Strange Sisters

Chapter 10

Later, she sat in a small, bare room at Headquarters. On the whole, everyone was quite kind to her. She was spoken to softly the few times she was spoken to at all, and the only really bad part about it was the waiting and the trying not to think what was going to happen.

After a long time, a man came into the room and spoke to her, and she recognized him as the sergeant of police who had come to her apartment yesterday.

“Good morning, Miss Gait,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

“Yes. Not your name, though. I can’t remember your name.”

“It’s Tromp. Sergeant Tromp.”

“Oh, yes. It’s not a difficult name. I should have remembered.”

His lips moved in a trace of a smile. “It’s all right. You weren’t in the best of condition for remembering, as I recall. If you’ll come with me now, please, there’s something we’d like you to do.”

She followed him out into the hall and down the hall into another room which was much larger and brighter than the first. She was placed in a line with four other women on an elevated platform under a glaring bulb that cast its light downward with such force and intensity that it seemed to rebound with a kind of material resiliency. She thought there were people in the room beyond the reach of the brilliant light, thought she heard the whisper of movement, but the glare blinded her, and she could not be sure. None of the other women said anything, and neither did she. It was very hot under the light, and she was thankful when a voice said, “Step down, please,” and she was permitted to descend from the platform.

Sergeant Tromp met her at the door and said, “Thank you, Miss Gait. Now we can go back.”

“Back where?” she said.

“To the room you came from.”

“What am I waiting for?”

“Like I told you last night, Lieutenant Ridley wants to see you.”

“Will it be long?”

“No. Not long now.”

He left her in the same room, and she sat in the same chair. After a while, she found that she was thinking too much about what might happen to her, and so she tried to concentrate on a calendar that hung on the wall opposite. It was a large calendar with a separate page for each month of the year, and no one had turned the calendar now for three months. The picture above the number was very bright and gay in spite of a film of dust that had gathered on its surface. It was mostly in primary colors, reds and yellows and blues, and it was a picture of a small boy with a rooster in his arms. Beyond the boy there was a lot of sky with some fluffy white clouds floating across it. She wondered what the boy’s name was, and if the rooster had a name, and if there were really a boy and a rooster like that, or if they were only something the artist had just thought up. The boy had bright red hair. It was the brightest red hair she had ever seen on anyone, even in a picture. Sergeant Tromp returned and said, “Now, Miss Gait” She got up and followed him again, and this time they turned the opposite direction in the hall and went down to a closed door which opened after knocking on it briefly. She went past him into a room that was slightly larger and slightly less bare than the one in which she had waited, and he closed the door again between them, leaving her to face alone a man who stood up behind a desk to meet her.

“Miss Gait?”

“Yes.”

“Sit down, please.”

He indicated a chair before the desk, and she went over and sat in it. The chair had arms and an upholstered seat and was considerably more comfortable than the chair in the other room. On the man’s desk, the desk of the man who must be Lieutenant Ridley, was a cardboard container almost full of coffee, and she could see by the scum of cream on top of the coffee that he had allowed it to become stone cold. She thought at first that Lieutenant Ridley himself was an old man, then she thought that he was a young man, and finally she decided that he was a young man with an old face, which is what he was. His eyes looked as if he hadn’t slept much recently, which he hadn’t.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” he said.

“It’s all right.”

“Have you had any breakfast?”

“No.”

“Would you care for some?”

“I’m not hungry, thank you.”

“Some coffee, at least?”

“No. No, thank you.”

He picked up a six-sided pencil and turned it in his fingers. He turned it slowly, so that each side came on top in turn, and he studied each side carefully, especially the side with the printing on it, before turning the pencil again.

“Do you understand why you are here, Miss Gait?”

“No,” she lied.

“You have no idea at all?”

“No.”

“It’s odd that you’re so docile about it. Most people kick up a fuss if they feel we’ve brought them in without justification.”

She said nothing, having no words to explain her emotional exhaustion even if it had been advisable to do so, and he looked up at her from the pencil with heavy eyes.

“Why did you try to leave town this morning, Miss Gait?”

“I wanted to go home. Back to the town where I was born. I bought a ticket on the bus, and I was going. Is that wrong?”

“It depends. You just decided all at once to go? At five o’clock in the morning? There are frequent buses that way, Miss Gait. Why didn’t you decide to go at a more convenient time?”

“I don’t know. I do things like that. I just make up my mind to do something, and I go ahead and do it.”

