A Stranger in My Grave

by Margaret Millar

  “I don’t care.”

  “You’re always saying you don’t care when you do.” Muriel went out to the kitchen and returned with the sewing scissors. She said as she began trimming his hair, “You might meet up with your ex, think of that.”

  “Why should I?”

  “There’s nothing worse than meeting up with your ex when you’re not looking your best. Hold your chin down a little.”

  “I don’t intend to see my former wife.”

  “You might see her by accident on the street.”

  “Then I’d look the other way and cross the street.”

  She had been waiting and wanting to hear this. She exhaled suddenly and noisily, as if she’d been holding her breath until she was reassured. “You’d really look the other way?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about her, Stan. Is she pretty?”

  “I’d prefer not to discuss it.”

  “You never ever talk about her—move your head a bit to the right—the way other men talk about their exes. What harm would it do if you told me a little about her, like is she pretty?”

  “What good would it do?”

  “Then at least I’d know. Chin down.”

  Chin down, he stared at his belt buckle. “And would you like to know she’s pretty?”

  “Well, no. I mean, it would be nicer if she wasn’t.”

  “She’s not,” Fielding said. “Does that satisfy you?”

  “No.”

  “All right, she’s ugly as sin. Fat, pimply, cross-eyed, bow-legged, pigeon-toed—”

  “Now you’re kidding me, Stan.”

  “I’d be kidding you even more,” he said soberly, “if I told you she looked pretty to me.”

  “She must have once, or you wouldn’t have married her.”

  “I was seventeen. All the girls looked good in those days.” It wasn’t true. He couldn’t even remember any of the other girls, only Ada, delicate and pink and fluffy like a cloud at sunset. He had intended, in his youth and strength, to spend the rest of his life looking after her; instead, she had spent hers doing it for him. He didn’t know, even now, at what point or for what reason their roles had been reversed.

  “Some of them still look good to you.” Muriel put down the sewing scissors. “You know what I bet? I bet that waitress of yours is nothing but a chippy.”

  “She’s a married woman with six children.”

  “A husband and six kids don’t make you an angel.”

  “Stop worrying, will you, Muriel? I’m not going up to San Félice to get involved with a waitress or my ex-wife. I’m going up solely to see Daisy.”

  “You had a chance to see her last Monday,” Muriel said anx­iously. “Why don’t you just phone her long distance or write her a letter? Then you could go and see her some other time, when you’re sure she’s at home.”

  “I want to see her now, today.”

  “Why so all of a sudden?”

  “I have reasons.”

  “Does it have something to do with Daisy’s old letters you were reading?”

  “Not a thing.” He hadn’t told her about the new letter, the one that had been sent special delivery to the warehouse where he worked and which was now hidden in his wallet, folded and refolded to the size of a postage stamp. This last letter wasn’t like the others he kept in the suitcase. It contained no money, no news, no polite inquiries about his health or statements about her own: Dear Father: I would be very much obliged if you’d let me know at once whether the name Carlos Theodore Camilla means anything to you. Please call collect, Robles 24663. Love, Daisy. Fielding would have liked to pretend that the brief, brusque, almost unfriendly note had never reached him, but he realized he couldn’t. He’d signed for it at the warehouse, and there would be a record of the signature at the post office. How had she got hold of the name and address of the warehouse? From Pinata, obviously, although Fielding couldn’t remember telling Pinata about his job—he’d been feeling bad that day, fuzzy around the edges, not sure where one thing ended and another began. Or maybe Pinata had found out in some other way; he was a detective as well as a bail bonds­man. A detective….

  God Almighty, he thought suddenly. Maybe she’s hired him. But why? And what did it have to do with Camilla?

  “You look awful flushed, Stan, like maybe you’ve got a fever coming on.”

  “Stop making a pest of yourself, will you? I have to get ready.”

