The Dream Walker Page 19

  The knife wasn’t causing me pain. It was only dragging and heavy. But I knew Kent Shaw could at any moment leap and press the knife deeper and then I would die. So I stood still for my life. I said, in Cora’s trill, “Why, of course. I am in the hospital, too. You can’t hurt me, darling. Not now, that I’ve got on to the trick of being two places …” and I laughed Cora’s laugh. So his whole design turned in his brain.

  He began to whinny, a high, sick sound. I knew he was afraid. I knew I could die … if I ran. So I took a step toward the faint light that crossed under and through the flimsy blind. The knife tip was wedged, in flesh or bone, and held there. I didn’t touch it. I wasn’t bleeding. Kent Shaw whinnied and drew himself against the wall.

  “You should keep your promises,” I said reproachfully. “Darlene and I did all the work. You mustn’t think you can kill us. We aren’t Ed Jones.”

  He made a most horrible sound.

  I shifted my course. I thought I could drive him to the window. I thought if he went through it, then I wouldn’t have to die. I could see his face now. He didn’t look at mine. With bursting eyeballs, he stared at the knife protruding bloodlessly from my breastbone.

  “Ed Jones was mortal, Kent, darling,” said I in Cora’s saucy, slightly malicious voice.

  He fell on the floor and rolled, out of all control, with that high whinnying sound coming steadily out of him.

  The light came on. I didn’t turn around because I was staring at a pair of hands that came from behind a dirty flowered curtain across the corner. The hands had a flannel sash in them and were ready to bind Kent Shaw to harmlessness. But they weren’t Charley’s hands.

  A voice behind me said loudly, “For God’s sake, Ollie!” It wasn’t Charley’s voice. It was Bud Gray.

  He floated in two strides all the way to the corner and flung the curtain aside. He looked piercingly at the woman who had been hidden there. He took the sash out of her hands and bent and secured Kent Shaw, who made no effort of any kind.

  The woman said to me, “I guess he would have found me in about another minute and I left my gun in the bed. I guess you saved my life, Miss … Hudson, isn’t it?” Her voice was not particularly nasal to my ear.

  Bud said, “Sit down, Ollie. Don’t touch that thing. What in hell has been going on!” He took those giant strides without waiting for an answer, and laid about him with commands, speaking to other people in the hall.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, keeping very erect, and the knife shook so I thought it might be loosened and fall of itself. I said, in my mind, Where can Charley be?

  Darlene Hite, in her nightdress, stood quietly.

  Bud Gray said to her, “You saved her life in Maine. I think you don’t like this much anymore. Am I right? Don’t be afraid, Miss Darlene Hite. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time. Need you on our side.”

  She looked at him. Her eyes fled, returned. “I’ve got to be, I guess,” said Darlene Hite with her usual clear-headedness.

  The rooming house had sprung to life all around us. I sat with the knife quivering, Darlene dressed behind the curtain, while Kent Shaw still steadily went on like a whistle that has been stuck open and the noise begins to rub on the raw of one’s nerves. Then police came and soon the ambulance, and a cool and imperturbable young man pulled that knife away. And Bud Gray watched Darlene with glowing eyes and talked and slowly she seemed to respond, to go toward him. So there I was, very numb and calm, sitting with my blouse in tatters and nothing but a wad of gauze to make me decent, when finally Charley Ives walked in.

  His face was stone. His eyes were porcelain.

  “My hero!” said I idiotically. “What kept you?”

  I saw his eyes blaze and, dizzy with a great revealing sense of utter relief … I fainted.

  Dr. Harper said, “That wound’s not much. You’re all right, Olivia.” I was in the emergency room at the hospital. He was better than reassuring. He let me talk and sort out my own impressions of the immediate past. I finally got what I was afraid to ask out of my mouth. “Cora?”

  “Worst possible place to try any poisoning is a first-class hospital,” the doctor said complacently. “We got at her with everything in the book. Cora’s all right.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Candies. Humbugs, they call ’em.” I let out a startled wail. “How the devil they got to her we still don’t know,” he said.

  “Is she telling …?”

