The Night She Won Miss America

by Michael Callahan

  “It was self-defense—”

  “It was murder! They’ll ask why didn’t I just pull him off you, why didn’t I just sock him in the nose? Why did I have to grab the ashtray, use it like a baseball bat to his head?”

  The prick of truth pierces her. Yes, they will ask that, she thinks. But she cannot will herself to say aloud what comes into her head next.

  Why didn’t you?

  Griff takes her back in his arms, still kneeling. Betty fights the urge to stiffen, to push him away.

  “Honey bear,” he whispers into her ear, stroking her hair now, “I was just so crazy when I saw what he was doing, that’s all. I couldn’t think straight. I didn’t even know it was happening. It was just instinct, was all. I had to make him stop, right then, right there. I had to make sure he couldn’t hurt you anymore. So I grabbed the ashtray . . .” She tunes out the rest. She doesn’t need to hear it.

  Because it’s all coming together now, the visual of Griff walking into the apartment, hearing her struggle in the bedroom, rushing in, and seeing what was happening. But instead of doing what any other person would do—grabbing Reeve by the shoulders, pulling him off, wrestling him over, knocking him out—Griff had found a weapon and, with one, precise, fatal blow, killed his college roommate by crushing his skull.

  Almost as if he’d been waiting for the chance.

  Betty tries to push the idea away. Impossible. There was no way Griff could have known Reeve would attack her, and certainly no way he could have timed it perfectly to fatally intervene. But his instinct. His instinct had not been to rescue.

  His instinct had been to kill.

  Betty steps out of her thoughts, sees Griff now pacing about the room, babbling, as if he’s arguing a legal case in front of a jury. Who is he speaking to? She knows who he is speaking to. Them.

  She wants to go home. She must concentrate on that. Getting home.

  Griff retrieves her new coat. “We have to go, right now,” he says, holding it out for her. “C’mon, Betty! Put the coat on!”

  “The rest of your clothes—”

  “There’s no time for that now.” He puts on his hat, rams his hands into his coat pockets. She hears the jingle of keys. When his right hand emerges, he’s holding a gun.

  Betty gasps. “Where did you get that?”

  “Never mind where I got it. We need to protect ourselves. People are after us.”

  How could you have been so stupid? So blind? Everyone warned you he was ill. But you were so very certain that your love was the cure. And now here you stand, in the middle of a crime scene, with a boy you don’t recognize anymore. A boy with a gun, who hears voices, who is leaving, and is not leaving without you. Who else is going to end up hurt—or dead?

  Knocking at the door. Betty jumps.

  She looks to Griff, his hand still holding the gun. Neither of them move.

  “Griffin! Griffin, dearest, it’s Mother.”

  Honor. Here.

  “Griffin, I know you and Betty are in there. You must let me in. I’m alone, I promise you. I just want to help you, darling. I’m here now. It’s all going to be all right. Open the door.”

  Griff silently lunges over to Betty’s side, clamps his hand down over her mouth. The gun in his hand is not pointed at her, but she feels it nonetheless, pressed up against her thigh.

  “Not a word,” he whispers.

  Twenty-one

  The cab drops Eddie at the corner of Twenty-First and Seventh. He doesn’t want to spook Griff by being seen getting out right in front of the apartment building in the middle of the block.

  His stomach churns, as if it’s ingested a meal comprised of sour ingredients. He tries to dismiss it as natural, a result of the stress he’s put himself under by allowing things to get this far. But even as he strolls in an overly casual manner down the sidewalk of Twenty-First Street, he knows he is lying to himself. This feeling is not new. It is not due to his career or what may or may not happen to it. It is because he is seeing her again, this girl who has bewitched him as none other has, with her grit and gumption, all wrapped up in the prettiest wrapping paper. This girl he must admit he loves, and who may never love him back.

  Damn you, Betty Jane Welch.

  He had been at the barber. The barber! Of all the places, that’s where he was when she called the hotel, left her cryptic message. Would Edward R. Murrow miss a message for a haircut? He imagines what will happen if his editor finds out what he’s been up to, what he hasn’t been reporting. He’ll be cleaning out his desk within the hour, lucky to land at the weekly Ocean City Sentinel, writing obituaries.

