The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

Originally published in Manhunt, August 1958.

Chapter 1

A woman wanted to see me about a job. Her name, she said, was Faith Salem. She lived, she said, in a certain apartment in a certain apartment building, and she told me the number of the apartment and the floor it was on and the name and the address of the building it was in. She said she wanted me to come there and see her at three o’clock that afternoon, the same day she called on the telephone, and I went and saw her, and it was three o’clock when I got there.

The door was opened by a maid with a face like half a walnut. You may think it’s impossible for a face to look like half a walnut, and I suppose it is, if you want to be literal, but half a walnut is, nevertheless, all I can think of as a comparison when I think of the face of this maid. She wasn’t young, and she probably wasn’t old. She was, as they say, an indeterminate age. Her eyes smiled, but not her lips, and she nodded her head three times as if she had checked me swiftly on three salient points and was satisfied on every one. This gave me confidence.

“I’m Percy Hand,” I said. “I have an appointment with Miss Salem.”

“This way,” she said. Following her out of a vestibule, I waded through a couple acres of thick wood pile in crossing two wide rooms, and then I crossed, in a third room, another acre of black and white tile that made me feel, by contrast, as if I were taking steps a yard high, and finally I got out onto a terrace in the sunlight, and Faith Salem got up off her stomach and faced me. She had been lying on a soft pad covered with bright yellow material that might have been silk or nylon or something, and she was wearing in a couple of places a very little bit of more material that was just as shining and soft and might have been the same kind, except that it was white instead of yellow. Sunbathing was what she was doing, and I was glad. Her skin was firm and golden brown, and it gave the impression of consistency all over, and I was willing to bet that the little bit of white in a couple of places was only a concession to present company. Nine times out of ten, when someone tries to describe a woman who is fairly tall and has a slim and pliant and beautiful body, he will say that she is willowy, and that’s what I say. I say that Faith Salem was willowy. I also say that her hair was almost the identical color of the rest of her, and this seemed somehow too perfect to have been accomplished deliberately by design, but it may have been. You had to look at her face for a long time before you became aware that she was certainly a number of years older than you’d thought at first she was.

“Mr. Hand has arrived, Miss Faith,” the maid said.

“Thank you. Maria,” Faith Salem said.

I stepped twice, and she stepped twice, and we met and shook hands. Her grip was firm. I liked the way her fingers took hold of my fingers and held them and were in no hurry to drop them.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Hand,” she said. “You must excuse me for receiving you this way, but the sun is on this terrace for only a short while each afternoon, and I didn’t want to miss any of it.”

“I’d have been sorry to have missed it myself,” I said.

She smiled gravely, taking my meaning, and then released my fingers and walked over to a yellow chaise lounge on which a white hip-length coat had been left lying. She put on the coat and moved to a wrought iron and glass table where there was a single tall tumbler with alternating red and yellow stripes. The tumbler was empty. Holding it against the light, she stared through it wistfully as if she were regretting its emptiness, and I watched her do this with pleasure and no regrets whatever. There is a kind of legerdemain about a short coat over something shorter. It creates the illusion, even when you have evidence to the contrary, that it’s all there is, there isn’t any more.

“I like you, Mr. Hand,” she said. “I like your looks.”

“Thanks. I like yours too.”

“Would you care for a drink?”

“Why not? It’s a warm day.”

“I had a gin and tonic before you came. Do you drink gin and tonic?”

“When it’s offered. A gin and tonic would be fine.”

She set the red and yellow tumbler on the glass top of the table and turned slightly in the direction of the entrance to the black and white tiled room.

“Gin and tonic, Maria,” she said. I had thought that the indeterminate maid with a face like half a walnut had gone away, and I felt a slight shock of surprise to discover that she had been standing all the while behind me. Now she nodded three times exactly, a repetition of the gesture she had made at the door, and backed away into the apartment and out of sight. Faith Salem sat down in a low wicker chair and crossed her feet at the ankles and stared at her long golden legs. I stared at them too.

“Please sit down, Mr. Hand,” she said. “Maria will bring the gin and tonics in a moment. In the meanwhile, if you like, I can begin explaining why I asked you to come here.”

“I’d appreciate it.” I folded myself into her chair’s mate. “I’ve been wondering, of course.”

“Naturally.” The full lower lip protruded a little, giving to her face a suggestion of darkness and brooding. “Let me begin by asking a question. Do you know Graham Markley?”

“Not personally. Like everyone else who reads the papers, I know something about him. Quondam boy-wonder of finance. No boy any longer. If he’s still a wonder, he doesn’t work at it quite so hard. Works harder nowadays, from reports, at spending some of what he’s made. Unless, of course, there’s another Graham Markley.”

“He’s the one. Graham and I have an understanding.”

There was, before the last word, a barely perceptible hesitation that gave to her statement a subtle and significant shading. She had explained in a breath, or in the briefest holding of a breath, the acres of pile and tile in this lavish stone and steel tower with terraces that caught the afternoon sun for at least a little while. Delicately, she had told me who paid the rent.

“That’s nice,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“It’s entirely informal at present, but it may not remain so. He’s asked me to marry him. Not immediately, which is impossible, but eventually.”

“That’ll be even better. Or will it?”

“It will. A certain amount of security attaches to marriage. There are certain compensations if the marriage fails.” She smiled slowly, the smile beginning and growing and forcing from her face the dark and almost petulant expression of brooding, and in her eyes, which were brown, there was instantly a gleam of cynical good humor which was the effect, as it turned out, of a kind of casual compatibility she had developed with herself. “I haven’t always had the good things that money buys, Mr. Hand, but I’ve learned from experience to live with them naturally. I don’t think I would care now to live with less. With these good things that money buys, I’m perfectly willing to accept my share of the bad things that money seems invariably to entail. Is my position clear?”

“Yes, it is.” I said. “It couldn’t be clearer.”

At that moment, Maria returned with a pair of gin and tonics in red and yellow glasses on a tray. She served one of them to Faith Salem and the other to me, and then she completed the three nods routine and went away again. The three nods, I now realized, was not a gesture of approval but an involuntary reaction to any situation to be handled, as my arrival earlier, or any situation already handled, as the serving of the drinks. I drank some of my tonic and liked it. There was a kind of astringency in the faintly bitter taste of the quinine. There was also, I thought now that it had been suggested to me, a kind of astringency in Faith Salem. A faintly bitter quality. A clean and refreshing tautness in her lean and lovely body and in her uncompromised compatibility with herself.

“Did you know Graham’s wife?” she asked suddenly.

“Which one?” I said.

“The last one. Number three, I think.”

“It doesn’t matter. There was no purpose in my asking for the distinction. I didn’t know number three, or two, or one. Graham Markley’s wives and I didn’t move in the same circles.”

“I thought perhaps you might have met her professionally.”

“As an employer or subject of investigation?”

“Either way.”

“Neither, as a matter of fact. And if I had, I couldn’t tell you.”

“Ethics? I heard that about you. Someone told me you were honorable and discreet. I believe it.”

“Thanks. Also thanks to someone.”

“That’s why I called you. I’m glad now that I did.”

“I know. You like my looks, and I like yours. We admire each other.”

“Are you always so flippant?”

“Scarcely ever. The truth is, I’m very serious, and I take my work seriously. Do you have some work for me to do?”

She swallowed some more of her tonic and held the glass in her lap with both hands. Her expression was again rather darkly brooding, and she seemed for a moment uncertain of herself.

“Perhaps you won’t want the job,” she said.

I nodded. “It’s possible.”

“We’ll see.” She swallowed more of the tonic and looked suddenly more decisive. “Do you remember what happened to Graham’s third wife?”

“I seem to remember that she left him, which wasn’t surprising. So did number one. So did number two. Excuse me if I’m being offensive.”

“Not at all. You’re not required to like Graham. Many people don’t. I confess that there are times when I don’t like him very much myself. I did like his third wife, however. We were in college together, as a matter of fact. We shared an apartment one year. Her name was Constance Vaughan then. I left school that year, the year we shared the apartment, and we never saw each other again.”

“You mean you never knew her as Mrs. Graham Markley?”

“Yes. I didn’t know she’d married. In college she didn’t seem, somehow, like the kind of girl who would ever marry anyone at all, let alone someone like Graham. That was a good many years ago, of course, and people change, I suppose. Anyhow, it was rather odd, wasn’t it? I came here about a year ago from Europe, where I had been living with my second husband, who is not my husband any longer, and I met Graham and after a while entered into our present arrangement, which is comfortable but not altogether satisfactory, and then I learned that he had been married to Constance, whom I had known all that time ago. Don’t you think that was quite odd?”

“It seems to meet the requirements of the term.”

“Yes. The truth is, it made me feel rather strange. Especially when I discovered that she had simply disappeared about a year before.”

“Disappeared?”

“Simply vanished. She hasn’t been seen since by anyone who knew her here. You’ll have to admit that it’s peculiar. Numbers one and two left Graham and divorced him and tapped him for alimony, which he probably deserved, and this was sensible. It was not sensible, however, simply to disappear without a trace and never sue for divorce and alimony, or even separate maintenance. Do you think so?”

“Off hand, I don’t. There may have been good reasons. Surely an attempt was made to locate her.”

“Oh, yes. Of course. Her disappearance was reported to the police, and they made an effort to find her, but it was kept pretty quiet, and I don’t think anyone tried very hard. Because of the circumstances, you see.”

“No, I don’t see. What circumstances?”

“Well, Constance had a baby. A little boy that got to be almost two years old and died. Constance loved him intensely. That’s the way she was about anyone or anything she loved. Very intense. It was rather frightening, in a way. Anyhow, when the little boy died, she seemed to be going right out of her mind with grief, and Graham was no consolation or comfort, of course, and then she met Regis Lawler. Psychologically, she was just ready for him, completely vulnerable, and she fell in love with him, and apparently they had an affair. To get to the point about circumstances, Regis Lawler disappeared the same night that Constance did, and that’s why no one got too excited or concerned. It was assumed that they’d gone away together.”

“Don’t you believe that they did?”

“I don’t know. I think I do. What do you think?”

“On the surface, it seems a reasonable assumption, but it leaves a lot of loose ends.”

“That’s it. That’s what disturbs me. Too many loose ends. I don’t like loose ends, Mr. Hand. Will you try to tie them up for me?”

“Find out where Constance Markley went?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You mean you won’t?”

“I mean I probably couldn’t. Look at it this way. The police have far greater facilities for this kind of thing than any private detective, and they’ve tried without success. Or if they did find out where Constance Markley went, it was obviously not police business and was quietly dropped. Either way, I’d be wasting my time and your money to try to find her now.”

“Don’t worry about wasting my money.”

“All right. I’ll just worry about wasting my time.”

“Is it wasted if it’s paid for?”

