Tightrope Walker

by Dorothy Gilman

  He smiled forgivingly. “One does not sell a personality like Jay Tuttle’s so cheaply, Miss Jones. Nora’s inheritance, once taxes were paid, was not so large as you might assume. With money of his own Jay could do much better, and he did. Before the year ended I was happy to see him safely married to Senator Plumtree’s daughter Janet, and I can assure you that an heiress to the Plumtree Pharmaceutical fortune, and the prospects of a father-in-law in Washington, made Nora look very small-league and provincial.”

  I simply gaped at him, wordless, and then I gasped, “You arranged it!”

  “But of course,” he said silkily. “The Plumtrees had always summered in Maine, and I made a point of meeting them in 1964.”

  “My God,” I whispered, and then I flung at him bitterly, “I’m surprised you let Nora go on living with all she knew about you both.”

  His lips tightened. “Only at Jay’s insistence,” he said. “The one time he—but it has always been a mistake, and it’s not one I plan to repeat now, Miss Jones. You will be shot beside your cash register—”

  He means I’m really going to be killed, I thought. Me.

  He made a soft tch-tch sound in his throat. “A pity, that. You can see what a nuisance you’re proving to me, but I appreciate your telling me this.” He gave me his first real smile; his teeth were expensive, too. “A few more deaths will scarcely be noticed among all the muggings and robberies these days but it does seem a bore. Kindly move to the cash register now.”

  “Kindly?” I echoed, and I laughed, I couldn’t help it. I mean, he was going to kill all of us and it seemed a bore? “Kindly move to the cash register?” I repeated.

  He gave me an impatient glance and I saw that I was reacting like a human being and this was tiresome to a man who thought and performed like a machine, like a computer that turns people into figures on a balance sheet. I think it was this that shocked me even more than his announcing that I was going to be shot beside the cash register, for it’s compassion that makes gods of us.

  He gestured with his gun. “Over,” he said, and when I didn’t move he came to get me.

  He could have shot me from where he stood but he was obviously a perfectionist, wanting things precisely right for the police. His computer mind must have written its own kind of scenario, planning distance and powder burns, and this rigidness was his first mistake because I was waiting for him with my fingers curled around the penknife, my anger as cold as steel now. Just as he reached for my arm I lifted the penknife out of my pocket and plunged it into his gleaming white shirt. It was a small knife, scarcely an inch in length, but his reaction gave me two seconds to get away. He yelped in pain.

  I knew I wouldn’t have a chance if I ran for the street door, I’d be shot before I unbolted the lock. I headed instead for the stairs; one bullet hit the wall behind me as I raced up them two at a time. I passed the door to my apartment, opened the one leading to the roof, closed it behind me and ran up the narrow stairs, unbolted the steel door at the top and plunged out on the flat graveled roof of my building.

  It was a shock to discover that it was almost dark. I didn’t pause. I raced across the gravel, dodging chimneys and apertures, and pulled myself up to the neighboring roof, three feet higher, where I checked the steel door leading down into this building: locked, of course. Over my shoulder I saw Holton’s head silhouetted against the sky as he climbed over the parapet behind me. I turned and jumped down to the next roof and stopped to examine the trap door here. No luck. I ran toward the edge of the third roof and abruptly came to a halt. I was facing an alleyway wide enough to park a car and too broad to jump. My escape was blocked. I was trapped.

  Fifty feet below me traffic passed in a steady stream; I shouted but no one heard. I turned and saw Holton scrambling down from the roof I’d just left and I could feel my adrenalin glands pouring out fight-or-flight screams, and my heart thudding mercilessly. There were two broken pieces of brick lying near me; I picked them up and hurled one at the empty window across the alley. The sound of breaking glass was muted, no more than a small whimper in the night—or was it I who whimpered?—but no one came to the window.

  I turned, grasping the one fragment of brick left me, and faced this man who had already killed twice.

