LITMIR.BIZ

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barefoot to the bed and sat and looked at me curiously. “What brings you across the river, Bill? Something about Jimmy?”

      I hesitated. She was instantly aware of my uncertainty, and a protective wariness narrowed her eyes.

      “About Jimmy,” I said. I knew my face must be coloring. “Stella,” I said, not looking at her, “the boy was in a bad way. A couple of previous arrests and the murder confession. It didn’t look good for him.”

      I knew I was blundering off in the wrong direction but I couldn’t help it.

      Her voice became strident in a way that I disliked. “Jimmy’s lawyer said that maybe they couldn’t prove premeditation. Did he change his mind? Bill . . .” There was a thin sound of fear.

      “That’s not what I mean,” I said desperately. “Jimmy . . . I guess he . . . got tired, or scared or something. Of waiting, and not knowing.” Her head came up and she looked at me incredulously. “I don’t know why,” I said. My mouth was very dry. “He hanged himself this afternoon. With his shirt. I don’t know why. But he’s dead. I’m sorry, Stella.”

      She stopped breathing for a moment and her fingers loosened in her lap. She was still looking at me with the same uncomprehending expression. She put her hands between her knees and pressed her legs together hard, so that the calves touched, and her head inclined forward, the mane of blonde hair dangling over her forehead. Her breasts moved erratically as she breathed.

      “Stella . . .” I said helplessly.

      She began to cry, with gulping irregular sobs. She slid off the bed, kneeled on the floor, holding her head like a sick dog, and cried.

      I sat beside her on the floor and held her, her face soft against my neck. She smelled of sweat and shampoo and woman-odor.

      I leaned back against the bed and held her and felt her tears warm on my cheek, knowing the tragedy of shattered hopes more tragic because the hopes were founded in futility, and it had always been that way for her, because she was a Ridge girl. And that was not all I knew. I knew she was poor and nearly alone when she quit high school her first year because she was tired of wearing the same dress three times a week and washing out the same underwear every night. I knew there was a boy, somewhere in her life, shot dead by the owner of a liquor store during an attempted holdup. I knew she worked nights as a waitress and saved her money patiently for the day when she could leave the Ridge and I knew there was a streak of honesty and independence in her a mile wide.

      I knew, most of all, that I had wanted her from the first moment I had seen her, in the hall of the police station, when she had spit in Gulliver’s face because he wouldn’t let her see her cousin.

      Holding the good comfortable weight of her against me as she cried I remembered last night, on the edge of the deep silent river. I had taken her there, to my river, where I liked to go and sit on a beached log beside the eddying water and look to the bluffs on the other side and think. The river-washed sand had been fine and smooth. It had been warm and quiet and very dark and there had been a strange terror about being close to the great moving river, so that it seemed almost inevitable we would lie close and eagerly, bonded by the searing kisses. I knew, as a man will know, that she wanted more, much more . . .

      She’s not a piece, Gulliver.

      Yet she had been prepared for me. She had been prepared to receive me, prepared in a way nice young girls usually are not.

      I understood that on the Ridge life is hard and uncertain and there is an attitude of get it while you can. Lust is solid beneath the surface of restless lives and chastity doesn’t exist where there is no reason for it to.

      Yes, I knew Stella, yet I didn’t know her. I didn’t know why it had been that way on the bank of the river. Now she squirmed and sobbed in my arms.

      “Bill . . . Bill, the poor little guy . . .”

      “There’s nothing you can do.”

      She turned away from me and rubbed at her reddened eyes. “He was such a little kid,” she said. The violence of her grief had given her hiccups. “Such a little . . . underweight kid. He never had a break, Bill. Never . . . had one goddam tiny break in his whole . . . goddam life.”

      She stood up awkwardly and sniffed and rubbed the back of her hand against her eyes and walked out of the bedroom, down the hall to the bath.

      I went to the window and looked out, at the acre or so of dumped trash where the city was trying to create a fill, at the patchwork fields beyond and the fringe of trees bounding the river.

      I felt as though I had no business being there, in her room, with the hard gun at my side and the badge in my pocket. A Ridge boy had died, and I was intruding on the wrenching grief of someone who had cared for him, who had recognized his consuming need for being wanted and protected. Well, I was a cop. I had put on the badge and I was right. Those, like Jimmy Herne, who made my work, were wrong. It was the only way I could think, the way all of us had to think. When you started making excuses for them, wondering why, your effectiveness as a cop goes. That’s what Gulliver had told me, and probably it was the truth. Never give them a break, Bill. When you start giving them a break, they’ll kill you. One way or another. That’s what Gulliver had said, many times.

      Yet I had tried to help Jimmy Herne, in a small way; not because I was sorry for him, but because of Stella.

      I had to think about her, and the four days, about her instinctive dislike for me because of the badge, the dislike that had disappeared, until the fulfillment for both of us, last night. I had to wonder if it had been for both of us . . .

      Stella returned. Her eyes had dried and there was a tight expression on her face. I tried to think of something to say, some small words of comfort. I couldn’t.

      She sat on the bed again, her legs spread beneath the slip, her shoulders rounded. “He hated prison,” she said, as if remembering every thing about him was important. “He nearly went crazy those eight months in the reformatory. He said he’d never go back. Never. He used to talk when he was staying with me. He’d sit and talk about what he was going to do. He wasn’t full of crap any more about being a big man, about the jobs he would pull. He was almost humble, wanting to find a good job and stick with it, become useful. He used to get that scared look every time he thought about the reformatory. Not just ordinary scared. When Mr. Smithell heard about him from the parole board, I thought that—well, that it would be okay.”

      She got up and went to the dresser and picked up her comb. She pulled it through the thick mane of hair, combing it down over her eyes.

      “Maybe what happened was best,” I said. “His lawyer was working for him, Stella. But he couldn’t have done much better for Jimmy than a life term.”

      She whipped the comb from her hair and flung it at me. I was startled by the cold fury in her eyes. She stood spraddle-legged with her breasts outthrust, fists hard near her thighs.

      “No!” she yelled. “It wasn’t for the best because Jimmy didn’t do it! He wasn’t any more guilty than I am and he’d be free right now instead of dead if it wasn’t for that dirty Gulliver!”

      I took her by the shoulders. “Stella, Jimmy confessed. He confessed because he was guilty and he knew it and you know it.”

      “Confession,” she said, as if she were going to spit. Her voice trembled. “I know all about confessions like that. The last time I visited Jimmy he could hardly move or talk to me. He kept getting his words mixed up. You think I’m simple? I know what goes on in the basement uptown. I’ve seen others who came out of there. Jimmy confessed because he didn’t have any choice. Gulliver beat him to a pulp.”

      “Shut up,” I said, my teeth together. “Shut up, unless you can prove it!” I could feel the deep pressure of unreasoning anger rising against her and I knew I was hurting her as she twisted under my hands.

      “Why don’t you tell me it’s not true?”

      I glared at her.

      “Because

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