Meeting Evil (24 page)

“You’re allowed to roam around there?”

“They don’t chain you to the wall any more and whip you,” Richie said, laughing. “Though I’ve seen some who that might help. They got some real nasty women there, with mouths like sewers. I can’t stand a bitch who uses foul language.”

“Is that what happened with the gas-station attendant this morning? She swore at you?” John wanted to know, while at the same time he found it unbelievable that he was politely questioning a murderer, who, as the criminal himself pointed out, was an invited guest. He could not bear to think of Richie’s caressing the children, because if he did, he might hate Joanie, which would be wrong, for how could she have possibly known Richie on sight for what he was? He had appeared harmless to John when wearing the T-shirt and cap. In suit, tie, and eyeglasses, he looked not only respectable but the embodiment of all that made sense.

The telephone rang. Joanie did not like the idea of a phone in the living room but put up with it because John insisted that he had to be always within no more than two rings of an instrument if he were to make certain sales. Strange as it might seem to those with no professional experience, there were people whom the littlest things dissuaded from a course of action, especially when the projected expenditure was in six figures.

The phone was unobtrusively tucked behind the large ceramic lamp on the table at one end of the sofa, where in truth it proved at least as convenient for Joanie’s long conversations with relatives and friends as it was for John, who often, when the matter concerned business, would ask the
caller to hang on until he could reach the little home office he had set up, again to Joanie’s complaint, in a corner of their bedroom.

Perhaps he should have welcomed a call now, but he dreaded it.

“John? Hi. This is Lang. The detective? How’re ya doin’?”

“Sure.”

“Just checking in. Our guy reports all’s quiet in the neighborhood. In my opinion Maranville’s a long way from here. In the wind, like we say. He might be demented, but these people usually have a lot of basic judgment. They don’t always go where you expect them to when they’re fugitives. They can be pretty sly. But it won’t last. It won’t take him long to do something stupid and get collared. So…”

“Thanks,” said John. He knew he should probably say something that might give Lang a clue, but his mind was too weary now for invention, and the last thing he wanted would be to incite an assault on the house.

“Keep your place buttoned up, windows and doors locked if they aren’t already. Make you feel safer. But we’re not gonna forget you. The chief wants you to know he considers this a personal concern of his.”

“You bet.” John put the phone away, behind the lamp. He had not looked toward Richie during his conversation with Lang, but he had a feeling that the man had not been much interested in it, that he could have said anything without putting himself in jeopardy. Nevertheless, he explained. “Business.”

Richie nodded and drank from his glass. “Which hasn’t been good lately.”

“My wife told you that?” John was furious.

“
You
told me, this afternoon,” said Richie. He looked benign. “What Joanie said was how terrific you are.”

John stared at him.

“We all think a lot of you, man. You got a lot of support. You’re a winner.”

“The hell with you.”

Richie was wounded. “What brought that on?”

“Just remember we got a deal. You eat dinner and then you leave.”

John felt a great need to look in on the children, whom he had not seen since morning. This represented more concern for himself than for them. They were sleeping through it all, and, if he could pull it off, would stay ignorant until they were adults, whereas he could use an exposure to their innocence.

But Joan came in at that moment. “All right, gentlemen: dinner is served.” She exchanged beaming expressions with Richie and led them to the dining room, where the table was set with the Feltons’ best china, the plates rimmed in gold, and the reserved-for-guests linen tablecloth and napkins.

“While you’re having your soup, I’ll be doing the steak, if you’ll excuse me.” Joan addressed these remarks to the guest. “It’s the only way I know to make sure it won’t get overdone.”

Richie was standing at a diffident distance.

“Please.” Joan indicated a chair.

“Right in the middle!” Richie said, extending a hand toward each of the extremities of the table. “You’re spoiling me rotten.”

“Wait till you’ve tasted the food. You might change your tune. Please sit down and begin.”

“You’re not having soup?”

“Now, don’t you worry about me!”

