The Dream Walker

by Charlotte Armstrong

  As I told them all I knew, I could see that over and above what a real detective had discovered it was scarcely anything. I don’t think they were impressed by my wispy bits of description. All of that seemed feeble and feminine and fairly useless.

  They began to tell me what they knew. They had already dug up three people who had been in the park at half past two, day before yesterday, on the fifth of May. Who all admitted they had watched Marcus, he being a celebrity. Two of them had seen no one approach him. The third one said he had seen a woman in a gray coat speak to Marcus and hand him a piece of paper.

  “He did not,” Gray said. “He’s the kind of witness who doesn’t even know he is lying. Remembers, to suit what he thinks the facts are.”

  Charley said, “He’s talked to reporters already. He’d be the one.”

  “Oh, there’ll be more such witnesses,” Gray said. “Some of them will have seen it all in a dream.”

  Johnny Cunneen said, “I was on the next bench, keeping an eye out, as I always do. But me they don’t listen to.” He held his head.

  “Pankerman admits to being in the park,” Charley said to me, “and all three witnesses say they saw him. We don’t doubt he was there.”

  “Did you see him, Uncle John?”

  “Neither Johnny nor I saw Mm,” said Marcus. “I suppose he kept around that corner, behind the trees.”

  “Does Raymond Pankerman admit he asked that favor of a strange woman? Does he admit he gave her an envelope?”

  “Oh, no. No, indeed. Not at all. For the rest, he stands just as he said he would, on the Fifth Amendment.” Gray looked disgusted.

  “So as not to incriminate himself,” Charley said. “And that’s devilish. Because he does incriminate himself, and Marcus, too.”

  “He has been behind this entire sequence,” Marcus said.

  “Pankerman!” I was astonished.

  “Of course.” Charley ticked off points. “In the park at the right moment. Lying, by this damned device of keeping suspiciously still. His name, his handwriting on the note in the blue envelope. Of course, he’s behind it.”

  “Why?”

  Then Marcus told me how his own hunch had been Pankerman’s fall.

  “Just for revenge?” cried I. “Why, that’s … that’s.…” I had no words for what I thought it was. Personal revenge seemed pitifully small and out of place against the scale of this affair. Personal revenge has been almost outlawed by doctrines of “adjustment” and self-analysis. The whole battery of popular psychology is trained in the opposite direction. Even violence, even war, is no longer thought of as revenge. But it is, I thought. Revenge is exactly what heats the blood. We want revenge. We want to punish. Oh Lord, I thought, who can be wise? What human being—when his blood, his glands, the motivations of his energies are so designed? I knew Marcus would say, as Dr. Barron would say: Anger is ours, built in our blood, to move our bodies. We can’t deny it. It’s just that our brains must tell us what shall make us angry.

  “What was in the envelope?” I asked. God knows I was angry.

  “It’s locked up,” said Charley, “with a couple of handwriting experts. Purports to be a windup, in Pankerman’s handwriting (and I’ll bet that’s genuine, myself), of some secret and damnable dealings between him and Marcus. Winding up, because Pankerman is going to be incapacitated. There’s enough implied, and just enough, to be damned cleverly convincing.”

  “Convincing?”

  “Some people are going to think I am a traitor,” Marcus said and I, thinking of all the stainless years behind him, thought my heart would break.

  “No, they won’t,” I cried. “We’ll stop it. How did they get the envelope into the book? Charley, you should know that.”

  Charley said, “I’ve had our place turned upside down. It would have been too easy. Anybody, dropping around, could have wandered into the shipping department. Anybody with the slightest cover of a reason to see me, for instance, or any one of the editors. Or it could have been a boyfriend of a clerk. Even a fake inspector of some kind. When it was done, we can roughly guess because we know the shipping date. March tenth. But I send Marcus books every month. Not hard to know.”

  “The envelope was glued in?”

  “We think it was. They didn’t want it to fall out, of course. But it was done by gluing a corner of the gummed strip on the envelope itself and who can prove it didn’t happen to fold out, happen to stick?”

  I was silent, appalled.

