“How’s that, Allie?”
“Five long years I work with her. I spend time, I spend money, I send her to coaches, I fix her teeth, I give her class. It’s like a goal I got. My own career I forget. I’m smalltime, granted, but I could make a buck if I gave a damn. I didn’t give a damn. Not for myself. So I train her and coach her and bring her along and get her this job — and she falls in love with my pal." His mouth twisted.
“You didn’t like that,” ventured the Lieutenant.
“I’m peculiar that way,” said Parks. “Especially now that she don’t need me any more. She had the wings I made for her, she could fly by herself. And the grand a week she was going to make in Vegas, that was going to build up this jerk I was keeping from starvation. My pal, my buddy.” He spat the words.
“So I put it to him one night. Was he double-crossing me, making a play for this dame I staked out for myself? And was he using my own dough to do it? Because even the clothes he had on his back were mine. He said no, somebody gave me a wrong steer. His loyalty was to me, to my career. When I clicked big I’d pull him up with me. The dame meant nothing to him, he said. So I said fine, then let’s have a laugh. I told him what to do, it would be a howl. Madeleine would drink this stuff and it would have alum or something that would make her pucker up so she wouldn’t look so sophisticated. While she sang about Paris. He had to admit it was funny, but his heart wasn’t in it. But he couldn’t look me in the face and say no. So he does it.”
“And you gave him a poison instead?”
Parks nodded. “I thought that was kind of cute. That way I got even with both double-crossers.”
“What did he say when he heard she was dead?”
“It was like a kick in the belly. But I told him I had evidence she was two-timing me with some guy, after the five years I put in for her, and he didn’t let out a peep.” Parks shrugged contemptuously. “Imagine, I get him to kill the dame he’s romancing and he just sits there.”
Calmly he sat back and lit a cigarette. “So I confessed. Where does that leave you, Sheriff or Marshal or whatever you are? Put that drunk on a stand and even a shyster lawyer would murder him. And Howie won’t talk. I do the thinking for both of us.” He laughed. “Howie never had an original idea in his life. He’s a copycat. Takes my style, my delivery, finally my dame. A couple hours ago I told him to clear out for a few months and I’d tell him when to come back. I promised him his old job of going for cigarettes. We drank on it.”
He sat up suddenly, made a noise, then his head fall back. A bubbling sound came from him and the Lieutenant yanked the dark glasses off. Parks’s eyes were wide and staring and his breath was coming in gasps. His hands clawed at the upholstery, digging into the leather; then, slowly, he relaxed. The Lieutenant felt for a pulse.
After a while Rooney said, “That guy’s dead.”
“Howie’s a copycat, all right,” the Lieutenant said. “Let’s find him before he gets any original ideas.”
Virginia Layefsky
Statement Of The Accused
We regret that it was not our editorial privilege to “discover” Virginia Layefsky. She has had one story published before — in "Ladies Home Journal” — and now we bring you her second. "Statement of the Accused" is a story you will not forget for a long, long time — if you ever do forget it…
The author’s formal training has been almost entirely in music. She studied at the Julliard, and before she left New York with her husband, who is a professional musician, she earned her living as a pianist. Now she and her husband move around a great deal. For six months of the year they live in Pittsburgh — for the symphony season; they spend a summer month in the British Virgin Islands, and the rest of the summer in Vermont where the author's husband is a member of the Estival String Quartet. All of which now gives Virginia Layefsky more time to write — which we fervently hope she will take advantage of…
"Statement of the Accused” is a devastating indictment of a certain type of motion picture currently in the vogue. We guarantee you will never see one of those movies again with quite the same feeling…
I go every Friday night. I like the ones best that have them girls they drag along the sand. I saw one like that once. He dragged her along the sand and they was in some desert and she was dead. She was little and long blonde hair and it dragged over the sand. And her head bumped a soft kind of bump when he dragged her down the hills and it showed her eyes was open. They just stared wide open and at first I didn’t think it was a good movie because they said a different language, and the words they print at the bottom go too fast to read. But it was, and it was French I think. He was crying but I don’t know why he was crying because sometimes I don’t watch all the whole movie, only parts, and her blouse was tore.
And all that hair and sand and her dead made me want to laugh and shake and I did. The inside of my mouth got so dry — not from popcorn, and I had some — that I had to lick my lips. It lasted a long time him dragging her with her eyes open until I wanted to shout out loud. But I didn’t because the usher comes then — he did before down at the Paradise — and made me leave. So I was quiet but I felt something happening to me so’s I could hardly sit still. And I couldn’t quit watching and I didn’t want to but I licked my lips some more and moved with her over that sand, and I could feel it all hot like sand, and then somebody whispered.
I looked but she wasn’t whispering to me. They all sat so still just looking at the picture and nothing happening. She was whispering to the man on her other side. He looked at me and he had on a suit and looked like the head of the shipping department, Mr. Munson, looks. And then the both of them got up and left to another seat across the aisle.
I stayed through it all over again through all that talk nobody understood and it took a long time to get back to the place where they were in the desert again. I knew just where it came though because I could feel it begin to happen and it was better that time. But after it was over the lights come on and I hated that. Everybody got up and left and I wanted to cry because I had to leave too. With the excitement still there and to go home where she was, to the apartment. I sleep in the living room because she has the bedroom but she waits up and she’s my aunt.
I been living with her since I was ten and my old lady run off with a merchant marine she met in a bar one night after the divorce. And that was ten years ago. She works in a pants factory, my aunt, every day. Sometimes at home she just stares at me without a word but sometimes she goes on and on and says she didn’t want me then and she don’t want me now. She’s always been like that; I heard about mother-in-laws and she’s worse than mother-in-laws, but like one too. When she does that I think something funny: I’m not married and she’s my mother-in-law I
I tell that to people. It’s a joke, and sometimes they laugh and sometimes they don’t. And it’s a good joke but not the best joke. They tell mother-in-law jokes around the shipping office and that’s the best kind. They don’t tell them to me though, but I hear them. O’Shaughnessy or Jackson or Mendoza never tell me any jokes but that’s because they all eat lunch together across the street. They go out together every day and they won’t let me come. Jackson says Beat it, creep.
But no more jokes on me any more, they all stopped that a long time ago, a week. Mr. Munson didn’t make them stop though he told them they shouldn’t, like the itch powder and the match that exploded and all the lies they tell me. I made them stop. I gnashed my teeth at Jackson one day and picked up the shears I cut twine with and dashed them at him. And I hissed like a cat. So now they leave me alone, and I just wrap packages.