The Second Pulp Crime

by Mack Reynolds

  Faith Salem returned with the snapshot and the Christmas card. I took them from her and finished my bourbon and looked first at the picture. I don’t know if I would have seen in it what I did if I hadn’t already heard about Constance Markley what I had. It’s impossible to know how much of what we see, or think we see, is the result of suggestion. Constance and Faith were standing side by side. Constance was shorter, slighter of build, less striking in effect. Faith was looking directly into the camera, but Constance was looking around and up at the face of Faith. It seemed to me that her expression was one of adoration. This was what might have been no more than the result of suggestion. I don’t know.

  I took the Christmas card out of its envelope. It had clearly been expensive, as cards go, and had probably been selected with particular care. On the back, Constance Markley had written a note. It said how miserable and lonely she was at home, how the days were interminable, how she longed for the time to come when she could return to Amity and Faith. Christmas vacation, I thought, must have lasted all of two weeks. I read the note with ambivalence. I felt pity, and I felt irritation.

  Faith Salem had finished her bourbon and was looking at me over the empty glass. Her eyes were clouded, and she shook her head slowly from side to side.

  “I guess you’ve got an idea,” she said.

  “That’s an exaggeration,” I said. “Why are you interested in all this? I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe it’s just that I’m naturally suspicious of a coincidence. Every time I come across one, I get curious.”

  “What coincidence?”

  “Never mind. If I put it in words, I’d probably decide it sounded too weak to bother with. I’m driving to Amity tomorrow. The trip’ll hike expenses. You’d better give me a hundred bucks.”

  “All right. I’ll get it for you.” She got up and went out of the room again. I watched her out and stood up to watch her in. From both angles and both sides she still looked good. She handed me the hundred bucks, and I took it and shoved it in a pocket and put my arms around her and kissed her.

  She had meant what she had said. She said she wouldn’t kiss me again, and she didn’t. She only stood quietly and let me kiss her, which was different and not half so pleasant. I took my arms away and stepped back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “So am I,” she said.

  Then we said good-by, and I left. Going, I met Graham Markley in the hall, coming. We spoke politely, and he asked me how the investigation was getting along. I said it was getting along all right. He didn’t even seem curious about the condition of my face.

  CHAPTER 8.

  I didn’t get out of town the next day until ten o’clock. It was three hundred fifty miles by highway to Amity. In my old clunker, allowing time for a couple of stops, I did well to average forty miles an hour. Figure it for yourself. It was almost exactly eight and a half hours later when I got there. About six-thirty. I was tired and hungry, and I went to a hotel and registered and went up to my room. I washed and went back down to the coffee shop and got a steak and ate it and went back to the room. By then it was eight. I lit a cigarette and lay down on the bed and began to wonder seriously why I was here and what the hell I was going to do, now that I was.

  I thought about a lot of things. I thought about Robin Robbins looking like a tough and lovely kid with her beautiful shiner. I thought about Faith Salem lying in the sun. I thought about Silas Lawler and Graham Markley and Regis Lawler and Constance Markley. The last pair were shadows. I couldn’t see them, and I couldn’t entirely believe in them, and I wished suddenly that I had never heard of them. I did this thinking about these people, but it didn’t get me anywhere. I lay there on the bed in the hotel room for what seemed like an hour, and I was surprised, when I looked at my watch, to learn that less than half that time had passed. The room was oppressive, and I didn’t want to stay there any longer. Getting up, I went downstairs and walked around the block and came back to the hotel and bought a newspaper at the tobacco counter and sat down to read it. I read some of the front page and some of the sports page and all the comics and started on the classified ads.

  Classified ads interest me. I always read them in the newspapers and in the backs of magazines that publish them. They are filled with the gains and losses and inferred intimacies of classified lives. If you are inclined to be a romantic, you can, by a kind of imaginative interpolation, read a lot of pathos and human interest into them. Someone in Amity, for instance, had lost a dog, and someone wanted to sell a bicycle that was probably once the heart of the life of some kid, and someone named Martha promised to forgive someone named Walter if he would come back from wherever he’d gone. Someone named Faith Salem wanted to teach you to play the piano for two dollars an hour.

  There it was, and that’s the way it sometimes happens. You follow an impulse over three hundred miles because of a thin coincidence, and right away, because of a mild idiosyncrasy, you run into another coincidence that’s just a little too much of one to be one, and the first one, although you don’t know why, no longer seems like one cither.

  I closed my eyes and tried to see Faith Salem lying again in the sun, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see her lying in the sun because she was in another town teaching piano lessons for two dollars an hour. It said so in the town’s newspaper. I opened my eyes and looked again, just to be certain, and it did. Piano lessons, it said. 1828 Canterbury Street, call LO 3314, it said. Faith Salem, it said.

  I stood up and folded the newspaper and stuck it in my coat pocket and looked at my watch. The watch said nine. I walked outside and started across the street to the parking lot where I’d left my car, but then, because it was getting late and I didn’t know the streets of the town, I turned and came back to the curb in front of the hotel and caught a taxi. I gave the driver the address, 1828 Canterbury Street, and sat back in the seat. The driver repeated the address after me and then concentrated silently on his driving. I didn’t try to think or make any guesses. I sat and listened to the ticking of the meter that seemed to be measuring the diminishing time and distance between me and something.

