Deadline at Dawn

Chapter 7

“Where to, lady?” He swung the door open.

She closed the door again, remained outside. “I wonder if you can help me. Have you been on this corner all night?”

“From twelve, off and on. I come on at twelve every night. I haven’t been here steady, but this is my reg’lar stand. I start out from here and come back to it again each time.”

“Did you have a woman fare, by herself, from this corner anytime after twelve tonight?”

“Yeah, I did have one. A couple hours ago.” Then he asked, “What are ya trying, to find someone?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, if you tell me what she looked like, maybe I can help you.”

“I can’t tell you what she looked like.”

He shrugged, hitched the edges of his hands up off the wheel-rim, then back again. “Then how am I gonna help you, lady?” he demanded not unreasonably. He waited a moment. “Well, is it something serious? Why don’t you try the cops?”

“No, it’s nothing serious. Just a personal matter.” She thought a moment. “Look, when they pay you off, do you notice it pretty closely?”

He smiled cheerlessly. “When they pay me off, that’s all I do notice, mostly. Just how much, and just how much over.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean— You remember where you took her.”

“I remember where I took her.”

“And you remember what she paid you.”

“I remember what she paid me.”

“But when she did pay you, do you remember— Look, I’m her now, a minute. Just watch me like you did her. Did she pay you like this—?” She handed him an imaginary sum through the cab-opening with her right hand. “Or did she pay you like this?” She handed him an imaginary sum with her left hand.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Try it again.”

She tried it again.

He shook his head. “All I saw was her hand. With the money on it. I picked up the money off it, and that left just her hand. I handed her back what was coming to her. And then she handed me back what was coming to me out of that. And that left just her hand again.”

“You don’t remember which side her thumb was on?”

“Nah.” He bucked his head disgustedly. “I didn’t look for it. What did I care which side her thumb was on? I did notice she had a ring on her hand, if that’s any good to you.”

“No, that isn’t any good. What kind of a ring was it?”

“Just an ordinary everyday wedding-band, no different from any of the rest of them. One’s like the other.”

She closed in a little against the cab. “It was on the hand she gave you the money with?”

“Sure, how else would I know she had it on?”

“Then she did pay you with the left hand.”

He acted immensely surprised. “Is that what you’ve been trying to find out? I didn’t get what you meant.”

She opened the door and got in. “Take me where you took her.”

He took her down Madison almost forever it seemed, then when he’d hit Madison Square and there was no more Madison after that, he turned west and took her along Twenty-third as far over as Seventh. Then he turned south again and took her down that until they were coming close to Sheridan Square. Suddenly he stopped short, at one of the minor streets just above Fourteenth. She thought it was for a light, it was so unexpected, but there was a green on when she looked ahead. He turned around.

“This is it.”

“This? But your fender’s out past the corner. Which side was it on, which building—? She didn’t give you any number?”

“She didn’t give me any number. She stopped me just like this, just like I am now. She tapped and said, ‘Let me out here.’ Look, I’m doing it over for you just exact. She climbed down right where you’re standing now yourself, right on the curve of the curb, right over that grate. I’m practically over my same oil-drippings from before. I can’t do it any better than that for you.”

“But which way did she—?”

“I didn’t look at her any more after that. As soon as her money left her and landed in my hand, I looked at that instead. Then I looked ahead of me down the street to make sure it was clear. Then I went.”

“But wait — don’t leave me stranded here like this! Don’t go!”

But he already had. His machine gave her a Bronx cheer out of its exhaust pipe, and she was standing there alone, with four corners around her.

She looked them over. Going clockwise, they went like this:

On the first corner, before which she stood now, was a cigar-store. It was locked and dark. On the second was a barbershop; closed up also. On the third was a filling station, blunting the corner with a cement runway, a dim light or two peering fitfully over it. On the fourth was a laundry; that was dark too.

To stop the cab where she had, shaving the corner, she must have gone into one of those four places. The barbershop was out entirely, the filling station scarcely more likely. It was the cigar-store that was the likeliest. It was the nearest to where she’d alighted, and it was plausible that she’d felt the need of a cigarette after what she’d been through. But Bricky had no choice in the matter in any case; since the filling station was the only one available, she went over to that.

She said to the attendant: “Have you been on duty here all night?”

“Yeah, I’m on the night-shift.”

“Did you happen to notice a girl get out of a taxi by herself, over there on that other corner, see where I’m pointing, within the last hour or so?”

He looked over. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I did. I seen her go into the cigar store.”

“You didn’t see her come out again?”

“No. I didn’t keep watching that long.”

She turned away. She’d traced her an inch further, that was all. Just from the curb to the cigar-store entrance.

She went back over there and stood where she had before and looked around. There was a narrow gash of light seaming the sidewalk about five or six doors back along the same block on whose outer extremity she stood perched. Conspicuous because it was rare at this hour.

