Those Who Walk Away

by Patricia Highsmith

  Coleman made a great effort to get himself in hand again. It took him some thirty seconds. He straightened up, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to think of the next thing he had to do in the present. He had to pack.

  By twelve-thirty they were installed in the Gritti Palace with a much nicer view from their fourth-floor windows of the hotel’s lovely terrace, which ended in steps down to the Grand Canal. Two motor-boats like the Marianna II bobbed in the water in front of the steps, snug under canvas in the lashing rain. Because of the bad weather, they lunched in the hotel and drank a good claret with their meal. Coleman was uneasy, especially in regard to what Inez was thinking, and tried to conceal it by joviality. It also occurred to him that Ray might have spoken to the police this morning, after he posted the letter, and that the police might be ready to arrest him, or deport him, or whatever they did with an American under such circumstances. But Coleman did not really believe this. This would end Ray’s guilt feelings, and in his way, Ray knew he deserved to suffer those feelings, and he was not going to end them so soon, Coleman thought.

  “The police have probably heard something more from Ray’s parents,” Coleman said to Inez, “and they want to talk to me about that.”

  “You said you met them?”

  “Oh, yes. They were vacationing in Rome the spring Ray met Peggy. Nice people, a little stuffy. She’s less stuffy than he is.”

  “Don’t be late for the police. That will annoy them.”

  Coleman chuckled, and clipped the end of a cigar. “They annoy me, dragging me out on a day like this.”

  Coleman set out at three-thirty. The journey, or voyage, once he was on a boat, took only fifteen or twenty minutes.

  The Capitano Dell’ Isola was at the police station in the Piazzale Roma. He introduced Coleman to a small, thin man with grey hair who he said was the Public Prosecutor of Venice. He was a tiny man in a loose grey suit, but Coleman felt a proper awe for the unknown powers that he might be able to wield.

  “It is his duty,” Capitano Dell’ Isola said, “to determine if there is a foundation for your detainment.”

  So the questions began again about the night of the Lido. If Dell’ Isola or anyone else had questioned the Smith-Peters or Mrs Perry, Coleman thought, they evidently had not said anything about his dislike of Ray Garrett. He knew they had not questioned Inez. Coleman was not asked his feelings. It was all cold fact, or rather cold lying, which Coleman thought he did with customary assurance.

  In a pause in the Public Prosecutor’s questioning, Dell’ Isola said, “We have spoken with Corrado Mancini, owner of the Marianna Due, and we have also examined the boat.”

  “Oh? And what did you learn?” asked Coleman.

  “He corroborates your story, that he was asleep at one o’clock when you left the Lido.” Dell’ Isola’s tone seemed more courteous in the presence of the Public Prosecutor.

  Coleman waited for a remark about the boat—a dent, a new scratch?—but none was forthcoming.

  “It may be necessary,” the Public Prosecutor said in his slow, grating voice, speaking in Italian, “to issue a…[Coleman took this phrase to mean a legal order for detainment] but I think that is not required at the moment, if we know where to find you and you do not leave Venice. You are at the Hotel Bauer-Gruenwald?”

  “I am at the Gritti Palace now,” Coleman answered. “I was going to inform you that I moved this morning.”

  This was taken down by a clerk.

  The Public Prosecutor murmured something to Dell’ Isola about informing the American Consulate. Dell’ Isola assured him that this had been done.

  “The father of Signor Garrett has telephoned,” Dell’ Isola said to Coleman, “to say that you were in Venice and might be of help. I told him we knew this and had spoken to you. I told them you were the last person we have been able to find who saw their son. I recounted the story of that night on the Lido as you told it to me, and they asked me to ask you again for anything—anything you can remember that Signor Garrett said about travelling, going anywhere. Anything about what he might have done. Because I must cable an answer to them.”

  Coleman took his time, sat very coolly in his chair, and said, “If I knew a single thing, I would have told you before.” He mixed his subjunctives, perhaps, but the idea was clear enough. “Perhaps he went back to Mallorca.”

