The Baxter Letters

by Dolores Hitchens

  He wasn’t in the lobby, he was outside, across the sidewalk at the curb, in the half-dark. She closed the lobby door behind her—the empty lobby, Mr. Keeley hadn’t been there with or without a mop—and walked slowly, self-consciously to where he stood. The half-dark took away the openness of the look he wore at the office. One of his big hands held a cigarette that glowed in the shadows. His face belonged here in the city’s gloom, somehow, not on a Nebraska farm nor on a Wyoming mountain. The look of outdoors was gone. She wanted to cry to him, Oh, don’t change; please don’t change because I like the way you are, I like plowman’s hands and I like the look of a western face, the rawboned honesty of it, the strength, the eyes that seem to see things far away. Please don’t turn into someone else!

  She stammered, “You gave me quite a surprise.”

  “I just decided all at once to do it this way,” he said. The voice was the same as usual, anyway. It was Mr. Dunavan’s voice, the friendly and interested voice that he used with her when he wasn’t dictating. “Maybe I’m going at it the wrong way. Well, if I am you can tell me.”

  “I’m sure you aren’t making any mistake.” His eyes seemed so intent, measuring, that she found herself blushing. He must have seen the name Burch on the label beside the buzzer. Did he suspect that she was Mrs. Burch, at times, or would he think that Burch must be the name of the mythical roommate? She wished she knew.

  “Do you have a few minutes to spare? Could we go to a coffee shop, or somewhere, and talk?”

  She sensed that his errand had nothing to do with the office, and wondered in embarrassment how she could have been so dense as to think so. “I have plenty of time.”

  They walked for a couple of blocks and into the brightness of Broadway. In the middle of the next block they found a delicatessen and coffee shop, brightly lit, crowded now with people either eating or shopping in the deli for things to take home for dinner. Jennifer took in a blur of impressions, the good smells of food, the tinkle of glass and silver, a hum of conversation. Mr. Dunavan had her elbow and was guiding her towards the rear of the place. She saw some half-familiar faces, people who were tenants of her own building, people she’d passed in the lobby over the months or with whom she’d shared the elevator.

  They found a table for two, a very small table at the end of the deli counter, squeezed in between a refrigerated pastry case and a towering display of cheeses. He pulled out her chair for her, then seated himself opposite. She saw with relief that he was back in focus, he was Mr. Dunavan, the one she knew.

  He offered her a menu. “My detective friend called me just before I left the office. I was late getting out.” He glanced up as a neat little waitress hurried over. “What do you want?” he asked Jennifer. “Just coffee? Or haven’t you had dinner?”

  “No.” She was gazing blankly at the menu.

  “How about some blintzes?” he offered. “This looks like the kind of place where they’ll be pretty good.”

  “Fine.” She closed the menu, glad to leave it to him. A chill had touched her at the thought of the police.

  Chapter 16

  “My detective friend was fishing,” Mr. Dunavan went on after the waitress had left. “It seems there has been another murder a lot like Mr. Shima’s. He didn’t give me any details, except that this time it’s a woman. He just wondered if my friend—that’s you—had been asking questions again. I told him no. But I think he’d like to tie Mr. Shima up to this new one.”

  “He didn’t give you the woman’s name?”

  “No. He was being quite close-mouthed. He wanted me to tell him something. So I decided to look up your address before I left the office, or rather I asked Miss Vonn for it—she was still there, getting into her coat.” A gleam of humor came into his eyes. “I think she got some peculiar ideas out of my request. She looked awfully wise.” He was watching to see if Jennifer could laugh about it.

  She tried, but she thought again with a touch of panic: He must have seen the name there beside the buzzer. When she had put down the address and the apartment number in her application for the job, she had never dreamed that anyone would ever come to check.

  Around them was warmth, conversation, movement and light, but she felt cold and unreasonably alone. There was silence between them. She wondered what he was thinking, what he might have guessed.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?” he asked quietly.

