After the First Death Read online

  Her name was Robin. I remember now, her name was Robin. At least that was what she told me, and I told her my name was Alex.

  An echo—

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Well, hello.”

  “Do you want to go out?” I still remembered the euphemisms. Four years, four and a half years, I still remembered the euphemisms. Some things you never forget, like swimming.

  “Sure.” An arm tucked in mine. “How much can you give me?”

  “Ten?”

  “Could you give me twenty?”

  “I guess.”

  “You’re not too drunk, are you, honey?”

  “I’m all right”

  “Cause it’s no good if you’re too drunk, and all.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You got a room?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I know a hotel—”

  Then a long blank stretch. Nothing, no matter how I go over it Just nothing. Evidently we walked or rode to the hotel. I’ve no idea which. We could have taken a cab, we could have walked. Perhaps the newspapers will tell me what happened, perhaps someone will have seen us walking together, perhaps a cab driver will remember conveying us to the Maxfield. But I cannot summon up the memory.

  Oh. I used my name at the hotel. My own name, my own address. Just the single lie of Mr. & Mrs., the usual hotel room lie. But my own name.

  That would make it easier for the police, as if it were not already sufficiently easy for them.

  Memory of checking in, no memory of getting to the room. Just the memory of being in the room, and giving her money, and getting undressed. And Robin getting undressed.

  This last memory was too vivid, too sharp. I cowered in my balcony seat and closed my eyes to shut out Randolph Scott. The white blouse, the black skirt, both off. The breasts—I had not previously believed them—bobbing in a white bra. “Help me with this, honey?” And turning her back to me so that I could unhook that bra. The silken feeling, so long forgotten, of her sweet skin. My hands surrounding her, cupping those breasts, those unbelieved breasts.

  (The memory ached. Pain in the groin, in the pit of the stomach. A fantastic visual and tactile memory, total recall of how she looked and felt. Those thin wrists, those thin legs, that round bottom, flat tummy, soft soft, oh!)

  I could not cease touching her. I had to touch and embrace all of her, every square inch of her.

  “Oh, lie down, honey. Here, let me French it for you—”

  Floating, on a bed, on a cloud, on the waves. Boneless, limp, floating. The memory of those hands, of that mouth. The Hindu flutist charming the snake. Robin Red Breast Robin Hood. Sweet Robin. Here, let me French it for you.

  Four and a half years.

  Some things once learned are never forgotten, like swimming.

  There the memory ended. I fought with it played with it and for a long time I could dredge up no more of it. I wanted to remember the killing, and yet I did not want to, and I fought a quiet battle with myself, then gave up at last and went downstairs to the stand in the lobby. I spent my last dime on a candy bar and took it upstairs again. I found the same seat unwrapped the candy bar, ate it in small thoughtful bites, and watched the movie for a few minutes.

  Then more memory.

  We had finished, Robin and I.I lay, eyes closed, sated, fulfilled. A door opened—Robin leaving? What? A variety of sounds which I did not open my eyes to investigate.

  Then—

  I could almost get it, but at first I was afraid. I sat in my seat and clenched my eyes tightly shut and made small hard fists of both my hands. I fought and won, and it came into focus.

  A hand clasped over Robin’s mouth but not my hand and another hand holding a knife but not my hand and Robin struggling in someone’s arms but not my arms and a knife slashing slashing but not my knife and blood everywhere but I could not move, I could not move, I could only gasp and moan and, at last, slip back under blackness.

  I sat bolt upright in my seat. Sweat poured from my forehead. My heart was pounding and I could not breathe.

  I remembered.

  I hadn’t killed her. I hadn’t done it. Somebody else killed her. Somebody else did it, wielded the knife, cut the ivory throat, killed, murdered.

  I remembered!

  5

  IT WAS DARK WHEN I LEFT THE MOVIE THEATER, FORTY-SECOND Street sparkled with the wilted glitter of a Christmas tree on Twelfth Night. Pairs of policemen and pairs of homosexuals cruised blindly by one another. I kept my face turned toward the store windows and walked toward Eighth Avenue with my head lowered. I held my breath for the last fifty yards and let it out in a rush as I turned the corner.

  I absolutely had to have money. The last dime, gone to buy a candy bar, could have bought me a phone call instead. If I could reach MacEwan, I could borrow money. Without money I had no chance at all. No chance to stay away from the police, no chance to find out whose hand had wielded the knife that slashed Robin’s throat.

  I was disgusted at the alacrity with which I had divested myself of Edward Boleslaw’s five dollars. Taxi, cigarettes, food, subway, movies, candy. Gone.

  Yet it was not difficult to understand how I had permitted this to happen. Until the last fragment of memory returned in that theater balcony, until the sudden incredible revelation that I was not guilty, that I had not killed little Robin, the idea of making a genuine attempt to remain free was basically unreal. I had been taking no positive steps to avoid the law. On the contrary, I had merely failed to surrender myself. By impoverishing myself once again, I did no more than advance the inevitable moment of capture or surrender.

  Now, with the last dime spent, I had a reason to remain a fugitive. Once arrested, I was finished. I had provided the police with a perfectly sound case against me. No assistant district attorney could be so unpolished as to lose such a case, no jury so blind as to fail to convict.

