“Not a good idea to come up tonight,” Sutherland said. “Late, you know. What is it you want to say?”
“Your wife has got to hear this too,” said Ralph, stopping.
“My wife?—Just what’re you talking about?”
“Does she know that you had those two girls to your house—Elsie and Marion—that Sunday morning early when I saw you? And I think Elsie saw me too?”
“Of course she knows. We’d all been to the same party.—What’re you getting at?” Even in the darkness, Ralph could see Sutherland’s brows draw down.
“That you are guilty,” Ralph said, “and if you don’t turn yourself in, I’ll take the—”
“Oh, cut it out, Linderman! Shove it!”
“This trick with the cartoon in the newspaper! You think I don’t know that’s a trick? You couldn’t put the blame on me, so you—”
“Your meddling isn’t doing one damn bit of good. You’ve been a pain in the ass since—”
“I’m going to write your wife a letter—put it in her hand! She’ll listen to reason!”
“You leave my wife out of this,” Sutherland said with sudden grimness, moving closer to Ralph.
Ralph backed a little. Two people, a man and a woman, walked past on the sidewalk and glanced with curiosity at both him and Sutherland.
“You keep away from me and my wife,” Sutherland continued in a lower tone, “or I’ll get the cops onto you and pronto. You don’t know how many times Elsie and the rest of us came near doing that already!”
“Hold it! I’ve got a gun here! I can settle the score here and now!” Ralph had his hand in his right side trousers pocket, where his wallet was, and the wallet’s corner made a good show.
Sutherland glanced at the pocket. The light was not strong from the nearest streetlamp, but strong enough for Sutherland to see, and Ralph fancied that Sutherland turned white in a matter of seconds. Sutherland let the plastic sack slip to the sidewalk, and swung at Ralph suddenly with his left fist.
Ralph dodged the blow, though it scraped the top of his head. He hurled himself forward, at the level of Sutherland’s waist, but he crashed against Sutherland’s knees instead, and fell.
Sutherland had fallen too, Ralph got to his feet first, then Sutherland was up like a jack-in-the-box, and he grabbed Ralph’s wrist and swung him toward a housefront. Ralph heard his own shoulder and head crack against brick. He managed to raise a foot—or a knee?—in time to catch Sutherland, who was coming at him again. Sutherland bent in pain, and Ralph struck him in the side of the head.
Both stood, a little bent, gasping. They were on Bedford Street now. A man veered away from them as if frightened, crossed Bedford and walked on.
“You will—turn yourself in,” said Ralph.
“You’ll get the hell out!” Sutherland seemed ready to tackle him again.
Ralph stepped back.
So did Sutherland step back, glanced at the sack he had let fall, but did not pick it up. Sutherland said more quietly, “Keep away, Linderman.”
“Hey, down there!—Cool it, would you?” The voice came from an open window somewhere on Bedford.
Sutherland glanced up, waved a hand nervously, but Ralph did not glance up.
“Adulterer,” Ralph said calmly, “and murderer.”
Sutherland said just as calmly, “Piss off or I’ll bust you wide open.” He advanced with fists ready.
Ralph met them: he struck at Sutherland’s stomach, but got a blow on the jaw himself. Ralph staggered—he was aware of that—and he did fall, rolled a very little, and got up again with some effort.
“Go on home,” Sutherland said, grabbing Ralph by the shirtfront. “I don’t care if you make it or not.” He released Ralph with a shove.
Sutherland was walking off, swaying, Ralph could see that, bending his head, spitting once before he turned the corner into Grove, out of sight. Ralph stood on his two feet, scowling, hot. Two people a few yards away stared at him, sidestepped into the street, and walked past. Ralph went to the corner. He could see Sutherland, and he walked after him, taking great breaths of air. Ahead of him was Elsie’s killer, half-conquered, wobbling.
“Sutherland—” Ralph started up the front steps as Sutherland stuck his key into the lock.
Sutherland turned, left fist ready—his other hand held the sack—and came down a step.
There were at least four steps, and Ralph on the second and third, fell against Sutherland in what might have been a tackle but wasn’t quite. Sutherland shoved him, and Ralph was aware of a sharp pain in his shoulder as he struck the sidewalk. Suddenly the line of the curb edge, the darker hue of the street inches from his eyes, were very clear in the light of a streetlamp.
