Perhaps, deep in Willard's nature, there was a submerged substratum of logic ... a willingness to give ground before an incontestable fact or an argument he could not hope to win. Fenton knew that to be true of the more volatile types ... on some occasions, at any rate.
Most of the anger went out of Willard's eyes and he sat down again on the edge of the cot, and cradled his head in his arms.
Fenton took a different tack. "The statement you signed wasn't too clear in a few respects," he said, casting a glance at Gallison that was generously forgiving, but still a little on the withering side. "I'd like to go over a few of the details with you. Just what happened when you entered the office and Miss Lathrup looked up and saw you standing there with a gun in your hand? Just what did you say to her before you shot her—and what did she say to you? Was she genuinely frightened from the start? It would be strange if she wasn't, but I'd like to have you tell me more about it in your own words. There are a few other questions I'd like to have answered. Take your time, try to think clearly. I'm not pressuring you. It's just that we've got to be convinced that every statement in your confession is true."
Willard looked up quickly, some of the anger sweeping back into his eyes. "Why should you need to be convinced? Don't you sometimes slap around poor devils who are completely innocent just to getanykind of a confession out of them?"
"You've been reading too many paperback novels," Fenton said.
"I'm not a fiction writer," Willard said. "I haven't read a paperback novel in five years."
"You should," Fenton said, wryly. "Some of the strongest, most realistic writing in America today is being done in that field. But cops get slandered in them a helluva lot. Not always, but sometimes. Some of the writers don't seem to like cops too well. They are often very sensitive, imaginative guys themselves and they don't like what cops sometimes do, even when they try to be very hard-boiled and call a spade a spade. And I won't deny that cops sometimes do step a little over the line. But it isn't as bad as you might think. Not nearly as bad."
"I've only your word for that."
"You may take my word for it. I've been on the force for thirty years. You get sadists in any department of life—I'll challenge anyone to deny that. And if an innocent man happens to get a bad break—comes up against the wrong kind of cop—it can be very bad. You could justify a certain degree of cop hatred in almost anyone on other grounds. The world we live in isn't for children. If cops were mild-mannered intellectuals, or held completely modern, psychiatric views about crime—and the causes of crime—society in general might be in for trouble on a day-to-day realistic basis."
"It might not do any harm at all if we gave it a try," Willard said.
"On a theoretical level there are times when I'm inclined to agree with you," Fenton said. "But there's another part of my nature that says there has to be a kind of binding cement to hold society together meanwhile—I mean, until Utopia's here. Cops have to be picked for toughness—to a certain extent. But that doesn't mean they can't be completely fair. A lot of them lean backwards to be fair, will be a big brother to young hoodlums if they think there's an ounce of decency left in them and all they need is a little of that 'not being completely rejected' feeling to give them a different slant on things. You know what I mean. But some cops can be sadistic, mean, even downright vicious. I would be the last to deny it."
Fenton smiled, trying his best to bring a little warmth into his words, to get the man on the cot to trust him. "There are times when I don't like cops myself, any better than you do. It's a very human feeling. Could I go any further than that, considering that I'm supposed to be just about as tough as they come in some respects, being a Lieutenant of Detectives on the Homicide Squad?"
"What do you want to know?" Willard asked. "What do you want me to tell you? I walked into her office and shot her dead. Isn't that all down on the record now? Haven't I confessed to it?"
"It still needs a little filling out," Fenton said. "Suppose we start at the beginning and just go over it all again, step by step."
A half hour later Fenton sat again at his desk, drumming with his fingers on the big double-file spread out before him.
Gallison hadn't seated himself this time. He stood awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot, and casting an occasional glance toward the window and at the large framed photograph of an Inspector in uniform on the opposite wall—Inspector Henry Millard, who had been dead for twenty years. He did not seem to want continuously to meet and hold Fenton's level, almost accusing gaze.
"He didn't do it," Fenton said. "I knew that the instant I started questioning him, but I had to make sure, beyond the faintest possibility of a doubt. All of the things he told me—and at least one-third of the details in his signed confession—are completely wide of the mark. He wasn't there, didn't shoot her, couldn't even tell me how she'd looked in falling fifteen seconds after the shot was fired. How she must have looked, I mean, for her head and shoulders to strike the desk the way they did, upsetting an ashtray, and to be consistent with the position she was in when Miss Prentiss found her. And the body wasn't moved—not a half-inch—until we arrived.
"Other things—a dozen, at least. I had the impression he wasn't even sure just where the bullet had entered her head. Oh, a murderer can be mistaken about many things, way off in some respects. But not quite that far off. Not nearly that far off, in fact, when he's studied everything published in the papers about the case, and has been in that office many times. There were details we didn't tell the reporters, details he couldn't possibly have known and he was completely wrong about all of them, with one or two exceptions. And that only strengthens the case against him—the very damaging evidence which proves that he wasn't the killer and couldn't possibly have been."
Fenton nodded, his fingers still tapping on the file. "You'd naturally expect him to be right about one or two things, even if they didn't appear in the papers. He's no dumb-bell. He couldn't have written those juvenile delinquency articles and foster-fathered a major movie if he was. He'd naturally be pretty good at guessing games. It's always the exceptions which strengthen, lend real weight, to that kind of rule."
Fenton cleared his throat. "It's like in medicine. You take a very rare, unusual kind of disease. Say there are twenty symptoms which are very diagnostic of that particular disease. But one of them only occurs in one case of the disease out of a hundred. And the patient has that one symptom, along with the others. Now ... let's say that in the whole United States, in the course of the year, only about two hundred people die of that rare disease.
"Don't you see what I'm driving at Gallison—or do you? It would have to mean that only about two people die from that disease with that particular symptom attached to it every year out of a nation of a hundred and seventy-five million people. According to the law of averages, how likely would the patient be to have the disease? The very symptom which does sometimes occur in connection with the disease—but rarely—which you might think would strengthen the diagnosis, actually helps to weaken it, to make it so unlikely as to practically eliminate the possibility that the patient could have it."
"So it's medicine he's talking about now," Gallison said, unable to keep a slight trace of acidity out of his voice, but wishing, almost instantly, that he hadn't spoken at all.
"I only used that as an example," Fenton said, his voice sharpening slightly. "But it spells the difference between a crack medical diagnostician and a bad one. It's always those little, subtle intangibles you have to take into consideration. And that's really just another way of saying you have to have imagination to be either a good cop or a good doctor."
A slightly wistful look came into Fenton's eyes. "I sometimes wish I'd taken up medicine. Healing people is much better than wallowing in the kind of ugly—Oh, well, skip it."
"But you can't clear a self-confessed murderer completely on that basis alone," Gallison protested. "His confession could be off in a hundred ways, and he could still be guilty. At least ... it would remain a possibility. You practically just admitted that yourself. If we had other evidence ... and we do have a little additional evidence ... we could still take it before a jury."
"You mean the DA could," Fenton said, his voice becoming tinged with the kind of impatience a grammar-school teacher might have displayed toward a pupil who had just pulled a boner in geography. "What are you trying to do—add to our burdens? The DA could take it before a jury, all right. But he'd get his ears pinned so far back that the next time he ran for election it would be as a dog-catcher. Did you ever hear of an alibi, Gallison? Or is that too involved a point of law for you?"