At least it was something that was open. She started toward it. She might have come this way. She started to be hopeful again. It only lasted for a few paces.

The casing through which the light was escaping widened slowly as perspective brought it up toward her. “Delicatessen” slowly spread out on its surface as the window-space expanded.

Food after a murder? It was only a degree less likely as a stopping-place than that barbershop back there. She’d come up abreast of it now. She went in anyway simply because there was no other resource left to her. She knew she was only wasting her energy.

“I’m looking for someone. Have you seen a girl, a blonde, in here the last hour or so? She was by herself.”

“With deposit-bottles?”

“No.” You don’t bring back deposit-bottles from a murder.

“I should know.” He let his hand fall heavily back on the counter.

His assistant chimed in: “I think I know who she means. That fussy one. You know, the one I had to say to her, ‘Lady, don’t scratch lines on the bread with your fingernail to show me how thick you want it sliced, if you ain’t going to buy the whole loaf. Maybe somebody else after you wants to buy it too.’ For ten cents worth of salami and pumpernickel, she takes up the whole loaf like this.” He picked up a loaf to demonstrate, stroked his nail down the soft underside of it, powdered white. “It’s got to be just so.”

“You’re doing it yourself,” his employer pointed out.

“Well all right, but I work here.”

The proprietor remembered now, if vaguely. “Oh her, you mean. Yeah, that’s right.”

Bricky was leaning avidly across the counter at them. “You couldn’t tell me her name, could you?”

“That I don’t know. She comes in here all the time. She lives next door there somewhere.” He negligently speared a thumb toward the wall behind him. Toward a row of catsup-bottles on a shelf, to be more exact.

“Oh,” she said flurriedly. “Oh.” She started to back away. “I’ll look for her, then. I didn’t know — I’ll go there right now and look for her.”

“Just next door,” he repeated.

She went out faster than she’d come in. It had paid off. She’d gained a yard on her this time.

She looped around and plunged into the flat-entrance immediately adjoining.

Six letterboxes in a row, on her left. Six more, on her right. Which was the one? Even if this was the “next door” of the delicatessen-keeper — and he’d carelessly thumbed down this way, instead of up the other — which of the doors within this all-embracing “next door” was it? How was she to know? She didn’t know the name. She didn’t know the face. The taxi-man was gone now. The trail had ended imbedded head-on in a slab of salami between two chunks of pumpernickel. That was the mocking windfall at the end of the treasure-hunt.

Miller, Carroll, Herzog, Ryan, vacant, Battipaglia. She bent low, eyes eight inches from the wall, scanning them. Some were in crooked, had to be read on the bias. One wasn’t in all the way, the “ia” of Battipaglia projected on the outside of the slot-frame. She was blonde, that was the name least likely to be hers of the lot. Still it was not an out-and-out impossibility; by marriage, by the peroxide-bottle—

She turned to the other side, ran her eyes along there at astigmatism-distance. Newmark, Simms, Lopez, Kirsch, Barlow, Stern.

It ought to be one. It couldn’t be all. It mightn’t be any. One chance out of eleven to be right. Ten chances to be wrong. Eleven, considering that it might not even be this building at all. “Next door” was elastic, could mean two houses down, three, any number as far as the first intervening crossing.

Ring one, any one at all; suppose they did scowl or snarl at her, what was that? She might be able to find out from them. No, she didn’t want to do that; she might be giving herself away. The floors, the walls, might have ears. The only way to strike and hope to succeed was suddenly, without giving any warning.

She went over to the inner door, to see if she could get in beyond where she was, even though the eventual flat remain anonymous. The knob was brass and it was kept well-polished. This seemed to be a conscientiously cared-for building, even though in the lower-rental brackets. She just stopped her hand in time, from pressing on it and turning it.

It was such a small thing, such a faint thing, such a nothing really. The contact of her hand, no matter how light, would have surely obliterated it. It was a miniature smudge upon the glossy, satin-surfaced brass, but in white. A sliver, a paring of a fingerprint, the ghost of a crescent scallop. As if someone whose fingertips had lately touched chalk had turned this knob before her.

“My pumpernickel-customer.” The delicatessen-man’s voice. “The machine don’t cut it thick enough to suit her. She takes her finger like this and shows me how wide she wants it cut.” Pumpernickel, a bread dusted with stubbornly-adhesive flour.

“She came in this door,” she said to herself. “She’s somewhere in this house.” The eleven chances to be wrong had shrunk to ten.

Go on in, you fool, go on up, go from door to door; you know now. She shook her head, stayed where she was. Strike suddenly, strike unexpectedly, otherwise you might lose everything.

