101 Mystery Stories

59 The Girl Who Jumped in the River Arthur Moore

It was after dark when I came along the Redding Bridge, going home from work. I was late. Usually I get out earlier, but if I had I wouldn’t have met her. I only saw her because I was on the walkway right beside the railing.

She was on an iron crossbeam, just out of the water, and she was soaking wet. I figured she had tried to end it all and had got cold feet at the last minute. You see those things in the papers all the time. Anyway it sure surprised me, seeing her. I got over the rail and down there in a second and grabbed her. There wasn’t anybody around. A few cars passed, crossing the bridge as I hauled her over the railing, but nobody stopped.

When I had her safe. I said, “What’d you try that for?”

She glared at me like I had something to do with it, “I like swimming,” she said with a lot of sarcasm. “What’d you think?”

So I shut up. I knew she hadn’t gone swimming. It was way too chilly for that.

My name is Ralph Callicut and I work across the bridge at the Ender Hardware plant, which is a wholesale place. I don’t have a car. so I walk back and forth across the bridge except when the weather is bad. then I take the bus.

Well, her teeth began to chatter, of course, because she was sopping and in a very bad way. I asked her where she lived and she said in Minneapolis, which was a long way off. so I figured she meant she was a stranger in town.

What do you think? I ended up taking her to my apartment so she could get dry. By the time we got there she was a worse mess, hair all stringy and her disposition very edgy. I got the heater going: she shucked her clothes in the bedroom, put on my old bathrobe and stood in front of the heater with her clothes spread out to dry.

“Jeez, Ralph,” she said, “can’t you make this thing hotter?”

I said it only got so hot and that was it. It was, too. I had already told her my name. She said hers was Louise, and she was hungry. I said I could make her some soup and she sighed like it would have to do.

She was looking at me very close. “I thought you were older.”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“Yeah? So am I. What d’you do?”

I told her I work for a hardware company. She wanted to know what I make and I told her a hundred and four take-home every week, but with a chance of advancement.

She said, “Yeah?”

So I went in and fixed her the soup. I had already eaten at Joe’s Place. While the soup was heating she came in and looked around the kitchen. It is not big. I have a small pad; livingroom, bedroom and kitchen. The landlord is going to paint next year, he says.

She looked at the soup and the peanut butter on the shelves. “Is that all you eat, soup and peanut butter?”

“You want some? I got bread, too.”

“No, thanks.”

She had combed her hair a little. It was slightly curly with frizzy ends, a little darker than blonde. Her face was shiny and raw-looking, with lines because she was tired. With no makeup she was on the seedy side. I wondered if she had run off from a husband, but I didn’t ask her. She had a snappy way of talking; she bit at you, sort of. I guessed she’d had a bad time, having to jump into the river and all.

Louise ate the soup. I made her some toast and she ate that too, even with peanut butter. She was hungrier than she thought. Then she smoked a cigarette and stared at me. “Don’t you have any coffee?”

I said sure, and boiled some water and made instant.

I wasn’t used to having a girl around. I never did get married, and I don’t have a steady girlfriend. Girls like me OK, but I’m not pushy, you know what I mean? When I ask them for a second date they usually say, “Oh gee, Ralph, why didn’t you ask me sooner? I got something to do tonight.” Like that.

While we had coffee, Louise turned all her clothes over and let them dry on the other side. She smoked most of my pack and kept staring at me. She was a very rumpled doll, but I didn’t say so.

Then she told me she had a suitcase.

I asked, “Where?”

“It’s at a guy’s house. He’s keeping it for me.”

“Where’s the house?”

She told me. It was about a mile away. She wanted to go over and get it. She got up and said, “Why don’t we go over and get it?”

I said, “OK,” and we went. About halfway there I began to wonder why I was going with her, but I couldn’t back out then. We walked all the way and she found the house easy. It was a tall flat; we went in and up the stairs. She knocked at a door on the second floor. A guy opened it and frowned at her. He was about my size and had a pencil behind his ear.

