Found in the Street (29 page)

36

Ralph had lain low for a few days after his encounter with John Sutherland, nursing his bruised shoulder, swollen eye and cut lip. He had fought well, Ralph thought, or at least he hadn't been wanting in courage, and that made him feel proud. Bleeding at the mouth, he had reiterated his story to the cop who had seen him home, and the cop had listened rather sympathetically and said he would check it out at the Sixth Precinct station to which Ralph had been, and to which the cop said he was attached. Ralph had been badly shaken then, and had not wanted to ask the officer to go with him again to the station. Ralph had understood that a policeman couldn't turn a blind eye to a fistfight between two men on a sidewalk, and Ralph had wanted to show a willingness to go home, had wanted to prove that he had a home by pulling out his keys. The cop had heard of Elsie's case. The cop had mentioned a suspect (maybe a couple of suspects), and Ralph had told the cop, for what it was worth, that Sutherland's cartoon, printed in the newspapers, was a trick to throw the police off his trail.

The girl Fran Dillon, found in The Bronx, did have the shadiest of reputations, according to the newspaper accounts, well known on the drug scene, habitué of bars frequented by addicts and prostitutes of both sexes, no fixed address and no employment. She had not been a friend of Elsie Tyler, but was acquainted with people who knew the slain model, and admitted to having seen her on several occasions in the company of other people. Well, just what did that prove, Ralph wondered, except that Sutherland had been able to present a cartoon of an underworld character and with the help of Marion Gill concoct a story that a figure looking like Frances Dillon had run out of the Greene Street apartment house? How convenient that Sutherland would have made a sketch on an earlier occasion, and Marion Gill would have seen the same person running from Elsie's corpse!

Ralph had enjoyed a few days when nothing happened, when he toyed with the idea of going to an employment agency on East Fourteenth Street to get a job, and put it off one more day, when he sat on a bench in Father Demo Square with God, getting some sun on his face and his healing lip, browsing in a book he had brought. On such an afternoon, on the way home, he had seen the headline: FRAN ADMITS GUILT! And another was SUSPECT TALKS! Ralph bought both papers, and walked directly home to read them. The same phrases were used in both the
Daily News
and the
Post.
Frances Dillon said she had had no intention of killing Elsie Tyler when she had left a bar on Wooster Street and walked uptown through Greene Street on her way to her East Village apartment. Then she had seen Elsie Tyler approaching her, and had had an impulse to hit her, and had picked up a brick that she had happened to see, followed Elsie up the front steps as Elsie let herself in, and struck her on the head, struck her “several times,” said Frances Dillon, though she also said she could not clearly remember doing it, and that she must have blacked out. It seemed to Ralph that she was going to plead, “Pity poor me, I'm just a drug addict, not responsible for what I do, and besides I was jealous of Elsie because she was so pretty and popular.” The jealousy element came out in both the newspaper accounts. In fact, a mess of emotions was implied, as the Dillon woman was called a lesbian, and it was projected that Elsie Tyler might have spurned her advances. Sick-making! Just as bad, even worse, was what criminals got away with these days, just by pleading diminished responsibility due to drink or drugs or some invisible brain defect, which could never be proved, of course, and which had led them to do this or that. But those cases, if won by the accused, required an expensive lawyer, and Ralph doubted that Fran Dillon was going to come up with one.

The woman Dillon had been living with, Virginia something, had said that Dillon admitted days earlier what she had done. Still another woman, Genevieve something, who had been questioned immediately after the murder because she was an acquaintance of Dillon, had said that she knew Dillon detested Elsie Tyler.

Elsie!
It pained Ralph every time his eyes fell upon her name in the newspapers, yet he devoured every sentence, hungry for information. Could it really be that Frances Dillon had done it? Surely not all these women—and some men were quoted too, the bar-keep at the Wooster Street place where Dillon had been until nearly 4 p.m. that afternoon—all these people's statements tended to point to person and place. Ralph listened to the radio. And as early as possible that evening, he bought a
Times,
in which he read the same thing over again in more restrained but all the more convincing prose. The
Times
gave no hint that Frances Dillon's confession might be an hysterical one, might be any kind of fantasy.

