Blue City

chapter 17

The rat in the maze was getting tired but as the experiment proceeded, the stimuli were becoming more powerful. I ran down a dark corridor, saw daylight under an ill-fitting door, and came out in an alley. Forty or fifty feet from the back door of the barbershop an old delivery truck stood shuddering, with its back doors swinging open. There was nobody in sight just then but there soon would be. I sprinted for the truck and crawled in. Behind the driver’s seat there was a pile of old burlap bags, and I covered myself with them and lay still, breathing the odor of rancid coffee beans.

In a few seconds I heard somebody come out and, with a straining grunt, lift something heavy onto the back of the truck. Then a door slammed open and several pairs of running feet came down the alley.

“Did you see a man in a dark-gray coat? He just came out of the back of the barbershop.”

“Not me, officer,” a boy’s voice said. “I been loading this here truck and I didn’t see nobody.”

“He must’ve gone the other way,” the barber said. “Out on Randall Street. I thought there was something funny about that character–”

“Who?” asked the delivery boy.

“He’s a murderer. He chopped up a woman into little pieces.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Let’s go!” the policeman said. “Maybe we can head him off.”

Their heavy footsteps went away like a receding doom. The boy ran into the building and left me the action of my heart to listen to. After a while he came out and climbed into the driver’s seat. The idling motor took hold and the truck began to move.

“Hey, wait a minute!” somebody yelled, and the driver slammed brakes on the truck and my breathing. My hand moved up my thigh, across my hip, and found the gun in my pocket.

“What you want, Pete?”

“You goin’ up past Gormlay’s?”

“Yeah. I can drop you there. Hop in.”

The door was flung open and the other seat creaked under weight. Two people in the front made it too bad for somebody. Probably me. But at least the truck was moving again, away from the danger zone.

“That was a pretty slinky little blonde I seen you with last night,” the driver said.

“Her?” The other boy’s voice was scornful. “I can take her or leave her alone. But she’s crazy about me, and that always helps. I give her a break every now and then.”

“Any time you don’t need her, you can drop her on my doorstep. I got a use for slinky little blondes.”

“I thought you was makin’ out with Rose?”

“Sure, I see her regular. But what I always say, variety, you know, the spice of life. I figure I’m a little young to settle down for keeps. I wanta look ’em over first. Like in business now.”

The truck bumped down a curb and turned left into a roaring stream of traffic. Minute by minute it was getting harder for me to lie still. Though I was probably getting enough air through the loosely woven burlap, I had the feeling that I wasn’t. I felt like a Turk in a sack on his last ride to the Bosphorus.

“What’s it got to do with business? Pleasure is what I call it.”

“Look at it this way,” the driver said. “I got something to sell, in a way. Does a guy that’s got something to sell let it go to the first bidder? No sir, not the way I do business! It’s the same with a dame. My plan is to look ’em over first and take the best I can get.”

“You better watch out you don’t knock Rose up, then.”

“Don’t worry about me. She knows her way around. And if she didn’t, I could always scrape up fifty bucks. Do it the scientific way, is what I always say.”

“Yeah, science is a great thing. It musta been tough on a girl before they had all this modern science.”

“I wonder what would make a guy cut a woman up like that,” the driver said.

“That guy the cops were after? Jeez, I dunno. Mr. Hirschman said he heard over the radio it was for revenge. She was his stepmother or sumpin’, and treated him terrible when he was a kid.”

“I betchit was sex. Take most of these murders, sex is at the bottom of it. Sex is what makes a man nuts. That’s the chief reason I go out with girls all the time.”

“Because you’re nuts?”

“Hell, no! Because I don’t wanna go nuts. I read a book, you gotta have a satisfactory sex life. That’s what it said in the book.”

“You can let me off at the red light. I don’t get it about sex making a guy nuts. It never made me feel any different one way or the other.”

“Yeah, but over a period of time,” the boy at the wheel said. “Over a period of time. So long, see you in church.”

“Not me you won’t!” The door opened and slammed, and the driver started to sing Don’t Be a Baby, Baby to himself and me.

The truck went into gear and turned left again. After a couple of minutes the sounds of traffic became intermittent. The truck turned and bumped up a curb, moved over an uneven pavement, and came to a stop in a quiet place. The driver got out, leaving the engine rattling, and opened the doors at the back. The rear springs squeaked and he grunted again as he lifted something heavy off the truck. His footsteps staggered away and a door slammed.

