Vanish in an Instant (12 page)

They crossed the street and got into Meecham's car.

13

At half-past
eight they were still searching, and Garino was getting hungry and beginning to worry about what his wife would say when he got home.

“Always before, I've found her,” Garino said. “She doesn't go from place to place, a drink here, a drink there, like some people. She's shy of strangers. There are only two or three little bars that she ever goes to.”

The two or three little bars had expanded into twenty, of all sizes. No one had seen, or admitted having seen, Mrs. Loftus.

Making a sudden decision, Meecham swung the car around in a U-turn at the next corner. “I'll take you home, Garino.”

“No, no. Mama said, find her. I've got to . . .”

“There's no point in both of us wasting time and this is my job, not yours,” Meecham said. The fact was, that al­though he enjoyed Garino's company, Garino slowed him down; he seemed to know everyone in town and he stopped to chat, shake hands, inquire after wives and children, like a politician touring the city, not forgetting the details in spite of more important issues in his mind. Meecham's im­patience had spread from the weather and the ugly little city to the Garinos and to Mrs. Loftus herself. She was a pathetic figure, but her very pathos was a burden and a nuisance. He wished he had never heard of her.

“This is my job,” he repeated. “You've done what you could, Garino.”

“Little enough,” Garino said gloomily. “I don't know where else. She has no friends anymore.”

“I'll take you home.”

“To tell the truth, I have a stomach-ache. Yes, and the cats. . . I have to look after the cats. And the furnace too, suppose it needs shaking down and Mama can't shake it down right, and the complaints start coming in, no heat, no hot water . . .”

His voice trailed away. Meecham turned left, in the di­rection of Oak Street, while Garino sat, stiff and uncom­fortable, his back barely touching the back of the seat, as if he was unaccustomed to driving in cars and wasn't sure what disaster the next corner would bring.

“Do you think you'll find her?” Garino said.

“Yes.”

“Then what? Then you bring her home, she goes to sleep, and in the morning it starts all over again. One day is like another. Sometimes,” he said soberly, “sometimes I think, ah, the hell with everything.”

Meecham stopped the car in front of the white-brick apartment building. He could see Mrs. Garino peering out of the window of the basement apartment. She had her face right up against the glass with both hands cupped around her eyes to shut out the kitchen light behind her. When she saw the car, and Garino getting out, she ducked her head in guilty haste.

“I hope you find her soon,” Garino said nervously.

“I hope so.”

“I will wait up, to see things are all right. Where will you go?”

“I'm not sure,” Meecham said. He was almost sure, though. Pulling away from the curb he tried to recall Loftus' words about his mother: “
She may want to come, she may have everything arranged, even get as far as the bus depot . . .
”

The depot was on a little side street toward the west side of town. Half of the small waiting room was taken up by rows of benches and the other half by a newsstand and a lunch counter. A bus had just left, or was loaded and ready to leave, because the benches were empty except for a man with a little girl about ten. Both the man and the little girl were completely absorbed in comic books.

Meecham sat down at the lunch counter and ordered coffee. There was only one other customer, an intense- looking, pimply young man in a bus-driver's uniform.

“I've got a few minutes yet,” the driver said. “Give me another cherry coke, Charley.”

“The way you guzzle that stuff, it's coating the insides of your stomach.” Charley put the drink on the counter and wiped his hands on his apron. He was a big burly man with a round face and a worried little smile. “I heard on the radio, more snow coming.”

“Snow don't bother me. It's the people asking questions and craning their necks all over the place trying to drive the bus.”

“Say, did the old lady get on all right?”

“I didn't see any old lady.”

“She bought a ticket. Maybe she's in the rest room and didn't hear the announcement. You better go and check, Roy.”

“Listen, Charley, I drive a bus, I don't run no old-ladies' home. You want to check, check.”

“Jesus, no one moves a muscle around this place except­ing me.”

Charley took off his apron and chef's hat and went to­ward the rest room. Meecham got up and followed him.

“I heard you talking,” Meecham said. “About an old lady.”

Charley paused at the door of the rest room, his hand on the knob. “So?”

“I'm looking for the mother of a friend of mine, woman in her late sixties, white hair, nice-looking, refined.”

“Could be her. Myself, I don't pay much attention to old ladies.”

Charley glanced around carefully to see that no one else had come in, and that the man and the little girl weren't watching, before he opened the door of the rest room.

It was a small square box of a room equipped with a chair and a moth-eaten couch, and smelling heavily of wet paper towels and disinfectant.

She was lying on her back on the couch with her eyes closed, a tiny woman, thin to the point of atrophy. Her face had the same look of fragility and innocence as her son's: high cheekbones with shadowed hollows underneath, wide serene forehead, and brown lashes thick and straight as bristles. She was dressed for a winter day in a black cloth coat with a lamb collar and high velvet carriage boots trimmed with black-dyed rabbit fur. Where the boots touched the calves of her withered legs, the fur was entirely rubbed away. At the foot of the couch, on the floor, was a paper bag and a stained and battered calfskin purse with a chain handle.

“I never been in here before,” Charley said with in­terest. “I guess women don't write on walls.”

“Mrs. Loftus,” Meecham said.

Her breathing paused at the mention of her name, just for a fraction of a second, and then it went on as before, heavy and uneven. Her hands were at her sides, palms up, in a supplicating way, as if she was asking for some­thing, money, help, mercy, love, or just another drink. She wore short kid gloves, and protruding from the wrist of the right glove was her bus ticket. She had put it, not in her purse as a grown woman would, but in her glove for safe­keeping. It reminded Meecham of the Sunday School col­lection nickels he had carried when he was a boy, in the thumb of his mitten or the toe of his shoe; the uncom­fortable but wonderfully virtuous feeling of that nickel-for-the-Lord in his shoe. The old lady and the old memory pierced him like unexpected arrows from a long bow.

