_It is the kind of news item you read at least a dozen times
a year, wonder about briefly, and then promptly forget--but
the real story is the one that the reporters are unable to
cover!_
* * * * *
"You again, Weldon," the Medical Examiner said wearily.
I nodded pleasantly and looked around the shabby room with a feeling
of hopeful eagerness. Maybe _this_ time, I thought, I'd get the
answer. I had the same sensation I always had in these places--the
quavery senile despair at being closed in a room with the single shaky
chair, tottering bureau, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, the
flaking metal bed.
There was a woman on the bed, an old woman with white hair thin enough
to show the tight-drawn scalp, her face and body so emaciated that the
flesh between the bones formed parchment pockets. The M.E. was going
over her as if she were a side of beef that he had to put a federal
grade stamp on, grumbling meanwhile about me and Sergeant Lou Pape,
who had brought me here.
[Illustration]
"When are you going to stop taking Weldon around to these cases,
Sergeant?" the M.E. demanded in annoyance. "Damned actor and his
morbid curiosity!"
For the first time, Lou was stung into defending me. "Mr. Weldon is a
friend of mine--I used to be an actor, too, before I joined the
force--and he's a follower of Stanislavsky."
The beat cop who'd reported the D.O.A. whipped around at the door. "A
Red?"
* * * * *
I let Lou Pape explain what the Stanislavsky method of acting was,
while I sat down on the one chair and tried to apply it. Stanislavsky
was the great pre-Revolution Russian stage director whose idea was
that actors had to think and feel like the characters they portrayed
so they could _be_ them. A Stanislavskian works out everything about a
character right up to the point where a play starts--where he was
born, when, his relationship with his parents, education, childhood,
adolescence, maturity, attitudes toward men, women, sex, money,
success, including incidents. The play itself is just an extension of
the life history created by the actor.
How does that tie in with the old woman who had died? Well, I'd had
the cockeyed kind of luck to go bald at 25 and I'd been playing old
men ever since. I had them down pretty well--it's not just a matter of
shuffling around all hunched over and talking in a high cracked voice,
which is cornball acting, but learning what old people are like
inside--and these cases I talked Lou Pape into taking me on were
studies in senility. I wanted to understand them, know what made them
do what they did, _feel_ the compulsion that drove them to it.
The old woman on the bed, for instance, had $32,000 in five bank
accounts ... and she'd died of starvation.
You've come across such cases in the news, at least a dozen a year,
and wondered who they were and why they did it. But you read the
items, thought about them for a little while, and then forgot them. My
interest was professional; I made my living playing old people and I
had to know as much about them as I could.
That's how it started off, at any rate. But the more cases I
investigated, the less sense they made to me, until finally they were
practically an obsession.
Look, they almost always have around $30,000 pinned to their
underwear, hidden in mattresses, or parked in the bank, yet they
starve themselves to death. If I could understand them, I could write
a play or have one written; I might really make a name for myself,
even get a Hollywood contract, maybe, if I could act them as they
should be acted.
So I sat there in the lone chair, trying to reconstruct the character
of the old woman who had died rather than spend a single cent of her
$32,000 for food.
* * * * *
"Malnutrition induced by senile psychosis," the M.E. said, writing out
the death certificate. He turned to me. "There's no mystery to it,
Weldon. They starve because they're less afraid of death than digging
into their savings."
I'd been imagining myself growing weak from hunger and trying to
decide that I ought to eat even if it cost me something. I came out of
it and said, "That's what you keep telling me."
"I keep hoping it'll convince you so you won't come around any more.
What are the chances, Weldon?"
"Depends. I will when I'm sure you're right. I'm not."
He shrugged disgustedly, ordered the wicker basket from the meat wagon
and had the old woman carried out. He and the beat cop left with the
basket team. He could at least have said good-by. He never did,
though.
A fat lot I cared about his attitude or dogmatic medical opinion.
