The Cry of the Owl

  “You’ve seen me before,” Robert said, embarrassed. “Ralph, if you—” He heard the apartment door open behind him.

  The elevator door slid open, and Ralph walked into the elevator.

  Robert turned to Nickie.

  She was leaning against the edge of the door, one hand on her curving hip. “Locking yourself out? Well, now we can be alone.”

  “That’ll be great.” Robert went past her into the apartment. His coat was lying on a white leather chair near the closet.

  She put her hands on his shoulders. “Why don’t you stay awhile, Bobbie? You know, I’ve missed you. Why shouldn’t I? The best lover I’ve ever had or ever will have, probably.”

  “Come on.” He drew back from her approaching lips, and she pulled back also, and for an instant her eyes appraised his face. He moved to one side and walked toward the door.

  “Darling, let’s go to bed. Ralph won’t be back for an hour. I know him. Anyway, the door has a bolt. And a service stairway,” she added with a smile.

  “Oh, Nickie, cut it out.” Robert reached for the doorknob, but she stepped in his way and stood with her back against the door.

  “Don’t deny it’d be pleasant. Why be a prude? Don’t tell me that girl in Pennsylvania is better in bed than I am.”

  Robert reached past her, had to touch her waist to get hold of the doorknob, and she leaned against his arm, laughing in her cooing, pigeonlike way, her lips compressed. It was a laugh he had heard when she was at her worst and also in her most affectionate moments. Now the laugh was strictly a taunt. Robert opened the door so abruptly it bumped her head. “Sorry,” he said, and pushed his way out into the hall.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t want to.”

  “Not in the mood. So long, Nickie.”

  “Oh, you’re always in the mood for it, you’re always up to it,” she called after him.

  Robert took the stairs down.

  “Coward!” she yelled. “Coward!”

  Robert went fast down the steps, his hand just above the polished banister, ready to grab it in case he tripped.

  “Coward! You’re insane !” her voice came after him. “You’re insane!”

  16

  When Ralph left the apartment building on East Eighty-second Street, he walked downtown on First Avenue and went into the first bar he came to. He ordered a Scotch and soda, drank half of it, then went to the telephone directory by the hat-check booth and looked up the number of the Sussex Arms Hotel. He asked to speak to Mr. Gresham. A funny name for Wyncoop to have chosen, Ralph thought. It made him think of Gresham’s Law, which he doubted if Wyncoop knew or could quote, about bad money driving out good, causing people to hoard the intrinsically more valuable, and though there seemed some possible connection between this law and the perhaps intrinsically valuable girl in Pennsylvania whom two men were fighting over, or he had thought Robert was fighting over her, Ralph hadn’t come to any clearer notion before Wyncoop was on the telephone.

  “Ralph Jurgen,” Ralph said. “I’d like to see you tonight.”

  “Tonight? Anything the matter?”

  “No-o. Are you going to be in?”

  “I was thinking of cruising around a little, maybe going to a late movie.”

  “Well, never mind that. I want to see you.” Ralph was a little high and also angry, or he wouldn’t have spoken so firmly, but it got results. Greg said he would stay in and wait for him.

  Ralph took a taxi down. The Sussex Arms was a third-rate hotel off Fourth Avenue. The lobby was vaguely dirty and so shabby one could not even imagine that it might once have seen better days, or known a more distinguished clientele. And it was for curious reasons, Ralph thought, that Wyncoop had chosen such a place—only partly because he felt less conspicuous here than at a more expensive hotel, but mostly to feel humble, to admit he was doing something dishonest, maybe to punish himself a little. Certainly Nickie would have paid his hotel bill anywhere. Greg had run out of cash, of course. Ralph took the elevator to the fourth floor. Even the elevator operator’s uniform was threadbare. Ralph Jurgen came from a poor family. Signs of poverty anywhere shocked his sensibilities, his aesthetics, even his morals. Poverty was ugly, tragic, and unnecessary.

  Greg was in shirtsleeves, an unbuttoned vest, and stocking feet. “Well, what’s up?” he asked when he had closed the door, but he asked it with a smile and rather politely.

  Ralph took off his topcoat and kept it over his arm as he sat down on a straight chair. “Bob Forester was in town tonight. He came to see Nickie.”