  He was walking toward me slowly, still breathing heavily from the climb but he was confident now and smiling faintly in the dusk, the gun in his hand pointed at me. I had two choices: I could climb over the parapet and leap to my death on the street fifty feet below me or I could stand here and be killed on the roof by Hubert Holton. In that moment I looked clearly and sanely into death and I was no longer afraid, I was angry.

  I began walking forward to meet him and then abruptly I ducked my head and ran, weaving and zigzagging. The first bullet hit and staggered me; my left arm felt as if it had been torn away but it had the effect of shocking me into a deeper fury. The second bullet grazed my temple, or so I thought until blood streamed into my eyes, but by that time I was under his gun and on Holton, kicking, screaming, biting. I had no thought for myself any more, only for this man who had the effrontery to kill—kill Hannah, kill Lipton, and now me. My left arm was dead but my right hand could still grasp my shard of brick, my knees could still kick. In the darkness we began a silent fight for the gun; when my teeth found his wrist the gun dropped to the roof, I kicked it aside and hit him with the brick and this time, caught off balance, he fell.

  I leaned over him, and seeing how still he was I straightened up, gasping at the agony of being upright, and at the pain in my head. I was crying now with huge, dry, soundless sobs. Dragging myself across the roof I managed to pull my body weakly over the parapet to the next building. I crept across it and half fell, half jumped to the roof of my own building. Here I nearly passed out but I pushed myself to the door, which Holton had left open. For just a moment here I leaned against a wall, sucking in air with great gulps, giddy and nearly blinded from the blood streaming into my eyes, and then I sat down on the stairs and lowered myself, step by step, still sitting—I could never have stood—until I reached the second floor and the stairs leading down to the shop.

  That was when I stopped to wipe the blood from my eyes and saw him.

  He was standing at the bottom of the stairs watching me. Watching me from the first floor, from a pool of light in the shop. I should have known he’d be here, too. I stared down at him through a film of blood, recognizing him from his pictures except that he wasn’t smiling now, those flawless twelve teeth were hidden. John Tuttle … State Senator Angus Tuttle now. He looked pale, strained, appalled at the sight of me. I saw him stare at me and lick his lips.

  “You’re supposed to be dead,” he whispered. It was a whisper that seemed to echo through a hundred caverns, reverberating and ricocheting off the walls.

  I shouted at him, “You can’t even do your own killing,” and, still crawling, I reached the top stair and looked down at him a second time.

  He had brought a pistol from his overcoat pocket and was staring at it in surprise. He lifted his eyes to look at me and licked his lips again. “Where’s Hubert?” he asked, and then he shouted, “Hubert, where are you? Hu, for God’s sake finish her off!”

  I wasn’t thinking any longer, I was a bloody wounded dying animal without reaction or fear. He was going to shoot me and finish the job and it no longer mattered, all that mattered was to die as quickly and as obtrusively as possible, and with dignity. For this I was ready to give away my life, and freely. I felt for the railing and pulled myself to my feet, my head exploding like a balloon, the walls circling around me, the stairs swaying in front of me. But I stood. It was going to have to be an execution, a real murder this time, not hidden and concealed for years and years.

  Behind me I heard Holton shout from the top of the stairs and below me I saw Tuttle lift his pistol. I stood erect and gritted my teeth, a great dizziness sweeping over me until abruptly the dizziness was joined with darkness and I fell just as a gun exploded, fell endlessly, the
roar of blood in my ears, until I came to rest on something soft. Dimly I heard a crash of splintering glass, and voices shouting. Opening my eyes I stared into one sightless, unblinking eye scarcely an inch away from me, an eye that receded, swam closer and then receded until at last, hearing Joe’s voice among the others, I gave myself up to the voluptuous, fathomless oblivion of unconsciousness.

