A Bullet for Cinderella Page 5

  “It defeats me,” Ruth said. I turned into the driveway and stopped in front of the animal hospital and got out as she did. We had been at ease and now we were awkward again. I wanted to find some way of seeing her again, and I didn’t know exactly how to go about it. I hoped her air of restraint was because she was hoping I would find a way. There had been too many little signs and hints of a surprising and unexpected closeness between us. She could not help but be aware of it.

  “I want to thank you, Ruth,” I said and put my hand out. She put her hand in mine, warm and firm, and her eyes met mine and slid away and I thought she flushed a bit. I could not be certain.

  “I’m glad to help you, Tal. You could—let me know if you think of more questions.”

  The opening was there, but it was too easy. I felt a compulsion to let her know how I felt. “I’d like to be with you again even if it’s not about the book.”

  She pulled her band away gently and faced me squarely, chin up. “I think I’d like that, too.” She grinned again. “See? A complete lack of traditional female technique.”

  “I like that. I like it that way.”

  “We better not start sounding too intense, Tal.”

  “Intense? I don’t know. I carried your picture a long time. It meant something. Now there’s a transition. You mean something.”

  “Do you say things like that just so you can listen to yourself saying them?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Call me,” she said. She whirled and was gone. Just before she went in the door I remembered what I meant to ask her. I called to her and she stopped and I went up to her.

  “Who should I talk to next about Timmy?”

  She looked slightly disappointed. “Oh, try Mr. Leach. Head of the math department at the high school. He took quite an interest in Timmy. And he’s a nice guy. Very sweet.”

  I drove back into town, full of the look of her, full of the impact of her. It was an impact that made the day, the trees, the city, all look more vivid. Her face was special and clear in my mind—the wide mouth, the one crooked tooth, the gray slant of her eyes. Her figure was good, shoulders just a bit too wide, hips just a shade too narrow to be classic. Her legs were long, with clean lines. Her flat back and the inswept lines of her waist were lovely. Her breasts were high and wide spaced, with a flavor of impertinence, almost arrogance. It was the coloring of her though that pleased me most. Dark red of the hair, gray of the eyes, golden skin tones.

  It was nearly three when I left her place. I tried to put her out of my mind and think of the interview with Leach. Leach might be the link with Cindy.

  I must have been a half mile from the Stamm place when I began to wonder if the Ford coupé behind me was the one I had seen beside Fitz’s shed. I made two turns at random and it stayed behind me. There was no attempt at the traditional nuances of shadowing someone. He tagged along, a hundred feet behind me. I pulled over onto the shoulder and got out. I saw that it was Fitz in the car. He pulled beyond me and got out, too.

  I marched up to him and said, “What the hell was the idea of going through my room.”

  He leaned on his car. “You have a nice gentle snore, Howard. Soothing.”

  “I could tell the police.”

  “Sure. Tell them all.” He squinted in the afternoon sunlight. He looked lazy and amused.

  “What good does it do you to follow me?”

  “I don’t know yet. Have a nice lunch with Ruthie? She’s a nice little item. All the proper equipment. She didn’t go for me at all. Maybe she likes the more helpless type. Maybe if you work it right you’ll get a chance to take her to—”

  He stopped abruptly, and his face changed. He looked beyond me. I turned just in time to see a dark blue sedan approaching at a high rate of speed. It sped by us and I caught a glimpse of a heavy balding man with a hard face behind the wheel, alone in the car. The car had out-of-state plates but it was gone before I could read the state.

  I turned back to Fitz. “There’s no point in following me around. I told you I don’t know any more—” I stopped because there was no point in going on. He looked as though I had become invisible and inaudible. He brushed by me and got into his car and drove on. I watched it recede down the road. I got into my own car. The episode made no sense to me.

  I shrugged it off my mind and began to think about Leach again.

