Wall of Eyes

Chapter 11

The woman opened her mouth to scream again. Higgins said, “Shut up!” and crawled to his feet. The woman’s mouth stayed open but no sound emerged.

“I fell,” Higgins said, brushing off his trousers. When he talked his jaw hurt but he didn’t mind, it had worked out all right.

“The floor’s too slippery,” he said. “It’s a wonder you girls don’t break your necks.”

“What... what are you doing back here? Joey’s got rules about that.” She had a deep coarse voice.

“I wanted to talk to one of the girls,” Higgins said easily.

“Which one?”

“You.”

“Me?” She took a step back. “I don’t know you. You better get out before I call Joey.”

“I don’t think you’ll want to call Joey. This is just between you and me.”

“I’ve got to go now. That’s my music.”

“Go ahead.”

He stepped back and she went past him through the curtain walking with fast nervous steps. There was a smattering of applause, the orchestra was muted, the woman began to sing, “Oh, there’s a lull in my life.” She sang it badly, keeping a little ahead of the orchestra as if she were trying to hurry it along.

She came back in five minutes. She looked more sure of herself than she had before. She had been thinking during the lull in her life.

“I want to talk to you about a friend of yours,” Higgins said. “You know what friend I mean?”

“No idea. Cop, are you?”

“Inspector Higgins, Miss Rosen. I’m looking for Tony Murillo.”

“So am I,” Mamie said. “And for his own good I hope you get there first.”

So it’s going to be like that, Higgins thought. He said, “We haven’t seen Murillo for some time, nearly ten years. Thought we’d look him up. You didn’t know him ten years ago?”

“No.”

“He’d just got two years for peddling reefers. I want to see him.”

“What for?”

“Questioning. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Living with him, aren’t you?”

“Now and then,” Mamie said coolly. “Off and on.”

Joey came in through the side door. “You stank,” he said to Mamie. “What in hell’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” Mamie said.

Joey turned to Higgins. “Policeman, eh? What have we done now? Where’s Stevie?”

“Mr. Jordan took a walk to cool off,” Higgins said. “He probably won’t be back tonight.”

“What’s going on here?” Joey demanded. “What right have the cops got to come in and bust up my show?”

“Don’t get excited,” Higgins said. “We wanted to talk to Mr. Jordan, that’s all. Now I want to talk to Miss Rosen. Alone.”

“Well, by Jesus, couldn’t you pick some other time? You frighten her half to death so she can only squawk when she should be singing, and you take Jordan...”

“Jordan went under his own steam,” Higgins said, “and I’d still like to talk to Miss Rosen alone.”

“What about?”

“Her boy friend.”

Joey whirled savagely toward Mamie. “For Christ’s sake didn’t I tell you if you didn’t keep away from that wop I was going to fire you? Every couple of months you show up all messed up with a black eye and a split lip and I should pay you for it! I’m in business. I’m not running a convalescent home for...” He took another step toward her. “Tell this cop where Murillo is. I want to see him in jail where he belongs. Tell hint.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Mamie whispered. “I don’t know.”

Joey stared at her for a minute, then he turned back to Higgins and said calmly, “Murillo’s probably hiding out in her room. She lives on Charles Street. Tell him the number, Mamie.”

“A hundred and ten,” Mamie said. “But he’s not there.”

“Not now he isn’t,” Joey said grimly. “But he’ll be back. Once a guy like Murillo finds a sucker like Mamie he don’t let go easy. He’ll be back.”

“He didn’t come back last night,” Mamie said. “I think he’s out of town on business.”

“Business!” Joey shouted.

“I’ll handle this,” Higgins said, waving Joey away. “Relax.”

“I’ll relax when you tell me where Jordan is and when he’s coming back.”

“I don’t know,” Higgins said. “Wait and see.”

“Wait and see, hell! What did he do?”

“Possibly he did a murder,” Higgins said thoughtfully. “We’d like to know.”

Joey walked stiffly to the door. He was cursing under his breath. He cursed them all, Mamie and Higgins and Jordan and Murillo. They were trying to ruin him, send him to the poorhouse. He slammed the door and put his hand in his pocket to jingle the loose change he always kept there so he could listen to the sweet clink of nickels.

