How Like an Angel (26 page)

TWENTY-ONE

Alberta Haywood lay
staring up through black thoughts at the white ceiling. It was no ordinary ceiling, though. Sometimes it receded until it seemed as far away as the sky, and sometimes it closed in on her, its soft satin whiteness touching her face until she thought she was in a coffin. But even in her coffin she had no more privacy than she had had in prison. People moved around her, poked her in the chest and back, stuck tubes in her nose and needles in her arm, talked. If what they said was interesting, she responded; if not, she pretended to have heard nothing.

Occasionally she asked a question of her own, “Where is George?”

“Now, Miss Haywood, we told you that several days ago.”

“I don't remember.”

“Your brother George is dead.”

“Really? Well, he'll have to find his own coffin. There cer­tainly isn't any room in this one. I'm quite cramped as it is.”

A medley of voices: “She's still delirious.” . . . “But the pneumonia's clearing up, her white count's practically back to normal.” . . . “It's been nearly a week now.” . . . “Continue the glucose.” . . . “Wish we could get a decent x-ray.” . . . “She keeps trying to take the tube out of her nose.” . . . “Apathy.” . . . “Hysteria.” . . . “Delirium.” . . .

The voices came and went. She took out the tube and it was replaced. She pulled off the blankets and they were put back. She fought and was beaten.

“Miss Haywood, there's a man here to ask you some ques­tions.”

“Tell him to go away.”

But the man did not go away. He stood beside the bed, looking down at her with strange, sad eyes. “Did you hire anyone to kill O'Gorman, Miss Haywood?”

“No.”

“Did you give your brother's clothes to a transient?”

“No.”

It was absolutely true. She'd done neither of those things. The man who asked such absurd questions must be an idiot. “Who are you?”

“Joe Quinn.”

“Well, you're an idiot, Joe Quinn.”

“Yes, I guess I am.”

“I don't answer the door to transients, let alone arrange murders. Ask George.”

“I can't ask George. He was killed six days ago.”

“Of course.”

“Why do you say, ‘Of course,' Miss Haywood?”

“George interfered with people's lives. Quite natural some­one should kill him.”

“Did he interfere with yours?”

“Every time he came here he tormented me with questions. He shouldn't have done that.” Tears, some for George, some for herself, squeezed out from under her closed eyelids. “He shouldn't have done it. Why couldn't he let people alone?”

“What people, Miss Haywood?”

“Us.”

“Who is ‘us'?”

“Us people. All us people of the world.”

She could sense, from the sudden quietness in the room, that she had made a bad mistake. To distract attention from it, she reached up and wrenched the feeding tube out of her nose. It was replaced. She threw off the blankets from the bed, and they were put back. She fought, even in her sleep, and even in her sleep she was beaten. There were no fresh sweet dreams left for her.

It was the first time Willie King had appeared at the office since George's funeral. Nothing in it had changed. On the floor, desks and chairs and wastebaskets were in the same position, and on the walls, Washington was still crossing the Delaware, and young Lincoln was still smiling inscrutably.

She stared around her, filled with resentment that nothing had changed. She wanted to take a crowbar and vandalize the place, smash the windows and ash trays and telephone, demol­ish the chairs and desks, then everything would look the way she felt inside.

Earl Perkins, hanging up his coat on the rack, gave her a small tentative smile. “Hello, Willie. You all right?”

“Fine. Just fine, thanks.”

“Gosh, Willie, I'm sorry. I mean, gosh, what can I say?”

“Try shutting up.” She glanced at the pile of mail on Earl's desk, some of it already opened. “Business as usual, eh?”

“Mrs. Haywood's orders were to keep going just as if George hadn't died.”

“That's a laugh. She's a very funny woman. I get hysterics when I think about her.”

“Now don't start that again, Willie.”

“Why not?”

“It won't do any good. And after all, maybe in her own way she's not as bad as you think.”

“She's worse.”

“So all right, she's worse,” Earl said in a resigned voice. “There's nothing you can do about it.”

“Yes, there is.” She went over to her desk and picked up the telephone. “I can call her, tell her a few of the things I couldn't tell her when George was alive.”

“You don't want to do that, Willie.”

“Oh, but I do. I've been planning it for days. Listen, you old harridan, I'll say. Listen, you selfish, conniving old woman. You want to know who killed George? You did. Not last week, or last month, but years ago, years and years. You choked the life out of him with those scrawny claws of yours—”

“Give me that phone,” Earl said.

“Why should I?”

“Stop arguing and give it to me.”

She shook her head stubbornly and began to dial. George was dead. She didn't care what happened now, there was no future for her. “Hello?”

“Hello.”

“Mrs. Haywood?”

“Yes, this is Mrs. Haywood speaking.”

How old she sounds,
Willie thought with surprise.
How very old and sick and defeated.

“This is Willie, Mrs. Haywood. I'm sorry I haven't called sooner. How are you getting along?”

“Adequately, thank you.”

“Perhaps you'd like me to come over one of these nights. We could keep each other company. I'm lonely, too.”

“Indeed? Well, you cope with your loneliness, I'll cope with mine.”

“If you change your mind, let me know.”

Willie put the receiver back on the hook and turned to face Earl. She had not particularly noticed him before except as a kid who shared the same office and had trouble with his diges­tion. He was a little young, perhaps, but he had a nice appear­ance and he worked hard. And if she could keep him on his ulcer diet—

She said, “Thanks, Earl. I'm really grateful to you.”