Getting inside this character was more important. The setting should
have helped; it was depressing, rank with the feel of solitary
desperation and needless death.
Lou Pape stood looking out the one dirty window, waiting patiently for
me. I let my joints stiffen as if they were thirty years older and
more worn out than they were, and empathized myself into a dilemma
between getting still weaker from hunger and drawing a little money
out of the bank.
I worked at it for half an hour or so with the deep concentration you
acquire when you use the Stanislavsky method. Then I gave up.
"The M.E. is wrong, Lou," I said. "It doesn't feel right."
Lou turned around from the window. He'd stood there all that time
without once coughing or scratching or doing anything else that might
have distracted me. "He knows his business, Mark."
"But he doesn't know old people."
"What is it you don't get?" he prompted, helping me dig my way through
a characterization like the trained Stanislavskian he was--and still
would have been if he hadn't gotten so sick of the insecurity of
acting that he'd become a cop. "Can't money be more important to a
psychotic than eating?"
"Sure," I agreed. "Up to a point. Undereating, yes. Actual starvation,
no."
"Why not?"
"You and the M.E. think it's easy to starve to death. It isn't. Not
when you can buy day-old bread at the bakeries, soup bones for about a
nickel a pound, wilted vegetables that groceries are glad to get rid
of. Anybody who's willing to eat that stuff can stay alive on nearly
nothing a day. Nearly nothing, Lou, and hunger is a damned potent
instinct. I can understand hating to spend even those few cents. I
can't see going without food altogether."
* * * * *
He took out a cigarette; he hadn't until then because he didn't want
to interrupt my concentration. "Maybe they get too weak to go out
after old bread and meat bones and wilted vegetables."
"It still doesn't figure." I got up off the shaky chair, my joints now
really stiff from sitting in it. "Do you know how long it takes to die
of starvation?"
"That depends on age, health, amount of activity--"
"Nuts!" I said. "It would take weeks!"
"So it takes weeks. Where's the problem--if there is one?"
I lit the pipe I'd learned to smoke instead of cigarettes--old men
seem to use pipes more than anything else, though maybe it'll be
different in the next generation. More cigarette smokers now, you see,
and they'd stick to the habit unless the doctor ordered them to cut it
out.
"Did you ever try starving for weeks, Lou?" I asked.
"No. Did you?"
"In a way. All these cases you've been taking me on for the last
couple of years--I've tried to be them. But let's say it's possible to
die of starvation when you have thousands of dollars put away. Let's
say you don't think of scrounging off food stores or working out a way
of freeloading or hitting soup lines. Let's say you stay in your room
and slowly starve to death."
He slowly picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip and flicked it away,
his sharp black eyes poking holes in the situation I'd built up for
him. But he wasn't ready to say anything yet.
"There's charity," I went on, "relief--except for those who have their
dough in banks, where it can be checked on--old age pension,
panhandling, cadging off neighbors."
He said, "We know these cases are hermits. They don't make contact
with anybody."
"Even when they're starting to get real hungry?"
"You've got something, Mark, but that's the wrong tack," he said
thoughtfully. "The point is that _they_ don't have to make contact;
other people know them or about them. Somebody would check after a few
days or a week--the janitor, the landlord, someone in the house or the
neighborhood."
"So they'd be found before they died."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" he agreed reluctantly. "They don't
generally have friends, and the relatives are usually so distant, they
hardly know these old people and whether they're alive or not. Maybe
that's what threw us off. But you don't need friends and relatives to
start wondering, and investigate when you haven't shown up for a
while." He lifted his head and looked at me. "What does that prove,
Mark?"
"That there's something wrong with these cases. I want to find out
what."
* * * * *
I got Lou to take me down to Headquarters, where he let me see the
bankbooks the old woman had left.
"She took damned good care of them," I said. "They look almost new."
"Wouldn't you take damned good care of the most important thing in
the world to you?" he asked. "You've seen the hoards of money the
others leave. Same thing."
