The Dream Walker

by Charlotte Armstrong

  I saw all this. I could no longer stand around piously maintaining that I hadn’t enough to go on, so I wasn’t making up my mind. Harm was being done. You can’t just tolerate cruelty, unkindness. You have to find something to go on. I gave up being inhumanly detached. I was just as human as anybody else. I took some things on faith. I chose my side. That’s not enough, either. I must go find proof that the Dream Walker was a wicked fraud.

  I went downstairs and talked the hospital into cashing a big check. I wasn’t a policeman. I had to do what I could do.

  I called on Josephine Crain.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Jo,” I said, “I’m here to beg you to help me prove that Cora Steffani is a fraud and this business a hoax.”

  “Well!” Josephine’s lovely eyes were amused. She drew me down on a quaint little sofa in her sunny room. “What’s happened, Olivia? I thought you were her little soldier.” (I hoped she’d never have to know what had happened.) “Not that I don’t agree with you,” Jo added. “She’s used me and I don’t like that. Never did.”

  “Tell me about the woman on the beach. She wasn’t Cora, of course. How was she different?”

  “I don’t like to talk about it and don’t quote me, Ollie, or I’ll scream.” Jo looked at me thoughtfully. “But there was one thing that nobody seems to have noticed. In her little scene, I had no lines.”

  “Charley Ives noticed that.”

  “Bright lad. Look, Ollie, my dear, I saw her for the briefest moment. I hardly got my attention out of my book. She resembles this Cora, of course. It’s the same nose.”

  “I want a difference.”

  Jo said, “I’ve seen this Steffani on TV, you know.”

  “Go on, Jo. You did notice something.”

  “The woman I saw on the beach didn’t use her hands. Whereas Steffani is the handy kind,” Jo made with beautiful accuracy one of Cora’s flying gestures. “That’s a deep habit, a mannerism like that.” She looked at me sideways.

  “Doesn’t help much, unless you’re ready to swear.”

  “I’m convinced,” Jo shrugged. “But what would it mean if I did swear?”

  “Was she excited?”

  “Not very. A cool customer, I’d say. I think she intended to seem upset and confused. But her hands didn’t move, Ollie.”

  I sat thinking of Cora’s hands, acting out annoyance, anguish, bewilderment, anything, everything.

  “Every hair on your head says this is important,” Jo smiled. “Don’t tell me why, if I shouldn’t know.”

  “I need some proof. I need it bad. Tell me this, Jo. You do go to the beach as a regular thing? People could expect you to be there?”

  “I go South for the sun and I insist on it. Yes, I sit on the beach and read or study every day that it is possible and nobody disturbs me. Yes, it’s regular. I daresay I am as good as a sundial.”

  “That’s why they used you,” I said.

  “It seems to me they’ve used you, too,” she reminded me.

  “Jo, if you think of anything.…”

  “If I had proof,” she said tartly, “I’d have trotted it out long ago.”

  I rose and she was willing to let me leave her as abruptly as I wished. I was thinking that surely Josephine Grain’s opinion would have some weight. Josephine Crain’s conviction would convince. Then at her door she said, “Wait a minute. There was a ring on her right hand. A narrow dark stone.”

  My hope ebbed away. An observant woman, an honest woman, who was an expert on gesturing hands, who understood the tyranny of a deep habitual mannerism. So what? It was the ring that would count. Cora Steffani wore on her right hand a ring with a narrow stone.

  Angelo Monti I tracked down (learning from Charley Ives) by wrestling for an hour over the telephone. He was in town and at rehearsal.

  “Miss Hudson,” he said, reluctantly, “I can tell you only that I saw the woman. I saw Cora Steffani. They looked like one to me. I am shortsighted. My vision is not all that it ought to be. Perhaps I am not a good eyewitness. I hope not.”

  “They are two women and I must find the one you saw in Chicago.”

  He didn’t argue with me. He had soft brown eyes, and whether they could see well or not, they were sympathetic. “I wish I could help you,” he said. “You are very determined, for some reason.”

  “Any smallest thing.…” I thought to myself he was a kind of expert, too. “Her voice?”

