The Screaming Mimi Read online

  Somebody said “Blood,” almost inaudibly.

  Weakly, as in a daze, the woman was trying to get up.

  She got her knees under her body and had pushed herself up until her arms were straight. The dog beside her moved quickly, and Blue Serge swore and yanked at his shoulder-holstered gun as the dog’s muzzle went toward the woman’s face. But before the gun was out, the dog had licked the woman’s face once with a long red tongue, whimpering.

  And then, as both detectives made a quick move toward the door, the dog crouched again and growled.

  But the woman was still getting up. Everyone could see the blood now, an oblong stain of it on the front of her white evening dress, over the abdomen. And – in the bright spotlight that made the thing seem like an act on a stage or something seen in the glass screen of a televised horror show – they could see the five-inch-long cut in the white cloth in the center of the oblong stain.

  Gray Suit said, “Jesus, a shiv. The Ripper.” Sweeney got shoved farther to one side as the two detectives pushed closer. He stepped around behind them, watching over their shoulders; he’d forgotten all about his idea of getting away as soon as he could. He could have walked away now and nobody would have noticed. But he didn’t.

  Gray Suit was standing with his coat half on and half off, frozen in the act of removing it. He jerked it back on now, and his shoulder jarred Sweeney’s chin.

  He barked, “Phone on the two-way for an ambulance and homicide, Dave. I’ll try to crease the dog.” His shoulder hit Sweeney’s chin again as he, too, pulled a gun from his shoulder holster. His voice got calm suddenly, as the gun was in his hand. He said, “Reach for the knob, Dave. The dog’ll freeze to jump you and I’ll have a clear shot. I think I can crease him.”

  But he didn’t raise the gun, and Dave didn’t move to reach for the knob. For the incredible thing was happening, the thing that Sweeney wasn’t ever going to forget – and that, probably, no one of the fifteen or twenty people who, by now, were in front of the doorway was ever going to forget.

  The woman in the hallway had one hand on the wall now. beside the row of mailboxes and buzzer buttons. She was struggling to a standing position now, her body erect, but still resting on one knee. The bright white light of the flash framed her like a spotlight on a stage, the whiteness of her dress and gloves and skin and the redness of that oblong patch of blood. Her eyes were still dazed. It must have been shock, Sweeney realized, for that knife wound couldn’t have been deep or serious or it would have bled much, much more. She closed her eyes now as, swaying a little, she got up off the other knee and stood straight.

  And the incredible thing happened.

  The dog padded back and reared up behind her, on his hind feet but without pushing his forepaws against her.

  His teeth went to the back of the white dress, the strapless evening gown, caught something, and pulled out and down.

  And the something – they found out later – was a white silk tab attached to a long zipper.

  Gently the dress fell off and became a white silken circle around her feet. She had worn nothing under the dress, nothing at all.

  For what seemed like minutes, but was probably about ten seconds, nobody moved, nothing moved. Nothing happened, except that the flashlight shook just a little in Blue Serge’s hand.

  Then the woman’s knees began to bend under her and she went down slowly – not falling, just sinking down like someone who is too weary to stand any longer – on top of the white circle of silk in which she had stood.

  Then a lot of things happened at once. Sweeney breathed again, for one thing. And Blue Serge sighted his gun very carefully toward the dog and pulled the trigger. The dog fell and lay in the hallway and Blue Serge went through the door and called back over his shoulder to Gray Suit, “Get the ambulance, Harry. Then tie that damn dog’s legs; I don’t think I killed him. I just creased him.” And Sweeney backed away and nobody paid any attention to him as he walked north to Delaware and then turned west to Bughouse Square.

  Godfrey wasn’t on the bench, but he couldn’t have been gone long, for the bench was still empty and benches don’t stay empty long on a summer night. Sweeney sat down and waited till the old man came back.

  “Hi, Sweeney,” God said. He sat down beside Sweeney. “Got a pint,” he said. “Want a slug?” It had been a silly question and Sweeney didn’t bother to answer it; he held out his hand. And God hadn’t expected an answer; he was holding out the bottle. Sweeney took a long pull.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Listen, she was beautiful, God. She was the most beautiful dame–” He took another, shorter pull at the bottle and handed it back. He said, “I’d give my right arm.”

