There were no bold contrasts at all, no clearly-defined human figures, no dramatic, story-telling content. Everything seemed to float and quiver, to be suspended in the air, or to recede into rainbow-hued distances. It was a blue world of enchantment and wonder, bathed in the light that never was on sea or land. But it was not a real world that dealt with the human condition on any level. A sensitive hand had worked with the pigments and hues of Merlin's realm of magic, avoiding the abstract and the symbolical but producing something just as provocatively illusive on an entirely different plane.
She tried to visualize just one of them—the least tenuous, the only one that held the faintest ray of hope—on the cover of a magazine.
No ... no ... absolutely not. The reproduction process alone would destroy whatever vitality the two foreground figures possessed. Didn't he know what the reproduction process could do at times to drawings so sharply delineated that the human figures seemed three-dimensional, right in the room with you?
Five minutes later Lynn Prentiss sat alone in the restaurant, glad that she had told him the complete truth, but unable to forget the look on his face when he'd gotten up and left her. It hadn't been an angry or reproachful look. He had kept a tight grip on his emotions, had even managed to smile and thank her, reaching out and giving her hand a firm squeeze, quite startling under the circumstances and totally unexpected.
He had thanked her for her candor and left, very quietly and with dignity. But behind the smile there had been a look of despair, almost of hopelessness, a shrinking together of his entire being. She could sense it: it was something that couldn't be hidden, that was beyond his power to conceal.
The waitress was staring at her again, her gaze completely mystified now, the cynical smirk erased, as if someone had passed a wet sponge dipped in a muscle-relaxing solvent across her lips. One of the rough-looking men had paid his bill and left, a little ahead of the young man with his sheaf of drawings that would never see publication anywhere unless—
Well, if he got them hung in an important midtown gallery—and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility—one of the art magazines might spend a small fortune to bring them out in just the right way, with the costliest of full-color techniques. The three in color were the best, the cloud formations extraordinary, and she was quite sure that someday the serious critics would sit up and take notice. But recognition might not come to him until he was too old to dream, and meanwhile—he desperately needed to sell a few drawings to bolster up his morale.
He hadn't come right out and told her that he was poor, but she knew he was. He would not have approached her outside the office in such a naïve, reckless way if he had been in any way loaded—she'd always disliked that word, but it came unbidden into her mind. With plenty of money to throw around he'd have acquired more self-confidence, even if serious artistic recognition was something money couldn't always buy. Not immediately anyway, not overnight. But with moneyandgenius—
Was it genius—or merely a very great talent? She couldn't be sure. She didn't know too much about art, but she did know how she felt when she saw a drawing or painting that took her breath away. And the way she felt was important, because she was very sensitive, imaginative and deep in her feelings; she had as much right as anyone to recognize, dwell upon, understand and praise the qualities which made a work of art outstanding.
She had at least praised his drawings; had been unstinting in her praise. And if her absolute candor had seemed almost brutal to him it had been actually something quite different. The truth was never brutal. It only hurt for a moment, hurt terribly, and then there was recovery and healing—you were much better off than you would have been if you'd gone on deceiving yourself. Only deception was bad.... It was the deceivers of the world who were the closest allies of the sadistic ones, pretending to be kind and tactful while inflicting grievous wounds. Not the only criminals by any means—open brutality without any excuse at all was worse—but the kind deceivers were the opposite of admirable.
Or was she deceiving herself a little? Was there something obstinate in her nature which put too great a stress on absolute truth-telling? Well, perhaps. But it was too late for penitence and regrets now. She hadn't slammed a door in his face. She'd told him, quite frankly, to try again. Anyone who could draw that well—could turn out saleable work. She was sure of it. He'd simply have to come down a little more to earth, and put some flesh-and-blood people into his drawings. Heightened drama, direct conflict. Not all the great paintings of the world had that element, but it sure helped when you wanted to sell an illustration to a magazine. Keep things sharp and clear and forget about the beautiful gossamer webbing for awhile. Time enough for that when you're famous and standing with a cocktail glass in your hand on the opening day of your own show.
She found herself visualizing it, sitting very straight and still, aware that the cashier was watching her and not caring at all. Anything ... to keep the memory of the slumped body, the ashen face, the out-thrust arm and ... the blood ... from coming too precipitously back into her mind.
He'd be standing surrounded by his paintings, wonderful elfland vistas, white nymphs in the clasp of satyrs, hairy and dwarfish, with cloven hoofs, and still pools in the deep woods would mirror the background orgies. The women surrounding him would be remarkable too, with plunging neck-lines, ogling eyes, purple-tinted eyelids, incredible gowns, with Cadillacs parked outside, and a guest book bearing the signatures of a hundred celebrities of the art and literary worlds.
His shyness would be gone, but he'd be a little ungainly looking still, a very thin, pale youth with darkly burning eyes.
"So nice ... so glad ... so pleased. Do you really think so? Isn't it strange that we both should know John Tremaine? And Hodgkins. Yes ... I was very pleased by what he said about me in the New York Times. That's right. Some of my early things did appear in the Eaton-Lathrup publications. But I had to ruin them first. Couldn't be helped, though. I take a cynical, detached attitude—"
Suddenly ... fear began to grow in her again, and an icy wind blew up her spine. What if ... he hadn't been quite the naïve, awkward, appealing youth that he had seemed? A few of the drawings....
Morbid? Well, yes ... distinctly on the morbid or suggestively erotic side, with the female forms—creatures of light and air—assuming strange postures as they dwindled and faded into blue distances as if borne on invisible winds. There was nothing repulsive about the figures, they were beautiful with no hint of ugliness or the deliberately perverse about them. But there was a suggestion of amorous abandonment and a strange, smouldering kind of half-virginal, half-wanton sensuality in their attitudes. It was as if the mind which had depicted them could have gone much further in giving them an illicit, orgiastic aspect and had been strongly tempted to do so. What if, in other drawings which had perhaps been shown to no one, all restraint had been thrust aside, and scenes portrayed that would have brought a quick flush to her cheeks—forced her to avert her eyes. She was no prude, but when the erotic aspects of a drawing verged on the pathological, when a completely pagan glorification of sex orgies and unrestraint was accepted as a matter of course it never failed to embarrass her and give her a slight feeling of uneasiness which she was powerless to overcome. Revulsion even, when the candor was too great, and her Puritan heritage too violently assailed.
All her life she had been in revolt against the hypocritical and straight-laced and her Puritan heritage was two generations removed. But there were limits—
It did no good at all for her to tell herself that she was being very foolish and unjust. An impetuous young painter today, determined to be completely true to his inner vision, had every right to be completely candid. There was a wide gulf between powerful and genuine art, executed with complete sincerity and the luridly cheap and sensational which had no artistic merit at all. But it was a feeling she could not entirely overcome.
Always in the back of her mind was the thought: Is he really like his drawings; is that the kind of person he is?
