Deep Water (22 page)

       Melinda threw her pocketbook at the sofa and took off her coat. "I see," she said. "Was it the bills that—" She stopped.

       He felt almost sorry for her in her defeat. "No, my dear. Horace told me several days ago that Carpenter knows nothing about Columbia University. Horace does, you see, and right in the Psychology Department. I don't know whether he's made an arrangement of some kind with Kennington or not to let him pursue his research there. It doesn't interest me."

       Melinda stalked into the kitchen. She was going to get drunk tonight, Vic knew. And whatever she had drunk with Carpenter had probably laid a very solid foundation for it. And for a monumental hangover tomorrow. Vic sighed and continued his paper. "Want a drink?" Melinda called from the kitchen.

       "No, thanks."

       "You're so healthy these days," she said as she came in with her own drink. "The picture of health and physical fitness. Well, it may interest you to know that Mr. Carpenter is a psychiatrist. He may not have graduated from anywhere," she said, on a defensive note, "but he knows a few things."

       Vic said with slow, measured disgust, "I don't expect to see him again." After a moment or so, when Melinda had said nothing, Vic asked, "Why? Has he been psychoanalyzing you?"

       "No."

       "That's too bad. He might have enlightened me about you. I admit I don't understand you."

       "I understand 'you'," she snapped.

       "Then why get a psychologist up here to look at me? What 'is' he, anyway, a psychologist or a detective?"

       "He's both," she said angrily. She was walking about, sipping a dark-beige highball.

       "Um-hm. And what does he have to say about me?" "He says you're a borderline case of schizophrenia."

       "Oh," Vic said. "Tell him I said he was a borderline. Nothing more. He's something betwixt and between, something you step over and forget."

       Melinda snorted. "He seems to be able to get you worked up—''

       "Daddy, what's schizomenia mean?" Trixie asked, still rapt, her arms around her knees.

       "It's an enlightening conversation for the child," Melinda said mincingly.

       "She's heard worse." Vic cleared his throat. "Schizophrenia, hon, means a split personality. It is a mental disease characterized by a loss of contact with one's environment and by dissolution of the personality. There. Understand? And it looks like your old Daddy's got it."

       "A-a-aw," Trixie said, laughing as if he were kidding her. "How do you know?"

       "Because Mr. Carpenter says I have."

       "How does Mr. Carpenter know you have?" Trixie asked, grinning, loving it. It was like the nonsense stories Vic told her about imaginary animals, and she would ask him could they fly, could they read, could they cook, could they sew, could they dress themselves, and sometimes they could and sometimes they couldn't.

       "Because Mr. Carpenter is a psychologist," Vic replied. "What's a psychologist?"Trixie asked.

       "Oh, Christ, Vic, stop it!" Melinda said, whirling around from the other side of the room to face him.

       "We shall continue this conversation at some other time," Vic said, smiling at his daughter.

       Melinda did get very drunk that night. She made two telephone calls that Vic managed not to listen to by going into the kitchen where it was impossible to hear a voice from Melinda's bedroom. Vic had fixed the dinner, which Melinda ate little of, and she was totteringly drunk by nine o'clock, Trixie's bedtime. By then Vic had defined several more psychological terms. It was difficult to explain to Trixie what consciousness was, but he told her that when people had had too much to drink and fell asleep on the sofa they were suffering from the loss of it.

Chapter 16

The next day Melinda was still sleeping when Vic came home for lunch. He knew she had been up very late the night before, because he had seen the glow of her bedroom light on the back lawn when he turned out his own light at two-thirty. When he came home at seven that evening, she had still not taken the edge off her hangover, though she said she had slept until three. Vic had two things to tell her, one pleasant and one perhaps not so pleasant, so he told her the first one before dinner, when her hangover seemed to be at its worst, hoping it might make her feel better.

       "You can be sure," he said, "that I'm not going to mention this detective episode to Horace or Phil or anybody else. So if Wilson and Ralph can keep their mouths shut, and they have every reason to, nobody needs know about it. Does anybody else know about it?" he asked with concern, as if he were on her side.

       "No," she groaned, completely vulnerable in her hour of suffering.

