The Three Roads

chapter 12

Bret’s mind resisted the clarity of the morning. He half woke and half opened his eyes, painfully conscious of the shining razors of light that slid through the openings of the Venetian blinds. He closed his eyes again, groping for the severed ends of his dreams. But the shadows of the dream evaded him, fleeing backward down the tunnel of sleep like insubstantial ghosts. Consciousness took hold of him like an obstetrical forceps and pulled him into life by the head. The pressure of reality clamped on his skull was painful and somehow humiliating. He sat up in bed to shake it off, but the pain and humiliation hung on. The pain became distinctly localized in the back of his head, and the humiliation sank to the pit of his stomach and turned to nausea. He swallowed, with a throat as dry as sandpaper.

The memory of what he had to do came back in a rush, and he looked at his wristwatch. Nearly nine o’clock. He had wasted a whole night in drinking and brawling and sleeping, and was no nearer to the man who killed his wife than he had been before. He jumped out of bed and began to dress quickly.

He became aware that someone was watching him from the twin bed on the other side of the room. He half turned to see his roommate leaning on one elbow, smiling wryly in his direction. What was the man’s name? Mill? No, Milne. Harry Milne. Their conversation of the night before came to him from a long way back, echoing against the hollow walls of his hangover.

“Good morning,” the man in the bed said. “Have a good sleep?”

“Very. I’ve got to thank you for the use of your bed.”

“Hell, that’s all right. Use it as long as you want. I only sleep in one bed at a time.”

“Will you let me pay you something?”

For some reason that seemed funny to Harry Milne. He laughed boyishly. “Christ, no! This isn’t a rooming house I run. I do things for my friends that I wouldn’t do for money.” That was funny too, and he laughed again. “You’re my friend because I like you. I make friends just like that–” he snapped his fingers “–and I drop ’em just as fast when the spirit moves me. Speaking of which, the spirit moved you pretty fast for a while last night. Hangover?”

“I’m as dry as a chip.”

“Just a minute. I’ll get you some milk in the icebox.”

“Please don’t bother.”

“It’s no bother.” He bounced out of bed and padded across the room. Bret disliked that feline way of walking, but he repressed the feeling. The man was treating him like a brother, and he had no right to dislike him.

Larry saw that something was wrong. Did the guy know him after all? Had he made a slip? No, that was impossible. It was probably something very simple, like the guy not liking to be talking to somebody half in and half out of his underwear. The guy had nothing to be ashamed of though. He had shoulders like an ox. A little too heavy for a perfect figure (like his own) but he was fast too, a good, fast light heavy. Larry had a desire to fight the man, not that he had anything against him at the moment, but just because it would be interesting. Interesting for about thirty seconds, that is. With his ring experience he’d cut the guy to ribbons in six punches. And that would be kind of fun, too. Come to think of it, it would be a hell of a lot of fun.

Taylor picked up his blue trousers and started to put them on.

“Hey,” Larry said from the doorway. “You can’t wear those.” He pointed at the triangular rip in the right leg. Even apart from that the whole uniform was streaked with dirt that wouldn’t brush off.

“Damn it! These are the only clothes I have with me.”

It didn’t occur to him that he could go to Paula for his things. He didn’t want to see her again until he had done what he had to do. For that matter, she’d probably phoned the hospital and told them he’d broken his parole, so to speak. Maybe they were already looking for him. The idea churned his stomach and made him angry.

“Look here,” the other man was saying. “We’re about the same size. You should be able to wear one of my suits. I’ll take your uniform to the tailor around the corner. You can get it back today.”

“No, I can wear the uniform.”

“Don’t be crazy. It’s a mess. Here, try this.” He tossed Bret a loose camel’s-hair sports coat. “I got a wardrobe I hate to see going to waste. These slacks ought to fit you. They’re a little too big for me. Go on, try ’em on.”

Bret put them on out of sheer curiosity. He hadn’t had civilian clothes on for years, and he’d never at any time worn a camel’s-hair coat with a pair of light-tan gabardine slacks. “I feel like a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” he said.

“Say, that’s pretty good.” Larry laughed again. Bret didn’t like his laugh any better than he liked his walk. There was something phony about all this pleasantness, and he didn’t like to be put under an obligation by it. Still, it couldn’t be helped unless he wanted to waste a lot more time.

Larry handed him a knitted brown tie and watched him tie it. “You look sharp.” He went on talking as he dressed. “Pretty smooth coat, eh? It set me back eighty of them. Don’t you go and get yourself into another barroom brawl, now. You wouldn’t do that to me and my coat, now would you?”

“I can’t wear your coat,” Bret said sharply.

“Now don’t be like that, fellow. I was only kidding. I want you to wear my coat, I’m crazy for you to wear it. Hell, I trust you, Lieutenant. You got to learn to recognize a friendly crack.”

You talk too much, Bret thought, and I don’t like your line of patter. What kind of cheap Hollywood character had he got tied up with? Still, this man had dragged him out of a bad situation and brought him home to sleep in his own bed. He couldn’t very well snub him because he walked too lightly or because his conversation was fast and tinny. “You’re the doctor,” he said a little heavy. “I’m very much obliged to you.”

Larry picked up the blue uniform and folded it over his arm. “I’ll rush this over to the tailor’s before you change your mind. If you want that milk I promised you, the icebox is right through there.” He pointed through the open door of the living room. “Hey, wait a minute. I almost forgot your stuff in the pockets.” His fingers went through them rapidly, piling the things on the bed: handkerchief, comb, letters, address book, key case, wallet, some crumpled newspaper clippings.

“Give me that.” Bret strode toward him and snatched the clippings from his hands, but not before Larry had seen what they were.

“Sure, sure,” Larry said. The guy was beginning to get on his nerves, and he was even a little afraid of him for a minute. Taylor was supposed to be nuts after all, and you never could tell about a nut. Ordinary people, if you got in a jam with them, you could chop down and leave them lie, but there was something about a nut that drained the guts out of you. He was nuts himself to bring a nut like Taylor home to his apartment. What kind of a comic did he think he was, playing jokes on himself like that? The guy could have murdered him in his sleep.

“Sure,” he repeated. “Don’t get the idea I was trying to interfere with your stuff.”

“I guess I was abrupt,” Bret said. “It’s just that I’ve got some things marked in these papers. Food for thought,” he added clumsily.

“Food for thought” is the word, Larry said to himself. His courage came flowing back and made him gay. Christ, the guy didn’t know a thing, not a damn thing! He, Larry, knew it all and he, Larry, was sitting on top of the situation, playing a sucker with his own dice for any stakes he wanted to name. The dope Taylor had nothing on him and never would; it was the other way round and he was going to remember that. He nearly felt sorry for the dope, but not quite. It never paid to feel sorry for anybody.

He almost ran on his way to the tailor’s shop, he felt so light and gay. He didn’t know what irony was, but it was irony he was enjoying. Here he was, running errands for Taylor, of all people. Living with him, lending him clothes, sleeping in the same room. And all the time with a double century in his hip pocket for not laying eyes on the guy. If money really talked the way Paula West thought it did, he’d be in Nevada by now. But it was more interesting here and he had the money anyway, and plenty more where that came from. All he had to do was name it and he could have it.

He felt quite disappointed and betrayed when he got back to his apartment and found that Taylor had left. There was a note under a full milk bottle on the kitchen table:

Oh well, Taylor would be back, he could count on that. Taylor was the kind of guy that would have to come back to give him back his suit. He wasn’t like that himself, praise God, but he’d met the type once or twice before in his life: the type that was so honest it hurt.

chapter 13

It was after ten when Bret reached the Golden Sunset Café. The place was deserted except for a few early barflies. It was chilly and desolate in the morning, like a fever patient who began each day with a low temperature and rose to a peak of delirium in the hot evening. The long room was like an image of his own hangover, run-down and almost empty, containing like a corrupt memory the odors of rancid grease and stale whisky spillings.

Fortunately neither of the bartenders who had witnessed the fight was on duty this morning. He had never seen the man behind the bar, a young man with thin round features like an emaciated infant’s, wearing pockets of gray flesh, puckered like chicken-skin, under his indeterminate pale eyes. Rollins?

An excitement that gave him no strength took hold of the lower half of his body and shook him visibly. He sat down in the booth nearest to the door and reasoned with himself. He couldn’t expect Rollins to be able to tell him anything. The police had questioned him long ago and found out merely that Lorraine had left by herself that night. Even if Rollins knew something more he had no reason to suppose that he could get it out of him. Still, the excitement would not stay down. It rose to his head and made him dizzy, so that Rollins’s face, if it was Rollins, wavered behind the bar and the stagnant air in the room buzzed like an electric bell.

“What’ll you have?” A waitress with a dark pitted face had come out of the kitchen at the back and was standing calmly over him like an attendant.

He recalled that he hadn’t eaten since noon of the previous day. “Fried eggs with toast?”

“Yeah. We got some bacon today if you want it.”

“Good. And bring me a quart of milk right away.” His dehydrated palate still regretted the bottle of milk he had left unopened, as a sign of his independence, on Harry Milne’s kitchen table.

“A quart of milk?” The waitress raised one heavy black eyebrow. “You want it spiked with anything?”

“No, thanks. I’m a milk addict.”

She stood and watched him drink it as if that were one for the book. Then she watched him eat his bacon and eggs.

“You were hungry,” she said. They never tipped you in the morning, anyway – the jerks that came to this joint had to be boiled before you could peel a nickel off their palms – so you might as well act natural.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m a food addict too.”

She laughed even if he didn’t, and what do you know, he gave her a buck and told her to keep the change. Things were looking up in the joint, and for a moment she forgot her varicose veins and almost stopped wishing that one of these A-bombs would explode directly over the roof of the Golden Sunset Café and destroy several square miles of L.A. with her in it.

“Is that James Rollins behind the bar?” Bret asked her.

“Uh-huh. That’s Jimmie.”

All but one of the barflies had drifted out. Rollins, who had just set up a boilermaker for the old man who remained, was manicuring himself with the blade of a pocketknife, scowling in bored concentration.

“Tell him I’d like to talk to him, will you? Over here.”

“Sure thing,” the waitress said, and went to the bar.

Rollins came through the little door at the front end and walked toward Bret with quick, jerky steps. “What can I do for you, my friend?”

“Please sit down.”

“Why not?” He sat down facing Bret across the table, his pale round forehead still furrowed by the blank scowl.

Bret said slowly: “You were on duty here the night that Mrs. Lorraine Taylor was murdered.”

A sneer of mental effort curled Rollins’s lips and left them tight. “Yeah. Yeah, I was. So what?”

“I’d like you to tell me what you saw of her.”

“You a cop?” he said in his quick monotone. “I already told my story to the cops.”

Bret took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and folded it small. A rodent brightness glimmered faintly in the eyes across the table. “No, I’m not a cop. I’m interested in what happened to Mrs. Taylor.”

“Jeez, bud, I don’t know any more than you do what happened to her. She walked out of here that night, and that was the last I saw of her.” Exerting a visible effort, he withdrew his attention from the twenty-dollar bill and looked into Bret’s eyes. His gaze was as transparent and innocent looking as gin.

“Was she drunk?”

Rollins’s wide mirthless grin showed a gold-capped wisdom tooth. “What do you think? You said you knew Lorrie. I never saw her sober, did you?”

“I didn’t say I knew her.”

“Oh, I caught you wrong. What’s your interest then? Say, you’re not writing one of these here true detectives?”

“No.” The interview was hopeless anyway, and there was no use in being cautious or discreet. “My name’s Taylor. She was my wife.”

“You her husband?” Rollins sat up straight, and conflicting emotions wrinkled his face like a sudden violent onset of old age. “I thought you was–” He regained control of his tongue.

“No doubt you did, but I’m not interested in what you thought.” He unfolded the bill and smoothed it out on the table. “You’re absolutely sure that she left here alone?”

“Sure I’m sure. I’m not the only witness either. You know that. I wouldn’t be holding out on a thing like that.”

“You called her Lorrie–”

“Did I? That must’ve slipped out. You know how it is.”

“I don’t know. Tell me. Was she in the habit of coming here?”

“Yeah, sure. She was in here every couple of nights.”

“Alone?”

“Of course alone,” Rollins said very glibly. “The kid was strictly on the up and up. She was a little bit of a lush, but you can’t hold that against her.”

“I don’t hold anything against her,” Bret said, imposing a level tone on the violence of his feelings. “Was she a friend of yours?”

“Not what you’d call a friend,” Rollins said uneasily. “Naturally I got to know her, with her coming in here all the time.”

“Always alone?”

“I told you she was alone, didn’t I? Look here, Mister, you got to excuse me, I got to get back to the bar. The boss’ll be coming in any time.” He cast a farewell glance at the twenty-dollar bill and rose to his feet.

“Sit down again,” Bret said. “You’ve only got one customer, and he still has part of his drink.” He took a second twenty from his wallet and laid it crosswise on the first.

Rollins resisted the magnetism of the bills, but it gradually drew him back to his seat. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” he said after an interval. “The kid was no floozie, if that’s what you’re trying to get at. I never had anything to do with her except for shoving her a drink across the bar. I never even knew her last name until I read it in the papers.”

“You know very well what I’m trying to get at. My wife is dead. I’m trying to find out why.”

“So why do you come to me? I’m not a prophet. I told the cops everything I know, and it wasn’t enough to do them any good.”

“Didn’t she have any friends? You should be able to give me some kind of a lead if she was in here nearly every night.”

“Sure. She knew a lot of the regulars. Everybody liked her. One guy or another used to buy her a drink, but there was nothing to it.”

In his eagerness to convince her husband of Lorraine’s innocence, Rollins was overstating his case. Bret was encouraged to go on. “Who bought her a drink? Give me a name.”

Rollins squirmed, but remained transfixed on the hope of a forty-dollar windfall. “I don’t keep no diary, Mr. Taylor,” he whined. “I got no list of names. I don’t keep track of the customers’ private life.”

“One name. One man that knew her. One man that bought her a drink.”

“I don’t want to get anybody into trouble, Mr. Taylor. It’s no crime to buy a girl a drink, and it’s not my business what people do as long as they don’t make trouble in this bar. For forty bucks it isn’t worth it to me to make trouble for a customer.”

“I have a lot of twenties in my wallet. How much?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Taylor. It isn’t the money I care about–”

“How much?”

“A hundred?” Rollins whispered.

“What can you give me for it?”

Rollins leaned across the table and spoke quietly, his eyes glancing sideways at the kitchen and the front door. “There’s a guy that was interested in her. He tried to pick her up a couple of times, but she wasn’t having any.”

“When?”

“Oh, several times. He was in here the night she got killed. He wanted to take her home, but she gave him the old brush-off.”

“Do you think that’s worth a hundred dollars?”

“Wait a minute. I didn’t tell it all yet. But for God’s sake, Mr. Taylor, keep me out of this. I don’t want to get anybody into trouble,” he said, thinking of himself.

“Is that why you didn’t tell the police?”

The drain of color from Rollins’s face placed his pimples in relief. “You’re not going to tell the police about this? I got no reason to think the guy had anything to do with murdering her. I wasn’t going to throw him to the lions without a reason, was I?”

“A friend of yours?”

“No, not what you call a friend. If he was a friend I wouldn’t be selling you his name for a hundred bucks, would I?”

Wouldn’t you, Bret thought. He said: “You haven’t told me his name.”

“You haven’t slipped me the hundred.”

“Here’s forty now.” He pushed the bills across the table. “You said there was more to tell.”

Rollins’s hand moved like a quick white bird, and the bills were gone from the table. “You going to give me the rest?”

“When you tell me the rest of your story, and if there’s anything to it.”

“Yeah, but how do I know I can trust you?”

“You can trust me. The question that’s bothering me is whether I can trust you.”

“I’m telling you what I know. I can’t do better than that.”

“You’re being slow about it. Go on.”

“Well, this particular party tried to pick Lorrie – your wife – up like I said. She said she was going home alone, or something like that – I didn’t hear her exact words.”

“This was the night she was killed?”

“Yeah, a few minutes before she left. She went out by herself, just like I said, and this party got up and went out right after her. I didn’t give it a thought then, but it came back to me when the cops were here the next day. I knew the guy had a car parked outside, and he might have gone out after her to give it another try on the street.”

“Who is this man?”

“He’s a fellow that comes in here sometimes. He used to be just another cheap grifter, but he made a lot of money during the war, and now he’s opened his own cocktail lounge over in Glendale. He’s still a crook through. The dirty bastard promised me a job over there, and then he turned around and gave the bar to Lefty Swift, a nance if I ever saw one.”

“I see.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re sure you’re not simply trying to make trouble for him?”

“Honest to God, Mr. Taylor, trouble is the last thing I want. You asked me to tell you anything I knew, and that’s what I’m doing. For God’s sake, you won’t tell Garth I told you?”

“Garth? Is that his name?”

“Yeah, Burton Garth. But you got to promise you won’t tell him I told you. I don’t know whether he had anything to do with the murder or not, but if he did I don’t want any part of it.”

“Unless it comes to court. Then you’ll have to be a witness.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he admitted reluctantly. “Do I get the other sixty?”

“If this Garth is a real lead. Otherwise not.”

Rollins snarled in frustrated rodent fury: “That’s not what you told me. You promised me a hundred.”

“You’ll get the rest after I see Garth. I told you you can trust me.”

“Trust you?” Rollins laughed hollowly. “You promised me a hundred and slip me a measly forty.”

“Calm down, or I’ll take the forty away from you and hold it in trust for you.” He stood up, casting a wide shadow across Rollins’s side of the booth. “Where can I find Burton Garth?”

“How do I know I’ll ever see you again?” Rollins muttered, half to himself.

“I said be quiet about that. Where is Garth?”

“He runs the Cockalorum over in Glendale. He’s probably there now. You could give me your address, couldn’t you?”

“I have no address,” Bret said on his way out.

chapter 14

Normally he wouldn’t have considered himself able to afford a taxi to Glendale, but money was one of a number of things he no longer cared about. He had between four and five hundred dollars in his pocket, with another couple of thousand in the bank, and he was convinced it was enough to see him through to whatever end he was blindly aiming for. Time was the only currency he was afraid to spend, for he felt that he had very little of that.

He spent the half-hour to Glendale leaning forward in his seat, as if to communicate some of his momentum to the cab. His need to be sure of something, combined with his unwillingness to face days or weeks of waiting and hunting down blind trails, had already half convinced him that Burton Garth was the man who had killed Lorraine.

The Cockalorum was half a block off East Broadway in the center of Glendale, a bar with a shiny new front of black-and-orange plastic. He told the taxi driver to wait.

