Highsmith, Patricia (27 page)

“Do you think Charles might know?”

“There’s no telling. Is there?” Guy took a cigarette.

“Good lord.” Anne stood looking at the corner of the sofa, as if she still saw Bruno where he had sat the night of the party. She whispered, “Amazing what goes on in people’s lives!”

Thirty-six

“Listen,” Guy said tensely into the receiver. “Listen, Bruno!”

Bruno was drunker than Guy had ever heard him, but he was determined to penetrate to the muddled bram. Then he thought suddenly that Gerard might be with him, and his voice grew even softer, cowardly with caution. He found out Bruno was in a telephone booth, alone. “Did you tell Gerard we met at the Art Institute?”

Bruno said he had. It came through the drunken mumblings that he had. Bruno wanted to come over. Guy couldn’t make it register that Gerard had already come to question him. Guy banged the telephone down, and tore open his collar. Bruno calling him now! Gerard had externalized his danger. Guy felt it was more imperative to break completely with Bruno even than to arrange a story with him that would tally. What annoyed him most was that he couldn’t tell from Bruno’s driveling what had happened to him, or even what kind of mood he was in.

Guy was upstairs in the studio with Anne when the door chime rang.

He opened the door only slightly, but Bruno bumped it wide, stumbled across the living room, and collapsed on the sofa. Guy stopped short in front of him, speechless first with anger, then disgust. Bruno’s fat, flushed neck bulged over his collar. He seemed more bloated than drunk, as if an edema of death had inflated his entire body, filling even the deep eye sockets so the red-gray eyes were thrust unnaturally forward. Bruno stared up at him. Guy went to the telephone to call a taxi.

“Guy, who is it?” Anne whispered down the stairway.

“Charles Bruno. He’s drunk.”

“Not drunk!“Bruno protested suddenly.

Anne came halfway down the stairs, and saw him. “Shouldn’t we just put him upstairs?”

“I don’t want him here.” Guy was looking in the telephone book, trying to find a taxi company’s number.

“Yess-s!” Bruno hissed, like a deflating tire.

Guy turned. Bruno was staring at him out of one eye, the eye the only living point in the sprawled, corpselike body. He was muttering something, rhythmically.

“What’s he saying?” Anne stood closer to Guy.

Guy went to Bruno and caught him by the shirtfront. The muttered, imbecilic chant infuriated him, Bruno drooled onto his hand as he tried to pull him upright. “Get up and get out!“Then he heard it: “I’ll tell her, I’ll tell her—I’ll tell her, I’ll tell her,” Bruno chanted, and the wild red eye stared up. “Don’t send me away, I’ll tell her—I’ll—”

Guy released him in abhorrence.

“What’s the matter, Guy? What’s he saying?”

“I’ll put him upstairs,” Guy said.

Guy tried with all his strength to get Bruno over his shoulder, but the flaccid, dead weight defeated him. Finally, Guy stretched him out across the sofa. He went to the front window. There was no car outside. Bruno might have dropped out of the sky. Bruno slept noiselessly, and Guy sat up watching him, smoking.

Bruno awakened about 3 in the morning, and had a couple of drinks to steady himself. After a few moments, except for the bloatedness, he looked almost normal. He was very happy at finding himself in Guy’s house, and had no recollection of arriving. “I had another round with Gerard,” he smiled. “Three days. Been seeing the papers?”

“No.”

“You’re a fine one, don’t even look at the papers!” Bruno said softly. “Gerard’s hot on a bum scent. This crook friend of mine, Matt Levine. He doesn’t have an alibi for that night. Herbert thinks it could be him. I been talking with all three of them for three days. Matt might get it.”

“Might die for it?”

Bruno hesitated, still smiling. “Not die, just take the rap. He’s got two or three killings on him now. The cops’re glad to have him.” Bruno shuddered, and drank the rest in his glass.

Guy wanted to pick up the big ashtray in front of him and smash Bruno’s bloated head, burn out the tension he felt would grow and grow until he did kill Bruno, or himself. He caught Bruno’s shoulders hard in both hands. “Will you get out? I swear this is the last time!”

“No,” Bruno said quietly, without any movement of resistance, and Guy saw the old indifference to pain, to death, that he had seen when he had fought him in the woods.

Guy put his hands over his own face, and felt its contortion against his palms. “If this Matt gets blamed,” he whispered,“I’ll tell them the whole story.”

