HARRY GORDON SWUNG THE CAR out of the driveway, belatedly switched on his lights, and began the long drive home. It had been a late party, later than he’d planned, and Lois was already half dozing beside him on the seat. Near the river, the road plunged suddenly into scattered patches of post-midnight fog, and he cursed to himself as he slowed the car to a crawl.
“What’s the matter?” Lois asked, rousing herself from near slumber. “You slowed down.”
“Little fog. Don’t worry about it. Only slowed as a precaution.”
“I told you we should have left earlier. But you had to have one more drink.”
“Go back to sleep. We’ll be home soon.”
She was silent, and he glanced sideways at her. Curled up on the seat with her long blonde hair falling over one eye, she might have been a little girl on the way home from a birthday party. There were times during the past six years when he’d regretted marrying her, but this was not one of them.
He turned back to the fog-patched road, a half-instant too late. The car was headed straight for the steel guard rail on the river side. He twisted hard on the steering wheel and felt the wheels skidding wildly beneath him. There was a grinding, tearing crash, and then a sheet of flame that might have been a dream. And then nothing.
His vision came swimming out of an amber pool, into a tropic oasis where the only sounds were the rustle of white-skirted legs and the tonal beeping of some far-off chimes. The place might almost have been a hospital.
“Harry?”
He started to turn his head and then the pain stopped him. The pain and the bandages. “Is that you, Les?”
Lester Shaw stepped into his vision and bent over the bed. “Thank God you’re all right, Harry.”
“I don’t feel all right. Where am I?” He asked it even though he knew.
“In the hospital. There was an accident, Harry.” Lester’s face was a somber mask that looked like molded putty.
“Lois…?”
“I’m sorry, Harry. She didn’t make it.”
“Lois!” He started out of bed, and had one wobbling foot on the cool floor when the nurse grabbed him and pulled him back. Then his head began to spin and someone plunged a needle into his arm.
Harry was in the hospital only three days. He came out with a slight concussion, two cracked ribs and numerous bruises, in time to attend his wife’s funeral at the little church where they’d worshipped on infrequent occasions. Lester and Muriel Shaw were at his side during the whole service, and the painful, eternal drive to the cemetery afterwards.
It was Muriel who had explained, a bit too bluntly, about the closed coffin at the funeral parlor. (“There was nothing left of her, Harry. She was burned to a cinder.”) And it was Lester who had filled in the details of the accident itself. (“We were about a half-mile behind you, Harry. We saw the car turn over and burst into flames, and we got there in time to pull you clear. But she was a goner from the start.”)
After the funeral they’d driven in silence back to Harry’s house—the rambling ranch on the hill that now seemed too big, too dank, too empty. While Muriel fixed coffee and Lester helped settle things, Harry dug out the folded newspapers from the last few days and read all about it in the clipped jargon of the newsman.
Mrs. Lois Gordon, 33, prominent socialite and wife of insurance man Harry G. Gordon, died early this morning in the flaming crash of their car on Route 17. Mr. & Mrs. Gordon were returning home after a party at the home of Joseph Angora when the accident occurred. Gordon, who was driving, was hospitalized with undetermined injuries, and is listed in fair condition.
There was a picture of her too, a recent one with her long blonde hair in all its glory. Some anxious photographer had flopped the negative, though, so that the familiar little mole was on her right cheek instead of the left. It was almost as if he were seeing her in a mirror, and somehow it made her seem still alive.
“I suppose it’s a good thing there aren’t any children,” Muriel said with her usual tact. “It would be terribly hard on them.”
“It’s hard on me,” Harry told her, sipping the coffee that was a poor imitation of Lois’ brew.
“Would you rather be alone tonight?” Lester asked.
“I think so, Les. Why don’t you two run along? Thanks for everything. Thanks for saving my life.” He didn’t add that they might better have let him burn along with her.
Later, when he was alone, he got out the bankbooks and stock certificates, and tried to figure out the financial meaning of Lois dead. Much of the money had been in her name, but there were two joint bank accounts and some other things like the house and car. Her mother had died a year after their marriage, leaving her close to a quarter of a million dollars.
Staring at the figures until they started to blur before his eyes, Harry Gordon wondered if it had been Lois or only the money that he’d loved. Now Lois was gone and the money remained, and he was afraid of what he might be learning about himself.
He went back to the office the next day, with his head still bandaged and his ribs taped. The injuries didn’t bother him, but the smothering air of careful solicitude drove him from the office after only an hour. Joseph Angora phoned him for lunch, and he used it as an excuse to say he’d be gone the remainder of the day.
