The Talented Mr. Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

Tom was wringing the shoe in his hands like a pair of gloves now, yet still keeping the shoe in position, because Marge was staring at him in a funny way. She was still thinking. Was she kidding him? Did she know now?

  Marge said earnestly, “I just can’t imagine Dickie ever being without his rings,” and Tom knew then that she hadn’t guessed the answer, that her mind was miles up some other road.

  He relaxed then, limply, sank down on the sofa and pretended to busy himself with putting on his shoes. “No,” he agreed, automatically.

  “If it weren’t so late, I’d call Mr. Greenleaf now. He’s probably in bed, and he wouldn’t sleep all night if I told him, I know.”

  Tom tried to push a foot into the second shoe. Even his fingers were limp, without strength. He racked his brain for something sensible to say. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it sooner,” he brought out in a deep voice. “It was just one of those—”

  “Yes, it makes it kind of silly at this point for Mr. Greenleaf to bring a private detective over, doesn’t it?” Her voice shook.

  Tom looked at her. She was about to cry. This was the very first moment, Tom realized, that she was admitting to herself that Dickie could be dead, that he probably was dead. Tom went toward her slowly. “I’m sorry, Marge. I’m sorry above all that I didn’t tell you sooner about the rings.” He put his arm around her. He fairly had to, because she was leaning against him. He smelled her perfume. The Stradivari, probably. “That’s one of the reasons I felt sure he’d killed himself—at least that he might have.”

  “Yes,” she said in a miserable, wailing tone.

  She was not crying, actually, only leaning against him with her head rigidly bent down. Like someone who has just heard the news of a death, Tom thought. Which she had.

  “How about a brandy?” he said tenderly.

  “No.”

  “Come over and sit on the sofa.” He led her toward it.

  She sat down, and he crossed the room to get the brandy, poured brandy into two inhalers. When he turned around, she was gone. He had just time to see the edge of her robe and her bare feet disappear at the top of the stairs.

  She preferred to be by herself, he thought. He started to take a brandy up to her, then decided against it. She was probably beyond the help of brandy. He knew how she felt. He carried the brandies solemnly back to the liquor cabinet. He had meant to pour only one back, but he poured them both back, and then let it go and replaced the bottle among the other bottles.

  He sank down on the sofa again, stretched a leg out with his foot dangling, too exhausted now even to remove his shoes. As tired as after he had killed Freddie Miles, he thought suddenly, or as after Dickie in San Remo. He had come so close! He remembered his cool thoughts of beating her senseless with his shoe heel, yet not roughly enough to break the skin anywhere, of dragging her through the front hall and out of the doors with the lights turned off so that no one would see them, and his quickly invented story, that she had evidently slipped, and thinking she could surely swim back to the steps, he hadn’t jumped in or shouted for help until— In a way, he had even imagined the exact words that he and Mr. Greenleaf would say to each other afterward, Mr. Greenleaf shocked and astounded, and he himself just as apparently shaken, but only apparently. Underneath he would be as calm and sure of himself as he had been after Freddie’s murder, because his story would be unassailable. Like the San Remo story. His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them.

  For a moment he heard his own voice saying: “. . . I stood there on the steps calling to her, thinking she’d come up any second, or even that she might be playing a trick on me. . . . But I wasn’t sure she’d hurt herself, and she’d been in such good humor standing there a moment before. . . .” He tensed himself. It was like a phonograph playing in his head, a little drama taking place right in the living room that he was unable to stop. He could see himself standing with the Italian police and Mr. Greenleaf by the big doors that opened to the front hall. He could see and hear himself talking earnestly. And being believed.

  But what seemed to terrify him was not the dialogue or his hallucinatory belief that he had done it (he knew he hadn’t), but the memory of himself standing in front of Marge with the shoe in his hand, imagining all this in a cool, methodical way. And the fact that he had done it twice before. Those two other times were facts, not imagination. He could say he hadn’t wanted to do them, but he had done them. He didn’t want to be a murderer. Sometimes he could absolutely forget that he had murdered, he realized. But sometimes—like now—he couldn’t. He had surely forgotten for a while tonight, when he had been thinking about the meaning of possessions, and why he liked to live in Europe.

