Frank walked slowly past the porch, reached the grilled gate that led to the road, turned around and came back. Officially he had no status; and unofficially it was none of his business that there was someone inside the house who wanted breakfast but who didn’t want to answer the door or to be seen. There was a possibility that old Mrs. Goodfield was not quite as bedridden as she professed to be, or that Murphy had heard Ortega’s special signal and ignored it. But the strongest possibility was Jack.
Frank went up the porch steps trying not to appear quite as furtive as he felt. He had his hand raised ready to knock again when he heard the sudden, loud clanking of an overhead garage door being lifted open hastily and clumsily. He reached the garage just as Jack Goodfield was climbing in behind the wheel of the Buick.
“Wait a minute! Hey, Goodfield!”
“Get out of my way, you.” Jack turned on the ignition and pressed the starter switch. But luck — and the fact that the car was in gear — was against him. Instead of going into a steady roar the engine coughed twice and the Buick took three playful leaps forward and stopped with a splintering crash of metal on wood. Simultaneous with the fracture of the garage wall came the fracture of Jack’s morale. He sagged forward in the seat, his forehead resting against the top of the steering wheel in a posture of defeat and exhaustion.
“All right, I give up. I give up.”
“Are you okay, Goodfield?”
“Oh sure, I’m great, just great. All right, let’s have it. How much do you want?” He got out of the car, slammed the door viciously, and emerged from the garage shaking his head back and forth as if to shake off the painful glare of the sun. “You might as well ask for the shirt off my back. That’s about all I’ve got. And it isn’t even a good shirt, it isn’t even clean. So go ahead, take it.”
“Sorry, it’s not my size. Besides, my wife doesn’t like me to wear white shirts, they’re too hard to launder.”
“For God’s sake, come to the point. You work for Evangeline’s husband.”
“I have nothing to do with your amours, Goodfield. I work for the Mental Health Society.”
“It’s too early in the morning for jokes.”
“No joke.”
Jack turned a little pale. “You mean somebody’s gone off their rocker around here? Well, by God, it doesn’t surprise me much. Which one is it?”
“I don’t know. In fact—”
“Maybe both of them, eh?”
“It’s not very likely.”
“Likely or not, that’s my opinion.”
“Based on what?”
“The way they’re acting, the way they’ve treated me. Sure, I arrived late and woke them up. Also, I wanted a small loan and that kind of thing doesn’t make you popular. I even grant you that I’m not the most lovable chap in the world. But I’m not absolutely detestable, I’m not completely abominable, I’ve got some good points.”
“I’m sure you have,” Frank agreed cautiously.
“You wouldn’t think so from the way they treated me. You’d think I was carrying bubonic plague. They ordered me out right away; they weren’t even going to let me stay the rest of the night, said they didn’t have room. Fantastic, isn’t it? One’s own flesh and blood and a big house like this. Wouldn’t you call that fantastic?”
“I might.”
“They just weren’t reasonable, considering that all I wanted was a bed for the night and a small loan and a chance to talk to Mother about some stock I thought of selling.”
“Goodfield stock?”
“Yes. It’s mine, it was given to me. Legally, I can do whatever I want with it. I can sell it or I can send it over Niagara Falls in a barrel. I can—” He broke off with an embarrassed little laugh. “I don’t know why I’m telling all this to a stranger. You wouldn’t be interested.”
“I think I would.”
“I’m not even interested myself, as a matter of fact. All this business stuff bores me. I wasn’t cut out for it.”
Frank guided him back to the point. “Did you talk to your mother about selling your stock?”
“Not yet. Last night it was too late, of course, and this morning when I rapped on her door she was still sleeping. I noticed a funny smell in the corridor outside her room.”
“What kind of smell?”
“Oh, it reminded me a lot of hospitals and sickness and things like that. I wonder if she’s a great deal sicker than they’ll admit. Have you seen her lately?”
“I’ve never seen her. Captain Greer has — he’s a friend of mine — and he thought she looked fine. He was pretty captivated, in fact.”
“Oh, she can be captivating all right, but she never wastes any of that on her children. Treats us like morons.” He paused, stroking his chin with his fingertips. “Speaking of morons, how can you tell when somebody’s gone off their rocker? Like Ethel, for instance. Could you tell if she... well, if she suddenly... well, you know—”
“I might.”
“It isn’t just the way she acted last night about my coming here. I’m not stupid enough to believe that anybody who dislikes me is crazy. Some people have their own good reasons for not liking me. But Ethel hasn’t. We’ve always gotten on well. I remembered her birthdays, I took her places like the opera house where Willett refused to go, and whenever any of her relatives showed up from Wisconsin I acted as extra man, took them around Chinatown, things like that. Sometimes it was pretty rough; Ethel has a lot of peculiar relatives.”
Frank suspected that Jack’s standards of peculiarity were themselves peculiar. Ethel’s cousins might have worn the wrong hats or preferred beer to martinis.
Jack went on chewing over his grievance like a dyspeptic steer, trying to make it more digestible. “Yes, you might even say that Ethel and I were pals. It was an awful surprise when she turned on me last night, turned on me like a wildcat — I can see you don’t believe that.”
“It’s difficult. Mrs. Goodfield seems to me to be a very” — ineffectual was the word that occurred to Frank but he changed it — “a very mild woman.”
“That’s what I always thought, until last night. The change in her was downright frightening. Why, I wouldn’t stay here now if they got down on their knees and begged me. Dead tired as I am, I’m going on my way.”
“You didn’t get much sleep?”
“An hour or two. They stuck me in some cramped little room that belongs to the maid — she’s away on a holiday — and then first thing this morning the birds started fussing and yipping around. One of them kept tapping at my window — tap, tap, tap. Damned annoying, birds in the morning, especially the tapping kind. I got up about eight-thirty and went upstairs to see if Mother was awake yet. I rapped on her door and tried the knob, but it was locked. That’s another odd thing, for a sick woman to sleep with her door locked so that no one could get inside to help her if she took a turn for the worse. It didn’t seem right, it worried me. People don’t lock bedroom doors unless they’re afraid, afraid of their own family. And that smell in the hall made me nervous.
“I tried a couple of other doors and they were locked, too. Then I looked out the hall window and saw you coming. Right then and there I decided to leave. I couldn’t think of a single reason for staying except my mother, and frankly, Mother’s always been able to look after herself.” He stroked his chin again as if the scrape of his whiskers against his fingertips gave him a reassurance of manhood. “I’m not running out on my duty. It’s just — I’ve got troubles of my own, I can’t afford to mess around with women who’ve gone off the beam.”