The Man in the Net

by Patrick Quentin

  Steve lit a cigarette and, as the match light spurted up, illuminating his full, sensual mouth, offered the pack to John. The troopers’ car drove up then, gliding to a stop beside them.

  “Steve?”

  Three troopers in uniform piled out as Steve and John got out of their car. One of the troopers came up to Steve, putting out his hand.

  “Hi, Steve. How they treating you? Haven’t seen you down to the alley lately. What’s the matter? Getting old?” There was a deep, friendly laugh and then, in quite a different mood, “Okay. Where’s this guy? You got him there?”

  “Yeah,” said Steve. “I’ve got him. Mr. Hamilton— Captain Green.”

  There were no lights burning in the house. Dimly John made out the large figure of Captain Green who was not holding out his hand.

  “Okay, Mister. Let’s get in there.”

  The men started toward the kitchen door. John went in ahead and turned on the kitchen light. The troopers lumbered after him, large, calm, dehumanized by their uniforms. Captain Green, who was youngish and ruddyfaced with very bright blue eyes, turned to watch John.

  “Wife missing, eh? Steve tells me she left a note. Let’s see it.”

  John led them to the living-room and turned on a light. The chaos of ripped canvases and smashed records on the floor, seen again after all that had happened, brought back to him the panic sensation of madness crouched ready to spring and now to clutch him by the throat. The three troopers stood, large, solid, looking without comment. Steve Ritter gave a whistle.

  “Boy, oh boy.”

  Captain Green said, “Your wife done this, Mister?”

  “Yes,” said John.

  “Where’s the note?”

  John threaded through the confusion to the table where he’d left the note by the typewriter. He brought it back and put it in the Captain’s large rough hand. Captain Green read it very slowly and deliberately, then he looked at it a while, then he handed it to Steve. Steve read it, his eyebrows puckering, and shot a quick glance at John which somehow subtly heightened the already soaring sense of danger.

  “Okay.” Captain Green’s voice was the flat, official voice of a man doing a job. “You guys”—he jerked his head at the two troopers—“take a look around the house. Cover the whole house.” He turned to John.

  “Where’s somewhere we can sit, Mister—somewhere where it’s not tore up?”

  John took him and Steve to the dining-room. They sat on the little wooden chairs around the table. Captain Green took from his uniform pocket a notebook and a stub of a pencil.

  “Okay. A description, Mister—height, age, build, what she was wearing.”

  Suddenly John could form no mental image of Linda at all. Then his mind started functioning again. As he offered meaningless measurements. Steve Ritter got up from the table, searched for an ashtray, found one and sat down again, putting his cigarette in the ashtray in front of him.

  Captain Green finished writing down the description. Then he picked up the note. Clumsily, as if this wasn’t the sort of thing he was accustomed to reading, he read out:

  “Find yourself another woman to slave for you, to stick pins in, to torture…. Look like things have been pretty bad between you two? A lot of bitterness there. She feels you been treating her pretty bad?”

  John could hear the heavy tread of the troopers upstairs. He looked at his own hands resting on the table in front of him. The skin over the knuckles was a whitish grey.

  “It’s exaggerated,” he said. “It’s very much exaggerated. You see, my wife’s not normal. She’s a neurotic. In fact, she’s an alcoholic. She’s been drinking for …”

  “Hey, wait a minute, John, boy. Hold on there. Wait a minute.” Steve Ritter was watching him across the table with a wondering, half-amused incredulity. “Ain’t you forgetting something? Ain’t you forgetting I’m a pal of Linda? Linda a drunk? Cripes, man, you know better than that.”

  Captain Green looked from one to the other of them.

  John said, “I’ve been trying to cover up for her, Steve. That’s why you don’t know, why nobody knows. It’s worse at home anyway. When she starts, she sees to it that she stays home. She …”

  “Whew!” Steve Ritter shook his head. “What d’you know? Wonders will never cease, will they, Tom?”

