Murder in the Wind (10 page)

He had a gift for the savage phrase. He could use words that hurt her. But out of her strength and her understanding she forgave him. His apologies were abject. Their lovemaking was as cyclical as his moods. There would be weeks when it would seem that he could not have enough of her. Then would come the coolness and he would withdraw physically to the point where, should she touch him inadvertently, she could feel the contraction of his muscles. And that hurt as badly as did the words.

David always had very good friends, very dear and close friends who would adore him for two months or three before, out of some compulsion, he would drive them off. No friend remained loyal very long.

In spite of their private difficulties, they maintained a united front. He never spoke harshly to her when there was anyone around to hear him. She was grateful for that, as she knew her pride was very strong. She loved him with all her heart. She wanted his life to be wonderful. She did everything she could to make him happy.

It all began to go wrong right after the first of the year. He slipped, day by day, further into a mood of depression. Yet this depression was not like the others. The others had been like the black clouds of brief violent storms. This was like a series of endless gray days, unmarked by any threat of violence. It seemed to her to be more apathy than depression. He went through his days like an automatic device devised to simulate a man. There seemed to be no restlessness in him—just a dulled acceptance. Though he had always been very fastidious, he began to shave and dress carelessly, and keep himself not quite clean. She tried in all the ways she could think of to stir him out of it. She changed scenes, set stages, planned little plots, but none of them worked. When, in unguarded moments, she would wonder if he was getting tired of her, fright would pinch her heart.

One day, out of desperation, she set a scene so crude that in prior years it would have been unthinkable. While he was at the agency she went into the small study where he had used to work during the evening. She found and laid out the incomplete manuscript of the book. She laid out fresh paper and carbon and second sheets in the way he had liked to have them before he had given up work on the book.

That evening she had taken his wrist and smiled at him and tugged and said, “Come on.”

He came along without protest. She turned on the desk lamp and showed him what she had done. He stood and looked at the desk and then he turned and looked at her with an absolute emptiness in his eyes. An emptiness that shocked her. “God, Ginny!” he said tonelessly. “Good God, what are you trying to do to me?”

“I thought that if you…”

But he had walked out of the room. He walked out of the apartment. By the time she got her coat on and got down to the street, he was gone. He came back within an hour and he was back down in the grayness of apathy, unreachable, untouchable. She apologized for what she had done. He shrugged and said it didn’t matter.

In June there was one day of gaiety. One day when he was like himself. Yet not like himself. There was an ersatz quality to his gaiety, as though it were the result of enormous effort—even as though this were a stranger, a quick study, who tried expertly to become David Sherrel. That was the day they ordered the car and planned a vacation trip. By the time the car was delivered he had no interest in it and she could not get him to talk about the trip again. She felt unused, wasted. The empty days and the empty nights went by and she smothered her resentment and refused to admit to herself that she was thoroughly, miserably bored.

On an evening in late July he was quiet at dinner—it had been months since they had been out together or had anyone in—and finally, as though saving something he had memorized, he said, “I know that I’ve been a mess lately, Ginny. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong. I feel as if, somewhere, I’ve lost all motivation. I want to try to get it back.”

“I want to help you.”

“I don’t want help. I talked to Lusker this morning. They’re giving me a six months’ leave of absence without pay. Lusker suggested psychiatry. I don’t think that’s the answer. I want to get away for a while.”

“I think it’s a wonderful idea, darling. We could go back up to…”

“I don’t think you understand. I have to get away by myself. I don’t know why. But that’s what I have to do.”

She looked at him and her face felt stiff, tight, as though covered with a fine porcelain glaze. “You have to do that?”

“Yes.”

All the angry words were close to the surface. She suppressed them. She stood up slowly and began to clear the table.

“It’s all right, then?” he asked.

“It looks as though it will have to be, David.”

He left two days later. She packed for him. She kissed him and told him to write. She went down to the car with him. He stood and looked at her and he looked shy and lost and she thought it was like sending a child to camp, or to war. He opened his lips as though to say something, then turned abruptly and got into the car. It was a Sunday morning in Manhattan. The streets were empty. She stood and watched the blue and white car turn the corner. She went back upstairs. She prepared carefully for tears. She put on a robe, stretched out on her bed with a big box of Kleenex at hand. She lay and waited for the tears. They did not come. She thought of the sweet little things and the sad little things, and tried, through pathos, to force tears. But they did not come. She realized she was trying to pump up tears the way some women seek out sad movies. She got up quickly and on that day she gave the apartment the most thorough cleaning it had ever had.

He sent a card from Augusta and one from Jacksonville and a third and final card from Sarasota saying that he would stay there for a time and let her know should he move on. There was an address she could write to. She wrote often, not knowing if he even bothered to read her letters.

