Highsmith, Patricia (12 page)

“Do you know anyone who might have wanted Mrs. Hames to die?”

“Yes.” Markman pointed at Guy. “Him.”

People turned to look at him. Guy sat tensely, frowning straight at Markman, for the first time really suspecting Markman.

“Why?”

Owen Markman hesitated a long while, mumbled something, then brought out one word: “Jealousy.”

Markman could not give a single credible reason for jealousy, but after that accusations of jealousy came from all sides. Even Katherine Smith said, “I guess so,”

Guy’s lawyer chuckled. He had the affidavits from the Faulkners in his hand. Guy hated the chuckle. He had always hated legal procedure. It was like a vicious game in which the objective seemed not to disclose the truth but to enable one lawyer to tilt at another, and unseat him on a technicality.

“You gave up an important commission—” the coroner began.

“I did not give it up,” Guy said. “I wrote them before I had the commission, saying I didn’t want it.”

“You telegraphed. Because you didn’t want your wife to follow you there. But when you learned in Mexico that your wife had lost her child, you sent another telegram to Palm Beach that you wished to be considered for the commission. Why?”

“Because I didn’t believe she’d follow me there then. I suspected she’d want to delay the divorce indefinitely. But I intended to see her—this week to discuss the divorce.” Guy wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and saw his lawyer purse his lips ruefully. His lawyer hadn’t wanted him to mention the divorce in connection with his change of mind about the commission. Guy didn’t care. It was the truth, and they could make of it what they wished.

“In your opinion was her husband capable of arranging for such a murder, Mrs. Joyce?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Joyce with the faintest quiver, her head high. The shrewd dark red lashes were almost closed, as Guy had so often seen them, so that one never knew where her eyes rested. “He wanted his divorce.”

There was an objection that Mrs. Joyce had said a few moments before that her daughter wanted the divorce and Guy Haines did not because he still loved her. “If both wanted a divorce, and it has been proven Mr. Haines did, why wasn’t there a divorce?”

The court was amused. The fingerprint experts could not come to agreement on their classifications. A hardware dealer, into whose store Miriam had come the day before her death, got tangled up as to whether her companion had been male or female, and more laughter camouflaged the fact he had been instructed to say a man. Guy’s lawyer harangued on geographical fact, the inconsistencies of the Joyce family, the affidavits in his hand, but Guy was sure that his own straightforwardness alone had absolved him from any suspicion.

The coroner suggested in his summation that the murder would seem to have been committed by a maniac unknown to the victim and the other parties. A verdict was brought in of “person or persons unknown,” and the case was turned over to the police.

A telegram arrived the next day, just as Guy was leaving his mother’s house: ALL GOOD WISHES FROM THE GOLDEN WEST UNSIGNED “From the Faulkners,” he said quickly to his mother. She smiled. “Tell Anne to take good care of my boy.” She pulled him down gently by his ear and kissed his cheek.

Bruno’s telegram was still wadded in his hand when he got to the airport. He tore it into tiny bits and dropped them into a wire trashbasket at the edge of the field. Every one of the pieces blew through the wire and went dancing out across the asphalt, gay as confetti in the windy sunlight.

Sixteen

Guy struggled to find a definite answer about Bruno—had he or hadn’t he?—and then gave it up. There was too much incredible in the possibility that Bruno had done it. What weight did the Metcalf taxi company’s card have? It would be like Bruno to find such a card in Santa Fe and mail it on to him. If it were not the act of a maniac, as the coroner and everyone else believed, wasn’t it far more likely that Owen Markman had arranged it?

He closed his mind to Metcalf, to Miriam, and to Bruno, and concentrated on the work for Palm Beach which, he saw from the first day, would demand all that he had in diplomacy, technical knowledge, and sheer physical strength. Except for Anne, he closed his mind to all his past that, for all his idealistic aims and the fighting for them, and the small success he had known, seemed miserable and grubbing compared to the magnificent main building of the country club. And the more he immersed himself in the new effort, the more he felt recreated also in a different and more perfect form.

