by John Farris
Donny raised a hand in agreeable salute and left without looking at me again. Roxy sat on the edge of his desk and brushed his small mustache with a finger, as if reassuring himself.
“What do you know, Bill?” he said calmly.
I leaned against the wall near the door, my hands against the smooth cold white leather that partially covered the walls. “The bottle contains a highball with a fatal dose of cyanide. I think Kelly Anne Fisher was drinking it when she died. Somebody put the cyanide in her glass knowing that when she died it would be blamed on her heart. It could have been just about anybody, including you, because Kelly Anne was highly unpopular at the time. I know that Dr. Einhorn suspected or was able to tell she hadn’t died of a heart attack and saved some of the drink to prove it.”
“And why would Dr. Einhorn give me the bottle?” Roxy said, his voice almost inaudible. He was finding strength somewhere. His eyes were softly confident.
“He made a mistake once,” I said. “You were around to mark it down in your book.” I walked closer to the desk. His eyes followed me almost dreamily.
“You can’t prove where it came from, Bill. You know that. Dr. Einhorn will never talk. You’re wasting your time, and mine. You can’t prove Kelly Anne died from it. You can’t prove somebody put the cyanide in her glass.”
“No, I can’t prove it. Not yet. I won’t stop trying, though.”
Roxy laughed, the surprisingly hearty sound beating against the shadowy tension in the office.
“I know, Bill. You’ll keep trying. That’s why I have to admire you. I should hate you. But you’re too much like me, Bill. No. You’re more what I wish I could be. You’re smart and tough. You’re not sure what you want, but you’re fighting to prove something to yourself. You’ll keep trying to prove that Dr. Einhorn and I are guilty of some crime. But I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to waste your time. I want you with me.”
His voice had become husky, compelling.
“I need you, Bill. I need you with me. Together we can find what we’re looking for. Together we’ll have the strength to fight anybody.” He slid off the desk, stood behind it. “Oh, Bill,” he said. His eyes pleaded with me. “What we can do together. We’ll go so far nobody can touch us. Men like Gulliver will thank us for allowing them to pick up our discarded cigarette butts. Please, Bill. Don’t fight me. Come with me.”
“You’ll never see the day,” I told him.
His eyes widened in dismay. “Bill, listen to me. What do you want? Money, women? You want men to twist like dolls? That’s what you want, Bill. You’re like me. I know.” His face was tight with anxiety, his lips firm with an odd, almost sexual excitement as he tried to measure me within the confined scope of his own desires. “Don’t just look at me, Bill!” His voice cracked with an uncertain sob. I said nothing. He leaned forward against his desk, his eyes on my face, demanding. “What do you want, Bill!”
“I want something to believe in,” I said. I hadn’t been thinking it. I didn’t know I was going to say it. But in some way the words represented a final transition, a long delayed completion of manhood. “I can’t believe in you, Roxy. You’re just a shadow anyway, of bigger men with bigger desires. You don’t have any real meaning.” I walked up to the desk.
There was a sound that came from Roxy, a tight high little squeal some animal might make in anticipation of death. The middle desk drawer opened. I saw his hand go in and come out. In the chalky yellow light from the lamp beside the desk I saw a revolver in his hand. I kicked out viciously. The lamp fell, the bowl shattering against the desk.
In the darkness I backed cautiously away. There was no shot. I couldn’t hear Roxy. I pushed off my shoes and went to my knees, crawled across the rug to the leather-bordered walls.
I waited there.
It was very still.
I waited for what seemed a long time, crouched, breathing shallowly. I waited for him to crack.
After a while Roxy said, “Bill?”
I said nothing.
He repeated, “Bill?” I could hear him move uncertainly then, as if he had shifted his weight. Then something heavy fell against the bottom of the desk drawer.
“I put the gun in the drawer,” Roxy said hopefully.
I said nothing.
He picked the gun up again. I heard it scrape against the drawer. He swung the cylinder out, removed the slugs. He dropped them, one by one, into the drawer. He put the gun in, too. He shut the drawer.