Now the marriage was quite over. It had ended.

She lay on the still hot beach, joined plastic cups over her eyes, feeling the sun grind into her body. And she tried to understand.

There were two things that had happened to her, long before David, that seemed to point out the direction of understanding.

One had happened to her in high school, during the first week of a course in Natural History. She could not remember the name of the instructor. He had been a small wide balding man with a sharp penetrating voice and a sarcastic manner. He had a projector and a box of slides. The room was darkened. He put the slides in the projector. They were pictures of prehistoric animals and lizards and birds, cleverly faked.

In essence he said, “These creatures no longer exist. They died out. Their own development brought them to a dead end. They had some fatal flaw which finally made it impossible for them to survive in a changing environment. They could not adapt. It is an oversimplification to call them nature’s mistakes. They were just dead ends in nature’s endless experimentation.”

And so it could be possible to say that David had within himself the flaw which made survival impossible. The flaw did not have to be isolated and described. It could be enough to know that it was there.

The second incident had happened when, in college, she had a date with a young instructor, a man named Val Jerrenson. As he was not supposed to date students, they had to be secretive about it. It had been a warm Saturday in May and they had gone down to an amusement park on the shore. They had been standing talking near a shooting gallery, and Virginia, looking over Val’s shoulder, saw the head of Val’s department walking toward them, frowning slightly.

Virginia had put her hand out quickly and Val had taken it instinctively. Raising her voice a little she had said, “Well, I have to run along, Mr. Jerrenson. Nice to run into you like this. I’ll have to catch up with the other girls.” She then looked directly at the head of the department and said, “Oh, hello, Dr. Thall! I didn’t know Mr. Jerrenson was with you. I really have to run.”

When Val finally came back to the car she was sitting there waiting for him, giggling.

After they had driven far enough to be safe, Val had looked at her with an odd expression, and said, “You know, Virginia, you frighten me a little, you have such a perfect instinct for survival. Such a gift for living. You are an organism designed to function perfectly in its environment. Such strength is a little disturbing.”

So add the two together. The flawed organism. And the survival organism. Living together, making a life together. She sensed that the marriage had made her stronger, because it had called on her strength, it had demanded it. Yet she had not wished to be strong. She had wanted a man who could dominate her. In the very beginning she had thought David such a man.

Thus, if it had added to her strength, had it not also added to his weakness? Would not David have been better with a silly girl, a gay careless erratic clinging little thing? Or was the flaw too deep?

There was one thing that she learned during the long days on the beach. She learned that her love was not as great as she had thought it. It made her ashamed to realize that. Yet in all honesty, it was an admission she had to make. And it was the final act which had cut love down to a manageable stature. It had been such a childish and insulting death. It was as though, out of petulance, he had flung something at her, had struck her in the face with sticky unpleasantness. She had cared for herself, keeping herself as handsome as she could, as fresh and alive and sweet-smelling, ready and waiting for his use of her. Through marriage his use of her had been sporadic despite its intensity. His withdrawn periods seemed a denial of her. And now he had consummated the final denial.

She could feel grief, and a sense of loss, and a sense of inadequacy—yet it was not a sharpness that pierced her heart. It was more like thinking of a death that had happened long ago. David had died long ago, and he moved through the eternity of memory, blond, slim, tall, with soft sensitive mouth, dulled eyes, a look of rejection. The ashes were soft and gray in the bronze box. And ashes had no life, no history. They were always old.

She knew at last when it was time to go back. When she awakened on Tuesday morning she knew that she had spent enough time in this place. A healing process had taken place. Wounds were closing. She could go back and face friends, and dispose of his personal possessions and give up the apartment and find something to do.

She looked at herself with utmost clarity and knew that any job she could find would not be enough. She knew that she would look for a man. A strong man. A man with courage and integrity and a sure sense of his own place. She knew that, at thirty, she had never been more attractive. With this man she would find she would be able to breed true. He would not need strength to lean on. He would exude strength and that strength would make her feel like a woman, rather than a mother or a guardian. There would be children, as many as she could have. And it would not be a rebound from David. It would, instead, be an acceptance of the years lost, and a desire to do, with those that were left, what she had been meant to do from the very beginning. And the first step was to find a job which would expose her to the greatest possible number of men who might meet her qualifications.

When she left in the rain on Wednesday morning, she was more than a little amused at her careful planning, at her incredible certainty that the future would be just as she desired it.

[The woman drives cautiously through the rain that makes drum sounds on the canvas top of the blue and white convertible. When passed by the Cadillac and the Mercedes her mouth tightens a bit with disapproval of people who go too fast in this sort of weather.

