Blue City

chapter 16

Floraine Weather lived, when she was alive, only a few blocks from Sanford’s house. I drove there with the idea that I’d probably find her at home. Parking her car around the corner, I went on foot to her front door. A maid who was sweeping the steps of the house next door, the one on the corner, glanced at me as I climbed the porch, so I went through the motions of ringing the bell. After waiting a minute I tried the door, found it open, and went in.

The curtains in the front room were still drawn, but enough light came through them to show what was in the room. She was lying by the chesterfield on which she had tried, the night before, to persuade Joey Sault to let greatness be thrust upon him. Her body had been arranged in a grotesque and awkward position, half-leaning against the chesterfield with her legs sprawled wide and her chin on her shoulder. In the subdued light of the quiet, beautiful room, it was as if a corpse laid out in a funeral parlor had, in a last bitter spasm of life, viciously parodied the final peace of the dead.

I moved into the center of the room and looked down at her. The knife that I had taken from Sault lay open and blood-smeared on the rug beside her twisted leg. Above the grimy mask of congealed blood which disguised her throat and the lower part of her face, her open eyes regarded me steadfastly. I didn’t want to do it, but I kneeled beside her and looked at her hands. Between the fingers of one I found the hair that Kerch had plucked from my head, and I took it back. The button from my coat had been placed under her body, and I had to move her before I found it. She was stiffer and colder than she had been, all but returned to the resistant mindlessness of inanimate objects. Kerch was giving me lessons in the natural history of death.

I had picked up the knife and was closing it when the abrupt hiss of intaken breath behind me turned my own body momentarily rigid. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a middle-aged woman standing in the doorway with her legs apart. The look of horror on her plain face was so intense that it outlawed me to myself, as if she had really caught me in a shameful act. The knife sprang open in my hand as I turned and stood up. Then, the breath that she had taken and held came out in a high scream. I walked towards her and saw in detail the unplucked eyebrows raised on her lined forehead, the lines that ran down from the fleshy wings of her nose, deepened and curved by her smile of terror, the tense wrinkle across her hairy upper lip, the false upper teeth that slid down into the space between her parted lips and made even her fear ridiculous. The insane logic of the situation was so pressing that I felt almost compelled to kill her as she expected me to. Her screaming was intolerable. Nothing I could say would silence her. The knife was in my hand.

But I refused the role of murderer for which I had been cast. As I approached the doorway she cowered away from me and fell backwards on the floor. I closed the knife and went out the front door, leaving her with her legs spraddled in front of her, her cotton print dress dragged up past her blue-veined thighs, her black mercerized stockings twisted around her thick ankles.

The maid on the next veranda was watching the house when I came out. I controlled the panic with which Mrs. Weather’s servant had infected me and walked briskly but casually down the steps and sidewalk to the street, past the staring girl with the immobilized broom. A door across the street burst open suddenly, but I didn’t turn my head to look. I turned the corner and made for the Packard. Before I reached it a woman shouted: “Stop him! Murder!” I jumped into the car and turned on the ignition. Then I realized that Floraine Weather’s car was no use to me if I wanted to get away.

As I got out, a big man in trousers and bathrobe came round the corner and ran heavily toward me. He had a white-lathered neck and a safety razor in his hand. I took Garland’s gun out of my pocket and showed it to him. He stopped in his tracks and stood panting, his little razor clenched in his hand like a weapon. The maid with the broom appeared at the corner and called to him:

“Don’t go near him, Mr. Terhune. He’ll kill you.”

“Throw down that gun,” Mr. Terhune commanded me. His voice was husky and uneven.

Several other women joined the maid at the corner, howling and squealing when they saw me. “Come back, Terry,” one of them cried. “Can’t you see he’s got a gun?”

For his age and weight, Mr. Terhune was a brave man. He walked toward me uncertainly but without halting, crouched forward slightly in his flapping bathrobe, like an old wrestler coming down the aisle to meet the unbeaten masked marvel.

I couldn’t shoot him, I couldn’t talk to him, I couldn’t stop him. I turned and ran. Mr. Terhune ran after me, bellowing: “Stop! Murderer!”

By the time I reached the next corner he was half a block behind me, but there must have been a dozen people, men and women, strung out along the street in chase. More were streaming from the houses to join them. They made a confused, rapid chattering, like a pack of monkeys that has been frightened by a snake.

