Deep Water

by Patricia Highsmith

  "I'm not sure it was just a threat, Horace. Melinda seemed pretty set on a divorce a few days ago."

  "'What'? Well, the fact remains, she didn't start one. I know because I asked. I asked Havermal what he'd found to substantiate die divorce idea. He hadn't found anything."

  Vic kept silent.

  Finally, Horace sat down. "Well, Vic just what happened when you picked up Cameron and drove him around?"

  Vic felt his eyes widen in a protective stare. "Nothing. Melinda wasn't mentioned. He was making conversation. It was the first time I'd seen him act a little unsure of himself. You see, Horace," Vic continued, pushing his luck with Horace just as he had pushed it with Havermal, "that's what makes me think Melinda was telling ne the truth when she said she was going to get a divorce. Matter of fact, she was supposed to start the divorce yesterday. She may not have had an appointment with a lawyer, but she was going to 'start' it yesterday, she told me. Then she mentioned Cameron's having two tickets for Mexico City, and she was going with him. No wonder Cameron wasn't comfortable with me. He didn't have to get in my car, of course, but you know the way he is. He acts first and thinks later, if at all. It crossed my mind that he might have had a date with Melinda at some lawyer's office yesterday afternoon. He'd be just crass enough to go up there and sit with her while they got the papers started."

  Horace shook his head in disgust.

  "But, as I said to the roving detective, Cameron might also have run out on the whole thing. He'd have to run out on his job, too. At least on this assignment. He couldn't have faced Melinda in Little Wesley after running out."

  "No. I see what you mean," Horace said thoughtfully. "That's probably just what he's done."

  Vic got up and opened a cabinet in the bottom of his desk. "I think you could use a drink, couldn't you?" He always knew when Horace could use a drink. "I'll go over and get some ice."

  "No, thanks. No ice for me. I'll take this for medicinal purposes—and it always seems more medicinal without ice."

  Vic got a glass from the top of his desk, washed it in his tiny bathroom, and took his own tooth glass for himself. He poured three fingers for each of them. Horace sipped his appreciatively.

  "I need this," Horace said. "I seem to take these things harder than you do."

  "You seem to," Vic said, smiling.

  "And you're in for another. It's like after the De Lisle business."

  "A big year for the detective agencies," Vic said, and saw Horace look at him. Horace had still not asked him outright if Carpenter had been a detective.

  "It's funny that Cameron's company doesn't look for him in New York, or Miami, or wherever a fellow like Cameron would go," Horace said. "Or Mexico City. Well—maybe they are looking." Vic deliberately changed the subject, slightly, by talking about the likelihood of finding a man who had chosen, say, to go to Australia to hide himself. The chances would be practically nil that he would be found, if he could get round the immigration authorities and enter Australia. They went on into the subject of individual blood chemistry. Horace said they could now identify an individual from a bit of his dried blood found on something perhaps months after his disappearance. Vic had also heard about that.

  "But suppose you haven't the person?" Vic asked, and Horace laughed.

  Vic thought of Cameron's blood on the white rocks of the quarry, and of Cameron some forty feet below in the water. If they found the blood, they would logically look for the body in the water, but perhaps there would be no blood left in the body, and no skin left on the fingertips. But Cameron might be identifiable. Vic wished he could go and take another look at the blood spots, do what he could to obliterate them, but he didn't dare go to the quarry for fear he might be seen. It seemed the only careless, stupid thing he had ever done in his life—to leave a trace where he had not wanted to leave a trace, to have failed to do properly something of such importance.

  By the time Horace got up to leave he was laughing. But it was not quite like Horace's usual laughter. He said with an effort at cheerfulness, "Well, we've weathered a lot, haven't we, Vic? They'll find Cameron somewhere. The police must have been alerted in all the big towns. They always are."

  Vic thanked him for his visit, and then he was gone. Vic stood in the garage, listening to his car going into the distance and thinking that Horace had not asked him where Melinda was or when she was coming back, knowing that Vic probably wouldn't have known and that questions would have embarrassed him. Vic went over to his snail aquaria.

