Don't Open the Door

by Ursula Curtis

  The more Arthur thought about it, and he thought about little else, the stranger it was that Lopez had been allowed to set the terms for silence. Apart from a kind of reluctant admiration for the ferocity of his temper, Rosalinda had only contempt for her stepfather; it seemed very odd that she would let such a golden opportunity rest in his hands. Particularly as her manner at their last meeting had been both purring and mocking: the manner of a woman with some devastating stroke up her sleeve. Even in her peculiar simplicity, Rosalinda would not regard a thousand dollars as devastating.

  For that matter, had there been something odd about Lopez himself, even apart from his amiability?

  Arthur might have pursued that impression, might have felt the first loosening of the tangle, except for a sudden realization that, occurring to him without warning in the middle of a meeting, turned him almost giddy with fright.

  In his shock at being confronted by Lopez in the parking lot, he had noted the man’s coveralls only in the sense that they made a more menacing garb than, say, a dark blue single-breasted suit. Now, out of nowhere, his mind supplied the coveralls with a faint clanking sound when Lopez moved, a wink of metal. Rosalinda’s stepfather was a carpenter by trade, and the weapon that had killed Molly was, the report had said, something closely resembling a hammer.

  From a great distance, Mr. Heatherwood’s voice said frigidly, “We don’t quite seem to have Arthur’s attention here,” and Arthur collected himself and put a hand apologetically to his jaw. “Sorry, sir. An ulcerated tooth—”

  “Miss Molloy, bring two aspirins for Mr. Pulliam, please. And a glass of water,” added Mr. Heatherwood with the air of a man pandering to weakness, and the meeting went on.

  A small portion of Arthur’s mind knew, when he was safely back in his own office, that Lopez had certainly not murdered Molly—but how would it look to the police, who would be ready by this time to pounce on the slightest appearance of a lead? In the light of his involvement with Rosalinda, would they believe that Arthur had never wished his wife dead; would have been horrified at even the suggestion of a divorce? Or would they reason that he had procured Molly’s death, and that Jennifer had somehow found it out?

  Arthur shuddered at the thought that he had even contemplated confiding in the Sheriff, because the very investigation that would prove him innocent would also accomplish his effective ruin.

  It was five o’clock at last, but he was doomed to a visit from Mr. Heatherwood, who wanted to hear a little verbal appreciation of Arthur’s new office and status and also to give him a lecture on the care of his teeth. “We’re soft, my boy,” he said, poking inquisitively with his cane at the earth around the huge potted plant to see if it had been properly watered. “Rushing like lemmings to our own disaster on our diet of white bread and flesh meats and cooked vegetables. To say nothing of sweets. One might almost say that our teeth have grown sedentary.” Pleased with this, Mr. Heatherwood repeated it before he went on, and on.

  In his acute nervousness, one of Arthur’s teeth had actually started to ache, something which could not have occurred in Mr. Heather wood’s celery-grinding, carrot-champing dentures. He was released at last, and bought an evening paper from the newsboy in the parking lot. The headline announcing the apprehension of a suspect in the candy-store killing caught but did not hold his eye in view of a brief inset bulletin stating that the man in question had been reposing in a Flagstaff jail at the time of the Valley murders.

  The guard in his booth, who had been such an attentive witness to the encounter with Lopez, usually nodded and touched his cap as Arthur Pulliam nosed his car through the gates. Tonight, instead, he gave Arthur a deliberate stare which seemed half challenge and half satisfaction, and, in the rearview mirror, could be seen to turn his head and watch the car out of sight.

  A few days ago Arthur would have been affronted by this insolence. He realized now that he had just received a warning.

  The Sheriff came to the Pulliam house that evening ostensibly to return the thick manila envelope of snapshots, letters, and other documents conscientiously gathered from Molly Pulliam’s small desk and examined in the light of her sister’s errand shortly before her death. But when the receipt had been signed he remained seated, in spite of Arthur’s nudging, “Can I offer you coffee, Sheriff? A drink?”

