Vanish in an Instant (11 page)

A column of bitterness rose like mercury in Meecham's throat.
Pig of a world
, he thought.
Preposterous pig of a world.

11

W
hen he
rang
the doorbell Emmy Hearst answered it herself, immediately, as if she'd been there at the door watching from behind the lace curtains of the little win­dow for someone who would never come. Her eyes were so swollen that they didn't look like human eyes at all, but like twin blisters raised by fire. When she spoke she held one hand against her throat as if to ease its aching:

You saw him?”

Mecham nodded. “Yes.”

I tried to. They wouldn't let me. They said I had no right, no right.” She clung to the door for support, a tall strong woman who had come abruptly, in a single day, to the end of her strength.

They've transferred him to the hospital,” Meecham said.

He'll get good care there. Won't he?”

“Of course.”

There was a burst of masculine laughter from one of the rooms on the second floor.

Mrs. Hearst glanced nervously at the staircase. “I can't ask you to come in, I—I'm busy. I have business to attend to.”

Mecham said, “I can't stay anyway. Loftus asked me to pick up a package of letters that he wants me to take to his mother.”

“His mother,” she said quietly. “Always his mother. She's a stone around his neck, drowning him, she's like a . . . Yes, I have the letters. They're in the kitchen. I'll get them for you.”

She went down the hall and through the swinging door into the kitchen. Meecham heard her give a little cry of surprise: “Why—why, I thought you were upstairs.”

“Well, I'm not upstairs. How do you like that, eh?”

The door stopped swinging and settled into place, en­tombing the sound waves in its heavy oak. But the woman's little cry of surprise hung in the air for a moment like a question mark of smoke and then disintegrated.

Meecham waited, uneasy and depressed. The front door was still open and he didn't close it; he felt that she had left it open deliberately. The wind blew down the hall and up the stairs, agitating the lace curtains and the coats and sweaters hanging on the old-fashioned hall rack. On the floor beside the rack there was a pile of rubbers and ga­loshes and a pair of battered tube skates and one gym shoe with the name Kryboski inked on each side.

Meecham looked at his watch and then coughed, a long purposeful cough. A minute later the swinging door opened again and Mrs. Hearst came toward him with a brown package under her arm. She was lurching slightly, as if she was carrying either inside the package or inside herself something heavy that threw her off balance.

She thrust the package at him. It was very light. “Here. Please go.
Please.
”

“Certainly,” Meecham said. But he was a little too late. A man had come out of the kitchen, a big ruddy-faced man with fair hair. A hall-length away he looked quite distin­guished and physically powerful. But as he came nearer, the shaft of light from the open door exposed the fraud like an efficient camera. His body was running to fat, and his face was disfigured by lines of indecision and self-doubt, ambition gone sour and life gone sour. His pale eyes moved constantly, back and forth, like birds at sea looking for a piece of kelp to rest on. He was one of those men Meecham recognized as a common type; the big boy whose mind and emotions had never been able to keep up with his maturing body. With the years the gap widened and the person­ality narrowed. He was, perhaps, forty-five.

Mrs. Hearst deliberately turned her head away as he ap­proached. When she spoke she didn't look at either of the men, she seemed to be addressing the grease-darkened lil­ies that climbed the wall:

“This is my husband, Jim.”

“Say, what is all this anyhow?” Hearst said. “Just what is it? Mysterious packages, cops in the house, Emmy bawling all over the joint. A guy has a right to know, don't he?”

He tugged, self-consciously, at his tie. The checked suit he wore was a little too tight around the hips, and the sleeves were too short, so that his wrists stuck out, not the vulnerable pipe-stem wrists of a growing boy, but thick wrists covered with coarse gold hairs. His manner, his clothes, his expression, they all added to his air of chronic failure . . . the air of a man who has tried and quit a hundred jobs in a hundred places, always out of step and off-beat.

“Well? Ain't anybody going to say anything but me? Not that I can't do the talking. I've got plenty to say and plenty to ask too.”

“Shut up, Jim,” Mrs. Heart said, without turning.

