I’d never, as I’ve said, bothered to think very seriously about Faye and George. It occurred to me now that maybe Faye, being all one thing, all the way through—as George probably wasn’t, and as most people aren’t—was probably the more decisive of the two. Then I thought, inevitably, I suppose, of Lady Macbeth. I wondered if Captain Heimrich was thinking about Lady Macbeth, or merely about Faye’s casual way with a thousand dollars.
“I don’t bother my wife with much business detail, Captain,” George Townsend said. “She knew only in a general way that there was any—any difficulty about the Blends account. I—”
“Of course, Captain,” Faye said. “I have every confidence in George.”
Flatly, I didn’t believe either of them. I looked at Captain Heimrich, and watched him close his eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he believed either of them or not—whether or not he felt as I did, that here, perhaps, was the character he wanted to fit his crime. Then I wondered whether, perhaps, he hadn’t seen it all the time. Maybe he’d already run into a woman who might kill somebody for new curtains and slip covers in her bedroom.
Then I looked at George. He was looking at Faye and he was looking at her with a kind of eagerness, with something that was almost avidity. My God, I thought, Faye’s as important to him as—as polished things are to Faye, as new curtains and slip covers for her bedroom are to Faye. The poor, unlucky bastard, I thought, and looked then at the Pooh. She was sitting very still, as she does sometimes. She was looking at George and Faye, seeing what I saw. Then she looked away quickly, as I had done, because it is embarrassing to look at people when they unconsciously reveal themselves.
But on that basis, I thought, there was nobody in the room to look at—nobody but the Pooh, and then I would reveal myself. (I don’t mind that, usually. I should have minded it then.) I couldn’t look at either George or Faye, because they had told one another, and told all of us, what they loved; I couldn’t look at Pauline Barlow, who had told us whom she loved, or thought she loved, and who hadn’t made the grade, or at Craig, who had, at best, taken candy from a child, or at Ann, who knew what he had done and who still loved him and had just offered to commit perjury for him. I knew, or thought I knew, too much about all these people to go on looking at them. So I looked at Heimrich. I was looking at him when Pauline Barlow spoke. Her voice was higher than usual, almost sharp.
“Why don’t you tell him the rest of it, Faye?” Pauline said. “Tell him what made you so confident? About father?”
“Keep still, Paulie,” George Townsend said. He spoke loudly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Poor George,” Paulie said. “You knew, didn’t you? Did you know all the time?”
“Dear Paulie,” Faye said, and she managed high laughter. It didn’t sound as if anything funny had been said. “Still trying to help Dwight, Paulie? Or yourself?”
“Father wanted you to divorce George and marry him,” Pauline said. “I’m sorry, Faye. I was going to make a telephone call and picked up the receiver and—and you and he were talking. Weeks ago.”
“Dear Paulie,” Faye said. “You mustn’t try so hard, dear. You really mustn’t. Dwight’s all right. Didn’t you hear Miss Dean? She’ll swear he couldn’t have—”
“Father gave you a choice, didn’t he, Faye?” Pauline said, as if Faye had not spoken. “You could divorce George and go with him. Or, you could stay with George but—pull your horns in. Pull them a long way in. Wasn’t that it?”
Faye laughed again.
“Paulie, you’re ridiculous,” she said. “You—you must be insane, dear. Your father!”
Barlow would have been the last man on earth, Faye’s voice said. Barlow had been a hundred years old.
“I don’t suppose he loved you,” Pauline said. “I really don’t. Maybe he didn’t love anybody. But—he thought you would be nice to have. As—as a kind of ornament, Faye. Wasn’t that it?”
“Captain,” George Townsend said, “can’t you stop this crazy kid? Stop her inventing things? Her—”
“Were you jealous, Paulie?” Faye said. “Is that it, dear?”
Pauline sat a moment under that. Then she stood up. She was very white. She faced Faye.
“You killed him!” she said. Her voice was very high, uncontrolled. “Killed him so you could have both. But mostly so you could have all—this!” She moved a hand out stiffly, in a harsh gesture toward the room. “Because he was—” Then her eyes went blank and she swayed. I moved as fast as I could, but I was in a chair and several feet from her. It was Forniss who caught her, although he had farther to move. He was very quick.
