Into the Night

And so she waited for them to come. She had slipped away from the scene outside moments after the woman’s life had slipped away. Gently she’d laid the woman’s head on the pavement. The crowd had opened up for her as she stepped through it, closing again around the woman’s body without taking note of Madeline. But someone surely had noticed her, and someone would say something to a policeman, and they would come to her door, if only to seek her testimony as a witness. Perhaps she had been there when the woman was shot. Perhaps she had seen the killer, or noted the license number of the car. Certainly she ought to be questioned, so that they might determine what she did or did not know.

The radio played on. Outside, the police cars came and went, the crowd dispersed. The gun, still wrapped in its velvet bag, remained on the table where she had flung it. From where she sat, she could see the ugly hole marked with powder burns where the bullet had exited.

If she had known the police were not to come, perhaps she might have turned the gun again on herself. But she fully expected their visit and was willing to leave the matter of her retribution up to them. Even when the sky lightened with dawn, she waited for them to appear.

But they did not appear.

For two days she waited. She did not leave the room. She did not eat or drink. It was impossible to say if she slept. She stayed in her chair, and there were times when her eyes were open and times when they were shut.

After two days, she knew the police were not going to come.

Starr Bartlett.

The dead woman. A name that breathed life, romance, even glamour. Starr Bartlett.

Madeline had listened for the name on the radio, expecting it from the tongue of every news announcer, but each report began and ended and the name didn’t come. Just as the police didn’t come. She learned no more from the newspapers she bought after she finally left her room. A murder in a different section of the city, a better-off section, would have made headlines, but here? In Madeline’s little corner of the city, in Starr Bartlett’s, death was not news. A gunshot was not news. It was commonplace, familiar. Dog bites man.

Madeline asked at the newsstand, at the grocer’s, at the Greek luncheonette that dished up eggs and toast at all hours. Finally she asked the gray-haired woman reading the horoscopes in a chair outside the self-serve laundromat, and the woman, speaking hoarsely around the remnants of a cigarette she’d smoked nearly down to the filter, said yes, she’d known the dead woman, to say hello to while they waited for their wash-and-wear to spin dry.

Starr Bartlett had lived in a rooming house just two blocks from Madeline’s own. She was young, in her twenties, and unmarried. She lived alone. And she had been struck down by a bullet which people said had been fired from a passing automobile. The woman’s own son was on the force, and he’d told her the police were convinced that the murder was the work of a random killer, possibly committed in imitation of a series of killings which had taken place two months previously in a large city a thousand miles away, and which had had enough press coverage to prompt a deranged person to emerge as a copycat killer.

If he struck again, the woman’s son told her with a comforting pat on the arm, they would surely get him.

The implication being that this particular case had reached a dead end, and that, if there were no more similar killings, the murderer would escape uncaught.

Well, there would be no more killings, not with that gun. Madeline placed it, velvet bag and all, inside a brown paper bag, and tucked the package into her purse. She took a long walk, and in its course she pushed the wrapped-up gun down a storm drain. It would most likely never be found; if it were, it would never be connected to her.

So she had gotten away with murder.

She thought about that a day or two later as she sat at the Greek’s lunch counter sipping a cup of coffee. She had bought a paper and could search through it for coverage of the death of Starr Bartlett, but without even opening the paper she knew there was nothing. And unless she confessed, she thought, there would be nothing. Starr was dead and her death had become part of the great body of unsolved crimes in the city’s files. There would be no stories because there was nothing to be said.

She saw those eyes, staring up at her. And the light going out of them, as the life went out of their owner.

“You all right, miss?”

She looked up. The counterman’s face was a mask of concern.

“The look on your face,” he said. “Like you were gonna faint, or something.”

“No,” she assured him. “No, I’m all right.”

Should she confess?

She thought about it. If the police had come, she would have confessed in a minute. But when they failed to appear it was as if she was being told that her confession was not required or even desired.

But what did that mean? Did she go scot-free?