Murder and Blueberry Pie

by Frances

  “Yes,” Grant said. “I think so.”

  “Listen,” Joe said, “she’s just a kid. Look at her. She’s just a kid. Not any older than Becky.”

  Rebecca was his oldest daughter; he had told Grant about Rebecca.

  “Just look at her,” Abrams said, again.

  Grant had looked at her, but, as if it were a duty he owed Joe Abrams—as if, somehow, he had to look carefully at the dead girl so that he could tell Joe Abrams that she was not his daughter—he looked again.

  She had blond hair, worn in what they called a “pony tail.” She wore a sweater and skirt and the odd, low-heeled shoes so many of them wore. She had a rounded face and the high, straight forehead—the almost infantile forehead—some women have; the forehead which seems, to many men, an assurance of an inner, abiding innocence. But, even as he looked at her, Grant thought that, under other circumstances, he would not have looked at her a second time because, obscurely, looking at her once was like looking at her a second time—or a third or fourth, or a hundredth. America bred them so, he thought—somewhere under a surge of pity, of revulsion that this could have happened—bred them by the hundreds and by the thousands; quick, bright girls, pretty with youth; girls uniformed in costume and in vocabulary; hard for the outsider to tell apart. He had them in his classes; in the warren which was the downtown branch of Dyckman they seemed to fill the halls.

  Hours ago—but not many hours—this heartbreaking child had been one of them, like any of them. And, now, slumped dead on the seat of a taxicab, no longer one with any of them, but unique in death.

  “We gotta take her to the cops,” Joe Abrams said. “That’s the best thing to do.”

  It was Joe Abrams’s city; these were his streets. He was the one to decide. “Right,” Grant said, and held the limp body up for a moment so that Joe could close the door.

  “West Twentieth, I guess,” Joe said. “Headed that way.” He went back to his seat, started the car. “Don’t see what else to do,” he said. “We call and wait around, and that’s where we go anyhow. Maybe East Twenty-second, but what the hell?”

  He seemed to be debating with himself and this, Reginald Grant thought, probably was good for him—this arguing with himself about trivial things; in an odd manner talking shop to himself. Not thinking of a girl named Rebecca, about the age of—about the age this girl had been, who now was without age.

  The Tenth Precinct station house, in West Twentieth Street, is also the headquarters of Homicide, Manhattan West. It did not take Joe long to reach it, and park in front of it between signs which said “No Parking.”

  “You want I—?” Joe said, as a completed sentence, and Grant said, “Yes. I’ll stay with her,” and watched Joe Abrams run across the sidewalk and into the station house. He came back out almost at once, and two uniformed policemen were with him. One of them looked into the cab, without opening the door, and said, “Jeeze, another kid.” Then he looked across the girl’s body at Grant. He did not say anything.

  Another uniformed man came out of the station house, hurrying. Behind him a man in civilian clothes came out and both looked in at the dead girl.

  “Switchblade,” the uniformed man said to the man in civilian clothes. “Another goddamn lousy punk.” The other man merely nodded.

  “O.K.,” the uniformed man—a sergeant, from his chevrons—said to Grant. “Better come along in and tell us about it, mister.”

  Grant got out of the cab on the side away from the curb. He went around the cab and into the station house, and felt, strangely, that he deserted the girl dead on the cab seat.

  They were taken to a small, scantily furnished, room on the second floor. The sergeant and the man in civilian clothes took them; it was the man in civilian clothes who asked the questions—their names first. After Grant had given his name, the detective said, “You’re English,” as a statement. Grant went on with it, briefly, adding occupation to a name, a New York address.

  “Oh,” the detective said, “that Grant,” as if much had been clarified. This puzzled Grant; the detective had a long, melancholy face, but it seemed unlikely that he was a reader of poetry. Very few people were, and Grant did not suppose that many of them were policemen.

