On the train she sat absolutely still, like a petrified human, which she was. The trip took two and a half hours. Then she had to get a cab and give the address. It was quite near the station, once the driver remembered that there really was a McCracken Building. “It’s that old red brick on the corner of Milsom, ain’t it?”
Than at last she stood in the grimy lobby, reading the list of tenants, no longer expecting and not finding any McCracken Company.
She stood indeterminately, then asked the old man on the elevator, “Is there anyone named McCracken in the building?”
He gaped stupidly. “This here is the McCracken Building.”
“I know. Is there anyone in it by that name?”
He seemed to think, if scratching his head was any indication. “The only ones I don’t know the names of, is them in 317. You don’t mean them, do you? They ain’t nobody else name of McCracken in the building; so if it’s anyone, it’s got to be them.”
He took her up to the third floor and left her. On the door of the room was a note, strung over the knob, “Back in an hour.” It was old and dirty, as if it had been used like this for months, but it was in Rickey’s writing. Wherever it was she was going, she had arrived. She tried the door, and it opened. Within the hour she’d see Rickey. She went in and shut the door. The office was bare, except for a single chair. She sat down on it, folded her hands, and waited.
In only a few minutes the door snapped open and a man, not Rickey at all, came in. This man was not very tall, a thin, dark fellow, not much to look at but purposeful in the way he shut the door behind him, in the way he stopped short when he saw her, in the way he stood coolly looking at her.
“Who are you?” he asked bluntly.
“I’m Rickey’s wife,” she said.
He did not seem surprised. “I’m Court,” he said, as if he didn’t expect her to know the name. She had never heard it. He walked swiftly about the room, swung open the door of a closet, and peered inside. “Empty,” he said, his voice smug with satisfaction. “That’s that, then.”
He took out a spotless handkerchief, shook it out, and went methodically over the room, the doors, window. “Stand up, Ellen,” he said, and rubbed the chair arms vigorously. He knew her first name. He must know Rickey well.
“The end,” he said.
There was a dreadful sound to it. Ellen felt as if she’d watched someone die.
“Where’s Rickey?” she asked.
He looked at her thoughtfully. “How much do you know?” She shook her head helplessly, and he went on, not at all ill-naturedly, “He’s in his room. He picked up a slug last Friday, and the wound got infected. Come along.”
She followed him without a question. She got into the two-tone gray Cadillac convertible with Court and said nothing until it had pulled smoothly into the line of traffic.
“He has a room here in Lower Falls?” she asked slowly, searching unwillingly for pieces of the puzzle.
“Natch,” said Court. “Where’d you expect him to sleep? It’s the same room he had before he got married—he never gave it up. How much has he told you?”
“Then there’s no McCracken Tool Company?”
He laughed as if he were really amused. “Cripes, McCracken! I suppose there was a McCracken once, but the McCracken Building was put up in the eighties. I can see he didn’t tell you much. Rickey invented the tool company.”
“But Rickey did sell tools,” she said. Her lips were stiff.
Court ignored that. “Listen, to save my own skin, I gotta tell you. The more you know, the less you’ll won’t to go squawking to the cops. Rickey invented the whole thing, tool salesman and all. He’s my boy,” negligently, “my payoff man, my rubout man. Those big bonuses he earned every once in a while, what do you suppose they were for? Because he was cute?”
“For—for killing?” Ellen whispered.
“I don’t like murder,” Court said. “I got a nice clean racket, never mind what it is, and I don’t like to dirty it up with blood. But once in a while I got to.”
She felt sick to death. Nothing could be worse than this. She felt as if all the blood had been wrung cut of her. She was sure the shock would kill her baby. When the car stopped, her knees trembled so much she didn’t think she could get out. But she made it and, still trembling, managed to walk up the outside flight of steps, then the inside flight, Court leading the way all the time. Without knocking, he opened a door on the second floor.
“Look what I brung you, boy,” he said.
Rickey was lying on the bed fully clothed. Flushed, unshaven for days, his eyes at first seeming glazed and unseeing. But after a moment he focused and said, “Ellen.”
