The thing that struck you about Ellen Schibe was her eyes. It wasn't the first thing that struck you; your eye traveled down the length of her body, taking in all of the details of a remarkable figure, but when that was done, the impression that stayed with you the longest was of her eyes. They were as much in contrast to her sensuous body as John Wayne would be in a ballet troupe. They were large and blue and completely lacking in expression, as if nature had poured all of the passion anyone gets into her body and had none left over for her eyes. You looked at Ellen and wondered what she would be like in bed, and as you looked more, as you gazed at her full breasts and her slim waist and just-big-enough hips and buttocks, you pictured delirious nights, but then you looked at her eyes and thought suddenly that it would not be so good after all. You looked again and decide that you wouldn't get to first base. And you wouldn't.
New York is full of women who look as if they are good in bed and aren't; there are many who look incapable of feeling any emotion at all, but even in New York a woman like Ellen stood out. You stopped thinking about the bed the minute she gazed at you. If there had ever been a spark of feeling in those eyes, it had long ago been drained out. There were paintings in museums, and not too good ones at that, that had more animation in them.
She was sitting impatiently in back of a tiny desk in a tastefully decorated office of a Park Avenue office building. It might have been the offices of a moderately successful advertising agency or consulting firm; nothing about it indicated that it was in fact the office of one of the more successful psychiatrists in the city. The furniture was Danish, bright, up to date, the magazines were new and slick. A tank of tropical fish, intended to have a calming effect on the patients, stood by the window, which ordinarily caught the morning sunlight and now showed the city in the dusk of a seven-thirty July evening.
The sign on the door said "William Pauling, M.D." and that was all. To the clientele that streamed into his waiting room during the day, he was a mere receptacle for the petty problems that seem to seek out the rich when they are idle. At night, though, Bill Pauling did what he wanted, what mattered to him in his professional life, what kept him sitting patiently at the head of the couch all day long as his bored dowagers went through their dreadful litany. Bill Pauling was interested in sex.
Nearly everybody is interested in sex, of course, but not to the extent that he was. Maladjustments were his meat. Ever since setting up practice, he had done research and treatment of the unfortunates on the fringes of respectability whose lives are tortured by an inability to perform a normal sexual act in the normal way. Helping them was his passion. Because of the nature of many of their perversions, they were unable to pay him for his services, and so he worked with them for nothing. The twenty dollars an hour he got from his day patients made up the difference.
Ellen looked at the tiny clock on her desk and wondered how long she would have to stay. She had been eager to take the job when the agency had first sent her to Pauling, even though it was only part-time, at night. She had needed the money badly. The job was simple but very boring. All of the patients slunk in, avoided her glance, and slunk out again. She was not a communicative person, but she did like some conversation once in a while. She wished the last patient would leave so she could go home.
She reached for the telephone on the desk and dialed her own number. I hope Kitty is home tonight, she thought. I have to talk to someone. But the phone rang and rang and no one answered. She hung up just as the door to the inner office opened.
The man who came out was rather short and chubby, average looking in every respect, neatly dressed. His name was Perry Bronston and Ellen liked him the best of all Pauling's "cases". He said "Hello" and "Good-bye", at least, which was more than she got from the others.
Bronston was followed out by Bill Pauling himself. He was the very picture of the clever young architect or lawyer, dressed conservatively but expensively, exuding confidence and good taste. He was slightly above middle height, slim, dark, and wore horn-rimmed glasses more for the effect than out of necessity. He might have grown a beard except that it would have made him look less like a psychiatrist and more like an architect, and despite his own psychological balance, he wanted very much to look like a psychiatrist. It was good for business.
He was smiling now as he led Bronston to the door, his arm on the shorter man's shoulder. Neither of them spoke, but Bronston seemed calmer than usual, and the doctor more satisfied, although his face revealed little of his emotions. He ushered the little man out the door and then turned to Ellen.
"I guess that's it for the night, Ellen," he said. "Can you do the closing up? I've got a dinner engagement and I'll be very late if I don't leave now."
Ellen stood up. "Certainly, Doctor." All business now. "I'll take care of everything."
"Fine." He opened the door and left the office. Ellen walked into his office and shut the door behind her.
There wasn't much to be done, because the cleaning men would be here later on, she thought, but there was a little that she should do.
She gathered up the doctor's notes and piled them on his desk, along with the manila folders where they were kept once they were arranged. Those weren't her responsibility, so she just went into the little room behind the big walnut desk and put the folders back into the filing cabinet. From an empty file drawer she took a dust rag and, returning to the office, dusted the doctor's desk and changed the calendar on it. Then she returned the rag and began to re-arrange the furniture slightly. She moved the chair that was behind the big leather couch to its place beside the desk, adjusted a lamp on a comer table, and turned off the air conditioner.
Just as she flicked the switch the lights went out. A fuse, she thought, and turned to leave the office. Then she heard the lock on the door click. No light seeped in under the crack at the bottom of the door.
"Is someone here?" Nothing. "Who is it?" No sound at all, then heavy breathing and the soft shuffle of careful footsteps on the thick carpet. Too frightened to speak now, she began to edge her way along the window wall, as the breathing became louder and faster and the shuffle began to sound like the hiss of a large snake as it came closer. Then a violent blow on the stomach and then one on the side of the head, and then she fell. A body crashed down on top of her, knocking her breath out, and strong hands began to pull her skirt up over her hips. She cried out, and one of the hands left the skirt and thudded into her mouth, pushing her lips against her teeth. Then her skirt was over her hips and her girdle was ripped down violently, then the front of her dress came off and her bra was flung across the room and blows began to rain down on her and the body was pressing into her and taking her roughly and there was no sound at all but the heavy breathing and she opened her mouth for one last scream and it started to come out but then it was stopped and rammed back down her throat with a set of knuckles and she forgot everything but the pain and the fire in her belly as the body pushed into her and trembling hands took her head and began to beat it on the carpet, first softly and then heavily as the breathing gave way to grunts and animal noises made in the back of the throat and then the world exploded and she went out completely.
When she came to, she was lying naked on the black leather couch and the lights were on. Her head throbbed and her lips were swollen and she tasted blood. She could not move at first, but then she became more conscious and she was able to sit up. Her knees trembled and when she looked down at them she noticed that her belly was neatly bisected by a thin line of blood that ran down from her navel and was finally lost between her legs. It had probably been made by a razor or a very sharp knife. She lay back on the couch and tried to breathe deeply to halt the shaking.
She looked around at the office. Nothing in it had been disturbed, but her clothes lay in slashed tatters all around it. There was nothing left intact except her shoes. Everything had been carefully sliced to ribbons and thrown everywhere.
She shook her head and tried to rise again. This time she made it, although the dizziness made her hold on to the furniture for a few minutes. She groped her way to the desk and sat down in the doctor's chair and picked up the telephone. She dialed Pauling's home number and the phone rang and rang and finally a voice said, "Dr. Pauling's residence." It was the answering service.
"This is Ellen Schibe, the doctor's night receptionist." Her mouth hurt when she used it and her speech was unclear. "Do you know where the doctor is?"
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Schibe, but the doctor didn't tell us where he would be tonight. He wasn't sure. He should be calling in fairly soon, though. Can I take a message from you for when he does?"
"No, thank you. I'll try later." She hung up and sat back. What should she do? The shock and fear had numbed her and she was still unclear as to what had happened, but she thought that she had been raped and that whoever had done it might still be around. The door to the outer office was closed and she didn't know what was awaiting her out there. She looked at the clock on the desk. Eight-twenty. The office building would be almost deserted by now, and there was no telling what might happen. Still, she couldn't stay in the office all night, either.
She got out of the chair and walked to the door. She opened it gingerly and peered into the outer office. It was empty, and the door to the hall was closed. She stepped out and went to the closet where she kept a raincoat. She put it on, then returned to the inner office and got her shoes. She buttoned the coat up tight around her neck and left the office, leaving the lights burning. She ran down the hall and punched furiously at the elevator button until the door opened. The operator goggled at her as she stepped inside.
"Jeez, what happened to you?" He closed the door and the elevator began to descend.
"Someone attacked me. Has anyone come from that floor since Dr. Pauling left?"
"Nobody's come in or out for the past hour or so. Who did it?"
"I don't know. Are you sure? Maybe they took the stairs."
"Could be. Nobody took the elevator though. Was it one of the doc's patients?"
"I don't know," she said crossly. The elevator reached the ground floor and the door opened. "Will you call me a cab?"
"Sure." He ran out of the elevator and through the lobby to the street. Ellen huddled in the corner, still too dazed and shaken to think of anything except getting out and getting home.
The elevator boy came back into the lobby and motioned to her. She ran out into the street and into the cab waiting out front. She gave the driver the address and sank back into a corner and closed her eyes. Everything was still a blur and she tried not to think about it. But she kept remembering the blows and the grunts and she shook her head, trying to drive the memory out.
"Which side, lady?" She came back to the present.
"Oh-the left side. The brownstone with the light steps."
The cab stopped and she paid the driver and got out. She ran up the steps and unlocked the door quickly and ran up the three flights to her apartment. She fumbled with the lock for a minute, then opened the door and shut it behind her and stood leaning against it.
Ellen's daughter Kitty looked up from the magazine she had been reading. It slipped from her fingers and her eyes widened. She jumped up and ran to her mother.
"What happened?" Ellen's pent-up emotions burst forth at last. Sobbing, she told the girl all that she could remember, and then collapsed into a chair, nearly hysterical. Kitty stood by her, wanting to do something but not knowing what to do. The sobbing stopped after a while and Ellen looked at her.
"Well, it's done with now and there isn't much that crying will do about it. I guess that I should clean up first of all." She stood up and took off the raincoat. Kitty gasped when she saw the cut on her mother's body. "Get my housecoat." The girl ran into the bedroom and came back with it. Ellen walked into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her fine lips were a bloody mess, her high cheekbones horribly bruised. She washed the blood off as best she could and gently sponged her abdomen. The cut was fine and not deep. When she was finished, she was still severely battered, but she looked a little better. She came out of the bathroom and went into the little kitchen. She found a pint of rye and poured herself a big drink. It burned like fire going over her lips but it soothed her a little bit when it was down. Kitty was following her around with eyes like saucers; a little girl with her father's black hair and not her mother's blonde, at fourteen just beginning to ripen into a woman, but still very much the boyish figure in her shorts that hugged her slim hips and her blouse that hung loosely around her tiny breasts.
Ellen took another drink and the phone rang. Kitty ran for it and picked it up.
"It's Dr. Pauling, Mother," she said excitedly. Ellen took the phone.
"Hello."
"Hello, Ellen. The answering service told me that you had called. Is anything the matter?"
Ellen poured out the story, this time a lot more calmly than before. When she finished there was a long pause before Pauling said anything.
"Are you badly hurt?"
"No, not very. Just a few bruises, and the cut."
"Did you call the police."
"No, not yet."
"Good. I'd rather you didn't just yet. This kind of thing can be handled very badly by the police and it would probably do a lot of harm to my patients and not accomplish much."
"Well, I don't know-"
"Let me have a chance to run this down a little by myself. I think that I might be able to get somewhere on my own, and if it was one of my people, I can find it out without his knowing it. You just stay home and try not to worry and III let you know what happens."
"But I can't just stay in the house forever! The police have got to find out sometime. The man nearly murdered me!"
"Yes, Ellen, I know, but if the police start asking questions, many of my patients will react very badly and it can cause a lot of harm. Let me try it first, and if I can't get anywhere, then we'll let the police take over."
"I'm so confused at this point, I don't know what to do."
"Exactly. That's why I want you to let me try my hand at it. It's possible that it wasn't any of my patients, anyhow. There may have been lots of people in the building tonight."
"You don't sound very convinced of that."
"Well-, to tell you the truth, I'm not. Violence is not a pattern that I remember with any of the people I'm seeing now, but I feel that it probably was one of them. Who else would know precisely where to find a woman in an office building on a Friday night in summer?"
"That's what I was thinking."
"Now, you just stay there and I'll be up in a couple of minutes and take a look at you."
"No, please don't."
"Don't be foolish, Ellen. Any number of things could have been done to you and we should know right away."
"I don't want anyone to touch me for a while. In a couple of days, maybe, but not right now."
"But I'm not going to do you any harm. I've got to see what happened to you before I can do anything."
"No, leave me alone for a couple of days. Then you can find out what you need to know."
"It may be too late by then."
"No. I don't want any men near me at all. Not even you."
"Rather than upset you any further, I'll agree, but I don't like it. At any rate, I want to examine you, and no one else. Is that clear? Only me."
"Very well."
"And you'll stay at home until I see you."
"Whatever you say."
"Fine. Well, goodnight."
"Goodnight."
He hung up and Ellen did the same. Kitty had listened to her mother's end of the conversation eagerly and peppered her with questions.
"What's going to happen? Who does he think did it? Are you going to call the police? Are we safe here?"
Ellen sighed and sat down on the couch next to the telephone. "I don't know, baby. Everything is very unclear now and all I want to do is go to bed and forget the whole thing for a while. Well be okay here but Yd rather you didn't go too far away for the next couple of days."
"But, mother-"
"No, you can stay inside for a while. It's for your own safety. I don't want anything to happen to you."
"But I had a date to go swimming tomorrow!"
"Then you'll have to cancel it. You shouldn't be having dates anyway. You're still too young, even for just swimming. I've told you that before."
Kitty started to reply, then realized how foolish she was being. Here her mother had been almost killed and she was crying about having to break a date. How childish!
"You're right, mother. I'll take care of it tomorrow,"
Ellen got up from the couch and went to her daughter and kissed the top of her head. "I'm going to bed now, baby. Don't stay up too late."
"Okay." Kitty patted her mother's hand and picked up her magazine.
Ellen went into the bedroom and shut the door behind her. She took off her robe and walked to the mirror and looked at herself. For a woman of thirty-three, she was still in remarkable shape. Her breasts, full and round, still pointed outward with the vigor of youth and her smooth thighs and calves had not developed the bulges that plagued many women of her age. She should have taken immense satisfaction from what she saw, but she stared at herself as she would a statue in a museum. It's a good body, she thought, but it's caused me nothing but trouble for nineteen years and it's started again. It's just a body and nothing more. The sight of the cut brought her up sharply and she remembered the flash of fire that she had felt even through the pain when her attacker had taken her, but she drove it out of her mind and turned away from the mirror. She put on a pair of pajamas and climbed into bed and turned off the light. The whiskey had made her sleepy and she wanted to sleep and run away from the memory more than anything else in the world at the moment. She was still in a daze, but she felt better.
Bill Pauling rubbed his eyes and began to reread his notes for what seemed like the hundredth time that evening. The words began to dance on the page and he put the folder down. Not a clue, he thought. Not one clue in all of these pages as to which one of my people would have done this type of thing. Everything in these notes points to extremely non-aggressive behavior, especially during sex. None of these people could have done it, and yet one of them must have.
He picked up the folders and went back to the little room behind the desk and filed them away. He sat down at the desk again and fingered the pile of slashed clothing on the blotter in front of him. Who was capable of committing a murder, even a symbolic one like this? It seemed almost hopeless.
He got from behind the desk again and went over to the couch and lay down on it. He tried to focus on the problem but his mind kept drifting and finally he closed his eyes. Just for a second, he thought. A psychiatrist's couch is pretty comfortable, though, and he fell asleep almost immediately.
Kitty had the magazine spread open on her lap but she hadn't turned a page for several minutes. She kept thinking about the rape and what her mother must have felt like. Then she began to wonder what she would feel like if it would happen to her. She and the rest of her friends often talked about it but none of them had any real idea what it was like. Not a rape, exactly, but a nice one, like she read about in the books all the girls passed around in study hall.
She put her hands inside her shorts and felt her smooth belly and the beginnings of womanhood. She moved her hand down further and touched herself and found that it sent a shiver through her. They say it hurts the first time, but it must be worth it.
She got out of the chair and took her clothes off. She looked at her body which was still young and touched her breasts and found that that made her feel good, like when a boy kissed her. Maybe she would let one of them try something the next time. Not all the way, though. Just a little.
She opened the couch into a bed and lay down on it, thinking about all the boys in school and which one of them she would like to try it with. It had to be someone special.
Ellen awoke with a start, hearing someone in the room. She lay motionless for a few minutes with her heart pounding before she slowly turned on her bedside light. There was no one. She sighed and turned the light off and rolled over. The old feeling began to come back to her but she forced it out of her mind and screwed up her eyes and tried to sink back into sleep. It was a hot night. A lot of people were probably sleepless.
Bill Pauling shook himself out of sleep and sat up on the couch. He was wet with sweat. He went to the window and turned on the air conditioner and stood in front of it for a moment. He looked at his watch and decided that he might as well finish out the night in the office. He could get up early and start work again.
He returned to the couch and took his shoes off. He lay down and was fast asleep soon.
Kitty decided on Jack Washburn. He was very good looking and very grown up. He would be a good one to try it with. She touched the nipple on her young breast and felt the thrill again just to make sure that she wasn't making a mistake. She wasn't
And somewhere in the city, a man woke from a very calm and deep sleep and reached under his pillow. It was still there and he brought it out and looked at it as it reflected the moonlight that came in the window. There were still a few dark brown spots on the tip and he touched them with a loving hand and tried to imagine what it would be like to push it all the way in and twist it around while he was doing it. The thought was almost too much and he had to get up and pace around the room until it went away. He would have to do that soon or he would burst.
CHAPTER II
Ellen awoke sopping wet, her body, her pajamas, her sheets. The room was closed and the heavy heat hung about it oppressively. She woke up thinking that she was back in Harmony, and started to spring up to get breakfast and then remembered that she was in New York and didn't have to get breakfast at all, or even get up. She fell back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling and thought about Harmony. It would be hot in Georgia, too, today, but not hot like here. It was dry and almost invigorating there. She remembered the heat and the dusty roads and the smell of the fields and Billy Joe. Especially Billy Joe.
He was drunk again. Not two o'clock in the afternoon and he was drunk and nasty. He sat by the open door looking out at the cars going by on the highway. His shirt was open and the sweat poured off him and soaked the top of his gray pants. He held the can of beer against his chest.
"Jeesus, it's hot ain't it. I sure would like to be in one of those convertible jobs toolin' down the road today. Be a lot better than sittin' around listening to you moan all day long."
She didn't reply, but kept on washing the dishes. The soap was a cheap kind and didn't give a lot of suds and the water was hard, so she had to scrub hard to get the dishes clean. The sweat dripped Into the sink and she was too hot to move very fast.
Billy Joe finished the beer and tossed the can into the yard. He pushed the chair back until the front legs were off the floor and put his feet on the door jamb. His dirty boots made black marks on the dull wood. He sighed.
"When do you think that old man of yours is going to die so we can get some money and move out of this trap?"
Ellen said nothing.
"Goddamn, I get sick of sittin' here with nothing to do and your old man with all that money socked away and not usin' it at all. Leastways, we could get a better car and cut out of this town once in a while."
"Why don't you get a job, then?"
He slammed forward on the floor and stood up. "I ain't going to work for just anybody for the crap wages they pay around here. What do you want from me? Go to work washin' cars like a nigger?" He came to the sink and grabbed her arm. "Why don't you try to get some dough out of that son of a bitchin' father of your? Christ almighty, he don't need it!" His black hair tumbled down over his wet forehead and his dark bloodshot eyes flashed.
She pulled her arm away. "You know my father hates your guts and he's not giving me anything as long as I'm married to you. I should have listened to him. He was right. You aren't any good, after all."
He dropped her arm and went to the icebox and took out a beer. "I oughta let you go back to him. Ain't no good to a man anyway, with that big belly."
"You did i."
"Not on purpose."
"If you were sober once in a while, you'd have better sense. You've never been careful when you've been drinking."
He turned his back and crossed the room and sat down. He held the beer can against his belly.
"Damn, that feels good. Only cool thing in the state of Georgia." He took a long drink and set the can down.
"Yes sir, when your old man kicks off, we're gonna live a little bit. Get some good whiskey for a change instead of this gut-rottin' beer."
"What about the baby?"
"To hell with the baby! I don't know if it's mine any-howl You worry about that when the time comes."
Ellen spun around. "Billy Joe Schibe, you're the biggest bastard in the South! Maybe in the world! All you can ever think about is your own self, and the rest of the world can go to hell. I get so sick of you sometimes that I wish I had never met you!"
He laughed. "You sure did go for me before, honey pot. First time I saw you, I could feel you leanin' toward me. You just couldn't wait to get it from me, could you?"
"You pig!"
"Now honey, it ain't like I was the first man got into your jeans. It's just that you never had it before like you had it from me." He laughed again and picked up the beer and drained the can and threw it away.
No words came into her mind. She was filled with revulsion for this half-animal that, in her teen-age romanticism, she had let herself fall in love with and many. She had been swayed by her first glimpse of him, and his rowdy ways had been in such contrast to what she had been used to that she had been taken in completely.
Despite her father's objections, they had married and now eight months later, Ellen was pregnant, without any medical care, without money, without any interest from the man who had gotten her that way.
It had been a wild few months before she found out that she would have a child, and then Billy Joe had lost interest and spent whatever he earned at odd jobs on beer. He managed to stay half-drunk most of the time and Ellen was half-starved most of the time. She had not been near her father and he had made no attempt to see her. For all practical purposes, she was alone in the world.
Billy Joe strode to the icebox and peered in. "Ain't there any more beer?"
"I guess not. You've been swilling it down pretty well today."
"You got any money?"
"Since when have you let me have any money?"
"Don't get smart. Just answer me."
"No, I haven't. And it doesn't take me much effort to get smarter than you. I was born that way."
He raised his hand and was about to sweep it across her face but she stared him down and he dropped his arm and stalked out of the house. He got into the rattletrap truck he owned and roared off down the highway to the Legion hall in town. Someone would be there to buy him a beer.
Ellen turned back to the dishes and finished them and then went outside to take the clothes off the line. Her own clothes were still in good shape since they were a holdover from her days at home, but she had no idea how long they would last or what she would do when they were worn out. The hot sun almost blinded her as she went into the yard. The heat was murderous. She took the clothes off the line and shook her head over the fine coat of dust they had managed to pick up already. It was impossible to keep anything clean. The red soil was everywhere in and out of the house. The land left to Billy Joe by his father was useless for cultivation, or for anything else. He held on to it as a symbol of property, his Southern heritage, and also because no one would buy it. He would not leave it and would not get a job in town. He hadn't had a steady job since he had gotten out of the army.
She finished folding the clothes and took them back into the house and put them into the drawers of the sagging bureau. The drawers were covered with the ever-present red dust, too, but Ellen was losing interest in trying to make the house livable. All she could think about lately was the coming baby and what she was going to do in a few weeks' time when it was due. She knew nothing about childbirth and as far as she knew Billy Joe had not made any plans. The county hospital was several miles away and he was spending more and more time away from home and might not even be a-round when it happened. The thought of having to do it herself petrified her. The little farm didn't even have a telephone. It had been taken out months before.
The truck came roaring back off the highway and screeched to a halt in the yard. No one had been at the Legion hall and he had just wasted gas going down there. He stomped into the house and went into the tiny bedroom and lay down on the bed. Ellen paid him no attention; she kept on putting the clothes away.
"Not a goddamn person in the place. Son of a bitch, I'm so dry I could spit cotton balls. Sure you ain't got a buck or so stashed away?"
She ignored him and continued with the clothes. When she finished she had to pass him to get out of the room and he reached out and grabbed her hand. He pulled her down on the bed beside him and put his hand on her breast.
"Got a buck for old Billy?" His hand went inside her dress and pinched her nipple. She tried to get away, but she couldn't move with his hand there. "Don't pull away from me honey. I'm just trying to be nice."
"You're trying to be nice, maybe, but you're just being stupid as usual."
