He was careful about the way he moved his feet, the way he held his body. He took short, restraining steps. He tried to pace himself by the sound of other heels clicking against the pavement. He knew that he was all right so long as he held with the ebb and flow of the street, but that he could not allow himself to break the tempo. He had to hold himself back, inside the breaking point. He was dimly aware that that might be the only real escape offered him, to break wildly into the open and run, until finally someone put a stop to his running. He was like the drinker who knows that one more tilt of the bottle will bring oblivion. That much was left to him, that he could refuse that escape.
He turned left when the flow of the crowd seemed to swerve, but he didn’t change his pace. He walked as he had been walking, until he felt the harsh hand on his shoulder.
He didn’t turn around. He heard himself say, “It’s all right,” but he wasn’t sure what he meant when he said it. He wasn’t sure of anything except that now that his movement had been broken his hold on himself had been broken with it.
The hand pulled him relentlessly and he let himself be drawn backward. The thought struck him that maybe this was better, better than running through the streets, better than forcing his body forever to take slow, measured steps; and then he heard a voice say. “You might have been killed, bud,” and he realized that the hand and his being stopped had nothing to do with him, nothing to do with what had happened to him. He had stepped off the curb into traffic, and a stranger, a man to whom he was no one, had caught his shoulder, holding him back. It might have happened to anyone, even to the man who had held him. Its happening to him had no significance.
Except that it had happened. Except that there would always be someone to reach out and grab his shoulder, to destroy the pattern he had set for himself. He knew that there were too many for him, that there would always be too many. He knew that in walking through the streets in the only way he could, he was running—because of what had happened.
He lifted the man’s hand from his shoulder, and he started back. He walked faster, returning. He could do that, now, even jostle others aside if it became necessary. Now that he was going back, it no longer mattered who took notice of him. He chose the same streets he had walked along before, even though there was a shorter way, through the park. He seemed to be undoing what he had already done by retracing it. When he reached the brownstone apartment, the childishness of this struck him, and he let himself in by the front door, although he had left by the rear. He ran the first half (light, until he remembered what he was running to, and not away from, and then he walked the remaining flights, his thin hand gripping the rail.
The telephone was just inside the door. There was a large oval mirror against the wall, behind the telephone table, and he remembered how Alice had hung it there so she could watch the shadowy play of emotion as she talked, laughing with delight at her quicksilver loveliness. He studied his own reflection as he dialed. It was a thin, white face, with plain features. It wasn’t a face like Alice’s, that could be switched and changed as she pleased. He could freeze it to a fixed, set mask that told nothing of the turmoil within him, but he could not vary the mask.
His voice was better. He could control the words and hold some part of the fear out of the tone. When his call went through, he said carefully, “This is Carter R. Rowe.” He gave the address and then he waited until the man at the other end had written it down. “You’d better send someone out here,” he explained. “Maybe more than one. You’d know about those things. It’s my wife, Alice. She’s been murdered.”
They sent three men: a small, thin man who introduced himself as Lieutenant Cross; a heavy, bull-like detective, Sergeant Hannigan; and a policeman in uniform. At first, Rowe directed his words to the uniform, but gradually the realization took shape in his mind that this was beyond the traffic violation stage, beyond the point where an ordinary policeman could distinguish right from wrong. It was the men in street clothes who asked the questions and who went into the bedroom together and closed the door, leaving the uniformed policeman watching him disinterestedly. It was the uniformed one who drew the notebook from his pocket and sat down, his legs crossed, resting the book on his thigh, as the others came back from the bedroom. For a moment the thought struck Rowe that he could talk to these men as he would discuss an accounting problem with Mr. Jeffers, the head of the firm. He would show his figures and balances and they would listen respectfully, keeping to the issue at hand. He watched Lieutenant Cross dial the telephone, and when the lieutenant had completed his call and spun to face him with dull, disinterested eyes, he knew that this was not a problem on which he could work together with these men.
“All right, Mr. Rowe,” Cross said. “Let’s hear your story.”
“I came home—” he began.
“Just a minute,” Cross said. “Let’s have the background first. Where do you work?”
“Jeffers, Lynn, and Holbrook,” he said. “I’m chief accountant. I’ve been with them seven years.”
“Married how long?”
“Ten years,” he said. Ten years and two months. The two months wouldn’t matter to them.
“Age?”
“Thirty-seven.”
Cross looked at the bedroom door. “And the—?”
“Twenty-eight,” he said. That was right. It was twenty-eight, almost to the day.
