Deep Water (21 page)

       "I don't care how much you see him outside of the house. don't want you to ask him here again."

       Melinda stared at him, shocked. "What's the matter?"

       "I don't like the guy," Vic said bluntly, looking back at the evening paper.

       "Since when don't you like him? I thought you thought he was very interesting."

       "He is '—very'," Vic said. He listened to Melinda's silence for few moments. She was standing by the sofa, shifting restlessly from foot to foot now. And she was in one of her few pairs of high-heeled shoes, because Mr. Carpenter was tall.

       "And since when do you say who's coming to the house and who isn't?" Melinda asked in a still-controlled voice, feeling him out.

       "Since now I don't happen to like him. I'm very sorry. I don't feel like discussing it. Can't you see him at his house or out somewhere? He's not going to be here much longer anyway, is he?"

       "No. I don't think he is. Maybe two weeks."

       Vic smiled at his paper, then turned the smile at her. Two weeks more on his payroll, he thought. He was tempted to let Melinda know now that he knew Mr. Carpenter was on his payroll, but a perverseness kept him from it. "Well, we'll all miss him, won't we?"

       "I don't say 'we'll' miss him," Melinda said.

       "Perhaps there'll be another along soon," he said, and he felt her bristle.

       She lighted a cigarette and threw her lighter down on a seat cushion of the sofa. "You're in a lovely mood tonight, aren't you? Hospitable, gracious—courteous. All the things you boast about being."

       "I've never boasted about being those things." He glanced at her. She looked frightened. "All right, Melinda, I'm sorry. I have nothing at all against Mr. Carpenter. He's very pleasant. He's a very nice young man."

       "You sound as if you don't mean that."

       "Do I? I'm sorry" He was striking a curious note between sentimental concern and overt hostility. He found himself smiling. "Let's forget about it, shall we? What's for dinner?"

       "I want to know that I can ask him to the house, if I care to, without your being rude."

       Vic swallowed. It wasn't Melinda, he thought, and it wasn't Mr. Carpenter himself, it was the principle of the thing. Again he felt the uncontrollable smile of habit. "Of course you can bring him to the house, honey I'm sorry I lost my temper." He waited. "When would you like to have him again? Were you thinking of asking him for dinner soon?"

       "You don't have to overdo it!" Melinda was playing nervously with a string in her hand, yanking it taut again and again around one finger.

       Let the string go, Vic told himself, though it annoyed him unreasonably. "What's for dinner, honey? Would you like me to fix it?"

       She started toward the kitchen suddenly. "I'll go and fix it," she said.

       There was a condition in his head which suggested the image dark treetops beaten violently in all directions by the wind. When he anticipated his actions, he imagined knocking ashtrays off tables as he reached for them, crushing snails' shells as he picked them up, because of a lack of control, but these things never happened. He watched his hands and they moved smoothly and precisely, as they always had, smallish, plump, innocuous hands, clear as a doctor's hands, except when he got ink on them at the printing plant from handling this and that in the pressroom. The snails still loved his hands, crawling slowly but unhesitatingly onto the forefinger that he extended to them, even when they were not lured by a scrap of lettuce held within their short vision.

       He finally realized what the image of the beaten treetops was. It was a very distinct memory that he had of a storm coming up over a mountain in Austria. He had been about ten years old. His father had been alive, and he and his mother and father had been on one of their yearly trips to Europe. His father had been a consulting engineer in gyrostatics, a man with an ample private income, though he had gone through the pretense of working all his life, of being a man whose main interests were the practical ones of earning a living which he did not need and of pursuing a career whose progress could not have been of vital importance to him. Vic remembered very well: his father had finished a period of two or three weeks' work in Paris, and their going to Munich and Salzburg had been part of a holiday before they came home. They had gone to an absolutely fairy-tale-like hotel on the St. Wolfgangsee, Vic thought, or had it been the Fuschlsee? And it had been winter—no snow on the ground yet, but they had been expecting it any moment, and then the storm had come up over the mountains outside their window. Vic remembered the deep-set windows, and the fact that, for all the thickness of the walls of the hotel, he had been cold, and that there had been nothing they could do about it because, whatever the heating facilities of the hotel had been, they hadn't been adequate. His father, extremely polite man, burdened by his sense of financial superiority to almost everyone else, would have suffered a much colder temperature in the room before he would have complained. 'Richesse oblige'. The storm had come, advancing over the mountains, which themselves had looked ominously close and black, like an insuperable dark giant of unknown dimensions. And the trees silhouetted on the mountain tops had bent this way and that, as tortured by the crazy, brooding wind or as if trying to uproot themselves to flee from it. His father had said in a voice that betrayed his own excitement, “There’s snow in that cloud," though the cloud had been nearly black, so black that their hotel room had become as dark as if it were evening. And when the black cloud had decided to roll down the mountain toward them, making a roaring chaos of the trees, Vic had fled from the window and cringed on the other side of the room. Vic remembered the astonishment, the disappointment on his father's face as he pulled him to his feet. Vic had been able to stand up but he could not force himself back to the window, though his father had wanted him to go.

