“The guys were fooling around. They’re sex fiends, and all of a sudden we almost hit a car parked halfway on the highway. No lights, nobody around, like it died and somebody just left it there.”
David saw the whole thing in his mind’s eye. “Did you stop?”
“Why should we have? We didn’t hit it or anything. But it cooled off Micky’s sex urge. When we got to Oak Forest, he dropped me at our driveway and took off.”
If the car was still there later, what did it mean? What had happened to the woman?
“If I didn’t see it,” David said, the words of denial slipping out, “you must have come home a lot later than me.”
“Not much. I kind of agitated to get us on the road. I’m sorry I said what I did, David. You shouldn’t be so sensitive. Women can be frustrated too, you know. You’re not crude like those other guys, and I admire that. I admire a lot about you.”
“Thanks,” he murmured.
“What do I have to do to make up for what I said? Ask you for another date? I was the one asked you last night, you know.”
“I’ll call you real soon, Sally.”
“I go back to school on Sunday.” She was on midterm break.
“I’ll call you,” he said again.
“Okay, David. Thanks for calling.” The phone clicked off.
Now he had hurt her, but he couldn’t help it. He stood in the booth after hanging up, and tried to find the words with which he could tell Sally what had happened to him. It went fine until he had to say, I didn’t stop. They hadn’t stopped either, but they’d not seen the screaming woman.
A man waiting to use the phone pushed open the door. “Do you always go into a phone booth when you want to talk to yourself?”
After an early dinner at the kitchen table David attacked his class assignments. He surprised himself with what sounded to him like a great exposition of the Valéry poem. It felt good, as though he’d made some kind of reparation in getting it done. He took it in to where his mother was writing letters and read it to her. He’d been pretty quiet at dinner and she hadn’t fussed or probed. He was making up.
She listened thoughtfully. Then, out of a clear sky, she said, “Would you like a year of study in France if it could be managed?”
David was stunned. It was as though she had said she no longer needed him. He’d been thinking all along that he was tied to her for life, and now it turned out she felt she was tied down by him. Maybe she had a man he didn’t even know about, somebody at the bank…. A tumult of alarms possessed him.
“Well?” she prompted.
“Yeah, sure. I mean that’s a third-year alternative and I’m only a freshman.”
“Only a freshman,” she repeated. “You put yourself down, Davie. You shouldn’t do that. The essay is very good.”
“It isn’t long enough to call it an essay.”
“Nevertheless, would you like to read me the poem itself?”
He was on his way to get the book when the phone rang. His mother called out to let the machine take it for now. He pretended not to hear her. All evening, except for when he lost himself in the poem, he had anticipated something heavy about to happen. Nevertheless, when he heard McGraw’s voice, his heart gave a sickening thump.
“David, I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner. We need to make a date, you and I. Tonight is convenient for me, or first thing in the morning.”
“No,” David said. “It’s not convenient for me.”
“Then you must make it convenient. It’s not a matter of choice, young man. Are you with someone now so that you can’t talk?”
“My mother’s home,” David muttered.
“Well now, sooner or later, you will want to involve her. Maybe not. That’s not my business. Let’s meet somewhere in the morning. I would say my office, but it’s being decorated. Unavailable really. And I don’t want to meet in your car again. We’re not conspiring thieves, are we?”
“David?” his mother called inquiringly from the study.
“I’ll be in in a minute, Mother.” To McGraw, he said, “You can come here in the morning, but not before eight-thirty.” It was his mother’s turn to drive. She’d leave by eight o’clock.
McGraw repeated the time and checked David’s address. He had it right.
Returning, book in hand, to where his mother was waiting, David explained, “I got some scratches on my car going down to the beach last night. A guy’s going to paint them for me.”
“Have it done by a professional, David. I’ll help you pay for it.”
“Great,” he said.
“Not everything is great,” she said. Then, “Shall we put off the poem until another time?”
McGraw arrived not long after the hall clock struck the hour. David had again cut loose his riders. He took the lawyer to the kitchen. McGraw was wearing the same topcoat. He took it off and put it on the back of a chair and perched the hat on top of it. “It’s a good thing I make house calls, isn’t it? Any coffee left in the pot?”
David poured half a mugful and heated it in the microwave. McGraw was taking inventory of every convenience in the kitchen—like he was pricing it for a yard sale.
He took the coffee black. “Why don’t we start with your side of the story first, David—what really happened to you on the way home?”
“I’m not going to tell you anything,” David said.
“In that case, hear this,” McGraw said. “A farmer whose address is rural box seventeen on the County Road heard a woman scream out in front of his place after midnight last night. It woke him from a sound sleep. He looked out, thought he saw a car stalled on the road, and decided to call the Sheriff’s Patrol. The call was clocked at twelve-twenty. But on account of the accident on the interstate, the patrol didn’t pick up on it till daylight. I went out there myself with Addy Muller, drove him in fact. He was dead on his feet after a double shift. But the farmer was pissed at how long it took the sheriff’s men to show up. I’m telling it to you straight, David….”