  We hit Canterbury Street at 6th and went down it twelve blocks. It was an ordinary residential street, paved with asphalt, with the ordinary variations in quality, you will find on most streets in most towns. It started bad and got better and then started getting worse, but it never got really good or as bad in the end as it had started. 1828 was a small white frame house with a fairly deep front lawn and vacant lots between it and the houses on both sides, which were also small and white and frame with fairly deep front lawns. On the corner at the end of the block was a neighborhood drug store with a vertical neon sign above the entrance. It would be a place to call another taxi in case of necessity, and so I paid off the one I had and let it go. I got out and went up a brick walk and across a porch. There was a light showing at a window, but I heard no sound and saw no shadow on the blind. After listening and watching for perhaps a minute, I knocked and waited for perhaps half another.

  Without any prelude of sound whatever, the door opened and a woman stood looking out at me. The light behind her left her face in shadow. She was rather short and very slim, almost fragile, and her voice, when she spoke, had an odd quality of detached airiness, as if it had no corporeal source. “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m looking for Miss Faith Salem,” I said.

  “I’m Faith Salem. What is it you want?”

  “Please excuse me for calling so late, but I was unable to get here earlier. My name is Percival Hand. You were referred to me as an excellent teacher.”

  “Thank you. Are you studying piano, Mr. Hand?”

  “No.” I laughed. “My daughter is the student. We’re new in town, and she needs a teacher. As I said, you were recommended. May I come in and discuss it with you?”

  “Yes, of course. Please come in.” I stepped past her into a small livi
ng room that was softly lighted by a table lamp and a floor lamp. On the floor was a rose-colored rug with an embossed pattern. The furniture was covered with bright chintz or polished cotton, and the windows were framed on three sides by panels and valences of the same color and kind of material. At the far end of the room, which was no farther than a few steps, a baby grand occupied all the space of a corner. Behind me, the woman who called herself Faith Salem closed the door. She came past me into the room and sat down in a chair beside the step-table on which the table lamp was standing. It was apparently the chair in which she had been sitting when I knocked, for a cigarette was burning in a tray on the table and an open book was lying face down beside the tray. The light from the lamp seemed to gather in her face and in the hands she folded in the lap. The hands were quiet, holding each other. The face was thin and pretty and perfectly reposed. I have never seen a more serene face than the face of Constance Markley at that moment.

  “Sit down, Mr. Hand,” she said. I did. I sat in a chair opposite her and held my hat on my knees and had the strange and inappropriate feeling of a visiting minister. I felt, anyhow, the way the minister always appeared to be feeling when he called on my mother a hundred years ago when I was home.

  “What a charming room,” I said.

  “Thank you.” She smiled and nodded. “I like bright colors. They make a place so cheerful. Did you say you are new in Amity, Mr. Hand?”

  “Yes. We just arrived recently.”

  “I see. Do you plan to make your home here permanently?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on how things work out, Miss Salem. Is that correct? I seem to remember that you’re single.”

  “That’s quite correct. I’ve never married,” she said, and nodded.

  “I’m surprised that such a lovely woman has escaped so long. Do you live here alone?”

  In her face for a moment was an amused expression that did not disturb the basic serenity, and I wondered if it was prompted by the trite compliment or the impertinent question. At any rate, she ignored the first and answered the second simply.

  “Yes. I’m quite alone here. I like living alone.”

  “Have you lived in Amity long?”

  “Many years. I came here as a student in the college and never left. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

  “Forgive my asking, but don’t you find it difficult to live by giving private music lessons?”

  “I’m certain that I should if I tried it. I give private lessons only in my off hours. Evenings and weekends. I’m also an instructor in the Amity Conservatory. A private school.” She hesitated, looking at me levelly across the short space between us, and I thought that she was now slightly disturbed, for the first time, by my irrelevant questions. “I understand that you should want to make inquiries of a teacher you are considering for your child, Mr. Hand, but yours don’t seem very pertinent. Would you like to know something about my training and qualifications?”

  “No, thanks. I’m sure you’re very competent, Miss Salem. I’m sorry if my questions seemed out of line. The truth is, I know so little about music myself that I hardly know what to talk about.”

  “Do you mind telling me who sent you to me, Mr. Hand?”

  “As a matter of fact, it was the Conservatory. They recommended you highly, but they didn’t mention that you were an instructor there.”

  “I see. Many students are directed to me that way. The ones who are unable to attend the Conservatory itself, that is.”

  I looked down at my hat, turning it slowly in my hands, and I didn’t like the way I was beginning to feel. No one could accuse me fairly of being a particularly sensitive guy, and ordinarily I am conscious of no corruption in the dubious practices of my trade, dubious practices being by no means restricted to the trade I happen to follow. By now I was beginning to feel somehow unclean, and every little lie was assuming in my mind the character of a monstrous deception. I was suddenly sick of it and wanted to be finished with it, the whole phony case. I had been hired for twenty-five and expenses to find a woman who had disappeared two years ago, and here she was in a town called Amity, living quietly under the name of Faith Salem, which was the name of the woman who had hired me to find her, and it had all been so fantastically quick and easy, a coincidence and an itch and a classified ad, and now there seemed to be nothing more to be done that I had been hired to do.

