The eyes focused on me, cold with hostility. “All right,” he said after a time. “You’re not a liar.” He sat down at the table again, with his shoulders slumped like a padded coat on an inadequate hanger.
Chapter 8
Passing the open door of the living-room, I caught a glimpse of the people waiting inside. Voices were subdued, faces white and strained. Nobody seemed to be drinking, and all the gay conversation had run out. The party was a group hangover, the dim old room the ancestral cave of death. A policeman in a blue shirt sat hunched in a chair by the door, studying the visored cap on his knee as if it were the face of a dear friend.
The door of the sitting-room across the hall was locked. I was about to knock on it, when a man on the other side uttered a four-letter word. It sounded incongruous in his high tenor. He was answered by a woman’s voice, rapid and low, too low to penetrate the heavy door and let me hear her words. The only sounds I could make out plainly were the sobbing gasps that punctuated the sentences.
I moved to the next door on that side and entered the dark room beyond it. The light from the hall made crouched shadows of the chairs along the wall and gleamed among the silver and dishes that cluttered the buffet. There was still a little light in the room when I closed the door behind me: a thin shining under the old-fashioned sliding doors that separated the dining-room from the sitting-room. I crossed the room quietly and lay down by the sliding doors. Maude Slocum’s voice slid under them:
“I’ve stopped trying. For years I did my best for you. It didn’t take. Now I’m giving up.”
“You never tried,” her husband answered, flatly and bitterly. “You’ve lived in my house, and eaten my bread, and never made the slightest attempt to help me. If I’m a personal failure, as you say, the failure is certainly yours as well as mine.”
“Your mother’s house,” she taunted him. “Your mother’s bread—a very unleavened loaf.”
“Leave my mother out of it!”
“How can I leave her out?” Now her voice was purring smoothly, in control of itself and of the situation. “She’s been the central figure in my married life. You had your chance to make a clean break with her when we were married, but you hadn’t the courage to take it.”
“I had no real chance, Maude.” The actorish voice wobbled under the burden of self-pity. “I was too young to get married. I was dependent on her—I hadn’t even finished school. There weren’t many jobs in those days, either, and you were in a hurry to be married—”
“I was in a hurry? You begged me with tears in your voice to marry you. You said your immortal soul depended on it.”
“I know, I thought it did.” The simple words held echoes of despair. “You wanted to marry me, too. You had your reasons.”
“You’re damned right I had my reasons, with a child in my belly and nobody else to turn to. I suppose I should have been the true-hearted little woman and swallowed my pride and gone away somewhere.” Her voice sank to an acid whisper: “That’s what your mother wanted, wasn’t it?”
“Your were never little, Maude.”
She laughed unpleasantly. “Neither was Mother, was she? Her lap was always big enough for you.”
“I know how you feel about me, Maude.”
“You can’t. I have no feeling at all. You’re a perfect blank as far as I’m concerned.”
“Very well.” He struggled to keep his voice steady. “But now that Mother’s dead, I think that you’d be a little kinder to—her memory. She was always good to Cathy. She had to go without things herself to send Cathy to school and dress her properly—”
“I admit that. What you don’t understand is the fact that I’m thinking about myself. I put Cathy first, of course. I love her, and I want the best of everything for her. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready for the shelf. I’m a woman as well as a mother. I’m only thirty-five.”
“That’s rather late to start all over again.”
“Right now I feel as if I haven’t started—that I’ve been saving myself for fifteen years. I won’t keep much longer. I’m going rotten inside.”
“Your version at the moment. This is the chance you’ve been waiting for. If Mother hadn’t died, you’d have been perfectly willing to go on as before.”
“I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Approximately as before, then. I know that something’s been happening to you since you made that trip to Chicago.”
“What about that trip to Chicago?” A threat tightened her voice like an unused muscle.
“I haven’t asked you any question about it. I don’t intend to. I do know that you’d changed when you came back that spring. You had more life—”
She cut him short contemptuously: “You’re well advised not to ask questions, James. I could ask questions, too, about Francis, for instance. Only, I know the answers.”
