Suspects

by David Thomson

  Mary Ann remained in Ireland. She rode horses and walked the dogs. She could telephone wherever she wanted and read any of the books. She picked raspberries and gooseberries in the garden, and blackberries in the hedgerows. For an hour every afternoon, she and Noah Cross took tea and he taught her his principles of triumph.

  “Not to have done a thing you’ve thought of—that will mortify you,” he told her. “You will be dead soon. How can you contemplate that and not do things?” He told her how they might be done. He urged her to make life her stage. They were as engrossed as children in a game, two people as bad as I have ever heard of. But the evil have their tenderness, and the virtuous cannot keep schemes of destruction out of their heads.

  Cross suggested that she have a friend over, so she called Matty. Cross inspected the two of them together. “Like twins trying to be strangers,” he noticed. Matty was flattered: she wanted others to see the resemblances. Mary Ann saw Matty relax, as if free of a lifetime’s constipation. But what had Cross meant in it for her? She looked at him and saw only eyes painted with the enjoyment of an afternoon and two pretty girls.

  “Isn’t he a dear?” said Matty when Cross went in for his nap. “And he can’t be too demanding. That’s nice for you.”

  Mary Ann smiled through Matty and thought, I will have to kill you, dear heart, I will really have to.

  For two years she lived in Ireland, sleeping with Noah in the bed as large as a ship, with two setters stretched across the end beyond their feet. Until one morning in June 1972, with sunrise searing the windows so the dogs looked like blood. He was awake before her, as always, watching her young struggles not to give up sleep.

  “Would you, my darling?” he asked her, putting the words into her like eggs in poaching water.

  They were both naked: summer was coming. One setter woke and grumbled when she tossed the sheets back and knelt beside him. It was an old, sweet twig in her mouth, but warm and supple. The phone rang.

  “Ruination.”

  She drew breath. “Let it.”

  “I am.”

  But it rang on, and a last duty to importance drew Noah away. He went to the table, naked and gaunt, his old body and the older penis upright. As he talked, he beckoned to Mary Ann; she went nimbly across the carpet. She was never so expert that kindness deserted her. As Noah Cross heard the stupid news from Washington, he came in her hot mouth, a hundred and two, and gasped at the freedom in his collapsing chest. She looked up and saw his face being abandoned. Noah tumbled down, dead. Mary Ann swallowed as she felt for his pulse and heard the petulant voice on the phone still asking for Noah… .

  The band started to play “That Old Feeling.” Mary Ann looked down at herself. Her breasts pressed against the silk from thinking about him. When she looked up, the Latin trombone was lifting like a gun aiming at a duck. The guy winked at her. She stood, turned and strolled in a bored way up the aisle. She left an elderly man behind her, a sentimentalist, vanquished that she would not listen to the music.

  There was Racine, dripping, silly and indolent. She saw him see her and she watched his mouth open. His moustache was like the embossed scar for a wound he had not yet suffered.

  It would take time, she knew, so it was agreeable that he was attractive in a defeated way. But it would work. Seven years of planning would not be denied. When Cross died, she had used the press’s hounding of her as a way of persuading Matty Tyler to change identities with her. Matty was only too happy. And once it had started, it was awkward to go back because the new Matty had met Edmund Walker, who was disposed to marry her. What would a big real-estate man think if his fiancée had an assumed name? “Go on,” urged the new Mary Ann. “I want you to be happy. And the name suits you.”

  For five years Walker grew richer, more explanatory and more tedious, and then in Miami, where they lived, Matty heard of Ned Racine, this less than rigorous lawyer who had made a mistake on a will. She knew the bar where he went, the music he liked, the old movie talk he hoarded, and how vulnerable he was to femmes fatales. So she strolled up the aisle and let him examine her and she reckoned six months before she could make the change in Edmund’s will, get Racine to murder him, let the investigation gather, have Ned take the fall and let “Mary Ann” do her one last best friend’s turn, and then follow the money to Sulaco.