“So he was out of town,” Higgins said. “You didn’t see him last night.”

“Someone else was with me,” Mamie said. “I can prove it. When I woke up yesterday noon Tony was gone. He never told me where he was going or what he did. He said it was none of my business.” She dabbed at her eyes. “What did he do? Tell me what he did.”

“Who was with you?”

“Stevie.”

“Jordan?”

“Yes.”

“All night?”

Mamie blew her nose delicately. Her eyes above the handkerchief were wary.

“Not in the way you mean,” she said.

“I don’t care what he did there! I want to know if he was there.”

“Why do you want to know?” He just kept looking at her and she knew stalling wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She said, “He drove me home.”

“And stayed?”

“Not then. He went away and came back.”

“When did he come back?”

“I don’t know. Late, I guess.”

“How late?”

“I don’t know. I had a bottle of rye and I wasn’t paying much attention to the time. I was just sitting there and...”

“Why did Jordan come back?”

“For a drink.”

“We found a full quart of scotch in his car.”

Her eyes hardened. “You did, did you?”

“Maybe he likes to drink up other people’s liquor first, eh?”

She didn’t answer.

“I guess he figured if Murillo could use you so could he, eh?”

“Use me,” she echoed in a tight voice. He let that sink in and he could see it was sinking in from the way her body seemed to grow rigid and taller.

“For a sucker,” Higgins said.

“Who was murdered?” she said at last.

“A girl, a blind girl.”

“Blind? Not...” She gulped. “Who was she?”

“Kelsey Heath.”

“Kelsey Heath,” Mamie said. “Heath.”

“She was killed about three or three-thirty in the morning.”

“How?”

“With a knife.”

She rubbed the damp spot under her breasts.

“We know Jordan was up there,” Higgins said, “about that time. No law against that, of course. But we have to check up on him because we found that the front door of the Heaths’ house had been left unlocked. An outsider could have killed her. So we tried Jordan out.”

“And he ran away,” Mamie said.

“He might just have been nervous,” Higgins said. “He didn’t have any motive for killing the girl.”

“Oh, didn’t he?” Mamie said in a hard voice.

“We don’t know of any.”

“Well, you should of been around last night when he was talking in his sleep. Kelsey Heath. Do you know who Kelsey Heath is? She’s the girl who killed Geraldine.” She paused to look slyly over at Higgins. “Well, you want to know about it? Kelsey Heath was driving the car. There were four of them in it but Geraldine was the one who was killed. Stevie went to see the car when it was in the garage, he went to see the blood on it, that’s how crazy it made him. You got a cigarette?”

Higgins gave her one and lit it. She inhaled, letting the smoke curl out through her nose. “Well, that would of been all right, he would of gotten over Geraldine dying. But it’s happened again. Johnny Heath has taken another girl away from him. You saw her in the show, a thin little thing who does handsprings and gives herself airs. Thinks she’s Jesus Christ’s first cousin. Well anyway, Stevie likes her, and he’s just beginning to get some place when Johnny Heath starts coming in and sees Marcie.”

Higgins said, “Geraldine was Jordan’s girl?”

“She slept with him. When Johnny Heath started to take her out she left Stevie flat, moved right out on him.”

Higgins smiled at the shock and reproof in her voice. Mamie would never walk out on her man. One hundred and ten Charles Street had better be watched very carefully. Murillo, like any other criminal big or small, would try to get to his girl after a crime.

“Well, a man don’t like that,” Mamie was saying. “If he does the walking out himself, well that’s different, he’s still got his self-respect. Women don’t need that kind of selfrespect, we get it from other things like nice clothes and hair-dos. Maybe if men could dress different, fix themselves up like, they wouldn’t be so touchy.”

Higgins agreed with her. “Jordan was touchy, was he?”

“Not more than most, I guess, but when you lose two girls to the same man it throws you. He acted funny when he drove me home, he kept bringing up Geraldine all the time. She’s been dead for two years now and I think when someone’s been dead for two years you ought to let her stay dead. But Stevie said it would happen again. He said Johnny Heath would come some night and take Marcie out and there’d be another accident — a lot of crazy talk like that.”

