Man Sinister

Chapter II

I walked upstairs. But I wasn’t in the house. I was back again in a USO club and it was the time of the big war. I was fresh out of OCS, a green as grass ninety-day wonder in the infantry. A crowd of brass was gathered near the punch bowl. As a rift appeared, I saw her. She was dark, smoothly tanned by the sun with black hair and eyes as merry as chinkapins. She was wearing white.

“North Carolina?” she said to me as we danced. “At last the Army is improving.”

“What part?” I asked.

“Greensboro,” she said.

I should have known then, but I just didn’t pause to think. Bryanne Quavely. North Carolina. Cigarette factories.

Later, it didn’t seem so important. There were too many other matters to be settled in the world at the moment to allow a little thing like a few million bucks to stand in the way of quick marriage when you know it’s your last leave, and she knows it too.

She lived all the way to the Rhine with me, in my heart. Mrs. Steve Martin. Who were the Quavelys?

A stealthy footfall behind a closed door in the upper hall brought me back to the present. I opened the door. It was obviously the room Harold and Vera were occupying.

Wilfred was standing near the closet, his fat shaking as if he were afraid to look over his shoulder. A pair of pliers showed its snout over the lip of the hip pocket of his jeans.

I walked across the room, spun him around. Then I made a quick grab and tore the revolver out of his hand.

He wiped his nose sullenly with his forefinger.

“Where’d you get this?” I balanced the gun.

“It’s his — Harold’s.”

“You found it in here?” I demanded.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t going to take it. I was just looking at it.”

“You know what Mr. Cranford told you the last time he caught you snooping.”

“I wasn’t snooping! I was just starting to straighten the room.”

“That’s Ellen’s job.”

“She’s busy with this cooking — for them, him!”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing.” He was sullen.

“You’d be better off to talk to me,” I advised. “You’d get more understanding.”

He raised his eyes. Surprisingly they were swimming with hot tears. “I hate him! I hope he gets hurt. Ellen’s always trying to smooch him when she gets him in a corner.”

“Ellen wouldn’t do that. She knows Harold is married.”

“She wouldn’t care!” he said defiantly. “To her he’s a big New York artist. She’s always felt that way. A wife wouldn’t matter. She said once she wouldn’t mind having a baby, if it was Harold’s.”

I’d known for a long time that Ellen had carried a torrid crush on Harold. I’d expected her to outgrow it. Now, seemingly, his absence and success had made her heart grow fonder than ever. I would have to suggest to Harold that he have a talk with Ellen, convince her that if her love was strong enough she would carry it in noble silence to the end of her days. It probably would appeal to the martyr in her.

“What makes you think Harold will get hurt?” I asked Wilfred. “You’re not getting any foolish notions, are you?”

“Naw. But I know he’s scared, and running. And when a man’s like that he’s in danger of getting hurt. He’s got a gun, too. He wouldn’t if somebody hadn’t followed him down here.”

“I think you’re mistaken,” I said calmly. “A lot of people keep guns on their premises. Some even carry them when they’re taking a trip by car. Now put the pistol back where you found it and get downstairs about your business.”

I thought it over after Wilfred was gone. The big question in my mind was the man who’d been across the street watching the house from the shadows of the tree. I wondered who he was and why he was following Harold — if he was. It was possible that Wilfred’s imagination was exaggerating things. If something really serious was afoot, Harold should — and was able — to go to the police.

Mind your own knitting, Martin.

I went back downstairs.

Dinner was a quiet meal. I saw that Vera noticed the way Ellen hovered at Harold’s elbow to serve him. The beautiful blonde smiled quietly. She was pretty sure of her man.

Papa Joe related incidents out of Harold’s childhood in an attempt to bring humor to the dinner. Nobody laughed much. It was obvious that Papa Joe was pleased with his son’s marriage. Vera brought an air of sophistication, poise, charm, even into a dining room that seemed to have been designed for glum eating.

Papa Joe was no less expansive about his son. “He was touched with something different, perhaps near genius, from his boyhood,” Papa Joe told Vera. “Not much like Steve, who cut classes when he got the chance and seemed determined to get mixed up in one scrape after another.”

I met his eyes with a smile. I hadn’t eaten much of his bread since I’d been able to shift for myself. But less than a month ago, after grogging myself up and losing my job in Charleston, I’d returned to Asheville. I hadn’t figured I was sponging on him, for I believed myself just about even with Papa Joe. Money that I’d saved during the war had been partly responsible for keeping his business from going under, and I’d been paying my own way since I’d come back this time for a visit.

And this would be the final time. I knew I would never return. Already I felt that heavy sense of loss that comes with any final departure. I had spent a good part of my childhood in this house. I had shoveled snow from the front walks, and careened down the hill before the house on my first bicycle. From its rear upstairs windows I had potted at sparrows with a bean-shooter.

Papa Joe’s wife had been my mother’s dearest friend. She had taken me in after I had lost my mother, and she had loved me like her own son. I’d eaten cookies baked by her in the same range that Ellen used today. When she, my foster mother, had died the soul had gone from Papa Joe’s home.

After dinner Vera and I wandered toward the parlor, talking idly.

“I noticed you called Mr. Cranford ‘Papa Joe,’ ” she said. “Why is that?”

