THE GIRL who looked out at me had straight black hair, cut very short, expressive blue eyes, and a small mouth. Her face was narrower than most, but she was a tall girl and it looked all right. Her breasts rose high and pointed, under some kind of black skintight pullover sweater without sleeves. She was Nathan Fisher’s sister, and she was very beautiful. She frowned slightly at me as if she couldn’t quite remember where she had known me, and wanted to remember.
“Yes?”
“I’m Sergeant Bill Randall.” I explained myself.
“Why . . . yes.” She smiled at me, a good sort of mischievous smile as if we were sharing a racy secret. “You were in charge of”—a shadow over the shrewd smiling blue eyes—“Mr. Smithell’s murder.”
“The investigation. That’s right.”
The door opened more. Her legs were long and slimly curved, revealed by high-cut white shorts. “Come in, Sergeant. What can I do for you?”
“Thank you. It’s about your brother.”
“Nathan?” I noticed the tightening of her long trim fingers around the doorknob, the quick uncertain change of tone in her voice.
“Yes. He—he was in an accident.” Goddam, Bill, quick before she passes out. “I mean, it was nothing serious. He’s not hurt. He was driving a little fast and hit a soft shoulder. I happened to be around. I brought him home. He’s asleep in my car.”
She had sagged momentarily against the door. Now she straightened, stood tall in front of me. A smile fluttered. “Oh,” she sighed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was clumsy about telling you. I always am with these things.”
“That’s all right.” The smile was firm, and for me. “Shall we get Nathan out of your car? It’s not raining so hard now.”
“I think it’s just about stopped.”
I stood aside as she walked through the big door. She was slim and tall and I admired the sleek long movements of her legs. Her walk was spoiled somewhat by a limp. But I noticed that her bad ankle had become a lot better since the night of the Smithell murder.
The light went on when I opened the car door and she leaned inside, her lips parting in a grimace as she saw the cut over Nathan’s eye. She looked over the front seat at the woman sprawled in the back and then again at Nathan almost immediately, her eyes empty. She raised one hand and touched fingers to the dried cut. Her face was gentle. She took him by the shoulder and shook him lightly.
“Nathan. Nathan!”
His eyes came open some and he looked at her. His mouth formed a loose smile. “Umm,” he said. “Hi.” He settled a little more in the front seat and closed his eyes again and went back to sleep.
She looked back at me, helplessly.
“I’ll carry him,” I said.
Upstairs I sat Nathan on the edge of his bed and Karis Fisher deftly undressed him. He was half awake, offered no help or resistance. She coaxed him into his pajamas and we put him to bed. Then she took a damp cloth from the adjoining bathroom and sponged his face. She didn’t seem upset by her brother’s condition. I guessed this was not the first time she had seen him that way.
I looked around his bedroom, noting the single bed. I remembered the heavy square ring that Fisher wore. His wife had given Nathan that ring, the ring he had left in a bathroom of Leland Smithell’s house the night Smithell had been killed, which was why he returned to the Smithell house and discovered the man’s body.
“What about his wife?” I asked.
She looked at me, her eyes frightened. “What about—who?”
“Nathan’s wife. The one who gave him the ring. Are they . . .”
“Oh,” she said, relieved. “You mean Kelly Anne. I thought you were talking about . . . that thing in the car. That would have been going too far.” She finished adjusting the covers about him, bent and kissed his forehead ligtly. “Even for Nathan.”
She took the washcloth into the bath, began turning out lights. I waited in the hallway for her as she closed the door carefully.
“Nathan’s wife died about a year ago,” she said. “Right here in the house, during some silly little party. Kelly Anne had a very bad heart and everybody knew it. She was right in the middle of a drink and she just folded up. Dr. Einhorn was here, too. He’d been treating her. He said she was probably dead before she hit the floor. Too much strain or something. Her heart failed. Nathan was grief-stricken. He loved her very much. I’m afraid he didn’t get much love back. I guess Kelly Anne was all right in her way. A flashy type blonde, stunning figure. She just didn’t care much about anything except Kelly Anne.”
There was a gleam of dislike in her eye, dislike that apparently hadn’t softened any with the passing of a year.
“Should she have been drinking if she had a heart condition?”
“No, but that was Kelly Anne for you. She said a bad heart wasn’t going to make an invalid of her. She carried on as if she had a spare one in her purse. Nathan worried himself sick about her. He gave her a lot of love. I don’t know what she gave him. I guess I couldn’t understand.” At the top of the stairs she turned to me. “Maybe you think I’m not upset when Nathan’s like that. But I am. Nathan’s really a fine man. He has a promising career ahead. He . . . just gets tired, sometimes.” Her chin trembled a little. “I guess I should be glad it doesn’t happen more often. I wish he would forget her. I wish he would.”