“Oh, he won’t. They won’t have enough. It’s a joke, son!” Bruno grinned. “Matt’s the right character with the wrong evidence. You’re the wrong character with the right evidence. You’re an important guy, f’ Christ’s sake!” He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to Guy. “I found this last -week. Very nice, Guy.”

Guy looked at the photograph of “The Pittsburgh Store,” funereally backgrounded by black. It was a booklet from the Modern Museum. He ready: “Guy Daniel Haines, hardly thirty, follows the Wright tradition. He has achieved a distinctive, uncompromising style noted for a rigorous simplicity without starkness, for the grace he calls ‘singingness’…” Guy closed it nervously, disgusted by the last word that was an invention of the Museum’s.

Bruno repocketed the booklet. “You’re one of the tops. If you kept your nerve up, they could turn you inside out and never suspect.”

Guy looked down at him. “That’s still no reason for you to see me. Why do you do it?” But he knew. Because his life with Anne fascinated Bruno. Because he himself derived something from seeing Bruno, some torture that perversely eased.

Bruno watched him as if he knew everything that passed through his mind. “I like you, Guy, but remember—they’ve got a lot more against you than against me. I could wiggle out if you turned me in, but you couldn’t. There’s the fact Herbert might remember you. And Anne might remember you were acting funny around that time. And the scratches and the scar. And all the little clues they’d shove in front of you, like the revolver, and glove pieces—” Bruno recited them slowly and fondly, like old memories. “With me against you, you’d crack up, I bet.”

Thirty-seven

Guy knew as soon as Anne called to him that she had seen the dent. He had meant to get it fixed, and had forgotten. He said first that he didn’t know how it got there, then that he did. He had taken the boat out last week, he said, and it had bumped a buoy.

“Don’t be terribly sorry,” she mocked him, “it isn’t worth it.” She took his hand as she stood up. “Egon said you had the boat out one afternoon. Is that why you didn’t say anything about it?”

“I suppose.”

“Did you take it out by yourself?” Anne smiled a little, because he wasn’t a good-enough sailor to take the boat out by himself.

Bruno had called up and insisted they go out for a sail. Gerard had come to a new deadend with Matt Levine, deadends everywhere, and Bruno had insisted that they celebrate. “I took it out with Charles Bruno one afternoon,” he said. And he had brought the revolver with him that day, too.

“It’s all right, Guy. Only why’d you see him again? I thought ‘ you disliked him so.”

“A whim,” he murmured. “It was the two days I was doing that work at home.” It wasn’t all right, Guy knew. Anne kept the India’s brass and white-painted wood gleaming and spotless, like something of chryselephantine. And Bruno! She mistrusted Bruno now.

“Guy, he’s not the man we saw that night in front of your apartment, is he? The one who spoke to us in the snow?”

“Yes. He’s the same one.” Guy’s fingers, supporting the weight of the revolver in his pocket, tightened helplessly.

“What’s his interest in you?” Anne followed him casually down the deck. “He isn’t interested in architecture particularly. I talked with him the night of the party.”

“He’s got no interest in me. Just doesn’t know what to do with himself.” When he got rid of the revolver, he thought, he could talk.

“You met him at school?”

“Yes. He was wandering around a corridor.” How easy it was to lie when one had to lie! But it was wrapping tendrils around his feet, his body, his brain. He would say the wrong thing one day. He was doomed to lose Anne. Perhaps he had already lost her, at this moment when he lighted a cigarette and she stood leaning against the mainmast, watching him. The revolver seemed to weight him to the spot, and determinedly he turned and walked toward the prow. Behind him, he heard Anne’s step onto the deck, and her soft tread in her tennis shoes, going back toward the cockpit. ‘I It was a sullen day, promising rain. The India rocked slowly on the choppy surface, and seemed no farther from the gray shore than it had been an hour ago. Guy learned on the bowsprit and looked down at his white-clad legs, the blue gilt-buttoned jacket he had taken from the India’s locker, that perhaps had belonged to Anne’s father. He might have been a sailor instead of an architect, he thought. He had been wild to go to sea at fourteen. What had stopped him? How different his life might have been without—what? Without Miriam, of course. He straightened impatiently and pulled the revolver from the pocket of the jacket.

He held the gun in both hands over the water, his elbow on the bowsprit. How intelligent a jewel, he thought, and how innocent it looked now. Himself—He let it drop. The gun turned once head-over, in perfect balance, with its familiar look of willingness, and disappeared.

