Deep Water (7 page)

       Don Wilson and his wife stood against the wall, Don looking lank and unhappy, and his wife, who was small and blond and usually animated, looking rather subdued. Vic supposed it was because they didn't know many people, and he had nodded and smiled a hello to them and was about to go and chat with them, but Don Wilson's unmistakably cold response stayed him. Perhaps Wilson was surprised to see him there at all, Vic thought, much less to see him greeted by all his old friends as if nothing had happened.

       Vic circulated around the edge of the dance floor, chatting with the MacPhersons and the Cowans and with the inevitable Mrs. Podnansky, whose two grandsons were here tonight. The younger grandson, Walter, had just got his law degree from Harvard. That evening Vic realized that there was something in what Melinda said about people shunning him—people he did not know at all. He saw people pointing him out to their dancing partners, then discussing him volubly, though always out of his earshot. Other total strangers turned away with self-conscious little smiles as he passed them, when at another time they might have introduced themselves and started talking. Strangers often started conversations with Vic about his printing plant. But Vic did not mind the shunning and the whispers. It made him feel strangely more comfortable and secure, in fact, than he usually felt at parties, perhaps because the whispering and pointing, at both him and Melinda, fairly guaranteed that Melinda would behave herself tonight. Melinda was having a good time, he could see that, though tonight she would probably tell him that she had not had a good time at all. She looked beautiful in a new amber-colored taffeta gown that had no belt and fitted her strong narrow waist and her hips as if it had been cut for her to the millimeter. By midnight she had danced with about fifteen partners, including a couple of youngish men Vic didn't know, either one of whom might have been Ralph Gosden's successor under ordinary circumstances, but Melinda was merely pleasant and gracious to them without being coy or hoydenish or femme fatale or pretending to have been swept off her feet by them—all of which tactics he had seen her use on other occasions. Neither did she drink too much. Vic was extremely proud of Melinda that evening. He had often been proud of the way she looked, but seldom, that he could remember, of the way she behaved.

       As Melinda came toward him after a dance, he heard a woman say, "That's his wife."

       "Oh, yes? She's lovely!"

       Someone's laughter obliterated part of the conversation. Then: "Nobody knows, you see! But some people think so… No, he certainly doesn't, does he?"

       "Hi," Melinda said to Vic. "Aren't you tired of standing up?" Her large green-brown eyes looking slurringly at him, as she often looked at men, though usually with a smile. She was not smiling now.

       "I haven't been standing up. I've been sitting with Mrs. Podnansky part of the time."

       "She's your favorite party girl, isn't she?"

       Vic laughed. "Can I get you something to drink?" "A quadruple Scotch."

       Before he could go off to get her anything, one of the young men who had danced with her before came up and said a solemn, "May I?" to Vic.

       "You may" Vic said, with a smile. He didn't think the emphatic "May I?" was a result of the McRae tale, though of course it might have been.

       Vic glanced over at Don Wilson and saw that Don was watching him again. Vic got himself a third helping of lemon ice—liquor had no charm for him that evening—and seeing Mary Meller looking rather detached, he took another portion of ice for her. Mary accepted it with a warm, friendly smile.

       "Evelyn and Phil want us to cool off with a dip over at their house after the dance is over. Can you and Melinda come?" Mary asked him.

       "We didn't bring our suits," Vic said, though that hadn't stopped them on other occasions when they had jumped into the Cowan pool naked. Melinda had, at least. Vic was a little shy about such things.

       "Drop by your house for your suits—or not?" Mary said gaily "It's such a dark night, who cares?"

       "I'll ask Melinda," Vic said.

       "She looks lovely tonight, doesn't she? Vic—" Mary touched his arm and he leaned a little closer. "Vic, you're not feeling uncomfortable tonight, are you? I wanted you to know that all your real friends are still your friends, the same as ever. I don't know what you've heard tonight, but I hope nothing unpleasant."

       "Didn't hear a thing!" Vic assured her, smiling.

       "I talked to Evelyn. She and Phil feel the same as we do. 'We' know you just said it as a—as a joke, in spite of what people like the Wilsons are trying to say."

       "What're they trying to say?"

