Nemesis

Larry saw this and it didn’t register. He didn’t know she was dead until he saw the knife. The knife was buried hilt-deep between the cup of her naked breasts. And the fingers of his outflung arm held the handle of the knife in a tight grip.

He lay there and stared at his hand. As if it were something he never had seen before. Something that didn’t belong to him. He saw the blood then, dark and crusted, on his hand, on his shirt sleeve, on the girl’s naked chest.

Something was crawling in his throat. He felt sick and shriveled inside.

He got off the bed and groped for a light-switch. The light showed him a cheap, small bedroom, with a curtained window, a chest of drawers, two chairs and an open door leading to a bathroom.

And the bed. That was all. The girl on the bed was naked, but the sheet was pulled across her hips. Her clothes were in a pile on the floor.

The thing was crawling in his throat again and he stumbled into the bathroom. He was sick for a long time. Then he tried to wash the blood from his hand. It stuck like glue. He got it off, but he couldn’t do anything about his sleeve.

He came back into the bedroom and sat down in one of the chairs. He stared at the dead body of the girl. He didn’t think. There was nothing but white horror in his head.

He was sitting there when the loud knock sounded on the door.

He turned to the door and his breath made a scratching noise in his ears. His heart was pounding as if he’d been running up-hill.

The knock was repeated, and a shrill, feminine voice said, “I got to have this room at ten o’clock. Keep that in mind. You don’t lay around all day in my house.” The knock sounded again. “Do you hear me in there?”

Larry prayed for the woman to go away. He wanted her voice to stop. He wanted the knocking to stop. If she knocked on the door again he knew he’d start screaming.

He said, “I heard you,” and his voice was a whisper. He tried again and it came out louder. She said, “See that you’re out of there by ten, that’s all.”

He heard her feet shuffle away and he got up and put on his suit coat, top coat and hat. He wasn’t thinking yet. But he had the blind instinct of flight.

One flicker of reason made him take out his handkerchief and wipe the hilt of the knife clean, and then he went to the door. He heard nothing on the opposite side and when he twisted the knob and pushed it open he was looking out on a gloomy, empty corridor.

He stepped out, pulled the door behind him and started down the single flight of steps. As he reached the front door of the house he heard someone coming down from the upper floors. He pulled open the door and ran down a flight of stone steps to the street.

He started walking. The street was in a cheap neighborhood. There were ashcans on the sidewalk and the houses were ancient structures, with brown-stone fronts, bay windows and gold lettered street numbers.

At the first intersection he saw a street sign. Nelson Boulevard. That was on the South Side. About four miles south of the Loop. About a mile West.

He kept walking. A clock in a pawn shop said seven-thirty. There weren’t many people on the street. He passed a colored couple, a gray-haired man with a metal lunch box, an old woman who looked like she was coming off a gin hangover.

He kept walking. He had no idea of direction. But there was a hopeless horror building inside him and he knew that soon he would have to think. He was afraid of thinking. As long as he could walk on blindly he felt invisible and anonymous, but he couldn’t go on forever. Sometime his thoughts would catch up with him.

At eight-thirty he turned into a restaurant. It was a cheap Greek eating place and there was no one at the counter. He sat down and ordered coffee from the proprietor, a fat man, with skin like leather and mustache that looked like a dirty scrub brush.

The coffee was in a thick white mug and he couldn’t drink it. He sat and looked at the cup. He tried to light a cigarette but his hands were trembling too much.

He started thinking. He tried not to, but it was no use.

He remembered the blonde girl he’d met, he remembered that she wanted him to go home with her. And he remembered how she looked lying on the bed with a knife stuck into her, and her blood crusted and dark on her white breast.

He thought of Fran. And he made a noise in his throat like an animal.

How long he sat there he had no way of knowing, but when he felt the hand on his shoulder he learned something. He learned about fear.

He looked up and there was a big man, with a hard, gray face, a gray overcoat and a gray hat standing beside him. The hand on his shoulder was big and business-like.

Larry tried to say something, but the words stuck. He couldn’t meet the big man’s level gaze.

“Let’s see your wallet,” the big man said.

Larry heard the words. He knew what they meant, but he didn’t have any muscular coordination. He started fumbling with his tie. The big man said again, “The wallet. And fast. I’m from the Bureau of Detectives.”