Michael Collins - Silent Scream

Miserable over her, Diana, and over me. Sure he was right, and miserable over what she was doing to him. Sure he was wrong, and miserable for suspecting her.

“All the time,” I said, cynical. I softened it. “But I get all the bad side.”

“It must be discouraging for you.”

What do you say to that? In my trade you get used to the bums and shysters, the cheats and hustlers, the greedy and the cruel. But I never get used to the nice ones. They try to smile, and look around as if wondering what they’re doing talking to me. It can’t be happening, some mistake.

“I can pay, I think,” he said. “I just have to know.”

If Mia Morgan hadn’t fired me, I could have said I had a client. But maybe it was better for him to know. Knowledge is supposed to make you free. Sometimes I think it only makes you know that no one is free, part of a capricious, arbitrary world. Victims of the way the ball bounces, no one’s fault, like Marty and me. Then, maybe to know that, accept it, is freedom.

“I get twenty-five a day,” I said. So much for cynicism.

He nodded, not even aware of the cut rate. “It’s not so much her. I won’t stand in her way. It’s me, sort of my dream. My woman, you know? In Korea, behind the lines and scared of anything that even moved, I used to keep going by imagining coming home to a woman like Diana, built a whole life on that. I didn’t find her so easy. Most women use you, just like the big shots do.”

He threw a nail into the river. “God, I sound bitter.”

He did, and maybe I didn’t blame him. But he didn’t want comment, he just wanted to talk it out. I let him.

“After Korea I couldn’t settle down, get back on the track. A lot of years.” His eyes wondered where all those years since Korea had gone. “We got married six years ago. Maybe we shouldn’t have. Before I met her, all I wanted was to paint, add to the world. Then I wanted her more, I guess. We were good at first, but I’m not the kind who can make money, make the world move.”

“Not many can, Hal,” I said. “It takes a special talent. Practical. Know what people are like, and how to use them.”

He watched a barge on the river. “She tried to teach one year, in night school. I tried to help, run the apartment, but night teaching took so much time she shut me out and I couldn’t take it. She quit, but it was never the same after that. We live my way, I guess, going nowhere. No money. Damn my painting!”

It was her voice-Damn your painting! He beat himself with it. We make our own pain. He didn’t want to think about what she was doing, but he did. He imagined the man, or worse.

“Maybe she needs help, Mr. Fortune,” he said. “I mean, you said… murder. I can’t make money, and maybe she’s mixed-”

“I’m Dan,” I said. “Has she said anything suspicious?”

“No, but… She’s been nervous, maybe scared. I’ve watched her talk to men at Dunlap’s parties. Men I don’t like. Guys like that Kezar you talked about. Big deals, fast talkers.”

“You go to Dunlap’s affairs with her?”

“He invites me. The husband, make it look good. I stand in the corner, let her enjoy herself.” The bitterness again. “I’d go on following her myself, but I’m not good at it. I wouldn’t want her to see me. That’d hurt her.”

“Yeh,” I said. “Hal, do you work on anything important?”

“A lot of Government research reports. Engineering stuff.”

I nodded. “Okay, you go to work. I’ll see what I find.”

Some people never learn. There are things you have to do. Maybe that’s freedom-knowing what you have to do. He was bitter, but he was worried, too. If Diana Wood was involved in anything, he was going to be hurt, too. The helpless bystander.

“Maybe there’s nothing to find,” he said. “Call me, okay?”

He was a dreamer. Jealous but guilty, worried but hopeful. Unless he was conning me, had his own scheme. In my work you trust no one all the way. If you want to survive. It doesn’t make me feel good.

I caught Lawrence Dunlap on his way out to lunch. Diana Wood’s desk was still untouched. Dunlap was with a tall, slender woman in her late twenties. She wore little make-up, had short and very neat brown hair, and her shoes were “sensible.” Her gray suit and coat were beautiful material, but a shade frumpy. A refined girl. With my slept-in shirt, duffel coat, and missing arm, I must have looked like something from Mars. She stared at me.

“I lost it in Montego Bay,” I said. “Sharks, you know.”

She flushed, but took it. I’d caught her staring, being vulgar, and she accepted her own standards. Not bad. What we used to call “breeding,” the real thing. Mainline and bankers.

Dunlap held her arm. “What do you want, Mr.-?”

“Fortune, Dan, detective,” I said. “Remember? I need some more information on that employee of yours.”

Dunlap’s Yale Club face was confused behind his glasses. He looked at the woman, and then he laughed.

“You mean Diana Wood? You can say her name in front of my wife, Mr. Fortune. All right, come inside for a moment.”

In his private office he sat in his desk chair, trim and casual, and grinned at me. His wife sat on a couch. I stood.

“You flatter me,” he said, smiled at his wife. “He thinks Diana and I are an item, Harriet. Jealous?”

“He is flattering you, dear,” Harriet Dunlap said.

She laughed, too. A bantering laugh, playful. They were a couple, passion under her polished surface. It was there in the way she looked at him, in her voice, and he returned the feeling. Trouble can be hidden, especially by well-brought-up patricians, but not real happiness. A happy couple. The only incongruous touch was his eyes. They didn’t quite fit the rest of his face, lines of strain around them. Maybe he worked too hard.

“You and Diana Wood were in Philadelphia the last three days?”

“So?” he said, nodded. “Yes, we were, a business conference.”

“You’re sure?” I said.

He studied me. “You’re no reference-checker, are you? Who is it? Harold Wood? He hired you?”

“Yes,” I said. It was true now. “But not just him. The police, too, Mr. Dunlap. You better tell me the truth.”

He hesitated, glanced at his wife. She smiled, shrugged. It was his decision. He thought for a time.

“If Wood tries to use it against Diana, I’ll deny I said it, but, no, Diana wasn’t with me. I don’t know where she was. I do know she would do nothing to concern the police.”

“You cover for her? Give her time off to play?”

“She had days coming. Look, Mr. Fortune, I like Diana, I don’t really know the husband. Diana’s a nice girl. What she does is her affair. I help as a friend. She’s helped me.”

“Hostess at parties? Nice to visiting clients?”

“It’s the way we have to do business sometimes.”

Harriet Dunlap said, “Rules of the game, Mr. Fortune.”

“Really?” I said to her. “Not nice for the mainline.”

“My family has been in the country three hundred years,” she said. “We didn’t survive without getting in the dirt to compete.”

“Look,” Dunlap said again, “it’s none of my business, but Wood almost asked for it. He seems to be a narrow man, surly, with no ambition to get ahead. At parties he stands in the corner, glowers at Diana when she’s just trying to have fun, and leaves her alone. So she met a man.” A shrug.

“What man?”

“I don’t know, I don’t want to know. I think Diana outgrew Wood, found out that she could have more, do better. I’m afraid she’s too much for Wood. He acts as if he never heard that a man could make money, from art or anything else. The things money can buy are beneath him, mundane. A pure young man.”