It is the world’s one crime its
babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve
so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they
seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no
gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they
die like sheep.
He and Guy were not leaden-eyed. He and Guy would not die like sheep now. He and Guy would reap. He would give Guy money, too, if he would take it.
twenty-six
At about the same time the next day, Bruno was sitting in a beach chair on the terrace of his house in Great Neck, in a mood of complaisance and halcyon content quite new and pleasant to him. Gerard had been prowling around that morning, but Bruno had been very calm and courteous, had seen that he and his little stooge got some lunch, and now Gerard was gone and he felt very proud of his behavior. He must never let Gerard get him down again like yesterday, because that was the way to get rattled and make mistakes. Gerard, of course, was the dumb one. If he’d just been nicer yesterday, he might have cooperated. Cooperated? Bruno laughed out loud. What did he mean cooperated? What was he doing, kidding himself?
Overhead a bird kept singing, “Tweedledee?” and answering itself, “Tweedledum!” Bruno cocked his head. His mother would know what kind of a bird it was. He gazed off at the russet-tinged lawn, the white plaster wall, the dogwoods that were beginning to bud. This afternoon, he found himself quite interested in nature. This afternoon, a check had arrived for twenty thousand for his mother. There would be a lot more when the insurance people stopped yapping and the lawyers got all the red tape cut. At lunch, he and his mother had talked about going to Capri, talked sketchily, but he knew they would go. And tonight, they were going out to dinner for the first time, at a little intime place that was their favorite restaurant, off the highway not far from Great Neck. No wonder he hadn’t liked nature before. Now that he owned the grass and the trees, it meant something.
Casually, he turned the pages of the address book in his lap. He had found it this morning, couldn’t remember if he had had it with him in Santa Fe or not, and wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything about Guy in it before Gerard found it. There certainly were a lot of people he wanted to look up again, now that he had the wherewithal. An idea came to him, and he took a pencil from his pocket. Under the P’s he wrote:
Tommy Pandini
232 W. 76 Street
and under the S’s:
“Slitch”
Life Guard Station
Hell Gate Bridge
Give Gerard a few mysterious people to look up.
Dan 8:15 Hotel Astor, he found in the memos at the back of the book. He didn’t even remember Dan. Get $ from Capt. by June 1. The next page sent a little chill down him: Item for Guy $25. He tore the perforated page out. That Santa Fe belt for Guy. Why had he even put it down? In some dull moment—
Gerard’s big black car purred into the driveway.
Bruno forced himself to sit there and finish checking the memos. Then he slipped the address book in his pocket, and poked the torn-out page into his mouth.
Gerard strolled onto the flagstones with a cigar in his mouth and his arms hanging.
“Anything new?” Bruno asked.
“Few things.” Gerard let his eyes sweep from the corner of the house diagonally across the lawn to the plaster wall, as though he reappraised the distance the murderer had run.
Bruno’s jaw moved casually on the little wad of paper, as if he chewed gum. “Such as what?” he asked. Past Gerard’s shoulder, he saw his little stooge sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, staring at them fixedly from under a gray hatbrim. Of all the sinister-looking guys, Bruno thought.
“Such as the fact the murderer didn’t cut back to town. He kept going in this general direction.” Gerard gestured like a country-store proprietor pointing out a road, bringing his whole arm down. “Cut through those woods over there and must have had a pretty rough time. We found these.”
Bruno got up and looked at a piece of the purple gloves and a shred of dark blue material, like Guy’s overcoat. “Gosh. You sure they’re off the murderer?”
“Reasonably sure. One’s off an overcoat. The other—probably a glove.”
“Or a muffler.”
“No, there’s a little seam.” Gerard poked it with a fat freckled forefinger.
“Pretty fancy gloves.”
“Ladies’ gloves.” Gerard looked up with a twinkle.
Bruno gave an amused smirk, and stopped contritely.
“I first thought he was a professional killer,” Gerard said with a sigh. “He certainly knew the house. But I don’t think a professional killer would have lost his head and tried to get through those woods at the point he did.”