“Is that so?” His tone inferred a broader significance in her words than she had intended. “Sometimes that isn’t so wise. To act precipitately, I mean. Sometimes it’s better to think about a thing.”

There was no response she dared to make, and so she was silent again, waiting for him to continue.

“Do you remember the man who called on you yesterday, Miss Gait?”

“Yes. It was Sergeant Tromp. I didn’t remember his name, but he told me again this morning.”

“Good. Do you remember what he said to you, or what you said to him?”

This was danger. This was the gap, the hiatus, the threat of the unknown. There was a sudden pain in her chest, a tightening noose around her heart, but she managed to answer quietly.

“No. I’d been drinking, you see.”

“I know. And you remember nothing?”

“Yes. Nothing.”

He released his breath in a long sigh and looked down at the pencil, revolving it slowly in his fingers.

“Then we’ll have to start fresh. There was a man, Miss Gait. His name was Angus Brunn, and he was murdered. Did you know him?”

Her first thought was to lie, but then she remembered in time the notebook with her name in it, and she decided it would be better to tell part of the truth and to lie only about the things they probably didn’t know.

“Angus Brunn?” she said, and she was surprised and a little replenished to discover how lightly the terrible name lay on her tongue. “Yes, I knew an Angus Brunn. I knew him very slightly.”

“Have you seen him recently?”

“I don’t know. I may have. One meets people here and there.”

“I don’t mean that. Not a casual meeting. Have you had a date with him, for instance? Been alone with him?”

Again she started to lie, and again she decided in time that it would be better to tell part of the truth. Because she had stood in a line under bright light for the inspection of whose eyes she did not know, and maybe they were the eyes of the taxi driver who had driven her and Angus Brunn to Brunn’s apartment, and maybe they were the eyes of someone unknown who had seen her going into or coming out of the apartment, but whosoever they were, they might have remembered what they saw, and the simple fact that the identification routine had been used was proof that they had seen something.

She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them and spoke so softly that Ridley had to lean forward across his desk to catch the words.

“All right. I was there. In his apartment, I mean. I went there with him the night he was killed. Night before last, it was.”

He nodded his head slowly without looking at her. “That’s good, Miss Gait. It’s always better to tell the truth. Why did you lie to begin with?”

“I didn’t lie.”

“That’s true. You didn’t. You were merely evasive. Why were you evasive, Miss Gait?”

“I was frightened. I thought I might be suspected.”

“Is that why you tried to leave town?”

“Yes.” -

“Tell me what happened in Angus Brunn’s apartment night before last.”

“While I was there?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Nothing much. He... he gave me a drink. Then he started doing something I didn’t like... getting familiar. So I left.”

“What time was it when you got there?”

“I don’t remember exactly. Around midnight, I think.”

“And when you left?”

“Maybe half an hour later. Maybe not quite so long.”

“I see. Did you meet anyone afterward?”

“No.”

“Where did you go?”

“Home. Back to my apartment.”

“Do you know if Angus Brunn planned to see anyone else after you left him?”

“No. He may have, but I don’t know.”

“Do you know of anyone who had a reason to want him dead?”

“No. I don’t really know much about him at all.”

“I see. As you know from the newspapers, he was stabbed with an ice-pick. All the evidence shows that he was approaching the person who stabbed him. This indicates that the killer might have been defending himself against an attack. Such a theory is supported also by the fact that Brunn’s face had been badly clawed. You said that you left his apartment because he became offensive Miss Gait. How offensive?”

The noose around her heart was now drawn so tight that she thought she would surely scream with the pain just as soon as she could gather enough breath. She had quite forgotten the marks on Angus Brunn’s face, but more threatening by far in the consideration of her own security, she had also forgotten the torn nails on her right hand. She clenched the hand nervously, digging the nails into her palm.

She whispered, “He didn’t get violent, if that’s what you mean.”

“That isn’t quite what I mean.” He smiled thinly. “At least, it isn’t what I’m most interested in at the moment. What I’m most interested in is, did you get violent?”

“No. I just left. I told you I just left.”

“May I see your hands, please?”

She looked across into his face as if she were mentally deficient, or a little deaf, her lips slightly apart in a rather adenoidal expression and her eyes dull.

“What?”

“Your hands, please. I’d like to see them.”

She extended her arms, hands turned palms up, and he smiled patiently and rather sadly.

“Palms down, please.”

She turned them down slowly, and he leaned forward and peered briefly at the torn nails and then leaned back again with a sigh and closed his eyes.

