The Key to Nicholas Street

by Stanley Ellin

“You ran away.”

  “No, I didn’t. I walked, like anybody else would.”

  “You walked like anybody else. And you happened to leave the note there like anybody else, even if you didn’t expect to come back.”

  “I didn’t even think of the note.”

  “Your mind must be very busy when you walk like anybody else.”

  “I swear I’m telling the truth, Mr. Ten Eyck. Why don’t you believe me!”

  “Well now,” said Mr. Ten Eyck, “since you put it to me so nice I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’re lying. You’re not lying so good, but I have to say you’re trying hard every step of the way. You are ready to knock down the lady’s house for a bill of maybe a few dollars. You write a note, and then change your mind, but you still leave the note. And then for a witness we have this mystery man behind the door. Of all, I think he is the hardest thing to swallow.”

  “You don’t believe him because you don’t want to believe him!” Junie burst out. “But there was somebody there, and I can tell you who it was even if I wasn’t there myself.”

  My mother went to her before Mr. Ten Eyck could open his mouth to answer this. “Junie,” she said gently, “if you’d only understand that there’s nothing to get excited about. All Mr. Ten Eyck is trying to do …”

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Ayres, but there’s a lot for Bob and me to get excited about.” She looked around at all of us, and I saw then that she must have put on mascara the first thing in the morning because there were two black tracks marking the tear stains on her cheeks. “When there’s any kind of trouble none of you have to give a damn about it because you’re Nicholas Street, and you don’t even know what trouble is! But Bob and I are just dirty, rotten Five Corners, aren’t we? And if there’s any kind of stick-up or murder or anything, you know damn well we did it, didn’t we!”

  “Look, girl,” Mr. Ten Eyck managed to get in, “we aren’t saying you did anything ….”

  “You don’t have to say it. Not when it’s written all over your stupid faces that you think it.”

  “Junie!” my mother said, shocked.

  “Well, you are thinking it, aren’t you?”

  “And maybe it would change our minds,” Mr. Ten Eyck said angrily, “if you told us a little more about that man in the house you know so much about.”

  “I couldn’t tell you half as much as he could himself,” Junie said slowly, and she was looking squarely at Matt now. “Could I, Mr. Chaves?” she asked sweetly.

  Matt’s face was impassive. “Are you saying that I was in Miss Ballou’s house last night, Junie?” There wasn’t a shade of anger or irony or incredulity in the way he said it. It was a polite question, as if he had overheard something and now wanted to learn what it was.

  “I’m saying just that, Mr. Chaves.”

  “Are you sure of this?” Mr. Ten Eyck demanded.

  “If you mean, was I there and saw him, I already told you no. But I’ll swear on the Bible it was Mr. Chaves, and anything that happened to Miss Ballou, he did it!”

  “But how do you know?” Mr. Ten Eyck persisted.

  “Because of the way he’s been carrying on today, that’s how I know! When he knew I was going over there this morning he was all pins and needles for me not to. He’d do anything to keep me from going over there in that cellar, because he knew all along that she was laying there dead! He even locked me out of the attic when I went to get the key to go over there, only afterward he lost his nerve and tried to pull a bluff about it. He’s smart, all right, but he’s not smart enough to get away with that kind of stuff!”

  Mr. Ten Eyck turned grimly to Matt. “Is this true?”

  Matt’s face was still blank as stone. “Unfortunately for the Five Corners minority,” he said, “it isn’t.”

  It was cruel, that facility he had in flicking the whip on a person’s emotional hide, and I don’t know who was stung more just then: Junie, who must have felt he was laughing at her, or Mr. Ten Eyck, who must have felt that somehow he was supporting Junie’s charge of prejudice. It was Mr. Ten Eyck who got in the first word.

  “Well now,” he said coldly, “this is very interesting, this business of the key. Maybe we ought to clear it up right now. Do you think you could, my friend?”