“Threatening talk?”

“Yeah, but not against the girl, Kelsey Heath. It was all against Johnny Heath himself. Well, he drove me home and I got out and went in the house. About an hour later...”

“What time?”

“Maybe four. He came back again and said he wanted to come in and have a drink. Him with all that scotch in the car, the damn cheapskate. So I let him in because — well, I was just sitting there anyway, might as well have company. He came in and we finished the rye and he went to sleep on the couch. That was when he talked in his sleep. He kept talking about Johnny Heath. I had to wake him up.”

She stopped and fished around inside her dress for her handkerchief. As soon as she found the handkerchief the tears came to her eyes. Perfect synchronization, Higgins thought, and a talent for tears. He watched her big soft eyes and then his gaze traveled down to her mouth. It was pulled tight and thin.

“I hate to rat on Stevie like this,” she said through the handkerchief. “But he said Johnny Heath had killed Geraldine, murdered her. When I woke him up he said he had to phone Marcie, that’s the one who does handsprings, and see if she was all right. I told him he couldn’t phone from the house at that time of morning because that’s my landlady’s rule. He went out to phone from a drugstore and never came back. That’s all.”

She replaced the handkerchief, smiled brightly at Higgins and turned to walk away.

“No, it isn’t all,” Higgins said grimly. “Come back here.”

“I have to go and change.”

“I want Murillo.”

“I swear to God I don’t know where he is,” Mamie cried. “I swear it. He never told me anything like that! There’d be weeks when I never heard from him at all.”

“He lived with you, didn’t he?”

“Sometimes. I told you, sometimes. But I guessed he had another place.”

“A hideout.”

“I guess.”

“And you never tried to find out where it was?”

She looked at him defiantly. “I tried, all right! What do you think I’m made of? I thought he might... might have another woman. So I asked him. And you know what that got me? A sock on the jaw. So I quit trying.”

“Murillo still smoke?”

“Smoke?”

“Jujus.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know anything at all about marihuana, I suppose?”

“Not a thing.”

They were still trying to stare each other down when Joey strode through the door again.

“Still here?” he said to Higgins. “Go and get dressed, Mamie. Tell Marcie Moore she’s wanted on the phone.”

Mamie disappeared, and a minute later Marcie came out of the dressing room. She wore the same costume and she had the black cape clutched tight around her body.

She looked uncertainly from Joey to Higgins.

“Phone,” Joey said.

“Who?” Marcie asked.

“Do I usually ask who?” Joey barked. “And you can tell the girls for me that this is the last time any of you are getting calls up front. Use the pay telephone. That’s what it’s for.”

“Yes.” Marcie slid past him.

She looked out of place in the club, Higgins decided. Not too innocent, exactly, or too young. Just earnest and humorless and proud. A one-track mind and that track a career. Her eyes were harder than Mamie’s.

She gave Higgins another fleeting glance and walked swiftly through the door. There was a small passageway and then the main room itself. She stayed close to the wall. The tables this far from the floor were not full and no one noticed her.

Joey’s office was a dingy cubbyhole beside the checkroom, furnished with a secondhand desk, a swivel chair, a paint-peeled filing cabinet and a small safe. Joey never spent money where it didn’t show.

Marcie closed the door behind her and picked up the phone, leaning against the desk. For an instant she couldn’t speak, then she drew in her breath and said softly, “Hello.”

“Hello. Marcie?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Johnny.”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“You don’t sound very happy about it,” Johnny said. “Anything the matter?”

“Matter?” The phone trembled in her hand. “Oh, no, nothing’s the matter! Except that you had to drag me into this mess!”

“Marcie, for God’s sake!”

“And don’t you swear at me,” she said shrilly. “This is going to ruin me, do you understand? If I get mixed up in this I’ll never get another chance. Can’t you leave me alone?”

“Of course,” Johnny said. “Of course.”