  He twisted on to his side, his feet drawn up on the sofa. He was sweating and shaking. What was happening to him? What had happened? Was he going to blurt out a lot of nonsense tomorrow when he saw Mr. Greenleaf, about Marge falling into the canal, and his screaming for help and jumping in and not finding her? Even with Marge standing there with them, would he go berserk and spill the story out and betray himself as a maniac?

  He had to face Mr. Greenleaf with the rings tomorrow. He would have to repeat the story he had told to Marge. He would have to give it details to make it better. He began to invent. His mind steadied. He was imagining a Roman hotel room, Dickie and he standing there talking, and Dickie taking off both his rings and handing them to him. Dickie said: “It’s just as well you don’t tell anybody about this. . . .”

  27

  Marge called Mr. Greenleaf at eight-thirty the next morning to ask how soon they could come over to his hotel, she had told Tom. But Mr. Greenleaf must have noticed that she was upset. Tom heard her starting to tell him the story of the rings. Marge used the same words that Tom had used to her about the rings—evidently Marge had believed him—but Tom could not tell what Mr. Greenleaf’s reaction was. He was afraid this piece of news might be just the one that would bring the whole picture into focus, and that when they saw Mr. Greenleaf this morning he might be in the company of a policeman ready to arrest Tom Ripley. This possibility rather offset the advantage of his not being on the scene when Mr. Greenleaf heard about the rings.

  “What did he say?” Tom asked when Marge had hung up.

  Marge sat down tiredly on a chair across the room. “He seems to feel the way I do. He said it himself. It looks as if Dickie meant to kill himself.”

  But Mr. Greenleaf would have a little time to think about it before they got there, Tom thought. “What time are we due?” Tom asked.

  “I told him about nine-thirty or before. As soon as we’ve had some coffee. The coffee’s on now.” Marge got up and went into the kitchen. She was already dressed. She had on the traveling suit that she had worn when she arrived.

  Tom sat up indecisively on the edge of the sofa and loosened his tie. He had slept in his clothes on the sofa, and Marge had awakened him when she had come down a few minutes ago. How he had possibly slept all night in the chilly room he didn’t know. It embarrassed him. Marge had been amazed to find him there. There was a crick in his neck, his back, and his right shoulder. He felt wretched. He stood up suddenly. “I’m going upstairs to wash,” he called to Marge.

  He glanced into his room upstairs and saw that Marge had packed her suitcase. It was lying in the middle of the floor, closed. Tom hoped that she and Mr. Greenleaf were still leaving on one of the morning trains. Probably they would, because Mr. Greenleaf was supposed to meet the American detective in Rome today.

  Tom undressed in the room next to Marge’s, then went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. After a look at himself in the mirror he decided to shave first, and he went back to the room to get his electric razor which he had removed from the bathroom, for no particular reason, when Marge arrived. On the way back he heard the telephone ring. Marge answered it. Tom leaned over the stairwell, listening.

  “Oh, that’s fine,” she said. “Oh, that doesn’t matter if we don’t
. . . . Yes, I’ll tell him. . . . All right, we’ll hurry. Tom’s just washing up. . . . Oh, less than an hour. Bye-bye.”

  He heard her walking toward the stairs, and he stepped back because he was naked.

  “Tom?” she yelled up. “The detective from America just got here! He just called Mr. Greenleaf and he’s coming from the airport!”

  “Fine!” Tom called back, and angrily went into the bedroom. He turned the shower off, and plugged his razor into the wall outlet. Suppose he’d been under the shower? Marge would have yelled up, anyway, simply assuming that he would be able to hear her. He would be glad when she was gone, and he hoped she left this morning. Unless she and Mr. Greenleaf decided to stay to see what the detective was going to do with him. Tom knew that the detective had come to Venice especially to see him, otherwise he would have waited to see Mr. Greenleaf in Rome. Tom wondered if Marge realized that too. Probably she didn’t. That took a minimum of deduction.