“That’s a good point. If you want to buy my time for a fee, why should I drag my heels? Maybe I’m too ethical.”

“Does that mean you accept?”

“No. Not yet. Be reasonable, Miss Salem. If Constance Markley and Regis Lawler went off together, they might be anywhere in the country or out of it. The West Coast. South America. Europe. Just about anywhere on earth.”

She finished her tonic, lit a cigarette, and let her head fall slowly against the back of the wicker chair as if she were suddenly very tired. With her eyes closed, the shadows of her lashes on her cheeks, she seemed to be asleep in an instant, except for the thin blue plume of smoke expelled slowly from her lungs. After a few moments, her eyes still closed, she spoke again.

“Why should they do that? Why disappear? Why run away at all? Women are leaving husbands every day. Men are leaving wives. They simply leave. Why didn’t Constance?”

“People do queer things sometimes. Usually there are reasons that seem good to the people. You said Mrs. Markley was an intense sort of person. You said she’d suffered a tragedy that nearly unbalanced her mentally. You implied that she hadn’t been happy with Graham Markley. Maybe she just wanted to go away clean — no connections, no repercussions, nothing at all left of the old life but a man she loved and the few things she’d have to remember because she couldn’t forget.”

“I know. I’ve thought of that, and it’s something that Constance might possibly have done, as I remember her.”

“How do you remember her?”

“Well, as I said, she was intense. She was always excited or depressed, and I could never quite understand what she was excited or depressed about. Ideas that occurred to her or were passed on to her by someone. Impressions and suggestions. Things like that. Little things that would never have influenced most people in the least. She was pretty, in a way, but it took quite a while before you realized it. She had a kind of delicacy or fragility about her, but I don’t believe that she was actually fragile physically. It was just an impression. She didn’t appeal to men, and I never thought that men appealed to her. In the year we lived together, she never went out with a man that I can recall. Her parents had money. That’s why I lived with her. I had practically no money at all then, and she took a fancy to me and wanted to rent an apartment for us, and so she did, and I stayed with her until near the end of the school year. I married a boy who also had money. Never mind me, though. The point is, we went away from school, and I didn’t see Constance again. She was angry with me and refused to say good-by, I’ve always been sorry.”

“How did she happen to meet and marry Graham Markley?”

“I don’t know. Graham is susceptible to variety in women. Probably her particular kind of intangible prettiness, her fragility, something happened to appeal to him at the time they met. I imagine their marriage was one of those sudden, impulsive things that usually should never happen.”

“I see. How did you learn so much about her? Not back there in the beginning. I mean after she married Markley. About her baby, her affair with Lawler, those things.”

“Oh, I picked up bits from various sources, but most of it I learned from Maria. She was maid to Constance, you see, when Constance and Graham were living together. When I came along and moved into this apartment, I sort of acquired her. Graham still had her and didn’t know what to do with her, so he sent her over to me. Isn’t that strange?”

“Convenient, I’d say. Did Maria see Constance Markley the night of her disappearance?”

“Yes. She helped Constance dress. Apparently she was the last person that Constance spoke to.”

“May I speak with her for a moment?”

“If you wish. I’ll get her.”

Chapter 2

She got up and walked barefooted off the terrace into the black and white tiled room, and I drank the last of my gin and tonic and wished for another, and in about three minutes, not longer, she returned with Maria. She sat down again and told Maria that she could also sit down if she pleased, but Maria preferred to stand. Her small brown face was perfectly composed, and expressionless.

“What do you want me to tell you?” she said.

“I want you to answer a few questions about Mrs. Markley,” I said. “Constance Markley, that is. Will you do that?”

“If I can.”

“Miss Salem says that you saw Mrs. Markley the night she disappeared. Is that so?”

“It’s so. I helped her dress for the evening.”

“Did she go out alone?”

“Yes. Alone.”

“Do you know where she was going?”

“I assumed that she was going to see Mr. Lawler. She didn’t tell me.”

“Did she go to see Mr. Lawler often?”

“Twice a week, maybe. Sometimes more.”

“How do you know? Did she confide in you?”

“More in me than anyone else. She had to talk to someone.”

“I see. Were you devoted to Mrs. Markley?”

“Yes. She was very kind, very unhappy. I pitied her.”

“Because of the death of her child?”

“Partly because of that. I don’t know. She was not happy.”

“Did you approve of her affair with Mr. Lawler?”

“Not approve, exactly. I understood it. She needed a special kind of love. A kind of attention.”

“Mr. Lawler gave her this?”

“He must have given it to her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have gone on with him. That’s reasonable.”

“Yes, it is. It’s reasonable. And so are you, Maria. You’re a very reasonable woman. Tell me. What was your impression of her the night she disappeared?”

“Pardon?”

“Her emotional state, I mean. Was she depressed? Cheerful?”

“Not depressed. Not cheerful. She was eager. There’s a difference between eagerness and cheerfulness.”

“That’s true. Besides being reasonable, Maria, you are also perceptive. Did she seem excessively agitated in any way?”

“Just eager. She was always eager when she went to see Mr. Lawler.”

“Do you think that Mr. Markley was aware of the relationship between his wife and Lawler?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t show much interest in anything Mrs. Markley did. Not even when the child died.”

“All right. Just one more question. Maria. What time did Mrs. Markley leave here?”

“About eight. Perhaps a few minutes before or after.”

“Thank you, Maria.”

Maria turned her still brown face toward Faith Salem, who smiled and nodded. The maid nodded in return, three times, and went away. Faith Salem stood up abruptly, standing with her legs spread and her hands rammed into the patch pockets of the short white coat.

“Well?” she said.

“It looks hopeless,” I said. “You’d be wasting your money.”

“Perhaps so. If I don’t waste it on you, I’ll waste it on someone else.”

“In that case, it might as well be me.”

“You agree, then? You’ll take the job?”

Looking up at her, I was beginning to feel dominated, which was not good, so I removed the feeling by standing.

“Tentatively,” I said.

“What do you mean, tentatively?”

“I’ll make a preliminary investigation. If anything significant or interesting comes out of it, I’ll go ahead. If not, I’ll quit. You’ll pay my expenses and twenty-five dollars a day. Are those terms acceptable?”

“Yes. I accept.”

“Another thing. I’m to be allowed to talk with whomever I think necessary. Is that also agreed?”

“Yes, of course.” She hesitated, her soft lower lip protruding again in the darkly brooding expression. “You mean Graham, I suppose. I’d prefer, naturally, that he not know whom you’re working for.”

“I won’t tell him unless I think it’s advisable. I promise that much.”

“That’s good enough. I have confidence in your word, Mr. Hand.”

“Ethical. Someone told you, and you believe it, and that’s what I am. I’ll begin my investigation, it you don’t mind, by asking you one more question. What are you afraid of?”

“Afraid? I’m afraid of nothing. I honestly believe that I’ve never been afraid of anything in my life.”

“I’m ready to concede that you probably haven’t. Let me put it differently. What disturbs you about Constance Markley’s disappearance?”

“I’ve explained that. I don’t like loose ends. Graham has asked me to marry him. For my own reasons, I want to accept. First, however, he has to get a divorce. He can get it, I suppose, on grounds of desertion. I only want to know that it really was desertion.”

“That’s not quite convincing. What alternative to desertion, specifically, do you have in mind?”

“You said you would ask one more question, Mr. Hand. You’ve asked two.”

“Excuse me. You can see how dedicated I become to my work.”

“I should appreciate that, of course, and I do. I honestly have no specific alternative in mind. I just don’t like the situation as it stands. There’s another thing, however. I knew Constance, and I liked her, and now by an exceptional turn of events I’m in the position of appropriating something that was hers. I want to know that it’s all right. I want to know where she went, and why she went wherever she did, and that everything is all right there and will be all right here, whatever happens.”

I believed her. I believed everything she told me. She was a woman I could not doubt or condemn or even criticize. If I had been as rich as Graham Markley, I’d have taken her away, later if not then, and I’d have kept her, and there would have been between us, in the end, more than the money which would have been essential in the beginning.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Do you have a photograph of Constance Markley that I can take along?”

“Yes. There’s one here that Maria brought. I’ll get it for you.”

She went inside and was gone for a few minutes and came back with the photograph. I took it from her and put it into the side pocket of my coat without looking at it. There would be plenty of time later to look at it, and now, in the last seconds of our first meeting, I wanted to look at Faith Salem.

“Goodbye,” I said. “I’ll see you again in a few days and let you know if I intend to go ahead.”

“Call before you come,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Certainly.”

“I’ll see you to the door.”

“No. Don’t bother. You’d better stay here in the sun. In another half hour, it’ll be gone.”

“Yes. So it will.” She looked up at the white disk in the sky beyond a ridge of tooled stone. “Goodbye, then. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

She offered me her hand, and I took it and held it and released it. In the middle of the black and white acre, I paused and looked back. She had already removed the short white coat and was lying on her stomach on the yellow pad. Her face was buried in the crook of an elbow.

I went on out and back to my office and put my feet on the desk and thought about her lying there in the sun. There was no sun in my office. In front of me was a blank wall, and behind me was a narrow window, and outside the narrow window was a narrow alley. Whenever I got tired of looking at the wall I could get up and stand by the window and look down into the alley, and whenever I got tired of looking into the alley I could sit down and look at the wall again, and whenever I got tired of looking at both the wall and the alley, which was frequently, I could go out somewhere and look at something else. Now I simply closed my eyes and saw clearly behind the lids a lean brown body interrupted in two places by the briefest of white hiatuses.

This was pleasant but not of the first importance. It was more important, though less pleasant, to think about Graham Markley. Conceding the priority of importance, I began reluctantly to think about him, and after a few minutes of reluctant thinking, I lowered my feet and reached for a telephone directory. After locating his name and number, I dialed the number and waited through a couple of rings, and then a voice came on that made me feel with its first careful syllable as if I’d neglected recently to bathe and clean my fingernails.

“Graham Markley’s residence,” the voice said.

“This is Percival Hand,” I said. “I’m a private detective. I’d like to speak with Mr. Markley.” Ordinarily I use the abbreviated version of my name, just plain Percy, but I felt compelled by the voice to be as proper and impressive as possible. As it was, in the exorbitantly long pause that followed, I felt as if I had been unpardonably offensive.

“If you will just hold the wire,” the voice said at last, “I shall see if Mr. Markley is at home.” Which meant, of course, that Mr. Markley was certainly at home, but that it remained to be seen if he would be so irresponsible as to talk with a private detective on the telephone, which was surely unlikely. I held the wire and waited. I inspected my nails and found them clean. I tried to smell myself and couldn’t. Another voice came on abruptly, and it was, as it developed, the voice of Graham Markley.

“Graham Markley speaking. What can I do for you, Mr. Hand?”

“I’d like to make an appointment to see you personally, if possible.”

