Leave Her to Hell

15

I turned left at the street toward the drug store on the corner, and I had walked about fifty feet in that direction when a man got out of a parked car and crossed the parking to intercept me. The car was a Caddy I had ridden in before, and the man was Silas Lawler.

“Surprised?” he said amiably.

“Not especially,” I said. “I thought it was probably your Caddy that crawled past when I arrived.”

“Mine? Not mine, Hand. You were in the house when we got here. Otherwise, you never would have got in at all.”

“Well, no matter. I heard you’ve been coming out here pretty regularly the last couple years.”

“I was afraid that might have been one of the things you heard. Robin has a bad habit of knowing things she’s not supposed to. Not that it matters much. You’ve just made me make an extra trip, that’s all. Darcy’s really annoyed, though. He’s the one who’s had to tail you since you got into this business, and Darcy doesn’t like that kind of work. He figures it’s degrading.”

“Poor Darcy. I’ll have to apologize the next time I see him.”

“That could be right now. Just turn your head a little. He’s sitting over there behind the wheel of the Caddy.”

“I’ll do it later. Right now I’m on my way to the corner to call a cab.”

“Forget it. Darcy and I wouldn’t think of letting you go to all that trouble. We’ve been waiting all this time just to give you a lift.”

“I hope you won’t be offended if I decline.”

“I’m afraid I would. I’m sensitive that way. I always take it personally if my hospitality’s refused. You wouldn’t want to hurt my feelings, would you?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“That’s not very gracious of you, Hand. I offer you a lift, the least you can do is be courteous about it. What I mean is, get in the Caddy.”

“No, thanks. The last time we got together, you didn’t behave very well. I don’t think I want to associate with you any more.”

“It won’t be for long.”

He took a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at me casually in such a way that it would, if it fired, shoot me casually through the head. I could see, in a glimmer of light, the ugly projection of a silencer.

“Now who’s not being gracious?” I said. “It seems to me a guy with any pride wouldn’t want to force an invitation on someone.”

“Oh, I won’t force it. You don’t want a lift, have it your own way. I’d just as soon kill you here.”

“Wouldn’t that be rather risky?”

“I don’t think so. Odds are no one will hear anything. You probably wouldn’t even be found for a while. Anyhow, I’m not here. I’m in my room at the restaurant. So’s Darcy. If it got to be necessary, which it probably wouldn’t, we could find half a dozen guests who are with us.”

I thought about it and decided that he could. Maybe even a full dozen. And so, after thinking, I conceded.

“I believe you could,” I said, “and I’ve decided to accept the lift after all.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

I crossed the parking to the Caddy, and while I was crossing, Darcy reached back from the front seat and unlatched the door, which swung open, and I got in like a paying passenger, with no effort, and Silas Lawler got in after me and closed the door behind him.

“Good-evening, Mr. Hand,” Darcy said.

“I’m beginning to doubt it,” I said.

He laughed softly and politely and settled under the wheel of the Caddy and started the engine and occupied himself with driving. He drove at a moderate rate of speed, with careful consideration of traffic regulations, and where he drove was out of town on a highway and off the highway onto a country road. I admired the erect and reliable look of the back of his head. He looked from the rear exactly like a man whose vocabulary included virtuoso.

“You’re a very stubborn guy, Hand,” Silas Lawler said. “You simply won’t take advice.”

“It’s a fault,” I said. “All my life I’ve been getting into trouble because of it.”

“You’re through with that,” he said. “This is the last trouble you’ll ever get into.”

This was not merely something he was saying. It was something he meant. I began trying to think of some way to change his mind, but I couldn’t, and so I began trying then to think of some way to get out of the Caddy and off in some dark field with a sporting chance, but I couldn’t think of that either. In the meanwhile, Darcy drove most of another mile and down a slope and across a culvert, and it was pitch dark down there in the little hollow where the culvert was. Silas Lawler leaned forward slightly and told him to stop the Caddy and turn off its lights, and Darcy did. The window beside Darcy was down, and I could hear clearly the infinite variety of little night sounds in the hollow and fields and all around.

