She was almost choked with fear, feeling that he was talking to cover nerving himself to violence. “You must be insane.”
“No. I think not. I have been in the grip of something, a fixed idea. I thought I could expand it into something that would enlighten and help others. A book. A system of religious thought.”
“Coming from you, after you’d killed those children——”
“No, no. I doubt that I am yet a murderer. Unless that foolish man at the service station has died. He saw me pick up the wrench and start for Larry, so . . . since Larry hadn’t noticed . . . I had to attend to the other man first. Larry himself—well, I think that his skull is thick enough, I don’t think I damaged him permanently. I may have improved his morals.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about”
“Actually, Curt’s mother may have a point. Some aberrant behavior may have been meant to be. But at any rate I had no desire to kill.”
“You killed my sister,” Lottie said softly.
“Her death was an accident. Believe me.”
He waited as if expecting her to assure him that she did believe. She sat small and quiet in the shadows. She had been testing some object under her chair, in the dark, probing it with her toes and tipping its balanced weight under her heel. It was something made of iron or steel. A big heavy tool, perhaps two feet long.
“Nor did I have anything to do with the deaths of Charles Carrol and Barbara Martin. The Carrol child was run over by his own father, chasing a dog, I understood. The poor Martin girl . . . she, too, must have felt that life needed to be a sampling of experience. But how she died—that was the fault, actually, of a woman named Kitzmiller, who took her in. Who was too stupid to know that the girl needed further medical attention.”
“You’re lying,” Lottie told him coldly. “I don’t know why. We don’t count. You needn’t impress us. I should think you’d want to tell us the truth before you cut our throats.”
She let an arm drop, silently, watching that floating face for any reaction. Her fingers touched cold, smooth steel.
Freitag’s voice hoarsened suddenly, as if what she had said had hit deep. “My confessing to these three deaths had a purpose,” he said. “A point. After all, punishing those I felt needed it would get little attention, would make little change, unless I could make it seem a part of something much more serious. I’ve been a teacher for years, and I’ve seen the power of example.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Lottie said illogically.
“Then . . . this idea. To make them think: you’ve been punished but you’ve gotten off lightly. Others weren’t so lucky. And you won’t be . . . next time.”
“I can’t believe all this.” Lottie was actually unaware of how deaf she was to any justification he might make. She heard his words and the surface of her mind rejected them; she had no idea of the toll taken by the months of grief and the savage hours of this day now closing.
She got her heels squarely under her and stood up quickly in the small afterdeck of the cruiser. The steel crowbar was in her hand—the bar left there carelessly by Larry Lebracht—and, avoiding the glitter of the knife, she brought it down on Freitag’s head with all her strength. She felt the crushing jar all the way up through her arms to the elbows.
He folded to his knees, dim there in the shadowy darkness, and she struck again without aim. There was the crack of bone, and a sharp coughing noise. He tried to say something. She struck again.
Curt took her arm. “Miss Tomlinson——”
She leaned against the railing. Curt took the bar from her hands. The wind off the bay seemed cold now and the dark around them swam with lights and voices, the converging mutter of other boats. And then behind them the cluttered boatyard came to life under a floodlamp on a pole.
A siren howled.
Curt was bent over Mr. Freitag.
“How is he?” Lottie whispered.
“I guess Teach is dead,” Curt replied.
Archer was at his desk, a cup of coffee, black, untouched in its paper cup, in front of him along with a clutter of teletype reports.
Matthews came in. He was smoking a cigar.
“For Christ’s sake don’t blow any goddamn cigar smoke around in here,” Archer said. “It stinks like hell around this place after midnight. It smells like an old graveyard. If you blow smoke at me, goddamn it, I’m going to quit. I’m going to leave this goddamn job.”
“You’re tired, sure,” said Matthews, blowing smoke. “I am too. It’s been a hell of a day. What say we knock off?”
Archer sunk down in his chair. “I hate to mark those damned cases closed, again.”
“So do I.”
Archer put his slim, long-fingered hands at the edge of the desk, dug his thumb nails into the grain of the wood. “There was just enough of an element of . . . well, call it chance . . . an element of chance in each death. Enough to make it maybe murder. Enough to make suckers out of us. Make slobs out of us.”
