Killing the Goose by Frances and Richard Lockridge Page A

fashion been violently alive. Or so Pam North, listening to words which got them nowhere, thought as she listened. No one would, for example, kill Cleo Harper.
    â€œUnless,” Pam said to herself, “they were married to her. But nobody ever would be.”
    Pam heard herself think this and was suddenly shocked. I’m cruel, she thought; I’m contemptuous because she isn’t attractive, I’m cruel because Jerry loves me and nobody will ever love her—no man and, not really, any woman. She’s just trying to make herself believe that Fran was her dearest friend; that she was dear to Fran. She is making it up for herself so that she can have it as a memory and—
    â€œUntil she met that horrible boy,” Cleo said. “That horrible, black, dirty boy. She must have been crazy—it wasn’t like her. She was never that way.”
    There was an odd emphasis on the word “that.” Cleo Harper spoke as if there were a kind of unspeakable loathesomeness about being “that way.” But as far as appeared, she meant merely that Frances had been normally responsive—had been at any rate interested—in a young man.
    â€œHe did something to her,” Cleo said. And now there was a new note in her thin voice. Before she had been sorry for herself, and writing ineffectual drama about her own not quite believable bereavement. But there was a new note now, not immediately decipherable. If Cleo had seemed strong enough to hate, you might have thought it hate. It caught Pam North’s attention.
    â€œIt ought to be him,” the girl said. “Him lying there, all cut and with blood all over him. Somebody ought to have killed him and then none of it would have happened.”
    Cleo Harper gulped and dabbed at her eyes. Then she looked up and it occurred to Pam that perhaps was not altogether ineffectual. There was something odd about her eyes.
    â€œThe dirty little beast,” the girl said. “The dirty— thing! ”
    There was no doubt about the note in her voice now. It was venom. There was room in the thin body and the thin mind of Cleo Harper for one large emotion—hatred. It was surprising.
    â€œNow, miss,” Mullins said. “Now, miss. You don’t want to work yourself up. O.K.?”
    â€œYou ought to kill him for it,” Cleo Harper said. “You ought—you’ve got a right. He killed her—he changed her and then he killed her. Somebody ought to kill him. He oughtn’t to be alive.”
    It was abashing. That was the only word for it. It was so naked; it was so much more than people said to other people. It spread emotions out too openly, let you see too deep. I don’t want to know that much about her, Pam thought. It is more than anybody ought to know about anybody else. It’s—ugly.
    And it lay in the tone, in the inflection.
    â€œNow, miss,” Mullins said. “You oughtn’t to talk that way. It ain’t—”
    He broke off, looking puzzled. Pam had a disturbing notion that Mullins had been about to say it wasn’t ladylike. Or perhaps he had really seen, and almost said, that it was not human.
    Mullins looked at Mrs. North, with a kind of anxiety. It was, his look told her, getting beyond him.
    It was beyond Pam too, she thought. Or she hoped it was—or she hoped she was wrong. She hoped that Cleo Harper hated Frank Martinelli because she believed he had killed her friend; that she felt a hatred which, although extreme, would still be comprehensible. Pam hoped that all this venom, which was not like anything she had seen before or wanted to see, was directed against a murderer, and not merely against a man—because he was a man and so had “changed” the feelings of a girl.
    I don’t care what people do, Pam thought. It isn’t that. Or how they feel, because any way of feeling can be natural and all right. Or I suppose it can—for some. But this