Manhattan Love Song

Chapter Seven

Gone from me, and just when I thought I had her closest. Turned from something beautiful into something unmentionable, filthy, fit only to be burned or hurriedly smothered with earth and hidden from sight. The mouth that had known how to smile so beautifully remained open now, where death had gone slinking in. The hands that had roamed in my hair were just white things now on the floor. The blue dress (the omen fulfilled!) that had encircled a living body’s perfection of form, remained now to cover a carcass.

The icy coating of shock that had coagulated all over me held fast for a moment or two — I even had time to do an unnaturally natural thing: reach out and silence the obscene radio — before it shattered abruptly, and red-hot knives of pain began cutting in at me.

I did things that the sane don’t do; got down on my knees, got down on my hands, lay there on my face and gnawed the down of the rug, writhing with the agony that has no seat, knows no physical cause, cannot be stemmed. Tears bubbled from my eyes as though they were percolaters, my nose ran, saliva dripped slowly from between my lips, a drop at a time. My heart pumped under me like a frantic, imprisoned bird caught between me and the floor. I died a hundred times where she had died just once.

The phenomena of grief are banal, after all. Who, seeing some one he loves lie dead, hasn’t spoken aloud, hasn’t pleaded to her to come back? I did all those things. “Bernice, can’t you hear me? It’s Wade, your miserable Wade you’re doing this to. Open your eyes — just for a minute — then you can close them again. Just give me one more look, one more smile, before you go.” I drew nearer and nearer to her, like a human being turned alligator. I kissed her at last, and the kiss brought me only horror and recoil. I cried out sharply at the coldness, the goneness of her, and leaped to my feet and drew back quivering. I stared reproachfully over at the thing lying there that had just tricked me like that.

I knew I hadn’t kissed her just now; that was never Bernice. But where was she, where had she gone? Oh, more almost than I wanted her back again, I wanted an explanation now, I wanted to be told. It was the finality of it that appalled me so, the utter, utter irretrievability. Oh, how much kinder it would have been, how much more consoling, to have belonged to one of those old, gone generations — and been able to kid myself that I would find her again the day I went myself. But knowing that the soil, the earth that trees take root in, never, never can take wings and rise and speak with a human voice — what was there left for me, what solace had I in the world?

What heaven was there for me, what haven, what hope? Our heaven would have been in California, with the things we knew of — the Chevrolet, and she, and I. There would never be any other; we had had our chance, we had muffed it, and — the rest was oblivion.

Exhausted, prostrated — though antipathy to what lay on the floor kept me erect on my feet somehow — drained of almost every feeling but one that hadn’t been tapped yet, I stood cowering limply against a wall as though the collar of my coat had caught on a nail and I were suspended there. The knives grew blunted at last, as though the continual driving of them into the same gashes had robbed them of their edge; they gave only a dull ache now. I had no more tears, I had nothing to feed them any more.

In the wake of my ebbing grief came something else — the blind, unreasoning will to preserve myself. I was in a room with that inert mound under the blue dress. The laws of the land said death for that. I must get out into the open. I felt as if the walls were likely to close around me and hold me there in a living trap if I stayed a minute longer. The lights shining so brightly in every corner, in every room of this empty silent place seemed much more horrible to me than darkness could possibly have been. I couldn’t look at her any more, she seemed to move each time I did. She seemed to cause a spell, a stagnation in the air. Breathe it as deeply as I would, I couldn’t get enough of it into my lungs — they seemed to be closing up. It was as though a spark of malevolence had remained behind when all else had fled, and was trying to draw me down, suck me down, into her condition.

I turned and beat my way along the wall out into the foyer to the door and flung it open, and the winds of life rushed in again. Fear instantaneously changed its form, and became a fear of the living and not of the dead. I must get away from here, away from here, and I mustn’t let any one see me!

I closed the door behind me and locked it with my key, fingers shaking like ribbons in a breeze. I put the key in my pocket, listened, then crossed the corridor and got the door open that led to the emergency staircase we had used that night. I went down it and down it and down it, not stopping a floor below but all the way to the bottom. On the inside of each heavy door giving out upon a corridor the number of the floor was painted in red. When I had come to the one below “2” I stopped, though the stairs still went further down, and opened it a little and peered out. The soft pinkish lights of the lobby met my eyes, and I heard some people getting out of the elevator to one side of me, without being able to see them because of an angle in the wall.

The ponderous metal slide closed again; evidently the car had just received another call from above. I heard the doorman I had disliked so remark, “Good evening,” and mention some one’s name. Then a woman’s voice said, “Will you get hold of a taxi for us, Leroy?” and I heard the glass doors in front swinging around.

I pushed the staircase door wide and stepped out; there was no one in the lobby. I walked quickly across it to the front door, still spinning idly around, and passed through it into the street. The doorman was standing out in the middle of the road blowing a little whistle repeatedly and staring fixedly up toward the corner. An elderly lady and a younger one were standing together on the edge of the sidewalk, waiting and looking in the same direction. They had evening wraps on. Neither they nor the doorman turned to look at me as I came out; as a matter of fact he had that very moment turned about to stare in the other direction, toward Fifth, so that his back was now to me altogether.

Though I tried to walk straight, it seemed to me I reeled at every step I took, that those I met would be bound to notice there was something wrong with me. But what more commonplace than an unsteady man making his way along a New York street? I crossed to the other side of Sixth and then turned down it, looking back, always looking crazily back, as though unable to control my neck muscles. An empty cab came along, and thinking I was looking for a taxi, the driver flung the door open for me without even coming to a halt. I took a little run toward it and jumped on, and he cracked the door shut after me, and asked friendlily, “Where to, buddy?”

“Grand Central Station,” I shuddered, biting my nails.

I clapped my hand to my breast pocket to make sure I still had the tickets; I could feel the slight stiffness of the pasteboard even through the cloth of my suit — they were there all right. The lights of New York went spinning and hurtling by like shoals of comets, and each time he turned the cab in a new direction, they flattened and elongated themselves against the windows and left tracks and smears of fire across the glass until they had had time to come into focus again. Tall buildings reeled and threatened to topple over on me, or else leaned far back as though we were about to climb up the faces of them, machine and all.

I must get out of this town — the train had left long ago, but there were others — only, I must get out of this town. Where didn’t matter; anywhere would do! Montreal. Quebec, some place across the line. And then I thought, shivering, “But they bring you back from those places. Just as quick, even quicker. They expect you to go there, they look for you there.” And then I remembered my grip, standing at that very moment in the lobby back there. “Oh, I’m gone!” I groaned aloud, and hid my face behind my sleeves.

I lifted my head again a moment later and looked thoughtfully at the driver’s back through foggy, unseeing eyes. What good would going back for it do, even if I did manage to get it into the cab with me and drive off again without being stopped? They knew who I was; the very doorman up there knew me by name, had seen me time and again. The grip wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t know already—

And what good for that matter, I began to tell myself, would going off like this do? Even if I did get out of New York, get to Quebec, get to Montreal? What was the most I could expect? To drag out an existence ten times worse than the one Bernice had foreseen for herself if she had quit New York — robbed of the right to use my own name any longer, cowering at every shadow that crossed my path, fleeing abruptly and silently from one place to the next as though pursued by ghosts or possessed of devils. Ah, no! To face such a future, to plunge into it, was not cowardice — was the utmost bravery, required more courage than I had. I hadn’t the guts, the lust for life anymore that that took. After all, what was there so sweet about life any longer to make it worth fighting for at such a price? What happiness was there left for me in this world even if I stood acquitted of all suspicion at that very moment? Gray days and endless nights without her. Month after month of them, year after year of them.