       "I thought it might make you feel better if I told you that," Vic said.

       "Thanks," she said indifferently.

       His shoulders moved in an involuntary shrug. But she was not looking at him. "By the way, I had a letter from Brian Ryder today. He's going to come up the third week in November. I told him he could stay with us. It'll be for two nights, three at the most. We've got a lot of work to do in the office, so we won't be here much." After a moment, when she had made no sign that she had heard, as if the words had penetrated about as little as they would have penetrated the ears of a person asleep, he added, feeling rather odd and as if he were talking to himself, "I'm sure from his letters he's a very civilized young man. He's only twenty-four."

       "I don't suppose you'd fix me another drink?" she said,

       extending her empty glass toward him, though she still stared at the floor.

       She ate a good dinner that evening. She could always eat with a hangover, and besides it was one of her theories that the more you ate with a hangover the better you felt. "Nail it down," was her remedy. After dinner she felt well enough to take a look at the evening paper. Vic put Trixie to bed, then came back and sat down in the armchair.

       "Melinda, I have a question to ask you," he began.

       "What?" She looked at him over the paper.

       "Would you like a divorce from me? If I gave you a very good income to live on?"

       She stared at him for perhaps five seconds. "No," she said firmly, and rather angrily.

       "But what's this all coming to?" he asked, opening his hands, and feeling suddenly the soul of logic. "You hate me. You treat me as an enemy. You get a detective after me—"

       "Because you killed Charley. You know it as sure as you're sitting there."

       "Darling, I just didn't. Now come to your senses."

       "Everybody 'knows' you did it!"

       "Who?"

       "Don Wilson knows it. Harold thinks so. Ralph knows it." "Why don't they prove it?" he asked gently.

       "Give them time. They'll prove it. Or 'I' will," she said, sitting forward on the sofa, reaching abruptly for her pack of cigarettes on the cocktail table.

       "How, I'd like to know. There's such a thing as framing a man, of course." He said musingly, "I suppose it's a little late. Say, why doesn't Don Wilson or Carpenter subject me to a lie detector? Not that they have any legal power to, however."

       "Harold said you wouldn't even react to it," she said. "He thinks you're cracked."

       "And the crack shall make you free."

       "Don't be funny, Vic."

       "Sorry. I wasn't trying to be funny. To get back to what I asked you before, I'll give you anything but Trixie, if you want to divorce me. Think of what it means. You'll have money to do what you want with, money to see the people you want to see. You'll be absolutely free of responsibility, free of responsibility for a child and for a husband. Think of the fun you could have."

       She was chewing her underlip as if his words tortured her perhaps with temptation. "I'm not finished with you yet. I'd like to destroy you, I'd like to smash you."

       He opened his hands again, lightly: "It's been done. There's always arsenic in the soup. But my taste buds are pretty good. Then there's—"

       "I didn't mean kill you. You're 'so—nuts', I don't suppose you'd mind 'that' very much. I'd like to smash your lousy ego!"

       "Haven't you? Darling, what more could you do than what you've been doing? What do you think I'm living on?" "Ego."

       A laugh bubbled up in him, and then he was serious again. "No, not ego. Just the pieces of myself that I can put together again and hold together—by force of will. Will power, if you like, that's what I live on, but not ego. How could I possibly have any?" he finished desperately, enjoying the discussion immensely and also enjoying the sound of his own voice, which seemed to be objective, like his own voice on a tape-recording machine being played back to him. He was also aware of the Thespian tone he had assumed, making his words a combination of distilled passion and utter hamminess. He went on in rich, full tones, with an earnest gesture of one hand, "You know that I love you, you know that I would give you anything that you wished or that I could give you." He paused for a moment, thinking that he had also given her the other half of the bed in there, his half, but that he really couldn't say it for fear of making himself laugh, or making her laugh. "This is my last offer. I don't know what more I can do."

       "I've told you," she said slowly, "I haven't finished with you yet. Why don't you divorce me? It'd be a lot safer for you. You certainly consider you've got grounds, don't you?" she said sarcastically, as if the grounds were illusory or as if he would have been a cad to use them.

