“It is not President Truman, madam. It’s the fruit fly. These diagrams on the wall here illustrate the life cycle of the fruit fly . . .”
“Fruit fly. Now I’ve heard everything. Hurry up, Tommy, Janet. . . . Not one of us moves an inch till all those cherries are eaten. Fruit fly. Next maybe you’ll start searching my dog for fleas. Maybe the dogs in California don’t have fleas. They got butterflies, maybe, gold butterflies. . . . Hurry up, Tommy.”
The little boy addressed as Tommy, after a sly glance at the inspector, cautiously slipped half a dozen cherries down the front of his shirt. He caught Charlotte’s eye and instantly assumed an expression of unassailable virtue.
Charlotte turned away, suppressing a smile. She noticed then, for the first time, the car that had stopped at the third gate. It was Easter’s car, but Easter wasn’t in it. He was standing beside a poster, watching her. She didn’t look at him. She looked at the poster. It showed how many millions of dollars of damage a pair of fruit flies could do.
He said, “Cute kid, that Tommy.”
“Are you following me?”
Easter shook his head. “If that isn’t just like you, Charlotte—there’s one main north-south highway and you think everyone behind you is deliberately following you.”
“I don’t think everyone is. Just you.”
“My dear Charlotte, I have to get home, too. I was hoping 101 would be big enough for both of us.”
An inspector approached, opened the back door of the car, and glanced around. “Any citrus fruits, lemons, oranges, limes . . . ?”
“No fruit at all.”
“How about that box of cherries you bought at Grant’s Pass?” Easter said. “Cherries are teeming with fruit flies.”
“I didn’t buy any cherries,” Charlotte told the inspector. “This man is just trying to delay me.”
“I have to check up anyway,” the inspector said. “May I have your trunk keys, please?”
She handed him the keys, and he went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk.
“See you later,” Easter said, and climbed back into his car. He honked the horn as he went past and waved his hand at her.
She kept the speedometer at seventy-five for the next hundred miles, but she didn’t catch up with Easter. She didn’t even know why she wanted to, except to prove to him that though she was a woman she was just as efficient and skillful a driver as any man.
She gave up the attempt at Eureka where she had to stop for gas and for lunch. She ate at a hamburger stand. She was amazed at herself for trying to overtake Easter, and at all the other rather childish things she’d said and done since she met him. The poise, the self-control, that she’d cultivated for years seemed to slip away when she was with Easter, leaving her as gauche as a high school girl, quick to blush, quick to be angered or take offense.
If I can’t catch up with him, Charlotte thought, I will lag away behind. I will make him wonder what’s happened to me. No, no, that’s absurd. I mustn’t even think of such a thing. I must be myself, not this half-aggressive, half-coy female. I will drive home in the ordinary way, as if Easter didn’t exist. I should be home by five.
It was nearly eight when she turned into her driveway.
In the headlights of the car the overhead door of the double garage loomed, a blank wall of white. The door was closed, and she’d left it open. Fear alerted her senses, quickened her imagination. The night wind, which only a moment ago had felt fresh against her skin, now seemed to have a treacherous softness about it. A laughing bird taunted her from his perch on a telephone wire.
She had left the garage door open and now it was closed. It was puzzling, but there was no reason to be afraid. She tried to convince herself that anyone could have closed it—Lewis, Miss Schiller, the postman, a child playing in the neighborhood, perhaps even Easter, trying to startle her as he’d startled her when he stepped from behind the tree at Sullivan’s—but common sense told her that none of these was a real possibility. Easter was no cruel practical joker and neither Lewis nor Miss Schiller had any reason to come here, knowing she was away. The child, the postman—she had thought of them only because she wanted quite desperately to believe that the closed door meant nothing, held no secrets.
She left the headlights on. As she walked towards the garage she remembered Easter’s picture of Violet’s face lathered with death-foam. But the sea is far away, she thought, not even visible at night like this; and I can swim. I can swim a mile if I have to.
It was the first time since she’d become involved in the case that she was afraid of physical violence directed against herself. Her vague diffuse fears (of Easter, of the old house on Olive Street) had synthesized into something so tight and compact it could fit on the point of a needle and pierce her spine.
The door was unlocked and, she saw now, not even fully closed. There were three or four inches of space at the bottom, as if someone in urgent haste had slammed the door down and it had bounced up a little and stuck there.
She had to strain to open it, breathing hard, her whole body tensed, braced against attack. But there was no attack, no one in the garage at all. Only a car, parked on the right side where Lewis always parked his—a small convertible with the top up.
She turned on the ceiling light and walked over to the front of the convertible. It was a blue Ford. She had seen many of them on the streets, but she didn’t know anyone who owned one and she could think of no reason for the car to be parked in her garage. It had been driven at high speed—grey and yellow blobs of insects splattered the windshield and the headlights and a small dead bird was caught in the chromium grillwork. She felt the hood of the engine with her hand; it was cold. The car had been standing there for some time.