  While he washed and shaved in the bathroom they shared with the old lady across the hall, Muriel laid out fresh underwear for him and a clean shirt and the new blue-striped tie Pinata had lent him earlier in the week. He had told Muriel he bought the tie after seeing it in a store window, and she had believed him because it seemed too slight a thing to lie about. She hadn’t known him long enough yet to realize that this secrecy about very trivial matters was as much a part of his nature as his devastating frankness about some of the important and serious ones. There had been no real need, for instance, for him to have recounted the details of the episode involving Nita and her husband and the jail and Pinata. Yet he had told her all about it, leaving out only the small detail of the tie he’d borrowed from Pinata.

  When he returned from the bathroom and saw that this tie was the one she’d picked out for him to wear, he put it back in the bureau drawer.

  “I like that one,” Muriel protested. “It goes with your eyes.”

  “It’s a little too gaudy. When you’re hitchhiking, it pays to look as conservative as possible, like a gentleman whose Cadillac has just had a flat tire and he can’t find a telephone.”

  “Like that, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to use for a Cadillac?”

  “My imagination, love. When I’m standing out there on the freeway, I’m going to imagine that Cadillac so hard that other people will see it.”

  “Why don’t you start right now so’s I can see it, too?”

  “I have started.” He went over to the window and pulled back the grimy pink net curtain. “There. What do you see?”

  “Cars. About a million cars.”

  “One of them’s my Cadillac.” Letting the curtain drop into place, he drew himself up to his full height and adjusted an imagi­nary monocle to his eye. “I beg your pardon, madam, but I wonder if you would be so kind as to direct me to the nearest petrol parlor?”

  She began to laugh, a girlish, giggly sound. “Oh Stan, honestly. You’re a scream. You ought to be an actor.”

  “I hesitate to contradict you, madam, but I am an actor. Permit me to introduce myself. My name—ah, but I quite forgot I am traveling incognito. I must not identify myself for fear of the terrifying adulation of my millions of fanatic admirers.”

  “Gee, you could fool anybody, Stan. You talk just like a gentle­man.”

  He stared down at her, suddenly sober. “Thanks.”

  “Why, I could see that Cadillac as plain as could be for a minute there. Red and black, with real leather upholstery and your initials on the door.” She touched his arm. It had gone stiff as a board. “Stan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the heck, we wouldn’t know what to do with a Cadillac if we had one. We’d have to pay the license and insurance and gas and oil, and then we’d have to find a place to park it—well, it just wouldn’t be worth the trouble, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not just shooting the breeze either. I mean it.”

  “Sure. Sure you do, Muriel.” He was touched by her loyalty, but at the same time it nagged at him; it reminded him that he didn’t deserve it and that he would have to try harder to deserve it in the future. The future, he thought. When he was younger, the future always seemed to him like a bright and beribboned box full of gifts. Now it loomed in front of him, dark gray and impene­tra
ble, like a leaden wall.

  He picked out a tie from the bureau drawer, dark gray to match the wall.

  “Stan? Take me with you?”

  “No, Muriel. I’m sorry.”

  “Will you be back in time to go to your job Monday night?”

  “I’ll be back.” He’d had the job, as night watchman for an elec­trical appliance warehouse on Figueroa Street, for only a week. The work was dull and lonely, but he made it more interesting for himself by imagining the place was going to be robbed any night now and visualizing how he would foil the robbers, with a flying tackle or a rabbit punch from behind, or a short, powerful left hook, or simply by outwitting them in a very clever way which he hadn’t figured out yet. Having outthought, or outfought, the robbers, he would go on to receive his reward from the president of the appliance firm. The rewards varied from money or some shares in the company to a large bronze plaque inscribed with his name and a description of his deed of valor: “To Stanley Elliott Fielding, Who, Above and Beyond the Call of Duty, Did Resist the Onslaught of Seven Masked and Desperate Criminals . . .”

  It was all fantasy, and he knew it. But it helped to pass the time and ease the tension he felt whenever he was alone.

