Into The Night (24 page)

It must be he. She didn't know anyone else. And if it were he, then he was calling to postpone or cancel the date. That would be the only possible reason. She stood there like a statue, refused to move. If she didn't answer, then he couldn't reach her to tell her not to come. She would go, anyway, just as she had intended to all along.

She gave it a minute even after it stopped, to make sure the line had been vacated. Then she went over to it and asked the operator, "That call you had for me just now, was that a man's voice? I was prevented from answering."

"That call wasn't for you," the operator said. "I'm sorry, I plugged in the wrong room number."

Madeline let out a long, deep breath as she hung up.

She still had a little loose time on her hands. She drew a glass of water in the serving-pantry, brought it out, and sat down with it in a chair, slowly sipping at it.

Finally she got up, went back into the other room, and got her handbag with the gun in it. As she surveyed herself in the mirror, ready to leave, a sudden sense of unreality came over her. This isn't so. This isn't true. Am I going out of here within the next couple of minutes on my way to kill a man?

She bent forward more closely, only inches away from the glass. Are those the eyes of a killer? Those soft, almost childlike things, pale blue disks swimming in crystalline moisture, pale brown lashes all around them like a feathery fringe. Those, the eyes of death?

She turned and ran out like someone possessed, as though the sight of her own face had frightened her. She didn't even turn to close the door after her, but gave it a backhand sweep as she went by it that closed it of its own momentum a few seconds after.

Even riding down in the elevator, the operator turned and darted her a quick little glance, as if he sensed some sort of stress emanating from her.

She got into a taxi and gave the address of Herrick's apartment.

In less than fifteen minutes they were at a halt in front of the place.

The driver waited a moment, entering the pick-up point and destination in his logbook. Then he turned around and said to her, "Isn't this where you wanted to go?"

She nodded affirmatively, without answering. What she wanted to say to him was, "Please turn around and take me back where we started from," but she forced herself not to.

He waited another minute, his elbow slung on top of the front seat. Then he asked, still patient, still tractable, "Didn't you bring any money with you? That what it is?"

Still without speaking, she opened her handbag, gave him some money, and opened the door. She shuddered as she got out.

But, upstairs before his door, she put her finger firmly enough on the button. She was now past the point of no return. There would be no more hesitancies, no more backing away.

He came to the door and they greeted one another with casual congeniality, even down to shaking hands.

"Hello, Madeline."

"Hello, Vick."

She said the usual things a woman visitor does when she looks over a man's apartment for the first time. "Very nice. I didn't realize you had as nice a place as this."

"It came to me just the way it is, nothing added, nothing taken away. A friend of mine had it, and when he got married he and his girl moved out to the country, so he turned this place over to me. I'm paying the old rent, too. It's a steal."

"Have you been here long?"

"Two and a half years."

Then she'd been here with him. This was where she'd lived.

She asked it, anyway. There was no reason not to.

"Did your wife live here with you?"

"Yes, Starr and I spent our marriage here." She saw the old pain cross his face again. The pain, the wanting, that wouldn't die.

He brought out the sherry and sprang the cork and poured it. The wine wasn't chilled but the empty glasses were. He'd learned that trick, which she knew of herself.

He offered her a cigarette. She had her own but she took one of his, to be agreeable. It turned out they smoked the same brand. They laughed a little about it.

"Would you like some music?" he offered. "Or would you rather not?"

"I would, I think it would be nice."

"What would you like?"

She considered. "One Fine Day,' from -Madame Butterfly-; 'Musetta's Waltz,' from -La Boheme-; 'The Stars Are Shining,' from -La Tosca-; maybe 'Vilia,' from -The Merry Widow-; the tango 'Jealousy'; 'April in Portugal.' Like that. I like music to follow a melody, I don't like ricky-tick music."

"I have them all. I'll keep it down," he said. "So that we can talk comfortably."

He racked records, flicked the lever, and the needle arm swung out, then in, then down, like something with an intelligence of its own. Then he came back and sat down opposite her on the sofa. The sofa that was to be his bier.