She wonders if this was the same road her dead husband drove on when he came down to Florida. And she wonders how fast he drove and then feels ridiculous for feeling concern about his safety. He is beyond all such fears.

She follows a slow-moving panel delivery truck for several miles and then when for a time visibility is relatively clear ahead she passes the truck.

The cars move toward the bridge, the blocked bridge—the bridge which was actually blocked by the carelessness of a young and foolish wife in New Orleans—a wife who took from her husband a fine clear edge of alertness and coordination—and thus killed him. A wife who now sits weeping again, though she does not yet know the new and greater cause for tears. Soon her phone will ring, because it is always easier to tell them that way than face to face.]

Steve Maiden picked up a thread in St. Petersburg on Tuesday afternoon. He found the loose end of a thread that had broken in Santa Fe five years ago. Tuesday afternoon at three o’clock he solved a problem that had kept many men busy over a period of years. They had not devoted their entire attentions to it. It was not a major problem. Yet not so minor as to be classified as an annoyance. It had been talked over many times. There was one school of thought which said that after the Santa Fe cell had been broken up, Strellman had left the country. Others believed he had holed up somewhere.

Strellman was not and had never been top drawer. But he was trained and competent and, in the right situation, perfectly capable of making a great deal of trouble.

When the faint Miami lead had come in, there was the question of whether to buck it to the Miami group or whether to handle it on a special basis. Because Steve had worked on the Strellman thing before, he was called off a routine investigation in Rhode Island and he sat in on the conference. As Steve knew no one in the Miami group, it was finally decided that he should go down on his own and see if that faint lead could be worked.

It wasn’t like the old days when most of the apparatus had been penetrated, and you could get your check from the inside. Too much of the apparatus had gone underground in the last few years, with new refinements of the cell structure and an absolute minimum of communication. The faint lead had been faint indeed. A conversation overheard in Chicago. About somebody getting off a boat in Miami and being certain they had seen Strellman, older, balder, fatter, walking out of a small hotel called the Joy-a-lee on the crummy end of Miami Beach. Because of the locale it was decided that Steve had best go down as a tourist, so he had driven down in his own car with the Maryland plates, pushing it a little because the day that Strellman had been seen was already a month, maybe more, in the past.

Steve Maiden had checked into a hotel down the block from the Joy-a-lee and he took a few days to make certain that Strellman was not still there. There were four photographs of Strellman in existence, and all four had been taken with a telephoto lens aimed through a hole in the side of a panel delivery truck, but they were reasonably clear. Steve knew he would recognize the man.

As he did not know the hotel setup, or what it could be, he moved in very lightly and indirectly, which was in itself the height of deception for he did not appear to be a man with any talent for lightness or indirection. At a distance he did not look like a big man. At close range he was big with that special quality of hardness that looks invulnerable. Square hard jaw, thick neck, gray-flecked hair cropped close to the round hard skull, beard shadow under the tight skin of the face. His eyes were brown and very deeply set. He smiled readily and often, and the smile seldom reached to the eyes. Through years of deception he had the ability to project himself at any social level—from beer-soaked unemployed truck driver to gentleman sportsman—fitting gestures, habits of speech, bearing, clothing to the impersonation at hand. Sometimes he wondered if, through disuse, the actual person of Steve Maiden had ceased to exist.

At the Joy-a-lee he became, as soon as he had made friends with the day clerk, a contractor from Maryland on the trail of a runaway wife. With silent apology to the memory of his wife, he showed the clerk the picture of Dorothy that he had carried ever since her death. The clerk was sympathetic, but the picture meant nothing to her. He explained that he had a pretty good idea of who she had run away with. He said he had sent north for a picture of the guy and it would be coming in any day. A few days later he took her the picture of Strellman and explained that the picture was five years old.

The woman took the picture and turned it toward the light and frowned and said, “You know, I think I’ve seen this man. I think he’s stayed here. I really do.”

By then she was a good enough friend to go through the register, card by card. She showed the picture to some of the other employees. It was a maid who remembered it better than the others and came up with what was almost a name. “Purvey or Purvis or Peavy or something like that.”

It turned out to be Harry J. Peavis of 1212 Acacia Avenue, St. Petersburg. Steve took a long steady look at the handwriting and saw certain points of similarity with the sample he had studied. He thanked the clerk and she made him promise not to do anything rash. He drove to St. Petersburg, arriving on a Sunday. If Peavis were Strellman, and it seemed reasonable that he was, the contact would have to be made with great care. Strellman was a trained agent, unlikely to be dulled by five years of freedom, and ready to run if alarmed in any way. He would have a new set of identifications ready, and some sort of escape hatch.

