Waltz Into Darkness (16 page)

Durand's
stupefaction this time was even worse than before. He was aghast.
"She is not Julia Russell! That is not her name ! If I am
married at all, I am married to Julia Russell, whoever and wherever
she may be-- This is a marriage by proxy, if you will call it that--
But this woman was someone else!"

"There
is where you are wrong." The commissioner told off each word
with the heavy thump of a single fingerpad to the desk top. "I
have consulted with the officials of the church where it was
performed, and I have consulted as well with our own lay experts in
jurisprudence. The woman who stood beside you in the church was
married to you in person, and not by proxy for another. No matter
what name she gave, false or true, no matter if she had said she was
the daughter of the President of the United States, heaven forbid
I--she is your lawfully wedded wife, in civil law and in religious
canon; she and only she and she alone. And nothing can make her
otherwise. You can have it annulled, of course, on the ground of
misrepresentation, but that is another matter--"

"My
God!" Durand groaned.

The
commissioner rose, went to the water cooler, and drew him a cup of
water. He ignored it.

"And
the money ?" he said at last, exhaustedly. "A woman can rob
a man of his life savings, under your very noses, and you cannot help
him, you cannot do anything for him? What kind of law is that, that
punishes the honest and protects malefactors? A woman can walk into a
man's house and--"

"No.
Now hold on. That brings us back again to where we were. A woman
cannot do that, and remain immune to reprisal. But a woman, just
any woman at all, did not do that, in your case."

"But--"

"Your
wife did that. And the law cannot touch her for it. You gave her
signed permission to do just what she did. Mr. Simms at the bank has
shown me the authorization card. Under such circumstances, where a
joint account exists, a wife cannot steal from her husband, a husband
from his wife."

He
glanced sorrowfully around at the window behind him.

"She
could pass by this building this very minute, out there in the
street, and we could not detain her, we could not put a hand upon
her."

Durand
let his shoulders slump forward, crushed. "You don't believe me,
then," was all he could think of to say. "That there's been
some sort of foul play concealed in the background of this. That one
woman started from St. Louis to be my wife, and another suddenly
appeared here in her place--"

"We
believe you, Mr. Durand. We believe you thoroughly. Let me put it
this way. We agree with you thoroughly in theory; in practice we
cannot lift a hand to help you. It is not that we are unwilling. If
we were to make an arrest, we could not hold the person, let alone
force restitution of the funds. The whole case is circumstantial. No
crime has been proven committed as yet. You went to the dock to meet
one woman, you met another in her stead. A substitution in itself is
no crime. It may be, how shall I say it, a personal treachery, a form
of trickery, but it is no crime recognized by law. My advice to you
is--"

Durand
smiled witheringly. "Forget the whole thing."

"No,
no. Not at all. Go to St. Louis and start working from that end. Get
proof that a crime, either of abduction or even something worse, was
committed against the true Julia Russell. Now listen to my words
carefully. I said get proof. A letter in someone else's handwriting
is proof only that--it is a letter in someone else's handwriting.
Dresses that are too big are only--dresses that are too big. I said
get proof that a crime was committed. Then take it--" He
wagged his forefinger solemnly back and forth, like a pendulum-- "not
to us, but to whichever are the authorities within whose jurisdiction
you have the proof to show it happened. That means, if on the river,
to whichever onshore community lies closest to where it happened."

Durand
brought his whole fist down despairingly on the commissioner's desk
top, like a mallet. "I hadn't realized until now," he said
furiously, "there were so many opportunities for a malefactor to
commit an offense and escape scot-free ! It seems to me it pays to
flout the law! Why bother to observe it when--"

"The
law as we apply it in this country," the commissioner said
forebearingly, "leans backward to protect the innocent. In one
or two rare cases, such as your own, it may work an injustice against
an honest accuser. In a hundred times a hundred others, it has
preserved an innocent person from unjust accusation, false arrest,
wrongful trial, and maybe even capital punishment, which cannot be
undone once it has taken place. The laws of the Romans, which govern
many foreign countries, say a man is guilty until proven innocent.
The Anglo-Saxon common law, which governs us here, says a man is
innocent until he is proven guilty."

He
sighed deeply. "Think that over, Mr. Durand."

"I
understand," Durand said at last, raising his head from its
wilted, downcast position. "I'm sorry I lost my temper."

"If
I had been tricked into marriage," the commissioner told him,
"and swindled out of fifty thousand dollars, I would have lost
my own temper, and far worse than you just did yours. But that
doesn't alter one whit of what I just told you. It still stands as I
explained it to you."

Durand
rose with wearied deliberation, ran two fingers down the outer
sideward crease of each trouser leg to restore them. "I'll go up
to St. Louis and start from there," he said with tight-lipped
grimness. "Good day," he added briefly.

"Good
day," the other echoed.

Durand
crossed to the door, swung it inward to go out.

"Durand,"
the commissioner called out as an afterthought.

Durand
turned his head to him.

"Don't
take the law into your own hands."

Durand
paused in the opening, held back his answer for a moment, as though
he hadn't heard him.

"I'll
try not to," he said finally, and went on out.

27

The
City of Baton Rouge reached the St. Louis dockside at 6 P.M., days
later. That was Wednesday, the eleventh.

