The Three Roads Read online

  Garth himself answered the phone: “Yes?”

  “This is Bret Taylor. I want you to come over to L.A. right away.”

  “For what?” The high voice was suspicious and resentful.

  “I want you to look at a man.”

  “I’m busy, Mr. Taylor. I got things to do besides chasing all over the county—”

  “Don’t you want to catch the man that beat you?”

  “Sure I do, but I don’t want to get in more trouble. I can’t afford it.”

  “You can’t afford to have me give your name to the police.”

  “You wouldn’t do that, Mr. Taylor? I co-operated with you, I helped you every way I could.”

  “You can come here and help me some more.” He described the location of the store. “I’ll wait here for you, but I won’t wait forever.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “You don’t have to like it. I’ll be waiting.” He hung up.

  There was a lunch counter in the front part of the store, and it reminded him that he was hungry. He slid onto an empty stool and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. Then he bought a paper and returned to his seat to read it. The small black letters formed words, and the words were strung together in sentences, but the sentences had no meaning. There were more legible sentences written in acid between the lines.

  In the first flush of recognition he had had no doubt that Milne was the man. But as his feelings cooled and shifted his point of view, the circumstances that pointed to Milne were revealing secondary patterns. Whether his hunch was right or wrong the obvious thing to do was to call in the police and give them the facts he had uncovered. But he rejected the idea. They’d only be a further complication, and he didn’t trust the police, who had failed Lorraine so miserably. He had failed her himself but he was resolved not to fail again. He trusted himself, and no one else, to remain incorruptible and see the thing through to the end.

  His mind was crouched and tense like a sprinter waiting for the gun. His look returned again and again to the doorway, yet when Garth appeared he didn’t recognize him immediately. The little man had changed to an off-white double-breasted suit with a black shirt and a yolk-yellow tie. He stood just inside the door, a sawed-off travesty of sartorial splendor, while his mobile little eyes glanced back and forth and finally settled on Bret. Bret threw down his unread newspaper and went to meet him.

  “You think we’re going to head into trouble?” Garth said as they went out. “This guy’s a killer, remember, if you got the right one, which I doubt—”

  “Save it until you see him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Half a block from here in his apartment.”

  “You expect me to walk right in on him? What if he knows me?”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  “Maybe. I don’t take chances on that boy.” Garth patted the side pocket of his coat significantly.

  “That won’t be necessary. We’ll do it like this.” The plan, which he explained as they walked toward the apartment, was intended to give Garth a look at Milne without being noticed himself. Bret would knock on Milne’s door while Garth waited down the hall. When Milne opened the door Bret would keep him there until Garth could walk past the door and downstairs to the lobby.

  “Yeh, but if he knows me? He might jump me.”

  “I’ll hold him.”

  “If this is the guy he won’t be so easy.”

  “I can hold him. Come on, this is the place.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  But he followed Bret through the lobby and up the carpeted stairs. The upstairs hallways were deserted, dimly lit by windows at their remote ends. All the doors were closed. Somewhere behind one of them a record of the “Pastoral” Symphony was being played. Its sweet rustic gaiety echoed forlornly through the building, bounding disconsolately against the doors and partitions and dying in the walled air.

  “Go down to the far end and start back after I knock. We don’t want him to hear us coming together.”

  Garth walked away with fear prodding him in the kidneys, a dapper and pathetic silhouette against the light from the window at the end of the hall.

  Bret followed Garth halfway down the hall and knocked on the door. From the tail of his eye he saw Garth moving toward him, and simultaneously he heard light footsteps inside the apartment. His throat felt tight, as if constricted by the pressure of converging events. The bolt of the lock was shifted, and Milne opened the door.

  “You again?”

  “I’m sorry I have to trouble you. You have my hat and tie.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” He looked narrowly into Bret’s face. “Is there anything else, or is that the works?”

  “Let me see.” Garth was to his left and behind him, out of his range of vision, but he could hear Garth’s footsteps falling softly on the carpeted floor. Milne’s eyes had shifted from Bret’s face and were looking beyond him into the hall. Garth’s footsteps were directly behind him now, following each other very slowly, so that it seemed his heart beat many times between the footfalls.

  “Won’t you let me pay you for all your trouble?”

  The pale eyes returned to him. “Hell, no. I’m glad to help you out. What happened to the girl friend?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe she’s waiting for you, eh? How’s about coming in and have a drink? It won’t do her no harm to wait while you have one little drink.”

  “No, thanks.” He allowed his impatience to enter his voice. “May I have my hat and tie? I’m in a hurry.”

  “Why, sure, certainly. I was just trying to be a pal.” He left the door open and returned a moment later with the white-covered hat and the black tie. “You want to look in a mirror to put your tie on?”

  “No, thanks. Not now.”

  “You leave my suit at the tailor’s like I said?”

  “Yes. Thanks for everything.”

  Bret walked away quickly without looking back. Not until he reached the head of the stairs did he hear the door softly close.

  Garth was waiting in the street, jumpy with nerves.

  “Is that the man?”

  “Now look here, Mr. Taylor. I saw him at night and it was quite a while ago. I think it’s him—”

  “Will you swear to it?”