  Although the question was directed at Matt it was Junie who instantly started talking away a mile a minute, and so confusingly that even I couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was saying. But then my mother cut in, and while she has a way of lingering over the smallest details for an uncomfortable length of time she has a sound memory. When she finished, Mr. Ten Eyck nodded his head understandingly.

  “I see,” he said, “so it could be that our friend here locked the attic as a practical joke—or maybe for more serious reasons. Now could you tell me which it was,” he said to Matt.

  Out of a clear sky my brother said, “He can’t tell you.”

  Mr. Ten Eyck sounded completely bewildered and angry now. “He can’t?”

  Dick swallowed hard. “No, because he didn’t lock the attic. I did.”

  My mother said wildly, “You did?” and Dick flinched at the sound of her voice. “But you said you went right out of the house after breakfast!”

  “I didn’t mean I ran right out of the house like that,” Dick said impatiently. “I didn’t feel so good so I hung around upstairs a little, and then I remembered Miss Ballou said she had some good records over there, and that I could borrow them any time I wanted. Only, I knew she wasn’t home so I figured I’d get Junie’s key.”

  “But all this business of locking the attic,” Mr. Ten Eyck said. “All this practical joking …”

  “I wasn’t playing any joke. It was just I heard Junie coming upstairs, and I got scared she’d find me there and wouldn’t like it. I shut the door before I even thought of it.”

  Mr. Ten Eyck shook his head uncomprehendingly. “But if you wanted that key so much why didn’t you ask for it?”

  Dick looked shamefaced. “Because I knew my mother wouldn’t like me to go over there. I just didn’t want her to find out. There’s no crime in that, is there?”

  “Oh, Dick,” mother said wearily, “you ought to know me better than that.”

  Mr. Ten Eyck brushed her aside. “So it was you up in that attic and not Mr. Chaves here.”

  “That’s right.”

  Mr. Ten Eyck looked at him narrowly. “How did you know what key to look for?”

  Dick licked his lips. “I—well, I figured it would look like the key to our side door. It should, shouldn’t it?”

  “Maybe yes, and maybe no. Now, tell me, where did you find this key?”

  Dick looked around at us helplessly. “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you do. What part of the room did you find the key in? Under the bed? On the ceiling?”

  “Oh,” Dick said with an air of surprise, and for a long minute his hand strayed worriedly over his face. “Oh, that? I think it was in the dresser drawer. I mean, I’m sure it was. The top drawer of the dresser.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I—Yes, I’m sure.”

  He was so pitifully shaken and uncertain that I felt achingly sorry for him, even though the picture of him fumbling through Junie’s private belongings, whatever the reason, was an unpleasant one. But I felt even more sorry for him when Mr. Ten Eyck suddenly turned to Junie and said, “Is that where you keep the key?” and she answered with absolute triumph in her voice, “No, it’s never there. It’s right on a hook on the wall near the door so I won’t forget it when I go over to Miss Ballou’s.”

  Dick’s lips moved feebly, but nothing came out.

  “Were you in that room?” demanded Mr. Ten Eyck.

  Dick shook his head almost imperceptibly, and mother cried, “Dick, why did you say you were? Why do you want to get mixed up in all this!”

  It was as if she had suddenly jolted the life back into him.

  “I don’t care!” he shouted. “I don’t believe Matt did
it! Now you’re all trying to pin it on him, but he wouldn’t do anything like that. You know he wouldn’t!”

  Mr. Ten Eyck looked furious. “So you think it’s better to lie about it, to mix everything up at such a time!”

  “I only wanted to help him.”

  “Why should you want to help him? Don’t you think he can take care of himself?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is he didn’t do it!”

  “And why are you so sure about that?”

  “Because he isn’t that kind. He’s funny about a lot of things, but he wouldn’t kill anybody. And he’d never want to hurt Miss Ballou. He even said her life was a mess, and all he’d do was pity her. You don’t talk like that about someone you want to kill, do you?”

  I was having my lesson thrown into my face by my own brother. He had never known Matt as I did, he could never be as close to him as I was, and yet he was saying out loud before everyone what I should have been saying. And listening to him I hated him and loved him for it.

