More Good Old Stuff Read online

  Charlebois said quickly, “Mademoiselle, I have a gun in my pocket and I shall watch this murderer. Will you please go downstairs and phone the police.”

  She looked at Jan Dalquist, hurt and questioning in her eyes. He stared at her without expression. Charlebois opened the door and Dalquist heard the quick tapping of her feet as she went down the stairs.

  Dalquist said, “You won’t get away with this, Jean Charlebois.” But even as he said it, he knew the scheme would work—that by the time he could divert the attention of the police away from himself, Charlebois would be out of reach. He felt ill as he thought of the additional weary months of search that would be necessary.

  He said, “And even if this does work long enough for you to get away, Charlebois, I will soon be after you again.” It was not said with defiance. It was said with a tired resignation. It expressed the soul-sickness of him, the cumulative exhaustion of killing and seeing death, the internal, pervading nausea that had been with him for two and a half years.

  Charlebois said, “You forget, monsieur. I know you now. I know your face. You will never kill me. Even if you find me, it is you who will die. In this game, once the hunter is known, the advantage is with the hunted. I will seek a place where you cannot approach me without my knowledge. And there I will kill you.”

  There was a quiet confidence in the ring of his words. To Dalquist, it was like a sentence of death. Somehow, he knew that it would end in precisely that way. For he was too weary with the game to continue much longer. He would walk blindly into a death that would be but a continuation of his present, purposeless existence.

  Charlebois chuckled. He said, “I did not believe that the young lady was in league with you. Had her reactions been different, I would have killed the both of you and escaped immediately. In a way you are lucky. But it will be more pleasant to deal with you at some future time in circumstances that are more to my liking.”

  “You are an egocentric animal, Jean Charlebois.”

  “Possibly, monsieur, but of an effectiveness truly surprising.”

  Dalquist heard the heavy steps on the stairs and tensed himself to spring as Charlebois glanced toward the door. But the slim man looked back too quickly.

  They walked in the door, with Jerry Ellis following them, two lean uniformed men. One crossed over and knelt by René’s body. He stood up and shrugged.

  The other said, “While we wait for Homicide, suppose you give me a quick reading.” He stepped over to Charlebois and held out his hand. Charlebois laid the automatic carefully in the outstretched hand.

  “Sir, the dead man is my employer and the manager of the Ancient Door, René Despard. That man in the chair came in here earlier in the evening, and we made arrangements for me to be his guide starting at eleven-thirty. He was with that young lady who called you. At eleven-thirty, René and I were in this room. That gentleman came in, quite drunk, and began to call us both foul names. René tried to quiet him. The gentleman pulled out that gun I just gave you and threatened us.

  “I circled him and struck him behind the ear. You will find the mark. He fell and dropped the gun. René took out that knife you see on the floor. As I picked up the gun, the gentleman jumped up and rushed at René, striking him violently on the arm. René dropped the knife. The man picked it up and drove it into René Despard.

  “The violence of his act seemed to sober him. I threatened him with the gun and he sat in that chair where he now is. You can see the marks of blood on his trousers. The woman came and knocked at the door. I admitted her and told her to call the police. Truly, it seems to me the act of a madman.” His voice broke. “René was—was my friend. A harmless man and a good man.”

  The first policeman said, “Made him drop the knife, picked it up and killed him with it.” He glanced at Dalquist.

  Dalquist said, “This is a fabric of lies. That man killed René. I saw him.”

  Charlebois grunted contemptuously. “Kill a man who was my friend and my employer? Any other employee will testify as to our great friendship.”

  The policeman turned to Dalquist and said, “Mister, you just keep your mouth shut. We’re damn tired of people getting crazy drunk in this town.”

  Dalquist knew that it would be that way. Charlebois was too convincing, too sincere in his expressions of bewilderment and sorrow. He avoided the pitfalls of retelling his story, of showing too much emotion or giving too much detail.

