“No. I certainly don’t.”
McCarron waited for Marge’s opinion.
“No,” Marge said, shaking her head.
“Think a minute,” McCarron said to Tom. “Do you think that might have explained his behavior? Do you think he’s avoiding answering the police by hiding out now?”
Tom thought for a minute. “He didn’t give me a single clue in that direction.”
“Do you think Dickie was afraid of something?”
“I can’t imagine of what,” Tom said.
McCarron asked Tom how close a friend Dickie had been of Freddie Miles, whom else he knew who was a friend of both Dickie and Freddie, if he knew of any debts between them, any girlfriends— “Only Marge that I know of,” Tom replied, and Marge protested that she wasn’t a girl friend of Freddie’s, so there couldn’t possibly have been any rivalry over her—and could Tom say that he was Dickie’s best friend in Europe?
“I wouldn’t say that,” Tom answered. “I think Marge Sherwood is. I hardly know any of Dickie’s friends in Europe.”
McCarron studied Tom’s face again. “What’s your opinion about these forgeries?”
“Are they forgeries? I didn’t think anybody was sure.”
“I don’t think they are,” Marge said.
“Opinion seems to be divided,” McCarron said. “The experts don’t think the letter he wrote to the bank in Naples is a forgery, which can only mean that if there is a forgery somewhere, he’s covering up for someone. Assuming there is a forgery, do you have any idea who he might be trying to cover up for?”
Tom hesitated a moment, and Marge said, “Knowing him, I can’t imagine him covering up for anyone. Why should he?”
McCarron was staring at Tom, but whether he was debating his honesty or mulling over all they had said to him, Tom couldn’t tell. McCarron looked like a typical American automobile salesman, or any other kind of salesman, Tom thought—cheerful, presentable, average in intellect, able to talk baseball with a man or pay a stupid compliment to a woman. Tom didn’t think too much of him, but, on the other hand, it was not wise to underestimate one’s opponent. McCarron’s small, soft mouth opened as Tom watched him, and he said, “Would you mind coming downstairs with me for a few minutes, Mr. Ripley, if you’ve still got a few minutes?”
“Certainly,” Tom said, standing up.
“We won’t be long,” McCarron said to Mr. Greenleaf and Marge.
Tom looked back from the door, because Mr. Greenleaf had gotten up and was starting to say something, though Tom didn’t listen. Tom was suddenly aware that it was raining, that thin, gray sheets of rain were slapping against the window panes. It was like a last glimpse, blurred and hasty—Marge’s figure looking small and huddled across the big room, Mr. Greenleaf doddering forward like an old man, protesting. But the comfortable room was the thing, and the view across the canal to where his house stood—invisible now because of the rain—which he might never see again.
Mr. Greenleaf was asking, “Are you—you are coming back in a few minutes?”
“Oh, yes,” McCarron answered with the impersonal firmness of an executioner.
They walked toward the elevator. Was this the way they did it? Tom wondered. A quiet word in the lobby. He would be handed over to the Italian police, and then McCarron would return to the room just as he had promised. McCarron had brought a couple of the papers from his briefcase with him. Tom stared at an ornamental vertical molding beside the floor number panel in the elevator: an egg-shaped design framed by four raised dots, egg-shape, dots, all the way down. Think of some sensible, ordinary remark to make about Mr. Greenleaf, for instance, Tom said to himself. He ground his teeth. If he only wouldn’t start sweating now. He hadn’t started yet, but maybe it would break out all over his face when they reached the lobby. McCarron was hardly as tall as his shoulder. Tom turned to him just as the elevator stopped, and said grimly, baring his teeth in a smile, “Is this your first trip to Venice?”
“Yes,” said McCarron. He was crossing the lobby. “Shall we go in here?” He indicated the coffee bar. His tone was polite.
“All right,” Tom said agreeably. The bar was not crowded, but there was not a single table that would be out of earshot of some other table. Would McCarron accuse him in a place like this, quietly laying down fact after fact on the table? He took the chair that McCarron pulled out for him. McCarron sat with his back to the wall.
A waiter came up. “Signori?”