At three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon Steve Maiden, from a safe vantage point, focused the newly purchased telescope on the small back yard of 1212 Acacia. Harry J. Peavis was tying cord on a tropical plant. He stood up and turned and became Strellman, his face startlingly close. Steve kept watching. He wished there were crosshairs on the object lens and a trigger under his finger. He backed away from the window, collapsed the telescope and put it back in its case. He made his phone call from a downtown hotel lobby. He phoned an unlisted Washington number and when a girl answered he asked for Mac.

“‘Yes, Steve.”

“Jackpot.”

“Good! Wonderful! Does he know?”

“I’m no amateur, Mac. I haven’t taken the chance of even checking the local background. Harry J. Peavis, 1212 Acacia Avenue. That’s all I know. Do you want a pickup?”

“Not until we know what he’s doing.”

“Want me to stay on him?”

“There’s too much chance he might know your face. I know it’s a hell of a remote chance, but even that is too much. Put our friends on watch until we can get some boys down there. Make sure they understand and don’t detail any clowns to this stakeout.”

“Right. And don’t send any clowns down, either.”

“Insubordination, Steve?”

“Damn close to it. I…I have a personal stake in this one.”

“And it’s the last of the group, isn’t it?”

“The very last one, Mac.”

“You come on back. Take your time. Take a couple of weeks in transit if you feel like it. You’ve earned it.”

After Steve hung up he visited an office building, identified himself, and explained to some sober earnest young men the importance of keeping Peavis under observation. After that was done he was free. He felt the letdown. It had been a long five years. This was the last of the group. No other man in the organization had the same personal stake in it as Maiden. His tirelessness in tracking down the others who had slipped away when Strellman did was legendary in his department. It was a special dedication understandable, but still a little frightening.

The reason for the geographical location of the cell in Santa Fe was quite obvious. These members had not been concerned with political philosophies. They were the hard core functionaries, the trained ones. The ruthless ones. They had determined the gullibility of the wife, the silly wife of a young physicist, and learned of the venality of a sergeant technician when another group, equally well trained, moved in on them. Steve Maiden had carried more than his share of the load—merely through assignment, not design. And it was his testimony that later dictated the severity of the prison terms. He almost failed to give testimony. He narrowly escaped being unable to give testimony. The package was sent to his home in Maryland. It was addressed to him. It had been mailed from New York. But it arrived a week before his birthday. And Dorothy, who had been doing some mail order shopping, must have thought it was one of the gifts she had ordered for him. So she opened it and died in the fractional part of a second that the explosive, expanding in gaseous violence, took to blow the windows out of the garden apartment.

Not only was the department unable to locate the maker and the sender, but it could never be determined how the traditional anonymity of departmental personnel had been penetrated to the extent that Maiden’s name and even his address had been made known. Even to his Maryland neighbors he was believed to be a traffic expert working for the Quartermaster General.

But, to the department and to Maiden, it was quite obvious that the violent death of Mrs. Stephen Maiden was connected with the recent successful defusing of the Santa Fe cell—successful to the extent that four had been picked up immediately, three had fled.

Of the three who fled, only Strellman bad been successful. Until now. And now the last dangling thread had been picked up. Maiden had seen the face of a fatter balder older man who had carefully tied up some tropical shrubs in the back yard of a house on a quiet street in a quiet city. And that ended it.

It had not been five years of single-minded dedication. There had not been enough to go on. And so many routine tasks had intervened. But the departmental chiefs were aware of Maiden’s personal stake, and so, during the five years, whenever it was possible to detail him to any aspect of the Santa Fe cleanup they had done so.

It was professional against professional. It was a pure form of counter-intelligence. Maiden was glad that it had nothing to do with people who claimed the fifth amendment, or who refused to sign oaths, or who had appeared on the wrong letterhead. They were the perennial amateurs, more annoying than dangerous. The professionals would swear their loyalty, lie under oath, would publicly deplore the disloyalty of the amateurs. Just as our own professionals would know better than to become public martyrs to the cause of Democracy in alien lands.

During his two years of marriage and before, Steve Maiden had known that his work was tricky, sometimes dangerous, generally monotonous, and highly essential.

He had not known it was heartless.

He realized that his previous attitude had been absurdly idealistic. He had believed certain holds were barred. Then he stood in the reeking mess of the apartment after they had taken her away. Here, in a tiny moment of time, in a partial second of current history, there had been blown to wet bits the satin and perfumed flesh of the long nights, and gone was the way she laughed and moved and shook her head and touched his cheek, and bent quickly to accept the lighter flame.