I stood up, felt along the wall for the light switch and turned on the overhead light. I put my shoes on.
Roxy looked as if he had just vomited. He leaned against the desk, his face pale. He licked at his lips with a small pink tongue.
“I didn’t have anything to do with Kelly Anne,” he said.
“Who killed her?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about Richard Olson?”
His head came up. “Who?” His eyes were puzzled, behind the glaze of despair.
“The man you know as Leland Smithell. He was Richard Olson three years ago when he took a bank in New York for forty thousand dollars and disappeared. Leland Smithell was murdered about ten days ago. He had some of the stolen money in a suitcase in the basement. There could have been anywhere up to fifteen thousand in the suitcase. It was all gone. Whoever killed Smithell knew about the money, took it. Next to the suitcase was a trunk with a dead man in it. Smithell had killed him. Through information about this murdered man we uncovered Smithell’s past.”
He shook his head. “I . . . don’t know anything about that. I didn’t even know the man.”
“But I think you know about Kelly Anne,” I said.
“No. Believe me.”
“Does Dr. Einhorn know who killed her?”
Roxy sat down in his chair, his hands folded tightly together. He was through talking to me. He was talking to himself now, silently.
“I’m going to see him,” I said. “Don’t tip him, Roxy.”
He looked up, his eyes blinded by remorse. I don’t think he heard me. He was slowly coming unstuck. I could sense the effort he was making to remain whole. His hands trembled.
I went downstairs to the bar. Donny Arlene was drinking Scotch and giving a fast deft line to a slim blonde girl dressed too maturely for her age who sat very straight and didn’t look at Arlene, and who seemed to have part of her attention focused on some inward voice.
I tipped him on the shoulder. “Pardon me,” I said.
He turned on the bar stool. His smile gleamed. “My friend,” he said.
“The gun,” I said.
He took it from his coat pocket fondly and gave it to me. The curly headed blonde had unbent enough to look at us as the exchange was made. Her face was thin and delicately pretty, but immature. She looked from the gun to Arlene, and seemed frightened. As he turned back to the bar the back of his hand trailed along her slim thigh tightly bound in a blue skirt, touched her bare knee. Her fingers tightened nervously on the glass in front of her. She drank. She looked at Arlene, at the dark smooth features. His smile was reassuring. She smiled back, weakly, seemed to lean toward him. Another sacrifice looking for an altar.
DR. EINHORN LIVED IN A LARGE ENGLISH-STYLE FIELDSTONE house cozily wrapped in old ivy in a good section of town. There were lights on all over the house but nobody answered my persistent rings. I tired quickly of leaning on the doorbell and tried the door. It was unlocked. I went inside.
The living room was to my left, a couple of steps down. A staircase to the upper floor was at my right.
“Hello,” I said, to the impassive furniture. No one answered. No dog came yapping toward me from within the house.
But there was a sound.
It came from upstairs, indistinctly, so that I listened closely for it to be repeated again, as if I hadn’t really heard it at all. I heard the tiny sound of a sob again.
I went upstairs, my feet silent on the carpeted steps. Directly ahead, at the end of a short hall, was a bedroom. I coul
d see the double bed inside. A black doctor’s bag was on the bed. All lights were on in this room, too. I went inside. I was following the sound now.
I found him in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, leaning over the bathtub. He was naked. Clenched in the fingers of his right hand was a double-edged razor blade. There were several scratches on his left wrist. He had tried. His face was clenched, too, as wrinkled as a new baby’s, as if he were filled with a sob so gigantic that he couldn’t force it out. His lips were parted. He saw nothing. He heard nothing.
On the floor lay a photograph of a middle-aged woman. He had scrawled on it in eyebrow pencil, Forgive me Martha. I took the blade from him. His eyes didn’t move.
“All right,” I said, “all right.” I felt afraid. I took him by the shoulder. He didn’t respond.