I peered closely at the earliest entry, April 23, 1907, $150. My eyes
aren't that bad; I was peering at the ink. It was dark, unfaded. I
pointed it out to Lou.
"From not being exposed to daylight much," he said. "They don't haul
out the bankbooks or money very often, I guess."
"And that adds up for you? I can see them being psychotics all their
lives ... but not _senile_ psychotics."
"They hoarded, Mark. That adds up for me."
"Funny," I said, watching him maneuver his cigarette as if he loved
the feel of it, drawing the smoke down and letting it out in plumes of
different shapes, from rings to slender streams. What a living he
could make doing cigarette commercials on TV! "I can see _you_ turn
into one of these cases, Lou."
He looked startled for a second, but then crushed out the butt
carefully so he could watch it instead of me. "Yeah? How so?"
"You've been too scared by poverty to take a chance. You know you
could do all right acting, but you don't dare giving up this crummy
job. Carry that far enough and you try to stop spending money, then
cut out eating, and finally wind up dead of starvation in a cheap
room."
"Me? I'd never get that scared of being broke!"
"At the age of 70 or 80?"
"Especially then! I'd probably tear loose for a while and then buy
into a home for the aged."
I wanted to grin, but I didn't. He'd proved my point. He'd also shown
that he was as bothered by these old people as I was.
"Tell me, Lou. If somebody kept you from dying, would you give him any
dough for it, even if you were a senile psychotic?"
I could see him using the Stanislavsky method to feel his way to the
answer. He shook his head. "Not while I was alive. Will it, maybe, not
give it."
"How would that be as a motive?"
* * * * *
He leaned against a metal filing cabinet. "No good, Mark. You know
what a hell of a time we have tracking down relatives to give the
money to, because these people don't leave wills. The few relatives we
find are always surprised when they get their inheritance--most of
them hardly remember dear old who-ever-it-was that died and left it to
them. All the other estates eventually go to the State treasury,
unclaimed."
"Well, it was an idea." I opened the oldest bankbook again. "Anybody
ever think of testing the ink, Lou?"
"What for? The banks' records always check. These aren't forgeries, if
that's what you're thinking."
"I don't know what I'm thinking," I admitted. "But I'd like to turn a
chemist loose on this for a little while."
"Look, Mark, there's a lot I'm willing to do for you, and I think I've
done plenty, but there's a limit--"
I let him explain why he couldn't let me borrow the book and then
waited while he figured out how it could be done and did it. He was
still grumbling when he helped me pick a chemist out of the telephone
directory and went along to the lab with me.
"But don't get any wrong notions," he said on the way. "I have to
protect State property, that's all, because I signed for it and I'm
responsible."
"Sure, sure," I agreed, to humor him. "If you're not curious, why not
just wait outside for me?"
He gave me one of those white-tooth grins that he had no right to
deprive women audiences of. "I could do that, but I'd rather see you
make a sap of yourself."
I turned the bankbook over to the chemist and we waited for the
report. When it came, it had to be translated.
* * * * *
The ink was typical of those used 50 years ago. Lou Pape gave me a jab
in the ribs at that. But then the chemist said that, according to the
amount of oxidation, it seemed fresh enough to be only a few months or
years old, and it was Lou's turn to get jabbed. Lou pushed him about
the aging, asking if it couldn't be the result of unusually good care.
The chemist couldn't say--that depended on the kind of care; an
airtight compartment, perhaps, filled with one of the inert gases, or
a vacuum. They hadn't been kept that way, of course, so Lou looked as
baffled as I felt.
He took the bankbook and we went out to the street.
"See what I mean?" I asked quietly, not wanting to rub it in.
"I see something, but I don't know what. Do you?"
"I wish I could say yes. It doesn't make any more sense than anything
else about these cases."
"What do you do next?"
"Damned if I know. There are thousands of old people in the city. Only
a few of them take this way out. I have to try to find them before
they do."
"If they're loaded, they won't say so, Mark, and there's no way of
telling them from those who are down and out."
