Call Me Killer (Prologue Crime)

by Harry Whittington

  She stopped talking. The sight of her bruised and hurt face left Sam speechless, shocked with pity and misunderstanding.

  For the space of three deep breaths, they stood there staring at each other. Sam’s eyes didn’t leave her face. Her lips moved, but were silent. Her slender, strong-boned hands worked, and then were still.

  She was a tall young woman, still under twenty-five, with rich blonde hair, a good and smooth skin and direct blue eyes. Her mouth was full, but rather straight. Her chin was firm. She was slightly inclined to plumpness. One day she would be solid and stout. At the moment, she was firmly rounded of breast and thigh, her upper legs seeming to push against her skirts. She appeared voluptuous. But Sam had been married to her for almost five years. He knew she was too stolid and unimaginative for erotic romancing. It took a lot of sex life to keep Sam content. Sometimes, he felt Elsa would be happier with none. At best, she tolerated him, and what she termed his foolishness. But for all the matter-of-factness he’d learned to expect of her, Sam told himself he was now thankful she was just as she was. She was the real and dependable person he needed as bulwark against the insanity that had raced and swirled after him through this night.

  Finally, he put out his arms to her, and saw the fleeting frown of impatience that marred the beauty of her eyes for the space of a wink.

  She came close to him, then stopped, shaking her blonde head slowly. There was something she wanted to say, something she seemed impelled to say, but at last, stoppering her thoughts almost visibly, she said evenly, “Sam, you’re cold. Where is your coat?”

  “I am cold,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

  She seemed about to speak again, to protest. Then she nodded, putting her hand on his arm to restrain him momentarily.

  “Wait,” she said, “until I turn off the light in the kitchen.”

  This was too much for Sam. It capped all he’d gone through since that horrible moment of waking in Ross Lambart’s unfamiliar office in the Citizens Trust Building.

  Now, standing with horror mounting like a knot in his tightened throat, he was realizing there was no time before that moment when he wakened, standing with spent gun in his hand. There was no yesterday, no last week. With agony creeping across the nape of his neck, he thought sickly: “I can’t even say when I last saw Elsa!”

  He reached out for her, like a child frightened in the night. But Elsa was already moving quickly to extinguish the kitchen light so that Sam Gowan could enter his own house!

  When the light was out, a narrow swath of yellow cast from the dining room doorway across the blue chrome-tile kitchen floor that Elsa waxed so religiously, she motioned him to enter.

  He came in, shutting the door behind him against the cold. He leaned for support on it as the warmth of the room attacked his chilled, shivering body.

  “I’ll make you some coffee,” Elsa said. “Get out of those wet things right away. I’ll get you some dry clothes while the coffee is perking.”

  Such simple words! Coffee. Perking. Simple and ineffably sweet, because they reminded Sam of sane and ordinary times, the time he so desperately wanted to return to, running back like a terrorized sibling toward the womb of warmth and reassuring normality.

  He began to strip off the soaked, cold shirt. For the first time he noted it was wine colored, with a flaired collar. Sam wore nothing but white shirts, and conservative ties. You didn’t go in for gaiety when you were a manufacturer’s bookkeeper. You were a nonentity, and you strove for anonymity.

  There was too much else plaguing his mind. The color of his shirt didn’t matter at all. Only one thing disturbed him, and that to the exclusion of everything else. Why was Elsa dressed in her best blue-wool suit? Her white shirtwaist, buttoned at her throat was fresh. She was dressed as though she were going out, as though she wanted to look her nicest.

  “Elsa,” he said. She had filled the electric percolator, plugged it into the socket of the electric stove.

  She seemed not to hear the frantic appeal in his voice. But turning briskly, starting out of the kitchen, she spoke across her shoulder as she went, “I’ll get you some warm things, Sam. I’ll just be a minute.”

  It was as though she told him clearly to stay where he was, there in the kitchen. She hurried through the dining room, and Sam followed her.

  “Elsa!” he said.