  “Let’s get away from here. He might come out.” He started away on his short legs, moving so fast that Bret had to run to catch him.

  “You know it’s him then, don’t you?”

  “I said I think it’s him, but I can’t swear to it. There’s no use dragging me into court, because I won’t swear to anything.”

  “Forget about the law, can’t you? That man slugged you and killed my wife. Didn’t he?”

  “It’s him all right,” Garth said reluctantly. “Only remember what I said if you drag me into court. I co-operated with you to the best of my ability—”

  “Give it a rest. And lend me your gun.”

  “What you want a gun for? You better call the cops and let them handle it. Give me a chance to pull out of here, and call the cops.”

  “I didn’t ask you for advice. I asked for your gun.”

  “You can’t have it. It’s a damn good gun, and I need it in my office.”

  “You can buy another.”

  “It’s not registered. It cost me fifty bucks. Give me one reason why I should hand you fifty bucks.”

  “Here.” They had reached the corner in front of the drugstore. Bret stopped him and held out a fifty-dollar bill.

  “It’s not registered, I told you. It’s not so easy to replace.”

  “All the better for both of us.”

  Garth took the money and looked at it. Then he swung past Bret in a half circle as calculated and neat as a veronica. Bret felt the sudden weight of metal in the pocket of his blouse, and almost as tangibly he felt a new respect for Garth. The little man had unsuspected talents.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me, boy. Y
ou try to use that rod and you’ll burn your fingers for sure.”

  “I don’t expect to use it. I want it for moral support.”

  “Moral support for what? I still say call the cops. Give me five minutes to get out—”

  “Maybe you’re right. I will.”

  “Uh?”

  Garth left him without a backward look or a good-bye and scurried across the road to his parked car. Bret stood on the corner, smiling grimly, until Garth’s yellow convertible had nosed out into the stream of traffic and merged with it. Then he went back to the apartment building he and Garth had just left. For reasons there was no time to examine, he had no intention of calling the police.

  For the third time in an hour he knocked on the door. This time there was no answer. An entire minute ticked off in individual seconds while he listened and waited. He knocked again more loudly and was answered by another thirty seconds of silence. He knocked so hard that the thin panels reverberated under his knuckles like a drum. Once more he waited very briefly, and then his patience ended. Stepping back across the hallway, he ran against the door and burst it open with his shoulder.

  The living-room contained nothing but the afternoon sunlight sluiced through the tilted slats of the Venetian blinds. He closed the door behind him and looked around the room. A row of nude photographs on the wall to his right: “To my old friend Larry …” “For Larry, who has what it takes …” A heavy armchair crouched in the corner beside a cabinet radio-phonograph and a table covered with piles of scrambled records. He looked behind the chair, behind the chesterfield, and went through the rest of the apartment: the kitchen, remarkably neat and clean; the windowless little bathroom, where he had been sick the night before; the bedroom with its two unmade beds, and nothing under them but rolls of fluffy dust; the closet full of clothes hanging in quiet ranks, with no man behind them. He had made one visit too many, and Milne had taken the hint.

  Standing in the empty bedroom with Milne’s possessions all around him, in his nostrils the piny odor of some sort of masculine scent, he was overwhelmed by his nearness to the man who had killed Lorraine. He had spoken to him, been touched by him, slept in his room with him all night, even worn his clothes. He had been in intimate contact with a murderer and had seen in him nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing worse than cheapness and vulgarity, qualities that had seemed harmless enough in a person who was helping him out. The cheapness had been moral bankruptcy, and the vulgarity had been viciousness. He had accepted help from the hands that strangled Lorraine, and felt contaminated as this room had been contaminated by Milne’s use.

  There was a photograph of Milne, very sleek and athletic in a sport shirt, in a leather frame on the dresser. He stared at the smiling face in cold anger and confusion, unable to understand why Milne had brought him home in the first place. Certainly humanitarianism wasn’t the reason. It was possible, as anything now seemed possible, that Milne had intended to kill him and had changed his mind. The intricacies of the brain that hid behind that smooth face and vain smile were completely mysterious to him.

  Now was the time to call the police if he was ever going to call them. A runaway man could disappear in Los Angeles County for weeks or months, or forever. No one man, searching alone, could begin to cover the hotels and motels and apartments, the rooming houses, flophouses, call houses, where Milne might hole up. A perversion of chance had led him to Milne once, but he hadn’t the slightest hope that it would happen again. It was a job for the police, and even they might fail at it.

  He started for the telephone in the living-room, wryly aware of the dramatic fitness of calling the police from the fugitive’s own apartment. Before he got to the telephone he realized that, drama or no drama, he couldn’t go through with it. He didn’t owe obedience to Paula, but he owed her some kind of loyalty. Her role in the case was too doubtful to permit him to bring in the police.