  The Sheriff refused both. He remarked in a regretful way that Richard Morley had been subjected to some unpleasantness at his home—a Spanish jar smashed, a swastika chalked on the front door.

  “Kids, and we have a pretty good idea which ones. I have a man checking on that now. You haven’t had any of that trouble?”

  Arthur Pulliam shook his head. “Should I expect it, Sheriff? Because when all this is—that is, in the near future I’ll be putting this place on the market, and if you think it’s advisable to have someone stay on the premises for the time being—”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary, word will get around that we’re keeping an eye out. But with all the publicity you haven’t been bothered by any of the usual cranks who crop up in cases like this?”

  There was something bordering upon a silence, and then Arthur Pulliam turned his head to give his finicky attention to a fold of curtain hanging not quite straight beside his chair. Light slid dazzlingly off his glasses as he turned back. “It’s interesting that you should ask that, because until just now it didn’t occur to me—”

  But it had occurred to him, thought the Sheriff, because he was quite smooth and ready with his account of a strange and belligerent workman—“The fellow had been drinking, I believe”—who had accosted him in the company parking lot and seemed to think he could have a job simply by demanding one. “I have nothing to do with the hiring, and I told him so, but a man of his type, in that frame of mind—”

  Pulliam spread his hands in a deprecating and half-humorous gesture which looked to the Sheriff completely alien. “From what you say now, I suppose he’d read of my connection with the company, and to be honest he was a good deal bigger than I am. He kept going on about being a hardship case, and in order to get rid of him I gave him a couple of dollars.”

  It was a lot of detail for a man of Pulliam’s pompous nature to volunteer, and it countered the guard’s report so suavely that he had clearly been braced for this. And, on the face of it, what more appropriate place for an out-of-work carpenter than a construction company? Except that these were Heatherwood’s general offices and austerely uninviting to workmen in coveralls. Moreover, Arthur Pulliam gave the strong impression of having little sympathy with hardship cases, let alone drinking hardship cases—and the guard, to whom the carpenter bad come to have Pulliam’s car pointed out, had said nothing about any evidence of liquor.

  Was it interesting that Pulliam should have been threatened by and given money to a man in that particular walk of life? The Sheriff was inclined to think so. “As he was looking for a job, I suppose he gave you his name?”

  “Yes, he did,” said Pulliam equably. “I don’t remember it, but it struck me at the time as being Italian or possibly Portuguese.”

  So certainly neither, thought the Sheriff. He rose to his formidable height. “Well, we like to look into these things. Maybe the guard at the gate will know the man.”

  “Maybe he will,” agreed Pulliam, apparently recognizing this possibility for the first time. “Certainly I recall his glancing at us several times . . . You’ll let me know, of course, the minute anything develops in this terrible business?”

  “Yes,” said the Sheriff gently, angered at this not-quite-open recognition of his empty threat. “I will do that, Mr. Pulliam.”

  Something there, almost certainly, he thought, getting into his car in the cold darkness—and almost certainly not traceable; the guard had never seen the man in question before, and Pulliam would be quite safe in sticking to his version. If only, he thought for perhaps the thousandth time since taking office, he had more men—a man, for instance, to hold a watching brief on Arthur Pulliam.
But routine crime went on in the Valley in spite of the two women so recently buried: gas stations and liquor stores were still held up, alcoholic spouses still turned on their mates with whatever damaging object came to hand, television sets and radios and other portables were burgled at a dizzy pace.

  At the corner of the driveway the Sheriff met headlights turning in. He caught a brief glimpse of a woman’s pale pointed face on the passenger side, and the outline of a man at the wheel. Under the circumstances he would have been interested in a lone woman’s evening visit to Arthur Pulliam. He was not interested in a couple, and he drove broodingly away.

  “Eve?” said Nina Earl’s voice when Eve caught the telephone on its fifth ring. “I know it’s late, but my conscience keeps peculiar hours . . . did I wake you up?”