The morning of the next day, another edition of the
Daily News
reported a bid of $300,000 for Frances Dillon's life story and of her slaying of Elsie Tyler, from a New York magazine that Ralph had heard of but had never bought or read. That kind of money could pay for a slick lawyer to get her off on a “temporary insanity” plea, just as if she were the daughter of a rich family, Ralph thought. Dillon's confession might be true. However, the Hitler diaries had been a hoax, and a lot of money had been paid for them.

Still, the grip of anger against Sutherland that had seized Ralph was easing a little. It was a relief to him mentally and physically, though he was not at once aware of the cause of the easing. He went for the second time in his period of joblessness to the Museum of Natural History up on Seventy-ninth Street. He adored this museum. There seemed always to be something new in it, because it was too big to take in on any one day, and he also found pleasure in looking at things that he had seen before. He could forget for half an hour at a stretch who he was and everything about his personal life. That day, Ralph found himself staring at a primitive drawing or marking on a clay slab made by American Indians. The face of one of the stick figures reminded Ralph of Sutherland's drawing of Frances Dillon—except that this little face was cheerful, the figure dancing even. He must have seen this exhibit before, but now he saw it with new eyes, as it were, and he looked eagerly at other human figures depicted on slabs and on the scaled down models of mountainsides.

“What're you smiling at?” a treble voice asked him.

The voice had come from a boy of about five on Ralph's right. Ralph hadn't realized that he had been smiling. “These. These little figures,” Ralph replied, pointing.

“Eddie—” said the man with the boy, probably his father. “You mustn't bother people—talking to them.”

“Wasn't bothering me,” Ralph said, but the man and the boy were moving off. A polite man, Ralph thought. Nice to know there were still some polite people in New York.

Ralph bought a
Rolling Stone,
because it had an exclusive interview with Fran Dillon, according to its bold headlines. With this four-page story plus photographs, Ralph had a deluge of details, names, even incidents—Elsie flirting with everybody, male and female, according to Fran. Ralph knew this to be untrue, because he had had a chance to observe Elsie, when she had worked at the coffee shop down on Seventh. How much else was untrue? And yet, the details piled up, as if Fran Dillon were deliberately trying to amass justification, in her eyes, for what she had done. She told of blackouts. Small wonder, Ralph thought, considering that she admitted to taking all kinds of drugs. “A sophisticated couple” on Grove Street was mentioned, and it was said that they had introduced Elsie Tyler to “a different and more worldly group,” and Fran Dillon had actually attended a couple of their parties, invited not by Elsie Tyler but by a friend of the slain girl. Ah, poor Elsie, it came down to the fact that she had associated with the dregs!

He took another day to digest all this, and in an odd way was afraid to think hard about it. Sutherland then was not Elsie's killer. Not Elsie's killer. Ralph had wanted Sutherland to cringe, or at least flinch, when he had said he was pointing a gun at him. But Sutherland had not.

It was time he got himself to the employment agency. It would look better, if he didn't let too many days or weeks go by without a job, without trying. For this occasion, Ralph shaved himself neatly, and put on a clean shirt and a tie. A jacket wasn't necessary, he thought. It was another warm day.

By mid-morning, he was walking east on Fourteenth Street toward the employment agency. The sun bore down, and the summer air, wafted into his nostrils as a bus swerved to the curb, stank as usual of car exhausts, grease, vague filth of all kinds. Ugly people shuffled toward him, slowed by the heat, overweight people with shopping bags, tired, bored, but still moving, slouching toward some destination. And of course the inevitable kids were with them, some hardly old enough to walk, some being pushed in collapsible seats-on-wheels, one peeing in the gutter this minute while his mother waited.

Suddenly Ralph slowed, almost stopped, and someone at once bumped against his sore shoulder from behind.

He'd seen Elsie! She was several yards ahead, blond head lowered for a second or two, then up again, and the distance between them narrowed fast. Elsie with her quick tread, not looking at but somehow dodging all the hideous figures before her. Ralph blinked. “
Els
—
!
”

In an instant, and it was like a gunshot, he realized that the girl wasn't Elsie, that this girl was taller, that this girl held her head more down, yes, and was an all round larger girl. And the fair hair was not really blond but dyed, phony.

