How on earth would he react to her letter?
He could do one of several things. He could ignore it, if he were kind. Or he might try to reason with her, try to find out what this was all about and why she felt as she did towards him. Or, then, he might become very angry. Justifiably angry. Again Lottie was aware of her burning face. He’d been kindness itself with Edie. Would he remind her of that?
Of course if he were completely innocent, the letter might not mean anything at all to him. Lottie was baffled now, because she couldn’t recall the exact wording.
It might be possible to get the note back before he read it.
She could knock at his door and say that someone had left a message for her and had mistakenly put it where it was. Weak, and it sounded too silly. She could knock—and then when he opened the door pretend to drop something, a purse or a letter or something, and pick it up along with the note before he noticed.
The trouble was, if she drew him over to the door at all, he’d see the white folded sheet. Picking it up, reading it, would only take a moment. Then he’d open the door and face her with the open sheet in his hand.
Pinched with self-disgust she went closer to the big window, passing the loom and her bench. The black cat noticed her and backed away, then pretended an innocent playful inspection of a nodding flower, as if of course he hadn’t even noticed the birds. You old fraud . . .
Her eyes searched the other step, the doorway. She licked her lips. There was a sudden dryness in her throat. Under the edge of the door, the tiny white triangle shone in the light. She hadn’t pushed the note completely in out of sight.
I can walk over there and slip it out again.
There was even more noise from next door. It sounded as if the tenant were dragging boxes from the closet. She heard thuds, scrapes. And again, she sensed his hurry and his absorbed attention to whatever he was doing.
She went to her own door and opened it soundlessly. The black cat retreated to the courtyard entry. The chattering sparrows flew up to the edge of the roof and settled there in a row. She stepped out. The air was cool with a sea smell. She glanced carefully at the windows opposite. None of the shades had been lifted.
He must be working in there in the dark. But of course, she corrected herself instantly, he could have the lights on. It would soon be dusk. He might simply have thought it not worth while to open the blinds, then close them again within an hour or so.
The walk underfoot made scratchy sounds. They seemed loud in the stillness. In the center of the courtyard she paused, listened. From out here the sounds from the other flat were muffled, almost indistinguishable. She looked over at his door. The tip of paper seemed brilliantly white. She tried to swallow a knot of nervous apprehension. Suddenly it seemed desperately important to get that note back!
She went, walking as silently as she could, to his door. She bent there, put a finger tip on the narrow triangle of paper. She tried to scratch and worry it towards her.
It was stuck.
This was the double-folded corner. Inside, the sheet must have opened somewhat, fanning out. She managed to get the tiny corner between her fingers, and pulled. It moved a little and then she felt the paper begin to buckle as if it had encountered a loose splinter or some other obstruction. At the same time there was a loud papery rattle. The folded sheet seemed to act as a sort of amplifier. She jerked her hand away. Surely he had heard that inside.
She waited, biting her lip in frightened vexation. She couldn’t just stay here, couldn’t remain bent beside his doorstep. If he were suddenly to open the door, she’d feel a fool.
Well, there was more to it than embarrassment. She couldn’t quite explain it to herself, but something cold and ominous seemed to have invaded her mind. It was as if the note bore an identification of herself which would be disastrous!
She firmly put thumb and forefinger on the projecting bit, and yanked, and the paper burst free with a distinct, echoing pop. She wadded it in her fist as she hurried, first towards her own door and then—some blind instinct guiding her—to the open entry of the courtyard.
She heard a door open behind her.
She didn’t want to look back. She couldn’t help herself. At the gate she threw a single look back over her shoulder. His door was ajar and he stood there in the shadows. There were no lights on inside, as she had pictured to herself. The gloom behind him was thick as that in a cave.
His eyes were fixed on hers. She met his gaze with a feeling of shock. He’d lived next door, sharing the one roof, he’d been friends with Edie, he had come offering help and sympathy when Edie had died—and yet he was a stranger more unfamiliar than someone she’d never met.
