The Three Roads Page 4

  He had raised himself on his elbows to look down into her face. “Do you live here?”

  “No, but I’m staying here this month.”

  “I suppose you live in Hollywood?”

  “For the last few years I have.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you were a Hollywood type.”

  “Hollywood is full of outlandish characters.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You’re not outlandish at all.”

  She smiled up at him. “I’m doing all right.”

  “I know. I can tell by your clothes. But there are other ways of doing all right.”

  “What other ways? Kitchen and Kinder?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I tried them.”

  “Kinder?”

  “No, no Kinder. But I was married for a while. That was a considerable time ago. It didn’t work out.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  She pressed her advantage. “I did my stint of plain living and high thinking too. I worked for the Detroit Free Press for my bread and butter, and wrote for the little magazines for art’s sake. Then I met an agent who offered to sell me down the river to Hollywood, and I let him sell me. I was sick of living in a one-room apartment and mending stockings after midnight. Now I just throw them away. Or did before the war.”

  “Stockings, or dollar bills?”

  “Five-dollar bills.”

  That silenced him for a while. “I guess you resent my high moral tone,” he said finally.

  “I guess I do. I can’t help wondering where you got it. You didn’t study for the ministry, did you?”

  “No.” But he added surprisingly: “My father did. He never finished his seminary course though. He lost his faith and turned into a philosophy professor instead of a minister. His religious emotions were transformed into a passion for morality. Morality was an obsession with him, at least after my mother died.”

  “How old were you when she died?” Already she was becoming infected with a lover’s typical symptom and most impossible desire, the desire to share all of his memories, to have known him from the beginning. “Very young?”

  “I think I was four. Four or five.”

  “That’s dreadful. What did she die of?”

  His face went blank. After a silence he answered: “I don’t know.”

  “But didn’t your father tell you?”

  “No,” he said curtly. “He was a strange man, terribly shy and secretive. I think he should have been a monk.”

  “What did he look like?” Paula said. “I don’t think I would have liked him.”

  “No. He wouldn’t have liked you either. Did you ever see a picture of Matthew Arnold? He looked like him. A long solemn face, intelligent-looking but too heavy, and sort of miserable. He wasn’t a happy man.”

  “You must have been glad to get away from him.”

  “It wasn’t easy. Even after he died I still felt under his thumb. I was at the University of Chicago then, and I tried kicking over the traces, but my heart wasn’t in it. That was when I found out I couldn’t drink.”

  “What happened?” She made her question as perfunctory as she could, but she was breathlessly eager to know.

  “I got drunk a few times, but I invariably wanted to fight. I had been storing up aggressiveness for fifteen years, and it all came out in the bars. I suppose that’s as good a place for aggressiveness as any.”

  “Aggressiveness against him, you mean? Did you hate your father?”

  “I never admitted it to myself, but I suppose I did. For a long time I was afraid even to think anything that he would disapprove of. He never laid a finger on me, but he put the fear of God into me. Of course I loved him, too. Does that sound complicated?”

  “Yes, but no more complicated than the way things happen.” She thought of her own father, who had been the antithesis of Bret’s, an easy-living hard-drinking salesman whose visits home became less and less frequent and finally ceased altogether. She had started out by despising him, but all she felt for his memory now was affectionate tolerance. Tolerance was the most she had felt for anyone for a long time, until now.

  A sudden four-o’clock chill drew off the strength of the sun and chased them back to the hotel. But after dinner they came back to the sea again, as if they both secretly recognized that it was the catalyst of their meeting. In the darkness under a palm tree by the public walk he kissed her for the first time, moving toward her with such violent suddenness that she felt waylaid. There was something pathetically arid about his kiss, as if the tropical sun had evaporated his vital juices, and he held her so briefly that she had no time to respond.

  The physical inadequacy of his kiss didn’t really matter. Already a new element had precipitated from her contact with him in the presence of the sea. The sound of the surf was full of echoes, and the night was larger than it had ever been.

  Because he had come from a great distance, from an unimaginable place where planes flew up from carrier decks and combat communications got locomotor ataxia, she had a vivid sense that the ocean stretched far beyond the limit of her vision, curving downward in darkness below the uncertain horizon to military islands and contested waters where the war was being fought. She was invaded by a consciousness that never withdrew again—that she was standing on the edge of a dim infinity from which anything might emerge to meet her: grief, or ecstasy, or death. And she had experienced the three of them.

  chapter 4

  Theodore Klifter watched her as she talked, occasionally stroking his reassuring beard. He had grown this beard involuntarily during a period when he had had no access to shaving materials—it hurt his S.S. guards in their professional feelings when their prospective victims cut their own throats—and he had retained it as a protection for the lower half of his face. The upper half of his face was shielded by thick spectacles that enlarged her image and blurred it slightly, as if there were a wall of glass between them.

  The admiration he felt for Paula was not wholly uncritical, though he knew that he made special allowances for tall women who had long brown hair, like the hair his mother had allowed him to brush for her in the evenings when he was a child. Paula was not extraordinarily intelligent, as he preferred women to be, and there was a harsh and irritating contrast between the hard surface of her conversation and the strong vein of emotional femininity in her nature. But she was honest and self-aware. She knew what she wanted and had the stability to wait for it. She was capable of sustaining a grand passion without lapses into moral triviality, and without romantic solemnity. Though other people’s lovers were his life’s most hackneyed theme, he couldn’t help being interested in the man who had won such a love from such a woman.

