Nothing That Meets the Eye (49 page)

This remark led them into the relationship between Lucy and Robbie, which Joel disclosed with appropriate reluctance. “I suppose they're having an affair—yes.”

Then the police went off to visit Robert Vanderholt. In about an hour, they brought Robbie back with them. Robbie was in a go-to-hell, what-do-I-know-about-it mood, but nervousness made him grimace and rub his nose, and Joel thought it made a bad impression on the police.

“What did you do after you left her yesterday at five o'clock?” asked one of the policemen.

“I went home—played some records—stayed in,” Robbie said.

“Did you have a quarrel with Mrs. Lucas yesterday?”

They were all standing in the bedroom, and now Robbie looked around him uneasily at the twisted bedspread, the glasses in which some pale scotch and water remained.

“We had a little quarrel, yes,” Robbie said.

“What about?”

Robbie shrugged, then rubbed his nose again. “It's embarrassing to say, but we quarreled because Lucy wanted to see me more often.” He threw a cocky glance at Joel.

“Did you strike her?” asked the policeman.

“I did, I'm sorry to say. I slapped her face. She hit me back, then I pushed her and she fell on the bed.”

“Anything after that?”

“No, I walked out after that.”

“Did she make any threats? Say where she might go?”

“No. If you want my opinion, she called for a taxi, took it to Philly or New York and spent last night in a hotel—under another name. She wants to get everybody worried over her. Or maybe she's hiding a black eye, I don't know.” Robbie shifted and started toward the door, as if he considered the interview over.

The two policemen seemed to think it was over, too. One said to Joel, “We'll keep you posted, Mr. Lucas.”

Betty Newman was looking out her window as the police went off. She came over with Chuckie, her son, trailing behind.

“Something the matter, Joel?” she asked.

“Joel looked worried. “I don't know. I can't find Lucy. I haven't seen her since yesterday morning at breakfast.”

“What?”

Joel explained the situation and why he had called the police. “When did you see her last, Betty?”

“I don't think I saw her all yesterday.—No, I didn't. I go off at eight-thirty, you know, and I'm not back till four-thirty.” Betty was a cashier at a roadside diner near Pennerlake. Her husband had run off with another woman years ago, Joel had heard. Betty was rather blowsy and getting on to forty. She and Lucy had never been chummy.

“One of our friends—uh—visited Lucy yesterday afternoon,” Joel said.

“I do remember seeing a blue convertible in your driveway, yes,” Betty said with an air of innocence, though Joel was sure she knew, just as the whole neighborhood knew, about Lucy.

“And do you know if Lucy went off with him? Around five?”

“I don't know. I really don't.”

That was just the answer Joel wanted.

“You think she was maybe kidnapped and murdered?” asked Chuckie Newman, who had been listening intently.

“Chuckie!” said his mother in horror.

Joel felt his face go fittingly white. “Let's hope not.”

Then Joel went into his house and called the Merrills. He said they had better not count on him and Lucy making it that evening, and to find another couple who could use the tickets. The Merrills didn't sound too upset, but asked him to call them as soon as he found out anything.

Sunday morning at eight, Joel was awakened by a telephone call from the Pennerlake police.

“Last night,” said the police officer, “a girl named Elinor Farrington called up after she heard the missing persons report on the radio. She said she and a couple of fellows had a conversation with a man planting a tree on Scrubby Mountain, kidding him, y'know, about maybe he was burying his wife. He said he was. Well, we couldn't investigate last night in the dark, but we did early this morning. Mr. Lucas, there was a body under that new tree, and the description certainly fits your wife's, so we'd like you to come over to the station and have a look, if you don't mind.”

Joel said he would be right over. He put on a fresh shirt and his best suit, thinking he might see the Farrington girl at the station.

They had Lucy on a table in a back room. Joel identified her.

“You recognize this blanket, Mr. Lucas?” asked the policeman, holding up the army blanket.

Joel nodded. “It's from our house.”

“The Farrington girl described the man she saw planting the tree. About five-ten, around thirty, wearing corduroy pants and a cap. She can't remember what color hair he had. I'd like you to talk to her.” He led Joel toward another room.

