Don't Open the Door

by Ursula Curtis

  “You been fooling around with my daughter,” said Lopez baldly.

  “I—well, really, sir! It’s possible that your daughter may have been employed by us in some capacity,” began Arthur over a terrible inner quaking—and then, his senses sharpened by dread, because this looked like a man who would not only attempt physical violence but be quite successful at it, he realized that Lopez had not made the pronouncement threateningly; it had been more in the nature of a remark.

  His relief that he was not to be the object of a beating died at once under the concurrent realization that here it came at last: the demand for terms. Arthur felt none of the calm which is reputed to come when a long-feared threat turns into actuality, perhaps because he had been badly shaken by the deputy’s attitude that morning. The deference and wholehearted sympathy of a week before had vanished; although the man had been polite enough he had been openly speculative. And for Arthur’s association with Rosalinda Lopez to come out now, and be brandished about the newspapers . . . The first and possibly the least effect would be the immediate loss of his job here. He hardly dared think beyond that.

  Lopez had brushed aside the flustered attempt at a disclaimer with a contemptuous slicing gesture with the edge of his hand. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  . . . But, Arthur was thinking frantically, neither Lopez nor Rosalinda could know of Mr. Heatherwood’s almost maniacal concern with morality, and they did know that he had been in Denver when Molly was killed. Might they accept a bluff: ‘Very well, if you don’t care about Rosalinda’s reputation, go ahead, tell the police’? To gain time, he gazed at Lopez with an appearance of puzzlement and said, “Do about what?”

  Lopez stared back, baffled, beginning to scowl. “My girl. Rosie.”

  There ought to have been some faint comfort in hearing the haughty Rosalinda thus reduced, but there was not. Arthur’s damp face felt cold in the little wind which had sprung up and was chasing spirals of dust around the parking lot. He was acutely conscious of the passing minutes which might bring a privileged few out of the building a little early, and of the fact that the guard at the gate, having nothing else to do, was almost certainly studying this menacing confrontation of a Heatherwood executive by a swarthy workman—because by now Lopez had placed his fists on his hips in an unmistakable attitude.

  He must get himself out of here as quickly as possible without making any damaging admissions or concessions. Arthur began with all the austerity he could muster, “If your daughter has any complaint as to her treatment here, she is free to make it through the proper channels. It’s true that her employment here was abruptly terminated”—after that first date Arthur had swiftly found her another job—“and so it might be possible to arrange something by way of compensation. But now you really must excuse me, Mr. Lopez, as I’m already late for an important—”

  “Look,” interrupted Lopez, suddenly open and blunt.

  “Rosie could make a lot of trouble for you—I read the papers, you know. Now, I got a brother in Vegas could get her a job there, she hates this dump anyway, and I figure maybe a thousand would get her some new clothes and expenses. Once she gets a look at Vegas she’ll forget you ever existed, man.”

  Two weeks ago Arthur would have been horrified at parting with such a sum unless it brought him something tangible and handsome. Now he wondered incredulously if for a mere thousand dollars he could be rid forever of this terrible threat to his job, his community standing, his very way of life? There must be a catch in it, unless for reasons of his own—Rosalinda had spoken with venom of her stepfather—Lopez was anxious to bundle her out of the way as speedily as possible and did not want to risk asking a larger demand.

  Because the man had an air of sincerity, almost of. appeal. He still looked dangerous when his brow clouded, but that might be an accident of feature: there were faces that could bring ferocity to a bowl of cornflakes. Arthur said guardedly that a thousand dollars was a great deal of money and that he would have to think about it. In the end—he was not quite sure how, but at any minute employees would begin to siphon into the parking lot—he was persuaded to part with a twenty- and a ten-dollar bill.

  To a prejudiced and careful watcher there was something unmistakable about the transfer of money between two unlikely parties—the bent heads, the outcoming hand before the shielding turn of both bodies. The guard in his booth noted it, just as he had noted earlier the strange workman’s bellicose stance, and the fact that he had been blocking the door of Mr. Pulliam’s car even though once or twice Mr. Pulliam had appeared quite anxious to get into it.

