Deep Water (30 page)

       He had some more wine with his cigarette and went on chat ting amiably with Trixie, though she was nearly falling asleep in her chair.

       "What're you two celebrating?" Melinda asked, leaning in the doorway between the living room and the dining alcove. "Life," Vic said. "Wine." He lifted the glass.

       Melinda straightened up slowly. She had bitten her lipstick and she had that vagueness of outline that was not so much that her makeup was slipping as that her mind was becoming fuddled. Vic stared at her, wondering if the fuzziness emanated from her eyes, which were always the first indication to him of how much she had drunk. But her eyes stared directly at him now. "What did you say to Tony?" she asked.

       "I didn't see Tony today," Vic said.

       "No?"

       "No."

       "'Tony pony!'" Trixie yelled, giggling.

       Melinda lifted her glass and took a big swallow, making a face afterward. "What did you tell him?" she demanded.

       "Nothing, Melinda."

       "Didn't you see him in Wesley?"

       Vic wondered if Don had happened to see them. "No," he said.

       "What're you so happy about tonight?"

       "Because Tony isn't here!" Trixie squealed.

       "Shut up, Trixie! What did you do to him?" Melinda asked, advancing on Vic.

       "Do to him? I haven't seen him."

       "Where were you all afternoon?"

       "I was at the office," Vic said.

       Melinda went into the kitchen for another drink.

       Trixie drowsed in her chair. Vic moved his chair closer to hers, to catch her if she toppled.

       Melinda came back with a kind of frozen, drunken horror on her face as if she had just seen something terrible in the kitchen, and Vic was about to ask her what had happened, when she said, "Did you kill him? Did you kill him, too?"

       "Melinda, don't be absurd."

       "Tony wouldn't be afraid to call me. Tony wouldn't forget. Tony's not afraid of anything, not even you!"

       "I didn't think he was afraid of me," Vic said."That's obvious."

       "That's why I know he didn't forget!" Melinda said, beginning to sound breathless. "That's why I know something's happened to him! And I'm going to tell 'everybody'—right now!" She set her glass down hard on the table, and at that instant there was a deep, sleepy roll of thunder, and Vic immediately thought that the rain tonight—and he had noticed that it looked like rain since about four o'clock—would wash away the tread marks of his tires, if any, on the dirt road, and a very good rain would help to wash away the bloodstains on the white rocks.

       Melinda was in her room, getting her coat, he supposed. He was not in the least afraid of what she might say to anyone, but he was afraid that something might happen to her if she drove her car in this state. Vic was getting up to go to her room when he saw Trixie lean sideways, and with a swoop of his left arm he caught her and softened the bob of her heavy head. He settled her head on his shoulder and walked to Melinda's room.

       "I don't think you should drive in this condition, Melinda," he said.

       "I've driven in worse. Do you know if the Mellers are in?"

       He gave an involuntary laugh. The Mellers were farther out of the way than the Cowans or the MacPhersons, who were in the direction of Wesley and Ralph and the Wilsons, and so she had asked him the question to save herself a trip. He looked at her as she bent over her dressing table, gathering lipstick and keys, swaying in her cream-colored topcoat, and he suddenly felt that he didn't care what happened to her tonight, because she was going out to denounce him again and it would serve her right to smash herself into a tree or to get stuck in a ditch on a fast turn. Then he thought of the hairpin turn on the hillside halfway between their house and the Mellers'. There was a cliff there, and the road would be slippery tonight. He thought of Cameron's body at the end of its fall, bouncing noiselessly off the final slope and rolling to a dead stillness. "Where do you want to go?" he asked. "I'll drive you."

       "Thanks!" She whirled around and her eyes struggled to find him. She frowned and blinked. "Thanks a lot!" she shouted, the words incongruously sharp and clear.

       Vic was sliding his hand nervously up and down Trixie's soft, overalled thigh. Suddenly he turned and carried Trixie to her room, laid her down gently on her bed, and came back to Melinda's room just in time to collide with her as she was rushing out of the door. The impact staggered them both back, and then Vic lost his head, or perhaps his temper, and the next thing he realized was that he was on top of Melinda on the bed, trying to hold her arms, pinning one arm down but failing to catch the other.

