Маргарет Миллар - Do Evil In Return

“Do I look good?”

“You look fine.”

“You have to look good to come to a police station. Otherwise — well...” His shoulders moved eloquently under the pounds of padding. “I got the suit from a friend of mine, he had to buy it to go to a classy wedding last year. You have to look respectable at a police station. The police don’t like me. I’ve been picked up a couple of times, nothing serious, just making a little noise and having a few too many. Even so. Even so, they hold things against a man.” He looked at her anxiously. “This tie is a little young for me.”

“Not at all.”

People are judged by their clothes. If you look like a bum you get treated like a bum. They won’t believe anything you tell them.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“About Violet,” he said. “About how they murdered her.”

“Why do you think that?”

“She never came home. And Voss is nervous. Nervous as a cat.”

“I see.”

“And this morning he said to me that I’d have to move out, he wasn’t going to rent rooms any more. them...”

“Two?”

“The roomer, name of Eddie. The two of them talked all night down in the kitchen where I couldn’t hear. They’re suspicious types, always figuring that someone is spying on them.”

There was a moment’s silence before Charlotte spoke again. “I wouldn’t tell the police that Violet was murdered. They’ll ask for evidence and you haven’t any.”

“The evidence of all my senses.”

“Tell them only what you know for certain — that she didn’t come home last night.”

“You think that’s best?”

“Yes. If you make a wild accusation that you can’t prove they might consider you a crackpot.”

“Which I’m not.”

“No.”

“Never have been and never will be a crackpot.”

He walked off down the hall, his trouser cuffs picking up the dust from the marble floor.

Charlotte had an impulse to follow him, to lend her support to his story, but she held back. He could tell it alone. Her presence might only raise questions: Back again, Miss Keating? Oh, it’s a disappearing girl this time. And what’s your connection with the girl and with this old man?

Tiddles was all right. He could manage by himself. On her way back to the office she drove past Voss’s house. The windows and doors were closed, the blinds drawn. Someone had taken in the rocking chair from the porch and removed from the window the sign that had said, clarence g. voss. phrenology and palmistry. fresh-cut flowers for sale. piano lessons.

She stopped the car and got out and walked up to the house, rapidly, as if she were trying to keep ahead of her better judgment.

The doorbell had jammed again but she didn’t bother fixing it this time. She pounded on the door with her fist. Half a dozen Negro children gathered on the sidewalk to watch her, curious and silent, their eyes popping with questions.

The door opened slightly and a woman’s voice said roughly through the crack, “What do you want?”

“I’m looking for Violet O’Gorman.”

“She’s not here.”

“Well, is Mr. Voss in?”

“He ain’t around, either.” She opened the door far enough to stick her head out, and yelled at the children on the sidewalk “You lads beat it, see? I don’t want none of you niggers hanging around here.”

The children departed, hiding their mortification under wide white grins.

“Are you Mrs. Voss?” Charlotte asked.

“Yeah, not that it’s anybody’s business.” She stood with her right hand on her lip, and her left on the door, ready to slam it shut. She had a dead-white skin with a heavy blotch of rouge running from each cheekbone to the hairline above her ears. Her thin mouth had been fattened with lipstick. It looked grotesquely young and voluptuous growing on the ageing face. “I don’t get the point of standing here,” she said bitterly. “If you want Violet, look for her. I ain’t the little sneak’s mother.”

Charlotte raised her eyebrows. “Sneak?”

“I said to Clarence, get that creepy kid out of here before I go batty. No, he says, no. He’s got an angle, he says. Ha. He’s got more angles than a pretzel and not one of them’s ever paid off. Money. Money, that’s what I want. Just once before I die I’d like some money!”

Poverty and disease had desiccated her mind. Nothing would ever grow there again.

Charlotte was repelled by the woman but she felt, too, a sense of compassion. (Lewis was sometimes annoyed by this compassion. He distrusted it, he couldn’t believe that it wasn’t some kind of neurosis: “Naturally you can afford to make excuses for and feel sorry for people, Charley, because you’re not involved. No one could ever really touch you.”)

Watching Mrs. Voss’s ruined face Charlotte realized that money was the only thing for her to hope for. She couldn’t ask for the return of her beauty, her health, her youth. Money was the symbol and substitute for all three. And it was possible. There was money all over the place — a dime in a slot machine at the right time, a tip on the right horse, the right number on a lottery ticket, the right angle.

Charlotte wondered about Voss’s angle on Violet. There must be money involved, but it wasn’t Violet’s. “My uncle says I can go to court and make the man pay a lot of money.” Violet had said in the office yesterday. “My uncle says I can ruin him forever.” That must be Voss’s angle. But Violet instead of going to court, had run away.

“Well, what do you think you’re staring at, anyways?” Mrs. Voss muttered. “I don’t have to stand around being stared at.”

The door slammed so hard that the porch shook and a frightened jay flew out squawking from under the eaves.

When she returned to her office after lunch the Wheeler boy and his mother were already waiting in the reception room. The boy was sitting silent over a comic book while Miss Schiller talked to his mother. Miss Schiller always attempted to diagnose, advise and cure the patients in the reception room before they even reached Charlotte’s office.

“... Castor oil,” she was saying. “I’ve seen some of the most frightful warts disappear with castor oil — oh, here’s doctor now. Good afternoon, doctor.”

“Afternoon,” Charlotte said. “You can come right in, Mrs. Wheeler, and you, Tommy.”

The boy was a handsome twelve-year-old, small for his age, and timid. His mother was a giant of a woman. When she sailed into the office with Tommy behind her she looked like a three-masted schooner towing a dinghy.

“Sit down, Tommy. Up here on this table.”

He sat down. He was trembling.

“Troubled with warts again, are you? Let’s have a look at them.”

She held a magnifier over the boy’s hands. The warts had multiplied in clusters all over his knuckles and the joints of his fingers.

“Let’s see now. I took off two of these with an electric needle about a year ago, didn’t I?”

He said in a whisper, “Don’t do that again.”

“I won’t. There are too many this time.” She turned to Mrs. Wheeler. “I think we should try some bismuth shots.”

“Shots?” Mrs. Wheeler’s mouth gaped. “Oh no! Tommy’s scared to death of shots. Aren’t you, Tommy?”

The boy let out a whimper.

“See? He’s just terrified of needles, he’s always been from the time he...”

“Nobody likes shots, Tommy.” Charlotte touched his shoulder reassuringly. “Have you ever given yourself a good hard pinch?”

“I guess.”

“That’s about how much this will hurt.”

He pinched himself on the forearm, thoughtfully. “That’ll be O.K., I guess.”