Deadline at Dawn

She thought she’d seen everything, known everything, but this was one thing she’d missed. One night a girl, right out on the middle of the floor at the mill, right in the middle of Begin the Beguine, she suddenly crumpled, went down like a shot. They said, afterwards, she’d taken something, but nobody knew for sure. All Bricky knew was she’d come in the long way, upright, and moving all over; she went out flat, and not moving, just twitching a little. They all rushed over to the windows in a mass and peered down, no matter what the manager said, how he berated them. They saw her down on the sidewalk, being shovelled into the ambulance, looking awfully small, awfully flat, on the white stretcher. She didn’t come around next night. She never came around again.

But even that, that was just before it happened. This was after.

She’d never seen anyone dead before.

She looked at his face, tried to reconstruct it, tried to fill it in. It was like reading a page on which the writing has already grown faded, blurred, distorted. It was like an ink-written page on which it has rained. Everything was still there yet, but everything had moved a little out of focus. The lines that had been facial characteristics were seams now. The mouth that had been either strong or weak, bitter or good-humored, was a gap now, a place where the face was open. The eyes that had been either kindly or cruel, wise or foolish, they were just glossy, lifeless insets now, like isinglass stuck into yellowish-gray dough.

His hair was well cared-for and full of life and light yet, for it dies last, or rather it doesn’t die when the body does, it grows on afterward. Even the death-shock and the fall had hardly disturbed a blade of it. Just one or two had fallen out of the furrows that his brush had trained them into through the years.

He had fine dark brows, like tippets of sealskin. Not grotesquely thick, but well-emphasized. And they were perfectly straight now, even; death had taken away perplexity and the need for bending them this way or that.

With all this, she couldn’t make out much what he’d been like. He looked as though he’d been about thirty-five or so. But the ages of men are trickier to calculate than those of women; he might have been thirty or he might have been forty. He must have been facially good-looking until an hour ago, or whenever it had happened — the putty mask that was left behind told her that — but then that’s the least important attribute a human being can have. Angels and devils are good-looking, both.

He’d liked life, in its pleasanter recreational aspects. Even in death he was still immaculately attired in evening clothes, the starched bosom of his shirt scarcely rumpled at all, the gala flower in his buttonhole still in place.

The underparts of his shoes were faintly glossy with floor-wax, so he’d danced in them not long ago, and their rims weren’t nicked or marked in any way, so he’d been a competent dancer, avoiding others and seeing that they avoided him on a crowded floor. What good did it do to know that now? He wouldn’t dance any more.

Quinn had come back to her again. She was aware of him standing beside her, without looking, and she was glad to have him there. Their shoulders touched lightly, and it felt good.

“Shouldn’t we close his—? They seem to be watching you when you’re not looking at them, and then when you look, they’re not.”

“No, don’t touch them,” he whispered. “I don’t know how to, anyway, do you?”

“I guess you just squeeze the lids together.”

But neither of them did it.

“Can you tell what it — was?” she asked with bated breath. “What it was done with?” She crouched slowly downward toward the floor, as if drawn by an irresistible compulsion. He remained erect an instant longer, then he crouched with her.

“It must be on him somewhere.”

He saw her hand arch timidly above the button holding the two sides of the jacket together across the form’s middle. Her fingers spread as if trying to undo it without coming into too close a contact with anything but that.

“Wait, let me do it,” he said quickly. He scissored his own fingers deftly, and the two sides of the jacket sprang open.

“There it is.” She drew in her breath.

A small reddish-black sworl was revealed, marring one armband of the white piqué vest. It was a good deal below the armpit, however, almost dead center above the heart.

“It must have been a gun,” he said. “Yeah, bullet. It’s round and frazzled. A knife would make a slit.”

He undid the buttons of the vest and parted that. Underneath it repeated itself, but it was far more spreading in its secondary results. The shirt had absorbed it like a blotter, all down the side, and a little bit over to the front in a random offshoot or two. He tried to keep her from seeing too much of it by holding the vest wings upward like a screen. Then he folded them back over it again.

“Must have been an awfully small one,” he said. “I’m no expert, but it’s a pretty tight little hole.”