As soon as I was out of sight around the corner, I slowed to a quick walk and looked up and down the street. For the moment there was nobody to be seen. I went up the first driveway, beside a tall, red brick house built close to the street. Before I reached the closed garage at the end of the driveway, I heard shouts and footsteps at the corner. I ducked around the rear corner of the house and stood against the wall, wondering where to go from there. The running feet I had heard went by and on up the street, but more kept coming.

I detached myself from the wall and ran across the deep back yard, past a covered sandbox and a child’s swing, through a row of leafless bushes that scratched at my clothes, over the high wooden fence. I crouched against the fence for a minute, looking ahead and listening behind me. The noise seemed to be fading away – at any rate coming no closer than the street. Ahead of me and to my right, a man came out the back of the house next door, buttoning his topcoat. He went into his garage and a minute later backed his car out. A little girl in a bib ran to the door and waved goodby to him. A woman with curlers in her hair came to the door behind the little girl and told her to get away from the open door, she’d catch cold. I watched these people with all the interest of a member of the family. They didn’t see me.

When the door slammed finally shut, I stood up and walked across the muddy lawn towards the back porch of the house I had landed behind. There were sounds of movement in the back kitchen, and a woman’s voice rose in a yell which froze me for a moment. What she said was: “Alec! Are you up yet? You don’t want to be late for school.”

There was a bicycle leaning against the back wall of the house beside the driveway. I climbed on, and coasted down the gentle slope to the street. After what seemed a long chase, I was back on Fenton Boulevard, half a block from Floraine Weather’s front door. I tried to comfort myself with the reflection that a bicycle is a kind of disguise, which makes an old man look older and a young man look younger, but going back to that street was like diving into ice-cold water. Out of the tail of my eyes as I turned downtown, I saw women and children scattered like confetti on the sidewalks and porches of the next block. I gripped the rubber ends of the handle bars and pedaled hard away from them. A steady blast of cold air poured into my face and made my eyes water, and my feet sprinted round on the pedals. God knows where I was going, but I was going, and I felt almost good about it.

At the second corner I passed, my inflated mood was smashed like a paper bag. Mr. Terhune was slogging up the side street towards me, his bare, sweating belly bouncing over his trousers in front of him and his bathrobe flying out behind. I put down my head and kept going, but he saw me, brandished his safety razor like a talisman, and let out a breathless yell. The motley pack behind him took up the cry of murder. I looked back from the next corner and saw him waving his arms in the middle of the road. A car slowed down and he jumped on the running board. When I looked again he was crouched on the side of the accelerating car, pointing ahead like a manhunter in an old movie serial – a middle-aged householder tapped by destiny and rising to the occasion with everything he had. I began to dislike him intensely, and even to regret I hadn’t shot him in the foot. But all I could do now was pedal for my life, which I did.

Ahead of me and somewhere out of sight a desultory whining formed itself into a steady tone that mounted gradually to a high shriek, so loud that it dominated the morning. As if to disclaim its threat, the siren died away and lost itself. But then it recovered its voice, nearer and louder. When I was passing the Presbyterian Church a police car turned into the street two blocks ahead of me and came towards me howling. I turned up the driveway at the side of the church, applied the brakes and found that there weren’t any, skidded on the gravelly sidewalk, and coasted shakily around the back of the church. The back door was locked. Somebody fired a shot on the other side of the building. I picked up the bicycle and threw it through the stained-glass window as a diversion, then ran around the corner of the church.

The next building was the Public Library, and memory or instinct led me around the back of it to the other side. There was a rusty old fire escape here, with an iron ladder nine or ten feet from the ground. I jumped for the bottom rung, went up hand over hand till I got a foothold, and climbed to the platform at the second story. The window was partly open, and the room inside looked deserted. From the direction of the church I heard a rhythmic pounding and then a smash, as if they had forced the back door. I hoisted my legs over the sill and locked the window behind me. I stood against the wall for a minute or two, breathing the peaceful smell of furniture oil and old books, and listening to my heart slow down.

