Leave Her to Hell (13 page)

This was speculation, of course. But it conformed to the facts and Colly’s character, and I was satisfied that this was substantially the way that Colly and Rosie had come to die. Somehow or other, in this deal or that, he had got onto a good thing, and so long as he’d exploited it with discretion he’d been tolerated and paid off. But then he’d got greedy—he’d got hot for the big killing—and the killing for his greed had been his own and Rosie’s. I sat there organizing the few facts that I had and formulating the theory that I believed so that I could offer them clearly to the police when they came. After what seemed like an inordinate time, but in fact wasn’t, they did come; and the one in charge was a Lieutenant Haskett.

I knew Haskett. We were not exactly friends, but there existed between us at least a tolerance based on a mutual moderate respect, and I admit that I was relieved to see him on the job. The night ahead still looked like a very long night indeed. But it might not, after all, be otherwise so bad as it might have been.

Haskett came into the room and spoke curtly, but not harshly, and went past me into the bathroom, where he remained for about twenty minutes with a couple of his men. Then he came out and straddled a straight chair and sat staring at me with his chin resting on the chair’s back. His hat was pushed back off a high bald forehead, and his glum expression seemed to indicate that his disposition was calm enough, if not cheerful.

“By God, Percy,” he said, “you’re finding bodies all over town tonight. How come?”

“Two bodies,” I said, “with connections.”

He nodded. “Keep on talking. I’m ready to listen.”

That’s what I did and what he did. I talked and he listened. I told him about Colly’s request and how I’d agreed to it. I told him how I’d waited from nine to ten in my office for a call that hadn’t come. I told him how I’d gone as per agreement to the apartment of Rosie to find her dead. I told him how I’d then gone to Colly’s office and found the building locked. I told him, finally, how I’d come to Colly’s room and found him as dead as Rosie, although by a different method. These were facts, the things that had happened. Afterward I told him my theory of why they were facts that had happened, and I had a notion that his generous ears were quivering as he heard me out.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You think Colly was blackmailing someone. You think he got dissatisfied with a steady but small income and tried for a big bundle. You think his redheaded girl friend was a kind of passive partner in this and was killed because Colly had set her up as a threat to the victim and then, under torture, gave away her identity. Is this right?”

“That’s my theory.”

“Well, it’s a pretty good theory. Try to be just as convincing when you tell me why it happened to be you that Colly got involved in this savory little operation.”

“I don’t know. I guess it was because I happened to be suitable and convenient. I had some contact with Colly on another matter and had come here to see him earlier today. Or is it yesterday now? Anyhow, that’s when he appealed to me.”

“What other matter?”

“A private case. It’s got nothing to do with this business.”

“Okay. I’ll find out later if it begins to look important. Now tell me if you’ve got any idea of the identity of this theoretical blackmail victim and murderer.”

“I haven’t.”

“I didn’t think you would.” He shook his head without lifting his chin from the back of the chair. “All you’ve got are a few facts and a lot of notions. Well, I’ve got some more work to do here, and then I’d better run over and see how Sergeant Dooley and his crew are coming with Rosie. It’s sure as hell that there’s a connection, one way or another, and it might even turn out to be the way you’ve said.”

He stood up, and I said, “Look, Lieutenant. I ought to go to Amity tomorrow on a case. I won’t be gone more than a few days at the most, and if you want me in the meanwhile you’ll know where to find me. Okay?”

He looked at me with professional skepticism, but finally he grunted and nodded and took me on faith and my record.

“Okay, I guess. Right now, though, you’d better stick around and go over to Rosie’s with me. I might think of some questions for you after I get there. After that, you’ll have to go with me to headquarters and sign a statement.”

“Sure,” I said.

I sat and smoked and waited until he’d finished his work, which took about an hour. Then we went to Rosie’s, where everything had been taken care of efficiently by Dooley and his crew, and finally we went to headquarters, where I dictated and signed a statement. I got home around three-thirty.

