Phillips turned to look bleakly at the girl beside him, sitting among the roots of the reeds with her muddy hands held awkwardly away from her wet clothes. She looked away from him and began gingerly to unfasten her clinging skirt, peeling it away from her legs. He crouched beside her in the darkness, knowing that neither of them had the courage to leave the shelter of the reeds. Karl Lewis might be standing just outside, waiting. He might have turned their own trick back on them, sending the runabout after a boat he knew to be empty, as a blind to cover his own approach.
Out on the water the sound of the outboard motor lost a couple of octaves in pitch. Phillips did not raise himself to look. It was easy enough to know what was happening out there; the runabout had reached the empty sailboat and was slowing to examine it. The men in the speedboat would have to come close to make sure that no one was lying down in the cockpit.
Then footsteps stopped at the edge of the reeds. The sound of the motor came back to its former pitch and volume—the speedboat turning back; and the reeds whispered protestingly as Karl Lewis came forward through the mud to meet it.
Phillips felt Chris close beside him and, glancing aside, dimly saw her pressing herself down among the springy stalks as he was doing, her body stiff with revulsion at the cold seeping wetness of the mud. She had twisted out of her sodden skirt, but even in the dark he could see that her playsuit was filthy; and as he stared at a black smear on the soaked white cloth of her sleeve, he remembered that he had seen all this before. Once before he had lain helpless, watching a girl in a white dress be killed.
He groped cautiously among the stalks of the reeds, seeking a weapon, a piece of driftwood, a stone, anything he could throw or strike with. His fingers found only the slippery folds of Chris’s discarded skirt, half buried in the muck: then the tall form of the blue-eyed man was above him and the world was a very small place, holding three people and the sound of an outboard motor. As he rose he noticed with a thin flash of amusement that the tall man was now carrying his own gun.
Karl Lewis started and turned as he lunged forward; and he knew a thrust of hope; the other had not guessed the trick, did not yet quite understand that the boat had been empty, was not expecting attack here on shore. His gun went off prematurely as Phillips dragged the wet cloth out of the mud, hearing mud and water sluice from it in a wide arc as he swung. The cloth opened in the air and he cracked it like a whip; the tall man threw himself back to avoid it, but it wound itself around his head in thin adhesive folds. The gun went off again, blindly. Phillips followed the tall man backward, reaching for the weapon; it crashed a third time as they fell; and he felt the altered concussion of a fourth discharge and knew that the automatic, choked with mud, had exploded.
The body beneath him twisted and squirmed and, sobbing for breath, he reached for the throat and hung on. A hand came up to beat at his face and he gagged and hid his face against the other’s chest, because the hand was ragged and incomplete, shattered by the explosion of the pistol. The broken hand tried to claw away the slippery folds that muffled the face, and the fingers crushing the throat.
Phillips heard the steady approaching whine of the outboard motor over the surging of blood in his ears. Then it changed pitch, and he knew the speedboat was turning away. Chris screamed sharply once, and was silent. None of it was particularly important. He would find out what it all meant when the man he was choking was dead.
A hand touched his shoulder. He looked up into the dark face of the black-haired man named Holt.
“All right, kid,” Mr. Holt said. “Give him air. We’ll take care of him from here.”
XIII
He could trace in his mind the steps by which he had got from Polling Creek to the guest room at the Wellses’, and all the time he had been thinking that if they wouldn’t talk so much and would move faster instead of standing around talking, he might possibly hang on long enough to get cleaned up and in bed before he blacked out completely. But when the doctor turned out the light and left him alone he lay staring up at the dark ceiling, watching the patterns of light shift as cars came and went in the drive. He waited for the shutter to close on his consciousness, but he had been holding it open too long. The damn thing was stuck.
At last he switched on the light again and sat up, clumsily lighting a cigarette from a package somebody had left under the lamp on the bedside table. He rubbed the aching welt along his jaw where the tall man had struck him with the gun-barrel, and smoked, and looked around the room, having seen it a hundred times before. Whenever Sand Point became crowded with guests, before the war, he would be sent over here with his pajamas and toothbrush. When the Wellses were hard up for room, Chris would come to Sand Point to sleep on the sunporch.
The room was at the rear of the house. The bathroom was opposite the stairs; then there was Chris’s room and the big front bedroom overlooking the bay. He knew the house as well as he knew Sand Point and it should have felt almost like being home, but instead it made him feel restless and unhappy. He had no right here; he was trading on something he had had once and had thrown away.
Nobody seemed to be upstairs. They were all down below, talking. Then he heard footsteps that he recognized, coming up.
She hesitated at the head of the stairs, came to the door, and opened it cautiously. He saw that she had got some of the mud off her, but not all; her grimy white playsuit looked almost dry, but her hair was still damp, and she looked terribly tired. He was suddenly glad for all the talk; she had heard everything, there was nothing he needed to explain to her. She knew about the tall man, and how she had come to be called; and she even knew about the girl. He did not even have to explain to her how he had felt about Janice, because she had known it before he did. There was nothing to explain, and there was really not very much to say.