"Now, that's no way to talk." He reached behind her and zipped open the dress and pulled it off her shoulders. She wore no bra because of the heat and her heavy breasts hung loosely. He pulled her down on top of him.
"Billy, use your head. We can't do anything."
"Honey, I ain't had any in a couple of weeks. How long can a man go without it?" He began to pull the dress off completely. She wiggled away and tried to get off the bed, but he grabbed her again and took the dress off. She was completely naked.
"I gotta have one more, baby." He grabbed her breast and began to rub his hand over it as he rolled her down beside him. He put his lips to her nipple, and despite herself she began to feel like she used to when he did that to her.
"How, bright man?"
"You on top."
"No."
"That's the only way, baby. The only way."
"I don't like it like that."
"You used to when we did it in the car."
"No, I didn't. I never liked it."
"Well, that's the way it's gonna be." He was caressing her all over now, rubbing his hands all over her thighs and belly and between her legs and breathing hard in the heat and the stuffiness of the room.
"Come on up here."
"No." He slapped her across the face.
"I said come up here and you do what I say."
He pulled her on top of him and began to move his body up and down and in and out while she sat with her eyes closed, crying.
"You bastard," she said between sobs. "You don't care anything about anyone but yourself and even if you hurt me good now or the baby it wouldn't matter to you as long as you got what you wanted and I hate you for it and I never want to see you again you son of a bitch, you dirty no good son of a-you dirty-you-youooh-oh-oh"
Never again, she thought. That was the last time that he had had her and the last time that any man had or would get near her. She had had Kitty and shortly thereafter Billy Joe had taken off for good and she had been left alone. She had gone back to her father and he had given her a hundred dollars on the doorstep of her home and shut the door in her face. She had used the money to go to Atlanta where she managed to find sporadic employment and save enough money to leave Georgia for good. She had come to New York seven years before, still a beautiful and very young looking girl at twenty-six, but in all that time, she had not had one date or gone near any man. Not that plenty of them hadn't tried, but sex had gotten her in the trouble that she was in and she was sure that it would again. Once was enough, she told herself. She wanted no more of it.
She told herself the same thing again as she got out of the bed and padded out into the living room. Once is enough for me, and never is enough for Kitty. She looked at her daughter as she slept with the cover thrown back, her naked young body thrown across the bed. She isn't going to make the same mistake I did and come to the same grief. Not if I can help it
She went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took out some eggs, bacon, and orange juice. She set the water to boil for coffee. She laid the bacon in a pan and set the orange juice on the table. The sound of the bacon frying woke Kitty up and she sat up in bed.
"Morning," she said rubbing her eyes. "How do you feel?"
"I feel all right, but I imagine I look pretty bad. I can feel my eye swollen up and my lips are pretty stiff."
"It doesn't look too bad. You aren't going to work today, are you?"
"I'm not going anywhere until I look decent again. I'm going to wait until Doctor Pauling tells me I can go out."
"Shouldn't he call the police? Can't he get into trouble if he doesn't?"
"I imagine so, but I guess he's willing to take that risk. I don't think it's the right thing to do myself, but I trust him." At least I think I do, she added to herself. She took the bacon out of the pan and broke the eggs into it. Kitty got up and went into the bedroom and returned wearing a robe. She sat down at the table and cupped her chin in her hand and stared at Ellen. She wanted to ask her all about the rape but she didn't know how to begin, so she took a piece of bacon from the platter and munched on it
Ellen took the eggs from the pan and divided them up between the two of them. Then she sat down and they both ate breakfast in silence. After the meal was finished, she cleared the table and began to wash the dishes.
"Will you go out and buy the paper?" she asked.
"Okay." Kitty hopped up and scampered into the bedroom and took off the robe. She sneaked a peek at herself in the mirror, pulling in her stomach and throwing her chest out as much as she could. Coming along, she thought. She put on a polo shirt and a pair of toreador pants and slipped into a pair of sandals. Then she left the apartment and ran down the stairs to the street.
It was another scorching day and she wished that her mother would let her go swimming with the crowd. She would have to tell Julie that she couldn't go.
She started off down the street to the subway station where the newsstand was, looking for one of the kids in the crowd, but no one seemed to be around. A Saturday morning in New York can leave the streets as deserted as if there were an air raid drill in progress. A few old people were sitting on the steps of the brownstones, warming their arthritic joints, the men with their pants legs rolled up above their knee or, like the women, dressed grotesquely in Bermuda shorts. They always disgusted Kitty and she hurried by them without looking their way.
Near the corner she saw Jack Washburn standing with a group of other boys. She crossed the street so it would seem that she hadn't seen him, hoping wildly that he would see her and come over.
She was rewarded by the sound of her name, and Jack broke away from the knot of boys and crossed the street. She stopped and waited for him with her heart pounding. He was young and still growing, but even now had passed out of the gawky stage of adolescence and was well on his way to manhood. He was tall and tanned, with tight black slacks that hugged his slim hips and stopped several inches above his white sneakers, exposing his ankles. He wore only a white tee shirt with the sleeves turned up several times, almost to his armpits. His hair was short and dirty blond. Kitty had a good crush on him, "Hi," he said. "What's doing?"
"My mother is sick and I can't go to the beach with you today. Will you tell Julie for me?"
"Bad news. I'll tell her. Hey, you look nice today." His eyes traveled over her boldly and she felt embarrassed and hoped she wasn't blushing. She moved in close to him.
"Thank you. You look nice too."
He took her arm and pulled her close, ever so gently. His hand went around her waist and rubbed the small of her back.
"How come we haven't gotten together sooner?"
"I don't know."
"We have to sometime."
"Yes. We do." She surprised herself. This kind of thing was easy. He released her when the other boys across the street began hooting and calling his name.
"I gotta go now. I'll call you sometime."
"Okay. See you." He ran across the street and Kitty continued on to the newsstand and bought the paper. She looked over at Jack on the other side of the street as she returned, but he was laughing with his friends and didn't see her. She walked back to the apartment and let herself in. Her mother was on the telephone as she opened the door.
"Well, I still think you ought to call the police. They're going to find out eventually and you'll be in trouble then -Well, I think that if you explain the situation, they'll be discreet. I do know how they feel about sex offenders, but they aren't going to like the idea at all-Doctor, it was me who was attacked, you know. I'm sorry, but after all, this could have been fatal to me. All right. But not too long. No more than a week. Well, I'll go to them myself then, if you don't. Goodbye."
She hung up and glared at the telephone.
"Damn him anyway. His precious patients are more important to him than anything in the world. All men are the same. Women are fine until something more interesting comes along and then we can all go in the back room and wash the dishes."
Kitty handed her the paper and she glanced over the front page and the first few inside pages. She shook her head disgustedly.
"Sex, sex, sex. Nothing but sex any more in the paper, on TV. It's horrible. Kitty, I want you to promise me that you'll never let any stupid boy take advantage of you. It's so easy to be led astray by them and they never suffer. It's always us women."
Kitty sighed inwardly. Oh, God here it comes again. Men are no damn good and we women have -to make sure they don't get the best of us. "Yes, Mother," she said aloud.
"I don't mean that I don't want you to have a good time and a normal life, of course I want the best for you, but I've told you so often what a rat your father was and he was no worse than any other man. They take all they can get and then leave you in the lurch to fend for yourself."
"Yes, Mother."
"You've got to be on your guard all the time to see that they don't get the best of you, because the ones who can sweet-talk you the most are always the ones who will do you the most harm."
"Yes, Mother."
"Believe me, I know what I'm talking about because I let one do that to me, but never again. No man in the world is worth all the agony I put up with from him. The only good I got out of it was you. But even so, if I had it to do all over again, believe you me."
"Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother! You've told me this a million times."
Ellen flushed and was about to shout back but checked the impulse and settled back. "I'm sorry. I know I'm repeating, but I want you to know what to expect."
"I know what to expect. I don't see why you have to harp on it all the time." Kitty was mad now. Her mother drove her crazy, always talking about how rotten men were just because she had picked a bad one.
"There's no reason to get snotty with me, young lady. It seems to me that you can show a little respect and consideration, especially after what I went through last night." She began to weep.
"I'm sorry, but you say the same thing over and over again till I'm sick of hearing it. I'm old enough to know what the score is."
"You don't know anything."
"I bet you knew a lot when you were my age."
"How dare you suggest that to me! You get into that room and stay there until I tell you, you can come out."
"I'm not a little kid any more. You can't do that to me."
Ellen stood up and slapped her. Kitty stepped back and ran into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. Ellen shouted at her through the door.
"You'll stay in that room until you learn some respect for your mother. You're getting entirely too free around here. No more dates for you for anything until I think you're mature enough to handle yourself. Is that clear?" Kitty said nothing. "Fine. Be silent. When you think that you can act like a reasonable grown up person, you can come out."
Kitty lay on the bed fuming. Any feeling she had for her mother was gone now. Rape or no rape, she was getting to be an adult with a brain and she wanted to be treated like one. She would show her mother. She was grown up for some things. She thought of Jack Washburn and the way he had run his hand over her. She was grown up enough for lots of things.
CHAPTER III
Bill Pauling sat at the head of the couch with the notebook open, almost falling asleep. His patient droned on, telling some incredibly boring tale about her youth the whole point of which seemed to be that her father had had a lot of money and that she had been pretty when she was a deb. Bill seriously doubted the latter, but said nothing. The whole monologue had no psychological significance beyond what was already known to him, and so he sat with his eyes half-open, nodding over his notes. The temptation to tell this fat and repulsive old dowager that all she needed was a good boot in the ass was stronger today than usual. He was very tired and psychologically defenseless.
The hour finally crawled to a close and the old lady got up and adjusted the furs she always wore, even in ninety-degree weather and went out the door, still gibbering. He forced a smile and shut the door. That's it, he thought. That is positively all I can take. I have to get some rest before I drop right here on the carpet. He crossed to his desk and picked up the telephone.
"Is there anything vital left for today, Miss Halloran?" he said when his secretary answered.
"Vital?"
"Is there anyone aside from the Airman's set who has an appointment today?"
"No, sir." Bill grinned. Halloran was disapproving already.
"Look, cancel the rest of the day's appointments and try and work them in the beginning of next week, will you? I've got to go home and get some rest."
"Yes, sir." The voice was icy. She probably thinks I was out whoring all night. I shouldn't be working on a Saturday, anyhow. He took his hat from the closet and left the office. Miss Halloran was already dialing the telephone and she refused to look at him. He walked down the hall and punched the button for the elevator. The office building was almost deserted on a summer week end and he didn't have to wait long. The door opened and he got on. The operator was the same man who had been on duty the night before. He looked at Bill expectantly, awaiting more questions about the previous night, but Bill was too tired to pursue the matter just then, and much to the operator's annoyance, kept silent for the whole trip except to say goodbye at the ground floor.
The hot air revived him a little and he decided to walk the few blocks to his apartment on Madison Avenue. He crossed over to the shadowy side of the street and began walking briskly, inhaling deeply.
He reached his apartment house a few minutes later, feeling a little better. He rode the elevator to his floor and let himself in the door. The apartment was very dark and stuffy. He opened the drapes to let the sunlight in and turned on his air conditioner.
A lot of twenty-dollar bills had gone into his three rooms; the carpet was thick and dark blue, the walls creamy white. His walnut furniture gleamed dully. He stood in the middle of the room indecisively for a moment, then said, "What the hell," aloud, and went behind the bar that stood in one corner of the room and made himself a gin. tonic. He sipped it and felt a lot better.
Last night's events were still plaguing him. He began to tick off the cases which seemed most likely to him.
Arthur Di Nonno, age thirty. Single. Sometime stage manager for summer theaters, usually working at a variety of odd jobs during the off season. Partem of homosexual indications but, surprisingly, no overt acts, despite the temptations in his profession. Severely dominating parents, especially the father. Failure to identify fully with the male's role in society because of this. A history of several frustrating attempts at satisfactory sexual relationships with women, almost all were failures. Possibility: slight, but tremendous confusion of that sort could lead to violence with the proper stimulus present.
Henry Baxter, age forty-eight. Divorced three times. Well educated, but unable to hold any job for long because of his erratic behavior. Extremely passive, desiring to let women take the aggressive role in lovemaking. Fully aware that this is a tremendous shortcoming, he seems to seek out opportunities to destroy himself, in his odd relationships with women, in his jobs, in his life in general. Strong death wish, erupting in extremely bizarre sexual practices, which he delights in repeating to even casual acquaintances. Possibility: fairly strong. His desire for self destruction might lead him to commit the ultimate act of social disapproval, and thus destroy him for good in prison or the electric chair.
Perry Bronston, age forty-six. Single. Impotent for the past ten years, cause unknown as yet. Possibly a too-strong mother attachment until her death, which almost coincided with the onset of impotence. Possibility: slight, although I don't know yet whether any sexual act took place. The beating and the use of the weapon doesn't rule him out though.
Bill sighed and finished the drink. There it was, neatly laid out. The three men whom he had been treating that night in the office, although it could have been anyone. Three men whom he thought he knew quite well, and one of them had fooled him or eluded him up to now. He would have to get started right away before anything worse happened.
But, where to begin? The usual devices had already been used: word association, the Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception Test. None of them had indicated anything but passive behavior, or, at best, violence directed inwardly and not outwardly. All of the conventional projective techniques had been exhausted, and some of the ones that had been omitted couldn't be used at this stage of the game. Hypnosis or drugs could do nothing but make the guilty party more suspicious and create an even worse situation. There had to be something new that he could try.
He went to the bookcase that lined one wall of the living room and leafed through some of the more recent textbooks in testing procedures and diagnosis. Nothing. Then he remembered a few articles that had appeared in the psychiatric journals about finger painting as a tool in diagnosis. The journals were in the office, though. He would have to check them on Monday. That might be the solution. It was new, and shouldn't arouse too much suspicion if he handled its introduction smoothly. It was still not an exact measure, but it might be the key to a breakthrough.
He was falling asleep leaning against the bar. He put the glass down, then picked it up again and took it to the kitchen and washed it. Compulsive, he told himself, grinning. He put the glass back under the bar and went into the bedroom. He took off his clothes and put on a pair of light pajamas and got into bed. He thought about the case for about ten seconds more before he went off to sleep. Young psychiatrists have easy consciences.
Ellen felt like sleeping too.
The heat in the apartment was stifling, even with all the windows open and the fan blowing directly on her. She had only a light duster on but she still felt as if she were in a steam bath. Kitty was still in the bedroom. Whether she was awake or asleep Ellen didn't know, but she was quiet. The bedroom was even more stuffy than the living room, if that were possible, and Ellen felt a twinge of pity for the girl, but steeled herself to ignoring her until she was ready to make peace on her mother's terms. The girl had to be reined in sharply before she got into any trouble. She was just getting to the age when she might do something foolish just for the thrill and be very sorry afterwards. Like she herself had done. And what had it gotten her? Trouble in assorted forms, most of it named Billy Joe Schibe.
Saturday nights in a little Southern town are the high points of a humdrum life. All Saturday afternoon the pickups and Ford sedans roll into town, disgorging the red-necked farmers and their child-broken wives who line the main street, sometimes looking in the store windows, sometimes walking along the pavement, but mostly just being in town for a few hours to lose the memory of barren red clay fields that they have wrestled with and lost to the five previous days. The men squat on their haunches and remain like that for hours exchanging monosyllables with their neighbors, and those few who have a little money left after their weekly purchase of enough cornmeal and salt pork to keep them going for another week get drunk. The women mostly stand around and watch their lads roll in the dirt, unconcerned with the cars that roll by. Later, the families go to the local movie house to see all of the films that are made exclusively for them and never see the inside of a projection booth in a big-city theater: The Roy Rogers, the Ma and Pa Kettles, films marketed for the rural population only. There is a great deal of rapt attention at all times.
The town people look on the farmers with a good deal of pity mixed with feelings of superiority. Many of them don't even go out on Saturday nights, leaving the town to the hicks. Sunday is the day for the town.
The teen-agers though, eager for anything, love to mingle with the farmers and their families, acting like tourists in a foreign country, even though they go to school with many of the children of the farmers. School is an unreal world, though and Harmony, Georgia on Saturday night is LIFE.
Ellen pushed her way through the crowd on her way to the drugstore. All the kids would be there by now, she thought, and she wanted to have a hand in making plans for the evening. It might be a good idea to drive to Macon and perhaps go to the movies there if any of the boys had any money. They had good movies in Macon. Maybe there'd be a Van Johnson in town. That would be good.
The drugstore was crowded with lads and they greeted Ellen happily. Plans were being discussed, discarded, and brought up again. When there isn't much to do, you take pains because the planning is the best part. The same partem repeated itself every Saturday night. They usually ended up by driving a few miles out of town to neck. The war was over, but gas was still scarce, and the forty miles to Macon was too far to be a habitual destination. And there was no other place to go but Macon. And not very much in Macon when you got there.
Ellen participated in the discussion, pressing for a drive to the city, until the drugstore owner shooed them out of the place. They were making too much noise and not spending any money. They regrouped on the sidewalk and continued weighing possibilities. Ellen began to see that she wouldn't get to Macon that night and grew disappointed. Life was certainly getting dull.
Then she noticed that a group of older boys was standing on the fringes of the crowd, watching intently. Most of them Ellen had seen before, though some of the faces were unusually unfamiliar for such a small town. They were quite a bit older, twenty-three or four, and she decided that many must have been in the army since she was quite young. One in particular was staring at her very hard. He was slightly drunk and his long black hair was disheveled. He looked a little like old man Schibe. It must be his son Billy Joe, who had been discharged a week ago. He wore a pair of old Levis and a pre-war shirt that had not allowed for his filling out in the service. The buttons strained against the material and threatened to pop at any moment He wore GI combat boots and heavy white socks. He came over to Ellen.
"Ain't you Lawyer Milton's kid?"
"That's right."
"You sure grew up, didn't you." His eyes passed over her body slowly and boldly. Ellen felt flattered at this interest from a veteran who had money in his pockets. Perhaps she'd make it to Macon after all.
"What you doin'? "
"Nothing."
"Like to take a ride."
"Where to?"
"I don't know. Around. Where d'you wanna go."
"Macon."
He laughed. "Okay, well go to Macon. Come on." He took her arm familiarly and started to lead her away. One of the boys in the group noticed and rushed after them.
"Hey, Ellen! Where you goin'? " They stopped and Billy Joe turned around slowly.
"What's it your business, kid?"
The boy looked startled and was about to turn away when one of the girls in the group snickered. His reputation was at stake now. He surveyed the situation. He had the strength of numbers. He turned back to Billy Joe, trying to be calm.
"You-" His voice broke and he began again. "You trying to start something?" He glanced behind him to make sure the group was still there.
There was a minute of utter silence, then Billy Joe sighed and took a large clasp knife out of his Levis. He opened it and held it lightly, almost carelessly, in his palm.
"Suppose I am?" He stared at the boy, who stared at the knife. Then he took Ellen's arm and turned away again. This time there wasn't a sound behind them.
Ellen was beside herself. Someone had actually almost fought over her! It was just like in the books she read about the knights, although Billy Joe was a rather crude Lancelot.
When he led her to his father's pickup truck the thrill faded a bit. She had half-expected a fairly new car that he could have afforded with his severance pay. Still, it was transportation. She climbed in and Billy Joe started the engine and drove down the street, nearly colliding with several cars and pedestrians. They drove out into the country. Billy Joe reached under the seat and pulled up a pint bottle of whiskey, unscrewed the cap with his teeth, spit it in his lap and took a long pull. "Want one?"
"No," Ellen said. "I don't like it."
"Suit yourself." He put the cap back on the bottle and dropped it on the floorboards. He reached over and pulled her to his side of the cab and put his arm around her, slipping his hand into the neckline of her peasant blouse. He had been many long months in the Pacific without a woman and he wasn't about to waste time.
Ellen stiffened momentarily, then relaxed against his shoulder. If this was the price she had to pay for getting to Macon, so be it.
"Have you been home long?"
"Eleven days."
"I guess it was pretty awful, wasn't it? I mean the war and all."
"Yeah." He began to fondle her nipple and she felt it stiffen beneath his fingers.
"I mean all the fighting and the noise and all that. And no one to talk to or anything."
"Yeah." His fingers kept probing and pressing, and she felt the warmth in her belly begin to spread out all over her and she kept on babbling, asking questions which he answered briefly. Her questions became more and more excited as his fingers did their work and his replies became briefer and briefer until he suddenly turned into a field and the truck bumped to a stop. He pushed the floor shift into neutral with his knee and reached across the steering wheel with his left hand and turned off the ignition, never taking his hand from her breast.
"Look, let's forget the blasted war. It's over and there's a lot of things I done in the war but there's a lot more things I ain't done in a long time and I got a lotta time to make up for." He pulled the blouse off her shoulders and lifted her breasts out of her half-bra and kissed them hungrily. He pushed her backwards to the cushions and his hands went under her skirt and Ellen stiffened again and then pushed herself towards him.
"Oh, yes, yes, do it there," she panted, tossing her head from side to side violently. He said nothing, pulling her panties off her hips and then over her thighs and finally he dropped them on the floor and pushed her skirt up to her waist. He put his hands under her and lifted her to him.
"No, no!" He stopped abruptly.
"What's the matter?"
"I don't want to go all the way."
"Bullshit, baby." He pressed his mouth over hers and pushed his tongue roughly against her lips. She fought back for a minute, but then his hands were flying over her, pressing and probing and stroking her until she thought that she would go out of her mind and then he was on her completely and the pressure mounted and the stars began to come at her. She rose and fell on the roller coaster and then she went way up high and stayed there and the stars went on and off. Then it was over and Billy Joe straightened up and arranged his clothing.
"Man, what a long time it's been. You just got three years' worth."
She pulled her skirt down over her knees and pushed her breasts back into the bra. She felt on the floorboards for her panties and wiggled into them.
Billy Joe started the engine.
"Still want to go to Macon?" he laughed.
"Sure."
"Okay. It's still early. We got time for at least a couple more." He finished the pint and threw it out the window and sped down the road towards Macon. Ellen cuddled against him as he whistled through his teeth happily. She felt like doing it again right away and she stroked his thigh, but he didn't respond.
They got back from Macon at ten o'clock the next morning and she had a violent argument with her father, the first of many about Billy Joe, but she didn't care. She had never felt like he had made her feel, and all she wanted was to be with him and feel that way all the time.
She had never felt that way before. Or since, not for a long time, not until last night, when, she now discovered to her surprise, she remembered a moment of pleasure amid all the agony. She found herself reliving that moment as she lay on the couch in her hot apartment. It was beginning to dominate her thoughts, that tiny moment of fire that had been so familiar to her, that moment that fourteen years' absence couldn't erase. She was becoming possessed by it, and the brutality was fading from her memory as the other came farther forward. She tried to put it out of her mind, and it went away, but it returned again, stronger than before and dominated her all the more.
She got up from the couch and stood in front of the fan, opening her duster to let the breeze blow directly on her body. The place where she had been cut had closed up now, and only a thin brown line remained on her flat, soft belly. She looked at her belly, then at her breasts admiringly, with new wonder. She was still a woman, she thought, still able to feel things and perhaps she had been wrong all these years. Perhaps what she had feared and assigned all her misfortunes to had not been the real trouble after all.
Then she took herself in hand again. "You fool," she said aloud, and then she repeated it. "You fool. What's the matter with you, anyway? You should be on the couch in the doctor's office, instead of outside letting the patients in. The very thought of rape giving pleasure to anyone. You must really be sick." And yet she could not shake the thought.
She walked to the window and looked out. There were few people on the street now during the hottest part of the day on what must be the hottest day of the year. They were at the beaches or in the air conditioned movies or a cool bar watching the ball game. No one on the streets to feel the heat as the sun poured it onto the pavement and the buildings which took it in and then would give it out again at night. It was hot, so hot! She moved restlessly around the room, but she couldn't escape it anywhere. No one could.
