It made me anxious, loitering by the house like this: I wondered suddenly if I was being watched, and immediately felt watched. Trying not to look as if I didn’t want to be seen, I approached the front door and rang the belclass="underline" no answer. The door handle, which was locked, had a keyhole right in it like the handles of hotel room doors. On a reluctant intuition, I took the key that had been left in my mailbox out of my pocket. Had this been anticipated, I wondered, my coming here? But I saw at once that the key wasn’t going to fit, and to the extent that one doesn’t like the idea of one’s apparently spontaneous decisions being somehow foreseen, this was a relief. But at the same time I realised that in some part of myself I had been considering going into the house and removing the letter I had allegedly written Elaine, and that I had perhaps all along been half-consciously hoping this key would be my means of entry; that this indeed had been my chief reason for coming here in the first place. Only now – now that I found myself obstructed in this wish – did I become fully conscious of the danger the letter up there in Elaine’s bedroom posed to me.
I had given this letter almost no thought since Elaine first mentioned it that evening up in her bedroom. The revelation of its existence had been so abruptly eclipsed by the larger revelation concerning Barbara Hellermann’s death, and events since then had plunged forward at such a speed, that I hadn’t had a chance to puzzle out its origins, or even to remember that this was something I needed to do. Now though, standing outside Elaine’s house, I realised that without conscious reflection I had placed this letter along with the note, the key, the poster, and all the other varyingly mischievous phenomena of the past weeks, in the category of visible manifestation of Trumilcik’s malice toward me. And whatever the ultimate goal of this malice might have been, I could easily imagine the importance to it of a document that appeared to form an unequivocal link between Elaine and myself.
With as casual an air as I could muster, I sauntered round to the back of the house and tried the back-door lock: again without success. As I moved on, I saw that the Venetian blind in one of the kitchen windows was half open. I peered in through the angled slats, and immediately a feeling of panic exploded inside me, even though what I saw amounted merely to a confirmation of what I had already been suspecting. There on the kitchen counter was the debris of the meal Elaine and I had shared almost a week ago, still not cleared away: dirty plates and cutlery, smeared wineglasses, crumpled serviettes. Lowering my head I could see through the narrow gaps between the metal slats to an area of the tiled floor where what looked like the remains of Elaine’s quiche had come crashing violently to the ground. Small insects were crawling over the pale curds and the gray, broken, brainlike florets of cauliflower.
Any further ideas I might have had about getting into the house disappeared from me then. I turned from the window, and reeled away with a sensation of being almost involuntarily driven off, the movement of my wobbly legs more a stagger than a walk. As I turned out of Lincoln Court I remembered what had seemed inconsequential at the time, that on the night of my dinner with Elaine I had left the scrap of paper with her address on it in my office. No doubt it had come out of my wallet along with the twenty-dollar bills I had left for Trumilcik. It had been in his possession. Elaine’s address had been in Trumilcik’s hands! He had known where I was going; known where Elaine lived. The implications of this sank heavily through me, spreading a sensation of utter horror. To the image of myself and Elaine inside her house that evening, I was now compelled to add the figure of Trumilcik peering in from the outside, steel rod in hand.
CHAPTER 13
The following day, as I rode the subway up to Dr Schrever’s office, I found myself thinking of her notebook. It occurred to me that, like Trumilcik’s rod and the letter in Elaine’s painted box, this too had become a kind of unauthorised representation of myself; at large in the world, and impersonating me in ways that could threaten to be at the very least embarrassing. I would have liked to have had it in my possession, but short of snatching it from Dr Schrever and running out of her office with it – something I could hardly see myself doing – I didn’t hold out much hope of this.
What did occur to me, though, was that I might be able to turn its existence to my advantage.
The word ‘alibi’ seemed almost as absurd in relation to the humdrum routines of my life, as ‘Private Investigator’ had a week earlier, and yet it struck me that my trip to Corinth (something I had naturally had no intention of discussing with Dr Schrever) had acquired a new significance. It was my alibi; at any rate as far as Rosa Vasquez was concerned. Placing myself in Corinth on the night of her murder seemed suddenly much more important than any advantage I might gain by my discretion. And it seemed to me that Dr Schrever’s notebook was the natural choice for the document of record.
Departing, therefore, from the policy of caution that had all but silenced me on her couch earlier that week, I made up my mind to tell Dr Schrever about Trumilcik after all. I would tell her the whole story: how I had come to suspect his presence in my office, how I had found his memoir and then gone on to discover his hiding place. I would tell her about the sheet and the rod, the vile offering he had left me in exchange for my forty dollars, the anonymous note, the Portland poster, the key… I would describe (already I could feel the enormous relief of being able to do all this) my growing suspicion of his involvement in the death of Barbara Hellermann, and I would tell her how, in my attempt to track him down, I had made my strange journey to Corinth last weekend.
Without being obtrusively so, I would be very precise about the timing of my trip and return. I would give a scrupulously accurate account of the journey, describing the bus ride up there, the rest-stop, the town, the shelter itself, all in the kind of minute detail by which reality makes itself felt. I would portray the people I had encountered along the way so faithfully that even if somewhere down the line they should forget or deny they had ever met me, no one would doubt that I had met them. Above all, I would be mercilessly honest about my own conduct and feelings: candid to the point of incriminating myself. That way – guilty of fraud and general duplicity – I would be immune to accusations of any more serious crime.
Unfortunately I never had a chance to implement this plan. Before I reached Dr Schrever’s office, this too had acquired a kind of protective force-field; one that seemed almost physically to hoist me up and drive me back in the opposite direction as fast as I could move.
I had bought the Daily News as I got out of the subway, and was reading it as I walked up along the park. There had been nothing new on Rosa Vasquez in the Times that morning, but the News had a development to report, and it was as I was reading about this that I felt myself being turned around and driven back down to the Village, filled with a weird, sickened sense of the ghastly irony with which this fiasco seemed to be working itself out.