Lois is sultry and wild, and lucky to be the daughter of Smithville's publishing magnate, John Maynard. Working as a reporter on the local newspaper, she doesn't have the talent or ability to write-but she does have an affair with the paper's editor, who is willing to accept her for her sexual attributes.
Lois trades erotic favors for assignments, and begins to enjoy her sensual credentials. Many powerful men pursue her, in hope of getting closer to her father. This discovery doesn't make her angry, because she takes from them whatever lust she can get-loving them and then leaving them and then writing about them in the paper, causing quite a scandal!
CHAPTER ONE
Lois stopped a moment at the foot of the stairs and returned the critical, unsmiling survey of the girl standing there in the looking glass across the bank of great tawny-bronze chrysanthemums. The girl was tawny-bronze herself like the chrysanthemums-her hair and her smooth suntanned skin-except that her eyes were yellow-green and her green taffeta off-the-shoulder dress clothed her with infinitely more art than chrysanthemum leaves ever have in mind. Lois Maynard regarded herself coolly there for a moment, then turned and crossed the hall into the library, the green taffeta swishing softly and with complete confidence as she moved.
It-was the least flattering mirror in the house, old, critical, prejudiced-like some of the people, Smithville's Finest, who would come swarming into the house in a few minutes now, eating and drinking their heads off-and covertly shaking them. The Prodigal Daughter-how long did you stay a returned prodigal in Smithville? It was six months now, going on seven, that Lois Maynard had been back home.
"Hi, Pops. All set?" She had waited expectantly just inside the door for her father to turn and look at her. "What are you doing? Locking up the drinking whiskey?"
John Maynard, born in Kentucky, was big and slow and had never had occasion to hurry all parts of his body at the same time. He finished locking the cellaret and slipped the key into the pocket of his shabby dinner jacket.
"Now, I wouldn't talk thataway, honey, if I was you." He drawled it amiably as he turned, smiling at his daughter. Women, horses, cards, guns, or whisky, none of them had ever surprised John Maynard out of his ordinary tempo or changed the slow smile on his extraordinary face. "Good God, Lois," he said equably, "you're nekkid as a jaybird. Is that green rig a dress?"
"A dress? You mean what a dress, Daddy. Isn't it wonderful?"
She lifted her bare arms and whirled in a gay swishing circle for him to see. "This dress, Daddy, has design and purpose."
"Then I'd go take it off, Lois," John Maynard said. "He's not coming, for one thing."
Lois Maynard stopped abruptly, the laughter wiped instantly from her red lips and greenish eyes. "What do you mean, he's not coming?" she demanded sharply. "Who's not coming?"
"Gus Blake," her father drawled. He went over to the big mahogany desk cleared of everything except the green blotter and the silver inkstand, and sat down on a corner of it. "Janey called up. They couldn't find a sitter."
"Oh, stuff!" She cut him off with a flippant swish of her taffeta bustle. "He'll come. So will Janey. Her mother always stays with the baby. It's just Janey's broken-wing tactics. They never work."
She was smiling and confident again. "Have we got a cigarette?" She took one from the box on the table beside her. "Janey's pretty stupid, Daddy. She just hasn't got any brains."
"And you have got 'em, honey?"
She looked at him quickly. His gentle drawl and the slow smile, easy and charming, that disguised the rugged lines of his massive face were snares she knew all about. She knew there was more she didn't know about him, but she did know that the slight stoop of his heavy shoulders were as conscious as the homely shabbiness of his dinner coat, and the black tie just enough askew to make men think he didn't much bother and women think he needed somebody to take care of him. A great big friendly brown dog, everybody's friend; John Maynard, slow and easy, simple as cornbread and pot likker, comfortable and unassuming and genial, with Smithville and Smith County and almost everybody in each all neatly tied hand and foot securely in his inside vest pocket.
"We ain't got much money, but we have a lot of fun-" John Maynard who had more than plenty of money. The fullback with the Phi Beta Kappa key in the back of his desk drawer there. John Maynard who'd drawled, "Communists? Well, I ain't much afraid of communists. When the ruckus died down I reckon I'd be Commissar of Smith County."
She looked at him intently. "What do you mean, Dad? Of course I've got brains. You've told me so yourself."
"Then maybe you're not usin' 'em as well as you might," John Maynard said. "Been wantin' to talk to you about this. The purpose of brains, now, is to get you what you want out of life. You think it's Gus Blake you want."
The green eyes smoldered with sudden fire. "I know it's Gus Blake I want. He belongs to me. If I hadn't gone away he'd never have married!"
"Let's stick to facts, Lois. If you hadn't gone off and married that no-good-"
"That was a mistake."
"I'm not criticizing you." He patted her shoulder gently. "You've had your fling. You've got your divorce and your own name back and the slate's clean. But Janey's got Gus. Now, wait a minute, Lois."
Lois Maynard stood rigidly beside the table, the color burning in her cheeks. "I'm waiting, Father."
"You came back home. You said you'd made a mistake. All right, honey, we all make mistakes. You said you'd found out it was Gus all the time and it was still Gus. You wanted him. You said if I'd give you a job on Gus's paperlet's just call it my paper-you'd get him back. And he didn't want you on the paper, but I sold him that one. I said you needed something to take your mind off yourself."
Lois Maynard moved impatiently. "Is this a cramming course in Ancient History One, Professor? I'm letter-perfect already. You sound like Mother to me, Dad. She's on Janey's side, too."
"I'm not on Janey's side. I'm on your side-right or wrong. I've always been on your side, honey. I don't say I approve, but you never asked me. I don't know as it's up to me to approve or disapprove. I expect there's a lot of things I do you don't approve of. But you're still on my side. Your mother's different. Your mother believes in ethics."
"What's ethics, Daddy?"
They both laughed. John Maynard's face sobered a little as he said, "It mightn't hurt either of us to try to find out what they are, sometime, honey."
"Sometime. Not right now, Daddy."
"Sometime when maybe somebody'll be tryin' to get Gus away from you? But that's not what I'm talkin' about, Lois. I'm sayin' I made Gus take you on the paper. And you've done well. I ain't sure but you could run the paper and me let Gus go. But that's not the point. The point is, Janey's still got Gus-and maybe you're bein' a little too obvious about what you want. That's not usin' your brains, Lois. That's what I don't like about that dress, for one thing. Gus ain't likely to fall for a nekkid woman-"
"I'm not naked, Daddy. And I'm tweed and high neck six days a week and this is relief. You can call it comic relief, but it's not."
"All right, all right. I'm just tryin' to help. I'm just tryin' to make you see maybe there's other ways of goin' about these things."
Her father's voice was mollifying and gentle.
"And I'm not saying I don't like Janey, either. I do. I feel mighty sorry for Janey. She's a sweet little thing. She's just runnin' out of her class, is all. Gus is away out there, and so are you. Together the two of you can go places-big places. That's the sort of thing I like to see. Now wait, honey! Don't be impatient. Half of brains is the patience that comes along with 'em. You say Janey's stupid. You say she was pickin' wild flowers the day brains were up for sale, and maybe you're right. But that's not the way to go about it, Lois. If you're dealin' with somebody stupid, honey, the thing to do is sit tight till they really do somethin' stupid. And I expect Janey's done it."
The bored detachment dropped from Lois Maynard like a drab shade falling from a naked light. She should have known her father better than to think he was lecturing her about a dress.
"What is it, Daddy? What's she done?"
"Got herself out on a limb," John Maynard said. His voice was soft and regretful. "Or I'm mighty afraid that's what she's gone and done. A mighty rickety limb at that. At least that's what it looks to me."
He reached back, unlocked the desk drawer, and pulled it open. He took out a small oblong sheaf of papers and handed them over to his daughter.
"There's quite a pile of these things."
"Why, they're checks," Lois said. She turned them over in her hand. " 'Payable to the Smith County Recreation Company, Inc.,' " she read. It was stamped on the back of each of them. She looked up at her father and back at the packet of checks. "Smith County Recreation Company," she repeated. "Isn't that your friend Doc Wernitz?"
She had a vague picture in her mind of the inconspicuous little man in a straight gray overcoat who'd come to the house a couple of times when his mechanics were all busy and reset the slot machine they had down in their playroom in the basement. It was an old one he'd given her father on Christmas, that had to be readjusted when the jackpot fell. She'd only noticed him because there was such a startling incongruity between his unobtrusive and selfeffacing manner and the noisy clamor of the jukeboxes and slot machines, labeled Property of Smith County Recreation Company, Inc., that he operated around the town.
"That's right. It's Doc Wernitz."
Her face was still blank as she turned the checks over and riffled through them. "They're all made out to the Sailing Club."
"And the Country Club. Ten dollars, mostly. A few twenties. That's the limit the club will cash."
"But that-that means slot machines?"
Her father nodded. She looked from him to the checks, still puzzled. One of them came loose from the staple that held them and floated down to the floor. She put her hand out to catch it.
"Don't worry, honey," John Maynard drawled. "It'll bounce."
Then Lois Maynard understood.
"Oh," she said. "Oh. They're rubber. They're all rubber."
"They're all rubber," her father said equably. "Three hundred and twenty dollars' worth. Not counting the bank's cleared something under a thousand dollars the last few months. Jim Ferguson gave these to me today at the directors' meeting. He don't know what to do about 'em. He likes Janey, and I expect he don't much like the idea of going to Gus about 'em."
"I don't blame him."
"Neither do I."
Lois looked down at the checks again. The clock on the mantel ticked on toward seven o'clock. Upstairs a door opened and closed. Her father put out his hand.
"I still don't get it, Dad," she said. "Look at these dates. Here's one to the Sailing Club on June twelfth. This one's July fourth. It's November now. Why-"
"They were coming in too thick and fast, I expect. Doc Wernitz cashed a hundred or so a month and hung on to the rest. It's a deal the clubs have with him, honey. He usually cashes checks when the banks are closed and the clubs run out of silver-but he takes checks a lot of times if there's some question the clubs might have trouble collecting."
John Maynard shrugged. "He can collect without anybody's feelings getting hurt, or just write the loss off to public relations. Like Gus. If Doc Wernitz was sticking around Smithville he wouldn't want to antagonize the editor of the local paper. He's torn up a lot of checks in his time-influential people, and people he might scare into stopping play if they realized the hole they'd got themselves in. But he's pulling out of Smithville now, selling out and going south, so he don't care about editors and people with influence anymore. I expect there'll be a lot of headaches in town tomorrow. Seems like it's powerful easy to write a check at the bar when you're playing the slot machines and forget to put it down when you get home with nothing to show for it. I bet Janey hasn't any idea of the amount that's out against her. That's why Ferguson let me take these this afternoon, to see if I could figure out some way to break the bad news. It's too bad Doc Wernitz decided to cash in and pull out all of a sudden like this-if you can say cash in."
He listened a moment. "Better give 'em to me, honey. Here comes your mother."
He put them back in the desk drawer and turned the key in the lock. Lois watched him silently. When he turned back she said, "Who else knows about this, Dad?"
"That Janey plays? Why, everybody in town, I expect, honey. Except Gus."
"No, no. I mean about those checks. Who'd dare tell Gus, I mean."
Her father shrugged. "Doc Wernitz, of course. Then there's Nate Rogers. Jim Ferguson asked him to stop with me, after the board meeting. His boy Orvie's always been so nice to Janey, maybe Fergie figured he'd help out if Gus Blake happens to need a quick loan or something. Or maybe Nate Rogers would pass the word to Orvie and Orvie could say something to Janey. They all like Janey, and, anyway, it's the sort of thing a bank president in a town like this don't want any hard feelin's about."
"Orvie," said Lois Maynard. "It's too bad she didn't marry Orvie and be done with it. He's the one that picked her up and stuck her down everybody's throat. Her father was a night watchman over at the plant and her mother took in roomers. If it hadn't been for Orvie's father's dough she'd still be on Main Street selling peanuts in the dime store."
"Just dry up, honey." His voice was still soft, unchanged, but Lois Maynard knew he meant it. "If it hadn't been for your great-granddaddy's dough, I'd still be back in the Kentucky mountains, jumpin' gullies to keep ahead of the revenooers."
"Not you, Daddy."
"Maybe not Janey, either, honey. Here comes your mother."
Lois tilted her elegant tawny head, listening. "No. She's stopped to check the bathrooms-see if the towels are right. You know Mother." She took hold of her father's arm. "Look, Dad. Tell Mr. Rogers and Fergie it's all settled, will you? Tell them you'll talk to Janey. Because listen. Aunt Mamie was in the office again today. She's starting one of her crusades. It's slot machines, this time. She's been driving Gus nearly nuts. He's going to fox her. He's coming out with a blast tomorrow, or next day-pro-slot machines, not anti. And if I stop him from-you know, making an ass of himself-"
"Why stop him, honey?" John Maynard asked.
She looked at him blankly, her red lips parted. "Why Dad! No man wants to look like a damn fool-"
"That's what I mean, honey. No man wants to look like a damn fool, but if he makes one of himself he's got to put up with his wife makin' a fool out of him."
Lois Maynard dropped his arm and looked straight ahead of her for a moment. "Oh," she said softly. "I see. Now I see."
"Anyway, it's no business of yours to go interferin' in the editorial policy of Gus's newspaper," John Maynard said. "I promised Gus that when he took you on." He smiled at her, listening to his wife's light tread as she crossed the hall toward the library door. He drew Lois's arm into his and patted it affectionately.
A question tinged with something very like despair seemed to flicker through the gray eyes of the frail woman standing in the doorway as she saw the two of them together there.
"Lucy," John Maynard said, "I've been tellin' Lois she's to keep her mouth out of Gus's editorials. If she starts tryin' to dictate to him what he's going to write or not write, I think he ought to fire her."
Lucy Maynard looked at her husband. "I think perhaps he ought to fire her anyway, John. That's a stunning dress, Lois. Superb theater. Sometime we must have caviar and pressed duck to match it. Everything else is ready, John." She turned her head, listening to the first car coming into the drive. "Please try to keep your sister Mamie from making a speech, John. I'll keep her up here out of the playroom if you'll just keep her from drinking too much. I don't know how she became convinced champagne is nonalcoholic. Mamie's temperance lecture when she's hiccuping never seems the least amusing to me."
CHAPTER TWO
The party was still just beginning. Lois Maynard, balanced on the arm of one of the deep-yellow leather sofas that flanked the log burning fireplace, could still hear herself think, and speak without having to scream to make herself heard. And still watch the stairs, smiling, to see Gus and Janey when they came. The cellar of the old house, converted into a playroom, was bigger than the Parish Hall and much more comfortable. The sofas in the recesses formed by the arched brick foundations were secluded and cozy, the jukebox was still playing sweet and low over in the corner where the bar and games were. The room was slowly filling up now as the crowd divided itself into the older sheep staying soberly upstairs with her father and mother and the younger goats skipping about down where the fun and noise was.
Lois saw that Orval Rogers was one of them. Not that Orval ever skipped, singly or in pairs. Coming down alone now, his black tie neatly tied, his blond hair neatly brushed, he looked very like a young but sober owl behind his neat steel-rimmed glasses. Halfway down the stairs he stopped, searching the room earnestly for a moment before he came on.
"Poor Orvie-"
Lois started a little-and looked around. It was Martha Ferguson, wife of the bank president.
"Oh, Martha. You took the words right out of my mind, dear."
It was not quite true, because in her mind they had none of the affectionate warmth and bubbling amusement they had as Martha Ferguson spoke them.
"Hi, Orvie," she said.
"Hi, Lois. Hi, Martha. Dad couldn't come, Lois. He says he's sorry, but he's too old for these bouts."
He looked around earnestly again.
"Janey isn't here yet," Lois said.
"Yeah, she said she didn't know whether she could get a sitter for little Jane."
Orvie Rogers wandered over toward the bar. Lois looked around at Martha Ferguson again. "I wonder why we always say 'Poor Orvie,'" she said abruptly. "He's got an awful lot more dough than any of the rest of us."
Martha Ferguson laughed. "Oh, he's so serious and his father makes him work so hard. Poor Orvie-I don't think he's really ever had any fun, or busted out all over. I'm devoted to him. He's really sweet." She took a manhattan off the tray held in front of her. "Now what I wonder-I mean if we are wondering-is how long, for heaven's sakes, we're going on always telling Orvie that Janey hasn't come yet, or Janey's over there, or Janey's upstairs or out in the garden. It's funny, isn't it?"
"Is it?"
Lois took a sip of the cocktail in her hand. Martha Ferguson glanced at her, her brown eyes kindling a little. "Oh, Lois, don't be a stinker and a louse! You know damn well you've no right to be."
"Darling! Who's being a stinker and a louse? You asked me a question and I asked you another."
"Okay," Martha Ferguson tossed off the rest of her cocktail and put the glass down. "It's not manners to quarrel with your hostess, so I guess I'll move along. I'm a bit tense tonight myself. I like Janey."
She let her eyes rest on Lois's plunging neckline and bare smooth shoulders for an instant. "That's a divine little twelve-ninety-eight job you've got on, Lois. Nice for a working girl, I mean. I hope Janey can't find a sitter, if you don't mind my saying so. Though I don't suppose that would keep Gus home." She glanced across the room. "There's my husband wasting his dough on Aunt Mamie's slot machine. I'd better grab him quick, before the rumor starts it's the bank's money he's stuffing down the iron maw."
As she moved away, Lois was alone for a moment in a dancing pool of firelight, her hand resting idly on the back of the yellow sofa, a witch woman smiling quietly as she watched Martha take her husband's arm to pull him away from the slot machine. She watched her cousin Dorsey Syms move in, drop one quarter, and move away for somebody else. If you play the slot machine, that's the way to do it, Lois thought. Take a chance-what was it? 2,400 to one on the jackpot, somebody had told her-and not take the second chance that was still 2,400 to one. She glanced up the stairs. She could hear her Aunt Mamie's vigorous, strident voice and see her in her mind's eye, a champagne glass in one hand, the other firmly pinioning some polite unfortunate, the rector probably, or the judge, vocally bludgeoning him on the decay of manners and morals in Smithville, while her son and her husband put their quarters in the machine. Aunt Mamie's slot machine, Martha Ferguson had called it. That was because of the printed sign over it. "This machine is for your amusement. It pays off seventy-five percent to you and twenty-five percent to the box in the corner for the League for Civic Improvement. It does not pay for the liquor you drink here. That's free." It was signed with John Maynard's vigorous scrawl.
Lois turned, smiling, to look up the stairs. The League for Civic Improvement was the banner under which John Maynard's sister
Mamie, otherwise Mrs. Nelson Syms, its founder and president, carried on all her whirlwind crusades. Lois could hear her voice now, rising above the clang of the machine-which must be paying off very well tonight, she thought, the way everybody was crowding in to play it, and judging by the crescendo of the laughing chatter around it...." clubs can't exist in this town without slot machines," Aunt Mamie was saying, "then the clubs will have to fold, my dear Commodore. Bingo is an entirely different matter. The League made twelve hundred dollars on Bingo last year. I myself won an electric mixer, and a very respectable woman I know won a washing machine she very badly needed. That is hardly what I call gambling, Commodore."
Poor Commodore, Lois thought. She could see him, too, in her mind's eye, a pleasant little man who was certainly no match for Mrs. Nelson Syms. But the Commodore and Aunt Mamie, Aunt Mamie's son Dorsey Syms, whom she'd just seen at the slot machine, Aunt Mamie's husband-Uncle Nelly, he was usually called-and her father's slot machine itself, the gift of Doc Wernitz, there for Amusement and Civic Improvement occupied only the periphery of Lois Maynard's active mind and smiling, attentive eye. Janey and Gus Blake occupied the center and core of both as she watched the stairs, waiting for them to come.
And if they didn't? If Gus hadn't heard about the checks, he'd certainly come. If he has heard, then he'd have to come, and make her come, just to show, to keep face in front of all their friends. Unless-Lois dismissed that. If Janey had been going on month after month, getting deeper and deeper into the hole she'd dug, she wasn't likely to choose tonight to try to crawl out of it, not with Gus so busy trying to get out a centennial edition of the Smithville Gazette that he was hardly civil to his own staff-Gus who by nature and circumstance was never more than six jumps from the sheriff anyway. She could dismiss that. Janey wouldn't tell him tonight even if Janey knew it herself, and nobody else would. Martha Ferguson, maybe-if her husband had told her. Martha might blurt it out for his own good.
Lois looked across the room. The Fergusons were standing at the bar talking to the impish boy behind it, Jim Ferguson's arm around his wife's shoulders. Lois shook her head. Martha talked a lot, but not when Jim told her to shut up. As president of the town's leading bank, this was one time he'd be sure to tell her. No, Gus could go on a long time without knowing anything about it. It was one of the things about a town like Smithville. "The conspiracy of silence," John Maynard called it. Like Aunt Mamie not knowing she used money from a slot machine, and the people who came and lived there for years not knowing that Judge Dikes hovered so solicitously around his sister because she'd pick up any small movable object if he didn't, and not knowing, for instance, that another of the guests upstairs had shot his wife and been acquitted without so much as the jury's leaving the box to make up their mind.
"Waiting for somebody?"
Lois started. She hadn't noticed her cousin Dorsey Syms move around behind the masonry piers to join her. He was smiling, the Maynard smile. There was very little Syms in Aunt Mamie's son. He had the Maynard height, the Maynard confidence, the black hair, brown eyes, straight nose, and slightly cleft chin. And a good deal of his Uncle John Maynard's charm. The Syms family had nothing much to distinguish them except an ancestor who'd conducted the Siege of Smithville against Cornwallis and whom Aunt Mamie had brevetted from ensign to colonel. Except Nelson Syms, of course. He had Aunt Mamie and the job her brother John Maynard had got him in the county treasurer's office. And his son Dorsey Syms, whose most attractive quality was his obvious fondness for his father. Neither of them could have survived Aunt Mamie if they hadn't formed a "league" of their own, Lois thought, hearing the voluble, determined voice beating on upstairs.
She smiled at her cousin. "Just wondering whether we ought to start feeding people."
"Not before Gus and Janey get here, surely," Dorsey Syms said. "I suppose they're coming?"
"I suppose so."
Not a ripple showed on the clear surface of her casual unconcern, but her pulse had quickened. He works in the bank. He knows. He must know all about it. He's trying to find out if I know, too. He's supposed to have been crazy about Janey once. She glanced aroun the playroom again. How many people there did know? Jim Ferguson certainly, and probably Martha. Orvie Rogers probably. Dorsey Syms, herself, her father upstairs-who else? There were at least thirty people there by now. If Janey and Gus didn't come pretty soon, somebody would say something.
"I hear Doc Wernitz is leaving town," Dorsey said. "Scotch please." He took a highball off the tray the boy was passing again. "Does he take that little gadget of yours over there along with him?"
"You mean the slot machine?" She wasn't smiling any longer. "That's Dad's, not mine." Her level gaze met his and held it. "And it was a gift, not a loan. Doc Wernitz hasn't any strings on Dad, or vice versa, if that's what you mean. Any more than he has on-"
She broke off and flashed around. The quick light in her cousin's eye and the delighted shout from everybody else in the playroom could only mean one of two things. A jackpot, or-"
"Janey! Hi, Janey!"
A jackpot, Lois Maynard thought, or Janey.
"Hi, Janey!" Everybody was shouting it, and Janey was there on the stairs. Gus was behind her, and Lois heard somebody say, "Hello, there, Gus, how's the boy?" But it was Janey they were glad to see and always saw first, Janey, who always just stopped and stood there, looking as if she'd just been scrubbed and had her hair ribbons tied, always surprised and eternally delighted that they noticed she'd come and really seemed to want her there. Lois Maynard suppressed a sharp flash of irritation. That was what she was doing now, just stopped halfway down the stairs, her small pointed face breaking into wreaths of happiness and delight, her blue eyes like breathless stars, just standing there surprised and excited as a child. And not even pretty. That irritated Lois Maynard. Her nose was too stubby and turned-up, her face too pointed, her eyes too big and set too far apart, all her facial bones showing, her fuzzy tow-colored hair escaping everywhere as the water she'd slicked it up with dried and it popped out of the black velvet ribbon she wore like a topknot on her head. Janey trying to look sleek and well-groomed was as absurd as her just standing there in the middle of the stairs.
"Go on, Janey." Lois heard Gus Blake, and saw him give her a little push to bring her to.
"Hello, hello, everybody!" She came on down the stairs. "Hello, Lois! I'm sorry we're late." She put her hand out. It was cold, so cold Lois Maynard was startled touching it.
