“All right,” I said, “if you think it makes so much sense why don’t you go tell Mr. Ten Eyck about it, instead of me?”
“In other words you’d like to find out just what I know and just what I still have to drag out of you. You’ve got a clever way of putting things, sonny. I think even your mother would be surprised to find out how smart her boy was.”
“You leave my mother out of this! And I wasn’t trying to be smart. All I meant was you don’t know anything because I didn’t do anything!”
“Oh, yes, you did. When you were standing up so nobly to help me you said something that turned on a great, white light. The kind you see in comic strips with an electric bulb drawn around it and the word ‘Idea’ in it. You told Ten Eyck that I said Kate Ballou had made a mess of her life, that, if anything, she was to be pitied. And do you know the funny thing about that? It was something I said for the first and only time to your sister the night before when we were in the kitchen together. And it was nothing she would ever discuss with you. No, there was a pair of ears against the kitchen door picking that tidbit up. Your ears, in fact.”
“I went down to get something to eat. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Only when I heard you and Bettina there I didn’t want to hang around!”
“And that shows good bringing-up, doesn’t it? And it also showed me that around the time somebody killed Kate Ballou you were up and doing. After that I started thinking, I started putting little pieces of the picture together. When you came down to breakfast, for instance, you grabbed the newspaper right there at the table and started going through it as if there was some big important news story you were afraid of missing.”
“A lot of people read the newspaper!”
“A lot of people do, but not you, Dick. No, this was the first time since I’ve known you that I’ve even caught you looking at the paper. But if you knew Kate Ballou was dead and that maybe the news had been broken you’d be in a sweat to see what the paper said, wouldn’t you?”
“If I knew she was dead!”
“Oh, granted, but there’s more to the picture than that. Much more. Like the little business of your mother’s remarking something about my dirty shoes at the breakfast table, which made me remember that they were all dirtied up when I first put them on. Dirtied with black, sooty coal-dust stains. And since they were your new sneakers, and since this house uses a gas heating system while Kate’s cellar is loaded with coal, it could be, it just could be, that those sneakers were over in her cellar the night before. With you in them, of course.”
“Do you think Mr. Ten Eyck would even listen to this stuff?”
“I’m not interested in what Mr. Ten Eyck would listen to. I’m only interested in putting together the little pieces. Like the one when you suddenly walked into the house the first time Ten Eyck was here, and we were all sitting around getting the law laid down.
“When you walked up to the house and saw the crowd here and all the excitement, did you stop to ask anyone what had happened? Did you rush into the house scared to death that something might have happened to anyone there? That would be the logical reaction for anyone breaking in on a scene like that. But all you did was show some annoyance because the lawn was getting mussed up. You weren’t worrying about anything having happened to somebody in the house, to your mother, for instance, because you knew damn well what had happened before anybody told you about it!”
I said, “Maybe you really think I did it, maybe you’re just trying to make trouble, I don’t know. But now I see why you’re talking to me like this, and not to Mr. Ten Eyck. You know he wouldn’t believe any of this stuff!”
“I told you I don’t give a damn whether he would or not. I know you did it. For all the shrewd way you twisted everything around I know you really did use that key from Junie’s room to get into Kate’s house, and this morning when the attic was locked it was just you trying to get the key back in place before Junie would find it was missing. And I know you did see Bob Macek walk away from that door, because you were the one behind the door all the time!
“And I also know that you had that note from him in your hand, and that you tore his signature away. It’s not in any of your pockets or the wastepaper basket or around the driveway. But it’s somewhere around wherever you happened to throw it.
“The only thing I don’t know is why you did it. But I’m going to find out. I’m dead serious, Dick. Before I get out of this room I’m going to know what went on between you and Kate Ballou.”
My arms were swinging easily at my sides, and my fists were so tight now that my fingernails were cutting into my palms.
I said, “You’d better go now, and not talk any more. I don’t like it.”
“Why did you do it, Dick? Did you go over there to take something, and she caught you at it?”
I said, “I don’t come from the kind of place you do. I don’t go around stealing things.”
“Were you in love with her, was that it? No, I’m not being sarcastic, Dick. You’re big enough and old enough to be as much in love as anyone else in the world, and it can lead you to do queer things. Was it something like that?”
“I hated her,” I said.
He looked at me a long time. “Your mother’s son, all right,” he whispered at last.
That was when I swung my fist at him. Not straight into the face because I didn’t want his head to bang back against the door where the sound could be heard, but in a sharp hook that would smash him down where I could really get at him. But he was a cat all right, all cat, and he moved so quickly that the punch didn’t land clean. It glanced along the side of his face, and I could feel the cheek tear under my signet ring. Then he half fell, half scrambled to the bed, and rolled over and across it to land on his feet on the other side, and stand there facing me before I could get at him again.
The cut on his cheek suddenly opened while he was standing there like that, and with a surprised gesture he put his hand up to it and then looked at his fingers. I was around the bed and close to him again, but he stepped back looking so bloody and beaten that I stopped short.
