Suspects

by David Thomson

  She went to Arkansas, to Fort Smith. Honeycutt, the deputy, had told her once that he thought she could have been Miss Knoxville. So she entered the Miss Arkansas contest in 1972, and she placed fourth. There was a young man in the audience, Lionel Leonard, and he wrote her poems, and asked to be allowed to see her. She dated him for a while, but then she left for Nashville and got a position there in a House of Pancakes as a hostess.

  A soldier came into the place where she worked, Glenn Kelly. He had been in Vietnam, and he was discharged. But he kept in training and wore a laundered uniform every day. They lived together in Nashville until Kelly went out one day and shot and killed Barbara Jean, the singer. Kelly was tried and put away for life. The whole thing got Alma’s picture in the papers. Lionel Leonard came to reclaim her. He was sure they were made for each other. He found her in her apartment one night and begged her to marry him. Alma was tired, laughing and screaming at him to get out. But he wouldn’t go, so she herself ran out to the verandah straight onto the butcher knife in the strong left hand of Henry Tawse, a vagrant with a last mission. She gasped and fell, so that her falling made the wound wider. Then Henry thrust the knife into his chest and collapsed on her.

  I shudder at the violence I am writing, as if I were inflicting it on myself. I can become these people, or let them fill my emptiness. In a sentence, I can change my voice and my life.

  DAVID JOHN LOCKE

  Jack Nicholson in The Passenger, 1975,

  directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

  He was in a small hotel in Chad, in northern Africa, in the desert, in the heat. David John Locke—profession: reporter. He had forgotten what he was looking for—guerrillas, no doubt, but if the urbane French-speaking President had happened by, on a tour of hotels, why not find the casual way to ask whether this civilized man had indeed killed thousands of his opponents? A reporter will ask anyone the old questions that everyone has learned to answer. So the world goes on. The expected interrogation hovers over it like flies above a corpse.

  He was thirty-three, born in London; to America, age two, when his father was attached to the embassy in Washington. In America, 1944 to 1960, when his father retired with a commendation and a dinner from Eisenhower. What had his father done? Intelligence. He was one of the few British the Americans trusted. Nineteen sixty to 1963, back in England, at Oxford, reading history. In 1964, he began as a journalist for the Sunday Times and the BBC, then the Washington Post, and so on, working on projects like Insight, Focus or Survey. A gang of bosses sent him to trouble spots to bring back fresh reports with the tang of danger and impudence—Beirut, Vietnam, Cuba, Djakarta, Bangladesh, Chad, Chad, Chad—he had become an expert there, despite broken French and frosted insight.

  There was a wife in Dawson Place, in Bayswater; the wife in a desirable, three-story Victorian house, narrow but deep, newly painted white, a house to keep up, with an attic room called Chad; the wife named Rachel, a tawny, angry wasp in the house, buzzing against him and the walls; a reason to be away and something to come home to; in and out, for how many more years, dark fingermarks always having to be sponged away from the doorjambs. While he had stayed in five hundred hotels.

  There was Delamere in London, his blind friend from Oxford who took pleasure in David’s American voice. Then, at forty, Delamere’s blindness became operable. The operation succeeded. He was elated. But the feeling did not last. The world looked drabber than he had imagined. With his white stick he had tapped out the world. Now he stood on street corners paralyzed by information. He stayed indoors, in the dark. David Locke guessed that Delamere might do away with himself.

  The previous night in a Chad hotel, before one more day of futile leads, David Locke met another Englishman, David Robertson. They were alike: same height, same age, same receding hair, same sinking stance, weighed down by a forgotten danger. They drank together. But when David Locke went in to see him a second night David Robertson was dead on the hotel bed, as if crept up on by the sinister peace while taking a rest. No trace of pain or regret: siesta. It was as if his vehicle had taken a turning and David Robertson had been borne off on another trip without bump or sway. Sometimes the dead die where they are sitting.