Photographers from newspapers and news magazines took pictures of the main building, the swimming pool, the bathhouses, and the terracing in the early stages of construction. Members of the club were also photographed inspecting the grounds, and Guy knew that below their pictures would be printed the amount of money each had donated to the cause of princely recreation. Sometimes he wondered if part of his enthusiasm might be due to a consciousness of the money behind the project, to the lavishness of space and materials he had to work with, to the flattery of the wealthy people who continually invited him to their homes. Guy never accepted their invitations. He knew he might be losing himself the small commissions he would need next winter, but he also knew he could never force himself to the social responsibilities that most architects assumed as a matter of course. Evenings when he did not want to be alone, he caught a bus to Clarence Brillhart’s house a few miles away, and they had dinner together, listened to phonograph records, and talked. Clarence Brillhart, the Palmyra Club manager, was a retired broker, a tall, white-haired old gentleman whom Guy often thought he would have liked as a father. Guy admired most of all his air of leisure, as imperturbable on the bustling, hectic construction grounds as in his own home. Guy hoped he might be like him in his own old age. But he felt he moved too fast, had always moved too fast. There was inevitably, he felt, a lack of dignity in moving fast.

Most evenings Guy read, wrote long letters to Anne, or merely went to bed, for he was always up by five and often worked all day with a blowtorch or mortar and trowel. He knew almost all the workmen by name. He liked to judge the temperament of each man, and to know how it contributed or did not contribute to the spirit of his buildings. “It is like directing a symphony,” he wrote to Anne. In the dusks, when he sat smoking his pipe in a thicket of the golf course, gazing down on the four white buildings, he felt that the Palmyra project was going to be perfect. He knew it when he saw the first horizontals laid across the spaced marble uprights of the main building. The Pittsburgh store had been marred at the last moment by the client’s change of mind about the window area. The hospital annex in Chicago had been ruined, Guy thought, by the cornice that was of darker stone than he had intended. But Brillhart permitted no interference, the Palmyra was going to be as perfect as his original conception, and Guy had never created anything before that he felt would be perfect.

In August, he went North to see Anne. She was working in the design department of a textile company in Manhattan. In the fall, she planned to go into partnership in a shop with another woman designer she had met. Neither of them mentioned Miriam until the fourth and last day of Guy’s visit. They were standing by the brook behind Anne’s house, in their last few minutes together before Anne drove him to the airport.

“Do you think it was Markman, Guy?” Anne asked him suddenly. And when Guy nodded: “It’s terrible—but I’m almost sure.”

Then one evening when he returned from Brillhart’s house to the furnished room where he lived, a letter from Bruno awaited him with one from Anne. The letter was from Los Angeles, forwarded by his mother from Metcalf. It congratulated him on his work in Palm Beach, wished him success, and begged for just a word from him. The P. S. said: Hope you are not annoyed at this letter. Have written many letters and not mailed them. Phoned your mother for your address, but she wouldn’t give it to me. Guy, honestly there is nothing to worry about or I wouldn’t have written. Don’t you know I’d be the first one to be careful? Write soon. I may go to Haiti soon. Again your friend and admirer. C. A. B.

A slow ache fell through him to his feet. He could not bear to be alone in his room. He went out to a bar, and almost before he knew what he was doing, had two ryes and then a third. In the mirror behind the bar, he saw himself glance at his sunburnt face, and it struck him that his eyes looked dishonest and furtive. Bruno had done it. It came thundering down with a weight that left no possibility of doubt any longer, like a cataclysm that only a madman’s unreason could have kept suspended all this while. He glanced about in the little bar as if he expected the walls to topple down on him. Bruno had done it. There was no mistaking Bruno’s personal pride in his, Guy’s, freedom now. Or the P. S. Or possibly even the trip to Haiti. But what did Bruno mean? Guy scowled at the face in the mirror and dropped his eyes, looked down at his hands, the front of his tweed jacket, his flannel trousers, and it flashed through his mind he had put these clothes on this morning as a certain person and that he would take them off tonight as another person, the person he would be from now on. He knew now. This was an instant—He could not say just what was happening, but he felt his entire life would be different, must be different, from now on.

If he knew Bruno had done it, why didn’t he turn him in? What did he feel about Bruno besides hatred and disgust? Was he afraid? Guy didn’t clearly know.