I dropped the blade into a wastebasket beneath the wash bowl. I knew I should hit him to try to bring him out of it. I couldn’t make myself do it. I went back into the bedroom. I looked again at his bag on the bed. He could have done it easier. Maybe the draining of blood was to have had some meaning for him. I shook my head.
Someone came up the stairs. A stout woman about fifty years old, hair beauty-parlor gray, body almost shapeless in a light gray suit. She wore a small black hat. The woman in the picture. She looked at me with hard surprise.
“Who are you?” she said, coming into the bedroom. “Where’s my husband?”
“Sergeant Randall,” I said automatically. “Cheyney police. I came to talk to . .
She went by me, into the bathroom, walking with urgent speed. I didn’t follow. I could hear her.
She must have looked at him for almost a minute. Then she said, “George.” And more sharply, “George!” After a short pause she said, her voice as brittle and fragile as late ice, “Oh my baby, baby, why won’t you talk to me, baby? What’s wrong?”
She came back into the bedroom. “He’s been working too hard. I knew it. I told him. He’s been working too hard. What did he try to do it with?”
“A razor blade.”
She sat in a chair as if her body was devoid of all energy. “I’ll call his brother. He owns a sanitarium not far from here. He’ll take care of George.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
She opened her eyes and breathed deeply. Her eyes showed no sign of approaching hysteria. There was iron in her system, a fine hard core beneath the flabbiness. “I’ll be all right. I was a nurse once. I know these things. I’ll be okay.”
She took the phone from the table beside the chair and placed her call. When she had hung up, she said, “Thank you for being here in time. What did you want to talk to George about?”
“It wasn’t important. I guess I’ll go now.”
“Before you go . . . I mean, I don’t want him to just sit in there. If . . .”
I nodded. I went into the bathroom and picked up Dr. Einhorn. He didn’t resist me. I carried him into the bedroom. His face still had that look of unspeakable grief. He made a small sound. I put him on the bed.
His wife pulled a chair close to the bed. She sat down near him. She had a Bible in one hand. She took one of his hands in her own. She opened the book, and began to read.
WHEN I GOT HOME I THOUGHT I WAS HUNGRY, SO I FIXED A sandwich and took a bottle of beer from the icebox. I went into the living room to eat, but after two bites I put the sandwich aside. There were too many knots in my stomach. I felt as if I had walked a long way down a far street and turned a corner, only to find myself again on the same long lonely street.
I must have dozed slightly, because the strident sound of the telephone alerted me with a cold drenching of fear. The feeling of dread persisted as I went to the telephone.
“Hello?”
“Bill? Phil Naar.” His voice sounded uncertain.
“Yeah?”
“I thought you’d want to know about this. I was over at the Highway Patrol when the call came in.” He spoke haltingly. “Some kids found a body in the woods about ten miles west of here. Shot twice.”
My mouth was dry. I had to lean against the table. I barely whispered. “Who, Phil?”
“Jimmy Herne’s cousin. The Francis girl. Looks like somebody murdered her.”
I shut my eyes. I had the precarious sensation of falling, emptily, through black space. “No,” I said. “No. No.”
“Bill—”
“I . . .”
“I thought you’d want to know.”
“Where are you?”
“At the Highway Patrol.”
“I want to go there,” I said. “I’ll come by for you.”
“Bill—”
I hung up. I got my gun from the bedroom. I put it on. I remember thinking only one thing. Defiantly. It can’t be. It’s a mistake. I thought that. It was the only thing that kept me moving. Somebody’s made a mistake.
9
IT WAS a narrow rutted road three-and-a-half miles from the state highway. On one side were big trees and a split rail fence; on the other was a rolling field. Near a deep ravine through which ran a creek, four cars and an ambulance were parked tightly together. The slope of the ravine was thick with brush and young trees. Headlights from the cars flooded the underbrush with smoky light. There were many men in the road.
We got out. I walked toward the men. Phil trotted behind me. One of the men was Superintendent Sevier, a big man in the Patrol. He looked at me with troubled eyes.
“Where?” I said.
