The Baxter Letters

by Dolores Hitchens

  At four o’clock she took the work in for Mr. Dunavan’s examination.

  “When you have time,” she said, “I’d like to ask you something.”

  “Ask it now. And by the way, why on earth did you pound this all out right now? You could have taken a couple of days on it.”

  “I work fast when I’m nervous, Mr. Dunavan. I had lunch with a woman—well, I almost had lunch with a woman whose name is on one of Uncle Bax’s letters.” She came to a full stop. “I shouldn’t bother you with this.”

  “If you quit talking about it now, you’re fired.”

  “Well, her name is Mrs. Appleton, and she phoned me this morning. We met.” Jennifer described the Italian restaurant. “She said that Mr. Shima was her cousin. She didn’t defend him nor claim that he was an angel. She thinks that Uncle Bax may be associated with a strong, cruel man in Nueva Brisa and that the letters are being delivered to … to kind of identify, point out, those people whose names are on them.”

  He turned his chair and pushed with a foot so that the chair rolled back from the desk a little. “Sit down, please. You believed what this woman told you?”

  “I guess I don’t know what to think. She seemed … awfully scared. She didn’t seem to be pretending.”

  “You said the letters are being delivered. Have you delivered more than the one you took to Mr. Shima?”

  “Yes. One more. To a Mr. Fallon.” She told him briefly of the visit to Mr. Fallon’s apartment, and of Sara and the dog. “What seems to confuse me, is that it’s all so improbable. It’s not something that would happen to an ordinary person like me. Of course Uncle Bax isn’t ordinary, he’s a black sheep.” She shrugged, baffled, and then added: “I should have told you about Mr. Fallon this morning, as soon as I came in. But I know you have a lot on your mind.”

  “You think that Mrs. Appleton really believes that she is in danger?”

  “She seemed to believe it. And so am I, she said.”

  “From whom?”

  “It’s all terribly vague. She left so many things unexplained.”

  He got out of the chair and walked to the windows and stood there with a stubborn look on his face. “There’s so damned little—if you did go to the police—”

  “She said I shouldn’t be alone in my apartment.”

  “Tell your roomate about it, too,” he warned.

  She couldn’t think of an answer for that.

  “You said that you had a newspaper friend.”

  He nodded. “Yes, and I might be able to get hold of Ron now. I’m going to try it. One thing. A promise from you.”

  “Yes.”

  “No more mail delivery on your part.”

  “I … I’d already made up my mind about that.”

  “And since these letters seem to be the source of the trouble, the possible danger, I want you to get them out of your possession. I’d say, burn them, the way this woman wants you to do with the one addressed to her. But maybe they’re evidence. Someday it might be awfully important to have them, to be able to turn them over to the cops, or to someone. So I’m going to ask you to bring the box and everything in it to me. I’ll put it in the vault here. I think you ought to go right away, and come right back with it. I’ll wait for you.” He remained standing by the windows, his face turned from her, an air of dissatisfaction about him. “And still, you mustn’t go to your apartment alone, before your roommate can be there too.”

  She almost blurted out that Tom would be there, she’d be safe, and then she bit back the words. Well, Tom might not be there. He liked to go out sometimes to a café in the Village where he could meet his friends.

  “I could get Mr. Keeley to go up with me.”

  “Be sure you do that, then.”

  He treats me like a child, she thought suddenly. That’s what I am to him—a country kid. An innocent out of his own past.

  And then, just as suddenly, she wished that she could be.

  Chapter 10

  In the vestibule she decided, just to be sure that Tom was home, that she ought to push the button beside their name on the entry panel. So she pushed it, and waited. Time wavered past. She pushed the button again and got nothing but silence.

  Tom wasn’t home.

  She thought of the apartment far away up there, all empty and alone, as she went on uncertainly into the lobby. She looked around, half-hoping to meet Mr. Keeley. The old marble tiles showed that Mr. Keeley had not mopped today. Of course he had been busy with the broken washing machine. Could he still be at work on it? Should she try the basement?