“Oh, Rickey,” she said, and ran to him, but he held her off with his left hand, moving it heavily, like a drunk.
“Don’t touch me,” he said, and seemed to lapse into a daze.
She turned to Court, whispering, “He’s so sick.”
“He’s dying,” Court said flatly. “He hasn’t got a chance. I’m waiting for him to go into a coma for good, then I call a doctor. I don’t dare let him go to the hospital while he’s conscious, see, or even while he can babble in his sleep. But when he gets real bad, see—? I want to send him to the hospital while he’s still alive, so nobody can say I neglected him.”
“It’s inhuman.” said Ellen, just breathing the words. She looked at her husband with a confusing detachment, as if she hardly knew him. Yet he was her husband, the father of her child, the perfect husband she had lived and breathed for. “I want to call a doctor,” she said, and burst into ragged sobs.
Court walked over to stand by the bed. “Rickey Garber,” he said, then bent over, shaking him. Ellen winced, because Court had grasped Rickey’s right arm. But Rickey only mumbled.
“Okay, sister,” said Court, and walked past her. “I want to be the one to call the doctor.”
She let him go without a word, although she suspected he would not be back. But Court came back almost at once, and in about fifteen minutes the doctor came.
“Why haven’t I been called before?” he asked sharply after his first look at Rickey.
“We just found him,” Court said. “Just now. His wife came looking for him at the office, and I brought her over as a favor. Never figured he was even sick.”
Ellen hardly listened. She was looking at Rickey. He killed! He killed for money! The doctor’s words sifted through to her. “I don’t know—” He looked about the austere little room indeterminately. “I suppose he ought to be in a hospital—”
“Spare no expense,” Court said hastily. “Nothing’s too good for my pal Rickey.” And then, innocently, “What’s wrong with him, anyway?”
“It’s almost impossible now to tell what happened. A wound of some sort, but it’s swelled up so I can’t recognize what caused it. Anyway, it almost doesn’t matter.” He glanced accusingly at Ellen. “I could have helped, earlier.”
An ambulance, and its clang lessening in the distance. The empty room, with almost no sign now of previous habitation. “I’ll drive you right to the hospital,” Court told her. “Just give me five minutes.” He worked efficiently through the room, disturbing nothing, searching, taking a few papers, setting fire to them in an ashtray.
“It’s like he was never here,” Court said, with the same smug satisfaction he had shown earlier at the McCracken Building.
In Court’s car on the way to the hospital she thought, let me see if I understand, and the appalling thing was that she did, she understood everything. Rickey had been a crook and a hoodlum and a murderer, and she had never guessed. He’d invented a life story and lived it, and to her it had been real. A whole two years of pretense fell into shape, two years of watching Rickey act like the husband they both wanted him to be. No wonder he’d always seemed like a movie composite—that’s actually what he had been. The movies were all he’d ever had as a model.
She knew it, and she did not weep. Not then, nor two days later when he died.
She did not weep when she went home to pack her few belongings, nor when she sent his things to the Salvation Army. Not even when her father came for her and she had to tell him the truth of it all, not even then did the tears come.
“I hate to say it,” her father told her, “because I know it’s so fresh it still hurls, but you’re lucky to be out of it as easy as this. No scandal, nothing to hurt you or the child.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered, and now she had tears for Rickey—but they were not for the little boy in him who had never known a mother’s love. They were not for the man who sought a cruel revenge on a world that had been cruel to him; nor were they even for the lonely man she had always known him to be, her poor Rickey locked away from her and from everyone in his own sad and loveless world.
No, she mourned Rickey Garber, her husband, the man she married, who kissed like Clark Gable and laughed like Robert Mitchum and had manners like Joseph Cotten and who looked like Rock Hunter and Tony Curtis and a little bit like Robert Montgomery.
“He was a perfect husband,” she sobbed; oh, yes, now indeed she wept.