“Coffee,” McCarron said.
“Cappuccino,” Tom said. “Would you like a cappuccino or an espresso?”
“Which is the one with milk? Cappuccino?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have that.”
Tom gave the order.
McCarron looked at him. His small mouth smiled on one side. Tom imagined three or four different beginnings: “You killed Richard, didn’t you? The rings are just too much, aren’t they?” Or “Tell me about the San Remo boat, Mr. Ripley, in detail.” Or simply, leading up quietly, “Where were you on February fifteenth, when Richard landed in . . . Naples? All right, but where were you living then? Where were you living in January, for instance? . . . Can you prove it?”
McCarron was saying nothing at all, only looking down at his plump hands now, and smiling faintly. As if it had been so absurdly simple for him to unravel, Tom thought, that he could hardly force himself to put it into words.
At a table next to them four Italian men were babbling away like a madhouse, screeching with wild laughter. Tom wanted to edge away from them. He sat motionless.
Tom had braced himself until his body felt like iron, until sheer tension created defiance. He heard himself asking, in an incredibly calm voice, “Did you have time to speak to Tenente Roverini when you came through Rome?” and at the same time he asked it, he realized that he had even an objective in the question: to find out if McCarron had heard about the San Remo boat.
“No, I didn’t,” McCarron said. “There was a message for me that Mr. Greenleaf would be in Rome today, but I’d landed in Rome so early, I thought I’d fly over and catch him—and also talk to you.” McCarron looked down at his papers. “What kind of a man is Richard? How would you describe him as far as his personality goes?”
Was McCarron going to lead up to it like this? Pick out more little clues from the words he chose to describe him? Or did he only want the objective opinion that he couldn’t get from Dickie’s parents? “He wanted to be a painter,” Tom began, “but he knew he’d never be a very good painter. He tried to act as if he didn’t care, and as if he were perfectly happy and leading exactly the kind of life he wanted to lead over here in Europe.” Tom moistened his lips. “But I think the life was beginning to get him down. His father disapproved, as you probably know. And Dickie had got himself into an awkward spot with Marge.”
“How do you mean?”
“Marge was in love with him, and he wasn’t with her, and at the same time he was seeing her so much in Mongibello, she kept on hoping—” Tom began to feel on safer ground, but he pretended to have difficulty in expressing himself. “He never actually discussed it with me. He always spoke very highly of Marge. He was very fond of her, but it was obvious to everybody—Marge too—that he never would marry her. But Marge never quite gave up. I think that’s the main reason Dickie left Mongibello.”
McCarron listened patiently and sympathetically, Tom thought. “What do you mean never gave up? What did she do?”
Tom waited until the waiter had set down the two frothy cups of cappuccino and stuck the tab between them under the sugar bowl. “She kept writing to him, wanting to see him, and at the same time being very tactful, I’m sure, about not intruding on him when he wanted to be by himself. He told me all this in Rome when I saw him. He said, after the Miles murder, that he certainly wasn’t in the mood to see Marge, and he was afraid that she’d come up to Rome from Mongibello when she heard of all the trouble he was in.”
“Why do you think he w
as nervous after the Miles murder?” McCarron took a sip of the coffee, winced from the heat or the bitterness, and stirred it with the spoon.
Tom explained. They’d been quite good friends, and Freddie had been killed just a few minutes after leaving his house.
“Do you think Richard might have killed Freddie?” McCarron asked quietly.
“No, I don’t.”
“Why?”
“Because there was no reason for him to kill him—at least no reason that I happen to know of.”
“People usually say, because so-and-so wasn’t the type to kill anybody,” McCarron said. “Do you think Richard was the type who could have killed anyone?”
Tom hesitated, seeking earnestly for the truth, “I never thought of it. I don’t know what kind of people are apt to kill somebody. I’ve seen him angry—”
“When?”