  She told herself, he’ll think I’m crazy, wanting an escort to my door.

  She hesitated at the elevator, and then walked on in, trying to assume a feeling of confidence. It was only the middle of the afternoon. She pushed the button for her floor. The door seemed reluctant to close. It made a couple of false starts and wheezes. Temperamental old wreck, she whispered to herself: get going. The door began to shut and then she had the feeling of being packed into a box, and she wanted out. But now the elevator had taken up its creaking ascent.

  Floors slid by, fell slowly downward, the portholes in the outer doors matching the one in the elevator for a moment to show grim fusty halls. She waited for that final porthole to glide down, fix itself into place, stop.

  She thought of something. Suppose the lights were out in the hall on her floor? The halls had no windows; they were only lengthened landings with three or four doors giving into apartments. If the lights should be out—

  Now why should I think of that?

  Her hand flew to the Close button. Something was beating in her chest, a ragged thump that must be her heart, and the pulse thudding in her ears almost drowned out the groans of the elevator.

  But then, the porthole—the right porthole—was there in front of her eyes, showing lights, showing the familiar shabby length of hall, her own door in the distance. With a lift of spirit she stepped out into the stale air that suddenly was welcome and familiar.

  She walked to her door, taking her key out of the purse as she went, and then she heard the music of the tape machine.

  Tom was in there, then, after all.

  She rapped. “Tom. Jeff here. Open up.”

  He turned down the machine to a whisper, but he didn’t come to the door. She waited, and then she looked behind her. As she watched, the elevator gave a few preliminary rattles and then slowly dropped away.

  “Tom!”

  The door opened all at once, and Jennifer gave a yelp. It was Sean who stood there, big in the shoulders, flabby in the paunch, tobacco-colored beard threaded with gray, almost bald. He had on loose terrycloth pants, a shirt without buttons, sandals. “Hi, Jeff. It’s just me here for the moment. Tom went out to the deli. Come on in, why don’t you?”

  She went in as Sean stood aside with an air of welcome, and the mean little part of her that she despised spoke up to say that he had invited her in as though she were the visitor. As though the place were his. And before the sensible side of her could crush it down the same niggling voice said Yes, maybe the place really was Sean’s during the day, every day, while she was at work.

  Sean had been on the couch, she saw. The velvet cushions still held the massive egg-shaped depression. She looked at the beer cans, the bowl of potato chips, the wedge of cheese on a plate, with a queer feeling of being out of place, an intruder. The tape machine went on whispering, something new, something Tom hadn’t ever played for her. Sheafs of manuscript paper lay all over the coffee table, the chair, and with even a small stack here and there on the rug.

  “You’ve been working with Tom,” she said. She tried to sound grateful. Sean had great discrimination, a fine sense of balance and pace when it came to writing.

  Didn’t he?

  “We’re trying to get as much done as possible,” Sean agreed. “I might have to pull out of New York. Any day.”

  “Tom said you had a job in the offing.”

  “I’ve got hopes. High hop
es.” He didn’t go back to the couch. He was waiting, perhaps, for her to indicate what she wanted him to do. To go or to stay.

  “I just came home for something, I have to go back to the office,” she told him.

  “Tom will be here any minute.”

  It would be nice to see Tom if only briefly. She started to walk to the hall that led to the bedroom. She’d get the box, wrap it up, then wait for Tom. Sean spoke behind her.

  “Somebody on your floor has a hell of a big dog.”

  It stopped her in her tracks. No one here on this hallway had a dog. She turned back to Sean. “You saw a dog up here?”

  “No. Heard the brute. Sniffing there at the outside door. Must have been a monster.”

  “But you didn’t see him.”

  “I didn’t have to see him. I heard him. A little while after Tom went out, there was all this sniffing at the door, it sounded like a moose blowing under water. And a couple of times he bumped the door, trying to get a better snootful I guess.” Sean grinned and shrugged at her. “It wasn’t any toy poodle by a long shot. He bumped the door like a moose, too.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Not a damn thing. But I guess he satisfied himself. The dog detective. He must have smelled me in here.”

