Read A Kiss Before Dying Online
Authors: Ira Levin
A Kiss Before Dying (7 page)
The easy bustle of normality filled the lobby. Most of the people there, having just entered from outside, were unaware of any disturbance. Swinging the valise lightly, he made his way across the marbled expanse and out into the bright noisy afternoon. As he jogged down the steps that fronted the building, two policemen passed him, going up. He turned and watched the blue uniforms vanish into a revolving door. At the foot of the steps he paused and examined his hands once again. They were steady as rocks. Not a tremor. He smiled. Turning, he looked at the revolving doors, wondering how dangerous it would be for him to go back, mingle with the crowd, see her …
He decided against it.
A University tramcar rumbled past. He walked double-time to the corner, where the car was detained by a red light. Swinging himself on, he dropped a dime in the box and walked to the rear of the car. He stood looking out of the window. When the car had gone about four blocks, a white ambulance clanged by, the pitch of its bell dropping as it passed. He watched it grow smaller and smaller and finally cut through traffic to pull up in front of the Municipal Building. Then the tramcar turned on to University Avenue, and he could see no more.
The baseball pep rally began at nine that night, taking place on an empty lot next to the stadium, but the news of a student’s suicide (for how could she have fallen when the
Clarion
clearly stated there was a three-and-a-half-foot wall?) put a damper on the entire affair. In the orange glow of the bonfire, the students, the girls especially, spread their blankets and sat huddled in conversation. The business manager of the baseball team and the members of the cheerleading squad tried vainly to make the rally what it should be. They spurred the boys to the gathering of more and more fuel, throwing on crates and cartons until the flaming pillar was so high it threatened to topple, but it was to no avail. Cheers wavered and died before half the school’s name was spelled out.
He had not attended many of the pep rallies before, but he attended this one. He walked the dark streets from his rooming house at a slow liturgic pace, bearing a carton in his arms.
In the afternoon he had emptied Dorothy’s valise, hiding her clothes under the mattress of his bed. Then, although it was a warm day, he had donned his trenchcoat, and after filling its pockets with the bottles and small containers of cosmetics that had been lodged among the clothes, he left the house with the valise, from which he had stripped the tags bearing Dorothy’s New York and Blue River addresses. He had gone downtown and checked the valise in a locker at the bus terminal. From there he had walked to the Morton Street Bridge, where he dropped the locker key and then the bottles, one by one, into the umber water, opening them first so that trapped air would not keep them afloat. Ghosts of pink lotion rode the water and thinned and faded. On his way home from the bridge he stopped at a grocery store, where he secured a tan corrugated carton that had once contained cans of pineapple juice.
He carried the carton to the rally and picked his way through the mass of squatting and reclining figures orange-sketched in the darkness. Stepping gingerly between blanket corners and bluejeaned legs, he advanced to the flaming centre of the field.
The heat and the glare were intense in the clearing that surrounded the roaring twelve-foot fire. He stood for a moment, staring at the flames. Suddenly the baseball manager and a cheerleader came dashing around from the other side of the clearing. ‘That’s it! That’s the boy!’ they cried, and seized the carton from his hands.
‘Hey,’ the manager said, hefting the box. ‘This isn’t empty.’
‘Books – old notebooks.’
‘Ah! Magnifico!’ The manager turned to the encircling crowd. ‘Attention! Attention! The burning of the books!’ A few people looked up from their conversations. The manager and the cheerleader took the carton between them, swinging it back and forth towards the rippling flames. ‘All the way to the top!’ the manager shouted.
‘Hey—’
‘Don’t worry, friend. We never miss! Book-burning a speciality!’ They swung the carton; one, two,
three
! It sailed up parallel to the cone-shaped pyre, arced over, and landed with a gush of sparks at the very top. It teetered a moment, then held. There was a spattering of applause from the on-lookers. ‘Hey, here comes Al with a packing-case!’ cried the cheerleader. He dashed around to the other side of the fire, the manager running after him.
He stood watching as the carton turned black, sheets of flame sliding up past its sides. Suddenly the foundation of the fire shifted, pushing out showers of sparks. A flaming brand hit his foot. He jumped back. Sparks glowed all over the front of his trousers. Nervously he slapped them out, his hands coppery in the fire’s glare.
When the last sparks were extinguished, he looked up to make certain that the carton was still secure. It was. Flames ripped up through its top. Its contents, he thought, were probably completely burned by now.