  She tried to stammer out a No, a firm nonchalant No, but it wouldn’t come. She knew she must look miserable, scared, stupid. She wrung her hands under the edge of the table.

  “Are you happy?”

  The tears came, but no words yet, and she wouldn’t look at him.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked,” he said contritely. “It’s none of my business. None whatever. I guess I’ve developed a few peculiar ideas of my own over the months—even more peculiar than Miss Vonn’s.”

  “Please don’t apologize. I want you to … to care,” she whispered. “I want it more than anything in the world.”

  He seemed puzzled then, and some of the remoteness came into his face, the detachment she had become accustomed to at the job. He was removing himself from her, disentangling his feelings, his affection—she almost cried to him then, there in the cafe, Please don’t turn away.

  “I have no right to … to ask you to care about me,” she said in a choked voice.

  “But I do.”

  “I know.” She went on miserably twisting her hands, her shamed face bent.

  The brisk little waitress brought the blintzes, the coffee. I’m going to choke if I try to eat, she thought. But then he leaned toward her; he put his hand beside her plate, palm up; he motioned with his fingers until she slipped one of her hands into his. “You look starved,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but you look as if you haven’t eaten all day. Please eat some for me.”

  She nodded, she glanced at him quickly, meeting his eyes. The remoteness, if it had been there at all, was gone. He did care and he wasn’t trying in the least to hide it. “I’ll … I’ll try.”

  He smiled a little, not letting go of her hand, in fact, squeezing her fingers tighter. “Let’s imagine something for a minute. A pretend thing, the way we did when we were kids. Suppose your dad was here, suppose he just walked in all at once and came here to this table and asked me, ‘So, how are you treating my little girl?’ And suppose I had to admit that I was letting you go hungry? How would he feel about that?”

  She tried to answer his smile because the remarks had been meant as a joke, but first she took a handkerchief from the old purse and dabbed away the tears. “If Dad saw these blintzes he’d say I was doing fine. He might ask why I was having stuffed pancakes for my dinner. But perhaps not. He’d see how good they look.”

  “I guess my dad might say about the same.” He released her hand, waited watchfully for her to pick up her fork. “We had pretty conservative meals, as I remember. My dad was a beef and potatoes man. He’s a long way from here. He didn’t think much of my idea of leaving home.”

  She dared ask it at last. “And where is home?”

  “Colorado. Northern Colorado.”

  She nodded, thinking that it all fit, it belonged with what she had thought of him. “You must have real winters there.”

  “You wouldn’t believe.”

  They ate, and her feeling of exhaustion, of bitter loss and regret, abated. The food was good, the coffee hot and fragrant. For this little while, she told herself, I can let myself imagine that Mr. Dunavan is my boyfriend, that I’m like other girls, that I’m having dinner out with him and that there is nothing at home to be explained—or to be concealed.

  “Getting back to my detective friend,” said Mr. Dunavan, pausing to take a husky swig of his coffee. “—who gave me the excuse to come barging out here tonight—if he insists I guess I’ll have to give him your name. You can talk to him at the office, if it comes to that.”

  With a cop you fly in a perfectly straight line
. You answer his questions. You give just the facts—the facts he asks for. You don’t make any detours to examine an Iowa conscience.

  “All that I have are suspicions and hunches. Will he listen to them? And after tonight there won’t be anything left because I’m going to deliver the last letter. To Brooklyn. And that’s the end.” And then again came the nagging half-thought, there was something about this part of it that needed explaining. Something about Uncle Bax’s request that she deliver the Coulter letter.

  She saw then what it was. She opened her mouth to tell Mr. Dunavan. But he was saying, “There is another letter? You didn’t put it in the vault?”

  “No.” She hated to admit that in a way she’d lied to him. “I have it here. Uncle Bax sent a large bill to pay for its delivery. But it’s not the money, it’s mostly that I am determined to get the thing finished, done, and be through. To know that there is nothing further for Bax to ask. It’s crazy, I know. And perhaps very dangerous. But perhaps tonight I’m not quite sane. Perhaps the mystery and the possibility of evil have made me unbalanced.”