Yes, Mr. Garth was in, said the soft-voiced young man behind the bar. He was in his office at the back. Just a minute and he’d call him.

“I’d like to talk to him in his office.”

“Just as you say, sir. It’s the last door on the right, the one beside the little girls’ room.”

The door of the office was partly open, and Bret knocked and stepped in. Garth was sitting behind a new steel desk that took up nearly half the floor space of the tiny cubicle. He was a bald-headed man in his forties, with a fleshy chin and neck that emphasized the sharpness of his nose and the smallness of his eyes. His sport coat was expensive and loud, matching the hysterical shrillness of his hand-painted sunset tie. Among drunks, morons, shills, prostitutes, and thieves, he might have passed for a man of distinction, so long as he had plenty of money in his pocket and spent it heavily. Bret hated him on sight, but that didn’t mean anything. The man looked much too cautious and sly to commit a passionate crime.

“And what can I do for you, sir?” Garth said in a husky tenor.

“It’s quite a story.”

“Well, I’m pretty busy just now. If you’ll just tell me what it is you want, Mr.–?”

“My name is Taylor. Lorraine Taylor was my wife.”

“I don’t know the lady. Should I?” His eyes shifted nervously, spoiling the effect of his smile.

Like all obvious bluffers Garth looked like a good subject for bluff. “I think you do,” Bret said. “You were seen on the street with her the night that she was murdered.”

“There must be some mistake.” His voice was loud and firm, but he leaned across the desk and pushed the door shut. Bret felt a wave of mingled claustrophobia and loathing pass through his body. Had he come to the end already, shut up in a windowless cell with an aging tenor in a hand-painted tie?

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Taylor? I can’t imagine what you’re talking about, but I’d like to help you if I can. You say your wife was murdered?” He clicked his tongue irritatingly.

“On the night of May 23 last, at approximately ten thirty. You were seen with her a short time before that. Do you deny it?”

“Of course I deny it.” But he wasn’t so angry and outraged as he should have been. “Look here, Mr. Taylor, just what are you trying to pull? Is this a joke?”

“It’s not the sort of thing I make jokes about. And you don’t seem particularly amused.”

“Naturally I don’t think it’s funny when somebody comes in out of a blue sky and accuses me of being mixed up in a murder.” His face groped for a smile but was frustrated again by his little, frightened eyes. “I don’t even remember what I was doing on May 23.”

“Yes you do. You were in the Golden Sunset Café that night. You asked my wife to let you take her home, and she refused. When she left, you followed her out and offered her a ride in your car.”

“Somebody’s been shooting you a line, Taylor, telling you wild stories about me. Who’s been doing that?”

“You’ll meet them in court,” Bret said with sober emphasis. So far the man had made no slip, not verbally at least, but he was almost certain now that Garth was hiding something. “I want you to come to the police with me and have your fingerprints compared with the fingerprints that were left in my house.”

“Go to hell!” Garth cried, in a voice that was as much a yelp as a bark.

“If you won’t go to them, they can come here.”

The anger that swelled Garth’s face fizzled out like air from a leaking balloon. “Good God, man, you can’t do that! I got a wife and kids. I just started up a legitimate business here. You can’t bring the cops in on me like that for no reason.”

“I had a wife too. Were you with her when she died?”

“No, I wasn’t! Will you for God’s sake sit down and listen to me, Mr. Taylor? You can’t do this to me. I never wished any harm to you or your wife either. Will you sit down and let me tell you why you can’t bring the cops in on this? I made a lot of enemies when I dropped out of the racket, and there’s nothing they’d like better than to see me railroaded to the pen.”

“I’m not interested in your prospects. I’m interested in the truth.”

“The truth is what I’m telling you, Mr. Taylor.” His smooth brown pate was glistening like melting ice.

“You haven’t told me anything yet.”

“I’m an innocent man. You’ve got to see that. I wouldn’t commit a crime like that, Mr. Taylor. I’ve got a daughter of my own almost as old as she was.”

Bret leaned heavily across the desk and looked down into the upturned face. “You said you didn’t know her.”

“I knew her. Sure I knew her. I gave her a lift home that night. That doesn’t make me a murderer, does it, if I gave a girl a lift home? You’re a reasonable man, Mr. Taylor. I wouldn’t be telling you this if I was guilty, would I? I’m as innocent as you are. Why don’t you sit down?”

Bret sat down in the room’s other chair, his knees squeezed uncomfortably against the end of the desk. Garth took a white silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his sweating face. “It’s hot in here,” he said hoarsely.

“I’m getting tired of waiting.”

“Yeah, sure. I’m not trying to stall you, Mr. Taylor.” He began to tell his story immediately, as if Bret had turned a dial. “I had no idea that the young lady was married, you’ve got to remember that. She was just a pretty girl I saw once or twice in the Golden Sunset Café, and I happened to get interested in her, in a perfectly innocent way. I was lonely – my wife and I aren’t too happy together, Mr. Taylor – and she looked as if she was, and I thought it would be nice if we could kind of get together. Companionship is all I had in mind, I’ll swear to that.”

“You’ll be swearing to all of this. Go on.”

“It’s quite true what you said, I was in the Golden Sunset on the night of May 23, and I happened to see her there. Frankly speaking, she was a little the worse for drink, and I became a little alarmed for her. The Golden Sunset is not a first-class restaurant, and some of its customers are unscrupulous, to say the least. Well, to make a long story short, I offered to take her home in my car. Being a married woman – only she didn’t tell me that – she quite naturally refused, and naturally I bowed myself out. It would’ve been better for me if I’d forgotten the whole thing right then and there, but I couldn’t, Mr. Taylor. I was worried about her and kept my eye on her. I told you I have a daughter of my own, going on eighteen. Mrs. Taylor couldn’t have been much older–”

“Skip the paternal element,” Bret said harshly. “You don’t expect me to believe that.”

The melting face congealed in hypocritical shock. “You don’t accuse me–?”

“I said skip it. It turns my stomach.”

Garth wiped his face again. Bret could see the wet discoloration spreading through the soft silk collar that encircled the fleshy neck. Perhaps the room was hot, but he himself felt cool and bloodless. His heart pounded in his chest like a dry stick on a drum head. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, after a while I saw her go out. She was kind of unsteady on her legs, and I didn’t know if she’d be able to get home by herself. I followed her out and offered her a lift, and she accepted it. She didn’t complain about it, but I got the idea that she was feeling a bit sick. She was looking a bit under the weather. Anyway, I drove her straight home. The ride seemed to do her good, because when we reached the house she was looking much better. As a matter of fact, she graciously invited me to come in for a drink, and I, like a fool, accepted. When we were climbing the steps of the front porch a man came running out of the front door. Mrs. Taylor was a little ahead of me, and he pushed her out of the way and came at me. He was a big guy and terrifically strong. I tried to fight him off, but he sailed into me like a lunatic. He caught me off balance and knocked me backwards down the steps. When I tried to get up he jumped me again and knocked me down on the sidewalk. I’m no coward, Mr. Taylor, but I knew I was no match for him, so I ran out to my car and drove away.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“I thought of doing that, but you see they’re not such very good friends of mine. And you’ve got to remember my position, Mr. Taylor. I was perfectly innocent, but you’d never get anybody to believe that. You don’t believe it yourself, and there’s my proof. I’m a married man, and in a way I had no right to be there. I thought this man was her husband. He came out of her house like I said, and besides, when he pushed her she said something that made me think it was her husband.”

“What did she say?”

“I forget exactly. Something like ‘Take your hands off me, you bastard!’ Anyway, she talked as if she knew him. I thought sure it was her husband or I wouldn’t have run out like that. And naturally I would’ve called the police. But I didn’t catch on that it wasn’t her husband until I read about it in the paper next day and found out that her husband was an officer in the Navy. This guy was in civilian clothes.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was big, like you, I told you that, and I think he was pretty well dressed. I think he was kind of good looking, but I didn’t get much of a look at his face. It was pretty dark, and everything happened too damn fast. One minute I was flat on my back on the sidewalk, and the next minute I was in my car and lamming out of there.”

“It still seems funny you didn’t go to the police,” Bret said slowly.

“I explained that. I thought it was her husband.”

“But next day when you found out it wasn’t? When you read in the papers that she had been murdered?”

“I couldn’t go to the cops,” Garth whined. “Say I told them about this guy and they couldn’t find him. Where would I be then? I’ll tell you: halfway to the San Quentin gas chamber for a murder I didn’t commit but couldn’t prove I didn’t.”

“That’s where you are now, isn’t it? Are you sure this man that beat you up ever existed?”

“For Christ’s sake!” Garth said wildly. “Look at this if you don’t believe me.” He pointed to a long white seam just below and parallel to his right eyebrow. “I almost lost my right eye where the guy socked me. Half of my eyelid was flapping loose, and I had a lump on the back of my head as big as a goose egg.”

“I have scars too. They don’t prove anything.”

“All right! All right! I’ll prove it to you. Come over to L.A. with me. Right now?”

“What for?”

“I can prove that I’m telling you the truth. My face was bleeding so bad after that guy hit me I went straight to the nearest doctor, and he put eight stitches in my eye. Maybe you know him. Dr. Ralston? He lives only two or three blocks from your house.”

“I don’t. I never lived there. But we’ll go and see him. I’ve got a taxi waiting outside.”

Garth stood up and took a pearl-gray fedora from the top of the safe in the corner behind him. Sitting behind his desk, he had given the impression of size, but when he stood up Bret could see that he was short and stout, a nervous little man whose legs were stiff with fright.

Garth was jumpy and ill at ease in the taxi. He tried to start a conversation about his family, which Bret said nothing to encourage. When Garth finally subsided they rode in silence. Bret kept his face turned away from the other man and wearied his eyes with the monotony of the streets they were passing through. The houses were stucco or frame, one-storied almost without exception, sitting on narrow fifty- or sixty-foot lots that allowed room for a square of lawn in front and a clothesline and tiny garden at the back. The cramped houses, hardly more individual than a row of rabbit hutches, stretched under the noon sun in a cityscape of quiet resignation. Led on by the westering dream, he thought, the latter-day pioneers came from all over the country, all over the world, to homestead in the flat and empty finality of these streets.

“Caesar Street,” Garth said suddenly. “Say, that’s your street. That’s your house there, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” He twisted his head around and caught a glimpse through the rear window of the stucco bungalow Garth was pointing at. It looked like any other house he had never seen.

Garth looked curiously into his face. “Don’t you know your own home?”

“I told you I never lived in it. My wife bought it when I was at sea.” It occurred to him suddenly that he had seen the house before, the night Garth had been there. That night was still a blank to him. Everything he knew about it he knew at second hand, but that wasn’t Garth’s affair.

“Anybody living there now?”

“I don’t know.” But of course there wouldn’t be. “No, it’s empty.”

“I thought I saw a dame in the back yard, but I guess it was the next house.”

Soon afterward the driver let them out in front of a two-story frame house identified by a weather beaten wooden sign attached to the railing of the porch: “Homer L. Ralston, M.D.”

“It’s a good thing I saw that sign,” Garth said. “I was bleeding like a pig, and the doc said a blow like that can kill a man sometimes.”

A cardboard sign on the front door invited them to “Ring and Walk In.” The dingy waiting-room was lined with patients sitting stiffly under the cold eye of the nurse who presided at a table beside the door. She looked up as they entered.

“Yes?”

“We want to see the doctor,” Garth said.

“The doctor is very busy. You’ll have to wait your turn.”

“We didn’t come here for treatment,” Bret put in. “It’s a legal matter.”

She shrugged her starched shoulders in fussy resignation. “Sit down, please. I’ll see what I can do when he finishes with his patient.”

After a strained five minutes they were ushered into the consultation room. The doctor, a big, dull-faced man in his middle fifties, was sitting sideways at the desk.

“What can I do for you gentlemen?” he said without rising.

“You remember me, doctor?” Garth asked eagerly. “When you put some stitches in my eye last May?”

The doctor regarded him for a moment. “Let’s see, you came in here after office hours, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s right. It was about–”

Bret interrupted him: “Let the doctor remember for himself.”

The doctor looked from one to the other through thick spectacles that made his brown eyes seem frog-like and suspicious. “You haven’t been having trouble with your eye, Mr.–?”

“Garth. Burton Garth. No trouble at all, doc. My own doctor, that’s Clark over in Glendale, came to look at it a couple of times, and he took out the stitches–”

The doctor cut him short. “If there’s nothing more, Mr. Garf, I have patients waiting.”

“There is something more,” Bret said. “A crime was committed at a certain time last May 23. Garth claims he was in your office at that time.”

The doctor took off his glasses and revealed his little, tired, old eyes. “You from the police?”

“I’m investigating the matter privately. If you can check the time Garth was here?”

“Don’t you remember when I came here, doc? You couldn’t forget that. I had blood all over my shirt.”

“I remember you all right. I was just going to bed. Let me see, it must have been around ten o’clock at night.”

“Would you swear to it?” Bret said.

“I believe I would. Yes, I would. It was about ten o’clock.”

“And the date?”

The doctor turned up the palms of his thick hands in a helpless gesture. “I hardly ever know what day of the week it is. But you can check my records.” He raised his voice and called: “Miss Davis.”

A young nurse came in by the rear door. “Yes, doctor?”

“Remember the night I called you back to help with this gentleman’s eye? Mr. Garth, is it?”

“Do you remember what time the doctor called you?” Bret asked her.

She turned up her eyes to the ceiling and stood still for a long moment. “Yeah,” she said at length. “It was a little after ten, maybe ten after. I paid special attention to the time because it was so late.”

“Check the date in the files, Miss Davis. These gentlemen will be in the waiting-room.” The doctor waved away their thanks and pressed a buzzer under the desk.

A few minutes later Miss Davis brought them a filing card that fixed May 23 as the date of Mr. Garth’s visit.

“Well, that’s that,” Garth said as they left the house. With the pressure of fear removed, his personality was already beginning to expand obnoxiously. “Maybe next time you won’t be in so much of a hurry to accuse innocent parties.”

“You’re lucky,” Bret said grimly. He was angered and humiliated by the fact that this corpulent little rat had picked up his wife on the street, even though it appeared that Garth had done no more than that. Garth was the kind of civilian that all servicemen hated, the man who stayed behind and made his pile out of the war; too old or sick to fight, but not too old or sick to pursue women and cuckold their absent husbands. But in this case Garth himself had been a victim. Bret’s mind shifted to the vague man who had knocked Garth down the steps.

“Can you tell me anything more about this man? Did she call him a name or anything like that?”

Garth turned and faced him beside the waiting taxi. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I told you as much as I know. He was big and good looking and he had on pretty snappy clothes. Sport clothes, I guess you’d call them. I think he had light-colored hair, but it’s hard to tell at night. Look here, Mr. Taylor, I got to get back to my business.”

“Go ahead. I know where to find you if I want you.”

Over his shoulder Garth gave him a last worried look. Then his tweedy, fat body was swallowed up by the taxi and trundled away. Bret stood on the curb for a moment to get his bearings, and then turned back on foot in the direction of Caesar Street.

chapter 15

A middle-aged woman was sitting on the porch of the white bungalow, looking very much as if she belonged there. He looked at the number again to make sure that it was his. 1233 Caesar Street; he’d addressed too many letters there to be mistaken. But the house evoked no image or sense of place. Even his knowledge that Lorraine had been murdered here and that he had found her body, while it hung upon his mind like a clock weight and had motivated all his actions during the past day and night, seemed wholly external to him, as unassimilable as the strange woman on the porch of his empty house.

He turned up the walk, and she rose to meet him, a heavy woman with a tired face framed by short, graying hair. An ill-fitting blue flowered cotton dress was wrinkled over her body, which time and gravity had conspired to ruin.

“Hello,” she said. “If you’re selling, there’s nothing I want to buy, unless it’s nylons, that is.” She looked down at her thick, naked legs. “Haven’t had no stockings for six months, that’s how my legs got so chapped, I always did have a delicate skin.”

“I’m not selling anything. My name’s Taylor–”

“You don’t say!” Her slack face tightened in pleased surprise. “Don’t tell me you’re Lieutenant Taylor?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I declare! I thought you was–” She dropped the end of the sentence like a hot potato and raised her voice to a shout. “Pa, come and see who’s here. We got a visitor, you’d never guess.” She winked at Bret and whispered hoarsely: “Don’t tell him who you are. Let him guess. He’ll be surprised.” She added to herself, or to the world in general: “Lord knows he needed something to sober him up!”

“I’m a little surprised myself,” Bret said stiffly. “I thought my house was empty.”

“You mean to say Miss West didn’t tell you? I knew she didn’t want to bother you when you was sick, but now you’re all better again, it’s funny she didn’t tell you. She was here a little while ago too. Anyway, if you ask me for my opinion, and I don’t care if you knew about it or not, it was real nice of you to let us stay here like this.”

“Not at all.” It was grotesque and incredible, but he was beginning to suspect that this woman was Lorraine’s mother. Lorraine had told him in San Francisco that her family was in Michigan, but she had evaded detailed questions about them. He’d guessed that she was ashamed of them, and he hadn’t inquired too closely into the story of her father’s being one of Henry Ford’s right-hand men and he could get her a very good secretarial job any day, only she’d rather make her own way in life and have her freedom.

The woman let her tongue run on with the unselfconsciousness of the poor, the people who have nothing to lose. “I hope you’re not thinking about moving in here yourself right away? Pa hasn’t found a job yet, and the way he’s been hitting the bottle since Lorraine passed away, the good Lord knows when he’s ever going to – Pa!” she cried again. “You gone to sleep in there?”

A man’s voice grumbled and whined inside the house, and two feet stamped heavily on the floor.

“He was asleep,” she said. “I never saw a man that could sleep as much as Joe Berker. He was on the graveyard shift the last year at Willow Run, and it got him in the habit of sleeping in the daytime. Now he sleeps at night besides. I told him more than once he ought to get himself examined for sleeping sickness, but I was only kidding. It’s probably just that wine he drinks all the time. He calls it vino since we came out here. You’d think he was a dago or something–”

Her voice ran down like an unwound phonograph when she perceived that Bret was no longer listening. The name “Berker” had confirmed his guess that this woman was his mother-in-law, and the knowledge filled him with an ugly sorrow. So this was the family he had married into; this gross and aging hag was the substitute he had acquired for the beautiful dead mother of his childhood. Then he became aware of the woman’s worried eyes watching his stony face. The awareness was like a dash of cold water. Snap out of it, you fool! He told himself. Byronic melancholy was the opium of the intellectuals and the last refuge of little minds. Snap out of it and act like a man!

