Strange Sisters

Chapter 12

Vera Telsa left the library of Burlington College and walked across the campus toward the street on which she lived. On the way she met the dean. She spoke with crisp courtesy and would have passed immediately if the dean hadn’t stopped. Vera didn’t want to talk with the dean at that moment and resented being forced to do so. She hid her resentment, however, behind a small smile and a faintly deferential attitude.

“I’ve been intending to speak with you, Dr. Telsa,” the dean said. “About this girl who killed the man up in the city and committed suicide afterward. Kathryn Gait, her name was. Such a terrible shock. Of course it’s been several years since she was here, but she was rather a favorite of yours, as I recall.”

Vera’s small smile didn’t waver. “Not particularly. She was a member of my little group of specials, and so I was naturally somewhat interested in her.”

“To be sure. Did you know that your class was the only one in which she made a passing mark?”

“I understood that she made a deplorable showing generally.”

“Yes. Quite an intelligent girl, too. I had nearly forgotten her until this tragic thing happened, and then I went back in the records and reviewed her file. I was forced to dismiss her from school at mid-year, you know. I tried to get her to see Dr. Sandstrom, but she refused flatly. Now, in the light of events, I wonder if I really did all I might have, if I shouldn’t have insisted...”

“You really shouldn’t blame yourself. I’m sure you did all you could.”

“I dare say I did. Certainly I had no idea... Well, I won’t detain you any longer, Doctor. Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon, Dean.”

Relieved, Vera completed her crossing of the campus. She felt light and vigorous, strangely uplifted. Her mood was, in fact, almost manic. She would not think of the awful episode of fear from which she had escaped. She would never think of it again. It was true that the fear, the remembrance of it, was still perilously near the surface of her consciousness, still broke the surface briefly at odd times, but she was quite adroit at the technique of repression. In time she would bury it.

In her house, she fixed herself a cup of tea and carried it into the living room. Her little group was meeting later, and she hoped the conversation would be stimulating. While she was waiting, it would be pleasant to listen to some music.

She went over to the console phonograph and adjusted the mechanism. The lilting music of Chopin was released in the room.

Jacqueline Wieland sat on a tall stool under ersatz stars and drank a daiquiri. She had almost ordered a Sidecar before she recalled at the last moment that she had decided not to drink Sidecars any more. She had also decided not to patronize the Bronze Lounge any more, for that matter, but she had reversed the decision. She had done so because she understood that it was dangerous to defer to ghosts, to allow her thoughts and actions to be regulated by irrational fear of certain associations.

It had been a difficult day at the store — a series of minor problems terminating with another irritating conference with the old fool from Furniture. But actually, she supposed, the day had been no more difficult than the average. It was just that she had been abnormally sensitized to any emotional impact, however trivial in nature, by the deadly threat to the structure of her life that had just removed itself. She was like a person who had just recovered from pneumonia and had to protect himself from every petty exposure. There had even been trauma in her escape, in the sudden release from fear, for it is, after all, a rather frightening and shattering experience to realize that you are capable of feeling a fierce, unholy joy in someone’s death.

She finished her daiquiri and thought that she would have another. The bartender appropriated her empty glass, and she nodded to indicate a refill. Sitting on the stool with her hands lying in her lap, feeling more relaxed than she had felt at any other time since the instant of the radio newscaster’s announcement and her own instantaneous reaction of terrible relief and joy, she watched the bartender measure ingredients into an electric blender. He was a small man with a tired face and a shining bald head, and he conducted his business with the bored, assured economy of motion that comes from long familiarity with simple routine. Placing a clean glass on the bar before her, he poured from the container of the blender and then moved away to resume an interrupted conversation with a beer drinker two stools down. Her attention followed him idly, enlarging to include the sense of his words to the beer drinker, and after the first words, she wished that it had not, that something had diverted it in time, or that she had left after the first daiquiri.

