The Three Roads Page 8

  Snatching at any straw to make him speak, she pointed to a landmark she had often noticed before, the tall, leaning chimney of a brick kiln on the inland side of the highway. “I bet an immigrant from Pisa built that.”

  “I beg your pardon.” His voice was heavy and dull. He hadn’t noticed the leaning chimney. He hadn’t even heard what she said, and she had to admit the warmed-over crack hardly deserved an audience.

  His face, in the quick glance she stole at it, was as dull as his voice, a closed door standing between his thoughts and her. For all she knew his mind, unconscious of the sun and wind, was trapped and digging vainly in a lightless, airless mine of memory. She thought of the pit ponies that lost their eyesight because they never saw the sun, and for a hopeless instant she supposed that Bret was lost to her forever in those subterranean tunnels. She rejected her depressed mood as soon as she recognized it, and drove five miles an hour faster.

  “I didn’t hear what you said, Paula. Excuse me.”

  “It was a silly remark, and I couldn’t possibly repeat it. Look, you can see the sea there between those two hills. Isn’t it blue?”

  He looked dutifully at the polished wedge of sea between the hills and looked away again. His eyes were bright blue and mindless, like the sea. His attention was turned inward, looking down the dark shaft. She didn’t think explicitly that they were only a few miles from La Jolla, but his refusal to look at the sea shocked her. She was eager to show him all the things he had been missing, all the fine exhibits in the gallery of the world, and he wouldn’t even look at their own memento—the Pacific.

  “What’s the matter, Bret?” her mouth said against her will.

  “I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking.”

  “But what about?”

  “About what I should do.”

  “I thought that was all settled. You’ll stay with me and see Dr. Klifter on alternate days. The rest of the time you can enjoy yourself for a change. I have to be at the studio in the mornings, and that’ll give you a chance to do some work if you want to.”

  “I don’t know whether I’ll bother with seeing Klifter.”

  “But, darling! You have an appointment on Wednesday.”

  “I don’t think my trouble is anything a psychoanalyst can help me with. It’s too real for that.”

  “He isn’t one of your old-fashioned dream doctors, Bret. He doesn’t try to explain everything in terms of infantile bed-wetting. He knows the importance of the adult problems—”

  “So do I. You see, I know what happened to my wife.”

  “You remember?”

  His answer was slow in coming. It seemed to her that everything hung on it, like Oedipus’ answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. The speedometer needle swung past seventy and hovered at seventy-five. The hair blew frantically about his head, but his face was as impassive as stone.

  Would his face change at all if the car left the road and somersaulted down the bank of the arroyo? For a wild moment she played with the notion of giving the wheel a final twist and abandoning them both to the decision of mass and energy. A bright, windy day like this was as good a time to die as any. It would be fitting as the last gesture of her ending youth.

  Almost before she was conscious of the moment, it was swept away by a deep rising hope. She caught a vision of herself years ahead living with her husband in a house with a garden and a big lawn where children and dogs could play. Her nerves leaned hard against the stability of that unbuilt house and that unconsummated marriage as she set her right foot on the brake. She turned off onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped the car. It seemed for an instant that the world had stopped, that the hills around them were waiting for a signal to move.

  “Do you remember?”

  “I don’t remember her death, if that’s what you mean. I remember marrying her in San Francisco.”

  “How do you know about her death? Did Dr. Klifter tell you?”

  “He gave me these.”

  He showed her the bundle of clippings, and she felt like a dreamer whose recurrent nightmare has suddenly and incredibly become part of the real world. She looked into his face and trembled to know what was going on behind those steady eyes.

  He felt most strongly a terrible pity for his dead wife, and a grinding shame. He had failed Lorraine, both living and dead. Living, he had abandoned her to violation and murder. Dead, he had forgotten her very existence, had sat snug and complacent for nine months in an animal world without memory, dreaming boy’s dreams of happiness with another woman. But the irreparable past, more fatal than any predestined future because it was unchangeable and absolute, had caught up with him and embraced him from behind.

  “That’s what happened, is it?” His right forefinger tapped the papers he was holding in his left hand. She took them and looked at them, but she was so upset that she could decipher nothing but the headlines.

  “Yes. Don’t you—?”

  “You needn’t ask me again if I remember. I don’t. I probably never will. The last thing I remember is flying in to San Francisco and landing at Alameda in the morning. They still haven’t caught the man that killed her?”

  “No. I’ve kept in touch with the police, and they’re no further now than they were then. Bret?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t let your mind dwell on this? I’m dreadfully sorry Klifter gave you those things. I shouldn’t have let him have them. I should have destroyed them long ago.”

  “He did me a good turn. A better turn than you and Wright, keeping me in a fool’s paradise.”

  “But this is in the past, Bret. It can’t change the present. It was sheer bad luck that it happened to us, and there’s really nothing we can do about it.”

  “It happened to my wife,” he said coldly. “To us only incidentally.”

