A Kiss Before Dying

  His eyes were narrowed, his jaw tightened by the last threads of a fast-ravelling patience. ‘Listen, Evvie,’ he said, ‘I asked you not to talk about it. Now will you just do me that one favour? Will you please?’ He jabbed the cigarette between his lips.

  She didn’t take her eyes from his face. Drawing a cigarette from the pack, she put it calmly to her lips and dropped the pack back into her purse. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said coolly, tucking the purse under her left arm. ‘I don’t know what you’re so touchy about.’

  ‘Can’t you understand? I knew the girl.’

  She struck a match and held it to his cigarette, the orange glow lighting his face, showing the blue eyes simmering with about-to-break strain, the jaw muscles tight as piano wires. One more jab, one more jab. She withdrew the match from his lighted cigarette, held it before his face. ‘They never did say why she did it, did they?’ His eyes closed painfully. ‘I’ll bet she was pregnant,’ she said.

  His face flared from flame orange to raw red as the match died and the tower flashed on. The wire-tight muscles burst and the blue eyes shot open like dams exploding. Now! Ellen thought triumphantly. Now! Let it be something good, something damning!

  ‘All right!’ he blazed, ‘all right! You know why I won’t talk about it? You know why I didn’t even want to come up here at all? Why I didn’t even want to come into this goddamn building?’ He flung away his cigarette. ‘Because the girl who committed suicide here was the girl I told you about last night! The one you smile like!’ His eyes dropped from her face. ‘The girl who I—’

  The words cut off guillotine-sharp. She saw his downcast eyes dilate with shock and then the tower light faded and she could see him only as a dim form confronting her. Suddenly his hand caught her left wrist, gripping it with paralysing pressure. A scream pushed the cigarette from her lips. He was wrenching at the fingers of her captive hand, clawing at them. The purse slid out from under her arm and thudded to her feet. Futilely her right hand flailed his head. He was thumbing the muscles of her hand, forcing the fingers open … Releasing her, he stepped back and became a dimly outlined form again.

  ‘What did you do?’ she cried. ‘What did you take?’ Dazedly she stooped and retrieved her purse. She flexed her left hand, her jarred senses vainly trying to recall the imprint of the object she had been holding.

  Then the red light flashed on again and she saw it resting in the palm of his hand as though he had been examining it even in the dark. The match-book. With the coppered letters glinting sharp and clear: Ellen Kingship.

  Coldness engulfed her. She closed her eyes sickly, nauseous fear ballooning in her stomach. She swayed; her back felt the hard edge of the airshaft parapet.

  EIGHT

  ‘Her sister,’ he faltered, ‘her sister.’

  She opened her eyes. He was staring at the match-book with glazed incomprehension. He looked up at her. ‘What is this?’ he asked dully. Suddenly he hurled the match-book at her feet and his voice flared loud again. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said quickly, ‘nothing.’ Her eyes darted desperately. He was standing between her and the stairway shed. If only she could circle around him. She began inching to her left, her back pulling against the parapet.

  He rubbed his forehead. ‘You – pick me up, you ask me questions about her, you get me up here.’ Now his voice was entreating: ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Nothing – nothing,’ warily sidestepping.

  ‘Then why did you do this?’ His body flexed to move forward.

  ‘Stop!’ she cried.

  The ball-poised feet dropped flat, frozen.

  ‘If anything happens to me,’ she said, forcing herself to speak slowly, evenly, ‘there’s somebody else who knows all about you. He knows I’m with you tonight, and he knows all about you, so if anything happens, anything at all—’

  ‘If anything—?’ His brow furrowed. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know what I mean. If I fall—’

  ‘Why should you?’ He stared unbelievingly. ‘You think I’d—?’ One hand gestured limply towards the parapet. ‘Jesus!’ he whispered. ‘What are you, crazy?’

  She was a good fifteen feet from him. She began edging away from the parapet, cutting across to get on a straight line with the stairway door that was behind him and on his right. He pivoted slowly, following her cautious transverse path. ‘What’s this “knows all about me”?’ he demanded. ‘Knows what?’

  ‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Everything. And he’s waiting downstairs. If I’m not down in five minutes he’s calling the police.’

  He slapped his forehead exhaustedly. ‘I give up,’ he moaned. ‘You want to go downstairs? You want to go? Well go ahead!’ He turned and backed to the airshaft parapet, to the spot where Ellen had been standing originally leaving her a clear path to the door. He stood with his elbows resting on the stone behind him. ‘Go ahead! Go on!’

  She moved towards the door slowly, suspiciously, knowing that he could still beat her there, cut her off. He didn’t move.

  ‘If I’m supposed to be arrested,’ he said. ‘I’d just like to know what for. Or is that too much to ask?’

  She made no answer until she had the door open in her hand. Then she said, ‘I expected you to be a convincing actor. You had to be, to make Dorothy believe you were going to marry her.’

  ‘What?’ This time his surprise seemed deeper, painful. ‘Now listen, I never said anything to make her believe I was going to marry her. That was all on her side, all her idea.’

  ‘You liar,’ she clenched hatefully. ‘You filthy liar.’ She ducked behind the shield of the open door and stepped over the high threshold.

  ‘Wait!’ As though sensing that any forward movement would send her running, he dropped back along the parapet and then cut out from it, following the same path Ellen had taken before. He stopped when he was opposite the doorway, some twenty feet from it. Within the shed Ellen turned to face him, one hand on the doorknob, ready to pull it closed.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said earnestly, ‘will you just tell me what this is all about? Please?’

  ‘You think I’m bluffing. You think we really don’t know.’

  ‘Jesus—’ he whispered furiously.

  ‘All right,’ she glared. ‘I’ll itemize it for you. One: she was pregnant. Two: you didn’t want—’

  ‘Pregnant?’ It hit him like a rock in the stomach. He leaned forward. ‘Dorothy was pregnant? Is that why she did it? Is that why she killed herself?’

  ‘She didn’t kill herself!’ Ellen cried. ‘You killed her!’ She pulled the door shut, turned and ran.

  She ran clatteringly down the metal steps, her heels ringing, clutching at the banister and swinging round the turn at each landing and before she had gone two and a half flights she heard him thundering down after her shouting, ‘Evvie, Ellen, Wait!’ and then it was too late to take the elevator because by the time she ran all the way around the corridor and it came and took her down he would be waiting there already so there was nothing to do but keep on running with her heart beating and legs aching down the fourteen flights from roof to lobby which were really twenty-eight half flights spiralling down through the gloomy stairwell with twenty-seven landings to swing out arm-pullingly banging against the wall with him thundering closer behind all the way down to the main floor half slipping with the damn heels and coming out into the slippery-floored cathedral of a lobby where the startled Negro head popped out of the elevator then pushing exhaustedly out through the heavy revolving door and down more steps to treacherous marble and almost bumping into a woman on the sidewalk and running down to the left down towards Washington Avenue down the small-town night-deserted street and finally slowing with her heart hard-pumping to snatch one backward look before rounding the corner and there he was running down the marble steps waving and shouting, ‘Wait! Wait!’ She wheeled around the corner running again ignoring the couple that turned to stare and th
e boys in the car shouting ‘Want a ride?’ and seeing the hotel down the block with its glass doors glowing like an ad for hotels getting nearer – he’s getting nearer too but don’t look back just keep on running – until at last she reached the beautiful glass doors and a man smiling amusedly held one of them open. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ and finally she was in the lobby, the lobby, the safe warm lobby, with bellhops, and loungers and men behind newspapers. She was dying to drop into one of the chairs but she went straight to the corner phone booths because if Gant went to the police with her, Gant who was a local celebrity, then they’d be more inclined to listen to her, believe her, investigate. Panting, she seized the phone book and flipped to the Ks – it was five to nine so he’d be at the studio. She slapped away pages, gaspingly catching her breath. There it was: KBRI – 5–1000. She opened her purse, and hunted for coins. Five-one-thousand, five-one-thousand, as she turned from the phone-book rack and looked up.

