Memory (Hard Case Crime)

by Donald E. Westlake

  Kirk had stepped down off the platform. Now he said, “Begin.” He held up his hands, as though carrying an imaginary tray, and came up on the platform again. He said, “Your dinner. Everything like you ordered.” There was a sly look on his face now, and some sort of faint accent in his words. He set the imaginary tray down on the table and stood looking at Cole.

  Cole knew he was now supposed to say something, but what? He poked at the bits and pieces Kirk had told him, and finally said, “You killed—” Who? Panic filled him for just an instant, followed by annoyance. When he couldn’t even remember himself, why should he ensnarl himself in sketchy absurdities? He gestured vaguely, and said “—him?” He shook his head. “Who did you kill? I don’t know.”

  Kirk waved his hands in exasperation. “What difference does it make? Make up any details you need, I’ll follow along. We’ll start again.” He went back down off the platform. “You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  Kirk began the scene again, same movements and same words and same attitude. This time, he had barely finished his speech when Cole said, “You killed him.”

  “Now, don’t start that again.”

  “I—” Cole looked around miserably, and found nothing to say.

  Kirk snapped out of character again and said, “You aren’t trying, Paul. You’ve got to feel the character. He’s going to die, tonight, for a crime he didn’t commit, and the guilty one is standing there in front of him. Can’t you feel it?”

  Cole tried to feel it, but he couldn’t. There was too much discomfort and worry and doubt in his real self; he couldn’t believe in the condemned man at all. He shook his head and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Switch the characters? I’ll be the condemned man, you be the attendant, it might be easier for you.”

  “I’ll try,” said Cole.

  They switched places. Kirk sat down at the chair, and slumped, his whole body registering despair. Cole went down off the platform, and did as Kirk had done. He carried an imaginary tray onto the platform and said, “Your dinner. Everything like you ordered.” He tried to say it the way Kirk had done, but it sounded flat to his ears, just words droned out in a monotone.

  Kirk raised his head laboriously, as though it weighed a ton. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.” Bitterness and despair and the cold remnants of anger were mixed in his tone and expression.

  Cole put the imaginary tray down on the table, and straightened, wondering what to say next. Now was he supposed to be a murderer, and Kirk was supposed to be someone convicted of a murder that Cole had done. What would a murderer say to Kirk now? Cole had no idea, and he shook his head, giving up. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  But Kirk thought it was part of the improvisation. Wearily he said, “You’re sorry. Tomorrow you’ll be here, and I’ll be nothing.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Cole.

  “You mean you don’t have the courage to do what you know you should do.” Kirk glanced up at him again, and then frowned. “Are you in character or not?”

  “I guess I’m not. It just isn’t working.”

  “You can’t feel these people at all? You can’t feel the grimy damp atmosphere of the cell, the...the guilt between these two men? You can’t feel any of it?”

  Cole shook his head.

  Kirk got to his feet and took out his cigarettes. His expression was irritated, his movements quick and impatient. He lit the cigarette and said, “What did you come back here for?” His voice was cold now, unfriendly.

  “I thought it would help. Everywhere I go I remember more things.”

  “How long have you been back in town?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Since before Christmas. A few days before Christmas, I think.”

  “Two weeks? Three weeks?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You’ve see your friends? Your neighborhood? Your apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’ve seen me. And I’ve given you a basic exercise.” Kirk was glaring at him, spitting out his words. “And what’s the result? Is it all coming back in a flood?”

  “No, not in a flood.”

  “Not at all. There’s nothing in you now. What did you come back here for, to bring me pain?”

  “No. No, I—”

  “I can’t talk to you any more now. I have people to see. I’m sorry you can’t stay here, but I have to lock up when I leave.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t do it.”

  “That’s all right, it’s not your fault.” But the words were said with mechanical rapidity; Kirk was already starting for the door.

  Cole followed him. It was like Rita again, but this time he didn’t entirely blame himself. Kirk knew what had happened to him, why should he expect him to be the same? Why treat him like this? Why so cold and bitter?

  Kirk held the door for him, and then closed and locked it. Cole had already started down the stairs, but moving slowly, hoping Kirk would get over his irritation. They went down the stairwell together in silence, and out to the late afternoon sun and the bitter cold of the street. Kirk said, brusquely, “I wish you a speedy recovery. Goodbye, Paul.” He turned and strode away, his hands in his overcoat pockets.

  Cole stood a while on the sidewalk, watching the movement of the wreckers across the street. The machines made grinding clanking noises, and the men shouted to one another. The sun was bright, making Cole squint, but the air was like ice and smelled of snow.

  Kirk hadn’t given him his four dollars back after all.

  Cole walked slowly northward, toward the subway station. None of it, back there in the big room where Kirk held his classes, none of it had been real. It was all like the condemned man and the jail cell, fantasy and make-believe. The students were not students, but were either hopeless misfits who couldn’t learn or natural actors who didn’t need to learn. The teacher was not a teacher, but simply a spectator of failures and successes, grubbing a living out of the one and justifying it with the other, but influencing neither. And the subject of their gatherings in that room was itself fantasy and make-believe, level after level.

