He took my doughnuts and then he was playing chess with the Colonel! That guy Stanley was always one step ahead of me. Just then Gladys came out of the bathroom. I ran over to her.
“Stanley’s in the Colonel’s room!” I said. “They’re playing chess.”
“No they’re not. Didn’t the Colonel tell you? He’s been psychoanalyzing Stanley.”
“What? How do you psychoanalyze a guy that won’t even talk to you?”
I followed Gladys into her room. It was afternoon but she must have just got up. She had coffee perking.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Geez, Willy, why don’t you just come in here like it was your own room and make yourself comfortable?”
I sat down at the table. She put some butter in a frying pan and lit a burner.
“He wasn’t psychoanalyzing him,” I said. “They were playing chess. The Colonel said, ‘It’s your move.’”
“That’s just what they say when they’re psychoanalyzing you. The Colonel was a shrink in the Army.”
“Not Army,” I said. “He was in the Air Force.”
She broke four eggs into the frying pan.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don’t know what he was or wasn’t in or out of. He does know a lot about psychology. He told me that when Stanley was a little boy his mother was killed in a fire and that’s why he can’t hear and he can’t talk. Stanley doesn’t even remember it. The Colonel’s trying to get him to remember it a little at a time instead of all at once.”
She put two plates and cups on the table.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “If Stanley was in a fire, he’d remember it.”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “It’s all locked up inside his subconscious. He’s scarred from the fire.”
“He doesn’t have any scars that I know of.”
“It’s not physical; it’s mental; psychological scars. He’s shut himself off from the world. Think about it: He blames himself for his mother’s death. Maybe he panicked and ran out of the house instead of trying to save her, or maybe he was mad at her and set the fire on purpose. The Colonel knows, but he can’t say, on account of a shrink’s not supposed to tell anybody. He wouldn’t even say Stanley’s name, but I knew who he was talking about.”
“If Stanley can’t talk, and if he can’t even remember the fire, how does the Colonel know about it?”
She had to think about that one. “I don’t know,” she said. She poured coffee into the cups on the table and put some bread in the toaster.
“Hypnosis!” she said, and snapped her fingers. “That’s how he does it! I’ll bet he’s been hypnotizing Stanley.”
She sat at the table across from me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Even if the Colonel hypnotized him so that he remembered the fire, he still wouldn’t be able to tell the Colonel about it, because he doesn’t talk. There’s no such thing as hypnosis, anyway.”
“Sure there is. You look at a pocket watch or a medal swinging on a string and you try not to think of anything, and then you remember something.”
She jumped up from the table and hurried to the stove.
“I hope you like your eggs well done,” she said. She put eggs and toast on our plates.
“You see what I mean?” she said, “I just hypnotized myself and forgot all about the eggs.”
“It’s been happening to me too,” I said; “but that’s just because we were smoking weed last night.”
“Well, that’s hypnosis,” she said.
“No it’s not. I think hypnosis is all a big fake.”
She sat down again, and we ate our breakfast and drank our coffee.
“You watch the wrestling on TV in the lobby every Saturday,” she said. “Is that all a big fake?”
“Not all of it. A lot of it is real.”
“It’s the same with hypnosis.”
I thought maybe Mr. Winkley had hypnotized me when I was looking at his eye.
“When somebody’s hypnotized, do they see stuff?” I said.
“Yeah, sometimes they do.”
“But what they see isn’t real.”
“Imagination is real, isn’t it?”
“No it’s not.”
“Sure it is. If it wasn’t real, you couldn’t imagine it in the first place.”
“If that’s true, then what I saw in Mr. Winkley’s eye—”
“He had something in his eye?”
“I wasn’t supposed to tell, but yeah. Last night he was walking on my chest—”
“Walking on your chest?”
“Yeah, he does that a lot. I was sitting in my chair with the light off. I was holding him and he was walking his front feet on my chest, and—”
“Why does he do that?”
“The Colonel said that he thinks I’m his mother and he’s trying to get milk out of me.”
“The Colonel’s wrong,” she said.
“I don’t know; he’s a pretty smart guy.”
“Cat’s not stupid either. If anybody was his mother it was Nancy, and she never said anything about him doing that to her. He never tried to get milk out of me, either. He better not; I’m not his mother. And you sure don’t look like anybody’s mother.”
“No, I think the Colonel’s right, because he was right about Mr. Winkley’s belly button.”
“He doesn’t have a belly button, does he? Well wait a minute; he must have one somewhere.”
“Yeah he does. You feel around and you’ll find it.”
“I’ll take your word for it. So, he was walking on your chest …”
“… and I was looking in his eye and I was trying to forget things because I didn’t want to think about anything and then I forgot everything and then I thought I saw something.”
“Was this before or after we smoked the dope?”
“Before.”
“What did you see?”
“I’m not supposed to tell.”
“If you’re not supposed to tell, that means that you must have already told somebody. I won’t tell anybody. What was it?”