“Mrs. Berker.” He held out his hand to her, fumbling awkwardly for words that would compensate for the contempt he had been feeling and had scarcely tried to hide. “I’m glad to meet you. Lorraine often talked about you – and wrote about you.” Lorraine had mentioned her once or twice: the prominent clubwoman and gracious hostess, a little stuffy and straitlaced as befitted her social position, though she had been a successful career woman before her love marriage to the rising young executive Berker–

Her hand, thick and coarse-grained, gripped his warmly. “Mercy me, don’t call me ‘Mrs. Berker,’ call me ‘Ma’! I guess we’re still related even if poor Lorraine ain’t with us any more.”

“Yes,” he said. “Ma.” The bitter bleating word incredibly brought tears to his eyes.

He was glad that she had turned away from him to peer through the dirty window into the house. “Look at that now. He’s gone back to sleep in there. Excuse me a minute. I’d ask you in only the parlor’s in such a mess.”

She pulled open the screen door and paused in the doorway for an instant before she went in. “Just sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you.”

For an instant of no more than a heartbeat’s duration the angles of her cheekbones and jaw had caught the light in such a way that he saw her resemblance to Lorraine. The line of the skull was there beneath the aging flesh, tender, pathetic, and clear, like a sculptured fragment of youth caught out of time. Just for that instant, it seemed that Lorraine had come back and was standing before him, heavy from the grave and cruelly aged by the eternal hours of death.

It was no more than a trick of the eye perhaps, but it had the stern and general sadness of deep insight. He saw more clearly than he ever had before that flesh was as grass, youth and beauty impermanent and precious, life itself a perishable good to be used while it lasted, generously and honorably. Even in pain and sorrow there was a sweet excitement, a sense of life; and a hard-earned pleasure like a boxer’s in submission to the punishment of time. The one irreparable loss was that of life itself. Lorraine was the one to be sorry for, the dead girl married to oblivion, and not the worn-out woman who had borne and survived Lorraine, who carried still within her declining body the talismanic fragments of youth.

The slamming of the screen door set a period to his thought. He sat down in the worn canvas chair his mother-in-law had vacated, and watched the street, trying to throw his attention away from himself, away from Lorraine and her family and the past, from all the bottomless spiral anguish of the world. Women were walking babies and shopping-carts on the pavement. A delivery boy went by on a red scooter that emitted a continuous stuttering raspberry. A paralytic old man passed the house inch by inch, walking quadrupedally with two canes. He was so old and thin, with the withered skin hanging in folds from his obstinate skeleton, that it was a wonder he could move at all. He stopped at regular intervals to rest and to look up at the sun, the emergency battery on which he depended for another month or another year of life.

Bret smiled at the old man with the sun in his face, half from sympathy and half from envy. At that age the only problem was to live, to wring another drop of energy from food and weather, cover another city block by minuscule degrees, reconquer the lengthening space between waking and sleeping. For a while in the hospital he had been like an old man himself, an old man or an infant, who needed nothing but sleep and food, until his resurgent mind had driven him like a cruel angel out of the Eden of the physical life. It was a hard rebirth into the adult world. He still had a nostalgia for the warm and quiet places of mental death, and a wildly yawing inclination to self-pity. Only in the last week had he been able to face the memory of Lorraine, to recognize the difficult fact that he had destroyed himself through her. No doubt the years of the war had softened him up for the final blow; Lorraine was the one who had found the fatal crack in his defenses.

For a while after their quick and ill-timed marriage he had held the truth at bay. During the first weeks of separation, when the one physical love of his life had been cut off and left him raw and sensitive to the masculine life of the ship, it had been important to him to keep her image intact. She was a good girl, a devoted wife, perhaps a little harebrained, but basically as sound and sweet as an apple; this was the icon that gave him strength in return for his uncritical worship. Then time and distance, working together like acids in combination, dissolved the fabric of the illusion. The memories of their marriage day and their drunk honeymoon fell into the patterns of reality, and her infrequent letters came to fill in the blanks. She was selfish. She was a liar. She was lazy and discontent. She was a fool. And he, who had married her between drinks on time he owed to another woman, was worse than a fool.

Even so he had enough integrity and objectivity to try to make the best of it. If he had made an unfortunate marriage so had she. He answered her letters dutifully. He sent her as large an allotment as he could afford, and, when she asked for it, the money for the down payment on the house, more than half the money he had saved for writing his book when the war ended. He tried to keep his thoughts loyal to her and to give her the benefit of whatever doubts he had. Meanwhile he lived on his nerve and by his sense of duty. Neither of these was enough to sustain a man indefinitely in the operational area. The last seven weeks before the ship was lost there was an average of eight or ten general quarters a day, but they didn’t disturb him much because he had given up sleeping almost entirely.

Now there were no more doubts. Lorraine’s morals, like her mind, had been as light as a net balloon. The only mystery was why he had not seen it on the first night. As casually as any tart she had let him pick her up and take her to his hotel room. He suspected he was only one in a long series of lovers that did not end with him, a second-class private in the nocturnal army that had bivouacked on her young mons. Perhaps the man who had caught her on this porch with Garth had been her steady lover, but even if that was so, she had been willing to be unfaithful to him, and with such a creature as Garth. He couldn’t hate the girl who had betrayed him and then died suddenly in the midst of her light sins. She had nothing to lose but her life, and she had lost it. Her body was already half turned to dust. All his hatred settled on the man who had been the last to violate her bed, the shadowy man who had taken her life as hostage to his jealousy.

The screen door creaked behind him, and he jumped up to meet Lorraine’s father, who was framed in the doorway like a living portrait of depression.

“That’s your son-in-law, Pa. Lieutenant Bret Taylor, no less. Go on out and make yourself sociable.”

Berker pushed the screen door partly open and slid through. He was wearing a faded denim shirt that gaped open at the neck, showing the mat of wiry hair on his chest, a shade darker than his gray stubble beard. His breath was winy, and the whites of his swollen eyes were wine red. He held out a grime-cracked hand with the forefinger cut off below the first joint.

“I’m glad to meet you,” Bret said as they shook hands.

“Same here. I guess you noticed I got a missing finger. Lost it in a corn cutter in 1915. I went down in the silo to look for it, but couldn’t find it. Probably made pretty good ensilage at that–”

“Now, Pa, the Lieutenant don’t want to hear about that.” She smiled apologetically at Bret. “It’s the first thing he wants to tell them about whenever he meets anybody.”

“Wouldn’t want them to think I was born that way,” Berker said moodily. “I stuck it in a little hole in the corn cutter, and whish! I’d of been more careful if I’d knew how hard it was to get a job with a finger missing. I don’t suppose you got any job worries though. That fiancée of yours looks pretty well heeled if I ever saw one–”

“Be quiet, Joe,” his wife said sharply. “Where’s your manners?”

“You want a slug of vino?” Berker asked, by way of remembering his manners. “I got a half-gallon jug, and it’s only half killed.”

“No, thanks. Did you say Paula was here?”

“Yeah, a couple of hours ago,” Mrs. Berker said. “She was looking for you. She was even talking about putting an ad in the papers, but I told her it wasn’t anything to get so worked up about. Joe here used to drop out of sight for a month at a time when he was your age, and then he’d turn up like a bad penny as dapper as you please.”

“Do you have a phone?” He resented Paula’s persistent interference, but if she was worried about him he’d have to get in touch with her.

Berker grinned sheepishly. “We got a phone, only it’s disconnected. We don’t know nobody in this burg anyhow, so it don’t make no difference. Why in hell we ever drove across the country to come and live in a burg where I don’t know nobody and can’t even get a job–”

“You be quiet,” his wife snapped. “If you got no job, you know whose fault it is, and you wouldn’t want your eldest daughter lying dead with nobody to tend her grave. Besides, Ellie’s making some real nice friends in the store, which is more than you can say for the trash she knew in that trailer camp. Ellie’s our other daughter,” she explained parenthetically to Bret. “You’d like her. If we was still in Michigan, you know as well as I do, Joe Berker, Ellie wouldn’t of stayed with us any more than Lorraine.”

“Good riddance, then.”

“That’s a fine way to talk. You want the lieutenant to think we ain’t good parents to our children? Where would we be now if it wasn’t for Ellie? Answer me that.”

“Go to hell!” He went in and slammed the door behind him. His diminishing voice complained as he retreated: “I made better money in my life than any snip of a girl–”

“Don’t pay no attention to him,” the woman said. “He hasn’t been the same since Lorraine – and then they closed down the plant. He’s worried about Ellie, thinks she’s getting fast ideas from the girls at the five-and-ten. He was worried about Lorraine the same way after she ran away to Hollywood. I told him a girl as pretty and bright as Lorraine was sure to land on her feet and maybe even make a success in pictures, but he always said she’d be ruined. It certainly turned the tables on him when she sent us the letter as cool as you please that she was married to a full lieutenant in the Navy. I hope you’ll get a chance to meet Ellie some day soon. I don’t think she’s quite as pretty as Lorraine, but a lot of people do. She’s a blonde, taking after Joe’s mother, and her hair is naturally wavy. She never had a permanent in her life.”

Bret’s sympathy had receded in spite of his efforts, and left his original stony contempt. “I have to be going,” he said brusquely. Wasn’t one of your daughters enough for me? Keep your Ellie with the naturally wavy hair, and keep the house and the furniture and the memories in it.

“Goodness gracious,” she said, “why don’t you sit down and relax for a bit? Don’t let Joe put you off like that; he don’t mean anything. We haven’t even had a real visit yet, and I know you want to see Lorraine’s pictures. She was the cutest kid you ever saw when she was little. Did she ever tell you she had red hair when she was a toddler? I got a lock of it in the trunk.”

On the point of departure he was struck by the full realization that these were the steps where Garth had been attacked, that was the door from which the murderer had come. Perhaps Lorraine had known the man for years, perhaps her mother knew him. Mrs. Berker was standing at the door holding it open, waiting uncertainly for some encouragement from him to fetch her mementos of Lorraine. Gradually her arm relaxed and let the door swing shut.

“I’m looking for a man Lorraine knew. He may have had something to do with her murder.”

“Now who would that be?” The whimpering question ended in a high-pitched sob, and a devil-mark grimace slid over her face and curled its sagging lines. “It was a terrible thing – a terrible thing to happen to my little girl.” The word “murder” had swept away her defenses, leaving nothing, no childhood snapshots or locks of hair, between her and the fact. She stood blinking like someone staring into a blinding light.

“I don’t know his name. I haven’t even a good description of him.”

“Somebody in Michigan? She had a lot of friends in Michigan, but most of the fellows she knew at Dearborn High were real nice boys. They wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“Did she know a big man with light hair? He probably had some money, he wore good clothes. About my size, I think, and he liked fighting. It’s possible his hair wasn’t blond.”

“It couldn’t be Sammy Luger? He was a big blond boy she went out with, and he had good clothes. Only I heard when we left Michigan he was still in the army. He was a sergeant in Berlin.”

“Then it couldn’t be Sammy Luger, could it?” He instantly regretted the savage irony of his tone and softened it. “Do you know of anyone else who fits the description?”

“She knew lots of big men, but she never ran around with the brawling kind. She was with a nice high-class crowd at Dearborn High. When she was in her junior year they elected her the most popular girl in the class. I guess it went to her head, sort of. She was doing real good in her studies but she quit before she finished up the year. She should have stayed with her ma and pa,” she lamented, “and then this wouldn’t of happened. It wasn’t anybody she knew that did it. It was one of these Los Angeles sex maniacs, a Mexican or a nigger. They’ll do anything to get a white girl. Many’s the time I’ve thought it’d been better for her if she’d grew up as ugly as a witch.”

Her sobs became more frequent, the rhythmic peaks of sound in a ululation that included fragments of sentences in its pattern: “… a good girl … nobody she knew … kill the dirty animals … killed my girl.”

Bret opened the door with his left hand and with his right arm around her heaving shoulders, propelled her into the house. The front door opened directly into the living-room. Berker was on his back, emitting strangulated snores, on the beaten chesterfield at the far end of the room. Beside him on the newspaper-covered floor a green glass jug stood open. The patches of floor that were visible between the dirty newspapers had lost their hardwood finish and were acquiring a patina of grease and grime. There were several teacups full of cigarette butts on the cracked glass tray of the coffee table, but most of the ashes and butts of recent months were piled in the disused fireplace, from which they had gradually spread like volcanic ash across the room. There was a tangle of peach-colored woman’s underwear on the radio, and in the opposite corner a lint-covered mop was leaning. The armchair beside the door, ripped as if by a butcher knife, was spilling its cotton guts into its lap.

Mrs. Berker sat down heavily. Her sobbing continued, unconsciously synchronized with her husband’s snores.

“I’m sorry,” Bret said to her bowed head, “for everything.”

He ran through the door and away from the house.

chapter 16

He caught a cab at the boulevard.

“Where to, bud?” the driver asked as he leaned back to open the door.

Paula’s address was on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t give it. If he went to Paula they’d have the old argument over again. For all he knew there were a couple of male nurses waiting at her house to wrap him in wet sheets and ship him back to the hospital. No telling what lengths an anxious woman would go to. Certainly he’d have to phone her as soon as he got the chance.

The light had changed, and the driver threw in the clutch. “Which way?” he said impatiently.

Almost without thinking, Bret gave him the address of Harry Milne’s apartment. His choice of destination was easy to rationalize. All day he’d felt like an impostor in Milne’s clothes, a naval officer masquerading as a smalltime Hollywood character. He was convinced that he’d be able to think better when he got into his blues again. The meeting with his unexpected tenants had jolted him and set his mind revolving in interminable circles. Paula seemed to have a finger in all of his affairs.

When his taxi drew up in front of the long stucco building, he noticed a roadster, the same color as Paula’s, parked in front of it under a palm. No doubt she’d be here to anticipate him if she’d known he was coming, but even a woman’s intuition wasn’t as clairvoyant as that. When he had climbed the stairs to the second floor and found the door of Milne’s apartment, his doubt of her clairvoyance was shaken. A woman’s voice that sounded very much like Paula’s was speaking in angry tones on the other side of the door. He knocked at once, and the angry voice was hushed.

Henry Milne, large and confident in his shirt sleeves, opened the door carefully and stood blocking the aperture with his body. “Hello, I wasn’t expecting you.” He stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him.

“I came to give you back your clothes.”

“They’re at the tailor’s,” Milne said quickly. “It’s got a sign, ‘Mac the Tailor,’ up that way, just around the corner to the right. You leave my suit with Mac, and I’ll pick it up later, eh? I’m busy right now, you know how it is.” He tried to wink gaily and conspiratorially, but there was no humor in his shallow, strained eyes.

In the face of this anxiety to get rid of him, Bret delayed his departure. “I’m grateful to you for helping me out,” he said blandly. “If I could–”

“Look, friend. I got a dame in here. You want to do something for me, you can blow. Leave my clothes at Mac’s. I trust you.”

His attitude was awkward and tense, with his right hand behind him on the doorknob. The door jerked open suddenly and almost threw him off balance. He shrugged his shoulders and stepped aside to make way for Paula.

“Bret! Where on earth have you been?”

She was as well groomed as usual, but her skin was pale and translucent and her eyes had a faintly mongoloid puffiness, as if she had spent a bad night. She wore a tall garish hat and a yellow wool suit in militant contrast to her mood.

“I’ve been around. Mr. Milne was good enough to lend me some clothes–”

“Mr. Milne?” She glanced at the man beside her, who was leaning with false nonchalance against the wall. It seemed to Bret that the look they exchanged was electric with hatred or some other emotion. “Oh,” was all she said, but her breath came out with the syllable and lent it a hissing quality.

“Look here, Lieutenant. You just shed the vestments at Mac the tailor’s like I said, and we’ll call it even.” He made a move toward the open door.

“Just a minute. I left my purse in there.” Paula stepped into the apartment ahead of him and came out a moment later with a yellow handbag. The door was shut behind her, and the bolt of the lock snapped home.

“What’s the matter with him? Did you accuse him of kidnapping me, or what?”

“How in hell did you get mixed up with that man?”

“It was perfectly natural,” he said unpleasantly. “I lost possession of my faculties last night, just as you might have expected, and he brought me home with him. But what brought you here?”

“I was looking for you. I was awake all last night–”

“You might have saved yourself the trouble. I admit my mental history has its blank spots, but I’m not exactly a character out of Krafft-Ebing.”

“It isn’t that, Bret. You told me you were going to look for the murderer. There are some terrible places in this city, some terrible people.” Involuntarily her eyes turned to the closed door. She took his hand and drew him along the hall.

He answered her as they descended the stairs: “Biologically, at least, I’m better equipped to deal with them than you are.”

“I don’t know whether you are, darling. I’m a woman, and my brain is ever so tortuous.”

“You haven’t explained how you got here.”

“Haven’t I?”

She said nothing more until he had paid off his taxi and was sitting beside her in her car.

“I know you don’t like me to do things like that, but you’ve no idea how miserable I was. I finally thought of going to that wretched café, and one of the bartenders knew that Miles – this man that took you home. Why didn’t you come to my house? I spent most of last week furnishing a room for you.”

“I’m sorry – sorry you were worried. I intended to phone you when Mrs. Berker told me you were looking for me.”

“You were there, then?”

“I wanted to see the house. I thought it was empty.”

“You don’t mind my letting them stay there? It was going to waste.”

“They can stay there forever as far as I’m concerned.” He leaned forward and looked soberly into her face. “You’re a pretty good woman, aren’t you? A generous sort of woman.”

“Am I?” She laughed lightly and uncertainly. “I suppose I feel I owe something to the people I’ve hated, even to their relatives.”

“Did you hate Lorraine?” He was painfully conscious that this was the first time her name had been spoken between them. The mere name seemed to add a dimension, a bitter edge of reality to their complicated situation.

“Yes, I hated her,” she answered bluntly. “Not since her death, but before, when she took you away from me.” She started the engine with a furious roar. “Damn you, you get me talking like somebody out of nineteenth-century drama! Can’t we stop thinking about Lorraine?”

“I can’t.”

The roadster was still at the curb, and she shifted to neutral and let it idle. She turned toward him in the seat and spoke to him in a small, coaxing voice he had never heard her use:

“You’ll come home with me now, won’t you? You have your appointment tomorrow. It’s funny to think it was only yesterday you left the hospital. It seems ages, doesn’t it?”

“You’ll have to cancel the appointment. I have other things to do. I’ve found out more in twenty-four hours than the police did in all those months.”