He hung up quietly. For a minute he stood smiling dryly at the mouthpiece as if it were Marcie herself. Well anyway, thank God there were no policemen listening in to that one.

He walked out of the kitchen, hot damning her or saying to hell with her, simply turning a page in his mind. She wants me to let her alone. So I’ll let her alone.

He went back to Alice and Philip in the drawing room. The three of them had been there all evening. They had been asked not to leave the house, so they had sat talking, discussing, plunging into the uneasy silences, gnawing at each other’s nerves. They had gone over everything Sands had asked and everything they had answered.

“Well?” Alice said.

“I phoned her,” Johnny said slowly, “and she made it clear that I wasn’t to phone again. I think I’d like a drink.”

“You’ll have to make it yourself,” Alice said. “Maurice is in bed.”

“I can ring for Ida.”

She said sharply, “Make it yourself. I don’t want Ida around any more tonight. I’ve given her notice. She’ll be leaving sometime tomorrow.”

“Then she might as well make herself useful tonight.” Johnny rang the bell. “Phil, relax for once and join me.”

“No, thanks.” Philip didn’t raise his head. He was sitting stiffly in a high-backed chair, his hands grasping the arms of the chair, his feet planted firmly on the floor. Only his neck seemed to have weakened sand could not support his head.

He looks ridiculous, Alice thought, so comically dignified. Even though there was no one there to laugh at him she couldn’t let him stay like that. She must sting him into moving.

“Have a drink,” she said. “You won’t sleep well tonight, will you, Philip?” He didn’t move or speak. “Philip, will you hand me...?” She couldn’t think of anything for him to hand her. She put her hand up to her mouth.

Johnny stared at her. “What’s the matter with you tonight?”

Her anger at Philip for looking foolish and at herself for not being able to stop him, instantly transferred itself to Johnny.

“Nothing,” she said gratingly. “Nothing’s the matter with me. I didn’t know anyone considered me human enough to have something the matter!”

“You talk like a damned spinster.”

“That’s what I am! Exactly. A damned spinster. On behalf of my class, Johnny, I thank you, because you’ve done a lot for spinsters. More, I think, than your share, and perhaps not in the approved fashion...”

“Keep quiet,” Johnny said harshly. “If anyone needs a drink you do. I don’t know what’s got into you.”

Alice threw back her head and laughed. She stopped as abruptly as she had begun and when she turned to Johnny the tears were wriggling down her cheeks like bright worms.

“Sex,” she said. “I guess that’s what’s got into me. Go ahead and look pained, Johnny. It’s a word I’m not supposed to know, isn’t it? Everybody else can know it but not Alice. It might interfere with my duties as housekeeper and nursemaid. Well, I’ve had a lot of experience in this house. I could go out now and manage a hotel, an orphanage, an insane asylum or a home for wayward girls! Come in.”

Ida bumped the door open with her rear and bounced across the room. The tray tinkled, the glasses skated, Ida’s breasts rode her in cross-rhythm like twin riders on a galloping horse.

She set the tray down on the small table beside Alice.

“Here’s the drinks,” she said, “ma’am.”

“Thank you,” Alice said. “That will be all.”

Ida had intended to go directly and peacefully to bed, but she felt the crack of the whip in Alice’s voice and it stung her into defiance. She was just as good as Alice was. Alice had no power over her; she, Ida could say whatever she wanted to, and if they tried force to get her out she’d simply go and tell the police. She’d have the law on them.

Though Ida’s alliance with the law was new, having begun that morning when a policeman smiled at her, it was as strong as her allegiance to God. It made her swell with power. She had God and the law on her side, she was strong enough now to stand up to Alice.

But she was too cautious to attack directly. She said, “A terrible tragedy. That’s what the policemen said and that’s what I say, a terrible tragedy.”

She looked expectantly around the room. Neither of the men paid any attention to her.

Alice said curtly, “Have you packed your bags?”

Her voice slapped the blood into Ida’s face. “Well, and if that’s all the thanks I get for my sympathy...”

“You may go to your room. We won’t be needing you any longer.”

“And don’t think I didn’t hear what you said about me being a wayward girl! I could have the law on you! Nobody can ever say anything about my morals.”

