RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (17 page)

"Keep trying," Cameron encouraged.

"Not in any of the company offices--"

Cameron couldn't refrain from gripping him by the shoulder, as though physical pressure might aid. "Keep it up. Don't quit. Keep it up."

" Somewhere -- Some where--"

He closed his eyes briefly, in intensity of effort. Suddenly he jolted from his chair, as though a tack had just been stuck into him. He pounded his fist down on the photograph, making the two strips of paper fly off in opposite directions.

"Why, he was the guide that used to go with us! He was hired by us--! On those trips. The rest of us were all amateurs and he was the professional we took along. He'd find the best places for us to go, and all that. Bucky. Yes, now I remember, we called him Bucky. Gee, I haven't thought about him in years!"

"Went with you where?" said Cameron tautly. "What trips?"

"Fishing trips, camping trips we used to make. Sort of a little friendly sporting outfit we got up. The Rod and Reel Club we called it. We'd all go off, two or three times a year, get away from business and all that. Go up in the woods, roughing it, camping out. You know what I mean."

"That's what I wanted," Cameron encouraged him. "Something like that. That's what I hoped I'd get from you. That's what I came here for. Now we're in the heat. Now, did you have any connection, any contact, with Strickland outside of those trips?"

Garrison nodded. "Yes, previous to them. But not afterward. From then on I stopped seeing him. We broke the club up."

"Paige?"

This time Garrison shook his head definitely. "No, I never saw him before those trips, and I never saw him afterward. It was only on the trips themselves that I saw him at all. He was there at the airport when we met to take off and we dropped him off there when we landed back and went our ways."

"Then that was the only time you and both these men were together? Both , not just one."

"That's right."

"You see, I have the three of you linked in two ways. First by a date. And secondly by a note. There's a date touches each of your lives. I don't know why, I don't know what it means. The last day of May, the thirty-first. Your first wife died on May thirty-first. Strickland's, shall we say, close friend met her death on May thirty-first. And finally the bodies of Buck and Sharon Paige were found together on May thirty-first. Twice could be a coincidence. Three times is no coincidence. Not when it happens to three men who already knew each other before it happened.

"And then there's a note. A particularly vicious note each of you got, right when it was calculated to hurt the most. All worded pretty much alike. I saw two of them. And I believe in the existence of a third, because the man who got that, Strickland, didn't know there were two others I had already seen when he told me about his. And the wording of his matched the others.

"And now we come to something very important. The crux of the whole matter. Because those notes and that date may recur in other lives, they may not be finished yet. I have no way of knowing until I find out what they mean. So you've got to tell me just who else was a member of that sporting outfit with you. I've got to know their names before we go any further. I've got to know where I can get hold of them and warn them."

"I can give you that without any trouble," Garrison told him. "Because it was a small outfit, only five of us in all." He counted off on his fingers. "Beside myself, Strickland, and this Paige, there were only two other fellows in it. And their names were--"

Suddenly, back at the small town where it all began, outside the lighted window of Geety's drugstore, overlooking the square, the phantom lover, the ghostly drugstore cowboy, is glimpsed again. For just one night. For just one night he's seen standing there again, in his old place, keeping his old vigil. No eyes for anyone but the one who doesn't come.

Most don't know him any more, don't know who he is, don't know the story; the town has changed so. The war came and went; the town swelled up with it and then burst. It's shrunken again now, back nearly to its former size, but the same people no longer inhabit it. They drifted on and others came to take their place. Geety's sign still says "Geety's," but it's just a trade name now, someone else is running it. There's a different cop, and a different girl in the ticket-window of the Bijou; there's a different crew in the trim brick firehouse across on the other side of the square.

But the square's still there, and the same old things go on.

It's June first, it's a Saturday night, and the lights are all blazing and the whole town's out on the hoof. Sauntering by in two's, every boy with his girl, every girl with her boy.

There's nothing disheveled or odd about him. You wouldn't know. His hair's freshly cut, the way a man gets his hair cut before a Saturday night date. His tie's new and colorful. A little colored boy came along before, and he even let the urchin give him a shine. They say purpose in life keeps you alive. Well then his life must be full of purpose. Because there's nothing to show he's gone off on a tangent. A doctor might be able to tell after a few visits. But who's to make him pay those few visits? And doctors don't go looking for their cases; cases have to go looking for their doctors.

The inside of the building may be a charnel house, but the façade is the same wholesome, conventional, commonplace one you see around you on all sides. No one has yet been able to look into the windows of people's souls from a passerby's point of view and see the inside. If they could, there'd be many a scream and many a sudden paling along the streets.

He looks at his watch from time to time, and he even gives a little tolerant, self-assured smile as he does so. The smile of a man who's not put out, who doesn't mind waiting a little; who knows she's bound to come.

Two little bobby soxers, feeling their oats, out looking for escorts (after all, perambulating the square is as good a way as any to get them if you haven't one already) happen by. They glance his way as they come abreast of him and decide even he might do. A new face, somebody new in town. Might be worth investigating.

They smirk and try to flirt with him, and slow their stroll to a snail's pace, to give him a chance to accost them if he sees fit.

"New scenery," one says audibly to the other, for his benefit.

He gets it. (It would be hard to miss.) But he only smiles a little, shakes his head a little. "Waiting for someone," he says. Then he tips his hat to them to soften the rejection and turns his face the other way.

They shrug to one another and go on; plenty of other fish in the sea, especially on a Saturday night.

They'll flirt with many men yet before they grow older and pass that stage. Meaning no harm, down by the square on a Saturday night. They'll never know how close they came to never flirting with any man again. One Saturday night, down on the square, with all the lights blazing. So close death brushes by you in a crowd sometimes.

