Strangers on a Train

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

  “And what else?”

  Guy looked at Bruno. Bruno was nibbling, so casually the action seemed nonchalant, at a fingernail of the hand that propped his cheek. “Can’t really say,” Guy answered.

  “Talked to you about your wife’s murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does he talk to you about the murder?” Gerard asked kindly. “I mean your wife’s murder.”

  Guy felt his face flush. He glanced again at Bruno, as anybody might, he thought, as anybody might in the presence of a discussed party who is being ignored. “He often asked me if I knew who might have done it.”

  “And do you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you like Charles?” Gerard’s fat fingers trembled slightly, incongruously. They began playing with a match cover on his desk blotter.

  Guy thought of Bruno’s fingers on the train, playing with the match cover, dropping it onto the steak. “Yes, I like him,” Guy answered puzzledly.

  “Hasn’t he annoyed you? Hasn’t he thrust himself on you many times?”

  “I don’t think so,” Guy said.

  “Were you annoyed when he came to your wedding?”

  “No.”

  “Did Charles ever tell you that he hated his father?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Did he ever tell you he’d like to kill him?”

  “No,” he replied in the same matter-of-fact tone.

  Gerard got the brown paper-wrapped book from a drawer in his desk. “Here’s the book Charles meant to mail you. Sorry I can’t let you have it just now, because I may need it. How did Charles happen to have your book?”

  “He told me he found it on the train.” Guy studied Gerard’s sleepy, enigmatic smile. He had seen a trace of it the night Gerard called at the house, but not like this. This smile was calculated to inspire dislike. This smile was a professional weapon. What it must be, Guy thought, facing that smile day after day. Involuntarily, he looked over at Bruno.

  “And you didn’t see each other on the train?” Gerard looked from Guy to Bruno.

  “No,” said Guy.

  “I spoke with the waiter who served you two dinner in Charles’ compartment.”

  Guy kept his eyes on Gerard. This naked shame, he thought, was more annihilating than guilt. This was annihilation he was feeling, even as he sat upright, looking straight at Gerard.

  “So what?” Bruno said shrilly.

  “So I’m interested in why you two take such elaborate trouble,” Gerard wagged his head amusedly, “to say you met months later.” He waited, letting the passing seconds eat at them. “You won’t tell me the answer. Well, the answer is obvious. That is, one answer, as a speculation.”

  All three of them were thinking of the answer, Guy thought. It was visible in the air now, linking him and Bruno, Bruno and Gerard, Gerard and himself. The answer Bruno had declared beyond thought, the eternally missing ingredient.

  “Will you tell me, Charles, you who read so many detective stories?”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

  “Within a few days, your wife was killed, Mr. Haines. Within a few months, Charles’ father. My obvious and first speculation is that you both knew those murders were going to happen—”

  “Oh, crap!” Bruno said.

  “—and discussed them. Pure speculation, of course. That’s assuming you met on the train. Where did you meet?” Gerard smiled. “Mr. Haines?”

  “Yes,” Guy said, “we met on the train.”

  “And why’ve you been so afraid of admitting it?” Gerard jabbed one of his freckled fingers at him, and again Guy felt in Gerard’s prosaicness his power to terrify.

  “I don’t know,” Guy said.

  “Wasn’t it because Charles told you he would like to have his father killed? And you were uneasy then, Mr. Haines, because you knew?”

  Was that Gerard’s trump? Guy said slowly, “Charles said nothing about killing his father.”

  Gerard’s eyes slid over in time to catch Bruno’s tight smirk of satisfaction. “Pure speculation, of course,” Gerard said.

  Guy and Bruno left the building together. Gerard had dismissed them together, and they walked together down the long block toward the little park where the subways were, and the taxicabs. Bruno looked back at the tall narrow building they had left.

  “All right, he still hasn’t anything,” Bruno said. “Any way you look at it, he hasn’t anything.”