  “Nickie just called,” Greg said with a slight smile.

  “Yes, I thought she would,” Ralph said. “Well, Greg, why don’t you call it off? You’ve bothered Bob enough, haven’t you? What more do you want?”

  “Jenny,” Greg said.

  “Hm-m. Of course.” Ralph looked at his loosely locked fingers. He wanted a cigarette, but the doctor had cut him down to ten a day. He was saving his tenth for the last moments before he fell asleep. “Pretty hard to get a girl if you’re not communicating with her, isn’t it? And as a corpse you can’t communicate, can you?”

  “I’m going to wreck that guy,” Greg said, throwing a match at his metal wastebasket. “I told you before, and I can do it. Wait and see. I want him out of that town. Out of the state. First he’s going to lose his job. I’ve got friends writing his boss.”

  “Writing his boss what?”

  “Writing him what a psychopath he is. Nickie knows it. You know it, too. He pulled a gun on Nickie. You know that.”

  “I know about the gun. Both versions. I got Bob’s from a friend of his named Peter Campbell. Nickie says I raised a table lighter at her the other night. It isn’t true. We were quarreling, all right, and I picked up a cigarette lighter to light a cigarette. She said I was going to kill her with it.” Ralph gave a laugh and crossed his legs. “Do you care to believe that, for instance?”

  Greg came closer to Ralph and drew hard on his cigarette. “Why believe a friend of Forester’s who heard the story only from him? And what about the prowler story, eh? How else do you think Forester met Jenny? Neither of them can tell me how they met.”

  Ralph raised his eyebrows. He didn’t know what to believe about the prowling story, and it didn’t seem to the point. Ralph noticed a half-finished pint of whiskey on the shabby brown writing table.

  “Drink?” asked Greg.

  “No, thanks. Greg, I came here to say one thing. I think you’ve played around long enough with this. It’s dishonest and unfair, not to mention useless.”

  “Useless? And who’re you to talk about what’s dishonest? The whole advertising business is dishonest, isn’t it? Be honest yourself.”

  “To get back to the point, I suggest you knock it off.”

  “Or what?” Greg said. “I’m trying something and I’m going to see it through.”

  “You think if you take Bob off the scene, the girl will just come to you. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “She loves me, I know that. She’s only infatuated with this guy. I’m the first man she’s ever been with. Ever slept with,” Greg said, poking himself in the chest with his thumb.

  The naïveté of that remark almost made Ralph smile. But there was also a pride in it that could make Greg dangerous. His stupid hands, hanging at the ends of the long, loose arms, looked eager for something to hit at. “What did Nickie say tonight?”

  “She’s with me,” Greg answered, and picked up the whiskey bottle. He poured a small drink into a tumbler, went behind a screen in the corner of the room, and turned on a tap. “She said she thought you might be warming up to Forester,” Greg said, coming back. “Jesus! Since when do guys who steal other guys’ girls get defended?”

  “Since when are girls stolen? They’re not—like bags of sugar, you know.”

  “Jenny is,” Greg said dreamily. “Like a bag of sugar.”

  Then Ralph knew Greg was a bit drunk. “Bob said tonight he wasn’t interested in the girl.”
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  “What?”

  “I heard him say the girl wasn’t the issue. He wants to find you.”

  “Sure he wants to find me. But he’s interested in Jenny, all right. Maybe he hasn’t got the guts to say so. Maybe he isn’t as enthusiastic about Jenny as she is about him, but he’s interested in her, all right. Sees her three and four times a week. No doubt sleeps with her. Jenny’s probably willing.” He made as if to hurl his glass against the wall, then drank it off.

  Ralph stood up. “Why don’t you just go back tomorrow? Tell your boss or your landlady or whatever you were on a bat in New York for a week. I have no doubt you can be more effective on the scene than hiding out in a hotel in New York.”

  Greg’s dark eyes lit up. “Not till I see the results of those letters my friends are writing. They’re also calling Jenny. They can tell her what kind of guy Forester is. She ought to know. The police ought to know. Added to that, he seduced her, the creep.”

  “And what did you do to her?”