  She had always wanted to be rich and live in an exotic land, and Noah Cross had helped her believe in it. In Sulaco, by the shore, she would write mystery stories and see if her spirit lapsed in the hothouse of luxury.

  I have had only a glimpse of her there: a postcard, with a looming cliff behind her and a gigolo reflected in her dark glasses. She looked trapped and ill, despite her tan. She never had the love of life that let Noah Cross last so long. She will be back, driven to intrigue, and she will know where to stand for the moonlight to catch her ivory silk and for “I love you” to linger in the scents and stew of the night.

  But perhaps she will come back better, too, more able to notice that the half-deaf elderly man next to her heard, “Daddy, Daddy,” and looked up ready to be transformed. Just as some children suppose themselves foundlings, so there are parents hoping to be claimed, undeterred by a toothache frown of evil in the young.

  Do the deaf make mistakes, or do they lip-read the story?

  JOHN FERGUSON

  James Stewart in Vertigo, 1958,

  directed by Alfred Hitchcock

  Is there some construction or do we live in unshaped turmoil? Is the mass of human creatures just random contiguousness, an impossible tottering pile, or is there an elegant cellular pattern in human association, so that the numb crowd is inspired by eternal forms of feeling and relationship—love, jealousy, curiosity, vengeance, desire, incest, ambition and fear of falling—flexing and pulsing through time and space, like the brain waves of sleep? Can the whole show be held together, or is it a collection of stories in which only stupid coincidence tempts the patternmaker? And similar concerns … etc. etc.

  John Ferguson was a captain of detectives. He had flown in bombers in World War II from the flat eastern edge of England to the medieval cities of Germany. He had been the navigator of the leading plane in the formation, which is to say the pathfinder, surrounded by maps, calculations and the toilet-roll trail of the way to the target, which he unwound during a flight. Then he would slip down beside the bombardier and look through the blast of the open hatch to the scars and dimples of the ground below. He matched these with the lines and clusters on the map and told the bombardier when to let the bombs go. The dead weight fell away from the plane; it lifted like a mother free of pregnancy. And soon the land flared and blinked with golden markers of destruction.

  Later, when he examined photographs of Dresden, he told himself they were the aftermath of other raids, for the ruined city in no way conformed with the descriptive rigor of the maps. Like all men in the service he was told that he might expect reaction, exhaustion and remorse after the war. For ordinary men, decent people, had been made destroyers of the world. But Scottie, as they called him, never faltered. It had been a just war, one that had to be fought.

  So he returned to San Francisco, the city where he had been born in 1915, the place where his father had died, falling from the top of one of the towers on the Golden Gate Bridge as it was built in the 1930s. Scottie joined the police. He had not thought of that before the war. He had wanted to be an architect; his degree from Stanford was in that subject. But the war taught him the pleasures of maps, routing and calculation, of search and destroy. It seemed to him that police work would employ these preoccupations, for what was it but the wish to bring order to the map of San Francisco, so that its grid could function?

  In that city more than most, the smooth regularity of the map is affected by higgledy-piggledy ground. The cloth of the map is draped over a hard and arrested upheaval. Thus, one night in 1957, John Ferguson was engaged in a rooftop chase; they never found out whether it was a cat burglar or a Peeping Tom. With another detective
, Scottie went up and down over the roofs of Pacific Heights after the dark shape. But Ferguson slipped: the roof was slimy from the fog. He slid down the tiles and was left dangling from gutter no more secure than sleep after five a.m. The other detective came back to help him. But in reaching down he tipped over to his death. Ferguson was left hanging, too nauseous to look at the zooming ground and the ragged body lying there.

  He developed chronic vertigo. He could not stand on a stool to realign a picture or change a light bulb. Whenever he looked down he swooned; if any kind of desire filled him he might faint. He had to give up the police force and dramatic excitements. There was nothing else to do but go into a private line of detective work. It was the only way he saw of conforming to his illness.

  Not long after this decision, he got a call from an old Stanford friend, Gavin Elster, who owned a shipping line in the city. They met, and Gavin asked him about his vertigo and his life in general. “You never married?” asked Elster. “No,” said Scottie. “Not that. I don’t think I’m suited to it.”

