The Nail and the Oracle (11 page)

Something was indeed—someone in the moonlight. Little Sister peered and peered through the gauze, then, because she could not bear to be uncertain, no, not for another second, she took the flimsy panel and held it to one side.

And he,
he
stood there! and when he saw the curtain move, he smiled. She could see the gleam of his teeth in the moonlight.

He began again to take off clothes. He took off a jacket and tossed it behind the kiosk. He took off a shirt. He took off his shoes, balancing like a great bird on one foot, then the other, never taking his eyes off her window. And all the while, smiling.

Whether or not he had learned any lesson, she had, and that was, don’t scream. It was only now, this second, that she knew she had learned it, knew what her screams had done last time. She whimpered only, dropped the curtain and fled to the telephone. She lifted it, and, unable to stay away from the window, carried it as close as she could. She took up the receiver—and oh! that blessed hum!—and looking out and back, dialed. And while she was dialing, she saw the dim form outside spring lithely up the side of the kiosk, stand and balance on tiptoe against the flickering sky.

He reached up high over his head, took the faint pencil-line of a wire in his hands, and leapt lightly back to the roof. She heard the twang as the wire parted, and in her hands, like a captured bird, the telephone went dead.

Her breath stopped as the life left the instrument. She thought her heart stopped too. She stood absolutely motionless, gazing at the dead thing, and then she moaned softly, softly replaced the handset, and backed away from the window. And even all the way back, near the bed, she could see him, for he had retired to the middle of the wide roof opposite.

And now he took two springy strides toward her, and now he
skipped once like a diver or an acrobat getting his stride, and now he was sprinting, and up the sloping, ramp-like eave he came, and launched himself into the air!

The square black hole of her open upper sash must have seemed a small target indeed—almost too narrow to admit his shoulders. But through it they went, never touching. His whole long body arrowed through the little opening and came at her like a javelin. And as she tensed herself for the crash of his landing, his body curved downward toward the floor. As his hands touched it he snapped his chin down to his collarbones, curled up in a tight ball, turned all his velocity into a roll. And there was no crash at all, only a great soft complex thud which shook her body and the bed, ending with a bump as he came up standing on his stockinged feet.

For a long moment—forever—they stood silently so, again their gazes locked, he smiling and balanced on his wide-planted feet, she pressed back against the edge of the bed. Then she sighed and fell backwards. She screwed up her eyes and her mouth, and through her twisted lips she gasped, “All right! All right!”

“Little Sister. Little Sister!”

Calling, calling … “I told you,” she blubbered, “I told you all right.”

“All right,” the voice echoed her, “You’re all right now. You must have fainted.”

She let her aching eyes open a crack, and cried out; the big overhead light was on, and it hurt her.

An arm slid cleverly behind her, raised her up. She parted her lips to speak, and cold touched them, a cup, cold water … she drank a little and began to tremble. “You’re all right now,” said the voice over the phone—oh God, not over the phone, right here in the room. She opened her eyes again, now ready for the blaze of light, and looked into the bland quiet face of Detective Sergeant Peter Poteen.

Numbly, she let her gaze fall away, and there across the room, hunched into her wicker chair and much too big for it, was
he, him
, the man on the roof. Louie, Clewie!

Oh!

“I knew he’d try to see you,” said Poteen, deftly fixing her pillow behind her. “I was out in the hall. I thought it might save everybody some trouble if I was with him, at the time. I lost him earlier and figured to meet him on the way to the door. Never dreamed he’d fly in like a bird.”

Unbelievably, the man, this Louie or Clewie or whatever, he grinned briefly, grinned at Poteen, and it was not at all as if he was a prisoner, or even a criminal. Little Sister began to cry.

Poteen left her alone to cry. He stepped away from her and he and the man talked—chatted was the word—friendly as could be—their faces politely averted while she pulled herself together.

When she was able, she whimpered, “What is it? What happened? What are you doing here?”

Poteen returned to her immediately. He looked at her gravely and then pulled up the straight chair. From the shelf above, he got some tissues from her box. He sat down and gave them to her. She crumpled one and sniffled into it. He said, “Tell me what happened that other time. Last year.”