  David Locke worked out what he would have to say at the hotel desk: “Il y a un homme mort… .” It was too complicated. He studied the corpse, how much it was like him. He never noticed the idea, but he acted on it, taking the body to his room, putting it on his bed, dressing it in his clothes, a decent fit after all. A lot alike. He steamed their two pictures from their passports. It was a small, magical exchange, like lifting the film of tiredness from a soul. Robertson was an international businessman, that’s all he had said. David Locke looked in the dead man’s bag; he was curious. He found an air ticket for London and Munich, a key and a diary with a few jottings: appointments, women’s names—Melina, Lucy, Daisy, Zelie—and a hotel like another name, Hotel de la Gloria.

  Feeling excited, he went down to the desk and said that the man in 17 appeared to be dead. That must be David Locke, said the black man. “Ah,” sighed the fresh Robertson.

  He went back to London and from the pavement outside the white house he saw Rachel watching David Locke’s obituary on television. But Robertson was thinking of the dark-haired girl he had seen sitting on a bench in Bloomsbury. He had always felt a lack of attachment or conviction in himself that could let a friend fade from his life while he followed a stranger. Strangers are more beckoning; they offer new lives. After I had written that, I heard Mary Frances’s scolding voice, trying to keep me in Nebraska. “But I never leave the house,” I said, and she looked at me helplessly, so that I couldn’t stand her eyes. I need to be in the dark, unseen.

  Then to Munich. The key opened the locker at the airport. A slender black case stood in the locker, and in the case he found an inventory of weapons. The men who followed him to the Zimmermann church—be a tourist, he had decided—gave him an enormous fifty thousand dollars for the inventory. They all had a friendly chat, agreeing not to cry over the spilled milk of the anti-aircraft guns. Robertson was a gunrunner.

  He went on to Barcelona in a hired car. He picked the place from the list of Avis offices. Why there, though? If anyone had known his love of Orwell, and his month in Catalonia in 1962, it might have been surmised. Was the Avis list printed with Barcelona in bold? Or was it chance, a stroke that obviates all this circumstantial speculation?

  He found the girl in Barcelona, at the Palacio Guell by Gaudi; there she was on another bench, reading the same book, Architecture Without Architects. She could have been the perpetual student. It could have been anticipated that a tourist in that city would seek out Gaudi.

  It was not awkward picking up this girl; perhaps she was as ready to take him from his track to hers. They went together, pursued by a Rachel anxious to hear from Robertson about Locke’s last hours. They shared hotel rooms and Locke imagined how Robertson would have made love—secretly, so as not to break the package, for he had a weak heart.

  Locke and the girl went by way of Almeria toward Algeciras—the rendezvous in the diary was set for there, at the Hotel de la Gloria. They found the place, a white building by the road, with a large open space behind it. He and the girl were in adjoining rooms.

  Locke lay down to rest and the girl went to her room. He could feel the steady motion of time, like the hurtle of the earth. There must be an engine or an author carrying it all along. From the bed he could imagine a part of him going up to the window and out into the courtyard where cars came and black men got out to talk and look at the hotel. He could imagine his senses reaching farther out into the yard, leaving muffled noises behind in his room, a door opening, a bump in the air. And left there like an old shell, behind his senses, Locke-Robertson, David, was quietly shot. By whom? The senses were too far away to know. When Rachel arrived, the men, the black men, had gone. The girl was still there, loyal … or appointed? Night fell on the Hotel de la Gloria and the lights burning in its windows were l
ike the sad but accepting guitar played within. All the senses of Locke, free but lost, gathered in the warm night air and looked at the girl with love and suspicion, like a reader following a story, saying, “Where next?”

  MAUREEN CUTTER

  Lisa Eichhorn in Cutter’s Way, 1981,

  directed by Ivan Passer

  There were two movie houses in Bedford Falls then, in the summers when Harry’s child Mo stayed with us. It was three summers she came, in the middle fifties, years as long as the cars, and they were the Dream and the Circle, each pretty in its way, the Dream built in ’twenty-one and the Circle going much further back. It had been a proper theater and an opera house, and it had the old painted curtain with a view of a fine house across a lake at evening.

  “Will the film be about the people in the house?” I remember Mo asked me one afternoon.