Bill Pauling couldn't, despite the air conditioner that strained to keep the room comfortable, and he tossed and turned and woke up all wet but went back to sleep again, feeling lousy the way you do when you sleep in the afternoon.
Kitty Schibe couldn't escape it as she lay on the bed in the oven-like room, thinking of Jack to try to escape from the discomfort, but thoughts of Jack led to thoughts of the beach and how unfair her mother was to keep her imprisoned like this on such a hot day.
One person managed to escape it a little. He sat with no clothes on in a tiny room in a run-down rooming house not at all his type of place and honed the big knife carefully with a whetstone and looked at the pictures of the women in the photography magazine he had bought that morning, at their big breasts and soft bellies and then he couldn't stand it any more and took one of the pictures and plunged the knife into it and ripped at it and then he felt much better. He put the magazine on a pile of other photography magazine, all similarly mutilated. He had done it to a lot of girls in the magazines. Soon he would have to do it to a real one.
CHAPTER IV
By Tuesday afternoon Ellen couldn't stand it any longer. She had been penned up in the apartment for almost four straight days, four days of unrelieved heat and humidity, with her temper growing shorter by the hour. She and Kitty were barely speaking to each other; each managed to stay in a different room, on one pretext or another, except at meal times. Kitty mostly stayed in the bedroom with the door almost closed and Ellen prowled restlessly around the living room and kitchen, sitting down, standing up, picking up a magazine and reading a few lines, then putting it down, dusting, combing her long hair.
Pauling had come to the apartment early Monday morning and examined her and asked many questions, most of which she couldn't answer, about what she remembered about her attacker, if anything, and then had left for the office, telling her again not to set foot outside the house until he told her to do so. Something else, something worse might happen if she didn't.
Even so, the walls seemed to move in closer and closer with each passing minute, and she was beginning to feel that nothing that could happen to her on the outside could be as bad as being imprisoned until Bill made some move.
This was what she told herself, but down deep inside her she knew that there were other reasons, too.
As hard as she tried, the thoughts of that night would not go away, and she found that they were no longer thoughts of fear or memories of pain, but memories of pleasure. She was becoming obsessed with the desire to find out who her attacker had been. What she would do when she discovered his identity she hadn't thought about but the desire to unmask him began to dominate all of her waking thoughts and even creep in on her dreams. Only the night before she had dreamed that she had been back in the doctor's office, naked, and the door opened and a faceless man with a halo of red light came in, his feet not touching the floor, and he sailed across the room to her, holding in his hand not a knife but something else and she welcomed him with outstretched arms and she became part of the red haze and the pleasure went through her again and she woke up.
This was the pattern of her days and she could stand it no longer. To hell with hiding, she said to herself. I'll find out myself who it was, one way or another.
She walked into the bedroom and threw off her robe and began to dress. Kitty rolled over on the bed and looked at her.
"Where are you going?"
"To work."
"But Dr. Pauling said-"
"I know what he said, but I can't stand it around here any longer. We're at each other's throats all the time and I'm going mad from boredom."
"Do you think you'll be all right at the office?"
"I think so. The doctor will be there and I won't stay late." She finished dressing-and brushed her hair and put on some make-up. Then she walked to the bed and kissed Kitty on the forehead. "Take it easy for now, baby, and let's try not to fight any more."
"Okay." Ellen walked out of the apartment and went down the stairs. Kitty waited a few moments, then popped out of bed and ran into the shower. If she hurried, she could be out on the street before the kids went in for dinner. Maybe Jack would still be around.
When Ellen walked into the office, she could see that Bill, after he got over his initial surprise, was furious, but Mr. Di Nonno was there, and he couldn't say anything. He merely glared at her, and closed the door to the inner office a bit harder than usual.
When Di Nonno had left, the next patient had not yet appeared, and Bill turned to her angrily.
"What in hell is wrong with you? Are you looking for trouble?"
"I couldn't stand it in that apartment another minute! I had to come down here, or I would have ended up climbing the walls."
"But it's pure foolishness! I'm no farther along than I was last week and I still think it's dangerous for you to be around here."
"But you're here, aren't you?"
"My office is soundproof, don't forget. I don't hear very much of what goes on out here."
"Well, I couldn't stand it any more, so I came back. Anyway, I'm here now, so there's no sense talking about it."
"I still think you're being very foolish, Ellen. It just isn't safe for you here."
"Then why don't you call the police?"
"I've explained that to you before." He lit a cigarette and sat down on one of the couches. "The police would only aggravate matters."
"Why are you so afraid of the police?" she asked. A suspicion was beginning to gnaw at her, one she tried to put down, but couldn't. "What qualifies you to be a detective all of a sudden?"
He put on his psychiatrist face. "It isn't a point of qualification, Ellen, it's merely that I think I know what I'm doing and I know I can handle this kind of thing better than the police. Sex deviation is my field, don't forget, and I want to see this through myself."
"So I'm to be the goat you stake out in hopes that the tiger will come back for one more try?"
"I'm not asking you to do anything at all. I told you to stay home until I had the whole thing worked out."
"But I can't stand to be in that house any longer! You try staying in my stuffy apartment for four days and see how long you last. It's all very well for you to talk, sitting here in a nice cool office, or in your nice cool apartment, but if you were in my position, believe me-"
The door opened and Perry Bronston entered. He glanced apprehensively from one to the other, sensing the hostility the way a timid man does, but Bill and Ellen quickly adjusted their faces and became warm and professional. Bill got up from the couch and led Bronston to the inner office, and Ellen sat down behind the desk. She felt worse than ever now. The doctor's reluctance to call in the police seriously troubled her. Why? Why was he being so foolish? It was personally and professionally dangerous to act this way. If the police found out, when they found out, he would be in a great deal of trouble, and no amount of reasoning would convince them that he had acted sensibly. The only reason for it was-but that was unthinkable! Or was it? How much did she really know?
The movie theater was not so cool in the last row of the balcony, nor so dark, but all the kids sat there anyway. Kitty tried hard to concentrate on the movie, but she was too conscious of the pressure of Jack's hand in hers, and his body just a few inches away. She had found him on the corner and he had promptly asked her for the date which she eagerly accepted. Since her mother had gone back to work, she felt that she was free, too, and she meant to take advantage of it in the best way she could. And this was the best way.
Jack slipped his arm around her shoulder, and she nestled close to him.
"Want to stay? This is a pretty rat movie."
"I don't care."
"Let's go over to the park. It's not as cool, but it's more private."
"Okay." They got up and walked down the steps and out of the theater. The warm air hit them and they stood for a moment adjusting to it before they walked west to the park.
Riverside Park runs from 72nd Street to 125th Street on the West Side of Manhattan, and its character changes radically many times along its two and a half mile parallel of the Hudson River. It can be a peaceful haven for young lovers or old folks or a battle ground for the JD's whose squalid homes h'e just a few blocks to the east. The difference can be in just a half a block, but then you take your chances venturing anywhere where there's grass in New York.
Jack and Kitty didn't think much about this, though, as they entered the park. There aren't many places for a young couple to go, and whatever risks you take have to be taken if you want privacy.
They strolled to a bench and sat down. The lights from the Jersey side winked in the distance and the big sign from Palisades Park flashed from the cliffs, inviting one and all to partake of its delights. They both watched it as if by mutual consent.
"Mitch Wilson's having a big show out there next Tuesday." This was a disc jockey on a local hard sell radio station that blared the latest top hits at the teen age record buyers.
"Yeah?" Jack said. "Who's going to be there?"
"Eldon Farquart, the Bleeders, Johnny Lee Binks and Little Jackson."
"Sounds like a gas."
"I think it will be."
"Want to go?"
"I'd love to."
"Okay, it's set. Pick you up at seven." He put his arm around her and pulled her to him. She came willingly and put her face up. He kissed her softly and then a little harder and his lips parted. She kept hers tight together until his hand found her young breast and pressed it through her blouse and she opened her mouth and his grip became tighter.
She fought clear of his lips. "Not too hard. It hurts when you do it that hard." His hand went inside her blouse and found her young nipple and she felt it stir, just as she had imagined it would. She pressed his hand and responded eagerly to his kisses, but when he tried to push his hand up under her skirt, she moved it away decisively.
"No, not that." She pulled away and straightened her skirt. Jack moved closer and grabbed her again, but she had begun to be scared and stood up quickly.
"I think I'd better go home now."
Jack sat quietly in front of her for several moments; then he stood up without saying a word and turned to leave with her. "Sheeeit."
They both spun around and peered behind the bench as an old man got up from the grass on which he had been lying and came towards them.
"Ah, sheeit, kids, here I thought I was gonna see somethin' and you went and disappointed me. I been waiting all night for someone to come by this here bench and when I seen you two I thought you was gonna show me somethin'. Now you ain't. Why not?" He advanced towards them and they both backed away at the same rate, too startled to run. Neither knew what to do.
The old man stepped carefully over the iron pipes that served as a fence. He was not dressed badly, not like a ass, but his general air of uncleanliness made up for his lack of physical dirt. He came closer to them.
"Why ain't you gonna do nothin'? " As he neared them, they could see his eyes glittering with an unnatural brightness, as if he had a fever.
"C'mon, let's see something." He looked from one to the other and Jack finally came to his senses and grabbed Kitty's arm and they took off up the path toward the bright fights of Broadway. The old man called after them, but they ran on together, hand in hand, until they were well out of the park and stopped and stood on a corner with the traffic whizzing by and caught their breath. They looked at each other wonderingly; Kitty confused and seeking an answer, Jack trying to look sophisticated and failing miserably.
"W-what was it?" she finally managed to say.
"Oh, just one of those perverts that hangs around the parks. I read about them in the paper. They're trying to clean them out."
"I was scared to death."
"Yeah."
He took her arm again and they proceeded up the street towards their block, eager to get back into their own environment.
"What time is it?"
He looked at his watch. "Nine-fifteen."
"God, my mother'll kill me if she's home now. I wasn't supposed to go out at all tonight."
"How come? What'd you do?"
"Oh, nothing. It doesn't matter." They were in front of her apartment house and she kissed him lightly on the cheek. "I had a nice time tonight."
"Will you go to the beach with me Saturday or Sunday?"
"I don't know if I can or not. I'll let you know later this week. Okay?"
"Okay." She kissed him again and turned and ran up the steps. Nine-fifteen. If her mother were home it would be a mess.
Nine-fifteen. Ellen stared at the desk clock impatiently. He was taking forever tonight with these people. Well, she reasoned, it was for her in many ways. Or was it? How could she be sure what he was doing in there? Maybe he wasn't trying to find out anything at all.
But that's silly, she told herself. He's a reputable psychiatrist with a good practice. He wouldn't be a person to do a thing like that. No, it had to be one of the patients. Which one? Pauling was making no headway, or if he was, he wasn't saying anything.
The need to know was becoming stronger and stronger as she sat at the desk, perhaps only a few feet away from the man who had done it. Who was in there now?
Oh, yes. Mr. Baxter. A fat, disgusting man with bad manners and a whiny voice. Why not him? He had always looked at her in a strange way when he was waiting for the doctor to see him. Why not?
A sudden thought hit her. If Pauling couldn't find out, perhaps she could. There was a way. She would get each of them to make love to her. She would remember what it had been like at the moment. A very methodical, systematic way. She would find out in her own way. When it happened, she would know the man. It had to be one of them. Baxter would be first.
She reached for the telephone and dialed home. It rang several times and then she heard Kitty's voice.
"Hello."
"Kitty, this is Mother. I wanted to tell you that I'd be home late tonight. Dr. Pauling has some work for me to do and he and I are going to stay behind and get it finished up. I probably won't be home until quite late, so don't wait up for me."
"Okay, Mom."
"What have you been doing all evening?"
"Oh, nothing much. I read a little, listened to the radio. I'm going to wash and set my hair, I think."
"Fine. Don't stay up too late. I'll see you in the morning. I'll try not to disturb you when I come in."
"All right, Mom. Goodbye."
Ellen said goodbye and hung up. Somehow she felt a little wicked lying to Kitty, and she smiled to herself. If the innocent little thing ever knew I
She looked impatiently at the office door. What was he doing in there? It isn't often in a woman's life that she plans a seduction and almost never a series of them, and the excitement of the idea was building up within her. Her thoughts raced back to that night again, and she knew that she would know when the time came. She was eager for it to begin, and she stared at the door and tapped her fingers on the desk top and muttered, "Come on; come ON!" to herself as she waited.
The struggle going on within her had finally resolved itself. For fourteen years she had been a Puritan, wanting nothing to do with men. In just a few short days, she had almost become the Ellen of old, eagerly seeking sex in any form she knew, willing to do anything to find an answer to her questions. Before they had been questions about life, about happiness and how and where to seek it, and sex had been an answer of a sort that she had closed her mind to all of these years. Now she had to find sex again, and through it find an answer, not of life as she had understood it years before, but life as it is, the struggle to keep from death. This was her goal, like the quests of the knights she used to read about, and like the knights, she sought it eagerly.
After what seemed hours, the office door opened and the two men came out. Baxter was drying his hands on a towel. He handed it to Pauling and then went out, glancing at Ellen as he opened the door. She tried to read his face, but it was expressionless. She turned to Pauling.
"Is that it for tonight, I hope?"
"Yes, it is. Well be finished in a few minutes and then I'll put you in a cab and you can go home and go to bed. I don't want you to come back until I tell you to."
"I'm sorry, Doctor, but I can't do that. You have to let me come in at night. I just can't remain home. What's the danger if you're here?"
"Ellen, we've been through this once this evening already, and I thought we had it settled. You are to stay at home until the danger is past."
"I'm coming in tomorrow night."
"No."
"You can't stop me." She turned and began to straighten up the desk. Bill was about to reply, but went back into the office. When she went in to put the notes away, she found him staring at three large pieces of poster board on which were smears of many colors of paint. They looked like the paintings that she used to see in the nursery school where Kitty had gone.
"What are they?"
"Finger paintings."
"What are they for?"
"I hope to find something out from them."
"Do they mean anything to you? They don't to me."
"I'm not sure, Ellen. I'm not sure at all." He continued to stare at them as she tidied up the office. Finally he put them down beside his desk and turned to her.
"Leave the rest for Miss Halloran in the morning. You should have been home long ago." They closed up the office and locked the front door and waited for the elevator. Ellen decided to try again.
"Doctor, don't you think you would have a better chance if I were in the office all the time when these people come to see you? I mean, wouldn't the one who did it be less likely to be suspicious if he saw me in the office? If I weren't around, he might be afraid that you knew everything and get scared; but if he saw me, he might think that you didn't know anything and be more relaxed. If he were more relaxed, wouldn't he be more likely to let something slip out?"
"I don't know, Ellen. I don't know. There's no set pattern for this kind of person. They're likely to do anything or feel anything. You can't assume rational behavior for them because they aren't wholly rational people."
"Surely you must be able to assume something."
"Not very much, I'm afraid. Where the hell is the elevator? You see, we know so very little about the sex murderer. They're sent off to prison and executed and we psychiatrists never really get a chance to do any work with them that amounts to anything, so we're pretty much in the dark about the whole personality type. That's why I want to try this on my own. If I can proceed the way I want to, I might possibly be able to isolate a few characteristics that haven't been fully understood up until now, and perhaps we can pool the information and come up with some definite idea of the sex murderer type, and get to him before he does any harm. They all give adequate warning before they commit a crime in one way or another. They're convicted of smaller sex crimes or they have a history of mental problems. We just don't know which warnings are the warnings of a murderer. If I can see this through, I might be able to add a little to what is known and save someone else. This is both for you, Ellen, and for society in general. This is why I'm so firm on not having the police in on it I need the time to develop in my own way."
The elevator came and cut the discussion off. They got on, thankful that the operator was not the one who had been on the week before. They were silent until the elevator reached the main floor and they got out on the street. Bill looked for a cab.
"Maybe you have a point, Ellen. I'm not sure of anything at this stage. Perhaps I am creating suspicion in the person's mind by not having you at work. I don't know. I'll call you in the morning and tell you whether or not I want you to come to work tomorrow. But you've got to abide by my decision. Is that clear?"
"I suppose so." He finally spotted a cab and hailed it.
It made an illegal U-turn and pulled up to the curb in front of them. Bill opened the door and helped Ellen in. He gave the driver her address and gave him two dollars.
"Keep whatever's left" He stuck his head in the window. "Ellen, I'll call you in the morning. Don't do anything until then."
"All right" He pulled his head out and the cab pulled away, sneaked past a red light, and turned east towards Central Park. When they were almost there, Ellen leaned forward.
"Stop the cab, please. I want to get you."
"But the guy told me-"
"I know what he told you. I want to get out here. You can keep the money."
Grumbling, he pulled the cab to the curb and she got out and set off hurriedly down the street towards Lexington Avenue. Baxter liked to have a drink after the session, she knew, and he might be in one of the local bars. If he were, she would find him and begin her task. It was going to have to start tonight! Her heart pounded as she almost ran down the deserted street.
CHAPTER V
She finally found him in the third bar she looked into, staring sadly into the remnants of a martini. She took a couple of quick breaths and walked inside and sat on the stool next to his. He didn't look up for a moment, and she studied him silently.
Looking at Henry Baxter's case history in the files at the doctor's, one would expect a lean angry type, hell bent on destroying himself and dragging as much of the world as he could with him. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. He was the picture of a middle-aged business man. His taste in clothes was conservative: gray flannels, creamy white shirts, quiet ties, heavy brogues. He was barber-shaved and manicured, his nails gleamed in the dim light and his powdered jaw was just beginning to show the faint stubble that would be very heavy in eight hours. Fat and passive, his whole appearance belied the self-destructive urge that frothed inside of him. You could sometimes see it after he had his fourth martini.
He was capable of holding down jobs paying as much as thirty thousand a year, but the demon that drove him on kept him from it. The same demon raged at him every time he left the doctor's office, and he had to drown it fast every time. So he sat finishing his third quick one, trying not to think about anything much at all.
"Why, hello, Mr. Baxter." She was surprised: she had expected to feel school-girlish and nervous, and that her voice would reflect it, but she was in full control of herself and extremely alert.
Baxter started and shot a quick glance to his right. His heavy features went through a volcanic upheaval as he tried to show genuine pleasure in meeting Ellen, but his eyes were those of a beast trapped at last in its own environment.
"Well, Miss Schibel What are you doing here? I should think you would be well in bed by now."
"Well, the doctor and I had some work to do, and I felt so beat afterwards that I thought I would stop in somewhere and have a drink before I went home. I don't normally do this sort of thing, so I picked the first place that I saw. It's strange seeing you here. Do you come here often?"
"Not here, no, but I usually stop off from the office on my way home and have a quick drink. Can I buy you one?"
"Thank you very much."
"What would you like."
"I'll have what ever you are."
He called the bartender over and ordered two martinis. They sat without saying anything, watching the bartender make the drinks, and when he set them down before him they grabbed eagerly and sipped slowly, hoping the gin might make it easier for them. Ellen took a couple of sips and set hers down, but Baxter continued taking small sips until the glass was almost empty. She decided that he would be easy. He was starting to feel nervous already. She edged closer to him.
"I think it's so strange to meet you here," she purred. "Don't you?"
He picked up the glass and drained it before murmuring something that sounded like "Yes." A great battle seemed to be waging inside him: the desire for this attractive woman, who, despite all she probably knew about him, seemed to be hurling herself at him, and an animal wariness that kept him back from making any reciprocal gestures to her.
And so the evening wore on. Ellen matched him drink for drink, hoping that the liquor would melt his reserve, but it seemed to do little more for either of them. Ellen could have been drinking water and Baxter grew only a little less suspicious and nervous.
The bar began to fill up and people crowded along its length, forcing the two of them to move closer and closer together, but even this didn't seem to work on Baxter. He kept on drinking the martinis and now the sweat was beginning to stand out on his forehead and run down his powdered jaw as he watched Ellen out of the corner of his eye. She tried desperately to get him into a conversation, but he replied in a few words and went back to his drink. It was getting time for more desperate measures.
She inched her stool a little closer until her knee was touching his. She pressed it ever so gently against his, and she felt it begin to tremble. His face was a study in upheaval. All the emotions that he felt inside were reflecting in his features. He turned a couple of colors mostly pink, before he settled back into his calm.
"It's getting awfully crowded in here." She pressed her knee harder. Still no reaction except fear. She finally put her hand on his thigh. She thought he was going to scream.
"Isn't there anyplace else where we can go where it isn't so noisy and warm?"
"I don't know anything about this neighborhood," he practically whined.
God, she thought, what am I going to have to do? I've done all but grab him right here and still he won't bite. Completely exasperated, she ran her hand all the way up his thigh.
She had finally pressed the right button. He turned to her, just like that, with his face lit up in a happy grin. "Do that again."
"Do what."
"What you just did."
She repeated the act and a spasm passed over him as he closed his eyes and relaxed all at once.
"You're right," he said. "It is too hot and noisy in here, I know some other nicer places." He threw a bill on the bar and they got up and walked outside into the heavy air. He hailed a cab and told the driver to head south.
"Where are we going?" She was beginning to have second thoughts now. In the bar there had been a lot of people around.
"Oh, I don't know. There are a lot of places we could go. I just thought we'd start somewhere and see where we end up." He put his fat hand into hers and scratched her palm, a dirty little schoolboy gesture that almost made her sick to her stomach. But she was this far in now; she couldn't turn back. The passion that had been so strong when she had thought about the rape did not seem to be so powerful anymore. This fat little beetle couldn't be capable of such an act, she reflected. He doesn't have enough nerve to do anything beyond that silly scratching.
The cab drove downtown and Baxter kept up a steady stream of meaningless chatter about himself and his troubles. He told tier about how lonely he was, about his wives and how they hated and tried to bleed him, all in speech just barely blurred by what had been a considerable amount of gin breathed on by a little vermouth.
Finally he told the driver to stop when the cab was quite far downtown on Third Avenue, almost in the Bowery. They got out and he steered her into a filthy bar that stood between a pawnshop and a cheap transient hotel. The bar itself was fairy crowded with semi-derelicts, most of whom looked at Ellen with unmasked hunger as Baxter almost dragged her inside.
In an excited voice he told her that he came there quite often, that there was really a rough crowd of men that hung out in there, that he had been in several fights and lost all of them. This with a trace of pride, as if he had designed it so well that the men had not an ounce of control over themselves and he was the master.
"I don't like this place, Mr. Baxter. Isn't there somewhere else where we can go and have the same amount of privacy?"
"Of course there is. Well go to my room soon, and we can be very much alone there, but first I want to have a few drinks, because I don't have any liquor at home." He was drinking beer now, swallowing it feverishly. Ellen had one sip of the bitter brew and let it stand.
She was not the only women in the place. Here and there along the bar, and at one or two of the tables, were the female counterparts of the down-at-the-heels men that patronized the place. Some sat quietly, allowing the men to feel them up for a free drink, not even paying attention to the shaky hands that roamed all over their bodies. Others took part in the general gaiety of the place, throwing back their heads to laugh and expose their filthy, almost toothless mouths, mouths here and there smeared with too much lipstick, like bloody gashes across their awful pale faces. They could have been of any age: all looked sixty but were probably a lot younger. Ellen felt more revolted by them than by any of the men there, and they paid her no attention at all. She would have caused comment in almost any place where there were women, if not comment, at least interest. But not here. All the women there were too far gone to retain even this most basic of female feelings, reaction to another woman as a potential rival
Ellen turned to Baxter, who was watching her very carefully now.
"I'm sorry, but I can't stand it in here. I'm going to have to leave whether you do or not."