"Hello, Dorsey-hello, Martha!" Janey moved on. "Hello, Orvie-hello, Jim!" Janey never said, "Hi, there," to people. Her voice was always warm and full of velvet delight, as if Lois, Dorsey Syms, Orvie Rogers, Martha and Jim Ferguson, each one of them, was the one person she'd hoped would be there without really daring to hope she could count on it. And the last person, Lois Maynard thought, in that room, or in the whole of Smith County, that anybody would think, to look at her, was responsible for the handsome sheaf of rubber checks upstairs in John Maynard's library desk drawer. If it made any difference to anybody what Janey did, it hardly seemed likely, now, the way the Fergusons, Orvie, Dorsey Syms, and all the rest of them gathered around her.
"Hi, there, Gus," Lois said. Gus Blake was left back with her. They were a little like something washed up on the beach as Janey's trim and sunlit craft took off to sea. Lois shook her head impatiently. It wasn't so at all. She could be at the other side of the room with all the rest of them, too, if she wanted to. She was here in the comparative quiet with Gus because that was the way she wanted it and had maneuvered to arrange it. I almost sound as if I'm jealous of Janey. It came sharply into her mind. But that was ridiculous. She wasn't in the least jealous of Janey Blake, only irritated at the way everybody always acted as if Janey were somehow something different, not just a little climber whose father was a night watchman at the Rogers plant, but something rare and precious, like a branch of apple blossoms in the snow. How in heaven's name had Gus Blake ever married her? She felt a sudden passionate impulse to scream it at him, scream it out at the top of her voice.
She clutched one fist in the green taffeta folds of her skirt.
Stop it, Lois, stop it! she told herself angrily. Just stop it. Don't be a fool. Remember you're the girl that has brains.
She forced herself to smile as she looked up at Janey's husband.
"How's the boss man tonight?"
"Pooped," Gus Blake said briefly. "Here comes a drink, and boy, can I use one. I'd like to throttle whoever it was got the big idea for a centennial edition. Thanks, Lawrence, and how about you Lois?"
Before she could remind him the centennial edition was his own idea, originally designed to keep her busy, or even say she didn't want another drink, Jim Ferguson had disengaged himself from Janey's entourage and was over with them.
"Hi there, Gus! How's the boy?" He gave Gus an enthusiastic slap on the back and pumped his hand. "Swell seeing you, boy. Swell party, Lois. Here comes chow. Well, be seein' you, boy."
He headed off for a table, calling Janey and Orvie Rogers to share it with him. Gus Blake looked at Lois, one brow quizzically raised.
"What's the matter with our banker?" he inquired. "Vine leaves? Or is my account overdrawn? Last time Fergie was that glad to see me was just after he turned me down on some dough I wanted to borrow from his blasted bank."
Lois held her breath for only an instant. There was no meaning in what he'd said. No meaning that he was aware of-yet.
"Vine leaves, I expect. Or isn't it barley they make Scotch out of? Here's food. Why don't we go back here and sit in peace if you're pooped?"
She moved around to a small table set for two just outside the dancing fan of firelight. Janey was across the room, but Lois could see the blank blue eyes following her and Gus as they got around there, away from the yellow sofas that were filling up with people bringing their plates to eat by the fire. Janey's the one who's jealous, not me. It flashed into her mind. Her pulse quickened. Jealousy was stupid. Jealous people did stupid things. And why should Janey care, anyway? She had Orvie, Jim Ferguson, and Dorsey Syms at her table.
Lois saw suddenly to her irritation that she herself had her uncle Nelson Syms. Uncle Nelly was drawing up a chair to talk to Gus.
"I expect you two see plenty of each other at the paper all day, and I want to ask Gus about that piece Mamie wants to write for the centennial edition. Her brother said it sure ought to go on the front page, but Mamie'd have to ask you, Gus. John always says he doesn't have any say about the paper, you run it. It's up to you."
Lois bit her lip in sharp vexation. There was nothing she could do. Poor Uncle Nelly. Thin and stoop-shouldered, he looked as if he'd been brought up in a potato cellar before a steam roller had permanently shaped him. Sometimes she wondered what would have happened to Uncle Nelly if Aunt Mamie hadn't married him and forced him to live their kind of life, moving him from job to job until John Maynard got him the one he'd had for ten years now, as a clerk in the county treasurer's office. He'd probably have been a lot happier and never had the stomach ulcers that put him in the hospital a couple of weeks out of every year.
He was going on about Aunt Mamie's article, and Gus Blake was listening, not irritably or even patiently, but with a friendly interest that apparently was quite genuine, sipping his highball, nodding his head, as serious about this nonsense, apparently, as Uncle Nelly himself. Anybody would think Uncle Nelly was one of his closest friends and most astute advisers, the way he was listening-or think he was glad to have Uncle Nelly there so he wouldn't be alone in the corner with her. But that was nonsense too.
I wonder if I'll ever really understand the guy, Lois Maynard thought, trying to blot out her uncle's voice. It had the unbearable monotony of a tap dripping in a basement laundry tub. She lowered her eyes and looked through her long, darkened lashes at the man across the table from her, the editor of her father's paper, her boss whose job she could take any time she decided she really wanted it-even if she and everybody else knew she couldn't do it as well as he did.
In repose, Gus looked sullen. Lois stared at him and then caught herself-mustn't be too obvious, she thought. Gus was lost in thoughts of his own. What she would have given to be able to share those thoughts!
Lois looked away, and in her imagination she was alone with Gus Blake, far away-in a tropical resort. They were entering the bedroom of their hotel suite, and Gus's strong arm was tight around her slender waist.
He laughed with her and led her smiling to the bed. "Gus," Lois imagined herself saying, "maybe we should wait."
"Wait? For what?" Gus demanded.
"Until we're married!" Lois exclaimed.
Gus laughed. "Can't do it," he said. "Already been married. Didn't like it a bit. And I won't do it again!"
In her fantasy, Lois was crushed. She turned away from Gus and began weeping-all of course for effect.
She was jarred out of it by the sound of Gus's laughter. She turned, and Gus was undressing, tossing his shirt over a chair, and then stepping out of his pants, leaving them on the floor.
"What do you think you're doing?" Lois asked. Suddenly she was nervous. This was so unlike Gus!
"Hurry up," Gus said to her. "I don't have all night."
"Hurry up?" Lois could feel her own excitement, suddenly building, but she chose to ignore it. "You'll have to leave-right now!"
Gus laughed again. "Stop fooling around," he said. He was naked and she couldn't keep her eyes off his massive, swollen manhood. He grinned at her and stroked himself, growing larger before her eyes. "Won't wait forever," Gus said matter-of-factly.
Lois sighed. There was no sense fighting it. She turned her back on Gus and unbuttoned her blouse, then took it off. She was not wearing a bra. Then she unfastened her skirt and stepped out of it.
She was clad in nothing but her panties and her high-heel shoes. Gus hugged her closely from behind, and she felt his hard member poke between her legs.
She shivered in delight then, aware of the hot bar that could so easily penetrate her softest parts. She reached down and capped the swollen head of his penis with her fingertips, surprised to find droplets of moisture there.
Then Lois turned and accepted his attentions fully. His hands came up and cupped her full, beautiful breasts. He massaged her nipples between his fingers and she gasped with pleasure when they hardened like little pebbles.
Then his hands were on her shoulders, pressing her down to her knees. She wrapped her arms around his legs and opened her mouth, wantonly accepting the rude hardness of him.
Her lips encircled the shaft, licking and caressing. His hips were in motion, and he reached down and held her head with his two powerful hands and quickly guided his member between her lips, easing it into her wet, warm mouth.
Gus grunted with animal satisfaction when he felt her lips tighten around his penis. He thrust into her with force, and though Lois had never been in such a position in her life, she found that she was enjoying it, loving it, eager to find out how far he would go.
Then he was tugging her to her feet, before she had had her fill of his delicious member. She looked into his eyes and realized that it was time.
He led her to the bed and then pushed her down, roughly. She tumbled backward, her body forming a diagonal across the bed. Then he knelt at the side of the bed and leaned forward, burying his face between her smooth thighs.
Lois gasped with pleasure when she felt his wet tongue probing and licking, and she clamped her legs tightly around his head as her pleasure quickly built to the flash point.
And then he mounted her, quickly and easily, thrusting deep within her on the very first stroke. She cried out in sudden hot pain but realized that the pain was easing before the cry was through. She was moaning with pleasure, encouraging him to roughhouse her, and her legs locked around his back and his frenzied strokes became more deliberate, more pleasurable, and more stimulating.
Lois realized that she was on the edge of a powerful orgasm and she used her heels to spur him on, and he picked up on it and began a series of deep, powerful strokes that carried her over the edge of total sexual pleasure-and then she felt the bursts of warmth that signaled Gus's own climax, a shivering, tensing delight that left her breathless with satisfaction.
And then Lois blinked her eyes and was back at the party-blushing.
CHAPTER THREE
Her pulse quickened again as she glanced across the table at him. The sound of his voice, the half-sardonic twist of his wide mouth when he smiled, the sudden subversive humor that lighted his gray eyes without apparent reason a hundred times a day-all of it added up to something that set up jet pinpoints of flame inside her far more exciting than anything else she'd ever known. And infinitely more exciting now she was back home after her own trial fling at marriage, with Janey a barrier between them, than he'd ever been when she was engaged to him, and could have had him simply by being a little less willful and impatient.
I was a fool, she thought. No. I wasn't. This is a lot more fun. There were things I had to learn.
As she looked at him again, pushing his plate away and getting a cigarette out of his pocket, squinting as he took the candle from the middle of the table to light it, Lois smiled to herself.
Maybe it's just the old Oedipus complex, after all. I could get it psyched out of me and save a lot of trouble.
He was very like her father, except that his hair was a crisp sandy ginger instead of iron-gray. He was as tall and strongly built, his shoulders had the same slight stoop, he moved in the same relaxed and easygoing fashion and with the same deceptive calm, concealing both power and energy, different in kind and perhaps used for different purposes, but the same in quality and latent reserve. Nobody would ever shove either of them twice. She knew that about her father. Jim Ferguson had proved it about Gus by passing the buck to her father in the form of Janey's checks. Other people would get a routine notice in the morning mail. Or Doc Wernitz would have got the checks bounced back to him, like a lot of others he'd got back from Smithville's slot machine addicts, written in their avid search for fool's gold. Fergie had done neither to Gus, whose bank balance was always precariously low and a matter of apparent indifference to him. And there was something odd somewhere-something odd about all of it that she couldn't put her finger on at the moment.
She shrugged it off. Gus's bank balance wasn't precariously low now. It was nonexistent, with three hundred and twenty strikes on it in the form of Janey's checks in her father's drawer. And it was her father's fault, in a way. She knew Gus was paid about half what he was worth, in terms of what he had made the paper pay or what her father would have had to pay anybody else as good, or not as good. There must have been some sort of a deal. She suspected that without knowing, but she knew one thing for sure. Gus, not her father, would be the one gypped in the end. That was one thing about John Maynard's deals. Like the slot machine over there in the corner. If the twenty-five percent-and it was a lot nearer forty-that went to the League for Civic Improvement hadn't come out of their friends' pockets, John Maynard would have had to put it up out of his own, just to keep Aunt Mamie out of his hair. It was all good, clean fun, and it was still a gyp.
Lois pushed her chair back and looked over at the corner. The machine was rattling away again now that people were through supper. Janey was still at the table with Orvie Rogers and Jim Ferguson. Martha Ferguson was at the slot machine with Dorsey Syms, Martha putting in the quarters and Dorsey pulling down the iron arm. It came down then, with the tinkle of a coin and an empty metallic sound, and suddenly both Martha and Dorsey Syms thrust their arms out around it.
"Hey, Janey! Come on, Janey!" Both of them were calling her. "Come on, Janey! We know this machine-it's ready to give! Come on, Janey!"
Lois Maynard had never heard Martha Ferguson so excited before. Her cheeks tingled. My God, she thought, they'll even stand aside for her to take their dough in a thirty-dollar jackpot. She was aware that she had got up abruptly and was standing gripping the back of her chair, watching everybody crowd forward, everybody shouting, "Come on, Janey, it's your turn at the jackpot!" Everybody but Gus Blake. She looked at him. He was still lounging lazily there on the seat in the corner behind the table, his wide mouth twisted in his semi-sardonic smile, relaxed and waiting for the tumult to die down.
"Come on, Janey!"
Janey had not moved. She was sitting bolt upright at her table, shaking her head, shaking out what was left of the mop of tow-colored fuzz tied with the velvet bow. "No," she said. She shook her head again. "I'm not going to play."
"Oh, come on, Janey. Come on, be a sport. Just two quarters, Janey. Look, nobody's won it for three weeks."
Jim Ferguson was pointing up to the framed cardboard bulletin behind the bar. "Look, Janey, the last jackpot was in October. Nelly won it in October."
Lois glanced at the board. It was a record of the jackpots, the dates and winners-all part of the fine, high plausibility that made Doc Wernitz's Christmas gift to her father all open and aboveboard and For Amusement Only. And keeps our playroom different from an ordinary clip joint-She turned sharply and looked at Gus Blake, her cheeks flushing. She'd said it to herself, but it was what he was thinking, too. She could tell by the amused glint in his eyes before his craggy face broke into an open grin.
"Relax, Lois," he said. "Or is it against the house rules for the customers to get a break?" He looked over at his wife. "Go on, Janey. We can use thirty bucks-if you get it."
For a fraction of an instant Lois Maynard felt really sorry for the girl. She's scared. She's terribly scared, she thought. And she ought to be. Even I'd be scared, in her shoes.
She turned her head. One of the servants had come down the steps and was beckoning to Gus.
"Telephone, Mr. Blake." He motioned to the recess behind the stairs. "It's the paper."
Lois felt her cheeks flush again as Gus got instantly to his feet. Now it was the paper. First it was her Uncle Nelly, then all the jackpot and Janey business, absorbing his attention in spite of all her maneuvering. Now the paper. The paper was the only thing he really gave a damn about, she thought irritably, glancing resentfully at his broad back as he reached the stairs, everybody still clamoring for Janey to come and win the jackpot.
"Go on, Janey, and maybe they'll all shut up." He stopped at the foot of the stairs and grinned at his wife before he went on around to answer the phone.
Janey's lips moved in a wooden smile. She pushed her chair back from the table. With the stiff movement of her young body the black velvet bow came loose and toppled into her lap. She picked it up, untied the bow, caught her hair and pulled it up, tying it into a topknot again. Then she raised her pointed little face. It was pinched and pale and her eyes were like black smudges. She tried to smile as she got to her feet.
"You're all-you're all terribly sweet. I-I'd love to get a jackpot, but I-I never do."
She moved with the curious grace of a wooden doll across to the machine, fishing in her bag.
Orvie Rogers sprang forward. "Here, Janey, I'll lend you some quarters."
"No thanks, I've got one. Maybe two-I don't know." She took another step forward to the machine.
"Come on, Janey. Don't let Dorsey pull it for you. He'll jinx it, Janey!"
Somebody shouted that, but it sounded disproportionately loud and raucous. Everybody else was suddenly tense and silent. It was like that moment at the race track when a hundred people hold their breath as the hundred-to-one shot pulls ahead of the favorite at the finish. It was absurd. Lois Maynard felt the sharp chill prickle across her bare shoulders and down her spine. Janey raised her hand, hesitating an instant before she put the coin in the slot. She reached over quickly, took hold of the iron handle, pulled it down, and dropped it as if it had burned into her hand. The reels spun through the harshly colored, blurred cycle of cherries, lemons, oranges, plums, and bells, spun the full cycle and whirred in turn to a stop. A cherry, another cherry, and an orange. Then came the final click, sharp and still curiously hollow, and the jingle of the three quarters falling.
"Leave 'em in, Janey! Leave 'em in for a nest egg!" someone shouted. "One more, Janey!"
"Go on, Janey. One more. I know this machine." It was Martha Ferguson who said that. She spoke quietly, but it sounded oddly like a command, as if thirty people there each willing the machine to pay must in some way make it pay. Janey Blake stood there motionless for a moment, her slight body rigid in front of the garishly painted machine, tensed sharply. She straightened her shoulders. Her towhead went up in a small gesture of defiance. Defiance, or was it pride? Lois Maynard, unconsciously gripping the back of her chair again, her own body as rigid as Janey's, saw it as Janey's hand went quickly out. She dropped the quarter, yanked down the arm, and flashed around.
"There," she said. "That's that." She took three steps forward, her eyes swimming blindly, her face white, her chin up. She took another step toward her table and put her hand out to reach for it when the room broke into delighted tumultuous cheers.
"Jackpot! Janey! Janey! It's a jackpot, Janey!"
Some of the quarters burst out over the cup, metal ringing on the tiled floor as everybody scrambled, laughing and excited, to pick up Janey's jackpot out of the corners. One came rolling across the room, spinning crazily at last an inch from Lois Maynard's green slipper. She put her foot out and stopped it without moving her eyes from Janey's rigid figure by the table. Her hand was still out. She was balancing herself against the table, her face blank and white, blind and deaf.
Deaf, blind, and very dumb, Lois Maynard thought sharply. She didn't seem to realize she'd won the jackpot, or that it might have been for a thousand dollars the way Smithville's elite were laughing and scrambling around on all fours picking up her rolling take. Jim Ferguson, president of the leading bank, and Martha his wife. Orvie Rogers, son of the richest man in the county. Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief. To say nothing of Dorsey Syms, rising young banker, and his father Uncle Nelly. Or herself, for that matter, she thought, bending down and picking up the quarter at her feet.
"Here," she said. She thrust it into Jim Ferguson's hand. "Give her this one, too."
He looked down at it, the banker's caution so automatic that she laughed for the first time since Janey and Gus had come. "It rolled out, Jim. Right over at my feet. If it's a counterfeit, some kind friend put it in."
He was already bursting back across the room to Janey. "Look, Janey! Here's a gold quarter, somebody's lucky piece! It's a quarter with gold wash-it's your lucky piece, Janey!" He opened her evening bag and thrust it inside, and dumped the rest of the quarters he'd picked up onto the pile on the table. "Come on, everybody. Bring out your folding money."
"What's all this? What's all this noise and racket?" Lois looked quickly over at the stairs. The screaming and laughter had brought her father down. John Maynard was bending over the banisters, handsome and smiling, as happy as everybody else. "What's going on down here?"
"It's Janey, John." Jim Ferguson pointed to the shining pile of coins heaped on the table. "Janey won the jackpot."
"Oh, good for Janey!"
If he had won it himself John Maynard could not have been more pleased. He reached in his pocket for his billfold. "How much, Jim?"
The president of the bank finished counting. "Thirty-two fifty, unless somebody's holding out on us."
"Fine." John Maynard took the bills out of his wallet. He looked across the room. "Phone Doc Wernitz, will you, Lois? Tell him the jackpot's hit and to come over and set the machine up again. Maybe Janey'll get another. Here Jim, give Janey this. Janey, there ain't nobody, honey, I'd rather-"
With the gold-washed lucky piece and counting Janey's quarters to put them into portable form, everybody had forgotten Janey for a moment, and everybody but Lois Maynard had forgotten Gus. He had come out of the cubicle behind the stairs and had stopped, his gray eyes hard as stone, looking over at Janey, as everybody else was looking at her then. She was standing there, not wooden anymore or rigid, but trembling, shaking from the black velvet bow on the top of her head to the soles of her gold-slippered feet. The tears were streaming down her cheeks.
She broke loose from Orvie Rogers and Martha Ferguson and ran blindly, choking back her sobs, through the mute and staggered crowd, past her husband and past John Maynard up the stairs, tripping at the top but catching herself and on out of sight.
Gus Blake took a step toward her and stopped again, a light in his eyes that was new to Lois Maynard, new and almost unbearably exciting, neither amused nor sardonic and least of all lazy or detached.
He said quietly, "Maybe somebody here better tell me what in hell's the matter with my child bride. Or maybe I'd better tell you something."
He turned and looked up the stairs. "There's no use Lois's calling Doc Wernitz to reset the machine, Maynard. Doc Wernitz is dead. They've just found him down in his cellar, his skull smashed with an iron bar. Somebody murdered Doc Wernitz a couple of hours ago-while everybody here was having a quick drink and getting into his black tie, white shirt, and dinner coat."
He turned back to Lois Maynard. "Go up and get Janey, will you? I'll take her home first."
"Orvie can take Janey home."
Who it was said that, in the intense silence of the room, Lois Maynard did not know.
"I'll take her home," Gus Blake said shortly.
He knows about Janey. As Lois Maynard thought it, a sharp quiver of excitement ran through her. There was something in the way he said it-She caught herself up quickly. Or was it something else? What could there be about the killing of the little gambler none of them could have known that had created instantly the extraordinary tension she could feel now in the room? It was so real and electric that she could feel it to the tips of her fingers as she slipped across to the stairs and up to go after Janey. She could feel it implicit in Gus Blake's voice as she heard him again and stopped at the head of the stairs to listen.
"I didn't know Doc Wernitz myself, but I knew something about him. He was a pretty decent sort of guy, for the racket he was in. I don't like the idea of his being murdered. So don't anybody here call up the Gazette tomorrow and try to tell me to lay off, and that Smithville doesn't want to get mixed up with gamblers getting what's coming to them. You're all gamblers, friends, and tomorrow I'm telling you all why I think it's okay for suckers to play Doc's slot machines."
He started up the stairs and stopped. "And don't get me wrong, pals," he said evenly. "I'm not condoning you, or the machines. Personally and privately, I think you both stink. So if you'll excuse me now, I'll go out and see what happened."
CHAPTER FOUR
Gus Blake brought the car to a lurching stop and reached over across Janey to open the door. Maybe he should have left her at the Maynards' and let Orvie Rogers bring her home later, but their house was on the way to Doc Wernitz's at Newton's Corner, and home in bed was obviously where she belonged. He tried to make her face out in the light coming through the dusty windshield from the overhead traffic signal on the corner. All he could see was a greenish seasick blob above the black velvet collar of her evening wrap.
"You sure you'll be okay, Janey? I've got to get out there before they start pushing things around. There's something screwy about this. You can smell it a mile."
"I'm okay, Gus."
"You don't sound it."
As the light changed, turning the greenish cast of her face into a rosy red, she looked a little better, anyway. She pulled herself forward in the seat.
"I'm all right, Gus. You go ahead. I told you I'm all right now."
"Sure, you told me, I still don't get it. I don't see anything about getting a thirty-two-fifty jackpot that's enough to make you blow your top the way you did. But there's no use our yakking about it anymore. You're a wreck." He opened the door. "You go on in and go to bed. Get your mother to stay all night. I'll make up the couch if I get home in time to need it. Okay?"
"Okay." Janey pulled her skirt around her legs and got out, holding on to the door to steady her wooden knees. She took a step and turned back.
"What is it, Janey?"
He didn't mean to sound abrupt or impatient, but he was in a hurry. When he'd said there was something screwy about Wernitz's murder he meant it. Smithville was not in any of the big-time gambling circuits. As such things went, Doc Wernitz had operated quietly and reasonably within the law. But slot machines and murder had teamed up before. If Doc Wernitz had been killed earlier, it might easily have been written off as an occupational hazard. Coming now, just as the news that he was shutting up shop and leaving Smithville had barely begun to trickle out into the open, it was something else again.
And what had the great Blake done when the counterman at the Margot Lunch had told him, that evening at six o'clock, that he'd heard Doc Wernitz was leaving? Blake, the Narcissus, had looked at himself in the black pool of the Margot's lousy coffee and wondered whether he ought to go back and pull his trenchant and thought-provoking editorial reply to Aunt Mamie on the slot machines, and decided against it. There'd always be another Wernitz to operate the machines, and always suckers to play them. That, plus a commendable caution on his part; he didn't want anybody in Smithville saying he'd written the editorial and then hotfooted it out to Wernitz for his approval-which is what they'd say if he'd been seen within a mile of Newton's Corner that or any other day.
And now it was too late. At that moment or a little earlier, or a little later, Doc Wernitz had been murdered. He gave himself a vicious kick in the seat of his mental pants, setting up a chain reaction that made his voice sound sharper and more impatient as he repeated his question. "What is it now? I'm in one hell of a hurry."
"I'm sorry." She drew back quietly. The light on the corner behind them switched to red, but the convertible coming along the street speeded up and shot through, live rubber screaming on the pavement as it slid to a sharp stop behind Gus Blakes' dingy coupe. Janey stiffened. It was too late for her to get the door shut. Lois Maynard was already there.
"I'm going with you, Gus. Come on, let me drive you."
She was at the car door, holding it open, bending forward as she talked to him. Janey moved back. They hadn't pushed her away, not physically, but the effect was the same. Her long black velvet skirt brushed the dry leaves in front of the hedge, her high heels tottered on the uneven bricks. Lois had low-heeled shoes on and a tweed coat lined with fur.
"You go back home, Lois."
Janey heard him, but she heard Lois, too.
