“That’s incredible!”
Kruslov sighed heavily. Their voices had carried well in the night quiet. I was not more than twenty-five feet from them. The police car radio began to make insane sounds — Donald Duck under a tin wash tub. The patrolman’s heels scuffed the gravel as he went quickly over to the car. He spoke a few times in a low voice.
“Nothing yet, sir,” he said to Kruslov.
“You are making a dreadful mistake,” Mrs. Speers said hotly. Her loyalty touched me.
“We’ll see, lady.”
“What makes you think he’d do a thing like that?”
I had sensed the growing irritation of Kruslov. Mrs. Speers had a penetrating, indignant voice, and he had had too little sleep. Perhaps under other circumstances he would have kept police business to himself. But Mrs. Speers had refused to be brushed off. He said in a hard voice, “Lady, I do not know what would make him do a thing like that. All I know is we took a look at his car today, at the plant. An expert opened the trunk and he found an empty tin can. There had been frozen orange juice in it. There was a white thread caught where the metal was ragged. The lab boys say that white thread came off the Olan girl’s skirt. Now why don’t you go back in the house?”
Mrs. Speers was defeated. She left without a word. I was defeated too. I remembered climbing down the slope to get the can. If I’d remembered Mrs. Speers’ trash on Monday night, the can would now be in the dump and covered up, white thread and all. Maybe there was a moral there, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I stood in the night behind the tree and felt as naked as the day I was born.
A man carrying a black case came out of my apartment. “You through, Bird?” Kruslov asked.
“I’m through.”
Kruslov turned to the patrolman. “You wait in the apartment with the door locked and the lights out. Just because it’s dark don’t go to sleep. I’ll take the car in now. If he’s missed by the other cars, you take him when he comes in. Don’t take any chances. Cuff him to the radiator and phone in. I’ll bet a buck he went to the movies or a bar. If he was still walking, they’d have him.”
Kruslov and Bird got in the car and went away. The patrolman stood in the doorway. He took out a cigar, bit the end off and lighted it. He looked at the night for a while and then went into my apartment. The lights went off. I moved slowly back across the side yard, keeping the tree trunk between me and the apartment. There was a high hedge at the far end of the side yard. I wedged myself into it and tried to do some constructive thinking, but my mind wouldn’t work. If I turned myself in I would have to try to explain why, after finding the body, I had gotten rid of it. The action seemed to scream of guilt. I kept plaguing myself by asking myself why I’d taken the body away in the first place. It was hardly constructive thought.
Fear grew larger and larger in my mind, fear that I was not going to get out of this. I’d taken her into my apartment and strangled her. I’d driven her car away and abandoned it. I’d come back and slept and disposed of the body the next day. My prints were on her car. Now they’d be looking for the tarp and they’d find it. It seemed to me I’d read that they could type sweat, and my hands had certainly been sweaty when I’d lifted the tarp with her body in it. It had been my belt around her throat, and they’d find that too. I wanted to start running through the night. I wanted to run hard out across the night fields, away from this place.
I thought of everybody I knew, and I could think of only two people in the whole world who would listen to me and believe me. Tory Wylan and Toni MacRae. Tory was far away, but Toni was close.
I moved like a thief through the adjoining back yard. Through a window I saw a woman washing dishes, white dishes with blue rims under hard white fluorescence. I kicked a child’s tin toy and scurried into deeper shadows and waited until my heart quieted. I stood by a lilac bush and looked at the lighted windows of the big yellow house. I had an insane wish to throw my head back and yell, “Toni! Toni!” Cry of terror; plea for help. Child in the night.
I circled the big yellow house, all but the front side, staying back far enough so I could see the high windows, but I did not see her. I worked my way back to the original place. I saw her then, in a second story window near the rear of the house. She walked by in front of the window, wearing a yellow robe, both hands fooling with her hair at the back of her dark head. I crouched and felt the ground and found three small stones. The first one rapped off the wood beside her window. The second made a clear sharp clink against the glass. Toni appeared in the window. The light was behind her so that I couldn’t see her expression. I threw the last one and it hit the glass, startling her. No one was looking out the other windows. I took my lighter out and held it near my chin and lighted it. The night wind wavered the flame. I put my hand in the area of light and crooked my finger a few times in a beckoning gesture before a stronger puff of wind blew the flame out.
She stood there, not moving. I could guess what was going on in her head: the boss was now reaching for the payoff. I guessed at her anger, yet knew somehow that curiosity would bring her down — and besides, she would want a chance to express indignation. She moved away from the window. When she appeared again she was dressed. She looked down and then left the window. A minute or so later she came walking down through the grass beside the house.
Twenty feet from me she said in a clear voice that seemed audible all over the city, “Mr. Sewell, exactly what do you think you’re doing?”
“Hush! Please!” My voice was a frightened croak.
She must have sensed the way I felt. She came close to me and whispered, “What on earth is the trouble?”
“The police are looking for me, Toni. They want to arrest me for the murder of Mary Olan.”
“That’s simply stupid! You couldn’t kill anybody.”
“Please, please don’t raise your voice like that, Toni. I didn’t kill her. But I’ll tell you what I did do. I found her body in my closet Sunday morning. I put the body in my car and took it out and left it where they found it. Now they can prove I did that. And if they can prove I did that...”
She stood silently in the darkness. “You fool, Clint! You utter damn fool!”
“I know, I know. I did it, I was stupid, I can’t take it back.”
“You better go right on down there and tell them just what you did.”
“You don’t know the whole thing. You don’t know how bad it looks.”
“You can’t tell them the truth?”
“I didn’t tell them in the beginning. I don’t dare to now.”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“This sounds silly as hell. I don’t know what I expect you to do. I just wanted to tell somebody. I just wanted to tell you. So it’s stupid. All right.”
She looked down and kicked lightly at the grass. “If you run and hide it’ll look even worse.”
“I know that! But what can I do. I can’t keep standing here. I wish I could tell you the whole thing.”
“Without any lies? Without leaving out any part of it?”
“I’m off lies, Toni. I’ve given them up. They don’t pay off.”
“You ought to go right to the police.”
“We can’t argue that here.”
She turned and looked at the house. There was just enough light from the house for me to see she was biting her underlip.
“I don’t want to get you involved,” I said.
“Shut up a minute. Have you got your car?”
“They took it away.”
“I suppose they’re watching your place.”
“There’s a man in there waiting for me to come home. They think I went out for a walk. They’re cruising around looking for me.”
“You can come to my room it you do exactly what I tell you to do.”