Tom described the two days in Rome, when Dickie, he said, had been angry and frustrated because of the police questioning, and had actually moved out of his apartment to avoid phone calls from friends and strangers. Tom tied this in with a growing frustration in Dickie, because he had not been progressing as he had wanted to in his painting. He depicted Dickie as a stubborn, proud young man, in awe of his father and therefore determined to defy his father’s wishes, a rather erratic fellow who was generous to strangers as well as to his friends, but who was subject to changes of mood—from sociability to sullen withdrawal. He summed it up by saying that Dickie was a very ordinary young man who liked to think he was extraordinary. “If he killed himself,” Tom concluded, “I think it was because he realized certain failures in himself—inadequacies. It’s much easier for me to imagine him a suicide than a murderer.”
“But I’m not so sure that he didn’t kill Freddie Miles. Are you?”
McCarron was perfectly sincere. Tom was sure of that. McCarron was even expecting him to defend Dickie now, because they had been friends. Tom felt some of his terror leaving him, but only some of it, like something melting very slowly inside him. “I’m not sure,” Tom said, “but I just don’t believe that he did.”
“I’m not sure either. But it would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” Tom said. “Everything.”
“Well, this is only the first day of work,” McCarron said with an optimistic smile. “I haven’t even looked over the report in Rome. I’ll probably want to talk to you again after I’ve been to Rome.”
Tom stared at him. It seemed to be over. “Do you speak Italian?”
“No, not very well, but I can read it. I do better in French, but I’ll get along,” McCarron said, as if it were not a matter of much importance.
It was very important, Tom thought. He couldn’t imagine McCarron extracting everything that Roverini knew about the Greenleaf case solely through an interpreter. Neither would McCarron be able to get around and chat with people like Dickie Greenleaf’s landlady in Rome. It was most important. “I talked with Roverini here in Venice a few weeks ago,” Tom said. “Give him my regards.”
“I’ll do that.” McCarron finished his coffee. “Knowing Dickie, what places do you think he would be likely to go if he wanted to hide out?”
Tom squirmed back a little on his chair. This was getting down to the bottom of the barrel, he thought. “Well, I know he likes Italy best. I wouldn’t bet on France. He also likes Greece. He talked about going to Majorca at some time. All of Spain is a possibility, I suppose.”
“I see,” McCarron said, sighing.
“Are you going back to Rome today?”
McCarron raised his eyebrows. “I imagine so, if I can catch a few hours’ sleep here. I haven’t been to bed in two days.”
He held up very well, Tom thought. “I think Mr. Greenleaf was wondering about the trains. There are two this morning and probably some more in the afternoon. He was planning to leave today.”
“We can leave today.” McCarron reached for the check. “Thanks very much for your help, Mr. Ripley. I have your address and phone number, in case I have to see you again.”
They stood up.
“Mind if I go up and say good-bye to Marge and Mr. Greenleaf?”
McCarron didn’t mind. They rode up in the elevator again. Tom had to check himself from whistling. Papa non vuole was going around in his head.
Tom looked closely at Marge as they went in, looking for signs of enmity. Marge only looked a little tragic, he thought. As if she had recently been made a widow.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions alone, too, Miss Sherwood,” McCarron said. “If you don’t mind,” he said to Mr. Greenleaf.
“Certainly not. I was just going down to the lobby to buy some newspapers,” Mr. Greenleaf said.
McCarron was carrying on. Tom said good-bye to Marge and to Mr. Greenleaf, in case they were going to Rome today and he did not see them again. He said to McCarron, “I’d be very glad to come to Rome at any time, if I can be of any help. I expect to be here until the end of May, anyway.”
“We’ll have something before then,” McCarron said with his confident Irish smile.
Tom went down to the lobby with Mr. Greenleaf.
“He asked me the same questions all over again,” Tom told Mr. Greenleaf, “and also my opinion of Richard’s character.”
“Well, what is your opinion?” Mr. Greenleaf asked in a hopeless tone.
Whether he was a suicide or had run away to hide himself would be conduct equally reprehensible in Mr. Greenleaf’s eyes, Tom knew. “I told him what I think is the truth,” Tom said, “that he’s capable of running away and also capable of committing suicide.”
Mr. Greenleaf made no comment, only patted Tom’s arm. “Good-bye, Tom.”
“Good-bye,” Tom said. “Let me hear from you.”
