Vanish in an Instant (16 page)

His face was not discolored, and though his mouth was slightly open, his tongue didn't protrude. He looked quite tranquil, as if the long night that he'd been dreading had turned out well and the dreams it held were pleasant. Its shadows were without terror, and its streets were the same strange streets that Birdie had walked along.

“I hears you, white boy, I hears you talkin and whisperin. You get down on your knees and ask the sweet Jesus to loose the devil in you standin in there whisperin and laughin bout a poor old nigger's insides.”

Gill wheeled around suddenly and screamed toward the open door: “Shut up! Shut up, I tell you!”

“Whisperin and laughin . . .”

“Shut up, goddam it!”

“Cursin and yellin and whisperin . . .”

“I'll come in and brain you, goddam it!”

“Threatenin, threatenin a poor old man that's full of sins and lice and gonna have his hair cut off. Get down on your knees, white boy, and ask for the devil to loose you.”

Gill stood with his fists pressed against his ribs, the color draining out of his knuckles. “All right, Billings,” he said at last. “I got down and the devil loosed me.”

“Sing Hallelujah.”

“Hallelujah,” Gill said, with the tears streaming down his face. “Hallelujah.”

17

The street
was
still five stories down, but the sky seemed closer than it had during the morning. Now at twi­light it pressed against the window of Meecham's office, a shapeless changing mass, the color of bruised flesh.

Mrs. Christy was gone for the day, and the telephone was ringing. There was a typewritten note propped against the lamp on Meecham's desk and he read it before he reached for the phone.

“E.J.M: Following calls came in. 11:35 Cordwink. 12:10 Mrs. Hamilton, no message. 1:15 Mr. Geo. Loesser, will call back. 1:40 Checker Cab, motion for new trial denied. 3:10 Miss McDaniels can't find her copy of will. 3:15 Sweeney Dry Cleaners, rug shrinkage unavoidable and refuse to settle. 3:45 Mrs. Alistair re trust deed. 4:05 Mr. Loesser, call him at 5-5988 before six. 4:33 Mr. Post won't be in tomorrow. L. E. Christy.”

He picked up the phone. “Hello, Meecham speaking.”

“This is George Loesser, Mr. Meecham. I may be wrong, but I think we met a year or so ago at a convention in Chi­cago.” Loesser spoke in a thin nervous voice with a slight New England accent. “Does that ring a bell?”

“It could,” Meecham said. He hadn't been to a conven­tion for ten years. “Bring me up to date a little.”

“Absolutely. Well, right now I'm with a Detroit firm, Lewenstein, Adler and Birch. The reason I'm in town is that I had to meet a client at the airport this morning and then I drove her over here. My client happens to be very interested in seeing you.”

“As a lawyer?”

“Not at all,” Loesser said sharply. “My firm handles all her affairs. This is quite a different matter, a personal one. She would like to talk to you because the Sheriff men­tioned your name in connection with Virginia Barkeley. You were looking after Mrs. Barkeley's interests, weren't you?”

“For a time.”

“My client is Lily Margolis.”

“Oh.”

“As you may know, she was in Lima visiting her sister at the time of Mr. Margolis' death.”

“I knew that, yes.”

“She returned as soon as she could. She's been with the Sheriff this morning and part of the afternoon. She hadn't anything much to tell him, of course. It was just a formality.”

“If she's seen Cordwink, why does she want to see me?”

“Frankly, I don't know.” Loesser sounded sincerely puz­zled. “Curiosity, probably. Cordwink didn't tell her a great deal, and you know women, they like details, never get sick of details. That's understandable, of course, in Lily's case. She's never come up against anything like this be­fore. She's led a very sheltered life, you might say, and this business has been a great shock to her emotionally, mainly because of the children. Naturally I've done my best to keep her and the children out of the papers.”

“I knew someone had.” Loesser had been successful too. No photograph or snapshot of either Lily Margolis or her children had appeared in any newspaper, and very few facts about her personal life had been mentioned. It was possible, though, that there were very few facts to men­tion, that Lily Margolis was one of those dull and virtuous women who had no interests outside of her children and the mechanical operations of her home. Meecham had met a great many such women, and sometimes their dullness, and often their virtue, was a surface covering, a thin sheet of ice over a running river, dangerous to cross.