  “You like women, though?”

  “Oh, very much. Very much.”

  Then Elster told him about his own wife, Madeleine, and why he was worried about her. She was beautiful, she was wealthy in her own right. They had a happy marriage. But Madeleine harbored some inner anxiety that Gavin could neither pin down nor dissolve. She had become obsessed with an ancestor who lived in the Bay Area a hundred years before, a woman named Carlotta, who had killed herself.

  “Doesn’t your wife need a doctor?” said Scottie.

  “She refuses. You know how it is. I want you to keep an eye on her. Tell me what she does. Don’t let her know, but follow her and be close—just in case.”

  Elster said he could afford the open-ended inquiry. He was sure that Madeleine’s mood was temporary. It would pass, but until then… .

  Ferguson began to follow Madeleine Elster. She was a blonde who wore gray and lilac. He got used to looking for her colors; they led him on like a motif, or some instinctive déjà vu. She was not hard to follow. She went in obvious and apparent ways, like an actress in a play whose feet have learned the chalk marks of rehearsal. And she did not look around her much; she did not look behind her in even a casual way. Rapt in her own thoughts, she went straight ahead and seemed more beguiling because of this certainty.

  It was just as Elster had said. Scottie saw her first at Ernie’s, dining with Gavin. The two men had arranged this. She stood close to him that night, while Gavin paid, so he was able to take in her aura. Then in the morning he waited for her outside the Brocklebank Building, on Nob Hill, where the Elsters lived. She went to a flower shop on Grant Avenue, and took the flowers to the grave of Carlotta Valdes, 1831–1857, at the Mission Dolores. He watched her misty-morning reverence there, and then followed her to the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, where she sat in front of a painting of a woman which Scottie found out was called Portrait of Carlotta.

  Then she went to the corner of Eddy and Gough, to the McKittrick Hotel, where she had rented the upstairs front room, which was the last place Carlotta lived before she killed herself. And then—all this time Ferguson followed her by car, parking in a dream of available space—on by way of Presidio Boulevard to Fort Point, the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. There, while he watched her, the gray-suited woman slipped into the fast, cold ocean: Scottie went in after her and pulled her out, water falling from her dark gray suit like the feeling of apartness. He was holding her, heavy, unconscious, but sentient.

  He fell in love with saving her. He took her back to his apartment at Lombard and Jones. He took off the gray clothes while she was still unconscious. Or was she sleeping, dreaming of a romance? They talked; they became friends. Madeleine told him about her feeling that Carlotta lived on in her, urging her to replay an earlier life.

  The next day he drove with her, out to see the redwoods in Marin. There was a tree trunk cut open, with the rings of age marked off in a concentric calendar of history. Madeleine found the place in the tree where Carlotta had been born and died, no thicker than veneer. That night, she dreamed of a tower in a Spanish village, with an intimation of falling. Scottie heard her story and remembered there was a place just as she had described, at San Juan Bautista. He decided to take Madeleine there to make a complete exorcism of this haunting nineteenth-century tale.

  But when they got there, as Madeleine discovered the further real details of her story, she became agitated. She ran away from Scottie and started up the staircase inside the tower. The detective ran after her, as fast as penmanship in an author who sees the conclusion for his story and wants to get there before its twist slips his mind. But as Ferguson began to climb the stairs, his vertigo returned. He was in an agony of nausea, from giddiness and the fear of what Madeleine might do. He was halfway up the tower when he heard a scream above him and then saw a dark shape, a bundle rushing downward, fall past the window at his level. He looked down and saw the gray-suited, blonde-haired body spread-eagled and still on the Spanish tiles below.

  In mystery stories, in film noir, the spirit of the story has a secret pact with the villain. It has to be, for the construction of the narrative is like the ingenuity of the plot. Is that why Jeff felt drawn to the bad, because they are authors, because the atmosphere of intrigue must always honor its design?

