The Fiend

by Margaret Millar

  “Stop repeating that phrase.”

  “Why? Because it doesn’t fit him, and you can’t bear listen­ing to the truth?”

  “Stop it, Ben, please. This isn’t the time.”

  “This is the very time,” he said soberly. “Right now, this minute, you’ve got to figure out how you really feel about Charlie. Sure, you love him, we both do. But you’re not com­mitted to him the way I am, or to put it bluntly, you’re not stuck with him. You still have a chance to change your mind, to get away. Do it, Louise.”

  “I can’t.”

  “For your own sake, you’d better try. Walk out of here now and don’t look back. For nearly a year you’ve been dreaming, and I’ve been letting you. Now the alarm’s ringing, it’s time to wake up and start moving. Beat it, Louise.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “I’m asking,” he said, “that one out of this trio gets a chance to survive. It won’t be Charlie and it can’t be me. That leaves you, Louise. Use your chance, for my sake if not your own. I’d like to think of you as being happy in the future, leading a nice, uncomplicated life.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “You won’t leave?”

  “No.”

  “Then God help you.” He went over to the window and stood with his back to Louise so she wouldn’t see the tears welling in his eyes. “A little girl disappeared last night. One person in this neighborhood has already mentioned Charlie in connection with the crime. There’ll be others, not just common gossips like Forster, but men with authority. Whatever Charlie has or hasn’t done, it’s going to be rough on him, and on you, too, if you stick around.”

  “I’m sticking.”

  “Yes, I was afraid you would. Why? Do you want to be a martyr?”

  “I want to be Charlie’s wife.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “Don’t try to destroy my confidence completely, Ben,” she said. “It would be easy, I don’t have very much. But what I have may help Charlie and perhaps you, too, in the days to come.”

  “Days? You’re thinking in terms of days? What about the months, years—”

  “They’re composed of days. I choose to think of them in that way. Now,” she added in a gentler voice, “do I get your blessing, Ben?”

  “You get everything I have to offer.”

  “Thank you.”

  She turned toward the doorway, hearing Charlie’s step in the hall. It sounded brisk and lively as if he’d had an abrupt change of mood in the past ten minutes. When he came in she noticed that he was freshly shaved and wearing his good suit and the tie she’d given him for his birthday. He looked sur­prised when he saw that she was still there, and she wondered whether he’d expected her to leave, and if so, why he’d taken the trouble to get all dressed up. He was carrying the evening newspaper. It was crumpled and torn as though it had been used to swat flies.

  He put it down carefully on the coffee table, his eyes fixed on Ben. “I found it after all, Ben. Right after you left to buy one I decided to go out and search for it again, and sure enough there it was, hidden behind that shrub with the pink flowers. Remember what we used to call it when we were kids, Ben? High biscuits. I used to think that it actually had biscuits on it but they were up so high I couldn’t see them.”

  “I looked under the hibiscus,” Ben said.

  “You must have missed it. It was there.”

  “It wasn’t there.”

  “You—you could have made a mistake, Ben. You were complaining about your eyes last week. Anyway, it’s such a small thing, we shouldn’t be raising all this fuss about it in front of Louise.”

  “Louise better get used to it. And if it’s such a small thing, why are you lying about it?”

  “Well, I—well, maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that.” The muscles of Charlie’s throat were working, as if he was try­ing to swallow or unswallow something large and painful and immovable. “When I got home I picked up the paper and took it into my room to read.”

  “Why? You’re not usually interested.”

  “I saw the headline about the little girl, and the picture. I wanted to study it, to make sure before—before going to the police.”

  Ben stared at him in silence for a moment, then he repeated, “Before going to the police. Is that what you said?”

  “Yes. I’m sure now—the face, the clothes, her name and address. I’m very sure. That’s why I got dressed up, so I’ll make a good impression at headquarters. You’ve always told me how necessary a good impression is. Do I look O.K.?”

  “You look dandy. You’ll make a dandy impression. . . . Jesus Godalmighty, what are you trying to do to me, to your­self? It isn’t enough that—”

  “But I’m only doing what I have to, Ben. The paper said any witnesses should come forward and tell what they know. And I’m a witness. That’s funny, isn’t it? I always wanted to be somebody and now I finally am. I’m a witness. That’s pretty important, according to the paper. I may even be the only one in the whole city, can you beat that?”

  “No. I don’t think anyone can. This time you’ve really done it, you’ve set a new high.”

  Charlie’s smile was strained, a mixture of pride and anxiety.

  “Well, I didn’t actually do anything, I just happened to be there when she came out of the house. The police are wrong about which house she came out of. It wasn’t her own, the way the paper said. It was the one—”

  “You just happened to be there, eh, Charlie?”

  “Yes.”

  “In your car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was the car parked?”

  “I—I’m not sure but I think I may have been only passing by, very slowly.”

  “Very, very slowly?”