Everything was all right between him and Mr. Greenleaf, Tom thought. And everything would be all right with Marge, too. She had swallowed the suicide explanation, and that was the direction her mind would run in from now on, he knew.
Tom spent the afternoon at home, expecting a telephone call, one telephone call at least from McCarron, even if it was not about anything important, but none came. There was only a call from Titi, the resident countess, inviting him for cocktails that afternoon. Tom accepted.
Why should he expect any trouble from Marge, he thought. She never had given him any. The suicide was an idée fixe, and she would arrange everything in her dull imagination to fit it.
28
McCarron called Tom the next day from Rome, wanting the names of everyone Dickie had known in Mongibello. That was apparently all that McCarron wanted to know, because he took a leisurely time getting them all, and checking them off against the list that Marge had given him. Most of the names Marge had already given him, but Tom went through them all, with their difficult addresses—Giorgio, of course, Pietro the boatkeeper, Fausto’s Aunt Maria whose last name he didn’t know though he told McCarron in a complicated way how to get to her house, Aldo the grocer, the Cecchis, and even old Stevenson, the recluse painter who lived just outside the village and whom Tom had never even met. It took Tom several minutes to list them all, and it would take McCarron several days to check on them, probably. He mentioned everybody but Signor Pucci, who had handled the sale of Dickie’s house and boat, and who would undoubtedly tell McCarron, if he hadn’t learned it through Marge, that Tom Ripley had come to Mongibello to arrange Dickie’s affairs. Tom did not think it very serious, one way or the other, if McCarron did know that he had taken care of Dickie’s affairs. And as to people like Aldo and Stevenson, McCarron was welcome to all he could get out of them.
“Anyone in Naples?” McCarron asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Rome?”
“I’m sorry, I never saw him with any friends in Rome.”
“Never met this painter—uh—Di Massimo?”
“No. I saw him once,” Tom said, “but I never met him.”
“What does he look like?”
“Well
, it was just on a street corner. I left Dickie as he was going to meet him, so I wasn’t very close to him. He looked about five feet nine, about fifty, grayish-black hair—that’s about all I remember. He looked rather solidly built. He was wearing a light-gray suit, I remember.”
“Hm-m—okay,” McCarron said absently, as if he were writing all that down. “Well, I guess that’s about all. Thanks very much, Mr. Ripley.”
“You’re very welcome. Good luck.”
Then Tom waited quietly in his house for several days, just as anybody would do, if the search for a missing friend had reached its intensest point. He declined three or four invitations to parties. The newspapers had renewed their interest in Dickie’s disappearance, inspired by the presence in Italy of an American private detective who had been hired by Dickie’s father. When some photographers from Europeo and Oggi came to take pictures of him and his house, he told them firmly to leave, and actually took one insistent young man by the elbow and propelled him across the living room toward the door. But nothing of any importance happened for five days—no telephone calls, no letters, even from Tenente Roverini. Tom imagined the worst sometimes, especially at dusk when he felt more depressed than at any other time of day. He imagined Roverini and McCarron getting together and developing the theory that Dickie could have disappeared in November, imagined McCarron checking on the time he had bought his car, imagined him picking up a scent when he found out that Dickie had not come back after the San Remo trip and that Tom Ripley had come down to arrange for the disposal of Dickie’s things. He measured and remeasured Mr. Greenleaf’s tired, indifferent good-bye that last morning in Venice, interpreted it as unfriendly, and imagined Mr. Greenleaf flying into a rage in Rome when no results came of all the efforts to find Dickie, and suddenly demanding a thorough investigation of Tom Ripley, that scoundrel he had sent over with his own money to try to get his son home.
But each morning Tom was optimistic again. On the good side was the fact that Marge unquestioningly believed that Dickie had spent those months sulking in Rome, and she would have kept all his letters and she would probably bring them all out to show to McCarron. Excellent letters they were, too. Tom was glad he had spent so much thought on them. Marge was an asset rather than a liability. It was really a very good thing that he had put down his shoe that night that she had found the rings.
The Talented Mr. Ripley Page 26