Уильям Макгиверн: The Big Heat

“The usual tug of war,” Kate said, going to the stove to turn the steak. She was a tall, red-haired girl, with good-humored but very direct blue eyes, and very fair, flawless skin. She wasn’t beautiful, although people thought she was at first because of her hair and complexion; but her features were very appealing in their liveliness, humor, and interest. Now, as she salted the steak, she was grinning slightly. “She had to go to the bathroom a few times, hear a couple of extra stories, and have a glass of water, before she finally went to sleep. She’s angelic all day, but at night she’s a holy terror.”

Bannion raised his eyebrows. “That’s the way I usually describe you,” he said.

“Seriously, the book says to be patient but firm. You’ve tried that, I suppose?”

“The book, the book,” Kate said. “It’s very scientific and calm, but it doesn’t work. Not with me anyway. The baby books never heard about Brigid, that’s the trouble.”

“The thing is, she’s madly in love with me,” Bannion said. “The Oedipus business, you know. Naturally she’s jealous of you, as any sensible woman would be, and that’s why there’s conflict. Reasonable?”

“Yes, but I don’t believe it,” Kate said.

“Well, it’s a little too pat, I guess,” Bannion said. “It’s like circumstantial evidence. If everything fits too well, look out. Come on, that steak’s done.”

“Here you are.”

After dinner Bannion settled down in the living room to look through the papers. He was in an odd mood, one of curious, nonspecific gratitude. It wasn’t just a highball, the steak, the sense of pleasant relaxation. He glanced around the warm, slightly cluttered room. One of Brigid’s dolls was on the radio, and a pull-toy and some books of hers were on the floor. Kate was sitting on the sofa, the sofa that needed covering he remembered, her feet curled under her, the lamplight touching her hair, her plain gold wedding band, her slim, silken legs.

He went back to his paper, his mood unresolved and unexplained. There was a story on Tom Deery on page three, a short story with a picture of the dead man. He read through it, remembering Deery as he had lain on the floor in his neat, orderly home, and his wife, who had seemed so fastidiously untouched by the messiness of his death. Bannion put down his paper and lit a cigarette. Deery’s travel books, tracked with marginal notes, was an odd thing. Why the devil did people read travel books? To learn something, to kill time, to escape into a world of arm-chair adventuring. All of those reasons perhaps. Possibly Deery was simply bored, and used the books as a crutch to help him through the long evenings. Bannion smiled slightly and glanced at the bookcase beside his chair. There were his crutches then, comfortable, well-worn ones, with pages as familiar to him as the lines of his hands. They were travel books of a sort; they were volumes of philosophy, and the world of ideas could be travelled and explored as well as foreign countries, and strange jungles. Deery read about the bullfighting in Spain, while he read the spiritual explosions of St. John Of The Cross, who was a Spaniard but no bullfighter. What was the difference? Why did one man read one thing, the next man another? Well, there didn’t have to be a difference of course. Bannion read philosophy because it was a relief from the dry and matter-of-fact routine of his own work. I’m not trying to escape from anything, he thought. Still you couldn’t be sure; the need for escape might be unconscious. But he didn’t think it was that. He was frowning now, asking himself some of the questions he would have liked to ask Deery. I read philosophy, he thought, because I’m too weak to stand up against the misery and meaningless heartbreak I run into every day on the job. I’m no scholar. I wouldn’t touch Nietzsche or Schopenhauer with a ten-foot pole. That’s a frank, cheerful prejudice, nothing more. I don’t want to listen to idols being smashed, I want to read something which puts sense into life.

“Are you going to read tonight?” Kate said, noticing that he was frowning at his books.

“No, I don’t think so. Maybe for half an hour at most.”

“Which one is it going to be?” she asked. “Croce or — what’s the German’s name?”

“Kant, I guess,” Bannion said. Deery, he thought, might have been better off with these books than with descriptions of the fertility charms in Pompeii. These were the men he, himself, had gone to for peace of mind. St. John Of The Cross, Kant, Spinoza, Santayana. The gentle philosophers, the ones who thought it was natural for man to be good, and that evil was the aberrant course, abnormal, accidental, out of line with man’s true needs and nature.

“That’s the one, Kant,” Kate said. “Isn’t it nice how I ramble on whether you’re listening or not? It must be a cozy little background noise for your own thoughts.”

“What? Oh, sure.” He glanced at her, smiling. “You’re getting good. You’re getting the names down fine. Kant, Croce, whither will it end?”

Kate made a face at him, and said, “I look at their names when I do the dusting, Smarty Pants. Don’t be stuck-up.”

“Go on, you’re reading them the minute my back is turned,” Bannion said, picking up his paper. Deery’s wife, he thought, knew nothing of her husband’s interests. She hadn’t known he read travel books. That didn’t indicate a very warm or sympathetic relationship. When a man takes to travel books it is something that a wife, if only in the light of self-interest, should consider thoughtfully, he thought.

Kate put her magazine aside. “Dave, didn’t you get enough philosophy in school?”

“At the time it seemed like too much,” he said. “I was interested in football then, and speculative discussion left me pretty cold. Probably—”

The phone rang, cutting off his sentence.

“Who could that be?” Kate said.

“I’ll get it.”

“Hurry. It’s going to wake Brigid.”

Bannion tip-toed past Brigid’s closed door and shut the dining room door before picking up the phone. “Hello,” he said.

“Mr. Bannion? Is this Mr. Bannion, the detective?” It was a woman’s voice, low, faintly anxious.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you so late,” the woman said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“What is it?” Bannion said.

“My name is Lucy, Lucy Carroway. I was a friend of Tom Deery’s. That’s why I called you, Mr. Bannion.” There was the sound of a faint, noisy conversation behind her anxious voice. “I just read that he killed himself, and I saw your name in the story. I looked you up in the telephone book, and that’s how I got your number. I know it’s late, Mr. Bannion, but I felt that I just had to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Well, about Tom,” the woman said. “I’ve got to see you about him, about him killing himself.”

“Won’t it keep till tomorrow?”

There was a pause. “I suppose so,” the woman said.

Bannion damned his conscience. He didn’t want to go out, but he would, of course. “Okay, where can I talk to you?” he said.

“I’m at the Triangle Bar now. I work here. That’s at Twentieth and Arch”

“I know the place.” He glanced at his watch. It was one-twenty. “I’ll be there before two, Lucy.”

“Thanks, thanks a lot, Mr. Bannion.”

He replaced the phone in its cradle and returned to the living room. Kate looked up at him inquiringly. Bannion shrugged. “Mysterious female wants to talk to me about a job I had tonight,” he said. “Probably she’s got it mixed up with a couple of other people she knew in Detroit or Oshkosh, but I’ve got to see her.” He smiled and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “Hell of a life, isn’t it?”