  “No, we have inquired of the police in Palma and Xanaunx,” said the Capitano, mispronouncing the town name. “He is not there. Signor Garrett’s father also asked me to ask you if you know anyone in Mallorca who might know what Signor Garrett planned to do next. The father has also written to one of his son’s friends in Mallorca, but there is not yet time for an answer. You have just been in Mallorca with Signor Garrett, have you not?”

  “Sorry, I can’t remember any names of the friends of Garrett in Mallorca. I met a few, but—I was there only a few days. For the funeral of my daughter, you know.”

  “Yes, I understand,” the Capitano murmured. “Do you think Signor Garrett was a suicide, Signor Col-e-man?”

  “I think it is possible,” Coleman said. “Where could he have gone without a passport?”

  Coleman was glad to make the trip by vaporetto back to the Gritti, and stood outdoors on the deck despite the rain. The police had also asked Garrett Senior if he thought his son could have committed suicide. (Dell’ Isola had not said what Garrett Senior’s reply to this had been.) Ray must have written several days ago that he, Coleman, was in Venice also. Obviously the Garretts had no suspicions about him, which meant that Ray had not told his parents that his former father-in-law detested him. Ray wouldn’t. People who deserved detesting seldom announced that they were detested. Coleman wished Ray would leave Venice, and he thought if he kept a cold silence Ray would finally skulk away, maybe in two or three days. But it was funny about his abandoning his things at the Seguso. Neurotic, Coleman thought. He couldn’t really work it out, though he supposed he was on the right track when he explained it as Ray’s wanting to put the blame on him for possibly having killed him, and also Ray’s wanting to feel dead.

  To Coleman’s disappointment, Inez was not in when he got back to the Gritti, and it crossed Coleman’s mind at once that she was keeping an appointment with the police, too. But there was a note for him at the desk, in one of the boxes where their two keys hung.

  “Went out to do some shopping for Charlotte. Back between 6-7. I.”

  Charlotte was her sixteen-year-old daughter, now going to school in France. A ghastly day for shopping, Coleman thought, but Inez was probably preparing for Christmas. He went up to his room, made sure the radiators in bedroom and bath were turned as high as possible (the room was quite comfortable, however), then lost himself in another pencil drawing of his figures seen from above. One of the figures had a face upturned, a hand held out—for alms or for rain, people could think what they wished.

  He had a Scotch at six, and tried his composition in pastels on a larger piece of drawing-paper.

  Inez knocked and came in just before seven. By now it had stopped raining, and was dark and gloomy beyond the windows.

  Well, she said, smiling. “How was it at the police?”

  Coleman took a deep breath. “Oh, they’d spoken to Ray’s father. Just wanted to know if I had any new ideas as to where Ray might be. Told them I hadn’t.” Coleman was sitting on the edge of his bed. He preferred beds to tables for drawing, “Like a Scotch, dear?”

  “Yes, I will, thank you.” She slipped off her high-heeled shoes, which were now covered in transparent rain boots. “What a day! I like to think that the weather was better in the days when Venice had her glory, otherwise I cannot see how life could have been so glamorous here.”

  “A truer word was never spoke. But it wasn’t any better,” Coleman said, pouring her drink into a tumbler. He added exactly twice the amount in water from the tap in the bathroom. “Did you find anything for Charlotte?”

  “A most beautiful sweater I found, of a yellow li
ke a Cezanne, and for her desk a leather case to hold paper and stamps. It is green morocco. Very pretty. And I wanted to say to her it is from Venice, you know.”

  Coleman gave her her drink, and picked up his own. “Salute.”

  Inez drank some, sat down on the other side of Coleman’s bed, and asked, “What do the parents of Ray say?” She sat upright, her body turned, as if she rode side-saddle.

  Coleman saw she was worried. “They’re interested in whether anyone in Mallorca knows anything. His friends there. I can’t remember any of their names, but that village isn’t big, if they want to send someone down there. He’s not in Mallorca. They’ve looked—or asked.”

  “And what do they say about you?”

  “About me?”