“Now she tells me, shut up. Mind my own business, she says. Maybe that's my trouble, I have minded my own busi­ness. I've winked an eye at things.” He looked at his wife. “Some pretty funny things, eh, Emmy?”

“Shut up,” she repeated listlessly. “He's not a cop, he's a lawyer. And the package . . . Oh, you tell him, Mr. Meecham. Tell him what's in the package since he won't believe me.”

“They're letters,” Meecham said. “Written to Loftus by his mother. I'm returning them to her at his request.”

Hearst looked disappointed. “Just a bunch of old letters, eh?”

“That's right.”

“You mean all the value they've got is just sentimental?”

“Yes.” Meecham didn't mention the money in one of the envelopes. He had the notion that if Hearst knew there was money involved he would put up a fight to keep it; a not unreasonable fight, since the package had been left in his own kitchen, and he, Meecham, had no power of attorney for Loftus, and, in fact, no proof that the package even be­longed to Loftus.

But Hearst had already lost interest in the package. He was watching his wife, his eyes moving constantly in their sockets but keeping her within range. “He's quite a sen­timental guy, Loftus is. Too bad I don't have that sentimental stuff, the ladies are crazy for it. And manners he's got too, real fancy manners that makes an ordinary guy feel like a bum. I'm not a bum. I'm a rough diamond, sure, but I don't go around carving people up either. Eh, Emmy?”

“I don't know what you do when you're out of town,” she said distinctly. “And I don't care.”

“I work. That's what I do. I
work
.” The word seemed to stimulate him. He turned to Meecham, suddenly ani­mated: “Right now I'm pushing a new product we got out, a soapless suds. Best thing on the market, Noscrub it's called. I'm in charge of out-of-town advertising.”

“You distribute free samples from door to door,” his wife said, still speaking in the same clear and distinct way, like a teacher correcting the repeated lies of a small boy.

“That's right, build me up. That's great. Funny how you could get so mealy-mouthed over Loftus because he read books instead of doing a man's work. Books and soft talk . . .”

“A man's work. A two-year-old could be taught to de­liver samples from door to door.”

His face purpled and he seemed ready to strike her. He looked, for the first time, decisive, sure of his ground and his rights. But the moment passed. His anger, like his other emotions, was not quite fully developed; it turned against himself so that he was his own victim.

“Wait till the product catches on,” he said. “Just wait.”

“Yes, Jim.”

“I'll be advertising manager, I've got Weber's word for it.”

“Yes, Jim.”

“Yes Jim, yes Jim, yes Jim.” He shook his head, in a new anger and an old despair. “Goddam it, build me up, Emmy. Like a real wife, build me up.”

“The higher you're built the sooner you'll fall.”

“You built
him
up. Earl this, Earl that, Earl you're wonderful.”

“I never said he was wonderful.”

“You did. I heard you.”

“People who spy at doors will hear anything, and what they don't hear they'll make up.”

“I didn't have to spy at doors. It was here, all over the place, right under my nose.” His eyes shifted to Meecham. “How about that, eh? You take a guy into your home, you treat him right, treat him like your own . . .”

“You never said a civil word to him in your life.” She was examining the wallpaper again. “Not a civil word.”

“You said enough for both of us, didn't you? What do you think, I should of shook his hand for making me feel like an old bum?”

“I haven't had a friend since I left school, man or woman, not a friend. That's what Earl is to me, a friend.”

“I've kicked around in my life, and one thing I know, there's no such thing as a man and woman being friends. It's not in the books. It's against nature.”

“Your nature, maybe. Not . . .”

“Anybody's nature!”

“Keep your voice down. The boys might hear you.”

“Let them. Maybe they'll learn a thing or two.”

“If you don't mind,” Meecham said, “I'd better be going.”

Neither of them paid the slightest attention. They were absorbed in each other, like boxers in a ring, each of them intent only on the other's weak spots and unguarded mo­ments.

She had crossed her arms on her chest, as if protecting a vulnerable place. “What are you accusing me of? Say it.”

“I will.”

“Well, go on. Say it in front of Mr. Meecham here. He's a lawyer.”

“Sure, I'll say it. I don't care if he's President Truman.”