“Don’t you think he needs a doctor? He complained about a headache.”
“No. I wouldn’t bother Dr. Einhorn about it. Nathan needs sleep more than anything else. He has those headaches now and then. He works far too hard. He’s running for Works Commissioner in the fall, you know. Sometimes he goes over forty hours without rest. That contributes as much as anything to his . . . lapses. Maybe when the elections are over things will become more normal.”
“I guess it’s none of my business, but this sort of thing isn’t so good for him politically.”
Her eyes were troubled. “Do you think that woman—”
“I doubt if she’s aware of who he is. He’s liable to get hold of a smart one some day, though, who would talk to anybody for the right price. That would be bad.”
“I know, I know,” she said miserably. “I can’t predict what Nathan will do next. I try to look after him, make him take time out for golf, or just loafing. He doesn’t really care about drinking. He just . . . has to. It must be lonely for him, despite his public life. We live here alone, since mother died about a year and a half ago. But Nathan and I were raised in this house and I hate to give it up.”
We stood less than a foot apart, sharing a comfortable feeling of intimacy undisturbed by an awareness of being strangers.
“It must be lonely for you, too.”
She sat on the top step, patted the carpet beside her. I sat down, too.
“No, not really. There’s always something to do in Cheyney or up at State. Parties and weddings. I guess I have the usual number of boy friends.”
“But no one in particular?”
She gave me a curious glance. “No. There never has been. Later, maybe. Right now there’s Nathan to think about.”
“You’re not still in college?”
“No. I graduated two years ago. I went to Smith my first year—” She smiled. “Mother insisted. Both she and grandmother graduated from Smith. But I was homesick and I got tired of all those Ivy League types. I finished up at State.” The sadness seemed to have left her. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thanks, Miss Fisher, I . . .”
She tugged at my hand. “Come on,” she said urgently. “And don’t call me Miss Fisher. My name’s Karis. It’s sort of silly, but that’s what mother wanted.”
“I like it,” I said, smiling a little. “Just one cup, and I’ll go.”
I followed her down the stairs. She walked carefully, favoring her injured ankle, supporting herself with one hand on the banister. Near the bottom of the stairs I put my hands around her waist and lifted her the rest of the way down.
“Ah,” she said, “muscles.”
“Yeah. That ankle still pretty bad?” I asked, embarrassed a little.
“It’s coming along. What a whack I gave it!”
“How did it happen?”
“Right after Nathan discovered Mr. Smithell was dead he came running back here. He yelled up to me from the front hallway. I thought the house was on fire, or something, so I threw on a robe and came running. My legs got all tangled up somehow and I hit my ankle against the banister post at the top of the stairs. I thought I’d die. That was a bad night for me. Seeing Mr. Smithell dead like that after we had just left him. It makes me feel morbid thinking about it. And that boy. I heard he hanged himself.”
“Yes.”
She shook her head dolefully. “I heard it on the radio. The whole news broadcast was depressing. This is just one of those gloomy nights. I’m glad you happened along, Bill. Kitchen’s this way.”
She took me by the hand and smiled at me. I was glad I had happened along, too.
But why all the confiding in me? Why so friendly? I’m not that pretty.
“Maybe I ought to skip the coffee. That woman in the car is pretty sick,” I said.
Karis dropped my hand.
ACCORDING TO AN ID CARD IN HER WALLET, WHICH SHE WORE attached to the belt of her slacks, the woman lived in an apartment on Foster Street, one block from the Katy yards. I took her there and shook her awake and guided her out of my car and up two flights of stairs, supporting her when she got the staggers. She chirped and cooed and giggled and moaned all the way.
When I got her inside her door she sat down on the floor with her feet sticking out in the hall and I couldn’t talk her into getting up. I should have left her like that. Instead I picked her up and carried her into the bedroom.
I sat her on the bed and she got up immediately and went for the bathroom like somebody had pulled the cork. I noticed that there were signs of a man living with her.
When she came back she was wearing only the soggy sweater. She collapsed on the bed and got comfortable.
“I’m all weak,” she said. “All weak. Undress me.”
I took hold of the sweater with some reluctance and pulled and wrenched and tugged and it came off. I hung it over the back of a chair.
“You’re nice to me,” she said. “He wasn’t nice. He prop-as-uh-properishuned me.”
“A sweet kid like you,” I said. “Imagine.”