“About what?”

I had already considered the relative advantages in this particular instance of candor and deception, and I had decided that there was probably little or nothing to choose between them. In cases where deception gains me nothing, I’m always prepared to be candid, and that’s what I was now.

“About your wife. Your third wife, that is.”

“I can’t imagine why my wife should be a point of discussion between you and me, Mr. Hand.”

“I thought you might be able to give me some useful information.” There was a moment of waiting. The wire sang softly in the interim.

“For what purpose?” he said. “Am I to understand that you’re investigating my wife’s disappearance?”

“That’s right.”

“At whose request?”

“I’m not at liberty to say at the moment.”

“Come, Mr. Hand. If you expect any cooperation from me, you’ll have to be less reticent.”

“I haven’t received any cooperation from you yet, Mr. Markley.”

“It was reasonably apparent to everyone, including the police and myself, why my wife went away. I confess that I can’t see any use in stirring up an unpleasant matter that I had hoped was forgotten. Do you know anything that would justify it?”

Again I evaluated the advantages of candor and deception, and this time I chose deception. The advantages in its favor seemed so palpable, as a matter of fact, that the evaluation required no more than a second.

“I’ve learned something,” I lied, “that I think will interest you.”

“Perhaps you had better tell me what it is.”

“Sorry. I’d rather not discuss it over the telephone.”

“I can’t see you today. It’s impossible.”

“Tomorrow will do. If you’ll set a time, I’ll be happy to call on you.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll come to your office.”

“I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“Thank you for your consideration. However, I prefer to see you in your office. How about two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

“Good. I’ll be expecting you.”

I told him where my office was, and we said good-by and hung up. Hocking back in my chair, I elevated my feet again and closed my eyes. Faith Salem was still lying in the sun. I watched her for a few moments and then opened my eyes and lit a cigarette and began thinking about Regis Lawler. I didn’t accomplish much by this, for I didn’t have much material for thought to start with. I had met him casually a few times quite a while ago, in this or that place we had both gone to, but most of what I knew about him was incidental to what I knew about his brother, who was older and generally more important and had more about him worth knowing.

The brother’s name was Silas. After long and precarious apprentice years in a number of illegal operations, he had begun slowly to achieve a kind of acceptance, even respectability, that increased in ratio to the measure of his security. Now he was the owner of a fine restaurant. At least, it was a restaurant among other things, and it was that equally, if not primarily. When you went there, it was assumed that you had come for good food, and that’s what you got. You got it in rich and quiet surroundings to the music of a string quartet that sometimes played Beethoven as well as Fritz Kreisler and Johann Strauss. The chefs were the best that Lawler could hire, and the best that Lawler could hire were as good as any and better than most. On the correct principle that good food should tolerate no distractions, the service was performed by elderly colored waiters who were artists in the difficult technique of being solicitous without being obtrusive.

If you wanted distractions, you went downstairs, below street level. This was known as the Apache Room, a little bit of the Left Bank transplanted, and it was phony and made no pretense of being anything else, and it was frankly for people who liked it that way. There were red-checked cloths on the tables, pretty girls with pretty legs who serviced the tables, a small orchestra with the peculiar quality that is supposed to be peculiarly Parisian, and murals all around the wails of girls in black stockings doing the can-can alternating with other murals of other girls being maltreated by Apaches and always showing quite a lot of one white thigh above a fancy garter in the deep slit of a tight skirt.

On the floor above the restaurant, up one flight of carpeted stairs, you could go to gamble if you chose. In a series of three large rooms muffled in drapes and carpets, you could play roulette or poker or blackjack or shoot dice, and sometimes you might even win at one or the other or all, but more often, of course, you lost and were expected to lose graciously. If you did not, as sometimes happened, you were escorted outside by a brace of hard-handed gentlemen in evening clothes, and you were thereafter persona non grata until you received absolution and clearance from Silas Lawler himself. The games were reputed to be honest, and, all things considered, they probably were.

In the basement, you could dance and make moderate love and get drunk, if you wished, on expensive drinks. In the restaurant, you did not get drunk or dance or make love or look at naughty murals. In the game rooms, you gambled quietly with no limit except your own judgment and bank account, and you saved everything else for some other place and some other time. Patrons passed as they pleased from one level to another, but the atmosphere was never permitted to go with them. The basement never climbed the stairs, nor did the upper floors descend.

Silas Lawler was, in brief, not a man to be taken lightly, or a man who would take lightly any transgression against himself or his interests. It was, I reflected, wholly incredible that he would be indifferent to the disappearance of a brother. Whatever the reason for the disappearance, whatever the technique of its execution, Silas Lawler knew it, or thought he knew it, and he might be prevailed upon to tell me in confidence, or he might not, but in any event it would be necessary for me to talk with him as soon as I could, which would probably be tomorrow. I would see Graham Markley at two, and later I would try to see Silas Lawler, and if nothing significant came of these two meetings I would go again to see Faith Salem, which would be a pleasure, and terminate our relationship, which would not.

Having thought my way back to Faith Salem, I closed my eyes and tried to find her, but the sun had left the terrace, and so had she. Opening my eyes, I lowered my feet and stood up. I had determined an agenda of sorts, and now there seemed to be nothing of importance left to do on this particular day. Besides, it was getting rather late, and I was getting rather hungry, and so I went out and patronized a steak house and afterward spent one-third of the night doing things that were not important and not related to anything that had gone before. About ten o’clock I returned to the room and bath and hot plate that I euphemistically called home. I went to bed and slept well.

Chapter 3

I woke up at seven in the morning, which is a nasty habit of mine that endures through indiscretions and hangovers and intermittent periods of irregular living. In the bathroom, I shaved and necessarily looked at my face in the mirror. I like you, Mr. Hand, Faith Salem had said. I like your looks. Well, it was an ambiguous expression. You could like the looks of a Collie dog or a pair of shoes or a Shoebill stork. It could mean that you were inspired by confidence or amusement or the urge to be a sister. Looking at my face, I was not deluded. I decided that I was probably somewhere between the dog and the stork. I finished shaving and dressed and went out for breakfast and arrived in due time at my office, where nothing happened all morning.

Two o’clock came, but Graham Markley didn’t. At ten after, he did.

I heard him enter the little cubbyhole in which my clients wait when there is another client ahead of them, which is something that should happen oftener than it does, and when I got to the door to meet him, he was standing there looking antiseptic among the germs. His expression included me with the others.

“Mr. Hand?” he said.

“That’s right. You’re Mr. Markley, I suppose?”

“Yes. I’m sorry to be late.”

“Think nothing of it. In this office, ten minutes late is early. Come in, please.”

He walked past me and sat down in the client’s chair beside the desk. Because I felt he would consider it an imposition, I didn’t offer to shake hands. I felt that he might even ignore or reject the offer, which would have made me indignant or even indiscreet. Resuming my place in the chair behind the desk, I made a quick inventory and acquired an impression. He sat rigidly, with his knees together and his hat on his knees. His straight black hair was receding but still had a majority present. His face was narrow, his nose was long, his lips were thin. Arrogance was implicit. He looked something like the guy who used to play Sherlock Holmes in the movies. Maybe he looked like Sherlock Holmes.

“Precisely what do you want to tell me, Mr. Hand?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “that isn’t quite my position. What I want is for you to tell me something.”

“Indeed? I gathered from our conversation on the telephone yesterday that you were in possession of some new information regarding my wife.”

“Did I infer that? It isn’t exactly true. What I meant to suggest was that the available information isn’t adequate. It leaves too much unexplained.”

“Do you think so? The police apparently didn’t. As a matter of fact, it was quite clear to everyone what my wife had done. It was, as you may realize, an embarrassing affair for me, and there seemed to be no good purpose in giving it undue publicity or in pursuing it indefinitely.”

“Do you still feel that way? That there is no purpose in pursuing it any further?”

“Until yesterday I did. Now I’m not so sure. I don’t wish to interfere with whatever kind of life my wife is trying to establish for herself, nor do I wish to restore any kind of contact between her and me, but since our telephone conversation I’ve begun to feel that it would be better for several reasons if she could be located.”

“Are you prepared to help?”

“Conditionally.”

“What conditions?”

“Are you, for your part, prepared to tell me who initiated this investigation?”

“What action would you consider taking if I were to tell you?”

“None. The truth is, I’m certain that I know. I merely want to verify it.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Miss Salem? I thought so. Well, it’s understandable. Under the circumstances of our relationship, she’s naturally concerned. She urged me once previously to try again to locate my wife, but I wasn’t inclined to reopen what was, as I said, an unpleasant and embarrassing affair. Apparently I underestimated the strength of her feeling.”

“You don’t resent her action, then?”

“Certainly not. I’m particularly anxious to settle any uneasiness she may feel. I’m even willing to assume the payment of your fee.”

“That’s between you and her, of course. Will you tell me why you think your wife disappeared?”

“As to why she disappeared, I can only speculate. As to why she left, which is something else, I’m certain. She was having an affair with a man named Regis Lawler. They went away together. The relationship between my wife and me had deteriorated by that time to such an extent that I really didn’t care. I considered it a satisfactory solution to our problem.”

“Satisfactory? You said painful and embarrassing.”

“Painful and embarrassing because it was humiliating. Any husband whose wife runs away with another man looks rather ridiculous. I mean that I had no sense of loss.”

“I see. Did she give you any idea that she was leaving before she went?”

“None. We didn’t see each other often the last few months we lived together. When we did see each other, we found very little to say.”

“You said you could only speculate as to why she disappeared instead of leaving openly. I’d like to hear your speculation.”

“You would need to have known her before you could understand. She was, to put it kindly, rather unstable. Less kindly, she was neurotic. She may have been almost psychotic at times. I don’t know. I don’t understand the subtle distinctions between these things. Anyhow, she had had a bad time when our child died. At first, after the initial shock, she became withdrawn and depressed, totally uninterested in living. Later there was a reaction. A kind of hysterical appetite for activity and experiences. It was then that she met Regis Lawler. It’s my opinion that she disappeared because she wanted to cut herself off completely from the life that had included our marriage and the death of our child. It’s difficult to believe, I know.”

“I wouldn’t say so. Not so difficult. I’ve already considered that motivation, as a matter of fact. It seems to fit in with the little I know about her. There’s another point, however, chat bothers me. Was Regis Lawler the kind of man to fall in with such a scheme?

“I can’t answer that. If he was devoted to her, it’s fair to assume that he would do as she wished, especially if she convinced him that it was something she desperately needed.”

“Possibly. I didn’t know Lawler well enough to have an idea. Miss Salem said that Mrs. Markley’s family had quite a lot of money. Did Mrs. Markley herself have any?”

“No. Her mother and father were both dead when we married. If they had money at one time, which I believe was so, it had been dissipated. The estate, I understand, did little more than pay the claims against it.”

