A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  He quickly drew the curtains, but even daylight did not make the room reassuring. It was much too narrow for its width, like the living-room, and was not in good repair. The green wallpaper was stained near the ceiling and the ceiling itself could have done with a coat of paint. Clearly Charles was indifferent to where he slept. The furniture was heavy Victorian walnut. There was a turkey carpet on the floor. The top of the bureau displayed only the cardboard stiffener from a shirt, together with two pins. In the top left-hand drawer, pushed to the back, behind white handkerchiefs edged with black lines, was a small automatic. Luke looked at it thoughtfully, but did not touch it. On the bedside table were some books: an anthology of the basic thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas and a detective story. The bed was not turned down and had a red velvet spread.

  There was something familiar about the room he could not place, until he noticed the green glass shade on the brass lamp and realized with a start that it was furnished to resemble Abraham Lincoln’s bedroom at the White House. He did not quite know what to make of that. He went out of the room and locked the communicating door to the dressing-room loud enough so that Maggie would hear the click.

  When he came back Maggie had taken off her shoes and was lying on the bed, staring at the dressing-room door. The soles of her feet had been perspiring and had darkened her stockings. He went over and sat on the edge of her bed, placing the key to the dressing-room on the table beside her. He forced himself to take her hand, afraid of what touching her might make him feel. He had invented a Maggie for himself that made the real Maggie difficult to face. He no longer knew how he felt about her. He had never really known how she felt about him. He was not altogether sure that he could face the risk he would have to take, and he knew that though both of them would take his help, neither one of them would help him. And it wasn’t his city.

  “I’m so afraid of her,” said Maggie.

  “There’s no need to be.”

  “You don’t know,” she said. She did not say anything more about that. “Will you stay?”

  “I’ll be round when you need me,” he said. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, and it was true, he did not look right in this room. “I can’t move in here. She’s right about that. But I’ll do my best.”

  “I’m so frightened,” she said. She said it as though she was just discovering it to be true.

  He got up and left the room. On the way downstairs he turned into the corridor and taking the key out of Charles’s door, put it in from the outside and locked the room. It was not a gesture he could explain, but it seemed to help. He left the key in the lock, in case the locked room should look odd.

  When he got down to the living-room he found Lily waiting for him. He ran a hand through his hair, conscious of his own appearance, and tried to face up to her.

  “She’s resting,” he said. He thought that this house seemed to upset her, too. She watched him.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “There isn’t much I can do. Once the news has broken, I’ll go down and see his lawyer. Who is his lawyer?”

  “His own firm, I suppose.” She was cautious.

  “Was it usual for Charles to go away and nobody to get upset about it?”

  She hesitated. “He disappeared sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “He was like that.” She sighed, staring down at her gloves. “He could be difficult at times. He never told anybody anything, really.”

  He was exasperated with her. “What are you afraid of?” he asked bluntly.

  “What makes you think I’m afraid of anything?”

  “You are. You know you are.”

  “I should never have let Maggie talk me into this,” she said. She was not at all friendly now.

  “Oh, don’t worry. You’ll get your money’s worth. But that’s all you’ll get.”

  “There’s no need to talk that way, Luke.”

  “Isn’t there?” he asked. “I think there is. Well, you’ve got me into it, and we’ve got to find out who was there. I can at least try the lawyers. They might know something, even if you don’t.”

  Lily stood up, smiling vacantly, as though dismissing him. “Just keep us out of the papers. That’s all I ask,” she said.

  He thought, privately, that probably she would ask for a great deal more than that, but it was no time to say so. He told her he would be back later. She didn’t bother to answer him. He let himself out of the house.

  VI

  HE SHOULD NOT HAVE COME BACK for any reason. He knew that. To be back with these people, or even in this city, gave him an uncomfortable feeling. He had no friends here and he knew it. The only friends he could make here were friends he did not want to have. Apart from that the glare upset him: the streets were too bright. It was hard for him to fit back into these people’s lives, for he had changed too much and they had not changed at all. Nor did he any longer know how he felt about Maggie. He had been away from her for too long.

  Once in the centre of town he felt better. He had the old relaxed wartime feeling of anticipation and cool-headedness, the poignancy of walking down a street which even if it was there to-morrow, might not be the same. He had no trouble at the hotel: they gave him a room at once. He went for a walk and bought half a dozen shirts and some socks, half to pass the time and half to smell the city out. He had always known the importance of a good address, and it seemed to him that if his part of this came out into the open, the better his address the safer they would all be. Besides, he enjoyed the prestige, for it was not so long since he had not been able to afford it.

  But he found everything slightly changed, and in particular the hotel. The hotel should not have changed. He had seen old pictures of it, after the earthquake, an immense shored-up shell with blind windows dominating the city. And he remembered the hotel as a mysterious social aquarium full of ormolu mirrors and a lot of red plush, inhabited by observant elderly and immobile fish. Now the place was merely fashionable. It did not remind him of that slightly legendary city of the past at all.

