Корнелл Вулрич - Manhattan Love Song

He brought me in again. “Lock the door,” the one who had asked me most of the questions the time before ordered. The room was already full of smoke; Bernice’s familiar things looked funny through it. Between that and the state my eyes were in, I could hardly see their faces straight anymore.

“Read him what you got there, George,” I heard him say. “His own words. From where she told him she wasn’t going with him.”

The man who had been using the vanity table for a desk all along began to read some typed sheets aloud. “—so I shot her. I threw the gun out of the window right after I’d done it—”

When he was through, the other one gave me a crafty sort of a smile and said, with remarkable (for him) moderation, “You admit you done it in just that way, do you? And you’re ready to sign what he just read to you, are you?”

“Yes,” I said dully.

Someone else said something to him under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, whereupon he whirled around fiercely and burst out: “Tell that to your grandmother! He’s as sane as I am! He’s yellow, that’s what’s the matter with him!”

Then turning back to me, again with unwonted restraint, he continued, “Suppose we were to make a few changes in that — just a coupla things here and there — suppose you were too excited to remember everything just the way it happened, and we were to sort of, now, help it along for you — would you still sign it?”

“I told you I did it,” I murmured, “and I’ll sign anything you want me to, any way you put it.”

He seemed almost more surprised than gratified for a moment, but he didn’t waste any time. The man at the desk handed him several typed sheets: whether they were the same ones he had read or not I couldn’t tell. He patted them into shape and put them down beside him without looking at them, took a fountain pen out of his pocket and held it toward me, saying: “All right, then sign this! This is the way it really happened.”

I took the pen from him, wrote my name where he showed me to on the paper he handed me, and then passed both back to him — or rather the pen alone, for he had never taken his hand from the paper for an instant.

“That’s that!” he said, folding the papers and inserting them into the inside pocket of his coat with an air of ponderous satisfaction. “You didn’t shoot her; you strangled her to death with your hands, like we found her!” And giving those around him the wink, he added, “Now bring on your lawyers!”

They asked me a few desultory questions after that, but more in the manner of horseplay than a serious attempt to find out anything further. Such as: Had I really forgotten I had choked her and imagined I had shot her, or had I deliberately invented the story about running down the staircase and getting a gun out of my grip? And if so, why?

“I don’t know why,” I said in a half-audible voice. “Maybe because I’m romantic. Maybe because it’s the first time I ever did a thing like this, and I wanted to make it sound better than it really was.” And to myself I added, “Or maybe because I didn’t do it at all in the first place.”

I no longer knew whether I had or hadn’t; I was no longer sure. I had been telling them I had for so long that it seemed to me I must have after all. I found myself actually forgetting that I hadn’t seen her at all from the moment I left her at five in the afternoon to get the tickets until the time I found her lying on the floor — found myself actually beginning to believe that I had found her still alive, had spoken to her when I came back at nine. It was literally with surprise that I at last stopped short and reminded myself, “But she was already gone when you got back; somebody else must have done it!”

Oh, I no longer knew whether I was sane or insane, awake or dreaming: no longer cared! All I knew was, every breath I drew was hellfire, every minute that passed was a crucifixion.

It was growing lighter outside the windows now, like so many times when I had been up in this room with her. I knew just where the first splashes of pearl and pink were going to hit against the wall; knew just at what point they would begin to spread like blisters and reach upward toward the ceiling and downward toward the floor. But just before it all began, they clicked a steel ring over my wrist and at last made ready to depart.

As they brought me out of the bedroom into the living room, I turned and asked if I couldn’t go to the bathroom. So the one whose wrist was joined to mine unwillingly turned aside and stood at my shoulder for a minute. After that they took me out to the elevator — Bernice’s apartment vanished forever behind the vertical metal trap — and I stood in the exact middle of all of them, like someone popular, like someone surrounded by all his friends, as we went down to the street.

Even at that unearthly hour, a handful of ghouls had gathered around the street door, or maybe they had been standing there all night like that, I don’t know — and there was another one of those starlike flashes and puffs of smoke, because it was still dim out on the street. But this time the men with me didn’t attempt to break the camera or drive the perpetrator away. Then, just as they were putting me in a car at the curb, another diversion occurred; I heard a protesting, argumentative voice somewhere in back of me. “I been waitin’ all night,” it said, “they wouldn’t even lemme go in the lobby! He owes me twenty-four dollars, and six more for overtime—” I heard them all laughing, and I turned and saw a man standing there, pale in the face and sweating with anxiety. “He rode all the way down to Gran’ Central with me—” he said. Meanwhile there was another one of those skyrocket flashes, followed by a tart smell, so close to me this time that I jumped and collided against the man I was manacled to. But by its light I recognized the protesting individual as the cabdriver I had hired at one time or another last night and then left standing before the door — just when, I wasn’t sure, or why, or whether I really hadn’t paid him as he said.

The man with me flicked me on the arm and said humorously, “Y’got any money on you?”

“Tell him to get a cop and have me pinched,” I answered stonily, and the irony of saying such a thing at such a time only dawned on me after I’d heard the roar of appreciation that went up on all sides. I didn’t smile.

They ushered me in the car and sat on each side of me, and we drove off down the streets of New York in the beginning of the morning light, with batches of lights going out everywhere, like that single bulb in Bernice’s living room had gone out a while back. But what was dawn and the start of the day for every one else was dusk and the ending of it for me.

But if it was dusk, and it was the end of my day, it seemed to go on forever and forever; the night that I prayed and yearned incessantly for seemed never to begin. Sometimes I used to wonder if what I had mistaken for an indictment hadn’t really been my trial after all, and I had been sentenced to life imprisonment without realizing it. I used to go into a cold sweat whenever it occurred to me that I might get life or twenty years instead of what I wanted. “Gee, it’s got to be that!” I moaned, walking back and forth. “It’s little enough to ask for! Those that don’t want it always get it — why shouldn’t I?”

Maxine came to see me — it seemed long afterward, but it may have only been a few days; all I know is, they brought me out one time, and she was on the other side of a wire screen. And she looked so bad, so old, so forlorn — it almost seemed I must be visiting her, and not she me.