The Cry of the Owl (17 page)

“No,” Robert said.

“Your wife said it was a possibility. Wyncoop—”

“My former wife,” Robert said.

“Yes. Sorry. She said Wyncoop wanted to know how you met Miss Thierolf, who told him through a friend of hers, and Wyncoop found out it wasn’t so.”

Robert swung around to the sand pot and flicked his ashes into it. “You can thank my wife a lot for her kind words. And for keeping out of my life and all the rest of it.”

“What’re you upset about?” Lippenholtz asked.

McGregor was finding enough to write about to keep on.

“I’m not upset, but I don’t like what you’re trying to imply. And what’s my former wife got to do with any of it?”

“She knows you, Mr. Forester, and naturally we want to find out all we can about you,” Lippenholtz said gently.

But they weren’t simply investigating, they were quizzing him with a slant, one he knew Nickie had put them onto. She wouldn’t hesitate to use the word “homicidal.” The seconds dragged on while the two men stared at him. “Are you looking in any hotels for Wyncoop?” Robert asked. “Under another name, of course.”

“Oh, yes,” said Lippenholtz. “You’ve been under treatment for mental disorder, haven’t you?”

That was Nickie again. Just as Robert started to answer, one of the draftsmen, Robert didn’t know his name, entered from the outside door, and they all glanced at him. Robert waited until he had walked out the other door into the drafting room. “I went to an analyst for a while when I was nineteen,” Robert said. “I went on my own. I wasn’t locked up anywhere. I went again about two years ago—no, a year ago. To a psychotherapist. For six weeks. I’ll give you their names if you like.”

Lippenholtz only looked at him. “Your wife told us a story about your pointing a gun at her. She said you fired it and missed.”

Robert took a deep breath, and then the first words of the sentence he had been going to say dissolved in his mind. “It’s true—true that I pointed a gun at her. An unloaded gun. The time I fired it was—I fired it into the fireplace on a different occasion. When my wife challenged me to.”

“Challenged you to?” asked Lippenholtz.

“I think she said I hadn’t the courage to fire it, or something like that.”

“A hunting rifle,” said Lippenholtz.

“Yes,” Robert said.

“You don’t fire hunting rifles? You don’t go hunting?”

“No.” Robert supposed Lippenholtz and McGregor did. “It was my wife’s gun. She goes hunting sometimes.”

“Isn’t it dangerous to have a loaded rifle in the house?”

“Yes. My wife loaded it. She has the permit, not I.”

Lippenholtz put one hand on the wall by the elevator and leaned on it, one foot crossed and propped on the toe. “That’s not the way we heard the story from your former wife, Mr. Forester.”

Robert found himself staring at a hole in Lippenholtz’s thin, dark-blue sock just above the heel. He blinked and looked at Lippenholtz. “As I told you, I can’t help what my wife says.”

“Miss Thierolf seems to know the story, too. She said you told her the gun was loaded, but that you didn’t fire it. What’re we supposed to believe, Mr. Forester?”

“The truth is the way I just said it.”

“What way?” asked Lippenholtz with an amused air.

“The gun wasn’t loaded when I pointed it at my wife.”

“Who’s lying? Miss Thierolf or your wife? Or both? Or you?” Lippenholtz laughed, three soft doglike yelps.

“I told Jenny Thierolf it was loaded,” Robert said. “Naturally she told you it was loaded. My wife knows very well it wasn’t.”

“Why did you tell Miss Thierolf it was loaded?” asked Lippenholtz, still smiling.

“I don’t know. It makes a better story.”

“Does it?”

“My former wife seems to think so, too.”

“Why did you tell Miss Thierolf the story in the first place?”

It was like a bog. “I don’t know.”

“It’s all pretty unclear,” said Lippenholtz, shaking his head as if Robert couldn’t be more suspect, whatever else came out about his past, and that they had him, whenever they cared to reach out and take him. “O.K., Mac?” Lippenholtz said to McGregor, who was still writing.

“Yep,” said McGregor.

“We’d like you to stay in town this weekend, Mr. Forester,” Lippenholtz said as he shoved himself from the wall. “So I hope
you weren’t planning to go away. Something may turn up this weekend.”

“I hope it does,” Robert said.

McGregor rang for the elevator.

“That’s all for now. Thank you very much, Mr. Forester.” With a nod, a little smile, a vestige of politeness, Lippenholtz turned away.