  She was in the hallway when she turned to face him, standing in his clinging underwear. She came back impatiently, snapped off the dining room lights so that Sam was left again in semi-darkness. Then, beyond her, he saw their two suitcases and one of Elsa’s hat boxes stacked in the hallway near the front door. Elsa was going out. Elsa was leaving.

  “Elsa!” he said sharply, “What is this? Why must I remain in the darkness in my own house? What is it? What’s the matter?”

  She whirled to face him. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said evenly. “The police are looking for you — ”

  “Already?” The word slipped involuntarily across Sam’s lips. “Do — you know, Elsa — where I was — last night?”

  Now he saw her mouth curl with unconcealed hatred. “No,” she said. “I don’t know. You’ve been missing for six months.”

  4

  SIX MONTHS! Where had he been? What had he been doing? He stared at Elsa. It was no wonder that her mouth curled with hatred. Quite evidently, Elsa thought he’d simply deserted her.

  He saw her drag in a deep breath. “I’ll get your warm clothes now,” she said. Her voice was as impersonal as though he were some stranger for whom she was performing some small and inconsequential kindness.

  He stood motionless in the darkened living room. He noted that the windows were tightly drawn, as if the house were being closed. His mind was spinning now with all he’d seen, endured, been told, and discovered during this awful night.

  He wanted to ask Elsa why he must stand in darkened shadows in his own house. But when she returned with his clothes over her arm and placed them on the furbished dining table for him, he forgot his own woes in the pity he felt for Elsa.

  Elsa went and stood in the doorway to the hall as he dressed. She leaned against the doorjamb, outlined in the corridor light. Looking at her, Sam felt she had never seemed so desirable. How too bad it was that sex played an alien part in Elsa’s life. She appeared to be made for love.

  Well, now she would never love him, he thought. Could he make Elsa, realistic and unimaginative Elsa, ever believe that he had been lost, even to himself? He shook his head, frustrated even before he began to speak to her.

  What a time Elsa must have had trying to live alone while he was gone! He was sure they had no savings. They hadn’t even a bank account. For when you were a fifty-five dollar a week employee, one thing was certain: you didn’t need banking services for your salary. They’d barely made ends meet when he was at home bringing in his pay check every two weeks.

  “Elsa,” he said softly. His own troubles, the fact that he would die for the murder of Ross Lambart, the cold, the time lost out of his life, none of that mattered beside the compassion he felt for her.

  But Elsa seemed unaware of the depth of feeling in the way Sam spoke her name. She turned her head a little in the light so that the yellow strands of her hair made a halo.

  “Yes?” Her voice was even, cold.

  “Elsa, I can’t say how sorry I am.”

  He saw then, too late, that Elsa thought he meant he regretted having deserted her.

  “Are you, Sam?”

  Dressed now, Sam took a step toward her. When he saw her body stiffen, he hesitated, and then stopped several feet from her.

  He lifted his hand, and then looked at it. For a second, it was as though he saw the empty automatic still clicking on spent chambers. He was a murderer! He had no right to ask anything of Elsa. Not even forgiveness.

  He spoke at last. “Would you mind saying — tell me, Elsa. Has it been too bad for you?”

  Her voice was strong with bitterness. “Why no,” she said. “
It hasn’t been bad at all. After I got used to your being gone. At first — I didn’t think it was fair. But — now I don’t expect anything at all.”

  He saw the futility of pursuing this further. ‘Tour eye,” he said. “It’s bruised and swollen. What’s the matter?”

  “Well, how late your interest comes,” she said sharply. “What’s the matter, Sam? Was it worse away from me, even than it was here with me? Did you finally realize that here at least you had your bed made, and three meals a day?”

  “I’m so sorry for you, Elsa. Really, I am.”

  “Your pity is the last thing in the world I want,” she replied “I’m all right, Sam. If I’d never have seen you again, I’d have been all right”

  “I know you hate me, Elsa. If I’ve been gone six months, you have every right to hate me. But — I’ll try to make it up to you. If you’ll let me.”

