So Lovely — and So Dead

Chapter One

There was no light showing through the crack under the door, and no one answered my knocking. Under the pressure of my hand, the door whispered inward into darkness. Through the slats of a Venetian blind, the light of a street lamp outside fell through to make the pattern of a trellis on the floor. Pushing the door shut behind me, I groped in darkness for an elusive light switch that didn’t seem to be where I remembered it.

Through the pattern of the trellis, a shadow moved toward me with a rush. The arm that I threw up in protection was knocked aside by a blow that caught me on the side of the head and sent me crashing into the wall. On buckling knees, I tried to slip sideways and away, but a hand, brushing my face, grasped me deliberately, almost gently, by the coat and pulled me back into heavy knuckles that smashed my mouth and sent me spinning into a sick world of nauseous, flaring colors.

I threw a fist wildly and felt it slip harmlessly above a twisting shoulder. Then the pitiless knuckles smashed again and again into my face with slow and murderous deliberation, while the hand on my coat held me up to meet them. The only way of escape was through the sick world of flaring colors into utter darkness. I took the way and went.

Later, I came up out of the darkness in a slow, shuddering spiral. Lying quietly on the floor by the wall, I listened intently and heard no sound. With a tremendous effort, I opened my eyes. Light still lay in a trellis pattern on the floor. Terror sharpened my hearing, as memory of that destroying pain returned, and I heard faintly from the bedroom the ticking of a clock. Nothing more.

After a long time, I turned over carefully onto my stomach and lay still again. My face was a mass of raw and burning agony. My head expanded and contracted in a kind of cadenced torture. Fighting nausea, I drew my knees up under me and found the wall with my hands. With infinite caution, I stood and waited for the retching sickness in my stomach to subside. Then, sliding a hand along the wall, I found the light switch and snapped it.

Turning, I looked around the room. Everything seemed to be in order — just as I remembered it. The worn rug, the shabby furniture, the cleanliness that couldn’t do much against its handicaps. Moving along the wall for support, I reached the bedroom door. Feeling around the edge of the doorway on the wall inside, I found another switch and produced light. Standing in the doorway, bracing myself with a hand on each side of the frame, I looked with breath cut short in my throat and sickness returning in a flood to churn my insides.

Everything here, too, was in its proper place. But nothing was in order. Nothing in this room or in all the world was in order, or would ever be in order again. Because of Maggie. Because of Maggie, who had lived here and had now died here. Violently. She lay on the floor between the old brass bed and the tired dresser against the wall at its foot. Except for her shoes, she was fully dressed and looked at first as if she had merely gone to sleep in the wrong place. That was the way she looked before you saw the ugly blue marks on her throat, the starting, terrified eyes, and the thick tongue pressing against the teeth in her open mouth. She had been beautiful, and she was ugly. She had been alive, and she was dead. Forgetting my need of support, I went across the bedroom fast, reeling a little, to the bathroom.

Inside, I stood over the sink, clutching porcelain, until sickness was gone again. In the small mirror of a medicine cabinet, I looked at the black and red reflected face and finally decided that it was mine. Running water into the basin, I did what I could to clean it up. The lower lip would need stitches.

After a while, I sat on the edge of the tub and tried to think, but I couldn’t make anything out of my thoughts. They traveled in circles through throbbing confusion and came out nowhere at all. I had only one idea that made any sense, and that was that I must call the police.

I got up and went back through the bedroom, not looking at Maggie, and back out into the living room. There was no phone in the apartment, but I remembered one in the hall. I went out and called the police and came back again.

Sitting in the living room, on the faded sofa with a broken spring, I waited for the police to come and tried to remember all the times Maggie and I had sat together on the sofa. I found myself going back over all the times, from the latest to the earliest. It gave me something to do, and I had just remembered twenty-three specific times when the hall door opened and a thin, undersized man in a double-breasted gray suit came into the room. He was followed by two other men who looked like detectives and were.

The thin man pushed his hat onto the back of his head, exposing a few wisps of gray hair, and looked at me. After the first startled expression at the sight of the smear for a face, his eyes made no concession to emotion at all.

“You the guy who called the police?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you say your name is?”

“Grieg. Norman Grieg.”

“On the phone, you mentioned murder. Where’s the body?”

“In the bedroom.”

“Okay. You wait here. You can smoke. If you need a drink and there’s anything around, help yourself. I’ll be back.”

He turned and went into the bedroom, the detectives following. Sitting on the sofa, I could hear them moving around and talking, but I couldn’t understand anything they said. Pretty soon more men came in from the hall and over to the bedroom. I heard the explosion of flash bulbs and smelled powder.

