We went into the kitchen and shut the door. I thought it would help to lessen the horror of the thing in the living-room. But it didn’t. All the time I was talking, planning what seemed, even though I’d made up my mind to it, absolutely preposterous, the feeling of the corpse remained. It was almost worse, as if now we were not there to watch it, it might suddenly stand up and some stealthy sound might stir beyond the door, bringing the panic, which was so close to the surface anyway, spouting up like a geyser.
I’d got us both drinks. I was sitting on a stool. The automatic can opener, which I was always bumping into when I was in the kitchen, hung on the wall, brushing against my elbow. Virginia stood by the window. She had taken off her coat. The scarlet geranium she’d bought the day before glowed on the sill behind her.
I made myself think of us as just any two people having drinks in any kitchen, and gradually, in spite of the fear and the sense of unreality, the plan began to form and to seem practical. Our apartment house had its own garage in the basement. There was a service elevator, a service entrance and a little service alleyway. If we waited until it was really late, I could bring the car into the service alley. Virginia and I together could get the body down in the elevator. We could put it in the luggage compartment of the car. I could drive—anywhere—and dump the body.
I looked at my watch. It was five to eight.
“We’ll wait till one or two. No one will be using the service elevator then; no one will be in the alley. He’s heavy but the two of us can get him to the elevator.”
I paused, looking across at her. She was being wonderfully unhysterical. That, more than anything, was making it possible.
“You think you can do that?” I said. “Help me?”
“Of course. But isn’t there a man all night in the garage?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’ll see you taking the car out.”
“Maybe he will, but it won’t matter. If ever it comes up, we’ll have a reason for taking it out so late.”
“What reason?”
“Any. We weren’t tired. We thought we’d drop into a nightclub. We can actually do it—after we’ve dumped the body.”
“But where shall we take him?”
“Anywhere.” An idea came. “Wall Street. Why not? At night Wall Street’s deserted as the Sahara.” An almost frightening self-confidence was coming to me. “Yes, we’ll drive down to Wall Street and when we’ve dumped him that’s all there’ll be to it. Later, after they’ve found him, they may eventually get on to the fact that you’d been married to him. They might even come here for a routine check. But if he was the way you said he was, there must be dozens of people who wanted to kill him. There’ll be nothing definite to point to you, and by then we’ll have worked out an alibi for you together.”
The tautness of the skin over her cheek-bones had relaxed. She was, I could tell, beginning to hope. But there was a cautious, almost wary look in her eyes.
“What about the gun?” she said.
“We’ll throw it in the river tonight.”
“But if they do come and check, they may find out you owned one.”
“I’ll say it was Beth’s, which it was, and that I got rid of it when she died.”
“Then—then it may work?”
“Of course it’ll work. We just have to sit here and sweat it out until one.”
She came over and stood in front of me. She put her hand on my shoulder.
“Lew, I don’t know what to say.”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“Oh yes there is. There’s everything.”
I rested my hand on hers and with the other one felt in my pocket for my cigarette packet. It was empty.
I said, “If you really want to do something for me, toss me a packet of cigarettes from the drawer.”
She started towards the cabinet and then stopped. “There aren’t any. I noticed before I went out. But I bought a carton. They must be in the living-room.”
A memory came of her walking in from the hall, stopping in her tracks, the package dropping from under her arm. It destroyed the little kitchen world of false security.
When we’d gone into the kitchen, I had turned out the lights in the living-room. Now it was an ominous cavern of dark and lighter shadows. I turned on a lamp. The illumination seemed dazzling. The body, huge, humped, sprawled across the carpet, seemed to fill the room. I could see the carton of cigarettes in its drugstore paper sack lying just beyond it by the door to the hall. I skirted the body. The cigarettes were only an inch or so from the outstretched right hand. As I bent and picked them up, my own hand brushed against a thick finger. From the contact, nausea came first, then near-panic. I dropped the cigarettes again. I fell to my knees. I felt the wrist, then the arm, then I lugged the arm upward.
“Virginia!”
After the silence, my voice sounded like a yell. As I looked up, she came running to the kitchen door.
“What is it?”
I stood up. I fought down the panic because I had to.
I said, “We can’t wait until one. It’s getting stiff. If we wait, we’ll never get it in the back of the car.”
She took a few steps towards me.
“You’re sure?” Thank God her voice was all right.
“Absolutely sure.”
“Then?”
“We’ll have to risk it. I’ll get the car. I’ll bring it to the alleyway. We’ll have to get him down and into it.”
“And then?”
“I’ll take the car back to the garage. We’ll leave it there until it’s late enough—then I’ll dump him.”
The moment when I might have cracked had passed. It wasn’t, after all, as impossible as it had seemed. The residents in the apartment house, when they got their cars from the garage, used the regular elevators to the basement. Who would be likely to be using the service elevator after eight? It was dark now. Who would be in the alley?
I said, “I’ll go down the back way. I’ll open the door to the alley. Then I’ll get the car and come back.”
“Now?” She was trying to keep the terror out of her voice, but it was there.
“Now,” I said.
I got my overcoat from the hall and drew Virginia back into the kitchen.
“Just sit here and wait. That’s all you’ve got to do.”
I’d already realised that the floor plan was almost ideal. A service entrance from the kitchen led to the fire-stairs, and the service elevator was no more than thirty feet along the bare cement corridor. There was one, but only one, other kitchen door between us and it. I didn’t know who it belonged to. I didn’t know any of the neighbours.
I went quietly down the corridor and pressed the button for the service elevator. I could hear it lumbering up; then it arrived and the door slid open. For a split second I thought: My God, someone’s in it. But it was only a mop standing head up in a bucket. As I descended, I thought of Sheila entertaining the family at 79th Street, of the familiar Denham existence going on with nothing more ominous to disturb it than anxiety as to whether or not Aunt Peggy would be “at her best”. I had been swept into another world. Even its geography was almost unknown to me. Once, the year before, when the lights had fused, I’d gone down the back way to the basement looking for the superintendent—and had failed. The memory supported me. I’d gone down, I’d wandered around bleak deserted areas, I’d even complained. They’d told me that the superintendent lived in the front and that if anyone needed him the proper procedure was to call down to the doorman to summon him.
That had been it, hadn’t it? Then what was there to fear?
