Do Evil In Return

15

She turned the car around and headed back in the direction of the motel. She wondered if Easter had arrived in town yet and what he was up to. Perhaps the girl Sally would be too afraid of losing her job to tell him about the tie Rawls had kept. Or perhaps he wouldn’t see Sally at all. She might be gone by the time he reached Mrs. Reyerling’s apartment and it was unlikely that Mrs. Reyerling would tell Easter about her and give Sally a chance to repeat her story.

She felt obscurely pleased that Easter might never find out about the episode in the motel but she didn’t understand why she should feel this way. The episode didn’t involve her personally. It concerned only the nameless, faceless man who had left a tie in a motel bathroom and the seed of a child in Violet’s womb. She realized that she was afraid of Easter. Though he couldn’t harm her, couldn’t even touch her, the fear was growing, stupidly, irrationally. What had he said on the telephone last night...? That he was driving up “unofficially.” This could mean that, officially, the case was closed. She suddenly hoped that it was, closed and filed away forever in a steel drawer.

She had an early dinner at a drive-in on Main Street. When she arrived back at her motel the sun was settling into a pillow of pink clouds and Mr. Coombs had turned on his red neon vacancy sign. He was still sitting in the kitchen chair, looking strangely dwarfed by the background of huge trees. He had finished his comics for the day, piled them neatly on the wooden step with a stone on top to keep his dreams from blowing away. Captives, they fussed and fluttered in the rising wind.

Mr. Coombs nodded, and tipped an invisible hat “Evening.”

“Good evening.”

“Cooling off some. Still too hot inside, though. If you want to sit out for a spell, I’ll bring you a chair.”

“No thanks, don’t bother.”

Mr. Coombs slapped at a mosquito on his forearm. “You get in touch with Myrtle Reyerling all right?”

“Yes.”

“Her kid sister died. A genuine tragedy.”

“I heard about it.”

“O’Gorman, her name was. I know her husband, we went to school together. He worked in a bar about a quarter-mile up the road, but I hear he blew town.”

“What bar?”

“Sullivan’s. Sullivan’s been dead for ten years, but they still call it that.” He stopped, looking a little embarrassed. “If you should want a drink there are places better than Sullivan’s. I mean, it’s not a very high-class establishment, that’s what I mean.”

A car with a skiff strapped to its top turned in from the highway and Mr. Coombs waddled over to meet it.

The sign, Sullivan’s Log Cabin, was hung between two posts just off the highway, but the building itself was set a hundred yards back from the road in a grove of redwoods. There was a cleared space for parking to the left of the sign. Charlotte left her car there and began walking up the footpath to the bar. There had once been a string of lights along the path but the bulbs had worn out or been broken; only the wires and empty sockets remained, and fragments of glass that crunched under Charlotte’s feet In spite of the brisk wind a sour smell rose from the ground, as if a long succession of drunks had tottered down the path, paused to be sick, and gone on. In the east a full moon was rising but its pallid light couldn’t penetrate the trees, and Charlotte had to feel her way timidly along the path.

She stopped suddenly and looked back over her shoulder — an instinctive movement; she’d heard nothing behind her, but she had an overwhelming impulse to look around.

A man stepped out from behind a tree, a tall man with massive sloping shoulders that gave his body an aspect of menace.

“Hello, Charlotte.”

“Oh. I... you startled me.”

“I hope so,” Easter said. He sounded angry. “Quite a fast one you pulled, coming here ahead of me.”

“I didn’t intend it as a ‘fast one.’ I merely drove up to...”

“Get some fresh air. I know. Well, now that fate and a mutual interest in fresh air has brought us together, let me buy you a drink.”

“No thanks.”

“Weren’t you on your way into Sullivan’s?”

“No.”

“Just out for a stroll, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t snap. It’s unbecoming.” He took her arm. “Come on, Charlotte. You and I have some things to discuss.”

“What things?”

“Things,” he said vaguely.

His hand on her arm was firm and surprisingly reassuring. She realized that this strange, somber place frightened her, and her fear of Easter was lost in the more immediate fear of walking alone up the dark path.

He matched his step to hers. “I talked to Mrs. Reyerling. She told me about the ‘nice-looking lady’ who claimed to be a friend of Violet’s.”

“Oh?”

“About the only additional fact that I learned about Violet was that she couldn’t swim. But — there was a girl with Mrs. Reyerling in the apartment, a Miss Morris. She seemed very quiet, very nervous.”

“Well, I didn’t make her quiet and nervous, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“I didn’t imply it. But it’s a thought — maybe you did.”

“How?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Easter said.

“I like to see you guess, you’re so good at it.”

“All right, I’ll guess that she gave you some information and you asked her not to tell me for some reason. You’re quite a devious character, Charlotte, in spite of that honest pan, that let’s-put-all-our-cards-on-the-table look.”

“You’re awfully quarrelsome, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think so. I get along all right with other people.”

“So do I. By the way, I don’t very much like being leaped at from behind trees. It’s cute and boyish and all that, but it gives me a pain.”

His teeth gleamed white in the darkness. “I’ll have to keep on giving you a pain if I can’t get any other reaction.”

Sullivan’s was a long narrow building made of logs, with Acme on Tap written across the front window in green neon. Inside, a middle-aged man in levis was playing two nickel slot-machines alternating between them with such quick precision that he seemed to be working a machine in a factory rather than enjoying himself. At the bar two men were studying a racing form, checking selections with a pencil, conferring in whispers, checking again. Sullivan’s had an air of deadly earnestness.

The bartender was young and bored.

“Beer for me, please,” Charlotte said.

“Make it two. Easter flipped a coin on the counter. “Things slow tonight, eh?”

