Strangers on a Train

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

  Howland got up and strolled slowly toward Gerard on his long thin legs, then hung back, leaning against the front of his desk. “But does all this shed any light on the case?”

  “The trouble with the police force is that it has a single-track mind,” Gerard announced. “This case, like many others, took a double-track mind. Simply couldn’t have been solved without a double-track mind.”

  “Who and when?” Howland sighed.

  “Ever hear of Guy Haines?”

  “Certainly. We questioned him last week.”

  “His wife. June eleventh of last year in Metcalf, Texas. Strangulation, remember? The police never solved it.”

  “Charles Bruno?” Howland frowned.

  “Did you know that Charles Bruno and Guy Haines were on the same train going South on June first? Ten days before the murder of Haines’ wife. Now, what do you deduce from that?”

  “You mean they knew each other before last June?”

  “No, I mean they met each other on that train. Can you put the rest together? I’m giving you the missing link.”

  The District Attorney smiled faintly. “You’re saying Charles Bruno killed Guy Haines’ wife?”

  “I certainly am.” Gerard looked up from his papers, finished. “The next question is, what’s my proof? There it is. All you want.” He gestured toward the papers that overlapped in a long row, like cards in a game of solitaire. “Read from the bottom up.”

  While Howland read, Gerard drew a cup of water from the tank in the corner and lighted another cigar from the one he had been smoking. The last statement, from Charles’ taxi driver in Metcalf, had come in this morning. He hadn’t even had a drink on it yet, but he was going to have three or four as soon as he left Howland, in the lounge car of an Iowa-bound train.

  The papers were signed statements from Hotel La Fonda bellhops, from one Edward Wilson who had seen Charles leaving the Santa Fe station on an eastbound train the day of Miriam Haines’ murder, from the Metcalf taxi driver who had driven Charles to the Kingdom of Fun Amusement Park at Lake Metcalf, from the barman in the roadhouse where Charles had tried to get hard liquor, plus telephone bills of long-distance calls to Metcalf.

  “But no doubt you know that already,” Gerard remarked.

  “Most of it, yes,” Howland answered calmly, still reading.

  “You knew he made a twenty-four-hour trip to Metcalf that day, too, did you?” Gerard asked, but he was really in too good spirits for sarcasm. “That taxi driver was certainly hard to find. Had to trace him all the way up to Seattle, but once we found him, it didn’t take any jostling for him to remember. People don’t forget a young man like Charles Bruno.”

  “So you’re saying Charles Bruno is so fond of murder,” Howland remarked amusedly, “that he murders the wife of a man he meets on a train the week before? A woman he’s never even seen? Or had he seen her?”

  Gerard chuckled again. “Of course he hadn’t. My Charles had a plan.” The “my” slipped out, but Gerard didn’t care. “Can’t you see it? Plain as the nose on your face? And this is only half.”

  “Sit down, Gerard, you’ll work yourself into a heart attack.”

  “You can’t see it. Because you didn’t know and don’t know Charles’ personality. You weren’t interested in the fact he spends most of his time planning perfect crimes of various sorts.”

  “All right, what’s the rest of your theory?”

  “That Guy Haines killed Samuel Bruno.”

  “Ow!” Howland groaned.

  Gerard smiled back at the first grin Howland had given him since he, Gerard, had made a mistake in a certain case years ago. “I haven’t finished checking on Guy Haines yet,” Gerard said with deliberate ingenuousness, puffing away at the cigar. “I want to take it easy, and that’s the only reason I’m here, to get you to take it easy with me. I didn’t know but what you’d grab Charles, you see, with all your information against him.”

  Howland smoothed his black mustache. “Everything you say confirms my belief you should have retired about fifteen years ago.”

  “Oh, I’ve solved a few cases in the last fifteen years.”

  “A man like Guy Haines?” Howland laughed again.