“All right,” I said, “now I’m telling you. Nobody wants you around here any more, not even my sister. So the best thing you can do is get out of Sutton and stay out. And any ideas you have about me you can take right with you.”
He had his hand at his cheek again, and then he held it out so that I could see the bloody marks on his fingers. “Look,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it himself.
I should have known him better. I dropped my eyes to look, and the next thing I knew, the edge of that hand hit my throat like an ax blade. I felt it was sinking in deeper and deeper, that it had suddenly taken a tight grip around my throat so that I was being strangled on my feet, but when I put up my hands to grab at it, it wasn’t there. Matt was standing back watching me, and as the pain reached down and tore into my chest and lungs I tried to say something to him but couldn’t. I went down to my knees, and while I was like that, trying to suck in a single drop of air, the heel of his moccasin struck me full against the jaw and I went over sideways on the floor.
The room was gauzy now, and he was just a shadow against the grayness, but I saw him move toward me and then like a miracle felt the air tear into my lungs. His feet were at my side now, and I grabbed for them with one arm. He went down, half on top of me, and with a furious kick freed one leg, but I tightened my grip around the other, and with my free arm I tried to catch him around the neck. On the first try my hand slipped away and caught the tee-shirt, ripping it down the back, but then I had a lock on his neck and I was squeezing it tight.
It was like trying to overpower an armful of hard rubber and steel springs, and I tried to roll over and get my weight on him, but every time I moved, his knees drove into my belly like pistons. Our heads were close together, and I could hear his breath starting to bubble between his lips. I knew if I could only hold that grip around his neck he’d go limp sooner or later, but just when I
thought his body was beginning to sag I felt his hand probing at my face. Then I felt his thumb at my eye gouging into it with a savage intentness, and that was when I knew my first real fear of him.
He would blind me if he could, maim me if he could. And there was no way to stop him except to do as he wanted. Even if I could break and batter him there I had the sick feeling that he would not even care, but would come back again and again until it was his turn. He would never leave me alone. He would hunt me out day or night wherever I was, and then we would be locked together like this again.
And the strangest thing of all was that we fought in silence. I didn’t want anyone to hear, and I think he felt the same way. So, pulling and beating at each other as we were, we never spoke a word, we moved bodies and arms and legs to avoid the sudden clatter against furniture.
I pulled free of him and tried to come to my feet so that I could meet him upright, but he was quicker than I was. While I was still on, my knees his fist drove into my face with the impact of a metal weight, and I almost went over backwards. Then I tried to grab at his arm, and when he pulled away I got to my feet facing him. He struck again and watched me as I swayed on my feet.
“Dick,” he whispered, “why did you kill her?”
I shook my head, and he struck again so that the room rose up and heaved about me.
“Why did you kill her?”
I lurched at him, and this time his foot jammed hard into my shin so that a geyser of pain suddenly boiled up through my leg. I grabbed at it with both hands, and while I was doing this his fist moved so fast that I didn’t even see it. I only knew that I was mildly surprised when the room tilted sideways and the floor came up to hit me along the side of my head.
Then I thought it was the blood pounding through my head, but I realized it was someone knocking hard on the door. “Richard!” my mother shouted from far away. “Richard, what’s going on in there!”
Matt’s feet were right next to my head now, and I knew what he was going to do. He was going to kick my face until there was nothing left but a bloody thing without eyes or nose or mouth. Until there was nothing left at all.
I tried to put my arms over my face to shield it, but he was kneeling next to me now, and he pushed them aside. His chest was heaving so that when he spoke, the words came out queer and broken.
“Dick,” he said, and it sounded as if he were saying a prayer, “Dick, if you tell me what happened I swear I won’t go to the police about it. But you’ve got to tell me, don’t you understand, and you’ve got to tell your people, too. Will you do that?”
I tried to say, “All right,” but I couldn’t talk. I moved my head so that he could see what I meant.
He put his arms under my shoulders and sat me up like that with my back against the dresser. Then I saw that his whole face was smeared with blood, and his arms, and the torn piece of tee-shirt that was left on him. I must look like that, too, I thought, and my heart sank when I realized how my mother would feel when she saw me. But it was too late to do anything about it. Matt pulled open the door, and my mother ran in, and my father, and Bettina right after her.
“Richard!” my mother screamed. “He’s beaten you up! Oh, look at you. Harry, why don’t you get the police! You stand there like that …!”
I shook my head even though it hurt bad to do it. “No police,” I managed to say.
It was all I could say until they had me cleaned up a little and sitting in my armchair, and all of them standing around me, wondering. And then I found that it wasn’t as hard to tell as I thought it would be. Not if you sat back with your eyes closed so that you couldn’t see what they felt. Not if you kept your voice flat and even, so that you would be telling just what happened, and none of the feelings would come back to you.