       But it had really been the lashing trees that frightened him, not the storm itself.

       Now he thought of the trees quite often when he heard of Melinda being out with Carpenter in the afternoon—though, as a matter of fact, he thought she often told him she was out with Carpenter, driving him out to Bear Lake, visiting with him in his house, or having cocktails with him at the Chesterfield bar, when she had been doing something else. He found this especially revolting. Outwardly, however, he reacted not at all to it. No more edged remarks, no frowns of annoyance. He asked Melinda perhaps twice more if she didn't want to ask Harold to the house, once when they were having the Mellers again and once when they had a standing six-rib roast. Melinda invited him neither time. And Vic thought, was this the technique? Trying to make him think their relationship had become so personal that they did not want to share their company with anybody else? That cold fish, Mr. Carpenter. He had control, perhaps, but he was the worst actor in the world. Whom did he think he was fooling? He hadn't even succeeded in getting the town to talk more against Victor Van Allen. And the thought that 'he' might be paying for all this was, to say the least, irksome.

       Vic kept his temper until he saw Ralph Gosden and Don Wilson walking along the street together one day. It was about one o'clock, and Vic had driven through town on his way home to lunch in order to pick up a pair of Trixie's shoes that he had left at the shoemaker's to be repaired. When he came out of the shoemaker's, Wilson and Ralph were on the same sidewalk, walking toward him, and he saw them both flinch, he thought, at the sight of him, and at the flinching his anger flared.

       "Hello, there," Vic said, with a little smile as he approached them. "I'd like to ask you something."

       They stopped. "What?" Ralph asked, with a cocky smile, though his thin skin paled.

       "I think you both know Mr. Harold Carpenter," Vic said. Ralph was flustered, but Wilson finally mumbled that he had met him.

       "I bet you have," Vic said. "Did you hire him?"

       "Hire him? What do you mean?" Wilson's black eyebrows came down.

       "You must know what I mean. He's not anything he says he is. I concluded that he was a detective, probably picked out by you, Wilson. Didn't you go to New York and choose him—?" Vic choked off the last phrase he might have said, "for my wife."

       "I don't know what you're talking about," Wilson said, scowling.

       But Vic could tell from Ralph's scared eyes that he had hit the truth, or somewhere very near it. "I think you know what I'm talking about. He's a detective and you know it, don't you? Don't you, Wilson?" Vic advanced a little and Wilson stepped back. Vic could have struck him, with pleasure.

       Wilson glanced around him to see if anyone was watching them. "He may be. I don't know the man very well."

       "Who picked him out? Didn't you? Or did you, Ralph?" he said, looking at Ralph. "On second thought, you wouldn't have the courage. You just stand around and watch, don't you, Ralph?"

       "Are you out of your head?" Ralph managed to say.

       "What agency did you get him from, Wilson?" Vic asked, still leaning forward intently.

       "What's the matter? Is he seeing too much of your wife?" Ralph chirped in. "Why don't you kill him if you don't like him?" "Shut up," Wilson said to Ralph. Wilson seemed to be trembling. "What agency?" Vic asked. "There's no use stalling, I 'know' he's a detective." And if Carpenter wasn't, Vic thought, if he was all wrong then they could just consider him mad. That was fine. "Neither of you talking? Well, I can get it out of Melinda. I didn't want to have to ask her, but she'll tell me soon enough. She doesn't think I know anything yet." Vic looked at Wilson contemptuously: "I'll make it known around here when I find out, Wilson. You might decide it's more comfortable if you move."

