The Sinful Ones

Chapter Six Gigolo’s Home

Carr pushed doubtfully at the iron gate. It opened a couple feet, then squided to a stop against gravel still slightly damp from yesterday’s rain. He stepped inside.

The house seemed unquestionably deserted. Still, recluses have been known to live in unlikely places.

Or a place like this might be secretly used by intruders. Eyes might even now be peering through the cracks between the boards covering the lower windows.

His feet were carrying him up the driveway, which led back behind the house, passing under a porte-cochere. He had almost reached it when he noticed the footprints.

They were a woman’s, quite fresh, and yet sunk more deeply than his own. They must have been made since the rain. There were two sets, one leading toward the porte-cochere, the other back from it.

Looking at the black ruined flowerbeds, inhaling their dank odor, Carr was relieved that there were footprints.

He examined them more closely. Those leading toward the porte-cochere were deeper and more widely spaced. He remembered that Jane had been almost running.

But the most startling discovery was that the footprints never reached the house at all. They stopped a good six feet from the soil-streaked steps. They cluttered confusedly there, then they returned toward the gate. Evidently Jane had run under the porte-cochere, waited until she was sure he was gone, then retraced her steps.

She apparently had wanted him to think that she lived in a mansion.

He walked back to the gate. A submerged memory from last night was tugging at his mind. He looked along the iron fence fronting the sidewalk. A scrap of paper just inside caught his eyes. It was lodged in the low black shoots of some leafless shrub.

He remembered something white fluttering down from Jane’s handbag in the dark, drifting down.

He worked his way to it, pushing between the fence and the shrubbery. Unpruned shoots caught at his coat.

The paper was twice creased and the edges were yellow and frayed, as if it had been carried around for a long time. It was not rain-marked. Unfolding it, he found the inside filled with a brown-inked script vividly recalling Jane’s scribbled warning, yet much smaller and more crabbed, as if a pen were to her a chisel for carving hieroglyphs. With some difficulty, holding the paper up and moving toward the center of the tangled lawn to catch the failing light, he read:

Carr looked over his shoulder at the boarded-up house. A bird skimmed up from the roof. It looked leaner than a pigeon. Perhaps a nighthawk. Somewhere down the block footsteps were clicking on concrete.

He considered the shape of the paper. It was about that of an envelope and the edges were torn. At first glance the other side seemed blank. Then he saw a faded postmark and address. He struck a match and, shielding it with the paper, made out the name—Jane Gregg; and the city—Chicago. The postmark was a little more than a year old. The address, lying the crease, presented more difficult, but he deciphered it: 1924 Mayberry Street.

The footsteps had come closer. He looked up. Beyond the fence a couple were passing. He could see a bit of white wing-collar and the glitter of a sequined comb. The gait was elderly. He guiltily whipped out the match, but they walked by without turning their heads.

After a moment he slipped through the gate, pulled it shut, and set out in the same direction they were going, cutting across the street before he passed them.

The street lights winked on. The leaves near the lights looked an artificial green. He walked faster.

In this direction there was no abrupt zone-wall, but rather a gradual deterioration. The houses shouldered closer to each other, grew smaller, crept toward the street. The trees straggled, gave out, the grass died. Down the cross-streets neon signs began to glow, and the drone of busses, radios and voices grew in volume. Suddenly the houses coalesced, reached the sidewalk with a rush, shot up in towering brick combers, became the barracks of the middle classes, with only a narrow channel of sidewalk between their walls and the rows of cars parked bumper to bumper.

Carr thought wryly of his shattered theory of thick-carpeted halls, candlelight and a persecuted heiress. Mayberry Street wasn’t that.

The strange notes Jane had inked on the envelope kept flashing in his consciousness. If anything had ever read more like a paranoid’s rulebook—! And yet…

A bent yellow street-sign said Maxwell. At the next corner, Marston. Then, following the mindless association pattern that so often governs the selection of street names, Mayberry.

He looked at the gold numerals painted on the glass door of the first apartment house. They were 1954-58.

As he went down the street, he had the feeling that he was walking back across the years.

The first floor of 1922-24 was lighted on the 24 side, except for a small dark sun-porch. Behind one window he noticed the edge of a red-upholstered davenport and a gray-haired man in shirtsleeves reading a newspaper. Inside the low-ceilinged vestibule he turned to the brass letter boxes on the 24 side. The first one read: Herbert Gregg. After a moment he pushed the button, waited, pushed it again.

There was no response, neither a mumble from the speaking tube, nor a buzz from the lock of the door to the stairs.

Yet the “Herbert Gregg” apartment ought to be the one in which he had seen the old man sitting.

Beyond the inner door, in the darkness of the stair well, he thought he saw something move. He couldn’t tell what it was. When he stepped closer and peered in, he saw nothing. He went outside. He craned his neck. The man was still sitting there. An old man—perhaps deaf?

