Waltz Into Darkness

45

He ran back and forth like mad between the gaping wardrobe and the uplidded trunk, empty-armed on each trip to, half-smothered under masses of her dresses on each trip fro. He dropped them into it in any old way, so that long before the potential capacity of trunk was exhausted, its actual capacity was filled and overflowing. This was no time for a painstaking job of packing. This was get out fast, run for their lives.

He heard her come in at the street door, and before she had even had time to quit the entryway, he called down to her sight-unseen from above, in wild urgency: “Bonny!” And then again, “Bonny! Come up here quick! Hurry! I have something to tell you!”

She delayed for some reason. Perhaps over the feminine trait of removing her bonnet or disposing of her parcels before doing anything further, even at a moment of crisis.

Half mad with his own haste, he rushed recklessly out of the room, ran down to get her. And then halfway to the bottom of the stairs he stopped short, as if his legs had been gripped by a brake; and stood still, stock still and yet trembling, and died a little.

The figure back to door, back to just-reclosed door, equally stock still, was Downs.

Neither of them moved. The discovery came, the discovery went, the discovery was long past. Just two icy still men endlessly looking at one another. From stairs to door. From door to stairs. One of them bleakly smiling now in ultimate vindication. One of them ashen-faced, stricken to death.

One of them sighed deeply at last. Then the other sighed too, as if in answer. Two sighs in the intense silence. Two different sighs. A sigh of despair, a sigh of completion.

“You called her just now,” Downs said slowly. “You called her by name. Thinking it was her. So she is here with you.”

Durand had turned partly sidewise, was gripping the rail with both hands and bent slightly over it, as if able to support himself by that means alone. He shook his head. First slowly. Then at each repetition, faster, faster; until he was beating the stubborn air with it. “No,” he said. “No. No. No.”

“Mr. Durand, I have good ears. I heard you.”

Ostrichlike, terrified, craven, trying to hide his head in the sands of his own mesmeric denial. As though to keep saying No, if persisted in long enough, would ward off the danger. Using the word as a sort of talisman.

“No. No. No!”

“Mr. Durand, let’s be men at least. You called her name, you hollered it down here.”

“No. No.” He took a toppling step, that brought him down a stair lower. Then another. But seeming to slide his body downward along the slanted rail rather than move his legs, so hard and fast did he cling to it. Like an inebriate; which he was. An inebriate of fright. “Someone else. Woman that comes in to do my cleaning. Her name sounds like that—” He didn’t know what he was saying any more.

“Very well,” Downs said drily. “I’ll take the woman that comes in to do your cleaning, the woman whose name sounds so much the same. I’m not hard to please.”

They were suddenly wary, watchful of one another; both pairs of eyes slanting first far over to this side, then far over to that, in a sort of synchronization of wordless guile. Physical movement followed, also in complete unison.

Durand broke from the stairs, Downs broke from the door-back. Their two diagonal rushes brought them together before the mirrored, antlered hatrack cabinet against the wall, with its armed seat that was also the lid of a storage box. Durand tried to hold it down, Downs to pry it up. Downs’ arm treacherously thrust in and out again, came up with the two long heliotrope streamers depending from a straw garden hat. The tip of one had been protruding, caught fast by the lid on its last closing; a fleck of color, a fingernail’s worth of color, in all that vast ground-floor area of house.

(“But why do you like it so?” he had once asked her.

“I don’t know. It’s my color, and anyone who knows me knows it’s my color. Wherever I am, there’s bound to be some of it around.”)

Downs let it fall back again into the box. “The costume for the woman who comes here to do your work,” he remarked. And then, looking his disgust and complete forfeiture of respect at Durand, he murmured something in a swallowed voice that sounded like, “God help you, in love with a—!”

“Downs, listen, I want to talk to you—!” The words tumbled over one another in their eagerness to be out. He was so breathless he could hardly articulate. He took him by the lapels, a hand to each, held him close in a sort of pleading stricture. “Come inside here, come in the next room, let me talk to you—!”

“You and I have nothing to talk about. All my talking is for—”

Durand moved insistently backward, drawing him after him by that close coat lock, until he had him in there past the threshold where he wanted him to be. Then let him go, and Downs stayed there where he’d brought him.

