Wall of Eyes

Chapter 17

The country road, the blonde girl behind the wheel, the crash, the splintering of glass...

When Sands opened his eyes, he knew the answer. An impossible answer. He smiled and shook his head at the ceiling and said, “Nonsense.” It sounded like nonsense at first. It was like looking in the back of an algebra book and finding an answer that seemed impossible; and because it was so impossible you began to work over the equation and gradually everything came together and the answer was right.

He rolled off the bed, gave his suit a few ineffectual swipes with a clothes brush, and pushed his hat on his head. He moved briskly, like a man who is sure what all his actions for the day are going to be, or who is pretending to himself that he is sure.

He was pretending. As soon as he went out small things began to go wrong for him and hold him up. The ignition key wouldn’t fit the lock and when it did the engine wouldn’t turn over.

Delay. He drove a whole block with the emergency brake on. He stopped at green lights thinking that at any moment they might turn red. He let other cars pass him and didn’t pass anything himself except a popcorn man pushing his cart. The popcorn looked very buttery. You didn’t often get really buttery popcorn any more. He stopped the car and waited for the man to catch up.

When he drove on again he had two bags of popcorn on the seat beside him. At the next traffic light he glanced over at the two bags. He knew then that he was stalling himself and he began to swear softly.

“For Christ’s sake maybe I should get out and buy a couple of ties or do my Christmas shopping, or go for a swim at the Y.”

A blare of horns behind him. He let in the clutch and drove on, but he still didn’t hurry. He had no idea of what he was going to do. Talk, probably. Stall a little more. Give them all half an hour or more in their little world and then blow it up, sky high.

The beginning and the end. The first sight of the corpse and the last sight of the murderer. These were the moments to hold back.

But you couldn’t hold them back forever. He was on St. Clair already. When he stopped in front of the Heaths’ one of the bags of popcorn fell on the floor. He picked it up and thrust it savagely back on the seat, and got out of the car. Another car was pulling up behind his and he recognized Dr. Loring at the wheel.

Loring came up. He smiled from force of habit but the smile was brief and it fled, never touching the eyes.

“Well?” he said, clearing his throat.

Sands nodded. “Going in here? Social or professional?”

They looked at each other with cold hostility, yet the hostility was not personal, it was directed against their own situations and against the Heath family who were responsible for the situations.

“Social,” Loring said, “or both.” A falling leaf grazed his face and he brushed at it impatiently. “I’m a little worried and I don’t like to leave cases up in the air like this.”

“Your patient is dead,” Sands said, “not up in the air.”

He turned and began to walk up the driveway. After a moment Loring followed him and caught up.

He said, “Have you reported me?”

Sands shook his head. “Nothing to report, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Because bigger, more important things have happened? If they hadn’t happened, I suppose you’d report me?” He sounded bitter. “Don’t bother answering that. I should be grateful. I am grateful. Just look at me, how grateful!”

“Why are you a psychiatrist?” Sands said.

“Why? My father was one.”

“Personally, I don’t think you’re a very good one, are you? You upset easily.”

“Thanks. I’m grateful again, for the encouragement this time.”

“You should be,” Sands said mildly. “Probably no one else will ever tell you. I seem to have been divinely chosen to tell people things. Oh, skip it.”

“I don’t like being a psychiatrist,” Loring said, after a time. They had paused at the bottom of the steps of the veranda. “It’s so indefinite. You have to guess a lot and I’m no good at guessing because I’m afraid I’ll be wrong.”

“Aren’t we all?” Sands said, and went up the steps and put his finger on the doorbell.

While they waited Loring kept rubbing his foot absently on the doormat.

“Damn it,” he said finally. “I’m too old to start over. Why couldn’t you have kept it quiet?”

“Thirty-two, perhaps?”

“Thirty-three.”

“Ancient of days,” Sands said.

“I’d like to... well, I was pretty good at pediatrics.”

“Kids, you mean?”

“Yes. I sort of — I do, in fact, like them.”

“Extraordinary,” Sands said dryly.