“Slow every night at this time. It’s too early. The afternoon drunks haven’t had a chance to sober up and come back again.”

Easter sipped his beer. It tasted metallic. “I see O’Gorman’s not around any more.”

“He quit last week. You a friend of his?”

“We have a lot in common.”

“I heard just tonight that he’s back in town,” the bartender said.

“Good. I’d like to catch up with him again.”

“I figure it’s just a rumor, though. This guy that claims he saw him said O’Gorman was driving a new Ford convertible. O’Gorman’s car was an old Plymouth that couldn’t do fifty if it was going downhill. You don’t get rich tending bar, believe you me.”

“Funny if he’s in town and didn’t call me. I’m kind of disappointed.”

“Yeah?” The bartender blinked. “I wouldn’t be too disappointed.”

“If he shows, tell him Easter is looking for him, Jim Easter.”

“He won’t show. He stuck me with a bum check for ten dollars. That and the convertible don’t make sense, unless the car’s hot.”

“Maybe it is.”

“A cop, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want any trouble here.”

“You won’t get any.”

“That’s a promise. I hope.” He ambled down to the other end of the bar and began talking to the two men who were bent over the racing form.

“So that’s the real reason you came up here,” Charlotte said. “Not to talk to Violet’s sister, but to look for O’Gorman and Voss.”

“Both. There was an off-chance that O’Gorman might be stupid enough to come home. In fact, he may not even know there’s a warrant out for him and Voss. The last report I had on O’Gorman was that he was heading north. He sold his ‘38 Plymouth at Crescent City for a hundred and fifty dollars. That’s about fifty dollars less than the list price, and after the deal was closed the new owner got a little suspicious about it. He called the local police and they called us.” He drained his glass. “This is the first I’ve heard about the Ford convertible, though. It makes it fairly certain that he’s around here someplace, not to stay, probably, but to do a little showing off in front of the home-town folks.”

“How could he buy a new car? He had no money.”

“He has now. What I’d like to know is where he got it. Any ideas?”

“No.”

“Sure of that?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Not even one tiny idea?”

“No! What are you getting at? I... you’re confusing me. You don’t think that I gave O’Gorman the money? I didn’t. When I went there, he and Voss had already gone.”

“Let’s be confused together,” Easter said lightly. “You know, I went to a lot of trouble for the privilege of buying you a beer.”

“Trouble?”

“Of course I didn’t think it would end up the way it did. I’m an incurable optimist. I figured that you would drive up here with me and give me a chance to parade my wit and charm etcetera, and we would return home, you with the first flush of love on your cheeks, and me feeling the same way as I did when I started. As I do now. Well,” he added, “it didn’t work out.”

“I’m beginning to see a little light.”

“Yes? Tell me about it.”

“It concerns a doctor I know called Bill Blake.”

“Blake? Yes, I believe I know him too.” He was smiling. “In fact we went to college together. I introduced him to the girl he married.”

“You also introduced him to the idea of calling me up and offering to...”

“Well, don’t get sore about it.”

“I’m not sore. I’m boiling.”

“You ought to be flattered.”

“You planned everything.”

“Not quite everything,” he said dryly. “I underestimated your obstinacy, or whatever quality a woman like you has that makes it impossible for her to see what’s good for her.”

“You’re good for me, are you?”

“I am,” he said. “Ballard isn’t.”

“Please leave him out of this.”

“How can I? You think you’re in love with the man.”

“I think so and I am.”

“You intend to marry him.”

“When it becomes possible, yes, of course I’ll marry him.”

“The thought makes me sick.” He ordered another beer, but when it came he didn’t drink it. He kept tracing a letter with his forefinger on the mist that appeared on the outside of the glass. B, B, and then again, B. “I have an interesting theory about you, Charlotte.”

“Have you?”

“I think the reason you picked Ballard is because you unconsciously wanted to avoid marriage. By falling in love with a man who couldn’t marry you anyway, your problem was solved for you, at least temporarily. Until his wife dies. Or something.”

“What do you mean, or something?”

“Just or something.” He erased all the B’s from his glass with one swipe of his palm. “People do die, you know. Like Violet.”

She stared at him, her eyes hostile. “If you’re implying that Gwen Ballard might possibly kill herself, I assure you you’re wrong. She isn’t the type.”

“You know her, then?”

“She’s been a patient of mine for a year.”

“Well,” he said. “Well. That’s very interesting. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been tempted to slip a little prussic acid in her cough medicine.”

“No,” she said steadily. “I’ve never been tempted. And I consider the remark incredibly boorish.”

His face had gone suddenly grave. “I’m glad it shocked you. It was intended to. If anything ever hap-pens to Mrs. Ballard, you’ll be hearing lots of remarks like that. You’re asking for them. You’re not only her doctor, you’re her husband’s girlfriend. That’s boorish too, eh?” When she turned away without answering, he added, “I suggest, very seriously, that you turn Mrs. Ballard over to another doctor.”

She was too proud to tell him that she had already tried. “Thanks for the advice.”

“You have a lot to lose, Charlotte. Stop leading with your chin... Now I suppose you’re sore again.”

“I’ve never stopped. You’re simply — simply impossible.”

“Now that’s a silly remark,” Easter said patiently. “I’m the most possible man you know.”

“I want to leave.”

“The door’s open.” He saw her hesitation. “What’s the matter, afraid of the dark?”

“No!”

“Well, go on. Leave.”

“Thanks, I will.”

“By the way if you want to get in touch with me, I’m staying at the Rose Court Motel. That’s where Miss Morris works. I thought it would be a nice place to stay. She’s such an interesting character.”

Charlotte walked to the door. She felt Easter’s eyes on her back, and she wondered if her stocking seams were straight