Into the Night

And closer at hand, another man yelped shrilly: “Be-jeezis, don’t ever tell me they’re no good!”

The woman looking out at Madeline was somewhat slipshod, but had amiability written all over her broad, good-natured face. She had evidently grown used to immeasurable decibels of noise and it no longer had any effect on her placidity. She was holding an orange-pop bottle in one hand and a bottle opener poised in the other. Madeline read the word “Yes?” from her pleasantly up-cornered lips.

“Would you be interested in contributing something to the multiple-sclerosis fund?” Madeline rattled off. “Any amount you care to give will be appreciated.”

“I can’t hear you,” the woman shouted.

“The multiple-sclerosis fund!” Madeline yelled back.

“I still can’t hear you!” the woman screeched.

Madeline let her arms sag limply. “I can’t yell any louder. I’ve used up all my voice.”

“Wait a minute,” the woman said. Or at least lip-formed. She turned her head around. “Vince!”

“Ball one,” came back hollowly in answer.

“Vince, I’m talking to you! There’s somebody at the door. Tone that thing down a minute, so I can find out what she wants.”

This time an injured but stentorian baritone managed to penetrate the sound barrier. “Top of the ninth, five-all, two men on base, and she asks me to tone it down!”

But Madeline didn’t wait for any more. She quietly but firmly closed the door again, from the outside, and went away.

It was a basement furnished room, and even as she stepped down from the sidewalk into the enclosed areaway it fronted on, a sense of foreboding overcame her. She even halted a moment and made a half turn as if to get back onto the sidewalk again. Then she overrode her hesitancy and crossed to the arched brownstone doorway set in under the high stoop, and rang. She could hear the faint ring deep inside the house somewhere. If personal risk was going to deter her, she told herself, then she shouldn’t have embarked on this odyssey in the first place. There was bound to be risk now and then along the way. Risk was to be expected. There had been risk attached to the Dell Nelson business and she’d come through that all right.

A dim bulb lit up behind the iron-barred basement door, and a man came into view.

She didn’t like the barred effect the door created between them. It suggested prison, confinement, restraint, something she wasn’t able to quite put her finger upon. Danger, that was it. It suggested some sort of latent danger, as if you were facing someone kept apart from you for his own good.

His face wasn’t what troubled her. There was nothing in it to suggest malevolence. It had deep lines in it, at the brow and around the eyes, not the lines of age but of punishing experience. But its overall aspect was a grim stoicism that took what it got, asked no quarter, and sought no retaliation.

He was anything but trim of appearance. He had on a rumpled shirt open at the neck, a pullover sweater that badly needed dry cleaning, and a pair of dingy slacks that needed pressing. He hadn’t shaved today, even if he had yesterday. His hair was light brown and tumbled. His eyes were a darker brown, and looked as though they’d seen a lot of things they wished they hadn’t.

Something inside her told her that if he wasn’t the one she was looking for, he came closer to being it than anyone else she’d come across yet.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Do you want to contribute to the multiple-sclerosis fund?”

“Why don’t they get up a fund for me sometimes?” he said, dourly. “I could use one too.”

“Well—” she faltered. “That’s not the point. The point is—”

He reached out and opened the grillwork door. “Do you want to come in and tell me about it?”

It was an invitation that even a seventeen-year-old novice would have backed away from in mistrust. It wasn’t even put forward artfully or adroitly. It made no promises of immunity, not even false ones meant to be broken. She even saw him glance past her shoulder, as if to see whether there was anyone else around out there.

And yet somehow the very baldness of his technique had the reverse effect of not driving her away, of arousing her interest. This was the very sort of man that might have inspired a wife to want him dead. Maybe something like this had happened to Starr. To others, that is to say, while he was married to Starr and she had to stand by looking on. He had every earmark of the professional rapist.

“You’re Mr. Herrick?”

“Mr. Herrick, right.”

“We keep lists of the people we call on back at our headquarters, Mr. Herrick. I have you down for my last call of the day,” she said pointedly. “So if I don’t report back afterward—”

“What makes you think you won’t report back afterward?”

“Nothing — so far.”