Oh, I had no one to stand at my shoulder and say in my ear, “A year from now, six months from now, it will still hurt perhaps when you remember her, but you won’t remember her constantly all day long or all through the night; days will have color and nights will have dawns. And a year is such a small part of a lifetime — take a sporting chance and stick it out!” And if I had had, I wouldn’t have believed them anyway, would have thrown the lie in their teeth. I was so sure that all my life from now on was going to be like tonight. So I made up my mind and I lifted my hand and I knocked on the glass.

“Never mind about the station,” I said. “Take me back to 55th Street again.”

And I wasn’t going back for my grip, I was going back to get what was waiting for me. And if nothing was waiting for me yet, why I was going to look it up myself. I was the coward, not the brave guy — I didn’t have the stuff in me, the starch, the sand, to face all those hours and weeks and months feeling the way I did: heartbroken, weary, alone, and bereft. This way was much quicker and easier.

When we got back to the door, I simply left him without a word and walked into the lobby. I already felt much calmer than I had at any time since earlier in the day. I even felt calmer than when I still thought she and I were going to make our getaway together. I had been all worked up with anticipation then. This was a soothing lassitude, on the contrary, that almost made me want to drop down in the first comfortable chair that came along and wait for things to turn up.

The doorman looked at me in surprise; evidently he had still thought I was upstairs all this time. “Why, I didn’t see you come down in the ele—!” he started to say to me.

“Phone for the police,” I interrupted laconically, stepping into the car. “Send them up to Miss Pascal’s apartment. I’ll be up there.” And I motioned the openmouthed operator to go ahead.

“Anything wrong, sir?” he finally managed to articulate.

“What’s that of your business?” I told him placidly.

He kept the car standing there with the door open after he had let me off, dying to get a look in after I opened the door, I suppose. “Go on down, will you!” I snarled. “What are you standing there for? There’s nothing to see.”

With which he reluctantly cut himself off from me behind the panel and was gone.

I unlocked the door and went in once more, leaving it wide open so that that creepy feeling of being alone in there wouldn’t come back. I turned a chair around so that it faced away from her, sat down in it, lit a cigarette, and directed my gaze out through the open door upon the elevator door opposite, which was in a direct line from where I was sitting. Something kept trying to pull my head around in the other direction; I had to stiffen the muscles of my neck to resist it. I kept praying I could hold out until they came, and not give in and look. “Bernice,” I murmured, “what more do you want of me? Let me be.”

When I was in the act of lighting a fresh cigarette from the stump of the old, they finally got there. They came filing across the corridor directly toward me, getting bigger and bigger all the time as they got nearer, while the chair and I seemed to grow smaller and smaller. As they entered the living room from the foyer, all I could see any more were their huge feet and the mammoth legs of their trousers. If they didn’t stop soon, they’d go over me, and I’d be crushed under their gigantic soles — my head sort of rolled over on my shoulder, and then I pulled it back again and everything was the right size once more.

“She dead?” one of them said to me, taking his eyes off the floor.

“Long time now,” I answered.

“You do it?” the same one said. He seemed to be asking the questions to satisfy his own personal curiosity, just as one man will go up to another on a street corner where a crowd has collected and ask what the trouble is. Others were busying themselves with her, I could tell without turning around; he seemed to have nothing to do for a minute, hence his interrogation of me.

“There she is,” I said listlessly, “and here I am. What more do you want?”

“Plenty,” he said, “you’re talking to an officer, and don’t forget it!” And he sent his fist hurtling into the side of my face. There was a flash of fire before my eyes, and I went over on the floor, chair and all. The pain was gone an instant after the blow, and it felt so lazy, so effortless, lying there prone like that, that I wanted to let my eyes close and not lift a finger toward getting up again. But the thought that she was on the floor too, somewhere just a little in back of me, made me come to and pick myself up again. I left the chair where it was.

“Pick it up,” he ordered truculently, “and next time don’t get so wise!”

I set it on its feet again and looked at him inquiringly.

“Siddown,” he thundered. “We’re coinin’ to you!”

But it seemed to take them hours to do so. People kept coming in and coming in, some in uniform and some without, some in white coats, some carrying satchels — all their attention was focused on her. Once or twice I dared to turn and look, because there were so many of them around her that I couldn’t see her any more — bending over her, squatting down on their haunches, pawing her, doing things that I couldn’t understand. A man carrying a tripod came in at one time and set it up just inside the door, and they all drew back from her, out of the way, and there was a flash of diamond-white light and a puff of smoke. Then he went even nearer her, almost stood directly above her, and there was another flash and another puff. Then he picked up the tripod and went out. I remember thinking vaguely that he must be a reporter, but it seems not, because later another man with a tripod came out of the emergency-staircase door, and the moment they saw him, two of them rushed out and came to blows with him. They broke the tripod, flung him into the elevator, and he was taken downstairs.

About midnight or one in the morning, they took me into Bernice’s bedroom and shut the door. The ones in uniform seemed to be playing a minor part by this time. There was one of them standing just inside the door with his hands clasped behind him, but all the others in the room were without uniforms. One of them had turned Bernice’s vanity table into a desk and was sitting beside it writing on a thick stenographic pad. The three pieces of baggage were gone from underneath it.

“Siddown!” I was told.

I sat down and leaned forward over my knees.

When they were through looking at me — and only because I was past caring about anything any more was I able to bear the awful, baleful scrutiny from all sides — they began to ask me questions. Or rather one in particular did. Sometimes, during all this, he’d get up as though he were through, and I’d think he had left the room, only to have him suddenly ask me something over my shoulder.

“Your name’s Wade,” they told me. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“How long have you known her?”

“About a month, I guess.”

“What’d you do it for?”

“I don’t know.”

Two or three of them advanced on me threateningly. “What’d you do it for?” he roared a second time.

“Because I loved her.”

The blow I got this time was from the back; I stumbled forward out of the chair, went down on both hands and struck my head against the edge of the thick glass slab that covered the vanity table. It opened the skin a little above one eye.

“Get up; you’re not hurt,” he informed me. “Now, are you gonna answer or aren’t you! Wait a minute,” he interrupted himself, “lemme ask you something else; where were you going with her tonight?”

“California.” I reached in my pocket, took out the tickets, and passed them to him.

When he was through looking at them he said, “Why were you going out there?”

“To live,” I said simply.

He got up and went away; I kept looking at the place he had just been sitting in. Suddenly he whipped out from somewhere in back of me, “Well, if she was going with you, what’d you do it for?”

“ ’Cause she backed out at the last minute,” I said instantly, without turning around.

“Now we’re gettin’ some place,” he remarked to the others, and came around in front of me and sat down again.

Most of the questions after that were easy to answer; all I had to keep remembering was that I had done it because she had changed her mind at the very last and refused to go with me — everything followed from that quite naturally. Toward the end, possibly because I was answering just as they seemed to want me to, they even became less threatening, dropped their voices a pitch or two.