A tiny piece of paper on the floor. In this entryway that was otherwise so meticulously clean, so it must have fallen only recently. A little fingernail-length tatter, that was all it was actually. It lay under the six letterboxes on the right-hand side as you came in, but under the whole row of them in general, not under any one in particular. For it was too far below, and out a little too far, to be attributed to any one of them individually.

She picked it up and looked at it carefully. It was so small, her two fingers almost hid it even as they held it. It was too much to expect it to have writing on it, there wouldn’t have been room for any, even had coincidence been willing to vouchsafe her that freak of good fortune; and there wasn’t. It was just a little nick of white.

But everything can tell you something. Her fingernail pried at it, and it came open, in flap-shape. It had been doubled in thickness. There was a neat, machine-made seam bisecting it now.

In other words, it was from a letter. It was a minute sliver torn from the top of an envelope, where the flap folds down, in hasty finger-opening. All the rest of the way across, the envelope had simply erupted into unsightly tatters. This one microscopic section, however, had been amputated by the violence of the process, had fallen off entirely.

What good was it to her even then? To be opened in here, the letter had come out of one of those boxes. One of the six on the right-hand side. Well — and? Well, to come out of one of those boxes, the box first had had to be opened. They opened downward, like little brass gangplanks. In opening them, the letterbox-key alone would be touched by the fingers. But in closing them up again, wouldn’t the natural, the quicker, the more dexterous thing to do be to use the tips of the fingers, to press them back flat again?

On the knob of the door was a tiny white sworl.

She peered close this time, even closer than the eight-inch gauge she’d used before. She looked all up and down the glass inset in each one, and the brass trim around it, not just at the name on the card beneath the pushbutton. She looked so close her breath steamed each one, and then it cleared again as she passed on to the next. Newmark, Simms, Lopez, Ki— She stopped short, went back a step, in a double-take of her entire body, not just the eyes alone.

There it was, a sketchy scar of white flecking the outside of the box, right up against the seam. A blemish that was so trivial, had not her mind been prepared ahead of time to see it, her eyes would surely have not seen it even then. And the name above it, Kirsch. The second-floor flat, on the right-hand side of the stairs as you went up.

The six chances had collapsed into one. The one was not a chance now any longer, it was a positive certainty.

Little things, the little things that are all around you, if you only know how to use them. The little things that can destroy you, if you don’t stop and think of them in time, guard yourself against them. And who could, for you don’t even realize they are there until it’s too late.

The nick of a nail across a loaf of pumpernickel, to show how thick it is to be sliced. The closing up, by thoughtless fingermotion, of a letterbox-flap within which there had been a square of white peering waiting. A bill, perhaps an advertisement, almost certainly nothing important. The hasty ripping of it open; what else is one to do with a letter? Finally, the turning of a knob to gain entrance within a building. How else is one to go inside to where one lives? Little things. And the sum-total of all of them? Catastrophe. Identification, confrontation, and accusation, for a thing thought safely buried miles away from here, and unseen by living eyes.

She pushed the ground-floor one on the other side. They wouldn’t have to shout down an inquiry through the core of the house then. The door retched several times on inner pushbutton-control, to show the latch had been lifted, and she swung it open and went in.

A man stood looking inquiringly through a crack of the inner door on her left-hand side as she made for the stairs. She flashed him a placating smile as she went hurrying past without stopping. “I’m sorry, that was a mistake. My hand must have slipped.”

He was too sleep-riddled for his perceptions to be very acute. He blinked vacantly and the door-crack closed up again. She was already nearly at the top of the first flight, and climbing fast.

A swing around the turn, and there it was looming in front of her. Coffin-size. The door through which death had come home a little while before. It looked just like all the other doors here. But it wasn’t. There was death pulsing from it, in unseen waves. She could almost feel them on her face, like a vibration.

Her outthrust foot had fallen to a halt, toe inches away from the bottom of it. Her other foot lingered further behind.

She listened. For a moment nothing, because she had caught it in a moment of silence. Then suddenly there was the sound of a plate going down on a table. Quick footsteps going away. Quick footsteps coming back again. The sound of another plate going down. This time the sound of a plate going down on another plate. Or more likely, of a cup going down on a saucer. Quick footsteps going away again.

She shuddered in spite of herself. Death had come home to an early-morning snack.

Quick footsteps coming back again. A paper bag rattled noisily as something was taken out of it. Pumpernickel bread, sliced thick.

Quick footsteps going away again. Gee, they were so busy, so chipper, happy almost. They wouldn’t be in another second or two. Death didn’t know she had an uninvited guest about to join her.

She knocked.

The footsteps died a sudden death.

She knocked again, fast and insistent.

The ghost of the footsteps came toward the door.

“Who is it? Who’s out there?”

She was a little frightened, you could tell it by the voice. People didn’t challenge in quite that breathless way, no matter what the hour of the night.

“A lady to see you.”

“A lady? What lady?”

