And the Girl Screamed (Prologue Crime)

by Gil Brewer

  “Here you are, Cliff.”

  It was a beat up Merc, for a fact.

  “You make me take this?”

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  “All right.”

  While I drove it out into the driveway, he went inside the house. I sat there with the motor idling, listening to the rattles and the roars. Exhaust seeped up through the floor boards and the hood rattled in a kind of frantic shimmy.

  Andy came back around the walk from the front of the house and stopped by the car, talking loudly above the engine.

  “Muffler’s shot.”

  “I see.”

  He was holding a bill in one hand. He gave it to me. It was a ten.

  “That’s the best I can do.”

  I sat idling the engine, and we stared at each other some more. The Merc rattled like hell.

  “I bought it for fifty bucks,” Andy said, rapping the hood with his knuckles. Then he stood there with his hair waving around the top of his head and he looked sad as hell.

  “So long, Andy—and thanks.”

  He just looked at me as I let her roll out of the drive onto the street. You had to get used to the gas pedal. When you pushed it, nothing happened. The idea was to push it on a slant, toward the brake, then jam it slightly the other way. Once you caught on, it worked fine.

  Cutting through side streets, I got to thinking about Andy again. If I was trusting him, he was trusting me. The only trouble was he was a good cop, and with good cops, the job comes first.

  Chapter Nine

  THE FOSTER HOME, at 219 Palm Drive, was lit up, but no police cars were around. I parked the Merc a few houses down and came back across the sidewalk.

  There’s something about empty houses and sick houses. And there’s something about houses where real tragedy has struck. I don’t know what it is, but you can feel it. Maybe it’s knowing about it beforehand that lends the atmosphere, but the Foster house sure showed it to me.

  It wasn’t too far from the walk, the lawn maybe twenty feet deep. There was one of those large front galleries, not with a railing, with solid wood around it. There were a hammock and a couple of wicker chairs, and it was very still. A worn grass mat stretched from the door to the top step. The door was open, but the screen door shaded the hallway. A bright white light was blinding over the porch, giving everything a stark appearance.

  As I stepped onto the porch, I heard soft voices from inside and there was an odor of many dinners. You wanted to walk very carefully.

  I rang the bell. It was like beating on a dishpan in the middle of prayers at church. I shrank a little, and waited.

  Jinny’s father answered the door. He was a thickset man wearing a wrinkled gray uniform I recognized as a mailman’s outfit. His lips were drawn tight, and his deepset eyes were a little shiny. I took the chance that he’d been notified. I had to work fast and time was slipping by the way it always did.

  “I’m from the police,” I said.

  He stared at me and something still fresher and newer than what was already in his eyes came across his face. It seemed almost as if the flesh on his face shifted position, though the expression of intent waiting did not alter.

  “Hate to do this, Mr. Foster—you are Mr. Foster?”

  He nodded.

  “I hate to do this,” I went on. “But I’ll have to ask you a few questions. I’ll make it as quick as I can.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” he said. “I told you over the phone I’ll do all I can. Come in.”

  He stepped away from the door. There was a small hallway, and a living room to the right, with a woman seated in an overstuffed blue chair beside a goldfish bowl, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. Her face was red-blotched and she avoided my gaze. She was a very motherly-looking woman, but sort of pinched around the chin and mouth.

  “Shall we go out to the kitchen?” Foster asked.

  I tipped my head toward the woman in there.

  For a moment he seemed to hesitate. Something came over his face again, but he stalled it. He moved his jaw a little.

  “All right,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  We went into the living room and he moved past a center table laden with magazines and books, and slumped in an uncomfortable looking chair. There was a rather rumpled couch opposite, and a console radio over beside the table with the goldfish on it.

  I went over and perched on the edge of the couch. It was a comfortable, uncomfortable, lived in, rather boring, brutally sad room. I looked across at Mr. Foster.

  The woman didn’t say anything. She kept sniffing and swallowing behind the handkerchief.

  “They said they’d send somebody right over,” he said “I didn’t think it would be this quick. They didn’t really tell us anything. Just that Jinny is—that Jinny was—” He put his hands together and cracked his knuckles and stared at the floor.

  The woman broke into tears again, loudly.

  I knew the police were in a rush to get started, but they could have waited to tell these folks in person. Sometimes it’s rougher over a phone. It sounded a little like something Al Calvin might do, to hurry things along.

  The room was not boring, after all. It was just sad.

  “Martha,” the man said. “Try—”

  I waited. After a while I told Foster what I knew, making it sound as if I’d gone out there in one of the patrol cars. “Now,” I said. “All I’d like, as quickly as possible, is the name of your daughter’s closest girl friend.”

  “What will we do?” Jinny’s mother said. “Frank’s supposed to be at work. Jinny’s our only child. We were just sitting here.” Her sobs ran up and up and up. She caught her breath and sighed. She swallowed several times. “She didn’t—I won’t—how could—” she said. She put her head down in her hands and rocked her shoulders and began to really cry.

