Highsmith, Patricia (34 page)

“Yeah,” Owen prompted.

“I told him Miriam’s name. I told him I hated her. Bruno had an idea for a murder. A double murder.”

“Jesus!” Owen whispered.

The “Jesus” reminded him of Bruno, and Guy had a horrible, an utterly horrible thought all at once, that he might ensnare Owen in the same trap that Bruno had used for him, that Owen in turn would capture another stranger who would capture another, and so on in infinite progression of the trapped and the hunted. Guy shuddered and clenched his hands. “My mistake was in speaking to him. My mistake was in telling a stranger my private business.”

“He told you he was going to kill her?”

“No, of course not. It was an idea he had. He was insane. He was a psychopath. I told him to shut up and to go to hell. I got rid of him!” He was back in the compartment. He was leaving it to go onto the platform. He heard the bang of the train’s heavy door. Got rid of him, he had thought!

“You didn’t tell him to do it.”

“No. He didn’t say he was going to do it.”

“Why don’t you have a straight shot? Why don’t you sit down?” Owen’s slow, rasping voice made the room steady again. His voice was like an ugly rock, solidly lodged in dry ground.

He didn’t want to sit down, and he didn’t want to drink. He had drunk Scotch like this in Bruno’s compartment. This was the end and he didn’t want it to be like the beginning. He touched the glass of Scotch and water that he had fixed for himself only for politeness’ sake. When he turned around, Owen was pouring more liquor into his glass, continued to pour it, as if to show Guy that he hadn’t been trying to do it behind his back.

“Well,” Owen drawled, “if the fellow was a nut like you say—That was the court’s opinion finally, too, wasn’t it, that it must have been a madman?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, sure I can understand how you felt afterwards, but if it was just a conversation like you say, I don’t see where you should blame yourself so awful much.”

Guy was staring at him incredulously. Didn’t it matter to Owen more than this? Maybe he didn’t entirely understand. “But you see—”

“When did you find out about it?” Owen’s brown eyes looked slurry.

“About three months after it happened. But you see, if not for me, Miriam would be alive now.” Guy watched Owen lower his lips to the glass again. He could taste the sickening mess of CocaCola and Scotch sliding into Owen’s wide mouth. What was Owen going to do? Leap up suddenly and fling the glass down, throttle him as Bruno had throttled Miriam? He couldn’t imagine that Owen would continue to sit there, but the seconds went by and Owen did not move. “You see, I had to tell you,” Guy persisted. “I considered you the one person I might have hurt, the one person who suffered. Her child had been yours. You were going to marry her. You loved her. It was you—”

“Hell, I didn’t love her.” Owen looked at Guy with no change whatever in his face.

Guy stared back at him. Didn’t love her, didn’t love her, Guy thought. His mind staggered back, trying to realign all the past equations that no longer balanced. “Didn’t love her?” he said.

“No. Well, not the way you seem to think. I certainly didn’t want her to die—and understand, I’d have done anything to prevent it, but I was glad enough not to have to marry her. Getting married was her idea. That’s why she had the child. That’s not a man’s fault, I wouldn’t say. Would you?” Owen was looking at him with a tipsy earnestness, waiting, his wide mouth the same firm, irregular line it had been on the witness stand, waiting for Guy to say something, to pass judgment on his conduct with Miriam.

Guy turned away with a vaguely impatient gesture. He couldn’t make the equations balance. He couldn’t make any sense to it, except an ironic sense. There was no reason for his being here now, except for an ironic reason. There was no reason for his sweating, painful self-torture in a hotel room for the benefit of a stranger who didn’t care, except for an ironic reason.

“Do you think so?” Owen kept on, reaching for the bottle on the table beside him.

Guy couldn’t have made himself say a word. A hot, inarticulate anger was rising inside him. He slid his tie down and opened his shirt collar, and glanced at the open windows for an airconditioning apparatus.

Owen shrugged. He looked quite comfortable in his open-collared shirt and unzipped leather jacket. Guy had an absolutely unreasonable desire to ram something down Owen’s throat, to beat him and crush him, above all to blast him out of his complacent comfort in the chair.