She knew that if such a yardstick were to be rigorously applied two-thirds of the world's great artists and great writers would stand condemned. The erotic was an important aspect of all life—to deny it honest expression was to emasculate art, to do violence to reality in all of its gustier aspects—the kind of reality you found in Swift and Cervantes, Chaucer and Defoe, Goya and Gauguin and Cezanne.
But knowing all that, never doubting it for a moment, why was she trembling again now? Why had something about his drawings, the faint aura of morbidity that seemed to hover over them, made her fearful and suspicious again?
Was it because she had at the beginning imagined that a mad killer might be following her; that morbidity and madness were often closely allied? Was it because she had suddenly begun to realize that deception, too, could be a fine art—if a man were a killer at heart?
He might be everything that he claimed to be, a young, unhappy and frustrated artist, desperately seeking commercial success, and still be a youth with a gun who had allowed his morbidity to drive him over the borderline. A youth with an imagined grievance against Lathrup, compulsively driven to seek redress for that grievance through an act of brutal violence.
When had he called at the office, seeking an interview which had been denied him? Yesterday ... two or three days ago? She had failed to ask him. Not that morning, surely, not before—
But how could she be entirely sure that hehadn'tcalled at the office in the morning, that hehadn'tstealthily found his way to Lathrup's office after pretending to leave, and....
She arose suddenly, determined to remain calm, to keep such thoughts from mushrooming out and growing to monstrous proportions in her mind.
Just nerves, she told herself firmly. No reason at all to think him a crafty dissembler, when his every word and gesture had borne the stamp of absolute sincerity. No one could be that perfect an actor. She had liked him ... she still liked him ... and she hoped that he would call at the office again, when the horror had become just a dim, receding memory—could it ever be quite that, she wondered—and he would ask her to lunch and she would look at his new drawings and all fear, all suspicion would be banished from her mind.
She crossed to the heavy plate-glass door, pulled inward and emerged into the street without a backward glance. She had a momentary qualm about not having ordered anything, even a cup of coffee. But she shrugged it off, telling herself that if the waitress and cashier were unhappy about it they could ... yes, go to hell.
Chapter IV
Ralph Gilmore could not escape from the nightmare. There was no escape anywhere, for his world had become star-crossed with dark patterns of betrayal and outrage that hid the light of the sun and turned the still wet, slippery pavement beneath his feet into a quagmire. He experienced a sinking sensation, a hollowness at the pit of his stomach which forced him to take refuge in his room and even there he could find no peace.
It was impossible to avoid remembering, impossible to keep the tormenting events of the past two weeks from screeching, roaring, clattering back into his mind like an onrushing subway train, its red lights ablaze. A jostling on the platform, a violent shove and he was lying directly in the path of the train, glued to the rails by blind terror. Only—the rush of returning memories was worse than that, much worse. If it had been merely physical, if it had been merely something that could crush and destroy him he might have welcomed it. But there was no escape from a horror of the mind, unless drink or drugs could be used as an anodyne and something deep in his nature prevented him from taking that dangerous road to forgetfulness.
Sleep was out of the question. When he threw himself down and shut his eyes the torment had become worse, the memory pictures more unendurable.
Unendurable, torturing now—like salt on raw wounds—but there had been moments when some of them had seemed very precious, worth dying for, worth ... say it, bring it out into the open ... worth killing for. But wasn't that an insane way of looking at it? The scales never came down completely, or balanced completely on one side or the other. There had to be some joy in the most agonizing of memories. Otherwise a man would never go on, would never wade deeper into a dark morass of guilt and self-torment. Knowing himself to be betrayed, but still going on, putting himself beyond the pale. There had to be a glittering prize shining in the darkness, beckoning, offering moments of respite—offering far more than that. Wild joy, forbidden pleasures, the mind-beguiling beauty of Medusa before her snake-wreathed face turned her victims to stone.
It was a nightmare now, engulfing him, making him want to die. But it hadn't been that way at the start. It had started glowingly, a new way of life opening up, a bright prospect of fulfillment stretching out before him with nothing at all to mar it.
There was nothing depressing or unwelcome about the acclaim of the really important critics, the substantial literary recognition he'd only pretended to despise in moments of immature cynicism. And it was not tormenting even now to go back and dwell on all the financial rewards which were showered on brilliant young novelists who were both serious and widely popular writers—rewards which had been almost within his grasp.
Success had not been a prospect reserved for the future alone—a prospect veiled in uncertainty that might not materialize for months or years, or turn out, in the end, to have been completely illusionary. Success had swept so close that it had taken on an aspect of immediacy. He had felt its invisible pulse-beats all about him, had glimpsed the bright fluttering of its wings. And with it had come an undreamed of happiness, something he'd hardly dared to hope for.
A woman he could worship, and adore and build a shrine around. A woman at the center of his life—not just at the periphery. A woman who did not think him awkward and self-conscious and ridiculously helpless in a practical way. A woman who knew what artists, writers, musicians—all creative people—were really like. A woman who didn't want to mother him, because she knew he had no real need to be mothered, that he had great inner strength and needed only to be understood and accepted for the kind of person he was.
He could not avoid asking himself, even now, just how much finding out the truth about her had changed him. Was he still the same person, thinking the same thoughts, capable of acting toward others in the same way? Or was he a different person entirely, thirty years older than the twenty-five years which made him, in the eyes of the world, still little more than a boy by actual year-count.
He felt incredibly old and drained—a man of seventy couldn't have felt any older. But no man of seventy could have been torn as he was by emotions so deeply rooted in despair. Both explosive violence and its tormenting aftermath of black despair could only be experienced in their full intensity by the young. In old age such emotions could still be destructive to body and mind, but never in quite so terrible a way.
He had a sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse to pick up the typewriter which had helped to betray him and hurl it with violence to the floor. But instead he stood rigid, unmoving, before the room's one small window, with its bleak, brick-wall outlook until time became fluid, backward-sweeping, and the present less real than a certain morning, almost three weeks before, when she had returned the manuscript he'd sent her with words of glowing praise, and a suggestion that he make a few minor changes which did not distress him at all.
"One of those big, brown envelopes, Ralph. Looks like another one of your stories came back. Ralph, you awake? Want me to open it and tell you—like you asked me to do the last time? You said it might bring you luck. It sure sounded silly to me. You can't change what's in a letter after it's been mailed, silly. But I'll open it if you want me to."
The knocking which had preceded the voice had been loud, insistent. It had continued for ten full seconds, but curiously enough, it was the voice itself which awakened him, even though he could not distinguish the words and their significance was completely lost on him.
He sighed and rolled over on his side, drawing the sheets up more tightly about his naked shoulders. Then, abruptly and almost instantly, he cursed under his breath and threw the sheets back, reviling himself for his lack of self-discipline in succumbing to drowsiness at ten in the morning.
He'd overslept again, which was unusual for him. He was at his best right after breakfast, when the typewriter keys seemed to come to life under his fingers and the beautiful words rushed pell-mell across a virgin sheet of white bond stationery—so fast that the keys sometimes interlocked, and caused an infuriating delay which he could do nothing about.