“All right,” Cross said. “Now, in ten years, problems come up between a couple. I’m a married man. I know. You got any of those you’d like to tell us about?”
Rowe shook his head. There were no problems, no problems at all. Everything had ended the moment—the second—he had opened the bedroom door. “No,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
“Friends?” Cross suggested.
Rowe gave him a list. Hall and Elsie Simmonds. Jerry Bancroft. The Redmonds. Clark Hammond. “Mostly people I met in business,” he explained.
“Nobody else?” Cross said, watching him. “No special friend of yours?”
“No,” he said.
“Look,” said Cross. “Ten years is a long time. In ten years, a man might make friends his wife doesn’t know about. Just a friend, maybe, that he sees off and on. Some girl who gives him a build-up when he’s low. If there’s anyone like that, it’d be better if you told us about her now.”
“There’s no one like that,” he said flatly.
Cross nodded. “Maybe it’s the other way around. Some guy a girl tries to be nice to, and he gets ideas. Maybe she finds out her husband suspects her, and tells the boyfriend off.”
“There was nothing like that,” he said. “There was just Alice and me. There was always just the two of us.”
Cross studied him a moment, shrugged. “All right,” he said. “Let’s have the rest of it. What happened today?”
He told them how he had rung the bell, the way he always did, to let Alice know he was coming, and how he had opened the door with his key. He had stood in the hallway a moment, waiting for her, and then he had dropped his hat on the chair in the corner and knocked on the bedroom door. He had knocked three times, and then he had opened the door and seen her.
“You called the police?” Cross asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I called the police.”
“I guess that covers it.” You can go in now, Mr. Rowe.”
He sat still, not moving.
Cross said again, “You can go in. You’ll have to identify the body.”
“I know her,” he said slowly. “I know who it is. It’s my wife. I don’t want to go in there.”
The heavyset one. Sergeant Hannigan, said, “It’s a formality, Rowe. Makes it simpler.” The sergeant dropped his feet from the rung of the chair opposite and stood up. “Come on.”
Rowe didn’t move. He said, “I can tell you how she is. She’s half-crumpled across the pillows. Her legs are drawn up as if she were trying to push something away from her. She has the knuckles of her left hand in her mouth.”
Hannigan said, from the doorway, “She couldn’t have fought much.”
“She didn’t fight,” he said. “She never fought—anything.” He said it to himself more than to Hannigan, knowing the detective had no way of understanding how important that part of Alice was to the whole. “Her name is Alice Lee Rowe. Mrs. Carter R. Rowe. My wife.” He felt that there was more he should say, but he didn’t know what it was. “She was stabbed. There was a towel wrapped around a knife handle, and then she was stabbed with it.”
“A quick end,” Hannigan said. “The knife was rammed home hard, and then pulled out halfway.”
He remembered that. The knife had seemed to go almost through her. He hadn’t been sure but what it was through her, pinning her to the bed.
“I did that,” he said. “I drew it out a little. It seemed to go right through her.”
“I see,” Lieutenant Cross said. He said it as though he didn’t see, as though he didn’t understand why Rowe had had to draw it out a little, in case she were pinned to the bed. Now that Rowe thought of it himself, he realized that it had made no difference to her. But at the time, while he had been standing over her, it had seemed important, and he had grasped the end of the towel and drawn the knife out a little.
The knock at the door drew his mind from it. “Doc West,” Cross said. “Or the lab boys.” He nodded to the uniformed policeman to open the door.
It was both. The medical examiner was a square chunk of a man; the laboratory men were quick, thin-faced boys who might have been part of Rowe’s own staff of accountants. The medical examiner nodded brusquely to Cross as he passed him on his way into the bedroom. The others lagged a moment in the doorway, exchanging greetings.
The older one spied Hannigan and grinned. “You here?” he said. “Thought you’d been pastured.”
“Next week,” Hannigan told him. “Six more days and a life of ease.”
Cross had opened the door to the little study off the living room. “You can wait in here, Mr. Rowe,” said. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like the jacket you’re wearing.” The lieutenant turned to the lab men. “There’s a towel around the knife,” he explained. “When you check it, you might want that coat.”
“He do it?” the younger one asked.
Cross scowled. “The way he tells it, nobody did it. Nobody at all. Unless it was a stranger who passed by on horseback.”
Hannigan led Rowe by the arm to the bedroom. “Let’s get this over with,” the detective said. “You can close your eyes, for all I care. Just tell me who she is. It’ll save us all trouble.”