  His mind balked when he tried to define that role, and understand her relation to the dead woman and to Harry Milne. He had always thought she was honest almost more honest than it was natural for a woman to be. Perhaps that was simply one of the illusions of love. The pain and doubt of the past day had eaten away some of his love for her, and he had come to feel that he knew her less. He could no longer follow the thoughts that moved behind her candid eyes. He knew that she had been disingenuous, if not deceitful, in urging him to think of the future, forget Lorraine, and drop the case. But the Medusa fact that stood between him and the telephone was worse than simple deceit. She and Harry Milne had met before. Because Paula had suppressed the truth, whatever it was, it followed that she was obscurely leagued with the murderer. He was afraid that if he looked further into that twisted fact and saw all its implications, it would turn him to stone.

  He used the telephone to call a taxi, and went downstairs to wait for it at the curb. When the taxi arrived he gave the driver Paula’s address. As they crossed to Wilshire in a rapid chaos of traffic his mind went on working, half against his will. Paula was involved with Milne, perhaps in something connected with the murder; by suppressing her connection with Milne, she had been protecting him; in spite of her efforts Milne had been forced to run; there was a chance that he’d run to Paula for further protection.

  They turned into her street, a typical Hollywood residential block of houses too elaborate and big for their lots, sentried along each curb by rows of palms like giant old men with ragged beards and their withered hair in their eyes. He saw Paula’s car in her driveway, and told the taxi driver to stop before they reached her house.

  “2245 is on up the street,” the driver said.

  “I know. Just stay here and I’ll pay you for the time.”

  They parked across the street and a hundred yards short of Paula’s house, and settled down to wait. The driver stretched out diagonally in his seat with the exaggerated abandon of a man relaxing on the job. Bret leaned forward tensely with his elbows on his knees and watched the house.

  After what seemed hours he looked at his watch. Ten minutes to six. No one had appeared on the glassed veranda or at any of the windows. No cars had come or gone. The declining sun made deep shadows between the houses, and the heat dropped out of the air as the shadows of the palm trees lengthened. The wide, low house where Paula lived seemed stable and peaceful in the amber light, washed clean and mellow by the gentle passage of time. A spray of water from the sprinkling system caught the horizontal rays and made a transient rainbow among the shrubbery on her lawn. Then the windows on the west side of the house burned ardently with borrowed light for the last few minutes before the sun went down. When the light withdrew, the windows were blank and dull like eyes that have lost their vision.

  As the afternoon changed into evening Bret sank further into depression. It was a grim task he had set himself, spying on Paula’s house like a detective or a jealous husband, waiting for the worst to happen. During the months he had been rebuilding his mind from its wreckage, it was Paula who had given him hope and energy to work against the inertia and boredom that oppressed him. She had provided the central meaning for the jerry-built thing he had made. His mind retreated in panic from the edge of the ruin he foresaw if Paula should be lost to him, the desert of dry ashes where he had lain once for an eternity bound hand and foot by paralysis of the will, in the undawning twilight of a mood too weak and cold to be called despair, prostrate in the chilly grip of self-disgust, obscurely plagued by little stillborn motivations, without reaction even to the memory of terror.

  In those first months at the hospital, which telescoped in his mind into one gray undeviating day, he had been worse than dead, a useless shape of organic matter too feeble and sick to bear the psychic burden of humanity. From such unpromising material, time and the doctors and Paula’s love had made him into a man again. Still he carried the memory of the ruin within him like the seed of a melancholy perennial. He had suffered enough to know his strength and weakness, and he knew that without Paula his world would turn gray again an
d bleed away to dust.

  Yet he didn’t see how he could help himself. He had to know the truth, and he had to see justice done. If he believed, as Paula said she did, that there was no justice anywhere, he wouldn’t be able to go on. Without justice, human decency, human life itself, could not exist; and it seemed to him that his belief in justice depended on the outcome of this case. It was the one event in his life that presented the problem of justice in uncompromising terms, in spite of the fact that he himself wasn’t entirely guiltless. If he had gone straight home and stayed there on that unremembered May night, still blank in his memory with the utter and tantalizing blankness of the empty frame that once enclosed the familiar portrait of a forgotten face, if he had stayed at home and waited for Lorraine, there would have been no murder, or he would have died preventing it. Failing that, he had to bring her murderer to justice, no matter what suffering ensued to Paula or to him. If Paula had conspired with Milne against his wife he had to know about it. He cursed his obsession and the ironic luck that had made him what he was and wedged him in this dilemma. But he stayed where he was, watching Paula’s house.

  The twilight was like a color blindness that leached off the colors of the roofs and windows and removed the third dimension that made the buildings real. The sky was still flamboyant in pink and yellow deepening into green, but night was lodging in the shrubbery and trees, in the corners of the houses, and under the eaves. A car appeared at the end of the block and came toward him, pausing twice before it stopped in front of Paula’s house. It was an old, battered coupé, with a middle-aged woman at the wheel. When she left the car he could see that she was decently dressed but in some way dowdy looking, perhaps because the skirt of her dark suit was too long or her hat was too straight on her head.

  Walking a little uncertainly on her thin legs, the woman crossed the sidewalk and approached the glassed porch. She glanced short-sightedly in the direction of the water spray and made an unnecessary and fussy detour. He was too far away to see her well, and the light was failing, but Bret felt sure he knew her. He knew in advance how she would climb the steps to the porch, her back straight and her head high, but with an awkwardness that came from fear of falling.