Orange juice, scrambled eggs and buttered toast, followed by three cups of strong black coffee, could work wonders right after breakfast. By noon he often found himself slowing down just a little. But he increased his writing tempo again right after lunch and continued on briskly, as a rule, until he called it a day at four in the afternoon. He had never been a burner of the midnight oil—the phrase had an old-fashioned but Parisian ring which he somehow liked—not even in college when he'd had to cram a hell of a lot to bluff his way through sessions of trig and calculus which he violently disliked. A writer could be independent, at least, completely himself, choose his own hours of work—
The knocking came again, louder this time, putting an abrupt end to his thoughts.
"Wait a minute!" he called out. "I just got up. For Pete's sake, you little dope, give me a chance to put something on."
"How did you know it was me, Ralph?"
"No one else would make such a racket!" he called back.
"I'm sorry, lover boy. I just thought—"
"Stop it, will you? What kind of a reputation are you trying to pin on me? Please, Nora, show some sense. I've got a busy day ahead of me."
He crossed the room, whipped a pair of gray doeskin slacks from the back of a chair, gathered up his socks from under the bed, kicked off his slippers and sat down on the edge of the bed, pulling on socks and trousers with awkward twistings-about.
When he went to the open door he was also wearing a shirt.
It never ceased to amaze him how closely life paralleled fiction—even the most realistic, hard-boiled kind of fiction, the Hemingway sort of thing. A struggling young writer and the landlady's daughter—brother, it sure could be made to fit. Anywhere, any place, any time, which meant, of course, that the hard-boiled writers were basically incurable romantics who took their cue from the way life always has of duplicating romantic patterns all over the place—every hour of every day and night. Especially every night.
Not that he'd slept with her or wanted to particularly. She was a forlorn, pathetic, over-effusive, well-meaning girl of nineteen, who could not speak grammatically for more than three sentences at a stretch, but whose syntax was colorful enough at times to arouse the interest of most protective males. A man with a Pygmalian complex would have been instantly drawn to her, would have seen tremendous possibilities in her.
"Darling, I'll make you over completely. You don't realize what tenderness, affection, understanding can do. You're a rare and unusual woman, but you've never had a chance to develop."
Perhaps he should have felt that way himself. But somehow he couldn't. She just wasn't physically attractive enough. Not bad looking, exactly, and a beauty parlor could have done wonders for her. But he had other things on his mind—at least for the moment.
She stood facing him in the doorway, looking more forlorn than usual, as if she regretted the slightly mocking way she'd called out to him through the door, calling him "silly" and all that—he had been too drowsy to take in the words, but he had an obscure feeling that she'd said something she was now regretting and her first words made him sure of it.
"I guess this story just wasn't liked by one of those stupid editors you're always saying don't know their—it's a word I don't like to use—from a hole in the ground. Do you want me to open it for you?"
"No, I'll open it," he said. He took the large, bulky envelope from her, and started to close the door, half-blocking the aperture with his body, but she squeezed past him into the room.
She crossed the room with a slow, self-conscious undulation of her hips and sat down on the edge of his bed. He felt a sudden stab of compassion for her. She was doing her pathetic best to entice him and he was in no mood to be enticed.
The bulky envelope had given him a jolt. It wasn't the worst jolt he'd ever experienced—he'd sold fifteen stories to the small-circulation quality magazines and two to the slicks, and you had to expect rejections now and then—but he had counted heavily on this particular story going over big.
It was an unusual story, a powerful story. He'd put virtually everything he had into it. And now—it had been slammed, thrown back in his face, with probably a miserable, printed rejection slip. Editors just didn't give a damn how much they hurt you—or insulted you. Quite famous authors occasionally got printed rejection slips. He knew that, but it didn't make the outrage even slightly more palatable or easy to accept.
He looked at the neat, printed address—Ralph Gilmore, 559 West 38th Street, New York City—and an angry flush mounted to his cheekbones. Not typewritten—printed—as if some incredible new machine had been used to add insult to injury.
He tore the envelope open and hesitated for an instant before removing its contents. What if he had been jumping to an unjust conclusion? He had no absolute assurance that the envelope contained a rejection slip. Quite possibly the editor had written him a long and sympathetic letter, expressing sincere regrets.
No ... that would have been worse. A hundred times worse. The manuscript had been returned to him, so obviously it had been rejected. What the hell did he care about how sorry the editor might feel about it?
Nora was staring at him with a look of bewildered concern on her face, as if she didn't quite know what it was all about, but could tell from the way he was glaring at the envelope that he had no intention of tossing it on the typewriter table, crossing to the bed and putting an arm about her waist. Not immediately, anyway, and she'd hoped it might happen this time, that he might turn to her for comfort at least. Three bulky envelopes in a week, and she knew how much rejections upset him. Writers were different from other people and probably most of them were a little crazy.
She'd dreamed about it and hoped for it, but how could she make it happen when he was so strange, so different, from anyone she'd ever known. The men she'd known had made it plain just what they'd expected from her in return for taking her out, making her feel important, a somebody. If she hadn't liked them she wouldn't have given them anything in return—she could be a real little bitch at times, why deny it—but shehadliked them, she had, she had! All except that Duncan worm she could have killed and that piece of—
She didn't say the word, even to herself. He didn't like that kind of coarseness, got upset whenever she came right out and said what she knew to be true. Not in a woman anyway. He could use worse language himself, could go way beyond anything you'd hear in a bar unless you were standing close to someone who mistook you for a hustler and was too drunk to tell the difference even when you moved quickly away from him.
She wanted to please him—God help her, she did want to. She couldn't explain it, because there was nothing so wonderful about him, even if he was a writer. But if he really wanted her, if he did or said something to make her sure, she'd go all the way with him. She'd have to be sure, because she had to like a man terribly, to worry about him and think about him and want to buy him things—a new scarf, a necktie, no matter how many neckties he had or how much money he spent on her—and be jealous of him and swear she'd kill any other woman who looked at him twice ... she had to love him that much and that terribly to go to bed with him.
All right, he wasn't the first one. There had been ... four others. But she'd never ... cared for ... anyone quite so much and if he was too blind to see it, or thought the stories he was always writing and getting returned were more important than a woman in bed with him, a woman who knew how to make him forget everything but the warm, clinging sweetness of....
All right, those were his words. Words from one of his crazy manuscripts. She'd copied them down and read them more than once, because they'd excited her. But that didn't mean she didn't feel that way herself. She couldn't use fancy words, maybe, but she knew what it meant to a man to hold a woman close, and pass his hands up and down over the smooth flesh of her shoulders and fondle her breasts.... And she knew what it meant to a woman.
Poetry too. He wrote poetry. "There's nothing in it," he'd said. "A great poet can starve to death, even quicker than an important novelist can. I won't be victimized to that extent. Read these if you want to—I don't give a damn about them. I probably won't write another poem in the next twenty years."
It didn't make much sense to her. If he was so worried about starving to death why couldn't he go out and get a job in a bakery?
She watched him closely as he tore open the envelope, quite sure that he would go into a rage when he read the letter attached to his story. It had happened ten or twelve times before, when she'd brought him his mail—either a letter or a printed slip which he'd tossed at her as if he expected her to become angry too.