I rubbed my pipe disgruntledly against the side of my nose to oil it.
"Ain't this a beaut of a problem? I wish I liked problems. I hate
them."
Lou had to get back on duty. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do
except worry my way through this tangle. He headed back to
Headquarters and I went over to the park and sat in the sun, warming
myself and trying to think like a senile psychotic who would rather
die of starvation than spend a few cents for food.
I didn't get anywhere, naturally. There are too many ways of beating
starvation, too many chances of being found before it's too late.
And the fresh ink, over half a century old....
* * * * *
I took to hanging around banks, hoping I'd see someone come in with an
old bankbook that had fresh ink from 50 years before. Lou was some
help there--he convinced the guards and tellers that I wasn't an
old-looking guy casing the place for a gang, and even got the tellers
to watch out for particularly dark ink in ancient bankbooks.
I stuck at it for a month, although there were a few stage calls that
didn't turn out right, and one radio and two TV parts, which did and
kept me going. I was almost glad the stage parts hadn't been given to
me; they'd have interrupted my outside work.
After a month without a thing turning up at the banks, though, I went
back to my two rooms in the theatrical hotel one night, tired and
discouraged, and I found Lou there. I expected him to give me another
talk on dropping the whole thing; he'd been doing that for a couple of
weeks now, every time we got together. I felt too low to put up an
argument. But Lou was holding back his excitement--acting like a cop,
you know, instead of projecting his feelings--and he couldn't haul me
out to his car as fast as he probably wanted me to go.
"Been trying to get in touch with you all day, Mark. Some old guy was
found wandering around, dazed and suffering from malnutrition, with
$17,000 in cash inside the lining of his jacket."
"_Alive?_" I asked, shocked right into eagerness again.
"Just barely. They're trying intravenous feeding to pull him through.
I don't think he'll make it."
"For God's sake, let's get there before he conks out!"
Lou raced me to the City Hospital and up to the ward. There was a
scrawny old man in a bed, nothing but a papery skin stretched thin
over a face like a skull and a body like a Halloween skeleton,
shivering as if he was cold. I knew it wasn't the cold. The medics
were injecting a heart stimulant into him and he was vibrating like a
rattletrap car racing over a gravel road.
"Who are you?" I practically yelled, grabbing his skinny arm. "What
happened to you?"
He went on shaking with his eyes closed and his mouth open.
"Ah, hell!" I said, disgusted. "He's in a coma."
"He might start talking," Lou told me. "I fixed it up so you can sit
here and listen in case he does."
"So I can listen to delirious ravings, you mean."
Lou got me a chair and put it next to the bed. "What are you kicking
about? This is the first live one you've seen, isn't it? That ought to
be good enough for you." He looked as annoyed as a director. "Besides,
you can get biographical data out of delirium that you'd never get if
he was conscious."
* * * * *
He was right, of course. Not only data, but attitudes, wishes,
resentments that would normally be repressed. I wasn't thinking of
acting at the moment, though. Here was somebody who could tell me
what I wanted to know ... only he couldn't talk.
Lou went to the door. "Good luck," he said, and went out.
I sat down and stared at the old man, _willing_ him to talk. I don't
have to ask if you've ever done that; everybody has. You keep thinking
over and over, getting more and more tense, "Talk, damn you, _talk_!"
until you find that every muscle in your body is a fist and your jaws
are aching because you've been clenching your teeth so hard. You might
just as well not bother, but once in a while a coincidence makes you
think you've done it. Like now.
The old man sort of came to. That is, he opened his eyes and looked
around without seeing anything, or it was so far away and long ago
that nobody else could see what he saw.
I hunched forward on the chair and willed harder than ever. Nothing
happened. He stared at the ceiling and through and beyond me. Then he
closed his eyes again and I slumped back, defeated and bitter--but
that was when he began talking.
