A Kiss Before Dying (3 page)

The classroom, in one of Stoddard’s new buildings, was a clean rectangle with one wall of aluminium-framed glass. Eight rows of seats faced the lecturer’s platform. There were ten grey metal seats to a row, each with a right arm that curved in and fanned to form a writing surface.

He sat at the back of the room, in the second seat from the window. The seat on his left, the window seat, the empty seat, was hers. It was the first class of the morning, a daily Social Science lecture, and their only class together this semester. The speaker’s voice droned in the sun-filled air.

Today of all days she could have made an effort to be on time. Didn’t she know he’d be frozen in an agony of suspense? Heaven or hell. Complete happiness, or the awful mess he didn’t even want to think about. He looked at his watch: 9.08. Damn her.

He shifted in his seat, fingering his key-chain nervously. He stared at the back of the girl in front of him and started to count the polka dots on her blouse.

The door at the side of the room opened quietly. His head jerked around.

She looked awful. Her face was pasty white so that the rouge was like paint. There were grey arcs under her eyes. She was looking at him the instant the door opened, and with a barely perceptible motion, she shook her head.

Oh God! He turned back to the key-chain in his fingers and stared at it, numb. He heard her coming around behind him, slipping into the seat on his left. He heard her books being put on the floor in the aisle between them, and then the scratching of a pen on paper, and finally the sound of a page being torn from a spiral-bound pad.

He turned. Her hand was extended towards him, holding a folded piece of blue-lined paper. She was watching him, her wide eyes anxious.

He took the paper and opened it in his lap:

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and turned to her, his face expressionless. Her lips made a tight nervous smile. He tried to make himself return the smile, but he couldn’t. His eyes went back to the note in his hand. He folded the paper in half, then folded it again and again, until it was a tight wad, which he placed in his pocket. Then he sat with his fingers locked firmly together, watching the lecturer.

After a few minutes, he was able to turn to Dorothy, give her a reassuring smile, and form the words ‘Don’t worry’ with silent lips.

When the bell sounded at 9.55, they left the room with the other students who were laughing and pushing and complaining about coming exams and overdue papers and dates. Outside, they moved from the crowded path and stood in the shadow of the concrete-walled building.

The colour was beginning to return to Dorothy’s cheeks. She spoke quickly. ‘It’ll be all right. I know it will. You won’t have to quit school. You’ll get more money from the government, won’t you? With a wife?’

‘A hundred and five a month.’ He couldn’t keep the sourness out of his voice.

‘Others get along on it – the ones in the trailer camp. We’ll manage.’

He put his books down on the grass. The important thing was to get time, time to think. He was afraid his knees were going to start shaking. He took her by the shoulders, smiling. ‘That’s the spirit. You just don’t worry about anything.’ He took a breath. ‘Friday afternoon we’ll go down to the Municipal—’

‘Friday?’

‘Baby, it’s Tuesday. Three days won’t make any difference now.’

‘I thought we’d go today.’

He fingered the collar of her coat. ‘Dorrie, we can’t. Be practical. There are so many things to be taken care of. I think I have to take a blood test first. I’ll have to check on that. And then, if we get married Friday we can have the weekend for a honeymoon. I’m going to get us a reservation at the New Washington House—’

She frowned indecisively.

‘What difference will three days make?’

‘I guess you’re right,’ she sighed.

‘That’s my baby.’

She touched his hand. ‘I – I know it isn’t the way we wanted it, but – you’re happy, aren’t you?’

‘Well, what do you think? Listen, the money isn’t that important. I just thought that for your sake—’

Her eyes were warm, reaching.

He looked at his watch. ‘You have a ten o’clock, don’t you?’

‘
Solamente el Español
. I can cut it.’

‘Don’t. We’ll have better reasons to cut our morning classes.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ll see you at eight,’ he said. ‘At the bench.’ Reluctantly, she turned to go. ‘Oh, Dorrie—’

‘Yes?’

‘You haven’t said anything to your sister, have you?’

‘Ellen? No.’

‘Well, you better not. Not until after we’re married.’

‘I thought I’d tell her before. We’ve been so close. I’d hate to do it without telling her.’

‘If she’s been so rotten to you the past two years—’

‘Not rotten.’

‘That was the word you used. Anyhow, she’s liable to tell your father. He might do something to stop us.’

‘What could he do?’

‘I don’t know. He would try anyway, wouldn’t he?’

‘All right. Whatever you say.’

‘Afterwards you’ll call her up right away. We’ll tell everybody.’

‘All right.’ A final smile, and then she was walking to the sunbright path, her hair glinting gold. He watched her until she disappeared behind the corner of a building. Then he picked up his books and walked away in the opposite direction. A braking car screeched somewhere, making him start. It sounded like a bird in a jungle.

