Cape Fear (8 page)

“I don’t want to listen to all this.”

“But you’ll listen, Lieutenant. You want the word. I got this word for you. After I found out from my brother about her marrying again, I planned the whole thing, just exactly the way I did it. I changed it just a little. I was going to keep her a week instead of only three days, but she lost her fight too fast.”

“So?”

“You’re supposed to be a big smart lawyer, Lieutenant. I thought about her and naturally I thought about you.”

“And you made plans for me?”

“Now you’re getting warm. But I couldn’t make plans for you because I didn’t know how you were set. I wasn’t
even sure I could locate you. I hoped to hell you hadn’t been killed or died of sickness.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I’m not threatening you, Lieutenant. Like I said, we started pretty near even. Now you’re a wife and three kids ahead of me.”

“And you want us to be even again.”

“I didn’t say that.”

They stared at each other, and Cady was still smiling. He looked entirely at ease. Sam Bowden could find no way to control the situation. “Did you poison our dog?” he demanded, and immediately regretted asking the question.

“Dog?” Cady’s eyes went round with mock surprise. “Poison your dog? Why, Lieutenant? You slander me.”

“Oh, come off it!”

“Come off what? No, I wouldn’t poison your dog any more than you’d put a plainclothes cop on my tail. You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“You did it, you filthy bastard!”

“I’ve got to be careful. I can’t take any punches at you, Lieutenant. I’d get sent up for assault. Want a cigar? They’re good ones.”

Sam turned helplessly away. Nancy had stopped working. She was standing looking intently toward them, her eyes narrowed, and she was biting her underlip.

“There’s a real stacked kid, Lieutenant. Almost as juicy as your wife.”

Sam turned back blindly and swung. Cady dropped his beer can and caught the punch deftly in the palm of his right hand.

“You get one sucker punch in a lifetime, Lieutenant. You’ve had yours.”

“Get out of here!”

Cady had stood up. He put the cigar in the corner of his mouth and spoke around it. “Sure. Maybe after a while you’ll get the whole picture, Lieutenant.” He walked toward the shed, moving lightly and easily. He grinned back at Sam, then waved his cigar at Nancy and said, “See you around, beautiful.”

Nancy came over to Sam. “Is that him? Is it? Daddy! You’re shaking!”

Sam, ignoring her, followed Cady around the shed. Cady got behind the wheel of an old gray Chevy. He beamed at Sam and Nancy and drove out.

“He
is
the one, isn’t he? He’s horrible! The way he looked at me made me feel all crawly, like worms do.”

“That’s Cady,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly husky.

“Why did he come
here
?”

“To put a little more pressure on. God knows how he found out we’d be here. I’m glad your mother and the boys weren’t here.”

They walked back to the boat. He glanced down at her as she walked beside him. Her face was solemn, thoughtful. This was not a problem that would affect only him and Carol. The children were within the orbit.

Nancy looked up at him. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is he going to do?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Daddy, do you remember a long time ago when I was little and the nightmares I had after we went to the circus?”

“I remember. What was the name of that ape? Gargantua.”

“That’s right. The place where they had him had glass walls and you held me by the hand and he turned and he looked right at me. Not at any of the other people. Right at me. And I felt like something inside me curled up and died. It was something savage that didn’t have any right to be in the same world I was in. Do you know what I mean?”

“Of course.”

“That man is a little bit like that. I mean I got a little bit of the same impression. Miss Boyce would say I was being unrealistic.”

“And who is Miss Boyce? I’ve heard that name.”

“Oh, she’s our English teacher. She’s been telling us that good fiction is good because it has character development in it that shows that nobody is completely good and nobody is completely evil. And in bad fiction the heroes are a hundred per cent heroic and the villains are a hundred per cent bad. But I think that man is all bad.”

Never before, he thought, have we been able to talk on an equivalent, adult level without a mutual shyness. “I suppose I could understand him, if I wanted to. He was in a dirty, brutal business, and he was a combat-fatigue case, and he went right from that into life imprisonment at hard labor. And that is a brutalizing environment. I suppose he couldn’t think of it as a reward for services rendered. So there had to be somebody to blame. And he couldn’t blame himself. I became the symbol. He doesn’t see me. He doesn’t
see Sam Bowden, lawyer, home owner, family type. He sees the lieutenant, the young J.A.G. full of puritanical righteousness who ruined his life. And I wish I could be one of your hundred per cent heroes about it. I wish I didn’t have a mind full of reservations and rationalizations.”

