Strangers on a Train

  They ordered something from the restaurant downstairs. Their ham and eggs were an unrecognizable dish of vermilion color, but quite good, they decided.

  “I’m glad you got to Mexico,” Anne said. “It’s been like something I knew so well and you didn’t, something I wanted you to know. Only Mexico City isn’t like the rest.” She went on, eating slowly, “It has a nostalgia like Paris or Vienna and you want to come back no matter what’s happened to you here.”

  Guy frowned. He had been to Paris and Vienna with Robert Treacher, a Canadian engineer, one summer when neither of them had any money. It hadn’t been the Paris and Vienna Anne had known. He looked down at the buttered sweet roll she had given him. At times he wanted passionately to know the flavor of every experience Anne had ever known, what had happened to her in every hour of her childhood. “What do you mean, no matter what’s happened to me here?”

  “I mean whether you’ve been sick. Or robbed.” She looked up at him and smiled. But the lamp’s light that made a glow through her smoke-blue eyes, a crescent glow on their darker rims, lent a mysterious sadness to her face. “I suppose it’s contrasts that make it attractive. Like people with incredible contrasts.”

  Guy stared at her, his finger crooked in the handle of his coffee cup. Somehow her mood, or perhaps what she said, made him feel inferior. “I’m sorry I don’t have any incredible contrasts.”

  “Oh-ho-ho!” Then she burst out in a laugh, her familiar gay laugh that delighted him even when she laughed at him, even when she had no intention of explaining herself.

  He sprang up. “How about some cake. I’m going to produce a cake like a jinni. A wonderful cake!” He got the cookie tin out of the corner of his suitcase. He had not thought of the cake until that moment, the cake his mother had baked him with the blackberry jam he had praised at his breakfasts.

  Anne telephoned the bar downstairs and ordered a very special liqueur that she knew of. The liqueur was a rich purple like the purple cake, in stemmed glasses hardly bigger around than a finger. The waiter had just gone, they were just lifting the glasses, when the telephone rang, in nervous, iterant rings.

  “Probably Mother,” Anne said.

  Guy answered it. He heard a voice talking distantly to an operator. Then the voice came louder, anxious and shrill, his mother’s voice:

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mama.”

  “Guy, something’s happened.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Miriam.”

  “What about her?” Guy pressed the receiver hard against his ear. He turned to Anne, and saw her face change as she looked at him.

  “She’s been killed, Guy. Last night—” She broke off.

  “What, Mama?”

  “It happened last night.” She spoke in the shrill, measured tones that Guy had heard only once or twice before in his life. “Guy, she was murdered.”

  “Murdered!”

  “Guy, what?” Anne asked, getting up.

  “Last night at the lake. They don’t know anything.”

  “You’re—”

  “Can you come home, Guy?”

  “Yes, Mama.—How?” he asked stupidly, wringing the telephone as if he could wring information from its two old-fashioned parts. “How?”

  “Strangled.” The one word, then silence.

  “Did you—?” he began. “Is—?”

  “Guy, what is it?” Anne held to his arm.

  “I’ll be home as fast as I can, Mama. Tonight. Don’t worry. I’ll see you very soon.” He hung up slowly and turned to Anne. “It’s Miriam. Miriam’s been killed.”

  Anne whispered, “Murdered—did you say?”

  Guy nodded, but it suddenly struck him there might be a mistake. If it were just a report—

  “When?”

  But it was last night. “Last night, she said.”

  “Do they know who?”

  “No. I’ve got to go tonight.”

  “My God.”

  He looked at Anne, standing motionless in front of him. “I’ve got to go tonight,” he said again, dazedly. Then he turned and went to the telephone to call for a plane reservation, but it was Anne who got the reservation for him, talking rapidly in Spanish.

  He began to pack. It seemed to take hours getting his few possessions into his suitcase. He stared at the brown bureau, wondering if he had already looked through it to see if everything were out of its drawers. Now, where he had seen the vision of the white house, a laughing face appeared, first the crescent mouth, then the face—Bruno’s face. The tongue curved lewdly over the upper lip, and then the silent, convulsed laughter came again, shaking the stringy hair over the forehead. Guy frowned at Anne.

