by John Gardner
When half a minute had passed, the girl in the beard and loose, beltless trench coat came blundering through the door, head craned forward, eyes rolled back to make certain Mr. Denham hadn’t seen her. She groped six feet into the room as if blind, then saw Mrs. Denham and gave a yelp. “Excuse me,” she said. Mrs. Denham said, “What on earth!” and looked over at Craine. “What next!” she said. Now she seemed alarmed. Craine stepped out of hiding, and Elaine Glass, hands flying to her mouth, turned to run out, but there stood Royce, obscenely grinning, his legs far apart and hips thrown forward, the pistol in his right hand, braced on his heavy left forearm.
Mrs. Denham jumped back, lifted willy-nilly off her feet like a puppet, and Elaine Glass screamed and came leaping, more agile than a gibbon, toward Craine, reaching for him wildly, like a woman who runs after a baby carriage, and Craine, before she hit, had a fleeting impression of her beard swinging sideways, her trench coat flaring, her bra-less boobs like two buoys rising slowly, then falling again, first one, then the other when the tide comes rolling in on the California coast. When she hit him, straight on, exactly like a truck for all the slightness of her frame, he had an impression of her mouth as a bottomless chasm smelling thickly of chocolate malt, and then the room fell upward, or rather Craine crashed floorward, slammed down by speed and intransigeant bone, landing so solidly on the bottle in the coat that it was amazing, as he later told Meakins, that he didn’t break his ass.
The wind was knocked out of him and her hair was in his face. The muscles of his stomach automatically tightened, locked around his belly and chest like a cramp, and however he might labor, eyes bulging, fingers clawing, feet jerking, he could suck in no air. From all around him, as it seemed to Craine, came the shrieks of the girl and a clatter of falling boxes and some secondary confusion that he gradually identified as the shouts of Mr. and Mrs. Denham. Royce was bending over Elaine Glass, struggling to pick her up off Craine, pulling her toward him as if mounting from behind, his square hands closed around her bosom. She twisted her head around, wild with terror, and screamed still louder. Royce roared back. At last, quite suddenly, Craine got his breath. It rushed in like a stinging wind, a nearly blinding flood of light. Mrs. Denham, lips pursed, held a heavy glass canister of tobacco in both hands, high above her head, and in the doorway Earl Denham stood shaking a mop, bellowing like a bull, with his pipe between his teeth. At each side of Denham stood Hannah Johnson and Tom Meakins, wide-eyed, jittering, banging their knees like a dance team. “No!” Hannah screamed, and her hands flew wildly. “No, Craine!”
Incredibly, Craine had his pistol out and was pointing it at Royce’s head.
He could not remember, later, getting back to the office. He remembered standing there, heart beating wildly, in the Denhams’ store, then sitting, at Mrs. Denham’s insistence—she came to him with a chair, telling him, “Sit down now, just sit down, Mr. Craine”—and Meakins taking over, face patchy red, loose skin trembling, more upset than Craine had ever seen him before, an anguished mother, woebegone fat widow, and Royce meek as a lamb in the corner, like a middle-class citizen arrested for indecent exposure—a terrible momentary ruin of himself, humanity stripped naked of its jokes. —All this, of course, Craine thought only later. At the time he thought nothing, merely sat patting himself, one pocket, then another, like a lunatic seeing if he was there. Hannah ran in, ran out, ran in, talking with the Denhams, with Royce, with the girl. “You just cry, honey. Do you good. I be with you in a minute.”
Then, somehow, they were back at the agency, and Craine had his overcoat and suit coat off. Like a man with a concussion, he kept looking around, trying to find the Bible.
“Craine,” Hannah said, “I’m ’onna tell you somethin. You’re lucky as hell and don’t forget it!” She seated him at his desk and poured whiskey in his glass. She was so angry she was wheezing and blowing; he’d never seen her so angry. She was sweating, sour as a raccoon. “Crazy Royce, he don’t know you was fixing to shoot him dead, least he don’t know for sure, since he’s all the time clowning with that pistol of his, so maybe you was too. That’s one reason you lucky.” She struck the air with a raised index finger, like a great black female judge.