  “Her ordinary voice,” said Monti, “is a little bit nasal. Not bad. Not good.”

  “Cora’s isn’t.”

  “Is that true?”

  “But did you never hear Cora speak?”

  “I hear her on the air. Then it is the actress voice. Too high in the mouth to my taste. I think it is like some singers who have the worst dreadful speaking voice in this world. They do not use their expensive education for every day, eh?”

  “Cora does,” I insisted.

  “Ah? But this woman spoke to me in Chicago with a nasal voice. Oh, very faint, but unpleasant to me. If she was lost, you know, to be unhappy will change the voice.” He was getting vague and confused. I wondered if he were superstitious.

  “But you’d be willing to say the voice in Chicago is not the voice Cora uses on stage?”

  “That much I would say. My ear is good. Does this have a meaning?”

  “Wait,” I said. “You saw Cora herself, here in New York. Didn’t she speak to you?”

  “She did not,” Monti said. “It was in a studio. I was arriving and she leaving. I did not speak much myself, only to say her name. What does one say to someone you have met in her dream? It is awkward. She looked quickly very unsteady and her friends led her away. Perhaps it was odd that she did not speak at all.” He looked at me hopefully.

  “I think it was odd,” I said.

  “My eyes can be fooled. My ear, no. I guess you are pretty, Miss Hudson. I know your voice is charming and I would recognize it in the dark twenty years from now.”

  “I’m sure you would,” I said warmly. He was such a nice worried kind little man. “But the problem is to find this faintly nasal voice.” He shrugged, looking helpless. “Tell me this, Mr. Monti. Could it be predicted that you would be in that tavern that night?”

  So then he explained about his friend Gallo.

  “I see. I see. Yes, that’s helpful. You were bound to be there and nowhere else. They could count on it.”

  “This helps you believe there are two women. But does it prove so?”

  “No. No, of course not.”

  “The man,” said Monti, “I have identified in a picture.” He shivered delicately.

  “What picture?”

  “A picture of the dead man in Los Angeles. Of course, I don’t trust my eyes. I cannot hear his voice again, unhappily.”

  “The dead man was the same man! The police have talked to you?” I cried.

  “Have they not.” He sighed.

  “Did you mention the woman’s voice to them?”

  “No one asked. I did tell them one more thing, not in the papers.”

  “What was that?”

  “She wore a pin. Gallo, my friend, he agrees to this. It was a small golden horse pinned on her shoulder. Gallo has eyes.”

  “Yes,” I said, my excitement fading. “I mustn’t keep you.”

  I left him. There it was again. An expert, a man with a delicate ear. But who would trust these experts of mine? And their intangibles? Cora’s golden horse, for sale in department stores everywhere, it was solid. It would count.

  I called Miss Reynolds and begged a leave of absence. I suppose my urgency was as obvious over the phone as it was in Jo’s sitting room or the bleak rehearsal hall. She let me go. I caught a cab, all luggageless as I was, to the airport. There are not many seasons when a single person, both flexible and determined, cannot get a seat to where she wants to go. In an hour I was on a plane for Denver.

  I had two little details about the second woman. She did not use her hands much
when she talked and she talked in a voice that was faintly nasal to a very discriminating ear. What, I asked myself, would Dr. Barron of Denver be an expert about? I found out very soon.

  It was dark when I got to Denver and late by the time I had myself dumped on his doorstep. In one of Denver’s inevitable brick houses, I met the gentleman whose voice I already knew.

  “Is there anything at all I can do for you?” he said to me.

  “My name is Olivia Hudson. I’ve come from New York. I need your help.”

  “Why, then, you’ll surely have it,” said he, and he took me in and the first thing I knew I was sipping hot tea while the good man’s wife, who was a little bit of a dumpling with snowy hair and merry young eyes, would not listen to any tale of having been fed on an airplane but prepared to give me nourishment as if I were starving.

  I told Dr. Barron all about the Washington incident. He reminded me of Marcus. Although he was a foot taller and perhaps a foot wider, too, he was just as solid all through.

