“It was. It is.” Mill looked intently at the tip of his cigar, talked slowly to it. “A hell of a lot worse.”
In spite of himself, Banner lowered his head.
Mill added: “Alice King has good stuff in her, as a person. You take the average fourteen-year-old girl and put her in that spot and she becomes like the mother, you know—shiftless, lazy, vain, a stupid slob. Alice didn’t.”
Banner glanced at the snapshot.
“I don’t mean just for looks,” Mill said a little impatiently. “There’s other things in a kid’s life. Alice King kept up her grades at Marley Junior High, even improved them in one case.
She started to appreciate ballet and modern dance. She did some dating. Normal, in other words, except for what she did twice a week.”
Banner looked a little sadly at the picture. Suddenly he stiffened and set it face down on the desk. He was flushed.
Mill smiled. “Thinking you’d like to jump the kid yourself, I bet!” More seriously he added, “One of the hard things about being a cop is that you can excuse the bad in most people because it’s in you, too... Give me the sheets, will you, for a minute?”
Banner slowly handed them across. The cop turned four pages, his wet thumb driving a crease into every one, then a fifth.
“Here it is. Where she meets Ronald Hutchinson.”
Banner’s lip curled. “Another customer?”
“Another kid. Fifteen, in fact. I found out a lot about him. A big wheel at Marley Junior High: baseball team in summer and football in winter, editor of the school paper, member of Arista, student president of the G.O. And rich, too. Lot of dough in the family. Old man is president of a chain of supermarkets.”
“The kid sounds like a snob.”
“No.” Mill shook his big head determinedly, and tapped a crown of ash off the cigar. “Nice, healthy kid with a lot of girlfriends. A good-looking kid with nice manners.”
Q: How did you come to meet Ronald Hutchinson?
A: I went out for the school paper.
Q: Oh, you volunteered to work for it.
A: That’s right. I thought I wanted to be a reporter when I grow up, so I took a crack at it. Ron was the student editor. We hit it off, all right. We liked each other. We laughed at the same things and had a lot in common. I always think that’s very important with a boy and girl.
Q: Tell me what happened between you two.
A: Nothing did, at the start. I knew he’d want to take me out, but I didn’t rush him. He waited two weeks. There was going to be a dance in the gym at school on Saturday night and he asked me to go with him. I said I would.
Q: Did he call you at home?
A: No, I never want boys to call me at home. It can get confusing.
Q: How did your mother feel about your taking off Saturday night?
A: Mother said it was fine, because she wants me to have good times. She doesn’t want to interfere with my social life.
Q: That’s for sure. So you and Ron Hutchinson hit it off, I suppose.
A: The first date, at the dance, was very sweet. Ron couldn’t samba, so a bunch of us showed him. It was a lot of fun. After that, I saw him in school. It got so that we used to hold hands over the lockers in our ‘official’ rooms. That means the rooms where students do things as a class, you know, according to what the principal wants.
Q: You were dating Ron pretty heavily?
A: We had a few cheap dates, first. We’d meet at the ice cream parlor and he’d buy me a soda and we’d sit and talk. We had an awful lot in common. Once in a while we’d go see a movie and hold hands. Then he’d walk home with me and say goodnight a block from the house. I never let boys call for me at the house.
Q: You didn’t mind the cheap dates?
A: No, they were fun. Ron said that the whole town knew about his being rich, so he didn’t have to impress girls by flashing a roll. A bankroll, he meant.
Q: In other words, you had nothing against Ron Hutchinson.
A: That’s right, nothing.
Q: No grudge of any kind.
A: Of course not.
Q: Did you think you were in love with him?
A: I suppose so.
Q: You were serious about him, then?
A: Yes. Almost praying I could keep him interested till I was eighteen, so we could get married. That shows you what a fool I was!
Q: Why a fool?
A: On account of what happened.
Q: How many times a week did you see him?
A: Two, three.
Q: How did your mother feel about that?
A: At first she thought it was very nice and she told me not to give away anything, if you know what I mean. Then she said I ought to be home at nights, to work if I had to. She said expenses were going up, and I ought to be paying a bigger share of my upkeep.
Q: How did you feel about that?
A: I wanted to get a job in a store, instead, but my mother didn’t want that.
Q: The two of you argued?
A: Yes. I started to get sick when I had to use the bedroom with one of the customers. Sometimes I’d throw up or say that I had cramps.
Q: Tell me about last night—Saturday night.
A: Mother was a little under the weather. She wanted me to stay with one of our customers. The man came in, Mr. Cameron, and I just got sick when I saw him. I started to cry. Mother got angry, but when she saw she was licked anyhow, she told me to go.
Q: You had a date with Ron?
A: We were headed for a party at the house of a friend of his.
Q: How about the knife, Alice? How come you took a pocketknife along with you on a date?
Banner caught his breath.
A: My mother thinks it’s a good idea to bring one, in case a girl gets into a spot where she needs a little help. Mother isn’t like most people, you know, and she always tells me to be very careful when I go out on a date and never go beyond necking. When we’re alone, she calls the customers animals. She always warns me that men are after one thing, and a girl has to use any way possible to keep—well, you know.