  “Who?” God asked.

  “The dame. I was walking north on State Street and–” He stopped, realizing he couldn’t tell about it. He said, “Skip it. How’d you get the likker?”

  “Stemmed a couple blocks.” God sighed. “I told you I could get a drink if I wanted it bad enough; I just didn’t want it bad enough before. A guy can get anything he wants, if he wants it bad enough.”

  “Nuts,” Sweeney said automatically. Then, suddenly, he laughed. “Anything?”

  “Anything you want,” said God, dogmatically. “It’s, the easiest thing in the world, Sweeney. Take rich men. Easiest thing in the world; anybody can get rich. All you got to do is want money so bad it means more to you than anything else. Concentrate on money and you get it. If you want other things worse, you don’t.”

  Sweeney chuckled. He was feeling swell now; that long drink had been just what he needed. He’d kid the old man by getting him to argue his favorite subject.

  “How about women?” he said.

  “What do you mean, how about women?” God’s eyes looked a little foggy; he was getting drunker. And a touch of Bostonian broad a was coming back into his speech, as it always did when he was really drunk. “You mean could you get any particular woman you wanted?”

  “Yeah,” said Sweeney. “Suppose there’s a particular dame, for instance, I’d like to spend a night with. Could I do that?”

  “If you wanted to bad enough, of course you could, Sweeney. If you concentrated all your efforts, direct and indirect, to that one objective, sure. Why not?” Sweeney laughed again.

  He leaned his head back, looking up into the dark green leaves of the trees. The laugh subsided to a chuckle and he took off his hat and fanned himself with it. Then he stared at the hat as though he had never seen it before, and began to dust it off carefully with the sleeve of his coat to reshape it so it looked more like a hat. He worked with the absorbed concentration of a child threading a needle.

  God had to ask him a second time before he heard the question. Not that it hadn’t been a foolish question to begin with; God hadn’t expected an answer, verbally. He was holding out the bottle.

  Sweeney didn’t take it. He put his hat back on and stood up. He winked at God and said, “No, thanks, pal. I got a date.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dawn was different. Dawn’s always different.

  Sweeney opened his eyes and it was dawn, a hot, gray, still dawn. Leaves hung listlessly on the trees over his head and the ground was hard under him. All his body ached.

  His mouth felt and tasted as though the inside of it was caked with something unmentionable – unmentionable here, that is, not to Sweeney. He mentioned it to himself and ran his tongue across his lips to moisten them. He swallowed a few times and got the inside of his mouth moist.

  He rubbed his eyes with the hairy backs of dirty hands and swore at a bird that was making a hell of a racket in a nearby tree. He sat up and leaned forward, his face in his hands, the bristle of his beard coarse against the palms of them. A streetcar went by on Clark Street and it didn’t sound any louder than an earthquake or the crack of doom. Not much louder, anyway.

  Awakening is never a good thing, sometimes it can be a horrible thing. With the cumulative hangover of two weeks of drinking, it is a horrible thing.r />
  But the thing to do, Sweeney knew, is to get moving, not to sit there and suffer, not to lie back down on the hard ground and try to go back to sleep, because you can’t ever go back to sleep when it’s like that. It’s hell on wheels, till you orient yourself; get wide awake and oriented and it’s merely hell, one dull aching hell until you get a few drinks under your belt. Then it’s all right. Or is it?

  Sweeney pushed the ground away from him and stood up. His legs worked. They carried him off the grass to the cement and along the walk to the bench where Godfrey lay still asleep and snoring gently. On the bench next to him lay the bottle, empty.

  Sweeney pushed God’s feet back and sat down gingerly on the edge of the bench. He put his rough chin in his filthy hands and rested his elbows on his knees, but he didn’t close his eyes. He kept them open.

  Had he finally gone over the edge, he wondered. The dame and the dog. He’d never hallucinated before.

  The dame and the dog.