After the long night and a sluggish morning, I didn’t get out of town the next day until ten o’clock. It was three hundred and fifty miles by highway to Amity. In my cold clunker, allowing time for a couple of stops, I did well to average forty miles an hour. Figure it for yourself. It was almost exactly eight and a half hours later when I got there. About six-thirty. I was tired and hungry, and I went to a hotel and registered and went up to my room. I washed and went back down to the coffee shop and got a steak and ate it and went back to the room. By then it was eight. I lit a cigarette and lay down on the bed and began to wonder seriously why I was here and what the hell I was going to do, now that I was.

I thought about a lot of things and people. I thought about Robin Robbins looking like a tough and lovely kid with her beautiful shiner. I thought about Faith Salem lying in the sun. I thought about Silas Lawler and Graham Markley and Regis Lawler and Constance Markley. The last pair were shadows. I couldn’t see them, and I couldn’t entirely believe in them, and I wished suddenly that I had never heard of them. I thought about Colly Alder and Rosie the redhead, and I wondered if anything could possibly be worth dying for the way Colly and Rosie had died.

I did this thinking about these people, but it didn’t get me anywhere. I lay there on the bed in the hotel room for what seemed like an hour, and I was surprised, when I looked at my watch, to learn that less than half that time had passed. The room was oppressive, and I didn’t want to stay there any longer. Getting up, I went downstairs and walked around the block and came back to the hotel and bought a newspaper at the tobacco counter and sat down to read it. Tomorrow, I thought, I would begin making inquiries of certain people in an effort to discover, as a beginning, why Silas Lawler came to Amity once a month. But in the meanwhile I would read the paper. I read some of the front page and some of the sports page and all of the comics, and started on the classified ads.

Classified ads interest me. I always read them in the newspapers and in the backs of magazines that publish them. They are filled with the gains and losses and inferred intimacies of classified lives. If you are inclined to be a romantic, you can, by a kind of imaginative interpolation, read a lot of pathos and human interest into them. Someone in Amity, for instance, had lost a dog, and someone wanted to sell a bicycle that was probably once the heart of the life of some kid, and someone named Martha promised to forgive someone named Walter if he would come back from wherever he’d gone.
Someone named Faith Salem wanted to teach you to play the piano for two dollars an hour.

There it was, and that’s the way it sometimes happens. You follow an impulse over three hundred miles because of a thin coincidence. And right away, because of a mild idiosyncrasy, you run into another coincidence that’s just a little too much of one to be one. And then the first one, although you don’t know why, no longer seems like one either.

I closed my eyes and tried to see Faith Salem lying again in the sun, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see her lying in the sun because she was in another town teaching piano lessons for two dollars an hour. It said so in the town’s newspaper. I opened my eyes and looked again, just to be certain, and it did. Piano lessons, it said. 1828 Canterbury Street, call LO-3314, it said. Faith Salem, it said.

I stood up and folded the newspaper and stuck it in my coat pocket and looked at my watch. The watch said nine. I walked outside and started across the street to the parking lot where I’d left my car. But then, because it was getting late and I didn’t know the streets of the town, I turned and came back to the curb in front of the hotel and caught a taxi. I gave the driver the address, 1828 Canterbury Street, and sat back in the seat. The driver repeated the address after me and then concentrated silently on his driving. I didn’t try to think or make any guesses. I sat and listened to the ticking of the meter that seemed to be measuring the diminishing time and distance between me and something.

We hit Canterbury Street at 6th and went down it twelve blocks. It was an ordinary residential street, paved with asphalt, with the ordinary variations in quality you will find on most streets in most towns. It started bad and got better and then started getting worse, but it never got really good or as bad in the end as it had started. 1828 was a small white frame house with a fairly deep front lawn and vacant lots between it and the houses on both sides, which were also small and white and frame with fairly deep front lawns. On the corner at the end of the block was a neighborhood drug store with a vertical neon sign above the entrance. It would be a place to call another taxi in case of necessity, and so I paid off the one I had and let it go. I got out and went up a brick walk and across a porch. There was a light showing at a window, but I heard no sound and saw no shadow on the blind. After listening and watching for perhaps a minute, I knocked and waited for perhaps half of another. While the half minute was passing, a car, a Caddy, drove slowly down the street and turned left at the corner.

Without any prelude of sound whatever, the door opened and a woman stood looking out at me. The light behind her left her face in shadow. She was rather short and very slim, almost fragile, and her voice, when she spoke, had an odd quality of detached airiness, as if it had no corporeal source.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m looking for Miss Faith Salem,” I said.