“C’mon, get up,” Sutherland was saying, twice, in a tone of impatience.
And Ralph was trying, and of course he would get up in a matter of seconds. He got one foot under him, rose and swayed.
“Say, what’s going on here?” said a strange voice. “Is this fellow—”
“‘S okay,” Sutherland said. “Never mind.”
Ralph wiped his wet mouth and chin with his forearm. “Officer—I’m glad to see you. This man—I’ve been—been to the local precinct station today—about him.”
“Who?—Where d’y’live?”
“I live here,” Sutherland said.
“Bleecker Street. Right up there.”
“Is it you two been fighting? We had a call about a fight.—What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Sutherland turned and put a foot on his step, then looked back. “He can make it home, I think.”
The cop looked puzzled. “You got some identification on you?” he asked Ralph.
“Yes.—Yes, sure.” Ralph reached for his wallet.
35
Jack stood at his door, watching. The cop was taking Linderman off, but in a gentle manner, talking with him, going in the direction of Bleecker Street. The cop was holding Linderman’s arm to steady him. Jack went into his own house, climbed the stairs two at a time, but in a slow, plodding way.
“Jack, f’gosh sake!” Natalia was in the hall, whispering. “What was all that?”
They went into the apartment and closed the door.
“Your ear’s bleeding. And your forehead!—Linderman started a fight? I saw some of it out the window.”
“Don’t worry.” Jack was in the bathroom, washing his face, looking at the ear Natalia had mentioned, where oddly there was a nick such as a knife might have made. A knuckle cut was worse, and the forehead scrape kept bleeding. Jack pressed a cold wet facecloth against his forehead, and turned to Natalia, smiling.
She was frowning, puzzled. “He attacked you? Just like that?”
“Not exactly.—Don’t worry, honey. Really—I think it’s finished now.”
A couple of minutes later, when Jack sat on the sofa with a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, he wondered about finished. Finished? Would Linderman ever be finished?
“Can’t you talk to me, Jack? What was he saying?”
“Sorry, it’s—I haven’t felt as funny as this since I had a fight with my worst enemy—when I was twelve!” Jack laughed, moistened his lips and drank. The drink cut the faint taste of blood in his mouth. “Old Linderman put up a hell of a good fight—for a man his age.”
“I hope that cop’s putting him away for a while.”
“No. I think the cop’s walking him home!” Jack laughed.
“Linderman’s accusing me again, that’s all. I heard him tell the cop he’d been to the local precinct station today, and maybe that’s true.—He thinks my cartoon of Fran is a trick—on my part.”
“Do you mean he just came up to you on the sidewalk—out here?”
“Yes! He intended to come up to see us. He wanted you to hear the truth. You know.”
Natalia was silent. She knew. “Gad, am I glad we’re leaving town! Eight more days. They’re bound to find out something definite in that time.—Don’t you think, Jack?”
Jack was not at all sure, but he nodded. “Sure.”
“You’re sure you’re not hurting or bleeding somewhere else, Jack?”
Jack took his knuckle from his lips. “No, I’m okay.”
“Thanks for picking up my cigarettes.” She had looked into the plastic sack. “Come in the bathroom, Jack. I’ll put some Savlon on your forehead. I should’ve thought of it right away.”
Jack went with her. The white cream felt good. Natalia’s mother Lily bought it in England and kept the Sutherlands in supply.
The telephone rang, and Natalia went to get it. The telephone calls kept coming, like the short notes of sympathy about Elsie, as if Elsie had been a member of their family. Sylvia Kinnock’s telegram of a few days ago had touched Jack:
…REALLY TRAGIC AND HATEFUL. AM STUCK IN ATLANTA OR WOULD BE WITH YOU. MY THOUGHTS ARE. LOVE, SYLVIA
Two days after Jack’s fight with Linderman, he and Natalia heard on the 6 o’clock TV news that Frances Dillon had been found in The Bronx, and was being questioned by police in connection with the slaying of Elsie Tyler nearly two weeks ago. Natalia went out to get the late edition of the Post. The paper reprinted Jack’s drawing, and said that Dillon had been recognized in a Bronx grocery store by a young man who had remembered “the woman’s hairline at the forehead and her mouth from the cartoon”. Dillon had been wearing sunglasses and had been in the company of a woman friend.
