Found in the Street

Found in the Street

BOOKS BY

Patricia Highsmith

NOVELS

Strangers on a Train

The Blunderer

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Deep Water

A Game for the Living

The Cry of the Owl

This Sweet Sickness

The Two Faces of January

The Glass Cell

The Story-Teller

Those Who Walk Away

The Tremor of Forgery

Ripley Under Ground

A Dog's Ransom

Ripley's Game

Edith's Diary

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

People Who Knock on the Door

Ripley Under Water

The Price of Salt
(AS CLARE MORGAN)

SHORT STORIES

Eleven

The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder

Little Tales of Misogyny

Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

The Black House

Mermaids on the Golf Course

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

Found in the Street

Patricia Highsmith

Grove Press

New York

Copyright © 1986 by Patricia Highsmith

Cover design by Charles Rue Woods

Cover photograph © EvanTravels/
iStockphoto.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or
permissions
@
groveatlantic.com
.

Originally published in Great Britain in 1986 by William Heinemann Ltd.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8021-2529-3

eISBN 978-0-8021-8995-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Highsmith, Patricia, 1921–1995

Found in the street.

I. Title. PS3558.I366F68 1987 813´.54

87-15287

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

For Kingsley

1

The girl trotted, and leapt to a curb. She wore new sneakers, spotlessly white, black corduroy trousers, and a white T-shirt with a red apple design on its front. Dodging pedestrians, she swerved and disappeared into a shop whose window displayed lavender­colored items, scarves of shocking pink, beads, and was out within seconds, moving on, tempted by the other side of the street, but staying on the side where she was. Like a butterfly, she described a half-circle to avoid a shuffling clump of people, then hovered before another shop whose wares extended onto the sidewalk. Not this one either.

The white sneakers flitted on, the short yellow hair bobbed. She moved toward a spot of red, lingered, and entered. The West Fourth Street shoppers drifted in both directions on the sidewalk. It was nearly 6 in the afternoon of a late August day, and the air was cool and sunny. The blond girl emerged with a beige plastic bag in one hand. Her other hand shoved a small billfold into a back pocket of her corduroys. Her smile was wider on her unrouged lips, a happy smile with a hint of mischief in it.

She paused to let a car go by, heels together as she rose impatiently on her toes. A young black passed in front of her, made as if to tweak her breast, and she drew back, upperlip curling to reveal a pointed eyetooth. On again she went, lips parted for air, eyes searching for gaps to run through.

Several yards in front of her, beyond dumpy women and boys in blue jeans, she spotted a male figure with a rather side to side gait and with a dog on a leash. The girl stopped abruptly, and took the first opportunity to cross the street.

God's lifting his leg and all's right with the world, Ralph Linderman was thinking as he approached the corner where Grove Street crossed Bleecker.

It was a lovely summer day, the low sun still poured from the west through certain of the crooked Village streets, and Grove Street looked prettier than usual to Ralph. Grove Street like Barrow and Commerce Streets was neat and tidy, and Ralph appreciated that. People polished their door-knockers and kept their front steps swept. Now Morton Street, just three streets southward, was a mess, scraps of paper in the gutter, ashcans in plain view at the curb. Ralph realized that he usually saw the uglier side of things and people too, but he considered this simply realistic, even wise, because to be suspicious of certain characters, before they had a chance to get at you, could save a man from a lot of mishap. New York for the most part was a sordid town. You had only to look around you at the littered streets to realize that people weren't pulling together, kids learning early that it was all right to toss paper cups right on the sidewalk, nuts of all kinds walking around muttering to themselves, usually obscenities and curses against their fellow men. Sick people and unhappy people! Then there were the muggers, one of them grabbing your arms from behind, the other fishing for your wallet, fleet of foot they were too. That had happened to Ralph once, coming home from work at around 5 in the morning. A curse upon
them,
muggers, the scum of the earth!

Ralph sometimes wished he had pulled out of New York twenty or more years ago, after he and Irma had broken up. Or rather, after she had gone off with another man, Ralph reminded himself without rancor now. He might have gone to Cleveland, Ohio, for instance, some place maybe a little more American, more decent. Might have met the right people or person who could have teamed up with him and made something out of Ralph's ideas. Ralph had a lot of ideas for useful inventions, but not enough training in mathematics and engineering. Then he'd had that fall about fifteen, no eighteen years ago, down the elevator shaft in a garage where he had been on daytime duty as security guard. In the bright sunlight, he hadn't seen that the floor of the elevator wasn't there, had thought the black square was just shadow on the floor, and he had fallen about seventeen feet. Nothing broken, amazingly, because he'd been in a heavy sheepskin coat that winter's day, but everything in him had been shaken up. That was what he had told the doctors, he remembered, and that was the way he had felt, as if his heart had come a little loose from its moorings, his brain too, headaches for a while and all that. They treated him for shock. They couldn't find anything wrong. But Ralph had felt changed ever since. He took care of himself now, he did, and made no apologies to anyone for it. He was lucky to be alive.