  The guard had no particular love for Pulliam, who tipped him scantily every Christmas with the air of bestowing a retirement fund. As soon as he was off duty, he telephoned and reported to his niece’s husband, the deputy.

  Eve Quinn was still shaken by a double encounter. Understandably, the identification at last of Ambrose’s rockles was not accompanied by a slow, beginning roll of drums.

  15

  “. . . NO,” said Eve to Richard Morley’s quietly pleading question. “I’ve thought and thought about it, and there was absolutely nothing else at all.”

  “Maybe that’s it, maybe you’ve been concentrating too hard,” said Richard, producing this as eagerly as though it were a fresh concept. “If you try and think of it as any ordinary phone call . . .”

  Eve knew her limitations in this respect but she was enormously sorry for Richard, who would soon be attending another funeral, and she removed her glance to the fire she had lit in the arched adobe fireplace and sent her mind back obediently.

  But there was nothing to remember in that interval after Mrs. Morley had walked audibly away. On that rainy night it would have been an elementary precaution for the killer to remove his shoes before entering the house; still, it was an especially frightful detail, a kind of travesty of neatness and domesticity . . . Eve, who had been gazing into the gold wrap of the flames, found herself gazing instead at Richard Morley’s calf-moccasined feet, and was suddenly so electrified with fear that she jerked back into the corner of the couch.

  But nothing had happened; in his urgency he had only come to the edge of his chair at the exact instant when the wind sent a tree shadow rushing across the floor. But the impression of physical movement in the room, of a checked spring, was so strong that Eve jumped up at once, saying randomly, “Excuse me a minute, I’d better see what Ambrose is doing—”

  Ambrose, in accordance with the helpful instructions on a preschool television program, was making a great gluey mass of papier-mache in the bathroom sink. Apart from a fleeting wish that she could get her hands on the beaming, nodding originator of this suggestion. Eve did not mind at all. She said in a firm, carrying voice (to remind Richard Morley that she was not alone in this house, although she knew herself to be ridiculous), “No more newspaper, Ambrose, and no more water. Don’t you want to come in and say hello to Mr. Morley?”

  “I have to make this,” said Ambrose in an absorbed and silky voice. “I have to make it.”

  “Yes, I see that,” said Eve, as polite as he, and left him. Naturally Richard Morley had been watching her with that terrible attentiveness; he had hoped, not feared, that she would remember some tiny flaw in that stillness. He was distraught with grief and anger, and had a right to his —devouring look; he saw people now as mere tools for discovery.

  (And the man who had struck down the two sisters: how did he look?)

  In the living room, Richard seemed not to have noticed Eve’s precipitate air; seemed, in fact, to have forgotten what they were talking about. He said abruptly, “My wife didn’t happen to mention anything about a letter, did she?”

  “No, she didn’t,” said Eve, but her heart lifted a little; this much of what Henry Conlon had told her about the other evening was true.

  “Well, she got a letter that upset her, or frightened her, a few days ago. I don’t know what it was about, or what became of it, and I don’t think the police beli
eve it ever existed at all,” said Richard with an air of mild wonder rather than bitterness, “but it occurred to me that the sender might have been the one who came to the door.”

  For some reason, this delineation was infinitely more chilling than “murderer”; it carried the suggestion of violence knocking randomly, not caring particularly who answered. And at that instant, as though on signal, a car door slammed in the driveway.

  Richard Morley, who had been about to leave, walked back into the living room and stared out through one of the tall windows. Eve, watching his face, saw for the first time why Jennifer might have kept a worrying secret from her husband. He said in a tight, hard voice, “Well, if it isn’t the old friend from Colorado,” remembered at the door to thank Eve perfunctorily, and was gone.

  “I thought I’d assure you that I’ve just been to the Sheriff’s office and accounted satisfactorily for my whereabouts last night,” said Henry Conlon to Eve in a brisk recitative tone. He added reflectively, “Under the circumstances, I’m surprised that you let me in just now.”

