“Damn you, be quiet.”
“Or you’ll tell your mommy on me?”
Slap.
“That ends it, Tommy. I’m leaving.”
“You do and you damn well best keep on going, ’cause I’ll be on the phone to your old lady and—”
“Do anything you want. I’m leaving.”
Sound of her running down the stairs. Quiet, for a moment. Then an outraged bellow, and a crash of smashing furniture, and silence.
Footfalls on the steps. A door creaking. Tommy’s bellow:
“What’s this supposed to be? Give me that—”
And a scream of agony, immediate, real, too intense to ignore.
Footfalls. Someone descending the stairs. The listener opened his door and glimpsed a figure vanishing into the shadows of the stairwell.
A scraping, as of a shoe being dragged slowly across linoleum, and a moan, and a low, wet cough. The listener looked up. He — Tommy? — stood swaying, left hand clutching the ballustrade, right gripping an object that gleamed in the light from the bare bulb over his head, a narrow object jutting from his chest.
He stumbled away and entered the apartment.
The police later said he died in the bathtub.
“...was stabbed with an ordinary kitchen knife, the kind you buy for a buck-and-a-half at the hardware store,” the detective was saying. The detective was large, crew-cut, neatly dressed in expensive looking brown tweed. He fidgeted, squirming on the chair; it was obvious he wanted, acutely, to be somewhere else. “Now can you tell me what you told the patrolman, sir? You saw the killer?”
“I did, yes,” replied the listener.
The detective leaned forward, and with attentiveness too elaborate to be real, asked, “Can you describe him?”
“Well, he ran by the door there just as I was opening it, fast, and I, well—”
The detective smiled a prefabricated smile. “Take it easy. No rush. He ran past, you say?”
“I’m sure he was tall, and dark. A Puerto Rican, maybe.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. You notice his clothing?”
“A jacket — a blue jacket, I’m sure. And slacks, those with the big cuffs, like sailors wear.”
“Bell bottoms?”
“Yes, bell bottoms. Oh, and gummies.”
“Gummies?”
“What you call tennis shoes.”
“Anything else?”
“I didn’t get a good look. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” The detective rose and again smiled, a genuine smile, this, a smile of relief. “You’ve been very helpful. We’ll try not to bother you further, but we may need you to testify if we catch him. You’ll be available?”
“I don’t go anywhere.”
As the detective was stepping into the hall, the listener asked, “Officer, do you think you will catch him?”
“Frankly, I doubt it. I read this as a junkie crime, a burglary that went sour. The victim fought, the kid panicked and killed him. A routine homicide. We get ’em a dozen a week, and there’s no way to solve ’em unless we get lucky. Once in a blue moon, we do. But we don’t count on it.”
The detective was gone, forever; the murderer would not be caught. A routine homicide. No way to solve ’em.
The girl eventually returned, and resumed her familiar rituals, arising late, leaving at five, arriving by cab at midnight. He can hear her, padding from bed to bath to kitchen.
She must, by now, realize she is a prisoner, for she has surely read the note he slipped under her door:
I saw you running away from killing Tommy. Don’t ever leave.
So, yes, she is undoubtedly forgetting the rages, the beatings, the feel of the knife handle in her fist, as he is forgetting the hideous expression that twisted her beauty as she disappeared into the shadows the night Tommy died, the flash of her lean calves as she plunged down the stairs.
But she will never forget she is a prisoner. She won’t; he knows.
And in the summer afternoons, she will sing.