The Watcher

by Dolores Hitchens

  The attendant rubbed the mirror and then slowly shook his head. “I don’t actually recollect, to be honest with you. But to make a guess, I think he went around back.”

  “Where the car had waited for him,” Molly said in a small, strained voice.

  “I don’t know. Sorry.”

  Uncle Florian was there, then, with a cold Coke from the machine. He forced her to take it, drink it.

  “It could be,” he said into her ear, “that this bugger in the black car was just somebody trying to help. I know you don’t believe it, you think something’s happened to him, something has been trying to happen. But look, baby—he’s alone nights there in that boatyard, sleeps in a shack you could pry open with a shoehorn. If somebody really wanted to get at him, that would look to be the place.”

  “Somebody has been watching us,” Molly said. She was looking into the half-empty Coke. There was nothing in her face but utter tiredness.

  “Well, hell, we’re not giving up now.” Uncle Florian went to the car and opened the doors and stood there waiting.

  Molly didn’t finish the drink. She put the bottle in the rack and went to the car and got in.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “NOW YOU think hard,” Uncle Florian said, guiding the car upon the highway as if it were a baby carriage full of quintuplets. “You think of what gave you the idea somebody’s got it in for you and Larry.”

  She wasn’t watching the oncoming cars now, and he knew this was a bad sign. She wasn’t expecting Larry back, now or ever. But she finally roused and answered. “It must have begun with my own feelings. Guilt. The need to hide and lie. The fear that the family would find out. A kind of dirtiness.”

  He swung the wheel so hard that the car lurched. “Now you wait a minute——”

  “No . . . I know what you’re going to say. I was a fool. I know it. I’d never make that mistake again, looking at us through Dad’s and Mother’s eyes. Or perhaps through the eyes of people like the Prescotts.”

  “Well, thank God for that!” he said explosively.

  “What I’m trying to say: these feelings built up in me a sense of needing to be punished. I was afraid of my own happiness. I deserved some horrible disaster. So that when gradually I got this idea of someone lurking around, I was sort of . . . all tuned in. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I sure do.”

  “I can’t even pin it down, I can’t even decide when it began and how I knew it was continuing.”

  He said cautiously, “It couldn’t have been your imagination?”

  “That I’m sure of. It wasn’t.”

  “Okay, then.” He breathed a sigh that almost seemed one of relief. “We go on from there. Somebody’s been spying on you two. Now—why?”

  She was staring at the scene ahead where the highway dropped and cut across a shallow coastal valley. There were bean fields along the edges of the hills. The dry bed of a stream snaked down to the beach, bordered with willows, the brushy growth now thick with shadow. To the right were broken cliffs above the Pacific. On the left was the railroad and in the distance, coming fast, one of the streamliners from San Diego, headed for L.A. The only building in sight was a small loading shed beside the tracks.

  “It seems all tangled up with the way I felt, with the guilt and the sense of doing wrong.”

  “Well, he had to have a better motive than that. Jealousy, maybe,” Uncle Florian pointed out. “How would he know about your conscience?”

  “It’s as if he . . . he was my conscience,” she said uncertainly.

  “Look. I agreed to believe you, to believe in this boogie-man. Now you’re saying——”

  She clenched her hands on her lap. “But he was real.”

  “You saw him? Describe him?”

  “I can’t.”

  Uncle Florian puffed out a breath as if blowing feathers away from his face. “This tippytoes, this visible reminder of sin, this incarnate conscience, must have done something, sometime, to make himself seem so damned real.”

  She threw him a look of fear and despair. “There was just once, this little thing—you’ll think I’m crazy. It was dark and I was going for some cigarettes or something, and I passed an alleyway near the beach. An apartment house, I think. The back doors. And someone stood there and watched me pass, and I knew. He is the one.”

  Uncle Florian blinked at the coming cars. He looked tired, wrinkled, with too many drinks under his belt and too many memories behind his eyes. “He’d been following you.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What the hell was he doing, then? Putting a hex on you? Sticking pins in a doll? Thumbing his nose? For God’s sake——”

  “He was watching,” she said desperately. “He passed judgment on me. He condemned me to some sort of hell. I sensed that, walking by. I’ve never felt so . . . so unclean, as just then!”

