Vanish in an Instant (10 page)

“So is a weasel, so I won't bother thanking you for that, Mrs. Hamilton.”

“You've been stringing me along,” she said in a cold flat voice. “
You're
going to be Loftus' lawyer, aren't you?”

“No.”

“You can lie about it. Go on. Everybody else lies.”

“I'm not lying.”

“How can I believe you? How can I believe anybody?” She crossed the room, moving with agonizing slowness like a deep-sea diver forcing his leaden feet across the ocean floor, fighting a pressure he can't see or understand. “I. . . Alice, I think I'll go up to my room and rest awhile. Please see that Mr. Meecham is—looked after.”

Meecham watched her until she disappeared around a corner of the hall. Then he turned his head and looked at Alice, and in that moment he had two wishes, diverging in means, but with a common purpose: to get Alice away from that house. His first wish was that he had a mother or a father or a family of some kind so that he could invite Alice to stay with them. Since he had no family at all, he wished that Mrs. Hamilton would take Alice and board the earliest plane for home. Some day, some remote day when he had surplus time and money, he might go to see her. She might be married, by that time, married and with a couple of children; a placid contented matron, shopping, going to movies, lying in the sun. This projection into the future was so vivid, his sense of loss so acute, that he felt a tide of rage rise in him, rise and ebb, leaving a taste of salt.

He said, abruptly, “When are you leaving for home?”

“You mean L.A.?”

“Yes.”

“I don't know. Mrs. Hamilton hasn't told me.”

“You could tell her. Tell her you want to leave.”

“But I don't want to,” she protested.

“Have you seen Virginia?”

“Yes, a few minutes ago, with Carney.”

“Suppose I told you I think Virginia is dangerous?”

“Are you trying to scare me? I don't understand. Every­thing is all right now, isn't it? Everything's been settled?” She took a step back, away from him. “Or has it? Why are you going to see Loftus if you're not his lawyer?”

“Because he asked me to.”

“As an old pal?”

“More or less.”

“You never saw him before last night, does that make you an old pal?”

“He thought I had an honest face,” Meecham said, “so I became his old pal right away. It happens, now and then, especially to a lonely guy in trouble. I'm a lonely guy my­self and I've been in trouble, so I know a little about these things.” He put on his coat. “Nobody seems to like the idea of me talking to Loftus. I wonder why.”

“I don't care, one way or the other. I was just puzzled.” She thrust her hands deep into the pockets of the oversize apron. “I guess I'm getting suspicious of everybody. I don't know why.”

“That's the trouble with suspicion, it infects even the nicest people. Good-bye, Alice.”

“Good-bye.”

He bent down and kissed her lightly on the forehead. She didn't react in any way. She just stood there, looking surprised and a little forlorn.

He was halfway to the center of town before he realized that he hadn't had any coffee after all. He wanted, then, to turn around and go back, not for the coffee he had missed, but because the solution of the problem had suddenly struck him. It was quite simple: the house should be abandoned like a ship about to sink under the weight of excess cargo. Alice and Mrs. Hamilton should go home, Carney get another job, Paul rent an office somewhere downtown. And Virginia—there was only one thing to do about Virginia: give her the money to run away, far away where the climate was good.

He thought of the expression on her face as she had watched the train go past and waved at the red caboose. Motion, change, speed, they were essential to Virginia. She should always be on a passing train, one that went round and round the world and never stopped.

9

Meecham
didn't go
directly to the jail. The place he wanted to see first was on his way. He found it finally, after driving past twice—a small store with a single win­dow, wedged inconspicuously between a bowling alley and a cigar shop.

A sign above the door was lettered in green and white: Doug Devine, Prop. There was no other identification, and none was needed. The window was piled to the ceiling with the scraps and leavings, the hopes and futilities, the desires and fears and evils, of human beings. Wedding rings and automatics, rosaries and hunting knives, worn shoes and violins; and, at the back of the window, the bland, ageless face of a grandfather clock. The clock was running, and on time: 10:35.

Inside the store a middle-aged man was sitting on a wicker bench examining a shotgun. The gun was old and grimy. About four or five inches of the barrel had been sawed off, and the rest of it was mended with black friction tape. It was a desperate weapon, as likely to explode when the trigger was pulled as to discharge its shot. Meecham wondered what desperate man had bought and sold it, and what desperate man would buy it and add another chapter to its dark allusive history.