Then, as Carr watched, the man put down his paper, settled back, looked across the room, and from the window came the opening triplets of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.

Carr felt the wire that fenced the tiny, nearly grassless plot press his calf and realized that he had taken a backward step. He reminded himself that he’d only heard Jane play the third movement. He couldn’t know she’d play the first just this way.

He went back into the vestibule, again pushed the button.

There was no faltering of the piano notes. They sounded icy, remove, inhuman, as if some huge insect were treading neatly, courtseyingly, infallibly up and down the keyboard.

Carr again peered through the inner door. Light trickled down from the second landing above. He tried the door. Someone must have left it off the buzzer, for it opened.

He hurried past the blackness of the bottom of the stair well. Five steps, a turn, five steps more. Then, just as he reached the first landing, which still wasn’t very light, he felt something small and silent come brushing up against his ankle from behind.

His back and hands pressed to the plaster wall.

Then he relaxed. Just a cat. A black cat with a white throat and chest, like evening clothes.

And a very cool cat too. It walked suavely toward the door of the Gregg apartment.

But about two feet away it stopped. For several seconds it stood there, head upraised, making no movement, except its fur seemed to thicken a little. Then, very slowly, it looked around.

It stared at Carr.

Beyond the door, the piano started the sprightly second movement.

Carr edged out his hand. His throat felt dry and constricted. “Kitty,” he croaked.

The cat arched its back, spat, then made a twisting leap that carried it halfway up the next semi-flight of stairs. It crouched on the top step, its bugged green eyes peering between the rails of the banister.

There were footsteps. Without thinking, Carr shrank back. The door opened, the music suddenly swelled, and a gray-haired lady in a blue and white print dress looked out and called, “Gigolo! Here, Gigolo!”

She had Jane’s small chin and short straight nose, behind veils of plumpness. Not Jane’s height, thought. She was rather dumpy. Her face had a foolish look.

And she must be short-sighted, for although she looked at the stairs, she didn’t see the cat, nor did she notice Carr. Feeling uncomfortably like a prowler, he started to step forward, then realized that she was so close he would give her a fright.

“Gigolo!” she called again. Then, to herself, “That cat!” A glance toward the dead bulb in the ceiling and a distracted headshake. “Gigolo!”

She backed inside. “I’m leaving it open, Gigolo,” she called. “Come in when you want to.”

Carr stepped out of the darkness with a husky, “Excuse me,” but the opening notes of the fast third movement, played too loudly, drowned him out.

He crossed to the door. The green eyes at the top of the stairs followed him. He raised his hand to knock. But at the same time he looked through the half-opened door, across a tiny hall, into the living room.

It was a smallish room, with too much heavy furniture in addition to the fake fireplace, and too many lace runners on little tables and antimacassars on the head rests and arms of chairs. He could see the other end of the red davenport and the slippered feet of the old man sitting in it. The woman had retired to a straight-backed chair across the room and was sitting with her hands folded, her lips worriedly pursed.

Between them was the piano, an upright. On top of it was a silver-framed picture of Jane.

But there was no one sitting at the piano.

To Carr, the rest of the room seemed to darken and curdle as he stared at the rippling keys.

Then he puffed out his breath. Of course, it was some kind of electric player.

He started to knock, then hesitated because they were listening to the music.

The woman moved uneasily on her chair. Her lips kept anxiously puckering and relaxing, like those of a fish behind aquarium glass.

Finally she said, “Aren’t you tiring yourself, dear? You’ve been at it all day, you know.”

Carr looked toward the man, but he could still see only the slippered feet. There was no reply.

The piano stopped. Carr took a step forward. But just then the woman got up and went over to the piano. He expected her to do something to the mechanism, but instead she began to stroke the air a couple of feet above the piano bench with a downward patting motion.

Carr felt himself shivering.

“There, there, dear,” she said, her face showing that silly, vacant expression he had noticed at the door, “that was very pretty, I know, but you’re really spending too much time on your music. At your age a girl ought to be having fun, meeting other young people. But you keep yourself cooped up.” She leaned forward, bent her head as if she were looking around the shoulder of someone seated at the piano, wagged her finger, and said with a sickly playfulness, “Look at the circles under those eyes.”

The slippered feet protruding from the red davenport twisted. A weary voice said, “Now don’t worry yourself over Jane, Mother.”

The woman straightened. “Too much practicing is bad for anyone. It’s undermining her health—and I don’t care how ambitious she is, or how ambitious you are for her.”

The slippered feet were drawn back. The davenport creaked. The man came into sight, not quite as old as Carr had thought, but tired-looking. His shirt, open at the neck, was made for a detachable collar.

