Leave Her to Hell

8

In a sidewalk telephone booth I dialed Faith Salem’s number and got Maria.

“Miss Salem’s apartment,” she said.

“This is Percy Hand,” I said. “Let me speak with Miss Salem.”

“One moment, please,” she said.

I waited a while. The open wire hummed in my ear. My head felt three times its normal size, and the hum was like a siren. I held the receiver a few inches away until Faith Salem’s voice came on.

“Hello, Mr. Hand,” she said.

“You said to call before I came,” I said. “I’m calling.”

“Is it something urgent?”

“I don’t know how urgent it is. I know I just turned down five grand in a chunk for twenty-five dollars and expenses a day. Under the circumstances, I feel like being humored.”

She was silent for ten seconds. The siren shattered my monstrous head.

“You sound angry,” she said finally.

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m an amiable boob who will take almost anything from anybody, and my heart holds nothing but love and tenderness for all of God’s creatures.”

Silence again. The siren again. Her voice again in due time.

“You’d better come up,” she said. “I’ll be expecting you.”

“Fifteen minutes,” I said.

When I got there, the sun was off the terrace, and so was she. She was waiting for me in the living room, and she was wearing a black silk jersey pullover blouse and black ballerina-type slippers and cream colored capri pants. On her they looked very good, or she looked very good in them, whichever way you saw it. She was lying on her side, propped up on one elbow on a sofa about nine feet long, and she got up and came to meet me between the sofa and the door. I thought I heard her breath catch and hold for a second in her throat.

“Your face,” she said.

“It must be a mess,” I said.

“There’s a stain on the front of your shirt,” she said. “Blood,” I said. “Mine.”

She reached up and touched gently with her finger tips the piece of adhesive that was holding together the lips of the cut that needed a stitch or two. The fingers moved slowly down over the swollen flesh and seemed to draw away the pain by a kind of delicate anesthetization. It was much better than codeine or a handful of aspirin.

“Come and sit down,” she said.

I did, and she did. We sat together on the nine foot sofa, and my right knee touched her left knee. And this might have been by accident or design, but in either event it was a pleasant situation that no one made any move to alter — certainly not I.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“So am I,” I said. “I’m sorrier than anyone.”

“Would you like to tell me about it?”

“It’s hardly worth while. I took a job, and this turned out to be part of it.”

“It’s all my fault.”

“Sure it is.”

“But I don’t understand. Why should anyone do this to you?”

“Someone wanted me to give up the job, and I didn’t want to. We had a difference of opinion.”

“Does that mean you’ve decided to go ahead with it?”

“That’s what it means. At least for a while longer. When anyone wants so hard for me to quit doing something I’m doing, it makes me stubborn. I’m a contrary fellow by nature.”

“You must be careful,” she said.

She sounded as if it would really make a difference if I wasn’t. She was sitting facing me, her left leg resting along the edge of the sofa and her right leg not touching the sofa at all, and she lifted her hand again and touched the battered side of my face as if she were reminding herself and me of the consequences of carelessness, and it seemed a natural completion of the gesture for her hand to slip on around my neck. Her arm followed, and her body came over against mine, and I was suddenly holding her and kissing her with bruised lips, and we got out of balance and toppled over gently and lay for maybe a minute in each other’s arms with our mouths together. Then she drew and released a deep breath that quivered her toes. She sat up, stood up, looked down at me with a kind of incredulity in her eyes.

“I think I need a drink,” she said. “You too.”

“No gin and tonic, thanks,” I said. “Straight bourbon.”

“Agreed,” she said.

She walked over to a cabinet to get it. I watched her go and watched her come. Her legs in the tight capri pants were long and lovely and worth watching. This was something she knew as well as I, and we were both happy about it. She handed me my bourbon in a little frosted glass with the ounces marked on the outside in the frost, and the bourbon came up to the third mark. I drank it down a mark, leaving two to go, and she sat down beside me and drank a little less of hers.

“I liked kissing you, and I’m glad I did,” she said, “but I won’t do it again.”

“All right,” I said.

“Are you offended?”

“No.”

“There’s nothing personal in it, you understand.”

“I understand.”

“There are obvious reasons why I can’t afford to.”

“I know the reasons. What I’d like to do now, if you don’t mind, is to quit talking about it. I came here to talk about something else, and it would probably be a good idea if we got started.”

“What did you come to talk about?”

“About you and Constance Markley. When I was here before, you said you knew her in college. You said you shared an apartment that she paid the rent on. I neglected to ask you what college it was.”

“Amity College.”

“That’s at Amity, of course.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“What was your name then?”

“The same as now. Faith Salem.”

“You told me you’d been married a couple of times. I’ve been wondering about the Miss. Did you get your maiden name restored both times?”

“Not legally. When I’m compelled to be legal, I use another name. Would you believe that I’m a countess?”

“I’d believe it if you said it.”

