His head flopped down again and smoke came out of the hidden gray gash of his lips. The chaplain’s hand pressed down on his shoulder once more, steadying the fear, damming it. Footsteps could be heard coming quietly and with horrible slowness along the stone-floored passage outside, and a sudden hush fell over Death Row. Instead of coming up, Scott Henderson’s head went down even further. The cigarette fell and rolled away. The chaplain’s hand pressed down harder, almost riveting him there to the bunk.
The footsteps had stopped. He could sense they were standing out there looking in at him, and though he tried not to look, he couldn’t hold out, his head came up against his will and turned slowly. He said, “Is this it now?”
The cell door started to ease back along its grooves, and the warden said, “This is it now, Scott.”
Scott Henderson’s program. Poor Scott Henderson’s program, returning like bread cast upon the waters. He stared at it. The handbag he had wrenched from her lay unnoticed at his feet.
The girl, meanwhile, was writhing there beside him, trying to break the soldered grip of his hand on her shoulder.
He put it carefully away in his inside pocket first of all. Then he took two hands to her, trundled her roughly along the sidewalk and over to where his car stood waiting. “Get in there, you heartless apology for a human being! You’re coming with me! You know what you’ve nearly done, don’t you?”
She threshed around for a moment before he got the door open and pushed her in. She went sprawling knees first, turned and scrambled upward against the seat. “Let me go, I tell you!” Her voice went keening up and down the street. “You can’t do this to me! Somebody come here! Aren’t there any cops in this town to stop a guy like him—!”
“Cops? You’re getting cops! All the cops you want! You’ll be sick of the sight of them before I get through with you!” Before she could squirm out at the opposite side, he had come in after her, yanked her violently back so that she floundered against him, and crashed the door shut after him.
He took the back of his hand to her twice to silence her; once in threat, the second time in fulfilment. Then he bent to the dashboard. “I never did that to a woman before,” he gritted. “But you’re no woman. You’re just a bum in feminine form. A no-good bum.” They swerved out from the curb, straightened and shot off. “Now you’re going to ride whether you want to or not, and you better see that you ride quiet. Every time you howl or try anything while I’m bucking this traffic I’ll give you another one of those if I have to. It’s up to you.”
She quit wildcatting, deflating sullenly against the seat leather, glowered there, while they cut around corners, bypassed car after car going the same way they were. Once, when a light held them up for a minute, she said defeatedly, without renewing her previous attempts to escape, “Where’re you heading with me?”
“You don’t know, do you?” he said cuttingly. “It’s all news to you, isn’t it?”
“Him, hunh?” she said with quiet resignation.
“Yeah, him, hunh?! Some specimen of humanity you are!” He crushed the accelerator flat once more, and both their heads went back in unison. “You ought to be beaten raw, for being willing to let an innocent man go to his death, when you could have stopped it at any time from first to last, just by coming forward and telling them what you know!”
“I figured it was that,” she said dully. She looked down at her hands. After a while she said, “When is it — tonight?”
“Yes, tonight!”
He saw her eyes widen slightly, in the reflected dashboard light, as though she hadn’t realized until now it was that imminent. “I didn’t know it was — going to be that soon,” she gulped.
“Well, it isn’t now!” he promised harshly. “Not as long as I’ve got you with me at last!”
Another light stopped them. He cursed it, sat there wiping his face with a large handkerchief. Then both their heads flung back together again.
She sat there staring steadily before her. Not at anything before or beyond the car. Yet not at anything below the windshield either, although it was there her eyes were fixed. He could see her in the mirror on her side. She was staring inwardly at something. The past, perhaps. Summing up her life. There was no bar whisky at hand now to provide her with an escape. She had to sit and face it, while the car raced on.
“You must be something made of sawdust, without any insides at all!” he told her once.
She answered, unexpectedly and at length. “Look what it did to me. You haven’t thought of that, have you? Haven’t I suffered enough for it already? Why should I care what happens to him, or to anyone else! What is he to me, anyway? They’re killing him tonight. But I’ve been killed for it already! I’m dead, I tell you, dead! You’ve got someone dead sitting in the car next to you.”
Her voice was the low growl of tragedy striking in the vitals; no shrill woman’s whine or plaint; a sexless groan of suffering. “Sometimes in dreams I see someone who had a beautiful home, a husband who loved her, money, beautiful things, the esteem of her friends, security; above all, security, safety. That was supposed to go on until she died. That was supposed to last. I can’t believe it was me. I know it wasn’t me. And yet the whisky-dreams, sometimes, tell me that it was. You know how dreams are—”
He sat eyeing the darkness that came streaming toward them, to part in the middle over the silver prow of the headlights and come together again behind them, like a mystic undulating tide. His eyes were gray pebbles, that didn’t move, didn’t hear, didn’t give a rap about her trouble.
“Do you know what it means to be thrown out into the street? Yes, literally thrown out, at two in the morning, with just the clothes you have on your back, and to have the doors locked behind you and your own servants warned not to admit you again on pain of dismissal! I sat on a park bench all night the first night. I had to borrow five dollars from my own former maid the next day, so that I could get a room, find shelter at least.”
“Why didn’t you come forward then, at least? If you’d already lost everything, what more did you have to lose?”
“His power over me didn’t end there. He warned me that if I opened my mouth, did anything to bring notoriety or disgrace on his good name, he’d sign me over into an institution for alcoholics. He could easily do it too, he has the influence, the money. I’d never get out again. Straitjackets and cold-water treatments.”
“All that’s no excuse. You must have known we were looking for you; you couldn’t have avoided knowing it. You must have known this man was going to die. You were yellow, that’s what you were. But if you never did a decent thing in your life before, and if you never do a decent thing in your life again, you’re going to do one now. You’re going to speak your piece and save Scott Henderson!”
She was silent for a long moment. Then her head went over slowly. “Yes,” she said at last, “I am. I want to — now. I must have been blind all these months, not to see it as it really is. Somehow I didn’t think of him all along until now, I only thought of myself, what I had to lose by it.” She looked up at him again. “And I would like to do one decent thing at least — just for a change.”
“You’re going to,” he promised grimly. “What time did you meet him at the bar that night?”
“Six-ten, by the clock in front of us.”
“Are you going to tell them that? Are you willing to swear to that?”
“Yes,” she said in an exhausted voice, “I’m going to tell them that. I’m willing to swear to that.”