Deadline at Dawn

Quick footsteps coming back again. A paper bag rattled noisily as something was taken out of it. Pumpernickel bread, sliced thick.

Quick footsteps going away again. Gee, they were so busy, so chipper, happy almost. They wouldn’t be in another second or two. Death didn’t know she had an uninvited guest about to join her.

She knocked.

The footsteps died a sudden death.

She knocked again, fast and insistent.

The ghost of the footsteps came toward the door.

“Who is it? Who’s out there?”

She was a little frightened, you could tell it by the voice. People didn’t challenge in quite that breathless way, no matter what the hour of the night.

“A lady to see you.”

“A lady? What lady?”

“If you’ll open, you will see.” She kept threat out of her voice, to try to cajole the final obstacle out of her way.

The knob pivoted undecidedly, she saw it go around, but the door didn’t open. “It isn’t you, Ruth, is it?”

“Just let me speak to you. It will only take a minute.”

Trust this once, and you’re undone forever; trust this once, and you’ll never trust again.

A latch-tongue shot back, the door broke casing.

She was about twenty-eight. Well, it was hard to say; twenty-six, then. She was blonde, and her hair was short and curly. It was a natural blonde, though it may have been given some slight abetment. Her sandy eyebrows and almost white lashes told that. Her face was hard, and yet it wasn’t. It wasn’t the hardness that comes from within, it was rather a protective coating, a crust, it wore. Beneath, still lurking in the eyes and along the seams that caught tautly at the corners of its mouth, was a child-like trustfulness, that was afraid to come out too far, it had been rebuffed so often. It had learned its lesson not once but many times; it tried to hide itself away from the world now.

Her cheeks were thin, there was a hollowed spot in each. She had too much rouge on them, and over too great an expanse, and it gave them a fevered look. She had on a cheap cotton dress in a design of thin pencil-stripes. They ran diagonal; on one side of an invisible center line, they ran down one way, on the other, they ran down the opposite way.

She was a little frightened by this intrusion, but she was hoping to be reassured.

All this in an instantaneous snapshot taken by the eyes, to be assembled later as the minutes went by.

“I want to see you.”

That forepointed foot was in the way now; the door couldn’t close any more. She hadn’t looked down, so she wasn’t aware of this yet.

“Who are you?”

“You’d better let me talk to you about this inside, for your own sake as well as mine. Don’t keep me standing out here.”

She pushed by her and was in. One of them closed the door, neither one of them was sure at the moment which of the two had done it.

It was a small living-dining room in a cramped furnished flat. Neat enough, but shoddy-cheap in every aspect. A window cast its foreshortened square of light upon a gray wall an arm’s span out from it. A skimpy length of cranberry velour drapery hung down on either side of it. A card table had been erected, and dishes and the things she had brought from the delicatessen stood upon it, waiting to be partaken of. A newspaper was even on it, a pale green tabloid, furled and held flat between two of the dishes, waiting to be taken up and read. A package of cigarettes, still unopened, lay waiting there too — she must have brought them in with her just now — and a furbished ashtray to go with them, and even a folder of matches. A paper napkin was spread over the sandwiches to keep the dust off them until she was ready.

A doorless opening beyond, with light coming through, must have led into a bedroom.

She saw all this, but it didn’t matter. Even death has a homelife, it doesn’t strike out suddenly out of nowhere.

“What’re you up to, anyway? I don’t let strangers in on me at this time of night. I don’t like the way you’re acting.”

She gave it to her without any embroidery. “You got in a taxi at the corner of Seventieth and Madison, around one. You’d been paying a call on someone around the corner from there. Right?”

The woman’s face answered for her. It was starting to get white.

“The man you were calling on is dead now. Right?”

The woman’s eyes curdled. The outside of her face died a little. It wasn’t pretty to watch.

“You killed him. Right?”

“Oh my God.” She said it soft and low. Her eyes rolled; the pupils were carried upward under their lids, out of sight. She was all white eyeball for a minute or two.

The corner of the bridge-table kept her upright, she found it with her hands, sight unseen.

She started to cry; it came up only as far as her eyes, then she changed her mind. Not enough tears formed to push their way out. They stayed in, giving the eyes a glassy coating.

“What are you, a policewoman?”

“Never mind what I am. We’re talking about you. You’re a killer. You’ve killed someone tonight.”