I threw off the sacks and slid off the back of the truck into another alley. The spectacles were still on my nose, blurring my vision. I tore them off and threw them into an empty carton at the end of a loading platform. Then I went out of the alley the way we had come in, and turned south along the street. It was a street of dirty little bars, four-dollar-permanent parlors, marked-down millinery shops, unappetizing delicatessens – the frayed hem of the business district. In the next block, among the two-bit hotels and store-front tabernacles, I felt even more at home with my sprouting beard and ruined clothes. Nearly everybody I met bore the stamp of poverty on faces strained thin or coarsened by the exigencies of marginal life, and nobody gave me a second glance.

Some kind of dead reckoning guided me east at the next corner and south again at the one after that. I went down a lane along a high board fence at the rear of a row of tenements, and came out behind the Harvey Apartments. She won’t be home, I told myself, to take the curse off disappointment. If she is, she won’t want you cluttering up her day. In any case, you’ve got no right to run to her with your troubles. She’s got enough of her own.

But the pride had been scared and beaten out of me. The open air and the bright sunlight frightened me the way a child is frightened of the dark. I felt as naked and desperate as a worm in the middle of a concrete road, nosing blindly for a place to hole up.

A plain-white card bearing the signature Carla Kaufman was in the number-three mailbox, and I found the corresponding apartment on the ground floor at the rear. I knocked softly on the door and waited. A middle-aged woman in a cotton wrapper opened the door across the hall and picked up a quart of milk.

“Carla’s never up this early in the morning,” she said. “She works late.”

“I know.” I kept my face to the door so that she couldn’t get a good view of me. “Thank you.” She closed her door.

I knocked again, and after an interval, slippered feet whispered inside the apartment and the door opened a crack. Her dark hair was tangled and her blue eyes puffed with sleep. She had on a blue quilted robe over blue pajamas. She looked at me uncertainly for a moment, as if she didn’t recognize me.

“Remember me?” I said. “The bad penny?”

She yawned, a wide, childish yawn and rubbed her fists into her eyes.

“May I come in?”

“I guess so.” She stepped back and I closed the door behind me. “What is this, anyway?”

I realized suddenly that she and I were almost complete strangers, that I was bringing nothing but bad trouble to girl I hardly knew, and the realization tied my tongue. “I shouldn’t have come here,” I muttered. Circumstances the night before had made it easy for me to talk to her, but now she had retreated into a private identity.

“It’s kind of early in the morning for visiting, isn’t it? Christ, I never get to bed before four.”

“I didn’t come to visit you. The police are after me.”

“I heard somebody got thrown out of the club last night. Was that you?”

“It was me, all right, but that isn’t what’s worrying me. Kerch framed me for a murder. He killed Mrs. Weather and hung it on me.”

“No!” She looked at me incredulously, and her morning pallor grew paler still.

“Don’t tell me things like that don’t happen. They do when Kerch is around.”

“Did you get to see Allister, like I told you?”

“Yeah, but he fell down on me. He’s got a better front and a high-class line of talk, but he’s as bad as the rest.”

“No, he’s not,” she said flatly. “He’s a good man.”

“He may be kind to his mother, I wouldn’t know. I came to you because you were the only one I could think of.”

She was frightened, but she did her best to hide it from me. “I’m glad you came to me. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, you know that? But I don’t know what to do.” She emitted a little snort that was halfway between a laugh and a sob.

“Just let me stay here for a while. I wouldn’t last long on the streets. There’s nobody else lives with you?”

“No. I told you I lived by myself. Take off your coat and hat, Johnny. Make yourself at home.”

“You’re a good girl. I suppose you know you’re taking a big risk?”

“Yeah, and so early in the morning, too,” she said in her ironic monotone. “I ought to murder you myself for waking me up so early in the morning.”

“Don’t use that word, ‘murder.’ Use any other word instead.”

“What’s the matter, you got the jitters, Johnny?” Her vivacity was a little forced but it was better than none.

“I won’t try to tell you about it,” I said as I struggled out of the tight coat I had stolen. “If I didn’t have the jitters, there’d be something the matter with my head.”

She hung my coat and hat in a closet which opened off the tiny hall, and led me into the living-room.

“Better pull down the blinds,” I said, but she was already on her way to the windows.

She switched on a floor lamp by an armchair. “Sit down. You look as if you’ve been up all night.”

“I have.”

“Go to sleep if you want to. I have only the one bed, but you can have it.”

“I couldn’t sleep. But thanks for being so damn nice.”

“For God’s sake, don’t get sentimental! You had any breakfast yet?”

“No, I’m not hungry.”

“Don’t kid yourself. Just give me three minutes to slip into some clothes, and I’ll make you breakfast.”

