Into The Night (16 page)

She snickered a little. "That nickname. For a big bruiser like him."

"He got it the first day he went to kindergarten and it's stuck to him ever since. He couldn't say his own name right when they asked him what it was."

The return trip downstairs was equally dynamic to the ascent, possibly even more so. A thin thread of plaster sifted off one corner of the ceiling like talcum powder. The fish in the bowl looked startled and changed directions abruptly.

"Is he always that noisy?" she asked, wincing.

The teammate gave her a hurt look. "You can't expect him to go around tippytoeing in ballet slippers."

"No, but he -could- tone it down a little," she suggested.

His partner's loyalty wouldn't dim, not by one kilowatt. "At least you always know where he is," he defended sturdily. "He ain't one of these sneaks."

He came in making a remark at a tangent for his partner alone. "That kid gets cuter every day." Then to her, "Where were we? Oh, about the man being the wrong man."

"Well, you're holding d'Angelo, aren't you?"

"We're booking d'Angelo, is right."

"Well, but there was another man in her life." (And if he asks me how I knew, I'll simply have to admit I withheld information and take whatever they dish out to me on that count.)

But he didn't. "Shiller the investment broker? We know all about him. We questioned him right at the very beginning and we released him in his own cognizance. He had a complete and perfect alibi. He was host to a dinner party of forty celebrating his wife's birthday at one of the swellest restaurants in town. Every society photographer on the beat there snapping him."

"But--but--" she sputtered.

"D'Angelo's the wrong man?" he queried humorously.

"He is. He's got to be," she cried vehemently.

He gave her not only the old one-two but a one-two-three-four. Left, right, right, left, leaving her groggy and down for the count. "Then what are the strokes from her nails doing on the backs of both his hands, and on his lower forearms?

"Why do the particles of skin embedded under her fingernails match up by lab analysis with samples taken from his?

"Why did he call us up, voluntarily, wait for us at a certain place, namely his home, voluntarily, give himself up to us when we got there, voluntarily, and accompany us back to headquarters, voluntarily?

"And lastly and mostly and mainly, why did he dictate and sign, unforced and of his own free will, a full confession?

"That he killed her, not because he hated her, but because he loved her. Loved her too much to be able to go on living with his own jealousy. Above all, loved her too much to be able to go on living without her after he -had- killed her.

"D'ja ever read -Othello?- That's it, in today's world.

"He might have had a hundred cheap little loves in his gangster days, but the real thing only hit him at last late in his life, real enough to live for, real enough to die for."

He sighed, almost as though he understood a thing like that, and how could he, how could anyone except the one who did the loving, lived the loving? Loved what was crass brass to others, loved it as precious imperishable gold.

The mystery of the human heart, that no detective can ever solve.

She sank down dazedly into the nearest chair at hand, still only half comprehending, and the title of a song she had seen on Dell's piano passed through her mind like a faraway echo. "Heaven Drops It's Curtain Down upon My Heart."

As she reentered her hotel and walked past the desk, the clerk greeted her and held out a letter toward her. She took it and stared at it with that momentary feeling of unreality which is apt to overcome anyone when they are confronted by their own handwriting. It was addressed: "Walter Shiller Esq., Warren, Shiller, Davis and Norton." In the upper left-hand corner there was a small glossy patch where the stamp, possibly dried out by too long a confinement in the vending machine, had loosened and dropped off. In the upper right, a petulant magenta-ink post office rubber stamp chided: "Returned for failure to pay postage."

"It came back several days ago," the clerk apologized. "I called up to ask you if you wanted us to put a stamp on it and remail it for you, but you were out. I guess I put it in your box and forgot about it. We've been very busy the last few days--"

He stopped short and stared, as she pressed the envelope to her lips, passionately, voraciously, over and over, like a love note from a lover, like a refund from the Internal Revenue Service.

"I thought you wanted it to go," he remarked uncertainly.

"So did I," she said. "So did I. Oh, how wrong can you be?"

"Miss Chalmers, please," he protested mournfully as she tore it into a hundred little pieces and scattered it all about her, "think of the poor porter who has to clean up here later on."

Upstairs at her desk afterward, she took out the cheap little pocket notebook with the line-ruled pages, and where it said,

    1. To get even with a woman.

ran a line through it.

Somebody else really did the job, not I, though, was her inescapable reflection.

"And now to kill a man."

How simple the words were. How easy to say, or think. And yet how frightful, how fearsome, to put into effect, to carry out. And once carried out, how impossible ever again to undo, to restore as it was before.

To turn someone like that--she let her gaze slowly travel around the hotel dining room, encompassing it and taking in each man in it in turn, but only the men (for it was a man who was to die, not a woman. Though women died too, they were no different):

One was smiling at the girl in front of him, interestedly drinking in her quick flow of words, nodding approvingly, admiringly, eyes glued to her unswervingly in the first head-on impact of youthful love.

One was looking at his watch as her eyes passed over him and telling the other three people at the table (probably) that it was time to start for the theater.

One was sitting alone, but quite complacently, an empty stemglass with a tiny white onion in it before him, thinking of something that pleased him very much, judging by the almost fatuous expression on his face.

One, just coming back after being called outside to answer a phone, was anything but complacent. His face was flushed with sulkiness and wounded vanity, and after he'd reseated himself to wait some more, he drummed anger-expressing fingers on the table.

One was breaking a roll open, preparing it for buttering.

One had his hand inside his pocket to get out money, and with the other one was good-naturedly waving off his friend's attempt to pay.

One was holding a vivaciously twinkling lighter across the table to the cigarette of his woman companion.

--to turn someone like that, or that, or that, into something that didn't move anymore. And soon rotted away. That didn't smile at some girl anymore, or look at a watch anymore. Or flick on a lighter anymore. Or take money out of his pocket.