  “You didn’t know the girl?” the detective said, and Grant shook his head. “I—” he said, but this time the detective shook his head and turned to Abrams and said, “All right, let’s have it.”

  “Never saw her before,” Joe Abrams said. “Must have been while I was having dinner.”

  He was told to go ahead.

  At about seven, Abrams said, he had parked the cab in its usual place—its usual place for that hour of the evening—and gone around the comer to a lunch counter and had a pastrami sandwich and coffee and a piece of pie. He had come back in about twenty minutes.

  “Because,” he said, “it was one of the professor’s nights and we’ve sort of got it set.”

  The detective looked at Grant then.

  “Joe’s been picking me up the past few weeks,” Grant said. “Call it an informal arrangement.”

  “Convenient this kind of weather,” the detective said. “So—you came back and got in the cab. Didn’t look in the back?”

  “What for?” Abrams said. “No. She was—” He hesitated. Grant could see him swallow. “Down on the floor,” Abrams said. “The professor thought at first somebody had left a coat. See what I mean? No, I didn’t look.”

  The detective waited for him to go on.

  “That’s the size of it,” Joe Abrams said. “Somebody put her in there while I was eating.”

  The detective turned back to Grant, then.

  “You saw her as soon as you got into the cab?”

  Grant told him about that—told him that, safely out of rain and fog, he had at first looked through the window at the night, and not at the interior of the cab. Why he had not seen her as he got in—he shrugged his shoulders. Perhaps one saw only what one was looking for. There was little light in the cab.

  “Light ought to go on when the door’s opened,” Joe said. “Only it’s out of whack. Been meaning to get it fixed.”

  “When you did see her,” the detective said, “she was on the floor? Against the door?”

  Grant nodded his head.

  “You lifted her up onto the seat?”

  “We both did,” Grant said. “I—we didn’t know she was dead. Anyway—a child—I thought she was a child—lying there on the floor. It—it seemed quite wrong.”

  “Sure,” the detective said. “Only thing you could have done, I guess. You’d never seen her before?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  The detective looked, then, at the uniformed sergeant. The sergeant nodded his head, briefly.

  “I don’t,” the detective said, “think we need to bother you any longer just now, Mr. Grant.”

  This surprised Reginald Grant, puzzled him. Surely, even here, in this fantastic city, the murder of a child was not something thus to be brushed off, pushed aside.

  “You’ll want to wash your hands,” the detective said and Grant, who had forgotten, looked at his hands. Looking at them, he felt a little sick.

  He had been sitting on a wooden chair. He started to stand up.

  “Perhaps,” the detective said, “you think we’re taking this lightly, Mr. Grant?” He spoke in a sad voice; his face was sad. It was as if new melancholy were, in that moment, laid on over the old. “We don’t, I assure you. We’ll find the killer, Mr. Grant. And—it’ll probably turn out to be another kid—some punk with a knife; some punk who’s in a gang. Killed her for some reason only a vicious child would understand, and put her in the cab to—to get her out of sight. You were just unlucky, Mr. Grant. Give you a bad impression of the way things are here, I’m afraid.” He sighed. “Not that they aren’t,” he said. Then he looked at his watch.

  “You want to go on to the lecture?” the detective said.

  And this, also, startled Reginald Grant, partly because he ha
d, in all that mattered, forgotten that, not much more than half an hour ago, he had got into a cab to go to Dyckman University (Downtown Branch) to talk of poetry; partly because he was surprised that this depressed policeman should have remembered what he had himself forgotten. He looked at his own watch and realized that, below the surface of his mind, he wanted it to be too late to go to the lecture. Still—

  “There isn’t anything more I can do about this?”

  “No,” the detective said. “I can’t think of anything. If you do—if you remember anything—you’ll get in touch.”

  “There will be people waiting,” Grant said. “For me. It—it is merely that it seems incongruous.”

  “A good deal is,” the detective said. “It’s up to you, of course. We’ll take you in a cruise car, if you like. Make better time that way.”