“Hm-m,” said Bruno with interest.
“He knew the right road to take, too. The right road was only ten yards away.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because this whole thing was carefully planned, Charles. The broken lock on the back door, the milk crate out there by the wall—”
Bruno was silent. Herbert had told Gerard that he, Bruno, broke the lock. Herbert had probably also told him he put the milk crate there.
“Purple gloves!” Gerard chuckled, as gaily as Bruno had ever heard him chuckle. “What does the color matter as long as they keep fingerprints off things, eh?”
“Yeah,” Bruno said.
Gerard entered the house through the terrace door.
Bruno followed him after a moment. Gerard went back to the kitchen, and Bruno climbed the stairs. He tossed the address book on his bed, then went down the hall. The open door of his father’s room gave him a funny feeling, as if he were just realizing his father were dead. It was the door’s hanging open that made him feel it, he thought, like a shirttail hanging out, like a guard let down, that never would have been if the Captain were alive. Bruno frowned, then went and closed the door quickly on the carpet scuffled by detectives’ feet, by Guy’s feet, on the desk with the looted pigeonholes and the checkbook that lay open as if awaiting his father’s signatures. He opened his mother’s door carefully. She was lying on her bed with the pink satin comforter drawn up to her chin, her head turned toward the inside of the room and her eyes open, as she had lain since Saturday night.
“You didn’t sleep, Mom?”
“No.”
“Gerard’s here again.”
“I know.”
“If you don’t want to be disturbed, I’ll tell him.”
“Darling, don’t be silly.”
Bruno sat down on the bed and bent close to her. “I wish you could sleep, Mom.” She had purple wrinkled shadows under her eyes, and she held her mouth in a way he had never seen before, that drew its corners long and thin.
“Darling, are you sure Sam never mentioned anything to you—never mentioned anyone?”
“Can you imagine him saying anything like that to me?” Bruno wandered about the room. Gerard’s presence in the house irked him. It was Gerard’s manner that was so obnoxious, as if he had something up his sleeve against everyone, even Herbert who he knew had idolized his father, who was saying everything against him short of plain accusation. But Herbert hadn’t seen him measuring the grounds, Bruno knew, or Gerard would have let him know by now. He had wandered all over the grounds, and the house while his mother was sick, and anyone seeing him wouldn’t have known when he was counting his paces or not. He wanted to sound off about Gerard now, but his mother wouldn’t understand. She insisted on their continuing to hire him, because he was supposed to be the best. They were not working together, his mother and he. His mother might say something else to Gerard—like the fact they’d decided only Thursday to leave Friday—of terrible importance and not mention it to him at all!
“You know you’re getting fat, Charley?” his mother said with a smil
e.
Bruno smiled, too, she sounded so like herself. She was putting on her shower cap at her dressing table now. “Appetite’s not bad,” he said. But his appetite was worse and so was his digestion. He was getting fatter anyway.
Gerard knocked just after his mother had closed the bathroom door.
“She’ll be quite a long time,” Bruno told him.
“Tell her I’ll be in the hall, will you?”
Bruno knocked on the bathroom door and told her, then went down to his own room. He could tell by the position of the address book on his bed that Gerard had found it and looked at it. Slowly Bruno mixed himself a short highball, drank it, then went softly down the hall and heard Gerard already talking to his mother.
“—didn’t seem in high or low spirits, eh?”
“He’s a very moody boy, you know. I doubt if I’d have noticed,” his mother said.
“Oh—people pick up psychic feelings sometimes. Don’t you agree, Elsie?”
His mother did not answer.
“—too bad, because I’d like more cooperation from him.”
“Do you think he’s withholding anything?”
“I don’t know,” with his disgusting smile, and Bruno could tell from his tone that Gerard expected him to be listening, too. “Do you?”
“Of course, I don’t think he is. What’re you getting at, Arthur?”
She was standing up to him. She wouldn’t think so much of Gerard after this, Bruno thought. He was being dumb again, a dumb Iowan.
