The Four Johns

Chapter 11

Mervyn walked listlessly back to the Yerba Buena Garden Apartments. He had no idea what he ought to do next. He stopped before his car, the fateful green convertible. It looked back at him with baleful intelligence, headlamps glinting with evil knowledge, bumper pursed as if restraining a smile.

By God! thought Mervyn. That’s one thing I can do, and right now. Before he left, he kicked the front left tire.

He stalked to his apartment and rummaged about until he found the pink ownership certificate. A minute later he was rapping on the door of Apartment 1.

John Boce looked out at him blearily. He wore a flannel bathrobe, rumpled and stained. His thin, sandy hair was mussed, his face flushed with sleep. “Oh, it’s you. Come in.” He yawned, showing a throatful of teeth and other things. “What’s on your mind, Mervyn?”

Mervyn’s words came as a surprise even to Mervyn. The idea must have been clamoring in his unconscious. “Did you put a fifth of whiskey outside my door last night?”

Boce stared. “Why should I do a stupid thing like that?”

“I thought you might have been returning the bottle you lifted last week.”

The big man scratched his stubbled cheek. “That bottle. Yeah. I remember. No, not me, Mervyn.”

“But that’s not why I’m here. I thought you might want to kiss the convertible good-bye.”

“Found a buyer?”

“I’m taking it to a dealer.”

“You’d do better to peddle it as an antique.”

“You can follow in the Volkswagen and drive me back, if you’re not too busy.”

Boce looked at Mervyn in mild astonishment. “You’re really going through with it?”

“I am.”

“Well, all right. I’ll have to find my clothes first. I don’t remember much about last night. I just might have undressed in the street. No. Here’s a shoe. Give me five minutes.”

Mervyn waited in the street. He paced up and down the sidewalk, stealing glances at the convertible, in which he still thought he detected a mocking intelligence.

When Boce came out, he frowned at the car. “I just looked in my checkbook, Mervyn, and I find that if I want to live dangerously I could buy the old clunk. For, say, one fifty?”

“Two fifty.”

“I might just be able to go one sixty.”

“I might take two forty.”

“Or even one sixty-two fifty.”

Mervyn got into the convertible. “Let’s get going, John. Here are the keys to the Volkswagen.”

“One sixty-five?”

Mervyn drove to Oakland’s auto row: acres and acres of automobiles, with signs on the windshields — SHARP, REAL CLEAN, SPECIAL, CHECK THIS ONE. In certain lots the cars bore conspicuous price tags. Mervyn suddenly pulled over to the curb and signaled Boce to park behind him.

Mervyn waited for Boce to join him. “I’ve been thinking,” Boce said in a subdued voice. “I just might be able to manage one seventy on a monthly-payoff basis.”

Mervyn pointed. “Look, chiseler. Same year, same model.”

The convertible Mervyn was pointing at bore a sign: THIS ONE’S TOPS. The price tag said $395.

Boce said feebly, “It’s a mistake. Or they’re insane.”

“How about querying the lunatics?” Mervyn suggested.

He drove into the lot. A salesman promptly emerged from the office; and after twenty minutes of looking, poking, testing and engine-checking by a mechanic, and ten minutes more of genial haggling, Mervyn signed the pink registration slip and drove away in the Volkswagen with $215.

Mervyn said cheerfully, “Well, that’s that.”

Boce said nothing. He sat in a sort of daze, as if he could not really believe that it was all over.

“Oh, say,” said Mervyn after a while. “I thought you had a date with a fertility goddess on the night of the fourteenth — the night Mary took off.”

“So?” said Boce glumly. “What about it?”

“My latest information is that the fertility goddess was named Harriet Brill. With those hips, I guess she qualifies at that.”

“You don’t have to be so sarcastic,” his friend replied in a surly tone. “So Harriet’s a little batty. I’ve known worse.”

Mervyn tried to make his question as casual-sounding as an inquiry about the weather. “Where’d you and Harriet go that night?”

“Not a damn place, if you must know,” Boce snapped. “All right, so I put you on. The fact is, Harriet was having one of her emotional crises, so I just stayed home and read a book. Satisfied?”

“In a way,” Mervyn said damply.

The accountant turned his great lumpy head toward Mervyn, his gray eyes sharp as flints behind the gold-rimmed glasses. “And by the way, what’s all the hooraw about the night of the fourteenth? There’s something going on you’re keeping from me, Mervyn!”

“Never mind that,” Mervyn mumbled. “Are you planning to return that bottle of bourbon you swiped?”

“I thought you said it had been returned.”

“But not by you.”

“What’s the difference? You got the bourbon back.”

“Forget it,” said Mervyn.

They finished the trip in silence. Mervyn dropped John Boce off at the Yerba Buena Garden Apartments and drove on restlessly.

Presently he found himself at the yacht harbor. He parked and sat looking out over the bay. The afternoon wind was blowing in through the Golden Gate, sending whitecaps surging against the seawall, where they shattered in great shards of spume.

Mervyn’s mind was shattered, too. He simply did not know what to do. His investigation, such as it was, was going from bad to worse. Now John Boce was back in the picture by his own admission, after Harriet Brill in one of her fantasies as a femme fatale had given him an alibi. The whole bloody business, Mervyn thought as he gnawed on a cuticle, was so damned unstable. Everything kept shifting. Now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t. How marvelous it must be for those mighty detectives in the books who had everything so neatly worked out for them! Everything this, or that, with nothing in between; black and white; definition, precision; every character acting like a number in an arithmetic problem...

