“I don’t know why,” I said in a half-audible voice. “Maybe because I’m romantic. Maybe because it’s the first time I ever did a thing like this, and I wanted to make it sound better than it really was.” And to myself I added, “Or maybe because I didn’t do it at all in the first place.”
I no longer knew whether I had or hadn’t; I was no longer sure. I had been telling them I had for so long that it seemed to me I must have after all. I found myself actually forgetting that I hadn’t seen her at all from the moment I left her at five in the afternoon to get the tickets until the time I found her lying on the floor — found myself actually beginning to believe that I had found her still alive, had spoken to her when I came back at nine. It was literally with surprise that I at last stopped short and reminded myself, “But she was already gone when you got back; somebody else must have done it!”
Oh, I no longer knew whether I was sane or insane, awake or dreaming: no longer cared! All I knew was, every breath I drew was hellfire, every minute that passed was a crucifixion.
It was growing lighter outside the windows now, like so many times when I had been up in this room with her. I knew just where the first splashes of pearl and pink were going to hit against the wall; knew just at what point they would begin to spread like blisters and reach upward toward the ceiling and downward toward the floor. But just before it all began, they clicked a steel ring over my wrist and at last made ready to depart.
As they brought me out of the bedroom into the living room, I turned and asked if I couldn’t go to the bathroom. So the one whose wrist was joined to mine unwillingly turned aside and stood at my shoulder for a minute. After that they took me out to the elevator — Bernice’s apartment vanished forever behind the vertical metal trap — and I stood in the exact middle of all of them, like someone popular, like someone surrounded by all his friends, as we went down to the street.
Even at that unearthly hour, a handful of ghouls had gathered around the street door, or maybe they had been standing there all night like that, I don’t know — and there was another one of those starlike flashes and puffs of smoke, because it was still dim out on the street. But this time the men with me didn’t attempt to break the camera or drive the perpetrator away. Then, just as they were putting me in a car at the curb, another diversion occurred; I heard a protesting, argumentative voice somewhere in back of me. “I been waitin’ all night,” it said, “they wouldn’t even lemme go in the lobby! He owes me twenty-four dollars, and six more for overtime—” I heard them all laughing, and I turned and saw a man standing there, pale in the face and sweating with anxiety. “He rode all the way down to Gran’ Central with me—” he said. Meanwhile there was another one of those skyrocket flashes, followed by a tart smell, so close to me this time that I jumped and collided against the man I was manacled to. But by its light I recognized the protesting individual as the cabdriver I had hired at one time or another last night and then left standing before the door — just when, I wasn’t sure, or why, or whether I really hadn’t paid him as he said.
The man with me flicked me on the arm and said humorously, “Y’got any money on you?”
“Tell him to get a cop and have me pinched,” I answered stonily, and the irony of saying such a thing at such a time only dawned on me after I’d heard the roar of appreciation that went up on all sides. I didn’t smile.
They ushered me in the car and sat on each side of me, and we drove off down the streets of New York in the beginning of the morning light, with batches of lights going out everywhere, like that single bulb in Bernice’s living room had gone out a while back. But what was dawn and the start of the day for every one else was dusk and the ending of it for me.
But if it was dusk, and it was the end of my day, it seemed to go on forever and forever; the night that I prayed and yearned incessantly for seemed never to begin. Sometimes I used to wonder if what I had mistaken for an indictment hadn’t really been my trial after all, and I had been sentenced to life imprisonment without realizing it. I used to go into a cold sweat whenever it occurred to me that I might get life or twenty years instead of what I wanted. “Gee, it’s got to be that!” I moaned, walking back and forth. “It’s little enough to ask for! Those that don’t want it always get it — why shouldn’t I?”
Maxine came to see me — it seemed long afterward, but it may have only been a few days; all I know is, they brought me out one time, and she was on the other side of a wire screen. And she looked so bad, so old, so forlorn — it almost seemed I must be visiting her, and not she me.
“Why did you leave me that night?” she said tenderly. “This wouldn’t have happened to you—”
“How is it out today?” I said. “Very warm, or is it cooler than it was before?”
She saw what I meant, so she answered, “It’s pretty warm, warmer than it was yesterday—”
“Where do you live now, Maxine?” I said. “In the same place?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ve been in the hospital; I just got out yesterday, that’s why I couldn’t come to you any sooner.”
“Feeling all right now?” I asked, letting my eyes stray around vacantly.
“Yes,” she said readily, “it was just the suddenness of the thing, on top of everything else—” Then she went on, “I have a lawyer for you; he’ll help you out of this.”
“I don’t want a lawyer,” I said.
“I want you to tell him everything, when he comes to see you,” she pleaded vibrantly. “He’s the best I could get hold of; it’s not too late yet — that awful confession, what did they do, grill it out of you? — there’s still every chance in the world, if you—”
“All I want,” I told her. “is to get it over with.”
“Wade, for my sake, if not your own,” she begged. “Won’t you give me this one last break? It’s taken every cent I had—”
“No, Maxine, no! I want to go!”
“Wade, darling,” she groaned, “for Bernice’s sake, then. She wouldn’t want you, she wouldn’t want any one to have this happen — she was too nice a girl!”
“Bernice is gone,” I answered. “There isn’t any more Bernice.”
“Wade, you didn’t do it, you know you didn’t! You’re lying your very life away!”
“I did it, Maxine!” I shouted passionately at her at last. “I choked her to death with my own hands! Now will you believe me? Now will you go away and leave me alone?”
“God forgive you for what you’re doing to the two of us!” was the last thing she said.
The lawyer’s name was Berenson. He came to see me the next day, and scowl as I would that I didn’t want to see any one, wouldn’t leave my cell I was brought in to him. It wasn’t important enough one way or the other, after all, for me to dig my heels between the boards of the floor and put up a physical struggle about.
“Your poor wife,” one of the first things he said to me was, “sold the very wedding ring off her finger, sold her radio, sold everything, to be able to get someone’s services in your defense. At that, the money she came to me with, wouldn’t have paid for the first half-hour’s conference we had. I have it put aside in my safe right now, and she’s welcome to it back the day the trial ends — no matter what the outcome. Now believe that or not. Wade, whichever you prefer!”
“I’d believe anything these days,” I told him.