Highsmith, Patricia (27 page)

“He probably had a key to fit.”. Carol yanked the thing loose from the table and dropped it on the carpet, a little black box with a trail of wire. “Look at it, like a rat,” she said. “A portrait of Harge.” Her face had flushed suddenly.

“Where does it go to?”

“To some room where it’s recorded. Probably across the hall. Bless these fancy wall to wall carpets!”

Carol kicked the dictaphone toward the center of the room.

Therese looked at the little rectangular box, and thought of it drinking up their words last night. “I wonder how long it’s been there?”

“How long do you think he could have been here without your seeing him?”

“Yesterday at the worst.” But even as she said it, she knew she could be wrong. She couldn’t have seen every face in the hotel.

And Carol was shaking her head. “Would it take him nearly two weeks to trace us from Salt Lake City to here? No, he just decided to have dinner with us tonight.” Carol turned from the bookshelf with a glass of brandy in her hand. The flush had left her face. Now she even smiled a little at Therese. “Clumsy fellow, isn’t he?” She sat down on the bed, swung a pillow behind her and leaned back. “Well, we’ve been here just about long enough, haven’t we?”

“When do you want to go?”

“Maybe tomorrow. We’ll get ourselves packed in the morning and take off after lunch. What do you think?”

Later, they went down to the car and took a drive, westward into the darkness. We shall not go farther west, Therese thought. She could not stamp out the panic that danced in the very core of her, that she felt due to something gone before, something that had happened long ago, not now, not this. She was uneasy, but Carol was not. Carol was not merely pretending coolness, she really was not afraid. Carol said, what could he do, after all, but she simply didn’t want to be spied upon.

“One other thing,” Carol said. “Try and find out what kind of car he’s in.”

That night, talking over the road map about their route tomorrow, talking as matter-of-factly as a couple of strangers, Therese thought surely tonight would not be like last night. But when they kissed good night in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials, which put together inevitably created desire.

THERESE COULD NOT find out what kind of car he had, because the cars were locked in separate garages, and though she had a view of the garages from the sunroom, she did not see him come out that morning. Neither did they see him at lunchtime.

Mrs. French insisted that they come into her room for a cordial, when she heard they were leaving. “You must have a stirrup cup,” Mrs. French said to Carol. “Why I haven’t even got your address yet!”

Therese remembered that they had promised to exchange flower bulbs. She remembered a long conversation in the car one day about bulbs that had cemented their friendship. Carol was incredibly patient to the last. One would never have guessed, seeing Carol sitting on Mrs. French’s sofa with the little glass Mrs. French kept filling, that she was in a hurry to get away. Mrs. French kissed them both on the cheek when they said good-by.

From Denver, they took a highway northward toward Wyoming. They stopped for coffee at the kind of place they always liked, an ordinary restaurant with a counter and a juke box. They put nickels into the juke box, but it was not the same as before. Therese knew it would not be the same for the rest of the trip, though Carol talked of going to Washington even yet, and perhaps up into Canada. Therese could feel that Carol’s goal was New York.

They spent the first night in a tourist camp that was built like a circle of tepees. While they were undressing, Carol looked up at the ceiling where the tepee poles came to a point, and said boredly, “The trouble some idiots go to,” and for some reason it struck Therese as hysterically funny. She laughed until Carol got tired of it and threatened to make her drink a tumbler of brandy, if she didn’t stop. And Therese was still smiling, standing by the window with a brandy in her hand, waiting for Carol to come out of the shower, when she saw a car drive up beside the large office tepee and stop. After a moment, the man who had gone into the office came out and looked around in the dark area within the circle of tepees, and it was his prowling step that arrested her attention. She was suddenly sure without seeing his face or even his figure very clearly that he was the detective.

“Carol!” she called.

Carol pushed the shower curtain aside and glanced at her and stopped drying herself. “Is it—”

“I don’t know, but I think so,” she said, and saw the anger spread slowly over Carol’s face and stiffen it, and it shocked Therese to sobriety, as if she had just realized an insult, to herself or to Carol.

