did.”

  “I see.” I sat for a long moment looking at him. I had hardly to ask about his own experience with girls; it seemed obvious he was a virgin, if not actually inclined to homosexuality.

  But I still hadn’t discovered his secret, the terrible secret we shared. So, pitching my voice to a kind of neutral compassion, I said quietly, “Bobby, do you know who killed your sister?”

  It was as if all movement within him ceased. His head hung limp and motionless; his hands remained perfectly inert in his lap, unrevealing. I couldn’t see his face.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  The head began to move from side to side, as if with a great effort.

  “Do you have any suspicion—anything that could help me?”

  The negative movement of the head stopped. Once more the thin, unhappy body was perfectly still in a chair that seemed suddenly to have grown larger around him.

  “Do you have a suspicion?”

  No response, either by word or movement.

  I sat looking at him, remembering the first time I’d seen him: his haunted eyes, as he walked down the passageway toward the murdered man’s apartment. Then I remembered Grinnel’s press conference, and my vision of the boy wrapped head to toe in his long cloak, staring down into his dead sister’s eyes.

  And then, incredibly, the image changed. The girl’s body had come alive. She stood alone in an obscure grove of terrible, twisted trees. The foliage, the tree trunks, the branches, all twined around her marble-smooth body, proud and nude, mocking the two who stood at a distance watching. She stood perfectly still, staring at them. Her look was haughty, disdainful of their grotesque stares. Her head was thrown back; her eyes were calm and cold.

  But then, slowly, her stance became unsure. She shrank away, back into the hostile, unyielding foliage. Terror was now dissolving her beauty. One of the two figures approached her, very slowly. She turned, but could not flee. She had become entangled in the twisted undergrowth, helplessly. She could only wait for the stranger’s hands on her throat, and death.

  My eyes were closed; I felt perspiration soaking through my shirt. I opened my eyes, surprised to find Bobby sitting exactly as before: head bowed down, his body narrow and timid.

  Suddenly there seemed little more I could say; he had only to sit, silent and inert. I couldn’t force him to answer. I could only guess.

  “Was it John Randall, Bobby? Is he the one you suspect?”

  Blindly, he shook his head.

  “Was it a man? Someone you know?”

  No response.

  For a single moment I felt myself almost lifted involuntarily to my feet by a sudden anger. I could beat him, dig my fingers into his skinny throat, force him to tell me.

  Yet I couldn’t. Somehow, I couldn’t.

  I could only demand furiously
:

  “Tell me, damn you. Tell me. Who is it? Who do you suspect? Don’t you want to find out who killed your own sister? Don’t you care?”

  He looked up, startled—suddenly afraid. He began to shake his head. Now he began to scramble out of his chair, keeping as far from me as possible.

  I let him get up and move to the safety of the nearby wall. Then, feeling my anger drained, I sighed and rose. I looked at him, pressed against the wall, watching me with his pale, frightened eyes. Oddly, ironically, a child’s refrain began pestering my consciousness: I’ll tell your father on you. I’ll tell your father.

  As I watched him, I’m sure he saw the contempt in my face. Perhaps he felt it, with the acute, primitive perception of someone at bay. Perhaps my contempt was too familiar: everyone, appraising him, comparing him, rejecting him. As I watched, I saw his face suddenly contort into a twisted grimace of hysterical hatred.

  His voice seemed to scream at me, yet its timbre was venomously low.

  “Get out. You—you—” His mouth worked, forming silent words, choked back by an inarticulate fury. “She’s dead, don’t you understand that. Doesn’t he understand that? Doesn’t he understand what will happen if—if—” He jerked his head violently from side to side, silencing himself with the tortured, gasping movement. Then, in headlong flight, he turned away from me and threw himself at a connecting door, hysterically fumbling at the knob.

  It was the door to the bathroom, and as I left, I heard him being violently sick.

  11

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, FRIDAY, I spent more than two hours trying to see Captain Larsen, and finally succeeded just before noon. I’d never talked with Larsen on a one-to-one basis, so I had no way of knowing whether he shared his colleagues’ prejudice against reporters doubling as clairvoyants, crime experts, and other forms of nuisance.

  Larsen’s office was vintage precinct—faintly oppressive and sad, somehow suggesting a lingering aura of grief, depravity, and fear.

  Larsen rose from behind his desk, nodded pleasantly, and motioned me to a stained, sturdy, City-of-San-Francisco oak armchair. I closed the door behind me, saying, “Thanks for seeing me, Captain. I appreciate it.” As I sat down, I wondered how many pimps and murderers had sat in the same chair, cursing and perspiring.

  “I hope this doesn’t set a precedent,” he remarked. “If I have to start seeing reporters individually, I’ll need someone else to chase the felons.” He smiled, picked up a long yellow pencil, and began doodling on a thick white pad of notepaper. I noticed that his desk was completely uncluttered. Papers were neatly stacked in the “In” and “Out” baskets and the phone was placed precisely in one corner, squared off with the desk.

  “Well,” I replied, trying to find a comfortable position in the chair, “this doesn’t have anything to do with, ah, reporting, actually.”

  His shrewd, lightly smiling blue eyes left the doodle long enough to glance at me briefly.

  “Something to do with Mr. Grinnel, then?” he asked.

  I felt surprise cross my face like a girl’s guilty blush. I almost stammered as I said, “Yes, that’s—as a matter of fact, that’s what it does have to do with.”

  He looked at me for a long, appraising moment and then returned to the doodle.

  “I understand you saw Grinnel yesterday,” he said. “What was it all about?”