  Her mouth felt dry and inside her chest, way inside, everything had grown very quiet. It was as if her heart didn’t want to beat, lest it be heard. “Was this long before I came?”

  “A little while. If one of the neighbors is keeping a beast like that, Jeff, I’d watch myself in the halls. You could get eaten up.”

  “It’s very odd,” she said, trying to find her normal voice. “Nobody on this floor has a dog. There aren’t even very many in the building. Mr. Keeley claims that the owner prefers people without pets.”

  “Maybe this thing doesn’t qualify as a pet. Maybe during the racing season they saddle it and run it at Acqueduct.”

  He laughed at his own joke, and she forced herself to smile. I’ll wait for Tom,” she told him, “just long enough to say hello. Meanwhile I’ve got to get something.”

  She went on back into the shabby gloom of the bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed and tried to think. She tried to think reasonably and calmly about Sean’s experience, but inside she was cowering small, and afraid.

  It was still only afternoon. Bad things happened at night, under the shelter of the dark. Like muggers in the park. The cops liked to have a dog along on park patrol, a big dog, because though the mugger could crouch down out of sight in the shrubbery and be invisible to the cop, the cop could walk right past him, the mugger couldn’t hide himself from the dog’s sense of smell. The dog knew that the mugger was there, hidden, and let the cop know too. In the dark.

  The dog sniffing at the door had let someone know that though Tom had left the building, a person remained in the apartment.

  Then she forced herself to stir, to get up, take Uncle Bax’s box from the closet and put it on the bed, and she thought, putting it down, that a few dollars should have been spared from all that Uncle Bax had sent to buy a spread. The ragged quilt looked awful.

  The box seemed bigger than she had remembered, now that it was time to remove it, take it through the streets and on the bus all the way back to the office. It was far too big to be carried inconspicuously, wrapped in whatever clever and unobtrusive way she might devise.

  She dumped the contents of the box out upon the bed, and she could see that there was too much junk to be gathered up into anything small. There was a cold knowledge, a bitter wisdom in her mind that told her she must walk out of here practically empty-handed. That not only must she not take the box nor its contents openly but that it would be better if she quit lugging the enormous old purse around and took instead something much smaller, a small flat bag just big enough for a wallet and a lipstick.

  If she couldn’t get the stuff out of the apartment—

  She twisted her hands together, and then she thought of Sean. If she gave him taxi fare …

  Or call the cops. The wish swept through her like an ache. Call the cops and just hand the whole thing over to them. Give them the letters, the ones she had left, tell them the story of Uncle Bax, Nueva Brisa, Mrs. Appleton, Mr. Shima—

  Of course cops were quite literal and wanted facts, not guesses and surmises, and they weren’t really crazy about mysteries. She would have to convince them that there was actually a plot, something was going on. Mrs. Appleton would help, of course.

  She knew in that instant that Mrs. Appleton wouldn’t help at all. And that supposing she did blow it all up like that, what would happen to Uncle Bax?

  Baxter Webb might be bargaining for his life down there in that improbable place, the banana republic Mr. Dunavan had told her about; Bax might be playing a game where every move meant a chance of death and for her to bring the police in on this end could simply mean that the game was over, spoiled, and he had lost.

  That first letter from him had seemed so cynical and smart-aleck on first reading, but thinking back on it now, hadn’t there been a kind of desperation there too? And an appeal? A reminder that she was his niece and that he was depending upon her for something very important?

  She sat rocking on the edge of the bed, looking at her haggard-eyed reflection in the mirror over the dresser, whispering to herself, “What on earth can I do?”

  Tom walked in. “Hi, Baby. He snapped on a lamp to dispel the gloom. “What’s going on? You’re home for something, Sean says.”

  “I … I was going to take all of this stuff of Uncle Bax’s down to the office and Mr. Dunavan was going to put it into the vault for me.”

