And once again the line was dead.
Twenty minutes later he was pressing the bell for her apartment. When she answered over the communicator and he told her who he was, there was a silence. The lock was not released. He pressed other bells at random. The door buzzed and he pushed it open and went into the tiny lobby. The elevator was in use. He went up two flights of stairs, found her apartment in the rear and beat upon the door with his fist.
“Go away!” she yelled.
He kept hammering. A door down the hall opened. A woman stared at him. He gave her a maniac grin and she ducked back into her apartment.
Finally the door swung open. Wilma Farnham tried to block the way, but he pushed roughly by her, turned and shut the door.
“How dare you!”
“Now there’s a great line. It swings, Wilma.”
“You’re stinking drunk!”
“I’m stinking indignant. Now you sit down, shut up and listen.” He took her by the shoulders, walked her backward into the couch and let go. She fell back with a gasp of shock and anger.
“Nothing you can say to me—”
“Shut up!” He stared at her. She wore a burly, shapeless, terry-cloth robe in a distinctly unpleasant shade of brown. Her brown hair fell to her shoulders. She was not wearing her glasses. Her small face was wrinkled with distaste, and she squinted at him myopically. “What the hell gives you the impression you’ve got this monopoly on loyalty and virtue and honor, Wilma? What makes you so damn quick to judge everybody else, on no evidence at all? What gives you the right to assume you know the slightest damned thing about me, or how I’d react to anything?”
“B-but you always just sort of drift with—”
“Shut up! You did as you were told. That’s fine. My congratulations. But it doesn’t make you unique. I did as I was told, too. I did not tell them one damn thing.”
She stared at him. “You’re trying to trick me somehow.”
“For God’s sake, call any of the brass. Ask them.”
She looked at him dubiously. “Not a thing?”
“Nothing.”
“But those lawyers told me you would tell everything. They said it was the only way you’d get a dime out of the estate.”
“They made just as bad a guess as you did.”
“Did you just say — nothing? Just refuse to talk?”
“I did better than that. I told them something they couldn’t possibly accept — something they couldn’t possibly believe.”
“What?”
“I told them I gave it all away.”
Her eyes were suddenly too round for squinting. “But... that’s—”
Suddenly she began to giggle. He would not have thought her capable of any sound so girlish. Then she began to guffaw. He laughed with her. Her hoots and shouts of laughter became wilder, and the tears were running down her small face, and suddenly he realized her laughter had turned into great sobs, great wrenching spasms of grief and pain.
He went to her, sat with her. She lunged gratefully into his arms, ramming her head into the side of his throat, snorting, snuffling, bellowing, her narrow body making little spasmed leapings with her sobs, and he could make out a few words here and there. “Sorry — so alone — ashamed — didn’t mean—”
He held her and patted her and said, “There, there, there.”
At last she began to quiet down. He became conscious of the fresh clean smell of her hair, and of the soft warmth of her against him, and of a hint of pleasant contour under the dreary robe. She gave a single great hiccup from time to time. Abruptly, she stiffened in his arms, thrust herself away and scrambled to the far end of the couch.
“Don’t come near me! Don’t touch me, you son of a bitch!”
“Wilma!”
“I know all about you. Maybe the rest of them roll right over on their back, but you better not get the idea I’m going to.”
“What the hell!”
“Hah! A wonderful imitation of innocence, Kirby Winter. I’m glad you’re loyal to your uncle, but that doesn’t mean I have to respect the other things you stand for.
“I knew what you had in mind, setting up those little conferences in that sordid hotel room. We both knew what you were after, didn’t we? That’s why I was on guard every single moment. I knew that if I gave you the slightest opportunity, you would have been after me like a madman.”
“What?”
“I was on guard every single minute. I had no intention of becoming your Miami plaything, Mr. Winter. You got enough of that, all over the world. I used to go to that room in absolute terror. I knew how you looked at me. And I thanked God, Mr. Winter, I thanked God for being so plain you weren’t likely to lose control of yourself. And I made myself plainer when I came to that room. Now that it’s all over, I can tell you another thing too, something that makes me sick with shame. Sometimes, Mr. Winter, in all my fear and all my contempt, I found myself wanting you to hurl yourself at me.”
“Hurl myself!”
“It was the devil in my heart, Mr. Winter. It was a sickness of the flesh, a crazy need to degrade myself. But I never gave way to it. I never gave you the slightest hint.”
“All we did was sit in that room and go over the reports and—”
“That’s what it looked like, yes. Ah, but how about the things unsaid, Mr. Winter, the turmoil and the tension underneath. What about that, Mr. Winter?”
He raised his right hand. “Miss Farnham, I swear before God that I never, for the slightest moment, felt the smallest twinge of desire for—”
He stopped abruptly. He saw anew the neat sterility of the apartment, the plain girl, the look on her face of sudden realization, hinting at the horrible blow to her pride that would soon be evident. And he knew that even if she was slightly mad, he could not do that to her.
He dropped his hand abruptly and gave her a wicked wink. “I guess I can’t get away with that, can I?”
“Beg pardon?”
He winked again. “Hell, baby, I used to see you walking, swinging that little round can one sweet inch from side to side and I used to think — uh — if I could just get you out of those glasses and those old-lady clothes and muss your hair up a little and get a drink into you, you’d be a pistol.”
“Y-you filthy animal!”
He shrugged. “But, like you said, cutie, you never gave me an opening. You never made the slightest move.”
She seemed to cover the distance from the couch to a doorway across the room in a single bound. She whirled and stared at him. Her face was pale. Her mouth worked. “Th-then,” she whispered, “if I didn’t — why in God’s name didn’t you?”
In the trembling silence he reached for the right response, but all he could find was his own terrible moment of truth. He felt impelled to meet it. “Because — I’m scared of women. I try to hide it. Women terrify me.”
She wore an expression of absolute incredulity. She took a half-step toward him. “But you’re so — so suave and so—”
“I’m a lousy fake, Wilma. I run like a rabbit, all the time.”
She bit her lip. “I... haven’t had many chances to run. But I always have. Like a rabbit. But you!”
“You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”
Suddenly she began to laugh again, but he could not laugh with her. He heard the laughter climbing toward hysteria.