Devine looked up from his task. He was a black Irish­man with coarse curly hair and eyes bright as beetles. “It works,” he said briefly. “I tried it.”

“Oh?”

“Sure. But you never know what you're going to hit. Aim it at your wife and you end up shooting the neighbor's pet goldfish.”

“That could be good.”

“Oh, sure. No argument about that. No law against shooting up goldfish.” He got up and put the shotgun care­fully on the wicker bench. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Maybe.”

“Buying or selling?”

“Buying.”

“I figure you for an insurance investigator,” Devine said. “Right or wrong?”

“Wrong.”

“I bet I was close.”

“Pretty close.”

“I'm always close. Practically the only thing I know in this whole cockeyed world is people and I can't make a nickel out of it. Give me an idea what you're interested in. You want to start music lessons, we got a nice clarinet.”

“No, thanks. What I . . .”

“Fellow that sold it to me said it once belonged to Benny Goodman. Funny thing, how a lot of people dream up the same old stuff and think it's new. There's not a clarinet in any pawnshop east of Frisco that ain't been played by Good­man or Artie Shaw. We got some nice bargains in jewelry.”

“I was thinking of a picture frame.”

“Just the frame?”

“Yes.”

“We got some first-class framed oil paintings, some gen­uine Manderheim's.”

“I never heard of Manderheim.”

“I never did either, but you'd be surprised how many I've sold.” He pointed to a picture of a vase of roses and ivy that was propped against the legs of an up-ended chair. “See that, over there. If I told my customers that some­body's Aunt Agnes painted it on her kitchen table, I couldn't give it away. But Manderheim—well, he's differ­ent, he's strictly class. Romantic, even. You want to know why he doesn't sign his pictures? Well, he's run away with another man's wife, see, and he doesn't want to be recog­nized because the husband is out gunning for him. Yes, sir, people will believe anything if it's preposterous enough.” He added, with a touch of gloom, “Funny thing is, I damn near believe in Manderheim myself.”

So did Meecham. “Maybe some other time I'll take a Manderheim,” he said. “Right now all I want is a frame. My girlfriend had her picture taken last week. By a curi­ous coincidence her name's Manderheim too.”

Devine didn't smile. “You want a
silver
frame?”

“Yes.”

“About eight by ten?”

“About that.”

Devine was silent a moment, rubbing the side of his chin with his hand. His skin was like sandpaper. “I'm in a pe­culiar business, mister, and I get peculiar people in here asking for peculiar things. Now there's nothing special about a silver picture frame by itself. I buy one occasion­ally, sell one occasionally. What's peculiar is that this morning, inside of one little hour, I get three calls for a silver frame. You're the third. The second was a cop, and the first was a lady.”

“Who was she?”

“State your business, mister.”

Meecham took one of his professional cards from his wallet.

Devine accepted the card, read it with a grunt and dropped it on the floor. “I told the cop, and I'm telling you. I didn't know her from Adam.”

“You said people are your specialty. You must have no­ticed her.”

“Sure, sure. I figured her for a nurse, or maybe a school­teacher. She was ordinary, not bad-looking not good-look­ing, not well-dressed, not poorly dressed. Forty, or there­-abouts, thin, had a sharp nose. Looked like she'd been crying or had a bad cold. She was standing outside when I opened up the store at nine. She said she wanted a few odds and ends for her house, and would I mind if she looked around. She went through the whole place very methodically, like someone who's used to looking for things. It took her about twenty minutes to find what she wanted: the silver frame, a table radio, and an onyx pen and pencil set. $48.50 for the works. A steal.”

“Have you seen the papers this morning?”

“I've got four kids,” Devine said. “When you got four kids you don't read the paper until night when they're all in bed. Why?”

Meecham ignored the question. “I suppose you remem­ber who sold you the articles that this woman bought.”

“Certainly. I both remember and I got it written down on my books. He's a young man I've done business with be­fore. Sometimes he pawns a couple things, sometimes sells them outright like yesterday. His name's Desmond. Duane Desmond.” He studied Meecham's face for a moment. “That's a phony, eh? I kind of thought it might be. What's his real tag?”

“Earl Loftus.”

“Why all the sudden interest in him? He dead or some­thing?”

“He's in jail.”