       "Oh, stop being God, Vic!" Ralph said, suddenly finding a little terrified courage. "Do you think you own this town? And justice, too?"

       "There're names for people like you, Ralph. Do you want me to call you a few of them?" Vic asked, his neck flushing with anger. Ralph shut his mouth.

       "I think you know my opinion of you," Wilson said. "I told it to you right to your face."

       "You're a brave man, Wilson. Why haven't you the courage to tell me where you found Carpenter? I'd like to discontinue his services, since I'm paying for them." Vic waited, watching the emotions churning in Wilson's scowling face. "No courage, Wilson?"

       "Yes, I've got the courage. It's the Confidential Detective Service in Manhattan." Wilson said.

       "Confidential!" Vic put his head back and laughed. "Ha-ha! Ho-ho-ho-o! Confidential!"

       Wilson and Ralph exchanged nervous looks.

       "Thanks," Vic said. "I'll call them up this afternoon. Tell me, did you pick him out, Wilson?"

       Wilson said nothing. He backed away as if to leave, as if he had had enough.

       "Didn't you pick him out, Wilson?" Vic called after them.

       Wilson glanced back, but he did not speak. He didn't have to.

       Vic had a quiet lunch alone—Melinda was not in-read some of the book about stained-glass windows, then went to the Manhattan classified directory and looked up the Confidential Detective Service under the heading "Detective Service." Confidential, he thought again, smiling.

       A man's voice with a rather tough New York accent answered the telephone.

       "Hello," Vic said. "I'm calling in regard to your employee Harold Carpenter, or the man who's going by that name on his present job."

       "Oh? Yes, I know who you're talkin' about." The man sounded courteous enough, in spite of his ugly accent.

       "We don't wish his services any longer," Vic said. "Oh. Awright. What's the trouble?"

       "Trouble?"

       "I mean, is there any trouble or complaints?"

       "Oh, no. Except that the man he's supposed to be getting information about knows he's a detective and isn't letting anything out."

       "I see. Are you Mr.—Mr. Donald Wilson of Little Wesley, Massachusetts?"

       "No, I am not."

       "Who are you?"

       "I'm the man he's supposed to be watching."

       Silence for a moment. "You are Victor Van Allen?"

       "Correct," Vic said. "So—either send a fresh man up or give it up. I suggest you give it up, because I'm paying the bill, and if this nonsense keeps on I'm just going to refuse to pay it. And I don't think the money'll come from anywhere else." Another silence. "Do you understand?"

       "Yes, Mr. Van Allen."

       "Good. If there're any further bills, you may send them to me direct, if you care to. I suppose you have my address?"

       "Yes, Mr. Van Allen."

       "Righto. That's all. Thank you. Oh, just a minute!"

       "Yes?"

       "Send Mr. Carpenter a wire discontinuing this assignment, will you, right away? I'll be willing to pay for that."

       "All right, Mr. Van Allen."

       They hung up.

       Melinda came in at seven-fifteen that evening, after cocktailing with Harold, she said.

       "Did Harold get his telegram?" Vic asked.

       "What telegram?"

       "The telegram from the Confidential Detective Service taking him off the job."

       Melinda's mouth opened, but her face showed more anger than surprise. "What do you know about it?" she asked aggressively. "Wilson spilled the beans," Vic said. "What's the matter with Wilson, anyway? Why doesn't he stick to his typewriter?"

       Trixie was listening, goggle-eyed, sitting on the living room floor.

       "'When' did he?" Melinda demanded.

       "This noon. I ran into him and Ralph on the street. A more terrified, silly-looking pair I've never seen."

       "What did he tell you?" Melinda asked, consternation on her face.

       "I simply asked him," Vic began patiently, "if Mr. Carpenter was a detective. 'Wasn't' he? I asked them both. And when Wilson said yes, which didn't take much pressure because he seemed to be scared out of his wits, I asked him what agency he worked for. And he told me, and I called them up and asked them to relieve Mr. Carpenter of his assignment. I'm tired of paying the bills."