Suspended Sentences (11 page)

She said, “Right now you're a rope and I'm drowning, and I'm clutching at you like mad. Is that all right?”

“That's just fine. You see the secret truth is, I'm kind of lone-some myself. I've only been separated a few months.”

“I always despised lawyers,” she said. “They feed on people's misery. They stir up friction. It's their job to treat everything as an adversary procedure — they're in the business of creating enemies. I've hated lawyers ever since my father was defrauded of his dry-cleaning business by some clever loophole-bending gangster lawyer. So you will pardon me, I hope, if I sometimes seem a bit distant with you. I'm not used to thinking of a lawyer as anything but loathsome.”

It only made him smile. “Is that how you thought of me when I was handling your divorce? Loathsome?”

“I regarded you as a necessary evil, I guess.”

“Most people think of lawyers like that,”

“Do they?”

“We are the lowest form of life, with the possible exception of interior decorators.”

“Now you're making fun of me.”

“Yeah, I am. You need it.”

“I do,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Do that again.”

“What?”

“Dimple up. Smile.”

But she didn't. She suddenly remembered the cat again.

She made herself go out into the world and behave as if there were a tomorrow and it mattered. She had to pick up several bolts of fabric for one client and work with the upholsterer on angling the pattern of the fabric properly for the furniture it was to cover; she had a doctor's waiting room to do in the new Medical Center court, and there were three messages left over from last week from the answering service. She returned all three calls, belatedly; two of the people had found other decorators. She made an appointment for Friday with the third.

But she kept thinking about Fido. It wasn't that she'd been inordinately fond of the cat; she hadn't — she wasn't that crazy about cats, really — but the cat had been the nearest thing to a child she'd had, and Murdoch had killed it deliberately.

Deliberately.

That was what frightened her.

She tried to get used to living in an apartment. Actually, since she was alone, it was quite roomy — two bedrooms (she set up her office in one) and a spacious terrace. It was on the second floor. It didn't exactly overlook the lake but if you leaned out over the railing of the terrace you could see a corner of the lake. The view mainly was of the country-club golf course, which was pleasant if over-groomed. Most of the golfers were overweight types who got their exercise in electric carts. She'd never had any interest in golf but being on the fifteenth hole was pleasant enough. She kept expecting a golf ball to come whizzing in through a windowpane, but nothing like that happened.

What did happen was that someone drew a chalk outline of a sprawled little girl's body on the floor of the hallway just outside her door.

It looked exactly like the outline of Amy Murdoch that the police had chalked on the asphalt lane.

“I talked to him again,” Charles told her over the phone. “Of course he says he doesn't know anything about it. He'd say that whether it was true or not, but it makes it hard to pin anything down. You know it
could
just
be some awful brat who read about the case in the newspaper.” The photograph of the chalked outline on the lane had appeared on an inside page of the paper. Carolyn remembered it and made a face.

She said into the phone, “I don't think it was just some little kid.”

“Well, we can't prove it was Murdoch. I can't go around threatening him with legal action when we haven't got any evidence against him. We'd look pretty silly in court asking for a restraining order and watching his lawyer get up and say, ‘Restrain from what?'”

“I know,” she said wearily. “It's not your fault.” But at least his voice had calmed her down enough so that she was able to go out into the hall with the mop and clean the chalk drawing off the floor.

Next day she received in the mail a copy of a children's magazine. It was the kind that was aimed at little girls the age Amy Murdoch had been — six, seven, eight. Full of cheery cartoons of fuzzy smiling animals. It had one of those addressograph-printed labels, with her name on it and the new address. Obviously a subscription had been taken out in her name.

In the next few days her mailbox began to fill up to the point of engorgement with magazines, newspapers, comic books, even cheap pornographic material — the kind that actually did come, she saw, in plain brown-paper wrappers.

Then the bills for all the subscriptions began to come in.

“Just write ‘Please cancel subscription' on the forms and send them back,” Charles told her. “Don't get rattled. He wants you to get rattled. Don't give him the satisfaction”

“For God's sake, Charles, I don't need avuncular advice. I need to have him
stopped
.”