What was there to be angry about? If he couldn't write well enough to get his stories taken by the magazines, what was to prevent him from going out and getting a paying job?
She had expected him to be angry, and felt a little let down, disappointed even, when she saw that he was reading the letter with only a slight frown on his face.
The frown vanished before he stopped reading. It changed to a smile and then, quite suddenly, he was laughing, yelling, waltzing around the room like a real gone beat. She got up, a little frightened, and stood staring at him, unable to believe her eyes.
"It's accepted," he shouted, "Believe it or not, it's accepted and it's going to be published. A female editor who knows strong writing when she sees it—who isn't scared off by the kind of candor that goes a little beyond Faulkner but is too genuine to ignore. And to think that I used to say unkind things about female editors!"
"You mean—the story's sold and you're going to get paid for it?" she asked, a stunned incredulity in her eyes.
"Of course it will be paid for," he said. "It's one of the biggest magazine groups in the country. Their check is as good as a signed order from the Secretary of the Treasury, for sixteen hundred dollars from the United States mint."
"Gee—that's wonderful."
"Wonderful isn't the word for it. I don't give a damn about the dough. What's the matter with you anyway ... haven't I tried to explain? Oh, sure, the dough means a little something to me. I wouldn't be human if it didn't. But the important thing is the story is going to be published. It's the best thing I've ever done—tremendous writing, really tremendous writing. I'm not being egoistical, I have very high standards. I know precisely what literary distinction is and when I've achieved it—quite by accident perhaps, once in a blue moon—but I've written enough and torn up enough manuscripts and suffered enough to know. This is a great story. It will knock the critics' eyes out."
"I guess I don't—"
"Don't apologize, don't say a word. It's a little too much for me at the moment, too. Did I ever tell you that you're beautiful?"
"No," she said. "You've never told me that. And I don't think I am."
"But you are. How would you like to have dinner with me tonight? We'll celebrate. We'll really kick over the traces."
"Ralph, I don't know. You've never asked me before. How come you've never asked me before?"
The "how come" grated on him, but he did his best not to look aggrieved.
"It's because I've been too busy—and too worried," he said. "You don't know what a writer goes through—eight, ten, twelve hours a day. The creative agony does something to you—makes you feel either detached, way off in the clouds somewhere or so nervously keyed up that you can't take down-to-earth realities in your stride. You forget things, make a fool of yourself, miss priceless opportunities. Like ... telling you how beautiful you are and how much it would mean to me if you'd say yes ... yes ... yes. You will have dinner with me."
Her surrender was complete, because it had already been decided upon. But it was the kind of surrender he hadn't expected, hadn't really wanted at all. It was physical and immediate and it appalled him, brought with it a commitment he hadn't planned on, an involvement he might have welcomed in a moment of desperation, when the sex hunger was a gnawing ache in him and loneliness was a gnawing ache, and a woman—any woman—would have been better than the gross mental images no sex-starved man can avoid conjuring up at times. But he wasn't desperate now, he'd been thrown a lifeline, and all the east was gold, bathed in the bright rays of an unexpected sunrise.
"Say what you just said again," she said. "Tell me I'm beautiful, even if we both know it's a lie. Say anything you want ... so long as you really need me, and we're not kidding each other about that part of it. Tell me I'm just a crazy kid, bitten by some kind of bug and I won't mind at all. Say I'm well-stacked even if I'm not beautiful, as if you were talking to someone about a girl you didn't respect too much. I won't care if you really need me, and do respect me, deep down...."
She was in his arms before he could say a word in reply, was straining against him, running her fingers through his hair, opening her lips and almost forcing him to kiss her with the kind of ardor it would have been impossible for him to wholly avoid. He suddenly realized that all she was wearing was a skirt and blouse, that both garments were so thin he could feel the texture of her skin through the cloth.
He could feel more than just the texture of her skin. Every movement of her body, every impassioned ripple of her flesh, increased the intimacy of her embrace and made him lose his head completely.
It was over almost before it had begun and although it had been sudden and maddening, tempting them both to abandon all restraint, he had found the strength to gently but firmly grasp her by the wrists and prevent her complete surrender. He felt cheated, tortured for an instant and then a wave of relief swept over him, because what had almost happened would have been a very serious commitment and he was not the kind of man who could take complete physical intimacy lightly.
Casual love-making was impossible for him. It never failed to stir him to the depths, to awaken impulses of loyalty and devotion, to place him under an obligation. He was perhaps different from the general run of males, but if he had gone out on the street and picked up some pathetic little prostitute and gone home with her the relationship would not have been entirely sordid and physical.
He sat now on the edge of the bed as if turned to stone, watching her get up with shining eyes and a deep flush on her face, cross the room to the door and go out, closing the door very softly behind her. He'd known what she was thinking. Next time it will be completely wonderful and he won't feel awkward and embarrassed afterwards and not know what to say.
She'd be thinking that, but it wouldn't be the truth. He had no intention of letting it happen again, of going even as far as he had before he'd found the strength to save himself from absolute disaster.
A moment or two before, with the returned manuscript still unopened in his hand, he'd had a momentary impulse to let himself go and accept the consequences, even if they would have been as binding in his scale of values as a marriage ceremony. He could never have walked out and left her—unless love died and they both agreed that the relationship had deteriorated and ceased to be important.
But all that was changed now. He'd opened the envelope and the letter had changed the world for him and if she hadn't thrown her arms around him and kissed him so passionately when he'd merely asked her for a dinner date in a moment of unreasoning exaltation....
It had been a physical response solely, the kind of response which any normal male with the blood warm in his veins would have been unable to exercise complete and instant control over, no matter how great his strength of will. It had been instinctive, the touching off of sex's trigger-mechanism in his brain, the automatic arousal which yielding softness, sweetness, femininity in all of its rapturous abandonment made inevitable in the male.
There was no reason for him to reproach himself or feel guilty about it. If for a moment he'd abandoned all restraint, carried her to the bed, and seared her lips with kisses which she had welcomed, demanded, insisted upon—had not the tightening of her arms, the almost convulsive straining of her body against him proved that she had been equally aroused?—if for a moment he'd become almost savagely primitive in his love-making, was that something which called for sackcloth and ashes and the covering of his head, as if he were a grieving widow instead of the completely normal, robustly endowed man he knew himself to be?
Hardly. Since she had been so completely eager and willing the cynical and unjust could brand his restraint as amusing if they wished and regard him as something of a fool. But he had his own standards and preferred to maintain them. An old maxim came almost unbidden into his mind. "They say what they say—let them say."
For a moment the exaltation he'd felt on reading the letter had been scattered to the winds, like dust particles in a rising gale or dust in a city apartment blown in all directions by a draft from an open window, or swept under the bed by an untidy housekeeper. And it had been the most precious kind of dust—a fine sprinkling of gold, each particle brightly shining.
