Джонатан Крейг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 12, December, 1953

“For God’s sake, Sally! What’s happened.”

“I... I think I broke her neck...”

“You think! Don’t you know?”

There was a pause. “Yes. I broke her neck, Carl. I didn’t mean to, but she was fighting, and all at once I heard something snap and...”

The thin film of perspiration along his back and shoulders was suddenly like a sheathe of ice.

“When, Sally? When did it happen?”

“J-just now. Just a minute ago.”

“You sure she’s dead?”

“Dead or dying. There was a pulse a few seconds ago, but—”

“But her neck! You’re positive it’s broken? That it just isn’t dislocated, or something?”

“It’s broken. This is it, Carl. For both of us. God...”

“Listen, damn it!” he said. “Was she wearing stockings? Long ones?”

“Yes. What—”

“Take one of them off her and hang her up with it.”

She seemed to have trouble breathing. “But I... I can’t do that. I—”

“You’ve got to! Do you hear? It’s the only way out. Tie one end of the stocking around her neck. Then put a chair beneath that steam pipe that runs across the ceiling. Haul her up on the chair with you and tie the other end around the pipe. Leave her hanging and kick the chair away, just like she’d done it herself.”

He waited, breathing heavily.

“All right,” Sally said. “I’ll try.”

“You’d better. And hurry. Get her up there and then leave the room for a few minutes. When you go back to see your prisoner, she’s hanged herself. See? They’ll give you hell for leaving her alone with stockings on, but that’s all they can do. She panicked and hanged herself; that’s all.”

“But, Carl, I—”

“No buts! Get busy!”

He opened up the siren and kept it open all the way back to the Eighteenth. He ran up the station steps, through the corridors. He was breathing quickly. When he arrived at the second floor he was soaked with perspiration.

He forced himself to walk leisurely through the large room that housed the detective headquarters, back toward the short corridor that led to the Quiet room. The Quiet room was a small, soundproof detention cell where they sometimes put the screamers and howlers until they calmed down enough for questioning. It had been designed to provide some degree of quiet for the men out in the headquarters room, and not as a torture chamber.

But it had served Streeter and Sally Creighton well and often.

Streeter paused at the door to the corridor and drew a paper cup of water from the cooler. Where in hell was Sally? he wondered. She should be out here by now, killing time before she went back to discover that her prisoner had hanged herself.

He glanced about him. There were only two other detectives in the room, and both were busy with paper work. A man in a T-shirt and blue jeans sat dozing in a chair, one wrist handcuffed to a chair arm.

Then he heard footsteps behind him, and Sally’s voice said, “Thank God you’re here.”

He turned to look at her. Her face was gray and her forehead was sheened with sweat.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked.

“To the john. I don’t know... something about this made me sick in the stomach.”

“Yeah. Well, let’s go down there and get it over with.”

He led the way down the corridor to the Quiet room and threw the heavy bolt. The goddamned little chippie, he thought. So she’d thought she was tough... Well, she’d asked for it, hadn’t she? She’d asked for it, and she’d damn well got it.

He jerked the door open and looked up at the girl hanging from the steam pipe. Her body was moving, very slowly, a few inches to the right and then back again.

He stared at her while the floor seemed to tilt beneath his feet and something raw and sickening filled his stomach.

He took a faltering step forward, and then another, his eyes straining and misted. It was difficult for him to see clearly. Absently, he brushed at his eyes with his sleeve. The hanging figure before him sprang into sudden, terrifying focus.

The girl’s body was as slim and graceful looking in death as it had been a few hours ago when he had watched her clearing away the dinner dishes. But not the face, not the horribly swollen face.

“Jeannie,” he whispered. “Jeannie, Jeannie...”

I was sick, to my stomach. There was my father, the gun in his hand, saying, “Take it! Take it!”

Mama told me to see Beaver but when I got to the toolshed I saw that someone had already tethered him, maybe the hired man from Ventura Father had sent away that morning after hardly a day with us. I went straight back to the house. I could hear them still talking in Father’s room. A lot of it I couldn’t understand but what they were saying about me I could figure out all right, and I stood by the door listening to them.

“You just haven’t cared about trying to understand,” Mama said.

“Anything that isn’t to your liking you won’t hear about.”

“Have it your way,” Father said. “I will not waste my time arguing with a woman or a boy.”

“But this is like everything else in our life,” Mama said. “You won’t bend an inch for Tommy or for me. That’s the way you run the ranch, that’s the way you treat your family and your help. Why won’t you leave even a little bit of what was once our marriage, Tom?”

There weren’t any words for what seemed a long time. All I could hear was my breathing. Then there was a sound like a slap and Mama called out Father’s name, “Thomas!” And it was awfully quiet in there again, not even anyone moving on the floor. When Mama started to talk it sounded like her throat was drowned in tears. She said, “You’re doing this because you know there’s nothing I won’t take on Tommy’s account.”

“Look,” Father said, “we’ve been through all that before. If you get any fun grubbing around in dead ashes, keep yourself a diary. You know how I feel, I know how you feel. It’s an old story and it always comes out the same, that if it wasn’t for Tommy we wouldn’t stay together an hour. All we can do is hate each other and wish to God one of us falls into a threshing machine or gets hit by a truck so Tommy need never know how it was with us. But while you’re living here, on my ranch, mothering my son, we’ll have no trouble so long as you understand what you’re to do. I won’t have you bringing up that boy a lacey-pants. He’s my son and I’m not giving in to childish whims.”

I could hear Mama clear her nose. “Thomas,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound like Mama, “I told you the boy doesn’t want to go hunting with you. It’s a simple thing. He loves you very much but he doesn’t like to kill anything, even in sport.”

“Kill!” Father exclaimed. “I’ve heard of men shamed by the soft eyes of deer, but this is only coyotes.”

“It doesn’t matter. Tommy doesn’t like to kill anything.”

“What kind of damned boy is that?” Father shouted. “I’d be the laughing stock of every rancher in the valley if they thought I had a son too chintzy to kill a lousy coyote.”

“He’s a gentle boy, don’t you see? Take him camping with you, sleep out on the range, shoot skeet, he likes that very much, but don’t ask him to kill living things. Try to understand the boy, not for my sake, for his. He wants so to admire you.”

“What do you mean, wants?” Father said, very loud. “Have you been turning him against me?”

“Please,” Mama said, “don’t shout. He’s out with his pony and I’d die if he heard us. I haven’t, Tom. I swear I haven’t. I’m just trying to tell you he’s the kind of boy who never even killed caterpillars out of curiosity.”