  • FOUR •

  Though the high-school kids had gone, the doors were unlocked and a janitor, sweeping green compound down the dark-red tiles of the corridor, told me I could probably find Mr. Leach in his office on the ground floor of the old building. The two buildings, new and old, were connected. Fire doors separated the frame building from the steel and concrete one. My steps echoed in the empty corridor with a metallic ring. A demure little girl came out of a classroom and closed the door behind her. She had a heavy armload of books. She looked as shy and gentle and timid as a puppy in a strange yard. She looked at me quickly and hurried on down the corridor ahead of me, moccasin soles slapping, meager horsetail bobbing, shoulders hunched.

  I found the right door and tapped on it. A tired voice told me to come in. Leach was a smallish man with a harsh face, jet eyebrows, a gray brushcut. He sat at a table marking papers. His desk, behind him, was stacked with books and more papers.

  “Something I can do for you?”

  “My name is Tal Howard. I want to talk to you about a student you used to have.”

  He shook hands without enthusiasm. “An ex-student who is in trouble?”

  “No. It’s—”

  “I’m refreshed. Not in trouble? Fancy that. The faculty has many callers. Federal narcotics people. Parole people. Prison officials. County police. Lawyers. Sometimes it seems that we turn out nothing but criminals of all dimensions. I interrupted you.”

  “I don’t want to impose on you. I can see how busy you are. I’m gathering material about Timmy Warden. Ruth Stamm suggested I talk to you.”

  He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “Timmy Warden. Gathering material. That has the sound of a book. Was he allowed to live long enough to give you enough material?”

  “Timmy and some others. They all died there in the camp. I was there, too. I almost died, but not quite.”

  “Sit down. I’m perfectly willing to talk about him. I take it you’re not a professional.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then this, as a labor of love, should be treated with all respect. Ruth knows as much about Timmy as any person alive, I should say.”

  “She told me a lot. And I got a lot from Timmy. But I need more. She said you were interested in him.”

  “I was. Mr. Howard, you have probably heard of cretins who can multiply two five digit numbers mentally and give the answer almost instantaneously.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I know. I know. Timmy was no cretin. He was a very normal young man. Almost abnormally normal if you sense what I mean. Yet he had a spark. Creative mathematics. He could sense the—the rhythm behind numbers. He devised unique short cuts in the solution of traditional class problems. He had that rare talent, the ability to grasp intricate relationships and see them in pure simple form. But there was no drive, no dedication. Without dedication, Mr. Howard, such ability is merely facility, an empty cleverness. I hoped to be a mathematician. I teach mathematics in a high school. Merely because I did not have enough of what Timmy Warden was born with. I hoped that one day he would acquire the dedication. But he never had time.”

  “I guess he didn’t.”

  “Even if he had the time I doubt if he would have gone any further. He was a very good, decent young man. Everything was too easy for him.”

  “It wasn’t easy at the end.”

  “I don’t imagine it was. Nor easy for hundreds of millions of his contemporaries anywhere in the world. This is a bad century, Mr. Howard. Bad for the young. Bad for most of us.”

  “What do you think would have become of him if he’d lived, Mr. Leach?”

/>   The man shrugged. “Nothing exceptional. Marriage, work, children. And death. No contribution. His name gone as if it never existed. One of the faceless ones. Like us, Mr. Howard.” He rubbed his eyes again, then smiled wanly. “I’m not usually so depressing, Mr. Howard. This has been a bad week. This is one of the weeks that add to my conviction that something is eating our young. This week the children have seemed more sullen, dangerous, dispirited, inane, vicious, foolish, and impossible than usual. This week a young sophomore in one of my classes went into the hospital with septicemia as the result of a self-inflicted abortion. And a rather pleasant boy was slashed. And last Monday two seniors died in a head-on collision while on their way back from Redding, full of liquor. The man in the other car is not expected to recover. When Timmy was here in school I was crying doom. But it was not like it is now. By comparison, those were the good old days, recent as they are.”

  “Was Timmy a disciplinary problem?”

  “No. He was lazy. Sometimes he created disturbances. On the whole he was co-operative. I used to hope Ruth would be the one to wake him up. She’s a solid person. Too good for him, perhaps.”

  “I guess he was pretty popular with the girls.”