  He had turned to Captain Green and the skepticism on his face was obvious now—skepticism and something else, a signal, a quick, significant communication to the Captain Green, phlegmatic as ever, merely grunted.

  “Okay,” he said. “She’s a drunk. She isn’t a drunk. Okay. But she’s gone. She’s disappeared. That’s it, ain’t it?” His eyes met John’s full on. “All right, Mister. There was some sort of quarrel between you, it seems. What was the quarrel about?”

  John told them about Charlie Raines’ letter. As he spoke, with the two blue pairs of eyes fixed on him, he could hear it all as if he were hearing it through the other men’s ears and it sounded, he knew, preposterous. That is, his attitude seemed preposterous. A man with only just enough to live on meagerly for five years, with a sheaf of reviews telling him his painting was no good, turning down the offer of a job at twenty-five thousand a year.

  “Twenty-five thousand?” Steve Ritter whistled again. “Boy!”

  He glanced at Captain Green, and this time the Captain, glancing back, grinned a broad, ponderous grin.

  “A wife don’t have to be no neurotic or alcoholic to get steamed up over that, eh, Steve? I know a couple of women who’d have done a lot worse than slash a few pictures, break up a record or two. Yes, sir.” The grin fading very quickly, he turned back to John. “So, on account of this feeling that you were interested in keeping up painting these—these paintings, you told your wife you were going to turn this job down?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And she was mad?”

  “It was all more complicated than that. It…”

  “But she got mad? Ain’t no need to be complicated about that, is there?”

  “Yes, she got mad.”

  “And she knew when you went to New York that you were set on turning this job down?”

  “Yes. But it wasn’t only that. She knew too that I was going to consult a psychiatrist about her.”

  “A psychiatrist?” Captain Green broke into a spontaneous burst of laughter. “A psychiatrist for the missus? On account of she was so neutrotic she got mad because you turned down a twenty-five thousand job?”

  Anger flared in John, but with it the thought came: I’ve got to be patient. I can’t expect them to understand. Not like this.

  He said, “As I told you, it’s far more complicated than that. She’d been sick for years. She’d never consent to see any doctor. Finally I’d got her to agree to seeing an old friend of mine in New York—Bill MacAllister.”

  “And you saw this Bill MacAllister when you were in New York?”

  “No, he was away on vacation.”

  “And you hadn’t called to check first?”

  “No, I hadn’t…”

  The two troopers came in. One of them had a bottle of gin in his hand. They stood by the door until Captain Green looked at them. Then the trooper with the bottle said:

  “We found this upstairs, Captain. It was in a drawer in a linen closet, like, just laying there. The drawer was open.”

  “That’s the bottle she’d hidden,” said John. “I found it after I got home. When she drinks, she always hides a bottle.”

  The trooper put the bottle of gin on the table. Neither Captain Green nor Steve Ritter said anything.

  “And then,” said the trooper, “we found this, Captain. Guess maybe it ain’t nothing. But it was laying like on the floor in a bedroom. Maybe it just ain’t nothing.”

  He put his hand in his pocket and produced a postcard —Bill MacAllister’s postcard. Captain Green stretched his hand out for it and read it. He looked up again at John.

  “This Bill MacA—this ain’t by any chance this doctor —this Bill Ma
cAllister?”

  “Yes,” said John. “It is.”

  The self-importance of a deduction made showed in the Captain’s round face. “Here on the postmark, it says it was mailed five days ago. So you got it before you went to New York. You knew all the time this Dr. MacAllister wouldn’t be there?”

  “No,” said John. Did this have to be dragged in too? “I never received the card. I only found it when I got back. She’d hidden it where she’d hidden the gin bottle. She always had a neurotic terror of everything to do with Bill because he’s a doctor. She must have got the postcard out of the mail and …”

  He heard his voice trailing off and he knew that he didn’t have the energy to push the point home against such stolid, implacable lack of understanding.

  “Captain.” The trooper who hadn’t spoken, the younger of the two, was watching Green with bright hopefulness. The rookie, thought John. The eager beaver. “Captain, could I maybe show you something in the living-room?”