"I'm going with you," she said coolly. She laughed. "A reporter's place is at her editor's side. I've never been in on a murder, Gus, and it's good experience, and I'm going, whether you like it or not. "I've got a press card, too. You'd better let me drive you. I can make better time than you can and not have a flat halfway there."
She pulled the door back with a determined hand. "Come on, Gus. Don't be a stubborn ape. We've got to hurry."
Janey put her key into the lock and held on to the doorknob for a moment, her eyes closed, trying to swallow down the hollow sick waves of despair coming up from inside her stomach. Gus was gone, in Lois's car. It was her own fault. He'd much rather drive himself than have even Lois drive him, but what she'd said about a flat was true. He had to drive at a snail's pace on the graveled corduroy roads out in the country. They could have had new tires-they could have had a new car-if it hadn't heen for her.
She let her burning forehead rest on the cold white surface of the door. How much was it? A thousand dollars? That couldn't be. There wasn't that much money in the whole world. It couldn't be a thousand dollars. That was crazy. She couldn't possibly have written that many checks, for ten dollars, or twenty dollars. There had to be something wrong somewhere. She raised her head, shook it violently to shake off the sick, horrible web of fear weaving itself around her mind, and turned the key in the lock. It was true, of course. There was no use denying it, no use lying to herself, pretending what was true couldn't be true.
It came again, the horrible sickening moment of torture as the truth flashed nakedly and clearly into her mind, before the intensity of it numbed and paralyzed her so that she could go on living with it inside her until it came again, suddenly like this, or earlier when the jackpot fell there at the Maynards'. She clenched her fists and pressed her head harder against the wood of the door. "Oh, no, no," she whispered. "It can't be." It couldn't be a thousand dollars. It couldn't possibly have added up to that much in the ten-and fifteen-and once in a while twenty-dollar checks she'd written and cashed at the Sailing Club and the Country Club. There had to be something wrong somewhere. The bank balance would have showed it over the last five months. The scribbled check stubs she'd torn out and stuck in her pocket, put away then and only got out and added up the week before, must be wrong. She must have made duplicates of some of them. That had to be it, or they'd have been turned in to the bank and showed on her balance. She'd kept telling herself that, half believing it at first, sharply repressing the whispering doubt telling her it was more likely to be the other way, that these weren't all, there were others she'd written and forgotten about and hadn't put down. More than a thousand dollars-it couldn't be. She kept telling herself that, with only a few icy prickles in her heart to tell her the truth, multiplying every time she added the check stubs again, until they'd turned suddenly into a freezing, sickening deluge there was no possibility of denying-and with it had come the paralyzing horrible fear weaving its web around her. It was true, and there was nothing she could do about it. The money was gone, there was no way to bring it back.
She knew it was true, and she'd even known it would be true, since she'd first started playing the slot machines in June, the month after Lois Maynard came back home and started working with Gus on the paper. She'd known it but she hadn't cared, at first. There was something about yanking down the iron handle of the machine that seemed to take the sickening loneliness out of her life. Every time she yanked at it she was yanking at Lois Maynard; every time she put in a quarter, or a half dollar, and yanked the iron handle she was transferring unhappiness, and resentment, and fear, from Gus and the woman who was the cause of it to the blatant inanimacy of the machine. It didn't matter if she won or lost. At least she wasn't at home, alone, while Gus and Lois covered the waterfront-the sailing races, the stock show, the tobacco auction, the city, council, and county commissioners' meetings-Gus conducting a private school of journalism with the owner's daughter as sole pupil.
"Why don't you leave the kid with your mother, Janey, and go down to the Club with Orvie? Lois and I'll join you for dinner when we get back. You'd be bored stiff, Janey. It's just a demonstration of contour plowing." If it wasn't contour plowing it was something else she wouldn't be interested in. "Why don't you go with Orvie on his boat, Janey? All they do at the finish line is sit around and have another drink, and you don't drink, Janey." And in August, they'd decided they'd put out a centennial edition of the Smithville Gazette. "Where's Orvie, Janey? He'll take you to the dance. We've got to work tonight."
"And I'm not married to Orvie-I'm married to Gus!"
It was a hurt, passionate protest that pulled her sharply up, bringing her back face to face with another reality that the jingle, clank, and whirr of the slot machines helped her momentarily to forget.
"Oh, I wish I were-" She didn't say the rest of it. Some kind of primitive fear that the spoken wish had a magic power of its own stopped her. You had to be sure before you said what you wished, sure it was what you really wanted. But it was what she wanted. Not because of the slot machines and the thousand dollars. If it hadn't been for all the rest of it there'd never have been any slot machines. She'd never played them, or wanted to play them, until everything else went out of her life when Lois Maynard came back into Gus's.
He should never have married me. I should have known I wasn't good enough for him. A thousand dollars-her mind flashed back to it. Real and tangible as it was, it was more than just a thousand dollars; it was a symbol into which she had translated all her loneliness and despair. Oh, I wish I were dead She had said it. You say things, and it's one step further. She clutched the small black velvet bag tighter in her hand, her lips suddenly dry as ashes. Inside it, there was another step. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment. Then she raised her chin, opened her eyes, and took a long breath of the cold November air. Her mother was staying with little Jane. She couldn't let her mother see, and she had a way of seeing when things were wrong.
She opened the door. "Hello, Mother. It's me."
She called up the stairs, expecting her mother would be there in the living room, dozing in front of the fire over her knitting. It was a small house in the center of the town, old brick, two rooms deep, three stories high, set back from the street behind a high privet hedge, with a long narrow backyard; the kitchen and dining room on the first floor, the living room and Gus's study on the second and their bedroom in front, little Jane's in back on the third, with a bathroom in between at the head of the narrow, crooked staircase up the side of the house. It was a good house if a crazy one, built by a man who wanted to have a small grocery store on the ground floor and rooms to live in above, that Gus had found, and that had become to Janey the core of a vivid rainbow dream-a dream that had started changing five months ago, slowly at first, and gathering speed until at last it had broken into a nightmare of despair and disillusion.
"Mother!" she called again. The double doors from the hall into the dining room were open, and the other door leading into the pantry. The light in the kitchen was on. Her mother came bustling happily out, wiping her hands on a yellow-and-white-checked dish towel.
"I thought I'd just make you children a coffee cake after little Jane went to sleep," she said briskly. "I didn't expect you home this early." She stopped wiping her hands, the smile on her face fading. "Why, Janey, what's the matter?" She put the dish towel down on the pantry table and came through the dining room. "What is it, Janey?"
For an instant the tenderness and anxiety in her mother's face almost betrayed her. She turned quickly and took off her evening wrap. As she dropped it on the chair she saw her mother's old gray coat on it, neatly folded across the back. Her black cotton gloves and worn black handbag were on the table. A thousand dollars-it was almost half of what her father made in a year at the Rogers plant-and with that and what her mother had made sewing and renting the spare room to a foreman in the shipping department they had brought Janey up and owned their own house, and even had a secondhand car now that Janey was married. They'd even saved something for their own kind of social security. "It's nothing, Mother."
Her mother was still standing there looking "Where's Gus, Janey?"
Janey put her hand on the chair to steady her knees.
"He had to go out in the country." She moistened her lips so she could speak. "Some man was killed. A man named Doc Wernitz-"
"I know," her mother said. "I heard it on the radio." Her voice was brisk and matter-of-fact again. "He was a gambler. He ran all these machines-supposed to give you something for nothing and never do. The Smithville Recreation Company. If that's what they call recreation. Janey!"
Janey was staring at her, her eyes drained of color. The Smithville Recreation Company. The words were an inaudible whisper scarcely moving her lips. That was what was stamped in red on the back of many of the ten-and twenty-dollar checks she'd written to the Sailing Club that the bank had returned with her statements the first of the month. Pay to the Smithville Recreation Company. It was stamped in red letters on the back-of a few hundred dollars' worth of all the checks she'd written.
"Janey, what is the matter with you?" her mother demanded. "Everybody knew Mr. Wernitz was the Smithville Recreation Company."
Everybody but Janey. It went slowly through her mind. I didn't know.
"And now they've murdered him." It was a statement of simple fact, the event neither surprising nor regrettable, the way her mother said it. Then, as if she had not meant it to sound as callous as it did, she said, "But it's a pity all the same. I'm sorry for the poor man. He wasn't a bad sort, just by himself. Dad'll miss him dropping by the plant on hot nights, to visit out on the pier."
Janey swayed dizzily. Her mother's voice seemed a long way off, reaching her through a swarm of angry bees buzzing in red stamped letters around her. It seemed as if her mother was saying her father knew Doc Wernitz, and Doc Wernitz used to visit with him. But it couldn't be. She was too dazed to hear.
"In fact, he was a lonely sort of man, your father always said." Her mother went over to the chair and took her coat. "His people came from the same place in the old country Dad's came from. I guess Dad'll miss him, if nobody else does. I guess your father was the only friend he had. Real friend, I mean."
She put on her coat. Janey stood motionless. The swarming bees had gone away. Everything seemed curiously quiet and very clear. Doc Wernitz was the Smithville Recreation Company. He was the one who cashed checks for the Country Club and the Sailing Club when the banks were closed and they'd run out of silver. He was a friend of her father's. He hadn't banked all of her checks he'd taken. That explained why so few of them showed on her monthly statement from the bank. The cold fear caught again at her heart. What did it mean? Had he just kept them, because her father was his friend?
She went uncertainly through the doors into the cool shadows of the dining room and let herself down into a chair, holding tightly to the edge of the table to keep from missing the chair and falling to the floor. Had he told her father? What if some of her checks, the ones he had not taken to the bank, were out at his house? What if Gus found them? What if Lois Maynard, out there now with Gus, found them? As she closed her eyes she could feel herself thinking, If only I didn't have to open them again, and ever look at anyone again "Janey." Her mother had started to the front door, but she came back into the dining room. Her shadow in front of the lamp on the hall table threw a merciful darkness across the table where Janey sat.
"Yes, Mother." How could she sit there in the crumbled ruins of her small universe and say, "Yes, Mother," as if nothing had happened and nothing mattered?
"I don't know what's the matter, Janey, but I know you don't act like yourself anymore, so it must mean you and Gus are having trouble. It's what Dad and I were afraid was going to happen when you were so bent and determined on marrying him. There was nothing anybody could say to you, you were so crazy in love with him. Dad wanted you to marry Orvie Rogers, because Orvie is a good boy, even if he didn't want you at first to run around with Orvie's crowd instead of boys of your own kind and condition. And Dad never thought Gus would marry you, Janey. The way you were, blind and deaf and dumb to everything else, Dad and I were worried sick all the time. You were so crazy mad after him. And if Lois Maynard hadn't gone off and left him the way she did, there's no telling what would have happened. She was the one he was in love with. Everybody in town knew that. He was never any part as crazy about you as you were about him."
"I know it." She tried to speak it, but no sound came. She knew it very well. It was that other reality she faced and tried desperately to forget each time she yanked down the handle of the slot machine. It was the thing she knew each time Gus said, "Why don't you get Orvie to take you?" It was the answer, every time she cried out to herself in protest that it was not Orvie but Gus she was married to.
She moistened her lips again. "I know it, Mother. You don't have to remind me."
"Somebody's got to remind you. I'm not doing it just to hurt you. You've got little Jane to think of, Janey. I'm glad to come and sit here when you and Gus want to go out and Dad's at work. I like to do it. But not if it makes you forget Gus has his work and you have yours. And that's most likely the matter with you right now, with that Maynard girl working on the paper and all. I guess you're worried, worried sick, Janey. But Gus is your husband. I don't think he's apt to forget as easy as you think. Gus never looked to Dad and me like a man that lets anybody pull him around by the nose."
She patted Janey's shoulder. "What if I worried all my life because there were a lot of pretty girls working the same place Dad worked? Good night, Janey. You better go and see that little Jane hasn't kicked the covers off. It's cold tonight."
The front door closed behind her. Janey listened to her step on the frosty pavement until it was gone and the house was silent except for the hum of the oil burner in the basement and the icebox motor coming on and going off.
"You've never thrown away a thousand dollars," she whispered. "You've never wished you could go to bed and go to sleep and never have to wake again-"
She pushed her chair back from the table and got to her feet. The black evening bag was on the table in the hall. Her feet were like blocks of frozen wood as she went over to it and picked it up. She held it for a moment and opened it. There were the thirty-two dollars in bills on top, that Lois Maynard had stuffed in there, with her handkerchief, and some quarters that dropped on the table as she took the bills out. One of them was the gilded quarter that Jim Ferguson had put in her bag. Somebody's lucky piece. Her lucky piece, Jim had said. She turned it over in her hand, dropped it back in the bag, and put the other quarters with the bills on the table.
The other thing was in the bag, too. She shivered as she took it out. It was a piece of yellow cleansing tissue, the corners twisted together to make a small pouch. Her fingers trembled as she untwisted it and held it open in the palm of her hand under the lamp on the table. A dozen small oblong capsules glittered up at her, a dozen small evil orange-colored eyes. Go to sleep and never have to wake up again-she stared blindly down at them. Then she raised her head, listening up the stairs, and drew a sudden breath of sharp and passionate decision. She jerked her hand back and flung them violently away from her, knocking her bag after them onto the rug. The evil orange eyes rolled off the rug onto the waxed pine floor and lay winking up at her. The gilded lucky piece flew out of the bag, rolled off in a crazy half-circle and back near her feet. It winked up, too. She bent down breathlessly and picked it up. Maybe it really was her lucky piece. She pressed it in her closed palm an instant before she picked up her bag and dropped it in. Then very slowly she gathered up the orange-colored capsules and put them back in the square of tissue. She got to her feet and counted them. There were only eleven. She got down again to look for the twelfth. It must have rolled into the dining room. She turned on the light and looked there, but it was nowhere in sight and she was suddenly too tired to look anymore.
In the morning. She folded the eleven up in the tissue and picked up her bag, too tired to find the last one now, too tired even to go out and turn off the kitchen light. She put her foot on the first step, and on the second. A thousand dollars-she might as well have flushed it down the bathroom drain, the way she was going to do with the orange-colored capsules. She clutched them a little tighter in her hand. A thousand dollars-it couldn't be. It couldn't possibly be.
Add to it the now-obvious plan of Lois, Janey thought. The little bitch has always had her eyes on Gus. Now she's made up her mind to go for it.
But Janey felt that Gus had too much class for a game like that. He was all man-and all hers, Janey thought. Gus was an honest, gruff sort of man, and the guilt he would suffer over an affair with Lois would be tremendous.
Janey wasn't that way. She had never understood Gus's guilt feelings about sex-but in a way she was glad that he had them. She felt it was a form of insurance that she did everything in her power to keep in force.
But her mind couldn't stay away from the thousand dollars. Suddenly Janey grinned. She could always become a hooker, she thought. What had she read about that? Something-probably in one of Gus's men's magazines. Suburban hookers, it was called. It was about housewives augmenting their incomes with afternoon prostitution.
When she read it, it had sounded bizarre and unreal. But now, faced with a shortfall of a thousand dollars, it didn't seem so farfetched at all.
Janey allowed her mind to drift. It was a pleasure to think about a way out, an escape route that no one had thought of. Of course, sleeping with strange men, having them actually make love to you for a few dollars ... she wasn't sure if she could go through with it.
Janey imagined herself waiting at home for the phone to ring-for she would be sent out on "assignment" rather than walk the streets.
The phone would ring and she would answer it. "Go to the Hotel Claridge," a voice would say, "Room 105."
A half-hour later she would arrive, wearing her white dress. She would knock on the door of room 105 and it would be answered by a barrel-chested man smoking a cigar. With a glance he would take in her lovely body and beautiful face. He would grin. "Come on in," he'd say.
After two drinks Janey knew that she would feel much better about it. Liquor was all she needed and she knew it. In fact, if she had three drinks, she'd probably be looking forward to it. After all, no one was ever going to know. It would be a secret, and she would leave the room a hundred dollars ahead.
He undressed as she finished her third drink. Janey saw it all in her mind's eye, clear as a bell. She saw herself lick her lips with nervous energy. And then the man dropped his trousers and Janey sucked in her breath in astonishment.
Janey had never seen such a huge penis. It seemed to be nine inches long and as thick as a baby's forearm. She swallowed nervously, aware that she was going to have to earn her money this time.
He dragged her to the bed and told her to take it off. She pulled her dress over her head and felt his thick fingers on her body immediately. He fingered her breasts roughly, and then jammed a thick hand between her legs, rubbing it back and forth roughly.
Janey wanted nothing more than to get it over with-the entire affair was beginning to sicken her. But then he pushed her backward onto the bed and stood over her, stroking himself, grinning lewdly at her.
"Play with yourself," he commanded. The thought of allowing this vile creature to witness so personal a matter disgusted Janey, but she realized that she was there for a hundred dollars, not for the pleasure of it.
She spread her long legs and massaged herself gently with the palm of her hand, surprised at her immediate and erotic response to it. She had figured that she was so turned off that nothing would happen, but her body betrayed her.
He was laughing now, calling her a whore because she would do anything that he said. He knelt on the bed, straddling her with his knees, and introduced his giant penis into her mouth. She almost gagged, but she found herself sucking eagerly after a few seconds, her hand still busily massaging her center.
And then she felt the gush of her orgasm-it came as a surprise to her-and she pulled away from his penis, but his hard hands fastened to the sides of her face and he told her to continue or he wouldn't pay a dime.
Janey felt his penis thickening even more-it didn't seem that anything could get that big! And then he began grunting and his thighs were jiggling with pleasure and his hot seed poured into her mouth, choking her, disgusting her, and at the same time adding to the pleasure that she was giving herself.
And then Janey snapped out of it, shaken and oddly excited by her fantasy.
CHAPTER FIVE
Gus Blake shifted his hundred and ninety pounds from his left haunch to his right. He was trying actually to shift his mind so he could concentrate on the garishly lighted room he was now in, to get rid of the image in it, of the basement downstairs and the little man lying in front of the fuse box, the side of his head smashed in, the blood drying on the earth floor, oozing out of his head again as Swede Carlson, chief of the county police, turned him over. And his face-the black cobwebs plastered to it, covering it like a filthy obscene veil. The fuse box was above him on the grimy whitewashed stone foundation walls. The center fuse that had been taken out was back in again. It had controlled the center lights in this room. Gus squinted up at them now, and looked about the room. This was the battered roll-top desk where Wernitz had been sitting. A cigarette just lighted had burned down to an unbroken column of gray ash in the copper tray. An opened fountain pen lay on a paper beside it, the high-backed swivel chair was quarter-turned, facing the hall door. Doc Wernitz had been working there when the three lights in the room went off, leaving the hall light on. He had put down his cigarette and his pen and gone through the hall and down the basement steps with no idea that the momentary easily repaired darkness he'd left would turn in one instant to another irreparable darkness. It was ruthlessly and hideously simple.
Gus shifted his weight again. Beside him, Swede Carlson, his broad posterior propped solidly against the edge of the roll-top desk, listened stolidly as Gus listened with rising irritation to the county attorney, speaking officially and for publication to the representative of the Smithville Gazette, who stood, notebook in hand, taking it down. The county attorney was at the far end of the room. In front of the grimy barred window, hamming it just enough to make it look good in the picture the Gazette photographer was taking.
"You can say we've got all the angles covered, Miss Maynard. There's never been any organized crime in Smith County, and there's not going to be."
Gus Blake was aware of a rasping in his left ear. It sounded like sandpaper taking rust off an iron gate. He heard it again and assorted it this time into words. "Get this dame out of here, Blake."
"You can say we're all on the same team, here in Smith County, Miss Maynard. We're putting everything we've got in this. Every law-enforcement officer in Smith County has his nose to the wheel."
The county attorney stopped, waited for the camera flash, and relaxed. He turned to Swede Carlson. "Anything you want to add, Chief?"
"I guess that about covers it, Frank."
Hearing the faintly sardonic inflection, Gus remembered what Swede Carlson had said down in the basement about the Filipino boy Buzz Rodriguez now sitting out in the hall under guard, waiting to be thrown into the Smithville County Jail. The county attorney's oblique glance across the room included both of them. He turned back to Lois Maynard. "One other thing. I want to make it clear that any rumors suggesting a scapegoat in this affair are false. The people of Smith County will have no doubt where they come from. And you can say Chief Carlson is in charge and giving the case his personal attention."
He picked his hat up off a chair. "I think that's all I can do here tonight. Can I take you back to town, Miss Maynard?"
"No, I've got my car, Mr. Hamilton," Lois Maynard said. She closed her notebook and looked at Gus. "What now?" she was asking.
Swede Carlson's elbow dug into his ribs. It was as eloquent as his low-rasped: "Get that dame out of here."
Lois Maynard was still looking at him. "Go out and have a look at the kitchen and pantry, Lois," he said. "Woman's angle. Bachelor Hall stuff."
Her green eyes sharpened.
"Go on," he said coolly. "And when you're through you can run along home. The Chief'll take me in."
For a moment as the suspicion changed to anger in her eyes he thought she was refusing. The county attorney had his overcoat on and his hat in his hand. "Come on, Miss Maynard. I'll show you the kitchen. I'd like to have another look at it myself. Attention to detail is what counts in cases like this."
As the door closed a wintry smile passed through Chief Carlson's bleak eyes. He said, "Never liked dames messin' around where they don't belong. Makes me nervous." He moved his heavy, nerveless body off the edge of the desk. "Okay, fella. What do you know?"
"I came out to ask you."
Gus looked around the room. It extended the length of the house, with two windows at the back and one at each side of the fireplace in the side wall. The back windows were barred with iron grids fixed solidly in the wall. The side windows were blocked, one with a heavy steel filing cabinet, the other with an old-fashioned safe, open, and in careful order compared with the bulging pigeonholes of the desk. It was covered with gray powdery film where the police had dusted for fingerprints. The three electric bulbs that had gone off were strung down from the ceiling, one over the desk and two in opposite corners of the room.
"He liked a lot of light."
Carlson nodded. "Had 'em all on tonight. On all over the place when the boys got here, 'cept those three. They came on when they put the fuse back."
He let himself down into the creaking swivel chair. Gus looked at the battered desk against the wall at the front end of the room. It was crowded with papers, the surface as well as the pigeonholes. A padlock in the middle front hung by a short chain. Behind the desk two long windows were sealed from the inside with brown-painted iron shutters. Across them and the strip of wall between them, an old pier glass, turned lengthwise over the desk, was tilted forward so that Doc Wernitz, sitting there, could glance up and see the whole room-the barred windows at the back end, the brown steel filing cabinet, and the open safe blocking the side windows.
"Anything missing, Swede?"
"No idea. You can say in the paper I've only given it a cursory glance, so far."
The chair creaked wretchedly as Carlson leaned back in it. He watched Gus cross the room to read the framed edged receipt of $3,500 and $1 by the Commissioners of Smith County, in return for which they authorized Paul M. Wernitz, operating as The Smith County Recreation Company, Inc., to distribute and offer for rent or lease recreational devices as defined in and in strict accordance with Chapter 482 of the Acts of 1944 and all regulations and amendments thereof. Gus glanced at the official signature at the bottom. It was always a little amusing to him to see Nelson Cadwallader Syms' cramped signature authorizing the distribution and operation of the machines that Aunt Mamie, Mrs. Nelson Cadwallader Syms, girding up her ample loins, was hell-bent on banishing and destroying forever-along with one of the county's most lucrative sources of cash income.
There was nothing else in the room to look at except the brown linoleum on the floor, cracked in places and worn to the boards in front of the desk and safe, and two wooden armchairs. There was also a calendar topped with a seminude bit of November cheesecake and the compliments of the Smithville Consumers Coal Company. Gus stopped in front of it, studying it with concentrated interest. He was trying to figure out what Swede Carlson was sitting there watching him for. He knew Carlson was a shrewd cop, for all the slow molasses and owl's-grease technique, tough and canny, and honest within the pragmatic limits of his calling. At least he had never known him to be dishonest, and he had known him to go out of his way to help people when not doing it would have seemed the smarter tack. Like the Filipino boy waiting outside now-unless that was a little political warfare and Carlson was just seeing to it the county attorney wasn't making the first arrest. Why, he wondered, was the Swede apparently so interested in him right now? He studied the lady on the calendar a moment longer and turned back.
"Think this is an out-of-county job, Swede? A mob killing?"
It had none of the marks of the two mob killings he'd covered in New York, nor any he'd ever heard about.
Chief Carlson brought the swivel chair creaking back into position. "Might be," he said. "And again it mightn't. I don't know much about it, Gus. Just got here a little before you did-been down in the other end of the county all evenin' talkin' to a guy that knifed his wife. Least that's the way it looks. Looks like a mighty lot of trouble for anybody else to go to."