  “Very. As with nearly everything else, things were too easy for him.”

  “He mentioned some of them in camp. Judy, Ruth, Cindy.”

  “I couldn’t be expected to identify them. If I remember correctly, I once had eight Judys in one class. Now that name, thank God, is beginning to die out a little. There have never been too many Cindys. Yet there has been a small, constant supply.”

  “I want to have a chance to talk to the girls he mentioned. I’ve talked to Ruth. Judy has moved away. I can’t remember Cindy’s last name. I wonder if there is any way I could get a look at the list of students in hopes of identifying her.”

  “I guess you could,” he said. “The administration office will be empty by now. You could ask them Monday. Let me see. Timmy graduated in forty-six. I keep old yearbooks here. They’re over there on that bottom shelf. You could take the ones for that year and the next two years and look them over, there by the window if you like. I have to get on with these papers. And I really can’t tell you much more about Timmy. I liked him and had hopes for him. But he lacked motivation. That seems to be the trouble with too many of the children lately. No motivation. They see no goal worth working for. They no longer have any dreams. They are content with the manufactured dreams of N.B.C. and Columbia.”

  I sat by the windows and went through the yearbooks. There was no Cindy in the yearbook for ’46. There was one in the ’47 yearbook. I knew when I saw her picture that she could not be the one. She was a great fat girl with small, pinched, discontented features, sullen, rebellious little eyes. There was a Cindy in the ’48 yearbook. She had a narrow face, protruding teeth, weak eyes behind heavy lenses, an expression of overwhelming stupidity. Yet I marked down their names. It would be worth a try, I thought.

  I went back to the ’46 yearbook and went through page after page of graduates more thoroughly. I came to a girl named Cynthia Cooper. She was a reasonably attractive snub-nosed blonde. I wondered if Timmy could possibly have said Cynthy. It would be an awkward nickname for Cynthia. And even though his voice by that time had been weak and blurred, I was certain he had said Cindy. He had repeated the name. But I wrote her down, too.

  Ruth Stamm’s yearbook picture was not very good. But the promise of her, the clear hint of what she would become, was there in her face. Her activities, listed under the picture, made a long list. It was the same with Timmy. He grinned into the camera.

  Mr. Leach looked up at me when I stood near his table. “Any luck?”

  “I took down some names. They might help.”

  I thanked him for his help. He was bent over his papers again before I got to the door. Odd little guy, with his own strange brand of dedication and concern. Pompous little man, but with an undercurrent of kindness.

  I got to the Hillston Inn at a little after five. I got some dimes from the cashier and went over to where four phone booths stood flanked against the lobby wall. I looked up the last name of the fat girl, Cindy Waskowitz. There were two Waskowitzes in the book. John W. and P. C. I tried John first. A woman with a nasal voice answered the phone.

  “I’m trying to locate a girl named Cindy Waskowitz who graduated from Hillston High in nineteen forty-seven. Is this her home?”

  “Hold it a minute,” the woman said. I could hear her talking to someone else in the room. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She came back on the line. “You want to know about Cindy.”

  “That’s right. Please.”

  “This wasn’t her home. But I can tell you about her. I’m her aunt. You want to know about her?”

  “Please.”

  “It was the glands. I couldn’t remember the word. My daughter just told me. The glands. When she got out from high school she weighed two hundred. From there she went up like balloons. Two hundred, two fifty, three hundred. When she died in the hospital she was nearly four hundred. She’d been over four hundred once, just before she went in the hospital. Glands, it was.”

  I remembered the rebellious eyes. Girl trapped inside the prison of white, soft flesh. A dancing girl, a lithe, quick-moving girl forever lost inside that slow inevitable encroachment. Stilled finally, and buried inside her suet prison.

  “Is your daughter about the same age Cindy would have been?”

  “A year older. She’s married and three kids already.” The woman chuckled warmly.

  “Could I talk to your daughter?”

  “Sure. Just a minute.”

  The daughter’s voice was colder, edged with thin suspicion. “What goes on anyhow? Why do you want to know about Cindy?”

