“You don’t understand Johnny,” he said. “He never means what he says. He’s always boasting, talking big. He’s never grown up, he’s still a boy.”
“You think such boys are harmless?”
“Johnny’s harmless. Anybody knows that. He brags because his sisters and his mother have always tried to boss him. He doesn’t know Murillo. He never even heard of him until this morning.”
“Yes?”
“I’m sure of it. Johnny’s harmless. He gets his small pleasures from trying to outwit people. Like this morning. He intended to appear at the office as a sign of good-will so they’d give him an extra week off. That’s typical of him.”
He spoke gravely and pedantically, and like a schoolmaster finishing a lecture he inclined his head slightly and left the room.
A dull young man, Sands decided, with a faint air of apology about him as if he didn’t feel entitled to the air he breathed, the rarefied air of the Heath family. The type of man the Heath sisters would choose, to bully and to mother alternately.
Yet Sands could not dismiss the man from his mind with such a simple classification. Could there be irony in the naive blank smoothness of Philip’s manner? Irony, Sands mused, there are a dozen kinds of irony. I’m ah ironist myself: Socratic irony I suppose you’d call it — but when I say I know nothing it’s often true. Johnny is a romantic ironist, defying fate, fighting his own mediocrity with a loud laugh and big muscles and his family’s money. And Philip? If Philip was an ironist the division between the external falsity and the internal truth lay so deep in his nature that it could not be decried. Perhaps so deep that it lay in the center of his mind, so that when his right lobe said white and his left lobe said black he himself could not tell which was right and which was wrong, but only that both were ironic in relation to each other.
Then the truth would be in neither, Sands thought, the truth would be in the irony.
The sun was becoming stronger and warmed the back of his neck. It was pleasant to sit in this strange bright little room and consider the destinies of other people and not have one of your own. Alice and Philip would marry, and eventually Maurice and Letty, and Maurice, in the manner of men who marry too late, would show his affection by patting Letty’s rear. The pats would be too hard to be playful, yet not hard enough to be anything else. They would undress, partly, in the dark, and Letty would close her eyes and think things. What did women think of at such a time? It had never been told or written. Women never gave themselves away completely.
Chapter 16
The section of the city was a bad one but the cottage itself was well kept and neat. A row of salvias still bloomed on either side of the veranda. Sands used the knocker, a brass lion’s head with a piece of felt glued to it to dull the sound.
The woman who came to the door was a small timid scrawny woman in a house dress and hair curlers. She opened the door about six inches and peered hostilely through the crack.
“Mrs. Moore?” Sands said. “I’ve come to see your daughter Marcella. My name is Sands.”
“My daughter’s sleeping,” Mrs. Moore said abruptly. “She works late and she’s got to get her sleep no matter what your name is. You can come back later.”
“No,” Sands said politely, “I can’t.”
“Well then, I guess you won’t see her.”
She sounded firm enough but she didn’t close the door. Sands guessed that Marcella had given her orders and that Mrs. Moore herself didn’t care who came to the house.
“Detective-Inspector Sands,” he said, giving her his card. “I want to see your daughter right now. It’s important, about a murder.”
“About... about a murder?” She looked shocked yet at the same time relieved that the decision had been taken from her hands. “Well, come in, I guess. I’ll call her.”
She flung open the door and stepped back quickly into the hall to let Sands come in. She put one hand up to her head as if to hide the curlers.
“I... I’ll go and call her. In there’s the parlor. You can sit down and I’ll...”
“Yes. Thanks.”
He left the door of the tiny parlor open. He heard Mrs. Moore go upstairs and call softly, “Marcie! Wake up, dear. There’s a...”
“How many times have I told you not to wake me up before...”
“Hush, dear. You weren’t sleeping, were you?”
“I was sleeping! Why do you think I wasn’t sleeping?”
“Not so loud. You just sounded sort of awake. I’m... I’m sorry. There’s a man downstairs. A policeman, he says he is.”
“Tell him to wait.” Marcie’s voice was deliberately loud and clear. “I’ll be down when I’m good and ready to come down.”
There were more sounds of hushing and then Mrs. Moore came downstairs again. She did not come into the parlor but stood in the doorway looking down at her fingernails.
“She’ll be down any minute,” she said in a low voice. “She’s kind of tired and...”
“Thanks,” Sands said again.
“And if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just... I’ll go and...”
“That’s all right.”
He waited for ten minutes. When Marcie appeared she gave him a curt nod. He saw that she had been making him wait deliberately, because she had not combed her hair or dressed or made up her face. Sands, tolerant of the larger sins, was always shocked by petty spite.
He said coldly, without rising, “Sit down, please.”
She crossed the room and sat down with exaggerated care for the long skirt of her housecoat. She didn’t look as young as she did under a spotlight, and not at all shy. She didn’t have to pretend anything here in this house that she herself supported. Behind this door she didn’t have to waste any of the shy fleeting glances she used on Stevie Jordan or Johnny Heath.
“Well?” she said.
He handed her his card. She took it, holding it by one corner.
“You don’t have to be so smart,” Sands said. “I’m not trying to get your fingerprints.”
She let the card flutter to the floor. “I was just being careful. The police think up a lot of cute things, like the insurance agent that came yesterday. He didn’t fool me. I can take care of myself.”
“You didn’t by any chance take care of Stevie Jordan too, did you?”
“Stevie? What are you talking about?”
“Jordan was shot last night in Joey Hanson’s office. He’s in the hospital and he probably won’t get out of it except the hard way, feet first.”
“Stevie,” she said in a dazed voice. “Stevie. I don’t believe it. No one would want to hurt Stevie. He was a very — he’s a nice guy.”
“Yes, I liked him,” Sands said quietly. “He hasn’t shot because he wasn’t a nice guy. He was shot because he got mixed up in this quite accidentally. The same as you did, Miss Moore. And once he was mixed up in it he lost his head, the same as you might.”
“I’m not mixed up in anything!” Marcie cried.
“Not actively, no,” Sands said. “But you knew them all, didn’t you? Kelsey Heath, Geraldine Smith, John Heath, Stevie Jordan, Mamie Rosen, Tony Murillo...”
“Murillo? I don’t know Murillo. I never even saw him.”
Sands stared at her.
“Well, I never did. I only know his name from listening to Mamie.”
“Strange,” Sands said.
“What’s so strange about it? Do you think any dame in her right senses would bring her boy friend backstage and introduce him to that bunch of bitches?” She paused and repeated “bitches,” because she liked the sound of the word coming from her own mouth. It was a word she often thought but never said. But here behind her own doors she didn’t have to pretend, she could say what she wanted to.