“In our psychology class Mr. Proctor told us that all mental illness is a condition where the individual can’t make a rational interpretation of reality. I had to memorize that. So if Mr. Cady can’t be rational …”

“I believe he’s mentally sick.”

“Then shouldn’t he be treated?”

“The law in this state is designed to protect people from being wrongly committed. A close relative can sign commitment papers which will put a person away for a period of observation, usually sixty days. Or, if a person commits an act of violence or, in public, acts in an irrational manner, he can be committed on the basis of the testimony of the law officers who witness the violence or irrationality. There’s no other way.”

She turned and ran her fingers along the sanded side of the hull. “So there isn’t much to do.”

“I would appreciate it if you’d break your date tonight. I’m not ordering you to. You would probably be safe, but we wouldn’t know if you were safe.”

She thought it over, frowning. “I’ll stay home.”

“I guess we can break out the paint.”

“All right. Are you going to tell Mother about this?”

“Yes. She has the right to know everything that happens.”

Tommy Kent appeared a few minutes before Carol and the boys came back. He was a rangy, good-looking boy, polite,
amusing and just deferential enough. He was given a brush. He and Nancy painted in the same area of the hull, each objecting to the other’s sloppy work. Sam was glad to see how she handled him. No melting looks. No tinges of adoration. She was brusque with him, fencing with him with pert confidence and the sure-footedness of self-respect, quietly aware of her own attractiveness. Sam was surprised that her young weapons were so professionally edged and were wielded with such an air of long practice. She treated him like a slightly incompetent elder brother, which was, of course, precisely the correct tactics with a school wheel like Tommy Kent. Sam, giving them sidelong glances from his painting position near the bow, could detect only one flaw in her utter naturalness. She took no pose or attitude that was in any way ungainly or awkward. She was as careful as if she were dancing. He heard her break the date. She was just sufficiently apologetic to avoid being rude. And just vague enough to awaken suspicion and jealousy. Sam saw the black scowl on Tommy’s face when Nancy turned away from him, and thought, Young man, she just sank the hook. She’s keeping the rod tip up, and she’s got the drag set perfectly. And when the time comes, she’s going to be just as expert with the net, and you will flap in the bottom of the boat, eyes rolling and gill covers trembling. Pike Foster never had a chance, and now she’s ready for bigger game.

After Carol arrived and made Nancy take time off for her sandwich and tea, and the four young ones were busily painting, Sam bought two beers and took Carol down to one of Jake’s sagging docks and sat beside her, feet dangling just above the water. There he told her about Max Cady.

“Here!” she said, her eyes wide and round. “Right here?”

“Right here, watching Nancy, when I got back. And when I looked at Nancy I seemed to see her the way he was seeing her and she’d never looked more undressed, even in that bikini thing you let her wear only when we’re on the island without guests.”

She closed her fingers on his wrist with hysterical strength and shut her eyes tightly and said, “It makes me feel ill. Oh, God, Sam! What are we going to do about it? Did you talk to him? Did you find out about Marilyn?”

“I talked to him. Right at the end I lost my temper. I tried to hit him. I was tremendously effectual. I tried to hit him while he was sitting down. I could have tossed a tennis ball at him. Underhand. His damn forearms are as big as my thighs, and he’s as quick as a weasel.”

“How about Marilyn?”

“He denied it. But he denied it in a way that was the same as telling me he did it.”

“What else did he say? Did he make threats?”

For a moment Sam was tempted to keep the story of Cady’s wife to himself. But he plodded through it, trying to do an unemotional job of straight reporting, looking down at the green bay water. Carol did not interrupt. When he looked at her it was as though she had suddenly, tragically become an older woman. At thirty-seven he had taken great pride in her agelessness, at the way she could look a consistent thirty and, at special times, a gay and miraculous twenty-five. Now, with shoulders slumped, and face all bones and gauntness, he saw for the first time how she would look when she became very old.