“Listen,” Guy began quietly, “I am a—”

But Owen had begun to speak at the same instant, and he went on, droningly, not looking at Guy who stood in the middle of the floor with his mouth still open.”… the second time. Got married two months after my divorce, and there was trouble right away. Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse. Louisa up and left two months ago after damn near setting the house on fire, a big apartment house.” He droned on, and poured more Scotch into his glass from the bottle at his elbow, and Guy felt a disrespect, a definite affront, directed against himself, in the way Owen helped himself. Guy remembered his own behavior at the inquest, undistinguished behavior, to say the least, for the husband of the victim. Why should Owen have respect for him? “The awful thing is, the man gets the worst of it, because the women do more talking. Take Louisa, she can go back to that apartment house and they’ll give her a welcome, but let me so much—”

“Listen!” Guy said, unable to stand it any longer. “I—I killed someone, too! I’m a murderer, too!”

Owen’s feet came down to the floor again, he sat up again, he even looked from Guy to the window and back again, as if he contemplated having to escape or having to defend himself, but the befuddled surprise and alarm on his face was so feeble, so halfhearted, that it seemed a mockery itself, seemed to mock Guy’s seriousness. Owen started to set his glass on the table and then didn’t. “How’s that?” he asked.

“Listen!” Guy shouted again. “Listen, I’m a dead man. I’m as good as dead right now, because I’m going to give myself up. Immediately! Because I killed a man, do you understand? Don’t look so unconcerned, and don’t lean back in that chair again!”

“Why shouldn’t I lean back in this chair?” Owen had both hands on his glass now, which he had just refilled with CocaCola and Scotch.

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I am a murderer, and took a man’s life, something no human being has a right to do?”

Owen might have nodded, or he might not have. At any rate, he drank again, slowly.

Guy stared at him. The words, unutterable tangles of thousands and thousands of words, seemed to congest even his blood, to cause waves of heat to sweep up his arms from his clenched hands. The words were curses against Owen, sentences and paragraphs of the confession he had written that morning, that were growing jumbled now because the drunken idiot in the armchair didn’t want to hear them. The drunken idiot was determined to look indifferent. He didn’t look like a murderer, he supposed, in his clean white shirtsleeves and his silk tie and his dark blue trousers, and maybe even his strained face didn’t look like a murderer’s to anybody else. “That’s the mistake,” Guy said aloud, “that nobody knows what a murderer looks like. A murderer looks like anybody!” He laid the back of his fist against his forehead and took it down again, because he had known the last words were coming, and had been unable to stop them. It was exactly like Bruno.

Abruptly Guy went and got himself a drink, a straight threefinger shot, and drank it off.

“Glad to see I’ve got a drinking companion,” Owen mumbled. Guy sat down on the neat, green-covered bed opposite Owen. Quite suddenly, he had felt tired. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he began again, “it doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”

“You’re not the first man I seen that killed another man. Or woman.” He chuckled. “Seems to me there’s more women that go free.”

“I’m not going free. I’m not free. I did this in cold blood. I had no reason. Don’t you see that might be worse? I did it for—” He wanted to say he did it because there had been that measure of perversity within him sufficient to do it, that he had done it because of the worm in the wood, but he knew it would make no sense to Owen, because Owen was a practical man. Owen was so practical, he would not bother to hit him, or flee from him, or call the police, because it was more comfortable to sit in the chair.

Owen waggled his head as if he really did consider Guy’s point. His lids were half dropped over his eyes. He twisted and reached for something in his hip pocket, a bag of tobacco. He got cigarette papers from the breast pocket of his shirts.

Guy watched his operations for what seemed like hours. “Here,” Guy said, offering him his own cigarettes.

Owen looked at them dubiously. “What kind are they?”

“Canadian. They’re quite good. Try one.”

“Thanks, I—” Owen drew the bag closed with his teeth—“prefer my own brand.” He spent at least three minutes rolling the cigarette.

