The Three Roads

by Ross Macdonald

  “You all right now, Lieutenant?” a man’s voice called from the car.

  “Yes. Thanks.” The police car drove away.

  She ran down the steps to meet him. When he came into the shaft of light from the porch, she saw the gauze bandage on his face and forgot everything else.

  “Darling, what’s happened? Where have you been?”

  “At police headquarters.”

  “But you’re hurt.”

  “A little. Miles is dead.”

  “You—?” She felt her lips go cold.

  “I didn’t kill him,” he said quietly. “I tried to, but I didn’t. He was shot resisting arrest.”

  She put her hand on his arm to help him up the steps, but he moved slightly so that her hand dropped away. They went into the house in single file like strangers, with her following behind. She saw the torn seams at the shoulders of his blouse, the dirt on his back, the great blue swelling at the base of his skull. She almost sank to the floor before she reached a chair.

  He turned on a floor lamp and sat down opposite her. She was keenly aware of the space between them, and of the alienation it symbolized.

  “Miles’s fingerprints checked with the prints on Lorraine’s table,” he said. “He was the man that was with her.”

  She tried to speak, but all she could hear was the voice babbling in her head: it’s over then, it’s over, I needn’t ever tell him, and Klifter said he wouldn’t if I forbade him. She had permitted indecision to enter her mind again, and it tied her tongue.

  “You were paying money to Miles,” he said then. “What were you paying him for?”

  So it wasn’t over after all. Well, it was what she deserved for going back on herself. In the end you got what you deserved.

  “Do the police know?”

  “I’m the only one that knows.”

  She gathered all her courage together in her throat and said: “I have something to tell you, Bret.”

  “I know you have.”

  He sat motionless, watching her. She looked directly into his eyes and was unable to assess their meaning. They were bright and steady and hard, unsoftened by love or any kind of hope.

  “Miles was blackmailing me,” she said with difficulty. “At first he threatened to go to the police. When I realized that he wouldn’t dare, and told him so, he said he would go to you, and I couldn’t let him do that. I’ve been paying him regularly for months. Tonight I saw it was no use. It had to stop. I went to him and told him I was finished. He tried to bluff me, and I did some threatening myself. I frightened him. It was easier than I expected it to be.”

  “He must have been frightened to do what he did. He tried to shoot it out with the police. But they had a machine gun.”

  “Were you with them?”

  “I was with him in the motel. He tried to shoot me before they killed him. In spite of that I felt sorry for him when he died.”

  “You needn’t have. He wasn’t worth it.”

  “You did your best to protect him from me.”

  “I was afraid that you would kill him.”

  “Are you sorry he’s dead?”

  “I’m glad he’s dead. But I’m gladder still that you didn’t kill him.”

  “I tried to. I aimed the gun at his head and couldn’t pull the trigger. I didn’t know why I couldn’t. Perhaps I felt I didn’t have the right. I didn’t have the right, did I, Paula?”

  She started visibly at the challenge in his question. She looked into his face again and understood the meaning of his eyes.

  “You remember?” she whispered faintly.

  “I think I have a pretty clear idea.”

  The scene that flickered at the back of his mind was dimmer and more confused than his firm voice admitted. It was shadowy dark like an underexposed film, and all but erased by other pictures superimposed upon it. He saw himself in the scene, small and foreshortened and faceless like an unknown actor whose movements have been recorded by an overhead camera. The faceless man in blues, dwarfed by the high May night, went up the walk and into the white bungalow. Another man, half out of his clothes, ran across the unlighted living-room, through the kitchen, and out of the house. Lorraine was in the bedroom trying to cover her body. Darkness covered her body.

  He knew what he had done, but he had no memory of the act. He drew his knowledge of it from the emotions that still poured along his nerves and stained his blood with their acid juices. Outraged self-righteousness and its hot and dangerous anger, the savage wish to inflict pain on the source of pain, the hopeless desire, which lay like an eyeless worm at the core of murder, to end an impossible situation by violence. The very violence that stretched it out forever.

  Paula watched his eyes turn inward and lose their sight, fogged once more by the obscurity at the center of his life. He looked as if he had forgotten her completely, and it frightened her. Complete indifference, nothingness, was the one enemy she had no idea how to fight. Any kind of talking was better than this long blind silence, even the kind of talking she had to do. She invented the desperate hope that if she could join him there, link hands with him in his darkness, they might emerge together on the other side.

  “You asked me to tell you,” she said.

  “Yes?” He spoke almost absently, like a man just coming awake.

  “I wasn’t with you when you found Lorraine.”

  “I know. I remember.”

  “Lorraine wasn’t dead when you found her.”

  It was terribly hard to say. She could feel the sweat gathering in drops between her breasts and trickling down to her waist, leaving a cold trail. It was terribly hard, and why was it up to her? How did she come to inherit a job like this? But that was too easy to answer. She’d asked for it. Everything she’d done, she’d done because she wanted to. It was her baby, and she knew it.

  She felt giddy and light when he took it away from her.

  “I know I killed her. You needn’t temper the wind to me. But I don’t understand what happened. You must have known I killed her.”

  “Yes,” she heard her voice replying from some corner of the room.

  “And that was what Milne knew, that was why you were paying him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You shouldn’t have put yourself in his hands.”

  Her sense of herself came back from a great distance, and her voice came with it. “I did what I thought I had to do. After that it was too late to change anything. I had to go through with it.”