“It’s a nice night to die,” I said.

Lawler sighed. He really did. A long soft sibilant sound with weariness in it.

“I’m sorry, Hand. I rather like you, as I’ve said before, and I wish you hadn’t made this necessary.”

“I fail to see the necessity,” I said.

“That’s because you don’t know enough about something you know too much about.”

“Is that supposed to make sense?”

“It is and it does.”

“Excuse me for being obtuse. I don’t know much of anything about anything that I can see. I know that Constance Markley is alive and teaching piano lessons in Amity at two bucks per. I know she’s calling herself Faith Salem. So what? She’s got a right to be alive, and to teach piano lessons, and what she calls herself is her business. I was hired to find her, and I found her. That’s a capital offense?”

“Murder is. Murder’s capital almost everywhere.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy. I haven’t commited any murder.”

“I know you haven’t,” he said. “But Constance has.”

I sat and listened to the sounds of the night from the hollow and fields and all around. For a few moments they were thunderously amplified and gathered in my head, and then they faded in an instant to their proper dimensions and places.

So that’s where Regis is, I thought. Regis is where I almost am.

And I said, “I don’t know anything about that. I haven’t got a shred of evidence.”

“Sorry.” He shook his head and took his gun out of his pocket again. “You know where Constance is, and that’s enough. You’ll tell the client who hired you, and your client will tell others, and the cops will know. Everyone thinks she and Regis ran away together. And when they learn that Regis isn’t with her and hasn’t ever been, they’ll wonder where he is, and he’s dead. It wouldn’t take them long to find that out. She couldn’t hold out against them for an hour. So you see? So you know too much to be trusted. So you’ve got to die. I’m glad for your sake that it’s a nice night for it.”

I didn’t try to convince him that I’d swap silence for life. The risk in a deal like that would have been all his, and he was too good a gambler to consider it. I sat and listened some more to the sounds in the nice night to die, and I was thinking pretty clearly and understanding a number of things, but there were some other things I wanted to understand and didn’t, and they were things that Silas Lawler could explain. Moreover, the longer we talked, the longer I lived, and this was important to me, if not to him.

“All right,” I said. “Constance killed Regis, and for some reason you want her to get away with it. Why? After all, Regis was your brother.”

“Foster brother.”

“Okay. Foster brother. It’s still in the family.”

“Regis was no damn good. Dying was the best thing he ever did, and he had to have help to do that. He wasn’t fit to touch Constance, let alone sleep with her. Why she ever loved him is something I’ll never understand. But she did. She loved him, and she killed him.”

“It sounds paradoxical, but it’s possible. It wouldn’t make her the first woman to kill a man she loved. Anyhow, I’m beginning to get a picture. You’re on her side, maybe because you both play the piano, and you helped her get away after she killed Regis. I’m guessing that you disposed of the body too, and that poses a puzzle I’ve been trying to figure. No body, no murder. Why should Constance run? And why, since she did, only to Amity? With your collusion, which she had, why not to Shangri-La or somewhere?”

He stared past me out the window into the audible night, and he seemed to be considering carefully the questions I’d asked. After a while he sighed again, the sibilant weariness with the job he had to do, or thought he had to do. Either way, unless I could prevent it, it would come to the same end for me.

“I guess it won’t hurt to tell you,” he said. “It’ll take a little time, but I’ve got plenty, and you’ve got practically none, and maybe it won’t hurt to allow you a little more.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s generous of you.”

