Strangers on a Train

by Strangers on a Train (2021) (retail) (epub)

  On Monday evening at about 8, Mrs. McCausland called him to the telephone. It was Anne.

  “Darling—I guess I’m a little upset.”

  “What’s the matter?” He knew what was the matter.

  “I got a letter. In this morning’s mail. About what you were talking about Saturday.”

  “What is it, Anne?”

  “About Miriam—typewritten. And it’s not signed.”

  “What does it say? Read it to me.”

  Anne read shakily, but in her distinct speech, “‘Dear Miss Faulkner, It may interest you to know that Guy Haines had more to do with his wife’s murder than the law thinks at present. But the truth will out. I think you should know in case you have any plans for marrying such a dual personality. Apart from that, this writer knows that Guy Haines will not remain a free man much longer.’ Signed, ‘A friend.’”

  Guy closed his eyes. “God!”

  “Guy, do you know who it could be?—Guy? Hello?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Who?”

  He knew from her voice she was merely frightened, that she believed in him, was afraid only for him. “I don’t know, Anne.”

  “Is that true, Guy?” she asked anxiously. “You should know. Something should be done.”

  “I don’t know,” Guy repeated, frowning. His mind seemed tied in an inextricable knot.

  “You must know. Think, Guy. Someone you might call an enemy?”

  “What’s the postmark?”

  “Grand Central. It’s perfectly plain paper. You can’t tell a thing from that.”

  “Save it for me.”

  “Of course, Guy. And I won’t tell anyone. The family, I mean.” A pause. “There must be someone, Guy. You suspected someone Saturday—didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t.” His throat closed up. “Sometimes these things happen, you know, after a trial.” And he was aware of a desire to cover Bruno as carefully as if Bruno had been himself, and he guilty. “When can I see you, Anne? Can I come out tonight?”

  “Well, I’m—sort of expected to go with Mother and Dad to a benefit thing. I can mail you the letter. Special delivery, you’ll get it tomorrow morning.”

  So it came the next morning, along with another of Bruno’s plans, and an affectionate but exhorting last paragraph in which he mentioned the letter to Anne and promised more.

  twenty-two

  Guy sat up on the edge of his bed, covered his face in his hands, then deliberately brought his hands down. It was the night that took up the body of his thoughts and distorted it, he felt, the night and the darkness and the sleeplessness. Yet the night had its truth also. In the night, one approached truth merely at a certain slant, but all truth was the same. If he told Anne the story, wouldn’t she consider he had been partially guilty? Marry him? How could she? What sort of beast was he that he could sit in a room where a bottom drawer held plans for a murder and the gun to do it with?

  In the frail predawn light, he studied his face in the mirror. The mouth slanted downward to the left, unlike his. The full underlip was thinner with tension. He tried to hold his eyes to an absolute steadiness. They stared back above pallid semicircles, like a part of him that had hardened with accusation, as if they gazed at their torturer.

  Should he dress and go out for a walk or try to sleep? His step on the carpet was light, unconsciously avoiding the spot by the armchair where the floor squeaked. You would skip these squeaking steps just for safety, Bruno’s letters said. My father’s door is just to the right as you know. I have gone over everything and there is no room for a hitch anywhere. See on map where the butler’s (Herbert’s) room is. This is the closest you’ll come to anyone. The hall floor squeaks there where I marked X. . . . He flung himself on the bed. You should not try to get rid of the Luger no matter what happens between the house and the RR station. He knew it all by heart, knew the sound of the kitchen door and the color of the hall carpet.

  If Bruno should get someone else to kill his father, he would have ample evidence in these letters to convict Bruno. He could avenge himself for what Bruno had done to him. Yet Bruno would merely counter with his lies that would convict him of planning Miriam’s murder. No, it would be only a matter of time until Bruno got someone. If he could weather Bruno’s threats only a while longer, it would all be over and he could sleep. If he did it, he thought, he wouldn’t use the big Luger, he would use the little revolver—

  Guy pulled himself up from the bed, aching, angry, and frightened by the words that had just passed through his mind. “The Shaw Building,” he said to himself, as if announcing a new scene, as if he could derail himself from the night’s tracks and set himself on the day’s. The Shaw Building. The ground is all grass covered to the steps in back, except for gravel you won’t have to touch. . . . Skip four, skip three, step wide at the top. You can remember it, it’s got a syncopated rhythm.