He got heavily to his feet. "Sort of looks the same way here. But I don't know much about mob killin's, 'cept what I see in the movies when I ain't got my shoulder off the wheel. When I'm not carry in' the ball, or keepin' my eye on it, that is. Keeps a fella pretty busy, not bein' an acrobat."
Gus grinned at him. "Why does this look the same?"
Chief Carlson glanced bleakly off in the general direction of the kitchen. "Can't say, Gus. Not considerin' the people you're runnin' with here lately."
"Miss Maynard?" Gus looked at him intently, surprised. "She works on the paper, Swede."
"Sure she does." Carlson agreed amiably. "Come to think of it, her old man owns it. Used to was, Gus, a fella could tell the Gazette somethin' off the record and it was off the record. It's different now. Tell the Gazette somethin' and Miss Maynard hot-foots it home and spills it to John. Not that he didn't know it already, mind you, but there were times he didn't know anybody else did. And I'm not sayin' she's out here tonight because he sent her. He's too smart for that."
Gus Blake's gaze was still intent. "If you're saying John Maynard's mixed up with Wernitz-"
"Okay, Gus. He's your boss. Loyalty's a fine thing. All I know is old Doc here gives him a quarter machine for Christmas. Doc Wernitz never gave presents just for fun. I'll tell you somethin', Gus. When Doc Wernitz told me he was pullin' up stakes and gettin' out of Smith County, he came personally round to headquarters and took me five miles out on a country road to do it. He didn't want anybody else to know he was pullin' out. He mentioned everybody in general and several in particular he didn't want to know. John Maynard was one of 'em. Funny thing, Gus, you were another."
"Me?" Gus gave him an alerted glance. Then he shook his head. "Unless you mean the editor of the paper."
"No. Not the editor of the paper. He meant you, personally."
"You're nuts, Swede. Or he was. I didn't even know the guy. I made a point of not knowing him." He grinned suddenly. "That's why you've been watching me as if you thought I'd get in the safe?"
"Sure, Gus. One of the reasons."
The bleak eyes rested steadily on him.
"No, I'm goin' to play ball with you Gus. I'll play ball with you if you'll keep your mouth shut and keep that dame out of this. Hear? Maybe I'm a fool to do it, but I know damn well you didn't slug Wernitz. Even if it-" Chief Carlson stopped a bare instant, and went on. "Even if it should look like you might have had some reason to."
Gus Blake looked silently at him. "Reason to?"
"Okay, Gus. Keep your shirt on. I'm just a dumb country cop, but there's some things I'd take my Bible oath on. Don't crowd me, now, Gus. If you're in a hole, I'll do my best to get you out. But if I'm wrong-just get this, Gus-if I'm wrong, so help me God, I'll hang you higher'n Absalom if I have to do it with my own hands. Now shut up and come on. I want to look around here, and I want to get at that kid out there before that fat-backed county attorney of John Maynard's throws him in the can and everybody starts yellin' race prejudice. He may be guilty and if he is he's going to hang, but till somebody proves it, it don't make sense to me."
He kicked the swivel chair toward the desk. "Go on, Gus. Get goin'. I'm lockin' this room up-nobody's goin' to paw around these papers 'cept me. Get all this straight, Gus. I been pushed around longer than I like it. Old Doc here was a sort of friend of mine. See?"
"Sure," Gus said. "I see."
He went over to the door, bewildered to a state of semi-shock. Either Swede Carlson was drunk or he was, and he knew neither of them was. He had never spoken five consecutive words to the murdered man. He wouldn't have recognized him, dead, down there in the cellar, any more than he would have recognized him alive on Main Street. He tried to think what the man really looked like, alive, without his head caved in and the black spidery veil covering his face. A vague image came into his mind of Doc Wernitz standing alone on the curb in front of the bank in Courthouse Square at noon one day. Whoever Gus was with had nudged his elbow and said, "That's Doc Wernitz. You know. Hi, there, Doc. How's tricks?" As the image cleared and focused Gus could see a sort of invisible little man, alone on the curb there, in straight gray topcoat, thick-lensed spectacles, neat-looking in a dry, ageless sort of way, who touched the brim of his gray hat and said, "No tricks." Gus remembered that now, and remembered that hearing him say, "No tricks," he'd turned to look at him again, thinking it was a pretty good answer to people who still went on saying, "How's tricks," and especially good in Wernitz's line of business.
He could not remember, now, who it was with him, and so far as he could recall that was the last time he'd seen Doc Wernitz until he saw him on the cellar floor, dead as a staved-in mackerel. As for any reason he himself could have-the big Swede was bats. He shrugged his shoulders as he crossed the room.
Or am I bats myself? he wondered. He went out into the passage and stopped short. Something had happened. When he had first got to the house, and again when he followed Carlson back up from the basement, he'd seen the young cop standing at the foot of the stairs by the Filipino boy who'd found the body. Buzz Rodriguez had been sitting on the stairs, his head on his hands, rocking back and forth, moaning incoherently. Gus had recognized him as one of Wernitz's service mechanics. He'd seen him in a dozen places servicing the fantastically elaborate machines, and sometimes seen him three and four times on a big night at the Sailing Club when the jackpots were falling, come to refill the window and tube of the machines. Something had happened now. The young cop was literally propping Rodriguez against the wall. His face was gray as ashes, his head wobbling forward. Gus turned to Carlson. He was pulling the door of Wernitz's office shut and talking at the same time.
"Get Mac in here to seal this door, Corbin. I'm leavin' the lights on and I want him to sit right there till I get back. Step on it, hear?"
He jerked around to the stairs. The young officer's red face gleamed with sweat. He looked undecided from Carlson to the limp body on his hands.
"Sure, Chief. But this guy's drunk. I don't know-"
Carlson strode across the hall. "What do you mean? This boy don't drink." He picked Rodriguez's slumping body up in one powerful arm, gave him one look, and swung around. "Good God, son, this boy's not drunk, he's half dead. Get an ambulance out here. There's a phone in the kitchen-step on it, son. Out there."
He struck a square forefinger off toward the back of the house. "Upstairs, Gus-get some blankets. This boy's hurt bad. I told that bas-"
Gus cleared the stairs. A door was open at the right. The room there was empty except for an iron folding cot in one corner, but two worn army blankets were folded across the foot. He grabbed them and ran back. Swede Carlson let the boy down on the floor and wrapped him up. His thick fingers moved gently over the back of the boy's head.
"He was slugged, too, down there in the basement. Like Wernitz." His face was hard, his colorless eyes set. He got to his feet. "It's a damn good thing I didn't let 'em throw him in the can. He could 'a been dead by mornin'. You would have had a scapegoat." He looked down at Rodriguez scowling heavily, and went past him to the back of the house. "Mac," he called. "Come in here."
Mac was a short, wiry detective in a double-breasted bright-blue suit.
"Seal this door up, and watch it. Nobody goes in there. That means nobody." Carlson motioned to the Philippine boy on the floor. "You know Buzz Rodriguez here. When the ambulance comes, Corbin's to go in with him. I'm phoning Stryker to meet him at the hospital and stick with him-all the time. Maybe the kid knows who hit him. I don't want any son of a bitch tellin' me he's dead before he can tell it." He put his hand on the door and turned back. "Is there a doctor in Smithville we know don't play the slot machines, Mac?"
The detective went on sealing up the door of Doc Wernitz's room. He shook his head. "Now you know none of them got time to fool around, Chief." He sounded to Gus like a man stepping around a wounded polecat on a narrow path.
If Carlson's reply was audible it was not audible to Gus. He followed into the kitchen passage, where a door opened on the cellar stairs.
"Watch him, Blake." The detective in the bright-blue suit spoke cautiously without turning as Gus went by him. "Murders burn him up. Gets mean-meaner'n hell. Get the Maynard girl out of here, if I was you."
Gus quickened his step, and slowed down deliberately. He'd let Lois Maynard off one part of this murder case-the part down in the basement. He knew she was upset anyway. But if experience was what she wanted, she could get the rest of it the way other reporters did and as it came. He grinned without amusement. In front of the cellar door he stopped, listening. Swede Carlson was talking on the phone. "And get hold of Doctor Adams. Tell him it's important, hear?"
The phone went back into place. Carlson was talking to someone in the kitchen. The answer quietly disposed of Lois Maynard, for the time being.
"Outside in her car, Chief. She don't like kitchens, she says. Don't know anything about 'em. She's goin' to wait for Blake."
Carlson came back into the passage. He gave Gus a bleak smile. "The lady's-"
He stopped as the phone rang. "Hold it, George. I'll answer that." Gus heard him say, "Hello," and a silence, and then Carlson's voice again, heavily ironic. "Tell Mr. Maynard Miss Maynard and Mr. Blake are both here. Both doin' nicely. I'll tell Miss Maynard her father's worried about her." He put the phone down and let his breath out slowly. "George, go tell Miss Maynard her father wants her to come home now. Tell her Mr. Blake says he can get along all right from here on without her."
As he came back Gus moved aside for him to open the cellar door. "Watch the old blood pressure, Chief," he said, grinning. "It boils the brains."
"Uh-huh," Swede Carlson said. "Funny thing, when I get blood-mad's when I start makin' my big mistakes. I guess that was okay, too. It was a colored boy's voice. I guess John Maynard is anxious, maybe." He took his watch out. "And it ain't late. It's only ten minutes past twelve. She must 'a been out later 'n this several times in her young life."
He opened the cellar door. "Now the rest of 'em are out of the way I want a good look around down here. Comin'? Watch these steps, they're carryin' weight with the two of us."
CHAPTER SIX
Lois Maynard started violently and whirled around to the man standing in the semidarkness beside her car. She hadn't heard him come out of the kitchen door or cross the yard or seen him till he spoke her name. She shot her hand up to her mouth, stifling an involuntary gasp. He was a policeman. He was saying, "Miss Maynard." She stared at him in the dim light with a speechless, somehow extraordinary horror.
"Miss Maynard!"
Lois Maynard gripped the wheel tightly. "I-I'm sorry!" she said. For one dazed and dizzy instant she had thought the policeman had come for her. She shook her head and pushed her hair quickly back from her forehead. "I'm sorry. I must have been asleep." She hadn't been asleep, unless it was a sort of hypnotic slumber, induced by the darkness all around her, outside and in.
"Your father called up to see if you were still here," the officer said. "Chief Carlson said to tell you Mr. Blake could go in with him. They may be quite a while yet. He says you better go on in."
"Thanks." She had to moisten her lips before she could say it casually enough. "Tell Mr. Blake I'll wait just the same." She tried to think of something to add to make it seem amusing if determined, but there was nothing. She was still too stunned by the effect his appearance had had, coming just when it did in the rapidly mounting horror building itself up in her mind.
Murder-I'd be a murderer, too. She was saying that to herself in the dark recesses of her mind just as he spoke her name, so profoundly absorbed that his abrupt appearance had made her lose the connection between herself waiting for Gus in the substantial reality of the Wernitz house and yard and spring to the insubstantial reality she herself had built up.
She ran her tongue over her dry lips again. If Janey Blake wanted to kill herself, it wasn't her fault. If Janey was fool enough to get herself in the kind of jam she was in and couldn't think of any better way out of it than a handful of sleeping pills, it was no problem of hers. If it was anybody's fault but Janey Blake's, it wasn't Lois Maynard's. It was her mother's. Her mother ought to know better than to leave her sleeping pills in the drawer by her bed where anybody who wanted them could help herself. Or her mother's doctor's fault, for letting her have a whole bottle full because he was going away for a month and she'd asked for them and he couldn't refuse John Maynard's wife. He had no right to give them to her, and she had no right to leave them there. She always made them lock up their guns when they came in from duck-or squirrel-shooting, and insisted that all antiseptics for external use be hidden away on a top shelf, and the most seductive lethal invention of them all she left in her table drawer, along with her reading glasses and the box of yellow cleansing tissues. And she talked about them-she was always passing out one or two, to help somebody sleep.
To sleep for a single night, not forever. Lois Maynard shivered and dug her hands deeper into her fur-lined pockets. Her jaw hardened stubbornly. Nobody could blame her if anything happened to Janey. She happened to know Janey was in an awful jam. She happened to go upstairs because Gus sent her to see if Janey was all right after the fantastic scene she'd made, winning the jackpot down there in the playroom. Who would even know she'd seen Janey there, the bottle of sleeping pills in her hand? Nobody would ever know. Nobody but herself. If Janey took the pills and didn't wake up, nobody would ever hold Lois Maynard responsible.
She jammed down the handle of the door and swung her feet around and out onto the hard ground. Nobody but yourself, Lois. It burned in her mind. She'd know it. She could never forget it. She stamped her feet on the ground to bring some life and warmth back into them. She'd always know it. She'd always know she was responsible. She paced back and forth on the uneven ground. It was the darkness that was doing this to her-the darkness, and the shock of her first contact with murder, and the frightening, horrible emptiness of it; the grimfaced, hard-eyed man brushing her aside, and her sitting out there by herself and seeing them cart the body away as if it was anything common and ordinary-like the ad somebody ran in the Gazette-"Dead Horses Removed." It was sordid and terrible, and morbid. The whole atmosphere reeked with morbidity and death. If only she'd insisted on staying inside with Gus She shot her head up, listening. Somewhere not far away a siren had begun its low, warning whine, rising slowly to a demanding scream, diminishing again as a twirling red light appeared between the black cedars lining the dirt lane from the country road. Long yellow fingers reached out toward the yard. The Fire Department's shining new ambulance streaked past her and pulled up. Two men jumped out. The policeman who'd told her to go home held the door open for them to bring the stretcher through. She caught her breath sharply and moved back, reaching for the chromium arrow on the hood of the car, gripping it to steady her. An ambulance coming there-she remembered one of the detectives in the kitchen saying Buzz Rodriguez, "the colored boy," out in the passage, was punch-drunk. But they'd had to call an ambulance. If somebody called an ambulance for Janey They were bringing the boy out on the stretcher. She saw Chief Carlson in the door. The young policeman she'd seen in the hall got in the ambulance behind the stretcher. She didn't see them close the doors and start off. Gus was there in the doorway with Carlson. The racing excitement that catching a sudden and unexpected glimpse of him always built up inside her was there now. She wanted him. If it weren't for Janey-She turned away quickly, biting her lip until the salt tasted on her tongue. Then she stopped abruptly, suddenly aware that the ambulance had gone and she was there alone in the yard again, nothing but silence and the small sounds of the night around her.
She drew a deep breath. You can't do it, Lois. No matter how much she wanted Gus, it was something she couldn't do. It was horrible. She saw Janey in her mind again, saw her, from halfway along the carpeted hall, there at her mother's bedside table, with the bottle of pills in her hand. She saw her resisting them, putting them quickly back, shoving the drawer shut and stepping away. She could have spoken to her then. She could have said, "Hi, Janeyare you okay?" Or she could have done it when she saw Janey's body stiffen and saw her twist her head around on her shoulder and hold it there tightly a moment before she took a quick step forward, pulled the drawer open, grabbed the piece of yellow tissue out of the box, picked up the bottle, and unscrewed the top, pouring the capsules into the tissue, twisting the ends together, and thrusting it into her bag.
I should have stopped her then. She whispered it to herself. But she hadn't. She'd even smiled, watching her. She put her hand up to her frozen cheek and rubbed it violently, horror seizing her again. She could still feel the smile on her face, and the upward tilt of her brow as she stepped quietly through the open door of her father's room and waited there, in the dark, until Janey came running out, clutching her bag in both hands. She could still feel herself standing there, and feel the satisfied smile that was on her face. She shivered suddenly. It was something evil, hideous, inside her. She'd known it was wrong then, but it hadn't mattered. Everything was working out perfectly. With Janey out of the way, everything would be just as she wanted it. But out here alone in the dark, where she had to stop and sit and listen to the sharp, shrill voice of the conscience she didn't often bother to listen to, it suddenly mattered. It mattered a great deal.
You can't do it. You get what you want, but you don't get it that way. Not even her father would approve of that. John Maynard was ruthless and he was none too scrupulous. She knew that. But this was callousness-plain and horrible.
She thought of Janey, at home in the narrow brick house, the capsules in her hand. She wouldn't take them right away. She'd resist them, the way she'd resisted the impulse to take them from the table drawer. Lois Maynard moved back to the car. She'd tell Gus, on the way home. She started to get in under the wheel. Somewhere behind the dark fringe of trees around the yard something slithered through the dry grass. A small animal squealed and was silent. There was no sound except the slithering movement in the grass. Across the darkness came the high pitch of the siren as the ambulance screamed through Newton's Corner. Lois tried to swallow. Her throat was as dry as the hard, parched ground under her feet. Maybe she couldn't wait till Gus came out and she drove him home. Maybe it was too late already She ran across the yard, catching her foot in a dry rut behind the green truck, stumbling forward, catching herself again and running on to the door. "Oh, Gus?" She pulled the door open. "Gus, you've got to go home!" As she stumbled into the kitchen and saw Chief Carlson and Gus Blake as they whirled around from the passage door, staring at her, she was conscious that no sound had come from her throat.
"Lois-for God's sake!"
She clenched her fists to control herself.
"Gus-you've got to come home. I'm-I'm tired waiting." She tried desperately to think what she could say. "I'm-I'm tired! Do you hear me? You've got to come home!"
She saw the alarm in Gus Blake's face change as she stamped her foot on the floor. Anger flashed up in his eyes, his jaw tightened in white hard ridges, "Gus, please! I'm tired, Gus!"
Then she saw Carlson put his heavy hand on Gus's arm.
"Go on, Gus. It's late. I'm goin', too."
She turned, pushed the door open, and ran out again, across the dry ruts in the littered yard to the safe and cooling darkness of the car.
"Take it easy, son," Swede Carlson said. "High blood pressure boils the brain. And find out why Miss Maynard's so upset, all of a sudden. From what I hear, she don't get tired till four or five in the mornin', and not from just sittin' in a car. Go on, Gus. Maybe we'd both like to know."
The clock in the courthouse tower struck eleven as Janey reached the top of the narrow crooked stairs. She unlatched the folding gate that was there to keep little Jane from toppling down the steps, fastened it securely back again, and went along the passage to the front room where she and Gus slept. She switched on the light between the beds, went over to the dressing table, and sat down, looking blindly into the mirror as she automatically pulled open the side drawer, put her velvet bag into it, closed it, and reached up and pulled the velvet bow off her hair. After a moment she got up and went back to little Jane's room, picked up the warm sleeping child, took her to the bathroom, and brought her back, still half asleep. It was a nightly routine that ordinarily filled her with a warm glow of happiness. Tonight she went through it automatically, without feeling. She was too numbed to think or feel.
She put the pink wool panda back up straight in the corner at the foot of the crib, facing the lop-eared white rabbit in the other corner, saw that the picture book was on the chair where little Jane could reach it if she woke first in the morning, and opened the window a little. Out in the hall she reached up to turn off the light and remembered that Gus never remembered about the gate across the stairs when he came in late, always bumped into it, always swore. She left the light on, started back to her room and stopped. Little Jane had waked.
"Daddy." Janey could hear her voice calling sleepily. "Daddy-little Dane wants a drink of water." At two and a half she could pronounce all her letters except the J of her name. Blue-eyed and yellow-haired, she looked very like what she called herself. Her father called her the little Dane. The little Dane and the big Swede. It flashed into Janey's mind. That was what he called the chief of the county constabulary. Her hand trembled as she went back to the girl's door.
"Daddy isn't here yet," she said. "He'll get you a drink of water in the morning. Good night, sweet."
She heard the sleepy, "Night," and closed the door. Her knees were watery-weak again. She put her hand on the rail across the stairwell and stood there. She shouldn't have thought of Chief Carlson. Doc Wernitz's house was out in the country. The chief of the county police would be in charge. He'd be out there with Gus now. He was a friend of Gus's. If he found the checks-She closed her eyes, holding on to the railing. It was all back again, all the writhing agony and despair. A thousand dollars, she thought dully. All the money she'd saved since Gus had turned over the accounts to her because he could never save anything. She'd worked so hard, and so gaily, saving it, had such fun shopping and planning, standing in line at the markets, making her own clothes and little Jane's, doing everything she knew how to do. Nest egg, backlog, call it anything, money in the bank; something she'd worked so happily to build up for them, to match the secure enchantment of the other part of her life with Gus-and then turned on, tearing it down and throwing it away, when Lois Maynard came and she saw all her dream world dissolving before her. Now, there was nothing left. The money was gone, the dream was gone. How she could explain it, she had no idea. She'd destroyed the only thing she'd ever been able to do for Gus. She wasn't beautiful and brilliant, the way Lois Maynard was, but she had been practical. She'd made Gus comfortable at home, and managed, and saved his money so he could buy a new car and have a new suit and new overcoat, or make a down payment on a house-and then she'd turned on him and thrown it all away.
It was all such stupid, sickening folly. And Lois Maynard knew she was stupid. It was in her veiled, patronizing smile every time she saw Janey or had to speak to her. And she was right. Gus would be better off with Lois. That was the worst of all of it. I've failed him in the only thing I knew how to do for him.
She went back to their room, took off her dress, and got her pajamas and yellow wool robe. She put them on, turned down the covers on Gus's bed and hers, and sat down, staring at his slippers on the floor. She was dumbly aware, somehow, that if she could get a moments release from the tension that was blinding her, there might be some way to get out of it. There was none now. She wasn't even thinking straight in her own stupid way; if she had been, she would never have taken the sleeping pills from Mrs. Maynard's table drawer. As they came into her mind again she got up, went to the dressing table, took her bag out of the drawer, and reached in it. She touched the gilded lucky piece first, pushed it aside, and felt for the folded tissue, to take the pills to the bathroom and flush them down. As they met her fingers, the telephone on the table between the beds jangled noisily.
She thrust the bag quickly into the drawer and shut it, almost as if the phone had eyes to see. As she picked it up, a cold hand closed sharply around her heart. Was it Gus now, calling from out there, to tell her he knew? She let herself sink down on the side of the bed. The phone rang again. "Hello."
A high-pitched voice, like an old man's whispering, came over the wire. "Is Mr. Blake there?"
"No. He's not in."
"Where is he? Where can I get in touch with him? It's important."
"He's out in the country." She started to say, "on the Wernitz case," and didn't. "He'll be here in the morning."
She put the phone down. It was a disguised voice. She knew that without thinking about it particularly. A lot of times people called up in the middle of the night, disguising their voices, to tell the editor of the newspaper something they wouldn't dare tell if there was any chance of their being recognized and held accountable. Usually slander, or-she swallowed a bitter doughy lump caught in the middle of her throat. Was this somebody calling to tell Gus-She stood up, took off her robe, and laid it across the foot of her bed.
"I've got to stop this," she said softly. "I've got to stop being a fool." She raised the window, got into bed and turned off the light. "I've got to quit even trying to think."
She heard the courthouse clock strike the half hour, three quarters, twelve o'clock. Quietly lying there, her mind seemed to clear a little.
The thousand dollars was gone. She had to face it, and everything else. There was only one thing to do. That was to tell Gus. She must stay awake, to tell him when he came in. It was all perfectly clear now. She got up, closed the window, and opened the hall door. She had to hear him when he came in, and get up and go down and see him downstairs, not up here, where he could fly into a rage and maybe shout at her and wake little Jane. He'd never flown into a rage and never shouted, but he'd never had any reason to before. She shivered a little, not knowing what he'd do, and got into bed again. The quarter hour struck as she lay there staring up at the ceiling.
Then she heard him. Or did she think she'd heard him? She hadn't heard a car drive up. But she wouldn't; he'd drive home with Lois, and leave her and walk home. He wouldn't let her drop him and drive home alone. Though she hadn't heard his step on the walk, and he usually ran the last few feet and up the steps onto the porch.
She sat up and turned on the light, listening. Maybe she'd made a mistake. Or she could have heard a rat. Sometimes rats that had been abroad for the summer came back to the old grocery store, not knowing people lived there now. Then she heard his footsteps. He was being very quiet. He usually wasn't. He usually ran into a chair and swore under his breath, the narrow stairwell funneling it all plainly up to her on the third floor. Janey wondered a little, now. He must be out in the kitchen, she thought. Always before she'd left coffee for him in the Thermos bottle in the pantry, but she had not tonight. Still, there was the coffee cake her mother had made. He could have coffee cake and a glass of milk. She reached for her robe and put her feet in her slippers. She'd go down and see him, and tell him. Now she'd made up her mind, she knew the quicker she did it the better, for everybody and everything. She went out into the hall. Her hands were icy-cold, her throat dry, and her legs not very steady as she took hold of the rail and leaned over to look down and tell him to wait there.
The light was on in the hall, but he was still out in the kitchen. She remembered she'd left both lights on when she came up. She took a step forward and stopped abruptly, looking over the rail down into the hall again, bewildered suddenly. A door was opening, the door to the basement. She knew its special hinge that whined in spite of all the oil she'd put on it. He was going, very quietly still, down into the basement. But he never went down there. He never looked at the furnace, or replaced a blown fuse, or did any of the things her father did in their basement at home. She wondered for an instant if he was sick. But that was silly. If he was sick he'd head for the washroom on the second floor.