“What was that?”

Guy turned and saw her standing on the deck near the cabin. He measured the ten or twelve feet between them. He could think of nothing, absolutely nothing to say to her.

Thirty-eight

Bruno hesitated about the drink. The bathroom walls had that look of breaking up in little pieces, as if the walls might not really have been there, or he might not really have been here.

“Ma!” But the frightened bleat shamed him, and he drank his drink.

He tiptoed into his mother’s room and awakened her with a press of the button by her bed, which signaled to Herbert in the kitchen that she was ready for her breakfast.

“Oh-h,” she yawned, then smiled. “And how are you?” She patted his arm, slid up from the covers, and went into the bathroom to wash.

Bruno sat quietly on her bed until she came out and got back under the cover again.

“We’re supposed to see that trip man this afternoon. What’s his name, Saunders? You’d better feel like going in with me.”

Bruno nodded. It was about their trip to Europe, that they might make into a round-the-world trip. It didn’t have any charm this morning. He might like to go around the world with Guy. Bruno stood up, wondering whether to go get another drink.

“How’re you feeling?”

His mother always asked him at the wrong times. “Okay,” he said, sitting down again.

There was a knock on the door, and Herbert came in. “Good morning, madam. Good morning, sir,” Herbert said without looking at either of them.

With his chin in his hand, Bruno frowned down at Herbert’s silent, polished, turned-out shoes. Herbert’s insolence lately was intolerable! Gerard had made him think he was the key to the whole case, if they just produced the right man. Everyone said how brave he was to have chased the murderer. And his father had left him twenty thousand in his will. Herbert might take a vacation!

“Does madam know if there’ll be six or seven for dinner?”

As Herbert spoke, Bruno looked up at his pink, pointed chin and thought, Guy whammed him there and knocked him right out.

“Oh, dear, I haven’t called yet, Herbert, but I think seven.”

“Very good, madam.”

Rutledge Overbeck II, Bruno thought. He had known his mother would end up having him, though she pretended to be doubtful because he would make an odd number. Rutledge Overbeck was madly in love with his mother, or pretending to be. Bruno wanted to tell his mother Herbert hadn’t sent his clothes to be pressed in six weeks, but he felt too sickish to begin.

“You know, I’m dying to see Australia,” she said through a bite of toast. She had propped a map up against her coffee pot.

A tingling, naked sensation spread over his buttocks. He stood up. “Ma, I don’t feel so hot.”

She frowned at him concernedly, which frightened him more, because he realized there was nothing in the world she could do to help him. “What’s the matter, darling? What do you want?”

He hurried from the room, feeling he might have to be sick. The bathroom went black. He staggered out, and let the still corked Scotch bottle topple onto his bed.

“What, Charley? What is it?”

“I wanna lie down.” He flopped down, but that wasn’t it. He motioned his mother away so he could get up, but when he sat up he wanted to lie down again, so he stood up.“Feel like I’m dying!”

“Lie down, darling. How about some—some hot tea?”

Bruno tore off his smoking jacket, then his pajama top. He was suffocating. He had to pant to breathe. He did feel like he was dying!

She hurried to him with a wet towel. “What is it, your stomach?”

“Everything. ” He kicked off his slippers. He went to the window to open it, but it was already open. He turned, sweating. “Ma, maybe I’m dying. You think I’m dying?”

“I’ll get you a drink!”

“No, get the doctor!” he shrieked. “Get me a drink, too!” Feebly he pulled his pajama string and let the pants drop. What was it? Not just the shakes. He was too weak to shake. Even his hands were weak and tingly. He held up his hands. The fingers were curved inward. He couldn’t open them. “Ma, somp’n’s the matter with my hands! Look, Ma, what is it, what is it?”

“Drink this!”

He heard the bottle chatter on the rim of the glass. He couldn’t wait for it. He trotted into the hall, stooped with terror, staring at his limp, curling hands. It was the two middle fingers on each hand. They were curving in, almost touching the palm.

“Darling, put your robe on!” she whispered.

“Get the doctor!” A robe! She talked about a robe! What did it matter if he was stark naked? “Ma, but don’t let ‘em take me away!” He plucked at her as she stood at the telephone. “Lock all the doors! You know what they do?” He spoke fast and confidentially, because the numbness was working up and he knew what was the matter now. He was a case! He was going to be like this all his life! “Know what they do, Ma, they put you in a straitjacket without a drop and it’ll kill me!”