The Far Cry

by Fredric Brown

  Poor Vi; it wasn't really her fault that she was what she was. Their unhappiness was his fault much more than hers. His fault for leaping before he looked, for not having known her long enough, before he suggested marriage, to have realized the complete incompatibility between them.

  Poor Vi; she was caught in a trap, even as he. Like him, she acquiesced in a marriage without love because fundamentally she was decent enough to think of the children first. She was weak, silly—but not vicious. Her selfishness was all in little things.

  And in one way at least this must be worse for her than for him; she was the more romantic one of the two of them. Love stories, love songs, every form of sentimental mush and gush, were her very life.

  He looked down at her closed eyes, her puffy face, her dishwater-colored hair that managed to be stringy despite frequent, and misnamed, permanents. Her skin was getting blo'tchy from too much drinking and too much candy— he often wondered which was the worse for her. Still under thirty but with her body getting grosser every year, her breasts beginning to be flabby and to sag, striation marks from a difficult delivery marring her thighs, the ugly mole—

  Dreaming now, no doubt, of some Prince Charming of a radio program or a magazine story—who, for Vi, would never come. She was stuck with him, George Weaver— and, just for a moment, he saw himself through her eyes.

  Let her sleep, for as long as she could.

  He took his typewriter out to the shed and put it on the table there, stacked paper next to it.

  He sat down in front of it and fed a piece of white paper into the machine, then sat staring at it, wondering how he could begin to write the story of Jenny Ames. Then wondering if he could write it at all.

  He’d found out all he could—had talked to everybody who knew anything about her at all, and still he knew absolutely nothing that was not in the newspaper account.

  Did it make a story? No, there were too many missing factors. An algebraic equation full of unknowns, and the biggest unknown was Jenny herself.

  Picture her, picture her in the horrible moment that Pepe Sanchez had seen. Could he start the story there?

  Sudden terror in her eyes, Jenny backed away from the knife, her hand groping behind her for the knob of the kitchen door. She was too frightened to scream and anyway there was no one to hear, no one but the man who came toward her with the knife—and he was mad, he must be mad. Her hand found the knob and turned it; the door swung outward into the night and she whirled through it, running. Death ran after her.

  But the words wouldn’t come. The picture, but not the words.

  Damn, he thought; why was he trying this at all? He wasn’t a writer. Why didn’t he simply send the facts he had, meager or not, to Luke and tell him that was everything available and then let Luke do the rest? Why didn’t he simply get it off his mind, the easy way?

  After a while he heard the radio from the house; Vi must be awake again. And it was a talking program but not loud enough for him to understand the voices so that was all right. As long as he couldn’t make out the words, the sound itself was almost soothing.

  Damn it, he ought to write to Luke anyway. And there was paper in the machine; why not now? He put a date line on the paper and then:

  Dear Luke:

  I’m afraid I’m being frustrated by the job you gave me. I’ve been digging in, or trying to—but there just aren’t any facts I can find out besides those in the newspaper account of the murder. And you must have read that, and decided it was insufficient, when you made your own investigation of the case. In fact, if you took notes at that time and still have them, I don’t know how I can help you at all.

  There’s still that damnable puzzle of the motive. Was it purely a psychopathic crime or was there gain for Nelson? If only Jenny Ames could be traced back beyond Albuquerque, maybe we could get somewhere. But if she couldn't be traced then, how can she be traced now, after eight years?

  The odd thing is how deeply I’ve found myself interested, almost obsessed, in thinking about the missing pieces of the puzzle—and how curious I've become.

  It occurs to me—just now, in fact—that Nelson might have been traced, at the time, through his painting style. He wasn't just pretending to be an artist; maybe he wasn’t too good a painter, but he took himself seriously. Wherever he went from here, he kept on painting. I've got three pictures of his—they were in the shed back of the house—that I've had framed because I like them.

  His style is quite individual: I think if I ever saw another painting of his—at least one painted at about the same period—I'd recognize it at sight. It’s too late now, probably, but if somebody had thought, then, to hang those three pictures somewhere in Taos, say in the lobby of a hotel where tourists would see them, and put a placard by them explaining that a wanted killer had painted them, sooner or later someone would have said, "Why, I know who painted those—"

  I also have a hunch, incidentally, that Nelson stayed in the Southwest. It seems probable that he had t.b., although since he wasn’t treated by a doctor here nobody knows how badly he had it. But it’s probable that he'd want to stay in the warm dry climate of New Mexico or Arizona—probably that's why he came here in the first place. And if he intended to cut back westward again and wanted to throw pursuit off the trail, that would account for why he registered under the name of Nelson in Amarillo, east of here. (There's also sixty dollars worth of reason in the form of cashed traveler's checks.) But I think he might have gone as far east as Amarillo deliberately and established himself there, as it were, on purpose to make the police think he was heading east or south (he left a red herring query about the roads to El Paso) so he could double back to, say, Arizona and not be traced there. The police should have concentrated their search there—particularly in artists’ colonies and tuberculosis sanatoriums. Or maybe they did, for all I know; maybe I'm second guessing. But they did miss that angle of reproducing his pictures.