The elevator came to a halt. The doors opened and I moved out. The garage was off to my left. I knew that. Almost directly in front of me, only a few feet away, was the basement fire door which led to the alley. I hurried to it and dropped the bar. As I half opened it, the cold night air rushed in. I looked out into the high-walled alley. A thin cat scurried. An old newspaper, blown into grey scattered individual sheets, strewed the cement surface. Not a soul.
I shut the door again, leaving the bolt hanging down. Usually when I wanted the car, I called down from the apartment for the attendant to bring it to the head of the ramp, but sometimes in the past for one reason or other, I’d just walked straight in. Doing it now would surely raise no suspicions. I threaded my way through dusty corridors past furnaces, pipes, the whole complex of a large apartment house’s intestines, back to the front of the building and the regular elevators, for that was the orthodox way of approaching the garage.
I went through the ordinary door and up the side of the ramp. One of the garage men was sitting outside his little cubicle reading the paper, his feet up on a chair. I knew him and he knew me.
“Hi, Mr. Denham—want the Chevy?”
He yelled to the other man. In a couple of minutes my car had been brought to the head of the ramp. In a couple more minutes I’d driven out into the street around the block and in again through the delivery entrance right up to the open fire door.
When I got back to the kitchen, Virginia was sitting at the white enamel table with her coat on. She jumped up.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s a cinch. It’s just getting him there.”
“There wasn’t anyone around?”
“No one. Ready?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m ready.”
“Quick then. I left the service elevator open.”
As we hurried into the living-room, I thought of the blood. If I carried him, blood would get on my clothes and I’d have to drive back to the garage. Better my suit than my overcoat. I took off the coat and threw it on a chair. I looked down at the body. Virginia came to my side.
“Take off your coat,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, understanding.
At first as we struggled silently and with growing despair, it seemed impossible—not just revolting and soul-destroying, but impossible. The dead weight was tremendous. We yanked and pulled. Once, as we rolled him on to his side, his leg kicking out, it seemed, with conscious viciousness, sent a table and lamp clattering to the floor. There was a moment in our planlessness when we were on the brink of collapse. Then, from some dim recess of my memory, I remembered the fireman’s grip. I got down on my hands and knees; I pulled one huge arm over my shoulder. While Virginia, panting, almost sobbing, pushed and clawed, I exerted all my strength and it was done. He was standing upright, or rather he was upright, lumbering forward on to my back. His head lurched over my shoulder; his cheek, cold, obscene as wax, was pressing against my cheek.
I was facing in the wrong direction. I managed to swivel around.
“Get the coats,” I said.
Virginia ran to the chair.
I lugged him through the kitchen. I lugged him out to the cement corridor. The worst part wasn’t the weight or the cheek, it was the dreadful dead shuffle of his toes dragging behind me—a monster noise from a monster movie. Ahead of me the dim light in the service elevator gleamed like a hopelessly inaccessible beacon. Somehow I got there. Virginia came in after me.
I said, “Press B for the basement.”
I had him up against the wall, jammed between my back and the wall, relieving me of some of the weight. As the elevator went down, he swerved sideways. I almost fell. Virginia jumped against me, pushing. Her foot caught the bucket. The mop tilted sideways; the damp woolly head splashed against my other cheek.
Then, when the nightmare should have reached its peak, it was all right. Maybe I had worn out my capacity for horror. The basement was as bleakly deserted as before. Virginia, hurrying ahead of me, opened the fire door and then, running to the car, opened the luggage compartment with the car keys. There were a few seconds of lurching forward, tilting, pushing, shoving with hands made savage by suppressed panic. Then the luggage compartment was shut.
We stood gasping, looking at each other. I turned my back.
“Is there blood?”
“I can’t see.”
“Give me the coat.”
I slipped on my overcoat. So did Virginia. She took out a comb and combed her hair. Then she combed mine. As she leaned towards me, I gripped her and held her against me. I thought: Now we’ve been through this together, nothing can separate us, and I felt a quite incredible joy.
“What do we do now, Lew?”
“Go for a drive.”
“A drive?”
“We can’t dump him yet and if I take the car straight back it’ll look odd. We’ll just drive for a bit—then I can take it back.”
We were both climbing into the car. In a few seconds we were out on the street. Driving into its leisurely evening activity was like being awakened from a dream into normal reality. No, not normal, of course not—driving through Manhattan with a body jammed in the luggage compartment had little that was normal in it.
But there was enough normality to make it possible to go on. I looked at myself in the windshield mirror, then I looked at Virginia. There was nothing to indicate what we’d been through. Nothing at all. I drove downtown to the U.N. Building and then uptown again. We hardly spoke, but every now and then I’d turn my head to her and every now and then she’d brush her hand against mine. The only thing that was unendurable was lack of cigarettes. We’d left them behind. I stopped at a corner drugstore on Third Avenue. Virginia got out and came back with two packets.
We smoked avidly, drove at random and then, about half an hour later—this seemed the minimal time to put in—we went back to the apartment house. I left Virginia off at the front entrance. The doorman was showing some other people into a taxi. As I drove away I saw him raise his hand to Virginia. She waved back. I drove around and down into the garage to the head of the ramp.
The garage man said, “Well, you weren’t out long.”
“We couldn’t get into the movie we wanted to see,” I said. “We decided to come home and blow ourselves to a nightclub later on instead.”
“One of them girlie shows? Wouldn’t consider trading chores with me, would you, Mr. Denham? I’m on all night tonight.”
He had his extra set of keys. That was the normal procedure. As he climbed into the car and shot it up through the lines of other parked cars, I had expected a tremor of panic to come. But it didn’t. Now it was out of sight, the corpse seemed to have lost its power.
It hadn’t though. The moment I let myself into the apartment, I could feel its lingering presence. I took off the overcoat and looked at myself in the hall mirror, twisting to see my back. Yes, there was blood on the grey gabardine of the shoulders, not much, but some. I went into the living-room. Virginia wasn’t there. The overturned table and lamp sprawled across the carpet, horribly suggesting the shape of the body.
“Virginia.”
She came out of the kitchen, carrying a basin.
She said, “There’s blood on the carpet.”
We were both down on our knees. The stain wasn’t wide but it was long and irregular, winding this way and that, maddeningly blurred by the oriental design of the carpet. She started to scrub. As I knelt at her side, panic stirred, a different kind of panic, a surface, brittle jitteriness in which the tiniest thing seemed impossibly complicated. Was soap and warm water right? Was that what one used to remove blood? How did one know?
