For two days she waited. She did not leave the room. She did not eat or drink. It was impossible to say if she slept. She stayed in her chair, and there were times when her eyes were open and times when they were shut.
After two days, she knew the police were not going to come.
Starr Bartlett.
The dead woman. A name that breathed life, romance, even glamour. Starr Bartlett.
Madeline had listened for the name on the radio, expecting it from the tongue of every news announcer, but each report began and ended and the name didn’t come. Just as the police didn’t come. She learned no more from the newspapers she bought after she finally left her room. A murder in a different section of the city, a better-off section, would have made headlines, but here? In Madeline’s little corner of the city, in Starr Bartlett’s, death was not news. A gunshot was not news. It was commonplace, familiar. Dog bites man.
Madeline asked at the newsstand, at the grocer’s, at the Greek luncheonette that dished up eggs and toast at all hours. Finally she asked the gray-haired woman reading the horoscopes in a chair outside the self-serve laundromat, and the woman, speaking hoarsely around the remnants of a cigarette she’d smoked nearly down to the filter, said yes, she’d known the dead woman, to say hello to while they waited for their wash-and-wear to spin dry.
Starr Bartlett had lived in a rooming house just two blocks from Madeline’s own. She was young, in her twenties, and unmarried. She lived alone. And she had been struck down by a bullet which people said had been fired from a passing automobile. The woman’s own son was on the force, and he’d told her the police were convinced that the murder was the work of a random killer, possibly committed in imitation of a series of killings which had taken place two months previously in a large city a thousand miles away, and which had had enough press coverage to prompt a deranged person to emerge as a copycat killer.
If he struck again, the woman’s son told her with a comforting pat on the arm, they would surely get him.
The implication being that this particular case had reached a dead end, and that, if there were no more similar killings, the murderer would escape uncaught.
Well, there would be no more killings, not with that gun. Madeline placed it, velvet bag and all, inside a brown paper bag, and tucked the package into her purse. She took a long walk, and in its course she pushed the wrapped-up gun down a storm drain. It would most likely never be found; if it were, it would never be connected to her.
So she had gotten away with murder.
She thought about that a day or two later as she sat at the Greek’s lunch counter sipping a cup of coffee. She had bought a paper and could search through it for coverage of the death of Starr Bartlett, but without even opening the paper she knew there was nothing. And unless she confessed, she thought, there would be nothing. Starr was dead and her death had become part of the great body of unsolved crimes in the city’s files. There would be no stories because there was nothing to be said.
She saw those eyes, staring up at her. And the light going out of them, as the life went out of their owner.
“You all right, miss?”
She looked up. The counterman’s face was a mask of concern.
“The look on your face,” he said. “Like you were gonna faint, or something.”
“No,” she assured him. “No, I’m all right.”
Should she confess?
She thought about it. If the police had come, she would have confessed in a minute. But when they failed to appear it was as if she was being told that her confession was not required or even desired.
But what did that mean? Did she go scot-free?
That seemed inappropriate. Perhaps nothing would be gained by her confession, but what would be gained by her escaping punishment altogether? Wasn’t she in debt? Didn’t she owe something?
To whom? To the police? To Society with a capital S?
No.
To Starr.
The thought, once it came to her, seemed unmistakably obvious. She, Madeline, had tried to kill herself. She had been unable to do so. She had killed Starr instead.
Starr had died for her.
Therefore, she would live for Starr.
But how?
Starr, she thought, I wanted to die because my life had no purpose. Now I can find a purpose in living for you, and you can go on living through me. But for God’s sake, who are you? What kind of life did you have, Starr? Starr, I don’t know you at all!
“I suppose I should rent her room,” the landlady said. “I guess I will, soon as I get around to it. I been sort of waiting for someone to come for her things, but I guess that’s not going to happen. I haven’t had the heart to pack up her things and send them. Long as her room’s the way she left it, it’s as if she could come back to it anytime. Soon as I pack up her stuff and rent the room out to somebody else, well, it makes her death that much more real for me, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Madeline said.
“I suppose I’m being silly,” the woman said. “If you want to see the room, I guess that’s all right. I don’t see who it would hurt. The police have been through it, looking for reasons why someone would kill her. Then I guess they decided no one had a reason to kill her, that she just got in the way of the bullet.”
That was truer than anybody realized, Madeline thought.
“Right this way, then,” the woman said.
A rooming house not unlike her own. The same cooking smells in the hallway, the kind of smells you got when cooking consisted mostly of heating up canned goods on hot plates. Creaking stairs. Walls that needed painting.
“You just can’t keep up with an old building like this,” the woman said defensively, although Madeline had said nothing. “One thing needs doing after another. You can’t keep up with it, you know. Or else you’d have to raise the rents, and people can’t pay but so much. I keep it clean, though, and I only rent to decent people.”
They were at Starr’s door. The woman knocked on it, then caught herself.
“I don’t know why I’m knocking,” she said. “Force of habit, I shouldn’t wonder. I respect people’s privacy, it’s the way I was brought up.”
She produced a key, turned it in the lock, opened the door. The room was smaller than Madeline’s, but similarly finished. The closet door was open, showing clothing on the hooks and hangers. The bed was made, and there was some clothing piled on it.
“You see what I mean,” the landlady said. “It’s like the room was waiting for her to come back to it.”
“Yes,” Madeline breathed.
“It’s hard to take in what happened to her. Shot down that way.”
“Yes.”
“As young as she was.”
“It’s tough to die when you’re young,” Madeline said. “Like a stray dog.”
“That’s just it,” the woman said. “She deserved better of life She didn’t deserve to die like a dog in the street, and that’s exactly how she did die. And for what purpose? For what purpose?”
Madeline didn’t say anything. For a long moment the two women stood there. Then the older woman cleared her throat, as if she were about to say something, and Madeline said, “Tell me about her.”
“What is there to tell? She lived here. Not for very long, but I felt that I knew her better than I did.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know exactly. We didn’t talk much. She mostly kept to herself. I told all this to the police.” She looked at Madeline. “Why do you have to know all this?”
“Just a sense I have. That she and I were alike. Young women, single, living alone in rooming houses in this neighborhood. It could as easily have been me out there, out for a walk, struck down by a stray bullet.”