  He is nearing the entrance to the building when its glass front door swings open. He stops, melts back into the shadows under a tree, out of the glow of the streetlamp.

  Honor McAllister is leaving. She gingerly grabs the railing with a gloved hand and proceeds carefully down the front steps, the shiny patent-leather handbag on her right forearm swinging back and forth with each alighting. She seems overly coiffed for such a grubby street, in an ink-blue dress with a fluffy silver fox collar, pearls on her wrist and throat. Her hat, blue velvet, is artfully tilted, with a natty plume spraying outward. If he didn’t know better, Eddie would swear she was on her way to dinner at ‘21.’

  For the first time he notices the car, a dark blue late-model Hudson, idling in front of the building. Honor leans into the passenger side window, utters something to the driver and a thick-set man in the front passenger seat, then opens the rear passenger door and slips inside. Eddie looks back up at the building. So she’s in on this, too? Betty was paranoid about being discovered; she certainly would have mentioned Honor being here. No. Honor must have found them on her own. If he could find Betty and Griff, it was perfectly reasonable that private detectives with access to the resources purchased with the McAllister checkbook could find them, too.

  Eddie leans back against the tree, tries to piece together what’s going on. Is Honor waiting for them to come out, to take them back with her to Atlantic City? He notices the driver has cut the Hudson’s engine. No. They’re waiting. Maybe Betty and Griff are out.

  Or already gone.

  Why wasn’t he in his room to get her call?

  Why does it matter?

  He doesn’t want it to. He has fought them, these aimless, fiery feelings. And yet—what was the Emily Dickinson quote? “The Heart wants what it wants—or else it does not care.” What a great, sensitive guy he was—able to quote a poet! And yet what was the point? In high school he fell hard and fast for willowy June Price, only to watch her saunter off into the arms of the football team’s running back. Now this, falling for a beauty queen. Twenty-four and already a master in the art of unrequited love.

  A half hour passes before the door to the apartment building swings open again. Betty comes out first, Griff right behind, as he hustles them both down the steps. Instinctively, Eddie takes a step forward. The doors of the Hudson fly open, Honor McAllister and her two dark-suited compatriots scrambling onto the sidewalk. “Griff! Darling! It’s Mother! Wait! Wait!”

  Griff has no intention of waiting. He and Betty take off running down the block, until they stop at a parked Fleetline and separate, Griff tumbling into the driver’s side and firing up the ignition. Honor and the men carom back into their own sedan, which roars to life. Wherever Griff and Betty are going, they aren’t going alone, whether they like it or not.

  Betty grabs the handle of the Fleetline’s passenger door.

  And that’s when it happens.

  She glimpses back up Twenty-First Street and spots him, now standing in the lachrymose orange hue of the streetlight. Their eyes meet for the briefest of instants, locking together in understanding.

  Hers simply say, I have to.

  And like a summer storm she’s gone, into the car, which screams away from the curb toward Eighth Avenue, turning wildly at the corner, vanished in a cloud of gray exhaust. The Hudson zips down the street seconds later, makes its own turn, cha
sing the country’s most talked-about couple through the streets of New York.

  Eddie stands, still as a statue, looking down at his shadow on the sidewalk. He doesn’t even register the young couple now passing by him, giggling and snuggling, probably on their way to dinner, does not see the woman approaching from the other direction, the metal cart she pulls behind her brimming with a sack of cleaning supplies. He can only stare at the shadow, at the shape of his fedora at the top, the shoulders, the straight lines of his silhouette that end at his feet. This is what I am to her, he thinks. A shadow.

  Their eyes met for only seconds, but he could see what was in hers. He wonders if she could see what was in his. That she had made her final choice, and that he had accepted it.

  Enough.

  Eddie pivots away from his sidewalk shadow, begins to head east toward Seventh Avenue.

  He is less than twenty feet from the corner when he stops, looks up at the night sky. He turns around, heads back toward the apartment.