  Eve, who for a confused moment thought he meant his thunderclap departure of the night before, gazed at the wrist he held out, the wrist with the long scratch.

  “I’d forgotten I had it. Luckily, Mrs. Birchall remembered.”

  Mrs. Birchall, Henry explained, lived in his apartment building and had a small enterprising daughter named Flora whom she was in the habit of taking to the park across the street. Mrs. Birchall was also a great reader, and read indefatigably while Flora fell into the fountain or started into the traffic and was rescued by whoever happened to be handy. Late on the afternoon of the day before, Flora had managed to attain a perilous height m a tree and ‘t had fallen to Henry’s lot to climb up after her and thereby come into conflict with a branch.

  “It’s a wonder that Mrs. Birchall noticed the scratch at all. Usually she just says, ‘I’m surprised at you, Flora’ and goes back to her book.” The faint amusement died out of Henry’s face. “I met Morley outside. We had a few words, to put it mildly. He said he found it hard to believe that I had been living here and hadn’t attempted to get in touch with my, quote, ‘old friend’ until so recently. I said I found it worse than hard to believe that he could think his wife had a male friend who was anything more than that. It was not,” said Henry ruefully, “a very edifying conversation.”

  The fire had died down to an occasional brilliant blink and a simmer. Eve added another small pinon log and said with a careful lack of expression, “He seemed to think that whoever wrote his wife that letter might have killed her.”

  “No.” The denial came out with complete certainty.

  “That’s a total, physical impossibility. Beside which it has no bearing on all this, on what happened to Jennifer or her sister. It was an entirely separate thing, and it was only Jennifer’s emotional state—”

  Henry broke off there, in a kind of baffled way. He said soberly, holding Eve’s gaze with gravity, “If anybody ever offers you a choice between a confidence to respect or a tiger that hasn’t eaten in six months, take the tiger. It’ll make .better company.”

  There seemed no answer to that, and obviously he did not expect one. After a roaming glance about him he asked, “Do you think you’re safe here?”

  The question didn’t startle Eve; she had already considered it. “I don’t know why not. The newspapers only said that Mrs. Morley had been on the phone with a friend, and obviously a friend who knew anything incriminating would have told the police right away.”

  “And where’s the guarantee that you won’t remember something? Richard Morley knows that you were talking to his wife, and he’s certainly told his brother-in-law, and they’ve probably both told other people.”

  “You can’t remember something that didn’t happen,” said Eve, “and although I can’t tell you why, exactly, I’m sure that whoever hung up that phone knows he’s safe from me.”

  (Forget that not half an hour ago she had fled this room, terrified by a trick of the wind, governed by instinct and not by logic or reason. Henry Conlon was now regarding her with something of the same attention, but she did not feel the slightest tinge of fear.)

  A chilly gray bloom was coming over the afternoon, and there was a beginning brush of wind around the house. As naturally as though he lived there, and would presently get up and fix drinks, Henry stretched out his hand and switched on the lamp beside him. His hand stayed there, arrested in the odd intimacy of the gesture, and his glance held Eve’s for a long moment that left her feeling a little light-headed, or enclosed in a bubble. “If you need any papier-mache,” she said inanely, “Ambrose is whipping up some in the bathroom.”

  “You were better off with the horned toad,” said Henry, matching her mood with accuracy. “Some day we must introduce Ambrose to Flora.” He rose and moved toward the door, frowning abstractedly. “I think I’ll sleep next door tonight,” he said.

  It was nearly full dark before Eve remembered the old pillow slip she had hung out on the line that morning, and she only remembered it then as a possible distraction for Ambrose, who had slipped and fallen on a sodden ribbon of newspaper half an hour ago and was still sobbing reminiscently. “Good Lord, I hope nobody took your cloth,” she said with an air of alarm, and let herself out the back door.

  She had often been outside here at night; usually to get something forgotten in the car, but she had never noticed before how far short of the clothesline the block of radiance from the kitchen fell, or the peculiar pattern of branch shadows on the adobe wall along the road. When the cottonwood leaves rattled overhead, the shadows seemed to take on life and pour over the wall like slender animals on a secret invasion. Eve, who had approached the clothesline at a sensible pace, unpinned the pillow slip in darkness and ran back to the house at almost panic speed.