  I was taken aback: she asked with such a weight of need. I would have made up some story about that house, but she seemed too earnest to mislead. “Maybe them,” I surmised. “Maybe.” But she thought my vagueness was a touch of mystery. You can never put hunters off if they are determined. Even silence entices them.

  “It must be,” she said, fixing her dark eyes on the house. The curtain shivered at times in some stage draft, and Mo wanted to see if the curtains stirred in the windows of the house. It would have been proof that someone there was watching us.

  My brother Harry had married a realtor, Ruth, and they lived in Seattle, where Harry worked for a car dealer. He made money in the fifties and in the summers he’d take Ruth off to Mexico, putting Mo on a plane to Omaha. Nineteen fifty-five, ’fifty-six and ’fifty-seven it was, until she was ten. What a solitary, thoughtful child, tired-looking so you wanted to take care of her. Maybe as she got older and became a woman she learned about that look, and used it. But the Mo I knew was artless and implacable in all she did or imagined.

  By looking in my list of pictures seen I can discover what I took her to: The Trouble with Harry (we laughed to think it might be her daddy); The Night of the Hunter (her hard, hot hand held on to me for most of that; I could count the beat of her alarm); Picnic (she was bored, she couldn’t know yet the appeal to a provincial girl of doing something awful); and The Searchers (we saw that twice—like a view you circle round on so you can look at it again before you have to move on—and you know it’s still there, years later, eroded a little, if only you would go back. But you can’t, you never do).

  Mo liked the pictures, but Travis would never go with us. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy particular movies; he couldn’t accept their being stories, not real and true. He cried so much you had to take him away from the place. But Mo took the pretense for granted, the way some children can sit on a horse and not be afraid. As soon as she arrived in the summer, she’d say, “Anything playing, Uncle George?” and I’d make a fuss about being caught unprepared. “Well, I don’t know, Mo. I hadn’t thought about that… .” Then she’d frown at me, trying not to smile. You never forget the light in a child if you’ve helped put it there. Or it’s going out.

  “Do you have to spoil her with pictures?” Mary Frances would ask, the dust of bread-making up to her elbows. It was her unsteady humor, and she’d wink at Mo, to grab an ally. But then it turned to rancor and Mo learned not to respond. She’d study her shoes solemnly, counting the cutout holes in the pattern of her sandals while I soaked up Mary Frances’s discontent. Anger in others will silence a child, until the quiet makes anger more suspicious. “Well, Miss Tight-Lips?” Mary Frances would demand, and Mo sank into passivity.

  The summers came to an end. I had letters from her sometimes: Harry must have told her to write. But when she was fifteen or so, their tone changed and then the letters stopped. She went to the University of Washington for a couple of years but dropped out in 1968, when she was twenty, and then drifted down to Berkeley to live, saying she was going to finish her degree. But she never did.

  She sent me a long letter in 1971, nine pages, typed, done over a span of three months, in installments. She apologized for getting out of touch, and said she remembered me well and still liked to go to the movies. When she got to Berkeley, she found a job at the Pacific Film Archive. She was friendly with a man there named Luddy who’d given her books to read on film. But she thought the books spoiled the pleasure, and she didn’t persevere with them.

  At the time she wrote, she was working in a bookstore for an Elmer Bender and his daughter, Marge, who was married to the writer John Converse. I used to read him in The New Republic, and I’d thought he was fair then. You can never tell enough from reading. She sent me his photograph, and that put me off. He had dead eyes, and a level, dishonest face, like a face in a mirror. Mo was in love with him, and they were having an affair without Marge knowing—or speaking. Converse and Marge had a little girl, but he had promised Mo he was going to marry her, told her time and again, and she got used to deceiving herself about it. Until he went off to Vietnam to be a reporter, and she had to recognize that he was more interested in testing himself.

  So Mo moved across the Bay. She worked with the Elster Corporation, and then she was taken on at San Francisco General as an orderly. She met Alex Cutter there. He was back from Vietnam, without an arm. I learned this later, from Harry, when I determined to put the bits and pieces of her life together. Cutter was luckier than many veterans, but filled with anger and self-pity, and looking for someone to be his one to blame. By then, perhaps, Mo was prepared to be a victim: it becomes a way of life for so many of us. You can count the broken faces wherever you look.

