Into the Night

Upstairs, she turned on the element in the serving pantry, drew water and put it on, then came outside again. She flung herself down on the sofa with a moan of unfeigned exhaustion, without even taking off her coat.

“No wonder people break under those things. I mean guilty people.”

He came away from the window and sat companionably down without being asked. “Know something? The innocent break quicker than the guilty. They haven’t the desperate necessity to cling to their lies.”

“Why did he reach out and shake hands with me? The captain, I mean. They don’t usually do that with people who are brought in for questioning, do they?”

“He could tell you were a better type,” he said glibly.

“No, he wanted to get a look at my hands.”

“You’re on the ball,” he said with a sly smile of admission.

She reached for one of her cigarettes in the guest holder, and deliberately refrained from offering one to him. Then when he held a match for her, she didn’t seem to see that either.

“Hate the sight of me, don’t you?” he said calmly. “But if the woman who lost her life had been your sister, that would have been different. That would’ve been my job, my duty. I would’ve been too lenient if I didn’t break everyone’s arm in at least three places.”

“Well, she wasn’t my sister. Thank God for that.” She got up and went in to take the boiling water off for the coffee. “How do you take it?” she asked crossly.

“Any way it comes.”

I’d like to put some lighter fluid in it, she thought malevolently.

He chuckled as she came back to him with the two cups. “I bet I know what you were thinking just then.”

“Even my very thoughts are under cross-examination.”

“Oh, don’t take it so big,” he said wearily. “A girl without a sense of humor is a bore.” He drank half his cup down at one swallow. He could do that because he had a very large mouth (in both senses of the word, she hastened to insist upon to herself).

“How’d you come to get mixed up with such a type as that, anyway?” he asked, looking down into his coffee as though trying to make up his mind whether there was enough of it left to make up one decent mouthful.

“I’ve been over all that twice already. I thought I could get ahead in my songwriting asp—”

“Oh, knock it off,” he cut in knowingly. “You’re no more interested in songwriting than my” — he changed whatever word he’d been about to use, and finished it — “my armhole. I bet you can’t even put two consecutive notes together. The stuff you showed her you probably cribbed from something somebody else composed and published. I picked up one of those masterpieces of yours over there. One of the cops detailed to standby duty happened to know how to play the piano. I tell you the truth, the rings made by the liquor glasses on the score sheets sounded much better than your notes. I know it’s a funny thing to do, play the piano with a corpse still on the premises, but if that didn’t wake her up we could be sure she was dead for real. Half the guys were holding their hands over their ears and begging him to quit before he even got to the end of it.”

“Go ahead,” she said with lethal suavity. “Anything else?”

He saw her glance down momentarily at what she was holding in her hands. “Don’t throw that. It can give a nasty burn.”

She put the steamy cup aside, as if to make sure she wouldn’t lose control and let it fly at him after all.

“No, the way I figure you,” he went on, sobering, “you’re one of these do-gooders. You feel guilty about some real or imaginary wrong you think you’ve done, and you’re trying to work it off in this way, by taking up with beauts like this Nelson.”

Although she scarcely moved at all, the sensation she experienced was that of receiving a stunning impact that kited her all the way back against a wall.

He’d only set eyes on her for the first time about four hours ago, and yet he already knew her that well! She kept shaking her head slightly to herself. A glaze of tears even formed in her eyes, without dropping. Tears of amazement, of humility. To think someone had read her that right.

She wondered if they realized, the fellow members of his squad, what they had working for them in this man in the way of instinct, intuitiveness, and ability to read human nature. All just as important to a detective, maybe more so, than technical know-how and cat-and-mouse stalking. He was a natural at his trade.

And yet this same man, she already knew to a certain extent, off duty could be noisy, frivolous, partial to lowbrow practical jokes, juvenile almost to the point of asininity or inanity.

But it takes many components, she realized, to make up a complete man.

He’d gone back to talking about the case again. “That stunt of pulling the shower curtain across to try to cover up the fact she was in the tub was very stupid,” he said reflectively. “The minute I spotted that I knew there had been violence committed. A person taking a shower pulls the curtain across to keep the water from getting on the floor, but a person taking a bath never does.”