Then at the very last, when it all seemed clear sailing, everything went wrong again. He had just told me that they were going to draw up a confession then and there and have me sign it, and had already ordered the policeman to take me into the other room and hold me there until it was ready — when he motioned me back again to where I had been sitting and said, “Suppose you run through it in your own words; take this down, George, and don’t miss anything.” Then to me again, “All right — you came up here a little after nine, and you found her all packed and ready for you. And then she said she wasn’t going. Now go on from there.”

I was so tired already; I couldn’t understand what more they wanted! I’d already said I’d done it; over and over I’d said I’d done it. I’d always thought they only questioned you like this when you denied a thing, not when you admitted it. I swallowed to moisten my throat, and said: “She said she wasn’t going. She said I didn’t have enough money. I begged her and she wouldn’t listen to me—” And right while I was speaking, I kept thinking, “Where am I going to say I got the gun? What am I going to say I did with it afterward?” So far, I noticed, they hadn’t asked me a word about that. “So then I told her I was going alone. She said, all right, go ahead. So I went downstairs by the emergency staircase; my bag was in the lobby and the doorman was outside in front of the house. He didn’t see me. I opened the bag and took the gun out. I went running all the way up the stairs again. I had her key, and I opened the door and went in again. I asked her for the last time if she would come with me, and she said no, so I shot her. I threw the gun out of the window right after I’d done it—”

I noticed that they’d all grown very quiet and were staring at me curiously; I saw one or two of them exchange looks with one another.

“How many bullets did you give her?” the man before me asked brutally.

Why hadn’t I thought of that? Why hadn’t I taken a look the whole time I was alone with her, and noticed?

“I don’t remember,” I said. “I think I fired two or three times—”

The man before me turned around and said, “You got that, George?”

“That’s no good,” someone else expostulated. “Why don’t you find out what he’s up to!”

“You lemme do this my own way, Dowlan!” he bellowed back, and glared at him to silence him. “I know what I’m doing!” I heard the door open and shut behind me, and he looked up, over and beyond me, and said, “You bring it with you? Good! Give it to George here.” And a typewriter of the portable variety was brought forward and placed on the vanity table. After which they ordered the policeman to take me outside to the other room, “until we tell you to bring him back again.”

No sooner had the door closed after me than I heard the keys of the typewriter begin to click at breakneck speed. The apartment door still stood wide open, but there was a policeman standing before it, and another one opposite him mounting guard over the elevator door. In the living room itself, a man was going around examining the knobs on the doors and other odds and ends, but evidently not in a professional capacity, for he had no magnifying glass. Yet when he turned my way, I saw that he had some sort of a little thing screwed into his eye. Another was sitting before a drawer that had been removed bodily from some article of furniture and going painstakingly through a cloud of papers it contained. Most of them looked like bills from a distance. She was gone now; she had evidently been taken away while I was inside. It made things a little more bearable for me. I asked the policeman to let me go to the bathroom, and the answer I got was more unpleasant than amusing. I sat down in the chair I had occupied originally.

The typewriter stopped after awhile, and you could hear their voices in the other room, but not what they were saying. I started to light a cigarette, and the policeman snarled, “Who told you to go ahead and smoke?”

The man who had been looking at the doorknobs and things lifted his head and said, “Let him smoke, Sheehan. He hasn’t long to do it in.”

“And it won’t be smoker’s heart that’ll stop him, either,” the policeman agreed.

The typewriter recommenced all at once, as though some point that had momentarily clogged its progress had just been settled. Then, a little while after that, a bulb in one of the lamps burnt out, from overuse no doubt, and went dark.

“She had a nice place here,” the policeman remarked thoughtfully.

“Did you ever know one that didn’t?” the man going over the bills snapped.

I noticed for the first time that the other one, the doorknob fellow, was no longer there, had gone without my even realizing it. But I was so tired; everything was bathed in a mist!

The typewriter stopped again. Then almost at once, this second time, the bedroom door opened, and they motioned to the policeman with their heads.

He brought me in again. “Lock the door,” the one who had asked me most of the questions the time before ordered. The room was already full of smoke; Bernice’s familiar things looked funny through it. Between that and the state my eyes were in, I could hardly see their faces straight anymore.

“Read him what you got there, George,” I heard him say. “His own words. From where she told him she wasn’t going with him.”

The man who had been using the vanity table for a desk all along began to read some typed sheets aloud. “—so I shot her. I threw the gun out of the window right after I’d done it—”

When he was through, the other one gave me a crafty sort of a smile and said, with remarkable (for him) moderation, “You admit you done it in just that way, do you? And you’re ready to sign what he just read to you, are you?”

“Yes,” I said dully.

Someone else said something to him under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, whereupon he whirled around fiercely and burst out: “Tell that to your grandmother! He’s as sane as I am! He’s yellow, that’s what’s the matter with him!”

Then turning back to me, again with unwonted restraint, he continued, “Suppose we were to make a few changes in that — just a coupla things here and there — suppose you were too excited to remember everything just the way it happened, and we were to sort of, now, help it along for you — would you still sign it?”

“I told you I did it,” I murmured, “and I’ll sign anything you want me to, any way you put it.”

He seemed almost more surprised than gratified for a moment, but he didn’t waste any time. The man at the desk handed him several typed sheets: whether they were the same ones he had read or not I couldn’t tell. He patted them into shape and put them down beside him without looking at them, took a fountain pen out of his pocket and held it toward me, saying: “All right, then sign this! This is the way it really happened.”

I took the pen from him, wrote my name where he showed me to on the paper he handed me, and then passed both back to him — or rather the pen alone, for he had never taken his hand from the paper for an instant.

“That’s that!” he said, folding the papers and inserting them into the inside pocket of his coat with an air of ponderous satisfaction. “You didn’t shoot her; you strangled her to death with your hands, like we found her!” And giving those around him the wink, he added, “Now bring on your lawyers!”

They asked me a few desultory questions after that, but more in the manner of horseplay than a serious attempt to find out anything further. Such as: Had I really forgotten I had choked her and imagined I had shot her, or had I deliberately invented the story about running down the staircase and getting a gun out of my grip? And if so, why?

“I don’t know why,” I said in a half-audible voice. “Maybe because I’m romantic. Maybe because it’s the first time I ever did a thing like this, and I wanted to make it sound better than it really was.” And to myself I added, “Or maybe because I didn’t do it at all in the first place.”

I no longer knew whether I had or hadn’t; I was no longer sure. I had been telling them I had for so long that it seemed to me I must have after all. I found myself actually forgetting that I hadn’t seen her at all from the moment I left her at five in the afternoon to get the tickets until the time I found her lying on the floor — found myself actually beginning to believe that I had found her still alive, had spoken to her when I came back at nine. It was literally with surprise that I at last stopped short and reminded myself, “But she was already gone when you got back; somebody else must have done it!”

Oh, I no longer knew whether I was sane or insane, awake or dreaming: no longer cared! All I knew was, every breath I drew was hellfire, every minute that passed was a crucifixion.

It was growing lighter outside the windows now, like so many times when I had been up in this room with her. I knew just where the first splashes of pearl and pink were going to hit against the wall; knew just at what point they would begin to spread like blisters and reach upward toward the ceiling and downward toward the floor. But just before it all began, they clicked a steel ring over my wrist and at last made ready to depart.