These had included the Pharmacy lab manual, the Kingship Copper pamphlets, the tags from the valise, and the few articles of clothing that Dorothy had prepared for their brief honeymoon: a cocktail dress of grey taffeta, a pair of black suede pumps, stockings, a half-slip, bra and panties, two handkerchiefs, a pair of pink satin mules, a pink negligee and a night-gown; silk and lace, delicate, scented, white …
From the Blue River
Clarion-Ledger
; Friday, 28 April 1950:
STODDARD CO-ED DIES IN PLUNGE
MUNICIPAL BUILDING TRAGEDY FATAL TO DAUGHTER OF COPPER MAGNATE
Dorothy Kingship, nineteen-year-old Stoddard University sophomore, was killed today when she fell or jumped from the roof of the fourteen-storey Blue River Municipal Building. The attractive blonde girl, whose home was in New York City, was a daughter of Leo Kingship,president of Kingship Copper Inc.
At 12.58 p.m., workers in the building were startled by a loud scream and a crashing sound from the wide airshaft which runs through the structure. Rushing to their windows, they saw the contorted figure of a young woman. Dr Harvey C. Hess, of 57 Woodbridge Circle, who was in the lobby at the time, reached the scene seconds later to pronounce the girl dead.
The police, arriving shortly thereafter, found a purse resting on the three-and-a-half-foot wall that encircles the airshaft. In the purse were a birth certificate and a Stoddard University registration card which served to identify the girl. Police also found a fresh cigarette stub on the roof, stained with lipstick of the shade Miss Kingship wore, leading them to conclude that she had been on the roof for several minutes prior to the plunge which ended her life …
Rex Cargill, an elevator operator, told police that he took Miss Kingship to the sixth or seventh floor half an hour before the tragedy. Another operator, Andrew Vecci, believes he took a woman dressed similarly to Miss Kingship to the fourteenth floor shortly after 12.30, but is uncertain of the floor at which she entered his car.
According to Stoddard’s Dean of Students, Clark D. Welch, Miss Kingship was doing satisfactory work in all her studies. Shocked residents of the dormitory where she lived could offer no reason why she might have taken her own life. They described her as quiet and withdrawn. ‘Nobody knew her too well,’ said one girl.
From the Blue River
Clarion-Ledger
; Saturday, 29 April 1950:
CO-ED’S DEATH WAS SUICIDE
SISTER RECEIVES NOTE IN MAIL
The death of Dorothy Kingship, Stoddard co-ed who plunged from the roof of the Municipal Building yesterday afternoon, was a suicide, Chief of Police Eldon Chesser told reporters last night. An unsigned note in a handwriting definitely established to be that of the dead girl was received through the mail late yesterday afternoon by her sister, Ellen Kingship, a student in Caldwell, Wisconsin. Although the exact wording of the note has not been made public, Chief Chester characterized it as ‘a clear expression of suicidal intent’. The note was mailed from this city, postmarked yesterday at 6.30 a.m.
On receiving the note, Ellen Kingship attempted to reach her sister by telephone. The call was transferred to Stoddard’s Dean of Students, Clark D. Welch, who informed Miss Kingship of the nineteen-year-old girl’s death. Miss Kingship left immediately for Blue River, arriving here yesterday evening. Her father, Leo Kingship, president of Kingship Copper Inc., is expected to arrive some time today, his plane having been grounded in Chicago because of bad weather.
LAST PERSON TO SPEAK TO SUICIDE DESCRIBES HER AS TENSE, NERVOUS
by La Verne Breen
‘She laughed a lot and was smiling the whole time she was in my room. And she kept moving around. I thought at the time that she was very happy about something, but now I realize that those were all symptoms of the terrible nervous strain she was under. Her laughs were tense laughs, not happy ones. I should have recognized that right away, being a psychology major.’ Thus Annabelle Koch, Stoddard sophomore, describes the behaviour of Dorothy Kingship two hours before the latter’s suicide.
Miss Koch, a native of Boston, is a petite and charming young lady. Yesterday she was confined to her dormitory room because of a severe head cold. ‘Dorothy knocked on the door around a quarter past eleven,’ says Miss Koch. ‘I was in bed. She came in and I was a little surprised, because we hardly knew each other. As I said, she was smiling and moving around a great deal. She was wearing a bathrobe. She asked if I would loan her the belt to my green suit. I should mention that we both have the same green suit. I got mine in Boston and she got hers in New York, but they’re exactly the same. We both wore them to dinner last Saturday night, and it was really embarrassing. Anyway, she asked if I would loan her my belt because the buckle of hers was broken. I hesitated at first, because it’s my new spring suit, but she seemed to want it so badly that I finally told her which drawer it was in and she got it. She thanked me very much and left.’
Here Miss Koch paused and removed her glasses. ‘Now here’s the strange part. Later, when the police came and searched her room for a note,
they found my belt on her desk
! I recognized it by the way the gold finish was rubbed off the tooth of the buckle. I had been very disappointed about that, because it was an expensive suit. The police kept the belt.