  Her laugh was harsh. “Make it up to me? Do you think you could ever make up to me the things you’ve done? How pleasant do you suppose it was to find one day your husband has abandoned you? That you can no longer even walk into the grocery store at the corner without having eyes — sly and knowing and pitying — fixed on you every minute? That people are going to ask about your husband, if you’ve heard, if the police have found out anything? The little money I had didn’t even last until Christmas. And what a lovely Christmas I had! Did you have a lovely Christmas, Sam? With a little bitch mistress somewhere? But I lived, Sam. I got along. Until now. And I don’t want anything from you — not now — not ever.”

  He looked again at the bags packed and standing near the front doorway. “Elsa, where are you going?”

  She looked at him for a moment, and then turning her head, stared at the suitcases on the floor. In the light, Sam noted a strange, puzzling frown on Elsa’s face, and she was silent a long time.

  At last she said in a voice that sounded almost cautious, though Sam didn’t know why in the world Elsa would be speaking guardedly, “I’m going home to my mother’s. On the bus this morning. I’ve borrowed some money from her, but it is all gone. She has been after me to come back to stay with her. I can help her with her boarding house. This morning I am going.”

  “Elsa–”

  She wheeled about to face him. “There is no use trying to argue me out of it, Sam. I’m leaving. We never had very much together. And now, what ever we had, is quite dead.”

  “Don’t hate me, Elsa.”

  “Oh, I don’t hate you,” she said sarcastically. “I don’t hate you at all, Sam. I knew for a long time that you were dissatisfied with me. It was just that I never thought Sam Gowan had the guts to run away and leave me. Well, even with all I went through, I had some respect for you when you were gone, but now, when you’ve come whining back, I feel nothing — except disgust.”

  Whatever Sam might have said in answer to this was stoppered by Elsa’s accusation that for a long time he had been dissatisfied with her.

  He stood there looking at her, and shook his head. He’d have to go back through a haze that had settled over his mind, but his surest knowledge was that he’d always loved Elsa devotedly, with respect and pride, even when there was no thought of erotic excitement in their marriage any more.

  He shook his head again, as though he was actually denying every ugly thought that reared itself accusingly in his conscience.

  His life with Elsa had been a matter of arising to the shattering clamor of a four-thirty a.m. alarm. Thrashing about in the darkness and half-sleep to shut off the ringing of the three dollar and ninety-five cent clock. Elsa prepared his breakfast while he shaved and dressed. At the manufacturing company office, he worked as a bookkeeper at a row of desks with other bookkeepers almost just like him, all day. He began to work at six, but a two-hour enforced lay-off from ten to twelve meant that his day ended at four and it was almost six before he was again out to Wilkins Road on the bus.

  They hadn’t gone out much, and they’d had few friends. Now that he thought about it, there hadn’t been much in common between them. Elsa had her friends along Wilkins Road of whom she saw a great deal more than she did of her husband.

  He felt, with a vague, insistent knowledge that there had been trouble between them. What it was, he could not now say. It was as though his mind refused to admit it at all. And more than that, his mind was too filled and swirling with Elsa’s bitterness, the bruise on her face which she obviously felt he had no right even to inquire about, her leaving him, and the dark and menacing cyclorama of terror that crawled across the background of all this immediate anguish. He couldn’t put all his attention to the long ago cause of trouble in his life with Elsa.

  But he remained sure that it had not been a personal thing, such as his lack of devotion, or his interest in some other woman. He knew better than that.

  For even at this moment, Sam could remember his youth. At eighteen he had discovered the wonders of women’s arms and loins and tender attentions. He had married Elsa because he had wanted love and children which Elsa had denied him. True, he had been no angel. He had even gone to jail once for stealing a car which he had never stolen. But he had been caught riding in it and was booked as an accomplice.

