Howie and I put Francine in her room and told her to stay there, but she wouldn’t let Howie leave and so he stayed with her and I went to my room to check on Mr. Winkley. It was night, but there was enough light coming in from the street so that I didn’t turn on my light. The balcony door was closed and I had nailed chicken wire over the window, because with one eye he might not realize the distance and he could try to go out the window and fall to the street.
I was shaking and sick in my stomach over what Francine had said about Nancy. Francine was a liar. I sat down and Mr. Winkley jumped up on my lap.
I figured that Francine was jealous of Nancy, but I didn’t see how anybody could be jealous of somebody that was dead.
We all knew that anything Francine said was only partly true. I was thinking that the part about Stanley standing outside Nancy’s door was probably true, because when Francine said it, Stanley’s face had turned red, which proved to me that he wasn’t really deaf like everybody said he was; but I didn’t think that he heard anybody in the room with Nancy other than Mr. Winkley, though Stanley might have thought so. Nancy loved that cat, and if someone was walking by her room in the middle of the night and heard her talking to him, they might get the wrong idea. Or maybe Stanley knew Francine was watching, and he wanted to make it look like there was a man in Nancy’s room, to make an alibi for what he was about to do, or maybe had already done. Or maybe he had a split personality and one half wanted to kill her and the other half wanted to save her. With a guy like Stanley, who never said anything, anything was possible. It was looking more and more to me like he was the killer.
Mr. Winkley was on my lap squeezing his claws into my chest to try to get milk. I didn’t want to think about anything and I was looking into his big black eye, and then I saw a picture in his eye of Nancy on her bed and somebody standing over her holding a needle.
Mr. Winkley yowled and jumped off my lap, and I jumped up too. He hopped up on the bed and sat there watching me. I must have jumped before he did, and scared him. By the way he was looking at me I could tell that he planned that if I went up to him he was going to let me get up close, then swipe his paw to throw me off, and then run and hide under the bed. Cats aren’t stupid.
I was looking at his eye to try to see the picture in there, but it was dark in the room, and he wasn’t going to let me get close enough. We watched each other from across the room. He could see me better than I could see him.
“You scared me too,” I said. “We’re even.”
I was still looking at his eye and he was looking at mine too. That’s when I smelled something funny, and I sniffed myself all over but it wasn’t me. It wasn’t coming from Mr. Winkley’s litter box, either. Then I saw a yellow spot on my pillow. Mr. Winkley had pissed on my pillow to get back at me for shutting him in the room. He was just sitting there on the bed staring at me.
“Okay,” I said. I lit a cigarette, and when I was lighting it I shut my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to be looking at the flame from the match; I don’t like a lot of light in my eyes.
“Maaa-ma,” he said, and that really made me mad. I’d had about enough of that cat. I shook the match out and opened my eyes.
“I’ll teach you to piss on the bed,” I said. “I’ll give you something to piss about.”
I had the lit cigarette in my hand and I started walking toward him, slow so I wouldn’t scare him. “I never wanted you in the first place,” I said. “Why won’t you learn?”
I don’t know why I was so mad at him, but I was, and the more I thought about what I was going to do to him, the madder I got. I put the cigarette in my mouth so that I could grab him with both hands, and then I’d hold him down with one hand and hold the cigarette in the other. When I got up close he swiped his paw just like I knew he would, and I grabbed him quick by the scruff of his neck. I held him down on the bed with both hands, and then I felt this funny feeling, like waves coming out of him, that went into my hands and up my arms to my neck and then down into my stomach, that made me feel weak and sick and I sat down on the bed holding him on my lap, and I wasn’t mad at him anymore. You can’t hold a cat and be mad at the same time. I don’t know how they do that, though.
I sat there with him on my lap for a while but I didn’t see any picture in his eye, and then I heard Stanley leaving Gladys’s party. He walked to his room, went in and closed his door. I didn’t feel like sleeping so I went back to the party. Gladys’s door was closed and I was about to knock when I heard the Colonel and Gladys talking. It sounded like the Colonel had been hitting the bottle pretty heavy, for him anyway. I was glad that he’d come out of his trance. I put my ear to the door and listened.
“What if he talks?” Gladys said.
“He will eventually. His consciousness has entirely repressed the memory of the event, which lies buried deep within the subconscious. But it won’t stay inside forever.”
“What do we do then?”
“We must prepare him. He must be provided with a new history and identity, plausible and acceptable to him. The objective facts of one’s life history do not constitute truth in its entirety.”
“They don’t always tell the whole story.”
“Correct. It is imperative that we continually reimagine past events. If the truth were to erupt suddenly, the consequences would be disastrous.”
“You think Willy will be all right?”
“Oh, yes. The reality and significance of actions and consequences will in time become more clear to him, and you were well within your prerogative in pointing out his responsibility in regard to Mr. Winkley attending the memorial. I am confident that with the proper guidance he may eventually reconcile the needs of the id, ego, and superego, but again, much is buried deep and can only be revealed gradually over time.
“Oh, it appears that our bottle is empty. Perhaps, if there is another bottle available, you might care to join me in one more drink?”
“The booze is all gone, Colonel.”
“But I believe there is another bottle in the cabinet? Oh, but I see you are shutting me off, and quite rightly. I was merely testing your bartending skills.”
I knocked on the door and went in.
