Johnny stood up in the cramped booth and eased the door open. Then he stood still directly behind the policeman, afraid of going around him on either side.
The policeman rocked up on his toes to rest his aching arches, cupped his nightstick against his knee and moved a few feet off toward the wide terrazzo steps that led up to the mezzanine. Then he yawned and shifted his weight, standing a little spraddle-legged, swinging his head around in a patient, careful arc again, beginning with the mezzanine, trailing down the stairs, then across the lobby.
Johnny couldn’t remain standing behind him much longer. You could stand directly behind a man just so long before he caught sight of you out of the corner of his eye. Nickles lowered his head and moved up the stairway, trying to stay just behind the policeman’s swinging gaze. He kept his head down, watching the steps as he mounted them slowly, one at a time. He concentrated on them, examining minutely the way the terrazzo was shallowed out slightly at the fore part of each step, probably from the soles of countless shoes that had traversed them. And he observed how the rounded steel leading edges of the steps were polished into a shiny-bright luster. His downcast eyes saw other feet moving past him, and going down in the opposite direction. He saw a child’s foot with falling socks and an untied shoelace pattering up the stairs two at a time, lightly. And he saw a woman’s heavy feet, swollen ankles protruding above black, low heeled shoes that were run down at the heels and dusty, with the eyelet work cracked, and split across the toes and bulging grotesquely around bunions. Then there weren’t any shoes for a few more steps. And then there was just a single pair of glistening brown French toed men’s shoes coming down in smart precision with the cuffs of expensive trousers breaking across their tops at just the right angle.
Johnny’s own shoes, costly imported leathers, custom made for him back in his plush days, were scuffed and dusty now and one of the laces was coming untied.
He made it to the top of the stairs and walked across the great semi-circular floor and sat down on a bench near the swinging doors marked Men and Women.
In a moment, Johnny saw the top of the policeman’s head appearing above the stairway. First his head, then his torso, then his legs. Bobbing and rising as he elevated himself one step at a time. And then he moved up past the final stair and he too was on the mezzanine, breathing a little heavily, patting his florid face with a handkerchief. He lifted his cap with the hand that had the nightstick’s hand-leather thong wrapped around it and, with his other hand, he mopped his bald head. Then he fixed his cap back in place, stuffed the handkerchief into a back pocket and began to swing his gaze around the mezzanine in the same patient, thorough way in which he had scrutinized the face of every person downstairs on the main floor where Johnny had so carefully avoided his scrutiny.
Johnny turned away from him and crossed his legs. He hoped the people around him wouldn’t hear his heart thumping.
On the same bench with him, a few feet away, was a tired young woman holding a baby in her arms. She was dressed in a stained magenta colored blouse, a dusty suit that had been mended in numerous places and a small hat. Her shabby cardboard suitcase was wedged under the bench behind her shoes as if for protection. She looked harried and weary as she automatically bounced the child on her knee and brushed a strand of hair from her own eyes.
Johnny looked past her, around the half-circle of the mezzanine, his eyes like scurrying, trapped animals. There was no other way down. The policeman was standing at the head of the only staircase.
“You goin’ a long way?” the tired girl with the baby asked. She seemed to address the question into space without much interest. Johnny realized she was talking to him.
“I—oh, no...just to Sacramento.”
She looked more directly at him. Her face was drawn and her eyes blinked leadenly. “Yeah? Hot, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” Johnny said. “It’s hot.”
She nodded. “It sure is hot.”
She bounced the baby a little harder, then rested her leg. “I come all the way from Arizona. I’m goin’ to San Francisco. My husband’s in the service there. In San Francisco.”
Johnny could see past her, into the mirror above the penny scales. In it, he could see the policeman moving slowly in their direction. His palm grew so slippery, it slid off the back of the bench and he wiped it on his trousers.
“You ever been there?” she inquired.
“Huh?”
“San Francisco.” She said it “S-a-a-a-n Fra-a-a-ancisco.” She hadn’t been away from Brooklyn too long, Johnny thought.
