Death Trap Read online

  I shaved away stubble that was like fine copper wire. My head pulsed with the dull ache of hangover. And I thought of Vicky. I thought of what-might-have-been.

  I had been an engineer on nine miles of new state highway on the Warrentown-Dalton road. We were straightening it and four-laning it. There were three big cuts, and a lot of fill. It was rolling, beautiful country. Because the job was closer to Dalton than to Warrentown, we set up just outside of Dalton. I had been there for a few days when we made the estimates for the bid, running soil tests and analyzing cores. I was in the first group to go back when our bid was the one accepted, and I worked with the boys rechecking the survey and the specifications.

  Dalton was a college town. Sheridan College, a small all-male liberal arts college of good reputation. The Department of Archeology there had found some Indian relics in one of the hills where we had to make a cut. They had written to the state capital and somebody there got in touch with the home offices in Chicago and we got word in the field to co-operate with the college.

  I was elected to go talk to them and find out what they wanted us to do. Sheridan College was on a hill south of the village. It was a beautiful September morning a little more than three years ago. I had rented a room in an old house just off the central square. The central square had a New England look, with big elms, walks, benches, a beat-up bandstand. There were white churches and stores and a big inn. I went back to my room and changed from sweaty khakis to slacks and a sports shirt, and drove one of the company sedans south on College Street and up the hill to the college buildings. I got there at eleven and classes were changing. College kids were criss-crossing the campus. I felt elderly and superior to them. I’d been out four years. I was twenty-six. I’d worked in Peru and in Cuba. I had been bitten by a tropical snake. I had seen a man pulled into the gearing of a stone crusher. I’d seen a gas truck slip off a mountain at dusk and, two hundred feet down the stone slope, strike and bloom like a strange blue and yellow flower. I felt superior to these kids, and slightly appalled that they should look so young.

  I located the administration building and went in and found an open door. I walked in and saw a dark head bent over a list of names, saw that dark head lift and found myself looking into the blue blue eyes of Victoria Landy. Psychologists deride the concept of love at first sight as being a delusion and a rationalization of the immature. All I know is that we looked at each other for what seemed a very long time. Afterward she told me that she felt oddly breathless and slightly dizzy. That was exactly the way I felt.

  I remember that I found out who I was supposed to see and she told me how to find him. I went and talked to him and he marked on my map the area he was interested in and I promised to inform him in advance of when we would start moving earth so he could put some people in his department on the scene.

  Then I went back and found the dark-haired girl, and that night we had dinner together at the MacClelland Inn, on a screened side porch where the night wind ruffled the candle flames and stirred her hair.

  I learned about her. She was twenty-three. She had been born and raised in Philadelphia. Her father had been an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her mother had been Italian. Her brother, the only other child, was six years younger and had just entered Sheridan College on a full scholarship. Vicky had gone to the University of Pennsylvania and, in order to help her father with the textbooks he wrote, had learned typing and shorthand. Right after her twenty-first birthday her father became eligible for a sabbatical year. Since Vicky would graduate soon and had a job promised her, and Alister was in an experimental school in Philadelphia with enrollment limited to children with an exceptionally high I.Q., she stayed to maintain the house and take care of Alister while their parents went to Italy.

  They received a letter a week from them. And then Vicky received a phone call from Washington, from the State Department, informing her that Dr. and Mrs. Christopher Landy had died in a hospital in Bergamo of food poisoning. She found out later that it had been a botulism acquired from spoiled sausage, resulting in the traditional blindness, destruction of the nervous system and death. The day after notification their last letter was received, stating that they planned to visit the village where her mother’s parents had been born and look up any relatives that might remain there.

  She explained to me that Alister was not the sort of boy you could send off to college on his own. I could not understand that until I met him. In the experimental school he had done a paper on a proposed mathematical approach to sociology. It was that paper which had won him the Sheridan scholarship.

