Killing the Goose by Frances and Richard Lockridge

Tuesday, 10:45 P.M. to 11:30 P.M.
    Cleo Harper’s conversation was oddly eager; it was as if she had been hoarding words and had now, inexplicably, turned spendthrift. Pam North had been sorry for her from the moment she came down, her pale eyes reddened as if she had been crying, a moist handkerchief in her working fingers. She was too tall and too thin, her pale hair was too pale. She stood a little stooped because she was too tall and that embarrassed her. The room she came into was harsh and impersonal. It was a room in which nobody had ever lingered; Cleo Harper was a girl with whom nobody had ever lingered. They belonged together, Pam thought—a girl who was going nowhere and a room to which nobody ever willingly went; a room in which, probably, young men had waited uneasily for girls to come down to them from the upstairs rooms of Breckley House, and from which young men and their girls had fled a little anxiously, as from something inimical.
    For the first time, Pam thought, watching Cleo Harper sitting uncomfortably on an uncomfortable chair, worrying a damp handkerchief—for the first time I understand what places like this are for; sterilized places like this, in which girls voluntarily live in dormitories, hygienically. They are for girls like Cleo Harper, with whom nobody will ever really want to live. They are for tall girls with flat chests and inevitably damp handkerchiefs, and always with slight colds in the head.
    Cleo Harper had a slight cold in the head and as she talked she sniffled. It was also evident after a moment that she had been crying and was ready to cry again. She cried again, unbecomingly, when Mullins identified himself, and introduced Mrs. North without identification, and said that he wanted to go over again the circumstances of her meeting Frank Martinelli that afternoon. The tall, pale girl bent her head and gulped. You could, Pam found, be very sorry for her, without liking her.
    â€œOh,” Cleo Harper said, “it was dreadful—dreadful. To do a thing like that—to Fran. To Fran of all people. To dear Fran.”
    Her words are inadequate, too, Pam North thought. She means more than that.
    â€œShe was my best friend,” Cleo said and dabbed at her nose. “Ever since I went to the company she was my best friend. She understood.”
    Cleo Harper did not say what Frances McCalley had understood—what there had been to understand. It was as if she had merely used the word which lay nearest.
    â€œAnd she’s dead,” Cleo said. “I just can’t believe it. I just can’t. What a horrible thing to do.”
    â€œIt was horrible,” Pam North said. “I know how you must feel.”
    But I don’t, Pam thought. I can never know how she feels. It’s as if she were feeling in a different language.
    â€œAbout this boy,” Mullins said. “This Martinelli.”
    But it was not easy to guide Cleo Harper. She was insistent that they know about Frances McCalley, who had been her dearest friend, with whom she had “always been,” with whom she had gone to movies and walked home from work, with whom once she had gone to a camp on summer vacation, with whom—in summer—she had ridden back and forth on the Staten Island ferry. You could see the two of them, as she talked; perhaps, Pam thought, you could see more than she meant them to see, or more than she knew.
    Because there was nothing to indicate that Frances McCalley had been a girl whom Cleo Harper would have contented. You could only guess at Frances now, and guess with little knowledge. But Martinelli, murderer or not, was a dark; angry youth and, murderer or not, he appeared to have had a dark, angry attachment to Frances McCalley. And a girl who was, contentedly, Cleo Harper’s best friend would hardly, you could suspect, engender such an attachment. People who are killed violently, unless they are killed by accident, usually have in some