Someone darkened the windows. The projector began to buzz. Colored light flooded the screen blurrily. Then the focus sharpened and there were the two dead girls alive and laughing into the camera, the fire-gutted apartment miraculously whole again around them.
The bridal party posed self-consciously, bursting into silent shrieks of laughter, pushing each other and struggling back to composure again. Chris Bond, the bridegroom, photographed well, his overdramatic features catching the attention whenever he came into the picture. The bride, in a pink satin dress cut too low, held a champagne glass to his lips and laughed over her shoulder at the camera. The maid of honor, in blue satin, poured more champagne, spilling it, breaking up the group into more silent shrieks of laughter and protest.
Gray didn’t need Zucker’s voice saying, “That’s Melissa,” to know who the girl in blue was. He watched, absorbed, as the camera panned across the laughing faces of the party, returning again and again to the three central figures.
Two sisters, unwittingly moving toward violent death six months apart and mysteriously connected. Or was there a connection? Watching them, Gray told himself there had to be. Coincidence was too easy an explanation.
Melissa and Beverly had looked very much alike. Their round blue eyes were alike, and their large, richly colored, smiling mouths, and they both had dimples and extremely light hair, bleached almost white. There was an appealing warmth in their confiding smiles at the camera. Both were slender, but with a roundness and ‘softness that suggested their later years might have meant increasing struggles with plumpness. Neither girl looked as if she would struggle very hard. It was easy to visualize them twenty years ahead, lapsed into comfortable fat. They didn’t look as if this or anything else would have worried them much.
Now Chris Bond was kissing all the girls in the party. There was a lot of struggling and laughter, and the camera jiggled as if whoever held it was laughing too. Now Bond kissed Melissa, rather too long. The camera dwelt lingeringly on it. Then it drew back to show Beverly thrusting herself between the two while the bridegroom laughed and the two sisters menaced each other with threatened slaps.
There was a sharp break and Melissa, pink and white and bosomy in billows of blue satin, leaned over a card table laying out cards. Her round chin was tucked in and her round wrists arched with conscious grace. She pointed from the cards to the bride and groom and there was a good deal of silent screaming and laughter as she held up four fingers.
Someone murmured, “Fortunetelling. Four kids?”
Now you saw the champagne going round again and glasses crowding to be filled. The bridegroom danced with the bride. Guests pushed forward to grimace into the camera. A girl in yellow did an impromptu cancan. And then, quite suddenly, it was all over. The screen flickered into blankness and the long-ago bridal party ended without warning.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Zucker’s rumbling voice said, “Run it again, Lynch. Krantz, keep your eye on the background this time…”
Gray watched the background, too, not expecting much. Whatever had been hidden in the apartment—if anything had been—was unlikely to show up here. The room had been too full of overlarge, heavily angular furniture and ornate lamp shades and pillows. It didn’t seem possible that anything here had ever originated in the McCreery house.
They were running the film a third time when Gray went silently out.
Gray went downstairs slowly. He was thinking of Melissa, six months dead, and the radiant Beverly Bond, dead two days now. He remembered her charred body on the sofa in the same room where he had just seen her dancing. Could Eileen Herrick have done what she claimed?
It seemed almost incredible to Gray, knowing her as he did. And yet the girl was dead. And Eileen by the very violence of her grief had put herself wholly out of his reach…
Gray paused on the stairs, struck by a new thought. So often hysteria can be a cover-up. A patient incoherent with tears can be saying, in effect, “How can you question me about things that hurt me so much? How can I answer when I’m crying as hard as this?” Was that what Eileen was saying to Gray?
There were questions she was evading. There were things she didn’t want known about this crime.
Gray turned abruptly and went back up the stairs.
Outside the door of the room where he had questioned Eileen this morning he saw the same matron who had led her out in tears. She looked up and nodded.
“How is Eileen now?” Gray asked.
“Better,” she said. “She calmed down as soon as I got her away.”