  These things Sam had done because, now at thirty, he realized he had been denied by a Depression the things he saw in the possession of luckier kids. Always denied, and always wanting. But in the reformatory, he had learned a lesson that sat heavily upon him when he was freed after six months. The law is exacting, and though it advertises justice with mercy, there is no such thing. Nothing is taken into account but the crime and the social status of the criminal. Social status means money. If you are poor, you let women alone, and you stay out of trouble, and you lead a silent, middle-of-the-road existence, and you never lift your head above your fellows. You never step out of line. This knowledge had made Sam’s life in the Navy easier for him during the years of the war: he was the perfect, docile, conforming, unprotesting petty officer.

  At the office which was run by the same methods and unfeeling machinery as the armed forces, allowing no political freedom, with monthly lie detector tests, loyalty investigations, no outspoken pursuit of happiness, he was silent as he worked, machine-like in his responses to orders, mild in his acceptance of the petty outrages suffered by every company employee under petty supervisors living in constant dread of the petty minds one swath above them in the spiral to nothingness.

  He kept all his desires, dreams, ambitions, his hurts and agonies, pent up and hidden within him. When his marriage to Elsa petered out almost immediately into the fool’s gold of dullness and routine, he said nothing. Certainly he hid from Elsa anything he might have thought as he continued to accept whatever happened to him.

  The point of all this, Sam knew as he stood there in the darkened dining room of his own home, aware without looking that daylight was slowly flooding upward beyond the locked windows, the half closed blinds, the point was that Sam had been frightened by that six months behind bars: even dull freedom was freedom. And more, he knew he had never struck back or brought undue attention upon himself for a far more important reason: he had lied in order to get that job.

  He had said that he had never been arrested, and evidently a routine check had failed to disclose his reformatory sentence and the alleged crime which led to it. And he had lived all those years in constant dread that he would be exposed, fired, and in Elsa’s eyes, disgraced.

  Suddenly, he was remembering a conversation with Ross Lambart. Sweat broke out across his forehead. For the moment, he thought it had happened tonight in the office at Citizens Trust.

  But he realized it had not. The time of which he thought was early November, the first of the winter — six months ago! And this was April! April 26th.

  They had been in a bar downtown near the post office. It was a large, darkened room, with many tables across from a dully lighted bar. He and Lambart had sat facing each other across one of these small tables for two back against a gray wall.

 
; It was as though he were almost upon something, something that would wipe out all the horror, all the lost time, all the hatred in Elsa’s face.

  Was it so terrible that his mind had blanked out and refused to remember it? What could Lambart have said that would be so intolerable?

  The doorbell’s ringing clattered into his maze of thoughts, and he stood shaken with emotion as Elsa walked along the hall to the door.

  He saw that she opened the door slowly, very carefully only a foot or so, standing in the slit of it so that she could see out. He shook his head again.

  He saw Elsa nod, and then step away. A broadshouldered man over six feet tall, with large ears and dry blonde hair still pressed down tight on his skull in the imprint of his felt hat, a simple, homely face, stepped into the foyer and stood with his hat in his hand.

  “Mrs. Gowan, my name is Alex Peters. I’m from police headquarters. My chief, Lieut. Milligan, wonders if you’d mind coming downtown with me so you could talk to him on a very urgent matter?”

  Elsa bit her lip. She seemed, to Sam who knew her so well, to move her shoulders with impatience that was obviously mounting inside her. “What did he want to see me about?” she said.

  Alex Peters shrugged. “He didn’t say, Mrs. Gowan. But I do know it’s very important.”

  “Well, if it’s about my husband, he’s home now.” She nodded her head toward Sam as he stepped out into the hallway. “I must say that after six months, it’s time I got a little attention from you people. But now that Sam is home, I don’t see any point in talking with your chief about anything.”

  Alex said nothing. He simply stood there as though he knew women and patiently waited until she talked herself out, got her handbag and hat and accompanied him. It was not his duty to argue with women, simply to see that she came in to the Chief’s office.

  “All right,” Elsa said at last. “If it won’t take too long, I might as well go.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Sam said. “I might be able to help.”