  “If it were anyone else I’d say no,” said Eve, sleep-bewildered and cross. She pushed her hair back with her free hand and peered uselessly at the clock; in her present state she was unable to read it.

  “Well, I told you about Al Wasek,” began Nina, maddeningly alert miles away. “You know, the health-bar nut, the artist who did the layouts for the Lockwood School.”

  Eve felt suddenly drenched awake. The clock hands steadied and showed only a few minutes after eleven— which was what came, she thought, of living with a small child. “Yes, I remember.”

  “Al’s been reading the papers, of course, but the thing you have to keep in mind is that he’s getting a divorce from his wife and custody of the children, he hopes, and has to walk on egg% so whatever you do about this you can’t mention him. Or me,” said Nina as a firm afterthought. “You haven’t gone back to sleep, have you?”

  “No, just getting a cigarette.” Ridiculously, in view of her own earlier pursuit of this very matter, Eve felt a pang of dread because she was finally to learn about the Lockwood School—and that, of course, was the memory of Henry Conlon saying wryly, “. . . take the tiger. It’ll make better company.”

  And now the secret was out, in this random and accidental fashion—or was it? “I don’t know what if anything this has to do with those awful goings-on out there in the Valley. Nothing, I should think, but you did ask me about the school, and you did seem to have a bee in your bonnet about Henry, and I thought you ought to know that the housemother who committed suicide at the school was a cousin or something of Richard Morley’s. There, I’ve done my duty and,” said Nina with magnificent unfairness, “I’m going to bed.”

  18

  THE suicide again. And an echo of Richard Morley’s taut, barely held control when he had sat on the couch questioning Eve . . .

  “Was that Mommy?” asked Ambrose in the doorway, sleep-flushed and anxious. The pajama legs that Eve had inexpertly turned up for him in Iris Saxon’s absence had come down, indeed seemed to have grown somewhat, and lay in little striped puddles on the floor. It was the kind of thing that would normally have enraged him, but in his almost accusing concentration he only gave the bottoms an absent pluck and began again, “Was that—”

  “No, that wasn’t your mother, it was just a friend of mine.” Surely he would not pick this hour of the night to get homesick. Yes, he would. “I want to go home,” said Ambrose in a rising wail, and commenced to cry.

  Eve had endured his tears of wrath with calm and even a measure of amusement; this was something else again, and as surprising, although it should not have been, as though a warlike dog had started to mew. She tried some helpless soothing, which made matters worse: Ambrose’s face turned an alarming color and his tears ran into the comers of his mouth. It was only when Eve said very crisply, “Well, they have to make the airplane, don’t they?” that a fascinated pause descended.

  “Make the airplane,” repeated Ambrose.

  “Yes. It’s a big job.”

  “With the wings.”

  “Certainly, wings—I should hope so—and then they have to put on the tail, and a few other things. It takes a while.”

  Ambrose was absorbed, and even twisted his tongue around to catch a few halted tears; clearly, some gratifying vision of people laboring solely on his behalf was taking place in his head. He was so pleased that he wanted to stay up and chat about it, but was presently persuaded to bed after a drink of water and a trip to the bathroom, from which he emerged saying with something of his old aplomb, “I made a A.”

  And so he had, with toothpaste on the inside of the sink. Partly out of her own fatigue, partly from a dim notion that he might find that straggly creation a talisman in the morning, Eve left it undisturbed. His emotional storm had been a blessing in a way; she was too tired to think about what Nina Earl had told her. Her last waking reflection was a hope that by morning Ambrose would have forgotten about going home, because morning would bring Iris Saxon.

  Four miles away, Arthur Pulliam was not at all sleepy although it was long past his customary hour for retiring. If he had been a man given to pinching himself he would have been black-and-blue. As it was, he was filled with the balked exhilaration of someone who has just been given a clean bill of health by his doctor and cannot even tell anyone he has been ill.