“You’re welcome,” Robert said.

Robert went back into the drafting room, started for his table, then veered away toward the men’s room in the far corner. For several minutes, the chaos of his thoughts resulted in nothing. Then Nickie entered his mind like a tangible image of danger. She’d do all she could against him, that was certain, and no use asking the old question why. Just count on it, he told himself. An angry impulse to call her left him as soon as it came. He wouldn’t be able to get a word in. Nickie would laugh at his concern, his anxiety, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep them out of his voice. He could write her, but he didn’t want anything on paper, even if nothing on the paper incriminated him or implied that he took what she told the police seriously. The mere fact of a letter would imply he took it seriously.

He realized he was worried because he had begun to believe Greg’s body could be found in the river, that it might wash up tomorrow in somebody’s back yard, and who would believe that he hadn’t knocked him in on purpose, or at least done nothing about saving him when he fell in? Robert rubbed cold water across his eyes, trying to erase the expression he saw in the mirror. He looked at his watch. An hour and a half before he could call Jenny at five at her house. He supposed Philadelphia was out tomorrow, because that was leaving town. He had no heart for looking for houses, anyway.

The rest of the afternoon his hand shook. Wasn’t it typical that Nickie interested herself so much in the little scandal he was in in Langley that she had taken the trouble to pass on to the police the fact that Greg didn’t know how she and Jenny had met, and that Greg thought he was the prowler who’d been making noises around the house? That she’d taken the trouble to say he’d been twice to head shrinkers, and probably said or implied that he’d been taken away to them in a strait jacket? Wasn’t it typical that she’d told them about the hunting rifle, with her own embellishments? Nickie had told so many of their friends about it, Robert knew she had finally come to believe it had happened the way she told it, that he had been in a rage at the time, that the gun had been loaded, that she had struggled and barely succeeded in pushing the barrel of the gun aside. Robert had noticed that she hadn’t told it to people who knew him quite well, or who liked him a little better than they did her, such as the Campbells. What had actually happened, with no one else present to hear—Nickie had one night told him he was too much of a psychopath to fire a gun unless he was killing a human, which accounted for his distaste for hunting. Then she had loaded the gun and stuck it in his hands and asked him if he had the courage to shoot her. Angry himself, Robert had taken the gun, pointed it into the fireplace, and fired—to get rid of the damned bullet, to make a loud noise that would be followed by at least a few seconds of blessed silence? He didn’t know why he had fired it, but he had. And no one had come knocking on the door from any other apartment in the building, nothing had happened at all, except that Nickie had been provided with a new fragment of a story. Nickie had found the mark the bullet had made in the back of the fireplace, and she
liked to point it out to people. Robert remembered Ralph’s stiff figure bending over to look at the mark on the brick, on perhaps the second occasion Robert had seen him, before Nickie’s intentions with him were quite clear. “You fired it?” Ralph had asked. “Yes,” Robert said. “Into the fireplace. Do you think I’d fire a gun at my wife?” Nickie had been out of the room then. Was it funny or was it merely tedious? It was both, Robert thought. He had never known what Ralph really believed, and he had never cared. Should he start caring now, he wondered?

It came to him suddenly: Greg was with Nickie. She’d hide him, or help him to hide. She’d be pleased to. Robert’s pencil stopped, and he stared at the glaring white paper in front of him. And what about Ralph? Would he put up with it? Of course, it depended on what Nickie told Ralph, and she could make up a good story, but even Ralph could read a newspaper. Or was he such a weakling he wouldn’t put up any opposition? Robert didn’t know much about Ralph Jurgen, but he thought he was a weakling. And of course he was in that first fine glow with Nickie. Best to assume he’d put up with anything Nickie wanted.

At five
P.M
., just before he left the plant, Robert went into one of the telephone booths at the end of the main corridor and called Jenny at her house. She sounded a bit constrained.

“Are you by yourself?” Robert asked.

“Oh, yes. Susie’s coming over later, but I’m alone now.”

“Is anything the matter? Have you heard anything?”

“No. Why?”

“You sounded a little strange. The police talked to me today, the same two. They said they’d talked to you.”

“Yes,” Jenny said.

“What’s the matter, Jenny? Can’t you talk to me?”

“Nothing’s the matter. Why do you keep asking that?”