“Well, what's stopping you? Go on, go on.”

“He was your lover,” Hearst said. “That piddling little shrimp was your lover.”

“You fool,” she whispered. “You
terrible
fool.” She be­gan to cry, very quietly, her forehead pressing against the wall. Tears fell from her swollen eyes and splattered the greasy lilies of the wallpaper. Her head moved, from one side to another, in misery and denial.

“Emmy?”

“Go away.”

“It's not true then, eh, Emmy?”

“What do you think? A sick man—a dying man—what—do—you—think?”

“I—well . . .”

He looked with pathetic uncertainty at Meecham, like a small boy who had made his mother cry and sought reas­surance that eventually she would stop and everything would be all right again.

“Emmy?” He touched her shoulder tentatively. “I didn't mean nothing, Emmy. You know me, I shoot off at the mouth, sure, but I wouldn't hurt a hair of your head. If you was only honest with me, Emmy. If you was only honest.”

Meecham went out the door with the package under his arm. Neither of them noticed or cared.

Outside, the wind was fresh, but he had a sensation of suffocating heaviness in his throat and chest, as if the slices of life he had seen in the course of the morning were too sharp and fibrous to be swallowed.

12

Highway 12 ran
due west from Arbana to Kincaid, just over fifty miles of straight road through flat country­side. Under better circumstances it might have been an hour drive. But heavy trucks and heavy weather had pocked and dented the road, and beyond Jackson the snow began to fall in huge wet flakes that clung to the windshield like glue. Every few minutes Meecham had to slow down to give the windshield wipers more power and speed.

When he reached Kincaid it was five, and the street lights were on. Here and there a few houses were already decorated for Christmas, with strings of colored lights along the porches, clusters of pine branches and cones attached to the doors. The shops and the streets were crowded, and the crowds looked gay as if freshened by the new snow.

He had no trouble finding Oak Street. It crossed the main highway at a traffic signal in the center of town.

Two Hundred Thirty-one was a two-story, white-brick apartment house in a neighborhood that derived its brash but decaying air from nearby slums. Meecham parked his car and crossed the street with the brown package under his arm. The building itself was well kept, and nailed to the front door there was a Christmas wreath, a red cello­phane bell surrounded by artificial spruce boughs and red wax berries. The snow made the spruce and the berries look quite real.

Inside the small lobby there was a row of locked mail­boxes and on the wall a black arrow pointing to the base­ment, and a sign, Manager's Office. The third mailbox belonged to Loftus' mother: Mrs. C. E. Loftus, Apartment Five.

Meecham walked down the hall. The carpeting was worn but clean, and the air smelled pungently of paint. Someone in the building obviously had a flair for lettering. All over the walls there were elaborately executed instruc­tions:
Apartments One—Five, This way
®®
. No Smoking in Corridors. Keep your Radio Low after Eleven O'Clock Please. No Soliciting. Please Use Night Bell Only When Necessary. Night Bell
®®
.

Number Five had a fire extinguisher fastened to the wall just outside the door. Meecham pressed the buzzer, waited half a minute, and pressed it again, twice. There was no response. He went back to the lobby and down the steps to the basement following the Manager's Office arrow.

A small man past middle age, in a peaked painting cap and splattered overalls, was squatting in a full knee bend outside the door, putting masking tape around the knob. He turned when he heard Meecham's footsteps, turned without rising and without losing his balance even for a moment. His back was straight as a board.

“Yes, sir?”

“Are you the manager?”

“Yes, sir, I am. Victor Garino.”

“I'm looking for Mrs. Loftus. I'm Eric Meecham, a friend of Earl's, her son.”

Garino's eyes behind his rimless spectacles looked misty.

“Oh, you are? Earl's a fine boy. You tried her apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Well, come in, come inside.” He opened the door and Meecham preceded him into a small living room. The room was so crowded with furniture and knickknacks that there was hardly any space to move. In a box beside an electric heater a litter of kittens was mewling, while the mother cat stalked around and around the box with a kind of angry dignity, as if ashamed of the way her children were behaving in front of a stranger.

“You like cats, Mr. Meecham? Yes?”

