“I... Ri... a friend asked me to... to... Please, don’t look at me like that, I... it was... your wife’s fault. If she’d left... left him alone...”
Curt dropped, “Indeed?” into the silence. He moved over to the fireplace, leaned an elbow on the mantle. From here he could see the clean even line of her hair parting. “Left whom alone?”
Debbie just shook her head, eyes squeezed tight shut to keep the tears inside. She mustn’t tell.
Curt, sensing the resistance in that direction, swung off at right angles. “Here. Use my handkerchief. What did Paula do to him?”
“All right!” she flared, red-eyed and hating it, but now able to hide her face behind his handkerchief, at least. “All right! Your precious wife picked him up in a motel bar and took him to her room and... seduced him! He’s not even twenty yet and she was... was...”
“Thirty-six.” All right, old, to nineteen. He said, “What motel was it? What month? What day?”
“I don’t know any of that.” Debbie found herself a little put out, through her tears, that she didn’t. Ricky had left her woefully unprepared to defend herself against this hateful accusing man who hadn’t really accused anyone of anything yet; but then, she thought, it wasn’t Ricky’s fault. She hadn’t told him about Professor Halstead’s call. She went on, controlling her tears now, “But that wasn’t all. She kept calling him at home, waiting around for him outside Jay... outside where he... works. She wouldn’t leave him alone. She was... was insatiable.”
As she used the damning word she watched his face, waiting for it to crumble under the impact of his wife’s infidelity; but he just stood there quietly, gravely attentive. None of the wrenching pain that she would feel if Ricky were to... But maybe when you got old, your emotions didn’t touch you anymore. Or maybe it was no surprise to him.
“You were in the phone booth because of your friend?”
Now that the bad part was past, Debbie didn’t mind talking. She nodded almost eagerly. “Ri... he planned to see her that Friday night and tell her to leave him alone, but then he had a flat tire and...”
“And so Paula, in despair, killed herself.”
Curt supplied the ending almost absently. Unless this girl was a consummate actress, she knew nothing at all about the vicious attack on Paula. Her boyfriend, call him X, had been damned clever, using Debbie’s love — whatever love meant at nineteen — by telling her a story she would want to believe, a tragic story that would give him stature in her eyes. Too sophisticated for nineteen? No. Not if you assume a doting mother, say, to spend a boyhood practicing on, a sister or two, perhaps, to study and observe as he grew up.
“You were his lookout, right, Debbie? So he wouldn’t be surprised here with her, and be... compromised?”
She nodded eagerly. “Except he was worried about her reputation, not his own.”
Curt nodded almost benignly, as an icy anger began to grip him. “One little thing that puzzles me, Debbie. If he was here because Paula wanted him to be, why would he need a lookout? If anyone rang the bell, she needed only not answer it.”
“I... don’t...” Debbie was momentarily stricken by the implications of the question. “Maybe... he was afraid you’d come home...”
“Have you ever heard of a man named Harold Rockwell?”
“I... no, sir.” She seemed genuinely confused. “Is he another of her... I mean...”
“Another of Paula’s lovers?” Curt felt grimly amused and a bit sick at the same time. X had done his work well. “No. Harold Rockwell was assaulted on a downtown street and beaten so viciously that he went blind, one week before my wile’s suicide. Four teen-agers did it, Debbie. Driving a two-tone green Chevrolet station wagon, a fifty-five or fifty-six model.”
He was watching her closely; the station wagon had sunk in, all right. It had meant something to her. But she tossed her head almost nervously, like a thoroughbred mare; still spirit in her.
“I don’t see what this has to do with... with anything.”
“Paula was a witness to that assault — the only witness. Because Rockwell was blind, only she could identify the attackers. One week later, on the Friday night Paula killed herself, my home was invaded by four teen-agers. Four predators, if you will. Just at eight o’clock, when you were in that phone booth, they parked a two-tone green fifty-five or fifty-six Chevrolet station wagon north of the golf course, walked down the fairway to the fourteenth green. You had the phone booth door open, the all-clear signal, so they came up to the house—”
“No!” she exclaimed, catching the implications for the first time.
“When Paula opened the door they hit her in the stomach, and then dragged her into the reading room...” He pointed toward the back hall. “Through there, just a few steps. There’s a daybed in there.”
Debbie was drawing her face from side to side in negation, eyes tight shut, as if already aware of what was coming. Curt knew he should stop now, but he couldn’t; he had reconstructed it too often in the silence of his mind to stop now.
“And then they raped her, one after the other. Maybe they even had seconds because she was such prime stuff. But always one of them would be on the porch to watch the phone booth through the trees.”
“Stop it,” she sobbed. “Please stop...”
“An hour, two hours after they left — we aren’t sure just what time that was — Paula went upstairs and very carefully and almost ceremoniously slit her wrist and bled to death.” He moved in on her, haunted by Worden’s coarse, unfeeling remark four months before. “Why do you think she did that, Debbie? Do you suppose she found out she liked it?”
He had come to a stop standing over her, breathing hard, sweat pouring down his face, shirt sodden. Debbie was huddled on the couch with her arms folded under her breasts, each white-fingered hand gripping the opposite elbow.
When she raised her face there was true horror and revulsion in it. “And you think that I... that I would help somebody... do...”
Curt backed off, shook his head; he felt sick. He said gently, “No, Debbie, I don’t think that. I think you were used, unwittingly.”
But he had lost her. He had lost control, pushed too hard, put her into a corner she had to get out of at any cost to logic or thought.
“I...” Her lips were so dry that she had to stop and wet them, but her chin thrust stubbornly and her eyes were almost transfigured. “Do you really expect me to believe that Ri... that my... that he would do something like that to anyone? I... know him. I...”
Curt knew she was just fighting back, that her mind was simply refusing the monstrous, the unacceptable, but it still momentarily shook him. What if he was wrong? What if it all just had been a series of grotesque and terrible coincidences? What if Paula had been having an affair with Debbie’s nineteen-year-old boyfriend?
He sighed. “It happened, Debbie, pretty much as I’ve told it. If you’re so convinced that your friend isn’t involved, give me his name. Let me talk with him, let me be convinced, too.” Even as he said it, he knew it was useless.
Debbie stood up on legs which she seemed to find tottery. “I want to go away now, please.”
“I’ll drive you back to school.”
“I’d rather walk.”
As she started for the door, Curt, on sudden impulse, picked up from the mantlepiece the envelope with Paula’s suicide note in it. The words had long since been burned indelibly into his brain. At the door, he thrust it into her hands. She met his eyes almost blindly, not understanding, still bewildered by lingering shock and emotion.