After the First Death (16 page)

“Well, I told you I was crazy.” She considered that. “What happened was I decided to trust you.”

“I trust you, too.”

“What’s to trust? What could I do to you?”

“Call the police.”

“Me?” She laughed. “The police and I”—holding up two fingers pressed together—“are not exactly like this.”

“Even so.”

“I hate to tell you this, I’m not proud of it, but I’ve been arrested. I’ve been in jail. Not just once. A few times.”

“That must be rough.”

“Rough! You know the House of Detention? In the Village?”

“I know where it is.”

She turned her eyes away. “I shouldn’t mention it. You can’t think much of me.”

“I was inside just once, but for a lot longer than you.”

“It’s different.”

“Maybe in some ways. I think I understand you better than you think, Jackie. You don’t have to worry about what you say to me.”

Long silence. Then, “There’s worse.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you probably know it already. One of the reasons I couldn’t stay at the hotel forever, I had to come back here.”

During the past few minutes her eyes had been running, and she had been sniffing nervously. I knew what was coming.

“You saw my arms.”

“Sure.”

“Well, then, you know.”

“Sure. You use stuff.”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

A longer silence this time. Then, “I have to fix now. I don’t want you to see me. It would make you sick.”

“No, it wouldn’t”

“I don’t mean sick, I mean you wouldn’t like me, seeing it. I want to go in the other room.”

“All right.”

“Alex?”

“What?”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

“All right.”

“You’ll stay here? You won’t leave? Because I think maybe I can help you. I mean finding out who did it. You won’t go?”

“Where would I go?”

“I don’t know. Away, I guess.”

“I won’t go anywhere.”

“Good.” She was rubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. She got to her feet and walked quickly out of the room. “I’ll be right back, Alex. I won’t be more than a minute, I’ll be right back.”

18

T
HE CHANGE WAS INSTANTLY VISIBLE WHEN SHE RETURNED, IT
was much more than a matter of pupil dilation. Her face, nervous and animated before she fixed, was now profoundly relaxed. She walked slowly, as if with cushioned feet, and her shoulders drooped. She sat on the couch, her feet out in front of her, and said, “Too bright, too bright,” and I went around turning off lights.

After awhile she said, “I was off for a whole year. I wasn’t working. There was this man. He lived in Scarsdale. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes.”

“I was never there. Is it nice?”

“Yes.”

“He was married. He paid for my apartment and gave me money, and I didn’t see anybody else. I saw him during the day, or sometimes he would stay over.” She closed her eyes. Her cigarette burned down, and I took it from between her fingers and put it out. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. “I was in love with him,” she said.

Her voice was very soft and she spoke slowly, levelly. Only her lips moved. Before she had talked with her hands, but now they remained still in her lap.

“An hour here, an hour there. And during the summer he always took his wife to Europe for two months. He would send the children to a camp in New England and take his wife to Europe, every summer. So this one summer, when we were seeing each other, he was going to give me a trip. He would let me buy a new wardrobe and he would arrange a trip for me to Puerto Rico. He would take care of the hotel and the airplane ticket and everything, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I was very excited about this. Are you from New York, Alex?”

“No.”

“Where?”

“Ohio.”

“Is it nice there?”

“Not especially.”

“Oh. But I’m from New York, see, and I was never anyplace. Always here in New York. So I was very excited about the trip, and I started shopping for clothes, and then this man explained to me that his business was bad and he couldn’t afford to pay for the trip. He could give me some money, but not enough for the trip.” The eyes closed again. I smoked half a cigarette, and then, eyes still shut, she said, “He could still send his kids to that camp and take his wife to Europe, but he couldn’t afford the trip for me. See?”

“I see.”

“So I was very hurt, Alex, and when he came back from Europe I didn’t live there any more. I started working again, tricking, and I started using stuff again, and I stopped being in love with him, and when he came back I didn’t live there any more.”

She fell silent again. I looked at her and wanted to touch her face.

She said, “Everybody needs a crutch, that’s all Everybody has his own hang-up.” She opened her eyes. “Here I’m telling you things I don’t ever tell anybody. Alex? How come you picked me up?”