Well, what was so terrible about it? God in His infinite wisdom-- or infinite indifference--did that every day, stopped lives by the score and by the hundreds. Blind Nature did it too, in a multitude of ways, if any distinction could be made between the two.

Yes, but she wasn't God, and she wasn't Nature. That was what was terrible about it.

Death took only an instant, a second. It couldn't by its nature take more than that. Even a lengthy dying was still life up until that final second. To destroy in less than a second, then, what it had taken twenty-five, thirty, forty years to grow and shape. To efface, to wipe out, what some mother had nurtured and cherished. What some younger woman had loved and joined her life to. To blank out the collected knowledge inside that mind, the specialties, the talents, the knacks, the lacks; never again to be reassembled in just that identical collectivity and ratio and proportion and degree. Unique, each single mind, out of all the millions of others. Irreplaceable. The memories, the experiences, the disappointments, the hates, the loves, the plans, the hopes.

All this--in just an instant, erased, extinguished, annihilated.

And yet it had to be. It was to be. It would be.

She wanted her own peace of mind back. She was entitled to it. She couldn't live without it, life would be unendurable.

She took up an unused table knife and slowly drew an invisible line along the tablecloth.

This is his path, slowly coming toward mine. Nearer as the days go by, nearer each hour and each day.

She drew another line toward the first one, but stopped it short before they encountered one another.

This is my path, slowly going toward his. Inevitably, they will come together. After they meet, mine will keep going on again. His won't. His will have stopped.

The shadow of a man's head and shoulders dimmed the whiteness of the table a little, and the waiter asked her if there was anything more.

She shook her head inattentively without looking up at him, and watched the faint outline efface itself from the cloth again.

Like that, life left you, went away from you. Like a faint shadowing slipping off the blankness of some empty tablecloth. Just like that.

It is at one and the same time both the easiest and yet the hardest thing in the world for a girl to meet a certain designated man, who is a stranger to her and within whose orbit she does not naturally fall: that is, with whom she does not share mutual friends nor gravitate within the same business or professional background as he does. It is easy if her long-range motive is marriage or her short-range one simply a love affair. Or for that matter, even just a quick sex-kick. Because then all she does is place herself in his way, go somewhere where she knows he'll be and where he can't help see her, and let the rest follow automatically from there. Either let him pick her up, or else pick him up and let him think he did.

But if her motive is something else again, if there is not the slightest possibility of love on her part, and even less on his, so that even the phony promise of love-yet-to-come cannot be used as an inducement or come-on in helping to break the ice, and if they have no mutual friends, no complementary backgrounds, then the difficulty becomes almost insurmountable.

Madeline's motive was murder, no more, no less. She was honest enough to admit to herself that that was all it could be called in the final analysis, no matter how she tried to gloss it over by calling it a deed of retribution, or atonement, or vindication, or whatever. It was death by violence, at her hands, and that was murder.

There had to be a relationship to precede this act. She couldn't just shoot him down at sight. One very good reason being she didn't -know- him by sight. She had to know he was the right one, she had to make sure. Since love was barred, and there was no business or professional empathy, the only possible relationship had to be friendship. No matter how false, but still a friendship.

And that was where the problem came in. A woman cannot suddenly meet and commence a friendship with a strange man, just like that.

Even apart from that, the logistics of getting within reach of him, she had a minor problem of identification on her hands. She had very little to go by. Charlotte herself had never set eyes on him in her life. She, Madeline, had no physical description whatever. Starr's letters to her mother had been filled with emotional descriptives, but never physical ones. He might be fat, he might be thin, might be short, might be tall. Might be fair, might be dark. She had to cut him out of a whole worldful of men.

Only two facts about him had filtered through Charlotte to her, both coming at second hand from Starr. And those two facts were the minimum that can be known about anyone: They were his two names, first and last. "Vick" and "Herrick." Not another thing. Not even that much in full, for one of them was probably a nickname. There was a very good possibility that "Vick" stood for "Victor," but not an out-and-out certainty.

She didn't even know what his occupation was, his method of earning a living. Starr had never told Charlotte, oddly enough, and so Charlotte had been unable to tell Madeline. Dell herself had only used the word "work," which could have meant anything. "Sometimes he used to go straight from work to pick her up."

Madeline took stock. She had this much, then: "Vick Herrick." And one thing in addition, gathered by indirection. Dell had admitted he was younger than she when she married him. Since Dell herself had been at the most still in her early thirties, he must be in his late twenties, even today.

Not much to go by. Very little. Vick Herrick, age twenty-eight, -nine, or thirty. No face, no height, no hair coloring. To be singled out, isolated, from a huge population complex.

For days on end, the very hopelessness of the task held her immobile, kept her from doing anything at all. So afraid of failure that she was afraid even to start in. Finally she had to say to herself, "Get up your nerve. Don't let it throw you like this. Even if you fail, it's better than just to sit doing nothing. It's too late to turn back now anymore, so the only place you can go is ahead." She took a deep breath, and without knowing just where to begin, began anyway.

The obvious thing of course was to consult the telephone directory. That wouldn't facilitate her striking up a friendship with him, but it might at least indicate -whom- to strike it up with. When she had hit upon a way of going about it.

She was surprised at the number of Herricks she encountered. She had thought it a fairly uncommon name. But she counted eighteen of them. However, of these there were only three listed with given names starting with a V, so the problem wasn't as bad as it seemed. One was a female, Vivian; the other two just had initials after them. She eliminated Vivian at once, and that left her with just two to concentrate on. At least within the metropolitan city limits. There was nothing of course to exclude his being a suburbanite, one of that teeming horde that siphoned in each morning and out again each night. In which case the task would be so magnified it might take the better part of a year. She closed her eyes with a shudder to ward off the dismal prospect.