She said, “I came for my bag, Charlie.”

I was surprised, because he had it waiting for her right by the door. He just shoved it with his foot and she looked at me, so I stepped in and picked it up. Charlie stared at me too, but he didn’t say anything at all, only I kind of thought he smiled a little bit. When I backed out he slammed the door.

“He was just keeping it for me,” Louise said as we went down to the street.

It was on my mind to ask her, “What next?” but she marched us right back to my pad like that was the only place to go. I didn’t know what to say.

When we got inside she went right into the bedroom and flopped on the bed. “Jeez, you made me walk the whole way. My feet’re killing me.”

I said, “You want to go to bed?” I guess I had ideas.

She looked at me then with a kind of funny stare. “Yeah, why don’t you sleep on the couch, Ralph?”

So I said, “Sure, OK.” Well, what the crackers — just for one night.

In the morning, instead of eating at Joe’s again, I had to rush out for milk, eggs and some bacon. Louise said she liked bacon. “Get some marmalade too, Ralph.”

While we were eating she asked me what my hours were and I told her, then I asked her, “What you going to do today?” I thought maybe she had someplace to go. “You going someplace?”

She said, “Nowhere. I guess I’ll stay here.”

I figured she had to think things over. I gave her a couple of bucks in case she needed to get something — you know. Then I slid out.

That night when I got off, I was sure surprised to see Louise coming across the bridge to meet me. It gave me a funny feeling having a sort of pretty girl interested in me. I guess I’m not a Don Juan or anything, really.

She was looking me over when we met. She said, “Don’t slouch over that way, Ralph.”

I said I wouldn’t and we walked back to the apartment. I hoped she had made dinner, but she hadn’t. She said she thought we were going out somewhere, which was funny because I hadn’t mentioned nothing. Anyhow, I took her to a beanery where they have pretty good stuff, but she didn’t think too much of it. They used too much salt in everything, she said.

I asked her what she did all day and she said she slept most of the time. “Except you can’t sleep real good because of all that street racket under the window.”

I said I was sorry.

When I turned on the TV set, she said, “How come you still got a black and white, huh?”

After a while I made some more coffee, and when it got late I realized she was going to stay there that night, too.

So I slept on the couch again.

I thought a lot about it the next day, but when I got home that night the apartment was all changed around. Louise had gone out and bought new curtains and charged them to me at the neighborhood center where they know me. Also she got me a new pillow for the couch. “It’s better for you than those two little ones.”

She had a fifth of gin too, and a couple of boxes of cookies. Later, when I saw the bottle, it was down by half and the cookies were all gone.

The next time she came across the bridge to meet me after work she said the stores were still open and that she really needed a new dress because she only had one. So I took her shopping. She bought a dress, panty hose, a pair of shoes and some underwear.

“I’ll get the rest later,” she said.

On the way back to the bridge she noticed Manny’s Hofbrau Cafe, which is a kind of ritzy spot in the little park at the end of the bridge. I had never been there. Louise said it looked a lot better than the beanery.

Dinner cost me eleven bucks; just the dinner alone. Her martinis cost a buck eighty.

That really started me thinking.

I am sort of an easygoing guy, not pushy at all. I’ve never been pushy with dames. But by this time I was beginning to figure that if I was letting her sleep in my bed, with me on the old lumpy couch, and buying her expensive dinners and gin and cigarettes and clothes, especially underwear, that maybe I ought to have something going my way. You know what I mean? It occurs to a guy. Things like that, they occur to a guy.

So, later on, when we got home and she was in the bed and I was on the old, lumpy couch — well, I got up and went into the bedroom.

Louise turned over and said, “Hey, what you doing in here?”

“I thought... er... it seemed to me—”

“Hey, Ralph, you just knock off with those ideas.”

“But... b-but—”

“No buts. We don’t hardly know each other.”

So I went back to the couch and thought about that. It was sort of true. Only it did seem to me that we could speed up the learning.