  Foster rose and went stolidly across the room to her. He looked at me, then quickly away. He patted her back, then looked at the palm of his hand.

  “She was seventeen,” he said. “She was a senior. Her best friend is Inez, I guess—huh, Martha?”

  Mrs. Foster rocked her head up and down. I felt sorry for them, but I wished they would hurry it up. I knew you couldn’t hurry them.

  Waiting, it got to me more and more how bad this was for everybody concerned. I was almost as much a part of it as the Fosters. If they knew the charges that were already placed against me, they would run screaming for the law, which thought only stirred me up a little more.

  As it was, the law could show any time. And Eve. How was she doing?

  It began to quiet down a little.

  “Inez what?” I said.

  “She hasn’t got a phone,” Foster said. “Harrington.”

  “Inez Harrington,” Mrs. Foster said loudly.

  “What’s her address, Martha?”

  Mrs. Foster waved one hand toward the rear of the house. “She lives out—out on Melbourne Boulevard.”

  “Kind of in the country,” Foster said.

  “It’s the first house past the Melbourne drive-in theater,” Mrs. Foster said. “You won’t miss it. The name’s on the mailbox. It’s on the same side of the road as the drive-in.” She heaved a sigh. “I feel so sorry for Inez, too.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I just can’t help it,” Mrs. Foster said.

  I looked at her husband. He shook his head.

  “It’s her folks,” Mrs. Foster said. “They just leave her alone all the time. All the time. That poor girl doesn’t have any family. They’re always running off some place. Been that way ever since she was little.”

  “Martha, please,” Foster said.

  She looked as if she might begin crying again. She kept shaking her head. “I remember how she used to come over here and just stand around looking—it was awful to see. Inez is a good girl, but her mother and father just don’t have any respect—any respect at all. Always running off, leaving her that way.”

  “That so
?” I asked Foster.

  He nodded. “They’re never home,” he said. “They run around with a pretty fast crowd. He’s some kind of salesman, and she goes with him—travels all over. They make it a big party. They send Inez money—she’s had to grow up fast.”

  “I see.”

  Mrs. Foster was staring at her lap. Mr. Foster’s eyes turned inward and his voice was touched with deep sadness. “What could have happened to Jinny?” he said softly. “What could she have done to have this happen? We’ve always treated her right—always.”

  Mrs. Foster looked accusingly at her husband and began to sob.

  I shook my head and stared at the floor, then stood up, and moved into the center of the room. I looked at them and they looked at me. I had to get going, yet I couldn’t appear too rushed, and right then I knew it wasn’t as bad for me as it was for them. But I kept thinking of what Eve had said about seeing the killer. And not knowing whether he saw her watching him. It kept rapping me, like that, and the sweat was beginning to pop like pins under my shirt.

  I didn’t know what to say to these people. It just wasn’t there to say. All the things you are supposed to say are so completely idiotic and shallow and appropriate without being in the least satisfactory.

  I knew that if I didn’t get out of here, I might get caught here.

  “There anything else you could tell me that might help?”

  They both shook their heads.

  There were lots of things I wanted to ask them about Jinny, only there was no time, and even if there had been time how could you ask? I had to stay ahead of the boys with the sirens. It would take maybe an hour to get anything out of these people, perhaps more than that, because they already resented my being here. Christ, it was going to be sweet when the boys in blue came along and they told them I’d been here. There would be growls in the hallway, and mutterings from outside, and shouts from the street—and cruisers would roar in the night, sirens wailing.

  Jinny’s girl friend would know more about the inside things concerning Jinny herself.

  “Officer,” Foster said. He stepped across the living room to me. “Could I go with you?” His eyes were a little wild. He kept wadding his hands together, cracking his knuckles. “I would like very much to get close to whoever did this,” he said slowly. His mouth jerked and twisted.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t do that,” I told him. “We’d both like the same thing, I assure you.”

  I managed to leave them then. Mrs. Foster did not look up. Mr. Foster started toward the door with me but something intervened in the middle of the hall and he just stood there staring at the floor, frowning, with one hand out slightly in front of him. I was glad I couldn’t see into his mind. It wouldn’t have made things any easier. I went over to the door, opened it as carefully as I could and slipped through onto the porch. As I closed the door, I looked back inside. He was still standing there, staring, his face showing confusion and heartbreak. For a moment, I watched him. He was going to be an enemy of mine in a very short while. His wife would probably cry out with horror when she learned that they had actually talked with the suspected killer of their daughter.

  As I started off the porch, a police car hissed in be side the curb and stopped with a light, dry squeak of brakes. The door on the near side opened. I dodged back onto the porch, headed for the far railing and went over. My heels sank into soft earth. I didn’t move.

  Two uniformed cops walked slowly up the front walk, talking softly. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. They paused, looking at the front door of the house. They didn’t like going in there. One of them sighed and shrugged.