I put her head on the pillow and pulled a sheet over her. She opened her eyes and giggled, wrapped her arms around my neck.
“Hee, hee, hee,” she said. “He’s not nice, like you. Get in with me?”
“Some other time,” I said.
But she found the strength to pull my head down and she kissed me on the nose, her mouth closing over the tip of it.
Hearing a noise, I removed the arms and straightened up. I turned toward the doorway. A man was standing there. A large man wearing denims, a khaki shirt. Hair puffed out at the throatline. His thick forearms were covered with it.
“He took my pants off me, Harry,” the dame said, to get us off to a lively start. Hee, hee, hee.
“Who are you?” he said mildly.
“Detective Sergeant Bill Randall,” I said, grinning foolishly. “The little lady was in an auto accident. I brought her home.”
He looked from me to her. She had turned over on her stomach and seemed to be asleep.
“Well, I guess I’ll be going.” I walked toward the door. He stepped aside without looking at me. “That’s quite a girl,” I said, just to be saying something.
“You ought to be married to her,” he said quietly, without turning his head.
“Hee, hee, hee,” the redhead giggled, the sound of it muffled because her face was in the pillow.
I MADE IT MY BUSINESS TO CALL ON NATHAN FISHER THE next morning. He had a couple of small rooms in the Times Publishing Company building above the pressroom. I went through an outer door with a long ugly crack in the glass like a sudden pain and found myself looking at a young man with waved blond hair and pale blue eyes who sat behind a secretary’s desk in one corner of the room.
He had a flat briefcase in his lap and a .38 caliber revolver in a holster under one arm. I couldn’t see the gun but I knew the man and knew he always carried it.
His name was Walsh and he looked after Dan Campion, who had been governor of the state a number of years ago, then a senator in Washington. Campion was after another term as governor, which was probably the reason for his visit to Nathan, who was in line for nomination as State Works Commissioner on the Campion ticket.
Walsh nodded my way. “Randall.”
“Hello, Walsh. How long has that been going on?”
He looked toward the door of Nathan’s office. Campion’s pale silhouette moved over the glass as he walked restlessly around inside.
“All morning.” A twist of his arm gave him the time, and he frowned slightly. “They’re about due to break it up. Dan’s got a lunch date over in Wescott in forty-five minutes.” He looked at me amiably through the smoke from a cigarette. “You come to see Dan’s boy?”
I nodded. The voices of the two men inside were audible but muffled. “Strategy meeting?” I said.
“Big rally up in Kell County, the twenty-third. Dan’s charting the plays.”
“How does Nathan stack up in this state?” I said.
Walsh shrugged. “I don’t need to tell you about politics, do I? Nathan works hard, he has that certain flair that makes votes stick to him. He’s sincere, but he doesn’t let that get in the way of ambition. The only drawback is, he’s young. Mr. East and Mr. West like their boys more mature and not so gung ho. But Campion’s softening them up. If he brings those two around, Nathan’s got it knocked. He’ll be right next door to the big office before you know it. He’ll learn a lot from Dan up there. I’d say things look good for him, if he doesn’t pull a fruitcake somewhere.”
“Yeah,” I said. Walsh was watching me with his customary eager-beagle look, his face still and alert, as if he was waiting for me to say something more. The door from Nathan’s office opened suddenly, diverting Walsh’s attention. He swung out of his chair easily.
Nathan and Dan Campion came out. They both nodded, but Nathan seemed too absorbed in something Campion was saying to pay much attention to me. After the ex-governor and Walsh had left, Nathan stared at me a moment, then said, “Come on inside, Randall.”
I went. Nathan’s office was furnished simply, with a second-hand desk that needed varnish, a few chairs and a large filing cabinet. There was a framed picture of his sister on the desk.
Nathan offered me a cigarette, took one for himself. I looked him over critically. His face was carefully shaved, but his eyes were watery and tired.
“How’re you feeling?” I said.
He snorted and managed a smile, blinked at smoke that hovered near his eyes. “Like my joints are eggshell. Big rag rug in my mouth.” He drew on the cigarette, looked at it with distaste and flipped it into an empty wastebasket.
“We hauled your car out of the ditch,” I said. “Minor damage. You can claim it in the garage back of the jail. Cost you five dollars for towing.”
He nodded gloomily, seemed to think about it a moment. He swung around to face me with a quizzical smile.
“I don’t remember a whole lot about last night. You looked after that girl—?”
“I took her home. She wasn’t hurt. She was no girl, either.”
