The Watcher

by Dolores Hitchens

  There was a short space of silence. Out on the darkening water the ferry hooted.

  “Miss Tomlinson should have known him pretty well,” the cop said. “It’s too bad she’s not here.”

  “I’m going to try her back door, take a look around.”

  Archer went through the kitchen to the alleyway. Lottie’s rear door wasn’t locked. He stepped in and switched on the kitchen lights. The place was laid out much like the one next door, but this apartment was different in that it was obviously fully lived in. Fuzzy around the edges, showing neglect, but still bearing the stamp of its occupant. He walked to the other room, then into Lottie’s bedroom. She was gone; in a way he was relieved. It had occurred to him she could be dead over here.

  The uniformed man was bent again at the desk, peering at the sheets of typescript. He looked up. “Any sign of her?”

  “The back door was open, I walked through the place. No one in it, and nothing that looked like trouble. It was all just the way I’d seen it earlier today.”

  “I hope she’s all right.”

  Archer stood silent, in thought, and then asked: “How much could you hear, while I was over there? Footsteps?”

  The cop looked doubtful. “I guess I wasn’t listening.”

  “Go next door. Stay in the front room for a minute or so, then go into the bedroom. I want to make a test.”

  The uniformed man went out obediently and after a while, faintly, Archer could hear the heavy tread in Lottie’s apartment. He went into the bedroom and picked up a packing box and dropped it. Then he hefted two or three of the big notebooks and let them fall to the floor. He slammed the closet door.

  He met the cop at the back door. The man looked into the lighted kitchen, bulky against the growing dark. “Sounded like the house fell.”

  “She would have heard him. He was sorting and packing. Clearing out to run. Something made him quit. She did, perhaps.”

  “You think she got suspicious of him?”

  Archer was remembering certain hesitations, a trace of thoughtful reserve, in Lottie as he had talked to her. “I wonder if she wasn’t, always?”

  The fingerprint men and other experts arrived from headquarters, and Archer went off to pound on neighboring doors. He found out certain things at once. The upper flat had been occupied by the owners up until six weeks before, when it had been vacated for renovating. The owners were in Europe. The two tenants below were not known for neighborliness. The girl lived in a shell of grief now, and before she’d been wrapped up in her weaving and the little sister; and in either case she had scant time for friendly contacts. The man must have lived the life of a wraith; few had even noted his comings and goings via the courtyard.

  Archer got one offbeat item from an elderly woman who lived nearby in an upstairs rear flat. She said she was sure she had seen a juvenile sneak into the bayside lower flat during the afternoon. She didn’t know the time, her clock was in the kitchen, but she supplied Archer with an excellent description which, had he known, fitted Curt precisely.

  She gave Archer a lecture on the current state of juvenile morals, and he asked her why she was so sure that the boy had been an interloper, and in reply she shook her head.

  When you got so old, you just knew things.

  Archer wished that he was, and that he did.

  He went to the radio cruiser and called in, checking on the progress with loose ends. No legible fingerprints, after all this time, on the stuff in Barbara Martin’s handbag. Small hopes die as painfully as big ones; Archer flinched. The man’s handkerchief didn’t have a laundry mark on it, either. Archer heard this with surprise, then was thoughtful. He turned from the phone with a frown. The man must have a family of sorts somewhere, to have his wash done privately; and then Archer growled an oath to himself, remembering the rash of self-service laundromats in the town. Great white rows of machines, and you stuck in the dirty clothes and soap, with fifteen cents for the coin slot; and the machine turned everything out clean in thirty minutes, and a second machine waited to dry it if you chose.

  Everywhere I turn, Archer thought, there’s a beautifully new neat explanation for what lacks. Civilization, you bore me.

  Curt’s mother opened up the gate-leg table in the corner of the front room and spread it with a blue cotton cloth. She’d been frying hamburger and onions and french fries, and the heat of the stove had brought a flush to her skin. She looked sweaty and vital, full of energy, her eyes shining.