Lieutenant Fenton sighed heavily and his voice softened a little. "Sorry, Gallison. That was a lousy thing for me to say. But at least you know that I wasn't pulling rank on you. It's something I've never done or never will do—unless you come in here and toss your badge on the desk and I have to hand it back to you and tell you to go through channels."
"Okay, Joe. I understand. Don't let it worry you."
"A policeman shouldn't have nerves, I guess. But things have been moving a little too fast for me in this case."
"Just how good is his alibi?" Gallison asked.
"Iron-plated," Fenton said. "And of course it isn'thisalibi in a strict sense, because he didn't even present it to us. It's an alibi we'll have to force him to accept as absolute proof that he couldn't have done it, because we want him to walk out of here without hallucinating when we release him. Otherwise someone might get the idea that this is a side wing of Bellevue. We've done our best so far to create that impression anyway."
"You mean—you think he may be ... a psycho?"
"Yes—and no," Fenton said.
"That's sure enlightening. Gets right back to what you just said about medical diagnosis. Maybe you should have been a psychiatrist, Joe."
"Maybe I'd better explain. He's not only a very brilliant writer of true-fact crime articles for the better magazines, with the stress placed on juvenile delinquency—he happens to be pretty much of a confirmed alcoholic. The wild binge kind—once in every three or four weeks he loses a week-end. Completely, goes absolutely blotto."
"Like in that Jackson novel that made such a big splash about twelve or fifteen years ago, you mean? I remember the movie even better than I do the book, but I read the book—"
"We seem to be very literary today," Fenton said. "Everywhere we turn in this case we come up against famous novels, or big-name writers or major movies or guys with a grievance against female editors. I suppose that's only to be expected—considering what kind of murder it was and where it took place. But it's hard to understand why so much of it has to drift our way in a single day. To answer your question—yes, he's theLost Week-Endkind of heavy drinker."
"Then why did you say 'yes—and no,' when I asked you if he was a psycho?"
"Because it's not a term you can use loosely when you're talking about alcoholics. What I guess I should say is—it's not a term you should useunambiguously. It had to be 'Yes—and no,' with a lot of half-way stages in between. There is such a thing as alcoholic insanity, you know—a clear-cut psychosis with very definite symptoms. You can get alcoholic softening of the brain, which is something else again, because it's physical as well as mental and it's usually fatal. You can be just a periodic drinker—not a hopeless alcoholic at all, although you'll be headed that way—and have the D.T.'s occasionally. Or you can be a very heavy, constant drinker and never have the D.T.'s.
"It all depends on how alcohol affects you. Just a little alcohol, for instance, could give Edgar Allan Poe the D.T.'s. And when a man has the D.T.'s, he's a psychotic, if only temporarily. Or behaves like one in all respects. And just constant, heavy drinking can make a man behave so erratically at times you could practically call him a psycho. And when a man is dead drunk, under any circumstances, would you say his behavior was merely neurotic?
"The thing you've got to remember about heavy drinking—periodic or otherwise—is that one of the things it most often does is bring about memory lapses. Very serious memory lapses—prolonged blackout periods. And that especially applies to theLost Week-Endkind of drinker."
"So Willard had a memory lapse and couldn't remember whether he shot her or not. Is that what you're trying to say?"
Fenton shook his head. "Nothing of the sort. You're forgetting about the alibi, apparently."
"Sorry I interrupted."
"Think nothing of it. But I'd be very grateful if you'd listen carefully. I'm just giving you a few simple facts about alcoholism."
"Not as a warning, I hope. I hardly ever touch the stuff."
"I'll just bet. I might have gone for that idea—that he couldn't remember if he'd shot or not, if we hadn't got all this new information about him just in the last hour. He's had memory lapses going back ten or twelve years. He's been in the Bellevue alcoholic ward seven times. And he just happened to be there on the morning of the murder. He was picked up the night before in a bar on West Eighth Street, after a brawl that was a little on the special side. He was roaring drunk and he blackened the eye of one of his drinking companions and knocked the other down, almost giving him a concussion.
"They were good friends of his, so they covered up for him. No police charge was lodged against him. But he was carted off to Bellevue and he remained there for two days. I don't believe in murder by thought control, do you?"
"But why did he confess? It makes no sense at all to me."
"Doesn't it? It makes plenty of sense to me and I'm sure it will to you if you'll give it a little thought. You know what guilt feelings can do to an alcoholic, don't you? You must have arrested at least a dozen drunks in the last ten years who were burning up with impatience to confess. To homicides they didn't and couldn't have committed."
"Yeah, that's true enough," Gallison said.
"You saw what she meant to him, how he felt about her. When I just asked him if he'd slept with her it set off a trigger-mechanism in his brain. It was like a delayed time bomb. He was dead sober when he turned himself in and confessed, but alcoholics can be dead sober and still have a kind of emotional hangover—sometimes lasting for days after a real wild binge on a lost week-end. He was—still is—in a very abnormal state."
"But why should he feel so guilty about his relations with her?" Gallison asked. "Why the threatening letters. You mean that he didn't actually feel she gyped him on that article sale to the movies and TV? If he didn't, he sure is a great little actor. He should have played a leading role in the movie himself."
"Oh, he felt she gyped him, all right. And that increased his load of guilt. He couldn't remember just when he'd last spent two days in Bellevue—not the exact date. He thought he'd gone to the Eaton-Lathrup publications on the morning of the murder, had a showdown with her and shot her dead. He might not have been completely sure about it, but he couldn't forget his earlier memory lapses. Some alcoholics feel guilty on just that basis alone. They know they're subject to memory lapses and they're always wondering what terrible crime they just might conceivably have committed during the blotto stage.
"And every aspect of his relations with her was steeped in guilt, apparently. Just being her lover made him feel guilty, apparently. You saw how he flared up when I questioned him about it. It sounds crazy, but there are a few men like that left in this day and age. A Puritanic hangover that alcoholism makes a real fighting issue, if it's ever openly discussed.
"Don't you see? She probably threw him over, rejected him, told him he wasn't her idea of a lover boy just about the time that big movie sale went through. So he had a double reason for hating her—a triple reason, in fact, since he felt guilty about just having an affair with her—and it all came out in the wash when he walked in here and confessed to a crime he didn't commit."
"But how about that movie and TV angle."
Fenton frowned, staring down at the double-file on his desk. "That's the screwiest part of it, the part that really ought to be used in a book sometime, by one of those mystery writers I told you about—two writers I know very well and would probably give me a percentage for bringing it to their attention, if I wasn't more or less incorruptible regarding Homicide Squad files. Fact is ... she leaned backwards to be fair, to see that he made a fairly large sum out of the movie sale ... even though he wasn't legally entitled to anything at all. He did get pretty close to his hundred thousand dollars."
Gallison whistled softly. "Brother, that's hard to believe. What happened to the dough? He's still living in fairly modest circumstances. He has a small house just north of White Plains, as you know, but he bought it several years ago and it's mortgaged right up to the hilt."