The black and white dog ambled at a leisurely pace, sniffing with interest at a car's tire, at a crumpled bit of tinfoil, lifting his leg now in a perfunctory way, having emptied his bladder minutes ago. The dog was about seven, and Ralph had picked him up at the city pound, saved him from death. God was a mongrel, but he had kind eyes, and Ralph valued that.

“God! God!” he said softly, tugging at the leash, because the dog had for several seconds been riveted to what Ralph saw was some other dog's excrement in the gutter. “Come along now.”

Was this Elsie walking toward him? Ralph blinked. No. But quite a similarity from a distance, that perky walk, that head held so high, even the illusion of Elsie's smile from a distance, but Ralph saw as the young blond girl passed him that she was not smiling. Now Elsie—
there
was one who ought to steer herself in a righter direction before it was too late! An innocent and naive girl from a small town in upstate New York, and barely twenty! It certainly wasn't too late, and Elsie hadn't got herself into any trouble yet. But it was her attitude that was dangerous for her. She trusted anybody. She seemed to think drugged people and the crazily made-up prostitutes on Eighth Street and along Sixth Avenue were just as trustworthy as—ordinary people maybe, or himself! Everybody amused her, Elsie said. Well, at least she seemed to be earning her own living so far. Ralph had got acquainted with Elsie about six months ago in a coffee shop on West Fourth. Then she had disappeared for a while, and when he next saw her on the street, she said she had been working at an all-night place somewhere that served espresso and wine. Elsie took temporary jobs. Ralph never knew where she'd turn up.

God's stiff walk alerted Ralph to the fact that he was about to do his major business. “God—curb now, boy!” Ralph tugged the crouched dog until all four paws were in the gutter. Absently, Ralph observed that the dog's bowels were in order, pulled a plastic bag and a scoop out of a jacket pocket, and took up the pile. He carried the scoop with dirty end down in the bag to be washed when he got home. Just as God ambled on at a brisker rate, something in the gutter caught Ralph's eye.

A billfold lay in the gutter just two yards from where God had defecated. Ralph bent and picked it up without quite stopping, and he and the dog—whose nose touched the wallet at the same time as Ralph's hand—walked on, Ralph with his eyes straight ahead. No one was rushing up behind him to claim it. Ralph had always wanted to find a wallet, a wallet full of money and identification, possibly. This wallet was fat with contents, its leather smooth and soft, calfskin probably. Ralph let the wallet slide into a pocket of his jacket. As was his habit, he walked left at Hudson toward Barrow Street, which led to Bleecker, where he lived.

Ralph and God entered a four-storey building and climbed the stairs to Ralph's apartment at the back. There had been the usual two kids insolently bouncing a ball right across the doorway downstairs, when Ralph had come in, the usual dark-clad figure of the Italian woman who lived on the third floor, and seemed always to be doing something with a bucket or a broom outside her open apartment door, and as usual Ralph had murmured, “Evening,” to her, not caring if she replied or not, but these people did not irk Ralph now, because he had the wallet.

With his apartment door closed, Ralph removed God's leash, then his own jacket, and laid the wallet on a wooden table at his two back windows. He used this table for eating, reading, and making drawings with a long ruler, and sometimes for constructing models of things with moving wooden parts. The table was of pine wood and about five feet long, nicked with saw marks at the edges, and sleek with wear. Ralph sat down in a straight chair and opened the wallet carefully.

There were a lot of bills in it, lots of new twenties, and Ralph counted it all and arrived at the sum of two hundred and sixty­three dollars. Now the papers, the identification. Ralph discovered that the wallet apparently belonged to John Mayes Sutherland, who seemed to have at least three addresses, one of them a town in Pennsylvania that Ralph had never heard of, another in California, one on Grove Street, surely where he lived now, Ralph thought, and perhaps near where he had lost the wallet. One card with a signature of Sutherland had a photograph of a young man in a turtle-neck sweater stapled to it, and was an admission card to a French film festival as a journalist. The card was a year out of date, but it had Sutherland's date of birth, from which Ralph saw that Sutherland would be thirty this year. There were four plastic credit cards, and in a flapped pocket Ralph found three snapshots, two of a young woman with long straight blondish hair, the third of the same girl with Sutherland. In the picture with the girl, Sutherland had a happy smile, and he looked younger than in the journalist photo.

Ralph was not interested in examining every scrap of paper in the wallet, and there were many, cards, scribbled addresses and phone numbers. He was wondering if Sutherland was in the telephone directory? If he were home now? Ralph found himself smiling as he reached for his telephone book.

There were several Sutherlands, but Ralph found what he wanted, J. M. on Grove Street.

Now? Ralph hesitated, then decided to savor his pleasure, his victory over dishonesty, a few minutes more. He could even write Sutherland a note. Today was Wednesday. Prolong his pleasure until Friday. No, that was overdoing it.

Ralph spread the telephone directory on the table and pulled the telephone toward him.

“Aou-u!—
Woof
!
” said God sharply, dark eyes fixed on Ralph, ready to lead the way to the fridge.

“All—right, you first, God,” said Ralph, and put the telephone back in its cradle. Ralph was not on duty tonight until 10 p.m., so there was time to try to get in touch with Sutherland.