“With my own parents dead,” I explained, “I felt that I shouldn’t call him ‘Papa.’ childish notion. So I tacked the name ‘Papa Joe’ onto him, and soon everybody was using it, including grown-ups.”

“He doesn’t like the name, does he?”

“I don’t know. Now that you mention it, I suppose he doesn’t.”

She laughed. “I’m glad I’m getting to know you, Steve. You’re refreshing. You accept things at face value, in perfectly good faith. You’re resilient. You keep right on acting in good faith even when life lets you down.”

“I really appear that way to you?” I was surprised.

“Of course. Did I say something wrong?”

I grinned wryly. “You might have done something easy, like swatting me with that vase over there. I’ve acted with less faith than anybody I ever had the displeasure to meet. Sometimes I think I’m the most decayed one of the whole tribe.”

“You mustn’t think such things about yourself!” she chided.

“It isn’t healthy, normal, is it?”

“No,” she said distantly.

I was sorry our talk had been routed into this channel. She was a nice kid. She loved Harold. If she would bear the selfishness I knew to run deep in him, she would enjoy a nice life as the wife of a successful artist.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You know I have a wife, don’t you? Harold told you what I did to her?”

“No, I didn’t know. Now it’s my turn — I’m sorry.” She offered her hand and I shook it. We were friends again, and I was glad.

From upstairs, Harold called to her. After she had gone, I lighted a cigarette and went out on the porch to smoke it.

I was finishing the cigarette when the stranger came. I was instantly almost sure it was the same man I’d seen watching the house. Short, blocky, dressed in a baggy suit.

When he stepped on the front porch I got a look at his face in the light spilling from the hallway. A heavy Irish face. Eyes of cold slate. A red stubble of beard. A mouth that could be either generous or tough as they come.

I hadn’t moved out of the shadows. “Cranford,” he said, “I hope you didn’t think I would give up so easily.” His voice was deep, rumbling in his chest, his words spoken with a clipped Yankee accent.

His belligerence annoyed me. I said, “I’m not Cranford. I’m his foster brother. Would you like to give him a message?”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“I could see if he’s in.”

“He’s in. He hasn’t left the house since he drove back an hour or more ago. His car is here, and he hasn’t left the house walking unless he went out the back way.”

“You’re saying you’ve been watching us?”

“I’m saying that I’ve been trying to see him. Now will you tell him I’m here?”

Harold himself stepped out on the porch. “I’ve nothing more to say to you, McGinty. Except that this has got to stop! You understand?”

Harold was deeply shaken, facing this man he called McGinty as if the act required every ounce of courage-he possessed. He was in a dangerous mood, his back to whatever wall McGinty had erected.

McGinty said, “We can’t talk here.”

“There’s no more talking to do!” Harold said flatly. “You’ve been wrong from the beginning, McGinty. You’d do well to make yourself scarce.”

McGinty stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, a thin smile on his face. “I’m getting you just about where I want you,” he said. “Just about to the breaking point.”

His words reacted on Harold like short, hard punches to the mid-section.

“We’ll talk,” McGinty said.

Harold dropped a glance at me. I interpreted it as resignation. He wished to speak to McGinty alone. I went in the house.

The door of Harold’s room was open when I passed down the upstairs hall. Vera was alone in the room, sitting rigid beside the bed, as if waiting for something to happen, something beyond her control.

“Hello,” she said, attempting a smile as she saw me stop in the doorway.

“Hello.”

“Harold is down there now talking with a strange man, isn’t he?” she asked.

“Yes.” I stepped inside the room. “What’s it all about?”

“It’s that damn painting.” Falling from her lips, the invective stunned me.

“One of Harold’s?”

“Yes. Now and then he decides to do a serious piece of work. Occasionally he even manages to get around to it.”

“This man — this McGinty — is after the painting?”

“No, nothing like that. McGinty cares nothing for the painting. The painting in itself is worth little. Two hundred dollars, I should say. Harold calls the painting The Wharf Girl. It’s supposed to express a mood of... well, a very dark, morbid mood. We saw the girl in a waterfront spaghetti joint one night. She had tried to jump off a dock. A big Irishman had seen her and had stopped her. He had brought her into the café and bought her coffee. She was still sobbing.”

“The man was McGinty?”

“You catch on quickly.”

“He’s Irish — at least he looks Irish. I was just guessing.”

“I wish we had never seen the girl,” Vera said, a note almost of desperation in her voice. “She was a tiny thing who looked as if she’d always been underfed. She had lovely white skin and her eyes were the largest and darkest I’ve ever seen. When they turned on you, their gaze seemed to jump at you. They were eyes so morbid and pathetic it was hard to look at them and not shudder. Harold wanted to paint her.”

She stopped speaking. I let the silence hang. She didn’t break it.

I said, after a moment, “You haven’t told me anything really.”

“I haven’t intended to. Why should I mix you up in our troubles?”

She was listening. For Harold’s footfall returning up the stairs. Then the footfall sounded and her shoulders sagged faintly in relief. She practically forgot I was there. I picked up the cue and crossed the hallway toward my own room. Harold brushed past me. His face was cotton-white; his eyes blazing.

He entered his room, and I heard his sharp, angry voice speaking to Vera, without being able to distinguish individual words.