Night Walker

by Donald Hamilton

  “Dad was killed in the war,” she said, rather stiffly.

  “Sorry,” Young said; and after a moment he added deliberately, because he wanted more information about her, “He must have had plenty of insurance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your mother isn’t buying you yachts and convertibles on a service pension, is she?”

  “Mother married again,” she said. “If it’s any of your damn business. Mark’s kind of a lemon, as far as I’m concerned, but the money’s nice.” There was silence between them for a while; then she moved her shoulders briefly, as if to dismiss her momentary annoyance at his prying, and leaned back comfortably in the seat facing him. “I could use a cigarette while that toast’s making.”

  “Sorry,” he said, patting his empty shirt pocket. “I haven’t been smoking; my nose hasn’t felt up to it. There’s probably some of Elizabeth’s around.” He saw a pack on the kitchen counter and started to rise.

  Bonita Decker said, “Never mind. I wouldn’t smoke one of hers if I was on a desert island.”

  Young said, “Relax, Red. Save your adrenalin. Don’t take it out on Philip Morris; he hasn’t done anything to you.” He brought her the pack and waited, standing over her with the matches; presently she shrugged irritably, took a cigarette, and let him light it for her. Then the toast popped up and she turned away to take care of that, while he sat down again.

  “You’re a funny guy,” she said at last, glancing at him sideways. When he did not react to this, she said, “I thought you were crazy about her.”

  “Elizabeth? What makes you think I’m not?”

  “The way you were talking about her a little while ago. Telling me she’s brittle—”

  Young said, surprised, “Well, she is, but what’s that got to do with it?” He grinned quickly. “Lots of men like their women brittle and helpless, Red; something you might kind of keep in mind. It makes a man feel big, to have somebody depending on him.”

  She turned to regard him critically across the table.

  “You’re pretty big already, sailor. I shouldn’t think you’d need a helpless female around to make you feel bigger.” He colored slightly under her scrutiny. She said, very young and positive, “I know I could never love anybody I couldn’t respect.”

  Young said, “People are good and bad. You can love the good and make allowances for the bad. What about you and Larry Wilson?”

  She said, “There are only two things wrong with that argument: first, Larry isn’t bad, and, second, I’m not in love with him.”

  “Then why are you sticking your neck out for him?”

  “Because he’s a good friend of mine,” she said. “Of course, you’re probably the virile type who can’t understand a man and a girl being friends... Because he’s a good friend, and because he was swell to me once when I needed somebody very badly.” After a moment, she went on: “Of course, I’ll admit I was mad about him for a while when I was a kid — honest, I idolized the guy — but, well, it sort of does something to your faith in a man to see him make a complete jackass of himself over somebody you can tell with half an eye is going to be just a total loss to the community, if you know what I mean. I mean, it makes you kind of take a deep breath and wonder just what the hell he’d be seeing in you, if he should ever look at you the way he looked at her. Not that Larry ever did. I don’t think he’s yet caught on to the fact that I’m almost old enough to vote....”

  Suddenly she was telling him all about Larry Wilson, asking him to understand Larry Wilson as she understood Larry Wilson. The picture that emerged from her description, of a gentle and kindly young man whose only flaws were a tendency to take himself and his family a little too seriously, and a habit of babying a boat through a squall instead of driving her as a real racing skipper should — not from lack of courage, the girl hastened to point out, but just from a love for boats — this picture was somewhat difficult for Young to reconcile with his own impression of Wilson as, even at best, a rather hearty and loud-mouthed type. He said as much.

