But in the end they didn’t hang him at all.
They let him out of it.
They said he wasn’t guilty because he wasn’t in his right mind and wasn’t responsible for his acts, and they sent him off somewhere to a place with cool white rooms and a cool green lawn and doctors to look after him and nurses to wait on him.
I thought a lot about the twelve people on the jury who let him out of it, and I began to hate them the same as Marilla, and I wished they were all dead, dead as Freda, but the more I thought about them the more they seemed like all other people, and after a long time I realized it was because they really were like all other people on earth. Freda was dead, and no one cared, all the people on earth had said it was all right because of a ridiculous story about a little man with a pointed nose and a pointed chin and yellow pointed shoes who had told a man named Marilla to kill her. Always I saw the face of Marilla and the face of Freda, and they seemed to get mixed up with other faces that I’d never seen before, and I wondered if I was insane myself, but I wasn’t, of course, any more than Marilla was.
And now I lay in my room in the hot and humid night, and across the interval between houses, behind the futile beating of blades, Mrs. Willkins’ gross body stirred in her black and gasping room.
And there was something else. Something new.
A man was walking the dark and airless streets of town beneath layers of lifeless leaves.
He walked with mincing steps, and he was far away in the beginning, when I first saw him, and I lay on my bed in my room and followed his progress with cat’s eyes through light and shadow across the pattern of the town. At times he was swallowed completely by darkness, and then no eyes could see him but mine, but the people who stirred in wakefulness in the houses he passed could hear the echo of his mincing steps, and he moved with surety of purpose and a pace that never varied through the silent, dappled streets until he came at last to the corner above my house and down the street to the house itself. Without moving from my bed, I could see him standing on the sidewalk below with his face lifted into the milky light of the moon, and then he came up across the porch into the house and up the stairs into the hall and stood outside my door.
I waited in the hot stillness, and after a while he knocked softly, and I got up in the dark, and my hand, swinging out, struck the tumbler on the table by the bed and knocked it to the floor with a sound of brittle thunder that rocked the room. I waited until the reverberations had diminished and died and the soft knock was repeated, and then I crossed to the door and opened it.
The warm fog inside my skull pressed closely on my brain, and though my head didn’t ache exactly, it felt very light and queer. The man in the hall looked at me and bowed in a peculiar, old-fashioned way from the waist and smiled politely.
“Excuse me for disturbing you at this hour,” he said, “but I must talk with you about a number of people. About Mrs. Willkins first of all, I think. May I come in?”
He was a little man with a long pointed nose and a pointed chin. He wore yellow pointed shoes.
I saw Marilla from, my window. He was walking in the yard below with the same man in white who comes now and then to my room, and he sat for a while on a bench under a tree, and I could see him quite clearly. The queer thing is, there was no hate, no longer any hate, and I’m thinking that perhaps I will be allowed to walk in the yard soon, and that Marilla and l may meet and sit together under the tree and talk about these things that happened. It will be pleasant to talk with someone who knows and understands…
KILL ME TOMORROW
Originally published in Manhunt, December 1955.
Peter Roche first saw her the afternoon of the day before Christmas. When he got home, she was sitting in front of the fire in the library with Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She drew on the cigarette, drank from the glass, and exhaled a thin blue cloud of smoke. He learned that it was a characteristic trick of hers, that sequence—drag, drink, blow. She nodded a headful of mahogany curls and looked at him with eyes that seemed black in the room but turned out later in the light to match almost perfectly the color of her hair.
“You must be Peter,” she said.
Her voice was throaty, as warm and mellow as the Scotch that lubricated it, as soft and lazy as the blue smoke it rode on.
He gave her a twisted grin and said, “Why must I be Peter? Why can’t I be Paul?”
She shook her head, the mahogany curls dancing and shimmering. Firelight and shadows flickered across her face.
“I know you’re Peter because your father told me all about you. ‘Only son,’ he said. ‘Slim and handsome and clever as the devil and no damn good,’ he said. You’re twenty-eight. You flunked out of medical school four years ago, and you haven’t done anything constructive since. Last year it cost five grand to buy you out of an affair with a predatory blonde. To