  “I’m going to burn these filthy things.” She had found her lighter in the snakeskin purse that lay between them on the seat. She lit it and applied the tear-shaped flame to the corner of the clippings.

  He knocked the lighter out of her hand and took them away from her.

  “Damn you!” she cried. “I don’t like violence, Bret.” She controlled her anger immediately and said in a neutral voice: “You might pick up my lighter and light me a cigarette.”

  “I’m sorry if I was rough.”

  “Forget it.” She accepted the lighted cigarette he handed her as a further token of apology. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t let me burn them though.”

  “There are some names I want—”

  “You’re not thinking of going to the police?” She tried to keep her voice steady and low, but terror lodged like a tin whistle in her throat and raised its pitch. “I went over the whole thing with them months ago, and nothing came of it.”

  “I don’t suppose they’d be much help. I thought I’d look up this bartender Rollins. He might be able to tell me something.”

  “Rollins?”

  “He was one of the witnesses at the inquest.”

  He riffled the clippings expertly, as if he had read them often enough to index them. “Here.” He pointed to a paragraph at the bottom of a column:

  According to the testimony of James P. Rollins, bartender at the downtown eating-place and an acquaintance of the murdered girl, Lorraine Taylor was alone when she left the Golden Sunset Café. “She was alone and a trifle the worse for drink,” Rollins put it. “I offered to call her a taxi but she said to never mind. I figured she could make it all right under her own power.”

  “He said she left by herself.” The whistle in Paula’s throat made a discordant tune. “What more could he tell?”

  “Probably nothing, but I want to talk to him. Don’t you see, I don’t even know who her friends were. I’ve got to try and understand what happened.”

  “But what are you going to do? There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I have to prove that for myself. If I could find the man that was with her—�
�

  “Are you jealous of a dead woman, Bret?”

  “One might think you were jealous of her yourself.”

  She started the car and turned it back onto the highway. It was hard to see the road through the tears that had been brought to her eyes by the wind or by her sudden feeling of desolation. The present and the future were slipping away again, and in some way the fault was hers. She blamed her own stupidity and weakness.

  They rode in silence through the green valleys and the barren hills, past the scrubbed whiteness of the sea resorts and the geometric forests of the Long Beach oilfields. The past slid along behind them on a trailer, as real as the buzzing, sprawling confusion of the Los Angeles suburbs. She longed for a city where she could submerge herself, ditch the trailing past, forget even the future. But the roaring blankness of Los Angeles was a comfortless backdrop to her loneliness.

  It was loneliness that made her speak at last, though she didn’t trust her voice.

  “You didn’t really mean it when you said you mightn’t go to Dr. Klifter?”

  “Didn’t I?”

  She lifted one hand from the wheel and touched his arm. “I don’t think you should make any decisions when you’re feeling depressed.”

  “I’ve got a reason for being depressed. I’m not going to get rid of it by fooling around with my childhood memories. I’ve got to act in the real world where the trouble started.”

  “Act?”

  “My wife was murdered. God knows our marriage never amounted to much, but I owe her something. The least I owe her is some attempt to find the man that killed her.”

  The concrete pavement billowed before her eyes, and for the second time that afternoon she felt unable to drive. They were far out on the boulevard, so it was easy to find a parking space. She turned off the motor and leaned against his shoulder in a gesture of weariness and abandonment.

  “You know you’re not fit to plunge into a thing like that. They only let you leave the hospital on the understanding that you’d be in Dr. Klifter’s care.”

  “I can’t rest until I find the man that killed her. That makes no sense to you, does it? What makes no sense to me is your idea that I should waste my time telling my dreams to a psychoanalyst, instead of settling the trouble at its source.”

  “Are you sure this is its source? Even if it is, it can’t be settled. You’ve got to learn to live with it.”

  He gave her a narrow look of doubt. “What makes you so sure?”

  “The police spent months on the case. You can’t do anything by yourself. I won’t let you bury yourself in the past—”

  “You sound afraid.”

  “I am afraid.”

  She pressed her face against the rigid muscles of his arm. Even in this moment of doubt and alienation she felt an undercurrent of pride in his strength, and gratitude that he had come back to her physically whole from the war.

  “I won’t argue with you any more,” he said. “Give me the key to the trunk compartment.”

  “But you’re coming home with me now? I told Mrs. Roberts to have dinner ready at seven.”

  “I’m sorry I have to spoil your plans. I’ve always spoiled your plans, haven’t I? Give me the key.”

  “I won’t!” She turned the ignition key and started the motor. “You’re coming home with me whether you like it or not.”

  Before she had finished the sentence he was out of the car. She called his name and started after him, running awkwardly on her high heels. A seedy old man who was standing in the doorway of a cigar store turned to watch her, smiling knowingly. Bret was walking rapidly away, his wide blue shoulders perfectly impassive. She called once more, but he paid no attention.