“Well …”
“Let me guess. It has something to do with what you and the Colonel were talking about last night, and then he tried to cover it up by saying it was something you saw in a murder mystery movie. I saw him kick your foot to keep you from talking about it. What trouble are you two guys into now? Did you see somebody killing somebody? Wait a minute. You and the Colonel don’t think that Nancy was …?”
“… Murdered. Mr. Winkley was in the room the night she died. He saw the whole thing, and there’s a picture in his eye.”
“I don’t know what you saw or thought you saw in that little monster’s eye, but the fact is that Nancy OD’d. Her room was locked, wasn’t it?”
“The door and window were both locked from the inside.”
“That’s it, then; OD’d, like I said.”
“When I woke up that morning, before we knew she had died, Mr.Winkley was out in the hallway.”
“Yeah, come to think of it, he must have been, because he wasn’t in the room when the police went in, or Elsie would have seen him; unless he went under the bed or something. But that couldn’t be, because if he was under the bed he’d still be locked in there. If he wasn’t in her room when the police came, where was he?”
“In the Colonel’s room, but he was in the hallway before that. I think he followed the killer out of Nancy’s room. He and the killer are the only ones who know how the killer got out of the room with the door and window locked. I can’t tell the police because they wouldn’t believe me and then Elsie would find out about Mr. Winkley and kick him out.”
“Not if you pay your rent she won’t. She’ll look the other way as long as your rent’s paid. You better pay her some of it, anyway, or else she’s liable to kick the both of you out. How do you think Mr. Winkley got out of Nancy’s room?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go get him. I want to look at his eye.”
I got Mr. Winkley and brought him to Gladys’s room. She put on her glasses, squatted down and cupped his chin in her hand. She always looked funny when she had glasses on.
“Turn off the light and pull the window shade down,” she said.
She was trying to hold his eyelid open with her thumb.
“Hold still, you little beast,” she said. “Look at me.” She stared into his eye.
“What exactly did you see?” she said. I didn’t answer because I thought she was talking to Mr. Winkley.
“What did you see, Willy?”
“I thought I saw a guy standing over Nancy with a needle in his hand,” I said.
“Do you know who it was?”
“I think it was Stanley,” I said. “It had to have been somebody who lives here at the hotel, because Elsie locks the door at night. It wasn’t Howie. This guy was taller and he wasn’t fat like Howie.”
Mr. Winkley didn’t like her holding him still and looking at his eye, and he kept trying to get away.
“I’m beginning to see something here,” she said. “It looks like … are you sure it wasn’t a woman?”
“It was a man.”
“Well, let me look again. You’re right; it’s a man. I can’t make out his face, but he’s built like the Colonel.”
“He and Stanley are about the same size,” I said.
“This guy might be a little bigger; maybe Roy.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “The guy I saw had two arms.”
“You saw both his arms?” she said.
“No, because he was standing sideways to me, but if he had just one arm like Roy, it seems I would have seen that and I didn’t.”
“The image is all wavy, like underwater. I can’t tell how many arms he has. Now it looks like a small thin guy. He’s young.”
Her saying it was a small thin guy didn’t make any sense.
“The only one around here that’s small and thin is Francine,” I said.
“Well, it could be, but I don’t think so. There might be one other person who fits that description. I think it’s somebody we both know well.”
“Keep looking and maybe it will get clearer.”
She was staring into his eye and then she saw something that made her suddenly jump back.
“You know who the killer is?” I said.
“No,” she said. “I just sensed the presence of negative energy waves; very heavy, very sad. Cat probably soaked up some funk that was floating around.”
“That’s because he was in the room during the murder.”
“Who knows? His eye looks like a bottomless pit. There’s nothing in there.”
“You mean you didn’t see anything?”
“No, I mean all of a sudden I saw a whole lot of nothing. There’s so much nothing in his head, it scared me.”
“But you said you saw a guy that looked like Stanley!”
“What? I beg your pardon, Willy, but I said no such thing. Anyway, Stanley’s too shy to kill anybody.”
“He’s not shy; that’s all an act. You don’t know that guy like I do.”
“You know Stanley about as good—as well—as you know your own self, by which I mean not so good.”
She stood up and Mr. Winkley jumped up on the table and started licking her plate. She banged her fist on the table and he ran under the bed. She sat down at the table across from me.
“I’m not saying there’s nothing in his eye,” she said; “only that I couldn’t see it. If Nancy was killed and if he saw it, then he might have it somewhere in his little head along with a lot of other stuff, but it doesn’t mean a lot to him, and it’s all disconnected. His little brain is like a dark closet full of old junk. He’s a little machine that goes around looking to kill things.”
“Last night you said the police might have a machine they could look in his eye with.”
“I don’t know what they have or don’t have. Nancy probably woke up to use the bathroom and when she opened the door Mr. Winkley ran out into the hallway. She was either half asleep or doped up and she didn’t see him go out. Then she got back in bed, took another shot, and OD’d.”