“Downs, listen— Wait a minute, there’s some brandy here, let me pour you a drink.”

“I keep my drinking for saloons.”

“Downs, listen— She’s not here, you’re making a terrible mistake—” Then quickly stilling his presumed contradiction by a fanwise rotation of the hand; “—but that isn’t what I want to talk to you about. It’s simply this. I... I’ve changed my mind. I want to drop the matter. I want the proceedings to stop.”

Downs repeated with ironic absence of inflection, “You want to drop the matter. You want the proceedings to stop.”

“I have that right, I have that choice. It was my complaint originally.”

“As a matter of fact, that’s only partly true. You were cocomplainant along with Miss Bertha Russell. But let’s say for the sake of argument, it was your sole complaint originally. Then what?” His brows went up. “And what?”

“But if I withdraw the complaint, if I cancel it—?”

“You have no control over me,” Downs said stonily. He slung one hip astride the arm of a chair he was standing beside, settled himself as if to wait. “You can rescind your complaint. All well and good. You can cease payment of any further fees to me. And as a matter of fact, your original retainer to me expired months ago. But you can’t compel me to quit the case. Is that plain enough to you? As the old saying goes, this is a free country. And I’m a free agent. If I happen to want to continue on my own account until I bring the assignment to a satisfactory conclusion — and it happens that I do — there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m no longer working for you, I’m working for my own conscience.”

Appalled, Durand began to tremble all over. “But that’s persecution—” he quavered.

“That’s being conscientious, I’d call it, though it’s not for me to say so,” Downs said with a frosty smile.

“But you’re not a public police official— You have no right—”

“Fully as much right as I had in the first place, when I took up the assignment on your behalf. The only difference being that now I’ll turn my findings over to them direct, when I’m ready, instead of through you.”

Durand, his feet clogging, had stumbled around and to the far side of the large bulky table desk present in the room, pacing his way along its edge with both hands, as if in momentary danger of collapse.

“Now wait— Now listen to me—” he panted, and fumbled with excruciating anxiety in the pockets of his waistcoat, one after the other, not finding the right one immediately. He brought out a key, turned it in the wood, pulled out a drawer. A moment later a compact ironbound box had appeared atop the desk, its lid standing up. He grubbed within it, came back toward Downs with both hands extended, paper money choking them.

“There’s twenty thousand dollars here. Downs, open your hand. Downs, hold it a minute; just hold it a minute.”

Downs’ hands had retreated into his trouser pockets at his approach; there was nothing there to deposit the offering in.

Downs shook his head with indolent stubbornness. “Not a minute, not an hour, not for keeps.” He switched his head commandingly. “Take it back where you got it, Durand.”

“Just hold it for me,” Durand persisted childishly. “Just hang onto it a moment, that’s all I’m asking—”

Downs stared at him imperturbably. “You’ve got the wrong man, Durand. That’s your misfortune. The one wrong man out of twenty. Or maybe even out of a hundred. I took the case professionally in the beginning, for a money payment. I’m on it for my own satisfaction now. I not only won’t take any further money to stay on it, but no amount of money could make me quit it any more. And don’t ask me why, because I can’t answer you. I’m a curious johnny, that’s all. You made a mistake, Durand, when you came to me in St. Louis. You should have gone to somebody else. You picked the one private investigator in the whole country, maybe, that once he starts out on something can’t leave off again, not even if he wants to. Sometimes I wonder what it is myself, I wish I knew. Maybe I’m a fanatic. I want that woman, not for you any more, but for my own satisfaction.” He drew his hands out of his pockets at last, but only to fold his arms flintily across his chest and lean back still farther against the chair he was propped against.

“I’m staying here until she comes in. And I’m taking her back with me.”

Durand was back beside the money box again, hands bedded atop its replaced contents, pressing down on it in strained futility.

Downs must have seen him glance speculatively toward the doorway. He read his mind.

“And if you go out of here, to try to meet her on the outside and Warn her off, I’m going right along with you.”

“You can’t forbid me to leave my own house,” Durand said despairingly.

“I didn’t say that. And you can’t prevent me from walking along beside you. Or just a step or two behind you. The streets are public.”

