Маргарет Миллар - The Listening Walls

Doors began opening in his mind, revealing rooms that were peopled with shadows and voiced with echoes. None of the shadows could be positively identified, and the echoes were like the nonsense syllables produced by a tape recording running backward. But in one corner of one room, a faceless woman sat at a desk, writing.

The telephone conversation with Helene Brandon continued.

“Mr. Dodd? Are you still...?”

“I’m here.”

“Listen to me. Please listen. There’s nothing to be gained by dragging me into this.”

“You have important evidence.”

“But I gave it to you. You have it now. That’s what counts, isn’t it — the evidence itself, not who tells it to the police. Can’t you keep me out of it? I’ll pay.”

“If I keep you out of it, I’ll be the one who ends up paying.”

“There must be ways.”

“Name one.”

She was silent a moment. He could hear her heavy, irregular breathing, as if thinking was to her a violent physical exercise.

“You,” she said finally, “you could have been the one who saw Rupert and the girl at Lassiter’s, at lunch time.”

“Maybe I could, except I ate my lunch out of a paper bag in my office.”

“Alone?”

“A couple of flies joined me for dessert.”

“Please, for heaven’s sake, be serious. You don’t know what this means to me and my family. My three children are all in school. They’re old enough to suffer from this, suffer terribly.”

“You can’t prevent their suffering. Their uncle is wanted for murder.”

“At least he’s not a blood relative. I am. I’m their mother. If I’m dragged into this, God help them.”

“O.K., O.K.,” Dodd said flatly. “So I saw Rupert and the girl at Lassiter’s. What was I doing there?”

“Having lunch.”

“My secretary knows damned well I took my lunch to work.”

“All right then, you were trailing Rupert — or is it tailing?”

“Either.”

“When the girl came into the picture you decided to tail her instead, so you did. She went to Union Square where she met...”

“How did she get to Union Square?”

“Took the Powell Street cable car.”

“Do you know that or are you making it up?”

“Making it up. But it sounds plausible, isn’t that what we’re aiming at? Besides, she entered the Square from Powell Street.”

“What time?”

“I don’t know, I sort of lost track of time. I was — thinking about Amy coming home. And other things.” She coughed, as if to warn herself not to step on dangerous ground. “I remember it started to rain, and the old men who were feeding the pigeons got up and left.”

“It started to rain about three o’clock.” He wouldn’t have noticed the time or the rain particularly, except that his secretary had come into his office to tell him in her own peculiar way, that she was going down to the drugstore to buy a bottle of cold pills. “Some people believe that rain cleanses and washes the air. But I happen to know for a fact that what it does is bring down all the viruses and bacteria from outer space, also Strontium 90. I suppose you don’t care about Strontium 90, but when your bones begin to decay inside you...”

“Three o’clock,” Helene said. “Yes, it must have been about that.”

“Where did she meet her friend in the plaid sport jacket?”

“I have no idea. It was simply a coincidence that I saw her again. I wasn’t following her or looking for her or anything. She just appeared.”

“O.K., that’s how I’ll have to play it, as a coincidence. The police don’t like coincidences, though.”

“Coincidences like that happen here all the time. In L.A. you can go downtown every day for a month and never meet a soul you’ve ever seen before. But here, the downtown’s so small I invariably meet someone I know when I go shopping or out to lunch. It’s sort of like a village in that respect.”

“The natives would get restless if they heard you say that.”

“It’s true, though. It’s one of the things I love about the city.”

“All right,” Dodd said. “So it was a small coincidence. I wasn’t tailing the girl, she just appeared.”

“Mr. Dodd, you’re going to help me? You’re really going to help me?”

“Not you. The kids.” He wanted to, but didn’t, tell her why. When he was a junior in high school, his father had been arrested on a drunk charge. It wasn’t much, but it made the newspapers. He’d left school and never gone back. “Your job now, Mrs. Brandon, is to be discreet. If the police question you, answer them. But don’t volunteer any information.”

“What if they find Rupert and he tells them the truth, that I was the one who saw him at Lassister’s with the girl?”

“Rupert,” Dodd said, “will have a lot of other talking to do before he gets around to that.”

When Miss Burton turned the corner it seemed to her that someone on the street was staging a huge outdoor pageant with all the neighbors serving as members of the cast and crew. It was impossible to tell what kind of pageant it could be, the characters and costumes were so varied and numerous: small boys on bicycles; women in housedresses, bathrobes, pajamas; men carrying cameras, babies, brief cases; groups of girls twittering and chirping like birds, and grim-lipped old ladies watching in silence from the back of the stage, as if the scene they were witnessing was old, remembered stuff to them.

Both sides of the street were lined with cars, some with engines still running and the headlights on and people peering out from the open windows. Miss Burton stopped and leaned against a lamppost, feeling suddenly dizzy and breathless. What are they trying to see? she thought. What do they expect to see? What are they waiting for?

The wind clawed her hair and pinched her lips blue and tore at her yellow coat, but she was unaware of any physical suffering. People pressed past her, shouting to each other above the wind. A large white dog paused to stare at her as if she was usurping his own private lamppost.

A woman wearing a battered muskrat coat over striped pajamas called the dog away. “He won’t hurt you, he’s gentle as a lamb.”

“I’m not — afraid,” Miss Burton said.

“You looked like you were.”

“No.”

“You can’t see much from here, but if you go any closer you might get involved. Believe me, it doesn’t pay to get involved.”

“What happened?”

“Murder is what happened. In the Kelloggs’ house. I’ve always known there was something funny about those people. Oh, they seemed nice enough, on the surface... Where are you going? Hey, wait a minute, you dropped your scarf!”

But Miss Burton was already on her way, running through the crowd, weaving in and out like a little quarterback pursued by giants.

Dodd was parking his car around the corner when he spotted her, recognizing her first by her yellow coat. She didn’t see him, she would have passed by without knowing he was there if he hadn’t called out to her: “Miss Burton!”

She turned to look at him, briefly and blindly, then she resumed her running. He started after her, without any plan or intention, like a dog chasing a moving object simply because it was moving. He hadn’t gone fifty yards when he began to puff and a sharp pain stabbed his side. He would never have caught up with her if she hadn’t stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk and fallen to her knees.

He helped her up. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“It’s a funny time to be practicing up for the four-minute mile.”

“Go away. Just go away.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing. Nothing. Please leave me alone. Please.”