‘I was very puzzled by Dorothy’s actions. She had pretended to want my belt, but she hadn’t used it at all. She was wearing her green suit when – when it happened. The police checked and her belt buckle wasn’t the least bit broken. It all seemed very mysterious.
‘Then I realized that the belt must have been just a pretext to talk to me. Laying out the suit probably reminded her of me, and everyone knew I was incapacitated with a cold, so she came in and pretended she needed the belt. She must have been desperate for someone to talk with. If only I’d recognized the signs at the time. I can’t help feeling that if I had got her to talk out her troubles, whatever they might have been, maybe all this wouldn’t have happened.’
… As we left Annabelle Koch’s room, she added a final word. ‘Even when the police return the belt to me,’ she said, ‘I know I won’t be able to wear my green suit again.’
He found the last six weeks of the school year disappointingly flat. He had expected the excitement created by Dorothy’s death to linger in the air like the glow of a rocket; instead it had faded almost immediately. He had anticipated more campus conversations and newspaper articles, allowing him the luxuriant superiority of the omniscient; instead – nothing. Three days after Dorothy died campus gossip veered away to pounce on a dozen marijuana cigarettes that had been discovered in one of the smaller dormitories. As for the newspapers, a short paragraph announcing Leo Kingship’s arrival in Blue River marked the last time the Kingship name appeared in the
Clarion-Ledger.
No word of an autopsy nor of her pregnancy, although surely when an unmarried girl committed suicide without stating a reason, that must be the first thing they looked for. Keeping it out of the papers must have cost Kingship plenty.
He told himself he should be rejoicing. If there had been any kind of inquiry he certainly would have been sought for questioning. But there had been no questions, no suspicion – hence no investigation. Everything had fallen into place perfectly. Except that business of the belt. That puzzled him. Why on earth had Dorothy taken that Koch girl’s belt when she hadn’t wanted to wear it? Maybe she really did want to talk to someone – about the wedding – and then had thought better of it. Thank God for that. Or maybe the buckle of her belt had really been broken, but she had managed to fix it after she had already taken Koch’s. Either way, though, it was an unimportant incident. Koch’s interpretation of it only strengthened the picture of a suicide, added to the flawless success of his plans. He should be walking on air, smiling at strangers, toasting himself with secret champagne. Instead there was this dull, leaden, let-down feeling. He couldn’t understand it.
His depression became worse when he returned to Menasset early in June. Here he was, right where he’d been last summer after the daughter of the farm equipment concern had told him about the boy back home, and the summer before, after he had left the widow. Dorothy’s death had been a defensive measure; all his planning hadn’t advanced him in the slightest.
He became impatient with his mother. His correspondence from school had been limited to a weekly postcard, and now she badgered him for details; did he have pictures of the girls he’d gone out with? – expecting them to be the most beautiful, the most sought after – Did he belong to this club, to that club? – expecting him to be the president of each – What was his standing in philosophy, in English, in Spanish? – expecting him to be the leader in all. One day he lost his temper. ‘It’s about time you realized I’m not the king of the world!’ he shouted, storming from the room.
He took a job for the summer; partly because he needed money, partly because being in the house with his mother all day made him uneasy. The job didn’t do any good towards taking his mind off things though; it was in a haberdashery shop whose fixtures were of angular modern design; the glass display counters were bound with inch-wide strips of burnished copper.
Towards the middle of July, however, he began to slough off his dejection. He still had the newspaper clippings about Dorothy’s death, locked in a small grey strongbox he kept in his bedroom closet. He began taking them out once in a while, skimming through them, smiling at the officious certainty of Chief of Police Eldon Chesser and the half-baked theorizing of Annabelle Koch.
He dug up his old library card, had it renewed, and began withdrawing books regularly: Pearson’s
Studies in Murder
, Bolitho’s
Murder for Profit
, volumes in the
Regional Murder Series.
He read about Landru, Smith, Pritchard, Crippen; men who had failed where he had succeeded. Of course it was only the failures whose stories got written – God knows how many successful ones there were. Still, it was flattering to consider how many had failed.
Until now he had always thought of what happened at the Municipal Building as ‘Dorrie’s death’. Now he began to think of it as ‘Dorrie’s murder’.
Sometimes, when he had lain in bed and read several accounts in one of the books, the enormous daring of what he had done would overwhelm him. He would get up and look at himself in the mirror over the dresser. I got away with murder, he would think. Once he whispered it aloud: ‘I got away with murder!’
So what if he wasn’t rich yet! Hell, he was only twenty-four.