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anything. Nobody even cares. And if they got them, so what?
Would it bring back Marge?"
"It might keep them from doing it to others."
"There'd be plenty of other miserable creeps to do it." Gonzalo
drew a deep breath, then said, "Well, maybe I'd better talk about it
and get it out of my system. It's all my fault, you see, because I
wake up too early. If it weren't for that, maybe Marge would be
alive and Alex wouldn't be the wreck he is now."
"Who's Alex?" asked Avalon.
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"My brother-in-law. He was married to Marge, and I liked him.
I think I liked him better than I ever did her, to be truthful. She
never approved of me. She thought being an artist was just my way
of goofing off. Of course, once I started making a decent living-no,
she never really approved of me even then and most of the time she
was, meaning no disrespect to the dead, one big pain. She liked
Alex, though."
"He wasn't an artist?" Avalon was carrying the burden of the
questioning and the others seemed willing to leave it to him.
"No. He wasn't much of anything when they married, just a
drifter, but afterward he became exactly what she wanted. She was
what he needed to get a little push into him. They needed each
other. She had something to care for-"
"No children?"
"No. None. Unless you want to count one miscarriage. Poor
Marge. Something biological, so she couldn't have kids. But it
didn't matter. Alex was her kid, and he flourished. He got a job the
month he was married, got promoted, did well. They were getting
to the point where they were planning to move out of that damned
death trap, and then it happened. Poor Alex. He was as much to
blame as I was. More, in fact. Of all days, he had to leave the house
on that one."
"He wasn't in the apartment, then?"
"Of course not. If he was, he might have scared them off."
"Or he might have gotten killed himself."
"In which case they would probably have run off and
left Marge alive. Believe me, I've listened to him list the
possibilities. No matter how he slices it, she'd still be alive if he
hadn't left that day, and it bothers him. And let me tell you, he's
gone to pot since it happened. He's just a drifter again now. I give
him money when I can and he gets odd jobs now and then. Poor
Alex. He had that five years of marriage when he was really
making it. He was a go-getter. Now it's all for nothing. Nothing to
show for it."
Gonzalo shook his head. "What gets me is that the victim isn't
the one who gets the worst of it. It's a senseless murder-hell,
everything they got in the apartment amounted to no more than
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about ten, fifteen dollars in small bills-but at least Marge died
quickly. The knife was right in the heart. But Alex suffers every
day of his life now, and my mother took it hard. And it bothers me,
too."
"Listen," said Halsted, "if you don't want to talk about it-"
"It's all right. ... I think of it nights sometimes. If I didn't wake
up early that day-"
"That's the second time you said that," said Trumbull. "What's
your waking up early got to do with it?"
"Because people who know me count on it. Look, I always wake
up at eight a.m. sharp. It doesn't vary by as much as five minutes
one way or the other. I don't even bother keeping the clock by my
bed; it stays in the kitchen. It's got something to do with rhythms in
the body."
"The biological clock," muttered Drake. "I wish it worked that
way with me. I hate getting up in the morning."
"It works with me all the time," said Gonzalo, and even under
the circumstances, there was a hint of complacence in his voice as
he said so. "Even if I go to sleep late-three in the morning, four-I
always wake up at exactly eight. I go back to sleep later in the day
if I'm knocked out, but at eight I wake up. Even on Sunday. You'd
think I'd have the right to sleep late on Sunday, but even then,
damn it, I wake up."
"You mean it happened on a Sunday?" asked Rubin.
Gonzalo nodded. "That's right. I should have been asleep. I
should have been the kind of person people would know better
than to wake early Sunday morning- but they don't hesitate. They
know I'll be awake, even on Sunday."
"Nuts," said Drake, apparently still brooding over his
difficulties in the morning. "You're an artist and make your own
hours. Why do you have to get up in the morning?"
"Well, I work best then. Besides, I'm time-conscious, too. I don't
have to live by the clock, but I like to know what time it is at all
times. That clock I have. It's trained, you know. After it happened,
after Marge was killed, I wasn't home for three days and it just
happened to stop either eight p.m. Sunday or eight a-.m. Monday. I
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don't know. Anyway, when I came back there it was with the hands
pointing to eight as though rubbing it in that that was wake-up
time."
Gonzalo brooded for a while and no one spoke. Henry passed
around the small brandy glasses with no expression on his face,
unless you counted the merest tightening of his lips.
Gonzalo finally said, "It's a funny thing but I had a rotten night,
that night before, and there was no reason for it. That time of year,
end of April, cherry-blossom time, is my favorite. I'm not exactly a
landscape artist, but that's the one time I do like to get into the
park and make some sketches. And the weather was good. I
remember it was a nice mild Saturday, the first really beautiful
weekend of the year, and my work was doing pretty well, too.
"I had no reason to feel bad that day, but I got more and more
restless. I remember I turned off my little television set just before
the eleven-o'clock news. It was as though I felt that I didn't want to
hear the news. It was as though I felt there would be bad news. I
remember that. I didn't make it up afterward, and I'm not a mystic.
But I had a premonition. I just did."
Rubin said, "More likely you had a touch of indigestion." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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