“I can't prove he's the one who's doing it. Neither can you.”

“Talk to him anyway. Threaten him. Please?”

Finally a golf ball
did
come through the window. It was the bedroom window — which overlooked the parking lot, not the golf course — and it was the middle of the night, when nobody could possibly have been playing golf. It made a hell of a noise; she thought she'd have a heart attack.

Wrapped around the golf ball and tied with a rubber band was a crumbled copy of that newspaper photo of the chalk outline on the pavement.

Trembling, she went into the kitchen, lit a gas ring on the stove, and set fire to the bit of newsprint. She watched it curl up and turn black, and wished it were Murdoch.

In the morning she called Charles at his office but the secretary told her Charles was out of town until Monday.

She went around the apartment half of the morning, pacing aimlessly, the hard leather heels of her shoes clicking angrily on the floor like dice. By noon she was distraught enough to think about having a drink, but she didn't. Instead she went down to the machine in the lobby and for the first time in three years bought a pack of cigarettes. A folder of matches came with it. The elevator had a big “No Smoking” sign, but she lit up anyway before she'd even got out of it.

She drew a deep chestful of smoke and it nauseated her and made her instantly, terrifyingly dizzy; she nearly fell to the floor, and had to lean with both hands on her doorknob until the wave of sick dizziness passed. She went inside, stumbled to the bathroom, threw the burning cigarette in the toilet, threw the pack of cigarettes in the wastebasket, leaned both arms against the sink, and stood there, head down, until she was sure she wasn't going to throw up. Then she looked up into the medicine-cabinet mirror.

Go ahead. Go to pieces. Fall apart
.

“The hell,” she said aloud. “It's just what he wants me to do. I'll be damned if I'll give him the satisfaction.”

She found the golf ball where she'd thrown it into the bedroom wastebasket. Feeling cold and angry and determinedly calm now, she put the golf ball in her handbag and went downstairs to the parking lot. It was nearly one o'clock. Murdoch would be home for lunch, probably. He sold real estate in a crummy office out west of town but he usually came home for lunch every day. The housekeeper prepared it for him and always had it ready for him when he arrived, which usually was at about 1:15.

Murdoch was a widower, a very close-mouthed man although not normally a surly one — he had a salesman's hearty but insincere graces, although his gift of gab was one he saved up for customers and rarely displayed in his home neighborhood. Richard had invited him over once or twice in the old days but he'd been a singularly boring dinner guest and after a while their only contact with Murdoch was an occasional wave from the car as one or another of them went in or out — or a shared beer now and then on Sundays when both Richard and Murdoch would be out mowing the lawns. Murdoch's life had mostly been wrapped up in his little girl; his wife had died of leukemia quite young, when Amy was only two or so — several months before Richard and Carolyn had moved in.

Basically her relationship with Murdoch had always been distant — cordial enough, but indifferent. About three months after the divorce Murdoch had made a sort of half-hearted and apparently dutiful gesture of inviting her out to dinner, explaining in a toe-in-the-dust aw-shucks way that since the two of them were the only singles in the whole neighborhood it was almost incumbent on them to go out together. But she'd found some excuse to decline the invitation and he hadn't asked a second time.

He was physically unpleasant; she found him nearly repulsive, although she knew women who liked his type — he was muscular enough, a
macho
character with huge arms and a big chest and military sort of crew-cut, flat on top. He had a beer-drinker's gut and the hands of a mountain gorilla; he looked more like a heavy-equipment mechanic than a realtor.

Mainly he sold small pre-war houses, in rundown areas, to blue-collar workers and their families. Presumably he looked to them like the kind of man they could trust. The word around the neighborhood was that his realty operation was a bit on the shady side — something to do with kickbacks to building inspectors and bribes to government mortgage people, Nobody had ever proved anything against Murdoch but he had just a slightly unsavory aura. In any case, she had always thought him unattractive, to say the least. But up to the time of Amy's death she had not thought of him as
menacing
.

Now, however, there was clearly no question but that he was executing a deliberate and careful scheme of harassment against her. Revenge for Amy's death.

