Glove compartment. Car. He blinked his eyes painfully, as though he were emerging from a long and dreadful sleep. The sun was beginning to set. It was a quarter to seven by his watch. Three boys were walking up the street. He followed them.
Ralph MacPherson worked at the office until nearly seven o’clock. He felt too weary to contact Kate again but he could picture her waiting at the telephone for his call, getting herself more and more worked up, and he knew he couldn’t postpone it any longer.
She answered before the second ring, in the guarded half-disguised voice she always used before he identified himself.
“Hello.”
“Kate, this is Mac.”
“Have you found anything out about Gowen?”
“Yes.”
“Well? Was I right? He’s some bum Sheridan picked up in a bar and hired to do his dirty work for him.”
“I hardly think so,” Mac said as patiently as he could. “I went over to Miria Street this afternoon and dropped in at a drugstore around the corner from Gowen’s house. I pretended I’d lost the address. Not very subtle, perhaps, but it worked. The druggist knows the Gowen family, they’ve been his customers for years. It didn’t take much to start him talking. Business was slow.”
She made an impatient sound. “Well, what did he say?”
“Charles Gowen lives with his brother Ben. Ben manages a downtown cafeteria, Charles has a job with a paper company. They’re both hard-working and clean-living. They don’t smoke or drink, they pay their bills on time, they mind their own business. There’s a neighborhood rumor that Charles is going to marry one of the local librarians, a very nice woman who is also hard-working and clean-living, etcetera, etcetera. In brief, Gowen’s not our man.”
“But he must be,” she said incredulously. “He ran away from me. He acted guilty.”
“It’s possible that you scared the daylights out of him. He may not be used to strange women chasing him around town. Not many of us are. Make me a promise, will you, Kate?”
“What is it?”
“That you’ll stop thinking about Sheridan’s machinations just for tonight and get yourself a decent rest.”
She didn’t argue with him but she didn’t promise either. She simply said she was sorry to have bothered him and hung up.
Parked half a block away, Charlie watched the three boys turn in the driveway of a house on Cielito Lane. Only a difference in planting and a ribbon of smoke rising from a backyard barbecue pit distinguished it from its neighbors, but to Charlie it was a very special house.
He drove past slowly. The mailbox had a name on it: David E. Brant.
(16)
It was Howard Arlington’s last night in the city for two weeks and he and Virginia had been invited to a farewell barbecue in the Brants’ patio. They didn’t want to go but neither of them indicated this in any way. Ever since their unpleasant scene the previous night, they’d been excessively polite to each other, to Dave and Ellen and Jessie, even to the gardener and the cleaning woman. It was as if they were trying to convince everyone, including themselves, that they were not the kind of people who staged domestic brawls — not they.
This new formal politeness affected not only their speech and actions but their style of dress. They both knew that Ellen and Dave would be in jeans and sneakers, but Howard had put on a dark business suit, white shirt and a tie, and Virginia wore a pink-flowered silk dress with a stole and matching high-heeled sandals. They looked as though they were going out to dinner and a symphony instead of to the neighbors’ backyard for hamburgers and hi-fi, both of which would be overdone.
The hi-fi was already going and so was the fire. Smoke and violins drifted into the Arlingtons’ kitchen window. Normally, Howard would have slammed the window shut and made some caustic remark about tract houses. Tonight he merely said, “Dave’s sending out signals. What time does Ellen want us over there?”
Virginia wasn’t sure Ellen wanted them over there at all but the invitation had been extended and accepted, there was nothing to be done about it. “Seven o’clock.”
“It’s nearly that now. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps we’d better leave Chap in the house.”
“Yes, perhaps we’d better.” Her voice gave no hint of the amused contempt she felt. The big retriever was already asleep on the davenport and it would have taken Howard a long time to wake him up, coax, bribe, push and pull him outside. Chap would not be mean about it, simply inert, immovable. Sometimes she wondered whether the dog had learned this passive resistance from her or whether she’d learned it from him. In any case the dog seemed just as aware as Virginia that the technique was successful. Inaction made opposing action futile; Howard was given no leverage to work with.
They went out the rear door, leaving a lamp in the living room turned on for Chap, and the kitchen light for themselves. At the bottom of the stairs, Howard suddenly stopped.
“I forgot a handkerchief. You go on without me, I’ll join you in a minute.”
“I’d rather wait, thank you. We were invited as a couple, let’s go as a couple.”
“A couple of what?” he said and went back in the house.
Virginia’s face was flushed with anger, and the rush of blood made her sunburn, now in the peeling stage, begin to itch painfully. She no longer blamed the sun as the real culprit, she blamed Howard. It was a Howardburn and it itched just as painfully inside as it did outside. There was a difference, though: inside, it couldn’t be scratched, no relief was possible.
When Howard returned, he was holding the handkerchief to his mouth as if to prove to her that he really needed it. His voice was muffled. “Virginia, listen.”
“What is it?”
“You don’t suppose the kid told her parents about that twenty dollars I gave her?”
“I talked to Ellen today, nothing was mentioned about it. By the way, Jessie has a name. I wish you’d stop referring to her as ‘the kid.’“
“There’s only one kid in our lives. It hardly seems necessary to name her.”
“I thought we’d agreed to be civil to each other for the rest of your time at home. Why do you want to start something now? We’ve had a pleasant day, don’t ruin it.”
“You think it’s been a pleasant day, do you?”
“As pleasant as possible,” Virginia said.
“As pleasant as possible while I’m around, is that what you mean? In other words, you don’t expect much in my company.”
“Perhaps I can’t afford to.”
“Well, tomorrow I’ll be back on the road. You and the kid can have a real ball.”
“Let’s stop this right now, Howard, before it goes too far. We’re not saying anything new anyway. It’s all been said.”
“And done,” Howard added. “It’s all said and done. Amen.” He looked down at her with a smile that was half-pained, half- mocking. “The problem is, what do people do and say after everything’s said and done? Where do we go from here?”
“To the Brants’ for a barbecue.”
“And then?”
“I can’t think any further than that now, Howard. I can’t think.”