Then they were side by side again, Mr. and Mrs. Nick Killeen, her hand tucked submissively under his arm, as a wife’s should be, her step matched to his, her heart beating his music. Down the long, vaulted church aisle they moved, toward where the doors stood open wide and the future, their future, waited. And behind them, two by two, came the bridesmaids like a bed of mobile flowers, yellow, azure, lilac, pink.
The apsed doorway receded overhead, gave way to a night sky soft as velvet, pricked with a single star, the evening star. Promising things, long life and happiness and laughter; promising things — but with a wink.
Their attendants hung back, as if bonded in some mischievous conspiracy, as the two principals unsuspectingly started down the short, spreading flight of church steps. The foremost of a short line of cars that had been held in readiness a few doors up the street meshed gears and started slowly forward to receive them. A gust of surreptitious giggling swept over those crowded in the doorway behind them. Hands sought paper bags, and the first few swirls of rice began to mist the steps. The bride threw up her arm to ward off the bombardment, huddled closer to the room. Squeals of glee were emitted, the air whitened with the falling grains.
There was a sudden caterwauling of hysterical brakes; a large black shape, blurred for a moment by its very unexpectedness, careened around the corner of the church. It skimmed over the curb, nearly threatened to mount the steps themselves for a moment. Then by some miracle of maniac steering it veered off, straightened out, revealed itself for a split second as a black sedan, then shot forward into blurred velocity again. A series of ear-splitting detonations had punctuated the whole incredible apparition, and reflected flashes traced it from window-pane to windowpane along the lower floors of the row houses opposite. In its wake a noxious cloud of black smoke blanketed the church steps and those on them, as though an evil spirit had passed that way, and only began to thin out long after the malignant red taillight had twisted from sight at the far upper end of the street.
The laughter and playful shouts had changed to strangled coughs and sputterings. Then there was a sudden silence, as of premonition. In it, a voice spoke a name. The bride spoke her husband’s name. “Nick!” Just once, in a hushed, terrified voice. An instant longer they stood down there motionless at the bottom of the steps, side by side, just as they had left the church. Then all at once she stood alone, and he lay at her feet.
The others broke, came milling down off the steps, fluttering around her. In the middle of them all his face peered up at her, like a white pebble lying at the bottom of a deep pool. There was a tiny fleck of red, a comma, so to speak, down near the bottom of her snowy veil. She kept staring at it as if hypnotized. His face didn’t move. Not a comma, no; a period.
Minutes went by that had no meaning any more. She was a statue in white, the one motionless, the one fixed thing, in all the eddying and swirling about. Voices shouting suggestions reached her as from another world, holding no meaning. “Open his shirt! Get these girls out of here, put them in the cars and send them home!”
Hands were extended toward her, trying to lead her away. “My place is here,” she murmured tonelessly.
“Stunned,” someone said. “Don’t let her stand there like that; see if you can get her to go with you.”
She motioned briefly, mechanically, and they let her be.
In the welter of sounds a dismal, clanging bell approached in the distance, rushing through the streets. Then it stopped short. A black bag stood open at her feet. “Gone,” a low voice said. A girl screamed somewhere close at hand. It wasn’t she.
The black bag was held partly toward her. “Here, let me give you—”
She motioned them aside with one hand, the one with the new gold wedding band on it. “Just let me hold my husband in my arms a moment. Just let me say goodbye.” She knelt over him, with a great welling up of white tulle around her like a snowdrift stirred by the wind. The two heads joined, as they had been meant to join, but only one gave the caress. Those hovering closest heard a soft whisper. “I won’t forget.”
Then she was erect again, the straightest one among all of them; like ice, like white fire. A whimpering bridesmaid plucked helplessly at her sleeve. “Please come away now, please, Julie.”
She didn’t seem to hear. “How many were in that car, Andrea?”
“I saw five, I think.”
“That is what I saw, too, and I have such very good eyes. What was the license number of that car, Andrea?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t have time—”
“I did. D3827. And I have such a very good memory.”
“Julie, don’t, you’re frightening me. Why aren’t you crying?”
“I am, where you can’t see it. Come with me, Andrea. I’m going back inside the church.”
“To pray?”
“No, to make a vow. Another vow to Nick.”
IV
Postmortem on Nick Killeen
“So that was it, and you’ve repaid your debt,” Wanger said musingly, “and nothing we can do to you now can take away the satisfaction of your accomplishment, is that it? No punishment that you receive from us can touch you — inside, where it really matters, is that right?”
She didn’t answer.
“Yes, I had you figured that way all along, and now I see that I had you figured right. Sure, imprisonment won’t be any punishment to you, no, nor even the chair itself, if they should happen to give you that. There isn’t a flicker of remorse in your eyes, there isn’t a shadow of fear in your heart.”
“There isn’t. You read me right.”
“The state can’t punish you, can it? But I can. Listen, Julie Killeen.
“You haven’t avenged Nick Killeen. You only think you have, but you haven’t. On the night that Bliss, Mitchell, Ferguson, Holmes and Moran tore past those church steps, howling drunk in their car, a man crouched at the first-floor window of a rooming house opposite, watching for the two of you, a gun in his hand, waiting for you to come out. He’d missed Killeen going in for some reason; maybe the cab Killeen arrived in formed an impediment in his line of fire, maybe there were too many people around him, maybe he reached his death post too late. And so he stayed there; he wasn’t going to miss him coming out.”
“He didn’t.”
“He raised his gun as you and your husband came down the steps. He sighted at Nick, and he pulled the trigger. The car streaked by in between at that instant, with its exhaust tube exploding a mile a minute. But his bullet found its mark, over the car’s low top. It was a freak of timing that wouldn’t have happened again in a hundred years, that couldn’t have happened if he had tried to arrange it that way. The very reflections of the backfiring along the row of unlighted windowpanes helped to cover up his flash.
“There’s your punishment, Julie Killeen. You’ve sent four innocent men to their deaths, who had nothing to do with killing your husband.”
He hadn’t reached her with that, he could tell; there was still the same glaze of icy imperviousness all over her. There was disbelief in her eyes. “Yes, I remember,” she said contemptuously, “the papers tried to hint at some flimsy possibility like that at the time, no doubt deliberately encouraged by you people to cover up your own incompetence. There have been cases before that were never solved — Elwell, Dorothy King, Rothstein — and there’s always the same reason; rottenness in the wrong places, bribery in the right places, pull. But there never was a case in the whole history of the police force that was allowed to pass so unnoticed as this. Not even a suspect questioned in it from first to last. As though a dog had been shot down in the streets!”