“It was after the war. We were sitting around in Japan waiting for transport.” He made an impatient outward gesture with his arm. “To make a long story short, I hit the officer in charge of the staging point. I broke his nose. He was a Colonel.”
“Did you have a reason, apart from the fact that you don’t like Colonels?”
“My reason may sound foolish to you. He caught me sketching one day and thought it would be dandy if I painted his portrait. I told him I didn’t take orders about my work. We got into a battle of wills. He threatened to keep me over there till I painted him. I hit him. If he’d had a little less rank, or a little more, or if he’d belonged to our unit, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But face had to be saved and I got a year in a detention camp and a D. D. I didn’t paint him, though,” he added with bitter satisfaction.
“You’re a pretty good hater. What do you like?”
“The life of the imagination,” he said. “It’s all I’m good for. Every time I try to do something in the actual world I make a mess of it. I never should have married Dolly, for instance.”
“Why did you?”
“It’s a hard question. I’ve been thinking about the answers to it ever since I got into this jam. The main thing was the money, of course – I’d be a hypocrite if I denied that. She had a little money, call it a dowry. I was trying to prepare a series of pictures for a show, and I needed money to do it. You always need money, at least I do, and so we struck a bargain.”
“You knew about her pregnancy?”
“It was one of the attractions, in a way.”
“Most men would feel the opposite way.”
“I’m not most men. I liked the idea of having a child but I didn’t want to be anybody’s father. I didn’t care who the father was, so long as it wasn’t me. Does that sound foolish? It may have something to do with the fact that my old man did the disappearing-father act when I was four years old.” There was a growl of resentment in his voice.
“Did your father have trouble with the law?”
He said with a sour mocking grin: “My father was the law. He was a lousy Chicago cop, with both front feet in the trough. A bad act. I remember the last time I saw him. I was eighteen at the time, hacking my way through art school. He was helping a blonde into a Cadillac in front of an apartment hotel on the Gold Coast.” He cleared his throat. “Next question.”
“Getting back to Dolly – I’m not quite clear how you felt about her.”
“Neither am I. I started out feeling sorry for her. I thought it might develop into something real – that’s an old boyish dream of mine.” His mouth curled in self-irony. “It didn’t. You know the pity that chills the heart? Oddly enough I never went to bed with her. I loved to paint her, though. That’s my way of loving people. I’m not much good at the other ways.”
“I thought you were a devil with the ladies.”
He flushed. “I’ve done my share of rutting. A lot of them think it’s artistic to bed with an artist. But there was only one in my life I cared about – and that one didn’t last. I was too fouled up.”
“What was her name?”
“Does it matter? Her first name was Anne.”
“Anne Castle.”
He gave me a bright astonished look. “Who told you about her?”
“She did. I was in Ajijic two or three nights ago. She spoke of you with great affection.”
“Well,” he said. “That’s a fresh note for a change. Is Anne all right?”
“She probably would be if she didn’t have you to worry about. It broke her heart when you decamped with Harriet. The least you can do is write her a letter.”
He sat quiet for a time. I think he was composing the letter in his head. To judge by his frowning concentration, he was having a hard time with it.
“If Anne was important to you,” I said, “why did you take up with Harriet?”
“I’d already made a commitment.” His eyes were still turned inward on himself.
“I don’t follow you, Campion.”
“I didn’t meet Harriet in Mexico, as you seem to think. I met her in my own house in Luna Bay several weeks before I went to Mexico. She came to see Dolly and the baby. She and Dolly were old friends. But Dolly wasn’t there that afternoon – she’d taken the baby in for his monthly checkup. Harriet stood around watching me paint. She was an amateur painter herself, and she got very excited over what I was doing. She was quite an excitable girl.”
“So?”
Campion looked at me uneasily. “I couldn’t help thinking what she could do for me, with a little encouragement. I was broke, as usual, and she obviously wasn’t. I thought it would be pleasant to have a patroness. I could stop worrying about the light bill and simply do my work. I made a date with her before Dolly got back with the baby. I saw her that night, and before long we were spending nights together.
“I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. Harriet acted as though she’d never been with a man. She fell so hard it scared me. She drove over from Tahoe a couple of times a week, and we were in and out of the motels. I should have had the sense to pull out of the situation. I had a feeling that it would lead to trouble.” He drew in a deep breath.
“What kind of trouble?”
“I didn’t know. But she was a serious girl, too serious, and terribly passionate. I shouldn’t have led her on.”
“Did you suspect that Blackwell was the baby’s father?”
He hesitated. “I may have, more or less subconsciously. Harriet said something once, when she was holding the baby in her arms. She called him little brother. It stuck in my mind, though I didn’t realize she was speaking literally.”
“And Dolly never told you?”
“No. I didn’t press the point, while she was alive. I didn’t really want to know who the father was. I thought I could love the baby better if he was anonymous. But it turned out I couldn’t love him too well. Him or anybody. Then I messed the whole thing up when I tried to go into orbit with Harriet. I should have stayed home and looked after Dolly and the baby.”
His voice was low, and I thought I heard the growl of manhood in it. He rose and struck his open left palm with his closed right fist. Shaking hands with himself in an embarrassed way, he went to the window.
“I was with Harriet the night Dolly was killed,” he said with his back turned.
“Harriet was the woman you slept with in the Travelers Motel?”
“That’s right. Slept isn’t quite accurate. We had an argument, and she started back to Tahoe in the middle of the night. I stayed in the room and got drunk. She’d brought me a bottle of her father’s Scotch.” He seemed to take a painful pride in spelling out the details of his humiliation.
“What was the argument about?”
“Marriage. She wanted to buy me a Reno divorce. I won’t deny I was tempted, but when it came to a showdown I found I couldn’t do it. I didn’t love Harriet. I didn’t love Dolly, either, but I had made a bargain with her to give the boy my name. I kept hoping if I stuck with it I’d learn to love the boy. But it was already too late. When I sobered up enough to drive myself home, Dolly was dead and the boy was gone and the cops were there.”
“Why didn’t you tell them where you’d spent the night? You had an alibi of sorts.”
“It didn’t look as if I’d have to use it. They questioned me and let me go. As soon as I was free, I got in touch with Harriet at Tahoe. She said I mustn’t on any account drag her or her family into it. She was protecting her father, obviously, though she didn’t say so. She sold me the idea of hiding out after they indicted me, and I spent a bad couple of weeks shut up in their beach house. I wanted to go on to Mexico – Ralph lent me his birth certificate with that in mind – but I had no money.