  She went back to the roadster and crawled in under the wheel. His white hat was a hundred yards away, moving steadily along the sidewalk. She watched it like a fading hope until it was out of sight.

  chapter 9

  As soon as she got home she went to the telephone in the hall and dialed a number. While the signal buzzed at the other end of the line she shut the door of the kitchen with her foot so that Mrs. Roberts wouldn’t hear.

  “Yeah?” A man’s voice answered.

  “Larry Miles?”

  “Well, this is a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you for a week or so.”

  “It isn’t pleasant. Bret Taylor is in town.”

  “Do tell,” said the softly modulated voice. “I thought he was all safely locked up with the other boys with the fantods.”

  “And it isn’t funny. He may be looking for you.”

  “So what do I do? Take a powder?”

  “Yes. Get out of town.”

  “It costs money to take a powder.”

  “You have the money.”

  “But nix, I had bad luck this week. No money. No money, no powder. Now a couple of C’s would take me to Las Vegas. I got friends there.”

  “All right, you can have the money. If you’ll get out of town for two weeks. I’ll let you have it tonight.”

  “That’s the good girl,” said the engaging voice. “Usual time, usual place?”

  “Yes. In the meantime, you know a place called the Golden Sunset Café?”

  “But yes. Do I pay it a visitation?”

  “Stay away from there,” she said. “Do you hear me, Miles?”

  “Excuse me while I adjust my hearing aid.”

  “I said this isn’t funny. Bret Taylor’s a big man, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do.”

  “Be calm, my sweet, I heard you.”

  “Then bear it in mind.”

  She set down the receiver and climbed the stairs to her room. The solid floors and brick walls of her house seemed as insubstantial as a cardboard studio set. Even her bedroom lacked intimate meaning, as if its fourth wall were missing and the bed on which she flung herself stood in full view of the unfriendly city.

  She got up and went to the mirror and looked at her face and didn’t like it. She crossed the room to the great closet to look for a beautiful dress to wear. Her wardrobe appalled her. Gowns and sweaters, suits and scarves and skirts and coats, were garish and hideous, like masquerade costumes on hangover morning. Out of the thousands of dollars’ worth of colored silk and cotton and wool, there wasn’t a thing she’d be seen dead in.

  When Larry went back to the bedroom the girl was sitting on the edge of the bed. In the excitement of the telephone call he’d forgotten all about her. Her red hair was tangled, but it shone prettily in the thin light that filtered through the closed blinds. When you looked at it in a better light you could see the darkness at the roots.

  “You were gone a long time,” she said. “Lover.”

  She stood up and came toward him with a dopey look on her face. Her navel and two nipples made a cartoon of another face, a long and mournful one. Whenever he saw that face instead of a body, he knew that he’d had enough of a girl. He let her kiss him, but he didn’t kiss her back.

  “What’s the matter, Larry?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Who was that on the phone?” she whispered in his ear. Her arms felt sticky against the back of his neck.

  “Business. I got irons in the fire.”

  “Such as?”

  “My business, not yours. Listen, Fran, why don’t you blow for now?”

  “So you can keep a date with another girl.”

  “I said it was business.”

  “I heard the way you talked on the phone. You think I’m dumb?”

  He looked straight into her eyes and grinned. “What do you think?”

  “Who is she?”

  “I thought I advised you to blow. Scram, fade, beat it, go away!”

  She placed her right cheek against his chest and held on. “I’ll go if you tell me who she is.”

  “All right,” he said. “You want to do it the hard way.” He took hold of her elbows with the air of a man removing an uncomfortable collar, broke her grip, and thrust her away.

  �
�You shouldn’t treat me like that,” she said.

  He took a step toward her. She backed away. “I’m going. But you’ll be sorry if you treat me like that.”

  She put on her shoes and a tan polo coat. He followed her into the living-room. “Don’t be like that, Fran. I told you it was business. I might have to go to Nevada for a couple of weeks.”

  “It’s nothing to me,” she said from the doorway, and added in a sweet and ugly voice: “Give her my love.”

  Listening to her footsteps go down the hall to her own apartment, he shrugged his shoulders. Fran had the idea that it was another woman, and there was no use arguing with a dame. It was another woman, all right, but Paula West was no she of his. West had a little too much class for him, not just the surface class that was his meat, but the kind that went way down out of sight like an iceberg and chilled you off at ten paces. She had quite a bit on the ball too, but it wasn’t bright of her to tell him to keep his nose out of the Golden Sunset. He hadn’t been near it for months, but now that he had a reason not to, that was exactly the bistro he was going to frequent.

  He flung off his dressing gown and went into the bathroom to shave. He didn’t have one of those three-way mirrors for looking at his profile, but by peering out of the corners of his eyes he caught a three-quarters view. He liked the way his chin jutted out from his neck in a clean line. Greek, but definitely. Not Greek like in the restaurant business, but like on monuments. They called him Adonis on the posters when he fought in the semifinals in Syracuse, and he’d looked the word up in the big dictionary in the branch library. His hair was light and wavy too, just like the picture of the monument in the dictionary.