  “I can’t let you go over to Brooklyn on any such errand,” he said slowly, with a look of unhappiness. “I can’t and I won’t. There are too many unexplained angles in your uncle’s affairs, and I keep getting this feeling that he’s used you, he’s put you into a place of danger for his own ends. He’s taken advantage of your honesty and your innocence.” He was tactful in not saying that Uncle Bax had also taken advantage of a possible need for money. “I don’t trust him.”

  I suppose I could say, I don’t owe him anything. And put the letter into the vault with the rest of his stuff. But tonight I made up my mind to do this last thing—because it is the last. There is nothing more to be delivered. I won’t go back to Mrs. Appleton again. She did what he wanted her to do, all those long years ago, she took the boy away from his father and got him out of the country, and then the boy died, and she can’t have enjoyed remembering that for all of these years. I won’t take her letter to her even if Bax wants me to. But in a way when I delivered that first letter to Mr. Shima, when I took the money for taking the letter, I … in an unspoken way I agreed to deliver the rest. And this final one, Mr. Coulter’s—yes, I guess I do intend to take it over to Brooklyn tonight.”

  She folded her hands on the table’s edge, waiting, wondering what he would say. He would say she ought to be locked up for her own protection. He would escort her back to the apartment and command her to stay there. But after a moment, he said, “I’ll go with you. If you’ll let me. Or even if you won’t. I can’t let you go wandering around at night in strange places.”

  A man was standing close to their table; he was examining the cheese-rack. He had a paper under his arm, and a lower-corner headline caught Jennifer’s attention.

  WOMAN FOUND

  NEAR DEATH

  Below was a subheading in smaller print.

  First Thought To Be

  Victim Of Heart Attack

  Her eyes drifted to the body of the news item.

  A well-dressed woman of about forty, who according to police bore no means of identification was discovered dying in the vicinity of

  The man carrying the paper moved away, turning so that the rest of the item was lost to view. Jennifer sipped the last of her coffee, aware of a nagging uneasiness. Mr. Dunavan was saying, “I can’t imagine why I didn’t remember until now; I meant to tell you as soon as I saw you. What my newspaper pal found out. I remembered it when you spoke of Mrs. Appleton and what happened to the boy.”

  She jerked her thoughts away from that unfinished news item. “You were going to try to find out what happened to the General’s wife. Bax brought her to New Orleans, she was reunited with her son, the boy died. And that’s the last we know.”

  “I found out what happened to her,” he said in a grim tone. “I wish I hadn’t. It’s not a pleasant piece of news. She killed herself when the child died. In New Orleans. There was a temporary question of identity—mystery woman, all that—but in the end the De la Cruz family took both the body of the boy and of his mother back to Nueva Brisa and gave them burial in the family mausoleum. And the General was taken out of prison just long enough to go to the funeral.”

  Jennifer was aware of a wrench of shock and grief, as though she had known these people, as though they’d been part of her own past, her own life. The image of the proud imperious woman rose before her mind’s eye, the unflinching face turned to the camera, the gaze level and unafraid.

  “She must have thought,” Jennifer said slowly, “that she had done the unforgivable thing. She had run away and taken her child, and then the child died. I wonder if she ever knew that her family had been behind it all?”

  “Probably not,” he answered. “I think your Uncle Bax never lets his left hand victim know what his right hand is doing. I hated to tell you this about the woman; and yet it might have a point in the present situation. And if we’re involved we ought to know everything we can. Shall we get started? You do still want to go over to Brooklyn tonight?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I want very much to go, to get finished. More than ever. And Mr. Coulter must be the last link. There was something I wanted to ask you about the Coulter letter, and now I’ve forgotten what it was.”

  “You’ll have time to think about it on the train.”

