A Bullet for Cinderella (7 page)

Ruth Stamm’s yearbook picture was not very good. But the promise of her, the clear hint of what she would become, was there in her face. Her activities, listed under the picture, made a long list. It was the same with Timmy. He grinned into the camera.

Mr. Leach looked up at me when I stood near his table. “Any luck?”

“I took down some names. They might help.”

I thanked him for his help. He was bent over his papers again before I got to the door. Odd little guy, with his own strange brand of dedication and concern. Pompous little man, but with an undercurrent of kindness.

I got to the Hillston Inn at a little after five. I got some dimes from the cashier and went over to where four phone booths stood flanked against the lobby wall. I looked up the last name of the fat girl, Cindy Waskowitz. There were two Waskowitzes in the book. John W. and P. C. I tried John first. A woman with a nasal voice answered the phone.

“I’m trying to locate a girl named Cindy Waskowitz who graduated from Hillston High in nineteen forty-seven. Is this her home?”

“Hold it a minute,” the woman said. I could hear her talking to someone else in the room. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She came back on the line. “You want to know about Cindy.”

“That’s right. Please.”

“This wasn’t her home. But I can tell you about her. I’m her aunt. You want to know about her?”

“Please.”

“It was the glands. I couldn’t remember the word. My daughter just told me. The glands. When she got out from high school she weighed two hundred. From there she went up like balloons. Two hundred, two fifty, three hundred. When she died in the hospital she was nearly four hundred. She’d been over four hundred once, just before she went in the hospital. Glands, it was.”

I remembered the rebellious eyes. Girl trapped inside the prison of white, soft flesh. A dancing girl, a lithe, quick-moving girl forever lost inside that slow inevitable encroachment. Stilled finally, and buried inside her suet prison.

“Is your daughter about the same age Cindy would have been?”

“A year older. She’s married and three kids already.” The woman chuckled warmly.

“Could I talk to your daughter?”

“Sure. Just a minute.”

The daughter’s voice was colder, edged with thin suspicion. “What goes on anyhow? Why do you want to know about Cindy?”

“I was wondering if she was ever friendly in high school with a boy named Timmy Warden.”

“Timmy is dead. It was in the papers.”

“I know that. Were they friendly?”

“Timmy and Cindy? Geez, that’s a tasty combination. He would have known who she was on account of her being such a tub. But I don’t think he ever spoke to her. Why should he? He had all the glamour items hanging around his neck. Why are you asking all this?”

“I was in the camp with him. Before he died he gave me a message to deliver to a girl named Cindy. I wondered if Cindy was the one.”

“Not a chance. Sorry. You just got the wrong one.”

“Was there another Cindy in the class?”

“In one of the lower classes. A funny-looking one. That’s the only one I can remember. All teeth. Glasses. A sandy sort of girl. I can’t remember her last name, though.”

“Cindy Kirschner?”

“That’s the name. Gosh, I don’t know where you’d find her. I think I saw her downtown once a year ago. Maybe it’s in the book. But I don’t think she’d fit any better than my cousin. I mean Timmy Warden ran around with his own group, kind of. Big shots in the school. That Kirschner wasn’t in that class, any more than my cousin. Or me.”

The bitterness was implicit in her tone. I thanked her again. She hung up.

I tried Kirschner. There was only one in the book. Ralph J. A woman answered the phone.

“I’m trying to locate a Cindy Kirschner who graduated from Hillston High in nineteen forty-eight.”

“That’s my daughter. Who is this calling, please?”

“Could you tell me how I could locate her?”

“She married, but she doesn’t have a phone. They have to use the one at the corner store. She doesn’t like to have people call her there because it’s a nuisance to the people at the store. And she has small children she doesn’t like to leave to go down there and answer the phone. If you want to see her, you could go out there. It’s sixteen ten Blackman Street. It’s near the corner of Butternut. A little blue house. Her name is Mrs. Rorick now. Mrs. Pat Rorick. What did you say your name is?”

I repeated the directions and said, “Thanks very much, Mrs. Kirschner. I appreciate your help. Good-by.”