As they brought me out of the bedroom into the living room, I turned and asked if I couldn’t go to the bathroom. So the one whose wrist was joined to mine unwillingly turned aside and stood at my shoulder for a minute. After that they took me out to the elevator — Bernice’s apartment vanished forever behind the vertical metal trap — and I stood in the exact middle of all of them, like someone popular, like someone surrounded by all his friends, as we went down to the street.

Even at that unearthly hour, a handful of ghouls had gathered around the street door, or maybe they had been standing there all night like that, I don’t know — and there was another one of those starlike flashes and puffs of smoke, because it was still dim out on the street. But this time the men with me didn’t attempt to break the camera or drive the perpetrator away. Then, just as they were putting me in a car at the curb, another diversion occurred; I heard a protesting, argumentative voice somewhere in back of me. “I been waitin’ all night,” it said, “they wouldn’t even lemme go in the lobby! He owes me twenty-four dollars, and six more for overtime—” I heard them all laughing, and I turned and saw a man standing there, pale in the face and sweating with anxiety. “He rode all the way down to Gran’ Central with me—” he said. Meanwhile there was another one of those skyrocket flashes, followed by a tart smell, so close to me this time that I jumped and collided against the man I was manacled to. But by its light I recognized the protesting individual as the cabdriver I had hired at one time or another last night and then left standing before the door — just when, I wasn’t sure, or why, or whether I really hadn’t paid him as he said.

The man with me flicked me on the arm and said humorously, “Y’got any money on you?”

“Tell him to get a cop and have me pinched,” I answered stonily, and the irony of saying such a thing at such a time only dawned on me after I’d heard the roar of appreciation that went up on all sides. I didn’t smile.

They ushered me in the car and sat on each side of me, and we drove off down the streets of New York in the beginning of the morning light, with batches of lights going out everywhere, like that single bulb in Bernice’s living room had gone out a while back. But what was dawn and the start of the day for every one else was dusk and the ending of it for me.

But if it was dusk, and it was the end of my day, it seemed to go on forever and forever; the night that I prayed and yearned incessantly for seemed never to begin. Sometimes I used to wonder if what I had mistaken for an indictment hadn’t really been my trial after all, and I had been sentenced to life imprisonment without realizing it. I used to go into a cold sweat whenever it occurred to me that I might get life or twenty years instead of what I wanted. “Gee, it’s got to be that!” I moaned, walking back and forth. “It’s little enough to ask for! Those that don’t want it always get it — why shouldn’t I?”

Maxine came to see me — it seemed long afterward, but it may have only been a few days; all I know is, they brought me out one time, and she was on the other side of a wire screen. And she looked so bad, so old, so forlorn — it almost seemed I must be visiting her, and not she me.

“Why did you leave me that night?” she said tenderly. “This wouldn’t have happened to you—”

“How is it out today?” I said. “Very warm, or is it cooler than it was before?”

She saw what I meant, so she answered, “It’s pretty warm, warmer than it was yesterday—”

“Where do you live now, Maxine?” I said. “In the same place?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ve been in the hospital; I just got out yesterday, that’s why I couldn’t come to you any sooner.”

“Feeling all right now?” I asked, letting my eyes stray around vacantly.

“Yes,” she said readily, “it was just the suddenness of the thing, on top of everything else—” Then she went on, “I have a lawyer for you; he’ll help you out of this.”

“I don’t want a lawyer,” I said.

“I want you to tell him everything, when he comes to see you,” she pleaded vibrantly. “He’s the best I could get hold of; it’s not too late yet — that awful confession, what did they do, grill it out of you? — there’s still every chance in the world, if you—”

“All I want,” I told her. “is to get it over with.”

“Wade, for my sake, if not your own,” she begged. “Won’t you give me this one last break? It’s taken every cent I had—”

“No, Maxine, no! I want to go!”

“Wade, darling,” she groaned, “for Bernice’s sake, then. She wouldn’t want you, she wouldn’t want any one to have this happen — she was too nice a girl!”

“Bernice is gone,” I answered. “There isn’t any more Bernice.”

“Wade, you didn’t do it, you know you didn’t! You’re lying your very life away!”

“I did it, Maxine!” I shouted passionately at her at last. “I choked her to death with my own hands! Now will you believe me? Now will you go away and leave me alone?”

“God forgive you for what you’re doing to the two of us!” was the last thing she said.

The lawyer’s name was Berenson. He came to see me the next day, and scowl as I would that I didn’t want to see any one, wouldn’t leave my cell I was brought in to him. It wasn’t important enough one way or the other, after all, for me to dig my heels between the boards of the floor and put up a physical struggle about.

“Your poor wife,” one of the first things he said to me was, “sold the very wedding ring off her finger, sold her radio, sold everything, to be able to get someone’s services in your defense. At that, the money she came to me with, wouldn’t have paid for the first half-hour’s conference we had. I have it put aside in my safe right now, and she’s welcome to it back the day the trial ends — no matter what the outcome. Now believe that or not. Wade, whichever you prefer!”

“I’d believe anything these days,” I told him.

“I’ve taken this case over,” he said, “because I’m interested in it — because I have a hunch it’s going to turn out to be the biggest case in years — and because I think I can squeeze enough prestige out of it before I’m through to last me the rest of my career. Do you get me?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t. Y’better lay off it, if it’s prestige you’re after, because you’ve got a client that doesn’t want to be defended and a case that can’t be won!”

“Why can’t it?” he snapped. “You didn’t kill her!”

“Didn’t I? I say I did,” I said sullenly. “How do you know I didn’t?”

“You were all the way down at Grand Central in a cab the first time.” he said, “and you turned around and went back there. If you’d done it, nothing could have gotten you within a mile of that place that night!”

“Why not?” I decided. “I couldn’t get away with it, that was all.”

“You would have gone to the nearest police station, then — not to the very room she was lying in, alone. Don’t try to tell me; I ought to know a little about human nature by now!”

“All right, Mr. Berenson,” I said, “build up your beautiful case! Build it sky-high! And when you’ve got it all spic and span and foolproof, I’m going to stand up there in the stand just the same and tell the world I killed Bernice Pascal!”

“You think you’re the kingpin in this, don’t you, Wade!” he told me scathingly. “You think the whole case is centered around you and whether you’re guilty or whether you’re not! Well, let me tell you, my dear boy, you’re not as important in this affair as that very colored girl she had working for her — you’re nothing more than the sucker that’s taking the rap!” He opened a dull silver cigarette case and held it toward me with the contemptuous air of some one feeding peanuts to a rather smelly animal in the zoo. “You loved her, didn’t you?” he said.

In thinking it over after he’d gone, I realized that it was at about this point I began to fall for him.

“Maybe I didn’t!” I assented wistfully.

“Your wife told me as much,” he went on. “She had an idea that that might be the reason for your whole fool attitude from the time of the arrest. Pascal’s gone, so you don’t give a damn one way or the other now.”

“Which is just about the size of it,” I said stiffly, “and my own privilege in the bargain.”

“Fair enough,” he agreed, “but it makes a pretty poor showing, when you come right down to it. Leaving yourself out of it altogether, you’re letting the real guys that killed the woman you love get away with murder. You don’t seem to feel that you owe that much to her — to get busy and settle accounts for her. In other words, Wade, you may be standing up and telling the world that you killed her — but what you’re telling yourself, and her, is that she’s not worth avenging! That she deserves what she got!”