Gray said, “Oh, she did?” He thought about it briefly. Then he said, “She in there now?”
“Yes. She’s taking some tests with a Mr. Abel, I think.”
From behind the heavy door a man’s voice said something violently, muffled by the walls, but angry and familiar.
“Yes, that’s Abel,” Gray said.
He knocked at the door. Abel’s voice, in the middle of a shout, didn’t pause or answer. Gray hesitated briefly. Then he opened the door and went in. Abel’s back was to the door. He leaned over the long table to pound his fist on a stack of charts spread out before Eileen.
“You’ve got to talk!” he was shouting furiously. “We’re on your side, damn it! We want to help! Why won’t you—”
Eileen, facing him, was a different Eileen from the one Gray knew. She was white and still, not crying, but rigid with resistance.
“I don’t want your help,” she said. “I don’t want anybody’s help. It’s nobody’s business but mine what I do.”
“You’re trying to commit suicide, you little fool!” Abel said, pounding the table again. “I won’t let you! If you won’t take any tests, at least you’ve got to talk. To Quine, anyhow, even if you won’t talk to me. Eileen, they’ll convict you! They’ll send you to the gas chamber! You’ve got to put up some defense or—”
“I killed her,” Eileen said stubbornly. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Eileen—” Abel reached a long arm across the table and seized the girl’s arm. He shook her. “Eileen!” His voice broke a little.
“All right, Abel,” Gray said.
Abel swung around, black-browed and flushed.
“You get the hell out of here,” he said in a choked voice.
Eileen looked up at Gray, startled, and the instant she knew him it seemed to Gray she turned on the tears as if with a faucet. Her eyes brimmed and her face convulsed with the familiar sobbing.
“You’re in this tool” she cried. “You’re all of you against me! Why can’t you just leave me alone!”
Abel shouted, “Eileen, shut up! Gray, you getting out or do I have to throw you out?”
Gray looked at him measuringly. Before either man could move, Eileen shoved back her chair gratingly and jumped to her feet Abel reached out a long arm for her as she rounded the end of the table. She shrank away from him, turned a wide gaze blurred with tears from Abel to Gray. Her voice shook.
“Do I have to talk to people?” she asked unsteadily. “Can’t I just—just be alone until they try me? All I want is for everyone to let me alone!”
Gray said quietly, “All right, Eileen. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Just go to the door and tell the matron. She can put us both out if you say so.”
Eileen gave him a drowning glance and a small, wan smile wavered briefly through it.
“You needn’t bother, though,” Gray said. “We’ll both go. Abel—”
“God damn it, speak for yourself,” Abel said furiously. He turned to the girl, started to say something, then made a gesture of violent resignation and began with shaking hands to gather up the charts and papers on the table.
Gray waited until he had them all in his brief case. He stepped to the door and held it open. With a look of ominous fury Abel strode past him. “I’ll see you outside, Gray,” he said, his voice tight. Gray nodded.
Eileen wasn’t looking at him. Gray said, “Maybe you’ll fe
el different later on, Eileen. I hope you’ll see me again. But you don’t have to, you know.” He hesitated. “Good-by,” he said, and turned away.
She didn’t answer. But just before the door closed behind him he heard her voice, low and shaken. “Good-by,” she said.
Gray drew a deep breath of heartfelt relief.
Abel was waiting for him at the end of the hall. Before he could speak, Gray raised a placating hand and said, “I’m sorry I had to do it that way, Abel. I threw you to the wolves. I had to. You see—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Abel demanded violently. “I ought to beat your head off.”
Gray said, “Suppose I hadn’t come in. Were you getting anywhere? Would Eileen have taken the tests?”
“She damn well won’t take any now. She won’t even talk.”
“Would she anyway?”
Abel hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said grudgingly. “But it was none of your business. I warned you to stay out of my—”
“You got pretty rough with her, didn’t you?”
