“I don’t sign.” And he didn’t. “Bad luck,” he said. That finished it. And as a matter of fact, it had turned out that way. He’d been right for whatever wrong reason.
And now the thing had dropped on another floor. If he believed in bad luck he might well break out into sweat again. He wiped his palms again on his napkin, though there was no need to. He was a damn fool for ever picking it up off the dirt floor, a worse fool for putting it in his trousers pocket just for the ironic devil of it—as well as to have it where nobody cleaning his desk or dresser drawer might come across it and wonder—but the worst stupidity of all was forgetting it and reaching in his pocket and dropping it in the slot machine—and never thinking about it until it came rolling along across the floor until Connie put her foot out and stepped on it.
I should have got hold of it then,
he thought. He could easily have done it. If, in fact, he had simply said, “That’s mine,” nobody would ever have thought of it a second time. Instead, it had suddenly seemed a good idea to be rid of it, get it away from him so he wouldn’t make another mistake of the same kind. It wasn’t until it was in Janey’s bag—or not even then, not until she burst into tears and was running past him up the steps—that he realized if the hundred-to-one chance came through it was the only thing that could tie him to Wernitz’s house and the Wernitz murder.
His palms were clammy and moist again.
I’ve got to get it.
As he got up from the breakfast table he knew that as clearly as he knew the sun was shining outside and that Paul M. Wernitz was dead, in the infinite darkness of eternity. Not that he was superstitious, even if the thing did seem suddenly imbued with a malignant animate perversity all its own. Otherwise how had it got into the tube or into the jack pot? That was another hundred-to-one Chance. Why hadn’t it gone down to the box behind, and lain there, safe and hidden, until a month later when they emptied the box, and nobody would be there to see it, or notice it, or remember anything about it? It looked like a conscious chain of animus, trying to get him all tangled up in what he knew was the perfect crime.
He moved his chair back from the table. Janey Blake had it now, and he had to get it. He couldn’t afford to take any chances now, not even a hundred-to-one chance, or a thousand-to-one. He’d figured all the chances, prepared for them intelligently and carefully. This was an off-chance he could never have foreseen. And he had to move fast. Not even Janey Blake, not Janey or anybody, was going to stand in his way. He knew more about Janey now. He was prepared to deal with her if he had to. What was Janey or Janey’s life even when his own was hanging precariously in the balance?
When Gus Blake
got downstairs his breakfast was on the side of the gas stove keeping warm for him, the percolator in front of his place set on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth on the counter in front of the window. Janey and little Jane were through, their dishes washed and on the drain board to dry. He could see them through the window in the back yard, Janey in a red sweater, the sleeves pushed up above her elbows, settling the little Dane in her white picket play pen with her sandbox, building-blocks, and doll’s house and the narrow street Janey had constructed among them so she could wheel her dolls around. She was bundled up in a blue snow suit and white hood and mittens, rosy-cheeked and laughing in the crisp November morning. Gus watched her tumble and right herself, and set off to her busy work at the sandbox. He smiled and poured himself a cup of coffee.
I’m a hell of a father,
he thought. It was supposed to be his job to get up in the morning while Janey got breakfast and put little Jane out in her yard so Janey could get on with her own busy work, but it had been over a month since he’d done it. He’d been sweating over the Centennial edition half the nights, and now with the Wernitz business on top of all of it he’d been pressed even harder. And it wasn’t only the Wernitz business. He poured another cup of coffee, got his plate from the stove, and sat down at the counter table, his eye still on the yard.
He was worried about Janey. She wasn’t acting like herself at all, except when she was with the little Dane. She was all right when she was with her, but not with anybody else. Not with him, certainly. It had been slowly dawning on him for a week or so. He watched her catch the rubber ball little Jane threw from the sandbox and toss it back. She was shaking her head then, shivering, pretending she was cold, and running back toward the steps, laughing and waving back at the little Dane. Almost at the brick walk by the side of the house she stopped abruptly, looking down at the ground. Gus craned his neck to see what it was. He thought,
Oh, hell.