  He didn’t believe it. It was one of the few things that couldn’t have happened. So it hadn’t happened. That was logic.

  He held his hand out in front of him and it was shaking, plenty, but no worse than it had before at times like this. He put it back down on the bench and used it and his other hand to push himself up. His legs still worked. They carried him across the square to Dearborn and south on Dearborn – a walking ache rather than a man – to Chicago Avenue. Brakes squealed as a taxi swerved to avoid hitting him as he crossed

  Chicago Avenue diagonally, without looking to either side. The taxi driver yelled something at him. Sweeney walked along the south side of Chicago Avenue to State Street and turned south.

  He walked three-quarters of a block and there was the Door. He stopped and stared at it, and after a while he went close to it and looked through the glass. It was dim inside, but he could see through the hallway to the door at the back.

  A newsboy came along, a bag of papers slung over his shoulder. He stopped beside Sweeney. He said, “Jeeze, that’s where it happened, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said Sweeney.

  “I know the broad,” said the newsboy. “I leave her a paper.” He reached past Sweeney for the knob of the door.

  “Gotta get in to leave some papers.” Sweeney stepped aside to let him past.

  When the newsboy came out, Sweeney went in. He walked back a few steps beside the mailboxes. This, where he was standing, was where she’d fallen. He looked down, then stooped to look closer; there were a few little dark dots on the floor.

  Sweeney stood up again and walked to the back. He opened the door there and looked through it. There was a cement walk that led back to the alley. That was all. He closed the door and flicked the light switch to the left of it, at the foot of the stairs leading upward. Two bulbs went on, one overhead at the foot of the stairs, the other overhead up front, by the mailboxes. The yellow light was sickly in the gray morning. He flicked it off again, then – as he noticed something on the wooden panel of the door – back on again.

  There were long closely-spaced vertical scratches on the wood. They looked fresh, and they looked like the claw-marks of a dog. They looked as though a dog had lunged against that door and then tried to claw his way through it.

  Sweeney turned off the light again and went out, taking with him one of the papers the newsboy had left in clips under several of the mailboxes. He walked past the next corner before he sat down on a step and unfolded the paper.

  It was a three-column splash, with two pix, one of the girl and one of the dog. The heading was:

  RIPPER ATTACKS DANCER; SAVED BY HER FAITHFUL DOG

  Fiend Makes Escape; “Can’t Identify,” Victim Says

  Sweeney studied the two pictures, read the article through, and studied the pictures again. Both were posed, obviously publicity stills. “Devil” was the caption under the picture of the dog, and he looked it. In a newspaper pic, you couldn’t see that yellow balefulness in his eyes, but he still didn’t look like anything you’d want to meet in an alley. He still looked, Sweeney thought, more like a wolf than a dog, and a bad wolf at that.

  But his eyes went back to the woman’s picture. The caption, “Yolanda Lang”, made Sweeney wonder what her real name was. But – looking at that picture of her – you wouldn’t care what her name was. The picture, unfortunately, didn’t show as much of her as Sweeney had seen last night.

  It was a waist-up shot, and Yolanda Lang wore a strapless evening gown moulded to show off her outstanding features – which Sweeney well knew to be genuine and not padding – and her soft blonde hair tumbled to her softer white shoulders. Her face was beautiful, too. Sweeney hadn’t much noticed her face last night. You couldn’t blame him for that.

  But it was worth noticing, now that there was less distraction to keep his eyes away from it. It was a face that was sweetly grave and gravely sweet. Except something about the eyes. But on an eighty-line screen newsprint picture you couldn’t be sure about that.

  Sweeney carefully folded the newspaper and put it down on the step beside him. There was a crooked grin on his face.

  He got up and trudged back to Bughouse Square.

  God was still snoring on the bench. Sweeney shook him and God opened his eyes. He stared up blearily at Sweeney and said, “Go away.”

  Sweeney said, “I am. That’s what I came to tell you. Look, I meant it.”

  “Meant what?”

  “What I said last night,” Sweeney said.

  “You’re crazy,” God said.

