“Yes.”
“Well, then . . . We can’t talk here. Voss is watching. He hates me, we have a great mutual hate.”
Charlotte unlocked the other door. The old man climbed into the car, running his hand over the upholstered seat with a sigh of satisfaction. “This is the life, yes sir, this is where I ought to be sitting, a big shot. And I would be, too, if it wasn’t that years ago I got an ulcer. A peptic ulcer, the doc called it. Sometimes I suffer—how I suffer! Right now I feel good. My name is Tidolliani, by the way. Tiddles, they call me.”
“Mine is Keating.”
“I know. I heard you tell Voss. I was listening at the window.”
“Why?”
He looked surprised. “Why? Well, I like to know what my enemies are doing so I can outwit them.”
Charlotte pulled away from the curb. She suspected that the old man, Tiddles, wasn’t entirely sane, but he seemed harmless and, besides, he had put into words her own feeling about Voss. (She thought of how angry Lewis would be if he ever found out. He was always trying to make her promise not to pick up hitchhikers, and he’d even bought her a gun to keep in the glove compartment of the car. Though she was flattered by Lewis’ concern, she’d refused to accept the gun.)
“You can stop anywhere now,” Tiddles said.
She turned off the next side street and parked the car. She asked abruptly, “Where is Violet?”
“I don’t know, but Voss does. He knew she wasn’t up in her room. He took her away himself in a car two hours ago, him and another man, one of the new roomers.”
“Took her away?”
“Well, she acted like she didn’t want to go. The other man was driving the car, an old blue coupe with an out-of-state license.”
“Did she have a suitcase with her?”
“No. The three of them drove off together, and pretty soon Voss and the roomer came back. Voss had two bottles of muscatel with him, and didn’t even offer me a drink. As if I cared,” he said bitterly. “As if I cared.”
“Violet didn’t come back later on by herself?”
“No. Maybe she never will.”
“Why do you say that? Of course she’ll come back,” Charlotte said firmly. “And when she does, I want you to tell her that I’ll call her tomorrow morning, in case Voss forgets.”
“He won’t forget, but he won’t tell her.” He glanced at her slyly out of the corner of his eye. “You might think I exaggerate about Voss, eh, because I hate him? Wrong! I don’t! He is a cheap crook that ought to be in jail. When I think of the people they put in jail nowadays, and here is Voss running loose on the streets! I have a friend who committed a murder. He had a record so clean you could eat off it, he never even put a slug in a pay phone, but he got sent up for life. They ought to have let him go. He’d learned his lesson, he’d never do it again. Besides there was only this one person he ever wanted to murder, his wife it was. A very nice lady but she made him nervous. Take a man like Voss, now. He would do anything for a dime, anything that was mean and petty and miserable and low enough. Yes. Yes, he even thinks he can play the piano and the harmonica!”
The old man was getting drunk on words and hate.
Charlotte said, “I’ll drive you home now.”
“All right,” he said with a sigh. “All right.”
“It was kind of you to go to all this trouble.”
“Think nothing of it. It was a pleasure.”
He got out at the corner nearest Voss’s house. Though he seemed tired, he had obviously enjoyed his little conspiracy with Charlotte against Voss.
“Voss,” he said, “Voss will think twice before coming in with two bottles of muscatel and not even offering me a drink.”
“Thanks for your help, and good night, Mr. . . .”
He spread his hands. “Such a hard name. You can call me Tiddles like the rest.”
“Good night, Tiddles.”
“I’ll wait up for Violet.”
He shuffled up the street, his head bent against the wind.
She thought about the old man all the way home. He was getting senile. The only thing that kept him alive was his hatred for Voss.
She put the car away in the garage, glad to be back again. The sight of her wide-windowed cheerful house raised her spirits. She thought, I was silly to get upset and worried over Violet. I’ll phone her tomorrow, help her in some way. The old man must have been exaggerating about Voss . . .
She was raising her hand to pull down the garage door when the blow struck her. She had no time to duck, or even to be aware that she’d been hit on the side of the head.
She dropped stiffly like a felled tree.
4
In the dream she was riding in a long, grey bus with Lewis and Voss and Violet and the old man, Tiddles. The rest were quarreling fiercely, and Charlotte kept trying to pacify them, to reason with them. But the words that came out of her mouth were terribly wrong:
You must calm down and regurgitate yourselves. You must stop this synthetic acne and parturition. I’ll call the police and you’ll all be incarcinomated. Stop the bus, I say, stop the pus!
When she regained consciousness she was lying on the davenport in her own sitting room. Lewis was kneeling beside her, urging her to drink from the bottle of Scotch he held under her nose as if the fumes alone were medicinal like smelling salts.
She grimaced and pushed the bottle away. “No—no . . .”
“Charley . . . Darling, are you all right?”
“Yes.” There was a painful area on the side of her head, but no swelling and the skin wasn’t broken; her coronet of braids had softened the blow.
“I found you in a faint on the driveway. I keep telling you, Charley, you’re overworking.”