Her hand went to her mouth and hovered there as if to guard what she said. He had an impulse, which he failed to obey, to touch her face, smooth the fear out of it.

“What have you found out?” she said finally.

“I’ve found out that there was a man with her, definitely.”

“The police know that.”

“They haven’t got a description of him and a witness who can identify him. I have.” He gave her Garth’s description of his assailant. “The police don’t know anything about a man like that, do they?”

“No,” she said through her nervous fingers. “All they have are the fingerprints.” Abruptly she started the car and drew away from the curb.

“Wait. I have to change my clothes. He said the shop was around the corner to the right.”

She swung so wide at the corner that she nearly struck a car going in the opposite direction. He had to remind her again to stop at the tailor’s.

As he took off Harry Milne’s clothes behind the faded green curtain at the back of the steamy shop, he wondered why Paula had called him Miles, and why she was acting so strangely. He folded the gabardine slacks over a wire hanger and draped the camel’s hair coat over them. When he had put on his pressed and mended uniform, his eyes lingered for a moment on the glad rags he had discarded. In the dim light of the ceiling bulb there was something eerie about the empty coat, like a deflated and truncated man hanging against the wall. His imagination stirred to life and added a face to the man. Milne (or Miles?) had light hair and was handsome enough in a way. Milne had a bit of a tin ear, and that meant a background of fighting. Milne was a big man about his own size. Beyond that, Milne had shown an unexplained interest in him. Was it because Milne knew he was Lorraine’s husband?

He rushed past the bowed little man at the pressing machine and out of the shop so fast that Mac had to follow him into the street to collect his money.

“Sorry, I’m in a hurry,” he said, and overpaid the man a dollar. Mac was unimpressed. He shuffled back into his shop, muttering resentfully to himself.

“A hurry about what?” Paula said when Bret climbed into the car. “And where’s your hat? Remember the time on the beach the commander reprimanded you for taking off your hat?”

There was more tension in her voice than the harmless reminiscence warranted, and he felt that she was trying to throw him off the track. The memory of their first weeks together, La Jolla and the bright nostalgia of love pulled at his mind, but he shook them off.

“My hat’s still back in Milne’s apartment. Drive around the block, will you, Paula?”

“I thought we were going home.”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t go back there, Bret. I don’t like that man. I don’t trust him.”

“I don’t trust him with my hat.”

“But you’ve got another in your luggage, haven’t you? Or you can buy one.”

“I want that particular hat. Among other things.”

“Other things?” Her hands were tight on the wheel, though she still hadn’t started the engine.

He knew that she guessed his intention. Through some obscure feminine channel she had reached the conclusion that he suspected Milne, or Miles (it wasn’t surprising that a murderer should use an alias). He knew too that she dreaded another meeting between them. But it would only start another argument if he brought the conflict into the open.

“My black tie,” he said. “He’s still got that too.”

She refused to accept his superficial version of the situation. “You mustn’t go back there, Bret. I forbid you to go back.”

A vein of anger swelled in his head. “ ‘Forbid’ is a strange word to use. It hasn’t become part of your official vocabulary yet.”

She looked at him blankly as if her mind was elsewhere, occupied with an internal pain or a remote disaster. The first time he had spoken to her at Bill Levy’s party she had seemed like an old friend. Now he saw her as a stranger. Her brown hair was too neatly arranged under her vivid hat. There were tiny dry lines in her forehead and at the corners of her swollen eyelids. Her orange lipstick was unnaturally bright against her pale skin, and so heavily applied that it seemed to weigh down her mouth.

“Still, I forbid you,” she said.

“That’s unfortunate.” His own face felt stiff and dry. There was a knot of pain behind his eyes, a focus of anger and desolation. He put his hand on the door handle and pressed it down.

“Wait,” she said sharply. “You’ve done enough to spoil my life. I’m not going to let you do more if I can help it.”

He stayed where he was, shocked and outraged by her frankness, which struck him like a blow below the belt.

“You may not feel that you owe me anything–”

“I know I do,” he said, but she didn’t pause in her furious speech.

“I feel that you do. You’ve given me damn little to go on, and I’ve been as faithful to you as a wife could be. Do you understand that I’ve lived by you from the first day? I’ve worked for our future together, and I’ve suffered for it. I have the right ask you to stay in this car and come home with me.”

“But why?”

“I can’t tell you why.”

“Then I have the right to refuse. I know what I owe you, but it doesn’t mean that you can give me orders. I have other debts to pay, and I’ve got to pay them in my own way.” He knew that what he was saying was melodramatic and unfair, but he was beyond caring. His brain was ice cold and boiling at the same time, like a cup of liquid air.

“Is your dead wife more important than our future?”

Her voice was weary and defeated, as if her subterranean thought had gone to the conclusion beyond the spate of words. Still, she had to finish the dialogue. Every scene had to have its dialogue, even if weeping, screaming, beating her fists on the windshield and on the hard man’s face beside her would have been a truer expression of her feelings.

He too had said it all before, and said it again: “My future won’t begin until I’ve licked the past.”

“You can’t lick the past. It’s done. It’s finished.”

“I’m licking it now.”

She essayed an ironic laugh that came out as a screechy titter. “You’re knocking yourself out, you mean, and for no good reason. For God’s sake, and mine and your own, let me drive you home with me.”

“I can’t. If you don’t see that, there must be very little about me that you do see.”

“I love you, Bret. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Love can be mistaken.”

“Are you ready to call it off then?”

“Not unless you force me to. I do know that we can’t set up housekeeping in an open grave.”

“Words! You can twist words any way you like, but I thought the thing we had was stronger than rhetoric. I thought you loved me. If you don’t I’m not interested in trying to force anything. Do you love me?”

A moment before, her face had been the face of a stranger, an unknown, harried woman in whose car he happened incongruously to be sitting, arguing for the right to master his difficult life. He looked into her face again and saw that it was his lover’s, familiar and dear in every line. He had loved her from the beginning and would never love anyone else. He was ashamed that she had had to ask him.

“I do love you,” he said. “But can’t you see there are things more important than love?”

“What things are more important than love?”

“Justice.”

“Justice! You think you can go and find justice like a lucky horseshoe? A four-leaf clover in a field? Look around you and tell me where you see justice, except in books and movies. Do you see the good people getting the breaks and the bad people getting the dirty end of the stick? The hell you do! There’s no Hays Office to censor life and make all come right in the end. Everybody has to make his own life turn out, and you know it. That’s all I’m arguing for, Bret, for you to keep your head out of trouble. You try to make things over, and you’ll only beat out your brains.” But before he answered she knew that her angry words were as ineffectual as she had said words were.

“You must think I’m pretty futile.” The irony he had intended was lost in his sense that he had spoken the truth. In self-distrust and confusion, still shaken by her statement that he might spoil her life, he clung to his stubborn will and the brittle mood that sustained it.

“I think you’re strong,” she said, “but you don’t know what you’re up against.”

“Your friend Milne? Or is the name ‘Miles’?”

“He’s not my friend. I detest him.”

“And you’re afraid of him, aren’t you? You haven’t told me why.”

“I’m afraid of a man who is capable of anything.”

“I’m not,” he said flatly.

It was no use talking any more. She could never be made to see that he had to do what he was doing. He had no right to love or security until he had settled the question that dragged on his mind. Only action could remove the deathly magnetism that drew him back and down and distorted all his certainties – even his certainty of Paula.

Through the dingy window of his shop Mac the tailor watched Bret as he got out of the car and walked away. The woman’s head turned slowly after him and stayed like that until he was out of sight. But she didn’t try to follow him or say a word. From the expression on her face it looked to Mac as if she was in bad trouble, with no idea of how to get out of it. He was just as glad when she drove away, because it made him feel kind of low to see a pretty woman stood up like that and looking so blue.

chapter 17

There was a pay telephone in the drugstore on the corner, tucked away behind the prescription counter. Bret couldn’t find the Cockalorum in the directory, but Information gave him the number.

Garth himself answered the phone: “Yes?”

“This is Bret Taylor. I want you to come over to L.A. right away.”

“For what?” The high voice was suspicious and resentful.

“I want you to look at a man.”

“I’m busy, Mr. Taylor. I got things to do besides chasing all over the county–”

“Don’t you want to catch the man that beat you?”

“Sure I do, but I don’t want to get in more trouble. I can’t afford it.”

“You can’t afford to have me give your name to the police.”

“You wouldn’t do that, Mr. Taylor? I co-operated with you, I helped you every way I could.”

“You can come here and help me some more.” He described the location of the store. “I’ll wait here for you, but I won’t wait forever.”

“I don’t like this.”

“You don’t have to like it. I’ll be waiting.” He hung up.

There was a lunch counter in the front part of the store, and it reminded him that he was hungry. He slid onto an empty stool and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. Then he bought a paper and returned to his seat to read it. The small black letters formed words, and the words were strung together in sentences, but the sentences had no meaning. There were more legible sentences written in acid between the lines.

In the first flush of recognition he had had no doubt that Milne was the man. But as his feelings cooled and shifted his point of view, the circumstances that pointed to Milne were revealing secondary patterns. Whether his hunch was right or wrong the obvious thing to do was to call in the police and give them the facts he had uncovered. But he rejected the idea. They’d only be a further complication, and he didn’t trust the police, who had failed Lorraine so miserably. He had failed her himself but he was resolved not to fail again. He trusted himself, and no one else, to remain incorruptible and see the thing through to the end.

His mind was crouched and tense like a sprinter waiting for the gun. His look returned again and again to the doorway, yet when Garth appeared he didn’t recognize him immediately. The little man had changed to an off-white double-breasted suit with a black shirt and a yolk-yellow tie. He stood just inside the door, a sawed-off travesty of sartorial splendor, while his mobile little eyes glanced back and forth and finally settled on Bret. Bret threw down his unread newspaper and went to meet him.

“You think we’re going to head into trouble?” Garth said as they went out. “This guy’s a killer, remember, if you got the right one, which I doubt–”

“Save it until you see him.”

“Where is he?”

“Half a block from here in his apartment.”

“You expect me to walk right in on him? What if he knows me?”

“You’ll be all right.”

“Maybe. I don’t take chances on that boy.” Garth patted the side pocket of his coat significantly.

“That won’t be necessary. We’ll do it like this.” The plan, which he explained as they walked toward the apartment, was intended to give Garth a look at Milne without being noticed himself. Bret would knock on Milne’s door while Garth waited down the hall. When Milne opened the door Bret would keep him there until Garth could walk past the door and downstairs to the lobby.

“Yeh, but if he knows me? He might jump me.”

“I’ll hold him.”

“If this is the guy he won’t be so easy.”

“I can hold him. Come on, this is the place.”

“I don’t like this.”

But he followed Bret through the lobby and up the carpeted stairs. The upstairs hallways were deserted, dimly lit by windows at their remote ends. All the doors were closed. Somewhere behind one of them a record of the “Pastoral” Symphony was being played. Its sweet rustic gaiety echoed forlornly through the building, bounding disconsolately against the doors and partitions and dying in the walled air.

“Go down to the far end and start back after I knock. We don’t want him to hear us coming together.”

Garth walked away with fear prodding him in the kidneys, a dapper and pathetic silhouette against the light from the window at the end of the hall.

Bret followed Garth halfway down the hall and knocked on the door. From the tail of his eye he saw Garth moving toward him, and simultaneously he heard light footsteps inside the apartment. His throat felt tight, as if constricted by the pressure of converging events. The bolt of the lock was shifted, and Milne opened the door.

“You again?”

“I’m sorry I have to trouble you. You have my hat and tie.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He looked narrowly into Bret’s face. “Is there anything else, or is that the works?”

“Let me see.” Garth was to his left and behind him, out of his range of vision, but he could hear Garth’s footsteps falling softly on the carpeted floor. Milne’s eyes had shifted from Bret’s face and were looking beyond him into the hall. Garth’s footsteps were directly behind him now, following each other very slowly, so that it seemed his heart beat many times between the footfalls.

“Won’t you let me pay you for all your trouble?”

The pale eyes returned to him. “Hell, no. I’m glad to help you out. What happened to the girl friend?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe she’s waiting for you, eh? How’s about coming in and have a drink? It won’t do her no harm to wait while you have one little drink.”

“No, thanks.” He allowed his impatience to enter his voice. “May I have my hat and tie? I’m in a hurry.”

“Why, sure, certainly. I was just trying to be a pal.” He left the door open and returned a moment later with the white-covered hat and the black tie. “You want to look in a mirror to put your tie on?”

“No, thanks. Not now.”

“You leave my suit at the tailor’s like I said?”

“Yes. Thanks for everything.”

Bret walked away quickly without looking back. Not until he reached the head of the stairs did he hear the door softly close.

Garth was waiting in the street, jumpy with nerves.

“Is that the man?”

“Now look here, Mr. Taylor. I saw him at night and it was quite a while ago. I think it’s him–”

“Will you swear to it?”

“Let’s get away from here. He might come out.” He started away on his short legs, moving so fast that Bret had to run to catch him.

“You know it’s him then, don’t you?”

“I said I think it’s him, but I can’t swear to it. There’s no use dragging me into court, because I won’t swear to anything.”

“Forget about the law, can’t you? That man slugged you and killed my wife. Didn’t he?”

“It’s him all right,” Garth said reluctantly. “Only remember what I said if you drag me into court. I co-operated with you to the best of my ability–”

“Give it a rest. And lend me your gun.”

“What you want a gun for? You better call the cops and let them handle it. Give me a chance to pull out of here, and call the cops.”

“I didn’t ask you for advice. I asked for your gun.”

“You can’t have it. It’s a damn good gun, and I need it in my office.”

“You can buy another.”

“It’s not registered. It cost me fifty bucks. Give me one reason why I should hand you fifty bucks.”

“Here.” They had reached the corner in front of the drugstore. Bret stopped him and held out a fifty-dollar bill.

“It’s not registered, I told you. It’s not so easy to replace.”

“All the better for both of us.”

Garth took the money and looked at it. Then he swung past Bret in a half circle as calculated and neat as a veronica. Bret felt the sudden weight of metal in the pocket of his blouse, and almost as tangibly he felt a new respect for Garth. The little man had unsuspected talents.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, boy. You try to use that rod and you’ll burn your fingers for sure.”

“I don’t expect to use it. I want it for moral support.”

“Moral support for what? I still say call the cops. Give me five minutes to get out–”

“Maybe you’re right. I will.”

“Uh?”

Garth left him without a backward look or a good-bye and scurried across the road to his parked car. Bret stood on the corner, smiling grimly, until Garth’s yellow convertible had nosed out into the stream of traffic and merged with it. Then he went back to the apartment building he and Garth had just left. For reasons there was no time to examine, he had no intention of calling the police.

For the third time in an hour he knocked on the door. This time there was no answer. An entire minute ticked off in individual seconds while he listened and waited. He knocked again more loudly and was answered by another thirty seconds of silence. He knocked so hard that the thin panels reverberated under his knuckles like a drum. Once more he waited very briefly, and then his patience ended. Stepping back across the hallway, he ran against the door and burst it open with his shoulder.

The living-room contained nothing but the afternoon sunlight sluiced through the tilted slats of the Venetian blinds. He closed the door behind him and looked around the room. A row of nude photographs on the wall to his right: “To my old friend Larry …” “For Larry, who has what it takes …” A heavy armchair crouched in the corner beside a cabinet radio-phonograph and a table covered with piles of scrambled records. He looked behind the chair, behind the chesterfield, and went through the rest of the apartment: the kitchen, remarkably neat and clean; the windowless little bathroom, where he had been sick the night before; the bedroom with its two unmade beds, and nothing under them but rolls of fluffy dust; the closet full of clothes hanging in quiet ranks, with no man behind them. He had made one visit too many, and Milne had taken the hint.

Standing in the empty bedroom with Milne’s possessions all around him, in his nostrils the piny odor of some sort of masculine scent, he was overwhelmed by his nearness to the man who had killed Lorraine. He had spoken to him, been touched by him, slept in his room with him all night, even worn his clothes. He had been in intimate contact with a murderer and had seen in him nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing worse than cheapness and vulgarity, qualities that had seemed harmless enough in a person who was helping him out. The cheapness had been moral bankruptcy, and the vulgarity had been viciousness. He had accepted help from the hands that strangled Lorraine, and felt contaminated as this room had been contaminated by Milne’s use.

There was a photograph of Milne, very sleek and athletic in a sport shirt, in a leather frame on the dresser. He stared at the smiling face in cold anger and confusion, unable to understand why Milne had brought him home in the first place. Certainly humanitarianism wasn’t the reason. It was possible, as anything now seemed possible, that Milne had intended to kill him and had changed his mind. The intricacies of the brain that hid behind that smooth face and vain smile were completely mysterious to him.

Now was the time to call the police if he was ever going to call them. A runaway man could disappear in Los Angeles County for weeks or months, or forever. No one man, searching alone, could begin to cover the hotels and motels and apartments, the rooming houses, flophouses, call houses, where Milne might hole up. A perversion of chance had led him to Milne once, but he hadn’t the slightest hope that it would happen again. It was a job for the police, and even they might fail at it.

He started for the telephone in the living-room, wryly aware of the dramatic fitness of calling the police from the fugitive’s own apartment. Before he got to the telephone he realized that, drama or no drama, he couldn’t go through with it. He didn’t owe obedience to Paula, but he owed her some kind of loyalty. Her role in the case was too doubtful to permit him to bring in the police.

His mind balked when he tried to define that role, and understand her relation to the dead woman and to Harry Milne. He had always thought she was honest almost more honest than it was natural for a woman to be. Perhaps that was simply one of the illusions of love. The pain and doubt of the past day had eaten away some of his love for her, and he had come to feel that he knew her less. He could no longer follow the thoughts that moved behind her candid eyes. He knew that she had been disingenuous, if not deceitful, in urging him to think of the future, forget Lorraine, and drop the case. But the Medusa fact that stood between him and the telephone was worse than simple deceit. She and Harry Milne had met before. Because Paula had suppressed the truth, whatever it was, it followed that she was obscurely leagued with the murderer. He was afraid that if he looked further into that twisted fact and saw all its implications, it would turn him to stone.

He used the telephone to call a taxi, and went downstairs to wait for it at the curb. When the taxi arrived he gave the driver Paula’s address. As they crossed to Wilshire in a rapid chaos of traffic his mind went on working, half against his will. Paula was involved with Milne, perhaps in something connected with the murder; by suppressing her connection with Milne, she had been protecting him; in spite of her efforts Milne had been forced to run; there was a chance that he’d run to Paula for further protection.