  I wish I could think of some equivalently good way of trying to trace Jenny Ames backward to wherever she came from.

  Well, if you want me to send you what dope I have, let me know and I'll do it. But I don't think it's really enough—and I'm just cussed enough and interested enough to keep on trying—if I can think of any more angles to try. Also it gives me something to do and something to be interested in—and God knows I need both.

  Vi is here now; got in this morning.

  Do you still want me to go ahead and take some pictures to go with the article? Or, unless I get something more on the story itself, should we forget the whole thing? I can take a picture or two of the house—will probably do that anyway—and maybe an interior shot of the kitchen, showing the doorway Pepe Sanchez saw her run through. And if you think it’s worth it, maybe I can find the man who found the body and have him show me the exact spot so I can take a picture of that. . . .

  He finished the letter and got it ready to mail; then he' went back to the house. Vi was eating candy and listening to the radio. The radio voices weren't soothing, now that he could hear them clearly.

  "Time for lunch, Vi. Let’s celebrate your arrival by eating in Taos this noon. And it'll give you a chance for a look at the town; I drove right through it on the way here. Besides, I've got a letter I want to mail.”

  "All right, George. But when this program is over. Shhhhh."

  Weaver waited.

  Chapter Eight

  Time, a week of it, passed slowly. To Weaver, it seemed like a month.

  He worried about money, for one thing. Money is something to worry about when none is coming in and plenty— more than he'd anticipated—going out. There was going to be less left in the fall than he’d hoped. He worried about how difficult it might be for him to get into the swing of things; and if there was no backlog left, he'd be starting cold, from scratch.

  The money was going out faster than he’d thought it would go. Vi's drinking—and she disliked wine, so her drinking cost more than his—didn't help. And almost every night she wa
nted to go, insisted on going, to one of the bars in Taos. And when you go to a bar you buy drinks for others and it runs you at least ten dollars before the evening is over, as against less than half that much if you stay home and do your drinking there. Oh, he enjoyed it—or parts of it—in a way, but there was the money going. Free rent, sure, but they were spending overall as much as if they'd kept their apartment in Kansas City. And, on top of it, the money that it was taking to keep the two girls in camp. Not that he begrudged that.

  So he worried. Sometimes he had dreams, almost nightmares, of the kind that had started his breakdown and had sent him to the sanatorium back home.

  He told himself, you damned fool, you’re here so you won’t worry. Forget it. A month or two without worrying at all is better than a whole goddam summer spent in worrying how much you’re spending. Forget money.

  Sure, but try to forget money when it’s going out and not coming in, and when the bottom of your bank account is in sight and you don’t know how soon you’ll be working again or how much money you’ll be able to make when you are. Try to forget money under circumstances like that.

  Well, there’s one way. Concentrate away from it. Think about something else.

  He concentrated on Jenny Ames just for something to concentrate on. He’d tried to paint and it hadn't helped. He’d tried to write, and he couldn’t. Neither fact surprised him; he knew that he was neither a painter nor a writer. He was just a—what was he? Just a guy who'd learned a little about the real estate business and didn’t know enough to do anything else, and had been forbidden to do the only thing he did know. Not that that worried him—he didn’t really like real estate—except for the fact that no money was coming in.

  He found himself thinking a lot about Jenny Ames.

  Of an evening, he'd be sitting in the kitchen having a drink with Vi, while it was early dark, still too early for them to drive into Taos if they were going that night, and he'd catch himself staring at the kitchen door that led out into the night, the illimitable dark into which—

  Sometimes he'd sit there again after they’d come home, a little drunk, Vi already in bed (she was always ready to turn in when they returned; Weaver seldom was) and—well, he'd almost see Jenny standing there. A girl with a white face and black hair, a green dress, her hand groping behind her for the door.

  Once, when he was drunk enough, he talked to her. But she didn't answer.

  It was the day after that when he began to find himself hating the three Nelson paintings hanging in his shack. Oh, he still liked them, but now he hated them too. And that happened to be the day he got a letter from Luke about the paintings. It read: -

  Dear George:

  You idiot, you. You write and ask me whether it’s worth while carrying on writing a story about the Jenny Ames murder and you almost convince me, for the first umpteen paragraphs, that it isn't, and then you come up with an idea that's worth its weight in printer‘s ink.

  There probably ought to be a special law in artists' colonies like Taos that sheriffs and other law officers ought to have a working knowledge of art. Then the sheriff who worked on the Nelson case wouldn't have overlooked, while it was hot, the idea of circularizing the country to find Nelson through his painting style.

  Now after eight years, it’s pretty much of an off-chance that he can be found that way. But, you idiot, don’t you see that whether it works or not isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that now you've got a really good story angle, so good that selling the story is a lead-pipe cinch. And you ask if pictures of the paintings should be taken!

  That's your lead. The fact that now, through this article, an eight-year old murder may be solved through an angle that was overlooked at the time of the original investigation. "Does any reader of this article know an artist who paints, or who painted eight years ago, in the style of the three pictures shown here?"