“The poor child,” Faye said. “I hadn’t realized. The poor, dear child!”
Forniss put Pauline flat on the floor. He knelt beside her for a moment and stood up.
“Fainted,” he said. “She’ll be all right, Captain.”
The Pooh was beside Pauline by then. She stayed there, felt her forehead, rubbed her wrists—did those things one does which don’t, I suppose, make any difference one way or another. Pauline opened her eyes very quickly; after a few minutes, the Pooh helped her to get up. “Captain,” the Pooh said, “she ought to lie down somewhere. She can’t go on with this. She—”
“I’ll stay here,” Pauline said. “It won’t happen again. I’ll stay here.”
She did, too. She sat in her chair again. She gripped both arms of the chair. Gradually, color came back into her face.
“Well, Mrs. Townsend?” Heimrich said.
Faye looked at him.
“Surely, Captain, you don’t—” she began.
“Now Mrs. Townsend,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes. “Now Mrs. Townsend. Isn’t it true? Or—partly true?”
“It’s absurd,” Faye said. “Surely you see that. Completely absurd. Really, Captain! If you think for a moment—”
But then she stopped, because Heimrich opened his eyes and looked, not at her, but at George.
“‘One but not both,’” Heimrich said. “‘One but not both.’ A question of advertising media, Mr. Townsend?”
There was a brief pause, and I saw George swallow. But when he spoke his voice was calm enough.
“That’s right, Captain,” George said. “The poor child’s—hysterical. The whole situation—” He shrugged and spread his hands. “Hysterical,” he repeated.
Heimrich continued to look at him. Then, slowly, Heimrich shook his head.
“No, Mr. Townsend,” he said. “Not hysterical. Because it’s true. Part of the truth, naturally. There are so many parts of the truth.” He looked around at us, slowly, looked at us one by one. He sighed, as if, suddenly, he had grown tired of all of us.
“So many reasons to kill a man,” he said. “Money, jealousy, fear, to keep what you have; to eat your cake and have it too. To be free; to keep a job. Merely because of sudden anger. So many reasons.” He looked around at us again. “Most of them are here, aren’t they?” he asked. “And—one of them was sufficient. Any of them might have been—one of them was. Each of you had opportunity to kill both Mr. Barlow and Mr. Eldredge.” He looked at Ann Dean. She shook her head. “Each of you,” he said. “Whatever may be said now, or might be said in court. We’ll worry about that last when we come to it, if we do.”
It sounded as if, in spite of all his questioning, in spite of all we had (for the most part unintentionally) done to help, Heimrich was no further along than he had been many hours before. He thought then that any of us might have done it; that any of us had reason. Now, the way it sounded, he had more facts and more possibilities to go on, but was no more certain which way to go. But, I thought, it isn’t the way it sounds.
“A jumble,” Heimrich said. “To some extent planned to be, naturally. On the assumption that a reasonable doubt always would exist. Not that we wouldn’t, or mightn’t, know, but that there would be nothing we could do about it.”
He looked around at us. His eyes now were very wide open.
“I do
know,” he said. “I have for some time. Since Mr. Eldredge died.”
Then, in the silence that followed that, there was a sudden sound—faint, hardly palpable. It was the sound of a suddenly indrawn breath. But I did not know who had made the sound.
“‘Bright’ Mr. Eldredge said,” Heimrich told us. “‘Bright’ or, perhaps, ‘light.’ And something that might have been ‘back’ and something else, even fainter, which might have been ‘three.’ At any rate, that’s what Mr. Otis says he said, isn’t it, Mr. Otis?”
“Yes,” I said. “As nearly as I could tell.”
“I don’t know why he put it that way,” Heimrich said. “Instead of trying to—say a name. I suppose nothing was very clear to him. That he died with a picture in his mind—a picture he had decided meant something. It did, I think. It was because of that picture that he was killed. You think he tried, at the very last, to say ‘three,’ Mr. Otis. As in, say, ‘three o’clock’?”
