“I don’t believe that.”
“Please, Dil. Men have been blind before. It’s nothing against you. And we don’t really have any specific evidence against her. It just looks very bad, that’s all. We don’t know what her reasons were—or what their relationship was. Laura seemed too self-sufficient to need any help in anything. Six days ago she phoned me and said she wanted to see me. Her voice was strange. I went over there as soon as I could. She questioned me through the door before she opened it. Anyone could see that she was terribly frightened—and yet it was a … a calm fright. That doesn’t make much sense, does it? She was frightened in a way that indicated she was used to being frightened. The draperies were drawn across the windows.
“I sat down at her invitation and she paced back and forth in front of me, smoking, her eyes looking out beyond the room. You know the sort of lazy way she talked? She didn’t talk that way any more. Sharp and hard and fast, and—older.
“She asked me if I had a place where I could put her up for a few weeks. Privately. She wasn’t asking. She was demanding. I said it could probably be arranged. She went and looked down into the street and stood for a long time absolutely still. I don’t even think she was breathing. She turned away abruptly. She told me she had changed her mind. She laughed in a very bitter way. I asked her if she was in some sort of trouble. She laughed again and said that you could say the world was in some sort of trouble. I told her I wanted to help her. She went to the door and held it open and thanked me for coming. She thanked me as though she were laughing at me. She said something funny. I can remember the exact words. She said it slowly and carefully, as though she wanted me to remember the exact words. ‘My dear, if my bargaining position is not as sound as I hope it is, you can tell Dillon for me that things are not always what they seem to be.’ ”
“That sounds as though …” I said. I didn’t want to finish the thought.
“I’ve been trying to make sense out of it, Dil. She was bargaining with somebody. Her life was at stake. She knew that. She had something to trade for her life, and the trade wasn’t good enough. But what?”
“Then you wrote me? I’m glad you did, Jill.”
“I was going purely on hunch in writing you. I went down to the street and I wanted to know what she saw out the window. There was a man across the street. Leaning against the side of that building painted pink. I don’t know if he was the one. It seemed odd he should stand in the sun when he could have crossed over and waited in the shade, if he were waiting for someone. He was just standing cleaning his fingernails with a broken match. A very ordinary-looking person. A rayon cord suit and a cocoa straw hat with a maroon band and one of those fair, sandy, tight, give-nothing faces. The end of his nose was sunburned. One of those men who can be a car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a hired assassin. If it is the third choice, there was something dreadful about him, standing there in the sun—something dreadful and ordinary, like the villain in a Hitchcock film. He looked at me, and it could have been the way any man looks at a girl. I’ve given his description to Captain Paris, too.”
I thought of the man she saw, of the broken match paring grime from ridged nails, of those same hands twisting the wire tight around Laura’s throat, the face serious and intent and workmanlike.
I stood up, and Jill’s face, her eyes worried, drifted across my eyes and then I was out of the air-conditioning, walking blindly through the heart of New Orleans in July, the drugged, sodden heat that eddies up out of the swamplands and compounds itself by glinting off chrome and rebounding off stone. A man cursed me as I shouldered him aside. When some of the blindness went away I found myself walking down Canal toward the river. I crossed over and turned down Burgundy and went into a dim bar that was like a dark cave amid sun-blasted rocks. The bartender set my drink in front of me. As my eyes adjusted I saw a sallow girl fiddling with a piano so small it was like a child’s toy. She had a constant dry cough. A tremendous buff-colored cat sat in regal pose on the corner of the bar. It stared at me with leonine contempt.
The drinks slid down my throat into nothingness. I was nothing. I saw the image of nothing in the blue mirror behind the ranked bottles. Nothing with cropped black hair and blunt features and Indian cheekbones and a level mouth and a look of violence.
The bar did not exist, and the semblance of reality was but projected imagination. I proved it by passing my hand through the buff-colored cat. But my hand touched fur and the writhe of quick muscles and my hand came back with three reddening lines across the back while the bartender laughed deep in his throat.
When I went out it was dusk and the sidewalk was domed, like one half of a concrete pipe. I could walk steadily along the ridge of it if I were careful. But when I stepped carelessly I fell down over the rounded edge either into the side of a building or into the street. Children followed me and I knew they were intent on my efforts to walk the top of the pipe and I tried harder for their sake. The dusk was purple and blue and the shadows on the pipe were tricky. Neon crackled and buzzed and throaty music thumped from the bars.
I slipped again and turned my back as I fell against the building. I stood with my legs braced and my eyes closed, the city going around me in a slow sick wheeling, the ache and wanting for Laura like a barb through my heart.
A hand fumbled against me and I reached down and caught a thin wrist. The child who had been trying to pick my pocket yanked her hand free and danced away, shouting something I couldn’t understand. The child with her mass of tumbled dark ringlets, face like chalk, eyes like velvet, was so beautiful that I wanted to cry.