“Then your wife had no personal financial matters to settle before she left?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Was Regis Lawler a wealthy man?”

“I have no idea. His brother apparently is.”

“Well, you can see what I’m getting at. It would not be a simple matter for a man of wealth to disappear. It would certainly entail the liquidation of assets — securities, property, things like that. He’d have to convert his wealth to negotiable paper that he could carry with him. If he wanted to assure his not being traced through them, he’d have to convert to cash. Do you know if Regis Lawler did any such thing?”

“No. But the police surely made such an obvious investigation. Since it was not an issue, it follows that Lawler did do something of the sort, that he had no holdings to convert.”

“Right. If Lawler had left much behind, the police wouldn’t have quit investigating. They’d have smelled more than a love affair. As you say, he either converted or had nothing to convert. At any rate, he must have had considerable cash in hand. Running away with a woman, I mean, wouldn’t be any two-dollar tour. Unless he had a job arranged somewhere, an assured income, he must have been, putting it mildly, damn well heeled.”

“Oh, I think it’s safe to assume that he had at least enough cash to last a while. I can’t imagine that. Regis Lawler was a pauper.”

His tone implied that no one but a simpleton, specifically me, would waste time speculating about it. I was beginning to think he was right. That was okay, though. I had been convinced from the beginning that I was wasting my time on the whole case. That was okay too, since I was doing it for a fee.

“How long ago was it that Mrs. Markley left?” I said.

“Two years ago next month.”

“Did she take anything with her? Any clothes, for example? I know from talking with her maid that she took nothing when she left home that night, but I’m thinking she might have taken or sent luggage ahead to be picked up later. She’d have done something like that, I imagine, if she was being secretive.”

“No doubt. On the other hand, if you accept the theory that she intended to make a complete break, she might not have wanted to keep any of her old possessions, not even her clothes. I don’t find this incredible in her case. Anyhow, I honestly don’t know if she took anything. She had closets full of clothes, of course. If anything was missing, I wouldn’t know.”

“How about the maid?”

“She thought that nothing was missing, but she wasn’t positive.” He looked at his wrist watch and stood up abruptly, his knees still together as they had been all the time he was sitting, and he had, looking down at me, a kind of stiff, military bearing and collateral arrogance. “I’m sorry to end this interview, Mr. Hand, but I have another appointment. You’ll have to excuse me.”

“Certainly,” I said. “I was running out of questions, anyhow. Thanks very much for coming in.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t been very helpful.”

“You never know. It doesn’t sound like much now, but it may mean something later.”

I walked around the desk and with him to the door. I didn’t offer to shake hands, and nether did he.

“Please inform Miss Salem or me of any progress,” he said.

“I’m not optimistic,” I said.

The door closed between us, and I went back and sat down. As far as I was concerned, I was still wasting time.

Chapter 4

From street level I went up two shallow steps into a spacious hall. The floor was carpeted. The walls were paneled with dark and lustrous walnut. At the far end of the hall, a broad sweep of stairs ascended. To my right as I entered was the dining room. The floor was carpeted in there also, and the walls were also walnut paneled. Tables were covered with snowy cloths and set with shining silver. A few early diners were dining. The string quartet was playing something softly that I remembered by sound and remembered after a moment by name. Stars in My Eyes. By Fritz Kreisler. A very pretty tune.

I looked right. A cocktail lounge was over that way, beyond a wide entrance and down a step. A number of people were drinking cocktails. There was no music. I recognized a martini, which was all right, a Manhattan, which was better, and an Alexander, which you can have. Everything was very elegant, very sedate. Maybe someone saw me, maybe not. No one spoke to me or tried to stop me. I walked down the hall and up the stairs.

The carpet went up with me, but the walnut stayed below. The hall upstairs ran a gauntlet of closed doors recessed in plaster. It was nice plaster, though, rough textured and painted a soft shade of brown. Cinnamon or Nutmeg or one of the names that brown acquires when it becomes a decorator color. It was too early for the games, and the rooms behind the doors were quiet. All, that is, except the last room behind the last door, which was the private room of Silas Lawler. Someone in there was playing a piano. A Chopin waltz was being played. I thought at first it was a recording, but then I decided it wasn’t. It was good, but not good enough.

I opened the door softly and stepped inside and closed the door behind me. It was Silas Lawler himself at the piano. He turned his face toward me, but his eyes had the kind of blind glaze that the eyes of a man may have when he is listening to good music or looking at his mistress or thinking of something a long way off. A pretty girl was sitting in a deep chair on the back of her neck. She had short black hair and smoky eyes and a small red petulant mouth. She was facing the door and me directly, and her eyes moved over me lazily without interest. Otherwise, she did not move in the slightest, and she did not speak.

Lawler finished the Chopin waltz, and the girl said, “That was nice, Lover.” She moved nothing but her lips, in shaping the words, and her eyes, which she rolled toward him in her head. She didn’t sound as if she meant what she said, and Lawler didn’t look as if he believed her. He didn’t even look as if he heard her. He was still staring at me, and the glaze was dissolving in his eyes.

“Who are you?” he said.

“Percy Hand,” I said. “We’ve met.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I remember you. Don’t you believe in knocking?”

“I didn’t want to interrupt the music. I like Chopin.”

“Do you? It’s better when it’s played right.”

“You play it fine. I thought at first it was Brailowsky.”

“If you thought it was Brailowsky, you’ve never heard him.”

“I’ve heard him, all right. I went to a concert once. I got a couple records.”

“In that case, you’ve got no ear for music. Brailowsky and I don’t sound alike.”

“Maybe not. Maybe it was just the shock of hearing you play at all. I never figured Silas Lawler for a pianist.”

“I was a deprived kid. I had secret hungers. I made some money and took lessons.”

“So was I. So had I. I didn’t.”

“Make money or take lessons?”

“Both.”

“You can see he’s poor,” the girl said. “He wears ready-made suits.”

“Botany 500,” I said. “Sixty-five bucks.”

Lawler looked at her levelly across the grand. I could have sworn that there was an expression of distaste on his face. The deprived kid business was on the level, I thought. He remembered the time. He didn’t like people who made cracks about the poor.

“This is Robin Robbins,” he said carefully. “She’s pretty, but she’s got no manners. That isn’t her real name, by the way. She didn’t think the one she had was good enough. The man you’re trying to insult, honey, is Percy Hand, a fairly good private detective.”

“He looks like Jack Palance,” she said.

“Jack Palance is ugly,” I said, “God, he’s ugly.”

“So are you,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“In a nice way,” she said. “Jack Palance is ugly in a nice way, and so are you. I don’t really care if you’re poor.”

“Just as long as you’re good in bed,” Lawler said. “Come over here.”

I walked over and stood beside the piano. Now I could see the girl only by looking over my shoulder. Instead, I looked down at Lawler. His face was clean shaven and square. He was neither tall nor fat, but he must have weighed two hundred. His hands rested quietly on the piano keys. They looked like chunks of stone.

“Here I am,” I said. “Why?”

“I want to be able to reach you in case you haven’t got a good reason for busting in here.”

“I’ve got a reason. You tell me if it’s good.”

“I’ll let you know. One way or another.”

“I want to talk about a couple people you know. Or knew. Your brother and Constance Markley.” He didn’t budge. His face stayed still, his body stayed still, the hands on the keys stayed still as stone. “It’s lousy. I’d be bored to death.”

“Is that so? I’m beginning to get real interested in them.”

“That’s your mistake. While we’re on mistakes, I’ll point out another. He isn’t my brother. Not even step-brother. Foster brother.”

“That makes it less intimate, I admit. Not quite impersonal, though. Wouldn’t you like to know where he is? How he is? Or maybe you already know.”

“I don’t. I don’t want to.”

“Well, I never heard the like. A man’s wife disappears. He doesn’t care. A man’s foster brother disappears. He doesn’t care. The indifference fascinates me.”

“Let me figure this.” His right hand suddenly struck a bass chord and dropped off the keys into his lap. The sound waves lingered, faded, died. “I’ve got a sluggish mind, and I think slow. Regis and Constance ran away. You’re a private detective. Could it be you’re trying to make yourself a case?”

“I’m not making any case. The case is made. I’m just working on it.”

“Take my advice. Don’t. Drop it. Forget it. It isn’t worth your time.”

“My time’s worth twenty-five dollars a day and expenses. That’s what I’m getting paid.”

“Who’s paying?”

“Sorry. I’m not at liberty to say.”

“It’s not enough.”

“I get by on it.”

“Not enough to pay a hospital bill, I mean. Or the price of a funeral, even.”

The girl stood up suddenly and stretched. She made a soft mewing sound, like a cat. I turned my head and watched her over my shoulder. Her breasts thrust out against her dress, her spread thighs strained against her tight skirt.

“I think I’ll go away somewhere,” she said. “I abhor violence.”

“You do that, honey,” Silas Lawler said.

She walked across to the door, and she walked pretty well. She had nice legs that moved nicely. You could follow the lines of her behind in the tight skirt. I’d have been more impressed if I hadn’t seen Faith Salem lying in the sun. At the door, before going out, she paused and looked back at me and grinned.

“You couldn’t hurt his face much,” she said. “You could change it, but you couldn’t hurt it.”

She was gone, and I said, “Lovely thing. Is it yours?”

“Now and then.” He shrugged. “If you’re interested, I won’t be offended.”

“I’m not. Besides, I’m too ugly. Were you threatening me a moment ago?”

“About the hospital, yes. About the funeral, no. It wouldn’t be necessary.”

“You never can tell. I get tired of living sometimes.”

“You’d get tireder of being dead.”

“That could be. The way I hear it explained, it sounds pretty dull.”

“You’re a pretty sharp guy, Hand. You’ve got a nose for what’s phony. I’m surprised a guy like you wouldn’t smell a phony case.”

“I won’t say I haven’t. I’m open to conviction.”

“All right. Regis and Constance had a real fire going. It didn’t develop, it was just there in both of them at first sight. First sight was right here. Downstairs in the lounge. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t. Regis was there, and Constance was there, and to hell with everyone else. Everyone and everything. They got in bed, and whatever they had survived. They ran away together, that’s all. Why don’t you leave it alone?”

“You make it sound so simple. I can’t help thinking, though, that running away’s one thing, disappearing’s another. You see the difference? There is one you know.”

“I see. It wouldn’t seem so strange if you’d known the woman. Constance, I mean. She’d had a bad time. She was sad, lost, looking for a way to somewhere. You get me? She was a real lady, but she had queer ideas. When she left, she wanted to leave it all, including herself. It’s pathetic when you stop to think about it.”

“I get the same picture everywhere. The same idea. I’m beginning to believe it. I’m skeptical about Regis, though. He doesn’t seem the type.”