She sat up, feeling dizzy and nauseated. “Someone hit me,” she said in a surprised voice. “On the head.”
“Lie down, darling.”
“No . . .”
“You hit your head when you fell.”
“No. Someone else—where’s my purse?”
“Purse? I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you find it?”
“I didn’t look for it, naturally,” Lewis said, frowning. “I came back to apologize for being irritable and found you on the driveway.”
“Lewis, get me the flashlight.”
“Why?”
“I want to see if my purse is out there.”
“You shouldn’t move around. I’ll go and look.”
“No. Let me.”
“Do you have to be so damned independent? Can’t I ever do anything for you? Hell, Charley . . .”
Her face was set and stubborn. He found the flashlight in the utility drawer in the kitchen and they went outside together to look for the purse. There was no sign of it.
Lewis said, “How much money was in it?”
“Forty dollars or so.”
“You’ll have to report it to the police.”
“In the morning,” Charlotte said. She didn’t point out to him what she observed in front of the garage door where she’d fallen. It was a dribble of moist sand. She hadn’t been to the beach for a month and there was no way the sand could have come there accidentally. Moist sand packed in a stocking or a sock, she thought. A neat home-made blackjack, except that it sometimes left traces.
They returned to the house and Lewis bolted the door. “As a lawyer I advise you to phone in a report to the police. Armed robbery is a serious business.”
“I can’t, not tonight. They’ll come out and ask questions and I don’t feel up to answering them.”
She was rather relieved that the purse had been stolen. There had been a series of petty robberies in the neighborhood recently and she wanted to believe that this was simply one of the series and that the man who did it had no connection with Voss or Violet or the face betw
een the rails of the banister. It was only chance that her visit to the house on Olive Street coincided with the robbery.
Lewis was looking at her sharply. “What were you doing out there on the driveway, anyway? I thought you were going to bed when I left.”
“I had a call to make.”
“Emergency?”
“I think so.”
“You’re holding something back.”
“I can’t discuss my cases with you, Lewis.”
“I don’t believe this was a case.”
“He was an Italian,” Charlotte said. “An old man about eighty.” It wasn’t quite a lie; Tiddles was a case, in a way. Lying to Lewis, even a little, pained her, but he sometimes made lying necessary by his extreme reactions to the truth. He would disapprove of her visit to Violet.
Lewis had some old-fashioned ideas about women. Gwen was, in a way, his ideal: she loved her home, she kept the place meticulous, the dogs clean and obedient, the garden neat, fragrant. But Lewis never stayed home to enjoy any of it. Gwen bored him to death, while Charlotte very frequently shocked him. It was a blow to his male pride that a woman could be as emotionally and physically independent as Charlotte. She was a competent physician and supported herself in comfort; she witnessed with detachment the most harrowing kinds of death and disease; she drove alone through the roughest sections of the city picking up hitchhikers when she wanted to, out of interest or pity; she paid calls to houses where the children slept five to a mattress on the floor. Such activities should be limited to men, in Lewis’ opinion. While it was all right for a woman to be a doctor, her practice should be confined to people of a certain level of society, within a certain income bracket. He would never understand that her background was different from his. She was fitted, by temperament and training, for the work she did. She enjoyed meeting all classes of people and she met them with an impersonal ease, and without pretensions of any kind.
“You shouldn’t stay here alone for the rest of the night,” Lewis said. “Call Miss Schiller and ask her to come over.”
“Oh no! She’ll be in bed.”
“She can get up again. Be reasonable, Charley.”
“She’ll fuss around all night.”
“Even so.”
“All right, Lewis,” she said wearily. “I’ll call her.”
Miss Schiller arrived by taxi five minutes after Lewis left.
She tottered under the weight of a suitcase the size of a trunk. Her face glowed with night cream, and in the bun of hair at the nape of her neck was stuck a pair of steel knitting needles. Miss Schiller was in a state of wild excitement.
“Imagine,” she kept repeating. “Just imagine!”
Among Miss Schiller’s friends things were always happening—people got engaged, sick, fired, married, divorced—these were common enough. But it wasn’t every day that someone she knew got hit on the head by a burglar and left to die in the night.
She was a little disappointed at the size and seriousness of Charlotte’s injury. You’d expect at least a lump at the hands of a ruthless burglar that attacked defenseless women and left them for dead. No lump and not a drop of blood. Miss Schiller swallowed her disappointment and reminded Charlotte that a criminal usually returns to the scene of his crime. Her tone implied strongly that very likely this one would be around during the night to finish the job.
“You can’t tell,” she said. “He might be watching us through the window this very minute.”
“He must have x-ray eyes then. The blinds are drawn.”
“I’ve never liked Venetian blinds,” Miss Schiller said decisively. “I know for a fact, anyone can see in through those cracks.”
She refused to accept Charlotte’s suggestion that she sleep in the guest room. After she’d turned out Charlotte’s light she took up her position on the davenport. From here she could watch all the windows and all the windows could watch her.