I kept on thinking about it. In the morning I got up and made both breakfasts, then thought about it all the way to work. At lunch time I had to borrow a buck because I had given Louise all my dough.

When I got home she was watching TV. She had bought another bottle of gin and more cookies. After I cooked dinner and was washing up, I asked her about the gin and she bit at me again, so I didn’t say nothing more. The house was in a kind of mess, so I mopped and dusted a little and she complained that I was making her sneeze.

She said, “Why don’t you do that on Saturdays?”

I said, “You could do a little something...”

She looked at me and snapped, “Hey, we’re not married, Ralph.” Yeah. That was true, all right.

The next day a new bed was delivered — some surprise when I got home! My old one was gone. The new one had a pinkish coverlet on it and some of those cute little rag dolls sitting at the corners. There were frilly yellow and pink curtains on the two bedroom windows.

“That old bed was saggy in the middle, Ralph.”

“Oh?” I hadn’t noticed that. I said I hadn’t noticed it.

“You don’t notice anything, Ralph. I had my hair done, too.”

Then I saw it; and I also noticed the bills that were piling up. She had put them under my new pillow on the couch. They added up to a lot more than I make in a week; one bill was for two more bottles of gin.

One evening the apartment house manager stopped me in the hall and asked about something. I was edgy because I thought he’d want to raise the rent because Louise was there, but he didn’t say nothing, which surprised me. He is the snappy-dresser kind of sport who plays the ponies and is very tight with a buck if the buck happened to be his. It sure surprised me, him not adding a little something to the rent. He asked me when I was going to work late next. That was all.

I happened to ask Louise if she had met him and she said, “Why don’t you fix yourself up a little bit, Ralph? You don’t always have to look like a grape picker.”

I said, using her comeback, “Ha-ha, we’re not married.”

“Ha-ha, you bet. You sure are a smart aleck, Ralph.”

Then the guy in the grocery store mentioned her the next time I went in, and when I left he said, “Say hello to Louise, pal. Tell her Freddie said hello.”

I had been trading there a year and I didn’t even know his name was Freddie.

The telephone bill was forty-seven bucks because of long-distance calls to Chicago. When I yelled, Louise said she didn’t make them. She didn’t know anybody in Chicago. I called the operator and she gave me a rundown when I complained.

“They were made to a party named Kostivich, sir.”

I told her that was their trouble. They had made a mistake and got my phone calls mixed up with the manager’s. His name was Kostivich, not mine. She gave me an argument, then called the supervisor who said they didn’t make them kind of mistakes. I didn’t get anywhere with them.

Louise said, “Jeez, don’t make a big stink, Ralph.”

So all this stuff was making me think more and more. I’m not dumb, you know.

Then there was the neighborhood saloon near my apartment. I hardly ever went into it, but one night I did, just to sort of have a beer and think. You know.

The bartender said, “Hey, aren’t you Ralph What’s-his-name?”

I said, “Yeah, why?”

He leaned an elbow on the bar and looked at me with funny little fish eyes. “Oh, nothin’.” Then he moved away.

When I went out, he said, “Hey, Ralph, say hello to Louise, huh? From Butchy.”

I said, “Sure, Butchy.” He glowered at me.

That was one more thing that made a guy wonder.

On Friday night Louise met me outside the hardware plant when I got off work. She was wearing a new dress and shoes and looked pretty good. “You never take me nowhere, Ralph,” she said. “How about us going to Manny’s Hofbrau for dinner?”

I said, looking at her new stuff, “I can’t afford it.”

She sniffed. “Jeez, Ralph, you sure are a cheapskate.”

Well, I took her, and it cost me fourteen bucks this time. She went for the Wiener-something-or-other and two martinis. Man, did she sop up the gin!

I had just about done all my thinking by then. I don’t go off half-cocked or anything.

It was dark when we got out of the cafe and strolled back across the bridge. There wasn’t any traffic at all, so I threw her over the railing into the river and went on home.