“I could.”
“I wasn’t, anyway. I went out with him a few times because he was a wonderful dancer.”
It wasn’t very convincing, in view of the evidence of the quarrel the two of them had had on Saturday night. But Meecham didn’t say anything.
They had come to a railroad crossing just as the signal turned red and the crossing barriers were being lowered into place. A freight train began to move very slowly down the track, heading west. Virginia strained forward in her seat and watched it intensely, watched each car roll ponderously past as if she was wishing she was on one of them, heading west to some place where the climate was good.
He felt sorry for her. The feeling disturbed him, so he turned his attention to the printing on the sides of the freight cars. Michigan Central. Rock Island. Burlington. Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. Union Pacific. Grand Rapids. C.P.R. Do Not Hump. And, in chalk, on the bulging belly of a tank car, Kilroy Was Here, followed by a spirited reply, Who Wasn’t, Joe and Howie.
A hundred cars—oil and lumber, automobiles and scrap metal and fertilizer, explosives and people—a vast jumble of everything, and always room for one more, Virginia.
The caboose slid past, the barriers rose and Virginia sat back in the seat, her eyes shining, her breathing accelerated. The train had excited her—its possibilities, its destination, its very movement. Impulsively, she raised her hand and waved at the caboose as it disappeared down the track.
8
Meecham stopped the car in the driveway and got out. Pulling his overcoat collar up around his neck, he went around the back of the car and opened the door for Virginia. “Here you are. And good luck.”
She glanced up at him in surprise. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“No.”
“But my mother will want to see you, to thank you.”
“She hasn’t anything to thank me for. The whole thing has been a pleasure.”
“You’re sore, aren’t you? Just because I suggested that about the bill.”
“I’m not sore,” Meecham said. “I have to go back to the jail to see Loftus.”
“Why?”
“Because he asked me to.”
“But why should he . . .?”
“I don’t know, and I probably wouldn’t tell you anyway.”
“Well, thanks for the ride.” She got out of the car and went toward the front door of the house. Before she was halfway there the door opened and Mrs. Hamilton came out.
Virginia ran into her mother’s arms and her mother held her there, rocking back and forth. It was almost an exact repetition of the scene the previous morning in Cordwink’s office.
“Momma!”
“Ginny darling. Darling girl.”
“Oh, momma!”
Meecham watched them, but this time he felt quite detached, unmoved. He wondered what Mrs. Hamilton would do if she found out how and why Virginia had tried to raise money.
As unobtrusively as possible he slid in behind the wheel of his car and pressed the starter button. Mrs. Hamilton’s reaction to the sound was immediate and exaggerated, like an amateur actress’ response to a cue that was late in coming.
“Mr. Meecham! Oh, Mr. Meecham, wait a minute.”
With an air of resignation Meecham switched off the ignition, set the emergency brake and got out of the car for the second time.
Mrs. Hamilton approached him, her right hand stretched out in greeting. “You weren’t leaving?”
“I was. I have some bus—”
“Please come in and have a cup of coffee. Or a drink. Business can wait. This is such a happy occasion for me. I have my girl back safe and sound.”
Safe and sound. Meecham almost winced at the phrase, it seemed so incongruous. Her girl would probably never be either safe or sound. He had a suspicion that Mrs. Hamilton knew this and that the phrase had slipped out, in unconscious irony.
“I’d like some coffee,” Meecham said. “Nice of you to invite me.”
Virginia had gone ahead into the house. Her coat had fallen off one shoulder and the hem dragged in the dirty snow.
“She looks terrible,” Mrs. Hamilton said, in a changed voice. “As if she hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept.”
“Have you?”
“Some. Thank God it’s all over now, anyway. It is over. Isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“The man is guilty, he’s proved it?”
“As far as I know, yes. I’m not the Sheriff’s confidant.”
The answer seemed to satisfy her. “I think you’ve brought us luck, Mr. Meecham.”
The inside of the house was moist and fragrant, like a florist’s shop. Meecham saw that, in anticipation of Virginia’s arrival, someone had watered all the plants, watered them too liberally as if to make up for past neglect. The saucers under the flowerpots were brimming and one of the ivy-planted wall brackets dripped with sharp little pings onto the waxed concrete floor.
Mrs. Hamilton didn’t notice the dripping. She had taken Virginia’s coat and was hanging it in the closet. She handled the coat with a kind of nervous tenderness as if it was of great value and she wasn’t sure how to treat it. For the first time Meecham took a close look at the coat. Its bold black and white design dazzled the eye, but the material was cheap.
Neither of the women made any move to take Meecham’s hat or coat, so he laid them across a chair. He was a little irritated because he was sure that the omission on their part was more than a lapse in manners; it was an unconscious expression of their real feeling toward him. He wondered again why Mrs. Hamilton had invited him in for coffee, and why he had accepted against his will.
“We should do something to celebrate,” Mrs. Hamilton said. “Perhaps a little dinner party tonight. Would you like that, Ginny?”
Virginia ignored, or didn’t hear, the question. She was gazing at Meecham thoughtfully, part of her lower lip caught between her teeth. “Meecham, I’ve got an idea.”
