An Air That Kills (10 page)

“I guess it is.”

“You must go and find out, Harry.”

Harry sagged against the desk, his head bowed. “Not now.”

“You've got to.”

“I can't face anyone right now.”

“You're facing me.”

“That's because we're both in the same spot.”

“Not quite,” she replied sharply. “You know where your wife is, you know she's alive and well. So we're not
quite
in the same spot, are we?”

He raised his head, slowly and with effort, as if it had turned to stone. Their eyes met, but he didn't speak.

“Harry. I need your help. You'll go and see Dorothy?”

“All right.”

“Now?”

“Now,” he said wearily.

TEN

He reached out and switched on the radio in his car. The six o'clock news broadcast was just beginning. Trouble in Israel. A train wreck in California. Stock market still going up. A warehouse on fire near the waterfront. A plane crash outside Denver. No mention of Ron's disappearance. Probably be­cause it's Sunday, Harry thought. This whole damn city goes dead on Sundays. Maybe Thelma's right and we ought to move to the States. I'll call her and tell her—no, she said to wait. I must be patient.

He turned north on Avenue Road and west on Grant, and about two miles from the intersection he came to what Dor­othy's mother called her town house.

The neighborhood was beginning to crumble around it but the house itself remained intact, as impervious as a stone for­tress with its three-storied turrets and barred windows.
A
medieval castle,
Harry thought as he parked his car in the driveway.
And inside the castle awaits the princess in her tower of ivory. Not the sleeping beauty, however. Poor Dor­othy has insomnia.

He could laugh at the house, make fun of Dorothy, and even feel pity and contempt for her, but at the same time he was a little awed and uneasy and resentful in the presence of wealth, like a dwarf who has been denied some secret hormone that stimulated growth, suddenly finding himself among giants.

He pressed the door chime and waited, bracing himself as if for attack the instant the huge mahogany door opened. When the door finally opened he almost laughed out loud at the sight of a little old woman in a black uniform, no bigger or braver than Harry's dwarf-image of himself. She stared up at him, round-eyed, as if male visitors to the household were scarce, and objects of suspicion.

“Mrs. Galloway wanted to see me,” he said. “I'm Harry Bream.”

She didn't speak, and only the slightest nod of her head indicated that she had heard him. But she opened the door wider and Harry took it as an invitation to enter. Then she closed the door, gave a little curtsy in Harry's general direction and darted off down the hall and up the stairs with several backward glances as if she perhaps feared pursuit.

The hall was like a museum, with a domed ceiling and marble floors and massive pieces of statuary. Harry would have liked a cigarette but there were no ash trays in sight and the walls seemed to be posted with invisible No Smoking signs. The only evidence of life in the room was a pair of battered roller skates abandoned at the bottom of the staircase. The skates struck a note of sad surprise in Harry: he was always forgetting that Dorothy had borne a child and that the child still lived here in this house. Harry hadn't seen her for years. She was kept, or chose to remain, out of sight.

He put his hands in his pockets and waited, and in a few minutes the little old woman came darting back down the steps, her white cap bobbing up and down on her head like a captive bird.

“Mrs. Galloway will see you in her room.” She spoke very slowly and not too clearly, as if at some time in the past, through illness or injury, she had lost the ability to speak and had had to learn the use of words all over again.

Harry followed her upstairs. The pace she set was so brisk that Harry was breathing hard by the time he reached the first landing, and openly puffing when he came to the top.

Dorothy's suite was in the south turret and the door was open.

Dorothy was stretched out on a chaise longue in a tangle of satin pillows, wearing a white lace negligee like a bride still dressed and waiting for a bridegroom long overdue. She was almost forty now, but she resembled a frail and fretful child. Extreme emaciation and years of discontent had ruined her good looks without aging her. It was as if she had been kept inaccessible to the weather in the streets. Neither sun nor wind nor rain had ever penetrated her high window.

Her mother sat in a slipper chair at Dorothy's right, and between the two women was a long low table holding a Scrab­ble board with a half-finished game laid out on it.

“Harry, dear, how nice of you to come.” Dorothy extended her hand and Harry took it and pressed it for a moment, disliking the feel of the long fleshless fingers that were like claws. He noticed what an unusually high color Dorothy had and the extreme brightness of her eyes and he thought at first that she was in the throes of a fever. But her hand felt cool and her voice was alert and Harry was forced to change his opinion. Dorothy was suffering not from fever but from fury. She was, in fact, as sore as a boil.

“Harry, you remember Mother, of course?”

“Certainly. Good evening, Mrs. Reynold.”

“Good evening, Harry. So good of you to come.”

“Not at all,” Harry said politely. “I hope I'm not interrupt­ing your game?”

“Game,” Dorothy repeated with a twist of her mouth. “It's not much of a
game.
I'm miles behind as usual.”

Mrs. Reynold flushed with embarrassment. “Now, Dorothy dear, that's not true and you know . . .”

“It is true. Besides, I
loathe
Scrabble. It gives me a head­ache.”

“I can't help winning once in a while if I happen to get the right letters.”

“It's not that I mind losing, not in the least. I've always been a good sport, I've made it a
point
to be a good sport, in spite of everything. Losing means nothing at all to me. It's just that you have
all
the luck.”

“Now, dear, remember last night, you got the Q and the Z right at the beginning and made QUARTZ
.”

Dorothy couldn't decide between signalizing last night's triumph and losing the argument about luck, so she turned away deliberately and said to Harry, “You must forgive us. Mother takes her Scrabble very seriously.”

“I've never played it,” Harry said.

“Don't. It's a tiresome thing. It always gives me a head­ache, especially when other people have all the luck. Sit down, won't you? I'll ring for tea.”

“Don't bother.”

“It's time for my medicine anyway and I can't take it without tea. It's the foulest stuff.”