       "You're in no condition to drive!" he shouted.

       Melinda's knee was against his chest, and suddenly it pushed him with an amazing force and he was catapulted backward, nearly somersaulted backward, and he heard an explosive crack in his ears. Then there was some kind of lull, during which he was aware that he was smiling foolishly, and he saw the weave of her gray rug very distinctly for a moment beside his shoe, and realized that he was trying to get himself from one knee onto his feet. He staggered a little and noticed on the gray rug nearly a dozen red dots, heard the upward whine of Melinda's car starting outside, which was peculiarly nauseating, and then he felt his warm blood sliding down the back of his collar.

       He stood up and headed mechanically for the bathroom. The whiteness of his face frightened him so that he stopped looking at it. He felt the wet back of his head, feeling for the wound. It was like a wide, smiling mouth in his hair, and he knew it would need stitches. He debated pouring a whisky before he telephoned for a doctor, versus possibly fainting before he could get the whisky and make the call, stupidly spent about a minute debating, and then went directly to Melinda's telephone.

       He dialed the operator, and asked her to dial Dr. Franklin, then on second thought Dr. Sewell, another Little Wesley doctor, because he didn't want Dr. Franklin to see another domestic crisis involving the Van Allens. Vic had never spoken before to Dr. Sewell, so he introduced himself first.

       "Hello, Dr. Sewell. This is Victor Van Allen on Pendleton Road ... Yes. I'm very fine. How are you?" The pale peach-colored wall in front of Vic was disintegrating, but he kept his voice very steady. "I wondered if you could possibly come out to the house tonight and bring some equipment to do a few stitches?"

Chapter 23

Vic had sometimes wondered what would happen if he, or Horace Meller, someone with fairly regular habits, were suddenly and inexplicably to disappear. He had wondered how soon anybody would become alarmed and just how logically the investigation would be conducted. He was going to have an opportunity to find out in the case of Cameron.

       The morning after he had cut his head, while he was breakfasting with Trixie, the telephone rang and he answered it, but hearing a murmur from Melinda and then a voice say, "Good morning, Mrs. Van Allen. This is Bernard Ferris," he hung up. A few minutes later, Melinda stormed through the dining room on the way to the kitchen for her orange juice.

       "That was Tony's client," she said to Vic. "He says Tony's company's going to make a 'thorough' investigation."

       Vic said nothing. He felt a trifle weak from loss of blood, he thought, or it may have been the sleeping pill the doctor had given him last night that made his head a little fuzzy. He had slept so soundly he had not even heard Melinda conic in.

       "What's the matter?" Trixie asked Vic. She was still round-eyed with surprise at seeing the bandage on his head, though Vic had made light of it and told her that he bumped it in the kitchen.

       "Tony seems to be missing," Vic said.

       "They don't know where he is?"

       "Nope. It looks like they don't."

       Trixie started to smile. "You mean he's hiding somewhere?" "Probably," Vic said.

       "Why?" Trixie asked.

       "I don't know. Can't imagine."

       From Melinda's haste around the house that morning, Vic supposed that she had an appointment with somebody, perhaps Mr. Ferris. He supposed Cameron's company would send a detective up, today or tomorrow. Vic went off to work at the usual time. Stephen and Carlyle and the garbage collector who removed scraps from the printing plant asked Vic about his head, because he was sporting a fat, disk-shaped bandage in the very spot where monks usually have their heads shaved, and Vic told them all that lie had raised up under a metal cabinet door in the kitchen and given himself an awful dig.

       Around five o'clock in the afternoon Melinda arrived with a detective who introduced himself as Pete Havermal from the Star Investigation Bureau in New York. The detective said that a Mr. Grant Houston of Wesley had seen Cameron getting into a car which Vic was driving on the main street of Wesley at some time between eleven and twelve yesterday morning.

       "Yes," Vic said. "That's correct. I ran into Tony after I'd dropped a friend off at the—"

       "What do you mean, you ran into him?" the detective interrupted rudely.

