The Dream Walker

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Then you think the bit on the golf course was supposed to happen at five?”

  “I sure do,” said Bud. “Because that’s the old chap’s one invariable habit. And that’s when he’d have no spry young companion.”

  “How did Cora make a mistake?” I wondered. “If it were written down,” said I, “a five and a three are not always unlike. They must have had it written down. How could they remember the tiny things, exact words, clothes, everything? Did you ever search …?” They looked upon me with kindness. “Nothing?” I queried. “Did you look everywhere? In the hospital, too?” They looked upon me with patience.

  “Got to blow the lid off the entire thing,” said Charley, “to explain the one detail that matters.”

  “The blue envelope,” said I.

  “Exactly. That’s the one.”

  “Kent Shaw put it in the book. Heavens, Charley, he’s always mooching around trying to sell his stuff.”

  “If we can prove that.…” This was our hope. Charley would try.

  “What will Kent do now?” I worried.

  “We’ll watch and see.”

  “Can’t let him really kill anybody.”

  “That’s right. Neither woman. For Marcus’ sake, if no other. Guards already on the hospital. Don’t worry.”

  “You think,” said I, “he arranged this rendezvous a long time ago. Did he know then he’d want to kill her? And set the time after dark?”

  “He’d want it dark enough not to be seen,” Bud said, “in any case.”

  “But why a rendezvous at all?”

  “For the payoff?” Charley said.

  “Now she knows it’s dangerous, but how is she going to ever get paid off?”

  “Aaaah,” said Bud Gray.

  “She must expect to get paid,” I insisted, “or she wouldn’t have risked that golf course bit and finished the job.”

  “Aaaah,” said Bud again and drew his head into his collar like a turtle and fell to thinking.

  Charley said, “Much as I’d nice to lay about me with Kent Shaw’s name, I think we’ll first have to see what we can get by watching him. We are supposing, aren’t we, that he would like to kill two women? One of them is where we can watch her. And he may yet lead us to the other one.” Bud sighed.

  “No need to be downhearted,” said Charley. “Our position shows a lot of improvement.”

  “If it hadn’t been for that chaperone type,” I fretted. “If I could have gotten one word out of him, if he had called me by Darlene’s name, even … that would really have been an improvement.”

  “If he’d stuck his knife in you,” said Charley, “better yet?” Then he exuded a kind of deep and dangerous silence.

  “Why, Bud was there,” said I. (But, oh, Kent Shaw could have killed me and I quivered to think of it, coward that I am.)

  Charley stretched like a big cat. “Might have expected something of the sort. Had you thought of it, Bud? Did you let her take the risk, blind?”

  “She’d have taken the risk,” Bud said firmly.

  “I don’t doubt she would,” said my cousin Charley, “She’d get carried away by the part.”

  “I doubt it,” snapped I.

  Bud said, ignoring me, “You make choices in this business.”

  “I agree,” said Charley Ives stiffly, “but I can’t admire taking advantage of Ollie’s dramatic instincts.”

  I was annoyed. “I don’t believe Bud knew he had a knife. I’m sure I didn’t.”

  “You better stick to your trade,” he said. “Stay around the hospital. Cora’s going to be under pressure and possibly.…”

  “Indulge my dramatic instincts there, you mean?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Make-believe?” said I, getting madder.

  “That’s right,” said Charley Ives.

  “I think you’re jealous,” I cried. I was thinking that I, the amateur, who had the luck—but not the sense to keep my mouth shut.

  Charley said. “That I deny. Jealousy is a rotten—” He shut up suddenly.

  “It sure is,” I murmured, thinking of Cora. “If Cora was a ‘woman scorned,’” I blurted. “Oh, Charley, you shouldn’t have kept on hanging around her.”

  “Teach me,” said Charley, in muted anguish.

  I bit my tongue and tasted blood.

  “You are right,” said Charley evenly, “and I was wrong.”

  Gray said something about some department and they began to use quick names and expressions I didn’t know. They were being professional over my head.