Ralph stood motionless as the girl swept past him. He was oblivious of the people who jostled him, of the mumbled complaints in foreign tongues and accents against his blocking the flow of human traffic. No, there wouldn't be another Elsie. Not ever again on earth, not ever.

37

“We kept the newspapers out of sight, but Jason either found them—or overheard something Max and I said. Maybe both,” Elaine Armstrong said to Jack on the telephone. “Anyway, he told Amelia. I am sorry, Jack. And we've had a TV shutdown here too.”

Jack said he understood. His daughter would recognize Elsie's photograph, and she could read. Jack remembered Natalia saying that she and Amelia and Elsie had once had ice cream together at some place in the Village, and how many other meetings had there been? “Don't worry too much about it, Elaine. We wouldn't have done any better, probably.—What time's convenient for me to pick her up?”

“I could walk her down. Now, even.” Elaine said she felt like taking a walk, and Amelia's little suitcase wasn't heavy at all.

In less than five minutes after she got home, Amelia spotted the photograph of Elsie on the pony on the living-room bookshelf. “That's Elsie—when she was little!” Amelia said, and her face lit with pleasure. Had Elsie given it to Mummy? Was Elsie coming back?

“Coming back,” Natalia said with a troubled frown. “Well—”

Jack was nearby, and like Natalia didn't know what to say.

“No, she's not coming back, honey,” Natalia said. “But we have this. It's nice, isn't it?” She meant the photograph. “I think she's even smaller than you here.” Natalia threw a dismal glance at Jack, as if to say, “Oh,
Chr-rist
!”

“
Why
isn't she coming back?” There was in the question not only naiveté but a challenge.

“Because she's dead—now. Elaine told me you knew that, ­Amelia.—We're all sad and sorry. But it's true.”

Amelia had locked her little fingers together and was bending them backward, looking at them. “But
you
didn't tell me.—She was dead when I went away.”

Natalia sighed and slapped her forehead.

“Because it was very sad news, Amelia, hon.” Jack put his hand against the back of Amelia's head, ruffled her hair gently. “We didn't want to tell you sad news like that. You know?”

“But it's true, though,” said Amelia.

“Yes,” Natalia said.

“Somebody hit her.” Amelia looked from Jack to her mother.

“That's true,” Jack said. “We were going to tell you when you came back home. But—”

To their relief, Amelia walked away, rather erectly, toward her room. But in the next hour or so, as they added to their note in progress for Susanne on the typewriter, took showers, and went out somewhere for a snack, Amelia's questions continued in the same vein. It was as if she had to have it confirmed over and over again by her parents: Elsie had really been killed, she would not be coming back again, she had been hit by another woman, and it had killed her. Amelia even knew the name Fran, and startled both Jack and Natalia when she uttered it.

Jack had an unpleasant vision of his little daughter poring over the newspapers, the tabloids, staring at photographs of Elsie, of Fran, of the Greene Street house where perhaps Amelia had been, understanding probably more than half of what she read. Jason, a year older, might have latched onto the papers when .his parents weren't looking, and shared them with Amelia. Jack would never want to ask Amelia or Jason about that.

The next morning, at some time between 9.30 and 10, Jack and Natalia and Amelia descended the stairs with their luggage, aided by Max Armstrong who had called up and come down to lend them a hand. It was a Saturday morning, and Max didn't have to go to the office.

Max found a taxi—they had been shy about ordering one for a specific time, lest they be delayed by something—and as Jack was walking toward Bleecker with a bag in each hand, he caught sight of a blond girl walking toward him and his heart almost stopped. The sun was behind her, glowing on the top of her head, she walked with light steps that seemed hardly to touch the ground, head high and with a smile on her lips.

She's still alive!
Jack thought.

But no, this was another girl, a different girl, and Jack shut his eyes as she passed him, nearly brushing his shoulder. His heart began to beat again, after a stumbling start. Amazing, that resemblance at a distance! Amazing, that lift, that shock of dazzlement at the sight of this girl, a total stranger!

“Jack!” Natalia called from the corner where she stood with a taxi door open.

Jack felt a clout on the left side of his face and forehead that made his ears ring, made him dizzy for a second. He had walked smack into a lamppost!

Up at the corner, Max and Natalia were laughing at him.