  Tom put on a quiet suit and tie, and went down to have coffee with Marge. He had taken his shower as hot as he could bear it, and he felt much better. Marge said nothing during the coffee except that the rings should make a great difference both to Mr. Greenleaf and the detective, and she meant that it should look to the detective, too, as if Dickie had killed himself. Tom hoped she was right. Everything depended on what kind of man the detective would be. Everything depended on the first impression he made on the detective.

  It was another gray, clammy day, not quite raining at nine o’clock, but it had rained, and it would rain again, probably toward noon. Tom and Marge caught the gondola from the church steps to San Marco, and walked from there to the Gritti. They telephoned up to Mr. Greenleaf’s room. Mr. Greenleaf said that Mr. McCarron was there, and asked them to come up.

  Mr. Greenleaf opened his door for them. “Good morning,” he said. He pressed Marge’s arm in a fatherly way. “Tom—”

  Tom came in behind Marge. The detective was standing by the window, a short chunky man of about thirty-five. His face looked friendly and alert. Moderately bright, but only moderately, was Tom’s first impression.

  “This is Alvin McCarron,” Mr. Greenleaf said. “Miss Sherwood and Mr. Tom Ripley.”

  They all said, “How do you do?”

  Tom noticed a brand-new briefcase on the bed with some papers and photographs lying around it. McCarron was looking him over.

  “I understand you’re a friend of Richard’s?” he asked.

  “We both are,” Tom said.

  They were interrupted for a minute while Mr. Greenleaf saw that they were all seated. It was a good-sized, heavily furnished room with windows on the canal. Tom sat down in an armless chair upholstered in red. McCarron had installed himself on the bed, and was looking through his sheaf of papers. There were a few photostated papers, Tom saw, that looked like pictures of Dickie’s checks. There were also several loose photographs of Dickie.

  “Do you have the rings?” McCarron asked, looking from Tom to Marge.

  “Yes,” Marge said solemnly, getting up. She took the rings from her handbag and gave them to McCarron.

  McCarron held them out in his palm to Mr. Greenleaf. “These are his rings?” he asked, and Mr. Greenleaf nodded after only a glance at them, while Marge’s face took on a slightly affronted expression as if she were about to say, “I know his rings just as well as Mr. Greenleaf and probably better.” McCarron turned to Tom. “When did he give them to you?” he asked.

  “In Rome. As nearly as I can remember, around February third, just a few days after the murder of Freddie Miles,” Tom answered.

  The detective was studying him with his inquisitive, mild brown eyes. His lifted eyebrows put a couple of wrinkles in the thick-looking skin of his forehead. He had wavy brown hair, cut very short on the sides, with a high curl above his forehead, in a rather cute college-boy style. One couldn’t tell a thing from that face, Tom thought; it was trained. “What did he say when he gave them to you?”

  “He said that if anything happened to him he wanted me to have them. I asked him what he thought was going to happen to him. He said he didn’t know, but something might.” Tom paused deliberately. “He didn’t seem more depressed at that particular moment than a lot of other times I’d talked to him, so it didn’t cross my mind that he was going to kill himself. I knew he intended to go away, that was all.”

  “Where?” asked the detective.

  “To Palermo, he said.” Tom looked at Marge. “He must have given them to me the day you spoke to me in Rome—at the Inghilterra. That day or the day before. Do you remember the date?”

  “February second,” Marge said in a subdued voice.

  McCarron was making notes. “What else?” he asked Tom. “What time of the day was it? Had he been drinking?”

  “No. He drinks very little. I think it was early afternoon. He said it would be just as well if I didn’t mention the rings to anybody, and of course I agreed. I put the rings away and completely forgot about them, as I told Miss Sherwood—I supposed because I’d so impressed on myself that he didn’t want me to say anything about them.” Tom spoke straightforwardly, stammering a little, inadvertently, just as anybody might stammer under the circumstances, Tom thought.

  “What did you do with the rings?”

  “I put them in an old box that I have—just a little box I keep odd buttons in.”