       "I mean that I saw him, coming out of a tobacco store, I think, crossing the street almost in front of my car, and I stopped and said hello to him. I asked him if I could give him a lift anywhere."

       "Why didn't you tell me that last night?" Melinda asked in a loud voice."He told me he hadn't seen Tony all day!" she informed the detective.

       "He said his car was right there:' Vic went on, "but he wanted to talk to me about something, so he got in."

       "Uh-huh. And where did you go?" asked Havermal. "Well—nowhere. We wouldn't have moved at all if we could've stayed there. But I wasn't parked."

       "Where did you go?" the detective repeated, beginning to make notes in a tablet. He was a pudgy yet tough-looking man, pig-eyed, businesslike, somewhere in his early forties. He looked as if he could get rough, if he had to.

       "I think we circled a couple of blocks—to the south-eastward, to be exact." Vic turned to Carlyle, who was standing by the door to the pressroom, listening spellbound, with his spittoon in hands. "This isn't important, Carlyle. You can go," Vic said.

       Carlyle limped back into the pressroom with the spittoon.

       "You went around a couple of blocks," said the detective. "For how long?"

       "Oh, possibly fifteen minutes or so."

       "And then what?"

       "Then I dropped Mr. Cameron back at his car."

       "Oh, really," Melinda said.

       "Did he get into the car?" the detective asked.

       Vic pretended to try to remember. "I can't say, because I don't think I watched him."

       "And what time was this?"

       "I'd say eleven-thirty."

       "And then what did you do?"

       "I drove to Ballinger to hear my daughter sing in a school contest."

       "Uh-huh. What time was that?"

       "Just before twelve. The contest started at twelve."

       "Were you there, Mrs. Van Allen?"

       "No," Melinda said.

       "See anybody you knew at the school contest?" asked the detective, squinting at him out of one pig eye.

       "No ... Oh, yes, the Petersons. We chatted a little bit." "Petersons," Havermal said, writing. "And what time was that?"

       Vic was tired of it. He gave a laugh. "I just don't know—exactly Maybe the Petersons would know"

       "Um-m. And what did Cameron want to talk to you about?"

       Vic again pretended to try to think. "He asked me—Oh, yes, whether I thought there was going to be more building around Ballinger or around Wesley in the next few years. I told him I honestly couldn't say. There hadn't been much lately"

       "What else did he talk about?"

       "You're wasting your time!" Melinda put in to Havermal.

       "I don't know. He seemed a little nervous to me, a little ill at ease. He said something about starting his own contracting business around here because he liked the country. He wasn't very definite."

       Melinda snorted with disbelief. "I never heard him say anything about starting a business up here."

       "How did he seem nervous?" Havermal asked. "Did he tell you why he was nervous or mention anything he was going to do that day?"

       "I'll tell you one thing he was going to do, Mr. Havermal," Vic began, deliberately letting his anger show. "He was going to meet my wife, who was going to start divorce proceedings against me for the purpose of marrying Mr. Cameron. They had airplane tickets for Mexico City. You look as if you hadn't heard that. Didn't my wife tell you? Or did she just tell you that I killed Mr. Cameron?"

       It was easy to see from the detective's expression that Melinda hadn't told him anything about a divorce. Havermal looked from one to the other of them. "Is that true, Mrs. Van Allen?"

       "Yes, that's true," she said, sullenly emphatic.

       "I don't think there's any need to ask me or anybody else why Mr. Cameron was ill at ease with me," Vic went on. "The wonder is that he could have asked my opinion about his business plans or got in my car at all."

       "Or that you would have asked to give him a lift," the detective said.

       Vic sighed. "I try to be polite—most of the time. Mr. Cameron has been a frequent guest at our house, you know. Perhaps my wife told you that. If you want to know why I denied having seen Cameron Monday, it was because I was sick of him, and because he'd stood my wife up on a date they'd had that evening, and she was upset and on the way to being drunk. I didn't want to discuss Cameron with her. I think you can understand."

       Havermal looked at Melinda. "You say you've known Cameron about a month?"

       "About," Melinda said.

       "And you intended to marry him?" Havermal was looking at her as if he had begun to doubt her sanity.