“Ummmhumm,” he said, as if it wasn’t important. Maybe it wasn’t. “She could have been sixteen, for all I could tell. Those lights in the place. No lights, actually. Ought to pass a law about places like that. Too easy to pick up. Too easy to get picked up. I don’t know. She just didn’t seem bothered when I puked under the table. That impressed me. I wasn’t drunk. Just some bad beer. Hell of an evening.”
The words rambled out with no particular thought or inflection behind them, as if his mind was rewinding after the session with Campion. He irritated me slightly, but at the same time I felt in touch with him emphatically, as if I could know his moods and desires without understanding them. Nathan had a magnetic quality, all right. A politician.
“You keep diversified company,” I said. “You hop from a tavern broad to the ex-governor of the state in a matter of hours and the only change I can see in you is a clean shirt.”
He smiled as if I had hurt him. “I don’t intend to do it. I know what I should do and what I shouldn’t. But up comes this thing and carries me off and the part of me that knows better can’t help me.”
“Your kind of mistake is the kind you can make too often.”
He accepted that. He sat on the edge of his desk and watched the fingers of his right hand curl and uncurl. “I’m beautiful this morning,” he said with faint irony. “I’m really beautiful this morning.” He looked at me again. “Am I going to have any court trouble because of that creature last night?”
“No.”
“You reading me off with a warning?”
“I don’t know what else to do with you.”
“Yeah.” He studied his hands. “I won’t do it again,” he said. They were just so many words.
“Take care of yourself,” I said. “Take care of your sister.”
I went out and shut the door behind me.
I WAS AT MY CLUTTERED DESK IN POLICE HEADQUARTERS about midnight when Phil Naar poked his head in the door.
“You still hanging around?” I said. Phil was working the 3-11 that week.
He came inside. He was wearing a coffee-colored shirt, sticking wet to him in places. He rested his stocky body in a chair near the window and gave me a tired grin.
“We had a cutting down in the Mill Bottom,” he said. “Two kids were arguing over what to play on the juke box, for Christ’s sake.” He patted his face and neck with his handkerchief. “I been over to St. Kit’s with it.”
“How did you get that?” I said, noticing the bandage on his left hand.
“A little trouble getting one of the kids into the squad car. The one that was still standing when we got there. He bit me. Smith had to unload his billy on the boy before we could handle him. Kids!”
“Yeah.”
He looked at the folder and pictures on my desk. “What have you got there? Jimmy Herne?”
I nodded. “I was adding the newspaper clippings about his suicide. Should I send out for coffee?”
“I can’t drink coffee in the summer. I must have told you that before.”
“Must have. It’s just my age. I can’t remember what people tell me any more. Old ladies help me across the street.”
“Send that to Jerry. He could use it.”
Jerry was Phil’s boy. He had a local television program out in Hollywood and played bit parts in movies.
“On second thought,” Phil said, “I’ll tell him myself when I get out there.” He looked at a calendar on one wall. “My God, eight more months. Only eight more months and then forty-four dollars and seventy-six cents a week for the rest of my life. All that, and social security, too.”
He reached out and unlaced his shoes, let them drop on the floor. His feet were on the radiator, which hasn’t worked for years. I don’t mean to sound like we’re hard up. The roof doesn’t leak, unless somebody spits on it.
“I heard something real interesting,” I said. “According to Miller Starkey, Jimmy Herne was telling the truth about where he got the thirty dollars.”
Phil picked at something stuck between a couple of his teeth. “You planning to let Gulliver know?” he said, trying to sound disinterested.
“I already did.”
He put his feet on the floor. “What did he say?”
I grinned. “He said I spoiled his evening.”
Phil spoke morosely. “The way you keep sticking your head in that lion’s mouth fascinates me. Either you got more guts than good sense or else you’re trying to prove something to yourself.”
I quit smiling. “Like what?”
“Aw,” Phil grumbled, “how would I know? You’re the college boy.” He didn’t look at me.
“The college boy,” I repeated. “Maybe that bothers you. Maybe you think you should be giving the orders around here.”
“Cut it out,” Phil said sharply. “I’m not the executive type. I’m just the kind of guy who spends his life taking orders and doing the best he can. I know that. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
We stared at each other for a while, not hostilely, but grimly. I broke it up. “Sorry, Phil. I’ve been touchy lately for some reason.”
He turned a little and stared out of the window. I tucked the papers on my desk into Jimmy’s folder. The photos remained spread out on my blotter. I looked at them again. I had taken them myself and they showed good detail. Three of the pictures were of Leland Smithell lying on the rug in his living room. He was wearing an undershirt and trousers, his bare feet were in slippers. The candy dish, of hammered copper with a wooden handle, lay on the floor nearby. It had been used to kill Smithell. The back of his head was badly crushed. He had been hit at least twice, and the autopsy surgeon reported that the back of his skull had collapsed, shoving pieces of bone into the brain.