They turned into her street, a typical Hollywood residential block of houses too elaborate and big for their lots, sentried along each curb by rows of palms like giant old men with ragged beards and their withered hair in their eyes. He saw Paula’s car in her driveway, and told the taxi driver to stop before they reached her house.

“2245 is on up the street,” the driver said.

“I know. Just stay here and I’ll pay you for the time.”

They parked across the street and a hundred yards short of Paula’s house, and settled down to wait. The driver stretched out diagonally in his seat with the exaggerated abandon of a man relaxing on the job. Bret leaned forward tensely with his elbows on his knees and watched the house.

After what seemed hours he looked at his watch. Ten minutes to six. No one had appeared on the glassed veranda or at any of the windows. No cars had come or gone. The declining sun made deep shadows between the houses, and the heat dropped out of the air as the shadows of the palm trees lengthened. The wide, low house where Paula lived seemed stable and peaceful in the amber light, washed clean and mellow by the gentle passage of time. A spray of water from the sprinkling system caught the horizontal rays and made a transient rainbow among the shrubbery on her lawn. Then the windows on the west side of the house burned ardently with borrowed light for the last few minutes before the sun went down. When the light withdrew, the windows were blank and dull like eyes that have lost their vision.

As the afternoon changed into evening Bret sank further into depression. It was a grim task he had set himself, spying on Paula’s house like a detective or a jealous husband, waiting for the worst to happen. During the months he had been rebuilding his mind from its wreckage, it was Paula who had given him hope and energy to work against the inertia and boredom that oppressed him. She had provided the central meaning for the jerry-built thing he had made. His mind retreated in panic from the edge of the ruin he foresaw if Paula should be lost to him, the desert of dry ashes where he had lain once for an eternity bound hand and foot by paralysis of the will, in the undawning twilight of a mood too weak and cold to be called despair, prostrate in the chilly grip of self-disgust, obscurely plagued by little stillborn motivations, without reaction even to the memory of terror.

In those first months at the hospital, which telescoped in his mind into one gray undeviating day, he had been worse than dead, a useless shape of organic matter too feeble and sick to bear the psychic burden of humanity. From such unpromising material, time and the doctors and Paula’s love had made him into a man again. Still he carried the memory of the ruin within him like the seed of a melancholy perennial. He had suffered enough to know his strength and weakness, and he knew that without Paula his world would turn gray again and bleed away to dust.

Yet he didn’t see how he could help himself. He had to know the truth, and he had to see justice done. If he believed, as Paula said she did, that there was no justice anywhere, he wouldn’t be able to go on. Without justice, human decency, human life itself, could not exist; and it seemed to him that his belief in justice depended on the outcome of this case. It was the one event in his life that presented the problem of justice in uncompromising terms, in spite of the fact that he himself wasn’t entirely guiltless. If he had gone straight home and stayed there on that unremembered May night, still blank in his memory with the utter and tantalizing blankness of the empty frame that once enclosed the familiar portrait of a forgotten face, if he had stayed at home and waited for Lorraine, there would have been no murder, or he would have died preventing it. Failing that, he had to bring her murderer to justice, no matter what suffering ensued to Paula or to him. If Paula had conspired with Milne against his wife he had to know about it. He cursed his obsession and the ironic luck that had made him what he was and wedged him in this dilemma. But he stayed where he was, watching Paula’s house.

The twilight was like a color blindness that leached off the colors of the roofs and windows and removed the third dimension that made the buildings real. The sky was still flamboyant in pink and yellow deepening into green, but night was lodging in the shrubbery and trees, in the corners of the houses, and under the eaves. A car appeared at the end of the block and came toward him, pausing twice before it stopped in front of Paula’s house. It was an old, battered coupé, with a middle-aged woman at the wheel. When she left the car he could see that she was decently dressed but in some way dowdy looking, perhaps because the skirt of her dark suit was too long or her hat was too straight on her head.

Walking a little uncertainly on her thin legs, the woman crossed the sidewalk and approached the glassed porch. She glanced short-sightedly in the direction of the water spray and made an unnecessary and fussy detour. He was too far away to see her well, and the light was failing, but Bret felt sure he knew her. He knew in advance how she would climb the steps to the porch, her back straight and her head high, but with an awkwardness that came from fear of falling.

Paula came to the door before the woman reached it, and greeted her on the steps. They shook hands formally. The woman held herself a little shyly, as she always did. As always, Bret felt vaguely sorry for her. When the two women went into the house, it was not Paula but the other woman whom he followed with his eyes. Yet he had no idea who she could be.

In the back seat of the cab in the gathering darkness he wrestled with the dread that his memory was leaving him again. His head throbbed where the bottle had struck him. Perhaps his brain had been physically injured, his memory centers knocked out for good. The thought that had oppressed him throughout his convalescence came back and weighed on him heavily. The mind was tethered to the body like a sinful spirit cursed to spend a lifetime in a beast, absolutely dependent on such perishable stuff as human flesh.

chapter 18

In spite of her rather unfortunate experiences with Professor Taylor, her first husband, and a bookish man if ever there was one, Mrs. Swanscutt had never ceased to be a lover of books. Anything between two covers, she freely admitted to her customers, was simply fascinating to her. It was this passion of hers for the printed word that had originally given her the idea of opening a lending library. It was a sort of literary thing to do, and it was a ladylike occupation. With her fine taste in books and her subtle tact in handling people, she hoped it would be profitable. God knew that after Frank was unjustly fired and they lost their house, they needed the money.

She didn’t make a mint of money from the library, but to the secret surprise of a woman who had never before quite succeeded in anything, she made enough for the two of them to live on. When the war came, her business increased still further, and she became quite prosperous. Of course money wasn’t worth as much as it used to be, but Frank had to admit that his scatterbrained little wife was making more money every week than he himself ever had. But he wasn’t the sort of man to sit in his tent and sulk about it; he was too much of a man for that. Since he couldn’t very well go out and take another regular job – his asthma was still troubling him awfully, no matter what they said about the California climate – he came into the shop nearly every day to help her with her work. He was especially good at keeping the books in strict alphabetical order according to authors’ names, and at counting the money.

In spite of all his illnesses and disappointments, the poor dear always kept himself beautifully well groomed too, and Mrs. Swanscutt was proud to have him in the shop. She knew that many of her female customers took real pleasure in being advised in their choice of books by such a distinguished appearing man. A lesser woman might have been jealous on occasion, but not she, not she. In every word Frank said to her, in every look that passed between them, it was so beautifully evident that he loved her as ardently now as he had in the beginning. She still felt, after twenty-five years, that her world had been well lost for love. Good name, husband, and son – she had given them all up for Frank Swanscutt, and he had not failed her, he had not been unworthy of the sacrifice.

Still, she sometimes permitted herself to wish, in no complaining spirit, that Frank could manage to come in more regularly, and perhaps a little earlier in the afternoon. After the noontime flurry, business became very quiet during the first half of the afternoon, and Mrs. Swanscutt was suffering increasingly from boredom. Six days a week for five years she had sat flanked by books from nine in the morning till six in the evening. Until recently she had tried to keep up with all the best sellers in order to have an informed opinion, but the last few months she had to admit that something was happening to her feeling for books. Sometimes she had to literally force herself to open up the front of a new book and read the first sentence on the first page. More and more she tended to rely on the publisher’s blurbs and the thumbnail reviews in the Retail Bookseller. She was like a person with a sweet tooth who has taken a position in a confectionery shop and ruined her stomach.

It was really funny the lengths she’d go to avoid reading a book. There were no clients in the shop, and there probably wouldn’t be until later in the afternoon, so she could afford to admit it to herself for once. This particular Tuesday afternoon she had cleaned her drawer, counted her change, manicured her left hand (Frank would do her right one in the evening), cut several hundred bookmarks out of that pretty blue paper, made out filing cards for the six new books that had come in that morning, and phoned Mrs. Wionowski to tell her that Forever Amber was now to be had if Mrs. Wionowski happened to be coming by that day. Just when she had run out of things to do, and was beginning to be afraid that she might be forced by sheer boredom to take a look at one of the six new books, the afternoon paper came and saved her for another hour.

She went through the paper from front to back and read everything in it: the front-page stories, the murders on the third page, the movie advertisements, the sports page, the comics, the local news, the society pages, the editorial page, the women’s page, the deaths and divorces, and the business and finance section. Then she started in on the classified ads. This was really her favorite part of the paper, and she naturally saved it to the last.

There was real drama in the classified ads, so much more actual and satisfying than fiction, and such infinite variety. So many homeless people looking for a house. A young couple that simply had to have a refrigerator on account of the baby. Doctors that specialized in diseases of men or diseases of women. Private detectives who would go anywhere and find out anything for a moderate fee. Most interesting of all were the personals, those cryptic fragments of life that could lead you off into romantic daydreams for minutes at a time. “Edie come home, Mother gladly forgives you” (what had Edie done?). “Jack and Sim, the deal is still on if you contact me before Thursday. Charlie.” (A bank robbery? the black market? who could tell?)

The last personal in the column rudely thrust Mrs. Swanscutt out of her daydream and set her heart beating madly. “Bret Taylor,” it said, “call me at Gladstone 37416. P.W.”

It’s fate, that’s what it is, Mrs. Swanscutt thought. Here I’ve been reading these things all these years, eavesdropping on other people’s lives, and now fate has beckoned me into the inner circle.

Then the habitual dullness of her life reasserted itself and told her this couldn’t be happening to her. It couldn’t be her Bret; such things simply didn’t happen. Not to her. Yet Bret Taylor wasn’t a common name; she’d never have chosen it if it had been. Well, there was one way to find out. She could phone that number, if she dared.

After a period of nervous hesitation, she dialed Gladstone 37416 with an unsteady forefinger.

A woman answered: “This is Miss West’s residence.”

“Hello,” Mrs. Swanscutt said excitedly. “Did you – are you the party who placed an advertisement in the personals column? I mean–”

“One moment, please,” the woman said. “I’ll call Miss West to the phone.”

Servants, Mrs. Swanscutt noted. Bret must be on friendly terms with some very good people, if it is Bret. But of course it’s quite impossible that it is–

“Yes?” said another woman, younger than the first. “This is Paula West.”

Paula West, P.W. She was right so far. “Did you advertise in the personals for a Bret Taylor?”

“Who is speaking, please?” The voice was careful and brisk. Quite a good voice, she thought. A lady’s voice.

“My name is Theodora Swanscutt.” She laughed nervously. “It used to be Taylor. Bret Taylor is my son.”

“You must be mistaken, Mrs. Swanscutt. Bret’s mother died a long time ago. It must be another Bret Taylor. As a matter of fact, I’ve contacted him, so it’s all right.”

“I see,” Mrs. Swanscutt said dully. “Well, I’m certainly glad you found him. I was naturally misled by the similarity in names. I’m sorry to have troubled you–”

“Just a minute,” Paula said. “I’m afraid I’m being terribly abrupt. But would you mind telling me your husband’s name?”

“Why, no. Franklin. Franklin L. Swanscutt.”

“No. I mean your first husband. Your son’s father.”

“George,” said Mrs. Swanscutt. The young woman was being brusque to the point of rudeness, but after all she had asked for it and she’d go through with it. “George Watt Taylor. He was a philosophy professor,” she added, not without pride.

“Then you’re not mistaken. That was his father’s name. But I can’t understand it. Bret said his mother was dead.”

“Dead? Of course I haven’t seen him in twenty-five years. Tell me, is he there now? Could I speak to him?”

“No, I’m afraid he’s not. But I’d love to have you come and see me. I’m his fiancée. Can you come for tea?”

Mrs. Swanscutt said she could, and Paula told her how to find the house. Then Mrs. Swanscutt threw caution to the winds and closed the shop for the rest of the afternoon. She didn’t even call Frank to tell him she was leaving, and though she hardly admitted it to herself, there was a certain satisfaction in not telling him. Just let him come to the shop and find her gone, just let him wonder! She felt quite careless and gay in a way she hadn’t felt for years.

Paula waited in a state of uncertainty and fear, as one might wait to keep an appointment with a ghost. The dead past was springing to life in unexpected forms. The banished years were coming home from exile to roost under her eaves like homing birds. Bewilderment and excitement turned her head, but a deeper emotion dragged at the bottom of her consciousness: terror. Bret had told her that his mother was dead, not only since his crack-up, but long before when they first met. Evidently he had been harboring a delusion for years. His insanity – for the first time she permitted herself to think of his illness as insanity – went far back, to their first weeks together. And how much further would it go? Ever since the night of Lorraine’s death she had comforted herself with the belief that his mental condition was a temporary illness, an effect of shock that would wear off as its cause receded in time. But now she was uncertain.

Mrs. Swanscutt’s telephone call had crystallized the fear that had been growing in her mind, that Bret was permanently insane, in spite of all her efforts lost beyond redemption. She was afraid, afraid for him and beginning to be afraid for herself. Two Daiquiris and six cigarettes did nothing to anaesthetize her fear. She had done all the wrong things, made all the wrong decisions, and that was the surest guarantee that she’d go on doing and making them right up to the final smash, whatever that would be. Her knowledge that she deserved whatever punishment she was going to get only deepened her fear. Every time she moved she made a misstep. Every time the telephone rang it suggested a new and dreadful possibility.

Her mind went round like a demented squirrel in a cage and gave her no peace. She went to the kitchen ostensibly to talk to Mrs. Roberts about dinner, actually to hear the sound of a human voice. Her housekeeper spoke calmly and cheerfully about the standing rib roast she had managed to get hold of, and whether she should go to the trouble of making Yorkshire pudding, but Paula could hardly listen to her.

“Do what you like. As a matter of fact, I’m not hungry. You might as well save the roast.”

“But it’s in the oven,” Mrs. Roberts said firmly. “If I take it out now, it’ll dry out.”

“So what? Let it dry out!”

“You’ve got to get some food in your stomach, Miss West. I don’t like the way you been eating lately. You may think you’re feeling jittery, but going without your regular meals just makes you feel jitterier.”

“Yes, I know. Go ahead and cook the roast. I’ve got a friend coming in for tea, by the way. I don’t know just when, but she should be here soon. I’ll let you know when to make it.”

“It’s a little late for tea, isn’t it?”

“That doesn’t matter.” Afternoon tea was a habit she’d picked up from the English writers in the studio. It was a convenience rather than a ritual, something to do with the mouth and hands when cocktails were inappropriate or doubtful.

“Okay, Miss West.”

Paula fled from under her friendly critical eyes, back to her living room. She tried to read a trade magazine, but that was a laugh. She couldn’t bear to listen to a record. She couldn’t even look at her Modigliani on the wall. Damn doll face! El Greco was more in her line at the moment, but she wasn’t in the El Greco bracket yet, and probably never would be. If she got out of this with a whole skin and her nervous system all in one piece, she’d be having more luck than she deserved. “Funny,” she thought, “a little while ago I was trying to talk Bret out of thinking about justice, and now I’m thinking that way myself.” But the only alternative to justice was blind chance, something you couldn’t face for long, not if you loved someone. So she was the girl who not so long ago had thought she could tear down the patterns of chance and rebuild them to suit her better. Now chance (or was it justice?) had taken the play away from her. If there was no Hays Office in the real world, there were no scenarists either – no human ones at least.

She heard the faltering engine as the car turned the corner and came down the street, and she was at the front door before the woman got out. A yellow taxi she had noticed when she glanced out of the window an hour or so earlier was still parked across the street near the corner. It occurred to her for a panicky moment that someone was watching her house, but she rejected the notion. She couldn’t see anyone in the cab but the driver sleeping behind the wheel, and he was probably just snatching a couple of hours’ rest after a hard day.

She stepped out onto the porch to meet Mrs. Swanscutt, who was climbing the steps a little uncertainly. There was something of the ghost about her, and something of the bird. Of ill omen? No, rather a timid bird listening for signs of danger; a hesitant, unwanted ghost looking for a house to haunt, with no assurance that she would ever find one. But that really wasn’t fair. There was something appealing about her, in spite of her nervousness and thinness and the dating of her clothes. She must have been nearly fifty – she’d have to be, of course, if she was Bret’s mother – but there was still a beauty of feature discernible in her sallow face. Paula looked into it for traces of Bret, and saw the same high-arched nose and blue eyes. There was none of his strength there, but there was a kind of vague charm hiding beneath the surface, almost as if it were afraid to show itself. There were lines around the mouth and eyes which showed that she had acquired the habit of suffering.

Paula liked her and felt sorry for her. She held out her hand and received the pressure of long thin fingers. “I’m very glad to see you, Mrs. Swanscutt.”

“It was so nice of you to ask me over.” She flung a bright birdlike glance upward at the house, as if to praise and glory in its size. “Coincidence certainly does have a long arm, doesn’t it?”

She gave Paula a similar look of admiration, which was a little absurd but not unpleasant. One dressed for those looks from other women.

Mrs. Swanscutt herself was not well dressed, though the gray suit she was wearing had probably been smart enough when she bought it six or seven years ago, and she knew how to wear clothes. Time had flattened her chest and thinned her legs, but her bones were good, and she carried herself like a lady – a lady in adversity.

“Please come in.” Paula led her into the living-room. “I’m sorry Bret isn’t here. I know how eager you must be to see him.”

“Oh, I am. Are you expecting him today? Where does he live?”

“No, I’m not expecting him. He’s in the Navy, you see – stationed in San Diego.”

“In the Navy?” Mrs. Swanscutt said brightly. “I’m so glad to hear that – he’s doing his bit.”

“He’s had quite a distinguished career in the Navy.” Paula couldn’t refuse that to the woman, though a funny kind of grief was gathering in her own throat. “Wait a minute. I have his picture.”

“I’d love to see it.”

Paula ran upstairs for her framed photograph of Bret. He’d had it taken when he was first commissioned as an ensign, and he’d aged a lot since then, but it was the only one she had. Tears came to her eyes for some reason when she faced the young, smiling face on her dressing table. She wiped them away and went back downstairs to the living-room.

“That’s my Bret,” said Mrs. Swanscutt. “My, he’s handsome, isn’t he? You didn’t tell me he was an officer.”

“Yes, he was an ensign then. He’s a full lieutenant now.” In order not to postpone the inevitable she added: “He’d be in line for lieutenant commander if it weren’t for his illness.”

“His illness? Is he ill?”

“He’s recovering, but he was seriously ill for a time. His ship was bombed last April, and he had an attack–” Her mind scrambled for the right word. All she could think of was “the screaming meemies,” and that was what she had herself. She found it at last: “An attack of battle exhaustion.”

“Why that’s dreadful! The poor boy! But you say he’s getting better?”

“Yes. Much better.” I hope. I hope.

