The Listening Walls

by Margaret Millar

  “No one could have stopped me. No one even has the right to question me about it. As a matter of fact, whatever employee of the bank informed Dodd about the check was guilty of improper conduct. Dodd holds no offi­cial position, and private records shouldn’t be open to him.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never met him.”

  “Miss Burton has,” she said, with deliberation. “Last night.”

  He tried to look indifferent. She could see his face in the mirror behind the counter, trying on various expres­sions none of which seemed to fit. He said finally, “So she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”

  “She didn’t intend to tell me anything, don’t be hard on her. She thought I’d come to the office as a spy for the great Brandon-Dodd combine. That’s a laugh, isn’t it?” She pushed away the empty plate with an expression of distaste as if she’d suddenly decided that she hadn’t been hungry after all and now regretted eating the hamburger. “Miss Burton’s in love with you, I suppose you know that.”

  “No, I don’t!” he said sharply. “You’re imagin­ing . . .”

  “It’s time you found out, then. It’s written all over her, Rupert. I feel rather bad about it.”

  “Why should you?”

  “Oh, empathy, I guess. It’s happened to me too, being in love with someone who hardly noticed me. That was years ago, of course,” she added quickly. “Before I met Gill.”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you in a hurry?”

  “Why?”

  “You keep looking at that clock on the wall.”

  “Well, I have to get back to the office pretty soon.”

  “I thought you weren’t going back to the office this afternoon.”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “Miss Burton.”

  “Miss Burton,” he said easily, “almost managed to con­vince me I wasn’t feeling well and should go home. The fact is, I’m fine and I intend to spend the afternoon work­ing.” He swung round on the stool as if he intended to get up and leave. Instead, after a second’s hesitation, he com­pleted the full circle and faced the counter again. “Let’s have some coffee, eh?”

  The maneuver would have been obvious even if she hadn’t already been suspicious of him. By tilting her head slightly, Helene could see in the mirror the reflection of the entrance door. A young woman had just come in and was surveying the room with an air of anxiety. She was well built and pretty, dressed in a skin tight woolen suit, a feathered hat, half a dozen strings of colored glass beads, and patent leather pumps with heels so high that she stood at a forward angle as if she were bucking a high wind. When she put up her hand to adjust the feathered hat over her blond curls, a platinum wedding band gleamed under the lights.

  “She’s rather pretty,” Helene said.

  “Who is?”

  “The young woman by the door. She appears to be looking for someone.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Well, notice now.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Oh, you might be interested. She is. She’s coming your way.”

  “She can’t be. I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  Rupert turned and gave the girl a long, cold, deliber­ate stare. She stopped abruptly, then headed for the cigarette machine, moving with little wobbly steps on the high, narrow heels. Helene noticed that her feet were proportionately larger than the rest of her, very wide and flat, as if she’d spent a considerable period of her life walking barefoot. When she had fished the cigarettes out of the trough, the girl put them in her black patent leather handbag and walked toward the exit. One of the men sitting at a table gave a low whistle as she passed, but she paid no attention, as if she hadn’t heard the sound or didn’t know what it meant or for whom it was intended.

  “I think she’s a farm girl,” Helene said. “That getup looks like something she’s copied from a movie maga­zine. I suppose you might call her a blonde with a good tan or a brunette with a good bleach job, depending on your viewpoint.”

  “I have no viewpoint. I don’t know the woman.”

  “She’s probably one of the secretaries in your office building and has a mad, mad crush on you.”

  “You’re being ridiculous. I’m not the type of man women get crushes on.”

  “Oh, but you are. You make a perfectly splendid father image, firm but kindly, strong but gentle, that sort of thing. It’s fatal—for a girl that age. How old would you say she is? Twenty-two? Twenty-five?”

  “I haven’t thought about it and don’t intend to.”

  “Years and years younger than Miss Burton, anyway, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Stop playing games.”

  Helene smiled. “I like games. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. It’s kind of amusing, isn’t it, Gill and Dodd sniffing around like a pair of nervous bloodhounds and me trying to put them off the scent? Your scent.”

  “Why are you trying?”

  “I told you, I like games.”

  “I like games too, when the grand prize isn’t my own skin. This is the second time you’ve warned me about Gill’s activities. What’s your real reason, Helene?”

  “It’s too complicated to explain.”

  “Don’t explain, then,” he said.

  “I won’t.”

  “I want to thank you, anyway, for all the trouble you’ve gone to.”

  “You’re welcome. At least I think you’re welcome. I don’t know. I—I’m beginning to feel like a traitor. I’d like to be reassured that I’m not, that I’ve done the right thing in coming here.”

  “You’ve done the right thing,” he said gravely. “Thank you again, Helene. Someday, perhaps soon, Amy will be here to thank you too.”

  “Amy? Soon?”

  “I hope so.”

  “She’s coming back?”

  “Of course she’s coming back. What made you think she wasn’t?”

  “Nothing—special.”