A Ford convertible, the kind of car Eddie was said to have bought. But Voss and Eddie were miles away by this time, perhaps already out of the country, as they had planned. “It’s better climes for Eddie and me.”
She got into the front seat and turned on the dashboard lights. The ignition key was gone; the car had been left there to stay in her garage. There was no way of getting rid of it except to push it upgrade by herself, which was impossible, or to call the Auto Club for a tow truck.
She turned sideways to step out of the car and a glint of metal on the back seat caught her eye. She leaned over the edge of the seat and saw that Voss and Eddie had reached their better climes.
They were curled up on the floor like a pair of lovers in a fatal embrace. Voss’s head was buried against Eddie’s chest; there was nothing to show how he had died. But Eddie’s face was upturned, pinned against the door, and on his forehead two neat dark holes had been bored. Death had come to him more easily than to Violet. He looked peacefully asleep except for the extra eyes on his forehead.
On the seat lay an ordinary jackknife with the large blade pulled out, a knife like the one Eddie had used the previous night. He’d taken it out of his vest pocket, and flipped the blade open and cleaned his fingernails while Voss was talking. The knife lay now on the back seat of the car, a childish, impotent weapon of defense against the swift certainty of a gun. Eddie had had no chance to use the knife; its blade was unstained, gleaming blandly in the light of the garage.
She stumbled out of the car, half paralyzed, not by the shock of seeing two dead bodies, but by the realization that there was no way now that she could get rid of the car and the bodies. They were hers, they were hanging from her neck like the mariner’s albatross. A scream died in her throat.
Outside, the bird was still laughing at her from the telephone wire.
18
A car passed on the road, not speeding as cars usually did on Mountain Drive at night, but groping along, as if the driver was searching for a certain house, a certain person. The car paused, reversed gear, and braked to a stop outside her house.
She ran out of the garage and pulled d
own the door just as Easter stepped through the wooden gate into the yard. He didn’t speak for a minute. His eyes traveled from her face to the Buick with the headlights still on, to the closed door of the garage.
“I’ll open the garage for you,” he said.
“No.” She made a convulsive movement of protest that stiffened her whole body, like an electric shock. “No, thanks.”
“All right, do it yourself.” He added something under his breath that sounded like “damn emancipated females.”
“I—I’d prefer to leave the car out.” Her voice was unnatural, high and tight, as if hands were squeezing her larynx. “I never know when I’ll have to make a call.”
“Blake’s taking your calls.”
“Stop arguing with me. I’m—tired. If you don’t mind, I wish you’d go away.”
“You’re always wishing I’d go away. It’s painful to me. Easter, Easter, go away, don’t come again some other . . .”
“Please. I really am tired.”
“I know. I won’t keep you. I came to see whether you got home all right.”
“Well, I did. I did. You can see that.”
“I can see a lot of things,” he said slowly. “You’re nervous as hell. What’s up?”
“Nothing. You—you didn’t really come here to see if I arrived safely. You’re spying on me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you think that I’m mixed up in all these terrible things.”
“They’re not so terrible—a suicide, a natural death—no murder.” He repeated, “No murder,” in an insinuating tone as if he expected her to contradict him. She said nothing.
He walked over to her car, turned off the headlights and removed the key ring from the ignition. He tossed it to her. It fell in the grass at her feet and she watched it dully, as if her mind were too dazed to understand the concept of catching something that was thrown at her.
“Your keys,” Easter said.
“Keys? Oh. Yes, of course.”
They knelt, simultaneously, to pick up the key ring and their arms touched. She drew back as if he’d aimed a blow at her.
He picked up the key ring first. “I’m poison to you, eh?”
“No. Not poison.” A jackknife, a gun, foam.
“You won’t be making any calls tonight. I’ll put your car away for you and bring your luggage into the house.”
“No! I won’t let . . .”
“What’s the matter? Is there something in the house you don’t want me to see?”
“No.”
“Ballard, perhaps?”
“There’s nothing in the house,” she said contemptuously. “Come in and see. Snoop all you want to.”
“Since you put it so charmingly, I will.”
He got her weekend bag out of the car while she unlocked the front door.
She turned on all the lights in the sitting room: “There. See anything?”
“No.”
“No guns or b—bodies?”
He looked at her quizzically. “I hardly expected to find any guns or bodies. Just Ballard.”
“Why do you want to see Lewis?”
“For one thing, his wife reported him missing this morning.”
“Missing? Lewis?”
“But that’s just one thing. There are other things. . . . Where is he?”
“I don’t know. And if Lewis wants to go away, it’s not my business, and it’s certainly not yours, Mr. Easter.”
“You might be surprised.”
“You have nothing against Lewis except that I love him.”
“The way I feel, that’s plenty to have against a man. Even if it were all.”
His intensity disturbed her. She didn’t know what to say or do. She stood near the door, her hat and gloves still on, her handbag under her. arm. She said finally, “Sit down and I’ll find something to drink.”
“I’ll stand, thanks. I feel more like a policeman when I’m standing and less like a guy calling on the woman he loves. I’m both. But right now I’m standing. Where’s Ballard?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since the night before last at dinnertime. I told him I was going to drive up to Oregon.”
