Michael Collins - Silent Scream

On the street he strode out, pulled her along in the bright cold. They looked in shops, and I got my picture outside a store-front art gallery. Not once did they glance around like people with anything to hide. After some more window shopping, they walked home in the thin late afternoon sun.

They didn’t come out again that night.

On Monday they walked to the subway together. She got off at Twenty-third Street, he stayed on. I followed her to Brown and Dunlap, settled in the lobby.

When she came down for lunch, she was alone. It was my sixth day. I decided to plunge, meet her-the “man on the make” approach. With her face it would have happened before, and it would cover me. Nice girls never suspect a man of more than one role at a time-a wolf couldn’t be a detective, too. When she took her salad to an empty table in the luncheonette, I joined her.

“Can I sit down, Diana?” I sat, smiled. “Dan Connors, I got your name at your office. Look, I don’t usually do this, but I had to meet you. I’ve watched you around here. Mad?”

She was startled, but only for an instant-it had happened before. Annoyed, but she smiled, too. A nervous smile. She was a nice person, soft, and she didn’t want to hurt me.

“I’m sorry, Mr… Connors, but-”

“Make it Dan,” I plunged ahead. “You’re in PR. I admire a career girl. I’m in import, get to travel a lot. The Far East, Africa, South America. Native crafts and stuff.”

I watched for some reaction, a tie-in to Mia Morgan. I got a reaction, but not what I had hoped for. Her eyes glistened, went distant. As if seeing Africa, the Far East.

“I haven’t traveled much, Mr. Connors. Now I really-”

“A girl like you?” I implied she could get a lot with what she had. “I go everywhere, never even time to get married.”

She looked around as if wondering how to get rid of me, but I’d hit a nerve in her, too. I saw it in her large eyes, in the way she shifted her body. A restlessness, a hunger. The way a small-town child used to look at the trains passing. A hunger for what the world had to offer, a restless sense of self.

She ate some lettuce. “We plan to travel soon.”

Maybe because I was a one-dimensional stranger, a man on the make, she showed it now without the complex conflicts we all have. She wanted. With her face, that opened a lot of possibilities. It was there, and then gone, and whatever she wanted wasn’t me.

“I’m married, Mr. Connors,” she said gently. “So I-”

“Sure,” I said. “But that boss of yours, Dunlap, he’s a handsome guy. I’ve seen the way he looks at you, right?”

The shot missed. Worse, it was a mistake. She got up.

“Please stay away from me,” she said, and walked out.

Walking away, she made me feel hollow. I liked her. It made me want to leave her alone. It made me want to know her better, too, maybe help. Besides, I’d been paid for a job.

So after a while I went back to her lobby. Who knew, maybe if I helped her…? I tried to stop thinking.

When I saw her again at five, I sensed a change. There was a look in her eyes, she turned north not south, and stopped in a cleaner’s. She came out with a flat box, walked straight to the subway on Park as if the idea of being followed had never occurred to her. A good sign. We rode uptown to Seventy-seventh Street, and I guessed where she was going. I was right-Le Cerf Agile. I had to be careful now, and got lucky. In the lounge she sat with her back to the bar. I slipped onto a corner stool.

For an hour I nursed my two-dollar beer, and no one came near her. I wondered-a woman with her face alone in a cocktail lounge? Then someone did. I shrank into my collar. It was Irving Kezar. She wasn’t happy to see the short, paunchy man. That didn’t bother Kezar. He touched her arm with his pudgy hand, talked for some twenty minutes, fawning. She said little.

Then the maitre came to her table. She took her box and hurried out without even a nod to Kezar-and without paying her check. Kezar went to the men’s room. I went out to the empty foyer, held the door open a few inches. She was getting into the back seat of a long, black car. I had a glimpse of New Jersey plates as the car drove off.

I went back to my dark corner of the bar, ordered a second two-dollar beer. I felt rotten.

I had seen Diana Wood’s eyes as she got into the car. Excited eyes that had to mean a man, and, from the car, a rich man. A man who paid her checks in Le Cerf Agile. Probably a secret evening dress in the box. Or maybe it wasn’t what it seemed.

Irving Kezar came back to his table, got a telephone, and made a series of calls while I decided whether to question the maitre about the black car or lie low and watch Kezar. The choice was made for me-a small, thin man now joined Irving Kezar.

It was the little, pasty-faced man in the oversized coat who had run out of Mia Morgan’s shop the first day.

So Kezar and Mia Morgan connected, and I wouldn’t question the maitre yet. The little man whispered fiercely to Kezar. They stood up. Kezar got his coat, an elegant herringbone Chesterfield, its velvet collar incongruous against his acne scars.

They walked south to Seventieth Street and went into a large brick apartment house once the best on the shabby block. It even had a service alley at the side, but was dingy now. I staked out across the street as a light snow began to fall. Cold. After fifteen minutes, I went into the lobby. Half the mailboxes had no names on them. A janitor mopped at the floor. He told me, yes, Mr. and Mrs. Kezar had apartment 6-C. Kezar, like most of his kind, spent his money to keep up a front.

I went back across the street. In ten minutes Kezar came out alone, wearing a raincoat now in the snow. The janitor held the lobby door for him. Kezar walked east. I let him reach the corner. I’d taken some ten steps after him when I heard the shots.

Unmistakable-three shots, spaced, a crash of glass, and something heavy hitting the ground in the service alley.

I ran to the alley. The janitor was already there, bent over a crumpled body. I recognized the oversized coat. The body was the bony-faced little man who’d been with Kezar.

The janitor looked up. “It’s Mr. Meyer!”

I ran to the lobby and into a waiting elevator. The door of 6-C was open, the chain broken from the wall. It was a large, seedy apartment of many rooms. I saw blood on a rug, the broken window. It had been open, heavy drapes pushed aside, and only the bottom panes of the raised lower half were smashed.

“What are you doing?” A woman stood in the doorway behind me. She stared around. “Irving?”

A heavy woman, maybe sixty. Gray, with watery eyes and an ugly, worn face. She wore a cheap blue coat.

“Mrs. Kezar?” I said, stepped toward her.

The janitor appeared with two uniformed policemen.

“That’s him! He wanted to know if Mr. Kezar lived here! I told him Six-C!”

Both patrolmen had their guns out, advanced slowly. It was no time to argue.

I sat in the precinct cell telling myself I’d been in jail before. Nothing to worry about, don’t panic. It didn’t help. I paced the cell, every minute like an hour. I sat down again on the iron cot. Pacing is the worst thing you can do.

There are men who love prison, commit crimes for no other real reason than to be sent back to prison. Mostly homosexuals, but that’s not the only reason. Prison is a simple world, its dangers known, its limits narrow-a haven from the vast, indifferent world that frightens them. Sometimes the world frightens me, too, but I’ll take my chances. Walls are no answer.

The row of holding cells was silent, no one inside now but me. I thought about the little man in the too-big overcoat he’d never grow to fill now. Meyer, the janitor had called him. So the little man was known where Irving Kezar lived. Kezar knew Meyer, Meyer knew Mia Morgan, and Mia Morgan and Kezar both knew Diana Wood. Where did that put Diana Wood? In the middle?