For Carr, time stopped, as if a clockworks universe hesitated before the next tick. In that frozen pause, only his thoughts moved. It was true, then. The dumpy man…The room clerk…Marcia in her bedroom…Last night with Jane—the bar, the music shop, the movie house, the chessplayers…And now this old woman.

All, all automata, machines!

Or else (time moved again) this old woman was crazy.

Yes, that was it. Crazy, insane. Behaving in her insanity as if her absent daughter was actually there. Believing it.

He clung to that thought.

“Really dear,” the old woman was saying vapidly, “you simply must rest.”

“Now, mother, don’t get excited,” the old man said soothingly. “Everything’s all right.”

The father insane too, Carr thought. No, humoring her. Pretending to believe her hallucinations. That must be it.

“Everything isn’t all right,” she contradicted tearfully. “I won’t have Jane practicing so much and taking those wild long walks by herself. Jane, you mustn’t—” Suddenly a look of fear came over her. “Oh, Jane, don’t go. Please don’t go, Jane.” She stretched out her hand toward the hall as if to restrain someone. Carr shrank back. He felt sick. It was horrible that this mad old woman should resemble Jane.

She dropped her hand. “She’s gone,” she said and began to sob.

The man put his arm around her shoulder. “You’ve scared her off,” he said softly. “But don’t cry, mother, please don’t cry. Tell you what, mother, let’s go sit in the dark for a while. It’ll rest you.” He urged her toward the sun porch.

Just then, behind Carr, the cat hissed and retreated a few steps higher, the vestibule door downstairs was banged open, there were loud footsteps, and voices raised in argument.

“But I tell you, Mr. Wilson, you’re just wasting our time. Dris checked. He told us so.”

“He lied. He’d been with those girls two hours when we saw him.”

“He hadn’t!”

“You think not?”

The first voice was brassy, complaining. The second was cool, jolly. They were those Carr had overheard in the cigarette shop.

Before he had time to weigh his fear or even to think coherently at all, he had slipped through the door in front of him, crossed the little hall as rapidly as he dared—Jane’s parents were out of the living room by now—tiptoed down the hallway leading to the back of the apartment, turned into the first room he came to, and was standing with his cheek to the wall, squinting back the way he had come.

He couldn’t quite see the front door. But in a little while long shadows darkened the plaster of the hallway, telling him that someone must be standing in the hall, cutting off the light from the living room.

“Well, she isn’t here,” he heard Mr. Wilson say.

“But we just heard her playing,” came the blonde’s voice, naggingly.

“Be reasonable, Miss Hackman,” Mr. Wilson objected. “You know very well that doesn’t prove anything.”

“But why would Dris lie about checking on her?”

Mr. Wilson snorted. “Dris would lie about anything to get time to be with his current girls.”

“That’s not true!” Miss Hackman sounded as if the remark had stung. “Dris might fool around with girls when we’re all having fun together. Naturally. But not just by himself, not alone!”

“You think he doesn’t have his private lusts? You think you’re the whole show?”

“Yes!”

“Ha!”

Carr waited for the footsteps or voices of Jane’s parents. Surely they must be aware of the intruders. The sun porch wasn’t that isolated.

Perhaps they were as terrified as he.

Or perhaps—no, damn it, that idea he’d had (when time had stopped) couldn’t, mustn’t be true.

“You’re not being fair,” Miss Hackman whined. “The girl’s probably somewhere in the back of the house. Let’s look.”

Carr had already stooped and unwhipped the knots of his shoelaces. Now he stepped out of his shoes. The room he was in contained twin beds. Light poured into it from a white-tiled bathroom. There was the same fussiness and profusion of bric-a-brac in the bedroom as in the living room.

One of the shadows in the hall grew darker. But just as Carr was starting for the bathroom, he heard Mr. Wilson snap a command.

“Stop! The sun porch! Listen to the old woman! What’s she saying?”

In the ensuing silence Carr could hear a faint mumbling.

“You see,” Mr. Wilson whispered loudly. “She’s talking as if the girl were there.”

“But—”

“Listen!”

The mumbling stopped.

“Do you need any more proof?” Mr. Wilson demanded. After a moment he went on, his voice smooth again. “I know about your tender feelings for Dris, Miss Hackman. As feelings, they mean nothing to me. As influences warping your judgment, they mean a great deal. Dris is very clever at times, but slack. You know that our pleasures, our plans, our very existence, depends on constant vigilance. We could be wrecked by one single person, such as this girl, or the little man with glasses.”

“He’s dead,” Miss Hackman interposed.

“That’s wishful thinking. Suppose he or that girl become actively hostile. Worse, suppose they inform another and stronger group like ourselves—there are such, believe me!—of our existence. You and I know, Miss Hackman, that girl knows about us—”

“I think she’s gone back into her old rut,” Miss Hackman interrupted, “and we don’t have to worry about her. That can happen. Most of them want to go back.”