  Bonita Decker said, “Well, that’s just what I mean. Larry’s fundamentally a shy person, and he compensates in front of strangers by putting on an act like that. He never really learned how to get along with other boys, if you know what I mean. His mother kept him in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits till he was twelve. I don’t know how he ever managed to get her to let her precious boy go out on the nasty water where he might get wet or even drown.” She shook her head quickly. “I used to make fun of him myself, the way kids do; I mean, he’s kind of a prissy person. You should see the way he keeps his boats; he’ll have a fit when he sees the way the Amberjack’s been let go this spring... He called me up one day after Dad had been killed,” she said with an abrupt change of tone. “I was hanging around the house wishing I was dead, too. I didn’t even know he knew me from the other teenage kids around here; this was during the war, remember, and he was already out of college and working in Washington, commuting every day with a bunch of other men who couldn’t find a place to live here. He said he was sailing a Comet in the Sunday races and needed a crew, and somebody’d told him I knew the difference between a square knot and a bowline.

  “I knew what somebody’d told him, of course. They’d told him that the little Decker girl had been moping around like a sick cat ever since the news came about the Captain. It made me mad; I told him to stick to his work in Washington and stop trying to build up the morale on the home front, I was doing fine, thanks, without any help from him. He said he wasn’t worrying about my morale, he was worrying about his boat, and did I want to help him sail it in the series or should he get somebody else? I went, and pretty soon he had me slaving over that damn little boat of his all week while he was in Washington, and Sundays we’d race. We trimmed the pants off them, too. Two years running.”

  She reached for her cigarette and found that it had burned down to a stub while she was eating and talking. She extinguished it and lit another, blowing the smoke out and waving it aside with her hand. She said, “Larry’s like that, sailor; I don’t care what you try to tell me about him. It bothers him to know that anybody’s hurt or in trouble. It bothers me, too, sometimes, but I get over it easy. Larry has to do something about it, if he can: That’s how she got him, of course. She gave him that poor-lonely-frightened-little-me line of hers, with a Georgia accent, and naturally nothing would do but that he marry her, just to cheer her up.”

  Young asked, “How do you know?”

  She laughed at that. “How do I know? Listen, sailor, that was one romance I followed from a grandstand seat. Every Sunday, rain or shine, in the cockpit of that damn little Comet, I’d hear all about how he’d been making out with dear, sweet, helpless Elizabeth during the week. It was a rough summer, sailor. I got awful goddamn tired of playing Little Sister Bunny, I can tell you. I guess I stopped idolizing him then; he was such a sap about it. Hell, I’d never even seen the girl, but I could tell she was a tramp. If he’d just crawled into bed with her instead of making this big production of it —! God, it made me sick, the first time I saw them together after they were married. I mean, she looked just exactly the way I knew she’d look.”

  Young said, “What was wrong with her looks, besides the fact that you weren’t going to like her however she looked?”

  Bonita glanced at him, and moved a shoulder jerkily, “Oh, I suppose she’s pretty enough, if you go for that damn sloppy Southern-belle type — all sweet and sexy — that can never seem to manage to promote two stockings without runs at the same time. I guess it wasn’t her looks, actually, it was the way she acted, right off the Old Plantation, when you knew damn well they had to run her down with dogs at the age of fifteen to put shoes on her for the first time. I mean, if there’s anything that gets me, it’s that damn phony refinement. Well, we’ve got some elderly female characters around this neck of the woods — like Aunt Molly Parr — who can spot that kind of stuff a mile off. Phonies, they go after. A couple of them corner
ed her one night. You know: ‘My dear, how sweet you look, any relation to the Virginia Sutters’ — that was her maiden name, Elizabeth Sutter.

  “I felt almost sorry for the girl; but, hell, all she had to do was look them in the eye and say that she’d never heard of the Virginia Sutters and that, if they were really interested, her dad ran a saloon down in Temperance, Georgia. Or whatever he does down there. That would have shut them up. Who gives a damn about that family stuff these days? But no, the little sap had to try and play it smart; she says, all bright-eyed, why, yes, her old daddy’d told her they had kin up in Virginia... The old ladies set her up and lowered the boom on her. I mean, they had her so twisted up she didn’t know what she was saying. She ran out of there, crying. The next party I saw her at, she’d left the Old Plantation at home, but she had a chip on her shoulder the size of a telephone pole; and she drank so much Larry had to pour her into the car and take her away... Socially, you might say she wasn’t a howling success. Well, I felt kind of sorry for Larry, but after all, he’d asked for it, and maybe he liked her anyway. I knew enough to keep out of it; there was no future in having him weeping on my shoulder. But when he lost his job in Washington... Well, I knew damn well he was no more a Red than Herbert Hoover, regardless of what people said. Since he wasn’t defending himself, it was a cinch he was protecting somebody, and I knew who that had to be.”