"You've hung around bars quite a bit, haven't you?" Fenton said, smiling a little. "I mean, just in line of duty, of course. Haven't you heard guys say: 'I made three hundred dollars last week, but it was burning a hole in my pocket. I blew it all in one night.'"
"Sure, sure," Gallison admitted. "I've heard guys talking that way often enough. But a hundred thousand dollars—"
"Not quite, probably. Seventy thousand would be closer, I should imagine. And income tax would take a big slice. Half of the rest could go as a feedback."
"What do you mean ... a feedback?"
"Money squandered on her while he was still in her good graces, as her number one lover boy. That would also give him an additional reason to hate her, when he thought about it afterwards. Know what it costs to take a woman with her expensive tastes out five nights a week, for perhaps three months?"
Gallison shrugged. "How should I know? I get upset sometimes when my wife orders three cocktails before dinner at a midtown bar."
"He's probably been living very high for the past three or four months, ever since the picture was sold and she gave him a slice of what it brought in cold cash. Just why she did it I can't imagine. Maybe there actually was a generous streak in her, and she really thought the concern owed him something, despite the contract. She could even have been a little in love with him at one time. He's not a bad looking guy, remember. And she probably knew she'd get quite a bit of it back in jewelry, furs and expensive entertainment."
Gallison whistled again. "I'm beginning to get the picture," he said. "If the dough actually was burning a hole in his pocket and there are plenty of guys like that. And if he had blotto periods—"
"Well, that winds it up," Fenton said. "We'll have to release him, of course. No reason to hold him now. The poor little guy. In a way, I feel sorry for him. It's no joke to be an alcoholic and feelthatguilty about getting himself a piece of very high-class tail."
"You're not fooling me, Joe. I bet you have a Puritan streak yourself. The only woman you've been interested in for the past fifteen years is the glamor doll you married."
"It could be," Fenton conceded. "My father was a farmer in Iowa and he went to church every Sunday, rain or shine. It's something you never entirely outgrow. But if I ever hear you shooting your mouth off about it—"
It was Gallison's turn to smile. "Don't worry, Joe. The secret's safe with me. I'm just glad I'm not that way."
"I see. You step out now and then—just tell your wife it's a double-duty assignment that will keep you up until dawn."
"I didn't say that. Hell, there's a difference between loyalty and the kind of act our little friend put on. He actually blushed, or didn't you notice, when you threw it up to him."
"Some day you'll become tolerant of every kind of human behavior," Fenton said. "We all have a chink in our armor somewhere."
"I suppose, I suppose."
"You don't have to suppose. It's goddam true. A guy can be a prig in one respect and a liberal-minded, very intelligent kind of human being in another. We're all jackasses one third of the time, at least."
"It's funny," Gallison said. "One of the Eaton-Lathrup editors is an alcoholic too. That Ellers guy. Do you suppose he has blackouts now and then?"
"With nothing more than that to go on," Fenton said, "we'd have no justification for suspecting him. Something may turn up, of course. We'll see. We've got a lot of digging to do, and our best lead so far has gone out the window. I didn't say that all confirmed alcoholics worry or feel guilty about what they may have done during a lost week-end. Only a few of them do, the ones who have criminal impulses or a strong reason for hating someone even when they're sober. We'll see, we'll see. Right now—"
The phone at Fenton's elbow started ringing.
He picked up the receiver, listened for a moment and re-cradled it, a very odd look coming into his eyes.
"Now nothing can surprise me," he said. "A first-class lead goes out the window and one just as promising comes flying in, like one of those goddam pigeons that are always messing up the sill."
"What is it?" Gallison asked. "Or would you rather make a production out of keeping me guessing?"
"Well ... there's a young writer whose work Helen Lathrup took very seriously at first and then tore into, ripping his self-esteem to shreds. I got that from the editor you just mentioned, Ellers. They were also sort of close and cozy for a time and then she refused to even see him when he phoned. She slammed his book manuscript back with a hell of a harsh criticism—Ellers read what she wrote. He also saw the manuscript and thought it was pretty good."
"Sounds sort of familiar," Gallison said. "Like the same record almost, but with a different groove maybe in it somewhere. I mean, she sure was an expert in the tease line. Give them every encouragement, the better to watch them writhe."
Fenton nodded. "Yeah ... in general I'd say yes. We've run into it twice before and in questioning the office staff I got the impression I'd just scratched the surface. She covered a lot of territory with her teasing. Except that most women who fall into that category either won't let a man touch them or won't go beyond a kiss. She was very generous with her encouragement, apparently."
"You mean she was willing to start off as if she was playing for keeps."
"If you want to put it that way. What puzzles me a little is that she didn't have to. Just one long, lingering look and most men would have been hooked, right through the gullet like a frog when you use it for bait. Ever fish for bass with frogs, Gallison? Sometimes they climb out of the water on a nearby bank and stare back, looking forlorn and pathetic as hell—pathetic enough to tear your heart out. But they're still hooked."
"So is the fisherman—if he doesn't catch any bass. Fisherwoman in this case, of course. What did she hope to gain by it?"
Fenton shrugged. "Who can say, exactly? Probably the same kind of cruel pleasure most women who fall into that category get from keeping a man dangling. Only, as I say, she seems to have been exceptionally generous-minded about it, at least at first. Women like that really fall into three categories. The first is scared stiff when a man so much as touches them, but they enjoy leading men on. The second had some kind of trauma in childhood which prevents them from warming up to men, but they'd genuinely like to be generous and don't intend to be deliberately cruel. The third kind is like Lathrup. What they are, basically, is men-destroying women. They can be both generous and cruel, and aren't actually repelled by men physically. They'll go all the way, but the hooked frog had better watch out."
"You know what, Joe? You really should have been a psychiatrist."
"Suppose we drop all that for the moment. You asked me what I'd found out. You want to hear it, or don't you?"
"Why not? We're supposed to be working together on a homicide case."
"All right, here it is. I put a trailer on the young writer. Not a shadow, no Squad close-check. Just did a little more digging, keeping him in view. He was just one of twenty suspects. Thought nothing important would turn up. His name's Ralph Gilmore, by the way. I gave you a brief run-down on him. Have you forgotten?"
"Naturally not," Gallison said. "But when you just called him a young writer—"
"All right, you remember. Good. I won't ask you how much you remember, because I went into most of this before and you failed to remember straight off. But anyhow, the digging paid off. All Gilmore did, about ten days ago, was go into a pawnshop on Park Row and buy himself a gun. The kind of under-the-counter deal that infuriates me, and this is one pawnbroker who'll wish he'd thought twice—or three times. He'll have the book thrown at him."
Gallison narrowed his eyes. "What kind of gun was it, Joe."
"What kind do you suppose? It couldn't have been any other kind, could it? She was shot with a forty-five, and if he'd bought a pearl-handled woman's gun did you think for a moment I'd have looked as stunned as I did just now?"
"You might have. It would have shown he had murder on his mind. At the last moment, he might have decided that a big automatic was what he really needed."
"Yeah, I can well imagine."