“If you’ll open, you will see.” She kept threat out of her voice, to try to cajole the final obstacle out of her way.

The knob pivoted undecidedly, she saw it go around, but the door didn’t open. “It isn’t you, Ruth, is it?”

“Just let me speak to you. It will only take a minute.”

Trust this once, and you’re undone forever; trust this once, and you’ll never trust again.

A latch-tongue shot back, the door broke casing.

She was about twenty-eight. Well, it was hard to say; twenty-six, then. She was blonde, and her hair was short and curly. It was a natural blonde, though it may have been given some slight abetment. Her sandy eyebrows and almost white lashes told that. Her face was hard, and yet it wasn’t. It wasn’t the hardness that comes from within, it was rather a protective coating, a crust, it wore. Beneath, still lurking in the eyes and along the seams that caught tautly at the corners of its mouth, was a child-like trustfulness, that was afraid to come out too far, it had been rebuffed so often. It had learned its lesson not once but many times; it tried to hide itself away from the world now.

Her cheeks were thin, there was a hollowed spot in each. She had too much rouge on them, and over too great an expanse, and it gave them a fevered look. She had on a cheap cotton dress in a design of thin pencil-stripes. They ran diagonal; on one side of an invisible center line, they ran down one way, on the other, they ran down the opposite way.

She was a little frightened by this intrusion, but she was hoping to be reassured.

All this in an instantaneous snapshot taken by the eyes, to be assembled later as the minutes went by.

“I want to see you.”

That forepointed foot was in the way now; the door couldn’t close any more. She hadn’t looked down, so she wasn’t aware of this yet.

“Who are you?”

“You’d better let me talk to you about this inside, for your own sake as well as mine. Don’t keep me standing out here.”

She pushed by her and was in. One of them closed the door, neither one of them was sure at the moment which of the two had done it.

It was a small living-dining room in a cramped furnished flat. Neat enough, but shoddy-cheap in every aspect. A window cast its foreshortened square of light upon a gray wall an arm’s span out from it. A skimpy length of cranberry velour drapery hung down on either side of it. A card table had been erected, and dishes and the things she had brought from the delicatessen stood upon it, waiting to be partaken of. A newspaper was even on it, a pale green tabloid, furled and held flat between two of the dishes, waiting to be taken up and read. A package of cigarettes, still unopened, lay waiting there too — she must have brought them in with her just now — and a furbished ashtray to go with them, and even a folder of matches. A paper napkin was spread over the sandwiches to keep the dust off them until she was ready.

A doorless opening beyond, with light coming through, must have led into a bedroom.

She saw all this, but it didn’t matter. Even death has a homelife, it doesn’t strike out suddenly out of nowhere.

“What’re you up to, anyway? I don’t let strangers in on me at this time of night. I don’t like the way you’re acting.”

She gave it to her without any embroidery. “You got in a taxi at the corner of Seventieth and Madison, around one. You’d been paying a call on someone around the corner from there. Right?”

The woman’s face answered for her. It was starting to get white.

“The man you were calling on is dead now. Right?”

The woman’s eyes curdled. The outside of her face died a little. It wasn’t pretty to watch.

“You killed him. Right?”

“Oh my God.” She said it soft and low. Her eyes rolled; the pupils were carried upward under their lids, out of sight. She was all white eyeball for a minute or two.

The corner of the bridge-table kept her upright, she found it with her hands, sight unseen.

She started to cry; it came up only as far as her eyes, then she changed her mind. Not enough tears formed to push their way out. They stayed in, giving the eyes a glassy coating.

“What are you, a policewoman?”

“Never mind what I am. We’re talking about you. You’re a killer. You’ve killed someone tonight.”

The woman’s hand went to the base of her throat for a minute, trying to ease it. A sob that was more like a cough sounded in it. “Let me get a drink of water a minute, I’m all— It’s all right, there’s no other way out of here.”

“And get your things while you’re in there,” Bricky said mercilessly.

She went in through the lighted opening. She had to hold onto one side of it to steer herself through it.

Bricky stood there looking down. She was listening, not thinking. A glass tinked. Her ears didn’t tell her. Some wire-fine instinct, jangling to an unseen current, told her. She took a quick step forward, went in there after her.

“Don’t drink that!” Bricky swung backhand at her face. The glass was knocked away from her parted lips. It didn’t break, it was cheap and thick. It just thudded to the floor, rolled over, spewing a thin watery trail after it.

It was only after she’d completed the act that her eyes roamed around and saw the bottle standing uncapped on a shelf above the sink. Brown glass, “Lysol” on the label.

The woman was gripping the edge of the sink with both hands, as though it were unsteady and liable to get away from her.

“So you’ve as good as told me, haven’t you?”

The woman was silent. Her hands, on the sink were shaking a little, that was all.

“You didn’t have to. I knew it anyway.”

The woman was silent.