He put his hand on her arm. "Don't do that. If you want to go, we will, but in a minute." He squeezed harder. "In a minute." Pleadingly.
"Now."
"All right." He got off the stool and put a dollar on the bar and they left. Ellen drew a strong breath of the stale city air, which was pure delight after the odor of the bar. Baxter began to lead her uptown.
"I don't live far from here. About six blocks. Let's walk."
"I don't care." She was thoroughly disgusted by now. Baxter was not the one, she felt sure, and yet she still had to find out beyond a doubt. Even though she wanted to fling his hand from her arm and run away as fast as she could, she knew that she would have to put him to the final test before coming to a conclusion.
They walked along the dirty streets silently, occasionally stepping into the street to avoid a ass lying in his own vomit across the width of the sidewalk. Now and then, a whiny voice called out to them from a doorway, or a shape shuffled out and stepped alongside of them wheezing a useless and worn-out phrase vaguely intended to get a penny or a dime and that almost never worked. When that happened Ellen clung a little closer to Baxter. As little help as he probably would be, he was something. In all the years that she had knocked around the city, and other cities, she had never come into contact with this world within a world. She had vague knowledge of its existence, but it had never been so real, so apparent to her senses, as now. She saw it, she heard it, she felt it, even smelled and almost tasted it in its rawest state. She breathed more freely when the character of the neighborhood began to change slightly and they finally reached the place where Baxter lived, one of a hundred anonymous rooming-houses that cater to the anonymous men who drift in an out of the city, living their aimless fives, finally dying in some cheap room similar to the one she now found herself in.
One iron bed. One warped dresser with a cracked, cloudy mirror. One battered easy chair, leaking padding from every joint. One dirty window, slightly open, looking out on nothing. One naked bulb overhead casting deep shadows all over the room. Several flies and moths orbiting the bulb. Several squashed bugs on the faded wallpaper not doing anything.
Ellen had gone too far now. She knew it just as she now knew Baxter was not the man. Not this man who was now aglow with excitement, a strange contrast in his good clothes in the worst room imaginable. Not this man who had chosen to live like this to feel the stab of pain and pleasure within him every time he looked at the filth that surrounded him. It could not be Baxter. She wanted to cry out, to scream, to weep, to run, and she could do none of them. She had gotten on the train and it wasn't making any stops until the end of the line. She had to ride it.
Baxter took off his coat, tie and vest and hung them in the closet. Then he turned to her, his eyes wide and his hands quivering slightly.
"Do you want to start now?" There it was. No hedging now, no flustering. He knew as well as she did. He took his shirt off and draped it on the chair. He repeated the question and she nodded. Get it over with, a voice cried out inside her. Get it over with and get out.
"Take your clothes off." The voice was pleading, yet with an edge of command in it. She unbuttoned the top of her dress and pulled it off her shoulders. She slid it down her hips and wriggled out of it. He wasn't even looking at her as he took his trousers off. She unsnapped her bra and her full breasts were bared.
She kept expecting him to come near her, yet he stayed on the other side of the room undressing methodically, almost shyly, as if she weren't there. She continued undressing until she was naked in front of him and he was naked by then too. His body was soft, almost feminine, with rolls of fatty tissue on his chest and abdomen.
Then he finally looked at her and she almost cringed, then steadied herself and returned his gaze. Her stomach tightened into knots as he approached and put out his hand. He touched her breasts lightly and, in spite of herself, she felt the nipple begin to harden. He smiled, "Can we get started?" He took her hand and led her to the crumpled bed. He rolled on it first and then pulled her down on top of him. His hand found her nipple again and squeezed it, while he took her hand and guided it over his body.
"You've been married," he said, "You know what to do." He held tight to her half-protesting hand, guiding it over him as she fought back wave after wave of revulsion, trying to cooperate with him to get it over with, but as she listened to his heavy breathing she became more sickened by the whole thing. She did what he wanted and then when she thought she could stand no more, she slid to the side of the bed and tried to pull him over to her. But he refused.
"No. I'm not ready yet." Just like a woman would say it. He pulled her back to him and took her hand again.
"What's wrong with you? What do you want?" She moved away.
He grabbed her roughly and shook her.
"How would you like the doctor to find out about this?"
"Don't try to threaten me."
"I'm not threatening. I'll tell the doctor first chance I get."
Sudden fear swept over her. Pauling must know nothing of this. If he found out, it would be the end of everything.
"All right," she said wearily, "I'll do whatever you want."
Baxter smiled happily and pulled her on top of him again.
She stumbled down the stairs an hour later, fighting back the nausea that rose in her throat and threatened to choke her. She could not believe that such men (were they men at all?) existed. Not even after what had happened.
Even now, as she reached the street and began to hurry along, not knowing or caring where she was going as long as it was away, she could not believe that it all had happened to her. She had been like a spectator, watching herself from a peephole in the wall. She shuddered.
But she knew for certain that it wasn't Henry Baxter. Henry Baxter was too involved with Henry Baxter to be capable of even doing injury to anyone else except Henry Baxter. She was sure of that now.
She suddenly realized that she had been walking in the wrong direction. When she came to the corner, she walked uptown one block so she wouldn't have to pass his place again and began hurrying faster in the opposite direction. She wanted to get home but didn't want to take a cab. She had to be calm when she saw Kitty and a cab would be too fast. She needed time to unwind so she decided to take the subway. This part of the city was unfamiliar to her but she thought that Greenwich Village was somewhere in the direction she was walking and she knew that she could catch the subway there.
Her mind raced in several different directions as she moved along, this time not seeing the filth around her, not seeing or hearing the bums that tried to stop her on the way.
She had to move fast now. Even if Baxter said nothing, she knew the doctor would find out sooner or later. She had to get the others alone and find out which one of them it was. There were only two now. Di Nonno and Bronston. The names beat over and over again in rhythm to the click of her high heels on the sidewalk. It was one of them and she would know soon enough which one. But it had to be done quickly, within the next few days, before Baxter blurted it out to the doctor, or the doctor began to suspect.
Gradually she came out of the dark streets of the East Side to the brighter fights of the Village area. Things were still alive here, even on a summer week night, with hundreds of people crowding the narrow sidewalks and looking into the shop windows. Many of them were tourists dressed to the teeth in their Omaha specials or Dayton casuals, staring at each other, hoping to catch a glimpse of a beatnik or a fairy or one of the other legendary beasts that the national magazines have peopled the Village with. But all Omaha sees is Dayton, and all Dayton sees is Kansas City, and they don't know that, but the others do and don't go out into the Village. Not while Omaha and Dayton and Kansas City are on the prowl, at any rate. They get the Village back about two A.M. when the rubes go back uptown to go to bed so they can get up to get in line early at Radio City.
Ellen slipped through the crowd paying no one any attention. She relaxed a little bit in the press of people, letting the laughter and the hard nasal voices soothe her a bit and bring her back to reality, but all she could think of now was a hot tub to wash all of the disgust away.
She finally reached the subway and made her way down the steps to the platform. The heat was staggering underground and all the benches were full. She prowled back and forth along the platform restlessly until the train roared in. She got on and sat down. It wasn't usually very crowded going uptown at this hour, but the line had its origin at Coney Island, and so the cars had a large number of people who had spent the day at the beach. They were mostly Puerto Ricans, in families of enormous size, jabbering at the top of their lungs. When the train stopped at a station, she could hear the sound of bongos coming from another car. There was also a large family of Negroes, the adults nattily dressed, the children neat and trim and well behaved, and a sprinkling of white families with children cross and whiny and sulky.
Ellen took notice of very little of this as she sat watching the stations whiz by. The car was a little cooler when the train was moving, but the litter of newspapers and peanut shells and candy wrappers reminded her of Baxter's room and she felt nauseated again. She got up long before her stop and stood by the door. When it opened at her station, she rushed out and up the steps to the street.
It was after midnight and almost everyone had gone indoors to try to sleep. There is a little relief from the heat at night, but not much. She walked the two blocks to the house very quickly and wearily climbed the steps to the apartment.
It was dark when she opened the door and she crept silently around and pulled out the sofa bed. Kitty stirred in the dark.
"Mother?" she murmured sleepily.
"Yes, dear. Go back to sleep and I'll see you in the morning."
She went into the bedroom and closed the door before she snapped the light on. She took of! her clothes quickly and threw them on the bed. It would be a long time before she would be able to wear that outfit again, if ever. Every shred of it cried out a remembrance of the awful hour she had spent. She walked to the mirror and looked into it. Her eyes weren't cold any more. The springs of fear and revulsion were still pumping their traces into them and she looked away quickly.
"How could you?"
"How could anyone?"
Her own voice frightened her even in her own room and she went into the bathroom and turned the water on in the tub. The roar of the water had a comforting sound and she turned on the water in the sink, too. She took a nail brush and scrubbed her hands until they were pink and raw and still she felt that they weren't clean. She turned the water off in both the tub and sink and got into the tub, letting the warm water creep up around her. She went limp and began to weep silently. The tears ran down her face and dropped into the bath water as she relived the whole thing. Then she turned her mind away with a terrific effort and tried to think of what she would do next. But she kept returning to that room and to that man and the tears returned and she sat up and grabbed the soap out of the dish and scrubbed herself violently. The effort tired her and she relaxed in the tub again and tried to think about the other two.
Two men were thinking about Ellen too. Henry Baxter remembered all that had gone on and thought happy thoughts about her. It had been good.
Another man lay and thought things about her. Things he would do to her soon. It would be good.
CHAPTER VI
The unrelenting heat woke Ellen at sunrise, despite the fact that she had tossed the whole night through. The daylight crept around the edges of the shade. She got up and walked to the window and pulled the shade up. The sun wasn't high yet and it cast long shadows down the street, long grotesque shadows that reminded her of the grotesqueness of the night before. Her thoughts were black ones, black as the shadows of the lampposts on the street.
She felt a sudden urge to destroy Henry Baxter, to do something terrible to him to pay him back for the terrible things he had made her do that horrible hour. She pictured him lying on the bed, she standing over him with a huge knife, ready to plunge it into his chest, and he crying and blubbering for mercy and full of apologies for what he had done.
She wrenched herself back to reality with a painful effort. What Baxter had done, or rather what she had done, was something that she alone had caused, quite deliberately and consciously, and there was no one to blame but herself if she now felt disgusted and ashamed. She had not had to do it at all, no more than she had to continue her little game any longer. And yet she felt no more able to stop then than she had been when Baxter had closed the door in his room and began to take his clothes off. Whatever happened would be a result of her deliberate choice, and she would have no one on which to lay the blame except herself for any consequences.
She remained by the window, watching the shadows shorten and the street come to life, little by little. The milkman no longer makes deliveries house to house on the West Side, if at all anywhere in Manhattan; he has been noisily mechanized. Now he makes one stop at the tiny delicatessens and unloads his cargo, cases of homogenized, vitaminized, pasteurized, sterilized chalk. The grocer sticks the sign (Milk/Leche) in the window and shoos the cat off the bagels and hard rolls, and sits down with his Times and Wall Street Journal to wait for the housewives who will straggle in, still in bathrobes and curlers, to pick over the breads and buy thirty cents worth of bologna or Swiss to make sandwiches for their men.
One by one they began to appear in the street, the white old timers, the newer Puerto Ricans, and the newest, the Negroes, just beginning to filter down from north of 125th Street.
Ellen watched them, and thought that when all of this was over, she and Kitty were going to have to find some other place to live. It was getting harder and harder to ever think of trying to raise the girl decently in that atmosphere, and she would have to look somewhere farther out of the city for a community where they could live the way people are supposed to.
The door opened quietly and Kitty crept in. She half-jumped when she saw Ellen by the window.
"Oh. I didn't expect you to be up yet. You got home so late last night."
"It wasn't so late, only about twelve. It probably seemed later."
"I guess so." Kitty walked to the closet and took her robe out and threw it around her naked body. "How come you had to work so late?"
"Oh, just a lot of things that the doctor wanted to clear up." She turned back to the window. "I think I may have to work late several more nights."
"Oh." Kitty came over to her mother. "Mom, is it all right if I go to the beach with the gang today? It's so hot out and I haven't been outside for five days, almost."
Ellen debated within herself. Things might still be dangerous for either of them, and yet she could not expect the poor child to remain cooped up in the apartment indefinitely. Now that she was closer to a solution, things might be a little safer for both of them, or at least the concentration would be on her and not on Kitty.
"All right. As long as you're home early." Kitty hugged Ellen and ran out of the room. Ellen heard her pick up the telephone and dial it rapidly.
"Julie? My mom says I can go! Okay." She hung up and raced back into the bedroom and threw off her robe. She ran to the bureau and pulled out her bathing suit and slipped into it quickly. Ellen noticed how she was beginning to fill out; the halter that had been only a convention a year ago now had become a necessity, and her skinny thighs were beginning to take on a smooth roundness that reminded her of her own teen-age years. For a moment, she considered changing her mind and making the girl stay home. What if something should happen to her? One look at her daughter's happy face, though, and she dismissed the idea.
Kitty threw on a pair of blue jeans, a loose jersey blouse, and slipped into dirty white sneakers. She picked up a straw beach bag which, Ellen saw to her amusement, was already packed, pecked her mother on the cheek, and started out of the room.
"Everyone's waiting for me. I promise I won't be home late." Then she was gone.
Ellen stood by the window and watched her scamper up the street until she had turned the corner. She left the window and lay back down on the bed. Nothing to do until four-thirty, when it was time to get dressed to go to the office. Nothing to do except to wonder what the night would bring, who would be put to the test tonight She closed her eyes and tried to find sleep again, but the thoughts of what might happen kept her very conscious. Yet she was eager for it to begin again.
The subway was hot and when it got to Coney Island the people poured off it breathing sighs of relief. The salt air smell was a treat to them after the hour in the stuffy cars. All of the kids raced towards the stairs, pushing and laughing. Kitty stuck close to Jack. A few of the other girls had shown unmistakably signs of interest in him, and her position wasn't secure yet. Perhaps she would have to let him go a little further, just to keep him interested.
They reached the street and raced for the boardwalk and the beach. It wasn't too crowded on a week day and they had plenty of room to spread out.
Kitty threw down her towel a little distance from the rest of the crowd. "Over here, Jack." He came over and dropped his things next to hers. Both of them pulled off their outer clothes, dropped them on the sand, and raced to the water. Kitty hesitated a moment; the water was still very cold in the early morning, but Jack plunged into the surf and swam out in a smooth crawl until the lifeguard's whistle brought him closer to the shore. He swam back until the water was waist high and waded in to where Kitty stood up to her knees in the scummy water. He splashed her, she squealed, then he wrapped his arms around her.
"Oh, Jack, you're freezing me." He laughed and pulled her closer. She tried to pull away, giggling, but he held her tighter and pulled her closer to him and kissed her. His tongue flicked into her mouth and she felt warm all over, even in her legs that had been so cold a moment ago. He pulled her belly close to his and she felt him stir and then he pulled her into the water with him and swam off quickly. She tried to follow him, but he was a strong swimmer and kept an easy distance from her without even trying. She finally gave up and went back to the edge of the water and watched him as he began horsing around with the other boys. They had short races and ducked each other and played a game where pairs of boys, one mounted on the other's shoulders, try to unseat the others. It was a rough, noisy game, and the girls, who had drifted into a bunch, encouraged the boys on until the lifeguard called an end to the game. As the boys were coming ashore, Kitty's friend, Julie, pulled her a little ways out of the knot of girls.
"Kitty, remember I told you about those boys I met here last weekend? The ones who have the apartment in Greenwich Village and who have these parties every once in a while?"
"Yes."
"Well, one of them called me up the other night and they're having a party next Saturday night, and they asked me to come and to bring any of my girl friends. Do you want to go?"
"I don't know, Julie. I don't know if my mother will let me. What kind of a party is it going to be?" she said suspiciously. She was sure Julie had done it, although she would never admit to it.
"Just a party. Try and get your mother to let you go. I don't want to go alone."
"I'm not sure I want to go."
"Are you scared?"
"Of what?"
"You know what. Nothing will happen. It'll just be a party."
"I don't know. I'll tell you later on." Jack was coming up now and she left Julie to run to meet him. His teeth were chattering slightly and they both ran back to the blanket he had spread out and flung themselves on it. Jack grabbed a towel and began rubbing himself vigorously.
"Damn, that water's cold!"
"I know," she said. He finished drying himself and flopped down beside her. He flung his arm across her shoulders and pulled her closer. She snuggled in and lay next to him with her head under his arm. He smelled clean and salty and she closed her eyes and let the hot sun bake into her body.
Jack lay motionless for quite a while and then he moved his hand, quite casually, until it fell on her buttock. She stirred briefly, then settled back into her pleasant doze. Even when his fingers lightly caressed the inside of her thigh she lay quietly. It only added to the pleasantness of the whole day. He lingered there for a while, touching her gently, before he turned himself over. He moved his hand from her buttocks up under her armpit and slowly slid it to her breast, cushioning it from the hard sand. In that position they both fell asleep, not hearing the cries and laughter and the blasting portables around them. They might have been on a beach in Tahiti for all they were aware.
It seemed to them to have been hours when they were finally awakened as a result of being chosen one set of the goals in a touch football game. The game was being played with the additional disadvantage of having no football. Nevertheless, the game was noisy and high-spirited and Jack jumped up to participate. Kitty moved over to where the girls were gathered, some dancing with each other on the sand, others cheering the game, although at any given moment there was much confusion about which side had the ball, particularly among the players. Julie sat down next to her.
"About next Saturday night." She rattled on, telling Kitty about how much fun the boys were and how much she knew Kitty would like them, and so on, but Kitty heard very little. She made appropriate replies from time to time, but her eyes and thoughts were on Jack all the while.
The game finally broke up for lunch, which was devoured wolfishly, then continued and ended in a wild dash to the ocean, the girls following close behind. After a swim, the boys reassembled and began acrobatic performances, until a patrolman on the boardwalk yelled at them to cut it out. They stopped, yelling insults at the cop, and went back to their individual blankets and necked for several hours, until the position of the sun told them that it was time to leave for home. They gathered up their belongings and carried them to the boardwalk where they brushed the sand off, emptied their shoes, dressed and headed for the subway. They stopped to buy some ice in paper cups from a little Italian stand, then climbed to the subway platform and got on an empty train. They sang all the way to Manhattan.
They continued to sing together for a few minutes after they left the subway, but one by one, they had to go home. Jack and Kitty walked toward her house, tired, red, sandy. He went with her as far as the top of the steps and she turned to him.
"I have to go upstairs now."
"Is your mother home?"
"What time is it?"
"About five-thirty."
"No, she isn't but she'll probably call to see if I'm home yet."
"Let me come up with you for a while."
"I can't." He put his hand in the small of her back and brought her close and kissed her hard. She felt warmer again, like she always did, and he slid the back of his hand over her breast and she felt it even through the construction of her bathing suit
"Just for a minute. She won't know if I'm there."
Kitty knew that she shouldn't but she knew that she wanted him to, more than anything. She reached into her straw bag and pulled out her key. She opened the door and took his hand and he followed her up the stairs.
Ellen waited. And waited. Di Nonno had pranced in and out, and she waited for Perry Bronston to arrive. He would be it for tonight. But the minutes dragged by and became a half-hour and still he hadn't shown up. Pauling was in his office, doing whatever it was he did with the finger paintings that he was having the patients do now, and probably didn't even know that it was long past the time for Bronston to have come in. Ellen picked up the telephone and pressed the button that would buzz in his office. She heard the receiver come off the hook after a few buzzes.
"Yes, Ellen." He sounded tired and preoccupied.
"Mr. Bronston is a half-hour late for his appointment, Doctor."
"Is he? What time is it, anyway."
"Almost eight."
"Well, I don't suppose that he's going to show up, then. Very strange. It's most unlike him. I'm surprised that he didn't call, at least. He always has before."
"Yes, I know."
"Well, I don't suppose there's much point in waiting for him to show up. We might as well call it a day. Come on in and we'll clean the place up." He hung up and Ellen walked into the inner office. He was sitting in his shirtsleeves staring at the two latest finger paintings.
"Any clues yet?" He shook his head sadly.
"Not one. I'm still waiting for a pattern of violence to show up, but there's only very non-violent reaction here. I can't understand it."
She walked closer. The paintings didn't look like anything to her; formless blobs of paint, streaks, here and there a circle or corkscrew shape.
"Which is which?"
"The one on the left is Baxter; the other is DiNonno." She looked hard at Baxter's but saw nothing in it that told her anything. Nor did Di Nonno's.
"What are they supposed to tell you?"
"Well, the area of using finger painting as a diagnostic technique is fairly new, and we don't know too much about it. We think that the selection of colors and the types of strokes that a patient will make, as well as whatever he says while he's painting, will tell us a little bit about his personality type. Homosexuals, for example, tend to choose the reds and yellows, colors usually preferred by women, over the blues and greens, which is what we would ordinarily expect from a man. That's the sort of thing that we look for."
"I see. Well, I don't think it was Mr. Baxter who did it."
"Oh? Why not?"
Ellen began putting the papers away in the file room so he would not be able to see her face. "I don't know. It's just a feeling that I have. Perhaps it's something that I remember sub-consciously. I really don't have a sound reason."
Pauling laughed. "Maybe I should work on you then, if your sub-conscious has all that information."
"No!" She startled herself. The grin left Pauling's face. He looked at her for a long minute, then dropped his gaze and swung around in his chair, away from her.
"All right, Ellen. It was only a joke."
They both finished their nightly clean-up without another word. Ellen walked out of the office first. Pauling followed her, locking the door behind him. They walked to the elevator together. Ellen finally broke the embarrassed silence.
"I'm sorry, Doctor. I'm still on edge over the whole affair."
"It's all right, Ellen." But she could see that it wasn't. "I hope we find something soon." He nodded but said nothing.
The elevator came and they got on and rode down to the ground floor. Just as they left the building a cab pulled up to the front door and Perry Bronston jumped out. He scurried over to them.
"Oh, I almost missed you. I know I'm terribly late, but I had to work late and I didn't know that I would be this late then the cab got into a traffic jam. Am I too late for tonight?"
Pauling looked mildly annoyed, but said, "No, I suppose not, Mr. Bronston. Since you're here now we might as well go ahead. We'll make it a short session, though." He turned to Ellen. "You go ahead home, Mrs. Schibe.
I won't be needing you any more tonight." The cab still stood at the curb and he took her arm and walked her over to it.
"It's all right, Doctor, I don't mind staying." I can't let this chance go, she thought. Perhaps he's the one and he's getting edgy.
"No, go on home. Your daughter will be worried about you."
"Yes, please do, Mrs. Schibe," Bronston added. "It's my fault and I don't want to penalize you for it."
"I don't mind. Really." But Pauling put her into the cab and he and Bronston turned back into the building. She gave the driver the address and settled back, angry at herself, at Pauling, and most of all at Bronston. It was almost as if he had come late deliberately to annoy her.
The apartment was cool with the lights off. Kitty and Jack had not noticed the gradual darkening and so it came as a shock to them when they suddenly realized that they could no longer see each other. Only feel.
They began to feel the wetness of the perspiration on them and Jack took his shirt off. After a moment Kitty pulled her jersey over her head. She put her arms around him and kissed him lingeringly and he began to caress her back and then his hand slid around to her breast and then inside her halter. Her nipple stiffened under his touch and grew hard as he stroked it gently. The pressure of his mouth increased and he bent her backwards until she was under him on the couch. She ran her hands up and down his back, slowly, lovingly at first, then feverishly.
He unsnapped the back of her halter and it fell away. His lips went to her nipples and the ecstasy became so great for her that she thought she would have to scream to relieve it. When he pushed his hands below the waist of her jeans she felt a hollowness in the pit of her stomach and a sudden panic seized her. She pulled away quickly, trembling. Jack straightened up.