He was having trouble with his glass, his hands so wobbly he couldn’t lift it. She scrutinized him, heavy lips pursed, then reached over, squinting, put one hand around his two, and helped him bring the whiskey to his mouth. He took a gulp and she helped him set it down again.
“And as far as a outsider would be able to say, it’s the girl was in the wrong, what with the beard and all. That’s reason number two.” She struck the air with two fingers. She could see, he knew, that he was hoping she’d help him again, but she drew back her hand, with a blistering look, closed the hand to a plump, tight first, and buttressed her hip with it. She tilted her head, chin lifted. In the next room Meakins was talking softly to the girl. Royce wasn’t there. “Get outta here,” Hannah had said when she’d finally gotten to Royce. “Emmit, go take a vacation.” The sun was overhead now, no shadows in the parking lot. “And reason number three is”—she shook three fingers—“the Denhams never called the police, thanks to me and Tom Meakins.”
Three
The experience was not an unusual one for Craine; detectives develop a kind of sense. He opened his eyes slowly, squinting at the gray metal dashboard for an instant before he rolled his eyes left, toward daylight and the sidewalk opposite, and saw her. She saw him the same second, and it was as if someone had struck her on the head from behind. She stood spraddle-legged, face thrown forward, mouth open, immobilized by panic—or so it seemed to Craine—too terrified to scream. Behind her, on the shaggy lawn bright with autumn leaves and long-shadowed sunlight, three students, two boys and a girl, were throwing a Day-Glo orange Frisbee. Craine winced, though he was hardly hung over at all this morning. He had an odd sensation in his ears, as if his mind were uncrinkling; otherwise he was fine. Carefully, he opened his eyes again. The day was clear and plain, not a hint of a shadow or apparition. Half a block away a small group of students in jeans and long hair moved, talking and laughing, toward the campus. Farther away other groups drifted in the same direction. It was eight, perhaps nine, o’clock. Craine had no time for a glance at his watch.
Hurriedly he rolled down the window and leaned his head out. The weather surprised him, gone suddenly warm. It would bring rain. “Everything all right, Miss Glass?” he called. He heard an unintended hint of nastiness in his tone. With a touch of surprise, as if he hadn’t listened to his own voice in years, he recognized the tone as habitual. The girl said nothing, staring as she’d have stared at a scorpion. He called again, more gently, he hoped, though he too was in a panic, one hand fumbling for the whiskey in the seat to the right of him, making sure the bottle was still upside up. “Everything all right?”
She bobbed her head up and down, turned to crane her head in the direction of the university as if for rescue, then jerked it back, looking at him again.
“Off to class?” he called. He got his pipe out, fumblingly, stuck it between his teeth and patted his pockets for matches. Partly the pipe was meant to put her at ease; partly he needed it because at the notch of his collarbone his heartbeat was a white-hot pain. He had no idea what Hannah and Meakins had told her. He was betting they’d put the whole burden on Ms. Glass, protecting the agency; betting they’d telephoned her parents and made them squirm. Again she was bobbing her head, this time with a panicky smile. Her long-fingered hands were moving, beside the pockets of her coat. It was camel’s hair. She had knee socks—heavy, like a soccer player’s—and shoes like a Puritan’s, with large, square buckles. On her head she had a navy blue beret. He understood more now, seeing her dressed in her normal attire. Her mother was pretty, probably dyed her hair slightly red, probably had gold tiles leading down the hallway to the bathroom. Her father was timid and intellectual, tendency to snap. Not a handsome man. She took after her father. Craine called out, “You forgot your books.”
“Hop in then. I’ll treat you.” Craine grinned.
