Strangers on a Train

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

  “Drink this!”

  Yes, liquor, liquor. He tried to catch it all in his stiff lips. It burnt his face and ran down his chest. He motioned for more. He tried to remind her to lock the doors. Oh, Christ, if it went away, he would be grateful all his life! He let Herbert and his mother push him onto the bed.

  “Tehmeh!” he choked. He twisted his mother’s dressing gown and nearly pulled her down on top of him. But at least he could hold to something now. “Dome tehmeh way!” he said with his breath, and she assured him she wouldn’t. She told him she would lock all the doors.

  Gerard, he thought. Gerard was still working against him, and he would keep on and on and on. Not only Gerard but a whole army of people, checking and snooping and visiting people, hammering typewriters, running out and running back with more pieces, pieces from Santa Fe now, and one day Gerard might put them together right. One day Gerard might come in and find him like this morning, and ask him and he would tell everything. He had killed someone. They killed you for killing someone. Maybe he couldn’t cope. He stared up at the light fixture in the center of the ceiling. It reminded him of the round chromium drainstop in the basin at his grandmother’s house in Los Angeles. Why did he think of that?

  The cruel jab of the hypodermic needle shocked him to sharper consciousness.

  The young, jumpy-looking doctor was talking to his mother in a corner of the darkened room. But he felt better. They wouldn’t take him away now. It was okay now. He had just been panicky. Cautiously, just under the top of the sheet, he watched his fingers flex. “Guy,” he whispered. His tongue was still thick, but he could talk. Then he saw the doctor go out.

  “Ma, I don’t want to go to Europe!” he said in a monotone as his mother came over.

  “All right, darling, we won’t go.” She sat down gently on the side of the bed, and he felt immediately better.

  “The doctor didn’t say I couldn’t go, did he?” As if he wouldn’t go if he wanted to! What was he afraid of? Not even of another attack like this! He touched the puffed shoulder of his mother’s dressing gown, but he thought of Rutledge Overbeck at dinner tonight, and let his hand drop. He was sure his mother was having an affair with him. She went to see him too much at his studio in Silver Springs, and she stayed too long. He didn’t want to admit it, but why shouldn’t he when it was under his nose? It was the first affair, and his father was dead so why shouldn’t she, but why did she have to pick such a jerk? Her eyes looked darker now, in the shaded room. She hadn’t improved since the days after his father’s death. She was going to be like this, Bruno realized now, stay like this, never be young again the way he liked her. “Don’t look so sad, Mom.”

  “Darling, will you promise me you’ll cut down? The doctor said this is the beginning of the end. This morning was a warning, don’t you see? Nature’s warning.” She moistened her lips, and the sudden softness of the rouged, lined underlip so close to him was more than Bruno could bear.

  He closed his eyes tight shut. If he promised, he would be lying. “Hell, I didn’t get the D.T.’s, did I? I never had ’em.”

  “But this is worse. I talked with the doctor. It’s destroying your nerve tissue, he said, and it can kill you. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “Promise me?” She watched his eyelids flutter shut again, and heard him sigh. The tragedy was not this morning, she thought, but years ago when he had taken his first drink by himself. The tragedy was not even the first drink, because the first drink was not the first resort but the last. There’d had to be first the failure of everything else—of her and Sam, of his friends, of his hope, of his interests, really. And hard as she tried, she could never discover why or where it might have begun, because Charley had always been given everything, and both she and Sam had done their best to encourage him in everything and anything he had ever shown interest in. If she could only discover the place in the past where it might have begun— She got up, needing a drink herself.