  It's a dilly, George. That’s the peg on which you hang the whole thing. Guard those pictures, and that idea, with your life. See that nobody beats you to the punch on it.

  I still don’t see why somebody didn't think of it at the time—unless the sheriff was the only one who knew about them. That could have been; I didn’t learn about them in the course of the brief investigation I made of the case, and I probably would have if their existence had been general knowledge.

  But those pictures are a real find, and they make the story money in the bank for you if you handle it right. It makes it so damn good that I hate to cut in on it. Why don’t you write it yourself, George?

  There are two good reasons why you should. One is that I've got an extension of my contract here; I’ve been hired to work on two more crime documentaries after this one. I'm making more money than I’ve ever made before and—hold thumbs for me— if the pictures I'm working on go over, I might never have to go back to magazine writing at all. The other reason is that the idea and the discovery of the paintings is strictly yours and I've got no business to chisel in, even if I needed dough, which I don't.

  So let's change my original suggestion to this: You write the article and take the photographs, including really good ones of the paintings, and send them to me. If the article turns out to be salable as written I'll forward it to my agent in New York to peddle for you and won't cut in at all. Counting the price you’ll get for the photographs, and counting out the agent's fee of ten percent, you should get at least three hundred, maybe four hundred bucks.

  If your story needs rewriting—and it shouldn’t if you read a couple of fact detective magazines to get the general style and slant—I’ll rewrite it for you. If all the data is there, no matter how you've written it, it shouldn't be more than a couple of hours work for me, and the charge will be one bottle of whisky, payable after you've made the sale and whenever we'll have a chance to drink it together. It’s got to be good acquiring expensive habits out here in Hollywood—but it won’t make too big a hole in your profits on the deal.

  Glad to learn that Vi is now with you and that . . .

  Three or four hundred bucks, Weaver thought. That much money was worth shooting for. And he’d been thinking of trying to write the story himself anyway.

  "Vi, did you bring my camera?” . .

  “Camera? Oh, George, I forgot about it. I remember now your writing me to bring it, same time you told. me to bring the typewriter, but the camera was put away in the trunk I’d already sent to storage, the things we didn’t want to leave in the apartment while it was sublet, and I was going to go down to the storage company and get it and then at the last minute there were so many things to do and . . ."

  "That's all right, Vi. I want to take a few pictures while we’re here, but I can rent or borrow a camera for a few days. Want to ride in with me now? You can have a drink while I’m hunting one up. There's a photographer's place near the Taos Inn; I can probably get one there .”

  “Sure, George. But I can't go dressed this way—”

  They left half an hour later, Vi dressed another way, and drove to Taos. He left Vi at the Taos Inn sipping a martini—her favorite drink in bars, although it was too much trouble for her to make them for herself when she drank at home—while he made arrangements to rent a camera for a few days and bought several rolls of film to go with it.

  He'd get right at taking the pictures, he decided, and he’d start work right away on the story. Three or four hundred bucks would make a hell of a lot of difference in his budget. He knew that he was taking advantage of Luke's generosity to take him up on the proposition, especially if it turned out that Luke would really have to rewrite the story, but maybe he could make it up to Luke some time, some way.

  Let's see, was there anything else he wanted before starting the story?

  Before he went into the bar of the Taos Inn to get Vi, he went to the phone in the lobby and called Callahan.

  "Weaver," he said. “Callahan, do you know whether the Seco man who found the body is still around? If I remember the name right, it’s Ramon Camillo
."

  "That's the name, but I don’t know if he's still around or not. Ask them at the Arroyo Seco post office; they’ll be able to tell you—and to tell you where he lives, if he’s still there .”

  "Thanks, I’ll do that.”

  "Find out what you wanted to find out in Albuquerque?”

  “More or less. The hotel’s gone, but I talked to the editor of the Tribune and got a few little extra details that'll help the story."

  “Good. Say, Weaver, I understand your wife's with you now. Why don‘t you drop around at the house with her some time? Do you play bridge?”

  “I do, but the missus doesn't. Sorry.”

  "Well, bridge isn’t the only thing in the world. Drop around anyway—any evening; if our lights are on, we’re home."

  Weaver promised that they would.

  He wondered whether he meant it or not. He liked Callahan all right, but he'd rather meet Mrs. Callahan first before he brought Vi around. Vi was—well, Vi could be embarrassing when she drank too much, and she’d probably drink too much if drinks were served. And if Callahan’s wife was the dignified, reserved type of woman, she'd be embarrassed by Vi. Vi seldom got bitchy from drinking—although even that could happen—but four or five drinks could make her pretty sloppy, and that was almost as bad.

  Bridge. He wished that they could play bridge. He'd liked it a lot, once. And he'd tried his best to teach Vi to play, but she just didn't have the brains to learn, or sufficient ability to concentrate. After a year of trying, her bidding and playing were so random and haphazard that—for the sake of the people they’d tried to play with—he'd given up the game completely.

  He got Vi out of the bar and drove toward home, stopping at the little post office in Arroyo Seco en route. He asked the postmaster about Ramon Camillo.

  “Ramon, he still lives here winters. But summers up in Colorado, Montana, the sheep."