  The visitor sat on the end of the couch, relaxed, his head back on the cushions, watching her. He wore a brown sports jacket, brown slacks, and beside him he had laid down a collection of papers, letters, and other material, not neatly stacked but rather hastily shuffled together. Once in a while he put a hand over to touch this stuff. His fingers were long, pale, and the nails looked bloodless.

  Ignoring Curt, who sat across the room with his arms on his knees, she said to the visitor, “I was surprised when I saw you. You were coming here, weren’t you? Lucky I bought plenty of hamburger.”

  “Lucky for me,” he agreed amiably.

  “Curt and I never have visitors to dinner. Do we Curt?” She shot a swift, curious glance at her son. “Cat got your tongue?”

  He lifted his face. There was a hostile blankness, as if inner defenses had gone up, shutting out his mother and the man on the couch and the world around them. “Afraid not.”

  “Afraid not. Afraid not. What kind of answer is that?”

  “The cat hasn’t got my tongue,” Curt said with an elaborate air of translation.

  “To be square about it,” the man on the couch said wryly.

  Curt glanced his way but said nothing.

  “We can sit down.” She bustled around, arranging chairs and squaring the plates and battered silver. “Hamburger’s done. We aren’t rich so we don’t live fancy.” She gave the man a steady look as he rose from the couch; she smiled directly into his eyes. “We have faith. We have the Lord’s word and His blessing. We’re proud to be poor in His name.”

  The man crossed the room almost lazily, sat down, unfolded the napkin. Curt’s mother paused in the act of arranging the platter of hamburger, the dishes of onions and french fries. “We say blessing.”

  The man refolded his napkin and put it carefully back beside the silver.

  The three bowed their heads above the chipped dinner plates and she began a long, involved prayer. Curt showed no sign of restiveness, though the visitor licked his lips a couple of times and half lifted his head as if she might be coming to an end. Inwardly Curt was withdrawn, sheltered in dull inattention. His mother’s voice was a monotone, words slipping past. He didn’t examine meanings.

  When the blessing had been said, when she had waited firmly for their answering amens, she began to dish up the food.

  The visitor examined the oozing hamburger patty, thick white gravy, the sticky french fries, and the onions in their patina of oil, and said, “Looks delicious.” He took up a slice of bread, broke it, and buttered a chunk.

  Her hair had loosened. It shone rich and warm in the unshaded glow of the wall bracket. “Thank you, but it’s just our usual. If I ever brought home a steak, the house would fall down. I mean, it really would!” She threw back her head to laugh.

  He gave the room a surveying stare as if taking the remark seriously. “No, it looks pretty sturdy to me. Nice and solid. And high, like a nest. You’ve got a lot of safety here, and comfort. Up away from trouble. I’ll bet you hunted for a while before you found this.”

  “Well, yes. I haven’t always”—she carefully divided the onions that remained between her and Curt—“don’t always have such good luck as I have here. The landlady’s nice.”

  Into Curt’s frozen mind snapped the combined images of other landladies, women with gray topknots, winking lenses, falcon noses, deep lines from nostril to jawbone setting the mouth into a pair of brackets, the lips gullied with little wrinkles all puckered into’ a spitting scorn. He remembered the thi
ngs they’d said to his mother, while he and she stood among packing boxes on the bare floors waiting for someone in a truck, all about her being such a crazy religious fanatic. And something else, something that didn’t belong with being a lady preacher but had instead to do with men. Men, not as they walked the streets and kept stores and mowed lawns at home, but as they came creeping at night on mysterious errands. The landladies had been explicit enough, ignoring his tender ears, but their words were not of Curt’s vernacular, then or now. It was by a sort of osmosis that he had come to understand what they had meant.

  “Besides that,” he said, unconsciously amplifying his mother’s words, “the old guy below us is deaf.”

  The visitor looked at Curt attentively.

  “Well, he is partially deaf,” Curt’s mother put in, as if this somehow made the defect more respectable. She added on a thoughtful note, unaware of self-betrayal: “He can’t carry a tune, either.”