       "I never said I wanted to divorce you, did I? I'd feel—as if I were shirking my responsibility if I did. Besides, it isn't appropriate for a man to divorce his wife. She should divorce him. But what I've been getting at—this quarreling—"

       "You haven't heard the end of it."

       "That's what I mean. Must you reply to me in a belligerent tone?" His own tone was still sweet.

       "You're right. I ought to save it for the final attack," she said just as belligerently.

       Vic sighed. "Well, I take it the 'status quo' is still the 'status quo ante'. When are you going to have Ralph arid Wilson to the house? Bring them on. I can take them."

       She stared at him, her green-brown eyes as cold and steady as a toad's.

       "Have you nothing more to say?" he asked.

       "I've said it."

       "Then I think I shall retire." He stood up and smiled at her. "Good night. Pleasant dreams," he said, taking his pipe from the little table beside his armchair. Then he walked into the other world of the garage and his room.

Chapter 17

Don Wilson and his wife moved to Wesley in less than two weeks after Vic's encounter with him on the street. Once more Melinda gave her services as a house-finder, though in this case it was an apartment in Wesley. Vic saw it as a disorderly withdrawal. Wilson had been routed at the first brush. He had retreated for better cover, but now it was going to be difficult for him to keep that scowling eye on his enemy.

       "What happened? Did people make it so unpleasant for him that he had to leave town?" Vic asked Melinda, knowing very well that was what had happened. Somehow, Vic supposed through Ralph, the story of the detective had leaked out. Ralph had perhaps fired a poorly aimed shot, telling people that Victor Van Allen had been tailed by a detective for five weeks just because he was so damned suspect, and Ralph's idea had probably been to arouse public opinion against Victor Van Allen if he could. But Vic's reputation had held. The repercussion was curious, as if a glass cannon ball had hit a stone wall and shattered into fragments, some of which had been picked up by the townspeople—pieces of a story out of which they could not make a whole. Who hired the detective, for instance? Some said Wilson himself—except that he hardly looked as if he had the money to do it. Others simply assumed the detective—if indeed he had existed, if the whole thing was not a made-up story—had been part of the police force and that some kind of routine investigation had been conducted very quietly at this time, a few weeks after the De Lisle incident. Horace knew the story better than any, but even he did not venture to say now, or venture to ask Vic, whether Melinda had hired the detective or not. Vic knew he suspected it, but it was as if this fact, if it was a fact, was simply too shameful to talk about, and would have been too painful for Vic to turn his mind to, and to answer "Yes" to, if Horace had asked him. Horace simply wore a pained expression these days.

       Vic felt more cheerful and benign than ever. More and more Melinda was sullenly drunk. On one of her many dashes to Wesley to see Don Wilson she was arrested for speeding and also accused of drunken driving. She called Vic at his office from the police station in Wesley, and Vic hurried over. She was not very drunk, he saw, not drunk at all comparatively speaking, but the highway officer must have caught a whiff, or he deduced drunkenness from her probably foolhardy counterattack when he had stopped her. In the station Melinda was boldly asking for an alcoholic content test to be made of her breath. But there was no apparatus in the station for such a test.

       "Well, you can see she's not drunk," Vic said to the police captain." I grant you she may have been speeding. I've known that to happen. I think you'd better handle the speeding part, Melinda, since I don't know what happened."

       Vic brought to bear all the tact at his command, knowing that if Melinda had her license suspended for six months, all hell would break loose in the household. Melinda incarcerated would be most unpleasant. The police captain gave a lecture on the seriousness of driving while intoxicated, which Vic listened to with respect, knowing that a happy ending was coming. But Melinda broke in with, "I certainly haven't been guilty of drunken driving before, and I insist I'm not drunk now!" Her conviction had some effect on the captain, and so, of course, did the fact that he was Victor Van Allen, an esteemed resident of Little Wesley and the founder of the Greenspur Press. Or at least Vic thought that the middle-aged captain looked intelligent enough to have heard of the Greenspur Press and to know his name, as a piece of local information, in connection with it. Melinda was let off with a $15 fine, which Vic paid out of his pocket. Melinda continued her dash to the Wilsons in Wesley.