She didn’t move. I began inching to her across the floor and she watched me still wary and suspicious. I could make out small puddles in my cell now; the jail smelled like the canals outside. The windows were at street level and sometimes when the canals rose around the city, water came over the ground and poured into the jail. Steam was rising from the floor. She didn’t seem to notice it. She blinked at me and her mouth was fuller and redder in the dark; she sighed heavily. A great sense of pain seemed to go through her. Her eyes were dazed and precise ovals in the small pool at our feet, and I could actually hear the sound of her lips parting. She shook her head a bit, as though to wake herself. In the deepening blue twilight of the windows in the opposite cells I saw a candle go by; I wondered if the people of Los Angeles had come to wear fires on their shoes. The flame reared like the trunk of an animal and the puddles of the jail caught the reflection of the candle and still held it after the candle had passed. Every small wave on the surface of the puddles of water muItiplied the color of the flame; a red and fiery sheen seemed to lie across the cell in the dark. She was a shadow framed by a ring of candlelight. At that moment I’d come too far down the white hourless hole of Los Angeles to give in to her so easily. Her face had smoke around it and she reached out to the bars of the cell when I caught her. I kept thinking that any minute someone would come to put out the flame of this candle, wherever in the city it was, so as to extinguish the reflections of the water’s surface. Old trash from the city lay by the doors. The shadows of the bars burned themselves into the water. A large dark cloud settled in the hall; for a moment I thought it was Wade. It’s Wade, I said to her. Her hair ran in black curls down her face, and I pressed myself to her. She was right against me. She shuddered at the sight of me. What is it, I said, I haven’t done anything.
We watched each other, pressed to each other, and I looked down at my hand holding her arm. I let go. For a moment she didn’t move, and then her eyes became sad and she stopped shuddering. I dropped my hands to my sides, and she turned and pushed open the door of the cell.
I know they locked that door. They gave it an extra rattle when they slammed it shut. But she pushed it open and walked through and stood in the hall looking back at me. I took a step; the door of the cell was still open. I swung it back and forth. Where are you going, I said. She walked into the dark end of the hall and I waited, looking at my fingers which had on them the blood from her arms that was not quite dry. For a moment I wasn’t sure if I was in a cell in Los Angeles or in a cell in Bell Pen somewhere in the ice of the north continent. At that moment it didn’t matter to me whether Ben Jarry had been hanged or whether my indiscretion had hanged him. I would have traded Ben Jarry a hundred times to have her pressed against me again. I looked at the shadow where she had vanished; I knew she wasn’t a ghost. I’d held her and she had opened the door and it was still open, and she had been too tired and afraid and suffering to be a ghost. The door at the other end of the hall opened and I looked, and there were Wade and Mallory. Wade was looking at me calmly. Mallory saw me standing in the open door of the cell and his face went white. Through the window was coming the last light of dusk, and the fire in the puddles all over the floor was gone.
I stared at my bloody fingers. “Inspector,” Mallory said to Wade, swallowing hard, “I swear to you we locked that cell.”
Wade was still calm. He looked as though half of him were receding into the night, as though he were disappearing by the moment. His clothes hung on him and his face was sunken. He blinked at me. “How did you open the cell, Cale,” he said. I could barely hear him.
“She opened it,” I told him.
Mallory was still swallowing. He exhaled and said, “There was a girl, Inspector.” He worked up the nerve to look at the side of Wade’s face and said, “She was in there a few minutes ago, I swear it. She had black hair and looked Mex maybe, or—” Wade turned to him. Shut up Mallory, he said quietly. He turned back to me.
I showed him my hands. “Well this isn’t my blood,” I said, “and I think you know it wasn’t on me when we came in last night.” Wade had his back to me before I finished talking. He was walking to the door at the end of the hall, and when he got there he pivoted imperceptibly and said to Mallory, Bring him along. He drifted out the door as though the ground were moving him. Nothing he did seemed of his own volition, not what he saw or what he said or did. Mallory gave me an utterly baffled look and motioned me on ahead of him. We followed Wade toward the front of the building and into his office. There were a few guys sitting around at their desks drinking coffee.
In his office Wade walked behind the desk and, not even looking at me, said, “I’m putting you under house arrest. You won’t be leaving the library except under exceptional circumstances. We’ll have your food prepared for you and bring you those supplies you need” He said all this so softly I could barely hear him. He looked five or ten years older than the night before, he looked like someone who had seen some-thing amazing and inexplicable. I noticed something else. I had to listen for it and then I had to figure out what it was. I realized it was the sound of the buildings: the sound had changed again. I tried to remember if I had feIt the rumble of the ground; I thought of the pools of fire on the floor of the jail.
“Am I still under arrest for murder?” I said to him.
“No,” he answered. “If you were under arrest for murder you would be in jail. You’re under arrest for violating conditions of your parole.”
I smiled. “It was Jarry wasn’t it,” I said.
Wade let out a deep breath.
“It was Jarry,” I said, “and you can’t arrest me for the murder of a man who’s already dead. That’s it, isn’t it?” I was angry. “You know what I think?”
Mallory was pulling me by the arm, toward the door. “Come on, jack.”
I was sure I had it all figured out. My mind was racing, inventing and discarding one theory after another, all in the course of seconds. For a moment I was sure Jarry had never been executed at all. For a moment I was sure it was all a setup to make me a scapegoat, to make me bait for whoever was coming here to get me. Whoever this Janet what’s-her-name was looking to meet up with. My mind was racing, trying to get it all straight, but it was going faster than I could follow, I was blathering to myself. “You know who she is,” I said to Wade, my eyes narrowing at him.
“Your Spanish girl? No.”
“But you know there is such a girl.”
“I have no reason at this point to disbelieve it.” I could still barely hear him. “But listen to me,” and as he leaned across his desk his voice did not so much rise as solidify, “if there is a Spanish girl, you stay away from her. I’m telling you for your sake. You can believe that body was Ben Jarry if you want, it doesn’t matter. But for your sake, you stay away from her.”
“You can’t admit it was him, can you?” I said, shaking my head. “It’s that hard for you, isn’t it.”
He came around from the desk and took Mallory by the shoulders and nearly lifted him up and out of the room. He slammed the door and stood facing it with his back to me for several seconds before he turned. When he turned he had this exhilarated mirthless grin on his face. I went nauseated and weak; suddenly I knew I hadn’t figured it out. Suddenly I knew something was very wrong. He stepped up to me and put his face an inch from mine. “It’s you, Cale,” he whispered. I looked at him and he looked at me, and his eyes had become eminently satisfied, but he was still too afraid to quite laugh in my face. “We checked it all out, just like you said,” he nodded, with the same wild sickening grin. “The prints and the blood, we went over it and over it. Didn’t that corpse look just a little familiar? All those times you got a look at it? You decided it was the object of your guiIt, but you know it was a little more familiar than that. Because it’s your body.”