Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“You got him,” Bret called. “You can come in.”

The door was flung open. For a moment it was quite empty, framing the quiet night. Then a uniformed policeman stepped in, carrying his Tommy gun in the crook of his arm. Behind him came the little man who ran the motel, and another armed policeman.

Bret sat up with his back against the wall.

“What’s your name?” the first policeman said.

“Taylor.”

“And him?”

“His name is Miles.”

“You mean it was.”

Bret got to his feet and looked across the room. He had enough strength left to feel sorry for the dead man, enough strength to regret the loss of all the human blood that had run out on the floor. The rising sickness took him unawares. It doubled him over the bed, flooding his throat and mouth and nasal passages with bitterness.

His enemy was dead. He had accomplished what he set out to do, but the only taste it left in his mouth was bitterness. His mind was as sick and turbulent as his body. His closed eyes looked down into a seething darkness that extended to the bottom of the night. Even there he found unreality, a shifting unreality that tugged at the foundations of his mind, and the reflection of a face he was afraid to recognize because it was so much like his own.

“What a mess!” the first policeman said.

“I was afraid they were going to make a mess,” said the little man.

The house was locked and dark when Paula reached home, but she felt no fear of going in alone. Having conquered the terrors of her mind and made her decision, she was immune to fear. Still, there were little things that continued to bother her. She was ashamed of having left the house without telling Mrs. Roberts that she wouldn’t be back for dinner. In fact she was even hungry. She turned on the lights in the front hallway and went through to the kitchen. Mrs. Roberts had written her a note in bold black capitals and left it on a chair in the center of the kitchen floor:

Regret you did not see fit to eat dinner. Roast is in refrig. wrapped in wax paper.

S. Roberts.

She found the roast and made herself a sandwich. She wasn’t jittery any more. She felt quite mistress of herself in a spinsterly way; a little cold and dead, but that was to be expected. She had elected a permanent spinsterhood, and it was no laughing matter. The thing she had chosen tasted very much like despair. It was as tasteless as unbuttered bread. Still, there was a certain satisfaction in getting your teeth into a solid chunk of despair.

She might have known from the beginning that it wouldn’t be a laughing matter. He hadn’t been merry in La Jolla; probably he had never been merry. His first kiss had been fierce and blocked, no gaiety in it. Even in love he was a man who moved with a weighty fatality, as if he meant everything he did and meant it forever. It was hard to believe that such a man could be so mixed up inside, still nursing a wound he had received when he was a baby. It was harder still to believe that mere words, even truthful words, could straighten him out and heal his wound.

Watch it, West, she said to herself as she munched her grief-stricken sandwich. You’ve made up your mind to go through with it and you’re going to go through with it. No rationalizing, please. No more thinking at all. You haven’t the brains for it, girl. And on the other hand you mustn’t let your feelings be your guide. They made you what you are today. Just do what the doctor said.

She turned off the kitchen lights and went to her sitting-room in the front part of the house. There she settled down to wait for Bret. She had no reason to feel sure that he would come, but she had that feeling. She had only to put in so much time, and then he’d have to come. While the hands of her watch crept round past ten thirty and then eleven, she put in time.

Waiting was the one thing above all others that she couldn’t stand, and she’d had so much of it lately. There were the months of waiting for him to come back after his ship went out from San Diego. More months of hopeless waiting after he married Lorraine. The worst months of all, suspended between mortal terror and boundless hope, while he was in the hospital in San Diego. She was still waiting, though the thing she had waited for had shriveled up and blown away. There was no more suspense, no more heights or depths. Her mind swung only in a little arc between the hope that he would come soon and the wish that he would not come for a long time. Even waiting was less painful than the end of the waiting was going to be.

She tried some music on the record player, but it stirred up her emotions, and she didn’t want that. Emotion made the whole thing so real. She switched it off and listened to the silence in the house: the ringing deafness, the sound of time moving slowly through silence. You could hear it advancing step by step with your heartbeats, drumming you through the virgin country of despair.

One thing about despair: it didn’t make you cry. You cried at its first onset, when you didn’t really believe it. You cried afterwards perhaps, when you felt like starting to live again and found out that you couldn’t. In the dead center of despair you couldn’t cry if you had to. And that was a good thing, for crying puffed up the eyes.

The hands of her watch crept round to eleven thirty while she listened to the silence. She turned out the lamp beside her chair and watched the darkness too. Darkness and silence suited her quite well, but she’d trade them in for oblivion any day. You couldn’t work, love, and suffer for years without feeling a letdown when it was all off at the last minute. Without, in fact, wishing you were dead. There was some slight consolation in knowing that time was grinding away, and you were on the assembly line, and the finished product was oblivion.

When she heard the car come into the street she knew that it was Bret. She’d have been quite as certain if it hadn’t been. She ran to the front door and flung it open. When she turned on the porch light her heart jumped. It was a police car at the curb. Bret climbed out slowly and stiffly, as if his body had aged years in a few hours.

“You all right now, Lieutenant?” a man’s voice called from the car.

“Yes. Thanks.” The police car drove away.

She ran down the steps to meet him. When he came into the shaft of light from the porch, she saw the gauze bandage on his face and forgot everything else.

“Darling, what’s happened? Where have you been?”

“At police headquarters.”

“But you’re hurt.”

“A little. Miles is dead.”

“You–?” She felt her lips go cold.

“I didn’t kill him,” he said quietly. “I tried to, but I didn’t. He was shot resisting arrest.”

She put her hand on his arm to help him up the steps, but he moved slightly so that her hand dropped away. They went into the house in single file like strangers, with her following behind. She saw the torn seams at the shoulders of his blouse, the dirt on his back, the great blue swelling at the base of his skull. She almost sank to the floor before she reached a chair.

He turned on a floor lamp and sat down opposite her. She was keenly aware of the space between them, and of the alienation it symbolized.

“Miles’s fingerprints checked with the prints on Lorraine’s table,” he said. “He was the man that was with her.”

She tried to speak, but all she could hear was the voice babbling in her head: it’s over then, it’s over, I needn’t ever tell him, and Klifter said he wouldn’t if I forbade him. She had permitted indecision to enter her mind again, and it tied her tongue.

“You were paying money to Miles,” he said then. “What were you paying him for?”