There was no one with a broom who could sweep it into view again, but it was coming back now by itself, creeping slowly back, and he could feel the splendor of it beginning to suffuse him. In a moment, if he just remained quietly seated on the edge of the bed, he could gather up all of the shining particles, and go out and put through a phone call from the drugstore on the corner.
She'd suggested he phone her as soon as he received the letter. Returning a manuscript for minor revisions when it was practically bought and paid for was unusual. But he had a feeling that he had sent the story to a very unusual editor. A woman who did things in her own, independent way, ignoring what was customary and established and rule-of-thumb, but with no sacrifice of efficiency.
Most editors would have kept the manuscript in the office, written him a letter of acceptance, and asked him to call and discuss the changes which would have to be made in it. But she'd sent it right back, assuming, no doubt, that the acceptance would so gratify and stimulate him that he'd sit down immediately and make the most important change while he was keyed up and at his best creatively.
It had probably seemed to her a gamble worth taking. All it had cost the firm was a dollar in postage and there could be no substitute for that kind of emotional stimulation, especially when there were a few pages that the author had perhaps grown cold on, or lost interest in.
It was a strong indication that she understood writers, knew precisely how their minds worked. Most writers, anyway. It wasn't her fault that she had gone slightly astray in his case. Every writer was unique—no two individuals in any creative field were ever exactly alike. For a moment hehadbeen stimulated enough to sit down, and make the most important change without even going out to buy a fresh pack of cigarettes and take a brisk, six-minute walk around the block.
It was just that—he felt too damned good right at the moment to sit down and concentrate. All of the golden dust had been gathered up now and it set up a shining—both inside his mind and outside—so that the whole room seemed filled with a glow that outshone the noonday sun.
Fifteen minutes later he stood in a drugstore phone booth so oppressively over-heated that it would have bothered him, if he had been about to phone a friend who never knew when to hang up. But now he was scarcely aware of the heat and it gave him no concern. Few editors had time to waste in inconsequential talk, and he had no intention of making a bad impression on her by baring the innermost secrets of his life.
That would come later ... if at all. He had a feeling that it would come eventually, because a woman who understood writers as she seemed to do would be unlikely to find that kind of conversation boring.
Everything was happening so fast it took his breath away. The miracle had increased in brightness and now he was sitting in a taxi on his way to Cafe Seventy in the East Sixties.
His phone call had been switched to her office very quickly and her voice had been decisive and a little sharp on the wire. But the instant he'd told her who he was no woman's voice could have taken on more graciousness and charm.
Informal, too. Delightfully ... no,intimatewasn't too presumptuous a word. There had been an unmistakable undercurrent of intimacy in her voice, as if she'd known him for a long time and they shared a secret ... a very precious kind of secret she preferred not to talk about within the four walls of a cold, briskly efficient magazine office.
It had meant, of course, that she was suggesting that they have lunch together, but before he could think of just the right words she herself had done the inviting. She had picked the cafe and the time—"About two ... I'm afraid it has to be a little late...."—and now, in about five more minutes, he would be there.
It was a very warm day and the air felt almost solid enough to cut with a knife. But the high humidity didn't bother him, because a breeze fragrant with springtime scents was blowing through the cab, even though the driver and no one on the streets—no one anywhere except himself—seemed to be aware of it.
When the cab drew into the curb in front of the cafe he added a tip to the fare that dispelled most of the driver's gloom. He got out, walked into the cafe as if he'd just decided while taking a stroll that the place looked all right, and so why should he stop to examine the three-dollar-minimum luncheon menu pasted to the window? He had an almost irrepressible impulse to tip the uniformed doorman too, just for the hell of it.
He saw and recognized her quickly enough, because she'd told him what kind of hat she'd be wearing and there was only one woman in the place that went with the kind of voice he'd heard on the phone.
It came as a distinct shock to him to discover that she wasn't alone. There was a man seated opposite her at the small table she'd chosen—or he had chosen for her—in a softly-lit recess on the left side of the cafe, about half-way to the back.
He disliked the man straight off, without precisely knowing why. He was about forty-five, with slightly graying hair cut rather short, a bland, almost mild-mannered way of smiling and nodding as he talked, and features which were distinctly on the handsome side. He was wearing a tropical worsted suit of expensive weave—the kind of suit you couldn't purchase readymade anywhere for less than a hundred dollars and you knew it was custom-tailored. Three hundred dollars would probably have been a more likely estimate of what the suit had set the man back. He wore a small red carnation in his buttonhole which the July heat had not yet succeeded in wilting.
Ralph became aware suddenly that she had raised her eyes and recognized him. But before he could respond with a nod and smile and draw closer to the table all of the blandness went out of her companion's face. His face hardened and an angry glint came into his eyes. He arose from the table, so angrily and abruptly that he overturned the chair he'd been sitting in.
What he did then was totally outrageous, unheard of. He leaned across the table and slapped Helen Lathrup on the right cheek, putting such force into the blow that thesmackwas audible to everyone in the cafe.
There was complete silence for an instant; no one moved or spoke. Helen Lathrup sat rigid, an ugly redness suffusing the right side of her face from temple to throat.
Then a woman gasped and a man muttered: "Why doesn't somebody kill the bastard?"
It was exactly what Ralph felt like doing and he made no attempt to control the impulse.
Helen Lathrup's escort had straightened on delivering the blow and was just starting to swing about when Ralph reached him, caught hold of his right arm, making the turn complete, and sent his fist crashing into the man's face.
It was a nose-breaking kind of blow, aimed directly at the bastard's—he was certainly that!—nose and mouth and not at his jaw. Ralph didn't just want to drop him to the floor. He wanted to send him to the hospital.
He thought he heard a cartilage crunch and splinter, but he couldn't be sure.
The man made no attempt to fight back, to defend himself in any way. However much he may have wanted to do so, he was clearly incapable of it.
The blow had stunned him. He swayed for the barest instant, back and forth like a marionette on a wire that had gone suddenly slack, and then his knees gave way, and he crashed to the floor and rolled over on his face.
Ralph stood very still for an instant staring down at him, almost equally stunned but feeling a hot surge of triumph pulsing upward through his chest, rising to his brain, half-intoxicating him.
He was kneeling on the floor at the bastard's side, turning him over, looking with satisfaction at the thin trickle of blood that was running from his mouth, when he felt the tugging.
Helen Lathrup was bending over also, close to Ralph, her breath hot on his face, her fingers biting into his arm, as if she knew that only pain could bring him quickly to his senses.
"We must leave," she breathed. "Wemust. Do you hear what I'm saying? I'm known here—they won't try to stop us. And he won't lodge a complaint. I'm sure of that.John Darby wouldn't dare—"
He raised his eyes and saw that she was deathly pale, that even the redness, where the vicious ugly bastard had slapped her, was starting to recede. He could see that it had left a slight welt, and all of his fury returned again for an instant, so that he could scarcely breathe.
She was trembling now and there was a pleading urgency in her eyes. "Hurry, before they feel they'd better send for the police, if only to protect themselves. We don't know how badly he's been hurt and it will take them a minute to find out. They won't try to stop us, I tell you, if we go right now."