“Well, I don’t say it often, because I’m not particularly proud of it. The count was attractive and quite entertaining for a while, but he turned out to be a mistake. I was in Europe with my first husband when I met him. You remember the publisher’s son I married in college? That one. We were in Europe, and he’d turned out to rather a mistake too, although not so bad a one as the count turned out later. Anyhow, I met the count and did things with him while my husband was doing things with someone else, and he was a very charming and convincing liar, and I decided it would probably be a smart move to make a change. It wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t it profitable?”

“No. The amount of his income was one of the things the count lied about most convincingly. Are you being rather nasty about it, incidentally? I hope not. Being nasty doesn’t suit you somehow.”

“Excuse me. You’ll have to remember that I’ve had a hard day. The publisher’s son and the count are none of my business. At your request, Constance Markley is. I’d like to know exactly the nature of the relationship that caused you to share an apartment.”

“It was normal, if that’s what you mean.”

“It isn’t.” I lowered the bourbon to the first mark. My mouth was cut on the inside, and the bourbon burned in the cut. “I don’t know just what I do mean. I don’t even know exactly why I asked the question or what I’m trying to learn. Just tell me what you can about Constance.”

She was silent, considering. Her consideration lasted about half a minute, and after it was finished, she took time before speaking to lower the level of her own bourbon, which required about half as long.

“It’s rather embarrassing,” she said.

“Come on,” I said. “Embarrass yourself.”

“Oh, well.” She shrugged. “I liked Constance. I told you I did. But I wasn’t utterly devoted to her. She was rather an uncomfortable girl to be around, to tell the truth. Very intense. Inclined to be possessive and jealous. She often resented the attention and time I gave to other people. At such times, she would be very difficult and demanding, then withdrawn and sullen, and finally almost pathetically repentant and eager to make everything right again. It was a kind of cycle that she repeated many times. Her expressions and gestures of affection made me feel uncomfortable. Not that there was the least sign of perversion in them, you understand. It was only that they were so exorbitant.”

“Would you say that she admired you?”

“I guess so. I guess that’s what it was.”

“Well, I understand it isn’t so unusual to find that kind of thing among school girls. Boys either, for that matter. Do you have anything left over from that time? Any snapshots or letters or anything like that?”

“It happens that I do. After you left the other day, I got to thinking about Constance, the time we were together, and I looked in an old case of odds and ends I’d picked up different times and places, the kind of stuff you accumulate and keep without any good reason, and there were this shapshot and a card among all the other things. They don’t amount to much. Just a snapshot of the two of us together, a card she sent me during the Christmas holiday of that year. Would you like to see them?”

I said I would, and she went to get them. Why I wanted to see them was something I didn’t know precisely. Why I was interested at all in this period of ancient history was something else I didn’t know. It had some basis, I think, in the feeling that the thing that could make a person leave an established life without any trace was surely something that had existed and had been growing for a long time, not something that had started yesterday or last week or even last year. Then there was, of course, the coincidence. Silas Lawler wanted this sleeping dog left lying, and once a month he went to the town where Constance Markley had once lived with Faith Salem, who wanted the dog wakened. It was that thin — that near to nothing. But it was all there was of anything at all.

Faith Salem returned with the snapshot and the Christmas card. I took them from her and finshed my bourbon and looked first at the picture. I don’t know if I would have seen in it what I did if I hadn’t already heard about Constance Markley what I had. It’s impossible to know how much of what we see, or think we see, is the result of suggestion. Constance and Faith were standing side by side. Constance was shorter, slighter of build, less striking in effect. Faith was looking directly into the camera, but Constance was looking around and up at the face of Faith. It seemed to me that her expression was one of adoration. This was what might have been no more than the result of suggestion. I don’t know.

I took the Christmas card out of its envelope. It had clearly been expensive, as cards go, and had probably been selected with particular care. On the back, Constance Markley had written a note. It said how miserable and lonely she was at home, how the days were interminable, how she longed for the time to come when she could return to Amity and Faith. Christmas vacation, I thought, must have lasted all of two weeks. I read the note with ambivalence. I felt pity, and I felt irritation.

Faith Salem had finished her bourbon and was looking at me over the empty glass. Her eyes were clouded, and she shook her head slowly from side to side.

“I guess you’ve got an idea,” she said.

“That’s an exaggeration,” I said.

“Why are you interested in all this? I don’t understand.”

“Maybe it’s just that I’m naturally suspicious of a coincidence. Every time I come across one, I get curious.”

“What coincidence?”

“Never mind. If I put it in words, I’d probably decide it sounded too weak to bother with. I think I’ll drive down to Amity, and the trip’ll hike expenses. You’d better give me a hundred bucks.”

“All right. I’ll get it for you.”

She got up and went out of the room again. I watched her out and stood up to watch her in. From both angles and both sides she still looked good. She handed me the hundred bucks, and I took it and shoved it in a pocket and put my arms around her and kissed her. She had meant what she had said. She had said she wouldn’t kiss me again, and she didn’t. She only stood quietly and let me kiss her, which was different and not half so pleasant. I took my arms away and stepped back.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“So am I,” she said.

Then we said good-bye, and I left. Going, I met Graham Markley in the hall, coming. We spoke politely, and he asked me how the investigation was getting along. I said it was getting along all right. He didn’t even seem curious about the condition of my face.