The Farrington girl, very sober-faced now and in a skirt, was sitting on a straight chair in a kind of waiting room. She repeated her description of the man she saw planting the tree, while Joel, looking very straightforward and neat in his dark blue suit and white shirt, listened attentively.

“She doesn't remember seeing any car nearby,” the officer said to Joel. Then, to the girl, “Is this the man you saw?”

Elinor Farrington looked at Joel, looked him up and down. “I don't think so, because the man was a different type. Very different. He was sort of squirmy. He rubbed his nose and wouldn't look me in the eye.”

The police officer looked at Joel. “Any ideas who the killer might be, Mr. Lucas?”

“I'm bound to have an idea,” Joel said carefully, “and I think it was the last person she was with. Robbie Vanderholt. Look at the way she was dressed—or rather not dressed.” He cleared his throat. “I think Vanderholt killed her and took her body out in the army blanket, kept it in his car over Friday night, and buried her yesterday morning. What else can I think?”

“We'll go back to Vanderholt,” said the police officer.

Joel went home again.

Before noon, the telephone rang, and the police had made great progress. They had found several caps and four pairs of corduroys, one old and mud-stained, in Vanderholt's closet. They had brought Vanderholt to the Pennerlake station and the Farrington girl had identified him.

“Vanderholt says he didn't do it,” said the officer, “but he may break down in a few hours.”

Joel called up the Merrills and solemnly reported the news: Robbie Vanderholt had killed Lucy. The Merrills had seen Robbie a couple of times, had noticed Lucy's interest in him, Joel knew, and so undoubtedly guessed that he was her latest.

“You poor darling!” Gert Merrill said. “Would you like to come and stay with us for a few days? You shouldn't be in that house all alone.”

Joel protested bravely that he was bearing up all right. And so he did to the Zabriskies and the Richardsons and a few other people who called up after the news appeared in Monday morning's newspapers. Three months later, the trial was over, and Robbie Vanderholt was sentenced to twenty-five years in a Trenton prison. He protested his innocence to the last, and accused Joel of having killed her in anger, but Robbie's words didn't stand up against fact: Robbie had a lot of corduroys and caps, Robbie twisted his face and rubbed his nose (he had on the stand also), and the Farrington girl had positively identified him.

Lucy's income from a trust fund left her by her family reverted to Joel: a hundred and fifty dollars per month, a sum that Lucy had managed to spend entirely on herself. Joel had certainly not killed her for that, but it was a nice addition to his salary. He bought a few things that he had wanted for a long time, a stereo, a new set of golf clubs, and a new dinner suit. He especially needed the last, as his friends were constantly inviting him to dinners to meet this or that pretty and eligible girl. Joel enjoyed his role as widower, after six months still too stunned by his wife's murder to contemplate marrying again, though his friends had reached the point of saying he deserved a better life than Lucy had been leading him.

One evening around nine, when Joel had just got settled with a beer in front of a promising television play, his doorbell rang. It was Betty Newman from next door.

“Oh, hello,” Joel said, surprised. “Come in.”

“Thanks.” Betty came in. She was in high heels, and Joel got a whiff of perfume as she walked past him.

“I was just starting to watch some TV,” Joel said. “Want to—”

“I'm not much in the mood,” Betty interrupted.

After a couple of minutes, it was obvious what she was in the mood for, and Joel was flabbergasted. Betty had had him over to dinner a couple of times since Lucy's death, but there hadn't been a hint of anything romantic or sexy in her attitude. Joel parried her as politely as he could.

“Oh, come on, Betty. I'm very flattered, but—I guess I'm the old-fashioned type. I still believe marital bliss is the only real thing, and I'd rather—”

“As a matter of fact, I'm talking about marriage,” Betty said. She was leaning back on his sofa now, with a glass of beer. Her pudgy face looked even less attractive than usual with the extra lipstick and the splotches of rouge on her cheeks.

“Well—I certainly can't think of marriage yet.”

“Can't you? I think you'd better. I know a little secret about you, Joel. And I think I've waited a decent length of time, don't you?”