There were a couple of women, though they might have been little girls
in his childhood, and he had his troubles with them. He was praying
for a toy train, a roadster, to pass his tests, to keep from being
fired, to be less lonely, and back to toys again. He hated his father,
and his mother was too busy with church bazaars and such to pay much
attention to him. There was a sister: she died when he was a kid. He
was glad she died, hoping maybe now his mother would notice him, but
he was also filled with guilt because he was glad. Then somebody, he
felt, was trying to shove him out of his job.
The intravenous feeding kept dripping into his vein and he went on
rambling. After ten or fifteen minutes of it, he fell asleep. I felt
so disappointed that I could have slapped him awake, only it wouldn't
have done any good. Smoking would have helped me relax, but it wasn't
allowed, and I didn't dare go outside for one, for fear he might
revive again and this time come up to the present.
* * * * *
"Broke!" he suddenly shrieked, trying to sit up.
I pushed him down gently, and he went on in frightful terror, "Old and
poor, nowhere to go, nobody wants me, can't make a living, read the
ads every day, no jobs for old men."
He blurted through weeks, months, years--I don't know--of fear and
despair. And finally he came to something that made his face glow like
a radium dial.
"An ad. No experience needed. Good salary." His face got dark and
awful. All he added was, "El Greco," or something that sounded like
it, and then he went into terminal breathing.
I rang for the nurse and she went for the doctor. I couldn't stand the
long moments when the old man's chest stopped moving, the abrupt
frantic gulps of air followed by no breath at all. I wanted to get
away from it, but I had to wait for whatever more he might say.
It didn't come. His eyes fogged and rolled up and he stopped taking
those spasmodic strangling breaths. The nurse came back with the
doctor, who felt his pulse and shook his head. She pulled the blanket
over the old man's face.
I left, feeling sick. I'd learned things I already knew about hate and
love and fear and hope and frustration. There was an ad in it
somewhere, but I had no way of telling if it had been years ago or
recently. And a name that sounded like "El Greco." That was a Spanish
painter of four-five hundred years ago. Had the old guy been
remembering a picture he'd seen?
No, he'd come up at least close to the present. The ad seemed to solve
his problem about being broke. But what about the $17,000 that had
been found in the lining of his jacket? He hadn't mentioned that. Of
course, being a senile psychotic, he could have considered himself
broke even with that amount of money. None coming in, you see.
That didn't add up, either. His was the terror of being old and
jobless. If he'd had money, he would have figured how to make it last,
and that would have come through in one way or another.
There was the ad, there was his hope, and there was this El Greco. A
Greek restaurant, maybe, where he might have been bumming his meals.
But where did the $17,000 fit in?
* * * * *
Lou Pape was too fed up with the whole thing to discuss it with me. He
just gave me the weary eye and said, "You're riding this too hard,
Mark. The guy was talking from fever. How do I know what figures and
what doesn't when I'm dealing with insanity or delirium?"
"But you admit there's plenty about these cases that doesn't figure?"
"Sure. Did you take a look at the condition the world is in lately?
Why should these old people be any exception?"
I couldn't blame him. He'd pulled me in on the cases with plenty of
trouble to himself, just to do me a favor. Now he was fed up. I guess
it wasn't even that--he thought I was ruining myself, at least
financially and maybe worse, by trying to run down the problem. He
said he'd be glad to see me any time and gas about anything or help me
with whatever might be bothering me, if he could, but not these cases
any more. He told me to lay off them, and then he left me on my own.
I don't know what he could have done, actually. I didn't need him to
go through the want ads with me, which I was doing every day, figuring
there might be something in the ravings about an ad. I spent more time
than I liked checking those slanted at old people, only to find they
were supposed to become messengers and such.
One brought me to an old brownstone five-story house in the East 80s.
I got on line with the rest of the applicants--there were men and
women, all decrepit, all looking badly in need of money--and waited my
turn. My face was lined with collodion wrinkles and I wore an antique
shiny suit and rundown shoes. I didn't look more prosperous or any
younger than they did.