“I’m Faith Salem. What is it you want?”

“Please excuse me for calling so late, but I was unable to get here earlier. My name is Percival Hand. You were referred to me as an excellent piano teacher.”

“Thank you. Are you studying piano, Mr. Hand?”

“No.” I laughed. “My daughter is the student. We’re new in town, and she needs a teacher. As I said, you were recommended. May I come in and discuss it with you?”

“Yes, of course. Please come in.”

I stepped past her into a small living room that was softly lighted by a table lamp and a floor lamp. On the floor was a rose-colored rug with an embossed pattern. The furniture was covered with bright chintz or polished cotton, and the windows were framed on three sides by panels and valences of the same color and kind of material. At the far end of the room, which was no farther than a few steps, a baby grand occupied all the space of a corner. Behind me, the woman who called herself Faith Salem closed the door. She came past me into the room and sat down in a chair beside the step-table on which the table lamp was standing. It was apparently the chair in which she had been sitting when I knocked, for a cigarette was burning in a tray on the table and an open book was lying face down beside the tray. The light from the lamp seemed to gather in her face and in the hands she folded in her lap. The hands were quiet, holding each other. The face was thin and pretty and perfectly reposed. I have never seen a more serene face than the face of Constance Markley at that moment. “Sit down, Mr. Hand,” she said.

I did. I sat in a chair opposite her and held my hat and had the strange and inappropriate feeling of a visiting minister. I felt, anyhow, the way the minister had always appeared to be feeling when he called on my mother a hundred years ago when I was home.

“What a charming room,” I said.

“Thank you.” She smiled and nodded. “I like bright colors. They make a place so cheerful. Did you say you are new in Amity, Mr. Hand?”

“Yes. We arrived just recently.”

“I see. Do you plan to make your home here permanently?”

“I don’t know. It depends on how things work out, Miss Salem. Is that correct? I seem to remember that you’re single.”

“That’s quite correct. I’ve never married.”

“I’m surprised that such a lovely woman has escaped so long. Do you live here alone?”

In her face for a moment was an amused expression that did not disturb the basic serenity, and I wondered if it was prompted by the trite compliment or the impertinent question. At any rate, she ignored the first and answered the second simply.

“Yes. I’m quite alone here. I like living alone.”

“Have you lived in Amity long?”

“Many years. I came here as a student in the college and never left. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

“Forgive my asking, but don’t you find it difficult to live by giving private music lessons?”

“I’m certain that I should if I tried it. I give private lessons only in my off hours. Evenings and weekends. I’m also an instructor in the Amity Conservatory. A private school.” She hesitated, looking at me levelly across the short space between us, and I thought that she was now slightly disturbed, for the first time, by my irrelevant questions. “I understand that you should want to make inquiries of a teacher you are considering for your child, Mr. Hand, but yours don’t seem very pertinent. Would you like to know something about my training and qualifications?”

“No, thanks. I’m sure that you’re very competent, Miss Salem. I’m sorry if my questions seemed out of line. The truth is, I know so little about music myself that I hardly know what to talk about.”

“Do you mind telling me who sent you to me, Mr. Hand?”

“As a matter of fact, it was the Conservatory. They recommended you highly, but they didn’t mention that you were an instructor there.”

“I see. Many students are directed to me that way. The ones who are unable to attend the Conservatory itself, that is.”

I looked down at my hat, turning it slowly in my hands, and I didn’t like the way I was beginning to feel. No one could accuse me fairly of being a particularly sensitive guy, and ordinarily I am conscious of no corruption in the dubious practices of my trade, dubious practices being by no means restricted to the trade I happen to follow. But now I was beginning to feel somehow unclean, and every little lie was assuming in my mind the character of a monstrous deception. I was suddenly sick of it and wanted to be finished with it, the whole phony case. I had been hired for twenty-five and expenses to find a woman who had disappeared two years ago, and here she was in a town called Amity, living quietly under the name of Faith Salem, which was the name of the woman who had hired me to find her, and it had all been so fantastically quick and easy, a coincidence and an itch and a classified ad, and now there seemed to be nothing more to be done that I had been hired to do.