An American Dream (8 page)

Something in her leaped to catch that child, I felt some avarice shake its way through; she was beginning as I was done, pinching and squeezing at the back of my neck: she came in ten seconds behind. “Oh,” she said, “you are trying to woo me.” By which time I was cold as ice, and kissed her mockingly on the nose.

“Now, listen,” I said, “take a shower.”

“Why?” She shook her head, pretending a half-bewilderment. But those forty seconds had drawn us to focus with each other. I felt as fine and evil as a razor and just as content with myself. There was something further in her I’d needed, some bitter perfect salt, narrow and mean as the eye of a personnel director.

“Because, my pet, the police will be here in five minutes.”

“You called them?”

“Of course.”

“My God.”

“They’ll be here in five minutes, and I’ve got to pretend to be overcome. Which of course I am.” And I smiled.

She looked at me in wonder. Was I mad, asked her eyes, or deserving of respect.

“But what,” she said like a German, “do you have to explain to them?”

“That I didn’t kill Deborah.”

“Who says you did?” She was trying to keep up with me, but this last had been a racing turn.

“I didn’t like Deborah very much. She detested me. You know that.”

“You were not very happy with each other.”

“Not very.”

“A woman doesn’t commit suicide for a man she detests.”

“Listen, pet, I have something awful to tell you. She had a sniff of you on me. And then she jumped. Like that. Before my eyes.”

“Mr. Rojack, you are hard as nails.”

“Hard as nails.” I pinched her shoulder a little. “Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s get out of this together. Then we have fun.”

“I’m scared,” she said.

“When the police talk to you, tell them the truth. Except for one obvious detail. Obviously, there was nothing between us.”

“Nothing between us.”

“You let me in tonight. A couple of hours ago. You don’t know the time exactly, a couple of hours ago. Then you went to sleep. You heard nothing until I woke you up.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t trust the police. If they say I said we were having an affair, deny it.”

“Mr. Rojack, you never laid a hand on me.”

“Right.” I took her chin between my thumb and forefinger, holding it as if precious. “Now, the second line of defense. If they bring me down to see you, or bring you up to see me, and you hear me say we went to bed tonight, then agree. But only if you hear me say it.”

“Will you tell them?”

“Not unless there’s evidence. In that case I’ll tell the police I wanted to protect our mutual reputation. It’ll still be all right.”

“Shouldn’t we admit it from the start?”

“More natural to conceal the fact.” I smiled. “Now, wash yourself. Quickly. If there’s time, get dressed. And look—”

“Yes.”

“Make yourself plain. Comb out your hair for God’s sake.”

With that, I quit the apartment. The elevator would take too long, but I rang anyway, five piercing rings to manifest impatience and then took the stairs. For the second time that night I was on my way down ten flights of stairs, but this time on the run. When I reached the lobby, it was empty, the doorman was doubtless ascending, a bit of good luck or bad luck (I could not keep up with the possibilities any longer) and then I was on the street and running a few steps to the Drive. There was one instant when the open air reached my nose and gave me a perfect fleeting sense of adventure on the wind, of some adventure long gone—a memory: I was eighteen, playing House Football for Harvard; it was a kickoff and the ball was coming to me, I had it, and was running. Off the river came a light breeze with the hint of turf to it. There was a fence lining the East River Drive, but it had no barbed wire on top, I was able to climb up and get over without ripping my pants, and come down the other side. There was now a jump of eight feet further down to a strip of curb, but I dropped—I hated jumping—but I dropped, jarred my ankle, hurt something minor in my groin, some little muscle, and made my way along the southbound traffic whose drivers were crawling by at five miles an hour in the unobstructed lane. Deborah was a hundred feet down the road. I had a glimpse of four or five cars collided into one another, and a gathering of forty or fifty people. A magnesium flare had been lit and it gave off the white intent glare which surrounds workingmen doing serious work at night. Two police cars flanked the scene, their red lights revolving like beacons. In the distance, I could hear the siren of an ambulance, and in the center was that numb mute circle of silence which surrounds a coffin in the center of a room. I could hear a woman weeping hysterically in one of the automobiles which had collided. There were the short, rapt, irritable tones of three big men talking to one another, a professional conversation, two police and a detective, I realized, and farther on an elderly man with dirty gray hair, a large nose, an unhealthy skin, and a pair
of pink-tinted glasses was sitting in his car, the door open, holding his temple, and groaning in a whining gurgling sound which betrayed the shoddy state of his internal plumbing.