  Tom seemed shocked. “What’ve you told him?”

  “Just that …” She hesitated, sensing that Tom wasn’t going to like what she had to say. “I told him I had some private papers I was worried about keeping in the apartment. And he offered to help.”

  “You should have told him you have a husband to watch over your papers, Jeff. Just put them back in the box. Nobody’s going to touch anything.”

  “Tom, something happened today. I met Mrs. Appleton. She called me at the office, and I met her for lunch, only she ran out before the food came. But she told me a few things. Mr. Shima was her cousin. He had decided to come to me openly just before he was killed, he had decided that he could trust me—”

  “Maybe he had decided that he could con you the way he was conning his blackmail victims.”

  “That’s possible, I suppose. Mrs. Appleton didn’t seem trying to fool me or anyone, though. She seemed awfully scared. She said I was in danger, that I mustn’t ever be alone in the apartment and that I was please to burn her letter, not to deliver it. Delivering the letters marks the people, she implied.” She didn’t want to argue with Tom; he was looking skeptical, pursing his lips, his eyes full of doubt. “I believed her, Tom.” She broke off to touch his arm as he stood there beside her. “Didn’t Sean tell you about the dog?”

  "What dog?”

  “The one that—” She stood up. “Let’s go on in the front room and let him tell it.”

  “He just left. Maybe he thought you’d come home early to check up and maybe he thought you didn’t like finding him here—”

  “I didn’t give that impression,” she said hotly, “because I didn’t feel that way. I know he’s here most days and that he’s really trying to help you, and that you depend on him, that you think his judgment is the best there is. I … Tom, what am I going to do with this stuff of Uncle Bax’s?”

  ‘Why in hell should you do anything except what Bax tells you to do?” There was a definiteness about Tom, a purpose, as if he had a stake here and knew it and meant to safeguard it. “You’ve accepted every dollar he’s sent. Go on. Tell me about the dog.”

  She told him Sean’s story of the dog but perhaps she wasn’t as good a storyteller as Sean because somehow it didn’t sound like much and she saw Tom’s expression turn to indifference even before she had finished. And now again she h
ad that sudden stilling and growing-small inside, the wish to hide, to be safe and hidden, the feeling of being near a trap.

  When she had finished, Tom waited a few moments as if to give the story a little thought, and then said, “We’ll keep our guard up. If I hear a dog in the hall I’m going to open the door.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I know what to do with a dog. Even the kind of dog you’ve cooked up in your imagination. Now, getting back to this stuff of Bax’s. I’ve been thinking about that. There’s something pretty big here—maybe. And I’ve decided that perhaps Uncle Bax isn’t in El Paso. Perhaps he’s still back in Nueva Brisa, enjoying that new wind and a lot more, while you do the job he needs to have done.”

  A hard bitter knot rose in her throat. I don’t care about Bax, she told herself fiercely. What is he to me, really? By what right did he involve me in this thing, this mystery filled with ugliness and fear? Tom was wrong. And Mrs. Appleton had been wrong. Uncle Bax was safe in El Paso. Safe in his usual hotel—whatever it was.

  She was the pawn, the monkey’s paw, pulling hot chestnuts out of a fire where she was damned well apt to get singed. She was a tool, a device, which he had manipulated with utter cynicism.

  “—so what I’ve decided to do,” Tom was saying across her line of thought, “—is to write Mr. Baxter Webb in Nueva Brisa. I think that if there’s a gringo in town of any importance, the postoffice will know about it, and Bax’ll get the letter. You’ll write it, of course. And you’ll tell Bax that some people seem rather stirred up here and that in order to deliver the last two letters, you need a thousand in cash.”

  The whole thing was so unexpected, so incredible, that she just stared at Tom without speaking.

  He reacted with anger. “Are you so stupid that you want to go on stumbling along the way you’ve done? For nothing? Don’t you grasp the fact that Uncle Bax has cut himself into somebody’s juicy pie? And that if you do the dirty work you deserve a part of the honey?”