“Looks like her old man beat her up.”
“Sergeant, I hope you locate her. It’s no town for a kid like that to be wandering around in. And I hope you bend her old man a little. A guy who hits his kid like that is some kind of animal.”
“Thanks for your help, Mr. DuShane.”
“I guess I should have turned her over to the cops at the depot.”
Back in my rental when I got the engine going and the heater on high and the wipers knocking the snow off, I dug an Illinois map out of the glove compartment and finally located Bureau. It was halfway between Joliet and Rock island, and lay about eight miles south of Interstate 80. The legend said that from the size of the circle marking it the population was between zero and two hundred and fifty. The idea of a town of zero population bemused me. Should it not have been from one to two hundred and fift? My eye, sliding, picked up the name of a town of the same size on the other side of the river. Florid. It looked like a typo. Florid, Illinois. The Florid Hotel. The Florid Bank. A cominunity of fat happy little people suffering from high blood pressure.
So I had enough leverage now, properly used, to unlock Miss Susan Kemmer. And Y knew I was sitting in a snowy automobile playing map games because I was reluctant to go use the leverage. Respect for the sanctity of the individual is a terrible burden in my line of work. I have seen cops whose greatest jolly is in taking your head apart and spreading all the pieces out on the table, under the interrogation lights. The totally dismembered personality can be put back together again, but the pieces never fit quite the way they did. And they come apart easier the next time. The old field strip.
Five o’clock and blundering old mother night had come in ahead of time to squat upon the city, upon two hundred thousand hair-trigger tempers clashing their way back toward good old homeheated television dinners, steam heat, the headachy little woman, the house-bound kids, and the dreadful feeling that Christmas was going to tear the guts out of the checking account.
I found a parking slot around the corner from Heidi’s place, and as I was going to enter the downstairs foyer, I turned on impulse and looked upward and picked out a big fat drifting flake, stuck my tongue out, and maneuvered under it. Consumer report. The snow is still pretty good. Cold as ever. Melts as fast. You can’t hardly taste the additives.
She let me in through the red door, into lamplight glow. Her creative day had ended and she was austere and queenly in a white knit dress with long sleeves-an off-white, neckline prim, shift-like in the loose beltless fit of it, hemline just above the knees in that third-grade look which gives women with legs as good as hers an innocently erotic flavor, and gives women with bad legs the clown look of Baby Snooks.
“What a Christly ghastly depressing day,” she said. She hiccuped. Astoundingly, she giggled. She looked appalled at herself, turned with careful stateliness, and said, walking away from me, “Don’t think you’ve discovered some kind of secret vice, McGee. I felt chilly and I had some sherry. The work was going well and I kept drinking it and I didn’t realize how many times I’d filled the glass and suddenly I was quite drunk. It isn’t habitual.”
“I’d never tab you as a wino, honey.”
She revolved like a window display, hiccuped again, and said, “I shall be perfectly all right in a few minutes.”
“How’s your house guest?”
“Still sleeping. She must have been exhausted. Let’s go see, shall we?”
I went down the short hallway with her. She turned on the hallway light: The room door was closed. She turned the knob carefully and swung the door open, hand still on the knob. I was right behind her. The wide vague band of light from the open doorway reached to the bed on the far side of the room. The young girl froze and gasped. She was standing beside the bed, and had obviously just taken off the borrowed nightgown and laid it on the bed and had been reaching toward the chair where her clothes were. The light was too shadowy to expose the facial damage. She had a ripeness, a pale heartiness in the light, and she quickly clapped one arm across her big young breasts and shielded her ginger-tan pubic tuft with her other hand.
A sound came from Heidi which turned every hair on the nape of my neck into a fine wiry bristle, crawled the flesh on the backs of my hands, and turned the small of my back to ice.
It was a tiny little-girl voice; thin and small, with none of the resonances of her maturity. It was a forlorn and sleepy little question. “Daddy? Daddy? Daddy, I’m scared. I had a bad dream. Daddy?”
Then she backed into me, banged the door shut. She stepped on my foot, turned into my arms, shuddered, and said, in that same infinitely pathetic little voice, “I’m going to tell on her. I’m going to tell on Gretchen! She was all bare!”
I held her. She was breathing rapidly, breathing a warm sherry-scented breath into my throat. Suddenly she slid her arms around my neck and held me with all her strength, crushing her soft and open mouth into mine, rocking and grinding her hips into me. There was so much frantic hunger from such a delicious direction, I was at least twotenths of a second catching up to her. Suddenly she sagged, fainting limp, and groaned, and would have fallen.
I helped her into the living room. She coughed and gagged. She stretched out full-length on the couch and rolled her head from side to side. I turned out the lamp shining down into her eyes and sat on the floor beside her and held her hand.
“What happened to me?” she asked. The little-girl voice was gone.
“Listen to me, Heidi. I want to tell you a sad story about a sensitive and complicated little girl in a silent house. She must have been about seven years old, and there were nurses and the smells of medicine and the adored mother was dying, and she felt frightened and alone, and had nightmares.”
She did not move as I reconstructed it for her. Her hand lay cool and boneless in mine. I finished it. There was no response.
“How vile!” she said in an almost inaudible tone. “How ugly and terrible.”
“Sure. A lonely man, wretchedly depressed. A young girl with a terrible crush on him. A slowwitted, amiable, romantic girl with all the ideas of soft surrender out of the love pulps and confessions. So she crept into his dark room and into his bed after God only knows how many nights of thinking about it. Soft, loving, willing young flesh and he took her. You came in on one of those nights to be comforted. She was just climbing out of his bed. There is a sexual undertone to every little girl’s love for her daddy.”
“‘No!”
“It must have terrified them to think that you might tell. But you went back to your own bed in another part of the house. And the doors slammed shut. It was too terrible a betrayal for you to endure. So it got pushed into a back closet of your mind, and the door was locked. But Heidi, you had to push other things in there too, and lock them away. The love for the father. And your own sexual responses. Slam the doors. Forget. The way you’ve forgotten how Gretchen looked, forgotten her voice. It turned you off, Heidi. Sex is vile. The world is vile. Love is ugliness.”
“Amateur diagnostics. Christ! It’s the parlor game I’m most sick of.”
“Look at me! Come on. One more little minute before you run and hide. You reverted all the way back. You regressed to seven years old. Then you slammed the door. Then you came at me like a she-tiger. Like rape. You couldn’t have made it plainer.”
“No. No.”