"I'm serious in one way," Gallison said. "You can fit silencers on smaller guns. An amateur doesn't usually commit murder with a forty-five—a big Luger cannon or anything like that—unless he just happens to have such a weapon lying around ... a war souvenir, say."
"You can't argue with a fact. Gilmore bought a big, long-barreled gun. Maybe the pawnbroker had only one gun to sell and that was it. Try buying a gun from a pawnbroker sometime. Gilmore was one of the lucky ones."
"And now you think his luck is running out?"
A weary, slightly embittered look came into Fenton's eyes. "How should I know, at this stage? If I was in his shoes I'd be plenty worried. But our job is simply to do what we can and take nothing for granted ... until we've checked and double-checked."
"Then we'd better get right after it."
"I think so," Fenton said.
Chapter VI
Ruth Porges could not have explained, even to herself, why the scream had unnerved her so. Like the others, she'd been unable to identify the voice. But she did have a faint, will-of-the-wisp kind of suspicion that it was Lynn Prentiss who had cried out in shock and horror. It hadn't sounded like Susan's voice at the desk or the voice of Joyce Sanderson from the linotype room.
And somehow, all morning, she's been expecting something alarming to happen. She couldn't have explained that either. It was just that—well, things were coming to a head as far as Lathrup was concerned. She was reaching the saturation point in arousing bitter anger and adding fuel to long-standing grievances.
Ruth Porges had only to close her eyes to bring it all back. She'd thought that what had happened had been filed securely away in her mind; was just a collapsed file covered with dust, the pages so yellow and brittle they'd crumble if she thumbed through them again.
But now she knew better. It wasn't that old a file. It had all happened less than ten months ago, and it had left a raw red wound in her mind. It could be put in very simple terms—no file was really needed. It would have sounded like a musical comedy refrain if it hadn't been so cruelly tragic. Over and over, echoing still.
She stole my man.Went right after him, with no scruples and no holds barred. And when she discovered that he wasn't too accomplished a lover—not too good in bed, why not say it?—she cast him aside like an old shoe.
Ruth Porges leaned back and shut her eyes and let the memories come flooding back.
He was wearing a gray trench coat and his hair was short-cropped, and he looked handsome and distinguished enough to make her think of Paris in the spring and she was sitting alone at a table in a Left Bank cafe, and there he was coming toward her, smiling his handsome, slightly crooked smile and it was just three years after the end of World War II.
But of course it hadn't been like that at all. She'd met him at a party in the Village and he'd been a writer of a sort and a painter of a sort and knew quite a few important people in the musical world. As far as she knew he hadn't sold a single story or article to a magazine and he certainly wasn't wealthy, but he always seemed to have enough money to take a girl out for the evening and spend perhaps fifteen or twenty dollars and he never tried to economize by suggesting they go to little Italian restaurants where you could get red wine by the bottle and the bill never exceeded three or four dollars.
No lavish spender, no Rainbow Room sort of escort, but her own salary was large enough to enable her to go to the Stork Club occasionally in the company of girl friends with escorts to spare, so she didn't begrudge him a fairly modest evening's entertainment when he seemed to like her so much.
And he did like her—no question about that. Roger Bendiner, the only man who'd ever really thought of her, entirely and all the time, as a woman who had so much ... so very much ... to give to a man.
"So you want me to meet your boss?" he said. "That's quite amusing, you know. A reversal of the usual sort of thing. A harassed husband comes home to a wife who's a little on the uncooperative side and says: 'Darling, I'm bringing the boss home for dinner. Try to build me up instead of tearing me down, just for this one evening, and make the meal a little outstanding, eh?'
"But this way it's much simpler. Your boss is a woman and I just have to charm her a little. All you have to worry about is whether or not I have enough charm. But since we're not married yet I'll have an ace to start with. Every executive-type woman is interested in an unmarried man, no matter how much he may be lacking in the social graces and even if he has a bashed in nose."
"You haven't a bashed in nose and you're not lacking in the social graces," she reminded him, smiling a little.
"Well, that's a matter of opinion," he said. "Of course you're right about my nose. But my ears are much too large and only Clark Gable could get away with ears this size and still—well, you know what I mean."
"I think you're just as handsome," she said.
The evening went so well at first that any kind of resentment directed toward Lathrup would have seemed to her ungracious and lacking in common sense. She wasn't quite sure why she'd invited Lathrup to meet Roger; was unable to explain it later to her own satisfaction and would have been at a complete loss to explain it to anyone else.
The impulse hadn't been prompted by a desire to impress Lathrup with her capacity to attract and hold a handsome man or to ingratiate herself with the woman in any way. She'd begun to dislike Lathrup a little even then, along with every other member of the editorial staff.
Probably she'd done it to impress Roger. Not that he'd needed to be impressed in that way, but to a woman deeply in love and not quite able to accept the miracle at face value a desire to shine, to seem exceptional in all respects can become almost a compulsion. And Lathrupwasdecorative, an exceptional woman in so many different ways that it was a feather in Ruth Porges' cap to claim her as a close friend as well as her employer. Simply to parade her before Roger in that capacity was so irresistible a temptation that she had succumbed to it with no particular misgivings, since it had never even occurred to her that Roger could transfer his adoration from her to another woman.
The transference had taken place so gradually that at first she had remained completely unaware of it. Even when she saw them together on the dance floor, and Roger was holding Lathrup a little more tightly and intimately than most of the other men were holding their partners and their cheeks seemed to remain in contact for a surprisingly long time—seemed, in fact, almost never to separate—she did not become in any way alarmed.
Annoyed, yes. Shewasa little annoyed, because even during a lull in the music they remained so completely absorbed in each other that they did not once glance in her direction.
But she thought nothing of it, really, and when they returned to the table and sat down and kept looking at each other, completely ignoring her, it was a full ten or fifteen minutes before her color began to rise a little and a look of concern crept into her eyes.
She wasn't angry at Roger even then ... or with Lathrup. She put their behavior down to a momentary infatuation brought on by Roger's five Manhattans, and Lathrup's three Old Fashioneds, an infatuation which would evaporate like dew in bright sunlight the instant the next dance number began and she and Roger would get out on the floor together, and she'd mold her body to his and he'd hold her more tightly than he'd have dared to hold Lathrup, and their lips would come together at least once in the course of the dance in a long and passionate kiss.
The lights were dim; no one would see. It would not cause a scandal. It would be in bad taste and unacceptable on such a dance floor in the presence of patrons who would never think of going so far, however much they might want to do so, and if in a brighter light it might even have brought a tap on the shoulder from an irate head waiter.
But she'd do it anyway ... she'd prove to Lathrup that she was a woman who was not afraid to dance with her man like a hellion on a Village cellar dance floor, like a real gone Beat nineteen years of age with a rose pinned in her hair and an upthrust of breasts that could make the most distinguished of midtown, gray-templed, capital-gains league patrons feel as primitive as a Dawn Man.
There were swanky night clubs where it was winked at and took place all the time, of course—the danse primeval. But this just didn't happen to be that kind of night club. She'd make it that kind, however—for Roger and herself alone. And if anyone saw or objected or tried to interfere she'd really show them what a hellion she could be. If the protests really angered her—she'd take off her clothes.