  “Baby . . . baby!”

  “I said you’d think I was crazy.” She folded her head down into her shaking hands.

  He got a cigarette lighted, fumbling with the wheel and the lighter and the pack. “Look. I’m a weather-beaten old rummy. I’ve been there. I know exactly what you’re talking about. This is my country. I mean, I feel that way about people watching me, all the time. I pass folks on the street, dozens of them, and they don’t seem to see me but I get a whiff of hell-fire off their minds. Or they pop into a store just before we meet. Or the women suddenly have to rummage in their purses, the over-burdened old bags, or the men have to hunt up the notice for the lodge dues in their inside coat pockets. You think they aren’t judging me and I don’t know it? Kiddo, I can give you chapter and verse. What they’re thinking.” He blew smoke in an angry explosion.

  She crept over close to him and laid her head on his arm.

  “If I could get close enough, I’d blow my breath in their faces,” he went on. “I wish to God it stunk enough to make them vomit. I’d like to see the old bags throwing up into their purses. I’d like to see the lodge brothers spewing in the gutters. Know what I’d do? I’d pass the word they were drunk.”

  She clung and trembled, and then his voice changed, dropped lower, took on a weary and exasperated humor.

  “No. No, I wouldn’t really. Kiddo, to tell the truth I don’t give a damn. If I did care, I’d do something to them or to me. But hell, they don’t even have an inkling. You can’t worry or communicate or hate over somebody who lives away off. And that’s them. They live and breathe and sleep and eat in another town. Hell, another dimension! And I’m on Alcohol Avenue, lying there relaxed with my eyeballs on the sidewalk.”

  She stroked his coat sleeve. “Please . . . darling——”

  “But this, to get to the meat of my meandering . . . you. You’re young and clean and sweet. You’re still in that world I can see dimly from my prone position. So why should the boogie-man follow you around?”

  “I’ve—broken the rules.”

  “Oh, God. Oh—look, one day in the market. I was pricing the wine. It was one of my poorer days. Mrs. Prescott, the same Mrs. Prescott your mother wants to impress with this goddamn party tonight—fright’s sake, it is tonight!—anyway, this same Mrs. Big Guts, she was in the market and so help me she was sticking a pound of butter into her handbag!”

  Molly said nothing.

  “Don’t you get it? Rules, schmules. Mr. Tippytoes must be purblind. He’s got the whole world . . . and he picks you?”

  “I don’t know why. But he did,” she said, muffled in the coat.

  He threw the cigarette away. Nothing he’d said had made any difference and wouldn’t. It was fixed in her head. It might be true, and meanwhile Uncle Florian decided to believe it. Believing it gave the day a certain orderliness and meaning, made what they were doing now an intelligent process. And these were things his days and processes hadn’t had since he could remember.

  They rolled up out of the shallow valley to a sunlit plateau and a wide sweep of the sea, and then Uncle
Florian was jabbing the brake pedal. “Service station ahead. We’ll find Larry. I’ve got a feeling.”

  She jerked erect. In the late light the place looked quiet and peaceful, a small yellow building set in a square of blacktop, with young white oleanders along the drive. The trio of pumps was new. She sensed in the instant that this was a one-man station, the creation of an optimist who had plunked a small hoard on a gamble for independence The car turned from the highway, and something warned her: a locked-up look, an empty silence. “No one’s here.” She peered at the yellow building. “I can see a sign. I’ll bet it says ‘Closed.’ ”

  The sign that leaned against the glass inside said just that.

  Uncle Florian grunted. He guided the convertible past the three pumps and out again to the highway. He waited for a burst of traffic to go past. Then suddenly he was looking at Molly. “Wait a minute.”

  All light had died in her eyes. “What is it?”

  He scratched his chin. “Something back there. Didn’t fit. Weren’t there air and water hoses at those pumps?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Place locked up. They lock them up, too.”