  He left it and walked down the steep hill, through that damp air that smelled always of iodine and the sea, to Union Square. Union Square was bright with clipped beds, short hedges, transplanted yews, and the old Dewey column, its tarnished Victory perpetually bearing a laurel wreath into the east. It was an exhilarating city, built on hills, rich, prosperous, and vain. It was not a male city. It had the chi-chi of a city built for women. It had the native, boyish style that belongs to cities that are cosmopolitan but not international.

  He had business to do. He wanted to see Charles’s partners before the news broke. He walked down into the commercial district, where the office buildings grew taller, forming cool canyons of their own.

  The offices of Madge, Foster, and Shannon were on the twenty-fifth floor of the Heist Building, a steel and green terra-cotta skyscraper in the ornamented Aztec style of the early 1930’s. The offices occupied the northwest side of the building, and hence faced the harbour. Prominent in the foreground was the white tower of the Federal Customs House, on whose top floor was a detention centre in which those Orientals who had entered the country illegally were temporarily jailed. It was not long since a Chinese woman had leaped from one of its windows. She had been held there for four years.

  Beyond the tower he could see the harbour and the small policed area of the international zone, behind its guards and its barbed wire. Despite the sunshine, it was a melancholy view. It did nothing to reassure him.

  The offices had that cramped luxury of very expensive space. The receptionist was a motherly woman of about forty-five, wearing steel spectacles and obviously loyal to the firm. Mr. Madge had died years ago. Luke said that he wanted to speak to Mr. Foster.

  “You’d better say Mrs. Barnes sent me,” he said. He did not quite know why, but it seemed to produce an effect. He saw no reason to mention Charles until absolutely necessary.

  The receptionist looked him
over, with particular attention to the cut of his suit, and he smiled back at her, watching her do it.

  She flushed and went down the hall. In a moment she came back and ushered him into Foster’s office.

  From the size of the office, Foster was the more important surviving partner. Then Luke realized he was the only surviving partner. The room was lined with legal books set in walnut shelves to the ceiling. It had a prosperous Persian rug, two comfortable green leather chairs, and there was a portable bar and television unit in one corner. The desk, massive and ornate, was a survival from some earlier period of correct legal furnishing.

  Foster was a short man with the vestiges of a tan, plump but tight, with a friendly beaten face hidden behind thick glasses. He stood up and the two shook hands. Foster then sat down behind the desk, teetering back and forth in his chair, playing with Luke’s card. He did not seem in the least surprised to see him.

  “I remember who you are now,” he said. “You’re one of Senator Ford’s young men.”

  Luke didn’t mind. Law was one of the few professions in which age was still an advantage and youth a draw-back. He was used to that attitude. He had also learned that Ford’s protégés did better in the south, but since he had done well in the south he did not mind that either. They talked about Ford for a few minutes, aimlessly. Of course while they talked they watched each other. Foster was not the sort of partner Luke would have expected Charles to have. There was about him nothing that was either unctuous or glaring. He was a quiet, competent man. Luke told him that Charles was dead.

  “How do you know?” asked Foster. He did not appear to be much moved one way or the other, but he did reach instinctively for his appointment pad.

  “I saw him.”

  Foster shook his head. “It might not be wise to say so.”

  “I don’t intend to say so.” It puzzled him that Foster seemed neither surprised nor particularly upset. Instead he merely watched Luke patiently.

  “And?” he asked at last.

  “The point is someone searched his house and took something away. It might be a good idea to find out who and what, for a number of reasons.”

  This did not seem to surprise Foster either, though it affected him more than the news of Charles’s death had done.

  “Lily Barnes is a strange woman,” he said suddenly. “I can’t say that I know her well, but I’ve known her for a long time. I don’t envy anyone who has to work for her, and I’ve handled her accounts for thirty years.”

  “I don’t quite follow.”

  “Just advice. You shouldn’t underestimate her, that’s all. Nor dislike her too much, even if she does dislike you. At the back of her head she means well. At least she’s loyal to something, though maybe even she couldn’t say what.”

  Luke was baffled. “But does she know anything about Charles?”

  Foster seemed embarrassed. “I don’t think anybody knew anything about Charles,” he said. “What was taken?”

  Luke threw the empty picture frame on the desk and Foster looked at it gingerly and shook his head. “I’ve never seen it,” he said. “It’s not like Charles.” He turned it over and examined the back of it. “It’s pretty cheap.”

  “You’ve no idea who could have been there?”

  “None. Charles wasn’t an open man.”

  “But somebody must know him. He must have friends. There could have been a woman.”

  “No, that was the trouble. There wasn’t anybody. That was what made him … a little eerie.”

  “How was he to work with?”

  “Brilliant. Ambitious. In a way I’m not sorry he’s gone.” Foster stood up and going to the window, stood with his back to the room. “Lily did a lot for him, of course. She brought him to me. Oh, not openly. But I began to be invited down to the Atherton place more than usual, oh, three or four times rather than once a month, maybe. I knew what was up and I knew what was expected of me. He had an odd effect on women. Hell, we were in low water and she bought him in. That is, she threatened to remove her affairs, just mentioning the possibility, you understand, casually, over dinner. And he got money from somewhere: he put up fifty thousand. That was long before he married the girl. I’ve often wondered how he got it.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  Foster shrugged. “I gathered from Santa Barbara and Stanford. Lily did the talking, and he never said anything about himself. I had the feeling sometimes he didn’t have any past. You didn’t get to know him. Even after his marriage he didn’t open up at all.”

