Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

Groener nodded and started off, his feet dragging. When he came opposite the bedroom he and his wife had occupied, he paused and his shoulders tightened wincingly. The Lieutenant looked away, but when the footsteps didn’t resume, he turned quickly back. The big man had disappeared.

The Lieutenant strode to the bedroom door. Groener was standing inside, just looking. The Lieutenant started to bark a question, but just then the big man’s steady left hand moved toward the bed in a slow curving gesture, as if he were caressing something invisible.

It was a bedroom with a lot of little tables and stacked cardboard boxes besides the usual furnishings—evidently used by Mrs. Labelle for storage purposes as well as guests—but a broad clear path led through the orderly clutter from the far side of the double bed to the large black square of the open window.

Standing two yards behind Groener’s back, the Lieutenant now became aware of the source of a high tinkling noise that had been fretting the edges of his mind for the past half hour. A small oscillating fan was going on a table beside the bed. Hanging from a yardstick stuck in a top dresser drawer a couple of feet from it was a collection of small oblongs and triangles of thin glass hanging on strings. When the stream of air swept them they jingled together monotonously.

The Lieutenant stepped up beside Groener, touched him on the shoulder, and indicated the arrangement beside the bed. Behind them the blond detective cleared his throat uneasily.

“My wife hated all little noises at night,” Groener explained. “Voice and tuned-down TVs and such. She used those Chinese windchimes to blur them out.”

“Was she quite a small woman?” the Lieutenant asked softly.

“How did you know that?” Groener asked as he started for the door. The Lieutenant pointed at the dresser mirror. It was turned down so that it cut off both their heads and the big man’s shoulders.

The Lieutenant and the blond detective listened to his footsteps clumping noisily down the long uncarpeted hall. They heard the frosted glass door to the dining room open and close.

The blond detective grinned. “I’ll bet he learned to walk loud to please his wife,” he said rapidly. “My mother-in-law does the same thing when she stays overnight with us. Claims it’s so as not to scare Ursie and me—we’ll know she’s coming. Say, this guy’s wife must have been nuttier than a fruit cake.”

“There are all kinds of alkies, Zocky,” the Lieutenant said heavily, “with different degrees of nuttiness and sanity. You notice anything about this room, Zocky?”

“Sure, it’s not messed up much for all the stuff in it,” the other answered instantly.

“That mean anything to you?”

Detective Zocky shrugged. “Takes all kinds to make a world,” he said. “My mother-in-law’s an ashtray-washing fanatic. Never dries ‘em either.”

They heard the dining room door open again. As they started back for the living room, Zocky whispered unabashed, “Hey, did you notice the near-empty fifth tucked behind the head of the bed?”

“No, I merely deduced the bottle would be there like Nero Wolfe,” the Lieutenant told him. “Thanks for the confirmation. Incidentally, quite a few people have a morbid fear of dirt, including cigar ashes. It’s called mysophobia. And now shut off that fan!”

Miss Graves was as tall for a woman as Groener for a man and even more gaunt, but it was a coldly beautiful gauntness. She dressed it well in a severe black Chinese dress of heavy silk that hugged her knees. Her hair was like a silver fleece.

She seemed determined to be hostile, for as she sat down she glared at the Lieutenant and said to him, “I’m a labor organizer!” as if that made them lifelong enemies.

“You are, huh?” the Lieutenant responded, thumbing a notebook and playing up to her hostility in a way that made Zocky grin behind her back. “Then what do you know about Mrs. Groener? An alcoholic, wasn’t she?”

“She was a thoroughly detestable woman!” Miss Graves snapped back sharply. “The only decent thing she ever did was what she did tonight, and she did that much too late! I hated her!”

“Does that mean you were in love with her husband?”

“I—Don’t be stupid, officer!”

“Stupid, my eye! There has to be some reason, since you stayed close friends—at least outwardly.” He held his aggressive, forward-hunching pose a moment, then leaned back, put away his notebook, smiled like a gentle tomcat, and said culturedly, “Hasn’t there now, Miss Graves? Most of these complications have a psychological basis.”

She did a double-take, then the tension seemed to go out of her. “You’re right, of course,” she said. “I knew Mr. Groener in college, before he ever met her, and after that I saw a bit of them both from time to time, through Mrs. Labelle and others.”

Her voice deepened. “I watched him misuse his best years on too many high-pressure jobs, trying to be too successful too soon—because of her. I watched him become an alcoholic because of her. Finally I saw him drag himself out of that morass, but remain tied to her more closely than ever. She was his weakness, or rather, she brought out the weakness in him.”

Miss Graves shook her head thoughtfully. “Actually I no longer hated her when she killed herself—because during the last years she wasn’t at all sane. It wasn’t just the liquor, understand. Mrs. Groener scribbled paranoid comments in the few books she read. I found some in one I loaned her. She wrote wild complaining letters to people which sometimes cost Mr. Groener jobs.

“As for her social behavior—well, they were staying here because they’d been put out of their last apartment on account of her screaming and loud abusive talk. And she did all sorts of queer little things. For instance, when I came in yesterday she was drinking in the sunroom and she had her left wrist tied to the arm of her chair with a scarf. I asked her why, and she giggled something about supposing I thought she was fit to be tied. I imagine you’ve seen that horrible little wind-and-glass machine she used to blank out the sounds of reality?”

The Lieutenant nodded.

“It wasn’t the first time she tried to commit suicide, either,” Miss Graves went on thoughtfully.

“No? Mr. Groener didn’t tell us anything about that.”

“He wouldn’t! He was always trying to cover up for her, and he still is! It’s a wonder he didn’t try to hide from you that she was an alcoholic.”

“About this earlier suicide attempt,” the Lieutenant prompted.

“I don’t know much about it except that it happened and she used sleeping pills.”

“I take it you don’t live here regularly, Miss Graves.”

“Oh no! Mrs. Labelle invited me yesterday with the idea of old friends rallying around the Groeners. It wasn’t a good idea. Mrs. Groener was hostile toward me, as always, and he was simply miserable.”

“About Mrs. Groener,” the Lieutenant said. “Besides her hostility did she seem depressed?”

Miss Graves shook her head. “No—just a little crazier than last time. And thinner than ever, a bunch of match-sticks. Her drinking had got to that stage. We had some drinks after dinner—not Mr. Groener, of course—and she got very drunk and loud. We could hear her ranting at him for a half hour after we all went to bed—about how he shouldn’t have let them be put out of their apartment and about how he always had to be surrounded by his old girl friends and—”

“Meaning you and Mrs. Labelle?” the Lieutenant cut in.

Miss Graves made a little grimace as she nodded. “Oh yes. Mrs. Groener firmly believed that any other halfway good-looking women in the same room with her husband was his mistress or had been at some time in the past. A fixed delusion though she’d only come out with it at a certain stage of her drinking. I knew that, but it still upset me. I had trouble getting to sleep.”