The car stopped then and Jill came toward me, drifting easily over the steepness of the sidewalk. I wanted to tell her what I had learned about reality, about shadows in all substance and substance in all shadows. That truth is a girl who coughs, or a buff cat, or a child who looks like an angel. There were no words, and then I was in a car. Then I was in a room, being undressed, and when I looked I saw that there was a tall young man with a ludicrously tiny head, as round as a small pumpkin, heavy glasses, bad complexion. I laughed at him and I was still laughing when he turned out the light and closed the door. I laughed alone in the darkness and listened to the sound of laughing until I turned my face into the pillow and knew that it had only seemed to be laughter. Death crouched in the darkness, and it took the form of a buff cat with Laura’s sherry eyes.
Chapter Three
Sam Spencer stared heavily at me across his desk. He was a huge man with a white face that hung in folds, ancient muscles billowed in fat.
Sam is legend. Twenty years ago in Texas a cable snapped and a tool string smashed across his hips and thighs. His wife, Betty, sat by the bedside, waiting for a moment of consciousness that would come before death. She knew her husband well, knew the force of him, the monumental stubbornness.
When he stirred and opened his eyes she said sharply, “Sam? The doctor says you’re going to die.”
Sam closed his eyes. He sighed. She thought she had lost. Then Sam opened one eye. His voice was like a wind blowing gently through a cave. “Tell that doc to tend to his doctorin’ and I’ll tend to Sam Spencer.”
In four months he was sitting up and eating like a horse. He never walked again. He retired five years ago, and when Betty died he came with Trans-Americas, which was glad to have him.
“I’ll get you back to work,” he said. “I’ll work you, boy. I’ll work you until it’ll take three of you to make a man’s shadow.”
“No, Sam,” I said.
His big chest lifted as he sighed. “What good can you do? I talked to Paris. He’s through with you. He doesn’t want you around. This is his business, not yours.”
“It’s my business, Sam.”
He pulled his thumb, cracking the knuckle. “Boy, listen. A year ago Dumont asks me who can maybe come along and fill this chair. I tell him you. He says I’m crazy. I tell him you’re steadying down. Mean anything?”
“Later it might, Sam. I don’t
know. Right now it doesn’t mean a thing. Thanks, though.”
“You gotta be heroic, eh? Go plunging around and make like catching murderers. A movie boy. Amateur cop. Maybe Dumont was right, boy.”
“Think about it, Sam. Use your head. Put yourself where I’m standing.”
He closed his eyes. He looked like an old white toad, sunning himself. “Engineers!” he said softly. “Better I should be house mother to a sorority. Twenty years ago I could take you out in the hall and beat it out of you.”
“Never,” I said. “Not with fists. Not with a club.”
He opened his eyes. “How are you fixed?”
“Money? I’ve been banking my pay for five years. Twenty thousand or so I’ve got. And then Laura’s dough. She banked it here the day she arrived. She had cash and bearer bonds she converted to cash. I get that, I guess. Around a quarter of a million. I don’t know what taxes will do to it.”
He whistled with surprise. “And I was going to give you a bonus to keep you going until you get all this nonsense out of your system. Maybe you won’t ever want to go back to work.”
“I’m one of those suckers who work for more than the dough involved. I work because it’s something I can do and like to do.”
“Let me know when you’re ready to come back,” he said.
I stood up. “How did you find me?”
“Jill phoned. She said they’d found you in the Quarter and bedded you down in a room at the Bayton. She’d feel better if you left town. So would I. So would Paris.”
“They’re calling Laura things,” I said. “I know she wasn’t like that. Part of staying is proving she wasn’t.”
“Get out of my office,” he said wearily.
I went to the apartment. The third-floor hallway was empty. The key slid easily into the lock. Eleven in the morning. The door clicked shut behind me. I had the crazy impulse to call her name. I just said it with my lips, without sound.
I couldn’t feel much of anything. I had expected to feel a lot. I went to the closet. Her clothes hung there, with the scent of her on them. I crushed the fabrics in my hands. I picked up the left shoe from a pair I didn’t remember. The shoe was new, but the sole was peeled open, the heel broken loose. All her shoes were like that. Somebody had looked hard for something. I wondered if he had found it. I wondered what it was.
The bureau drawers had been pretty well messed up. I guessed that they had been dumped out and the police had later put the things back in. The papers I had read over black coffee that morning told how the body had been discovered at three in the morning, an estimated three hours after she died. One of those accidents. The man on the floor below had come home a little stoned. He had gone up two flights instead of one and had walked into what he thought was his own apartment. Except for that accident, I might have walked in on her.
I sat on the edge of the bed and smoked. Funny there was so little reaction. After a time I went into the bathroom. Her yellow toothbrush was in the holder. That did it. The storm didn’t last long. After it was over I felt different. Cold and quiet, almost nerveless. I knew that I could go on. Anguish was carefully locked away in a deep and private place. After this was all over maybe I could take it out again. Maybe it would still be fresh and sharp. But I had no more time for it now. Anger and pain had changed to a new emotion. There was enough money, and all the rest of time. The world wasn’t going to be big enough for him to hide in. I would find him. It was that simple. I knew that I would find him.