“How did you tear your nails, Miss Gait?”

“I... I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember? I should think it would be quite painful, tearing your nails like that. Surely you can remember if you try.”

“I... I think I did it opening a package. Yes. Yes, that’s it. I remember now. It was a cardboard box, and the flaps that came together on top were glued down tightly. I pulled them loose with my fingers, and I tore the nails.”

He opened his eyes and repeated his thin smile, and she knew that he believed nothing of what she said, but he didn’t pursue the matter because the lie was patent, and it was something he could come back to when he was ready. The lines seemed to deepen in his thin, old-looking face, and the sadness deepened and darkened in his eyes.

“There’s something that bothers me,” he said. “When Sergeant Tromp talked with you last night, you said something about your hair. The color of your hair. What did you mean by that, Miss Gait?”

So that was it. That was what she had said, and the memory of saying it must have lingered beneath the level of her conscious mind, because the fear of having said something was in her when she awoke, and it was something that had disturbed her in all the hours since.

“I don’t remember saying that. I guess I was just talking crazy. As I said, I’d been drinking.”

“I believe you asked the sergeant if he’d come to arrest you for the color of your hair. Don’t you think that’s a strange thing to say even if you’d had too much to drink?”

“I guess so. I don’t know. I don’t remember anything about it.”

He dropped his eyes and began to talk softly to the top of his desk, and she was in the first instant back in the quiet library long ago with the slender book in her hands, and then she was in her bed every night before sleeping and every morning after waking in all the depression periods that had happened to her since, and the words were in her mind before they were on his tongue.

After he was quiet, he went on looking at the desk for a while, and then he looked up and said, “Only it’s murder now, Miss Gait.”

She almost told him everything at that moment — how it started and how it happened and how it had been afterward. But then, because evasion had become such a chronic technique in her adjustment to life that she could not immediately overcome it, she said nothing whatever, and after waiting for her, after giving her a long chance, he said tiredly, “You may go home now, Miss Gait, but you are not to leave the city. Please don’t try again.”

Incredible as it seemed, he was offering her freedom of a sort when she had really expected none of any sort, and she retrieved it, however precariously, with a strange feeling of dread at being turned out to loose ends. She stood up and said, “Thank you,” and went out quickly into the hall, the door closing behind her.

He sat at his desk and watched her shadow vanish from the glass, and he thought, You could have held her. There’s evidence enough, and before long there will be more than enough. It’s only a matter of getting it together. Better than that and much easier, you could have broken her down. She’s confused and tense and hanging on by a thread, and only a little pressure would bring the break. Why didn’t you hold her? Why didn’t you apply the pressure, James J. Ridley?

The J was for Jasper, but he hated the name and was ashamed of it and therefore never used it. His mother had wanted him to be a minister, and sometimes he wished he had been one, but the reason he hadn’t was that all the ministers he had ever known had had black and white minds. As for himself, he had never had any faith in the ancient battle of good and evil except as it was fought by the individual within himself, and he had always been conscious of living among his fellows in a glass house. So he had eventually become a policeman instead of a minister. He was always fascinated and depressed by the complex and tragic pattern of neural and glandular processes, or whatever you wanted to call the essential function that made a man what he was, and he had long ago learned to accept with bitter resignation the simple truth that the soul was a strange bed that accommodated strange bedfellows. Sometimes he would remind himself of the scriptural admonition that a man is as he thinketh in his heart, and then he would look into his own and look quickly away. Hunting disturbed and depressed him, and his job was hunting, and it was often a great burden. He was disturbed and depressed because he had no real belief in arbitrary and ruthless categories of transgressions or in pat prescriptions for their treatment, and when, as an agent of retribution, he tried to convince himself that the security of the group required the castigation of the aberrant and the apostate, he would inevitably begin to weigh against each other in his mind the transgressions of the individual against the group and the transgressions of the group against the individual, and this only deepened his depression. He was, in brief, the best kind of policeman, a very good policeman of the highest type, but for his own sake he should have been almost anything else in the world.

When he was a kid at home, his father used to set mousetraps in the pantry at night. In his room just off the kitchen, lying there stiffly in the darkness that seemed to gather and hover, he could hear his father moving around out there, his tread heavy and measured on the hard linoleum, and it was easy to follow him by ear to the kitchen cabinet where the spring traps were kept on a top shelf, across to the icebox for rat-trap cheese, back to the cabinet for the baiting, the final preparation of the little machines of death, and so finally into the pantry where the traps were placed strategically on the dark shelves. And at last, as if it were the terrifying eclipse of all hope and compassion, the sudden erasure of the crack of light under the door to the kitchen.