  Captain Green rose cumbersomely and left the room with the troopers. John was immensely conscious again of Steve Ritter sitting across the table. Involuntarily he caught his eye. Steve’s face broke into a wide grin.

  “Boy!” he said. “Boy!”

  Soon Captain Green came back. He didn’t sit down again. He just stood at the door, almost blocking the whole area.

  “That note,” he said. “She typed it, didn’t she, Mister?”

  “Yes.”

  “No signature, no nothing. Just typed.”

  “That’s right.”.

  “She do a lot of typing?”

  Careful, thought John. Don’t tell them about the typewriter. Then suddenly anger flared up in him again. To hell with them. Why was he letting them force him into behaving as if he were guilty of something? Tell them the truth. The truth was the only solid ground. If he started to lie now, the nightmare would engulf him.

  “No,” he said, “as a matter of fact, that’s my typewriter. It’s usually out in the studio. She must have brought it in.”

  “So she went out to the studio and brought in the typewriter and typed her message without signing it or nothing? And yet—as Jim here just pointed out to me—there’s a pen right there on that table by the typewriter. Wouldn’t it be the easiest thing just to pick up the pen and write that note? Wouldn’t you say that, Mister?”

  It was the anger that was preserving John. It was his only prop now. Suddenly, needing to assert himself and to cut through the miasma of suspicions, he said, “I didn’t type it. If that’s what you’re hinting around about, why not come out with it? I didn’t type that note.”

  The moment he’d said it, it sounded terribly wrong and he knew that, in his attempt to break out of the net, he had taken the wrong turn. Now it was he who had said it.

  Before anyone, even the Morelands, had voiced their accusations, it had been he who had brought it out into the open.

  All pretense of formal politeness gone now, Captain Green came across the room until he was standing immediately in front of him. He glowered down at him. “Okay, Mister. Where’s your wife?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How come that suitcase was found on the dump?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you type that note?”

  “I told you I didn’t.”

  “Did you break up those records?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Did you plant that gin bottle upstairs in the drawer?” The rain of questions stopped as abruptly as it had begun. For a moment Captain Green stood over him, glaring down. Then, with a little wheezing grunt, he went back to the table and picked up the notebook again. “Okay. When did you go to New York?”

  “On the afternoon train yesterday. Brad Carey went down with me and came back with me too.”

  “When you were in New York did you see this guy about the job?”

  “Yes.”

  “Name and address.”

  John gave them. Captain Green wrote them down in the notebook.

  “And you stayed in New York overnight?”

  “Yes. At the same hotel as Brad Carey. Check with him if you want to.”

  John named the hotel, and Captain Green wrote that down too.

  “And you came back on the evening train today?” “That’s right. With Brad.”

  “And you’ve told us all you know?”

  “I’ve told you.”

  “Okay.” Captain Green closed the notebook with a flip and glanced at Steve. “I’ll get the description on the teletype right away. If there’s no word come in, search-parties in the morning, farming out through the woods. The lake too. Better drag the lake. You can get that fixed up, Steve. Corral all the guys you need in the village.”

  “Sure.” Steve was still looking at John, the white enigmatic grin stretching his lips. “There won’t be no difficulty getting volunteers. No, sir. We’re all crazy about Linda in Stoneville. All of us.”

  “Start early, Steve. Early as you can.”

  “Okay, Cap.”

  Captain Green put the notebook in his pocket.

  “Well, no use sticking around here. Gotta get back to that teletype.”

  He started toward the kitchen. The two troopers went after him. Then Steve. John followed them. All the men crowded around the kitchen door. None of them was looking at John.

  And then, with no warning, Captain Green swung to face him. His blue eyes were thin, brilliant slits.

  “Okay, Mister. Tell us. What have you done with your wife?”