He didn’t look at her. He looked beyond her at the window, at the little ring dangling from the shade. He said, “She’s my wife, Alice.” He stood there, keeping his eyes on the curtain ring, until Hannigan turned him gently and guided him to the door of the study.
He wondered what they would do to her. He had read somewhere that they were callous in their work, but he knew that she was still beautiful, even in death, and he hoped that her beauty would make them handle her tenderly. Lines of Thomas Hood came back to him, and he felt the urge to recite them aloud:
“Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashioned so slenderly.
Young, and so fair!”
He rose to his feet as though to leave the study, and the uniformed policeman stirred in his chair. Rowe checked himself and stepped to his desk, rummaging for cigarettes. He found a crumpled package and lit one, and then, remembering, held the package out. The policeman leaned forward, caught himself, and leaned back. He was on duty. He couldn’t smoke. But Rowe could smoke. He was free to do what he wished. He could open the bottom drawer of his desk and have a drink of the Scotch they’d been saving for Christmas. He could take off his shoes, or his tie. There was a policeman in the room watching him, and yet he could do whatever he might wish, and the policeman could not prevent him. Suddenly he understood what there was that he could not do, what they meant to keep him from doing, and the policeman made sense to him. There was a reason for him just as there was a reason for everything.
“I’m not going to kill myself,” Rowe said.
He watched the policeman whip out his notebook and write, “I’m not going to kill myself”; and after that he didn’t say anything else. He just sat there, smoking the cigarettes and staring at nothing, until he heard Cross call from the other room and Hannigan opened the door.
Lieutenant Cross was leaning against the telephone table, his hands braced behind his back, as though he were getting ready to push away from it. “All right, Rowe,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of it. It was a nice idea. It would have been hard to prove that you’d come in twice today. But you were seen the second time. Why was it twice, Rowe? Why did you leave, and then come back? And why didn’t you tell us about the first time?”
Rowe shook his head. He had forgotten that part of it. It was something he hadn’t done; what he might have done instead of calling the police. When the man’s hand had caught his shoulder in the street, he had known there was no place to go but back. The two times were one in his mind.
Cross pushed himself away from the table. He picked up the gray felt hat from the chair in the corner. “Here’s where you slipped, Rowe,” he said. “You might have pulled it off. Husband comes home from work and finds his wife murdered. But when you left this morning, you were wearing a hat. This hat. We checked with your office. You wore it at lunch. When you were seen coming home, you were bareheaded, but your hat was inside the apartment. Why, Rowe? Why did you kill her?”
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t the way you—”
Cross crumpled the gray felt in his hands. “The hat, Rowe,” he said patiently. “Who brought it home? Who put it inside? This guy you dreamed up? The stranger on horseback?”
“No,” he said. “It’s my hat. It has my initials in it. I wore it today.”
Cross loosened his grip, dropping the fedora to the floor. He kicked it once. “Okay,” he said. “That’s what I figured. Let’s go.”
He heard the clang of the outer door and the ring of footsteps down the corridor the way he heard all sounds now, with the knowledge that these things, the opening and closing of doors, the sound of footsteps, the brittleness of voices, were the slender links that connected him with the world outside. They were audible evidences that the universe had not shrank, by some strange inversion, to the grilled door and the three plain walls that housed him.
It was Hannigan. Rowe said, “I’m glad to see you. Sergeant,” and he meant the words as he said them. It was a moment in his life now to see even this stocky detective who came in with the outdoor rain on his topcoat and an air of damp freshness about him.
Hannigan sat down heavily on the edge of the bunk, spreading the wet tails of his coat behind him. “It’s ‘Mister’ now. Just plain Joe Hannigan.”
Rowe felt that that was supposed to make a difference between them, that Hannigan was no longer part of the law, but the law and the people outside had become fused in his mind. There was himself and what had happened to him, and then everyone else outside and apart from him. He took the cigarette Hannigan offered without saying anything.
Hannigan said, “How’s your lawyer, Rowe?”
“All right,” he said. “Mr. Jeffers sent him. His name is Rangold.”
“Ed Rangold.” Hannigan accepted him verbally. “You talk to him?”
“He knows what happened,” he said. “You all know what happened.”
“Yeah,” Hannigan said. “Sure. We got your story, But that’s not enough.”
Ed Rangold had told Rowe that it wasn’t enough. There was nothing for the jury to sink its teeth into. “Reasonable doubt,” Rangold had said. “But, man, it has to be tangible doubt. There has to be a dark alley somewhere in the picture, some other way it could have happened.”