  I shrank in my seat, feeling miserable. Me, the blundering amateur, who had the luck—but not the sense to keep my mouth shut. Of course, Charley blamed himself, and why did I have to be the detestable type who pointed things out and was “right”? I pretended to sleep.

  When we got back to town, my escorts left me flat to go set up the machinery. They were calmer than I. They knew that patience and effort would turn up something useful. They were trained to take a hypothesis, like the involvement of Kent Shaw, and go to work to test it.

  I knew some of the plans. People would try to find a connection between Kent Shaw and Raymond Pankerman. (They never did.)

  Try to find out if and when Kent Shaw had got into Charley’s place while the book in which the blue envelope was found was lying there waiting to be shipped to Marcus. (They found nothing like evidence; only the possibility.)

  Inquire in Los Angeles about Kent Shaw on the night of the murder of Jones. (Nothing.)

  Investigate his finances, check on his long-distance calls, his travels. (Too long, too late.)

  Go back in his career to see where his path had crossed Darlene Hite’s. (And this they found, but what was it but another possibility?)

  Of course, possibilities pile up, but it was going to be a long slow swell, and meanwhile Marcus could only deny any knowledge of the blue envelope. But he couldn’t explain, and the story roared, frothed, spit.…

  I went home. I let myself into my own place and looked at my books and my records, my paintings, my bric-a-brac, my ivory tower. I prayed that in some way, I, from my isolation, in my feebleness, had yet a use. But all my ideas were, I sadly recognized, strictly theatrical.

  This was the twenty-first of May. I called the hospital. Cora would take no calls, see no one. I spoke to Dr. Harper. He told me that they were in a state of siege and that the board insisted that Cora had to be kicked out of there. “Disrupts our work, hurts our reputation, name suffers, people are upset. Can’t go on. Charley Ives sold me a bill of goods in the first place. Had no idea what we were in for.” He was fuming.

  “You can’t just throw her out into the street,” said I, alarmed, thinking of Kent Shaw.

  “She claims it’s all over because wild horses couldn’t drag another word from her lips. If she ever has another dream nobody will know it. Oh, she’s a fraud, Miss Olivia.”

  “Where can she go?” I was worried.

  “She’s got an apartment. Oh, she’s in a panic. Doesn’t want to go there. We’ve got guards here, as a matter of fact. And it’s intolerable.”

  “She has to be safe, for Marcus’ sake.”

  “I suppose so,” the doctor admitted gloomily. “She speaks of going abroad as soon as she can get the money.”

  “The money?” I pricked up my ears.

  “I’ve half a mind to give her the money to get rid of her.”

  “Oh, no. Don’t you do that. Remind her of me.”

  “If you want to get in to see her,” he growled, “I’ll see that you do.”

  “No. I’d rather she let me in,” said I.

  Staunch old friend. It was a phony characterization.

  When I called Marcus, he was cheerful. He knew all that Charley knew. So I told him about my strange experience in Miss Beth’s store. “It was odd, Uncle John. What I’d like to know … did I feel prophetically hopeful because I was going to see Kent Shaw? Or did I see Kent Shaw because I felt hopeful?”

  “Go
od girl, Ollie. You saw him because you felt hopeful, I should say.”

  “But wasn’t it a coincidence?”

  “Coincidence means only a connection that’s not seen. Roots meet underground. And hope is creative. Look at it this way. Suppose you’d stood there without hope, bewailing a stone wall. You’d have been blind. He could have walked by without your noticing.”

  “Hope is creative?” said I. “How can that be?”

  “I don’t know how,” said Marcus. “I only perceive that it is.”

  So he passed me some courage. While the papers bled ink, the talk careened dangerously, giddily on, and Marcus was being soiled and stained and disrespectful words cannot entirely be eaten, ever. Respect is a kind of Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses can’t put it all the way up again.

  Please, if I am making this clear at all, please do read the fine print and the follow-up and all the hard, dry parts in the news. Don’t let your mind jump onto the next sensational headline. Oh, it’s more fun to float along, enjoying the high spots. The new murder. The latest scandal. Today’s clash. But afterward, people have to live. And if all you remember is a vague impression of some nasty mess, and the thing that remains is only your notion that this person once fell away from the clear and unquestioned way—and to know what truly did happen is a task too dry, too hard—ah, please. It isn’t fair.