  Hortense and Edgar were making love, Edgar reaching down from a little rock to kiss Hortense on the mouth. Hortense was reared on the end of her foot, swaying a little under his caress like a slow dancer enchanted by music. Vic watched for perhaps five minutes, thinking of absolutely nothing, not even of the snails, until he saw the cup-shaped excrescences start to appear on the right side of both the snails' heads. How they did adore each other, and how perfect they were together! The glutinous cups grew larger and touched, rim to rim. Their mouths drew apart.

  Vic looked at his watch. Five minutes to ten. It struck him as a strangely depressing time of the evening. The house was utterly silent. He wondered if Trixie was asleep? He cleared his throat and the small, rational sound was as noisy as a foot over gravel.

  The snails made no sound. Hortense was shooting her dart first. She missed. Or was that part of the game? After a few moments, Edgar tried, missed, drew back and struck again, hitting the right spot so that the dart went in, which inspired Hortense to try again, too. She had a harder time, aiming upward, but she made it after three deliberate and patient tries. Then as if shocked into a profounder trance, their heads went back a little, their tentacles drew almost in, and Vic knew that if they had had lidded eyes they would have been closed. The snails were motionless now. He stared at them until he saw the first signs that the rims of their cups were going to separate. Then he walked up and down the garage floor for a minute, suffering an unaccustomed sense of restlessness. His mind turned to Melinda, and he went to the snails again to keep himself from thinking of her.

  A quarter to eleven. Was she at the Wilsons'? Were all the jaws working at once? Was the detective there, or would he have gone to bed after his hard day? Would anyone possibly think of the quarry?

  Vic bent over the snails, looking at them now through a hand magnifying lens. They were connected only by the two darts. They would stay like this for at least another hour, he knew Tonight he hadn't their patience. He went into his room to read.

  Chapter 24

  Hortense spent twenty-four hours laying her eggs about five days later, and Detective Havermal was still prowling the community, doing a far more thorough and out-in-the-open job than Carpenter had done on the De Lisle case. Havermal visited the Cowans, the MacPhersons, the Stephen Hineses, the Petersons, old Carlyle, Hansen the grocer, Ed Clarke the hardware store proprietor (Vic was highly respected at Clarke's Hardware and probably spent more money there than any other of Ed's customers), Sam at the Lord Chesterfield bar, Wrigley the newsdealer who delivered papers to the Van Aliens, and Pete Lazzari and George Anderson, the two garbagemen who collected from the printing plant and the Van Allen house, respectively. Havermal visited them with his purpose more or less obvious, Vic gathered—to make Vic responsible for Cameron's disappearance—and he asked direct questions. The general attitude of the interrogated, Vic learned, was one of extreme caution in making any statements to Havermal arid also one of resentment. It was unfortunate for Havermal that his personality was so antagonizing. Even the garbage collectors, simple men, grasped the import of Havermal's insinuations, and reacted negatively.

  Said Pete Lazzari to Vic, "I ain't interested in what Mrs. Van Allen does, I sez. I know she drinks some, that's all. You're tryin' to nail a guy for murder. 'That's' pretty interestin'. I known Mr. Van Allen six years, I sez, and you won't find a nicer guy in town. I beard of punks like you, I sez to him. You know where you belong? I sez. On my truck along with the rest of the muck!" Pete I Lazz
ari was all torso and no legs, and could toss loaded ashcans of garbage twelve feet into the air over the rim of his truck like nothing.

  On his second visit to the Mellers, Horace turned him away at the door. Stephen Hines gave him a lecture on the English principle of law that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty, and on its deterioration in America because of unlettered, base-minded persons like Havermal.

  Melinda informed Vic that the airlines had been checked and that Tony had not taken any plane. But Cameron had bought two tickets. Havermal had found that out, and also the fact that they were under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Cameron. "He might have turned his ticket in and bought another ticket under another name," Vic said.

  "No, he couldn't," Melinda said triumphantly. "You have to have a Tourist Card to get into Mexico, and they look at the card before the plane leaves New York. Tony told me."