“I wanted to find out if—”

“No no no. I saw you on the street, you know, back and forth, back and forth. There were a lot of girls out tonight What made you pick me?”

“You were the prettiest.”

She opened her eyes very wide and turned a little toward me. Truth is perhaps contagious; I had not meant to tell her that had tried to avoid telling it to myself, but it had come out. She studied my eyes very closely.

“You’re a very nice person, Alex.”

I looked at her and didn’t know what to do.

“Yes,” she said, very softly, to the question I had not asked. “I would like it very much, Alex.”

So I kissed her.

She kissed greedily, eagerly, like a yearning schoolgirl in a parked car. She kissed warm and wet and tightened her arms around my neck. She kissed sweet and soft, and I rubbed the back of her neck and stroked her like a frightened kitten.

We walked drunkenly to her little bedroom and stopped to kiss in the doorway. She sighed, and murmured my name. We entered the bedroom and left the lights out. We undressed. She drew down the bedclothing and we lay down on the bed together.

“Well, it took awhile, but here we are. Who would of guessed?”

“Shhhh.”

“Alex—”

We kissed, and she clung to me, and I felt the awesome softness of her. Every bit of her was soft and smooth. I could not stop touching her. I touched her breasts, her belly, her back, her bottom, her legs. I loved the way she felt.

She lay quite still, eyes closed, body at peace, in the sweet inertia of heroin, while I wrote song lyrics on all the delights of her flesh. I stroked her and kissed her, and at length her body began to make sweet abbreviated movements, and her breathing matched these movements in rhythm. She made small noises, sweet dim sounds. I ceased to think, I lost myself utterly in the smell taste touch of her. And at length she said, suddenly urgent, “Now, darling, now.”

I threw myself down upon that small soft body, and her hand clutched me and tucked me home. She worked and strained in sweet agony beneath me. I brought her there. I heard her cry out and felt her quiver, and then I melted at last inside her in unutterable delight.

She came back from the bathroom. I had not moved or opened my eyes. She slipped into bed beside me and said, “I’m not sick, you don’t have to worry.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

“You must of been.”

“No.”

“I had the clap three times. The other, never.” Her voice was flat. “I been everything, I had everything. I wish to hell I was somebody else.”

“I don’t.”

“I’ll wake up and you’ll be gone.”

“No.”

“In your little soldier suit.”

“No.”

“Hold onto me, Alex, I feel all shaky.”

She was small and soft in my arms. I kissed her. She opened her eyes for a moment, then closed them again and relaxed. I let my own eyes slip shut and discovered how exhausted I was. There was a curtain ready to come down and I wasn’t going to fight it.

She said, “The watch and the wallet. And Robin’s purse.”

“Huh?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I don’t follow you.”

She spoke with an effort, dragging the words up one by one. “The man who killed them. I just had an idea. Tomorrow. First sleep.”

We fell asleep holding each other.

19

W
HEN I AWOKE A LITTLE BEFORE NOON JACKIE BROUGHT ME A
cup of coffee and a sweet roll. “I usually eat breakfast around the corner,” she said. “But I figured the less you go out and let people see you, the better. The roll okay?”

“Fine.”

“I bought you some socks and underwear. I hope everything’s the right size. It’s just schlock from Columbus Avenue but at least it’s clean.”

I got dressed. The socks and underwear were the right size. I felt a little foolish putting on my uniform again, but it still seemed a worthwhile disguise. I went into the kitchen and got another cup of coffee and took it into the living room.

We smoked and drank coffee. She had evidently fixed an hour or so before, as well as I could judge. Her movements were slow and studied, but she wasn’t as obviously junked up as she had been the night before. Her face, clean and fresh, looked very vulnerable. She would dart quick looks at me, then turn her attention back to cigarette and coffee.

After a while I said, “Well, I guess I better get going.”

“Who said?”

“Well I—”

She turned away. “Go, if you want to. You don’t have to stay on my account.”