  “Mr. Haines!”

  Guy started, and cut himself. He laid his razor down and went to the door.

  “Hello, Guy. Are you ready yet?” asked the voice on the telephone, lewd in the early morning, ugly with the complexities of night. “Want some more?”

  “You don’t bother me.”

  Bruno laughed.

  Guy hung up, trembling.

  The shock lingered through the day, tremulous and traumatic. He wanted desperately to see Anne that evening, wanted desperately that instant of glimpsing her from some spot where he had promised to wait. But he wanted also to deprive himself of her. He took a long walk up Riverside Drive to tire himself, but slept badly nevertheless, and had a series of unpleasant dreams. It would be different, Guy thought, once the Shaw contract was signed, once he could go ahead on his work.

  Douglas Frear of the Shaw Realty Company called the next morning as he had promised. “Mr. Haines,” said his slow, hoarse voice, “we’ve received a most peculiar letter concerning you.”

  “What? What kind of a letter?”

  “Concerning your wife. I didn’t know—Shall I read it to you?”

  “Please.”

  “‘To Whom It May Concern: No doubt it will interest you to learn that Guy Daniel Haines, whose wife was murdered last June, had more of a role in the deed than the courts know. This is from one who knows, and who knows also that there will be a retrial soon which will show his real part in the crime.’—I trust it’s a crank letter, Mr. Haines. I just thought you should know about it.”

  “Of course.” In the corner, Myers worked over his drawing board as calmly as on any other morning of the week.

  “I think I heard about—uh—the tragedy last year. There’s no question of a retrial, is there?”

  “Certainly not. That is, I’ve heard nothing about it.” Guy cursed his confusion. Mr. Frear wanted only to know if he would be free to work.

  “Sorry we haven’t quite made up our minds on that contract, Mr. Haines.”

  The Shaw Realty Company waited until the following morning to tell him they weren’t entirely satisfied with his drawings. In fact, they were interested in the work of another architect.

  How had Bruno found out about the building, Guy wondered. But there were any number of ways. It might have been mentioned in the papers—Bruno kept himself well informed on architectural news—or Bruno might have called when he knew he was out of the office, casually gotten the information from Myers. Guy looked at Myers again, and wondered if he had ever spoken on the telephone with Bruno. The possibility had a flavor of the unearthly.

  Now that the building was gone, he began to see it in terms of what it would not mean. He would not have the extra money he had counted on by summer. Nor the prestige, the prestige with the Faulkner family. It did not once occur to him—as much at the root of his anguish as any of the other reasons—that he had suffered frustration in seeing a creation come to nothing.

  It would be only a matter of time until Bruno informed the next client, and the next. This was his threat to ruin his career. And his life with Anne? Guy th
ought of her with a flash of pain. It seemed to him that he was forgetting for long intervals that he loved her. Something was happening between them, he could not say what. He felt Bruno was destroying his courage to love. Every slightest thing deepened his anxiety, from the fact he had lost his best pair of shoes by forgetting what repair shop he had taken them to, to the house at Alton, which already seemed more than they should have taken on, which he doubted they could fill.

  In the office, Myers worked on his routine, drafting agency jobs, and Guy’s telephone never rang. Once Guy thought, even Bruno doesn’t call because he wants it to build up and build up, so his voice will be welcome when it comes. And disgusted with himself, Guy went down in the middle of the day and drank martinis in a Madison Avenue bar. He was to have had lunch with Anne, but she had called and broken the appointment, he could not remember why. She had not sounded precisely cool, but he thought she had not given any real reason for not lunching with him. She certainly hadn’t said she was going shopping for something for the house, or he would have remembered it. Or would he have? Or was she retaliating for his breaking his promise to come out to dinner with her family last Sunday? He had been too tired and too depressed to see anyone last Sunday. A quiet, unacknowledged quarrel seemed to be going on between himself and Anne. Lately, he felt too miserable to inflict himself on her, and she pretended to be too busy to see him when he asked to see her. She was busy planning for the house, and busy quarreling with him. It did not make sense. Nothing in the world made sense except to escape from Bruno. There was no way of doing that that made sense. What would happen in a court would not make sense.