She removed the knitting needles from her hair and put them within easy reach on the coffee table. The needles were not, as Charlotte had supposed, for knitting, but for defense. And in the big suitcase at her feet were some of Miss Schiller’s more valuable possessions.
(If there was one burglar in town there was very likely another, and she was taking no chances.)
Miss Schiller spent a restless but satisfying night. She investigated noises, diagnosed shadows, patrolled the house and suffered frequent hot flashes which necessitated her getting ice water out of the refrigerator. Every ten or fifteen minutes she crept into Charlotte’s room to ask Charlotte if she was sleeping and to assure her that all was, temporarily, well.
Listening to Miss Schiller make her rounds was worse than listening to a dozen taps dripping or a couple of tomcats fighting outside the window. Towards morning Charlotte fell asleep with bitter thoughts of both Lewis and Miss Schiller.
5
After breakfast Charlotte dropped Miss Schiller and her suitcase at the office and went on to Mercywood Hospital to make her morning calls. Lack of sleep never bothered her. When she pushed through the heavy swinging doors of the hospital she looked fresh and alert.
In a private phone booth in the corridor downstairs she looked up Voss’s number and dialed. Though she heard the phone being lifted off the hook at the other end, no one answered.
“Hello. Hello. Is this 2-8593?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t Voss. This voice was high and quavering, the voice of someone very old or very frightened; “Violet? Violet?”
“No,” Charlotte said. “It’s Violet I want to speak to.”
“She went away.”
“She went away where?”
But the line was dead. Charlotte hung up impatiently. Damn the girl, she thought, I’ve wasted hours on her already. I have work to do.
It was half-past ten by the time she finished making her rounds of the wards. When she returned to her office she found that Miss Schiller had done nothing in her absence; she hadn’t even opened the mail. It was quite obvious that Miss Schiller had spent the morning telephoning all her friends, telling them what had happened and probably a few things that hadn’t.
Flushing under Charlotte’s gaze, Miss Schiller picked up her appointment book.
“The little Wheeler boy’s coming in at two,” she said. “His mother says he didn’t pass and she thinks it’s because he’s so self-conscious about his warts. She wants you to take them off.”
Charlotte made a noncommittal noise. The Wheeler child’s only trouble was an hysterical mother.
“Oh, and Mrs. Ballard phoned, doctor. She had one of those palpitating spells during the night and she wants you to come over before office hours this afternoon.”
“Call her back and tell her I won’t be able to make it before five-thirty or six.”
“I told her you were booked straight through practically and you weren’t feeling well.”
“I’m feeling perfectly well,” Charlotte said. “And I wish to God you’d forget about last night.”
Miss Schiller looked injured. “Well. Well, I must say.”
“Have you a list of the house calls I have to make before lunch?”
“Here it is.”
Charlotte looked over the list. The patients were all women. The majority of her patients were women and children, a fact that irritated her, since she wanted a more general practice. She said, “I’ll be seeing Mrs. Connelly last. You can get in touch with me there if anything turns up.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“After that I’ll have to go down to the city hall and report the loss of my purse.”
“You could phone, right from here.”
“If I do they’ll send a policeman out.”
“Oh. That wouldn’t look nice, would it?”
“Not particularly.”
“I’ll call Mrs. Ballard then, doctor. A lovely person, isn�
��t she?”
“Yes.”
“Just lovely, I think.”
Charlotte gave her a sharp glance. It wasn’t possible that Miss Schiller knew . . . ? No, of course not. She was just chattering, as usual. To Miss Schiller, Mrs. Ballard was simply a regular patient whose husband paid her bills promptly and in person, and sometimes dropped in to talk with the doctor about his wife’s condition. Having Gwen as a patient was becoming more and more unbearable. But it had to be borne; there was no way of getting out of it. Charlotte had suggested to her several times that she consult another doctor, a nerve specialist, but Gwen had been sweetly adamant: “Oh no, Dr. Keating. I have the greatest faith in you!”
I won’t go, Charlotte thought. I’ll send someone else—Parslow or James—I refuse to go.
When she passed the mirror in the corridor on her way outside she saw that her face was pale and pinched-looking; it was beginning to show the strain, not of the past night, but of the coming afternoon.
The police department occupied the rear half of the city hall.
Charlotte knew by sight the sergeant on duty at the desk, a man named Quincy. His wife had been in a traction cast at Mercywood for several weeks and Charlotte frequently met him in the corridors looking rather ineffectual and down at the heel. In uniform, behind his desk, he seemed larger, and his tone was brusque and officious.
He reprimanded Charlotte for her delay in reporting the stolen purse.
“We might have picked the man up last night,” he said, frowning.
“You might have. It’s not likely that he’d hang around afterwards, though.”
“You can’t expect protection unless you co-operate with the police. The least people can do is report things on time.” He tapped his knuckles irritably with a pencil, as if he wished they were hers. “You say you were closing the garage door when the assailant struck you from behind and ran off with your purse.”
“Yes. I wasn’t seriously hurt, as you can see.”
“It’s assault, anyway. Did you see the weapon?”
Do Evil in Return Page 3