  “Pankerman is in it and Cora Steffani is in it, and this Darlene Hite is very possibly the other woman.”

  “I’m sure she is,” I said.

  “And the whole thing,” said Charley Ives, “has been working up to this.”

  Ruthie Miller, with her tiny hands clenched, said, “They are just fiends!” I saw Marcus smile at her.

  “I can see, vaguely,” I said, “why Pankerman might do it. I suppose he had to use Darlene or somebody else who looks as much like Cora. What I don’t understand—why would Cora Steffani want to hurt Marcus? Or … or you, Charley? Or …” I floundered, “or me for that matter? She knows how we feel about Marcus. Is she doing this to me and to you, just for the notoriety?”

  Charley said impatiently, “Teacher, she is doing it.”

  “But I thought you and she were … almost together again. I know you’re fond of her. You like a rascal. I understand that. And I’ve rather liked her myself. What motive overpowers that … well, call it fondness?”

  Charley looked at me with pity. Gray said, “Guessing why isn’t going to help us find this Darlene Hite. Which is what we’ve got to do. An awful lot of people are looking for her, right now. But if she killed that man in L.A., believe me, she could be out of the country.”

  “I wonder,” said Marcus. We all listened. “Tell me,” said the old gentleman, “if these people worked out this plan, as they must have done, far in advance and in great detail, could such a plan include this killing?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not. Ed Jones happened to recognize the other woman in Chicago. So they had to keep him quiet. Of course, they couldn’t have planned on killing him from the beginning. I don’t think even Cora—” I stopped. (Why even Cora? Did I think Cora was blood-driven, then? Cora would take revenge? For what?)

  “How did this woman, Cora, know he’d be dead in the ferns on March twenty-eighth?” asked Marcus.

  “Perhaps she didn’t,” I said. “She was shocked. I remember. Don’t you, Charley?”

  “She expected something dead,” Charley reminded me. “But I agree. I don’t think she expected it to be human.”

  “Then,” said Marcus, pursuing his own lucid line of reasoning, “there was a change in plan, and the question is, how were these two women in communication?”

  “A change, sir?”

  “Isn’t it too much to suppose that they had for many weeks planned for something to be dead in those ferns so that when it became necessary to kill a man, he fitted right in?”

  “Ned Dancer had the switchboard operator bribed and Mildred Garrick was paying the maid,” Charley said, surprising me, “and Ollie was there all along. Kept there no doubt to observe that there was no communication.”

  “I observed none,” I said unhappily.

  Marcus gave me a swift loving look. “But they changed a plan. They did communicate. Now, I would like to suppose there had been no Ed Jones. What was the original plan, before they changed it?”

  “Oh, I suppose more stuff,” said Charley. “A few more well-known people, until they had drawn enough attention.”

  “Would it have been quite so violently publicized,” said Marcus, “without that dead man?”

  “I see what you mean, sir,” said Charley. “That dead body is the one thing that really put this show on the road. But that was an afterthought. A revision.”

  “Yes. So I wonder,” said Marcus, “if they had been left with the original scheme only, would they not be planning yet another of these … occ
urrences. A capper incident, to sandwich me in the middle and help the excitement along?”

  We considered this. It seemed right to me. A deliberate anticlimax. A good showman faking a show not to look like a show might do that.

  “They don’t need it now,” Gray said.

  “But when you suggested that Darlene Hite has left the country,” Marcus turned to him, “I began to wonder if her job is quite over. Somebody very clever has designed this thing.”

  “How, in the name of heaven,” cried Johnny Cunneen, leaving off worrying his fingernails with his teeth, “can you guess what they’ll do, if they are planning another one? It may be anywhere in the whole country. It can happen to any one of thousands of people. It lasts about five minutes. You can’t set any trap.”

  Charley said, “But if you could, Darlene Hite would walk right into it.”

  Gray shook his head. “She’s too smart,” he said didactically.

  “Just the same,” said Charley, “on a bare chance, I think we’ll try to be ready.”

  “How can you?” cried Ruthie.

  “Have a plane set to go. Do that much. It only costs money. First sign of any trance, we can take off, and with luck.… After all, this Hite woman does not really vanish into thin air.”