She went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. I sat and thought of nothing, but a little spring of good feeling had begun to bubble up inside me. She was a good girl with a nice solid core. I felt like an alley cat that has been taken in out of the cold and given warm milk, except that an alley cat is never tempted to shed tears of gratitude. She was right. I was getting sentimental. And as sometimes happens for no good reason when you’re beaten down and exhausted, a node of heat had formed in my loins and was branching through my body. I caught myself waiting second by second for the bedroom door to open again. “What’s the matter, Weather,” I asked myself, “you got no shame?”

She came out looking brisk, with her hair pinned up and an apron over her dress. Her only concession to my sex was a trace of lipstick on her mouth. But the stiff cotton front of the high-collared dress curved breathtakingly over her bosom and fell away into a tight-belted waist I could have put my hands around.

“I like you in that dress,” I said lamely.

“No kidding?” She looked at me and smiled. “You’re not talking as if you had the jitters now.”

“You cured ’em.” I stood up and moved toward her.

She moved away with a dancer’s bodily tact. “What you need is food, my boy. You better stay out of the kitchen. Somebody might see you from the back porch.”

She let the door swing to and left me alone again. I heard the rattle of a pan on the stove, grease sizzling, eggs being broken.

“You want ’em sunny side up?” she called.

“Easy over,” I called back.

While water ran into a coffee percolator and the eggs sputtered in hot grease, I looked around the room. There wasn’t much to look at: a chesterfield and matching armchair, a coffee table, a portable record player on a stand with a pile of records beside it, a magazine rack containing a Mademoiselle, a couple of copies of Life, and a cheap reprint of a historical romance; but as it was, the room was crowded. There were no pictures on the wall, and no photograph anywhere. Either she hadn’t lived there long, or she hadn’t intended to stay. Even a migratory bird left more permanent traces than she had in her living-room.

She came through the swinging door with a wooden tray in one hand, a pot of coffee in the other. She set down the tray on the coffee table beside me, and I saw that it contained a plate of four fried eggs and a pile of toast.

“This looks wonderful,” I said. “Aren’t you going to eat, too?”

“Not this early. I’ll have some coffee, though. You want your coffee black?”

“Very black.”

I stabbed an egg and discovered that I was hungry after all.

She half-sat on the arm of the other chair with one slender knee swinging loose, and watched me over the rim of her coffee cup.

“You want some more?” she said after a while. “I only made four on account of you not being hungry.”

“I was wrong.” I finished the toast with my coffee. “But I’m not hungry any more. I almost feel good, in fact.”

“I feel pretty good, too. God knows why.”

“Don’t you ever get lonely?” I don’t know why I said it. Perhaps it was the homelessness of the room, or her attitude on the chair arm, perched like a bird waiting for a signal to take flight.

“I don’t think so,” she said after a pause. “I never thought about it much. Maybe I’m a kind of hermit. I get awfully tired of all the people at the club, having to talk to them, and everything.”

“Anybody would, but I didn’t exactly mean that. I mean when you come home, and probably make your own supper, and eat by yourself.”

“I often eat with Sonia down the hall. And sometimes with Francie Sontag. She’s right upstairs. I go out a lot to eat, too. It’s no fun cooking for yourself. You know, I got a hell of a bang out of making breakfast for you. I’d hate to think I was the homemaker type.” She let herself fall back into the chair in a movement that was deliberately hoydenish, but with such unconscious grace that it looked right.

“Maybe you are, though.”

She kicked her legs restlessly over the arm, then succumbed to the seriousness of her thoughts: “It’s not much fun doing anything for yourself. I spend about an hour a day fixing my nails, and another hour on my hair, but I just do it to put in time. There’s no real kick in it. I used to hate the dirty work around Grandfather’s flat, but there was some kind of kick in it that I don’t get when I clean up this dump. Sometimes I sit on my tail for three or four hours without lifting a finger. Maybe I’m just plain lazy.”

“Maybe you are. Or maybe you’re lonely.”

“You’re a serious-minded son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“Not particularly. That’s just the way you affect me. I don’t think you live the way you should.”

“Now, Johnny.” She spoke lightly but with an undertone of resentment. “You’re not going to start harping on that again?”

“I mean you shouldn’t live by yourself like this. You said you like doing things for other people. Why don’t you give yourself a chance to?”

“That’s true. I’d rather do up another girl’s hair than do my own.” She gave me a quizzical look that was a half smile. “You don’t mean I should start living with somebody? I get plenty of that kind of offers.”

“Maybe I don’t know what I mean.”