  “Maybe by Thanksgiving, or at least by Christmas, we’ll all be together again. Everything will be the same as it always was.”

  “The same,” she repeated dully. “Of course. Precisely the same.”

  Precisely. Inevitably. Irrevocably.

  She rose, one hand pressed against her mouth to stifle a sound she could never let anyone else hear.

  Later, when she was asked, she couldn’t remember ex­actly how she spent the next couple of hours. She recalled walking along many streets, staring into the windows of shops and the faces of strangers. For a long, or a little, time she sat on a bench in Union Square watching sad-eyed old men feed bread crumbs and popcorn to the pigeons. The pigeons were plump and sleek and did not resemble Amy at all, but Helene drew back in protest when one of them came too close to her foot. She was repelled by its dependence, its insistent docility, which it seemed to be forcing on her. Amy. Amy again. By Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. No hope of never.

  It started to rain lightly and the old men abandoned their benches and ambled off to shelter. Helene put on her gloves and rose, ready to leave, when she saw the girl from Lassiter’s grill entering the Square from Powell Street. She had no idea whether the girl would recognize her or whether it would be important if she did, but simply as a precaution she picked up a discarded newspa­per from the grass and held it in front of her as a spying shield.

  She thought at first that the girl was alone and that the man walking parallel to her was just about to pass her and be on his own way. He didn’t pass. He kept right on walking beside her but at a distance, as if the two of them were in the midst or the aftermath of a quarrel. They approached the bench where Helene sat hidden behind the limp newspaper, with the pigeons cooing and coaxing at her feet.

  The man had the sa
me startling color contrast as the girl, very light hair and deeply tanned skin. They might have been brother and sister. The man was the older of the two, perhaps in his early thirties. There were clearly defined laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, but he wasn’t laughing. He looked pale under his tan, and feeble under the loud plaid sport coat. Helene had never seen him before but she remembered others like him. Years ago during the depression in Oakland, her way to school led her past a poolroom where jobless young men used to hang out for lack of anything better to do. On their faces, in their posture, they all shared a com­mon expression, not bitter or angry, but listless, as if they hadn’t expected much anyway. The man in the plaid coat wore the same expression.

  The farm girl and the poolroom buff. They looked out of place in the Square and with each other. She couldn’t imagine what connection either of them could have with Rupert. I must have been mistaken, she thought. Rupert was telling me the truth when he said he didn’t know the girl, had never seen her before. He’s probably been telling the truth about everything. Sus­picion is contagious. I caught it from Gill.

  It was nearly four o’clock when she returned to Gill’s office and found him with his topcoat on and his briefcase under his arm, ready to depart.

  “You’re soaking wet,” he said. “Where have you been?”

  “Oh, walking. Looking at things.”

  “If you hurry, you can catch the 4:37 train home.”

  “Aren’t you coming too?”

  “Later. I have to see Dodd.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s time we had a showdown with Rupert.”

  “But why now, today?”

  “The dog’s been found.”

  She looked at him stupidly. “Dog? What . . .”

  “Amy’s dog,” he said.

  15.

  “The Sidalia Kennels,” Dodd said. “It’s a combination small-animal hospital and boarding kennel on Skyline Boulevard just outside the city limits. He brought the dog in Sunday night, the fourteenth of September. The vet himself wasn’t there but a college kid, a Cal Aggie student who helps out during the summer, was on duty at the time. The dog had a spot of eczema on his back and Kellogg’s instructions were to keep him there until fur­ther notice. He paid a month’s board in advance. The dog was wearing a plaid harness but no leash. He’s in good shape, according to the vet; the eczema’s gone and he’s ready to leave whenever Kellogg wants to pick him up. . . . Did you call Kellogg’s office, by the way?”

  Gill nodded. “Miss Burton said he left at noon to go home.”

  “We’ll catch him there then. You understand, don’t you, that there’s nothing much we can do except ask him questions and hope for answers. It’s not illegal to park a dog at a kennel. And it’s not illegal to use a power of at­torney, even fifteen thousand dollars’ worth.”

  “What would he want with all that money?”

  “Let’s go and find out. We’ll take my car if you don’t mind.”

  With the slackening of the rain, a wind had risen, and the little Volkswagen wavered with the gusts as if it were going to roll like tumbleweed across the road. But there was no place for it to roll. All the way out Fulton Street the five o’clock traffic moved bumper to bumper. Gill sat with his fists clenched against his thighs, and every time Dodd applied the brakes, Gill’s foot stamped on the floor­board.

  “It’s a little car,” Dodd said after a time. “It only needs one driver.”

  “Sorry.”

  “There’s no need to get all tensed up about this, Bran­don. When we confront him with what we know of the truth, he may break down and tell us the rest of it. Then again, he may have a nice pat explanation for everything.”

  “Including the money?”

  “The money part’s easy. He needed it to send to Amy—her expenses in New York are running higher than she expected.”

  “She isn’t in New York.”

  “So if I were Kellogg, I’d say, prove it.”

  “I will, even if I have to wring the truth out of him with my bare hands.”

