Women's Wiles

by Joyce Harrington

  “Me?”

  “I mean who might mistake me for you? An old lover?”

  She half smiled, surprised. “What do you know about me?”

  “Only what you’ve wanted me to know, like always. The lover was just a guess. After all, you’re forty years old and single. There must have been men, maybe married…

  “You make it all rather melodramatic.” She continued to look amused.

  “Shooting is melodramatic!”

  She didn’t reply.

  “What about Warren?” I persisted. “Would he kill to keep your job? Would he mistake me for you?”

  She looked at me in amazement, as if the possibility were too fantastic to believe. “Lynne, anyone—Warren in particular—who would take the trouble and risk involved in murder, would be a bit more careful than that.”

  “Maybe they don’t know you have an identical twin?”

  She sighed, her jaw settling back in a tired frown. “They know. When you’ve held as important a position as I have, believe me, they know.” She paused, then added, “But if you really think that someone is mistaking you for me, maybe you should move out of my apartment. Take a hotel room. I’ll pay for it, of course.”

  I shook my head

  Fingering the phone, she said, “Lynne, you haven’t made much of a case for this death threat. I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, but the truth is that you’ve always leaned on me. Are you sure that this death thing isn’t just a reaction to my own condition? It does happen in twins.”

  “I think not,” I snapped, finally exasperated. “I’ve been through years of therapy. Our bodies may be identical, but my mind is all my own.”

  She sat silent.

  The awkwardness grew. “Listen Wynne, I know you’ve got business to take care of. I interrupted your phone call when I came in. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She nodded, a tiredness showing in her eyes. But I wasn’t out of the room before she picked up the phone.

  As I walked down the hall, I thought again about what an amazing person she was. Dying from kidney failure, and she was still barking at subordinates. I wondered about Warren—did he allow her to run things from her hospital room? Did he believe Wynne’s story about her condition? Could he think I was she, coming in for treatment? Not likely. If Warren were anything like Wynne, by now he would have a solid grip on the vice presidency. He would have removed any trace of Wynne, and she’d have to fight him for the job.

  Still, I stopped by the door, afraid to go out.

  If Wynne wasn’t giving orders to Warren or some other subordinate, whom was she yelling at? “What do you think I’m paying you for?” she had demanded.

  She wasn’t paying anyone at the company. She wasn’t paying any expenses—I was handling those. There was nothing she needed.

  Or was there?

  My hand went around back to my remaining kidney.

  You Can’t Be a Little Girl All Your Life

  Stanley Ellin

  It was the silence that woke her. Not suddenly—Tom had pointed out more than once with a sort of humorous envy that she slept like the dead—but slowly; drawing her up from a hundred fathoms of sleep so that she lay just on the surface of consciousness, eyes closed, listening to the familiar pattern of night sounds around her, wondering where it had been disarranged.

  Then she heard the creak of a floorboard—the reassuring creak of a board under the step of a late-returning husband—and understood. Even while she was a hundred fathoms under, she must have known Tom had come into the room, must have anticipated the click of the bed-light being switched on, the solid thump of footsteps from bed to closet, from closet to dresser—the unfailing routine which always culminated with his leaning over her and whispering, “Asleep?” and her small groan which said yes, she was asleep but glad he was home, and would he please not stay up all the rest of the night working at those papers.

  So he was in the room now, she knew, but for some reason he was not going through the accustomed routine, and that was what had awakened her. Like the time they’d had the cricket, poor thing; for a week it had relentlessly chirped away the dark hours from some hidden corner of the house until she’d got used to it. The night it died, or went off to make a cocoon or whatever crickets do, she’d lain awake for an hour waiting to hear it, and then slept badly after that until she’d got used to living without it.

  Poor thing, she thought drowsily, not really caring very much but waiting for the light to go on, the footsteps to move comfortingly between bed and closet. Somehow the thought became a serpent crawling down her spine, winding tight around her chest. Poor thing, it said to her, poor stupid thing—it isn’t Tom at all!

  She opened her eyes at the moment the man’s gloved hand brutally slammed over her mouth. In that moment she saw the towering shadow of him, heard the sob of breath in his throat, smelled the sour reek of liquor. Then she wildly bit down on the hand that gagged her, her teeth sinking into the glove, grinding at it. He smashed his other fist squarely into her face. She went limp, her head lolling half off the bed. He smashed his fist into her face again.

  After that, blackness rushed in on her like a whirlwind.

  She looked at the pale balloons hovering under the ceiling and saw with idle interest that they were turning into masks, but with features queerly reversed, mouths on top, eyes below. The masks moved and righted themselves. Became faces. Dr. Vaughn. And Tom. And a woman. Someone with a small white dunce cap perched on her head. A nurse.

  The doctor leaned over her, lifted her eyelid with his thumb, and she discovered that her face was one throbbing bruise. He withdrew the thumb and grunted. From long acquaintance, she recognized it as a grunt of satisfaction.

  He said, “Know who I am, Julie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Know what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you feel?”

  She considered that. “Funny. I mean, far away. And there’s a buzzing in my ears.”

  “That was the needle. After we brought you around you went into a real sweet hysteria, and I gave you a needle. Remember that?”