She felt her fingers close tighter over the sheet of paper, wadding it against her thigh, to keep it from his sight.
Then she was in the street. There was sweat on her face; she hadn’t known it until the sea wind hit her as she stepped free of the wall. She went up a block, away from the bay, towards the middle of the peninsula. Down the street she saw a mailbox. She might not have noticed it, but there was a police car drawn up beside it. A man in a postman’s uniform was getting out of the car, and nearby was another figure, one that reminded her of Archer.
She turned at the next corner. She circled back until she reached the bay. Most of the bathers had left the beach. It was near enough the dinner hour so that the sea-food cafés were filling up. She passed one, felt the faces looking out at her as she walked. She felt utterly removed from the rest of the human race, set apart, a creature with unfathomable emotions and impulses.
“I must be crazy,” she whispered to herself.
People did go crazy with grief, with loss. And it seemed now, in retrospect, that her actions after Edie’s death had been those of a mentally unbalanced person. And now, she thought, I’m still no better. Writing the note, sticking it under his door, was the act of an idiot.
She walked out upon a small pier where boats were tied, leaned on the rail, opened her hand, and let the sheet of wadded paper fall to the water. It began to float away, looking very white. The paper gradually softened and filled with water. It flattened and finally sank.
I didn’t even reread it, she thought. She tried to remember what she had written. Something about his being the kind of person the police were looking for. An unpleasant secretive person who wrote anonymous letters confessing to murder. Silly, she thought, rubbing her hair back from her face. The whole thing’s very silly.
The idea of the letter, the confession, had seemed unreal, almost ridiculous from the first. She had dismissed it almost as soon as Archer had told her of it.
Then she remembered something else. Archer himself. The letter had had nothing to do with Archer’s opinion about Edie’s death.
Nothing silly about that—he was thoroughly convinced that it was murder. And he always had been.
The postman let down the side of the box and Archer looked in at a heap of mail, letters and bigger items, jumbled together in the bottom of the box. Then he squatted beside the postman and reached for a handful. The man gave him a close, sharp look as if he might be planning to tamper with the sacredness of Uncle Sam’s postal service.
Archer found what he was looking for almost at once, and it was a shock. He ripped open the envelope, and while he was doing it the postman muttered some kind of protest, and Archer paused long enough to show him the typed address on the envelope.
He grunted incredulously at the message. Almost instantly he decided that it had been written by a different person. The first letter had had an air of pompous righteousness. It had been deliberate, wordy, and erudite. But here, in this new letter, his sensitive inner ear caught a sort of juvenile defiance. A thumb-on-nose, yaah-yaah-yaah-you-can’t-catch-me note.
Two different people—or a split personality? Possibly the latter. The guy was admittedly a nut; why not?
He stood and revolved it mentally and listened to his hunches, and decided that he liked the idea of two differe
nt people better. He rammed the folded sheet and the envelope into his coat pocket. His first impulse was to hurry off to the flat next to Lottie Tomlinson’s and pound down the door. But he checked this impulse at once. Matthews would want to move carefully; he would want to see this letter and have it compared with the first. A stake-out, surveillance, was called for while this examination went on. Archer frowned into the distance, where the squad car sped towards headquarters with the purse Mr. Martin had given him. Then he went to his own car, flipped the switch on the radio, asked the operator for Matthews.
Matthews had gone out.
Archer requested a squad car; and then a warning stirred in the back of his mind. All this police activity around the mailbox might be noticed by the wrong people, and give fright. Lottie’s home was almost within sight of this corner. Archer directed the squad car to meet him three blocks down.
The postman came to the car to ask if he was needed further. He had a route to cover. Tomorrow was Sunday and he had no wish to work half of Saturday night. If Archer was through with him, he’d phone the post office and they’d send someone for him. Archer let him go.
