What Happened to Lisa?

Chapter III

Pickens reached out and caught a handful of my hair. He twisted my head over hard. I grabbed his wrist, tried to bring my body around, break his grip and snap him down on the bed. But I still had not recovered to that degree. I lacked the strength, and he chuckled as he saw that I was for the moment powerless.

“We’ll never permit you to meet her,” he said. “And we’ll find her. You should have leveled with me in your hotel room, Holloway. I don’t like you for that. Not one damn bit!” He twisted his hand, driving pain through my head that set me gagging again. “Now where is she, Holloway?”

“Wait a minute, Pickens!” Gardiner seemed to have taken all that he could. His eyes bulged; sweat was pouring off of him. “There must be a better way than this.”

He forced himself to waddle to the bed, stood looking down at me. I couldn’t help but stare him in the face, the way Pickens had my head twisted back.

“You’re a strange nut, Holloway,” Gardiner said. “Don’t you know when you’re licked? You could make a good piece of change right now for yourself. How would two thousand dollars sound?”

When I didn’t speak, Gardiner’s face became suffused with angry color. The power of his checkbook had never been questioned before.

“After all, it isn’t as if we were planning anything crooked, Holloway. We have a perfect right to know where she is. Her father and I wouldn’t dream of doing anything mean to her.”

“Except trade her the way you would a bitch dog,” I said.

Gardiner clenched his hand. He said, “Damn you!” It sounded like the petulant shrilling of a spoiled, bratty child.

Pickens glanced at him. “Now maybe you’ll agree with my method. Want me to hit him?”

“No,” Gardiner said in a thin voice. “Hold him. I’ll hit him.”

He punched. My lips went numb from the blow. But I didn’t lose a tooth and he barely drew blood. He had the strength of a pot of mush.

Contempt was in Tickens’s face. “I think you’d better let me earn my own fee.”

Gardiner stood back, rubbing his knuckles. He was gasping, and his face looked dull and loose.

A knock sounded on the door and Jones’s voice identified him. Gardiner unlocked the door. Jones entered the room, his face set and white, and he brought an utter stillness.

“The Rogersville police have found her,” he said. “In the river. What was left of her. She was still wearing her ring and watch. The fish and river scavengers left that much at least for me to identify her by.”

I was unimportant now. Pickens released me, and I supported myself spread-armed on the bed, hearing the words of Jones over and over. Gardiner put his face in his hands and began crying like a child.

Jones moved slowly through the heat hush to the bed. “You’re the cause of her coming here, Holloway.”

His first punch knocked me flat. He bent over the bed and I saw his fists flying at me. This wasn’t mush-armed Gardiner punching, either. How many times Jones struck I don’t know. The second blow knocked me into a dead, dark world of unconsciousness...

I awoke in heat-sticky blackness of night. I lay with my eyes open, smelling the sour stench of the room, hearing the hustle of traffic below.

A slow constriction began taking hold of my throat. I was seeing her in the dark waters of the river. Jones and Gardiner were reclaiming what was left of her from the morgue. I hated them, my guts in knots, for driving her to this end.

And the man who’d killed her — I didn’t possess enough hatred for him. That tightness in my throat choked my breath off for a moment. I would eat only to have strength to hunt him down. I would sleep only when my flesh surrendered to exhaustion. I’d never quit, never stop, no matter what the cost. He was a doomed man, and there was no way out for him.

A vile, unholy thing, that kind of thirst for vengeance. An uncivilized, primitive thing that belonged in the jungle. The raw power of it drove me to my feet.

I went out of the room, found a bathroom at the end of the hall, and washed the worst of my grime and pain away in cold water.

Then I went down to the street. It was nearly midnight.

I missed the trio at the morgue. Her body had already been released to her father. I rode a second cab to the station and there under a freight shed in the darkness I found Gardiner keeping a lone vigil.

Near him stood a baggage truck holding a black-draped casket. I walked up to him, and he took a hard breath.

“I’m sorry, Holloway. Our roughing you up didn’t do any good, did it?” He looked at me, and blinked at tears in his eyes. “She would have married you, wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know. I never asked her. Our difference in social position, my belief that she acted for me through a sense of duty, seemed important once.”

“What was she to you, Holloway? I’ve got to know!”

“No,” I said, “you don’t.”

He was trembling, staring into my eyes. “Yes! Why this attachment for her? Why this willingness to take a beating, to go to the most extreme lengths for her?” His words became a soft scream. “What did she do for you, Holloway?”

I looked at the casket. “Okay, Gardiner, maybe you suspect something of the truth. But you mustn’t think evil of her. So here it is. She gave me back my belief in my manhood. In France I stepped on an anti-personnel mine. You know what those things can do to you? The doctors who operated and did the skin grafting tried to convince me that I’d be the same afterward. But I didn’t believe them. I was convinced they were handing me patter to get me well enough to empty the bed for the next man. I imagined crazy things happening to me, my hair growing long, my voice changing. She knew and understood what I was going through. And when I left the hospital she was there, ready with all her warmth to prove to me — in the one sure way it could be proved — that I was still a complete man.”

