Dutch Blue Error

by William G. Tapply

  “She’s been through a lot,” I said, deciding not to contradict Deborah’s designation of me as her attorney. I filled Ellis in, and then he summarized for me what he had found. The big desk in the living room and a smaller writing desk in Deborah’s bedroom seemed to be the only things that had been rifled. Deborah had not been able to find anything missing in the house.

  “The guy evidently was looking for something,” concluded Ellis. “From what you told me, a good bet is that stamp.”

  “Which he didn’t find,” I finished. “Which means that he could be back. For her.”

  Ellis cocked his head. “A little farfetched, don’t you think?”

  “No. Two men have already been killed for that stamp.”

  “That’s a theory,” said Ellis, “which, from what you’ve said, the police don’t buy.”

  “The lady needs protection.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll talk with the Chief. Remember, Mr. Coyne, this is Carlisle. We’re a pretty quiet little town. We have our share of housebreaks, beered-up teenagers smashing mailboxes, normal number of driving-under-the-influence cases. But damn few assaults. It’s a peaceful little community, all in all.”

  “This lady is in danger.”

  “Like I say, I’ll talk to the Chief.”

  Ellis went outside, I assumed to use the car radio. As soon as he had left the room, Deborah returned. She set a big mug of tea on the coffee table in front of me and perched on the edge of a straight-backed chair.

  “They’re not going to do anything, are they?”

  I shook my head. “Probably not.”

  “You know,” she said, fixing me with her silvery eyes, “I’m considered quite competent in the business community. Aggressive, even. I hold my own with the men. I’ve never used the pretty little helpless girl routine to get my way. I play by the rules. I don’t bat my eyelashes and let the tears well up in my eyes and say, ‘Oh, my, you’re so strong.’ I want to succeed. And when I do, I don’t want anybody to say it’s because I’m a lady, because I have some kind of an edge.”

  I nodded and slurped from the mug of tea.

  “But this,” she continued, “this makes me feel helpless. Out of control. I figured I was doing okay. I mean, considering that my father was murdered, I was doing pretty damn good. But now—now, I’ve got to admit it. I’m scared.”

  “That’s reasonable. That’s okay. You should be scared.”

  “It’s not being scared that bothers me. It’s not being, in control. Waiting for someone to come after me.”

  “Look,” I said, “if the police won’t guarantee you protection, I’ll stay here tonight.”

  I assumed she’d protest. Instead, she said, “Okay.”

  A couple minutes later Ellis returned, shaking his head.

  “No dice. Best I could do, we’ll have a patrol car drive by once in a while.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You hear anything, just call the station,” he said to Deborah. “Anything at all. Don’t hesitate. Like I said, there’ll be a car in the area. We can be here in a minute or two.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I guess that’s it, then. You find anything missing, be sure to let us know.”

  “Sure,” said Deborah. She walked to the door with him, closed it behind him, then came back to the living room.

  She went to the jumble of papers on the floor and sat down.

  I knelt beside her.

  “I’ll help,” I said.

  She turned to look at me. “You know,” she said, “you really shouldn’t listen to what all those people are saying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re really not such a bad guy. For a lawyer.”

  “Oh.”

  Her hand came up and touched my cheek. Her kiss was cool and soft on the corner of my mouth. I didn’t move.

  She leaned back, her fingers still on my face, and grinned.

  “What was that for?”

  “I felt like it. Should I apologize?”

  “Nope. Want to do it again?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  She sat back on her heels and began to gather up the papers that lay scattered around her on the floor. I moved back to the sofa and picked up my mug of tea, which I found to be still warm. I held it in both my hands, my elbows on my knees, and watched Deborah scoop up the papers and arrange them on her desk. She moved with economical grace, stooping and stretching, and I enjoyed looking at her. Soon the papers stood in neat piles on the desktop. Then she turned to face me.

  “You really don’t have to stay. I’ll be fine. The police will be around in their car.”

  I shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  “I’m okay now.” She touched the stacks of papers on the desk, tapping their edges to neaten them. “I can get these organized tomorrow.”