“Oh yeah. I been there.”
She nodded as if that satisfied an important point in her mind. Suddenly she frowned at him. “You sure are fidgety.” She shifted her sleeping baby to the other knee. “Say, you look like a pretty nice guy. Would you hold her for just a minute?” She nodded toward the swinging door marked Women. “You know, it’s kinda hard to manage with her....”
In the mirror, Johnny saw that the policeman was not more than twenty feet from him by then.
“Oh,” Johnny wet his lips. “Sure. Yeah, I’ll hold her.”
The woman lifted the child who was wrapped in a soft pink blanket and placed her carefully in Johnny’s arms. “Gee, thank you! I won’t be a minute.” She ambled off toward the door marked Women.
Johnny held the child awkwardly. Then he propped her up across one shoulder so that she hid his face from the approaching policeman.
The baby didn’t approve of that position. She began to squirm. In a minute, she was howling. Johnny would never have believed that so much noise could come out of one tiny, red-faced infant. Everybody on the mezzanine glared his way.
Hurriedly, he stood up and went into the men’s room, pushing the swinging door with his shoulder. The child was crying more lustily than ever.
There was a commotion outside on the floor, too. A woman was screaming and feet were scuffling. Johnny looked around the tile-floored room frantically. There was only one other exit—high windows covered with frosted glass. To the left was a row of porcelain urinals. Against the floor, below the windows, was a row of shining, chromium-plated faucets bent over gleaming lavatories. Crumpled wet paper towels were lying around the floor at the base of a large metal disposal bin. Several men were standing at the urinals. They all turned to stare at the screaming child. One of the toilets flushed and a man pushed the stall door open with one hand while he pulled up his trousers with another. The place stank of disinfectant and liquid soap.
A startled porter, towel in one hand, whiskbroom in the other, stared at Johnny, mouth agape. Johnny thrust the squirming infant into the porter’s arms, rammed a nickel in the slot of one of the self-locking stalls, yanked it open and went in. He closed the door and stood on the porcelain bowl so his feet wouldn’t show.
At that moment an excited mob of people burst in through the swinging door. Johnny could hear the young mother wailing that her child had been kidnapped and murdered. The policeman’s voice was yelling for order and a hundred other voices added to the din. Johnny eased the stall door open. The bulk of the crowd had surrounded the porter, wedging him into the far corner. He was still holding the child, trying to explain what had happened, while the policeman waved his nightstick under his nose and the woman continued to scream hysterically.
Johnny took advantage of the momentary confusion to slip through the mob, out through the swinging door. He crossed the mezzanine quickly, using all his will power to keep from breaking into a dead run.
When at last he had reached the cool night air outside, he did start running. He let the pent-up panic take over and he ran for blocks until he fell against the side of a building totally winded.
Fifteen minutes later and still out of breath he was climbing up the hotel stairs, to the room in which Ruth Jordon was waiting.
She let him in.
“Johnny, darling!” She gave a little choked cry and clung to him. “It’s been like sitting through two eternity’s, here alone....
”
He pushed her away.
“Johnny—” Her fingers went to her throat. “What’s wrong?” she faltered.
He wished now that Jean hadn’t said what she had about Ruth Jordon. He wished it desperately. Not since Christine had walked out on him, had a woman gotten under his skin—until now, and Ruth. Now he had begun to think that Ruth was the girl for him, the clean, fine woman who would bear his children and his name. The one woman he wanted to marry.
He had begun to think crazy things like that.
“What—what did you find out, Johnny?”
“Not too much. Jean’s been shot.”
“Shot? Oh, no, Johnny...how?”
He kept staring at her, not wanting to say what he had to.
“Take your clothes off.” His voice was low and steady.
Her fingers closed around her throat. The blood left her face. “Don’t...say it like that, Johnny,” she whispered. There were tears in her eyes.
“How do you want me to say it?”