They sat half turned toward one another, easily, negligently, and they chatted.

"I like you very much, Madeline," he said at one point.

She knew exactly how he meant it. It wasn't a declaration of love. You don't lean back on an elbow, with your legs crossed, and say I like you very much, and mean it for love. He had his love already. He liked her as a person. She was compatible.

She didn't know just what to say to that, so she quite simply said the obvious thing: "Thank you. It's always nice to be told that."

After the second glass of sherry, he got up and began his preparations.

The food was excellent. He might not have been an all-around cook (as he had told her he wasn't), but the few dishes he knew how to do, he knew how to do well.

But her concern wasn't with the food.

The setting was charming. Only it had the wrong people in it. The setting would have been perfect for two lovers. Or even appealing for just two friends. The comfortable, livable, unostentatious yet well-done bachelor apartment, the bright-spirited table, the unobtrusive music, the intimacy of a highly attractive woman and a personable man. But they weren't lovers, they weren't friends, they were the slayer and the one who was to be slain.

She glanced around once, in the middle of something he was saying, at the handbag lying there on the sofa across the room where she had left it, with the gun in it, then turned back to him again.

No, it was all wrong to do it this way. To come here and take his food and hospitality, and then to shoot him between the eyes. It was abominable, it was cowardly, it was the worst kind of treachery. And yet what other way was there for her to do it? There was no other way. To lie in wait and shoot him from some doorway as he stepped from a taxi to his entrance? To go up and ring his bell and shoot him as he came to the door, unaware and unprepared? That was for sneak assassinations, such as the underworld carried out, or jealous women, or former business associates with an obsessive grudge. She wasn't an assassin, and this wasn't that kind of a killing. This was a killing in fulfillment of a sacred pledge. There was no other way to do it but this, in the open, to his face, letting him know if possible what it was for before he died.

"I thought you looked a little white, just then," he said.

She smiled without denying it.

"But now you don't again."

He filtered the Hennessy into the coffees, then held them both in his hands.

"Shall we take our coffee over there?" he said, tipping his head toward the sofa. "Starr and I always did, whenever we ate home. Which wasn't often."

She got up and went over to it, and they both reseated themselves again where they'd been before, one at each end of it. At a distance of about five feet. There really was no reason for them to be any closer.

But I still don't know, she thought. I must try to get that out of him. I still don't know why she left him.

"Doesn't it hurt you?" she asked him quite bluntly.

"Doesn't what?"

"Doesn't it remind you?"

"Oh, the coffee. No, little things like that don't matter. There's nothing the same about it. The cups aren't the same. The girl sharing them with me isn't the same. The only thing that's the same is the man." Then the pain came and went. "The only thing that hurts is the one big thing--that she left me."

I have him going now. I have him going.

The rack of records finally came to an end. There was a definitive little click, almost like a snub. He turned his head around toward it, then gave her an inquiring look.

"No more," she said curtly, and sliced her hand at it edgewise almost fiercely. Damn that ill-timed machine, she thought.

"Was it very sudden, her leaving you?" She had been straining forward a little toward him. She became aware of it herself, and forced herself to lean back more.

"Terribly sudden. Awfully sudden." He killed all the rest of his coffee in one swallow, more for the brandy than for the coffee, she surmised.

"Sometimes that's kinder, sometimes it's not."

"It's never kind, in love."

And I'm not being kind, am I, doing this to you? But I've got to know. Oh, I've got to know--why I'm killing you.

"Take another drink," she said with perfidious sympathy-- which was only partly perfidious. "When you take a drink, it makes it easier to talk. When you talk, it makes it easier to bear."

He looked at her in acknowledgment. "I've never told it to anybody. You see, there wasn't anybody to tell."

"There is now," she said lullingly.

He poured Hennessy into a snifter, about a quarter of the way up the sides. Then he rolled it back and forth between his hands.

She took a chance. It might not come if she just sat and waited. "Was there a quarrel--just before?"

"There wasn't time for a quarrel."

"Oh," she said.