At last it looked all right. At least you couldn’t see anything—not with the naked eye. Virginia took the basin back into the kitchen. I put the table and lamp back into place. The gun was still lying on the carpet. I picked it up.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Throw it in the river.”
“I know, but what are you going to do with it now?”
“Put it back in the drawer,” I said, and then, “There’s blood on my suit.”
“I know.”
“We’d better get rid of it, hadn’t we?”
“Yes,” she said. “Down the incinerator chute.”
“I’ve got to take a shower.”
“Yes,” she said, “yes.”
We both showered. When I was dressed again, I took the bundled-up suit and headed for the kitchen. Virginia, in a short black dress, came hurrying after me.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking the suit to the chute.”
“Not like that.”
She snatched the suit from me, ran into the kitchen and came back with scissors. She sat down and began cutting the jacket to pieces with erratic jagged strokes. Then she started on the trousers. As I watched her, her tension frayed on mine.
I said, “The zipper won’t burn. Probably the buttons won’t either.”
“No, no. That’s right.”
Almost wildly she was snipping off the buttons, ripping out the zipper. When she’d finished, I scooped up the fragments of the suit from her lap. I started for the kitchen. I was just at its threshold when the front-door buzzer rang.
It was the worst of all the moments because it was the world making its first demand on us before we’d prepared ourselves for anything. I spun around to Virginia. She had turned to me. Then both of us did exactly the same thing. We glanced hectically around the room as if there must be some huge, damning sign of what had happened. There wasn’t anything, of course. The room looked exactly the way it had always looked except that the dark material of the carpet was faintly darker where we’d scrubbed.
The buzzer sounded again more persistently.
It was Virginia who said, “Answer it.”
“But if it’s the police.”
“How could it be the police?”
“If someone’s framing you—why not?”
“My God!” She hesitated. “But the doorman knows I’m here. He saw me coming up. If it is the police and we don’t answer, it’ll be worse.”
That was so obvious that I should have thought of it too, but the grotesque unnaturalness of standing there clutching the bloodstained fragments of my grey gabardine suit had blurred my reactions.
I brought the bundle of scraps back to her.
“You take them to the chute.”
For a second she glanced down at the buttons in her palm and the dangling zipper. Then she turned to a table and tumbled them into a drawer. She snatched the suit from me and started for the kitchen. I went out into the hall. I’d lost all track of time, and time could be tremendously important. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes to ten.
If it was the police, what should we say we’d been doing? I’d come home from the office. We’d had drinks and eaten. We’d gone to a movie but we hadn’t been able to get in. What movie?
The buzzer shrilled again. I stood paralysed.
“Lewis,” called a voice from outside. “Lewis.”
The police fantasy disintegrated. I opened the door.
“Well,” said Aunt Peggy. “Well, well, well.”
She was wearing a mink coat, no hat, no gloves, no pocket-book even—just the mink coat wrapped irregularly around her. Even then in my swirl of astonishment and relief, I could gauge almost exactly the degree of her drunkenness. It was about two thirds of the way, the fourth day, probably, of the hidden bottle and the nip. It was the excitable stage of the bright eyes, the persistent giggle, the slight puffiness of the cheeks.
Aunt Peggy was there. For some reason she was there. Do something about her.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello, Lewis.” The giggle came, not changing the fixed brightness of the eyes. “I’m a fugitive from Sheila’s godawful party.”
The giggle came again. Still clutching the mink coat around her, she started past me into the living-room with slow, deliberate steps, the ankles bulging a trifle over the edge of the stiletto-heeled shoes. Aunt Peggy had always been big, one of those broad-boned, butter-haired blondes turned out annually on the private school chain-belt for distribution in the social marriage mart. At fifty she should have been indistinguishable from all the other hundreds of pampered females who had drifted undeviatingly from a Main Line debut to a seat on the Milk Fund Ball Committee. God alone knew what had gone wrong.
God alone knew too what she could be doing here. I watched her cautious progress into the living-room, forcing myself to find from somewhere the resilence to cope with her. I was never good at it at the best of times. Unlike Hugo, Uncle Gene, Tanya and Beth, I’d never been able to keep up the elaborate Denham pretence. When she was drunk, I could only see her as drunk. And when my nerves frayed too far, I yelled at her because the whole business humiliated me.
We met as little as possible.
She was in the living-room now, standing on the damp edge of the carpet.
“Lewis, where are you, Lewis?”
I joined her. My thoughts, disjointed by relief, were skittering all over the place. Why had Uncle Gene been so idiotic as to take her to Sheila’s party in this condition? How had she managed to slip away? And most of all, how the hell was I going to get rid of her? Call Sheila’s? Have them all pouring over here after her? Take her home then? In the car? An image came of the pianist’s body jammed into the luggage compartment. Aunt Peggy became almost as terrible then as the police.
She had sat down, settling herself rather cumbersomely into a chair, letting the mink coat drop open.
I said, “Does Uncle Gene know you’re here?”
When she was like this, Aunt Peggy seldom answered questions directly. Her face, whose girlish prettiness was still almost intact except for a general plumpening of the contours, raised its gaze from contemplation of her knees.
“Your uncle? Your uncle as usual is slobbering all over Princess Natasha. Sheila has some extraordinary young man. Really, it’s all most peculiar—really.”
“But how did you get out?” I said.
“Out?” It was a fatally wrong word. “What do you mean-out? Why shouldn’t I be out?”
“Aunt Peggy, you know what I mean. Do they know you’re here? That’s all.”
“How should I know what they know?”
“But you can’t just walk out of a party at ten o’clock without their knowing.”
“Oh, can’t you!” Aunt Peggy giggled again. She’d forgotten I’d incurred her displeasure. She leaned conspiratorially towards me. “If a party’s a godawful boring party and you’re bored to distraction, you can say you’re feeling a little unwell, can’t you? You can say you’re going downstairs to lie down for a while, can’t you? Now, Lewis, don’t be boring, Lewis. Where’s this girl Sheila did so much talking about? Have you got her hidden somewhere? That’s perfectly ridiculous. She’s perfectly enchanting, Sheila says. Perfectly enchanting. Why don’t you produce this perfectly enchanting girl?”
