Strangers on a Train

Ten

At her dressing table in Hotel La Fonda, Santa Fe, Elsie Bruno sat removing the night’s dry skin cream from her face with a cleansing tissue. Now and then, with wide, absent blue eyes, she leaned closer to the mirror to examine the little mesh of wrinkles below her lids and the laugh lines that curved from the base of her nose. Though her chin was somewhat recessive, the lower part of her face projected, thrusting her full lips forward in a manner quite different from Bruno’s face. Santa Fe, she thought, was the only place she could see the laugh lines in the mirror when she sat all the way back at her dressing table.

“This light around here—might as well be an X-ray,” she remarked to her son.

Bruno, slumped in his pajamas in a rawhide chair, cast a puffy eye over at the window. He was too tired to go and pull the shade down. “You look good, Mom,” he croaked. He lowered his pursed lips to the glass of water that rested on his hairless chest, and frowned thoughtfully.

Like an enormous walnut in feeble, jittery squirrel hands, an idea, bigger and closer than any idea he had ever known, had been revolving in his mind for several days. When his mother left town, he intended to crack open the idea and start thinking in earnest. His idea was to go and get Miriam. The time was ripe, and the time was now. Guy needed it now. In a few days, a week even, it might be too late for the Palm Beach thing, and he wouldn’t.

Her face had grown fatter in these few days in Santa Fe, Elsie thought. She could tell by the plumpness of her cheeks compared to the small taut triangle of her nose. She hid the laugh lines with a smile at herself, tilted her curly blond head, and blinked her eyes.

“Charley, should I pick up that silver belt this morning?” she asked, as casually as if she spoke to herself. The belt was two hundred and fifty something, but Sam would send another thousand on to California. It was such a good-looking belt, like nothing in New York. What else was Santa Fe good for but silver?

“What else is he good for?” Bruno murmured.

Elsie picked up her shower cap and turned to him with her quick broad smile that had no variations. “Darling,” coaxingly.

“Ummm?”

“You won’t do anything you shouldn’t while I’m gone?”

“No, Ma.”

She left the shower cap perched on the crown of her head, looked at a long narrow red nail, then reached for a sandpaper stick. Of course, Fred Wiley would be only too happy to buy the silver belt for her—he’d probably turn up at the station with something atrocious and twice as expensive anyway—but she didn’t want Fred on her neck in California. With the least encouragement, he would come to California with her. Better that he only swore eternal love at the station, wept a little, and went straight home to his wife.

“I must say last night was funny though,” Elsie went on. “Fred saw it first.” She laughed, and the sandpaper stick flew in a blur. Bruno said coolly, “I had nothing to do with it.”

“All right, darling, you had nothing to do with it!” Bruno’s mouth twisted. His mother had awakened him at 4 in the morning, in hysterics, to tell him there was a dead bull in the Plaza. A bull sitting on a bench with a hat and coat on, reading a newspaper. Typical of Wilson’s collegiate pranks. Wilson would be talking about it today, Bruno knew, elaborating on it till he thought of something dumber to do. Last night in La Placita, the hotel bar, he had planned a murder—while Wilson dressed a dead bull. Even in Wilson’s tall stories about his war service, he had never claimed to have killed anybody, not even a Jap. Bruno closed his eyes, thinking contentedly of last night. Around ten o’clock, Fred Wiley and a lot of other baldheads had trooped into La Placita half crocked, like a musical comedy stagline, to take his mother to a party. He’d been invited, too, but he had told his mother he had a date with Wilson, because he needed time to think. And last night he had decided yes. He had been thinking really since Saturday when he talked to Guy, and here it was Saturday again, and it was tomorrow or never, when his mother left for California. He was sick of the question, could he do it. How long had the question been with him? Longer than he could remember. He felt like he could do it. Something kept telling him that the time, the circumstances, the cause would never be better. A pure murder, without personal motives! He didn’t consider the possibility of Guy’s murdering his father a motive, because he didn’t count on it. Maybe Guy could be persuaded, maybe not. The point was, now was the time to act, because the setup was so perfect. He’d called Guy’s house again last night to make sure he still wasn’t back from Mexico. Guy had been in Mexico since Sunday, his mother said.