I finally came up to the woman who was doing the interviewing. She sat
behind a plain office desk down in the main floor hall, with a pile
of application cards in front of her and a ballpoint pen in one
strong, slender hand. She had red hair with gold lights in it and eyes
so pale blue that they would have seemed the same color as the whites
if she'd been on the stage. Her face would have been beautiful except
for her rigid control of expression; she smiled abruptly, shut it off
just like that, looked me over with all the impersonality and
penetration of an X-ray from the soles to the bald head, exactly as
she'd done with the others. But that skin! If it was as perfect as
that all over her slim, stiffly erect, proudly shaped body, she had no
business off the stage!
"Name, address, previous occupation, social security number?" she
asked in a voice with good clarity, resonance and diction. She wrote
it all down while I gave the information to her. Then she asked me for
references, and I mentioned Sergeant Lou Pape. "Fine," she said.
"We'll get in touch with you if anything comes up. Don't call
us--we'll call you."
I hung around to see who'd be picked. There was only one, an old man,
two ahead of me in the line, who had no social security number, no
references, not even any relatives or friends she could have checked
up on him with.
Damn! _Of course_ that was what she wanted! Hadn't all the starvation
cases been people without social security, references, either no
friends and relatives or those they'd lost track of?
I'd pulled a blooper, but how was I to know until too late?
Well, there was a way of making it right.
* * * * *
When it was good and dark that evening, I stood on the corner and
watched the lights in the brownstone house. The ones on the first two
floors went out, leaving only those on the third and fourth. Closed
for the day ... or open for business?
I got into a building a few doors down by pushing a button and waiting
until the buzzer answered, then racing up to the roof while some man
yelled down the stairs to find out who was there. I crossed the tops
of the two houses between and went down the fire escape.
It wasn't easy, though not as tough as you might imagine. The fact is
that I'm a whole year younger than Lou Pape, even if I could play his
grandpa professionally. I still have muscles left and I used them to
get down the fire escape at the rear of the house.
The fourth floor room I looked into had some kind of wire mesh cage
and some hooded machinery. Nobody there.
The third floor room was the redhead's. She was coming out of the
bathroom with a terrycloth bathrobe and a towel turban on when I
looked in. She slid the robe off and began dusting herself with
powder. That skin _did_ cover her.
She turned and moved toward a vanity against the wall that I was on
the other side of. The next thing I knew, the window was flung up and
she had a gun on me.
"Come right in--Mr. Weldon, isn't it?" she said in that completely
controlled voice of hers. One day her control would crack, I thought
irrelevantly, and the pieces would be found from Dallas to North
Carolina. "I had an idea you seemed more curious than was justified by
a help-wanted ad."
"A man my age doesn't get to see many pretty girls," I told her,
making my own voice crack pathetically in a senile whinny.
She motioned me into the room. When I was inside, I saw a light over
the window blinking red. It stopped the moment I was in the room. A
silent burglar alarm.
She let her pale blue eyes wash insolently over me. "A man your age
can see all the pretty girls he wants to. You're not old."
[Illustration]
"And you use a rinse," I retorted.
She ignored it. "I specifically advertised for old people. Why did you
apply?"
It had happened so abruptly that I hadn't had a chance to use the
Stanislavsky method to _feel_ old in the presence of a beautiful nude
woman. I don't even know if it would have worked. Nothing's perfect.
"I needed a job awful bad," I answered sullenly, knowing it sounded
like an ad lib.
* * * * *
She smiled with more contempt than humor. "You had a job, Mr. Weldon.
You were very busy trying to find out why senile psychotics starve
themselves to death."
"How did you know that?" I asked, startled.
"A little investigation of my own. I also happen to know you didn't
tell your friend Sergeant Pape that you were going to be here
tonight."
That was a fact, too. I hadn't felt sure enough that I'd found the
answer to call him about it. Looking at the gun in her steady hand, I
was sorry I hadn't.
