The Dream Walker

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “The other?” I made myself stop thinking about Charley Ives.

  “The accomplice. The one who does the walking, on schedule, and then vanishes. The one people see. Her job isn’t easy.” He spoke with a good deal of sympathy. I suppose he’s had experience and knows what it means to turn up on schedule, and to vanish, too.

  “How could there be such a person? How can they do all this?”

  “Ah,” said Gray, “we wish we knew.”

  “And why?” said I. But I wasn’t really wondering why. I was worrying only about my own position. How could I turn away from Cora? And how could I not? What should I do? Now, I can understand that nobody expected me to be superhumanly wise. But me. Which was pretty vain and foolish, but there I floundered.

  When Charley came down in about five minutes, he wore his poker face. They both went away, saying only polite good-byes. I felt cast out.

  I went up to Cora’s room and found her in a weeping rage. Charley Ives had made her so. Who else? So I proceeded to be patient and soothing toward the furious woman whom I even tried to forgive for taking some of her anger out in sullen unresponsiveness to me. But whom I neither knew, nor understood, nor even deeply cared for. No harm if, passively, in suspension of judgment, I stood by an old friend, said I to myself, compulsively.

  That’s when she decided to go through with it. She had compulsions of her own. Marcus says the difference between us was only that she didn’t take the risk on the side of kindness. But I think Marcus is kind.

  Chapter Ten

  The whole month of April went by with Cora barricaded, everybody baffled, hue and cry. Nothing more happened until that fifth day of May.

  Darlene, meanwhile, was going about her business. Kent Shaw stayed out West. He was not seen about, and certainly not thought about by me. Raymond Pankerman was in the throes now, and his case competed with Cora’s in the headlines.

  And Cora remained in that hospital, acting, acting. Doctors came and went. Policemen came and went. Before all of these, she remained stubbornly baffled, herself, afraid of her own mystery, and unable to remember (that neat device that saved her so much trouble and risk) any more than was on record already about her dreams.

  And I came and went, in the delusion that I was aloof but kind, and I found Cora listless, playing prostration. We would speak idly of other things. I must have been restful. But Charley Ives came no more. I did not see him anywhere.

  Now a day or so after Cora’s stormy time with Charley Ives, she had a jeering little note from Kent Shaw. I brought her mail from her apartment. She let me read the note. It said:

  CORA, DARLING:

  Dead bodies, aw-ready! Come off it, why don’t you? Next time you get on your broom, keep away from Los Angeles. This kind of town, a man takes too much dope some night, they clean the streets. Me, I don’t believe all I read in the papers. When I do, send me rue, send me rosemary.

  KENT

  I made nothing of that. Maybe Cora saw both a reassurance and a threat in it. And took rosemary for remembrance. She wanted to believe Kent Shaw was not a killer. And she knew nothing about Ed Jones, except what had been in the papers. Nobody knew he was the man in Chicago, or in the snow. That was only guesswork. Maybe she could believe that Kent Shaw, looking for something dead, had found a body. Just any body. Maybe she swallowed that. In a way, she had to. Anyhow, the public uproar continued.

  It was bad for the hospital. Cora thought it was a fortress, but it was her prison. Charley Ives had put her there to keep, and the hospital, resenting it fiercely, was nevertheless stuck with her. So she spread herself out in that room-and-bath, bringing her own things, becoming cozy. But newspapermen crept about the building, trying to get in and the open pressure they put on was enough nearly to buckle the walls. Cora kept refusing to see the press.

  On the fourth day of May, she capitulated. She agreed to talk to one and chose Ned Dancer for that one because she knew him. He could relay the interview or not, as he pleased. (He’d better please, said the rest.) She would see him tomorrow, at 2:00 P.M., if Dr. Harper and I would consent to be present.

  So then it was the fifth of May, and at 2:00 P.M., Ned was ceremoniously admitted, and along with him who should turn up but Charley Ives.

  “Mind?” he said.

  Cora said wanly and sweetly, “Of course not, Charley. Please do stay.” If there was a glitter in the eyes, the lids were heavy and hid it. I didn’t sense the malice. I was busy taking care to be calm and detached in my chosen position, standing by.