“Don’t mention it. And you’d better listen close because I’m only going over it once lightly. The night it happened, I went up to Regis’s apartment to see him about something personal. I punched the bell a couple times, but no one answered, so I tried the door, and it wasn’t locked. I went in, and there they were. Regis on the floor and Constance in a chair. Regis was dead, and she was gone. What I mean, she was in a state of shock. She was paying no more attention to Regis than if he’d just lain down for a nap. She hardly seemed aware that I’d come into the room. I checked Regis and saw that he’d been shot neatly between the eyes. She just sat there and watched me without moving or saying a word, her eyes as big and bright and dry as the eyes of an owl. I asked her what had happened, but she only shook her head and said she didn’t understand. She said she was confused and couldn’t seem to get things clear in her mind. I wanted to help her. I held her hands and kept talking to her, trying to get her to remember, but even a dumb guy like me could see pretty soon that it wasn’t any use. She was gone, not home — and it wasn’t any act. She kept insisting she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand where she was, or why, or who Regis was, or I was, or a damn thing about anything. She said her name was Faith Salem. She said she lived in Amity. She said she just wanted to go home.

“That’s the way it was. Whatever I did to help her, I had to do blind. So it was a big chance. So I was an accessory after the fact. To hell with all that. What I finally did, I took her to my room at the restaurant and made her promise to stay there, and then I got Darcy and went back for Regis. Darcy’s a guy I trust. About the only guy. We got the body out of the building the back way between us. I’ve got a place in the country I sometimes go to, and we took Regis there, and Darcy put him in a good deep hole in the ground with a lot of quicklime, and I went back to the restaurant, and that was all for Regis. It was good enough. I haven’t lost any sleep because of Regis.”

He said all this quietly and easily, without the slightest trace of anger or excitement. He said it in exactly the same manner in which he would kill me in a little while, in his own time when he was good and ready, and I sat and waited for him to finish the story, whatever was left of it. I had a strange and strong sense of revelation — a kind of gathering of loose ends in an obscure pattern.

“She wasn’t there,” he said. “She had simply walked out of the restaurant and was gone. I went looking for her. I beat the whole damn city, but I never found her. It was two weeks later before I saw her again. I remembered what she’d called herself: Faith Salem. I remembered where she’d said she lived: Amity. I went to Amity and tried to find her, but she wasn’t there, and so I waited and kept looking, and finally she came. About two weeks later. I don’t know where she’d been in the meanwhile, or how she got there, but she was dressed differently, in a plain suit, and she seemed to be in perfectly good condition. She’d had money in her purse the night she left. I know because I checked. Almost seven hundred dollars. Anyhow, I let her alone and kept watching after her, the same as I’ve done ever since, waiting to see what she’d do. What she did was rent that little house she lives in and start giving piano lessons.

“She advertised. She called herself Faith Salem. She got along all right, and finally she started teaching at a private conservatory. The point is, she wasn’t acting or consciously hiding. She really thought she was someone named Faith Salem. I’m pretty ignorant about such things, but I did some reading and fished a little information out of a medico who had a debt in my game rooms, and I finally I got an understanding of it. She was in a kind of condition that’s called a fugue. Same name as a kind of musical composition. Unless something happened to shock her out of it, she might go on in this condition for years. Maybe the rest of her life. I figured it was safer for her to leave her as she was. As long as she was in the fugue state, she’d act perfectly normal in the identity she’d assumed and would never give herself away.

“There were obvious dangers, of course. The thing I worried most about was that she’d come out of the fugue. She wouldn’t remember anything since the murder, because the fugue period is entirely forgotten after recovery. But the murder was before the fugue, and she’d remember it as the last thing that happened to her, and if I wasn’t around to help her then, she’d be done for. God knows what she’d do. So I’ve been keeping watch over her the best I can, and everything’s been all right, except now you’ve come along and made like a God-damn detective, and I’ve got to kill you. And now’s the time for it.”

That was Darcy’s cue. He got out of the front seat and opened the door to the back seat on my side, and I was supposed to get out quietly into the road to save the cushions, but I didn^’t want to do it. What I wanted to do was live, and in the growing sense of revelation and gathering ends, I thought I could see a faint chance.