  Bruno opened his eyes tentatively. He felt deliciously heavy with sleep. He saw himself halfway across the room, as if he watched himself on a screen. He was in his red-brown suit. It was the island in Metcalf. He saw his younger, slimmer body arc toward Miriam and fling her to the earth, those few short moments separate from time before and time after. He felt he had made special movements, thought special brilliant thoughts in those moments, and that such an interval would never come again. Like Guy had talked about himself, the other day on the boat, when he built the Palmyra. Bruno was glad those special moments for both of them had come so near the same time. Sometimes he thought he could die without regrets, because what else could he ever do that would measure up to the night in Metcalf? What else wouldn’t be an anticlimax? Sometimes, like now, he felt his energy might be winding down, and something, maybe his curiosity, dying down. But he didn’t mind, because he felt so wise now somehow, and really so content. Only yesterday he had wanted to go around the world. And why? To say he had been? To say to whom? Last month he had written to William Beebe, volunteering to go down in the new super-bathysphere that they were testing first without a man inside. Why? Everything was silly compared to the night in Metcalf. Every person he knew was silly compared to Guy. Silliest of all to think he’d wanted to see a lot of European women! Maybe the Captain’s whores had soured him, so what? Lots of people thought sex was overrated. No love lasts forever, the psychologists said. But he really shouldn’t say that about Guy and Anne. He had a feeling theirs might last, but just why he didn’t know. It wasn’t only that Guy was so wrapped up in her he was blind to all the rest. It wasn’t just that Guy had enough money now. It was something invisible that he hadn’t even thought of yet. Sometimes he felt he was right on the brink of thinking of it. No, he didn’t want the answer for himself. Purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

  He turned on his side, smiling, clicking and unclicking the top of his gold Dunhill lighter. That trip man wouldn’t see them today or any other day. Home was a hell of a lot more comfortable than Europe. And Guy was here.

  thirty-nine

  Gerard was chasing him through a forest, waving all the clues at him—the glove scraps, the shred of overcoat, even the revolver, because Gerard already had Guy. Guy was tied up back in the forest, and his right hand was bleeding fast. If he couldn’t circle around and get to him, Guy would bleed to death. Gerard giggled as he ran, as if it were a good joke, a good trick they’d played, but he’d guessed it after all. In a minute, Gerard would touch him with those ugly hands!

  “Guy!” But his voice sounded feeble. And Gerard was almost touching him. That was the game, when Gerard touched him!

  With all his power, Bruno struggled to sit up. The nightmare slid from his brain like heavy slabs of rock.

  Gerard! There he was!

  “What’s the matter? Bad dream?”

  The pink-purply hands touched him, and Bruno whirled himself off the bed onto the floor.

  “Woke you just in time, eh?” Gerard laughed.

  Bruno set his teeth hard enough to break them. He bolted to the bathroom and took a drink with the door wide open. In the mirror, his face looked like a battlefield in hell.

  “Sorry to intrude, but I found something new,” Gerard said in the tense, high-pitched voice that meant he had scored a little victory. “About your friend Guy Haines. The one you were just dreaming about, weren’t you?”

  The glass cracked in Bruno’s hand, and meticulously he gathered up the pieces from the basin and put them in the jagged bottom of the glass. He staggered boredly back to his bed.

  “When did you meet him, Charles? Not last December.” Gerard leaned against the chest of drawers, lighting a cigar. “Did you meet him about a year and a half ago? Did you go with him on the train down to Santa Fe?” Gerard waited. He pulled something from under his arm and tossed it on the bed. “Remember that?”

  It was Guy’s Plato book from Santa Fe, still wrapped and with its address half rubbed off. “Sur
e, I remember it.” Bruno pushed it away. “I lost it going to the post office.”

  “Hotel La Fonda had it right on the shelf. How’d you happen to borrow a book of Plato?”

  “I found it on the train.” Bruno looked up. “It had Guy’s address in it, so I meant to mail it. Found it in the dining car, matter of fact.” He looked straight at Gerard, who was watching him with his sharp, steady little eyes that didn’t always have anything behind them.

  “When did you meet him, Charley?” Gerard asked again, with the patient air of one questioning a child he knows is lying.

  “In December.”

  “You know about his wife’s murder, of course.”

  “Sure, I read about it. Then I read about him building the Palmyra Club.”

  “And you thought, how interesting, because you had found a book six months before that belonged to him.”

  Bruno hesitated. “Yeah.”

  Gerard grunted, and looked down with a little smile of disgust.

