Stranger At Home (21 page)

She went into Vickers' room and stood there, just beyond the door, holding the clumsy bundle of clothing and her knitting bag. She was not looking at anything in particular. She did not move. She was thinking,
I shall be lonely. I shall be very lonely, without her
.

Presently she walked over to the bed and put down the things she carried and began to lay the clothes out neatly. The shoes she examined closely, then went to the wardrobe and inspected the shoes that were in it. She found a pair almost identical with the ones she held in her hand. These she took and placed in her knitting bag, returning the original pair to the tidy pile of clothing. Then she went out and continued down the hall to her own room, carrying the heavy knitting bag with the toes of Vickers' black Oxfords sticking out of it. There was no need to make sure first that the coast was clear. She could hear them below in the hall. Bill Saul was leaving.

He was saying, “Mind if I drop around occasionally? With Job and Harry gone, I haven't anybody left to play gin rummy with.”

Angie said, “What's wrong with Peggy?”

“She doesn't know a run from a hole in her stocking, and besides she can't count above two.”

“And besides,” said Angie, “you're getting a little bored with her.”

“A little,” said Bill. “Kee-rist! And she sticks to me like a friendly drunk. She won't even fight with me. She just puts her head in my lap and goes to sleep. What can you do?”

Angie laughed. “Poor Bill. You just can't seem to find the right combination. What are you going to do when you run out of girls?”

“Is that possible?” he asked. His pale, clear eyes were studying Angie. There was a look in them. His mouth smiled and his voice was casual, but there was a look in his eyes. “I guess maybe it is, at that. And if that happens, Vick will sure as hell have to go back to Mexico.” He glanced at Vickers and said plaintively, ‘I'm still damned if I can see why you had to come back at all.”

“It was inconsiderate of me.”

“Damn right it was. Another eight or ten years and I'd have got somewhere with this gal.”

“So sorry,” said Vickers. “I should have thought of that.” Saul stepped out through the open door and Vickers leaned on the door jamb, his free arm sliding around Angie's waist. “Drop around any time, Bill. Glad to have you.”

Saul smiled. Light fell obliquely across his face, breaking it into sharp angular planes, a chiaroscuro Satan.

“Thanks,” he said. “I'll do that.” He did not move to go. He stood looking at Vickers, still smiling, an odd sort of half-forgotten smile that had no kindness in it. He said softly, “Do you still think this is fun, Vick? Are you enjoying yourself?”

Vickers relaxed against the door jamb. He said, “It all does have its elements of humor, don't you think?” He tightened his arm around Angie's waist, drew her in against him until her body was moulded to the lazy curve of his own. There did not seem to be anything false or studied about the movement. Angie fitted there as though she belonged. Her lashes were lowered, her eyes and the expression of her face veiled in shadow. Vickers, too, was indistinct, standing with his back to the light, but Bill Saul could see that he, too, was smiling, and that it was a peculiarly merciless thing to be called a smile.

Vickers moved his hand up over Angie's breast, a deliberate, bold caress.

“Good night, Bill,” he said.

Saul nodded and turned abruptly on his heel and went away. Vickers moved to go back inside, and Angie pulled herself away from him. She walked quickly down the hall, not far, then spun around and came back. He had closed the door and stood somberly watching her. Her cheeks were crimson, her eyes blazing. She slapped him, hard, across the face. Tears, slow and widely spaced, ran down her cheeks. They looked as hot as her eyes.

He caught her shoulders and said, almost roughly, “Don't you understand?”

“What do you think I am, Vick – another Peggy, to be pawed over anytime you feel like it? I thought you...”

“Listen to me.” All his lazy self-sufficient ease was gone now. “Bill was lying last night. He had to be, or – or I'm off my head. He came up here to do something. That man Trehearne brought in – I'll swear Bill hit him to get him out of the way. Then he changed his mind, because he knew that something was wrong. He played the whole thing off against me, so now if anything ever happens he's in the clear and I'm suspected of lunacy, and he's got you and Joan for witnesses.”