  “No.”

  “Just as well. Don’t let it bother you.”

  It didn’t bother her. What bothered her was not knowing the time. Things were so unreal when you didn’t know the time. She tried to turn her head toward the clock on the night-table, and the doctor said, “It’s a little after six. Almost sunrise. Probably be the first time you’ve ever seen it, I’ll bet.”

  She smiled at him as much as her swollen mouth would permit. “Saw it last New Year’s,” she said.

  Tom came around the other side of the bed. He sat down on it and took her hand tightly in his. “Julie,” he said. “Julie, Julie, Julie,” the words coming out in a rush as if they had been building up in him with explosive force.

  She loved him and pitied him for that, and for the way he looked. He looked awful. Haggard, unshaven, his eyes sunk deep in his head, he looked as if he were running on nerve alone. Because of me, she thought unhappily, all because of me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry!” He gripped her hand so hard that she winced. “Because some lunatic—some animal—!”

  “Oh, please!”

  “I know. I know you want to shut it out, darling, but you mustn’t yet. Look, Julie, the police have been waiting all night to talk to you. They’re sure they can find the man, but they need your help. You’ll have to describe him, tell them whatever you can about him. Then you won’t even have to think about it again. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew you would.”

  He started to get up, but the doctor said, “No, you stay here with her. I’ll tell them on my way out. Have to get along, anyhow—these all-night shifts are hard on an old man.” He stood with his hand on the doorknob. “When they find him,” he said in a hard voice, “I’d like the pleasure—” and let it go at that, knowing they understood.

&
nbsp; The big, white-haired man with the rumpled suit was Lieutenant Christensen of the police department. The small, dapper man with the mustache was Mr. Dahl of the district attorney’s office. Ordinarily, said Mr. Dahl, he did not take a personal part in criminal investigations, but when it came to—that is, in a case of this kind, special measures were called for. Everyone must cooperate fully. Mrs. Barton must cooperate, too. Painful as it might be, she must answer Lieutenant Christensen’s questions frankly and without embarrassment. Would she do that?

  Julie saw Tom nodding encouragement to her. “Yes,” she said.

  She watched Lieutenant Christensen draw a notebook and pad from his pocket. His gesture, when he pressed the end of the pen to release its point, made him look as if he were stabbing at an insect.

  He said, “First of all, I want you to tell me exactly what happened. Everything you can remember about it.”

  She told him, and he scribbled away in the notebook, the pen clicking at each stroke.

  “What time was that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “About what time? The closer we can pin it down, the better we can check on alibis. When did you go to bed?”

  “At ten thirty.”

  “And Mr. Barton came home around twelve, so we know it happened between ten thirty and twelve.” The lieutenant addressed himself to the notebook, then pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Now for something even more important.”

  “Yes?”

  “Just this. Would you recognize the man if you saw him again?”

  She closed her eyes, trying to make form out of that monstrous shadow, but feeling only the nauseous terror of it. “No,” she said.

  “You don’t sound so sure about it.”

  “But I am.”

  “How can you be? Yes, I know the room was kind of dark and all that, but you said you were awake after you first heard him come in. That means you had time to get adjusted to the dark. And some light from the streetlamp outside hits your window shade here. You wouldn’t see so well under the conditions, maybe, but you’d see something, wouldn’t you? I mean, enough to point out the man if you had the chance. Isn’t that right?”

  She felt uneasily that he was right and she was wrong, but there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it. “Yes,” she said, “but it wasn’t like that.”

  Dahl, the man from the district attorney’s office, shifted on his feet. “Mrs. Barton—” he started to say, but Lieutenant Christensen silenced him with a curt gesture of the hand.

  “Now look,” the lieutenant said. “Let me put it this way. Suppose we had this man some place where you could see him close up, but he couldn’t see you at all. Can you picture that? He’d be right up there in front of you, but he wouldn’t even know you were looking at him. Don’t you think it would be pretty easy to recognize him then?”

  Julie found herself growing desperately anxious to give him the answer he wanted, to see what he wanted her to see; but no matter how hard she tried she could not. She shook her head hopelessly, and Lieutenant Christensen drew a long breath.

  “All right,” he said, “then is there anything you can tell me about him? How big was he? Tall, short, or medium.”

  The shadow towered over her. “Tall. No, I’m not sure. But I think he was.”

  “White or colored?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “About how old?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anything distinctive about his clothes? Anything you might have taken notice of?”

  She started to shake her head again, then suddenly remembered. “Gloves,” she said, pleased with herself. “He was wearing gloves.”

  “Leather or wool?”

  “Leather.” The sour taste of the leather was in her mouth now. It made her stomach turn over.

  Click-click went the pen, and the lieutenant looked up from the notebook expectantly. “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  The lieutenant frowned. “It doesn’t add up to very much, does it? I mean, the way you tell it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said, and wondered why she was so ready with that phrase now. What was it that she had done to feel sorry about? She felt the tears of self-pity start to rise, and she drew Tom’s hand to her breast, turning to look at him for comfort. She was shocked to see he was regarding her with the same expression that the lieutenant wore.