Angora was a middle-aged balding man who ran an export business of vague dimensions and hovered at the fringes of Long Island society. Since his wife Betty was crippled and confined to a wheel chair, Angora did more than his share of party-giving at the big old house out beyond Garden City. Harry and Lois had been returning from one of Angora’s parties when the accident occurred.
“Sorry I couldn’t get to the funeral,” he said with a somber shake of Harry’s hand. “Betty and I just couldn’t believe it.”
“Thanks for the flowers,” Harry said.
They ordered drinks and talked about it, in the matter-of-fact manner of mature men. To Harry it was a relief, after the solicitude of the office. But then, over the second drink, Angora suddenly looked away. “You know, Betty doesn’t think she’s dead.”
“What?”
“Well, you know how Betty is, stuck in that chair all the time. Sometimes she gets some pretty strange ideas. She doesn’t think Lois is dead.”
“Who does she think we buried?” Harry asked, somehow becoming angry at this sudden turn in the conversation.
Angora tried hard to chuckle, apparently sorry he’d mentioned the subject. “Forget it, Harry. Forget it! It’s getting late. We’d better order our food.”
But though no more was said, the seed of thought had been planted. All that afternoon, Harry tried to remember Lois as she had been, tried to summon up in his mind a picture of Lois alive, not Lois dead. It was foolish, of course. She was dead and buried, and Betty Angora’s ramblings would never bring her back.
On the weekend, Harry bought a new car and drove into Manhattan. The city had never seemed quite so lonely to him as it did that Saturday night, and when he finally parked in an all-night ramp to walk the streets for a while he found that a light spring drizzle had deprived him of even the companionship of the sidewalk.
He finally settled for two beers in a Greenwich Village bar, but even there he could not be free of the memory of Lois. They’d come here once or twice, and over the second drink he found himself sneaking a look at the folded newspaper clipping that told about her death. He tried to tell himself that such feelings were only natural just a week after her death, but somehow rationalization didn’t help. He left the bar and found that the drizzle had stopped. The streets of the Village were beginning to fill once more.
And then he saw her—Lois.
His heart seemed to stop beating, and a cold sweat covered every inch of his body. Lois, her blonde hair hanging free, dressed in a shabby raincoat and slacks, carrying a paper bag from an all night delicatessen.
He started after her, hurrying as she threaded a rapid passage through the suddenly crowded sidewalk. She’s not dead, Betty Angora had said. She’s not dead.
“Lois!”
She didn’t turn, only kept going. At the south end of Washington Square she turned suddenly and entered the dimly lit hallway of an apartment house. It was there that he caught her by the arm. “Lois—you’re alive!”
She turned to him in the harsh light of the overhead bulb. “Take your hand off me, mister, or you’ll be dead.”
“I…” There was still an amazing resemblance, but now, up close, he could see his mistake. The eyes were different, harder, and there was no mole. Even the long hair was not exactly the right shade. It was not Lois. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
“You thought I was somebody else. That’s an old line, mister.”
“I thought you were my wife. She died last week.”
“Well! That’s the first time I’ve ever been mistaken for a ghost!”
“I—I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Could I make up for it by buying you a drink?”
“I’ve got a whole bagful of beer right here, and a party going upstairs.” He started to turn away and she stopped him. “Let me drop the beer and I’ll come out for a quick one, mister. I guess you owe me something after scaring me half to death. Be right back.”
She was back down in a few moments, with a drunken male voice calling after her, “Don’t be long, Rosie.”
He took her back to the same bar and introduced himself over a beer. She smiled and said, “I’m Rosie Yates. Rosemary, but nobody calls me that. I’m an actress, I guess. Been in some off-Broadway stuff by Albee and Beckett. Now tell me about this wife of yours.”
“She was killed in an auto accident last week.” He touched the bruise on his forehead where the bandage had been. “From a distance, in the street, you looked like her. Besides that, some crazy woman I know thinks Lois is still alive.”
“Well, if she is, I’m sure not her.”
“I know that now. I also know that Lois is dead.”
“Do you want to come back to my party?”
“I don’t think so, thanks.”
They had another beer, and talked, and it was almost the way it used to be. It had been a long time since he’d spoken to a girl like this. “Come see me in a play some time,” she said.
“I’d like to. I hope it’s up in Times Square.”
“I’m getting old for the big time. Almost thirty. Playwrights don’t write leads for women my age any more.”
Harry shrugged. “Not unless they’re Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee.”
“I think I’d like to do comedy somehow. Life is tragic every day. It’s tragic when the bills come in and you’re out of a job, and you’ve got a big choice of sleeping with your producer or starving.”
He shook his head sadly. “And I thought the insurance business was bad.”
He walked back to the apartment with her and left her at the bottom of the stairs. “Goodnight, Rosie.”
She smiled, just for a second. “Goodnight, Harry.”
