Vanish in an Instant

19

The night was turning cold, and an eager new wind raced up and down the streets. Under the lights the sidewalks and the limbs of trees shone icy.

Meecham moved stiffly toward the house with his brief case in his hand. During the past hour when the weather had changed, some of Mrs. Hearst’s boys had made a slide of ice, three or four yards long, from the sidewalk to the porch steps. Meecham would have liked to try the slide, but the brief case felt heavy and he felt heavy. He thought, if this was another house and if Alice was with me, we might try the slide together.

On the porch, underneath the parlor window, there was a stepladder lying on its side, and a basket of pine branches and a spiral of copper wire, as if someone had started to decorate the house for Christmas and then lost interest. The parlor blinds were up, and the crystal chandelier hanging from the center of the ceiling blazed with light. A group of young men and girls were sitting around a table playing cards.

Meecham went up the steps and pressed the doorbell. The porch light went on instantly above his head like a spotlight. It stayed on for a few seconds and then it went off again, and the door was opened by Emmy Hearst. Her eyes were still puffed, but she’d put on some make-up and a black close-fitting dress that looked new and emphasized her slimness.

“Come in.”

“Thanks.”

“We’ll have to talk in the kitchen. One of the boys is entertaining.”

She closed the door behind him and led the way down the hall. Following her, Meecham had the same impression of youth and energy that he’d had the first time he saw her standing at the sink humming to herself. It had been a shock then, as it was now, when she turned around and her face showed the bitter years.

“He isn’t here,” she said abruptly. “He had to go downtown. He asked me to tell you to wait.”

“For how long?”

“He didn’t say.”

“I had an idea that he wanted to see me as soon as possible.”

She crossed her arms as if holding herself together in readiness for a blow. “What about?”

“You’d better ask him.”

“I did. He wouldn’t tell me. But it’s bad, isn’t it?”

“I can’t very well discuss...”

“How bad?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully.

“It’s about this murder? Isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

She sat down on the couch and began to pick bits of wool off the blanket that covered it. The floor was littered with fuzz, as if she had already spent hours sitting there picking at the blanket like an industrious bird gathering material for its nest. She spoke listlessly, without raising her head: “After you phoned him, he phoned someone else.”

“Who was it?”

“I heard him dialing but I couldn’t hear his words. Afterwards he came and told me he was going downtown for a package of cigarettes.”

“And I’m to wait here until he comes back?”

She turned the blanket over and began on the other side. “I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“Why?”

“When he walked out the door I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to see him again.”

A trickle of sweat ran down the side of Meecham’s face leaving a cold moist track like a slug’s track. He said carefully, “I think I’d better try to find him.”

“Don’t. Let him go.”

“He has some information. I want it.”

“Information,” she repeated. “He’s taken you in. What information could he have? He was here, right in this house, when Margolis was killed. He was sleeping.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I saw him. That was the night I cut my arm. See, it’s still bandaged.”

She started to push up her left sleeve but Meecham stopped her. “Yes, I remember the bandage.”

“Well, that was the night it happened — Saturday. I had gotten up to take a sleeping pill. One of the boys broke the porcelain tap in the basin a week or so ago, and I fell against it in the dark and cut myself. I went into Jim’s room to see if he’d help me bandage it. But he was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him up. That was about 12:30.” She leaned forward, looking at him anxiously. “You don’t understand about Jim. He’s like a kid. He’s never had much excitement, and when this — this business happened, we weren’t mixed up in it at all, but Jim — it went to his head. He’d say anything to be in on things, to be part of the excitement.”

“Someone might take him seriously.”

“No one who knows him.”

“There are a lot of people who don’t know him,” Meecham said. Including me, he thought. I take him seriously. “I’ll wait for another fifteen minutes. If he doesn’t show up I’ll start looking for him.”

“I don’t care.” She shook her head. “We’re through anyway. I’m going away. The car’s mine, I paid for it myself. I’m going to get in it and drive, just drive away somewhere, I don’t care where I end up.”

They were Virginia’s words, but she spoke them with more decision and assurance than Virginia had. Virginia might dream of leaving, pack her vague plans between layers of folded hopes; but Emmy Hearst would leave, get into her car and drive away without a backward glance. She was a forceful woman, and Meecham thought what a comic tragedy it was that such a woman would always choose emotionally stunted men like Hearst, or physically stunted ones like Loftus.

“I’ll stay with my sister in Chelsea for a while, and then, after that, I don’t know. Everything’s so vague and useless. When Earl was alive, no matter how bad things were, I always had a reason for living.” She leaned over suddenly, and with nervous fingers gathered up all the fuzz on the floor and squeezed it into a ball. “I loved Earl. He was the only person I’ve ever loved in my whole life. He was — perfect.”

“No,” Meecham said. “He wasn’t.”

“To me he was.” She went to the sink and threw the ball of fuzz into the garbage strainer, as if deliberately walking away from the argument. The supper dishes were still on the drainboard, two glasses, two plates, two of everything. Jim’s and Emmy’s, Meecham thought ironically. His and Hers.

“You’re idealizing Loftus,” he said. “It will be harder for you if you don’t face reality.”

“I don’t care.”

“Not tonight, perhaps, but next week, next year. You’ll go on with your life, working, meeting new people. But you’ll never meet a living man who’ll be as perfect as your image of a dead man. So you’ll have to change that image, cut it down to size.”

She turned and stared at him. “What are you getting at, Mr. Meecham?”

“Loftus was human. He had bad qualities as well as good qualities.”

“You could never shake my faith in him.”

“I can,” Meecham said. “I think I have to.”

“Try. Go ahead and try.”

“Did he ever tell you about Birdie?”

“Birdie?” A pulse began to pound in her throat, and she put her hand over it to hide it. “Who was — Birdie?”

“She was his wife.”

“No. No, he never had a wife.”

“He married her about two years ago. They were diver—”

“Please,” she said. “Please. Don’t.”

“They were divorced — there was trouble over his mother, I believe — and later Birdie was killed in an auto accident out West.”

For almost a whole minute she didn’t speak or move. Then, with a sudden furious sweep of her hand, she thrust all the dishes off the drainboard into the sink. The crash split the air, and little pieces of glass sprayed out of the sink like water from a fountain.

Some of the glass struck her but she didn’t flinch or even notice. She just turned and walked away from the whole mess, looking very composed.

Pausing in the doorway, she said to Meecham in a cold flat voice, “Your fifteen minutes are up. Good night, Mr. Meecham.”