“God knows that isn’t true!” I burst out. “I’d choke the rats that did it with my own hands if I only knew who they—”

Then I knew by the smile on his face that I had told him I hadn’t done it.

“I’m taking the case, Wade,” he let me know. “I mayn’t be able to keep you out of the chair, but at least I’ll keep you out of the witness box!”

But I went back to the cell shaking my head and thinking, “What good is it if he does get the right guys? What good is it if I do get even for her? What good is anything? Will it bring her back?”

I must have been a funny client, though! After that first day, I told Berenson anything he wanted to know, didn’t hold back a thing — and yet never again, after that first slip of the tongue, would I admit I hadn’t done it. I noticed he didn’t waste much time arguing out that point with me (and to me it seemed all that mattered in the whole thing: whether I said I did do it or said I didn’t do it) but seemed more interested in a whole lot of other things, side issues like the party at Jerry’s that Saturday night, and the way Bernice had once begged me to stop seeing her, and the man that had answered her phone the night I had called her from the restaurant, and the way I had met Marion on the street and she had had a spasm of jealousy over what I told her, and so on.

Sometimes I would tell him things that it seemed to me he should have gone into ecstasies over, should have congratulated me on remembering, and he would brush them impatiently aside and remark, “That’s not a bit of good to me.” And then again, he would suddenly flap his wings and lose feathers all over the room about some trivial detail that didn’t have the utmost bearing on the case, as far as I could see. I used to wonder sometimes if he was really a good lawyer.

For instance, during one of our talks I suddenly recalled how I had walked out of Bernice’s place the first night I met her, wearing somebody else’s hat by mistake. Not only that, but by some quirk of memory the size and make of it even came back to me! I at once gave him the dope on it, afraid I might forget all about it again. “Y’better put that down,” I advised, “size 6⅜! And inside the hatband it said Boulevard des Capucines!” And waited for him to fall all over me when he heard it. My life was pretty colorless, I guess.

All he said was, “Don’t let’s waste time. Wade; I’m not running the fashion column for men in the theater programs.” And then, on the other hand, one time when I was trying to recall, more for my own morbid satisfaction than his benefit, what my last words to her had been when I left there the afternoon it happened, I recollected that they hadn’t been to her at all, but to Tenacity, who had stopped me on my way out to ask me if Bernice was “fixing to fire her, or what?” He no sooner heard that than he stopped me then and there and demanded excitedly, “Why didn’t you tell me that before? That the colored girl was still in the place when you left! I’ve had a feeling all along that she’d be our trump card in this!”

I didn’t follow him, and gave him a look that told him so.

“I’d like to bet,” he said, slapping his knee, “that she was drawing pay from other sources besides the wages Pascal paid her!”

I still didn’t get him but no longer bothered signaling the fact. “I read in one of the tabs,” I said, “that they had her down at headquarters the day after, questioning her. I think they’re going to use her as a witness against me—”

“Let me get my hands on her!” he said viciously. “I’ll find out who Pascal’s friends were!”

“Anyway, she left the place herself five minutes after I did that afternoon,” I remarked indifferently. “The doorman and the elevator man both backed her up on that, according to what the paper—”

“Oh, her alibi’s as good as gold,” he interrupted caustically. “A little too good, if you want to know the way I feel about it. She wasn’t satisfied with asking the doorman what time it was — she had to let her Ingersoll slip out of her hand while she was pretending to wind it and break the crystal on the floor, and then make some remark about that meaning bad luck, a death in the house or something to that effect. And the doorman, being colored himself, wasn’t likely to forget that when the time came. Then on top of that, as though that weren’t enough, she conveniently remembered some phone message Pascal had asked her to deliver, and used the downstairs phone — as though she couldn’t have thought of that while she was still upstairs!”

“Oh, that must’ve been to me,” I said reflectively and then again, “No, that’s right, it was a man, and it didn’t come until quarter to—”

“It wasn’t to you at all,” he said sourly. “I got the whole story. It was to some girlfriend of Pascal’s, and the call never went through because she’d been dispossessed for having too many brawls in her place. This clever colored wench has to throw a fit of giggling when she hears that, pretending it struck her so funny, and repeat the whole thing to the doorman word for word. Take it from me, she knew what was coming and wanted to impress every one with the fact that she was going home at quarter to five. I’d like to bet that other days no one even saw her come and go!”

I remembered something then and told him: “Wait a minute, you’ve got the whole thing wrong. That wasn’t the time she made that call — she’d already made it upstairs right in front of me and Bernice. Bernice called her in the room specially for that, and I remember she said she didn’t have to look the number up; she knew it by heart. And that was when they told her they were dispossessed — not down in the lobby at all.”

“Well, it’s damn queer, then,” he said, “that it should strike her so funny fifteen floors below that she has to break out laughing all over the place until the doorman himself told her not to make so much noise; she’d get him in trouble. I never yet heard of any colored Englishwomen, did you?”

“Maybe she’s from the British West Indies,” I suggested unwittingly.

He gave me an indescribable look and shook his head to himself. “You never killed Bernice Pascal,” he said in a low voice. I turned my face aside with sharp impatience. “No, it’s ten to one that what she did downstairs, the coon I mean,” he went on, “was step over to the phone and send out the tip-off that Pascal was packing and getting ready to skip out of New York that night. And then went over to the doorman and pretended that the call she had just made was the first one, the one you heard her make upstairs. Just let her take the stand — I’ll get it out of her. They’ll wish they had paid her fare to California, whoever they are!”

I was so little interested, however, in what his plans were, and in fact in the whole trial itself, that I didn’t even know what date had been set for it. I’d only glanced at a paper on two occasions since they’d brought me here, and as it nearly turned my stomach to see Bernice’s face splashed all over the pages in gummy ink — with words like “Butterfly” and “Slain Beauty” and “Queen of Hearts” written above it — and encounter column after column of a diary that I knew damn well she’d never written, I didn’t repeat the attempt. It was tough enough to have lost her without having to share her with the entire world.

And Berenson, either because he had so much else on his mind that it never occurred to him or because he took it for granted that I already knew, never said a word to me about it either. So the first I knew about when it was due to begin was the morning of the very day itself, when the turnkey suggested to me not unkindly that I “oughta take a shave for myself.”

“Why?” I said, “the cement walls aren’t complaining, are they?”

“They’ll be taking pictures of you today in court,” he said, “and you look like hell. You wanta make a good impression on the jury, don’t ya?”

“Oh, is it today?” I said, and I went ahead and “took a shave for myself.” And I mean just that, for myself, and not for the jury or anybody else.

And so it began — and all I did after that was sit there, day after day, and day after day. I couldn’t even understand what they were talking about most of the time. They’d bring me in each morning and sit me down — and I always sat in the same place — and then at noon they’d take me back again, and then early in the afternoon they’d bring me in again, and then late in the afternoon they’d take me out again. And the next day the whole dreary thing would start over again. All I did was go in and out of that room and sit there — with every one in the back of the room staring their eyes out at me.

At the end of the first week, when I was confident the thing must be nearly over, I found out through Berenson that they’d only just gotten through picking out jurors. When he saw the look on my face, he said, “Wade, this is an interesting case; most men in your shoes would hug every delay!”

He told me Maxine had been present every day. “Tell her to go on home!” I said harshly. “Hasn’t she got enough decency to stay away from here?”