  “I see,” Young said. “So it was you who suggested to him that he was covering up for somebody.”

  “Well, hell,” she said, “somebody had to do something for the guy; he wasn’t doing anything for himself. I put it up to him. At first he wouldn’t think of watching her — he said a man shouldn’t spy on his own wife — but I kidded him into it by saying that we had to know just what she was doing and who she was working with in order to help her get out of their clutches. Stuff like that. I mean, he was still crazy about her, the sap; whatever she had done, he said, he was sure it wasn’t her fault. The word he used was ‘impressionable.’ She was impressionable. Somebody was taking advantage of her... If you’d heard him talk,” Bonita Decker said, looking up, “if you’d heard him talk, sailor, you’d know he had nothing to do with it. I mean, the whole thing had him utterly baffled. All he wanted to do was protect her.”

  She looked at Young across the table with a question in her eyes, wanting him to be convinced now but knowing that he was not; the knowledge, clearly, frightened her a little. It was the first time in her life, Young reflected, that the kid had come up against the fact that a man shows a different face to every person he meets. She did not want even to admit the possibility that there might be another Larry Wilson than the nice boy who had asked her sailing to take her mind off her father’s death a long time ago.

  Young said, deliberately, “He was swell to me, too. He was driving clear out of his way to help me get to Norfolk on time. I woke up in the hospital, with these.” He touched the taped places on his nose and scalp. He saw the disbelief and a vague, uneasy fear in the eyes of the girl facing him; and he leaned forward and said, “Red, you’re betting on the wrong horse. I’m not standing up for Elizabeth; apparently she’s mixed up in it too and it’s a little late to worry about who pulled her in. But your boy Larry—”

  “He’s not my-boy-Larry,” she said quickly. “He’s just a guy I happen to like who’s in trouble.”

  “Yes,” Young said. “The question is, just how much of his trouble are you willing to buy.” He drew a long, patient breath. “Listen, Red, this is the way I met Larry Wilson...” He told the story of that night, from the car stopping for him to his coming to consciousness in the hospital. Finished, he waited for her to speak; when she did not, he said, “That’s your Larry Wilson, Red. Do you know why I have this?” He touched the tape over his nose. “I have this, I figure, because I broke the damn thing playing football once; and your boy Larry couldn’t have a body turning up with his clothes and a dented nose, his own being nice and straight. The fire was going to take care of the other discrepancies, but he had to fix that nose, so he just gave the body an extra lick across the face before releasing the emergency and tossing a match in the gas he’d poured all over the car.”

  He stopped, as she slid out of the booth and got to her feet and turned to face him. “I don’t believe it,” she said stiffly. “I don’t believe it. Larry wouldn’t do a thing like that!”

  Young said, “Well, damn it, I didn’t hit myself over the head!”

  “How do I know what you did?” she cried, suddenly angry. “All I really know about you is that I’ve got a button off a naval officer’s uniform that might be yours, and that you’ve been playing footsie with her, and that Larry’s missing. Why should I believe anything you tell me? For all I know Larry picked you up like you said, and you were thinking about deserting, so you slugged him and hid his body somewhere and went driving off with his car and clothes, only you smashed up on the way and wound up here.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked, as she swung about and started for the door.

  “I’m going to call the police. I should have done it a long time ago.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Young said. “But the F.B.I.—”

  “I’ll believe you called them when I see them!” she said. She pushed through the swinging door and let it close behind her. After a moment, Young rose and followed her. He could hear her rapping impatiently at the instrument as he came through the dining room; when she saw him, she straightened up slowly, facing him. There was a strange, taut look on her face.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  She moved quite suddenly, pulling the long-barreled pistol from her waistband. She had to work at it a moment to get the high front sight clear; then she pointed it at him. “So you called the F.B.I.!” she said. “On a dead phone!”