“I told him what happened,” Rowe said.
“You ran,” Hannigan said, slowly. “You came in and found her that way and ran. Why? There has to be a reason for that, Rowe.”
It came back to that, to the one point where his decision had been wrong. That was something he could not explain, any more than he had been able to explain drawing the knife out of her side.
“I was upset,” he told Hannigan. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Why?” Hannigan repeated. “Don’t you see, Rowe? That’s not a normal reaction. You weren’t afraid of her, were you, Rowe?”
He didn’t answer, but Hannigan found his own answer. “If you’d been afraid of her, you couldn’t have touched the knife.” Hannigan leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “It’s things like that, Rowe, little things that I can’t figure. They worry me, Rowe. A guy like you, if he’d killed his wife, giving her a clean book, like you did. That doesn’t make sense. A man planning a murder like it shapes up as you did—leaving himself without even an out.” Hannigan inched over on the bed, talking earnestly. He seemed to have forgotten anyone was with him, to be going over to himself the things that had come up in his mind. “Like you saying you always rang the bell before you opened the door. If a woman is as scary as that, she’s not going to let a stranger in when she’s only half-dressed. But you gave us that, Rowe, for free.” Hannigan stopped a moment, weighing a thought. “That could be it,” he said. “You might figure as long as she’s gone, your life is over. You might be asking for this, Rowe.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to die, Hannigan.”
“Nuts,” Hannigan said. He got up, pulling his coat around him. “Look, Rowe,” he said, “I’m not on this anymore. I’m a free man. I’m heading for Florida. I’ve got twenty years behind me, and I never yet worked on a case that went sour. I never had a backfire after we sent a man up. I’ve got a nice clean slate, and I want to keep it that way.”
He understood now what Hannigan wanted. He felt a flash of bitterness toward this man who could balance a life against his own peace of mind, but there was no strength to the feeling. He saw that circumstances had made him and what happened to him a part of Hannigan, and that Hannigan had come to him asking for help. He was aware that he could give that help, by a word or gesture, without affecting the case against himself. But he couldn’t give it.
One thing remained to him: the end of their marriage. Not a culmination of years of fighting, of hate, fear and deceit. He had a right to that, to the honesty of his love for her. His eyes met Hannigan’s steadily.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said.
His thoughts stayed with Hannigan in the endless chain of hours that time had become to him. It gave him something to do with his mind, to force it to analyze this man about whom he knew nothing, to attempt to measure the strength of Hannigan’s motive. He knew that Hannigan’s interest in him was a selfish interest, and he knew vaguely that this fact lent force to it. He considered Hannigan as a man apart from himself, as someone who had become entangled by accident in his life. It was not until the third visit, until the day Hannigan laid the pictures of the knife on the bunk between them, that the feeling of uneasiness took hold of him.
“The police never traced it,” Hannigan said. “They figured they didn’t need it, so they let it slide. It’s not easy to tie a knife to the person who bought it.”
Rowe’s lawyer had explained that as a point in his favor; and Rowe had understood that it was a weak point, a straw on the water, but that there was that one slight thing in his favor.
“I may try it,” Hannigan said. “I want this thing clean, Rowe. Wrapped up neat. And the knife could do it.”
It was then that the uncertainty had been born inside him and he had forced his face to its fixed, set mask. It was at that point that he stopped considering Hannigan as someone apart from himself, and understood that the crossing of their lives had enmeshed them both. After that visit, after Hannigan had left, he became aware that the outcome no longer rested with his lawyer or with the mood of the jury, but upon the efforts of this man to whom he was nothing. He was suddenly, sharply afraid of this man whose life had been forced into his own.
He knew when they came to release him from jail that in some way Hannigan was responsible for his freedom. He accepted the sympathy of the others, the apologies for the errors that might have been made, and he let his lawyer lead him on a triumphal march to the street, but his mind was on Hannigan and his eyes sought him in the corridors and on the sidewalk. When he saw the bull-like figure in the doorway of a bar opposite, he knew he was being given a choice. He could go along with the others, or he could face this man who had broken his pretenses and saved his life doing it. He shook free from the lawyer’s hand and crossed the street to the bar, following the ex-detective to a table.
He looked across the table at Hannigan. He knew that this man understood him now, that Hannigan knew the reasons underlying all of his actions. He was aware that his life, the ten years he had guarded, was open to Hannigan as it had been open to no man in the past. He didn’t know what Hannigan thought of him, or how Hannigan judged his actions, but he felt close to him with the knowledge that here for the first time was a man who knew his life for what it had been. He said, “She couldn’t help it, Hannigan.”