  The people at Sheridan, after interviewing Alister, understood why her presence would be desirable for at least a year or two, and arranged to give her a job in the administrative office. She had been at work a week when I met her. Alister was living in a dormitory. She was living in a rented room in one of the faculty houses.

  I do not know how to describe her. She was not at all like the women who had previously attracted me. I had preferred laughing women whose diction did not make me uncomfortable, big extroverted girls with simple hungers easily gratified—like the singer at Varadero Beach, and the Russian in Quito, and the coeds of Southern Cal where I had paid for my groceries by being a fast wingback and a long ball outfielder.

  She was not tall. There was a quietness about her. She had many silences, and some of them were most solemn. Her face was so lean and controlled as to be almost ascetical, but the primness was denied by the ripe-blooming flower of her mouth. Her hair was so very dark and her eyes were so very blue. She walked and moved lithely; and somehow, in the controlled sway of her small hips, there was more earthy promise than in the strut of any stripper. She looked fragile, yet on the Sunday I took her out and we walked miles on the road job, I could not tire her. In her dark conservative dresses, in the sheaths she liked to wear, you could imagine that naked she might look like a plucked bird, with lattice of ribs, immature breasts, hollow belly, concave thighs. Yet on one of the last warm days of the year I took her to a lake where we swam. Her suit was powder blue. Her arms and legs were long and round, creamy and flawless. Her breasts were deep and her hips had a rounded ripeness, almost an abundance. She swam with the easy tireless grace of an otter, and on that rare day she laughed aloud often, the laughter astonishingly deep in her throat, white teeth gleaming, black hair pasted flat on the contour of the fragile skull.

  Because she was so unlike any girl I had ever known, I was not at ease with her. I moved cautiously. There was a challenge in the quality of her mind, and to meet it I did not drink heavily when we went out together. I felt no need to, and suspected that had I done so she would have shown not contempt but boredom.

  We argued about her brother, about this feeling of dedication she seemed to have. She said that he was a responsibility emotionally, yet his mind was worth any dedication. I met him. He was a misfit. He was petty, arrogant, supercilious, querulous and painfully shy. Alister was a very handsome boy. He irritated me. He was condescending to his sister, contemptuous of the school, the instructors, the other students. He could be morose, humorless and stubborn as a mule. He seemed to invite physical attack.

  And yet … some of the things he said, the views he held …

  Look at it this way. In my terms. Triangulation is the simplest process in civil engineering. Line up point A from points B and C and soon you know a hell of a lot more about the location of point A. Now assume that point A is, instead of a physical point, an idea. By inheritance and training and quality of mind, you are forever condemned to regard idea A from point B. You can see it in only one way. And then along comes an Alister Landy who can stand at point C and look at the same idea. It is only genius which is capable of the unique viewpoint. And the observations of genius give us our chance of seeing old ideas in new depth. This can stretch your mind, and it is a frightening thing.

  Afterwards I talked to Vicky about him.

  “Now you do see what I mean, Hugh.�
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  “I think so. But he’s a monster. Forgive me for saying that.”

  “I want you to be frank. But you’re wrong. You see all the defenses. They irritate me, but not as much as they do you, because I can see underneath. I can see the frightened boy. He’s almost alone in the world. He’s never been able to gain social acceptance or approval. When he was little he fought hard for that approval, playing games that bored him, fighting other little boys even though he thought it was childish. But he always said the wrong thing and they set him apart and finally he decided to stay apart from them—and from all of us. He wants so desperately to be loved that he goes at it in all the wrong ways. I sensed he wanted your approval. He’s a rebel, a barbarian. Already he is thoroughly disliked by the student body and most of the faculty.”

  “But can’t they see that he’s really got something special?”

  She smiled slowly and the smile turned into a grin, wrinkling an ivory nose. “Now who is defending him?”

  She was what I had.

  It didn’t take long to ruin it.