“You know what happened.”

“Tell me
all
of what happened.”

“That,” she remembered, “is what you asked me when you came here that time, three weeks after.”

He nodded. “And you told me what you told the papers. I just wanted to know the rest of it.”

“There isn’t any rest of it.”

He breathed deeply once, a patient sound, not exactly a sigh. “That first time you called me, to complain of a Peeping Tom making obscene gestures at you from the roof. Was that the first time you had seen this fellow out on the roof?”

She opened her mouth, drew in air—and then hesitated. There was a certain something about Poteen’s bland dark face that was not easy to lie to. “Well,” she said at length, “no, it wasn’t.”

Poteen made no move anyone might describe, but something inside him seemed to relax. “How many times did you see him before?”

“
I
don’t know,” she said in the beginnings of anger. “How do
you expect me to remember, exactly how many times?”

“Ten times? Twenty times? Fifty?”

“Oh, not fifty.”

“More than ten?”

“What right have you got to question me like this?” she shouted.

The thing inside him seemed to tighten up again. He reached in his breast pocket and drew out a thick sheaf of mimeo paper. “Know what this is? This is the transcript of his trial. Listen,” he said in a tone which gave her no choice but to do as she was told.

He read, “ ‘Q. Did you or did you not indecently expose your person to the view of the plaintiff?

“ ‘A. I didn’t even—

“ ‘Q. Answer the question. Did you or did not not—

“ ‘A. But I was only—

“ ‘The Court: The witness will answer the question.

“ ‘Q. Did you—

“ ‘A. Yes! Yes! Yes! If that’s what I got to say.’ ”

Poteen held up the transcript so she could see a handwritten line penciled in it. “Here was something off the record but the court stenographer remembered it. His Honor stood up and leaned across the bench and yelled at the witness, ‘You did, did you! You got a fat nerve pleading innocent, wasting everybody’s time!’ Then he said to strike that.”

Poteen paused, then struck the papers softly with his free hand. “Let’s just say that
this
is my right to question you this way.” He folded the transcript and put it away, and went on in exactly the previous voice, “You’d seen him out on the roof before?”

She whispered, “Yes.”

“More than ten times?”

“… Yes.”

“More than twenty?”

She glared at him. “No.”

“Very well,” he shrugged in a way that took all the strength out of her glare; it just didn’t matter. “Now, as to what was called in court ‘indecent exposure’ and ‘obscene gestures.’ Exactly what was that? Just what did he do? Try to remember.”

Little Sister really and truly blushed. “I … c-can’t say it!”

“All right. Perhaps I can find a way to say it for you. He was relieving himself. Is that about it?”

She put her hands to her cheeks and nodded.

“Very well,” he said clinically, not surprised, angry, shocked, anything. “Now—was this the only occasion when you had seen this?”

She would not answer.

“Well?” And the way he produced that one syllable, she had to answer. She shook her head.

“How many times?” He waited, then said, “More than twice? Ten times?”

“Five times,” she said at last.

“Five times,” he repeated. “All right, let’s get back to what he was doing on the roof in the first place.”

She made a vague gesture.

“Well … tricks.”

He waited, and she said, “You know—like,
tricks
. Standing on his hands and all. He had some sort of—well, pipes, like.”

“Handstand bars. Like a small parallel bars. Built ’em himself,” said Poteen. “One more thing—how was he dressed when he did this?”

“Well, not in much, I can tell you!”

“Would you say it was less, say, than a bathing suit?”

“It
was
a bathing suit.”

That inward, indescribable relaxation came to Poteen again, and he said, “Well, we don’t need any more of this third degree. Now let me fill in the details for you.

“Clewie Richardson there is what they used to call a circus buff. Ever hear that term? Circus struck when he was barely able to walk. All he ever wanted in his life was to be a flyer—you, know—aerialist. Came to town to get a job and save up enough to get down to Florida; Sarasota, where the circus had winter quarters. Figured he could save up enough to keep him until he could get some sort of a job with them. Got a night loading job in the warehouse, worked hard.

