The Long Night (4 page)

I looked up at him and then I looked down at his hand. I said, “The circus is over, bigmouth. I'm awake now. Take your hands off me . . . and keep them off me. I don't like being pushed around.”

He stared at me with dead eyes in which a light began to glow far down out of sight. Slowly his grin returned. And with it came the warning that tightened his thin mouth. He said, “What you like or don't like doesn't amount to a row of——”

Cooke was too fast for him. My reactions hadn't got back yet to normal. It was Cooke who struck away the fist that might've torn my head off my shoulders. And it was Cooke who loosened the grip on my lapels and who pushed me into the chair again. He said, “If you want to stay out of any more trouble, Bowman, keep your lip buttoned. Next time, I won't stop him.”

“There won't be any next time,” I said. “If he tries to lay a hand on me again, I'll kick his teeth in. What d'you take me for—a medicine ball?”

Sullivan said, “Big words. . . . For a private dick, very big words.” He studied me down and up through half-shut,
bitter eyes while he blew on his knuckles. His lumpy face was reflective. In a vaguely puzzled voice, he said, “Could it be that this guy's got some kind of a drag in the right places? Could it be?”

“He's a pal of the D.A.,” Cooke said.

“Yeh . . .? I guessed there was something . . . kinda useful when you know the right people, ain't it?” He was looking at Cooke but he was talking to me.

“Until I do something wrong,” I said, “I don't need any drag. And I've told you the truth about how I came to be here and what happened afterwards.”

“We'll see about that. Meantime——” He slid two fingers and a thumb into his coat pocket and brought out a folded handkerchief. Without taking his eyes off mine, he began to open it out. Then he said, “Ever seen this before?”

It was a belt—a narrow, green belt with a gold clasp. When it was fully exposed, he took hold of it by the very tip of one end and held it up for my inspection like it was a snake he had just killed. After a short silence, he said, “Well. . .?”

“No,” I said. “I haven't. Where am I supposed to have seen it?”

He glanced briefly at Cooke and nodded. Cooke walked over to the clothes closet and opened one of the doors and pulled out an extending garment rail. He unhooked a green dress and carried it back to me by the hanger.

When he got close enough, I saw the dress had belt loops but no belt. I also saw that Sullivan was trying out a lopsided grin on me. I said, “And I've never seen that either. What're you trying to prove?”

“Let me tell him,” Sullivan said. With the belt swinging to and fro from his finger and thumb, he added, “It'll save time.”

The guy who'd been humming
Swan Lake
ballet must've finished whatever he'd been doing by then because he came away from the bed and went towards the door. He was a sandy character with square, rimless glasses and pale eyes and deep lines stretching down from the corners of his nose past his mouth.

Cooke said, “Still feel the same about it, Doc?”

And Doc said, “I'll know for sure when I get it opened
up . . . but you'll be safe enough if you work on the lines we discussed.” He didn't look at me. At the door, he nodded to no one in particular and added, “I'm going to get some sleep . . . see you later . . . good night.” For one swift moment as he went out, his eyes met mine. His expression didn't change but he made me feel like a louse.

No one spoke while his footsteps padded along the hallway farther and farther away. I heard mumbled talk and the slight rattle of the elevator gates and the whine of the motor. And after that everything was quiet again except for Sullivan's chesty breathing and the tiny sounds Cooke made with his knuckles as he stood flexing his fingers and watching me.

Sullivan didn't seem to be in any hurry. He went on swinging the belt from side to side like he wanted to hypnotise me and his face was the bland face of a guy with plenty of patience. You'd have thought he was waiting for something to happen.

From my point of view, everything that could happen had already happened. All I wanted right then was to get out of my sticky clothes and let a needle shower wash the rye off me. But the prospects didn't look so good. No one but me showed any urge to continue the proceedings.

I said, “I guess I've been dopey up to now. That was the M.E. . . . wasn't it?”

Sullivan chewed at his thin lower lip and stared at me down the side of his nose. He said, “It was.”

“And the it he was talking about opening up is Judith Walker's body?”