  They were married. I have a picture of the wedding: Cutter in a bow tie, all askew, his black patch slipping off a drunken eye—I have never established whether that eye was damaged, or the patch swagger. Mo is next to him, on his sound arm, but looking alone, staring at the photographer as if he had just offered to shoot her. There’s a handsome man on her other side—he seems asleep, propped up—Richard Bone, Cutter’s one friend. His drowsy eyes are looking down at Mo’s dark hair, as fine as chocolate lace. Is he smelling her?

  They went to live in Santa Barbara, the three of them. There must have been good times, but Harry said it was always a wonder Mo stayed. He told her he’d have her back at home. But she didn’t budge. She drank more year by year, vodka or rum, while Cutter talked about his loathsomeness. The police said she was drunk and had dropped a cigarette which set light to the house and she’d been burned to blackened bone. It was dry timber, with straw rugs, the house: it was consumed in fifteen minutes, and no one was there to drag her out. They knew her by the teeth.

  I fretted over her years before that, and Mary Frances would look at me in disbelief. “Can’t you ever care for your own children?” she said. “You dreadful fool.”

  “They don’t want it,” I explained.

  “How would you know?”

  “They hold me off.”

  “You’d do anything for a stranger.” She was crying. “Those films. They make the strange so attractive.”

  This could be so. They are so full of hope and change. I remember, though, in ’fifty-six how Mo took me for an ice cream after The Searchers and recounted the story we’d just seen, about a search for a niece who did not know her uncle anymore. I have done what I can with Mo’s life. Cutter died not long after her. He had needed her too much. He had gone to the house of this man named Cord, and become abusive. Bone was with him. It was some stupid quarrel: Cutter was always looking for grievances. I wrote to Bone asking him for information. But all I got was a handwritten page saying, “I let her down, like everyone else let her down. She was depressed that night, and for all I know she shut the door after I had gone and built a bonfire in the living room. We will never know for sure; she kept it her secret. She did not mention you.”

  How does anyone read that and not imagine more?

  AL

  Charles McGraw in The Killers, 1946,

  directed by Robert Siodmak

  There’s no more than �
�Al” to go on, the one surprised word uttered by his companion as the two men were shot by a policeman named Lubinsky and James Reardon, an insurance agent, in a bar in Philadelphia. There were no marks of identification on this Al, no family pictures, no driver’s license, no names or initials sewn into his clothes. He was a man of about forty-five, in a dark suit, a white shirt and a plain black tie, with shoes that someone polished every day. He wore a gray hat with a black band, and the face beneath it was cut out of rock. There was a frown above and between his eyes, cold, hard eyes, but sensitive, or worried, too. He looked like someone who took care, yet he handed out pain without any weakening. Al was a professional killer. Or so they said. They said he had killed a man, “Swede” Lunn, in Brentwood, New Jersey, and that he had done it for money. He was a contract killer. You wouldn’t reach him directly. If you wanted someone killed, you need never meet Al or ponder over his eyes. You put in a call, and a few more calls got to Al. The sum of money you had agreed would go down by maybe 60 percent by the time it reached him. Those are the eyes of someone who suspects he’s being chiseled.

  This was in 1946—I wonder if Als still work in the same way. This Al and the other one came into Harry’s Diner in Brentwood just before six, just before dinner. They took over the place, they closed it up, they had Nick Adams stay where he was, and they waited for Lunn. They said they would be killing him for a friend. The other one was fat, aggressive and theatrical, but Al was lean and restrained. He said no more than he had to, and you could have fancied that he was bored by the other one’s caustic and unnecessary talk. It was as if Al was the real thing, while the other was an actor horning in on a contract to get material for a picture. The other one was already thinking aloud in script lines—“They all come here and eat the big dinner.” But Al saw no act in what he was doing; he did not enjoy the lip-smacking talk. He was worrying whether he could shoot Lunn correctly and get away without a trace.