Trying to catch a glimpse of the talkers, Carr began to edge closer to the door, noiseless in his stocking feet.

“But the mother…?” Mr. Wilson was saying.

“Crazy. So she thinks the girl’s there.”

Mr. Wilson’s shadow nodded. “I’ll grant you that—as a possibility. The girl perhaps has gone back into her rut. But perhaps she hasn’t. Perhaps she’s taken up with Dris, or he with her, on the sly.”

“Oh no! That’s indecent! If I repeat to Dris what you just said—”

“Still, wouldn’t you like proof that it isn’t so?”

“I wouldn’t lower myself to entertain such a contemptible suspicion!”

“You wouldn’t, eh? You don’t sound—What’s that!”

Carr stiffened. Looking down, he saw that he had knocked over a stupid little doorstop in the form of a porcelain Pekinese sitting up to beg. He started for the bathroom door, but he had hardly taken the first painfully cautious step when he heard, from that direction, faintly, but unmistakably, the sound of someone else moving around. He froze, then turned toward the hall. He heard the stamp of high heels, a little throaty exclamation of surprise from Mr. Wilson, a softly pattering rush, the paralyzing fighting squall of a cat, a flailing of shadows, a smash and clatter as if a cane or umbrella had been brought down on a table, and Mr. Wilson’s exclamation:

“Damn!”

Next Carr caught a glimpse of Miss Hackman. She had on a pearl gray evening dress, off the shoulders, and a mink wrap over her arm. She was coming down the hall, but she didn’t see him.

At the same moment something launched itself at her from behind. The cat Gigolo landed in the faultless golden hair, claws raking. Miss Hackman screamed.

The ensuing battle was too quick and confused for Carr to follow it clearly, and most of it took place in the little hall, out of sight except for the shadows. Twice more the cane or umbrella smashed down. Mr. Wilson and Miss Hackman shouted and yelled at each other at the same time, the cat squalled continually. Then Mr. Wilson shouted, “The door!” There came a final whangling blow, followed by Mr. Wilson’s “Damn!”

For the next few moment’s, only heavy breathing from the hallway, then Miss Hackman’s voice, rising to a vindictive wail: “Bitch! Look what it did to my cheek. Oh, why must there be cats!”

Then Mr. Wilson, grimly businesslike: “It hasn’t got away. It’s trapped on the stairs. We can get it.”

Miss Hackman: “This wouldn’t have happened if we’d brought the beast!”

Mr. Wilson: “The beast! This afternoon you thought differently. Do you remember what happened to Dris?”

Miss Hackman: “That was his own fault. He shouldn’t have teased it. Besides, the beast likes me.”

Mr. Wilson: “Yes, I’ve seen her look at you and lick her chops. We’re wasting time, Miss Hackman. You’ll have a lot more than a scratched cheek—or a snapped-off hand—to snivel about if we don’t clear up this mess right away. Come on. We’ve got to kill that cat.”

Carr heard footsteps, then the sound of Mr. Wilson’s voice growing fainter as he ascended the stairs, calling out softly and wheedlingly, “Here, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,” and a few moments later Miss Hackman joined in with a sugariness that made Carr shake:

“Here, kitty.”

The voices moved off. Carr waited a little. Then he tiptoed across the room and peered through the bathroom door. The white-tiled cubicle was empty, but beyond it was another open door, leading to another bedroom.

He could see that it was a smaller bedroom, but friendlier. There was a littered dressing table with lamps whose little pink shades were awry. On the wall he recognized prints of paintings by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Beside the dressing-table was a small bookcase overflowing with sheet-music piled helter-skelter and novels with bright, torn dust-covers. There was a bottle of ink on the dressing table, mixed in with the cosmetics. It was overturned and a large dry brown stain pooled out from it.

His heart began to pound as he crossed the bathroom’s white tiles. He remembered the brown ink on the paper Jane had dropped.

But there was something strange about the bedroom he was approaching. Despite the lively, adolescent disorder, there was an ancient feel to it, almost a museum feel—like some historic room kept just as its illustrious occupant had left it. The novel on the dressing-table was last year’s best seller.

Still…

He poked his hand though the door. Something moved beside him and he quickly turned his head.

He had only a moment to look before the blow fell. But in that moment, before the cap of pain was pulled down over his eyes and ears, blacking out everything, he recognized his assailant.

The cords in the neck stood out, the cheeks were drawn back, exposing the big front teeth, like those of a rat. Indeed the whole aspect—watery magnified eyes, low forehead, tangled dark hair, taut spindle-limbed figure—was that of a cornered rat.

It was the small dark man with glasses.