“It could have been that,” I said. “I’ve told you all—”
“Yes,” Heimrich said. “I think it was, Mr. Otis. I think the picture was of something that happened at about three o’clock. I think it was three o’clock on Sunday morning, a couple of hours after Mr. Barlow was killed. I think—” He stopped. He closed his eyes.
“Mr. Otis,” he said. “I found the gun. I thought I would, naturally. Perhaps I should say, ‘a gun.’ I want you to look at it.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. His eyes were very blue, their gaze very intense.
“I ca—” I began, and did not get to finish the word, because Heimrich said, sharply, “Wait!” He opened the brief case once more. He took out of it a forty-five automatic. “Come here, Mr. Otis,” he said. “Look at this.”
His voice was not raised; he continued to look at me, and I felt he was trying to tell me something. I got up and walked over to the table. He held the gun out to me and I took it.
“I want you to identify it, Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “You may as well. It’s your gun.”
I looked at it. It could have been.
“Your gun, Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “Identify it.”
“All right,” I said. “It’s my gun.”
I didn’t know whether I had said it or whether Heimrich had said it with my voice. I didn’t know whether it was true.
“Your gun,” Heimrich said. “That’s right, Mr. Otis. The gun that killed Barlow!”
I was going around inside. He had wanted a confession, said there would be a confession. And I had confessed! I didn’t know why. I put a hand down to steady myself on the table and started to say something. I don’t know what. But then Heimrich wasn’t looking at me. He was looking beyond me. And George Townsend was speaking.
“That’s not true,” he said, and there was an odd note, almost a triumphant note, in his voice. “You’re trying to play a trick, Captain. You and Otis—you’re both lying. It’s a—” And then he stopped. He stopped as if he had fallen over something.
“Why yes, Mr. Townsend,” Heimrich said. “It was a trick, naturally. Yes, we’re both lying, Mr. Townsend. But—how did you know?”
Townsend had his hands on the arms of his chair, as if he were about to get up. His mouth was a little open, but nothing came out of it.
“Because Mr. Otis’ gun is at the bottom of a reservoir, Mr. Townsend? Or buried somewhere? Is that how you know this isn’t it? And—because Mr. Otis’ gun wasn’t used? Because you know what gun was used, don’t you? Just as you know what Eldredge was trying to say? You—stop him, Sergeant!”
But that time, Sergeant Forniss wasn’t quick enough. George Townsend was standing up, and now he had a gun of his own. I don’t know where he got it. I suppose he’d hidden it in the chair, beside a cushion. Just in case. He waved the gun. Sergeant Forniss decided against being a dead hero. He stopped.
“A dirty, lying trick!” Townsend said. His voice was almost a shout; he was flushed and he was, I thought, swallowed up in being furious at Heimrich. He wasn’t afraid—yet. He was just sore as hell. He had been out-smarted, and he hated it. “You’ll never prove—” Then he stopped. There was a new expression on his face. For an instant he stood there and in that instant I think he saw himself standing there—standing there holding the automatic with which he had killed two men so that he could have what Barlow had told him he couldn’t have—could have Faye and the Blends account to boot. I think he saw himself standing there and, by just standing there, with that automatic, confessing he had killed two men.
Heimrich had not moved. He sat at the table and looked at George Townsend. The gun that wasn’t mine was on the table in front of him, but he did not move to pick it up.
“Now Mr. Townsend,” Heimrich said, “I don’t have to prove anything now, do I? There isn’t any reasonable doubt any more.” He shook his head, almost as if he were disappointed in Townsend. “I said you’d confess, you know,” he told George. “Confess before witnesses. Put down the gun, Mr. Townsend.”
Then George laughed.
“Why doesn’t one of you take it?” he asked, and now his voice had almost its ordinary tone. “Come on, Faye.”
Faye Townsend didn’t move.
For a second or two George didn’t seem to notice this; he was watching Heimrich, Forniss, the rest of us. Then he said again, “Come on, Faye. Let’s get out of here.” Then, when she still didn’t move, he turned a little so that he could see her without taking his eyes off the others. Faye just sat in her chair and looked at him. Then, slowly, the color began to go out of George’s face, and expression went out of it with the color. I don’t know how to describe it, exactly, but his face seemed somehow to fall apart. Then I thought, My God, he’s going to cry!