He fell silent for a time. I could hear one of them breathing. Finally, he sighed. “Well, we’re getting nowhere. What do you want?”
“I’ll tell you what I want. Half of everything you have, and that includes half of this property now.”
“Now! Mother’s death has been exceedingly convenient for you, hasn’t it? If I didn’t know you, Maude, I’d believe that you killed Mother yourself.”
“I won’t pretend I’m sorry that it happened. As soon as this unpleasantness is over with, and you’ve agreed to a settlement, I’m going to court.”
“I’ll make a settlement,” he said thinly. “You’ve waited long enough for your share of the property. Now you can have it.”
“And Cathy,” she insisted. “Don’t forget Cathy.”
“I have not forgotten her. Cathy is staying with me.”
“So she can live à trois with you and Francis? I think not.”
He spoke with great effort: “Francis doesn’t enter into the picture.”
“Francis or someone like him. I know your penchant, James.”
“No.” The word exploded from his lips. “Cathy is all I want.”
“I know what you want. You want a healthy life so you can twine around it like a vine. You tried it with me, but I tore you loose, and you shan’t twist yourself around Cathy. I’m moving out of here, and taking her with me.”
“No. No.” The second word trailed off in a painful whimper. “You mustn’t leave me alone.”
“You have your friends,” she said with irony.
“Don’t leave me, Maude. I’m afraid to be left alone. I need you both, much more than you believe.” His voice was quite unmanned, a hysterical boy’s.
“You’ve neglected me for fifteen years,” she said. “When I’ve finally got my chance to go, you insist I have to stay.”
“You must stay. It’s your duty to stay with me. I can’t be left alone.”
“Be a man,” she said. “I can’t have any feeling for a whining jellyfish.”
“You used to love me—”
“Did I?”
“You wanted to be my wife and look after me.”
“That was a long time ago. I can’t remember.”
I heard breath drawn in, feet moving quickly on the floor. “Whore!” he cried in a harsh choking voice. “You’re a horrible cold woman, and I hate you.”
“It chills a woman off,” she said clearly and firmly, “being married to a fairy.”
“Horrible. Woman.” The caesura between the words was marked by a blow on flesh. Then something bony, his knees perhaps, bumped unevenly on the floor. “Forgive me,” he said, “forgive me.”
“You struck me.” Her voice was blank with shock. “You hurt me.”
“I didn’t mean it. Forgive me. I love you, Maude. Please stay with me.” A retching sob tore through his babbling and lengthened rhythmically. For a long time there was nothing but the sound of the man’s crying.
Then she began to comfort him, in a gentle lulling voice. “Be quiet, Jimmie. Dear Jimmie. I’ll stay with you. We’ll have a good life yet, won’t we, my dea
r?”
I staggered slightly when I got to my feet. I felt as if I’d been listening in on a microphone built into the walls of hell. I passed the closed door of the sitting-room without breaking my stride, and went out onto the lawn. The sky was black and moving. Long gray clouds streamed across the mountains to the sea, flowing like a river over the jagged edge of the world.
I was halfway across the lawn to the drive when I remembered that my car was parked on the street in Nopal Valley. I went around to the back of the house and found the kitchen empty except for the housekeeper. Mrs. Strang was an elderly woman with a long, soft face and fading hair. She was cooking something in a saucepan on the stove.
She jumped sideways at the sound of my footsteps. “Heavens! You frightened me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m Archer, a friend of Mrs. Slocum’s.”
“Oh yes, you phoned, I remember.” Her lips were trembling and blue.
I said: “Is Cathy all right?”
“Yes, she’s all right. I’m making her some hot milk to put her to sleep. The poor child needs her rest after all these terrible things happening.”
In a way I felt responsible for Cathy, if only because there was nobody else to feel responsible. Her parents were completely involved in their private war, negotiating their little armistice. Probably it had always been like that.