“Do you think he’ll be glad to see me?” Mrs. Swanscutt said shyly. “Does he ever speak of me?”

“No, never.” She was tired of handling people with kid gloves. Let them face the truth for a change, as she had had to face it. Irony and grief had already destroyed her sympathy with this woman, this sentimental mother who had forgotten her son for twenty-five years and now walked out of the past to claim her maternal rights. “Bret told me you were dead.”

“That’s strange. He couldn’t have believed that. His father knew I was alive. He was a stern man, but surely he wouldn’t tell his son that his mother was dead. It wouldn’t be natural!”

It would be a relief to think it wasn’t Bret’s mind that was at fault, that he had been deceived by his father. But this idea, like a lamp turned on in the corner of a room, lit up one area while it cast the rest into deeper darkness. Dr. Klifter had told her over the phone that Bret had been deeply impressed by his mother’s death. Yet his mother had not died. Could he have confused his mother with his wife? Stranger things had happened in case histories she had read.

“I may as well tell you, Mrs. Swanscutt, that Bret has had rather serious psychological difficulties. You couldn’t have been in Los Angeles last May?”

“No. Why? We were visiting my sister in New Mexico. Do you mean that Bret had a nervous breakdown?”

“You might call it that–”

“His father had a nervous breakdown. That was before I met him, while he was still in the seminary. I don’t think he ever recovered from it entirely. He was a very intelligent man, and highly cultivated, but he was always a little – unpredictable.” She raised her voice slightly in sing-song defiance, like someone reciting a creed to a private god. “I’ve never regretted leaving him for an instant.”

Paula took advantage of the opportunity. “Just what were the circumstances of your leaving him?”

Mrs. Swanscutt’s blue eyes clouded and looked away. “It’s rather a painful memory,” she faltered. Then her voice regained its power and at the same time became a little phony. “Don’t imagine that I consider that I did wrong. I followed the dictates of my heart, and I have never known a moment’s remorse. I married Frank immediately after the divorce, and our marriage has been an ideally happy one. Our friends will tell you that. We put love ahead of reputation and convention, but a love like ours is more important than anything else, Miss West.”

I know the feeling, Paula thought, even if your dialogue does need a little toning down (but then you learned to talk before Hemingway was here to teach you). “The last thing I want to seem is critical,” she said carefully. “And I have no desire to cause you pain. It simply happens that Bret has been having trouble with his memory. He’s confused about what happened to you, for one thing. It may be that if you tell me what actually happened it will help to clear up his trouble.” She let out her breath slowly. Trying to get the truth out of an aging romantic was as ticklish as walking on eggs.

But the carefully chosen words had their effect. The woman looked both guilty and penitent, and she spoke in an honest, uninflated way. “I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Bret, not for the world. It was terrible for me to have it happen, and I hated to leave him. But he was so young I was convinced that he wouldn’t remember.”

“How old was he?”

“Four. He was only a baby. It couldn’t have meant anything to him.”

“Bret’s doctor would probably disagree. I don’t know whether you’ve read much about psychoanalysis–”

“Oh yes, I have. I do a great deal of reading.”

“Then you know how important they think certain childhood events can be. Some of them say that the first year is the most important of all.”

“I took very good care of him when he was a baby,” Mrs. Swanscutt said irrelevantly.

“No doubt. But what happened when he was four? He told his doctor that he went into his room and found you dead.”

“Is that what he said?” There was incredulous horror in the strained blue eyes. For a moment she might almost have believed that she had died then and had been deceiving herself for twenty-five years. Perhaps part of her died then, Paula thought, the part that belonged to her son.

“Yes, that’s what he said. That delusion may be the origin of his mental troubles. That’s why the truth is so important, do you see?”

“Is he in the asylum?” It was hard for her to say the word, but she got it out.

“Yes.” After all, he had been in a mental ward until yesterday. She needed every available tool to pry the truth out of this misty-brained woman.

“My poor boy!” Mrs. Swanscutt said. “My poor boy!”

Mrs. Roberts came in with the tea cart, walking firmly as if she had waited long enough and was determined to get it over with.

“Oh, I’d forgotten about tea,” Paula said, but she was furious. Damn Roberts for blundering in at the crisis of her third degree! And damn the Swanscutt woman for being a woman! She could guess well enough what Bret had found in his mother’s room. But she had to know.

She said in a low hard voice over the teacups: “I believe you did Bret an injury, Mrs. Swanscutt. The least you can do is tell me what happened so that I can tell his doctor.”

“I can’t tell you. I can’t.”

Paula felt a cold fury gathering in her body. Once again she was fighting for Bret’s sanity and her own chance of happiness. The woman could either tell her or get out of her house. “You had a lover,” she stated.

“Yes.” The admission was almost inaudible. “My present husband. Frank was a graduate student in the college, and he did the heavy work around the house in return for a room. We saw a great deal of each other, and we fell in love. But you can’t possibly understand the circumstances, Miss West.”

“Why not? I’m in love – with Bret.”

“After Bret was born my husband never came near me again. Do you understand me? He believed that intercourse was wrong except for the purpose of having children, and the doctor said I couldn’t have any more children. George had his own room, and never once in four years did he come into mine.”

I haven’t bedded with a man for six years, Paula thought, but she didn’t say it.

“Frank became my lover. I never thought of it as wicked. I simply didn’t think of George as my husband any longer. He was more than ten years older than I, and he seemed more like a father to me after the first year. He was never ordained, but he was like a priest. Frank was my true husband.”

“You needn’t make apologies to me,” Paula said. “Most of my friends have been married at least twice. I divorced my first husband in 1940.”

“You did? For Bret?”

“No, I didn’t know Bret then. For myself.”

“I see.”

The woman was stalling again. Perhaps she needed another jolt. Well, Paula thought, I’m the girl to give it to her. I take them, and I dish them out. “And when did Bret come into this? Or didn’t he matter?”

“Of course he mattered.” Mrs. Swanscutt said in her wispy, emotional voice. “I loved him too. I never dreamed it would turn out as it did.”

“Yes?”

“He must have been frightened by a dream – he sometimes had nightmares, though he hadn’t had one for a long time. Anyway, he woke up in the middle of the night and came to my room. Frank was with me. We were – in bed together. Bret came in very quietly and turned on the ceiling light – that was the first we knew of his being there. When he saw us he carried on something terrible. He set up a terrible howling and rushed at me with his fists. He bruised my breast quite badly.”

I’m glad, said Paula to herself.

“George heard the disturbance and came running up the stairs. He caught Frank before he could get back to his room, and they fought in the hall. It was frightful. George knocked Frank down – he was quite a powerful man. I tried to take Bret in my arms and quiet him, but he hit and scratched at me like a wild animal. Then he ran back to the nursery, and that was the last I saw of him. George went downstairs and locked himself in his study. Frank and I left town that night and went to Cincinnati, where his people lived. Several years after that I received a legal notice that George had divorced me on grounds of desertion. Frank and I got married and came west, and I never heard from George again. Perhaps he did tell Bret that I was dead. I don’t know.”

Paula respected Mrs. Swanscutt’s honesty, but it was not enough to keep her from hating the woman. She had harmed Bret, and that damned her forever in Paula’s eyes. Still, she spoke as kindly as she could. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Swanscutt. Will you have some more tea?”

“No, thank you. But I do think I’ll have one of these sandwiches. I’m quite famished.” Her voice broke then, and she placed her hand lightly on Paula’s arm. “I know you love Bret. You speak of him as if you loved him. Do you think I’m evil, an evil mother?”

“I think you were unlucky, I’m sorry for you. Bret was unlucky too – and George. He’s dead, by the way.”

The hall telephone rang, and Paula was there before Mrs. Roberts could come out of the kitchen. “Hello?”

“Is that you, Miss West?”

“Yes.” She shut the door to the living-room with her foot.

“You know who’s talking. I want to see you personally – now. Your boy friend has been sticking his nose in once too often, and I don’t like it. Not a little bit.”

“I warned you to leave town. You said you would.”

“Maybe I did, but I’m not going, understand? I’m sticking around to see what gives. I think you’ve been giving me the cross, and I don’t like it.”

“Think what you like. I haven’t.”

“Maybe you haven’t and maybe you have. Anyway, I want to see you. Do I get to?”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll come. Are you at home?”

“Nix! Taylor drops in too much. I’m in the Mexicana Motel, room 106. Know where that is?”

“On Hollywood Boulevard?”

“Correct. I’ll be waiting. And if you bring anybody with you you’ll be making an ugly mistake – but ugly.” He hung up.

Paula got rid of Mrs. Swanscutt as smoothly as she could, and backed her roadster down the driveway. At the last moment she ran back into the house to get the small .25 automatic she kept in the drawer beside her jewel case.

chapter 19

It was dark when Paula’s visitor came out of the house, but Bret was able to see in the light from the windows that Paula was not with her. The middle-aged woman got into her coupé and drove away alone. Bret had an impulse to follow her, if only to find out whether he should know her, but he decided not to. There was no reason to suppose that the woman had anything to do with the case or with him, and it was Paula he was following. He had a hunch that sooner or later Harry Milne would come to her or she would go to him.

The taxi driver woke up when the coupé went coughing by them. He stretched and rubbed his eyes. “Jeez! It’s dark already. We going to be here all night?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I go off at eight, bud. It’s past seven now.”

“I want you to stay on if you can. Here’s ten dollars on account.”

“Well, I guess it’ll be okay. But I got to call up the dispatcher.”

“Not now. Wait.”

A minute later, as if to verify his hunch, Paula’s roadster backed down the driveway and stopped beside the front porch. She got out and ran into the house again.

“Drive down to the corner,” he told the driver. “I want you to follow that roadster, but I don’t know which way she’ll turn.”

“Right.”

The taxi started up and rolled slowly past the house. Before they reached the corner the roadster backed out of the driveway and turned toward them. Bret took off his white hat and crouched down in the seat. The roadster, with Paula at the wheel, passed them at accelerating speed and turned at the corner toward the center of Hollywood.

“That’s the one. Don’t lose her.”

“I’ll do what I can,” the driver yelled over his shoulder. “This jalopy is no speed wagon.”

He kept the roadster in sight. It disappeared for a while in a traffic jam at Hollywood and Vine, but Bret caught a tail-end glimpse of it, and they gained on it again when it turned up the boulevard. After a mile or so it stopped at the curb, and Paula got out. They were in time to see her turn up the walk to the two-story stucco building with a red neon sign: “Mexicana Motel.”

“Park up the street ahead of her,” Bret said as he got out. “If she comes out before I do, watch which direction she goes.”

“Okay,” the driver said wearily.

Paula had avoided the door to the front office of the motel and had gone up a flight of open stairs on the left side of the building. As soon as she was out of sight Bret went after her. With his head on a level with the top step he saw her knocking at a door halfway down the balcony. The door opened, and for a moment he saw her profile clear in a shaft of yellow light. She went in, and the door closed.

Moving as silently as he could, Bret walked along the balcony, past a row of closed doors, to the one that had opened and closed. Enough light came into the courtyard to let him read the metal numbers on the door, “106.” There was a narrow window beside the door, but the blind was tightly drawn. Not even a human shadow appeared against the light, though he could hear the murmur of voices. He stood against the wall beside the window and strained his ears. There was a man’s voice yapping excitedly, and a woman’s softer tones. He knelt down and held his ear against the window. Undoubtedly the woman’s voice was Paula’s, but he could not be sure of the man’s.

The woman’s voice rose suddenly, and he heard a few words that made him sure.

“You’ll keep your mouth shut or I’ll kill you.…”

The man let out a mirthless hyena laugh.

Bret stood up and felt for the gun in his pocket. Then someone spoke softly behind him.

“Hold it, friend. We don’t want any trouble around here now.”

Bret whirled on a short egg-shaped man standing in his shirt sleeves behind him with his hands in his pockets. “Who are you?”

“I run this place, is all. And what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Be quiet,” Bret whispered tensely. Apart from the danger in the situation he couldn’t bear the idea of having Paula come out and find him here. He moved toward the man in shirt sleeves, who came with him in the direction of the stairs.

“I saw you follow her up here. Your wife?”

“That’s no concern of yours.”

“Oh, yes, it’s some concern of mine. You were all set to make trouble, weren’t you? Trouble is the one thing my business can’t stand.”

They paused at the foot of the stairs, and the little man’s face shone ruddily under the neon. It was a lined and drooping face, with thick black eyebrows that pressed down on the squinting black eyes as if by their own weight, a fleshy nose, heavy lips that stretched insensitively around a dead cigar. The total effect was ugliness and a kind of shrewd honesty.

“I can’t stand here,” Bret said. “She may come out any minute.”

“So what! I thought you wanted to see her.”

“Not her. The man.”

“Come in here.” He led Bret through a door marked “Office” and closed the Venetian blind over the front window. “What’s the deal, Lieutenant? You trying to catch them in flagrante delicto, like they say?”

“No, nothing like that. Who’s registered in 106?”

“That’s the kind of information I only give to the cops–”

“Hell, I’ll go and find out for myself!” He started for the door.

“Just a minute, just a minute. You want me to call the cops? I told you we can’t stand trouble here.”

Bret turned uncertainly at the door. “Who’s in 106?”

“A guy called Miles. Checked in this afternoon. You know him?”

“I know him. Sorry, but I’m going up there.”

The little man had been standing at the window peering out through the blind. “What’s the use?” he said now. “She just came down a minute ago and drove away.”

“God damn you!” Bret flung open the door to the street. Paula’s roadster was gone.

“You said you didn’t want to see her,” the little man said behind him. “I didn’t want you to, either. When you get a threesome with two sexes in it, it spells trouble. Trouble spells cops. Cops spell bad business.”

“Keep out of this. I’m going up to see Miles.”

“Maybe it’d be better if you didn’t. You’re feeling kind of overheated, aren’t you, Lieutenant? I told you we don’t want any trouble.”

“Give it a rest. You’ve got to expect trouble when you rent rooms to criminals.”

“A criminal because he laid your wife on you? Come on now, Lieutenant.”

“This isn’t a divorce case, you fool! This is murder!”

“What’s that!”

Bret slammed the door in his face. The little man sat down at his desk and pulled his cradle phone toward him. He relit his cigar stub and blew several smoke rings. After a brief period of contemplation he crushed out his cigar and, without having used it, pushed the telephone to the back of the desk.

He then took a key case out of his trousers pocket, selected a small steel key, used it to unlock the upper right-hand drawer of the desk, and removed from the drawer a gray steel revolver with full chambers, which he shoved into his right trousers pocket. Then he went quietly upstairs.

chapter 20

When Paula came down the steps from the motel balcony she noticed the yellow cab at the curb. It seemed to her that the driver’s eyes were watching her covertly from its shadowy interior. She kept it in her rear-view mirror as she drove away. The cab stayed where it was until she lost sight of it.

Evidently her nerves were playing her tricks again. If they were, it was no wonder. The strain of facing Miles and saying what she’d said had put her in a state beyond fear. She felt hollow and light, like a blown eggshell. She had poured out all her strength in sustaining that final stand, but it had worked.

Her only regret was that she hadn’t stood up to him months before. The money didn’t matter to her, but the last few months had eaten away her moral fiber, and it was wearing awfully thin. She moved her hands and feet and drove by the little sparks of life that hung on flickering in her nerve ends. She felt too weak to face the rest of the night alone, and she turned down Wilshire in the direction of Dr. Klifter’s hotel.

She phoned him from the desk, and he came to the gate of the pueblo to meet her, a quiet-walking little man in bright, informal clothes, with the air of a wizard in disguise.

“It is a pleasure to see you again, Miss West.”

“I have to talk to you.”

“Then walk into my parlor. Come.” His English was remarkably pure, she thought absently, but his attempts to make gay little remarks gave him away.

When they were in his living-room he offered her a chair and a drink.

“I’m afraid a drink would make me drunk. Can you possibly give me coffee?”

“I make rather good Turkish coffee.”

“Just some plain American coffee. Please.”

“Certainly.” He disappeared into the kitchen, and she heard the sounds he made filling the coffee maker. “Shall I expect Lieutenant Taylor tomorrow?” he called.

“I don’t know.” When she raised her voice it sounded dry and harsh. “He’s walked out on me.”

“Walked out on you?” The bearded face appeared in the doorway, complete in itself, like John the Baptist’s head. She felt no certainty that it was attached to any body.

“He’s trying to hunt down the murderer,” she said unreally to the disembodied head.

“Yes?” The little trotting body followed the head into the room.

“He left me yesterday as soon as we got here. I saw him this afternoon. He’d been wandering around the city looking for the man. I tried to talk him out of it, but he was obsessed with the idea of finding the murderer. He said justice is more important than anything else.” The room itself seemed disembodied now, a cube of soft light adrift in space, menaced by the jagged clamor of the stars.

“Perhaps justice is as important as that to him,” said the other inmate of the wandering room. “His superego is remarkably strong, I think, even for an American.”

“Superego!” she cried in the midst of bubbling laughter. “Can’t you forget your jargon for five minutes? We’re talking about a man. What right had you to tell him about his wife? It’s had a terrible effect on him. He thinks he’s found the murderer, and I don’t know what he’ll do.”

Her uncontrollable laughter was suddenly displaced by tears. She covered her face and cried like a child. Klifter sat down and waited.

After a while she raised her eyes and looked at him. He was sprawled carelessly in a corner of the chesterfield, one arm over the end, his right ankle resting on his left knee. His trouser leg had crept up above his garterless sock, showing a pale and spindly segment of his right leg.

“I hear it boiling.” He jumped up and went into the kitchen. “You wish it black?”

“Black, please.”

He sat and watched her silently while she gulped the scalding coffee. It helped her to get rid of the end-of-the-world feeling she had had, the terrible immediate sense that the earth was whirling and plunging in open space. Wild dreams always had a whisky taste, but reality was bitter and hot and smelt of breakfast in her mother’s kitchen in Highland Park, Detroit.

“Thank you,” she said when he poured her a second cup. “If you’ll show me where your bathroom is, I’d better fix my face.”

Her faith in herself came back with the removal of eroded powder and the application of fresh lipstick, and her faith in the doctor came back along with it. When she returned to the living-room she told him about her visit from Bret’s mother.

For the first time in their acquaintance she saw Klifter look surprised. “You are absolutely certain that this woman – what is her name?”

“Mrs. Swanscutt.”

“You are certain that this Mrs. Swanscutt is really his mother?”

“No woman could act that part. No woman would want to. Anyway, what reason could she have for deceiving me?”

“I do not know. There are many things about this case I do not know. There was no apparent reason for deception, yet your Bret has been a victim of deception for many years.”