In one way, it was like a nightmare that had come upon him in broad daylight, been thrust upon him unexpectedly when he had thought himself fully awake. And in another way, it was an intoxicating kind of trance, filled with sound and fury, but a trance from which he had no desire to escape.
Sitting in a cab at her side, with the sound and the fury behind him, it seemed suddenly that he was in another dimension of time and space, where nothing but miracles could take place. The fact that she was trembling still, her very agitation, seemed to make her more desirable, for it awoke in him protective instincts along with a feeling of adoration.
He had never thought that any woman could be quite so beautiful. He had never dared to hope that he would find himself so intimately involved with a famous editor who was also the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
For hehadbecome intimately involved with her. He had fought another man in a very primitive way as her champion and defender, and it was impossible not to think of that as intimacy. It had brought him as close to her, if only for a moment, as a lover's embrace would have done.
Was not that kind of violence one pathway to intimacy? A murderer was intimate with his victim in a quite terrible way, even when physical love-making was completely absent. This was not that kind of intimacy. But in defending her and trying his best in a moment of savage rage to injure the man who had struck her, hadn't he come close to her in much the same primitively intimate way? The only difference was—he hadn't come close to her with the intention of doing her harm. But the same savage currents had flowed for an instant between them, bringing them very close.
She was sitting so close to him that he could feel the warmth and yielding softness of her body through her thin summer clothes—a softness that was also a firmness, a roundness—and his temples began to pound, and a trip-hammer started up in his loins.
He glanced at her quickly and saw that her eyes were shining in a very strange way. A wild kind of excitement seemed to be stirring in her.
It should have given him warning, should have given him pause. It should have at least flashed across his mind that a woman can become wildly excited in the most primitive of all ways—by just the sight of two men fighting over her, willing and eager to kill for her. And even if one of the two had just struck her brutally and no longer desired her, just the fight alone....
But he did not realize that for many days.
For a fortnight they were together constantly, and his admiration for her had become like a singing flame, his every instinct had whispered that he had found the one perfect woman at last, and that nothing could mar for him the perfection of her body when she came, slender and white and trembling a little, into his arms.
It had not taken him long to discover that wherever Helen Lathrup went—people whispered that she went everywhere, but never in his presence had one of those whispers been heard—she stood out, was the center of all eyes. In a crowd, at concerts and recitals, in smoke-filled Beatnik-patronized expresso restaurants in the Village, on the exclusive, walled-off beaches of fashionable summer resorts there was and could be only one Helen Lathrup.
And when the blow finally came and she refused even to speak to him on the phone, when he surrendered all of his masculine pride and allowed himself to become defenseless and completely at her mercy, he had not at first completely despaired, or turned against her like some sick and humiliated dog backed into a corner and forced to bite at last.
He had gone on begging for her favors, for one more dinner date, one more hour alone with her, one last opportunity, however brief, to prove to her that their quarrels had been needless, and he would find a way to please her still.
He had gone on pleading even when he could no longer deceive himself about her. Tormenting him gave her pleasure and she was not only the most beautiful but the cruelest woman he had ever known.
It was only when she attacked him where he was most vulnerable ... in his work ... it was only when she sneered at the novel she had once praised and returned it to him with blue-pencilings that made him no longer want to go on living ... it was only then that he decided that he could endure no more, and that only her death would set him free.
Chapter V
Lieutenant of Detectives Joseph Fenton of Homicide West was remembering some of the others. The tragic and unusual cases, the sensational ones, the kind that stayed in the headlines for weeks and months and increased the circulation of newspapers from coast to coast by hundreds of millions of copies.
He sat staring down at his best lead so far, the only lead he could really sink his teeth into, wishing to hell he didn't have to remember. He drummed with his fingers on the desktop and hunched his shoulders a little. He was making a big mistake and he knew it. It was always a mistake to think back across the years when he had a job to do that called for a maximum of effort and concentration. It made him feel guilty and took the edge off his keenness. It was the worst kind of mistake but he kept on making it, because murder was always a shock to him.
Every time he saw a beautiful white body stretched out cold on a mortuary slab he remembered how he'd fainted at the sight of the first one, twenty-five years in the past when he'd been a young rookie. Just fallen to the floor and passed out, the way medical students sometimes do when they first have to dissect a cadaver—the organs are put in separate trays, each neatly labeled—and even experienced, case-hardened surgeons when an operation is especially sanguinary ... like on the human eye, for instance. He'd read that somewhere, and he didn't doubt it, not for a moment.
Well ... there was no danger of that happening to him now. He'd seen too many of the really gruesome ones, and the badly marked up ones, and the "floaters" with no fingerprints left to identify them by, every vestige of flesh dissolved away by weeks in the water, and ... the beautiful unmarked ones who were in some respects the most tragic of all.
He had watched many of them carried away in baskets, feeling angry and resentful but forcing himself to remain calm, refusing to let the photographers and print men suspect that he was dying himself a little inwardly, and had kept right on dying, inch by slow inch, across the years. His hair was white now and his face a little more heavily lined than it should have been, but otherwise it didn't show on the surface.
In some of them he had sensed a strange kind of peace—like a hand reaching out to touch him from beyond the grave; cool, steady, no longer feverish. But over most of them there still seemed to hover a penumbra of violence, a crying out for vengeance and retribution, a protest that even death could not wholly silence.
There was no need for him to remind himself that the Lathrup case was one of the explosively violent ones, with that strange residual violence remaining, making itself felt, every time his thoughts returned to it. Not only in the magazine office itself, with her loveliness only slightly marred by the small, dark hole in her temple—the wound had bled profusely, but the blood had not spread over her features—but later, when the body had been lifted into a sheet, and removed from the office, and the last flash-bulb had gone off and he'd been left alone with the medical examiner. He had been just the same as being completely alone, because Hunter had completed his preliminary examination, and his thoughts were back in a smoke-filled room where a poker game was in progress. To Hunter it had been no more than a routine interruption, breaking in on a winning hand and making him so morose and ill-tempered that Fenton, who had always found him a hard man to deal with, had shut up after asking him only two questions.
The residual violence was there, all right, a something in the room that seemed to point an accusing finger, to demand that justice be not too long delayed, to threaten reprisals if the vanished killer were not relentlessly tracked down and made to answer for his crime. It was a feeling Fenton had—nothing more. The threat of reprisal was not directed at him, but at the nebulous entity known as society. But it was always there, always present, a demand for retribution from beyond the grave, a screaming and a pleading, an insistence that justice be done or all hell would yawn for someone.
All right, it was only something he imagined, peculiar to him alone. But he knew from experience that it was unwise to take even imagined horrors lightly. They were part of a man's thinking, his inner life, his individuality. It was a mistake to take themtooseriously, but just as bad to brush them aside as of no importance.
All right, the violence had been there, but in another way the office had seemed the opposite of crepe-somber. It had seemed still filled with her living presence, as if she were still striding back and forth from her desk to the window, or sitting at her desk impatiently talking into the intercom.