  “It isn’t much to go on.”

  “No, it’s not much.” Foster sighed. “I asked him out to our place at Belvedere once. He came and he was a good guest and it was as though he’d never been there at all. He was all the time watching tilings, too. I took off my shirt, while we went sailing, and saw him looking at the label in it. He wouldn’t ask me where I got it, you understand, but he found out. Charles always found out. And he didn’t buy one like it, either. He went to the same shirtmaker and bought something else.”

  “He must have relatives or a family,” said Luke.

  “You’d think so.” Foster picked up the picture frame again. “Why is it so important?”

  “Maggie was there when he died.”

  Foster looked startled. “I see,” he said.

  “So now you know why I’m here,” said Luke bitterly.

  “I was wondering.” Foster shifted his position. He seemed acutely embarrassed, though Luke could not make out why. He got up and wandered round the office, not really looking at anything, and then went over to the window again and looked out across the port to where the thick Doric column of the Coit Memorial reared out of its trees towards the sky.

  “You didn’t know Jerome, of course,” he said.

  “Who’s Jerome?”

  “Maggie’s father.” Foster was silent, gazing out across the city, his short, over-plump body slightly ridiculous when seen from behind. Finally, he sighed deeply and turned to face Luke.

  “What I’m trying to say,” he said, “is that if you do have to find out about Charles, I suppose you will find out things about other people, too. The little bit I know I can’t tell you, and it isn’t anything that will help you, anyhow. I know you don’t get along with Lily. Most people don’t. But if you do find it out, try to understand it. And try to understand her, too.” He waved a hand helplessly. “I know a lot about them, one way and another. Lily’s a fool, but she isn’t a simple woman, and what’s done is done. She’s vain and she pretends to be a rattle, and she plots, and I suppose she can be ruthless when she’s really frightened. But she’s lonely and she has her reasons. We all have our reasons, and most of us get stuck with them. Come over here and look out of the window.” He waited until Luke did so. “It’s just a jumbled heap of stone and concrete, with a bay around it. Some people think it’s beautiful; some people don’t. Lily was born over there in the Palace Hotel. You can just see it if you squint out of the window. She was a Smith. There aren’t any streets or parks named after them, and there are a lot of them, but in her own mind she was a Smith. She just feels that way. God knows what Smiths. Until she married she lived up on the hills behind us and out towards the sea. She married Jerome and there aren’t any streets named after the Barnes, either. There used to be, but they were changed. We all lived here, in a way we don’t now. That’s why Lily lives down in Atherton. She can get away with living in the past as long as she stays there.

  “You’ve got to figure out what Charles made out of it all. That’s harder. You see, he didn’t belong here. He didn’t have any past. And in the old days small town people always wanted to come here. It was glamour, I guess. I came from a small town myself. Petaluma, in case you care.

  “Well, Charles made a big mistake. He thought just being here was what was important. It’s not. It’s what being here means. He never belonged. He never belonged anywhere. But Lily and Maggie and me, and even maybe people like you, whatever you think otherwis
e, or people make you think otherwise, belong somewhere until we die. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “I think so,” said Luke.

  “Then go easy,” said Foster. With a last look out of the window he came back to his desk. “Lily phoned me before you came. I don’t think she knows what she’s doing. This has hit her hard and it’s given her a lot to think about. And she overestimates herself, which doesn’t make it any easier. Anyway, she wants the thing hushed up. Well, it can’t be hushed up, but maybe we can tone it down a little.” He looked thoughtful. “How is Maggie holding up?”

  “I don’t quite know. She seems semi-hysterical.”

  “Ummmmm,” said Foster. He stood up, evasively fiddling with his glasses.

  “One other thing,” said Luke. “What about the will?”

  “What about it?”

  “It might tell us something.”

  “It might,” said Foster, “but I haven’t got it.” He didn’t, clearly, want to talk about it. “He didn’t die intestate, you can be sure of that. Charles was tidy.” He picked up the picture frame and handed it back to Luke. There was something distasteful about that torn, imitation leather frame.

  “They’ll have to bring it before a coroner’s jury and all, because of the jurisdiction,” said Foster. “If the papers whip it up, and they will, they’ll need a good jury. That gives you about a week to find out what you can. And if I find out anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “It isn’t much time.”

  “It’s all the time you’ve got. There’s one other thing. If Charles knew anybody, it was somebody he couldn’t get rid of. Somebody who had known him too long, I think. And probably a woman. He wasn’t so good with men.” He played with the blotter edges. “And don’t get hurt.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Nothing. I just think maybe you might. And it isn’t worth it. It might have been once, but it isn’t now.”

  Luke blushed.