  PART III

  “Do you mean I can never go back?” asked Colin.… “No,” said the Prince of Galt, “for you have gone through the maze.”

  from The Maze in the Heart of the Castle

  14

  It was a long journey, full of darkness at first, and whispering voices I knew I’d heard before but couldn’t identify. And it was cold, a glacial cold that numbed and paralyzed. As my perceptions sharpened I realized that I was in a labyrinth, with walls binding me on either side, and it was the faint sound of music that drew me forward. I walked on, turning corner after corner, sometimes seeing faint shapes in front of me that turned into mist when I reached them. Yet someone was with me, I knew this; someone I could neither see nor touch but whose presence was familiar, peaceful and very close: I was not entirely alone. The maze twisted and turned and I stumbled on, subtly guided by this presence until suddenly I felt intimations of warmth ahead, and turning into a long passageway I saw light, and began to run, and as I ran I saw that I was leaving behind pieces of myself, like outgrown clothing, until I felt transparent, weightless and at last without fear.

  Reluctantly I opened my eyes. A lighted room. White walls. A young man with black hair sitting in a red Naugahyde chair reading a magazine. The two worlds converged, split apart, the labyrinth receding before certain images of pain and violence, a rooftop and a gun. I was not dead, I was lying in a bed, all white and pristine, the blood wiped away from my eyes, my left arm in a splint; I felt incredibly tidy. I was alive and it was Joe sitting in the leather chair. I said softly, tentatively, “Joe.”

  “Amelia?” He jumped up and came to my bed. “My God, Amelia, welcome back.”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling at him mistily.

  He said in a funny kind of voice that shook a little, “I love you, Amelia. Quite awfully, as a matter of fact.”

  “You understand,” I said carefully and slowly, “I’m surprised.”

  “At my loving you?” He sounded startled.

  “No,” I said, thinking about this, “at being alive.” I turned this slowly over in my mind, and frowned. “There was an eye.… Why do I keep remembering an eye, Joe?”

  Joe must have understood that I wasn’t functioning yet at his level because he said gently, “Possibly because you landed on top of Jay Tuttle when you fell down the stairs, Amelia.”

  “I did that, too?” I said, marveling.

  “You were damn lucky, actually. As the police put it all together,” he explained, “Holton shot you from behind, from the top of the stairs, and at that same moment you lost consciousness and fell. The bullet hit Tuttle at the bottom of the stairs instead, whereupon he fell over and you landed on top of him. Which is where you were when I smashed down the door and found you.”

  How very complicated life sounded, I thought, and how very fast Joe talked. “Weird,” I said politely, for it had no reality for me now. “I hope no one was hurt.” I was still half clinging to the maze, willing it to come back to me so that I could discover what lay at the end of it. But Joe was talking again, naming names that tugged at my other memory and willing me to listen to him instead.

  “Tuttle’s still alive,” he was saying, “but Holton’s dead. Holton went back up to the roof and killed himself there. Tuttle’s been arraigned as an accessory to your near-murder and he’s in all the newspapers but no longer smiling. The police know about Hannah now, too. Robin and I took them all the papers and documents.”

  “Ah,” I said, nodding at the name Hannah, and wondered if it had been she who guided me through the maze. I said drowsily, “I love you, too, Joe, but I couldn’t find you. When I got home.”

  I didn’t understand why he looked as if he were going to explode; he looked the same way he’d looked when I told him I had to go to Maine to find Hannah. I watched in wonder as he swallowed his anger, I could see him literally bite it off and swallow it.

  He said in a ludicrously controlled, even voice, “I spent two days in Maine looking for you, Amelia. Two days.”

  “But you left Maine,” I said, frowning.

  “I went back to Maine,” he said. “I phoned you on Tuesday night at the Golden Kingfisher Motel, Amelia. Tuesday night. You weren’t there. You weren’t there at midnight or at half-past midnight or at one o’clock in the morning, or at two. The manager found your suitcase there, but not you or the van.”

  “Weird,” I said, watching him and thinking he had lovely eyes.

  “Weird!” he echoed in a strangled voice. “As soon as I finished in court on Wednesday I hopped the first plane and by two o’clock in the afternoon I was back in Anglesworth with the state police.”

  I stared at him in amazement.

  “I will not,” he said, seeing that he had my full attention at last, “go into my reactions when I learned that Hannah’s house had burned to the ground, or that the tire marks of a medium-sized van were found nearby in the grass. I will only tell you that it was twenty-four more hours before I knew that you were still alive. That’s when the state police finally traced your van to a place called the Bide-a-Wee motel where a girl answering your description registered at ten o’clock soaking wet, and checked out several hours later. And then, Amelia—my God, Amelia, I barely got back in time.”