  Not when my basic and instinctive reaction to the female was to attempt to rack up a score, add a pelt to the trophy shelf. I sensed it wouldn’t be easy. So I went at it very carefully. And without conscience. Why should I have felt any twinge of conscience? She was of age. She was willing to go out with me. So she was taking her own chances. Plenty of others had taken their chances too, and, to the gratification of my male ego, most of them had lost the game. I didn’t want to have to classify Vicky as one of the ones who got away. So I moved very carefully.

  There are rules. Some people don’t follow them. When you don’t follow the rules, you can’t rack up a legitimate score. You’ve cheated. The rules say that you cannot promise marriage, hint at an engagement, or even use the word love.

  When I first kissed her I anticipated a tepid response, a response which would be another implied obstacle in the way. But from way back, from the groves and hillsides and yellow sun of her mother’s people, came a response that was sudden and vivid and alive, like the tart-sweet taste of a good red wine. Her arms were tight and then convulsively tight, and her mouth was something soft and broken. Then she flung herself aside, moving away from me. The moon slanted down through the car window on her side, shining into her lap where her lean hands kept twisting and knotting, pulling at each other. I heard the deepness of her breathing, saw the flower-heaviness of her head, her half-closed long-lashed eyes. I knew that it would be easy then, and I was pleased and excited.

  Why not? I was a construction bum. There were girls in every land. This was more special than most, but that merely made her a more desirable target. She was of age. She took her chances. And nobody had said anything about love.

  I spoiled it. I worked entrapment. I moved cautiously. I betrayed her with her own deep sensuality, and at the end I closed my ears to her protests, to her fright, to her pleading. My answer was not in her voice, but in the physical indications of a passion she could not quell without my help. I did not help her.

  It ended three weeks after the first kiss. It ended at midnight in a shabby room in a shabby motel on the far side of Warrentown. I lay in the darkness and smoked a cigarette. She was crying almost soundlessly beside me. I felt uneasy and uncomfortable. It was not the way it should have been.

  “Why are you crying?”

  She did not answer me. After what seemed a long time she stopped crying. I felt the bed move as she got up. I heard the rustle of her clothing.

  “Now what are you doing?”

  She turned on the light. She was dressed. I squinted into the light and pulled a corner of the sheet across myself. She looked down at me, and there were shadows under her blue eyes.

  She looked down at me for a long time and then tried to smile and said, “I love you.”

  It was on the edge of my tongue to say the same to her, but that was not in the rule book. I guess I smiled uneasily.

  “Will we be married?” she asked. It was a question so Victorian that I tried to laugh.

  “Is it funny?”

  “Vicky, honey, you don’t understand the kind of business I’m in. Hell, next month I could be sent to Spanish Morocco.”

  “That isn’t what I mean.”

  Her eyes made me feel guilty. You cover guilt with spurious anger. “No,” I said. “We won’t be married. Does that answer your question, darling?”

  Her face was very still. She folded her arms, hugging her breasts as though she were cold. “I hope you’re very proud,” she said softly. “Maybe you keep a diary. Be sure to list my every reaction before you forget.”

  “Wait a minute, honey.”

  “Could you please get dressed? I’ll wait in the car.”

  She had nothing to say on the way back. I do not mean that she made evasive answers. She would not open her mouth. After I got back to my place I could not get to sleep. I felt uncomfortable, and did not know why. After all, I had scored. Mission accomplished. She would get over being haughty. I told myself that I felt uneasy because she had been a virgin. I had not expected that and had, in fact, come very close to ending it when I found out. But in the dark room, in the dark bed, next to warmth and shivering eagerness tempered by fright, that brand of will power is an unusual commodity indeed.

  She would come around, I told myself. I would have to apologize, get a chance to talk to her. It would be all right.