“Well, well,” said Jack, pleased by the small success of his cartoon. He was not sure of Fran’s guilt—she might have fled the East Village out of panic about her drug-dealing—and he was glad that Natalia took the news calmly too.
“Now we’ll see,” was Natalia’s remark. “They’ll hold her till she has some sober moments, anyway.”
By an earlier arrangement, Susanne Bewley was away on a two-week holiday, and in Maine with her boyfriend Michael. She had telephoned when she had heard of Elsie’s death. “I remember that girl so well,” Susanne had said to Jack. And she had asked if Linderman was suspected, though she hadn’t recalled his name. Natalia must have told her about Linderman. Jack wondered if Susanne knew how fond Natalia had been of Elsie? Not likely, he supposed, yet one never knew how much another person, especially the quiet Susanne, might pick up or intuit.
Jack felt a strange silence between him and Natalia sometimes. They were both on their feet a lot, going out on errands, preparing to close the house for a month, maybe longer. Amelia spent half her time at the Armstrongs’, as Elaine’s sister was visiting and could keep an eye on the kids. But what was Natalia thinking, and feeling, for instance when she looked into the deep freeze part of the fridge and said in a bored tone:
“Good God.”
It still looked pretty full, Jack knew, even though they had tried to empty it, and he also knew that Natalia didn’t give a damn about the state of the deep freeze.
“Susanne’s coming right after we leave, honey. She can take it home to use.”
In Natalia’s eyes he saw either a vagueness, as if her thoughts were far away, or a hardness, as if he weren’t Jack, her husband, but maybe somebody else. And was she possibly wondering how he felt? Or did she care? Had she been more in love with Elsie than he? And maybe in a different way? Natalia had been to bed with Elsie, of that he was sure, and he had not. But then he hadn’t wanted to, he reminded himself. It hadn’t been that kind of love. Or was it because he knew he would’ve been rejected by Elsie that he took this attitude? He’d been over all this before, he realized as he slid a drawing pad into the bottom of a suitcase. He had loved to admire Elsie from a distance, as if she were a good painting or a drawing. Yes, that was closer to the truth. What had Natalia hoped or expected from her relationship with Elsie, which Marion had seemed to accept? Or when in love, did one always expect anything more than the experience, the pleasant sensation of being in love? Jack wondered if he would ever ask Natalia about all this.
“Can you get that. Jack?” Natalia said from the front hall.
She meant the telephone. It was Marion. No, she wasn’t at home, she said, but at her friend Myra’s house around the corner, and she wanted to tell Natalia and him that they had got Fran.
“Oh, we heard that, sure, couple of days ago,” Jack said.
“No, I mean she confessed! A cop on McCullen’s squad called me up twenty minutes ago to tell me. Wasn’t that nice of him? I thought you’d both like to know—love to know—the latest news.”
“No kidding, Marion! It’s true?’ Jack asked in a cautious voice, unbelieving.
“My hunch was right. That pig!” Marion sounded quiet and grim. “That’s what this city has, what this city does. I’m a realist. I’m not even surprised.”
“They’re sure she’s telling the truth?” Jack meant, that Fran wasn’t talking out a fantasy for some odd reason.
“The police sound sure of it. She said she saw Elsie and did it—on an impulse. It’ll probably be in the papers later tonight. Tell Natalia.”
“She’s here. Want to speak with her?”
“No.—I couldn’t face it. I mean—Sorry, Jack!”
Jack said he understood.
“Who was that?” Natalia called from the hall.
“Marion.” Jack walked in her direction. “She said Fran confessed—confessed to it.”
Natalia’s eyes widened a little. “Really.—Good. Good!—That didn’t take long. A day and a half?” Natalia went into the kitchen, absently picked up a dishtowel that lay over the back of a straight chair. Her fingers tightened on the towel. “Good. That beast! I don’t even want to call her an animal. She’s worse.”