  But where was Regis Lawler? Here was Constance, but where was Regis? Well, I had not been hired to find Regis. I had been hired to find Constance, and I had found her, and that was all of it. Almost all of it, anyhow. All that was left to do for my money to get up and get away quietly with my unclean feeling after my necessary deceptions. Tomorrow I would drive back where I had come from, and I would report what I had learned to the woman who was paying me, and then she would know as much as I did, and what she wanted to do with it was her business and not mine.

  There were still, however, so many loose ends. So many mental itches I couldn’t scratch. I did not know why Constance had come to Amity. Nor why she had assumed the name of Faith Salem. Nor certainly why, for that matter, the real Faith Salem wanted her found. Nor why Silas Lawler did not. Nor where in the world was Regis Lawler. Nor if, in fact, he was. In the world, that is.

  Suddenly I looked up and said, “Mrs. Markley, where is Regis Lawler?”

  Her expression was queer. It was an expression I remembered for a long time afterward and sometimes saw in the black shag end of the kind of night when a man is vulnerable and cannot sleep. She stared at me for a minute with wide eyes in which there was a creeping dumb pain, and then, in an instant, there was a counter expression which seemed to be a denial of the pain and the pain’s cause. Her lids dropped slowly, as if she were all at once very tired. Sitting there with her hands folded in her lap, she looked as if she were praying, and when she opened her eyes again, the expressions of pain and its denial were gone, and there was nothing where they had been but puzzlement.

  “What did you call me?” she said.

  “Mrs. Markley. Constance Markley.”

  “If this is a joke, Mr. Hand, it’s in very bad taste.”

  “It’s no joke. Your name is Constance Markley, and I asked you where Regis Lawler is.”

  “I don’t know Constance Markley. Nor Regis Lawler.” She unfolded her hands and stood up, and she was not angry and apparently no longer puzzled. She had withdrawn behind an impenetrable defense of serenity. “I don’t know you either, Mr. Hand. Whoever you are and whatever you came here for, you are obviously not what you represented yourself to be, and you didn’t come for the purpose you claimed.”

  “True. I’m not, and I didn’t.”

  “In that case, we have nothing more to discuss. If you will leave quietly, I’ll be happy to forget that you ever came.”

  I did as she suggested. I left quietly. She had said that I was in bad taste, and I guess I was, for the taste was in my mouth, and it was bad.

  I turned left at the street toward the drug store on the corner, and I had walked about fifty feet in that direction when a man got out of a parked car and crossed the parking to intercept me, and the car was a Caddy I had ridden in before, and the man was Silas Lawler.

  “Surprised?” he said amiably.

  “Not especially,” I said. “I heard you’ve been coming out here pretty regularly the last couple years.”

  “I was afraid that might have been one of the things you heard. Robin has a bad habit of knowing things she’s not supposed to. Not that it matters much. You’ve just made me make an extra trip, that’s all. Darcy’s really annoyed, though. He’s the one who’s had to tail you since you got into this business, and Darcy doesn’t like that kind of work. He figures it’s degrading.”

  “Poor Darcy. I’ll have to apologize the next time I see him.”

  “That could be right now. Just turn your head a little. He�
��s sitting over there behind the wheel of the Caddy.”

  “I’ll have to do it some other time. Right now I’m on my way to the corner to call a cab.”

  “Forget it. Darcy and I wouldn’t think of letting you go to all that trouble. We’ve been waiting all this time just to give you a lift.”

  “I hope you won’t be offended if I decline.”

  “I’m afraid I would. I’m sensitive that way. I always take it personally if my hospitality’s refused. You wouldn’t want to hurt my feelings, would you?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “That’s not very gracious of you. Hand. I offer you a lift, the least you can do is be courteous about it. What I mean is, get in the Caddy.”

  “No, thanks. The last time we got together, you didn’t behave very well. I don’t think I want to associate with you any more.”

  “It won’t be for long.”

  He took a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at me casually in such a way that it would, if it fired, shoot me casually through the head. I could see, in a glimmer of light, the ugly projection of a silencer.

  “Now who’s not being gracious?”

  I said. “It seems to me a guy with any pride wouldn’t want to force an invitation on someone.”

  “Oh, I won’t force it. You don’t want a lift, have it your own way. I’d just as soon kill you here.”

  “Wouldn’t that be rather risky?”

  “I don’t think so. Odds are no one will hear anything. You probably wouldn’t even be found for a while. Anyhow, I’m not here. I’m in my room at the restaurant. So’s Darcy. If it got to be necessary, which it probably wouldn’t, we could find a half dozen guests who are with us.”

  I thought about it and decided that he could. Maybe even a full dozen. And so, after thinking, I conceded.

  “I believe you could,” I said, “and I’ve decided to accept the lift after all.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate it.”