She suddenly realized that she'd allowed herself to become more drunk that she'd ever imagine she could be. She'd had five Manhattans too, and the last one she hadn't sipped. She downed it in a gulp, her eyes on Roger's face.
Roger had apparently forgotten that there was more than one woman seated at the table with him. And that woman wasn't herself. He was looking at Lathrup now in a way that made her turn away with a half-sob of shock. The pure animal flamed in his eyes. He was undressing her with his eyes and she was smiling back at him, apparently not caring in the least, giving him the kind of encouragement that could only be characterized as lascivious, the look of a wanton lost to all shame.
Ladylike as well ... that was the most shocking, revolting, unbelievable part of it.
Ruth Porges had an impulse to get up, lean across the table and slap Lathrup's face.
In her present state of intoxication it would not have been a ladylike slap. She was quite sure of that. She'd lose her job, of course, along with the man she'd already lost—her satyr-lover whom she'd allowed herself to idealize. And to think that he'd held her in his arms, and she'd yielded her virginal body to him, surrendering utterly to his fiercely insistent, madly passionate caresses. A man incapable of loyalty, a man consumed by the kind of gross sensuality that degraded a woman by its complete lack of respect for her as an individual.
If he could look at Lathrup that way, at her thighs and bourgeoning breasts—the more bourgeoning because of the wanton way she'd constricted their swelling roundness—and her hair and lips and eyes ... he could look at any woman that way, feel the same way about any woman attractive enough to catch his eye and even some who were the opposite of attractive, but who had something about them that stirred men of primitive instincts to a frenzy of desire. The more coarse and slatternly the woman the more some men seemed to be stirred.
Not that Lathrup was coarse and slatternly—just the opposite. And Roger was the kind of man who would be repelled by a real slut. She gave him that much credit. He was nothing if not fastidious, he would seek to pluck only the unique and delicate blooms that grew very high up, on trees of rare growth arching above white marble terraces, their branches stirred by breezes from the blue Mediterranean, or the New York equivalent of such blooms.
What kind of woman was Lathrup anyway? A hard, executive-type woman two-thirds of the time, a woman some people might wonder about and even just possibly think a lesbian—although there was little about her to suggest that—and then,all woman, so completely feminine that she could bring a man to his knees before her with a single provocative glance.
How could she hope to compete with a woman like that? And she no longer wanted to, because Roger was clearly unworthy of her, not the kind of man she'd thought him, not the eternally devoted lover who had found in her alone something special that he had been searching for all his life, just as she had been searching....
She stiffened suddenly, an intolerable anguish arising in her and making it difficult for her to breathe. Roger had arisen from the table again and was moving out onto the dance floor with Lathrup held firmly in his embrace. The orchestra was playing a waltz now and the tempo of the music was slow and sensuous and Lathrup had abandoned all pretense of reserve.
The way their bodies blended, seemed almost to melt together, was more outrageous than the Village cellar wildness she had pictured to herself a moment before and which she would not have hesitated to engage in if she'd felt that Roger had wanted to feel that close to her in a defiantly intimate way.
This was a more outrageous intimacy, because it was unmistakably the clinging embrace of two lovers in a darkened room, behind the privacy of a securely locked door.
Neither of them seemed to care that the dance floor wasn't quite that dimly lit and that their completely shameless amorousness would be observed by everyone on the floor. And then she saw that they were kissing each other just as shamelessly, that their lips were meeting and clinging, and that one of the kisses seemed to go on and on.
She had opened her lips and....
Oh, dear God, how could she endure watching them, knowing what such a kiss could mean, how it could burn and scorch and drive a man and woman deeply, truly in love, to the kind of madness that wasn't in the least profane when it was sanctified by that kind of love. But when it wasn't—
How she ever lived through the rest of the evening without becoming hysterical and screaming accusations at both of them she had never been able to explain or analyze in a rational way to her own satisfaction and seal away in the mental file that would become, from time to time, a raw, profusely bleeding wound again.
Perhaps the salve which Roger had applied to the wound toward the end of the evening had helped a little. He'd begun to pour it on at the end of the second dance, chiefly by noticing her again and pressing her hand warmly, and when they arose to leave he was all courtesy, all consideration again.
He'd put Lathrup into a taxi at her own request and they'd gone home together. Not to her home, but to Roger's apartment. But for those three weeks Roger's apartment had become more of a home to her than the two-room, rent-controlled apartment she'd occupied for ten years on the northern fringe of the Village.
As the taxi shot westward and then turned south toward the Chelsea section—the night club was on Fifty-Second Street just east of Broadway—his arm went around her and he pressed her very tightly to him.
"Your boss is quite a woman, Honeybunch," he said. "But she can't hold a candle to you. All right, she's a top-drawer beauty, distinctly on the special side. There are a lot of men who would find her irresistible, but not me. No matter how much I found myself attracted to her it wouldn't ... well, flower into an immediate interest, the kind of interest that doesn't quite make you know whether you're coming or going."
She wasn't deceived or mollified, but some instinct of caution deep in her mind prevented her from giving too free a rein to her anger.
"Your interest in her seemed immediate enough to me," she said. "I happened to notice the way you were dancing."
He gave her waist an even tighter squeeze. "Good grief—you can hardly blame me for going overboard just a little. How often does a guy like me get to dance with a lady in sables?"
"She never wears sables—or mink either. It just happens to be an eccentricity of hers. I wish to hell you'd shut up and not try to be amusing."
"Okay, let's not have an argument about it. We had fun, didn't we? It was a good evening."
"Not to me, it wasn't."
"But why, for Pete's sake? Tell me why? What did I do, that was so unusual? Do you mind if I tell you something? Please don't get on a high horse, don't lose your temper—"
"I've already lost it. It's so far lost I'll probably never get it back again."
"All right, but just listen ... please. You're a wonderful person. But you have so low a boiling point at times that you're your own worst enemy. You cut off your nose to spite your face. I do it, too ... often enough. Maybe that's why we get along so well together."
"Do we? Right now I'd say we were more like a tiger and a lion in a cage together."
"All right. A tiger and a lion can get along very well together, if their temperaments coincide. They can even mate and give birth to atigron. There's one at the Bronx Zoo. In fact—"
"Now you're trying to be amusing again. You'd better be damned serious, because I was never more serious in my life ... about what happened on that dance floor. I'm going to say something that will shock you. You think I'm a prude. You've said so often enough, despite the fact that I've never behaved like one with you in bed, have I?Have I?"
His eyes became suddenly serious. "No, darling—of course not. And if I ever called you a prude I'm sorry. That was only when I first met you and you did seem—"
"A scared virgin? All right, maybe I was. You wouldn't understand, probably, if I told you what torments I went through before I met you; what a high, terrible price I had to pay for feeling that way, for being like that. Most people think it amusing."
"I never did. I thought it tragic but I loved you all the more because of it."
"You felt sorry for me, did you? Pitied me?"
"I didn't say that. Do we have to talk about it now? Do you want to spoil the rest of the night?"
"What rest of the night? Do you think after what happened this evening there's going to be any more fun in bed for us?"