  “What’s the matter, Guy?”

  “Nothing,” he said. How did he look now?

  fourteen

  Supposing Bruno had done it? He couldn’t have, of course, but just supposing he had? Had they caught him? Had Bruno told them the murder was a plan of theirs? Guy could easily imagine Bruno hysterical, saying anything. There was no predicting what a neurotic child like Bruno would say. Guy searched his hazy memory of their conversation on the train and tried to recall if in jest or anger or drunkenness he had said anything that might have been taken as a consent to Bruno’s insane idea. He hadn’t. Against this negative answer, he weighed Bruno’s letter that he remembered word for word: that idea we had for a couple of murders. It could be done, I am sure. I cannot express to you my supremest confidence—

  From the plane window, Guy looked down into total blackness. Why wasn’t he more anxious than he was? Up the dim cylinder of the plane’s body, a match glowed at someone’s cigarette. The scent of Mexican tobacco was faint, bitter, and sickening. He looked at his watch: 4:25.

  Toward dawn he fell asleep, yielding to the shaking roar of the motors that seemed bent on tearing the plane apart, tearing his mind apart, and scattering the pieces in the sky. He awakened to a gray overcast morning, and a new thought: Miriam’s lover had killed her. It was so obvious, so likely. He had killed her in a quarrel. One read such cases so often in the newspapers, the victims so often women like Miriam. There was a front-page story about a girl’s murder in the tabloid El Grafico he had bought at the airport—he hadn’t been able to find an American paper, though he had almost missed the plane looking for one—and a picture of her grinning Mexican lover holding the knife with which he had killed her, and Guy started to read it, becoming bored in the second paragraph.

  A plainclothesman met him at the Metcalf airport and asked if he would mind answering a few questions. They got into a taxi together.

  “Have they found the murderer?” Guy asked him.

  “No.”

  The plainclothesman looked tired, as if he had been up all night, like the rest of the reporters and clerks and police in the old North Side courthouse. Guy glanced around the big wooden room, looking for Bruno before he was aware of doing so. When he lighted a cigarette, the man next to him asked him what kind it was, and accepted the one Guy offered him. They were Anne’s Belmonts that he had pocketed when he was packing.

  “Guy Daniel Haines, 717 Ambrose Street, Metcalf. . . . When did you leave Metcalf? . . . And when did you get to Mexico City?”

  Chairs scraped. A noiseless typewriter started bumping after them.

  Another plainclothesman with a badge, with his jacket open and a swagbelly protruding, strolled closer. “Why did you go to Mexico?”

  “To visit some friends.”

  “Who?”

  “The Faulkners. Alex Faulkner of New York.”

  “Why didn’t you tell your mother where you were going?”

  “I did tell her.”

  “She didn’t know where you were staying in Mexico City,” the plainclothesman informed him blandly, and referred to his notes. “You sent your wife a letter Sunday asking for a divorce. What did she reply?”

  “That she wanted to talk with me.”

  “But you didn’t care to talk wit
h her anymore, did you?” asked a clear tenor voice.

  Guy looked at the young police officer, and said nothing.

  “Was her child to be yours?”

  He started to answer, but was interrupted.

  “Why did you come to Texas last week to see your wife?”

  “Didn’t you want a divorce pretty badly, Mr. Haines?”

  “Are you in love with Anne Faulkner?”

  Laughter.

  “You know your wife had a lover, Mr. Haines. Were you jealous?”

  “You were depending on that child for your divorce, weren’t you?”

  “That’s all!” someone said.

  A photograph was thrust in front of him, and the image spun with his anger before it straightened to a long dark head, handsome and stupid brown eyes, a cleft, manly chin—a face that might have been a movie actor’s, and no one had to tell him this was Miriam’s lover, because this was the kind of face she had liked three years ago.

  “No,” Guy said.

  “Haven’t you and he had some talks together?”

  “That’s all!”

