Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“I don’t know,” Guy repeated, frowning. His mind seemed tied in an inextricable knot.

“You must know. Think, Guy. Someone you might call an enemy?”

“What’s the postmark?”

“Grand Central. It’s perfectly plain paper. You can’t tell a thing from that.”

“Save it for me.”

“Of course, Guy. And I won’t tell anyone. The family, I mean.” A pause. “There must be someone, Guy. You suspected someone Saturday—didn’t you?”

“I didn’t.” His throat closed up. “Sometimes these things happen, you know, after a trial.” And he was aware of a desire to cover Bruno as carefully as if Bruno had been himself, and he guilty. “When can I see you, Anne? Can I come out tonight?”

“Well, I’m—sort of expected to go with Mother and Dad to a benefit thing. I can mail you the letter. Special delivery, you’ll get it tomorrow morning.”

So it came the next morning, along with another of Bruno’s plans, and an affectionate but exhorting last paragraph in which he mentioned the letter to Anne and promised more.

Twenty-two

Guy sat up on the edge of his bed, covered his face in his hands, then deliberately brought his hands down. It was the night that took up the body of his thoughts and distorted it, he felt, the night and the darkness and the sleeplessness. Yet the night had its truth also. In the night, one approached truth merely at a certain slant, but all truth was the same. If he told Anne the story, wouldn’t she consider he had been partially guilty? Marry him? How could she? What sort of beast was he that he could sit in a room where a bottom drawer held plans for a murder and the gun to do it with?

In the frail predawn light, he studied his face in the mirror. The mouth slanted downward to the left, unlike his. The full underlip was thinner with tension. He tried to hold his eyes to an absolute steadiness. They stared back above pallid semicircles, like a part of him that had hardened with accusation, as if they gazed at their torturer.

Should he dress and go out for a walk or try to sleep? His step on the carpet was light, unconsciously avoiding the spot by the armchair where the floor squeaked. You would skip these squeaking steps just for safety, Bruno’s letters said. My father’s door is just to the right as you know. I have gone over everything and there is no room for a hitch anywhere. See on map where the butler’s (Herbert’s) room is. This is the closest you’ll come to anyone. The hall floor squeaks there where I marked X…. He flung himself on the bed. You should not try to get rid of the Luger no matter what happens between the house and the RR station. He knew it all by heart, knew the sound of the kitchen door and the color of the hall carpet.

If Bruno should get someone else to kill his father, he would have ample evidence in these letters to convict Bruno. He could avenge himself for what Bruno had done to him. Yet Bruno would merely counter with his lies that would convict him of planning Miriam’s murder. No, it would be only a matter of time until Bruno got someone. If he could weather Bruno’s threats only a while longer, it would all be over and he could sleep. If he did it, he thought, he wouldn’t use the big Luger, he would use the little revolver— Guy pulled himself up from the bed, aching, angry, and frightened by the words that had just passed through his mind. “The Shaw Building,” he said to himself, as if announcing a new scene, as if he could derail himself from the night’s tracks and set himself on the day’s. The Shaw Building. The ground is all grass covered to the steps in back, except for gravel you won’t have to touch…. Skip four, skip three, step wide at the top. You can remember it, it’s got a syncopated rhythm.

“Mr. Raines!”

Guy started, and cut himself. He laid his razor down and went to the door.

“Hello, Guy. Are you ready yet?” asked the voice on the telephone, lewd in the early morning, ugly with the complexities of night. “Want some more?”

“You don’t bother me.”

Bruno laughed.

Guy hung up, trembling.

The shock lingered through the day, tremulous and traumatic. He wanted desperately to see Anne that evening, wanted desperately that instant of glimpsing her from some spot where he had promised to wait. But he wanted also to deprive himself of her. He took a long walk up Riverside Drive to tire himself, but slept badly nevertheless, and had a series of unpleasant dreams. It would be different, Guy thought, once the Shaw contract was signed, once he could go ahead on his work.

Douglas Frear of the Shaw Realty Company called the next morning as he had promised. “Mr. Haines,” said his slow, hoarse voice, “we’ve received a most peculiar letter concerning you.”

“What? What kind of a letter?”

“Concerning your wife. I didn’t know—Shall I read it to you?”

“Please.”

‘“To Whom It May Concern: No doubt it will interest you to learn that Guy Daniel Haines, whose wife was murdered last June, had more of a role in the deed than the courts know. This is from one who knows, and who knows also that there will be a retrial soon which will show his real part in the crime.’—I trust it’s a crank letter, Mr. Haines. I just thought you should know about it.”

“Of course.” In the corner, Myers worked over his drawing board as calmly as on any other morning of the week.

“I think I heard about—uh—the tragedy last year. There’s no question of a retrial, is there?”

“Certainly not. That is, I’ve heard nothing about it.” Guy cursed his confusion. Mr. Frear wanted only to know if he would be free to work.

“Sorry we haven’t quite made up our minds on that contract, Mr. Haines.”

The Shaw Realty Company waited until the following morning to tell him they weren’t entirely satisfied with his drawings. In fact, they were interested in the work of another architect.

How had Bruno found out about the building, Guy wondered. But there were any number of ways. It might have been mentioned in the papers—Bruno kept himself well informed on architectural news—or Bruno might have called when he knew he was out of the office, casually gotten the information from Myers. Guy looked at Myers again, and wondered if he had ever spoken on the telephone with Bruno. The possibility had a flavor of the unearthly.

Now that the building was gone, he began to see it in terms of what it would not mean. He would not have the extra money he had counted on by summer. Nor the prestige, the prestige with the Faulkner family. It did not once occur to him—as much at the root of his anguish as any of the other reasons—that he had suffered frustration in seeing a creation come to nothing.

It would be only a matter of time until Bruno informed the next client, and the next. This was his threat to ruin his career. And his life with Anne? Guy thought of her with a flash of pain. It seemed to him that he was forgetting for long intervals that he loved her. Something was happening between them, he could not say what. He felt Bruno was destroying his courage to love. Every slightest thing deepened his anxiety, from the fact he had lost his best pair of shoes by forgetting what repair shop he had taken them to, to the house at Alton, which already seemed more than they should have taken on, which he doubted they could fill.

In the office, Myers worked on his routine, drafting agency jobs, and Guy’s telephone never rang. Once Guy thought, even Bruno doesn’t call because he wants it to build up and build up, so his voice will be welcome when it conies. And disgusted with himself, Guy went down in the middle of the day and drank martinis in a Madison Avenue bar. He was to have had lunch with Anne, but she had called and broken the appointment, he could not remember why. She had not sounded precisely cool, but he thought she had not given any real reason for not lunching with him. She certainly hadn’t said she was going shopping for something for the house, or he would have remembered it. Or would he have? Or was she retaliating for his breaking his promise to come out to dinner with her family last Sunday? He had been too tired and too depressed to see anyone last Sunday. A quiet, unacknowledged quarrel seemed to be going on between himself and Anne. Lately, he felt too miserable to inflict himself on her, and she pretended to be too busy to see him when he asked to see her. She was busy planning for the house, and busy quarreling with him. It did not make sense. Nothing in the world made sense except to escape from Bruno. There was no way of doing that that made sense. What would happen in a court would not make sense.