"Be quiet, will you? Drop it. I know what it cost you to say that. You're not the kind of woman who thinks in those terms. What has happened between us meant something to me. Why can't you believe it?"
"Oh, yes—it probably did mean something. Laying a round-heels would mean something to even a young hoodlum with about as much sensitivity as a chimpanzee. It's important to the male. I've been told that."
He said nothing in reply, but he withdrew his arm from her waist, and sat very straight and still at her side. She could imagine what he was thinking. He was afraid of angering her further, of saying the wrong thing. Whatcouldhe say, really? There were no right words, everything he told her would be a lie.
She'd seen the way he'd kissed Lathrup on the dance floor and the burning outrage, the shame she'd felt, after all she'd meant to him—or had allowed herself to think she'd meant to him—couldn't be driven from her mind by anything he might say.
She looked down at her legs. She had fine legs, shapely legs, and she had a good body too, a damned good body, but all that she had been able to do was unleash a savage lust in him and now that lust had been turned elsewhere.
If she'd known the truth about him at the beginning she wouldn't have allowed him to touch her. She'd have—yes, scratched his eyes out. She felt degraded, soiled, and the band of despair and bitter anger she'd felt on leaving the night club continued to tighten about her heart.
She'd ask to be taken home. She'd demand that he tell the driver to continue on to the Village. If he thought for one moment she'd go to his apartment now and spend the rest of the night with him he was a fool as well as an amorous opportunist with nothing but concealed evil in his soul.
Concealed? That was good. He hadn't made any attempt to conceal it on the dance floor, hadn't cared how much he hurt her or made her feel ignored, rejected, degraded. And he had dared to call it a good evening, had dared to pretend that she hadn't noticed, or would be broad-minded enough to dismiss what he'd done as meaningless, just a light flirtation that could be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders.
For all his brazen disloyalty and the progress he'd made with Lathrup in one short hour he didn't know enough about how a sensitive, completely devoted woman would feel about such behavior to make him anything but a clod at heart, a miserable excuse for a lover whom no woman in her right mind would look at twice.
What was wrong with Lathrup? Couldn't she see what kind of man he was? Hadn't she even suspected the truth about him? If she'd taken him away from a completely unattractive woman, some ugly-looking strumpet or a vicious nag, it would have been easy enough to find excuses for him and to think of him as romantic and misunderstood. But couldn't she see that he was a switch artist, and a very clumsy one at that, drawn to a new face like a moth to a flame?
The more she thought about it the more she became choked with fury. She found herself unable to say a word, even when the cab turned west on Thirty-fourth Street and continued on toward his apartment.
He spoke again then, and there was a kind of pleading tenderness in his voice.
"Let's pretend it didn't happen," he said. "I was pretty tight, I guess. And I swear to you I didn't make a deliberate play for her. Believe me, I didn't. That dance production was her idea—"
She turned on him, her eyes blazing. "What a stupid, conceited thing to say! Production is good. It certainly was that. If you'd been dancing naked together you couldn't have made more of a spectacle of yourselves."
"She's a very attractive woman and I'm only human, darling. Sometimes you seem to forget that."
"That's the oldest male excuse in the world. But just let a woman use it—and see how far she gets."
"Oh, I don't know. Lots of women with a great deal of integrity, completely devoted wives, let themselves go a little when they're dancing with exceptionally good-looking guys, and their husbands don't blacken their eyes or threaten to divorce them. Not if they're mature and realistic enough to—"
"Shut up, will you? I've heard enough. I'm not married to you, remember that."
"I don't see what that has to do with it, either way. I'm just trying to be logical, that's all. I'm not stupid enough to believe that only men are capable of thinking logically and realistically, as so many people claim. Women have a logic of their own. I'll concede that. But it's on a different plane entirely."
"Are you through? I'd think you were just talking to hear yourself talk, if I couldn't read your mind like a book. You're trying to cover up. You think if you pile up enough important-sounding excuses you'll be able to get around me again."
"Will you listen to me—"
"I'm through listening. I'm not going home with you and that's final. Tell the driver to turn south when we get to Eighth Avenue."
"Why? It doesn't make sense. You know I love you."
"I'll just bet."
How she ever allowed herself to be persuaded she never quite knew.
She no longer felt any real warmth toward him. She was quite sure, in fact, that she hated him now ... loathed and despised him. But something deep in her nature urged her to have it out with him, to come to a complete showdown in the apartment they'd shared together, to let him know, in an unmistakable way, with gestures as well as words, that they were at the parting of the ways.
They'd kept their voices low, but she was by no means sure that the driver hadn't overheard some of their conversation and the thought brought a hot flush to her cheeks, made her even angrier than she had been. What right had he to expose her to such an indignity, when he knew how sensitive she was about discussing private matters in public? He'd raised his voice at times, just a little, and she was sure that though they had spoken in whispers most of the time the driver had been all ears and was doubtless gloating over another choice tidbit of Manhattan falling-out-between-lovers.
He'd talked about Lathrup, mentioned her by name, and probably nine taxi drivers out of ten knew that the Eaton-Lathrup publications were a big-time magazine group and that Lathrup herself was often mentioned by Winchell. She'd been on TV often enough—and so had Ruth Porges.
"I picked up a couple of real dog-and-cat fighting celebrities last night. Brother! It happens about three times a night, when you're cruising around Fifty-Second. They don't care what they say—get a big kick out of airing their dirty linen when they know you can't help overhearing what they're saying. Yap, yap, yap. The guy apologizing, making excuses and the dame ready to stand off and lam him one. They might as well stand in Times Square with a megaphone—"
But the driver seemed courteous enough when the cab drew in to the curb in front of Roger's apartment-house residence, perhaps because Roger tossed him two dollars and told him to keep the change, but more probably because he was a very young, pleasant-faced lad who looked as innocent as a new-shorn lamb.
Roger had two cocktails with cherries aswim in them standing on a tray five minutes after he'd turned the key in the door of his apartment. He was very good at that and even now, despite her anger, she admired that aspect of his woman-pleasing competence.
"Why don't you take off your dress and be comfortable, darling," he said. "We're not exactly strangers, you know."
She shook her head. "You're entitled to believe what you wish. But we started being strangers about two hours ago. Right now I feel as if I knew absolutely nothing about you—beyond the fact that when you meet an attractive woman for the first time she's tight in your arms a half hour later. You don't believe in letting a single blade of grass grow under your feet, do you?"
"Now look—" he protested. "Do you have to bequitethat touchy? I'll go further than I did. It was partly my fault. You could say, I suppose, that I put up no resistance, was carried away by the liquor, the soft lights, the music. And I was plenty pie-eyed. It usually takes a dozen Manhattans to make me as tight as I was a few hours ago. Too much acid in the system or something like that. It happens sometimes."
"It's worn off now ... is that it? So you've got a perfect excuse and any other woman would understand and fall into your arms and beg to be forgiven for her lack of understanding."
"No, you've a right to be a little burned up. But do you have to work over it the way you're doing, build it up into something criminal? You'd think I'd tried to rape her or something."