  A bitter smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, yet he felt he might have cried, too, like a child. He hailed a taxi in front of the courthouse. On the ride home, he read the double column on the front page of the Metcalf Star:

  QUEST CONTINUES FOR GIRL’S SLAYER

  June 12—The quest continues for the slayer of Mrs. Miriam Joyce Haines of this city, victim of strangulation by an unknown assailant on Metcalf Island Sunday night.

  Two fingerprint experts arrive today who will endeavor to establish classifications of fingerprints taken from several oars and rowboats of the Lake Metcalf rowboat docks. But police and detectives fear that obtainable fingerprints are hazy. Authorities yesterday afternoon expressed the opinion that the crime might have been the act of a maniac. Apart from dubious fingerprints and several heelprints around the scene of the attack, police officials have not yet uncovered any vital clue.

  Most important testimony at the inquest, it is believed, will come from Owen Markman, 30, longshoreman of Houston, and a close friend of the murdered woman.

  Interment of Mrs. Haines’ body will take place today at Remington Cemetery. The cortege departs from Howell Funeral Home on College Avenue at 2:00 P.M. this afternoon.

  Guy lighted a cigarette from the end of another. His hands were still shaking, but he felt vaguely better. He hadn’t thought of the possibility of a maniac. A maniac reduced it to a kind of horrible accident.

  His mother sat in her rocker in the living room with a handkerchief pressed to her temple, waiting for him, though she did not get up when he came in. Guy embraced her and kissed her cheek, relieved to see she hadn’t been crying.

  “I spent yesterday with Mrs. Joyce,” she said, “but I just can’t go to the funeral.”

  “There isn’t any need to, Mama.” He glanced at his watch and saw it was already past 2. For an instant, he felt that Miriam might have been buried alive, that she might awaken and scream in protest. He turned, and passed his hand across his forehead.

  “Mrs. Joyce,” his mother said softly, “asked me if you might know something.”

  Guy faced her again. Mrs. Joyce resented him, he knew. He hated her now for what she might have said to his mother. “Don’t see them again, Mama. You don’t have to, do you?”

  “No.”

  “And thank you for going over.”

  Upstairs on his bureau, he found three letters and a small square package with a Santa Fe store label. The package contained a narrow belt of braided lizard skin with a silver buckle formed like an H. A note enclosed said:

  Lost your Plato book on way to post office. I hope this will help make up.

  Charley

  Guy picked up the penciled envelope from the Santa Fe hotel. There was only a small card inside. On the card’s back was printed:

  NICE TOWN METCALF

  Turning the card, he read mechanically:

  24 HOUR

  DONOVAN TAXI SERVICE

  RAIN OR SHINE

  Call 2-3333

  SAFE FAST COURTEOUS

  Something had been erased beneath the message on the back. Guy held the card to the light and made out one word: Ginnie. It was a Metcalf taxi company’s card, but it had been mailed from Santa Fe. It doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t prove anything, he thought. But he crushed the card and the envelope and the package wrappings into his wastebasket. He loathed Bruno, he realized. He opened the box in the wastebasket and put the belt in, too. It was a handsome belt, but he happened also to loathe lizard and snake skin.

  Anne telephoned him that night from Mexico City. She wanted to know everything that had happened, and he told her what he knew.

  “They don’t have any suspicion who did it?” she asked.

  “They don’t seem to.”

  “You don’t sound well, Guy. Did you get any rest?”

  “Not yet.” He couldn’t tell her now about Bruno. His mother had said that a man had called twice, wanting to talk to him, and Guy had no doubt who it was. But he knew he could not tell Anne about Bruno until he was sure. He could not begin.

  “We’ve just sent those affidavits, darling. You know, about your being here with us?”

  He had wired her for them after talking to one of the police detectives. “Everything’ll be all right after the inquest,” he said.

  But it troubled him the rest of the night that he had not told Anne about Bruno. It was not the horror that he wished to spare her. He felt it was some sense of personal guilt that he himself could not bear.