“Always is. Or almost always is,” Matthews said tiredly. “I’ll bet in at least half the accidental deaths, there’s that difficulty.”
“You call it a difficulty?”
“Don’t try to pick a fight.” Matthews went over to the window and pulled the drapes, blew more smoke into them. They’d stink for a week, Archer thought, watching him in anger. “We’re just not God. We’re not even an all-seeing eye,” Matthews went on. “I used to think, sure, like you, there might be something in Edith Tomlinson’s death. But this kid we had in here tonight, this Curt What’s-his-name with the mother in the emergency hospital, says it almost happened once before. The little girl was hasty and clumsy. She got her feet wrapped and had to be helped. A couple of other kids back him up; I talked to them on the phone. So it wasn’t impossible.”
Archer went on chewing at the desk with his nails.
“The thing I hate,” Matthews said, “is not preventing this other stuff. But then, maybe——” He chewed the cigar thoughtfully. “Don’t really know what I’m trying to say. Maybe there was a kind of blowup all set to go and old Freitag sort of took out the cork.”
Archer said tightly, “I spent the day tormenting people about things they’d stopped tormenting themselves about long ago. Mrs. Carrol’s all doped up tonight so she can sleep, and Carrol is chewing his nails over the idea his kid was a sadist with animals. Lottie Tomlinson has killed a man with a crowbar. That kid, Curt——” He broke off. “I can’t forget Barbara Martin’s father. My God, if I had Freitag here alive now, I’d——”
“You’ve always seemed like a pretty cool piece of goods to me before,” Matthews said, looking Archer over. “Maybe you had a blowup coming too.”
Archer went on as if prodding himself. “That guy in the service station, all beat up. Larry Lebracht beaten to a pulp, a fugitive kid from an orphanage that doesn’t want him back. His girl slashed her wrists when she thought Freitag must have killed him. How much can you do with one letter, in one day?”
“Quite a lot if you work it right.” Matthews dropped the cigar regretfully into an ash tray; Archer transferred it promptly to the waste basket. “Well, one kind of good thing—Larry Lebracht works for old man Warren, the boatyard. Warren thought enough of him, he paid for doctoring his head. Says Larry can be a partner there someday if he wants. And something more.”
Archer looked to make sure the waste basket wasn’t burning.
“Old man Warren bailed out the girl’s uncle. And Lebracht and the uncle took off.”
In a cocoon of blankets on the hospital bed, Molly opened an eye and looked at the gray light. It was growing daylight. There were steel bars along the side of the bed, making it into a sort of crib. She felt woozy and dopey. Her wrists were encased in bandages. She got her hands up out of the blankets and inspected these wrappings, and horror squeezed itself into her numbed thoughts. A picture flashed in her mind: uplifted faces in the downstairs hall, herself floating above them. Come down. Come down, Molly. Her father’s voice, commandi
ng. Come down Molly and tell us what this is all about. What have you tried to do? No, not quite that. The words had been: Calm down, Molly. And then she remembered the later scene in the kitchen, sitting on the kitchen stool while her father said patiently over and over, Calm down, Molly, and tell us why you did this to us.
And one little glimpse: the colored maid crying over beside the sink while she fumbled with a bowl full of ice cubes and a washcloth, preparing a cold compress for Molly’s wrists.
Then the terrible part had begun. Her mother had come in. Perfume. A dress that glittered, the diamonds at her throat. High heels tapping; and then the screams. Over Molly’s own tearing sobs, the screams that accused her of being a tramp.
A tramp.
A no-good, wrist-cutting freak of a tramp.
Then something to do with Uncle Florian.
Molly fought free of the blankets and sat up in the cool hospital room, in the gray light, and began to struggle with the criblike bars that shut in her bed. And the next moment a person in white was there, all clean white starch and a kind voice. And you must go back to sleep.
There were three legs at first. Three legs that she could see from under the cocoon of covers. Then one more leg moved into sight and she uncovered her head and looked up. Uncle Florian and Larry stood by her bed. Larry bent down to her so suddenly it almost scared her.
He smelled as antiseptic as she did.