  Dalquist was surprised to see, out of the corner of his eye, that Jerry was moving closer to his chair. The room was very silent. One policeman leaned against the doorframe and picked his teeth with a fragment of matchstick. Charlebois stared numbly at the floor. Dalquist pleaded with the Fates for a man of perception among those they were awaiting.

  They all started when Jerry said loudly, “You say that the dead man dropped the knife and Mr. Dalquist picked it up off the floor?”

  The policeman by the door said, “Stay out of this, lady. We’ll ask any questions that need to be asked.”

  She fumbled with her purse, and her very thin cigarette case dropped to the floor. It landed by Dalquist’s feet. Instinctively he bent over for it.

  As he fumbled at it, he heard Jerry say loudly, “You’re fools to listen to that waiter! Look at this man! Do you believe he could pick a knife that thin off the floor when he can’t even pick up my cigarette case, which is twice as thick as the knife? Look at his hands!”

  It was true. With the numb ends of his manufactured fingers, with the absence of fingernails, Jan Dalquist could only fumble at the case. He couldn’t get a grasp on it. The policeman by the door stepped over. Dalquist straightened up and held out his hands. The policeman’s mouth twisted as he looked at them.

  There was a flash of movement and the other policeman yelled, “Hey! Stop, you!” Charlebois had melted out of the room. Dalquist heard his feet pounding along the corridor. It was obvious that it had been Charlebois’s only possible move. Once Jerry had cast sufficient doubt on Charlebois’s story so as to make it essential to hold him, he couldn’t risk staying.

  Dalquist said, “Stay in this room!” as he ran out into the corridor. He realized that Charlebois hadn’t wanted to take the risk of running into the men who would soon be coming up the stairs. He would duck in somewhere.

  A gun boomed in the corridor. The policemen disappeared into the small room where they had had dinner. Dalquist followed them. He found them leaning out from the balcony, looking up. One said, “Went up the face of the building on those vines. The leaves are shaking … There he is. Wing him, Joe!”

  The shot cracked more flatly in the open air. The policeman said, “Got him. Look out!”

  They ducked back away from the railing as a screaming figure fell down through the night. It struck the iron balcony railing, and as it clanged like a bell in a minor key, the scream stopped abruptly. There was a noise in the court a second later. A noise that might be made by a soaked rag slammed down onto a basement floor. A woman in the court screamed. A man cursed softly and fluently. The policeman who had fired the shot said, “Al, I feel kinda sick.”

  She was waiting in the shadow of the building when he walked out of Police Headquarters with orders to return and sign statements at ten the following morning.

  He glanced at his watch as he walked up to her. Three-fifteen in the morning.

  She said, “Mister, where were we when we were so rudely interrupted? I know a place where you can buy a short girl a small beer.”

  She began to walk and he fell in step beside her, grinning. Somehow a weight had been lifted off his heart.

  He asked, “Why did you follow me?”

  She said, “Lipstick is a fine thing. Just as you left I looked in my purse for mine and found your lighter. At first I thought I had picked it up by accident. Then I realized that you must have put it there for a reason. I hurried after you, not certain of what to do. I saw you turn in here. You weren’t in the bar or in the dining room. I tried upstairs and heard some sort of t
humping behind that first door. I listened and couldn’t hear you. Maybe the brandy got me. After a while I started to kick the door. You know the rest.”

  “I suppose you’ve got a million questions to ask me?”

  “Have I asked you any?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Jan, two people have to have some sort of a code. Let’s make ours a code of no questions. When either of us wants the other to know something, we’ll tell it without waiting for questions. Okay?”

  She put her hand on his arm, stopped him. She held her hand out. “Shake on it, mister.”

  He took her hand quickly. Her clasp was firm and warm.

  “No questions?” she asked.

  “No questions,” he said, smiling down at her.

  “And no regrets?”

  “No regrets, Jerry,” he said.

  “And now you buy me that beer.”

  A Corpse in His Dreams

  In his dream, as in a thousand dreams before, Alicia Crane called to him, her voice thin, sweet, clear.

