Корнелл Вулрич - Manhattan Love Song

About midnight or one in the morning, they took me into Bernice’s bedroom and shut the door. The ones in uniform seemed to be playing a minor part by this time. There was one of them standing just inside the door with his hands clasped behind him, but all the others in the room were without uniforms. One of them had turned Bernice’s vanity table into a desk and was sitting beside it writing on a thick stenographic pad. The three pieces of baggage were gone from underneath it.

“Siddown!” I was told.

I sat down and leaned forward over my knees.

When they were through looking at me — and only because I was past caring about anything any more was I able to bear the awful, baleful scrutiny from all sides — they began to ask me questions. Or rather one in particular did. Sometimes, during all this, he’d get up as though he were through, and I’d think he had left the room, only to have him suddenly ask me something over my shoulder.

“Your name’s Wade,” they told me. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“How long have you known her?”

“About a month, I guess.”

“What’d you do it for?”

“I don’t know.”

Two or three of them advanced on me threateningly. “What’d you do it for?” he roared a second time.

“Because I loved her.”

The blow I got this time was from the back; I stumbled forward out of the chair, went down on both hands and struck my head against the edge of the thick glass slab that covered the vanity table. It opened the skin a little above one eye.

“Get up; you’re not hurt,” he informed me. “Now, are you gonna answer or aren’t you! Wait a minute,” he interrupted himself, “lemme ask you something else; where were you going with her tonight?”

“California.” I reached in my pocket, took out the tickets, and passed them to him.

When he was through looking at them he said, “Why were you going out there?”

“To live,” I said simply.

He got up and went away; I kept looking at the place he had just been sitting in. Suddenly he whipped out from somewhere in back of me, “Well, if she was going with you, what’d you do it for?”

“ ’Cause she backed out at the last minute,” I said instantly, without turning around.

“Now we’re gettin’ some place,” he remarked to the others, and came around in front of me and sat down again.

Most of the questions after that were easy to answer; all I had to keep remembering was that I had done it because she had changed her mind at the very last and refused to go with me — everything followed from that quite naturally. Toward the end, possibly because I was answering just as they seemed to want me to, they even became less threatening, dropped their voices a pitch or two.

Then at the very last, when it all seemed clear sailing, everything went wrong again. He had just told me that they were going to draw up a confession then and there and have me sign it, and had already ordered the policeman to take me into the other room and hold me there until it was ready — when he motioned me back again to where I had been sitting and said, “Suppose you run through it in your own words; take this down, George, and don’t miss anything.” Then to me again, “All right — you came up here a little after nine, and you found her all packed and ready for you. And then she said she wasn’t going. Now go on from there.”

I was so tired already; I couldn’t understand what more they wanted! I’d already said I’d done it; over and over I’d said I’d done it. I’d always thought they only questioned you like this when you denied a thing, not when you admitted it. I swallowed to moisten my throat, and said: “She said she wasn’t going. She said I didn’t have enough money. I begged her and she wouldn’t listen to me—” And right while I was speaking, I kept thinking, “Where am I going to say I got the gun? What am I going to say I did with it afterward?” So far, I noticed, they hadn’t asked me a word about that. “So then I told her I was going alone. She said, all right, go ahead. So I went downstairs by the emergency staircase; my bag was in the lobby and the doorman was outside in front of the house. He didn’t see me. I opened the bag and took the gun out. I went running all the way up the stairs again. I had her key, and I opened the door and went in again. I asked her for the last time if she would come with me, and she said no, so I shot her. I threw the gun out of the window right after I’d done it—”

I noticed that they’d all grown very quiet and were staring at me curiously; I saw one or two of them exchange looks with one another.

“How many bullets did you give her?” the man before me asked brutally.

Why hadn’t I thought of that? Why hadn’t I taken a look the whole time I was alone with her, and noticed?

“I don’t remember,” I said. “I think I fired two or three times—”

The man before me turned around and said, “You got that, George?”

“That’s no good,” someone else expostulated. “Why don’t you find out what he’s up to!”

“You lemme do this my own way, Dowlan!” he bellowed back, and glared at him to silence him. “I know what I’m doing!” I heard the door open and shut behind me, and he looked up, over and beyond me, and said, “You bring it with you? Good! Give it to George here.” And a typewriter of the portable variety was brought forward and placed on the vanity table. After which they ordered the policeman to take me outside to the other room, “until we tell you to bring him back again.”

No sooner had the door closed after me than I heard the keys of the typewriter begin to click at breakneck speed. The apartment door still stood wide open, but there was a policeman standing before it, and another one opposite him mounting guard over the elevator door. In the living room itself, a man was going around examining the knobs on the doors and other odds and ends, but evidently not in a professional capacity, for he had no magnifying glass. Yet when he turned my way, I saw that he had some sort of a little thing screwed into his eye. Another was sitting before a drawer that had been removed bodily from some article of furniture and going painstakingly through a cloud of papers it contained. Most of them looked like bills from a distance. She was gone now; she had evidently been taken away while I was inside. It made things a little more bearable for me. I asked the policeman to let me go to the bathroom, and the answer I got was more unpleasant than amusing. I sat down in the chair I had occupied originally.

The typewriter stopped after awhile, and you could hear their voices in the other room, but not what they were saying. I started to light a cigarette, and the policeman snarled, “Who told you to go ahead and smoke?”

The man who had been looking at the doorknobs and things lifted his head and said, “Let him smoke, Sheehan. He hasn’t long to do it in.”

“And it won’t be smoker’s heart that’ll stop him, either,” the policeman agreed.

The typewriter recommenced all at once, as though some point that had momentarily clogged its progress had just been settled. Then, a little while after that, a bulb in one of the lamps burnt out, from overuse no doubt, and went dark.

“She had a nice place here,” the policeman remarked thoughtfully.

“Did you ever know one that didn’t?” the man going over the bills snapped.

I noticed for the first time that the other one, the doorknob fellow, was no longer there, had gone without my even realizing it. But I was so tired; everything was bathed in a mist!

The typewriter stopped again. Then almost at once, this second time, the bedroom door opened, and they motioned to the policeman with their heads.