Abel’s dark face flushed darker. “All right, I lost my temper. But somebody’s got to do something! There’s something phony about this whole thing. You know she won’t even talk to Quine? She talked her head off to the D.A., and she won’t even open her mouth to her own lawyer. She’s trying to kill herself!”
“There’s something phony somewhere,” Gray said. “But we won’t find out what it is by yelling at her. I think I have a better chance than anybody to get her to talk—if I can just break through a block of resistance she’s set up. What happened just now may do the trick. I had to side with her against you.”
“You used me as a fall guy,” Abel said bitterly. “Now she’ll hate me.”
“You weren’t helping any,” Gray pointed out. “As it is, I think we’ve opened the door a crack. Next time I see her she may start talking. I know it’s rough on you, but you aren’t facing a murder charge. Eileen’s the one who matters right now. Nobody else.”
Abel rubbed his face hard and sighed a noisy sigh.
“Well—hell, I guess you’re right. But you’d better come through now you’ve set things up this way. Or, by God, I’ll beat your head off yet.”
Gray gave him a wry grin. “What about the other tests?” he asked.
Abel sighed again and then nodded. “I still think it’s a lousy trick. But I’ll go ahead. You’ve talked to the others?”
“Yes.” Gray looked puzzled. “I don’t think any of them did it,” he said. “We’ll see what you turn up. That little guy, Ferguson, is covering something I don’t understand. He’s the most interesting, but I don’t think he’s guilty either.”
Abel said, “Hell, maybe they’re all innocent. Maybe the killer’s still running around loose.”
They looked at each other speculatively.
10
It was eight o’clock that night before Gray finished with his last patient. There was a dull ache in the small of his back. He stood up, stretching and yawning. Looking at the empty chair beside his desk, he thought of Eileen Herrick sitting there, small and desperate, yesterday morning. The memories and problems tangled around her came into his mind in a flood the moment he relaxed the guard he had set to exclude them. And now, for the first time, he remembered a detail which the pressure of events had buried until now.
That earring. A dolphin-shaped single earring that Eileen had taken out of her handbag to finger nervously when last she sat in this room. Gray thought about it. It didn’t seem of any importance, and yet something insistent in the way she had handled the thing made it linger in his mind. Finally he shook his head, shrugged and reached for the telephone.
It rang sharply under his hand. He picked it up.
“Mr. Gray?” asked a woman’s low, resonant voice.
“Yes.”
“This is Zoe Herrick, Mr. Gray. I—I wonder if you could possibly spare the time to come and see me?” There was a rather studied hesistance in her voice. Gray remembered that she had been an actress before her marriage. He pulled his appointment book toward him.
“Tonight?” he asked.
“Oh, no. That is—I’d rather see you alone. My husband is usually at home in the evenings.” She managed to put a good deal of drama into the words. “Sometime tomorrow?” she asked throatily.
Gray smiled to himself. “It would have to be early,” he said. “Say ten o’clock?”
“Good,” Zoe said. “It’s a very urgent matter or I wouldn’t trouble you. Ten o’clock, then. And thank you, Mr. Gray!”
Gray put down the phone, a little puzzled. This self-dramatization was interesting. Zoe ought to be too worried to put on that small performance for his benefit. It was inconsistent, and inconsistencies always interested him.
The McCreerys, for instance—they were inconsistent. And Ferguson, the mousy little confessor—he was inconsistent too. Gray pinched his lip and thought about Ferguson. Presently he took up the phone again and dialed a familiar number. He asked for Captain Zucker and rather to his surprise heard the deep, rough voice say, “Hello?”
“Mike Gray, Harry,” he said. “Don’t you ever go home?”
“You just caught me. What’s up?”
“Nothing. I thought I’d come down and talk a little more to Ferguson and the others. I—”
Zucker said, “What? I thought Quine posted you.”
“About what?”
“Oh, we let those other three go.”
