I Married A Dead Man (22 page)

               
She closed the handbag, and took it with her, and went out of the room, went out to the back of the hall.

               
She took out the classified directory, looked under "Garages."

               
He might leave it out in the streets overnight. But she didn't think he would. He was the kind who prized his cars and his hats and his watches. He was the kind of man prized everything but his women.

               
The garages were alphabetized, and she began calling them alphabetically.

               
"Have you a New York car there for the night, license 09231?"

               
At the third place the night attendant came back and said: "Yes, we have. It was just brought in a few minutes ago."

               
"Mr. Georgesson?"

               
"Yeah, that's right. What about it, lady? Whaddya want from us?"

               
"I--I was out in it just now. The young man just brought me home in it. And I find I left something with him. I have to get hold of him. Please, it's important. Will you tell me where I can reach him?"

               
"We ain't supposed to do that, lady."

               
"But I can't get in. He has my doorkey, don't you understand?"

               
"Whyn'tcha ring your doorbell?" the gruff voice answered.

               
"You fool!" she exploded, her fury lending her plausible eloquence. "I wasn't supposed to be out with him in the first place! I don't want to attract any attention. I can't ring the doorbell!"

               
"I getcha, lady," the voice jeered, with that particular degree of greasiness she'd known it would have, "I getcha." And a double tongue-click was given for punctuation. "Wait'll I check up."

               
He left. He got on again, said: "He's been keeping his car with us for some time now. The address on our records is 110 Decatur Road. I don't know if that's still--"

               
But she'd hung up.

40

               
She used her own key to unlock the garage-door. The little roadster that Bill habitually used was out, but the big car, the sedan, was in there. She backed it out. Then she got out a moment, went back to refasten the garage-door.

               
There was the same feeling of unreality about this as before; a sort of dream-fantasy, a state of somnambulism, yet with over-all awareness. The chip-chip of footsteps along the cement garage-driveway that were someone else's, yet were her own--sounding from under her. It was as though she had experienced a violent personality split, and one of her selves, aghast and helpless, watched a phantom murderess issue from the cleavage and start out upon her deadly quest. She could only pace this dark thing, this other self, could not recapture nor reabsorb it, once loosed. Hence (perhaps) the detached objectivity of the footsteps, the mirror-like reproduction of her own movements.

               
Reentering the car, she backed it into the street, reversed it, and let it flow forward. Not violently, but with the suave pick-up of a perfectly possessed driver. Some other hand, not hers--so firm, so steady, so pure--remembered to reach for the door-latch and draw the door securely closed with a smart little clout.

               
Outside, the street-lights went spinning by like glowing bowls coming toward her down a bowling-alley. But each shot was a miss, they went alternately too far out to this side, too far out to that With herself and the car, the kingpin in the middle that they never knocked down.

               
She thought: That must be Fate, bowling against me. But I don't care, let them come.

               
Then the car had stopped again. So easy it was to go forth to kill a man.

               
She didn't study it closely, to see what it was like. It didn't matter what it was like; she was going in there, it was going to happen there.

               
She pedalled the accelerator again, went on past the door and around the corner. There she made a turn, for the right-of-way was against her, pointed the car forward to the way from which she had just come, brought it over against the sidewalk, stopped it there, just out of sight.

               
She took up her bag from beside her on the seat, as a woman does who is about to leave a car, secured it under her arm.

               
She shut off the ignition and got out. She walked back around the corner, to where she'd just come from, with the quick, preoccupied gait of a woman returning home late at night, who hastens to get off the street. One has seen them that way many times; minding their own business with an added intentness, for they know they run a greater risk of being accosted then that during the daylight hours.

               
She found herself alone on a gloomy nocturnal strip of sidewalk in front of a long rambling two-story structure, hybrid, half commercial and half living quarters. The ground floor was a succession of unlighted store-fronts, the upper a long row of windows. The white shape of a milk bottle stood on the sill of one of these. One was lighted, but with the shade drawn. Not the one with the milk bottle.

               
Between two of the store-fronts, recessed, almost secretive in its inconspicuousness, there was a single-panel door, with a wafflepattern of multiple small panes set into it. They could be detected because there was a dim hall-light somewhere beyond them, doing its best to overcome the darkness.

               
She went over to it and tried it, and it swung out without any demur, it had no lock, was simply a closure for appearances' sake. Inside there was a rusted radiator, and a cement stair going up, and at the side of this, just as it began, a row of letter boxes and pushbuttons. His name was on the third she scanned, but not in its own right, superimposed on the card of the previous tenant, left behind. He had pencil-scratched the name off, and then put in his own underneath. "S. Georgesson." He didn't print very well.

               
He didn't do anything very well, except smash up people's lives. He did that very well, he was an expert.

               
She went on up the stairs and followed the hall. It was a jerrybuilt, makeshift sort of a place. During the war shortage they must have taken the attic or storage-space part of the stores below and rigged it up into these flats.