  Vic smiled. "Remember the story the Cowans told us when they went to Mexico a couple of years ago? Evelyn had lost her birth certificate and they hadn't time to get one for her, so they just told the clerk at the Mexican Consulate their names, and he wrote out Tourist Cards for them without asking for any identification at all. That Tourist Card business is just a way of mulcting three dollars, or whatever it is, from every tourist who enters Mexico. Otherwise they'd let you in on an ordinary passport just as any other country does."

  Melinda had no retort to that. She seemed restless and troubled, and there was an air of defeat about her as Havermal's stay in Little Wesley dragged on to a week. Havermal had exhausted everything there was to try. He had cruised the countryside around Wesley, Melinda said, in a radius of the distance a car could travel and still get to Ballinger in about thirty-five minutes. Vic did not know whether he had discovered the quarry or not—he must have used a map of the district, but Vic knew that some maps did not show the quarry—and this time Vic did not push his luck by asking Melinda if he had. It had rained heavily twice since Havermal had been in Little Wesley. There were rust stains on some of the flat rocks around the quarry where pieces of equipment had lain or were still lying. It would probably be hard to decide which stains were from blood and which from rust. It was incredible, Vic thought, that Havermal had not looked at the quarry by now, but perhaps he hadn't. He seemed to be spending a good half of his time cruising the roads, as Melinda said, and perhaps beating the underbrush for a body.

  Havermal made one more call on Vic at the printing plant. He had nothing more concrete to throw at Vic than some critical statements that Don Wilson had made. "Don Wilson thinks he's got your number. He thinks you killed De Lisle, too. It's pretty funny when a guy with a strong motive in both cases happens to be the last guy two 'dead' guys are seen with," said Havermal.

  "You mean you've found Cameron's body?" asked Vic, wide-eyed, but really Havermal didn't even inspire him to get any fun out of the interview.

  "Yeah, we found the body," Havermal said, watching Vic so pointedly that Vic knew it wasn't so, but he followed through with an ingenuous:

  "'Where'? Why didn't you say so?"

  Insolently, Havermal made no answer, and after a few seconds went on to something else. When Don Wilson came up again, Vic said with a gentle smile:

  "Don Wilson had better watch out. I could certainly sue him for libel, and I don't think he could afford it. His wife's very sweet, don't you think?"

  "And dumb," Havermal commented.

  "Well," Vic said, still affable, “I don't think you'll get much out of the people up here if you go around insulting them."

  "Thanks," Havermal said in the tone of a honking goose.

  "I'd like to thank you for one thing before you leave Little Wesley," Vic said, "and that is for showing me how solid the community is in—well, liking me. Not that I've even striven for the approval of the community or particularly craved it, but it's awfully nice to know it's there."

  Havermal left not long after that, without even a parting shot at him. Vic picked up the two cigarette butts that Havermal had ground out on the floor and dropped them in his wastebasket. Then he went back into the printing room. He was in the middle of arranging a dried skeleton of an oak leaf and a flattened basket worm's cocoon in a graceful composition to serve as a colophon beneath one of Brian Ryder's poems.

  Vic had another demonstration of community loyalty that evening. Hal Pfeiffer, editor of Wesley's 'New Wesleyan', called him to say that a detective named Havermal had been into his office to give a slanderous account of an investigation he had been making in regard to the Cameron case and the part in it "possibly" played by Victor Van Allen and his wife, had offered his story ostensibly at local news, and Mr. Pfeiffer had given him short shrift and had shown him the door.

  "I've never met you, Mr. Van Allen, but I've heard about you,'' said Mr. Pfeiffer over the telephone. "I thought I'd tell you about this in case you were possibly worried about any such thing as this happening. The 'New Wesleyan' doesn't want anything to do with characters like Havermal."

  Vic reported that to Melinda.

  There was even a story from Vic's cleaners. When Vic went iii to pick up some clothes that were ready, Fred Warner, the manager, leaned over the counter and whispered that "that detective" had been in to have a look at any of Victor Van Allen's clothes that had been brought in lately. The detective had found a pair of trousers with blood on them, but Mrs. Van Allen had been with him, and she had explained, Warner said, that the trousers were stained with Vic's own blood, because he had cut his head one evening.

