Pity Him Afterwards

He finally had to give up. He pushed the offending sheet and blanket away and sat up. He picked up his watch again and strapped it to his wrist and looked at it, fully believing that he had been awake half an hour or more, trying to get back to sleep, and it was now only six twenty-five. Five minutes.

So he got out of bed. He dressed, and reached for his cigarettes, and put one between his lips. But even before lighting it he got a presentiment of what the taste would be like, and he put it back in the pack. He grabbed a towel and went across the hall to the bathroom and washed his face and hands, and then went back and finished dressing, putting a clean shirt on that immediately started to itch across the shoulder blades.

He went downstairs, intending to go out to the kitchen and make himself a cup of coffee, but by the time he got to the first floor he’d thought better of it. The shape he was in, he shouldn’t mess around with stoves and breakable dishes. Maybe the Lounge would be open across the way, or maybe at least there’d be an employee around who could be talked into letting him have a cup of coffee.

He unlocked the front door and went outside to chill damp air and a yellow-orange sun six feet up from the horizon, right at eye level where it could do the most bad. He squinted away from it, and glanced off to the right, and saw three cars parked in front of the theater. There was the white Continental, which he now knew belonged to Loueen Campbell, who acted for the joy of it and not the money, and the red MG, which belonged to Bob Haldemann. But the little old dusty Dodge was there too, and that belonged to Mary Ann McKendrick. What the dickens was she doing here this early in the morning?

He decided to go find out.

He stepped down off the porch and crossed the crackling gravel to the theater. But all the doors were locked. Eight of them, eight glass doors marching along in a row, and he checked them one by one, from this end to that end, and they were all locked.

She left her car here? She went home without it?

That was silly. He knocked on the nearest glass door. Then he kicked it a little bit. And finally he saw one of the inner doors open, and Mary Ann herself peered across the lobby at him. She identified him, and then she came over and stood on the other side of the glass door and called, “What do you want?” Her voice sounded muffled and far away.

He just looked at her. He didn’t know how to answer the question in five or six words, and five or six words is about as long as a conversation can run at a clip with a locked glass door in the way. She waited, and he waited, and finally he boiled it all down to its simplest form, and shouted it through the glass: “I want a cup of coffee.”

She looked surprised, and shouted, “I haven’t got any coffee.”

“Listen, would they be” — he turned his head, and pointed toward the Lounge — “open this time of—?” It wasn’t any good. He gazed unhappily at her through the glass. “Do we have to shout through this door all the time?”

“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” she shouted, and turned away.

“God damn it!”

She turned back, surprised again. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Listen,” he shouted. “You don’t have to lock the damn — there’s no need to — I didn’t kill her, for Christ’s sake!”

“I never said you did!”

“That captain cleared me, I couldn’t have done it, the timing’s wrong.”

“That’s wonderful for you,” she said, trying to shout sarcasm. “But I have work to do.”

“At six o’clock in the morning?”

She came up close to the glass and studied him intently. “Are you drunk?”

“No! I’m hung over!”

That last about did it. His head split wide open and the sunlight seared in. He screwed his face up and put his hand to his forehead and turned away. “Never mind,” he muttered, too low for her to hear. “Just never mind.”

Behind him, there sounded a series of clicks, and she pushed open the door. When he looked back, she was standing in the doorway smiling at him. “Every time I see you you’re hung over,” she told him. “Are you hung over every day?”

“Except in Lent.”

“You want somebody to make you a cup of coffee, is that it?”

“I didn’t know when Mrs. Whatsername came to make breakfast, and if I tried it myself right now I’d blow up the house.”

“She isn’t coming at all. She called last night. The killing scared her away. She’ll be back when the fiend is caught, and not before. That was her word, fiend.”

“It’s as good as any.”

“That’s right, you saw her. So I suppose it’s all right for you to be hung over again today.”

“Thank you.” He started to reach for a cigarette, then changed his mind again. Coffee first. Then another thought occurred to him. “Are you really working at six o’clock in the morning?”

“It isn’t six o’clock, it’s after six-thirty. And yes, I really am. Or I was, until you showed up.”

“Do you always work at six o’clock in the morning?”