Durand pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, held it there a moment, as though there were some light overhead that was too strong in his eyes. “Downs, I can raise another thirty thousand in New Orleans. Inside twenty-four hours. Go with me there, keep me in sight every step of the way; you have my promise. Fifty thousand dollars, just to let us alone. Just to forget you ever heard of—”

“Save your breath, I made my speech on that,” Downs said contemptuously.

Durand clenched a fist, shook it, not threateningly, but imploringly, at him. “Why do you have to blacken her name, ruin her life? What good—?”

Downs’ mouth shaped a laugh, but no sound came. “Blacken the name of that wanton? Ruin the life of that murdering trollop?”

The impact left physical traces across Durand’s face, blanching it in livid streaks across the mouth and eyes, yet he ignored it. “She didn’t do anything. The whole thing’s circumstantial. She just happened to be on the same boat, that’s all. So were dozens of others. You can’t say for certain what happened to Julia Russell. No one can, no one knows. She just disappeared. She may have met with an accident. People have. Or she may still be alive at this very hour. She may have run off with someone else she met on the boat. All Bonny is guilty of, was passing herself off on me under another name, in the very beginning. And if I forgive her for that, as I have long ago—”

Downs suddenly left his semirecumbent position on the chair arm. He was on his feet, facing him alertly, eyes glittering now.

“Here’s something you don’t seem to know yet, Mr. Durand. And I think you may as well know it now, as later. You’re going to soon enough, anyway. There isn’t just a disappearance involved any longer. And I can say for certain just what happened to Julia Russell! I can now, if I couldn’t the last time you saw me!”

He was leaning slightly forward in his intensity, in his zeal; that zeal of which he had spoken himself a few minutes earlier.

“A body drifted ashore out of the eddies at Cape Girardeau on the tenth of this month. You can get white, Mr. Durand; you have reason. A body that had been murdered, thrown into the water dead. There was no water in the lungs. I took Bertha Russell down to look at it. And badly decomposed as it was, she identified it. As that of Julia Russell, her sister. Triply fortified, even though there was no face left any more. By twin moles high on the inner side of the left thigh. That no other human being ever saw since early childhood, practically. By the uncommon fact that both end-teeth on both jaws, all four in other words, bore gold crowns. And lastly by the fact that her side bore peculiar scars in a straight line, from the teeth of a garden rake; again from her childhood. The rake had been rusty and the punctures had had to be cauterized by a hot iron.”

He stopped for lack of breath, and there was a moment of silence.

Durand was standing there, head bowed, looking downward before himself. Perhaps to the floor in implicit capitulation, perhaps to the outthrust drawer from which the strongbox had come. He was breathing with difficulty; his chest rose and fell with visible labor at each intake and expulsion.

“Do the official police know about this?” he asked finally, without raising his head.

“Not yet, but they will when I get her back there with me.”

“You’ll never get her back there with you, Downs. She’s not going to leave this house. And neither are you.”

Now his head came up. And with it the pistol his hand had fallen upon, long ago, long before this.

Shock slashed across Downs’s face; it mirrored fear, collapse, panic, for a moment each, in turn; all the usual and only-human reactions. But then he curbed them, and after that he bore himself well.

He spoke for his life, but his voice was steady and reasonable, and after the first abortive step back, he held his ground sturdily. Nor did he cringe and bunch his shoulders defensively, but held himself tautly erect. He did not try to disguise his fear, but he mastered it, which is the greater bravery of the two.

“Don’t do anything like that. Keep your head, man. You’re still not involved. There’s nothing punishable as yet in your taking up with this woman. The crime was committed before you met her. You were not a party to it. You’ve been foolish but not criminal so far— Don’t, Durand— Stop and think before it’s too late. For your own sake, while there’s still time, put that down. Put it back where you got it.”

Durand, for the first time during the entire interview, seemed to be addressing, not the investigator, but someone else. But who it was, no one could have said. He didn’t know himself. “It’s already too late. It’s been too late since I first met her. It’s been too late since the day I was born. It’s been too late since God first created this world!”

He looked down, to avoid seeing Downs’s face. He looked down at his own finger, curled about the trigger. Watching it with a sort of detached curiosity, as though it were not a part of him. Watching as if to see what it would do.

“Bonny,” he sobbed brokenly, as though pleading with her to let him go.