“You’re making a mistake,” I said, “and if you go ahead and finish making it, it won’t be your first, but it may very well be your last and worst.”

Darcy stood erect by the open door and waited patiently and politely. Silas Lawler made an abrupt gesture with his gun and then became utterly still and silent for the longest several seconds there have ever been. Finally he sighed, and the tension went out of him.

“All right,” he said. “Another minute or two. What mistake?”

“Assuming that Constance Markley killed Regis Lawler,” I laid.

“She was in the room with him. He was dead.”

“Conceded. But you said you checked her purse and saw seven hundred dollars. Did you see a gun?”

“No. No gun.”

“Was it in the room? Anywhere in the apartment?”

“I never found it.”

“You think maybe she shot him with her finger?”

“I’ve wondered about that. You explain it.”

“I already have. She didn’t shoot him.”

“You’re just guessing.”

“Maybe so. But I’ve got better reasons for my guess than you’ve got for yours. You think she went off the deep end and killed him because he was getting tired of her. Is that it?”

“She’d had troubles. Things had piled up. Regis was more than a lover. He was a kind of salvation.”

“I’ll tell you something I’ve learned. The night Regis died, Constance Markley’s maid helped her dress. According to this maid, she was eager. She wasn’t angry or depressed or particularly disturbed in any way. She was only eager to see her lover. Does that sound like a woman betrayed and ready to kill? It sounds to me more like a woman who was still ignorant of whatever defections her lover was committing.”

“Say she was ignorant. She learned after she got there.”

“Sure. And shot him with her finger.”

Again, for the time it took to draw and release a long breath. Silas Lawler was silent. At the open door, Darcy shifted his weight with a grating of gravel.

“You got anything else to say?” Lawler said.

“Only what you’re already thinking,” I said. “Constance Markley didn’t kill Regis. Neither did you. But someone did. Pretend for a minute that it was you. You murdered a man, and the night of the murder the man’s mistress vanishes. No one knows where she went. No one knows why. In your mind these two things, the murder and the disappearance, are inevitably associated. It’s too big a coincidence. There must be a connection. But what is it? Does she know something that may be placing you in jeopardy every second of your life? Or every second of hers? You must learn this at any cost, and you must learn it before anyone else. You may pretend indifference, but in your mind are the constant uncertainty, the constant fear. They’re there for two long years. Then a garden variety private detective stumbles onto something. Maybe. He makes a trip to a town named Amity where the vanished mistress once lived with the same woman who has hired the detective to find her. Several people, in one way or another, learn of this trip. Including you, the murderer. What do these people do? They stay at home and mind their own business. Except you, the murderer. You don’t stay at home and mind your own business because your business is in Amity. I keep thinking about the Caddy that crawled past the house while I was on the porch. I wonder whose it was?”

That was all I had. It wasn’t much, but it was all, and I had a strong conviction that it was true. Silas Lawler was still, and so was Darcy. In the stillness, like a living and measurable organism, was a growing sense of compelling urgency. I could hear it at last in Lawler’s voice when he spoke again.

“Darcy,” he said, “let’s go back.”

Darcy got under the wheel, and we turned and went. We went as fast as the Caddy’s horses could run on the road and highway and streets they had to follow. On Canterbury Street, in front of the small frame house in which Constance Markley lived, Silas Lawler and I got out on the parking and looked up across the lawn to the house, and the light was still on the blind behind the window, and everything was quiet. Then, after a terrible interval in which urgency was slowly becoming farce, there was a shadow on the blind that was not a woman’s, a scream in the house that was.

The scream was not loud, not long, and there was no shadow and no sound by the time Lawler and I reached the porch. I was faster than he, running on longer legs, and he was a step behind me when I threw open the door to see Constance Markley hanging by the neck from the hands of her husband.

Interrupted in murder, he turned his face toward us in the precise instant that Lawler fired, and in another instant he was dead.

Constance Markley began to scream again.

She screamed and screamed and screamed.

I had a notion that the screams were two years old.