  I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was innocent. And there was no reason on earth for anyone else on earth to believe me.

  A man, very tall, with long hair neatly combed, dressed in an Italian silk suit and wearing black shoes with sharply pointed toes, emerged from a rooming house on Eighth Avenue a few doors south of Forty-first Street. He turned my way, and I moved from the shadows to meet him, and hoped as I did so that my face was not one he had recently seen on television.

  I said, “I hope you’ll pardon me, I hate to impose, but my wallet was lifted on Times Square. I didn’t even realize it was gone until I got to the subway toll booth. If you could spare twenty cents—”

  Liquid brown eyes met mine. They showed sympathy with just the smallest touch of humor beneath.

  “Of course,” he said. “A dreadful lot, these pickpockets. The city’s absolutely turned jungle, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will a token help you?”

  “Yes, it will Sorry to bother you this way—”

  “Don’t happen to have the time, do you?”

  I looked at my empty wrist, then at him. “Don’t have my watch,” I said. “Must have left it home.”

  “Got your watch too, did he?”

  “No, I must have—”

  He ran a long-fingered hand through his wavy hair. “Oh, I sympathize,” he said, smiling gently. “These boys are dangerous, there’s no gainsaying that. We know better than to go with them, don’t we? They rob us with impunity. We can hardly scream for the police, after all.” A languid sigh. “And yet go with them we do. For they are such a delight at times, are they not?”

  “Uh.”

  “I’m for uptown, if you’d care to share a taxi—”

  “I live in Brooklyn.”

  “Ah. Ships that pass in the night.” He handed me a subway token. “I hope you didn’t lose very much money?”

  “Not too much.”

  “You’re fortunate.” A quick smile. “Better luck next time, friend.”

  People were queued up at the token booth. I waited until the line
was gone, then went to the booth and slid the token through the window. “Better cash this in,” I said. “Won’t do me any good in Spokane.”

  The attendant took the token, poked two dimes my way. I went upstairs and outside. I walked half a dozen blocks down Eighth Avenue looking for an outdoor telephone booth, then gave up and called from a cigar store.

  Doug answered.

  I said, “It’s Alex. I have to tell you—”

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Where have they got you? I’ll get a lawyer down to see you. I—”

  “I’m not in custody.”

  “You haven’t turned yourself in yet? You’d better. The police were here a few hours ago, asking about you. And they showed a photo of you on television. It’ll be in the morning papers. My God, Alex, what happened?”

  “Nothing happened.” We were both silent for a moment, and then I said, “I didn’t kill the girl Doug.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was with her, but that’s no crime. Someone else killed her.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you—”

  “I saw someone else kill her. It’s the last thing I remember. I can’t remember what he looked like. Just a hand with a knife in it.”

  “You were drinking.”

  “Yes.”

  “Memory’s a funny thing, Alex. Of course the police can try to help you. Pentothal, drugs like that, they might improve your memory. Fill things out.”

  “I can’t go to the police.”

  “I don’t see what else you can do—”

  “I can’t go to them.”

  “Why not?”

  It was a thoroughly maddening conversation. “Because they won’t for a minute believe me,” I said, “any more than you do.”

  The sentence echoed back and forth over the telephone line. Neither of us had anything in particular to append to it. Finally, his voice somewhat different now, he said, “Why are you calling me?”

  “I need money.”

  “To make a run for it? You’ll never do it.”

  “Not to run, damn it To survive while I find out who in hell killed the girl Doug, please, humor me. Pretend to believe me.”

  “Oh, Christ—”

  “Let me have a couple of hundred in cash. You’ll get it back.”

  “Are you that flat?”

  “Well, I can’t exactly run around cashing checks. Can I come up there? I’ve got ten cents in my pocket, that’s all. I’ll find a way to get another dime for the subway. All right?”

  “I don’t want you coming up here.”

  “Why not?”

  “The police were here, don’t you understand? I don’t want to be an accessory—”

  I stopped listening. I tuned in again long enough to hear something to the effect that, after all, this was not the first time this had happened, and then I tuned out again and gave up.

  “Alex? Are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me where you are. I’ll come down, give you the dough. But I don’t want you coming up here. Fair enough?”

  Tell me where you are. I almost did, but the operator cut in just then, requesting that I deposit another five cents. I’d already wasted ten cents on the call and that was enough. I stalled her.

  Tell me where you are. And he, my good friend, acting no doubt in my own best interests, would tell the police where to find me.

  “Broadway and Eighty-sixth Street,” I said. “Southwest corner.” And hung up.

  6

  I WALKED DOWNTOWN. I HAD ONE DIME LEFT, AND WOULD HAVE needed another to take the subway, and it did not seem worth the effort to hunt up and hustle a second sympathetic faggot. It was simpler to walk.

  I stayed on Eighth Avenue as far as Thirty-third Street. Further down there were a batch of Greek and Arabic nightclubs, belly dancers and such, and more street and sidewalk traffic than I cared to be exposed to. At Thirty-third I cut over to Seventh, and stayed on Seventh down to the Village. The Village, too, was crowded, but there was no help for that.

