A Covenant with Death (4 page)

I waved to Geronimo—that was how he signed himself, by the way, even checks—and ran upstairs. I opened the windows and took off my white linen jacket and sat down at my desk and called Alfred.

“That's right,” he said. “Around ten last night. Strangled, looks like. No idea why, and it could have been anybody. No evidence one way or another. I'm afraid Bryan's in for a hard time.”

“No criminal assault, I take it. Why Bryan?”

“That's right. No real reason,” Alfred said, “except that, well, he was there, he was around. And he was drunk, and he said some suspicious things. He's a strange fellow,” and I could almost see Alfred frown and fret, sadly yearning for a neatly classified criminal like a walking delegate (they were coming to be called “union organizers” and their presence in Soledad City contravened a municipal ordinance) or a drunk and disorderly.

“Go slow,” I said, “You know that's not enough.”

“Of course I know,” Alfred barked. “Sorry. I mean that it's only a possibility. He was closest to her. He'd been drinking again and he had a bad bruise on his face. And you never know what goes on in a marriage. There was talk about her and various people, just talk as far as we know. Of course even if it was true, I don't suppose a man goes around killing his wife just because she's, uh—”

“Flighty.”

“That's it.” He sounded at once relieved and embarrassed.

“All right,” I said. “It's in your hands. And the District Attorney's. Get the coroner's jury together, and the grand jury if Dietrich wants it. If you make an arrest get your man to me or Hochstadter right away. And Alfred—”

“What is it, Ben?”

“I don't know how to say this, and I don't mean to rile you, but remember about confessions. Don't be clubbing anybody.”

“Ben,” he said, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I've never done that. Not even with—not with anybody.”

“You've never had a first-degree murder either. I didn't mean any harm, Alfred. Just a caution.”

“All right. Forget it. I'll keep you posted.”

“Thanks, friend. I'll see you later.”

Alfred had called me Piggy until I was twenty or so; I was a stocky little black-haired black-eyed boy. Then he decided I deserved better, college boy and all, and switched to Ben—my full name is Benjamin Morales Lewis. Everybody called me Ben. My mother called me Judge when she felt I had done something egregiously stupid, which was, come to think of it, often.

Now I had nothing to do. I leaned back and thought about the Talbots. I had never spoken to the deceased, and only casually to her husband, so there was not much to think about. After a while I derricked out my father's silver watch. It was 8:20. I called Rosemary at her home. She had left for school. I waited twenty minutes and called her at school. She was in class; for long distance they would fetch her. I waited. I tapped my fingers on the oaken desk. I looked out at the bright, dry, dusty day. I thought of Louise Talbot, and then of Rosemary dead, and did not like it. Then I heard her voice and my legs tingled and I was not a judge any more. “Hello,” I said. “Hello, hello, hello.”

“You miss me,” she said.

“Come for the weekend.”

“All right. But I'm shameless. I wish you wouldn't wait until Friday.”

“I didn't realize,” I said. “I didn't even know it
was
Friday. I hope you didn't have any other plans. Anyway I asked you last week.”

“You are a fool,” she said. “But there are certain things about you I like.”

“Tell me. I have all day.”

“This is the principal's office.” Her voice was suddenly crisp and neutral, but I was slipping into a kind of moony drunkenness.

“And he just walked in. Watch his free hand. All right. Tell me tonight. I'll be at the station.”

“Fine,” she said, and then quickly, “lovely.”

“Yes,” I said. “I love you.”

“Well,” she said brightly, “I'm sure all of us here feel the same way.”

“That's fine. Bring everybody along.”

“Then we'll consider it arranged.” I could see the principal frowning.

“Yes indeed,” I said. “And I hope you will allow me to express the general feeling here by indicating to you our extreme pleasure that these preliminary discussions have borne such—”

“Goodbye,” she said pleasantly, and hung up. My palms were wet.

It was at lunch, at the Territorial, that I spoke to the Colonel, and after lunch, in the bar (the sign on the wall now stated “Reading Room”), that Alfred achieved his conversational catharsis. When Alfred had gone back to his office at the jail I loitered, greeting friends and absorbing gossip. There was only one topic and no one said anything original or illuminating. I had no wish to go home and listen to my mother pontificate. She would be wise, irreverent, full of insight, and—worst of all—probably right She could keep. At about four I went to my office and called to see if all the trains were running on time. They were. I pulled out a book, at random, and found myself reading about Cooley v. Board of Wardens (12 Howard 299), a decision handed down by the United States Supreme Court in 1851 governing the employment of harbor pilots in the port of Philadelphia. We were five hundred miles from salt water, but a good judge is ready for anything.

I am embarrassed, remembering all this; but I will not apologize.

3

The weekend passed pleasantly, which is the old-fashioned way to describe two nights of Dionysiac revels and two days of adolescent mooning. The clear suspicion had now assailed me that marriage was not a matter of grave and careful deliberation, but a deed one went ahead and did: a simple yes or no, please. The corollary suspicion was nastier: that I did not want to marry. Despite much evidence to the contrary I still thought of myself as a young man of middle-class rectitude, and I was uneasy; the age of carefree liberation was not yet upon us, and morning-after remorse was not yet archiac and unmanly. Guilt, in short, but something more, too, on the order of an esthetic betrayal. There she stood, or sat, or lay, a brown-eyed Viking, a boreal beauty whose absence left me in pain, and yet in whose presence I could not take the natural and desirable final step; a step to which I could find no let, stop or hindrance either in the nature of man or in the immediate ambience. What braked and bound me? No visions of a lost freedom; the world of the mind was open to me and I had even, as the saying went, been to New York, not to mention Paris. No crass ambitions; Soledad City was tawdry and provincial but not ignoble, and being a judge seemed all right, sustaining rather than creating, with time to wonder and to read and to enjoy life. Still, Rosemary's voice was a bit high for my taste. Nonsense. It was an awful voice, tiny and piping and breathless. (“A small but unpleasant voice,” they said of one soprano; yes.)

Well. Foolishness. I knew I would need, soon, to think deeply about this. Responsibility, it was, and this time I did not have a jury or a precedent to assume it for me. I was tired of tiptoeing, of leaving my love by the dawn's early light. I liked to lie with my lips in her hair and my eyes shut against the dazzle of sunlight on her ivory haunch, the one French novelists invariably called the “hanche galbée,” the loveliest of curves in a curved universe. But, but. Well, nobody was rushing me.

And while I rose on a Sabbath morning, stretched, groaned, touched my toes, blinked, felt the blood course and the bladder press and the lungs fill and the brain prickle, a mile away dust descended to dust and ashes to ashes as Louise Talbot was buried. The Colonel attended the funeral; he attended everything; and he described it later. Martin DeKalb's horse-drawn hearse, and the two hired Pierce-Arrows behind it, three or four private cars behind them. The clip-clop along a shadeless road and the cars stalling one by one in a senseless and random rotation so that the line of them died and lurched and died again and stretched and shrank like a drunken snake. Then the cemetery, the cortege passing through the gates at about nine-thirty and crawling up the one dusty road and halting. Bryan Talbot got out of the first Pierce-Arrow and stood by the casket. Mr. and Mrs. Hoyers, parents of the deceased (and here the Colonel shocked himself and us by a monumental slip of the tongue: “the bride's parents,” he said), emerged from the other hired car and stood across from Bryan, not looking at him or speaking to him. And after the brief service in the pitiless morning sun, the pastor's meaningless comforts, Hoyers sweating under the arms, his wife sobbing softly, Bryan blank and glassy—after the few mourners had comforted parents and husband and the gravediggers had returned to fill the hole—then the small group dispersed slowly, and the Colonel smelled sweet grass and heard birdsong until the cars started up and the smell became the smell of exhaust and the birds were frightened into silence. But the old soldier noticed again that the Hoyerses and Talbot did not speak, or look; just disappeared into their cars. So he snooped about, and discovered that the Hoyerses were staying at the Territorial and planned to be in our city until at least Tuesday; not at the house, not with Bryan, and Emil Dietrich had paid them a call. Which the Colonel duly reported, with flashings of the eye and archings of the brow and whinnies of delectation.

On Monday, May seventh, the newspaper informed us that an Army monoplane had flown across the country, without stopping, from Hempstead on Long Island to San Diego, in twenty-seven hours; and that there had been earthquakes in Turkey and Chile. On Tuesday it informed us that the grand jury was considering the murder of Louise Talbot. “I think they were wrong about her,” my mother said that night. We were sipping coffee on the veranda. It was a warm night and the new street lamps were sparking and sputtering; lizards crawled and locusts chirred and far off a voice whooped; relentlessly, suicidally, a moth assaulted the screen. When I was a young boy we had heard distant coyotes barking into the still night air; but no longer. “She may have been a cold woman, and trying too hard. Marriage is supposed to be fun. If it isn't—and it may not have been her fault—a woman is liable to do any crazy thing. That husband of hers never looked like much.”

“That doesn't make him a murderer.” Bryan Talbot, who is, in a twisted sense, the hero of this narrative, looked like very little. Pleasant enough; I liked him all right; early thirties, five feet nine, light brown hair, humor in the eyes now and then; a graceful carriage; all in all, a superior municipal employee, maybe a junior water commissioner, or a superintendent of schools. He was neither. He had a shrewd mind but he drank too much and was not steady. He was, for lack of a more precise word, a free-lancer. A dabbler. Real estate. A small automobile agency for two years, after which he was bored and sold out. The whiskey traffic, which he handled openly for a while, as a business; no one bothered him. He had helped, on the business end, to plan the first and only streetcar line in town; he conferred with lawyers, criticized contracts intelligently, rode in the third seat on the inaugural trip from Town Hall to the Mexico Road, and then declined a position as director of the line. Colonel Oates had asked him why. “For a gold dollar four times a year?” he answered. “I'll tell you, Colonel: it's a dead end. The fun's over. I intend to move on sometime soon. Denver, maybe, or California. I'm shooting for bigger things. Fifteen thousand a year.”

“Fifteen thousand!” The Colonel was shocked; anything over three thousand was superfluous in Soledad City.

“Yes,” Talbot said firmly. “I've got a damn good mind for business. I have no trouble making a living. And if I can swing just one big deal, I'm on my way. I know what people think of me.” He grinned. “Not much of a sticker: go into something, wrap it up, hop right out again. Well, they're right. As soon as the deal is made, as soon as it turns into just a job, I lose interest. I'm an entrepreneur. I was born to fees and not to wages. I went to college, and got out with honors, and I want a lot of the good things in life.”

“Go get 'em,” the Colonel had said. “You're a cocky young fellow, aren't you.”

Nor did that make him a murderer.

“He's a good Presbyterian,” I said to my mother. “What should she have married? A weight lifter?”

“You'll never learn. If I've told you once … strength is nothing, gentleness is all. Still, you're right. He was a good Presbyterian. That whole road's full of churchgoers. Not much fun. And the Talbots were right next door to an elder.”

“Bruce Donnelley.”

“Yes. There's a man I really don't like. Your father once said that when the Donnelleys pulled up the shades in the morning it wasn't to let the sunlight in; it was to show the neighbors that they weren't copulating in the daytime.”

Bruce Donnelley again, with his carefully knotted necktie and his detachable collars, like a Wall Street fellow. A man no one knew because he was all surface. Silent, powerful, and heavy-laden, a cornerstone of the social edifice. I remember wondering what he thought of the murder: was he outraged, or only annoyed? Uncomprehending, or grieving mute with the wisdom of those-who-know? A strange sort of municipal colossus: the marmoreal Moses, chairman of the moral board. And murder next door.

“Colonel Oates thinks Louise Talbot was a volcano,” I said.

“Poor Sebastian,” she said. “Poor epicene Sebastian,” a strange adjective but strangely accurate. “He told you that to make me jealous.”

“Maybe so. He said he wished
he'd
been her next-door neighbor twenty years ago. Then he said, ‘Better yet, forty-five.'”

“Forty-five years ago,” she mused. “That's sad. Still”—she cheered up—“he was perfectly right. Boys of seventeen, if they are intelligent enough to take tutoring—”

“Oh, my God,” I groaned. “Why don't you go bake an apple pie like everybody's else's mother?”