  “I think so. I may have stopped for a minute when I saw her on account of I was surprised. It was so late and she shouldn’t have been out. Her parents should have taken better care of her, not letting her run wild on the streets past ten o’clock, no one to protect her.”

  “Did you offer to protect her, Charlie?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Did you talk to her at all?”

  “No. I may have sort of spoken her name out loud because I was so surprised to see her, it being late and cold and lonely.” He broke off suddenly, frowning. “You’re mixing me up with your questions. You’re getting me off the subject. That’s not the important part, how I happened to be there and what I did. The important thing is, she didn’t come out of her own house. The police think she did, so it’s my duty to straighten them out. I bet they’ll be very glad to have some new evidence.”

  “I just bet they will,” Ben said. “Go to your room, Charlie.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Go to your room.”

  “I can’t do that. I’m a witness, they need me. They need me, Ben.”

  “Then they’ll have to come and get you.”

  “You’re interfering with justice. That’s a very wrong thing to do.”

  “Justice? What kind of justice do you think is in store for you, when you can’t even tell them what you were doing out­side the girl’s house, or whether you were parked there or just passing by?”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Ben. They’re not after me, I didn’t do anything.”

  Ben turned away. He wanted to hit Charlie with his fist, he wanted to weep or to run shrieking out into the street. But all he could do was stand with his face to the wall, wishing he were back on the street corner where he could pretend he was any­one, going any place, at any hour of the day or night.

  The only sound in the room was Charlie’s breathing. It was ordinary breathing, in and out, in and out, but to Ben it was the sound of doom. “Maybe I ought to go ahe
ad and let you ruin yourself,” he said finally. “I can’t do that, though. Not yet, anyway. So I’m asking you to stay in your room for tonight and we’ll discuss this in the morning.”

  “Ben may be right, Charlie,” Louise said. It was the first time she’d spoken since Charlie came into the room. She used her library voice, very quiet but authoritative. “You need time to get your story straight.”

  Charlie shook his head stubbornly. “It’s not a story.”

  “All right then, you need time to remember the facts. You can’t claim to have been at the scene without giving some plausible reason why you were there and what you were doing.”

  “I wanted some fresh air.”

  “Other streets, other neighborhoods, have fresh air. The police will ask you why you picked that one.”

  “I didn’t. I was driving around everywhere, just driving around, breathing the free—the fresh air.”

  “The way you did the other night?”

  “Other night?”

  “When I found you on Jacaranda Road.”

  “Why do you bring that up?” he said violently. “You know nothing happened that night. You told me, you were the one who convinced me. You said, nothing’s happened, Charlie. Noth­ing whatever has happened, it’s all in your mind. Why aren’t you saying that now, Louise?”

  “I will, if you want me to.”

  “Not because you believe it?”

  “I—believe it.” She clung to his arm, half-protectively, half- helplessly.

  He looked down at her as if she were a stranger making an intimate demand. “Don’t touch me, woman.”

  “Please, Charlie, you mustn’t talk to me like that. I love you.”

  “No. You spoil things for me. You spoiled my being a wit­ness.”

  He jerked his arm out of her grasp and ran toward the hall. A few seconds later she heard the slam of his bedroom door. There was a finality about it like the closing of the last page of a book.

  It’s over, she thought. I had a dream, the alarm rang, I woke up and it’s over.

  She could still hear the alarm ringing in her ears, and above it, the sound of Ben’s voice. It sounded very calm but it was the calmness of defeat.

  “I should have forced you to leave. I would have, if I’d known what was going on in his mind. But this witness bit, how could I have called that?” He looked out the window. It was getting dark and foggy. The broad, leathery leaves of the loquat tree were already dripping and the street lights had appeared wear­ing their gauzy gray nightgowns. “Either the whole thing’s a fantasy, or he’s telling the truth but not all of it.”

  “All of it?”

  “That he attacked the child and killed her.”

  “Stop it. I’ll never believe that, never.”

  “You half believed it when you walked in this door. You came here for reassurance. You wanted to be told that Charlie arrived home early last night, that he and I had a talk and then he went to bed. Well, he didn’t, we didn’t. This isn’t a very good place to come for reassurance, Louise. It’s a luxury we don’t keep in stock.”

  “I didn’t come here for reassurance. I wanted to see Charlie, to tell him that I love him and I trust him.”

  “You trust him, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far? Far enough to allow him to go to the police with his story?”

  “Naturally I’d like him to get the details straight first, before he exposes himself to—to their questions.”

  “You make it sound very simple, as if Charlie’s mind is a reference book he can open at will and look up the answers. Maybe you’re right, in a way. Maybe his mind is a book, but it’s written in a language you and I can’t understand, and the pages aren’t in order and some of them are glued together and some are missing entirely. Not exactly a perfect place to find answers, is it, Louise?”