Three of the four walls of the big square room were lined with bookshelves. Against the fourth there was a semicircular counter with a swinging door at the side. A sign propped on the counter said: “Children’s Department: Circulating Desk: Hours from 3 to 5:30 P.M.” I breathed easier. It looked as if nobody would be here in the morning. There was a bulletin board beside the open door, and I scanned the notices nervously. The largest was a hand-painted invitation to: “Come and Hear Miss Flicka Runymede’s weekly Series of Readings from Andersen and Grimm”; Thursday’s tales were to be “The Little Match Girl” and “The Ugly Duckling.”

A pair of dragging feet began to ascend the creaky stairs on the other side of the door. I ran across the room on my toes, vaulted the circulation desk, and sat down behind in between piles of books. The footsteps dragged across the landing and the door squeaked open. “That’s goshdarned funny,” an old man’s voice said to itself: “I was goshdarned sure I opened that window this morning.” I began to regret the impulse that had made me close it.

The feet crossed the floor so slowly, as if time itself had creeping paralysis, that I wanted to get behind him and push.

“I’ll be goldarn goshdarned,” the old man sputtered to himself. “I didn’t even unlock the goldamned thing.” I heard him fling the window wide open. “This time, stay open, see? I got more to do than going around opening windows the whole Jehosophat day.”

Somebody shouted outside: “Hey, there! Did you see anybody running past here?”

“Nope,” the old man said. “I ain’t seen nobody nohow. Who you looking for?”

“An escaped murderer. An insane killer that killed a woman up the street.”

“A murderer?” the old man quavered at the window.

“You think I’m kidding, grandpa? Did you see him or hear anything?”

“I didn’t hear nobody or nothing.”

“Well, if you do, just sing out. We’ll be around here searching.”

“Certainly will, officer. Yes, sir. But I hope to Moses he don’t come around here.”

The old man’s feet recrossed the room in a syncopated shuffle and creaked back down the steps. When I could no longer hear him on the stairs, I climbed out from behind the counter and followed him out the door. Because I didn’t dare go back to the windows, I had to find another way out. By leaning on the banister and shifting my weight gradually from step to step, I kept the stairs from creaking. There was a landing halfway down, from which I could see that the stairs led into the main entrance hall of the library. I was weighing the chances of making a run for it when I saw the back of a blue policeman’s uniform at the front door.

Opening off the landing was a door with a groundglass window which bore the lettering: “Storage Department.” I tried the knob, found that it gave, and went through into a dark corridor. At the end of the corridor was a second door that opened into a long, low room. Shelves of yellowing newspapers and books with worn bindings rose from floor to ceiling between narrow aisles. I had a wild impulse to browse among the old newspapers, perhaps to find an account of my father’s murder, or his wedding, or the last party he threw. It was the impulse of a man who had no time to lose and nothing to gain by saving it.

At the far end of the room, between green-blinded windows, there was a shelf labeled: “These Books Are Not To Be Circulated.” Some of the titles I noticed were Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Sentimental Education, To Have and Have Not, The Wild Palms. It was somehow comforting to know that the good people of the town that supported Kerch were protected against the lubricity of Rabelais, the immorality of Flaubert, the viciousness of Hemingway, and the degradation of Faulkner.

There was a circular iron staircase in the corner to my right, leading down into darkness. I descended by it to the next floor, where I found myself among dim bookshelves, probably the main stacks of the library. The iron stairs led down further, and I followed them for two more flights and felt a cement floor under my feet. The basement windows were small and placed high in the concrete wall, but I started towards them to see if they opened. The longer I stayed where I was, the more thoroughly I’d be encircled and the more certainly caught in the end.

Before I reached the first of the row of windows, the polished black leather legs of a motorcycle cop strode across it. The sight of them was like a blow in the face, which sent me backwards across the room to the opposite wall. I backed into a door, found the latch, and went through it into the next room. This was a toilet and washroom, lit by a naked bulb which hung on a cord from the ceiling above a cracked mirror and sink.

So many faces had passed, so many things had happened before my eyes in the last twelve hours that I had forgotten I had a face myself. When I looked at it in the clouded mirror, I would have been willing to settle for none. I was pale under the streaks of dirt, and the black beard coming out of my cheeks and chin made me look paler. There was a dark abrasion on the left angle of my jaw. Worst of all were my eyes, a blue sludge color framed in pink, as if I had spent the night carousing and having a hell of a time. I didn’t like my face. It didn’t have any frank, boyish charm at all. With the dark-red spatter on my shirt, I looked like a refugee from a murder rap. A little crazy, too, in a sly way.