  “I’m not a creep, at least!” Greg turned his back on Ralph.

  “You mean to say you’ve got friends in Pennsylvania who know where you are?”

  Greg swung around again and his hands sailed out from his sides like weights on pendulums. “I take it back about my friends. No, they don’t know. They’re not writing. They think I’m dead. I wrote one letter myself. To Forester’s boss.”

  The telephone rang.

  “I’m not here,” Ralph said, “and I didn’t come here.”

  Greg smiled at him understandingly as he picked up the telephone. “Hi,” Greg said. “No … No, he didn’t.”

  Ralph looked down at a movie-program tearsheet on the writing table. It was from a movie house on West Forty-second Street. Sexual Orgies of the Pygmies … High School Students’ House of Pleasure.

  “Yes,” Greg said more gently. “I remembered. Don’t worry about anything. … No … I think so, yes … Yes … Bye-bye.” He hung up. Ralph was looking at him, standing with his hand on the doorknob. Greg looked away from his eyes.

  “I think you ought to get out of town by tomorrow. Go back to Langley or wherever it is you live.”

  “Humbert Corners. Where Jenny lives. That creep lives in Langley.”

  “Just get out, Greg.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He smiled. “Why?”

  “For one thing, I’m sure Bob’s going to ask the police to check the New York hotels for you. He knows damned well you’re here and that Nickie’s in on it, too.”

  Greg shrugged. “O.K., I’ll go somewhere else.”

  “And who’s going to pay your bills where you go?”

  “Listen, Ralph, what Nickie’s giving me’s a temporary loan. I’ve got the dough in my bank. But I can’t exactly write a check now, can I?”

  “If you’re not out tomorrow, I’m going to tell the police where you are,” Ralph said.

  “What’s the matter with now?”

  “I don’t want to be messed up with you if I can help it!” Ralph’s voice shook with sudden anger. “However—I can tell the police tonight, yes.”

  “You do and I’ll—” Greg started forward.

  Ralph did not move. “You’ll do what?” Ralph opened the door and went out, banging the door behind him. He walked to the elevator and pushed the button, glanced at Greg’s door, which was still closed, then faced the elevator again, blinking his eyes slowly, but breathing as hard as if he had been fighting. Nickie was playing around with Greg, and it was only jealousy that had given him any courage, Ralph knew. He suspected Nickie, and where Nickie was concerned, he supposed suspicion was equal to certainty. One morning, or a couple of afternoons, while he had been at the office. Or if it hadn’t happened, it would. Greg would be another little triumph, albeit a scummy one, for Nickie. Another small way of hitting at him—being unfaithful in the fourth month of marriage with a mediocre young man. Another way of binding Greg to her, as she bound or tried to bind so many nonentities, drunks, and phonies who hung around the house—by flattery, favors, lavish hospitality, and sometimes by getting into their beds.

  But once on the street, walking northward to cool himself off before he hailed a taxi, Ralph knew he wasn’t going to call the police tonight and maybe not tomorrow. He’d scared Greg enough, he thought. Greg would get out of town tomorrow—maybe even tonight. The silly game would go on in Philadelphia or somewhere else, he supposed, but at least it wouldn’t be under his nose.

  Nickie was not there when Ralph got home.

  The fact set up an immediate and unpleasant churning in his brain, and he found himself smiling foolishly, as if to convince himself he didn’t care. He realized he had seen the same smile on Robert’s face two hours before. Ralph was sure that Greg’s first “Yes” to her over the telephone had been a confirmation that he was there, and the second “Yes” was probably Greg’s agreeing to her coming down to see him.

  Ralph took off his coat and his jacket and wandered through the apartment, looked at the bedroom with its oversized double bed, turned away with muddled thoughts, and stopped short at the threshold of Nickie’s workroom. Canvas boards hung askew from the wooden railing around the walls. Splashes of color struck his eyes, making him blink and frown. The floor was carpetless, and she had evidently stepped in a blob of turquoise paint, as it was tracked all about the floor, like a color motif in a Pollock. On the easel, he recognized a tracing of an Augustus John, upside down, its lines represented in dots. Nickie’s idea was to copy the “rhythms” of Augustus John drawings, and make abstracts of them upside down. She hadn’t volunteered this news to him, but he had asked her what all the upside-down drawings were doing in the house, and then she had explained. No one would ever know they were from John’s drawings, and he was not to tell anybody. Ralph turned away. He had no right to look into her workroom, he supposed. No matter that she read his personal mail, opened it and clumsily sealed it, leaving traces of rubber cement, before he got home for it. That was Nickie, suspicious when there was no cause for suspicion. But one day, he thought dismally, there might be.