When she turned the car into the lane Murdoch's semi-antique Chevy station wagon was in the driveway. Good; it meant he'd come home for lunch. Carolyn got out of the car and walked halfway up the walk toward the Murdoch porch. It was one of those old clapboard places with the porch running around three sides of the house. Part of it, on the left side, was screened in as a sleeping porch. The rest had a little picket-fence type railing which was turning gray in patches and needed paint.

She fumbled in her handbag a moment and then looked up. Nobody was in sight. She gave the golf ball a good strong throw. It made a satisfying noise when it crashed through Murdoch's front window.

And it brought him boiling out of the place, as she'd thought it would. “Damn irresponsible kids —” he was roaring; then he recognized her and his face froze and he went absolutely still.

She spoke up in a clear strong voice. “I've had enough harassment from you. I'm sorry, very sorry, about what happened to Amy and I wish I could make it up to you. I know you don't understand this, or believe it, but I feel nearly as bad about it as you do. But I've had enough. Harassing me won't bring her back to you — you ought to know that. Now you've had your revenge and you've had your satisfaction and you've made me feel absolutely rotten all these weeks, and now I want you to stop it. Do you understand? Stop it!”

He hadn't said a word; he still didn't. His eyes narrowed down to slits and he merely watched her, unblinking. But she saw that one fist slowly clenched and unclenched. It kept doing that, with a terrible slow rhythm, closing and opening.

He didn't respond to her words at all. She looked at the massive strength of him and felt appalled by her own temerity but, just the same, she stepped forward — five paces, six, seven — until she was nearly nose-to-nose with him, and she shouted in his face with blind thundering rage: “Leave me alone, Murdoch! Do you hear me?
Leave me alone!
” And she slapped him, as hard as she could, across the face.

He didn't even move. He was like some sort of immutable granite rock.

She stood trembling, hyperventilating; she raised her arm again, to strike him, but he stirred then. It was as if he didn't even see her threatening rising arm. He merely turned slowly on one heel and walked back up the steps to the porch.

She screamed at his back: “
Did you hear me, Murdoch?
”

He didn't answer. He just disappeared inside; the screen door slapped shut behind him.

Lacking the courage to follow him into his house, she was forced to turn away and get in the car. She sat trembling for quite a while. She kept expecting to see his face at a window but he never appeared. Finally she drove off.

The phone: Charles. “Hi. I'm sorry I've been out of touch. I was out of town.”

“That's what your secretary said.”

“I, uh, hell, this is awkward. Look, my wife and I — we've, uh, well, we're going to give it another try. We're trying for a reconciliation. For the sake of the kids, you know, and — well, we've been together a long time, nearly twenty years now. A lot of shared experience there. A lot of understanding. I think we may make it. I know it doesn't usually work out, but we want to give it a try. I thought I'd better tell you…”

“I understand, Charles. Don't worry about me.”

“Are you all right? No more trouble with Murdoch, I hope.”

“He made a little trouble. I had it out with him today. I don't know if it will do any good, but at least it gave me the satisfaction of telling him off.”

“That was a gutsy thing to do. What did he say?”

“Nothing. Maybe he's just chewing on what I said, thinking about it. Maybe something of what I said penetrated that little pea brain of his. I don't know. It's hard to tell. Anyhow he didn't do or say anything nasty.”

“Well, maybe that's a good sign.”

“Maybe. I hope so. Listen, Charles?”

“Yes?”

“I wish you good luck and every happiness. I mean that.”

“I know you do. You're a damn good person, Carolyn.”

“Good-bye.”

She went to bed and hugged the pillow to her; she felt acutely alone tonight.
I have got to get out in the world
, she told herself with force,
and start making friends again
. This was ridiculous. She was a healthy thirty-six-year-old woman without any entangling attachments or encumbrances; she was no beauty but she was reasonably attractive in her chunky short-waisted way — after all, there were men who
liked
freckles and big chests on their women — and it was idiotic to confine herself in this kind of self-pitying isolation; there was no need for it.