Today, however, he had come and found her gone, her door locked, and he had let himself in with the blade of his pocketknife. Now he sat in her litter, drinking her wine, and waited for her to come home. It was light when he arrived at her door, but it had since grown dark. The date, although he didn’t know it, was the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine’s Day.
Secure and comforted in the dark room, he became a little drowsy under the influence of the wine, and he was fixed in a warm and wonderful suspension between sleeping and waking when Maggie opened the door and switched on the ceiling light.
She was carrying something in a brown paper bag, and she walked with the bag into her tiny kitchen and came back without it. Removing her cloth coat, she tossed it toward a chair, where it caught and held for a moment on the arm and then slipped off into a pile on the floor.
All the while she was doing this, walking into the kitchen and walking back and removing her coat, she glanced several times at Buddy as if he were no more than a part of the general litter that would probably eventually need cleaning up.
“How did you get in here?” she said finally. “It seems to me I locked the door when I left.”
“I used my pocketknife,” he said, “and I may use it on you before I leave if you don’t treat me any better than you have been.”
“In that case, you’d better use it on me immediately, because I don’t intend to treat you a damn bit better, and you’re leaving right away.”
“Am I? Try and make me,” he challenged, his brows drawing together above his eyes.
“I could call the police and have you arrested. Don’t you know it’s against the law to break into someone’s private place?”
“Go ahead and call the police. I dare you. I’ve been thinking about having a talk with them anyhow.”
She stood staring at him contemptuously, legs spread and hands on hips. Absorbed in her contemptuous appraisal, she seemed not to have heard his response to her threat.
“Who the hell told you that you could drink my wine?” she said.
“I’m not sure it’s yours. I think it may be some that I bought and left here myself.”
“Take it and get out, then. I don’t want it or you.”
“I’m not going until I’ve talked with you, and I may not go at all. I may just move in and stay. What do you think of that?”
“I think you’re sick, that’s what I think,” she said contemptuously. “You’ve always been crazy, of course. But now you’re crazier than ever. You ought to be in an institution.”
“You’re the one who ought to be in an institution. That’s where you’d probably be if everyone knew you as well as I do.”
“Why don’t you tell them? It would only prove, on the contrary, that you’re absolutely irresponsible and ought to be locked up where you can’t do anyone any harm.”
“You’re a fine one to be talking about doing someone harm,” he growled.
“Am I? Why? I haven’t harmed anyone that I know of. Am I to blame because you’re sick and keep imagining that you’ve been mistreated? Why don’t you simply go away and leave me alone and quit trying to impose yourself where you’re no longer wanted?”
“I wasn’t referring to myself,” Buddy muttered, his words insinuating some hidden and darker meaning.
“Weren’t you? Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me who. I can’t think of anyone else I know who is baby enough to imagine such nonsense.”
“You needn’t act so innocent with me because I know what you are, and I know what you’ve done. It was damn convenient when old Cannon’s rich wife got killed just when she did, wasn’t it? I’ve been thinking what a strange coincidence it was. To happen, I mean, right after I went and told her about him and you.”
“So it was you who told. I thought it must have been, you sneaky son of a bitch.” Maggie’s lip curled and her eyes glittered with hate.
“Don’t call me names,” he said. “I won’t stand for it.”
“The hell you won’t! You’ll stand for a lot more than that before I’m through with you, if you aren’t careful. It’s a serious matter to accuse someone of killing his wife, especially when it had been proved impossible by reliable witnesses.”
“I didn’t accuse him of killing her,” Buddy said. “I only said her death was a remarkable coincidence, and it was.” He paused, watching her reaction with a sly expression. “I’ve been wondering if he hired someone to kill her for him. Did he? Doesn’t he tell you secrets when you’re sleeping with him?”
“Well, by God, you’re a greater menace even than I thought. There’s simply no telling what insane idea will get into your mind next. It’s the truth that I could have you committed if I wanted to go to the trouble. Perhaps he didn’t have to hire someone to kill her. Perhaps I did it for him myself out of friendship. How do you like that for an idea?”
This was an extremely precarious maneuver, and Maggie knew it. After executing it almost without thinking, with only the most fleeting notion that he would never suspect her of suggesting the truth, she waited anxiously for his response, her anxiety completely dissembled by the pose which she still held, legs spread and hands on hips, of aggressive contempt.
She could see instantly by the sudden stillness in his eyes and face that she had made a grave tactical error, to say the least. He didn’t dismiss her suggestion as sarcasm at all. He accepted it and considered it and seemed to be wondering why he hadn’t thought of it himself.”
“You could have,” he said, his eyes shrewd and speculative. “You’re capable of it. I guess I’m about the only person on earth, maybe except old Cannon, who knows that you’re capable of anything, even murder, if it suits your purpose. The reason I know is that I am, too.
People like you and me know about each other. We have a feeling.”
“Well, isn’t that the most precious notion!” She sneered and shrugged, abandoning at last her aggressive pose. “It might interest you to know that the only feeling I have for you is a sickness to my stomach. You make me sick, sick, sick!”