  McCarron regarded him for a moment in silence, and Tom took the moment to brace himself. Out of that placid yet alert Irish face could come anything, a challenging question, a flat statement that he was lying. Tom clung harder in his mind to his own facts, determined to defend them unto death. In the silence, Tom could almost hear Marge’s breathing, and a cough from Mr. Greenleaf made him start. Mr. Greenleaf looked remarkably calm, almost bored. Tom wondered if he had fixed up some scheme with McCarron against him, based on the rings story?

  “Is he the kind of man to lend you the rings for luck for a short time? Had he ever done anything else like that?” McCarron asked.

  “No,” Marge said before Tom could answer.

  Tom began to breathe more easily. He could see that McCarron didn’t know yet what he should make out of it. McCarron was waiting for him to answer. “He had lent me certain things before,” Tom said. “He’d told me to help myself to his ties and jackets now and then. But that’s quite a different matter from the rings, of course.” He had felt a compulsion to say that, because Marge undoubtedly knew about the time Dickie had found him in his clothes.

  “I can’t imagine Dickie without his rings,” Marge said to McCarron. “He took the green one off when he went swimming, but he always put it right on again. They were just like part of his dressing. That’s why I think he was either intending to kill himself or he meant to change his identity.”

  McCarron nodded. “Had he any enemies that you know of?”

  “Absolutely none,” Tom said. “I’ve thought of that.”

  “Any reason you can think of why he might have wanted to disguise himself, or assume another identity?”

  Tom said carefully, twisting his aching neck, “Possibly—but it’s next to impossible in Europe. He’d have had to have a different passport. Any country he’d have entered, he would have had to have a passport. He’d have had to have a passport even to get into a hotel.”

  “You told me he might not have had to have a passport,” Mr. Greenleaf said.

  “Yes, I said that about small hotels in Italy. It’s a remote possibility, of course. But after all this publicity about his disappearance, I don’t see how he could still be keeping it up,” Tom said. “Somebody would surely have betrayed him by this time.”

  “Well, he left with his passport, obviously,” McCarron said, “because he got into Sicily with it and registered at a big hotel.”

  “Yes,” Tom said.

  McCarron made notes for a moment, then looked up at Tom. “Well, how do you see it, Mr. Ripley?”

  McCarron wasn’t nearly finished, Tom thought. McCarron
was going to see him alone later. “I’m afraid I agree with Miss Sherwood that it looks as if he’s killed himself, and it looks as if he intended to all along. I’ve said that before to Mr. Greenleaf.”

  McCarron looked at Mr. Greenleaf, but Mr. Greenleaf said nothing, only looked expectantly at McCarron. Tom had the feeling that McCarron was now inclined to think that Dickie was dead, too, and that it was a waste of time and money for him to have come over.

  “I just want to check these facts again,” McCarron said, still plodding on, going back to his papers. “The last time Richard was seen by anyone is February fifteenth, when he got off the boat in Naples, coming from Palermo.”

  “That’s correct.” Mr. Greenleaf said. “A steward remembers seeing him.”

  “But no sign of him at any hotel after that, and no communications from him since.” McCarron looked from Mr. Greenleaf to Tom.

  “No,” Tom said.

  McCarron looked at Marge.

  “No,” Marge said.

  “And when was the last time you saw him, Miss Sherwood?”

  “On November twenty-third, when he left for San Remo,” Marge said promptly.

  “You were then in Mongibello?” McCarron asked, pronouncing the town’s name with a hard “g,” as if he had no knowledge of Italian, or at least no relationship to the spoken language.

  “Yes,” Marge said. “I just missed seeing him in Rome in February, but the last time I saw him was in Mongibello.”

  Good old Marge! Tom felt almost affectionate toward her—underneath everything. He had begun to feel affectionate this morning, even though she had irritated him. “He was trying to avoid everyone in Rome,” Tom put in. “That’s why, when he first gave me the rings, I thought he was on some tack of getting away from everyone he had known, living in another city, and just vanishing for a while.”

  “Why, do you think?”

  Tom elaborated, mentioning the murder of his friend Freddie Miles, and its effect on Dickie.

  “Do you think Richard knew who killed Freddie Miles?”