Then he was alone in total darkness with proximate death. The wall between his bedroom and the pantry was thin, and the sound of the springing traps seemed to be amplified rather than reduced by the passage through, so that the sharp snaps, when they came, were like the terrible crashing of summer thunder.

The waiting was bad, very bad. Sometimes, when he was lucky, he fell asleep before the first trap snapped, and then in the morning it was all right, and it was possible to reduce the experience to the vague status of something that has lost the little meaning it ever had. Other times. Though, the sound of the springing traps preceded sleep, and he was filled with the strange terror and torture of conflicting griefs — for the small animal that acquired in violent death a significance greater than itself, and for the man, his father, who had perpetrated the dark violence.

Then there were the times when the waiting was not to be endured. The times when he got out of bed, the floor cold and hard under his bare feet, the intimate environment corrupted by the evil of darkness, and walked softly through the kitchen to the pantry to release the traps, holding each strong spring carefully with a thumb and letting it move over and down slowly in a release of tension. The black threat removed, sleep came easily, for the time, in an armistice that never developed into final peace.

Next morning, of course, the accounting. His father, anger modified by bewilderment in the face of behavior he could in no way understand, looking at him with the shadow of his bafflement in his eyes. His mother, the gentle interventionist, saying, “Now, dad, now, dad.” His father, shoulders lifting in exasperation and defeat, saying, “Oh, well, then, let the damn things take the place,” and walking away with the relief one always feels in discarding responsibility for the unnatural.

It’s a long way from a mouse to a man. It’s a long, long way from exorbitant sorrow for the death of a tiny rodent to exaltation in the killing of a human. And in the interim between there must be the painful development of mental toughness and resiliency, the capacity to take the world as it is without the burden of personal responsibility or distorted guilt.

Take the time on Leyte in the wet bleak days when the last line of Japanese defense cracked under hammering and fell apart, the enemy scattering and fleeing in small groups over the rough face of the island. He was on patrol. He remembered quite clearly, though he would have liked to forget, the complete sequence of events — the squad resting on the crest of a bill, the shabby Filipino hut in the valley below, lonely in desertion. The sequence running to its end — the waft down the slope into the valley in the high grass, the cautious approach to the hut and the sudden breathless suspense when the rhythmic tapping became audible, at last the view of the Japanese soldier, seen with stark clarity beyond the sight of a rifle, as he sat cross-legged at the front of the hut pounding in his steel helmet rice for the meal he would never eat. Oh, it was great fun, that kill. The Jap never knew James Ridley was there, no danger whatever to Ridley’s security. Just a ragged, dirty, lonely and beaten man, jerking up in a posture of horrible surprise when the bullet struck him, and then slumping over in utter immobility, as if, in the end, he couldn’t die fast enough.

No judgment against Ridley, no indictment. Praise, rather, in those days when a moratorium had been declared on the Sixth Commandment. The warm, effusive approval and commendation of comrades. And worst of all, worst now in dark retrospect, that cruel and singing exaltation in his own heart.

Yes, it’s a long, long way from a mouse to a man, and sometime along the way, somehow, comes the tough resiliency, the ability to cope on even terms. But the old self is never lost. It recedes in one time only to reassert itself in another, and James Ridley stirred uneasily behind his desk and repeated bitterly that he was only an agent, that he was only doing a job.

He was very tired. He had been busy most of the night, and the rest of the night he had sat at his desk and gathered in his mind loose threads of inference and suggestion and odds and ends of fact, and it had all started because a girl who had drunk too much had referred to a poem. He cursed himself for his familiarity with the lines, wished to God that he had never read them, but once he had heard them from Sergeant Tromp and understood their significance in relation to the girl and to the man she had surely killed, there was nothing to do but to go ahead along the line suggested. So he had walked the streets, had visited places he knew, and because a girl cannot live a certain kind of life in one city for several years without leaving here and there circumstantial evidence of the kind of life she lived, he had learned a great deal. Nothing definitive, nothing that actually proved anything, certainly not murder, but sufficient to make him understand the kind of person Kathy Gait was and to make him understand why, under certain circumstances, she might kill a man. What bothered him most was why she had placed herself in those circumstances. He thought he understood that, too, and it bothered him. It made him feel for her a great pity.