The detonation stunned him briefly, and smoke drew a transient merciful curtain between the two of them. But that thinned again and was wafted aside long before it could do any good.

Then he looked up and met the face he hadn’t wanted to.

Downs was still up, strangely.

There was in his face such unutterable, poignant rebuke that, to have had to look at it a second time during a single lifetime would have cost Durand his reason, he had a feeling then.

A hushed word hovered about them in the sudden new stillness of the room, like a sigh of penitence. Somebody had breathed “Brother,” and later Durand had the strange feeling it had been he.

Downs’s legs gave abruptly, and he went with a crash. More violently, for the delay, than if he had fallen at once. And lay there dead. Dead beyond mistaking, with his eyes open but viscid opaque matter, with his lips rubbery and slightly unsealed.

The things he did then, Durand, he was slow in coming to, as though it were he and not Downs who was now in timeless eternity; and even as he did them, though he saw himself doing them, he was unaware of doing them. As though they were the acts of his hands and his body, and not of his brain.

He remembered sitting for a while on a chair, on the outermost edge of a chair, like someone uneasy, about to rise again at any moment, but yet who fails to do so. He only saw that he had been sitting when he finally did stand and quit the chair. He’d been holding the pistol in his hand the whole time, and tapping its muzzle against the cap of his knee.

He went over to the desk and returned it to where he’d taken it from. Then he noted the cash box still standing there on top the desk, with its lid up and some escaped bank notes lying about it. These he returned to it, and then closed and locked it, and then he put it away too. Then he locked the drawer and pocketed the key.

Yes, he thought dazedly, I can repair everything but one thing. There is one thing I cannot return to, what it was before. And he swayed, shuddering, for a moment against the corner of the desk, as if the thought were a strong cold wind assailing him and threatening to overbalance him.

The situation seemed timeless, as if he were going to stay in here forever with this dead man. This dead thing that had been a man; dressed like a man, but not a man any longer. He felt no immediate urge to get out of the room; instinct told him it was better to be here, behind its concealing walls, than elsewhere. But he wanted not to have to look at what lay on the floor any longer. He wanted his eyes not to have to keep returning to it every other moment.

Downs lay upon an oblong rug, and he lay transverse upon it, so that one upper corner protruded far out past his shoulder, one lower far down below his foot. There was in this violation of symmetry, too, an irritant that continually inflamed his nerves every time his gaze fell upon the high relief offered by the floor.

He went over at last and dropped down by the dead face, and, folding over the margin of rug, covered it, as with a thick, woolly winding sheet. Then noting in himself symptoms of relief or at least amelioration, shifted rapidly down by the feet of the corpse — without standing, by working his upended feet along under his body — and turned over that corner, swathing the feet and lower legs. All that lay revealed now was a truncated torso.

Suddenly, inspired, he turned the body over, and the rug with it. And then a second time, and the rug still with it. It was gone now, completely hidden, disappeared within a cocoon of roughspun rugback. But he did it still once more, and the rug had become a long, hollow cylinder. No more than a rolled rug; nothing about it to amaze or attest or accuse.

But it was in the way. It blocked passage in or out of the doorway.

He scrambled downward upon all fours and began to roll it across the room, toward the base of the opposite wall. It rolled lumpily and a little erratically, guided by the weight of its own fill rather than his manipulations. He had to stop and straighten, and move ahead of it to get a chair out of the way.

Then, tired, when he had returned to it, he no longer got down and used his hands to it. He remained erect and planted his foot against it and prodded it forward in that way, until at last he had it close up against the wall base, and as unobtrusive as it would ever be.

A small mother-of-pearl collar button had jumped out of it en route and lay there behind it on the floor. He picked that up, and returned to it, and tossed it in freehand at one of the openings; but no longer sure which one of the two it was, whether at head or at feet.

Exhausted now, he staggered back across the room, and found the wall nearest the door-opening, the farthest one from it, and sank back deflated against that, letting it support him at shoulders and at rump. And just remained that way, inert.

He was still there like that when she came in.

Her arrival now was anticlimax. He could give it no import any longer. He was drained of nervous energy. He turned listlessly at the sound of her entrance, back beyond sight in the hall. A moment later she had arrived abreast of him, was standing looking into the room, busied in taking a glove off one hand.