  “Do they think you might have done him any harm?”

  The question was spoken in a calm and clinical tone, not at all like Inez. “They didn’t give me a hint of that.”

  “What did you do, Edward? Did you tell me the truth?”

  He didn’t give a damn, Coleman reminded himself, what Inez thought, or if she knew the truth. “I did what I told you.”

  Inez only looked at him.

  Coleman said carelessly, pulling a handkerchief from his hip pocket and blowing his nose, “You look as if you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t know what to believe. I saw the Smith-Peters for a while this—”

  “I sometimes think there’re eight of them—instead of simply two. The biggest bores I’ve ever met, and they’re underfoot all the time.”

  “You know, Edward,” Inez said in a softer voice, “they think you might have killed Ray—pushed him overboard unconscious or something like that.”

  Stupidity! Coleman thought at once of the Marianna II, her varnished brown hull, and of the fact that they hadn’t used her after that night. Their four-day rental period had run out. “Well, I can’t help what they think, can I? What are they going to do about it?”

  “Oh, I don’t think they’re going to do anything about it. Or rather, I don’t know,” she said quickly, shrugging in a nervous way.

  She must know, Coleman thought. That was an important point. Coleman smoked a little, then started putting his pastels back in their wooden box. “Well, what did they say? Just said out of the blue they thought I killed him?”

  “Oh, no, my goodness!” Her French accent was stronger now, which Coleman knew meant she was under a strain. “They asked me if I thought you could have done him harm, and then they said they thought you might have. They saw so well, you know, that you hate him.”

  “And what if I do?”

  “Hate him?”

  “Yes.”

  Inez hesitated. “But did you kill him?”

  “And what if I did?” Coleman asked in a quieter tone.

  “Did you, Edward?”

  Coleman walked across the room with his empty glass, walked on springy feet, and turned towards her. “Yes, I did. But who’s going to prove it, and who’s going to do anything about it?” He felt he had thrown down a gauntlet—and yet, unfortunately, his adversaries did not seem important or even aroused enough to make the contest very exciting.

  “You did, really, Edward? You are not joking with me?” she asked almost in a whisper.

  “I am not joking. I pushed him off the boat. The motor-boat. After fighting with him. He wasn’t unconscious, but he probably drowned. We were a long way from land.” He said it bitterly, but defiantly, and without regret. He said it with all the power of wishing it were true. And Inez believed him, he saw that, too. He said more calmly, “You probably want to tell the police. Go ahead. You probably want to leave—leave me now, too.” He gestured with both arms. “Go ahead and tell the Smith-Peters, too. Get on the telephone now and tell them.”

  “Oh, Edward, as if I would say a thing like that over the telephone!” Inez said in a shuddering voice. “As if I would tell them at all!” Now she was shrill with tears. She bit her underlip, then said, “You did.”

  Coleman slowly poured himself another drink, one not too big.

  “The body will surely be washed up. It will surely be found,” Inez said.

  “Yes. Surely,” Coleman said from the bathroom.

  “Why do you stay in Venice then? It’s not very safe.”

  Coleman was pleased at her concern, evident in the words and the tone. “If they want to attach it to me, they’ll do so, whether I’m in Venice or New York or Rome.” He walked back into his bedroom, stood with his feet apart, looking down at Inez who still sat in her erect, side-saddle position on his bed. “I am not worried,” Coleman said flatly, and walked towards his dark window. He turned around and said, “I detested him, yes. He caused the death of my daughter. And I consider him—considered him utterly worthless. There are people and people. Souls! Souls, they say. Some souls are worth more than others. And my daughter’s was worth a million like his. I wouldn’t even compare them, wouldn’t even assume they’re made of the same stuff. Do you see what I mean? I took justice in my own hands; yes, and if I pay for it, I pay for it. So what?” Coleman set down his untouched drink on the night-table. He took a cigar from his case and lit it, his lips loose around it as he held it between his teeth.

  Inez was still watching him.

  “I don’t know if you understand what I’m talking about, but it doesn’t matter if you do or not. That’s the way it is.”

