Strange Sisters

Chapter 5

If it was a long way from Kenny Renowski to Angus Brunn, it was also a long way from a sofa to a park bench. The narrow slats of the bench pressed into her flesh, and she stirred, shifting her weight. She hadn’t thought of Vera Telsa in such detail for quite some time, and had wished, as a matter of fact, never to think of her in such detail again. It was not always possible, however, to control the direction or the material of one’s thoughts. Thinking, after all, was no more than the making of certain connections in the intricate and mysterious system of nerves with which one was equipped, and connections were made without deliberate or conscious effort. Especially, at this moment, the one that sent into her mind the thought that she would one day also wish never to think of Jacqueline again, and that when she did so, it would be with sickness and regret and self-recrimination.

But that was not true. She would not permit it to be true. For Jacqueline was far more than Vera had ever been. She was, indeed, far more than herself. She was hope. She was salvation. She was absolution in a cocktail lounge. If only, that is, one could ever arrive at the time and the place. If only one could sleep quietly through the threatening interim.

Then she became aware that the terminus of her line of vision past the cast-iron man was a narrow store on the street beyond. Her eyes adjusted to the distance and focused, picking out details. Behind dirty glass was an upright cardboard figure of a girl in a very brief swimming suit, two scraps of white cloth barely breaking the continuity of golden skin. Above the girl’s head was a glaring sun with long spears of flame flaring from its circumference to show how hot it was. The girl’s skin remained so beautifully golden under the blistering sun because she used a certain kind of lotion which was spelled out below in cool color. Across the top of the window in flaked letters was the claim that prescriptions were carefully compounded.

A drug store. A shabby, struggling drug store that looked as if it wouldn’t let a small point of ethics interfere with a sale. After all, plenty of places must sell barbiturates without prescriptions. She was almost certain of that There was so much of it around in one form or another.

Without thinking any more about it, because she had already sat and thought too long, she got up and crossed the park and the street beyond and went into the drug store. Inside, the store was shadowy and cool and cluttered, scented with the mixed emissions of fountain flavors. The only light was that which filtered in from the street through the dirty display window and two smaller side windows near the ceiling. At first she thought that there was no one present but herself, but then she heard a staccato voice behind the partition at the rear that divided the store into front and back portions. The voice had a cultivated professional vigor, and after listening for a moment, she realized that it belonged to a radio news reporter. She listened a moment longer in frozen attention that possessed an element of terror, thinking that the reporter might be relating local events, that she might hear the name of Angus Brunn, but then she became aware that his remarks were international, and she walked on toward the source of the voice, her heels rapping sharply on the floor, the constriction in her chest slowly relaxing.

A man appeared in a doorway in the partition and moved forward to meet her. “Can I help you, miss?”

“Yes. I’d like some sleeping tablets, please.”

He was a tall man, and he leaned forward and down a little to look at her. His face was long, the skin hanging loosely on its bone structure, and his eyes were small and dull and tired. Looking at her, he lifted one hand and took the tip of his nose between thumb and index finger, pinching it gently.

“Sleeping tablets require a prescription, you know.”

“I know. I had a prescription, but I seem to have lost it. I’m sure it was nothing uncommon. Any kind of good tablet would do.”

“Who was the doctor? I’ll call him and get the prescription for you.”

“He’s not here. Not in the city, I mean. I got the prescription out of town.”

“That’s too bad. Law says you have to have a doctor’s prescription. Couldn’t you get another one?”

“I don’t like to pay the fee. It seems so unnecessary, and I don’t have money to waste.”

“Sure. Don’t blame you for feeling that way. Fees are pretty rough. For something simple like this, it’d probably be three minutes and three bucks.” He released his nose and sighed. “Okay, miss. Maybe I can fix you up.”

He walked back through the doorway in the partition. She could near him moving around behind the thin barrier, and even though she understood that he knew she was lying, she experienced a renewal of the feeling of cleverness that she had known in Angus Brunn’s apartment last night. A sense of triumph disproportionate and briefly exhilarating.

The druggist returned shortly from the rear and handed her a small cardboard box. She noticed that the box had no label to identify either its contents or its source.

“I’m taking a chance doing this, miss,” he said. “I could get into a Jot of trouble.”

She accepted this as an oblique request for a bonus in compensation for the risk, though it was almost certainly a risk he took frequently and considered negligible. Nevertheless, establishing the lie of her desire to avoid a doctor’s fee, she gave him a ten dollar bill and turned without waiting for any gesture on his part to make change.

“Thank you very much,” she said, and she walked up past the fountain and out across the park with the cast-iron man to the street on the other side. She retraced her way along the street past the drug store she had entered earlier, walking much more slowly now, and so back to her apartment. In the apartment, she sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the box. The tablets inside were green, the coating hard and bright Green dragons, they were called. She had never taken barbiturates herself, even though sleepless nights had become common in her life, but she had encountered addicts and had picked up some of their slang terminology. She counted the tablets and discovered that there was an even dozen.