“Is that a fact?” Devine showed no surprise. “Well, like they say, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Who was the lady who bought the stuff he sold me?”

“I thought you might have recognized her,” Meecham said with a wry little smile. “It was Manderheim's mistress.”

Devine blushed like a girl. “Oh, can it now. What the hell.” He followed Meecham to the door. “The stuff I got from Desmond—Loftus, I mean—it wasn't hot?”

“No.”

“That's a relief. I wonder why the woman bought it all back again?”

“Maybe to return it to him.” Maybe to remember him by, he added silently. He thought of the way she had sat in Loftus' room, her head buried in her hands, in silent grief. He said, “There was no picture in the frame?”

“Sure there was. A nice-looking woman, sixty or there­abouts, white hair. I figured at first it must be Loftus' mother. I asked him didn't he want to take the picture out and keep it, and he said no. So I guess it wasn't his mother.”

“I think it was.”

“Well, now that's strange, eh? You'd think a guy would keep a picture of his own mother.”

It was strange. Particularly strange in the case of Loftus, the devoted son. “What did you do with it?”

“Threw it away. It was no pin-up, what else would I do?”

“Maybe you could remember where you threw it.”

“Sure I could remember, for all the good it will do. I put it in the furnace and burned it along with the other rub­bish. It was just an ordinary picture, ordinary woman. How was I to know anybody'd want it? What do you want it for, anyway?”

“I don't. I'm just curious. I'd like to know why Loftus didn't keep it.”

“Maybe he was sore at her. I get sore at my old lady.”

“You may be right.” Meecham opened the door. After the mustiness of the shop the winter wind felt fresh and clean. “Thanks for the information.”

“Welcome. Come in again.”

“I will.” Meecham stepped out into the street and stood for a moment in front of the cluttered window, buttoning his topcoat. When he looked back into the store, he saw that Devine had returned to the wicker bench and was sit­ting with the ancient shotgun across his knees.

1
0

He found
Loftus
in a small room across the hall from the Sheriff's office. Loftus was alone, and not under re­straint of any kind, though there was a policeman outside in the corridor.

Meecham knew the policeman. His name was Samuels; he was nearing retirement age, his legs and feet bothered him, and he suffered from attacks of hiccups that some­times lasted for hours. Whenever Samuels got the hiccups his colleagues planned intricate, and occasionally hilarious, ways of scaring them away. None of them worked.

“Hello, Samuels,” Meecham said. “How are things?”

“Bad. You got here just in time. They're taking your boy in there away.”

“Where to?”

“The doc says he should be in a hospital. So as soon as I get the transfer papers, that's where I'm taking him, out to County.”

“I'll talk to him first. Mind if I close this door?”

Samuels shrugged, a magnificently eloquent shrug which implied that as far as he was concerned every door in the place should be shut and the whole building blown up.

Meecham went inside and closed the door. The room was very small, furnished with a card table and three fold­ing chairs, all different, a bridge lamp, a davenport with two broken springs, and a swivel chair with a cracked and worn leather seat. Everything in the room seemed to be dis­cards from other rooms and offices, including the pictures that lined the windowless walls: photographs of the De­troit Red Wings, Abraham Lincoln, a sailboat, Dizzy Dean, and a score of unnamed and unremembered magis­trates and judges and policemen.

Loftus was sitting in one of the folding chairs, staring up at the ceiling ventilator, his eyes strained and suppli­cating, as if they saw, beyond the ventilator, the sky; and beyond the sky the great hole of eternity already open for him.

Meecham said, “Loftus?”

Loftus moaned, faintly, the protesting sound of a man re­turning from a dream.

“Sorry I'm late, Loftus. Are you feeling all right?”

“I've been trying to pray. My mind won't let me, it keeps flying, flying through space.” He lowered his head, and his eyes met Meecham's. “They're taking me away. I think I'm dying.”

The ventilator whirred like wings.

“No. No, you're not, Loftus. Cordwink thinks you'll be more comfortable in the hospital, have more care, better food.” He spoke too heartily, in an attempt to cover his conviction that the care and comfort were too late, the food useless to a man who couldn't eat.

“I don't want to go to the hospital. Please. I don't want to go, Mr. Meecham.”

“I can't prevent them doing what's best for you.”

“It's not best. I hate that air, smelling of sickness. I—well, I'll go, of course. I'll go. There's no choice.” He glanced down at the suitcase beside his feet. It was the first time Meecham noticed it. “Emmy came to see me this morning.”