Q: And you believe that?
A: Mother’s had more experience than me.
Q: So you took a pocketknife along on every date?
A: Most of them. It came in handy for little things, you know, like cutting open envelopes. I never had to use it to scare off a boy. Not till last night, that is.
Q: Ron made a pass at you?
A: We were at Baker’s Lane. You know, a lot of cars stop there for couples to neck in peace and quiet. Ron had borrowed his dad’s car for the date. He said to me. “What about it, honey?” He put a hand under my dress and started slowly unbuttoning it from behind. Like one of the customers does, Mr. Strawbridge, that is. Anyhow, I tried to stop Ron. I said: “I’m not one of those girls.” And to make a joke out of it, to show I meant it for a joke, I pulled out the pocketknife and said: “Better not.” Of course, I said it in such a way he was sure it was a joke.
Q: He didn’t give up trying, did he?
A: No. He was very calm, very patient, very sure of himself and sure what would happen. Like a customer. Any customer. I was sitting there with my knuckles in my mouth to keep from making a sound. Then Ron fumbled with something in his breast pocket and brought out a wallet and spread it open. He said very seriously: “I hope you’ll let me buy things for you, and make life easier for you. A girl and her mother alone always have a rough time,” he glanced down at my dress, my best dress, “and I’d be glad to help. The money doesn’t mean a thing to me.” And all the time he was running a thumb over the bills in his wallet just like one of the customers before he pays. Just like Mr. Dail. The exact same…
Q: All right, all right! We’ll pick up the questioning later on. The way you’re crying, a person would think I’d belted you one. Strike that!
Mill said thoughtfully: “She was in love with rich-boy Ron and, when he offered to buy her, just like one of the customers would, she acted blindly with the knife.�
��
One of Mill’s hands stiffened in a fist; he stuck out a forefinger and stabbed it suddenly against his heart.
Banner stared at the finger, then quickly looked away.
Double Jeopardy
Susan Dunlap
“Don’t give me excuses. Do it right, damn it! What do you think I’m paying you for?” Wynne slammed down the phone.
I stood in the doorway, still amazed at my sister’s authority, despite the fact that she had controlled situations for nearly forty years.
Even now, lying in the hospital, she continued to play the executive. But, after all, she was the first woman in the state to have become senior vice president of a major corporation. I wondered if it was Warren or some other harried assistant who had felt the sting of her tongue this time.
As she looked at me her expression changed from irritation to concern. “Lynne, why are you lurking in the doorway? You’re shaking. Come in and tell me what’s the matter.”
I walked in, a bit unsteadily, and sat on the plastic chair next to the bed. “It happened again.”
“What this time?”
I took a deep breath, holding my hands one on top of the other on my lap, trying to calm myself enough to be coherent.
The room was bare—hospital-green curtains pulled back against hospital-green walls. The flowers and plant arrangements had been sent to Wynne’s apartment when she had first taken sick leave months ago, but by the time I arrived in the city, they were long dead. Funny how I hesitated to change anything in her apartment, where I, for however long it might be, was only a guest.
Wynne sat propped up on the hospital bed, her hair black and shining, with not a hint of gray.
I looked at her face, at the deceptively fragile smile that had always been strong. Our features were so similar, almost exact, yet no one had ever mixed us up. And Wynne’s compact body had always looked forceful where mine had merely seemed small. She’d changed suddenly when she’d become ill. It was as if her underpinnings had been jerked loose, and she had sped past me on the way to old age.
“Lynne, I’m really worried about you,” she said with an anxiety in her voice I hadn’t heard in ages. “What happened?”
“Another shot. It just missed my head. If I hadn’t stumbled…” My hands were shaking.
Wynne leaned forward and reached out with her hands to my own, steadying mine with her own calm. “Have you notified the police?”
“They’re no help. They take a report and then—nothing. I don’t think they believe me. Another hysterical middle-aged woman.”
Wynne nodded. “Let’s just go through the thing again. I’m used to handling problems—gives me something to think about when I’m on the dialysis machine.”
It sounded cold, but that was the way she was now. We’d been apart since college, and emotionally longer than that. Really, I could hardly claim to know her anymore. Our twin-ness had never had that special affinity—secret baby language, intuitively shared joys and apprehensions. In us, the physical resemblance had merely served to point out our very different traits. I had wound up teaching in our home-town grammar school; she, more determined and ambitious, had made her way up in the world of business.
“So?” she said impatiently.
“Someone shot at me three times. If I weren’t always tripping and turning my ankle…”
“And you have no idea who it might be?”
“None. Who would want to kill me? Why? Really, what difference would it make if I died? Who would care?”
“It would matter to me.” She pressed my hands, then drew away. “You’re all I have. I wouldn’t have asked you to come if you weren’t vital to me.”
I bit my lip. “There are things…I want to say before…” But I couldn’t say “you die,” and Wynne, for all her lack of sentimentality, didn’t seem to be able to supply the words for me.
Instead I said, “Wynne, you shouldn’t cut yourself off like this.”
“I have you. I need someone away from the company.”