  I will not forget that fifth incident. The scene exists somewhere indelibly in my brain as if it were a film in a can. It actually does exist on a piece of tape, for anyone to hear again. Ned Dancer had brought the inevitable recorder. Cora made no objection. Ned said there were some people who didn’t trust him, as he plugged it into the wall and set the microphone on the table.

  Cora was propped high on the bed, having climbed back in to play invalid for this occasion. She wore a rose-pink woolly bed jacket and careful makeup. Set among her froth, which could not entirely conceal the hospital white and hospital austerity, she was rosily and frivolously pretty, except for the pawn-of-fate mask on the face and the nervous slide of the hands along the edge of the sheet, back and forth. Ned Dancer stood up to the right of her and asked his questions in his unemotional voice. The doctor, a tubby little man with graying hair en brosse, rimless glasses, and an air of harassed goodwill, was silently standing behind him.

  Charley Ives was sprawled in the low visitor’s chair, overflowing it, not so much physically as by the very quality he has of being noticeable. I had refused that chair or any. I was literally standing by, on Cora’s left. I remember my dress because I wore it for days afterward, a crisp taffeta with white at neck and cuff (which white I laundered in some odd places).

  Cora answered Ned’s questions patiently and without ire. There was nothing new. We’d heard these answers all before. The interview went drearily as the tape rolled relentlessly on the spool. At half past two, Dr. Harper shifted position, as Cora’s eyes closed tiredly. “About enough …” he began.

  “One or two more,” Ned begged, “and then I’d like to talk to you, Doctor.”

  “Nothing I can tell you,” Dr. Harper said, quickly putting up his defenses. I was listening to this exchange.

  Charley rose from the chair. Cora’s head had slipped sideways. I stood there and saw the flutter of her heart expressed in trembling pink wool and I thought, appalled, “Oh, no, no, no! Not again! Not anymore!”

  The doctor stepped closer. Ned Dancer said, “What?” Then sharply, “Is that a trance state, Doctor?”

  Dr. Harper touched her. Her lips tightened. He lifted a hand to slap her cheek and Ned stopped him. “Wait,” he begged. “Let’s just see what happens. This is giving me a break.” His bleak eyes commented: Break, yah! No doubt my presence was arranged. He looked around at the spool of tape still turning. “How long do these things last?”

  Charley said, “Can you tell she’s faking, Doc? What about it?”

  Dr. Harper licked his lip. When he spoke he must have had the turning tape in mind, because it was a fine screen of obscuring syllables, sounding calm and judicious, but with no meaning. He didn’t even commit himself to saying he didn’t know.

  Ned said anxiously, “That’s an hour’s tape and there’s about twenty minutes left. What do you think? Shall I turn it off? I want to get this and I’d rather not stop it. How many minutes do these fits run?”

  “You want a prophecy?” said Charley, somber and resigned.

  Dr. Harper forgot his caution. “I can bring her out of that, I think.” I knew at once he had pain in mind.

  “No, no,” said Ned. “Wait a minute. Listen …” he wanted the story. (May he be forgiven.)

  “Sit down, Ollie,” Charley said to me. “You don’t have to stand there, for gosh sakes. You look like you’re going to fall down.”

  “I’m all right,” I said, trying not to fall ag
ainst his arm. But I wasn’t all right. I did need supporting. I was tired to death of the whole business. How long could I stand by while this went on? How long was Cora (my old friend Cora) going to keep it up? At first I was weary. Then, I was afraid. It seemed too long, too much, too elaborate. She’d got all the publicity possible already. She was in a mess about a murder. What more did she want? How could it go on?

  What if, I thought, Cora really was helpless, was ill in the sense of being abnormal, supernatural? Then, was it a shell, lying there in pink, and did Cora herself, clothed in a spare body, like a second suit of clothes, walk somewhere? Speak somewhere? To be seen and heard somewhere else, not here?

  To believe that all this was contrived seemed just as mad as to believe it wasn’t. For the first time, really, I, Olivia Hudson, tasted belief in the appearances. It was the first time and the last.

  The clock and the tape rolled on and on with our heart beats, Charley’s, where the back of my head was resting, mine near where his hand held me. Time played tricks with me, being very long, very short. It was actually twelve minutes before Cora opened her eyes and straightened her neck and stiffened her back.