"But you did find out I own this building, that my name is May
Roberts, and that I'm the daughter of the late Dr. Anthony Roberts,
the physicist," she continued. "Is there anything else you want me to
tell you about yourself?"
"I know enough already. I'm more interested in you and the starvation
cases. If you weren't connected with them, you wouldn't have known I
was investigating them."
"That's obvious, isn't it?" She reached for a cigarette on the vanity
and used a lighter with her free hand. The big mirror gave me another
view of her lovely body, but that was beginning to interest me less
than the gun. I thought of making a grab for it. There was too much
distance between us, though, and she knew better than to take her eyes
off me while she was lighting up. "I'm not afraid of professional
detectives, Mr. Weldon. They deal only with facts and every one of
them will draw the same conclusions from a given set of circumstances.
I don't like amateurs. They guess too much. They don't stick to
reality. The result--" her pale eyes chilled and her shapely mouth
went hard--"is that they are likely to get too close to the truth."
I wanted a smoke myself, but I wasn't willing to make a move toward
the pipe in my jacket. "I may be close to the truth, Miss Roberts, but
I don't know what the devil it is. I still don't know how you're tied
in with the senile psychotics or why they starve with all that money.
You could let me go and I wouldn't have a thing on you."
She glanced down at herself and laughed for real for the first time.
"You wouldn't, would you? On the other hand, you know where I'm
working from and could nag Sergeant Pape into getting a search
warrant. It wouldn't incriminate me, but it would be inconvenient. I
don't care to be inconvenienced."
"Which means what?"
"You want to find out my connection with senile psychotics. I intend
to show you."
"How?"
She gestured dangerously with the gun. "Turn your face to the wall and
stay that way while I get dressed. Make one attempt to turn around
before I tell you to and I'll shoot you. You're guilty of
housebreaking, you know. It would be a little inconvenient for me to
have an investigation ... but not as inconvenient as for you."
* * * * *
I faced the wall, feeling my stomach braid itself into a tight,
painful knot of fear. Of what, I didn't know yet, only that old people
who had something to do with her died of starvation. I wasn't old, but
that didn't seem very comforting. She was the most frigid,
calculating, _deadly_ woman I'd ever met. That alone was enough to
scare hell out of me. And there was the problem of what she was
capable of.
Hearing the sounds of her dressing behind me, I wanted to lunge around
and rush her, taking a chance that she might be too busy pulling on a
girdle or reaching back to fasten a bra to have the gun in her hand.
It was a suicidal impulse and I gave it up instantly. Other women
might compulsively finish concealing themselves before snatching up
the gun. Not her.
"All right," she said at last.
I faced her. She was wearing coveralls that, if anything, emphasized
the curves of her figure. She had a sort of babushka that covered her
red hair and kept it in place--the kind of thing women workers used to
wear in factories during the war. She had looked lethal with nothing
on but a gun and a hard expression. She looked like a sentence of
execution now.
"Open that door, turn to the right and go upstairs," she told me,
indicating directions with the gun.
I went. It was the longest, most anxious short walk I've ever taken.
She ordered me to open a door on the fourth floor, and we were inside
the room I'd seen from the fire escape. The mesh cage seemed like a
torture chamber to me, the hooded motors designed to shoot an
agonizing current through my emaciating body.
"You're going to do to me what you did to the old man you hired
today?" I probed, hoping for an answer that would really answer.
She flipped on the switch that started the motors and there was a
shrill, menacing whine. The wire mesh of the cage began blurring
oddly, as if vibrating like the tines of a tuning fork.
"You've been an unexpected nuisance, Weldon," she said above the
motors. "I never thought you'd get this far. But as long as you have,
we might as well both benefit by it."
"Benefit?" I repeated. "_Both_ of us?"
She opened the drawer of a work table and pulled out a stack of
envelopes held with a rubber band. She put the stack at the other edge
of the table.
"Would you rather have all cash or bank accounts or both?"