“His father must have told him his mother was dead. I can understand a man doing that under the circumstances.”

“Yes, but he had a memory image, a pseudo memory, of his mother’s death. He described the occasion to me in some detail. He said he went into her room and found her cold body, the hands folded on the breast, the head on a white satin pillow.”

“I don’t know what that false memory proves about his mind. If there’s something irreparably wrong with his mind there’s good reason for it. The thing he found that night must have been as shocking to him as death could be.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’m afraid I hate that woman,” Paula said. “It isn’t adultery I object to so much. It’s the sloppy kind of adultery that couldn’t be bothered to protect a child from its consequences.”

“After twenty-five years the consequences have not yet ceased. I should have guessed the truth. I noticed those unreal elements in his story: the crossed hands, the satin pillow. Women do not normally sleep on white satin pillows, even in America. They do not arrange their hands in a funeral attitude when they die in their sleep. No doubt he saw the body of someone in a coffin when he was young – perhaps his aunt – and invented his mother’s death scene from the material to satisfy his mind.”

“But why should his mind seek that kind of satisfaction?”

“Evasion is a less clumsy word, and it may be closer to the truth. I cannot tell until I have talked with him at greater length and learned to know him better. He and I together must learn to know him. Still, let us suppose. Let us suppose that his father told him that his mother was dead. What might a small boy think? What might he not? He had blundered into her room in the middle of the night and found her doing something which he did not understand. It is very likely that he felt that in admitting this man to her bed his mother was cheating him of his filial rights. He ran at her in a childish fury and struck her. Then the lover and the cuckold fought in the hall, and the little boy ran back to his own room. In the morning his mother was gone.

“Perhaps it was then, so soon, that his father told him she was dead. Death is a mystery to a child’s mind, an awesome mystery. To us, too, it is a mystery, an inexplicable accident, but to a child! May he not have imagined deep in his heart that he had killed his mother with his feeble fists? Such a secret, too dreadful to be spoken of to his stern father, may explain the genesis of his guilt. All of us are guilty, plagued by anxiety and self-loathing, but there are some who are more susceptible to this than others. Your Bret has always been oppressed by guilt, and I think we may have found its source. If we can re-establish in his memory that strange night, that queer morning, we should free his mind of its burden.”

“You can’t,” Paula said. She sat upright in her chair with her cup held steadily on her knee.

He stared myopically at her uncovered face. His white hands fluttered limply and returned to their perch on his knee. “You seem very certain,” he said mildly.

“It seems to me that you’re the one who’s overcertain. You’re explaining a man’s life on the basis of very few facts, and even those facts are doubtful.”

“All facts are doubtful. But consider my advantage. I have an actual witness, other than the patient, of the traumatic event, and that is rare in my work. I admit that my conclusions are hypothetical, subject to verification. But the immediate test of a hypothetical explanation is its power to explain, its impact on the imagination. I will state my hypothesis in more detail. The violence in the house, followed by his mother’s disappearance and his father’s silence, would be enough to convince the little boy that a great wrong had been done. It is easy for a child to suppose that he has committed a wrong. The line between wish and responsibility, between intention and guilt, is very thinly drawn in a child’s mind. I do not insist that he believed he killed his mother. The possibility would be enough.

“No child could face such a horrible imagining for long. The mind protects itself in any way it can. A memory, or an imagined memory, which is too terrible to face must be pressed back into forgetfulness, covered up, and smoothed over. The boy’s mind took refuge in the illusion that his mother had been dead when he entered her room. The violence was denied and forgotten. It was a harmless illusion, harmless except to him. While it enabled him to live and grow, free of conscience guilt, it planted the seed of guilt deep in his unconscious. It set the pattern also for his adult reaction to shock. Evasion at any price, at the price of memory itself. Does such an explanation explain nothing? Has it no impact of reality?”

“Yes, it does. It’s dreadfully convincing. But does it mean, this pattern of evasion, that there is no hope for his memory?”

“On the contrary. It means that he must be told the truth. A man’s life cannot be sustained on illusion doubly compounded.”

“He must be told the truth?” she echoed. The question went on echoing in her mind until it embraced her whole life and threatened its foundations.

“I have thought so from the beginning. Now I am certain of it.”

The lines of the conversation, spoken and unspoken, converged in a bright point of fear before her eyes. The point expanded into a vision of Bret, senseless and lost forever, slain by an arrow of truth. And where was he now? Wandering somewhere in the city, utterly vulnerable to evil. Entering a dark alley where a gunman was waiting?

She rose so quickly and awkwardly that her cup and saucer fell to the floor and shattered.

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” the doctor said before she could apologize. But he didn’t rise to take the hand she extended. “Do not go just yet. Sit down again, please.”

“I don’t know where he is. I have to find him.”

“Don’t be afraid. There is no reason to be afraid. Circumstances struck at his Achilles heel, but he will recover.”

“You don’t understand. I’m afraid something may happen tonight. I’m afraid he’ll get into trouble.”

“I doubt it. I doubt that he will do anything wrong.” His eyes seemed to have become brighter and smaller behind his spectacles. “It is true that the guilt-ridden are often predisposed to violence. Guilt is normally thought of as the result of sin, but it may also be its cause. A man who feels guilty may with unconscious deliberation commit an act which is sinful in his own eyes. Such an act may serve to rationalize his guilt, to justify it, one might say. Many criminals have performed senseless crimes, which could not fail to be discovered, in order to receive punishment for their guilt.”

“It’s ridiculous to talk about him as if he were a criminal.” She was still standing in the middle of the floor. Tension and indecision had drawn her body off center and made her seem ungainly.

“Do please sit down, Miss West. Conversation is a sedentary art.”

“I haven’t time for conversation.”

“But you must listen to what I have to say. And you must listen more carefully. I was speaking analogically and made no moral judgment on your Bret. I do not approach a case with moral preconceptions. I have argued with Stekel on occasions that an analyst should enter the patient’s mind with no preconceptions at all. This case of Taylor tends to prove my point.”

“How?” She sat on the edge of the chair, her feet among the shards of broken china.

“My preconceptions led me into error. I supposed almost from the beginning that Taylor was a clear case of infantile regression to the Oedipus pattern fixated by the mother’s death. Now you tell me that the mother’s death never occurred. That does not mean, of course, that the Oedipus element is not present. Taylor’s relations with women will always be influenced, I had almost said determined, by his early relations with his mother. His sexual life will always be difficult because his mother betrayed him, so to speak.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“No. You are perceptive about these things. You must be aware also that in spite of his revolt against his father, he will always tend to see himself through his father’s eyes. He cannot escape from the moral judgments which his father bequeathed to him. And with a part of his mind, the part which sits in judgment, he does not wish to escape.”

“But wasn’t his loss of memory an escape? You called it an evasion–”

“I know it. Perhaps there is a deeper explanation, however. The loss of memory may have been a punishment inflicted on him by his own mind. A kind of death, a capital punishment.”

“He said that,” Paula whispered. “He said it was like death.”

“Really?” He leaned toward her, his body a bundle of sharp angles loosely clothed in tweed. “Then the possibility is decidedly worth exploring. It raises a further question. What guilt, real or imagined, would require the self-infliction of such a punishment?”

Leaving the question hanging unanswered in the air, he leaned back against the arm of the chesterfield. Paula watched him intently, unable to relax. Without a cup to hold on to, her hands were playful in her lap.

He went on in his gentle, slightly thickened voice. “I have sometimes thought that we of the Viennese school have paid too little attention to problems of moral guilt. Freud himself was a child of his century. He never quite outgrew the physiological laboratory and its atmosphere of materialistic determinism. It is curious, is it not, that the subtlest introspectionist since Augustine should have under-valued the moral and religious life and seen the human mind in terms of blind forces working in Newtonian space?”

“You’re talking like a Jungian,” she said. “I can’t listen to a lecture now.”

He ignored her protest. “I am far from being a Jungian. I am an analyst first and always. Jung has reverted to type and abandoned analysis for theology. I think that explains his popularity in the United States, which has its own Calvinistic tradition. Nevertheless I must admit that the products of this moralistic tradition, men like your Bret, cannot be studied in a moral vacuum. They must be interpreted, partly at least, in their own moralistic terms. The guilt of such men cannot be taken for granted or explained away on general grounds. It must be traced to its source.”

“But you explained Bret’s guilt. You said that childhood experience was the crucial one.” She rummaged in her bag for a cigarette, which broke in her fingers when she tried to light it.

He brought her an ash tray and remained standing over her. “The strains and shocks of the adult life are equally crucial in a case like this. You questioned my wisdom in telling him of the murder, but I maintain I was right. He must be told everything. To a mind which has been starved of truth, you cannot dole out truth in fragments. I do not know what you know. I do not need to. But he does. He is groping in the darkness of the external world for a truth his own mind has refused him. You tell me that he thinks he has found the murderer of his wife. Do you believe that he has?”

Two deep lines formed on either side of her scarlet mouth and twisted it like a pair of pincers. “I don’t know. I–”

“Are you sure that you don’t know? If you are suppressing the truth you are perpetuating the darkness of his mind.”

“No!” she cried. “I’ve been protecting him.”

“From reality? From justice? In ignorance he will find no justice. There is justice in the truth because they are the same thing. Would you deny him justice?”

“I have no faith in justice.”

“But he has. Perhaps you do not need the faith. He does. When a mind has broken through the surface of appearances, a strong rope is needed to pull it out.”

“I don’t trust any rope.” She felt the symbolic horror of the word and suppressed a shiver. “Do you, Dr. Klifter?”

“Have I faith in universal justice, do you mean? No. But I trust the faith of men who have it.”

She sensed his weakness and thrust her wedge further into the opening. “Is that scientific? I came to you as a doctor, but you’re talking like a priest – a priest who has lost his own faith.”

“Very well, I accept the role.”

“Though you yourself believe in nothing?”

“I believe in one thing: the individual man. I am not so mad as to try to remake men in my image. I remake them in their own.”

“Even then you assume a great responsibility.”

“No greater than the one you have assumed. I believe your responsibility is too heavy for you.”

After a while she said: “I know it is.”

“Then give him back to himself. Tell him the truth. I think he knows it already but will not recognize it. Eventually he will recover all his memories. When he does he will cease to trust you.”

“I don’t care about myself. I’ve lost him no matter what I do.” She rose with a movement of disconsolate finality, gathering herself to face the outer loneliness and darkness.

He followed her to the door and gave her his hand. “Perhaps you have lost him. If that is so, his loss is the greater one. But I wish you both good fortune. You need not be afraid that I will tell anyone what I have guessed – not even him, if you do not wish it.”

“Thank you.” Her face was troubled but bold.

She went out, and he heard her heels click rapidly across the paved terrace into silence.

chapter 21

Bret knocked on the door of 106. After a heavy pause Miles called out: “Who’s that?”

Bret knocked again.

“Who’s there?”

Bedsprings creaked, and quiet footsteps crossed the floor of the room. The blind on the window beside the door twitched slightly. Bret flattened himself against the door. He couldn’t see the window from there, but he could see the pencil of light that was thrown across the balcony when the edge of the blind was lifted. After a moment the light was erased.

The footsteps came to the door. They were hardly footsteps at all, but the muffled whisper of stockinged feet. Miles spoke softly through the door. “Is there anybody there?” A slight nasal wheeze added an overtone of uneasiness to the question.

Bret stayed where he was and said nothing. The door between them was so thin that he believed he could hear the other man’s breathing. Very softly a hand touched the door and moved against it. A bolt screeched faintly as it was withdrawn from its socket. The knob on which Bret’s hand was lightly resting turned against his palm. It was like a movement of repellent life in an unexpected place, a worm in the apple, a snake under the pillow. He removed his hand and stood back a few inches from the door.

Quarter inch by quarter inch it opened. A single eye blinked through the crack, unfocused. Bret forced his shoulder through the opening.

“You!” Miles said, straining against the door.

With his back against the jamb Bret forced the door inward with his hands. Miles stepped back suddenly, and Bret, unbalanced, came headlong into the room. When he looked up, Miles was facing him with his right hand in front of him on a level with his navel, his thumb pressed down on the base of a four-inch knife blade that projected horizontally.

The shining blade in its center brought the room into focus: the unrelieved ugliness of the stucco walls and the cracked ceiling; the uncarpeted floor worn through to the bare wood by endless traffic between the bathroom and the bed; the chipped metal bed with its frayed cotton bedspread crumpled in the central depression of the mattress; the single lamp on the bedside table wearing its scorched brown paper shade askew. No one came to such a room to live. You came to sleep for a night when nothing better was available; to escape from marriage or convention or police; or to wait. A pair of shoes on the floor and a coat draped over the only chair were the sole signs of occupancy. Miles had come here to wait, and the knife provided the meaning for which he and the room had been waiting.

Bret put his hand in his pocket and found the butt of the gun. “Drop it!” he said.

“You got no gun.” His tone was half questioning.

With his forefinger curled snugly between the trigger and the guard, Bret withdrew his hand from his pocket and answered the question. Miles’ eyes, the balance of power, the focus of the room, shifted to the more potent weapon.

“That I should get the cross from her!” Miles said. “A dirty double-crossing bitch like that!” His face contorted monkeylike in a strange combination of senility and childishness. “Sure, sure. Now tell me I’m talking about the woman you love.”

His body was crouched and tense, but the knife, deprived of potency by the gun, hung down in his hand.

“Drop the knife and close the door.”

Miles looked down at the knife as if he had forgotten it. He compressed the spring, shut the blade into the handle, and tossed it onto the bed. He went to the door, circling Bret with Bret turning at the center of his circle, and took hold of the knob with his left hand. For an instant his body was quite still.

“You wouldn’t make it,” Bret said. “Shut the door and come here.”

When Miles turned from the closed door he was greatly altered by fear. His face was pale and seemed to have lost flesh. His carefully brushed blond hair was growing limp and dark, falling down over his temples like an adolescent’s. His mouth had lost its shape and was feeling for another shape. Bret hadn’t noticed before how wide and dark his nostrils were. A little thing like that could spoil his boyish good looks and give a corny touch even to his terror. A little thing like that was crucial when you were deciding to kill a man.

“What do you want?” Miles said. His voice was unsteady and high.

“Come here.”

Miles moved toward him slowly, as if the gun projected a tangible force against his body.

“Stand still.” Bret raised the hand that was holding the gun, so that Miles was looking directly into its muzzle. His eyes strained and crossed but could not look away. Suddenly his face was shining, streaming with sweat. Dark patches of wetness appeared on the breast of his shirt and under his arms. His whole body was realizing the fear of death. “No,” he whispered. “Jesus!”

“How long did you know my wife?”

“Me?” he babbled. “I didn’t know your wife. What makes you think I knew your wife?”

“Answer me quickly.”

“We were friends, that’s all. Just friends. She was a sweet kid. I never did anything to her.” His roving eyes were drawn back to the steady gun. “Oh, no,” he said. “Don’t shoot.” Two deep-curved wrinkles formed at the base of his nose. His teeth chattered between them. “You’re crazy,” he stammered.

There was a souring smell in the air. There was a sour taste in Bret’s mouth, a sour sickness in his stomach. In the moment of triumph everything had turned sour. He was ashamed of his triumph, ashamed of the quality of his opponent. This chattering, sweating boy had violated his bed and killed his wife, but now he offered no resistance, no challenge. That wet shuddering softness was a sick anticlimax to the danger he had expected.

But the man had killed and the man had to die. He sighted along the gun. Miles saw the movement of his eyes.

He went down heavily on his knees. “Oh, God, Mr. Taylor, don’t shoot! I told her I wouldn’t bother her any more. It’s all off, finished. You’ll never see me again.”

Bret stepped back a pace. “You told who you wouldn’t bother her? Miss West?”

“Yeah, sure. I promised her.”

“Were you and she in this together?”

“Yeah, but I told you it was all off. You don’t have to worry about me any more, Mr. Taylor. I’ll give her back the money, all of it I got left. I’ll do anything you say.”

For a sick and ugly moment Bret’s hand had squeezed on the trigger, trying to fire the gun. It was what he had come here to do. It was what Miles deserved. But he could not do it. He had never shot an animal in the field, and a man was harder to shoot, if only because he had a greater capacity for fear than any animal. His years in the Pacific had given him an insurmountable backlog of sympathy, of fellowship with fear. As the fever went out of him he realized that he had no right to impose the fear of death on anyone.

“Get up,” Bret said.

Miles watched the lowering arm, the gun declining from the level of his head toward the empty floor. He was still on his knees, but his posture seemed less abject.

“Get up. I’m taking you to the police.”

“You can’t do that!” Miles yelped. “They got my handprint. It’ll put me in the gas chamber.”

“You’ll get what you deserve. I told you to get up.”

“You take me to the cops, and I’ll spill everything. Everything, you understand? You may be crazy, but you’re not that crazy.”

This is the end of Paula, he thought, of everything we planned for the future – the end of Paula and the end of me. But he could not kill Miles, and he could not let him go free. “Get up,” he said.

Miles sprang toward him instead, his two hands at Bret’s ankles and his shoulder crashing against Bret’s knees. Bret went down on his back with a thud that knocked out his wind. His hand squeezed the gun in reflex. It fired once, then clattered on the floor somewhere behind his head.

Miles’s hands were working up his body, pounding his stomach, tearing savagely at his face, closing on his throat. Bret jerked his hips, upward, unseating the man astride him and twisting onto his stomach. The hands returned to his throat from behind. Lowering his head, he brought his knees under him, straight-armed the floor, and rose to his feet. Miles was still behind him with his left arm hooked around his neck, his right fist pounding his kidneys.

He dropped to his knees again, jerking Miles forward and down with him, and reached up for Miles’s head. He found it and took hold. Miles came over his shoulder, somersaulting in the air, and struck the floor with the full length of his body. But he was quick. Before Bret could pin him he was away and turning at the wall.

Bret looked for the gun and couldn’t see it. A blow on the side of his face turned him around and sent him staggering to the other side of the room. Miles was after him before he recovered his balance. A heel in the small of his back slammed him against the wall and brought him to his knees with the feeling that his body had been broken in two. The second kick caught him a glancing blow on the nape of the neck. His head crackled and went numb, though he could still feel the raw half of his face that the rough wall had abraded. He twisted on his knees in time to receive the third kick in the stomach.

Miles closed in on him then, striking rapidly at his face with both fists. They hurt, but they didn’t rock him hard. That was wonderful. Miles was fast and tricky, but he couldn’t hit. All he had to do was take the punishment and concentrate on getting to his feet. The trouble was that his legs were hard to handle. And he couldn’t concentrate on them properly with those fists in his face.