“If I were a psychiatrist explaining it I’d say I had an inferiority complex and that the reason I prefer to deal with children and like them is that they do not challenge my superiority.”

“This is where I get out,” Sands said.

Alice opened the door. When she saw Loring she flushed slightly.

“Well,” she said. “Two of you this time. Come in.”

Loring coughed and said, “I... I just dropped in to see how things are going.”

“Oh, things are going beautifully,” Alice said, with a cold glance at Sands. “Mr. Sands here is trying to hang my brother and has driven Philip into heroic hysterics and Ida into a fit. Ida is praying, Johnny is drinking, Philip is girding his loins to go out and prove Johnny is innocent. And I—” she smiled bitterly “—am the keeper.”

“Sorry,” Loring mumbled. “I’ll wait, if you want to talk to the Inspector.”

“I do,” Alice said grimly. “But what I have to say to him is no secret.”

She turned to Sands. “And that’s not all, Mr. Sands. Maurice has given notice. He is up in his room taking a sunbath because you made him nervous! Of all the preposterous, ridiculous...”

She paused and beat her fists together. “I thought you were polite and quiet and very nice for a policeman. And yet here I am, the only sane one in the house now, thanks to you! I have to answer the phone and the doorbell and cook lunch and serve it and get people to eat it...” Her voice broke and she looked like a child about to cry.

“Oh, come now,” Sands said. “The exercise will do you good.”

She might have cried then from sheer rage but she was too conscious of Loring’s presence, aware that he was watching her, analyzing her.

She said to him quietly, “No, I’m not going to have hysterics. You won’t be called upon to...”

“Alice!”

Philip came lunging down the stairs, shouting, “Alice! I forbid you to have anything to — I forbid you to say anything more to that policeman!”

Alice turned, watching him come closer, her eyes narrowed. He had his topcoat on and was knotting a scarf around his neck. His hat was on the back on his head and a strand of hair hung over his forehead.

She thought, what a fool he looks, why must he, every time? I must protect him against looking foolish.

She went to meet him. She put her arm through his. He was too astonished to move, and stood silently with his mouth open, staring at her.

She knew that Sands and Loring were watching and that Philip had no dignity, no defense.

“Philip,” she said, smiling, and pressed his arm.

The surprise went out of his eyes and he began to smile too, gently, as if they were alone in the hall. He leaned down and brushed her forehead with his mouth, still smiling.

“Going out, Mr. James?” Sands said dryly.

Philip turned around, all the belligerent uncertainty coming back into his face. Alice quietly took her hand from his arm and walked toward Loring.

“You wanted to talk to me?” she said gravely. “Come in here.”

She didn’t look back at Philip. Loring followed her into the drawing room, frowning faintly at her back as if she had done something he couldn’t explain and didn’t like.

When the door had closed again, Sands repeated, “Going out?”

“Yes, I was,” Philip said. “I was going to see you.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to find Murillo and prove that Johnny never had anything to do with him.” He didn’t sound like a hero, or look like one.

Champagne to stale beer, Sands thought and wondered if Alice Heath had planned this change in him. Incalculable woman, you couldn’t tell about her. “And how would you go about finding Murillo, Mr. James?”

“The girl,” Philip said. “His girl, the one you said shot Mr. Jordan.”

“Mamie Rosen,” Sands said.

“Mamie Rosen,” Philip repeated eagerly. “Yes. If she was his girl, she’d know. You have only to insist, really insist on her telling.”

“You think so?”

“If I could talk to her and tell her just what it means to people like Alice and Johnny, nice people who’ve never done any harm, I’m sure she’d see... see reason, and tell where this man is hiding.”

“There are all degrees of reason,” Sands said. “She might just say to hell with nice people like Alice and Johnny. In fact she did.” He took a step closer to Philip so that their eyes were only two feet apart. “No. See, she loves this man Murillo. It doesn’t matter what you call him, murderer, thief, anything, he’s the one. Love. For Mamie it may come down to something quite simple like Murillo being better in bed than any man she knows.”