“Marion said—Fran spotted Elsie on the street and did it on impulse. Homicide Squad man called up Marion and told her.”
Natalia pulled the dishtowel taut between her fists, then snapped the towel once like a whip, and dropped it again over the chair back.
When Jack next saw Natalia, a half hour later, she was lying on the sofa, looking at the ceiling. He saw her daub her eyes with a handful of paper tissues.
And what had he been doing for the past half hour ? Almost the same thing in his workroom, wandering around with wet but somehow relieved eyes, not caring now if a couple of pictures of Elsie were still visible, not looking at them either.
Natalia saw him and pushed herself up on one elbow.
“You really loved her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Natalia looked at him. “Didn’t you?”
Jack was silent for several seconds. “I suppose you went to bed with her.”
Natalia shrugged and smiled. “Bed. Yes. That’s not—everything, is it?”
How did Natalia mean that? He waited.
“And you?” she asked.
Jack gave a laugh. “Me?—I never tried!”
“But you wanted to?”
“Not really, no. Frankly, no.”
Natalia was sitting up, forearms on her knees, smiling now.
In the amusement in her eyes, Jack could read a lot. Natalia realized all the things that were true: that he had been knocked for a loop by Elsie, that Elsie would have refused him if he had ever proposed making love to her, and that in fact the act of “making love” wasn’t of great importance compared to loving, compared to caring.
With a quick nod, Natalia got up, and the nod seemed to say, “I understand, and you know that I do.”
Neither Jack nor Natalia spent much time over the newspapers. They glanced through the paragraphs. There was Fran Dillon’s unhealthy-looking round face as she sat in T-shirt and trousers, talking to the police. “I was jealous of her, sure. I hated her.” Jack wondered if Fran was going to plead temporary insanity, insist that she had been “overcome by emotion”, and he realized that he didn’t care. The point was that they had her, and that the details she gave made her confession sound true.
More pleasant and satisfying, like a breeze from another and better world, were the contents of a manila envelope that came from the Tylers in upstate New York. It was addressed to both Jack an
d Natalia, there was a letter and a photograph of Elsie at about four, sitting on a pony—not a Shetland but a red-brown ordinary pony—in blue overalls and white socks, brown sandals, and hair so fair it looked white, grinning with the wide naivete and joy that both Jack and Natalia had often seen in her face, blue eyes dazzled with happiness. Mrs Tyler had written the letter and signed herself Grace Tyler.
…our favorite picture of Elsie as a small child, but my husband had a copy made so we are not without it, and I thought you both might like to have it. How Elsie loved to ride around on that pony! It belonged to a neighbor who let Elsie and her brother ride it quite often until it grew faster than the kids did. In these sad days, we look sometimes at this picture and are grateful that we had Elsie with us for a while.
Again our love and thanks to you both, and God bless you for your kindness.
William Tyler had added a few words below.
Natalia propped the photograph up on the living-room bookshelf near the telephone, and smiled at it. It was like sunshine, Jack thought, like Elsie herself, back for a while, though he knew the feeling would pass, change. What he liked, what he was sure Natalia liked too about the Tylers’ letter was that there had been no bitterness in it, no hint of a desire for revenge for what had happened to Elsie. Nothing but friendliness and good will.
“Her brother—” Natalia said, turning to Jack. “I didn’t meet him, but Elsie’s mother said he came to the service and sat apart from them. He was so broken up, he didn’t want to meet anybody.”
Elsie’s brother. Jack didn’t know his name, and maybe Elsie had never uttered his name, though she had mentioned him.
Jack straightened after peering at the photograph, and felt pain on both sides of his ribs. Which of them had won that fight? He hadn’t hit Linderman as hard as he might have done (or so Jack believed), because Linderman was an older man. But still, who had won? It was funny, but after that fight with a boy when Jack had been twelve, either he had forgotten or he couldn’t remember now who had won. He remembered only tensed nerves and muscles, and giving his all to that fight. Had Linderman won in his attitude to Elsie? She was an ideal, he had said, too young to know how to manage her life, still in the process of growing up—words like that Linderman had used, and looking at Elsie’s photograph at perhaps four, Jack realized a new truth in Linderman’s rantings.