The Man in the Net (21 page)

John took the box. His fingers clumsy with eagerness, he flicked back the little gold clasp and lifted the lid. The bracelet was the first thing to catch his eye. It was exactly as Angel had described it—a broad gold band with five little gold plaques dangling from it. Some of the plaques had the side with the engraved letter face upward. I, he saw … D … A … There was other jewelry too. Earrings, a necklace, a gold ring with a large gleaming stone. A diamond? But he merely flashed them a glance because of the other thing which lay in the box. It was a spool of the tape he used on his tape recorder.

He picked it up and turned it over. A piece of paper was stuck on it and, on the paper, in his own neat script, was written: Mendelssohn—Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage —Kletzki.

For a moment he gazed at it blankly, thinking: This is the tape I couldn’t find in the living-room. Then, gradually, he felt excitement seeping through him. It was the last tape he had recorded and its playing time was half an hour. The Mendelssohn only ran about ten minutes. There had been almost twenty minutes of unused tape at the end of the spool.

So, in his knowledge of Linda, he had almost hit the mark. Not love letters, but a record on tape. A record of what? Some compromising conversation? That must be it. Of course … When had he recorded the Mendelssohn? About a week ago. Then, sometime during the last week after the reviews of the show had come in….

“Gee!” Buck’s voice came through to him. “What is it— that thing? Some sort of typewriter ribbon or something?”

Wasn’t it all now blatantly clear? Linda with a lover. (Who? Steve Ritter? Think of it as Steve.) Linda thinking after the failure of the show
: John’s no good to me as a husband; I’ve found someone else who’d be much more satisfactory
—if I could swing it. Linda, being Linda, arranging a compromising scene in the living-room and stealthily flicking on the switch of the tape recorder.

Success had come with such astonishing ease that his mind was confused by a multiplicity of thoughts. He picked up the ring and examined it. Wasn’t the square-cut stone a real diamond? And weren’t the pearls in the necklace, if not real, at least cultured? If they were, how could Steve Ritter have afforded such extravagant gifts? And, if he were right about Linda, how could it be Steve anyway? Could even Linda have fooled herself that the way to a better life could conceivably open up to her through Steve Ritter?

No, of course Steve hadn’t been her lover. He saw that now. If he had been, she would never have admitted it. The confession had been a lie after all—or rather a half lie, a tacit admission that she did have a lover but that the lover wasn’t Steve.

Then—who? One of the Carey set? It had to be. If there had been anyone else he would at least have had some knowledge of his existence. Brad? No, not Brad. Brad had been in New York with him all through the period of the murder. Mr. Carey? How could it be Mr. Carey, who, during the key months when the affair must have been going on, had been in hospital? Then Gordon Moreland?

Gordon Moreland running through the woods with the villagers! Gordon Moreland, implacably hostile, pushing Steve Ritter deeper and deeper into his suspicions!

The excitement was making him feel almost drunk.

Here was the tape in his hand. All he had to do was to get the recorder, play the tape and he would know. Where could he play it? At the Fishers’? Why not? The recorder was broken, but it could be fixed. Yes, he would send one of the children to Pittsfield in the morning. And once he’d played the tape, once he knew …

Suddenly all the dangers surrounding him seemed to be only sham, cardboard dangers—even the trooper up at the house.

“Listen, Buck, could you get the trooper to let you into the house?”

The boy’s face shone with delight. “Boy, you want me to go back—to go to the house?”

“You think you could talk him into it?”

“Me? Georgie-Porgie? You kidding? I could talk old Georgie-Porgie into buying my space-suit for, say, twenty-five dollars when it cost only nineteen eighty-five.”

“Then listen. Get him to let you into the house. You know what a tape recorder looks like?”

“A tape recorder?”

“You’ll see it on the record cabinet in the living-room, right by the phonograph amplifier. It’s like a portable phonograph in a leather case. You can’t miss it. If you get in, open the living-room window at the back, drop the recorder down into the flower-bed and then go out again through the front door. When you get your chance, sneak around to the back and bring the recorder down here.” “Boy,” said Buck. “Oh, boy. Just you hold your horses. That’s all. Just you sit here and hold your horses. Little old Super-Buck Ritter will carry out that mission in a flash.” He grinned, thumped his chest and ran off again through the trees.