  “I was wondering if she was ever friendly in high school with a boy named Timmy Warden.”

  “Timmy is dead. It was in the papers.”

  “I know that. Were they friendly?”

  “Timmy and Cindy? Geez, that’s a tasty combination. He would have known who she was on account of her being such a tub. But I don’t think he ever spoke to her. Why should he? He had all the glamour items hanging around his neck. Why are you asking all this?”

  “I was in the camp with him. Before he died he gave me a message to deliver to a girl named Cindy. I wondered if Cindy was the one.”

  “Not a chance. Sorry. You just got the wrong one.”

  “Was there another Cindy in the class?”

  “In one of the lower classes. A funny-looking one. That’s the only one I can remember. All teeth. Glasses. A sandy sort of girl. I can’t remember her last name, though.”

  “Cindy Kirschner?”

  “That’s the name. Gosh, I don’t know where you’d find her. I think I saw her downtown once a year ago. Maybe it’s in the book. But I don’t think she’d fit any better than my cousin. I mean Timmy Warden ran around with his own group, kind of. Big shots in the school. That Kirschner wasn’t in that class, any more than my cousin. Or me.”

  The bitterness was implicit in her tone. I thanked her again. She hung up.

  I tried Kirschner. There was only one in the book. Ralph J. A woman answered the phone.

  “I’m trying to locate a Cindy Kirschner who graduated from Hillston High in nineteen forty-eight.”

  “That’s my daughter. Who is this calling, please?”

  “Could you tell me how I could locate her?”

  “She married, but she doesn’t have a phone. They have to use the one at the corner store. She doesn’t like to have people call her there because it’s a nuisance to the people at the store. And she has small children she doesn’t like to leave to go down there and answer the phone. If you want to see her, you could go out there. It’s sixteen ten Blackman Street. It’s near the corner of Butternut. A little blue house. Her name is Mrs. Rorick now. Mrs. Pat Rorick. What did you say your name is?”

  I repeated the directions and said, “Thanks very much, Mrs. Kirs
chner. I appreciate your help. Good-by.”

  I hung up. I was tempted to try Cynthia Cooper, but decided I had better take one at a time, eliminate one before starting the next. I stepped out of the booth. Earl Fitzmartin stepped out of the adjoining booth. He smiled at me almost genially.

  “So it’s got something to do with somebody named Cindy.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “ ‘I was in camp with Timmy. Before he died he gave me a message to deliver to a girl named Cindy.’ So you try two Cindy’s in a row. And you know when they graduated. Busy, aren’t you?”

  “Go to hell, Fitz.”

  He stood with his big hard fists on his hips, rocking back and forth from heel to toe, smiling placidly at me. “You’re busy, Tal. Nice little lunch with Ruth. Trip to the high school. Tracking down Cindy. Does she know where the loot is?”

  He was wearing a dark suit, well cut. It looked expensive. His shoes were shined, his shirt crisp. I wished I’d been more alert. It’s no great trick to stand in one phone booth and listen to the conversation in the adjoining one. I hadn’t even thought of secrecy, of making certain I couldn’t be overheard. Now he had almost as much as I did.

  “How did you get along with George, Howard?”

  “I got along fine.”

  “Strange guy, isn’t he?”

  “He’s a little odd.”

  “And he’s damn near broke. That’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  “It’s too bad.”

  “The Stamm girl comes around and holds his hand. Maybe it makes him feel better. Poor guy. You know he even had to sell the cabin. Did Timmy ever talk about the cabin?”

  He had talked about it when we were first imprisoned. I’d forgotten about it until that moment. I remembered Timmy saying that it was on a small lake, a rustic cabin their father had built. He and George had gone there to fish, many times.

  “He mentioned it,” I said.

  “I heard about it after I got here. It seemed like a good place. So I went up there with my little shovel. No dice, Tal. I dug up most of the lake shore. I dug a hundred holes. See how nice I am to you? That’s one more place where it isn’t. Later on George let me use it for a while before he sold it. It’s nice up there. You’d like it. But it’s clean.”