As the city outside stirred, awoke to the new day, and went about its business, she began to verge almost on collapse. As butchers, barbers, bakers, elevator operators, bus conductors, street cleaners, bootblacks, newspaper vendors — and pallbearers — took up their daily tasks she commenced to beg them:
“Oh, please let me go! I can’t stand any more of this! Please let me go! I haven’t done anything! I tell you I don’t know where he went!” Her distress became almost unendurable; she couldn’t even sit still on her chair any longer; her fidgeting hands plucked her handkerchief into threads. It was obvious that unless they dismissed her soon they were going to have a first-class case of hysteria on their hands.
After holding what seemed to her like an endless conference in an adjoining room, they sent out word that she would be released on her own recognizance. She was, of course, to hold herself at their disposal for further questioning at any time. If she tried to leave town, she would be arrested.
It was now ten minutes past nine. She fled downstairs to the street like one possessed. She must have sensed that their object in suddenly letting her go was in the hope that she would eventually lead them to Champ Lane.
So she was careful — very careful — even in her frantic haste. She dodged, apparently aimlessly, through the stream of pedestrians, darted into a large department store, dashed down into the basement and left the store by a side-street entrance. Then she plunged across the street and entered a small and grimy but quite respectable hotel.
She had to call Eddie — right away. If she used the pay booth in the lobby, someone might overhear her. She wasn’t sure that she’d actually lost whoever might be trailing her. So she went into the ladies’ washroom and used the telephone there.
In a minute, Eddie’s low-pitched voice came to her over the wire. She identified herself. “What about — him, Eddie? Is he all right? Where is he?”
“Hold it, sister. I haven’t heard a thing.”
“But he said — Eddie, he said he’d call you.” Her voice rose as panic stirred through her; her fingers squeezed around the mouthpiece of the phone until they ached.
“Look. Don’t come over here. Call me later. I’ll let you know if I hear anything...”
“But, Eddie, something must have—” The phone clicked in her ear, and to no one in particular she said, loudly, shrilly, “His arm — the bleeding — dear God, no!”
When she was on the street again, she was a woman gone mad. Her face was all pulled apart the mouth wrenched open, eyes wide and staring. She forgot that someone might be following her, she forgot to be careful, she forgot everything but Champ — and his arm — and the blood — and where he was, lying unconscious, maybe dead, in that awful place...
She waved to a taxi, jumped in with a swift, sprawling movement, and gave the driver the address of the house she’d left the night before.
The crepe was still affixed to the front door, and but for the two yawning second-floor windows, and some strips of tape holding the glass in place in the street door, there was nothing to witness last night’s battle. The superintendent was sweeping up glass shards from the side-walk as she got out of the cab and accosted him with a white, strained face.
“I came back to get my things,” she said, staring at him with a peculiar fixed tensity.
He glowered at her over his shoulder. “The quicker the better!” He spat, virtuously if inaccurately. “Go on up, help yourself. Fine people to have living in a respectable house!”
She couldn’t seem to tear herself away, though. She kept looking from him to the crêpe and from the crepe to him. Her eyes strayed up the bullet-pitted facade of the building — stopped a little higher than the second floor, where the blinds were drawn down full length.
“What time,” she asked as casually as she could, “are they having their funeral?”
“Yah, you should ask!” he growled resentfully. “Fine funeral you and that loafer husband of yours give ’em!” And then as she hovered there in the middle of all his glass-sweepings, he went on, “It’s all over with long ago. Eight o’clock sharp they come by and screw down the lid. Eight-thirty already they left the house! He’s under the ground at Evergreen Cemetery by now, poor man, and may his soul rest in peace—”
Something that sounded like the twang of a snapping violin string fell on his cars, and when he looked, his carefully collected glass-sweepings were scattered all over the sidewalk again.
She got the door of the taxi open and fell in. She didn’t climb in, she fell in on her lace. The driver heard a choked sound that he translated as “Evergreen Cemetery,” and acted upon it. Her legs were still sticking out through the open door as the cab veered off.
Down at the lower corner, by one of those coincidences that were happening again, there was another cab drawn up at the curb with three men in it. She had managed to get up on her knees by the time her machine flashed by. She screamed out at them through the open window, “For God’s sake, follow me — if you’re Feds!” Which was a strange invitation to come from Champ Lane’s wife. Her outthrust arm, beckoning them on wind mill-fashion, continued to wave frantically out the window for blocks down.
“Quit it, lady!” warned the driver at one point, when she had caught him by the shoulders with both hands to help him get some speed up. “Or I’ll turn you over to a cop!”
One cop did overtake them shortly, on a motorcycle, but instead of stopping them, he shot ahead, holding the crosswise traffic in the side streets until they had gone by.
No vehicle had ever yet arrived outside a burial ground with such indecent haste as this one, squealing to a skidding stop and filling the peaceful air with a smell of burned-out bearings. But she was already tumbling through the dignified ornamental gateway, into the tranquil setting of well groomed shrubbery, neat white markers, and winding, sanded paths.
She drew up abruptly, cupped both hands despairingly to the sides of her head, as though not knowing which way to turn. A distant muffled explosion, like a percussion cap buried in the ground, solved her dilemma for her. She sped in that direction like an arrow out of a bow.
Halfway she met a crowd of people running toward her — in fact scattering in all directions from a single focal point. Frightened people, squalling, gibbering people, one or two of them even stumbling over the turf in their frantic, heedless haste to reach the gates. She battled her way through them until she reached the spot where the stampede had started. An equally frightened but more courageous sexton stood at bay on a little mound of freshly upturned earth, a prayer book extended exorcisingly toward a coffin that was precariously balanced on the very lip of the grave. It was pounding as though it contained a dynamo. And as it pounded it rocked, almost seesawed, with a violent inner agitation. The sexton’s white lips moved in hurried exhortation, but no sound passed them.
The widow stood, wavering, by him.
Just as she got there a second gun shot echoed hollowly inside the monstrous thing, and wisps of smoke filtered out of bullet holes that the coffin must have received the night before. Champ Line’s wife dropped down beside it, threw her arms over it in maddened, forestalling embrace, to keep it from going over. She was aware of three men running up after her from the direction of the entrance gates. She recognized one of the men who had questioned her.
“Help me,” she sobbed. “You followed me because you wanted Champ Lane — he’s in there — help me get him out—”
The man’s face went hard and incredulous. “In there — how?”