She wondered how many she should take. Two, perhaps? Being in possession of the coveted soporifics, she had now a morbid fear of taking too much, of sleeping beyond her appointment. Possibly one would be sufficient. Yes, she would take no chances. She would take only one, and if that were not enough, she would just have to stay awake and deal as best she could with corrosive time. Getting up, she went into the bathroom and washed a tablet down her throat with tepid tap water, leaving the remaining eleven on a shelf in the medicine cabinet. Back in the bedroom, she got her alarm clock and set the alarm for four o’clock, checking the setting twice to be certain that she’d made no error. Then she placed the clock on a bedside table not more than two feet from where her head would lie and stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes.

In the darkness behind her lids, the floating fear that she had kept diffused by physical activity halted and gathered and stared at her with yellow eyes. She lay quietly, forcing herself to keep her lids lowered, and after a long time the gathered fear loosened again and moved, washing through her sluggishly. How long would the tablet take? How long before the green dragon took her into its arms? Or would it, perhaps, not be effective at all?

His hair, his hair, the color of his hair, they’re taking him to prison for the color of his hair. But no! Not his. Hers. They would come, and they would get her, and they would take her away. They would take her to prison for the color of her hair. It was very essential to keep the gender straight, though keeping the gender straight was sometimes quite a problem. One had to try, however, one had always to try, and if the attempt came out bad, came out murder, that was unfortunate but really quite incidental, for it was only the color of the hair that mattered, and everything else, even murder, was only a ramification, a damned, damned consequence of the color of the hair.

But she had, for a moment, forgotten something, and she almost laughed aloud in the darkness behind her lids when she remembered again what she had, for a moment, forgotten. She had very foolishly forgotten Jacqueline, and that was the reason she almost laughed aloud in hysterical relief, because Jacqueline didn’t object to the color of her hair at air and would never permit them to come and get her because of it. Jacqueline was very wise, and she would know precisely how to restore everything immediately to sanity and to reduce a dead body to a few cents’ worth of chemicals that should disturb no one very much or for very long. She was sitting right now with a kind of cool omnipotence behind her blond desk, and probably she was saying something crisp and definitive into the ivory telephone, just as she had been the day Kathy had gone into the office to see her.

She had been called into the office, as a matter of fact. She had just come on a week before from Burlington College for girls, and she had applied at the personnel section of the department store for a clerking job, more just to have something to do than because she was in immediate need of money. Stella had left her enough to preclude worry over money for a long time, but she had discovered that it was a little better somehow if one were occupied, and so she had applied for the job of clerking because it was the only kind of work she could think of that didn’t require any particular training. The department store being progressive in its approach to personnel problems, she had been given some tests that were supposed to indicate whether it would be worthwhile hiring her. As it turned out, the tests indicated that she was not only worthwhile hiring but that she might profitably be hired to do something better than selling perfume or costume jewelry or ladies’ lingerie. So she had been called into Jacqueline’s office, and Jacqueline in the gray chalkstripe was talking into the ivory telephone, and after a minute she cradled the instrument and smiled at Kathy, and the understanding that was later verified was a thing immediately felt.

“Miss Gait?” she said. “Sit down, please.”

Kathy sat down primly with her knees together and her hands folded on her knees. She pushed the recurrent and disturbing thought of Vera Telsa from her mind and returned Jacqueline’s smile. Jacqueline picked up some papers from the surface of her desk and tapped them with the pointed nails of one hand. Kathy could see that the papers had long columns of little squares on them. Some of the squares had neat little checks in them, and she recognized the answer sheets to the tests she had taken.

Jacqueline said, “You are trying for a position with us, I believe, Miss Gait.”

“Yes.”

“What, exactly, do you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. Nothing in particular, I guess. I thought maybe a clerking job.”

Jacqueline’s smile grew in an instant into a soft laugh, and she dropped the papers onto the desk. “My dear, I’m afraid you’re underselling yourself. I believe we can do a little better for you and for ourselves by using you in a different capacity. Can you take shorthand?”

“No.”

“Do you type?”

“A little. I’m not very good.”

“Well, no matter. There are other ways of utilizing you. Before we make an assignment, however, it will be necessary to administer a few more tests. Just to be certain that we do the right thing, you understand. Would you object to that?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Very well, then. Please report back to the gentleman who sent you here. He will know how to go ahead.”