Hannigan said, “It must have been a hell of a life for you, Rowe.”
He didn’t answer that. There was no answer to it. It had been his life, and she had been his wife and he had loved her. In her way, she had loved him. He was certain of that. It was why he was still there, always, when the others had gone. “She couldn’t help it, Hannigan,” he said again.
“I wouldn’t know,” Hannigan said. “But you’d have burned for it, Rowe. That I can tell you.”
It had not been fear of that that had sent him into the streets when he first had found her. This thing had happened to her, a thing for which his forgiveness was useless, his understanding meant nothing. It had not occurred to him, at first, that he might be accused of the murder. He had seen the veil torn from their lives—her warmness, her weakness, held up to public laughter. He had been running from himself, and not from the police. He had been unsure of himself, wondering whether he might not, during the trial, scream the truth to the world. He had told Hannigan that.
“It would have been too late,” Hannigan said. “That’s why I tried to show you. You couldn’t have waited until you were halfway to the chair, and then shouted accusations at a dead woman. You’d have just cinched it that way.”
He couldn’t have done it the other way, either. When Lieutenant Cross had asked the names of “special friends,” he couldn’t have handed him a list of men and said: It might have been any of these; they’re the ones you mean. He felt it was important that Hannigan, who understood him and what he had done should understand the reason for doing it. He said again, “She couldn’t help it, Hannigan.”
“He didn’t know that,” Hannigan said. “He thought she’d divorce you and marry him. When he found out he was wrong, he killed her.” His thick fingers drummed the table top. “It was Bancroft,” Hannigan said. “Jerry Bancroft, in case you didn’t know.”
He hadn’t known. He wondered now how Hannigan had known, how this man apart from their lives had plucked the name Bancroft out of nothing and said: This one here, he did it. He was the one. The feeling of closeness became stronger in him as Hannigan picked up the thread of his thoughts.
“I was looking for a man,” Hannigan said. “The way I saw it, if you hadn’t killed her, there had to be another man in her life.” He hesitated, as if he were wondering how he could say it. He said it honestly, finally, the way it had happened. “I found too many men.”
It was out. The wall Rowe had spent ten years building was down. He kept his eyes on the glass-topped table between them, not looking at Hannigan. He knew that Hannigan was winding it up for him, closing the book, and that Hannigan would go on now until it was finished. He waited it out.
“The rest was routine,” Hannigan said. “It was a question of checking where each one had been the day of the murder, of whittling it down. The knife was the clincher. When I traced the knife to him, I had it.”
It had been as simple as that. One of them had used the knife, so one of them had bought it.
“For the record,” Hannigan said, “it was just one of those things. A man makes a play for a married woman, and she gives him the brush-off. So he kills her. The rest doesn’t matter. The papers’ll give it the once-over-lightly. There’s no meat in the story. Cross had it tagged, right from the start, only he didn’t know it. For the book, this Bancroft was the stranger on horseback.”
Rowe said slowly, “I owe my life to you.” He knew as he said it that the feeling that should have been in the words was missing. He wanted to say more, to praise Hannigan’s work, but he felt the need to be away from this man against whom he was defenseless. He pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. “My friends are waiting.”
“Sure,” Hannigan said. “Well, I’ll be seeing you, Rowe.”
His nod accepted the lie, but he knew Hannigan was not deceived by the gesture. There was hatred inside him for this man from whose final prying he had failed to protect her. The hatred would be in his eyes for Hannigan to read. He could say again: She couldn’t help it, Hannigan; but Hannigan would shrug and say: I wouldn’t know about that.
Rowe turned swiftly and walked to the street. He did not look back. When he joined Ed Rangold and old Mr. Jeffers on the corner, his face was a still, fixed mask.
“Sorry,” he apologized for breaking away. “I had to see that man. I owe him a lot.” He steeled himself for the rest of it, the lie that would rebuild the wall. “Because of Alice,” he said quietly. “Even more than myself.”
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT (FREELY TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL TELEPHONE CALL): The origin of the story is a patchwork of what one knows about people and what one thinks he knows, but can’t say surely to be so. A man seems to be in love with his wife and she with him, and yet she, shall we say, digresses. He knows it, but will not, cannot admit it. I looked at the situation from the rear, as it were, assumed murder as the force to compel revelation, and watched the stranger on horseback ride away.