“Very much.” He had never particularly liked or dis­liked them but the sight of the tiny furry bodies stirred something inside him.

“Yes, I like all animals, but cats, ah, they're quiet and quick, and they earn their keep. We never have any com­plaints about rats,” Garino added proudly. “Never. Sit down, will you? Then I can sit down too. Ah, that's better. You came from Earl, eh? How is he?”

“The same as usual.”

“Ah, yes. Did you . . .? You knocked on her door very loud, did you? Sometimes she's hard of hearing. Also she's a deep sleeper.”

“Also she gets loaded.”

“Yes,” Garino said in a melancholy voice. “She gets loaded very bad. Often's the time I let myself in her apart­ment with my passkey just to see she's not burning the place down or something. She's a problem. She's a nice lady but she's a problem.”

“I can see that.”

“How we found out, Mama and me, was by the inciner­ator. Rum bottles. Empty rum bottles kept coming down the chute all the time making a fine mess. Mama said it must be Mrs. Loftus. No, I said, no, how could it be, such a nice dignified lady drinking all that rum. Mama was right, though.” Garino's eyes were sad as a hound's. “I went up and asked Mrs. Loftus please not to throw rum bottles down the chute. Right away she denied it, acted real shocked. Why, Victor, she said, why, Victor, you know I never touch the stuff. It must be the young couple up­stairs, she said.”

The mother cat had settled down beside Garino on the davenport and was purring in her sleep.

“After that,” Garino said, “there were no more rum bottles in the incinerator. She took them out and threw them somewhere. I often saw her go down the street with a paper bag full of bottles. It looked funny, her such a lady walking down the street to dispose of her
garbage
. Ah, we feel bad, Mama and me. The bottles didn't make such a great mess, we would have just let her keep on using the in­cinerator.”

“Maybe you should.”

“It's too late now. If I went and told her it was all right to use the incinerator she couldn't
pretend
any more, she couldn't have any pride left. That wouldn't be good. Any­way”—Garino spread his hands—”she's not such a terrible bother. Her rent is always paid, Earl sends it to me. And she is quiet. No parties, no company. She keeps to herself. Sometimes when she forgets to eat, Mama takes her up a little plate of something. She's not a common drunkard, you understand. She's a lady who's had one sorrow too many. Some people get strong under sorrows. Other peo­ple, they snap like twigs, they break, it's not their fault.”

“What sorrows?” Meecham said.

“First, they lost their money and then her husband ran away, just left one afternoon while she was at a movie. After that her son went out and got married, left her alone. For nearly a year she was alone and then Earl and his wife came back and they all lived together up in Number Five. That was worse than being alone because there were fights all the time, just words, but loud nasty words, be­tween Earl and his wife, and Earl and his mother, and his mother and his wife. Fighting, fighting, over everything.”

“What was his wife's name?”

“Birdie, they called her. Such a silly name. She wasn't anything like a bird. She was a big woman, older than Earl, and quite pleasant unless you crossed her. . . . She had a terrible temper, just terrible. Maybe everything would have worked out, though, if the three of them didn't have to live together, if there wouldn't've been that jealousy be­tween the two women. As it was, Birdie left town—she'd only been here a month or so—and a little while afterwards Earl got a legal notice that she'd divorced him in some other state, Nevada, I think.”

“When was that?”

“About two years ago. Upped and left just as suddenly as Mr. Loftus had left. After that Earl began to change. No one knew he was sick, he just got quieter and never went out. First we thought it was sadness over Birdie. He was crazy over her, and when she was in a good mood she babied him and fussed over him like a mother. Mrs. Loftus never babied him, being such a baby herself in some ways. Yes, we thought Earl's trouble was lovesick. But he didn't get any better. One day he went to Arbana, he wanted to look up some books in the University Library, he was al­ways book crazy. He never came back here. He wrote his mother, he paid her rent, everything was friendly, but he never came back. Maybe it was true what Mrs. Loftus told me—that he had to stay there for hospital treatments. But we have a hospital here. So . . .” He sighed. “Ah well, I'm getting to be an old gossip. More and more, an old gossip.” He got up from the davenport and then reached down and patted the cat's head as if apologizing for making too abrupt a move. “I'll go and ask Mama if she saw Mrs. Loftus go out.”