GORDON MORELAND? As he waited, John sat in the sun by the hemlocks, contemplating his potential enemy. He was sure of it now. Linda had always been impressed by Gordon Moreland. He was the celebrity which John should have become and hadn’t; and not only that, he was doubly dependent on Roz both as a wife and a collaborator, an ideal challenge. How satisfying it must have been to Linda to have stolen the husband of the chic winterer-in-Europe. It had been the Parkinson-Raines situation again—the corroding compulsion to compete beyond her league. Linda entangling Gordon Moreland, wheedling gifts out of him, using the affair as a sophisticated secret to bolster her ego, and then, when her dreams of John’s easy success had collapsed with the show at the Denham Galleries, Linda suddenly thinking:
Make Gordon marry me.

He could reconstruct it all now. Some time, just before the Raines and Raines letter, Linda had challenged Gordon with the tape.
Divorce Roz, marry me
—or else. It might have worked with some men, with Brad for example, but it could never have worked with Gordon Moreland. Gordon Moreland was made out of granite like old Mr. Carey. Not even Linda could have succeeded in railroading him into giving up for a penniless neurotic woman a wife whose collaboration was his bread and butter, and a life of cozy respectability as the idol of the Carey set. It would have been her will against his. Had he pleaded for time? Probably. And then … Of course! Linda’s spectacular appearance at Vickie’s birthday party had not been merely to humiliate him. He should have realized that, with his wife, things had always been far more complex than they seemed on the surface. Behind that elaborate front, Linda had been making her final threat. All the time she was telling the Carey set of his decision to refuse the job, she had been speaking directly at Gordon Moreland.

You see? John’s finally proved he’s no good for me. Okay. If I can’t make him change his mind, this is it. Get ready.

And he had. There, announced to the world by Linda, was the news of a violent quarrel in which John had hit her, and the next day he was going to New York. There it was all laid out for Gordon Moreland—the perfect opportunity. He could kill her—and frame it on John. He could order the cement early in the morning when John was still in Stoneville and could still physically have committed the crime, and then, after he’d left for New York …

That was it. All he needed now was to get the recorder and have it repaired—and then it would be over.

In less than half an hour Buck was back again, carrying the recorder and whistling jauntily. Suddenly he remembered, stopped whistling, looking guilty and whispered:

“Man, was I smooth. Boy, I’m telling you. Old Georgie-Porgie—is he a dope! There he was sitting in the car, smoking a cigarette. And I said, So you’ve got to guard the house of horror. And he said, It had to be me stuck out here and not being relieved until midnight. And I said, Gee, think of it. Don’t it give you the creeps with her murdered and all? And he said, What you think I am, a kid? And I said, A kid wouldn’t be scared. And he said, You’re a big mouth, aren’t you? And I said, Want to bet? Want to put a dime on it? I bet I can go right over all that old house in every room and everything and not be scared. I bet you a dime, old Georgie-Porgie. And he laughed and threw out the key to me and said, Okay, a dime on it that you come running outta there in less’n sixty seconds. And I took the key …”

John had opened the case of the recorder and was sitting with it on the ground pine. As Buck’s breathless story rattled on, he examined the machine carefully. Yes, the tubes had gone. Three of them. But otherwise it seemed undamaged. He’d had his wallet in his pocket when he’d run away from the house. There was enough money in it for tubes. Tomorrow one of the kids could thumb a ride into Pittsfield and buy them. Would the electric light have been cut off at the Fishers’? It wasn’t likely, for they were only spending a couple of months in California. But one of the kids could go up there tomorrow and check that too. Yes, with any luck, tomorrow he would be able to play the tape at the Fishers’ and then he would know. And once he knew …

“. . so I opened the window like you said and put out the recorder and I shut the window and I went out again through the front door to Georgie-Porgie and I said, So what about it, Georgie-Porgie? I stayed in over five minutes, didn’t I? And I went upstairs and everything. How about that dime? And he gave me the dime. Boy, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it, John? I got it for you, didn’t I?” Buck’s plump red face was wreathed in smiles of triumph. “Want me to go up again, John? I could do it. I bet I could do it.”

