“If she is Slick Merina’s wife why does he let her work in a restaurant?” Danny screamed. “He has money!”
“Sure, but you think she gets any?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look,” Angelo said. “This girl, she is a good girl. She comes to the city only six months ago, from some little place in New Hampshire. She comes here to study at business school, nights, and she gets a job daytimes working as a waitress. Slick Merina, he gets a load of her and dates her up.
“Well, she falls for him. She is all alone in the city, and lonesome and how is she to know Slick Merina is the kind of man he is? After all, does he look like a killer? No! So she falls hook, line and sinker, and marries him — and then, when it is too late, she finds out the truth.”
Danny Phillips nodded, tears in his eyes.
“So naturally, being a good girl,” Angelo said, “she hates him. And he knows it. And it makes him sore. He says to her, ‘All right; you hate me, you get no money; you want to eat you go to work.’ So she gets a job at the Braydon, and that burns him up even worse. He abuses her. Only the other night he beat her up, and she comes to work with her face purple from bruises.”
Danny Phillips sat very still, except for his hands. His hands opened and closed, opened and closed, and were sweaty. “Why don’t she go home?” he muttered.
“For one thing, it costs money. For another, she is scared he would follow her. This Slick Merina is bad. He says to her, ‘You go home, you run away from me, and you’ll be sorry. You and your folks, too. You go back to that jerk town in New Hampshire and I’ll make you wish you was dead.’ So she is afraid to go home.”
Danny Phillips took all that with him when he left Angelo’s rooming house. He took it back to his own rooming house and gnawed on it, brooded over it, almost as if the problem were his own. That night be slept with it.
For two days, Thursday and Friday, Danny thought of nothing else. He knew now the reason for that faraway look in the girl’s eyes when he first saw her in front of the department store. He knew, too, why she had lied about being beaten up. A girl like that had pride. She wouldn’t tell her troubles to everyone. All this information Angelo had, he had picked up piece by piece, over a long period of time.
Saturday afternoon Danny emerged from the subway with two fresh wallets in his possession, two wallets containing, together, over eighty dollars. He hadn’t had an easy time getting hold of that money. For some strange reason — probably because he wanted the money so very badly — his hands had acquired a tendency to twitch, and he’d really been scared.
But he had it, and after getting rid of the empty wallets in a refuse can he headed for Abanico’s pawn shop on Kelsey Street. It didn’t matter that Abanico knew him and might wonder things.
He got what he wanted in Abanico’s for twenty dollars and then did another errand, and returned to his rooming house. It was about five-thirty then. From Mrs. Macusker he obtained an envelope and a sheet of writing paper, and then upstairs in his own room, with the door shut, he composed a letter
It was hard work, writing that letter. Not only was it hard work spelling the words out so they could be read, but he had to be careful what he put into it. So it was almost six-thirty when Danny arrived at 23 Dickson Street.
You could have asked Danny Phillips then what his plans were, and he wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Not in detail. All he really had was a vague idea of what he thought ought to be done, and a belief in his own ability to accomplish it. But he didn’t know how he was going to accomplish it. His brain wasn’t thorough enough to pigeon-hole a sequence of ideas and say, “This is step one, this is step two, this is step three and so forth.” So when Danny arrived at the apartment house he hadn’t any definite idea of what to do when he got there.
So far, he had gone along step by step in a kind of groping fashion, not worrying about the ultimate consequences. Now, however, he saw the end in sight and appreciated the obstacles still to be hurdled. For one thing, he had to be sure that Slick Merina was not in that apartment.
Getting past the downstairs door was not difficult, even though the door was locked. He merely punched the bell marked Janitor and mumbled into the speaking tube: “Let me in, please. It is Mr. Merrill. I have forgot my keys.” A man named Anthony Merrill occupied apartment number 4, according to the directory.
The door buzzed, and Danny went in.
When he approached the door of her apartment, though, he felt shaky. All he had to do was bend down and push under the door the envelope he had prepared at his rooming house, but he had to be sure Slick Merina would not get it. So he stood beside the door and listened, thinking that if Slick Merina were inside there would be some talking going on.
There was. And it was not ordinary talk, either. And it was not Slick Merina doing the talking; it was the girl.
And it was not Slick Merina doing the listening, because why would the girl be telling him about how she came to the city and got a job in a restaurant and so forth?
It was funny, but Danny Phillips could hear every word of it, almost as if there were no door in front of him. He put his left ear against the door and plugged up his right ear with a finger, and the words seemed to crawl right up inside the wood, as if they were coming out of a phonograph. That was because the girl was hysterical, sort of, and talking in a loud voice.
Then Danny heard a man’s voice, deep and gruff, saying: “I don’t care what Merino threatens! You’re coming with me! You never should have left home in the first place!”
The girl started to cry then, and the man’s voice lost some of its gruffness, but still Danny could hear what he was saying. He said: “Listen, darling, you can’t go on living like this. You just can’t. You were my girl back home, and you loved me. I know you did. And you can learn to love me again, after this mess is cleared up. We were kids together, Dorothy. We grew up loving each other. What kind of a man would I be if I went back home and left you here, knowing what I know about the hell you’ve been through?”
The girl didn’t answer. She just cried. Danny Phillips, listening, didn’t know whether it was her tears or the man’s words that made him feel so dry and tight and twisted inside. Most likely it was the stuff the man was telling her. He was her sweetheart. Danny hadn’t counted on any such complication as that.
The man said then: “Dearest, you’ve got to give me an answer. Will you go home with me?”
“I... I can’t, Jim,” she sobbed.
His voice, answering that, was so loud all of a sudden that Danny actually jumped away from it. You could hear it out in the hall, even without putting your ear to the door.
“Then I’ll settle one thing before I go home!” he shouted. “I’ll rid you of that beast and his brutality! I’ll kill him!”
Danny Phillips was pretty good at putting sounds together to form pictures, and by listening carefully he had a fair idea of what was happening. The girl was pleading with the man — with this Jim — and telling him he couldn’t do things that way, and the man was refusing to listen. She probably had her arms around him, trying to hold him back, because when he came toward the door where Danny crouched, her voice came with him, sobbing and pleading with him. Then the door opened and they were out in the hall.