  Powell confronted her. He was flushed and panting, his blond hair wild. She wasn’t afraid; there were bright lights and people. Hate levelled her rough breathing like a glacier: ‘You should have run the other way. It won’t do you any good, but I would start running if I were you.’

  And he looked at her with a sick-dog, pleading, near-tears expression that was so pathetically sad-looking it had to be true, and he said softly, hurtfully, ‘Ellen, I loved her.’

  ‘I have a phone call to make,’ she said, ‘if you’ll get out of the way.’

  ‘Please, I’ve got to talk to you,’ he pleaded. ‘Was she? Was she really pregnant?’

  ‘I have a phone call to make.’

  ‘Was she?’ he demanded.

  ‘You know she was!’

  ‘The papers said nothing! Nothing … !’ Suddenly his brow furrowed and his voice dropped low, intense. ‘What month was she in?’

  ‘Will you please get out of my—’

  ‘What month was she in?’ His voice was demanding again.

  ‘Oh God! The second.’

  He let out a tremendous weight-dropping sigh of relief.

  ‘Now will you please get out of my way?’

  ‘Not until you explain what’s going on. This Evelyn Kittredge act—’

  Her glare was acid.

  He whispered confusedly, ‘You mean you really think I killed her?’ and saw no change in the narrow stabbing of her eyes. ‘I was in New York!’ he protested. ‘I can prove it! I was in New York all last spring!’

  It shook her, but only for a moment. Then she said, ‘I suppose you could figure out a way to prove you were in Cairo, Egypt, if you wanted to.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he hissed, exasperated. ‘Will you just let me speak to you for five minutes? Five minutes?’ He glanced around and caught a glimpse of a man’s head vanishing behind a quickly lifted newspaper. ‘People are listening,’ he said. ‘Just come into the cocktail lounge for five minutes. What harm can it do? I couldn’t “do anything” to you there, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘What good can it do?’ she argued. ‘If you were in New York and you didn’t kill her, then why did you avoid looking at the Municipal Building when we passed it last night? And why didn’t you want to go up on the roof tonight? And why did you stare down into the airshaft the way you did?’

  He looked at her awkwardly, painfully. ‘I can’t explain it,’ he said haltingly, ‘only I don’t know whether you’ll be able to understand it. You see, I felt’ – he groped for a word – ‘I felt responsible for her suicide.’

  Most of the booths in the black-walled lounge were empty. Glasses clinked and the soft piano dallied with some Gershwin themes. They took the seats they had occupied the night before, Ellen sitting back stiffly against the upholstered partition as though to repudiate any suggestion of intimacy. When the waiter appeared they ordered whisky sours, and it wasn’t until the drinks were on the table between them and Powell had taken the first sip of his that, realizing Ellen’s intention to maintain a non-committal silence, he began to speak. The words came slowly at first, and with embarrassment.

  ‘I met her a couple of weeks after classes began last year,’ he said. ‘Last school year, I mean. Late September. I’d seen her before – she was in two of my classes and she’d been in one of my classes in freshman year – but I never spoke to her until this particular day because I usually wind up with a seat in the first or second row and she always sat at the back, in the corner. Well, on the night before this day when I spoke to her, I’d been talking with some guys and one of them had said how the quiet girls were the ones who—’ He paused, fingering his glass and looking down at it. ‘You’re more likely to have a good time with a quiet girl. So when I saw her the next day, sitting at the back in the corner where she always sat, I remembered what this guy had said.

  ‘I started a conversation with her, going out of the room at the end of the period. I told her I’d forgotten to take down the assignment and would she give it to me, and she did. I think she knew it was just an excuse to talk, but still she responded so – so eagerly it surprised me. I mean, usually a pretty girl will take a thing like that lightly, give you smart answers, you know. But she was so – unsophisticated, she made me feel a little guilty.

