for hysterics, sister. You better go in and sit down.”
This struck her as being a reasonable explanation and a wise suggestion. She accepted the one and acted upon the other. She went inside and sat in a chair with her legs stretched in front of her, and her feet were such a great distance away that she had difficulty seeing them. Vision improved shortly, however, and she could see not only her own feet quite clearly but also another pair of feet beyond them. They must belong to the man who opened the door, she decided. He must have followed her into the room. He must have turned on a light, too. She hadn’t, she was certain, and if he hadn’t done it, the room would be dark. She resented this. She wanted him to go away. She was grateful to him for his service, of course, but he had no right to presume on her gratitude. Had she thanked him? Maybe he was waiting for that. She thought that she he’d, but it could have been the cabbie she was remembering. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be quite all right now.”
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to talk with you. Do you feel capable of talking?”
“I could talk with you if I wanted to, but I don’t believe I want to. You’ll have to excuse me.”
“Can you see this?”
He was holding a hand toward her palm up, and the light gathered and glittered on something in the palm, but she couldn’t tell what the thing was. She squinted, peering at it, shaking her head.
“What is it?” she said.
“A badge. My identification. My name’s Sergeant Tromp. I’m a policeman.”
His words were a glacial wind, and the mist condensed and fell inside her skull like icy rain, leaving exposed for a terrible moment the ugly, distorted shape of terror waiting patiently beyond the frail defenses of delusion and fantasy and alcohol. Then the mist rose again from the surface of her feverish brain, blurring the vision and delaying the certain issue.
“A policeman?” she said. “What do you want?”
“Like I said, to talk with you. Not me, to be exact, but Lieutenant Ridley. Down at police headquarters. He sent me to bring you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know any Lieutenant Ridley. I don’t know any lieutenants at all.”
“That’s all right. He doesn’t know you, either. He’d like to get acquainted.”
“Policemen are to arrest people. Does he want to arrest me?”
“You done anything to be arrested for?”
She shook her head, looking at him craftily from under lowered lids. “You’re trying to trick me, Sergeant. You’re trying to make me incriminate myself. I don’t have to answer that.”
“Sure, sister. That’s right. You don’t have to answer anything.”
“I don’t mind, though. I don’t mind answering. It’s not what I’ve done, you see. It’s what I have.”
“What’s that?”
“Look at me. Can you see anything wrong?”
“You’ve had too much to drink, that’s all I can see.”
“No, no. It’s my hair. Can you see anything wrong with my hair?”
“It needs brushing. Otherwise, it looks okay.”
“I mean the color. The color is wrong. Is this lieutenant going to arrest me because of my hair?”
“Look, sister. Save the jokes for Ridley. He’s a very literate guy with a sense of humor. He likes a good joke.”
“Joke? I guess it is a kind of joke. On me. Someone always keeps playing jokes on me, Sergeant. Like giving me hair of a nameless and abominable color. Don’t you think that’s funny? They’re taking me to prison for the color of my hair. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You’ve come to take me to prison for the color of my hair, haven’t you?”
He said wearily. “Not prison. Not yet. Just down to Headquarters. Listen to me, sister. Putting it bluntly, you’re drunk, and it’s getting late. The lieutenant will be getting tired of waiting. What you need is a cold shower. Suppose you go get one, like a good girl, and I’ll wait for you here.”
“A shower?”
“That’s what I said. Go along, now. You wouldn’t want me to help you, would you?”
She shuddered and stood up. Placing her feet very carefully, she walked past him and into the bedroom. Terror waited in the mist, but the mist was warm and shielding and would not rise. The mist was thrice blessed. The mist was her last friend on earth. She walked through it across the room until her knees struck the edge of the bed. Gently, with a long sigh, she lay down on her face, and the mist closed in upon her and darkened and was perfectly still.
In the other room, Sergeant Tromp waited a reasonable length of time for the sound of the shower, and then he went into the bedroom. Standing beside the bed, he looked down at the recumbent figure. His emotional state was a bitter mixture—tiredness and cynicism and vestigial pity. He was tired because a man just naturally gets tired after so long a time on a road that isn’t going anyplace to speak of, and he was cynical because cynicism is something that can’t be helped after a while, life in general being what it is. Why did he feel pity? Well, she wasn’t much more than a kid, and she was in a hell of a mess, and once he might have felt a hell of a lot more than he was now capable of feeling. Rolling her over onto her back, he lifted an eyelid, felt her pulse, turned away with a whispered curse.
“God damn it,” he said. “God damn it to hell.” Methodically, with slow professional assurance, he searched the room. Closet, drawers, two pieces of luggage. He was looking for nothing in particular, and he found nothing. In the bathroom, he looked into the medicine cabinet and found the unlabeled box. He opened it and looked at the shiny green tablets and put it back. Moving back through the bedroom into the living room, he found the telephone and dialed Headquarters.
“Lieutenant Ridley in Homicide,” he said.
He waited, looking at the wall with milky blue eyes that had the curious shallow look of blindness. After a few seconds, he said, “Lieutenant? Sergeant Tromp. She’s here. Came in just a few minutes ago. Now she’s gone out again. Like a light, I mean. What? Yeah, plastered. I sent her to take a shower, and she passed out on the bed.”
At the other end of the line, Lieutenant Ridley said, “Can you bring her out of it?”
“I doubt it. She’s really been tying one on.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter much. Let her sleep it off. I’ll send a man around to keep an eye on the place. We can bring her down in the morning.”
“That’s what I thought. She’s a crazy dame, Lieutenant. Talks crazy.”
“All drunks talk crazy.”
“I got an idea this was different. Something behind the liquor.”
“What did she say?”
“Crazy stuff. Stuff about the color of her hair. About going to prison for it.”
There was a long silence. The wire hummed. Sergeant Tromp waited with the patience he had learned on the road going no place much, and Ridley came back in his own good time. His voice possessed a sudden hushed quality, as if he were looking at the truth written in cobwebs and was afraid to breathe on it.
“Housman,” he said.
“What?”
“The hair. The stuff she was talking. It’s from a poem by a guy named Housman. You wait for relief, Sergeant. Put him in the hall.”
“Right.”
Sergeant Tromp hung up and cursed again. Imagine the guy pinning it down like that. You say something about hair and right away he says