The Three Roads Page 14

  Her sobs became more frequent, the rhythmic peaks of sound in a ululation that included fragments of sentences in its pattern: “… a good girl … nobody she knew … kill the dirty animals … killed my girl.”

  Bret opened the door with his left hand and with his right arm around her heaving shoulders, propelled her into the house. The front door opened directly into the living-room. Berker was on his back, emitting strangulated snores, on the beaten chesterfield at the far end of the room. Beside him on the newspaper-covered floor a green glass jug stood open. The patches of floor that were visible between the dirty newspapers had lost their hardwood finish and were acquiring a patina of grease and grime. There were several teacups full of cigarette butts on the cracked glass tray of the coffee table, but most of the ashes and butts of recent months were piled in the disused fireplace, from which they had gradually spread like volcanic ash across the room. There was a tangle of peach-colored woman’s underwear on the radio, and in the opposite corner a lint-covered mop was leaning. The armchair beside the door, ripped as if by a butcher knife, was spilling its cotton guts into its lap.

  Mrs. Berker sat down heavily. Her sobbing continued, unconsciously synchronized with her husband’s snores.

  “I’m sorry,” Bret said to her bowed head, “for everything.”

  He ran through the door and away from the house.

  chapter 16

  He caught a cab at the boulevard.

  “Where to, bud?” the driver asked as he leaned back to open the door.

  Paula’s address was on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t give it. If he went to Paula they’d have the old argument over again. For all he knew there were a couple of male nurses waiting at her house to wrap him in wet sheets and ship him back to the hospital. No telling what lengths an anxious woman would go to. Certainly he’d have to phone her as soon as he got the chance.

  The light had changed, and the driver threw in the clutch. “Which way?” he said impatiently.

  Almost without thinking, Bret gave him the address of Harry Milne’s apartment. His choice of destination was easy to rationalize. All day he’d felt like an impostor in Milne’s clothes, a naval officer masquerading as a smalltime Hollywood character. He was convinced that he’d be able to think better when he got into his blues again. The meeting with his unexpected tenants had jolted him and set his mind revolving in interminable circles. Paula seemed to have a finger in all of his affairs.

  When his taxi drew up in front of the long stucco building, he noticed a roadster, the same color as Paula’s, parked in front of it under a palm. No doubt she’d be here to anticipate him if she’d known he was coming, but even a woman’s intuition wasn’t as clairvoyant as that. When he had climbed the stairs to the second floor and found the door of Milne’s apartment, his doubt of her clairvoyance was shaken. A woman’s voice that sounded very much like Paula’s was speaking in angry tones on the other side of the door. He knocked at once, and the angry voice was hushed.

  Henry Milne, large and confident in his shirt sleeves, opened the door carefully and stood blocking the aperture with his body. “Hello, I wasn’t expecting you.” He stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him.

  “I came to give you back your clothes.”

  “They’re at the tailor’s,” Milne said quickly. “It’s got a sign, ‘Mac the Tailor,’ up that way, just around the corner to the right. You leave my suit with Mac, and I’ll pick it up later, eh? I’m busy right now, you know how it is.” He tried to wink gaily and conspiratorially, but there was no humor in his shallow, strained eyes.

  In the face of this anxiety to get rid of him, Bret delayed his departure. “I’m grateful to you for helping me out,” he said blandly. “If I could—”

  “Look, friend. I got a dame in here. You want to do something for me, you can blow. Leave my clothes at Mac’s. I trust you.”

  His attitude was awkward and tense, with his right hand behind him on the doorknob. The door jerked open suddenly and almost threw him off balance. He shrugged his shoulders and stepped aside to make way for Paula.

  “Bret! Where on earth have you been?”

  She was as well groomed as usual, but her skin was pale and translucent and her eyes had a faintly mongoloid puffiness, as if she had spent a bad night. She wore a tall garish hat and a yellow wool suit in militant contrast to her mood.

  “I’ve been around. Mr. Milne was good enough to lend me some clothes—”

  “Mr. Milne?” She glanced at the man beside her, who was leaning with false nonchalance against the wall. It seemed to Bret that the look they exchanged was electric with hatred or some other emotion. “Oh,” was all she said, but her breath came out with the syllable and lent it a hissing quality.

  “Look here, Lieutenant. You just shed the vestments at Mac the tailor’s like I said, and we’ll call it even.” He made a move toward the open door.

  “Just a minute. I left my purse in there.” Paula stepped into the apartment ahead of him and came out a moment later with a yellow handbag. The door was shut behind her, and the bolt of the lock snapped home.

  “What’s the matter with him? Did you accuse him of kidnapping me, or what?”

  “How in hell did you get mixed up with that man?”

  “It was perfectly natural,” he said unpleasantly. “I lost possession of my faculties last night, just as you might have expected, and he brought me home with him. But what brought you here?”

  “I was looking for you. I was awake all last night—”

  “You might have saved yourself the trouble. I admit my mental history has its blank spots, but I’m not exactly a character out of Krafft-Ebing.”

  “It isn’t that, Bret. You told me you were going to look for the murderer. There are some terrible places in this city, some terrible people.” Involuntarily her eyes turned to the closed door. She took his hand and drew him along the hall.