“Mrs. Hearst?”

“Yes. They wouldn't let her in, but they let me have the stuff she brought me, some of my clothes and my radio. I don't know how she got the radio. I sold it yesterday.”

“She bought it back from Devine this morning.”

“She? God! She must have found out about the name I—I used.”

“Maybe not,” Meecham said. “I did, though.”

“Duane Desmond. How do you like that for a grown man, eh? Funny, isn't it? I don't know what got into me. Duane Desmond. God!” He pounded the flimsy card table with his fist. One of the hinged legs collapsed and the table sagged but didn't fall. Loftus bent down and straight­ened the hinge, looking a little ashamed of himself. “You won't tell Emmy.”

“Why should I?”

“She mustn't find out. She doesn't know I'm a fool.” He rested his head on his hands. Meecham saw then the toothmarks on the knuckles of both of Loftus' hands. Even in the dim yellow light of the old bridge lamp they were plainly the marks of teeth, and one of them was bleeding. The blood looked like any other blood to Meecham. But he knew that this blood was venom, and that the long night—when Loftus had sat in silent frenzy biting his knuckles—was only the beginning of a longer night.

Meecham was seized by a sensation of incredible help­lessness. He wanted to communicate with Loftus, to express sympathy and friendship, but the words he knew were in­adequate as all words are inadequate in the imminence of death. For the first time in his life Meecham experienced a sense of religion, a feeling that the only way he and Lof­tus could communicate with each other was through a third being, a translator of the spirit.

Loftus turned his head suddenly. “You went to Devine's to check up on me, Mr. Meecham?”

“I had to find out what happened to the articles that were missing from your room, whether you'd given them away, pawned them, sold them.”

“Is that so important?”

“It's important because Cordwink has—or had—an idea that someone paid you to kill Margolis.”

“Is that your idea too?”

“No. I think you sold the stuff to Devine because you were broke. If you were broke, obviously you weren't paid.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Certainly. You could tell me anything you like but it wouldn't necessarily be the truth.”

“You think I'm a liar, Mr. Meecham?” he said, anx­iously.

“You're human.”

“All this checking up on me, it's not necessary. I ask no favors. I'm a guilty man and I'm willing to take my pun­ishment. But this prying—this unnecessary. . .”

“What you say isn't evidence unless it's backed by what you've done.”

“I guess you're right. But whatever you find out, don't tell Emmy.”

“What is there to find out?”

Loftus didn't answer. He was gnawing on his bleeding knuckles again.

“She's very fond of you, Loftus.”

“She is, yes, I'm sure she is. I . . . What did . . .? You were talking to her last night, what did she say about me?”

“She was full of praise, of course; how kind and thought­ful you were, and a little bit about your history.”

Footsteps passed in the corridor beyond the door. They sounded faint and far away.

“It's hard to admit you're nothing,” Loftus said. “I'm ad­mitting it now. My life has been without meaning or pur­pose or satisfaction. I should never have been born; my father didn't want children and my mother felt trapped by the responsibility. The whole thing has been a mistake from beginning to end. I am afraid of my moment of dying, terribly afraid. But I will be glad to be gone. You don't read poetry, Mr. Meecham?''

“No.”

“There's a phrase that Yeats used. I have it written down in my book.” He took a little black notebook from his shirt pocket and leafed through it. Each page that Meecham could see was crammed from top to bottom with writing, writing so small that it seemed impossible to read with the naked eye. He wondered whether this was Loftus' natural handwriting, or whether he wrote that way deliberately to save space in the little book.

“Here it is,” Loftus said. “I'm not sure exactly what it means, it's out of context. But this one phrase keeps crop­ping up in my head lately: ‘That this pragmatical prepos­terous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem, Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme.'

“‘Pragmatical preposterous pig of a world,'“ he said, spitting out the words like pits that he'd been chewing too long. “That describes it. I will be glad to leave.”

He lapsed into silence again. The only sound in the room was the whirring of the ventilator, though there was a sensation of sound and movement, as if beyond the closed door many things were happening, preposterous things.

Meecham said, “Why did you ask me to come here?”

“I want to hire you. Oh, not to defend me, that won't be necessary. But there are one or two little things that I won't be able to take care of. I'd like you to do them for me.”