“Like I was saying,” the bartender said to the beer drinker, “she was in here that evening, the evening before the day it came out in the papers about her being suspected of knifing this guy. She was drunk, all right, really drunk, but somehow not drunk like the standard lush. It was more like she was drinking to get away from something. That’s what I thought at the time, and now I can see it was true. She kept drinking straight rye and talking crazy as hell, but it was more than the rye talking, it was something behind the rye, something on her mind that was driving her nuts. She kept saying things about her hair, the color of it, how the color was wrong and how God must love me because He made me bald, and finally she said something about the empty cup of the world.”

“Jesus,” the beer drinker said.

“Yeah. It made a guy feel kind of queer to hear it.” The bartender looked down at the bar and shook his head, remembering. “I finally got her into a booth and got her a cup of black coffee, but then she just got up all of a sudden and walked out. She left her purse behind in the booth, and I put it away, thinking she’d be back for it, but then the very next day, like I said, it came out about her being suspected of murder, and so I called the cops, and a snotty lieutenant named Ridley came around to pick it up. I told him all this that I’m telling you, and he just stood and listened as if I were passing the time of day, and after I was finished he said okay, just to forget it, and he walked out with the purse without so much as a go to hell. Maybe he didn’t figure a bartender could have any sense, or he wouldn’t be a bartender, and he might be right, at that. Anyhow, the dame cut off all of her hair that same night and took a handful of sleeping pills, so I guess there was some kind of crazy meaning in what she said, even if he didn’t think so.”

“Psycho,” the beer drinker said. “I was reading in a magazine that there are more psychos now than ever before. It’s the pressure. Too much pressure on everyone.”

The bartender kept on looking at the bar and shaking his head. He said slowly, “I don’t know. There was something about her. Something kind of young and all mixed up. I felt sorry for her. I keep thinking that she was looking for help, trying to find someone to help her, and there wasn’t anyone, not anyone in the world.”

It was then that Jacqueline left. Outside, she stood on the curb and waited for a taxi to come along, a tall and striking woman, beautifully and severely groomed and tailored. In the grace of her posture and the tilt of her head, there was pride and a certain arrogance. The taxi driver who finally responded to her signal thought she was real class, the kind of dame you saw once in a coon’s age.

Lieutenant Ridley sat in his office and watched three sparrows.

There was one window in the room that overlooked a narrow brick alley. The window was recessed about eight inches in the wall of the building, leaving an outside sill wide enough for the accommodation of birds. Sometimes pigeons sat on the sill, but this afternoon three sparrows had assumed possession, and they had been sitting out there for a long time. They sat in a row so precisely spaced that it seemed someone must have measured the distance between them. Occasionally, one of the sparrows would stir and stretch its feathers, but none of them ever signified any serious intention of flying away. Ridley knew that this was true because he had been watching them. He had started watching them at four, and it was now five, and he could guarantee that the same three sparrows had been there all the time.

He was thankful for the company of the small, gray birds. He sat in his chair with his back to the desk and the door and wondered why this was. Perhaps, he thought, it was because they were birds of no importance, just drab little bits of life that were harbingers of nothing. When you’d descended the social strata of birds to the sparrow, there just wasn’t any place lower to go. That was even implied in the scriptures. When the scriptures said that God marked the fall of the sparrow, it was supposed to indicate the ultimate in concern and compassion. If a lousy little sparrow got consideration, there was plenty for everyone. Back home, the kids around the neighborhood had called them sparkies and had shot them with B-B guns. He’d never owned a B-B gun himself. He’d never enjoyed killing anything until, for a short while between then and now, he’d learned to enjoy killing men.

Someone came into the room behind him and sat down. Without turning around to see, he knew by the pace and weight of the tread that it was Tromp. He waited for Tromp to speak and wished that he wouldn’t.

“It’s all wrapped up, then?” Tromp said.

Ridley stirred in his chair, still watching the sparrows. “Why not?”

“No reason, I guess. I guess she was guilty, all right.”

“Of course she was guilty. I don’t know what a jury would’ve thought about the evidence, but that doesn’t matter now. She was guilty, and she’s dead, and that’s the end of it.”