  They left the train and caught a cab, left the cab at the nearest main corner. Mr. Coulter might be alarmed by a cab drawing up to his door at this hour. Or perhaps not. Mr. Dunavan paid off the cab and he and Jennifer struck off eastward, a block of fairly large old homes, trees whose leaves rustled drying in the night air, a couple of dogs who barked, street lamps here and there, a few cars passing. At the end of the block Mr. Dunavan paused. “We’ve run out of houses.”

  Ahead, across what seemed to be a great area of broken and hilly and vacant land, lay distant tracks on which a train stood dozing, a freight train with strings of tank cars and a lighted caboose, and past that a tangle that must be railroad yards. Overhead sodium-vapor lamps made phosphorescent splotches on the dark, outlining the train that lay between them and the yards, and there were the distant hoots of diesel engines, the dim hum of motors, the screech of iron wheels. Jennifer looked at the black waste before them. “It’s a dump or something.”

  “Mr. Coulter must have lived here a long time ago, and Uncle Bax didn’t keep track of what happened to him. If that’s the case I can’t say I’m unhappy about it,” Mr. Dunavan decided.

  As if in answer and to confound him, a lighted square appeared against one of the hilly heaps. And then, as it all fell into focus, the rim of the heap could be seen to be a rooftop, shadowy walls appeared behind the scratchy pale outline of a picket fence, and there was even a sidewalk.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Mr. Dunavan, disgusted.

  “I will too,” she agreed. “I thought nothing was there. Except junk. It’s out there all by itself, a house that got lost.”

  “Maximum privacy is what it’s got,” Mr. Dunavan said.

  He took her arm to guide her. She felt shaky and scared, and she wondered at her mood back at the apartment and the crazy impulse that had sent her here on a fool’s errand this late at night. If Mr. Dunavan hadn’t been with her she would have turned to scurry back the way she had come.

  They were in front of the dimly-visible gate, and he opened it for her to pass into the yard. A sense of remembrance plucked at her, and she thought of all the times he had held the little gate open for her at the steno pool, the times he had made the effort to be courteous, to show that he regarded her as a person instead of an adjunct to a typewriter, and then she couldn’t stop herself, she touched his hand on the gate.

  His other hand came to rest immediately on her arm; he was turning her and she turned willingly and went close, and this was better, this was a million times better than anything she had known before—even though with a bitter taste she knew that nothing could come of it, nothing at all. This was dead-e
nd, as dead-end as Mr. Coulter’s street. But it was sweet, it was terribly and achingly sweet all the same.

  He kissed her, very gently. He had a clean smell, up close; he smelled of laundered shirt and clean wool and scrubbed skin, and his big hands on her waist had a surprising and pleasing strength.

  I didn’t know what I wanted, she thought, fighting the tears. I didn’t know what I wanted until it was entirely too late.

  “Don’t cry,” he whispered. “It’s all going to turn out all right. Wait and see. It’s going to be all right.”

  He must think that she was crying for fright, here at the strange old isolated house which sheltered strange Mr. Coulter, and he was telling her not to be afraid, nothing was going to harm her. She choked back the tears. She couldn’t tell him why she was crying.

  “If you aren’t happy,” he said softly, “I’m going to move heaven and earth to change things. I won’t leave you in a place or with anyone, if you aren’t happy. You can bet your boots on it.”

  She didn’t have any boots to bet, but she saw with a terrific inward jolt that he hadn’t been thinking about Mr. Coulter or the situation here at the moment at all. He was talking about her life. And he was promising that there would be changes made if she weren’t happy.

  She believed him. It was strange to stand there in the dark in this place out of nowhere, and to know that her whole existence was being changed, turned around, pointed in a different direction. This was an improbable place for such an important event, an improbable time. But when Mr. Dunavan said that he had no intention of seeing her remain where she wasn’t happy, she felt complete confidence in whatever he meant to do.

  “We have a lot to talk over,” he said against her ear. “Do we really have to visit Mr. Coulter and hand him his letter?”

  “I … I guess so,” she whispered back. “I want to get rid of it. I want to be finished.”