  He was sure, at the sound of a car in the drive less than a full minute after he had closed the front door, that the Sheriff had returned. Had he embroidered his encounter with Lopez too much? But the man, once reported, had had to be explained away somehow. Arthur opened the door with deliberate impatience, prepared to make some chilly protest at this harassment, and Rolslinda walked in.

  The timing of this had so much the air of a planned confrontation that Arthur half-expected the Sheriff to follow, but the driver of the low unfamiliar car outside, its motor running softly, was a young man engaged in lighting a cigarette. “Close the door, I have only a minute,” said Rosalinda, both waspish and breathless, and, caught between bewilderment and fright, Arthur closed it.

  Rosalinda was wearing a loose ivory coat and a subtly different look, which might have been the sweeping of her black hair back and up from her face, emphasizing the imperious bone structure. “Don’t you dare say anything about us to anyone,” she demanded fiercely, burrowing with some wildness into her huge black handbag, “or you’ll ruin everything.”

  Arthur was speechless, gazing with spellbound horror at the sparkle on her visible and ungloved left hand. Was it conceivable that she had bought some trinket and was going about claiming a relationship between them?

  “Because I’m getting married,” said Rosalinda rapidly. She had found what she was looking for and now slapped down on the nearest table a thick fold of what later turned out to be blank paper. “I told Nicky I had to deliver some typing—you wouldn’t believe how jealous he is—but I had to warn you, don’t say a word. He’d kill us both.”

  Arthur stared at her, stunned, realizing in a groping fashion that it must be Nicky outside, that the diamond was real and nothing to do with him, that Rosalinda herself was now actually afraid of discovery. “But . . . when we had lunch the other day—”

  “I didn’t have this, then,” said Rosalinda, admiring her ring. She added with a trace of mockery, “Besides, I wanted to see what you’d do.”

  In a very few words it became clear that Arthur had been right in his suspicion: she had only drifted into his orbit because of a gigantic quarrel with Nicky, who had then taken himself off to San Diego. Returning full of love and repentance, and plainly imagining Rosalinda to be as mournful as he during his absence, he must not be allowed under any circumstances to suspect an involvement with another man.

  “He has a very hot temper,” said Rosalinda, glowing and obviously understating the case, “so—”

  “Wait,” said Arthur. Even in his astonishment he had been conscious of a growing wrath at Lopez. “I don’t think you know that your stepfather—”

  Rosalinda, who had been moving restively toward the door, listened in turn. Her face grew ferocious; she hissed something in Spanish, something she seldom did, and it did not sound fond. Snatching a pen from her bag, seizing up a piece of t
he blank paper she had flung down, she scribbled, tore, and handed the paper to Arthur. She said blackly, “If he bothers you again, if he opens his mouth, ask him about this license number.”

  That had been the strangeness in Lopez: a surreptitious haste because he was acting without his stepdaughter’s knowledge or consent, and had reason to fear a reprisal. Was the license plate number something to do with a stolen car? Rosalinda seemed very sure of its power, and Arthur did not ask but folded the slip of paper prudently into his wallet.

  Should he, out of a vast relief Rosalinda could not even guess at, offer something in the way of a wedding present? Good God, no. Instead, a little stiffly, Arthur bestowed his felicitations, which Rosalinda received with open impatience and then was gone, out of his house, his driveway, and his life.

  It would be hours before he grew aware that the buffer between him and the full realization of the fact and the manner of Molly’s dying was gone too.

  The next day was one of the longest Eve had ever lived through.

  In at least partial explanation of his unheralded attack of homesickness the night before, Ambrose had a sore throat and a temperature. (“You know, when I saw him out in his bare feet in the wet grass last week, I thought . . .” said Iris Saxon judicially, tying on her apron.)

  At ten o’clock Ambrose was still gratified by breakfast in bed and other unusual attentions: this was more like it, his manner implied. By eleven he was growing querulous, by twelve he was huddled rebelliously before the television set in bathrobe and slippers. Iris Saxon cast him a disapproving look, and inquired of Eve in a low voice, “Oughtn’t he to be in bed?”