  If you can’t get the girl, he tells himself, you might as well get the story.

  ༶

  He has buzzed at least five times. No answer.

  Eddie checks the name again, which is ludicrous, because he’s already checked the name thrice. Third down on the left: R. SPENCER.

  It had been surprisingly easy finding him: while the Atlantic City detectives—and, presumably, those hired by Honor McAllister—had spent their days asking around the nursery and the bars and the beaches about Griff’s friends and contacts, trying to find out who might help him and Betty escape, Eddie had gone straight to NYU. He knew from experience that there was no one more likely to help you out in a jam than a buddy you’d lived with in college. College was the first place you were away from everything—your high school friends, your family, most specifically your parents. You shared secrets and rites of passage with your college roommate that you didn’t with anyone else. It hadn’t taken Eddie long to figure out that Griffin McAllister had been something of a loner during his years in high school. He’d originally enrolled at the elite Lawrenceville School in the middle of the state, only to last less than a year and finish his education at the decidedly less posh Atlantic City High School. Same thing in college: Accepted into NYU, lasted less than a year. But at NYU he’d had a roommate who’d quickly left, replaced by a new one: Reeve Spencer, a skinny prankster who’d grown up north of Albany and who was now an apprentice at a Midtown bank, handling mortgage applications. Reeve and Griff had been written up more than once for their behavior at NYU—including twice for public drunkenness. It was only natural, Eddie thought, that Griff would come to New York after fleeing Atlantic City with Betty. The city offered peerless terrain for disappearing.

  Perhaps if his newspaper career ends because of all of this, he can apply to become a detective. No doubt it pays better. And actually gets you dates.

  Eddie mulls whether to just begin randomly buzzing residents, see if anyone will let him in, when the inside door opens and a man of about thirty-five breezes past. Eddie catches the door with his foot, swings it open, and walks inside, up the three flights to Reeve’s apartment. Is this how Honor had gotten in? He suspects not. People like her merely open their wallets to get someone to let them in.

  He is about to rap on Reeve’s door but stops. It’s ajar.

  Eddie pushes it with his finger, listening to its slow, moaning creak, steps inside. “Hello? Hello? Reeve Spencer? Is anyone here?”

  The door to the apartment opens onto a small galley kitchen, its harsh overhead light illuminating a few glasses sitting downturned on a dishtowel by the sink. Eddie walks into the dark living room. Pieces of a broken lamp lie scattered on the floor.

  He pivots back to the kitchen, which has an alcove opposite where there is a small desk. The desk chair had been flipped on its side; Eddie can see one of its sides has splintered. He inspects the floor. Blood, small droplets all over the place. A few specks on the wall.

  His pulse speeds up.

  He can make out the light coming from the open crack of the bedroom door at the end of the hall, past the bathroom on the right. He steps carefully toward it, listening intently for movement, sound, anything. There is nothing but eerie silence. He pokes the door, watches it slowly swing open.

  Eddie has never laid eyes on a dead man before—his branch of the Tates does not believe in open caskets, no matter what the other English do—but he knows, instantly, that Reeve Spencer is dead. His body lies crumpled on the floor by the bed, torso now mired in a sticky, burgundy pool of blood. His head has been bashed in. His open eyes stare at nothing. A blood-soaked ashtray sits on the floor a few feet away.

  Eddie bolts from the room, fights the retching rising in his throat. He pictures it: Reeve and Griff arguing, Griff reaching for the ashtray. But why? How could you justify that? Griff was tall, muscular. He had at least thirty pounds and six inches on Reeve.

  This was not self-defense. This was murder.

  Unless.

  Eddie closes his eyes at the thought.

  What if it wasn’t Griff who killed Reeve?

  Twenty-two

  From the passenger seat, Betty cannot get a clear look into the rearview. But as they zigzag through the streets of Manhattan, she can see enough to know that the Hudson, with Honor McAllister inside it, is still in striking distance behind them.

