by Packer, Vin
“She really was,” said Liddy. “I’m always hearing good things about her.”
“Oh, can it, you two. The poor woman’s dead; may she rest in peace.” Archie looked at his watch. Eleven-ten.
Frank Gamble said, “Stop pot-watching. Watched pots never boil.”
“If she knew I had to go to Bay Shore tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind,” Archie said.
Liddy lit a Gauloise. “She probably thinks you’re tooting around with me.”
“Oh, bank on that.”
“You know what we ought to do,” said Frank Gamble. “We ought to surprise Dru when we get back. Don’t tell her anything about it, Archie. Just tell her Liddy’s coming out with her new husband, and watch her face fall when she sees it’s me.”
Archie smiled weakly; he could see the possibilities in the idea as well as he could perceive anything that night. Clouding his perception right at that moment was his memory of Mrs. Muckermann’s warning about his health and a vague sense of congestion in his chest. Was he imagining it? They had walked from the hotel in the pouring rain.
He said, “I’m going to try Dru again.”
“Then I’ll call the airlines,” Frank Gamble said, “but we’re not going to get anywhere in that soup out there. That’s Campbell’s soup and a half!”
Archie said, “What are you going to do if you have to stay over?”
“Find a hotel room,” his father answered. “Liddy doesn’t have a place any more, and my secretary’s at my place with her boyfriend, baby-sitting for Woof-Woof.”
“Woof-Woof,” Liddy said affectionately. “My new step-poodle.”
Archie said, “You can stay here. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“There’s something about that idea,” said Liddy, “that’s positively primal scene obscene.”
“What’s primal scene?” said Frank Gamble.
“Never mind,” Liddy said, “or you’ll start going to a shrink and then I’ll lose all faith in human nature.”
He didn’t get Dru, and he didn’t try after midnight. About that time Frank Gamble came wandering out of the bedroom, wearing one of Archie’s old terrycloth robes, with his socks still strapped to his garters, and another Dutch Masters stuck into his jaw. Archie had fixed a bed on the couch. He was finishing a can of beer and a paperback reprint of a Patricia Highsmith suspense novel when Frank Gamble sat down heavily beside him.
“I really want to thank you, son, for making it so easy for Liddy and me. It means a lot.”
“Don’t mention it. You’d better get some sleep.”
“You seem depressed, son. Did that astrologer back at the hotel depress you by telling you those things?”
“I was laughing when I told you about it. Didn’t you see me laughing when I told you about it?”
“I know, son. Sometimes we laugh on the outside and cry on the inside.”
Archie winced. “Dad, get some sleep.”
“I will. But I want to tell you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Whatever your mother told you about me, son, I wish you’d stop and think about what I said earlier. I hadn’t had any practice being a father.”
“Let’s just forget it, Dad. It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m a happy man now, son.”
“I’m glad you are.”
“And a happy man makes his peace with the world.” “I know.”
“Gets things off his chest.” “Right.” “Airs things.” “Yeah. Right.”
“A happy man wants everybody to be as happy a man as he is.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“I respected your mother, but I didn’t really love her, son.” “Okay.”
“She was a woman who commanded a man’s respect.” “Fine.”
“Now, I know she told you things about me. I never planned on having children. Whatever she told you, remember, son, I wasn’t prepared for a child. One day your mother simply told me you were on the way.”
“Sorry about that.”
“I was flabbergasted, son. I was twenty years old, son. Just a boy myself. Just getting a start in life.” “Dad, you don’t have to go into all of this. I don’t care.” “The thing is: what’d your mother tell you?” “About what?”
Liddy’s voice then. “The thing is,” said she, wearing Dru’s yellow seersucker bathrobe, walking up to Frank Gamble, “you can’t even sit up with the boys all night any more, Daddy Gamble, not even with your own boy. C’mon, Mommy wants you in with her.”
She jerked him to his feet. Docilely, being led by the hand, Archie’s father followed her into the bedroom. Daddy Gamble and Mommy. Jesus!
Eagerly, Archie returned to the utterly logical and predictable world of Miss Highsmith where: Greg’s hand was still free and plunging with the knife.
CHAPTER 23
“Hello, darling,” she said.
“Hi there. No, wait—don’t get in yet. I’m getting out.”
“In the rain?”
“In the rain.”
“And this fog—it’s—”
“Coming in on little cat’s feet,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Once I drowned a cat. The runt of the litter.” “They’re not like dogs. They’re independent.” “Too independent.”
“I guess so. This is a bad rain. Can’t we get in the car?” “Far too independent,” he said. “What have you got there? What are you carrying?” “Forrest’s gun.”
“He doesn’t own a gun … A gun?” “This is his gun. I killed him with it.” “Hey, don’t horse around. I don’t like it.” “I put him in the blue Slumber Bag. Pink for girls; blue for boys.”
“That is a gun!”
“That little cat was afraid, like your eyes are now. But she fought hard.” “Don’t, Neal. I am afraid.” “You pushed Margaret, didn’t you?” “No! No!”
“You might as well admit it.”
“I didn’t push her!”
“Because it won’t matter either way.”
