Dark Passage by David Goodis Read Free Book Online Page B

the
apartment house. She stood there and looked at the window. Her head
went low and that meant she was looking at the grey Pontiac. Then
the window again. Then the Pontiac. Then the window. Then she
started on down the street. Then she stopped and took another look
at the window. She took a few steps in the direction of the
apartment house. She hesitated, then came on.
    “For God's sake” Parry
murmured.
    She stopped again. This time she made a
definite about-face and walked on and kept on walking.
    Parry looked at the door and he was about
to make a go for it when he remembered that his attire consisted of
a yellow towel and nothing more. He sucked at the cigarette and
walked without meaning in a small circle and then he went back to
the window. No Madge Rapf. But something else. This time it was a
policeman on the other side of the street. The policeman didn’t
look at the apartment house. Parry crossed to the davenport and sat
on the edge, the cigarette burning furiously as he gave it the
works.
    Something pulled him up from the davenport
and he went into the kitchen. It was small and white and spotless.
He put his hand on a solid bar of glass, the handle of the
refrigerator. He opened the door and looked at the food without
knowing why he was looking at it. He looked at a neat row of
oranges and then he closed the door. He looked at the kitchen
cabinet, the sink, the floor—the incinerator. He opened the metal
cap of the incinerator and gazed into the black hole. He closed the
incinerator, went out of the kitchen and into the bathroom. When he
came out of the bathroom he went into the one room that was left,
the bedroom.
    The bedroom was all yellow. Pale yellow
broadloom rug and furniture and dark yellow walls. Four water-color
landscapes that weren’t bad. They were signed “Irene Janney.” He
recognized the pale-green meadow and the hills. And again he saw
the dark-green woods and the road. He wanted another cigarette and
he went into the parlor.
    When he came back to the bedroom he stood
in front of the bureau and ran his fingers cross the shining yellow
wood. He puffed hard at the cigarette and then he opened the top
drawer. It was divided into two sections. There was a big bottle of
violet cologne that would follow the half-filled bottle on top of
the bureau. There was a carton of Luckies, two jars of skin cream,
a pile of handkerchiefs wrapped in a sachet-scented fold of
grey-violet satin. There was a box filled with various sorts of
buttons. That was about all for the top drawer.
    The second drawer had underthings and more
handkerchiefs and three handbags. They were expensive. Everything
was expensive. Everything was neat and clean. The third drawer was
about the same. The fourth drawer was heaped with papers and
note-books and text-books. Parry examined the papers and books. He
found out that Irene Janney had attended the University of Oregon,
had majored in sociology, had graduated in 1939. There were
considerable examination papers and theses and most of them were
marked B. There was a record book from the Class of ’39 and he
followed the alphabetical order until he came to her picture and
write-up. Her picture was nothing special. She was even thinner
then than now, and she was plenty thin now. She looked uncertain
and worried, as if she was afraid of what would happen to her after
graduation.
    There was something at the bottom of the
drawer peeping out from the edge of a textbook. It was from a
newspaper. It became a clipping as Parry took it out. He saw the
picture of a man who looked something like Irene. The picture was
captioned “Dies in Prison.” Underneath the picture was the name
Calvin Janney. Alongside the picture was an article headed “Road
Ends for Janney.”
    Calvin Janney, sentenced four years ago to
life imprisonment for the murder of his wife, died last night in
San Quentin prison. He had been ill for the past several months.
Officials said Janney made a death-bed statement claiming