“But why? Why not let Warren come?”
“No.” She spat out the word. “I can’t let him see me like this.”
She looked all right to me. Better than I was likely to look if I didn’t find out who was shooting at me.
Wynne must have divined my thoughts, for she said irritably, “You don’t show someone who’s after your job how sick you are. I’ve never told any of them that I’m on the dialysis machine.” She shook her head as if to dismiss the unacceptable thought. “I told them it was just one kidney that failed, that I was having it removed.” Her face moved into a tenuous smile. “I know all the details from your own operation. So don’t say that you never did anything for me.”
I didn’t know how to answer. Could Wynne really hide the fact that she was dying? Warren had been her assistant for ten years. He had taken over her job as acting senior vice president. I had assumed they were friends, but I guess I didn’t understand the nature of friendship in business.
Brusquely, Wynne gestured for me to go on.
Swallowing my annoyance, I reminded myself that she was used to giving orders and now she had no one but me to boss around.
But before I could answer, a nurse came in and with an air of authority that dwarfed even Wynne’s, motioned me away as she drew the green curtain in a half oval around the bed.
I walked to the window and looked out, but I didn’t want to see the parking lot again. I didn’t want to search each bush, behind every car, looking for a sniper. Instead, I turned back toward the room—this small private room, so very impersonal. Even Wynne, with all her power, hadn’t the ability to stamp any image of herself onto it. It was merely a holding cell for the dying.
“Just another minute,” the nurse called out.
I nodded, realizing as I did so that she couldn’t see me behind the curtain.
I wondered if this room held the same horror for Wynne as it did for me. Or more? Or different? Would I ever see this mind-numbing green without thinking of the day I arrived in the city, unnerved by Wynne’s sudden insistence that I come, after years of increasingly perfunctory letters. That first day. I sat down and she said she was dying. No, wait, not dying. She had never used that word. It was her doctor who said “dying.”
It had been bright and clear that day, too. The sunlight had been cut by the Venetian blinds so that pale ribbons sliced across the green wall. And when he told me, the light merged with the green and that numbing green shone and the wall seemed to jump out at me and I couldn’t focus, couldn’t think about anything but the wall.
Time softens things, but that moment remained hard and bright and brittle.
“Lynne, you keep staring off in the distance. Are you sure you’re all right?” The nurse was gone. Wynne was looking at me, her lips turned up in the hint of a smile, but her eyes serious. “Are you still seeing the doctor?”
“Doctor? You mean the psychiatrist at home?”
“Yes.”
“Wynne, I wasn’t seeing him because I was crazy. It was just therapy. I needed some perspective.”
“On?”
“Us,” I answered. She looked truly surprised, and I couldn’t help but feel stung to realize once more that she, who had influenced every part of my life, was so unaffected by me.
“You were saying, before the nurse came for my spit and polish, who might want to kill you? It’s so hard to believe.”
I shifted my mind gratefully. Still, where to begin? I was too ordinary—a middle-aged first-grade teacher—to make enemies. If it had been Wynne…
“Well,” she said, tightening her lips, “we’ll have to examine the possibilities.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have any money, no insurance other than the teachers’ association policy.”
“And that goes to Michael?”
“Yes, but Michael’s not going to come all the way from Los Angeles to shoot his mother so he can inherit two thousand dollars and a clapboard house.”
&nb
sp; “I didn’t mean that.” She looked momentarily confused, and hurt. “I was just listing the possibilities. You have to do that. You can’t let sentiment stand in the way of your goal. I had to learn that long ago. There are plenty of people who have wanted me out of the way.”
“But they weren’t trying to murder you!”
She shrugged. And she watched me.
“Wynne, I’m the one they’re trying to kill. No one would kill you now. What would be the point? I mean…”
Her face turned white.
“Wynne, we don’t have much time! Either of us. Maybe we can’t find out who’s shooting at me, but at least we can feel like sisters.” I paused, then went on. “When you asked me to come here, after all these years, I thought you wanted to close the gap between us.” I smiled, heard my voice breaking. “Frankly, I was surprised it mattered to you. It was a shock to realize how much it mattered to me. I…”
Her eyes were moist. She looked away. But when she turned back there was no sign of the emotion that had passed.
Startled, I began awkwardly brushing at my hair with my hand, rather than reaching toward my sister, as I’d instinctively wanted to do. I forced my attention back to the question under consideration. Suppose no one did know Wynne was dying. Warren at least had been kept in the dark, or so Wynne thought. I was beginning to wonder if she had accepted it herself.
“You’re not working,” I said. “You don’t have any connection with the company now. How could you be a threat to anyone?”
The lines in her face hardened. “I know things. When I get out of here, I’m going back. I’ll see who’s been out to get me. I’ll take care of them! I’m too valuable for the company to just forget.”
“You what!” I stared at the green wall. Wynne had shoved the death threat to me aside, finding it of less importance than interoffice grudges. I looked at her, wondering what we really meant to each other. In many ways we were so alike. I felt so helpless in the face of her bitterness.
“Who particularly,” I asked, “would want to kill you!”
Women's Wiles Page 11
