“I don’t believe that, either. It doesn’t explain why she was killed there.”
“Assume a nut. There she was in the dark park for sentimental reasons, and there at the same time for reasons of his own was a psycho. It just happened.”
“That’s possible, and it would probably be a big relief to someone if we bought it, but we don’t. Not me, anyhow. For one thing, the killing was too neat. Nuts are generally messy. Whoever did this just slipped a long thin blade into her from behind, and that was all of it. The coroner says the blade reached the heart, and she probably died fast without ever knowing exactly what happened to her.”
I remembered her face in the light of a match, the fixed wonder that was almost an expression of serenity, and it was in that instant, for the first time since finding her dead in the old bandstand, that I realized fully that dying had not made her someone else with nothing to do with anything that had happened, and that she was still, although dead, the same person I had known and loved and ached for and wanted once to marry. I wasn’t sorry now, after the temporary illusion of yesterday’s sad evening, that she had made a jilted jackass of me, and in fact I was grateful that she had, since she had left, in leaving, a vacancy for Sid, but I was sorry for a lot of other things, and most of all I felt sorry and guilty for having agreed to meet her in the place where she was lolled. I had said that she had quit being important a long time ago, which was true in a way, but Cotton McBride had said that dying made her important all over again, which was also true in another way that wasn’t the way that Cotton had meant. I wasn’t quite sure of the way myself, but I suddenly hoped with all my heart, which was hurting, that someone even guiltier than I turned out to be even sorrier than I that she had died in the particular way that she had.
“What’s the matter?” Cotton said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Why?”
“You’re looking funny.”
“Am I? I don’t feel funny. Not by a damn sight. I was wondering what you’ve done with her.”
“The body? It’s over in a back room of Paley’s Funeral Parlor. The coroner’s finished with it. Maybe Paley is too. You might be able to see it if you’re interested.”
“Thanks. I might be interested. I’m also interested in going home, Cotton, if you’re agreeable. I was just getting ready to leave when you came in.”
“All right. I’m finished for now, I guess. You haven’t been much help, to tell the truth. If you get any better ideas, you let me know.”
“I’ll do that.”
He retrieved his stained hat and left, and I went out and told Millie to go home, or wherever she wanted to go, which she did willingly after being convinced that I hadn’t been arrested. It was three-thirty then, and I returned to my office and stood by my desk looking down at the phone. Sid was home, organizing her notes on Zoroaster and waiting for me to call, and I wanted to call at once, without further delay for any reason, but I didn’t. After a minute or two, I went out and downstairs and east on the street three blocks and two blocks south to Charlie Paley’s Funeral Parlor. Excuse me. Chapel, he called it. There was a little chapel, all right, with an organ, and I had a fancy when I went in that I could hear “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere” coming out of the pipes, but actually the organ was silent and the chapel was empty. I found Charlie’s office, Charlie in it, and he said it was all right to see Beth, she was ready, and he took me back to see her.
She was lying in this little room just off the alley, and it seemed to me a bleak and depressing room to lie in, even dead, but Beth didn’t seem to mind, her face serene and still fixed in wonder, although it was now apparently the wonder of a dream, for her eyes were closed. Charlie went away and left me with her, and I stood there and tried to say silently the proper good-by that we had never said, but it was simply something that couldn’t now be wrapped up neatly after being and ending in such disorder, and after a fair trial that came to nothing I went back to the Rexall drugstore across from my office and called Sid.
She said she was just getting ready to come, and I crossed the street and stood on the curb until she came, and we went home.
CHAPTER 8
It was something like seven, thereabouts, and we were out on the back terrace in a couple of sling chairs, holding hands in one of those prolonged aftermaths, almost apathetically tender, which sometimes follow, assuming an appropriate pair, a busy and pleasurable time of greater intensity. The cicadas were up there in the trees, under which the shadows had a land of blue transparency, and I was looking at the martin house on a tall pole at the rear of the yard, remembering how I used to lie on my back in a shady place for nearly a whole afternoon at a time in order to watch the slim birds gliding on still wings against the blue and white of sky and clouds. You may think that I had more immediate and significant things to think about, which I did, but they were things that I didn’t want to think about, and so, as an evasion technique, I thought about other