  “It’s a dirty business, then,” said he. “Bearing false witness like that. Now, how shall I help you, my dear?”

  “Think of something,” said I once more, “that distinguishes those two women. To help me find the other one. Did the one on the path use her hands much?” I made Cora’s gestures. “Like this?”

  “Maybe she didn’t.” Dr. Barron’s beautiful clear gray eyes were intent on the memory of what he had seen.

  “Or the voices. Were they different?”

  “It’s possible. I never swore they were one. After a while, I was not satisfied.”

  “Why weren’t you, sir?”

  “Now, the one that met me on the path,” said he, “that one was making out to be lost.” He looked me in the eye. “But it was all put-on,” he said.

  “You mean she was acting?”

  “Put-on,” he repeated. “It wasn’t true. If ever I saw a young woman who’d know where she was, and all, it was that one. She was not a bit scared and she didn’t think she was doing wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A fellow in my line of work, he meets more of sin and sorrow than the baker’s boy,” said Dr. Barron, “and she wasn’t sinning and she wasn’t sorry. She was cool as a cucumber and it might be that she was doing her duty. But the young lady who came the following day, oh, she was mad.”

  “Cora was mad?”

  “Full of the anger and the hatred. And the weeping and the gnashing of teeth,” he said. “Oh, but that was put-on. And me trying to comfort her when they turned the machine off, and she tickled to death about something all the time. Indeed, she was.”

  I realized his field in which he was an expert. Soul states, you might call it. I gasped. “You mean Cora was triumphant? But of course, she might have been.” I began to turn in my mind my own memories of Cora’s states. I’d known her for seventeen years. All I remembered sensing under the mask was a bit of malice now and then. But of course Cora was malicious. Always had been. I was just used to it.

  “Oh, she wasn’t so easy,” Dr. Barron said, “until I had said my say and she was sure it pleased her. Oh, that weeping and that wailing and that gnashing of teeth, it was put-on all right.” (And he’d know what was put-on. I couldn’t doubt it.) “Sorry,” said he, “she was not. But she was sinning. For I count it not a good sound thing to be full of hate for another. Now, the young man, Charley. He was one she’s mad at.”

  “Oh?” I said faintly. “You mean my cousin, Charley Ives? Why, I guess they quarreled. But Cora doesn’t hate Charley. They were married once, but it was a friendly divorce.”

  Dr. Barron looked at me kindly. “Did you think there was such a thing, my dear?”

  “But tell me.…”

  “Now, my dear, what am I to tell you? That young woman would enjoy the clawing of his bright-blue eyes out. And if she plays she wouldn’t, it’s only put-on. How can I know why that is? But here we’re doing no better than gossiping and we’re no farther.”

  “It’s hardly proof,” I said, feeling very queer. I pulled myself together. “Dr. Barron, did the police ever show you a picture of Edward Jones?”

  “He that leaped out into the path, the day, and grabbed her? They did, indeed, show me a picture but I was too far. If he’s the man who’s dead, I should be sorry I did not swear it was two young women, at the time.”

  “I don’t know how much good it would have done,” I murmured.

  “It’s kind of you to comfort me,” said that darling man. But he needed nobody’s comfort. He was tough, my Dr. Barron, in the most wonderful way.

  “Now, here’s Jane,” he said, “and you’ll have the dish of soup she’s fixed and the bite or two on top of that and you’ll spend what’s left of the night on the couch which I’m told is fair comfortable.”

  “I can’t spend the night, thank you. I requested a seat to Los Angeles, and if they’ve got one for me, I must go. I haven’t much time.”

  Mrs. Barron said, “Ah, dear, can you sleep on them planes so up in the air as they are?”

  Dr. Barron said with the most wonderful smile, “Why not? I see, my dear, you mean to find out what is behind it all. You are very angry with these women.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am very angry.”

  “Good,” said he.

  But I wasn’t going to put on anything. “I don’t know … I don’t care if it’s good or not,” I said, nearly in tears. “If I can I’m going to stop them.”

  “I thought I would tell you,” he said gently, “it’s not always a bad thing to be angry. For I can see you are not used to it. Eat now, while I’m thinking if there is anything at all that I can do.”