  “Anything missing?”

  “I can’t tell for sure. I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe whoever it was wasn’t looking for the stamp at all,” I said.” Maybe he was looking for something in the papers.”

  “You mean something about the stamp?”

  “Could be. You know, a letter, an insurance policy, a document of authentication.”

  “Well, he didn’t find anything like that,” she said, “because I don’t have anything like that.”

  I stood up. “Guess I’ll go, now,” I said, “if you’re sure you’re going to be all right.”

  “You can have a drink before you go.”

  “Well, okay,” I said. “You twisted my arm.”

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’d like to change first. I’ve still got my work clothes on. I’ll be right back.”

  She returned a few minutes later wrapped in a big, red terry-cloth bathrobe. Her hair hung loose. Bare feet peeped from under the full-length robe.

  “Now,” she said, “what would you like?”

  “What I’d really like is popcorn.”

  She smiled. “Really?”

  “Really. Popcorn and Coke is what I want.”

  “I’ve got Pepsi. That okay?”

  I nodded. “And a cigarette,” I added.

  “Outside.”

  “I remember.”

  The rain had let up. A soft mist drifted through the lights outside Deborah’s house. The big pine trees dripped steadily. The air smelled of decay. A little breeze had sprung up, the forerunner of the cold front which would move in behind the storm. It promised winter.

  I stood on the little porch smoking until the chilly night air drove me back inside. Deborah called from the kitchen, “Almost ready. Why don’t you put on a record?”

  We ate popcorn, drank Pepsi-Cola, and listened to Stan Getz, and we didn’t talk much. The silence felt comfortable. Deborah curled in one corner of the sofa wrapped in her big red robe with her feet tucked under her. I slipped off my shoes and put my feet up on the coffee table. The big bowl on the cushion between us emptied quickly.

  When the records ended, Deborah went to the stereo and knelt in front of it. “Let’s hear the other sides,” she said. Then, with her back still toward me, she said, “You know about me. But I don’t know anything about you. I don’t even know if you’re married.”

  “I’m not.”

  The Getz saxophone filled Deborah’s living room with sweet, sad sounds. She curled back into the sofa again. Her pewter eyes regarded me solemnly. “You seem like the sort of man who would be married.”

  I nodded. “I seem that way to me, too. I was married. Eleven years. It ended one day.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I was sorry for a long time, too.”

  “What happened?”

  I waved my hand. “One of those things.”

  “It’s painful to you.”

  “No.” I picked at a couple of half-popped kernels in the bottom of the bowl. “No, it’s not painful. Do you really want to hear about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” I sank back into the cus
hions of the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. “I met Gloria my first year of law school. That was in the early sixties. I used to hang around the Federal courthouse in New Haven. There were lots of interesting civil liberties cases in those days, if you remember. That’s what I wanted to do then. First Amendment stuff. The great Constitutional issues. Making history before the Supreme Court. Anyhow, I met this young photographer. She worked for a New Haven paper, and on the side did yearbook portraits for schools, weddings, freelance stuff for magazines. One day she asked if I’d mind if she photographed me. She was working on a proposal for Life magazine. The faces of young America on the make, something like that. She said I had the prototypical three-piece-suit face. I told her that wasn’t very flattering. But she had a great pair of legs and an infectious laugh. Turned out she had no interest whatsoever in photographing me. She just wanted to meet me.”

  “A three-piece-suit face,” repeated Deborah, smiling. “You still have one of those.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m not exactly young America on the make anymore, though. We hit it off, Gloria and I. I thought she was the most unusual woman I’d ever met. Totally uninhibited. Great laugh. And she really had talent. We decided not to get married while I was in school. We vowed to keep our careers and our relationship separated. See,” I said, “part of what I loved about Gloria was her talent and her independence. We lived together, off and on, for two years. This was way before that was an acceptable thing to do. Gloria didn’t care. It was her idea. And we got married the day after I got my degree from Yale.”