It was a bare damp place where the water from the downspout at the corner of the house collected, that he’d promised to fix and never got around to. It hadn’t rained for three days. The little Dane wasn’t likely to get her feet muddy or slip on it—not when she was in her pen, at least.
Janey was still looking at it. He saw her go over and pull four thin bamboo stakes out of a clump of chrysanthemums in the side border, and start back to the bare patch in the grass. She turned then and looked up at the house, at the upper windows, before she looked at the kitchen window and saw him. He grinned and waved, but she didn’t smile back. She just stood there a moment, tossed the stakes over on the border again, brushed her hands lightly together, and came on toward the back door, looking around casually as she came. Gus swore a little. He’d get somebody to come and fix the blasted drainpipe and patch up the triple-blasted lawn if that was what she was sore about. Or he’d go do it himself. There was probably grass seed in the garden box in the basement. This was the one place he’d ever lived in or worked in where what you needed any given moment was right there where it was supposed to be.
Now if Janey could only read and write, she’d be a hell of a lot more use around the
Gazette
than Connie Maynard or anybody else he could think of just offhand. He watched her run back and pick up the little Dane, who’d pitched over with her doll buggy and was yelling bloody murder one second and laughing her head off the next. He sat down again and looked at his watch. It was time to be shoving, but he had to talk to Janey. She’d left the play pen and gone down toward the end of the yard, just sort of mooning around, he thought irritably; it wasn’t quite the weather to be out looking for crocuses or whatever, with only a light sweater on. Then suddenly it struck Gus Blake that she wasn’t coming in. Something else struck him at the same time, a
non sequitur
in one sense,
sequitur
as hell in another. It was something Connie Maynard had said as they’d got to her house when he drove home with her at two-thirty that morning. He could still hear her saying it.
“Gus—I don’t want to louse up any of your illusions, precious, but hasn’t it ever occurred to you that maybe your Janey just a little tiny bit regrets not marrying Orvie Rogers instead of you? She’d have a cook and maids and clothes and she wouldn’t have to get up and cook your breakfast and wash your clothes. You’re wonderful, of course, dear, and amusing and terribly intelligent—but it’s all on a special level that Janey must find pretty rotten dull at times—if you don’t mind my saying so. After all, she’s young and she could easily like to have a little fun once in a while. But I’m sorry, angel. I shouldn’t have said it. But you are a little self-centered, aren’t you? I mean—”
He could hear himself, too. “Janey and I get on all right, Connie—thanks just the same.” Stiff like, putting Miss Maynard right back in her own place. He could hear her laugh as she’d bent over to kiss him lightly on the cheek.
“Okay, darling. You’ll find out. Everybody else knows it. And sometime you’re going to want to kiss me good night—and will I let you? I sure will. We’re the same sort, Gus. Janey’s too sweet for either of us. We’re both stinkers at heart, dear. Well, good night, Gus. Thanks for bringing me home.”
He got up, took his dishes over to the sink, and turned on the hot water. He stood there for a moment, looking down at them. There was a lot in it. Somehow, he’d realized it all a long time ago, in fact, when he married Janey. The idea of permanence had not really been part of it, not that he’d thought about it rationally in any such terms but because impermanence was something he just naturally took for granted. You had a job in New York in February and in San Francisco in March, and in May you were in London helping cover a war that was knocking everything people had thought was permanent to very small bits and to hell with it. Connie Maynard had come as near to the idea of permanence as he’d ever particularly thought of, during the war and just after it, when permanence in your personal non-material life had taken on a peculiar importance. But Connie had cured him of that quaint idea.
He put his dishes on the drain board with Janey’s and little Jane’s. It wasn’t until Connie sounded off the night before that he’d thought much about any of it again. Or after he’d left her rather, and started to walk home and decided to go down to the paper and write up the Wernitz deal instead. It was one of the nice things about a newspaper. Everything was so damned current. You didn’t have time to worry about the past, or the future—or even your own personal present. He went into the pantry and stood there, listening, to see if, now he was out of the window and out of the kitchen, Janey would come on in. And after a few minutes she did. He heard her shut the door and stop at the sink, surprised, probably, that he’d cleared and washed his dishes. Then she came on toward the pantry.
