When we got back to the door, I simply left him without a word and walked into the lobby. I already felt much calmer than I had at any time since earlier in the day. I even felt calmer than when I still thought she and I were going to make our getaway together. I had been all worked up with anticipation then. This was a soothing lassitude, on the contrary, that almost made me want to drop down in the first comfortable chair that came along and wait for things to turn up.
The doorman looked at me in surprise; evidently he had still thought I was upstairs all this time. “Why, I didn’t see you come down in the ele—!” he started to say to me.
“Phone for the police,” I interrupted laconically, stepping into the car. “Send them up to Miss Pascal’s apartment. I’ll be up there.” And I motioned the openmouthed operator to go ahead.
“Anything wrong, sir?” he finally managed to articulate.
“What’s that of your business?” I told him placidly.
He kept the car standing there with the door open after he had let me off, dying to get a look in after I opened the door, I suppose. “Go on down, will you!” I snarled. “What are you standing there for? There’s nothing to see.”
With which he reluctantly cut himself off from me behind the panel and was gone.
I unlocked the door and went in once more, leaving it wide open so that that creepy feeling of being alone in there wouldn’t come back. I turned a chair around so that it faced away from her, sat down in it, lit a cigarette, and directed my gaze out through the open door upon the elevator door opposite, which was in a direct line from where I was sitting. Something kept trying to pull my head around in the other direction; I had to stiffen the muscles of my neck to resist it. I kept praying I could hold out until they came, and not give in and look. “Bernice,” I murmured, “what more do you want of me? Let me be.”
When I was in the act of lighting a fresh cigarette from the stump of the old, they finally got there. They came filing across the corridor directly toward me, getting bigger and bigger all the time as they got nearer, while the chair and I seemed to grow smaller and smaller. As they entered the living room from the foyer, all I could see any more were their huge feet and the mammoth legs of their trousers. If they didn’t stop soon, they’d go over me, and I’d be crushed under their gigantic soles — my head sort of rolled over on my shoulder, and then I pulled it back again and everything was the right size once more.
“She dead?” one of them said to me, taking his eyes off the floor.
“Long time now,” I answered.
“You do it?” the same one said. He seemed to be asking the questions to satisfy his own personal curiosity, just as one man will go up to another on a street corner where a crowd has collected and ask what the trouble is. Others were busying themselves with her, I could tell without turning around; he seemed to have nothing to do for a minute, hence his interrogation of me.
“There she is,” I said listlessly, “and here I am. What more do you want?”
“Plenty,” he said, “you’re talking to an officer, and don’t forget it!” And he sent his fist hurtling into the side of my face. There was a flash of fire before my eyes, and I went over on the floor, chair and all. The pain was gone an instant after the blow, and it felt so lazy, so effortless, lying there prone like that, that I wanted to let my eyes close and not lift a finger toward getting up again. But the thought that she was on the floor too, somewhere just a little in back of me, made me come to and pick myself up again. I left the chair where it was.
“Pick it up,” he ordered truculently, “and next time don’t get so wise!”
I set it on its feet again and looked at him inquiringly.
“Siddown,” he thundered. “We’re coinin’ to you!”
But it seemed to take them hours to do so. People kept coming in and coming in, some in uniform and some without, some in white coats, some carrying satchels — all their attention was focused on her. Once or twice I dared to turn and look, because there were so many of them around her that I couldn’t see her any more — bending over her, squatting down on their haunches, pawing her, doing things that I couldn’t understand. A man carrying a tripod came in at one time and set it up just inside the door, and they all drew back from her, out of the way, and there was a flash of diamond-white light and a puff of smoke. Then he went even nearer her, almost stood directly above her, and there was another flash and another puff. Then he picked up the tripod and went out. I remember thinking vaguely that he must be a reporter, but it seems not, because later another man with a tripod came out of the emergency-staircase door, and the moment they saw him, two of them rushed out and came to blows with him. They broke the tripod, flung him into the elevator, and he was taken downstairs.
About midnight or one in the morning, they took me into Bernice’s bedroom and shut the door. The ones in uniform seemed to be playing a minor part by this time. There was one of them standing just inside the door with his hands clasped behind him, but all the others in the room were without uniforms. One of them had turned Bernice’s vanity table into a desk and was sitting beside it writing on a thick stenographic pad. The three pieces of baggage were gone from underneath it.
“Siddown!” I was told.
I sat down and leaned forward over my knees.
When they were through looking at me — and only because I was past caring about anything any more was I able to bear the awful, baleful scrutiny from all sides — they began to ask me questions. Or rather one in particular did. Sometimes, during all this, he’d get up as though he were through, and I’d think he had left the room, only to have him suddenly ask me something over my shoulder.
“Your name’s Wade,” they told me. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“How long have you known her?”
“About a month, I guess.”
“What’d you do it for?”
“I don’t know.”
Two or three of them advanced on me threateningly. “What’d you do it for?” he roared a second time.
“Because I loved her.”
The blow I got this time was from the back; I stumbled forward out of the chair, went down on both hands and struck my head against the edge of the thick glass slab that covered the vanity table. It opened the skin a little above one eye.
“Get up; you’re not hurt,” he informed me. “Now, are you gonna answer or aren’t you! Wait a minute,” he interrupted himself, “lemme ask you something else; where were you going with her tonight?”
“California.” I reached in my pocket, took out the tickets, and passed them to him.
When he was through looking at them he said, “Why were you going out there?”
“To live,” I said simply.
He got up and went away; I kept looking at the place he had just been sitting in. Suddenly he whipped out from somewhere in back of me, “Well, if she was going with you, what’d you do it for?”
“ ’Cause she backed out at the last minute,” I said instantly, without turning around.
“Now we’re gettin’ some place,” he remarked to the others, and came around in front of me and sat down again.
Most of the questions after that were easy to answer; all I had to keep remembering was that I had done it because she had changed her mind at the very last and refused to go with me — everything followed from that quite naturally. Toward the end, possibly because I was answering just as they seemed to want me to, they even became less threatening, dropped their voices a pitch or two.