She pulled her robe around her, went along to the head of the stairs, and bent down to unlatch little Jane's folding gate. She took hold of the latch, looking down into the lighted hall. Suddenly there was no light. She was staring down into pitch and total darkness. The lights had gone off. There was nothing but darkness thick as a blanket thrown over her head. She could hear the soft pad of footsteps coming very quietly back up the basement steps.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The soft pad of footsteps was coming back up the basement stairs. Janey swallowed down the great lump swelling in her throat. She moistened her lips and swallowed again. The hinge whined softly and she heard the muted click of the catch as the door closed. Her legs were frozen, gripped in an awful paralysis as the blackness crept tighter and closer around her, suffocating her in its relentless cold invisibility. She drew herself sharply up and clenched her fists. "No! I'm crazy! There's no one there. I'm just hearing things. The power's gone off. All over town. The power's gone off!"
She jerked her head around toward her room and stiffened rigidly again. The power was not off. She could see the faint greenish glow change to red; sifting from the street through the closed slats of the Venetian blind at the front window. Her mouth and throat turned very dry again as she turned quickly back, her eyes straining down into the inky blackness of the stairwell. Perhaps it was just their power that had gone off. Then she heard the loose board in the pantry in front of the dining room door. Something heavy had touched-something heavier than she was and lighter than Gus. There wasn't a board or step in the house that creaked or a door that opened that she didn't know and couldn't recognize. It was part of the enchanted game she'd played, when Gus had been out at night and she was happily curled up in bed warm and waiting, clocking his progress into the house and through it until he got to the top of the steps and suddenly remembered and started tiptoeing until he got into their darkened room, invariably hitting the foot of his bed, swearing softly until she broke into a laugh. He was always so funny. But this was not funny. The swinging door from the pantry into the dining room was opening. She could hear the soft swish as it scraped its semicircular pattern across the end of the rug. Her eyes strained wide over the rail, staring down, not sure at first, then horribly sure, with a desperate panic clutching at her heart.
It was a light. A faint nebulous glow came seeping, foggy and indistinct, until it focused, brightening, taking form, creeping out of the dining room across the floor of the hall, moving out, onto the rug, rising slowly, like baleful water, up the white baseboard, the nebulous glow sifting between the banister posts, throwing them into wide, shadowy bars against the white walls, moving bars as the ball of light moved deliberately forward, deliberate and purposive. It was someone. Someone with a reason. Someone who knew she was there alone. The telephone call. The disguised voice. It flashed into her paralyzed mind with the speed of light, and with the purpose of light, illuminating and clarifying it.
She jerked her body erect, her hands steady and her knees firm and strong. She opened her mouth to scream, to scream and run to the window to scream again. Then she flashed her hand to her mouth and swung around to the door of little Jane's room. She couldn't scream. If she screamed she'd frighten little Jane. Her mind clicked sharply into place as she reached quickly down to the rickety gate, tried it to see it was latched, and turned and ran along the dark passage to her room. If they'd turned off the lights they might have torn out the telephone, too-but that she could see, and then, if she had to, she could open the window in front and scream out into the street. She ran around the foot of Gus's bed. Nobody could frighten little Jane. Nobody could come into her house at night and creep around and frighten her child. It was the sort of thing a child might never get over. Her cheeks flushed with sudden anger that burned out all trace of fear. The hand she thrust out reached the telephone accurately. As the dial tone buzzed in her ear her finger flashed around the slots to the last one. Operator. She whirled the dial around and waited, her breath coming quickly.
There was one ring, two rings. She flashed around, looking out into the hall. The soft glow of the light reflected up the narrow shaft of the stairs was brighter. The dark shadow of the rail along the hall was moving, coming closer into focus as the glow reflecting it brightened and came nearer. Janey listened, holding her breath. The corner step where the crooked stairs turned to the second floor had not squeaked. That she would have heard. Then as she did hear it, her heart tightening, the operator's calm voice was in her other ear.
"May I help you?"
"Call the police, 42 Locust Street. Emergency."
Her voice was crisp and very clear.
"There's someone in the house. The lights are cut off. My child and I are here alone. And call me back quickly. Locust 4298."
"42 Locust Street. Locust 4298. Right."
The operator cut the connection. The dial tone buzzed again in Janey's ear. She slipped the phone quietly back into the cradle, her hand resting on it to pick it up again, her body straight and taut on the side of the bed, her small, pointed jaw tight, her hot blue eyes fixed on the foggy glow of light out in the hall. It had stopped. The shadow of the stair rail had stopped moving. It was stationary on the wall. The center board in the hall on the second floor hadn't creaked. But they were close. Too close.
The phone rang sharply. The shadow of the rail jerked and moved crazily up and down for an instant and was fixed and still again. Janey caught the phone up and raised her voice as she said, "Hello," turning so it would carry out into the hall and down to the listening ears below. The light moved abruptly and disappeared-into Gus's den. She knew that even before she heard the faint click as the telephone down there was raised and she could hear the sharp breathing of someone else there on the line.
"The police are on their way, Mrs. Blake," the operator's crisp voice said. "The patrol car's at Fifth and Fetter. It ought to be there in less than a minute. I'll call you again. Or why don't I call the people across the street? Who-"
Janey moistened her lips. The downstairs phone had gone quietly back into place. The quickly drawn breath was no longer there in her ear. The light was in the hall again. The shadow of the rail flew up to the white wall and was blotted out as the light below faded and disappeared as silently as it had come.
"No," she said. "Don't bother. I-I think he's gone. But you'd better call again."
She put the phone down. The police were coming. Maybe Gus would come with them, she thought. It flashed into her mind that that was silly. Gus was with the county police. It was the city police coming here to her. County and city police weren't the same at all. She went quickly over to the window and drew up the blinds. There was a little light outside, light in relation to the pitch blackness inside the house. She crept back quickly into the hall and stood leaning over the rail, looking down. There was no sound, nothing. Then abruptly she heard a sound. It was the oil burner. She heard it switch on and heard the familiar tap-tap-tap, like little ghosts playing hopscotch up and down the hot-water pipes as it started to work. She stood there listening. After a long moment she let her breath out and drew it in again slowly. It meant that a door or window had been opened and cold air was coming into the house. The thermostat was set at 60. She listened still. The oil burner was still going. Then there was another tap-tap-tap louder than that the little ghosts make in the pipes. She turned and ran to the front window and threw it up. She leaned out. A car with lights dimmed was at the curb. A dark uniformed figure was at the end of the walk, another at the front door, knocking on it.
'I'll come down," she called.
"You stay there, ma'am, till we get in. We've got the house surrounded."
It did not sound stilted or absurd to Janey. It sounded wonderful.
"Okay. I think it must be the back door. The switch is in the basement."
She closed the window and went back into the hall. In a moment she heard heavy honest feet on the first floor and saw bobbing lights with a nebulous glow that held no terror. She unlatched the gate and tied her robe more securely around her as she felt her way down the stairs. She was halfway down to the first floor when the lights flashed on. The policeman standing by the front door stared at her. He thrust his gun back into the holster.
"You could 'a got shot easy, lady," he said irritably. "I told you to stay up there."
Janey came on down the stairs. She drew herself up with dignity. "I don't want my little girl waked up," she said stiffly. "I don't want people tramping all over the house waking her up."
The policeman stared at her. "Look, lady. You don't seem to realize-" He stopped. "Okay, Mrs. Blake. I guess you scared him away. The back door's open. I'll have a look all around upstairs. You go in there and sit down. I won't wake your girl up."
Janey went into the dining room, switched the lights on, and sat down. She was sitting there, the sapphire sparks still shooting from her wide blue eyes, when he came back again.
"All okay upstairs, Mrs. Blake. Are you all right?"
Janey nodded.
"If you're alone here, I'll leave a man-"
"You don't have to do that," Janey said quickly. "I'm sure he won't come back. My husband will be home pretty soon. We'll be perfectly all right. I'm not scared. I-I was at first, but then I-I was just mad, I guess." He hesitated, looking at her sitting there.
You wouldn't think she had that much of what it takes. Mosquito weight, plenty of punch.
"All right, Mrs. Blake. You'll be all right. You go to bed and go to sleep. We'll keep an eye out. Will you leave a note for your maid not to touch anything down there around the fuse box, and tomorrow we'll dust that switch for fingerprints." '
"I don't have a maid," Janey said.
"Okay, then, Mrs. Blake. I'll lock up in back for you and go out the front door. Tomorrow morning Lieutenant Williams'll want to talk to Mr. Blake about this. Can you see he's here round nine-fifteen? And you ought to get him to put a bolt on your kitchen door. Any dime store key'll open it."
He was back in an instant. "Good night, Mrs. Blake."
"Good night."
She waited for him to close the door, still very calm. The closing of the door shattered all her control as instantly as if it had been a rainbow bubble hitting the floor, bursting into a million pinpoints of soapy water.
"Oh, no!" She gripped the edge of the table. She could hear heavy steps coming from the side of the house. They were all going, leaving her alone again. She ran to the front door, her heart in her throat, and stopped, the tears pricking like hot grease along her eyelids.
They were gone. She walked back to the living room and sank in an easy chair, waves of excitement alternating with bouts of nausea.
What was going on?
She drifted off into an uneasy sleep, the lights on, the room silent. She felt assured that she was safe for the night. He would not dare return.
She dreamed of her experience.
She heard him coming up the stairs. Janey ran to her child's room, but was surprised to see that her daughter wasn't there. Then she remembered that her daughter was spending the night with her grandmother.
In her dream, Janey heaved a sigh of relief. It wasn't nearly so terrifying with the child out of the house. Janey felt that she could look after herself.
She ran back to her room, aware that he was rounding the bend in the stairway. Soon he would be upstairs.
She could see his shadow against the wall.
Janey slammed the door behind her and heard his footsteps quicken. Then he was pounding on the door, and as she watched, she saw the hinges give.
Then the door fell into the room and he stood there, tall and strong and grinning at her. "Don't make it hard on yourself," he said to Janey. "Don't make me hurt you. I will, you know. But I don't want to. All I want from you is some fun."
Janey backed up to the bed and then fell backward across it-and in her dream she felt faintly ridiculous. He was on her quickly, pulling off her nightgown, then marveling at her perfectly formed body.
He ran a tongue over his dry lips and quickly unfastened his belt. Janey's heart was pounding, yet she couldn't take her eyes off her attacker.
He was a handsome young man, fit and attractive. His large blue eyes were curiously innocent, and his short blond hair was cut exactly the way in which she liked men to wear it.
Then he dropped his trousers and advanced toward her.
It couldn't be happening. She had read of scenes like this, but certainly it would never happen in Smithville! But yet here he was, a wide grin on his face, his hand stroking his massive member, his eyes locked onto the nest between her thighs.
Janey closed her legs and tried to scramble off the bed but his strong hand gripped her shoulder and flung her backward. She screamed but she knew that no one could hear it. Then he forced his torso between her legs, adjusted himself once, and then she felt the burning, stretching sensation of total, quick penetration.
She gasped with pain and tried to beat her fists in his face but he laughed and grabbed each wrist in a powerful hand and immobilized her. She strained, but each movement only eased his penetration until he was finally locked into her, deep and hard.
Janey knew that at least her daughter wasn't there to see her shame, and maybe Gus would return in time to fight the rapist.
She moaned as he shoved in harder, and then she thought of her husband, out with Lois Maynard, and she was filled with a sudden hot anger that she had never known before.
Janey felt her legs opening as the anger swelled within her. Gus was probably doing the same thing to Lois, she thought furiously. An evil grin parted her lips and she caught her attacker's eye. "Is that all you can do?" she whispered to him.
He reared back and stroked long and hard as Janey groaned under his new assault-only now it felt wonderful, filling her with a savage joy that assuaged her anger.
If Gus can do it, so can I, she thought passionately. If this is what it's all about, then give me my share too. She groaned as the rapist pulled out completely and then rammed home again, and her legs were spread apart as much as possible and still she wanted to make herself more available to him. She wanted to do everything that she could to erase the thought of her husband making love to Lois Maynard.
And then she felt the rapist slowing down, easing in and out, and she sighed in orgasmic relief as her climax swept over her and then she felt the sudden violent trembling that seized him and he was pouring all of his energy into her, hot and wet, and she smiled and close her eyes and pulled him down close to her.
And then she awoke, shaken and excited, unable to sleep. But now in some way she was prepared to take up her vigil in the quiet night again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was ten minutes past two by the clock on the elegant simulated tortoiseshell dashboard and five minutes past by the clock on the courthouse tower as Lois Maynard flipped the wheel lightly around and turned out of the square into Fetter Street.
"I tell you again, Gus," she said patiently. "There's nothing whatever wrong with me. No matter what Swede Carlson thinks or you or anybody else thinks. I just got a case of jitters, sitting out there alone."
Now that she was back in town, among houses and people who were alive, not dead, she was ready to believe that was the way it was. It had all been a sort of wild phantasmagoria that didn't make any possible sense. She ought never to let anything like a conscience bother her. All a conscience was, was an atavistic throwback to childhood, your own and your family's, when you were taught a lot of nonsense and punished if you didn't follow it. Janey wasn't going to take any sleeping pills. That was nonsense of another sort. More of her old broken-wing tactics.
"I got the most awful jitters out there, Gus, and I'm terribly ashamed of myself. Will you excuse it, please? Just this once, please?"
That was the line to take. She realized it instantly, aware of the change taking place in him as he relaxed a little in the seat beside her. There was no use being stiff-necked and combative, the way she'd started out being. It only made him more and worse of both. She ought to know him well enough by now to know that, if nothing else.
"I'm really horribly sorry, Gus. Please don't be cross at me. I guess I'm not nearly as competent as I try to pretend. I guess murder's something you have to get used to, isn't it?"
"It sure is," Gus said. He knew it from a lot of experience. He was sick out behind a row of garbage cans the first one he'd covered. Even if she didn't see Wernitz on the cellar floor, she'd sat out in the dark and seen them take him away, and seen the ambulance. Imagining things was a lot worse sometimes than seeing them. "It's my fault," he said. "I shouldn't have let you go."
"Oh, then you're not mad at me, Gus? Thanks! You're sweet. May I kiss you? Do you mind if I do, Gus-just once?"
She leaned over toward him, the car swerving with the quick movement of her body.
"Drive, Lois. Drive the car and keep off the milk truck."
They weren't quite on it, but they would be if Lois got her libido all unleashed, which usually happened when she got contrite and feminine. "And don't make passes at your boss." He grinned at her in the dark. She laughed and slowed the car down for the red light.
"Who's going to make them if I don't?" she inquired easily. "Marriage has made you horribly stuffy, hasn't it? Or are you just afraid to let yourself go?"
The light changed. Instead of turning left toward her own house, she turned toward the center of town.
"Hey," Gus said. "Where-"
"Who's driving this car, Mr. Blake?" She kept to the right and down Locust Street. "I took you out, and I bring you back. The Maynard shuttle service has its standards."
"Don't be a dope, Lois. I don't want you to drive out alone. I don't care about you, but your father'll be sore. It's after two."
The smile moved in her yellow-green eyes. Something was finally working the way she'd planned it-planned and forgotten it in her sudden attack of moral jitters out in the Wernitz yard. She'd planned it on her way in to pick him up and take him out to Wernitz's, as part of her cold war against Janey. Janey would be awake and watching, she was sure of that. She'd probably be upstairs in the dark, looking out the window, and she'd see her drive Gus up to the door. Gus would have to object to her going back by herself-as a supper guest at her father's house that night, he'd have to object. And Janey would see them drive up, and drive off again. And it was working. The house was just a block away now. She let him protest until suddenly she was aware that something wasn't working.
Oh, my God! she thought. Her hand on the wheel tightened. The car lurched a little and came back as she caught herself and it. Something had gone wrong. Her mouth was as dry again as it had been out in the Wernitz yard. A policeman-More alert for the sight of the narrow red brick house behind the privet hedge at the moment than Gus, who turned telling her to drive on around the block and he'd take her home and get a taxi back, she'd seen the uniformed policeman come up and turn in there. Gus had not. She'd seen the lights in the house first, too, in the dining room downstairs, in the living room on the second floor, and bedroom on the third. Oh, no, she couldn't have! But why were the lights on at a quarter past two, and why was the policeman going into the house? Lois moistened her parched lips. She must have done it.
It was an instant of impulsive dismay not as close to horror as she had thought it was going to be, or as it had been out in the dark yard. Here in town, with Gus beside her, a fait accompli almost in her hands, she was herself again. She was the girl slipping back into the shadow of her father's room, watching Janey, pleased that Janey was taking the sleeping pills from her mother's table drawer. She could feel the hard, tight smile on her face again there in the car. It was what she wanted. She'd been a stupid fool out at Wernitz's.
"What goes on?" Gus said suddenly. He'd turned to look at the house. It was surprise that alerted him, nothing more. He wasn't worried, only surprised to see the house all lighted up at a quarter past two in the morning. "Better stop."
Lois Maynard had already decided that. Her foot was on the brake and she was slipping easily along the curb.
"Maybe Janey's-" She started to say maybe Janey was sick, but that was a mistake. She realized abruptly that with the scene she'd made out in the country, and even in spite of her denials there was anything behind it, it could look very strange. "Maybe Janey's got company-strays from our party." She said it lightly as she stopped the car. The fact that there were no cars except Gus's old coupe in front of the house occurred to her at once. "Or maybe just Orvie," she said. "Let's both go in, shall we? Maybe there's a cup of coffee. Or I could even do with a drink, after what I've been through-or what you've been through with me.
"Okay." Gus opened the door and held it while she slid across the seat and out at the brick walk. He was looking up at the house, a little worried, she thought, in spite of what she'd said. Worried about the kid, probably, she decided as he closed the door. She went up the walk with him, her pulse beating quickly, her throat dry, not with any agonized remorse, but dry the way it was at the races or when she saw Gus suddenly come into a room. She held her breath sharply as he put his key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the door. And let it go as sharply as she stepped inside and looked around. The policeman? Where had he got to? There was no one in the hall, and no one moving upstairs. She was listening intently to hear them up there. Then she turned and looked into the lighted dining room. Gus had shut the door and come on in. He was there in the double door beside her. Both of them were looking at Janey, in her yellow wool dressing gown, her head on her folded arms, her eyes closed, her long lashes sweeping her pale cheeks, asleep, quietly asleep. Lois's heart leaped for an instant.
"Why, she's asleep." Gus said it in the surprised way people say unexpected obvious truths.
Lois stood motionless there. Her eyes, moving around the room, fell suddenly on a small bright-orange capsule, on the floor against the table leg. She moved a step to hide it from Gus. Her hands were trembling. Then she had taken them. She looked quickly back at Janey, aware that Gus had moved. He was going over to the table.
"Why don't you just let her sleep, Gus, till she wakes up?" Lois Maynard said. "She doesn't look as if she'd had much sleep lately, does she?" She went close to the table herself, bent down quickly, and picked up the orange capsule, slipped it into her coat pocket.
"No, I'll get her upstairs."
As he spoke, Janey stirred and opened her eyes. "Gus!"
She got up quickly. "Oh, Gus!" She put her hands out to him, and saw Lois Maynard. She dropped her hands to her sides and took a step forward.
"Janey, what's happened? What the-" Gus stopped and began again. "Janey, what's the matter?"
"Just waiting for you, dear," Lois said. She stifled a slight yawn. "It is frightfully late, of course. But now we're here what about a drink?" She looked at Janey. "Or do you want to go to bed? Don't mind me if you do. I'll swallow it down and scoot along. I wish newspaper offices closed down on Saturday." She turned to Gus. "What about a drink, boss? And don't look at Janey like that. A girl's got a right to wait up for her husband. And it's her dining room, isn't it? I mean if she likes to sleep sitting up?"
"Shut up, Lois." He cut her off brusquely. She knew she was making him sore, but that was all right. If he was sore at her he wouldn't be too patient with Janey. That was the point right now. No man, especially not Gus Blake, liked the idea of a woman waiting up for him, especially when another woman was a witness to it.
"What's the idea, Janey?" he asked impatiently.
Lois's eyes smiled. She was so right. And Janey was such a little sheep. All she did was open her vapid blue eyes a little wider, move back another step, take hold of the back of the chair, and moisten her pale lips.
If I ever wait up for him, Lois thought, I won't have on cotton pajamas and a woolen bathrobe, and I'll comb my hair and put on some lipstick. And I won't let him push me around like this.
"Nothing's the matter, Gus," Janey was saying, "I-I guess I went to sleep, is all." She turned her small white face to him and tried to smile. "I'm sorry you caught me. Why don't you get Lois a drink? There's some Scotch in the pantry. And then take her home."
"That's big of you, madam," Lois said pleasantly. "But I can get home with no trouble whatsoever. I would like a drink."
"I'll get you one if you two dames will shut up."
Gus pushed a chair into the table, pushed open the pantry door, and let it swing shut.
"You know the green-eyed business is frightfully young, Janey," Lois Maynard said evenly. "Did you drop this? I found it here on the floor." She took the orange capsule out of her pocket and held it out to Janey. She smiled again. The girl really had thought of taking them tonight. She could tell by the way her body stiffened and her saucer eyes opened even wider. "Take it, dear. It's yours. You don't have to worry. It takes guts to really go to sleep."
She felt Janey's cold fingertips touch her hand as she silently took the capsule and put it in the pocket of her dressing gown. She started almost convulsively as Gus pushed the pantry door open again.
"Didn't your mother stay, Janey?" he asked. Lois's eyes smiled again. He was the picture of the intelligent male trying to find out what was going on in the minds of a couple of women, one acting true to form, the other off on a tangent that made no sense of any kind.
"Oh, if she did then you can take me home, can't you?" Lois said quickly. "I do really hate to go alone." She took the highball he handed her, raised it to her lips, and smiled across the rim of it at Janey.
"Is your mother here?" Gus asked impatiently. "I told you-"
Janey found her voice. "Yes, she's here. She's upstairs." Her fingers tightened on the back of the chair. "I've made up the couch in the study for you. And if you-if you don't mind, I'll go on up and go to bed. Good night. Good night, Lois."
CHAPTER NINE
The Iron Curtain would be fluttering in as many shreds as a grass skirt if the news of the world spread as fast and as pervasively as local gossip in Smithville. It dripped from the sable wings of night and sped forth refreshed on the golden wings of the morn. On Saturday morning everybody in Smithville was feeling exceedingly sorry for Janey Blake. Her overdraft varied from one hundred to one thousand dollars, but there was no variation in the reason for it-the slot machines, the way Gus Blake was carrying on, tearing around the country with John Maynard's divorced daughter. Even after Janey had driven a burglar out of the house single-handedly, Gus Blake had come home and brought the Maynard girl with him and gone off with her again, not getting back till five o'clock in the morning, leaving little Mrs. Blake and the kid alone there in the house all night. It made the patrolman watching the house sore as a pup. It was a dirty trick, with Mrs. Blake scared as she was and pretending she wasn't. The milkman who saw Miss Maynard kissing Gus Blake at two o'clock in the morning on Fetter Street didn't care what they did if she hadn't nearly run into his truck just as he was starting out. They could kiss each other all they pleased-what worried him was five hundred bottles of milk and cream and an undetermined amount of cottage cheese. And everybody felt exceedingly sorry for Janey. Everybody, with two exceptions. One was Lois Maynard, who still, however, in a way and when she didn't stop to think, felt a little sorry for Janey, in the slightly contemptuous and offhand way a beautiful sleek panther might feel about a young sheep she was trailing across an open field of daisies.
The second exception was the murderer of Paul M. Wernitz.
There was nothing in all this that made Smithville very different from any other town. Gus Blake was finding that out daily as he tried to make it sound unique and interesting for the centennial edition of the Gazette. Nor was domestic conversation very different, even in the homes of the people who had been to the Maynards' party the night before and had to be at the office the same time Saturday morning as they were the other five working days of the week.
Martha Ferguson, the red-haired wife of the president of Smithville's leading bank, pulled the plug out of the coffeepot and glanced up, past her red-haired freckle-faced thirteen-year-old daughter, earnestly frying bacon and eggs, at the clock on the back of the electric range. It was ten minutes past eight, and Jim was still not down. Fortunately her son did not have to shave yet, and a bath, so far as she knew, had never taken him more than three minutes except under compulsion since he'd graduated from outside assistance. He was over at the sink, in as much of his football gear as was permitted by the house rules, diluting the frozen orange juice. Martha Ferguson put two more slices of bread in the toaster.