  “Yes, John, boy.” Steve’s white smile suddenly gave itself away, revealing itself as the excited, sadistic smile of the Enemy. “Give us a break, John. Think of the trouble you’ll save us—and the money. What did you do with Linda before you went to New York and faked an alibi with Brad?”

  All four of the men were looking at him now. They weren’t individuals anymore; they were merged into a homogeneous block of male watchfulness—the pack bound together by the pack’s preconceived suspicion of the outsider. He’s guilty. Just because he’s different, he’s guilty. Destroy him.

  This, then, was to be the moment—not the thing found in the weeds, not an arm, maybe, sodden and pale, drifting at the water’s edge of Lake Sheldon—but this!

  His anger was still there to combat them.

  “Get out of here,” he said quietly. “All of you. Get out of here.”

  “My, John!” Steve’s eyes were very wide open, showing the white all around the irises. “What sort of talk is that? To your pals?”

  John swung toward him. Instantly Captain Green stepped between them, bulky, majestically impervious.

  “Okay, Steve. Let it go. Don’t ride the guy. Come on.”

  The young trooper, carrying the gin bottle, opened the screen door. Captain Green, with his hand on Steve’s arm. went out. The two troopers went after them.

  John stood at the door, watching them. As the police car drove away, he heard Steve Ritter’s laugh, loud, derisive, ringing out through the darkness.

  11

  HE HADN'T eaten since lunch in New York. Although he wasn’t hungry, he remembered the fact and drank a glass of milk. Then, because being idle was worse than doing nothing, he went into the living-room and started to clear up the destruction. He made himself examine everything with care, treating it merely as damaged property, to keep from thinking about Linda and the spite and the madness. All the canvases were beyond saving, but the phonograph amplifier and the recorder seemed only to have their tubes smashed. Some of the records had not been broken. He collected them up and put them back in the cabinet. The spools of tape were his special love. He had only recently bought the tape-recorder and there were no more than seven or eight tapes of music which he had taken off the radio. He sought them out in the mess of broken records and canvas strips and found them all except his most recent tape of the Mendelssohn “Calm Sea And Prosperous Voyage” Overture. Probably it was somewhere under the couch or one of the chairs, but i
t didn’t matter. They were all useless anyway, hopelessly torn and tangled. He threw them down again. Then he gathered up all the debris, took it, armload by armload, outside and stacked it neatly against the studio wall.

  His life had changed so drastically in the last few hours that it was impossible to imagine himself as he had been before he went to New York—just as it was impossible any more to speculate about Linda. She had gone, and by going had done this to him. That was all that had any reality. She had spawned the nightmare which had climaxed with Steve and the three troopers, ominous dream figures, staring at him from four pairs of eyes which, in their itch to destroy, had become one.

  What have you done with your wife?

  He stood by the studio doors, gazing through the shadowy trunks of the apple trees toward the great hulking darkness of the woods beyond. An owl cried—the strange, half-human wailing owl which he had heard once before. Suddenly he knew he couldn’t go back to the house. The house was Linda, madness, the danger that had come to strike him. In the house he wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  He went into the studio, stripped to his underclothes and threw himself down on an old couch. He thought of Linda’s description tapping out, right at that very moment probably, over the teletype. And he thought of Stoneville.

  Stoneville was now the Enemy. People were still awake. Old women whispering, “Have you heard … ?” Boys and girls, coming home from a summer’s evening, met by their mothers or their fathers. “Have you heard about Mrs. Hamilton?” And, the center of it all, Steve Ritter with his bland white smile, moving from house to house, collecting volunteers for the search-parties tomorrow.

  “How about a little off-season hunting, boy? Sure, big hunt—big hunt for Linda Hamilton … Haven’t you heard? She’s crazy and drunk, wandering off in the woods. Leastways that’s what her husband says…. Now, boy, take it easy? … John Hamilton murder her? A nice quiet artistic type like John Hamilton, murdering his wife? … Shouldn’t say things like that around a police officer, boy … that’s libelous, that is … If John says she’s crazy and drunk, wandering off in the woods … then she’s crazy and drunk…”