“You’re coming back there with me now. You’re coming up there — where it happened.”

The woman exploded into a strangled bleat. “No. You can’t make me. I don’t know who you are, but you can’t make me. I’ll kill you first. I don’t have to die twice. Once was enough.”

Her hand shot out into some sort of a rubber rack hanging to one side of the sink. Something flashed in the light, and a short, sharp-bladed kitchen-knife reared back over her shoulder, about to slash forward at Bricky.

There was no time to get out of the way, the place was too cramped. She flung herself forward upon her instead. Her hand caught the death-dealing arm at the wrist, tried to hold it off. Their other two arms threshed and clawed at one another, and finally riveted themselves together and stalemated one another.

The woman had the strength of desperation, of suicide. Bricky had the strength of self-preservation. An equipoise was established, that had to break sooner or later. They swayed slightly, moving very little, scarcely leaving the rim of the sink at all. Once they both bent over it together; again, they both bent outward the other way. Their hair came down. They didn’t scream, didn’t shrill. This wasn’t a cat-fight over some fancied slight; this was a fight to the death between two human beings. And death abolishes sex.

They rotated a little, then they went back again the other way. In the silence you couldn’t hear anything but their strident breaths. They had frozen into a tableau of exhaustion, Bricky too spent to ward off the knife, the other too spent to drive it home altogether.

A key fumbled at the door, on the outside of the other room.

Suddenly, with crazy irrelevancy, their roles had reversed.

The other woman was desperately trying to fling the knife away, rid herself of it, discard it. Bricky, still not understanding, held her wrist in a vise, choked off its power of motion. The fingers opened and the knife fell to the floor. The woman’s foot darted out, kicked it out of sight under the sink. There was nothing to strive over any more. They released one another uncertainly.

The woman dropped to her knees beside Bricky, began pulling at the bottom of her dress in agonized supplication.

“Don’t tell Harry. Oh my God, don’t tell Harry. Have pity on me.”

The door in the other room was opening.

A voice called through cheerily: “Helen, you back yet?”

“Don’t. I don’t care what you do to me, but don’t tell Harry. Not right away, anyway. I love him so. He’s all I’ve got. I’ll do anything you say — anything.”

Bricky was bending over, trying to detach her importunate, kneading hands from the fabric of her dress. “Will you come back there with me? Will you come back quietly, like I want you to?”

The woman nodded, avid for reprieve.

His shadow was already coming toward the doorway. He must have stepped aside for a moment to sample a mouthful of the food waiting on the card table.

“All right,” Bricky relented. “I’ll play ball with you if you play it with me.”

The woman cowering at her feet only had time to whisper one thing more. “Leave it to me, let me do the talking—”

He was standing in the doorway.

Just a guy, to Bricky, a man. Only the eyes of love could change him into what he was for this other woman, and only this other woman had those eyes of love for him. So Bricky couldn’t really see him as he was to her. Just a guy. A dime-a-dozen guy.

The woman kneeling at her feet seemed not to see him. She said, “The hem is too long on this side, that’s what the trouble is. It makes the whole skirt hang uneven.” She stopped as if she’d only then seen him. “Oh, hello, Harry,” she said delightedly. “I didn’t even hear you come in!”

He said, “Who’s this? Who’ve you got with you?”

She picked herself up, went over to him and kissed him. He gave Bricky a stupidly inquiring look over her shoulder.

She stood aside. “Mary, meet my husband.”

“Mary Coleman,” Bricky said dutifully.

They nodded to one another reservedly. He glanced down at his own coat and trousers, then over at the bed; he was obviously tired. After a strained moment of triple silence, he turned on his heel and went back inside. “I’m going ahead in and eat,” he said inhospitably.

They followed him in there. “Well, I guess I’ll run along, now that your husband’s back.”

“Wait a minute, I’ll go over with you and get that. You know, that pattern.”

He’d sat down. He shoved the paper napkin into the gap between two buttons of his shirt, so that it fanned out from there. “At this hour?” he said. “Clothes at three in the morning,” he grunted under his breath.

“I’ll be back in five minutes. She lives just around the corner from here.”

“Should I wait up for you?” he asked disgruntledly. “I’m tired.”

“You go ahead and get to bed. I’ll be back before you know it. I won’t even take my coat.”

“You’d better take your coat,” Bricky said. “It gets a little chilly at this hour of the morning.”

She went in and got it. Both their faces were a little pale, Bricky’s and hers. Bricky wondered if he noticed it.

He’d gotten up to come to the door with them, chewing on a mouthful of his sandwich. A sandwich that had cost so dear.

She kissed him again.

“And Harry, don’t make a mistake and lock the door on the inside so that I can’t use my key. I don’t want to have to ring and wake you, in case you are asleep already.”

“Don’t stay out too long. I don’t want anything happening to you.”