He flung himself up and out, trying to butt with his head. Miles stepped back just far enough and cuffed him to the floor with a rabbit punch. He rolled sideways and felt the iron leg of the bed against his head. Then Miles was behind him again, and the hands were at his throat. Bret caught hold of an individual finger and bent it backward. Miles sighed, and the hands went away.

Bret rolled onto his face, got his knees under him again, and raised the weight of his body with his legs. Miles caught him on the point of the chin with a long uppercut, almost before his hands had left the floor. He staggered backward, but his legs held him up. The man could not hit. That was wonderful.

“You can’t punch,” Bret tried to say. He discovered that his mouth was too numb to be used for speaking. He put his left fist in front of it, cocked his right, and moved in on Miles on his badly disciplined legs.

Miles waited for him, watching his feet. Bret feinted with his left awkwardly. Miles countered and came off balance. Bret’s right struck him heavily in the neck just below the ear. Miles backed away, stubbed his heel on the wall, moved sideways along it. Bret followed him.

“You’re finished,” Bret said. “I’m going to spoil your face for good.” He had to speak elaborately, like an elocutionist, in order to form the words.

Miles was no longer watching Bret’s feet. He had noticed his own left hand. Its second finger projected rigidly, bent back at a right angle with the back of his hand. He whimpered.

Bret hit him between the eyes with all his force. He felt the bones move in his right hand, grinding against each other like stones in a bag. Miles was sliding down the wall inch by inch, his face turned sideways and his eyes fixed.

Bret walked to the bed and lay across it. The cold metal of the knife handle came in contact with his face. He pushed it onto the floor with a weary gesture. All his remaining energy was going into an effort not to be sick. The sickness was pressing upward from his stomach into his throat.

There was a slight movement on the floor behind him, the rustle of cloth against wood. Slowly he raised himself and turned. Miles was squatting in the corner with the gun. The flow of time stopped suddenly, like a river frozen in an instant by incredible cold. For the duration of the endless moment Bret looked into the muzzle, the dark, round mouth from which, like a roaring word of command imposing silence, death would come. All the traffic of his mind passed through that narrow hole, the rat hole through which his life, like a rodent fleeing from a collapsing building, was going to leave his body. Yet he was too tired to be afraid, and too certain that the end had come, to try to change it. He had found what he was looking for, and he had hoped for nothing more than this. Then the moment ended. Another moment began, and he was still alive.

Someone knocked on the door with an object heavier than a fist.

Bret said: “Come in,” without turning his head. He was dizzy with the effort of continuing to live, but all his muscles had tensed for action.

“Stay out of here,” Miles yelled. “I’ll shoot.”

“Stand back from the door,” a man’s voice bellowed. “We got a Tommy gun.”

“So you brought the law, you bastard!” Miles was snarling. “I warned you.” He fired at Bret.

A fraction of a second ahead of the bullet, Bret rolled off the bed onto the floor.

A loud stuttering sounded from the balcony, and a series of irregularly spaced holes made an inverted V in the middle of the door. Miles fired at the door. Bret rolled to the wall and lay still.

“Drop your gun and come out with your hands on your head,” the voice commanded. “This is your last chance.”

Miles fired again from the corner and started for the door of the bathroom. The rapid fire of the submachine gun began again, and a row of holes marched across the door and the opposite wall. Miles fell to his knees in a little cloud of plaster dust and crawled the rest of the way to the bathroom door. At the threshold he fell on his face and stopped moving. Bright arterial blood spouted from his mouth.

“You got him,” Bret called. “You can come in.”

The door was flung open. For a moment it was quite empty, framing the quiet night. Then a uniformed policeman stepped in, carrying his Tommy gun in the crook of his arm. Behind him came the little man who ran the motel, and another armed policeman.

Bret sat up with his back against the wall.

“What’s your name?” the first policeman said.

“Taylor.”

“And him?”

“His name is Miles.”

“You mean it was.”

Bret got to his feet and looked across the room. He had enough strength left to feel sorry for the dead man, enough strength to regret the loss of all the human blood that had run out on the floor. The rising sickness took him unawares. It doubled him over the bed, flooding his throat and mouth and nasal passages with bitterness.

His enemy was dead. He had accomplished what he set out to do, but the only taste it left in his mouth was bitterness. His mind was as sick and turbulent as his body. His closed eyes looked down into a seething darkness that extended to the bottom of the night. Even there he found unreality, a shifting unreality that tugged at the foundations of his mind, and the reflection of a face he was afraid to recognize because it was so much like his own.

“What a mess!” the first policeman said.

“I was afraid they were going to make a mess,” said the little man.

chapter 22

The house was locked and dark when Paula reached home, but she felt no fear of going in alone. Having conquered the terrors of her mind and made her decision, she was immune to fear. Still, there were little things that continued to bother her. She was ashamed of having left the house without telling Mrs. Roberts that she wouldn’t be back for dinner. In fact she was even hungry. She turned on the lights in the front hallway and went through to the kitchen. Mrs. Roberts had written her a note in bold black capitals and left it on a chair in the center of the kitchen floor:

She found the roast and made herself a sandwich. She wasn’t jittery any more. She felt quite mistress of herself in a spinsterly way; a little cold and dead, but that was to be expected. She had elected a permanent spinsterhood, and it was no laughing matter. The thing she had chosen tasted very much like despair. It was as tasteless as unbuttered bread. Still, there was a certain satisfaction in getting your teeth into a solid chunk of despair.

She might have known from the beginning that it wouldn’t be a laughing matter. He hadn’t been merry in La Jolla; probably he had never been merry. His first kiss had been fierce and blocked, no gaiety in it. Even in love he was a man who moved with a weighty fatality, as if he meant everything he did and meant it forever. It was hard to believe that such a man could be so mixed up inside, still nursing a wound he had received when he was a baby. It was harder still to believe that mere words, even truthful words, could straighten him out and heal his wound.

Watch it, West, she said to herself as she munched her grief-stricken sandwich. You’ve made up your mind to go through with it and you’re going to go through with it. No rationalizing, please. No more thinking at all. You haven’t the brains for it, girl. And on the other hand you mustn’t let your feelings be your guide. They made you what you are today. Just do what the doctor said.

She turned off the kitchen lights and went to her sitting-room in the front part of the house. There she settled down to wait for Bret. She had no reason to feel sure that he would come, but she had that feeling. She had only to put in so much time, and then he’d have to come. While the hands of her watch crept round past ten thirty and then eleven, she put in time.

Waiting was the one thing above all others that she couldn’t stand, and she’d had so much of it lately. There were the months of waiting for him to come back after his ship went out from San Diego. More months of hopeless waiting after he married Lorraine. The worst months of all, suspended between mortal terror and boundless hope, while he was in the hospital in San Diego. She was still waiting, though the thing she had waited for had shriveled up and blown away. There was no more suspense, no more heights or depths. Her mind swung only in a little arc between the hope that he would come soon and the wish that he would not come for a long time. Even waiting was less painful than the end of the waiting was going to be.

She tried some music on the record player, but it stirred up her emotions, and she didn’t want that. Emotion made the whole thing so real. She switched it off and listened to the silence in the house: the ringing deafness, the sound of time moving slowly through silence. You could hear it advancing step by step with your heartbeats, drumming you through the virgin country of despair.

One thing about despair: it didn’t make you cry. You cried at its first onset, when you didn’t really believe it. You cried afterwards perhaps, when you felt like starting to live again and found out that you couldn’t. In the dead center of despair you couldn’t cry if you had to. And that was a good thing, for crying puffed up the eyes.

The hands of her watch crept round to eleven thirty while she listened to the silence. She turned out the lamp beside her chair and watched the darkness too. Darkness and silence suited her quite well, but she’d trade them in for oblivion any day. You couldn’t work, love, and suffer for years without feeling a letdown when it was all off at the last minute. Without, in fact, wishing you were dead. There was some slight consolation in knowing that time was grinding away, and you were on the assembly line, and the finished product was oblivion.

When she heard the car come into the street she knew that it was Bret. She’d have been quite as certain if it hadn’t been. She ran to the front door and flung it open. When she turned on the porch light her heart jumped. It was a police car at the curb. Bret climbed out slowly and stiffly, as if his body had aged years in a few hours.

“You all right now, Lieutenant?” a man’s voice called from the car.

“Yes. Thanks.” The police car drove away.

She ran down the steps to meet him. When he came into the shaft of light from the porch, she saw the gauze bandage on his face and forgot everything else.

“Darling, what’s happened? Where have you been?”

“At police headquarters.”

“But you’re hurt.”

“A little. Miles is dead.”

“You–?” She felt her lips go cold.

“I didn’t kill him,” he said quietly. “I tried to, but I didn’t. He was shot resisting arrest.”

She put her hand on his arm to help him up the steps, but he moved slightly so that her hand dropped away. They went into the house in single file like strangers, with her following behind. She saw the torn seams at the shoulders of his blouse, the dirt on his back, the great blue swelling at the base of his skull. She almost sank to the floor before she reached a chair.

He turned on a floor lamp and sat down opposite her. She was keenly aware of the space between them, and of the alienation it symbolized.

“Miles’s fingerprints checked with the prints on Lorraine’s table,” he said. “He was the man that was with her.”

She tried to speak, but all she could hear was the voice babbling in her head: it’s over then, it’s over, I needn’t ever tell him, and Klifter said he wouldn’t if I forbade him. She had permitted indecision to enter her mind again, and it tied her tongue.

“You were paying money to Miles,” he said then. “What were you paying him for?”

So it wasn’t over after all. Well, it was what she deserved for going back on herself. In the end you got what you deserved.

“Do the police know?”

“I’m the only one that knows.”

She gathered all her courage together in her throat and said: “I have something to tell you, Bret.”

“I know you have.”

He sat motionless, watching her. She looked directly into his eyes and was unable to assess their meaning. They were bright and steady and hard, unsoftened by love or any kind of hope.

“Miles was blackmailing me,” she said with difficulty. “At first he threatened to go to the police. When I realized that he wouldn’t dare, and told him so, he said he would go to you, and I couldn’t let him do that. I’ve been paying him regularly for months. Tonight I saw it was no use. It had to stop. I went to him and told him I was finished. He tried to bluff me, and I did some threatening myself. I frightened him. It was easier than I expected it to be.”

“He must have been frightened to do what he did. He tried to shoot it out with the police. But they had a machine gun.”

“Were you with them?”

“I was with him in the motel. He tried to shoot me before they killed him. In spite of that I felt sorry for him when he died.”

“You needn’t have. He wasn’t worth it.”

“You did your best to protect him from me.”

“I was afraid that you would kill him.”

“Are you sorry he’s dead?”

“I’m glad he’s dead. But I’m gladder still that you didn’t kill him.”

“I tried to. I aimed the gun at his head and couldn’t pull the trigger. I didn’t know why I couldn’t. Perhaps I felt I didn’t have the right. I didn’t have the right, did I, Paula?”

She started visibly at the challenge in his question. She looked into his face again and understood the meaning of his eyes.

“You remember?” she whispered faintly.

“I think I have a pretty clear idea.”

The scene that flickered at the back of his mind was dimmer and more confused than his firm voice admitted. It was shadowy dark like an underexposed film, and all but erased by other pictures superimposed upon it. He saw himself in the scene, small and foreshortened and faceless like an unknown actor whose movements have been recorded by an overhead camera. The faceless man in blues, dwarfed by the high May night, went up the walk and into the white bungalow. Another man, half out of his clothes, ran across the unlighted living-room, through the kitchen, and out of the house. Lorraine was in the bedroom trying to cover her body. Darkness covered her body.

He knew what he had done, but he had no memory of the act. He drew his knowledge of it from the emotions that still poured along his nerves and stained his blood with their acid juices. Outraged self-righteousness and its hot and dangerous anger, the savage wish to inflict pain on the source of pain, the hopeless desire, which lay like an eyeless worm at the core of murder, to end an impossible situation by violence. The very violence that stretched it out forever.

Paula watched his eyes turn inward and lose their sight, fogged once more by the obscurity at the center of his life. He looked as if he had forgotten her completely, and it frightened her. Complete indifference, nothingness, was the one enemy she had no idea how to fight. Any kind of talking was better than this long blind silence, even the kind of talking she had to do. She invented the desperate hope that if she could join him there, link hands with him in his darkness, they might emerge together on the other side.

“You asked me to tell you,” she said.

“Yes?” He spoke almost absently, like a man just coming awake.

“I wasn’t with you when you found Lorraine.”

“I know. I remember.”

“Lorraine wasn’t dead when you found her.”

It was terribly hard to say. She could feel the sweat gathering in drops between her breasts and trickling down to her waist, leaving a cold trail. It was terribly hard, and why was it up to her? How did she come to inherit a job like this? But that was too easy to answer. She’d asked for it. Everything she’d done, she’d done because she wanted to. It was her baby, and she knew it.

She felt giddy and light when he took it away from her.

“I know I killed her. You needn’t temper the wind to me. But I don’t understand what happened. You must have known I killed her.”

“Yes,” she heard her voice replying from some corner of the room.

“And that was what Milne knew, that was why you were paying him?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have put yourself in his hands.”

Her sense of herself came back from a great distance, and her voice came with it. “I did what I thought I had to do. After that it was too late to change anything. I had to go through with it.”

“I don’t understand why. Tell me what happened.” The part of his face she could see was rigidly controlled, and his firmness gave her courage to go on.

“I wasn’t there. I came when you telephoned. I only know what you told me over the phone and what Miles said afterwards. You told me that you were in dreadful trouble, that you’d found Lorraine with a man, and killed her. When I got to your house you were unconscious in the bedroom. Lorraine’s body was on the bed.”

“But you said you spoke to Miles. I thought he ran away.”

“He did. They saw you coming up the walk, and Lorraine knew you. Miles came to see me the next day. He’d read about me in the papers, and realized that I had some money and that I’d lied to the police. I’ve been paying him ever since.”

“I had to drag you into it, didn’t I?” His voice cracked and became raw with emotion. “I wasn’t content to make a filthy mess of my own life. I had to drag you into it.”

“You made me glad,” she said. “You called on me to help you when you were at the end of the rope, and it made me glad.”

Before the love and courage that shone from her tired face, he felt a terrible humility. Not the false and transient humility of wounded pride, but the humility a man who has lost and regretted his virtue feels in the presence of virtue.

“I’m not fit to live in the same world with you, Paula. This afternoon I even suspected that you and Miles were partners in some way.”

“I know you did. It’s no wonder you were suspicious of me. I lied to you, I lied to everyone. When the police came I told them the story that you and I had been for a drive, and that we were together when you found Lorraine’s body. Once I’d told that lie I couldn’t change my story or they’d have thought we conspired to murder. It’s strange, isn’t it? They never doubted my word.”

“No one should ever doubt your word.”

“That’s the hell of having an honest face,” she said. “If I’d been challenged I’d have had to tell the truth. Nobody challenged me. I know now I should have told them the truth anyway. Considering the circumstances, you might have been acquitted or given a short manslaughter sentence. But I waited until it was too late. Then I found out that you didn’t know yourself what you had done. I was afraid of what the truth might do to you. But I was wrong about that too. I did the wrong thing from start to finish.”

“No.”

He was so deeply moved that he couldn’t say anything more. Shame washed over him like waves of dirty water that left him foul and breathless. He was sick to death of himself, the self-deluded fool, proud and intolerant and hard of heart, who had projected his own guilt outward like a shadow that darkened everything it touched. Phrases from his childhood came back to him like fragments of a language he had almost forgotten, or was just beginning to learn. The mote that is in your brother’s eye … the beam that is in your own. Judge not lest ye be judged.

He was no more than a tiny mote of darkness in the sun, a little seed of flesh thrown down between the earth and sky, blown here and there by the wind of time that swept away the insect generations of men. He had betrayed his own side in the unequal war against death, and deserved nothing of anyone. Yet he drew a bitter strength from his humility. He could say the word “murderer” to himself and answer to the name. He could see it was not justice but mercy that he needed.

He leaned forward and covered his shamed face with his hands, so that his words were muffled. “You took such a risk for me. You must have been crazy to think I was worth it.”

“ ‘Crazy’ is a word we don’t use in our family.” She tried to smile, but her mouth was forced into a grimace of pity instead.

She couldn’t bear to sit here and see him bowed. She crossed the space between them and went down on her knees, holding his head to her breast. She felt his body shaking and held him tighter. She would have liked to be able to divide her own flesh, to take him inside of her and shield and comfort him.

“What am I going to do?” he said against her breast. He had taken a life and could no more evade his guilt than a hunchback could unstrap his hump. Whatever he said for the rest of his life would be censored by the knowledge that certain things could not be spoken. His perceptions would be darkened forever by the black memory that stood between him and the sun. Yet there was no way out. He couldn’t tell the police, for if he did, Paula, who was innocent, would suffer for his guilt. He had to go on living with the knowledge of what he had done, not just tonight, but every night, and in the daylight. “What can I do?” he said.

“Come to bed. You’re tired, and it’s past midnight. There’s nothing for you to do but come to bed.”

“Can you possibly still love me?”

“Tonight before you came I thought I’d lost you. I wanted to die.”

“But aren’t you–?” His voice broke.

She held him tighter still, as if her arms could smother the remorse inside his head. “Aren’t I what?”

“Afraid of me?”

For a second she felt quite panicky, she didn’t know exactly why. She wasn’t afraid of him, but she was afraid. Life was so very complicated and unpredictable, and the energy she needed to cope with it had all drained out of her tonight. She’d been living on her nerve for months, buying vitality on margin, and all the bills had come due at once. She knew that she had won, but she was too tired to realize her victory, too tired to think of the future without fear.

No doubt she’d feel different in the morning. Life would begin again, and the unsettling future would become the routine present. There’d be people to see and dialogue to write, appointments with Klifter, meals to plan, a place for Bret to start to work again, an excuse to put off Mrs. Swanscutt for a while. She didn’t want that bird of ill omen at her wedding; it was already equipped with ill omen enough. Still, she was sure that things would get better. The worst of the danger was over, and the worst of the pain. Things would never be as good as they might once have been, but they would be good enough. She had learned not to make too great demands on life. It was enough for her at the moment that she and Bret were very close to each other. She told him without faltering that she could never be afraid of him – she loved him too much.

“You’re very good,” he said. The warmth of her body had penetrated to his marrow, and he wasn’t shaking any more.

“Come to bed,” she said again.

They went up the stairs arm in arm. It’s past midnight, she was thinking, but it’s still a long time till morning. To him she said more cheerful things.