  “Stop badgering me like this,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

  “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

  “Is that all I ever get from you any more, an invitation to leave, walk away, don’t come back?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you before, one of the three of us should have a chance, just a chance.” He was still watching the fog pressing at the window like the gray facelessness of despair. “Charlie’s my problem, now more than ever. I’ll look after him. He won’t go to the police tonight or any other night. He’ll do what I tell him to do. I’ll see that he gets to work in the morning and that he gets home safely after work. I’ll stay with him, talk to him, listen to him, play the remember-game with him. He likes that— remember when we were kids, Ben?—he can play it for hours. It won’t be a happy life or a productive one, but the most I can hope for Charlie right now is that he’s allowed to survive at all. He’s a registered sex offender. Sooner or later he’s bound to be questioned about the child’s disappearance. I only hope it’s later so I can try and push this witness idea out of his head.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “I’ll convince him that he wasn’t near the house, he didn’t see the child, he didn’t see anything. He was at home with me, he dozed off in an armchair, he had a nightmare.”

  “Don’t do it, Ben. It’s too risky, tampering with a mind that’s already confused about what’s real and what isn’t.”

  “If he doesn’t know what’s real,” Ben said, “I’ll have to tell him. And he’ll believe me. It will be like playing the remember- game. Remember last night, Charlie, when you were sitting in the armchair? And you suddenly dozed off, you cried out in your sleep, you were having a nightmare about a house, a child coming out of a house....”

  He had to write the letter very quickly because he knew Ben would be coming in soon to talk to him. He folded the letter six times, slipped it into an envelope, addressed the envelope to Police Headquarters and put it in the zippered inside pocket of his wind-breaker. Then he returned to his desk. The desk had been given to him when he was twelve and it was too small for him. He had to hunch way down in order to work at it but he didn’t mind this. It made him feel big, a giant of a man; a kindly giant, though, who used his strength only to protect, never to bully, so everyone respected him.

  When Ben came in, Charlie pretended to be studying an advertisement in the back pages of a magazine.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Ben said. “I brought home some chicken pies from the cafeteria and heated them up.”

  “I’ll eat one if you want me to, Ben, but I’d just as soon not.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Not very. I had chicken pie last night.”

  “We had ravioli last night. Don’t you remember? I cut myself opening the can. Look, here’s the cut on my finger.”

  Charlie looked at the cut with polite interest. “That’s too bad. You must be more careful. I wasn’t here last night for dinner.”

  “Yes, you were. You ate too much and later you dozed off in Father’s armchair in the front room.”

  “No, Ben, that was a lot of other nights. Last night was dif­ferent, it was very different. First I took that delivery to the Forest Service. All that heat and dust up in the mountains gave me a headache so I went to the drug store for some aspirin.”

  “The aspirin made you sleepy. That’s why you dozed—”

  “I wasn’t a bit sleepy, I was hungry. I was going to take Louise some place to eat—I don’t mean eat her,” he added earnestly. “I mean, where we could both eat some food. Only she wasn’t at the library so I went by myself and had a chicken pie.”

  “Where?”

  “The cafeteria you manage. It wouldn’t be loyal to go any­where else.”

  “You picked a hell of a time to be loyal,” Ben said. “Did anyone see you?”

  “They mu
st have. There I was.”

  “Did you speak to anyone?”

  “The cashier. I said hello.”

  “Did she recognize you?”

  “Oh yes. She made a joke about how everyone had to pay around that joint, even the boss’s brother.”

  That fixes it, Ben thought. If he’d planned every detail in advance he couldn’t have done a better job of lousing things up. “What time were you there?”

  “I don’t know. I hate watching the clock, it watches me back.”

  “What did you do after you finished eating?”

  “Drove around, I told you that. I wanted some fresh air to clear the dust out of my sinuses.”

  “You were home by ten o’clock.”

  “No, I couldn’t have been. It was after ten when I saw—”

  “You saw nothing,” Ben said harshly. “You were home with me by ten o’clock.”

  “I don’t remember seeing you when I came in.”

  “You didn’t. I was in bed. But I knew what time it was be­cause I’d just turned out the light.”

  “You couldn’t be mistaken, like about the ravioli?”

  “The ravioli business was simply a device to get at the truth. I knew you’d been to the drug store and the library but I wanted you to recall those things for yourself. You did.”

  “Not this other, though.”

  “You were home by ten. I wasn’t asleep yet, I heard you come in. If anyone asks you, that’s what you’re to say. Say it now.”

  “Please leave—leave me alone, Ben.”

  “I can’t.” Ben leaned over the desk, his face white and con­torted. “You’re in danger and I’m trying to save you. I’m going to save you in spite of yourself. Now say it. Say you were home by ten o’clock.”

  “Will you leave me alone, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was home by ten o’clock,” Charlie repeated, blinking. “You cut yourself opening a can of ravioli. You were bleeding, you were bleeding all over the bloody kitchen. Let me see your cut again. Does it still hurt, Ben?”