               
What a place to live, she thought dimly.

               
What a place to die, she thought remorselessly.

               
She could see the thin line the light made under his door. She knocked, and then she knocked again, softly like the first time. He had his radio on in there. She could hear that quite distinctly through the door.

               
She raised her hand and smoothed back her hair, while waiting. You smoothed your hair--if it needed it--just before you were going to see anyone, or anyone was going to see you. That was why she did it now.

               
They said you were frightened at a time like this. They said you were keyed-up to an ungovernable pitch. They said you were blinded by fuming emotion.

               
They said. What did they know? She felt nothing. Neither fear nor excitement nor blind anger. Only a dull, aching determination all over.

               
He didn't hear, or he wasn't coming to open. She tried the knob, and this door too, like the one below, was unlocked, it gave inward. Why shouldn't it be, she reasoned, what did he have to fear from others? They didn't take from him, he took from them.

               
She closed it behind her, to keep this just between the two of them.

               
He didn't meet her eyes. The room was reeking with his presence, but it was a double arrangement, bed- and living-quarters, and he must be in the one just beyond, must have just stepped in as she arrived outside. She could see offside light coming through the opening.

               
The coat and hat he'd worn in the car with her tonight were slung over a chair, the coat broadside across its seat, the hat atop that. A cigarette that he'd incompletely extinguished a few short moments ago was in a glass tray, stubbornly smouldering away. The drink that he'd started, then left, and was coming back to finish any second now--the drink with which he was celebrating tonight's successful enterprise--stood there on the edge of the table. The white block of its still-unmelted ice cube peered through the side of the glass, through the straw-colored whiskey it floated in.

               
The sight of it brought back a furnished room in New York. He took his drinks weak; he liked them strong, but he took them weak when it was his own whiskey he was using. "There's always another one coming up," he used to say to her.

               
There wasn't now. This was his last drink. (You should have made it stronger, she thought to herself wryly.)

               
Some sort of gritty noise was bothering her. A pulsation, a discord of some sort It was meant for music, but no music could have reached her as music, as she was now. The hypertension of her senses filtered it into a sound somewhat like a scrubbing-brush being passed over a sheet of ribbed tin. Or maybe, it occurred to her, it was on the inside of her, and not outside anywhere.

               
No, there it was. He had a small battery-portable standing against the side wall. She went over to it.

               
" Che gelida mannina --" some far-off voice was singing; she didn't know what that meant. She only knew that this was no love-scene, this was a death-scene.

               
Her hand gave a brutal little wrench, like wringing the neck of a chicken, and there was a stupor of silence in his two shoddy rooms. This one out here, and that one in there.

               
Now he'd step out to see who had done that.

               
She turned to face the opening. She raised her handbag frontally to her chest. She undid it, and took out the gun, and fitted her hand around it, the way her hand was supposed to go. Without flurry, without a tremor, every move in perfect coordination.

               
She sighted the gun toward the opening.

               
"Steve," she said to him, at no more than room-to-room conversational pitch in the utter stillness. "Come out here a second. I want to see you."

               
No fear, no love, no hate, no anything at all.

               
He didn't come. Had he seen her in a mirror? Had he guessed? Was he that much of a coward, cringing away even from a woman?

               
The fractured cigarette continued to unravel into smoke-skeins. The ice cube continued to peer through the highball glass, foursquare and uneroded.

               
She went toward the opening.

               
"Steve," she rasped. "Your wife is here. Here to see you."

               
He didn't stir, he didn't answer.

               
She made the turn of the doorway, gun wheeling before her like some sort of foreshortened steering-gear. The second room was not parallel to the first; it was over at a right angle to it It was very small, just an alcove for sleeping in. It had a bulb up above, as though a luminous blister had formed on the calcimined surface of the ceiling. There was also a lamp beside the iron cot, and that was lit as well, but it was upside-down. It was standing on its head on the floor, its extension-wire grotesquely looped in air.

               
She'd caught him in the act of getting ready for bed. His shirt was lying over the foot of the cot. That was all he'd taken off. And now he was trying to hide from her, down on the floor somewhere, below cot-level, on the far side of it. His hand peered over it--he'd forgotten that it showed--clutching at the bedding, pulling it into long, puckered lines. And the top of his head showed, burrowed against the cot--just a glimpse of it--bowed in attempt at concealment, but not inclined deeply enough. And then, just on the other side of that, though his second hand didn't show, more of those puckered wrinkles ran over the edge of the bedding at one place, as though it were down below there somewhere out of sight, but hanging on for dear life.

               
And when she looked at the floor, out beyond the far side of the cot, she could glimpse the lower part of one leg, extended out behind him in a long, lazy sprawl. The other one didn't show, must have been drawn up closer under his body.

               
"Get up," she sneered. "At least I thought I hated a man. Now I don't know what you are." She passed around the foot of the cot, and his back came into view. He didn't move, but every line of his body expressed the arrested impulse to get away.