So that was how she’d got away from 79th Street and that was why she was here. She’d found out about Virginia. Not from Uncle Gene and Hugo, of course, who’d be rigidly suppressing the unsuitable news of my second marriage. Sheila, in her anxiety to make Ray Callender seem as unsensational as possible, had made a point of “breaking the ice” for us all around. I might have guessed it.
The slightest of sounds made me look beyond Aunt Peggy to the kitchen door. Virginia was standing there tautly. For a moment I thought: Oh God, something’s gone wrong about the chute. Then I realised she was merely waiting for me to make some signal. Bring her in. Get it over with. What else was there to do?
With a dreadful false cheerfulness, I said, “Oh, there you are, Virginia. Come and meet Aunt Peggy.”
Aunt Peggy tried to get up but not very hard. Virginia came to her and held out her hand.
“Hello, Mrs. Denham,” she said, “I’m Virginia Harwood.”
“Well,” said Aunt Peggy. “Well, well, well.”
The meaninglessly bright eyes focused on Virginia with no inquisitiveness, with no malice either; they just focused.
“Charming,” she said. “Perfectly charming. Perfectly …”
The words drifted off. A fatuous smile came. Then she went blank. She hadn’t passed out or gone to sleep. She was just sitting there—a vegetable.
I knew what had happened, of course. There’d been the effort of the party, the boredom—always the boredom—and then the artificial stimulus of “sneaking off to see Lewis’s new girl”. Now that Virginia had been seen and was just as boring as anything else, there was nothing to stave off the withdrawal into that world of alcoholic apathy which had become her only reality and which, for all I knew, had some weird secret compensations of its own. I’d seen this dozens of times before and, as always, I felt a kind of despairing rage. Only now it was immensely stronger.
“Aunt Peggy,” I shouted.
Virginia shot me a look, blank, bewildered.
I grabbed my aunt’s arms and shook her. “Aunt Peggy.”
“Charming,” she said. “Quite, quite charming.”
Her voice tilting, Virginia said, “What’ll we do?”
“Coffee,” I said. “It might help.”
She dashed back into the kitchen.
“Aunt Peggy,” I said again and the phone rang. It rang again. I ran and picked it up.
“Lew, for Christ’s sake, is Mother there?” Hugo’s voice, under emotional stress, always receded to a schoolboy alto.
“Yes,” I said.
“Thank God. I was certain that’s what she’d do. Has she been there long?”
“Just a couple of minutes.”
“Why the hell didn’t you call us?”
“She’s …”
“Never mind, never mind. We’ll be right over.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “We can take …”
I stopped because Hugo had hung up.
Virginia came out of the kitchen.
“Who was it?”
“Hugo. They’re coming for her.”
“They? All of them?”
“I don’t know. But I couldn’t stop them. He hung up.”
“But …”
“It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. They’ll take her home and then … How’s the coffee?”
“I’m making it. But …”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve told you. It’s all right.”
Virginia went back into the kitchen. Aunt Peggy gave a sigh. I turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide open. A tiny bubble of saliva had formed at the corner of her mouth. I turned my back. In my mind I was saying over and over again what I’d said to Virginia and didn’t even begin to believe.
It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. It’s all perfectly all right …
They came, dozens of them it seemed—although in fact it was only Uncle Gene and Tanya. They brought as always their own individual atmosphere of dazzling condescension. The Denhams made every room they walked into seem not quite good enough for them, feudal lords stopping off for a moment to bring bowls of soup to the cottagers. Aunt Peggy was better. The coffee and the bustle of arrival had pulled her around until she was almost sober—more than sober enough for the family to pretend there was nothing the matter at all. As it happened, that only made it worse, because now there was no longer an “emergency,” they were turning the whole thing into a social event, their formal introduction to Virginia.
They took off their coats and sat down. They expected drinks as if that was their reason for being there. After I’d brought the drinks they concentrated on Virginia, handling her with their most platinum charm. There was nothing to reveal the faintest hint of the fact that only a few hours before Tanya’s husband had been spluttering, “You can’t possibly marry a woman like that,” while Uncle Gene, upstairs at the Club, had been waiting for the word that the “adventuress” had finally been put to rout.
Tanya, at least, had the grace to look a little uncomfortable, but Uncle Gene was shameless. I was absolutely certain that Hugo had told him about the marriage and just as certain that he was shaken to the core. But he was treating Virginia with the polish of a diplomat handling a foreign potentate. Did he have anything up his sleeve? I wondered. Some weapon which, of course, it would be unthinkable to use now in front of Aunt Peggy? Possibly. But possibly too this was just another demonstration of the Denham hypocrisy which they called breeding. Whatever it was, now that it was running parallel with their own dreadful need for dissimulation, its smoothness was quite unendurable. I stood with a strong drink, next to Aunt Peggy, watching Virginia and marvelling at the skill with which she was parrying them.
As minute ticked by after minute, I struggled against the turmoil of my nerves, telling myself this didn’t really matter. It wasn’t much past eleven. It was still too early to get rid of the body; this awful family party wasn’t making the thing jammed in the back of the car any more dangerous; in fact, for all I knew, it might even later be a help. But the tension in me—almost like an actual physical pain—grew more and more acute.
At one point I glanced at Aunt Peggy. She was sitting up quite straight in the chair beside me, smiling a gracious smile, turning her head from one talker to the next, nodding occasionally to indicate that she agreed with or at least was taking in the conversation. Oh God, I thought, any minute now she’s going to get interested and talk and talk and talk. That meant that Uncle Gene, with his blind, unflagging courtesy to her, would see to it that we all listened until the talking jag had worn off. When? An hour from now? Two hours from now?
It was in the same second of my looking at her that she looked at me. Or rather, she didn’t look at me, she looked at the drink in my hand which hovered only a foot or so away from her. In a flash the idea came. Tanya was chattering on about something. I half turned away from Aunt Peggy and took out a cigarette. I put my drink down on the table next to her so that I could light the cigarette. Then, as if I’d forgotten the drink, I pretended to listen to Tanya.
Thirty seconds or so later when I picked up the glass it was empty. And only thirty or so seconds after that, I heard Aunt Peggy give a little grunt. Then she half fell out of the chair.
I sprang to her, supporting her, easing her back against the cushions.
I said, instinctively slipping into Denhamese, “Uncle Gene, I think Aunt Peggy’s overtaxed herself a bit. Hadn’t you better take her home?”