  Bruno was sullen, but calm. Suddenly Guy realized how cool Bruno had been under Gerard’s attack. Guy was continually imagining Bruno hysterical under pressure. He glanced quickly at Bruno’s tall hunched figure beside him, feeling that wild, reckless comradeship of the day in the restaurant. But he had nothing to say. Surely, he thought, Bruno must know that Gerard wasn’t going to tell them everything he had discovered.

  “You know, the funny thing,” Bruno continued, “Gerard’s not looking for us, he’s looking for other people.”

  forty-two

  Gerard poked a finger between the bars and waggled it at the little bird that fluttered in terror against the opposite side of the cage. Gerard whistled a single soft note.

  From the center of the room, Anne watched him uneasily. She didn’t like his having just told her Guy had been lying, then his strolling off to frighten the canary. She hadn’t liked Gerard for the last quarter hour, and because she had thought she did like him on his first visit, her misjudgment annoyed her.

  “What’s his name?” Gerard asked.

  “Sweetie,” Anne replied. She ducked her head a little, embarrassedly, and swung half around. Her new alligator pumps made her feel very tall and graceful, and she had thought, when she bought them that afternoon, that Guy would like them, that they would coax a smile from him as they sat having a cocktail before dinner. But Gerard’s arrival had spoilt that.

  “Do you have any idea why your husband didn’t want to say he met Charles June before last?”

  The month Miriam was murdered, Anne thought again. June before last meant nothing else to her. “It was a difficult month for him,” she said. “It was the month his wife died. He might have forgotten almost anything that happened that month.” She frowned, feeling Gerard was making too much of his little discovery, that it couldn’t matter so very much, since Guy hadn’t even seen Charles in the six months afterwards.

  “Not in this case,” Gerard said casually, reseating himself. “No, I think Charles talked with your husband on the train about his father, told him he wanted him dead, maybe even told him how he intended to go about—”

  “I can’t imagine Guy listening to that,” Anne interrupted him.

  “I don’t know,” Gerard went on blandly, “I don’t know, but I strongly suspect Charles knew about his father’s murder and that he may have confided to your husband that night on the train. Charles is that kind of a young man. And I think the kind of man your husband is would have kept quiet about it, tried to avoid Charles from then on. Don’t you?”

  It would explain a great deal, Anne thought. But it would also make Guy a kind of accomplice. Gerard seemed to want to make Guy an accomplice. “I’m sure my husband wouldn’t have tolerated Charles even to this extent,” she said firmly, “if Charles had told him anything like that.”

  “A very good point. However—” Gerard stopped vaguely, as if lost in his own slow thoughts.

  Anne did not like to look at the top of his bald freckled head, so she stared at the tile cigarette box on the coffee table, and finally took a cigarette.

  “Do you think your husband has any suspicion who murdered his wife, Mrs. Haines?”

  Anne blew her smoke out defiantly. “I certainly do not.”

  “You see, if that night on the train, Charles went into the subject of murder, he went into it thoroughly. And if your husband did have some reason to think his wife’s life was in danger, and if he mentioned it to Charles—why then they have a sort of mutual secret, a mutual peril even. It’s only a speculation,�
� he hurried to add, “but investigators always have to speculate.”

  “I know my husband couldn’t have said anything about his wife’s being in danger. I was with him in Mexico City when the news came, and with him days before in New York.”

  “How about March of this year?” Gerard asked in the same even tone. He reached for his empty highball glass, and submitted to Anne’s taking it to refill.

  Anne stood at the bar with her back to Gerard, remembering March, the month Charles’ father was killed, remembering Guy’s nervousness then. Had that fight been in February or March? And hadn’t he fought with Charles Bruno?

  “Do you think your husband could have been seeing Charles now and then around the month of March without your knowing about it?”

  Of course, she thought, that might explain it: that Guy had known Charles intended to kill his father, and had tried to stop him, had fought with him, in a bar. “He could have, I suppose,” she said uncertainly. “I don’t know.”

  “How did your husband seem around the month of March, if you can remember, Mrs. Haines?”

  “He was nervous. I think I know the things he was nervous about.”

  “What things?”