Without forming a conscious decision he was cutting the rest of the day’s classes. He walked all the way through the town and down to the river, which was not blue but a dull muddy brown. Leaning on the rail of the black-girded Morton Street Bridge, he looked into the water and smoked a cigarette.

Here it was. The dilemma had finally caught up with him and engulfed him like the filthy water that pounded the abutments of the bridge. Marry her or leave her. A wife and a child and no money, or be hounded and blackballed by her father. ‘You don’t know me, sir. My name is Leo Kingship. I’d like to speak to you about the young man you have just employed – the young man your daughter is going with – I think you should know—’ Then what? There would be no place to go to but home. He thought of his mother. Years of complacent pride, patronizing sneers for the neighbours’ children, and then she sees him clerking in a dry goods store, not just for the summer, but permanently. Or even some lousy mill! His father had failed to live up to her expectations, and he’d seen what love she’d had for the old man burn itself into bitterness and contempt. Was that in store for him too? People talking behind his back. Oh Jesus! Why hadn’t the goddamned pills killed the girl?

If only he could get her to undergo an operation. But no, she was determined to get married, and even if he pleaded she’d still want to consult Ellen before taking such a drastic measure. And anyway, where would they get the money? And suppose something happened, suppose she died. He would be involved because he would have been the one who arranged for the operation. He’d be right where he started – with her father out to get him. Her death wouldn’t do him a bit of good.

Not if she died that way.

There was a heart scratched into the black paint of the railing, with initials on either side of the arrow that pierced it. He concentrated on the design, picking at it with his fingernail, trying to blank his mind of what had finally welled to the surface. The scratches had exposed cross-sections of paint layers: black, orange, black, orange, black, orange. It reminded him of the pictures of rock strata in a geology text. Records of dead ages.

Dead.

After a while he picked up his books and slowly walked from the bridge. Cars flew towards him and passed with a rushing sound.

He went into a dingy riverside restaurant and ordered a ham sandwich and coffee. He ate the sandwich at a little corner table. While sipping the coffee, he took out his memorandum book and fountain pen.

The first thing that had entered his mind was the Colt .45 he had taken on leaving the army. Bullets could be obtained with little difficulty. But assuming he wanted to do it, a gun would be no good. It would have to look like an accident, or suicide. The gun would complicate matters too much.

He thought of poison. But where would he get it? Hermy Godsen? No. Maybe the Pharmacy Building. The supply room there shouldn’t be too hard to get into. He would have to do some research at the library, to see which poison …

It would have to look like an accident or suicide, because if it looked like anything else, he would be the first one the police would suspect.

There were so many details – assuming he wanted to do it. Today was Tuesday; the marriage could be postponed no later than Friday or she might get worried and call Ellen. Friday would be the deadline. It would require a great deal of fast, careful planning.

He looked at the notes he had written:

1. Gun (n.g.)

2. Poison

    (a) Selection

   
(b) Obtaining

   
(c) Administering

   
(d) Appearance of (1) accident, or (2) suicide

Assuming, of course, that he wanted to do it. At present it was all purely speculative: he would explore the details a little. A mental exercise.

But his stride, when he left the restaurant and headed back through town, was relaxed and sure and steady.

He reached the campus at three o’clock and went directly to the library. In the card catalogue he found listed six books likely to contain the information he wanted; four of them were general works on toxicology; the other two, manuals of criminal investigation whose file cards indexed chapters on poisons. Rather than have a librarian get the books for him, he registered at the desk and went into the stacks himself.

He had never been in the stacks before. There were three floors filled with bookshelves, a metal staircase spiralling up through them. One of the books on his list was out. He found the other five without difficulty on the shelves on the third floor. Seating himself at one of the small study tables that flanked a wall of the room, he turned on the lamp, arranged his pen and memorandum book in readiness, and began to read.

At the end of an hour, he had a list of five toxic chemicals likely to be found in the Pharmacy supply room, any one of which, by virtue of its reaction time and the symptoms it produced prior to death, would be suitable for the plan whose rudimentary outline he had already formulated during the walk from the river.

He left the library and the campus, and walked in the direction of the house where he roomed. When he had gone two blocks he came upon a dress shop whose windows were plastered with big-lettered sale signs. One of the signs had a sketch of an hourglass with the legend
Last Days of Sale.

He looked at the hourglass for a moment. Then he turned around and walked back towards the campus.

He went to the University Bookstore. After consulting the mimeographed booklist tacked to the bulletin board, he asked the clerk for a copy of
Pharmaceutical Techniques
, the laboratory manual used by the advanced pharmacy students. ‘Pretty late in the semester,’ the clerk commented, returning from the rear of the store with the manual in his hand. It was a large thin book with a distinctive greenpaper cover. ‘Lose yours?’