It worked. Instantly Uncle Gene and Tanya were scurrying around Aunt Peggy. Tanya was helping her out of the chair. Uncle Gene, hovering, looking a little flustered, was murmuring to Virginia.
“She’s not at all strong, you know. Not strong at all, I’m afraid.”
They were helping her to the hall. She wasn’t completely out. That is, she could walk. One leg could move forward and then the other. But that was about all. They were in the hall. They were putting on their coats. Uncle Gene was opening the door.
“Well, good night, good night. No, Lewis, don’t come to the elevator. We can manager.”
I stood on the threshold for a moment, watching Aunt Peggy’s bulky back as they coaxed her down the corridor. I closed the door. I turned to Virginia. She smiled a pale, despairing smile.
“Yes,” I said. “They’ve gone.”
We went into the living-room. The relief I’d been expecting didn’t come. Eleven-fifteen. The wait still stretching ahead of us seemed interminable. There were, I knew, dozens of details we should have been thinking about and discussing, but my mind was no longer working that way. The moment I thought now of the body in the car, I could feel panic uncoiling like a snake in my stomach. Don’t think then. Wait. When it has to be done, do it.
Virginia was moving about the room picking up glasses and dirty ashtrays. From the steely conscientiousness with which she was doing it, I could tell that it was her way of keeping herself in control. And why not? What could be more sensible? Go on pretending it was just an ordinary evening, that people had come in, that glasses had to be washed. She went into the kitchen. I followed her.
Quite absurdly, not saying anything to each other, we stood at the sink. Virginia handed the washed glasses to me; I wiped them and put them away in the closet.
Then the phone in the living-room rang. I looked at Virginia. She looked at me. The phone rang again. I went to answer it.
I picked up the receiver, feeling the sweat slippery on my palm.
“Mr. Denham?” It was a man’s voice, rough, dimly familiar.
“Yes,” I said.
“This is Ben, the night man down at the garage.”
It seemed to me that the floor under my feet was teetering very slightly to and fro.
“Mr. Denham, I just stepped out for a moment and I figure I should tell you, seeing you was planning to use the Chevy later on. George says the doorman called down for him to bring it out front. Seems your uncle called for it. Seems your aunt wasn’t feeling too well and they couldn’t get a taxi so your uncle said to use the Chevy. If I’d been there, I’d of called you first to check, but the doorman just told George to bring it round front and he done it. That’s okay, I guess, isn’t it, Mr. Denham?”
He’d stopped talking. I knew it. I was supposed to say something. I knew that too. But my tongue seemed to be made of sponge.
“That’s okay, isn’t it, Mr. Denham?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s okay.”
“Just thought I’d call and check. Okay then, Mr. Denham. See you later, maybe.”
I put down the phone and stood looking at the damp impression of my palm on the black plastic of the receiver. I could hear Virginia in the kitchen. I knew I must keep the snake from stirring. Uncle Gene had taken the car. That was reasonable. He’d wanted to get Aunt Peggy home as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. When he got home he’d call, or if he didn’t I’d call him and go pick up the car again. Nothing that mattered was changed. Why should he look in the luggage compartment? What conceivable chain of circumstances could bring that about?
It would be all right.
There it was, the feeble, solitary straw to which I had clung so many times that evening.
It would be all right.
I went into the kitchen. Virginia was standing with her back to the sink.
I said, “You mustn’t worry, because it’s going to be all right. But Uncle Gene’s taken the car.”
She put the back of her hand up to her mouth. I could see the knuckles pressing against her teeth. Her terror was more nakedly evident than if she’d screamed.
I took her arms. “Virginia, it doesn’t matter. He won’t find it. There’s no reason on earth why he should. We’ll wait for him to call. If he doesn’t, I’ll call him and go pick it up again.”
“No!” she said.
“No?”
“Not you—not just you. The two of us. This is because of me. Whatever we’ve got to do, I’m going to do it too.”
Her arms were around my neck. Her lips were clinging to mine and then moving stumblingly over my face.
“Lew,” she said, “Oh, Lew.”
She had started to sob. I slipped my arm around her and drew her into the living-room and down on to the couch. Still sobbing, she was clutching me to her, and as I kissed her and murmured incoherent comfort, I began to realise that her instinctive feminine capitulation to the horror was more effective than my rigid attempts at self-control. Gradually in the warmth of physical contact, I could feel the nervous tension slackening out of me.
When the phone rang ten minutes later, I was almost calm.
It wasn’t Uncle Gene. It was Tanya.
“Lew darling, I hope you’re not furious. We took your car.”
“I know,” I said. “The garage man told me.”
“We simply had to. As you can imagine, it was rather awful with Mother and not a taxi anywhere. I drove them back and I’ve just got home. What shall we do with the car? Do you want us to bring it back?”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll come and get it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course.”
I heard her murmuring to Hugo. Then she said, “That’s lovely. Then you’ll stop in for a drink, won’t you? And please, Hugo says, do bring Virginia.” She gave a little laugh. “He told me, you know. About the wedding. You are a beast not to have said anything yesterday. He’s simply dying to meet her. I told him how charming she is—how impressed I was.”
So she was impressed, was she? I thought of her dark Slavic frown in the restaurant and her appalled “But … Beth!” Were the Denhams changing the party line?
“Then you’ll be right over?” she was saying.
“That’s fine,” I said.
As I hung up, I looked at my watch. Quarter to twelve. A drink with Hugo and Tanya—unbearable but it had to be bearable—and then wouldn’t it be almost time? Wall Street after midnight? This, then, was the beginning of the end.
Virginia had left the couch and was fixing her face at a mirror.
I said, “You can take having a drink with Hugo and Tanya, can’t you? He’s crazy to meet you and she’s crazy about you. They can’t wait, it seems, to welcome you into the bosom of the family.”
She turned with the lipstick in her hand.
“Go in for a drink? With the car just left there out in the street?”
“It’s as safe there as anywhere. It won’t be for long. Then we can go on to Wall Street.”
“You mean, right after that—without coming back here?”
“Isn’t that best?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose so. Then we’ll have to take the gun.”
“Yes.”
We hurried into the bedroom. I went to the bedside table and slipped the gun into my pocket. We picked up our coats in the hall. When we walked out into the lobby from the elevator, the doorman was sitting by the revolving door. He jumped up.
