The Fiend (30 page)

He touched Gallantyne lightly on the arm and the two men walked over to the far corner of the room and began talking in whispers. Though she couldn't distinguish any words, she was sure they were talking about her until Gallantyne finally raised his voice and said, “I must ask you not to mention Charlie Gowen to anyone, Mrs. Oakley.”

“Charlie Gowen? I don't even know who—”

“The man in the green coupé. Don't tell anyone about him, not your friends or relatives or reporters or any other policeman. As far as you're concerned, Charlie Gowen doesn't even exist.”

(21
)

When Charlie arrived
home at 5:30, he was so tired he could hardly get out of his car and cross the patch of lawn that sepa­rated the driveway from the house. He had worked very hard all day in the hope that his boss, Mr. Warner, would notice, and approve of him. He especially needed Mr. Warner's ap­proval because Ben was angry with him for staying out too late the previous night. Although he knew Mr. Warner and Ben were entirely different people, and pleasing one didn't necessarily mean placating the other, he couldn't keep from trying. In his thoughts they weighed the same, and in his dreams they often showed up wearing each other's faces.

At the bottom of the porch steps he stooped to pick up the evening
Journal.
It lay under the hibiscus bush, fastened with an elastic band and folded so he could see only the middle third of the oversized headline:
u seen the

Usually, Charlie waited for the
Journal
until after Ben had finished with it because Ben liked to be the first to discover interesting bits of news and pass them along. But tonight he didn't hesitate. He tore off the elastic band and unfolded the paper. Jessie's face was smiling up at him. It didn't look the way it had the last time he'd seen her, shocked and frightened, but she was wearing the same clothes, a white bathrobe over pajamas.

The headline said
have you seen this girl
?—and under­neath the picture was an explanation of it: “This is a com­posite picture made from a snapshot of Jessie Brant's face superimposed on one of a child of similar height and build wearing clothes similar to those missing from Jessie's wardrobe. The
Journal
is offering $1,000 reward for information leading to the discovery of Jessie Brant's whereabouts.”

For a long time Charlie stood looking at the girl who was half-Jessie, half-stranger. Then he turned and stumbled up the porch steps and into the house, clutching the newspaper against his chest as though to hide from the neighbors an old wound that had reopened and started to bleed again. In his room, with the door locked and the blinds drawn, he read the account of Jessie's disappearance. It began with a description of Jessie herself; of her father, a technician with an electronics firm; her brother, Michael, who hadn't learned the news until he'd been picked off a fishing boat by the Coast Guard cutter; her mother, the last member of her family to see Jessie alive at ten o'clock.

The official police announcement was issued by Lieutenant D. W. Gallantyne: “The evidence now in our possession in­dicates that Jessie departed from her house voluntarily, using the back door and leaving it unlocked so she would be able to return. What person, or set of circumstances, prevented her re­turn? We are asking the public to help us answer that question. There is a strong possibility that someone noticed her leaving the house or walking along the street, and that that person can give us further information, such as what direction she was go­ing and whether she was alone. Anyone who saw her is urged to contact us immediately. Jessie's grief-stricken parents join us in this appeal.”

The light in the room was very dim. Narrowing his eyes to keep them in focus, Charlie reread the statement by Gallantyne. It was wrong, he knew it was wrong. It hadn't happened like that. Somebody should tell the lieutenant and set him straight.

He lay down on the bed, still holding the newspaper against his chest. The ticking of his alarm clock sounded extraordinarily loud and clear. He'd had the clock since his college days. It was like an old friend, the last voice he heard at night, the first voice in the morning:
tick it, tick it, tick it.
But now the voice began to sound different, not friendly, not comforting.

Wicked wicked, wicked sicked, wicked sicked.

“I'm not,” he whispered. “I'm not. I didn't touch her.”

Wicked sicked, pick a ticket, try and kick it, wicked wicked, buy a ticket, buy a ticket, buy a ticket.

Ben called out, “Charlie? You in there?” When he didn't get an answer he tried the door and found it locked. “Listen, Charlie, I'm not mad at you anymore. I realize you're a grown man now and if you want to stay out late, well, what the heck, that's your business. Right?”

“Yes, Ben.”

“I've got to stop treating you like a kid brother who's still wet behind the ears. That's what Louise says and by golly, it makes sense, doesn't it?”

“I guess so.”

“She'll be over pretty soon. You don't want her to catch you sulk—unprepared.”

“I'm preparing, Ben.”

“Good. I couldn't find the
Journal,
by the way. Have you got it in there?”

“No.”

“The delivery boy must have missed us. Well, I hate to report him so I think I'll go pick one up over at the drug store. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

“All right.”

“Charlie, listen, you're O.K., aren't you? I mean, everything's fine?”

“I am not sicked.”

“What? I didn't hear what you—”

“I am not sicked.”

The unfamiliar word worried Ben. As the worry became larger and larger, chunks of it began dropping off and changing into something he could more easily handle—anger. By the time he reached the drug store he'd convinced himself that Charlie had used the word deliberately to annoy him.

Mr. Forster was standing outside his drug store. Though his face looked grave, there was a glint of excitement in his eyes as though he'd just found out that one of his customers had contracted a nonfatal illness which would require years of prescriptions.

“Well, well, it's Benny Gowen. How's the world treating you, Benny?”

“Fine. Nobody calls me Benny any more, Mr. Forster.”

