She had lied. She hadn’t seen me shoot Lesser. She had been unconscious. She knew I shot him because I had told her I did.
“I’m waiting,” he said.
I couldn’t fight anymore. There wasn’t anything in me that wanted to fight. I was trying to think, trying to see how her mind had worked. Maybe she hadn’t trusted me after I told her I’d killed Lesser and the blonde. Maybe she figured that some day I might kill her because she knew too much.
When we had been in each other’s arms a few hours before, I’d said to her, “I’m not leaving anybody around that can send me to the chair. If it’s me or somebody else... well, Johnny comes first.”
She must have made up her mind then while we were there on the couch. Maybe that was why she’d said goodbye to me when I left, and maybe that was why she was crying. Because she knew that when I went down the steps I was going out of her life forever.
“Talk,” Harrigan said.
“When did she call you?”
“About a quarter of four.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Just what you heard. She said she’d kept quiet because she was afraid of what you might do. She claims she had nothing to do with the frame-up on her husband.”
“She said that?”
“That’s her story, but she’s lying. She was in this thing with you right up to her dirty neck. I’ll get her, too. I listened to her story because I knew when I got you I’d get the rest of it. You can fix her now.”
There was a knock on the door and a copper came in and said something to Harrigan.
Harrigan grinned at me, but it was the way he’d grin at something crawling out from under a damp log. Just before he would step on it.
“Olsen’s outside. We brought him over here when she got through singing. He wants to see you alone. The poor guy deserves that much.”
He and Morowitz and Slade went out and I was left alone in the dirty room with the stale smell of cigarette smoke.
A few seconds went by and then her husband came in, looking terrible. His eyes were red and wild and he came over to me, his hands working nervously. He looked big and he looked mad.
“They told me everything, Johnny,” he said. He stood there, just looking at me and working his hands. He said in a ragged voice, “Johnny, was she in on it? Tell me that, Johnny, or I’ll kill you right now.”
I didn’t care if he killed me because I knew nothing could ever hurt me again. Alice had done that to me and left herself in the clear. I could drag her in with me and that was what Harrigan expected me to do. I could tell the whole story and she’d be done for.
I wanted to fix her, I wanted to hurt her like she’d hurt me. But this wasn’t the way to do it.
There was another way, a horrible way — for her. If I turned on her now she could stand it. The mean tough streak in her would fight back hard. That would make her hate me, and she’d be happy the night I went to the chair.
Harrigan might send her up but she could stand that, because she was tough and hard. And she’d spend those years hating her husband, hating me, and that would keep her alive.
I didn’t want her to live. I wanted her to take the same trip I was going to take.
There was a way.
“Frank, she’s clean,” I said. “I made her do what she did. She was clean all the time and she loved you, but she was afraid of me. Don’t believe anything else, Frank.”
He blinked his eyes and then he started to blubber. His big thick face was working to keep the tears back.
“I knew she wasn’t in it! I knew it! I got to get to her.”
He looked wildly around the room, as if he didn’t know where to go. Then he saw the door and went out, walking fast and brushing the tears from his face with the back of his hand.
That was the way.
He’d take her back now. When she went to bed with him she’d be thinking of what she’d done, and she’d be thinking about where I was and that she had put me there. She’d think I had lied to keep her out of jail. When those things started to work on her she’d tear wide open and this time she’d be alone. There wouldn’t be anybody else to rip. She’d be all alone. I wondered how long she’d last.
When Harrigan came back in I said, “Get a stenographer. This is the works and you’re only getting it once.”
That took a little time but finally they got one and Morowitz and Slade and a few other coppers were there as witnesses.
I had to keep Alice in the clear. The cops weren’t going to get her. Frank was going to get her. But he wouldn’t have her very long.
I started talking and it wasn’t easy keeping her in the clear. Harrigan knew I was lying and he swore at me and threatened to beat me silly, but I told him he was going to take it my way or there wouldn’t be any confession at all, and finally he shut up and let me get it down the way I wanted.
I got through about ten o’clock and the way if read I’d done everything. Alice was in the clear.
There wasn’t anything in it about the blonde. She was just a dumb kid that nobody remembered, and she was dead because she had loved something rotten.
Maybe that was why I was going to die, too.
Chapter XVII
This is the night. There’s a lot of noise from the other guys along the block. Some of them are moaning and beating tin cups against the bars.
They didn’t waste any time after they got the confession. The judge gave me the chair about three seconds after my lawyer stopped talking. He spent about ten minutes telling me what a rat I was and he did a swell job of it because this is an election year and I guess he wanted the papers to get the story.
That was six weeks ago.
There’s a pretty nice guy here named Father Riley and he’s been in to talk to me every couple days. He brings in papers and cigarettes and one day he told me if I said I was sorry and meant it that everything would be all right.
I can’t say that, because it’s not the way I feel. Everything I did was wrong, but if I had the chance it would probably go the same way again.
The paper he brought me tonight has a story about Alice. She’s not on the front page. There’s another murder on the front page, and she’s over on page nineteen, beside an ad for women’s corsets.
The story tells how she got up this morning and went into the bathroom with her husband’s gun and shot herself under the heart. There’s a little in the story about Lesser and Frank and me, but it’s a pretty short story.
She lasted longer than I thought. In a little while I’ll take that same trip.
There was something wrong with us that made us end this way. We were twisted and warped and we couldn’t fit anywhere unless we were together.
Maybe if I’d stayed on the street I was raised on, where the kids played ball in the summer and the fireman came around in the afternoon to give us a splashing, it would have been different. Maybe if I’d married one of the girls I met at the parish dances, this wouldn’t have happened.
Nobody knows about things like that, but my guess is that we’d have still been in trouble, but just in a different place with different people.
We’re the same wrong kind of people, but if we could have been together, maybe it would have worked out.
Father Riley has told me about saying I’m sorry, and he’s told me a lot about Heaven, but I can’t get interested in what he tells me, because I know she won’t be there.
The noise from the other cells is louder now, so I guess the guards are on their way.