“It’s hideous!” she said.

“I know.”

“That poor woman. And what a slimy way to threaten us. By indirection. Did Nancy find out who he was?”

“She didn’t notice him until toward the end. When she saw us talking, she guessed. When I threw my ridiculous punch, she knew. After he drove away we talked. She made good sense. I think I’m very proud of her. She willingly broke tonight’s date.”

“I’m glad. Isn’t Tommy nice?”

“Quite nice, but don’t start talking as if she’s eighteen. He’s better material than Pike. And she seems to be able to handle him well. I don’t know where she learned.”

“It isn’t something you learn.”

“I guess she inherited it from you, honey. There I was, minding my own business, looking around for a place to sit in that cafeteria and …” He was trying to be light, but he knew it was falling flat. Her head was bent and he saw the tears clinging to her black lashes. He put his hand on her arm.

“It will be all right,” he said. She shook her head violently. “Drink your beer, baby. Look. It’s Saturday. The sun is shining. There’s the whole brood. We’ll make out. They can’t lick the Bowdens.”

Her voice was muffled. “You go back and help. I’ll stay here a little while.”

After he picked up his brush he looked back. She looked small out on the dock. Small, humbled and dreadfully afraid.

HE HAD MET CAROL
on a Friday noon in late April of 1942 at the Horn and Hardart Cafeteria near the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. He was in his final year of law school. She was in her senior year in the undergraduate school.

Seeing no seats on the ground floor, he had carried his tray up the stairs. It was almost as crowded upstairs. He looked across the room and saw an exceptionally pretty girl alone at a wall table for two. She seemed to be reading a textbook. Had it happened a year earlier he would never have gone over and balanced the tray on the corner of the table and said, “Do you mind?” He was not particularly shy, but at the same time he had always been awkward about approaching a girl he did not know. But it was 1942 and there was a new and reckless flavor in the world. Standards were changing quickly. He had been hitting the books hard, and
it was April and there was the smell of spring, and this was a very pretty girl indeed.

“Do you mind?”

She gave him a quick, cool glance and looked back down at her book. “Go ahead.”

He unloaded his tray and sat and began to eat. She had finished her lunch and was eating cheesecake, taking very small morsels onto her fork, making it last. As she showed no intention of looking up, he felt perfectly safe in staring at her. She was good to stare at. Long black lashes and good brow and high cheekbones. Curiously harsh black hair. She wore a green nubby suit and a yellow blouse with meager ruffles at the throat. He thought forlornly of some of his more extroverted friends, and how blandly and confidently they could open a conversation. Soon she would finish her cheesecake and coffee and be gone, perhaps with another cold little glance. And he could sit alone and think of what he should have said.

Suddenly he recognized the text she was reading. He had used it when he was an undergraduate. Durfey’s
Abnormal Psychology
. After several mute rehearsals, he said with the greatest possible casualness, “That course gave me a bad time.”

She glanced over at him, as though surprised to find someone at the table. “Did it.” She looked back at her book. It was not a question. It was an end to all conversation.

He floundered on, saying, “I … I objected to the vagueness of the field. They use labels, but they don’t seem to be able to measure … things.”

She closed the book slowly, keeping her finger in it at her place. She stared at him and at his plate. He wished he had
ordered something with more dignity than franks and beans.

“Don’t you know the rules?” she asked frigidly.

“What rules?”

“The unwritten rules. You are not supposed to try to strike up a conversation with the coeds at this great university. We are drab, shabby, myopic little things you men students call bookbags. We’re all beneath your lordly notice. If a dear fraternity brother makes the social error of bringing a bookbag to a fraternity function, he is looked on with loathing. So suppose you whiz on out to Bryn Mawr and try your luck out there.”

He felt his face turn sweaty red. She had opened her text again. His awkwardness turned slowly to anger. “All right. So I spoke to you. If you don’t want to talk, say so. But being pretty doesn’t give you any special right to be rude. I didn’t establish the unwritten rules. I don’t date the coeds here because it so happens that I’m engaged to a girl in New York.”