Vanish in an Instant (19 page)

19

The night
was
turning cold, and an eager new wind raced up and down the streets. Under the lights the side­walks and the limbs of trees shone icy.

Meecham moved stiffly toward the house with his brief case in his hand. During the past hour when the weather had changed, some of Mrs. Hearst's boys had made a slide of ice, three or four yards long, from the sidewalk to the porch steps. Meecham would have liked to try the slide, but the brief case felt heavy and he felt heavy. He thought, if this was another house and if Alice was with me, we might try the slide together.

On the porch, underneath the parlor window, there was a stepladder lying on its side, and a basket of pine branches and a spiral of copper wire, as if someone had started to decorate the house for Christmas and then lost interest. The parlor blinds were up, and the crystal chan­delier hanging from the center of the ceiling blazed with light. A group of young men and girls were sitting around a table playing cards.

Meecham went up the steps and pressed the doorbell. The porch light went on instantly above his head like a spotlight. It stayed on for a few seconds and then it went off again, and the door was opened by Emmy Hearst. Her eyes were still puffed, but she'd put on some make-up and a black close-fitting dress that looked new and emphasized her slimness.

“Come in.”

“Thanks.”

“We'll have to talk in the kitchen. One of the boys is en­tertaining.”

She closed the door behind him and led the way down the hall. Following her, Meecham had the same impres­sion of youth and energy that he'd had the first time he saw her standing at the sink humming to herself. It had been a shock then, as it was now, when she turned around and her face showed the bitter years.

“He isn't here,” she said abruptly. “He had to go down­town. He asked me to tell you to wait.”

“For how long?”

“He didn't say.”

“I had an idea that he wanted to see me as soon as pos­sible.”

She crossed her arms as if holding herself together in readiness for a blow. “What about?”

“You'd better ask him.”

“I did. He wouldn't tell me. But it's bad, isn't it?”

“I can't very well discuss . . .”

“How bad?”

“I don't know,” he said truthfully.

“It's about this murder? Isn't it?”

“I think so.”

She sat down on the couch and began to pick bits of wool off the blanket that covered it. The floor was littered with fuzz, as if she had already spent hours sitting there picking at the blanket like an industrious bird gathering material for its nest. She spoke listlessly, without raising her head: “After you phoned him, he phoned someone else.”

“Who was it?”

“I heard him dialing but I couldn't hear his words. Afterwards he came and told me he was going downtown for a package of cigarettes.”

“And I'm to wait here until he comes back?”

She turned the blanket over and began on the other side. “I don't think he's coming back.”

“Why?”

“When he walked out the door I had a feeling that I wasn't going to see him again.”

A trickle of sweat ran down the side of Meecham's face leaving a cold moist track like a slug's track. He said care­fully, “I think I'd better try to find him.”

“Don't. Let him go.”

“He has some information. I want it.”

“Information,” she repeated. “He's taken you in. What information could he have? He was here, right in this house, when Margolis was killed. He was sleeping.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I saw him. That was the night I cut my arm. See, it's still bandaged.”

She started to push up her left sleeve but Meecham stopped her. “Yes, I remember the bandage.”

“Well, that was the night it happened—Saturday. I had gotten up to take a sleeping pill. One of the boys broke the porcelain tap in the basin a week or so ago, and I fell against it in the dark and cut myself. I went into Jim's room to see if he'd help me bandage it. But he was sleeping and I didn't want to wake him up. That was about 12:30.” She leaned forward, looking at him anxiously. “You don't understand about Jim. He's like a kid. He's never had much excitement, and when this—this business happened, we weren't mixed up in it at all, but Jim—it went to his head. He'd say anything to be in on things, to be part of the excitement.”

“Someone might take him seriously.”

“No one who knows him.”

“There are a lot of people who don't know him,” Mee­cham said.
Including me
, he thought.
I take him seriously
. “I'll wait for another fifteen minutes. If he doesn't show up I'll start looking for him.”

“I don't care.” She shook her head. “We're through any­way. I'm going away. The car's mine, I paid for it myself. I'm going to get in it and drive, just drive away somewhere, I don't care where I end up.”

They were Virginia's words, but she spoke them with more decision and assurance than Virginia had. Virginia might dream of leaving, pack her vague plans between layers of folded hopes; but Emmy Hearst would leave, get into her car and drive away without a backward glance. She was a forceful woman, and Meecham thought what a comic tragedy it was that such a woman would always choose emotionally stunted men like Hearst, or physically stunted ones like Loftus.