“Not so loud,” Philip said, frowning. “Alice might hear you.”

“Some day,” Sands said, “Alice will have to be told where babies come from, but you better put off telling her until she’s thirty-five.”

“I...” The hero in him wanted to object but was far too feeble.

“Go ahead,” Sands said. “You go and tell Mamie Rosen all about Alice and Johnny. Tell her about the house they live in, tell her about Maurice tiptoeing around in a monkey suit and taking sunbaths. She won’t know what a sunbath is but tell her anyway. Tell her that Alice put her hands in dishwater today for the first time in her life and broke down. Tell her about that little room down the hall where Alice sits and makes her powerful decisions, like whether to add mushrooms to the chicken patties.”

One corner of his mouth turned up in a half-smile. “Yes. Mamie will break down. You’ll have her weeping. She’ll tell you where Murillo is, if you really want to know. She lives at one hundred and ten Charles Street.”

For a time Philip’s face loosened, the jaws were slack, the eyes undetermined. But he had the mulishness of an insecure man who feels he’s being pushed and the pushing gave him something definite to fight against.

“I’m going,” he said at last.

“Of course you are,” Sands said.

“You mean — you’re letting me?” he said, sounding almost indignant.

“Sure. It’s your funeral.”

“Funeral? You mean she’s dangerous?”

“Want me to come with you?”

“No! No, of course not! I’m... perfectly capable of... of managing her. Well. You say one hundred and ten Charles Street?”

“I say one hundred and ten Charles Street,” Sands said. “Happy Landing.”

Philip took a couple of steps toward the door, then he swung around to find Sands smiling, an idiotic smile like a well-fed happy baby.

“I—” Philip said.

“Yes?” Sands said softly. “Go on, Mr. James. You want to save Alice and Johnny, and your own soft berth here, don’t you? Go on.”

The door opened and banged shut again. With the banging of the door the smile disappeared from Sands’ face.

“I’m so smart,” he said. “I’m so goddamn smart I have to go messing around.”

He looked out of the little square windows at the top of the door and saw Philip disappearing around a bend in the driveway.

Loring saw him too, from the windows of the drawing room. He hadn’t spoken since he entered the room, but had stood watching the leaves falling from the trees, almost hypnotized by the constant motion. One leaf, a second leaf, a million leaves.

And one of them’s me, he thought, and it doesn’t matter a damn what I do. My time’s half up, I’ve fluttered half-way down. The rest is up to me, and if I like kids, there’s no reason...

“Mr. James has gone out,” he said.

He didn’t turn around, but he heard her move, sigh.

“Has he?” she said after a time, and he knew from her voice that she had been crying noiselessly since they’d come into the room.

“I guess I haven’t anything to talk about after all,” he said abruptly. “I don’t know why I came except...” Except to see you, he finished silently.

“Except to see how things were going?” Alice said. “That was nice of you.”

He turned from the windows and looked at her to see if she was being ironic. But her face told him nothing. It was expressionless, and the eyes beneath the pink lids were dead.

If any man loved her, Loring thought, she’d kill him, gradually, day by day she’d kill him as her mother killed her father.

Frozen-face. I want to get out of here.

“Won’t you sit down?” Alice said.

“No. No, thanks,” he said violently. “I have a few calls.”

“Could I offer you a drink?”

Don’t offer me anything, stay away from me, sit there in that chair while I run away from you. “No, thanks, nothing.” He walked quickly toward the door.

She stirred in her chair but did not rise. “Shall we see you again?”

“See me again?” he said hoarsely. “No, no, I’m leaving town. I’m thinking of starting over again — pediatrics.”

She blinked slowly when the door slammed and thought, how peculiar. But an instant later she had forgotten him. It was not Loring who had left, but Alice herself. She had slipped back into the past, skipping lightly like a child over the well-known paths. Her fingers lay tense, stretched out along the arms of the chair as if they were ready to grasp some half-forgotten word or thought or gesture and fondle it.

The past was dead and dear, it couldn’t change, it didn’t threaten. Comfortable and pleasant, like a closet full of old clothes. You could wear some of them when you were alone, but you didn’t have to bother with the rest, even to look at them.

