The girl opened for him at the seventh.
“Wait here for me. And no other passengers on the way down, straight trip.”
She was all eyes as he made his way down the peaceful, homelike corridor; she could tell it was an arrest.
He knocked on the door. Her voice said unfrightenedly, “Who is it?”
“Open the door, please,” he answered quietly.
She did immediately, surprise at the male voice still showing on her face. She had a washbasin full of silk stockings there behind her.
“Would you mind coming over with me?” He was somber about it but not truculent.
She said, “Oh,” in a weak little voice.
He stood there waiting in the open doorway. She fumbled around for her outer things in a closet, couldn’t get what she was looking for. “I don’t know why I’m not frightened,” she faltered. “I suppose I ought to be—” She was very badly frightened. She dropped the hanger with her coat and had to brush it off. Then she tried to put the coat on, forgetting to take the hanger out of it.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you. Miss Baker,” he said morosely.
“I’ll have to leave my stockings go, won’t I?” she said.
“I guess you better let them go.”
She knitted her brows, pulled out the stopper on her way past. “I wish I’d finished them before you got here,” she sighed. “Am I coming back?” she asked just before putting the lights out. “Or should I...should I take anything with me for the night?” She was very badly frightened.
He just closed the door for her.
“You see, I’ve never been arrested before,” she said placatingly, accompanying him down the hall, quick nervous little steps to his longer slower ones.
“Cut it out, will ya?” he said gruffly, with a sort of querulous annoyance.
He came into the dim room, looked at her, lit a cigarette whose outer radius of slowly expanding smoke took a moment or two to reach the conical shaft from the shaded light over her. When it did it turned pale blue, like something in a test tube. “Crying won’t do any good,” he said with distant correctness. “You’re not being mistreated in any way. And you have only yourself to blame for being here.”
“You don’t know what it means—” she said in the direction his voice had come from. “You deal in arrests, to you it’s nothing. You can’t possibly know what goes through you, when you’re in your room, secure and contented and at peace with the world one minute, and the next someone suddenly comes for you to take you away. Takes you down through the building you live in, in front of everybody, takes you through the streets — and when they get you there you find out you’re supposed to have — to have murdered a man! Oh, I can’t stand it! I’m frightened of the whole world tonight! I feel as though I were in the middle of one of those stories told to my own children, suddenly come true; bewitched, held under the power of some ogre’s spell.”
And as she wept, she tried to smile into the darkness at them, in apology.
Another voice spoke up from the perimeter of gloom: “D’you think Moran had an easy time of it, that last half hour or so in the closet? You didn’t see him when he was taken out; we did.”
She pressed her hair flat to her head, soundlessly.
“Don’t,” Wanger said in an aside. “She’s the sensitive type.”
The unseen matron made a plucking sound at her lips with her tongue, to express her own opinion on that subject.
“I didn’t know it was a murder. I didn’t know it was done to him purposely!” the girl on the wooden chair said. “When you had me out there at their house the other day, I simply thought it had been an accident, that he’d locked himself in some way, and the child hadn’t realized the seriousness of the danger, and then afterward perhaps, to escape the blame, as children will, had made up the story that I was there.”
Wanger said, “That doesn’t alter the case any. That’s not what we’re talking to you about now. You didn’t eat at the Swedish woman’s. You didn’t go to the Standard. But you went to both of those places afterwards and told them to say you did! Then you wonder why you’re here.”
She held one wrist with the other hand, twisting at it circularly. Finally she said, “I know — I didn’t realize I was being watched so soon — you seemed so friendly that afternoon.”
“We don’t give warnings.”
“I didn’t know it was a murder; I thought it was just the child’s little fib I had to contend with.” She took a deep breath. “I was — with my husband. His name is Larry Stark, he... he lives at 420 Marcy Avenue. I made dinner for him at his apartment and was there all evening.”
It made no impression. “Why didn’t you tell us that the first time you were asked?”
“I couldn’t, don’t you see? I’m a teacher, I’m not supposed to be married, it’ll cost me my job.”
“We’ve shot your first story to pieces, there’s nothing left of it; naturally you’ve got to replace it, you can’t just stand on thin air. Why should we believe this one any more than the first?”
“Ask Larry — he’ll tell you! He’ll tell you I was there with him the whole time.”
“We’ll ask him all right. And he probably will tell us you were there with him. But the Moran child tells us you were there with him. And the crayon drawing tells us you were there with him. And the two glasses of orange juice in the icebox tell us you were there with him. And your dark blue suit tells us you were there with him. And your own actions for the past few days tell us you were there with him. That’s quite a lineup to buck, little girl.”
She gave a wordless intake of breath and let her head tilt back across the chair back.
A shaft of yellow corridor light slashed through the foursquare darkness around her and a voice said, “He’s ready for her now.”
Wanger’s chair scraped back. “It’s a little late for that now. It won’t do you as much good as if you’d come out with it in the beginning. This thing’s well under way. Miss Baker, and it seldom pays to change trains in the middle of a trip — you’re liable to fall down between the two of them.”
His hand became visible up past the wrist, reaching out into the downpouring cone of light for her.
She was crying again, soundlessly as ever, when the matron and Wanger brought her up before his superior’s desk.
“So this is the young lady?” Under other circumstances it might have been misconstrued as a half-friendly opening remark. It wasn’t meant that way.
A phone beside him stuttered, “D-d-d-d-d-ding, br-r-r-r-ring.”
He said, “Just a minute.”
Then he said, “Who? Yes, there’s a Wanger here, but you can’t use his extension. Well, what is it you—”
He lowered it, looked across the desk at him. “There’s somebody has something to tell you about this girl you just brought in. Go ahead, see what it is.”
He motioned, and the matron stepped outside with Miss Baker again.
“The husband, I guess,” Wanger murmured, moving around beside him and picking up the instrument.
A woman’s voice said, “Hello, is this Wanger?”
“Yes. Who is it wants to—” he started to say warily.
The other voice cut through his like a knife through butter. “I’m doing the talking. You’ve just brought a girl in with you from the Women’s Residence Club. A Miss Baker, a kindergarten teacher. That right? Well, this is just to tell you she had nothing to do with what happened to Moran in that closet; I don’t care how it looks or what you think you know or what you think you’ve found out.”