“Oh?” said his father. “Yeah. Yeah, son.” He went over and tugged.
“Gun,” said Ellery, pointing a wavering finger at the Police Positive. “No, that’s not it. I buried his gun in the East River. Heaved it. No more gun, Daddy.”
“Come on, son, I’ll get you to bed.”
“Know what I am?” said Ellery. “I’m a pooped-out poop. Believe in heaving guns. So what? So no guns. So there you are.” He waved his arms. “You think. But you know what you know in your heart? You’re a pooped-out poop. Because you know something? He’s right. Lot of people would say he’s right. You know something?”
“Come on, son.”
“Maybe I’d say it myself. Guns!”
Ellery put his arms around his father and wept.
There were no letters for the V and W meetings. Ellery witnessed them because he shadowed Martha day and night. Apparently the appointments were made from a public telephone booth, for which he breathed a prayer of thanks. It meant that for these, at least, Dirk would not be on the trail.
Martha must have called the letter-code system off.
“She knows,” Nikki said. “She knows he knows.”
Ellery saw her meet Harrison on the sidewalk before the offices of Variety on West 46th Street. He was not interested in them. He had eyes only for the terrain.
It was all right. Dirk was not there.
Ellery let them go.
Again, they met among the booths in the main shed of Washington Market, surrounded by the perfect vegetables and immaculate meats and jarred delicacies of the world. Harrison kissed her perfunctorily and seemed more disposed to stroll about, but Martha hurried him off, and they left by the West Street entrance to cross to the parking space below the elevated express highway, get into Harrison’s car, and drive away.
Ellery had parked his car nearby, and he followed. He kept looking behind him. Dirk’s shadow lurked everywhere.
Harrison drove slowly, avoiding the highway for the crowded streets. The convertible bore gradually uptown. Again it was Martha who seemed to be doing most of the talking. Occasionally Harrison turned to her, and Ellery caught a scowl on the perfect profile.
But when the actor let Martha out at Eighth Avenue and 41st Street, he watched her for a moment, and then he drove off smiling.
Martha went the rest of the way on foot to the theater where her company was rehearsing. She did not look back. She walked like a middle-aged woman.
Harrison’s departing smile kept hectoring Ellery. It had seemed curiously contented.
When Nikki phoned that night, Ellery shouted at her.
Nikki did not shout back. She crept into bed and pulled the sheet over her eyes.
X· Y·
Nikki had seesawed through so many crises that, by the close of that first week in September, she was conscious of nothing more vital than a dizziness and a roaring in her ears. She could not have said what she was typing or even what day it was. Her life these days had the shimmer of a half-remembered dream.
Martha and Dirk floated in and out of a jumble of disconnected sequences. In all that week Nikki could recall no word or look between them. What went on in their bedroom at night she did not know, but in the waking hours their paths crisscrossed without touching, like the orbits of distant stars. Nikki was vaguely grateful. A collision would have sent her screaming into the night.
Remotely, she thought she knew what was happening. Dirk was ignoring Martha in order to control the direction of his life. He could not attend her and survive. And Martha... About Martha, Nikki was in total darkness. Martha got up early and bathed and dressed and fled. She came home, usually after midnight, and crept into bed.
Dirk drove hard toward the climax of his book. Nikki heard him sometimes, long after she had gone to bed, pecking at the typewriter between clinks of a bottle on a glass. It was only toward the end of the week — just before the onset of nightmare — that Nikki realized he was no longer sleeping in the bedroom but was bedding down on the living-room sofa without taking his clothes off. When Martha left in the morning, he went into the bedroom and shut the door.
So matters stood until Friday, the fourth of September — Red Friday, as Nikki ever after remembered it.
On Thursday night, when Martha had got home, she tapped on Nikki’s door.
“No, Mar, it’s all right,” said Nikki. “I wasn’t asleep.”
Martha had not crossed the threshold. “It’s Saturday night, Nikki.”
“What’s Saturday night?”
“The opening. In Bridgeport.”
“Oh! Yes.” Nikki had forgotten all about the opening in Bridgeport. She had forgotten all about the Greenspan play.
“I’m leaving some tickets for you and Ellery and anyone else you’d like to have along. They’ll be at the box office.”
“Aren’t you excited? Thanks, Mar!”
“Will you tell Dirk?”
“Tell him what?”
“About the opening. I’ll leave a ticket for him, too.”
“You mean Dirk doesn’t know—?”
But Martha was gone.
Nikki gave Dirk the message Friday morning, after Martha left. His heavy brows came together painfully, and he said, “Opening?” Then he nodded and turned away.
Martha returned to the apartment just after four.
“Martha, something wrong?” It was so long since Nikki had seen Martha at home in mid-afternoon that she could only think of trouble.
“No,” said Martha coolly. “We’re having the final dress tonight, and I’ve got to change and get up to Bridgeport.”
Martha disappeared in the bedroom and locked the door. Nikki waited until she heard the tub running, then she went back to the study.
“Who was that?” asked Dirk.
“Martha. She’s holding the final rehearsal tonight.”
“In Bridgeport?”
“Of course. The scenery’s all up there and everything, I suppose, and they’ve got to become familiar with the stage—” Nikki knew just what was going through his mind. On the road to Bridgeport lay Darien.
Dirk turned away and after a moment he resumed dictating.
At a few minutes past five the telephone rang. The extension was at her elbow and Nikki picked it up and said absently: “Lawrence residence. Hello?”
“Let me speak to Mrs. Lawrence, please.”
It was Van Harrison.
A sub-Arctic cold gripped Nikki’s throat. She swallowed frantically. “She’s... she’s gone for the day!” She hung up, keeping her hand on the phone. “Go on, Dirk.”
“Who was that?”
“Somebody for Charlotte. Let’s see, now...” As she blindly scanned the lines of typing, she gave silent thanks to the fates that had decreed Friday as Charlotte’s afternoon off. “I don’t know, Dirk, this last paragraph doesn’t seem right to me. How about looking it over while I go out and powder my nose and stuff?”
Before Dirk could say anything, Nikki went out of the study. She closed the door.
She had just reached the foyer when the telephone rang again. She sprang at it before the ring could be repeated.
“I told you—” she began in a fierce undertone.
“Hello?” said a voice.
It was Martha, on the bedroom extension.
“Martha.” Harrison sounded peevish. “Who the devil was that just told me...?”
Nikki heard Martha’s gasp. Then Martha said in a voice so harsh Nikki was confused, “It’s for me, Nikki. Hang up.”
“Oh. Sorry, Mar.” Nikki depressed the bar of the phone. The pulse in her throat was annoying her. Very slowly, she released the bar.
“—knew damn well you were home,” Harrison was complaining. “I phoned you at the theater—”