  “She couldn’t very well talk while we worked on her, believe me. She’s back in her bed, playing too sick to speak, thinking it over, I suppose. Charley Ives is fit to be tied.”

  “He was here, then?”

  “Hanging over her, with a tape recorder running.”

  “Of course,” said I. “Did they bring Kent Shaw here?”

  The doctor shook his head. I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes. “Sit up. You’re fine. You’re also lucky. I better see if Charley’s around.”

  A nurse was helping me put my clothing back together over the bandages when Charley came bursting in. He cast one glance at me and my latest immodesty. The bright blue of his eye was not exactly sympathetic. He spoke briefly to the doctor. He marched over. I understood.

  I burst into apology. “Oh, Charley, I was wrong. And you were right. I shouldn’t have done anything I did.”

  “True,” Charley said gently but firmly.

  “And you had to be with Cora. I didn’t mean to reproach you. I was just scared, Charley.”

  Charley blinked. His face turned wooden.

  “Is he really clear out of his head? Kent Shaw?” I cried. “So nothing he says can be evidence? Charley, is it that bad?”

  “He’s pretty much gone,” Charley said.

  “Then I’ve wrecked everything.”

  “Anything could have sent him off the deep end,” Charley said impatiently. “Don’t beat yourself, now. Darlene thinks she’d have been gone.…” Then he relaxed and looked amused. “You know, a little ordinary human cowardice, and you could have yelled for help. Bud was in the basement.”

  “Oh,” said I stupidly, “then I had a hero after all.” Thunderous silence. “I’m sorry for what I said,” I was nearly bawling. “For what I did … everything.…”

  “Never mind, coz. Bud has Darlene. But why he didn’t jump a little faster into that room I’ll never.…”

  “Oh, no, Bud was wonderful,” said I, thinking of Darlene and how Bud had projected to her, somehow, in those impossible circumstances, his friendliness and his admiration and his hope for her. “But it’s all right,” I cried, feeling reprieved, “if Darlene is talking.”

  Charley said, “It’ll be all right,” in a manner just a little too soothing.

  I was alarmed all over again. All I could think was that I’d hurt Marcus. “Charley, if Bud was there soon enough to hear what was said, how Kent kept calling me Darlene, and all that … won’t it help?”

  “We’ve got Kent Shaw,” said Charley. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “And Cora?”

  “Uh huh,” he said. “So now you get home to bed. Walking around with knives … of all the …!” He turned his back abruptly. “Bud said it was a top performance, in fact, it fooled him. Had enough, coz? Better go home, hadn’t you?”

  “Charley, my boy,” said I tartly, “you’re a lousy actor. I’ve said so before. What I did is even worse than I know, isn’t it? Tell Teacher, come on.”

  Charley turned around again. “Okay, Teacher,” he sighed. “It’s this way. Kent Shaw is in no shape to tell us how he put the blue envelope in the book. Darlene doesn’t know anything about that. She wasn’t coached about Washington. She wasn’t there. And she can’t tie in Pankerman. She never heard of his being in it. Now, lacking Kent Shaw, only Raymond Pankerman can tell us about the blue envelope, since he wrote the letter that was in it, and he must have given it to Shaw. The problem is, get Pankerman. Him and his Fifth Amendment.”

  “But Cora can tie in Pankerma
n,” I said slowly, “can’t she? She’d know Kent Shaw had no money. And she’d make sure where the money was coming from.”

  “I should think so, too. But you see, Cora isn’t talking. Yet.”

  “But you’ve got her. For Heaven’s sakes, Charley!”

  “Sure. Sure, we’ve got her.”

  “Don’t you think you can make her talk?”

  Charley said with false cheer, “Maybe. Maybe I’m just pessimistic.” We looked at each other. There was that hard stubborn fight in Cora, that long-practiced clawing and scratching for her advantage. There would be no repentance, no aching conscience, no intolerable pain of guilt, to break her down. She didn’t even understand what, indeed, she had done.

  “Bud’s got Darlene upstairs now. Going to try. We’re waiting on the Boss,” Charley told me. “We can tell her we’ve got Kent Shaw.”