“Don't they now. Well, that puts me in a class by myself. What can I do for you?”

“I'd like a
Journal.”

“Sorry, I'm all sold out.” Mr. Forster was watching Ben carefully over the top of his spectacles. “Soon as I put them out here on the stand this afternoon people began picking them up like they were ten-dollar bills. Nothing sells papers like a real nasty case of murder or whatever it was. But I guess you know all about it, being you work downtown in the hub of things.”

“I don't have a chance to read when I'm on the job,” Ben said.

“Who was murdered?”

“The police don't claim it was murder. But I figure it must have been. The kid's gone, nobody's seen hide nor hair of her since last night.”

“Kid?”

“A nine-year-old girl named Jessie Brant. Disappeared right from in front of her own house or thereabouts. Now, nobody can tell me a nine-year-old kid wearing nightclothes wouldn't have been spotted by this time if she were still alive. It's not reasonable. Mark my words, she's lying dead some place and the most they can hope for is to find the body and catch the man responsible for the crime. You agree, Benny?”

“I know nothing about it.”

Mr. Forster took off his spectacles and began cleaning them with a handkerchief that was dirtier than they were. “How's Charlie, by the way?”

He is not sicked.
“He's all right. He's been all right for a long time now, Mr. Forster.”

“Reason I asked is, he came in here yesterday with a bad headache. He bought some aspirin, but shucks, taking aspirin isn't getting to the root of anything. A funny thing about head­aches, some doctors think they're mostly psychological, you know, caused by emotional problems. In Charlie's case I'm inclined to agree. Look at the record, all that trouble he's had and—”

“That's in the past.”

“Being in the past and being over aren't necessarily the same thing.” Mr. Forster replaced his spectacles with the air of a man who confidently expected new knowledge from increased vision. “Now don't get me wrong.
I
think Charlie's O.K. But I'm a friend of his, I'm not the average person reading about the kid and remembering back. There's bound to be talk.”

“I'm sure you'll do your share of it.” Ben turned to walk away but Mr. Forster's hand on his arm was like an anchor. “Let go of me.”

“You must have misunderstood me, Ben. I
like
Charlie, I'm on his side. But I can't help feeling there's something wrong again. It probably doesn't involve the kid at all because it started yesterday afternoon before anything happened to her. Are you going to be reasonable and listen to me, Ben?”

“I'll listen if you have anything constructive to say.”

“Maybe it's constructive, I don't know. Anyhow, a man came in here yesterday asking where Charlie lived. He gave me a pretty thin story about forgetting to look up the house number. I pretended to go along with it but I knew damned well he was trying to pump me.”

“About Charlie?”

“Yes.”

“What'd you tell him?”

“All the right things. Don't worry about that part of it, I gave Charlie a clean bill of health, 100 percent. Only—well, it's been on my mind ever since. The man looked like an official of some kind, why was he interested in Charlie?”

“Why didn't you ask him?”

“Heck, it would have spoiled the game. I was supposed to be taken in, see. I was playing the part of—”

“Playing games isn't going to help Charlie.”

Mr. Forster's eyes glistened with excitement. “So now you're leveling with me, eh, Ben? There
is
something wrong, Charlie needs help again. Is that it?”

“We all need help, Mr. Forster,” Ben said and walked away, this time without interference. He knew Mr. Forster would be watching him and he tried to move naturally and easily as though he couldn't feel the leaden chains attached to his limbs. He had felt these chains for almost his entire life; attached to the other end of them was Charlie.

He stopped at the corner, aware of the traffic going by, the people moving up and down and across the streets, the clock in the courthouse tower chiming six. He wanted to quiet the clock so he would lose consciousness of time; he wanted to join one of the streams of strangers, anonymous people going to un­named places. Whoever, wherever, whenever, was better than being Ben on his way home to Charlie to ask him about a dead child.

Louise's little sports car was parked at the curb in front of the house. Ben found her in the living room, leafing through the pages of a magazine. She smiled when she looked up and saw him in the doorway, but he could tell from the uneasiness in her eyes that she'd read about the child and had been silently asking the same questions that Mr. Forster was asking out loud.

He said, trying to sound cheerful and unafraid, “Hello, Louise. When did you arrive?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

“Where's Charlie?”

“In his room getting dressed.”

“Oh. Are you going out some place? I thought—well, it's turning kind of cold out, it might be a nice night to build a fire and all three of us sit around and talk.”

Louise smiled again with weary patience as if she was sick of talk and especially the talk of children, young or old. “I don't know what Charlie has in mind. When he answered the door he simply told me he was getting dressed. I'm not even sure he wanted me to wait for him. But I'm waiting, anyway. It's becoming a habit.” She added, without any change in tone, “What time did he come home last night?”

“It must have been pretty late. I was asleep.”

“You went to
sleep
with Charlie still out wandering around by himself? How could you have?”

“I was tired.”

“You led me to understand that you'd go on looking for him. You said if I went home for some rest that you'd take over. And you didn't.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I started thinking about the conversation we had earlier,” Ben said with deliberation. “You gave me the business about how I should trust Charlie, let him have a chance to grow up, allow him to reach his own decisions. You can't have it both ways, Louise. You can't tell me one minute to treat him like a responsible adult and the next minute send me out chasing after him as if he was a three-year-old. You can't accuse me of making mistakes in dealing with him and then an hour later beg me to make the same mistakes. Be honest, Louise. Where do you stand? What do you really think of Charlie?”