  Ned glanced at the tape, still going, and was about to speak when I said (may I be forgiven), “Don’t interrupt. She forgets, if you do.”

  Cora said in that brisk way she had of speaking her part, so effective, because it sounded like simple reporting with all her emotions postponed. “I was walking. I was in a park. Wearing my gray coat. I stopped to … see where I was. There was a man on the path who said to me, ‘Beg pardon, could I ask a favor of a stranger?’ He wasn’t young, wasn’t old. I knew him.” Cora pressed her temples in her palms. She had the stage. Not one of us moved. “He said to me,” she went on, “‘Would you give this envelope to an old gentleman around the corner, sitting on a bench, over there? Just tell him it’s from Ray.’ ‘I’ll be glad to,’ I said, ‘if you will tell me where I am.’ ‘You are in Washington,’ he told me. ‘Just do this thing for me?’ So I walked around the corner and there was an old gentleman and I gave him the envelope. It was pale blue. And I said, ‘This is from Ray.’ And he thanked me and put it away. So I.…” She hesitated.

  Charley’s hands hurt me. Charley said in a quiet voice but one that vibrated through my whole body, “Who was the old gentleman?”

  “Marcus,” said Cora at once, staring into space. “John Paul Marcus.”

  “And this Ray?”

  “I’ve seen his picture all over,” she said. “I think the name is Pankerman. So I.…”

  “What’s this?” Ned’s eyes jumped.

  Cora looked bewildered. Her eyes changed focus. “I don’t know,” she faltered.

  “That’s all for now?” said Charley in that same voice.

  “It fades,” she whimpered.

  “The hell it fades—” Charley threw me aside and went over and jerked out the cord of the tape recorder.

  “Let it alone,” bellowed Ned Dancer. “Wait a minute. Cora, what did Marcus do with the envelope?”

  Cora opened her mouth but didn’t speak. Charley was stuffing the cord into the recorder’s case with violent haste. He discarded the microphone. He shut down the lid. Ned said, “Hey, that’s mine.”

  Charley said, “Dancer, if you breathe.…”

  Ned said, “I got to.”

  “Come to Washington. You can’t print this kind of stuff without checking.”

  “No,” Ned said.

  “And you won’t.” Charley wasn’t asking.

  “I will, if it checks,” Ned said. “I got to.”

  Charley said, “Doc, keep quiet and shut her up. Don’t let anybody in here.”

  “Nurse.…”

  “Keep the nurses quiet.” Charley yanked out Cora’s telephone. The doctor yelped. “The woman’s a devil,” said Charley Ives. “I’d strangle her, gladly, right now. If it would do any good. Which it wouldn’t. You, keep her quiet.” Cora began to wail and moan. Charley now had the tape recorder in one hand and Ned’s shoulder in the other. “Cousin Ollie,” he barked at me. “You better keep her lying mouth shut.”

  “Get out of here,” the doctor said wearily.

  Ned Dancer opened the door. The doctor was bending over his writhing patient with his ear close. We didn’t hear it. We were not meant to hear it yet. But she told him, then or a little later, one thing more.

  I didn’t hear it because I went out the door behind the men. “It’s all lies,” I said in the corridor.

  Charley sucked air in through his teeth. I’d never seen him so angry, not even the time we had fought so long ago. “Raymond Pankerman passing secret papers to Marcus!” Charley made a sound of such deep disgust that I thought he had spit on the floor.

  “It’s going to check,” Ned Dancer said. “Marcus himself is going to tell us there was this dame in a gray coat.…”

  “That he accepted an envelope from some stranger? From some Ray? Naaaaah.”

  “And put it away. Yes, and it will be found.”

  “Can’t be.”

  “No? Dead body couldn’t be in the ferns, either. This thing is built.”

  “Over my dead body will they get away with this one,” Charley said.

  I said, “Tell me what I can do.”

  Charley herded us both down the hall into Dr. Harper’s office. He closed and locked the door and got on the phone. Ned stood there biting his thumbnail, his cold eyes bleak. I stood against the door.