  “Matthew! Matthew, darling. Matthew Otis!”

  “But you’re dead!” he said in his dream. “Dead, dead, dead, dead.”

  Odd that she couldn’t or wouldn’t believe. And what was she doing here in China? There was a battle coming up.

  Above the sound of her voice he could hear the sound of battle. The distant slap of rifles, the surly crump of mortar, the guttural whack of a grenade.

  “You’re dead, Alicia Crane! Dead!”

  But he couldn’t make her hear. “Matthew! Matthew, darling!”

  He awoke, his leg cramped from being braced against the green plush of the seat in front of him. The train, huffing laboriously along the coast toward Cranesbay, rocked and jolted on the uneven railbed. The vivid dream made everything unreal. Yes, Alicia was dead. He had killed her just nine years before. Nine years this month.

  November 1939.

  He turned to peer out into the darkness. The lights of a farmhouse appeared, then fled off into the night.

  He picked the magazine up off the littered floor, and turned to the article he had been reading when he fell asleep. “Cheap Death in China,” by Matthew Otis. With a wry smile he reread the editor’s introduction:

  As this is being printed, Matthew Otis is on his way back to this country after three long years with the Chinese armies. In order to gather the news, Mr. Otis has lived as a Chinese soldier. Only those who have seen the Chinese armies know the incredible hardships that Mr. Otis has endured in order to bring you factual reporting of the Chinese Civil War. Matthew Otis is a tall, powerful man who looks older than his thirty-two years. His face is tanned, and in his gray eyes is a dim reflection of the misery he has witnessed in his …

  Matthew yawned and put the magazine on the seat beside him. Maybe one day he’d write an article that would tell them the motivation behind his efforts. Maybe one day he’d tell them he had lived in the distant places of the earth because he fled from a girl who would not stay properly dead.

  And he would have to tell them that he was returning to Cranesbay for the first time since it had happened, hoping that in some way he would be able to rid himself of the nightmare that had been his ever since the day of her death. The night of her death.

  He smiled. That would be a fine article. He would tell how during that first year he had carried her, fresh and vivid, in his mind. The tone of her voice. The warmth of her lips. The proud, high way in which she carried her head.

  But in nine years his memories had grown more, rather than less, vivid. He could not escape her. She made all his days of danger tasteless, his vain seeking of delight insipid.

  He knew that he was afraid to come back.

  And yet if he was ever to be able to live in the present and in the future, it had to be done.

  Guilt is a hand across the eyes, a knife at the heart. There can be no peace, no joy, no ecstasy, no pride in accomplishment. With guilt all there can be is a pseudo-life where one goes through the motions expected of an adult, and carries in his mind the horrors imagined by a child.

  The aged coach jolted and the gray smoke hung in wet strands across the stale air yellowed by the coach lights. Across the aisle a doughy woman reached for a whining child that fought to get away from her. In the seat ahead two sailors, two tired blue-and-white memories of wartime, slept noisily with their mouths open.

  He felt the rising tide of excitement, a chill that ran down his back, a hollow feeling in his stomach. But it was the excitement of a man who, alone in a factory at night, has caught his fingers in slow-moving gears and knows that the gears will inevitably pull in his arm, elbow, shoulder, killing him at last.

  The excitement of a man whose car is plunged into a dizzy skid across sheer ice toward the inevitable precipice.

  Matthew Otis on vacation!

  Matthew Otis returning to appease the ghosts of long ago. A private Munich.

  Matthew Otis returning to the overgrown village of Cranesbay, where he had become an adult, fallen in love with Alicia Crane and killed her.

  The train’s whistle was a lonesome call at a deserted crossing. Out there in the darkness was the ocean. To his left were the high hills, shrouded by night. Ahead would be the crescent of Cranesbay, a city carelessly arranged on the shelf of land between the hills and the sea. The train whistled again and something within him answered the lonely cry.

  There was no way to leap out into the night rain, turn back across half the earth. It was done. The symbol of fulfillment was the little orange cardboard ticket wedged into the window lever. In his mind was the memory of her echoing voice in his dream.

  It was mingled with the memory of long ago, when her voice had been different. When her eyes had looked on him and found him good. When her hand …

  Alicia Crane reached her hand across the table and traced the blue vein on the back of his hand.

  The dance floor was crowded and the band was giving a not ineffective imitation of Goodman.

  “Matt,” she said softly, “what are the words you use when two people are like this?”

  He smiled at her. “Meant for each other.”

  “Don’t sound so flip, darling,” she said.

  “I can’t help it, Alicia. Nineteen thirty-nine is a wisecrack period. A hundred years ago I’d be swearing eternal devotion and getting my tight pants all dirty by kneeling in front of you, my right hand over my heart.”

  “Couldn’t you do that now, Matt?”

  “Sure, but you’d think I was clowning. No, honey. I have to tell you I love you as though it were the punch line in a wisecrack and then you believe me. I love you, honey.”

  “I want to be kissed,” she said firmly.

  He began to get up, saying, “We can take a walk out to the car.”

  “Yes, but later, Matt. When I was a kid I always saved the icing until last. Let’s just sit and think of how nice that kiss is going to be. Then it will taste even better.”

  She smiled and something about the way her gray eyes looked made his heart pause in its beat.

  Suddenly the smile faded as she looked toward the door.

  “What is it?”

  “Roy Bedford, Matt. I was afraid for a minute he was drunk. He hates you, Matt.”

  “I don’t blame him, honey. He had the nicest girl in the world and she belongs to me now. Let him hate me.”

  “If he comes over, please be nice, Matt.”

  “If he’s nice, I’ll be nice.”

  He glanced across the dance floor. Roy Bedford was with a girl who had her hair frizzed out in a mop. Her mouth was dark with lipstick. Roy led her to a booth and Matt saw him glance over, murmur something to the girl, then cross over toward them.

  He had an easy smile on his face. He was tall, with a sharp, aquiline face, crisp dark hair and eyes set so far apart as to give him an odd opaque look.

  He walked up to the booth, smiled down at Alicia and said, “How’re the lovebugs getting along, lovely?” There was a slur
in his voice.

  “Just fine, Roy,” Alicia said blandly.

  Matt said, “Sit down a minute and have a drink, Roy.”

  To his surprise Roy sat beside Alicia and said, “Thanks.”

  They stared across at each other and behind them was the history of a vicious competition that had begun in grade school. Roy Bedford had seemed to depend on winning as much as on breathing. And this time he had lost. Once before he had lost. Back when the high school basketball coach had tried to start a boxing team …

  (Through puffed eye, through maze of blood and pain, standing on wavering legs, Matt looked down at Roy Bedford, who, with blind fury, was crawling to his feet to be smashed to the floor again. The hoarse sound of Bedford’s breathing was loud in the deserted gym.

  Matt said, “Had enough?”

  Roy rushed him, staggering, blundering. Matt, his arms like lead, beat him once more to the floor. Roy Bedford didn’t get up. Instead he rolled onto his stomach and began to sob, loudly, hoarsely. Matt untied the gloves, walked slowly to the showers and washed away the blood and part of the pain. When he looked back Roy was sitting on one of the stools, his face in his hands. Matt knew he would never be forgiven. That ended the boxing team.)

  Roy Bedford was defeated again—and by the same person. Alicia is mine, Matt thought. And he knows it.

  The drinks came; Roy drank his quickly. Matt looked curiously across the room. The girl Roy had brought still sat there.

  Matt said, “Maybe your girl’s lonesome, Roy. Maybe you better trot on back.”

  “Alicia doesn’t want me to go,” Roy said lightly.

  “Don’t be so silly, Roy,” Alicia said. Her tone was also light. “We’ve got nothing to talk about. Ever. You’d make me happy if you’d just go away. Don’t think that you make me uncomfortable. You just bore me.”