A sensation like a thumb pressing at the base of his throat made him tear at his collar, but his pajama jacket was open all the way down the front. Bruno began to button it dreamily.

“You won’t change your mind and come with me?” His mother asked, getting up. “If you did, I’d go up to Reno. Helen’s there now and so’s George Kennedy.”

“Only one reason I’d like to see you in Reno, Mom.”

“Charley—” She tipped her head to one side and back again.

“Have patience? If it weren’t for Sam, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

“Sure, we would.”

She sighed. “You won’t change your mind?”

“I’m having fun here,” he said through a groan.

She looked at her nails again. “All I’ve heard is how bored you are.”

“That’s with Wilson. I’m not gonna see him again.”

“You’re not going to run back to New York?”

“What’d I do in New York?”

“Grannie’d be so disappointed if you fell down again this year.”

“When did I ever fall down?” Bruno jested weakly, and suddenly felt sick enough to die, too sick even to throw up. He knew the feeling, it lasted only a minute, but God, he thought, let there not be time for breakfast before the train, don’t let her say the word breakfast. He stiffened, not moving a muscle, barely breathing between his parted lips. With one eye shut, he watched her move toward him in her pale blue silk wrapper, a hand on her hip, looking as shrewd as she could which wasn’t shrewd at all, because her eyes were so round. And she was smiling besides.

“What’ve you and Wilson got up your sleeves?”

“That punk?”

She sat down on the arm of his chair. “Just because he steals your thunder,” she said, shaking him slightly by the shoulder. “Don’t do anything too awful, darling, because I haven’t got the money just now to throw around cleaning up after you.”

“Stick him for some more. Get me a thousand, too.”

“Darling.” She laid the cool backs of her fingers against his forehead. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll be there day after tomorrow probably.”

“Let’s have fun in California.”

“Sure.”

“Why’re you so serious this morning!”

“I’m not, Ma.”

She tweaked the thin dangling hair over his forehead, and went on into the bathroom.

Bruno jumped up and shouted against the roar of her running bath, “Ma, I got money to pay my bill here!”

“What, angel?”

He went closer and repeated it, then sank back in the chair, exhausted with the effort. He did not want his mother to know about the long-distance calls to Metcalf. If she didn’t, everything was working out fine. His mother hadn’t minded very much his not staying on, hadn’t really minded enough. Was she meeting this jerk Fred on the train or something? Bruno dragged himself up, feeling a slow animosity rising in him against Fred Wiley. He wanted to tell his mother he was staying on in Santa Fe for the biggest experience of his life. She wouldn’t be running the water in there now, paying no attention to him, if she knew a fraction of what it meant. He wanted to say, Ma, life’s going to be a lot better for both of us soon, because this is the beginning of getting rid of the Captain. Whether Guy came through with his part of the deal or not, if he was successful with Miriam, he would have proved a point. A perfect murder. Some day, another person he didn’t know yet would turn up and some kind of a deal could be made. Bruno bent his chin down to his chest in sudden anguish. How could he tell his mother? Murder and his mother didn’t go together. “How gruesome!” she would say. He looked at the bathroom door with a hurt, distant expression. It had dawned on him that he couldn’t tell anyone, ever. Except Guy. He sat down again.

“Sleepyhead!”

He blinked when she clapped her hands. Then he smiled. Dully, with a wistful realization that much would happen before he saw them again, he watched his mother’s legs flex as she tightened her stockings. The slim lines of her legs always gave him a lift, made him proud. His mother had the best-looking legs he had ever seen on anyone, no matter what age. Ziegfeld had picked her, and hadn’t Ziegfeld known his stuff? But she had married right back into the kind of life she had run away from. He was going to liberate her soon, and she didn’t know it.

“Don’t forget to mail that,” his mother said.

Bruno winced as the two rattlesnakes’ heads tipped over toward him. It was a tie rack they had bought for the Captain, made of interlocking cowhorns and topped by two stuffed baby rattlers sticking their tongues out at each other over a mirror. The Captain hated tie racks, hated snakes, dogs, cats, birds—What didn’t he hate? He would hate the corny tie rack, and that was why he had talked his mother into getting it for him. Bruno smiled affectionately at the tie rack. It hadn’t been hard to talk his mother into getting it.