  “Ruthie?… Charley Ives.” Now Ned moved and listened to little Ruthie Miller’s voice from Washington. “Where is Marcus?… Oh, yes, I see.… Anybody with him?… Cunneen, eh? No, nothing I can tell you. Just ask Marcus not to talk to anybody outside the household. Tell him I’m coming right down.”

  “So he’s in the park?” said Ned.

  “Yes, he’s in the park. It’s a chilly day, but he goes if it isn’t actually storming.” Charley was quoting. His mouth drew down bitterly.

  He dialed long distance again. Maybe you’ve seen a man fight with a telephone for his weapon. Charley argued, insisted, demanded, and finally, although it had taken him twenty minutes, he got a number out of someone that gave him the man he was after.

  “I want to talk to Raymond Pankerman,” said Charley for the sixth time. “I’m told he’s due there.… This is Charley Ives and it is important.… Oh he did? Put him on.… I don’t care what he wants to know. Tell him who is calling.” Charley hung on.

  Ned Dancer lifted his head. “He’s been in the park?” said he lightly, like the flick of a rapier.

  “Yes, he’s just come across the park,” said Charley’s bitter mouth. He was hunched over the phone with one foot on the recorder. I stood tight against the door. Ned moved up and down like a man in a cell. Then once more he put his ear where he, too, could hear the speaker on the wire.

  “Pankerman? My name is Ives. You crossed the park just now?… As a matter of fact, I am interested. You met a woman in a gray coat?… No, I don’t need to tell you what it’s all about. Did you give her anything?… What’s that?… Go to hell!” shouted Charley and hung up and held his head. Ned Dancer said something crude and unfit for my ear.

  “What did he say?” I quavered.

  “He said he didn’t have to answer,” said Charley in a voice of loathing. “Asked me if I’d ever heard of the Fifth Amendment.”

  We stared at each other’s faces.

  (Oh how deep was Raymond Pankerman’s prankish laughter? How much did the ego expand under the tweeds? How sweet was his revenge?)

  Charley jumped up, pushed me aside, and unlocked the door. He herded us out, seeming as big as a mountain and about as lazy and easygoing as a volcano.

  “Tell me how to help,” I cried. “What shall I do?”

  Charley had no hands. He hung onto that recorder and Ned’s shoulder again and Ned was as shifty and nervous as a race horse at the barrier. “You, Teacher?” Charley was thinking about everything but me. “I got to get hold of Gray. Ned and I are
going to Washington, right quick. Find the accomplice. Get the whole damn scheme out by the roots. Prove exactly how they are working this.” He spun around.

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  Charley gave me one blue flash through his lashes. Then they were off, taking the stairs, looking for an escape from what other newsmen might be lurking in the lobby. They went too fast for me to follow.

  I knew, as well as Charley did, how this could hurt Marcus. What, he had any furtive truck at all with such as Pankerman? If such a thing were rumored, the whole country would wince and ask an explanation.

  Rumored! But the way of this rumor was so fantastic! There was no explanation of Cora Steffani, the Dream Walker. No way to understand how she could have done what she said she did in that park. But, oh, there would be people to swear that Pankerman was in the park, at the exact right time. And Cora had done it before, as the whole world thought it knew. There was a dead man in the ferns, wasn’t there? So some would dismiss this for a ridiculous falsehood, and some would not. But fraud or no fraud, not one cranny of the nation could fail to reverberate with the story. Marcus would be in the white heat of publicity, defensive, trying to prove a negative, denying.

  Denying what? We didn’t even know yet what was supposed to be in the envelope, but I quaked to think of it. Ned Dancer must be right. There would be an envelope. The devilish scheme would include a real envelope, somehow, somewhere. It wasn’t all clear in my head, but I felt that here was the reason for the whole scheme. I felt they meant to injure Marcus and this purpose was important enough for all the trouble.

  Charley Ives was right. The one thing to be done was expose. Get it out. Open it. Find out who, how, why, and tell, on our side, with fact, fact, and fact. We could not sit smug and say, “Why that’s ridiculous. Untrue. Who could believe such nonsense!” People didn’t have to believe the nonsense. Doubt was enough. Doubt, for most, is exactly the same thing as condemnation. Those who are really able to suspend judgment are not in the majority. Even they aren’t getting anywhere, but only preparing to get somewhere.