It seemed certain she would flee, but after a moment’s hesitation—to Craine’s mild astonishment—she looked left and right, head thrown forward myopically, checking for traffic, then came hurrying across the street and, watching him to see that he didn’t run over her, edged around the front of the truck. He leaned over, reaching past the whiskey, and pushed open the door. She poked her head in, wide-eyed. Her mouth was large and full and as plain as a bagel.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said—speaking in a burst above the restaurant noise, shoveling her egg in, chewing with her mouth open, sometimes jerking back from her plate, stopping suddenly, eyebrows jerking upward, eyes slightly bulging, her long hand poking at her breakfast with her fork as if she thought for a moment she’d discovered a hair in it—possibly a spider—but finding nothing and popping the bite into her mouth, chewing again very carefully with her mouth open, eyes cast over toward the corner of the restaurant as if analyzing the texture of the egg for the hair she’d missed. “Boy! You don’t know! They come driving from Chicago—my parents never fly—my mother loves flying but my father’s scared shitless, so everywhere they go they take the car or the train. So they come driving from Chicago and we all go to the Gardens, it’s the only restaurant in Gourmet magazine—they do everything in style, if you know what I mean, and they tell you about it—you know what I mean?”
Craine nodded, carefully spreading jelly on his toast. The restaurant was crowded—students, telephone men, bakery-truck drivers with yellow writing on their coats. Craine had to lean in to hear. The brick and glass walls sent back a primal roar, the deep pythonic rumble of silverware and talk, and in the kitchen and at the pass-through, plates slammed, bacon hissed, busboys and waitresses cried out sharply to the two black cooks.
“It makes me naushus when we eat in fancy restaurants,” Elaine said. “When I was little I used to throw up. Sometimes I still do. You know what I mean?”
“It’s all right,” Craine said, trying to calm her.
“All right? Are you crazy?”
At first he misheard her in all the noise, but then he got it. “I mean you don’t need to be nervous. It’s all right.” He had his whiskey in the booth seat beside him. He’d decided it was better not to leave it in the truck. He resisted the temptation now to pour himself a shot, concentrating instead on finishing off his toast. He was not a big breakfast man. Even the toast went down heavy as remorse.
Tentatively the girl poked hashbrowns into her mouth. “So we sit there with these fountains all around us, the place is practically dark, and these waiters in black standing over us like buzzards, listening to every word we say but not showing it, faces just like wax, you know?—and every time my mother gets a cigarette out, or my father—they both smoke like maniacs, trying to kill themselves, it’s the truth, they really are—there’s the waiter’s silver lighter.”
Fork upside down, she trapped the last of the hashbrowns and raised them to her mouth. Her eyes were large now, and not only because of the magnification of her lenses.
“ ‘Elaine, we just don’t understand,’ my mother says. As if right from the beginning it was all in my head. It was their idea I should hire a detective. ‘We’re not so poor we can’t afford a little safety,’ says my mother. ‘To your father and I there is nothing in this world more important than your welfare.’ She calls up Uncle Phil, he’s not really my uncle, he’s a lawyer, she thinks he knows everything. He’s a member of my father’s camera club and sometimes he and his wife and my mother and father play bridge. He asks around, these people he knows there, detectives or something, and he tells my mother, ‘There’s a man down in Carbondale named Gerald Craine. I’m told he’s the best.’ I was suspicious right away. I mean, people talk, and you’re sort of a local character, you know what I mean? But what am I supposed to do? Who am I gonna ask? You don’t know how hard it is for a person to make friends in a place like this. The people in my classes, well—I’m Jewish, for one thing. It gives you an unfair intellectual advantage, and they hate you, it’s a well-known fact. They hardly even look at you, the kids in my classes, and if you raise your hand and answer a question they look disgusted. I do it anyway, because you have to get an education or you’re a victim all your life, especially if you’re a woman.” She looked down, frowning as if she’d glimpsed the image leaping up in Craine’s mind, not that she possibly could, he supposed—an image of Elaine Glass sullenly leaving the classroom, notebook and textbooks clamped to her chest, head thrown forward, chin lifted, eyes lowered, avoiding whatever looks her classmates gave her, whether mocking, friendly, or utterly oblivious, poor sad alien child darkly wrapped to the eyes in defensive righteousness. She wrung her hands. “I forgot what I was saying,” she said.
He closed his fingers around the bottle but again changed his mind. “You were suspicious when your family’s friend suggested me,” he prompted. He tried to catch their waitress’s eye to ask for coffee. She saw him but coolly looked away.
Elaine Glass nodded, less embarrassed now. “Right. That’s right. So I went and got the cashier’s check—” She glanced up at him. “It’s not true that I spied on your agency for weeks, but it is true that after I’d mailed you the check—”
Craine smiled, touched by her earnestness. “I know. It’s all right. Go on.”