Then at last the law of averages gets in its work; someone turns up in the crowd, one of the old prewar inhabitants, who knows him from before, knows who he is, or rather who he was. Takes a second look, startles into long-dormant recognition, leaves his girl's side and going over, stops before him.

"Hello, Johnny. Don't you remember me, Johnny Marr?"

Just looks at him, but doesn't answer.

"We used to play basketball together, on the team. Red Washburn. Sure, you remember me. Don't you remember the coach, Ed Taylor? Old 'Iron Man Ed'? He died at Tarawa; first man to plant the flag-- Or one of them places."

Just looks at him, but doesn't say a word. Doesn't even blink.

"What's the matter with you, Johnny? I used to work parttime at Allen's Grocery, after school, delivering orders. I own the store now. Remember old man Allen's daughter, that never would notice any of us? That's her standing right over there. She's my wife now."

Just looks at him, and never utters a sound.

He gives up at last, looks doubtful, looks embarrassed; goes back to her, scratching his head, and they go on together.

"I could swear that was Johnny Marr. Don't tell me I'm losing my memory. Couldn't get a word out of him. You remember Johnny Marr; don't he look like him to you?"

"I don't want to look back at him. I never took any notice of that crowd of boys you used to run around with, anyway."

"But then, if he wasn't, why didn't he say he wasn't? He just stood there mum, like a ghost. Maybe that story I once heard about him is true after all; that he blew his top and--"

"Oh, forget it, Hartley," she says inattentively, and gives him a slight directional push. "Get on the line and get our tickets; they're all getting ahead of you, and I don't want to sit all the way over on the side again."

Old friendship; youth's friendship.

It gets later, and the crowd thins out, the lights dim out. The movie house empties out, and then the soda parlors, and finally even the two taverns: "Mike's Place" on the square, and the slightly racier "Kelly's" out in the outskirts. Geety's is dark long ago, and the five-and-ten even longer ago. Joe the cabman has put his cab away and gone home to his wife and kids. Even the cop on the beat has clocked out. Even the cats and the dogs have gone in for the night.

One tolls from the steeple. That steeple that's still five hours fast. The square's stark empty now, all the lights are out.

No one sees him go away. No one's there to see him go away. How he goes, nor where he goes, nor when he goes.

But in the morning, when daylight finds the square, the place in front of the drugstore is empty, no one's standing there. And that night no one's there any more, either. Nor the night after, nor the next night.

Just that one night, and then he's gone away again.

But the caretaker of the cemetery up on the hill could tell--but doesn't, because nobody asks him--could tell if he wanted to, how the very next morning, that Sunday morning, when he first made his rounds, he suddenly came upon a fresh wreath of flowers placed on one of the markers, that hadn't been there when he last made his rounds the night before. Flowers in the night, flowers in the dark, that no hands had been seen to leave. Flowers so wistful, so tender, so heartbroken; not storebought, but flowers of the field, assembled, wreathed together, by unpractised hand. Against the half-forgotten headstone that reads:

DOROTHY

I shall be waiting.

THEY WERE ALL CLUSTERED around the clock, thick as bees, waiting for their chosen partners. Their partners of just that one evening, or their partners of every evening. The men waiting for their girls. The girls waiting for their men.

Most of them were young. One or two were a little more mature, but most of them were young, and glowing with their youngness. That is the only time to wait by a clock, for your date around eight, when you're young. When you get a little older, it's a lonesome thing to do. But when you're young, every time you do it it's Christmas Eve and there's a big package coming along any minute for you to unwrap. And even if you don't find what you wanted inside it, it doesn't matter: because tomorrow night will be Christmas Eve all over again, and there'll be another big package coming along any minute for you to unwrap. It's when the packages stop coming and the Christmas-tree lights die down, that you know all of a sudden you're old.

It was the clock at the Carlton Hotel, the clock inside the lobby, the most famous meeting place in town. Custom had made it that, convenience. Everyone met everyone else there. No matter where you were going, you started from there.

The girls were pretty, and the boys were clean-cut and decent-looking. Some of the girls sat while they waited, but a few were standing, because there weren't enough seats to go around. Sometimes, when they knew each other, they split a chair between them, one on the seat, the other perched on the arm, even if they weren't going out on the same date together. The boys, of course, all stood. They acted each according to his temperament and his nature. The restless, the skeptical, the unsure ones, walked back and forth, occasionally went toward the entrance and looked out, came back again, checked their watches against the clock, tapped their feet, drummed their fingers. ("Did she mean it when she said she'd be here, or is she standing me up?") The patient, the credulous, the calm ones stood relaxed, not bothering to move about much, not bothering to consult the clock, except to make sure of their own punctuality. ("She'll be here. She said she would. I can count on it.")

The boy, the one particular boy standing there, was one of the confident, unworried ones. His shoulder was sloped against one of the squared columns that margined the lobby, he was peacefully browsing through his newspaper under a bracket of electric wall candles.

He acted very sure she'd come, whoever she was to be. There must have been a perfect understanding between them, they must have been already in the later stages of "keeping company," just preceding formal engagement when you no longer have to worry about outside interference.

He was about twenty-three. He was a good-looking, husky kid. Good football material. Not overly-intelligent, perhaps, no one would have accused him of that. But otherwise wholly prepossessing. The kind of a boy older men would like to take into their offices. The kind of a boy older women would like to have meeting their daughters under the clock at the Carlton. They mightn't know where Mary Jane was, but at least they didn't have to worry about it while they didn't know.