“Right again.” The belt was a green pendulum with the clasp describing an arc of twinkling gold.

“If I hadn't been dropped in the bathroom,” I said, “she might've recovered from the overdose of phenobarb she'd taken.”

“She might.” He stuck out his lip and his bland face became a mean face. “How do you know she died from too much phenobarb?”

“I checked her eyes and they didn't react to light or touch. When she spoke with me on the phone, I advised her to take a couple of phenobarbs and sleep off her yen to bump herself off.”

“Oh, you advised her to do that, did you? What else did you check?”

“That she was still breathing . . . but her skin was clammy and I knew she had to have attention fast or it'd be too late.”

With vague irritation in his voice, Cooke said, “Didn't you think of calling the police?” He was still holding up the green dress like he was trying to sell it to me.

“Yes,” I said. “But I didn't feel it was a good idea.”

“Why?” Sullivan threw the query at me almost before I'd finished.

“The circumstances were, at the very least, embarrassing,” I said.

He straightened up slowly. “For a guy who'd had a skinful, you seem to have done a lot of thinking.”

“Don't go by the state I was in when you found me,” I said. “I'd had no skinful. I hadn't had anything to drink at all.”

Without the slightest trace of heat, he said, “You're lying. I know a lush when I meet one. And you'd been soaking up rye inside and out. You were blind, paralytic shikker . . . you got so crazy with drink you don't even remember what you did.” The belt slowed and stopped swinging. He hunched forward and his lips drew back from his uneven teeth. He said, “Want me to tell you what really happened.”

“No,” I said. “But that won't stop you. You've got it all worked out to your own satisfaction and nothing I could say would make you change your opinion. So . . . go ahead and tell me what really happened.”

“My opinion”—his grin was back again—“will be the jury's opinion. If you don't talk fast, you're gonna cop a first-degree murder rap that'll send you to the chair. But if you play ball, we might get it toned down to temporary insanity owing to excessive drinking. Interested?”

“No sale,” I said. “Go on with your reconstruction of what happened.”

“O.K.” He shrugged and began to coil the belt round his forefinger. And he handled it very carefully. I knew why he was so careful.

Then he said, “This Walker dame never called you; coming here was your idea. When you arrived, she was ready for bed—but not with you. She made the mistake of letting
you in. She also made the mistake of having a drink with you—just one little drink so's to be sociable. What she didn't suspect was that you'd lace hers with K.O. drops . . . enough to get her drowsy and in a more reasonable mood. . . .” He wrapped the belt in his handkerchief again and put it back in his pocket. Then he cleared his throat and asked, “How'm I doing?” His eyes were as predatory as the eyes of a fox.

“Fine,” I said. “There's a future for you in Hollywood.”

He gave me the kind of spring-loaded nod he'd used before and enclosed his right fist in his left hand. When he'd decided I wasn't going to say any more, he said, “You're gonna find there's none for you in New York. However . . . all three of us know what happened after that. You'd overdone the dope and she passed out before you could proposition her. That was a big disappointment, wasn't it?”

“Why ask me?” I said. “Have you lost the place in your script?”

Cooke came back into circulation. With a pained look on his baby face, he said, “You know, Bowman, you're not making things any easier for yourself by acting the ostrich. The story you've told has got as many holes in it as a collander. It's time you realised you're in a spot. This is a murder rap—the kind of murder that gets a jury all hot under the collar.”

“But he wouldn't know about that,” Sullivan said. “He doesn't remember anything at all. He was snoring on the floor when the M.E. made his examination.”

I had a sudden dreadful sense of panic. For a moment I felt like I'd gone to bed in my own apartment and slept my way into a nightmare. And I was still asleep; this was still my nightmare. None of it was real. Soon I'd waken up to the clangour of my alarm clock and the whole thing would disappear and I'd promise myself I'd watch what I ate last thing at night. . . .