Outside, it was starting to drizzle again.
Harry spent Sunday with Lester and Muriel, and was thankful for their company. The day dragged toward evening, with all of them too conscious of Lois. Dead, she contributed more of a presence than she ever had in life.
Monday morning he went to the office early for the first time. The daily routine had taken hold, and no one gave him more than a passing glance. He flipped through his mail, noting the return addresses, and opened a few. There were sympathy notes from business associates, and one or two letters from friends. A square white envelope finally attracted his attention and he opened it.
The message was brief and typewritten: Harry—Please help me. I didn’t die in the accident, but I’m in terrible trouble. I’ll try to reach you later today. It was signed Lois, but in a shaky handwriting he barely recognized.
His first thought was that the thing was some sort of horrible joke. He sat staring at the letter for a long time, wondering which of his friends could have been guilty of such a thing. It certainly wasn’t from Lois. She rarely typed her letters, and the signature wasn’t much like hers at all. And besides, she was dead.
Besides, she was dead.
But for a moment he’d almost forgotten that fact. For a moment, while checking off the reasons why the letter couldn’t be from Lois, he’d almost imagined she was still alive!
He turned over the envelope and studied the inky black postmark. Early Sunday morning from New York. Grand Central Station. It could have been mailed Saturday night or Sunday morning.
Terrible trouble.
He picked up the telephone and called Lester Shaw at his office across town. “Les, something’s come up. Can I meet you for lunch?”
“Sure, Harry. Noon all right?”
They met at the same place he’d lunched with Angora a few days earlier. There was never much of a crowd on Monday noons, and he sometimes wondered what people did on Mondays instead of eating lunch.
“Thanks for coming, Les.”
Lester Shaw ran a nervous hand through his thinning blond hair. “What’s the trouble, Harry?”
Toying with the tapered base of his water glass, Harry began to talk. “I think I mentioned to you and Muriel yesterday about this crazy thing Angora told me, how his wife didn’t believe Lois was dead. Well, I didn’t tell you something else. Saturday night I went into New York and almost assaulted a girl down in the Village that looked something like Lois.”
“Harry!”
He held up his hand. “There’s more. Luckily, this girl was very understanding. I bought her a drink and everything was fine. But the point is, what Angora told me has lit some sort of a spark in my own mind. Call it anything you like, but I suppose it’s all traced to the shock of the accident and the fact that I never saw her body.
“There was nothing much to see, Harry. Believe me.”
“I know. I know. But I didn’t see it, and for all I know, maybe she is still alive.” He took the folded letter from his pocket and passed it across the table to Lester. “I received this in the morning mail.”
Lester Shaw read it through quickly. “Do you believe this?”
“No, of course not. And yet I…”
Lester put the note on the table between them. “Harry, you’ve got to come to your senses about this thing. You can’t accept the responsibility for Lois’ death, so you’re building up a fantasy that she’s still alive.”
“What about this note? Who sent it?”
Lester Shaw bit his lip before answering. “Is it possible that you could have sent it to yourself, Harry, without remembering you did it?”
“What? Do you think I’ve cracked up completely?”
“You said you mistook somebody for Lois the other night.”
“That was different.”
“Well, you’ll know soon enough if the note’s on the level. She says she’ll contact you today.”
“Yes,” Harry said quietly, thinking about it. “And right now I don’t know which would be worse—to have her dead or alive.”
The second message came at four that afternoon. It was a telegram addressed to Harry at his office. He ripped it open with an unsteady hand and read the brief words. Harry, need money desperately. Have Lester Shaw meet me Sherman Park fountain tomorrow morning at seven. Trust me. Lois.
He stuffed the telegram into his pocket and left the office. But he didn’t immediately phone Lester. Instead, he drove out beyond Garden City to Joseph Angora’s old house. As he pulled into the driveway he remembered it was his first visit since the night of the accident. The place looked different now, gloomy and alone in the uncertain light of dusk. It didn’t look at all like a place for parties.
“I just got home,” Angora said, answering the door. “How are you, Harry?”
“Not so good, I guess. I was wondering if I could see Betty.”
“Sure. What about?”
“About Lois.”
Angora nodded and led the way through the familiar rooms. There was a maid at times, and a cook, but Harry saw neither of them now. Betty was alone in her chair on the rear sun porch, staring out toward the west where there was nothing now but a faint remembered glow low in the evening sky.
“How are you, Harry?” she said, holding out her hand to him. “We don’t often have this pleasure on a weeknight.” She was a small woman of perhaps forty-five, who looked just a little the way Queen Victoria must have looked.
“Hello, Betty.”
“So sorry about your wife.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Behind him, he was aware that Angora had joined them on the enclosed porch. “Joe told me something last week. Something you said.”
