“Old Harry,” she said then.
I closed the book. I put down the glass. I put down my cigarette also, so there were only my hands left, and since there wasn’t anymore room on the table I picked those up and stared at them.
“The same… same old Harry.”
It was a year. I supposed it was a year, but when I looked up at her everything was the way it had always been. There was the face, there were the eyes. It was all there and it still did it to me, and even if I’d had a last name like Onassis or Getty or Zeckendorf this was still the only counter in the world I could buy it at.
She had one hand on the doorknob. She was wearing one of those white linen summer coats which weigh about as much as an overseas airmail stamp and her other hand was inside of it, holding herself below the left breast so that she looked as if she had knocked aside six or eight old ladies in her breathless sprint to get here. But she generally looked like that. That was just another one of the little things that made her so easy to forget.
She had moved toward me half a step, unsteady on her feet, and then had thought better of it. She stood there, clinging to the knob, and all I could do was flip some more pages in the book.
A mighty fortress is our God, said Martin Luther. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, said Emiliano Zapata. Work out your salvation with diligence, said Gautama Buddha. Everyone had something right on the tip of his tongue except Fannin.
“You’re stoned,” I said then. “You’re stoned and you ought to be in bed. Go the hell home, won’t you? Or wherever it is you’re shacked up now.”
I didn’t want to say it like that, God knows I didn’t. But there wasn’t any other way. I’d found that out a year ago and I wasn’t going to leave myself open for it again.
She was still swaying slightly, the out-of-breath smile still in her eyes, being so lovely you could pawn your poor brains for five minutes of not remembering what had happened. “Old Harry,” she said again. “The same tough, hard… same old… same…”
I was out of my chair when she started to buckle, but it came too fast. She hadn’t given any sign, hadn’t even closed her eyes, just turning a little and then going over as if she’d simply gotten tired of standing there and thought she might like to try the rug for size, and I had to go down on one knee to keep her from hitting. I took her weight with one arm around her shoulders and eased her down, holding her head and shoulders up. And then all of a sudden all of the lovely, lovely toys were smashed and scattered all at once.
“Cathy,” I said. “Oh, good God, Cathy—”
The coat had covered it while she was standing. The stain was as big as a six-dollar sirloin below her breast, dark and seeping, and the inside of her hand was soaked with it from where she had had her palm pressed against herself. I saw the slash in the blouse where the blade had gone in, no wider than a man’s leather watch band, centered and near the top of the seepage.
Her eyes were open, staring at me, but they weren’t smiling now. There wasn’t any expression in them at all. They were as empty as two spoonfuls of weak tea.
“Harry. Know what I did, Harry? Real… cops and robbers. You would have…”
“Easy, baby,” I said. “Tell me later. Let me get a doctor. You just lie here and—”
“No!” She had clutched me by the wrist. A four-year-old at his first Hershey bar would have had a hand about as sticky. Or with as little strength in the grip. “Harry, don’t let me go. Hold me, Harry, I…”
Her hand slipped away. All I could think of were the five minutes I’d spent counting the sterling while she was dragging herself up the stairs.
“Cath, you’ve got to let me—” I was stretching, trying to reach a pillow from the couch without letting her go. I couldn’t make it.
“Cathy, I’m going to make you lie back. Just don’t move and 111—”
“Harry—”
“Yes, baby, yes. Here I am.”
“Harry… just for a minute… both your arms. Hold me, Harry.”
My right arm was still beneath her shoulders. I put my other hand along her cheek and it was tearing me apart then. Because it wasn’t going to make any difference if I called a doctor now or ever. I could save the dime for my estate.
I lowered my hand to below her breast, cupping it tight against the wound. The blade had missed her heart but it had been close enough. It had to have happened just before she rang the bell. It was seconds before I caught the faint small beat, like a whisper behind heavy draperies.
“Harry…”
“Here, baby, here.”
“Nobody else, Harry. Rotten… so rotten for you. The only one… only one it was ever right with. You, Harry…”
“I know, baby, I know.”
“Harry…”
And then there was nothing else. “Cath,” I said. “Cath. Baby, I—” Or maybe I didn’t say it out loud, I’m not sure. It didn’t matter. I knelt there holding her for another minute, feeling her hair against my neck, and then I put her down.
The phone was ringing. I had no idea how long it had been doing that again. I got up and walked toward the bedroom extension to answer it. I had a dead one on the living-room carpet and all my instincts told me there were a dozen things I’d better start doing, but I couldn’t think of any of them. Because this one wasn’t just silver dollars for Harry Fannin, private cop. This one was about Cathy.
The phone was in my hand. “Yes?” I said stupidly.
“Mr. Fannin, please, this is Sally Kline again. I tried to tell you before, I live with Cathy. I’m worried, Mr. Fannin, and I didn’t know who else to call. I think Cathy’s in trouble. I think something might happen to her.”
I was staring into the other room. The irony of it registered very remotely. “What?” I said.
“Oh, heavens, what’s the matter? Are you asleep, Mr. Fannin? I said it’s about Cathy, about your wife…”
CHAPTER 2
I met her in the summer of ‘56. It had been one of those weeks when all the business is the kind the competition deserves. On Monday a pleasant Mrs. Dijulio told me that her sweet, innocent, sixteen-year-old Maria was being kept out all night by a nota so nice’a crowd, and could I perhaps tella the boys to leave her alone? Sure. I told’a the boys, although I had to confiscate a few switchblades to do it, and that left me with Maria. Alone in Central Park with charming, innocent Maria. First she ripped off her blouse and screamed rape. No patrolman was close enough to be impressed so she ripped off her skirt too. That impressed me, enough to spank her. So then she threw her arms around my neck and wailed that this was what she had wanted all along, a man, a real man. She had lovely arms, only thirty or forty needle punctures above the elbows. I went over there again the next morning and dialed the number myself to make certain that Mrs. Dijulio got through to the juvenile bureau.
That was Monday. Wednesday it was a pharmacist named Heppenstall whose wife had wandered. I found her easily enough, holed up with a Matterhorn-size lesbian and the dregs of a case of rum in a dollar-a-night Third Avenue hotel.
Agnes Heppenstall threw a sheet-shredding tantrum while I booted out her playmate, then turned whisky coy the minute we were alone. She was such a dreadful mess, she said. And it was all psychological. Heppenstall hadn’t excited her in seventeen years and so she had been experimenting. And I was such a pretty man, couldn’t I help her experiment some more? She was sick four times in the cab on the way home, and not psychologically.