  Ralph showered and went to bed, and for half an hour concentrated on a dozen dull brochures of a soft-drink company for which his agency was to create a six-months’ campaign. The agency had done the prospectus for the campaign in detail, but the soft-drink company was not satisfied. It was Ralph’s job to look over the material to see if it could be improved, to find some new slant. Only horrible puns occurred to him. He was sick of puns. His tenth cigarette was long out. He put the brochures down on the floor with the prospectus, and turned out the light.

  The closing of the apartment door awakened him. Ralph blinked and read the radium dial of the clock: 2:17 A.M.

  Nickie opened the bedroom door and said, “Hi,” hanging on to the doorknob. “How’re you?”

  Ralph could tell at once she wasn’t drunk. She was acting a bit shy, and perhaps guilty. “Good, thanks. Have a nice evening?”

  “Greg is leaving town tonight, you’ll be happy to know,” she said, and turned away, tossing her coat over her shoulder.

  The light from the living room lit up the bedroom in a faint and depressing way. Ralph looked at the rise of his toes under the pale yellow woolen blanket. “Where’s he going?” Ralph asked.

  Nickie pulled her white angora sweater over her head, shook it and hung it over a chair back. She never wore brassieres, and she had no modesty, false or otherwise. She faced Ralph with her hands on her hips. “He didn’t say.”

  “Let’s hope it’s Humbert Corners or wherever he lives.”

  “Oh, no. It’s not going to be Humbert Corners.” She unfastened her sandals, kicked them off, then went to the closet and unzipped her slacks. “What’s it to you, Ralphie? Why tell him you’re going to tell the police where he is—when you know you won’t? What’s the idea of being so holier than thou?” She hung up her slacks with a rattle of hangers.

  Ralph took it in silence. He’d been warned, he remembered, before he married Nickie. S
he only marries people she thinks she can push around. “Did you give him any checks?” Ralph asked.

  “No, just cash, dearie, and I’m quite sure I’ll get it back.”

  He heard Nickie running water in the bathroom. The evening had somehow been a success for her. He could tell by her good spirits. Greg was going to go on with his game, she’d given him moral support, no doubt assured him he had nothing to worry about from Ralph. Greg would go somewhere else and take another name. What have you got against Robert Forester? Ralph wanted to ask as she came toward the bed in her pajamas, but he knew she’d answer only, That’s my business, darling, or, more flippantly, I’ll play my games and you play yours. He tensed as she fell into bed beside him, face down. He had a feeling she was going to say something more to him. But in less than a minute, he heard her regular, shallow breathing, which meant she was fast asleep.

  17

  Robert called Jenny early Monday morning, before she went to work. He asked if he could see her that evening.

  “Well—I don’t know.”

  Robert gave a laugh. “You don’t know? Have you got a date?”

  “No.”

  “I’d like to see you just for a few minutes. I’ll come over to your place or you come here. Which would you like?”

  “Can’t you tell me now what it is?”

  “I’d rather not say it over the phone. Just give me a few minutes, Jenny. What time would you like tonight?”

  They at last agreed that Jenny would come to his house around nine o’clock. Robert was frowning as he hung up. Jenny had sounded very strange. She was anxious about Greg, of course, and perhaps her friends had been talking to her over the weekend. People like Susie Escham. Susie was the type who would say to Jenny, just to make things exciting, “Well, there’s a possibility Robert knocked him in, isn’t there? Naturally Robert wouldn’t want to admit it, if he did.” And since Greg knew Susie, he’d probably told her about Jenny’s “prowler.” And how many more people like Susie did Jenny know, Robert wondered.

  In midmorning, Nancy came to Robert’s table and told him that Mr. Jaffe wanted to see him in his office.