She looked up at him with steady eyes. “About Lois. I said she was still alive.”
“Why do you think so?”
“I’ve seen her,” Betty Angora answered, quite simply. “I saw her the day after the accident, walking out there in the garden.”
A sort of shiver ran down Harry’s spine at the words. “I think you’d better tell me about it,” he said, in a voice he might have used to comfort a deranged person. Until now he’d always considered Betty to be sound of mind, even though her body was crippled.
“I was dozing in the afternoon,” she said, “and as I came awake I saw her, right down there among the rose bushes. She almost seemed to be looking for buds, but of course it’s still too early for them.”
“Couldn’t it have been a dream?” Harry asked. “A dream brought on by the news of her death in the accident?”
“Perhaps it was a dream,” Betty admitted, “but that really doesn’t matter. What matters was that I had a vision of her alive, and therefore she really is alive.”
Angora spoke softly from behind Harry. “Betty’s been right about these things before,” he said. “Remember that little boy who was lost in the desert a few years back? Betty said right from the start he was still alive, and sure enough, pretty soon they found him.”
Harry sighed and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. “I received a letter and a telegram signed with her name,” he said. “Did you send them, Betty?”
“Of course not! Why do you fight it like this, Harry? Accept the fact that she’s still alive. I didn’t send you any letters.”
He stared at the deep brown pools of Betty’s eyes, trying to decide if she were lying. But all he saw there was a strangeness he could never understand, a borderland of shadow he could never hope to reach. He did not envy Joseph Angora.
“Thank you,” he said finally. “Thank you for talking to me.”
As he rose to leave, Angora took his arm. “Keep in touch, Harry. If there’s anything we can do…”
“Thanks,” Harry said.
He drove back to his own place and phoned Lester Shaw. In brief, clipped phrases he told him about the latest message, and the visit to the Angora home. “What do you think, Les?”
On the other end of the line Lester Shaw’s voice was uncertain. “I think somebody’s got a pretty mad sense of humor,” he said, but there was a questioning tone in his words. “Do you think Betty Angora sent the messages?”
“Why should she?”
“Why would anybody? Any sane person, at least.”
“Could Lois still be alive, Les?” Harry asked. It seemed he’d been asking that question ever since the accident, if only to himself.
“We got there right after the crash, Harry.”
“But did you actually see her in the car?”
“Harry, Harry! There was a body in the car. It had to be Lois.”
“I suppose so. And yet, suppose she really is alive, somehow, and in need of help? This isn’t just some nut that sent the telegram. It’s someone who knew your name, for one thing.”
Lester Shaw sighed. “What do you want me to do now, Harry?”
“I think you should meet her in the morning—whoever she is. I’ll give you a little money, maybe a hundred dollars. And I’ll be waiting nearby. We’ll find out about this, once and for all.”
“All right, Harry. If that’s what you want.”
“I’ll come for you in the morning. At six-thirty.”
On these spring mornings there was a sort of mist off the ocean that often clung till almost noon, obscuring vision and casting a fog-like gloom over all like a smothering blanket. It was like that at Sherman Park, at five minutes to seven.
“She picked this place because she knew about the mist,” Harry said at once.
“She wouldn’t have known yesterday what the weather would be like,” Lester said. “It doesn’t happen every day.”
The park, covering only a few square blocks near the center of the village, was a strange place in the dawn’s half-light. They could barely make out the fountain at its center, and the still bare trees hung damp with droplets of clinging vapor.
“I’ll wait here,” Harry said. “Give you a few minutes alone with whoever it is.”
Lester Shaw nodded. “I won’t give her the money till you show up anyway.” Then he left Harry’s side and hurried toward the fountain.
For some moments Harry strained his eyes, trying to make out something in the brightening landscape. There was no sound but the distant traffic of work-bound motorists and the steady splashing of the fountain water.
He waited until his watch showed five minutes after seven. Then he started walking into the park. Ahead, he thought he heard someone cough. But there was nothing to be seen, nothing but the wetness of the trees and the first beginnings of springtime buds.
“Les?”
There was no one at the fountain, not Lester Shaw or Lois or anyone. He walked all the way around it and was about to start back when he saw something in the fountain, something almost hidden by the rippling, foaming water.
It was Lester Shaw, and he was dead.
After a time a detective came who seemed to be in charge. He had a bulky look about him and constantly jingled the coins in his pants pocket as he spoke. Harry Gordon didn’t like him.
“Name is Kater. Sergeant Kater. Want to tell me what happened?”
“I—I was to meet somebody here,” Harry began. “I told the officer all about it.”
“Suppose you tell me, too. Start with the dead man.”