“I'll stay with my sister in Chelsea for a while, and then, after that, I don't know. Everything's so vague and useless. When Earl was alive, no matter how bad things were, I always had a reason for living.” She leaned over suddenly, and with nervous fingers gathered up all the fuzz on the floor and squeezed it into a ball. “I loved Earl. He was the only person I've ever loved in my whole life. He was—per­fect.”

“No,” Meecham said. “He wasn't.”

“To me he was.” She went to the sink and threw the ball of fuzz into the garbage strainer, as if deliberately walk­ing away from the argument. The supper dishes were still on the drainboard, two glasses, two plates, two of every­thing. Jim's and Emmy's, Meecham thought ironically. His and Hers.

“You're idealizing Loftus,” he said. “It will be harder for you if you don't face reality.”

“I don't care.”

“Not tonight, perhaps, but next week, next year. You'll go on with your life, working, meeting new people. But you'll never meet a living man who'll be as perfect as your image of a dead man. So you'll have to change that image, cut it down to size.”

She turned and stared at him. “What are you getting at, Mr. Meecham?”

“Loftus was human. He had bad qualities as well as good qualities.”

“You could never shake my faith in him.”

“I can,” Meecham said. “I think I have to.”

“Try. Go ahead and try.”

“Did he ever tell you about Birdie?”

“Birdie?” A pulse began to pound in her throat, and she put her hand over it to hide it. “Who was—Birdie?”

“She was his wife.”

“No. No, he never had a wife.”

“He married her about two years ago. They were diver—”

“Please,” she said. “Please. Don't.”

“They were divorced—there was trouble over his mother, I believe—and later Birdie was killed in an auto accident out West.”

For almost a whole minute she didn't speak or move. Then, with a sudden furious sweep of her hand, she thrust all the dishes off the drainboard into the sink. The crash split the air, and little pieces of glass sprayed out of the sink like water from a fountain.

Some of the glass struck her but she didn't flinch or even notice. She just turned and walked away from the whole mess, looking very composed.

Pausing in the doorway, she said to Meecham in a cold flat voice, “Your fifteen minutes are up. Good night, Mr. Meecham.”

20

Eight o'clock
,
and
a church bell was ringing out a Christmas carol, alternately brash and wispy, as the wind carried the tune like a temperamental choir boy.

O Little Town of Bethlehem. As he passed the church Meecham sang with the bells, a nervous obsessive singing that had nothing to do with music but was only an expres­sion of disquiet. People were gathered on the church steps, huddled protectively in groups to withstand the force of the weather and of other groups. O Little Town.

Two blocks beyond the church he saw, in the glare of his headlights, a woman walking alone down the street. She was limping, heading into the wind with her coat and scarf flapping uselessly behind her like sails torn from a mast. Meecham pulled over to the curb. The woman turned abruptly, glanced at the car through her horn-rimmed glasses, and then began walking again with the springy uneven steps of someone accustomed to walking on ice.

Meecham drove ahead a few yards, stopped the car and leaned across the seat to open the window nearest the curb.

“Carney.”

She came closer, blinking away the moisture from her wind-whipped eyes. Her cheeks and her chin and the tip of her nose were red and shiny with cold.

She said, “Give me a lift?”

“Hop in.” He opened the door and she got into the car. Leaning back in the seat she held her mittened hands against her face to ease the aching of the cold.

“I'm freezing.”

“You look it.”

“I couldn't get a cab so I decided to walk.” Her glasses had steamed up from the heat of the car so that she looked blind. She made no attempt to take off the glasses or wipe them; she seemed content, for the moment, to see nothing, to rest behind the fog like a ship at anchor.

The car moved ahead with a spinning of the rear wheels.

“Where are you going?” Meecham said.

“To the house. Alice phoned and asked me to come. She said it was an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?”

Carney gave a quick nervous laugh. “Any kind. Some people seem to jump from emergency to emergency, and other people like me just wait around to be useful after the fall.”

“What's happened, Carney?”

“They've gone, that's what happened. The two of them—Virginia and her mother.”

“When?”

“Just a while ago. They sent Alice out on some errand or other, and when she came back to the house they were gone. She phoned me right away and she tried to phone you and Paul too.”