  Secretary, whoever you are. Delete the paragraph above, I mustn’t bleat. I don’t think I’m feeling very well.… Tomorrow, if I have tomorrow … I can finish this. Start a new chapter.…

  Chapter Nineteen

  I don’t mean to drag you through all the anguish we suffered, being ignorant. So I will try to follow my original intention and go backstage, and tell how the four who were in the plot were moving in what to us was darkness.

  I will go back to Darlene Hite. Once she realized (after the discovery of the body of Ed Jones, on March 28) that Kent Shaw was a killer, Darlene saw ahead. She saw what was written on the wall because she was smart. And because she had been in the jungle. Kent Shaw, who had killed a man just to save his beautiful scheme intact, would not hesitate to eliminate her, either, once her job was finished. So Darlene considered her position.

  She was not required to do anything in Washington on the fifth of May. (This incident, she knew nothing about.) Her script called only for an appearance in Castine on May 20. That would be the end of it. She was to meet her boss afterward and collect her handsome reward and live happily ever after.

  But Darlene, having read the papers and well-considered the future, wished to take care of Darlene. So she left New Orleans early in April, went to Toronto, and there, early in May, she found a surgeon and had her nose remodeled.

  Now the doctor in Toronto read the papers, too. When, after I’d gone to Los Angeles, after the fifth of May, we broke forth the suspicion that a certain Darlene Hite might be involved in Cora’s huge hoax, and when we published her pictures, you would think he’d speculate about this patient. Maybe he did. But the pictures were old and, as I say, retouched for glamor, and furthermore, he believed the third witness in the park in Washington. The doctor thought Darlene Hite had been seen in Washington on the fifth of May. So how could she be his patient, whom he was even then attending? He didn’t even mention it. She had another name, a cover story, and plenty of “expense” money. He did not wish to embarrass her.

  So Darlene lay low and healed. She read what was supposed to have happened to Marcus and knew it hadn’t. She may have dimly recognized the crux of the plot. But Darlene, as I think I’ve said before, had a narrow view and the meaning of John Paul Marcus was neither apparent nor important to her. She was looking after Darlene, and doing it very well, too.

  In good time, she “vanished” from Toronto. She evolved a new character. Bleached her hair back to its original blond or even whiter. Bleached her brows. Took off assorted supporting garments. Practiced a new waddling walk. Bought elderly oxfords, those dreadful shoes that are offered to women over fifty as a matter of course.

  She went to New York and foxily smoothed out a future way there. She took off for Castine two weeks early. On May 20, at 5:00 P.M. (the figure Cora took for a three in the script, after all this time), Darlene used a black fringe of artificial hair under the scarf and very easily vanished to a prepared identity after that stunt was over.

  But she had ad-libbed. She had warned Cora Steffani, as best she could, for she knew that Cora’s elimination was also written on the wall.

  Now Darlene’s problem was to collect her wages and live to enjoy them.

  She had kept the rendezvous with Kent Shaw before the museum. But we interfered. She’d seen us. She was hoping Bud and I would go away. She was watching, when I stepped out from behind that shrub. She could tell as well as I that Kent Shaw had been fooled, for a moment. She knew he was dangerous. She may even have known he held that knife, for she could expect a knife. So Darlene acted. Stepped out from some ambush of her own, crossed the road, and threw that beam of light in my face to save my life.

  Darlene Hite, of course, was the old biddy in the dolman. But her nose, as we had been able to see so plainly when I turned the light on her, was no longer anything like Cora’s nose. I did not recognize her. (Me and my methods! Me and my vanities!)

  But she didn’t get the key. Key to some deposit box where her money lay hidden and waiting for her. The key Kent Shaw was promising to deliver that night in front of the little museum, in the dark and the cold.