“Lester Shaw. He was a close friend of mine.”
“Did you shoot him?”
“No! Of course I didn’t!”
“Somebody did. You must have seen who.”
“I didn’t see a thing.”
“Did you hear the shot?”
“No. I heard something like a cough. I suppose that was it.”
Kater held a whispered conversation with another detective, and then came back to where Harry sat on the damp park bench. “Small caliber gun pressed against his jacket. I suppose it could have sounded like a cough. Who did you come here to meet?”
“My wife. Lois Gordon.”
“Did she come?”
“I didn’t see her.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s been dead for over a week.”
The detective nodded his head and stopped jingling the coins. “You’d better come down to headquarters, Mr. Gordon. This is going to take a while.”
It took quite a while. Harry found himself, before the day was over, recounting to Kater every incident since the night of the accident. Conversations and movements and messages and meetings were gone over in detail, and toward the end of the day, when Harry was ready for even a jail cell cot, the detective seemed to be just warming up. He excused himself for a half-hour, and when he returned he was jingling the coins again.
“Just been talking to the victim’s wife,” he said.
“Muriel. How’s she taking it?”
“As well as could be expected. She’s a good-looking girl.”
Harry sighed and wished he had a cigarette. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Men have been killed for lots less. Is there anything between you and Muriel Shaw?”
“Not a thing. I told you everything I know. Why can’t you believe it?”
“The story is a bit hard to take, Mr. Gordon. From where I stand, you’re the best suspect I’ve got.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“Not quite yet.”
He went out again, and Harry spent the next hour staring through the heavy wire window grating, watching home-bound traffic in the street below. He tried to remember what it had been like just two short weeks ago, when Lois was alive and the world was right.
When Lois was alive. Had she ever been really alive?
“I’d like you to talk with a witness,” Sergeant Kater said behind him.
“A witness? To the murder?”
“A man who may have seen your wife.”
Harry’s heart began to thud as he followed the detective into the next room. Kater offered him a cigarette, and then introduced him to an elderly man with white hair who sat uncertainly on a long wooden bench. The man’s name, it appeared, was Otto Carry, and he sold newspapers to the early morning commuters at the Long Island railroad station down the street from Sherman Park.
“A woman,” he said, peering at Harry through thick glasses. “Long blonde hair and a mole on her right cheek. She got off the train from New York around a quarter to seven. I noticed her because not many people come out from the city at that hour.”
“A lot of women have blonde hair and moles,” Harry said uncertainly.
Kater cleared his throat. “He’s already identified the picture in the newspaper.”
“The picture of Lois?”
The detective nodded. “That’s right,” he then confirmed aloud.
“Then she is alive.”
Kater showed Otto Carry to the door. “Thank you, sir. We’ll be in touch.” Then he came back and sat down opposite Harry. “She might be,” he conceded.
“Back from the dead?”
The detective shook his head. “They never come back. But then, perhaps she never went away.”
Greenwich Village that night was alive with the warmth of spring. The streets around Washington Square were crowded to overflowing with the heady mixture of artists and tourists and students and would-be beats who seemed always to come out when the air was clear and inviting. Harry Gordon threaded his way among them, seeking and finally finding a half-remembered doorway.
He was in luck. She was home, and she came to the door after his second knock. “Hello, there. Remember me?”
She frowned for only an instant. “You’re the fellow from the other night! Harry!”
“Right the first time. May I come in?”
Rosie Yates stood aside and let him enter. She’d been washing her hair and it was a mass of brightly colored plastic curlers. “If you don’t mind my appearance,” she told him. “I don’t usually get visitors on Tuesday evenings.”
“It’s such a nice night. I thought you might be out.”
She gestured toward her hair.
“Weekly chore. This and cleaning the apartment. I used to do it Mondays, but now I have a class at the New School.”
The apartment was a confusion of vacuum cleaner and dust cloths, and he saw at once that he had indeed interrupted a weekly chore. “I’m sorry. I should have called first.”
“Not at all! Good to see you again so soon. Want a beer? I don’t have anything stronger right now. That party Saturday night pretty much cleaned me out.”
“A beer will be fine.”
He sat down somewhat uncertainly on the edge of a faded and shabby divan that quite possibly opened into a bed. He heard her rummaging around in the kitchen, and she returned in a minute with two cans of cold beer. “So what’s been new with you?”
He found himself filling her in briefly on the events of the past few days, telling her of the strange messages, and his visit to the Angora home, and finally the murder of Lester Shaw.
“It’s like a nightmare,” she said. “Aren’t there any definite clues?”
“None that point to anyone but me. The detective, Kater, thinks I killed him because I was having an affair with his wife, Muriel.”
“Were you?”