  “Well, do you!” he demanded of Mr. Ten Eyck.

  It was clear that it was taking Mr. Ten Eyck an effort to keep his exasperation bottled up. “Well now,” he said, “I am sure that you read a lot of books on psychology, Dick, and you must be very smart in it. But I want to tell you one thing. And,” he said pointedly to the rest of us, “this goes for all of you. A woman has been killed. I do not think murder is cute like it says in some of those detective books which people read who have never seen a man lying dead with a bullet in him, or his skull split open with an ax, or maybe a woman with her neck broken by somebody.

  “And I don’t think it’s cute to lie about things and mix them up so that maybe whoever did it can walk away and do it again sometime when he feels like it. I mean this. I think you should know that, and I think you should respect it.”

  Stuffy little man that he was, he could be impressive at times. Of us all only Matt seemed to be unimpressed.

  “All right,” he said brusquely, “then getting down to cases on this signature business I’d like to point out that there’s a big difference between the impression made by a signed letter and an anonymous letter. And anyone smart enough to know that could figure this note would catch up with Bob sooner or later, which it did, and when it did it would automatically make him look guilty as hell.”

  “If somebody is trying to pin this on me,” Bob said in a choked voice. “That guy behind the door. If I could only get my hands on him …”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Ten Eyck, “so now we’re back to the mystery man.”

  “There was somebody there, Mr. Ten Eyck. I swear there was.”

  “Well now, you swear to everything so easy, boy, I would like to think once or twice before believing it. Even more, I’d like us to do what we came for. As much as possible I want to reconstruct this business so I can see for myself what everybody is talking about. If we go in the driveway and have everybody do what they say they were doing maybe all this stuff about doors and notes and mystery men will make some sense.”

  “In the driveway!” my mother said, horrified. “With everybody in the street standing there …”

  Mr. Ten Eyck sighed. “I’ll tell them to go away,” he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  They were all out there as mother had known they would be, and Mr. Ten Eyck did tell them to go away. It wasn’t easy—Mrs. McIntyre was especially sharp about it—but they finally went, and left us alone in the driveway there.

  It was very hot and still now. The sky was stretched tight without a cloud in it, and when I looked at our car parked in front of the house I could see the heat waves rippling over it without a break. Her car—Kate Ballou’s huge roadster—was in the garage, and I wondered what would become of it now. And what would become of those fine things that had always seemed to me a natural part of her—the jewelry, the pictures on the walls, the clothes in the closets. Somehow, it would have seemed right just to lock the door of that house and to let it stay like that until it all crumbled away and nothing was left. But it could never be done like that. Kate Ballou was dead and gone, but the things she left behind still had a life to live. They were more real than she was now. She would just be a name on some paintings and letters and documents, but they would be given away or sold, and would be the only things left of her that you could put your hand on.

  Matt once said, “I remember the first time I met Kate. She came into Wallace’s office, and there were four or five of us sitting around there, and she had that mink coat on. Not the one she has now, I suppose, but the one before it. Anyhow, I had just learned the facts of life about mink and knew a good one when I saw it, and I remember thinking that this baby cost more money than I was going to make that year.

  “And you know what she did? She pulled it off and tossed it back into a corner. Wherever Mr. Gunther and Mr. Jaeckel were that moment they must have felt the room tottering around them, but the coat bothered her, and the handiest thing to do was toss it aside, and that’s what she did.”

  “Admirable,” I said. “Of course, she wasn’t trying to make an impression on anyone, was she?”

  “That was my first guess, too, but I was wrong.”

  “Oh, you were.”

  “The wrongest kind of wrong. The more I came to know her, the more I came to know that the way she handled that coat was Kate Ballou through and through. And she’s that way about everything she owns except paintings. I don’t mean her commercial stuff, I mean the gallery work she paints or collects. But everything else is something to use, to get a kick out of, and to toss aside whenever you feel like it.”