  “Then it changed,” said Deborah.

  “Yes. Oh, it was very gradual. Not even noticeable, at first. We got a house in Wellesley, joined the country club, had a couple of kids. She didn’t do much photography, except our own family. Always taking pictures of the boys. She became absorbed in the boys and the house. Our conversations grew narrower and narrower. The price of pork chops, the evils of house dust, the relative merits of nursery schools, crab grass, laundry detergent.”

  I looked at Deborah. Her arms were folded across her knees. Her chin rested on her hands, and she was studying me with her gray eyes.

  “You got bored with her,” she said.

  I nodded. “Yes. One day I realized it. Our marriage was boring. She had changed. She was dull. The laughter was gone.”

  “So you dumped her.”

  “That’s not…”

  Deborah’s eyes narrowed. “No, I understand. Gloria was stuck raising the kids, taking care of the house, and you went out into the world every day. What the hell did you expect?”

  I nodded. “Sure. That’s what I figured, too. I begged her to go back to work. I told her we’d get a maid. The kids were in school. Hell, I pleaded with her to get out of the house. I figured that’s what she wanted. But see, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t what she wanted at all. It had gone too far, I guess. She wanted to talk about pork chops and house dust. It’s all that interested her. Everything I had loved about her was dying. There was only one way to save her.”

  “Really magnanimous. You dumped her to save her. Some rationalization!”

  “I liberated her,” I said.

  “Humph!” snorted Deborah. “Then what?”

  “It worked. You’ve got to understand something. I had the ideal marriage, by conventional standards. A dutiful wife, great cook, wonderful mother. She kept her figure, made love whenever I wanted—at least pretended enthusiasm for it—good hostess, charmed my clients, nice backhand. No bad habits. Never nagged me, never questioned my comings and goings. But it saddened me, and I couldn’t allow her to turn into a Stepford wife, a mindless servant to what she thought were my wishes and needs. Hell, she wouldn’t even contest the divorce. ‘If that’s what you want,’ she said.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then I wasn’t around anymore to give her life any meaning. She had to find it herself. She went through a bad few months. Kept calling me. But eventually she started taking pictures again. And three years after our divorce, to the day, she called me up and asked me out to dinner. I went. She was bubbling. Had a contract from some magazine to do a photographic series on historic homes in Newport. We had champagne. She said to me, ‘You forced me to be free. Thank you.’ She was her old self again.”

  “Forced to be free,” said Deborah. “Nice for you, it seems to me.”

  I shook my head. “No. Not nice for me. Not at all. Like you said earlier, I’m the sort of man who should be married. My life was a lot better—a lot richer—when I was married. It was Gloria, I think, who was the sort of woman who shouldn’t be married.”

  “Why haven’t you remarried, then?”

  “I think,” I said, “what I actually am, is the sort of man who should be married to Gloria. But Gloria’s not the sort of woman who should be married at all. Or at least, not to me.”

  Deborah stared at me with her chin perched atop her knees. Her hair fell forward, framing her face, so that she reminded me of an owl. “That’s either a very tragic story,” she said, shaking her head slowly, “or else it’s a great big rationalization.”

  I shrugged.

  “So you still love her, then.”

  “From afar. In the abstract. Yes, I suppose so.”

  “And the two boys,” she said. “Where do they fit in?” Her eyes narrowed. “If you had to do it again, would you have children?”

  I smiled at her. “Sure. But not the same ones.”

  She frowned.

  “That was a joke.”

  Deborah turned her face so that her cheek rested on her forearm. “Very funny.” She closed her eyes.

  I stretched and stood up. “Well,” I said. “It’s late. Tomorrow’s a work day. I’ll be leaving.”

  “You might as well stay,” she said. “I can make up the couch,” she added quickly. “It pulls out. It’s quite comfortable.”

  I reached to touch her shoulder, but she stood up and moved away from me. “I hope you don’t misunderstand.”

  “Oh, no. I understand. The couch will be fine.”