“Really, George,” Faye Townsend said, “do you think I’m an utter fool?”
Every wave of her hair was immaculately in place; her lipstick looked as if it had just been put on. The polish was all there, all intact. George had killed two men and tried to fasten his murders on the Pooh and me—and then on Dwight Craig—on Pauline—on anybody else. But at that moment I was damn sorry for him. He just looked at Faye, and his face kept on disintegrating.
“But you’re a fool, George,” Faye said. “Do you think I’ll run with you?” She paused. “After what you’ve done,” she added, and that was false as hell. It didn’t matter what he’d done; that wasn’t the reason. “Hiding in corners,” she said. “In little, dirty rooms. Afraid to show our faces.” That wasn’t false. There weren’t going to be any dirty little rooms for Faye Townsend; there wasn’t going to be any hiding of her pretty, well-kept face. Not if Faye knew it.
George just looked at her. I thought he would say something, would call her the name that was in my mind, that I thought was the only name for her. But he didn’t. He just looked. Then, very slowly, he shook his head. And then he began to back toward the french doors to the terrace. He kept the gun up, and nobody moved until he had reached behind him and opened the screen, and backed—very slowly, very carefully—onto the terrace. He turned, then, and began to run toward the turnaround of the drive, where his car was.
I waited for someone to stop him; for a trooper to stop him. But there was just the sound of his feet as he ran on the gravel.
Forniss and Heimrich moved, then, and Craig and I followed them, and the Pooh came with us. Faye just sat there. As I turned to go toward the door, she had one hand up, patting hair which didn’t need patting. I guess the whole business had upset her.
Townsend was just closing the door of the big Buick when we got to the terrace. Then the starter began to grind. Forniss started toward the car, and now he had an automatic in his hand. But Heimrich said, “Take it easy, Charlie.” Forniss kept on moving toward the car, but he didn’t move fast. And the starter kept on grinding. I realized, suddenly, that it had already been grinding a lot too long. I looked at Heimrich.
“Now Mr. Otis,” Heimrich said. “Did you think we’d just let him walk out on us?”
&nb
sp; I didn’t know what I thought. I watched Sergeant Forniss saunter on toward the car. He made, it seemed to me, a hell of a big target. But nothing happened. He opened the door of the car, quite casually—but with his gun ready, for all that.
George Townsend was sitting behind the wheel, bent over it, and the starter kept on whirring and nothing happened. Then the whirring stopped. George sat for a moment, looking at his hands on the wheel of a car that wasn’t going anywhere. Then he leaned down over the wheel. He gave the whole thing up, then; you could see that he gave it up by the shape his body took.
“All right, Mr. Townsend,” Forniss said. “You’d better come along, now.”
For a moment, Townsend didn’t appear to hear him. Then he turned sideways and got out of the car. He stood for a moment and looked at it …
“We jammed the choke, Mr. Townsend,” Forniss said. “It’s easy with these automatic chokes.”
George Townsend just shook his head—very slowly, as if he might go on shaking it for the rest of his life.
11
Captain Heimrich was kind enough to say I had been very helpful; he said he appreciated it, naturally. I said it was nothing, nothing at all, and I suppose my voice gave me away, because the Pooh laughed. It was the first real laughter I had heard from anybody for hours; the first laughter with no purpose, except to respond to something funny. It was pleasant to hear, even if I was the something funny.
“Dear Oh-Oh,” the Pooh said. “Why don’t you just ask the man?”
We were on the terrace of Mean Abode, and it was mid-afternoon and just as hot as it had been since the Friday before. Heimrich and Sergeant Forniss had brought us there, after George Townsend—with no expression in his face, with his eyes blank—had been started for another destination. We had asked the captain and the sergeant to have a drink, Forniss had looked at Heimrich and, after a second, Heimrich had nodded. He said he thought it would be a very good idea. He smiled a little as he said it; he had, then, a very pleasant smile.
A Client Is Canceled Page 17