“Hardly!”
She flung back her head in a gesture he’d seen her use before. “Still, this part about your wife being alive is so ridiculous. Couldn’t someone have set up the whole plan, the messages and everything, just to murder this man Shaw?”
“Somebody like Muriel?”
“Or that Angora you mentioned.”
“But why?”
She puzzled over it a moment and then went back to her beer. “I wish there was some way I could help you, Harry.”
“If you mean that, I think there is.”
“How?”
“I noticed you Saturday night because at a quick glance you looked something like Lois. I want to take you to see a couple of people in the morning. I want to see if they react the same way.”
“What people?”
“The newspaper vendor, Otto Carry. And perhaps Mrs. Angora, too.”
“But why?”
“These people think they saw someone; someone who might have been Lois. I want to visit them with you and try to get some reaction out of them. If they really did see her, they’ll probably notice your resemblance to her. Carry should, at least, since he never saw her alive.”
“Harry, do you want her to be alive? Or dead?”
He tried to think about that, but whatever the answer was, he wasn’t yet ready to face it. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.”
“You’re an odd guy.”
“Will you come with me in the morning?”
“Sure. I guess so.” She hesitated a moment and then said, “Lois was a very beautiful woman. I found a picture of her in this magazine.” She reached over to the coffee table and picked up a three-month-old copy of a fashion magazine. There were some color shots taken at Newport last summer, and one of them showed him with Lois on the beach. He remembered how they’d kidded about it when the magazine appeared.
“Yes,” he answered simply.
Later that night, alone at home, he cried for the first time since the accident. But he cried for himself rather than Lois.
In the morning he picked up Rosie Yates early, and they reached the area of Sherman Park before eight. It was another sunny day, with train-bound crowds moving perhaps a little slower than they did in the chill months of winter. Harry parked the car and they waited till a dull period between trains before approaching Otto Carry at his post.
“Hello, there,” Harry said.
The old man looked up from his stack of papers, peering through the thick glasses with uncertain recognition. “You—you’re the fellow from yesterday, at the police station.”
“That’s right.”
“Want a paper?”
“Sure. Give me a Times. This girl is a friend of mine. Miss Yates.”
Otto Carry’s eyes swept over her. “Mornin’,” he said without interest.
“I was wondering… This woman you saw yesterday—did she look anything like Miss Yates here?”
The old man peered again. “Not much. Hair’s the wrong color for one thing. And no mole. The one yesterday, she had a lot more makeup on, too.”
Harry brought out the newspaper photo and the picture from the magazine. “Was this the girl?”
“I seen the one picture yesterday. Yeah, that’s the girl.”
“Thanks. Thank you very much.”
He started to turn away with Rosie Yates when a familiar voice said, “Playing detective, Mr. Gordon?” It was Sergeant Kater, looking sleepy in a topcoat he didn’t need.
“Hello. No, just buying a paper.”
Kater stepped up close. “Mind introducing me to the girl, Mr. Gordon?”
“Rosie Yates, Sergeant Kater.”
The detective nodded. “He told me about you. It’s a pleasure.”
“Look,” Harry began, “are you following me or something?”
“No. I was looking around over at the park and I saw you come in here. I was just curious.” He took out a cigarette. “I’m especially curious about your social life, Mr. Gordon.”
Harry was annoyed. “Look, I told you I just met Miss Yates last Saturday. Right, Rosie?”
The girl flushed a bit and nodded. “That’s right.”
Kater nodded. “I’ll see you around, Mr. Gordon.” He drifted out of the station, leaving them alone with the newsdealer.
“I don’t like that man,” Rosie said. “He thinks you’re hiding something.”
Harry was reminded of Lester Shaw’s words. Was it possible after all that he was hiding something? Was it possible he’d sent those messages to himself, and even murdered Shaw without knowing it? He remembered the head injury he’d suffered in the accident.
“I gotta go,” Otto Carry said suddenly. “Train due in three minutes.”
“Now what?” Rosie asked. “That woman? Betty Angora?”
“I guess not today,” Harry decided. “She’ll keep. Besides, I’ve got some other things to do.”
“That detective upset you.”
“I suppose so. He might still be following us, and I don’t want to go up to Angora’s now. I’ll take you home.”
They made the trip back to the Village apartment mostly in silence. He dropped her with a promise to call again, and then turned the car back toward Long Island. On the way he remembered an unpleasant duty. Lester Shaw’s body would be at the funeral parlor, and he would have to pay his respects. Somehow the thought of seeing Lester dead, and Muriel alive, was something he couldn’t yet face. The death of Lester had been almost more of a shock than the death of his wife, and there was no chance of Lester’s returning.