  At first as I walked, I thought about money. It was my most immediate need. I was neither hungry nor tired just yet but I could anticipate being both before very long; I would need food and a safe place to sleep, and money could secure them both. I considered letting a homosexual pick me up and then rolling him. The tall slender man who had given me the token had suggested that much to me by assuming I had met just such a fate myself. He did make it sound the simplest of crimes to carry off, but I couldn’t see myself in the role. It would be embarrassing, before and during and after. No.

  But there was another way, one which would permit me to draw from my own experience. And, in a sense, even an old score. I thought about it and worked out as many details as it seemed profitable to work out in advance. I got it all set in my mind and then stopped thinking about it.

  And thought instead of Robin.

  Facts: I had not killed her. Someone else had killed her. Someone had killed her in such a way as to leave me the obvious villain, obvious even to myself. Someone had wanted me saddled with her murder.

  Facts: I had not merely been a convenience for the killer. He had gone to great lengths to make sure I was caught. Soaked my clothes with blood. Stole my watch and wallet to make escape all the more difficult. Fitted all the trappings of the murder scene to the earlier murder of Evangeline Grant. The slashed throat, the passed-out post-coital killer, everything.

  Conclusion: The murder of Robin had been the means to an end. She had been killed solely to frame me. I drank, I blacked out I stumbled around, I picked up Robin, and all the while the killer lurked in shadows, following, waiting. Robin had bad luck, but I had an enemy.

  Who, for the love of God?

  I lit my last cigarette. The question was absurd. I didn’t even know anyone. I stayed in my apartment I played chess, I read, I thought about applying for jobs I could never get. I carried on no love affairs, threatened no one’s career, and generally interacted with virtually no one. That there was any person in my life with any motive whatsoever for framing me for murder was utterly inconceivable. Barring the existence of a maniacally impractical joker, it was quite impossible that anyone could have done this to me on purpose.

  Odd that I didn’t make the obvious connection then. But I was fatigued, after all, and sufficiently dizzy with the knowledge that I was innocent of Robin’s murder. And the mind tends to take for granted whatever it has learned to acknowledge as fact. So, however obvious the next bit of reasoning might later seem, I missed it for the time being.

  A partial explanation may lie in the coincidence of my reaching Fourteenth Street at just that point in my train of thought. I crossed the street and moved through the northern edge of Greenwich Village, and at once my mind busied itself with thoughts of money and how it was to be obtained.

  I knew I’d find the sailors. It was just a question of time. There are always several groups of sailors in the Village, and they always drink, and they always look for girls, and it never works out right for them. They all come from places like Des Moines and Topeka and Chillicothe, and they have all heard wondrous stories about Greenwich Village, where all the men are queer and all the women believe in Free Love—a situation which, were it true, would have to engender extraordinary frustration all around.

  Poor sailors. There are no streetwalkers in the Village. There are any number of lovely young ladies, of all ages and colors and temperaments, and most of these young ladies look promiscuous, and many of them surely are, and none of them are interested in sailors. They all hate sailors. No one knows why; it seems to be traditional.

  I met my sailors just as they were leaving a lesbian bar on Cornelia Street. There were three of them, and they were all somewhere between drinking age and voting age. They had evidently not known the place was a lesbian club. They had evidently not known that the girls therein had even less use for sailors than the average Village females. They had evidently mad
e passes at some of the femmes and had been subsequently put down rather forcefully by some of the butches, and now they were trying to decide whether to be shocked or amused.

  The saddest part was that they obviously felt that they were the first sailors to whom this sort of thing had ever happened, and for this reason they were both loathing and treasuring the moment. They were definitely not the first sailors to whom this sort of thing had ever happened. It always happens.

  I fell in with them.

  We walked and talked together. We talked of lesbians. We talked of women and whiskey the world over. We talked, before very long, of the desirability of locating female companionship as soon as possible.

  “I hear the mayor calls this town Fun City,” said one of the sailors, the youngest and drunkest and loudest. “What do you figure is his idea of fun, the mayor’s?”

  “Maybe a fast game of parcheesi.”

  “The mayor,” said the third, “has never been to Tokyo.”

  “Look here, Lou,” said the first, “you live here, right? You must know where we can find some chickens.”

  Lou was my name, for the moment. Theirs were Red, Johnny, and Canada. Canada was the oldest. Red was the tallest and Johnny was the youngest and drunkest and loudest. They took me to a bar and insisted on buying me a drink. I ordered milk, mumbling apologetically about an ulcer. I wanted a drink, and thought I could handle it without any trouble, but caution seemed indicated. They had a couple of rounds, flashed large rolls of bills, ogled some girls, and talked again about the need that was paramount in their minds. We left the bar, and they suggested once again that I might know some agreeable women.

  “If I thought you boys were really serious—”

  “You kidding Lou?”

  “Well, there are three girls I know who might be interested. Just kids, really. Nineteen or twenty. Let’s see—Barbara’s an actress, and I think Sheila and Jan are dancers, though they don’t get much work. Beautiful girls, and they like to have a good time.”