"It started out as some kind of an attack. I didn't know it was going to end up by her leaving me. I didn't know until weeks later."

"But you said--"

It was coming now. It had started. It had started and nothing could stop it. Like when you turn on a faucet and the handle breaks off. Or start a rock slide down a slope of shale.

He pointed to a place nearer the opposite wall than to them. "She fell down on the carpet right there. See where I'm pointing? She fell down very suddenly. Fell like a stone." And as if to reassure her, he said, "It's not the same carpet. Don't be alarmed. I had it changed."

"Illness?"

"I didn't know at first, I couldn't tell. She was conscious, her eyes stayed open. But she couldn't talk, or wouldn't. She kept threshing around on the floor, as if she were having a convulsion. Saliva kept flowing out of her mouth, in spurts. It shone silvery, in little foamy patches. That's why I had the carpet changed, later on. And she started to bite at it. She pulled little tufts out of it with her teeth."

Sweat was pouring down his own face now.

Starr? This was the same Starr who died in my own arms so quietly, so unassumingly, later on? "Not temporary insan--?"

"No," he said quickly, before she had time to finish. "I couldn't do anything with her. She became worse each time I tried to go near her. When I'd try to pick her up in my arms, she'd thresh violently. Unmanageably. A spasm would go through her, almost like a patient undergoing electric-shock therapy."

He swallowed some of his drink. He looked as though it were pulling all the lining off his throat as it went down.

"I had to phone for an ambulance finally. The intern examined her right there on the floor where she was lying. He said it was shock. Acute shock. Emotional shock. He said he'd seen it in soldiers, during the Korean War. He gave her a needle to quiet her, and, of course, they took her to the hospital."

Now he took another drink, a worse one, a more hurtful one.

She took a chance and opened her handbag narrowly, just about the width of the edge of her hand, and dipped inside and pulled out a handkerchief. It had a little cologne on it, but that couldn't be helped. She threw it over toward him, and he picked it up and mopped his soaking forehead with it, and then pressed it between the palms of his hands.

"As she went out that door on the stretcher, that was the last time I ever saw her. I never saw her again to this day. She never came back here from that night on."

"But--how is it you didn't go with her? Doesn't a husband usually go with his wife, when she's taken ill like that?"

"She wouldn't let me. She carried on so terribly. You see the needle didn't take effect quickly enough, and she must have heard me say I'd ride over with her in the ambulance. She started to moan and plead to them not to let me come near her, she didn't want me to come near her. Finally the intern took me aside and said it might be better if I didn't; the idea seemed to have an exciting effect on her. To wait awhile and give her time to quiet down. He said he didn't think it was anything to worry about, it was just a nerve crisis of some kind.

"So I walked the floor, walked the floor, all night long."

He stopped suddenly. He gave her a peculiar look and said, "Why am I telling you all this?"

"I don't know," Madeline said quietly. "There are times when everybody has to tell somebody things--and I'm the one this time." Then she added, "Finish it. You've already told me so much, it doesn't matter if you go ahead. I'd like to hear the rest."

"The rest is very little," he said. "I gave them time to get her there, and then I called the hospital. They'd checked her in--I'd arranged for a private room--and they told me she was asleep.

"I stayed on my feet all night. I went around the very first thing the next day, and they told me she was resting quietly, but I must have patience, I couldn't see her yet, she still wasn't in any condition to be disturbed.

"I went back in the evening. There was a new nurse on duty, but she told me the same thing.

"Well, for the first three, maybe four, days I could understand it and I could accept it." He clenched his fist, and then splayed the fingers open again in all directions. "But for three weeks--three weeks--three weeks"--he said it three times--"I visited that hospital twice a day. Forty-two visits. And somewhere along in those weeks I finally caught on. It might have been hospital regulations in the beginning but it was her own doing that was keeping me out by this time. She must have refused to see me and ordered them not to admit me. I couldn't even reach her by phone. The nurse always answered each time, and wouldn't let me talk to her. I tried writing. The letters came back unopened inside typed hospital envelopes."