“What do you mean ‘doped up’? Nancy never took drugs.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this Willy, but I suppose you should know. She’d been using; heroin.”
“No. She would never …”
“She only got started about two months ago. I didn’t know she was into it that bad.”
“No,” I said. “That’s crazy. There was no reason for her to be taking drugs.”
“It’s never about having a reason,” Gladys said. “It’s when you don’t have a reason that you get started with junk, when you think there’s no reason not to. It gives you its own reason. After a while it gets to be like a religion.”
Gladys had been a junky, and I was thinking that maybe she got Nancy started with the drugs. I just stared at her.
“Hey, she didn’t get it from me!” Gladys said. “I tried to get her to stop. She wasn’t hooked, but she was headed in that direction. Don’t tell anybody I told you this, but I think it was Roy that got her into it. I don’t know why she’d been hanging around with him. He wasn’t her type.”
“She wasn’t hanging around with Roy,” I said. “He was following her around, and so was Stanley. Even if she was taking drugs, she didn’t kill herself. Somebody gave her a hot shot.”
I was looking down at the table.
“Look at me,” she said. She reached over the table and took my chin in her hand. “Willy, look at me.”
She was trying to pull my chin up, and I didn’t want to look at her because I didn’t want her hypnotizing me. I looked away, at her wall clock that was a cat. Every time it ticked, its tail swung, and its eyes went back and forth. I looked at her clock that was ticking. She let go of my chin.
“She didn’t kill herself,” I said. “She never used drugs.”
“That’s not how it happened, Willy. She was lonely, and she felt beaten down, like her life wasn’t going anywhere, and she didn’t see any way out. Roy came along at just the wrong time. He got to her when she was weak, and he made out like he was a big shot and promised her he’d give her everything she ever wanted. He knew just how to do it. She’d been good all her life and nothing good ever happened to her, so she gave up on it. She wanted to try something else.”
I blinked my eyes and looked away from the clock and at Gladys.
“I don’t think so,” I said, “because I was going to set up a bird feeder for her, and then we were going to the movies, and then …”
Gladys reached over the table and squeezed my shoulder, and it felt like when I picked up Mr. Winkley.
“She really liked you a lot,” she said.
“Stanley was following her around,” I said.
“Yeah, but nothing went on between them. She was just being nice to him.”
“Well, somebody killed her, and it wasn’t me. Her Virgin Mary statue is gone.”
She didn’t say anything for a while, and she was off in space.
“Her mother gave her that statue,” she said.
“I never had a mother,” I said.
“You had a mother, Willy; you just don’t remember her.”
I figured there was no point in arguing with her.
“All her money’s gone too,” I said.
“What makes you think somebody took her statue and her money?” she said. “Did the cops tell you that?”
I didn’t say anything, because the Colonel had told me not to.
“Well, I don’t know where you get these ideas,” she said. “Anyway, her money can’t be missing; Nancy kept her money in the bank.”
“She took it out, the day before she died,” I said. “We know because we looked through her bank book. It was on her table.”
“We? You and the Colonel, you mean. I should have known. Do you mean that you two broke into her room after the cops left? You both could get in a lot of trouble for that. I know the cops locked the door, because I tried to get in myself. I wanted to see if she had a picture I could use in her obituary, and I guess maybe I also wanted it for myself, but I wasn’t going to break in. Did you see any pictures of her in her room?”
“No.” I didn’t want to tell her about the picture I found in Stanley’s room because I wanted to keep it.
“How did you get in? Did you break the lock?”
“No. The Colonel can get into anything.”
“He can get you both into trouble; that’s what he can get into. Why do you think she took all her money out of the bank?”
“She was planning to go somewhere. Her suitcase was out, and half packed. Or maybe it was half unpacked. I think she couldn’t make up her mind if she was going or staying. She didn’t say anything to you about leaving, did she?”
Gladys squashed her cigarette out in her dirty plate. “Maybe it was suicide,” she said. “We’ll never know.”
She got up from the table and took the dishes to the sink.
“The cops probably took the money, and anybody could have taken the statue,” she said. “A lot of things go missing around this joint. I had a set of faux emerald earrings on my bureau last night and this morning they were gone. Francine probably took them, and she probably took the statue too, to add to her doll collection. Anyway I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today, Willy, so maybe you better be going along now.”
“She’s not stealing anymore since the doctor cured her.”
“Relapse,” she said. “The cure doesn’t always take the first time.”
“She might have to go back and get another one,” I said. “Maybe we could ask the Colonel to psychoanalyze her.”
“That’s an idea,” she said. “I probably just misplaced them, though. Maybe you can snoop around and find them for me.”
“Okay; I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything.”
“Don’t you and the Colonel have some investigating to do?”
“I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody.”
“I can keep a secret. Now go on, go out and investigate. Scram, beat it, vamoose. And if you see my earrings, let me know.”