by Frances
“There was somebody with her, then,” Lois said. “Wait—I did smell something. I didn’t pay any attention.”
“A hell of a reporter,” he said. “Yes—somebody in the bedroom or somewhere. Listening at the door. Had been smoking and couldn’t take the smoke away with him. So—”
“So that was the rat-a-tat-tat business,” she said. “The lurking on the top landing. All right. Did you hear anything?”
He nodded his head. He was pleased.
“Lines of dialogue,” he said. “Woman’s voice: ‘This was supposed to be a walk-on.”
“Man’s voice: Indistinguishable rumble.”
“Woman’s voice: ‘Not if it’s got sides. Equity wouldn’t approve. Got to—”
“Man’s voice: Same rumble, but soothing in tone.”
“Woman’s voice: ‘With anybody you want to. As long as you get it straight. Now, I want to get some sleep. So—”
“Whereupon,” Bob said, “I joined the lady at the foot of the stairs.”
He had not been looking at Lois as he spoke. He had been looking into the driver’s mirror. Now he said, “Damn! Going the other way.”
Lois turned and looked back toward the house they had left. A man had come down the sandstone stairs. On the sidewalk, he walked away from them. He was only a figure moving in a half light—a man walking.
Bob Oliver started the MG, which briefly jumped up and down at the curb, then turned out and rolled up the narrow, oneway street. It picked up speed and turned right at the next corner and then, almost at once, right again.
But the streets in the western fringe of Greenwich Village are unconventional, form no convenient checkerboard. It was several minutes before, having circled more than a block, they went back through Commerce Street, went slowly, looking for a man who had walked the wrong way when he came out of a four- story brick apartment house. They saw a man who walked a dog, and a man who staggered, and a boy and a girl walking hand in hand.
“One up for the opposition,” Bob said, and headed the little car north on Eighth Avenue. “He knows us; we don’t know him.”
“If,” Lois said, holding on as they turned left into Twenty-third, “there is an opposition.”
“Don’t,” Bob Oliver said, “be more of a wild goose than you have to. Of course there’s an opposition.”
She said nothing. She pointedly said nothing. They went up a ramp, onto the West Side Highway. They went much faster than they should have gone.
“And,” he said, when they were above Forty-second Street, “funny business. Grace got herself a part—what she was talking about. Thought it would be a walk-on. Turns out it’s got ‘sides.’ Actors measure dialogue by the number of—”
“Thank you,” Lois said. “Thank you so much. It’s nice of you to explain it all so carefully for a country cousin.”
He looked at her briefly.
“For God’s sake,” he said, “don’t bush your tail again.”
“Geese do,” Lois said, with bitterness—and, it occurred to her, probably with inaccuracy.
He took one hand from the wheel. He used it to pat her arm. “Cats,” he said. “Not geese.”
“All right,” she said. “Geese hiss.”
Whereupon, she hissed. She hissed as if she meant it.
And Robert Oliver gave a sudden, violent snort of laughter—a convulsion of laughter so extreme that the hurrying little car momentarily wavered in its course. He brought it back. He continued to laugh.
The impossible man, Lois thought. As if I’d meant— Two can glare as easily as one, she decided, and glared at Bob Oliver. Momentarily, he turned toward her, a grin wide on his face, his body still vibrating with his laughter. And then, for no reason at all, she felt laughter coming to a boil inside her, and tried to check it, and was laughing. That started him off again, and they went up Riverside Drive, in a small open car, laughing uncontrollably in the warm night. Which was, all things considered, most ridiculous.
Then, as they crossed the toll bridge over the Harlem River, they stopped laughing, as if they had agreed to stop. Not, Lois told herself, that they had agreed or were ever really apt to. Merely because they were, seemed inclined to be, simultaneously infected with laughter—
“Of course,” Oliver said, “we’ve tipped our hand. If—”
“If there’s anything in it to tip,” she said. “You know—there still doesn’t have to be. Goose or no goose, we’ve still got nothing to go on.”