"What's the matter?"
"I'm afraid."
"Don't be. There isn't anything to be afraid of. I won't hurt you."
"I'm afraid. I can't do it."
"You sure act like you want to."
"I do, Jack, I do. But I can't. I don't know why."
"Well, let's." He bent her back again and put his lips to hers and slipped them down to her neck, her shoulders, her breasts. Then a small sound, a light flashing on, and a sharp intake of breath.
Ellen's mouth hung open and a thousand thoughts raced in her mind. It had to happen sometime, she thought. But not tonight. She wanted to run away from the whole thing, as if she had stumbled into the wrong room in a hotel. She wanted to kill the boy, and Kitty too, and herself.
She took another step into the room and watched them as they sat like two kids, which is all they were, who had been caught raiding the pantry. No one said anything for a long time, and then Ellen found her voice and spoke slowly, deliberately.
"You'd better go, young man, and I never want to see you around here again. Is that clear?"
Jack stared at the floor. He must have been blushing but she couldn't see it for the redness of his sunburn.
"Yes, ma'am." He picked up his shirt from the floor, threw a furtive glance that said nothing at all at Kitty and squeezed past Ellen and out the door. He went down the stairs sideways, as if he expected something to be thrown at him any moment.
Ellen slammed the door, and turned to Kitty, who had by now thrown her blouse on again. "I don't know what to say."
Kitty looked at the floor and then slowly raised her eyes to her mother's. Ellen read defiance, pure naked defiance in them. It was no longer a case of mother and daughter, it was woman and woman. She might have Kitty as a daughter for brief moments from now on, but she had been lost for good that night. Or perhaps some night earlier.
"How long has this been going on without my knowing it?" No reply. "How much have you two been seeing of each other?" Nothing. She drew a breath. "What's gone on between you?"
"He didn't lay me if that's what you mean."
A vacuum sucked everything out of Ellen. She stared at Kitty. There were no words, and even if there were there wouldn't be any use for them. She walked out of the living room into the bedroom and closed the door softly. She wished she hadn't come home just then. She wished she had managed to be with Bronston that night. She wished she were dead.
CHAPTER VII
"I simply don't know what to do any more," Ellen said. She spread her palms in a gesture of hopelessness. "The situation seems to have gotten completely out of control."
Pauling glanced up at her as he had occasionally done during her relating of the entire story, then his eyes returned to the edge of his desk.
The last patient had left and as much as Ellen had wanted to continue her search she felt that the problem that had exploded in her face last night was more important. At least for the moment. She sat on the edge of the hard leather chair that the patients used, a chair she had never sat in before, and looked anxiously at the doctor.
Pauling lifted his head and gazed out of the office window and saw that night had completely fallen. He turned to Ellen with a little smile.
"It's dark now and I'm starving. Let me buy you dinner and we can talk better when we have full stomachs. One need at a time." Ellen was shocked at the invitation and showed it. Pauling stood up and put a hand on her shoulder.
"You don't need a psychiatrist now, Ellen. You need a friend. And friends don't talk in offices. Come on."
She stood up and started to tidy up the office. "Never mind that tonight. No one's going to steal anything."
The elevator came right away when they rang for it, and a cab was just passing the building when they walked outside. Everything seemed to be going for them.
They rode a little downtown and a little east, to a small French restaurant that Pauling frequented and where he was well-known. Even so, perhaps because of the rain, the place was crowded and they had to wait at the bar before they could get a table. The bar was almost full but they managed to find two stools at the end. Pauling ordered martinis.
"If you don't mind I'd rather have a daiquiri," Ellen said. Not another martini for a long time, she thought. Not after Baxter.
"Sure," Pauling said and changed the order. When the drinks came he took a short sip, fit a cigarette and looked at Ellen.
"You've had a tough time of it, haven't you?"
"I suppose so. Not much worse than a lot of women who've run to New York for one reason or another though."
"That's true. It draws them like a magnet. I don't imagine there's another city in the country to compare with it except L.A."
"A lot of them, most of them, get better or worse. I just seem to stay the same. Every time things seem to be improving something like this comes along to foul it up."
"Which?"
"Which what?"
"Which are you talking about that fouled things up?
What happened to Kitty or what happened to you? Which was worse for you?"
Ellen finished her drink and stared at the cocktail napkin in front of her. She picked it up and put it down a couple of times before she lifted her eyes and met Pauling's steady stare.
"I'm not sure. When the-first thing-happened I thought that nothing in the world could be more painful or humiliating. Now I'm not so sure."
Pauling emptied his glass and signalled to the barman for a refill.
"Good. Your reaction is normal and so is your daughter's."
"Normal?"
"Of course. But I wonder what you're worrying about. Is it the fact that Kitty was on the verge of intimacy with a boy? Or is it her defiant attitude towards the whole thing?"
"I don't know that either."
"If it's her relationship I'm afraid you can't do anything about that. She's a very attractive lively girl and unless you lock her up in a castle like a fairytale princess she's going to have some relationships with boys. This doesn't mean that she's going to 'go all the way,' as they call it. Most girls indulge in heavy necking or petting, most limit themselves to that. They've too much fear of anything beyond that."
"But the way she reacted when I confronted her!"
"Entirely normal. Let's suppose-"
"We can seat you now, Dr. Pauling." The head waiter stood behind them. They finished their drinks and followed him to a small table in the rear of the restaurant. Pauling waved aside the menu.
"Bring us some hors d'oeuvres and whatever the chef made best today, Phillippe. And another martini and daiquiri."
"None for me, please."
"Just another martini then." The waiter went away and Pauling resumed talking.
"Her defiance is just a defense. Most kids at her age hate their parents, and there are some additional complications. You've been against men since she can remember and have made no bones about it to her. First, she wants to see what the hullaballoo is about and second, it's a way of resisting your authority. She doesn't know about normal relationships with men; you've never told her. Then again, perhaps, sub-consciously, she's jealous because you had a sexual experience and she didn't." He noted the astonished look on her face and repeated the word. "Sub-consciously. Any fourteen year old is in rivalry with her mother. Perhaps even in this respect. She's got to have some too, especially since the both of you have never bothered with men for as long as she's been alive. It's been strictly a female society."
It was too much for Ellen to comprehend. A lot of the psychiatric mumbo-jumbo she had been exposed to had made little sense to her, but this was straining the limits of her belief.
"Do you mean to tell me that Kitty wanted to be raped? Because she's jealous of me?"
"Yes and No." It took the remainder of this martini, dinner, a bottle of good red wine at dinner, and a couple of snifters of brandy afterwards to sort out the Yeses and Noes. Ellen noted with surprise and a little bit of alarm that he drank quite a bit more than she imagined a psychiatrist would, or should. Even so, it did not seem to affect him. He slowly sipped whatever drink happened to be in front of him while he continued to give what amounted to a lecture on teen-age morals and ideas.
He talked and talked until they were the last couple in the restaurant and the waiters had taken their jackets off and were having their own meal in a corner of the room. The busboys were beginning to clean everything off the table and started to cast irritated glances at the two of them. Finally, the head waiter came over.
"I'm sorry, Doctor, but we're closing in a few minutes." He slipped the check next to Pauling's elbow and retreated once more. Pauling put a couple of dollars on the table and got up, still talking. He signed the check on the back without looking at the total and handed it and a credit card to the cashier on the way out.
The summer storm was still raging when they walked outside. They stood under the restaurant canopy for a minute as he wound up his explanation, "Do you understand now?"
"I'm not sure. I think I'm beginning to."
"Well, my place is close by, and it's still early. Do you want to come up for a nightcap and I'll try to illustrate the situation a little more?"
Ellen was surprised once more. His casual informality had always been hard to fit into her mental image of a doctor, particularly a psychiatrist, but this was unusual, even for him. She debated, but the liquor had had its effect on her, too, and she felt no need for caution.
"That would be fine." They waited the customary twenty minutes it takes to find an empty cab on the East Side on a rainy night, especially when the downtown theaters are getting out, and rode the short distance to his apartment.
It was on a high floor, and as Ellen stood by the window, she could see the headlights of the cars streaming across the bridge to Queens. She felt very secure from the driving rain outside, almost in another world.
Pauling switched on the FM radio on his way behind the bar. He poured her a shot of brandy and made himself a gin tonic. He brought her drink to her.
"You're very fortunate," she said. "All of this and you're still a young man."
"Yes, I am. But I know my business and I've worked hard. This," he gestured with his arm, "is the product of a lot of years of sacrifice. I wasn't born to a life of luxury."
Ellen took the brandy and sat down in a large armless chair near his bookcase. She glanced at the titles of the books, but they meant nothing to her. Pauling sat some distance away, on a sofa, and put his feet up on a coffee table. He took off his glasses and resumed talking about Kitty's probable attitudes and what Ellen should and shouldn't do. He rambled on, outlining possibilities, theories, conjectures, building them up, tearing them down. Ellen listened for a while but the brandy began to have a narcotic effect and her mind began to wander. She had never been in such a luxurious apartment before. She looked at Pauling and suddenly felt an overpowering desire to have him. She had not felt like that since Billy Joe had first looked at her.
Pauling paused to take a sip of his drink and she stood up.
"Can I have another brandy? I'll fix it myself."
"Please. Don't bother to ask." She walked to the bar and poured the drink, a little fuller than the first one, tossed down half of it, and refilled the glass. She returned not to the chair she had been in but to the sofa Pauling was sprawled on. She sat down a few feet from him and tucked her legs under her. She sipped the brandy and reached across to him and took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket.
Pauling looked at her, and the mutual consent was established in a few seconds. Only a look passed between them, but nothing more had to be said. It was decided from that moment. He would go on talking about the subject until he got tired or exhausted the subject, neither of which seemed in the near future, and then they would go to bed.
Ellen lit her cigarette with a polished walnut table lighter. She rested her arm on the back of the sofa and leaned her head on her arm, listening to his voice, but not hearing his words, just looking at him.
He didn't look at her at all but when he got up and made himself another gin tonic and sat down again he was only a few inches from her.
And he kept on talking.
When Ellen leaned forward to stub out her cigarette, her body was practically across his and her arm just a hair away from his neck. As she straightened up she brought her arm down on his shoulders and nudged him towards her. He stopped in mid-sentence and embraced her in a long kiss. He seemed now to be a man in a hurry. His hand went to her breast and squeezed it against her rib cage. Her long slender fingers played with the back of his neck as he held her taut against him. His hand cupped her stockinged knee and began to creep upward. She pulled her mouth away from his.
"Please, Bill, it's been a long time for me. I imagine that it hasn't for you. I want to enjoy it just as much as you. Take me slowly. You should know what a woman wants."
He withdrew his hand and ran it up and down her calf. His fingers were light, and she felt the almost dead-and-buried feeling begin to grow inside of her, like a small candle relit after years. It would take a while to start burning but the flame would be just as intense as before. Pauling took pains to keep the flame going.
After about a half-hour this way he said. "Do you want to go inside?" She nodded and they both got up and she followed him into the bedroom. He walked in and flipped on the air-conditioner, then turned back the cover on the king-sized bed. He began to undress.
Ellen was trembling now. She had to ask him to unzip the back of the dress for her, she stepped out of it. She managed her garters by herself and pulled her stockings off and hung them over a chair. Then she pulled her slip over her head and tried to reach behind her to unfasten her bra, but her fingers were shaking so that she could not manage it. Pauling came over, in his shorts, to do it. She saw that he was built as she had imagined: trim and firm. He unhooked the elastic and it fell to her feet. He reached around and cupped her breasts and kissed the nape of her neck and her shoulders. Her stomach now felt like a giant cavern with the air being sucked out of it and her heart was pounding wildly, seeming to echo in the emptiness. She threw her head back against his shoulder and slowly pushed the girdle over her hips and down her thighs until it was loose enough to go the rest of the way by itself. She reached behind her and he began to propel her slowly towards the bed.
When they reached it, he let go of her and took off his shorts. Then they got on the bed together and he took her in his arms again. He caressed her with his lips, his hands, like a thousand butterflies passing over every inch of her skin and the pressure mounted and mounted within her. His lips and hands drew every nerve in her body tight like a violin string and he worked slowly until she finally pulled him to her and she cried out, "Now, now!" and they rocked and swayed together as one in the brilliant clarity of the sudden brief moment and then lay spent, discovering each other once again, as if for the first time.
She smiled because he looked so serious again.
"What's the matter?"
He grinned weakly. "This is bad for my reputation. A doctor should remain aloof."
"Don't worry, I won't tell. Not even prissy old Miss Halloran." She kissed him. "She might want it too, then. Like a fringe benefit."
"Perish the thought."
"What time is it?"
He glanced at the clock on his nightstand. "Three-fifteen."
"My God! Kitty will be frantic! She'll think something terrible happened to me."
"Call her up."
"No, I don't want to wake her." She sat up in the bed. "I'd better go home."
"Let's take a shower first."
"I don't want to take the time."
"A quick one. We both need it."
"All right." They went into the bathroom and got into the stall shower, which was barely big enough to hold both of them. They had to stand very close together and they soaped each other and the warm water cascaded down on the two of them, close together, and Pauling pushed her against the wall in a lingering kiss and seemed ready to start again, but she pushed him away gently and turned the water off. They got out and dried each other off with enormous thick towels and went back to the bedroom. Ellen slipped into her girdle and got her bra on by herself. She stepped into her slip and saw that Pauling was dressing too.
"You don't have to get dressed. I can get home by myself."
"It's all right. I'll see you into a cab anyway."
"Please don't bother. You have to get up in the morning and I don't."
"All right," he said. He took off his clothes and got into pajamas and a silk bathrobe.
Ellen put her dress on and slipped into her shoes. She took the stockings from the chair and walked into the living room and put them in her purse.
Pauling took her to the door and kissed her tenderly, lightly.
"I'll see you at five-thirty."
"Yes."
"And afterwards?"
"Possibly," she said, teasingly. She left him and walked to the elevator. He watched in the doorway until she got on, then went inside.
Not tonight, my darling doctor, she thought, going down in the elevator. She opened her purse and took out her lipstick and compact.
Not tonight, my sweetheart. Tonight it will have to be someone else.
I have to know. For both of us, now.
CHAPTER VIII
It was almost four o'clock when Ellen got home, and she slept late the next morning. Kitty stayed out of the bedroom entirely, and when Ellen awoke a little before noon, she felt very rested and a lot more cheerful than she had in a long time. Her sleep had been deep and peaceful, free of the nagging dream that had tormented her since the rape.
She walked into the living room. Kitty was lazing on the couch, thumbing idly through a woman's magazine. She paid her mother no attention. Ellen went into the kitchen, had a glass of juice, and set the coffee on to perk. When it was finished, she poured a cup and went back into the living room and sat down opposite Kitty.
"Kitty," she began.
"You were out awfully late last night," Kitty said without looking up.
"I was busy. Now, about what happened the other night-"
"I guess you were busy. You didn't get home till four."
"That's beside the point. About the other night." Kitty looked up from the magazine.
"I'd be much more interested in hearing about last night."
Ellen jumped up and raced across the room. Kitty scrambled up too, but not quite fast enough. Ellen grabbed her by the hair and struck her savagely across the face, once, then again. The girl tried to pull away, but Ellen held her fast and hit her again and again. Then she let go and stood above her daughter, who buried her face in the couch, sobbing violently.
"I don't know who you think you are lately, or what you think you've become all of a sudden, but perhaps I'd better remind you of some basic facts. I am your mother. You are fourteen years old, still a child. Maybe you don't like that, but for all your words, you are still a child in the way you think and the way you act. Since you're a child, I have to be responsible for raising you and making sure that you don't destroy yourself through your own stupidity. As long as you continue to live here and depend on me for your support, you will listen to what I tell you, and what is more, you will do what I say. There's a limit to what I'll take from you, Kitty, and we just reached it. Is that clear?"
Kitty sat up, red-eyed and blew her nose.
"You want me to live like a nun. You don't have any fun, so you don't want anyone else to enjoy themselves either."
"That's not true! I want you to have everything I never had, which includes a happy life and a happy marriage."
"How can I be happy if you constantly yell at me all the time?"
"You don't know what's best for you." She was feeling helpless again. She felt unable to continue the discussion; sooner or later, where she had been the night before would come up and she didn't want to discuss that, even though she was sure Kitty suspected the truth. They were stalemated: each knowing something, afraid the other knew more, each half-ashamed, not of her own actions, but of the other's.
She went back into the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee. She heard the door close. Kitty had probably gone into the bathroom to wash away the tears. Ellen hoped that she hadn't left a mark on her face. There had been a deep red spot where she had slapped her.
Returning to the living room, she glanced toward the bathroom door and saw that it was open. She walked over to it. No one was there. She quickly crossed to the window and leaned out just in time to see Kitty reach the corner and turn it.
Her first reaction was to throw her clothes on and go outside and find her and drag her back by her ear, like a little child who had crossed the street without her parent's approval. Then she thought better of it. Kitty had some sense. She wouldn't do anything rash. She'd be home when she calmed down or got tired of standing around with nothing to do.
The rest of the day passed quietly. Ellen tidied up the apartment, pressed some dresses and blouses. When she was taking a shower late in the afternoon, she heard the door open and close. She took her time about finishing, and casually strolled into the living room. Kitty was eating a sandwich.
"Where have you been?" she said, quite calmly.
"At the movies with Julie. I planned to go anyway," Kitty answered, just as calmly.
Ellen went into the bedroom and finished dressing. She came back out and walked straight to the mirror in the hall and began adjusting the scarf she had put around her neck.
"I'll be home late again tonight. You stay inside the house. There's enough to eat. I'll be calling to make sure you do."
Kitty stood up and came closer. She looked at Ellen in one of those mercurial changes from woman to little girl that occurs so often at her age.
"What's going on, Mother?" The question was full of bafflement and hurt. Ellen had to fight hard to keep from taking the girl in her arms as if she were a little baby again. You've got to be strong and tough, she told herself.
"I can't tell you. At least not now." She patted her arm and walked out of the apartment. She knew that Kitty was watching her as she descended the stairs. Finally, as she reached the front door, she heard the door close.
She went into the street and began walking east towards the park. The air was heavy with impending rain once more. A few drops began to splatter on the pavement as she waited for the bus that would take her across the park. Fortunately, it came before the storm finally broke, and she settled down in a seat near the window watching it hurl buckets of water against the side of the bus. She got out at Madison Avenue and waited in a doorway for the downtown bus. She waited a long time, and then three buses came, one right behind the other. She got to the office just a little before five-thirty.
Miss Halloran, the doctor's daytime receptionist, was sitting at the desk with her hat and coat on. Ellen smiled and greeted her, and got nothing in return. Miss Halloran stood up and adjusted her hat and gloves.
"Is Dr. Pauling here now?" Ellen asked.
"No, he had to go to the hospital. He said he'd be back around six." She sniffed contemptuously. "You certainly left the place in a mess last night."
"I know. I'm sorry about that. My daughter got sick suddenly and I had to rush home."
"The doctor said it was you who got sick and went home."
Oh, darn it, Ellen thought. That tears it. She tried to brazen it out.
"Perhaps you misunderstood him."
"I doubt it. I've worked for him for three years, ever since he set up private practice, and I've never misunderstood him yet."
"It's raining out, dear. Better take your umbrella. Or you can borrow mine, if you like."
"I'd rather get wet," Halloran retorted and shut the door behind her.
"Just as you like, dear," Ellen said to no one in particular. She sat behind the desk and looked at the appointment book. Bronston was first, then Di Nonno, Baxter last. That meant that she had to get out of the office early, to catch either of them. Today was Friday, it was exactly a week since it had happened, and whoever did it must be getting edgy by now. Ellen was edgy, too. She had to find out more tonight.
Pauling came in about ten minutes of six. He took off his raincoat and shook it all over the carpet. When he hung it up, he turned and smiled at Ellen. He wanted to kiss her, but somehow couldn't bring himself to it in the office. It was as if she were a different woman from the one he had been with the night before. Ellen hoped he wouldn't come near her. Things were hard enough as it was.
"Halloran was complaining about the mess the place was left in and I told her that Kitty had gotten sick and I had to go home."
Pauling smiled ruefully. "I told her-"
"She told me what you told her."
"Oh. Well, that's that, I suppose. I don't think she connects us, except in her own fantasies. It doesn't look too good for you, though."
"I'm quite sure it doesn't change her feelings about me. I don't think she's given me the benefit of a doubt ever since I've been working here."
"I suppose not."
Precisely at six, Bronston walked in. Pauling took him into the inner office, leaving Ellen to scheme how she could get out of the office. She picked up the telephone and dialed her home number. It rang twice, then she heard the receiver being picked up.
"Kitty?"
"Yes."
"This is mother. I want you to call me back here at six-forty five. Don't bother to say anything if you don't want to; just call me here. I can't tell you why yet."
"All right." She sounded a little worried, and very puzzled.
"Don't worry. Nothing's wrong."
"I guess not. But you won't be home until late."
"Kitty, I don't want any talk like that."
"I'll call back like you said." She hung up.
Ellen waited impatiently for the session with Bronston to be over. At six-forty, Di Nonno came in. He nodded to her, and sat in the farthest corner of the room with a copy of Theatre Arts.
At a quarter of seven, the inner office door opened and Bronston came out looking, mildly concerned. He walked straight to the door, neglecting his usual "Good night" for Ellen. Then Pauling stuck his head out the door and beckoned Di Nonno in. Just as he got up, the telephone rang. She picked it up.
"Hello," she said. "What? Yes, of course. I'll try to. be there as soon as possible." Kitty had not said a word. Ellen hung up and stood up.
"That was my daughter, Doctor. She's just had a severe spell of vomiting and I think I should go home to her."
Pauling had no expression at all. "Very well, if you must. But come inside first. There's something that needs to be done." He turned to Di Nonno. "I'll be with you in just a minute."
Ellen walked into his office and he closed the door and propelled her away from it.
This is awfully strange. She was all right two hours ago, wasn't she?"
"Yes, she was. That's why I'm so concerned now."
"I don't like it, Ellen. Not at all."
"I must go."
"All right. But I don't understand at all, Ellen. What's going on?"
She began to grow panicky. Bronston would be getting away if she delayed any longer.
"I have to go now. I really do." She broke away and almost ran out of the office. She threw on her raincoat and rushed down the hall, buttoning it as she ran. She punched the elevator button furiously until it came and she fidgeted until it reached the ground floor. She was out the door before it had opened completely and raced toward the front door.
The rain pelted down on the sidewalk, raising a haze difficult to see through for more than a block or so. As far as she could see, the street was deserted. She ran up the street a little way so she could see around the corner, but that block too, was empty.
She jumped into the doorway of a bookstore and fit a cigarette. It was too late to go back to the office now, and the time was running out when it would be safe for her to play her little game.
She decided to wait until Di Nonno came out and she would see what success she had with him. He was a scared rabbit like the rest, but she felt confident that she would be able to get close to him.
Crossing the street, she stationed herself opposite the office building. Here there was no protective doorway to stand in. The rain poured on her, soaking her to the skin. She wished that she hadn't forgotten her umbrella in her haste. She looked at her watch. The crystal was slightly fogged over, but she could barely make out that it was about seven. At least a half-hour wait before he came out. Time for a cup of coffee somewhere; time to dry out in the warm coziness of a local luncheonette, and yet she dared not leave. So she stood in the rain.
She saw Baxter get out of a cab and race into the building. She looked at her watch again. Seven twenty-five. It shouldn't be much longer. She hoped it wouldn't be.
Finally, she saw him come out of the building. He stood hesitantly under the protective overhang of the building, and then started down the avenue. She crossed the street resolutely.