“Don’t hurt my baby, Neal.”
“It would only be another bad apple, Pen.”
He fired the gun twice.
She fell to the ground near the right front wheel of the Falcon.
Her body was illuminated by the headlights from his Consul.
He tossed the revolver into the bushes, got back inside the Consul, removed his gloves and drove down the mountain. He listened to the radio announcer forecast clearing weather tomorrow and remembered all the times Penny and he had come up here this way in separate cars and felt this same fog come in the window of the Falcon, its cold dampness refreshing their warm bare flesh while they clung together in the back seat.
CHAPTER 24
And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
While Neal Dana listened to Officer Baird on the phone, he smiled at the poem above his desk and at the naïveté which had prompted him to frame it and hang it there.
He had so many doubts about himself, hadn’t he, before all of this had happened? He had been so self-chastising, so uncertain of his own mettle. Was it any wonder Margaret had ultimately cracked, and with the peculiar sense of the absurd characteristic of the mentally ill, chosen to look for support from someone altogether lacking in mettle?
“Clarence Bissel’s coming by in an hour,” said Baird. “He refuses to believe she was pregnant. He wants to see the autopsy report with his own eyes.”
“Yes, he’d have that reaction,” Neal said. “Penny was as afraid of having the baby because of him as she was afraid of not having it because of Forrest.”
“She definitely said Forrest knew about it?”
“Yes.”
“Then Forrest couldn’t have been very far from here.”
“Unless he called her long distance. Penny claimed she had no idea where he was.”
“She wouldn’t have admitted it if she did know.” “I suppose not.”
“And she gave no indication who fa
thered the child?”
“She said he was a stranger. She hadn’t seen him before or after she met him that night at the drive-in.”
“Had she actually approached anyone about performing an abortion, Dr. Dana?”
Neal said, “I don’t think so. What she really wanted from me yesterday was a confirmation that abortion wasn’t a sin. I said it wasn’t a matter of it being a sin, it was a matter of risking her health, if not her life.”
“What was her reaction?”
“She seemed to want to take the risk. She didn’t know how to go about it, though—who to ask.”
“So I suppose she asked Forrest; who else could she turn to for help with something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“She asked Forrest, and Forrest argued with her.” “Yes, according to her he would have tried to talk her out of it.”
“And kill her when he wasn’t able to.” “That’s hard to believe.”
“Is it, Dr. Dana? I think Forrest was somewhere in the vicinity. He met her up on the mountain to talk with her about this. There was an argument. He shot her … Incidentally, we’re combing the mountains for any trace of him … and Mrs. Dana.”
“Yes … I don’t think of Forrest as a killer.”
“A killer isn’t thought of as a killer, until he kills.”
“Still …”
“We traced the gun, Dr. Dana. It belongs to a fellow named Fitzhugh. He worked with Forrest; they were buddies. Fitzhugh’s in the hospital with hernia trouble, been there two weeks.”
“Then that pretty much says it,” said Neal.
The policeman said, “Yes, that says it.”
Neal returned to examining the folder of a patient suffering from alcoholic psychosis. He studied his Wechsler-Bellevue, Wells Memory Test, and Stanford-Binet Vocabulary findings.
He had never worked with more assiduity; he had never realized such interior calm.
Last night he had slept more soundly than he had since he was a very young man. He had awakened remembering a dream which truly spelled out his metamorphosis. In it, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini was playing, and his father was dancing with a golden statue who was carrying an ear of corn. When Neal went to cut in, Margaret said: “How’s that little girl whose brother you helped?” Norman Dana laughed. “Neal’s the little girl, aren’t you, Cornelia?”, and Neal pumped three bullets into his heart. Then he buried him.
“May I ask you something?” Margaret said. “Do you want plain squash or squash with onions and tomatoes?”
And then he ran toward Margaret through the tall elephant grass, smelled the scent of the sun in her hair when he caught her to him; her fingers held on to his shirt, both of them laughing so hard.
• • •
Neal’s father had been dead since Neal was a freshman in college, but Neal could remember when he was a student coming across a sentence of Desnoyers: “Ce sont les morts qu’il faut qu’on tue.” One must kill the dead. Neal had underlined it, memorized it, but never learned to do it. Look there for the reason he found it necessary to frame such poems as the one hanging above his desk.
Until Neal had buried him, finally, last night, Norman Dana had survived the grave, was the reason Neal had never found the confidence to study medicine, and the reason, too, these past few days, for the paranoia which had compelled Neal to imagine Margaret had been with many men besides Forrest Bissel.
One must kill the dead.
And now Margaret ran toward him in dreams, younger and laughing, with her hair spilling to her shoulders, and lived in fantasies while Neal listened to music or drove to work or sat on the upper porch under the stars watching the lights of the Tappan Zee.
Margaret lived, and so she should, for she had never wanted anything for Neal but what was best, and she had given him her best until the very end, when his inadequacies finally took their toll from her.
Neal flipped through the pages in the file until he found the patient’s Rorschach. He studied it, noted the impairment of the visual-motor functioning and the absence of response to the bright color area, and then he glanced at his watch.
It was four-thirty.