“Where’s Howie?” Gladys said.
“He’s with Francine,” I said. “He won’t leave her until she settles down and she won’t settle down if he tries to leave.”
I sat on the sofa next to the Colonel. Gladys started picking up from the party and was washing dishes at the sink with her back to us. I was thinking about how I’d seen the murderer in Mr. Winkley’s eye. I couldn’t see who it was, though. I thought it was probably Stanley but it might be Roy.
Gladys was running water at the sink and I whispered so she wouldn’t hear.
“Colonel,” I said; “you told me that everything that anybody ever sees is recorded somewhere inside their head.”
“True.”
“What about Mr. Winkley? If he saw something …?”
“Everything he ever saw or otherwise sensed is recorded …”
“… Inside his head. He has a picture in there.”
“Yes.”
“Because just now, when I was in my room with him, his eye got big and black and I looked right into it and I thought I saw the killer standing by Nancy’s bed.”
“The light in your room must have been dim, which caused pupillar dilation of his eye, making it in effect a screen on which you projected a repressed image from your own subconscious.”
“What?”
“You can’t see anything in his eye that you don’t already know.”
“But there was a picture in his eye of the murder!” I said.
Gladys turned around. “What murder?” she said. “What picture in whose eye?”
“In Mister—” I started to tell her, but the Colonel kicked my foot and I remembered that Gladys wasn’t supposed to know anything about the investigation.
“In Mister who?” she said.
“Why,” the Colonel said, “In Mister … Mystery Television Theater, the program Willy and I were watching in the lobby this afternoon, the murderer came to believe that the victim’s retinas retained an image of the murderer approaching with the murder weapon, which in this case was a handgun.”
“I saw that one!” Gladys said. She came over and sat on the sofa with us. I was sitting in between them, and I was looking from one to the other as they talked. “He kept imagining the dead woman’s eyes, and two of him, one in each of her eyes, holding the gun,” she said. “It drove him crazy until he confessed.”
“But there was in reality no actual picture to be obtained from the victim’s eyes,” the Colonel said. “It was merely the result of a conflict between the killer’s id and his superego.”
“I don’t know about that,” Gladys said. “When you see something that makes an impression, you take a snapshot to look at later on; I know I do. It’s like you have a camera inside your head.”
“Figuratively, perhaps,” the Colonel said. “But nobody else can develop that photo; only you.”
“How do you know that, Colonel?” Gladys said. “I’ve been reading all about how science is always coming up with new things. They could invent some kind of machine the cops could use to solve crimes. I bet they already have and they’re not telling anybody.”
“Oh posh, Gladys. That’s as preposterous as flying to the moon.”
Gladys’s eyebrow went up. “The moon, Colonel?” she said, and she had him there, because they’d already just sent a man to the moon.
“I meant that only as a figure of speech,” he said. “Yes, I suppose if they can put a man on the moon, then anything is possible. I concede that perhaps someday forensic tools might be developed which could—perhaps—recover some tangible evidence of a crime from within the eyes of the victim or witness.”
“What’s forensic?” I said. I didn’t understand everything they were saying.
“Well, I thought it was a good movie,” Gladys said.
“I never said it wasn’t. Willy and I enjoyed it. Didn’t we, Willy?” He kicked my foot again.
“What’s forensic?” I said.
“Forensics,” he explained, “is the application and utilization of various scientific fields by means of which, uh …”
“It’s when the police use science to solve crimes,” Gladys said. “Fingerprints and all that jazz.”
“Okay, I get it,” I said. “Forensics.”
The Colonel got up to leave.
“It’s late for an old man,” he said.
Gladys gave him some food wrapped in tin foil.
“That is very kind of you, Gladys,” he said. “It was a fine memorial occasion. Oh, before I go, an item of mine has recently gone missing; a medal awarded in recognition of my military service. I seem to remember it as having last been on my bureau, but my memory sometimes fails me of late. I often carry the medal with me, and it may be that it was in my pocket and the string to which it is attached became entangled in my handkerchief, in which case the medal may have left my possession when I removed the handkerchief from my pocket during the course of my perambulations. Might either of you have seen it?”
“Not me,” I said.
“On the floor in the hall, or in the lobby perhaps?” he said.
“I haven’t seen it,” Gladys said. “I’ll keep an eye out, though.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Thank you. Goodnight, Gladys. Goodnight, Willy.”
The Colonel left and Gladys took off her wig and tossed it on the bed. She mussed her hair and let out a deep breath.
“There’s a lot of sadness in the world, Willy.”
She was watching me out of the corner of her eye looking at her as she took off her earrings and necklace, and I was wondering what it would be like to get in bed with her.
Whatever she was thinking, she snapped out of it and said, “Jeepers creepers, Willy, don’t do that.”
“What did I do, Gladys?”
“I don’t know; you put the heebie jeebies on me, I think. Don’t do it again. What do you think, I’m your mother or something?”
She opened her closet, changed behind the door, and came out wearing her nightgown, and she was just Gladys again. She opened her bureau drawer and rummaged through the underwear. “There’s a reefer stick hiding in here somewhere,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ve been saving it for. Somebody’s got to smoke it sometime. You want to get high?”
“Yeah; but I have to check on Mr. Winkley first.”
“Bring him back and we’ll all get high; no use letting good smoke go to waste.”