Those Who Walk Away

by Patricia Highsmith

  “I feel sure,” Inez said, “that Edward was horrible to you that evening. I wish you would tell me the truth, Ray.”

  In front of these nice friends, Ray thought. He felt he blushed like a boy caught out in a lie. But it was Inez who was deceiving him a little. As Antonio had suggested, Coleman might have bragged to Inez that he had done away with Ray Garrett that night. If so, that hadn’t upset Inez seriously. She hadn’t spoken to the police. Now she wanted the truth, probably because it was more ‘interesting’ or because she was simply curious, or because she was finished with Coleman. Ray said, “He was rude, but he didn’t do anything.”

  Inez squirmed in her chair and said, “Laura and Francis, I am unable to think of lunch today—if you don’t mind.”

  The Smith-Peters were understanding, and agreed that Inez should stay on and talk with Ray, if she wished. Francis Smith-Peters was looking for the waiter, and insisted upon paying.

  “We won’t be leaving tomorrow,” Laura Smith-Peters said to Inez in her high, nasal voice, a sympathetic whine. “We’re just as concerned about Ed as you are. We want you to know that, Inez.”

  Inez nodded. “Thank you, Laura.”

  Laura Smith-Peters gave Ray a tentative smile. Ray felt she was at a loss what to say to him, that she was both curious about him and afraid of him.

  “You’re staying on a while, I suppose, Mr Garrett?” her husband asked, in a tone of certainty, perhaps because he believed the police would detain him.

  “Oh, a day or so, I think,” Ray replied.

  “We’ll call you up later this afternoon,” Laura Smith-Peters said, patting Inez’s shoulder as she got up. “You’ll be in around four?”

  Inez nodded.

  They said good-bye to Ray and left.

  Ray sat down again. “Another Cinzano?” he asked Inez.

  “No, thank you.” She lit a cigarette. “You know what I want to ask you, Ray. To tell me the absolute truth. I thought when I first met you, you were very truthful. Now you do not seem so.”

  Again Ray felt embarrassed. “About Tuesday night, I’m telling you the absolute truth. Maybe I shouldn’t have left him lying on the ground, but after all—a man who’d come after me to crush my skull with a rock, and hit me hard with it—”

  “How big was the rock?”

  He told her.

  “If you did kill him,” she said in a whisper, “and if someone else found him that night—they might have been afraid to report it. Don’t you think? Some people are like that. They’d rather walk away—or push the body into a canal.” Her brows trembled.

  Everybody would rather walk away, Ray thought. He looked away from her distress, a distress caused by her feelings for Coleman, he realized. “That’s possible. It’s also possible he’s hiding out in order to get me in trouble. I suppose you’ve thought of that?”

  Inez hadn’t, to Ray’s surprise. It seemed to show a lack of imagination, that she hadn’t thought of it.

  “Where do you think he might go, if he were hiding out?” Ray asked.

  But he didn’t get anywhere with this. Inez said he had left his passport in his room, and she thought he had not much money, and no Traveller’s Cheques, because he never had any.

  “He is so violent when he is angry,” she went on. “One can see it bubbling in him.” She curled the fingers of one hand. “And he can get in such trouble. I saw it in Rome.”

  “What happened in Rome?”

  “An argument with a police officer over a parking violation. It was my car, which is now in Venice at the garage, because I had her driven here. Edward was trying to defend me, of course. The Italian police are used to argument, but Edward was almost hitting him. I had to hold Edward’s arm. We got the full fine, I assure you, and afterwards I ask Edward, ‘What did you accomplish? I could have got off the fine.’” Inez smiled sadly. “You are not afraid to tell me—if you think you killed him?”

  Her emotion bothered him. Would he be afraid to tell her? She might not report him, just as she had not reported Coleman, when there were strong grounds for suspicion. Therefore, he decided he would not be afraid to tell her. Murderers have nothing to fear from society crossed his mind swiftly. “I’ve told you, I don’t think I did.”

  Inez sighed.