"You almost did. I was afraid for a moment we'd be asked to leave ... and not too politely."
"You're exaggerating a hell of a lot and I'm sure you know it."
"Nothing of the kind. The way you were dancing wouldn't have been tolerated in half the dives in the Village. I mean the real dives—not the kind that are reserved for tourists."
"You know all about them, I suppose. Have you been to them often?"
"I've never stepped inside one. But I wasn't born yesterday. I know what goes on in such places."
"Look, we're getting nowhere. Will you believe me and listen? If I met her tomorrow on the street I'd just say hello, and smile and tip my hat and pass on. I swear it."
"I can just picture it. She'd smile back, and the way she smiles when she knows what she wants and will have no trouble getting it—doesn't require any effort on her part. It just comes naturally. And going home with her would come naturally to you, too.
"She has a beautiful place. Have you seen it? Of course you haven't ... because you met her tonight for the first time. So perhaps I'd better describe it for you. You go up in a private elevator, and you step out and there you are—in a real golden Rembrandt setting. The lighting is the newest Paris importation, and there are a lot of abstract paintings on the walls of her bedroom, you know, all little colored squares in different colors that mean absolutely nothing but only hang on the walls of the major league museums because the smaller museums can't afford them.
"'I'll be back in a minute,' she'll say, and away she'll go, tripping lightly, into the bathroom—all black onyx with gold fixtures—and when she comes out you'll be sitting with a cocktail glass in your hand—she'll have invited you to mix your own, with just the right shade of icing, at a private bar that will knock your eyes out—and when you see what she's wearing, or isn't wearing, you'll forget where you are and think you're in a kind of glorified cathouse."
She became a little frightened when she saw the way Roger was looking at her and lowered her eyes, wishing she'd kept silent. Simply had it out with him, the way she'd intended and walked out of the apartment for the last time, slamming the door behind her.
Why had she ranted on so recklessly? She'd talked like a shrew driven half out of her mind by jealousy, and that had been a mistake. It was giving him too much ammunition, giving him the kind of satisfaction he wasn't entitled to. Angering him at the same time, making him look at her in a strange way, a way new to her, as if the suggestive picture she'd painted for him of a totally shameless Lathrup had aroused in him instincts that were base and dangerous. Something about the look not only scared her, it caused her to pale a little and move further away from him.
Then her own anger came sweeping back and she said the worst possible thing, and could have bitten her tongue out the instant it left her lips. "Don't look so shocked, little man. I've a feeling it wouldn't take much finesse on the part of any woman to seduce you."
It was cruelly insulting for two reasons, but she realized that too late. He wasn't a little man. He was a very big man and completely sure of himself as far as his masculinity was concerned. And no man likes to think that it is the woman who is doing the seducing. It was almost as bad as those ridiculous cases you read about in the newspapers, where a man goes into court and claims he's been taken advantage of by a woman in a physical way, his high-minded morality impaired. A male virgin, backed into a corner by an Amazon determined to rape him.
She remembered one case in particular—it flashed across her mind in that instant of wild folly completely unbidden. Three young hoodlum girls had captured a man at the point of a gun, taken him for an auto ride and forced him to make love to them. What she'd just said was like telling Roger that, in circumstances like that, he wouldn't have been more than eager to oblige, or found the experience less than exhilarating.
"I asked you to take off your dress and get comfortable," Roger said, still looking at her in that frightening way. "What's got into you, anyway? What makes you think that Helen Lathrup would be so much more attractive to me than you are? Right at this moment I'll waive the soft lighting and the abstract paintings and even the gold-and-onyx bathroom. I'm just a plain guy with plain tastes, anyway. In room decorations, I mean. I like my women to be a little on the special side, decorative and all that. I'm speaking in the plural, because you insist on it so strongly, and seem to feel that I should have a lot of women chasing after me. You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you I've had only three serious affairs in my life and one of them ended in divorce and the two I didn't marry I would have married under ordinary circumstances, but death can move in fast sometimes and make even marriage impossible.
"No—I didn't poison them. I'm not a bluebeard, whatever else you may think me. One died in my arms and it kills me even now to think about it and I'll probably never get over it. Died in my arms with the blood running out of her mouth, in a hospital with an incurable disease and she was glad that I could be there. There was one parting, years later, on completely friendly terms, with a girl who didn't think I'd make too good a husband, because we just happened to be temperamentally poles apart in our thinking. And that's the whole of it—until I met you."
Ordinarily what he'd said would have moved her, and completely changed the way she felt. Banished her fear even, all of it, made her willing to forgive him. But she was beyond herself with anger still, too confused to think clearly.
"I'm going to leave you," she said. "This is the end. I'm going right out of here now and I'm not coming back."
"Sit down!" he said, his voice suddenly harsher than she'd ever known it to be. "You love me and you know it. You're just being a stubborn little fool. Sit down and relax. And drink this cocktail. It will do you good."
"No," she said. "I'm leaving right now."
What he did then was totally unexpected, she wouldn't have thought him capable of it.
He stepped forward, grasped the top of her dress and ripped it all the way down her back to her waist. Then he half-swung her about and planted a kiss in the middle of her back, so fierce a kiss that it bruised her flesh, causing her to cry out in protest.
He held her firmly and continued to kiss the bare flesh of her shoulders and back, and then he ripped more of the dress away, and buried his face between her breasts, a strange, stricken, almost sobbing sound coming from his throat, as if even in that moment of primitive love-making he was begging her to relent a little, to forgive him and be tender, to run her fingers through his hair, as she had so often done in the past.
But she was too frightened to do anything but struggle violently to free herself. Always in the past he had made love impetuously, his great strength sometimes causing him to hurt her a little. But never had his ardor gotten out of control and his hands moved over her trembling body in quite so demanding a way. He was pressing her to him so fiercely she felt half-smothered, his fingers bruising her thighs, her buttocks, refusing to relinquish their grip.
She feared only his capacity for self-control, not that he would be deliberately cruel or brutally force her to submit to him against her will. But she did not know how far he could hold in check his desperate need to make this renewal of their intimacy a kind of masculine triumph so complete and overwhelming that it would bring them closer than they had ever been before and put an end to all future uncertainty. And in so doing, he might lose all awareness of his own strength and inflict an irreparable injury upon her.
Her emotions were mixed, strange, verging on utter panic in that awful moment of smothering proximity, when his body seemed like a rod of steel bruising her from knee to shoulder and threatening to turn into a steel trap with cruel jaws which might snap shut at any moment, shattering the very bones of her body.
She began to kick and moan, to beat with her fists on his shoulders. And then she was screaming at him, demanding that he release her, increasing with an energy she hardly knew that she possessed the frenzy of her twistings and turnings.
How she ever managed to reach down and get a firm grip on her right slipper and wrench it off she never quite knew. Only that she had the slipper in her hand suddenly and was beating him on the face with it, hitting him on the side of his face with the high heel as hard as she could, and then across his forehead and not even stopping when he cried out and slapped her on the face with the flat of his hand.
She struck at him again and again, not caring if she hurt him severely, because he was still refusing to release her and the slap had turned her into a wild woman. Some instinct, some lingering trace of sanity or compassion, prevented her from striking him across the eyes. But she didn't stop hitting him even when she saw a bright splotch of blood leap out on his right temple.