He resisted an impulse to telephone Anne until it was too late, and finally, at three in the morning, could resist no longer. Lying on his bed in the darkness, he talked to her very calmly, about commonplace matters, and once he even laughed. Even Anne did not notice anything wrong, he thought when he had hung up. He felt somehow slighted, and vaguely alarmed.

His mother wrote that the man who had called while he was in Mexico, and said his name was Phil, had called again to ask how he might reach him. She was worried that it might have something to do with Miriam, and wondered if she should tell the police.

Guy wrote back to her: “I found out who the annoying telephoner was. Phil Johnson, a fellow I knew in Chicago.”

Seventeen

“Charley, what’re all these clippings?”

“Friend of mine, Ma!” Bruno shouted through the bathroom door. He turned the water on harder, leaned on the basin, and concentrated on the bright nickel-plated drainstop. After a moment, he reached for the Scotch bottle he kept under towels in the clothes hamper. He felt less shaky with the glass of Scotch and water in his hand, and spent a few seconds inspecting the silver braid on the sleeve of his new smoking jacket. He liked the jacket so much, he wore it as a bathrobe also. In the mirror, the oval lapels framed the portrait of a young man of leisure, of reckless and mysterious adventure, a young man of humor and depth, power and gentleness (witness the glass held delicately between thumb and forefinger with the air of an imperial toast)—a young man with two lives. He drank to himself.

“Charley?”

“Minute, Mom!”

He cast a wild eye about the bathroom. There was no window. Lately it happened about twice a week. Half an hour or so after he got up, he felt as if someone were kneeling on his chest and stifling him. He closed his eyes and dragged air in and out of his lungs as fast as he could. Then the liquor took. It bedded his leaping nerves like a hand passing down his body. He straightened and opened the door.

“Shaving,” he said.

His mother was in tennis shorts and a halter, bending over his unmade bed where the clippings were strewn. “Who was she?”

“Wife of a fellow I met on the train coming down from New York. Guy Haines.” Bruno smiled. He liked to say Guy’s name. “Interesting, isn’t it? They haven’t caught the murderer yet.”

“Probably a maniac,” she sighed.

Bruno’s face sobered. “Oh, I doubt it. Circumstances are too complicated.”

Elsie stood up and slid her thumb inside her belt. The bulge just below her belt disappeared, and for a moment she looked as Bruno had seen her all her life until this last year, trim as a twenty-year-old down to her thin ankles. “Your friend Guy’s got a nice face.”

“Nicest fellow you ever saw. It’s a shame he’s dragged in on it. He told me on the train he hadn’t seen his wife in a couple of years. Guy’s no more a murderer than I am!” Bruno smiled at his inadvertent joke, and to cover it added, “His wife was a roundheels anyway—”

“Darling.” She took him by the braidedged lapels. “Won’t you watch your language a little for the duration? I know Grannie’s horrified sometimes.”

“Grannie wouldn’t know what a roundheels means,” Bruno said hoarsely.

Elsie threw her head back and shrieked.

“Ma, you’re getting too much sun. I don’t like your face that dark.”

“I don’t like yours that pale.”

Bruno frowned. The leathery look of his mother’s forehead offended him painfully. He kissed her suddenly on the cheek.

“Promise me you’ll sit in the sun a half hour today anyway. People come thousands of miles to get to California, and here you sit in the house!”

Bruno frowned down his nose. “Ma, you’re not interested in my friend!”

“I am interested in your friend. You haven’t told me much about him.”

Bruno smiled shyly. No, he had been very good. He had let the clippings lie out in his room only today for the first time, because he was sure now both he and Guy were safe. If he talked a quarter of an hour about Guy now, his mother would probably forget, too. If it were even necessary that she forget. “Did you read all that?” He nodded toward the bed.

“No, not all that. How many drinks this morning?”

“One.”

“I smell two.”

“All right, Mom, I had two.”

“Darling, won’t you watch the morning drinks? Morning drinks are the end. I’ve seen alcoholic after alcoholic—”

“Alcoholic is a nasty word.” Bruno resumed his slow circuit of the room. “I feel better since I drink a little more, Ma. You said yourself I’m more cheerful and my appetite’s better. Scotch is a very pure drink. Some people it agrees with.”