  Ray drank the last of his drink and watched her. Was she really so perturbed about a man like Coleman? Perhaps she was upset now, but wouldn’t there be another such man in her life in a few months? Or weeks? All at once, her mystery, her attractiveness—inevitably mingled with a certain dignity like a mandate that she should be respected and highly respected—all this fell away from her, and Ray saw her as another human being like himself, just as selfish and maybe more so, since what was she doing with her life besides trying to please herself at every turn? At the same time, a certain gallantry and generosity rose in him. He sat up. “You don’t think he could have gone back to Rome?”

  “Yes, he could have. But I don’t think so. You know—Edward told me he pushed you into the water that night of the Lido.” Inez was not looking at him as she spoke. “I am so glad he did not.”

  And what had she done about it? Continued sleeping in the same bed with Coleman, probably, as Antonio started to say. “Did you tell the Smith-Peters?”

  “No. I was not sure whether to believe him—and yet I believed him. You had disappeared. And then—the day when Edward was not in the hotel room here—I look in his wardrobe to see if he has a gun anywhere. I find your scarf under all his handkerchiefs. You know, the scarf you showed me.” Now she looked at him.

  “Yes.”

  “So I thought—maybe Edward killed you and took that out of your coat. So that evening—this was Monday night the last—I said to him, ‘Edward, I saw the scarf you have under your handkerchiefs. Where did you get it?’ He said, ‘It’s Peggy’s. I got it from Ray. Ray had no right to having it,’ something like that. I could see he was suddenly—crazy. So I said to him—really to calm him down, I said, ‘You know Ray told me about that scarf. He bought it here in Venice because it looked like Peggy, not because—It never was Peggy’s scarf,’ I said. Then Edward got more angry and said you had lied to me, and that I knew it and wanted to annoy him. He put the scarf in his pocket then, as if I had somehow insulted the scarf. You know?”

  “Yes,” Ray said. He could imagine it. “He saw it the Lido night. I pulled the scarf out of my pocket by accident, and he just demanded it.” He was glad to tell Inez this. It gave him the relief of a confession, which was strange since the scarf in a way was a false prop, or object. Suddenly Ray’s emotions about Peggy became unreal also, his guilt, that vast, grey, cyclonic form that he had been unable to deal with, seemed suddenly a thing of one dimension, fooling the eye, fooling the heart. Peggy was not false like the scarf, yet the emotions they both caused seemed now equally unwarranted, unwarrantable. Ray shuddered, ducked his head, then deliberately sat straighter.

  “What’s the matter?” Inez asked.

  “The trouble the scarf caused. The trouble!” Ray smiled. “And I only bought it on impulse one morning!”

  “Now he carries it in his pocket all the time. He guards it.” Inez spoke seriously.

  Ray might have smiled, but didn’t. “People carry crosses. They’re not the real cross.”

  “M-m. I see your point.”

  “Antonio,” Ray began on a more cheerful note, “I saw him on the street one day. He said you all thought Coleman killed me. He talked as if you discussed it.”

  “Oh, we did not discuss it,” Inez said. “But I am sure they suspected, yes.”

  “But you didn’t speak to the police,” Ray said.

  “No. We were not sure enough.”

  “Even when Coleman told you?” Ray asked.

  “No.”

  Inez, Ray supposed, like most people, had a departmentalized brain. Coleman she loved, or liked, so she would protect him. The Smith-Peters were ‘outsiders,’ possible dangers, so she would throw off as much of their suspicion of Co
leman as she could. He sensed this without questioning Inez any further, and it would have been hard to put into words and maybe ungallant to ask a woman about. Women were supposed not to have an abstract sense of justice, Ray had read somewhere. But was this abstract, since she knew him? Ray said, “I think you should tell the police he went once to Chioggia. He might go there again because he has friends there. I’ll look for him, too, Inez. And now I must be going.” Ray stood up. “You should stay in the hotel here, so you’ll have any news as soon as the police get it. Good-bye, Inez.”

  She looked startled at his ‘Good-bye.’ “Where are you staying on Giudecca? I must know where to reach you.”

  Ray told her the four-figure number and street, but said the house had no telephone.

  Now she looked disappointed, lost.

  Ray started to offer to ring her later today, then asked himself, why should he? “The police know where I am. Bye-bye, Inez.”