While he waited for the squad car, Archer couldn’t resist a quick stroll, a roundabout block, to a point where he could see Lottie’s apartment. For the first time he took a really good look at the building, sizing it up. Upstairs, the big flat was vacant. They’d be asking about two-fifty a month until October. He could see the clean empty windows, the freshly painted ceilings, lit by the dying sunlight. The courtyard facing the street made a little private place, good for sunbathing and lounging and patio dining. He had never seen Lottie sitting out in it. He had the impression that Lottie spent her days in the recesses of her flat. Lying in the darkened bedroom. Or in the kitchen, bumbling over the fragments of a meal.
He sauntered nearer, avid for a close look at that other door.
Blinds down all around. The place had a closed, vacant look and for a moment Archer was stung with apprehension. This letter, both letters, could be a big joke! All the work he’d done with the Carrols, with Martin and with Lottie, his conviction about the truth of the confession, seemed no more than a gust of wind blowing through his brain, and gone. But then he looked again, seeing a newspaper scuffed aside by the step; and he got a new impression entirely.
All tucked up, he thought, like a mouse in its hole.
He turned in an inconspicuous manner and went back the way he had come. He was thinking, though, about the tenant in that other flat; and curiosity was a taste in his mouth, hungry and clinging, more real than the flavor of Martin’s whisky. He wanted to know. Face: its complexion, expression, its zeal and energy, its smile and frown. Body: its age and build, the way it moved, its strength, the way it dressed. The mind: what worm lay in it.
He found himself clenching his fists at his sides, and the movement had no resemblance to the semi-poetic steepling to which his fingers were accustomed.
Where had the bastard come from? What was his business, what did he do for a living? Whom did he know? Who let him into their homes, unaware, and let him talk to their kids and let him sit there nodding and judging and making plans inside his diseased brain? Had he been inside Lottie’s place, studying the little sister, probing the young mind just beginning to unfold? Sure he had!
Hell, Archer thought, he’d be willing to bet that the bastard had been a kind of chum to the kid! A big-brother or uncle type. A scrap of his conversation with Lottie returned: she still collected sea shells and stray dogs and sick birds. In that moment, Archer felt that if he turned he could see the bastard with the dead kid, as real as life, in that courtyard with a fluffed lump of feathers between them.
A surge of blood darkened his face. He licked his lips.
I’m jumping to conclusions, he reminded himself.
Got to do a lot of checking, quick. We’ll want the name, what references he gave in renting the flat, past history, record if he’s got one. We’re going to have to phone Lottie Tomlinson and get her out of there and talk to her. And contact the other neighbors without being seen.
And then, if the letter proves out, jump him.
It wasn’t going to be the same touch on the typewriter. Archer promised himself that, crediting his own subconscious antennas. But it could damned well be the same machine. The look of the typing on the page, the sheet itself, had registered with him somehow.
What kind of story lay behind a switch like that he couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t figure it, but he knew he was going to enjoy it immensely.
He turned into the street where the mailbox stood, and there two blocks away the squad car was just slowing to a stop. Archer quickened his step in its direction. It was then that some sort of reflected light, a twin twinkle like a pair of eyes, flickered at the edge of vision; and he glanced that way. Whatever it had been was gone. High, he thought. Roof level or near it. He frowned over the impression, then dismissed it.
In the attic Curt hurriedly crawled from the window embrasure and put the binoculars away under the cot. He slid rubber-soled sandals on his feet, hitched the jeans higher on his bare torso, went out into the other room. His mother was just entering from the door to the stairs. She had a sack of groceries in her arms; her purse dangled from a wrist. Someone was behind her. A man. Curt stopped, grew tense, a sensation almost like a desire to retch rising in his throat.
“Hello, Curt.” Under the blown, lustrous hair her face looked flushed, alive, and the mouth seemed full-lipped and pulsing with fresh color. She set the groceries on the table, dropped the purse, turned to the man who had hesitated at the doorway. “Come in. This is my boy. He was in bed asleep when you were here last night.”