She had reported back to the gentleman, and the gentleman had administered the additional tests, and one of the tests was something called a personality inventory. Kathy had taken a personality inventory once before, when she had entered Burlington College, and she understood that there was a mysterious sort of lie detector in the construction of it and that it was just as well in the end to tell the truth strictly, and so she had. It was this inventory that later verified for Jacqueline what was originally only felt. She told Kathy about it after quite a long time, after she had taken her to lunch several times, and to dinner, and to a kind of place that Kathy had never heard of, and eventually to the cold ivory room.

Although she was placed in a job with a future and fairly attractive pay, Kathy didn’t stay with the department store long. Just as she hadn’t stayed long at Burlington College. It was an unfortunate element of her personality that she was a drifter, if not from place to place, at least from thing to thing. She simply couldn’t sustain interest in anything for any considerable length of time. So she had given up her job with the idea that she would look for something more to her liking, but somehow she never got down to looking very seriously, and she had continued from then till now, because the inheritance from Stella permitted a certain amount of independence, living from day to day in a kind of inert routine that only Jacqueline kept from degenerating to a level of intolerable despondency.

At first, when she left the department store, she had been afraid that it would alienate Jacqueline, that it would mean the end of the sustaining relationship. But later Jacqueline had met her for cocktails and had laughed and said, “Perhaps it’s just as well, everything considered. Of course it need make no difference at all between us.” And so they continued to meet, for lunch, for dinner, for special engagements that Jacqueline arranged, though less frequently recently than before, and through it all the ivory room, and Jacqueline remained a new center of life in its new direction, as Stella and Stella’s house had been before Stella died. While it was going on, while it was happening, everything was fine, everything was justified by the quality of her mood, but afterward, when she returned alone to the small uptown apartment, she began to fall more and more frequently into deep periods of depression and despair and intense self-hatred that lasted longer and longer before they dispersed. So it was that she came slowly and painfully to the conviction that a break was necessary, and that once the break was made, her life would take still another new direction and become better and better after the first bad time. So it was that she came by delusion necessary to existence to Angus Brunn and death and a dozen soporifics.

The pill worked. Slowly, the imagery of her brain blurring and dissolving and running away, she sank softly into a sleep that was for a while undisturbed. Then, as she rose with time nearer the level of consciousness, the imagery returned distorted, unfocused by the waking mind’s eye, and she began to whimper and toss, now and then crying out, and when the strident four o’clock alarm smashed into her brain, she jerked upright in bed immediately, her heart pounding and her body bathed in sweat.

Reorienting quickly, she went into the bathroom and showered and put on fresh clothing. She had a full hour to reach the Bronze Lounge, but she hurried nevertheless, driven by the unreasonable fear that tardiness might destroy all hope at the last moment. Not until she was in a taxi on the street did she take time to look at her watch, and only then did she realize that she had forty minutes remaining for a trip that would require no more than twenty. She could wait in the lounge, however. It would be pleasant to wait there in security, to take her time with a Sidecar and anticipate the coming of Jacqueline and the miraculous dissipation of a nightmare.

The Bronze Lounge was an unimpeachable spot in a reputable section. It took its name from the type of metal with which it was embellished. There was a lot of burnished bronze grillwork and many large bronze planters in which grew green foliage with broad, shining leaves that looked as if they had been rubbed with oil. All the small items like ash-trays and match-holders and candlesticks were also bronze, or convincing imitations. There was a small dining room separated from the bar by a partition of the bronze grillwork. In the ceiling of both the bar and the dining room were many star-shaped perforations through which light was diffused softly so that one might dine or drink under a semblance of heaven.

Kathy found an empty booth at the rear of the bar which provided a clear view of the entrance. She ordered a Sidecar and waited. It was then a quarter to five, and time passed quickly to the hour. After five, however, as the fear developed that Jacqueline had changed her mind and would not come after all, the pace of time was retarded, and it required an age for the minute hand of the lighted clock above the bar to creep one hundred fifty degrees around the circumference. It was then, when despair had reached its maximum growth, that Jacqueline appeared in the entrance, paused for a moment while her pupils dilated in adjustment to shadows, and made her way to the rear where Kathy waited.

She was wearing the hard brown gabardine, and her body moved inside the severe tailoring with strong, fluid grace. She slipped into the booth across from Kathy and leaned forward to caress Kathy’s hand briefly with the tips of cool fingers. “Hello, darling. Sorry to be late. I was delayed at the last minute by an intolerable old bore in Furniture. Seems he’s having difficulty with his sales force. What are you drinking?”

“A Sidecar.”

“Oh, yes. It’s always a Sidecar, isn’t it? I’ll have one, too, I think. Are you ready for another?”

“Yes, thanks.”