  "The bloodstains were all on the back part of the pants," Warner said, chuckling, "on the top part. Easy to see it was a couple of drips from a head accident, but you should've seen how disappointed that detective was! He's a real bloodhound—just not a very good one, eh, Mr. Van Allen?"

  And then Havermal suddenly left.

  The whole town seemed to give a sigh of relief, Vic thought. People on the streets seemed to smile more, to smile at each other, as if to say that their solidarity had defeated one more detested outsider. Parties broke out. Even the Petersons invited Vic and Melinda to a party at which Vic met several people he had not met before, people who treated him with a great deal of respect. At this party—composed of people whom Melinda would ordinarily have tried to look down on—it first came to Vic's notice that Melinda was changing. She was not particularly warm or charming as she had been at parties after the De Lisle incident, but she smiled, even at him, she made no grimaces over the punch which he knew she loathed, and she did not insult anybody, as far as Vic knew. It set off some disjointed speculations in Vic's mind. She wasn't behaving herself to offset a bad public opinion of him now, because there wasn't any need of it. Was she simply tired of pretending to be sullen, worn out from emanating hatred? Hatred was a tiring emotion, but Melinda had nothing else to do with herself. Was she possibly pleased because he was rather a guest of honor at the Petersons' party? But she had never been pleased by anything like that before. Vic even wondered if she were in a conspiracy with Havermal to get him off guard and then spring some evidence that they hadn't yet told him about. But no, he had an overwhelming conviction that Havermal had shot his last bolt in Little Wesley and missed. There was nothing gloating about Melinda these days. She was just a bit sweeter, softer. Thinking back, Vic could recall even a few smiles from her at home. And she hadn't been to see Don Wilson for a week, Vic thought.

  "How's Don Wilson?" Vic asked after they came home from the Petersons' party. "You haven't mentioned him lately"

  "Did I ever mention him?" Melinda asked, but her voice was not belligerent.

  "No. I guess you didn't," Vic said. "Well, how is he? Business all right?"

  "Oh, he's stewing over something," Melinda said in a curiously preoccupied tone that made Vic look at her. She was looking at him from the living room sofa where she had sat down to remove her shoes. She was smiling a little. And she wasn't at all drunk. "Why'd you ask?"

  "Because I hadn't heard anything from him lately."

&nb
sp; "I guess you heard enough at one point. Havermal told me he told you what he'd said."

  "That wasn't the first time. I didn't mind."

  "Well—he didn't get anywhere, did he?"

  Vic looked at her, bewildered, though he kept his calm, pleasant expression like a mask. "He certainly didn't. Didn't you want him to get somewhere?"

  "I suppose I wanted to know the truth." She lighted a cigarette with her familiar arrogance, flinging the match at the fire. place and falling far short. "Don seemed to have some good theories. I guess they were just theories." She looked at him with a trace of self-consciousness, as if she didn't expect him to believe she meant it.

  He didn't believe she meant it. She was playing some kind of game. Slowly he filled his pipe, letting several moments pass during which she might have gone on. He was not going to go on, but neither was he going to walk out to his room immediately, which was what he wanted to do.

  "Well, you certainly were a hit tonight," she said finally.

  "David against the Goliaths. And little David won. Didn't I?" he asked with his ambiguous smile that he knew was still ambiguous to Melinda.

  She was staring at him and visibly pondering her next move. It was a physical one. She slapped her hands together, got up, and said, "What do you say we have an honest drink after all that pink lemonade? God, was it awful!" She started for the kitchen.

  "Not for me, Melinda. It's a little late."

  "Two o'clock? What's come over you?"

  "Sleepiness," he said, smiling as he walked toward her. He kissed her cheek. She might have been a statue, but her immobility was probably more surprise than indifference, he thought. "G'night, honey. I suppose Trixie's spending all day tomorrow at the Petersons', isn't she?" Trixie had gone to the Petersons' with Vic and Melinda, and around ten o'clock she had gone up to Janey's bedroom to sleep.

  "I suppose."

  "Well, good night." As he went out of the door into the garage, she was still standing there as if undecided whether to fix herself a drink alone or not.