  “I understand what you are talking about,” Inez said.

  “And I don’t expect your approval,” he added.

  “It’s as if you stay here—just defying his body to wash up somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” said Coleman. He was looking into space.

  There was a yell and a splash from beyond the window, beyond the hotel’s terrace, but the splashing sound had not been a large one, and the yell might have been one of surprise, maybe even a laugh. Only Inez had jumped at it slightly. In the distance, a large ship sounded its deep horn, which vibrated like an organ note in the wet air. Coleman thought of the water that surrounded them, the deep water into which the whole city might one day slide.

  When he looked at Inez again, she had a different expression, as if her thoughts were far away, though she still looked at him. She looked, Coleman thought, content. He frowned, trying to assess this. Was it relief? He waited for her to say the next words, strolled over to the ashtray and rolled his cigar in it. Was she going to say she was leaving tomorrow? Or stay and stand by him?

  He walked once more to the window, cigar between his teeth, and rested his hands on the sill. He looked out into foggy, yellowish lights on the canal, at the inevitable vaporetto passing, windows all tight shut against the weather. “I thought tomorrow,” he said, “I’d take a boat—maybe hire one and go over Chioggia way. Just to take a look again. Maybe you can see the Smith-Peters, do something with them.” He did not want Inez on the Chioggia trip, because he wanted to rough it, pay a fisherman to take him out on his boat for the day, something like that. “I’ll be back late evening.”

  “All right, Edward,” Inez said docilely.

  Coleman went over and pressed her shoulders, bent and kissed her on the cheek. She did not resist him now. “Finish your drink and have another. You ought to have a hot bath, if you’ve been out in this weather all afternoon. Rest a little bit, and I’ll knock on your door about eight and we’ll think of a nice place for dinner. I’d like to see the things you bought for Charlotte, unless they’re all wrapped.”

  “They’re not wrapped,” Inez said, getting up. She did not take another drink, but she went off to her room, to take a hot bath as he had suggested, Coleman was sure.

  13

  Coleman spent his Sunday in Chioggia, arriving back in Venice at 11 p.m. to an hotel empty of Inez. She hadn’t checked out, but had left no message for him. Coleman didn’t care. He was tired, and he had bruised his knee, falling on it when he slipped in a fishing-boat around five o’clock. The knee was swelling. He did not feel like looking for Inez in the Monaco,
or even in the hotel dining-room downstairs. He had a bath, and went to bed with a nightcap and a London Observer which he had bought at Piazzale Roma.

  His telephone rang just before midnight.

  “‘Allo, Edward,” Inez said. “Were you awake?”

  “Yes. I got in a few minutes ago. You’re in your room?”

  “Mm-m. I’ll come in to see you.”

  “Very good.” Coleman put the telephone down.

  Inez came in smiling, still in her short fur jacket and a hat. “You had a good day?”

  “Great,” Coleman said. “Except I didn’t bring back any fish. And I banged my knee.”

  Inez had to see his knee. She recommended a cold towel, and brought one from the bathroom, with a second towel to put under it so his bed would not become wet. She told him there had been a celebration at della Salute, the anniversary of the saving of Venice from the plague in the sixteen hundreds, for which occasion Santa Maria della Salute had been built. Coleman stared down imperturbably at his ugly, hairy leg, his knotty knee, now much bigger than normal, which Inez was tending so carefully with her slender, pink-nailed hands. His knee was grotesque, Coleman thought without amusement, without even concern for its swelling. It was like something drawn by Hieronymus Bosch.

  “I suppose you saw those bores today,” Coleman said.

  “Yes, and I saw Antonio, too. I have sent him on his way.” Inez gave the wet towel a final gentle pat, and pulled the sheet over it.

  “And where is his way?”

  “Positano now. He’s going tomorrow morning. I made the reservation for him on the plane to Naples.”

  And no doubt paid for the ticket, Coleman thought, but he was glad Inez had taken the initiative and urged him off. Coleman felt Inez was protecting him. “You didn’t have a quarrel?”