But Sullivan was real. I wasn't dreaming him up. My saturated shirt and collar and the acrid taste in my mouth were real, too. So was the look on Cooke's pink-and-white face. He was staring at something behind me. When I twisted my neck to look over my shoulder, all I could see was a screen round the bed on which I'd found Judith sleeping like she was
dead . . . with dead eyes that had no pupils . . . and a moist, cold skin . . . and her breasts thrusting against the tapered top of her nightdress . . . and the smell of rye on her breath.

They were watching me and waiting and feeding the panic within me. My head was aching worse than ever . . . Judith had had a headache . . . she'd begged me to hurry . . . but I'd been too late . . . too late . . . too late . . . too late. . . . The words bumped inside my head in time with the beating of the pulse in my throat. I had a choking desire to throw up.

Then it passed. I said, “What is it I don't remember?”

“The M.E. thinks she was man-handled,” Sullivan said. “He's not prepared to say for sure . . . but that's what he thinks. Then you killed her . . . the tabloids'll lap it up . . . every yellow rag in the state will go to town on it . . . weeks before you stand trial, ten million people will have found you guilty and sent you to the chair . . . they just love sex-killers . . . and that goes for the jury—if you clam up on us instead of giving yourself a break. . . .”

His voice seemed to go on and on in my head. Thoughts and words and faces began to spin like a multi-coloured wheel . . . faster . . . and faster. . . . Something churned in my stomach and the desire to throw up became irresistible. With nausea filling my throat, I got out of the chair and thrust him aside and stumbled blindly into the bathroom.

I felt better when I came back. My head still hurt and I was so cold I had goose-pimples, but the cold was in my mind, too. I could think straight—really straight—for the first time. My panic had gone. I said, “So she didn't die from an overdose of some sleeping-draught. . . . How am I supposed to have killed her?”

“With this thing.” Sullivan tapped his pocket. His eyes were boring into my face like they were ferrets chasing a rabbit in my mind. He was so damn' sure of himself. “Why don't you quit the kidding?” he asked. “You ain't forgotten. You got scared at what you'd done and you put the belt round her neck and strangled her. Isn't that what you did?”

“No,” I said. “I've already told you all I know right up to the time I got slugged.”

“That's what you think,” he said. “But soon you're
gonna play the other side of the disc. Soon you're gonna sing a different song—D.A. or no D.A. Because you did strangle her . . . you murdering sonovabitch!” His voice spat at me like a whiplash and the skin round his mouth had gone tight and grey.

Cooke said, “I guess you wouldn't like to take a look at her . . .?” He was moving away from me and circling the chair.

“You guess wrong,” I told him. “If that's how she died, then it happened after I'd been laid cold. And the guy who bent a sap over my head is my nominee.”

“We got all the nominee we need,” Sullivan said. “Go take a look-see at your late girl-friend and can the chatter.”

I got up and I walked round the screen and I stood beside Cooke. He was watching me obliquely. I wondered if my face revealed how darn scared I was.

She'd been pale before but now her skin was dark and her red mouth was open wider. The mark of the belt was an overlapping, mottled weal around her neck. And the bodice of her nightgown had been ripped down to the waist. Crisscrossed on the smooth flesh of her breast were claw marks like those of a cat.

There was no need for me to see any more. I stopped feeling scared and I began to feel mad instead. I said, “I'd like to be there when somebody burns for this.”

Sullivan had come close to me. He was wearing another tight, cruel smile. He said, “Don't worry, drag-man, you'll be there all right. I'm making it my business to see you'll be there.”

I Won't Forget the next couple of hours in a long time. Whether it was due to the bang on the head or just plain weariness or both, I wouldn't know, but I found it nearly impossible to stay awake. Every few minutes, my eyes would shut and I'd force them open and they'd shut again and Sullivan would growl, “Quit stalling,” and I'd tell him where he could go and what he could do when he got there.

Lack of ventilation might've had something to do with it, too. The grill room at Headquarters was in the basement and it had no windows. There was an extraction fan high up in one of the brick walls but it wasn't working. Cooke tried it after we'd been stewing for half-an-hour and then he gave it up and sat down again behind me.