perfectly all right when I left a few minutes before eleven. There wasn’t a sign of anything wrong. I was careful not to even turn on my automobile lights while I coasted down away from the house, and there wasn’t a soul around and I’m sure nobody saw me. So I don’t see what Ellie and I did had to do with what happened to her later, but I’ve still got that awful feeling inside me that if I hadn’t done it everything might be different. And I don’t know I can stand to face Marv when he comes home. Having Sissy there right in the house is bad enough. And if Minerva ever finds out…”
Shayne said thoughtfully, “You’re sure you left a little before eleven?”
“Minerva will tell you that,” Wilsson assured him eagerly. “Like I told you before, it was a little after eleven when I got home and she was watching the news on TeeVee. So whatever happened to Ellie must’ve happened after eleven o’clock.”
“If you’re telling the truth,” said Shayne.
“Well, I am. Like I say, I can prove I was home a few minutes after eleven.”
“But you haven’t proved that Ellie Blake was still alive when you left her bedroom,” Shayne pointed out grimly.
Harry Wilsson stared at him in consternation and horror, his jaw drooping open slackly. “Why would I hurt her?” he cried out. “My Lord, she’d just… well, you know.” He swallowed hard and appeared to be on the verge of tears. “I don’t know what else I can say,” he quavered.
“I don’t either,” Shayne said uncompromisingly. He looked at his watch and got up. “For the moment I’m going to keep this confidential, Wilsson. But you’re not in the clear. I’ll be talking to you again.” He turned and strode out of the office hurriedly.
12
Marvin Blake awoke that day slowly and unwillingly. He had a terrible, splitting headache and his mouth tasted of dry cow manure (the way he imagined dry cow manure tasted). He was enveloped in a grayish fog of semi-consciousness which he hugged about him gratefully and into which he retreated each time his mind threatened to pierce the barrier into full awareness.
Mercifully, memory was anesthetized for a long period of drugged half-wakefulness during which he fought back against the horror of fully realizing where he was and why he was there.
Slowly, inexorably, consciousness came to him, and with it the horrible phantasms of memory which had been floating, wraithlike, beyond the barrier; which he had sensed, but refused to give credence to.
It came back to him with a sickening, savage onrush of reality and with stark clarity. His body trembled violently and then stiffened, and tears flowed from his eyes, and he knew an awful sense of desolation and of self- pity.
He knew where he was and why he was there. He recalled planning to kill himself last night, and he was filled with bitter self-revulsion for having failed to carry out his plan.
He opened his eyes wide and discovered that he was lying on his back, fully clothed, on top of the spread on a hotel bed. Overhead, an unshaded electric bulb cast a sickly yellow light over the bare room with its drawn shade and tightly closed window. Beyond the faded shade, bright sunlight told him it was well into the next day, but he had not the faintest idea what time it was.
He had passed out, of course, he realized bitterly and with self-loathing. He was a weakling who had sought strength from a whiskey bottle to bolster up his resolution and had, instead, brought himself to this miserable state where time must go on and the galling future must be faced.
He closed his eyes tightly for a long moment, and then gritted his teeth and forced himself to turn on his side so he could see his wristwatch.
It was almost two-thirty. In the afternoon. The train from Miami was due to come through about three o’clock! The same train that he had happily planned to come home on when he departed for the convention a few days ago.
He was expected on that train. Sissy would be at the station to greet him and throw her sweet arms about his neck and press her face against him. Oh, God. Sissy!
With sudden sure clarity he knew it was Sissy who mattered now. He mustn’t fail Sissy. Her mother and Harry Wilsson!
He forced the memory to the back of his mind at the same time as he forced his rebellious body to sit up in bed and his legs to swing over the side.
A flooding wave of nausea engulfed him and he bent forward retching, and then vomited on the floor between his wide-spread feet. Some of the vomit splashed up onto to his shoes, and he stared at the stains dully and reminded himself that he must wash them off before Sissy saw them.
Because Sissy must never know. She must never suspect. He did have something to live for. He was grateful, now, that God had intervened last night and caused him to take that second drink from the bottle before he took his own life.
His senses were spinning and his head was splitting wide open as he shambled to his feet and made his way unsteadily into the bathroom. The physical effort caused him to vomit again, and he hung laxly over the toilet seat, trembling and white-faced, retching again and again until it seemed that his very guts would be wrenched loose and would have to come up.
And suddenly he felt better. He was still weak and shaking, but the sharp, screaming pain in his head had subsided to a dull, endurable ache.
He loosened his collar and removed his tie, and ran cold water in the basin and soaked a hand-towel in it to slosh over his face and neck. He found a glass in the cabinet above the lavatory and washed the taste of dry manure out of his mouth and drank two glassfuls of the wonderful stuff, and then dried his face and consulted his watch again.
Miraculously, less than ten minutes had passed since he had looked at it before. He went back into the bedroom and grimaced when he saw the whiskey bottle on the bureau, less than half full now, and the water glass sitting beside it. His suitcase stood at the foot of the bed, opened, and he knelt down and groped for his razor. He started to search for fresh blades, and then he remembered clearly. The new packet he had taken out the night before still lay unopened on the bed.
And on the rug lay the pad of yellow paper with lined pages. He stared down at the words: “To whom it may concern ” and underneath that, the scrawled, “I, Marvin Blake, wish to state… That was as far as he’d got last night. And now he was glad that was as far as he’d got. Now, when he got off the train at Sunray there must be nothing to indicate that he had not spent the night in Miami as previously planned. He must be shaved and look reasonably neat. A hangover didn’t matter. It would be accepted as a natural result of cutting loose at the last night of the convention. There was no reason in the world for anyone to suspect anything else, he told himself. No one had actually seen him leave the hotel yesterday afternoon. None of the fellows would really have missed him last night… not enough to make any queries, certainly. He doubted whether any of the other delegates would have been taking the train today. Practically all of them had driven their cars to the city. After all, it was an auto dealers’ convention, and he remembered that Harry had kidded him about taking the train instead of driving his own car.
Harry!
Oh, God. Harry. Would he ever again in the future be able to think of that name without a sudden tightening of his heart, an awful sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, a traumatic trembling.
He hurried into the bathroom and shaved himself sketchily. Then he forced himself to take time to comb his hair carefully, replace his tie, and scrub the vomit off his shoes with the wet hand-towel.
He left the whiskey bottle sitting just as it was on the bureau, replaced his razor and closed his bag, and still had fifteen minutes until train-time when he went out of the hotel room and locked the door behind him.
Downstairs, he found a pimply-faced young man at the desk in place of the rheumy-eyed old man who had checked him in last night, and he slid his room-key across with a ten-dollar bill, muttering, “I’m checking out,” and averted his face while the young man yawned and checked his registration and languidly counted out his change.