  Her quiet face showed traces of the hard day she had had, but she had plunged into her story as soon as she was seated in his living-room with a drink. He let her talk, for he understood that she had wound up her courage to this point, and was unwilling to give it time to run down.

  “You already know, don’t you, that he had a severe shock last April when his ship was bombed? It was one of the suicide planes that the Japanese used so much in the last months of the war. A great many of Bret’s shipmates were killed, and he himself was rather badly burned and thrown into the water. He was picked up by a crash boat and flown to Guam. He recuperated in the naval hospital there. I didn’t know anything about this at the time, but his wife did.

  “When he’d been on Guam about four weeks the hospital authorities decided that he was fit to fly home for survivor’s leave. His burns were healed, and he showed no signs of a mental condition, at least none appeared in his medical record. He landed at San Francisco after an overnight hop from Hawaii, and after some red tape and delay he caught a train for Los Angeles. He got home about nine thirty at night, but his wife wasn’t there.”

  “Where was she?”

  “She was downtown in a bar. The bartender knew her slightly and told the police next day that she had been there. She didn’t know when
Bret was coming, you see. He couldn’t be sure what day he’d catch a plane from Guam, and even if he had, he couldn’t have written her on account of the censorship. He should have wired her from San Francisco, but I guess he wanted to surprise her by dropping in out of the blue. Or perhaps he was suspicious of her. Anyway, she wasn’t home when he arrived. He was upset and lonely, so he phoned me. I was never so glad to hear from anyone in my life. I didn’t care, that night, whether he was married to another woman or not. I picked him up at his house, and we went for a drive.”

  “How did he behave?”

  “Correctly. Too damn correctly.”

  “That’s not exactly what I mean—”

  “I know it isn’t,” she said with a faint smile. “He seemed pretty much as he’d always been except that he was more silent. His manner to me was distant, so much so that I wondered why he’d bothered to call me. He wouldn’t talk about his experiences or about the bombing. All I could get out of him was a sort of communiqué. He couldn’t conceal his worry about his wife. I drove out Sunset and out the highway toward Malibu, but it wasn’t more than an hour before he asked me to take him home again.”

  “He was eager to see her, then?”

  “Yes. I noticed his nervousness, and that may account for it. Of course you’d expect him to be nervous after what he’d gone through. He was thinner than he’d ever been, and he’d never had any excess flesh. He was quite jumpy by the time we got back to his house, and for some reason he asked me to come in with him. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of witnessing his meeting with his wife, but he insisted for some reason. I think he wanted to be honest with her, not to deceive her even about a little thing like a car ride. So in I went.” She took a long swallow of whisky and soda. The doctor observed that her hand was clenched white around the glass.

  “The light was on in the front bedroom—it hadn’t been when I called for him—and he opened the door and walked in. I heard him say her name, Lorraine, and then a thud as he collapsed on the floor. I followed him in and saw her lying on the bed naked on top of the bedclothes. She had an enviable figure even in death, but her face was ugly because she had been strangled. I went to the phone and called the police. Then I went back to the bedroom and found that Bret was still unconscious on the floor. I tried to revive him but it didn’t do any good. He remained unconscious all night and most of the next day. When the police arrived they found a rolled prophylactic tube on the table beside Lorraine’s bed, and other evidence that a man had been with her. The man who murdered her has never been caught.”

  She was breathing quickly, and the blood had withdrawn from her face, leaving fever spots of rouge on each cheekbone. She raised her glass and finished its contents. “May I have another drink, Dr. Klifter? I didn’t realize it would take so much out of me to tell you that.” She handed him her empty glass.

  When he came back from the kitchen with a strong drink for her and a weaker one for himself, she was standing by the window looking out. Her tailored back was tense and straight in the attitude of listening. Even when she disregarded him she disturbed him, not entirely because she was tall and brown-haired and well made. She was one of the women who without relinquishing their female quality had entered into man’s estate. Her body was as streamlined as a projectile, potent as a weapon, but she did not use it to advance her interests or excuse her errors. Europe had had its share of women who lived their own lives and asked for no quarter, but they were the exception rather than the rule. In Los Angeles there were scores of thousands of such women living boldly by their wits, self-contained and energetic atoms in a chaotic society.

  He set down the glasses and approached her from behind, looking out through the casement over her broad padded shoulder. She was watching the darkness intently. The walled grounds of the hotel were as quiet and dark as a countryside. The only sound came from a distant bungalow where a radio faintly chided the silence.

  With her high heels she was an inch or two taller than he. When they were standing it was hard for him to preserve the patriarchal attitude of his profession. Since he had left his clinic and his professorship and migrated to a strange country, he had found himself dangerously willing at times to slip into a relationship of dependence on such women. He gripped his thick, dark beard with his right hand and thought earnestly of himself as a somewhat priestlike figure, superior to human weaknesses, even his own—a man with weaned affections, as the American Pilgrims said.