       "It's not her, it's him. He thinks you're odd. Well, we're all odd, aren't we?" Mary said, with a gay laugh. "He must be looking for another plot for a story. I think he's 'very' odd!"

       Vic knew Mary well enough to know that she was more concerned than she was pretending to be. "What is he saying?" Vic asked.

       "Oh, he's saying—that you don't react normally. I can imagine what Ralph Gosden's been saying. I mean the fuel he's added to the fire. Oh, Don Wilson's just saying that you ought to be watched and that you're very mysterious." Mary whispered the last word, smiling. "I told him we'd all had the opportunity of watching you for the past nine or ten years, and that you're one of the finest, sweetest, most unmysterious men I've ever known!"

       "Mrs. Meller, may I have this dance with you?" Vic asked. "Do you think your husband would mind?"

       "Why, Vic! I can't believe it!"

       He took her ice plate and carried it with his own to the refreshment stall a few feet away, then returned and swept Mary out onto the floor to the music of a waltz. The waltz had always been his favorite dance. He waltzed very well. He saw Melinda notice him and stop short with surprise. Horace and Evelyn were looking at him, too. Vic shortened his steps so that he would not look silly, because a joyous exuberance had filled him as if a long-repressed desire had burst forth. He felt he could have flown with Mary, if it had not been for the other couples that cluttered the floor around him.

       "Why, you're a wonderful dancer!" Mary said. "Why've you been hiding it all these years?"

       Vic did not try to answer.

       Long after the dance was over Vic felt a tingling exhilaration is if he had achieved a triumph. When Melinda had finished a lance, he went over to her, made a little bow and said, "May I, Melinda?"

       She hid her surprise almost immediately by closing her eyes, turning her head away from him. "Oh, darling, I'm tired," she said.

       On their way home, when Melinda asked, "What inspired you to dance tonight?" he was able to pass it off, to forestall her kidding him with "I thought I might as well baffle people by being inconsistent as well as odd. I'm supposed never to dance, you know."

       Melinda hadn't been in the mood for the Cowans' swimming pool, though she had declined their invitation very graciously.

       "I thought you were charming tonight," Vic said to her at home.

       "I have to put myself out to counteract some of the damage you've done," she replied. "I worked hard tonight."

       Vic shrugged involuntarily, smiled a little, and said nothing. Melinda had had just as good a time as she'd had at other club dances when she had got too high, or flirted, or got sick, or created some other kind of disturbance that hadn't enhanced their popularity, either.

       Lying in his bed that night Vic relived the moments on the dance floor with Mary Meller. Don Wilson's scowling face. The whispering people. He thought that a few people there tonight really believed that he had killed Malcolm McRae—the people who knew him least. That was what Mary had tried to tell him. If Mary hadn't known him so well, or thought she knew him so well, she might be one of the people who suspected him, he thought. She had as much as said it that night of the party. 'You're like somebody waiting very patiently and one day—you'll do something'. He remembered the exact words, and how he had smiled at their mildness. Yes, all these years he had played a game of seeming calm and indifferent to whatever Melinda did. He had deliberately hidden everything he felt—and in those months of her first affair he had felt something, even if it was only shock, but he had succeeded in concealing it. That was what baffled people, he knew. He had seen it in their faces, even in Horace's. He didn't react with the normal jealousy, and something was going to give. That was the conclusion people came to. And that was what made his story so good: something had given, and he had murdered one of Melinda's lovers. That was more believable than that he had taken it for four years without saying or doing anything. To have burst out, finally, was merely human. People understood that. Nobody on earth could prove that he had murdered Malcolm McRae, he thought, but neither could anybody prove that he hadn't.

Chapter 6

It was a little more than two weeks after the Fourth of July dance, when Vic was breakfasting with Trixie one morning, that lie saw the item in the 'New York Times':

