Suspended Sentences

She thought of Stanley Murdoch standing on the porch staring at her, and the screech — filled with message — of Murdoch’s tires on the very patch of pavement where the little girl had died; and Carolyn said, “You bet.”

By the time she signed the lease that Charles had prepared for her, on the condominium, she had recovered enough self-confidence to drive there herself with the carload of fragile things she didn’t trust to the movers. She emptied the car, left the cartons in the apartment, and drove back to her house to pick up a few more things, and Fido. She’d have taken the cat on the first trip but of course he’d been nowhere in sight. She remembered one of Richard’s wry sayings: “Cats are just like cops. Never around when you want ’em.”

When she drove into the lane, Fido was there. Squashed flat on the same spot of pavement where Amy Murdoch had died.

“I know he did it on purpose.”

“Murdoch?”

She gave Charles a look. “Who else?”

“Well, you’ll never prove that, will you?”

“I know he did it. He wants revenge for his little girl. He won’t stop until —”

“Until what? Until you’ve been punished enough? God knows you’ve had enough punishment from this thing. I think I’d better have a talk with Murdoch.”

“If it’ll do any good.” She reached for the drink.

“I’ll make the appropriate threats,” Charles said drily. “Take it easy on that stuff — that’s your fourth one.”

“I didn’t ask you to count my drinks.”

“Yeah, I know. How about having di

“I don’t go out with married men, Charles.”

“We’re separated.”

It took her a moment to absorb that. Then she squinted at him. “I’m in no shape to be made passes at.”

“Your shape is just fine, Carolyn, but right now I’m disinclined to take unfair advantage of you. I think you need company right now, that’s all.”

“I don’t want pity. I don’t think I could deal with that.”

“A friend’s concern isn’t pity.”

“Oh, hell,” she said, “take me to di

“Your husband always had a macabre sense of humor, didn’t he?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t usually bring him into conversations like that.”

“I understand. It’s just that right now you haven’t got any anchor at all and you keep reaching for memories to prop you up.” Charles had very sincere warm eyes — brown eyes, nothing startling — and his hairline was starting to go, and there was too much flesh around too little chin, and he had a paunch and was only about five-eight and generally speaking he wasn’t the sort of man she had fantasies about, but —

She said, “Right now you’re a rope and I’m drowning, and I’m clutching at you like mad. Is that all right?”

“That’s just fine. You see the secret truth is, I’m kind of lone-some myself. I’ve only been separated a few months.”

“I always despised lawyers,” she said. “They feed on people’s misery. They stir up friction. It’s their job to treat everything as an adversary procedure — they’re in the business of creating enemies. I’ve hated lawyers ever since my father was defrauded of his dry-cleaning business by some clever loophole-bending gangster lawyer. So you will pardon me, I hope, if I sometimes seem a bit distant with you. I’m not used to thinking of a lawyer as anything but loathsome.”

It only made him smile. “Is that how you thought of me when I was handling your divorce? Loathsome?”

“I regarded you as a necessary evil, I guess.”

“Most people think of lawyers like that,”

“Do they?”

“We are the lowest form of life, with the possible exception of interior decorators.”

“Now you’re making fun of me.”

“Yeah, I am. You need it.”

“I do,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Do that again.”

“What?”

“Dimple up. Smile.”

But she didn’t. She suddenly remembered the cat again.

She made herself go out into the world and behave as if there were a tomorrow and it mattered. She had to pick up several bolts of fabric for one client and work with the upholsterer on angling the pattern of the fabric properly for the furniture it was to cover; she had a doctor’s waiting room to do in the new Medical Center court, and there were three messages left over from last week from the answering service. She returned all three calls, belatedly; two of the people had found other decorators. She made an appointment for Friday with the third.

But she kept thinking about Fido. It wasn’t that she’d been inordinately fond of the cat; she hadn’t — she wasn’t that crazy about cats, really — but the cat had been the nearest thing to a child she’d had, and Murdoch had killed it deliberately.

Deliberately.

That was what frightened her.

She tried to get used to living in an apartment. Actually, since she was alone, it was quite roomy — two bedrooms (she set up her office in one) and a spacious terrace. It was on the second floor. It didn’t exactly overlook the lake but if you leaned out over the railing of the terrace you could see a corner of the lake. The view mainly was of the country-club golf course, which was pleasant if over-groomed. Most of the golfers were overweight types who got their exercise in electric carts. She’d never had any interest in golf but being on the fifteenth hole was pleasant enough. She kept expecting a golf ball to come whizzing in through a windowpane, but nothing like that happened.

What did happen was that someone drew a chalk outline of a sprawled little girl’s body on the floor of the hallway just outside her door.

It looked exactly like the outline of Amy Murdoch that the police had chalked on the asphalt lane.

“I talked to him again,” Charles told her over the phone. “Of course he says he doesn’t know anything about it. He’d say that whether it was true or not, but it makes it hard to pin anything down. You know it could just be some awful brat who read about the case in the newspaper.” The photograph of the chalked outline on the lane had appeared on an inside page of the paper. Carolyn remembered it and made a face.

She said into the phone, “I don’t think it was just some little kid.”

“Well, we can’t prove it was Murdoch. I can’t go around threatening him with legal action when we haven’t got any evidence against him. We’d look pretty silly in court asking for a restraining order and watching his lawyer get up and say, ‘Restrain from what?’”

“I know,” she said wearily. “It’s not your fault.” But at least his voice had calmed her down enough so that she was able to go out into the hall with the mop and clean the chalk drawing off the floor.

Next day she received in the mail a copy of a children’s magazine. It was the kind that was aimed at little girls the age Amy Murdoch had been — six, seven, eight. Full of cheery cartoons of fuzzy smiling animals. It had one of those addressograph-printed labels, with her name on it and the new address. Obviously a subscription had been taken out in her name.

In the next few days her mailbox began to fill up to the point of engorgement with magazines, newspapers, comic books, even cheap pornographic material — the kind that actually did come, she saw, in plain brown-paper wrappers.

Then the bills for all the subscriptions began to come in.

“Just write ‘Please cancel subscription’ on the forms and send them back,” Charles told her. “Don’t get rattled. He wants you to get rattled. Don’t give him the satisfaction”

“For God’s sake, Charles, I don’t need avuncular advice. I need to have him stopped.”

“I can’t prove he’s the one who’s doing it. Neither can you.”

“Talk to him anyway. Threaten him. Please?”

Finally a golf ball did come through the window. It was the bedroom window — which overlooked the parking lot, not the golf course — and it was the middle of the night, when nobody could possibly have been playing golf. It made a hell of a noise; she thought she’d have a heart attack.