Robert rubbed a hand across his frowning brows. “They said they asked you how we’d met. I wondered what you told them.”

“I told them it was none of their business.”

“Oh. It’s too bad we didn’t agree to say we’d met at a drugstore counter over a soda, something like that. Anything—”

“I don’t think it’s their business,” Jenny said stubbornly.

“Well, it seems they’re hammering the prowling story now. Greg spoke to Nickie about it. What she said didn’t help. I—” He decided not to tell Jenny his suspicion that Nickie might be helping to hide Greg, or that he wanted to go to New York to see Nickie.

“Well—I denied that,” Jenny said finally, slowly.

“Jenny, you sound so low. I’m damned sorry about this mess.”

“Robert, I love you so,” Jenny breathed into the telephone with a sound like a sob.

She made it seem they were being wrenched apart by the cruel force of the law. It was not what he wanted to hear. “How did you say we’d met? Did you say anything?”

“I said it was an irrelevant question.”

“Oh. Jenny, I can’t go to Philly tomorrow because the police want me to stay in town this weekend.”

“All right,” she said with resignation. “Robert—you still think he’s alive?”

“Yes. I certainly do.”

Robert drove to New York on Sunday evening. He had thought of putting it off until Monday evening, Sunday still being part of the weekend, but the telephone call from Greg’s landlady at noon on Sunday had thrown him into a rage. He hadn’t mentioned Mrs. Van Vleet’s call when Jenny phoned him at three Sunday afternoon. Jenny was a little hurt because he hadn’t wanted to see her Sunday. She had invited him to come for brunch, and she had asked him Saturday noon, when they met in Rittersville for a snack in a diner near the garage where Robert was having his car greased. It had been an unsatisfactory meeting. Jenny had kept looking at him as if he were miles away, lost to her somehow, as perhaps he was, from her point of view. They hadn’t found much to talk to each other about, and Robert had wanted nothing but to get back to his house, where he could be alone, where news, good or bad, might come at any minute at the door or over the telephone. Or simply disagreeable voices, like that of Mrs. Van Vleet. She had called him up to give him a piece of her
mind, Robert supposed, and what surprised him more than anything was that she could be so voluble, so sure of herself, while addressing someone she considered a murderer. Weren’t people supposed to be afraid of murderers? If she really believed him a murderer, wouldn’t she be afraid he might get angry and come after her, too? She had asked if Robert was still working at Langley Aeronautics, and when he said yes, she had said, “It’s a wonder to me you’ve still got a job. It’s a wonder to me you can hold your head up in the community, it is indeed. … A fine young man like Greg … trifling with his girl … a fine young girl. I hear you don’t even want to marry her. I should hope not! You’re a killer—or the next thing to it!” And Robert had stood there answering, “Yes … No,” politely, trying to smile at it and failing, failing to get more than four consecutive words out before he was interrupted. What was the use? But he knew it took only a noisy minority like Mrs. Van Vleet in a community to hang a man, literally or figuratively.

Robert drove fast over the Pulaski Skyway toward the Lincoln Tunnel. After all, he remembered, the Tessers’ two calls had been friendly and very comforting. On the second one, Dick had been a bit tight and had said, “I believe you left him sitting on the bank, but if he got up and fell in, that’s about what he asked for. Isn’t it?”

Robert stopped at a drugstore on Ninth Avenue and called his and Nickie’s old number. She kept a listing in her maiden name, Veronica Grace, and in the year-old directory before him, the number was their old one. To his surprise, Nickie answered on the first ring.

“Well, well! I wonder what brings you here. … Yes, darling, but we’re not through dinner yet. Can you give us maybe forty-five minutes? … Nine-thirty, that’ll be fine for us.”

Robert walked slowly back to his car, wondering if he should call the Campbells or Vic McBain in the half hour he had to kill. Edna Campbell had written him last week, saying they would like to see him and could put him up if he came to New York, and saying they hoped the trouble he was in in Langley would soon be over, and what really had happened? Robert had not answered her letter as yet. He decided not to call anyone before he saw Nickie.

She had given him an address on East Eighty-second Street. Robert drove slowly, deliberately hitting red lights, put his car in an underground parking garage on Third Avenue, and walked the three or four blocks to Nickie’s building. It was a five-story town house, with a marble foyer to which he was admitted by a release button. He climbed the stairs, though there was a small self-operating elevator. The Jurgens were on the third floor.