  It occurred to Reginald Grant that he was being urged, gently, to do his duty—was, at the least, being offered an opportunity to make so right a decision. He had never been so tempted to use the American’s procrastinating “We-11.”

  “Decent of you,” he said. “You’re probably right, Mr.—”

  “Shapiro,” the sad detective said. “It’s entirely up to you.”

  “I’d appreciate the car,” Grant said. He looked at his hands. “And—” There is a limit beyond which the incongruous cannot be allowed to progress; one may not lecture on poetry with a child’s blood on one’s hands.

  And, when he stood behind the lectern, apologized for his lateness without explaining it, it occurred to Reginald Grant that he was probably the first poet in history to be hurtled through foggy streets, with a siren clearing the way ahead, in order that he might, in academic cloister, discuss his art. Tomorrow it would be unbelievable that any of this had happened.

  “Although by his own actions, the influence of Mr. Ezra Pound has been jeopardized,” Mr. Reginald Grant said, formally, to some eighty-odd lovers of poetry, “we must not let extraneous factors blind us to—”

  II

  It is, Grant thought, riding home in a taxi through a night which had not improved, remarkable how selective the human mind can be—how it can, in a sense, segregate. My own mind, he thought, pushed murder out, locked the door behind it; my mind has been, for the past three hours or so, occupied solely with the way words fall, are arranged to fall, so that, in the end, the whole made by the words is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. (Or, his mind irrelevantly interjected, its participles.) Greater than and, in some sense—a sense as infinitely hard to put into words—different from.

  For those hours of the mind’s segregation, it was as if there had never been a child’s blood on his hands. For those hours, his mind had been in the way Pound had had with words, and Eliot and Frost and John Ciardi. And it had gone rather well, which was surprising. It was true that, autographing a book of his own, he had noticed under one nail a trace of something he was very much afraid was blood. He had, surreptitiously, managed to flick it out with a nail of his other hand.

  He could tell that it had gone well not only by the intentness of the faces into which he looked as he spoke, but by the very considerable number who had, afterward, come around to ask questions left unanswered—very intelligent questions, for the most part. He had sat on the edge of the platform, his legs dangling—a position of no special dignity but of reasonable comfort—and answered questions as well as he could (so many intelligent questions do not permit of intelligent answers) and written his name on the flyleaves of four books. (Four/ This last one, counting both British and American sales, must by now have reached almost three thousand. And in two years only!)

  He had got into the cab, which had not been easy to find on a dripping night, and had turned out to be one of the objectionable midgets, with, still remaining, that glow which warms the spirit of anybody who feels that he has done something rather well, and has not yet had time for cooling second thoughts. And, as he got into the cab, he had looked involuntarily at the floor on the other side. There was nothing on the floor and he took a deep breath of relief. His mind said that this was ridiculous; something else inside him said it was nothing of the kind.

  He had read, of course, of “juvenile delinquents” (which had seemed rather an elaborate way of putting it) and of the wars of teen-age gangs. He had not supposed that this was peculiar to the United States or, for that matter, to the present time. He thought, as he often thought in various connections, of the great difference there is in knowing that certain things happen—famine, for example; the murderous leaps of tidal waves—and having immediate contact with catastrophe. Boys and girls were shot on city streets and stabbed to death on them for—what had the sad detective said? Reasons only a vicious child would understand—and one clicked tongue against teeth in deprecation. But one did not expect to find blood on one’s own hands.

  He had supposed, to be sure, that it was usually the boys who were killed, and usually by other boys, and that the girls of the gangs were more likely to be the occasions for than the victims of murder. He had also assumed that, when murder was done—inadvertently or by intent—the victim was left to lie in sight, while the assailants ran.

  This girl, clearly, had not been—had been tucked into a cab. Or, pushed in alive and killed there? Put in the cab, the detective—oh yes, named Shapiro—had said to “get her out of sight.” As a child might hide a toy he had broken.