  I couldn’t move. If I did, they’d hear me. Only I had to move, because light shone across the top of the porch railing, and there was my face hanging out.

  “Come on,” one of them said. “Let’s get inside. No use standing out here.”

  “I know,” the other said. “But—”

  I stepped slowly along the soft ground toward the rear of the house. They knocked on the door. I heard Foster clomp stolidly through the house toward the door.

  At the corner by the rear of the house, I stood beside thick azalea bushes. I didn’t want to leave the Merc, but I couldn’t get to it without going out front again. I didn’t believe the Fosters had seen the Merc, it was parked down the block too far. They wouldn’t necessarily associate it with me.

  One of them came off the front porch, running. Then I heard the other. They weren’t yelling, or anything, but they knew I’d been there. They had been posted. And now the Fosters knew, too.

  I dodged across the rear lawn and came up in the shadows beside a small, slant-roofed shack that stood beside a garage. Then I saw one of the cops come riming along the side of the house, a gun in his hand.

  He hesitated at the rear corner of the house, his face pale under his cap, shining in the darkness.

  “Ralph?” the one out front called softly.

  “Yeah,” the one by the rear of the house said. “He’s not around. He wouldn’t be around here. He prob’ly took off.”

  The one that had been out front came from the opposite side of the house, walking swiftly across the backyard.

  They stood there and whispered to each other.

  “For Christ’s sake, what d’you think of that?”

  “Don’t talk so loud.”

  “You think he’s around?”

  “I don’t think he’s around. He would of took off. Wouldn’t you of took off?”

  The other didn’t answer. They stood there, looking. The one called Ralph still had his gun drawn. I could hear them breathing, and I could hear the rocking hard sound of my own heart. If they looked directly my way, they would see me. I could see where my shadow changed the shape of the shadow of the shack across the lawn.

  “Listen,” Ralph said. “You go on out and call in. Tell them he was here. Tell them we’ll keep looking. Foster said he just left, not two seconds before we came, and I didn’t hear a car.”

  “He’s on foot.”

  “Well, maybe. Go on and call in. I’ll wait.”

  The other trotted softly up along the side of the house. Ralph waited, looking some more. Then he started toward the garage, two hairs off my azimuth.

  It would be a flaming feather in his cap. It could mean a shot at plain clothes for him, and he knew it.

  I didn’t want to tangle with him. It could be he’d take me, but either way, it was bad. If I roughed him up, Harnett would take a dimmer view than ever of the whole matter.

  Ralph reached the garage and stood there, breathing hard, hanging onto his damned gun, his back to me.

  There was a low hedge between me and the next back yard. But in the yard over there were several orange and grapefruit trees, and it was well shadowed.

  Ralph was beginning to sense things. I knew just how he felt; I’d been through it myself, and standing alone, like that, close to quarry, you sometimes do sense another’s presence.

  Only he started in the wrong direction.

  I went for the hedge. As I stepped over, the other cop came trotting back along the side of the house.

  “Ralph?” he called in a whisper. “Ralph?”

  Ralph turned, and I ran.

  Neither of them said anything. They just started running like hell at me.

  I came across that lawn, saw a wire fence, and took it, landed in a narrow field rimmed by young oaks. I came down the field.

  “Stop!” Ralph called. “Don’t—be a—fool!”

  The field ended at another wire fence. I took that, and stood for a moment in the deep dust of a dark, garage and tree-shadowed alley. They were coming fast across the field.

  I had to get away. And I had to lead them away from the Merc. I ran through another backyard, heading up in the opposite direction and heard them climbing the fence, the wire screaking and whining. Running hard, I reached the side of a house, passed windows, and saw two old ladies inside watching TV. I cut across their front yard, then
dipped in along the fronts of the homes on the street.

  “Over here!” Ralph called.

  There was a vacant lot. I crossed it, came to an empty house with a “For Sale” sign in the yard. I could hear them coming up the back way, behind the houses. They were almost to the vacant lot.

  I took the front porch of the empty house, grabbed the low-hanging roof, swung up there and stretched out flat.

  They came into the vacant lot, running.

  “You take the front,” Ralph called.

  They did it that way, then stopped when they reached the house where I was.

  “Hell,” the one out front said.

  Ralph didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t see him now. Then he started walking up along the side of the house and paused, breathing heavily, directly under the porch roof where I lay. The other one came over to him.

  “Listen,” Ralph said.

  They listened for a time.

  “Not a sound.”

  “We lost the bastard.”

  “Wait.”

  I breathed with my mouth open. I was out of breath, and the sound echoed faintly in the corner of the roof. The pebbled roof was still slightly warm from the afternoon sun.

  “He’s got to be around someplace.”

  “I tell you, he got away. Maybe that wasn’t even him.”

  “It was him, all right. Don’t kid yourself.”

  “Let’s try across the street.”

  They walked across the street, treading heavily now.

  As soon as they were over by the corner, I dropped off the roof and ran back, the way I had come, to where I had parked the Merc.