Then Joel knew, and ice went down his veins. He sat up stiffly in his armchair. “What're you talking about?” he asked with an effort at a smile, and at the same time he was thinking: Betty might suspect, but she can't prove anything. Maybe she saw him drive out of the garage that Saturday morning, but she hadn't seen the body on the floor in the back of the car.

“I know what you're thinking,” Betty said. “But I saw Robbie Vanderholt go off by himself at five-fifteen that afternoon. He wasn't carrying any corpse with him. Then you came home.” She waited.

“You're making that up, Betty.”

“I am not. And furthermore, I'll spill it to the police—if you're not more cooperative. I've been very cooperative with the police so far—from your point of view.”

Joel chewed the inside of his cheek, suddenly seeing a vista, a long one, of his life ahead with Betty. Saggy breasts and blowsy cheeks and that awful freckle-faced goon of a son that went with the deal. A situation that would inspire a second murder, if any situation would. But he could never dare risk a second murder. Or could he?

Betty recrossed her plump legs. She looked absolutely confident. “I'll make you as happy as I can, Joel. How about it? Don't you think we could have a pretty good life together?” She smiled as winningly as she was able.

His heart heaved, like a sick stomach. “Yeah, sure, Betty. Sure we could.”

“So, it's a deal?”

It's a deal,” Joel said.

THINGS HAD GONE BADLY

T
his was the story in the newspapers, in the local paper and in the New York Times, and it merited about five lines in both:

Robert Lottman, 25, a sculptor, confessed having killed his wife, Lee, 23, by blows about the head with a rolling pin in the kitchen of their home near Bloomington, Indiana. Their two-year-old daughter, Melinda, in the kitchen at the time, was unhurt in her crib when police arrived, after having been summoned by Lottman.

Robert Lottman went quietly into the hands of the police, then into a jail cell, his manner described by one journalist as “cool” and by another as “cold and indifferent.”

The two-year-old Melinda was at once sent to her grandmother, Evelyn Watts, of Evanston, Illinois. Mrs. Watts expressed disbelief of her son-in-law's act. She had liked Robert Lottman, until now. She had been sure that he loved her daughter. She couldn't understand why the murder had happened. She had never seen Robert lose his temper. Robert didn't drink or take drugs. What had happened?

The psychiatrists—two—were asking the same questions in the Bloomington jail. They were not keenly interested, but a psychiatric questionnaire was a necessary formality.

“I don't know,” Robert Lottman replied. “I loved her, yes. I loved her.” He detested saying that to the officially engaged psychiatrists, but it seemed little to reveal, since why should he have married Lee if he hadn't loved her?

“You had quarrels?” said one psychiatrist. It was more a statement than a question. “Fights before?” That was a question.

“No, never,” said Robert. He looked his interrogator in the eyes.

“Then why did you do this?” Long pause. “Sudden fit of temper?”

Robert remained silent, uncomfortable. He was thinking that he didn't have to answer, anyway. Since he had admitted striking the fatal blows, what did it matter if they had had a quarrel, if he had had a fit of temper, or not? “I was not angry,” Robert said finally, hoping this would satisfy the two and that they would go away. He had been sitting on the hard chair for twenty minutes.

Now the dark-haired psychiatrist said to Robert, “You know, if you and your wife had been having a quarrel—about anything—it could be a manslaughter charge. Lighter than premeditated murder.”

“Come on, Stanley, no one's bringing up premeditated in this—as yet. It's a household affair.”

Robert wanted to switch them both off. He wagged his head, tired and bored. The psychiatrists might think that movement “evasive,” he thought. Robert did not feel in the least evasive. He felt contemptuous of the two men before him, questioning him. Robert had pride. He was not going to tell them why he killed Lee. These two might never understand. They didn't look the types to take the time. Maybe he would write out why he had killed Lee. But write it for whom? Not the court, certainly. Maybe for himself only. Robert was a sculptor, not a writer, but he could make himself clear in words if he wanted to.

“We're trying to do the best for you before the—the—uh—trial,” said one of the men.

“Sentence. Before the sentence,” said the other.

The best for him? What did it matter? Robert said nothing.

“You don't care what kind of sentence they give you?” asked the dark-haired one.

“That's correct. I don't care.”

“There wasn't another man in the picture?” asked the plump, baldish one, in a tone of hoping that there had been.