“Chr-rist!” Carol said, and flung the towel at the floor. She drew on her robe and tied the belt of it. “Well—what’s he doing?”

“I think he’s stopping here.” Therese stood back at the edge of the window. “His car’s still in front of the office, anyway. If we turn out the light, I’ll be able to see a lot better.”

Carol groaned. “Oh, don’t. I couldn’t. It bores me,” she said with the utmost boredom and disgust.

And Therese smiled, twistedly, and checked another insane impulse to laugh, because Carol would have been furious if she had laughed. Then she saw the car roll under the garage door of a tepee across the circle.

“Yes, he’s stopping here. It’s a black two-door sedan.”

Carol sat down on the bed with a sigh. She smiled at Therese, a quick smile of fatigue and boredom, of resignation and helplessness and anger.

“Take your shower. And then get dressed again.”

“But I don’t know if it’s him at all.”

“That’s just the hell of it, darling.”

Therese took a shower and lay down in her clothes beside Carol. Carol had turned out the light. She was smoking cigarettes in the dark, and said nothing to her until finally she touched her arm and said, “Let’s go.” It was three thirty when they drove out of the tourist camp. They had paid their bill in advance. There was no light anywhere, and unless the detective was watching them with his light out, no one had observed them.

“What do you want to do, sleep again somewhere?” Carol asked her.

“No. Do you?”

“No. Let’s see how much distance we can make.” She pressed the pedal to the floor. The road was clear and smooth as far as the headlights swept.

As dawn was breaking, a highway patrolman stopped them for speeding, and Carol had to pay a twenty-two dollar fine in a town called Central City, Nebraska. They lost thirty miles by having to follow the patrolman back to the little town, but Carol went through with it without a word, unlike herself, unlike the time she had argued and cajoled the patrolman out of an arrest for speeding, and a New Jersey speed cop at that.

“Irritating,” Carol said when they got back into the car, and that was all she said, for hours.

Therese offered to drive, but Carol said she wanted to. And the flat Nebraska prairie spread out before them, yellow with wheat stubble, brown-splotched with bare earth and stone, deceptively warm looking in the white winter sun. Because they went a little slower now, Therese had a panicky sensation of not moving at all, as if the earth drifted under them and they stood still. She watched the road behind them for another patrol car, for the detective’s car, and for the nameless, shapeless thing she felt pursuing them from Colorado Springs. She watched the land and the sky for the meaningless events that her mind insisted on attaching significance to, the buzzard that banked slowly in the sky, the direction of a tangle of weeds that bounced over a rutted field before the wind, and whether a chimney had smoke or not. Around eight o’clock, an irresistible sleepiness weighted her eyelids and clouded her head, so she felt scarcely any surprise when she saw a car behind them like the car she watched for, a two-door sedan of dark color.

“There’s a car like that behind us,” she said. “It’s got a yellow license plate.”

Carol said nothing for a minute, but she glanced in the mirror and blew her breath out through pursed lips. “I doubt it. If it is, he’s a better man than I thought.” She was slowing down. “If I let him pass, do you think you can recognize him?”

“Yes.” Couldn’t she recognize the blurriest glimpse of him by now?

Carol slowed almost to a stop and took the road map and laid it across the wheel and looked at it. The other car approached, and it was him inside, and went by.

“Yes,” Therese said. The man hadn’t glanced at her.

Carol pressed the gas pedal down. “You’re sure, are you?”

“Positive.” Therese watched the speedometer go up to sixty-five and over.

“What are you going to do?”

“Speak to him.”

Carol slacked her speed as they closed the distance. They drew alongside of the detective’s car, and he turned to look at them, the wide straight mouth unchanging, the eyes like round gray dots, expressionless as the mouth. Carol waved her hand downward. The man’s car slowed.

“Roll your window down,” Carol said to Therese.

The detective’s car pulled over into the sandy shoulder of the road and stopped.

Carol stopped her car with its rear wheels on the highway, and spoke across Therese. “Do you like our company or what?” she asked.