The second week it became a little more comprehensible; at least they stopped asking jurors what business they were in and whether they were opposed to capital punishment, and began to have a succession of people on the stand — who spoke of things more closely related to me. But presently I had heard the banal, monotonous story so often, from so many different angles, that I could have yelled my lungs out for mercy. In sheer self-defense I fell into the habit of staring hypnotically out of the nearest of the wide, tall windows. The sun came pouring in through them almost without exception during the whole of this time, and if I watched attentively enough, I could see little grains of dust floating around in it and making patterns. But at the end of one session Berenson took occasion to warn me against doing that. He said it made me seem callous, hard-boiled, would make a bad impression on the jury. “Oh, jury be damned!” I thought to myself wearily.

Among those called on as witnesses was Leroy, Bernice’s Harvard-accent doorman. His last name was Devereaux, I found out. He came to court without his uniform and wearing a fuzzy caramel-colored suit with patch pockets and a half belt in back that would have driven any college freshman insane with longing. With this went beige spats, four inches of brown-silk handkerchief hanging out of his breast pocket, and, I am almost positive, a walking stick hanging up somewhere in the courthouse checkroom.

He sat up there at elegant ease, and no man in the room could match his English. It was really as delightful as it was instructive to listen to him speak, but I noticed the judge had to turn his head away several times during the course of the cross-questioning.

Leroy told how I had appeared about nine in Bernice’s lobby, passed a grip I was carrying to him, and then insisted I had just had a message from him on her behalf to come up there, which he again flatly denied having sent me, just as he had that night. This point held them up for fully half an hour, and only the liquidity of Leroy’s vowels kept me from returning to look out of the window again in spite of Berenson’s admonition. When they had finally decided that it was the relief man who had sent the message (and I saw Berenson give me a triumphant look, but what about I couldn’t imagine), Leroy was allowed to go ahead. He told them he had asked me if I wanted to be announced, whereupon (the “whereupon” was his own, too) I had given him an odd look and remarked: “Miss Pascal expects me more than she ever expected any one in her life.” At which point I heard a buzz of excitement rise from the onlookers at the back of the room. The judge struck the desk with his mallet, and when they had grown quiet again. Westman, the prosecuting attorney, asked Leroy to describe the look he said I had given him.

“It was a, I should say a sinister look,” Leroy said.

I had never known just how to pronounce that word until I heard him use it.

“Explain what you mean,” Westman said.

“It was the look of a man who is dangerous, who is capable of almost anything. Well, there’s no other word for it, it was a sinister look, that was all,” Leroy informed him dogmatically.

I felt like jumping up then and there and protesting that it couldn’t have been that kind of a look because I hadn’t known how to pronounce the word at the time.

“Has the defendant that look on him now?” Westman went on.

Leroy turned to look at me, and I certainly had, even if I’d never had it before; I was glaring at him with all my might. “Thoroughly,” he said, turning away again in a hurry.

From there he went on to say that he had next seen me at about quarter to ten, and had been very much taken aback, because I was going in again like the time before, and he hadn’t seen me come out at all. And that I had told him to get the police, I would be up in Bernice’s apartment.

When Berenson took him over, he asked him a few desultory questions first, and then suddenly skipped all the intermediate evidence to inquire with beguiling deference what his, Leroy’s, theory was as to how I had managed to leave the building without being seen either by himself or the elevator operator. I couldn’t figure out why he was asking that at this late day. The whole town, or anyway as large a part of it as was following the case, knew by this time I had come down the emergency staircase when neither of them were looking. That had been in the confession I had signed.

Leroy smiled tolerantly and said, “We all know how he accomplished that—” and repeated what I had done.

“In that case,” Berenson said quickly, “would it have been equally possible for any one else to have used the same staircase that evening — and not be seen by you or any one in the lobby?”

“I don’t see why not,” Leroy replied haughtily. “I’m kept quite busy before the house procuring cars. Especially around dinnertime. And after all, I don’t expect people to slink—”

“Answer yes or no!” Berenson snapped. “Would it have been equally possible for any one else to have come down those stairs that night and left the building without being seen by you?”

“Yes,” Leroy answered sulkily. I suppose he didn’t like to be confined to one-syllable words because there wasn’t as much opportunity to pronounce them beautifully.

“That’s all,” Berenson said. Leroy uncoiled himself, stood up so that every one would have a fair chance to admire and profit by his attire, and left the stand walking on air. Some rude damsel in back tittered.

Berenson called someone I’d never seen before in his place. Also colored. I began to wonder if Bernice and I were the only white people involved in this case. This one, it soon turned out, was the reliefman. He had been on duty, he said, from seven until nine that evening. He had not telephoned any message to me from Bernice. He had not telephoned any message to anybody from Bernice. He had not telephoned any message to anybody from anybody. Every dwelling in the building had its own private phone; the only calls he had received were incoming ones, there had only been two of those, and one had been a wrong number and the other a lady who wished to have her husband informed, when he got home, that he was to come right out again and meet her at Tony’s, Jimmy was there. “Your witness,” Berenson said after a sufficient amount of this.

I now understood his triumphant look to me awhile back, when Leroy had been on the stand, and the phone message I had gotten had been credited to the relief man. But I still didn’t understand what he had to be, feel, or look triumphant about. After all, even if the message was proven to be fake (and I was beginning to think it was myself, because the relief man’s voice didn’t even approach the Octavus-Roy-Cohen dialect that had greeted my ears over the wire), that didn’t prove that I hadn’t gone up there and done it myself anyway. It merely suggested feebly, if one were inclined to be prejudiced in my favor, that I had been framed by some person or persons unknown. And on the other hand, there was only my word for it that there had been any such message at all. Only Maxine and I had been there when the phone rang; what chance had Berenson of proving it to the jury?

I noticed that Westman himself considered this point so immaterial to the evidence that he didn’t even try very hard to shake the relief man’s insistence on not having sent the call, just let him go after a question or two. When the case was adjourned for that day, Berenson came up to me almost exuberantly, he seemed so pleased with the way things had gone, and giving my biceps a furtive, encouraging grip, breathed, “Wait’ll to-morrow, kid! It’s going to start getting rosy from now on. They’re calling Tenacity!”

I had a peculiar dream that night in the cell of a sort of black Bernice, whom I was very much in love with, but the color of whose skin kept rubbing off on my clothes every time I went near her. And each time it did, she sort of cried out in pain, so that my heart was wrung.

Next day, about halfway through the morning’s session, the famous Tenacity’s name was at last called. “Tenacity Lowell! Take the stand, please.” They waited; no sign of her. They called her a second time, louder than before. I turned to look. The people in the back of the room were twisting their heads this way and that, but no one came forward. All the faces but one were unmistakably Caucasian — and that one belonged to the unforgetable Leroy, who was present again. She wasn’t to have been a witness for the defense, far from it, but when it came down to it, Berenson’s face showed more disappointment and worry than the prosecuting attorney’s by far, I thought.

After a minute’s hiatus, the case went grinding ponderously on without her. Westman called another name, one that I didn’t recognize, and an unknown took the stand. The seemingly interminable succession of ebony witnesses had finally come to an end with him. Which was something. But even Leroy’s sartorial splendor paled to nothingness compared to what was now on display. His clothes fitted as though they had been poured over him hot and allowed to harden. And he had a gardenia in his coat. Or maybe it was only a white carnation.

“Do you recognize this defendant?” said Westman ominously.