He was walking very fast and she had to trot to catch up to him. Meanwhile, her mind searched wildly for an opening. She tried to remember all she could about him, but she drew blanks at every turn. Something came to her about the theatre, and she had it! She hurried the last few feet and called his name.
He stopped and turned around, then looked astonished. Then he turned and continued plowing into the rain again. She caught up with him and took his arm.
"Please, don't be like that. I want to talk to you."
He was scared. More scared than Baxter had been. His eyes seemed to pull back into their sockets the way a turtle retracts its head.
"What about?"
"I can't talk to you in the rain. Can't you spare me a half-hour?"
"What for?" He kept on walking, turning the corner towards the subway.
"It's a private matter, about my daughter. About me."
He began walking faster. "I don't want to talk to you about your daughter or you. Or anything else."
"But I need your advice. About the theatre. You're the only one I know who's been in the theatre, so you're the only one I can talk to."
The word had produced a little of the effect she had wanted. He slowed down a little and looked mildly interested.
They came to the subway and he said, "I have to go here-" and she said, "So do I," and they went down the stairs and into the steamy heat of the station.
"Didn't I hear you tell Dr. Pauling that your daughter got sick and you had to go home?" he said.
"Yes, that's what I told him, but there was something else I had to attend to that was very urgent and I didn't want to tell him what it was. I was coming back to see if I could catch you when I saw you leaving the office."
"What is the sudden interest?"
He's beginning to be flattered, she thought. Just like all the two-bit actors. If you feed their vanity a little, they crumple like wet paper. Even more than most men.
The train roared in just then, cutting off further conversation. They got on and found seats in the center of the car. There was a group of children in the car, coming home from the zoo or someplace and the noise was deafening. Added to the noise of the subway itself, it made conversation impossible. They tried for a while, but even when the train stopped, the noise of the kids continued. They gave up and Di Nonno smiled ruefully.
She sat close to him, trying with all her might to convey a feeling of dependency on him. He didn't respond much, but at least he wasn't flinching. That was a start.
They were pretty far south, fairly close to where she thought he lived, although she couldn't remember his address. Someplace near the Village, she thought. She watched for slight movements, and as the train came into Astor Place, she saw him make a preparatory move. She jumped up first, and began to smile and say good-by, when he stood up, too. She looked surprised, and pleased.
They got out and started for the exit. "Do you live near here?" she said. "On West Fourth. Do you live nearby, too."
"Oh, no. I have to see a friend who lives on-Eighth Street."
"Well, I go that way sometimes. We can walk and talk."
"That would be fine." She casually slipped her arm into his, and surprisingly, he accepted it. They climbed up the stairway and back out into the rain and started walking west.
"What are you so concerned about?" he said.
"It's my daughter, Mr. Di Nonno. She worries me very much. She's been doing little plays in school and she's got it into her head that she wants to be an actress. She's pestering the life out of me to get me to let her go to summer stock next summer, and I don't know what to do. I need advice very badly."
"How old is your daughter?"
"Fourteen."
"That's pretty young for stock, although we occasionally see children of that age. It's a matter of maturity, talent, a great many things. It's hard to make a judgment on the basis of age alone." They were approaching the commercial section of Eighth Street and she felt that she had to make the play soon, or lose it entirely. She made up a tremendously long and involved story about Kitty's wanting to go on the stage, detailing all the arguments that they had had about the matter until they were in the heart of the area. There she stopped and began to cry. Di Nonno was embarrassed and took the bait nicely.
"Look, this is no place to discuss anything." He looked around. Ellen had stopped in front of a cozy-looking bar. "Let's hop in here and I'll buy you a drink."
Ellen's tears ceased quickly once they were inside the bar and seated in a booth towards the rear. The bar itself was like a hundred others; a sprinkling of servicemen, looking bored to death, a few arty-looking types, two real fags, and just people. Di Nonno ordered a grasshopper and Ellen a scotch.
"Aren't you supposed to be visiting someone?" he said.
"I'm still a little early. I'm not supposed to be there for about an hour yet. I quit work early, don't forget."
"That's right. Now, about summer stock.. . . . . . . " He rattled on, first making general statements about the setup of the summer theatres throughout the country, then, in the way that theatre people have, proceeding illogic-ally from generalizations to particulars-particulars about themselves. She had to listen to the complete details of all of his summers on the stock circuit, first as an actor, then a stage manager. When it seemed that all he could say about his professional activities had been exhausted, he drifted into his private life. Ellen was bored to death. For three nights out of the past four, she had sat and watched men Liquor themselves up and go on talking jags. It was getting hard to take.
Just as it seemed that she could take no more of it and, desire to know her rapist or no, she was going to call a halt to the whole affair, someone came up to their booth.
"Hello, Art." It was a short, slender blond, dressed in a simple blouse and pleated skirt, perhaps twenty-one or two. Di Nonno broke off his stream of conversation and half-rose.
"Hi, Sally."
"How are you? How come you aren't upstate this summer?"
"Oh, one thing and another." He was slurring slightly, but seemed sober enough. "This is a friend of mine, Mrs. Shine. Sit down."
The girl slid into the booth next to Ellen. "I'm Sally Sarton."
"My name is Ellen Schibe."
Di Nonno got up and went to the bar.
Sally watched him go. "I've never seen you with him before, and I usually see him here and there quite a lot. Have you known him long?"
"Off and on for a while."
"That's Arthur. Off and on. One of these days he's going to make up his mind whether he's a boy or a girl and we're all going to be a lot happier." Ellen smiled and Sally did too.
Di Nonno came back from the bar with two grasshoppers, a scotch, and a coke on a tray.
"You ordair, madame?" he said, in a terrible French accent, then giggled at himself. He set the drinks on the table and sat down. He drank the first one in one long sip, then started on the second.
"Now, you leave Mrs. Shine!"
"Schibe."
"Alone. She's a nice lady with a nice lil girl who wants to be an actress. An ac-ter-ess. Nice li'l girl."
"Art is the worst drunk I know. He does it faster than anyone I've ever seen. Makes you a cheap date, doesn't it, honey?" she said to him. He didn't reply.
"Won't you have a drink, Sally?"
"Thanks, I don't like it. Bad for the figure, anyhow."
"Are you a model?"
"Sometimes. Sometimes an actress. Sometimes a lot of things."
"Sally's good actress. Plays the part of a college girl. Plays parts on the stage too." It was too much for him; he dissolved into gales of laughter hitting the table with his palm.
The bartender came over to them.
"Sally, he's getting too noisy. You'll have to go if he keeps it up."
"Sorry, Harry," she said. "Arthur!" Her voice cracked out like a whip snapping. "Stop this childishness at once." He stopped, Sally began talking, rattling on about one thing and another, first to Di Nonno, then to Ellen, but more and more ignoring him and talking to her alone. Ellen sipped her drink slowly and listened. Di Nonno had stopped drinking, but seemed to have retreated into a private world.
This went on for some time, how long Ellen could not estimate, and suddenly she felt a hand brush her knee. She stiffened and shot a glance over at Di Nonno, but the table was three feet wide and both of his hands were on the table. She fought for control and to keep her face calm. Then the hand brushed her again, more lingeringly than before, and settled on her thigh.
She looked at Sally. The conversation was the same, trivial things, but there was an edge to the voice and a steely glint in the eye that almost frightened her. The girl's hand continued pressing and probing her thigh, the slender fingers much stronger than Ellen would have imagined, and then the fingers crept down and sneaked under the hem of her skirt and came up higher. And still the meaningless chatter continued without interruption, as if it were a piece that she had learned and could recite without thinking about it.
Ellen wanted to break away and couldn't. Something was keeping her there; something she couldn't understand. She looked at Di Nonno; he had withdrawn from the situation completely.
Sally was working on her feverishly now, and the signs of strain were showing in her voice. The words were faster and less distinct, and finally she got up and pulled Di Nonno to his feet and beckoned to Ellen.
"Let's go, Art. Let's go to your place." He nodded silently and stumbled out of the bar.
"Come on, Ellen." Ellen wanted to resist, wanted to refuse, but she couldn't. Something inside her kept her riveted to this girl, whether it was the girl or her own self she did not know, but she, too, rose, and followed Sally out of the bar.
The rain had stopped and Sally set off at a brisk pace toward West Fourth. Di Nonno kept up with her, and Ellen followed slightly behind.
Why? Why? She repeated to herself over and over and found no answer.
Di Nonno's apartment was in a slightly old, well kept building. He fumbled with the key and Sally took it from him impatiently and opened the door. Ellen followed them in, closing the door behind her. It had no sooner closed than Sally was on her like a tiger, kissing her wildly, almost tearing at her clothes. Her tongue sent hot bolts through her, hot bolts of shame and distaste and yet she had once more committed herself to something that she could not control any longer. She could comply, and the compliance sent unknown, unsuspected shivers of anticipation through her.
Di Nonno seated himself in a chair and watched them. Sally had unbuttoned the top of Ellen's blouse and was squeezing her breasts as she kissed her and ran her fingers through her hair. Then she took her hand and led her to the bed. Ellen followed like a zombie.
Sally took her bra off and kissed her breasts, this time gently. Then she began to take her own clothes off.
"You, too." Ellen began to strip.
Sally's body was beautiful. Creamy, smooth skin, saucy breasts tilting slightly upwards, inviting nipples now hard with passion, smooth hips melting into slim legs. She watched Ellen as she finished undressing. As she came towards her, Ellen thought: What a waste, then she was engulfed in the girl's overpowering passion and dragged to the bed and pulled onto it as Sally covered her with kisses. A little spark of something in the back of her mind told Ellen, "No, No, No," once more then it was snuffed out completely.
"I don't know what to do," she said.
"Don't worry, darling. I'll show you. I know everything to do."
And she did.
A little later, she rose up on one elbow and looked at Di Nonno, who had sat and watched all this time. "Think you're ready now?" He nodded. "Okay, come on."
He rose and came towards the bed, shedding his clothes as he approached. "This will be almost as good," Sally said. Ellen thought it was better. But only a little.
CHAPTER IX
Ellen bunked as her eyes tried to become accustomed to the bright sunlight. It was almost six o'clock in the morning.
Well, she thought, I guess he isn't the one either. Not that rabbit. He'd be too scared every minute. It just wasn't possible.
That left just one, Perry Bronston. But he was impotent! It couldn't be him! It would be physically impossible for him to rape me or anyone.
It had to be someone else. It wasn't Baxter, it wasn't Di Nonno, and it couldn't be Bronston. The three likeliest people had all, one way or another, eliminated themselves. She wondered what Pauling was doing about it. Whether he was really doing anything at all. The old gnawing fear came back to her then. Could it have been he? Was it at all possible?
There was no indication to her at all, and yet the idea persisted and she could not rid herself of it. Something kept knocking at her, something that told her that there was some chink in his professional armor that she didn't see clearly. Perhaps it was the fact that he seemed to drink a little more than he should. This was a lack of control that he had, and might be the surface indication of something deeper, the way an ice cube only shows a part of its surface above the liquid it floats in.
Why not Bill Pauling? How did she know that he was trying to find out anything at all? All of this silly talk about finger painting and such finger painting! A game for children.
Her thoughts kept her occupied until she got to the subway station, and then she decided to get a cab instead. What she had just been doing seemed to have happened months ago, and she found it hard to remember that Kitty was at home, and would probably be frantic with worry. The dominant thought was about the situation, and what her next move should be. There was no point in going after Bronston, because it was useless to try. Perhaps she should try Bill once more. Coldly, on the deserted street corner, she outlined the possible solutions in her head.
She finally got a cab and started uptown. Her mind tried to work, but her fatigued body, emotionally drained from her long seige with Sally and Di Nonno, refused to let her function. She sat with her eyes closed until the taxi pulled up in front of her house.
She went up the stairs slowly, pausing at each landing to catch her breath. Her only thought now was the bed, and how wonderful it would be to be able to sleep without dreams. She opened the door, and four heads turned simultaneously to look at her: Kitty, Pauling, and two policemen. She stopped in the doorway and stared back at them. Finally Pauling came forward.
"Ellen, what's happened to you? We've been searching for you for hours. We looked everywhere."
"What's going on? What's the matter?" She was hopelessly confused now, confused, and scared, and aware that the whole thing was out now.
Kitty stepped forward, some emotion that Ellen had never seen before in her eyes.
"Dr. Pauling called to find out how I was and I told him I didn't know where you were-"
"And I got worried about you and called the police-" Pauling chimed in.
"And we've been up all night worrying." Ellen knew the look now. She had seen it in her father's eyes, a long time before. It was a look of utter despising.
It broke her in two. She might, perhaps, have been able to sustain the performance a week or so more, if the pressures of her trouble with Kitty had lessened; but the look in Kitty's eyes, her whole attitude, told Ellen that she had lost the girl forever. There was no point in making a pretense any longer. She turned to Pauling.
"Please tell them." She sank wearily in a chair. "Tell them what?"
She was on the verge of hysteria. She fought to keep her voice under control, to keep it from rising and rising to a pitch that would deafen them all.
"Please don't pretend any longer, Bill! Please! If you don't tell them now, I will."
Slowly, reluctantly, Bill told them the story. He outlined it from the first incident that he could recall to the last, turning occasionally to Ellen to clarify a point or to seek confirmation. She answered in monosyllables or nodded mutely. Midway through the story, one of the policemen went to the telephone and made a call. When Pauling had finished, the two cops looked at each other, and then one of them shook his head sadly.
"You oughta know better, Doc. This kind of thing isn't anybody's business but ours. If you had told us before this, we'd of probably had the guy by now. You wait too long in cases like this, they take off or something like that, and you can't do anything."
Pauling gestured impatiently. "I know all that, but in this case-"
"Yeah, you told us all about your theory. It didn't work, though."
"Not yet, but I think I'm on to something now." Ellen sat up.
"What?" the cop asked.
"I can't say now. I'll be able to tell you when I get more definite indications. It's too soon yet for any statement."
He's stalling, Ellen thought. Her eyes were almost closed now; she was only dimly aware of the three men standing, and Kitty sitting withdrawn from the whole situation in a corner.
"Well," the first policeman said, seating himself on the arm of the couch, "I called Lieutenant Mannheim a few minutes ago about this. It's too big for us two now. Boy, he's gonna be P.O.'d at you, Doc. Pardon the language, ladies."
Mannheim entered a few minutes later, not at all the detective story detective lieutenant, but rather a thin, small man, who looked more like a bookie or shoe salesman than a cop. He was all police, though.
"For Pete's sake, some of you doctors are the worst! We've got hell's own time trying to keep track of the sex crimes in this city, and you, who ought to know better, refuse to cooperate." Pauling tried to protest, but Mannheim silenced him with a look. "Now we have the problem of finding somebody who's had a week to get over being scared, and has started to become careful." He shook his head, and walked over to Ellen.
"Lady," he began, and then noticed that her eyes were closed. He shook her gently until she opened them. "Abbott, go make some coffee, or get someone to make some." The big cop looked at Kitty, who remained where she was, staring at the floor. He shrugged and went into the kitchen.
"Lady, I want to ask you some questions about what happened last week." Mannheim continued. "I'll try to make them short, but we have to know as much as possible."
"Dr. Pauling told about everything. Ask him."
"I already did, but I want to hear it from you." He began asking questions, covering every detail that Ellen could remember. He asked the same question several times, until Ellen thought she would scream. The big cop brought in coffee, and Mannheim made her drink steaming cups of it and kept probing.
Finally, he asked the question she had been dreading.
"Where were you last night?"
Ellen was past caring now. Nothing seemed to be important enough to keep back from this man who looked as if he might be able to put an end to the whole situation.
So she told him. She told Mannheim, who looked at her impassively, occasionally writing something down in a little book. She told the policemen, one leaning forward in the chair, open-mouthed, the other sitting staring at the floor, seeming embarrassed. She told Pauling, whose face told her only that he was scared to death she would say something about the night they had spent together. She told Kitty, who tried like hell to seem disinterested, but who writhed in shame for herself and her mother.
She was like a madwoman. She went into each detail, leaving nothing out, giving the whole scope of her actions from the previous Tuesday until that morning, leaving out only the evening with Pauling, When she was finished, Mannheim sat back and looked at her.
"You've had a busy week."
"I've had a damned busy week and I'm tired now and I want to go to bed," she snapped.
"You can sleep forever, for all I care, in a little while. Right now, though, there are some more questions I have to ask you."
"Can't it wait? My ears are buzzing and I'm up to my armpits in coffee."
"I'm afraid not."
She sighed a deep sigh. "All right."
"On the basis of your-ah-research, you would say that this man," he referred to his book, "Baxter, is not the attacker?"
"Yes."
"Probably not," Pauling added. Now that the pressure was off him, he was beginning to be interested again.
"Thank you, Doctor." His voice was loaded with sarcasm.
"And the same holds true for, ah, Di Nonno."
"I think so."
"Now, who does that leave."
"Only Perry Bronston," Pauling said. And you, Ellen thought. "Bronston? No one's mentioned him."
"He's impotent."
"Oh. Well, I guess we'll have to start asking questions some place else, then. Is your office building open today, Doc?"
"Yes, but listen, Lieutenant-"
Mannheim turned to him wearily. "Listen, Doctor
Pauling, let me give you a little post-graduate course in criminology. Both you and she have been futzing around in the dark here, like a couple of kids playing Perry Mason, and all the while, Mrs. Schibe has been in serious danger of losing her life." He turned to Ellen. "You've been very lucky, lady, because if I know the type at all, they'll try to finish the job. It starts preying on their minds. You'd call it an obsession, Doc. Pretty soon they start disregarding any risks at all. That's when it's dangerous but when we have our best chance of getting them, if we don't grab them right away. We should be getting to that time right now.
"Now, perhaps both of you feel that neither of these guys, Baxter or Di Nonno, did it, but a lot of our police work is checking out the obvious. Either of the two could be a different person when they're liquored up, or full of tea or horse, or when the moon is right, or for a hundred other reasons. You know that, Doc." Pauling nodded reluctantly. "So the first thing we do is go after these guys and bring 'em in for questioning. All three. Even Bronston might know something. Next, we keep a guard outside of this house, to make sure you don't go out, Mrs. Schibe, but most of all, to make sure no one comes in. Okay?"
Pauling shook his head. "Lieutenant, I think it's a grave mistake. My patients are neurotic; the slightest upset and-"
"And they rape someone, or worse. I'm sorry, Doc, if I throw your patients into a trauma, but it's in the police department's hands now. Your methods are too slow and don't work. Ours usually do." He came over to Ellen. "Mrs. Schibe, you are not to leave the apartment under any circumstances. If you need anything, send your daughter. Does anyone of them know you have one? Well, do they know what she looks like? Good."
He turned to Pauling. "Please, Doctor Pauling, no more detective work. We don't like amateurs any more than you would in your racket. You know, a cop needs to be a little bit of a psychiatrist, but a psychiatrist has no need at all of being a cop." He walked to the door, motioning to the two patrolmen to follow him. They closed the door behind them.
Pauling sat down in a chair and looked at Ellen, who was practically asleep again.
"That was a very foolish thing to do."
"Oh, really, Bill, don't you start on me now. I've had enough for one day."
"You don't seem to have any idea of the possible consequences that could have resulted from what you did! Don't you realize that what happened to you was just a sort of prelude to what might have happened, or to what this person has in mind. You heard what the Lieutenant said."
"Since when are you so concerned with my safety?" she snapped. "A week ago at this time you didn't want the police anywhere near me."
"And I still wouldn't, except that you've taken it into your head to invite disaster. Now we have no choice except to do what the police tell us."
"What's so horrible about that? The whole thing might have been over by now if I had gone to them to begin with."
"And nothing would have been accomplished."
"Nothing? I would be safe now. Is that nothing?"
"Ellen, you know what I mean. I've told you how I feel about this before, and why I feel this way."
"I'm sorry, Doctor, but I'm afraid I can't sympathize with your position any longer. I want to be out of this whole mess."
"What do you think you were accomplishing by doing what you've been doing with Baxter and Di Nonno? Did you think that that was getting you out of anything?"
"I don't know! I don't know anything any more; I'm so damned fed up with questions and everybody in the world telling me what to do that I could just jump under a bus or something!
Pauling remained silent, waiting for her to get control of herself. After a long pause, she looked at him calmly.
"Please go, Bill. I'm so tired I don't think I can use my brain anymore."
"I know, Ellen. I'll go, but I want you to promise that this time you'll do what you're supposed to. Stay inside and don't let anyone in. I'll give you someihing that will make you sleep a little sounder and perhaps a bit longer." He reached into his small briefcase and took out a few packets. He gave them to Kitty, who sat in a chair in the corner, seeming totally disinterested.
"Mix two of these in a glass of water and give them to your mother." She got up and went into the kitchen.
"I have to get to the hospital, but I'll be at the office later on today if you want me for anything." Ellen nodded.
Kitty came back outside and handed the glass to Pauling. He looked confused for a moment, then gave her a hard look, but handed the glass to Ellen.
"Try to rest as long as possible. Well let the police handle it from here." He went to the door and left.
Ellen drank the liquid down and made a face over it. Then she got out of the chair with a painful effort and started towards the bedroom. Her vision was beginning to play tricks on her now; the room danced in front of her eyes. She noticed Kitty staring at her as she passed by her, and stopped.
"Don't hate me, Kitty. You'll understand someday."
"I doubt that."
Ellen was too tired to argue. She went into the bedroom and began taking off her clothes. Naked, she started for the bed, weaving like a drunkard, and was asleep almost before she had completely lowered her body on it.
CHAPTER X
Bnx Pauling drove his car slowly through the park, unaware of the honking of the always-in-a hurry cabs and cars behind him. He racked his brain trying to think of something that he could do quickly, something that would take the pressure off him and Ellen.
The silly bitch, he thought. She has as much of an obsession as the guy who raped her. Still, nothing too awful seemed to have happened to her, at least not physically, and it threw a new light on the situation. He must be completely in the dark about the man's identity and it was beginning to seem quite likely that it might not have been any one of the three. None of the first two had shown any pattern of violence against her this time, so, unless different circumstances produced different reactions on their parts; unless-He almost went off the side of the road. Great guns, he thought, how far wrong I've been!
He gunned his engine and raced through the park, jumping several red lights to get to the office. He was out of the car almost before it had stopped rolling and raced into the building.
The lone elevator operator was sitting on a small stool, engrossed in a copy of Playboy. He put it aside as the doctor rushed into the elevator and followed him in. He shut the door and the elevator went up.
"No rest at all, eh, Doctor?"
"I'm afraid not. Have the police been around here at all this morning?"
"The police? No, they haven't Should they have been?"
"I suppose not." The elevator stopped and he raced down the hall and into the office. He picked up the telephone and dialed the hospital. When the phone was answered, he told the girl that he was going to be held up that day and to hold his cases over until the following Monday. She said she would and he hung up.
He went into the file room and began to pull out all of the material that he had on the three men, scanning it briefly before putting selected papers on a pile to one side.
He went to a corner of the little room and gathered up the pile of finger paintings that had been stacked there. He came back out and began laying them down on the floor, each man's in a row, ones from the same day lined up one above the other, fifteen in all. He began to pace the floor, reading aloud from the transcriptions of the notes he had taken, stopping now and then to squat over a painting and stare at it. Once or twice he raced to the shelf where he kept his psychiatric magazines and turned to an article. Then he returned to his examination of the paintings, muttering to himself.
He seemed to be getting nowhere, and then suddenly an idea hit him. He hurried to the bookcase and took down a massive volume and began leafing through it. He found the page he wanted and read it aloud. Then he went back to the finger pantings and the notes. He picked one painting up and looked at it for a long time. Then he went to the phone and dialed the police.
When the receiver at the other end was picked up, he said, "I'd like to get in touch with a Lieutenant Mannheim, over on the West Side. It's very urgent that I do. This is Doctor William Pauling, on Madison Avenue."