He slipped the file into his briefcase (Margaret, with her unfailing good taste, had found it for him at Mark Cross) and buzzed his secretary to announce that he was leaving for the day.
On his way home he stopped to buy a newspaper. The headline was devoted to the President’s speech, but at the bottom of the front page Neal saw: LOCAL GIRL KILLED IN MOUNTAINS.
• • •
Dru Gamble was sitting in the Cages’ Buick waiting for Neal when his car came up the hill. In the back seat she had two suitcases which she had spent the afternoon packing; in the pocket of her rust-colored linen suit, the train schedule from Tarrytown with the departure time circled and the time of arrival in Syracuse checked.
She was carrying the letters and the diary, and her own letter to Neal, as she got out of the Buick and greeted him.
“Hi! How about a swim? I think it’s warm enough,” he said.
“Only if you’ll promise to drown me.” “Hey, Dru, what’s the matter?” “Name it.”
“Oh, nothing’s that bad. Let me fix you a drink.”
She tried to think of things that would keep the tears behind the floodgates as she followed him into the house. She had made up her mind not to discuss her problems with Neal; that would be colossal nerve considering her reason for being there, but three sips through her martini it all came out. She told him how the answering service had called to advise her that Archie had to leave for Long Island early that morning on business, and how she had decided to go to New York for the weekend—let Archie fend for himself out here. She told him of her arrival at the apartment. She described the bed made up on the living-room couch, the dents in both pillows of the double bed in the bedroom, and the Gauloises in the ashtray on the bed table.
“It sounds like he slept on the couch,” Neal said.
“He probably started out on the couch. That would be Archie’s way. Stay over, he’d say, I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“Look, Dru, if Archie had gone in to see her yesterday, and for the reason you say, and if she’s the sort you describe, why would there have been any reason for him to make up the couch? They would have just gone to bed in the first place, wouldn’t they?”
“Archie didn’t know why he was going into New York yesterday. I’m sure he thought it was business. Then a sudden impulse overtook him, right? To call Liddy. Oh, I know him. If he’d planned it, he would have stayed at Liddy’s.”
“That was a bad storm last night. Remember that.”
“I know. That was probably the excuse. He probably invited her to our place, and then persuaded her not to go home because of the storm. Then another sudden impulse overtook him, right? He got up from the couch and moved stealthily toward the bedroom. Lurching, no doubt, from wall to wall. I know he was loaded.” “How do you know that?”
“He was smoking cigars. He has to be loaded to the gills for that.”
She told him she was going to her sister’s in Syracuse, and Neal said he’d drive her to Tarrytown to the train. “Maybe you will,” said Dru.
“No. I will. I don’t think you should go without hearing Archie’s side, but if you’re determined, I’ll drive you there.”
“See how you feel when you look this over,” said Dru.
She stood up and walked across to the coffee table in front of the couch. She put the letters and the diary on it, and her letter to Neal. Neal picked up the pack of letters from Tuto first.
“Letters of Margaret’s?”
“Letters of Margaret’s,” said Dru. “You might as well take a look, Neal. And there’s a letter there from me.”
She left him puzzling over it all, took the newspaper from atop his briefcase, and went back to the wing chair by the window. A warm breeze blew the curtains; yes, it was warm enough today to swim, and she imagined Archie and Liddy boar
ding the ferry in Bay Shore early that morning for the ride across to Ocean Beach.
Business in Bay Shore.
Archie ought to have been able to come up with something better than that.
Bay Shore was Fire Island. Period. It was Ocean Beach, or Point O’ Woods, or Fair Harbor, or Saltaire, or Kismet, but it was Fire Island.
What other reason was there for anyone to go to Bay Shore?
Dru heard Neal mutter “Diable,” under his breath.
She fortified herself with a large swallow of martini, and shook the fold from the Rockland-Orange Gazette.
She said, “Neal? Before you read any more, would you read my letter to you first?”
Then Dru turned her attention to the newspaper.
LOCAL GIRL KILLED
IN MOUNTAINS
Penny Bissel, 22, of 2102 Main Street, Nyack, New York was found dead late last night beside a Ford Falcon registered in the name of Clarence Bissell, her father.
Miss Bissell had been shot twice, through the heart, with a small Browning automatic pistol.
Autopsy was performed revealing the victim was pregnant.
The lonely road on Bear Mountain where the body was discovered by state troopers is a popular lovers’ …
Three words ripped across her mind like whiplashes.
Penny!
Falcon!
Pregnant!
Dru Gamble looked up from the newspaper at the same time Neal Dana put her letter down on the coffee table. Their eyes met.
He was the first to move. He stood. And to speak. “I’m sorry, Dru.” Then he came slowly toward her.
CHAPTER 25
A yellow bee flew into the back seat of the Buick.
Tiffany Cage, a curled beige ball on the floor, lazily removed a dark brown paw from one crossed blue eye, and peered up in the direction of the buzzing.
The bee swooped down and made a pass at her nose, desperately trying to find a way out of the Buick.
Tiffany Cage sniffed with irritation, opened the other crossed eye, and snapped the air angrily with her crooked dark brown tail.