  There was a report going about that Owen Markman had not wanted to marry Miriam after the loss of the child, and that she had started a breach-of-promise action against him. Miriam really had lost the child accidentally, Guy’s mother said. Mrs. Joyce had told her that Miriam had tripped on a black silk nightgown that she particularly liked, that Owen had given her, and had fallen downstairs in her house. Guy believed the story implicitly. A compassion and remorse he had never before felt for Miriam had entered his heart. Now she seemed pitiably ill-fated and entirely innocent.

  fifteen

  “Not more than seven yards and not less than five,” the grave, self-assured young man in the chair replied. “No, I did not see anyone.”

  “I think about fifteen feet,” said the wide-eyed girl, Katherine Smith, who looked as frightened as if it had just happened. “Maybe a little more,” she added softly.

  “About thirty feet. I was the first one down at the boat,” said Ralph Joyce, Miriam’s brother. His red hair was like Miriam’s, and he had the same gray-green eyes, but his heavy square jaw took away the resemblance. “I wouldn’t say she had any enemy. Not enough to do something like this.”

  “I didn’t hear one thing,” Katherine Smith said earnestly, shaking her head.

  Ralph Joyce said he hadn’t heard anything, and Richard Schuyler’s positive statement ended it:

  “There weren’t any sounds.”

  The facts repeated and repeated lost their horror and even their drama for Guy. They were like dull blows of a hammer, nailing the story in his mind forever. The nearness of the three others was the unbelievable. Only a maniac would have dared come so near, Guy thought, that was certain.

  “Were you the father of the child Mrs. Haines lost?”

  “Yes.” Owen Markman slouched forward over his locked fingers. A glum, hangdog manner spoilt the dashing good looks Guy had seen in the photograph. He wore gray buckskin shoes, as if he had just come from his job in Houston. Miriam would not have been proud of him today, Guy thought.

  “Do you know anyone who might have wanted Mrs. Haines to die?”

  “Yes.” Markman pointed at Guy. “Him.”

  People turned to look at him. Guy sat tensely, frowning straight at Markman, for the first time really suspecting Markman.

  “Why?”

  Owen Markman hesitated a long while, mumbled something, then brought out one word: “Jealousy
.”

  Markman could not give a single credible reason for jealousy, but after that accusations of jealousy came from all sides. Even Katherine Smith said, “I guess so.”

  Guy’s lawyer chuckled. He had the affidavits from the Faulkners in his hand. Guy hated the chuckle. He had always hated legal procedure. It was like a vicious game in which the objective seemed not to disclose the truth but to enable one lawyer to tilt at another, and unseat him on a technicality.

  “You gave up an important commission—” the coroner began.

  “I did not give it up,” Guy said. “I wrote them before I had the commission, saying I didn’t want it.”

  “You telegraphed. Because you didn’t want your wife to follow you there. But when you learned in Mexico that your wife had lost her child, you sent another telegram to Palm Beach that you wished to be considered for the commission. Why?”

  “Because I didn’t believe she’d follow me there then. I suspected she’d want to delay the divorce indefinitely. But I intended to see her—this week to discuss the divorce.” Guy wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and saw his lawyer purse his lips ruefully. His lawyer hadn’t wanted him to mention the divorce in connection with his change of mind about the commission. Guy didn’t care. It was the truth, and they could make of it what they wished.

  “In your opinion was her husband capable of arranging for such a murder, Mrs. Joyce?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Joyce with the faintest quiver, her head high. The shrewd dark red lashes were almost closed, as Guy had so often seen them, so that one never knew where her eyes rested. “He wanted his divorce.”

  There was an objection that Mrs. Joyce had said a few moments before that her daughter wanted the divorce and Guy Haines did not because he still loved her. “If both wanted a divorce, and it has been proven Mr. Haines did, why wasn’t there a divorce?”

  The court was amused. The fingerprint experts could not come to agreement on their classifications. A hardware dealer, into whose store Miriam had come the day before her death, got tangled up as to whether her companion had been male or female, and more laughter camouflaged the fact he had been instructed to say a man. Guy’s lawyer harangued on geographical fact, the inconsistencies of the Joyce family, the affidavits in his hand, but Guy was sure that his own straightforwardness alone had absolved him from any suspicion.