  Young frowned. “It wasn’t dead this afternoon. Let me—”

  “Stay where you are!”

  He sighed. “We’ve been through all this before, Red.”

  “And don’t call me Red!” she cried. She started backing toward the front door. He let her go, moving to the telephone as she moved away. He was aware of the slender gun barrel following him as he crossed the hall. The instrument was quite silent when he picked it up; there was no dial tone and no response when he pressed the bar and spun the dial. He replaced it in the cradle thoughtfully. Bonita Decker had reached the door now. He watched her reach back to push the screen aside, slip out, turn to run down the steps, and stop, still holding the screen door open, forgotten. He moved to her side. She was looking down the bluff at a yellow light burning in the cabin of the cruiser moored at the end of the pier. It had not been there earlier in the evening, of that Young was quite certain.

  The girl turned to look at him, her suspicion and hostility suddenly forgotten. There was even a pleading note to her voice when she spoke. “Tell me — Tell me, did you really see Larry this evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you — think that could be him, down there?”

  Young looked at the light, and the pattern of the evening began to make sense to him. They’ll use the emergency rendezvous near Elder Island, Elizabeth had said, but she could have lied or been misled or, with the F.B.I. on the job, the plans could have been changed. This was why Larry Wilson’s boat had been put into the water this spring even though Wilson himself had not been around to use it; for use in an emergency, if one should arise. And the light, junior? he asked himself caustically. Don’t forget about the light, and the character throwing stones at Elizabeth’s window, standing right in front of the empty garage that should have told him he was wasting his time.

  But it had not been Elizabeth the stones had been intended to awaken; and it was not Elizabeth for whom the light was burning. If you wanted to move a man from one place to another — from a house to a boat, say — it could be best and most quietly done under the man’s own power. Going into a house after a man who was known to be armed might be dangerous and noisy, but awak
ening him gently, stimulating his interest and his curiosity, leading him down the hill to investigate an unexplained light, after first cutting the telephone wires so that he could not summon help....But why me? he asked, but the answer to that was plain. He was the man who had sent the F.B.I. on a wild-goose chase after another boat down the Bay; if he were to disappear now, never to be heard of again, there would be no question in anybody’s mind of his guilty involvement in whatever was going on; the responsibility for a great many questionable occurrences could be loaded onto his shoulders. They would not drag the Bay for him; he would be just another traitor who had disappeared behind the curtain.

  “Yes,” he heard himself say quietly, “I think that might very well be Larry, down there.”

  There was fear all around them. He wanted to run; but there was, he knew suddenly, no place to run to. It was almost a relief to know it; there was no decision to make. They would not let him get away. He could go to them, or they would come to him, one or the other.

  He said, without looking at her, “Red, give me my gun, will you?” He held out his hand for it.

  She shook her head quickly. “I’m keeping the guns, sailor. The way you feel about him, you’d shoot him without giving him a chance.”

  He wanted to tell her to get into her car and make a run for it, but he knew she would not go, and it would only lead to further argument. Besides, he was a little tired of sympathizing with people who bought chips in games too stiff for them, including himself.

  “All right,” he said, almost irritably. “Well, what the hell are you waiting for, Christmas?”

  She said, “Will you give him a chance to talk, to explain—”

  “You’ve got the guns,” Young said. “He can explain all night.”

  They moved down the steps and across the gravel. At the edge of the lawn Young drew a deep breath that hurt the old bruises and torn ligaments in his chest but did not seem to touch the emptiness of his lungs. He remembered that he had gone down this hill once before today to see Larry Wilson. The girl beside him was looking at him; he wondered if she could sense his fear. He walked slowly down the path and she followed him. The night breeze felt colder as he neared the water.