‘No. It was stolen.’

‘Oh. Anything else?’

‘Yes. I’d like some envelopes, please.’

‘What size?’

‘Regular envelopes. For letters.’

The clerk put a pack of white envelopes on the book. ‘That’s a dollar-fifty and twenty-five. Plus tax – a dollar seventy-nine.’

The College of Pharmacy was housed in one of Stoddard’s old buildings, three storeys of ivy-masked brick. Its front had broad stone steps that led up to the main entrance. At either side of the building were steps leading down to a long corridor which cut straight through the basement, where the supply room was located. There was a Yale lock on the supply-room door. Keys to this lock were in the possession of the usual university functionaries, the entire faculty of the College of Pharmacy, and those advanced students who had received permission to work without supervision. This was the regular arrangement followed in all departments of the university which used enough equipment to necessitate the maintenance of a supply room. It was an arrangement familiar to almost everyone on campus.  

He came in at the main entrance and crossed the hall to the lounge. Two bridge games were in session and some other students sat around, reading and talking. A few of them glanced up when he entered. He went directly to the long clothes rack in the corner and put his books on the shelf above it. Removing his corduroy jacket, he hung it on one of the hooks. He took the pack of envelopes from among his books, removed three of them and folded them into his hip pocket. He put the rest of the envelopes back with the books, took the lab manual, and left the room.

He went downstairs to the basement corridor. There was a men’s room to the right of the stairwell. He entered it and, after looking under the doors to make sure the booths were empty, dropped the manual on the floor. He stepped on it a few times and then kicked it all the way across the tiled floor. When he picked it up it had lost its blatant newness. He put it on the ledge of a sink. Watching himself in the mirror, he unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt and rolled the sleeves halfway up his arms. He unfastened his collar and lowered the knot of his tie. Tucking the manual under his arm, he stepped out into the corridor.

The door to the supply room was midway between the central stairwell and one end of the corridor. On the wall a few feet beyond it was a bulletin board. He walked down to the board and stood before it, looking at the notices tacked there. He stood with his back turned slightly towards the end of the corridor, so that from the corner of his eye he could see the stairwell. He held the manual under his left arm. His right arm was at his side, fingers by his key-chain.

A girl came out of the supply room, closing the door behind her. She carried one of the green manuals and a beaker half full of a milky fluid. He watched her as she went down the corridor and turned to climb the stairs.

Some people entered from the door behind him. They walked past, talking. Three men. They went straight down the corridor and out the door at the other end. He kept looking at the bulletin board.

At five o’clock bells rang, and for a few minutes there was a great deal of activity in the hallway. It subsided quickly though, and he was alone again. One of the notices on the board was an illustrated folder about summer sessions at the University of Zurich. He began to read it.

A bald-headed man emerged from the stairwell. He had no manual, but it was apparent from the angle at which he approached and the movement of his hand towards his key-chain that he was coming to the supply room. There was, however, the look of an instructor … Putting his back towards the approaching man, he turned a page of the Zurich pamphlet. He heard the sound of a key in the door, and then the door opening and closing. A minute later, it opened and closed again, and the sound of the man’s footsteps diminished and then changed to a stair-climbing rhythm.

He resumed his former position and lit a cigarette. After one puff he dropped it and ground it under his foot; a girl had appeared, coming towards him. There was a lab manual in her hand. She had lanky brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses. She was taking a brass key from the pocket of her smock.

He lessened the pressure of the manual under his arm, letting it drop down into his left hand, conspicuous with its green cover. With a last casual finger-flick at the Zurich folder, he moved to the supply-room door, not looking at the approaching girl. He fumbled with his key-chain as though the keys had caught in the pocket’s lining. When he finally brought out the bunch of keys the girl was already at the door. His attention was on the keys, shuffling through them, apparently looking for a certain one. It seemed as though he didn’t become conscious of the girl’s presence until she had inserted her key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door partially open, smiling up at him. ‘Oh, thanks,’ he said, reaching over her to push the door wide, his other hand tucking the keys back in his pocket. He followed the girl in and closed the door behind them.

It was a small room with counters and shelves filled with labelled bottles and boxes and odd-looking apparatus. The girl touched a wall switch, making fluorescent tubes wink to life, incongruous among the room’s old-fashioned fittings. She went to the side of the room and opened her manual on a counter there. ‘Are you in Aberson’s class?’ she asked.

He went to the opposite side. He stood with his back to the girl, facing a wall of bottles. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Faint clinkings of glass and metal sounded in the room. ‘How’s his arm?’

‘About the same, I guess,’ he said. He touched the bottles, pushing them against each other, so the girl’s curiosity should not be aroused.

‘Isn’t that the craziest thing?’ she said. ‘I hear he’s practically blind without his glasses.’ She lapsed into silence.