“My own feeling about the matter,” Loesser said, “is that it would be better to forget it. In fact, I'm phoning you now under protest. I didn't want to, and I don't think any­thing will be gained by mulling over the sordid details. But Lily wants it that way. If you come and talk to her you'll be reimbursed for your time, of course.”

“You realize that the case is settled.”

“Of course. Since the young man killed himself this morning . . .”

“How did you find that out?”

“Strangely enough, Lily was in the Sheriff's office when the message was phoned in. She couldn't help overhear­ing.” Loesser coughed, but it was more of a nervous man­nerism than a real cough. “I understand you were a friend of the young man?”

“I knew him.”

“It's a sad affair all around, but especially for Lily and the two children. Fortunately, they're well provided for. One of the few sensible things Margolis did in his lifetime was to take out enough insurance.”

“Double indemnity has healed a lot of broken hearts.”

“It helps, and why not?” Loesser said defensively.

“Why not, indeed.” Meecham looked at the clock on his desk: 5:10. “I'll be glad to see Mrs. Margolis. When?”

“How about tonight after dinner? Or right away, if you'd prefer.”

“That would be better.”

“I'm at Lily's house now. Do you know where Lancaster Drive is, near the golf course?”

“Yes.”

“It's 1206, a white-and-green colonial house. You can't miss it. The kids have spent all afternoon building a couple of snowmen at the driveway entrance.”

“I'll be there in twenty minutes.”

The floodlight was on at the entrance gate, and the snow figures stood like sepulchers, one on each side. Loesser had made a mistake about them, though. They weren't snowmen. One of them was a lady, with a pink ruffled apron tied around her lumpy waist and a bandana covering her head to hide its baldness. One of her char­coal eyes had fallen out of its melting socket. She had a witch's nose made out of a carrot and a moist beet-mouth, and stuck in her chest was a long dripping icicle that gleamed in the light like a stiletto with a jeweled handle. The snow lady seemed to be aware of the wound: her blurred beet-mouth was anguished, and her single eye stared helplessly into the night.

Meecham pressed hard on the accelerator and the wheels of the car spun for a moment in the slush and then took hold. The driveway was on a steep grade and it hadn't been shoveled. Neither had the steps of the house, or the wide pillared veranda. There were sounds of dripping everywhere, as in a greenhouse.

Nearly every window was lighted and wide open, as if the rooms were being aired after a period of disease.

Loesser answered the door himself. In contrast to his thin nervous voice over the phone, he was a heavy-set moon-faced man in his forties, with a smile that flashed off and on with the precision of a traffic signal. He had court­room manners and a way of talking to a person without looking at him, as if he was really aiming his words at an unseen and very critical jury.

“Good of you to come, Meecham.” The two men shook hands. “Let me take your coat. The maid's upstairs with the kids.”

He took Meecham's coat and hung it in a small closet that opened off the foyer. Meecham noticed that the closet was empty except for a pair of child's rubber boots.

“Lily hasn't had time to unpack or get organized,” Loesser said. “I'm her cousin, by the way, in case you were wondering how I come in on all this.”

“I wasn't wondering very hard.”

“No? Well, I thought you might. The fact is”—he tugged at his tie—”the fact of the matter is that I've stood by Lily all during this unfortunate marriage of hers.”

It was the sort of remark that demanded an answer of some kind:
Oh? How interesting. Is that a fact? Good for you, old boy. Stout fellow.
Meecham merely made an in­determinate noise.

“Well, Lily's waiting in the den,” Loesser said. “It's the only room in the house that doesn't smell of moth crystals. The place has been closed up, you know.”

The den wasn't what Meecham expected from its name, a book-and-pipe sanctuary for a man. It turned out to be a small room on the southeast corner of the house, equipped for activity, not rest. There was a sewing machine, a draw­ing board, a small hand-loom, a dressmaker's dummy, and a long unpainted wooden table filled with children's toys. The pine walls were covered with children's art, sketches and watercolors and fingerpaintings, some of them hanging from the molding in frames, and some of them fastened loosely to the wall with thumbtacks. The pictures were all signed, most of them right across the middle, Ann M. or Georgie.