  He answered her as they descended the stairs: “Biologically, at least, I’m better equipped to deal with them than you are.”

  “I don’t know whether you are, darling. I’m a woman, and my brain is ever so tortuous.”

  “You haven’t explained how you got here.”

  “Haven’t I?”

  She said nothing more until he had paid off his taxi and was sitting beside her in her car.

  “I know you don’t like me to do things like that, but you’ve no idea how miserable I was. I finally thought of going to that wretched café, and one of the bartenders knew that Miles—this man that took you home. Why didn’t you come to my house? I spent most of last week furnishing a room for you.”

  “I’m sorry—sorry you were worried. I intended to phone you when Mrs. Berker told me you were looking for me.”

  “You were there, then?”

  “I wanted to see the house. I thought it was empty.”

  “You don’t mind my letting them stay there? It was going to waste.”

  “They can stay there forever as far as I’m concerned.” He leaned forward and looked soberly into her face. “You’re a pretty good woman, aren’t you? A generous sort of woman.”

  “Am I?” She laughed lightly and uncertainly. “I suppose I feel I owe something to the people I’ve hated, even to their relatives.”

  “Did you hate Lorraine?” He was painfully conscious that this was the first time her name had been spoken between them. The mere name seemed to add a dimension, a bitter edge of reality to their complicated situation.

  “Yes, I hated her,” she answered bluntly. “Not since her death, but before, when she took you away from me.” She started the engine with a furious roar. “Damn you, you get me talking like somebody out of nineteenth-century drama! Can’t we stop thinking about Lorraine?”

  “I can’t.”

  The roadster was still at the curb, and she shifted to neutral and let it idle. She turned toward him in the seat and spoke to him in a small, coaxing voice he had never heard her use:

  “Y
ou’ll come home with me now, won’t you? You have your appointment tomorrow. It’s funny to think it was only yesterday you left the hospital. It seems ages, doesn’t it?”

  “You’ll have to cancel the appointment. I have other things to do. I’ve found out more in twenty-four hours than the police did in all those months.”

  Her hand went to her mouth and hovered there as if to guard what she said. He had an impulse, which he failed to obey, to touch her face, smooth the fear out of it.

  “What have you found out?” she said finally.

  “I’ve found out that there was a man with her, definitely.”

  “The police know that.”

  “They haven’t got a description of him and a witness who can identify him. I have.” He gave her Garth’s description of his assailant. “The police don’t know anything about a man like that, do they?”

  “No,” she said through her nervous fingers. “All they have are the fingerprints.” Abruptly she started the car and drew away from the curb.

  “Wait. I have to change my clothes. He said the shop was around the corner to the right.”

  She swung so wide at the corner that she nearly struck a car going in the opposite direction. He had to remind her again to stop at the tailor’s.

  As he took off Harry Milne’s clothes behind the faded green curtain at the back of the steamy shop, he wondered why Paula had called him Miles, and why she was acting so strangely. He folded the gabardine slacks over a wire hanger and draped the camel’s hair coat over them. When he had put on his pressed and mended uniform, his eyes lingered for a moment on the glad rags he had discarded. In the dim light of the ceiling bulb there was something eerie about the empty coat, like a deflated and truncated man hanging against the wall. His imagination stirred to life and added a face to the man. Milne (or Miles?) had light hair and was handsome enough in a way. Milne had a bit of a tin ear, and that meant a background of fighting. Milne was a big man about his own size. Beyond that, Milne had shown an unexplained interest in him. Was it because Milne knew he was Lorraine’s husband?

  He rushed past the bowed little man at the pressing machine and out of the shop so fast that Mac had to follow him into the street to collect his money.

  “Sorry, I’m in a hurry,” he said, and overpaid the man a dollar. Mac was unimpressed. He shuffled back into his shop, muttering resentfully to himself.

  “A hurry about what?” Paula said when Bret climbed into the car. “And where’s your hat? Remember the time on the beach the commander reprimanded you for taking off your hat?”

  There was more tension in her voice than the harmless reminiscence warranted, and he felt that she was trying to throw him off the track. The memory of their first weeks together, La Jolla and the bright nostalgia of love pulled at his mind, but he shook them off.

  “My hat’s still back in Milne’s apartment. Drive around the block, will you, Paula?”

  “I thought we were going home.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t go back there, Bret. I don’t like that man. I don’t trust him.”

  “I don’t trust him with my hat.”

  “But you’ve got another in your luggage, haven’t you? Or you can buy one.”

  “I want that particular hat. Among other things.”

  “Other things?” Her hands were tight on the wheel, though she still hadn’t started the engine.

  He knew that she guessed his intention. Through some obscure feminine channel she had reached the conclusion that he suspected Milne, or Miles (it wasn’t surprising that a murderer should use an alias). He knew too that she dreaded another meeting between them. But it would only start another argument if he brought the conflict into the open.

  “My black tie,” he said. “He’s still got that too.”

  She refused to accept his superficial version of the situation. “You mustn’t go back there, Bret. I forbid you to go back.”