  “Against a fellow like Charles? Mind you, I don’t say Guy Haines did it of his own free will. He was made to do it for Charles’ unsolicited favor of freeing him of his wife. Charles hates women,” he remarked in a parenthesis. “That was Charles’ plan. Exchange. No clues, you see. No motives. Oh, I can just hear him! But even Charles is human. He was too interested in Guy Haines to leave him alone afterward. And Guy Haines was too frightened to do anything about it. Yes—” Gerard jerked his head for emphasis, and his jowls shook—“Haines was coerced. How terribly probably no one will ever know.”

  Howland’s smile went away momentarily at Gerard’s earnestness. The story had the barest possibility, but still a possibility. “Hmm-m.”

  “Unless he tells us,” Gerard added.

  “And how do you propose to make him tell us?”

  “Oh, he may yet confess. It’s wearing him down. But otherwise, confront him with the facts. Which my men are busy gathering. One thing, Howland—” Gerard jabbed a finger at his papers on the chair seat. “When you and your—your army of oxes go out checking these statements, don’t question Guy Haines’ mother. I don’t want Haines forewarned.”

  “Oh. Cat-and-mouse technique for Mr. Haines,” Howland smiled. He turned to make a telephone call about an inconsequential matter, and Gerard waited, resenting that he had to turn his information over to Howland, that he had to leave the Charles-Guy Haines spectacle. “Well—” Howland let his breath out in a long sigh—“what do you want me to do, work over your little boy with this stuff? Think he’ll break down and tell all about his brilliant plan with Guy Haines, architect?”

  “No, I don’t want him worked over. I like clean jobs. I want a few days more or maybe weeks to finish checking on Haines, then I’ll confront them both. I’m giving you this on Charles, because from now on I’m out of the case personally, so far as they’re to know. I’m going to Iowa for a vacation, I really am, and I’m going to let Charles know it.” Gerard’s face lighted with a big smile.

  “It’s going to be hard to hold the boys back,” Howland said regretfully, “especially for all the time it’ll take you to get evidence against Guy Haines.”

  “Incidentally—” Gerard picked up his hat and shook it at Howland. “You couldn’t crack Charles with all that, but I could crack Guy Haines with what I’ve got this minute.”

  “Oh, you mean we couldn’t crack Guy Haines?”

  Gerard looked at him with elaborate contempt. “But you’re not interested in cracking him, are you? You don’t think he’s the man.”

  “Take that vacation, Gerard!”

  Methodically, Gerard gathered his papers and started to pocket them.

  “I thought you were going to leave those.”

  “Oh, if you think you’ll need them.” Gerard presented the papers courteously, and turned toward the door.

  “Mind telling me what you’ve got that’ll crack Guy Haines?”

  Gerard made a disdainful sound in his throat. “The man is tortured with guilt,” he said, and went out.

  forty-four

  “You know, in the whole world,” Bruno said, and tears started in his eyes so he had to look down at the long hearth-stone under his feet, “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here tonight, Anne.” He leaned his elbow jauntily on the high mantel.

  “Very nice of you to say,” Anne smiled, and set the plate of melted cheese and anchovy canapés on the sawbuck table. “Have one of these while they’re hot.”

  Bruno took one, though he knew he wouldn’t be able to get it down. The table looked beautiful, set for two with gray linen and big gray plates. Gerard was off on a vacation. They had beaten him, Guy and he, and the lid was off his brains! He might have tried to kiss Anne, he thought, if she didn’t belong to Guy. Bruno stood taller a
nd adjusted his cuffs. He took great pride in being a perfect gentleman with Anne. “So Guy thinks he’s going to like it up there?” Bruno asked. Guy was in Canada now, working on the big Alberta dam. “I’m glad all this dumb questioning is over, so he won’t have to worry about it when he’s working. You can imagine how I feel. Like celebrating!” He laughed, mainly at his understatement.