Angie was still rigid and angry between his hands. Her shoulder bones were cracking in his grip, but she was not going to complain. She said steadily, “What has that got to do with pawing me in front of Bill?”

“He wants you. Christ, he was practically raping you on the doorstep, the way he was looking at you. You're the only reason he has for any of this. He's tried twice to kill me. He'll try again. He's got to, because he can't stand the thought of your being with me. It was all right as long as you were alone. But not now. I wanted to bring it to his mind. I wanted to slap him in the face with it.”

He let her go, suddenly, almost pushing her. “We've got to finish this,” he said. “I don't care how it's done or what happens, as long as it's finished.”

She studied him. She had not realized how tired he was. Her expression softened, turned grave.

“Yes,” she said. “We are right back at the beginning.” Weariness overcame her suddenly. Her body felt drained and hollow, her head like a great dull weight. She sank down on a chair.

‘I'm afraid, Vick. What's going to happen? The police, and you and me and Bill, and poor Joan – what's going to happen?”

He did not answer for a moment. He could not. He had to wait, until the pain in his head eased off enough so that he could see around it. Until the fear let go of his insides enough so that he could breathe. He was hearing Bill Saul's voice saying,
For your sake, for Angie's sake – will you see a psychiatrist?

He heard Angie say, from a great distance, “Vick, are you all right?” He felt her hand on his arm. He reached out blindly and caught her to him, and the fear went away and the pain didn't matter anymore because there was something born in him that was much greater than either one of them. It was not love. It was not passion. It was anger. Sheer, simple, primitive, murderous anger.

He whispered, “Someone has done this to me. And by Christ, I'm going to get him.”

Upstairs in her room, with the door locked, Joan Merrill carefully pricked the fourth finger of her left hand with a needle she had sterilized by holding it in the flame of a match. She laid the needle down and kneaded the finger until the blood began to flow steadily. The black Oxfords she had taken from Vickers' room were laid on a newspaper on the floor. Standing erect, she held her hand over them and let the blood splash on the tips of them. It glistened darkly against the black polish. Just a little blood. Only a drop or two. She was careful not to get any inside the shoes.

Wrapping a bit of cotton tightly around her finger, she took a linen handkerchief and wiped the blood off of the shoes, after giving it a few minutes to sink in. Then she put the shoes in the back of her closet, with the newspaper wrapped around them. The handkerchief she hid where it would be safe until she could get rid of it for good. Then she went to bed.

The next morning she got out the shoes again and polished them carefully all over with black polish, and put them in the sun to dry.

The morning passed quietly. It was one of those times when there seemed to be nothing to do and even less to say. Joan spent most of the time in her room. She gave no sign that she had overheard any of the conversation the night before. She merely said that she was tired and overwrought, and wished to rest. Angie and Vickers got a late, slow breakfast and then went down by the pool and stretched out in long chairs and lay in the sun.

Vickers had a peculiar feeling of relaxation and emptiness. It was almost a feeling of peace. He lay in the sun, half drowsing, and there was no sense of time, no urge to be and think and do. He puzzled over this condition. He tried to drive his mind to grapple with the things that were going to decide his life, and Angie's life, and very probably somebody's death, and his mind reached out with the hands of a child. It picked up the thoughts of hate and murder like beach pebbles and let them fall again. It was concerned only with the motion of the turquoise water against the tiles.

He glanced at Angie. She lay close to him, her chair facing his. He looked at her brown legs and the lift of her breasts, and the deep blackness of her hair. Her eyes were closed, her mouth remote and soft and a little sad. Vickers had a swift strange feeling of distance, as though she were far away and completely unfamiliar. Once or twice before he had felt like that, in the last four years. It seemed that when life and its involvements with emotions and the personalities of other people became too complex, one retreated into oneself. One grasped at the all-important I, and everyone else was a stranger. The emotional lines broke down, and there was no communication. One sat safely wrapped up in one's own personal flesh and rested. Perhaps it was sheer self-preservation.