  She wasn’t interested, wasn’t following what he said. She was waiting for something . . . for nothing. Her hands were folded in her lap.

  “I’m going back for a look.”

  He backed the convertible, jockeying for a spot near the, small yellow office. He got out. He glanced at Molly, who hadn’t moved. He leaned in and opened the glove compartment and took out a pint bottle. “Putting on my thinking cap.” He drank, returned the pint to the glove compartment. “You wait, I’ll look around.”

  She turned as if awakening. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing, maybe.” He walked from the car slowly, sizing up the small yellow office. The sunlight made a glitter on the glass that enclosed three sides. A lot of fresh merchandise on the shelves, he noted in passing. Boxed inner tubes, all sizes. A rack of tires, wrapped in brown paper spirals. Oil and gas-additives and gunk for stopping radiator leaks, on wire display pyramids. A shelf with order pads in neat array, a phone. Ready for business. Even the pencils lying by the order pads had been sharpened.

  But business was being turned away.

  Uncle Florian almost stumbled over the gum machine. He sucked in his breath, licked his lips, gave it a tentative kick as if it might be a mirage. He took a quick glance at the car. “I know damned well they take them inside,” he muttered to no one. Then he put a hand on the door knob, testing. The door opened smoothly. He yanked it shut again before Molly could notice. He took a long hard look inside, through the glass panel in the upper half of the yellow steel door. The mottled gray-and-yellow asphalt tile on the floor was clean, polished and empty.

  He went away, around the corner to the rear. Here was equipment for fixing tires, a dip tank, a machine for extracting inner tubes, air hoses. A grease hoist. Beside the hoist was a tiny yellow shed, shelves inside full of canned oil. The doors had been unlocked, hung open, and the last of the level light shone on the bright labels.

  He looked for the rest rooms. They were off at the edge of the blacktop, spanking new yellow paint making a brave show against the massed young oleanders. Uncle Florian suddenly wanted another drink. He wanted it bad. He rubbed his mouth, shook his head, and walked off to the entrance where it said MEN. He rapped on the lattice which hid the door from the driveway. “Anybody in there? Hello! Hello!”

  A windy sound came from the open bean fields, a brush of surf from the sea. Then, under these, a moaning gurgle, a human voice trying to get out a word. Uncle Florian’s hair stood up on his neck. His head pulsed with a rush of blood. His hand shook as he reached past the edge of the lattice and pushed in the door.

  He first saw the gout of blood on the wall over the washbasin, then the mirror there reflecting his own pop-eyed image, then the man on the floor. The whisky came up with such a rush that he barely had time to swerve, to hit the dirt beyond the lattice. He heard running steps; it was a moment before he thought of Molly. Then he braced himself at the edge of the lattice, and she ran into him bodily.

  “Don’t. Baby, don’t go in there.”

  “Larry!” It was a scream, tearing the silence to shreds.

  “Don’t look!”

  She was like a cat. She had steel springs in her wrists, she had claws, she spit at him through her teeth. “Let . . . go!”

  She got past him. He was old and pudding-soft and fuzzy with drink, he consoled himself. The screams were horrible.

  He went off to the phone, fumbling in his pants for a dime.

  Barbara Martin’s father didn’t seem like an old man, Archer thought, until you looked into his eyes. Then you saw that here was a man whose life was over as far as important things were concerned. He was still going through the motions, but he had the tentative air towards his own existence of a man who has lived through a holocaust, or has been the witness of slaughter, or an unwilling soldier in an old, old war.

  They were in the vestibule of Martin’s apartment. Not, Archer remembered, the address given in the death certificate. The family had split up after Barbara had died. The mother was in the East with the younger children. Martin had remained in Newport Beach. To go through the motions.

  “Come inside, Mr. Archer. Take a chair. Any chair.” Martin waved vaguely at the furniture. It sat around the rim of the room, very ordinary stuff, but still a grade better than the place itself. The five-year-old drapes didn’t do anything for the cracked, waved-paned windows. The rug was too big for the floor, and Martin had tucked it up against the wall. The place smelled dusty. A brown dog, very old, lay in a corner on some tattered cushions.