“No, Buck'. That’s all.” John looked at his watch; it was almost eight. “I guess you’d better get home. We don’t want to take any chances.”

“But, gee, John …”

“No, Buck. Thanks a million. You did fine. You were terrific. But now you’d better go home. See you first thing tomorrow and bring some breakfast if you can.”

He wasn’t going to need Emily now. Should he ask Buck to stop off at the Jones’ house and tell the girls not to come? No, he thought. It was better to have them come. It was always safer to have Angel under his eye, and he remembered Emily’s abrupt departure from the cave. He had to make things right with Emily.

After Buck had gone, he took the recorder and Linda’s box into the cave. The candle had gone out again. He put the recorder and the box down in a corner at the back and lay down on Emily’s bed in the darkness.

In his nervous tension, the thought of having to wait until tomorrow for the recorder to be fixed seemed almost unendurable. But it had to be, and once it was fixed … But was that true? The first excitement was over now and he was thinking more soberly. With all the evidence against him, would he be able to exonerate himself merely by offering the troopers the tape? What would it prove? That Linda had been having an affair with Gordon, perhaps. But couldn’t that, just like everything else, be turned against him? What was to stop Captain Green from interpreting it as just another motive for his having killed his wife? He felt the old anxiety crowding back. This wasn’t as nearly over as he had thought. Of course it wasn’t. Somehow he’d have to think out something else— something much more damning …

His thoughts raced ahead, collided with each other and went around in circles. There had to be a way. But nothing came to him and his mind was still churning ineffectually much later when the faint owl cry sounded above him. In a few moments he heard scuffling at the hole in the wall and then Angel’s voice, cooing:

“John? Dear John. Dear, dearest, darling John. Are you there, dear John?”

“I’m here.”

It was pitch dark now and the children were quite invisible to him.

Angel said, “Emily, light the candle.”

There was no reply from Emily.

“Emily!” Angel’s voice was preposterously haughty.

“Light the candle, I said. Didn’t you hear me? John and Louise and Mickey and Cow and I want a candle. Slave, big, fat, drippy slave, light the candle.”

Still Emily made no reply, but John could hear her groping her way past him toward the back of the cave. Soon he heard the spurt of a match and candlelight quivered from behind him. Angel was standing by the hole in the wall, blinking. Under one arm she carried a dilapidated Mickey Mouse, and clutched against her breast was a large brown-and-white toy cow. She smiled at John and then, turning to the orange crate, dropped a low curtsy to Louise and put the Mickey Mouse and the cow down next to her.

“We’ve come to spend the night with you and Louise. Mickey and Cow and me. We’re all going to spend the night while Emily goes off and is eaten by the ghost.” She ran to John, threw her arms around his waist and beamed up at him with swooning sentimentality. “Oh, I love you so much. I love you. I love you.”

Emily came up with the candle in a Coke bottle. She bent and set it down on the floor. John glanced at her anxiously. Her face was a set, cold mask and she deliberately avoided his gaze.

“Do you want me to go up to the bam now?” she said. “I brought a flashlight.”

“Yes,” said Angel. “Go now, go now.”

John said, “It’s okay, Emily. There’s no need to go. Buck was here bringing me something to eat and he knew the trooper. It seemed so much easier that way. So I let him go and it worked.”

Still not looking at him, Emily said, “But you said I was to go.”

“I know I did. I’m sorry if you wanted to do it. But I thought you’d be glad not to have to go.”

“You said it was me. You picked me.”

“Emily dear…” he began.

“Don’t call her dear,” screamed Angel. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”

“Emily …”

“She isn’t dear. We hate her. We all hate her. And she can’t go to the barn and see the ghost because she’s too dopey. She’d do it wrong. Wouldn’t she, John? That’s why you made Buck go because stupid old Emily’s too stupid. Nyah.” Angel started to dance madly around. “Nyah, nyah, nyah.”

Suddenly the set mask of Emily’s face collapsed. Her mouth quivered out of control and tears spurted in her eyes.

“I can’t bear it,” she said. “I’ve tried and tried, but it’s too much. I can’t bear it. I—I wish I was dead.”

She threw her knuckles up against her mouth and then, the pigtail swinging, she spun around and ran toward the hole in the wall.

“Emily…”