“I didn’t mean to imply anything like that,” said Levine. “By the way, were you Mrs. Walker’s first husband’s doctor, too?”
“No, I wasn’t. His name was Thornbridge, wasn’t it? I never met the man. Is there some sort of question about him?”
“No, not at all.” Levine evaded a few more questions, then hung up, his duty done. He turned to Crawley and shook his head. “Nothing to—”
A sudden crash behind him froze the words in his throat. He halfrose from the chair, mouth wide open, face paling as the blood rushed from his head, his nerves and muscles stiff and tingling.
It was over in a second, and he sank back into the chair, turning around to see what had happened. McFarlane was sheepishly picking himself up from the floor, his chair lying on its back beside him. He grinned shakily at Levine. “Leaned back too far that time,” he said.
“Don’t do that,” said Levine, his voice shaky. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead, feeling cold perspiration slick against the skin. He was trembling all over. Once again, he reached to his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and this time felt an instant of panic when he found the pocket empty. He pressed the palm of his hand to the pocket, and beneath pocket and skin he felt the thrumming of his heart, and automatically counted the beats. Thum, thum, skip, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, skip, thum, thum,—
On the sixth beat, the sixth beat. He sat there listening, hand pressed to his chest, and gradually the agitation subsided and the skip came every seventh beat and then every eighth beat, and then he could dare to move again.
He licked his lips, needing a cigarette now more than at any other time in the last three days, more than he could ever remember needing a cigarette at any time in his whole life.
His resolve crumbled. Shamefacedly, he turned to his partner. “Jack, do you have a cigarette?”
Crawley looked away from McFarlane, who was checking himself for damage. “I thought you were giving them up, Abe,” he said.
“Not around here. Please, Jack.”
“Sure.” Crawley tossed him his pack.
Levine caught the pack, shook out one cigarette, threw the rest back to Crawley. He took a book of matches from the desk drawer, put the cigarette in his mouth, feeling the comforting familiarity of it between his lips, and struck a match. He held the match up, then sat looking at the flame, struck by a sudden thought.
Albert Walker had died of a heart attack. “She made a loud noise at him. The second attack was more severe, and he hadn’t really recovered as yet from the first.”
He shook the match out, took the cigarette from between his lips. It had been every sixth beat there for a while, after the loud noise of McFarlane’s backward dive.
Had Gloria Thornbridge Walker really killed Albert Walker?
Would Abraham Levine really kill Abraham Levine?
The second question was easier to answer. Levine opened the desk drawer and dropped the cigarette and matches into it.
The first question he didn’t try to answer at all. He would sleep on it. Right now, he wasn’t thinking straight enough.
At dinner that night, he talked it over with his wife. “Peg,” he said, “I’ve got a problem.”
“A problem?” She looked up in surprise, a short solid stout woman three years her husband’s junior, her iron-gray hair rigidly curled in a home permanent. “If you’re coming to me,” she said, “it must be awful.”
He smiled, nodding. “It is.” It was rare for him to talk about his job with his wife. The younger men, he knew, discussed their work with their wives as a matter of course, expecting and receiving suggestions and ideas and advice. But he was a product of an older upbringing, and still believed instinctively that women should be shielded from the more brutal aspects of life. It was only when the problem was one he couldn’t discuss with Crawley that he turned to Peg for someone to talk to. “I’m getting old,” he said suddenly, thinking of the differences between himself and the younger men.
She laughed. “That’s your problem? Don’t feel lonely, Abe, it happens to all kinds of people. Have some more gravy.”
“Let me tell you,” he said. “A little girl came in today, maybe ten years old, dressed nicely, polite, very intelligent. She wanted to report that her mother had killed her stepfather.”
“A little girl?” She sounded shocked. She too believed that there were those who should be shielded from the more brutal aspects of life, but with her the shielded ones were children. “A little girl? A thing like that?”
“Wait,” he said. “Let me tell you. I called the doctor and he said it was a heart attack. The stepfather — Mr. Walker — he’d had one attack already, and the second one on top of it killed him.”
“But the little girl blames the mother?” Peg leaned forward. “Psychological, you think?”
“I don’t know. I asked her how her mother had done the killing, and she said her mother made a loud noise at her father.”
“A joke.” She shook her head. “These children today, I don’t know where they get their ideas. All this on the TV—”
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. A man with a bad heart, bedridden, an invalid. A sudden shock, a loud noise, it might do it, bring on that second attack.”
“What else did this little girl say?”
“That’s all. Her stepfather was good, and her mother was bad, and she’d stopped off on her way home from school. She only had a minute, because she didn’t want her mother to know what she was doing.”
“You let her go? You didn’t question her?”
Levine shrugged. “I didn’t believe her,” he said. “You know the imagination children have.”
“But now?”
“Now, I don’t know.” He held up his hand, two fingers extended. “Now,” he said, “there’s two questions in my mind. First, is the little girl right or wrong? Did her mother actually make a loud noise that killed her stepfather or not? And if she did, then question number two: Did she do it on purpose, or was it an accident?” He waggled the two fingers and looked at his wife. “Do you see? Maybe the little girl is right, and her mother actually did cause the death, but not intentionally. If so, I don’t want to make things worse for the mother by dragging it into the open. Maybe the little girl is wrong altogether, and if so it would be best to just let the whole thing slide. But maybe she’s right, and it was murder, and then that child is in danger, because if I don’t do anything, she’ll try some other way, and the mother will find out.”
Peg shook her head. “I don’t like that, a little girl like that. Could she defend herself? A woman to kill her husband, a woman like that could kill her child just as easy. I don’t like that at all, Abe.”
“Neither do I.” He reached for the coffee cup, drank. “The question is, what do I do?”
She shook her head again. “A child like that,” she said. “A woman like that. And then again, maybe not.” She looked at her husband. “For right now,” she said, “you eat. We can think about it.”
For the rest of dinner they discussed other things. After the meal, as usual, the craving for a cigarette suddenly intensified, and he was unable to concentrate on anything but his resolution. They watched television during the evening, and by bedtime he still hadn’t made a decision. Getting ready for bed, Peg suddenly said, “The little girl. You’ve been thinking?”
“I’ll sleep on it,” he said. “Maybe in the morning. Peg, I am longing for a cigarette.”
“Nails in your coffin,” she said bluntly. He blinked, and went away silently to brush his teeth.