  Ray walked away from the Grand Canal, into the centre of the city, to the Teatro La Fenice. From here, five narrow streets led off in varying directions. Ray looked for Coleman. He had an oppressive realization that looking, one person looking on foot, was an absurdity in Venice. This little start-of-a-maze in which he stood, at La Fenice, was duplicated two hundred, three hundred times all over the city of Venice. And behind the wall of any house, really any house he walked past—except maybe the Ca’ Rezzonica or the Ca’ d’Oro—Coleman could be hiding. Or in the back of scores of bars, trattorie, or in the rooms of a hundred small hotels. Ray walked on, finding no Coleman, but feeling very conspicuous himself with his head bandage. He zigzagged and walked until he was tired, and then aimed for a vaporetto stop which turned out to be the Ca’ d’Oro stop, prophetic, he thought, of the utter hopelessness of finding Coleman, because he surely wasn’t in the Ca’ d’Oro. But just on the off chance, Ray bought a ticket to the museum and went in and walked through all the rooms looking for Coleman. He was not there.

  When he came out of the Ca’ d’Oro, it was darker and colder. Ray remembered he had had no lunch, but he was not hungry. He walked towards the waterbus pier.

  And suppose he had killed Coleman? Suppose Coleman had been swept out to sea via some canal, and he simply was not in the city now? Ray, as he waited for the boat, looked up at the blue-and-purple sky above the rooftops of Venice, over the ancient skyline with its occasional thrust of church dome with a cross. Suppose Coleman were never to see this view again, and that he, Ray Garrett, was responsible for that? Ray felt suddenly discouraged, guilty, untouchable. He shivered, partly from the cold, partly from what he was thinking, or trying to imagine, which was himself striking a blow, or several blows, that had put a stop to someone’s life. Had he struck more than one blow with that rock? Ray, when he tried to remember, was as vague on this point as on whether Coleman had been stirring, or conscious, when he left him.

  The light was on in Signor Ciardi’s kitchen and living-room when Ray arrived back, but he quietly used the outside stone stairs, which led into the first-floor hall. In his room, where he was glad to see that Giustina had built a fire, Ray lay down on the bed, pulled his overcoat over him, and slept like one exhausted. He had two disturbing dreams. In one, Ray had found a baby whose owner he could not find anywhere, though no one seemed to mind his keeping it. This dream woke him up. It was five thirty. Ray washed his face in cold water, and went down to speak to Signor Ciardi, It occurred to Ray that he had not bought an evening paper, and there might well be something about him or Coleman in the papers this evening.

  Signor Ciardi was in the kitchen with Giustina, and he had a newspaper on the table before him.

  Signor Ciardi jumped up. “Ah, Signor Weelson!—Or Signor Garrett? Is this not you?” His smile was sly but friendly.

  Ray glanced at the photograph. “It is,” he said. He read the short item under it. There was nothing about Coleman’s whereabouts.

  “So it was not a fall the other evening. It was a fight, no? With the man who is your father in-law, the Signor Coleman.”

  Ray looked at Giustina, who was watching with open-mouthed fascination, yet with no alarm. “That is true, Signor Ciardi.”

  “And now Signor Col-e-man is missing.”

  Ray smiled. The atmosphere was so different from that at the police station, or with the Smith-Peters! “I think he got up and walked away. And hid himself,” Ray said. “I gave him quite a—a blow that night, too.” Ray illustrated in pantomime. “He was following me with a stone and he hit me first.” How simple it all sounded in his simple Italian!

  “Ah, capisco! And why did you not say so, Tuesday night?”

  “I—well, I didn’t want you to know that I knew Signor Col-e-man,” Ray replied, automatically pronouncing the name in Italian. “I was trying to avoid him.”

  Signor Ciardi frowned thoughtfully. “It was his daughter then—who killed herself. Your wife.”

  “Si.”

  “Just recently?”

  “About a month ago,” Ray replied.

  “Some wine for the Signor, Giustina, please,” said Signor Ciardi.

  Giustina hurried to pour some.

  Ray wanted to make a telephone call before six. “I mustn’t stay long now,” he said, looking at his watch.

  “But have a glass! So you spoke to the police today?”

  “I told them who I was,” Ray said. “I had hidden myself long enough—myself and my grief. My thanks to you, Signor Ciardi, for being such a good friend. Like Luigi.” He made this little speech in a straightforward way.