John felt like the outsider. As such, he took his seat while the guest was still standing. The soup steamed before him in
its bowl. It was recognizably the canned chicken-noodle favored by Melanie, whom he had shown how noisily to suck up the strands of pasta while crossing one’s eyes. This had not won applause from her mother.

Joan appeared in the kitchen doorway. “The wine, John, the wine.”

So he had to get up and go fetch the bottles from the living room and find the corkscrew under the clutter in the drawer of the sideboard. By the time he had opened the bottle of red wine, Joanie was back with a filled salad bowl. “We’re starting with
white
,” she reproachfully told him.

“My fault,” Richie said, with a little contrite shrug. “I was drinking red earlier. I don’t know anything about wine.”

John looked bleakly at the two of them, the stars of this grotesquerie, then dutifully opened the white wine and poured a glassful for Richie. Joan went to the kitchen. Richie began to drink soup from a dainty spoon.

John had eaten nothing since breakfast cereal, but he certainly had no appetite now. In the suit and tie and especially the glasses, Richie looked genteel enough, and his features might even be called patrician, insofar as John understood the term, which would seem to apply principally to the nose, longish but narrow and poreless, and eyes on the small side. Where had he gone to shave and acquire the clothing? And what of the automobile parked outside?

“I’m sure you stole the car,” John said in a voice designed not to penetrate the kitchen doorway, beyond which Joan anyway was making a clatter. “You robbed somebody, took his car and his money, and bought the clothes, maybe? Or stole them, too? But the glasses, I can’t figure them out.”

“I like the way they feel.” Richie jiggled them with a hand to either temple-piece. “I just wish I could see better through them. Driving here wasn’t easy.”

“They’re not your prescription?” John told himself that nobody stole someone else’s glasses. In this situation, he did not wish to serve as waiter, his normal spousely role when his wife did the cooking, but somebody had to do it, and he would not suffer Richie’s volunteering.

But when he stood up, bowl in hand, Richie said, reaching, “If you’re not going to eat that…” John let him exchange it for the empty bowl. Why not?

Joanie entered with a napkin-covered platter and a narrow dish containing a hard new stick of butter, as opposed to the easy-spread tub margarine that was routine. He had not known any was in the house; this must have been frozen.

Richie chided her affectionately. “Hot rolls? Joanie, you shouldn’t have.”

She lowered the dish and looked from John to the empty bowl before him. “Aren’t you the hungry one? But you can’t have seconds. You have to leave room for what’s coming.”

She was talking to him as if he were one of the children. At the same time, he was touched to realize that however valid her other reason for giving herself no soup, the fact was that the two servings would have exhausted the only can. Which meant that their criminal guest had got every drop of it.

Richie nibbled daintily at a roll until Joan returned to the kitchen, at which point he devoured the rest of it in one bite and reached for another. While attacking the butter, which was still so hard that it tended to fragment against the dull blade, he said, “I’m starved. I had quite a day.”

“I know. I was there,” John said softly, though he had a feeling that Joanie would not have heard him had he shouted. “Sharon and Tim and I were just telling the police about it.”

Richie helped himself to more white wine. “This is better food than I’ve tasted for a long time. They feed you like a
dog at Barnes.” He gulped the remainder of the soup and packed it down with a third roll. He groaned in pleasure while reaching for a fourth. “Be around here for long, and I’d be as heavy as you, John.”

“But you won’t be here after this meal,” said John.

“Almost forgot these!” It was Joanie, bringing the wooden-handled steak knives. “You might want to sharpen them, John. They are pretty dull by now.”

“Joanie,” Richie said, “I can’t keep my hands off these rolls.”

She looked genuinely pleased, but in point of fact Joan did not like to cook and ordinarily resented any special notice paid to a meal of her making, with the idea that she was thereby being identified as no more than a housewife.

It was therefore a kind of remonstrance when John said, “We had the children before Joan could go on for her master’s. But she wants to go back to school as soon as the baby is a little older.”

She made no acknowledgment. “Would you mind, John, bringing out the vegetables? I have to concentrate on the steak now.”