Trying again to think, I made a little better job of it than before. I tried to recall every impression I had got of the man who had attacked me in the dark, because I knew the thin, gray man would have questions to ask, and it would be better for me if I had some answers to give. Not that there was much to recall. You just don’t get much of a picture of a man who beats you into sudden insensibility in the dark. About all I could remember were the hard, cruel hands that clutched and smashed with pitiless power.

A fat man wearing a black Homburg and carrying a black bag came out of the bedroom and hurried across to the hall door. Behind him, the thin man in the double-breasted suit stopped in the doorway to the bedroom and said, “Just when you think you’ve seen everything, something new comes up. Thanks, Doc.”

The fat man paused with his hand on the knob, looking back and shaking his head.

“Must have been a giant,” he said. “Never seen anything like it before.”

He opened the door and went out, and the thin man began prowling the living room. Nothing seemed to interest him much, and he ended up in a few minutes in front of the sofa. His eyes, looking down at me, were still very carefully guarded.

“I didn’t tell you my name,” he said. “It’s Muller. Detective Lieutenant.”

I didn’t say anything, and his eyes moved slowly over my ruined face.

“You mean to tell me that little gal in there did all that before you finally managed to choke her to death?”

Words came blurred from between my puffed lips. He leaned a little forward and listened carefully.

“You’re joking,” I said.

“I could tell a better joke than that, Buster. This isn’t funny. Not to me. Not to you. Especially not to you.”

“I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I came.”

“Yes? How come you came?”

“I had a date with her.”

“We got her name as Margaret Hadley. That right?”

“Yes.”

“How well did you know her?”

“We were planning to be married.”

“Oh. How long you known her?”

“About a year.”

“You come here often?”

“Whenever I could. Maybe twice a week.”

“That isn’t very often for a guy to see the girl he’s planning to marry.”

“I’m a graduate student and part-time instructor at the University here. I don’t have many free nights.”

“I see. Was Miss Hadley a student, too?”

“No. She was assistant to the University librarian.”

“You notice anything strange about her lately? Anything that might indicate she was in trouble?”

I answered carefully, trying to say what I felt without giving it exaggerated emphasis.

“I think so. For about a week she’s been rather remote. Worried, I think. I had an idea maybe she was working too hard.”

“Do librarians work so hard?”

“This was unusual. The Stoneman library, you know. Maybe you remember that old man Stoneman left it to the University when he died some time back. Recently, Margaret and Dr. Cross, the librarian, have been working on it. They went out to the Stoneman place together to see to the packing of the books about a week ago. Since then, they’ve been cataloging the stuff, trying to get it properly classified for the stacks.”

“I see. Now we’re to the big question. Where’d you get that face?”

I told him what had happened as exactly as I could. He leaned forward a little farther, listening intently, his eyes frozen in an expression of sharp attention. When I’d finished, he straightened with a sigh.

“Look, Buster. You say you threw one punch over this guy’s shoulder. How’d you throw it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“How’d you throw the punch? Up? Down? Straight out?”

“Oh. Just about straight out, I think.”

He shook his head.

“I don’t think so. Not unless he was crouching. You heard the Doc when he went out. The fat guy. He mentioned a giant. There’s a bruised place on the girl’s throat that was made by a thumb. There’re four places made by fingers. The places made by fingers come all the way around the throat to the place made by the thumb. Get the idea? She was choked to death with one hand. A big hand. The hand of a big guy.”

I saw again the shadow coming at me through the pattern of light. I sensed again the man who had held me easily with one hand while he beat me brutally with the other. The hands had been big, all right. But not the man. The man hadn’t been any taller than I. Six feet, that is. T shook my head and said so.

Muller didn’t answer. I saw that he was looking down at my own hands, and I held them out.

“They’re not big,” I said.

He sighed again and shrugged.

“No. Not big enough. It’s hard to tell about things in the dark. You must be mistaken. We’re looking for a big man. Maybe not a giant, like Doc said, but a real big guy.”

He turned away and prowded. Apparently not looking for anything in particular. Just prowling. After a while, he came back.

“Think, Buster. Think hard. Can you think of anyone at all who might have had a reason for killing your girl?”

“No one. Not one at all.”

“No idea who the guy was who attacked you in this room tonight?”

“No.”

“I can see you’re not going to be any help. I never saw a guy who knew less about a girl he was going to marry. How about family? She got any?”

“There’s a mother. Lives upstate in a little town called Shelby.”

“That’s something. We’ll get in touch. For all the good you are, you may as well go home. Leave your address.”

A detective wrote my address in a little book, and Muller went back into the bedroom without another word. No one tried to stop me when I walked out of the house and away.