“Did you tell him why?”
“Yes.”
“And he didn’t want you to go?”
“He didn’t care.”
“You’re lying.”
“He didn’t care much.”
“Plenty.”
“Stop beating around the bush like this,” she said passionately. “If he cared at all, it was because the trip meant that I wouldn’t see him for a couple of days. What other reason would he have for caring whether I went to Ashley or not?”
“I can think of several.”
“You. You can think of anything against Lewis. He told me that’s what you were—a troublemaker.”
“That’s what I am.” He lit a cigarette. There was no draft in the room. The smoke moved directly, purposefully, to the ceiling. “By the way, I have news for you about Voss and Eddie.”
She felt the blood draining out of her face. She turned and began taking off her gloves and her hat, fussing with her purse—any kind of quick movement to distract his eye from her pallor.
“They’ve disappeared. Sunk without a trace. I’m a little disappointed about losing them. I was hoping to ask Eddie a few questions about where he got the money to buy his new car.”
You can still ask him. But he won’t answer.
The telephone began to ring. She looked towards it, dazedly, as if she’d never heard a phone ring and was surprised that the curious black object could make such a noise.
“Answer it,” Easter said. “Or I will, if you like.”
“No. No. I will.” She crossed the room and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Dr. Keating, it’s me, Gwen Ballard. I’ve been trying to get you all day. Miss Schiller kept telling me to phone Dr. Blake. But I wouldn’t. I said, no, Dr. Keating’s my doctor, I won’t see anyone else.”
Charlotte glanced over her shoulder at Easter. He hadn’t moved, but his body was tense as if every nerve cell was straining to help him hear what was being said at the other end of the line. She put her hand over the receiver and said, “This is a private call from one of my patients. You wouldn’t be interested.”
He didn’t speak, just looked at her, unblinking.
She took her hand away from the receiver. “Is there anything the matter?”
“I’ve had another attack.” Gwen’s breathing was labored, her voice faint and tremulous. “I’m alone. I’m afraid.”
“There’s nothing to worry about. Take it easy and . . .”
“I must see you. Please come, Dr. Keating—Charlotte—I must talk to someone, a friend.”
A friend. Gwen, alone and in terror, calling to her, of all the people in the city, as a friend. Charlotte felt a nausea rising from her stomach, souring her throat. “Has anything happened?”
“He tried to kill me. Yes! He tried to kill me! He said he hated me, he’d always hated me!”
The pitch and volume of Gwen’s voice had risen. Charlotte saw that Easter had heard, not the words perhaps, but the notes of hysteria. She had to quiet Gwen before Easter got suspicious. She said, “I’ll be right over. Ten minutes.”
“Oh, thank you, Dr. Keating, thank you.”
Charlotte replaced the phone. “I have to make a call.”
“So I heard.”
“If you’ll excuse me now . . .” She looked pointedly towards the door.
Easter raised one eyebrow. “You want me to leave?”
“It’s customary.”
“Suppose I like it here. It’s cozy and warm, and I expect Ballard to call.”
His reaction was something she hadn’t fore
seen. She’d thought he would leave when she did, giving her a chance, later, to plan what to do about Voss and O’Gorman. There was no way of forcing him to leave except—and the irony stung—to call the police.
Silently, she picked up her hat and purse and went out the door. She didn’t look back, and Easter didn’t speak.
As she backed her car out of the driveway she saw that she had made a fatal error.
In her hurry to close the garage door when she heard Easter’s car, she had forgotten to turn out the light. Its beams shone gaily out of the little window at the side of the garage, as if inviting anyone to come in and see for himself.
19
Nine o’clock. An offshore wind was blowing and the palm trees cringed and leaned away from it, waving their frantic arms.
The Ballard house couldn’t be seen from the street. It appeared suddenly, at a curve in the cypress-lined walk, a handsome house of oiled redwood set in a formal garden. Charlotte had always disliked this garden. The flower beds were too meticulously planned; they seemed to have no connection with nature anymore. They were Gwen’s and not the earth’s. The lawn, too, was so immaculate that it was impossible to imagine real people walking on it.
And real people never did, Charlotte thought. The lawn wasn’t to be walked on, but to be admired from the dining alcove or from the picture window in the living room. Even the collies, whom Gwen loved best, were not allowed on the grass. They had their own yard behind the house, fenced runways and miniature houses and a brooder for the bitches with new pups.
A light was kept on for them all night. Charlotte could see several of the dogs watching her cautiously through the wire fencing, their tails half raised, as if they weren’t sure yet that she was a friend.
She spoke to them softly and one of the tails began to wag, slowly, with dignity, like a feathered fan waved by a condescending duchess.
The other dogs, Gwen’s three favorites, were upstairs with her in her bedroom. They lay beside her bed, a protective phalanx. Gwen had told them to lie down and they had obeyed; but their eyes were restless, they followed Charlotte’s every move, they searched Gwen’s face for reassurance, and now and then the big sable-colored male let out a whimper like a child.
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