I hung up. I was tempted to try Cynthia Cooper, but decided I had better take one at a time, eliminate one before starting the next. I stepped out of the booth. Earl Fitzmartin stepped out of the adjoining booth. He smiled at me almost genially.

“So it’s got something to do with somebody named Cindy.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“ ‘I was in camp with Timmy. Before he died he gave me a message to deliver to a girl named Cindy.’ So you try two Cindy’s in a row. And you know when they graduated. Busy, aren’t you?”

“Go to hell, Fitz.”

He stood with his big hard fists on his hips, rocking back and forth from heel to toe, smiling placidly at me. “You’re busy, Tal. Nice little lunch with Ruth. Trip to the high school. Tracking down Cindy. Does she know where the loot is?”

He was wearing a dark suit, well cut. It looked expensive. His shoes were shined, his shirt crisp. I wished I’d been more alert. It’s no great trick to stand in one phone booth and listen to the conversation in the adjoining one. I hadn’t even thought of secrecy, of making certain I couldn’t be overheard. Now he had almost as much as I did.

“How did you get along with George, Howard?”

“I got along fine.”

“Strange guy, isn’t he?”

“He’s a little odd.”

“And he’s damn near broke. That’s a shame, isn’t it?”

“It’s too bad.”

“The Stamm girl comes around and holds his hand. Maybe it makes him feel better. Poor guy. You know he even had to sell the cabin. Did Timmy ever talk about the cabin?”

He had talked about it when we were first imprisoned. I’d forgotten about it until that moment. I remembered Timmy saying that it was on a small lake, a rustic cabin their father had built. He and George had gone there to fish, many times.

“He mentioned it,” I said.

“I heard about it after I got here. It seemed like a good place. So I went up there with my little shovel. No dice, Tal. I dug up most of the lake shore. I dug a hundred holes. See how nice I am to you? That’s one more place where it isn’t. Later on George let me use it for a while before he sold it. It’s nice up there. You’d like it. But it’s clean.”

“Thanks for the information.”

“I’m keeping an eye on you, Tal. I’m interested in your progress. I’ll keep in touch.”

“You do that.”

“Blackman runs east off Delaware. It starts three blocks north of here. Butternut must be about fourteen blocks over. It’s not hard to find.”

“Thanks.”

I turned on my heel and left him. It was dusk when I headed out Blackman. I found Butternut without difficulty. I found the blue house and parked in front.

As I went up the walk toward the front door the first light went on inside the house. I pushed the bell and she opened the door and looked out at me, the light behind her, child in her arms.

“Mrs. Rorick?”

“I’m Mrs. Rorick,” she said. Her voice was soft and warm and pleasant.

“You were Cindy Kirschner then. I was a friend of Timmy Warden in prison camp.”

She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Won’t you come in a minute.”

When I was inside and she had turned toward the light I could see her better. The teeth had been fixed. Her face was fuller. She was still a colorless woman with heavy glasses, but now there was a pride about her, a confidence that had been lacking in the picture I had seen. Another child sat on a small tricycle and gave me a wide-eyed stare. Both children looked very much like her. Mrs. Rorick did not ask me to sit down.

“How well did you know Timmy, Mrs. Rorick?”

“I don’t think he ever knew I was alive.”

“In camp, before he died, he mentioned a Cindy. Could you have been the one?”

“I certainly doubt that.”

It confused me. I said, “When I mentioned him you asked me to come in. I thought—”

She smiled. “I guess I’ll have to tell you. I had the most fantastic and awful crush on him. For years and years. It was pathetic. Whenever we were in the same class I used to stare at him all the time. I wrote letters to him and tore them up. I sent him unsigned cards at Easter and Valentine Day and Christmas and on his birthday. I knew when his birthday was because once a girl I knew went to a party at his house. It was really awful. It gave me a lot of miserable years. Now it seems funny. But it wasn’t funny then. It started in the sixth or seventh grade. He was two grades ahead. It lasted until he graduated from high school. He had a red knit cap he wore in winter. I stole it from the cloakroom. I slept with it under my pillow for months and months. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

She was very pleasant. I smiled back at her. “You got over it.”

“Oh, yes. At last. And then I met Pat. I’m sorry about Timmy. That was a terrible thing. No, if he mentioned any Cindy it wasn’t me. Maybe he would know me by sight. But I don’t think he’d know my name.”