“How did they leave?”

“In the new car. I should have known there was some­thing funny about that car. It isn't like Mrs. Hamilton to go out and buy something like that without shopping around. She's not stingy, but she's careful about her pur­chases—she hates to get stung.”

“Where did she buy the car?”

“Right off the showroom floor. You know that Kaiser Frazer branch out near the stadium. She and Virginia went there in a cab this morning, and Virginia drove the car home—a yellow Frazer sedan.”

“It's gone now, of course?”

“Yes. Alice checked.”

“Why is she so sure they're not coming back?”

“Because they left some money for her in an envelope, her salary and enough to get home on.” With a sound of anger she shook her head violently, like a wet spaniel shaking water off its ears. “How could they be so stupid? A middle-aged woman and her married daughter running away like a couple of children. Why? Why did they do it?”

“Figure it out.”

“No, I don't want to. It—looks bad, doesn't it?”

“As bad as possible.”

“Oh God, I'm tired. I'm tired of emergencies. I'm tired of playing the maiden aunt. When something goes wrong, call Carney. It's been like that ever since I knew them. Well.” She took a deep breath. “Well, now something has gone really wrong and I can't help them at all.”

Meecham turned left at the next corner. Part of the Barkeley house was visible at the end of the block, but most of it was hidden behind the evergreen hedge where Loftus had stood the first night. It seemed a long time ago.

He said, “Did you have any idea they were planning to leave?”

“No, but I thought something was in the wind. The new car, and then the telegram this morning.”

“What telegram?”

“From Willett, her son in Los Angeles. He wired his mother a thousand dollars. She had to go down to the West­ern Union office to get it. Now why should Willett have wired her that much money?”

“Because she asked him to.”

“She must have,” Carney said. “But why? She had a lot of money when she came. I remember asking her about Willett the night she arrived, and she said something about Willett being the same old Willett, that he was in a great stew because she was carrying so much cash.”

“How much is so much?”

“I can't give you a definite figure, but I know she's always carried very large amounts of cash. She was never afraid of being robbed, as I would be. On the contrary, it gave her a sense of security.”

He stopped the car in the driveway but didn't get out. Instead, he said, “What happened to her money?”

Carney hesitated. She had taken off her glasses and was swinging them in a circle, one way and then another. “She gave it away, I guess.”

“To whom?”

“Well, to Virginia. She . . .”

“Virginia hasn't a dime,” Meecham said. “She was try­ing to cook up a scheme with me to float enough cash to run away.”

“I don't know, I just can't reason things out. Nothing seems—well, sensible. Nothing seems
sensible.
”

“Not yet.”

They got out of the car and went toward the house, walking side by side and close together in curious intimacy, like mourners approaching a grave. But the grave was only Virginia's patio, built for sun and summer but now dark and useless, the redwood chairs glazed with ice, the bar­becue pit discolored by the soot of winter, and the plants dead in their hanging baskets.

Inside the house it was very warm but Alice and Barke­ley still had their heavy coats on, as if in the stress of the moment they had both forgotten their personal comfort.

Alice looked ready to cry, but there was no sign of emo­tion on Barkeley's face except for a kind of weary contempt.

He addressed Meecham. “Well, what do we do now, call the police?”

“Perhaps that's the best idea.”

“I don't want to, but I can't think of any alternative.”

“You might try to catch up with them.”

“How?”

“We know they're heading west, that's the important point. From here as far as Morrisburg, Highway 12 is the only road west. At Morrisburg they can take 60 southwest. So the problem is to catch them before they reach Morris­burg.”

“I'll get the car out,” Barkeley said. He was halfway to the door before he finished the sentence. It was the first time Meecham had seen him move quickly.

Carney had sat down and taken off her galoshes. “I won't go along. Alice can, but I won't. Like I said, I'm tired of emergencies.”

Meecham looked at Alice. “Do you want to come?”

“I'm not sure.”

“It will be safer if you stay here. The roads aren't good and we'll be speeding.”

She touched his sleeve, shyly. “It would be worse staying here wondering if anything's happened to you.”

“Nothing will happen to me. I want you to stay here with Carney.”

“I—all right.”

“Well,” Carney said with an odd little smile. “So that's the way it is, is it?”

Meecham nodded.