She kissed him a third time.

“You kissed me already,” he said.

“Can’t I kiss you an extra time if I feel like it?”

“Sure, if you feel like it,” he consented.

His hand was already at the knot of his tie, and his mouth was stretching into a yawn, as he ushered them out.

She started to cry the minute the door was shut behind the two of them. Grimacing without sound. “I thought I’d break down before we got out of there. He was tired, or he would have noticed it in my eyes. I love him so much.”

“Take it easy,” Bricky said brusquely.

They went down the stairs, Bricky in the lead. They went out into the solemn blueness of the street.

Helen Kirsch glanced behind her at the doorway. “I won’t be coming back again, will I?” She bit her lips. “I loved it there — with him. It wasn’t much, but it had him in it.”

“Then why didn’t you stick close to it, while you had it?” Bricky said stonily. “Cut out the hearts and flowers. I carried out my part of the bargain, now see that you carry out yours.” She thought: Life is like a see-saw. Every time one of us goes up, somebody else at the other end of the board goes down.

They walked as far as the corner.

“We’ll take a taxi,” Bricky said. “That’s about the quickest way.”

The figure beside her cowered a little.

She hopes I won’t find one, Bricky said to herself. Any little thing to delay us. She saw one and she shrilled at it, and it came over.

Bricky shovelled her hand invitingly toward her companion, as if to have the destination come from her unprompted, to hear what it would be.

“The exact—?”

“No, the nearest corner is good enough.”

“The corner of Seventieth and Madison,” Helen Kirsch said in a stricken voice.

Bricky nodded to herself in narrow-lidded confirmation, cracked the door to after them.

The cab wheeled about for uptown, the city began to pay off block by block. The street-lights roller-coastered in and out again, in and out again, through the windows at the sides.

Helen Kirsch’s hands formed a bow-knot of despair at her mouth. “Who’ll send his shirts out to the laundry for him? He’ll never remember that; I’ve always had to do it for him.”

Bricky didn’t answer.

The blocks paid off. The street-lights flickered in and out.

“I wonder what he’ll do with himself, without me, on Sundays. That was his only day off. Now he’ll have the whole day on his hands.”

Bricky looked the other way. “Why rub it into yourself?” she said gruffly.

A light stopped them, and in the stillness of the wait, the engine-throb was like somebody’s heart going.

More blocks. More flickering street-lights seeping in. New York’s such a long city, especially when you’re riding lengthwise through it — to the end of all your hopes.

“You’re so fast, you police,” Helen Kirsch said. “I always heard you were, but I never believed it before, until now.”

We police, Bricky thought sadly. We police is good. If she only knew.

She started to cry a little more, Helen Kirsch. “I can’t believe it. He isn’t really— He can’t be—”

“He’s dead,” Bricky said flintily. “Dead as they make them. Dead as they come.”

The sound of the word seemed to do something to Helen Kirsch. She crumpled forward suddenly above her own lap, as though she had a folding pain; covered her face. This time the tears came good; hot and heavy. “I didn’t mean to!” she sobbed strangledly. “I didn’t! Oh, I didn’t, I tell you!”

“Were you alone there in the room with him?”

She saw her head nod reluctantly in the gloom.

“Did you have a gun in your hand?”

The nod came even slower, but it came once more.

“Did you fire it at him?”

“It went off—”

“They always do. Funny how they always do, with girls like you. Always go off of their own accords, and with darned good aim too. Did he fall down when it went off? Answer me. Did he?”

“Yes.” She shuddered at the recollection. “He fell, and he pulled me down with him. I couldn’t get clear for a minute. I tore myself away from him, and I got up and I ran.”

“But he didn’t. Did he lie there after he’d fallen? Did he lie there still, or did he get up and chase you?”

“He... he didn’t get up and come after me.”

“You fired a gun at him. He fell down. He lay there. All your welshing won’t change what that is. Little sister, you’ve got yourself a murder on your hands.”

Helen Kirsch squealed like a stuck pig. Or like a puppy dog that’s been accidentally stepped on. She burrowed her face rearwards into the corner seam of the cab, almost as though she were trying to squeeze her way out through there, burst it asunder. Her hand beat a reflex protest on the padding.

“I didn’t mean to! Oh God, hear me! I didn’t mean to! I didn’t want to go to that party. This other girl, where I work, she talked me into it! I didn’t want to go. I’d never done a thing like that before, behind Harry’s back. Then when I got there and saw there were only four of us, just the two couples, I didn’t like the way it looked, I didn’t want to stay. And then the other couple slipped off somewhere, before I knew it they’d gone, and I was alone with him.”

Bricky tried to buck her up, the only way she knew how. “What’re you so afraid of anyway?” she said brusquely. “You’ll never even do a stretch on it, probably. You’ve got the perfect defense. They always take the woman’s word in a case like that. And this time, there is no other word but yours.”