She put an arm around his neck, tight. “I thought you were dead.”
“I just damned well love you to pieces,” he said brokenly.
Uncle Florian said huskily, “They’re going to run us right back out of here, baby, so we’ve got to talk fast. Larry and I are going on a trip. A little jaunt. Don’t know where. Your mother’s dismissing the battery complaint, so I don’t have to worry about that. Larry and I’ll bum our way north and pick fruit or mop out saloons. Killing time. We’ll write you care of general delivery.”
She shivered, crying out, “Don’t go away!”
“I’m coming back!” Larry told her.
“I am goddamn well taking him away until he’s over eighteen,” said Uncle Florian. “They don’t catch me for contributing. Or whatever. After that I’ll bring him back and turn him over to you. And the two of you can get married. And I can take up drinking where I’m going to have to leave off.”
“Oh, I can’t stand it!” Molly wept.
“Sure, you can, baby. Look, when we get back you’ll have forgotten all about this unpleasantness. You’ll have a job and can support us in luxury. And I’ll stand up at your wedding, providing I can stand at all. I never saw such a goddamn happy ending in my life.” He bent down in his turn, and gave her a wavering, loose-lipped kind of kiss.
Against her hair he whispered, “Don’t be too tough on your old lady. And remember your dad always was a stuffed shirt and can’t help it. And all you’ve got to do is wait.”
She looked at them, at Larry and at Uncle Florian, knowing how her love would follow them. Her love would go with them, and she would wait.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
DOLORES HITCHENS
Born Julia Clara Catherine Dolores Birk on December 25, 1907, in San Antonio, Texas. Published poems while completing graduate studies at the University of California; enrolled in a nursing school. She worked as a nurse at Hollywood Hospital, and later became a teacher before pursuing a professional writing career. Married T. K. Olsen, whom she later divorced. Married Hubert Allen “Bert” Hitchens, a railroad investigating officer, who had a son, Gordon (later founder of Film Comment and contributor to Variety). Together they had a son, Michael. As D. B. Olsen, published two novels featuring Lt. Stephen Mayhew, The Clue in the Clay (1938) and Death Cuts a Silhouette (1939); twelve novels featuring elderly amateur sleuth Rachel Murdock: The Cat Saw Murder (1939), The Alarm of the Black Cat (1942), Catspaw for Murder (1943), The Cat Wears a Noose (1944), Cats Don’t Smile (1945), Cats Don’t Need Coffins (1946), Cats Have Tall Shadows (1948), The Cat Wears a Mask (1949), Death Wears Cat’s Eyes (1950), Cat and Capricorn (1951), The Cat Walk (1953), and Death Walks on Cat Feet (1956); and six novels featuring Professor A. Pennyfeather: Shroud for the Bride (1945), Gallows for the Groom (1947), Devious Design (1948), Something About Midnight (1950), Love Me in Death (1951), and Enrollment Cancelled (1952). Published play A Cookie for Henry (1941) as Dolores Birk Hitchens; novel Shivering Bough (1942) as Noel Burke; and novels Blue Geranium (1944) and The Unloved (1965) as Dolan Birkley. Cowrote five railroad detective novels with Bert Hitchens: F.O.B. Murder (1955), One-Way Ticket (1956), End of Line (1957), The Man Who Followed Women (1959), and The Grudge (1963). As Dolores Hitchens, published two private detective novels featuring California private eye Jim Sader: Sleep With Strangers (1955) and Sleep With Slander (1960); as well as stand-alone suspense novels Stairway to an Empty Room (1951), Nets to Catch the Wind (1952), Terror Lurks in Darkness (1953), Beat Back the Tide (1954), Fools’ Gold (1958), The Watcher (1959, adapted for the television series Thriller in 1960), Footsteps in the Night (1961), The Abductor (1962), The Bank with the Bamboo Door (1965), The Man Who Cried All the Way Home (1966), Postscript to Nightmare (1967), A Collection of Strangers (1969), The Baxter Letters (1971), and In a House Unknown (1973). Jean-Luc Godard adapted Fools’ Gold into the 1964 film Band of Outsiders. Died in August 1973 in San Antonio, Texas.
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