“Child,” he said, “what was our Grace talking about, then?”
“About a play,” she said. “About just what it sounded like—a real part in a real play. A part that had been built up, so that it was a better part than it had started out to be. And the man—her agent, maybe. Even the producer. Or—”
“And,” Bob said, but there was now less certainty in his voice, “and hiding in a bathroom, or wherever, when we dropped in to—ask for an address?”
“All right,” Lois said. “Who’s the goose now—the gander? They may have been—combining business with pleasure. A lady’s reputation.”
“Grace Farthing’s?” he said, with disbelief.
“Any woman’s,” she said. “The right of privacy, if nothing else. And another thing—she didn’t show any signs of recognizing me. Accepted that bit about the country cousin.”
They didn’t know as to that, of course, he said, and the MG picked up speed on the Saw Mill River Parkway. That she hadn’t shown any signs—yes, he agreed. It was also quite possible that, since she had had no reason to pay particular attention to Lois in the Inn’s taproom—
“If,” she said, “it is the same woman. I still don’t know. The point is, we may have nothing at all. It may be no more than I thought at first—an imagination running away.”
“A tandem now,” he said; but then, “I’ll grant you it’s all pretty —fuzzy.”
“She didn’t recognize me because she’d never seen me,” Lois said. “That’s A. She was talking about a real play. That’s B. The man was her agent and she was saying, I want a better contract if I’m going on with the part and that he could take it up with anyone he wanted to as long as he got her more money. That’s C. And after we’d gone he put his clo—”
She stopped abruptly, and he laughed again, but this time briefly.
“It makes more sense,” she said. “The other thing—the fuzzy things—”
“To put it in words,” he said. “That she impersonated the old lady as part of some plan to make a lot of money. Obviously for Ella Harbrook, with residual benefits to Ella’s nephew, to the detriment of one Blake Montfort.”
“All right,” she said, and the small car—after a hesitancy which would serve (no policeman being in sight) for a full stop—darted around the Hawthorne Circle. “All right—what plan?”
There was a considerable amount of silence.
“See?” she said. “Back where we started. The only point would have been to sign the will—”
But, the will was not forged. They went over it again, driving north and east. Again she described the scene in the dim, cool room.
“You’re sure,” he said, “that she really signed it? Then, I mean?”
“I watched her,” she said. “Saw her hand move. Saw Mr. Graham blot the signature. Of course I’m sure.”
There was a very considerable period of silence. The car, receiving only abstracted supervision, took advantage of this, and went much faster.
“Mrs. Banks in Glenville?” Bob Oliver said, finally. “Another Mrs. Banks in Commerce Street?”
“Coincidence,” she said. “You knew a woman named Banks. I’ll grant you, one who happened to be an actress. Happened to have played old women’s parts. It’s not such an uncommon name. It’s not uncommon at all. Look—you looked it up in the telephone directory. Under Banks? Or just her stage name?”
“Banks first.”
“All right. How many Bankses?”
“Almost two columns,” he said. “I’ll a
dmit—”
She said, “Well?” with some triumph.
“The voice?” he said. “What it all started with? The unusually carrying quality of the voice? Which—wasn’t in Mrs. Montfort’s.” He waited a moment. Then he said, “Well?” but said the word with a kind of gentleness.
“She—” Lois said and paused. “She was weak and—made a special effort? Raised her voice? Changed its—quality?”
“Don’t be—” he began, and was told to wait.
“Public speakers do,” she said. “Somebody told me that once. A man who was running for something. He said that, once you got the knack, it wasn’t a matter of volume at all but of—he said pitch.”
He considered. Then he said he supposed it was possible. A lot of coincidence—
“All the same,” he said, “it still seems to me we’ve bitten off more coincidence than we can chew.”
It was, she pointed out, easier to chew than a forged signature that very evidently wasn’t. Than a murder that a good doctor called natural death—death from the infirmities of age.