  Curt bent above his plate, cutting the hamburger patty into quarters, dipping it into the gravy before putting it into his mouth to chew.

  “Many deaf people have harsh and inflexible voices,” said the visitor with wry complaint. “I remember a professor at college. After all these years—his classes were an ordeal, we dreaded them. He stated each fact in a kind of muffled monotone. You had to listen carefully to catch what he meant, to get any sense of it; he’d talk about the horrors of the rape of Rome with the same delivery he mused about his dahlias.”

  Curt’s mother bent on him her shining and expectant eyes. ‘You must have a wonderful education, being a teacher.”

  He shrugged, ignored her admiration. “A requirement in California. A certain number of years, university and so on. I don’t have a doctorate.” She looked blank, then started to say something, and he put in quickly, “Nothing to do with medicine. The doctor’s degree, the Ph.D., is the highest university degree and many teachers have them. I don’t. I have just the master’s.”

  “It must be wonderful to go to college.” She said it wistfully, toying with her fork, her face soft and almost shy between the wings of lustrous hair. “I quit high school. Quit to go to Bible Institute. But I didn’t finish that, either. I married Curt’s father.”

  “He too was a Bible student?” Some irony underlay the question.

  “Well, he . . . wanted to be. He tried for a while. He prayed and he studied, me praying and studying right alongside him. But there was the weakness in him, wanting to drink and dance and listen to trashy music, run around with the wrong kind of people. He just couldn’t quit those things.”

  The visitor shrugged pessimistically. “He couldn’t help himself.”

  She shook her head. “He gave up too soon, I always felt. I begged him, I told him it would come if he kept trying. But he didn’t wait.” She rose swiftly, rushed across the room, brought back the big notebook folder full of her own hymns. “He could have found it working with me, teaching and preaching, and singing. He could have conquered in glory. But he wouldn’t try any more, finally. He went like a pig to its wallow.” Her eyes no longer shone warmly; they had taken on a glitter.

  “You did far too much, of course,” said the visitor.

  She hesitated. “Too much? How?”

  “All this——” He wagged a hand, summing up her ineffectual didoes in the simple gesture. “Useless. He was past caring and hearing. He was bent on a way he could not change. How old was he?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Far too late. It has to happen in first youth.”

  The glitter died to a puzzled attention. “What does?”

  “Becoming a decent human being.” The visitor pushed his plate, laid a long hand firmly along the table edge, leaned forward. “I’m not a religious fanatic. My morals are not those of orthodoxy. In fact, one might say—the opposite.” He smiled slightly. “I believe, with simple finality, in one single cure for evil.”

  Curt waited; the light above the table threw shadow into his eyes and gave the flat planes of his cheeks a dusted look, where the fine white hair had begun to thicken.

  “What single cure?” said his mother, almost scornfully.

  “Death.” The visitor looked from one to the other. “You should have killed him. But of course, much better to have had it happen when he was . . . say . . . about Curt’s age. The flaw must have been visible. Someone should have taken steps.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “YOU MUST be crazy.” She said it half jokingly, though she sensed his utter conviction, and her attitude began to lose its coquettish warmth. “Besides, that’s not Christian. Killing people, before their time to go. Even a sinner must be given every chance to change.”

  “They don’t, though,” the visitor assured her.

  “God arranges our time to die.”

  “I can’t agree. It seems to me a matter of chance, and this offends my sense of justice. I see so many who are evil, living to a ripe old age. And on the other hand, as the old saw has it, ‘The good die young.’ To attempt a small correction on this order would seem only the reasonable thing to do.”

  She brushed at an invisible crease in the cotton table cover. “You wouldn’t talk that way in school. In front of the youngsters,” she said uneasily.

  “No. I wouldn’t. For one thing, I’d shortly be out of a job. Though I think a realistic idea of what might happen to them could bring a sharp improvement in behavior.”