Her head didn’t go up. It went lower, if anything, in utter prostration.

“It isn’t that— It isn’t that— How can I ever live with Harry any more, after? He won’t have me.”

“He’ll forgive you for going to what you thought was just a harmless party.”

“They never do, they never do — for that.”

Suddenly Bricky understood, completely, devastatingly.

“Oh,” she said in a crushed voice. “You fired at him—”

“I fired at him after.”

The cab slowed, came in for a stop.

Bricky paid him from the seat, then they got out. Bricky took her by the wrist, said, “Stand here a minute till the cab drives away.”

They stood there motionless; the cab rolled off, leaving its ghost in blue exhaust-tracery on the night air. Its going rugged at their skirts and flared them a little. Then they stood there alone on the edge of the curb.

“What are you going to do to me now?” Helen Kirsch quailed in pitiful helplessness.

“Show me where you ditched the gun. That’s what I want to know first. You lead the way.”

Her hostage went down that street there, bearing east; Bricky close beside her like an upright shadow.

Bricky thought: “She went out of her way first, over this way, to discard the gun; then doubled back along the same street to the avenue once more and got into the cab there. That was an erratic thing to do.” She didn’t comment on it, went with her unquestioningly.

They crossed the arid grandeur of Park Avenue, with its double width and stepped-up wedges of safety in the middle; dead to the world, scarcely a light showing in a window along it for the twenty blocks or so that the eye could encompass. Most of the bedrooms along here were to the rear, anyway. The most overrated thoroughfare in the world.

They went on. They came to Lexington, narrower, more human, more alive at least. They still went on, toward Third. They crossed that, under the iron tracery of the El, went on toward Second.

Bricky said at last, “What brought you so far over?”

“I was going the wrong way. I didn’t know where I was at first. I was, like dazed, when I first came out.”

Yes, Bricky thought, anyone would be, immediately after taking someone’s life.

The Kirsch girl spoke again in a moment or two. “It’s in one of these alleys between the buildings along here. There was a row of ashcans standing there, waiting to be dumped. The first one had a lid on it. I lifted that and chucked it underneath.” Then she said, “Maybe they’ve been emptied already.”

“They don’t come around until just before daybreak,” Bricky said.

“I think that’s the one. There it is, in there. See them? There’s about six of them in a row.”

“Stay with me,” Bricky warned. “Come over next to me while I look.”

All the other girl said was, “I’m playing the game. You played it back at my place.”

They turned aside and the shadows of the inset blacked the two of them out. All you could hear were their voices, whispering guardedly. That and the faint clash of an ashcan-lid being removed.

“Got it?”

There was an accusing pause. Then Bricky slurred, “Are you telling me the level on this?”

“Somebody’s found it! Somebody’s taken it out!”

“Are you sure this is the right place?”

“It was in this alley, and no other. I remember how it looked, when you turned and faced the street from in here. Those windows across there with all the little white splits in their panes. And it was this first can here. It’s full of coke-husks.”

Silence from Bricky.

“I swear I’m telling you the truth. Why would I want to back out now, after bringing you all the way over here?”

“You sound like it was the truth, at that. Never mind, don’t dig your arm all the way down through that stuff. It would be on the top if it was anywhere at all. Some night-scavenger must have come along right after you and found it. Maybe someone noticed you slip in and out of here.”

They reappeared suddenly in the lesser sombreness of the sidewalk.

“All right, now let’s go there,” Bricky said quietly.

The girl stopped short and looked at her pleadingly. “Do I have to?”

“You’ve got to go where it is. That’s what I hauled you out of your place with me for. That’s the main thing, not digging up the gun. The heck with the gun.”

They started on the way back. They recrossed Third. Suddenly the girl had stopped again. She was shaking all over; Bricky could tell even in the darkness.

“Snap out of it,” she started to say. “What’re you balking for n—?”

Without a word the girl turned aside and went into the rancid entrance they had halted opposite. For a moment Bricky thought she was trying to elude her, make a getaway. Her arm started to reach out after her to pull her back. Then she let it fall, checked the exclamation that had risen to her lips. A curious, coldly-frightening sensation coursed through her for a minute.

She went in after her. “What’re you doing, kidding me?” Her voice was unsteady.

In the dim light there was inside this hallway, this tunnel toward — who knew what? — she saw the girl look at her as if she didn’t understand her, didn’t know what she meant by asking that.

She waived the question. The girl went up stairs there at the back. She went at her heels. She couldn’t have told which was the more frightened one of the two of them now. Her fright was a sort of sick dismay.

Halfway up the girl stopped again. “I can’t— Why do I have to?”

Bricky motioned ahead of the two of them with a stab of her finger. “Keep going, wherever you’re going,” she said tersely.

Their shadows climbed the dingy walls beside them.