She nodded her head up and down like an eager student, running her fork around and around the plate though there was nothing left but grease and maybe two bits of egg the size of rice gains. “I was scared, that’s all. I was afraid you’d—I don’t know. You hear stories, especially a woman living all alone the way I do.” She said woman as if she’d learned to call herself that only recently.
“So anyway,” Craine said, helping her again, “Hannah called your parents and they came down.”
She nodded again, guilty. “And they took me to the Gardens, like it was my birthday or something. ‘Your father is very concerned about you,’ my mother says. There he sits, cutting his meat in little pieces—he has trouble with his teeth—and every now and then he takes a peek at his watch. He has to get back, can’t even wait till morning. Big contract in the works. My mother’s gonna have to drive so he can sleep; they have the Cadillac. But he’s very concerned, right? Right.” Quickly she forced herself to soften the tone, but only for a moment, her anger too much for her. “I don’t know, maybe he is. Anyway this is her business, not his. The woman is the homemaker, husband’s supposed to take care of the prayers and credit cards. ‘Your father is very very concerned, Elaine. Look at him, he hasn’t been able to eat since he heard.’ He’s been eyeing my wine all night just in case I don’t drink it all. All the waiters stand around listening, and the people at the tables around us keep glancing over, you know, annoyed at us. They all have blue eyes. It really makes me physically ill. ‘Listen, Elaine,’ my mother says—she puts on this expression, making sure I won’t shriek at her—‘your father and I believe you should find yourself a good analyst down here, someone you can see on a more regular basis. Maybe Dr. Metzger can recommend someone.’ He’s my shrink at home. ‘It’s a university,’ says my mother. ‘They must have good analysts. Are there Jews on the faculty?’ I want to scream, I’m so embarrassed. ‘Ma,’ I want to say, ‘I’m not crazy.’ What I really want to do is get out of there, make them bring me home. Home to Evanston, I mean, the place where we lived before we moved, the place I told you about, where I saw—” She broke off abruptly and glanced at Craine, then away, nervously running her tongue around her lips.
“The place where you witnessed the murder?” Craine asked.
She nodded, swallowing. “Not the murder itself, actually. But I did see the murderer running away. He had on these satiny blue and white gym clothes, and short, brown hair, a sort of crew cut. The way he jumped the hedge, he was like a hurdler
.”
Her hand was trembling. Craine studied it, then glanced at his own, trembling too, presumably not for the same reason. He got out his pipe and tobacco. “You told the police that?”
“I phoned in an anonymous tip. I was afraid, you know what I mean?”
“You did the right thing. It’s all right.” He patted his pockets for matches. “You saw his face?”
She shook her head, looking down.
“But the person you see following you now is the same one, that much you’re sure of.”
Elaine Glass nodded, but hesitantly. Perhaps only now had she begun to have doubts. When she raised her head there were tears in her eyes. Craine started, thought of touching her hand, then thought better of it. The waitress came hurrying toward their booth, carrying a tray, and he raised his hand, beckoning, but she ignored him. He was secretly glad. He found his matches, struck one, lit his pipe, and took a puff or two. Casually he drew his bottle from the paper sack on the seat beside him and poured two, three fingers of it into his emptied water glass. He saluted Elaine—she was looking away, trying to see the clock, or trying to hide from him the fact that her long, agile fingers, quick as bird’s wings, were brushing away tears—and taking advantage of her distraction, he drained the glass. Then, gently, giving her no excuse for anger, Craine asked, “You have boyfriends, Elaine?” At once he added, to mislead her, “Someone you could call if—”
“No,” she said. Again her eyes filled and she turned away sharply, pawing at the tears with the back of one wrist.
Craine threw a scrutinizing look at her, then poured himself another splash of Scotch. He registered—and hurriedly forgot—the thought that he was drinking too fast. It was a thought too complex to lead to action anyway. He wanted to keep his mind sharp, wanted not to rouse her doubts and fears, but also the curious excitement he was feeling was making him jittery, and if he had to keep consciously remembering not to drink ….