But I had broken through the crowd and was about to kneel at Deborah’s body. An arm in a blue serge sleeve held me back.

“Officer, that’s my wife.”

The arm went down suddenly. “You better not look, mister.”

There was nothing agreeable to see. She must first have struck the pavement, and the nearest car had been almost at a halt before it hit her. Perhaps it pushed the body a few feet. Now her limbs had the used-up look of rope washed limp in the sea, and her head was wedged beneath a tire. There was a man taking photographs, his strobe light going off each time with a mean crackling hiss, and as I knelt, he stepped back and turned to someone else, a doctor with a satchel in his hand, and said, “She’s yours.”

“All right, move the car back,” the doctor said. Two policemen near me pushed on the automobile and retired the front wheels a foot before the car bumped gently into the car behind it. I knelt ahead of the medical examiner and looked at her face. It was filthy with the scrape of asphalt and tire marks. Just half of her was recognizable, for the side of her face which caught the tire was swollen. She looked like a fat young girl. But the back of her head, like a fruit gone rotten and lying in its juices, was the center of a pond of coagulated blood near to a foot in diameter. I stayed between the police photographer who was getting ready to take more pictures and the medical examiner who was opening his satchel, and still on my knees, touched my face to hers, being careful to catch some of the blood on my hands, and even (as I nuzzled her hair with my nose) a streak or two more on my cheeks. “Oh, baby,” I said aloud. It might have been good to weep, but nothing of that sort was even near. No, shock and stupor would be the best I could muster. “Deborah,” I said, and like an echo from the worst of one’s past came a clear sense of doing this before, of making love to some
woman who was not attractive to me, of something unpleasant in her scent or dead in her skin, and me saying “Oh, darling, oh, baby,” in that rape of one’s private existence which manners demand. So, now, the “Oh, darling” came out full of timbre, full of loss. “Oh, Christ, Christ,” I repeated dully.

“Are you the husband?” a voice asked in my ear. Without turning around, I had an idea of the man who spoke. He was a detective, and he must be at least six feet tall, big through the shoulder and with the beginning of a gut. It was an Irish voice oiled with a sense of its authority, and in control of a thousand irritations. “Yes,” I said, and looked up to meet a man who did not correspond to his voice. He was about five-eight in height, almost slim, with a hard, clean face and the sort of cold blue eyes which live for a contest. So it was like the small shock of meeting somebody after talking on the telephone.

“Your name?”

I told him.

“Mr. Rojack, there’s a series of directly unpleasant details to get through.”

“All right.” I said dumbly, more than careful not to meet his eye.

“My name is Roberts. We have to take your wife to Four Hundred East Twenty-ninth, and we may have to call you down there to identify her again, but for the minute now—if you’d just wait for us.”

I was debating whether to say, “My God, right in front of my eyes, she jumped like that!” but that was one duck which would never lift from the lake. I had an uneasy sense of Roberts which was not unlike the uneasy sense I used to have of Deborah.

I wandered down the line of banged-up cars, and discovered that the unpleasant elderly man with the pink-tinted glasses was still moaning. There was a young couple with him, a tall dark good-looking Italian who might have been the man’s nephew—he showed a family resemblance. He had a sulky face, a perfect pompadour of
black straight hair, and was wearing a dark suit, a white silk shirt, a silver-white silk tie. He was a type I never liked on sight, and I liked him less because of the blonde girl he had with him. I caught no more than a glimpse of her, but she had one of those perfect American faces, a small-town girl’s face with the sort of perfect clean features which find their way onto every advertisement and every billboard in the land. Yet there was something better about this girl, she had the subtle touch of a most expensive show girl, there was a silvery cunning in her features. And a quiet remote little air. Her nose was a classic. It turned up with just the tough tilt of a speedboat planing through the water.