They stood before a door now.

Harry Kirsch’s wife looked at it, all around its edges four-square, as though it were insuperable.

“Open it,” Bricky said, reading their destination in her antipathy.

She reached out and touched the knob as though afraid it would sting her. She gave it a quick turn and then snatched her hand back. It slanted open now.

“You first,” Bricky said.

The other girl’s face was that of a doomed thing as she went in before her. Bricky remembered something she’d said down at her own flat earlier. Yes, this was like dying twice, all right. But she wasn’t dying alone, something in Bricky was dying along with her — had been ever since outside on the street before.

A light was on. First there was a narrow, prison-like hall. They went down that. They passed an open doorway, with the room beyond it dark. White-painted wood gleaming faintly in it. A kitchen, most likely. They passed a second one, also open, also dark. Then the hall opened frontally into a lighted room before it, and they went in there, and stopped.

It was a nondescript sort of place; it must have been rented just for the party, just for tonight, just for a place of assignation. Rented furnished as it was. It didn’t look as though it had been lived in consistently, or was meant to be. Something about it.

There was no one in this room. There had been somebody in it before, plentifully in it, rowdy in it, raising hell in it, before. Glasses stood around haphazardly; only four of them to begin with, but multiplied four-fold, six-fold, in the many still-moist scars all around them, where they had been taken up and set down again repeatedly. A fractured phonograph record lay on the seat of one of the chairs. Bricky picked up a central fragment, bearing the label, and looked at it. “Pistol-Packin’ Mamma.” She winced at the malevolent appropriateness, chucked it aside.

The Kirsch girl stopped and pointed. Toward a doorless room-opening beyond. She was rigid there, rooted; she couldn’t have been made to go on any further. Bricky went on alone.

She stopped at the threshold and stood looking in. There was no further place to go. There was no further need.

It had a window, but the shade was down over it, down firmly, down all the way. There were two more glasses in here. One was still full, as if it had been pressed on someone who quickly set it down untouched, in the face of some greater crisis looming.

He was lying there over on the far side, stretched out in disordered repose. Inert, immovable.

Bricky went over close to him, bent down. Then she drew her head back sharply, averted it, fanned her hand in front of her face a couple of times. She got up, nudged her foot along the form here and there, as if with a sort of idle curiosity.

Then she went back to the doorway, looked out.

Helen Kirsch was standing there frozen, her face covered with both hands, in a pose of abysmal tragedy. Bricky just stared.

There was silence for a moment.

The other girl sensed her stare, slowly dropped her hands, met her look questioningly.

There was still silence.

Then, slowly, she discovered something on Bricky’s face. “What are you looking at me like that for? Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

“Come here a minute. I want you to see something.”

Helen Kirsch quailed, shook her head.

Bricky pulled her over against her will, held her, made her look into the second room.

Something grunted on the far side of it. The log-like figure was in flux now. Right while they watched it was struggling to pick itself up, with that floundering motion typical of the drunk who has lain comatose for a long while.

“He’s not dead,” Bricky said. “Just dead drunk. Even if he’d been dead he’d have been the wrong dead man. There’s the hole up there on the wall where the bullet went in.”

A stifled scream from Helen Kirsch centered his wavering attention on them. He fixed a poached eye on her. He seemed to remember her vaguely.

“Whosh your friend?” he grunted. “Esh have another drink, you and me and her.”

They both stood staring transfixedly at him until he was all the way up, like a bear on its hind legs. Then the tableau shattered.

“Let’s get out of here,” Bricky said tersely, “before the whole thing starts over.”

Helen Kirsch would have stood there all night. She acted as though something had numbed her, robbed her of all power of motion. Bricky had to dislodge her, thrust her before her. She prodded her ahead of her, across the intervening room, along the hall, and out onto the stair-landing outside.

Behind them, something heavy fell back again into place, lay still.

Bricky jerked the door to after them, for added safety.

“Come on,” she had to tell her dazed companion. “Come away from here. Don’t stand there.” All the way down the stairs they ran, armed together, the one in sobbing relief, the other in grim frustration.

They came spilling out into the open, in a sweep that carried them paces down the sidewalk before it slackened and died. Then Bricky stopped short, turned to her.

“You love that man downtown, that George or Harry or whatever his name is?”

Helen Kirsch shook her head, unable to articulate. Her eyes sparkled with a threat of tears again.

“Then what’re you waiting for, you little fool?” She threw up her arm, as a brake to a passing cab. “Go back there. Go back there fast!” The cab veered up, stopped. “Get in.”

Bricky closed the cab-door between them. A pale face looked mutely out at her for a moment. Bricky thumbed the driver on.

“You’ve got your happy ending now; don’t crowd your luck. Stay with your Harry where you belong — and keep your mouth shut, your eyes to yourself, and your fingers off gun-triggers after this.”