Legion by William Peter Blatty Page A

door pushing open. It was Kinderman. He quietly entered the room. “Take a break,” he said to Jourdan.
    With a feeling of gratitude, she left.
    Kinderman stared at the woman for a time. Then he took off his hat. “Are you feeling all right, dear?” he asked her gently. The old woman said nothing. Then abruptly her arms came up and her hands made the patterned, mysterious movements that Kinderman had seen in the Potomac Boathouse. Kinderman carefully picked up a chair and then put it down softly beside the bed. He smelled disinfectant. He sat in the chair and started watching intently. The movements had a meaning. What was their meaning? The hands were casting shadows on the opposite wall, black spidery hieroglyphs, like a code. Kinderman studied the woman’s face. It had a look of sanctity about it, and in her eyes was something curiously like longing.
    For almost an hour Kinderman sat in the strange half-light with the sound of the rain and his breathing and his thoughts. Once he brooded on the quarks and the whispers of physics that matter was not things, but merely processes in a world of shifting shadows and illusions, a world in which neutrinos were said to be ghosts, and electrons were able to go backwards in time. Look directly at the faintest stars and they vanish, he thought; their light strikes only cones in the eye; but look beside them and you see them: their light hits the rods. Kinderman sensed that in this strange new universe he must look to the side to solve his case. He rejected the old woman’s involvement in the murder; yet in some way that he could not explain, she somehow embodied it. This instinct was puzzling, yet strong, whenever he looked away from the facts.
    When the old woman’s movements had finally stopped, the detective stood up and looked down at the bed. He held his hat by the brim in both hands and said, “Good night, miss. I’m sorry to have troubled you.” With that, he walked out of the room.
    Jourdan was smoking in the hall. The detective approached her and studied her face. She seemed uneasy.
    “Has she spoken?” he asked her.
    She exhaled smoke and shook her head. “No. No, she hasn’t.”
    “She ate?”
    “Yes, some oatmeal. Hot soup.” She flicked an ash that was not there.
    “You seem troubled,” said Kinderman.
    “I dunno. It just got a little creepy in there. No reason. Just a feeling.” She shrugged. “I dunno.”
    “You’re very tired. Please go home,” the detective told her. “There are nurses… .”
    “All the same, I hate to leave her. She’s so pathetic.” She flicked another ash and her eyes were slightly darting. “Yeah, I guess I’m pretty beat, though. You really think I should?”
    “You’ve been wonderful. Go home now.”
    Jourdan looked relieved. “Thanks, Lieutenant. Good night.” She turned and walked away quickly. Kinderman watched her. She felt it, too, he thought, the same thing. But what? What’s the problem ? The old lady didn’t do it.
    Kinderman watched an old scrubwoman working. On her head was a soiled red bandana. She was mopping up the floor. That’s a scrubwoman mopping, he thought, that’s all.
    Again in touch with normality, he went home. He ached for his bed.
    Mary was waiting up for him in the kitchen. She was sitting at the little maple table, dressed in a pale blue woolen robe. She had a sturdy face and mischievous eyes. “Hello, Bill. You look tired,” she said.
    “I am turning into an eyelid.”
    He kissed her on the forehead and sat.
    “Are you hungry?” she asked him.
    “Not a lot.”
    “There’s some brisket.”
    “Not the carp?”
    She giggled.
    “And so how was your day?” she asked.
    “Good times, as usual, gambling.”
    Mary knew about Kintry. She’d heard it on the news. But they’d agreed years before that Kinderman’s work was never to enter the peace of their house, at least not as a subject of conversation. The late night calls could not be helped.
    “So what’s new? How was