“You were probably next on her list,” I said.
“No.”
The muffled word came from his daughter. She began to get up, rising laboriously from her hands and knees like a hurt fighter. She flung her hair back. Her face had hardly changed. It was as lovely as ever, on the surface, but empty of meaning — like a doll’s plastic face.
“I was next on my list,” she said dully. “I tried to shoot myself when I realized you knew about me. Father stopped me.”
“I didn’t know about you until now.”
“You did. You must have. When you were talking to father in the garden, you meant me to hear it all — everything you said about Hilary.”
“Did I?”
The Admiral said with a kind of awe, “You killed him, Alice. Why did you want his blood on your hands? Why?” His own hand paused in mid-air. He looked at her as if he had fathered a strange and evil thing.
She bowed her head in silence. I answered for her. “She’d stolen the Chardin for Todd and met his conditions. But then she saw that he couldn’t get away, or if he did he’d be brought back, and questioned. She couldn’t be sure he’d keep quiet about Hugh. This afternoon she made sure. The second murder always comes easier.”
“No!” She shook her blonde head violently. “I didn’t murder Hugh. I hit him with something, but I didn’t intend to kill him. He struck me first — he struck me, and then I hit him back.”
“With a deadly weapon, a metal fist. You hit at him twice with it. The second blow didn’t miss.”
“But I didn’t mean to kill him. Hilary knew I didn’t mean to kill him.”
“How would he know? Was he there?”
“He was downstairs in his flat. When he heard Hugh fall, he came up. Hugh was still alive. He died in Hilary’s car, when we were starting for the hospital. Hilary said he’d help me cover up. He took that horrible fist and threw it into the sea.
“I hardly knew what I was doing by that time. Hilary did it all. He put the body in Hugh’s car and drove it up the mountain. I followed in his car and brought him back. On the way back he told me why he was helping me. He needed money. He knew we had no money, but he had a chance to sell the Chardin. I took it for him this morning. I had to! Everything I did, I did because I had to.”
She looked from me to her father. He averted his face from her.
“You didn’t have to smash Hugh’s skull,” I said. “Why did you do that?”
Her doll’s eyes rolled in her head, then came back to me, glinting with a cold and deathly coquetry. “If I tell you, will you do one thing for me? One favor? Give me father’s gun for just a second?”
“And let you kill us all?”
“Only myself,” she said. “Just leave one shell in it.”
“Don’t give it to her,” the Admiral said. “She’s done enough to disgrace us.”
“I have no intention of giving it to her. And I don’t have to be told why she killed Hugh. While she was waiting in his studio last night, she found a sketch of his. It was an old sketch, but she didn’t know that. She’d never seen it before, for obvious reasons.”
“What kind of sketch?”
“A portrait of a nude woman. She tacked it up on the easel and decorated it with a beard. When Hugh came home he saw what she’d done. He didn’t like to have his pictures spoiled, and he probably slapped her face.”
“He hit me with his fist,” Alice said. “I killed him in self-defense.”
“That may be the way you’ve rationalized it. Actually, you killed him out of jealousy.”
She laughed. It was a cruel sound, like vital tissue being ruptured. “Jealousy of her?”
“The same jealousy that made you ruin the sketch.”
Her eyes widened, but they were blind, looking into herself. “Jealousy? I don’t know. I felt so lonely, so all alone in the world. I had nobody to love me — not since my mother died.”
“It isn’t true, Alice. You had me.” The Admiral’s tentative hand came out and paused again in the air, as though there was an invisible wall between them.
“I never had you. I hardly saw you. Then Sara took you. I had no one — no one until Hugh. I thought at last that I had someone to love me, someone I could count on, someone—”
Her voice broke off. The Admiral looked everywhere but at his daughter. The room was like a cubicle in hell where lost souls suffered under the silent treatment. The silence was finally broken by the sound of a distant siren. It rose and expanded until its lamentation filled the night.
Alice was crying, with her face uncovered. Mary Western came forward and put her arm around her. “Don’t cry.” Her voice was warm. Her face had a grave beauty.
“You hate me, too.”
“No. I’m sorry for you, Alice. Sorrier than I am for Hugh.”
The Admiral touched my arm. “Who was the woman in the sketch?” he said in a trembling voice.
I looked into his tired old face and decided that he had suffered enough.
“I don’t know,” I said.
But I could see the knowledge in his eyes.
Paul Gallico
Hurry, Hurry, Hurry!
Paul Gallico, sports writer, short-story writer, novelist, and scenario writer, and one of the most popular authors of our time, gives us a carnival tale about a cynical, dissolute scalawag of a fortuneteller and of a shy, dewy-eyed innocent of a girl who put her faith in the old faker... But faker or not, Swami Mirza Baba was a natural-born crimebuster...
One late-summer day around the turn of the century, a cheap carnival came to a small town in Kansas for the county fair, in time to relieve some of the tensions built up by the brutal murder of an innocent widow on a lonely farm and the forthcoming hanging of the farmhand who had been found guilty of the crime.
The morning of the day the fair was to open in Thackerville, the carnival boss, Bowers, strode the busy midway where the concessions were being knocked together — the Ferris wheel and giant swing, the freak and girly shows, the hoopla games and wheels of fortune — and bawled, “Hoi! Gather ’round all hands. The Sheriff wants everybody.”
At that moment the curtains parted at the booth over which hung a garish poster showing a turbaned Indian gazing into a crystal ball and advertising: SWAMI MIRZA BABA TELLS THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE — 25¢, and Nick Jackson strolled out of the booth, spitting a stream of tobacco juice.
He was an unkempt, friendless, lonely man, past 60 but looking older, with a gray, seamed face and small, red-rimmed eyes. Hard-boiled, irreverent, he had the cynicism of a man whose lifetime had been spent in the city slums doing the best he could, and around cheap burlesque shows, traveling circuses, dime museums, and carnivals. He had been shill, barker, shell-game operator, short-change artist, front worker, and con man, but age and drink had made him unreliable in a tight pinch and he had ended up “dukkerin,” as the Romany gypsies called fortunetelling.
“All right now, you rats, listen to me,” the Sheriff began his address. He was a big man with a good forehead and hard, clear eyes. He wore a snakeskin belt and ten-gallon hat, and his neck rose from his flannel shirt like the column of a cottonwood tree. “This is a hardworking community of decent God-fearing people. We’re a-goin’ to let you operate here long as you behave. I know you for what you are, a pack o’ thieves, rascals, and scalawags. But you ain’t goin’ to get away with anything here. I got my eye on all of you and I been around some too.”
Nobody in the group of carny men stirred or said anything with the exception of the old fortuneteller who spat again.