Residence in City Located
The proprietress of a small loop hotel testified to police this afternoon that a Samuel Zeitman had registered at her hotel on the seventeenth of March, this year, and had since resided there. She later identified the body as that of her lodger. She was unable, however, to tell anything of the man’s activities. He was very quiet, even secretive, she says. She could remember no men visitors to his room. A search of the dead man’s room revealed a second gun, several cartridges, and a blackjack, but no clue as to his activities. Every effort will be made, however, to seek out the killer, police stated.
The rest was repetition.
In the days that followed, not one new thing was discovered about that death. I watched for the case every day in the papers, of course; it was played up on page one for a couple of days, then slipped rapidly into newspaper oblivion.
It was some days before I ventured again to look over that railing. From that time until I left Mrs. Garr’s house I never did stand there without expecting to see another heap of clothes in the weeds below. Sometimes I’d feel pushed to look—and I’d see Water Street, dirty but innocent, with children playing in the rubbish heaps where a dead man had lain a few days before.
One thing I certainly took for granted: that the killing of Sam Zeitman had nothing to do with Mrs. Garr’s house or the people in it. It never entered my mind that it had, any more than it concerned the other people in the houses up and down Trent Street. Some gangster had had reason to shoot Sam Zeitman, had done so, and had quietly and efficiently slung the body over the rail at Sixteenth Street because it was a handy, quiet spot. That it could have been me that caused Sam Zeitman’s death—well, that would have been as incomprehensible as that it was me that caused the moon to shine.
Life in Mrs. Garr’s house went on as usual. I was jumpy for a while, but it wore off. Mrs. Garr kept to her orbit. Mrs. Tewman cleaned. The lodgers came and went. My apartment was settled. I liked my two rooms; on bright days they were extremely pleasant. Mrs. Garr was the fly in the ointment, of course. I was putting away my winter clothes one day, shaking them on the back porch to air, dragging the steamer trunk out to the kitchen floor, unpacking my summer clothes, when the sharp rap I’d come to know so well sounded on my door.
“You’re running my hot water in your kitchen,” Mrs. Garr burst at me, her eyes hard and hot.
“Why, no, I haven’t been using any water.”
“It’s no use your talking that way to me. I can tell.” She pushed past me, halted a moment to stare at my clothes and the trunk in the kitchen, limped on to the sink. Her fingers closed over the hot-water faucet.
“No, you didn’t,” she grunted. “I can tell if anybody’s been using my hot water in their kitchen, because then their faucet’s hot.” She switched subjects quickly. “You doing something with your clo’es?”
“I’m putting away my winter things.”
“My, you got a lot o’ clo’es. I cer’n’ly admire to see pretty clo’es.”
She plumped herself down on the kitchen chair.
She stuck like a limpet, sitting there while I shook out and hung my summer dresses, folded and packed the winter things.
She sat hunched forward, her arms folded across her knees.
“We’re going to have another change in this house,” she told me importantly. “Them Wallers, they’re going. I don’t trust that man. I don’t trust her, either.”
“Why, I thought he was an ex-policeman,” I said. “Certainly you can trust an ex-policeman.”
“No, I don’t trust ’em. He snoops. Oh, they don’t think I know what’s going on, but I can tell. Coming down into my basement, says he’s looking for nails. She comes right into the kitchen, asks can she borrow an egg. Oh, they’re looking, all right.”
I forbore saying that the only person I had known to do any snooping in that house was Mrs. Garr. I couldn’t move a table without having her turn up, her black eyes inquiring and suspicious.
“But what could he be looking for?” I argued, instead.
She shot me a glinty look. “They like to snoop. They just like to snoop, people like them.”
“Oh, you’re just imagining it. You’re here too much. Cooped up. Now it’s getting to be so nice outdoors, you ought to get away once in a while. Go somewhere. See a movie. Why, you never go out!”
“I ain’t a hand for going. Not now no more. Oh, in my young days, then I was a goer. I could put many a young girl now’days in the shade.”
“I’m sure of it. Your hair’s still so lovely.”
I’d reached her pride, of course.
“Yes, I always had a handsome head o’ hair. Many’s the people remarked about my hair. A handsome head o’ hair . . . I could help you get that trunk back, now.”
“Oh, don’t bother. I got it out myself. It’s too hard on you.”
“No, ’tain’t. I ain’t so old as you think.”
She took one end of the trunk again, and again, gasping, helped me get it back in place before she’d leave.
—
OF COURSE, I WAS certain her talk of people rummaging through her possessions was imagination.
Certain, that is, until the day in late April when Mrs. Halloran finally persuaded Mrs. Garr out to see Three Little Maids, which was playing at the second-run movie house below the capitol that week.
They left in a flurry of argument; at the last moment Mrs. Garr, with all an old person’s reluctance to change from settled habit, sat stubbornly down in the chair in the hall to say no, she wasn’t going. Mrs. Halloran knocked at my door to get my seconding opinion that it would be good for Mrs. Garr to