“What for? I didn't do anything except stand here.”

“Maybe that's enough. You just keep standing there, will you?”

“Well, sure. Only I don't know what in heck you're talking about.”

“You will.”

From the telephone in the hall, Mrs. Haywood went back to the kitchen and resumed her preparation of breakfast. Celery stalks, spinach, carrots, a head of lettuce, wheat germ, powdered protein and two eggs went into the blender and came out the thick gray-green mixture which started Mrs. Haywood's dietary day.

So far she hadn't admitted to herself or to anyone else that George had been murdered. In her reconstruction of his death, George, standing at the top of the Tower, had suffered an attack of vertigo and fallen, due to poor eating habits and lack of proper exercise and rest. To Quinn, to Sheriff Lassiter, to the police officials of Chicote, to John Ronda, the local pub­lisher, she had reiterated this belief without attempting to explain why George had gone to the Tower in the first place or what he had hoped to accomplish there. On the subject of Alberta, she was silent.

“Lonely, are you, Willie?” she said aloud. “Well, you de­serve to be. Who kept George out at nights so he didn't get his eight hours of sleep? Who made him eat restaurant dinners high in cholesterol and low in calcium and riboflavin? Who persuaded him to sit for hours at a movie when he should have been using his muscles at the Y?”

In the past two weeks she had begun to talk to herself and to people who were not there and never would be. Much of what she said consisted of excerpts and homilies from her col­lection of self-help books on nutrition, positive thinking, dynamic living, health and happiness through concentration, peace of mind, and the uses and development of will power. She took all the self-styled authorities with utter seriousness, even though they frequently contradicted themselves and each other. It kept her busy and prevented her from think­ing.

“The authorities are too stupid to recognize a simple truth. First, there was the exertion of climbing the stairs when his system was not prepared for it. His heart muscles were flabby, his arteries choked with cholesterol. Then, too, he should have had at least eighty-five grams of protein that day, and one full gram of calcium, and of course he didn't.”

She poured the mixture from the blender into a glass and held it up to the window over the sink. In the opaque grayness she could see youth and health and vigor, will power, happi­ness, peace of mind, free-flowing arteries, firm abdominal muscles, a fortune in real estate and eternal life.

She took a sip of her dream cocktail.

“If George had started his day with this, he'd be alive right now. The vertigo would never have happened.”

The first sip had tasted bitter and the texture was wrong. She took a second and it was the same, bitter, too thin to eat, too thick to drink.

“I must have left something out. What did I leave out?”

September came. The O'Gorman children went back to school and every night Martha helped them with their home­work. Richard had written a theme on
“How I Spent My Summer Vacation” and given it to her to check for spelling and grammatical errors.

“This handwriting is terrible,” Martha said. “Don't they teach handwriting in school anymore?”

“Sure they teach it,” Richard said cheerfully. “I guess I just don't learn it.”

“I don't think I'll be able to read it.”

“Just keep trying, Mom.”

“Oh, I'll keep trying, all right, but will the teacher?” Martha returned to the theme. According to Richard's version of the summer, he had done more work than a company of Seabees. “This
is
you you're writing about?”

“Sure. That's the title, isn't it? How
I
Spent
My
Summer. Listen, Mom. Do you know what a lot of the kids are doing this year?”

“I certainly do,” Martha said dryly. “I've been told often enough. Some of them are driving their own Cadillacs. Others get fifty a week allowance, are allowed to stay out until mid­night—”

“No, I'm serious, Mom. Some of the kids—one of them, anyway, does his homework on a typewriter.”

“At your age?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“If you use a typewriter for everything now, by the time you're ready for college you'll have forgotten how to write by hand.”

“You said I couldn't anyway.”

Martha looked at him coolly. “Well, what I didn't say, but what I'm saying right now, smarty pants, is that you'd better pay stricter attention to your handwriting. Is that clear?”

Richard groaned, twitched and rolled his eyes, but he said, “Yes, ma'am.”

“Beginning now. You should copy this theme over before you give it to the teacher, if you're interested in a decent grade on it.”

“Didn't we have a typewriter once? A long time ago?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to it?”

Martha hesitated before she answered, “I don't really know.”

“Gosh, maybe it's still around some place in the storeroom or the garage. I'm going to look for it.”

“No. You won't find it, Richard.”

“I might. You said you didn't really know where it is.”

“I
do
know where it isn't. There's no need to ransack the storeroom and the garage looking for something that doesn't exist. Now please don't start telling me what the other kids are allowed to do. Just accept the fact that you're under­privileged, abused, neglected and short-changed, and carry on from there. Will you do that?”

“Well, gee whiz.”

“That just about sums it up, friend. Gee whiz.”

She kept her tone light so the boy wouldn't suspect how much the sudden mention of the typewriter had shaken her. It had been Patrick's, an old portable he had bought second­hand, and which had never worked properly. The keys stuck together, the margin regulators were temperamental, and the bell rang only when it wanted to. She remembered how earn­estly and patiently Patrick had hunched over it, trying to teach himself the touch system and never succeeding at that any more than he had at all the other things he had tried.
I encour­aged him too much,
she thought.
I let him climb too high and when he fell I provided too soft a cushion so he never broke a bone or learned his own limitations.