Buddy stood up all at once, apparently distracted, tipping the glass he had been holding and spilling the cheap dark wine out onto the floor. Looking slowly around the room, he seemed to have forgotten where he was and why he had come.
Finally, when he became aware again of Maggie, his face softened and saddened. In his eyes, where the slyness had been before, there was a bitter and supplicating tenderness.
“Let me stay here with you, Maggie,” he said. “Please do. Without you I’m lonely and afraid and simply don’t know what to do or how to get along. Don’t make me do something to hurt you. Please don’t.”
“What the hell could you do to hurt me? It strikes me that the shoe is on the other foot.”
“You know what I could do, and I’ll do it,” he retorted sharply. “I’ll tell the police about you and old Cannon.”
“God, you’re a sneak! You’re an absolute monster of deception.”
“It won’t do any good to call me any more names. If you won’t let me stay, I’d just as soon you’d hate me as not.”
He was sick and sly and capable of any treachery, and Maggie understood, at last, that he was a far greater menace than she had imagined. Staring at him with a fierce scowl, she wondered desperately what to do, and she thought that the best and safest thing would be to kill him.
She was certain that she could get away with it with no worse consequences to herself than a certain amount of inconvenience. He had forced his way into her room and made a nuisance of himself, and she would only have to call the police, after it was done, and say that he had attacked her, compelling her to kill him in self-defense.
It would really be quite simple to get away with it after it was done, but the trouble was in doing it, and the principle trouble was that there was nothing at hand to do it with.
She could hardly kill him with her hands, for he was very strong. Hitting him over the head with something like a heavy glass ash t
ray would entail such obvious movements that he would surely be able to see her intent and defend himself. There was, however, a sharp knife in the tiny kitchen. If she could get the knife, she could probably hide it at her side or behind her and get close enough to stick it into him quickly in a soft spot, like the belly, before he knew what was happening. Yes, she thought, the knife would be surest and safest if only she could get it.
“Well,” she said amiably, “I see that you have the better of me, and I might as well admit it.”
“That’s right,” he said, his taut face relaxing.
“What we had better do is talk it over reasonably and come to some agreement. First, however, I’d like to go into the kitchen and pour myself a small glass of wine. Excuse me.”
She walked casually into the kitchen and went directly to the drawer where the knife was kept. Opening the drawer, holding the knife at her side, she turned to pour the wine, to which she had committed herself, and there was Buddy behind her, standing in the doorway, having followed her so silently that she had not heard.
“What have you got there?” he demanded sharply.
“Nothing.”
“It’s a knife, isn’t it? You were going to kill me, weren’t you?”
“Don’t be absurd. You’ve got such a guilty conscience that you imagine all sorts of wild things.”
“You were going to kill me. Did you really kill Mrs. Cannon too? I guess you really did.”
She had been moving toward him slowly during this exchange, and now she was quite close, within striking distance. Suddenly she whipped the knife up from her side toward the soft place below his diaphram. It proved to be another mistake.
Quick as she was, he was quicker, and it was only a matter of seconds before the knife was shaken loose onto the floor. She clawed at his face with her other hand and tried to curse him, but she couldn’t curse because his fingers were around her throat, crushing the column of her neck, cutting off the precious air and she was dying.
Watching her stiffen and die beneath his throttling hands, her eyes tilting upward in her head, her face mottling, Buddy knew with deep despair and sorrow that he had killed his only hope — that from now on fear and loneliness would never end in his world.
18
THE CHIEF OF POLICE was boiling. His expression, directed toward Trajan, was the equivalent of his voice, which was a growl.
“By God, Trajan,” he said, “this is the end! Do you hear me? The end, I’m telling you! I’m willing to go along with my men in any reasonable investigation, but if you think I’m going to support you in what’s assuming the character of persecution, you’re crazy as hell.
“By God, I’ve had the county attorney on my back. I’ve had the mayor on my back. I’ve had protests from men who are just too damn influential to be ignored. They’re all on my back, Trajan, and I’m on yours. The truth is, you’ve been acting like a maniac. You won’t listen to reason from anyone. Have you got an obsession about this Cannon or something? ”
Trajan shifted in his chair, fighting a gaseous eruption, staring behind and above the chief at a juncture of wall and ceiling.
“I got a notion he’s guilty,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Sure.” The chief put his hands flat on his desk, exercising control. “You got a notion, and that’s all you got. You got no proof. You got no evidence. As a matter of fact, all the evidence is to the contrary. God damn it, a half dozen men of the highest repute have testified that he was in their company at the time of the murder. He was there all the time. He didn’t leave for a minute. How the hell do you figure he’s guilty. Black magic or something? Voodoo, maybe?”
“All right. He didn’t actually do it himself. I’m satisfied about that. But he was involved somehow. I’d stake my job on it.”
“That’s exactly what you’re staking, Trajan, if you didn’t know it.”
“Well, you’ll see I’m right. I’ve been working on the angle of a collaborator. Someone in it with him, or maybe someone he just hired.”
“You got any evidence to support collaboration?”
