Waltz Into Darkness (31 page)

He
heard her come in at the street door, and before she had even had
time to quit the entryway, he called down to her sight-unseen from
above, in wild urgency: "Bonny!" And then again, "Bonny!
Come up here quick! Hurry! I have something to tell you!"

She
delayed for some reason. Perhaps over the feminine trait of removing
her bonnet or disposing of her parcels before doing anything further,
even at a moment of crisis.

Half
mad with his own haste, he rushed recklessly out of the room, ran
down to get her. And then halfway to the bottom of the stairs he
stopped short, as if 'his legs had been gripped by a brake; and stood
still, stock still and yet trembling, and died a little.

The
figure back to door, back to just-reclosed door, equally stock still,
was Downs.

Neither
of them moved. The discovery came, the discovery went, the discovery
was long past. Just two icy still men endlessly looking at one
another. From stairs to door. From door to stairs. One of them
bleakly smiling now in ultimate vindication. One of them ashen-faced,
stricken to death.

One
of them sighed deeply at last. Then the other sighed too, as if in
answer. Two sighs in the intense silence. Two different sighs. A sigh
of despair, a sigh of completion.

"You
called her just now," Downs said slowly. "You called her by
name. Thinking it was her. So she is here with you."

Durand
had turned partly sidewise, was gripping the rail with both hands and
bent slightly over it, as if able to support himself by that means
alone. He shook his head. First slowly. Then at each repetition,
faster, faster; until he was beating the stubborn air with it. "No,"
he said. "No. No. No."

"Mr.
Durand, I have good ears. I heard you."

Ostrichlike,
terrified, craven, trying to hide his head in the sands of his own
mesmeric denial. As though to keep saying No, if persisted in long
enough, would ward off the danger. Using the word as a sort of
talisman.

"No.
No. No!"

"Mr.
Durand, let's be men at least. You called her name, you hollered it
down here."

"No.
No." He took a toppling step, that brought him down a stair
lower. Then another. But seeming to slide his body downward along the
slanted rail rather than move his legs, so hard and fast did he ding
to it. Like an inebriate; which he was. An inebriate of fright.
"Someone else. Woman that comes in to do my cleaning. Her name
sounds like that--" He didn't know what he was saying any more.

"Very
well," Downs said drily. "I'll take the woman that comes in
to do your cleaning, the woman whose name sounds so much the same.
I'm not hard to please."

They
were suddenly wary, watchful of one another; both pairs of eyes
slanting first far over to this side, then far over to that, in a
sort of synchronization of wordless guile. Physical movement
followed, also in complete unison.

Durand
broke from the stairs, Downs broke from the door-back. Their two
diagonal rushes brought them together before the mirrored, antlered
hatrack cabinet against the wall, with its armed seat that was also
the lid of a storage box. Durand tried to hold it down, Downs to pry
it up. Downs' arm treacherously thrust in and out again, came up with
the two long heliotrope streamers depending from a straw garden hat.
The tip of one had been protruding, caught fast by the lid on its
last closing; a fleck of color, a fingernail's worth of color, in all
that vast ground-floor area of house.

("But
why do you like it so?" he had once asked her.

"I
don't know. It's my color, and anyone who knows me knows it's my
color. Wherever I am, there's bound to be some of it around.")'

Downs
let it fall back again into the box. "The costume for the woman
who comes here to do your work," he remarked. And then, looking
his disgust and complete forfeiture of respect at Durand, he murmured
something in a swallowed voice that sounded like, "God help you,
in love with a--!"

"Downs,
listen, I want to talk to you--!" The words tumbled over one
another in their eagerness to be out. He was so breathless he could
hardly articulate. He took him by the lapels, a hand to each, held
him close in a sort of pleading stricture. "Come inside here,
come in the next room, let me talk to you--!"

"You
and I have nothing to talk about. All my talking is for--"

Durand
moved insistently backward, drawing him after him by that close coat
lock, until he had him in there past the threshold where he wanted
him to be. Then let him go, and Downs stayed there where he'd brought
him.

"Downs,
listen-- Wait a minute, there's some brandy here, let me pour you a
drink."

"I
keep my drinking for saloons."

"Downs,
listen-- She's not here, you're making a terrible mistake-" Then
quickly stilling his presumed contradiction by a fanwise rotation of
the hand; "--but that isn't what I want to talk to you about.
It's simply this. I--I've changed my mind. I want to drop the matter.
I want the proceedings to stop."

Downs
repeated with ironic absence of inflection, "You want to drop
the matter. You want the proceedings to stop."

"I
have that right, I have that choice. It was my complaint originally."

"As
a matter of fact, that's only partly true. You were cocomplainant
along with Miss Bertha Russell. But let's say for the sake of
argument, it was your sole complaint originally. Then what?"
His brows went up. "And what?"

"But
if I withdraw the complaint, if I cancel it--?"

"You
have no control over me," Downs said stonily. He slung one hip
astride the arm of a chair he was standing beside, settled himself as
if to wait. "You can rescind your complaint. All well and good.
You can cease payment of any further fees to me. And as a matter of
fact, your original retainer to me expired months ago. But you can't
compel me to quit the case. Is that plain enough to you? As the old
saying goes, this is a free country. And I'm a free agent. If I
happen to want to continue on my own account until I bring the
assignment to a satisfactory conclusion--and it happens that I
do--there's nothing you can do about it. I'm no longer working for
you, I'm working for my own conscience."