  “What might happen—you mean, dying?”

  “Yes.” He shook his head ruefully. “Would you believe it, even the H-bomb seems to have lost its terror? Familiarity, of course, plus the complacent thought that it’s never really going to happen.”

  She thought it over, smoothing the invisible wrinkle with her firm brown hand. “No one would do a thing like that—kill youngsters because they were going bad.”

  He shrugged. “We’ve had deaths right here in Newport that no one has been able to explain.”

  There was an uncertain, stretched-out moment of silence. Curt stirred in his chair, looking neither at his mother nor the man, and then he blurted: “I want to go over to Arnold’s. We’re going to watch TV tonight.”

  “You stay right where you are and finish what’s on your plate. I might let you go later when the dishes are done.” She turned to the man. The wary distrust was gone, as if she had at last identified some old, familiar adversary. “I see now what’s happened. You’ve been reading meanings.”

  He lifted his brows in sardonic question.

  She went on: “You’ve seen sin around you and you’ve drawn conclusions. You’ve tried to make out the pattern, make it fit your poor human understanding.” She waited as if expecting his instant enlightenment. “I used to do the same thing, I’d see something bad happen to somebody, them getting just what they deserved according to my ideas, and I’d figure it was judgment. That’s before I got real understanding.”

  “You have it now?” he wondered with a touch of mockery.

  “Sure I do. Like last night. What I told you.”

  He seemed mildly provoked. “That wrestling with sin?”

  “It’s what we need to do. Struggle with temptation. Fight it. Sing and pray. But if the temptation doesn’t go away, if it stays right with us, gets stronger, it’s meant.”

  “You’re implying that bad behavior has its place in the scheme of things. That God—as you imagine him—permits it for some purpose we’re not given to understand. But I can’t believe this. Your ‘temptation,’ as you call it, is simply a congenital lack of decent instinct.”

  She shook her head. “I see that we have a lot of talking to do.” The smile returned, the warmth lit up her eyes. “You’re making it hard, putting it into big words. Because you’re educated and can’t help it.”

  He seemed to reconsider. His manner was that of a man who suddenly checks himself before going too far. “I’ll let you explain it all. We have the entire evening, providing there are no interruptions.”

  “Shouldn’t be.�
�� She finished her meal quickly. “I’ll send Curt on over to see his friend and we can be alone.”

  “It might be better if Curt stayed home. He can read, or something, in his room.”

  She was disappointed. “Well . . . if you say so. But I don’t see why——”

  “I’d just feel better about it.”

  Curt listened, not to the words but to the tone; and the inflection made him uneasy. He got up and began to collect the dishes, carrying them into the tiny kitchen. He made a soapy solution in the dishpan, dipped in the plates and the silver. The window above the sink gave a dim view of the night outside. Without seeing it, Curt knew that the flat black bay lay out there, lights winking across it. Along the rim were the boat landings, all lit up, the slips and the boats rocking a little. Further along were all the hot-dog stands, the cocktail bars, ice-cream parlors, the penny arcades and kiddy rides, under a blaze of neon. And over all the tall dark sky.

  People were out there, some of them walking and gawking along the bayside under the lights, a thin early-summer crowd; and some were sitting at home, only a little way away, and none of them knew what was going on up here, the crazy man in the other room talking to his crazy mother, his mother all pleased and interested because she thought she might bring him around to her way of thinking.

  The factor of time suddenly occurred to Curt, and he stopped washing dishes to frown over it. He had seen the squad car in the street near Lottie’s place and had figured that the cops must have gotten the letter and be interested in that next-door flat. Curt had been filled with pleased excitement and had been about to go out to look on, when the visitor had arrived with his mother.

  Why had the man left home? Had something warned him? What was that his mother had said on first coming? You were coming here, weren’t you?

  She must have met him, then, in the yard below. Or perhaps even on the stairs.

  Curt drained the plates, wiped the silver. He was beginning to feel afraid. Could the man somehow know about that letter? Know that he had written it?