I asked her if she had any theories about the murder. She said that, honeymoon or no honeymoon, one man was never enough for a slut like that girl. Maybe she wanted some boyfriend to move in with them and that nice husband didn’t take to the idea and so they killed him and made up some kind of a wild story. She told me that if I had seen what she had seen, I would know that girl was capable of anything — the more rotten, the better she’d like it.
I had the feeling she was holding something back. I didn’t know in which direction to look. At last, by a kind of psychic triangulation, I made a guess at it and tested my guess by saying, “You sound as if you thought Paul Warcroft was a nice young man.” She said he seemed very nice. It was a crime and a shame the way a sly, meek-acting little whore could snare such a fine young fellow. Then I said, “I would think then that it was your Christian duty to at least give young Warcroft some clue as to what he had gotten himself into. Why didn’t you?”
The smugness again. “I didn’t say I didn’t.”
“Then you did?”
“Sometimes you have to face up to it, Dr. Maas, and find the courage to tell somebody something they don’t want to hear.”
“What did you tell him?”
“When they drove out they were always together. Then he drove out alone. That was the day before the poor boy died. It was in the afternoon. I was doing some weeding in my flower beds, and like a fool I left the old wheelbarrer right in the driveway where he couldn’t get past it when he came back. So I went and apologized about it. And I asked him if he knew his wife had stayed in the cabin before. He said of course, and that was why she wanted to honeymoon there, because it was so quiet and beautiful and she had wonderful memories of the place because she had found it by accident when she needed it the most. I guess I must have snuffed some and looked strange and maybe I laughed, because he asked me what was the matter. And I said it certainly was strange how a wonderful memory for one person wasn’t exactly such a pretty memory for the next one. He wanted to know what I meant, and finally I said that being her husband he had a right to know. I said I’d had to throw her off the place the last time. I said she had a nasty habit of picking up boys and bringing them back to the cabin and doing filthy things to them. I said I warned her but she kept it up, and as my husband and I don’t hold with that kind of thing, I had to tell her to get out. I said we were decent people and we’d raised decent children and led a decent life, and even with the changing times and all, it seemed to me a kind of a nasty tricky thing to do to have your honeymoon right in the same bed where she’d been copulating those scruffy-looking hippie boys. He didn’t say word one. He just drove away like a bat, and a piece of gravel hit me in the leg and stung like fury. I did my duty, and it wasn’t an easy thing to do, believe you me. I always say the truth will out. Whatever you do in this life, you pay for.”
By then, of course, all the signposts were up. I made an appointment with Dr. Grenko and flew down and had a long talk with him. A very able man. Very human and very concerned. At first he did not think it could be possible. But the more he heard, the more uncertain he became.
A week later, on a warm Sunday afternoon, he met me at the Turner farm. He had left early in the morning and driven up with Norrie. She knew what was expected of her. She was to help us with the investigation of Paul’s death.
Grenko was very good with her. She had a childish earnestness about her. She was smaller than I had anticipated. One hundred pounds, probably. Almost pretty.
Grenko and I had worked out our little tableau, our clinical demonstration. It did not take long. I explained to her that we were trying to get a better line on Mike Henderson’s motives so that he could defend himself properly in a court of law. I stood on the shady bank beside the pool. Grenko took her ten feet away, beyond the replaced stone. He told her that he thought that Paul had probably said something to Mike which made Mike furious enough to kill Paul.
“Mike is very fond of you, Norrie,” I told her. “Maybe Paul insulted you somehow, said something bad about you in front of Mike.”
“But Paul wouldn’t have done that!”
“What if he said that...” I paused, continued. “You are a cheap slut. You wanted your honeymoon here because you were here two years ago, screwing some stupid kid, until Mrs. Turner threw you off the place.”
She was motionless, and her face had a slack remote look. Then she grunted and pounced. I heard her hands clap against the stone. She gave a cough of effort as she swung it up, and with eyes blazing, mouth agape, took two running steps and launched it at my face. I sidestepped it and it thudded onto the bank, rolled down, and splashed into the willow pool.
She was staring at the opposite slope, a hand shading her eyes. “Mike?” she said. She turned to Grenko. “That’s what he had to do, you know. When Paul said that, there wasn’t anything left for Mike to do but kill him. Everybody should be able to understand that. It’s not all that hard to understand? But I don’t know why he didn’t come back. I don’t know why he kept walking. I guess he was scared. Maybe he was ashamed, too. Because Paul and I loved each other very dearly. And we weren’t married long.”
What do you do with it? Where do you go when there isn’t any place to go? Those were the questions Grenko and I covered when I saw him again last week. We didn’t cover them. We went over them and around them and under them.
Who killed Paul? Norrie’s people killed him. Mush killed him. Mike killed him. Mabel Turner killed him. Hundred-pound girls can’t lift and throw rocks that size.
Grenko says the question is academic at best, because he is losing her. She is moving away from us all, into a world she can more easily endure. Contact is ever more tenuous and uncertain.
“And,” said Grenko with a kind of ironic despair, “she keeps getting prettier and prettier. Maybe one of these days she’ll be as pretty as her mother always wanted her to be.”
Quarrel
After knowing crazy Kaberrian seven years at least, last Sunday I got my first good look at him. In the park. I would have walked by the bench except he said, “Hey! You! Noonan!”
So I stopped and the way I looked at him made him laugh, and from the laugh I knew it was crazy Kaberrian sitting there in the sunshine with a girl in a green suit. The laugh was the same. Everything else had been changed. With that twelve or so pounds of shiny curly black hair chopped away and shaved away, underneath was a very ordinary-looking type person, like the uptown subways are full of five evenings a week, like come and take away things people don’t make a payment on.
Always he had all those odds and ends of clothes fastened with string, the jump boots, wrapped sandwiches stashed here and there, little signs pinned on about how to live, and always in a couple of pockets those plays of his, such a terrible mimeograph job nobody could read them but him. I had not seen him in months, and this type in the store-window suit and shined shoes was not the crazy Kaberrian I would never see again, I knew.
I put my nose level with his, five inches away, and shook my head and wanted almost to cry. “A sell job,” I said. “A fink-off. You squared it, huh, baby?”
So they both laughed, just as if there wasn’t any guilt at all, him and the pretty little basket in her green suit, and Kaberrian said, “Noonan. You got Buckley aboard?”
“Like forever.”
“Noonan, this is Ellie. Noonan, Ellie should meet Buckley.”
Buckley was napping in the side pocket. I got him out and he blinked in the sunlight. He is gold color. A truly Great Mouse, and she put her hand out and Buckley didn’t freeze up so I put him into her hand. No flinch, no baby talk, no kissing noises. She just said, “Hi, Buckley,” and stroked the top of his head with a thumb and gave him back and I put him back in his pocket and pretty soon heard the little crackling as he got going on one of the peanuts. So then the Ellie basket looked at her watch and gave Kaberrian a little housewifey smacko and went off, and he looked dreamy as he saw her depart, and it is worth admitting that she walked very girl in every way.