“How do you know?”
“I have eyes. I have ears.” Anger had begun to whine in the undertones of her voice. “She was dressed and painted like a woman of the streets, and when she opened her mouth – well, she spoke the language of the streets. She made coarse jokes about the child in her womb, and how” – her voice faded almost out – “it got there. She had no respect for herself as a woman, no moral standards. That girl destroyed my son.”
She’d forgotten all about her hope of reconciliation. The angry wheezing in the passages of her head sounded like a ghost in a ruined house. Sable was looking at her anxiously, but he held his tongue.
“Destroyed him?” I said.
“Morally, she destroyed him. She possessed him like an evil spirit. My son would never have taken the money if it hadn’t been for the spell she cast on him. I know that with utter certitude.”
Sable leaned forward in his chair. “What money are you referring to?”
“The money Anthony stole from his father. Haven’t I told you about it, Gordon? No, I don’t believe I have. I’ve told no one, I’ve always been so ashamed.” She lifted her hands and dropped them in her robed lap. “But now I can forgive him for that, too.”
“How much money was involved?” I said.
“I don’t know exactly how much, to the penny. Several thousand dollars, anyway. Ever since the day the banks closed, Mr. Galton had had a habit of keeping a certain amount of cash for current expenses.”
“Where did he keep it?”
“In his private safe, in the study. The combination was on a piece of paper pasted to the inside of his desk drawer. Anthony must have found it there, and used it to open the safe. He took everything in it, all the money, and even some of my jewels which I kept there.”
“Are you sure he took it?”
“Unfortunately, yes. It disappeared at the same time he did. It’s why he hid himself away, and never came back to us.”
Sable’s glum look deepened. Probably he was thinking the same thing I was: that several thousand dollars in cash, in the slums of San Francisco, in the depths of the depression, were a very likely passport to oblivion.
But we couldn’t say it out loud. With her money, and her asthma, and her heart, Mrs. Galton was living at several removes from reality. Apparently that was how it had to be.
“Do you have a picture of your son, taken not too long before his disappearance?”
“I believe I have. I’ll ask Cassie to have a look. She should be coming soon.”
“In the meantime, can you give me any other information? Particularly about where your son might have gone, who or where he might have visited.”
“I know nothing of his life after he left the university. He cut himself off from all decent society. He was perversely bound to sink in the social scale, to declass himself. I’m afraid my son had a nostalgie de la boue – a nostalgia for the gutter. He tried to cover it over with fancy talk about re-establishing contact with the earth, becoming a poet of the people, and such nonsense. His real interest was dirt for dirt’s own sake. I brought him up to be pure in thought and desire, but somehow – somehow he became fascinated with the pitch that defileth. And the pitch defiled him.”
Her breathing was noisy. She had begun to shake, and scratch with waxy fingers at the robe that covered her knees.
Sable leaned toward her solicitously. “You mustn’t excite yourself, Mrs. Galton. It was all over long ago.”
“It’s not all over. I want Anthony back. I have nobody. I have nothing. He was stolen away from me.”
“We’ll get him back if it’s humanly possible.”
“Yes, I know you will, Gordon.” Her mood had changed like a fitful wind. Her head inclined toward Sable’s shoulder as though to rest against it. She spoke like a little girl betrayed by time and loss, by fading hair and wrinkles and the fear of death: “I’m a foolish angry old woman. You’re always so good to me. Anthony will be good to me, too, won’t he, when he comes? In spite of all I’ve said against him, he was a darling boy. He was always good to his poor mother, and he will be again.”
She was chanting in a ritual of hope. If she said it often enough, it would have to come true.
“I’m sure he will, Mrs. Galton.”
Sable rose and pressed her hand. I was always a little suspicious of men who put themselves out too much for rich old ladies, or even poor ones. But then it was part of bis job.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “I want my lunch. What’s going on downstairs?”
She lunged half out of her long chair and got hold of a wired bellpush on the table beside it. She kept her finger pressed on the button until her lunch arrived. That was a tense five minutes.
Chapter 4
IT CAME on a covered platter carried by the woman I’d seen on the badminton court. She had changed her shorts for a plain linen dress which managed to conceal her figure, if not her fine brown legs. Her blue eyes were watchful.
“You kept me waiting, Cassie,” the old woman said. “What on earth were you doing?”
“Preparing your food. Before that I played some badminton with Sheila Howell.”
“I might have known you two would be enjoying yourselves while I sit up here starving.”
“Oh come, it’s not as bad as all that.”
“It’s not for you to say. You’re not my doctor. Ask August Howell, and he’ll tell you how important it is that I have my nourishment.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Maria. I thought you wouldn’t want to be disturbed while you were in conference.”
She stood just inside the doorway, still holding the tray like a shield in front of her. She wasn’t young: close up, I could see the fortyish lines in her face and the knowledge in her blue eyes. But she held herself with adolescent awkwardness, immobilized by feelings she couldn’t express.
“Well, you needn’t stand there like a dummy.”
Cassie moved suddenly. She set the tray on the table and uncovered the food. There was a good deal of food. Mrs. Galton began to fork salad into her mouth. The movements of her hands and jaws were rapid and mechanical. She was oblivious to the three of us watching her.
Sable and I retreated into the hallway and along it to the head of the stairs which curved in a baronial sweep down to the entrance hall. He leaned on the iron balustrade and lit a cigarette.
“Well, Lew, what do you think?”
I lit a cigarette of my own before I replied. “I think it’s a waste of time and money.”
“I told you that.”
“But you want me to go ahead with it anyway?”
“I can’t see any other way to handle it, or handle her. Mrs. Galton takes a good deal of handling.”
“Can you trust her memory? She seems to be reliving the past. Sometimes old people get mixed up about what actually happened. That story about the money he stole, for example. Do you believe it?”
“I’ve never known her to lie. And I really doubt that she’s as confused as she sounds. She likes to dramatize herself. It’s the only excitement she has left.”
“How old is she?”
“Seventy-three, I believe.”
“That isn’t so old. What about her son?”
“He’ll be about forty-four, if he’s still extant.”
“She doesn’t seem to realize that. She talks about him as if he was still a boy. How long has she been sitting in that room?”
“Ever since I’ve known her, anyway. Ten years. Occasionally, when she has a good day, she lets Miss Hildreth take her for a drive. It doesn’t do much to bring her up to date, though. It’s usually just a quick trip to the cemetery where her husband is buried. He died soon after Anthony took off. According to Mrs. Galton, that was what killed him. Miss Hildreth says he died of a coronary.”