“This was just as if I pulled a gun on someone in a public park and shot him,” Guy went on, determined to go on, though it was as if he talked to an inanimate thing like a dictaphone in the chair, with the difference that his words didn’t seem to be penetrating in any way. Mightn’t it dawn on Owen that he could pull a gun on him now in this hotel room? Guy said, “I was driven to it. That’s what I’ll tell the police, but that won’t make any difference, because the point is, I did it. You see, I have to tell you Bruno’s idea.” At least Owen was looking at him now, but his face, far from being rapt, seemed actually to wear an expression of pleasant, polite, drunken attention. Guy refused to let it stop him. “Bruno’s idea was that we should kill for each other, that he should kill Miriam and I should kill his father. Then he came to Texas and killed Miriam, behind my back. Without my knowledge or consent, do you see?” His choice of words was abominable, but at least Owen was listening. At least the words were coming out. “I didn’t know about it, and I didn’t even suspect—not really. Until months later. And then he began to haunt me. He began to tell me he would pin the blame for Miriam’s death on me, unless I went through with the rest of his damned plan, do you see? Which was to kill his father. The whole idea rested on the fact that there was no reason for the murders. No personal motives. So we couldn’t be traced, individually. Provided we didn’t see each other. But that’s another point. The point is, I did kill him. I was broken down. Bruno broke me down with letters and blackmail and sleeplessness. He drove me insane, too. And listen, I believe any man can be broke down. I could break you down. Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones Bruno used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keeps the totalitarian states going? Or do you ever stop to wonder about things like that, Owen? Anyway, that’s what I’ll tell the police, but it won’t matter, because they’ll say I shouldn’t have broken down.

It won’t matter, because they’ll say I was weak. But I don’t care now, do you see? I can face anyone now, do you see?” He bent to look into Owen’s face, but Owen seemed scarcely to see him. Owen’s head was sagged sideways, resting in his hand. Guy stood up straight. He couldn’t make Owen see, he could feel that Owen wasn’t understanding the main point at all, but that didn’t matter either. “I’ll accept it, whatever they want to do to me. I’ll say the same thing to the police tomorrow.”

“Can you prove it?” Owen asked.

“Prove what? What is there to prove about my killing a man?”

The bottle slipped out of Owen’s fingers and fell onto the floor, but there was so little in it now that almost nothing spilled. “You’re an architect, aren’t you?” Owen asked. “I remember now.” He righted the bottle clumsily, leaving it on the floor.

“What does it matter?”

“I was wondering.”

“Wondering what?” Guy asked impatiently.

“Because you sound a little touched—if you want my honest opinion. Ain’t saying you do.” And behind Owen’s fogged expression now was a simple wariness lest Guy might walk over and hit him for his remark. When he saw that Guy didn’t move, he sat back in his chair again, and slumped lower than before.

Guy groped for a concrete idea to present to Owen. He didn’t want his audience to slip away, indifferent as it was. “Listen, how do you feel about the men you know who’ve killed somebody? How do you treat them? How do you act with them? Do you pass the time of day with them the same as you’d do with anybody else?”

Under Guy’s intense scrutiny, Owen did seem to try to think. Finally he said with a smile, blinking his eyes relaxedly, “Live and let live.”

Anger seized him again. For an instant, it was like a hot vise, holding his body and brain. There were no words for what he felt. Or there were too many words to begin. The word formed itself and spat itself from between his teeth: “Idiot!”

Owen stirred slightly in his chair, but his unruffledness prevailed. He seemed undecided whether to smile or to frown. “What business is it of mine?” he asked firmly.

“What business? Because you—you are a part of society!”

“Well, then it’s society’s business,” Owen replied with a lazy wave of his hand. He was looking at the Scotch bottle, in which only half an inch remained.

What business, Guy thought. Was that his real attitude, or was he drunk? It must be Owen’s attitude. There was no reason for him to lie now. Then he remembered it had been his own attitude when he had suspected Bruno, before Bruno had begun to dog him. Was that most people’s attitude? If so, who was society?

Guy turned his back on Owen. He knew well enough who society was. But the society he had been thinking about in regard to himself, he realized, was the law, was inexorable rules. Society was people like Owen, people like himself, people like—Brillhart, for instance, in Palm Beach. Would Brillhart have reported him? No. He couldn’t imagine Brillhart reporting him. Everyone would leave it for someone else, who would leave it for someone else, and no one would do it. Did he care about rules? Wasn’t it a rule that had kept him tied to Miriam? Wasn’t it a person who was murdered, and therefore people who mattered? If people from Owen to Brillhart didn’t care sufficiently to betray him, should he care any further? Why did he think this morning that he had wanted to give himself up to the police? What masochism was it? He wouldn’t give himself up. What, concretely, did he have on his conscience now? What human being would inform on him?