Killer, Come Back to Me

“That’s even sillier than all the rest,” said Alyce Fabian tiredly. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Mr. Douglas might have and not told you.”

“Why kill a man?” said Douglas. “John knew all about us.”

“I did indeed,” said John Fabian, and laughed.

He stopped laughing and his hand twitched, hidden in the snowflake interior of the tiny doll, and her mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. He was trying to make her carry the laughter on after he had stopped, but there was no sound, save the little empty whisper of her lips moving and gasping, while Fabian stared down at the little face and perspiration came out, shining, upon his cheeks.

* * *

The next afternoon Lieutenant Krovitch moved through the theater darkness backstage, found the iron stairs and climbed with great thought, taking as much time as he deemed necessary on each step, up to the second-level dressing rooms. He rapped on one of the thin-paneled doors.

“Come in,” said Fabian’s voice from what seemed a great distance.

Krovitch entered and closed the door and stood looking at the man who was slumped before his dressing mirror. “I have something I’d like to show you,” Krovitch said. His face showing no emotion whatever, he opened a manila folder and pulled out a glossy photograph, which he placed on the dressing table.

John Fabian raised his eyebrows, glanced quickly up at Krovitch and then settled slowly back in his chair. He put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and massaged his face carefully, as if he had a headache. Krovitch turned the picture over and began to read from the typewritten data on the back. “Name, Miss Ilyana Riamonova. One hundred pounds. Blue eyes. Black hair. Oval face. Born 1914, New York City. Disappeared 1934. Believed a victim of amnesia. Of Russo-Slav parentage. Etcetera. Etcetera.”

Fabian’s lip twitched.

Krovitch laid the photograph down, shaking his head thoughtfully. “It was pretty silly of me to go through police files for a picture of a marionette. You should have heard the laughter at headquarters. God. Still, here she is—Riabouchinska. Not papiermâché, not wood, not a puppet, but a woman who once lived and moved around and—disappeared.” He looked steadily at Fabian. “Suppose you take it from there?”

Fabian half smiled. “There’s nothing to it at all. I saw this woman’s picture a long time ago, liked her looks and copied my marionette after her.”

“Nothing to it at all.” Krovitch took a deep breath and exhaled, wiping his face with a huge handkerchief. “Fabian, this very morning I shuffled through a stack of Billboard magazines that high. In the year 1934 I found an interesting article concerning an act which played on a second-rate circuit, known as Fabian and Sweet William. Sweet William was a little boy dummy. There was a girl assistant—Ilyana Riamonova. No picture of her in the article, but I at least had a name, the name of a real person, to go on. It was simple to check police files then and dig up this picture. The resemblance, needless to say, between the live woman on one hand and the puppet on the other is nothing short of incredible. Suppose you go back and tell your story over again, Fabian.”

“She was my assistant, that’s all. I simply used her as a model.”

“You’re making me sweat,” said the detective. “Do you th

ink I’m a fool? Do you think I don’t know love when I see it? I’ve watched you handle the marionette, I’ve seen you talk to it, I’ve seen how you make it react to you. You’re in love with the puppet naturally, because you loved the original woman very, very much. I’ve lived too long not to sense that. Hell, Fabian, stop fencing around.”

Fabian lifted his pale slender hands, turned them over, examined them and let them fall.

“All right. In 1934 I was billed as Fabian and Sweet William. Sweet William was a small bulb-nosed boy dummy I carved a long time ago. I was in Los Angeles when this girl appeared at the stage door one night. She’d followed my work for years. She was desperate for a job and she hoped to be my assistant.…”

He remembered her in the half light of the alley behind the theater and how startled he was at her freshness and eagerness to work with and for him and the way the cool rain touched softly down through the narrow alleyway and caught in small spangles through her hair, melting in dark warmness, and the rain beaded upon her white porcelain hand holding her coat together at her neck.

He saw her lips’ motion in the dark and her voice, separated off on another sound track, it seemed, speaking to him in the autumn wind, and he remembered that without his saying yes or no or perhaps she was suddenly on the stage with him, in the great pouring bright light, and in two months he, who had always prided himself on his cynicism and disbelief, had stepped off the rim of the world after her, plunging down a bottomless place of no limit and no light anywhere.

Arguments followed, and more than arguments—things said and done that lacked all sense and sanity and fairness. She had edged away from him at last, causing his rages and remarkable hysterias. Once he burned her entire wardrobe in a fit of jealousy. She had taken this quietly. But then one night he handed her a week’s notice, accused her of monstrous disloyalty, shouted at her, seized her, slapped her again and again across the face, bullied her about and thrust her out the door, slamming it!

She disappeared that night.

When he found the next day that she was really gone and there was nowhere to find her, it was like standing in the center of a titanic explosion. All the world was smashed flat and all the echoes of the explosion came back to reverberate at midnight, at four in the morning, at dawn, and he was up early, stunned with the sound of coffee simmering and the sound of matches being struck and cigarettes lit and himself trying to shave and looking at mirrors that were sickening in their distortion.

He clipped out all the advertisements that he took in the papers and pasted them in neat rows in a scrapbook—all the ads describing her and telling about her and asking for her back. He even put a private detective on the case. People talked. The police dropped by to question him. There was more talk.

But she was gone like a piece of white incredibly fragile tissue paper, blown over the sky and down. A record of her was sent to the largest cities, and that was the end of it for the police. But not for Fabian. She might be dead or just running away, but wherever she was he knew that somehow and in some way he would have her back.

One night he came home, bringing his own darkness with him, and collapsed upon a chair, and before he knew it he found himself speaking to Sweet William in the totally black room.

“William, it’s all over and done. I can’t keep it up!”

And William cried, “Coward! Coward!” from the air above his head, out of the emptiness. “You can get her back if you want!”

Sweet William squeaked and clappered at him in the night. “Yes, you can! Think!” he insisted. “Think of a way. You can do it. Put me aside, lock me up. Start all over.”