A little flirt of violet scent seemed to reach him; but perhaps more imagined by the sight of her, recalled to memory from former times, than actually inhaled now.

She turned her head and saw him there, propped upright, splayed hands at a loss.

Her puckered mouth ejaculated a note of laughter. “Lou! What are you doing there like that? Flat up against—”

He didn’t speak.

Her gaze swept the room in general, seeking for the answer.

He saw her glance halt at the transverse dust patch coating the floor. The rug’s ghost, so to speak.

“What happened to the rug?”

“There’s someone in it. There’s a man’s body in it.” Even as he said it, it struck him how curious that sounded. There’s someone in it. As though there were some miniature living being dwelling in it. But what other way was there to say it?

He turned his head to indicate it. She turned hers in accompaniment, and thus located it. A rounded shadow secretively nestling along the base of the wall; easy for the eye to miss, the legs of chairs distracting it.

“Don’t go over—” he started to say. But she had already started swiftly for it. He didn’t finish the injunction, more from lack of energy than because she had already disobeyed it.

He saw her crouch down by the oval, stovepipe-like opening, her skirts puddling about her. She put her face close and peered. Then she thrust her arm in, to feel blindly if there was indeed something in there. He saw her grasp it by its edges next, as if to partially unroll it, or at least stretch the aperture.

“Don’t—” he said sickly. “Don’t open it again.”

She straightened and came back toward him again. There was an alertness in her face, a sort of wary shrewdness, but that was all; no horror and no fear, no pallor of shock. She even seemed to have gained vitality, as if this were — not a moral catastrophe — but a test to put her on her mettle.

“Who did it? You?” she demanded in a brisk whisper.

“It’s Downs,” he said.

Her eyes were on him with bright insistency; there was a single-minded intentness to them that almost amounted to avidity; insistency on knowing, on being told. Hard practicality. But no emotional dilution whatever.

“He came here to get you.”

He wouldn’t have gone ahead. His head dipped in conclusion. But she urged the continuation from him by putting hand to his chin and tipping it up again.

“He found out you were here.”

She nodded now, rapidly. The explanation sufficed, that seemed to mean; she accepted it, she understood it. The act, the consequence stemming from it, was a normal one. None other could have been expected. None other could have been desired. A nod or two of her head spoke to him, saying these things.

She gripped his upper arm tight. He hadn’t known she possessed so much strength, so much burning heat, in her fingers. He had the curious impression it was a form of commendation.

There was an intimacy tincturing her next remark, a rapport, none of their love passages had ever had before.

“What’d you do it with? What’d you take?”

“The gun there,” he said. “The one in the desk.”

She turned and looked at the rug. And while she stood turned thus, she struck him lightly on the chest with the back of her hand. And the only thing he could read in the gesture was rakish camaraderie, a sort of flippant, unspoken bond.

Then she looked back at him, and looked him in the face long and well. Lazily half smiling the while, as if discovering in the familiar outlines of his face, for the first time, some new qualities, to be appreciated, to be admired.

“You need a drink,” she said with brittle decisiveness. “I do too. Wait a minute, I’ll get us one.”

He watched her go to it, and pour from the decanter twice, and put the glass stopper back in, and give it a little twist as if it were a knob.

He felt as if he were venturing into a strange new world. Which had had its well-established customs all along, but which he was only now encountering for the first time. That was what you did after you took a life; you took a drink next. He hadn’t known that, it wouldn’t have occurred to him, but for her. He felt like a novice in the presence of a practised hand.

She put one of the two glasses into his hand, and continuing to clasp that same hand about the wrist, as if in token of affection, poked her other hand wildly, vertically, up into the air.

“Now you’re a man after my own heart,” she said with glittering fervor. “Now you’re worth taking up with. Now you’re my kind of man.”

She smote his uncertain glass with hers, and her head went back, and she pitched the liquor in through those demure lips, that scarcely seemed able to open at all.

“Here’s to us,” she said. “To you. To me. To the two of us. Drink up, my lovey. A short life and an exciting one.”

She cast her drained glass against the wall and it sprayed into fragments.

He hesitated a moment, then, as if hurrying to overtake her, lest he be left all alone, drained his own and sent it after hers.