CHAPTER TWO
I was playing La Valse by Ravel when it started. I don’t like most of Ravel’s music, and the Bolero, which is all most people know about him, is very dull when you hear it a couple of times. But La Valse is different. I must have played it ten times since I got it the week before, and every time I could get the same excitement from it. If I closed my eyes I could see old Vienna and a huge ballroom in it; not one of those movie ballrooms but bigger than your eyes could take in. The floor was like a mirror and it went out farther than you could see, and the pillars all around went up so high they disappeared into clouds. That was the picture.
Then people started to fill the floor. The women wore white swirling dresses, and the men wore uniforms of all colors. They danced, whirling around and around that ballroom, and all they knew was that this ballroom was the whole world, and they were happy dancing around in it.
And the way I saw it, the most beautiful woman dancing there was my mother, not the way she looked now, but much younger, the way she looked in the picture on my dresser. I didn’t see her dancing with my father because he wouldn’t have fitted, but she was dancing with someone else who wasn’t important. And she and all the rest of them went around that room with the music.
But there was another world outside the ballroom, all wars and hate and trouble, and it started to push close around. Everything got dark as the smoke of the wars blew through the room, and the pillars were cracking and bending because they couldn’t take the weight. And then everything came crashing down on the ballroom, and the music ended.
That was the way I saw it, and I was playing the records when I thought that perhaps my mother would like to come to my room and hear them because she never had. I went down the hall to her room, but when I got near the door I could hear that she and my father were arguing. It surprised me a little because they sounded so serious, and because she and my father never argued much. Most of the time he acted as if he didn’t know she was around, or didn’t care, and all she ever seemed to worry about was that no one should ever bother him or get in his way. When Bettina and I were kids my mother was always saying, for one reason or another, “Now, don’t bother daddy with that nonsense, children. You know he doesn’t like you in the way.” And then she’d try to make up to us for it so that we wouldn’t feel hurt.
I was surprised now to hear them arguing like this, and I was going to turn around and go back to my room when suddenly I heard my mother say, I’m going to that Ballou woman to settle things between you two, and I stopped short. Then he answered something, and she said, How do you think it feels when I see her bold as brass, laughing at me? Do you think there’s any pleasure in my life with that filth under my nose!
I stood there, and all I could think was, My father! My father and that woman! and it was like suddenly seeing him the way he really was. In front of the world he could be hard and cold, with a sharp tongue, and that way of not caring what happened to you, but where no one could see, he carried on with another woman, and the two of them could have a fine time laughing at my mother. The hardest thing to understand was that it was my father—who went down to the store every morning, and came home every evening with the newspaper under his arm, and who sat outside trying to paint, and who sometimes brought me things. It was like the outside world crashing down on the ballroom in that waltz.
I went back down the hall quietly so that they wouldn’t know I had been there, and when I got into my room I shut the door tight behind me and then I took the record from the machine and I smashed it. There was another one in the album, and I took that out and smashed it, too. But even as I was picking up the little pieces and throwing them into my wastepaper basket I knew what I had to do. It was hard work getting the pieces up, my fingers were as cold and numb as if I had kept them in ice water for an hour, but with each piece that I picked up and threw away I saw clearer and clearer what had to be done.
I would go to Miss Ballou and tell her she had to keep away from my father, that maybe it would be best for her to go away altogether so that there wouldn’t even be any questions afterward. She might not like it, she might think I was a fresh kid talking out of turn, but I knew different. My father was doing wrong, and my mo
ther was being hurt because of that, and there couldn’t even be any argument about it. When I tried to picture how she would answer me it was hard to see her even being angry. Ashamed, maybe, but not angry.
I slipped on my sneakers and went downstairs and out across the alley. I rang the bell a couple of times, but she wasn’t in. The house was dark and empty, and standing there I realized that she might not get in until the early morning. When she came up from the city you usually heard her car running into the garage about two or three in the morning. With that car if she started around midnight from New York she could avoid highway traffic and be up at Sutton in no time.
While I was standing there the side door of our house slammed, and my father came out and walked direct to the garage. There was a chance that he would see me standing in Miss Ballou’s doorway when he backed the car out, so as soon as he started it up I ran across, but slipped on the driveway and he almost backed into me. I yelled, and he stopped the car, looking scared.
He said something, and I told him I was all right, but it was hard to get the words out. It made me sick just to look at him then, and think what he was really like, and I was glad when he didn’t fuss around, but just drove away.
When I was back in my room I sat down and tried to get my thoughts straight. I could see her by luck sometime, and talk to her, but that wasn’t what I wanted. It had to be quick, as quick as possible. It had to be done and settled before anyone even knew about it. I knew Junie had a key to next door in her room; if I could get it I could be over there waiting when Miss Ballou came home.
Junie was out on the porch where she used to go every evening, so I went straight up to her room. I didn’t have to hunt for the key; it was hanging on the wall, and there was a die cut on its head with 159 on it so that I knew it was for Miss Ballou’s house. Then I went down to my mother’s room and knocked on the door.
The Key to Nicholas Street Page 17