Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

office. She hung up when an excited voice began to ask questions. Then she dropped her gun into a handy drawer. Before she returned to the girl, there was something she was going to do for herself.

She fumbled with the tiny Lowfield telephone directory, opening it with ponderous care to the “G” page. She read the numbers out loud to herself and dialed with that same nerve-wracking slowness.

He answered the telephone himself.

“Randall,” she said, enunciating very deliberately. Then she was unable to speak.

“Catherine?”

“Randall…I wish you would come. Tom is dead.”

The silence was full of questions he was not going to ask yet.

“Tom is dead,” she repeated, and carefully hung up the phone, because she was afraid she was going to say it again.

She wondered what she had been planning to do next. Then she remembered Leila, and looked around the kitchen for something to take the girl. The most useful thing she could see was a roll of paper towels.

I think this is shock, she told herself. With precise movements, in slow motion, she picked up the roll of paper towels and began her slow trip back to the den.

As it turned out, the towels were a good idea. Leila had dissolved in tears by now, and she began choking out her story almost incoherently when Catherine reappeared.

Catherine handed Leila the roll, or rather simply thrust it into the girl’s lap. She debated whether or not she could now sit down, and decided she could. She sat by the weeping girl and fixed a wide gray gaze on the pretty face now fuzzy with tears.

“We had a date,” Leila choked, “but his car was in the shop, so I had to drive over to his place, but I parked the car a block away because I didn’t want anyone to tell Mama and Daddy, you know how people here tell your parents everything…”

Catherine automatically ripped a towel off the roll and stuffed it into Leila’s hands. Leila looked at it as if she had never seen one, and used it.

“Oh, I loved him so much, and he was so good-looking…You know how it is…I just couldn’t help it.” A pause for another application of the towel. “And then when we were in bed, I mean, after it was over, there was a sound in the hall-”

I hope it was good for Tom, Catherine thought clearly. It better have been good.

“-and he got up and put on his pants, and he told me to stay quiet, not to move. He just whispered right up close to my ear, I was so…scared…‘I left the damn door unlocked,’ he said.”

Leila turned her ruined face to Catherine, and her long hand gripped Catherine’s frail wrist with painful strength.

“He went out and then I heard sounds, oh God, sounds. They hit the walls and came off them, out in the hall and then in the living room. I heard things falling and turning over. I thought there must be five people out there, I swear to God. And I couldn’t keep quiet any more, I screamed. And I thought someone ran out of the house. So I waited for Tom to come get me. I thought he’d come in and say it had been a burglar. When he didn’t come back, I thought he was calling the police. And I wanted to get up and get dressed before they got there. But I couldn’t…I was too scared. I waited and waited, and I couldn’t hear anything. So then I put my underwear on, as quiet as I could. I thought at least I could start getting ready. And then I heard the screen door. And it was you. I thought it was the man coming back. I guess it was a man. But I couldn’t wait anymore. I had to see. I couldn’t wait for Tom anymore.”

Sirens and lights outside.

The difference was that this time Randall was there, and his mother Angel. Randall only left Catherine once, to identify Tom formally. Angel made coffee and more coffee. And she greeted Leila’s parents and led them to their weeping daughter.

Catherine observed dryly that Leila had recovered enough wits to protect herself: the girl edited her story to say that she and Tom had been sitting in the living room when they heard the noise of someone prowling, and that Tom has hustled her into the bedroom for her protection. That left open the question of why Tom hadn’t called the police from the telephone in the living room, but Catherine decided that on the whole Leila had done well.

Then it was Catherine’s turn.

She was holding an embroidered pillow in her lap. She remembered her mother’s hands setting in the stitches. She had moved it from its place in the corner of the couch, so that she could jam herself into that corner as tightly as possible. The couch protected her right side and her back, and Randall was a solid wall on her left. Her fingers went over and over the embroidery her mother had worked on for hours. While Sheriff Galton asked her questions, her fingers never quit moving, in contrast to her face, which felt stiff, as if it didn’t fit her skull very well.

Why had she not heard the screams Leila said she had given?

Because if Leila was shut in the bedroom, I wouldn’t.

Why had she gone over to the house?

I heard the buzzer, he was calling me. I was too late. I heard a rustle in the grass, before the buzzer went off.

Why hadn’t she called the police?

I thought it was a bird. I guess now it was-whoever…

She was grateful for Randall and his mother, but she had gone where Randall could not reach her. She knew he was there, she felt his warmth and knew he was supporting her. She knew Angel was smoothing the way with cups of coffee and her mere presence, for Angel Gerrard, with her erect figure and carefully tended white hair, was a strong and influential woman and an impressive ally.

Catherine desperately wanted to reach out to them, to talk to them, to touch Randall’s broad hand, but she could not. She looked at them from the corner of her eye. When they looked at her, she turned away: for suspicion hung around her like the heavy summer air.

She saw it in the eyes of the police, she saw it in the way Leila’s parents carefully ignored her.

She heard one of the deputies ask Leila if the clothing Catherine was wearing now was the same she had worn when Leila saw her kneeling by Tom’s body. She saw the deputy look at the blood dried on her knees, and at the smears on her hand.

No one would look directly at her face.

People might accept that she had happened to find one body, but not two, Catherine saw.

Not that she had been first on the scene two times.

Not that she had reported two murders. In three days.

The bruise forming on Leila’s face, where Catherine had hit her, was examined by suspicious eyes. Leila had included the blow in her recital, and she had been quite graphic in describing how she was knocked to the wall by the force of Catherine’s open hand.

Catherine saw very clearly that her frame was being reassessed with regard to its strength.

In a sideways glance, Catherine saw Angel Gerrard’s back get stiffer and stiffer during Leila’s account. A gleam entered Angel’s alert brown eyes.

“I wonder how soon you can fire that girl?” Angel said very quietly to Randall, when the room was momentarily emptied of all but the three of them.

“I won’t wait too long,” Randall said grimly. There was a rough edge to his voice that Catherine had never heard before.

“Of course she was in bed with the boy,” Angel said briskly. She looked at Catherine for confirmation.

For the first time, Catherine met Angel’s eyes directly. She nodded.

“I thought so,” Angel said. “She’s a pretty thing, but she has the brains of a gourd. I wonder that she manages to file things correctly.”

“She doesn’t,” Randall said.

“Catherine,” Angel said sharply.

Catherine kept her face averted.

“Look at me, girl,” Angel said more sharply.

Catherine did, and felt as if she had gotten a shot of amphetamine.

“Did you hit that girl?”

“Yes,” Catherine replied.