  “I’m . . . sort of batching here.” Martin sat down and began to light a cigarette. “The flat gets run down. Excuse it, please:’

  “Think nothing of it. I’m alone myself,” Archer said.

  “You wanted to know something about a medicine bottle. I went out to the garage, have some stuff stored there, haven’t opened some of the boxes in months. But I found some odds and ends, some of it Barbara’s stuff and other things——” He looked at the cigarette as if it hadn’t delivered some expected ease, reassurance, relaxation, and he was disappointed in it. “I’ve got a couple of boxes in the kitchen. If you want to look.”

  “I’d be glad to.” Archer, too, began to light a cigarette. He was tired. It had been a hell of a day. He felt indescribably dirty. “I don’t suppose your wife might have taken some of the girl’s things with her.”

  “She——” He decided the cigarette might have something in it if he drew on it hard enough. “She wanted nothing of Barbara’s. Not even a picture. Not even a memory.” His voice cracked a little on the last few words.

  There was a clock-tick of silence.

  Martin glanced over into the corner. “Not even Barbara’s dog.”

  Archer let it go. He didn’t want to, but he had a hunch Martin would be pretty useless if he investigated that line and kept him talking on it. “I have a few things I’d like to ask, about your daughter. First, whether she liked boats, owned or had owned a boat. Where she took it to be worked on, painted, and repaired, if ever.”

  “She and my oldest son Robbie had a small sailboat. Mostly, it was Robbie’s. Barbara had gotten quite grown up in the last year or so before her death. Grown up, and very loving and . . . beautiful.”

  My salary doesn’t cover looking into this man’s eyes, Archer thought. The city treasury couldn’t finance it.

  Martin continued, “Oh, she sailed with Robbie now and then. But she knew people with nice boats, with real yachts. You can’t live here long without that, especially if you’re young and look the way Barbara looked. She had lots of invitations for trips. Acapulco, Santa Barbara, Monterey. Even . . . once . . . a summer in the San Juan Islands. Then, those last months she met this . . . this boy. His father had bought him a motor launch. We didn’t know about their being out in it alone.”
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br />   Archer had his hands on the arms of the chair. “Mr. Martin”—the man lifted his bent head—“Mr. Martin, do you have any whisky?”

  “Why, yes. Excuse me. My rudeness—I didn’t think. I guess I took it for granted . . . on duty . . .”

  He went, stooped and gray, to a corner where a sideboard stood beside the kitchen doorway. He got a bottle from a compartment, poured two shots neat. “Want water?”

  “No, thanks.”

  They drank. “Now. What about repairs to this boat she owned with your son?”

  Martin seemed to think about it. “Robbie painted it once with Barbara’s help. I remember how they argued over the colors. She ran a splinter under her nail, too, and it was infected, had to be treated. She was a delicate girl that way, had so little resistance. She seemed to have so much life in her, so much love of living. But she was like a flower. You could blow her away with a breath.”

  The whisky wasn’t going to be enough. Archer thought, I’m damned if I can keep this according to routine, all according to the rules of evidence, and not leading a witness, and that kind of crap. He said abruptly, “Did she ever hang around a boatyard, one run by a man named Warren for instance? Would she have hidden out there, in a place like that, after the abortion?”

  Martin didn’t seem disturbed or distressed by his bluntness. Perhaps the questions were familiar to him. Perhaps he asked them of himself, deep in the nighttime when he had trouble getting to sleep. “I know the place you mean. I’ve met Warren. I don’t believe Barbara went there.”

  “Where would she have gone? What kind of person would she have appealed to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Haven’t you given this some thought?”

  “Much more than you can imagine,” Martin said. There was a kind of dignity, beaten but intact, in the way he faced up to the question.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’ve been very careful about coming to a decision. You see, Mr. Archer, I decided long ago that in an obscure way my child had been murdered.”