"Do you know the precinct, Doctor?"
"I'm afraid not. That's why I called."
"I see. Just a minute." The phone went dead for a minute and then the voice came back on, giving Pauling a precinct number and a telephone number.
Pauling hung up and dialed the new number. When the phone was answered, he asked for Mannheim.
"Lieutenant, this is Doctor Pauling. Have you done anything about the case yet?"
"No, Doctor, I haven't. Just as I came back here, we got a report on a couple of knife fights in the neighborhood, and we've been pretty busy since then. Anything new?"
"I think so. I think I have a pretty good idea who did it."
"Oh?" He seemed interested, but distrustful. Professional pride is strong in everyone. "Who?"
Pauling told him. Mannheim gave a snort, then Pauling continued talking. He talked for five minutes, then stopped. There was a new respect in Mannheim's voice when he finally replied.
"Okay, Doc, I'll buy it. It's straight out of left field, but I'll buy it. Now look, just keep out of it from here on in, okay? We know exactly how to handle it from here."
"Should I call Mrs. Schibe?"
"No. There's no point in getting her panicky yet. We can possibly wrap it up before she gets out of bed tomorrow. It's noon now. It shouldn't take too long."
"All right, Lieutenant. I'll leave it in your hands." He hung up and sat back staring at the paintings on the floor. What an ass he had been not to have noticed it before. It was as clear as a picture!
He tried to forget the whole thing and leave it in the hands of the police but his scientific curiosity was getting the better of him. Once the police got hold of the man, he would have no chance to find out anything of value. He fought the notion; finally he went into the outer office and took the receptionist's leather bound address book out of the desk. He came back to his own desk, looked up a number and dialed it.
"Hello." The familiar voice was cautious now, and even a little crafty.
'This is Doctor Pauling."
"Yes." Now it was a little tense.
"I was wondering if you could come down to the office for a while this afternoon. Something's come up and I'd like to discuss it with you." He was keeping his voice as casual as he could, but even at that moment he was beginning to realize that he had made a mistake. A very big mistake.
"I don't think so, Doctor. I don't think so at all."
Pauling struggled for control.
"Well, ah, then, could I drop by your place for just a few minutes?"
"I don't think so, Doctor. I won't be home."
"Oh, I see." Then a long pause. Then the voice at the other end began again.
"I guess you know now."
"I suppose so," Pauling said.
"Well, I suppose it had to come out sometime. Were you surprised?"
"Quite frankly, yes. I never suspected."
"I suppose I should have told you, but I was hoping you could find another way for me without my having to tell you."
"You should have said something."
"I couldn't. I can't help myself. I've never been able to help myself."
"What are you going to do now?"
"I'm going to kill her."
"What for? Why don't you talk to me first before you do anything."
"I'm sorry, Doctor. I have to. I can't control it anymore."
He hung up. Pauling arose and paced the floor. Stupid bastard. You stupid bastard. Now you've really fixed it up nice.
He came back to the desk and called the police station again.
"Lieutenant Mannheim, please," he said to the voice that answered.
"He isn't here right now. He left just a few minutes ago. Can I help you?"
"I don't think so," Pauling said despairingly.
"Can I take a message?"
"No."
"Well, who's calling?"
But Pauling had hung up. He debated about calling Ellen, then decided to take at least a part of Mannheim's advice.
You'd better find him yourself, he thought. Every move you make, you're just mixing it up more, so you better go out and get him yourself.
Okay. Where do we start?
You might as well start anywhere. You're not going to find him anyway. You know you aren't.
I know.
You just killed Ellen, you know. I know.
He left the office and walked slowly down the hall.
CHAPTER XI
Kitty watched her mother go into the bedroom. Several emotions battled inside of her: pity, disgust, anger, fear, hatred. Her mother was a whore! That's what it boiled down to. And all that talk and the big scene she raised the other night. And she going off doing who knew what with all those perverts. She remembered the man in the park and tried to picture her mother with him, or someone like him, and the hot tears began to run down her cheeks as the picture emerged. She would show herl There's nothing she can do that I can't match, she told herself. Til make her feel as horrible as she made me feel today. All that stuff she talked about, and in front of everyone, too.
She got up and walked to the door silently. She took her wallet from a table near the closet and eased the door open a foot or so and slipped through it She took a long time to close the door, even though she knew that Ellen probably wouldn't hear her. She went down the stairs quickly and into the street. There was a car parked directly in front of the house, an unmarked car with two men in street clothes sitting inside it, but she knew it was a police car. She strolled down the block as casually as she could, and turned the corner. Her nind was full of plots, but none of them made much sense on second thought.
Then she remembered the party in the Village that Julie had told her about. Julie had put the address in her wallet and now she looked to see if it were stall there. It was. But the party wasn't going to begin for several hours yet, and all the kids were at the beach. She decided to go to a movie.
She sat in the theater for almost five hours, sitting through two complete shows and not really paying a bit of attention to what went on on the screen. When she thought it was late enough, she left the theater and started for the subway. Her mind kept returning to all the things that Ellen had said that morning, and the pictures they left in her mind almost made her want to vomit. The more she thought about it, the more she felt the wave of hatred for her mother. She would show her. Anyone can play that game!
She came to the subway and pushed her way through the returning beach crowd to the entrance and went down to the platform. The train came; she got on and took a seat, not noticing the passengers around her.
She was so buried in thought that she almost missed the stop when it came. She just made it out the door before it closed and the train left. She stood looking at the sign that read "SHERIDAN SQUARE" and hunted for the exit.
When she got on the street she found her bearings again. She knew the Village fairly well; most of the high school kids went down there on week-ends. She hurried on, eager to meet the boys. They were artists or writers, or something, or wanted to be, and Julie said they were older and very intelligent and lots of fun.
She walked south to Leroy Street and turned up the block until she came to the address Julie had given her. It was an old town house facing a park, but now it was in the process of falling apart little by little. Even though it was only a little past six, she could hear the sounds of a party well in progress on the second floor. She climbed the stairs and knocked at the door, although it was slightly open. There was no reply, so she rang the bell.
The door was opened all the way by a man with a small goatee, wearing big sunglasses. He was naked except for a pair of dirty sneakers, Bermuda shorts, and a black beret.
"Hi, chick. Fall in." He stood aside for her. She took a couple of steps into the hall.
"I'm a friend of Julie Prostore's. She said it was okay if I came tonight."
"Sure, doll, sure. We're all friends here. Well, come in. Can't get nowhere flapping in the hall."
Kitty followed him down the hall into a long narrow room that already had about thirty people in it. Some were seated along the wall, some stood by a phonograph, snapping their fingers and nodding their heads to some fast-paced progressive jazz corning out of the speaker. Others were dancing, but with total disregard for the rhythm of the music they could hear. Some of the girls were dancing together, and also some of the boys.
"I'm Lou Fischel. I share this pad with a couple of the other cats here. What'll you take for a blast?"
"A blast?"
"Vodka, beer, wine. Sterno? In English, fox, a drink."
"Oh, I don't care. What are you having?"
"Little potion of my own concoction. I call it the X-15 because it makes you fly higher and faster than anything else."
"I'll have one of those, please."
"To hear is to obey, memsahib." He touched his chest, lips and forehead and disappeared down another long corridor.
Kitty looked around for Julie, and then remembered that she wasn't planning to come until around eight. She had to slip out of the house on the pretext of going to the movies with Kitty and some of the other girls. So it would be a while before she saw a friendly face, even though it was beginning to look as if she would have a good time.
Lou came back bearing a drink in his hand. He gave it to Kitty and she sipped it. It was sweet and at the same time a little bitter but she decided that she liked it.
He took her by the arm and walked her over to the group standing by the phonograph. "What's your name, honey?"
"Kitty Schibe."
He made introductions and moved off into the crowd, which was increasing in size all the time. The crowd by the phonograph nodded to her and went back to their conversation. She understood very little, but remained anyway.
"But the celestial concept in his home, man, like when you hear it, doesn't it like lift you up and carry you to the fartherest reaches of your consciousness? Like its cosmic quality is to be sought after long after the simple physical effects have died away. After your ears have ceased with the sound, what is going on inside your head? Are you here on the square planet or have you transcended into the realms of the Truth and the Light?"
"That happened only one time, man. I was sitting in Central Park by the reservoir with my back against one of those fine old ancient maples and the sky was clear and I heard the horn blowing at me. At me, man! Not for the world, but just for me, sitting in the park with my back up against that mother lovin' maple tree. Yes! It came at me from above, and I felt the Truth and I was like in contact with nature on more than the physical level and I knew what it was all about. That was the only time."
"Dig. That's what I mean."
"That's what happened."
"Dig."
Kitty finished the rest of her drink. It had made her a little dizzy, but it had improved her state of mind. Perhaps another will be even better, she thought, and set off down the corridor that Lou had used. It was long and there was a couple necking along one of the walls. She was past them before it occurred to her to look back at them and she saw that they weren't just necking. They were oblivious to her presence, locked together, lips pressed tightly to one another. She hurried on, embarrassed.
She found the kitchen but it was empty. She saw a bottle labeled Vodka and filled her glass half full. She didn't know which was the Chianti, so she filled the glass with water and tasted. It was less pleasant than the other drink, but bearable. She turned to go out of the kitchen and saw Lou standing in the doorway. He caught her in his arms and propelled her back a few steps.
"Stay awhile, little chick."
"I just came out to get another drink. Is that okay?"
"Anything is okay with me." He moved closer to her, and she kept on backing up until she was in a corner and could not move any further. Lou put his hand out and touched her breast lightly and then cupped it with his hand. He came closer and put his other hand in back of her neck and kissed her. The two drinks had made her carefree. She put her arms around him and kissed him back, opening her mouth slightly. He lifted the bottom of her jersey and put his hand under it. It moved up and felt under her bra and touched her nipples. Her nipples grew taut under his probing. She pressed her lips into his and ground her belly close to his. He stopped kissing her then and took his hand away.
"Lots of time for this later, chick," he whispered. "Let's get bombed first." He took two shot glasses off a shelf and poured them full of vodka. He handed her one and tossed the other one down himself. She drank it and felt it hot and burning down her throat and her stomach. He took a cigarette out of his pants pocket, a handmade cigarette in brown paper, and fit it. He puffed in deeply, held the smoke in his lungs and released it slowly. He offered the cigarette to her.
"What kind is that?" she asked.
He laughed. "Boy, you are square, aren't you? It's pot, baby. The weed. Tea. The big M. Blissville in a cylinder." He put it between her lips and she closed her eyes and inhaled it. It made her cough and feel fight headed and the room spun before her eyes. Lou took a few more drags and gave it to her again. This time the puff brought nausea; she put her hand to her mouth and rushed to the sink and threw up in it. Lou snickered.
"Oh little Kitty Schibe, you are so far from being with it you're pathetic! Here, take some ginger ale and get the puke taste out of your mouth." She took it and rinsed her mouth out and then swallowed a glassful. It made her feel a lot better. Now she was light headed but not sick. Lou poured her another shot of vodka and it lifted her off the floor and threw her against the wall hard, or so she felt. He took her by the hand and led her back to the rest of the party, which by now had grown in size to about sixty, crowded together in the heat of the close room. One or two of the girls had taken off their blouses and bras and stood bare-chested, and at least one of the men was wearing nothing but his undershorts. No one seemed to pay much attention to one another, and even their conversation was more to themselves than to anyone listening. When they were not talking, they were staring vacantly into space.
Several couples were sitting or lying along one wall, making love to each other as if they were alone. She turned to see if Lou were watching, but he had disappeared into the mob and she was alone again. She felt a hand on her buttocks and turned and looked at a very tall Oriental boy standing behind her. She smiled.
"Hello," she said.
"Want to dance?" he said, and she nodded and he took her in his arms and began to move in time to the quick rhythm of the record on the phonograph. They didn't cover much area, the floor was too crowded for that; he held her tight and stepped very gracefully in a small arc. He said nothing, just looked down at her with expressionless eyes and his hand moved up her back under her blouse and he began to dance her out of the room, into the corridor where the kitchen was and he continued dancing down the long hall into a bedroom and closed the door with his foot and danced her to the bed and then pushed her backwards until she was half lying on it.
Kitty was in a stupor; all of this had happened so quickly that she hadn't had time to think about anything and now the tall dark boy was pulling the jersey over her head and had taken off her bra and was unzipping her shorts and she didn't care; she only wanted him to do what she knew he would do and she wanted it done fast. He pulled her panties off her hips and put her legs on the bed and took his own clothes off and lay down beside her. His large hand held her small breast and he fingered her as no one ever had before. She was alive with passion and writhing and she felt around in the dark for him and found him and felt something new, something strange and new as he put his lips to hers for the first time.
"This is my first time," she whispered. "Be gentle with me."
He said nothing but buried his face in her tiny white breasts and then she felt a tearing inside of her and white flashes danced around her in the dark and she began to hurt, but she didn't care now, she was at the top of the roller coaster and then it began to descend and she went with it, down to the bottom and then up over the next hump and then down again, the rising and falling coming in quicker succession and then it was over and the tall boy got up and put his clothes on and went out the door, and Kitty lay in the bed, hurting a little but feeling warm inside and tired, as if she had been running a mile. The door opened and she saw Lou silhouetted in the fight from the big room. He came inside and walked to the bed.
"You okay? I saw you walk out of the room with Jimmy Kono. Are you okay?"
"Yes." She didn't tell him about the bleeding, because she didn't want him to make any more fun of her.
He came up to the side of the bed. He leaned down and touched her thigh. She took his hand and moved it between her legs and he sat down on the bed and put his arm behind her shoulders and lifted her up and kissed her. Then he let her fall back onto the mattress and stood up and went to the door and closed it. He took his clothes off and lay down beside her. She grabbed him and pulled him to her.
"Hey, take it easy, chick. There's no big hurry, is there?" He wiggled back a little distance from her and began to caress her gently.
"I don't want to wait! I want to do it now!" She was all fire now and wanting the sensation to begin again and keep going forever.
"That's fine, babe, but I've had a bit to drink and it's going to take me a little time to get worked up. That's the way it happens sometimes." He continued caressing her, rubbing his hand between her legs and tweaking her nipple with his fingers. She tried to relax and enjoy the slow warming up, but all she could think about was the roller coaster and she didn't want to wait. She grabbed his shoulders and pulled him on top of her and began to work her hips the way she had before, but the sensation wasn't there.
"No good, chick," Lou whispered forcefully. She pushed him off her then and began to rub herself frantically.
"Then get out of here and get me someone who can do it!"
Lou whistled softly. "Sure, chick." He left the room and went into the crowd and pulled one of his roommates aside.
"Listen, Hal, I got this frantic hotpants inside who isn't getting enough. Go in and take care of her, will you?" Hal looked at Lou unbelievingly for an instant, then went down the hall to the bedroom. When he opened the door, a shaft of light illuminated the bed. He saw Kitty, writhing on the bed, both her hands cupped on her abdomen. He closed the door and undid his clothing and threw himself on her. He was rough, but she didn't care. She held him tight to her and ripped his shirt and bit his shoulder and didn't want to stop when it was all over. Hal finally pulled away and went back to the party. He took one of his friends aside and told him about Kitty. His friend went down the hall and into the bedroom and Kitty welcomed him wordlessly and clung to him until he spent himself and then he got up and told one of his friends. Finally there was no one else and she lay alone in the dark, worn out, and drifted off to sleep.
She woke to the sound of bongos beating sensuously in the other room. She stretched and got out of the bed. She ached a little bit and she wanted a drink badly. She turned on the light. The bed was a mess and the top sheet was torn. She threw the blanket over the sheets and picked up her panties from the floor and put them on, and then her shorts. She searched for her bra but couldn't find it, so she slipped her jersey on over her head without it.
She left the room and stopped off in the kitchen and grabbed a pint of gin and continued on into the big room. The bongos were increasing their intensity and as she came into the room she saw that there were three boys on the bongos and a tall lithe Negro boy was improvising a primitive dance to the beat. He was stripped to the waist and as Kitty came further into the room, a tall Negress stood up, stripped to the waist, and joined him. The two of them improvised a wild sensual dance as the bongo's beat increased to a blood heating rate. The door opened and a new couple walked in the room; the boy was carrying a big conga drum and he rushed to the bongo players and soon the heavy bass throb echoed in the room. The dancers began to spin, the heavy ebony breasts of the Negress pointed straight out with the motion. She began to bend backwards, throbbing with the beat and the tall boy came over and began to lean over her, sinking lower and lower over her. She finally bent completely to the floor, back arched, held up by her bent legs and her hands. The boy bent over her and put his hands on either side of her and suspended his body inches from hers, both of them bobbing and swaying to the beat in imitation of the sex act. Someone began to clap his hands and soon everyone in the room was clapping in unison, then a wild chant began and all the spectators were swaying back and forth, clapping and chanting, some moaning low, some screaming high, as the sweat poured off the drummers and the dancers sank low and then arched higher and then lower again and began to inch towards the floor, trancelike, and the dance was not any longer an imitation of the sex act but the sex act itself and the clapping and the moaning and the screaming and the swaying grew louder and faster, in time to the motions of the couple consummating the ritual on the floor and the beat continued and the crowd ringed the couple as they slipped their clothes off and went to each other and then a few of the others fell to the floor and someone grabbed Kitty and her shorts came off and she went to the floor and someone was on top of her and she heard the drum pounding in her head and felt it throbbing in her belly and then another kind of throbbing and she began to moan and cry with the joy of it and she grabbed another boy by the legs and pulled him to her and then she fainted.
She was lying on the floor with her shorts off and also her blouse, in the middle of the room when her senses returned and the party had thinned out somewhat but there were still about ten couples left. Some of them were sleeping lightly, others just sat with their arms around each other, not talking or even looking at each other. The music was quiet now, something sounding vaguely Oriental. All of the girls were bare-chested, most wore only their panties, the boys had their trousers on, one or two only in shorts and nothing else. Kitty sat up and looked about, but no one looked at her. Then she saw that Lou was sitting alone in the corner and she crawled over to him, creeping over the legs of some of the sleepers in order to reach him.
He gazed at her calmly as she snuggled herself into the crook of his arm. He dropped his hand lazily on her breast and held it lightly.
"How old are you, Kitty?"
"Fourteen."
"Oh, man alive, what will you be like when you grow up. Mmmmm, mmm." He shook his head.
"How often do you have these parties, Lou?"
"Oh, once a month or so, I guess. Give me your phone number later and I'll let you know when the next one is. Do you want a drink now?"
"Yes." He took his arm away and got off the floor and came back with a straw covered bottle. He sat down again and uncorked it and gave it to her. "All we have left is wine." She drank and he drank. "Want a stick, too?" He lit another reefer and gave her a drag. This time it lifted her up and kept her there. She noticed that most of the other couples were smoking it, too, and completely wrapped up in themselves. The sweet odor filled the room and the world became a rosy place for Kitty. She was ten feet tall and there wasn't a problem in the universe important enough to disturb her. She was bigger than all of them. From a hundred miles away she heard
Lou's soft voice talking to her, but he was insignificant now; she kept puffing on the marijuana and cruising farther away from the real world. All of her perceptions seemed to be sharpened to a fine edge, she heard things in the music that she never knew existed there before, and saw tilings in the simplest article in the room. The abstract paintings vibrated with a life of their own, and everything was in slow motion. She felt Lou's hand on her breast, and it tingled with a new sensation. All this while he had been talking, and finally his voice came to her clearly.
"I'm the only guy in this whole room that you didn't lay tonight."
She giggled at the vague memory of it. "Well, you had your chance, but you loused it up. Loused up a louse. That's funny." She laughed out loud, and Lou laughed too, but his was more self-conscious.
"How 'bout another chance?" he asked, tightening his grip on her breast.
"Sure." His hand slipped under the elastic of her panties and fondled her. "But let's kill this bottle first. And I want some more tea."
"There isn't any more," he said. "That was my last stick. I had to pass the rest around to the group. Too much isn't good anyway, to start off with. You'll get sick again."
"But I feel wonderful. Can't you get some more?"
"Sure, chick, I'll just hop around to the candy store and pick up a pack or two. Be serious. When it's gone, it's gone. We can have another time sometime. I'll show you a few other things, too."
They finished the wine and Kitty settled back against his chest, feeling wonderful, not too high, just very aware of sensation. She pushed his hand into her panties again and pressed it hard. He began to tickle her lightly and she bent her knees and snuggled in closer. He took her hand and put it inside of his shorts and she held him tightly and closed her eyes ecstatically.
Tou want to go into the bedroom now?" she said.
"Yeah. I think I can make it this time." They rose and started into the bedroom. Lou cupped her adolescent bosoms in his hands and nuzzled the back of her neck. They went into the bedroom and she turned to him and took off his shorts and he took her panties and they fell on the bed, and she was all over him, kissing and biting and licking him, wanting all of his body at once and trying to have it completely and Lou was kissing and biting her and the two of them rolled all around the bed, twisting into strange shapes and then Lou stretched her out on her stomach and fell on her back. One hand groped for her breast, the other held her belly, and then went down farther and the sensation started all over again and she felt even better this time and she moved and she felt in back of her for him but she could not touch him easily so she grabbed the pillow and held on to it with both hands as tight as she could, and said, "Oh, Lou, Lou, Lou," over and over again and big colored lights seemed to burst forth in the darkness and she knew that whatever Lou wanted she would do for him and she would go with him and he was better than any of the others had been and she kept saying his name and she thought that she wouldn't ever go home, she would just stay and make love with Lou and no one else and then it was over and she started to think about someone else right away.
CHAPTER XII
The telephone rang and rang and rang in Ellen's dream, and finally she awoke and realized that the telephone had only intruded on her dream; that it was real. She stumbled out of bed, throwing a glance at the bedside clock as she left the room. It was eight-thirty Sunday morning.
"Hello." Her voice was fuzzy and the words came out with difficulty.
"Ellen, this is Bill. I've got something important to tell you. I'm down the street in a luncheonette. Can I come up?" His voice was weary.
"I guess so, Bill. Is it really important?"
"I'm afraid so." He hung up.
Ellen went into the kitchen and put water on for coffee. A dim memory of something unusual came to her, and she went back into the living room. Kitty wasn't there. The sofa bed was folded up neatly, but no sign of the girl. She wondered about it, then decided that she could have gone out for the paper or for something to eat.
The buzzer rang and she went into the kitchen and pushed the button that would open the downstairs door. She went to the door; opened it.
Bill Pauling trudged up the stairs slowly. He looked terrible. His clothes were rumpled, his shirt was wrinkled and dirty around the collar. He had a good day's growth of beard and his eyes were red rimmed from lack of sleep. He came up the stairs and came into the apartment and sank into a chair.
"What's the matter, Bill?"
"I know who did it."
Ellen took a deep breath. "Who?"
"Perry Bronston."
Her eyes widened and she sat down on the sofa bed. "But that's impossible. He's impotent!"
"It's possible. What's more, he did it. He told me so himself."
"Have the police got him already?"
"No, I talked to him on the telephone. That's part of the problem."
"I don't understand what's going on at all. Please tell mel What makes you think it's Bronston? How could he possibly rape anyone? Why don't the police have him?"
"One answer at a time. Do I smell coffee? Could I have some? I'm beat. That's part of the story, too."
She went into the kitchen and turned the coffee off. She poured two cups and returned to the living room. She sat down and looked at Pauling expectantly. He sipped the coffee, lit a cigarette, and began.
"It was Bronston, Ellen. I know he's impotent; completely incapable of participating in any sex act under normal circumstances. Under normal circumstances. However, he can, and does, participate in sex acts which are accompanied by violence. He can only commit rape; he's incapable with any other conditions but those which are violent. I won't go into the details of why this is so, because they're pretty involved. It's tied in with a hatred of his mother on whom he was, nevertheless, overly dependent. He hates women and this method both satisfies his sex drive and his emotional state. It's a kind of sadism, only perhaps a little worse. The sadist can usually be satisfied short of inflicting too terrible damage on his victim. I'm afraid Bronston can't be, any more. It's taken hold of him completely."