“He wasn’t. Not before he met Constance. Before he met her, he was a charming, no-good bastard, but then he met her, and he changed. Queer. You wouldn’t have thought she’d have appealed to him, but she did. He’d have done anything she wanted. Very queer.”

“Yeah. Queer and corny.”

“I don’t blame you for thinking so. You’d have to see it to believe it.”

“Did Regis have an interest in this restaurant?”

“Regis didn’t have a pot. Just what I gave him. Spending money.”

“What did they use for cash when they left? What are they using now? And don’t feed me any more corn. You don’t live on love. Some people get a job and live in a cottage, but not Regis and Constance. Everything they were and did is against it.”

The fingers of his left hand moved up the keys. It was remarkable how lightly that chunk of rock moved. The thin sounds of the short scale lasted no longer than a few seconds. The left hand joined the right in his lap.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I don’t know why. What I ought to do is throw you out of here. Anyhow, Regis had cash. Enough for a lifetime in the right place. See that picture over there? It’s a copy of a Rembrandt. Behind it there’s a safe. Regis knew the combination. The night he went away, I had seventy-five grand in it. Regis took it.”

“That’s a lot of cash to have in a safe behind a picture.”

“I had it for a purpose. Never mind what.”

“You let him get away with it? You didn’t try to recover it?”

“No. To tell the truth, I was relieved. I always felt an obligation toward him because of the woman whose lousy kid he was. Now the obligation is wiped out. We’re quits.” He lifted both hands and replaced them gently on the keys of the piano. There was not the slightest sound from the wires inside. “Besides, I figured it was partly for her. For Constance. I liked her. I hope she’s happier than she ever was.”

I started to refer again to corn, but I thought better of it. Then I thought that it would probably be a good time to leave, and I turned and went as far as the door. “Hand,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Forget it. Drop it. You hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said.

I opened the door and went out. After three steps in the hall, I heard the piano. What I heard from it was something else by Chopin.

Chapter 5

On the way in, no one had spoken to me. On the way out, someone did. The lower hall was the place, and Robin Robbins was the person. She was standing in the entrance to the cocktail lounge, at the edge of the shallow step, and although she was standing erect, like a lady, she somehow gave the impression of leaning indolently against an immaterial lamppost. Her voice was lazy, threaded with a kind of insolent amusement. “Buy me a drink?” she said.

“I’m too poor,” I said.

“Tough. Let me buy you one.”

“I’m too proud.”

“Poor and proud. My God, it sounds like something by Horatio Alger.”

“Junior.”

“What?”

“Horatio Alger, Junior. You forgot the junior.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t forget him altogether. What do you say we start trying?”

“I’m surprised you know anything about him to start trying to forget. He was a long time ago, honey. Were kids still reading him when you were a kid?”

“I wouldn’t know. I was never a kid. I was born old and just got older.”

“Like me. That gives us something in common, I guess. Maybe we ought to have that drink together after all. I’ll buy.”

“No. I’ve got a better idea for a poor, proud man. In my apartment there’s a bottle of scotch left over from another time. Someone gave it to me. We could go there and drink out of it for free.”

“I don’t care for scotch. It tastes like medicine.”

“There’s a bottle of bourbon there too. In case you don’t care for bourbon, there’s rye.”

“No brandy? No champagne?”

“Anything you want.”

“That’s quite a selection to be left over from other times. Was it all given to you?”

“Why not? People are always giving me something. They seem to enjoy it.”

“Thanks for offering to share the wealth. However, I don’t think so. Some other time, maybe.”

She opened a small purse she was holding in her hands and extracted a cigarette. I went closer and supplied a light. She inhaled and exhaled and stared into the smoke with her smoky eyes. Her breath coming out with the smoke made a soft, sighing sound.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve got something I thought you might be interested in.”

“You’ve got plenty I might be interested in, honey.”

She dragged again and sighed again. The smoke thinned and hung in a pale blue haze between us. In her eyes was a suggestion of something new. Something less than insolence, a little more than amusement. Her lush little mouth curved amiably.

“That’s not quite what I meant, but it’s something to consider. What I meant was something I can tell you.”

“Information? Is it free like the scotch and the bourbon and the rye? Don’t forget I’m a guy who wears ready-made suits.”

“I remember. Poor and proud and probably honest. Right out of H. Alger, Junior. Don’t worry about it, though. It’s free like the scotch and the bourbon and the rye.”

“Everything free. No price on anything. I hope you won’t be offended, honey, but somehow I got an idea it’s out of character.”

“All right. Forget it. You were asking questions about a couple of people, and I thought you were, interested. My mistake, Horatio.” Her mouth curved now in the opposite direction from amiability. What had been in her eyes was gone, and what replaced it was contempt. I thought in the instant before she turned away that she was going to spit on the floor. Before she could descend the step and walk away nicely on her nice legs with the neat movement of her neat behind, I took a step and put a hand on her arm, and we stood posed that way for a second or two or longer, she arrested and I arresting, and then she turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder.

“Yes?” she said.

“Make mine bourbon,” I said.

We went the rest of the way down the hall together and down the two steps and outside. Beside the building was a paved parking lot reserved for patrons, and I had left my car there, although I was not properly a patron. We walked around and got into the car and drove in it to her apartment, which was in a nice building on a good street. It was on the fifth floor, which we reached by elevator, and it didn’t have any terrace that got the sun in the afternoon, or any terrace at all, or any of many features that the apartment of Faith Salem had, including several acres, but it was a nice enough apartment just the same, a far better apartment than any I had ever lived in or probably ever would. Besides, it was certainly something that someone had just wanted to give her. For a consideration, of course. An exchange, in a way, of commodities.

“Fix a bourbon for yourself,” she said. “For me too, in water. I’ll be back in a minute.”

She went out of the room and was gone about five times as long as the minute. In the meanwhile, I found ingredients and mixed two bourbon highballs and had them ready when she returned. She looked just the same as she’d looked when she’d gone, which was good enough to be disturbing.

“I lose,” I said.

“Some people always do,” she said. “Lose what, exactly?”

“A bet. With myself. I bet you’d gone to get into something more comfortable.”

“Why should I? What I’m wearing is comfortable enough. There’s practically nothing to it.”

I was facing her with a full glass in each hand. She approached me casually, as if she were going to ask for a light or brush a crumb off my tie. She kept right on walking, right into me, and put her arms around my neck and her mouth on my mouth, and I stood there with my arms projecting beyond her on both sides, the damn glasses in my hands, and we remained static and breathless in this position for quite a long time. Finally she stepped back and helped herself to the glass in one of my hands. She took a drink and tilted her head and subjected me and my effect to a smoldering appraisal.

“I’ve always wanted to kiss a man as ugly as you,” she said. “It wasn’t bad.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve had worse myself, but under better conditions.”

“I’m wondering if it’s good enough to develop. I think it might be.”

“You go on wondering about it and let me know.”

“I’ll do that.”

She moved over to a chair and lowered herself onto her neat behind and crossed her nice legs. From where I found a chair and sat, across from her, I could see quite a lot of the legs. She didn’t mind, and neither did I.

“If you decide to develop it,” I said, “won’t Silas Lawler object?”

She swallowed some more of her highball and looked into what was left. Her soft and succulent little mouth assumed lax and ugly lines.

“To hell with Silas Lawler,” she said.

“Don’t kid me,” I said. “I know he pays the bills.”

“So he pays the bills. There’s one bill he may owe that he hasn’t paid. If he owes it, I want him to pay in full.”

“For what?”

“For the murder of Regis Lawler.”

She continued to look into her glass. From her expression, she must have seen something offensive on the bottom. I looked into mine and saw nothing but good whisky and pure water. I drained it.

“Maybe you don’t know what you said,” I said.

“I know what I said. I said he may owe it. I’d like to know.”

“And I’d like to know what makes you think he may.”

“Start with that fairy tale about Regis and Constance Markley running off together. Just disappearing completely so they could have a beautiful new life together. Do you believe it?”

“I don’t believe it. I don’t disbelieve it. I’ve got an open mind.”

“Brother, if you’d known Regis Lawler as well as I did, you’d know the whole idea is phony. He just wasn’t the type.”

“I’ve heard that. I’ve also heard that he was in love with Constance. It’s been suggested that he might have done for her what he wouldn’t have done for anyone else.”

“That’s another phony bit. His being in love with Constance, I mean. He wasn’t.”

“No? This is a new angle. Convince me.”

“Maybe I can’t. I don’t have any letters or tapes or photographs. Neither does anyone else, thank God. I could give you some interesting clinical descriptions, but I won’t. Basically I’m a modest girl. I like my privacy.”

“I think I get you, but I’m not sure. Are you telling me more or less delicately that Regis had love enough for two?”

“Two? Is that all the higher you can count? Anyhow, what’s love? All I know is, we went through the motions of what passes for love in my crowd, and he seemed to enjoy it. Whatever you call it, he felt more of it for me than he felt for anyone else, including Constance, and I guess you couldn’t have expected more than that from Regis.” Her little mouth had for a moment a bitter twist. The bitterness tainted the sound of her words. She did not have the look and sound of a woman who had been rejected. She had the look and sound of a woman who had been accepted with qualifications and used without them. Most of all, a woman who had understood the qualifications from the beginning and had accepted them and submitted to them.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I always have trouble understanding anything when it gets the least complicated. You were having Regis on the side of Silas, and Regis was having you on the side of Constance. Not that I want to make you sound like a chaser or a dish of buttered peas. Is that right?”

“Damn it, that’s what I said.”

“And Silas killed Regis in anger because he found out about it. Is that what you mean?”

“It’s a solid thought. I like it better than the fairy tale.”

“I’m not sure that I share your preference. I don’t want to hurt you, honey, but I doubt like hell that Silas considers you worth killing for. He just gave me permission to try my luck if the notion struck me, but maybe he didn’t really mean it. Anyhow, you’ll have to admit that it doesn’t sound like a case of homicidal jealousy.”

“Who mentioned jealousy?” She shrugged angrily, a small gesture of dismissal. “He’s proud. He’s vain and sensitive. He’s made a hell of a lot out of nothing at all, but he can’t forget that he only went to the fourth grade and got where he is by doing things proper people don’t do. He still feels secretly inferior and insecure, and he always will. The one thing he can’t stand is the slightest suggestion of contempt. He’d kill anyone for that. Can you think of anything more contemptuous than taking another man’s wife or mistress?”

I thought of seventy-five grand. It seemed to me that helping yourself to that much lettuce was a contemptuous act too, and I thought about discussing it as a motive for murder, but I couldn’t see that it would get me anywhere in present circumstances, and so I decided against it.

“So he killed Regis,” I said. “That was a couple of years ago. And ever since he’s gone on with you as if nothing at all had happened. After murder, business as usual at the same old stand. Is that it?”