When he opened the kitchen door, a rich odor of oil and garlic spilled out, submerging the smell of paint. Meecham went over to the box of kittens and knelt down beside it. They were all asleep now, piled haphazardly on top of one another in a corner. He touched one of them very gently with his forefinger, and immediately the mother cat sauntered over to the box with the casual but alert air of a policeman who doesn't want to start trouble but intends to be around if trouble appears.

Garino returned, followed by a short broad woman in a cotton housedress. She obviously wasn't Italian like her husband. Her hair was light brown, her eyes green, and she had a certain brusqueness of movement and speech that suggested impatience.

Garino started to speak. “Mama said, yes, Mrs. Loftus went out early this morning. To the grocery store, that's what Mama thought, only Mama thought maybe she'd come back again and . . .”

“I can tell it, Victor,” his wife said. “After all, I've got a tongue in my head.” She flashed a glance at Meecham. “I guess Victor told you about her?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there you have it. When she goes out I never know when she'll come home or how she'll come home or if she'll come home. Nobody knows. She doesn't know her­self.” Mrs. Garino crossed her arms on her chest with slightly exaggerated belligerence. “She's been gone all day. You know what that means, Victor.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Remember last time.”

“Yes. Yes, Mama.”

“You'd better go and start looking for her.”

Garino glanced at Meecham with an air of apology. “Usually she stays in her apartment and drinks quietly by herself. But sometimes . . .”

“This is a
sometime
,” his wife said sharply. “You get your coat on, Victor. You find her. We've got other tenants to consider too. Remember last time.”

“What happened last time?” Meecham addressed the question to Garino.

Garino looked down at his hands. “She got in trouble, arrested. After that she was in the hospital for two weeks. She was sick.”

“She had the D. T.'s.” Mrs. Garino's face had gone a little hard. “You hurry up now, Victor.”

“All right, all right.”

“I'll go with you,” Meecham said. “I have to find her anyway.”

The woman turned and gave him a long level stare. “Why?”

“I have something for her.”

“Money?”

“Yes.”

Garino had gone into the next room to get his coat. “She'll blow it all in two days,” his wife said in a low voice. “Victor, in there, he thinks I'm getting sour. Yes, and maybe I am. I've got myself to consider too. All this extra work and worry and none of it doing one sliver of good, sure I'm sour. But Victor . . . Ha, Victor thinks she's a
lady
, and
ladies
don't get to be common ordinary drunks. Ha. Victor's been in this country for twenty years and he still thinks like a Wop, still talks about
ladies
. People are people. Everyone's people.”

Garino stood in the doorway with his hat and coat on and a woolen muffler crossed at his neck. “You talk too much, Mama.” He added, to Meecham, “Scotch women are jealous.”

Mrs. Garino's face was white. “Jealous! Me, jealous!”

“Yes, you are.” Garino went over and kissed her affec­tionately on the forehead. “I'll be back as soon as I can.”

“As if I cared.”

“You could make some fresh coffee and have it ready.”

“I wouldn't make you any coffee for all the money in the world.”

“I'm not offering you money.”

“
Me, jealous. That's funny. That's a scream.”

“Get me a clean handkerchief, will you, Mama?”

She went into the next room, muttering under her breath. When she returned with the handkerchief she didn't hand it to him; she threw it at him from the door­way. He caught it, one-handed, and then he went out the door, smiling. Meecham followed him up the steps and through the lobby and into the street.

Garino was still smiling. “Ah, now, you mustn't be em­barrassed, Mr. Meecham. That wasn't a quarrel. Mama and I have been married for twenty-one years. When I get home there will be fresh coffee on the stove and I will tell Mama I love her and she will admit she's a little jealous.”

“That's all there is to it, eh?”

“Not at first, no. But after twenty-one years we have worked out some short cuts. We have a system.”

“My car's across the road,” Meecham said.

“We could walk. I know some of the places where she goes, only two or three blocks away. But then, maybe you don't like walking?”

“It's all right for women and children.”