David didn’t say anything. McGraw took a noisy sip of his coffee. “Addy remembered you kids on the beach and figured you might’ve been heading home about then. He remembered you lived in Oak Forest. He asked me if I’d like to look you up while he made the rounds of the hospitals. You were the one he remembered by name and school. He thought you were too young to be running with that crowd.
“You didn’t want to talk to me, David, you didn’t show much respect for the truth either. In other words, you were scared. I can see why.
“It turns out the woman was on her way home from work, tired, late, and she had to relieve herself. No traffic that she could see. She pulled halfway off the road, turned off the lights, and went in front of the car. Now wouldn’t you like to take it from there?”
David was silent.
“David, there was a witness. You were driving at high speed, came out of nowhere just as she came around from in front of the car. You could have made sausage meat of her, and you didn’t even stop.”
“I didn’t hit her. I know that.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“So what do you think happened to her?”
David shook his head.
“But you didn’t care as long as you could get away.”
“I did care, but I knew I hadn’t hit her.”
“You knew?” McGraw waited, breathing noisily, a snort.
“What happened to her, mister?” David could feel that terrible tightness in his throat.
“I’m not a doctor,” McGraw said.
“Is she all right?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Oh, no. But she is alive.”
David caught the emphasis on “she.” “You said there was a witness. Were they in the car with her?”
McGraw gave him the sad smirk of a smile. “No, David, you are the witness.”
He wondered how that could be and then realized he had in effect confessed to McGraw. He’d been trapped. He ha
d trapped himself. And he was all he cared about. Not the woman. She wasn’t a real person to him. She was a scream, like a face he’d brought up on the computer screen.
“I want to see her,” he said. What he wanted was to feel her, to flesh-and-blood feel her.
“You could have seen her at the scene. Now it’s up to her whether or when she will see you.”
“What am I supposed to do, mister?”
“Exactly what I advised you to do yesterday: go over to the Sheriff’s Office this morning and give Deputy Muller your statement.”
“And if I don’t?”
“They’ll come and get you, David. I can promise you that. The woman will swear out the warrant for your arrest.”
And the arrest would be reported in the County Sentinel’s “Crime Watch.” But the woman was alive: why couldn’t he say thank God and mean it? He hated himself for what came into his mind and for saying it, but he did: “What if I asked you to represent me?”
“It’s too late for that,” McGraw said, sounding regretful.
“You’re representing her, aren’t you?”
“Such a smart young man, David, would you believe me if I told you I don’t wish to represent either of you in a court of law? You will agree surely that you owe the unfortunate woman something simply on the strength of the information we have exchanged here this morning?”
“Isn’t this some kind of blackmail, mister?”
“What a dirty word. No, David. I am offering you an honorable solution to something that could be very nasty. It could mess up your life, your career, people knowing you’d run away like that. What I haven’t told you till now—the woman was pregnant, David. She miscarried after the accident.”
David felt the message like a blow to the stomach. He had trouble getting his breath.
“I think we can call it an accident,” McGraw went on, “but in her mind it was murder.”
“I’m sorry for her,” David said finally, and it wasn’t associated with McGraw’s mention of murder. It was for something lost.
“Sorrow’s too cheap, David. Think about it and after you’ve seen Deputy Muller, let’s talk again. She’s a poor, hardworking woman. A settlement would not impoverish your family.”
David watched McGraw down the driveway, the coat as he struggled into it swished out like Batman’s cape. He tucked it around him as he got behind the wheel of a car marked SHERIFF’S OFFICE.
The woman was human, David thought, a human being, and the sorrow he felt was for her, not for himself. It was going to be McGraw’s word against his, no matter what happened, he reasoned. Not that he was thinking of the lie he could tell to get out of his admission, but he wanted time to think about what he was going to do. He didn’t think McGraw would make any move until he had turned himself in, until he signed something saying he had left the scene where someone might have been hurt due to his reckless speed. He was trying to tell himself the truth, the way it was now. In a way, he had hit the woman and he wanted to go back and pick her up. He couldn’t do that, but if he could find her, he could ask her to listen to him, and he could tell her he was sorry. Murder, he felt sure, was McGraw’s word. It was meant to scare him. The funny thing was it didn’t, but McGraw still did.
David knew he needed help. Maybe he did need a lawyer, but he just didn’t think so. What he needed first was a private detective, something as remote from his experience as a TV melodrama. What he needed was his father. Not available. He’d recommend a lawyer anyway, and in spite of what his mother had said about David’s being able to talk to him, he didn’t think his father would be able to listen.
He drove to school and got to see Father Moran in his office. The priest shook hands with him, not the usual start of a student interview. He knew a troubled young person when he saw one. He told David to move his chair so the light wouldn’t shine in his face.
“I got to thinking after yesterday’s brouhaha,” the priest said, “one of those what-if questions. What if, after hiding out overnight, Iscariot had showed up at the foot of the cross and said, ‘Lord, forgive me.’”
David grinned. There was nothing to say and yet there was a lot.
“What can I do for you, Crowley?”
“I did a bad thing, Father.” David told his story, even to having thrown the condom into the wind.
The priest lifted an eyebrow. “Standard equipment,” he growled. It was the only comment he made until David was finished. Then, after a few seconds of thought: “And when you find her?”