  “Well, he—as a matter of fact, he hired me to try and find out something about his daughter’s murder.” Suddenly I felt like a small boy caught in mischief being interrogated by the school principal.

  “You mean he hired you as a clairvoyant.” His gaze remained on the doodle; his tone was noncommittal.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded slowly. He tore off the top sheet of notepaper, crumpled it, and tossed it precisely into the wastebasket.

  “Did he give you a retainer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” Again he nodded. And now I was becoming a little impatient at the cat-and-mouse questions.

  “I don’t want to keep you,” I said. “What I’m after is some information—any information you might have on the Grinnel case. I know you’ve been working on it, and in the meantime we’ve dropped it. The paper, I mean. But I thought that—”

  “You’ve been working on it a day now, I gather,” he interrupted quietly. “Have you got anything?”

  “Well, that’s a difficult question to answer, yes or no. We don’t work the same, obviously. Something that might seem important to me might not seem like—”

  “It all comes to the same thing, though,” he said mildly. “Either the D.A. has enough evidence to ask for an indictment, or he doesn’t.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I know.”

  “So I gather you don’t have any evidence of that kind. As yet, anyhow.”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Because if you do, it’s your duty to turn it over to us without delay. It’s your moral duty as a citizen, and your legal obligation, too.”

  I sighed. “Yes, I know that, Captain. And, believe me, I’m not one of these private eye types. Or a—a vigilante. I’m just someone who—”

  “This business you were involved in down in San Jose, with Nazario. Is there more to it than I read in the papers?” His eyes lit with a frosty, Nordic humor.

  I sighed again. By now, I’d discovered the pattern of Larsen’s interview technique. He kept his head, stayed calm, and tried to keep his adversary off balance with interruptions and sudden, disconcerting changes in the conversation’s direction.

  I decided to try and break up the pattern.

  “Have you talked with Nazario recently, by any chance?”

  He glanced at me, perhaps a little surprised.

  “Yes, I have, as a matter of fact.”

  “Did you ask him about me—about the Gruenwald girl’s murder?”

  He tore off a second doodle, crumpled it, and threw it in the basket. Then he looked at me directly, and for the first time smiled.

  “As a matter of fact,” he admitted, with the athlete’s appreciation of another’s well-scored point, “as a matter of fact, I talked to him about an hour ago. He says you could be the genuine article. And, knowing Nazario, that’s as good a recommendation as you can get in this business.”

  I leaned back in the chair, which somehow seemed a little more comfortable.

  “I wish you’d post that on the employees’ bulletin board,” I said.

  Again he smiled. “I can understand your feelings. On the other hand, I’m sure you can understand our feelings. Or, at least, the feelings of some of us. Personally, as long as you play by the rules and don’t start thinking of yourself as either a hero or God’s gift to the police department, I don’t see why we can’t work together.” He placed the pencil upon the memo pad and dropped both into his center desk drawer, closing it. Then, in a friendlier, brisker voice, he said, “Well, what can I do for you?”

  “Just tell me whatever you can about the case,” I replied promptly. “I’d certainly appreciate it. And, whatever I find out, I’ll pass it on to you without delay. I promise.”

  “Fair enough. Well, the truth is that there really isn’t much of substance that isn’t already known to you. We’ve checked out everyone that might’ve had a possible motive for murdering either Miss Grinnel and Mr. Pastor separately, or both together. Anyone who did seem to have a motive we double-checked, and triple-checked, without any results whatever.”

  “Did you find many people with motives?”

  He shook his head. “No. Actually just three, if you count Pastor’s wife—which I don’t.”

  “Who were the other two?”

  “John Randall, who you know about, and a girl named Joyce Hastings, the one Pastor went around with for a year or so before Roberta Grinnel appeared on the scene.”

  “And you give both of them a completely clean bill?”

  “Well—” He thought about it. “In this business, nothing’s completely certain, especially
in the absence of a corroborated alibi. However, I’m satisfied.”

  “What about some nutty kid that might’ve had a crush on Roberta without her even knowing?”

  He shrugged. “There’s always that, of course. Except that, to qualify, he’s got to murder both people efficiently and quietly in an apartment building in the dead of night, and then get away without leaving a trace.” He shook his head. “That’s a tough proposition. A guy could plan it for a year and still get caught.”

  “When I talked to Mr. Grinnel,” I said, “he mentioned a file of crank letters that you photostated, and apparently the F.B.I, did, too. Has anything developed from that?”

  “Nothing developed from our end, and we haven’t heard from the F.B.I. There were some three thousand letters; that’s pretty long odds.”

  “How is the F.B.I, handling their investigation?”

  Wryly he shrugged. “You never know how the F.B.I, is handling an investigation until you read about it in the papers. You don’t have to quote me, but it’s the truth, at least in my experience. However, I will say that the F.B.I, is the only law-enforcement agency capable of getting a pattern from those letters. To mean anything, we’d have to find the crank and then connect him with Roberta Grinnel. And we just don’t have the facilities.”

  “Mr. Grinnel, of course, thinks that the murder was aimed at him.”

  “In my opinion,” Larsen said evenly, “Mr. Grinnel is also a crank. You don’t have to quote me on that, either.”

  I smiled. “What’s your theory on the case, Captain?”

  “Well—” An expression of distaste crossed his face. “Of course, ‘theories’ are something I find just gum up the works. Theories are actually preconceptions, and too often you’re tempted to make the facts fit the theory, instead of vice versa. However, my opinion is that they were murdered by a nut, some kind of a homicidal maniac, probably. And, whether we muffed our initial investigation or not, the fact remains that, by now, the guy’s deep down underground, with his hole pulled in around him.”

  “But how’re you going to—?”