The wind had blown the sun low in the western sky, and the bay looked bleak and bitter. Across the water San Francisco loomed lifeless, the San Francisco of On the Beach, a miraculously preserved mound of unpeopled ruins. And was that so fanciful? Mervyn mused. It was just like that for Mary, where she was now. It would be the same for him when “John” sent him to join her.

Mervyn parked the Volkswagen before the apartments in an unearthly purple-gray dusk. It made him shiver; and he crossed the court to his apartment.

He was fitting his key into the lock when it happened.

Cracksmack!

Inches from his head a splintered hole appeared in the doorjamb.

For a moment Mervyn stood paralyzed with fright. Then sheer rage spun him around. The court was empty. So was the balcony opposite. But he thought he detected a quiver of motion in the hedge bordering the vacant lot at the rear. He ran for the passage through the hedge.

The lot was empty.

He ran across to Kellogg, the street beyond. There was no one in sight, which in the dusk meant something less than a block in either direction. But far enough.

Mervyn turned back. To his right was the garage, to his left the blank side wall of the three-story apartment building that fronted Kellogg Street.

Mervyn swiftly checked the garage, looking under and into cars, telling himself as his skin prickled in the half darkness that he was being an absolute idiot. But there was no one in the garage.

Mervyn looked around. Motion he had definitely seen — a flutter of cloth. And he had reached the lot quickly enough after the shot to have overtaken or at least caught a glimpse of a fleeing figure.

Then where had his assailant gone? Behind each of the two six-plexes that made up the Yerba Buena Garden Apartments there was a narrow gap. He might have squirmed through the hedge and vanished behind either of the buildings.

Mervyn moved again, less recklessly now, to check the gaps.

The hedge to the east was thick and looked impenetrable, ruling out the passage behind the building in which Mervyn lived.

To the south the hedge was sparser, and Mervyn thought he saw signs of bent branches. He peered warily down the passage. A high, shaky-looking wooden fence sealed off the south edge of the lot, running to the house facing Perdue Street. Fence and house created an alley all the way to Perdue Street. It was empty.

Mervyn hurried back through the court and around to the front of the south six-plex. In the gap where the alley opened to the sidewalk grew a tall hydrangea bush. No one had run through the bush; the brittle stems were unbroken. Could he have climbed to a window sill of either the house to the south or the six-plex, and then jumped over the hydrangea? Mervyn studied the ground. The lawn was new and well-watered; even in the twilight he would have seen the signs left by such a leap, a leap incredible to begin with.

Then could his assailant have jumped the fence into the yard next door? He returned to the back lot. Beyond the fence lay a cul-de-sac, with exits only through the house facing on Perdue Street or over a feeble trellis into a yard beyond. Possible, yes. But highly unlikely.

Then where?

Mervyn went back to his apartment. No one seemed to have heard the shot.

He examined the bullet hole in the doorjamb. The bullet was completely buried in the redwood. He tried to estimate the angle of entry by eye. It did seem to lead back to the hedge.

He was still puzzling over the mystery of his would-be assassin’s inexplicable disappearance when he dug the slug out of the jamb. It was small, probably from a .22 hand gun... Standing there beside the splintered hole, turning the little slug over in his fingers, Mervyn suddenly became conscious of his vulnerability. It was beyond belief, but someone had tried to shoot him dead!

He hurried into his apartment, locked the door, switched off his lights and stood by the court window in the dark, sweating.

He realized now that he had never really believed the anonymous notes. Words on paper — how could they hurt you? No matter what they said.

But that bullet whizzing by his head... this slug... It became slippery in his hand.

Whoever it was had apparently waited in the deepening dusk by the hedge for his return. Waited with a gun.

And yet it all looked so peaceful out there. Homey, sort of. The lights from Harriet Brill’s and Susie Hazelwood’s apartments shone cheerfully, made even more reassuring by the fact that Mrs. Kelly’s windows and the windows of all the apartments on the lower deck were dark. And on his own side John Boce’s windows were spilling light onto the court.

Mervyn stood there in the dark, his own darkness, feeling a great aching need to reach out and touch the glow from Susie’s windows. And suddenly the darkness was insupportable. And he was very hungry.

He pulled the drapes tightly across the windows before he turned on the lights.

Then he cooked himself some bacon and eggs, tried to read a book on daily life in the twelfth century, jerked out of a doze with the merest memory of a terrifying dream, and hastily undressed and stumbled into bed.

Mervyn opened his eyes to a brilliant morning, with the purest of washed blue skies. The air coming through his bedroom windows was heavily fragrant with the odor of mown grass and freshly watered geranium leaves.

For a moment, half asleep still, he felt wonderful. But then it all came back, and his spirits plummeted. He crawled out of bed like an old man and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes to restore his youth. Afterward, he drank three cups of black coffee.

What to do?

He bethought himself of the morning newspaper and automatically went to his locked door. Then it came back to him, and he had to fight himself to unlock it. Even then, he found himself ducking out like a thief.

Crossing the court to his mailbox, he forced his legs to slow down.

As he pulled his newspaper out of the mailbox, something fell.

A cheap white envelope.

Slowly, Mervyn stooped and picked it up.

No stamp or postmark. This one had been delivered by hand.

He went back to his apartment and locked the door and sat down and opened the letter.

It said: