An Air That Kills (23 page)

He was a little paunchier, a little balder, than Turee re­membered, but his step was still bouncy and his grin still boyish. It looked quite real, as if he was genuinely glad to see an old friend.

He crossed the patio, his hand extended. “Ralph, old boy. By God, you're a sight for sore eyes. You don't look a day older. Does he, Thelma? Sit down. How about a drink, fel­low? What would you . . .”

“Let's not play games, Harry,” Thelma cut in sharply. “Please.”

“Come now, we've got to be polite, sweetheart. What's the matter with a little drink for auld lang syne?”

“I'm not sure Ralph would accept a drink from either of us.”

“Nonsense. He's our friend.”

No one spoke, but the words
So was Galloway
hung in the air like dust in a shaft of sunlight.

Finally Turee said, “Did Galloway?”

“Did he what?” A fretful little frown appeared between Harry's eyebrows. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“The night he died, did Galloway accept a drink from you?”

“Two, as a matter of fact.”

“Loaded with barbiturates?”

“Loaded with nothing more than
Scotch.”

“How did you manage to drug him?”

“Drug him? Absurd. He came in, he said he was feeling sick and wanted something to settle his stomach. I gave it to him. Maybe I gave him too much. Quite accidentally.”

“Harry . . .”

“Must we go into all this? It's done, it's over, it's been over for years. Besides, I've got a headache. Every time I go to the doctor I get a headache. I hate his guts. All these psychiatrists are quacks and fools.”

“Why go to him, then?”

“Thelma insists. There's nothing the matter with me. The whole thing's absurd. I feel fine. I only go to please Thelma. Isn't that right, Thelma?”

Thelma was silent.

“Well, tell him, Thelma. Tell him there's nothing the matter with me, I only go to the doctor to please you, Thelma?”

She sat mute, not looking at him but staring upwards, as if she were lost and alone on an island, searching the sky for signs of rescue.

“Tell him the truth, Thelma. Go on. The truth.”

“God help us,” she said and turned and began walking to­ward the house.

“Thelma, come back here.”

“No. Please.”

“I command you to come back here. You must obey
me. I'm
the boss. We settled that years ago, didn't we? I'm the boss, aren't I?”

She hesitated a moment, biting the corner of her mouth.

Then she said quietly, “Yes. Sure you are, Harry.”

“You mustn't walk out on me like that. It's disrespectful. I don't like it. I won't tolerate it. You hear?”

“Yes, Harry.”

He held out his hands toward her, palms up, and Turee saw on each wrist a red scar in the shape of a cross. “You know what I've got to do if you don't treat me right, if you don't behave yourself. And this time I won't fail. I'll cut deep.”

“No, Harry. Don't. Don't make me suffer any more.”

“You suffer? Thelma, Thelma, you've got it all wrong. I'm the one who must suffer. I must wash away your sins with my blood. Now sit down and be polite. Ralph came all the way down here to see us. We must be hospitable. He's our old friend. Eh, Ralph? How many years has it been, Ralph?”

“About a dozen,” Turee said.

“Only a dozen? Ron and I were friends for twice that long. Ron's dead,” he added, as if he were imparting a piece of news. “It's my turn next.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Thelma and the doctor keep asking the same question. It's not something I think. It's something I know. Some people know things. Without rhyme or reason they just know. There's a special day ahead for me. I will recognize it when it comes. There will be signs, in the sky, the air, the trees, so I will know,
this is
it, this is the day
.”

“What about your wife and your little boy?”

“My little boy? So you believed her, too. I don't blame you, it's quite a convincing story she tells. Only it's not true. The boy belongs to Galloway. Thelma lied to salve my ego. She's a very talented liar. For a long time I believed her when she said she was pregnant before Ron ever went near her. I believed her because I so very much wanted to. I managed to convince myself that all the tests I'd taken back in Toronto were wrong, that I wasn't sterile, I was a man like other men. Then one day, when I was giving the boy his bath, I noticed the way his left ear stuck out from his head a little more than the right ear, like Ron's. And the shape of his hands and feet—exactly like Ron's. And I knew then Thelma had lied to me. Oh, her reasons were noble, but she'd lied to me, deceived me, made a fool of me. She'd sinned. I had to do something, I kept thinking something must be done, Thelma must be saved. I tried to wash away her sins with my blood.” He held out his scarred wrists. “She didn't understand. She thought it was a mere suicide attempt. She called the fool-doctor and they took me to a hospital. They couldn't keep me there, though. I'm too smart. I was polite, I behaved myself, I answered their questions. They let me go in a couple of weeks. The trick is to tell them enough but not too much. Let them think you're communicating but keep your secrets to yourself. Talk all you want about your childhood but not about your child. Especially if he's not really yours. Thelma.”

She raised her eyes to him. They looked pale and pure as if they'd been washed a thousand times with tears. “Don't leave me alone, Harry. I love you.”

“I know that,” he said wearily. “I love you too. But the time has come when I must know the truth. I have been living with so many lies, I can hardly tell any more what's real and what isn't. Like Charley. Your husband, Charley. I know he isn't real, we made him up together, you and I. Yet sometimes I can see him quite distinctly, sitting in my chair, driving my car, walking into your bedroom and closing the door. And if I listen hard enough I can hear the two of you whispering together, I can hear the creak of bedsprings, and I know you're making love in there, you and Charley, and I want to kill him for the same reason I killed Ron, because he dared to touch you.”

“Don't go on, don't think about it.”

“You never knew that before, did you, Thelma? I didn't want Ron's money. I wanted his life. I killed him out of rage and hate and jealousy. When he was in the back seat unconscious and I was driving his car, wearing his cap, carrying his wallet, I felt like a man. Funny, isn't it? He wasn't really much of a man. But he had something I didn't, something I wanted. And later when I was strapping him into the safety belt on top of the cliff, and you were waiting on the road in our own car, all I could think of was, you'll never touch her again, Galloway, you'll never touch another woman, cuckold another friend, beget another bastard . . .”

“Stop. Please stop.”

“Not now. This is the time for truth. You're such a natural liar, Thelma. You lie the way other people breathe, without thinking about it.”

“No!”

“But you must tell the truth now. There isn't much time. The boy—my boy—he's not really mine, is he, Thelma?”

“I lied for your sake. I wanted you to be happy. I . . .”

“The boy is Ron's?”

“Yes,” she said in a ragged whisper. “Don't hate me for it. Please don't hate me.”

“Thelma, Thelma, you are my love, how could I ever hate you? You've told me the truth. That's the first step.”

“Step?”

“To atonement, to peace.” He looked up at the sky, smil­ing and composed. “You see that single cloud up there, Thelma? That's one of the signs I've been waiting for.”

“It's only a cloud, Harry. Don't imagine . . .”

“Only a cloud? Ah, no. This is the day.”

“Stop.”

“Don't you feel how different it is from other days? You, Ralph, don't you feel it, too?”

“It's an ordinary day,” Turee said. “How about that drink you offered me a while ago?”

“Not now. You can pour it yourself after I've gone.”

“You just got here, don't talk about leaving.”

“I must. Look, Ralph. There. See it? A bird flying across the cloud. If I'd had any doubts at all, that would dispel them.”

Turee tried to catch Thelma's eye for some hint on how to handle the situation. But her eyes were closed. She seemed to have fallen into a troubled sleep. Her hands twitched and tears glittered on her lashes.

“You can't leave Thelma.”

“No,” Harry said. “I won't leave Thelma. She's coming with me. She wants to.” He reached down and touched her gently on the shoulder. “You want to, don't you, Thelma? We've been down some pretty dreary roads together. This last won't be any rougher.”

Turee said, “Stop this foolishness and let me help you.”

“It's too late to do anything for me. Help the boy, if you can. He's a good boy. He deserves to be brought up by a good man. You don't have to be afraid he'll grow up to be like me.”

“I won't let you walk off like this . . .”

“You can't stop us. Besides, I don't think you really want to. They still hang people in Canada.” He leaned down and kissed Thelma on the forehead. “Come on, dear.”

Thelma rose silently, hanging on to his arm.

“For God's sake, don't go with him, Thelma,” Turee shouted. “Stop and think.”

“I've already thought,” she said quietly.

They walked together hand in hand across the patio and up the steep path along the side of the house.

A minute later Turee heard the roar of a car engine. He thought of the cliffs of Santa Monica above the sea, like the cliffs of Wiarton above the lake, and he could see behind the next corner of time the last dreary road Harry had chosen.

They still hang people in Canada,
Turee thought.
It's better this way. Better for the boy. He's got a life to live, I must see that he lives it right . . . My God, I wonder what Nancy will say. . .

 

 

 

 

 

THE END

About the Author

 

 

Margaret Millar
(1915-1994) was the author of 27 books and a masterful pioneer of psychological mysteries and thrillers. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she spent most of her life in Santa Barbara, California, with her husband Ken Millar, who is better known by the 
nom de plume
 of Ross MacDonald. Her 1956 novel 
Beast in View
 won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. In 1965 Millar was the recipient of the 
Los Angeles Times
 Woman of the Year Award and in 1983 the Mystery Writers of America awarded her the Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement. Millar's cutting wit and superb plotting have left her an enduring legacy as one of the most important crime writers of both her own and subsequent generations.

A sneak peak at Margaret Millar's
The Listening Walls

1.

 

From her resting
place in the broom closet Consuela could hear the two American ladies in 404 arguing. The closet was as narrow as the road to heaven and smelled of furniture polish and chlorine, and of Consuela herself. But it was not physical discomfort that disturbed her siesta; it was the strain of trying to understand what the Americans were arguing about. Money? Love? What else was there, Consuela wondered, and wiped the sweat off her forehead and neck with one of the clean towels she was supposed to place in the bathrooms at exactly six o'clock.

It was now seven. She refolded the towel and put it back on the pile. The manager might be a little crazy on the subject of clean towels and exact times, but Consuela was not. A few germs never hurt anybody, especially if no one knew they were there, and what was an hour, one way or the other, in the face of eternity?

Every month the manager, Señor Escamillo, herded the members of the housekeeping staff into one of the banquet rooms, yapping at their heels like a nervous ter­rier.

“Now hear this. I have had complaints. Yes,
com­plaints.
So once again we are here, and once again I say to you the Americans are our most valuable customers. We must keep them so. We must speak always American; we must think American. Now. What do the Americans hate the most passionately? Germs. So we do not give them germs. We give them clean towels. Twice a day, clean towels absolutely without germs. Now, the water. They will ask questions about the water and you will say this water from the tap is the purest water in all of Mexico City. Now. Any questions?”

Consuela had a number of questions, such as why did the manager use bottled water in his office, but self-preservation kept her silent. She needed the job. Her boyfriend had a bent for picking the wrong horses at the Hipódromo, the wrong numbers in the lottery, the wrong jai alai player in the
quiniela.

The argument between the two ladies was continuing. Were they arguing about love? Not very likely, Consuela decided. Pedro, the elevator operator and chief spy of the establishment, addressed each of the American ladies as señora, so presumably they had husbands somewhere and were in the city on vacation.

Money? Not likely, either. Both of the ladies looked prosperous. The taller one (Wilma, her friend called her) had a genuine full-length mink coat which she wore constantly, even going down to breakfast; and when she mo
ved along the corridor she clanked like a trolley car she had on so many bracelets. She left nothing behind in her room except a locked suitcase. Consuela had, as a mat­ter of routine, searched through the bureau drawers, and they were all as empty as a sinner's heart. The locked suitcase and the empty drawers were naturally a great disappointment to Consuela, who had refurbished her wardrobe considerably during the months she'd worked at the hotel. Taking the odd garment here and there was not actually stealing. It was more a matter of common sense, even of justice. If some people were very rich and others very poor, things had to be evened up a bit, and Consuela was doing her part.

“Everything locked,” Consuela muttered among the brooms. “And all those bracelets. Clank, clank, clank.”

She picked four bath towels off the top of the pile, swung them over her left shoulder and stepped out into the hall, a handsome young woman with a haughty tilt to her head. Her confident stride and the casual way she wore the towels made her look like an athlete headed for the showers after a good day on the court or in the field.

Outside 404 she paused a moment to listen, but all any­one could hear, even with ears of a fox, was the roar of traffic from the
avenida
below. Everyone in the city seemed to be going somewhere, and Consuela had an urge to run down the back stairs and go with them. Her feet, large and flat in their straw
espadrilles,
ached to be running. But instead they stood quietly outside 404 until the tall one, Wilma, opened the door.

She was dressed to go out to dinner in a red silk suit. Every curl, every ring, every bracelet was in place, but only half her make-up had been applied, so that one eye was dull and pale as a fish's and the other sparkled with a gold lid and a bright black fringe under a gaily improb­able arch. When the paint job was completed she would be, Consuela had to admit, imposing, the kind of woman who would not have to catch the eye of a waiter because his eye would be already on her.

But she is not
hembra, Consuela thought.
She has no more bosoms than a bull. Let her keep her underwear locked up. It wouldn't fit me anyway.
And Consuela, who was conspicuously
hembra,
if not downright fat, inflated her chest and rhumbaed her hips through the doorway.

“Oh, it's you,” Wilma said. “Again.” She turned her back with abrupt annoyance and addressed her com­panion. “It seems to me every time I take a breath in this place someone's pussyfooting around turning down beds or changing towels. We get about as much privacy as in a hospital ward.”

Amy Kellogg, standing by the window, made a sound of embarrassed protest, a kind of combination of
ssshh
and
oh dear.
The sound was Amy's own, the resonance of her personality, and an expert could have detected in it the echoes of all the things she hadn't had the nerve to say in her lifetime, to her parents, her brother Gill, her husband Rupert, her old friend Wilma. She was not, as her brother Gill frequently pointed out, getting any younger. It was time for her to take a firm stand, be de­cisive and businesslike.
Don't let people walk all over you,
he often said, while his own boots went tramp, crunch, grind.
Make your own decisions,
he said, but every time she did make a decision it was taken away from her and cast aside or improved, as if it were a toy a child had made, crude and grotesque.

Wilma said, giving herself another golden eyelid, “I feel as if someone's spying on me.”

“They're only trying to provide good service.”

“The towels she put in this morning stank.”

“I didn't notice.”

“You smoke. Your sense of smell has deteriorated. Mine hasn't. They stank.”

“I wish you wouldn't—do you think you ought to talk like this in front of the girl?”

“She doesn't understand.”

“But the travel agency said everyone on the hotel staff spoke English.”

“The travel agency is in San Francisco. We're here.” Wilma made
here
sound like a synonym for
hell.
“If she can speak English why doesn't she say something?”

Wouldn't you like to know,
Consuela thought, swish­ing cold water nonchalantly around the washbasin. She not speak English, ha! She, who had once lived in Los Angeles, until the immigration authorities had caught up with her father and sent the whole family back with a busload of wetbacks; she, who had a genuine American boyfriend and was the envy of the whole neighborhood because she would one day, with the cooperation of the right horses, numbers and jai alai players, return to Los Angeles and walk among the movie stars. Not speak English!
Ho ho to you, Wilma, with no more bosoms than a bull!

“She's really very pretty,” Amy said. “Don't you think so?”

“I hadn't noticed.”

“She is. Terribly pretty,” Amy repeated, watching Consuela's reflection in the bathroom mirror for some sign that the girl had understood, a blush, a brightening of the eye. But Consuela was an older hand at pretense than Amy was at exposing pretenses. She came out of the bathroom, smiling, bland, and turned down each of the twin beds and plumped up the pillows. For Consuela the pretense was like a game. It could be a dangerous one, if the Americans complained to the manager, who knew she could speak English perfectly. But she couldn't resist it any more than she could resist pilfering a pretty nylon slip, a gaudy belt, or a pair of lace panties.

Amy, who knew a little about games too, said, “What's your name? Do you speak English?”

Consuela grinned and shrugged and spread her hands. Then she turned so quickly that her
espadrilles
squeaked in protest, and a moment later she was speeding down the hall to her broom closet. The grin had dropped off her face, and her throat felt tight as a cork in a bottle. In the narrow darkness, without quite knowing why, she crossed herself.

“I don't trust that girl,” Wilma said.

“We could move to another hotel.”

“They're all the same. The whole country's the same. Corrupt.”

“We've only been here two days. Don't you think . . .”

“I don't have to think. I can smell. Corruption always smells.”

Wilma sounded positive, as she always did when she was wrong or unsure of herself. She finished her make-up job by applying a dot of lipstick to the inside corner of each eye while Amy watched, hoping that Wilma's “nerves” were not going to erupt again. The signs were all there, like the first wisps of smoke over a volcano; the trembling hands, the hard, fast breathing, the quick sus­picions.

Wilma had had a bad year, a divorce (her second), the death of her parents in a plane wreck, a bout of pneu­monia. She had planned the holiday in Mexico to get away from it all. Instead, she had taken it all with her.
Includ­ing,
Amy thought grimly,
me. Well, I needn't have come. Rupert said I was making a mistake and Gill called me an imbecile. But Wilma has no one left but me.

Wilma turned away from the bureau mirror. “I look like a hag.”

The wisps of smoke were becoming clouds.

“No, you don't,” Amy said. “And I'm sorry I called you a poor sport. I mean…”

“This suit hangs on me like a tent.”

“It's a beautiful suit.”

“Of course it's a beautiful suit. It's a fine suit. It's the hag inside that's ruining it.”

“Don't talk like that. You're only thirty-three.”

“Only! I've lost so much weight. I'm like a stick.” Wilma sat down abruptly on the edge of one of the beds. “I feel sick.”

“Where? Is it your head again?”

“My stomach. Oh, God. It's like—like being poisoned.”

“Poisoned? Now, Wilma, you mustn't
think
like that.”

“I know. I
know.
But I feel so sick.” She rolled over sideways across the bed, her hands clutching her stomach.

“I'm going to call a doctor.”

“No, no—I don't trust—foreigners . . .”

“I can't sit here and watch you suffer.”

“Oh God. I'm dying—I can't breathe . . .”

Her groans reached the broom closet, and Consuela pressed against the listening wall, as still and alert as a lizard on a sunny rock.