  “She does about as well,” said Gray.

  Charley looked stubborn. Sig Rudolf cleared his throat. He was about to say something ponderous. But I said, “Charley, my boy, I hate to tell you this. But wherever Cora may walk in a dream, there’ll be folks, and if folks, then probably a telephone. We’re not getting anywhere. We can’t just wait and hope Cora does it again and chase around in airplanes …” (which was absurd for air-worn me to be saying). “That’s so feeble,” I sputtered. “While Marcus is going to be hurt.” (Is being hurt, I thought.) “What are the reactions?”

  “Grim faces,” Gray told me, “around the Capitol.”

  “Everybody knows,” said Charley, and now he was up and walking around, “that Marcus is no liar. But, damn it, the thing has got to be explained.”

  “But we can explain it, can’t we?” Ruthie said. “It’s just a plot against him.”

  “Baby,” said Charley Ives, “we have to explain with bells on. We have to do it down to the last hook and eye. We got to get confessions and tape recordings and cross-examinations and witnesses and breakdowns and the works.”

  Sig Rudolf said, “Certainly. Then you can sue, and get it into the courts, where there is some orderly machinery. In centuries of struggle, we’ve figured out the best way men know yet to get at the truth, expose the guilty, protect the innocent, and if we now bypass the work of these centuries and accuse and convict and sentence a man by gossip and rumor—”

  “Sig,” said Charley patiently. “We know. Unfortunately, there’s no law that I ever heard about which says a woman mustn’t be in two places at once, if she can manage to do the trick. We can hardly drag Cora into court for that. Let’s get on, shall we? Now that Ollie’s back.”

  “Tell me what I can do?” I said.

  “Pankerman is sitting behind a mass of lawyers, three deep. Darlene Hite is not available. But Cora Steffani is in that hospital where I was smart enough to put her and keep her handy. So Cora Steffani is our bird-in-hand, and she has got to be broken down until she tells us. Now, you, Ollie, are going to stand by Cora for auld lang syne.…” I began to shake my head. “Even the lie about Marcus,” continued Charley, “while it upsets you, still can’t wean you from your high principles. Can it? You have no proof that Marcus didn’t do it. You don’t believe in condemning people.”

  “No,” I cried. “No.”

  “Ollie, you’re going to have to.”

  “I can’t pretend to be that stupid,” I flared. “Cora’s not that gullible. She knows what I think of Marcus. The whole world knows.”

  “Loyalties,” said Charley, “conflict. Yeah. Well, somehow or other, you’ve got to keep on being her only friend. I don’t care how you handle it.”

  “How can I pretend to be her friend when she’s lying about Marcus? There’s a limit to what’s plausible.”

  “I’m telling you what you can do to help,” he said. (Charley Ives and I were going to fight.) “You asked me. Act, why don’t you? Use your art.”

  “You don’t even understand what it is,” I cried.

  “Make-believe, isn’t it?” he snapped. “How have you managed to stick around being loyal to her since Ed Jones died? Keep that up.”

  (I couldn’t imagine how I’d managed. I didn’t know.) “I was wrong,” I cried. “Absolutely stupid and wrong. But what I’m trying to tell you, for me to step out of character.…”

  “Just be yourself, Teacher,” said Charley. “Just be a kind of unshakable saint, sweetly naïve, nobly aloof, devoted to principle, and stubborn as an ornery old country mule.”

  “Charley, my boy,” I began, “your childish ideas—”

  “Shut up, coz, and listen to me. You’ve got to be tolerant and kind and loyal and understanding.”

  “Who says so!” I raged. “And what are you going to be?”

  “Me, I’m going to be so unnice and caddish and ungentlemanly,” said Charley Ives, “that you and she will quite agree. I’ll rile her up. She’ll turn to you.”

  “You’re a dreamer,” I said. “She’ll never confess to me. Charley, you’re a fool!” I was so mad at Charley Ives that I’d forgotten there were other people in the room.

  Bud Gray said, calmly, “It’s an old police trick, Miss Hudson. The mean cop and the mild sympathetic one, working in a pair.”