“Well, good luck to you both. Maybe you won't need it as much as Carnova and I did, but you'll need it.”

The last Meecham saw of her she was sitting with her right knee crossed over her left, her hand nursing her crippled foot. She looked old and bitter and hard, as if, in the role she'd played as maiden aunt, all the nieces and nephews had turned out bad and she had no faith or char­ity left.

The two men sat in the front seat. At first they were too tense to talk; they stared in silence at the road ahead while the windshield wipers clicked back and forth like metronomes. There was a light snow, not falling, but sweeping up and across the road in gusts, so that one mo­ment there was nothing to be seen except whirls of white, and the next moment, in the lull of the wind, the air would be clear and everything seemed to be doubly visible—the billboards, the telephone poles, and the heavy piles of snow left at intervals on each side of the road by the snow plough after the last storm.

“They won't get far in weather like this,” Barkeley said finally. “Virginia's a terrible driver.”

“Virginia isn't driving,” Meecham said.

“She must be. Her mother doesn't know how.”

“They have a friend with them. A man called Hearst.”

Barkeley's only reaction of surprise was to take a tighter grip on the steering wheel. “Who is Hearst?”

“He lives in the house where Loftus lived, he works for a detergent company, and he wants to go to California.”

“That's not telling me much.”

“It's as much as I definitely know. What I suspect is that he's a very small-time chiseler, and that he knows some­thing your wife and mother-in-law don't want known. So they took Hearst along, not for the ride, but to get him as far away from town as possible.”

“What does he know?”

“As far as I can gather from the physical evidence— times, places, actions—there's only one thing he can know. At the time Margolis was killed on Saturday night, Hearst was in his own house. So was Loftus.”

“So was . . .? No. No, that's impossible.”

“He was watching Loftus because he was jealous of him. Hearst is a traveling man, away from home all week on business. He had time to hatch plenty of suspicions about his wife and Loftus, not without some justification. On Saturday night Mrs. Hearst left the house about 7:30, met Loftus out on the sidewalk on his way home after din­ner downtown, and then went on to a hockey game. That's her story, but Hearst didn't believe it. He was pretty sure she intended to meet Loftus somewhere in the course of the evening. He could have followed his wife, of course. But Hearst is a lazy, half-hearted man; it was easier for him to stay right in the house and keep an eye on Loftus. I believe that's what he did. He spied on Loftus and Loftus didn't go out.”

“You have no proof of that.”

“No, it's merely an opinion,” Meecham said. The word reminded him vividly of the scene between Lily Margolis and her cousin, Loesser, a few hours before: “I will not be quiet, George. I have a right to my opinion.” “Keep it an
opinion
, then.” “Very well. In my
opinion
, Virginia Barke­ley killed my husband in a jealous rage!”

He said aloud, “We may never know the truth of what happened. Maybe there isn't any whole truth about any­thing, just a lot of versions, of different colors and different flavors, like ice cream, and you pick the most palatable. Cigarette?”

“Not while I'm driving.”

Meecham lit one for himself, cupping his hands over the lighter so that its sudden glare wouldn't distract Barkeley's eyes from the road. The wind was slackening, and the flakes of snow had become larger, coagulating with mois­ture into thick fluffy whirls that clung stickily wherever they fell. The windshield wipers had lost their rhythm. They jerked, slowed, stopped, and went on in wild haste, like a hunted man.

Meecham spoke again. “As Carney put it, nothing seems sensible. Loftus was an intelligent young man with a con­science, yet he accepted money to confess to a murder he didn't commit and fabricated enough circumstantial evi­dence to back it up—his bloodstained clothes, his knowl­edge of the inside of Margolis' cottage, what kind of knife was used, where it was kept, the temperature of the room, the number of times Margolis was stabbed, and so on. He couldn't have fabricated all that evidence without help.”

“Whose help?”

Meecham didn't answer.

“You mean my wife's help,” Barkeley said. “Don't you?”

“It seems—logical.”

“But the blood on his clothes—how could Loftus have managed that? The Sheriff himself said that it wasn't rubbed on, it was splattered there from a wound, a quart or more of the stuff.”

“That's one of two things I hope to find out soon. Where did the blood come from and where did the money go?”

“You think my wife knows.”

“It's very possible.”

“You might as well make that a definite opinion, Mee­cham. You seem to have opinions about everything.”