It made me remember a day long ago, and a beefy sadistic kid named Ronny who was three years older than my eleven. It was a cold day in the vacant lot with the wind whining around the piles of lumber. The kids stood and watched us through that nightmare fight. I was crying with anger as he kept knocking me down, and after a while the blows didn’t hurt any more. It was a kind of floating. An entranced monotony. And suddenly I knew, with perfect confidence, that I could not lose. Those who watched us no longer yelled. They stood with sick faces. When at last he went down, he stayed down. They pulled me off him. I spent a week in bed. A small scar at the corner of my mouth is all that remains. And once again I felt that same unfounded confidence.
If the coldness had not come over me, I could not have forced myself to stay in the apartment. Now I could. The many evidences of Laura no longer had the power to sicken me. I packed her clothes in her expensive initialed luggage, crisscrossed with fresh knife slits, and stacked them in the back of the closet. There was an empty carton under the sink. I filled it with jars and tubes and bottles of cosmetics and set it out in the hall. I took the yellow-handled toothbrush out and tossed it on top of the carton.
I hung my own clothes in the closet. I left the door open because the inside of the closet was strong with the scent she liked best.
The ringing of the phone startled me. I hadn’t realized that a phone had been installed. It took long moments to find it on the broad window sill behind a drapery.
“This is Zeck. Hoped I’d find you there. We’re releasing the body. Any special place you want?”
“Wherever you say, Lieutenant.”
“Halbert and Rune, then. They’re in the book. You phone and tell ’em. They’ll know what to do. Inquest is this afternoon. Pick you up at two?”
I agreed. I phoned Halbert and Rune and made the arrangements. The man asked about her rings. I told him to bury them with her. I told him the denomination and he said he’d get somebody for a short service.
The formal proceedings at the inquest were quick and emotionless. “By hand of person or persons unknown.” I was sworn in and asked a few simple questions. How had I been advised to return from Mexico? Did I know of any new friends she might have made? Was there no mention of anything in a letter that might help? Jill was kept a bit longer and questioned closely about her final interview with the deceased.
Jill and Tram went with me to the funeral chapel and then to the cemetery the following morning at ten. The cemetery was out on Gentilly Road. The plot was tiny and expensive. They do not dig deep graves in New Orleans. They dig down about eighteen inches and put in a concrete slab. The coffin rests on that, encircled by cement blocks. Later workmen roof over the block enclosure, cover the whole rectangle with smooth cement, and paint it white. The marble with the inscription is set into the end. The whole thing can be of marble slabs if you want it that way.
It was like I wanted it. Just her name—Laura Rentane Bryant—and the dates. It was most odd to stand there and hear the murmur of the voice of burial mingling with the thrusting roar of traffic on Gentilly. I put a spray of yellow orchids on top of the coffin. Yellow orchids for Laura. And yet, who was Laura? I had to find out. Laura was a girl I had married. She was only a portion of this woman we had just buried.
Tram Widdmar, a bellowing man with the general look of a vast cupid about to tell a questionable story, was as subdued as I have ever seen him. After it was over I wanted to walk, and I asked Jill to walk with me. We walked slowly west on Gentilly. We stopped in a supermarket and bought a loaf of bread and took it into a small park. We sat on shaded grass and flipped bread balls out to the ducks and swans.
“What next, Dil?” she asked at last.
“Find a loose end somewhere and catch hold and hang on until something comes loose.”
“And if there are no loose ends?”
“There will be. Somewhere.”
“Paris got word from Washington. No passport issued in that name. She had a passport. Bill French saw it.”
“I saw it too,” I said. “I kidded her about the picture. That’s when she promised she’d have a new one taken. It’s gone.”
“Maybe that was what the killer searched for in the apartment, Dil.”
“No. He looked in places too small to hold a passport.”
“I’m assigned to the case, Dil. It’s good newspaper stuff. Mystery killing of lovely woman. They want me to keep it alive as long as I can. If you find that loose end you spoke about …”
&n
bsp; “I’ll tell you. Unless by telling you I spoil my chances.”
She looked out across the pond. “Why should I feel so afraid, Dil?” she asked in a small voice. “Why should I feel so afraid?”
Chapter Four
It was easy to tell Jill Townsend that I was going to find a loose end and hang on. It made me sound like a big operator. I was dramatizing myself. You do things like that. In a sense Jill was the girl with the hair ribbon watching me hang by my knees from the apple tree.
Maybe I was kidding myself about getting hold of a loose end. I wasn’t kidding myself about the anger. That was with me. That was something I could taste.
We fed the ducks and then walked back to where Jill had left her little car parked near the cemetery entrance. One day maybe I’d be able to go back in there and look at her grave. Not yet. Not for a long time.
Jill dropped me off on the far side of Canal from the corner of Bourbon and she went on back to her newsroom. I walked down the shady side of Bourbon, trying to forget all the emotions twisting around inside me, trying to think it out as logically as I could. So far there were three unknown factors. One, the huge blond man; two, the tight-faced sandy guy with the sunburned nose; three, Laura’s enigmatic statement about things not being what they seem to be.
Murder for the Bride Page 3