I shrugged. “Kinky some way, I suppose. It does happen, you know. To old women, I mean. Maybe a mother thing.”
“Maybe he hates women,” she speculated. “Wants to punish them.”
I nodded.
She had finished by the time Evelyn Mayne came back, very listless now, looking like a woebegone ghost, and dropped into a chair. She hadn’t got dressed or even combed her hair. In one hand she had her glass, full and dark, and in the other a large, pale gray leather glove, which she carried oddly, dangling it by one finger.
Marcia started to ask her about it, but she just began to recite once more all that had happened to her that night, in an unemotional, mechanical voice that sounded as if it would go on forever.
Look, I didn’t like the woman—she was a particularly useless, venomous sort of nuisance (those wearisome suicide attempts!)—but that recital got to me. I found myself hating the person who would deliberately put someone into the state she was in. I realized, perhaps for the first time, just what a vicious and sick crime rape is and how cheap are all the easy jokes about it.
Eventually the glove came into the narrative naturally: “… and in order to do that he had to take off his glove. He was particularly excited just then, and it must have got shoved behind the couch and forgotten, where I found it just now.”
Marcia pounced on the glove at once then, saying it was important evidence they must tell the police about. So she called them and after a bit she managed to get Officer Hart himself, and he told her to tell Evelyn Mayne to hold onto the glove and he’d send someone over for it eventually.
It was more than time for me to get on to work, but I stayed until she finished her call, because I wanted to remind her about our date that evening.
She begged off, saying she’d be too tired from the sleep she’d lost and anyway she’d decided to go to the tenants’ meeting tonight. She told me, “This has made me realize that I’ve got to begin to take some responsibility for what happens around me. We may make fun of such people—the good neighbors—but they’ve got something solid about them.”
I was pretty miffed at that, though I don’t think I let it show. Oh, I didn’t so much mind her turning me down—there were reasons enough for it that she didn’t have to make such a production of it and drag in “good neighbors.” (Mr. Helpful, who else?) Besides, Evelyn Mayne came out of her sad apathy long enough to give me a big smile when Marcia said “No.”
So I didn’t go to the tenants’ meeting that night, as I might otherwise have done. Instead I had dinner out and went to the movie—it was lousy—and then had a few drinks, so that it was late when I got back (no signs of life in the lobby or lift or corridor) and gratefully piled into bed.
I was dragged out of the depths of sleep—that first blissful plunge—by a persistent knocking. I shouted something angry but unintelligible and when there was no reply made myself get up, feeling furious.
It was Marcia. With a really remarkable effort I kept my mouth shut and even smoothed out whatever expression was contorting my face. The words one utters on being suddenly awakened, especially from that matchless first sleep that is never recaptured, can be as disastrous as speaking in drink. Our relationship had progressed to the critical stage and I sure didn’t want to blow it, especially when treasures I’d hoped to win were spread out in front of my face, as it were, under a semi-transparent nightgown and hastily-thrown-on negligee.
I looked up, a little, at her face. Her eyes were wide.
She said in a sort of frightened little-girl voice that didn’t seem at all put on, “I’m awfully sorry to wake you up at three o’clock in the morning, Jeff, but would you keep this ‘spooky’ for me? I can’t get to sleep with it in my room,”
It is a testimony to the very high quality of Marcia’s treasures that I didn’t until then notice what she was carrying in front of her—in a fold of toilet paper—the pale gray leather glove Evelyn Mayne had found behind her couch.
“Huh?” I said, not at all brilliantly. “Didn’t Officer Hart come back, or send someone over to pick it up?”
She shook her head. “Evelyn had it, of course, while I was at my job—her social worker did come over right after you left. But then at supper time her son and daughter-in-law came (Officer Hart did scare them!) and bundled her off to the hospital, and she left the glove with me. I called the police, but Officer Hart was off duty and Officer Halstead, whom I talked to, told me they’d be over to pick it up early in the morning. Please take it, Jeff. Whenever I look at it, I think of that crazy sneaking around with the silver hair down his face and waving the knife. It keeps giving me the shivers.”
I looked again at her “spooky” in its fold of tissue (so that she wouldn’t have to touch it, what other reason?) and, you know, it began to give me the shivers. Just an old glove, but now it had an invisible gray aura radiating from it.
“Okay,” I said, closing my hand on it with an effort, and went on ungraciously, really without thinking, “Though I wonder you didn’t ask Mr. Helpful first, what with all his offers and seeing him at the meeting.”
“Well, I asked you,” she said a little angrily. Then her features relaxed into a warm smile, “Thanks, Jeff.”
Only then did it occur to me that here I was passing up in my sleep-soddenness what might be a priceless opportunity. Well, that could be corrected. But before I could invite her in, there came this sharp little cough, or clearing of the throat. We both turned and there was Mr. Helpful in front of his open door, dressed in pajamas and a belted maroon dressing gown. He came smiling and dancing toward us (he didn’t really dance, but he gave that impression in spite of being six foot four) and saying, “Could I be of any assistance, Miss Everly? Did something alarm you? Is there… er?…” He hesitated, as if there might be something he should be embarrassed at.
Marcia shook her head curtly and said to me quite coolly, “No thank you, I needn’t come in, Mr. Winter. That will be fine. Good night.”
I realized Baldy had managed to embarrass her and that she was making it clear that we weren’t parting after a rendezvous, or about to have one. (But to use my last name!)
As she passed him, she gave him a formal nod. He hurried back to his own door, a highlight dancing on the back of his head. (Marcia says he shaves it; I, that he doesn’t have to.)
I waited until I heard her double-lock her door and slide the bolt across. Then I looked grimly at Baldy until he’d gone inside and closed his—I had that pleasure. Then I retired myself, tossed the glove down on some sheets of paper on the table in front of the open window, threw myself into bed and switched out the light.
I fully expected to spend considerable time being furious at my hulking, mincing, officious neighbor, and maybe at Marcia too, before I could get to sleep, but somehow my mind took off on a fantasy about the building around me as it might have been a half century ago. Ghostly bellboys sped silently with little notes inviting or accepting rendezvous. Ghostly waiters wheeled noiseless carts of silver-covered suppers for two. Pert, ghostly maids whirled ghostly sheets through the dark air as they made the bed, their smiles suggesting they might substitute for non-arriving sweethearts. The soft darkness whirlpooled. Somewhere was wind.
I woke with a start as if someone or something had touched me, and I sat up in bed. And then I realized that something was touching me high on my neck, just below my ear. Something long, like a finger laid flat or—oh God!—a centipede. I remembered how centipedes were supposed to cling with their scores of tiny feet—and this was clinging. As a child I’d been terrified by a tropical centipede that had come weaving out of a stalk of new-bought bananas in the kitchen, and the memory still returned full force once in a great while. Now it galvanized me into whirling my hand behind my head and striking my neck a great brushing swipe, making my jaw and ear sting. I instantly turned on the light and rapidly looked all around me without seeing anything close to me that might have brushed off my neck. I thought I’d felt something with my hand when I’d done that, but I couldn’t be sure.