       SLAYER OF NEW YORK ADVERTISING MAN FOUND

       8-Month-Old Mystery Slaying of

       Malcolm McRae Solved

       With a spoonful of grapefruit poised in mid-air, Vic pored over it. The police had picked up a man working as a clerk in a haberdashery shop in the state of Washington who had confessed to the crime, and there was "no doubt" that he was the murderer, though they were still checking the facts. The man's name was Howard Olney. He was thirty-one and a brother of Phyllis Olney, an entertainer, who had once been "on intimate terms" with McRae. Olney, said the paper, blamed McRae for separating himself and his sister as a professional team. They were nightclub entertainers, specializing in magic tricks. Phyllis Olney had met McRae in Chicago and had broken her contract to come with him to New York a year and a half ago. Olney had run out of money, his sister had never sent him any though she had promised that she would (who'd ever been able to squeeze a nickel out of Mal?), and, according to Olney, McRae had abandoned his sister, leaving her destitute. Nearly a year later Olney had hitchhiked to New York for the express purpose of avenging himself and his sister by killing McRae. Psychiatrists who had examined Olney said he showed manic-depressive tendencies, which would probably be taken into account when his trial came up.

       "Daddy!"Trixie had finally got his attention."I said I'm going to finish your belt today!"

       Vic had the feeling she had yelled it at him three times. "That' great. You mean the braided belt."

       "The 'only' belt I'm making this summer," Trixie said in a tom that showed her annoyance with him. She dumped some puffed wheat from the little package in front of her onto her corn flakes stirred them together, then reached for the bottle of ketchup Trixie was in a ketchup period. Ketchup had to be on everything from scrambled eggs to rice pudding.

       "Well, I'm looking forward to it," Vic said. "I hope you made it big enough."

       "It's a whopper."

       "Good." Vic stared at her brown, smooth little shoulder crossed by the denim overall straps, thought vaguely of telling her to take a sweater this morning, then returned to the paper in his hand.

       The remoteness of the murderer's relationship to his victim and the fact that he left no clues [said the paper] made this a nearly "perfect" crime. It was only after months of patient inquiry into every friend and acquaintance of the murdered man that the police were able to pick up the trail of Olney ...

       Whether the story would be in the 'New Wesleyan' this evening or not, Vic thought, many people in Little Wesley received the 'Times' every morning. Everybody who was interested in the story was going to know about it by tonight.

       "Aren't you going to have any bacon and eggs?" Trixie asked.

       Trixie usually claimed one piece of his bacon. He didn't want any bacon and eggs now. He saw that she had a big pool of ketchup in her bowl and that the cereal was probably inedible, even for Trixie. He got up slowly, went into the kitchen, and mechanically lit the fire under a skillet. He put in two pieces of bacon. He felt faintly nauseous.

       "Daddy? I've just got fi-yuv 'min-n-nits'!" Trixie yelled to him in a minatory tone.

       "Coming up, puss," he called back.

       "Hey! Since when do you call 'me' puss?"

       Vic didn't answer. He'd tell Melinda this morning, he thought, before she had a chance to hear it from anybody else.

       He had barely set the bacon down in front of Trixie when he heard the low moan of the school bus coming up the road. Trixie scurried about, collecting her badminton racket and the big red workman's handkerchief she was crazy about and wore around her neck most of the time, holding a piece of bacon in the fingers of one hand. She turned at the door, popped the bacon into her mouth, and Vic heard the crunch of baby teeth on it. "'Bye, Daddy!" and she was gone.

       Vic stared at the sofa in the living room, remembering a time when Mal had passed out there and had had to spend the night—though Mal had revived enough to ask to be put into a guest room, Vic recalled. He thought of Ralph lying there, that last evening, his head in the same spot Mal's head had been. Ralph was going to be amused by the story, Vic thought. Ralph might be back before long.

       Vic went into the kitchen, heated the coffee for a moment, then poured a cup for Melinda, adding a scant teaspoon of sugar. He carried the coffee to her door and knocked.

       "Umm-m?"

       "It's me. I've got some coffee for you."

       "Com-me in-n," she drawled, half with sleepiness, half with n annoyance.

       He went in. She lay on her back, her arms under her head. She wore pajamas, she slept without a pillow, and there was always something peculiarly Spartan about her, to Vic, on the rare occasions when he went into her room to awaken her, and when he saw her lying in her bed alone. There would be the wind sweeping the room, billowing the curtains as he opened the door on the coldest winter mornings. There would be a blanket kicked off onto the floor, because even in a temperature nearly freezing Melinda could keep warm under practically nothing. There was a blanket kicked off on the floor now. Melinda lay under a sheet. Vic handed her the big cup of coffee. It was her own blue and white cup, with her name on it.