  “His work—” Somehow she couldn’t grant him a word more than that about Guy. Everything she said, she felt Gerard would incorporate in the misty picture he was composing, in which he was trying to see Guy. She waited, and Gerard waited, as if he vied with her not to break the silence first.

  Finally, he tapped out his cigar and said, “If anything does occur to you about that time in regard to Charles, will you be sure and tell me? Call me any time during the day or night. There’ll be somebody there to take messages.” He wrote another name on his business card, and handed it to Anne.

  Anne turned from the door and went directly to the coffee table to remove his glass. Through the front window, she saw him sitting in his car with his head bent forward, like a man asleep, while, she supposed, he made his notes. Then with a little stab, she thought of his writing that Guy might have seen Charles in March without her knowing about it. Why had she said it? She did know about it. Guy said he hadn’t seen Charles, between December and the wedding.

  When Guy came in about an hour later, Anne was in the kitchen, tending the casserole that was nearly done in the oven. She saw Guy put his head up, sniffing the air.

  “Shrimp casserole,” Anne told him. “I guess I should open a vent.”

  “Was Gerard here?”

  “Yes. You knew he was coming?”

  “Cigars,” he said laconically. Gerard had told her about the meeting on the train, of course. “What did he want this time?” he asked.

  “He wanted to know more about Charles Bruno.” Anne glanced at him quickly from the front window. “If you’d said anything to me about suspecting him of anything. And he wanted to know about March.”

  “About March?” He stepped onto the raised portion of the floor where Anne stood.

  He stopped in front of her, and Anne saw the pupils of his eyes contract suddenly. She could see a few of the hair-fine scars over his cheekbone from that night in March, or February. “Wanted to know if you suspected Charles was going to have his father killed that month.” But Guy only stared at her with his mouth in a familiar straight line, without alarm, and without guilt. She stepped aside, and went down into the living room. “It’s terrible, isn’t it,” she said, “murder?”

  Guy tapped a fresh cigarette on his watch face. It tortured him to hear her say “murder.” He wished he could erase every memory of Bruno from her brain.

  “You didn’t know, did you, Guy—in March?”

  “No, Anne. What did you tell Gerard?”

  “Do you believe Charles had his father killed?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s possible. But it doesn’t concern us.” And he did not realize for seconds that it was even a lie.

  “That’s right. It doesn’t concern us.” She looked at him again. “Gerard also said you met Charles June before last on the train.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Well—what does it matter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it because of something Charles said on the train? Is that why you dislike him?”

  Guy shoved his hands deeper in his jacket pockets. He wanted a brandy suddenly. He knew he showed what he felt, that he could not hide it from Anne now. “Listen, Anne,” he said quickly. “Bruno told me on the train he wished his father were dead. He didn’t mention any plans, he didn’t mention any names. I didn’t like the way he said it, and after that I didn’t like him. I refuse to tell Gerard all that, because I don’t know if Bruno had his father killed or not. That’s for the police to find out. Innocent men have been hanged because people reported their saying something like that.”

  But whether she believed him or not, he thought, he was finished. It seemed the basest lie he had ever told, the basest thing he had ever done—the transferring of his guilt to another man. Even Bruno wouldn’t have lied like this, wouldn’t have lied against him like this. He felt himself totally false, totally a lie. He flung his cigarette into the fireplace and put his hands over his face.

  “Guy, I do believe you’re doing what you should,” Anne’s voice said gently.

  His face was a lie, his level eyes, the firm mouth, the sensitive hands. He whipped his hands down and put them in his pockets. “I could use a brandy.”

  “Wasn’t it Charles you fought with in March?” she asked as she stood at the bar.

  There was no reason not to lie about this also, but he could not. “No, Anne.” He knew from the quick sidelong glance she gave him that she didn’t believe him. She probably thought he had fought with Bruno to stop him. She was probably proud of him! Must there always be this protection, that he didn’t even want? Must everything always be so easy for him? But Anne would not be satisfied with this. She would come back to it and back to it until he told her, he knew.