The man got out of his car and closed his door. Some three yards of ground separated the cars, and the detective crossed half of it and stood. His dead little eyes had darkish rims around their gray irises, like a doll’s blank and steady eyes. He was not young. His face looked worn by the weathers he had driven it through, and the shadow of his beard deepened the bent creases on either side of his mouth.

“I’m doing my job, Mrs. Aird,” he said.

“That’s pretty obvious. It’s nasty work, isn’t it?”

The detective tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail and lighted it in the gusty wind with a slowness that suggested a stage performance. “At least it’s nearly over.”

“Then why don’t you leave us alone,” Carol said, her voice as tense as the arm that supported her on the steering wheel…

“Because I have orders to follow you on this trip. But if you’re going back to New York, I won’t have to any more. I advise you to go back, Mrs. Aird. Are you going back now?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Because I’ve got some information—information that I’d say was in your interest to go back and take care of.”

“Thanks,” Carol said cynically. “Thanks so much for telling me. It’s not in my plans to go back just yet. But I can give you my itinerary, so you can leave us alone and catch up on your sleep.”

The detective looked at her with a false and meaningless smile, not like a person at all, but like a machine wound up and set on a course. “I think you’ll go back to New York. I’m giving you sound advice. Your child is at stake. I suppose you know that, don’t you?”

“My child is my property!”

A crease twitched in his cheek. “A human being is not property, Mrs. Aird.”

Carol raised her voice. “Are you going to tag along the rest of the way?”

“Are you going back to New York?”

“No.”

“I think you will,” the detective said, and he turned away slowly toward his car.

Carol stepped on the starter. She reached for Therese’s hand and squeezed it for a moment in reassurance, and then the car shot forward. Therese sat up with her elbows on her knees and her hands pressed to her forehead, yielding to a shame and shock she had never known before, that she had repressed before the detective.

“Carol!”

Carol was crying, silently. Therese looked at the downward curve of her lips that was not like Carol at all, but rather like a small girl’s twisted grimace of crying. She stared incredulously at the tear that rolled over Carol’s cheekbone.

“Get me a cigarette,” Carol said.

When Therese handed it to her, lighted, she had wiped the tear away, and it was over. Carol drove for a minute, slowly, smoking the cigarette.

“Crawl in the back and get the gun,” Carol said.

Therese did not move for a moment.

Carol glanced at her. “Will you?”

Therese slid agilely in her slacks over the back seat, and dragged the navy-blue suitcase onto the seat. She opened the clasps and got out the sweater with the gun.

“Just hand it to me,” Carol said calmly. “I want it in the side pocket.”

She reached her hand over her shoulder, and Therese put the white handle of the gun into it, and crawled back into the front seat.

The detective was still following them, half a mile behind them, back of the horse and farm wagon that had turned into the highway from a dirt road. Carol held Therese’s hand and drove with her left hand. Therese looked down at the faintly freckled fingers that dug their strong cool tips into her palm.

“I’m going to talk to him again,” Carol said, and pressed the gas pedal down steadily. “If you want to get out, I’ll put you off at the next gas station or something and come back for you.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” Therese said. Carol was going to demand the detective’s records, and Therese had a vision of Carol hurt, of his pulling a gun with an expert’s oily speed and firing it before Carol could even pull the trigger. But those things didn’t happen, wouldn’t happen, she thought, and she set her teeth. She kneaded Carol’s hand in her fingers.

“All right. And don’t worry. I just want to talk to him.” She swung the car suddenly into a smaller road off the highway to the left. The road went up between sloping fields, and turned and went through woods. Carol drove fast, though the road was bad. “He’s coming on, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

There was one farmhouse set in the rolling hills, and then nothing but scrubby, rocky land and the road that kept disappearing around the curves before them. Where the road clung to a sloping hill, Carol went round a curve and stopped the car carelessly, half in the road.

She reached for the side pocket and pulled the gun, out. She opened something on it, and Therese saw the bullets inside. Then Carol looked through the windshield, and let her hands with the gun fall in her lap.

“I’d better not, better not,” she said quickly, and dropped the gun back in the side pocket. Then she pulled the car up, and straightened it by the side of the hill. “Stay in the car,” she said to Therese, and got out.