She shook her head slowly, her big, wide open eyes staring at him. “What’s wrong with you? You look at me as if I had some horrible disease or something.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Just take your clothes off. Then everything will be all right, maybe.” He realized his clenched fingers were digging into his palms.
She stared at him for a long time, then shook her head. A tiny pulse fluttered in her throat. “No, Johnny,” she whispered.
He thought about the night in the Mexican café. It had been dark in that back room. She had been only a vague form, nothing about her had been clear. Then, this morning—she had belonged to him, yes...he remembered she had stopped him from removing her bra—and the towel around her shoulders.
Why?
The question rattled around in his mind like a scream reverberating through an empty chamber.
“Do I have to tear them off?” he asked through his teeth.
Then her shoulders slumped. Her eyes could no longer meet his. “All right, Johnny,” she muttered in a dead voice. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons at the front of her dress. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“I knew I was going to have to tell you. But I kept waiting. I hoped there’d be some other way. She shuddered. “Maybe if I hadn’t waited, Miff and the Nathan girl would still be alive—”
The dress slipped from her shoulders, fell around her ankles. She hooked her thumbs in her panties, pushed them over her hips and stepped out of them. Last of all, she reached back of her shoulder blades, unhooked her bra and lifted it off her arms.
Then she stood before him, her beautiful golden body bare. She stood with her shoulders slumped, her stomach muscles sagging, her face lowered.
“You see, I’ve been lying all along, Johnny,” she whispered. “There hasn’t been any amnesia....”
She drew a deep breath. Her eyes remained downcast, looking at the floor. “It’s all been an act. This is the truth—no more lying. I was going to tell you today, anyway. I wouldn’t let you go on hiding from the police when I know who really shot Miff Smith. I was standing beside him that night, listening to the record, when Raye Cowles came in with a little shiny pistol in her hand. She must have been drunk or something. I’ve never seen a woman’s face so—so twisted and horrible. She screamed all sorts of terrible, vile things at Miff. Then, at the loudest part of the record, where Krupa takes a drum solo and hits all the rim shots, she pulled the trigger.”
Her voice came to Johnny from the end of a long echoing tunnel. “Her first shot was intended for me. The gun went off in my face, blinding me. I turned and ran through the kitchen. I heard her shoot again. I found a stairway leading up to the attic. There was one more shot—I heard it when I was up there. Then, after it was all over, I ran out.”
She kept her eyes closed. She sounded like a child reciting a memorized lesson in a dull monotone. “I ran home. I lifted the telephone to call the police. But Sam Cowles was there in my house, waiting for me. It seems he had been on Rays heels all night, trying to catch her. He knew she was hopped up and crazy mad and might kill somebody. Well, he got to Miff’s apartment a few minutes too late, just as Raye was running down the steps with the gun in her hand. She was hysterical at first. And he drove her around until she’d calmed down a bit and was able to tell him what had happened. Then she told him I had seen her and that her shot had only grazed me. They followed me home. He got there a minute after I did and walked in the front door just as I picked up the telephone to call the police. He—he made me put it down.”
She drew a shuddering breath. Her face was all twisted and agonized. She raised her eyes and suddenly she was older and not so pretty. “Something—something happened to me when I was younger, Johnny. I was just out of high school, running around with a fast, expensive crowd. My folks lived here then. And Sam Cowles, even then, was the big shot in this town’s society. He used to give parties up at his place. He had everything you’d ever want—liquor, marihuana, heroin. We’d go to his parties—I thought he was glamorous.”
Johnny died inside. He felt as if there was nothing left in him except scraps of old scorched paper blowing away in a dry wind. “Sam Cowles,” he said in a voice a hundred years old. “You and....”
“Yes, Johnny,” she admitted. “Sam Cowles. The man you despise more than anybody else in the world. I let him make love to me when I was just a little more than a baby.”
She turned away from him. “He’s the only one, Johnny. There never has been anybody else until you. I didn’t want to do anything with him that night. But there was something in my drink. I passed out. When I woke up everybody else had gone. I was alone in his big house with him.” She shuddered. “He made me do it, Johnny. I didn’t want to, but he forced me to do all sorts of terrible things with him and he took pictures....”