Some of the clothes were ugly with sagging seams, and evil stains, tattered, too loose or too tight. Leave these in the closet. Bring out the yellow linen dress and slip it over your head. See how thick the cloth was and how well it fitted. It made you twenty again.

Twenty. You were sitting on a piano bench with a young man beside you...

She put her hand up to her forehead and moved her fingers gently over it. Yellow linen. Ah, that was a dress, with Philip sewn into every seam and the pockets full of music and the cloth soft as a baby next to your skin.

She opened her eyes suddenly and they were wild and anguished.

“Where is it?” she whispered. “Where is it now? Where is my yellow dress?”

Given to the poor or used as dusters or burned or decayed into nothing or grayed with mildew in an attic.

Behind her she heard the door opening, and turned her head slowly. Loring was standing in the doorway holding her yellow dress over his arm.

He’s brought it back to me, she thought. He has found it and brought it back. I’ll never lose it again now.

Then she saw that it was only a trench coat that he was carrying and she began to shiver violently and twist her hands.

“Alice,” he said gently. “Alice, you’re frightened. You’re cold.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll put my coat over you, Alice.”

“Yes, I’m cold.”

He put the coat around her shoulders. It felt strange and rough against her skin, but she drew it closer.

Philip took Johnny’s car. He had no car of his own and they had never offered him one. When Isobel Heath was alive she would send him down to the Conservatory in her own car with her chauffeur at the wheel. Philip would sit in the back seat with his music across his knee, never at ease because any moment the chauffeur might glance in the mirror and catch him off guard looking awed and excited, not belonging at all to the car or the life it implied. And the chauffeur’s eyes would be mildly contemptuous, or else frankly disrespectful: Come up here, buddy, where you belong.

But when he could forget the chauffeur the car gave him a pleasant feeling. He could look out of the window and pretend to people that he was very bored by the whole thing. It was very hard to look bored. It almost seemed as if you had to be very rich, or very tough, you couldn’t let yourself be excited by little things, like taking Alice to the opera. She had only gone with him once because she didn’t like opera. When he was sitting in the box beside her he kept glancing at her out of the corner of his eye and thinking that she looked like a princess, and he tried to look bored and accustomed to princesses.

“You’re like a fish out of water,” Alice had said. “Can’t you sit still?”

Princess voice, soft and lazy. Oh, yes, whatever else you could say about Alice you liked being seen with her. It was funny to think that if she had run in her stocking or if her slip showed, her whole pose might disintegrate. She might blush, or look furtive or try to hurry, she might become a shopgirl quite suddenly. It showed how important it was, not just money but the air that money could give you.

He turned south on Yonge Street. At the first stoplight he looked around and saw people staring at the yellow roadster. For a second he was ashamed and sick that he didn’t look like Johnny, that he didn’t fit this car any more than he had fitted Isobel’s car. But the feeling passed. In his way he probably looked better than Johnny because he had more brains. The people who stared at the car would surely recognize this: Intelligent young fellow, not one of those idle rich.

A girl walked in front of the car. Philip watched her hips swinging under the cheap skirt. She turned her head and her glance stabbed his eyes and went right through out the back of his head as if his skull was made of paper.

He flushed and thought, slut, little slut. But when he drove on his hand on the wheel was unsteady and his eyes were hot and uneasy. He had been tried and found wanting by a girl in a cheap skirt. He wanted to turn the car around and follow the girl, to reason with her, convince her: You have no right not to see me. I am Philip James. I play the piano. I gave a concert.

He jerked at the gearshift and it made a grinding noise and people turned their heads toward him. He got away from them, he drove fast to escape their eyes, though here too he wanted to go back and explain that he was really a good driver, that he was nervous, he didn’t often grind the gears, he was nervous.

Every time he stopped the car he had new wounds to lick. A policeman shouted at him because he went through on a yellow light. A child, crossing, thumped his fist on the fender of the car and grinned. An old lady with an armful of parcels looked bitterly at him and her mouth moved over something ugly. And with every wound his eyes darted quickly, wildly, from one side to the other, seeking other wounds.