“You want me to get at the truth, don’t you, Elsie?” Gerard asked, like a radio detective. “He’s hazy about what he did Thursday night after leaving you. He’s got some pretty shady acquaintances. One might have been a hireling of a business enemy’s of Sam’s, a spy or something like that. And Charles could have mentioned that you and he were leaving the next day—”
“What’re you getting at, Arthur, that Charles knows something about this?”
“Elsie, I wouldn’t be surprised. Would you, really?”
“Damn him!” Bruno murmured. Damn him for saying that to his mother!
“I’ll certainly tell you everything he tells me.”
Bruno drifted toward the stairway. Her submissiveness shocked him. Suppose she began to suspect? Murder was something she wouldn’t be able to take. Hadn’t he realized it in Santa Fe? And if she remembered Guy, remembered that he had talked about him in Los Angeles? If Gerard found Guy in the next two weeks, he might have scratches on him from getting through those woods, or a bruise or a cut that might raise suspicion. Bruno heard Herbert’s soft tread in the downstairs hall, saw him come into view with his mother’s afternoon drink on a tray, and retreated up the stairs again. His heart beat as if he were in a battle, a strange many-sided battle. He hurried back to his own room, took a big drink, then lay down and tried to fall asleep.
He awakened with a jerk and rolled from under Gerard’s hand on his shoulder.
“By-by,” Gerard said, his smile showing his tobacco-stained lower teeth. “Just leaving and thought I’d say good-by.”
“Is it worth waking somebody up for?” Bruno said.
Gerard chuckled and waddled from the room before Bruno could think of some mitigating phrase he really wanted to say. He plunged back on the pillow and tried to resume his nap, but when he closed his eyes, he saw Gerard’s stocky figure in the light-brown suit going down the halls, slipping wraithlike through closed doors, bending to look into drawers, to read letters, to make notes, turning to point a finger at him, tormenting his mother so it was impossible not to fight back.
twenty-seven
“What else can you make of it? He’s accusing me!” Bruno shouted across the table.
“Darling, he’s not. He’s attending to his business.”
Bruno pushed his hair back. “Want to dance, Mom?”
“You’re in no condition to dance.”
He wasn’t and he knew it. “Then I want another drink.”
“Darling, the food’s coming right away.”
Her patience with it all, the purple circles under her eyes, pained him so he could not look in front of him. Bruno glanced around for a waiter. The place was so crowded tonight, it was hard to tell a waiter from any other guy. His eyes stopped on a man at a table across the dance floor who looked like Gerard. He couldn’t see the man he was with, but he certainly looked like Gerard, the bald head and light brown hair, except this man wore a black jacket. Bruno closed one eye to stop the rhythmic splitting of the image.
“Charley, do sit down. The waiter’s coming.”
It was Gerard, and he was laughing now, as if the other fellow had told him he was watching them. For one suspended, furious second, Bruno wondered whether to tell his mother.
Then he sat down and said with vehemence: “Gerard’s over there!”
“Is he? Where?”
“Over left of the orchestra. Under the blue lamp.”
“I don’t see him.” His mother stretched up. “Darling, you’re imagining.”
“I am not imagining!” Bruno shouted and threw his napkin in his roast beef au jus.
“I see the one you mean, and it’s not Gerard,” she said patiently.
“You can’t see him as good as I can! It’s him and I don’t feel like eating in the same room with him!”
“Charles,” she sighed. “Do you want another drink? Have another drink. Here’s a waiter.”
“I don’t even feel like drinkin’ with him! Want me to prove it’s him?”
“What does it matter? He’s not going to bother us. He’s guarding us probably.”
“You admit it’s him! He’s spying on us and he’s in a dark suit so he can follow us anywhere else we go!”
“It’s not Arthur anyway,” she said quietly, squeezing lemon over her broiled fish. “You’re having hallucinations.”
Bruno stared at her with his mouth open. “What do you mean saying things like that to me, Mom?” His voice cracked.
“Sweetie, everybody’s looking at us.”
“I don’t care!”
“Darling, let me tell you something. You’re making too much out of this.” She interrupted him, “You are, because you want to. You want excitement. I’ve seen it before.”