  “Back?” I repeated blurredly. It seemed a very long story that Joe insisted I hear.

  “To Trafton, to find your telegram on my doorstep. In time to rush to your shop and find you lying with Tuttle at the bottom of the stairs. In time to prevent Holton from shooting you again.”

  I said clearly and firmly, “They were Despas, Joe, and Nora was one of them, I learned that. But I’m not.”

  “Amelia,” Joe said patiently, “you are going to marry me, aren’t you?”

  “Well,” I began, and then hesitated. Perhaps, I thought, I had found the heart of the maze after all. Right here. Now. In this room. Me. But without finishing either my sentence or my thought I fell asleep, and the next day Joe had to repeat everything he’d said to me all over again.

  And so it became just one more sordid story that would titillate newspaper readers all through the fall and winter of the trial. A slightly demented Horatio Alger story of a clever young man who years ago learned to use a handsome face and a broad smile—twelve teeth showing, after all—to charm his way into Hannah’s family and destroy it. And an older man, frustrated, pedantic, ambitious, who was looking for just such a young man with a big smile to exploit for his own purposes, for of what use is a handsome face and a broad smile—or ambition and knowledge—without power? And money is power. And Hannah had money.

  And they got away with it, like the old-time marauders who sacked villages at night, leaving blood in their wake, except they wore business suits and ties, and they smiled a lot and covered everything up, including their real faces.

  The one thing they never dreamed of in their wildest moments was Hannah’s note. Or my curiosity, for that matter.

  This pleases me. The little things still count.

  In the tabloids Hannah was barely mentioned at all, but the New York Times reprinted their long-ago review of The Maze in the Heart of the Castle, and the book is going to be reissued at the same time that In the Land of the Golden Warriors will be published. For the latter book Robin has been asked to write a Foreword, and in it he is explaining the circumstances of the manuscript’s discovery, and he is dedicating the book to me because Hannah would have wanted it, he says.

  Neither will bring Hannah back to life, of course. Or will they? Just a little? If she was a ghost I think she has been laid to rest now, although at times I still feel very close to her.

/>   I think now about how our lives all touch each other, gently or violently, for good or evil, as Hannah’s life touched mine. People’s futures have been rearranged by all this. Robin, for instance, is going to have money again, enough so that he needn’t dye his hair and climb five flights of stairs to sleep. It’s too late for Hannah’s will to be upset but a very good lawyer advised him to sue the senator for damages, and when this became evident there was a hasty and very large settlement out of court to avoid even more publicity.

  As for Nora, she is dead. Robin tells me that she died of heart failure at what he believes to be the precise moment that Jay Tuttle was shot on the stairs. As if she knew. I think about this sometimes.… The newspapers carried photos of Tuttle’s heiress wife, daughter of the famous Senator Plumtree—such a very suitable combination for Holton’s wildest dreams—and yet I wonder.… Tuttle chose to keep Nora alive and in luxury for years, refusing to allow Holton to kill her, perhaps the only time he ever stood up to Holton; he visited her surprisingly often, too, for such a busy man. There are curious bonds between people of love and guilt and pity and remorse, and who is to say that Nora and Jay hadn’t gone on loving each other all those years? Often I wonder what their lives might have been if Tuttle had been less malleable and Holton less ambitious. I blame Hubert Holton for much more than murder.

  From Garwin Mason there came flowers: the news of Tuttle’s fall from grace must have been very big in Maine. There was no note enclosed, only his name on a card, but there was no need for a note, I knew what he wanted to say.

  The affair touched even Daisy, or Doris Tucci, who surprised me very much by coming to see me in the hospital. She brought me flowers and also, with a grin, a hairbrush. She shook her head over me and told me I was a damn fool, and lucky to be alive.

  “I know,” I said meekly, thinking that Daisy had a very broad maternal streak in her. “You told me I was a nut.”