“Hi, Mr. Denham, your uncle took your car. Did they tell you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Your aunt.” He shook his head. “Poor lady, she looked real bad. Not a coronary, was it? My old man had a coronary just last week-end.”
“No, she’ll be all right,” I said.
We walked to the corner and got a cab. As we climbed into it, panic dealt me a sudden blow. Hadn’t we forgotten something? Wasn’t there some obvious, damning overlooked thing that we’d left behind in the apartment?
“Where to, mister?”
I gave the address in Turtle Bay. That was where Hugo and Tanya lived.
As I settled myself next to Virginia, I could feel the hard bulk of the gun pressed against my hip. The gun in the river—the body to Wall Street. It would come. Eventually we’d be able to be just two ordinary people in a taxi again …
We arrived at Hugo’s. As I paid off the cab, I could see my car. It was parked directly outside Hugo’s house. There was a Mercedes in front of it and just behind it a Cadillac. Surely it was camouflaged; surely, in this unobtrusively opulent neighbourhood, there was nothing, absolutely nothing to …
Hugo was opening the door. Tanya was hovering behind him. We were ushered into the hall with chattered greetings.
“So this is Virginia. Come in, come in. I can call you Virginia, can’t I? Tanya girl, take Virginia up to the living-room.”
Virginia and Tanya were starting up the stairs. Hugo glanced a little anxiously after them and then, with his compulsive tidiness, fussed our coats away into the closet.
“Listen, Lew, I told Father everything at the Club. You said I should.”
“I know,” I said.
He didn’t take it too well. Boy, he pretty near hit the ceiling for a while. But can you believe it? Now he’s met her, he’s crazy about her, Tanya says. Real thoroughbred, he said. Just look at her and you can tell. I had to tell you. He’d have told you himself but, of course, he had to be a bit tricky with Mother there and all.”
He was guiding me up the stairs, still holding on to my arm, glancing at me out of the edges of his absurdly glamorous eyes.
“Listen, Lew, about that foolishness. The South American, Rome, all that. It’s just a lot of vicious gossip. Not a word of truth in it. Father’s sure and so am I. So … Lew, you will forget it, won’t you? I mean, you won’t be mad. I know I goofed at the Club. But it was all so sudden, wasn’t it? And with Beth and everything. Gosh, Lew, I wouldn’t want you to feel bad.”
Dimly, because Uncle Gene and Hugo were the last of my worries at that moment, I noted the inevitable Denham ostrich technique in operation. I was married; the matter was out of their hands. Okay. Make the best of it. Forget the facts. Invent new ones. Change by Denham metamorphosis the “Byword of Rome” into the “Real Thoroughbred”.
We got to the living-room on the second floor. Tanya had had all the décor changed again. She was almost as vague about the value of the American dollar as her grandparents. This time everything was cream and yellow. We had to admire it. Hugo fiddled with mint juleps. Then we all sat around being gracious and upper-upper-class and terribly fond of each other.
For some temperaments, perhaps, it might have been soothing, but for me the contrast between Hugo’s secure little nest and our own reality made a persistent onslaught on my dwindling control. With every second, the idea of the car parked outside grew more and more ominous. I was sitting on a daffodil couch while Tanya, curled at the other end, was chattering away. I thought I was listening adequately, but suddenly she said, “Darling, what’s the matter? You’re looking at your watch all the time.”
Was I? I hadn’t even realised it. I glanced at Virginia. She was very deliberately not looking at me.
“I …” I said. “I …”
Then Hugo gave a dazzling smile and said with a daring and vulgarity which was quite unlike him, “Tanya girl, why not? Newlyweds, you know. Newlyweds don’t want to sit around all night nattering with the family.”
He had given us our cue to leave. At least I thought he had, but before I could take advantage of it, the thought of newlyweds had brought on a sentimental mood and he had started to narrate to Virginia the saga of how True Love had come to him. I had heard the story over and over again, and even the first time it had been tedious enough. Now it was excruciating. The pleasure steamer on Lac Leman. (It could only have been Lac Leman, the stodgiest lake in the world.) The girl in white leaning on the rail, the drunken Schweizer-Deutsch trying to get fresh with her, the noble Sir Galahad Hugo coming to the rescue, raising his hat gallantly, saying, “Let me introduce myself. I am Hugo Denham of New York City and, as for you—there’s no need to ask who you are. Anyone can tell you’re a princess.” And then the punch line: “I’d just said that, just to be continental, you know. And imagine! I’d hit it right on the button.”
I waited agonisedly for the familiar punch line. It came. On the word “button,” I jumped up, saying, “Okay, Hugo, thanks. Thanks for the drink.” In a few moments, Virginia and I were climbing into the car, while Hugo and Tanya, standing at the open front door, holding their mint juleps, stood watching us benignly.
I headed the car away from the kerb.
“Quick,” said Virginia, waving and smiling a fixed desperate smile out of the window. “For God’s sake, get out of here.”
The body first? Or the gun? I opened my mouth to put this question to Virginia, but a glimpse of Tanya and Hugo, still smiling and waving in the doorway like an upper-crust young host and hostess in a slick magazine ad, made the very idea of such a statement unimaginable.
I thought: The body first. Yes. Get rid of it. Dump it. Never think of it again—ever.
I started to drive downtown, with Virginia sitting straight and silent beside me. Where in Wall Street? With a sort of hysterical frivolity, I thought of Uncle Gene’s bank building. No. Not there, of course. But where? It didn’t matter. Drive down, drive around, find a place, any place….
I turned east in the Twenties. It was amazing how even here, the moment you left the main avenues, the streets were already almost deserted. It wasn’t going to be hard. The moment we found the right place, an alleyway or a delivery entrance …
Then, as my confidence soared, Virginia gave a strangled gasp.
“My God!”
I spun around to her. “What is it?”
“His overcoat.”
“His overcoat?”
“He wasn’t wearing an overcoat but he must have had one. He’d never have gone out in this cold without one.”
There was near-panic in her voice. Once again it infected me. Of course!
“It’s got to be in the apartment, Lew. It’s … Yes, of course, in the hall cupboard. You came in with your overcoat. So did I. We never looked in the hall cupboard.”
The damning thing! The thing I’d known we had overlooked.
“Quick, Lew. Go back.”
It was only with a great effort of will that I cleared the mounting fumes from my brain.