"I don't know what on earth's keeping your dad this morning," she said. "The Maynards' hoedown certainly doesn't account for it. We were home by twelve." She waited for the toast to pop up, took it out, and buttered it. "Do you people realize," she said, "that all over the United States there are people just like us, waiting for the man of the house to get out of the bathroom and come down and eat? Millions and millions of them. Anybody that thinks the bathroom in the American home is a sanitary device is nuts. It's nothing but a throwback to the prehistoric cave where the male could hide in comfort in his fur skins while the female and the young were outside in the cold hunting sticks to rub together. And if you spill much more of that orange juice, sweetie, there won't be any left."
She laughed at her son and went out into the hall.
"Jim, are you ever coming down? What on earth are you doing? If you're eating soap, there's bacon and eggs down here. You've got to get to the bank. You're only president of it-you don't own it."
"Coming, darling." Jim Ferguson, hurrying down from the landing, stopped to check his pockets for handkerchief, billfold, change, and fountain pen. She waited for him at the foot of the stairs.
"Do something about those checks of poor little Janey today, Jim." She spoke earnestly, lowering her voice so the children could not hear her. "I simply can't bear to think of her going around with all this hanging over her. Can't we lend her the money to cover the things, Jim? I could get it from Dad. He might just as well loosen up a bit before he dies. I'll write to him today. But for heaven's sake, come and eat."
At the Nelson Cadwallader Symses' house in Batmen Street, Lois Maynard's Aunt Mamie Syms towered like the chairman of the Committee of the Whole at the head of the heavy Empire table in the old-fashioned dining room, where militant pieces of family furniture stood about against the brown-papered walls as if they had waited too long to march out and at last had given up hope. The dust of Aunt Mamie's tenure had faded off their spit and polish into an adamantine gray except on the surface portions that even Aunt Mamie's down at-the-heel maid couldn't overlook. As the long narrow windows were seldom washed and were hung with sun-faded brown rep curtains, it was hardly noticeable, and Aunt Mamie's vigorous attention was fixed on civic, not domestic, problems. Except at the moment. She took off her reading glasses and put down her paper. "Dorsey," she said.
Aunt Mamie's son was older than Martha Ferguson's, and instead of a football jersey and simulated Notre Dame pants he wore a chalkstripe blue suit, a blue shirt, and blue striped tie. He was already through his breakfast, waiting for another cup of coffee, the only product of the Syms kitchen that could be called even average.
"Dorsey." Aunt Mamie tapped the table with a wing of her horn-rimmed glasses that were as near a gavel as anything at hand. "Where is your father?"
Dorsey Syms turned the Maynard brown eyes and the Maynard smile toward his mother as he put down the sporting and financial section and pushed his plate back. He didn't answer. Aunt Mamie's questions were mostly rhetorical, or if not rhetorical, fully capable of being, and intended to be, answered from the chair.
"I hope," Aunt Mamie said, glancing toward the clock on the big Empire sideboard, "that he hasn't forgotten he's supposed to look over the letter I've written. Gus Blake tampered with the last one I wrote. I can spell quite as well as anyone else. I was deeply mortified, the way it came out in the paper. Your father's just dawdling this morning-dawdle, dawdle."
Dorsey smiled at her. She'd forgotten she was late for breakfast herself. No one, however, could ever accuse her of dawdling.
"And just when I've got to see Doctor Mason," his mother added. "I have a very severe headache. It must be my eyes."
Only a stout effort on the part of a stout woman kept Aunt Mamie from putting her head on her hands and all three on the breakfast table. Dorsey smiled again and looked at his watch.
"Why don't you just wait, Mother?" he said "Maybe it'll wear off. I mean, you don't have to use your eyes much today or tomorrow. Maybe they'll clear up if you rest them a little. You do too much."
"Well, perhaps, Dorsey."
He heard his father coming slowly down the stairs. He pushed his chair back. It was a dirty trick, going off, leaving his father to cope with one of his mother's champagne eyestrains. But there'd be a lot to do at the bank this morning There were at least ten people in town who'd hot-foot it there as soon as they opened their morning mail. Which meant work for him in the savings department. The ones who had savings would have to take them out. The others-Dorsey Syms shrugged mentally. That was their problem. Old Doc Wernitz must have had some wry sense of humor, he thought. Maybe he got a kick out of hanging on to a lot of checks people wrote after their sixth high ball and forgot about. Maybe he'd really enjoyed bringing them all in one batch, just toward the holidays and at the end of the month, when most Smithville bank accounts were on their last legs anyway. Notices had gone out to ten depositors, six with savings. An eleventh should have gone, to Janey Blake. But it hadn't. And there was no telling how many the other two banks across Courthouse Square had sent out.
He listened to his father coming along the hall. His father banked over at the Merchants National. It was the one determined stand Dorsey had ever known Nelson Cadwallader Syms to make. He'd refused, even in face of the plea of family solidarity, to bank where his wife's brother John Maynard was on the board of directors. Poor old Nelly, Dorsey thought. He was probably expecting a notice himself that morning, and was in no hurry of any kind to get to the office to get it.
Dorsey went around the table and dropped a kiss on his mother's feverish cheek. "I've got to rush," he said. He raised his voice to carry to the hall. "So long, Dad. I've got to shove. See you later." He went out the other way, through the kitchen. He always hated to see his father beaten down.
The butler at the Rogerses' country house out on the Bay glanced apprehensively at the paper propped up in front of the master of the ; house at the foot of the dining table. Mr. Rogers had cleared his throat twice already. The third time was the boiling point, in caloric inverse to the bacon and eggs under the plastic lid covering Mr. Orval's plate at the other end of the table. The butler's palms were discreetly moist as he listened intently for Mr. Orval to bust out of his room upstairs. He could hear him then, running halfway down the stairs and slowing up to come the rest of the way quietly and soberly. Mr. Orval's father did not like people being late to meals and having to race into the dining room, no matter how many parties they'd been to the night before. The butler cleared his own throat noiselessly and breathed more freely as he poured a cup of coffee from the silver pot and put it at Mr. Orval's place.
"Good morning, sir," he said.
Mr. Rogers's gray brows beetled over the edge of his paper, but not before Orvie Rogers had had time to give his tie a yank into proper place.
"Good morning, son."
"Good morning, Dad."
Mr. Rogers went back to his paper, Orvie took the lid off his bacon and eggs.
The butler glided across the thick Chinese rug through the swinging door into the pantry as Mr. Rogers cleared his throat the third time. Behind the door he paused, listening discreetly. He wondered just how rough a session it was going to be. Mr. Orval was not any too fit. The expression on his face as he'd lifted the plastic lid had nothing to do with the bacon and eggs being cold. It had to do merely with their being. He heard Mr. Rogers clear his throat again.
"About those checks we were talking about, son."
The butler glided swiftly away toward the kitchen. He had heard Mr. Rogers discuss checks with his son before at breakfast, and it was nothing he cared to listen to again.
"You'll find a check on my desk, Orvie," Mr. Rogers said. "I want you to take it by and give it to Janey. Tell her it's a personal loan from me to her, and she can pay it back when and as she can."
Orvie Rogers looked up quickly and opened his mouth. He closed it again as his father cleared his throat for the fifth time. "I understand this fellow Wernitz was murdered last night."
"So I heard," Orvie said. Even coffee tasted foul this morning.
"Good riddance. I wish we could get those machines out of Smith County. Nobody would think of cutting a hole in his pants pocket to let his money dribble out, and nobody with any gumption would put a nickel in a coin machine."
His brows beetled over at Orvie again. He knew Orvie played the slot machines, and Orvie knew he knew it.
"In any case," he said, "Janey's a fine girl. I don't want her mixed up with this filth. I'm very fond of Janey." He said it very much as if it were a personal I accusation. Orvie waiting, half expecting, from I long experience, that his father would go on and say, "If you'd had the gumption of a wet muskrat you'd have married her before Blake did." He didn't mind it anymore. Things would have been different if he had married her-or if she would have married him.
"And I suggest you let Blake get out of the way before you go there," his father said. "I've got some idea that what Gus doesn't know about this won't hurt him. I daresay most of us are fools when we get out of our own field. I learned that when we had to convert the plant at the beginning of the war."
At John Maynard's house in town his daughter, in a tailored suit and white blouse tied in a flat bow at the neck, ready for a day's work at the Smithville Gazette, jabbed viciously into the grapefruit in front of her as she waited for her father's footsteps on the stairs. At last she put her spoon down impatiently and pressed the bell under the table. When the butler came she said, "Lawrence-go upstairs and find out what in God's name is keeping my father. Bang on the door. Maybe he's slipped in the shower."
She picked up her spoon again. "Never mind. Here he comes."
She raised her voice. "Daddy, if you don't hurry you're not going downtown with me."
Then she realized that he was not coming. He was going into the library first. She looked at her watch. She was in a hurry. Gus always got to the office earlier than anybody else, and she had some unfinished business with Gus that she wanted to get on with. Her father was coming now. She looked up expectantly at him. Then she frowned. He wasn't smiling his slow, easy smile, as he usually did.
"What's the matter, Daddy?"
"Nothin', honey."
John Maynard came around the table and kissed her on the top of her head. He went to his place at the end of the table, waiting until Lawrence had gone out of the room.
"Lois, you haven't done anythin' foolish, have you, honey?" he asked gently.
"Lots of things, I guess, Dad. Why? What particular one do you want to know about now?"
"I'm not jokin', honey. I'm talkin' about those checks I showed you last night. Did you take 'em out of the drawer in there?"
Lois Maynard stared at him. "Good heavens, no. Why should I do that? They're no-Do you mean they're gone?"
"That's what I mean, Lois. They're gone. The whole lot of 'em. I was goin' to take 'em around after Gus left home this mornin' and have a little talk with Janey." He looked past her out of the window for a few moments. "I'm tryin' to think who was in there last night. Who'd want to take 'em, I mean, Lois."
He shrugged and picked up his napkin, the old smile coming back on his handsome, rugged face. "It was mighty nice little Janey won the jackpot last night."
Lois was watching him intently across the table.
"Daddy," she said sharply. She put down her coffee cup. "Just how well did you know this Doc Wernitz who was killed last night?"
John Maynard smiled at her. "Now, honey." He wiped his broad mouth with corner of his napkin. "Now, honey, if I was you, I'd keep my little nose out of things that don't concern me. It's always best. Usually I've always found it was safest, in the long run, too."
Lois wanted to say something but no words formed in her mouth. Her father was telling her to shut up, in no uncertain terms. He knew something-Lois could sense it. She had seen that same look on his face once before, recently-when he was paying off Janey's jackpot!
She managed to supress her interest. Lois stood and left the room. John Maynard watched her go, then turned his face toward the window that overlooked the grounds.
It was a messy business, all right. And John Maynard was only going to wait a short time before he moved into action.
John Maynard smiled. It was a shame that it took something like this to get the juices flowing. But that was part of growing older. You needed new experiences in order to feel anything. Not like when he was young, John Maynard thought. It was different then, and he had been a different man, always eager to experience life in its most vivid terms.
He remembered his first visit to Chicago. He'd been a wild man then, young and strong and filled with the grit and stamina of a young bull. John Maynard had five thousand dollars in his pockets on that first trip, and when he left Chicago four days later he was broke.
It was the last time in his life that he had been down to the wire, but he never once regretted the mad, exciting, totally wanton scene that he had purchased.
Memories live forever, John Maynard thought.
He chuckled. It had been a wintery night, cold and blowing, and he'd arrived at Jeanine's House of Pleasure half-drunk and frozen through to the bone.
The girls had helped him off with his coat, then led him into the sitting room where he poured down at least half a bottle of the finest whiskey he'd ever tasted. All the girls were curious about what John Maynard had in the packages he'd brought under his arm, but it wasn't until he was thoroughly warmed up that he handed them out.
The packages went to Sissy and Claire, the two lovely blondes who'd been in his service since he arrived. The girls eagerly and happily tore open the wrappings, then tossed aside the box tops-and there, for each of them, was a fur coat!
John chuckled again. Those damned coats more than paid for themselves in sheer, sensual, sexual pleasure. There wasn't enough Sissy and Clare could do for him-and he let them do as they pleased about ten minutes later, after they led him stumbling up the stairs to the bedroom that they all shared.
They undressed him and then gave him a quick sponge bath, using warm, sudsy water, rinsing him clean with fresh warm water. Then they led him to the bed, and if he remembered correctly, John Maynard was singing at the top of his voice all the time.
Claire and Sissy didn't care-they even told him that they enjoyed his loud, boisterous singing. Sissy laid him down on his back, flat on the bed, then quickly and nimbly jumped atop him, planting her sweet, perfumed center right on his mouth.
John loved it. He could feel Claire tugging at him, making his cock hard and thick, and then the warm wet smoothness of her lips encircled him and he felt her tongue swirling around his shaft.
But that was nothing compared to the way Sissy moved atop him. John Maynard held her by the flesh of her hips as she swiveled and rolled, giving his tongue and lips tempting targets which he probed eagerly and, for Sissy, pleasurably.
He was more than half-drunk, John Maynard was, but his stamina and raw male vitality was not diminished in the slightest. Both Sissy and Claire had been overjoyed to find themselves his sexual slaves the past few days, delighted to have-for once-a young bull to play with instead of the tired, aging businessmen who were their usual companions.
The girls exchanged positions and John Maynard laughed uproariously. He'd never had an experience like this in his life-no one back home would believe it!
The girls knew exactly how to please him in every way. Later, when he lay top Sissy, her small, perfect form clinging to him, he leaned to his right and kissed Claire full on the mouth, for she was there too, stretched out, available for his hands and mouth.
They had carried on for days in like fashion, and John's mind came up with many different games for them to play. He was totally uninhibited, ready for anything, willing to do it again if he liked it.
When it was over and Sissy and Claire stood by the door, shivering in their light wraps, it was Sissy who pressed the gold-washed quarter into his hand. "For luck," she said.
It was the same golden quarter he'd given to his old friend.
CHAPTER TEN
The murderer of Paul M. Wernitz mentally shook his head a little. It was a mistake to come down later than usual for breakfast. It was a mistake to do anything to call anybody's attention to the fact that he wanted time to be alone, to think, to calculate, and reflect over his errors, so he could retrieve them if necessary and guard against future ones. Above all, he had to act as if there were nothing special on his mind, act as normally and casually as he always acted. He had to forget the sound of old Wernitz's head as the iron bar hit it, not a loud sound, more like an eggshell as you closed your hand on it to crush it. But that was not why he'd spent so much time over his bath and shave. It was the unfortunate fact that in the average house the bathroom was the only place a man could lock the door and be alone without the risk of somebody walking in and surprising some expression that the most astute and carefully guarded mind might transmit unconsciously to the motor nerves and impulses controlling any man's face. He had seen something of it in his own face in the medicine chest mirror as he thought about himself, and the mistakes he'd already made, when he was wiping his face after he had rinsed off the shaving soap. But it wasn't Wernitz's eggshell skull he had been thinking about. He kept his eyes down on his plate as he thought about it all again.
Damn Janey Blake, he said quietly to himself. Who would ever have thought the little devil had that much guts? If he hadn't had the quick-wittedness to pick up the phone in Gus's den they might easily have gotten him. But they still wouldn't have been able to connect him with the Wernitz thing out at Newton's Corner. That was the one thing he didn't have to worry about. He had been too smart to leave any tracks behind him there. He frowned suddenly, and bit his lower lip, remembering he was supposed to appear as he always did. He relaxed and took up his coffee cup, took a swallow, and put it down calmly.
The Janey business was an error. He could see that now. Calling her up, and calling up out at Wernitz's to check on Gus and Lois, had seemed to make it easy going. It wasn't his fault she turned out to be so quick on the trigger, but it was the sort of thing he should have been smart enough to figure on.
I can't afford any more mistakes, he thought. Janey was his second, or third. No. His fourth. He had to be brutally honest with himself if nobody else. He had to see his mistakes and admit them, and above all not miss any of them.
It's a funny kind of thing, he thought, moving the newspaper so it shielded his face. It wasn't as if he'd acted on the spur of the moment. He'd known for some time he was going to kill Paul M. Wernitz. He had considered ways and means on what he might call an academic level for quite a while. The fact that Wernitz had forced his hand by suddenly letting it be known he was closing up shop and leaving Smithville, so that he had to use perhaps his least brilliant modus operandi, was unfortunate in one sense but very fortunate in another. Brilliance was likely to be involved, while in a murder at least simplicity and the presence of a natural and obvious suspect-especially if he happened to be an alien employee-was all to the good, if not egotistically so satisfying. He had been surprised himself at how neat the whole thing was-just as he was surprised now at how easy it was to carry on as if there nothing at all on his mind. He heard himself listening and talking as much as he ever talked while he was trying to read the paper at the breakfast table. It was almost as if he were two people existing in one body.
The only thing to watch, really, was that one didn't get confused with the other.
He turned the page of the paper, realizing that the page he was apparently so engrossed in had nothing on it but an ad for a special sale of women's fur coats. He turned to the financial reports. That was something he could be legitimately engrossed in, if anybody happened to notice.
Janey was a mistake. But Janey was only secondary, an effect following a cause, and the cause was his real mistake. It was just a piece of damned luck, is all it was, he told himself. But it wasn't true, and he knew it. If he had let the blasted thing stay where it was, he wouldn't have had any bad luck to complain about. Up to that point, everything was okay. Nobody could trace the calls he put in to get the service mechanics out of the place and off to the farthest corners of the county. He'd figured them out with a map, and gone to each place, to see for certain that Wernitz owned the machines there, get the names of the people who'd call in, and even listen to them to see what they'd say when they did call. He'd made a mistake about Heron Point, not checking up to find out it was closing down the day before. But even that had worked out all right, too, because Buzz Rodriguez, who took the call, hadn't remembered, either, until he was halfway there, so that he got to the basement only in time to get a crack on his head, too. All that, with the one slight mistake that hadn't mattered, had been carefully worked out and skillfully done.
The thing to do now was to sit tight; and there was one little trouble. He frowned down again at the small print of the stock market listings before he could catch himself. He had to get the thing he'd made the stupid mistake, his only serious mistake, of picking up off the dirt floor of Wernitz's cellar.
I don't know why the hell it worries me the way it does. He could say that again, the way he'd said it to himself when he'd almost nicked his jawbone shaving. The chances were a hundred to one, a thousand to one more likely, that nobody but himself knew anything about it, or could even connect him with Wernitz by means of it. Wernitz was close-mouthed, solitary to a psychotic degree. Afraid of the dark, blinding himself with glaring white lights, superstitious as a root-and clay-painted aborigine clutching on to his tribal talisman. But a talisman lost potency if other tribesmen knew about it. Even Achilles probably never went around bragging about his heel.
He quit reading the market reports and took another swallow of coffee. It was cold now, but he hardly noticed it. The palms of his hands had broken out in cold sweat. He unobtrusively wiped them off on the napkin in his lap. A hundred to one or a thousand to one, he had to get Wernitz's talisman back, the gold-washed lucky quarter that he could have known Wernitz would reach for when the lights went off, to hold in his hand to come down into the shadow-filled basement and put in a new fuse. It must have been in his hand, to fly out and land, glittering like an evil eye there on the dirt floor when the iron bar came down on the eggshell skull.
Why did I have to pick it up? Why didn't I leave it there?
He knew the answer to that, too. It had appealed to a kind of grisly sense of ironic relief, all of a sudden. It had even been grimly comic. "Who ever called this thing a lucky piece?" Wernitz had been almost fanatically dependent on it.
He took the last bite of his toast and the last sip of cold coffee. It was entirely by accident he'd learned about it himself. Some perfectly minor and unimportant piece of business that needed Wernitz's signature. He had said yes, in the clipped laconic way of speaking he had, and then put his hand in his pocket, taken something out, put it on the table under his hand and peered at it. He said yes again. Then, as he'd started to put it back in his pocket his elbow struck the chair and the thing fell on the floor. He went after it in a flash. It was the gilded quarter. Funny, all of it, in one way, but not in another. Not the way Wernitz's dry face had broken out with sweat as he retrieved it and put it back in his pocket. "No," he said then. "I don't sign." And he didn't. "Bad luck," he said. That finished it. And as a matter-of-fact, it had turned out that way. He'd been right for whatever wrong reason. And now the thing had dropped on another floor. If he believed in bad luck he might well break out into sweat again. He wiped his palms again on his napkin, though there was no need to. He was a damn fool for ever picking it up off the dirt floor, a worse fool for putting it in his trouser pocket just for the ironic devil of it-as well as to have it where nobody cleaning his desk or dresser drawer might come across it and wonder-but the worst stupidity of all was forgetting it and reaching in his pocket and dropping it in the slot machine-and never thinking about it until it came rolling along across the floor until Lois put her foot out and stepped on it.
I should have got hold of it then, he thought. He could easily have done it. If, in fact, he had simply said, "That's mine," nobody would ever have thought of it a second time. Instead, it had suddenly seemed a good idea to be rid of it, get it away from him so he wouldn't make another mistake of the same kind. It wasn't until it was in Janey's bag-or not even then, not until she burst into tears and was running past him up the steps-that he realized if the hundred-to-one chance came through it was the only thing that could tie him to Wernitz's house and the Wernitz murder.
His palms were clammy and moist again.
I've got to get it. As he got up from the breakfast table he knew that as clearly as he knew the sun was shining outside and that Paul M. Wernitz was dead, in the infinite darkness of eternity. Not that he was superstitious, even if the thing did seem suddenly imbued with a malignant animate perversity all its own. Otherwise how had it got into the tube or into the jackpot? That was another hundred-to-one chance. Why hadn't it gone down to the box behind, and lain there, safe and hidden, until a month later when they emptied the box, and nobody would be there to see it, or notice it, or remember anything about it? It looked like a conscious chain of animus, trying to get him all tangled up in what he knew was the perfect crime.
He moved his chair back from the table. Janey Blake had it now, and he had to get it. He couldn't afford to take any chances now, not even a hundred-to-one chance, or a thousand-to-one. He'd figured all the chances, prepared for them intelligently and carefully. This was an off chance he could never have foreseen. And he had to move fast. Not even Janey Blake, not Janey or anybody, was going to stand in his way. He knew more about Janey now. He was prepared to deal with her if he had to. What was Janey or Janey's life even when his own was hanging precariously in the balance?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Gus Blake got downstairs his breakfast was on the side of the gas stove keeping warm for him, the percolator in front of his place set on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth on the counter in front of the window. Janey and little Jane were through, their dishes washed and on the drainboard to dry. He could see them through the window in the backyard, Janey in a red sweater, the sleeves pushed up above her elbows, settling the little Dane in her white picket playpen with her sandbox, building blocks, and doll's house and the narrow street Janey had constructed among them so she could wheel her dolls around. She was bundled up in a blue snowsuit and white hood and mittens, rosy-cheeked and laughing in the crisp November morning. Gus watched her tumble and right herself, and set off to her busywork at the sandbox. He smiled and poured himself a cup of coffee.
I'm a hell of a father, he thought. It was supposed to be his job to get up in the morning while Janey got breakfast and put little Jane out in her yard so Janey could get on with her own busywork, but it had been over a month since he'd done it. He'd been sweating over the centennial edition half the nights, and now with the Wernitz business on top of all of it he'd been pressed even harder. And it wasn't only the Wernitz business. He poured another cup of coffee, got his plate from the stove, and sat down at the counter table, his eye still on the yard.
He was worried about Janey. She wasn't acting like herself at all, except when she was with the little Dane. She was all right when she was with her, but not with anybody else. Not with him, certainly. It had been slowly dawning on him for a week or so. He watched her catch the rubber ball little Jane threw from the sandbox and toss it back. She was shaking her head then, shivering, pretending she was cold, and running back toward the steps, laughing and waving back at the little Dane. Almost at the brick walk by the side of the house she stopped abruptly, looking down at the ground. Gus craned his neck to see what it was. He thought. Oh, hell. It was a bare damp place where the water from the downspout at the corner of the house collected, that he'd promised to fix and never got around to. It hadn't rained for three days. The little Dane wasn't likely to get her feet muddy or slip on it-not when she was in her pen, at least.
Janey was still looking at it. He saw her go over and pull four thin bamboo stakes out of a clump of chrysanthemums in the side border, and start back to the bare patch in the grass. She turned then and looked up at the house, at the upper window, before she looked at the kitchen window and saw him. He grinned and waved, but she didn't smile back. She just stood there a moment, tossed the stakes over on the border again, brushed her hands lightly together, and came on toward the back door, looking around casually as she came. Gus swore a little. He'd get somebody to come and fix the blasted drainpipe and patch up the triple-blasted lawn if that was what she was sore about. Or he'd go do it himself. There was probably grass seed in the garden box in the basement. This was the one place he'd ever lived in or worked in where what you needed any given moment was right there, where it was supposed to be.