“I don’t know,” David said. “I just want her to know I’m sorry for what happened to her.”
“Even a decent lawyer would advise you against self-incrimination.”
“I don’t care!” David all but shouted.
“By the grace of God, I’m not a lawyer,” the priest said. He took the phone book from the bottom drawer of his desk. “Let’s start with the nearest hospital to where this misfortune occurred.”
Within the half-hour he had the name and address for Alice Moss. When she hemorrhaged with the miscarriage, she had taken herself back to St. Vincent’s Hospital. It was where she worked on the custodial staff.
“If you didn’t hear me scream,” the woman said after she’d thought about it, “how were you going to hear if something else happened to me?”
“I don’t think I wanted to hear anything,” David said.
Mrs. Moss scraped a bit of congealed egg from the table with her thumbnail. They sat in the hospital’s employees’ cafeteria, where midafternoon traffic was light. She did not in any way resemble the face behind the scream. Her salt-and-pepper hair hung in a clump at the back of her head. Her eyes were tired. She seemed confused, slow, but her question was on the mark. She twisted uncomfortably on the metal chair. “I don’t like you coming to me like this,” she said. “I’d just as soon never know you.”
“I’m sorry,” David said.
“You said that already and I believe you’re telling the truth. But I think you’re sorry over something I’m not real sure I feel the same way about. That lawyer got me all confused, telling me how I feel when I don’t feel that way at all.” She concentrated on ST. MARY’S COLLEGE, the lettering on the breast of his sweater. “David—Mr. Crowley …”
“David’s fine,” he said.
“I’m not saying what I want to say, and maybe I should keep it to myself.” She drew a deep breath and looked at him directly. “I didn’t want to have a baby at all, but I’m a church person and I felt I had to go through with it. Mind, I could have been killed myself last night, I know that …”
“I do too,” David said.
“And maybe that would have been murder, but I still couldn’t call the other thing murder. I was thinking when I came back to work this noon: wasn’t I lucky on both counts?”
Before the next Christian Ethics class David told Father Moran about his meeting in the hospital cafeteria.
“Did she forgive you?”
“I think so.”
“You’re lucky, my lad,” the priest said. They reached the classroom door. “I have a word of advice for you, Crowley. One word….” He waited.
“Yes, Father?”
“Abstinence.”
Till Death Do Us Part
KITTY FOUND HIM FINALLY. He was out on the terrace, no place to be on such a night. He stood, his hands on the parapet, his face to the wind and the strange billowing fog. At times the whole galaxy of lights that shone across the park from Fifth Avenue vanished from sight. Mark leaned over the parapet and looked down, unaware—or not wanting to acknowledge—that his wife had come out from the party to look for him. The apartment was full of guests, most of them agency clients and among those some of the most successful writers in the country, and Mark was out on the terrace.
“I’ve been looking all over for you. People are asking where you are.”
“Who?” he said over his shoulder.
“Oh, God. You’re in one of those moods. I’m sorry if I interrupted
you with Jonathan, but I could see him getting restless. He has no patience. I didn’t want him to leave the party.”
He mumbled something she didn’t hear.
“If you must know, I didn’t want him hurting your feelings.”
“Or me hurting his. Or isn’t that possible?” He half-turned toward her. “I was going to ask him if now that he has all that money, we can call him the Root of all evil. You interrupted just in time.”
“Are you drunk?” He had played upon the author’s name, Jonathan Root, and referred to the recent book contract Kitty had negotiated for him, seven figures.
“Not as drunk as I’d like to be.”
“You’re going to catch cold out here, and we don’t need it this time of year. Please, darling.”
November, with all the cheerful holidays coming up, he thought. He turned and faced her, his elbows on the parapet. She looked glamorous—and was!—a white beaded dress, one shoulder bare, the little sway of self-assurance, and those very blue eyes that, except for the sparkle, were to be seen only in his mind’s eye at the moment. “It’s you that’s going to catch cold,” he said. “Go in and enjoy your party.”
“It’s not my party. It’s our party.”
“No, Kitty. That mixed bag in there is all yours. I don’t like to see people eating their hearts out.”
“That’s pure imagination, and you’re wrong. Success rubs off. Believe me. Look at me! Am I not the perfect example? If you’ve got it, you’ll get it. I’m going in now and I want you to come with me.”
“In a few minutes.”
“Damn you,” she said and whirled around to almost collide with André Wilczynski, a young writer, mostly of poetry, who was both client and sometime employee. When he served as waiter on such occasions as this, Mark called him their poet in residence.
Wilczynski tried to hold the door for Kitty and at the same time balance the martini on his tray. He, too, had been looking everywhere for Mark. Kitty snatched the glass from the tray. “Let him come inside for it if he wants it.”
Kitty swept indoors. Mark turned back to watch the fog. When the doors closed between him and the party, he could hear the singing wheels of the traffic below and the rev of a heavy motor when the bus pulled away from the stop at Seventy-fourth Street. Looking down, he could see the doorman—like a tin soldier blowing a thin whistle with a little toy taxi creeping into view.
In the Still of the Night: Tales to Lock Your Doors By Page 13