Gardiner stared at me, his face going to pieces. I heard him sobbing as I walked off the freight shed platform.

There was a small office in Police Headquarters occupied by a lean lieutenant of detectives who looked like a sandy-haired college track star. Ed Ransom was his name.

He rocked back in his swivel chair and said he’d talked to Jones. “He admitted following you here, roughing you up. He said you might even file assault charges.”

“That can wait. Have you got anything?”

He shrugged. “You’re a newspaper man and know what we’re facing. This kind of killing often slips into the unsolved file. She must have been killed for that sizable chunk of cash she was carrying. A tramp, or a mugger.”

“How about the attacks on her the week before she disappeared?”

“She was upset by her mother’s death. Her father explained that.”

A dribble of sweat crawled down my cheek. “I deny that Lisa suffered delusions! She was as level-headed as—”

“Calm down, Holloway. I didn’t call it delusions. But she was certainly emotionally upset, enough to imagine things for the moment.”

“And she came here and was killed by a tramp for the money she was carrying.”

“It holds water. And remember your press card isn’t worth a damn here.”

His tone was a flat dismissal. I left to phone my paper...

Brilliant sunlight was boiling through the window of my hotel room when I awoke. I was stiff and sore. After a few minutes I crawled out of bed, flexed my muscles, and padded into the shower. The cold sting of the water made me feel better.

While I was having breakfast at a restaurant near the hotel, I saw Pickens. He was lounging in a doorway across the street.

So Jones had left him behind. I thought of the manhandling he’d given me last night and the food grew sour in my stomach. I went out on the street, turned west. Now and then I tried to spot him, but didn’t see him. I walked to Headquarters, sidled over to the side of the swinging double doors once I was inside.

Pickens walked along the front of an office building, took up a stance just beyond a sidewalk news stand. He smoked patiently, figuring that I would be checking with Ransom for some time.

Just then Ransom himself came down the corridor into the vestibule. He was red-eyed and haggard. He worked the twelve to eight trick, but today he had two hours’ overtime under his belt and his temper showed on his face.

He stopped when he saw me.

I said, “I’ve thought it over. I want to swear out that warrant.”

“For Jones?”

“No, for Pickens.”

“So get your warrant and have the Clearview cops pick him up.”

“He didn’t go back. He’s across the street now, waiting for me.”

That brought a show of interest to Ransom’s eyes.

“Convinced now that Jones is hiding something?” I asked.

“I’m convinced that he doesn’t want a lot of notoriety stirred up. But go on and get your warrant. I doubt if we’ll have Pickens in jail more than a few minutes before he makes bond.” He turned away, turned back again. “We’ve been grilling bums all night. You’ve got a story. We picked up a tramp, a known mugger, who’s been spending some sugar the past few days. We found a woman’s zipper wallet in his room. I’m sure it was Lisa’s.”

His eyes challenged me to digest that as he took his departure.

I swore out the warrant for Pickens and got the rest of the story on the tramp from a dick named Blake Hannrihan. The tramp claimed, he’d found the wallet on the bridge. It was possible. The wallet might have fallen from her purse when she’d been thrown over. But would the tramp have kept the wallet? Why hadn’t he removed the money and got rid of the wallet if he’d killed her?

Hannrihan assured me that you never knew what such characters would do. I phoned a rewrite man from the press room at Headquarters. Then I walked back out into the sunlight.

I didn’t know how long I would be free of Pickens. Today, tomorrow, or the next day I’d turn around and he would be there, I knew.

I flagged a taxi, slid into the rear seat, and asked the driver, “You know a place called The Dive?”

“Yeah, but the place ain’t open this time of day.”

“I’ll go anyway — for the ride.”

The Dive was just around the corner from a block of smart dress shops, in a good section of town. I suspected then that the name was a misnomer, a deliberate effort to spice up a tony and high-priced joint. The exterior of the club was of pale blue crystal, but I guessed that inside the motif would lean, in a sophisticated way, toward the name. Checkered tablecloths, candles stuck in the necks of brandy and wine bottles, the hat check and cigarette girls dressed like French apaches.

On a small billboard near the opaque blue doors was a shot of the interior of the club, bearing out my supposition. Beside the interior shot and overshadowing it was a full length shot of a tall blonde dressed in a low cut black dress. Over her picture was the caption:

And beneath it, the one word:

It gave me a kind of lost feeling to look at the blonde’s picture. For she reminded me of Lisa. Of course Lisa’s hair had been black, the slant of the eyebrows was different, the shadows of the cheek-bones and the width of the lips were not the same, yet an intangible something brought Lisa to life in my mind as I looked at the picture.

I closed my eyes for a moment and wondered if it would always be like this. Seeing Lisa whenever I looked at a woman of the same size and build, with the same haunted expression in her face. This never again being quite free of Lisa.