  Darlene had guessed easily enough what he’d rather deliver. She had a gun under that dolman. She’d hoped to surprise him, to take the key away, and vanish, as she was so skilled in doing. Then conquer the problem of safely reaching that box—thereafter to disappear forever.

  But she had found herself saving my life instead.

  Darlene was no killer, nor did she want to see anyone killed. When she saw me on that dim sidewalk, living, and so close to dying, it was no abstraction, either. Darlene was shaken. For the first time, she glimpsed the fact that taking care of Darlene might mean taking care of other people, also. And not letting murder go. But she skipped out of Castine in her own invisible way. There was her pay.

  She came to New York, where she had deep-laid some alternate plans. At that time, she was wondering how to expose all but herself, thinking in terms of anonymous letters. She didn’t want to appear. She wanted her well-earned money. She’d better get that first, she thought. She would try for it once more.

  None of this did we know.

  Now Raymond Pankerman, watching the big impossible lie stir up the country to a frenzy, must have been laughing. I suppose it was the bright spot in his days. Yet I wonder whether he had the imagination or the sensitivity to know what had been done to Marcus. I wonder if he was satisfied. At any rate, he paid off. The combination to Kent Shaw’s safe was to be forwarded, lacking a countermand, by relays through innocent people. Kent Shaw knew where it lay ready for him. But he was either too smart or too preoccupied to go near it. If he had, he might have been pounced upon. For he was watched.

  He had been picked up at Boston airport, on his way down. He’d come back to his rooming house. He did not seem to move.

  I can imagine how he was preoccupied. Now he saw himself and his beautiful hoax at the mercy of his fellow conspirators. He could understand the pressure upon them, especially the women. He wanted them silent forever. But he could not murder a woman he couldn’t even locate. For Darlene he could only wait, holding the only lure he had, her money. The other woman, however, was very conspicuously located. He knew where Cora was.

  So Kent Shaw, in the shabby room among the clutter of his souvenirs, kept to his surface poverty and brooded, schemed, thought. How was he going to murder Cora in the well-protected hospital room? Especially since the whole world had been told somebody was going to try?

  He was very clever, that mad little man.

  Now, about Cora. She was terrified. She was in a terrible spot. She knew Kent wanted
to kill her. She could no longer duck or dodge the fact that he had killed Ed Jones. If, to save her own life, she broke down and revealed the plot, she herself was an accessory to that killing. How could she meet Kent Shaw and collect her money, fearing trim as she did? Even if she had her key, how could she go for the money, since her face was as well known to the public as any face alive? The thing had gotten out of hand. The hospital threatened to throw her out. She was afraid. She wanted to run to another continent and hide. What could she use for money?

  I’d divined that money was the crux of her problem. Pressure was on her to call for me.

  Nevertheless, on the twenty-first, nothing moved. Everything seemed to have come to a stop.

  On the twenty-second there were some ripples. Mildred Garrick came to see me. Oh, I’d been seen by the press. The white light that beat on all concerned did not skip me. I played my poor part, said foolish things. I had to. I sent most of them away puzzled or sad. But Mildred had something to tell me.

  “Cora’s been writing letters. Did you know? Did you advise her?”

  “I haven’t seen her since—”

  “She wrote this note to Jo Crain.”

  I read the copy she handed me. I blazed. It was as if Cora thought she could get out gracefully by the exercise of just a little charming politeness. She was like a child putting on manners. “Look how good I am being now!” Sweet words, brave apologies, daintily done. I was furious. She didn’t, as Charley had said, have a political thought in her head, or a moral one, either. She didn’t know the meaning of “accessory before or after the fact” or of “shalt not bear false witness” or any other rule connected with her fellow men. All she knew was that Marcus was famous. She didn’t know why. She herself wanted to be famous, period. She hadn’t cared why. Greedy for attention, money, and a bit of revenge, she knew not what she did. She couldn’t even conceive that the affair of the blue envelope would live after her. She said in that note, oh sweetly, that she intended to go away and surely it would all be forgotten. She didn’t even consider that her countrymen would need to know and must know what the truth was about Marcus.