The man looked at Curt. “Hi, there. I’ve seen you around.” He smiled. He came into the room with a quiet way of walking.
“You sure have,” Curt said. “I’ve been in some of your classes.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE SUN was going down. A bank of clouds lay like a feather-edge of gold out along the horizon, lit by the sun behind it; and the sea had great ropy paths of purple shadow in it. On the headland, the small yellow service station looked lonely but important, like a painted landmark set there to guide the ships.
A second car sat pulled in behind the convertible, black and white and marked with the emblem of the California Highway Patrol. One of the officers, with Uncle Florian, had stayed with the injured man in the toilet. The second officer was with Molly in the service station. He had pulled a stool from under the counter, got her to sit on it. He had offered to get a Coke from the machine for her, but she had shaken her head.
When Molly looked at him, he swam in and out of focus. A rocking pulse beat inside her skull. Her hands felt cold and remote, as if between them and her brain some connection had gone awry. “It isn’t Larry out there.” She repeated it, not quite believing it. At first she had been sure that the beaten, bloody thing in the toilet must be Larry, though it didn’t wear Larry’s face.
“Yes, we know it’s not your friend. It’s Bob Maule. He owns this place. Opened up two weeks ago.” The voice was patient and steadying. “It looks as if somebody might have tried a stick-up. And he put up a fight.”
She saw that in the officer’s mind this had nothing to do with her errand, her search for Larry, though she was sure it must have. “Have you called a doctor?”
“Ambulance on the way, miss.”
“Do you think he’s going to die?”
“Probably not. He took an awful clip on the back of the head but he’s not unconscious. Probably a concussion.”
“Couldn’t he tell you who did it?”
“We’ll try to talk to him after the doctor sees him.”
She tried to take it in, organize it so that it fitted into the rest of what she knew, the events of this strange day which had shifted into nightmare. She and Uncle Florian had stumbled on the aftermath of a robbery, that was all; it was a coincidence.
She looked up at the big man in the unifor
m and said, “Why don’t you check the cashbox?”
He nodded. He knew his way around in here; he went at once to a drawer fitted into the counter below an adding machine. He pulled it out. From where she sat Molly could see the money. “Scared out,” he, said.
“It wasn’t a stick-up,” Molly said. “It was something else.”
He looked at her. “There’s no sign that anyone came here to fix a flat. Your uncle looked. The dip tank is dry and the air hose back there isn’t connected.”
“He brought Larry here,” she said from her parched, scratchy throat. “Something went wrong.”
“This black car you keep talking about——”
“I’ve seen it somewhere. Around town. Newport.”
“We’ve put out a bulletin on it,” he reminded her. “We’ll find your friend.”
“He’s not a friend. He’s somebody I love, someone I love terribly.”
“I understand. It was just a manner of speaking.”
She wanted to cry again; it would have been a relief. But terror had dried her tears, parched her throat. She sat and trembled.
He wanted somehow to put her at ease. “Give me a good description. I can add it to what we have. Color of hair and eyes, height and weight. Age, and so on. We’ll locate him.” He picked up a pencil from the counter, turned a sheet of paper towards him. “The name again?”
“Larry Lebracht.”
“How old?”
The pencil poised in his fingers waved and glittered. After a moment he looked up at her curiously. Molly felt naked. It was then that the ambulance cut in, siren dying, from the highway. A sheriff’s car rolled in behind it.
“Wait here. I’ll be back.” He put down the pencil and hurried out to direct the ambulance driver. Molly rubbed a hand across her eyes.
She got to her feet. The room seemed unsteady. She caught the rim of the counter, pulling herself close, her face next to the glass pane. The big white ambulance rolled past the office, on out to the rest rooms. The sheriff’s car stopped behind the station and two officers got out and went hurriedly on. Molly felt alone, in a backwash. A cold despair settled in her, heavy as stone.
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