The first blow possibly had only stunned him, and he had stumbled against an end table near the sofa, upsetting the heavy metal table lamp, which could be seen on the floor in the pictures.
Along with several diagrams of the first floor of the house, I put the pictures back in the folder. Impulsively, I took out my report of the investigation and Jimmy’s confession, reread them both.
Smithell had lived in Cheyney about three years. No one knew where he was from, and apparently he had no living relatives. A check of his few papers turned up no letters from anywhere but Cheyney. He wasn’t wealthy but had enough money to invest in the expansion program of Nordin Kaylor, and eventually became Kaylor’s partner. He lived in a new ranch-type house just down the street from the Fishers in the best section of town, apparently lived quietly. He entertained occasionally, belonged to Wood Hills Country Club and was socially acceptable. He seemed about fifty years old. His only charity had been a homely kid named Jimmy Herne, whom he had heard about from a friend connected with the state prison system. He had wanted someone to look after his house for him, and Jimmy eventually got the job. Somebody, besides Stella Francis, had been hoping Jimmy would straighten out. But Jimmy murdered Smithell, probably without meaning to, for a couple of rings and other pieces of men’s jewelry. And, apparently, thirty dollars. He had never had a chance to get away with it and he had finally ended his unattractive life personally, after confessing. There was nothing more.
Nothing more, except that I couldn’t quite think of Jimmy as just another folder filled with reports and fingerprint cards and arrest sheets. Maybe that was Stella’s fault, for trying to make me see the hard ugly life when nobody gives a damn. So that I had to think about a frightened kid walking away from the reformatory, telling himself, grimly, that he was through with it, that he’d die before he went back.
Then staying with Stella a while, before the job with Smithell came along.
Washing dishes, cutting grass, catering to and supervising routine for an aging bachelor.
For ten months. And then . . .
A mistimed try for quick money, and running.
And being brought back, and knowing there wasn’t a chance, because nobody would listen to him.
Phil was still looking out of the window, and I wondered if he was remembering, as I was . . .
The kid lay beside the wooden chair in the basement, the chair that was bolted to the floor. Gulliver lifted his head with a hand under the chin.
“I . . . didn’t . . . do . . . it . . .”
Gulliver looked at Phil Naar, who had come in quietly while it was going on. I watched both of them.
“Clean him up, Phil, and take him over to the jail” Gulliver went to the door and left without looking again at Jimmy Herne.
Phil wet his handkerchief at a sink on the wall. He helped Jimmy to a sitting position. Jimmy’s head hung, as if he didn’t have strength to lift it. Blood was bright on Jimmy’s lower lip. Phil wiped at it with the handkerchief.
“You must have bit your lip,” he said.
He helped Jimmy to his feet. The kid stood uncertainly for a moment, finding strength. He held his head gently with his hands.
“I guess I don’t need to put the cuffs on you just to walk over to the jail, do I?” Phil said.
Jimmy turned and kicked him. It seemed to take all he had because he sat down then, in the chair.
“What . . . did you do that for?” Phil said, his eyes full of hurt. “I didn’t do anything to you.”
Jimmy sobbed. “You goddam cop!”
“You got a cigarette, Bill?”
“Oh? Sure.” I tossed him my pack and he lit one.
“Thanks. Well, I guess I ought to go on home. No reason to stick around. No reason for you to stick around, either.”
“No.” I put the remaining papers in the folder, secured it. “What do you think, Phil? I mean about Jimmy and the thirty dollars.”
Phil sighed, and began putting on his shoes. “There had to be some truth in him somewhere. I guess that was it.”
“Suppose that wasn’t all the truth.”
He gave me a frayed stare. “What do you want to say, Bill?”
“Damned if I know.”
Phil stood up and took out his handkerchief, patted his chin. “Eight more months,” he said, to himself. “Just eight more months. I don’t want to do anything but stay out of his way for that long. I don’t even want him to know I’m around, for eight more months.”
His face was drawn. There was a sour tension in the hot little room, and I knew he could taste it. He sighed. “Well, there’s always the chance we were wrong about . . .”
“Suppose we don’t talk about it,” I said. “Suppose we forget all about it because we can’t do anything about it anyway, now.”
Phil took his hat off, combed his slack white hair with his fingers and put the hat back on.
“If you find a way to forget it,” he said irritably, “let me know. I’d like to get some sleep too.”