“Mr. Meecham, dear,” Mrs. Hamilton corrected. “Mr. It sounds coarse to . . .”
“Momma, please. I’m talking.”
“Then talk properly.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Momma, this is important!” She turned back to Meecham. “I think I’ll sue them for false arrest. I suffered grievous humiliation, didn’t I, my reputation was damaged, I underwent great privations, et cetera. How about that, Meecham?”
“It’s not such a good idea,” Meecham said.
“It is, it’s a wonderful idea. Why, I could get a fortune if I won.”
“You couldn’t win because you haven’t a case. There was no malicious persecution, and the Sheriff had enough grounds to arr—”
“Stop.” Mrs. Hamilton spoke quietly but with such force, such cold anger, that Meecham stopped in the middle of a word, and Virginia turned to look at her mother with an air of surprise. “I’m ashamed of you, Virginia. Ashamed.”
“For heaven’s sake, Momma, I’ve got my rights and . . .”
“There’ll be no further discussion of this, ever.” Mrs. Hamilton’s face had changed from white to pink, and now back to white again, as if there was something the matter with her circulatory system and it responded too quickly and too violently to changes in her emotions. “The subject will never be brought up again. Is that clear to you, Virginia? And you, Mr. Meecham?”
“The whole thing was a pipe-dream anyway,” Meecham said.
“Of course. Of course it was.” She was regaining her composure. “You hear that, Virginia?”
“I heard.”
“Now go and say hello to Carney, like a good girl. She can’t leave the office.”
Virginia turned obediently and walked away, but not before giving Meecham an obvious we’ll-talk-about-it-later glance. Mrs. Hami
lton must have seen the glance and interpreted it, but she said nothing about it until she and Meecham were settled in front of the fireplace.
Between them, so close to Meecham that he could scarcely move his legs, there was an immense three-tiered glass table that looked as though it weighed a ton. The chair that Meecham occupied was deep and low and soft, one of those chairs it was difficult to get out of even without a table blocking the way.
Meecham felt suddenly and inexplicably afraid. The fear passed over him like a wave, accelerating his heartbeat, and left behind beads of moisture on his forehead and a damp cold sensation across the small of his back. He had to control an impulse to kick away the huge table, spilling the coffee from its silver urn, shattering the china cups and the glass tiers. Violence is the instinctive response to fear. But because the fear was nameless and unimmediate, the violence was vague and unreasoning. He dropped an ash tray. Dropped it, quite unintentionally, and when he saw it break he had no conscious feeling of satisfaction, but he stopped sweating and his heartbeat was normal again.
Mrs. Hamilton dismissed his apologies with a gesture. She looked annoyed, not at the loss of the ash tray, but at the interruption of her thoughts.
She said quietly and firmly, “You understand, don’t you, that Virginia gets wild ideas sometimes. You mustn’t take them seriously.”
“I don’t.”
“This false arrest business would never do, you understand that.”
“Quite.” He didn’t remind her that he’d said the same thing himself, at least twice.
“Virginia can be very persuasive. I—I beg of you not to pay any attention to her. She doesn’t realize the consequences of such a thing—more publicity and investigations, policemen prying into things.”
“What things?”
“Everything,” she said, spreading her small plump hands. “Paul has suffered enough. Crank phone calls and letters, and reporters stopping him on the street.”
“It will all blow over.”
“Not if Virginia does anything further. Like this suit she wants to start.”
“No lawyer would touch it.”
It was his third or fourth reassurance. “That’s a relief,” she said, and Meecham thought the subject was closed until she added, “Why does Virginia want money so badly?”
“You’d better ask her.”
“She’d lie.”
“Maybe.”
“Not that she’s a liar, a real liar, but she’s secretive sometimes because she doesn’t understand how completely sympathetic I am to her.” She repeated the word completely with emphasis, as if denying an unspoken accusation of lack of sympathy. “I understand her, she’s my girl. We’ve always been very close.”
“I see that.”
“Tell me frankly, Mr. Meecham. Did you examine any of the reports about Virginia?”
“What reports?”
“While she was in—while she was there, they must have asked her questions, given her tests, things like that. They usually do, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know how they—turned out?”
“No.”
“I thought since you were . . . Well, it doesn’t really matter. Virginia’s normal, of course. A little spoiled, but completely normal.”
“I agree,” Meecham said. It was futile to say anything else.
Mrs. Hamilton looked at him gratefully. She had received the answer she wanted and now it was time to change the subject before Meecham could reverse or modify his answer. She said, “It’s been a sordid business. I’m glad it’s over, and I suppose you are too.”
“In a way.”
“Send me your bill as soon as possible. I don’t know how long I’ll be staying here. Or I can pay you right now, if you like, in cash.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Somewhere in the house a telephone rang, twice.
“You’ll come to our little celebration dinner tonight, Mr. Meecham?”
“Thanks, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it.” He never wanted to set foot in that house again, to be subtly imprisoned by a soft chair and a glass table and a quiet frantic woman. “I have some business to attend to.”