  We each took an end of the heavy coffee table and moved it aside. Then I pulled out the fold-away bed while Deborah went for sheets and blankets. We made up the bed together like a comfortably married couple, stretching the sheets between us, tucking them under, and smoothing two blankets on top. She produced a pillow and laid a folded afghan across the foot of the bed.

  “Your bathroom is off the kitchen. There’s a new toothbrush and clean towels. If there’s anything else you need…” She sounded like the girl behind the counter at a Holiday Inn.

  “That sounds fine,” I said.

  “What time do you get up in the morning?”

  “Earlier than I want to,” I said. “I’ll wake up around five. I used to be able to sleep. No more. I don’t need an alarm.”

  “Well, okay, then. I’ll make some breakfast for you. Good night.” She reached up on tiptoes and kissed my cheek lightly. Then she disappeared behind a door down a short hallway.

  I wandered outside for the day’s last cigarette. The carpet of pine needles was soft and damp underfoot. Up through the canopy of pines I could see the clouds skidding across the moonlit sky. The wind rustled high in the trees. I shivered. If the wind died, there would be a frost, the first of the season. The storm had swept summer away.

  I was edgy. The melancholy of a stormy Sunday evening still lingered in the fuzzy part of my consciousness, and the evil that had invaded Deborah’s house mixed with it to produce a lump of malaise in my chest. I looked back at the house. Lights glowed warm and orange through the windows of the living room.

  I stamped out my cigarette and went back inside. I checked the locks on both the front and back doors and found the broken pane of glass that had allowed the invader to get in. Nothing I could do about that. If he wanted to come back, he’d get in. I hoped that my car in the driveway would deter him if he decided to return that night.

  There was no sound from the direc
tion of Deborah’s bedroom. I hoped she felt secure. I wished I did. I remembered once again the little black hole at the base of Albert Dopplinger’s skull, and the rusty brown stain on Francis Shaughnessey’s carpet, and the taste of chloroform in my mouth. I found Deborah’s liquor supply in a kitchen cabinet and poured myself half a tumbler of Jim Beam. I brought it into the living room and turned the stereo on low. I sipped bourbon and listened to Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto’s unforgettable rendering of “The Girl from Ipanema.” The upbeat bossa nova failed to raise my spirits.

  Deborah had left two big, fluffy bath towels and a new toothbrush still wrapped in cellophane in the bathroom for me. I showered quickly and sipped the last of my bourbon while I toweled myself dry. Then I laid my clothes as neatly as I could over a chair, turned out all the lights, and crawled naked into my bed.

  It was more comfortable than I’d expected, and sleep came quickly. It seemed like only minutes, but it had been perhaps an hour when I sensed a presence in the room with me. Immediately my nerves went on alert. I lay still and forced my breathing to remain slow and regular. I lifted my eyelids a millimeter. A figure stood beside my bed, and it took me just an instant to realize it was Deborah. I let my eyelids fall shut again.

  I felt her fingers on my face, a tentative touch, as if she were testing the feel of my skin. Her hand lingered there for a moment, lightly, absentmindedly tracing the line from my cheekbone along my jaw. Then it moved away. I could smell her fragrance, clean and soapy.

  Then her hand grasped my shoulder, none too gently.

  “Hey,” she said. “Hey, Coyne. You awake?”

  I opened my eyes to look at her. She was standing beside my bed staring down at me. She wore a shapeless, pale-colored nightgown. Her hair hung loose around her face.

  I yawned ostentatiously. “Funny thing,” I said. “Sleep seems to be eluding me.”

  She sat beside me, her rump solid and warm against my shoulder. “Listen,” she said. “You wanna hold me for a little while?”

  “Sure. Okay,” I said.

  Afterward, she curled herself into a little fetal ball and backed tightly against the front of me. I lay on my side, my face in her hair and my arm around her, snuggling her against me. She held my wrist in both of her hands. Her nightgown had ridden up over her hips, and her skin was warm and soft and alive where it touched mine. Her body rocked gently with the rhythms of her sleep. And then I slept, too.