“I'll get the tea,” Mrs. Reynold said, rising. “I hate to bother Miss Parks when I can just as easily do it myself.”

“It's her job to be bothered.”

“Even so, dear. I'd rather do it myself. Sometimes she forgets to scald the pot.”

Mrs. Reynold seemed both grateful for an excuse to leave and guilty about using it. As she passed Harry she gave him an anxious little look. It seemed to ask him to be kind to Dorothy, or at least tolerant.

When she had gone Dorothy said, “Mother's bored with all this hospital routine. I am, too, only I have to stand it. I wouldn't last a week without expert care.”

“You're looking better, Dorothy.”

Harry knew right away that this remark was a mistake. Dorothy frowned with displeasure and her fingers plucked at one of the satin pillows. “I don't see how I can be. I was
so
upset this morning Miss Parks had to call the doctor. I've got a new doctor, the last one was hopelessly out of date. Nothing but psychology, psychology. What good is psychology when your heart is beating like a triphammer, and the least excite­ment makes you feel faint?”

“What was the cause of the excitement?”

“Ron's call. I thought your wife might have told you.”

“She didn't.”

“I'm much calmer tonight, my pulse is just a shade under ninety—the doctor gave me an injection. Honestly, the way I've been prodded and poked with needles!”

“What about Ron?”

“He called here last night and told Mother he wanted to talk to me, and Mother, for some obscure reason, put him on to me. Mother means to do the right thing.” Dorothy paused and let the implication go on without her, like a riderless horse:
but she never does, of
course.
“I wasn't feeling very well anyway and it was after nine o'clock, past my bedtime, and I'd had a nagging pain in my left kidney all day.”

“How long after nine o'clock?”

“A few minutes. I remember taking my pulse after the call. It was,” she added with an air of satisfaction, “nearly a hun­dred and twenty.”

“Why did the call upset you to such an extent?”

“It was so unexpected, for one thing. Ron hadn't called me, hadn't communicated with me in any way, for years. He had no reason to. At the time of the divorce I asked for nothing from him but Barbara, and of course I was given sole custody of her, in view of his behavior with that terrible woman—what was she, a stenographer or something? Com­mon, anyway.”

“She was a copywriter for an advertising agency.”

Dorothy raised her brows. “That's common enough, surely? At any rate, I was totally unprepared for any call from Ron. I'd almost forgotten he existed. He never had a very strong personality, he's not the kind of person one remembers. My father, for instance, died when I was barely ten and yet I can recall him so much more distinctly than I can Ron.”

“What was the call about?”

“I'd like to know, really. His words were distorted, con­fused.”

“What was the matter with him?”

“Plain and simple intoxication, that's what I've since de­cided. He was roaring drunk, maudlin drunk. You know Ron—he never could hold his liquor like a gentleman.”

It seemed to Harry that this was the dozenth time in the past twenty-four hours that someone had said to him, “You know Ron.” Yes, he knew Ron, better than anyone did, and one of the things he knew very well was that when Ron was drinking, before he reached the point of confusion he always got sick and sobered up. If he had a weak head he also had a weak stomach, and the latter canceled out the former.

“He seemed terribly
contrite,”
Dorothy went on. “He apologized for the harm he'd done to me and said he was going to straighten everything out, pay all his debts, I think that was the way he put it. He asked about Barbara. I told him he had no right even to ask. I told him Barbara was being brought up to believe that her father was dead.”

“That was pretty . . . cruel, wasn't it, Dorothy?”

She smiled. “Wasn't it, though? But I thought while he was paying his debts, I'd pay one of mine. I owed him a little cruelty. All those times when I was so ill I could scarcely move and he went off partying—that was the year I had my liver trouble. The doctors says I'm not over it to this day. Just last week I had to have a bromsulfalein—that's the dye test for liver functioning.
More
needles. I tell you I'm getting heartily sick of needles. I'm
little better than a pincushion. And what good does it all do anyway. I haven't much longer. They all know it, they simply refuse to admit . . .”

“Dorothy.”

Her name, spoken sharply, almost contemptuously, shocked her into a brief silence. She looked at him with her mouth half open, as if he had ordered her to be quiet. But she could not be quiet for long; an order was what she gave, not took, and a minute later she was off again.

“I know you think I'm feeling sorry for myself, that I oughtn't go on like this about my illness. But what else have I to talk about? What ever happens to me—shut up in this hideous house with an old woman and a pair of incompetent nurses who can't even take a temperature properly? It's always normal—that's what they tell me—it's
normal,
they say, when I know perfectly well that I'm running a fever, when my head feels as if it's burning up. And they're careful, oh, they're very careful, not to leave the thermometer around so I can take my own temperature. They hide it.”

Harry was disturbed by what was to him this new develop­ment in Dorothy. In the past her egocentricity and her symp­toms had been just as extreme, but now they
were underlined by delusions of persecution. No longer did the princess dwell at ease in her ivory tower: she was imprisoned in a hideous house at the mercy of an old woman and bumbling nurses who lied and hid thermometers.

She continued to talk, her words coming faster and faster, and it seemed to Harry that she was incapable of stopping voluntarily and must be helped. He wondered how he could draw her attention away from herself without antagonizing her to the point where she would faint or go into hysterics or use any of the other tricks which by this time came as naturally to her as breathing.

He said, “Ron disappeared last night.”

She stopped in the middle of a sentence, and her right hand, on the point of making a gesture, dropped quietly into her lap. “Why didn't you tell me before?”

“I tried.”
,

“Disappeared, that could mean anything.”

“In this case it means that he failed to keep an appoint­ment, one that he was looking forward to, and that he hasn't communicated with anyone since.”

“Not even his—that woman?”

“Her name is Esther,” Harry said with a trace of irrita­bility.