  Anne stared at his tall restless figure by the mantel, and wondered if Guy, despite his hatred, felt the same fascination she did. She still didn’t know, though, whether Charles Bruno would have been capable of arranging his father’s murder, and she had spent the whole day with him in order to make up her mind. He slid away from certain questions with joking answers, he was serious and careful about answering others. He hated Miriam as if he had known her. It rather surprised Anne that Guy had told him so much about Miriam.

  “Why didn’t you want to tell anyone you’d met Guy on the train?” Anne asked.

  “I didn’t mind. I just made the mistake of kidding around about it first, said we’d met in school. Then all those questions came up, and Gerard started making a lot out of it. I guess because it looked bad, frankly. Miriam killed so soon after, you know. I think it was quite nice of Guy at the inquest on Miriam not to drag in anybody he’d just met by accident.” He laughed, a single loud clap, and dropped into the armchair. “Not that I’m a suspicious character, by any means!”

  “But that didn’t have anything to do with the questioning about your father’s death.”

  “Of course not. But Gerard doesn’t pay any attention to logic. He should have been an inventor!”

  Anne frowned. She couldn’t believe that Guy would have fallen in with Charles’ story simply because telling the truth would have looked bad, or even because Charles had told him on the train that he hated his father. She must ask Guy again. There was a great deal she had to ask him. About Charles’ hostility to Miriam, for instance, though he had never seen her. Anne went into the kitchen.

  Bruno strolled to the front window with his drink, and watched a plane alternating its red and green lights in the black sky. It looked like a person exercising, he thought, touching fingertips to shoulders and stretching arms out again. He wished Guy might be on that plane, coming home. He looked at the dusky pink face of his new wristwatch, thinking again, before he read the time on its tall gold numerals, that Guy would probably like a watch like this, because of its modern design. In just three hours more, he would have been with Anne twenty-four hours, a whole day. He had driven by last evening instead of telephoning, and it had gotten so late, Anne had invited him to spend the night. He had slept up in the guest room where they had put him the night of the party, and Anne had brought him some hot bouillon before he went to sleep. Anne was terribly sweet to him, and he really loved her! He spun around on his heel, and saw her coming in from the kitchen with their plates.

  “Guy’s very fond of you, you know,” Anne said during the dinner.

  Bruno looked at her, having already forgotten what they had been talking about. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him! I feel a tremendous tie with him, like a brother. I guess because everything started happening to him just after we met each other on the train.” And though he had started out to be gay, even funny, the seriousness of his real feeling for Guy got the better of him. He fingered the rack of Guy’s pipes near him on an end table. His heart was pounding. The stuffed potato was beautiful, but he didn’t dare eat another mouthful. Nor the red wine. He had an impulse to try to spend the night again. Couldn’t he manage to stay again tonight, if he didn’t feel well? On the other hand, the new house was closer than Anne thought. Saturday he was giving a big party. “You’re sure Guy’ll be back this weekend?” he asked.

  “So he said.” Anne ate her green salad thoughtfully. “I don’t know whether he’ll feel like a party, though. When he’s been working, he usually doesn’t like anything more distracting than a sail.”

  “I’d like a sail. If you wouldn’t mind company.”

  “Come along.” Then she remembered, Charles had already been out on the India, had invited himself with Guy, had dented the gunwail, and suddenly she felt puzzled, tricked, as if something had prevented her remembering until now. And she found herself thinking, Charles could probably do anything, atrocious things, and fool everyone with the same ingratiating naïveté, the same shy smile. Except Gerard. Yes, he could have arranged his father’s murder. Gerard wouldn’t be speculating in that direction if it weren’t possible. She might be sitting opposite a murderer. She felt a little pluck of terror as she got up, a bit too abruptly as if she were fleeing, and removed the dinner plates. And his grim, merciless pleasure in talking of his loathing for Miriam. He would have enjoyed killing her, Anne thought. A fragile suspicion that he might have killed her crossed her mind like a dry leaf blown by the wind.

  “So you went on to Santa Fe after you met Guy?” she almost stammered, from the kitchen.

  “Uh-huh.” Bruno was deep in the big green armchair again.