SILENTLY, SILENTLY
Originally published in Four Quarters #3, Mar. 1961
Letty Windsor couldn’t help it: So it finally caught up with her! was what flashed through her mind. The freedom Hilda Perrice always insisted upon—“I’m no kitchen canary,” she’d boast, “I have to fly free!”—here it was insolently demanding payment. Hilda’s young daughter had been arrested and Letty, hating herself even as she thought it, went right on: Now comes the piper, wanting pay for his tunes.
She was loyal enough to Hilda not to speak her treacherous ideas aloud, not even to Peter, who drove home a strategic few minutes after Hilda had sobbed her hysterical story into the phone. In fact, she wouldn’t even let herself believe it, not really. Everyone knew juvenile delinquency wasn’t that simple to explain. But—a fifteen-year-old girl caught holding up a store! It made Letty shiver with a fleeting anxiety for her own fifteen-year-old—not, of course, that she had anything to worry about with Ellen. No fears for Ellen! Just the same she reminded herself firmly, it isn’t fair to blame Hilda! And yet in spite of her good intentions she couldn’t control the persistent, nagging thought: it all comes back to Hilda.
One door you couldn’t lay it to was the neighborhood. Cedar Acres was as far from a slum as its name implied. It was a neat development near Boston, close enough to be washed by the Atlantic’s salty air on a brisk March day like this one, yet far enough off to be called country.
The pretty little houses all looked like homes. There was money enough for all the luxuries most of the families considered necessities, like televisions and clothes dryers and summer camps for the kids. Even Hilda, a widow for ten years, lived comfortably on the combination of annuity and pension Carl had left. And yet—the trouble had started somewhere because there was no shaking off the fact that Janice, pretty, vivid Janice, was in jail!
“It was all over the school.” Ellen contributed her bit to the discussion as calmly as if the arrest of a classmate were part of the daily routine. Letty looked with astonishment at Ellen, a budding young thing who might have sat for a picture of Letty herself twenty years earlier, and she thought wryly, alas, the callous young!
“So Janice finally had a tantrum big enough to draw notice,” Peter said.
That was Peter, all right, his fine-edged accountant’s mind always able to pinpoint the matter. Always? Letty reproached herself for such a concept of perfection. There he sat on the edge of the kitchen table, a young thirty-eight, slim and tall. He was still for her taste the best-looking man in the world. He was always so poised, so sure of himself—and, in truth, so often right. But always? If it were something close to home, not a neighbor’s problem, not an item in a client’s financial statement of his drawing up—if it were something about one of his own children, would he still have that accurate visibility, that unerring aim that brought him straight to the heart of the matter?
“A real J. D.,” Ellen was saying cynically. “You don’t know the half of it. She used to keep a bottle of bourbon in her gym locker.”
“But you and Janice were never friendly,” Letty said quickly. Of course not! Ellen, so clean-looking, so freshly, dewily young, her brown hair caught up in a pony tail with a pink ribbon to match her sweater—the question didn’t even need asking. “I mean,” she said apologetically, “even though you’re in the same classes, I don’t remember you ever mentioning being together—”
Ellen’s mood changed in the mercurial way it had. “I’m never together with anyone,” she said softly. Her quiet blue eyes didn’t change, her delightful young figure hardly seemed to stir, but she melted out of the room almost before the sound of her voice did. Letty’s eyes followed her daughter, as did her heart, so completely that Peter had to speak twice to get her attention.
“Oh—!” she said, waking up. “Well, Hilda just got back after a whole day with the juvenile authorities. They caught Janice and some boy last night, holding up a liquor store. Peter, it’s enough to scare you! Hilda thought Janice was in bed when the police came!”
“I doubt if she really had any idea where Janice was,” Peter said, and at her quick defense he said impatiently, “Never mind, never mind, we’ll never agree on Hilda Perrice.”
“We’ll have to agree now,” Letty said seriously. “Anyway, I’ve never denied she ran around a lot, all those bridge games and so forth. Yes, she neglected—things.”