“You’re supposed to be asleep, Hugh,” she said. “Do you want me to get the doctor to give you something before he goes?”
“No, I’m all right,” he said. “You’d better get something dry on, hadn’t you?”
“I’m going to,” she said. “… The doctor said you should stay in bed at least ten days. He says your headaches are due to concussion from the accident… Didn’t they tell you when you left the hospital that you should stay quiet?”
“They always tell you that.”
“Mother called your folks,” she said. “They’ll be down in the morning.”
“Fine.”
“Well,” she said, “well, I’m going to take a bath. You’d better turn out the light and try to sleep.”
“I will as soon as I’ve finished this smoke.”
She looked at him for a moment, and her mouth had suddenly a tight, almost frightened look. He thought he knew how she felt. It was hard to realize that a person you had known very well once could have become almost a stranger, that you could not talk to. She turned quickly and went out, closing the door quietly behind her.
He pushed the pillow up behind his shoulders and leaned against the head of the bed and stared blankly at the curling smoke of the cigarette. He tried to think what was in her mind and in his own, but he could not feel anything but a vague tired bitterness. He did not blame her for anything. The war was still close enough that you remembered that almost anybody, given an opportunity and an excuse, would kill: it did not anger him that she had thought him a murderer. But the fact that she could think so, and that they had not even been able to talk it out between them, showed how far apart they had come in a year.
He found himself almost wishing for Janice. Janice had been like the little girl who was horrid when she was bad, but when she was good she was very, very good… And at any rate he had known her, and could talk to her. Then he realized that even this was not true and he had no idea what the real Janice had been like. The tall man had called her a greedy little tramp. The tall man had probably never chased fireflies with her… He had lived a year with a woman who had not existed. And the long-legged girl with the upturned nose, whom he had kissed, h
ad not existed, either. Everybody was six other people.
Mr. Holt opened the door gently, looked inside, and came in. There was mud on his shoes and on the cuffs of his trousers, but he looked satisfied with the world. He stood over the bed, studying Hugh Phillips’s face, and misinterpreted the expression he found there.
“You’re still pretty sore at me, aren’t you, Mr. Phillips?”
Phillips shook his head.
Mr. Holt asked quietly, “How do you think we happened to be there? We’ve been watching the place for a week. The man on the job tonight missed you because he wasn’t expecting anybody coming by water; but when he saw the young lady drive in, he knew that something was up and passed the word along…”
“Then you knew all the time…”
The black-haired man drew up a chair and sat down.
“Could I miss it?” he asked. “I said to myself, hell, the boy’s crazy; and then I looked at her head…”
Phillips winced. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I thought of that. It made me wonder if I hadn’t been dreaming.”
“I had a time with the doctor,” Mr. Holt said, smiling. “He wanted to spill it; I had to swear I’d give it out in a week no matter what happened; and that the coroner wouldn’t ask any leading questions. When the week was up… Mr. Phillips, I’ve been busy as a three-legged dog with fleas, and that damn doctor like to climb down my throat…”
Phillips crushed out his cigarette in the glass ashtray on the bedside table.
“I still don’t get it,” he said, and he knew that his voice was unfriendly. “Suppose you had let me tell it. With the doctor’s evidence, certainly I’d have been believed…”
“Mr. Phillips, you should know something about politics.” The black-haired man smiled cheerfully. “Look, Mr. Phillips, there’s an election coming up… and you come along, yelling murder. Sure it was murder. But my God, did you have to call a plain old socket wrench what you did?”
“What difference—?”
“The Black Cross!” said Mr. Holt with a wry grimace. “‘My wife was killed by a man wielding a black cross.’ And the wounds in her head to prove it! Can’t you see the reporters diving for the phone booths? Hell, they’d have had the Black Hand, the KKK, and the Spanish Inquisition, all loose in this County together. I wouldn’t wonder but some of them would have made a swastika of it and claimed the old man was hiding Nazis under his bed… Don’t you see, Mr. Phillips? I had to stop it. I had to give myself time to work on it. Now we can break it all together and what you said doesn’t make any difference. They can’t let their imaginations loose on it because we’ll give them the answer before they can get started. They can’t make anything of it that isn’t there.”
“Yes,” said Phillips grimly. “But you might have let me in on it.”
Mr. Holt grinned. “I figured I’d better let you stew a while, Mr. Phillips, seeing as I wasn’t at all sure you hadn’t used the wrench on her yourself.”
Phillips started. Then he laughed. “Yes, I kind of wondered if you… But how would I have got rid of it?”
The older man said calmly, “The girl might have got rid of it for you. When I saw the two of you leaving the inquest together I was mighty glad I hadn’t let on to you.”