  Griff has raced up Eighth Avenue, banking a sudden, hard right turn at Thirtieth Street, almost mowing down three people crossing. A block up, a right on Seventh Avenue, another few blocks, left on Twenty-Sixth, then up to Fifth Avenue, and so it’s gone for the last twenty minutes, literally getting nowhere fast. He’s sailed through at least two red lights, horns blaring from all sides in protest. Betty keeps her ever-whitening knuckles gripped to the passenger door. She’s afraid to utter a sound, to distract him. It is astonishing, she thinks, that a police car has not pulled them over. She worries what will happen if it does. If this is his reaction to being cornered by his own mother, there is no telling what it might be if surrounded by the cops.

  How did she let it come to this, to a car chase through the streets of Manhattan? She had a plan. Then Reeve had come home and torn it asunder. How could she possibly explain what had happened now? Who would ever believe her?

  They’d stood in the apartment, silent as the grave, as Honor had kept up her incessant knocking and inquiries, determined to be let in, assured they were inside. And then, after minutes that felt like hours, she had suddenly left, her heels clicking as she descended the marble staircase of the apartment building, until they heard the interior door swing open, and then the fainter, muffled sound of her going down the outside front steps.

  Griff had relaxed his hold on her. “She’ll be outside, waiting for us,” he said.

  Betty had not been able to get her mind off the gun. As long as it was her and Griff alone, she had a chance to calm him down, to cut through the voices and their fog of paranoia. But the gun. It was one thing to be a man who was under tremendous stress and having it manifest in crazy ways. It was quite another to be that man and to be carrying a loaded weapon.

  I have to get the gun. His hand was in his coat pocket, and though she couldn’t tell for sure, she was confident that he still had his right hand firmly around the grip. Her mind had been whirling with schemes and diversions to get him to take off the coat when he’d suddenly turned to her and said, “We’ll have to make a run for it.”

  Instinctively her eyes had darted around the room, high, low, and sideways, as if some sort of magic alternative was going to present itself. “I . . . I don’t know if that’s a good idea, my darling,” she eked out. “I am sure the authorities are downstairs with your mother. We’ll be walking right into a brigade of police.”

  Which might not be the worst thing, she thought. As long as I can get him to go down without the gun. Because if they walked outside, and there were policemen to greet them . . . there would be no way to know what Griff would do. He’d already
killed a man today. In those first moments after Honor left, his expression had seemed wild, untamed. There was just too much risk going out now, when they didn’t know what was on the other side of the door. She had to convince him to stay, to settle down. Maybe she could go out alone first, assess the situation, talk to Honor, develop the right plan.

  Oh, why hadn’t Eddie come?

  Griff had begun stalking around the apartment, throwing more things in the suitcase Betty had started to pack earlier. He was suddenly oddly calm and workmanlike, as if he were late for a train and needed to focus in order to allow enough time to make it to the station. “No, that isn’t how Mother operates,” he’d said flatly, wadding a white shirt into a ball and stuffing it in. “The only thing she’s truly afraid of is scandal. Believe me, I would know: I’ve caused enough of it. She would never involve the police. Though I am sure she’s not alone.”

  Betty watched him work, fascinated and unsettled by the spooky calm now draped over him like a shroud. “You think your father is here, too?”

  Griff scoffed. “Dear old dad? Ha! No sir. He lost interest in me years ago, when the doctors first diagnosed my ‘problem.’ Besides, he’d never take a day off from the nursery. That’s the child he really cares about.”

  “I am sure he cares about you. And Martha.”

  He straightened up, took a minute to consider this. “Martha. Yes, maybe. She’s pretty and bright and in many ways like a younger version of Mother, before all of the bitterness and social rivalry set in. Martha’s a good egg.”

  Betty was about to tell him she’d spoken to Martha today but stopped herself. Even an innocent phone call could seem like a betrayal, like it was Betty who had tipped off Honor where they were, drawn her to their doorstep. She had to make sure she stayed on his good side.

  “Even if you’re right,” Betty had said, trying to sound breezy, “your mother is formidable. If she has anyone with her, they are not likely going to let us simply walk past them out into the evening air.”