  But I never heard another word from her lips, except when she would answer the phone. As soon as she recognized my voice there would be a soft decisive click and a dead line. I waited for her. I walked with her. I tried to talk to her. She walked with a lithe, even stride, never glancing at me or speaking. I could have been an invisible, inaudible man. She became visibly thinner and more pale. I wrote to her. There was no answer. I was certain she did not open the letters. I was still trying when I was transferred to the Spanish airfield job. And by then I knew what I had lost, what I had spoiled. Realization was a long time in coming; and when it came in all its intensity, I knew that the world seldom saw as great a fool as I. She had magic, integrity, passion and a rare loveliness. And I had gone at her the way you go at one of those coin machines where you try to pick up the prize with a toy crane. I could have had the whole machine, with all the prizes and all the candy. But I had settled for gilt and glass.

  Other girls became tasteless. The gusto had gone out of the game. One breast was too like another; hips could move in identical cadence.

  Time did not seem to soften the sense of loss. Had I come back from Spain sooner, I would have tried to see her. But I knew it would be the same; so I stayed away, forgoing my chances of quick trips back to the States until the sense of loss was dulled, until there were days and weeks when I could forget her entirely. Yet on the sour mornings, or during the nights I could not sleep …

  And this morning there was no need for depression. I forced Vicky out of my mind by thinking about Scotty, wondering about what he could provide. In Guaymas I would rent a cruiser after I learned the waters. Maybe about twenty-six foot, with good bunks, a decent galley. Anchor for the night. Go over the side in first light, down into the gray warm water.

  Then I went down to breakfast and found the clipping and went back up to the room. It was Alister Landy, her brother. I had met him; yet I could not say if it was possible or impossible for him to commit rape and murder.

  It was all over now. The kid would be electrocuted. He would be nineteen now, or perhaps twenty. She would be twenty-six. And in five months I would be thirty. Perhaps she has married. She would not care to see me. There is too much on her mind. There is nothing I can do. Drive on down and see Scotty. Ignore it. Forget her. Don’t go near her. It will just make the pain sharp again and there is nothing in all the world you can do to mend what you spoiled.

  Chapter Two

  I kept checking the map as I drove south. And I knew when I came to the crossroads. I could turn east at that junction, toward Dalton. Or continue south
. I arrived at the crossroads at three o’clock on the thirteenth of October, on Thursday afternoon. There was a big truck stop. I pulled in and parked. I sat at the counter and had coffee. I could see the phone booth in the back. I kept turning and looking at it.

  Finally I stood up slowly, wearily. I went to the cashier and got change. I shut myself into the booth and dialed long distance. She gave me the college. A woman answered. I put the coins in the box.

  “I’d like to speak to Miss Landy, please. Miss Victoria Landy.”

  The woman hesitated and said, “She is no longer employed here.”

  “Would you know where I can reach her?”

  She asked me to hold the line. She came back on and gave me a phone number in the village. I thanked her and got the operator and gave her the number and made the call person-to-person. I had about a half minute wait.

  “I’m sorry, but that number has been disconnected.”

  I thanked her and went back to the counter and had more coffee. I thought of her pride, and her gentleness, and the way she would lift her blue eyes to mine as the slow smile came. I paid for the coffee and picked up some cigarettes and walked slowly out to the wagon. I got in and sat for a long time before I started it up and headed east, driving too fast.

  It was late when I drove into Warrentown. I passed the motel where it had ended. A lighted sign said, Under New Management. I stayed at a newer place down the road. After I checked in, I drove into town. Warrentown is a small city of about thirty thousand. I found a bar. I could be thirty-five miles from Vicky. Or if she had gone up to stay near the prison, she could be a hundred miles away. I knew I would find her tomorrow. It made me feel empty in the middle. And lost.

  The bar was crowded. It was a neighborhood place. I found room at the curve of the bar. They stare at you in a neighborhood place and try to figure you out. It makes a short hush in the conversation and then they go on as before. A husband and wife team near me were having a deadly almost inaudible quarrel. She was drunk, her face loose, her eyes glittering, her fist opening and closing in a puddle of beer. They left soon, her face mirroring the pain of his hard hand on her arm. It gave me room to expand a little. I looked around without being too obvious about it, and picked my pigeon. He was a little guy, about fifty, well-dressed, with quick shrewd eyes. When I had a chance I moved next to him.