“I had a nervous breakdown after that. I didn’t dare tell my folks what had happened. Dad worshipped me. He thought I was the cleanest, purest angel in the world. He’s terribly ill with a heart ailment. The shock would have stopped his heart. So I went to Dr. Nathan. That was the first time he treated me. I told him all.”
She shook her head, squeezing back tears with tightly closed eye lids. “That’s why I’ve lied to protect Raye Cowles. Sam still has those pictures and records. He threatened to make them public, send them to my father unless I kept quiet about Rays shooting Miff. It would have killed Dad. I had to think up something. People saw me go up to Miff’s Monday night. It was a desperate, crazy idea, I guess, but I decided to pretend I couldn’t remember anything that happened that night. I don’t think I fooled Ed Nathan, but he thinks as much of my Dad as I do and guess he wanted to protect him, too. I—I didn’t want to lose the two men I loved most in the world...Dad and...you, darling—”
Well, here she is, Johnny. The clean, pure youngster you were so afraid to touch—because she was too innocent! The girl you thought you might marry some day—if you ever came out of this mess alive!
And now you knew you’d never be able to forget what she’d just told you. For the rest of your life you’d be wondering if Sam Cowles really forced her that night—or if she’d lied about that too. You’d always wonder if she’d gone to him of her own free will, seeking a cheap thrill like all the other women who visited Sam Cowles. And in case you ever did forget, there’d always be something to remind you every time she took off her clothes to nestle into your waiting arms—a little memento of that night with Sam Cowles—the initials “S.O.” that he had burned in her left breast....
Johnny felt as if he were going to be suddenly and violently ill.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
TIME TO KILL
Friday Evening, 11:00 P.M.
Johnny walked around in circles for a long time. There was an aching in his throat. People bumped into him. He was on the street and the night air blew against him, but now it was warm like a tepid, enervating breath off the desert. Still, he was not aware of any par
ticular sensation. He walked through an alley where a pair of tramps were sitting on a curb and he might have been one of them, with his wrinkled, stained suit, his scuffed shoes white with dust, and his haggard face.
Slowly, the full consciousness of Ruth Jordon’s confession spread through him and took root in his conscious mind which had been shying away from it like a woman averting her eyes from a sordid, revolting object, not wanting to think about it. But it was a fact that he was going to have to live with for the rest of his life so he had to begin thinking about it. He had to distill it into an ordinary cold fact, had to catalogue it in his mind’s store of trivia, along with his name, and who was president of the United States, and the exact amount of his union dues.
He had to think of the girl with whom he had fallen in love—her clean young eyes and fresh mouth and sweet, golden body, all of that a plaything for a lecherous man whose only god was power and his own rotten ego. He had to hurt himself with the same masochistic pleasure as a person gets from grinding down on a throbbing tooth. He had to imagine the whole scene—Cowles’ hands going over her, his mouth on her—and Ruth returning the dirty caresses in a drunken orgy, groaning with the pleasure of it.
He came out of a mental fog, hearing his own hoarse curses in his ears and feeling blinding flashes of white hot pain wracking his body. And he realized that he was standing in an alley, ramming his fist against a wall, splattering the wall and his coat sleeve with his own blood. He shook his head like a stunned bear and began to walk again. He took out a handkerchief and wrapped it around the bleeding knuckles of his left hand and kept on walking.
“Boy, you sure can pick ’em, Johnny Nickles,” he swore at himself. “First Christine, now this one. When it comes to women, you got about as much sense as a kid in first year of Junior High.”
He went back to the hotel and telephoned George Swenninger. “Okay,” he said wearily, “we’re all set now. I have the address of the place where Raye Cowles is hidden out and I have an eyewitness who will swear that she killed Miff Smith. Yeah. Ten minutes? Okay. Yeah, here in the lobby.”
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