Activity had given the room an air of pleasant untidi­ness. But there was nothing untidy about Lily Margolis. She was a slim muscular young woman in a tweed suit with flecks of blue in it that exactly matched the color of her eyes. Her brown hair was clipped short in rows of curls, and the curls were so uniform that it seemed as though she had weighed and measured each of them before letting herself be seen in public. Her face was deeply sunburned, so that her eyes looked very bright and clear in contrast, and her teeth very white. Her features were plain, but the carefully chosen tweed suit, and the carefully acquired sun­burn, gave her quite a striking appearance.

She repeated the words Loesser had used, but her New England accent was stronger than his, as if she had retained it deliberately to show her contempt for the Middle West.

“It was very good of you to come, Mr. Meecham. Please sit down, won't you? And George, would you mind awfully bringing us a drink?”

Loesser got up obediently, but he looked slightly pained and he turned at the doorway to give Mrs. Margolis a don't-say-anything-interesting-while-I'm-gone glance.

Lily Margolis returned to the wooden bench by the drawing board where she'd been sitting before she rose to greet Meecham. She sat, stiff and erect, her feet planted squarely on the floor, her large competent-looking hands crossed on her knees. “You see, Mr. Meecham, I don't know quite what happened, or why. Everything is fuzzy and confused. It's like trying to understand someone else's nightmare.”

Someone else's, Meecham noted, not her own. The state­ment fitted in with his previous conception of her; she seemed to have the occupational schizophrenia of the per­fect secretary, a self-effacing manner combined with a posi­tive knowledge of her own superiority.
Yes, boss
on the one hand, and
silly boy
on the other. Perhaps not exactly the perfect wife.

She leaned forward slightly toward Meecham, but with­out bending her back. “I had taken the children down to Lima to spend Christmas with my sister—her husband is a mining engineer. I was only there two weeks when the mes­sage came that Claude had had an accident. Rather delicate
wording, don't you think, for what really happened.”

“You're weathering the shock very well,” Meecham said.

“When you've had as many shocks as I've had in eight years, one more hardly matters. I'm a little punchy by this time, like an old fighter.” She smiled, without bitterness, without feeling of any kind. “I've had so much uncertainty. Now at least things are settled. I don't have to wonder where Claude is or what he's doing. I don't have to try and decide whether to divorce him for the sake of the children, or not to divorce him for the sake of the children. Fate stepped in and like a referee stopped the fight. I'm not sorry and I won't pretend that I'm sorry. Claude was a ter­rible fool. Only a terrible fool would . . .”

She stopped but the idea was clear: only a terrible fool would get murdered. And, in a sense, Meecham agreed; the victim, like the murderer, had a certain choice of fate, a se­lection of circumstances.

Loesser returned with a pitcher of martinis. He poured a drink for Meecham and one for himself.

“You'll excuse me, Mr. Meecham,” Lily Margolis said. “I don't drink.”

“It makes her sick,” Loesser explained. “Well, here's how.”

“It doesn't make me sick in the least, George. I wish you wouldn't keep telling that to everyone.”

“Well, it does make you sick. I've . . .”

“George
dear
, what will Mr. Meecham think of us, in­dulging in a silly family squabble like this?”

Loesser gazed with a stony little smile at the wall behind her head:
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that the witness is lying, that the effect of alcohol on her system is highly deleterious, and, in fact, it makes her sick.

Meecham shifted restlessly in his chair. There was a bowl of russet apples on the table in front of him and the sight and smell of them started a hungry gnawing in his stomach. He felt like a man who had come to a banquet as guest speaker and then found himself lost in the shuffle of preliminaries and introductions while the food got cold. So far Mrs. Margolis hadn't asked a single question about her husband's death, and Meecham was almost certain now that she didn't intend to, that he had been invited to the house not to talk but to listen.

“George, there's no point in your staying here,” Mrs. Margolis said suddenly. “You have a long drive ahead of you and you know how Marion hates anyone to be late for dinner.”

Loesser cleared his throat. “It's my duty to stay. This is a family matter.”

“Are you afraid I'll say the wrong thing?”

“Well, no. Not really.”

Mrs. Margolis laughed and said to Meecham, “He is. He's afraid I'll make a slanderous remark about Virginia. I will, too.”