“Of course. You must have other clients, hundreds.”
“A few, anyway.”
“This man, Loftus. He’ll undoubtedly get a good lawyer?”
“Money or no money, he’ll get a lawyer of some kind.”
“Why do you say, money or no money?”
“If he can’t afford to pay, the court will appoint two lawyers for the defense. There’s no Public Defender here as there is in Los Angeles.”
“I didn’t realize we had such a thing. I’ve never had occasion to be interested in—matters like that.”
Quick light footsteps sounded in the hall, and a moment later Alice appeared in the doorway. She looked as if she had been working. Her hair was drawn back tightly behind her ears and tied with a blue ribbon, and she wore an apron that reached almost to her ankles. Her face was warm and flushed and pretty.
Mrs. Hamilton frowned, faintly but pointedly, in Alice’s direction, like a mother silencing a little girl, warning her not to interrupt while the grownups were talking. Or, if she had to interrupt, at least to remove her apron first.
“My dear Alice,” she said, “what have you been doing?”
“Cleaning.”
“You know perfectly well you’re not expected to do any of the household work.”
“I don’t mind. And it needed doing.”
Mrs. Hamilton turned to Meecham with a smile that seemed forced. “Now what would you do with a girl like that?”
“I don’t know,” Meecham said. He felt, quite irrationally, that Alice’s appearance had changed something in the room, broken a tension, snapped an invisible wire. He got up from the chair, pushing the glass table away until its bamboo legs shrieked in protest. The table was lighter than he thought.
Alice was watching him gravely from the doorway. “Your office called, Mr. Meecham. You’re to drop in there after you talk to Mr. Loftus.”
“Thank you.”
In the silence that followed Meecham could hear the ivy-planted wall bracket still dripping, very slowly and softly, like the final blood from a death wound.
Mrs. Hamilton had risen too, to face Meecham. “I think you might be quite a clever and devious creature, Mr. Meecham.”
“So is a weasel, so I won’t bother thanking you for that, Mrs. Hamilton.”
“You’ve been stringing me along,” she said in a cold flat voice. “You’re going to be Loftus’ lawyer, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You can lie about it. Go on. Everybody else lies.”
“I’m not lying.”
“How can I believe you? How can I believe anybody?” She crossed the room, moving with agonizing slowness like a deep-sea diver forcing his leaden feet across the ocean floor, fighting a pressure he can’t see or understand. “I. . . Alice, I think I’ll go up to my room and rest awhile. Please see that Mr. Meecham is—looked after.”
Meecham watched her until she disappeared around a corner of the hall. Then he turned his head and looked at Alice, and in that moment he had two wishes, diverging in means, but with a common purpose: to get Alice away from that house. His first wish was that he had a mother or a father or a family of some kind so that he could invite Alice to stay with them. Since he had no family at all, he wished that Mrs. Hamilton would take Alice and board the earliest plane for home. Some day, some remote day when he had surplus time and money, he might go to see her. She might be married, by that time, married and with a couple of children; a placid contented matron, shopping, going to movies, lying in the sun. This projection into the fut
ure was so vivid, his sense of loss so acute, that he felt a tide of rage rise in him, rise and ebb, leaving a taste of salt.
He said, abruptly, “When are you leaving for home?”
“You mean L.A.?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. Mrs. Hamilton hasn’t told me.”
“You could tell her. Tell her you want to leave.”
“But I don’t want to,” she protested.
“Have you seen Virginia?”
“Yes, a few minutes ago, with Carney.”
“Suppose I told you I think Virginia is dangerous?”
“Are you trying to scare me? I don’t understand. Everything is all right now, isn’t it? Everything’s been settled?” She took a step back, away from him. “Or has it? Why are you going to see Loftus if you’re not his lawyer?”
“Because he asked me to.”
“As an old pal?”
“More or less.”
“You never saw him before last night, does that make you an old pal?”
“He thought I had an honest face,” Meecham said, “so I became his old pal right away. It happens, now and then, especially to a lonely guy in trouble. I’m a lonely guy myself and I’ve been in trouble, so I know a little about these things.” He put on his coat. “Nobody seems to like the idea of me talking to Loftus. I wonder why.”
“I don’t care, one way or the other. I was just puzzled.” She thrust her hands deep into the pockets of the oversize apron. “I guess I’m getting suspicious of everybody. I don’t know why.”
“That’s the trouble with suspicion, it infects even the nicest people. Good-bye, Alice.”
“Good-bye.”
He bent down and kissed her lightly on the forehead. She didn’t react in any way. She just stood there, looking surprised and a little forlorn.
He was halfway to the center of town before he realized that he hadn’t had any coffee after all. He wanted, then, to turn around and go back, not for the coffee he had missed, but because the solution of the problem had suddenly struck him. It was quite simple: the house should be abandoned like a ship about to sink under the weight of excess cargo. Alice and Mrs. Hamilton should go home, Carney get another job, Paul rent an office somewhere downtown. And Virginia—there was only one thing to do about Virginia: give her the money to run away, far away where the climate was good.
Vanish in an Instant Page 8