  Muriel helped him on with his jacket. “There. You look real nice, Stan. Nobody’d ever take you for a night watchman.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where will you stay when you get there, Stan?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “I should know how to get in touch with you in case something comes up about your job. I suppose I could call Daisy’s house if it was real important.”

  “No, don’t,” he said quickly. “I may not even be going to Daisy’s house.”

  “But you said before you—”

  “Listen. Remember the young man I told you about who paid my fine? Steve Pinata. His office is on East Opal Street. If any­thing urgent should come up, leave a message for me with Pinata.”

  She went with him to the door, clinging to his arm. “Remem­ber what you promised, Stan, about laying off the liquor and behaving yourself in general.”

  “Of course.”

  “I wish I was going along.”

  “Next time.”

  He kissed her good-bye before he opened the door because of Miss Wittenburg, the old lady who lived across the hall. Miss Wittenburg kept the door of her apartment wide open all day and sat just inside it, with her spectacles on and a newspaper across her knee. Sometimes she read the paper in silence; at other times she became quite voluble, addressing her comments to her younger sister, who’d been gone for a year.

  “There they are now, Rosemary,” Miss Wittenburg said in her strong New England accent. “He appears to be groomed for the street. Good riddance, I say. I’m glad you agree. Did you notice the deplorable condition in which he left the bathroom again? All that wetness. Wet, wet, wet everywhere ... I am surprised at you, Rosemary, making such a vulgar remark. Father would turn over in his grave to hear such a thing fall from your lips.”

  “Go inside and lock the door,” Fielding said to Muriel. “And keep it locked.”

  “All right.”

  “And don’t worry about me. I’ll be home tomorrow night, or Monday at the latest.”

  “Whispering,” said Miss Wittenburg, “is a mark of poor breeding.”

  “Stan, please take care of yourself, won’t you?”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “You know I do, Muriel.”

  “Whispering,” Miss Wittenburg repeated, “is not only a mark of poor breeding, but I have it on very good authority that it is going to be declared illegal in all states west of the Mississippi. The penalties, I understand, will be very severe.”

  Fielding raised his voice. “Good-bye, Rosemary. Good-bye, Miss Wittenburg.”

  “Pay no attention, Rosemary. What effrontery the man has, addressing you by your first name. Next thing he’ll be trying to—oh, it makes me shudder even to think of it.” She, too, raised her voice. “Good manners compel me to respond to your greeting, Mr. Whisper, but I do so with grave misgivings. Good-bye.”

  “Oh Lord,” Fielding said, and began to laugh. Muriel laughed with him, while Miss Wittenburg described to Rosemary certain legislation which was about to go into effect in seventeen states prohibiting laughter, mockery, and fornication.

  “Keep your door locked, Muriel.”

  “She’s just a harmless old lady.”

  “There’s no such thing as a harmless old lady.”

  “Wait. Stan, you forgot your toothbrush.”

  “I’ll pick one up in San Félice. Good-bye, love.”

  “Good-bye, Stan. And good luck.”

  After he’d gone, Muriel locked herself in the apartment and, standing by the window, cried quietly and efficiently for five minutes. Then, red-eyed but calm, she dragged out from under the bed Fielding’s battered rawhide suitcase.

  11

  Memories are crowding in on me so hard and fast that I can barely breathe. . . .

  The Neighborhood Clinic was housed in an old adobe building off State Street near the middle of town. A great many of Pinata’s clients had been in and out of its vast oak doors, and over the years Pinata had come to know the director, Charles Alston, quite well. Alston was neither a doctor nor a trained social worker. He was a retired insurance executive, a widower, who devoted most of his time and energy to the solution of other people’s problems. To keep the clinic operating, he persuaded doctors and laymen to donate their services, fought city and county officials for funds, plagued the local newspaper for free publicity, addressed women’s clubs and political rallies and church groups, and bearded the Lions in their den and the Rotarians and Knights of Columbus in theirs.