  Dodd was silent a moment, apparently engrossed in guiding the car through the traffic which had thinned out somewhat west of Presidio Boulevard. “Come on now, Brandon. You’re not really figuring on that bare-hand bit.”

  “I am.”

  “Why are you carrying a gun, then?”

  “I—don’t know. I bought it this afternoon. I’ve never owned a gun before. It suddenly occurred to me that I ought to have one, that I needed one.”

  “And now you feel better?”

  “No.”

  “Nor do I,” Dodd said grimly. “Get rid of it.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “I think it will. You’re not the type who should be mess­ing around with loaded guns.”

  “I guess I knew that,” Gill said. “It’s not loaded. I didn’t buy any cartridges.”

  Dodd made a little sound that seemed to indicate amusement or relief or some of both. “I can’t figure you, Brandon.”

  “If I wanted to be figured, as you put it, I would have gone to a psychiatrist, not a detective. Turn right at the next corner. The house is in the middle of the third block.”

  “You’d better leave the gun in the car.”

  “Why? It’s not loaded.”

  “Kellogg might get the idea that it is, and counter with one of his own that is loaded. That would leave us out on a pretty thin limb.”

  “Have it your way.” Gill handed over the gun and Dodd locked it inside the glove compartment.

  “There’s one more thing, Brandon. Let me do the talking. At first, anyway. You can horn in later if you like, but right at the beginning let’s not get this thing slob­bered up with emotions.”

  Gill got out of the car, stiffly. “I don’t like your choice of language.”

  Dodd’s reply was lost in the wind. He pulled up the collar of his coat and followed Gill up the walk to the porch.

  It was a middle-income neighborhood where great at­tention was paid to outward appearances. Lawns no bigger than an elephant’s ear were groomed to perfection, hedges barely had time to grow before they were clipped. The roses and camellias were fed almost as well and regularly as the occupants of the houses, and were probably given more care and inspection for signs of dis­ease. It was a street of conformity; where identical houses were painted at the same time every spring, a place of rules where gardens, parenthood and the future were planned with equal care, and even if everything went wrong the master plan remained in effect—keep up ap­pearances, clip the hedges, mow the lawn, so that no one will suspect that there’s a third mortgage and that Mother’s headaches are caused by martinis, not migraine.

  Dodd asked, “Who picked the house?”

  “Amy did.” Gill pressed the door chime. “That is to say, she took my advice. The property was part of an es­tate sale which I found out about before it was announced on the open market.”

  “She could have afforded something more elaborate, though?”

  “She could, yes. But not Rupert. Amy has always in­sisted on living within Rupert’s income.”

  “Why?”

  Gill looked annoyed, and Dodd wasn’t sure whether it was the question that bothered him or the fact that no one was responding to the door chime.

  “My sister,” Gill said, “believes in the good old-fash­ioned type of marriage where the husband provides the financial support. It is not a case of stingi—of thriftiness.”

  The quick switch of words interested Dodd. So he really thinks she’s stingy. That probably means he’s tried to borrow money from her and she refused. I wonder how hard up he actually is and to what degree his desperate need for Amy is more financial than brotherly.

  Inside the house a telephone began to ring. It rang ei
ght times, ten times, then stopped for a few seconds and began again, as if the caller suspected that the first dial­ing had been incorrect.

  “He’s not here,” Dodd said. “There’s no use wasting our time.”

  “Wait just a few more minutes. He might be in the shower.”

  “Or in Santa Cruz.”

  “Why Santa Cruz?”

  “No reason.” Dodd shrugged. “I just picked the name out of a hat as a place to go when you don’t want to stay where you are.”

  “You must have had a reason for picking that name rather than any other.”

  “It may not be valid.”

  “Let’s hear it anyway.”

  It was getting dark. The lights in the houses on both sides of the street began coming on almost simultaneously. For a few moments, before drapes were drawn and blinds shut, the street had a festive air, a look of Christmas.

  “It’s just a hunch,” Dodd said. “Suppose Kellogg decided to skip town, what would be the first thing he’d do?”

  “Get some cash together.” “He already did that this morning. What do you think his next move might be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either; I’m just guessing. But judging from what I’ve heard about some of his characteristics, I have a notion he’d pick up his dog. The Sidalia Kennel is on Skyline Boulevard, and Skyline Boulevard leads to Santa Cruz. If he left the office at noon, as Miss Burton claims, he could easily be in Santa Cruz by this time. From there he’d probably head for L.A.”

  “Santa Cruz isn’t on the direct route to L.A.”

  “He may be trying to avoid direct routes.”

  “We can’t assume that he’s left town,” Gill said. “Why should he? He doesn’t know we’ve found out about the dog and the cash.”

  “Someone may have tipped him off.”

  “That’s impossible. No one else knows about it.”

  “No one?”

  “Just my secretary. And my wife, Helene. You can rule them out, of course.”

  “Of course,” Dodd said, but the ironic tone nullified the words. “Where is your wife now?”