“I do,” he said readily. “Like hell you do,” I growled to myself, “when’d I ever see you before?”

“Tell the court your story,” Westman ordered.

The new witness took hold of one cuff, and then the other, and meticulously pulled them down an inch below the sleeve of his coat. “The Saturday before I read about this murder,” he announced in a clear, ringing voice that carried all the way to the end of the room and back with a lot left over, “I was coming out of the Cort Theater, where I worked at the time, and this man was standing at the stage entrance.” Then all at once I remembered who he was. “Well, for the love of Mike!” I thought with a gasp, “is that going to be brought up too?” It wouldn’t have surprised me any more to see my old teacher from school come parading in to tell all about how I had broken a window with an eraser in 8-B.

The stage-trained voice went on and on without even a moment’s loss for a word, without even an “er” or an “um.” For the First time since the trial had begun, I found myself a little uncomfortable, embarrassed, wishing I didn’t have to sit there in the room. For all I knew, he might have every intention of telling why he had taken me up to the flat in the first place. But he had that part nicely under control, it soon appeared. “—when we got to where I lived, I found out that my friend the stage manager hadn’t waited, he may have had a headache or something that evening, but the thing is he hadn’t waited, he’d gone home. So I turned to this man and told him that I thought the best thing for him to do would be to call around at the theater the following Monday, a little earlier if possible to make sure my friend hadn’t gone home yet, and then borrow the hundred dollars — never knowing what type person he was!” And he paused dramatically, with a neat little spread of the hands, to let my awful double-facedness sink in upon his listeners. “Before I quite realized what was happening,” he went on, “he had forced his way in, struck me in the face so that I was simply covered with blood and nearly lost consciousness, and robbed me of the hundred dollars. Me!” he repeated with orchidaceous indignation, indicating his cravat, “who had tried to do him a good turn!” And flashing me a sulky look, as much as to say, “Now look what you got!” he turned his profile the other way.

I couldn’t help noticing that the atmosphere in the courtroom, particularly on the part of the spectators, wasn’t nearly as sympathetic as it might have been, considering the amount of effort and dramatic suspense he had put into his recital. But it was reverence itself compared to what was brought on later, when Berenson had taken him over.

He began by asking him: “Did you report this incident to the police at the time it happened, Mr. Saint-Clair?”

“Sinclair. It’s pronounced as if it were spelt s-i-n. I told Mr. Westman that.”

Berenson roared, “I didn’t ask you how you say your name! I asked you if you reported this alleged robbery to the police at the time!”

“No,” replied the witness heatedly, “and you don’t have to yell at me like that, either!”

When the gale of merriment had subsided and he could make himself audible once more, Berenson demanded, “Why not? Why didn’t you?”

“For reasons of my own.”

“Will you kindly tell the court what they are?” Berenson insisted.

“Because I was afraid it might hurt me professionally,” Mr. Sinclair answered unwillingly. I could tell, even from where I was, that he was a little less at ease than he had been up to now.

“But you claim you were the one who was robbed,” Berenson said dulcetly. “How could that hurt you professionally or otherwise?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the witness answered peevishly. “I just had an idea that it might, that was all!”

I was almost expecting Berenson to wind up by getting him to admit he was the one who had done the robbing, before he was through.

“And yet you’re willing enough to come here today and tell your story to the court, irrelevant as it may be. How is that, Mr. Sinclair?”

“I’m not working now,” he said lamely. “I was then.”

“Well, I don’t pretend to understand the ethics of the theatrical profession,” Berenson remarked stingingly. “We’ll let that part of it go. Where did you have this money, this hundred and fifteen dollars you say the defendant stole from you?”

“In my apartment.”

“We already know that, Mr. Sinclair,” Berenson said patiently. “Just whereabouts was it? Under the rug?”

There was a preliminary titter or two from the back, but I, who already knew the answer that Berenson was bound to get if he kept on insisting, held on to the chair I was on.

The Sinclair gentleman suddenly lost the little temper that remained to him and blurted out vindictively, “In the bathroom, behind the toilet paper! Now are you satisfied?”

The judge had to threaten to have the room cleared no less than three times before the ribald outbursts this had brought on were effectively stemmed. It took nearly three minutes, I should judge. And by that time, the hunted yet venomous look on Mr. Sinclair’s face would have drawn pity from any one but a courtroom audience.

When he was released from the stand (Berenson told me later that he cut such a ridiculous figure, he had benefited rather than harmed us), he made his way to the back of the room with a rapidity that almost resembled flight, and disappeared through the big frosted-glass doors to the accompaniment of a playful hiss from some young woman or other seated back there.

I thought he had come back again, possibly to avenge himself on her or on all of us, a moment later when I saw everyone’s head turning that way, from the jury to the very court attendants, and heard a commotion at the door. People began to stand up in their seats here and there to look over the heads of others, and the judge’s gavel had no effect for a moment or two. Westman hurriedly quit his place before the witness-box and disappeared toward the back of the room, and when a line of vision had been cleared, I saw him standing before a woman whose entire face was wound with bandages so that not even the eyes showed through, supported on either side by a colored man and woman as though she could hardly stand up.

She was taken out of the room again as soon as he had finished speaking to her two attendants, for it was evident that she herself couldn’t talk, and after he had conferred with the judge, the latter rapped and announced that court was adjourned until the following day owing to the incapacitation of one of the principal witnesses for the state, Tenacity Lowell.

The way Berenson came to me when I had been escorted back, you would have thought his own life was at stake and not mine. “They threw acid at her,” he gasped despondently, “right in the doorway of her own flat! She’s lost an eye, and the whole lower part of her face’s been eaten away — can’t talk even if she wanted to.” He gave me a searching look. “It’s not going to be easy now, Wade.”

“Do you think it has anything to do with this?” I asked him. “With the case?”

“Do I think!” he said bitterly.

“But she was Westman’s witness — what would they want to bawl up the prosecution for like that, if I’m supposed to be taking the rap for some one?”

“Listen, you knew her when she was Pascal’s maid — did she ever strike you as being anything intelligent? Well, whatever she knew, I could’ve gotten out of her. And she knew, all right! And they knew she knew. They weren’t taking unnecessary chances—”

“Gee, that was a lousy thing to do,” I commented.

“Feel sorry for yourself, Wade,” he advised me knowingly. “If it wasn’t for that very wench there, Pascal would be alive right now in California with you. She was the one sent them the tip-off that night — I know what I’m talking about!” He lit a cigarette and shook it at me when it was lit. “She got Pascal hers that night. And now, indirectly, she’s getting you yours. Don’t look at me like that,” he said fiercely. “Do you think I’m talking through my hat or something! I had a damn good chance of getting you out of it if Westman had put her on the stand. And now — you may as well hear it from me as from any one else — I think it’s too late for me to pull you through. You’re in the soup.”

“And what about it?” I said. “I could’ve been in Montreal or Winnipeg the day after it happened, if I’d wanted to. And still be there today, if I’d wanted to badly enough. Only I didn’t want to. I wanted to be where I am. And I wanted to get just what I’m going to get, nothing less and nothing more.”

“The case is closing,” he warned me, “and there’s not much time left! There’s only one thing that might still do some good — how much I don’t know. I can let you take the stand yourself — in your own defense.”

“Do that,” I said, “and hear all about how I choked Bernice Pascal to death.”