“Oh,” she said. She stopped, her eyes wide as they always were, but different, as if she had pulled an opaque blue curtain down behind them. “Oh. I thought you’d probably gone. You must have a lot to do, don’t you? I’m going down to Mother’s as soon as I get the beds made.”
“Janey.” As he stepped toward her he trod on the loose board in front of the pantry door. It creaked loudly. Her body tensed and he saw her fists clench tightly. She was nervous as a cat. As he stepped off the board it creaked again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really will get a carpenter to come fix that.” He’d said it dozens of times, but she’d always laughed. She didn’t even smile now.
“You’ve said that before. But it’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”
It made it harder for him to go on, but he did.
“Janey, if I’ve done anything peculiarly and especially obnoxious to you, I’m sorry,” he said seriously. “I’m sorry I was so late last night, and I’m sorry I wasn’t up in time to drive your mother home this morning.”
He could hear the courthouse clock strike nine. Half an hour late now. He was always at his desk by eight-thirty. He saw Janey’s eyes move off, listening to it, too, and it seemed to him listening for something else. The light flush that stained her cheeks when he mentioned her mother faded. He looked at her intently. “Your mother did stay all night, didn’t she?”
She flushed again, and hesitated, moistening her lips. Then she turned her blue eyes up to his. “No. I told a lie,” she said warmly. “She went back home as soon I came in.” He stared at her. “What the—” He stopped himself abruptly. What was the matter with him? He was always getting sore at somebody lately. And Janey was getting sore, too. Sore at him. That was something that had never happened before. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. But I want you to quit saying, ‘What the hell,’ to me. Just quit it! I won’t stand for it any more. And quit saying you’ll have the floor board fixed or the drain pipe fixed, or any of the other things you’re always going to do and never think of any more. Because it doesn’t matter. I don’t want you to do
anything
around here. All I want you to do is go away and go on about your own business, and let me go on about mine!”
She could hear herself saying things she didn’t mean and didn’t care about, because she was angry and wounded still from last night, and bitterly resentful. But she did mean part of it. She did want him to get out of the house before the police came. She had to get him out before they came. This was her business. She’d started it without him, and waited desperately for him to come and take it out of her hands, and he came and brought Connie Maynard and was cross and rude to her. Connie was rude and offensive—“It’s her dining-room, isn’t it?”—raising her eyebrows, belittling Janey’s taste and Janey’s pride—and then he’d gone off with, Connie and stayed until five o’clock in the morning. And he could go again. He could go back to Connie and leave her to go on taking care of herself and little Jane. She could do it very well. She didn’t need anyone to stand around and act as if she were a stupid little fool, and got sore at her because she was trying to do her job the best she could.
She tried to listen out the back way and out the front at the same time. She had to have Gus out of the way when the police came. She didn’t want him ever to know what had happened the night before. He could go away and stay until five o’clock with Connie. Let him go to her now. She didn’t want him there anymore. The police would be there soon, to fingerprint the fuse box in the basement. And there was the thing she’d just discovered out in the damp bare patch near the brick walk.
It was a large clear footprint made by someone who was running. The sole of the shoe was quite deep and the heel barely showed at all. It was headed toward the end of the garden. Even if there weren’t fingerprints in the basement, a footprint would help. But somehow, during the night, either asleep or awake, she had become convinced of the importance of finding out who had come into the house. It was someone who wanted something. It wasn’t the few bits of silver on the sideboard, and she had no jewelry anybody would want. It had to be something else—and there was only one thing she had that was of any value. She’d thought it over and over again in the night. That was little Jane.
She caught her breath now and held it for an instant before she turned and ran out into the kitchen. It hadn’t occurred to her until that moment that if they’d come into the house to take little Jane they could just as easily come into the yard— But little Jane was there, playing in the sandbox. “Janey! What is the matter with you?”