  Bruno felt odd, uncomfortable. When had he seen it before, a smile like that after a grunt? Once when he had lied to his father about something, very obviously lied and clung to it, and his father’s grunt, the disbelief in the smile, had shamed him. Bruno realized that his eyes pled with Gerard to forgive him, so he deliberately looked off at the window.

  “And you made all those calls to Metcalf not even knowing Guy Haines.” Gerard picked up the book.

  “What calls?”

  “Several calls.”

  “Maybe one when I was tight.”

  “Several. About what?”

  “About the damned book!” If Gerard knew him so well, he should know that was exactly the kind of thing he would do. “Maybe I called when I heard his wife got murdered.”

  Gerard shook his head. “You called before she was murdered.”

  “So what? Maybe I did.”

  “So what? I’ll have to ask Mr. Haines. Considering your interest in murder, it’s remarkable you didn’t call him after the murder, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sick of murder!” Bruno shouted.

  “Oh, I believe it, Charley, I believe it!” Gerard sauntered out, and down the hall toward his mother’s room.

  Bruno showered and dressed with slow care. Gerard had been much, much more excited about Matt Levine, he remembered. As far as he knew, he had made only two calls to Metcalf from Hotel La Fonda, where Gerard must have picked up the bills. He could say Guy’s mother was mistaken about the others, that it hadn’t been he.

  “What’d Gerard want?” Bruno asked his mother.

  “Nothing much. Wanted to know if I knew a friend of yours. Guy Haines.” She was brushing her hair with upward strokes, so it stood out wildly around the calm, tired face. “He’s an architect, isn’t he?”

  “Uh-huh. I don’t know him very well.” He strolled along the floor behind her. She had forgotten the clippings in Los Angeles, just as he had thought she would. Thank Christ, he hadn’t reminded her he knew Guy when all the Palmyra pictures came out! The back of his mind must have known he was going to get Guy to do it.

  “Gerard was talking about your calling him last summer. What was all that?”

  “Oh, Mom, I get so damn sick of Gerard’s dumb steers!”

  forty

  A few moments later that morning, Guy stepped out of the director’s office at Hanson and Knapp Drafters, happier than he had felt in weeks. The firm was copying the last of the hospital drawings, the most complex Guy had ever supervised, the last okays had come through on the building materials, and he had gotten a telegram early that morning from Bob Treacher that made Guy rejoice for his old friend. Bob had been appointed to an advisory committee of engineers for the new Alberta Dam in Canada, a job he had been looking forward to for the last five years.

  Here and there at one of the long tables that fanned out on either side of him, a draftsman looked up and watched him as he walked toward the outer door. Guy nodded a greeting to a smiling foreman. He detected the smallest glow of self-esteem. Or maybe it was nothing but his new suit, he thought, only the third suit in his life he had ever had made for him. Anne had chosen the gray-blue glen plaid material. Anne had chosen the tomato-colored woolen tie this morning to go with it, an old tie but one that he liked. He tightened its knot in the mirror between the elevators. There was a wild gray hair sticking up from one black, heavy eyebrow. The brows went up a little in surprise. He smoothed the hair down. It was the first gray hair he had ever noticed on himself.

  A draftsman opened the office door. “Mr. Haines? Lucky I caught you. There’s a telephone call.”

  Guy went back, hoping it wouldn’t be long, because he was to meet Anne for lunch in ten minutes. He took the call in an empty office off the drafting room.

  “Hello, Guy? Listen, Gerard found that Plato book. . . . Yeah, in Santa Fe. Now, listen, it doesn’t change anything. . . .”

  Five minutes had passed before Guy was back at the elevators. He had always known the Plato might be found. Not a chance, Bruno had said. Bruno could be wrong. Bruno could be caught, therefore. Guy scowled as if it were incredible, the idea Bruno could be caught. And somehow it had been incredible, until now.