"He's like Jack the Ripper."
"Sort of. Anyhow, I bollixed up the whole deal by calling him yesterday. I guess he's been waiting for something of the sort, because he didn't seem surprised. Anyway, I got his wind up, and he told me that he was going to have to kill you."
"Kill me?"
"The only thing that's open to him now."
"Didn't you call the police."
"No. Not after I talked to him."
"Why not?"
He stubbed out his cigarette and gulped down the coffee. He stared at the floor for a minute, then looked up. "I was ashamed to."
"But what now? Suppose he had come here! What then?"
"Come to the window." She followed him and he pointed to a plain unmarked sedan parked directly across the street in front of the house. "It's the police. You would be safe in any case."
"Except for the back entrance and the fire escape."
"I've been up all night, looking for him. I searched everywhere I could think of where a person like that might go. I had no luck at all."
"I think we'd better call the police."
"I think it's too late for that now. I've been thinking that it might be best if you got out of the city for a while until the police get Iiim. I've got a cabin on a lake up in Connecticut and you and Kitty could go up there until the whole tiling is over and it's safe for you to come back. Where is Kitty, by the way?"
T don't know. I guess she went out to the store or something. She wasn't here when I got up. But she should be back by now."
"Well, I think you both ought to get out of the city. I have the key to the place with me." He gave it to her. "You can rent a car and drive up there today. It shouldn't take more than an hour or so to get there."
"I can't rent a car. I don't have a license."
"Can you drive at all?"
"Well, yes, I suppose so. But I haven't driven a car in years."
"I'll rent the car for you and bring it around. You're going to have to try."
"What about the police out front?"
"I don't know. I'll have to think of something. Don't worry about that, though, just get yourself together and when Kitty comes back, be ready to take off. I'll be back in a little while."
He got up and left the apartment. Ellen went into the bedroom and began dressing. She put on her underwear, then decided on a pair of slacks and a blouse. Then she threw a few things into a small suitcase and came into the living room to wait for Kitty.
Kitty came in about ten-thirty, shame-faced and sullen, just beginning to realize the enormity of what she had done, but too proud now to back down from anything.
Ellen's first reaction was to jump all over her, but she suddenly realized that both of them were in great danger; realized it for perhaps the first time, and knew that she had to be calm, and strong. So she said nothing about it, asked no questions.
Tack a small suitcase, Kitty. We're leaving town for a few days."
"Why?" Kitty was puzzled. Too much had happened in the past day.
"Never mind why right now; we haven't got time to talk about it. Just get something in a suitcase and get ready."
"Where are we going?"
"To Doctor Pauling's place in Connecticut. He's letting us use it for a few days. Now get moving."
Kitty went into the bedroom and packed slowly while Ellen sat in a chair and chewed her knuckles. Now that Kitty was home, she was anxious to get moving. Time was precious, and so was distance.
At last the bell rang and she jumped to answer it. Pauling came up the stairs. He had changed his clothes but looked even more haggard than before. He came in the apartment.
"Kitty's back?"
"She's in the bedroom, packing."
"Good. Now, the cops can't see you from the door if it's closed, so you and Kitty wait there until you see me divert their attention."
"How are you going to do it?"
"You'll see. Then drive like a banshee until you get to my place. I've written the directions down and they're in the glove compartment of the car."
"I'm almost afraid to trust you any more, Bill. I think we ought to tell the police."
"Just trust me this one more time. I've screwed it, and I've got to set it straight."
Kitty came out of the bedroom carrying a suitcase. All three of them left the apartment and descended the stairs. When they got to the front door, Pauling made a silencing gesture and went outside alone. He crossed directly to the police car. Both cops seemed totally unaware of anything that was happening, sitting with newspapers in the most relaxed of positions. Pauling knew, though, that they were watching every move he made.
"How's everything, fellows?" he said cheerfully.
The cop on the side nearest him, the side on the street, pulled his eyes from the paper and regarded Pauling calmly.
"Pardon me, Mac?"
"I just said, how's everything going? Tm Doctor Pauling, Mrs. Schibe's boss." All the while he kept his eyes on the street. He saw a car coming and then pretended not to see it.
"I don't know what you're talking about, Mac, so why don't you just take off," the cop said. The car was approaching.
"Sorry, my mistake." The car was almost next to him now, and he took a half step and turned around. Just as the rear fender of the car passed close to him, he gave it a strong slap with his forearm, then fell down, writhing on the pavement, between the police car and the other one. Both cops were out of the car in an instant. At the same instant, Ellen saw that this was the chance she was being given and she and Kitty slipped out the door and up the block to where the rented car was parked. They slipped in and Ellen started the engine. She pulled out and passed Pauling and the others just as the policemen were helping him to his feet and he was shaking his head as if to say he was all right. They turned the comer and headed for the West Side Highway.
"No, I'm okay," Pauling was saying. "Just a little shook." He smiled and leaned against the police car.
"Are you sure?" one cop asked him.
"I told you I was a doctor. I felt for broken bones."
"Okay." Both of them went back to the car, after telling the very shaken up driver of the other car to take off.
Pauling saw Ellen's car turn the corner and felt relieved. Then another car passed him, slowing down for a minute. He glanced up out of habit, and saw Perry Bronston behind the wheel. Bronston smiled, nodded and then was gone, turning the same corner.
Pauling caught himself just as he was about to bolt across to his own car. No sense in arousing suspicion. He strolled as casually as he could across the street to where his own car was parked and got in. He started the engine and it purred into life. He pulled slowly away from the curb. Then he noticed a bumping on the right side of the car. It continued and he found the car hard to handle. He stopped, got out and saw that the right front tire was flat. He bent to examine it and saw where it had been slashed. By a big knife.
Kitty asked a million questions as they drove along the Merritt Parkway. Ellen sloughed most of them off or just refused to answer them. It was better that she knew nothing at all. She told her repeatedly that the doctor had suggested it merely because there was an unhealthy atmosphere in the city, and that it would be better if they went someplace quiet for a while.
"But why did we have to slip away from the police like that?"
"Because they wouldn't want us to go."
"Why not?"
"Kitty, stop asking so many questions. Look at those directions again and tell me what exit we're suppose to get off at." Kitty fumbled in the glove compartment and fished out the paper, the directions written in Pauling's scrawl. She mumbled aloud, then looked up as a sign flashed by.
"It's this one!" Ellen turned off hurriedly and disappeared down the ramp. The car following in the left hand lane was too far back and couldn't get over in time. It was three miles to the next exit.
Pauling's directions were good and they found the cottage without any trouble. It was a fairly small log cabin, furnished with very rustic furniture, even a bear rug in front of a great stone fireplace. The room was hung with Pauling's weapon collection: rifles, pistols, spears, knives of all sorts. It was a man's place, and Ellen felt out of place in it.
They searched the house and located some food. After lunch, Kitty stood up lazily.
"Is it okay if I take a walk down to the lake, Mom?"
Ellen wanted to say no, but still didn't want to risk arousing the girl's suspicions.
"I suppose so. Just don't go too far away."
"Okay." She ran out of the door and down the path to the lake which was about a quarter-mile away.
Ellen began to clear the table. There was still a vague something about the house that made her feel uneasy, something she could not yet put her finger on. It was a whole atmosphere that made her jumpy. She put the dishes in the sink and ran the water. It ran cold from both taps. She set a pan full on to boil and went into the living room again.
Whatever it was that upset her about the house, it was strongest in the living room. She walked around, feeling more uncomfortable every moment. Then it came to her. She looked at the walls, at what was hanging on them. Rifles, other weapons. But there were mostly knives. Knives of every kind. They hung all over the walls, big ones, small ones, curved, straight, zigzagged. Knives.
Things began to click in her mind. What was she doing here? How had she let herself be talked into such a situation? She wasn't at all safer here than in the city. She was three miles from the town and there was no telephone, not even any other homes as far as she knew. A perfect place to trap someone. Why had he been so insistent? Why? She began to fit the pieces together in her mind.
He had refused to call in the police right from the first. He had wanted her to stay secluded in her apartment, and had gotten furious when she hadn't. What land of a person was he? She didn't know. She did know that he drank too much. That in itself was very unstable. All that song and dance about trying to help people. And those phony paintings. He had never wanted to have anyone else know about what had happened. When the police came in, it was because Kitty had called them. Even after the police had been called in, he had done his best to keep them away and to keep Ellen away from them.
And here she was, out in what amounted to the wilderness, with no place to turn for help. It had all been a sham, a pretense to get her out here where he could finish her off easily. Her and Kitty. Kitty! She was out there!
Ellen raced to the door, intent on getting Kitty and getting in the car and hurrying back to the city just as fast as she could. Just as she opened the door, she heard the sound of a car coming down the dirt road. She waited for a moment and then saw Pauling's car come around the bend and pull up beside the other one.
She closed the door and pushed the heavy old-fashioned latch forward. She stood by a window and watched him jump from the car and race towards the cabin. His face and arms and shirt were filthy from changing the tire and his hair was matted and hanging over his forehead. His eyes were even redder than they had been that morning and they were full of excitement. He looked like a madman.
He is a madman, Ellen thought, and shrank back from the window as he neared the house. He rattled the door, but it wouldn't open.
"Ellen? Ellen? Are you in there?"
She didn't answer and her eyes searched wildly for something to defend herself with. She picked a heavy rifle off the wall and stood farther back from the door. Pauling rattled harder.
"Ellen! It's me, Bill. Please open the door!"
She found her voice and it came out shrill and trembling.
"Get away from here, you bastard! Get away!"
"Ellen, listen to me! Bronston is on his way here, or he's here already! He followed you. I saw him. He's going to finish the job here! Now let me in!"
"No! It isn't Bronston at all. I know now. It was you all the time! You did it!"
"Ellen, be reasonable! Think!"
"I've thought. Now get out of here!"
"Ellen, you aren't safe! Let me in!"
"Get away!" She began to scream as loud as she could and Pauling rattled the door harder and then began to throw himself at it. She ran to the back door and locked it; then came into the living room and stood in the middle of the floor screaming "Get away!" and holding on to the rifle by the barrel like a baseball bat.
The rattling stopped and she saw the flash of his body -as he ran around the corner of the house to the back door. It was not as strong as the front and as he threw his shoulder against it, the whole house rattled. He continued to bang at it, and she slipped the latch off the front door. Finally, she heard it splinter and she threw the door open, dropped the rifle, and took off towards the lake. She heard him calling after her. She ignored the path, running headlong into the bushes, crashing through them, thinking of only one thing: to get Kitty and get away.
CHAPTER XIII
Kitty left the house and walked slowly towards the lake. The sun was still fairly high and it silvered the surface of the lake a half-mile distant from where she was walking, close to the shore. Soon the sun would be dipping behind the tall evergreens that fringed the lake, but now it was warm and very peaceful. There seemed to be no one else around.
She skirted the edge of the lake as she began to walk along a path that seemed to circle around it. She kept her eyes open for a glimpse of some wild animals, perhaps a rabbit or even a frog, but all she saw was an occasional bird overhead or a ripple in the water that announced a fish.
It all had an odd effect on her. She found it hard to remember that just a few hours ago she had been lying on a dirty unmade bed, wild with passion as boys she didn't know and probably wouldn't see again (except for Lou, she thought) made love to her and probably forgot her right away. It seemed incongruous in that peaceful setting to think of sex or boys.
She had walked a mile or more, until she was almost on the side of the lake opposite the house when she decided to wade in the water for a little bit. She took off her sandals and put them on a fallen log and stepped into the water. The dark mud oozed up between her toes and the water, warm now after having absorbed the sun's rays, lapped at her ankles and then at her calves. She waded out until the water was almost up to her knees, then moved parallel to the shore for twenty or thirty feet. She was feeling like a little kid again, and wishing that she had brought her bathing suit with her so that she could take a dip.
She came back to shore and climbed back on the bank. The water had felt so good that she said the heck with it and pulled her blouse over her head and then stepped out of her shorts and waded back into the water again. She went out as far as her waist, then dove in and swam under water for a few feet. The water was colder than it had been closer to the shore, but it refreshed her. She swam to the surface, took a deep breath, and dove again. The light underwear made her feel almost naked, free of restraint, and her hair flowed behind her, making her look like a young mermaid suddenly transported to inland waters. Finally she ran out of breath and lazily paddled to the shore, near where she had left her clothes.
She was about ten feet from her clothes when she came out of the water and started for them, shaking her head like a wet puppy. Something caught her eye. Startled, she looked up through the wet strands hanging in front of her eyes and her heart began to thump in her chest. A man was there at the edge of the bank, standing directly in front of her, looking at her. She glanced down at the wet bra, and she could see the faint shadow through her panties. She made an involuntary gesture of covering up as she saw that the man was surveying her calmly, coldly, with a faint, almost sarcastic smile on his lips. He stood directly between her and her clothes.
"Hello," he said. His voice was flat and very calm.
"You scared me. I didn't know there was anyone around."
"I watched you swimming for a while. You're very pretty." The comers of his mouth nickered a little, and his hands trembled slightly. His right hand moved up to his belt buckle and played with it momentarily, then passed over his chest lightly. He pressed something inside his jacket.
Kitty became very frightened. She understood nothing of what was happening, and yet she knew that this man was not normal and that she had to get back to her mother.
"I have to get back now. Excuse me." She tried to rush past him, to get her clothes and hurry down the path back to the cabin, but he took her arm, very gently but firmly, and held her fast. He was a small man, but his grip was strong. Her arm ached where he held her and she saw that his knuckles were white.
"You're Mrs. Schibe's daughter. I looked all over for you two."
"Let me go!" She struggled but it was useless. His free hand cupped her breast tightly and squeezed it. Kitty tried to scream but couldn't find her voice. She stared wide-eyed into his flat blue eyes that seemed to have nothing in them except a very faint flickering, far back.
"Why don't you take your clothes off?" His hand crept inside her bra and fingered her nipple. The grip he held her in tightened.
Kitty began to cry. "Please let me alone. I don't know you. Why do you want to do this to me?"
"I cant let you alone. Take your clothes off." His voice was still level and flat, but now becoming tinged with an edge of excitement. He took his hand out of her bra and reached inside his coat and took out a long knife that shone in the crisp sunlight. He cut the elastic on her bra and it fell forward on her arms. He tore it off and threw it on the ground. Then he tore her panties from her and threw them into the water. He pushed her roughly out at arm's length and stared at her.
"Oh, that's very nice. Young. Still not all formed, but very nice just the same. Fresh and sweet. I'll bet you never even had it yet, have you. Never have you had some man come up to you and really give it to you?" He reached out with the knife and touched her lightly with it, just the point that seemed so razor-sharp. He ran it along her belly, then up to her trembling breasts and the edge of the knife touched her nipple. He pushed it a little and it made an impression on the rosy prominence, not hard enough or deep enough to draw blood, but he watched it, fascinated. "Yes, I'll bet no one ever got hold of them until now, no one ever saw you like this before. You're almost as good as your mother, do you know that? Almost." He held the knife loosely and let it descend from her breasts back to her belly and beyond, the sharp edge making a fine white line along her tanned skin. His eyes were no longer flat and expressionless but wild and dancing with excitement and his body was trembling almost as much as Kitty's was. She could not speak, could not act, could barely think and then only that this was the reason that they had driven up here in such a hurry and now the both of them were trapped and there was no way out of it.
She didn't struggle with him, but fought to get her voice. "Please, please don't do anything," she pleaded. She was sobbing great sobs now and her breath came in gasps; both of them were reaching peaks of emotion.
He released her suddenly. "Go in the water." She obeyed, backing in until she felt the warm mud again, keeping her eyes on him as he followed her. When she got about knee deep he said, "Stop there." She stopped and he waded in a little after her, wetting his shoes and his trousers, but not aware of it. He grabbed her by the upper arm again and forced her to her knees and then forced her down into the water completely and grabbed her by the hair and pushed her head under. He held her head under the water until she fought for air and then pulled her above the surface for an instant and pushed her under again; all the while repeating over and over again, in his calm, mouthful voice, "No good bitches, lousy whores," and every dirty word that he knew as he pulled and pushed Kitty out of the water and then under again; her lungs now fighting for the air that she needed for breathing and leaving none left for the scream that had welled up inside of her head and threatened to burst out every second.
Ellen raced through the underbrush, heedless of the bushes that stood in her way. She was intent on escaping from Pauling; nothing else mattered. Once she paused to listen, but heard nothing. He didn't know where she was yet. But he would know soon.
She plunged forward again. Where was Kitty? She couldn't have gone far. She wanted to call out her name, but if she did Pauling would hear and be able to find her. The branches caught her dress but she continued on wildly, stopping now and then to listen for Pauling and for Kitty. She heard a sound. It was someone splashing in the water not far away. She turned in the direction of the sound.
Ellen burst into the little clearing and stopped short. She took in the scene quickly: Kitty on her hands and knees gasping for breath, and him, the One, suddenly alert, standing between, them the knife poised. Even while she saw all this, her mind was racing for a solution. No time now for reflection on her mistakes, on how stupid she had been to have suspected Pauling (Where was he? Near enough to hear and come running?). Time now only to think of something fast, killing time until he could be calmed down enough to be handled. Her mind groped. She had had to think fast during the previous week, but it had never been so urgent as now.
She looked at Kitty and saw that she was naked. She looked at Bronston and saw the wild eyes and the big knife and the shaking hands and then she began to unbutton her blouse.
"This is what you want, isn't it?" She barely managed to keep her hands steady as she worked with the buttons. She took the blouse off and dropped it on the ground. Bronston stared, confused.
"Isn't it what you want? Me?" She unzipped her skirt and stripped out of it and pushed the shoulder straps of her slip and bra down on her arms and slid them off. She pushed the slip over her hips and undid the bra as she wriggled out of it. Then she took off her panties and stood with her hands on her hips, looking Bronston full in the eye.
"Here it is. What are you waiting for? You had it once already, or do you have to be in the dark where you can beat someone up like the stinking little yellow coward you are? You poor white mouse without enough guts to get a woman in any healthy way, and can't even do anything anyway even if you do get one!" He was standing bewildered by this sudden change, looking from Kitty to Ellen and back again, his wild eyes suddenly gone crafty as his mind tried to digest what was going on. He gripped the knife even tighter and started towards Ellen and then stepped back towards Kitty and stood still once more. Two naked women, each equally desirable, only one of which could be gotten in the way that he wanted, because the other would get away. It was too much for him. His lips trembled, and his face screwed up in childlike frustration.
"It's not right!" he whined. "It's not at all the way it's supposed to be. It's not right." He looked from one to the other, trying to make up his mind.
Ellen laughed, a short bark that stopped his mood as suddenly as it had begun. His face got back its calm, crafty look.
"You think you can fool me, but I'm too smart for that I fooled that doctor and I fooled the police and I'm going to get what I want. I'm going to take your daughter and rip her up and twist it inside of her until her guts come running out and then I'm going to get you too and that way it's going to be better, even better than I planned and neither of you will be around later and all you stinking women will be sorry you did what you did to me!" He started for Kitty, who backed out into the lake, and he splashed in the water after her. She kept backing out, screaming now, and Ellen moved in and spun him around and threw herself at him, rubbing her naked body against him and trying to pull him back to the shore. He had tremendous reserves of strength, but she had a new power in her and she slowly forced him back out of the water, clinging to him, holding him so that he couldn't bring the knife around close to her. She pulled him on the shore and grabbed his hand and ran it over her body, pressing it against her breasts and running it down her belly until he trembled and his grip on her became looser and she grabbed him tighter. He became more excited, she could see that the impotence was leaving him and she pressed closer, grinding her body into his until he finally dropped the knife and forced her to the ground, digging his hands into her shoulders. He was wild now, his lips moving wordlessly and his eyes on fire as she clung, but he had all his clothes on and then he spent himself and she felt her consciousness leaving her.
Suddenly, there was a crashing through the brush and Bill Pauling burst in to the clearing. Bronston jumped up quickly and grabbed the knife again.
"Keep away." His voice was shrill. He waved the knife in front of him.
Pauling paused uncertainly. The psychiatrist in him said that this was a sick mind who had to be calmed down slowly, the knife taken away, then reassured until he was completely controllable. The man in him saw a knife pointed at him, an unconscious woman lying on the ground, and a near hysterical teenager in a few feet of water behind Bronston. Any sudden move could put that knife into anyone, whoever was closest. He put his hands out.
"Perry, you haven't done anything yet. Don't do something you don't want to do. We can talk this over, just as we've talked other things over, and find an answer. Let's go back to the cabin and sit down. We can work this out."
"We can't work anything out! It's too late!"
"No it isn't." He tried to edge closer, but Bronston took a step closer to Ellen's unconscious body, and
Pauling stopped. "You never helped me! No one ever helped me! No one ever let me do what I wanted; not my mother or you, or anyone. Now I'm going to do what I want and you can't stop me."
He lowered the knife in close to his side and rushed at Ellen. Pauling leaped. He caught him just as he bent over Ellen, and the impact sent him reeling back to the water's edge. He stumbled briefly and regained his balance and went into a crouch, facing Pauling a few feet away. Kitty moved farther back out in the water.
Pauling stationed himself between Bronston and Ellen, who was beginning to stir. Bronston came forward slowly, his face in a mask of such utter hate and insanity that it frightened Pauling, who was very used to such things. He moved slowly, the big sharp knife held loosely in the palm of his hand at about waist level, waving it in an arc of a few inches as he came forward. He looked as if he really knew how to handle it.
Pauling watched the knife. He knew that if the first move Bronston made didn't catch him, he would have the advantage. He watched the knife, waiting for the tell-tale increase of pressure on the handle that would warn him. When it came, he was ready.
Bronston stepped in quickly, drawing the knife back slightly. Pauling moved in to one side and brought his left hand down in a chopping motion that deflected the course of the knife slightly to one side. It grazed his right side and then he moved in closer and kneed Bronston in the groin. Bronston stumbled back, grunting with pain, and then rushed forward again, the knife starting shoulder high and coming down in a sweeping arc. Pauling stepped back as the knife flashed in front of him, then rushed forward. He grabbed Bronston's wrist and twisted it, pushing his left hand under his chin, forcing his head farther and farther back. He pushed against Pauling and forced him to release his pressure just enough for him to bring the knife a little out from his body. He pushed against Pauling again, trying to shake loose, but Pauling gathered all his remaining strength and pushed back and the hand holding Bronston's wrist twisted it and the big sharp knife reversed its direction and plunged into Bronston's chest right below the first rib. It went in deep and Bronston clawed at it, reeling and stumbling and finally he fell to the ground, blowing bubbles of blood from his rapidly filling lungs. He would drown in seconds.
Pauling rushed to Ellen, who was starting to sit up. He knelt down and put his arm around her. She clung to him tightly. She felt the warm stickiness on her arm and looked at his side.
"You're hurt."
"It's nothing at all. We can bandage it when we get back to the house. Are you all right?"
"Yes. Now I am." She clung closer to him and he patted her reassuringly. She looked at Bronston.
"Is he-"
"I'm afraid so." He helped her to her feet. "We can call the police from town after we get cleaned up and get a grip on ourselves."
Ellen looked out into the lake where Kitty still stood.
"It's all right now, Kitty. You can come in. It's all right now." Kitty ran in to her and flung her arms around her. Ellen patted her shoulder.
Yes, she thought, it's all right now. She stepped into her dress quickly and gave Kitty her slip to put on.
"It's all right now," she repeated aloud. She put her arms around Kitty and her other around Pauling and they started back towards the house.