“I wish she’d left a note — a confession. Usually they do that.”

“Not the ones like her. Not the ones who have the big break. They don’t stop to write a note for the convenience of cops.”

“Yeah.” Tromp’s voice was heavy. “She was a real psycho, all right. Why didn’t we hold her? We had enough to justify it.”

Ridley ignored the subtle undertone of accusation, for he had, after all, been asking himself the same question. Why didn’t you hold her, James J. Ridley? She was guilty, and she was ready to break, and you knew that both of these things were true, so why didn’t you hold her? He didn’t answer the question. Someday he would answer it, because he was basically honest even with himself, but he was not ready now. For the present, it was better to sit and watch the sparrows on the window sill.

“All that dyed hair on the floor,” Tromp said. “Her scalp all stained with that orange stuff the way it was. Why would a dame do something like that?”

“She was unbalanced. Off the deep end. You said it yourself, Sergeant. Psycho, you said.”

“Sure. But that doesn’t explain anything. You know that as well as I do. Crazy people do crazy things, but what makes them do certain kinds of crazy things? They’ve got reasons, just like anyone else.”

“That’s not our problem. Leave it to the head doctors.”

“Maybe it’s our problem if it indicates a motive. We still I don’t know why she killed the guy. We can make a pretty good guess, but we don’t really know. That crazy stuff about her hair was on her mind. She started talking it right away the night I was there, the night she came in plastered. Then she ends up trying a dye job, dead with an old-fashioned convict’s haircut. That’s not coincidence. It means something.”

“All right, Sergeant, all right.”

Ridley shifted his weight in the chair. He wanted Tromp to quit talking. He wanted Tromp to go away. He closed his eyes, obliterating the sparrows. Behind his lids, the thin face and hairless head of Kathy Gait was a soft illumination. A kind of cross between innocence and obscenity, he thought. He opened his eyes and the sparrows were still there.

Behind him, there was a measured, padded sound, and he realized that Tromp was pounding a clenched fist into a palm.

“Those pills,” Tromp said bitterly. “Those Goddamn green pills. They were in the medicine cabinet when I was there the first time. I should’ve taken them.”

“Why? She’d have found another way. Maybe a less pleasant one.”

“I should’ve known what they were. I should’ve taken them.”

“You can’t anticipate suicide in the case of everyone with a supply of soporifics.”

“This was different. In this case there were pointers.”

“Look, Sergeant. You’ve been in this game long enough to know better than to bleed for something that can’t be helped. You’d better forget it.”

“Sure. You’re right, of course.”

Tromp stood up. He felt that Ridley was holding back, and it made him sore. Ridley knew what it was all about, no question of that. That hair stuff. Why all this had happened. He’d known from the first, right from the moment he’d sniffed the scent over the telephone, but he wasn’t putting out. That was pretty apparent by now. All right, Goddamn him. Let the smart bastard stay buttoned up. To hell with all of it.

“I think I’ll get along home,” he said.

“Sure. See you tomorrow.”

Tromp left, and Ridley began to think that maybe it would have been better, on the whole, if he’d married and established a home himself. It might be pretty nice, having a wife. Maybe a kid or two. Of course he was comfortable enough in his room. He had all the books there that he’d read and liked well enough to keep, and he had a lot more that he wanted to read and had never got around to. There were so many things a man never got around to.

How did it start? How did it grow? How did a pretty girl a man could have loved come in such a twisted way to such a bad end?

He wasn’t thinking about murder. Murder was incidental.

He told himself that he’d better quit thinking about it at all. He’d better follow his advice to Tromp and forget it. He’d better get out of here and go to his room and read a book. Maybe he’d read Ecclesiastes. He didn’t read the Bible much any more, and he hadn’t read Ecclesiastes for a long time. Pretty soon he’d go get a drink and go to his room and read it again: The words of the Preacher, the son of David...

In the meantime, he watched the sparrows.