  Momentarily, as he came out into the sunlight, he was conscious again of the new suit, and he clenched his fist in frustrated anger with himself. “I found the book on the train, see?” Bruno had said. “If I called you in Metcalf, it was on account of the book. But I didn’t meet you until December . . .” The voice more clipped and anxious than Guy had ever heard it before, so alert, so harried, it hardly seemed Bruno’s voice. Guy went over the fabrication Bruno had just given him as if it were something that didn’t belong to him, as if it were a swatch of material he indifferently considered for a suit, he thought. No, there were no holes in it, but it wouldn’t necessarily wear. Not if someone remembered seeing them on the train. The waiter, for instance, who had served them in Bruno’s compartment.

  He tried to slow his breathing, tried to slow his pace. He looked up at the small disc of the winter sun. His black brows with the gray hair, with the white scar, his brows that were growing shaggier lately, Anne said, broke the glare into particles and protected him. If one looks directly into the sun for fifteen seconds, one can burn through the cornea, he remembered from somewhere. Anne protected him, too. His work protected him. The new suit, the stupid new suit. He felt suddenly inadequate and dull-witted, helpless. Death had insinuated itself into his brain. It enwrapped him. He had breathed its air so long, perhaps, he had grown quite used to it. Well, then, he was not afraid. He squared his shoulders superfluously.

  Anne had not arrived when he got to the restaurant. Then he remembered she had said she was going to pick up the snapshots they had made Sunday at the house. Guy pulled Bob Treacher’s telegram from his pocket and read it again and again:

  JUST APPOINTED TO ALBERTA COMMITTEE. HAVE RECOMMENDED YOU. THIS IS A BRIDGE, GUY. GET FREE SOON AS POSSIBLE. ACCEPTANCE GUARANTEED. LETTER COMING.

  BOB

  Acceptance guaranteed. Regardless of how he engineered his life, his ability to engineer a bridge was beyond question. Guy sipped his martini thoughtfully, holding the surface perfectly steady.

  forty-one

  “I’ve wandered into another case,” Gerard murmured pleasantly, gazing at the typewritten report on his desk. He had not looked at Bruno since the young man had come in. “Murder of Guy Haines’ first wife. Never been solved.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I thought you’d know quite a lot about it. Now tell me everything you know.” Gerard settled himself.

  Bruno could tell he had gone all the way into it since Monday when he had the Plato book. “Nothing,” Bruno said. “Nobody knows. Do they?”

  “What do you think? You must have talked a great deal with Guy about it.”

  “Not particularly. Not at all. Why?”

  “Because murder interests you so much.”

  “What do you mean, murder interests me so much?”r />
  “Oh, come, Charles, if I didn’t know from you, I’d know that much from your father!” Gerard said in a rare burst of impatience.

  Bruno started to reach for a cigarette and stopped. “I talked with him about it,” he said quietly, respectfully. “He doesn’t know anything. He didn’t even know his wife very well then.”

  “Who do you think did it? Did you ever think Mr. Haines might have arranged it? Were you interested maybe in how he’d done it and gotten away with it?” At his ease again, Gerard leaned back with his hands behind his head, as if they were talking about the good weather that day.

  “Of course I don’t think he arranged it,” Bruno replied. “You don’t seem to realize the caliber of the person you’re talking about.”

  “The only caliber ever worth considering is the gun’s, Charles.” Gerard picked up his telephone. “As you’d be the first to tell me probably.— Have Mr. Haines come in, will you?”

  Bruno jumped a little, and Gerard saw it. Gerard watched him in silence as they listened to Guy’s footsteps coming closer in the hall. He had expected Gerard would do this, Bruno told himself. So what, so what, so what?

  Guy looked nervous, Bruno thought, but his usual air of being nervous and in a hurry covered it. He spoke to Gerard, and nodded to Bruno.

  Gerard offered him his remaining chair, a straight one. “My whole purpose in asking you to come down here, Mr. Haines, is to ask you a very simple question. What does Charles talk with you about most of the time?” Gerard offered Guy a cigarette from a pack that must have been years old, Bruno thought, and Guy took it.

  Bruno saw Guy’s eyebrows draw together with the look of irritation that was exactly appropriate. “He’s talked to me now and then about the Palmyra Club,” Guy replied.