“Could he have meant some other Cindy?”

“It would have to be some other Cindy. But I can’t
think who. There was a girl named Cindy Waskowitz but it couldn’t have been her, either. She’s dead now.”

“Can you think of who it could be?”

She frowned and shook her head slowly. “N-No, I can’t. There’s something in the back of my mind, though. From a long time ago. Something I heard, or saw. I don’t know. I shouldn’t even try to guess. It’s so vague. No, I can’t help you.”

“But the name Cindy means something?”

“For a moment I thought it did. It’s gone now. I’m sorry.”

“If you remember, could you get in touch with me?”

She smiled broadly. “You haven’t told me who you are.”

“I’m sorry. My name is Howard. Tal Howard. I’m staying at the Sunset Motel. You could leave a message there for me.”

“Why are you so interested in finding this Cindy?”

I could at least be consistent. “I’m writing a book. I need all the information about Timmy that I can get.”

“Put in the book that he was kind. Put that in.”

“In what way, Mrs. Rorick?”

She shifted uneasily. “I used to have dreadful buck teeth. My people could never afford to have them fixed. One day—that’s when I was in John L. Davis School, that’s the grade school where Timmy went, too, and it was before they built the junior high, I was in the sixth grade and Timmy was in the eighth. A boy came with some funny teeth that stuck way out like mine. He put them in his mouth in assembly and he was making faces at me. I was trying not to cry. A lot of them were laughing. Timmy took the teeth away from the boy and dropped them on the floor and smashed them under his heel. I never forgot that. I started working while I was in high school and saving money. I had enough after I was out to go to get my teeth straightened. But it was too late to straighten them then. So I had them taken out. I wanted marriage and I wanted children, and the way I was no man would even take me out.” She straightened her shoulders a little. “I guess it worked,” she said.

“I guess it did.”

“So put that in the book. It belongs in the book.”

“I will.”

“And if I can remember that other, I’ll phone you, Mr. Howard.”

I thanked her and left. I drove back toward the center of town. I began to think of Fitz again. Ruth was right when she used the word creepy. But it was more than that. You sensed that Fitz was a man who would not be restrained by the things that restrain the rest of us. He had proved in the camp that he didn’t give a damn what people thought of him. He depended on himself to an almost psychopathic extent. It made you feel helpless in trying to deal with him. You could think of no appeal that would work. He couldn’t be scared or reasoned with. He was as primitive and functional as the design of an ax. He could not even be anticipated, because his logic was not of normal pattern. And then, too, there was the startling physical strength.

In camp I had seen several minor exhibitions of that power, but only one that showed the true extent of it. Those of us who saw it talked about it a long time. The guards who saw it treated Fitz with uneasy respect after that. One of the supply trucks became mired inside the compound, rear duals down to the hubs. They broke a towline trying to snake it out. Then they rounded up a bunch of us to unload the supply truck. The cases aboard had obviously been loaded on with a winch. We got all the stuff off except one big wooden packing case. We never did learn what was in it. We only knew it was heavy. We were trying to get a crude dolly under it, but when we tilted it, we couldn’t get the dolly far enough back. Every guard was yelling incomprehensible orders. I imagine Fitz lost patience. He jumped up into the bed of the truck, put his back against the case, squatted and got his fingers under the edge. Then he came up with it, his face a mask of effort, cords standing out on his throat. He lifted it high enough so the dolly could be put under it. He lowered it again and jumped down off the truck, oddly pale and perspiring heavily.

Once it was rolled to the tail gate on the dolly, enough men could get hold of it to ease it down. When it was on the ground one of the biggest of the guards swaggered up, grinning at his friends, and tried to do what Fitz had done. He couldn’t budge it. He and one of his friends got it up a few inches, but not as high as Fitz had. They were humiliated and they took it out on the rest of us, but not on Fitz. He was left alone.

Back in town I decided I would have a drink at the Inn and a solitary meal and try to think of what the next step should be. I was picked up in front of the Inn, ten steps from my car.

T
here were two of them. One was a thin, sandy man in uniform and the other was a massive middle-aged man in a gray suit with a pouched, florid face.