Each bottle had a white label with black lettering. A few bore an additional label that glared poisonin red. He scanned the rows of bottles quickly, his mind registering only the red-labelled ones. The list was in his pocket, but the names he had written on it shimmered in the air before him as though printed on a gauze screen.

He found one. The bottle was a bit above eye level not two feet from where he stood.
White Arsenic
– As
₄
O
₆
s –
POISON
. It was half filled with white powder. His hand moved towards it, stopped.

He turned slowly until he could see the girl from the corner of his eye. She was pouring some yellow powder from the tray of a balance into a glass cup. He turned back to the wall and opened his manual on the counter. He looked at meaningless pages of diagrams and instructions.

At last the girl’s movements took on sounds of finality; the balance being put away, a drawer closing. He leaned more closely over the manual, following the lines of print with a careful finger. Her footsteps moved to the door. ‘So long,’ she said.

‘So long.’

The door opened and closed. He looked around. He was alone.

He took his handkerchief and the envelopes from his pocket. With the handkerchief draped over his right hand, he lifted the arsenic bottle from the shelf, put it on the counter, and removed the stopper. The powder was like flour. He poured about a tablespoonful into the envelope; it fell in whispering puffs. He folded the envelope into a tight pack, folded that into a second envelope and pocketed it. After he had stoppered and replaced the bottle he moved slowly around the room, reading the labels on drawers and boxes, the third envelope held open in his hand.

He found what he wanted within several minutes: a box filled with empty gelatine capsules, glittering like oval bubbles. He took six of them, to be on the safe side. He put them in the third envelope and slipped it gently into his pocket, so as not to crush the capsules. Then, when everything appeared as he had found it, he took the manual from the counter, turned out the lights, and left the room.

After retrieving his books and his jacket, he left the campus again. He felt wonderfully secure; he had devised a course of action and had executed its initial steps with speed and precision. Of course it was still only a tentative plan and he was in no way committed to carry it through to its goal. He would see how the next steps worked out. The police would never believe that Dorrie had taken a lethal dose of arsenic by accident. It would have to look like suicide, like obvious, indisputable suicide. There would have to be a note or something equally convincing. Because if they ever suspected that it wasn’t suicide and started an investigation, the girl who had let him into the supply room would always be able to identify him.

He walked slowly, conscious of the fragile capsules in the lefthand pocket of his trousers.

* * *

He met Dorothy at eight o’clock. They went to the Uptown, where the Joan Fontaine picture was still playing.

The night before, Dorothy had been anxious to go; her world had been as grey as the pills he had given her. But tonight – tonight everything was radiant. The promise of immediate marriage had swirled away her problems the way a fresh wind swirls away dead leaves; not only the looming problem of her pregnancy, but all the problems she had ever had; the loneliness, the insecurity. The only hint of grey remaining was the inevitable day when her father, having already been appalled by a hasty unquestioning marriage, would learn the truth about its cause. But even that seemed of trifling importance tonight. She had always hated his unyielding morality and had defied it only in secrecy and guilt. Now she would be able to display her defiance openly, from the security of a husband’s arms. Her father would make an ugly scene of it, but in her heart she looked forward to it a little.

She envisioned a warm and happy life in the trailer camp, still warmer and happier when the baby came. She was impatient with the motion picture, which distracted her from a reality more beautiful than any movie could ever be.

He, on the other hand, had not wanted to see the picture on the previous night. He was not fond of movies, and he especially disliked pictures that were founded on exaggerated emotions. Tonight, however, in comfort and darkness, with his arm about Dorothy and his hand resting lightly on the upper slope of her breast, he relished the first moments of relaxation he had known since Sunday night, when she had told him she was pregnant.

He surrendered all his attention to the picture, as though answers to eternal mysteries were hidden in the windings of its plot. He enjoyed it immensely.

* * *

Afterwards he went home and made up the capsules.

He funnelled the white powder from a folded sheet of paper into the tiny gelatine cups, and then fitted the slightly larger cups that were the other halves of the capsules over them. It took him almost an hour, since he ruined two capsules, one squashed and the other softened by the moisture of his fingers, before he was able to complete two good ones.

When he was finished, he took the damaged capsules and the remaining capsules and powder into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. He did the same with the paper from which he had poured the arsenic and the envelopes in which he had carried it, first tearing them into small pieces. Then he put the two arsenic capsules into a fresh envelope and hid them in the bottom drawer of his bureau, under the pyjamas and the Kingship Copper pamphlets, the sight of which brought a wry smile to his face.

One of the books he had read that afternoon had listed the lethal dose of arsenic as varying from one-tenth to one-half of a gram. By rough computation, he estimated that the two capsules contained a total of five grams.