Bruno was absolutely speechless. His mother was turning against him. He had seen her look at the Captain the way she looked at him now.
“You’ve probably said something to Gerard,” she went on, “in anger, and he thinks you’re behaving most peculiarly. Well, you are.”
“Is that any reason for him to tail me day and night?”
“Darling, I don’t think that’s Gerard,” she said firmly.
Bruno pushed himself up and staggered away toward the table where Gerard sat. He’d prove to her it was Gerard, and prove to Gerard he wasn’t afraid of him. A couple of tables blocked him at the edge of the dance floor, but he could see it was Gerard now.
Gerard looked up at him and waved a hand familiarly, and his little stooge stared at him. And he, he and his mother were paying for it! Bruno opened his mouth, not knowing exactly what he wanted to say, then teetered around. He knew what he wanted to do, call up Guy. Right here and now. Right in the same room with Gerard. He struggled across the dance floor toward the telephone booth by the bar. The slow, crazily revolving figures pressed him back like a sea wave, baffling him. The wave floated toward him again, buoyant but insuperable, sweeping him yet farther back, and a similar moment at a party in his house when he was a little boy, when he tried to get through the dancing couples to his mother across the living room, came back to him.
Bruno woke up early in the morning, in bed, and lay perfectly still, retracing the last moments he could remember. He knew he had passed out. Had he called Guy before he passed out? If he had, could Gerard trace it? He surely hadn’t talked to Guy or he’d remember it, but maybe he’d called his house. He got up to go ask his mother if he had passed out in the telephone booth. Then the shakes came on and he went into th
e bathroom. The Scotch and water splashed up in his face when he lifted the glass. He braced himself against the bathroom door. It was getting him at both ends now, the shakes, early and late, waking him earlier and earlier, and he had to take more and more at night to get to sleep.
And in between was Gerard.
twenty-eight
Momentarily, and faintly, as one re-experiences a remembered sensation, Guy felt secure and self-sufficient as he sat down at his work table where he had his hospital books and notes carefully arranged.
In the last month, he had washed and repainted all his bookshelves, had his carpet and curtains cleaned, and had scrubbed his kitchenette until its porcelain and aluminum gleamed. All guilt, he had thought as he poured the pans of dirty water down the sink, but since he could sleep no more than two or three hours a night, and then only after physical exercise, he reasoned that cleaning one’s house was a more profitable manner of tiring oneself than walking the streets of the city.
He looked at the unopened newspaper on his bed, then got up and glanced through all its pages. But the papers had stopped mentioning the murder six weeks ago. He had taken care of every clue—the purple gloves cut up and flushed down the toilet, the overcoat (a good overcoat, and he had thought of giving it to a beggar, but who would be so base as to give even a beggar a murderer’s overcoat?) and the trousers torn in pieces and disposed of gradually in the garbage. And the Luger dropped off the Manhattan Bridge. And his shoes off another. The only thing he had not disposed of was the little revolver.
He went to his bureau to look at it. Its hardness under his fingertips soothed him. The one clue he had not disposed of, and all the clue they needed if they found him. He knew exactly why he kept the revolver: it was his, a part of himself, the third hand that had done the murder. It was himself at fifteen when he had bought it, himself when he had loved Miriam and had kept it in their room in Chicago, looking at it now and then in his most contented, most inward moments. The best of himself, with its mechanical, absolute logic. Like him, he thought now, in its power to kill.
If Bruno dared to contact him again, he would kill him, too. Guy was sure that he could. Bruno would know it, too. Bruno had always been able to read him. The silence from Bruno now brought more relief than the silence from the police. In fact, he was not anxious at all lest the police find him, had never been. The anxiety had always been within himself, a battle of himself against himself, so torturous he might have welcomed the law’s intervention. Society’s law was lax compared to the law of conscience. He might go to the law and confess, but confession seemed a minor point, a mere gesture, even an easy way out, an avoidance of truth. If the law executed him, it would be a mere gesture.
Strangers on a Train Page 17