  Whenever and wherever there was any group to be enlight­ened, Alston could be found doing the enlightening, shooting statistics at his audience with the speed of a machine gun. This rapid delivery was essential: it kept his listeners from examining the facts and figures too closely, an effect that Alston found highly desirable, since he frequently made up his own statistics. He had no qualms about doing this, believing that it was a legit­imate part of his war on ignorance. “Did you know,” he would cry out, pointing the finger of doom, “that one in seven of you good, unsuspecting, innocent people out there will spend some time in a mental institution?” If the audience appeared listless and unimpressionable, he changed this figure to one in five or even one in three. “Prevention is the answer. Prevention. We at the Clinic may not be able to solve everyone’s problems. What we hope to do is to keep them small enough to be manageable.”

  At noon on Saturday, Alston put the closed sign on the oak doors and locked up for the weekend. It had been a strenuous but successful week. The Democratic League and the Veterans of Foreign Wars had contributed toward the new children’s wing, the Plasterers and Cement Finishers Local 341 had volunteered their services, and the Monitor-Press was planning a series of arti­cles on the Clinic and offering a prize for the best essay entitled “An Ounce of Prevention.”

  Alston had just shoved the steel bolt into place when someone began pounding on the door. This frequently happened when the Clinic was closed for the night or the weekend. It was one of Alston’s dreams that someday he might have enough person­nel and money to keep it open at all times, like a hospital, or at least on Sundays. Sunday was a bad day for the frightened.

  “We’re closed,” Alston shouted through the door. “If you’re desperately in need of help, call Dr. Mercado, 5-3698. Have you got that?”

  Pinata didn’t say anything. He just waited, knowing that Alston would open the door because he couldn’t turn anyone away.

  “Dr. Mercado, 5-3698, if you need help. Oh, what the hell,” Alston said, and pushed open the door. “If you need
—oh, it’s you, Steve.”

  “Hello, Charley. Sorry to bother you like this.”

  “Looking for one of your clients?”

  “I’d like some information.”

  “I charge by the hour,” Alston said. “Or shall I say that I accept donations for the new children’s wing? A check will do, provid­ing it’s good. Come in.”

  Pinata followed him into his office, a small, high-ceilinged room painted a garish pink. The pink had been Alston’s idea; it was a cheerful color for people who saw too many of the blues and grays and blacks of life.

  “Sit down,” Alston said. “How’s business?”

  “If I told you it was good, you’d put the bite on me.”

  “The bite’s on you. This is after hours. I get time and a half.”

  In spite of the lightness of his tone, Pinata knew he was quite serious. “All right, that suits me. Say ten dollars?”

  “Fifteen would look prettier on the books.”

  “On yours, sure, but not mine.”

  “Very well, I won’t argue. I would, however, like to point out that one person in every five will—”

  “I heard that last week at the Kiwanis.”

  Alston’s face brightened. “That was a rousing good meeting, eh? I hate to scare the lads like that, but if fear is what makes them bring out their wallets, fear is what I have to provide.”

  “Today,” Pinata said, “I’m just scared ten dollars’ worth.”

  “Maybe I’ll do better next time. Believe me, I’ll try.”

  “I believe you.”

  “All right, so what’s your problem?”

  “Juanita Garcia.”

  “Good Lord,” Alston said with a heavy sigh. “Is she back in town?”

  “I have reason to think so.”

  “You know her, eh?”

  “Not personally.”

  “Well, consider yourself lucky. We don’t use the word incorrigible around here, but I never got closer to using it than when we were trying to cope with Juanita. Now, there’s a case where an ounce of prevention might have been worth a few pounds of cure. If she’d been brought to us when she first showed signs of disturbance as a child—well, we might have done some good and we might not. With Juanita it’s difficult to say. When we finally saw her, by order of the Juvenile Court, she was sixteen, already divorced from one man and about eight months pregnant by another. Because of her condition, we had to handle her with kid gloves. I think that’s where she got the idea.”