  The other man—Dahl—was saying something to her.

  “Mrs. Barton,” he said, and again, “Mrs. Barton,” until she faced him. “I know how you feel, Mrs. Barton, but what I have to say is terribly important. Will you please listen to me?”

  “Yes,” she said numbly.

  “When I talked to you at one o’clock this morning, Mrs. Barton, you were in a state—well, you do understand that I wasn’t trying to badger you then. I was working on your behalf. On behalf of the whole community, in fact.”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything about it.”

  “I see. But you understand now, don’t you? And you do know that there’s been a series of these outrages in the community during recent years, and that the administration and the press have put a great deal of pressure—rightly, of course—on my office and on the police department to do something about it?”

  Julie let her head fall back on the pillow, and closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. I also say that we can’t do very much unless the injured party—the victim—helps us in every way possible. And why won’t she? Why does she so often refuse to identify the criminal or testify against him in cases like this? Because she might face some publicity? Because she might have started off by encouraging the man, and is afraid of what he’d say about her on the witness stand? I don’t care what the reason is, that woman is guilty of turning a wild beast loose on her helpless neighbors!

  “Look, Mrs. Barton. I’ll guarantee that the man who did this has a police record, and the kind of offenses listed on it—well, I wouldn’t even want to name them in front of you. There’s a dozen people at headquarters right now looking through all such records, and when they find the right one it’ll lead us straight to him. But after that, you’re the only one who can help us get rid of him for keeps. I want you to tell me right now that you’ll do that for us when the time comes. It’s your duty. You can’t turn away from it.”

  “I know. But I didn’t see him.”

  “You saw more than you realize, Mrs. Barton. Now, don’t get me wrong, because I’m not saying that you’re deliberately holding out or anything like that. You’ve had a terrible shock. You want to forget it, get it out of your mind completely. And that’s what’ll happen, if you let yourself go this way. So, knowing that, and not letting yourself go, do you think you can describe the man more accurately now?”

  Maybe I had been wrong about Tom, she thought, about the way he had looked at me. She opened her eyes hopefully and was bitterly sorry she had. His expression of angry bewilderment was unchanged, but now he was leaning forward, staring at her as if he could draw the right answer from her by force of will. And she knew he couldn’t. The tears overflowed, and she cried weakly; then magically a tissue was pressed into her hand. She had forgotten the nurse. The upside-down face bent over her from behind the bed, and she was strangely consoled by the sight of it. All these men in the room—even her husband—had been made aliens by what had happened to her. It was good to have a woman there.

  “Mrs. Barton!” Dahl’s voice was unexpectedly sharp, and Tom turned abruptly toward him. Dahl must have caught the warning in that, Julie realized with gratitude; when he spoke again his voice was considerably softer. “Mrs. Barton, please let me put the matter before you bluntly. Let me show you what we’re faced with here.

  “A dangerous man is on the prowl. You seem to think he was drunk, but he wasn’t too drunk to know exactly where he could find a victim who was alone and unprotected. He probably had this house staked out for weeks
in advance, knowing your husband’s been working late at his office. And he knew how to get into the house. He scraped this window sill here pretty badly, coming in over it.

  “He wasn’t here to rob the place—he had the opportunity, but he wasn’t interested in it. He was interested in one thing, and one thing only.” Surprisingly, Dahl walked over to the dresser and lifted the framed wedding picture from it. “This is you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Julie said in bewilderment.

  “You’re a very pretty young woman, you know.” Dahl put down the picture, lifted up her hand mirror, and approached her with it. “Now I want to show you how a pretty young woman looks after she’s tried to resist a man like that.” He suddenly flashed the mirror before her and she shrank in horror from its reflection.

  “Oh, please!” she cried.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Dahl said harshly. “According to the doctor, you’ll heal up fine in a while. But until then, won’t you see that man as clear as day every time you look into this thing? Won’t you be able to point him out, and lay your hand on the Bible, and swear he was the one?”

  She wasn’t sure any more. She looked at him wonderingly, and he threw wide his arms, summing up his case. “You’ll know him when you see him again, won’t you?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” she said.

  She thought she would be left alone after that, but she was wrong. The world had business with her, and there was no way of shutting it out. The doorbell chimed incessantly. The telephone in the hall rang, was silent while someone took the call, then rang again. Men with hard faces—police officials—would be ushered into the room by Tom. They would duck their heads at her in embarrassment, would solemnly survey the room, then go off in a comer to whisper together. Tom would lead them out, and would return to her side. He had nothing to say. He would just sit there, taut with impatience, waiting for the doorbell or telephone to ring again.

  He was seldom apart from her, and Julie, watching him, found herself increasingly troubled by that. She was keeping him from his work, distracting him from the thing that mattered most to him. She didn’t know much about his business affairs, but she did know he had been working for months on some very big deal—the one that had been responsible for her solitary evenings at home—and what would happen to it while he was away from his office? She had only been married two years, but she was already well-versed in the creed of the businessman’s wife. Troubles at home may come and go, it said, but Business abides. She used to find that idea repellent, but now it warmed her. Tom would go to the office, and she would lock the door against everybody, and there would be continuity.