  That lopsided grin came back to Sweeney’s face. He said, “You didn’t see her. You weren’t there. So long.” He cut across the grass to Clark Street and stood there a minute. He had a dull headache now, and he wanted a drink damned bad. He held out his hand and watched it shake, and then put it in his pocket so he wouldn’t have to think about it.

  He started walking south on Clark. The sun was up now, slanting down the east-west streets. The traffic was getting heavy, and noisy.

  He thought, Sweeney Walking Across the Day.

  He was sweating, and it wasn’t only from the heat.

  He smelled, too, and he knew it. His feet hurt. He was a hell of a mess, an aching mess, top and bottom and inside and out.

  Sweeney Walking Across the Day.

  And across the Loop, and on south to Roosevelt Road. He didn’t dare stop. He turned the corner east on Roosevelt Road, kept on going on a block and a half, and turned into the entrance of an apartment building.

  He rang a buzzer and stood waiting till the latch on the door clicked. He opened it and trudged up stairs to the third floor. A door at the front was ajar and a bald head stuck through it. The face under the bald head looked at Sweeney, approaching, and a disgusted look came over it.

  The door slammed.

  Sweeney put a dirty hand on the wall to steady himself and kept on coming. He started to knock on the door, loudly. He knocked a full minute and then put a hand to his forehead to hold it a while, maybe half a minute. He leaned against the wall.

  He straightened up and started knocking again, louder.

  He heard footsteps shuffle to the door. “Get the hell away or I’ll call copper.”

  Sweeney knocked again. He said, “Call copper then, pally. We’ll both go down to the jug and explain.”

  “What the hell do you want?”

  Sweeney said, “Open up.” He started knocking again, louder. A door down the hail opened and a woman’s frightened face looked out.

  Sweeney knocked some more. The voice inside said, “All right, all right. Just a second.” The footsteps shuffled away and back again and the key turned.

  The door opened and the bald man stepped back from it. He wore a shapeless bathrobe and scuffed slippers, and apparently nothing else. He was a little smaller than Sweeney, but he had his right hand in the pocket of the bathrobe and the pocket bulged.

  Sweeney walked on in and kicked the door shut beside him. He walked to the middle of the cluttered room.


  He turned around and said, “Hi, Goetz,” mildly.

  The bald man was still beside the door. He said, “What the hell do you want?”

  “A double saw,” Sweeney said. “You know what for. Or shall I tell you in words of one syllable?”

  “Like hell I’ll give you a double saw. If you’re still harping back to that Goddam horse, I told you I didn’t shove the bet. I gave you your fin back. You took it.”

  “I took it on account,” Sweeney said. “I didn’t need the money bad enough then to get tough about it. Now I do. So okay, let’s review the bidding. You touted me on that oat-burner. It was your idea. So I gave you a fin to bet, and the horse came in at five for one, and you tell me you didn’t get the bet down for me.”

  “God damn it, I didn’t. The heat was on. Mike’s was closed and–”

  “You didn’t even try Mike’s. You just held the bet. If the horse had lost – like you expected – you’d have kept my fin. So whether you got the bet down or not you owe me twenty.”

  “The hell I do. Get out.”

  The bald man took his hand out of the bathrobe pocket and there was a little twenty-five calibre automatic in it.

  Sweeney shook his head sadly. He said, “If it was twenty grand, I’d be afraid of that thing – maybe. For twenty bucks you wouldn’t put a shooting on your record. For a lousy double saw you wouldn’t have the cops up here snooping around. Anyway, I don’t think you would. I’ll gamble on it.”

  He looked around the room until he saw a pair of pants hanging over the back of the chair. He started for the pants.

  The bald man snicked the safety off the little automatic. He said, “You son of a bitch–” Sweeney picked up the pants by the cuffs and started shaking them. Keys and change hit the carpet and he kept on shaking. He said, “Someday, Goetz, you’ll call a man a son of a bitch who is a son of a bitch, and he’ll take you apart.” A wallet from the hip pocket of the trousers hit the carpet, and Sweeney picked it up. He flipped it open, and grunted. There was only a ten and a five in the wallet.