  ‘Well anyway, we went out that Saturday night, went to a movie and to Frank’s Florentine Room, and we really had a nice time. I don’t mean fooling around or anything. Just a nice time. We went out again the next Saturday night and two times the week after that, and then three times until finally, just before we broke up, we were seeing each other almost every night. Once we got to know each other, she was a lot of fun. Not at all like she’d been in class. Happy, I liked her.

  ‘Early November it turned out that that guy was right, what he said about quiet girls. About Dorothy, anyway.’ He glanced up, his eyes meeting Ellen’s squarely. ‘Know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said coolly, impassive as a judge.

  ‘This is a hell of a thing to tell a girl’s sister.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She was a nice girl,’ he said, still looking at her. ‘It was just that she was – love-starved. Not sex. Love.’ His glance fell. ‘She told me about things at home, about her mother – your mother, about how she’d wanted to go to school with you.’

  A tremor ran through her; she told herself it was only the vibration caused by someone sitting down in the booth behind her.

  ‘Things went on that way for a while,’ Powell continued, talking more swiftly now, his shame melting into a confessionary satisfaction. ‘She was really in love, hanging on to my arm and smiling up at me all the time. I mentioned once I liked argyle socks; she knitted me three pairs of them.’ He scratched the table-top carefully. ‘I loved her too, only it wasn’t the same. It was – sympathy-love. I felt sorry for her. Very nice of me.

  ‘The middle of December she started to talk about marriage. Very indirectly. It was just before Christmas vacation and I was going to stay here in Blue River. I’ve got no family and all I’ve got in Chicago are a couple of cousins and some high school and navy friends. So she wanted me to go to New York with her. Meet the family. I told her no, but she kept bringing it up again and finally there was a showdown.

  ‘I told her I wasn’t ready to get tied down yet, and she said that plenty of men were engaged and even married by twenty-two and if it was the future I was worrying about, her father would find a place for me. I didn’t want that though. I had ambitions. I’ll have to tell you about my ambitions some day. I was going to revolutionize American advertising. Well anyway, she said we could both get jobs when we finished school, and I said she could never live that way having been rich all her life. She said I didn’t love her as much as she loved me, and I said I guessed she was right. That was it, of course, more than any of the other reasons.

  ‘There was a scene and it was terrible. She cried and said I’d be sorry and all the things a girl says. Then after a while she changed her tack and said she was wrong; we would wait and go on the
way we had been. But I’d been feeling sort of guilty all along, so I figured that since we’d had this halfway break, we might as well make it complete, and right before a vacation was the best to do it. I told her it was all over, and there was more crying and more “You’ll be sorry” and that’s the way it ended. Couple of days later she left for New York.’

  Ellen said, ‘All during that vacation she was in such a bad mood. Sulking, picking arguments—’

  Powell printed wet rings on the table with the bottom of his glass. ‘After vacation,’ he said, ‘it was bad. We still had those two classes together. I would sit in the front of the room not daring to look back. We kept bumping into each other all over campus. So I decided I’d had enough of Stoddard and applied for a transfer to nyu.’ He saw the downcast expression on Ellen’s face. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Don’t you believe me? I can prove all this. I’ve got a transcript from nyuand I think I’ve still got a note that Dorothy sent me when she returned a bracelet I’d given her.’

  ‘No,’ Ellen said dully. ‘I believe you. That’s just the trouble.’

  He gave her a baffled look, and then continued. ‘Just before I left, towards the end of January, she was starting to go with another guy. I saw—’

  ‘Another man?’ Ellen leaned forward.

  ‘I saw them together a couple of times. It hadn’t been such a big blow to her after all, I thought. I left with a nice clean conscience. Even felt a bit noble.’

  ‘Who was he?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The other man.’

  ‘I don’t know. A man. I think he was in one of my classes. Let me finish.

  ‘I read about her suicide the first of May, just a paragraph in the New York papers. I raced up to Times Square and got a Clarion-Ledger at the Out-of-Town Newspaper stand. bought a Clarion every day of that week, waiting for them to say what was in the note she sent you. They never did. They never said why she did it.