  “I don’t understand why. Tell me what happened.” The part of his face she could see was rigidly controlled, and his firmness gave her courage to go on.

  “I wasn’t there. I came when you telephoned. I only know what you told me over the phone and what Miles said afterwards. You told me that you were in dreadful trouble, that you’d found Lorraine with a man, and killed her. When I got to your house you were unconscious in the bedroom. Lorraine’s body was on the bed.”

  “But you said you spoke to Miles. I thought he ran away.”

  “He did. They saw you coming up the walk, and Lorraine knew you. Miles came to see me the next day. He’d read about me in the papers, and realized that I had some money and that I’d lied to the police. I’ve been paying him ever since.”

  “I had to drag you into it, didn’t I?” His voice cracked and became raw with emotion. “I wasn’t content to make a filthy mess of my own life. I had to drag you into it.”

  “You made me glad,” she said. “You called on me to help you when you were at the end of the rope, and it made me glad.”

  Before the love and courage that shone from her tired face, he felt a terrible humility. Not the false and transient humility of wounded pride, but the humility a man who has lost and regretted his virtue feels in the presence of virtue.

  “I’m not fit to live in the same world with you, Paula. This afternoon I even suspected that you and Miles were partners in some way.”

  “I know you did. It’s no wonder you were suspicious of
me. I lied to you, I lied to everyone. When the police came I told them the story that you and I had been for a drive, and that we were together when you found Lorraine’s body. Once I’d told that lie I couldn’t change my story or they’d have thought we conspired to murder. It’s strange, isn’t it? They never doubted my word.”

  “No one should ever doubt your word.”

  “That’s the hell of having an honest face,” she said. “If I’d been challenged I’d have had to tell the truth. Nobody challenged me. I know now I should have told them the truth anyway. Considering the circumstances, you might have been acquitted or given a short manslaughter sentence. But I waited until it was too late. Then I found out that you didn’t know yourself what you had done. I was afraid of what the truth might do to you. But I was wrong about that too. I did the wrong thing from start to finish.”

  “No.”

  He was so deeply moved that he couldn’t say anything more. Shame washed over him like waves of dirty water that left him foul and breathless. He was sick to death of himself, the self-deluded fool, proud and intolerant and hard of heart, who had projected his own guilt outward like a shadow that darkened everything it touched. Phrases from his childhood came back to him like fragments of a language he had almost forgotten, or was just beginning to learn. The mote that is in your brother’s eye … the beam that is in your own. Judge not lest ye be judged.

  He was no more than a tiny mote of darkness in the sun, a little seed of flesh thrown down between the earth and sky, blown here and there by the wind of time that swept away the insect generations of men. He had betrayed his own side in the unequal war against death, and deserved nothing of anyone. Yet he drew a bitter strength from his humility. He could say the word “murderer” to himself and answer to the name. He could see it was not justice but mercy that he needed.

  He leaned forward and covered his shamed face with his hands, so that his words were muffled. “You took such a risk for me. You must have been crazy to think I was worth it.”

  “ ‘Crazy’ is a word we don’t use in our family.” She tried to smile, but her mouth was forced into a grimace of pity instead.

  She couldn’t bear to sit here and see him bowed. She crossed the space between them and went down on her knees, holding his head to her breast. She felt his body shaking and held him tighter. She would have liked to be able to divide her own flesh, to take him inside of her and shield and comfort him.

  “What am I going to do?” he said against her breast. He had taken a life and could no more evade his guilt than a hunchback could unstrap his hump. Whatever he said for the rest of his life would be censored by the knowledge that certain things could not be spoken. His perceptions would be darkened forever by the black memory that stood between him and the sun. Yet there was no way out. He couldn’t tell the police, for if he did, Paula, who was innocent, would suffer for his guilt. He had to go on living with the knowledge of what he had done, not just tonight, but every night, and in the daylight. “What can I do?” he said.

  “Come to bed. You’re tired, and it’s past midnight. There’s nothing for you to do but come to bed.”

  “Can you possibly still love me?”

  “Tonight before you came I thought I’d lost you. I wanted to die.”

  “But aren’t you—?” His voice broke.

  She held him tighter still, as if her arms could smother the remorse inside his head. “Aren’t I what?”

  “Afraid of me?”

  For a second she felt quite panicky, she didn’t know exactly why. She wasn’t afraid of him, but she was afraid. Life was so very complicated and unpredictable, and the energy she needed to cope with it had all drained out of her tonight. She’d been living on her nerve for months, buying vitality on margin, and all the bills had come due at once. She knew that she had won, but she was too tired to realize her victory, too tired to think of the future without fear.

  No doubt she’d feel different in the morning. Life would begin again, and the unsettling future would become the routine present. There’d be people to see and dialogue to write, appointments with Klifter, meals to plan, a place for Bret to start to work again, an excuse to put off Mrs. Swanscutt for a while. She didn’t want that bird of ill omen at her wedding; it was already equipped with ill omen enough. Still, she was sure that things would get better. The worst of the danger was over, and the worst of the pain. Things would never be as good as they might once have been, but they would be good enough. She had learned not to make too great demands on life. It was enough for her at the moment that she and Bret were very close to each other. She told him without faltering that she could never be afraid of him—she loved him too much.

  “You’re very good,” he said. The warmth of her body had penetrated to his marrow, and he wasn’t shaking any more.

  “Come to bed,” she said again.

  They went up the stairs arm in arm. It’s past midnight, she was thinking, but it’s still a long time till morning. To him she said more cheerful things.