The Whitaker Girl

Chapter 6: The Statement

The cold-storage smell was still on his hands. He had washed at the standpipe outside the annex and the water had gone up his cuff, and now the smell came back off his own skin with the heat of it — ammonia, and under the ammonia the wet cardboard and the ice.

A man who spent an hour in that room carried it for a day. The whole dock knew what it meant. Nobody said it to his face.

His back teeth ached. He had held his face still for an hour, and the ache had gone up behind his ear. He worked his tongue against the inside of his cheek and tasted salt.

Bell was at the top of the stairs with the overcoat over his arm. He held it open. Eli turned his shoulders into it, and the wool was cold across the back from having been carried outside.

"Everything?" Eli said.

"The clerk gave up the others. And the man who paid them." Bell's breath showed. "He signed it at the end."

"At the end."

"Before he went. I watched him put his name to it."

They had carried the clerk out through the dock door an hour before, with a tarp over him, and nobody had been told to say anything different.

Eli put out his hand and Bell gave him the paper. It was folded twice and the fold had gone soft from a pocket. Eli opened it. The writing got smaller toward the bottom of the page, the way a man's writing goes when his hand is going. He read the names.

Two of them he had shaken hands with.

He folded the paper on its own creases and put it inside his coat.

"I'll put it in his tray myself," he said.

"Do I say how we got it?"

"Say we got it in the yard."

Bell took his hat off and put it back on. He was a head shorter than Eli and built like his father, who ran the Kesslers' house, and he had been in that room for all of it and had not once looked away.

"And you?" Bell said. "How do you feel?"

"I don't want him." Eli said it in the flat way he said things he had already decided. "He bled on the floor in there and I was glad of it. That was all it was."

"Glad."

"Yes."

Bell looked at the cuff of Eli's shirt, where the water had gone dark.

"And for her," Bell said.

"Yes."

"You want to bite into Miss Whitaker's throat and drink the blood out of it."

"Yes."

"Years, now."

"Years."

"How many?"

"Enough."

"No one else. Not once."

"No one else."

He had liked it since he was a boy: the chair, the hour, his own mind working at the thing that would make a man in front of him want to die sooner. He had liked the heat of the blood. He had been frightened of himself when he was small, and he was not frightened now, and there was one man alive he had ever said so to.

The pulse moved in Miss Whitaker's throat when she swallowed. He had seen it the first time he stood near enough to see it, and what he had felt was thirst — the plain kind, the kind a man feels at noon with no water anywhere. It had not gone away. He had dreamed of it once and got up and shaved.

Bell let out a breath through his nose and looked out at the water. Below them a flatbed idled at the loading door with its lights on, and a crane was working somewhere up the row, and the ice plant's compressor kept up its noise under everything.

"Then don't put her in your house," Bell said.

"She needs it," Eli said.

"She."

"Her mother's mind isn't going to hold, and her brother's ten years old, and money doesn't fix either one. Her grandfather is the reason I'm alive. The agreement came out of that, and I'm not the one who breaks it while she has nothing to stand on."

"And when she has something to stand on?"

"When I've lived through this year, I'll tell you what I'm doing next year."

Bell waited.

"That's the answer," Eli said.

"Find Ray," he said then. "Tonight."

"He's your father's brother."

"He had two of my men in his warehouse and put them down himself, and then he sent me the paper on it. He thinks he can push me."

Bell waited with his hands at his sides.

"What do I tell him it's for?"

"Nothing."

He was still dressed at twenty past two, the house dark, when Bell came back up the drive. Bell had his collar turned up and his shoes were wet through.

"Mr. Ray's house," Bell said. "The front of it is blown out. Every window on that side of the street."

"Was he in it?"

"He hadn't come home."

Eli stood with his hands in his pockets. The report was finished. Bell stayed in the door a moment longer than the report needed, and Eli let him.

"Anything else?" Eli said.

"No."

"Then go to bed."

His father sent for both of them at eleven. The room on the second floor smelled of the leather on the chairs and of the coffee that had been poured at nine and never touched, and the shade was down on the harbor side. His father did not shout. His voice in a closed room got slower instead of louder, and the men in the outer office could hear every word of it anyway.

"I have one brother and one son," August said. "I have one of each. There are men in this town who have waited twenty years for the two of you to hand them something like this, and you have handed them the whole of it in one night. I am not going to ask which of you did it. I don't want to know. I want the pair of you to sit in this room until the police stop calling me, and I want it understood that this company has one head, and that it is not whichever one of you feels quickest this week."

Raymond sat with his ankle on his knee, turning a cufflink with his thumb. Gold with a black center, and it turned and turned.

"Shake hands," August said.

Raymond stood up first. He put his hand out, and Eli took it. The grip was dry and short.

"Now get out, the both of you."

Raymond stopped in the corridor to set his cuff straight. "I'll want something for the windows," he said.

"Send me the bill."

"I don't want the bill." He looked at Eli a moment, then went down the corridor, and his heels went down three flights ahead of Eli's.

His father's secretary kept a tray on the corner of her desk for whatever came in during the day. Eli took the statement out of his coat and laid it on top of the pile and squared it with two fingers, and the smell came up off it, faint and cold, the room in the annex.

"The engagement's stood since spring," Bell said at his shoulder. "If you put a day on it now—"

"Put a day on it."

"People will say you're hurrying her."

"If it waits until this is over, it doesn't happen. She'll have found a way out by then."

Bell took out his notebook. "Which day?"

"Ask my mother. Ask hers. I want it in the paper before the month's out."

Bell wrote it down and did not put the pencil away. Eli looked at him until he looked up from the page.

"Does Mr. Ray hear it from me?"

Bell still had a desk in Raymond's office and drew his pay out of it, and Eli had never asked him to give up either.

"He hears it when the rest of them do."

Eli put his hat on and went down the stairs, and the man at the door came up off his stool, and Eli told him to sit down.