She must have felt me staring at her, for she turned around—she had been ministering with a certain boredom to the weak gutty sounds of the man in the pink-tinted glasses—and her eyes which were an astonishing green-golden-yellow in color (the eyes of an ocelot) now looked at me with an open small-town concern. “You poor man, your face is covered with blood,” she said. It was a warm, strong, confident, almost masculine voice, a trace of a Southern accent to it, and she took out her handkerchief and dabbed at my cheek.

“It must have been awful,” she said. A subtle hard-headed ever-so-guarded maternity lay under the pressure with which she scrubbed the handkerchief at my face.

“Hey, Cherry,” said her friend, “go up front, and talk to those cops, and see if we can get Uncle out of here.” Studiously, he was avoiding me.

“Let it be, Tony,” she said. “Don’t look to draw attention.”

And the uncle groaned again, as if to begrudge me
my
attention.

“Thank you,” I said to her, “you’re very kind.”

“I know you,” she said, looking carefully at my face. “You’re on television.”

“Yes.”

“You have a good program.”

“Thank you.”

“Mr. Rojack.” The detective was calling me.

“What is your name?” I asked her.

“Don’t even think about it, Mr. Rojack,” she said with a smile, and turned back to Tony.

And now I realized the detective had seen me chatting with nothing less than a blonde.

“Let’s go upstairs and talk,” he said.

We stepped into a squad car, the siren was opened, and we drove up the Drive to an exit, and then turned back to the apartment. We didn’t say a word on the way. That was just as well. Sitting next to me Roberts gave off the physical communion one usually receives from a woman. He had an awareness of me; it was as if some instinct in him reached into me and I was all too aware of him.

By the time we arrived, there were two more squad cars in the street. Our silence continued as we rode up in the elevator, and when we got to the apartment, a few more detectives and a few more police were standing about. There was a joyless odor in the air now somewhat reminiscent of liquid soap. Two of the police were talking to Ruta. She had not combed out her hair. Instead she had done her best to restore it, and she looked too attractive. The skirt and blouse had been changed for a pink-orange silk wrapper.

But she made up for it by her greeting. “Mr. Rojack, you poor poor man,” she said. “Can I make you some coffee?”

I nodded. I wanted a drink as well. Perhaps she would have the sense to put something in the cup.

“All right,” said Roberts, “I’d like to go to the room where this happened.” He gave a nod to one of the other detectives, a big Irishman with white hair, and the two of them followed me. The second detective was very friendly. He gave a wink of commiseration as we sat down.

“All right, to begin with,” said Roberts, “how long have you and your wife been living here?”

“She’s been here for six or eight weeks.”

“But you haven’t?”

“No, we’ve been separated for a year.”

“How many years were you married?”

“Almost nine.”

“And since you separated, you’ve been seeing her often?”

“Perhaps once or twice a week. Tonight was the first time I’d been over in two weeks.”

“Now, on the phone you said this was an accident.”

“Yes, I think I said it was a frightful accident. I think those were my words.”

“An accident in fact?”

“No, Detective. I may as well tell you that it was suicide.”

“Why did you say it was an accident?”

“I had some dim hope of protecting my wife’s reputation.”

“I’m glad you didn’t try to go ahead with that story.”

“It wasn’t until I hung up that I realized I had in effect told the next thing to a lie. I think that took me out of my shock a little. When I called down to the maid, I decided to tell her the truth.”

“All right then.” He nodded. “It was a suicide. Your wife
jumped
through the window.” He was doing his best to make the word inoffensive. “Now, let me get it clear. Your wife got up from bed. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Went to the window and opened it?”

“No, I’d opened it a few minutes before. She’d been complaining about the heat and asked me to open the window as wide as I could.” I shivered now, for the window was still open, and the room was cold.

“Forgive me for prying,” said Roberts, “but suicides are nasty
unless they’re cleared up quickly. I have some difficult questions to ask you.”

“Ask what you wish. I don’t think any of this has hit me yet.”