  “I’m to be a policeman, then?”

  Marcus said placidly, “You’re not a bad actress, Ollie. You’re a pretty good one.”

  I looked at him and the wind blew wider. “Of course, I’ll try,” I said. “Anything, Uncle John. If you think it might work.”

  “I imagine,” said Marcus, “Charley can make her pretty mad if he wants to.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” I said. “It’s just—”

  “It’s the only.…” Charley put his hands in his pockets as if to keep himself from shaking me. “What can we do but try to upset her and trip her up? She’s safe with her mouth shut, so far, and she knows that and all the or-elseing in the world isn’t going to make her forget that. But if she gets good and mad at me, I should think she might blurt out something to a female chum.” He looked me in the eye. “Yes, it’s dirty.”

  “I don’t care how dirty it is,” I cried. “That doesn’t worry me. I’m touched by your little character sketch, Charley, my boy, and your faith and all. But I don’t think it will work. You never have understood how it is between Cora and me.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure,” he snapped. “And it’s got to work. Come on, let’s get going. Try doing what I say.” Charley looked dangerous.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, as humbly as I could which wasn’t very. He threw my coat around me. Sig begged a ride in the plane Charley had waiting. Gray was coming, too. We said good-bye to Marcus. Goodbye and good hope.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Charley and Bud Gray sat together and talked while I, beside Sig Rudolf, listened and did not always hear his oratorical fuming. We would be in New York soon after noon, although I’d almost stopped noticing the days go around.

  The papers were sniffing at the story now, much more boldly. By nightfall, they would be in full cry. Whoever believed that Marcus would not lie would be wearing graver faces as the uproar increased, ink spilled, tongues wagged. We could deny, deny … deny. We could tell all the truth we knew until our faces were blue, and it wouldn’t be enough. It couldn’t still the voices or stop the ink flowing.

  Charley Ives was right. We had to have a fully detailed explanation on our side.

  We were nearly in when Charley came over. “Where will you tell Cora you’ve been?” he asked me crisply. “Better decide.”

  “Denver, Los Angeles, Washington.”

  “Why not just Washington, for two nights and a da
y. You can’t explain Los Angeles.” His voice became rather gentle. “Ollie, don’t you understand? You’re going to have to be lying to her.”

  “I presume,” I said stonily, “that when you lie you should try not to get caught at it. Kent Shaw was on the plane out of Los Angeles. Who knows if he’s seen her, or seen someone who’s told her?”

  “I beg your pardon,” Charley said. “Kent Shaw have anything to offer?”

  “If he did, I didn’t take it. I went to sleep.”

  “You must be tired.” He was being cautious and gentle. “It was good of you to go.”

  “Not much good,” I said. I don’t like kid gloves.

  “Ollie, let’s not fight.”

  “Charley, my boy,” I said wearily, “the opposite of fighting isn’t, I hope, buttering each other up with patronizing praise. I realize that I am the rankest amateur at this police business, although I must say you’re not very good at acting, either. Don’t worry about me. I’ll try to do as you suggest.”

  Charley’s face was pink. “Sometimes, I can’t understand how you can make such thoroughly nasty remarks, while looking as if you were after the Holy Grail,” he said. “You scare the life out of me.”

  “Why?”

  “If I didn’t know you were a petty thief, I’d be telling myself you could not tell a lie.”

  “Thief!” I squealed.

  “Well,” he said, cocking a blue eye, “it was more or less my property.”

  “What was?”

  “At least I didn’t steal it from you. I stole it from somebody else.”

  “Charley,” I bounced upright, “you are the most exasperating …!”

  “Well,” he said, blotting my sentence and my whole train of thought out, with his sudden deep sadness, “put up with me, Ollie. Let’s put up with each other, shall we? For Marcus’ sake?”

  I was shocked. “There must be some misunderstanding,” I murmured.

  “I think so,” he said. “And I’m a better actor than you think. Never mind. Lie your head off to Cora, will you, coz?”

  “It’ll be lying,” I said. “It won’t be art, though.”