  Then she turned to him, and he saw the terror in her face.

  “What is troubling you, Miss West?”

  Her voice was shallow and quick, but her whole body labored to produce it. “I thought I saw somebody outside looking in the window.”

  “But who?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody I knew. I only saw two eyes, or thought I saw them.”

  “It must have been imaginary. The gates of the pueblo are locked at eight, and anyone who comes in must pass the desk. I have never been troubled by window peepers.”

  She laughed uncertainly. “Neither have I until lately. But the last few months I’ve thought there’s been someone following me. Even in my own house I don’t feel safe.”

  “It’s an unsettling experience even if it is not actual.”

  “Have you had that feeling, Doctor? The sense of being followed, being watched by malignant eyes?”

  She noticed the full highball glass standing on the coffee table, crossed to it, and drank greedily.

  Dr. Klifter looked around the heavily furnished, anonymous room. For two years he had occupied the same bungalow in the walled grounds of this pueblo hotel, but he still considered himself a transient. He had hung no pictures, bought no furniture, planted no seeds in the flower beds. The scented stock and early daffodils bloomed around his house, but they did not seem to bloom for him. He felt that his only rights were squatter’s rights. His trunk was in the closet waiting to be packed. At worst—at very worst—he had traveler’s checks and a volume of Rilke’s poems always in his pockets, and was ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

  “Whenever I leave a doorway,” he said, “I look both ways. When I turn a corner I look up and down the street. I know that there is no Gestapo in America, but I have my own Gestapo in my mind. Eventually I hope it may be disbanded. Still my neck is stiff from looking over my shoulder.”

  “You seem pretty sure that my fears are imaginary.” The drink had restored some of the color to her cheeks.

  “The things you see, the eyes, and the people that follow you, are almost certainly imaginary. The fears themselves are real. We are all pursued by fears from birth to death, from the fear of being born to the fear of dying. There is no one who has not seen those eyes in the night. I mentioned my own peculiarly Jewish fear as an example.”

  “You’re very kind,” she said.

  “On the contrary, I am very cruel.” He motioned her into a chair and sat down facing her. “But I like to think that mine is the cruelty of a surgeon who amputates in order to save a life. You have been courageous to tell me so much about this murder, and without evasion. Will you tell me one thing more?”

  “I will if I can.”

  “It has occurred to me—I shall be quite as frank with you as you have been with me—that Mr. Taylor’s amnesia was, and is, the evasive action of a depleted ego in the face of a guilt that it could not bear. You were with him on that night, and you should be able to clear up that possibility for me.”

  “Are you asking me whether Bret killed his wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t. I know he didn’t, but you don’t have to take my word for it. The police surgeon established that she was killed at about ten thirty, and at that time Bret and I were halfway to Malibu. There was other evidence corroborating the medical testimony. The woman next door heard a scream from the house at that time.”

  “Was anyone seen to leave?”

  “The woman didn’t look. She thought the scream was a radio sound effect at the time. Nob
ody else heard or saw anything till Bret and I found her body.”

  “The thing is still very vivid to you after nine months.”

  “Could it help being? I kept the newspaper clippings on the case too. I have them here if you want them.”

  She rummaged in her bag and produced a wad of clippings held together with paper clips. Unfolding the top layer, she spread it out on the coffee table in front of him. “These are the worst in a way, but the Examiner had the most complete coverage.”

  The doctor glanced rapidly down the columns of print:

  There were dark marks of discoloration on her neck, and the face of the dead girl was suffused with blood, according to Dr. Lambert Sims, Assistant Medical Examiner. Dr. Sims quickly established that the young wife had been strangled to death, and criminally attacked as well, scarcely more than half an hour before the receipt of the telephone call from Mrs. Pangborn.

  There was ample evidence that a strange man had been present in the room, and the police theory is that the murderer accompanied his victim to her house. None of the other residents of the quiet residential street saw him arrive, or leave after his bloody business was completed. Mrs. Marguerite Schultz, next-door neighbor of the murdered woman, stated at the inquest that she heard a faint scream from the house of death at approximately 10:30 on the night of the murder. Mrs. Schultz testified that she thought nothing of it at the time, attributing it to a crime radio program, but it helped to corroborate the findings of the medical examiner and fix the time of death.

  The most sinister and revealing clue was a series of spots of blood on the porch and sidewalk of the murder bungalow. Dr. Sims has been able to establish that these stains were fresh human blood of a different blood-type from that of any of the known principals in the case. But the man who shed that blood, presumed by the police to be the killer, has not yet been apprehended.

  Lieutenant Samuel Warren of the Homicide Squad of the Los Angeles police, who is in charge of the case, attaches great importance, also, to a set of fingerprints, evidently those of a man, which were found in the room of horror. These “prints,” taken from the surface of the bedside table beside the murder bed, indicate, according to Lieutenant Warren, that the killer leaned upon it in the commission of his foul deed. Eventually, Lieutenant Warren believes, the killer will make the inevitable slip and fall into the clutches of the law. When he does, his fingerprints will be waiting in the police files to convict him.