“Sure. Why not? Laughing like hell all the time. Feeling all the time the same kind of contempt for Regis and me that he imagines we felt for him. Silas would get a lot of satisfaction out of something like that.” She looked down into her glass, swirling what was left of her drink around and around the inner circumference. Bitterness increased the distortion of her mouth. “He’ll throw me out after a while,” she said.

“You’re quite a psychologist,” I said. “All that stuff about inferiority and insecurity and implied contempt. I wish I had as much brains as you.”

“All right, you bastard. So I’m the kind who ought to stick to the little words. So I only went to the eighth grade myself. Go ahead and ridicule me.”

“You’re wrong. I wasn’t ridiculing you. I never ridicule anyone. The trouble your theory has is the same trouble that the other theory has, and the trouble with both is that they leave loose ends all over the place. I can mention a few, if you’d care to hear them.”

“Mention whatever you please.”

“All right. Where’s the body?”

“I don’t know. You’re the detective. Work on it”

“Where’s Constance? Did he kill both of them? If so, why? He had no reason to hate her. As a matter of fact, they should have been on the same team. You, not Constance, would have been the logical second victim.”

“I know. Don’t you think I’ve thought of that a thousand times? Maybe she knew he killed Regis. Maybe she learned about it somehow or even actually witnessed it. Damn it, I’ve told you something you didn’t know. I’ve told you about Regis and me. I’ve told you he was not really in love with Constance and would never have run away with her for any longer than a weekend. I’ve told you this, and it’s the truth, and all you do is keep wanting me to be the detective. You’re the detective, brother. I’ve told you that too.”

“Sure you have. I’m the detective and all I’ve got to do is explain how someone killed a man and a woman and completely disposed of their bodies. That would be a tough chore, honey. Practically impossible.”

“Silas Lawler’s been doing the practically impossible for quite a few years. He’s a very competent guy.”

“He Is. I know it, and I’m not forgetting it. However, I can think of a third theory that excludes him. It’s simpler and it ties up an end or two. You said Regis didn’t love Constance. He just had an affair with her. Suppose he tried to end the affair and got himself killed for his trouble? She was a strange female, I’m told. Almost psychotic, someone said. Do you think she was capable?”

Robin Robbins stood up abruptly. She carried her glass over to the ingredients and stood quietly with her back to me. Apparently she was only considering whether she should mix herself another or not. She decided not. Depositing her glass, she helped herself to a cigarette from a box and lit it with a lighter. Trailing smoke, she returned to her chair.

“Oh, Constance was capable, all right,” she said. “She was much too good to do a lot of things I’ve done and will probably do again and again if the price is right, but there’s one thing she could have done that I couldn’t, and that’s murder. And if you think that sounds like more eighth grade psychology, you can forget it and get the hell out of here.”

“I don’t know about the psychology,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure that you don’t really think she killed Regis. If you did, you’d be happy to say so.”

“That’s right.” She nodded in amiable agreement. “I wouldn’t mind at all doing Constance a bad turn, but she didn’t kill Regis. That’s obvious.”

“I’m inclined to agree. In the first place, she couldn’t have got rid of the body. In the second place, if she could and did, why run away afterward? It wouldn’t be sensible.”

“Well, it’s your problem, brother. I guess it’s time you went somewhere else and began to think about it.”

“Yeah. I’m the detective. You’ve told me and told me. You haven’t told me much else, though. Not anything very convincing. You got an idea that Silas killed Regis because you and Regis made a kind of illicit cuckold of him, and you lure me here with free bourbon and tell me so, and I’m supposed to be converted by this evangelical message. It’s pretty thin, if you don’t mind my saying it. Excuse me for being skeptical.”

“That’s all right. I didn’t expect much from you anyhow. I just thought I’d try.”

“Try harder.”

“I’ve got nothing more to tell you.”

“Really? That’s hard to believe. You’re not exactly inexpensive, honey, and I’ll bet you have to earn your keep. What I mean is, you and Silas surely get convivial on occasions. Even intimate. Men are likely to become indiscreet under such circumstances. They say things they wouldn’t ordinarily say. If Silas killed Regis because of you, I’d think he’d even have an urge to gloat. By innuendo, at least.”

She moved her head against the back of her chair in a lazy negative. “I’m a girl who knows the side of her bread the butter is on, and I earn my keep. You’re right there. But you’re wrong if you think Silas Lawler is the kind who gets confidential or careless. He’s a very reserved guy, and he protects his position. He tends to his own business, and most of his business nowadays is on the three floors of the building we just left. To be honest, he’s pretty damn dull. He works. He eats and sleeps and plays that damn piano, and once in a while he makes love. Once a month, for a few days, he goes to some place called Amity.”

“Amity? Why does he go there?”

“I wouldn’t know. I guess he has interests.”

“Do you ever go with him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m never invited, thank God. Who wants to go to Amity?”

I took a deep breath and held it till it hurt and then released it.

“That’s right,” I said. “Who does? Incidentally there’s something else that nags me. It seems to me that you’re trying to ruin a good thing for yourself, and I don’t understand it. What happens to you and all this if Silas turns out to be a murderer?”

“Whatever it is, I’ll try to bear it. I may even celebrate. In the meanwhile, on the chance that I’m wrong about him, I may be as well be comfortable.”

I stood up and looked down, and she stayed down and looked up, and because she was a shrewd and tough wench with looks and brains and queer attachments and flexible morals, I though it would be pleasant and acceptable to kiss her once in return for the time she’d kissed me once, and that’s what I did, and it was. It was pleasant and acceptable. It even started being exciting. Just as her hands were reaching for me, I straightened and turned and walked to the door, and she came out of the chair after me. She put her arms around my waist from behind.

“It’s worth developing,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided.”

“Sorry,” I said. “My own mind isn’t made up yet. I’ll let you know.”

I loosened her hands and held them in mine against my belly. After a few seconds, I dropped them and opened the door and started out.

“You ugly bastard,” she said.

“Don’t call me,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

“Go to hell,” she said.

I got on out and closed the door softly and began wishing immediately that I hadn’t.

Chapter 6

The next morning I checked a couple of morgues. The newspaper variety. I turned the brittle bones of old dailies and disturbed the rest of dead stories, but I learned nothing of significance regarding Constance Markley. She was there, all right, briefly and quietly interred in ink. No one had got excited. No one had smelled anything, apparently, that couldn’t eventually be fumigated in divorce court. I left the second morgue about noon and stopped for a steak sandwich and a beer on the way to my office. In the office, sitting, I elevated my feet and began to think.

Maybe thinking is an exaggeration. I didn’t really have an idea.

All I had was an itch, a tiny burr of coincidence that had caught in a wrinkle of my cortex. It didn’t amount to much, but I thought I might as well worry it a while, having nothing else on hand or in mind, and what I thought I would do specifically was go back and see Faith Salem again, and I would go, if I could arrange it, when Faith and the sun were on the terrace. She had said to call ahead of time, and so I lowered my feet and reached for the phone, and that’s when I saw the gorilla.

He was a handsome gorilla in a Brooks Brothers suit, but a gorilla just the same. There’s something about the breed that you can’t miss. They smell all right, and they look all right, and there’s nothing you can isolate ordinarily as a unique physical characteristic that identifies one of them definitely as a gorilla rather than as a broker or a rich plumber, but they seem to have a chronic quality of deadliness that a broker or a plumber would have only infrequently, in special circumstances, if ever. This one was standing in the doorway watching me, and he had got there without a sound. He smiled. He was plainly prepared to treat me with all the courtesy I was prepared to make possible.

“Mr. Hand?” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“I have a message from Mr. Silas Lawler. He would appreciate it very much if you could come to see him as soon as possible.”

“I just went to see him yesterday.”

“Mr. Lawler knows that. He regrets that he must inconvenience you again so soon. Apparently something important has come up.”

“Something else important came up first. I was just getting ready to go out and take care of it.”

“Mr. Lawler is certain that you’ll prefer to give his business priority.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what to do. You go back to Mr. Lawler and tell him I’ll be around this evening or first thing tomorrow.”

“Mr. Lawler is most urgent that you come immediately. I have instructions to drive you there and bring you back. For your convenience, of course.”

“Of course. Mr. Lawler is notoriously considerate. Suppose I don’t want to go.”

“Mr. Lawler hopes you will want to accommodate him.”

“Let’s suppose I refuse.”

“Mr. Lawler didn’t anticipate that contingency, I’m afraid. He said to bring you.”

“Even if I resist?”

“As I understood my orders, Mr. Lawler made no qualifications.”

“Do you think you’re man enough to execute them without qualifications?”

“I think so.”

“In that case,” I said, “we’d better go.”

I got my hat and put it over the place where the lumps would have been if I hadn’t. Together, like cronies, we went downstairs and got into his car, which was a Caddy, and drove in it to Silas Lawler’s restaurant plus. In the hall outside Silas Lawler’s private room, we stood and listened to the piano, which was being played. What was being played on it this time was not something by Chopin, and I couldn’t identify who it was by certainly, but I thought it was probably Mozart. The music was airy and intricate. It sounded as if it had been written by a man who felt very good and wanted everyone else to feel as good as he did.

“Mr. Lawler doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s playing,” the Brooks Brothers gorilla said.

“You can’t be too careful with artists,” I said. “They’re touchy.”

“Mr. Lawler’s a virtuoso,” he said.

He didn’t even blink when he said it. It was obviously a word he was used to and not something special for effect. I wondered if they were granting degrees to gorillas these days, but I didn’t think it would be wise to ask. There wouldn’t have been time for an answer, anyhow, for the virtuoso stopped playing the music by Mozart, or at least not Chopin, and the gorilla knocked twice on the door and opened it, and I walked into the room ahead of him.

Silas Lawler got off the bench and walked around the curve of the grand and stopped in the spot where the canary usually perches in nightclubs. He didn’t perch, however. He merely leaned. From the same chair in which she had sat yesterday, Robin Robbins looked across at me with a poker face, and I could see at once, in spite of shadows and cosmetics, that somebody had hung one on her. A plum-colored bruise spread down from her left eye across the bone of her cheek. There was still some swelling of the flesh too, although it had certainly been reduced from what it surely had been. She looked rather cute, to tell the truth. The shiner somehow made her look like the kid she said she never was.

“How are you, Hand?” Lawler said. “It was kind of you to come.”

“Your messenger was persuasive,” I said. “I couldn’t resist him.”

“Darcy, you mean. I can always depend on Darcy to do a job like a gentleman. He dislikes violence almost as much as I do. I’m sure you didn’t find him abusive.”

“Not at all. I’ve never been threatened half so courteously before.” I turned my head and looked down at Robin Robbins. “Apparently you weren’t so lucky, honey. You must have run into an interior gorilla somewhere.”

“I fell over my lip,” she said.