“Hey, lady,” Charley said. “Wake up. Your bus is leav­ing.”

She moved her head to one side and her hat slipped to the floor, exposing her white silky hair, a little yellowed in places from neglect and curling tongs. Charley bent down to pick up the hat, but he didn't reach it. He straight­ened up with a grunt of surprise. “Hell, she's drunk. Catch that breath, will you? She's kayoed.”

The bus driver, too, had come into the room. He stared down at the woman with his pale lips pressed together in disapproval. “It's a fine thing, isn't it, having people like that hanging around our depot.”

“Come on, lady. Wake up now.”

“You can just save your breath, Charley. I wouldn't
dream
of taking her on
my
bus, not if she's got thirty tickets.”

“Oh, shut up. Give the old girl a break. She's somebody's mother.”

“Just so long as she ain't mine,” the driver said. “Per­sonally, I've got a good mind to call the police. They know how to deal with people like that.”

Charley's face hardened. “Call the police and I'll clobber you. Now get out of here.”

“You can't order . . .”

“Turn blue. Just turn blue.”

The driver backed out of the room, still talking, but inaudibly, under his breath.

“That stinking lily,” Charley said. “I ought to poke him, but I don't want to bust my knuckles.”

Meecham was bending over Mrs. Loftus. He had taken off her gloves and was rubbing her small bony hands. The skin felt very dry and cold like a leaf in autumn.

“Mrs. Loftus. Can you hear me?”

She stirred a little, and spoke a name without opening her eyes. “Victor?”

“I'm taking you home, Mrs. Loftus.”

She didn't answer.

“Maybe if I opened the window,” Charley said, “she'd snap out of it sooner.”

“Good idea.”

Charley went over and pushed up the window over the washbasin. Fresh snow from the sill sifted into the room like a flight of furry white-winged insects coming to rest. “I never figured she was drunk, see. She's been in a couple of times today and I thought first she was waiting for someone and didn't know what bus to meet. Then, about an hour ago, she comes in the third time, buys a ticket for Arbana and sits down to wait. I kept an eye on her because she looked sick and she acted sick; kept coming in here to the rest room and coming out again. I never for a minute figured she was getting herself hootched.”

Meecham picked up the paper bag from the floor and looked inside. It contained a half-empty fifth of cheap rum. He twisted the bag shut again and dropped it into the metal trash container.

“I don't want to hurry you, mister,” Charley said. “Noth­ing like that. Only if she's the mother of a friend of yours like you said, maybe you ought to phone your friend.”

“He's out of town. I'll take her home myself.”

“I don't want to hurry you, I know you're in a spot. Only there's a little kid out there with her father. You know kids, they're always running to the can. Suppose she comes in here and sees the old lady, it might scare her.”

Meecham recalled the gruesome cover of the comic book the little girl had been reading, but he said agreeably, “Yes, it might. I'll do my best.”

He looked down again at Mrs. Loftus, helpless in her coma of rum and ruin. He wondered if this was how Virginia was on the night Margolis was killed, and if Loftus, watching her, had unconsciously identified her with his mother, had attacked Margolis as the father-rival-invader. It seemed to Meecham that this idea made the murder of Margolis more plausible, that it synthesized the rather vague and philosophical motives Loftus had given into something stronger and closer to the heart. Loftus was a passive man, a man of ideas. For him to become the ag­gressor, to commit so positive and final an act as murder, must have required a positive motive: not money, as Cord­wink believed, and not the childishly rationalized notion of ridding the world of a nuisance; but hate, the obverse of fear, and rage, the obverse of impotence.

“Victor?” Mrs. Loftus said again. She had opened her eyes and was staring up at the ceiling, at one particular spot, as if she realized that she was in a strange place and was afraid to look around and find out where.

“Victor isn't here,” Meecham said. “He's waiting for you at home. I'll take you there.”

“I'm in the hospital?”

“No, in the bus depot.”

“Bus?
Bus
.” She struggled to get up, lost her balance and sat down heavily on the couch again. “My bus ticket. Where's my bus ticket? Got to see Earl. Got to see my boy.”

Meecham put his hand on her arm to steady her; it felt as fleshless as a broom handle. “The bus has gone, Mrs. Loftus. Besides, you're not well enough to go on a trip by yourself.”

“I'm not well.” Her pale round eyes took on a crafty ex­pression. “I'm ill, aren't I?”

“Yes.”

“I had a fainting spell. I remember now. I felt quite faint, so I just lay down and had a little rest until the feeling passed. That's reasonable, isn't it?”

“Of course.”

“You be sure and tell Victor that. Victor's beginning to get some very odd ideas.” She picked up her purse from the floor, hanging on to Meecham's coat sleeve to balance her­self when she leaned over. “Where is my luggage?”

“I haven't seen it,” Meecham said. “Perhaps you checked . . .”

“I had my luggage with me. In a paper bag. I couldn't find my suitcase so I packed a few little things in a paper bag.” She had begun to tremble violently, all over her body. Her knees shook, and her mouth and hands and shoulders, and her head kept moving back and forth as if her neck was too feeble to hold it up and it was just balanc­ing there precariously like a ball on the nose of a seal. “It wasn't much, my toothbrush and towel and a few little things like that. But it's a matter of principle. I want my luggage. I want my luggage.” She looked up at Charley. “You. Are you the attendant?”

“Me?” Charley said. “Oh, sure.”