“No.”
“But, Lew …”
“If it’s there, we can get it later. We can destroy it the way we destroyed my suit.”
“But when they find him without a coat, they’ll know he must have been driven there from somewhere else.”
“I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“But …”
“Go back to the apartment? Come out again with a coat over my arm? Or a suitcase?”
“Yes,” she said. She turned her head. Her pupils were dilated with fear. “Oh, Lew, it’s all impossible. It’s hopeless. We should never have tried. You should have called the police. You …”
“Shut up,” I said. “Shut up, baby.”
I put my hand on her arm. It was quivering. “Darling, please listen to me. Everything’s going to be all right. I started this. I’m going to finish it.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Lew. I’m sorry.”
As I drove on, heading south, the city became progressively darker, quieter, until we were moving past the courthouse deeper into the shrouded, mysterious canyons of the financial district. Everything, it seemed, that I’d ever heard about Wall Street by night was true. It was a desert, a huge, sombre Gobi with vast skyscraper cactuses sprouting up from solitude.
The moment I saw the place, I knew. We were in a crosstown street behind the Prudential Building. A little alley ran off between a featureless block of offices and a wildly anachronistic Victorian warehouse. There wasn’t the remotest hint of a human being. I drove the car in. As once before, I found that the moments which should have been the most horrible had the least impact. In less than a minute we’d lugged the body out of the baggage compartment, slithered it along the cracked cement until it lay, hidden from the street, behind a cluttered collection of ashcans.
We were in the car again, driving uptown. Way over on the West Side, I threw the gun into the Hudson. I took a flashlight then and inspected the luggage compartment. So far as I could see, there was no trace of any blood. But to make sure, I pulled out the rubber floor covering and threw it behind a pile of broken orange crates on the dockside.
At last it was done. The long nightmare was over.
As we drove crosstown at random, with no other plan than to get away from the river, I waited for the reckless sense of relief that, surely, should come. There was no sign of it. In fact, now that the anaesthesia of extreme danger had passed, my new alertness of mind was almost painful. We’d got rid of the body and the gun, yes. But there was still the possibility that the police would eventually come to question Virginia. It might never happen. A marriage in Paris might easily be overlooked or, even if unearthed, considered irrelevant to the murder. But the time to take chances had gone for ever. We had to be sure of an alibi in case we should need it and right now was the moment to get our evening absolutely straight. Not what we had done, of course, but what we were going to say we’d done.
How did it shape up at the moment? Remember. Remember exactly. I’d got back from the office at six-thirty. Forget about the call from the false “Sheila Potter”. Obliterate that. It could hurt far more than it could help. Virginia had been waiting at home. No. Regardless of where the police might think the murder had taken place, the most crucial of all moments was still the actual time of its commission. Between five-thirty and six-thirty? Then—change it. Virginia hadn’t been at home alone. She’d been shopping. She’d picked me up at the office at five and we’d gone home together. That was better. We’d had drinks and something to eat. Then we’d taken the car out to go to a movie. (What movie? Decide that later on.) We hadn’t been able to get in so we’d driven home again. The doorman had seen Virginia entering the foyer. The garage man had seen me bring in the car. Okay. After that? Aunt Peggy had come, then Uncle Gene and Tanya. They’d taken the car. Both the doorman and the two garage men were witnesses. A short time later Virginia and I had taken a taxi to Hugo’s to pick up the car. We’d had our drinks with Hugo and Tanya. But what then? What had we been doing between the time we left Hugo and the time I’d have to check the car in to the garage man again?
I knew, of course. I’d already anticipated it with the garage man. After Hugo and Tanya, we’d gone to a night-club. That was it. What night-club? Any night-club except the Club Marocain.
I put my hand on Virginia’s arm. “We’re going to the Trinidad Room …”
I picked the Trinidad Room because its bar was always crowded and in almost total darkness. It was most improbable that anyone would notice exactly when we’d come in or how long we’d been there. We had a drink at the bar and then to be on the safe side sat through the final floor show, which, blurred by my weariness, passed in a kind of haze of noise and nudity. It was nearly three when finally I let Virginia out of the car at the front entrance of the apartment building. My exhaustion was comlete now and in a way it was an effective relief, for in my utter weariness there was no part of me left that cared. We would have to look for the overcoat in the apartment. If it was there, we’d have to destroy it. The last dregs of my energy would just about be up to that. But after that had been done—stagger to bed, obliterate everything until morning.
I drove the car up to the head of the garage ramp. Ben, the night man, was snoozing in his cubicle. He came out yawning and grinning.
“Hi, Mr. Denham, so you hit the bright lights after all.”
“That’s right.”
“Got the Chevy back too. I knew it was okay about your uncle, still I figured I should check.”
I gave him the second set of keys which I’d retrieved from Hugo, and still yawning he climbed into the car.
“Okay, Mr. Denham. Get your rest now. There’s work to be done tomorrow.”
When I let myself into the apartment, Virginia was sitting in the living-room in the chair where Aunt Peggy had sat. There was a large black chesterfield with a velvet collar spread on her lap. Her hair falling across her forehead, she was savagely attacking a sleeve with the pair of kitchen scissors.
She glanced up. Her eyes seemed huge in the taut-skinned hollows of their sockets. Dimly, concentrating on the coat, I thought: Poor kid, she’s more exhausted than I am.
“It was there in the hall cupboard, Lew. I found it right away.”
I struggled bemusedly to cope with the implications of that fact. His coat had been hung up in the closet. Why? Why not dropped on a chair? He’d come in with a key? He’d hung his coat up in the closet? Who hung their coats up in other people’s closets? No one. Then he had been let in? He had been greeted by someone who had taken the coat, who had hung it up …?
“I even recognised it.” Virginia’s voice cut into my muzzy reflections and shattered them. “He bought it three years ago when we were living in Paris.”
That was, I knew, the most innocent of remarks. She had been living with him in Paris three years ago. Why wouldn’t she remember his coat? But as I stood watching her slashing to and fro with the scissors at the coat which she had seen three years ago in Paris, she became once again an ambiguous stranger, not my wife but the wife of—what was his name?—Mr. Olsen, pianist, deceased. Love bred trust? That was the decision I’d made. But what did I know about her? What did I know about my wife?
My head was aching. I’d hardly noticed it before. I sat down on the arm of a chair. Virginia went on destroying the coat, adding to a little pile of buttons on the table beside her.
