Hickey nodded. He picked up the file and shoved it in a drawer. He shut the drawer. Symbol of completion.
I went to the Herald and did a nice, neat, factual follow-up on the story I had already filed. Then I stopped at the State Store and picked up a bottle, and returned to the bachelor apartment I inhabit for fifty weeks of the year.
So I was home, as Hickey had recommended, but I did not forget it. I forgot to go out for food, and I forgot later to turn the lights on, but I couldn’t forget Marjorie. I kept seeing her face turned toward me in the moonlight, with the dew on her cheeks and her lips parted. After a while it seemed to me that she had been trying to speak, to tell me something. And I got angry.
“That’s just like you,” I said. “Make a mess of things, and then come running to me for help. Well, this time I can’t help you.”
I thought of her sitting all alone in her car in the old logging cut, listening to the motor throb, feeling death with every breath she breathed, and I wondered if she had thought that at the end. I wondered if she had thought of me at all.
“Such a waste, Marjorie. You could have left Brian. You could have done a million other things. Why did you have to go and kill yourself?”
It was hot and dark in the room. The Marjorie-image receded slowly into a thickening haze.
“That’s it,” I said. “Go away.”
The haze got thicker. It enveloped me, too. It was restful. Marjorie was gone. Everything was gone. It was very nice.
Then the noise began.
It was a sharp, insistent noise. A ringing. It had a definite significance, one I tried hard to ignore. But I couldn’t, quite. It was the doorbell, and in the end I didn’t have any choice. I fought my way partly out of the fog and answered it.
She was standing in the hall, looking in at me.
“Oh, God,” I said. “No. I told you. You can’t come back to me now. You’re dead.”
Her voice reached me out of an enormous and terrible void.
“Please,” it said. “Mr. Carver, please! My name is Sheila Harding. I want to talk to you.”
She was shorter than Marjorie, and not so handsome. This girl’s hair was brown and her eyes were blue.
I hung onto the door jamb. “I don’t know you,” I said, too far gone to be polite.
“I was a friend of Marjorie’s.” She stepped forward. “Please, I must talk to you.”
She pushed by me, and I let her. I switched the light on and closed the door. There was a chair beside the door. I sat in it.
She didn’t look like her at all, really. She didn’t move the same way, and the whole shape and outline of her was different. She kept glancing at me, and it dawned on me that she hadn’t counted on finding me drunk.
“I can still hear you,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”
She hesitated. “Maybe I’d better—”
“I plan to be drunk all the rest of this week. So unless it’s something that can wait—”
“All right,” she said rather sharply. “It’s about Marjorie.”
I waited.
“She was a very unhappy person,” Sheila Harding said.
“That’s not what Brian said. He said she was happy.”
“He knows better than that,” she said bitterly. “He must know. He just doesn’t want to admit it. Of course, I knew Marjorie quite a long while before I realized it, but that’s different. We both belonged to the League.”
“Oh,” I said. “You’re one of those society dolls. Now wait.” The name Harding clicked over in my dim brain with a sound of falling coins. “Gilbert Harding, Harding Steel, umpteen millions. I don’t remember a daughter.”
“There wasn’t one. I’m his niece.”
“Marjorie enjoyed belonging to the League,” I said. “She was born and raised on the South Side, right where I was. Her biggest ambition was to grow up to be a snob.”
I was annoying Miss Harding, who said, “That isn’t important, Mr. Carver. The important thing is that she needed a friend very badly, and for some reason she picked me.”
“You look the friendly type.”
Her mouth tightened another notch. But she went on. “Marjorie was worried about Brian. About what he was doing, the people he was mixed up with.”
I laughed. I got up and went over to the window, in search of air. “Brian was working for Justinian when she married him. She knew it. She thought it was just splendid of him to be so ambitious.”
“Nine years ago,” said Sheila quietly, “Justinian was a lot more careful what he did.”
She sounded so sensible and so grim that I turned around and looked at her with considerably more interest.
“That’s true,” I said. “But I still think it was late in the day for Marjorie to get upset. I told her at the beginning just what the score was. She didn’t give a damn, as long as it paid.”
“She did later. I told you she was an unhappy person. She had made some bad mistakes, and she knew it.”
“They weren’t that bad,” I said. “They weren’t so bad she had to kill herself.”
Her eyes met mine, blue, compelling, strangely hard.
“Marjorie didn’t kill herself,” she said.
Chapter Three
I let that hang there in the hot, still air while I looked at it.
Marjorie didn’t kill herself.
There were two sides to it. One: Of course she killed herself; the evidence is as clear as day. Two: I’m not surprised; I never thought she did.
I said carefully, “I was in the office of the chief of police this afternoon. I heard all the evidence, the autopsy report, the works. Furthermore, I saw the body, and a doctor friend of mine saw it. Monoxide poisoning, self-administered, in her own car. Period.”
“I read the papers,” said Sheila. “I know all about that. I know all about you, too.”
“Do you?”
“Marjorie told me.”
“Girlish confidences, eh?”
“Something a little more than that, Mr. Carver. It was when you were beaten so badly, a year or so back, that Marjorie began to feel — well, to put it honestly — guilty.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not at my best tonight. Go on.”
“Then,” said Sheila, “my brother was killed, just after New Year’s.”
“Your brother?” I sat down again, this time on the edge of the bed, facing her.
“He was in the personnel department of Harding Steel, a very junior executive. He told me the numbers racket — the bug, he called it — was taking thousands of dollars out of the men’s pay checks every month. I guess that goes on in all the mills, more or less.”
“Around here it does. And more, not less.”
“Well, Bill thought he’d found a way to catch the people who were doing it, and clean up Harding Steel. He was ambitious. He wanted to do something big and startling. He was all excited about it. And then a load of steel rods dropped on him, and that was that. Just a plant accident. Everybody was sorry.”
I remembered, now that she told me. I hadn’t covered the story myself, and there was no reason in particular why it should stick in my mind. But there hadn’t been any suspicion of foul play at the time. I said so.
“Of course not. They were very careful about it. But Bill had told me the night before that his life had been threatened. He almost bragged about it. He said they couldn’t stop him now; he had the men he wanted — Justinian’s men, naturally — right here.” She held out her hand and closed the fingers. “He was murdered.”
“And you told this to Marjorie.”
“Yes. We were very good friends, Mr. Carver. Very close. She didn’t think I was hysterical. She knew Bill, and liked him. She became terribly angry and upset. She said she would find out everything she could, and if it was really murder she was going to make Brian quit Justinian.”