  Signor Ciardi seized his hand and pumped it. “I like you, Signor Garrett. You are a gentleman!” He handed Ray his wine, and pointed to the newspaper. “If Luigi sees this, he will be here tonight. Providing his wife doesn’t lock him in to sleep. But she will not. She can’t do that!”

  Ray gave Giustina a nod of thanks before he drank. The wine was good. “Signor Ciardi, if you wish, I can go to an hotel now with my own passport. If you don’t wish, I can stay just a day or so more—” There was something nice about not having a telephone at Signor Ciardi’s. A certain quietude would be ended at an hotel.

  Signor Ciardi spread his hands in protest. “No question of my not wishing! Of course I wish that you stay. But we now call you Signor Garrett, yes?—You are an art dealer, Signor Garrett?”

  “I intend to open a place of exposition in New York. Signor Ciardi—if I may go out to make a telephone call—”

  “Ah, si, I regret that I have no telephone,” said Signor Ciardi, who probably did not regret it at all, since there were always small boys in the neighbourhood to run messages.

  “I don’t,” said Ray, smiling. “I’ll be back in five minutes.

  Ray ran out, without his overcoat. He wanted to ring Elisabetta. The caffé where she worked was called the Bar Dino, and he hoped it had a telephone listing. He found it after some searching, and by then it was three minutes to six.

  A man answered, and then Elisabetta was summoned.

  “This is Filipo,” Ray said in Italian, expecting any kind of reaction to that—her hanging up, or a polite statement that she had had enough of wild newspaper stories and did not want to see him again.

  But she answered in a calm tone, “Ah, Filipo! How are you?”

  “Very well, thanks. I am wondering if I can see you this evening? Maybe after dinner? Or I would be very happy if you are free for dinner.”

  “I should not go out for dinner, not tonight,” she replied. “Perhaps after dinner?”

  “At eight-thirty? Nine?”

  They made an appointment for nine.

  She had evidently not seen the paper, Ray thought. He would take a paper along with him tonight when he saw her, and if she hadn’t seen one by then, she might be amused. There had been some truth in the stories he had told her, anyway!

  An orologia shop window caught Ray’s eye as he walked homeward. An electric clock for the kitchen would make a nice present for Signor Ciardi and Giustina, he thought. Giustin
a had complained more than once about the old alarm clock on the kitchen sideboard which ran too slowly, and which Signor Ciardi frequently carried to some other room of the house. Ray bought a fancy cream-coloured clock with a gold-and-black face for eight thousand three hundred lire. It was pleasant to be able to use Traveller’s Cheques again, and Ray remembered also that he was due to send two cheques for a hundred dollars each to his painter friends in New York. He usually sent the cheques on the fifteenth of the month. The painters, a young man named Usher in the village, and an old man, who lived on the edge of Harlem, preferred the cheques by the month instead of in one lump for the year, as it helped them to economize.

  Ray presented the box to Giustina when he returned to the kitchen of the Ciardi house. A present for the house, Ray said.

  Giustina was enchanted with the clock. Signor Ciardi pronounced it magnifico. A place on the wall was decided upon. But they must wait for Gugliemo, one of Signor Ciardi’s friends who was a carpenter, to put it up, as it had to be fixed to the wall properly.

  Signor Ciardi, Ray said, “may I invite you to dinner tonight? It would give me great pleasure.”

  “Ah—” Signor Ciardi thought, looked at Giustina, then said, “Si, why not? With much pleasure, I accept. Giustina, I know you have veal cutlets, but cutlets can wait. Or have two yourself. If you allow me, Signor Garrett, to touch my face,” he added, gesturing to the two-or three-day beard. “Have another glass. I’ll just be a moment. Giustina, if anyone comes, I am back a little after nine, maybe. Va bene, Signor Garrett?”

  Ray made a gesture as if that, or anything else, were quite all right with him, and went off to get his overcoat.

  Signor Ciardi was ready in a very short time, and even had on a shirt and tie.

  “One thing,” Ray said as they walked out, “Let us not discuss problems tonight. Life, maybe, but not problems.”

  Signor Ciardi seemed cheerfully of accord. “And later we will see Luigi. I feel sure he will come.”

  “Much later. I have an appointment at nine with a young lady.”