When the pressure of his arms fell away and went staggering back from her she tossed the slipper into a corner of the room, snatched up the cocktail from the center table—he'd set the tray down before seizing hold of her—and emptied the glass in his face.
The liquor splashed across the right side of his face, wetting his hair and running down his cheek, dissolving the blood. It drenched both lapels of his dinner jacket and gave him an almost clownish look, for his face remained faintly red-streaked, and he kept swaying for a moment, with a sickly grimace on his face.
He closed his eyes and blinked twice furiously and when he opened them again the grimace was gone. Hot anger flamed in his eyes instead. But he didn't advance upon her and slap her again. He simply stood very still, glaring at her.
"All right," he said. "Maybe you'd better go. I was a fool to think I could reach you in any way. What did you think I was going to do—ravish you? Sure, sure, I know. I was a little rough. But I'm not an eighteen-year-old kid. I'm thirty-four and when two people are in love—or are supposed to have been in love and one of the partners still thinks along those lines, and hasn't forgotten the other times when the big, important part has been welcomed and has meant something—you let yourself get dizzy with longing and you don't think you'll be mistaken for the kind of brute no woman would trust herself alone with in a hotel lobby when the doorman's back is turned. Not for more than ten or twelve seconds anyway."
"You shouldn't have torn my clothes off," she said, swaying a little herself now, feeling sick inside.
"Oh, so I tore your clothes off. When will you outgrow that exaggerating tendency of yours? You asked me to tear your blouse off once, remember? You said: 'If I was wearing a dress, darling, I'd ask you to unzipper me down the back. But just this flimsy blouse—Darling, will you think me shameless if I ask you to tear it off. I'd like to hear the silk rip, under your big, strong hands.'"
A hot flush suffused her cheeks. "I never said anything of the sort. You're putting the words of a wanton into my mouth."
"No, I sincerely don't believe so. You may not have used those exact words, but it's practically what you did say. And I didn't think you a wanton. I loved and respected you and—I still do, I guess. But it's hopeless. I realize that now. There is a streak of prudery in you you'll never overcome. And when you add jealousy to it—"
"Do you dare stand there and tell me you don't think I had a right to feel jealous, after the way you carried on with Lathrup tonight?"
He shook his head. "No, you had every right. But I told you I was sorry ... damned sorry and ashamed of myself ... and I meant every word of it. Jealousy can be flattering to a man. Some men don't like it at all, but others do. I always have. It's the surest sign there is that a man means something to a woman, that she really loves him. And real love is too precious a commodity for a man to take the other attitude—that jealousy is an annoyance and justifies anger or resentment. But there's one kind of jealousy no man likes, unless there's something wrong with him—unless he's a masochist and enjoys torturing himself. It's the kind that won't listen to reason, that makes no allowances for the fact that a man can look at another attractive woman without bringing the world toppling down about his ears. Or even hold her a little too tightly on a dance floor and kiss her once or twice."
"Once or twice would have been quite all right with me. But the kind of kiss—"
"All right. We've had a violent quarrel and you've hit me as hard as you could with the heel of a shoe—and that ought to even things up. Now I'm afraid it's goodbye. I'll always love you, I guess, but I've never been a glutton for punishment."
"You went very far tonight—with Lathrup and what you call slightly rough love-making. You went a hell of a long way."
"All right, I won't deny it. So it's hopeless, isn't it? We both agree about that."
"Yes," she said, speaking very slowly and carefully, emphasizing each word, but her heart felt dead within her. "We both agree."
Even though Ruth Porges dressed severely enough in the office she had always—unlike Lathrup—had a liking for mink. An entire coat she could not have afforded, but her mink stole was a very capacious and expensive one. She removed it from the back of the chair where she had tossed it on entering Roger's apartment and draped it carefully over her shoulders. It concealed almost all of the torn parts of her dress. A mink stole in July was an affectation but tonight she was grateful that she had succumbed to the impulse to appear at the nightclub with a fur piece draped over her arm.
She stopped by the door for an instant, bending to put on her slipper. She wondered if, on arriving home, she would find the tip caked with dried blood. She hoped she wouldn't. It might have made her break down and sob half the night. She'd have to remember to take a Miltown on retiring. There was another tranquilizer she was thinking of switching to. It was a little stronger, but quite harmless, really. As harmless as the memory of Roger would be a year from now. Every woman was entitled to at least one mistake in her choice of a man, and, having started late, she was well ahead in that respect.
She walked out into the entrance hall without a backward glance, opened the front door and shut it very firmly behind her. She was glad that Roger had not offered to see her to the elevator or to accompany her to the street and put her into a taxi. She had a great many things to be grateful for.
And she wished—she wished that she were dead.
It was six days after Helen Lathrup had been found slain in her office by Lynn Prentiss that Ruth Porges found the murder weapon. She stumbled upon it by pure accident, in a place where the police hadn't looked and would scarcely have thought of looking.
That she found it at all was due to one of those almost unbelievable blind flukes which fiction writers prefer to shun, but which persist in occurring, with surprising frequency, in real life.
She not only found the weapon—a black metal, long-barreled forty-eight calibre pistol equipped with a silencer—but she knew immediately who the owner of the gun was, precisely when and how it had come into his possession, and hence, by inference, who the murderer had to be. Unless, of course, someone who was not the murderer had loaned the gun to someone else. And that seemed unlikely, since a man or woman owning such a gun would know exactly how it had been used and would have gone immediately to the police and cleared himself of all suspicion by naming the borrower and explaining the circumstances under which he had allowed himself to be made an unwitting dupe to the one crime in which a taste for silence could lead straight to the electric chair.
Ruth Porges found the gun in a sixty-foot-deep excavation. In New York City, there are many scenic beauties and intricate works of engineering construction which can be said to be typical of the city as a whole. Every city has them, of course, but some cities are famous for their numerous bridges and reservoirs, or high stately office buildings, or parks and playgrounds, or triple-laned speedways, or museums and schools. New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago and San Francisco all shine in that respect, along with perhaps fifty other cities from coast to coast.
New York is a city of bridges, of course, the most beautiful bridges in the world, if you're willing to waive the Golden Gate. It is also a city of equally beautiful parks and its cluster of tall buildings is second to none. But New York, in recent years, and perhaps more than any other city in the throes of a refurbishing and a reconstruction, of a tearing down and a putting up, is a city of excavations.
Everywhere there are excavations, three or four blocks apart, deep and yawning and carefully encircled by board fences to keep absent-minded people from falling into them in the dark or even in broad daylight. Some are one hundred percent walled in and others are open a little on one side and are hence a menace to the unwary and should painstakingly be avoided if one does not wish to die.
If one does not wish to die! But if the psychologists and the psychiatrists are to be believed, there are a great many people in every large city who wish to die. People on the run, thieves and murderers, wanted by the law, hiding out from day to day in dismal furnished rooms and never knowing when the blow will fall, a knock on the door, a voice demanding: "Open up, Buster—or we'll start shooting through the door!"