  “She doesn’t know … how he is?”

  “No.”

  “But you haven’t got him,” I said sadly, “because Kent Shaw isn’t anymore. Will he recover in time, Charley?”

  Charley just shook his head.

  “Then,” I said, “it’s not going to be easy to make Cora talk.” And then I saw headlines, pictures, heard arguments … and I could see months and months of it, and Cora cast as the lone, the underdog … and some woolly-headed sympathy edging around … and a long, noisy, damaging struggle yet before us. Unless she confessed, too.

  “You don’t have leverage,” I said, “and she’s got nothing to lose.”

  Charley sat down suddenly on a chair next to mine and he took my hands. “Coz, do you know how to make her talk?” I shook my head. “I forced you to try acting my way,” he said. “Maybe I don’t understand.…”

  “I … I did have a silly idea,” I said. “It’s wild and foolish. It’s only play-acting.”

  “We’ve got to have her story. If we can’t smash all of it, in one blow.…”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I don’t know how to deal with her. I’ve made nothing but mistakes since I met her. Thought I found something I’d been missing—gaiety, spice of life. Ran into something too tortuous and unprincipled for … well, for me. Tried to get out of it and made a mess of that, too. I can make her angry, coz. But I’m never the one to know how to make her talk.” Charley frightened me, being as humble as this.

  “Unless,” I said, “you touch a feeling that’s true, you won’t do it.”

  “She hasn’t any feelings,” he said bitterly.

  “Yes. She has,” I said.

  “Coz?” Charley seemed to be listening hard as he could to my very thoughts. “Had you better come along upstairs?”

  The doctor said, “Now, just a minute. She’s had about enough for one night. Came damned close to being killed.”

  “Twice over,” I said. “She offered me a piece of candy and I was too stupid to ask where it came from.”

  Charley said to me sternly, “No good to Marcus for you to bewail how stupid you are.”

  “Why, that’s so,” said I, bracing up.

  “If you even think you’ve got the least idea how to help.”

  I felt better suddenly. “Wait and see,” I said, “and if she’s too tortuous for you.…” I suppose I grinned.

  “Uh huh,” said Charley, sounding more cheerful. “Takes fire to fight fire. You better tag along. What will you do?” he demanded.

  “Nothing, I hope. If I have to, I’ll … tell her some truth.” (I knew I had to say this.) “She’ll never believe, unless I do, you know.”

  Charley said under his breath, “Teacher, you terrify me.”

  “Let me go,” I said, “in a wheelchair, I think.” I looked down at my blouse, which was bloodstained. “Just as I am.”

  “Hold on to your hat, Doc,” said Charley Ives grimly.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  They pushed me in a wheelchair down the familiar corridor on the eighth floor and into Cora’s room, where there was a crowd. She was lying abed, pale, her lids languorous. They lifted at sight of me. “Why, Ollie?” she whimpered in surprise.

  I made my lids languorous and sick and said nothing, laying foundations.

  “What happened?” she asked weakly.

  Nobody answered her. A man I’d never seen before said quietly, “All in order? Shall we begin?” He was a stocky individual with very large eyes over which flesh, beneath his brows, seemed to fall in a fold. Bud Gray was standing near him, exuding a kind of possessiveness over Darlene Hite, in the easy chair. Her almost white, very pale hair was caught back neatly. Her gray eyes were serious. Her hands were quiet. Her attitude was subdued and businesslike. Yet I could imagine that something about her was leaning, leaning with pitiable relief and trust, on Mr. Horace (Bud) Gray. They made a pair. I saw Ned Dancer being a mouse in the corner with his ears out.

  Cora’s black-and-yellow robe was thrown around her shoulders and the long folds, that should fall to her feet, lay like a long splash above the white coverlet. She was keeping still, in seventeen languages. Oh, I knew her! I prayed I knew her now. Her eyes disdained Darlene Hite, skipped over Charley with a flicker of scorn, but when they shifted to me they were not satisfied.

  I touched the floor with my toe and rolled the chair ever so slightly that light might fall on my bandages and my blood.