He wished that this were not so. He was amazed to find that he did not want to be separated from Angie. He was even more amazed at the violence with which a thought burst into his conscious mind.
She must have told the truth, she must love me, because otherwise there is no one on God's earth who has told me the truth, or who has loved me. Me, as Michael Vickers. To Pépon and Amelita I was – somebody else, and that was different. I can never go back to them
.

The implications of this thought struck him so harshly that he sprang up as though to escape some physical threat. He moved so abruptly that Angie started awake, half rising. He saw her eyes widen, searching for him, and he saw the deep fear in them, and heard his name on her lips. His psychic isolation was knocked suddenly to the four winds.
No one
, he thought,
could look like that and not mean it
.

He smiled at her. “It's all right, darling. Just a bee about to sting me.” She accepted the lie, still looking at him, still afraid, but relaxing a little, and he watched the relief come into her face. Relief for him, that he was safe, that nothing had happened. He stooped and kissed her forehead.

“I'm sorry I startled you. Lie down again, and rest.”

Her arms went around him, tight. Her face lifted to his, like the face of a child begging for comfort.

“Nothing can happen to us, Vick? Nothing can hurt us? Nothing can take you away from me again?”

“No,” he said. “Of course not.”

Her mouth was warm, infinitely tender. She lay back again, still holding to his hand, and she smiled, but he knew that she was still afraid. And so was he, more afraid than he had ever been in his life before.

Faintly from the house he heard the door chimes, and then somewhere around in front the hounds began to bay a welcome. His hand tightened on Angie's. For a moment neither of them moved. The chimes sounded again. Vickers said quietly,

“I guess that's Bill. We'd better go in.”

It was Bill. He was alone, and his usual easy, acidly amiable self. As he came in, he jerked his head backward toward the world beyond the Vickers' gate, and said,

“I suppose you know the joint is crawling with cops.”

“It doesn't surprise me,” Vickers said. The three of them went into the living room. Upstairs, Joan Merrill's door opened.

“Just like the old days,” said Bill, and sighed nostalgically. “I'd forgotten what it was like to have a shadow.”

Angie said, “You, too, Bill?”

“Sure. A character in a broken-down heap that I'll bet could do ninety uphill if it had to. He thinks he's invisible. Well, maybe he would be to a law-abiding citizen.”

Angie smiled. “But not to you.”

“Well, of course, I've reformed. But even so, one remembers the teachings of one's youth, does one not?”

“Oh,” said Vickers, “definitely, one does. Drinks all round?”

“Right,” said Bill Saul, “and how about some three­handed gin?”

They played three-handed gin.

The afternoon wore on. Joan Merrill came into the living room and sat in a corner knitting. They had drinks, but no one got even remotely drunk. Bill Saul won consistently, but by small margins except where Angie was concerned. It was the usual pattern. Everything was normal. Nobody said anything or even looked anything out of the way. They did not mention the murder. They talked trivialities or concentrated on the cards, and everything was just as it had been four years, ago, three good friends playing a round of gin and Joan knitting quietly in the corner, and the shadows outside getting slowly longer across a smooth green lawn.

Bill Saul went out to the kitchen for more ice.

Joan Merrill put down her knitting and went out also. Nobody asked her why, or where she was going. Nobody noticed her at all.

Angie turned to Vickers and whispered, “I can't stand this much longer.” There was a sudden hint of hysteria in her eyes. “Can't we do something? Can't we make him do something?”

“No.” He took hold of her, speaking rapidly. “Hold on, old girl. We've got to. He's got to make the first move, in his own time.” He closed his eyes and turned a grimace of pain into a wry grin. “And I hope it's soon, because I don't want to spend the rest of my life playing three-handed gin. Christ, it's given me a head!”

“Vick.” She started to speak, and then changed her mind, but he knew what she had been going to say.

“I hope,” he said somberly, “we're not mistaken, because if it isn't Bill...”

He did not finish. He reached out and began shuffling the cards.

Out in the kitchen Joan Merrill faced Bill Saul over a tray of ice cubes laid on the white table. Her voice was low and hurried.