  “And that to you is an enviable quality?”

  “Don’t you see why?”

  “I guess I’m pretty obtuse, but I don’t see why.”

  “You are pretty, and you are obtuse, but we’ll let that pass. The fact is that Kate is bigger than anything she owns. It’s a subtle point, but if you strain you’ll begin to get it. She’s bigger than her furs, or her car, or her pretty house on Nicholas Street, or anything else she holds title to. She herself is the big thing. She’s an accepted artist who’s doing good and will do better, and she can say, ‘I’m big, and therefore I have these things,’ not, ‘I have these things, and therefore I’m big.’ It’s only little people without any real meat to them who have to say, ‘Don’t look at me; look at what I own.’”

  “I can’t even say that, Matt. What do I own?”

  “You own me, darling. Just stick along with me, and you’ll wear rags.”

  “Oh, fine,” I said.

  “And love it.”

  So Kate Ballou said, “I’m big,” but now she was small. Smaller than the smallest thing in the world which had life in it. Smaller than that ant there, busily moving along the crack in the concrete, and then onto the scorching concrete itself, and then suddenly gone under a monstrous shoe. Crushed flat, and gone.

  I must have cried out, because they were all looking at me. And Dick lifted his shoe away from the tiny splotch on the concrete as he turned toward me, his face worried.

  “What’s wrong, sis?”

  “That ant!” I said, and then, “Nothing. Nothing at all’s wrong.”

  “You sounded as if something scared you silly. And you look funny. Don’t you feel well?”

  It struck me that he didn’t look well himself, that none of them did. “Oh, I feel fine!” I said. “I feel just dandy!”

  Mr. Ten Eyck looked at me over his glasses. “Now, now, Bettina, you know this blowing up doesn’t help things any.”

  “All right,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

  My voice said clearly enough that I wasn’t, but he let it go at that and turned to Dick. “Dick,” he said, “I want you to go to the garage where you were when you saw Bob. And Bob will go to the side door there and do over whatever he did last night. I mean, knocking at the door, and writing the note, and the way he looked at this mystery man he says was there, and so on. And you,” he said to Matt. “I’d like you
to do something, too.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to go inside there right by the door, and stand there. Just as if you heard somebody at the door, and you put your face there to see who it was.”

  “I see,” said Matt. “And what happens when Bob identifies me, and then I bring twenty witnesses from the ferry to prove I was there when all this was going on?”

  “What happens later is your business, my friend. First, we’ll try it my way.”

  The key did not work easily, but finally Mr. Ten Eyck shoved the door open, and Matt walked inside. Then the door was pulled shut and locked again while Bob took his position outside it, and Dick, his feet dragging, moved to the garage.

  “Now,” Mr. Ten Eyck said to Bob, “you came to the door here, and you thought maybe somebody was home. Then what did you do?”

  “I rang the bell.” Bob put his thumb against the bell, and I could hear the thin tinkle of it from the kitchen. “I held on and rang pretty steady, but nobody came.”

  “What did you do then? Knock?”

  Bob looked shocked. “At that hour? It must have been around ten o’clock. Anyhow, I could hear the bell was ringing. There wasn’t any sense knocking, was there?”

  “All right, so you just rang. Then what?”

  “Well, then I figured out about the note. I mean, I’d leave a note so she’d know to get in touch with me before she left town for good. So, I did.”

  “You had paper and pencil right with you?”

  “It wasn’t anything special. I always have them with me.”

  “Do you have them with you right now?”

  Bob’s hands went slowly to his pockets and then dropped limp at his side. His face was sick. “No, but the way you came to the house … I mean the way you jumped on me all of a sudden about Miss Ballou being killed and all. I didn’t even have time to get my shirt buttoned, the way you did it!”

  Mr. Ten Eyck said dryly, “You mean, if I hadn’t walked in on you like I did you would have taken paper and pencil with you to go pitch ball this afternoon.”

  “I didn’t say that! It’s just during work days I always have them with me! I have to have them for orders and stuff!”