William McGivern - The Seven File

“Get her, I said,” Grant yelled. “You think this is a goddamn debating club? Do what I tell you!”

Belle stumbled toward the door as if his words had struck her with a physical impact. “It’s wrong, you know it’s wrong,” she said.

“Please don’t,” the nurse said, in a breaking voice.

Belle stopped in the doorway and looked at her. “Nobody had said ‘please’ to me for years,” she said slowly.

“Please,” the nurse said again, but she was crying now and the word was an indistinct sound in the silence.

“Sure, sure,” Belle said, staring at Grant. “Nobody is going to hurt that baby. You promised she wouldn’t be hurt. A fine word of honor you’ve got. I couldn’t ever look at myself again if anything happened to that kid. I’m a mother. I’ve got feelings, Eddie.”

“Belle, get moving,” Grant said in a thick, choking voice. “I can’t take any more of this.” The gun had swung around to her and Hank saw that he was ready to shoot; he was breathing with a kind of desperate urgency, as if he couldn’t get enough air, and his eyes were blazing with fury.

This wasn’t what Hank wanted; the explosion had to be between Duke and Grant.

“I think you’d better write the note,” he said to the nurse. He spoke as quietly and calmly as he could, trying to reduce the dangerous tension in the room.

“Yes,” she said quickly, desperately. “I will.”

“Okay, okay,” Grant said. The gun came down to his side and he wet his dry lips. “That’s what I wanted in the first place...”

They watched in awkward silence as she wrote the note. The light shone on her dark head and touched the tears on her cheeks with flickering brilliance. There was no sound but the soft pull of the pencil, and the uneven catch in her breathing.

When she stopped writing, Grant picked up the note and read it through several times, nodding his head slowly. “You could have done this right away and saved all the commotion.” Then he stared at Belle until she flushed under his intent, impersonal scrutiny.

“There’s no reason to look like that,” she said uneasily. “It wouldn’t have been right, Eddie. You know that.”

He walked into the living room without answering her. “You know it. Eddie,” she said, staring after him anxiously.

Hank walked around the table and put his hand on the girl’s shoulder. She had lowered her head on her arms and was weeping helplessly.

There was nothing he could say; words of comfort or hope would be grotesque. He patted her arm gently, and at last she raised her head and pressed her cheek against the back of his hand. It was an impersonal response, he knew; she was like a frightened child turning impulsively and instinctively toward the kindness in the stranger’s voice.

By six o’clock Monday night the film which had been shot in Thirty-first Street was delivered to the Bradleys’ by two agents wearing the uniforms of a rug-cleaning service. The film, along with screen and projector, was inside a neatly wrapped carpet.

Crowley set up the screen in the long dining room, after closing the doors and drawing the blinds on the windows. He seated Ellie and Dick Bradley to the right of the projector, Oliphant Bradley and Mrs. Jarrod to the left, and now they stared up at him, their faces pale anxious blurs in the semidarkness.

They were watching him with a mixture of fear and hope, he realized: they hoped for miracles, but feared he was going to play a conjurer’s trick on them. And he felt the same way himself...

Crowley snapped a switch and a beam of blue-white light illuminated the square screen at the end of the room. “Before we start I want to point out a few things,” he said. “This will be a long session. Don’t be discouraged if we seem to be getting nowhere. Keep watching. Now, about what to watch for: first of all, faces you’ve seen before, people who may have worked for you, or with you at some time in the past. Secretaries, chauffeurs, maids, gardeners, butlers, handymen. Anyone you might have had contact with at clubs, parking lots, garages, shops, restaurants.” Crowley ticked off categories on his fingers. “Caddies, locker room attendants, bartenders, waiters, elevator operators, maintenance men, shoeshine boys — speak up if you see anyone you’ve known before. Mrs. Jarrod, I want you to watch particularly for anyone you’ve ever seen around this house — delivery boys, window-washers, plumbers, painters, part-time maids, part-time catering help, that sort of thing. Do you all understand?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Oliphant Bradley said sharply.

“The next point is a little more difficult,” Crowley said. “I want you to be alert for anything that strikes you as odd or unusual... no matter how trivial or inconsequential it may seem. For years you’ve been soaking up unconscious impressions of this street. You know how it looks normally, you know the feel of it. If anything strikes you as off key — I want to know about it. I can’t give you an example. I wouldn’t if I could. I don’t want you looking for peculiarities. And I don’t want to suggest what you should look for. It won’t work that way. Something may jar your unconscious picture of this street. That’s what I want to know about. I’m putting this badly, I think. But do you have an idea of what I mean?” He glanced from face to face and they all nodded solemnly — like children in a classroom, he thought.

“All right, let’s go,” he said, flicking a switch.

The film began to run...

For the first half-hour there was hardly a stir in the room; their mood was expectant and tense as the life of the street moved before their eyes. Cars, trucks and cabs rolled by and people of every kind and type filled the screen; delivery boys, postmen, pedestrians of all ages, smartly dressed girls, an occasional soldier, a few drunks, a construction worker in a metal helmet biting into a long Italian sandwich — the group could have been duplicated on a thousand of the city’s streets. Crowley stopped the camera several times to study specific faces, freezing the flowing scene into a grotesque and unnatural immobility. Oliphant Bradley stood up once and said, “Wait! Look there!” in high, excited voice, but when Crowley stopped the scene the old man sat down shaking his head slowly. “No, it’s not the same chap. It was someone who’d worked for my father, I thought. But that could hardly be, eh?” He asked the question in a confused voice.

When the rain began the people thinned out, and there followed seemingly interminable stretches of building fronts and wet sidewalks.

“This doesn’t seen to be getting us anywhere,” Dick Bradley said, taking out his cigarettes. “Smoke, Ellie?”

“No, please keep watching.”

The atmosphere in the room had changed; hope was dying. There would be no miracles; only a conjurer’s trick... Crowley sensed this in the flurries of talk, the restless shiftings of positions.

Finally it was over and the screen gleamed white and blank at the end of the room. Crowley turned off the projector and snapped on the overhead lights. “The footage we’ve just seen was shot from a house on this side of the street. The film from the church steeple is next. But first: did you notice anything unusual?”

“Two more hours of film,” Oliphant Bradley said wearily, “I — it seems a waste of time.”

“Did you see anything odd or curious?” Crowley said, watching them alertly. He had seen something near the end of the film. “Anything at all?” he said, and his voice was sharper now, prodding their memories.

Ellie was sitting forward on the edge of the chair, a faint frown shadowing her smooth forehead. “I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “It’s probably silly. I know it can’t mean—”