  A vein of anger swelled in his head. “ ‘Forbid’ is a strange word to use. It hasn’t become part of your official vocabulary yet.”

  She looked at him blankly as if her mind was elsewhere, occupied with an internal pain or a remote disaster. The first time he had spoken to her at Bill Levy’s party she had seemed like an old friend. Now he saw her as a stranger. Her brown hair was too neatly arranged under her vivid hat. There were tiny dry lines in her forehead and at the corners of her swollen eyelids. Her orange lipstick was unnaturally bright against her pale skin, and so heavily applied that it seemed to weigh down her mouth.

  “Still, I forbid you,” she said.

  “That’s unfortunate.” His own face felt stiff and dry. There was a knot of pain behind his eyes, a focus of anger and desolation. He put his hand on the door handle and pressed it down.

  “Wait,” she said sharply. “You’ve done enough to spoil my life. I’m not going to let you do more if I can help it.”

  He stayed where he was, shocked and outraged by her frankness, which struck him like a blow below the belt.

  “You may not feel that you owe me anything—”

  “I know I do,” he said, but she didn’t pause in her furious speech.

  “I feel that you do. You’ve given me damn little to go on, and I’ve been as faithful to you as a wife could be. Do you understand that I’ve lived by you from the first day? I’ve worked for our future together, and I’ve suffered for it. I have the right ask you to stay in this car and come home with me.”

  “But why?”

  “I can’t tell you why.”

  “Then I have the right to refuse. I know what I owe you, but it doesn’t mean that you can give me orders. I have other debts to pay, and I’ve got to pay them in my own way.” He knew that what he was saying was melodramatic and unfair, but he was beyond caring. His brain was ice cold and boiling at the same time, like a cup of liquid air.

  “Is your dead wife more important than our future?”

  Her voice was weary and defeated, as if her subterranean thought had gone to the conclusion beyond the spate of words. Still, she had to finish the dialogue. Every scene had to have its dialogue, even if weeping, screaming, beating her fists on the windshield and on the hard man’s face beside her would have been a truer expression of her feelings.

  He too had said it all before, and said it again: “My future won’t begin until I’ve licked the past.”

  “You can’t lick the past. It’s done. It’s finished.”

  “I’m licking it now.”

  She essayed an ironic laugh that came out as a screechy titter. “You’re knocking yourself out, you mean, and for no good reason. For God’s sake, and mine and your own, let me drive you home with me.”

  “I can’t. If you don’t see that, there must be very little about me that you do see.”

  “I love you, Bret. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Love can be mistaken.”

  “Are you ready to call it off then?”

  “Not unless you force me to. I do know that we can’t set up housekeeping in an open grave.”

  “Words! You can twist words any way you like, but I thought the thing we had was stronger than rhetoric. I thought you loved me. If you don’t I’m not interested in trying to force anything. Do you love me?”

  A moment before, her face had been the face of a stranger, an unknown, harried woman in whose car he happened incongruously to be sitting, arguing for the right to master his difficult life. He looked into her face again and saw that it was his lover’s, familiar and dear in every line. He had loved her from the beginning and would never love anyone else. He was ashamed that she had had to ask him.

  “I do love you,” he said. “But can’t you see there are things more important than love?”

  “What things are more important than love?”

  “Justice.”

  “Justice! You think you can go and find justice like a lucky horseshoe? A four-leaf clover in a field? Look around you and tell me where you see justice, except in
books and movies. Do you see the good people getting the breaks and the bad people getting the dirty end of the stick? The hell you do! There’s no Hays Office to censor life and make all come right in the end. Everybody has to make his own life turn out, and you know it. That’s all I’m arguing for, Bret, for you to keep your head out of trouble. You try to make things over, and you’ll only beat out your brains.” But before he answered she knew that her angry words were as ineffectual as she had said words were.

  “You must think I’m pretty futile.” The irony he had intended was lost in his sense that he had spoken the truth. In self-distrust and confusion, still shaken by her statement that he might spoil her life, he clung to his stubborn will and the brittle mood that sustained it.

  “I think you’re strong,” she said, “but you don’t know what you’re up against.”

  “Your friend Milne? Or is the name ‘Miles’?”

  “He’s not my friend. I detest him.”

  “And you’re afraid of him, aren’t you? You haven’t told me why.”

  “I’m afraid of a man who is capable of anything.”

  “I’m not,” he said flatly.

  It was no use talking any more. She could never be made to see that he had to do what he was doing. He had no right to love or security until he had settled the question that dragged on his mind. Only action could remove the deathly magnetism that drew him back and down and distorted all his certainties—even his certainty of Paula.

  Through the dingy window of his shop Mac the tailor watched Bret as he got out of the car and walked away. The woman’s head turned slowly after him and stayed like that until he was out of sight. But she didn’t try to follow him or say a word. From the expression on her face it looked to Mac as if she was in bad trouble, with no idea of how to get out of it. He was just as glad when she drove away, because it made him feel kind of low to see a pretty woman stood up like that and looking so blue.

  chapter 17

  There was a pay telephone in the drugstore on the corner, tucked away behind the prescription counter. Bret couldn’t find the Cockalorum in the directory, but Information gave him the number.