Lawler laughed, and I could have sworn that there was a note of tenderness in it. “Robin’s impetuous. She’s always doing something she later regrets, and I’m always prepared to forgive her eventually, although I sometimes lose my temper in the meanwhile. Isn’t that so, Robin?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “We love each other in spite of everything.”

“I won’t deny that Robin’s been punished,” Lawler said, “but I’m afraid I must charge you with being partially responsible, Hand. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for taking advantage of her innocence.”

“I am,” I said, “I truly am.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t think we need to be too critical. Robin, I realize, is even harder to resist than Darcy. For different reasons, of course. She’s told me what the two of you talked about yesterday after leaving here together, and she understands now how foolish she was. Don’t you, Robin?”

“Sure,” she said. “I was foolish.”

“She wants me to ask you to forget all about it, don’t you, Robin?”

Sure,” she said. “Forget it.”

“You see?” Lawler shrugged and shifted his weight against the piano. “Robin and I are really very compatible. We are never able to keep secrets from one another for very long.”

“That’s sweet,” I said. “I’m touched.”

He was looking directly at Robin for the first time now. “Wouldn’t you like to apologize to Mr. Hand for causing him so much trouble, Robin?”

“I apologize, Mr. Hand, from the bottom of my heart,” she said.

“I liked it better when you told me to go to hell,” I said.

Lawler stood erect and stopped looking at Robin in order to look at me. “That wasn’t a very gracious response, Hand. However, let it pass. I also want to apologize to you.”

“What for?”

“I’m afraid I was a little unreasonable yesterday. I understand now that you were hired to investigate the matter we discussed, and you’re naturally concerned about your fee. I have no right to ask you to sacrifice that, of course. What do you think it will amount to?”

“That depends on how long the job lasts. I get twenty-five dollars a day and expenses.”

“Very reasonable. I’ll pay you five thousand dollars to drop the case. That should be adequate.”

“Bribery?”

“Don’t be offensive. Compensation for the loss of your fee.”

“It’s not enough.”

“Really? I figure that it comes to two-hundred days’ work. What do you think would be fair?”

“Make it a million, and I’ll take it.”

“Your joke isn’t very funny, Hand. It’s bad taste to joke about a serious matter.”

“I’m not joking. You see, I’ve got to be compensated for more than the loss of a fee. I’ve got to be compensated for the loss of my integrity, such as it is. I don’t figure a million’s too much for that.”

“Nonsense. You’re wasting your time, anyhow. I assured you of that. Is it ethical to go on accepting a fee under false pretenses?”

“I explained to my client that it might not come to anything. Probably wouldn’t, as a matter of fact. We’re both satisfied.”

“Perhaps I could persuade your client that he is making a mistake. Would you care to give me his name?”

“No, I wouldn’t. The truth is, I don’t particularly care for your methods of persuasion.”

“No matter. If I really want to learn the identity of your client, I can do it easily enough. Now, however, I don’t propose to discuss this matter with you any longer. I believe I’ve made you a fair proposition. Do you still refuse to accept it?”

“Sorry. I’m holding out for the million.”

If there was the slightest sign between him and Darcy behind me, the lifting of a brow or the twitch of a tick, I never saw it. It could be, I guess, that they’d developed a kind of extra-sensory communication that functioned automatically when the time was precisely right. Anyhow, sign or not, Darcy grabbed me abruptly above the elbows from behind and wrenched my arms and shoulders back so violently that I thought for a moment I’d split down the middle like a spring fryer. At the same instant, Lawler made a fist and stepped forward within range.

“I regret this, Hand,” he said. “I really do.”

“I know,” I said. “You dislike violence. You and Darcy both.”

“It’s your own fault, of course. You’re behaving like a recalcitrant boy, and it’s necessary to teach you a lesson.”

“Don’t you think you ought to teach me somewhere else? You wouldn’t want to get blood on this expensive carpet.”

“It’s acrilan. Haven’t you heard of it? One of these new miracle fabrics. Blood wipes right off.”

“Is that a fact? Better living through chemistry. I’m impressed.” He was tired now of the whole business. I could see in his face that he was tired, and I believe that he actually did regret what he considered the necessity of having to do what he was going to do. It was only that he knew no other way to fight, in spite of Chopin and Mozart and the veneer of respectability, than the way of violence. He wanted to get it over with, and he did. He drove the fist into my face, and it was like getting hit with a jagged boulder. Flesh split on bone, and bone cracked, and darkness welled up internally.

I sagged, I guess, and hung by my arms from the hands of Darcy, and after a while, I guess, I straightened and lifted my head and was hit again in the face. When I opened my eyes after that, I was lying on the carpet, and there was blood on it. In my mouth there was more blood, and a thin and bitter fluid risen from my stomach. I was sick and in pain, but mostly I was ashamed. I got up slowly, in sections, and looked at Lawler through a pink mist.

“Your carnet’s a mess,” I said. “I hope you’re right about acrilan.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You’re a tough guy, Hand, and I like you. If you think I get any kicks out of pushing you around, you’re wrong. There’s a lavatory in there. Through that door. Why don’t you go in and wash your face?”

“I think I will,” I said.

I went in and turned on the cold tap and caught double handfuls of water and buried my face in them. The water burned like acid, but it revived me and dispelled the pink fog. In the mirror above the lavatory, I saw that a cut on my cheekbone needed a stitch or two. I found some adhesive tape in the medicine cabinet and pulled the cut together and went back out into the other room.

Lawler was seated at the grand again. Darcy was leaning against the wall behind him. Robin Robbins, in her chair, was still wearing her poker face. I thought I saw in her eyes a guarded gleam of something appealing. Compassion? Camaraderie based on mutual beatings? A raincheck? Who could be sure with Robin? I kept right on walking toward the door, and I was almost there when Lawler spoke to me.

“Hand,” he said.

I stopped but didn’t turn. I didn’t answer either. It hurt to talk, and I saw no sense in it.

“One thing more,” he said. “I made a reasonable offer, and you’d be wise to accept it. This is just a suggestion of what you’ll get if you don’t. I’ll put a check for five thousand in the mail today. You’ll get it tomorrow.”

“Thanks very much,” I said.

I started again and kept going and got on out of there.

Chapter 7

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 for 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 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 made 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 be 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 at college.”

“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 snapshot 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 a 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 finished 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’m driving to Amity tomorrow. 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 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-by, 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.

Chapter 8

I didn’t get out of town the next day until ten o’clock. It was three hundred fifty miles by highway to Amity. In my old clunker, allowing time for a couple of stops, I did well to average forty miles an hour. Figure it for yourself. It was almost exactly eight and a half hours later when I got there. About six-thirty. I was tired and hungry, and I went to a hotel and registered and went up to my room. I washed and went back down to the coffee shop and got a steak and ate it and went back to the room. By then it was eight. I lit a cigarette and lay down on the bed and began to wonder seriously why I was here and what the hell I was going to do, now that I was.

I thought about a lot of things. I thought about Robin Robbins looking like a tough and lovely kid with her beautiful shiner. I thought about Faith Salem lying in the sun. I thought about Silas Lawler and Graham Markley and Regis Lawler and Constance Markley. The last pair were shadows. I couldn’t see them, and I couldn’t entirely believe in them, and I wished suddenly that I had never heard of them. I did this thinking about these people, but it didn’t get me anywhere. I lay there on the bed in the hotel room for what seemed like an hour, and I was surprised, when I looked at my watch, to learn that less than half that time had passed. The room was oppressive, and I didn’t want to stay there any longer. Getting up, I went downstairs and walked around the block and came back to the hotel and bought a newspaper at the tobacco counter and sat down to read it. I read some of the front page and some of the sports page and all the comics and started on the classified ads.

Classified ads interest me. I always read them in the newspapers and in the backs of magazines that publish them. They are filled with the gains and losses and inferred intimacies of classified lives. If you are inclined to be a romantic, you can, by a kind of imaginative interpolation, read a lot of pathos and human interest into them. Someone in Amity, for instance, had lost a dog, and someone wanted to sell a bicycle that was probably once the heart of the life of some kid, and someone named Martha promised to forgive someone named Walter if he would come back from wherever he’d gone. Someone named Faith Salem wanted to teach you to play the piano for two dollars an hour.

There it was, and that’s the way it sometimes happens. You follow an impulse over three hundred miles because of a thin coincidence, and right away, because of a mild idiosyncrasy, you run into another coincidence that’s just a little too much of one to be one, and the first one, although you don’t know why, no longer seems like one either.

I closed my eyes and tried to see Faith Salem lying again in the sun, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see her lying in the sun because she was in another town teaching piano lessons for two dollars an hour. It said so in the town’s newspaper. I opened my eyes and looked again, just to be certain, and it did. Piano lessons, it said. 1828 Canterbury Street, call LO 3314, it said. Faith Salem, it said.

I stood up and folded the newspaper and stuck it in my coat pocket and looked at my watch. The watch said nine. I walked outside and started across the street to the parking lot where I’d left my car, but then, because it was getting late and I didn’t know the streets of the town, I turned and came back to the curb in front of the hotel and caught a taxi. I gave the driver the address, 1828 Canterbury Street, and sat back in the seat. The driver repeated the address after me and then concentrated silently on his driving. I didn’t try to think or make any guesses. I sat and listened to the ticking of the meter that seemed to be measuring the diminishing time and distance between me and something.

We hit Canterbury Street at 6th and went down it twelve blocks. It was an ordinary residential street, paved with asphalt, with the ordinary variations in quality, you will find on most streets in most towns. It started bad and got better and then started getting worse, but it never got really good or as bad in the end as it had started. 1828 was a small white frame house with a fairly deep front lawn and vacant lots between it and the houses on both sides, which were also small and white and frame with fairly deep front lawns. On the corner at the end of the block was a neighborhood drug store with a vertical neon sign above the entrance. It would be a place to call another taxi in case of necessity, and so I paid off the one I had and let it go. I got out and went up a brick walk and across a porch. There was a light showing at a window, but I heard no sound and saw no shadow on the blind. After listening and watching for perhaps a minute, I knocked and waited for perhaps half another.

Without any prelude of sound whatever, the door opened and a woman stood looking out at me. The light behind her left her face in shadow. She was rather short and very slim, almost fragile, and her voice, when she spoke, had an odd quality of detached airiness, as if it had no corporeal source. “Yes?” she said.

“I’m looking for Miss Faith Salem,” I said.

“I’m Faith Salem. What is it you want?”

“Please excuse me for calling so late, but I was unable to get here earlier. My name is Percival Hand. You were referred to me as an excellent teacher.”

“Thank you. Are you studying piano, Mr. Hand?”

“No.” I laughed. “My daughter is the student. We’re new in town, and she needs a teacher. As I said, you were recommended. May I come in and discuss it with you?”

