“Yes. Good night.”
She phoned for a cab in the kitchen, speaking in a very loud, distinct voice to make sure they overheard. Then she went out the back door, slamming it behind her.
“Twenty dollars was too much,” Frieda said.
“I didn’t have a ten.”
“You could have asked me.”
“I could have, yes.” I could have... I never meant... what if... Useless phrases belonging only to the past.
“What happened to your hand?”
“I hit a man.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it. You’d never do anything so primitive.”
“Well, I did.”
“What on earth for?”
“I wanted to make him tell me where Cleo is. I was sure he knew. She probably went directly to him the morning she left here. He refused to admit anything.”
“You should have tried to bribe him. God knows that’s not above you. We just had an example of it a minute ago.”
“I wanted to hit him.”
“That’s always been the governing principle of your life. You wanted to do something, so you did it... Do you want to eat your soup? If you don’t, I’ll take it back to the kitchen and we’ll go on with the rest of the meal.”
He looked at her bitterly. “There’s no sympathy in you, is there, Frieda?”
“I’m reserving mine for the man who was hit.”
“Don’t waste your time. He’s dead.”
She tried to cover her alarm with a show of cynicism. “If this is one of your attempts to build yourself a macho image, forget it.”
“I’ll have to go to the police. I’ve been trying to get in touch with some of the company’s lawyers but they’re in Washington or L.A. or Sacramento. One is even hunting capercaillie in Scotland. They’re everyplace but here. And they’re not accustomed to dealing with cases like this anyway. It’s a criminal matter.”
“Roger Lennard,” she said. “You killed Roger Lennard?”
“I’m not sure. He took some pills. Maybe he’d already taken them when I arrived. He made no attempt to fight back. I thought it was because he didn’t have the guts, but maybe he was already dying. We have to wait for the results of an autopsy.”
“How long will that take?”
“I don’t know.”
She sat twisting the soup spoon around and around between her fingers as though she was trying to wring its neck. “Chalk another one up to Cleo. She’ll beat us all before she’s through.”
“Don’t blame Cleo. It’s my fault. Cleo wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“No, she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Or a dog or a horse. But what about the rest of us? We’re the ones who get our wings pulled out, our paws stepped on.”
“Please, let’s not argue about Cleo. We have to decide what to do next.”
“We? You mean I now have a part in the decision making?”
“You always did.”
He was down and she would have liked to kick him a few more times to make sure he remembered after he got up again. But she was a reasonable woman with a keen sense of survival. He was down. That was enough.
“Give me the whole picture,” she said. “You knocked at his door. Was it locked?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell him who was there?”
“Yes.”
“And he unlocked the door and let you in?”
“Yes, right away. I had the peculiar feeling that he might even have been expecting me. He seemed almost resigned. He knew who I was, of course. Cleo probably talked about me to him the way she does to everyone.”
“All right, he let you in. Then what?”
Her husband stared into his soup bowl. The little lemon raft with its cargo of parsley had floated to one side as if his breath had provided enough wind to move it. “He lives — lived — in a mobile home, a very small one where everything is wall-to-wall. There was a typewriter on the table, I remember, and a magazine on the couch. I asked him right away where Cleo was and he claimed he didn’t know, that she’d walked out on him. He talked very slowly and calmly and that made me even angrier. I began to yell at him. One of the neighbors overheard me and reported it later to the police.”
“When you hit him, did he fall down?”
“No. I hit him again.”
“Then did he fall down?”
“No.”
“How could you have killed him when he wasn’t even knocked over by the force of the blows?”
“The effects of head injuries aren’t always immediately apparent.”
“But he was still standing up when you left?”
“Yes.”
“Then the chances are that you had nothing to do with his death?”
“I made it clear to him that he didn’t have much of a future in this town or in his profession or with Cleo. If that caused him to take an overdose of pills, then I have some moral responsibility for his death.”
“A man doesn’t commit suicide because of a few words spoken in anger. He may have been planning it for weeks, months, even years. He had many personal problems, according to Aragon.” She paused. “What about Aragon? He might be able to help you.”
“He’s too young and inexperienced.”
“At least he’s not hunting capercaillie in Scotland,” she said sharply. “Whatever the hell capercaillie is. Shall I call him?”
“If you like.”
“If I like? What I’d like is a nice peaceful life without a husband who goes around slugging people.”
She had hit him once too often while he was down. He was getting up now, and it showed in his face and his voice.
“The person I should have slugged is you, Frieda.”
“It’s a bit late for that. It would cost you too much, especially where it hurts, in the pocketbook.”
“You intend to leave me, don’t you?”
“If Cleo comes back, yes. I can’t face another year like the past fourteen.”
“Have things been that bad?”
“Worse. You don’t realize that because you were away most of the time, at the office or at meetings out of town, while I was stuck at home watching her every minute, trying to teach her to talk properly and to read, looking after the succession of stray animals and birds she dragged home only to lose interest in them almost immediately, the way she lost interest in the dog Zia. She took him with her that morning and then she must have simply left him somewhere, forgot all about him.”
“Why do our conversations always revert to Cleo?”
“Because she’s been the focus of our lives, not you or I or Ted.”
He said, “Here I am, in serious trouble, sitting in front of a bowl of cold soup, across the table from a wife who hates me, talking about a sister who ran away from me.”
“At least we can take care of the cold soup part.”
She carried the soup bowls back to the kitchen and returned with two plates of salad. “I repeat the question, Hilton. Shall I call Aragon? You don’t have to take his advice, just see what he has to say.”
“Go ahead.”
“You might want to do it yourself.”
“No. You handle these things very well, Frieda. It’s one of your talents.”
She used the wall phone in the kitchen. There was no answer from Aragon’s apartment, so she left a message with the answering service at his office for him to call back. She saw the headlights of a car coming up the driveway and she thought at first what a nice coincidence it was, to have Aragon show up at the very time she was trying to get in touch with him. But as she listened she knew the car couldn’t be his. The engine sounded too quiet and smooth.
She went to the front door and opened it at the first ring of the chime. The overhead light that switched on automatically when the door opened revealed a tall middle aged man with a deeply tanned face and bright, expressionless eyes that reminded her of Cleo’s.