Флетчер Флора - The Brass Bed

“Are you serious?”

“Certainly I’m serious. It seems to me, Felix, that you are trying to act like some kind of detective, and I can’t understand why you are making things difficult for me.”

She sounded, as she said it, deserted and miserable and all alone with her monstrous trouble. I wanted to go to her and put my arms around her and tell her that it was all right, that everything was perfectly all right, but that would have been a long way from true, and I couldn’t say it, and there was obviously no use in talking with her any longer about anything at all. I turned and walked away from her and back to the house.

In the hall outside the living room, I picked up the telephone and stood holding it without separating it from its cradle. Jolly came after me into the hall.

“So you are going to call them, then,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I thought you would surely help me.”

“I want to help you if I can, and I will, but it would be no help to try to deceive the police. We would only be found out, and then we would both be in very serious trouble.”

“I am still convinced that it would probably work.”

“It would not. There is not the slightest chance of its working. Besides, I can’t understand why you are so concerned about calling the police. It was an accident. Sid was drunk, and he passed out behind the car in the garage. That’s the way it happened, isn’t it?”

For several seconds she did not breathe, her small breasts rising and holding and falling with a long sigh after the seconds had passed.

“Yes, of course. That is the only way it could possibly have happened. Call the police, then, if you must. Call them at once.”

She turned abruptly and went into the living room, and I called the police and told them the situation and where to come. Then I went into the living room myself and found Jolly sitting in the same chair she had been sitting in when I arrived. She did not look at me and said nothing.

“It will be all right,” I said.

She shook her head and folded her hands and sat looking down at them.

“No. It will not be all right. It will be terrible. They will ask me questions, and persecute me, and treat me as if I were a criminal or something, and I am not at all sure that I can bear it.”

“Why should they do that?”

“Please don’t be evasive, Felix. You know very well that it will look extremely peculiar so soon after Kirby. The sheriff who was here that morning was very sly and disturbing, and it was perfectly plain that he did not believe that it happened with Kirby the way I told it, and now, under the circumstances, it is not likely that the police will believe that it happened with Sid the way it appears.”

“If it was an accident, it will be all right. It will not matter about Kirby or anything else.”

“Is that so? Are you sure that it’s so?”

She looked up from her hands slowly, sat looking at me with eyes in which the light had gathered, and then she stood up and put her arms around my neck and pressed closely against me, and her flesh was cold, and she was trembling.

“The truth is, Felix, I am very frightened.”

“You must not be frightened. It would be a bad mistake to let them know that you are frightened.”

“You will simply have to stay with me, Felix. You must always stay with me now, and there must never be anything more about surviving without me and such foolishness as that.”

“Is that your decision?”

“Yes, it is. And I would like you to put your arms around me now.”

“All right, if you wish it.”

“That’s good. I like very much to have your arms around me, and I am feeling better already. Would you care to kiss me also?”

I kissed her, and her lips were cold and remained cold under mine, but the trembling of her body ceased slowly. Afterward she sat down in the chair and folded her hands again in her lap.

“Do you think it will take them long?” she asked.

“No. Not long.”

“I hope they will come quickly now that it’s settled.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“No, thank you. I don’t believe I care for anything at all.”

I sat in another chair, and we waited together for them to come.

There were three of them in the beginning, and they spent quite a long time in the garage. Eventually, however, one of them came into the house and through the kitchen and into the living room from the hall. He was the one who was obviously in charge and had come through the house and out the back way to the garage originally, after learning that Sid was there, while the other two had waited in the police car in the drive and had gone directly to the garage from there without coming into the house at all. His name was Jason, the one who came in. His first name was Henry, but we referred to him as Jason only, and he was a lieutenant of detectives. He was short and broad and looked very powerful physically, but he looked at you mildly, and he spoke politely. He took his hat off inside the house and kept turning it around and around by the brim in his hands.

“I hope you don’t mind if I ask some questions,” he said. “You understand, of course, that it is necessary.”

“Yes,” I said, “of course.”

He stopped turning his hat around and laid it on a chair and took a little notebook out of one pocket and looked around through the others until he found a short pencil. He opened the notebook and held the pencil poised above it but, as I recall, he never made a note about anything that was said, and I suppose the notebook and pencil were only parts of a habit, just as the hat was.

“First of all,” he said, “who found him?”

“It was I who found him,” Jolly said, “but before I answer any more questions I would like to be assured that you are actually a policeman.”

He looked surprised for a second, but no longer, and he held the notebook and pencil together in one hand while he got out identification and showed it to her and put it away again with the other.

“I assure you that I am actually a policeman,” he said.

“Well,” Jolly said, “I was uncertain because you are not wearing a uniform.”

“Not all policemen wear uniforms,” he said.

“No?” Jolly said. “I was of the opinion that all policemen were required to wear them.”

I was of the opinion myself that she hadn’t been of any such opinion at all, and I couldn’t understand why she was immediately needling him this way, and it’s the truth that I never understood half the things about her.

“Now,” he said, “what time was it that you found him?”

“As to that, I’m not sure,” Jolly said. She frowned a little and appeared to be thinking. “I believe that it was around ten o’clock. Do you think it must have been around ten o’clock, Felix? I called you very shortly afterward, and perhaps you can remember when it was that I called.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It was about ten.”

He turned toward me but didn’t look at me. He was looking instead at the watch on his wrist.

“You mean that you were not here when he was discovered?”

“No,” I said. “Jolly called me, and I came right over, but I was not here.”

“You should feel honored. Usually when someone finds a body, they call the police first, or at least first thing after a doctor, and after that they may call a friend if they are frightened and feel the need of company or something. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if you turned out to be the first person who ever got called into a thing like this ahead of a doctor or the police.”

It was sarcasm, of course, but it wasn’t said like sarcasm, but very mildly and in all apparent innocence, and the funny thing was, it gave it a kind of deadliness that it wouldn’t otherwise have had.