“You’ll take good care of Cathy?” I said to Mrs. Strang.
She answered me with pride: “I always have, Mr. Archer. She’s very well worth it, you know. Some of her teachers think she is a genius.”
“This place is lousy with geniuses, isn’t it?”
I left before I got into an argument. From the kitchen door, I saw a white flash splatter the darkness below the garages like a brushful of whitewash. They were still taking pictures around the pool.
Knudson was there with three members of his department, directing a series of measurements. Near them the body lay under a blanket, waiting patiently to be taken away. The underwater lights of the pool were on, so that the water was a pale emerald depth with a luminous and restless surface filming it.
When he saw me Knudson moved away from his group and lifted his chin at an angle. When I was near enough to hear his low voice: “What did she say? Co-operate with us?”
“I didn’t see her. She was locked in the room with her husband.”
His nostrils flared in a private nasal sneer, not intended for me. “I’ve got our radio cars out looking for Reavis. You could be a help, since you know him to see.”
“It’s a little off my beat, isn’t it?”
“You be the judge of that.” His shoulders rose and fell in a muscular slow-motion shrug. “It seems to me there’s a certain responsibility—?”
“Maybe so. Can you get me a lift into town? Not with Franks.”
“Sure.” He turned to the photographer, who was kneeling by the body. “Just about finished, Winowsky?”
“Yeah.” He threw back the blanket. “A couple more shots of the stiff. I want to do her justice, my professional honor demands it.”
“You take Mr. Archer into town with you.”
“Yeah.”
He stood over the body in a crouching position and flashed the bulb attached to the top of his camera. The white magnesium light drew the dead face from the shadows and projected it against the night. The freckles grew like acne on the lime-white skin. Bulbous and white, like deepsea life, the foam bulged from the nostrils and gaping mouth. The open green eyes gazed up in blank amazement at the dark sky moving between the darker mountains.
“Once more,” the photographer said, and stepped across the body. “Now watch the birdie.”
The white light flashed again on the unmoving face.
Chapter 9
The building was pink stucco, big and new and ugly. It had a side entrance with “Romp Room” lettered above it in red neon. The wall was blind except for the door and a couple of round screened ventilators. I could hear the noise of the romping from the outside: the double-time beat of a band, the shuffling of many feet. When I pulled the heavy door open, the noise blasted my ears.
Most of it came from the platform at the rear end of the room, where a group of young men in white flannels were maltreating a piano, a guitar, a trombone, a trumpet, drums. The piano tinkled and boomed, the trombone brayed, the trumpet squawked and screeched. The guitar bit chunks from the chromatic scale and spat them out in rapid fire without chewing them. The drummer hit everything he had, drums, traps, cymbals, stamped on the floor, beat the rungs of his chair, banged the chrome rod that supported the microphone. The Furious Five, it said on his biggest drum.
The rest of the noise came from the booths that lined three walls of the room, and from the dance-floor in the middle where twenty or thirty couples whirled in the smoke. The high titter of drunk and flattered women, the animal sounds of drunk and eager men. Babel with a wild jazz obbligato.
A big henna redhead in a shotsilk blouse was making drinks at a service bar near the door. Her torso jiggled in the blouse like a giant soft-boiled egg with the shell removed. The waitresses came and went in an antlike steam, and all the whiskies came from the same bottle. In an interval between waitresses, I went up to the bar. The big woman smashed an empty bottle under it and straightened up, breathing hard.
“I’m Helen,” she said with a rubber-lipped public smile. “You want a drink, you find a seat and I send a waitress to you.”
“Thanks, I’m looking for Pat.”
“Pat who? Does she work here?”
“He’s a man. Young, big, with curly dark hair.”
“Friend, I got troubles of my own. Don’t you go away mad, though. Try the waitresses if you want.” She took a deep breath when she finished, and the egg swelled up almost to her chin.
“Two bombs, beer chasers,” a waitress said behind me.