“Why can’t you come right out and say it?” Peter asked exasperatedly. “The truth is Hilda was never there when Janice needed her. She neglected her, she belittled her by ignoring her—not things, Letty. A human being. Her daughter, Janice.”
“All right,” Letty said, “she neglected Janice.”
“Skip it,” Peter said, calming down. “I honestly don’t care except to pity that poor kid. Thank heaven our kids aren’t up against the same situation.” The sincerity of the unconscious compliment was irresistible. Letty found it no effort at all to follow his switch of ideas when he looked at his watch and asked, “Where’s Kenny?”
“There’s a Little League game,” she reminded him. “He’ll be home in time for dinner. Pete—” Should she? She stopped herself fearfully, then went on uncertainly, without giving herself time to think, “Pete, you have a daughter too. Remember how jealous she was when Kenny was born?”
“Now what?” Peter asked, sounding amused.
“It’s only—” Letty said timidly. “It’s just that she did seem to grow out of it, just as you said she would, and of course she was only four, but now—they were saying at the P.T.A.—a daughter needs her father more in her early teens than ever—”
“You go to too many meetings, honey,” Peter said agreeably. “If Ellen wanted time with me, she could have it. A girl her age can speak up for what she wants.”
Before she could put a careful argument into words, Kenny burst in as dark and as vibrant as Peter, and full of small boy boasts about his batting average. The two men began a lively talk on man-type subjects, putting an end to a discussion that Letty realized had been dangerously one-sided to begin with. Hilda joined them long before dessert, just us Letty had expected. No woman for secret sorrows was Hilda! Her eyes were red, and her pixie face was for once completely free of makeup below the bleached and carefully ragged haircut. She drank several cups of coffee, talking uninhibitedly between swallows.
“It’s not like me to speak ill of the dead,” she announced, “but after all, Carl’s family! I’m sure my Jan gets it from that side. There was that cousin, the embezzler. Remember? Jan is definitely a Perrice through and through.”
“She looks exactly like you,” Peter said, but Hilda was so industriously disclaiming any responsibility for bringing up her daughter that she did not stop to take offense.
“I’ve known for a long time there was something wrong,” she rattled on feverishly, “but I was just waiting. Wait and see, I’d tell myself. Well, so I
waited. And now they want me to send her to Collingsworth Hall! I said to them, what kind of a mother do you take me for? And so they said, think it over. So I am. But I said to them, give me my baby, I want to take her home; so they said, she’s no baby, at least she helped hold up that store like a grownup. If you ask me, it was all this boy leading her on that caused the trouble. I don’t even know him. An Eric Kleppe from over Barton way. Can you imagine? Foreign scum, contaminating us like that? A boy I didn’t even know! I told them. My poor baby.”
When she had calmed down a little, she explained what her real errand was. “I can’t bear to go back there tomorrow. That Mrs. Sturgess keeps asking the ghastliest questions. So I wondered, Letty, if you’d come with me sort of hold my hand—”
After she had left and the children gone up to bed, Peter said thoughtfully, “I think she’s got something wrong, Letty. She doesn’t get to give her permission on the Collingsworth Hall deal. Janice is simply sentenced to Collingsworth Hall the way an adult is sentenced to prison.”
“How awful!” Letty gasped.
“Better say how merciful—it may be Janice’s salvation,” Peter told her matter-of-factly. “I’ve heard they do wonders for those kids.”
Letty had heard it too, but until she went there the next day, she had not even known where the juvenile building was. The terrible Mrs. Sturgess was a psychiatric social worker, and of course not an ogre at all. She was a middle-aged woman with a pleasant face, and her first words confirmed what Peter had said: “I’m glad you got here in time to say goodbye to Janice, Mrs. Perrice.”
Hilda screamed, “I won’t let my baby go!”
Mrs. Sturgess appeared unmoved by these dramatics. After a minute or so she said quietly, “I’m going to have Janice brought in now, Mrs. Perrice. If you can control yourself, it will be much easier for her.”
The 2nd Golden Age of Mystery and Crime MEGAPACK ™: Ruth Chessman Page 12