“No. Not yet.”
“All right, then. I’ll tell you something, and you listen. You let Cannon alone until you’ve got evidence you could go to court with. You’ve hounded this man until you’ve got him on the verge of collapse. More important than that, you’ve got my guts in the sauce pan, and I don’t like it.
“This is the last word, Trajan. The last damn word. You go back in there where you’ve been grilling him for the past hour and let him go. Don’t you bring him back, or even go near him, until you’ve got something solid that will stick. What’s more, if you don’t have anything soon, you’re dropping the whole business for good and all. You hear me?”
Trajan stood up. He closed, his mouth tight against a belch, and his gross body shook from the confined eruption.
“I hear you,” he said.
He left the chief’s office and went down a short hall to another room which was his own, and went inside. Brad was sitting alone in a straight chair, his face livid and drawn, his eyes drained of light. He did not look around when Trajan entered.
“The chief says I’ve got to let you go,” Trajan said. “He thinks I’m persecuting you.”
Brad stood up, holding himself carefully erect. By extending himself, he managed to sustain an attitude of cold disdain that he was far from feeling. He was afraid of Trajan. The gross man was as terrifying to him as a nightmare.
“Thank you very much,” he said. “I’m relieved to learn that there is at least one rational man on this police force. Does this mean that I’m now to be free of your persecution?”
“It means I won’t bring you back here, and I won’t bother you anywhere else. Not until I’ve got the one who killed your wife for you. Don’t sleep too well, though. Don’t ever relax. I’ll keep working at it officially as long as they’ll let me, and then I’ll work on it unofficially on my own time. We’ll be seeing each other again, Dr. Cannon.”
Turning, Brad walked out of the room. He felt unreal, a monstrous distortion of himself. Nowadays, with more and more difficulty, he could barely sustain an identity with the man he had been, or a genuine conviction that there was any continuity of experience between then and now. He walked firmly and erect, moving and placing each foot in turn with an effect of excessive care.
It was dark outside. The lights were on. He didn’t know how long he had been in police headquarters, but it had been light when he arrived in response to Trajan’s peremptory summons, and it seemed like a long, long time ago.
He shuddered with a dreadful sense of near disaster when he thought how close he had come, in exhaustion and desperation, to ending his torment by shouting out the truth into Trajan’s ugly face. The fat detective was a madman. There was no question about that. He was a man obsessed and driven by virulent hatred that seeped from his rancid interior without any true relationship to whatever or whoever drew it forth. His final threat, just now delivered, had the quality of a profane vow.
There was to Brad, however, a nearer and more pressing menace than eventual exposure, and this was the menace of disintegration, the frightful dissolution of courage and confidence and control. It was evident in a growing inability to conduct his classes properly or to deal effectively with the slightest problem. The danger in this was that it would surely be open, after passing for a while as a natural reaction to shock and grief, to an interpretation of guilt and fear. In fact, he felt that this interpretation was already prevailing, and his mind was becoming as tormented as a paranoid’s by ideas of reference. Every intercepted glance was a glance of suspicion. Every half-heard word was an accusation.
Fortunately, since the turn of the term, Maggie was no longer in his class, and so he was not compelled to pretend a casual class-room relationship. That would have been a performance far beyond his capability. In his thinking now she had become an ageless and immutable child-woman, assuming an odd infallibility. It was she who could
give him lasting assurance. It was she who would save him in the end from the implacable Trajan. And it was she whom he must now see, tonight, in order somehow to survive tomorrow.
In his car, driving, he exercised the same excessive care with which he had walked, as if moving in any way were extremely perilous and imposed the greatest challenge.
At a corner several blocks from headquarters, he saw a phone booth outside a drugstore, and he stopped at the curb in the next block and walked back to the booth and dialed Maggie’s number. The phone rang and rang and wasn’t answered, and after a while he hung up and wondered with despair what he should do.
Now that he had tried and failed to reach her, it was absolutely imperative that he see her and talk with her as soon as possible. Failure to do so, he felt, would surely be disastrous. What he would do, he decided, was go on to her apartment immediately. Perhaps she would be there before him, having arrived while he was on his way. If she wasn’t there, not having arrived, she would certainly be there later, and he would wait until she came.
He returned to his car and drove away, turning after several minutes onto a quiet residential street lighted only at intersections by overhead lamps. He drove slowly along this street for five blocks, watching the street behind him in the rear-view mirror, but there was no one following him, and so he turned off the street onto another in the direction of Maggie’s apartment.
Now, moving toward his destination by the most direct route, he was struck by the realization of how readily and naturally he had assumed the attitude and actions of guilt, looking over his shoulder along a devious way, and he had again the feeling of being unreal, a figure in a grim fantasy and a stranger to himself.
Parking on the street behind Maggie’s apartment house, he walked half around the block and entered the building. He met no one on the street or in the lower hall, and he ascended the stairs quickly to Maggie’s door. His sense of urgency had increased with each step, and when there was no response to his knocking he had a mounting and irrational conviction of everything going irremediably wrong.
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