  That evening, Guy lighted the first fire of the year, the first fire in their new house. Anne lay on the long hearthstone with her head on a sofa pillow. The thin nostalgic chill of autumn was in the air, filling Guy with melancholy and a restless energy. The energy was not buoyant as autumnal energy had been in his youth, but underlaid with frenzy and despair, as if his life were winding down and this might be his last spurt. What better proof did he need that his life was winding down than that he had no dread of what lay ahead? Couldn’t Gerard guess it now, knowing that he and Bruno had met on the train? Wouldn’t it dawn on him one day, one night, one instant as his fat fingers lifted a cigar to his mouth? What were they waiting for, Gerard and the police? He had sometimes the feeling that Gerard wanted to gather every tiniest contributing fact, every gram of evidence against them both, then let it fall suddenly upon them and demolish them. But however they demolished him, Guy thought, they would not demolish his buildings. And he felt again the strange and lonely isolation of his spirit from his flesh, even from his mind.

  But suppose his secret with Bruno were never found out? There were still those moments of mingled horror at what he had done, and of absolute despondency, when he felt that secret bore a charmed inviolability. Perhaps, he thought, that was why he was not afraid of Gerard or the police, because he still believed in its inviolability. If no one had guessed it so far, after all their carelessness, after all Bruno’s hints, wasn’t there something making it impregnable?

  Anne had fallen asleep. He stared at the smooth curve of her forehead, paled to silver by the fire’s light. Then he lowered his lips to her forehead and kissed her, so gently she would not awaken. The ache inside him translated itself into words: “I forgive you.” He wanted Anne to say it, no one but Anne.

  In his mind, the side of the scale that bore his guilt was hopelessly weighted, beyond the scale’s measure, yet into the other side he continually threw the equally hopeless featherweight of self-defense. He had committed the crime in self-defense, he reasoned. But he vacillated i
n completely believing this. If he believed in the full complement of evil in himself, he had to believe also in a natural compulsion to express it. He found himself wondering, therefore, from time to time, if he might have enjoyed his crime in some way, derived some primal satisfaction from it—how else could one really explain in mankind the continued toleration of wars, the perennial enthusiasm for wars when they came, if not for some primal pleasure in killing?—and because the capacity to wonder came so often, he accepted it as true that he had.

  forty-three

  District attorney Phil Howland, immaculate and gaunt, as sharp of outline as Gerard was fuzzy, smiled tolerantly through his cigarette smoke. “Why don’t you let the kid alone? It was an angle at first, I grant you. We combed through his friends, too. There’s nothing, Gerard. And you can’t arrest a man on his personality.”

  Gerard recrossed his legs and allowed himself a complaisant smile. This was his hour. His satisfaction was heightened by the fact he had sat here smiling in the same way during other less momentous interviews.

  Howland pushed a typewritten sheet with his fingertips to the edge of the desk. “Twelve new names here, if you’re interested. Friends of the late Mr. Samuel furnished us by the insurance companies,” Howland said in his calm, bored voice, and Gerard knew he pretended especial boredom now, because as District Attorney he had so many hundreds of men at his disposal, could throw so much finer nets so much farther.

  “You can tear them up,” Gerard said.

  Howland hid his surprise with a smile, but he couldn’t hide the sudden curiosity in his dark, wide eyes. “I suppose you’ve already got your man. Charles Bruno, of course.”

  “Of course,” Gerard chuckled. “Only I’ve got him for another murder.”

  “Only one? You always said he was good for four or five.”

  “I never said,” Gerard denied quietly. He was smoothing out a number of papers, folded in thirds like letters, on his knees.

  “Who?”

  “Curious? Don’t you know?” Gerard smiled with his cigar between his teeth. He pulled a straight chair closer to him, and proceeded to cover its seat with his papers. He never used Howland’s desk, however many papers he had, and Howland knew now not to bother offering it. Howland disliked him, personally as well as professionally, Gerard knew. Howland accused him of not being cooperative with the police. The police had never been in the least cooperative with him, but with all their hindrance, Gerard in the last decade had solved an impressive number of cases the police hadn’t even been warm on.