Now if Janey could only read and write, she'd be a hell of a lot more use around the Gazette than Lois Maynard or anybody else he could think of just offhand. He watched her run back and pick up the little Dane, who'd pitched over with her doll buggy and was yelling bloody murder one second and laughing her head off the next. He sat down again and looked at his watch. It was time to be shoving, but he had to talk to Janey. She'd left the playpen and gone down toward the end of the yard, just sort of mooning around, he thought irritably; it wasn't quite the weather to be out looking for crocuses or whatever, with only a light sweater on. Then suddenly it struck Gus Blake that she wasn't coming in. Something else struck him at the same time, a non sequitur in one sense, sequitur as hell in another. It was something Lois Maynard had said as they'd got to her house when he drove home with her at two-thirty that morning. He could still hear her saying it.
"Gus-I don't want to louse up any of your illusions, precious, but hasn't it ever occurred to you that maybe your Janey just a little tiny bit regrets not marrying Orvie Rogers instead of you? She'd have a cook and maids and clothes and she wouldn't have to get up and cook your breakfast and wash your clothes. You're wonderful, of course, dear, and amusing and terribly intelligent-but it's all on a special level that Janey must find pretty rotten dull at times-if you don't mind my saying so. After all, she's young and she could easily like to have a little fun once in a while. But I'm sorry, angel. I shouldn't have said it. But you are a little self-centered, aren't you? I mean-"
He could hear himself, too. "Janey and I get on all right, Lois-thanks just the same." Stiff like, putting Miss Maynard right back in her own place. He could hear her laugh as she'd bent over to kiss him lightly on the cheek.
"Okay, darling, You'll find out. Everybody else knows it. And sometime you're going to want to kiss me good night-and will I let you?
I sure will. We're both stinkers at heart, dear. Well, good night, Gus. Thanks for bringing me home."
He got up, took his dishes over to the sink, and turned on the hot water. He stood there for a moment, looking down at them. There was a lot in it. Somehow, he'd realized it all a long time ago, in fact, when he married Janey. The idea of permanence had not really been part of it, not that he'd thought about it rationally in any such terms but because impermanence was something he just naturally took for granted. You had a job in New York in February and in San Francisco in March, and in May you were in London helping cover a war that was knocking everything people had thought was permanent to very small bits and to hell with it. Lois Maynard had come as near to the idea of permanence as he'd ever particularly thought of, during the war and just after it, when permanence in your personal nonmaterial life had taken on a peculiar importance. But Lois had cured him of that quaint idea.
He put his dishes on the drain board with Janey's and little Jane's. It wasn't until Lois sounded off the night before that he'd thought much about any of it again. Or after he'd left her, rather, and started to walk home and decided to go down to the paper and write up the" Wernitz deal instead. It was one of the nice things about a newspaper. Everything was so damned current. You didn't have time to worry about the past, or the future-or even your own personal present. He went into the pantry and stood there, listening, to see if, now he was out of the window and out of the kitchen, Janey would come on in. And after a few minutes she did. He heard her shut the door and stop at the sink, surprised, probably, that he'd cleared and washed his dishes. Then she came on toward the pantry.
"Oh," she said. She stopped, her eyes wide as they always were, but different, as if she had pulled an opaque blue curtain down behind them. "Oh. I thought you'd probably gone. You must have a lot to do, don't you? I'm going down to Mother's as soon as I get the beds made."
"Janey." As he stepped toward her he trod on the loose board in front of the pantry door. It creaked loudly. Her body tensed and he saw her fists clench tightly. She was nervous as a cat. As he stepped off the board it creaked again. "I'm sorry," he said. "I really will get a carpenter to come fix that." He'd said it dozens of times, but she'd always laughed. She didn't even smile now.
"You've said that before. But it's all right. It doesn't matter."
It made it harder for him to go on, but he did.
"Janey, if I've done anything peculiarly and especially obnoxious to you, I'm sorry," he said seriously. "I'm sorry I was so late last night, and I'm sorry I wasn't up in time to drive your mother home this morning."
He could hear the courthouse clock strike nine. Half an hour late now. He was always at his desk by eight-thirty. He saw Janey's eyes move off, listening to it, too, and it seemed to him listening for something else. The light flush that stained her cheeks when he mentioned her mother faded. He looked at her intently. "Your mother did stay all night, didn't she?"
She flushed again, and hesitated, moistening her lips. Then she turned her blue eyes up to his. "No, I told a lie," she said warmly. "She went back home as soon as I came in."
He stared at her. "What the-" He stopped himself abruptly. What was the matter with him? He was always getting sore at somebody lately. And Janey was getting sore, too. Sore at him. That was something that had never happened before. "I'm sorry," he said.
"It doesn't matter. But I want you to quit saying, 'What the hell,' to me. Just quit it! I won't stand for it anymore. And quit saying you'll have the floorboard fixed or the drainpipe fixed, or any of the other things you're always going to do and never think of anymore. Because it doesn't matter. I don't want you to do anything around here. All I want you to do is go away and go on about your own business, and let me go on about mine!" , She could hear herself saying things she didn't mean and didn't care about, because she was angry and wounded still from last night, and bitterly resentful. But she did mean part of it. She did want him to get out of the house before the police came. She had to get him out before they came. This was her business. She'd started it without him, and waited desperately for him to come and take it out of her hands, and he came and brought Lois Maynard and was cross and rude to her. Lois was rude and offensive. "It's her dining room, isn't it?"-raising her eyebrows, belittling Janey's taste and Janey's pride-and then he'd gone off with Lois, and stayed until five o'clock in the morning. And he could go again. He could go back to Lois and leave her to go on taking care of herself and little Jane. She could do it very well. She didn't need anyone to stand around and act as if she were a stupid little fool, and get sore at her because she was trying to do her job the best she could.
She tried to listen out the back way when the police came. She didn't want him ever to know what had happened the night before. He could go away and stay until five o'clock with Lois. Let him go to her now. She didn't want him there anymore. The police would be there soon, to fingerprint the fuse box in the basement. And there was the thing she'd just discovered out in the damp bare patch near the brick walk.
It was a large clear footprint made by someone who was running. The sole of the shoe was quite deep and the heel barely showed at all. It was headed toward the end of the garden. Even if there weren't fingerprints in the basement, a footprint would help. But somehow, during the night, either asleep or awake, she had become convinced of the importance of finding out who had come into the house. It was someone who wanted something. It wasn't the few bits of silver on the sideboard, and she had no jewelry anybody would want. It had to be something else-and there was only one thing she had that was of any value. She'd thought it over and over again in the night. That was little Jane.
She caught her breath now and held it for an instant before she turned and ran out into the kitchen. It hadn't occurred to her until that moment that if they'd come into the house to take little Jane they could just as easily come into the yard-but little Jane was there, playing in the sandbox.
"Janey! What is the matter with you?"
As Gus followed her into the kitchen she flashed around at him, her eyes hot, her lips trembling. "Just go, will you? Just go and leave me alone!"
He stood there a moment, a little dazed and unbelieving. This was incredible. This wasn't Janey at all. It was someone he'd never known or heard of. It was as if the little Dane's white lop-eared rabbit had suddenly turned into a snarling wildcat at the foot of the crib. And as he took a step backward to retire with whatever dignity he could manage, she turned around and flew out into the yard. He saw her at the playpen, turned, and went back through the pantry. As he stepped on the creaking board again, a wave of anger flashed up in him. Drainpipes, bare spots in the grass, loose boards, By God, he'd fix one of them anyway. He opened the basement door, banged it shut behind him, and went downstairs. The garden box was in the corner by the area door. He yanked it open. Lime, fertilizer, grass seed. He picked up the seed and took the rake off the hook behind the box. He could hear Janey upstairs in the kitchen, and he waited until he heard her go through the pantry and dining room and start upstairs with little Jane. He opened the area door and went up to the ground level. A black boy with a bamboo leaf rake was coming around the side of the house.
"You want the leaves raked up?"
"Yeah," Gus said. "Here. Take this." He handed him the box of grass seed. "See that patch there? Rake it up and seed it. If you know anybody that can fix a drainspout, tell 'em to come and fix it and send me the bill."
He went back down the area steps into the basement, hung up his rake, closed the garden box, and went upstairs. The hinge on the door whined as he closed and latched it. The loose board creaked as he went into the dining room. He took his overcoat and hat off the chair and started out. At the front door he turned. Maybe there was still something he could say to Janey. He looked up the stairwell. She was standing up there, holding to the rail, looking down, her face frozen into the most extraordinary mask.
"Janey-for God's sake, what-"
She drew her body erect and taut, "Oh," she said. "It's you. I-I thought you'd gone. Please-please go." She turned away slowly and disappeared toward little Jane's room.
For a moment Gus stood there, not knowing what to do. He took off his coat and put it and his hat on the chair. He couldn't leave her like this. As he turned to go up the stairs, he heard someone come onto the porch and heard the doorbell ring through the dining room from the pantry. And heard Janey's footsteps on the top floor, running out into the hall. He went to the door and opened it. He said, "Oh. Oh, hello, Orvie."
Orvie Rogers's mouth dropped open a little. "Oh," he said. "I-I thought you'd gone to the office. I-I just stopped by to speak to Janey."
For a moment Gus stood there motionless. It was only a moment, but it seemed to him a very long time indeed before he could unloosen his hand from the doorknob and get his vocal cords in a fit order to function sensibly and audibly. It evidently seemed a long time to Orvie Rogers. He swallowed before he said, "It-it wasn't important anyway, Gus. I-I'll come back later. It was just something-"
"Not at all," Gus said. He could hear the false cheery cordiality in his voice and knew he was sounding like a third-rate aristocrat in a bad movie. "Not at all," he said again. "Come in. I was just leaving." He got the doorknob out of his hand, got back into the hall, and picked up his hat and coat again. "I was just shoving off."
He managed to move toward the stairs. She was up there, looking expectantly over the banister rail, one hand up, breathlessly holding on to the neck of her red sweater. He caught the briefest glimpse of her, not having meant to look up, not wanting to see her caught out. Oh, God! he thought; not Janey! The saliva that flushed into his mouth was bitter as wormwood and gall. He swallowed it down with an effort that wrenched and churned the food in his stomach, tasting it sour and bilious again. No wonder she was so damned anxious to get him out of the house. He controlled himself deliberately, sick at himself for being able to make his voice sound as if everything was swell. Everything perfectly fine. "It's Orvie, Janey."
"Orvie?" He could see her swallow and moisten her lips. "What-what does he want, Gus?"
He was rather proud of himself then. In a way. He sounded fine as he said, "I don't know. Why don't you come on down and ask him? I've got to shove off. So long." He started to the door. "Or why don't you go on up to the living room, Orvie? I'll see you later."
"Okay," Orvie Rogers said.
Gus closed the front door and went down the walk. Or he assumed he did. He found himself at his desk a little while later. At least he guessed it was his desk. Swede Carlson was sitting beside it waiting for him, talking to Lois Maynard.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"Morning!" Lois Maynard's cheerful lilt gave his stomach another wrench. She made it sound as if they'd just had breakfast together but don't ever let anybody else know our beautiful, lovely secret. One colorless eye of Swede Carlson flickered. Gus felt the other cocked bleakly on him as he hung his overcoat on the hook by the washbowl in the corner and stuck his hat on top of it. The hell with both of them. He turned back. Swede Carlson looked at him disinterestedly.
"Thought you came back and did your story last night," he said.
"That's right," Gus answered curtly. "Got anything to add to it? I thought you were going home and go to bed."
Oh, oh, Lois Maynard thought. He's mad about something. I bet little sheep-eyes gave him one hell of a going-over this morning.
She had a bright picture of Janey trailing lugubriously around in her old yellow bathrobe and wool-lined slippers, no lipstick, tow hair unkempt, red-nosed, probably weeping into his coffee cup. She caught a quick glimpse of herself, crisply tailored and neat, in the cracked mirror over the washbowl, and smiled at it before she moved around and perched on the corner of his desk, looking casual but business-like, waiting for orders. Chief Carlson was cutting something off an oblong brown block. She shuddered inside a little. She hadn't known people still chewed tobacco.
"I did go home, just like I said," Carlson said placidly. He closed his knife and put it and the plug back in his pocket. "But I got up this morning. Still haven't got anythin' to add, not right now. The boy's still out, over at the hospital." He put on his hat. "I'm just makin' a few calls. Routine checkup, I guess you people call it."
His bleak gaze was still fixed on Gus. If it meant anything, Gus Blake, embroiled in his own special kettle of bitterly simmering oil, was missing it. He jerked his chair up to the desk.
"Then why don't you get on and make 'em?" he said offensively. "Tell me about it later. But just get the hell out of here, will you? You, too, Lois. Both of you. Clear out and shut the door. Cut out all the yakkety-yak, for just five minutes. I've got to work."
"Thought maybe I'd like to see that editorial I hear you wrote," Carlson said equably. "Understand you-"
"Okay, okay. I'm not pulling it, if that's what you want to know. I'm letting it ride just like it is. Lois'll get it for you. Now get out, will you? Get out before I throw you out."
He heard the door close as they went into Lois Maynard's small office next to his, and waited a moment before he stretched his head up and back as far as he could, gritting his teeth, staring up at the stains on the grimy ceiling. He was sick as a horse. If there was only someplace he could go and get the hell out of here. Get drunk, he thought; go out and get lousy stinking drunk and just forget about the whole business. He jerked his head forward again and pushed his chair violently back, got up, started toward his overcoat in the corner, stopped, and came slowly back. He was drunk already-or his stomach felt as if he had been drunk. It was churning now; it had the classic dimensions of a first-class hangover. Anyway, getting polluted and going through it all over again wasn't going to help. It never had and it never would.
He ripped his handkerchief out and blew his nose. In a minute or two he was going to bawl like the little Dane. It was going to be the second time in his life he'd wanted to cry, the first since he'd been in the hospital plane flying into Pearl from Iwo Jima. And bawling didn't help any more than getting boiled did. He blew his nose again, and sat down in his chair. For get it, Blake. Just take it-socko, wham-take it and shut up.
He stuck a sheet of paper in his typewriter and stared at it until it gradually came into focus and the room gathered itself together, everything coming back into solid form and settling itself firmly where he was used to seeing it. It settled back, but it was all changed. All small-time, all down at the heel. A rattling typewriter on a rattletrap desk in the back room of a run-down building that ought to have been condemned before the Civil War. What the hell was he doing there? What the hell was he doing sitting in a room with Managing Editor printed on the door-the G and E rubbed off so that it read Managin ditor? What was he doing there, anyway? Grubbing away at a hundred bucks a week on the understanding that if he pulled the paper out of the red four years he could buy a controlling interest in it over the next four years at the appraised value the day he came to it. It was all funny as hell, now he was seeing it with the fish scales off his eyes. Whatever-But that brought him to Janey again, and he wasn't going to think about Janey. That had been his first mistake. Blake. Blake the lion in the street, doing a favor because he had a little time to spare.
A copy boy kicking the door brought him to sharply. "Come in!" he bellowed. "And next time knock! Don't kick the damn door down, you little-" He swung around, hearing himself and seeing the astonished boy. "Sorry," he said quickly. "Sorry. I take it all back. Just put it in the basket, will you, Ty?"
"Here it is." Lois Maynard pulled the proof sheet of the day's editorial off the holder by her desk and glanced at it again. It was how she knew Gus must have come back to the office to work after he'd left her at her door a little before three o'clock. The first few lines under the head Suckers had been changed.
Slot machine operators come and go. They go quietly sometimes. Sometimes they're murdered before they get a chance to go quietly. Like Doc Wernitz out at Newton's Corner last night.
The suckers who play them go on forever. The rest of it was the same. She handed it over to Swede Carlson.
"You know, Chief," she said, sitting down at her desk, "I don't think Gus has the faintest idea that his wife is in such a mess over the slot machines."
She pulled her chair up abruptly to cover her own surprise. Was that why he was so all-fired mad? It hadn't occurred to her until that second. That was the trouble with the egotistic approach. She had simply taken for granted that the row between Gus and Janey must have been over her. And row there had been-she knew Gus too well to make any mistake about that-but what she'd just thought of was much more likely. She looked at Carlson. He had his horn-rimmed reading glasses on, concentrated on the editorial. She pulled forward a bunch of rewrite stuff the boy had put on her desk while she was talking to him in Gus's office, and glanced at the top sheet. It was the report from the blotter at the city police station for the twenty-four preceding hours, and never very interesting. Today there was a scribbled note clipped to it. She picked it up and read it.
"Lois-Guess Blake will want to write up his own four-alarm burglary." The reporter's initials were penciled at the bottom.
She read it again, and read the story as it had been written leaving the Blakes's four-alarm burglary out. Then she looked over at Chief Carlson to ask him, and changed her mind. He was county police, anyway, and this was something that needed a little time to think about. She put the story back on her desk face down and took a cigarette out of the box in front of her. Carlson was just about to the end of the editorial now, and he'd be gone in a minute.
He put the proof sheets down on the desk. "So Mrs. Blake is in a mess with the slot machines, is she?" he asked soberly. "Why do you say that, Miss Maynard?"
Lois was too surprised to think of anything at all to say for an instant. "Oh," she said. "Why, I-I supposed you knew it. Everybody in town seems to-except Gus. I'm really sorry. I wouldn't have peeped, but I thought that was the reason you were giving Gus such a fish-eyed stare in there. Let's just skip it, shall we? It would make it frightfully awkward for me."
A bleak smile lighted Carlson's heavy face a little. "You mean you think maybe, because Mrs. Blake's lost say a couple of hundred-"
He stopped. "More than a couple of hundred, is it?"
"I must be horribly transparent, Chief." Lois laughed. But you're right. It's rather more than that."
"A lot of people are more transparent than they think, Miss Maynard," Carlson said. "But say she was in the hole a couple of thousand, even, you won't think I think Gus Blake went out there and slugged Doc Wernitz on that account, now, will you, Miss Maynard? Maybe I'm dumber 'n I think I am, but I'm not that dumb. There's another thing maybe you could tell me. About this deal Gus has got with your father. About the paper, I mean."
Lois looked at him a moment. She said, "Thanks for telling me something. I supposed they had some kind of-deal. I don't know what it is. Perhaps you'd better ask my father. Or Gus. What's that got to do with Mr. Wernitz getting murdered?"
Swede Carlson shook his head. "Nothin', Miss Maynard. Nothin' in particular. I just wondered, that's all. I'm interested in a lot of things, right now. What Wernitz did with all the dough he made, for instance. Whether he left a will. What made him decide to get out of town. Who he talked to about it. Who'd profit by havin' him dead. A lot of things like that, Miss Maynard."
He took his hat off the corner of her desk. "I guess you're pretty new on this murder business," he said. "You were pretty upset, last night, it looked like to me."
He's watching me. I'm transparent. She kept her eyes wide and interested, not blank, fixed on his face.
"I'm very new to it. It did upset me."
"That's what I figured." Swede Carlson nodded his understanding. "Well, I'll tell you, Miss Maynard. I've been chief here in Smith County for fifteen years next April. I've seen a lot of people killed, one way and another. When men kill each other, it's when they get juiced up and blood-mad. It's quick, then-quick and easy for the cops, too. Or a little fella can get scared of a big fella and not see any other road out. Or jealousy. Sometimes one fella thinks another one's hangin' around his wife too much."
He shrugged his heavy shoulders as if that was just one of those things nobody could ever do anything about.
"But by and large, Miss Maynard, when one fella sets out and does a neat premeditated killin', it's because the other fella could put him in jail for swindlin' him out of somethin'-money, property, somethin' the fella stole from him-and the funny thing, it's not so much him keepin' the money, or the property, of the fella he stole it from as it is him keepin' his own reputation. You know, Miss Maynard, I figure most killin's that are premeditated, like the one we've got here, come because people are just plain cowards."
The bleak eyes rested steadily on her.
"If you're rich you're afraid to lose your money and your reputation. But if you had to take your choice, it's always your reputation. That's the most important, just the same as if you were poor. I guess reputation's mighty important, no matter how you look at it."
Chief Carlson went over to the door. "Well, I guess I got to go. I better be thinkin' about my own reputation. If I don't get this business cleared up, I'll be out on a rotten limb for fair. Ain't often I get a chance to talk to a real intelligent lady." He opened the door. "Tell Gus I'll be back. I'd give him time to cool down a little first, if I was you."
Lois Maynard sat motionless in her chair for several moments. Keeping her face rigid as it was she pulled open her desk drawer and reached for the mirror under the pile of papers in it. She held it up in front of her. Transparent. He'd said people were more transparent than they knew-but she'd known while he was still sitting there how transparent she'd become. The mirror only proved what her dry, slightly parted lips and the strained feeling along her eyelids had already told her. The rouge stood out in queer patches on her cheeks. She moistened her lips, blinked her eyes, and put the mirror in the drawer again.
He was talking about her father, of course. All the time he'd been pretending to talk about his experience with murder, he'd really been talking about John Maynard. She tried to think when it was she'd first become aware of it, but everything he'd said was so mixed up in her mind that she couldn't think back over it and say when it was she knew that was what he was telling her. She got up and paced back and forth in the little room. Her father-her father who'd told her at breakfast that it was best to keep her little nose out of things that were none of her business. She flung herself into the armchair again. But that was absurd. Her father had been at home. He was out in the pantry seeing about the liquor for the party when she got there at half past five. When was Wernitz killed? She caught the proof off the rack and ran her eye quickly down Gus's story. Between five forty-five and seven. The service mechanic had phoned the police at twelve minutes to ten. According to the story, he had told them when they got out there and found him down in the basement with Wernitz's body that he had come back from a call at 6:35 approximately, and found Wernitz dead, after he had tried to turn on the lights in the office and gone down to fix the fuse.
Five forty-five and seven. Lois put the proof sheet down. At a quarter to seven he was in the library, dressed for dinner, talking to her about Janey's checks. It was impossible for him to have got out to Newton's Corner, killed Wernitz and-she stopped and clenched her jaws, her cheeks flaming hot all of a sudden. How dared she even consider anything so stupid and revolting. It was like blasphemy even to think of it. Swede Carlson had better watch out who he was talking about.
She gave her head a violent shake and looked at her watch. As soon as she got through the stuff in front of her, she'd call her father up and ask him to meet her at the Sailing Club for lunch. Never. Never in all her life had she heard anything so foul and revolting, underhanded and positively rotten. She picked up the sheet with the police reports on it, and the note attached. The next thing, they'd be saying John Maynard had burgled the Blake house. She got up, went over to the door to Gus's office, and wrenched it open.
"Smitty says do you want to write the-"
She had got that much of it out before she saw Gus was not at his desk. A sheet of blank paper was sticking out of his typewriter-blank, but in too crooked for anybody to write on it. She glanced over at the corner by the washbasin. His hat and coat were gone.
"Where in the world-"
She turned quickly as the Gazette's crime reporter, who also covered the financial district, consisting of the three banks on Courthouse Square, and the industrial district, which was the Rogers plant across Carson Creek, came in the door.
"What do I do about the Blakes's burglar?" he inquired testily. "They're going over to fingerprint the joint. Do I cover it or does-"
T don't know. If he'd wanted it in, I guess he'd have said so. He didn't, so I guess he doesn't. Anyway, he's gone. I don't know where he is. Where's his secretary? Ask her, don't ask me."
"She's home sick with a cold in the head."
"Then skip it," Lois Maynard snapped. "He's probably gone home himself if the police are there."
"Keep your shirt on." He started to close the door. "It's okay with me. I don't know what's the matter with everybody this morning."
"Wait, Smitty." She came out of a red fog and started functioning again. "What is this four-alarm burglary? What happened?"
"Oh, nothing much," Smitty said indifferently. "Just a guy in the house and Mrs. Blake scared him out. I just figured maybe there was an angle. The guy switched the lights out in the basement, like the Wernitz deal. But I guess Blake got that as easy as I did. I thought of telling Swede Carlson, but he was in there, so I guess Gus already told him. I've got to do the market report now. You can get winter kale for fifteen cents a bunch at Tony Modesto's when you put your two bucks down on Carter's Fancy-he's a cinch for the three-o'clock at Bowie."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lois waited until the door shut, closing out the roar of the presses. Her teeth bit down over her full lower lip. So that was it; that was why Janey was downstairs at half past two in the morning. But why hadn't Gus said anything about it to Carlson? Why was he keeping it out of the paper? She lighted another cigarette, went over to the soot-stained window, and looked down through the coarse screen grating at the garbage cans in the area that belonged to the lunchroom next door, without being conscious of them for the first time in six months. Unless-Was it possible Gus didn't know anything about it? She shrugged the idea off at once. Janey would hardly miss the chance to be a heroine. Some things didn't make sense. In fact, she thought suddenly, nothing made sense. She saw the garbage cans then and smelled the stale grease and dishwater seeping in around the windowpane, or imagined she did, and went back to her desk. If she got the paper out by herself today, she'd have a talking-point with her father. She sat down and got to work, laughed suddenly. The idea of getting him to give her the paper to save himself income tax must have been developing quietly in her subconscious mind all night. She remembered how it had occurred to her at the party while she was waiting for Gus to come. She'd settled for Gus, then. Today she rather thought she'd have them both.