  He hadn’t remembered anything more before I found the airline had a seat for me and I left them in a rush, but feeling as if I were tearing myself away from my home. While I was borne in the dark over the mountain snow and over the desert cold, I had the deepest conviction that their prayers rode with me. So I lay in my seat and I cried a little bit. And I felt better.

  Although all I had found out about Darlene Hite was her hands, her voice, and the businesslike state of her soul.

  Chapter Twelve

  Much bedraggled, I got to Los Angeles in the morning, took the airport bus to a hotel downtown, and checked in, but not to rest. I washed my travel-dingy collar and cuffs which (being nylon) dried while I washed myself.

  There was nothing in the papers about Marcus, not yet. I didn’t call Washington or try to tell Charley Ives where I was or why. I had nothing very solid to offer. I considered where to begin here. As I dressed, I thought of renting a car and driving out to Cameroon Canyon. But I realized there was no point in talking to Patrick Davenport. He hadn’t, according to all accounts, seen or heard anything whatsoever outside his house the night of the murder. I knew he was a lean, dynamic man who dominated, wherever he was, talked very fast, and was impossible to interrupt. I didn’t think it would help to tangle with him.

  So I went to the police.

  I was put into the presence of a sober, spruce young man, Sergeant Bartholomew. He had a plain face, a steady eye, a clear soft voice, and he seemed to carry responsibility quietly, as a matter of course, although I soon felt him to be both sensitive and subtle. He repeated my name politely and I knew at once that he recognized it and me and had placed me. I told him I’d come from New York to talk about the murder of Ed Jones. “I want you to tell me things,” I said. “I don’t suppose you will, unless I tell you some things first.”

  “It might be a good idea,” he said with a smile.

  So I told him all about the fifth dream, in the hospital, and Cora and Raymond Pankerman and the blue envelope. I knew I’d have to and I knew it was safe to do so. I didn’t have to argue the implications. His plain face grew stern.

  “Marcus is my great uncle,” I said, “but you know Marcus, too, and this weird lie they are telling must be exposed. I don’t know what’s going on in Washington. I’ve been talking to Josephine Crain and Angelo
Monti and Dr. Barron, so far. Now, I want to find out from you.…” I couldn’t state what I wanted to find out.

  “We want to find out, too,” said he. “Did those people tell you anything useful?”

  “There are two women, Mr. Bartholomew. There must be. And all these people think so.” I told him what I had gleaned. So little. “No proof,” I ended.

  He was smiling over Dr. Barron. “Oh,” he said easily, “there are two women, all right. The other one is the one we are looking for, too.”

  “You think she killed Ed Jones?”

  “We think she’ll know a lot about it.”

  “Angelo Monti identified Ed Jones, didn’t he?”

  “He more or less did. We have to be careful about a single identification from a photograph by a man with poor eyes.”

  “I suppose so,” I said somewhat dejectedly.

  He looked directly at me. “This Cora Steffani wasn’t in any trance state on the night of March twenty-sixth, was she?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Ed Jones was seen in a bar with a woman that night.”

  “Here in Los Angeles? Was she like Cora?”

  “The description’s not very detailed. She probably was the right height and coloring.”

  “Nobody saw a woman on Cameroon Canyon Drive, the night of the twenty-eighth, when Cora said she walked there in the dream?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Patrick Davenport didn’t?”

  “He sure wishes he had,” grinned the sergeant. “He’s called me up six times with queer noises to report that he’s just remembered and so on.” He shook his head. “Nobody saw her, Miss Hudson. She wasn’t there.”

  “Of course Cora wasn’t there.”

  “Neither was her double. I don’t think any slight five-foot-four woman—that’s your own build, Miss Hudson—dragged a big man’s body out of a car into those ferns.” (I suppose I shuddered.) “I wouldn’t be surprised if the accomplice had an accomplice,” he said, watching to see what I would make of this.

  “Do you know anything about this double?” I pleaded.

  “I don’t know whether I do.” He gave me that direct and thoughtful look again.