  JUDY BARTON

  Kim Novak in Vertigo, 1958,

  directed by Alfred Hitchcock

  No one knows what a stripper looks like. He had seen her “dance” a few times before this sank in. Peeling to the lethargic beat of tumescent music, she wore vivid makeup, glitter in her hair and crystalline clothes, all hooks, straps, sequins and secret snappers. The stripper’s art needs special garments made to tear away like the husk of a pomegranate. So you do not notice the woman as she is, because you are looking for fulfilment of the mind’s eye. You are examining an idea—depravity or pleasure, or their perilous symbiosis. The woman is playing a character. Her self stays garbed. Gavin Elster realized this when he saw Judy Barton leaving the club in Oakland where she worked. For he did not notice her. She slipped past him. He was still searching for the odalisque in the green spotlight. The real woman was so edgy and unimpressive, such a mess.

  But the area between her brow and her chin, and between her ears—the stamp of her face—was so like Madeleine’s. He had realized this in the club, under the lights; that stare was imprinted on the wall of his mind already. Seven years of reproachful, frigid Madeleine had put it there. This Judy had the same insecurity, but she was coarser, more carnal, a copperhead, not the ash blonde of Madeleine.

  So he came back another night, to the dark part of Oakland, and he spoke to her. She thought it was another pickup. His car, his clothes, his voice alarmed her: how easily wealth seems sinister. How foolish of the world not to understand that he was broke, that he depended on Madeleine’s money. Gradually he seduced her. He knew enough of her anxiety to woo her with insights. More than that, he was himself seduced by his wife’s features so transformed by sensuality. A whore had taken over the chapel called Madeleine. He thought of his abstinent wife with vengeful disdain now that he rode on Judy’s body and he could look down on the same face, unrestrained and heaving.

  Judy believed this suave man loved her. She had never known such dulcet kindness, or such consideration. She appreciated that he could only meet her on the east side of the Bay; he understood her ambition to be a performer. He began to school her. They had bed games in which she was another person. He praised her ability to imagine herself as someone else, and he said they might marry if only Madeleine were dead. He was joking, of course, but the game might be fun.

  He bought her outfits—gray suits, with mauve scarves. He had her dye her hair blonde (it was becoming), and when it had grown longer he taught her how to put it up in a special twist like a vortex. Then he mentioned his plan. It was daring; it was becoming. It would require her total belief as an actress. It would win him for her.r />
  She was to come over to San Francisco in her new look—so like Madeleine’s that only Gavin would know the difference. Then she was to let herself be followed by a detective hired by Gavin because of concern that his wife was going mad. Judy would play the part of the wife, entranced by the sad history of a relative from the last century, Carlotta Valdes, whose melancholy drew her toward a solemn but well-shaped suicide.

  “What if Madeleine, your wife, sees me?” asked Judy.

  “She never goes out, she’s so … depressed.”

  And so Judy began to be followed. It was hard not to notice her devoted shadow. But it was easier if she remembered the morbid gravity of Madeleine’s daily ritual. She led the detective from clue to clue, establishing the story. Although she never looked at him, she began to feel the weight of tenderness in John Ferguson, like a bomb begging to fall or a love aching for a beloved. The intrigue worked; the plot turned into a narrative, even to the most risky moment of all, when she dropped into the Bay gambling that he would follow.

  She kept her eyes closed as he rescued her, as he put her in the back seat of his car, as carefully as if she were a bouquet, and she remained in her imitation of sleep as he fastidiously took off her wet clothes. She wondered if he would recognize a stripper’s body. But her embarrassment was eased away by the care she could feel in him. Once, his hand brushed against her skin, and she knew he had done it experimentally, out of temptation. She knew this man she had not yet seen was in love with her, and she felt his attention falling on her like dew.

  Judy fell in love with him as they talked: he so longed to deter her from her scripted “death”—it was as if a character somehow knew that the duke, say, was destined to be shot in 1914, unless he could rewrite his story. It was easy to provoke the trip to San Juan Bautista because Scottie believed he could rid Madeleine of her curse. When they got there, Judy saw the signal at the top of the tower telling her that Gavin was ready.