  What did Kirk know? What, at bottom, did that fantastic man know? Nothing. He had left in rudeness and contempt, and why? Was it because Cole was no longer as good an actor as Kirk? No. It was because Cole was no longer wearing the coat-tails Kirk wanted to ride. That was it, pure and simple, nothing more to be said.

  Except that Kirk was wrong. Knowing nothing, having nothing, being nothing, offering nothing, it should be no surprise that Kirk was wrong. He looked at Cole now and he didn’t see the bright young arrogant Cole of three years ago, and in the simple illogic of his mind he concluded at once that that earlier Cole was gone forever.

  Well, he’s not. He’s still in here, he’s inside my head. He’s an actor, he’s a man with a vocation, a man with a talent, a man with a future. He’s down inside here, and he’ll come back out without your help, as strong and as full as ever. You haven’t discouraged me, damn you, all you’ve done is strengthened me. So what do you think of that?

  He walked along with rapid strides, though there was no particular place he had to go. But the physical movement of hard walking helped to bolster him, helped to keep him thinking confident and defiant thoughts, to ignore the doubts nibbling in around the edges.

  25

  But the feeling of belligerent self-assurance he had taken away with him from the meeting with Robin Kirk couldn’t last, not without further sustenance. The periods of black depression came and went, like a slow and heavy pulse. When they came on him they drained him of all strength and all purpose, left him slumped and morose and sorrowful. He very often felt like crying at these times, and sometimes thought crying would help, would work some darkness out of his system, but the tears never came.

  Helen Arndt phoned the next day, Saturday, to hear how the meeting had gone with Robin Kirk, and he was embarrassed to have to
tell her it had gone badly. But she cheered him up—or tried to—saying, “Don’t take it to heart, honey, that’s just Robin’s way. He’s as emotional as if he had talent.”

  She asked him, too, if he would like to come over for dinner again that night, but he claimed a prior engagement, people he was supposed to meet at a Village bar, with whom he was to talk about his past. The excuse had been readied in his head for two days; he was terrified of going up to that apartment again. It embarrassed him and made him feel foolish to have a woman so obviously lusting for him, and now that she seemed to believe they had already had relations together once, he knew any subsequent time alone with her would be uncomfortable in the extreme.

  His spate of traveling and visiting seemed to have come to a close, and reluctantly but inevitably he slipped once more into his routine. The first unemployment insurance check had been waiting for him on Friday when he’d returned from seeing Robin Kirk, and on Monday he cashed it at the bank. He had kept two dollars in his checking account there in order to keep the account open, and he now added twenty-eight dollars of the thirty-eight dollar unemployment insurance check to it, keeping the rest for groceries and cigarettes. The trip to the bank, and to the supermarket on Seventh Avenue, were his only journeys away from the apartment; from then on he stayed at home, working aimlessly in his two rooms and half-listening to his records. No one came by, no one telephoned. The two times he remembered to check with his answering service, there were no messages.

  At night, the dreams. Sometimes now he did have vague visual memories of the dreams after awakening; the square of shiny metal was prominent, full of menace, and sometimes he seemed to remember having seen Edna’s face. Edna also still came into his waking mind from time to time, as clearly and as uselessly as ever, but he’d given up trying to exorcise her; the unfaded memory of her was just one of the vagaries of his mind that he could do nothing about. Once his full memory was restored, the part of his past that had involved Edna would sink to its proper insignificance.

  On Wednesday, six days after the phone had last rung, it suddenly commenced a flurry of activity; two calls the same morning. The first came while he was scrubbing the tiled bathroom floor, and for just a second he couldn’t think what was making the noise. Then he hurriedly dried his hands and ran to answer the ringing, and a male voice said, “Paul Cole, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Doctor Edgarton.”

  The name meant nothing. Cautiously, Cole said, “Yes?”

  There was a short silence on the line, and then the doctor said, “Oh! Of course, you don’t remember. You came to see me two weeks ago about your head injury. Your memory problem.”

  “Oh. Yes, that’s right. I’m sorry, I didn’t remember the name.”

  “That’s quite all right, I should have realized. I have your X-rays. Could you come down this afternoon? Say, three-thirty?”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Just after ten.”

  “Yes, I can come down.”

  “Do you have the address?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not sure...”

  “I’ll give it to you again, anyway, to be on the safe side.”

  Cole got a pencil and a sheet of paper from the desk drawer and wrote down the address the doctor gave him. He promised again to be there at three-thirty, and hung up.

  Almost immediately, the phone rang again. Cole stared at it, not believing it. Twice in a row? Could it be the doctor again, with something else to tell him?

  But it was Helen Arndt. “I finally got you something, honey,” she announced, immediately after his hello. “A job. If you think you can handle it, of course. It isn’t much, but you’ll make a hundred or so, and it is work, a fresh start for you. It’s one line, all right?”