“I’m sure of it,” Alice said.

Johnny said gravely, “Morels. An edible fungus found on the twenty-fourth of May.”

Philip smiled slightly. Ida watched them, speechless with rage. They were laughing at her. These people, for all they were on the wrong side of God and the law, were laughing at her.

“You’ll laugh on the other side of your faces,” she said at last. But her voice wasn’t as loud as she meant it to be. To make up for it she swung round with an exaggerated gesture of defiance, a toss of her head, a lift of one shoulder and a little wag of her buttocks.

Alice called her back sharply.

“Ida!”

Ida stopped but didn’t turn her head.

“I don’t want any more threats or hints from you, Ida,” Alice said quietly. “It might help you to keep your mouth shut if I tell you that one of the policemen found traces of morphine on Kelsey’s hands. You know what that means, Ida. It means that she tried to kill herself. And where did she get the morphine, Ida?”

Ida turned and ran down the hall. Alice followed her as far as the door, shouting, “From you! She got it from you! You helped her!”

There was no answer, but the diminishing sound of running feet. Alice shut the door and leaned against it, suddenly weary and without hope.

The two men were staring at her.

“What did you mean?” Philip said hoarsely. “Where did you find that out?”

Alice walked slowly back into the room. She looked deliberately at Philip. “I eavesdropped.”

“You what?” Johnny said.

There was shock in his face. Alice felt that in a minute he would say, “That’s not cricket!” not because he disapproved of eavesdropping but because it was she, Alice, who had done it.

They don’t think I’m human. They expect so much of me, all of them expect too much of me and always have.

“I eavesdropped,” she repeated, finding a certain pleasure in the word now. “The police wouldn’t tell me anything and I felt it was my right to know. They — just took her away — in a basket — and I had nothing to say about the funeral or the autopsy or inquest. They asked me questions and refused to answer any of mine.”

“High-handed,” Johnny said, “as usual.”

“What can you expect?” Philip said. “Any one of us might have...” His voice faded, emerged again. “Why did she want to kill herself? Because I said I was going away? She knew I wouldn’t go, she knew I couldn’t leave her.”

Alice took the glass Johnny gave her. It was easier to talk to Philip if she had a glass to stare into, somewhere to look so she wouldn’t have to look at his face, so strangely formless now that he no longer had Kelsey to fight against or to live for.

“She tried to kill herself,” Alice said, “for the same reason other people do. Life didn’t suit her. She couldn’t have been content with half-measures. She wouldn’t even try.” She kept her voice calm. “What are we going to do about — her dog?”

“Send him back,” Johnny said. “It takes a long time to train them and it wouldn’t be fair to keep him.” He gulped his drink and his hands were shaking.

Alice stared into her glass. Queer, they could talk about Kelsey and Kelsey’s blindness almost with detachment, but they couldn’t mention the dog without weighting the air with tears. It was as if the dog was a symbol and the symbol had become stronger and realer than what it stood for.

“Better have a drink, Philip,” she said without looking at him.

“No. No, I don’t want — but I’d like...”

“Go ahead and play something if you want to. It will make you feel better.”

“I’d... if you wouldn’t mind...”

Don’t let him cry now, Alice thought. He’s such a fool already, don’t let him cry and break down.

“Something loud,” she said. “There’s too much softness in this house, too much whispering, tiptoeing...”

The policeman, sitting on a garden bench at the side of the house, heard the music. Of course it was kind of funny to hear music in a house of mourning, but if they have it why not something snappy? He began to whistle softly, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”

Mr. Heath heard it and moved to the window to listen. Philip was playing wildly tonight. Dashing brilliant inaccuracy, that was Philip. He had never been as good as Isobel thought he was — but why tell Isobel? And there was no point in telling Philip, he knew it already. He had never arranged a third concert.

He pictured Philip at the piano. How strange he looked when he played, his eyes wild as a tiger’s. You could hardly believe it was Philip.

Mr. Heath smiled and said aloud, “Tiger, tiger, burning bright. Little lamb, who made thee?”