Wilde West (34 page)

THE GERMAN OFFICER:
Murder as a philosophical inquiry? But Mr. Wilde, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot on the one hand assume an insane hidden self, and then assume that this hidden self is conducting an investigation into the nature of reality.

THE POET:
I assume nothing. I merely, for a time, play with an idea or two.
(Ideas being, at the moment, all the Poet has to play with.)

THE JOURNALIST:
This is garbage.
(Heads turn.)
First of all, you don't know anything about this murderer. You said so yourself. You haven't got a single fact to start making up theories with.

THE POET:
Facts would only confuse us.

This clever sally is met with a gratifying set of smiles from the Countess, the German Officer, and the Disciple. The Businessman still looks fairly ill.

THE JOURNALIST:
Second, it looks to me like you're all forgetting that what you're talking about here is one of
us.
Me, or von Hesse, or Vail, or Ruddick, or
you
, Wilde. Everyone's being real civilized and sophisticated about it, but what you're all saying is that one of us is a murderer. A killer. You can really believe that after we've been together all this time?

THE GERMAN OFFICER:
It has not been actually for long, Mr. O'Conner. A few weeks is hardly time enough for any human being to know another. An entire life, perhaps, is not time enough.

THE JOURNALIST
(speaking with a vehemence and a venom that seem uncalled for):
I don't buy that. I think you can size a person up, good or bad, in a couple of hours. And I don't buy this “hidden self” thing either. I think this guy, whoever he is, and I
don't
think he's one of us, is killing these women just because he
wants
to. You don't need any fancy psychological theories to figure him out. Killing is what he
does.
It's what he
wants
to do. But if you really buy the idea that he's one of us, then you'd be better off forgetting theories, and start trying to decide what you're going to do about it. And it looks to me like there's
nothing
you can do about it. Nothing at all.

THE GERMAN OFFICER
(quietly):
There is one possibility.
(Heads turn once again. The Poet is reminded of spectators at a tennis match.)
We could divide ourselves into pairs. Each of us would remain, at all times, with his assigned partner. This way, at least, none of us would have an opportunity to commit any further atrocities.

THE JOURNALIST
(with another leer):
Great. I'll take the Countess.

THE BUSINESSMAN:
Hey!

THE GERMAN OFFICER
(faintly smiling):
What you suggest is impossible. And Countess de la Môle is of course beyond suspicion.

THE JOURNALIST:
Why? You don't know
anything
about this killer. If it could be one of us, it could just as easily be the Countess.

THE BUSINESSMAN:
Listen, O'Conner, I'm warning you—

THE JOURNALIST
(disgustedly):
Ah, forget it. Pairing up is a crazy idea anyway. Think about it. Who wants to spend the rest of the tour shackled to anybody here?
(Yet another leer.)
Except to the Countess, naturally. And the other thing is, if I really believed that
one
of you was a murderer, I for damn sure wouldn't want to sleep in the same room with
any
of you.

THE GERMAN OFFICER:
The killer has never struck against a man.

THE JOURNALIST
(once again speaking with an untoward vehemence, as though interpreting the German Officer's remark asa personal attack):
How do we
know
that? Maybe there are dead men rotting away back in El Paso and San Francisco. Maybe they haven't been found yet, or maybe Grigsby just doesn't
know
about them. And even if this guy hasn't killed a man,
so far
, how do you know that he's not gonna start? How do we know that one night he's not gonna go even crazier and kill his roommate, just so he
can
go out and kill another woman? You
don't
know it. Like I said, you don't know
anything.
Do any of you really want to take a risk like that?

The Disciple and the Businessman look at one another and then, in unison, their glances fall away.

THE GERMAN OFFICER:
I would of course accept this risk.

The Journalist snorts and opens his flask to take a drink.

THE JOURNALIST:
Yeah, but who's gonna accept it with you?
More silence. No one moves. The German Officer looks at the others and, after a moment, sadly frowns. And the Poet abruptly realizes that although the trip may continue, although they may all remain together over the countless miles that stretch from here to New York City, the tour as it has been constituted—seven people sharing meals and transport and time and also a simple, a commonplace, really a rather banal belief: a belief in the essential humanity of one another—all that is over. The killer, whoever he is, has killed this as well.

And killed, too, this particular dramatic piece. Pity. Exeunt the Poet, pursued by a bear.

A
FTER DOCTOR BOYNTON LEFT
Grigsby's office, Grigsby walked out into the anteroom and strapped on his gun. Behind him, Carver Peckingham swung his long legs down to the floor and lowered his chair—quietly, maybe thinking that if he did it softly enough, Grigsby wouldn't notice that his feet had been perched atop the desk.

“You goin' out again, Marshal?” Carver asked him.

“Yeah.” He pulled the sheepskin coat up over his shoulders and turned to the deputy. “I'm not gonna be back again today, prob'ly, and tomorrow I'm goin' outta town. You mind the store for me, okay, Carver?”

Carver was leaning forward eagerly in his chair. “Sure, Marshal. Where you goin'?”

“Not sure yet.” Best that Carver didn't know. The deputy couldn't tell a lie to save his life, and tomorrow, one way or another, Greaves would be looking for Grigsby.