“You’re insane,” he spat at me. “I should have pleaded that for you in the first place.”

“Sane or insane,” I told him grimly, “cook I must — in the big, high chair.”

“Don’t bother wishing for it,” he said. “It’ll come quickly enough. And once this case closes, Mr. Know-it-all, an appeal isn’t going to help any!” He flung his cigarette down, reached over, and caught me by the wrist. “Get up there, will you, Wade, if I call on you tomorrow, and tell them the truth — for the love of Christ, tell them the truth! Tell them how you loved her — tell them what she meant to you — talk to them just like you have to me at times — they’re not morons, they’ll understand how it is you couldn’t have possibly done it. My God, there’s something sincere about you when you start talking about her — that would get anyone! Any one who was ever young, who was ever in love himself—” With his hand glued to my wrist, he kept shaking me by the arm. “What can I say to you, fellow, to make you understand? Tell them how she auctioned herself off for a hundred dollars that night — tell them, don’t be ashamed! Tell them how you went out hunting it up. Tell them how you robbed this actor. It’s not going to hurt you; it’s going to help you, if anything! You did it for her. You’ll have that jury in the hollow of your hand. The average man is more of a sentimentalist deep down in himself than any woman alive. Why, the very fact that you signed that confession may be all to the good in the end! You loved her so — that you didn’t want to live; that stands to reason. I still have the taxi driver, to tell them how you were all the way down to Grand Central, could have gotten away beautifully! How’re they going to get around the fact that you didn’t even know how she had been killed when you first told your story to the police? I’ll take care of that, I’ll bring it all out when I sum up — but you — you’ve got to get up there and help me! We’ve still got this one chance, Wade, slim as it is — don’t be a quitter, you owe me something; do this much for me at least. Other clients plead with their lawyers to get them out; here’s a lawyer pleading with his client—”

“If you want me to take the stand,” I said wearily, “I’ll take the stand. But when Westman asks me if I killed her, and he will, I’m going to say yes. That’s all I’ve got left now, the determination to die. I’m going to hang on to it.”

I heard him swearing at me then; making all kinds of noise. I almost thought he was going to hit me in the jaw, he was so furious. I’m positive he would have liked to. I simply didn’t listen, shut all the crannies of my mind and didn’t hear him. Then, after a while, he was gone, and I was by myself again. Glad of it, too. I did what I did every other night — ate my meal when it was brought in to me, and then took a cigarette out of the flattened, crumpled pack I kept in my back pocket, that the turnkey used to buy for me two or three times a week. I gave him a quarter each time — fifteen cents for the thirteen-cent package and ten cents for himself for doing me the favor of getting it. When I was through smoking it, I took off my coat and vest and shoes and pants and went to sleep on the cot in my shirt, tie, socks, and underwear. I didn’t bother taking my tie off ever, because I had a good, even knot in it (from the time I’d first come in here) and I didn’t imagine there was much chance of getting it that accurate a second time without a mirror or anything. Not that it would have mattered, but I was tired of tying neckties around myself all my life long, like I was of everything else.

The next day in court. Berenson had me take the stand — maybe to call my bluff, or maybe because there was nothing else left for him to do any more. He gave me a long, long look, and then he said in a low voice, “Tell your story, Wade,” and then he didn’t look at me any more but just sat there looking down at the floor. I couldn’t even tell if he was listening or not.

I told it briefly, I wanted to get it over with; began abruptly at what had been practically the end of it.

“We were going to California. She wanted to go to California because it was far from New York, and she didn’t like New York any more. I bought the tickets and went home and packed my valise—” At this point, I saw Maxine sitting at the back of the room, the very end seat, on the aisle. “Poor kid,” I thought remorsefully, “just today she had to come here! I told him to tell her to stay away.” Her face was just like a little round white golf-ball at that distance. “So small an area,” I thought, “to suffer so much.”

“When I got there, the doorman insisted he hadn’t called me up and given me any message. I went upstairs anyway, and found her there—”

I stopped a minute, with stage fright or something. If Berenson had shut up, maybe I would have told it the way he wanted me to, the way it had — I suppose — really been.

“Alive or dead?” he said, without looking up from the floor.

“Alive,” I said.

He didn’t bat an eyelash, although for him it probably meant five or ten thousand a year income from now on instead of fifty or seventy-five or a hundred.

Maxine didn’t move, either. I could still see her way over there in the corner, but there was something whiter than her face now in front of it — a handkerchief, I suppose.

“She told me she wasn’t going with me after all. I asked her why. She said I didn’t have enough money. I caught hold of her by the neck, and after awhile we both fell to the floor and she was dead. I went downstairs without any one seeing me and got into a taxi. Then I came back again—”

“Your defendant,” Berenson said dismally, the minute I had stopped speaking.

“You admit you killed her, Mr. Wade?” Westman said as soon as he stood up. The “Mr. Wade” was my reward, I guess, for being the admirable defendant I was.

“I’m no doctor, Mr. Prosecuting Attorney,” I said. “I choked her, and she didn’t move any more. I guess she died then.”

“Would you like us to believe.” he sneered, “that you didn’t intend her to die? That the strangulation was unpremeditated?”

Something blew up inside me, and I sprang to my feet with smarting eyes that blurred out all the faces before me. “You don’t think I wanted to kill her, do you!” I shouted in the direction I’d last seen his face a moment ago. “That much I’ll never admit! How could I want to kill her, damn you, when she was the only thing I had!” And I flopped back in the chair again and brushed my sleeve across my face.

A few minutes later I was out of the box, back where I always sat. I can’t remember if he asked me any more questions after that or not. The deepening fog that had begun to settle over me from that point on didn’t lift any more. All I knew was, she was gone! gone! gone! Why did they keep this up, months afterward, week in and week out? Why didn’t they let me go too!

Maxine came up to me for a minute when I was being led out that day. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done?” I forced my mind to come back to where I was standing, looking at her. “Wade, if they do this thing to you, I want to go too.”

I felt my mouth smiling the way I told it to, and said to her: “Isn’t one of us being here better than none of us being here?”

And I was even going to reach out and touch her on the face to try to make her feel better, but while I was thinking about it, she and the courtroom moved slowly away and I discovered I was back in the cell again holding a thick mug of milk and coffee to my mouth. So I knew I couldn’t do it any more because she was no longer with me.

The next day, I think it was, they both summed up their cases — Westman and Berenson — so I knew it must at last be about over. Oh, God, I was sick of having loved her, of having killed her or not killed her, of having known her at all! I wanted the nothingness that was coming to come even quicker — when there would be no Bernice, no Wade, no New York.

Right after those thirteen that had been there all along went out, I was taken out too. And when I was brought in again, they filed in too. And when the one on the end stood up, I cared less than any one in the room what he was going to say. Then the word “Guilty” came floating toward me like a golden balloon in the air, the reward for all I had been through.

And it grew dark, and it grew light again, and it grew dark and light again. Maybe six times, or maybe sixteen times or maybe sixty. And they kept bringing me back to that place, and bringing me back to that place, and bringing me back to that place. And the last time they brought me back, the judge spoke for a long time, and ended up by saying, “and may God have mercy on your soul.” Then I heard a loud cry in a corner of the room, and turned that way, and saw Maxine lying on the floor. And while the world rolled on without her, I wondered if she had died then or was still living. But some day soon, soon now, the world won’t have to wonder that about me.