  He lighted a cigarette, then noticed he already had one. Hunched over the shiny black table, he smoked them both. His arms and hands with the cigarettes seemed mirrored. What was he doing here at 1:15 in the afternoon, growing swimmy on his third martini, making himself incapable of work, assuming he had any? Guy Haines who loved Anne, who had built the Palmyra? He hadn’t even the courage to throw his martini glass into the corner. Quicksand. Suppose he sank completely. Suppose he did kill for Bruno. It would be so simple, as Bruno said, when the house was empty except for his father and the butler, and Guy knew the house more exactly than his home in Metcalf. He could leave clues against Bruno, too, leave the Luger in the room. This thought became a single point of concreteness. His fists closed reflexively against Bruno, then the impotence of his clenched hands before him on the table shamed him. He must not let his mind go there again. That was exactly what Bruno wanted his mind to do.

  He wet his handkerchief in the glass of water and daubed his face. A shaving cut began to sting. He looked at it in the mirror beside him. It had started to bleed, a tiny red mark just to one side of the faint cleft in his chin. He wanted to throw his fist at the chin in the mirror. He jerked himself up and went to pay his bill.

  But having been there once, it was easy for his mind to go there again. In the nights when he could not sleep, he enacted the murder, and it soothed him like a drug. It was not murder but an act he performed to rid himself of Bruno, the slice of a knife that cut away a malignant growth. In the night, Bruno’s father was not a person but an object, as he himself was not a person but a force. To enact it, leaving the Luger in the room, to follow Bruno’s progress to conviction and death, was a catharsis.

  Bruno sent him an alligator billfold with gold corners and his initials G.D.H. inside. “I thought this looked like you, Guy,” said the note inside. “Please don’t make things tough. I am very fond of you. As ever, Bruno.” Guy’s arm moved to fling it into a trash-basket on the street, then he slipped it into his pocket. He hated to throw away a beautiful thing. He would think of something else to do with it.

  That same morning, Guy declined an invitation to speak on a radio panel. He was in no condition to work and he knew it. Why did he even keep coming to the office? He would have been delighted to stay drunk all day, and especially all night. He watched his hand turning and turning the folded compass on his desk top. Someone had once told him that he had hands like a Capuchin monk. Tim O’Flaherty in Chicago. Once when they had sat eating spaghetti in Tim’s basement apartment, talking of Le Corbusier and the verbal eloquence that seemed innate in architects, a natural concomitant of the profession, and how fortunate it was, because generally you had to talk your way. But it had all been possible then, even with Miriam draining him, merely a clean invigorating fight ahead, and somehow right with all its difficulties. He turned the compass over and over, sliding his fingers down it and turning it, until he thought the noise might be bothering Myers and stopped.

  “Pull out of it, Guy,” Myers said amiably.

  “It isn’t anything one snaps out of. One either cracks up or doesn’t,” Guy retorted with a dead calm in his voice, and then, unable to stop himself, “I don’t want advice, Myers. Thanks.”

  “Listen, Guy—” Myers stood up, smiling, lanky, tranquil. But he did not come beyond the corner of his desk.

  Guy got his coat from the tree by the door. “I’m sorry. Let’s forget it.”

  “I know what’s the matter. Pre-wedding nerves. I had them, too. What do you say we go down and have a drink?”