That she had been a strong-willed, very determined woman despite her aspect of pulse-stirring femininity he'd strongly suspected the instant he'd entered the office with its costly but severely functional furnishings. The choice of furnishings had quite obviously not been influenced in any way by feminine whims and extravagances. No woman, surely, would have really liked such severity in the décor surrounding her. But a woman determined to keep her professional and private lives in separate compartments might well have made such a choice deliberately and taken pride in her ability to impose a severe discipline upon herself.
The conclusion he'd drawn, the kind of woman he'd pictured her as being, hadn't been based on anything very solid. It had been a mere hunch at first, a gathering together of intangibles. But the few questions he'd had an opportunity to ask the editorial staff immediately on his arrival had completely confirmed it. She'd been a considerable woman, and had ruffled a great deal of fur the wrong way, apparently, and there had probably been some baring of claws.
Well ... all right. The Lathrup slaying was one of the sensational ones. It would arouse widespread indignation if it were not solved quickly and even more indignation if it remained unsolved for the next fifty years, as well it might. If the murderer was caught and stood trial—the newspapers would have no reason to complain and it would enrich a great many other people in a dozen or more ways, perhaps even the murderer himself if he wrote the story of his life for a major news syndicate the week before he went to the chair.
He couldn't take it with him—but what the hell. There'd be the thrill of making all that money overnight. Or was the stipulation that a murderer couldn't profit from his crime a bugaboo in that department too? Thirty years on the Force, and he still didn't know for sure.
Well ... there was nothing to be gained by shaking his head and dwelling with anger and pity on the tragic circumstances of a crime he could have done nothing to prevent. Her beauty, so cruelly hidden now from all but the eyes of a mortician—there would be a brief moment when it would be again on view—every aspect of her personal life; the way she'd walked and talked and held herself, her wardrobe, her personal likes and dislikes, the friends she'd made, the enemies who did not think too highly of her, her jewels, her rumored affairs, her choice of restaurants, had all become the emotional property of the public.
Not too short a life perhaps. But to die at thirty-six always meant ... many of the great moments, the moments of complete fulfillment and happiness, however brief, which every human being born into the world had a right to look forward to, would never be experienced at all. A cruel and tragic outrage had been perpetrated upon her, cutting off her life in mid-stream.
That the outrage could be attributed to the inscrutable workings of Fate or Destiny or whatever you cared to call the big, continuously revolving wheel ... that it struck down thousands of women just as beautiful every day all over the world ... that illness and accidents took a far more grievous toll ... did not diminish by one whit the tragedy of it. And when it was brought about by a deliberate act of willful criminal violence it had a special quality which made it seem a hundred times more cruel and unjust.
Fenton looked down at the three letters, spread fanwise on the desk before him. Each was neatly typewritten, neatly creased and just as neatly signed in a firm, precise hand.Michael Willard.
An article writer, and a good one, if the staff at Eaton-Lathrup were right about him and there was no reason to doubt their competence. A free-lance article writer who had quarreled violently with Helen Lathrup three weeks before her death. Fenton had found the letters in the slain woman's desk.
Each was a hot-tempered letter and one was extremely violent, not quite threatening Lathrup with bodily harm but strongly hinting that such harm might be visited upon her if she did not correct what the writer claimed was avery seriousmistake.
It seemed incredible to Fenton that anyone, no matter how enraged, would send a prominent editor such threats and sign the letters with his own name.
The man had practically started himself on a walk to the chair. And that particularly irritated Fenton, because Willard would have to be captured before he could complete the walk, and a three-state alert had proved as ineffective in locating him as a fast-moving city dragnet and three Westchester roadblocks in the vicinity of his suburban home....
Fenton was still frowning down at the letters, the only strong lead he had, when someone said from the doorway: "He's given himself up."
Fenton looked up quickly, annoyed, the statement not registering immediately, as First Grade Detective John Gallison had apparently assumed it would.
Gallison was a big man, almost as big as Fenton, and he had much the same look about him—the look of a man aged in some ways beyond his years, but with a curiously unlined face, and the almost boyish aspect that seems to hover until late in life about big, ruggedly built men with beat-up features who never take the trouble to comb their hair.
"What is it, Gallison?" Fenton asked, and then the words themselves penetrated, and he rose from his desk, a look of stunned disbelief in his eyes.
"Is it Willard you're talking about?"
"Who else?" Gallison said, coming into the office and sitting down opposite Fenton in a chair that was two sizes too small for him.
"He came in and gave himself up. He said he knew we'd found the letters, and it would only be prolonging the agony for him to hide out in a furnished room somewhere and live in fear until we closed in on him. He thought of heading north into Canada, or south into Mexico, and even of hopping a freighter to South America. That's what he said, believe it or not. I'm practically quoting his exact words."
"Well, what made him change his mind? We've had such a tough job tracing him he could have gotten all the way to Brazil by this time. If you're going to tell me he was afraid the Brazilian non-extradition policy doesn't cover murder ... skip it. I'm not in a very humorous mood right now."
Gallison smiled slightly. "He said he just wasn't capable of it. Too sensitive, too imaginative, too afraid of life in the buff to take it by the horns that way. I'm still quoting him. He said he was never cut out to be a fugitive. Anything connected with the police terrifies him. If a Government agent should call on him about some trivial, completely innocent matter he'd have a heart attack. He just can't take that sort of thing. He has made a full confession. He says he killed her because she pulled an outrageous gyp on him."
"Yes, I know," Fenton said. "It's what he claims in these letters. He claims he wrote a series of articles for her about juvenile delinquency, and I guess you saw the major, six-million-dollar movie that was based on his material. The Clark Gable-Monroe sort of thing. And now it's on TV, a two-year contract for a weekly series and I think the sponsor is General Motors, but I'm not sure. In case you don't know, all of that is about as big-time as you can get. It would make practically any writer feel entitled to walk down Fifth Avenue shoulder to shoulder with the biggest names in TV and stop for a moment to shake the paw of the MGM lion. The lions in front of the library would look that way to him."
"He says he didn't get a cent out of it," Gallison said. "Not one single penny."
"That's hard to believe," Fenton said. "It seems he sold the Eaton-Lathrup Publications all rights to the material. I haven't looked too deeply into the technicalities involved in such transactions but I'm pretty sure that 'all rights' means exactly what it says. If a magazine buys material on that basis it is entitled to all of the profits accruing from subsequent re-sales, to TV, the movies or whatever."
"Willard practically admits that," Gallison said. "In fact—"
"Wait a minute," Fenton said, a little impatiently. "Let me finish. It's my understanding that not many of the really big magazine groups buy all rights. There's usually a contract involved, with a stipulation in it concerning the rights. And even when they do buy all rights they're seldom one hundred percent legalistic about it. They'll often lean backwards to see that the author gets a break, gets at least a slice of the pie if the work passes into the so-called big-time. I don't know how Lathrup felt about that or just what her policy was, of course. But if he claims he's been gyped out of money he's entitled to in a strictlylegalsense, I don't believe he has a legal leg to stand on. Not if he sold the group all rights, with no reservations whatever."