“What are they?”

“I have some money. I sold my car and a few little arti­cles. It amounted to $716.00 I want my mother to have it.”

“Where is it?”

“Emmy will give it to you. It's in an envelope in the middle of a package of letters. Deduct your fee, whatever it is, and give the rest of the money and all the letters to my mother. They're her letters. She wrote them to me when I came here. Tell her. . .” He hesitated, clenching and unclenching his hands. “Tell her to reread them, every one of them, to see. . . No. No, don't tell her that. Let her do what she likes with them. It's too late anyway. Just give her the money and tell her to go away somewhere for a while.”

“Why?”

“She can't—can't face things very well. It's better if she goes away. Her address was in one of the morning papers. That's bad. She may be hounded by reporters or—well, Kincaid is a small cruel town.”

“I'll deliver your message. I don't guarantee that I can persuade her to leave.”

“You can try. Here, I'll write the address down for you.”

“Don't bother, I saw the papers,” Meecham said. He re­membered the address, not from any newspaper, but from the Railway Express consignment slip that had been pasted across Loftus' suitcase:
From Mrs. Charles E. Loftus, 231 Oak Street, Kincaid, Michigan, to Mr. Earl Duane Loftus, 611 Division Street, Arbana, Michigan. Contents valued at $50.00.

“I know it's asking a lot, Mr. Meecham. But if you could go sometime today, get to her first—it's only a hundred miles. . . .”

“I'll go today.”

“Thank you.” Loftus rose, clumsily, supporting himself by leaning one hand on the card table and the other on the back of the chair. “Thank you very much.”

“Why didn't you keep her picture, Loftus?”

“I wanted to be alone. Entirely alone, without even a picture. Can you understand that?”

“It isn't a good thing to be alone. Relatives have a way of standing by in emergencies. Haven't you got any, except your mother?”

“I had a wife once. She left me, got a divorce. I can't blame her. She was a big, strong, healthy woman. At least she was then, I haven't seen her for a long time.”

“Has it occurred to you that your mother might want to come here to see you?”

Loftus shrugged, wearily. “She won't come. Oh, she'll want to come, she may even plan to come, have everything arranged, suitcase neatly packed, everything. She may even get as far as the bus depot. Then she'll take a little drink to calm her nerves. You can guess the rest.”

“Yes.” He recalled the number of books about alcohol­ism that Loftus kept in his room.

“She was always death against liquor. She never had a drink until she was nearly fifty. My father had run out on her by that time, and one day she went out and bought a bottle of wine to calm her nerves. It happened right away. One drink, and she was a drunk. She'd been a drunk for maybe thirty years and didn't find it out until then. For her the world vanished in that instant. She has never seen it since. She never will again.”

“Perhaps. There are cures.”

Loftus only shook his head.

“I'll see to it personally that she comes to visit you, if you want her to.”

“No, thank you,” Loftus said politely. “I don't want to see anyone.”

The door from the corridor opened and the policeman, Samuels, came in. He had taken his handcuffs from the leather case fastened to his belt and he was playing with them, clicking them from wide to narrow and back again, the way Miss Jennings played with her ring of keys and for the same reason, because he was bored and a little em­barrassed.

“All through, Mr. Meecham? We got orders to be on the move.”

Meecham turned to Loftus. “Are we all through?”

“I think so,” Loftus said.

“If something else comes up, let me know. In any case, I'll be around to see you when I've transacted the business we discussed. Perhaps early in the morning.”

“Thank you.”

“I'll see Emmy right away.”

“Tell her not to worry. Everything's going to be fine.”

“I will. Good luck.”

Meecham stood in the doorway of the small windowless room and watched the two men go down the corridor, handcuffed together, walking slowly and in step. Then he turned, abruptly, and walked as fast as he could in the other direction and out the rear entrance.

It was noon, but there was no sun. The sky hung close over the smoky city like a sagging tent top that would some day blow away, exposing the vast blackness of space.

Meecham waited for the traffic signal to change. A car went through the yellow light and almost sideswiped an­other car. Both drivers began to curse, ineffectually through closed windows, like little boys hurling threats from the safety of their own doorsteps. A woman came out of the supermarket across the street, jerking the arm of the crying child staggering along behind her. An old man on crutches inched his way across the icy sidewalk to the curb and stood eyeing the speeding cars with hate and fear.