“I’d never seen her in my life, before…”
“Was I going to take your word for that, Mr. Phillips? After all, men have been known to get rid of their wives before, when someone else came along. When I checked on her, though, I found that she’d never been east of St. Louis before. She’d gone to Hollywood from St. Louis for the same reason all of them go; and when she couldn’t make the grade she got a job selling cigarettes at a place called the Grotto. Run by this man Lewis, who’d been mixed up in some things including a murder for which he’d been alibied by a young lady answering your wife’s description, who’d later disappeared. When I found Mr. Lewis here, in the same cottage with the Carlson girl, things began to make sense, kind of. We were tracing the truck when you broke things up.”
“Have you found it?”
The black-haired man shrugged. “We know where to look for it now. There were three men, claiming to be fishermen, living in a cottage down the road from the Brown place. One of them disappeared the night your wife was killed. The girl says he drove the truck west and gave us some ideas where we might find him. She’s down town making a statement now. We caught her trying to get away while the men were after you and Miss Wells.”
Phillips said, “Yes, she was getting pretty close to a breakdown.”
Mr. Holt rose. “I tell you, Mr. Phillips,” he said, and suddenly his face looked tired, “I tell you, I hate a case where a nice-looking girl is involved. Half the time you’ll give her breaks you wouldn’t give a man, and the other half you’ll be harder on her than you would a man, to show you can’t be influenced. I know. I was eight years on the force in Baltimore before I married and moved down here…” He grimaced. “Hell, I’ve got a daughter fifteen who wants to go to Hollywood. Why can’t they stay home?”
Hugh Phillips regarded the strong mahogany face of the black-haired man curiously. In the hospital Mr. Holt had been an impressive figure who had spoken to him convincingly from the heights of a superior strength and wisdom, calling him ‘kid.’ That was the way Phillips had remembered him, with a certain amount of antagonism, but also with something very close to fear. But tonight Mr. Holt had become, suddenly, merely a large weathered man who still knew things that Hugh Phillips did not know, but who addressed him respectfully with a distinct country accent, and asked for his sympathy and understanding. He was another person who was six other people.
It occurred to Phillips that Mr. Holt was a very good actor and something of a diplomat; he was, in other words, a politician. In the hospital he had wanted Phillips’s silence and had obtained it by a shrewd mixture of bluff, veiled threats, and downright lies. Now he needed Phillips’s cooperation and was willing to become a likeable yokel to get it: even though the case had closed favorably, Mr. Holt had no desire to have the bereaved husband complaining that he had been browbeaten into concealing his wife’s murder for political reasons.
“Well,” Phillips said slowly, when the other did not speak. “Well, any way you want to handle it, Mr. Holt… All I want to do is forget about it.” After all, the man had done a good job and had probably saved his life. Although one could not help wondering just how far Mr. Holt would have got had Karl Lewis not sent the girl to pick up Phillips after the inquest…
The room seemed to change when he was gone, as if he had taken with him the world in which people murdered, were murdered, were suspected of murder; the world in which the policeman was not an automaton at a street crossing, but a central fact of life. Phillips moved after a while, reaching for the light switch. Then he let his hand fall slowly, and lighted a fresh cigarette; and after a long time, as he had hoped she would, seeing the light under his door, she came.
It was not quite fair of him, he thought, to have been married. He knew a little too much. He was quite aware of how hard she must have worked to get her hair looking so well so quickly; and after a year of marriage he could readily tell when a girl had taken pains with her make-up; and he knew that the pale blue printed satin housecoat she was wearing was a special one reserved for traveling or when there was company in the house, because a girl did not buy a thing like that just to have breakfast with her mother. He noticed these things and found that they gave him a little hope.
The housecoat made her, however, look quite tall and rather remote from anything he remembered about her.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” she asked.
“I guess I wanted to see you.”
He watched her come forward and sit down on the side of the bed. She smoothed the shining skirt of the housecoat over her knee and traced the pattern on it with her finger.
“I didn’t think you would,” she said at last.
“Would what?”
“Want to see me.” He saw a slow fl
ush rise under the golden sunburn of her face. “I don’t know how I could have said something so… so completely dreadful. Even if I thought it I didn’t have to say it… But I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to know if you had killed her.”
Her freshly washed hair curled, a little damp, at the nape of her neck behind her ear. He could see a small pulse beating inside the low collar of the coat.
“Chris,” he said, “Chris, when that girl called you, and you thought I’d tried to commit suicide…”
She did not look up. “Oh, she told you.”
“Yes. She said you asked her not to call the police. What were you going to do, Chris?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“You thought I was a murderer. When Lewis shot at me you thought he was a policeman. But you ran with me; on the boat you were doing your best to help me get away…”
Chris stood up suddenly and walked across the room to the dresser. He could see her face in the mirror; then she had turned abruptly to face him.
“It isn’t quite fair to ask, is it, Hugh?” she said stiffly. “It makes me look rather like a fool, doesn’t it?”
It had never occurred to him before that Christine Wells was beautiful. Perhaps he had never really looked at her before; he had known her too long. The discovery embarrassed him and he did not know how to behave. He thought of the year of their lives he had wasted.
“No,” he said. “I’m the one who looks rather like a fool, Chris.”
Table of Contents
DEADFALL
THE BLACK CROSS
Murder Twice Told Page 19