I put out my cigarette and set the empty cup on the coffee table, but I stayed on the couch. I hadn’t seen the script yet and I didn’t know my lines. She was a hooker and I was a John, she was an angel of mercy and I was a man in trouble, she was Jane and I was Tarzan, all those things. I didn’t know my lines.

Without looking at me she said, “You don’t remember what I said last night? About the watch and the wallet and the purse?”

I had forgotten.

“Because that part of it doesn’t add up right,” she said. “I thought if we sort of picked at it we might get somewheres. See what I mean?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, Alex, what I mean is, what happened to your watch and wallet?”

“They must have been stolen.”

“And Robin’s purse?”

“I didn’t know she had one.”

“She always carried a purse. Same as I always do. I make sure I get the money as soon as I’m in the room with the fellow, and I put my coat or something over the purse. You know, on a chair or on the dresser. I know Robin always did the same.”

I closed my eyes, trying to remember. It was getting increasingly harder to bring that particular night back into focus. It seemed to me now that I remembered a purse, that she had taken my money and tucked it into a purse, but I couldn’t be entirely sure.

“Maybe she had a purse. I don’t know.”

“She must of had one, Alex. A lot of the colored girls don’t, they like to leave their bras on and they’ll tuck the bills in there, but most men don’t like that. Leaving the bra on, I mean.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, she had to have a purse. And you had your watch and wallet, didn’t you?”

“I hardly thought about it. I just supposed that they had been stolen somewhere along the line.”

“But you had them when you went with Robin.”

“Did I?”

She spread her small hands. “Well, what else? You paid Robin, didn’t you? You gave her some money?”

“Twenty dollars.”

“You must of given her money if you made love to her. So that means you had the watch and wallet when you went with her.”

“I guess so.” I looked at her, the small intense eyes, the head tilted forward in concentration. “But what difference does it make? If I had them then, I certainly didn’t have them when I woke up the next morning. So—”

“Well, what happened to them?”

“Oh.”

“You see what I mean, Alex?”

“I never even thought of it.”

“Well, see, you were too busy concentrating on who could of done it and then you didn’t stop to think about just what it was that happened. But that was one of the first things I thought of, that the watch and the wallet were gone. And Robin’s purse, too. It wasn’t there when you woke up?”

“If it was, I never saw it”

“Would you of noticed it?”

“I’m not sure. But the watch and the wallet were gone. Unless they were in the purse.”

“You mean if Robin took them?” I nodded. “No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “Robin didn’t take diem. Robin never stole.”

“Never?”

“No. Neither do I, I never steal I did once, a long time ago. A man who passed out. We didn’t even make love, he just got on the bed and passed out. And I went through his wallet and took his money. Not his wallet but just the money from it. Almost a hundred dollars. I felt bad about it. I don’t mean I sat around crying, but I felt bad about it.”

She fell silent, her gaze turned inward, fastening upon the memory and the way she had felt. “I never did it again,” she said. “A lot of the girls do, maybe most of them, but I never do, and neither did Robin. I’m pretty sure of that.”

“Then the watch and wallet—”

“Maybe the killer.”

“But why?”

A shrug. “Everybody likes money.”

“Not the man who framed me. I didn’t have much in the wallet, and the watch wasn’t worth a fortune. And whoever set me up for this wouldn’t take chances for a few dollars. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Suppose he hired someone.”

I had briefly considered this possibility, but I had not wanted to dwell on it Because once I allowed it, my elimination process went utterly out the window. The proof that Russell Stone, for example, was not in New York Saturday night—it counted for nothing once I admitted that he could have hired someone to do his killing for him. Still, like it or not, it was quite possible. And it was similarly possible that a hired killer would take the trouble to add a watch and wallet and a whore’s purse to his haul.

“We can forget the purse and the wallet,” she was saying. “Whoever he was, he’d just take the money and ditch the rest. Stick them in a trashcan, probably. That’s no help.”

“What about the watch?”

“That’s our chance.” Her teeth worried her lower lip. “I hope it wasn’t a really cheap watch. Like they sell in drugstores for $10.95.”