“Yeah,” observed Wise glumly. “And there goes the murderer.” And he pitched his thumb over his shoulder in Marshall’s direction.
Marshall stumbled slightly over the projecting foot of a chair in his path, and to maintain himself had to bend acutely for a second and lean upon the chair-arm.
Then he straightened, moved on into the adjoining room at a rusty, recalcitrant gait. The kindly partition was between him and them like a protective shield.
It was a twilight-dim bedroom, all in pearly gray tones. On one wall the opening behind him cast an illusory panel of pallid, straw-colored light. Within this, in purplish-gray, was a silhouette of Wise, profile-wards, as he sat there at the bridge table outside. It wavered a little about the edges occasionally. At other times it was steel sharp in outline. Every so often a monstrous, swollen sausage of a hand would loom up before him, deposit something on the table or reclaim something. Something that looked like a slab or a tile, though it was in actuality a playing card. Sometimes the silhouette would become satanic, and a tangled mass of thin snakes would issue from its mouth and nostrils and writhe upward to the top margin of the panel. Skeins of cigar smoke.
Marshall leaned across the beveled edge of a bureau in there, pressing against it as though he were using it to hold in his stomach, and he could feel a drop or two of moisture slowly part from his downturned forehead and fall off.
Their voices were as close as ever, sounded almost at his shoulder.
Marjorie’s winning little laugh. “I thought you were holding that up your sleeve!”
And Mrs. Wise: “Does he know where to find the light? Tell him where the switch is, Bill.”
Wise called in: “Need any light in there? Want me to show you? It’s right behind the door, as you go in.”
“I’ve found it,” he called back. They were helping him in what he intended doing. The illusory panel vanished from the wall as the light went on. But at least it would have warned him of Wise’s approach; now he had no safeguard at all.
He put up his hand, gave the back of his head a couple of quick cuffs at a tangent, that started the hair awry.
I was looking for his comb, in case he comes in on me, he instructed himself.
He noiselessly slipped open one of the top drawers of the bureau, and it was lying there, in the first one he opened. He moved it, deposited it out of sight under the lining paper.
The accompanying brush to it. Handkerchiefs. Collars. A pair of suspenders, with the elastic worn threadbare. A buttonhook.
He stealthily closed it again. He opened the one below. Hers. Closed that again. He opened the one on the opposite side.
“Take your hands off that!” Mrs. Wise commanded with sudden sharpness. “That’s mine!”
And Marshall jumped, and buckled, and died a little; but it was the cards she was talking about, in there.
The hand must be nearly over. They’d be through soon; he’d have to hurry.
A paper or two, written matter, in this one. Not much, but this was more like it, this was what he’d been hoping for. A celluloid pocket calendar, compliments of one of the local merchants. A Chinese laundry ticket, beetling ideographs inked on it. A rough draft of an expense account, left incomplete, penciled columnarly on the back of an envelope:
1 month’s rental, furnished flat $35.
meals, @ $1.50 per day 45.
laundry, barber, and other supplies 2.
telegram to N. Y. 0.40
That last item caught his eye, showed him it was no harmless household expense account. Showed him Wise was not working for this office, here, as he pretended to be, but for someone or something in New York.
A picture postcard, sent from somewhere called Sharon Springs, from someone called simply “Jim”; little more than simply exuberant greeting and then signature. But the greeting in itself — “Hello, you old flatfoot!”
Flatfoot; wasn’t that what they called policemen? He’d heard that somewhere, that slang expression.
It hadn’t been sent here, it had been sent to that last place, Detroit, and then he’d brought it on here with him, for some reason. Maybe overlooked in some pocket.
Nothing else. Nothing else written.
There was a dingy leather collar-button box there in the middle drawer. Why he looked into it, he didn’t know. But it was as though his hand were led to it unerringly, without his being aware of the wherefore.
It held the collar buttons it was intended to. A stickpin or two, with a gaping hole where there had once been some semiprecious stone. A pair of cuff links. A scattering of pearled buttons lost from shirts and the like.
A metal shield, the color of silver blurred to a pewter drabness.
He picked it up and stared.
The coat of arms of the City of New York. And lettering, above, below, that read “Department of Police of the City of New York.” And numerals.
He clapped his hands together over it, blotted it out. As if hiding it from sight, covering it from his own eyes, would undo the actuality of its existence.
A plain-clothes detective, a member of the New York City police force! Evidence could go no further, proof could be made no more final than this. It was here, pressed tight between his own two hands. And he, Marshall, was right in the same house with him. His wife was playing partners with him, with the very manhunter sent to track him down, at a table in the other room.
He replaced it in the collar-button box, and shut the box, and reclosed the drawer, and heeled his hands to the latter, pressing desperately, as if to hold it shut by main force.
Then he turned from the bureau and, hand out to any available support that lay along the way, lumbered totteringly, as if dragging an iron ball and chain after him, into the adjoining bathroom.
He turned the light on in there. He opened a tap, and sluiced water from it along his forehead.
He opened the door of the chest next, and looked for a moment. Then his hand reached up into it, came down again. Now he looked at his hand, not the chest any longer.
He was holding a squat brown bottle in his fingers now, allowing the warning symbol of a death’s head to turn slightly within his grasp from left to right as he revolved the bottle. That seemed to make it come more alive, somehow, that little flicker of movement.
He poured. But what he was reading wasn’t there on the label.
He was reading the past. His own past. The flight and the heartbreak. The crumbling of hopes, the defacing of a marriage, the endless pursuit by shadows. He was reading the future. The aloneness of those who run counter to the pack. The waning of youth, the lessening of earning power, the misery and destitution inevitably bequeathed by lifelong rootlessness and vagrancy, the horrors of a derelict old age at last, supine along some gutter somewhere.
Words came into his mind.
I’m tired. Tired of fear. I’m sick of being afraid. I want not to be afraid any more. I want to know peace.
I want to go where there are no police. Where it’s too dark even for the police to follow you. Too far even for the police to bring you back from.
Where I can be at last let alone.
There was a tumbler there, upside-down on the strip of glass shelf that stood above the washstand.
He took the tumbler and poured from the bottle into it. Then put the bottle back and closed the chest front. It wasn’t his bottle after all.
The faucet was still running a little. He held the tumbler to it for a moment, and let a little run in. As though he were mixing a highball. The highball of death.