When he got to Charles Street he was scraped and lacerated, tom by his own teeth. But Charles Street soothed him. The houses were so old and shabby and the yellow car so new and he was driving the yellow car. He began to look bored again and the wounds began to close, one after another. The people who had hurt him were no longer static in his mind, they went on with their business and faded. The girl in the cheap skirt went on walking, the grinning boy crossed the street, the policeman shouted at someone else, the old woman carried her parcls home.

He stopped the car and got out and began to walk along the street, peering at the numbers of the house, saying them aloud: “Eighty-eight. Tourists. Running Water. Special Rates by Week or Month.”

His voice reassured him. He didn’t want to think about Mamie Rosen just yet, and if he could keep talking even to himself he wouldn’t have to think about her.

“Ninety-four. Board and Room.”

He pulled his hat down over his eyes. He didn’t want anyone to see him, recognize him. He even put his hands into his pockets as if to hide everything of himself that he could.

“Ninety-eight. One hundred and two. Tea Cups Read. Have your Fortune told.”

He went past that one fast, almost afraid that his fortune might come at him out of a window if he didn’t hurry, a grimy fortune floating out of a grimy window, floating faster than he could walk.

“One hundred and six.” That was better. A row of shrubs and a pram on the veranda. He didn’t want children himself but he liked to think of other people having them. It gave him a sense of security, of continuance and respectability. He called them kiddies, and if they hadn’t dirty noses he sometimes said, “Hello, there!” If they had dirty noses he hurried past, feeling surreptitiously in his pocket for his own handkerchief. A little later he would have to blow his nose, he would blow it hard and hurry on, and once he had thrown the handkerchief away into the road.

A man was standing on the curb ahead of him reading a newspaper. Philip pulled down his hat brim again and hunched inside his coat. He looked around once, then walked quickly past the man, his head bent forward like a goat about to charge.

One hundred and ten.

The man with the newspaper raised his eyes then and looked at Philip’s back.

Now that’s a hell of a funny way to walk, he thought. If it was winter now and he was cold you could figure he was trying to keep warm.

He didn’t pretend to read the paper any more. It just fell out of his hand. He thought, he’s got a gun in his pocket. Well, that’s all right, so have I.

He said, “Hey!”

Philip was nearly at the door. He made a quick half-turn.

“Hey!” the man said. “Come here!”

For a second neither of them moved. Then Philip’s hands came out of his pockets and he used them to swing his body around, to help him run, propel him along the street. His movements were mad and violent as if every muscle was straining to help him get away. His breath rasped, his arms flailed, his feet hit the sidewalk, heavy and powerful. He was running, escaping from the man with the newspaper, the girl with the skirt, the grinning boy, the policeman. He was escaping from Alice and Johnny, from Isobel in her urn and Kelsey on her table in the morgue and Geraldine and Sands and Mamie.

He began to shout, “Eeeee! Eeeee!” swept by a surge of ferocious joy in running, getting away, escaping them, never to see any of them again, never, never...

He was running bent almost in two and when the bullet pierced his back he fell on his face and his nose squashed against the sidewalk like a splash of rotten fruit.

He had a moment left, a moment to hear someone shout, “Murillo!” to move his mouth in protest, to taste his own blood, and to feel in the last part of the last moment that he was glad to die like this on a velvet rug with some warm soothing liquid pouring over his face.

“I got him. Shoot to kill, they said. Is he dead?”

“Jesus, is he! Turn him over. What’s that in his pocket?”

“A letter. Here, you take it.”

“ ‘Philip James!’ Philip James! Jesus, this ain’t Murillo!”

“It’s got to be Murillo. I shot him. It’s got to be. Shoot to kill, they said. Sure, it’s Murillo. It’s got to be! It’s got to be! He was carrying a gun. He had his hands in his pockets ready to shoot first.”

“No gun.”

“Must be a gun!”

“No gun.”

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ!”