All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [247]
I almost drowned in those eyes during the one-minute interview I had in order to get permission to see Sadie. “She is very difficult,” he said.
Sadie was lying on a chaise longue by a window which gave over a stretch of lawn sloping down to a bayou. Her chopped-off black hair was wild and her face was chalk-white and the afternoon light striking across it made it look more than ever like the plaster-of-Paris mask of Medusa riddled with BB shot. But it was a mask flung down on a pillow and the eyes that looked out of it belonged to the mask. They did not belong to Sadie Burke. There wasn’t anything burning there.
“Hello, Sadie,” I said, “I hope you don’t mind me coming to see you.”
She studied me a moment out of the unburning eyes. “It’s O.K. with me,” she said.
So I sat down and hitched my chair up closer and lighted a cigarette.
“How you getting on?” I asked.
She turned her head in my direction and gave me another long look. For an instant, there was a flicker in the eyes as when a breath of air touches an ember. “Look here,” she said, “I’m getting on all right. Why the hell shouldn’t I be getting on all right?”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“I didn’t come out here because there was anything wrong with me. I came because I was tired. I wanted a rest. That’s what I said to that God-damned doctor. I said, ‘I’m here to get a rest because I’m tired and I don’t want you messing around and trying to swap secrets with me and find out if I ever had any dreams about red fire engines.’ I said, ‘If I ever started swapping secrets with you I’d burn your ears off, but I’m here to rest and I don’t want you in my hair.’ I said, ‘I’m tired of a lot of things and I’m God-damned tired of a lot of people and that goes for you, too, Doc.’ ”
She pushed herself up on one arm and looked at me. Then said, “And that goes for you, too, Jack Burden.”
I didn’t say anything to that and I didn’t move. So she sank back down, and into herself.
I let my cigarette burn up my fingers and lighted another one before I said, “Sadie, I reckon I know how you feel and I don’t want to be bringing everything up again, but–”
“You don’t know a thing about how I feel,” she said.
“Some idea–maybe,” I said. “But what I came for was to ask you a question.”
“I thought you came because you were so damned fond of me.”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I am. We’ve been around a long time together and we always got along. But that’s not–”
“Yeah,” she interrupted, and again thrust herself up on one arm, “everything and everybody just got alone fine. Oh, Jesus, just fine.”
I waited while she sank back and turned her eyes from me across the lawn below toward the bayou. A crow was making its way across the clear air above the tattered cypress tops beyond the bayou. Then the crow was gone, and I said, “Adam Stanton killed the Boss, but he never got that idea by himself. Somebody primed him to do it. Somebody who knew the kind of man Adam was and knew the inside of how he took the job at the medical center and knew–”
She didn’t seem to be listening to me. She was watching the clear air above the tattered cypresses where the crow had gone. I hesitated, and then, watching her face, went on. “–and knew about the Boss and Anne Stanton.”
I waited again and watched her face as I handed those names to her, but it didn’t show a thing. It simply looked tired, tired and not giving a damn.
“I found out one thing,” I continued. “A man called Adam that afternoon and told him about the Boss and his sister. And some more stuff. You can guess what stuff. So he went wild. He went to see his sister and jumped her and she didn’t deny it. She isn’t the kind of person who could deny it. I guess she was sick of having a secret and she was almost glad not to have it any longer and–”
“Yeah,” Sadie said, not turning to me, “tell me how noble and high-tone Anne Stanton is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and felt the blood flushing my face. “I guess I did get off the point.”
“I guess you did, all right.”
I waited. Then, “That man who called up Adam, do you have any notion who it was?”
She seemed to be turning that question over in her mind. If she had heard it, for I couldn