“Half the women in these flats have got men supporting them. But it’s no damn good, not for the women anyway. Practically every one of them turns into a lush. All except Francie and a couple of others. They go soft, and get fussy and worried, like a hen without any chicks. Then they start drinking in the afternoon, and pretty soon they’re drinking in the forenoon. Like Mrs. Williams across the hall. You know what she has for breakfast every morning? Three slugs of rye. Every two or three months her man doesn’t show up for a week or so, and she drinks so hard she gets the d. t.’s. They make me mad, the way they throw themselves away, but I can’t tell them anything.”

“You’re not even throwing yourself away,” I said. “You’re sitting and waiting and letting your best years go by. Waiting for nothing.”

She drew in her legs and sat up with them under her. “I know it, but you don’t have to say it. Half the time I’m so blue I can’t even listen to music on the record player. It doesn’t do any good to tell me things like that. It only makes things worse.”

“Why the hell don’t you snap out of it?”

Her mouth twisted into an ugly shape. “Why the hell don’t you mind your own business?”

My own temper flared up to meet hers, but subsided almost immediately. Already a shadow of regret had softened her face, and her teeth plucked at her lower lip.

“I didn’t tell you that Joe Sault’s dead, did I?”

“You know you didn’t. Why are you telling me now?” Her eyes and voice were as calm as could be, but I got the impression that perhaps she was watching herself, guarding against an emotion she didn’t want to admit.

“I’m not sure. It could be the thing you needed to start you off on a fresh track. You know, a new page in the book.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me at all.” The flatness of her tone illustrated her meaning. “I haven’t had anything to do with him for nearly two years. I told you last night how I felt about him.”

“Still, I think you’re better off with him dead.”

“Did you kill him?” In her voice there was the suppressed excitement of a woman who thinks she has guessed the answer to a question, and finds it somehow flattering to herself.

“No,” I said emphatically. “Kerch beat him to death.”

“Oh.” Conflicting emotions made a delicate shadow play in her eyes.

“I never thought I’d feel sorry for Joey, but I did.”

“I don’t,” she said, too readily. “Does Francie know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s going to jolt her. She was always fond of him. God knows why. He was her youngest brother, and she practically brought him up.” She was silent for a while, her eyes unfocused in thought. “That wasn’t true, what I said about not being sorry for him. I am sorry. It’s funny. I thought I hated him so much.” She added irrelevantly: “You don’t like me a little bit, do you?”

“I like you. I think we could understand each other. I’ve felt kind of lonely and unsettled, the same way you do, ever since my family broke up. I could never get close to my mother. She was all right and she did what she could, but I couldn’t talk to her. It really didn’t bother me much when she died.”

“It broke me up when my mother died,” she said. “I guess I never got over it. But she was different. I could talk to her about anything. The things that Grandfather said never seemed to make any real sense to me. He’s supposed to be pretty clever, but he gets all tangled up in words. He’s got his head in the clouds, he reminds me of Allister. Since my mother died I haven’t really had anybody I could talk to – or that I wanted to talk to.”

“Do you know Allister pretty well?”

“I told you I knew him.” She seemed unwilling to tell me any more. “How old were you when your mother died?”

“I was seventeen, but I’d been running around pretty much on my own for a long time before that. She left me enough money to go to college for a couple of years, but that didn’t mean much to me. I went to three different colleges, and I never felt I belonged to anything, then or after. My last couple of years in the army were pretty good, though. I got to be a sergeant, and our platoon made a sharp team. But most of them got knocked off at Malmédy, in the Battle of the Bulge. I guess you’ve heard about that.”

“Naturally. You must think I’m a complete stupe.”

“I don’t think you’re half as stupid as you try to pretend to be. But you need somebody to snap you out of it.”

“Aren’t you wonderful?” she said with a smile. “You’re sitting here with the cops looking for you, tired out and beaten up, and all you think about is how I should run my life. Aren’t you worried about yourself?”

“Not particularly. I’m too far gone to worry about.”

“Oh no. You’re not.” Her bare legs uncoiled from under her and brought her across to me in two running steps. “We’ve got to do something. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

She kissed my cheek in a warm, flurried way. My arms went around her legs as she stood in front of me, and my fingers pressed the cool skin behind her knees.

“Don’t,” she said, and pushed her hands downward against my shoulders.

I didn’t believe she meant it. My embrace moved up her thighs.

“Don’t,” she said. “Please.”

The strain in her voice made me look up at her face. The angry embarrassment I saw there seemed more than half genuine. I let go of her, and she stepped back precipitately into the middle of the room.

“You mustn’t,” she said with relief. “I couldn’t let you make love to me in the morning. We’ve got to think of what to do.”

“I haven’t any ideas. Have you?”

“You’re the one who should snap out of it. Wait a minute–”

“What’s the matter?”

“Hush! There’s somebody coming up the back steps.”