She wheeled her typewriter around and set to work feeding out her own copy until she came across a precis Gus had written for a box on the front page. It was headed with a large question mark. Under it was: Who murdered Doc Wernitz?
She read it intently.
The following are the known facts about Paul M. Wernitz.
He was sixty-one years old.
He was born in Czechoslovakia.
He came to the United States in 1909 at the age of twenty.
He was naturalized in Tacoma, Washington, in 1919.
He went to Carson City, Nevada, in 1921 and worked there in a gambling establishment, buying a controlling interest in it in 1926.
He came to Smith County in 1931, organized the Smith County Recreation Company Incorporated in 1936.
He bought the Chapman farm at Newton's Corner in 1935.
He lived alone in the main farmhouse.
At the time of his murder last night, the former kitchen wing of the farmhouse was being occupied by Ralph (Buzz) Rodriguez, Wernitz's assistant and service mechanic.
He employed five other assistants.
He kept the lights on in the house from sundown to sunup from a pathological fear of the dark.
He employed no household help.
He is reputed to be a wealthy man.
He was known, though not generally, to be closing his house and leaving Smith County.
Those are the known facts about Doc Wernitz. These are the known facts surrounding his murder as this paper got them from the Chief of the Smith County Constabulary, Henry L. (Swede) Carlson.
Doc Wernitz was expected to return to Newton's Corner yesterday at 5:30 P.M.
At 5:15 P.M. Buzz Rodriguez turned the lights on in the main house, except for the old farmhouse parlor, which Wernitz used as his office and kept locked.
Buzz Rodriguez, George Jeffers, Franklin Thomas, and James Mason, service mechanics, were in the downstairs office of the kitchen wing at 5:00 P.M. waiting as usual to go on service calls.
Buzz Rodriguez's story, as coherently as the police are able to make it out, is as follows:
He was not on duty until 8:00 P.M. but he was there at the house because a girl he expected to see had to work all day. Three calls for service came between 5:00 and 5:20. They were from widely separated parts of the county. A fourth call came at 5:24 from Heron Point. Buzz Rodriguez left a note under Wernitz's door and took the call. He returned to the house at 6:20. The lights were not on in Wernitz's office. He went in the house and saw the office door open. He tried the lights, found them out of order, and went down in the basement to replace the fuse. There he either fell or was struck on the head.
He is now in the General Hospital with severe concussion, under police guard until Chief Carlson can talk to him.
The three other service mechanics returned from their calls sometime after eight o'clock. Those calls were false alarms. The proprietors of the establishments denied they put such calls through. Four other calls were made after eight o'clock.
Buzz Rodriguez called the police at 10:02 P.M. and reported Wernitz's murder.
The police say he sounded excited and incoherent.
They arrived at the house at 10:09 and found Buzz Rodriguez in the cellar with Wernitz's body.
The fuse controlling the lights in Wernitz's office had been unscrewed and was lying on the cellar floor.
The iron bar murderer used to crush Wernitz's skull was lying bloodstained beside him.
Buzz Rodriguez collapsed and was found injured, by Chief Carlson, at 12:42 while awaiting questioning under technical arrest.
Who killed Doc Wernitz? The Smithville Gazette will pay a reward of $1,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Doc Wernitz's murderer.
Lois Maynard read it through, turned back to the first half, and read it through again. She sat looking down at it. Gus didn't know anything about Doc Wernitz. He'd told her so on the way out to Newton's Corner. Nobody knew anything about him. Her father had told her that. He hadn't known Wernitz was a Czech, when he'd come to America, or anything about him at all. She was still wondering about it, slightly dazed, when her door opened.
"Hi, Lois. How about some lunch?"
She looked up, startled. "Oh, hello, Dorsey. How are you? I'd love it. Is it lunchtime?"
She looked at her watch, surprised, and then glanced through the door into Gus's office. He still wasn't back. She was still in a semi-bewildered fog. How and where had Gus got so much dope about Wernitz-and when? That was even more amazing.
"I wish banking was that fascinating," Dorsey Syms said, grinning at her. "Or maybe it's the food at our house. I always know damned well when it's pushing twelve."
"I usually do, too." Lois laughed. "But this really is fascinating. Look at it. Did you know this or any of it about Doc Wernitz?"
Dorsey propped himself on the edge of her desk and took the proof. "All I knew about him was he was a handsome customer at the Smithville Trust Company," he said. "Carlson was in this morning. Boy, do I wish I had the dough that old buzzard Wernitz had." He read the two columns of the box, and shook his head. "I didn't know any of this, except the Newton's Corner end of it. I always understood nobody knew where he came from. Or anything about him, till he got here." He tossed the sheet back on the desk. "Lunch?"
"Oh-" Lois remembered abruptly. "I was going to call Dad and ask him to take me down to the Sailing Club." Her yellow-green eyes smouldered as she thought of what Chief Carlson had really been saying to her.
Dorsey Syms grinned and shook his head. "He can't afford it, Lois. Not today he can't."
"What do you mean?"
She controlled herself sharply. She hadn't meant to sound alarmed, but she did.
"Hey, I didn't mean it! All I meant was that he's through being generous for the day." He laughed and got Lois's coat off the hanger behind the door. "I didn't know he was that fond of our Janey."
Lois pushed her chair back. "Will you tell me what you're talking about?"
"It's hush stuff, Lois. Confidential as hell. He covered Janey's overdraft for her this morning. Three hundred and twenty bucks' worth of nice new overdraft. You should have seen Fergie. He almost had tears in his eyes, his secretary told me."
He helped her on with her coat.
"I think it's swell. I just wonder why he did it, is all."
"Why shouldn't he?" She took her compact out of her bag and powdered her nose. Why on earth had he done that? What had happened? What earthly reason "Well, don't snap at me, Lois," Dorsey said equably. "It's none of my business. All I was wondering was what Carlson's going to think. Your father isn't a noted philanthropist. Or didn't you know that? Or am I wrong? Anyway, it's a bank secret. I guess I shouldn't have told you. For Pete's sake, don't tell him I told you. I've got trouble enough on my hands as it is."
"Why? What trouble have you got?" Not that she cared. She had trouble of her own she'd rather worry about just now.
"That's why I'm taking you to lunch, baby. I need an alibi!"
He grinned at her as she looked at him blankly. "You-you need an alibi?"
"That's what I said. Come on to lunch and I'll explain it."
Her pulse quickened as she snapped her bag shut and took her gloves out of her pocket.
"Fine," she said. "Come on."
If Dorsey Syms needed an alibi, she was thinking quickly, she'd be glad to help him. If her father needed one, then Dorsey's could crash. The minute the police knew-There were people Lois would rather have thrown to the wolves. Dorsey Syms was the only one begging for it. She smiled brightly at him as they went through the press rooms.
She stopped just before they got to the door to wave over to the dry old man in his shirt sleeves at the desk marked City Editor, in the corner by the front window. "Goodbye, Ed, I'm going out to lunch." Dorsey opened the long plate-glass door into the narrow vestibule. He stood aside, holding it open for someone coming in the storm door from the street.
"Cheese it, the cops!" He grinned back at Lois, and at the tall thin man who had stopped and was holding the storm door open for them to come on through. "Raiding the joint, Bill? You know my cousin Lois Maynard? This is Lieutenant Williams, Lois."
"Oh," Lois said. The smile faded from her eyes. "Of course." She recognized him now he'd taken off his green felt hat. "How are you? Is there anything I can do for you before I go out? Gus Blake isn't here."
Lieutenant Williams stepped back into the street.
"No, it was Gus I wanted to see," he said. "I've just been down to his place. About that entry he had last night. Where is he, do you know? I'd like to get in touch with him."
"I don't know where he is," Lois said.
She looked over at the empty space along the Reserved line in front of the Gazette building. "His car's gone. Maybe he's gone with Chief Carlson out to the Wernitz house. But I don't know, Lieutenant. He came in this morning and left right away. I assumed he'd gone home."
And if he hadn't, she was thinking, maybe he really didn't know about the entry, as Williams called it. Even Gus wouldn't be that casual about his possessions-she hoped. She turned to her cousin.
"You haven't seen him?"
"Not since he was in the bank. That was about ten-thirty. I didn't get a chance to talk to him."
The detective put his hat back on. "It's funny he wouldn't stick around," he said. "Around home, I mean." He seemed more puzzled than perturbed. "You were with him, I understand, Miss Maynard. When he got home last night. Didn't he seem to think there might be some connection between the entry and the Wernitz deal? I just told Swede Carlson. He hadn't heard about it. That's the trouble with this county-city setup. Your right hand don't know anything about your left one till the trail's stone cold. What did Gus say about it, Miss Maynard?"
"He didn't say a thing," Lois said. "Nothing at all. I don't think he knew anything about it. Mrs. Blake didn't mention it while I was there. And Gus certainly wouldn't have gone off and left her and the kid and taken me home if he'd known anything about it."
Lieutenant Williams looked at her.
"Yeah," he said slowly. "Carlson and I both thought it looked a little sort of-well, sort of-"
He let it hang there without saying sort of what, perhaps because he saw the large figure of the county chief coming up the street toward the Gazette office.
"Well, if you see him tell him Swede and I are looking for him, will you?"
He tipped his hat perfunctorily and walked off to meet Carlson.
Dorsey glanced at his cousin. Her cheeks were flushed a little. She went quickly across the sidewalk to her car and opened the door before he could reach it.
"Why don't you lay off Janey, Lois?" he inquired calmly as he stepped in after her and pulled the door shut.
"Why don't you mind your own business, Dorsey?"
She jammed her foot down on the starter. The engine roared. Dorsey saw Carlson and Williams look around at them, and go on talking again. Swede Carlson, his shoulder propped against the telephone pole on the curb, his overcoat open, both hands in his trouser pockets, leaned his head to one side and spat magnificently into the gutter. Dorsey saw that Lois was too annoyed to see that the chief of the county police was still looking at the shining green convertible, if Lieutenant Williams was not.
"I'd like to know just where the hell Gus has gone," she snapped as she pulled out and into the stream of market-day traffic. "And another thing I'd like to know is just where he got all that inside dope on Wernitz. And what he went to the bank for. He never goes to the bank."
Dorsey Syms reached in his pocket and got out a cigarette. He reached forward and pressed in the lighter on the dash.
"So I ought to mind my own business," he remarked equably.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Janey put the last of little Jane's things in the blue canvas suitcase and snapped the lid shut. She hurried, listening breathlessly down the stairwell, starting at every rattle and shiver of the house as a truck jolted by in the street, and the creeping sounds in the hot-water pipes up the wall.
"Put Flopsie in, too, Mummy." Little Jane came over with the white lop-eared rabbit in her arms. Janey started to refuse, and remembered. She mustn't let little Jane see she was frightened and nervous.
"Of course," she said. "We wouldn't leave Flopsie. Who'd give Flopsie her lunch?"
"And Daddy. Who'll give Daddy his lunch, Mummy?"
Janey's throat tightened. "Daddy'll get his lunch downtown. And we've got to hurry, sweetie. What else shall we take?" She tried not to look down at the troubled blue eyes in the round, sober little face turned up to her. "Daddy loves to eat downtown. Hurry, now. We'll take your coat and leggings downstairs and put them on down there, and then we'll get a taxi and go see Grandma. I'll take the suitcase down and you stay here till I come. Here's your book. Look at the pictures till I come back."
She took the suitcase out into the hall. Her own was already packed and waiting at the foot of her bed. She listened a moment, went along to the front room, picked up her hat and coat, and looked hastily around. She didn't want to leave anything behind that she'd need and have to come back for, and she had to hurry. She had to' get little Jane out of the house. Lieutenant Williams had been there, with his camera and fingerprint powder, soberly going all over the basement and the pantry and dining room, and all over the backyard. The footprint was gone. She hadn't even mentioned it to him. The black boy was already frightened at the way she'd run out when she saw him seeding the grass where it had been; there was no use for the police to start blaming him. The way they'd moved around and talked when they thought she wasn't listening had destroyed the last poignant hope that somehow none of it had really happened, or that, if it had, it was all over now and there was nothing to worry about anymore. But even if it hadn't, she had to get out anyway. The sickening terror in her stomach when she'd heard the basement hinge whine and the pantry board creak was almost more than she could bear, even when she found it was only Gus. He must have thought she was crazy, if he thought about it at all. Or that she was just stupider than usual. If he hadn't thought already she was being stupidly contrary, he'd never have made the fuss about the grass patch and the floorboard. And she'd never really cared about either of them. It had always been a joke before.
She looked over the top of her dressing table, pulled open the drawer, and saw her evening bag there. The sleeping pills-she remembered suddenly. The orange capsules she'd taken from Mrs. Maynard's table. They were still there. The one she'd dropped and Lois had given back to her was halfway to the river by now, or wherever Smithville's sewage went. She took the yellow tissue with the rest of them in it, went to the bathroom, and flushed them down to follow it. That really would have been a crazy and stupid thing to do. Who would have taken care of little Jane? It was more than stupid, it was wrong. But it was all over now and somehow very remote, as if it had been another Janey in another life, too hurt and confused to know what she was doing.
She started back to the bedroom and stopped, catching her breath sharply. It was the doorbell. Someone at the front door. Normally she would have run downstairs to open it-but nothing was normal in that house anymore.
"Be careful," Lieutenant Williams had told her. "I don't want to worry you, Mrs. Blake, but you ought to be careful who you let in the house." He hadn't said, "Even if it's somebody you know," but she'd sensed it. Or was it just something inside of herself that told her that? Or just nerves? The bell rang again. She ran to the front room, pushed the window up, and looked out. "Who is it?"
As she saw who it was, her hands tightened on the sill. It was Chief Carlson. The big Swede. Her mouth went dry suddenly. The checks at Wernitz's-she realized oddly that she'd forgotten all about that. Even when Orvie Rogers had given her the envelope from his father and mumbled something about slot machines it had seemed all very unreal. There was no time to think about it, then, because the police came right away and Orvie just stuck it in her hand and got out. He probably thought the police would think it was funny, his being there when he should be at the plant. The envelope was in her red sweater pocket in the suitcase now.
But looking out now on Swede Carlson's thick, foreshortened figure, Janey remembered the slot machines again.
"I'll be right down," she called.
She picked up her hat and coat and the suitcase and stopped as little Jane's door. "You read quietly, sweetie, until I get back. I won't be long."
In the front hall she put the suitcase down by the stairs and laid her hat and coat on the chair. She opened the door. "Come in, Mr. Carlson."
He dwarfed the tiny hallway as he came in. It looked even smaller than it did with Gus in it, as tall but not as wide either way. Chief Carlson's eye went straight to the suitcase.
"Goin' somewhere, Mrs. Blake?" he asked pleasantly.
Jane swallowed quickly. Would he think she was trying to run away-or try to stop her going?
"Just down to my mother's on Charter Street," she said breathlessly. "I'm taking my little girl. I've got to go, Mr. Carlson. I-I'm afraid to stay here. I-"
"That's a smart idea, Mrs. Blake. I'm glad you're goin'."
So this was Gus Blake's Janey he was always hearing about. She'd been pointed out to him on the street, but he'd never seen her close up without a hat on. Scrawny little thing, compared with Mrs. Carlson, anyway. Pretty eyes; washed out-she was scared-but still pretty. What was she scared of him for? Or what else would it be?
"I was just talkin' to Lieutenant Williams," he said. "He told me about you last night. Mighty plucky, Mrs. Blake. I bet Gus was mighty proud of you."
"Gus-doesn't know anything about it." She moved back into the dining room. "Would you like to sit down here? The living room's upstairs."
"And your bedroom on the third floor, I understand. That's where you called the operator from?"
Janey nodded.
"Why didn't you tell Gus, Mrs. Blake?"
As her chin lifted he thought for an instant she was going to say it was none of his business. She turned her blank blue eyes to look not at him but through him. Not as scared now as she was when he came. He waited, wondering if she was going to say, "Because Gus came in with Lois Maynard and went out with her and so the hell with Gus, Mr. Carlson."
"He-he's very busy," she said. "I didn't think it was important enough to worry him about it."
His bleak eyes rested on her for a moment. "Suppose you show me around, Mrs. Blake," he said quietly. "And tell me all about it." He smiled a little. "I'll be careful not to make any more noise 'n I can help."
He saw the flush creep along Janey's high, pale cheekbones. "I'm sorry," he said. He hadn't meant to hurt her feelings.
"It's all right," she said quickly. "I suppose it was stupid of me. But I'm pretty stupid, anyway, I guess. But it's just that I-I don't want little Jane to grow up always scared of everything, like thunder and the dark and dogs and caterpillars and things. I don't think people have any fun if they're always afraid of everything."
Swede Carlson nodded. "You're right, Mrs. Blake. Doc Wernitz, for instance-he was afraid of the dark. I guess the fella that murdered him-if he should just happen to be the one came here-figured a little slip like you would be too afraid to open her mouth and scream-much less have the pluck and brains to get to the phone right away. I sorta figure that's why he turned the lights off first. So you'd be so scared you wouldn't know what it was he was after."
She was almost to the pantry door on her way to take him down to the basement. She flashed around and stood rigid, her fingertips on the end of the table to steady herself, her eyes wide, changed from blue to sooty-black, staring at him, her lips parted, moving soundlessly, repeating the word he had used deliberately.
"Murdered-" He could see her lips frame it.
"I'm afraid so, Mrs. Blake. That's why I'm askin' you to show me around, and tell me everythin' you can think of. Forget all this stuff about your bein' stupid. Gus wouldn't ever have fallen in love with a stupid girl no matter how pretty she was."
He saw he could have saved his breath. She hadn't heard him.
"Oh-then you-you don't think it's my baby he was after? It's not little Jane?" she gasped. "Oh, if I was sure it wasn't little Jane they were after, I-I wouldn't be half as scared!"
The big man's bleak eyes were warmer.
"Because-oh, you see we haven't got anything, anything a burglar would want. This silver-" She threw her hand out at the tea service on the sideboard, a wedding present from Orvie Rogers's parents. "That's all we've got that's valuable. And he-he went right past it. I couldn't think of anything else they'd want but little Jane-maybe on account of something Gus wrote in the paper. But if it's not little Jane, I'm not afraid anymore!"
Swede Carlson mentally shook his head. The poor kid, he thought. That was why she'd looked out the window upstairs, as though the devil himself might be at the door. His face was a shade grimmer. What a night she must have spent, with Gus off gall-wanting all over the country with the Maynard witch. Sometimes it looked like the brighter a fellow was the bigger fool he was. And if Janey Blake was stupid, he'd take them stupid every time. And she really meant it. A little color had come back into her cheeks and her eyes had lost the washed-out stare and come alive again. Afraid of kidnapping-not afraid of murder.
"That's the way I figure it, Mrs. Blake," he said quietly. "I don't know what he was after. But I don't figure it was any kidnappin'. Now, suppose you just tell me what happened. Everythin', hear?"
The loose board, the whining hinge, the fuse box, clean as a whistle under the gray powder Williams had left, the basement steps, the hinge whining again, the latch' clicking, the glow moving slowly and steadily up the stairs. Janey heard and explained it all.
"And out here," she said. She opened the kitchen door. "I didn't tell Mr. Williams, because it was gone. It was a man's footprint in the damp ground here, where it washes from the drain spout when it rains. I-I'm sorry, but it got raked over this morning. He-he must have been running, because the toe was a lot deeper than the heel. It was about an eleven, and sort of pointed. I mean not blunt like your shoes, but sort of narrower at the tip, like an evening-"
She stopped, looking up at him, blinking her eyes. Swede Carlson looked down at her. He was reflecting philosophically that if he ever died of apoplexy it wouldn't be in his own bed like a decent God-fearing citizen. It would be right at the feet of some blank-faced, blue-eyed dame saying, "I'm sorry, but I washed his fingerprints off the door, they were all covered with blood, it looked as if I never scrubbed." He took our his handkerchief and blew his nose savagely. Her voice, coming as through the distant roar of the Volga booming across the bosom of the Little Mother of all the Russians, sounded thin and reed-like in his congested ears. "-not blunt like your shoes, but sort of-" And then she was standing there looking at him blank and half-dazed again.
"Isn't that funny?" she said. Her eyes wandered off across the garden to a little bunch of bamboo stalks lying on the ground by the frostbitten chrysanthemum in the border. "That's just what it looked like. I thought there was something funny about it. It looked like the print you'd make with a pair of patent-leather evening shoes."
She looked back at Carlson. "You-you don't suppose it could have been anybody that-that was at the Maynards' party? The men had on dinner coats. But that doesn't make any-any sense. Who would-I mean, they were all our friends, Chief Carlson!"
She twisted her fingers together quickly, the pitch and tempo of her voice rising in indignant protest. "It couldn't have been anybody who's a friend of ours!"
"It looks like the fella that killed Doc Wernitz was a friend of his," Swede Carlson said, in as matter-of-fact tone as he could manage. "He wouldn't have been in the house if he wasn't. Nothin's turned up missin', so far, that we know of."
She was looking down at the raked patch of earth. "He was going that way." She pointed to the iron gate at the end of the narrow garden. "If he went through there, he must have got away down the alley. Do you know what I bet, Mr. Carlson? Not bet-I don't mean that." She amended it hastily. "Because I'm never going to gamble anymore. I lost over a thousand dollars on the slot machines."
She broke off, her jaw dropping, her eyes wide. She raised her hand halfway to her mouth and dropped it to her side again. "Why, I've-I've said it! I'm not afraid to say it anymore! But-that's wonderful, isn't it? I've been-I've been too ashamed to admit it to anybody else!"
"You'll feel better, admittin' it, Mrs. Blake. I guess we all do crazy things we don't like to admit to anybody, one time or another." He let her stand there in a dazed wonder at herself an instant. "What is it you were goin' to bet? If you'd been a bettin' man, that is, Mrs. Blake."
Her face lighted up in a sudden delighted smile, and sobered as quickly. "You know Mr. Hazenhofer? The baker over on Mercer Street?"
Swede Carlson nodded.
"Well, he runs a night shift, and he won't let any of them smoke in the kitchens. I don't think it's a kitchen at a bakery, but where they make the bread and stuff and bake it. Or anyplace-he's mean about it, really. So they go out in back, where there's that lattice place, where he has the grapevine. They go out there and smoke when he's not looking. And maybe-I mean, if any of them happened to be out there, and anybody went along the alley-"
Carlson nodded again. "I'll look into it. Now, you listen to me, Janey. I'm going to call you that, because Gus is a friend of mine." He saw her stiffen, and went calmly on. "I'm goin' to wait downstairs while you go get your things and get that baby of yours. Then I'm goin' to take you down to your mother's. Now, you're not to say anythin' to anybody, about what you told me here. Not your mother, or your father, not even Gus. Hear? You're not to say anythin' about that shoe print, or anythin' else. I'm like you, Janey. I'm not easy to scare. But I'm sort of scared right now. I'm goin' to be worse scared if somebody happens to find out maybe you're not so stupid, after all. You just don't say anythin' to anybody 'cept to me."
He took her arm and started back to the kitchen door with her.
"Let's look at it this way, Janey. If I'm right, and I'd be the last fella in Smith County to think I ain't, somebody came in here last night to get somethin' you all have got. Or-but we'll skip the other. We'll assume it's somethin' you've got he's got to get a hold of. Now you think that over, and keep your mouth shut about it. You hear, Janey?"
"Yes," Janey Blake said. "I hear. I-think they must be mistaken, but I-I still hear. I promise. I won't say a word."
She was a woman, Swede Carlson reflected, but somehow he believed her when she said it.
It was two days later that Lieutenant Williams said to Dorsey Syms: "It's over. We've been over the account books, and now we know Wernitz kept Vanaman informed of his accounts. Then too, we've got your footprint cast, taken from the backyard at the Blakes's. Seems you put a lucky piece in a slot machine by mistake. The Blakes won it, and you knew you had to get it back, because you got it at Wernitz's. All fits together quite simply now. You thought Wernitz was closing his account and you didn't have the money to pay out. How many accounts have you been jugglin' in the past five years, friend?"
Dorsey broke down in great sobs and confessed.
Still another day later it came out that Mr. Wernitz had left all his interests in the Smithville Evening Gazette to Janey, because of his friend ship with her father. She now owned ninety percent of the stock. That headline appeared plus one more; the announcement of the forthcoming blessed event for Janey and Gus.