He'd
never been in the town before, but where a year ago he would have
relished and appreciated all its differences, its novelty: its
brisker, more bustling air than languorous New Orleans, its faintly
Germanic over-all aspect, impalpable but still very patent to one who
came from the French-steeped city down-river; now his heart was too
heavy to care or note anything about it, other than that his trip was
at an end, and this was the place where it had ended; this was the
place that was going to solve the riddle for him, decide his problem,
settle his fate.

It
was a cloudy day, but even in its cloudiness there was something
spruce, tangy, lacking in New Orleans overcasts. There was energy in
the air; less of graciousness, considerably more of ugliness.

It
was, to him at any rate, the North; the farthest north he'd yet been.

He
had Bertha Russell's address ready at hand, of course, but because of
the advanced hour, and perhaps also without realizing it because of a
latent cowardice, that strove to put off the climactic ordeal for as
long as possible, he decided to find himself quarters in a hotel
first before setting out to locate and interview this unknown woman
upon whom all now depended.

He
emerged cityward of the pier shed, was immediately accosted with
upraised whips by a small bevy of coachmen gathered hopefully about,
and climbed into one of their vehicles at random.

"Find
me some kind of a hotel," he said glumly. "Nothing fancy.
And not too far into the town."

"Yes
sir. The Commercial Travelers' be about right, I reckon. Just a
stone's throw from here."

Even
the colored people spoke more rapidly up here than at home, he noted
with dulled detachment.

The
hotel was a dingy, beery, waterfront place, but it served his purpose
well enough to be accepted. He was given key and directions and
allowed to find his own way to a cheerless bedroom with an almost
viewless window, triply blocked by a brick abutment, a film of
congealed dust ground into its panes, and a dank curtain, its pores
long-since sealed by soilage. But twilight was already blurring the
air, and he wouldn't have looked forth even if he could. He hadn't
come here to enjoy a view.

He
dropped his bag and settled down with heavy despondency in a chair,
to chafe his wrists and brood.

He
pictured again the scene to come, as he had been doing all day on the
boat, and the night before. Heard again the reassuring voice he hoped
to hear. "She was always wild, Mr. Durand; our Julia was like
that. This isn't the first time she has run away. She will come back
to you again, never fear. When you least look for her, she will
suddenly return and ask your forgiveness."

He
must want it to be that way, he realized, always to shape it so in
his imaginings. To be assured that she was the actual Julia; a cheat,
a robber, an absconder, but still the person she had represented
herself to be. Why, he wondered, why?

Because
anonymity meant her loss would be even more complete, more
irremediable. Anonymity meant she was gone forever, there was not
even a she to hope to find some day, there was nothing left him.

Or
was it because the alternative to her still being Julia was something
still darker, even worse, the very thought of which sent a shudder
coursing through him.

And
then he remembered the letter, that Bertha had said was in a
stranger's handwriting, and--all his hope was taken away.

He
quitted his room presently and went down and tried to eat something
in the wholly unprepossessing dining room connected with the hotel, a
typical traveling salesman sort of eating place, filled with smoke,
noisy with boastful voices, and with not a woman in the place; he ate
out of sheer habit and without knowing what it was he ate. Then,
sitting there with a cup of viscous, stone-cold coffee untouched
before him, he suddenly noted that it was nearing nine on the large,
yellowing clockface aloft on the wall, and decided to carry out his
errand then and there and have done with it, without waiting for
morning. To try to sleep on it would be agonizing, unbearable. He
wanted it over, whether for best or worst; he wanted to know at once,
he couldn't stand the uncertainty another half-hour.

He
went back to his room for a moment, got the, sister's two letters,
his marriage certificate, and all the other pertinent memoranda of
the matter, gathered them into one readily accessible pocket, came
down, found a coach, and gave the address.

He
couldn't tell much about the house from the outside in the gloom. It
seemed large enough. The upper part of its silhouette sloped back,
meaning it had a mansard roof. It was in a vicinity of eminent
cleanliness and respectability. Trees lined the streets, and the
streets were lifeless with the absence within doors, where lawabiding
citizens belonged at this hour, of those who dwelt hereabout. An
occasional gas lamppost twinkled like a lime-colored glowworm down
the vista of trees. A church steeple sliced like a stubby black knife
upward against the brickdust-tinted sky, paler than earth because of
its luminous low-massed cloud banks.

As
for the house itself, orange lamp shine showed through a pair of
double windows on the lower floor, the rest were in darkness.
Someone, at least, was within.

He
got out and fumbled for money.

"Wait
for you, sir?" the man asked.

"No,"
he said reluctantly, "no. I don't know how long I'm going to
have to be." And yet he almost hated to see the coach turn about
and go off and leave him there cut off, as it were, and helpless to
retreat now at the last moment, as he felt sorely tempted to do.

He
went over to the door and found a small bone pushbutton, and thumbed
it flat.

There
was a considerable wait, but he forebore from ringing again.

Then
presently, but very gradually, as if kindled by the approach of light
from a distance, a fanlight that had been invisible to him until now
slowly glowed into alternating bands of dark red and colorless glass.

A
woman's voice called through the door, "Who is it, please? What
did you wish ?"

She
lived alone, judging by these characteristic precautions.

"I'd
like to speak to Miss Bertha Russell, please," he called back.
"It's important."