“And,” she said, nailing it down, “he must have been there within minutes after she died. Wasn’t he?”
Bob Oliver supposed so. He didn’t think that Dr. Young was wrong.
“Then,” she said, “let’s give it up. I had a brainstorm. All right —I’ll say it first. A tempest in a teacup. If I’m willing to settle for that, you ought to be.”
He did not answer at once. They had reached the end of the parkway and a light stopped them. “I suppose—” he began, and the light turned green and the little car jumped. It jumped across the intersection and cut sharp to the right onto a narrow winding blacktop. There was a bank on one side and a drop on the other. The MG cornered sharply to the right, the beam of its headlights chasing to catch the road again.
And suddenly, with no warning, the car lurched from its path —was a car gone mad, intent on self-destruction. Lois was hurled against the low door and clutched at it, and the car went insanely up on two wheels, and hung there, twisting, and plunged toward the left of the road and the drop beyond—and swerved back as Oliver fought it, and skidded broadside of the road, still alive with some destructive madness of its own and toward the drop again and—
And stopped, right side up still, inches from the edge. Bob Oliver’s hands were white from pressure on the wheel. He lifted them from the wheel.
He said, “You all right?” and said it, incongruously, with a kind of anger. Then he looked at her. “Anyway,” he said, “you’re still here.”
“I’m all right,” she said, hoping that was true. She made a mental survey. “Quite all right,” she said. “What happened?”
“Front tire,” he said. “Not the best place for it. Lucky we weren’t going fast.”
“Weren’t—” she said, and paused. “Weren’t we?” she said.
He grinned down at her, briefly. He said, “Not very.” He said, “Can’t do anything here, blocking the road,” and backed the little car from the edge. It limped badly, went ker-chunk, kerchunk, around a curve and for some yards before the shoulder was wide enough to take it. Oliver pulled off there, and got out and went to the left front wheel and squatted beside it. (Glaring at it, Lois was sure, although she could not clearly see his face.)
Then he stood up and stood against the car, looking down at her and there was a strange expression on his face—an expression, she thought, partly of anger and half (more than half) of complete surprise.
“Somebody,” he said, speaking slowly—“somebody who doesn’t like us much, cut the side wall. Not all the way. Just—just the right amount. So that when pressure built up as the tire got hot there’d be a good chance. Somebody who doesn’t like us much, Lois.”
She looked at him, her eyes wide.
“At a guess,” he said, “somebody who knows I sometimes drive rather fast. At seventy or so it wouldn’t—wouldn’t have been funny.”
He continued to look at her.
“Tempest in what teacup?” he said. “How much do you bid for coincidence now, my dear?”
“I’m not laughing,” Lois Williams said.
VI
She held a flashlight pointed while he changed the tire. The flashlight beam was fragile in the night’s darkness. Cars passed them on the narrow road, but not many cars, and Lois felt that they were a long way from anywhere, and somehow defenseless and exposed. It was easy enough—uncomfortably easy—during those minutes to believe that somebody didn’t “like them much”—that someone had, in short, tried to kill them. That, with the tire changed, Bob Oliver went around the little car with the flashlight, squatted by each wheel, examined each tire with light and fingers, intensified her uneasiness, and she found that she was looking this way and that, trying to look through the darkness, straining her ears for hostile sounds, thinking that any sound must surely be hostile.
It was better when they were both in the car again and the car was moving. Movement seemed, in itself, a kind of protection and she thought, absurdly, nobody can hurt us now. It was absurd because it was precisely through the car’s movement that somebody had tried to hurt them, to kill them. If anybody had.
“You all right?” Oliver said, without looking at her, taking his eyes from the road.
“A little jittery,” she said. “It’s—a hard idea to get used to. Accept.”