“They let him have a checker’s office to sleep in—just a rathole, but they got a kind of watchman out of the deal, and he got to save a few more dollars. Meantime he kept practicing, keeping himself in shape. Last summer he was ready to make the break, go south, try for his break with the circus. Last summer he was seventeen. Three solid years working on his own for that.”

“I didn’t know!” Little Sister said in defense—in annoyance.

“You didn’t want to know,” said Poteen mildly. “So he lived in the warehouse, working nights, practicing days. The only washroom is down on the ground floor, by the way, which is why he—” He shrugged. “Technically he was guilty of
something
. That could constitute a nuisance, I suppose. Now then: as to this exposure charge. In all the time he used the roof, he
never
knew he could be seen. Out in the middle, where he had his bars, maybe—there are tall buildings out there, though none nearby.

“But back in this corner, by your window, that stairway-housing thing, that blocks off the view from everywhere except this window. When he stepped behind it, he did it to get out of sight. Yours is the only living quarters on this floor, right? All the rest is loft space. Right?”

Mute, she nodded.

“All right, now I’m going to describe to you exactly what happened that day.” He glanced at the boy, and against her will, her gaze was drawn to him too. Clewie Richardson was a big youth, wide, tall, well-muscled, and somehow scrubbed-looking. He sat in her wicker chair dressed in black slacks and a white T-shirt, his stockinged feet crossed at the ankles, his whole large lithe frame leaning raptly toward Poteen.

“He worked out for a couple of hours—oh, it had to be the hours you’d be home, what a break! You and that early-morning job of yours! And then he—well, he committed his nuisance. And it was then for the very first time he saw you looking through your curtain. You can imagine how he felt. Or maybe you can’t.

“All right—he cleared out then, and you waited two whole hours—why, I’ll never know—and then took it upon yourself to make that phone call. So I said I’d check on it and I did. I talked to
the men loading at the warehouse; Clewie was out eating. When he got back and they told him the cops were looking for him, he got all wound up. All he wanted to do was to talk to you, tell you he didn’t know you were watching, didn’t mean anything by it. He came up and knocked on your door, and next thing you know you started to scream. He wanted to calm you down, explain, but it all blew up in his face.

“Then once the squad-cars got here—” Again, that meaningful shrug. “The way the papers were playing up assault cases this last year, he didn’t have a chance. Even the defense attorney told him to save himself trouble and plead guilty. He didn’t, and—” Audibly, he tapped the transcript in his breast pocket—“look what that got him.”

“I … didn’t know,” said Little Sister, rather differently.

“I didn’t either, until next day. I went off duty after I spoke to the guys at the warehouse; then by next morning it was all over and Clewie was upstate. Five and a half hours, my God! Not that I’d’ve been able to do anything. Or wanted to, at the time. I had the fever, same as everyone else. But later … well, it kept bothering me.

“Finally I came to see you and somehow, the way you told the story, it—oh, it was too much the way a sob-sister writes a crime story. So I looked it up. You had that scandal-sheet Page Three story about by heart, didn’t you?”

“You—” and for a moment she thought she was going to swear at him, but she changed it. “You could have stayed out of it.”

He shook his head and said mildly, “No I couldn’t.” He looked at her with those understanding dark eyes for too long. She had to turn away, and he said, just like on TV, “I’m a cop, mam. I have to uphold the law. But sometimes I stop and think what the law is. The law in this country is the best we can do to make justice apply to everybody. That’s what they get made for and that’s how most of ’em work. If they don’t work that way then somebody ought to fix the trouble.

“Look here,” he said, waving a hand at Clewie Richardson and meaning the whole thing, the, complaint, assault, arrest, imprisonment—all of it. “The law was upheld all down the line, but it took a year out of his life for a misdemeanor. Everything costs,
Little Sister. Somebody pays for everything. Clewie Richardson here paid plenty—for what?

“Partly for newspapers reaching down long handles to stir up some circulation. Partly for rapists who never got caught. Partly for his own ignorance, not knowing his rights, and his own bullheadedness, trying to talk to you. And partly, he paid for something you got out of it. That last is the only part I really don’t know about. What did you get out of it, Little Sister?”