I asked her: “Is Gretchen here?”
“Gretchen Keck, you mean? The waitress jerked a flat thumb at a tall girl on the dance floor. “That’s her, the blonde in the blue dress.”
I waited till the music stopped, and crossed to an empty booth. Some of the couples stayed where they were in the center of the room, arms locked, face to face. A Mexican boy in blue jeans and a white shirt stood with the tall blonde. Gretchen was as light as the boy was dark, with a fair skin and a pull-taffy pompadour that made her taller than he was. They couldn’t stand still. Their hips, pressed flat together, moved in a slow weaving round and round until the music started and quickened their beat.
While she danced on a dime by herself, he moved in a circle about her, turkey strutting, flapping his arms like a rooster, leaping and stamping. He moved his head and neck in the horizontal plane, Balinese fashion, danced squatting on his heels like a Cossack, invented new gyrations of the hips, body and feet jerked by separate rhythms. She stood where she was, her movements slightly mimicking his, and his circle tightened about her. They came together again, their bodies shaken and snaked through their length by an impossible shimmy. Then she was still on his arched breast, and her arms fell loose. He held her, and the music went on without them.
In the booth behind me, a woman called in bracero Spanish upon the Mother of God to witness her justifiable act of violence. She thrust herself out of her seat, a gaunt Mexican girl with hair like fresh-poured tar. From her clenched right fist, a four-inch knife-blade projected upward. I moved, bracing one hand on the seat and pivoting. My left toe caught her instep and she fell hard, face down. The spring-knife struck the floor and clattered out of her reach. At its signal the dark boy and the blonde girl sprang apart, so suddenly that the girl staggered on her high heels. The boy looked at the knife on the floor and the woman struggling to her knees. His eyes watered and his bronze face took on a greenish patina.
Slouching and woebegone, without a backward look, he went to the woman and tried awkwardly to help her rise. She spat out words in Spanish that sounded like a string of cheap firecrackers. Her worn black satin dress was coated w
ith dust. Half of her sallow pitted face was grimy. She began to weep. He put his arms around her and said, “Please, I am sorry.” They went out together. The music stopped.
A heavy middle-aged man in a fake policeman’s uniform appeared from nowhere. He picked up the knife, broke it across his knee, and dropped the blade and handle in the pocket of his blue coat. He came to my booth, stepping lightly as if he was walking on eggs. His shoes were slit and mis-shapen across the base of the toes.
“Nice work, son,” he said. “They flare up so fast sometimes I can’t keep track of ’em.”
“Knife-play disturbs my drinking.”
His red-rimmed eyes peered from a face that was gullied by time. “New in these parts, ain’t you?”
“Yeah,” I answered, though I felt as if I’d been in Nopal Valley for days. “Speaking of my drinking, I haven’t been doing any.”
He signaled to a waitress. “We’ll fix that.” She set down a trayful of empty glasses grained with the leavings of foam. “What’ll it be?”
“A bottle of beer.” I disturbed the bar whisky. “Ask Gretchen what she’s drinking, and if she’ll have one with me.”
The drink and Gretchen arrived simultaneously. “Helen says no charge,” the waitress said. “Your drinks are on the house. Or anything.”
“Food?”
“Not this late. The kitchen’s closed.”
“What, then?”
The waitress set my beer down hard so that it foamed, and went away without answering.
Gretchen giggled, not unpleasantly, as she slid into the seat across from me. “Helen’s got rooms upstairs. She says there’s too many men in this burg, and somebody has to do something to take the pressure off.” She sipped her drink, rum coke, and winked grotesquely over the rim of the glass. Her eyes were naïve and clear, the color of cornflowers. Not even the lascivious red mouth constructed with lipstick over her own could spoil her freshness.
“I’m a very low-pressure type myself.”
She looked me over carefully, did everything but feel the texture of the material my coat was made of. “Maybe. You don’t have the upstairs look, I admit. You can move, though, brother.”
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