“No. I've said that.” How he had hoped for another man! “Isn't this enough? I don't know how I can tell you any more.”

A minute later he was free, at least of those two. A prison guard came in and accompanied him back to his cell. Robert paid no attention to the guard. He had no intention of trying to escape out one of the doors, two of which gave onto a parking lot. The jail did not look grim or well guarded, it was just a jail.

Robert's mind was on another man. There had not been another man. Funny, in a way, since Lee had been so fantastically popular when Robert had met her.

Back in his cell he was still thinking of that, Lee's popularity. She had been twenty going to art school in Chicago, when Robert met her. He had visited the Reinecker Art Institute in quest of a part-time job, two or three mornings a week, teaching sculpture. He had his own credentials from the Art Students League in New York and from a Brooklyn academy, less well known, but he had a prize from that school, attested to by a certificate and a photograph of his work which had taken first prize. The Reinecker, however, had wanted a teacher for five mornings a week, and Robert had hesitated, said he would think it over. Nine to noon, five days a week. They would have taken Robert on, yes, and they hadn't thought it unusual that Robert wished to consider it for a few days. Robert had walked out of the superintendent's office and into the hall, down a short flight of stairs, and met Lee coming up the stairs.

He had not met her in the usual sense, and she had been with two young men, one on either side of her, all three talking, as Robert remembered it, but his eyes had met Lee's eyes for an instant. Robert could still see it as clearly as if it had been a color photograph that he carried with him. Lee was blond, not very tall, and had blue eyes. She had been wearing beige trousers, like chino pants, a pale blue shirt or blouse.

Robert had turned and followed her. She had a smooth, oval face, a high forehead, round and rather bulging. The important thing was her eyes—intelligent, appraising, cool. Who wouldn't have followed those eyes? Robert wondered. As he had walked behind the trio in the corridor, Lee had looked back once at him, aware that he was following her. The two boys with her had eyes only for Lee, Robert remembered. Robert was to see plenty of this later. But Lee had stopped and turned, looking at him.

Robert had said, “Hello,” like one stunned. Hadn't the other two fallen back a step, stunned also in the presence of love at first sight? Robert was not sure. He had managed to get out something, because he wanted her as a model, quite apart from the fact that he had fallen suddenly in love with her. “You're a student here?” Maybe he had said something like that. Anyway, Lee had said that she was not studying painting any longer and was intending to go to a photography school, somewhere else. Robert had whipped his little sketchbook from a back pocket, a pencil, had got Lee's name and address, and had given her his own. She had a telephone number. She lived with her mother in Evanston.

She had liked him, that was the important thing, enough to give him her name and address. And suddenly, too, she had been walking with him, back down the long cream-colored corridor with its closed doors on either side, bulletins and posters everywhere on the walls—and the other two young men had vanished, or were maybe standing in the corridor behind them, puzzled.

And then things had gone badly.

Robert was now sitting on his bed, thinking: things had gone badly. But he was thinking of two periods of time—just after he had met Lee and the past weeks. Between times about three years had passed.

In the first bad or uncertain period, just after he met Lee, it had seemed to Robert that she was afraid of him. She refused to make dates with him, she wrote him an ambiguous note: did she want to see him again, or not? Robert lived just thirty miles or so from Evanston. One of the young men in whose company Robert had first seen Lee was still present and in full force. This Robert had discovered when he had his first date with Lee. She had had to ease the young man politely from her mother's house, and he had gone off with a smirk at Robert, as if to say, “You're wasting your time, fellow.”

Robert and Lee had gone back to her mother's house after dinner (her mother was divorced), and Lee had shown him her drawings, some paintings that were not as good as her drawings, and her new photographic efforts. Robert was impressed. Many were portraits of people she knew, young and old. She had imagination and energy. The energy showed in Lee herself—a strong body neither slender nor sturdy but something in between, with a grace of movement. Above all, her energy showed in her enthusiasm for her work.

Robert had blurted out around midnight, “I love you—you know?” Then Lee had been silent, as if surprised (how could she be, when half a dozen men must be in love with her? Robert had thought), and then she had gone on putting away her photographs in their labeled folders and portfolios. He had not tried to take her hand or to kiss her.