  “Here we are,” the cabby told him. “Lousy night, ain’t it, Mac?”

  Reginald Grant, recalled, said, “Quite,” and paid, and climbed a flight of stairs to his flat on the first floor. (He was too tired now to make adjustments; suddenly, as the cab driver told him they were there, his mind had emptied, as if a plug had been pulled.) He made himself a drink; there were coals glowing in the fireplace and he added to them two ridiculously expensive, and not especially flammable, sticks of wood. After a time, one of the sticks began to smoke, which was approximately par for the course.

  Grant, sipping slowly of scotch and water—he had put a cube of ice in the drink, absent-mindedly and without even surprising himself—was nearing the bottom of the glass when the buzzer sounded, very loudly. Who, at this time of night, he wondered, and went into the hall and pressed the button which would release the latch of the downstairs door. He heard the door open, and opened his own door into the stair hall. Two men were coming up the stairs.

  The first of them was a square man with a wide face and a brush haircut. He wore a double-breasted suit and Grant, who noticed such things, noticed that the shoulders were padded. He was dressed, Grant thought, more as he had once expected all American men to be than had any other American man he had so far met. The man looked up the stairs and smiled pleasantly.

  The man behind him was taller and darker, and wore a single- breasted blue suit, with a black raincoat over it—over it but unbuttoned.

  Grant said, “Yes?”

  The square man said, “Mr. Grant?” and, when Grant nodded, “Police officers.”

  Grant was not really surprised. He had not, actually, thought it would be all that simple, all that cursory. He knew little of the methods of American police—or of any police, for that matter—but he had been a little surprised that there had not, in the police station, been more—well, call it routine; call it formality. Allowing for the different idiom—in his one previous contact with policemen above the rank of constable he had been “sirred” endlessly—he had supposed, or would have supposed if he had ever before thought of it, there would be many questions and much writing down of answers. (When he had been asked about poor old Ben the questions had been endless, although it had been clear from the start that he knew few significant answers.)

  He said, “Yes?” again and the square man indicated, by a gesture, that he go back into the flat. He went back and the two men came in after him and the tall one in the black raincoat closed the door after them. Grant led them along the corridor to the living room.

  “Sorry to bother you on a lousy ni
ght like this,” the square man said. “Only, the captain’d like to see you about the girl.”

  “I’m afraid,” Grant said, “I told the other detective—Shapiro—all I know about it. Of course—”

  “Sure,” the square spokesman said—the other man merely stood with his back to the door and looked at the slowly smoking fire. “Don’t doubt it, myself. But the captain’s a different kettle of fish. Know what I mean?”

  “No,” Grant said. “I can’t say that I do, y’know.”

  “Man you talked to,” the spokesman said, “is pretty easygoing.” He paused, seemed to consider. “Fact is,” he said, “between us, the captain sort of chewed him out. Don’t tell him I said that, but that’s the way it is. Lots of lines on the reports, see, and the captain likes to see ’em filled up. So he says to us, ‘Go ask this Mr. Grant to come around and help us get things squared away.’ So, here we are.”

  “I don’t,” Grant said, “suppose I have any choice?”

  “Now listen,” the square man said, “it ain’t that way, Mr. Grant. Just some details for the record. Shouldn’t take more than—oh, an hour maybe. Take you to the captain and bring you back. Not more than an hour or hour and a half at the most. O.K.?”

  “Not in the morning?”

  “You know,” the square man said, “that’s what I said to the captain. You want him tonight? And he said I was damned right he did.” He shrugged the padded shoulders. “We’re just doing what we’re told,” he said. “Can’t go beyond that.”

  The implication was there, Grant thought. If he had his way, the implication was, the square man wouldn’t have dragged himself, or anybody else, out on a lousy night like this. Only, he didn’t have his way. And, Reginald Grant did not have a choice.