“But he didn’t. Did he lie there after he’d fallen? Did he lie there still, or did he get up and chase you?”
“He... he didn’t get up and come after me.”
“You fired a gun at him. He fell down. He lay there. All your welshing won’t change what that is. Little sister, you’ve got yourself a murder on your hands.”
Helen Kirsch squealed like a stuck pig. Or like a puppy dog that’s been accidentally stepped on. She burrowed her face rearwards into the corner seam of the cab, almost as though she were trying to squeeze her way out through there, burst it asunder. Her hand beat a reflex protest on the padding.
“I didn’t mean to! Oh God, hear me! I didn’t mean to! I didn’t want to go to that party. This other girl, where I work, she talked me into it! I didn’t want to go. I’d never done a thing like that before, behind Harry’s back. Then when I got there and saw there were only four of us, just the two couples, I didn’t like the way it looked, I didn’t want to stay. And then the other couple slipped off somewhere, before I knew it they’d gone, and I was alone with him.”
Bricky tried to buck her up, the only way she knew how. “What’re you so afraid of anyway?” she said brusquely. “You’ll never even do a stretch on it, probably. You’ve got the perfect defense. They always take the woman’s word in a case like that. And this time, there is no other word but yours.”
Her head didn’t go up. It went lower, if anything, in utter prostration.
“It isn’t that— It isn’t that— How can I ever live with Harry any more, after? He won’t have me.”
“He’ll forgive you for going to what you thought was just a harmless party.”
“They never do, they never do — for that.”
Suddenly Bricky understood, completely, devastatingly.
“Oh,” she said in a crushed voice. “You fired at him—”
“I fired at him after.”
The cab slowed, came in for a stop.
Bricky paid him from the seat, then they got out. Bricky took her by the wrist, said, “Stand here a minute till the cab drives away.”
They stood there motionless; the cab rolled off, leaving its ghost in blue exhaust-tracery on the night air. Its going rugged at their skirts and flared them a little. Then they stood there alone on the edge of the curb.
“What are you going to do to me now?” Helen Kirsch quailed in pitiful helplessness.
“Show me where you ditched the gun. That’s what I want to know first. You lead the way.”
Her hostage went down that street there, bearing east; Bricky close beside her like an upright shadow.
Bricky thought: “She went out of her way first, over this way, to discard the gun; then doubled back along the same street to the avenue once more and got into the cab there. That was an erratic thing to do.” She didn’t comment on it, went with her unquestioningly.
They crossed the arid grandeur of Park Avenue, with its double width and stepped-up wedges of safety in the middle; dead to the world, scarcely a light showing in a window along it for the twenty blocks or so that the eye could encompass. Most of the bedrooms along here were to the rear, anyway. The most overrated thoroughfare in the world.
They went on. They came to Lexington, narrower, more human, more alive at least. They still went on, toward Third. They crossed that, under the iron tracery of the El, went on toward Second.
Bricky said at last, “What brought you so far over?”
“I was going the wrong way. I didn’t know where I was at first. I was, like dazed, when I first came out.”
Yes, Bricky thought, anyone would be, immediately after taking someone’s life.
The Kirsch girl spoke again in a moment or two. “It’s in one of these alleys between the buildings along here. There was a row of ashcans standing there, waiting to be dumped. The first one had a lid on it. I lifted that and chucked it underneath.” Then she said, “Maybe they’ve been emptied already.”
“They don’t come around until just before daybreak,” Bricky said.
“I think that’s the one. There it is, in there. See them? There’s about six of them in a row.”
“Stay with me,” Bricky warned. “Come over next to me while I look.”
All the other girl said was, “I’m playing the game. You played it back at my place.”
They turned aside and the shadows of the inset blacked the two of them out. All you could hear were their voices, whispering guardedly. That and the faint clash of an ashcan-lid being removed.
“Got it?”
There was an accusing pause. Then Bricky slurred, “Are you telling me the level on this?”
“Somebody’s found it! Somebody’s taken it out!”
“Are you sure this is the right place?”
“It was in this alley, and no other. I remember how it looked, when you turned and faced the street from in here. Those windows across there with all the little white splits in their panes. And it was this first can here. It’s full of coke-husks.”
Silence from Bricky.
“I swear I’m telling you the truth. Why would I want to back out now, after bringing you all the way over here?”
“You sound like it was the truth, at that. Never mind, don’t dig your arm all the way down through that stuff. It would be on the top if it was anywhere at all. Some night-scavenger must have come along right after you and found it. Maybe someone noticed you slip in and out of here.”
They reappeared suddenly in the lesser sombreness of the sidewalk.
“All right, now let’s go there,” Bricky said quietly.
The girl stopped short and looked at her pleadingly. “Do I have to?”
“You’ve got to go where it is. That’s what I hauled you out of your place with me for. That’s the main thing, not digging up the gun. The heck with the gun.”
They started on the way back. They recrossed Third. Suddenly the girl had stopped again. She was shaking all over; Bricky could tell even in the darkness.
“Snap out of it,” she started to say. “What’re you balking for n—?”
Without a word the girl turned aside and went into the rancid entrance they had halted opposite. For a moment Bricky thought she was trying to elude her, make a getaway. Her arm started to reach out after her to pull her back. Then she let it fall, checked the exclamation that had risen to her lips. A curious, coldly-frightening sensation coursed through her for a minute.
She went in after her. “What’re you doing, kidding me?” Her voice was unsteady.
In the dim light there was inside this hallway, this tunnel toward — who knew what? — she saw the girl look at her as if she didn’t understand her, didn’t know what she meant by asking that.
She waived the question. The girl went up stairs there at the back. She went at her heels. She couldn’t have told which was the more frightened one of the two of them now. Her fright was a sort of sick dismay.
Halfway up the girl stopped again. “I can’t— Why do I have to?”
Bricky motioned ahead of the two of them with a stab of her finger. “Keep going, wherever you’re going,” she said tersely.
Their shadows climbed the dingy walls beside them.
They stood before a door now.
Harry Kirsch’s wife looked at it, all around its edges four-square, as though it were insuperable.
“Open it,” Bricky said, reading their destination in her antipathy.
She reached out and touched the knob as though afraid it would sting her. She gave it a quick turn and then snatched her hand back. It slanted open now.
“You first,” Bricky said.
The other girl’s face was that of a doomed thing as she went in before her. Bricky remembered something she’d said down at her own flat earlier. Yes, this was like dying twice, all right. But she wasn’t dying alone, something in Bricky was dying along with her — had been ever since outside on the street before.