A little shock of alarm made Gray’s hand tighten on the phone. He wasn’t sure why yet, but he said almost automatically, “Ferguson, too? Hell, Harry—you should have told me.”
“How long do you think we can hold a suspect without charging him?” Zucker demanded. “He’s clear, anyhow. We turned up witnesses. He couldn’t have been within a couple of miles of the Bond apartment at the time of the kill.”
“What time did he leave?”
“About an hour ago. Why?”
Gray drummed on the desk. “I don’t like it. There’s something wrong with Ferguson. He’s guilty of something. Maybe not murder, but something that seems just as big to him. And he’s under a lot of pressure.”
“What kind of pressure?”
“I wish I knew.”
“So?” Zucker said.
“You know what a confession is, for a man like Ferguson? It’s a kind of re-enactment of the original crime. If his confession isn’t believed, his tensions can build up so much he may have to re-enact the original crime—whatever it was—in another try at getting the punishment he feels he deserves.”
“What do you want me to do, arrest him again?” Zucker was impatient. “This is some kind of cover-up for the Herrick girl, isn’t it? You and Quine figured it out between you. Well, it won’t work.”
“I’m not trying to work anything,” Gray said. “I’m just warning you. Ferguson’s an obsessive-compulsive type who’s got to have relief sometimes or else explode. I’m afraid of the explosion. I don’t know what might happen. I think he’s heading for trouble. What kind is anybody’s guess.”
Zucker snorted.
“If I could talk to him again—” Gray said.
“Maybe I ought to pick him up on suspicion of being an obsessive-compulsive type,” Zucker said. “Like hell. And you can tell Daley Quine his tricks won’t work with me.”
“You’ve got it wrong, Harry. I just—”
Zucker said heavily, “I’m going home. Good-by.”
“Wait! At least let me have Ferguson’s address. Maybe I can check up on him myself.”
Zucker grumbled into the phone. There was the sound of paper rustling. “All right, here it is,” he said, and rattled off a number and street. “Got it? Okay, then get the hell off the line and let me go home.”
Gray said, “Thanks, Harry. I’ll let you know if—”
The click of a broken connection sounded in his ear.
A blaze of white light was glaring on the house front as Gray drew up
to the curb at Ferguson’s address. For a moment, the psychoanalyst had the sickening conviction that his fears were all too well-founded, that he had come too late. But it wasn’t police searchlights that cast this glare. Clouds of dust were billowing from behind a high board fence next to the house, and machinery clanked noisily.
A nighttime wrecking crew was at work. As Gray watched, a tall metal arm swung into sight from behind a wall, jockeyed into position by some unseen workman in a cab beneath it. From the arm a heavy steel ball swung on its cable. Gray watched it sway, maneuvering into position. Then the arm swung wide, the steel ball swung with it and crashed with a hollow boom against the side of a brick wall.
Part of the wall exploded inward. Clouds of dust billowed up. The decrepit brick building tottered under the blow, its shell standing like a bomb-blasted ruin in the glare of the searchlights.
Gray got out of his car and went up the steps of the dingy white stucco building next to the collapsing walls. A neatly lettered sign in the door’s glass panel read ROOMS FOR RENT. Gray tried the door. It opened under his hand and he stepped into a hall that ran straight back, with doors on both sides. The crash of the wrecking ball and the sliding rumble of falling brick sounded muffled in his ears as he went down the hall.
Ferguson’s room was Number 8. There was no bell. Gray knocked. Inside somebody made a quick movement, with a sense of surprise in it. Feet sounded very briefly on an uncarpeted floor and underfoot Gray felt the old boards shift slightly from the moving weight of somebody beyond the door. Then the hollow boom of the wrecking ball crashed out, making the walls jolt a little and echoing down the long, dim hall.
Gray listened as the noise died. There was no sound in there now. He knocked again.
Then, carefully, he tried the door. It was locked.
“Ferguson?” he called.
Still no answer, but he could feel the boards shift again underfoot as the little man moved uneasily just inside.
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