He parked across the street from the funeral parlor and went in. It was too early for regular visiting hours, but Muriel was already there, dressed in somber shadows that rustled when she walked. “Hello, Harry. It looks like a bad year for us both.”
“I’m awfully sorry, Muriel.”
“Who would want to kill him, Harry? Who would want to kill a big dope like Les?”
“He was an old friend, Muriel. I’d rather it had been me.” Harry walked into the dim sanctum where the casket rested among dripping baskets of flowers. He knelt for a momentary prayer, then went back to Muriel’s side. “Harry,” she said softly, “do you think he was killed because he saw something that night? At the accident?”
“I don’t know, Muriel. Look, I’ll be back tonight. OK?”
“Sure.” She tried to smile as he left.
Across the street, Sergeant Kater was waiting in his car. “Get in,” he said simply.
“You’ve been following me.” Harry slid into the seat next to him. “Why?”
“Because I wanted to talk some more.”
“About Muriel and me?”
“And other things.”
“Like what?”
“I want to hear everything you’ve been up to since the last time we talked,” he said curtly.
Harry gave a sort of growl. “Is that going to help find out if Lois is dead or alive?”
The detective stared straight ahead. “If I were you, Mr. Gordon, I wouldn’t be so anxious to find that out.”
“Why not?”
“Because if your wife is still alive, she’s a murderess. She killed Lester Shaw, and very possibly the person who burned to death in your car. If she’s alive, she might try to kill you next.”
The night came with uncertainty, the reflected glow in the western sky lingering far beyond its appointed time. Harry had spent a few hours at the office, shuffling papers into vague piles for a future date, and when he returned home it was with a feeling of emptiness that seemed worse than the day of the funeral. Lois dead was a body lost, but Lois alive might be a soul lost as well. He wondered if he could face her alive, the strange wild thing she might have become.
The telephone rang at ten minutes to ten, and he picked it up to hear a whisper that was tantalizingly familiar. “Harry?”
“Who is this?”
“Try to listen. I can’t speak any louder. This is Lois.”
Suddenly his body seemed to be sweating from every pore. A cold knot began to grow in the pit of his stomach. “Lois? Are you alive?” he asked, realizing at once how foolish the question must sound.
“Of course I’m alive. Didn’t you get my messages?”
“I can hardly hear you.”
“I’m alive. But I’m in awful trouble. I need money, Harry. I have to get out of town.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m hiding. It doesn’t matter where.”
“Les is dead.”
“I know it. I didn’t kill him, Harry. You have to believe that.”
“You were seen near the park.”
“I was there, but I didn’t kill him.”
“Who did? And whose body was that in the car?”
“I’ll explain it all when I see you, Harry. Can’t you trust me?”
Something, something. “Is this really Lois?”
“Harry! Do I have to come there?”
“Maybe you’d better.”
“I need money. Ten thousand dollars.”
“Where am I supposed to get it?”
“There’s money. And it’s really mine anyway.”
Really hers. Maybe that had been the trouble for all those years. “I can’t raise it in the middle of the night.”
“Don’t you have any around the house?”
“How much did I ever have around the house? Fifty, sixty dollars.”
“Tomorrow? Can you get it tomorrow? In cash?”
“You come here tonight and we’ll talk about it. I have to get to the bottom of a few things first.”
She gave a resigned sigh. “I’ll come, Harry. But it’ll be dangerous. There are people who want to kill me.”
“I’ll call the police.”
“No! They’d send me to prison, Harry. They’d say I killed Lester Shaw, and that woman in the car.”
“All right. Come out here now. Tell me what happened, the truth, and we’ll see what we can work out about the money.”
“I’ll be there in an hour,” she whispered, and hung up.
He sat for a long time at the telephone, wondering if he should call Kater. If it weren’t Lois, if it were someone else, then his life was in great danger. Even if it were Lois, he couldn’t be sure of handling her. If it were Lois… If she’d come back.
The doorbell buzzed at five minutes after eleven, and he knew it would be her. He walked to answer it, trying to keep his emotions under control, wondering what he would see when he swung open the door. He was ready for almost anything, but he was not ready for Lois.
She stood there, wearing dark glasses and a scarf that partly covered her hair. She was more beautiful than he remembered her, more mysterious, more feminine.
“Come in,” he said quietly.
“Hello, Harry,” She still spoke in a whisper, as if unsure of herself.
“You can speak up. We’re alone.”
“I…”
For a moment, for just a moment, he felt like forgetting the whole crazy business. He felt like taking this woman in his arms and making love to her, as he had with Lois so many countless times in the past.
“She would have used her key,” he said simply.
“What?”
“Lois wouldn’t have rung the doorbell. She would have used her key.”