Jacqueline gave the order and leaned back to wait for the cocktails. Her smooth black hair caught the light of ersatz stars, and her long, rather heavy face was softened and beautified by shifting shadows. Looking at her, feeling within herself a rising of hope and restoration, Kathy wondered what it was the face of Jacqueline suggested, and she thought immediately that it was like the face of a Renaissance Borgia, strong and dominating and touched from beneath with the mark of potential cruelty. In the atmosphere of irrational hope, there was a chill breath of more reasoned despair.

The waiter brought the Sidecars and went away. Jacqueline lifted her glass by its thin stem and tilted a swallow of the pale drink into her mouth over the frosting of powdered sugar around its rim.

“Now, darling,” she said, “why all the distress?”

Kathy looked down into her own glass, forcing sound through her constricted throat Her words, formed with difficulty, were aspirate and hoarse. “I’m in trouble, Jacqueline. Bad trouble.”

She continued to stare down into her glass, aware with a morbid sensitivity to externals of the saturated silence that followed her words. After a minute, she looked up into Jacqueline’s eyes and saw that they were suddenly withdrawn, measuring her from an incalculable distance.

“Perhaps you’d better tell me about it,” Jacqueline said.

Now that Kathy had started, it was easier to talk, but she still spoke slowly, her words fashioned with exaggerated care, formed by her lips in advance of sound and spaced too far apart. “It started with a man. His name was Angus Brunn. We met by accident in a bar, and he bought me a drink, and we talked for a little while, and later, the next day, he called me on the telephone, and I let him take me out. We went out together several times.”

For the first time, then, Jacqueline’s ivory veneer cracked. Only for an instant. The cracks healed themselves, the fragments of her expression flowing quickly together and sealing. But her voice betrayed the inner tempest “Why? In Christ’s name, why?”

“I don’t know. It’s very hard to express. Mostly it was because things kept getting worse and worse. Sometimes everything would be all right but then I’d get these terrible periods of depression when I felt dirty and defiled and hated myself and wanted to die, and these periods kept happening more and more frequently, especially when I hadn’t been with you for quite a while or had just come away from being with you, and I began to think that I’d have to do something or it would be the end of me, that I just couldn’t keep going on forever the way I was.”

The carefully modulated voice across the booth throbbed with fury and venom. “You little fool! You damned treacherous little fool! So you thought you could change yourself by letting some man paw you, is that it? So you let him violate you and ruin you, and now you come crying to me! Is that it? Damn you to hell, is that it?”

“No, Jacqueline! It wasn’t that way at all. I couldn’t go through with it, you see. That’s what I thought all right, and I tried to do it, but at the last minute I couldn’t. It was horrible. It made me sick with revulsion.”

“Good! Good, good, good, you stupid, bloody little fool!”

By that time Kathy knew, of course, that she had come to the end of her delusion. No cure, no hope. Absolution denied. But having come so far, there was nothing left to do but to continue as she had started, and so she lifted her eyes and said with a sudden, strange feeling of calm, “I killed him, Jacqueline. I killed him, and he’s lying dead in his apartment right now, unless someone has found him and taken him away.”

The suspension again, all sound and motion in abeyance, terror crouching and ready to spring. A tic, very faint and barely discernible, began to function at one corner of Jacqueline’s mouth. She stirred and whispered, “Oh, Christ, what have you done? Do you realize what this will mean? Do you understand what the police will do with you? The things they will make you say?”

“What can I do?”

Jacqueline lifted her cocktail glass and drained it. “Let me think. For Christ’s sake, let me think! You could never get away with it. Never in the world. The police will find you in no time, once they begin.” She paused, thinking, and very slowly her composure returned. There was about her now a kind of calculating wariness born of awful danger. After a while, she said, “There’s only one solution. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. You must give yourself up. Go to a police station and tell them that you have killed this man. Tell them that he attacked you and that you killed to defend yourself. Tell them you were terrified and ran away but have decided that the only way to save yourself is to tell the truth. They’ll believe you. There will be a mess, of course, a trial, but it will be a mess of your own making, and it will prevent the ruin of people who had nothing to do with it. It will prevent yours, too. If you give the police a case they can accept, they’ll do less investigating, and you’ll come out of it all right. Women always do in such cases.”

Kathy said nothing. She sat looking into her glass, and although she heard Jacqueline’s words, they were sounds without special significance, because now nothing seemed significant or worth saving, even if there were still something that could be saved, and she wished only that Jacqueline, who had sustained her so long, would go away quickly and forever.

Which is what she did. She slipped out of the booth and looked down and said, “Another thing. Don’t mention my name. If you mention my name, you will be sorry. If you mention my name, I’ll see that it’s known why you really killed this man, and you’ll have no chance at all of getting off.”

She walked away through the lounge, and it was strange that someone who had been in her turn the center of life, who had come and lingered to a wild, aberrant singing of blood, should now depart, thanks to no more than so many square yards of carpet, without making any sound whatever.