You love her, I said stubbornly to myself. Remember. You love her.
At last she was finished.
“There.”
She came to me quite unself-consciously. How could she sense the perverted, perverting ideas that were sprouting in my mind? She put her hands on my arms, smiling with a little bleak smile.
“We’ve done it, haven’t we? It ought to be all right, oughtn’t it?”
I tried to remember everything we’d done, everything we’d planned, every precaution we’d taken. Even in my exhaustion I knew that, in a way, this was our last chance. But the effort was simply beyond me. What we’d done, we’d done. We’d just have to hope for the best.
“I guess so,” I said. “I suppose so.”
One cigarette, maybe. One last cigarette. I brought out my pack. I offered it to her. She shook her head. I took one.
As I lit it, she said, “That reminds me. I’d better get my case. I left it by the telephone in the hall when that call came.”
She started away from me to the hall. The call made by someone pretending to be Sheila! That had happened, hadn’t it? At five the phone had rung? Virginia had gone to answer it? A voice, imitating Sheila, had said: I’ve something important to tell you?
Virginia was hurrying back into the room.
“Lew, did you take my case?”
“Isn’t it there?”
“No. But I distinctly remember putting it down by the phone when the call came. I’m absolutely sure. I … My God!”
The look on her face brought the full horror of the evening rushing back.
“Lew, you don’t think … I mean, it’s just the sort of thing Quentin would do, particularly since he gave it to me.”
“Quentin?” I said.
“Him. Quentin Olsen.”
So that had been his name! Quentin. From Q. to V. Gibraltar may tumble. Forgetting everything else, I could only think then of the pianist greeting our table from the stage, sitting down at the piano and playing “Our Love Is Here to Stay”. Why? Why would he have played that song, which obviously had been the symbol of their marriage, unless he had known she was there? And yet he hadn’t known. She had sworn she hadn’t spoken to him when she left the table. For a terrible moment, before I could suppress it, suspicion took full possession of me again. She had lied about that? Then she had lied about everything? Every impossible act I had performed that evening I had performed as a dupe?
Because thinking that way was quite intolerable, I managed to censor it out. The song had been a coincidence. Of course. Obviously it had been merely the standard number with which he opened his act. That was it. It had to be.
Virginia was standing watching me, waiting—for what? For me to say something?
I said, “He gave it to you?”
“Yes. And it’s gone. Don’t you see? If he’d noticed it lying there by the phone! It’s valuable. If he’d picked it up! And he wouldn’t think twice about it. We never searched his pockets. Lew, how could we have been such fools?”
I remembered then, and this new, totally unanticipated blow pushed everything else out of my mind. Of course he’d taken her cigarette-case. When I felt in his pocket for the wallet, I had touched the hard edge of a cigarette-case. I had felt it again when I’d put the wallet back.
So there was to be no end. You struggled, you hid this, you destroyed that, you took impossible chances and somehow you pulled them off—and then you overlooked something as screamingly obvious as searching the body.
I said, “There was a case in his pocket. I didn’t look at it, but it was there.”
“My God!” she said again.
I could feel a dry, crawling sensation on the surface of my skin. I started like an automaton towards the hall.
“Where are you going?”
“To get it.”
“Back down to Wall Street again?”
“It’s yours, isn’t it? If the police find it in his pocket …”
“But, Lew.” She was running after me. “Lew, it’s hours ago. The police have almost certainly discovered him by now.”
“If they have, they have. But I’ve got to try.”
She was clinging to my arm.
“No, Lew. Think. How can you do it? Take the car out again? Not possibly. Get a taxi? When it comes out in the papers, do you think the driver wouldn’t remember that he took a fare down there in the middle of the night?”
Vaguely her words penetrated the denseness of my exhaustion. The car? No. A taxi? No. The subway? I had a vision of myself emerging alone from the deserted subway station, walking along the deserted streets in that cavernous skyscraper solitude. I saw myself moving up the alley, heard the sound of police sirens screaming behind me. But if I didn’t go, if I gave up now, mightn’t that invalidate everything we’d fought so hard to establish?
“Lew, listen to me. Please listen. He gave it to me in Paris. I only kept it all this time because it was the one valuable thing I owned to fall back on. God knows where he got it from. Probably it was stolen. How can they trace it? They may not even get around to finding out I was married to him. But even if they do, I can say I gave it back to him when I left him. I can say I haven’t seen it for years. Please, Lew. Nobody will know. You must see. It’s safer to leave it, I swear. There’s much less risk.”
I heard her voice. I even realised its logic. A cigarette-case given to her in Paris by a crook who’d almost certainly stolen it? Q. to V.? All right. What did that prove? Trust then to luck? Don’t take the final and most precarious gamble? Yes, that was the better way.
Better? Or easier? Never mind. Never mind now.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll leave it. We’ll take the chance …”
Later, as we lay together in the narrow bed, our arms around each other, against all reason and beyond my exhaustion, peace of mind came to me. Virginia was right. The cigarette-case didn’t matter. But it wasn’t just that. Above all, there was the knowledge that I had been able to cling on to my belief in her innocence. In the gruelling challenge which had been thrust on me, I had betrayed neither myself nor my love.
Virginia was already asleep. Her head was resting on my shoulder. Her breathing came softly, almost contentedly. Yes. it would be all right. Maybe, in spite of the cigarette-case, in spite of all that shrouded, unknown past of hers that was, in a way, my greatest enemy, the police would never get on to us at all. Maybe, just maybe, we’d had our share of horror and my life, the life which had nothing to do with the Denhams, had been saved.
In the last flicker of consciousness, I kissed my wife’s cheek. We’d been tested in the furnace and we hadn’t cracked …
The morning seemed almost ordinary. There was nothing in the papers. At breakfast we went over and over again our version of how we had spent the night before, but somehow there was no sense of urgency about it. It seemed as overscrupulous as reading the disaster instructions on an ocean liner. I went to the office feeling hardly tired at all.
It was eleven-thirty when Virginia telephoned.
In a tight little voice, she said, “Lew, the police just called.”
The instant my illusion of safety was challenged I knew that it had no substance at all.
“It was a Lieutenant Trant from Homicide. And, Lew, it’s you he wants to see.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. I told him your office address. He said he’d be there in half an hour. Lew, what is it? What can have happened?”