“God, Waller!”
Suddenly Mr. Waller stumbled backward to his chair; his head dropped to his hands and he began sobbing, the broken, wrenching way a man sobs. I didn’t look, but I could feel Mrs. Waller patting his shoulder.
“Did you kill Mrs. Garr, Waller?” The lieutenant’s voice was as even as if he’d been asking about the weather.
“Before God, no.”
“Did you make the attack on Mrs. Dacres Monday night?”
“No.”
The lieutenant shrugged weary shoulders, turned to me.
“Why don’t you go on along home, Mrs. Dacres? The rest of this is just going to be the same reel, over and over until he breaks the rest of the way. I think I might get along better without you. I’ll let you know when I get where I’m going. Thanks for what you did.”
I went out, down the corridor, past the desk, out into June sunshine. I was tense with excitement. But I was glad to go. I’d had enough of seeing the Wallers bludgeoned. Questions were worse than knives. Worse than clubs. Questions carefully hunt out the vital spot. Then strike! Strike! Strike!
Odd that I should feel any pity at all for the Wallers. Incomprehensible that I should pity Mr. Waller, who had let Rose Liberry’s father and mother suffer more terribly because the world was made to think their daughter vicious. Vicious at sixteen. Girls were vicious, sometimes, at sixteen. But not their daughter. Not Rose. Not Rose with the grave eyes.
I called Hodge Kistler from a corner drugstore; over dinner, I told him what the afternoon had brought out.
“It is awful,” Hodge agreed soberly when I had finished. “The whole thing’s awful. That nice kid, getting into that sort of thing. And then letting her parents think she was rotten. Letting that God-awful oldish-bitch off with five years. Waller ought to be shot.”
“That’s the trouble,” I said. “I think he wishes he was. He looks as if he wouldn’t mind if he were shot. I can’t hate him as I should.”
“Hate him? Why should you? Hate’s personal.”
“Is it? Then what about Mr. Grant? He hated Mrs. Garr. His reasons were impersonal.”
“The reasons he gave were impersonal. You don’t know what his real reasons were—or are.”
“No, that’s true. Well, whatever they were, it doesn’t look now as if they had anything to do with what we’re interested in. The lieutenant is sure Waller is the one. They have personal enough reasons for wanting to bump Mrs. Garr off, goodness knows. I’d hate anyone who’d led me into doing anything that nasty.”
“Mean to say you’d let yourself be led?”
“How do I know? I’m feeling very humble tonight. I only know I was there in the room when Mr. Waller told. And I could feel what he was feeling. I can’t get away from it. He was feeling exactly as I would have if it had been me.”
“Honest. Now, if it was me, I’m certain I should have run from the house, waving the note on high. Heck, think how I could have rocked the world with that suicide note in 1919! Even 1920! The only thing that could have made that story bigger than it was, and that was big enough. Well, Rose Liberry died to give Gilling City a clean government; she accomplished that much. Lots of men have lived longer and done less.”
“Now that note wouldn’t mean anything, would it?”
“Not to anyone who didn’t know the girl. Oh, a few old-timers might remember the case well enough to be mildly interested. But the lieutenant ought to make an effort to find the girl’s relatives, if there are any, and let them know.”
“It’s meaning something to Mr. Waller,” I said grimly.
We went to my apartment then; if the lieutenant called, he would call there. I thought about the Wallers as we waited; I couldn’t get them out of my mind. Mr. Kistler was restless and uncommunicative, too. I thought about Mr. Waller, young, in debt. His wife heavy with a baby. Crying about what it was going to cost. Mr. Waller, young, walking along his beat and thinking about his wife crying over where they’d get the money for the baby. A girl running to him in her nightgown, screaming. I thought about Mr. Waller running into the red-plush house and up the richly carpeted stairs, accustomed to the feet of Gilling City’s Prominent Men. Waller running, forgetting his crying wife now, running quickly down a hall and into a bedroom where a girl hung by a sheet.
Mr. Waller working fast, taking the girl down and laying her on the bed, but knowing she was dead. Grabbing up the note and reading it. I thought about how Mrs. Garr would run in screaming, offering him money, a thousand dollars, two thousand, three thousand, five—anything, to help keep her out of bad trouble; it wasn’t any of her fault, and the law would get her; the law would get her, and she had plenty of money.
“See,” she would cry, running out and coming back, “money, money, money!” She would give him all this, her hands full, she would give him more, she would pay him money the rest of his life. The girl was dead. Not taking money wouldn’t make her live again.
I thought about Mr. Waller testifying in the court, with Mrs. Garr’s frantic little black eyes on him, promising, promising. I thought about Mrs. Garr’s hair whitening in prison to that lovely, pure white. And of Mr. Waller, thrown out with the rest of his fellows, to destroy himself on his own slow poison of memory.
We talked fitfully, expecting every moment to hear the phone ring and the lieutenant’s triumphant voice announcing a confession.
Hours went by. Then slow feet came into the hall; heavy, leaden feet that lifted someone slowly up the stairs. Just one pair of feet.
“I’m sure that was Mrs. Waller,” I whispered. “Alone.”
Still we waited. We heard Mr. Grant go out. We heard him return.
We
