The last illusion to go was the one of love. Unlike the norm of most beautiful women, she was strongly, hungrily sexed. But her only interest was her own gratification. He existed as an available instrument of her completion, not as a person. She would say the expected words of love, but as a short lesson learned by rote.
He knew that, as a person, he did not exist for her. Nor did anyone else in the world really exist. She lived entirely for herself, and anyone who entered her life in any way existed only as a part of the frame around her. Should they fit her preconceived notion of herself, they were acceptable. If they did not fit, they were ignored.
She was an indifferent housekeeper, a dull, lazy and unimaginative cook. In his final knowledge he admitted to himself that she was stupid, lazy, insensitive, greedy, superficial and curiously coarse. He had thought a child might change her, but after he became convinced they could not conceive, he felt a guilty relief. He took the joyless use of her that she took of him. And he intoned the expected words with her own lack of conviction. He felt responsibility toward her. He did not feel that he could leave her. And when he thought of how she would be in twenty years, soft, fat, querulous, whining, his heart seemed to hang sick and heavy in his breast. He knew she would hurt him in his profession. At the moment it was not too important. At faculty affairs she was decorative, and when she opened her mouth and the emptinesses came out, it was thought cute. Lucille, the doll-wife.
The one factor he most resented was the way she managed to stifle his ability to do a second novel. He tried. He could not work. There was always the knowledge of her in the house. Her listless boredom, her sighing discontent. She felt he had cheated her somehow. This life was too meager. She didn’t understand money, or how to handle it. She merely knew that she had to have a great deal more than she had. Her desires were infantile. She wanted a glossy convertible, country club membership, a mink, travel, matched luggage, a fulltime maid, and one really good square-cut emerald. Lee obviously couldn’t acquire those things and never would. So Lee had cheated her. And her family felt Lee had cheated her.
As he was unable to work at what he wanted most to do, he had filled his time as completely as he could with extra work. Any obligation was preferable to the endless evenings after eating one of those frozen horrors she purchased called “television dinners,” trying to read in the small living room while she lived the spurious life of the picture tube.
The marriage had become a curious armed truce. In a small and very guilty corner of his soul he hoped that out of her ignorance and her boredom she would commit some act so monstrous that it would cancel his obligation to her and he would be free of her. Though he had the dark suspicion that there had been very few personable men in her home neighborhood who had not managed to trigger her quick physical responses, she seemed now to be utterly faithful. She spent a great deal of time with Ruthie Loftis, the plump brunette wife of a car salesman who lived three blocks down Arcadia Street. Ruthie was cut from the same pattern. When he was forced to over-hear fifteen minutes of any Lucille-Ruthie conversation, he felt like throwing his head back and roaring like a gut-shot bear.
He glanced at Keefler and saw that the man was looking at Lucille with cold avidity and an overtone of astonishment.
“Seems like your brother-in-law Danny has come up missing,” Keefler said easily. “When was the the last time you saw him? Now don’t look at him, honey. You look at me and tell me.”
“Gee, I got to think. It was a long time ago. Lee, wasn’t it about your birthday?”
“I told you not to look at him.”
“I’m sorry. It’s like a game, sort of, huh? He was here the day after Lee’s birthday, when he was twenty-nine. I’m twenty-four. Let me see. He brought you something. I can’t remem... oh, that stuff for your desk. I don’t know why he had to bring junk like that.”
“Have you seen him since?”
Lucille’s eyes looked wider. She shook her head from side to side, with the slow solemnity of a child. “No, Mr. Keefler. We haven’t seen him at all.”
Lee felt the tension at the nape of his neck. Lucille was a congenital liar, and a poor one. There were always reasons for her lies. Where did the change go? Gee, honey, it must have fallen out of my pocket. Those are new shoes, aren’t they? Are you crazy! I’ve had these for ages. Why didn’t you tell me Dr. Ewing called? But he didn’t, honest. Always with the same extra width of eye, the same slow shake of her lovely head, the slight abused pout of her heavy lips. He had seen it so many times that he knew beyond any doubt that Lucille was lying to Keefler. He looked narrowly at Keefler, who took out a cigarette and lit the match one-handed. Keefler stood up. “Well, you back up what your husband told me, Mrs. Bronson. I guess you folks are in the clear.”
He started toward the screen door and turned sharply and said, “What work is he doing, Lucille? What work is Danny doing?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Honest. He wouldn’t say.”
Keefler stood by the screen door, nibbling his lower lip. “Go on in the house, honey,” he said.
Lee saw Lucille obey with an unexpected docility. She never took readily to being ordered about. Keefler gestured to Lee. He got up and walked over. Keefler looked up at him. “Big bastard, aren’t you?”
“Is that a question... sir?”
“Don’t get porky. You can’t afford it. You don’t mean anything to me. I can step on you like on a bug. Now I’m telling you just what you’re going to do. You’re going to wait, and if you get any kind of word from Danny, you aren’t going to wait ten seconds before you get hold of me. You’re going to move fast, Bronson. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be the sorriest guy in the state. Right now he’s a wanted man. Understand? You hide one single damn thing, and there’s laws that cover that, and I’ll go to a lot of work to see that I make them stick.”
Keefler settled his hat more squarely on his head. He shook out his suit coat and rehung it over his left arm. He went down the steps and out to the walk. He looked back once and lifted his arm in a sardonic gesture of farewell.
Chapter Two
Johnny Keefler
When Keefler looked back the second time, Bronson was no longer standing behind the screen door. There were four blocks to walk, and even though it was five o’clock, it was still a thick hot day. He felt satisfaction when he thought of Lee Bronson.
A punk like his brother. Hide behind that big education, but still a punk. Two kinds of people. The ones with a record and the ones without. Traffic arrests were the only kind you couldn’t count. The rest of them all had larceny in their hearts. Give Lee Bronson the right chance and he’d make a grab, same as the rest of them.
There was an alley in the back of Keefler’s mind. It had been there the day it happened, and it would be there all the days of his life. A squalid alley in the Sink, a narrow path between the knee-deep litter that lay against the walls of the buildings on either side. No window looked down into that alley.