He found the bowlful of peas-and-carrots on the counter next to the microwave, the bell of which rang as he approached. He opened the door and withdrew the hot potato puffs. But Joanie, returning, stopped him from carrying them out in the plastic container. She had a dish ready.

“Did you sharpen the steak knives?”

“How could I?” he asked sharply. “You just mentioned it, and then said get the vegetables.”

“Is everything okay with you?” She peered narrowly at him.

His response was bluff: “Why, sure!”

“It just seems like you ought to be in a better mood.”

“I
am
in a good mood,” said he. “I’ve just had a long day.”

“You’ve had a kind of nutty day, if you ask me.” She said it with obvious affection, a hand at the small of his back. “You leave without saying goodbye, and those crazy phone calls—what were they all about? I didn’t even understand the last one. I guess you were joking—?”

“Sorry about trying to clown around,” John said. “I realize I don’t have much talent in that direction. It was just—”

She pushed him toward the doorway. “Get that stuff out there before it’s cold, willya please?”

In the dining room Richie asked, “So you’re not the boss in the family.”

John picked up a steak knife and tested its edge with the ball of his thumb: the dumb way, he was aware, and occasionally he cut himself, yet he continued to do it.

Richie took notice of what he was doing. “Here’s the only test.” He pressed his own knife against the tablecloth and cut a long slit in it.

In the next instant John realized that Richie had used the back of the blade and done no damage to the cloth, but while watching the episode he had convulsively cut his own thumb, and it was bleeding. Still smirking over his trick, Richie, it could be hoped, had not yet seen the wound. John turned quickly and returned to the kitchen, where Joanie was just sliding the steak, on the foil-covered pan, into the broiler compartment at the bottom of the stove.

“Just cut myself,” he said self-pityingly to her bent back. “The knives are plenty sharp.”

“There’s Band-Aids in the drawer. I’ll get one for you.”

John did not need her nursing. He knew exactly where the tin was kept—they had several, each on hand at another
place in the house where Melanie might suffer some slight damage in daily misadventures—and got one of the slenderer of the selection of bandages offered. Meanwhile, the profusion of blood from the slit in his thumb was, as always, remarkable. He saw his spotted trail on the floor. After cleaning the wound with a dampened paper towel, he went along, crouching, to wipe the vinyl tiles.

When he returned to the dining room, the white-wine bottle was empty and only one potato puff remained on the serving plate. The peas-and-carrots, however, looked untouched.

Richie put both hands flat on the table and drummed them for a moment. “It might not be my place to ask this, John, but what are you doing in this line of work, anyway? You haven’t been making much money at it. Besides, it’s mostly a woman’s game nowadays, isn’t it?”

Only by exerting the maximum in self-control did John manage not to blow up at the question, which had already been asked, though perhaps not so candidly, by some of his in-laws and, of course, by his own father not long before the man died.

Richie went on: “It’s just that you could do so much better.”

John could not help it. “At crime? Killing people, hurting people? Taking their property?”

“You could do a lot of good in the world and make a buck, too, so far as that goes. You’re a born healer, John. You’ve done more for me in a couple of hours than all the quacks in all the years.”

John could not have explained to himself why he made a sincere response. “My father wanted me to be a doctor. He never had the least idea of what my aptitudes were, if any. Just be a doctor, because that’s impressive as well as profitable.
Don’t be what he was, working in the same office of the same company all your life. Well, the latter was easy enough to manage. But to be a doctor you have to begin with premed: I couldn’t even get past the basic chemistry course.”

Richie frowned. “I’m talking about an inner thing, not the lies they teach in medical school. You’d be wasting your time taking courses.”

The comment served to remind John, once again, that it was surely a waste to speak sincerely about anything with a madman. He could now smell the meat under the broiler. It was nauseating.

Richie went on, leaning over his empty plate. “You serve the truth.”

Against his better judgment John said, “Then why don’t you listen to me? Give yourself up.”

Richie seemed to be thinking this over. After a moment, however, he said, “One thing is certain: it’s a waste of time for all concerned when I’m in Barnes.”