And, in fact, she found that now her mind did try to reject the very unpleasant idea, tried to push it away. Somewhere, her mind began to insist, there is a quite simple explanation—an explanation which does not involve anything so melodramatic as a plot to kill. To kill me, her mind said—preposterous! She looked at Bob Oliver, who was looking at the road—who seemed to be some distance away.
What it must be, she thought, is that he is simply wrong, wrong in thinking that somebody cut the tire. Tires blow out, for reasons of their own; accidents happen. This had been an accident. One can accept accidents. One has to accept them—an airplane darts out of a cloud and, with all the sky to fly in, all space open—with time stretching as wide as space—knifes into another airplane—and the world flares. But that is an accident, not a thing planned. A hundred things, a thousand, combine toward catastrophe—wind currents, an instant longer of waiting at the end of a runway (or a moment less spent there), a minute deviation from a course plotted (or rigid adherence to a course) and two hurtling objects coincide in space and forty-three men and women die. And Ken dies.
It may be presumed, must be, that an accident may “happen” at any moment, although the presumption remains that it will happen to someone else. (Without that presumption, any activity would be impossible, but inaction hardly less so.) But it is ridiculous to believe, Lois Williams’s mind insisted, that an intent to destroy can be directed against me. Such things do not happen—not to me.
They went, at moderate pace, along Glenville’s Main Street. Everything was most ordinary, and entirely safe, and murder, attempted or achieved, was something one saw on a motion picture screen, or (inescapably) on TV, or read about in newspapers or in books. After seeing it (or reading about it) one went to the refrigerator and got a glass of milk, or a bottle of beer, and sat in humdrum safety. That, Lois’s mind said, is the way things really are.
“I’ll come in with you for a moment,” Bob Oliver said, when they stopped in the turnaround of the bright small house in Long Meadow Manor. “Just have a look around. O.K.?”
“Of course,” Lois said. “But—there won’t be anything to find.”
They went in and lights went on and it was more than ever preposterous that there should be anything to find—anything inimical to find. To humor him—he was scowling again—she went with him into the kitchen, into the two bedrooms; she waited while he glared into bathrooms and closets. There was nothing which was not to be expected, which was not as it should be.
“A drink?” she said, back in the living room. “A nightcap?”
They settled on beer. They had been to the melodramatic m
ovie (which they had invented as they went along) and were back among ordinary things.
“Are you really sure,” Lois said, “that somebody cut the tire?”
He glared at her. He asked her, angrily, if she supposed he was a damned fool.
“I just thought—” she began, in a small and amicable voice.
“What you want,” he said, “is to pay no attention and have things go away. Of course it isn’t pleasant to think somebody’s trying to kill you. You’re damn’ right the tire was cut. I suppose you want to argue—”
“I don’t,” she said, “want to argue at all. Unless you think it’s absolutely necessary. I—”
He made an impatient gesture.
“That,” he said, “it was just one of those coincidences you’re so fond of. Because they make things so much—smoother. As for example—some juvenile delinquent, engaged in childish vandalism, just happens—”
He did not so much stop, as run down. He continued to glare at her, but it was by no means his best glare. It was even possible, Lois thought, that it was a somewhat defensive glare.
“Well?” she said. “It does happen. One reads about it often enough. Malicious mischief for its own sake. For all we know, a gang of unpleasant brats may have spent the whole evening slashing tires in the Village. For all—”
“Don’t be—” he began, rather loudly, but that, too, died.
“All right,” he said. “I don’t say it isn’t possible. Any coincidence is possible. If we can turn up a nice soothing coincidence—”
He looked angrily around the room, saw the telephone and went to it. He dialed—dialed extensively. He said, “City desk, please” and “Can I speak to Hump? Bob Oliver calling” and, “Hump? Oliver. Got a minute?”
He listened momentarily. He said, “The hell you are.” He said, “No, the other way around” and then, “Listen. I was in town this evening. Down in the Village. On Commerce Street. Some joker gashed one of my tires. What I wondered—outbreak of that sort of thing? Or was I specially—”
