“Except Kelsey,” Alice said bitterly. “My sister. My sister and a prostitute called Mamie.”
“How he became engaged to Kelsey I don’t know,” Sands said.
“She was used to him, and she felt sorry for him.”
“And she loved him.”
“No, no, never!”
“Yes, I think she did,” Sands said. “I think you both did.”
She hung onto the arms of the chair. “I! I love a man with a woman like that, a murderer, a thief!”
“You didn’t know he was a murderer and a thief. Mamie did, and she loved him. I think that sometimes it must have pleased him to have Kelsey here and Mamie waiting for him down there. Yes, there’d be a lot of satisfaction in that. Probably it was his happiest period, when he was engaged to Kelsey before the accident. He didn’t even have to choose, you see, he could have both his women and both his lives, his tweeds and his pointed yellow shoes, his music and his dope.”
“A dope fiend!”
“Not a dope fiend. A lot of musicians use marihuana and some need it all the time, but Murillo didn’t. As Philip James, marihuana was even distasteful to him, incongruous, like using the sheets from Mamie’s bed on the bed he had here. Yes, I think for a time he was almost happy, until one night Johnny made a date from a restaurant downtown. Kelsey and Philip waited in the car and when Johnny came out of the house with the girl he had phoned, the girl was Geraldine Smith.
“He had only a little time to work things out. He knew that Geraldine would have to die and die soon before she could say anything. The road was slippery and the car skidded a little. He was Murillo then, gambling on his life. He took the wheel and the car ran off the road and crashed. It was his only chance. James would have muffed it, but Murillo didn’t. The girl, Geraldine, had been flung from the car. Johnny was still in the rumbleseat, Kelsey was unconscious on the road. He dragged Geraldine away from the road in case a passing car should come along. He was bleeding badly where the glass from the windshield had struck his chest. That may have given him the idea.
“He took a piece of glass and cut her throat and face and threw the glass away and came back to the car.”
“He did it,” Alice said dully. “You thought it was Johnny and he did it.”
“Yes, I thought it was Johnny. He was the only one who knew the girl, and I didn’t consider that the accident was planned. Very few men would have the almost insane irresponsibility and guts to drive a car deliberately into a ditch unless their lives depended on it. Yet, in a sense, his life did depend on it. With Geraldine dead he could keep going, and for another two years he did keep going.
“They were bad years. Kelsey was blind and he was tied to a blind girl. Geraldine was dead and he had her murder on his conscience.”
“Conscience!” Alice said bitterly.
“Yes, he had one, as all sensitive men have, but it was a subjective conscience. He had no standards except his own personal welfare, and so he wasn’t sorry he had killed the girl, he was merely sorry that he had been forced to kill her. Kelsey, too, had changed in other ways besides her blindness. Her mind had sharpened and splintered and the splinters were like antennae which could pick up and relay to her waves that the rest of you missed. I think that for two years she relived that accident, every detail of it, and I think that at the end she knew.”
“She dreamed of it,” Alice said, “of the girl. She’d scream out in her sleep.”
“For two years,” Sands said, “she kept postponing her marriage, she gave away her ring to a maid, not because she loved him and didn’t want him to be tied to a blind girl, not because she wasn’t sure about the accident. It must have seemed incredible to her at first, or perhaps it came so gradually that it was no shock.”
“She tried to kill herself.”
“Not from shock, from uncertainty. She had all that time to think, to feel it all out, the wheel under her hands, the skidding, the sudden swerve of the car as Philip jerked the wheel, the crash. She thought of it for two years and at the end of two years she wasn’t sure, she knew she could never be sure that it was Philip who had swung the car off the road and killed the girl and blinded her, Kelsey. Even apart from her blindness this uncertainty was enough to twist her mind. And there was no solution to her doubt, she could never bring herself to ask him outright. If he denied it she wouldn’t have believed him. Perhaps she was actually frightened that he’d admit it, and kept trying him out, subtly.”
“The last day,” Alice said, “she said, ‘I can’t trust anyone, can I, Philip?’ He told her, no, she couldn’t.”
“So she asked Ida to bring her the morphine.”
“Why didn’t she confide in me?” Alice said bleakly. “She never hinted...”
“Would you have believed her? Even as it was, didn’t you go to a psychiatrist about her? Only one of you would have believed her, Philip himself. He knew what she was thinking, he saw her reliving the accident day by day. He must have wanted to escape from her, to leave this house and never come back, but he couldn’t go. If he went Kelsey might talk. If he left her he knew she’d realize the truth and be sure of it. So he had to stay and watch her. He couldn’t stop watching her, and she must have felt his eyes. His were the eyes that stared at her, that meant hate and danger, a wall of eyes that must gradually have closed in on her. She had only one way of escape, Mamie’s way.
“While the doctors were working over her you sent Philip out for a walk. It was then that he went to the tavern and sat drinking at the table leaving his fingerprints on the glasses. He didn’t go to Mamie this time, he just sat there in the tavern, falling and sinking into that big hole that always waited for him — caught between two worlds.
“He must have known why Kelsey had tried to kill herself and known too that she wouldn’t die. And if she didn’t die, you’d all be after her asking why? And she’d tell you. He was desperate, he wanted to do something, to fight something. So he got up from the table and tried to get the bartender to hand over the night’s receipts. Crazy, isn’t it? That feeble gesture, that frail little sock at fate, as if by robbing a till he could become the doer and not the doneby.
“The bartender told him to go to hell. He ran then, and a couple of men chased him for a block or so and gave up. After all, nothing had been lost by them. The loss was Murillo’s. He had tried and failed, and failure was to him a living pain through his whole body. He came back to the house. The hall light was on. He went upstairs into Kelsey’s room and switched on the light. He must have been insane with hate standing there and seeing that she was breathing and hadn’t died. Perhaps she woke up and knew who had come to her room and why he had come. Or perhaps he killed her right away, as soon as he saw the knife on the table beside her bed. After he killed her he was calmer, his mind was working again. He took his pocketknife out of his coat — that was when some shreds of marihuana scattered on the rug — and picked the lock on the jewel box. He was going to take some of the jewels to make the murder look like robbery. But Mr. Heath came home then. He went past the door, very slowly, while Philip stood inside the room, knowing that the light was shining under the door, knowing that Mr. Heath might come in and find him there with Kelsey dead.
“The shock of Mr. Heath’s footsteps going past the door stunned him. He didn’t notice he hadn’t taken the jewels, he didn’t notice the shreds that had fallen from his pocket, he didn’t think of turning Kelsey’s light off. His only wish was to escape. As soon as he got out of the door he began to run.
“He was always escaping from something, he ran out of the tavern and out of the house, he was running when he was killed. It’s dark in here. Shall I turn on the lights?”