And then silence—for two weeks, for a month. She was too busy to make dates, she said when he telephoned. And Robert recalled his friends' advice, with mingled gratefulness and annoyance: “Play it cool, Bob, and she'll come around to you.” He was not the type to play it cool, but he had done his best, and Lee had come around, made dates with him, even said yes when he asked her to marry him. By then they had been to bed together several times in his studio. Robert was head over heels. He felt he had met a goddess. He did not care for the word goddess, but he ­didn't know what else to liken her to, because there was no other girl in the world like her.

The advice. Robert lit one of his remaining five cigarettes. Advice reminded him of his parents in New York. They had telephoned him yesterday, and he had been allowed to speak with both of them.

“Is it true, Bobby?” his mother had asked in a voice that pained Robert to remember.

“We just can't believe it,” his father had said in a heavy, hopeless tone. “We thought it was a mistake—of names, identity—”

It wasn't a mistake, Robert had told him. Yes, he had done it. How could he explain on the telephone? Did it really matter if he explained it, much as he liked and loved his parents? Could they ever understand even if he wrote it out for them? “My life is finished,” Robert had said at the end. The guard had beckoned to him then (even though his parents had been paying for the call), and Robert had told his father that he had to hang up.

If he were writing it—Robert was walking around his cell, whose confinement and barred door did not bother him in the least now—he would say that Lee had become a different person. That was it, and Robert had realized that long ago, nearly two years ago. If he ever wrote anything about Lee and himself, he would have to say this from the start and emphatically. That was the essence, and that was what he had been unable to take, or accept, whatever you wanted to call it. His fault. Sure. Lee had the right to change, or maybe just to become herself.

When the baby was less than a year old, Robert had asked her if she wanted to divorce him.

“But why?” Lee had asked back. “What's wrong, Bob? Are you so unhappy?”

They hadn't made love for a month or more. Robert couldn't, and maybe Lee hadn't even noticed, absorbed as she was in Melinda. It wasn't the act or the pleasure of making love that was so important, meaning not even the absence of it was so important, but the fact that Lee had become another person with motherhood—formidable word—and with all the fussing around the house, which had begun early in their marriage. Gradually she had dropped her photography. The equipment in her darkroom had begun to gather dust before Melinda's birth, Robert remembered. They had got a mortgage on a pretty house, not too big or too small, outside the town where Robert had had his rented studio. There had been a period of shopping for furniture, curtains, buying a fridge and a stove, but Lee hadn't stopped. Then it had been slipcovers for the sofa and living room armchairs, and Lee was good at the sewing machine. Then she had become pregnant. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and Robert had been as happy as she. Sunday afternoon dinners at her mother's, a bit boring but bearable, sometimes even cozy and reassuring.

Robert paused in front of the not very big mirror fastened to the wall above his basin. He saw that he was frowning. He rubbed his chin brusquely, barely met his own eyes. He was not interested in looking at himself. Rotten shave he had given himself that morning. What had he been thinking of then?

The magic just fell away, Robert thought. Would he write a sentence like that, if he were writing about himself and Lee?

Robert felt suddenly puzzled. How could anyone write something about anything, until it was clear in his own head? How could anyone put into words or phrases how much he had loved Lee? The clumsiness, the bluntness of certain pop-song lyrics came now to Robert . . . the catch in my throat when we meet . . . when I look in your eyes, I want to die . . . the places we yee-eewst to go together . . . Lee had liked pop music as background sometimes when she sewed, changed the baby, or gave her a bath. If only Lee had stopped doing little things, let him change the baby (he could), just dropped everything and got back to her own work!

Robert was working himself into a torment again. Absurd. Lee was dead and forever dead. What good did tension, even analysis, do now, really?

In the next seconds he was back to the present. His parents were coming to see him tomorrow. Lee's mother evidently did not wish to see him, and she had gone with Melinda to a sister's house somewhere in Illinois. Rather, she was going, after the funeral. The funeral was today. Robert realized that with only a mild shock; he had an impulse to look at his wristwatch, and didn't. He knew it was still before noon, because the guard had not brought his lunch tray. Funerals were always in the morning, weren't they?