Appalled,
Durand began to tremble all over. "But that's persecution--"
he quavered.

"That's
being conscientious, I'd call it, though it's not for me to say so,"
Downs said with a frosty smile.

"But
you're not a public police official-- You have no right--"

"Fully
as much right as I had in the first place, when I took up the
assignment on your behalf. The only difference being that now I'll
turn my findings over to them direct, when I'm ready, instead of
through you."

Durand,
his feet clogging, had stumbled around and to the far side of the
large bulky table desk present in the room, pacing his way along its
edge with both hands, as if in momentary danger of collapse.

"Now
wait-- Now listen to me--" he panted, and fumbled with
excruciating anxiety in the pockets of his waistcoat, one after the
other, not finding the right one immediately. He brought out a key,
turned it in the wood, pulled out a drawer. A moment later a compact
ironbound box had appeared atop the desk, its lid standing up. He
grubbed within it, came back toward Downs with both hands extended,
paper money choking them.

"There's
twenty thousand dollars here. Downs, open your hand. Downs, hold it a
minute; just hold it a minute."

Downs'
hands had retreated into his trouser pockets at his approach; there
was nothing there to deposit the offering in.

Downs
shook his head with indolent stubbornness. "Not a minute, not an
hour, not for keeps." He switched his head commandingly. "Take
it back where you got it, Durand."

"Just
hold it for me," Durand persisted childishly. "Just hang
onto it a moment, that's all I'm asking--"

Downs
stared at him imperturbably. "You've got the wrong man, Durand.
That's your misfortune. The one wrong man out of twenty. Or maybe
even out of a hundred. I took the case professionally in the
beginning, for a money payment. I'm on it for my own satisfaction
now. I not only won't take any further money to stay on it, but no
amount of money could make me quit it any more. And don't ask me why,
because I can't answer you. I'm a curious johnny, that's all. You
made a mistake, Durand, when you came to me in St. Louis. You should
have gone to somebody else. You picked the one private investigator
in the whole country, maybe, that once he starts out on something
can't leave off again, not even if he wants to. Sometimes I wonder
what it is myself, I wish I knew. Maybe I'm a fanatic. I want that
woman, not for you any more, but for my own satisfaction." He
drew his hands out of his pockets at last, but only to fold his arms
ifintily across his chest and lean back still farther against the
chair he was propped against.

"I'm
staying here until she comes in. And I'm taking her back with me."

Durand
was back beside the money box again, hands bedded atop its replaced
contents, pressing down on it in strained futility.

Downs
must have seen him glance speculatively toward the doorway. He read
his mind.

"And
if you go out of here, to try to meet her on the outside and warn her
off, I'm going right along with you."

"You
can't forbid me to leave my own house," Durand said
despairingly.

"I
didn't say that. And you can't prevent me from walking along beside
you. Or just a step or two behind you. The streets are public."

Durand
pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, held it there a moment,
as though there were some light overhead that was too strong in his
eyes. "Downs, I can raise another thirty thousand in New
Orleans. Inside twenty-four hours. Go with me there, keep me in sight
every step of the way; you have my promise. Fifty thousand dollars,
just to let us alone. Just to forget you ever heard of--"

"Save
your breath, I made my speech on that," Downs said
contemptuously.

Durand
clenched a fist, shook it, not threateningly, but imploringly, at
him. "Why do you have to blacken her name, ruin her life? What
good-- ?"

Downs'
mouth shaped a laugh, but no sound came. "Blacken the name of
that wanton? Ruin the life of that murdering trollop?"

The
impact left physical traces across Durand's face, blanching it in
livid streaks across the mouth and eyes, yet he ignored it. "She
didn't do anything. The whole thing's circumstantial. She just
happened to be on the same boat, that's all. So were dozens of
others. You can't say for certain what happened to Julia Russell.
No one can, no one knows. She just disappeared. She may have met with
an accident. People have. Or she may still be alive at this very
hour. She may have run off with someone else she met on the boat. All
Bonny is guilty of, was passing herself off on me under another name,
in the very beginning. And if I forgive her for that, as I have
long ago--"

Downs
suddenly left his semirecumbent position on the chair arm. He was on
his feet, facing him alertly, eyes glittering now.

"Here's
something you don't seem to know yet, Mr. Durand. And I think you may
as well know it now, as later. You're going to soon enough, anyway.
There isn't just a disappearance involved any longer. And I can
say for certain just what happened to Julia Russell! I can now, if I
couldn't the last time you saw me!"

He
was leaning slightly forward in his intensity, in his zeal; that zeal
of which he had spoken himself a few minutes earlier.

"A
body drifted ashore out of the eddies at Cape Girardeau on the tenth
of this month. You can get white, Mr. Durand; you have reason. A body
that had been murdered, thrown into the water dead. There was no
water in the lungs. I took Bertha Russell down to look at it. And
badly decomposed as it was, she identified it. As that of Julia
Russell, her sister. Triply fortified, even though there was no face
left any more. By twin moles high on the inner side of the left
thigh. That no other human being ever saw since early childhood,
practically. By the uncommon fact that both end-teeth on both jaws,
all four in other words, bore gold crowns. And lastly by the fact
that her side bore peculiar scars in a straight line, from the teeth
of a garden rake; again from her childhood. The rake had been rusty
and the punctures had had to be cauterized by a hot iron."