I washed my face in cold water and combed the front part of my hair with a pocket comb. The back of my head was a stiff and tangled mass which hurt to the touch. Then I cautiously opened the door and looked through into the next room.

It was a windowless cell with several open lockers along one wall, and along the other a row of hooks from which hung two or three hats and topcoats. I tried each of the coats and found a worn Oxford gray that would go over my shoulders without tearing. The greasy old fedora that went with it was too big for me, but I needed a hat. My own had been lost somewhere, I didn’t know when. So I jammed it on my head with the brim resting on my ears. To complete the disguise, I found a dusty pair of rimless spectacles on the top shelf of one of the open lockers, and a big leather book in another. The spectacles blurred my vision, even after I had wiped them, but that was all to the good. Maybe they’d make my eyes look different.

I went back through the washroom and peered over the spectacles into the mirror. I recognized myself all right, but perhaps I looked a little like an impecunious scholar, and even a trifle Jewish. I hoped that native fascism hadn’t progressed in the city to the point where the police would think I was a suspicious character because I looked Jewish.

I retraced my steps across the basement, up the spiral staircase, through the storage department, and out onto the landing above the entrance hall. The policeman was still standing with his back to the door. I felt shaky and conspicuous, like an inexperienced diver about to go off the high board for the first time. But I hunched my shoulders in what I hoped would look like a scholar’s stoop, and went down the stairs to the door.

I pulled open the heavy glass door and mumbled: “Excuse me, officer,” to the policeman’s broad back.

“Pardon me.” He stepped aside out of my way.

I walked down the stone steps in front of him, using all my self-control to keep from breaking into a run. There was a police car parked at the curb, which contained a man in plain clothes listening to his short-wave radio. There were two more policemen and a group of civilians on the corner in front of the church. I crossed the street in front of the parked car and walked away in the opposite direction from the church. When I reached the corner I refrained from looking back. I turned downtown and started walking faster. Main Street would be a tough gauntlet to run, but the only person I could go to for help lived in the Harvey Apartments, on the other side of the business district. And even she was an off-chance.

I passed a number of people and none of them paid any attention to me. The life of the city was going on as if Floraine Weather had never died, or never lived. There was a bus parked on the next corner, headed in the direction I wanted to go, and I joined the line of passengers and got on.

“How much?” I said to the driver.

“Five cents in the downtown zone. Say, it sure looks as if you’re gonna read a book.”

“Yeah.”

I found an unoccupied seat in the back and opened the book in my lap. It was St. Augustine’s City of God, in Latin. At the next stop, which was Main Street, most of the passengers got off and left me feeling kind of naked. I stayed where I was, pretending to be engrossed in Latin I couldn’t read.

“Hey, bud,” the driver said. “You with the book. It cost you another fare if you want to stay on.”

“Where do you go from here?”

“To Farmers’ Square and up Fenton Boulevard. That where you want to go?”

I got off in a hurry, hugging my book. The policeman on the corner glanced at me curiously, looked away for a moment at the traffic, and looked back at me with renewed interest. I went in at the first open door I came to. It happened to be a barbershop.

The barber standing beside an empty chair at the back snapped a towel like a lion tamer who has seen a lion. “Shave or haircut, sir?”

My nerves recoiled at the thought of spending half an hour in a barber’s chair, with a policeman just outside. “I just came in to get some hair tonic. I’ve been troubled by dandruff.”

“Would you just mind taking your hat off, let me look at your scalp?”

“Yes, I would. I just want you to sell me a bottle of hair tonic.”

“Very well, sir. O.K. What kind would you wish?”

“That kind.” I pointed at a bottle with a purple label.

“Yes, sir. Virility Violet. Very effective for dandruff, Virility Violet. That will be one dollar, and three cents tax.”

I set my book down on a table and took out my wallet to pay him. As I did so, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the policeman watching me through the window.

“Is there a back way out of here?”

“Yes, sir. Right through there. You sick or something?”

“Yes,” I said, and left him.

“Hey, you forgot your tonic! You forgot your book–”

The door closing behind me cut off his voice, but I could still hear the police whistle in the street.