  The Boss began, in a cold monotone, to outline the plot. He began to ring in Darlene’s testimony, by his questions and her answers, her firm, precise, untinted answers. It rolled out, sounding complete and damning.

  Finally he said, “Now you had a certain written memorandum of all this, Miss Hite. The times, places, and the words you were to say?”

  “I did.” Her voice was untrained, to be sure, but the nasal quality was really very slight and it was not unpleasant.

  “You have it still?” she was asked.

  “I have only the instructions for Castine. The others I burned. It is in a kind of shorthand but I can read it for you.”

  “You think Miss Steffani had a duplicate?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “May we see yours?”

  Darlene took a pair of eyeglasses out of her bag. They were hung on a cord by means of short rubber tubes slipped over the earpieces, just as Cora’s also were. Darlene pulled off one of the rubber tubes and produced from its interior a tiny scrap of paper.

  Bud Gray now raised his hands and we saw that he had Cora’s glasses. He did as Darlene had done. But there was nothing hidden, nothing there. Cora had managed to destroy it all. Her mouth twitched.

  Charley Ives said, “No matter.”

  The Boss said, “That about tells the story. We will move into court. Miss Hite can give her side of it. Raymond Pankerman is available. Kent Shaw is in custody.”

  Cora said, “Am I in custody?”

  “You are.”

  “Then I am,” she said and shrugged. (I almost saw her legs crossing on some witness stand.)

  Charley tried very hard to look relieved. “Pretty clever,” he drawled. “Why don’t you tell us your side of it, Cora?”

  Cora said, “Why should I tell you anything? You all think you know everything.” Her eyes jerked to me. “What happened to Ollie?” she asked irritably.

  I said broodingly, “Kent Shaw and I disagreed, that’s all.”

  Cora bit her lip. Her eyes traveled from side to side. She was shrewd. She leaned back. “Well,” she said petulantly, “I should think the doctor might explain that I ought to be asleep. I was poisoned, you know.”

  “I know,” I murmured. (It puzzled her.)

  “I’m ready to take down anything you have to say,” said Bud Gray. (Dancer was, too.)

  “Why, bless you,” said Cora impudently. “Then take down this. That woman doesn’t look one bit like me. You say she’s had an operation. I say she just wants in on my publicity.”

  Charley said, “Won’t do, Cora.”

  “No?” said Cora. “Where is Kent Shaw? That pip-squeak mastermind. Why haven’t you got hi
m here?” Oh, she was shrewd.

  “They are examining him downtown,” Charley lied placidly.

  “Where?” said Cora. “In the morgue? Ah, ah, mustn’t fib, you know. If Ollie got hurt as bad as that, surely she was well avenged by all these big strong men.” I heard the malice and the jealousy in that tone. “I’d sure like to know what happened to the other fellow,” she said, looking incorrigibly saucy.

  “He isn’t dead,” Charley said. “Don’t make that mistake.”

  “Then bring him around, why don’t you?” she challenged.

  If she knew Kent Shaw was insane and unable to bear witness, we might never get the truth about the blue envelope and without that one detail.… Now, she’d got in her head the notion that Kent Shaw was dead and no witness, ever. No danger. So Cora was going to hang on. She had to. Guilt didn’t bother her and good-looking women had got off things before. She could be very confusing. It was her only chance. In a muddle she might squeak through. She had nothing to lose by trying. She wasn’t going to confess. I stopped hoping for it.

  “Tell us about Pankerman,” the Boss said, as if she gladly would. The suggestion of his manner didn’t work.

  “I’ve seen his name in the papers,” said Cora. “Is that what you mean?” Her eyes lit with the old mischief. “Oh, go on, it’s nothing but a plot,” said Cora outrageously. “To save your precious John Paul Marcus from what are his just deserts, as far as I can see. I don’t care what you say or do. Keep me in custody. I dream. That’s all I know.” She sighed prettily. “More headlines,” she pouted. “Will I always be the most famous woman in America?”

  Several people in that room (including me) could have socked her. There she was, Cora Steffani, phony, illogical, unreasonable … completely beaten, and still not beaten. And what was there to do?