  Anne dropped a demitasse spoon and it made an outrageous clatter on the tiles. The odd thing, she thought, was that it didn’t seem to matter what one said to Charles or asked him. Nothing would shock him. But instead of making it simpler to talk to him, this was the very quality that she felt rattling her and throwing her off.

  “Have you ever been to Metcalf?” she heard her own voice call around the partition.

  “No,” Bruno replied. “No, I always wanted to. Have you?”

  Bruno sipped his coffee at the mantel. Anne was on the sofa, her head tipped back so the curve of her throat above the tiny ruffled collar of her dress was the lightest thing about her. Anne is like light to me, Bruno remembered Guy once saying. If he could strangle Anne, too, then Guy and he could really be together. Bruno frowned at himself, then laughed and shifted on his feet.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Just thinking,” he smiled. “I was thinking of what Guy always says, about the doubleness of everything. You know, the positive and negative, side by side. Every decision has a reason against it.” He noticed suddenly he was breathing hard.

  “You mean two sides to everything?”

  “Oh, no, that’s too simple!” Women were really so crude sometimes! “People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.” It thrilled him to say Guy’s words, though he hadn’t like hearing them, he remembered, because Guy had said the two people were mortal enemies, too, and Guy had meant him and himself.

  Anne brought her head up slowly from the sofa back. It sounded so like Guy, yet he had never said it to her. Anne thought of the unsigned letter last spring. Charles must have written it. Guy must have meant Charles when he talked of ambush. There was no one else beside Charles to whom Guy reacted so violently. Surely it was Charles who alternated hatred with devotion.

  “It’s not all good and evil either, but that’s how it shows itself best, in action,” Bruno went on cheerfully. “By the way, I mustn’t forget to tell Guy about giving the thousand dollars to a beggar. I always said when I had my own money, I’d give a thousand to a beggar. Well, I did, but you think he thanked me? It took me twenty minutes to prove to him the money was real! I had to take a hundred in a bank and break if for him! Then he acted as if he though I was crazy!” Bruno looked down and shook his head. He had counted on its being a memorable experience, and then to have the bastard look practically sore at him the next time he saw him—still begging on the same street corner, too—because he hadn’t brought him another thousand! “As I was saying anyway—”

  “About good and evil,” Anne said. She loathed him. She knew all that Guy felt now about him. But she didn’t yet know why Guy tolerated him.

  “Oh. Well, these things come out in actions. But for instance, murderers. Punishing them in the law courts won’t make them any better, Guy says. Every man is his own
law court and punishes himself enough. In fact, every man is just about everything to Guy!” He laughed. He was so tight, he could hardly see her face now, but he wanted to tell her everything that he and Guy had ever talked about, right up to the last little secret that he couldn’t tell her.

  “People without consciences don’t punish themselves, do they?” Anne asked.

  Bruno looked at the ceiling. “That’s true. Some people are too dumb to have consciences, other people too evil. Generally the dumb ones get caught. But take the two murderers of Guy’s wife and my father.” Bruno tried to look serious. “Both of them must have been pretty brilliant people, don’t you think?”

  “So that have consciences and don’t deserve to get caught?”

  “Oh, I don’t say that. Of course not! But don’t think they aren’t suffering a little. In their fashion!” He laughed again, because he was really too tight to know just where he was going. “They weren’t just madmen, like they said the murderer of Guy’s wife was. Shows how little the authorities know about real criminology. A crime like that took planning.” Out of the blue, he remembered he hadn’t planned that one at all, but he certainly had planned his father’s, which illustrated his point well enough. “What’s the matter?”

  Anne laid her cold fingers against her forehead. “Nothing.”

  Bruno fixed her a highball at the bar Guy had built into the side of the fireplace. Bruno wanted a bar just like it for his own house.

  “Where did Guy get those scratches on his face last March?”

  “What scratches?” Bruno turned to her. Guy had told him she didn’t know about the scratches.