"That's just it," Gallison said. "That's where he claims she took advantage of him. He says that, like plenty of other writers, he's no businessman. You'd laugh to hear the way he's been going on about that, if he wasn't a self-confessed murderer. Nothing a murderer says or does is ever funny. But the way he put it would have gone over big on a TV comic program. He claims he has no more business sense than a two-year-old; would sign any contract that was pushed under his nose without looking at even the large print, let alone the fine. He claims he's—well, the term he used was 'a commercial imbecile.' He takes a sort of pride in it. And he thought she understood that some writers were like that—some of the biggest names, in fact, in the writing business.
"They can't even bring themselves to glance twice at a contract. It's not important to them, they're way off in the clouds somewhere, figuring what their characters are going to say and do in the next chapter."
"He could be right about that," Fenton said, sighing. "Up to a point anyway. I've known two or three big-name mystery writers in my time, and my wife sort of—well, collects them. Writers in general, I mean, along with painters and musicians. It's an odd hobby for the wife of an old police warhorse, but show me just one thing I can really understand about women and I'll get you a lieutenancy tomorrow, if I have to go down to Center Street myself and beg for it. You'd be the biggest asset the Homicide Squad could possibly have."
It was Gallison's turn to sigh. "I guess I'm the way Willard is about contracts when it comes to understanding women," he said. "You seem to forget I've been married myself for fifteen years. Every day my wife is a different kind of woman. But the big difference came between the day before and the day after I married her."
"It's usually that way," Fenton said. "You wake up and discover your wife is a human being."
His expression sobered abruptly. "Where is Willard now? In a cell or still under the lights. If you've got a signed confession—"
"We've got it, all right—signed, sealed and delivered."
"So you just went ahead without even consulting me, is that it? What am I supposed to be around here—a rookie fresh from the asphalt?"
"It couldn't be helped, Lieutenant.... It all happened so fast."
"John! You're asking for trouble, boy!"
"All right then, Joe. I swear it really couldn't be helped. It all just poured out of him, so fast we had trouble in taking it down and had to ask him to read it over three times. We wouldn't have laid a finger on him, anyway. You know that as well as I do."
"Sometimes I wonder. A cop can get terribly angry at times and once, about four years ago, I saw something I deliberately shut my eyes to, and I've never regretted it. They had this ... human animal ... stripped to the waist in the tank room and were ... well, never mind. He committed a brutal sex crime and when they were through with him ... they had a full confession. I just turned on my heels and walked out."
"We still wouldn't have laid a finger on Willard."
"I know, I know. I guess I'd better have a talk with him."
Willard was sitting alone in a cell that dwarfed him a little, despite its narrowness, because he was both a very small and a very frail-looking man. Fenton put his age at about forty-five, although he could have been four of five years older.
He didn't look very much like a writer, but Fenton knew that few writers conformed to the picture people had of them. In general, they looked remarkably like everybody else.
Willard was about five-feet-two in his socks, and he was in them now because both his belt and his shoes had been taken away from him. He had thoughtful gray eyes, and rather handsome features and there was nothing in the least aggressive-looking about him. He was hard to picture with a gun in his hand, taking deliberate aim and shooting a defenseless woman through the head. It was difficult even, to think of him as a man with a violent temper who could write threatening letters or resort to any kind of extreme physical violence, even under the goadings of rage.
He looked up quickly when Fenton and Gallison entered the cell and then got slowly to his feet.
Fenton frowned a little and gestured toward the cot upon which he had been sitting.
"Sit down, please," he said. "No sense in standing. We're just going to have a brief talk and then you can see your lawyer, if you wish. You don't have to say a word, if you prefer to wait until he gets here. It's my duty to tell you that, even though you've signed a confession. Anything you may decide to tell us can be used as evidence in court, in addition to the information in the statement you've just signed. Is that clear to you?"
Willard nodded and sat down again on the edge of the cot. "What does all that matter now?" he said. "I'm going to plead guilty anyway. I killed her because—well, you don't know what kind of woman she was, so you probably won't be able to understand how a man can be driven to desperation—"
"I've just read the statement you made," Fenton said. "It doesn't tell me what kind of woman she was, but it tells me a great deal about you. I've read the letters you wrote to her as well. You seem to feel that you've been very shabbily treated. I would like to know a little more about that."
"What more can I say? What more can I possibly say? When a writer who has lived most of his life on a very modest income loses at least a hundred thousand dollars—"
"You mean ... your rightful share in what your series of articles has brought the Eaton-Lathrup publications in cash so far? Or will bring them within the next few months? Or merely what youbelieveshould be your rightful share, putting aside for the moment all legal considerations. You signed a contract giving the concern all rights, didn't you?"
"Yes, but she gave me to believe—"
"Just what did she give you to believe?"
"That she was prepared to be very generous about the entire matter if the articles should make a great deal of money for the magazines. She wouldn't hold me to the strict letter of the contract. She'd waive the 'all rights' clause. A great many magazines do that. It's taken for granted—"
"I see. But are you sure about that? Don't you think you should have made sure before signing the contract, if you had any doubts at all? There's nothing in the least unethical about a magazine group buying all rights, you know. It's their privilege under the law."
"But she knew how impractical most writers are! She knew how—well, yes, even infantile they can be about such things. And she made me feel that she was my friend, that she'd never dream of taking advantage of me in any way."
"But she didn't, if you signed a contract giving the concern all rights, unqualifiedly, with no strings attached."
"And I still say she did! She led me on, deceived me. She—"
He was on his feet again now and some of the mildness, the constrained look, the look thatdidn'tmake him look like a man who might be capable of resorting to violence under stress, was gone from his eyes.
"She led me on, I tell you. There was something about her, something I mistook for great generosity and warmth—"
Fenton looked at him steadily for a moment, carefully weighing what he was about to say. He asked the question in a quiet tone, but he knew that it was emotionally charged, and strategically just the right question to put to the man at that particular moment.
"Were you her lover, Willard?"
Willard flushed scarlet and lowered his eyes.
"Were you?"
Willard compressed his lips and said nothing, but a look of torment had come into his eyes.
"You slept with her, didn't you, Willard?"
"Yes, damn you!" There was a look of naked agony in the frail man's eyes now, and the words came out choked with rage.
Then, quite suddenly, he was trembling violently, clenching his fists like a man deranged.
"Why don't you ask me if she was good in bed? Or if I was? Haven't you a spark of decency in you? I've heard of the third degree but a question like that is worse. Oh, damn you to hell!"
"Why, Willard? I mean—why do you feel it's such an indecent question, a question I've no right to ask? You've confessed to a very serious crime. You've confessed to—I'm going to use another police term I hope won't shock your sensitive spirit too much—you've confessed to what we call the Big One. You can't stand on the niceties when you've taken a human life—or question the right of a policeman, sworn to uphold the law, to ask what, under ordinary circumstances, you might consider a damned impertinent question, an invasion of privacy. Sensitive women, wives and mothers, have been asked far franker questions on the witness stand. There are times when every question must be asked and answered, no matter how much it may anger you or make you writhe."