He pointed toward a narrow path through the brush. I went toward it. Nobody said anything to me. There was a spring coiled inside me, ready to whip loose.
The ground was muddy. I slipped a couple of times.
There were a couple of men around her. She was lying on the path, on her side. I saw her in a ring of light cast by two powerful flashlights.
Her blond hair was caked with mud. There was mud on her face, arms and legs. Her clothing was damp. I could smell the clamminess of death about her. Her blouse was ripped open, torn in places. Her breasts were exposed. Under the right breast was a hole, clotted with dark blood. There was another hole just below the first. Dried blood covered her stomach and part of her blouse. Because she had been dead for more than a day and because of the ways death can change a person’s face she didn’t look too much like herself. Because of that I was able to stand it. I was able to look at her with some feeling of detachment. She hadn’t died easy. My Stella hadn’t died easy. There was a grimace on her lips and her eyes reflected stilled agony.
I noticed scratches on her hands and legs. Her skirt was torn, but was still in place. So was her underwear. She held her brassiere tightly in one hand.
I thought I had some degree of self-possession but somehow time must have slipped a gear for me and I was unaware of how long I kneeled in the mud and looked at her. I must have been saying something, because one of the troopers hauled me up and held me tightly while another, with sad eyes, slapped the hell out of me.
I shook my head, and blinked.
“All right. Now I’m all right.”
The first trooper released me.
I could feel a sudden center of calm inside me, amid a churning sickness. I looked at the body again and walked up the path to join the cops.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” Sevier said. I knew Phil had been explaining to them. They all wore the same uncomfortable look.
He held his hat in his hands, turning it over and over. He is a tall man with a receding hairline and a brushy mustache, and a murky expression. “A couple of kids out hunting found her about six,” he said. “With one thing and another it was seven-thirty before we got on it. Looks like somebody fell or was pushed down the path into the ravine. She didn’t die right away, but tried to crawl back up the path. She got around twenty feet. We found her purse up here. Made the identification that way. I’d say about forty-eight hours.”
“What about tire tracks?”
“Might have been some. It rained out here late yesterday afternoon. Ha
rd on tire tracks laid in dust.”
“From the condition her clothing was in,” he went on, “we thought she might have been criminally assaulted first. But her underwear is intact, except for the brassiere. She might have had trouble breathing as she tried to crawl back and so tore it off.”
“You’ve got her bag?”
“We went through it. Just a few items. Comb, lipstick, coin purse, a few cards, keys. That was all. Not even a photo.” I leaned against the front fender of one of the cars and put my face in my hands. I stayed that way for a long time, just holding my head gently and not thinking. Most of them went away, to do what they had to do. But Sevier stayed. I felt his hand on my shoulder.
“How well did you know the girl, Bill?”
“I kind of loved her,” I said.
“I see.” He hesitated, almost as embarrassed. “We hope you’ll be able to help us.”
“I don’t know who killed her,” I said. “I don’t know who’d want to kill her.”
“You’d like to find out.”
“Yes.”
“What did you get suspended for, Bill?”
“Insubordination covers it as well as anything.”
For a moment we listened to the insect noises in the cool summer night, the crackle of sound from the two-way radios in the patrol cars.
“We could use your help, Bill,” he said. “Unofficially.”
“I don’t know what I could do. But I want to help. It’s better than sitting around and slowly going crazy.”
“Anything you get belongs to us.”
“I know that. I’m still a cop.”
We shook hands in the darkness.
THERE WAS ONE LIGHT ON IN THE ROOMING HOUSE ON DAVIS Street. The same skinny hairy little man who had let me in last time came from the rear of the house to see who was rattling the screen door. He had added an undershirt and a pair of flopping slippers to the striped shorts. He was eating a dish of ice cream with a tablespoon.
“What do you want?” he said. “Ever’body’s asleep. Ever’body but me. I can’t sleep. I got a bowel complaint.” He squinted at me through the wire mesh. “I know you,” he said. “You was here before. If you want Stella, you’re wasting your time. She ain’t been here for two, three days.”