  Ambrose examined the cloth with great care and, finally, satisfaction. “No germs,” he said, turning his still-red and tear-streaked face up to Eve.

  “Of course not.” Was he going to start that again? “Saxon said germs. Dreadly germs.”

  “Mrs. Saxon.” Eve felt a trace of annoyance at Iris, who should know by now that Ambrose, with his anxious and loving regard for his own person, was the last child who needed lectures of that nature.

  “Saxon,” corrected Ambrose firmly, “and he took my rockles.” He put the pillow slip in Eve’s lap and clambered up on the arm of the couch, breathing heavily and moistly in her ear. “Now cut it, in a tringe.”

  Eve let that go by; tringe was close enough. As she went in search of her scissors she reflected that she must be the only rockles-maker in existence, because it was a certainty that when she had finished fringing the cloth Ambrose would demand that she sew on a colored patch. She was less surprised by the identification of the missing treasure (was it the pocketlike appearance of the other patch that had suggested that peculiar name?) than by Ambrose’s firm conviction that Ned Saxon had deprived him of it.

  And the tool shed was tied up in it somewhere, or so he thought. Eve recalled the afternoon, an impossible length of time ago, when Ambrose had tugged imperiously at her hand and led her toward the shed. He had stopped short then, as though some memory had frightened him, and Eve, not wanting to enter the place herself, had said, “You can’t possibly have left anything of yours in there.”

  She supposed now that he could have slipped inside behind someone—for all his plumpness and his ability to trip on perfectly flat surfaces he was surprisingly fast—but even granted that he had dropped the cloth in the shed, what would Ned Saxon, or indeed anybody else, want with it? It might have been used to wipe oily hands, of course, or clean a windshield, and no one but Ambrose would recognize it as being of inestimable value . . . better not pursue the matter, as there was no great love between Ambrose and the Saxons as it was. Besides—Eve was now cutting an oblong out of a printed blouse she had never liked—it wasn’t important, as she was almost finished with the substitute.

  Becaus
e she thought of the tool shed in terms of spiders and shadows and even possibly snakes, Eve had forgotten its primary purpose. No picture presented itself of a man selecting a hammer which could hardly be traced to him, stowing it in a pocket, realizing from a sound behind him that he had a three-year-old watcher. Diverting the child’s attention while he snatched up a rag from the floor and wrapped it concealingly around the shaft of the hammer, saying later to the indignant and accusing Ambrose, “That old piece of cloth? You didn’t want that, it had deadly germs on it . .

  An enticing oven scent emerged from the kitchen. “Dinner’s ready,” said Eve.

  Iris Saxon was also preparing dinner in an abstracted way, her face pale and frowning with thought. From bewilderment, she had slipped without any conscious process into at least a sharing of Ned’s cool assessment of Arthur Pulliam. “But I don’t see why. It seems so . . . I don’t know, impossible.”

  “I don’t see why either,” said Ned Saxon, “but he was certainly acting very odd that day.” His brilliant blue gaze, wrinkled at the corners, might have been that of a captain staring at a periscope where no submarine is supposed to be—but this was a very friendly submarine. “You’ll admit that he forced that drink on us, all of a sudden.”

  “Well, he did seem very jumpy,” admitted Iris, adding a tiny sprinkle of salt to the boiled squash, but no pepper; Ned’s stomach could not tolerate spices. “But you know that Jennifer was never crazy about Arthur, and even she never thought for a minute that he had anything to do with what happened to Molly. If she’d had the slightest suspicion . . .’

  “Maybe she found out something the day she was there at the house,” suggested Ned softly. “You never know about people, Iris. Maybe Arthur Pulliam looks like a church deacon just because he isn’t anything like a church deacon, underneath.”

  A year ago, Iris would have refuted this. Now she said uncertainly, “Well, he did take a lot of trips away . .