  Myers’ familiarity piqued a certain sense of dignity that Guy was never aware of until it was affronted. He could not bear to look at Myers’ untroubled, empty face, his smug banality. “Thanks,” he said, “I really don’t feel like it.” He closed the door softly behind him.

  twenty-three

  Guy glanced again at the row of brownstones across the street, sure he had seen Bruno. His eyes smarted and swam, fighting the dusk. He had seen him, there by the black iron gate, where he was not. Guy turned and ran up his steps. He had tickets to a Verdi opera tonight. Anne was going to meet him at the theatre at 8:30. He didn’t feel like seeing Anne tonight, didn’t want Anne’s kind of cheering, didn’t want to exhaust himself pretending he felt better than he did. She was worried about his not sleeping. Not that she said much, but that little annoyed him. Above all, he didn’t want to hear Verdi. Whatever had possessed him to buy tickets to Verdi? He had wanted to do something to please Anne, but at best she wouldn’t like it very much, and wasn’t there something insane about buying tickets for something neither of them liked?

  Mrs. McCausland gave him a number he was supposed to call. He thought it looked like the number of one of Anne’s aunts. He hoped Anne might be busy tonight.

  “Guy, I don’t see how I can make it,” Anne said. “These two people Aunt Julie wanted me to meet aren’t coming until after dinner.”

  “All right.”

  “And I can’t duck out on it.”

  “It’s perfectly all right.”

  “I am sorry though. Do you know I haven’t seen you since Saturday?”

  Guy bit the end of his tongue. An actual repulsion against her clinging, her concern, even her clear, gentle voice that had before been like an embrace itself—all this seemed a revelation he no longer loved her.

  “Why don’t you take Mrs. McCausland tonight? I think it’d be nice if you did.”

  “Anne, I don’t care at all.”

  “There haven’t been any more letters, Guy?”

  “No.” The third time she had asked him!

  “I do love you. You won’t forget, will you?”

  “No, Anne.”

  He fled upstairs to his room, hung up his coat and washed, combed his hair, and immediately there was nothing to do, and he wanted Anne. He wanted her terribly. Why had he been so mad as to think he didn’t want to see her? He searched his pockets for Mrs. McCausland’s note with the telephone number, then ran downstairs and looked for it on the hall floor. It had vanished—as if someone had deliberately snatched it away to thwart him. He peered through the etched glass of the front door. Bruno, he thought, Bruno had taken it.

  The Faulkners would know her aunt’s number. He would see her, spend the evening with her, even if it meant spending the evening with her Aunt Julie. The telephone in Long Island rang and
rang and nobody answered. He tried again to think of her aunt’s last name, and couldn’t.

  His room seemed filled with palpable, suspenseful silence. He glanced at the low bookshelves he had built around the walls, at the ivy Mrs. McCausland had given him in the wall brackets, at the empty red plush chair by the reading lamp, at his sketch in black and white over his bed entitled “Imaginary Zoo,” at the monk’s cloth curtains that concealed his kitchenette. Almost boredly he went and moved the curtains aside and looked behind them. He had a definite feeling someone was waiting for him in the room, though he was not in the least frightened. He picked up the newspaper and started to read.

  A few moments later, he was in a bar drinking a second martini. He had to sleep, he reasoned, even if it meant drinking alone, which he despised. He walked down to Times Square, got a haircut, and on the way home bought a quart of milk and a couple of tabloids. After he wrote a letter to his mother, he thought, he would drink some milk, read the papers, and go to bed. Or there might even be Anne’s telephone number on the floor when he came in. But there wasn’t.

  At about 2 in the morning, he got up from bed and wandered about the room, hungry and unwilling to eat. Yet one night last week, he remembered, he had opened a can of sardines and devoured them on the blade of a knife. The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself. He plucked a notebook from the bookshelf and turned through it hastily. It was his first New York notebook, when he was about twenty-two. He had sketched indiscriminately—the Chrysler Building, the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, barges on the East River, workmen leaning on electric drills that bit horizontally into rock. There was a series on the Radio City buildings, with notes on space, on the opposite page the same building with the amendations he would make, or perhaps an entirely new building of his own conception. He closed the book quickly because it was good, and he doubted if he could do as well now. The Palmyra seemed the last spurt of that generous, happy energy of his youth. The sob he had been suppressing contracted his chest with a sickening, familiar pain—familiar from the years after Miriam. He lay down on his bed in order to stop the next.