  She couldn’t have known it, but his answer all depended upon the timing of her call. If she had phoned during one of the times when he was feeling depressed and defeated, when the curt dismissal of Robin Kirk was smarting in him and seemed somehow justified to him, he would have refused the job, certain he couldn’t handle it. But her call had come right after the silence of his days had already been broken, and this combination of calls made him full of confidence in himself. He would get better. He’d been home less than a month, and it would take a little time, that was all. That was all.

  He said, “I ought to be able to remember one line. What is it, a play?”

  “No, baby, television. A drama special, you know the type? It’s one of those live-on-tape things.”

  “All right, I’ll do it.”

  “Sturdy boy. Do you have a pencil?”

  There were pencil and paper right in front of him, the paper already written on. He turned it over to the blank side, picked up the pencil and said, “I’m ready.”

  “The studio is in the Bronx, God alone knows why.” She gave him the address, and said, “Now, you’re to be there next Monday, the nineteenth. Write that down, baby.”

  “I will.”

  “Monday, the nineteenth of January. Ten A.M. Bring two or three suits with you.”

  “All right.”

  “Honey, you want me to call you Monday morning? To remind you.”

  “No, that’s all right, I’ll leave myself a note.”

  “You’ve got an answering service, haven’t you? Have them call you, so you don’t oversleep. All right, honey?”

  “All right, I will.”

  “How is it coming? Any improvement?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a little, I’m not sure.”

  “You poor boy, you don’t know how I feel for you. Listen, come on up this evening, we’ll have steak again and everything, same as last time. But not quite so much to drink, eh?”

  “Oh, uh...I’m supposed to go, I’ve got a date tonight already. I’m sorry, I...It’s a girl named Rita, I don’t know if you know her.”

  “Sweetie, where’s your sense? Don’t come flaunting your other women in my face. For Heaven’s sake, honey.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I...”

  She laughed, as though it were a joke, but there was something brittle in her laughter. “Never mind, honey,” she said. “We’ll make it Monday. You can tell me all about your first day back on the job.”

  There was no way out of that. He nodded reluctantly, though she couldn’t see him, and said, “All right.”

  “Good boy. Be good tonight.”

  “I will.”

  He hung up, relieved that the conversation was finished, and sat a while longer at the desk, looking at the note he’d written. He had a job. A job in his profession, by God. He was going to act, he was going at last to do what Paul Cole was born to do.

  He immediately put the note up on the wall, so he wouldn’t miss the opportunity. He had forgotten all about the address on the other side, forgotten he was supposed to go see the doctor this afternoon.

  The prospect of work so exhilarated him that he couldn’t stay around the apartment. He put on his coat and went out, to find the first real snowstorm of the season just getting underway. Snow angled down in white regiments, battalions. It was like looking at the world through a misted window and a shredded white curtain. Cole walked through this, enjoying the fact of snow the way children do, and when he saw a theater marquee that offered two musical comedies at once he bought a ticket without a qualm. At four o’clock, when the doctor began phoning his apartment, Cole was sitting warm and happy in a theater on Sixth Avenue, bright pictures on the wall in front of him and white snow building on the roof.

  26

  When the doorbell rang, Cole was washing underwear in the bathroom sink. It was Friday, two days since he’d heard about the acting job and forgotten to go to the doctor’s office, and already it seemed to him as though the unchanging round of his days had remained static almost forever. The ringing of his doorbell startled him the way some people are startled by bulletins on television.

  He approached the door warily, drying his hands on a towel, and before h
e was halfway there the bell jangled again, prodded by an imperious thumb. He dropped the towel on a kitchen chair, crossed the room, and at last opened the door.

  It was Helen Arndt, looking stern; her expression terrified him. Then he realized it was not to be taken seriously, she was only imitating sternness, for apparently humorous reasons.

  Still, it was strong make-believe. When she came into the apartment, her high heels beat purposefully on the floor. Heavily girdled, fur coat hanging open, she was encased in a dark green suit like a medieval knight in his armor. Only the little chartreuse hat perched atilt atop her head belied the general effect; otherwise, she was as solid and intimidating as a battleship.

  Once in his living room, she took a stance, right arm pushing fur coat back to put right fist on cocked right hip. “All right, sweetie,” she said, her voice continuing the mock-severity of her manner, “what you need is a nurse. So here I am. Put on your coat.”

  Cole hadn’t yet closed the hall door. He said, “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Remember Doctor Edgarton? The one I made you go see?”

  Yes, he did. And dimly now it seemed to him he’d heard from or of the doctor more recently, but he couldn’t be sure. He said, “I remember him.”

  “He phoned you Wednesday. Just before I did, apparently. You remember me calling you Wednesday?”

  “About the job.” Of course he remembered that. He read the note about it three or four times a day.

  “You were supposed,” she told him, ignoring his right answer, “to see the doctor Wednesday afternoon. No, you don’t remember that at all, I can see it in your face.” She sighed, a burlesque sigh of long-suffering martyrdom. “Well, it’s not your fault, it’s just the way things are.”

  “I was supposed to—”

  “This time,” she interrupted, “he did it right. He phoned me. Helen is to bring little Paul to see the nice doctor. All right?”

  “I’m sorry if I did something wrong. I don’t remember—”