“Yes, of course. Please come in.” I stepped past her into a small living room that was softly lighted by a table lamp and a floor lamp. On the floor was a rose-colored rug with an embossed pattern. The furniture was covered with bright chintz or polished cotton, and the windows were framed on three sides by panels and valences of the same color and kind of material. At the far end of the room, which was no farther than a few steps, a baby grand occupied all the space of a corner. Behind me, the woman who called herself Faith Salem closed the door. She came past me into the room and sat down in a chair beside the step-table on which the table lamp was standing. It was apparently the chair in which she had been sitting when I knocked, for a cigarette was burning in a tray on the table and an open book was lying face down beside the tray. The light from the lamp seemed to gather in her face and in the hands she folded in the lap. The hands were quiet, holding each other. The face was thin and pretty and perfectly reposed. I have never seen a more serene face than the face of Constance Markley at that moment.

“Sit down, Mr. Hand,” she said. I did. I sat in a chair opposite her and held my hat on my knees and had the strange and inappropriate feeling of a visiting minister. I felt, anyhow, the way the minister always appeared to be feeling when he called on my mother a hundred years ago when I was home.

“What a charming room,” I said.

“Thank you.” She smiled and nodded. “I like bright colors. They make a place so cheerful. Did you say you are new in Amity, Mr. Hand?”

“Yes. We just arrived recently.”

“I see. Do you plan to make your home here permanently?”

“I don’t know. It depends on how things work out, Miss Salem. Is that correct? I seem to remember that you’re single.”

“That’s quite correct. I’ve never married,” she said, and nodded.

“I’m surprised that such a lovely woman has escaped so long. Do you live here alone?”

In her face for a moment was an amused expression that did not disturb the basic serenity, and I wondered if it was prompted by the trite compliment or the impertinent question. At any rate, she ignored the first and answered the second simply.

“Yes. I’m quite alone here. I like living alone.”

“Have you lived in Amity long?”

“Many years. I came here as a student in the college and never left. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

“Forgive my asking, but don’t you find it difficult to live by giving private music lessons?”

“I’m certain that I should if I tried it. I give private lessons only in my off hours. Evenings and weekends. I’m also an instructor in the Amity Conservatory. A private school.” She hesitated, looking at me levelly across the short space between us, and I thought that she was now slightly disturbed, for the first time, by my irrelevant questions. “I understand that you should want to make inquiries of a teacher you are considering for your child, Mr. Hand, but yours don’t seem very pertinent. Would you like to know something about my training and qualifications?”

“No, thanks. I’m sure you’re very competent, Miss Salem. I’m sorry if my questions seemed out of line. The truth is, I know so little about music myself that I hardly know what to talk about.”

“Do you mind telling me who sent you to me, Mr. Hand?”

“As a matter of fact, it was the Conservatory. They recommended you highly, but they didn’t mention that you were an instructor there.”

“I see. Many students are directed to me that way. The ones who are unable to attend the Conservatory itself, that is.”

I looked down at my hat, turning it slowly in my hands, and I didn’t like the way I was beginning to feel. No one could accuse me fairly of being a particularly sensitive guy, and ordinarily I am conscious of no corruption in the dubious practices of my trade, dubious practices being by no means restricted to the trade I happen to follow. By now I was beginning to feel somehow unclean, and every little lie was assuming in my mind the character of a monstrous deception. I was suddenly sick of it and wanted to be finished with it, the whole phony case. I had been hired for twenty-five and expenses to find a woman who had disappeared two years ago, and here she was in a town called Amity, living quietly under the name of Faith Salem, which was the name of the woman who had hired me to find her, and it had all been so fantastically quick and easy, a coincidence and an itch and a classified ad, and now there seemed to be nothing more to be done that I had been hired to do.

But where was Regis Lawler? Here was Constance, but where was Regis? Well, I had not been hired to find Regis. I had been hired to find Constance, and I had found her, and that was all of it. Almost all of it, anyhow. All that was left to do for my money to get up and get away quietly with my unclean feeling after my necessary deceptions. Tomorrow I would drive back where I had come from, and I would report what I had learned to the woman who was paying me, and then she would know as much as I did, and what she wanted to do with it was her business and not mine.

There were still, however, so many loose ends. So many mental itches I couldn’t scratch. I did not know why Constance had come to Amity. Nor why she had assumed the name of Faith Salem. Nor certainly why, for that matter, the real Faith Salem wanted her found. Nor why Silas Lawler did not. Nor where in the world was Regis Lawler. Nor if, in fact, he was. In the world, that is.

Suddenly I looked up and said, “Mrs. Markley, where is Regis Lawler?”

Her expression was queer. It was an expression I remembered for a long time afterward and sometimes saw in the black shag end of the kind of night when a man is vulnerable and cannot sleep. She stared at me for a minute with wide eyes in which there was a creeping dumb pain, and then, in an instant, there was a counter expression which seemed to be a denial of the pain and the pain’s cause. Her lids dropped slowly, as if she were all at once very tired. Sitting there with her hands folded in her lap, she looked as if she were praying, and when she opened her eyes again, the expressions of pain and its denial were gone, and there was nothing where they had been but puzzlement.

“What did you call me?” she said.

“Mrs. Markley. Constance Markley.”

“If this is a joke, Mr. Hand, it’s in very bad taste.”

“It’s no joke. Your name is Constance Markley, and I asked you where Regis Lawler is.”

“I don’t know Constance Markley. Nor Regis Lawler.” She unfolded her hands and stood up, and she was not angry and apparently no longer puzzled. She had withdrawn behind an impenetrable defense of serenity. “I don’t know you either, Mr. Hand. Whoever you are and whatever you came here for, you are obviously not what you represented yourself to be, and you didn’t come for the purpose you claimed.”

“True. I’m not, and I didn’t.”

“In that case, we have nothing more to discuss. If you will leave quietly, I’ll be happy to forget that you ever came.”

I did as she suggested. I left quietly. She had said that I was in bad taste, and I guess I was, for the taste was in my mouth, and it was bad.

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, and 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 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 have to do it some other time. 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 a half 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 slid 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 to teach 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 teaching 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 committed 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, and 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, and 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, and 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 act. 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. Maybe 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 quick lime, 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, and 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 the game rooms, and 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 said.

“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?”

“No.”

“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 home and mind your own business, because your business is in Amity.”

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.

Chapter 9

I took a week to get things cleared up. I stayed in Amity that week, and then I went home, and the day after I went home, I went up to the apartment of Faith Salem. I made a point of going when the sun was on the terrace. Maria let me in, and I crossed the acres of pile and tile and went out where Faith was. She was lying on her back on the bright soft pad with one forearm across her eyes to shade them from the light. She didn’t move the arm when I came out.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Hand,” she said.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Excuse me for not getting up. Will you please sit down?”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Thanks.”

I sat down in a wicker chair. It was very warm on the terrace in the sun, but the warmth was pleasant, and after a while I began to feel it in my bones. Faith Salem’s lean brown body remained motionless, except for the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breasts in breathing, and I suspected that her eyes were closed under her arm.

“So it was Graham after all,” she said.

“That’s what you suspected, wasn’t it?”

“In a way. I had a feeling, but it was a feeling that he had done something to Constance. I can’t understand why he killed this man.”

“Not because of the affair. He didn’t care about that.”

“Why, then?”

“Regis Lawler tried to blackmail him. It went back to something that happened several years ago. Graham Markley and Constance were driving back from the country. They’d been on a party, and Graham was drunk. He hit a woman on the highway and killed her and kept right on driving. It was a nasty business. Constance isn’t a strong person, nor even a very pleasant person, and she agreed with Graham that it was better to keep quiet about the incident. It’s easy for some people to rationalize that kind of attitude. Then, in due time, after the death of her child, she met Regis Lawler, and she wanted to do with Regis just what everyone actually assumed she had done. She wanted to run away from everything — her marriage, her guilt, everything associated with her child’s death, all the unhappiness that people like her seem doomed to accumulate.

“Apparently Regis let her believe that he might be willing to go along with this, but he had no money. Silas Lawler told me that Regis stole seventy-five grand from a wall safe at the restaurant, but it wasn’t so. It was only a lie Silas used to make their running away plausible. What really happened was that Constance told Regis about the woman’s death on the highway, and Regis tried the blackmail, although he actually had no intention, it seems, of going anywhere at all with Constance. The blackmail didn’t work. Graham Markley wasn’t the kind of weak character to submit. He went to Lawler’s apartment and killed him. When Constance went there later the same night and found his body, she knew immediately what had surely happened. Her own burden of guilt was too heavy to bear in addition to everything else, and so she escaped it by becoming someone else to whom none of this had ever happened. It was something that could only have happened under certain conditions to a certain kind of person. She became the one woman she had known that she completely admired and envied, and she went back to the place where she had, for a while, been happier than she had ever been before or since. She became you, and she went back to Amity. With a break or two and a couple of hunches, I got the idea that she might be there, and I went there to see if I could find her, and Graham Markley learned from you where I was going. He was terribly afraid of what Constance might know to tell if she was found, and it was imperative, as he saw it, to get rid of her for good and all. And so he followed me and found her and tried to kill her, but it didn’t turn out that way.”

“I’m sorry I told him,” she said. “It was a mistake.”

“Not for me,” I said. “It made me a smart guy instead of a corpse.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s not important.”

The sun in the sky was nearing the tooled ridge of stone. I wished for a drink, but nobody brought one. Faith Salem’s breasts rose and fell, rose and fell. Her long brown legs stirred slightly in the sun.

“Did Constance tell all this?” she said.

“The part about the murder. Not the rest.”

“How strange it is. How strange simply to forget everything and become someone else.”

“Strange enough, but not incredible. It’s happened before. People have gone half around the world and lived undetected in new identities tor years.”

“Is she all right now?”

“She remembers who she is and everything that happened until she found the body of Regis Lawler in his apartment. She doesn’t remember anything that happened in the time of the fugue. That’s a long way from all right, I guess, but it’s as good as she can hope for.”

“Why become me? Why me of all people?”

There was honest wonderment in her voice. Looking at her, the lean brown length of her, I could have told her why, but I didn’t. I had a feeling that it was time to be going, and I stood up.

“I think I’d better leave now,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

“I’ll send you a bill.”

“Of course. I’ll be here as long as the rent’s paid. That’s about three months.”

“Are you going to look at me before I leave?”

“No. I don’t think so. Do you mind letting yourself out?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Good-by, then, Mr. Hand. I wish you had a lot of money. It’s a shame you’re so poor.”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s a crying shame.”

She never moved or looked at me, and I went away. The next day I sent her a bill, and two days after that I got a check. I saw her twice again, but not to speak to. Once she was coming out of a shop alone, and once she was going into a theater on the arm of a man. I learned later that she married a very rich brewer and went to live in Milwaukee.