The gun appeared in her hand by magic, and he knew she must have been holding it out of sight all the time. It was a tiny weapon, just enough of one to make a muffled cough against a man’s chest. “What do you want?” he asked her.
“Money. Ten thousand dollars.”
Then it was her natural voice, and it no longer went with this vision of Lois alive. He took a step toward the gun and saw it explode in a flash of anger. As the bullet ripped into his side he saw Kater leap from somewhere and tackle the girl with a bound of fury.
“I didn’t think she’d shoot,” Harry said stupidly, feeling the blood trickling through his shirt.
Kater had the gun now, and he held her on the floor in a viselike grip as he tried to get handcuffs on her. “She shot Shaw, didn’t she? Why not you, too?” Finally he had her on her feet and was calling an ambulance. “I told you,” he said to Harry. “I told you they never come back. Not from the grave.”
Rosie Yates looked at them both and spat.
Harry was back in the hospital for a few days, and it seemed somehow, awakening the next morning, that none of it had really happened. Perhaps it had all been a long, long nightmare. After a time, Sergeant Kater was standing by his bed, and he knew it was all too true.
“The girl is just plain nuts,” Kater was saying. “Imagine thinking she could get away with something like that!”
“I helped her get the idea,” Harry said. “I mistook her for Lois the first time I saw her, and then I told her all about it. Since Betty Angora had already come up with the idea that Lois was still alive, this Rosie Yates decided to follow through on it.”
Kater nodded from beside the bed. “She looked it up in the papers and learned that Lois had been fairly wealthy. I suppose that’s when she decided to try a shakedown by pretending Lois was still alive. From her point of view the scheme was pretty good. She’d send you a couple of messages and get you to send her some money, and that would be the end of it. She figured Lester Shaw for the go-between, because she thought she could fool him with her makeup.”
“How did she know Shaw’s name? She had it in the telegram.”
“That part was simple. She followed you Monday to see your reaction to the letter. She was probably wearing a wig. Remember, she was an actress. Anyway, in that restaurant she saw you show Shaw the letter. You said it was on the table between you for some time. She figured Shaw must be a friend, the kind you’d trust to deliver money to Lois. She simply followed Shaw and found out his name, and then sent the telegram. The real Lois probably wouldn’t have used his full name in the telegram, but she did, of course.”
“And like a fool I sent Les to meet her.”
“Don’t blame yourself. With her makeup on and her hair dyed to match that color photo in the magazine, she probably thought she could fool Shaw and get the money from him. Of course she couldn’t, especially since he’d seen Lois’ body in the car and was convinced she was really dead. He grabbed Rosie and she shot him in a panic.”
“How did she ever expect to fool me last night when she wasn’t able to fool Les?”
“She hoped you’d be enough in doubt that you’d have some money around for her anyway. Then she could take it, and it wouldn’t matter what you believed. She’d have left you dead. I guess the second murder always comes easy after the first one.”
“The makeup was good,” Harry admitted. “But of course she couldn’t possibly imitate a voice she’d never heard.”
“You gave her a bad start, visiting her apartment Tuesday, just after she’d washed the coloring out of her hair. And then she had to mention the magazine with Lois’ picture in it, because she was afraid you’d already spotted it.”
“You knew it wasn’t Lois,” Harry said.
“I knew. I had a pretty good idea of the whole caper, in fact. The news vender, Otto Carry, described the woman he saw as having a mole on her right cheek. That matched the newspaper photo, but you told me it had been mistakenly flopped, that the mole was really on her left cheek. That told me two things: it wasn’t really Lois, but somebody who tried to make up as her; more important, it wasn’t anybody who had known Lois in life, or she wouldn’t have made that mistake with the false mole. That eliminated most of your friends, and immediately turned my suspicions to the one woman in the case, who by your own admission looked something like Lois to begin with, and was an actress besides.”
“And Otto Carry didn’t recognize her without the hair coloring and the mole.”
“Would you expect him to, after one quick glimpse?”
“But Rosie Yates worked from two pictures for her makeup. Didn’t she notice the correct position of the mole in the color shot?”
The detective shrugged. “She guessed which was the right one, and guessed wrong.”
Harry had one more question. “But who was it Betty Angora saw in her garden, the day after the accident? It couldn’t have been Rosie then.”
“I don’t answer questions like that, Mr. Gordon,” Kater said. “I’m only a detective. Maybe she just saw what she wanted to see, some dream or other. It started everything in motion, though, that vision of hers.”
Harry didn’t get to Lester Shaw’s funeral. He was a day late getting out of the hospital, and when he went to visit Muriel she wasn’t at home. He thought of calling on the Angoras, but decided to wait a while. Lois was really dead, and now he had his whole lifetime to get used to the idea.