Grigsby looked around the anteroom, glanced at the door to his office, and wondered whether he'd ever see any of it again.

He turned to Carver. “Greaves'll maybe give you a hard time tomorrow.”

When he discovered Grigsby gone tomorrow, Greaves would think that he'd run out. That bothered Grigsby some, Greaves thinking he'd turned yellow. But with all the tour members, including the killer, leaving town, Grigsby knew he had to follow them.

Another thing. Maybe Judge Sheldon would be able to get Grigsby recalled tomorrow, and maybe he wouldn't. But if he did manage it, the only way Grigsby might be able to get his job back (which maybe he'd want to, and maybe he wouldn't) was to figure out who the killer was.

Carver smiled up at him. “Don't you worry none, Marshal. I can take care of myself.”

Grigsby nodded. “Know you can. But don't be no hero, Carver.”

“Greaves don't scare me none.”

Gruffly, Grigsby said, “Don't you be no hero. That's an order. Greaves leans on you, you bend. Hear me?”

Carver nodded, abashed. “Yes sir.”

Grigsby glanced around once more.

In June it would be twelve years since Grigsby had first stepped into these two rooms, and they looked exactly the same today as they had then. From time to time Clara had begged him to fix them up, hang pictures on the wall, lay carpets on the floor. But Grigsby had liked them the way they were—plain, simple, functional. They made the place look like a marshal's office, and that was the way a marshal's office was supposed to look.

It seemed to him now that his twelve years here had left no mark at all. He might never have been here; might never have hung his coat on the coat rack; might never have lowered his painful hip behind the big broad wooden desk …

“Anything else, Marshal?”

Grigsby looked at him.

Anything else.

What could he say to Carver's eager young face?

Time passes. Things change. Life goes on but sometimes we don't.

He shook his head. “Nope. See you, Carver.”

Mary Hanrahan opened the door, her bony shoulders stooped, her long face so pale that the freckles across her nose seemed gray. She wore a brown cotton frock, much washed and often ironed, and against her gaunt frame it looked almost as worn and tired as she did. Her gray hair was pulled into a bun at the back of her thin neck. Resignation was etched into the lines at the hollows of her cheeks, smudged into the circles below her eyes. But when she saw Grigsby, her face tightened—it folded up, like a flower when the sunlight left it.

“Mary,” Grigsby said, nodding.

“Bob,” she said, her voice flat. She didn't nod.

“Sorry, Mary. I got to talk to him.”

“He's asleep.” Cool and curt, offering the words with the reluctance of a miser handing out gold coins.

“It's important. I wouldn't bother him unless it was.”

“He needs his sleep,” she said.

“It's important,” he repeated.

She folded her arms below her small parched breasts and she shook her head, less in refusal than in disappointment. “You're still the same, Bob Grigsby. Some people have it in them to change, but not you. You're still the same selfish man you've always been. Does it matter to you, the horror he had to face this morning? Does it matter to you that he was hours getting to sleep, he was so sick at heart?”

“It matters,” Grigsby said. “But I got a job to do.”

“
It's not your job
,” she said. Her eyes narrowing, she leaned toward him and put one hand on the door, the other on the jamb, effectively blocking his way. “Greaves wants you out of it. Gerry told me so. And nothing good will come to him by helping you. Isn't it enough you ruined your own life, and Clara's? Do you have to ruin his as well?”

Grigsby looked down. Whatever happened, whatever was said here, he was going to talk to Hanrahan. If listening to a lecture from Mary was the price he had to pay, then he would pay it.

“Oh Bob,” she said, and her voice had softened. Grigsby looked up and for a moment he saw, hovering like a ghost before her present-day self, the Mary she had once been, tall and slender and proud. “Won't you leave him be?” she said. “You know he can't refuse you, whatever you ask him. Bob, if you've any fondness for the man at all,
please
leave him alone. We've enough trouble without the sort you'll be bringing us.”

But it was too late, even if Grigsby could have turned himself, magically, into some other person. Because just then he heard Hanrahan's voice behind her: “Let the man in, Mary. In this house we don't keep no one standin' on the doorstep, not even the divil himself.”

Mary glanced over her shoulder. She turned back to Grigsby for a moment with a look of naked fury; and then, all at once, her face sagged back into its usual look of resignation.

She stood aside and Grigsby stepped into the small parlor.

Wearing his uniform pants and the top of his union suit, his feet bare, Hanrahan stood in front of the curtained doorway that led into the kitchen and the bedroom. The light in the room was dim; the shades were drawn at the windows and only a single small oil lamp burned on the end table. Grigsby suspected that the room was always like this, blurred and indistinct in the grayness of a perpetual dusk.

Behind Grisgsby, Mary slammed the door shut.

“It's all right,” Hanrahan said to his wife. “I wasn't sleepin' anyhow. Fetch us a bottle, would you, Mary?”

Mary's face was closed again. “You fetch your own bloody bottle,” she snapped, and stalked past them. She whipped the curtains aside and stormed through them.

Hanrahan turned to Grigsby. He smiled apologetically and ran a hand back through his disheveled hair. “She's not feelin' herself today,” he said. “Have a seat, Bob. I'll be back directly.”