“That’s ridiculous, Lieutenant. Regardless of any gossip you may have heard, I don’t know this, uh, Tony person. And I most certainly did not plot with him or anyone else to kill my husband. Why—”
“He says you did. We got a signed confession from him.”
“Have you?” But of course they didn’t have. They might have found out about Tony, but he would never have talked. “That hardly proves anything, does it?”
“Now, you listen to me, Mrs. Clinton! Maybe you think that —”
“How is my husband, anyway? I do hope he wasn’t seriously hurt.”
“How is he?” the lieutenant snarled. “How would he be after gettin’ worked over with—” He broke off, his eyes flickering. “As a matter of fact,” he said heavily, “he’s going to be all right. He was pretty badly injured, but he was able to give us a statement and —”
“I’m so glad. But why are you questioning me, then?” It was another trick. Bill had to be dead. “If he gave you a statement, then you must know that everything happened just like I said.”
She waited, looked at him quizzically. Powers scowled, his stern face wrinkling with exasperation.
“All right,” he said at last. “All right, Mrs. Clinton. Your husband is dead. We don’t have any statement from him, and we don’t have any confession from Tony.”
“Yes?”
“But we know that you’re guilty, and you know that you are. And you’d better get it off your conscience while you still can.”
“While I still can?”
“Doc” — Powers jerked his head at the doctor. At the man, that is, who appeared to be a doctor. “Lay it on the line, Doc. Tell her that her boyfriend hit her a little too hard.”
The man came forward hesitantly. He said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Clinton. You have a — uh — you’ve sustained a very serious injury.”
“Have I?” Ardis smiled. “I feel fine.”
“I don’t think,” the doctor said judiciously, “that that’s quite true. What you mean is that you don’t feel anything at all. You couldn’t. You see, with an injury such as yours —”
“Get out,” Ardis said. “Both of you get out.”
“Please, Mrs. Clinton. Believe me, this isn’t a trick. I haven’t wanted to alarm you, but—”
“And you haven’t,” she said. “You haven’t scared me even a little bit, mister. Now, clear out!”
She closed her eyes, kept them closed firmly. When, at last, she reopened them, Powers and the doctor — if he really had been a doctor — were gone. And the room was in darkness.
She lay smiling to herself, congratulating herself. In the corridor outside, she heard heavy footsteps approaching; and she tensed for a moment. Then, remembering, she relaxed again.
Not Bill, of course. She was through with that jerk forever. He’d driven her half out of her mind, got her to the point where she couldn’t have taken another minute of him if her life depended on it. But now …
The footsteps stopped in front of her door. A key turned in the lock, the door opened and closed.
There was a clatter of a lunch pail being set down; then a familiar voice — maddeningly familiar words:
“Well. Another day, another dollar.”
Ardis’s mouth tightened; it twisted slowly in a malicious grin. So they hadn’t given up yet! They were pulling this one last trick. Well, let them; she’d play along with the gag.
The man plodded across the room, stooped, and gave her a halfhearted peck on the cheek. “Long time no see,” he said. “What we havin’ for supper?”
“Bill…” Ardis said. “How do I look, Bill?”
“OK. Got your lipstick smeared, though. What’d you say we was having for supper?”
“Stewed owls! Now, look, mister. I don’t know who you —”
“Sounds good. We got any hot water?”
“Of course, we’ve got hot water! Don’t we always have? Why do you always have to ask if — if—”
She couldn’t go through with it. Even as a gag — even someone who merely sounded and acted like he did — it was too much to bear.
“Y-you get out of here!” she quavered. “I don’t have to stand for this! I c-can’t stand it! I did it for fifteen years, and —”
“So what’s to get excited about?” he said. “Well, guess I’ll go splash the chassis.”
“Stop it! STOP IT!” Her screams filled the room …silent screams ripping through silence. “He’s —you’re dead! I know you are! You’re dead, and I don’t have to put up with you for another minute. And — and —!”
“Wouldn’t take no bets on that if I was you,” he said mildly. “Not with a broken neck like yours.”
He trudged off toward the bathroom, wherever the bathroom is in Eternity.
1968
CORNELL WOOLRICH
FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE
Cornell (George Hopley) Woolrich (1903-1968) was born in New York City but divided his early years between Latin America and Mexico, with his father, and New York, with his Manhattan socialite mother. While still an undergraduate at Columbia University, he wrote his first novel, a romance, Cover Charge (1926). Another romantic novel, Children of the Ritz (1927), quickly followed, and it won a $10,000 prize jointly offered by College Humor magazine and First National Pictures, which filmed it in 1929. Four more romantic novels, favorably compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, followed. Woolrich had also begun to write short stories, and his first mystery was published in 1934. Most of his subsequent work (more than two hundred stories and sixteen novels) was in that genre. A reclusive alcoholic, he rarely left his hotel room for the last three decades of his life.
Arguably the greatest suspense writer of the twentieth century, Woolrich, under his own name and the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley, was able to construct plots that stretched credulity, especially in their dependence on coincidence, yet relentlessly gripped readers. He is noted for producing stories of the everyday gone wrong, as terrible things happen to ordinary people. More than twenty of his novels and stories were filmed, including The Leopard Man (1943), based on Black Alibi (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur; Phantom Lady (1944), directed by Robert Siodmak; Rear Window (1954), based on “It Had to Be Murder” and directed by Alfred Hitchcock; and The Bride Wore Black (1967), directed by Francois Truffaut. More true of the literary works than the motion pictures (since Hollywood preferred happy endings), Woolrich was able to heighten suspense by being totally unpredictable, with readers never knowing if the suspense would be relieved or if it would be worse when the tale was ended.
“For the Rest of Her Life,” the last Woolrich story published during his lifetime, first appeared in the May 1968 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and was first collected in his Angels of Darkness (1978). It was made into a two-hour television movie in West Germany in 1974, directed and adapted for the screen by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Their eyes met in Rome. On a street in Rome — the Via Piemonte.
He was coming down it, coming along toward her, when she first saw him. She didn’t know it but he was also coming into her life, into her destiny — bringing what was meant to be.
Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.
If she had not come along the Via Piemonte that day, would it still have happened? If she had come along the Via Piemonte that day, but ten minutes later than she did, would it still have happened? Therein lies the real mystery. And no one ever knows, and no one ever will.