This Sweet Sickness (17 page)

David ignored it and looked up at a corner of the room, put his head back against the sofa, and listened to the piano on the phonograph.

Then Effie said, “Wes!” in a teary voice, and David saw her press her hands together in a ludicrous despair, as if the evening and her two guests had slipped out of her control. And Wes was stumbling toward David, smiling slyly and pointing at him.

“Isn't that true, Davy boy?” Wes asked.

“Be careful, Wes. Leave Dave alone,” Effie said.

“I didn't even hear what he said,” David told her calmly.

“I said you don't want a girl you can have, you want a girl who doesn't want you. It's a neurotic symptom,” Wes said cheerfully, rocking on his heels with his hands in his pockets. “I'm thinking of your welfare. I'm trying to give you some good advice. I don't care
who
she is.”

“Dave, I haven't been talking to him about this. Honestly. Don't let it—” Effie made a jump to protect a glass on the coffee table, but Wes knocked it over, anyway—his own, and empty.

David looked at him placidly. “Since you don't know what you're talking about, I'd appreciate it if—”

But Wes didn't stop. The boring, half-jocular advice went on and on.
That girl
. No name mentioned. That girl who was finishing college or something. And did it drive him so crazy he had to spend his weekends drunk maybe? Or maybe with another girl? David took a cigarette, then threw it down on the coffee table unlighted. He kept his composure, but the words fell on his shoulders, the top of his lowered head, and seemed to cling to him. Even Effie was begging Wes to stop.

“You don't understand,” David said into his hands, and heard Wes laugh.

“Effie's been telling me,” Wes said explanatorily, “that she feels sorry for you. She thinks it's hopeless.”

“I didn't say exactly
hopeless
,” Effie bleated.

David had stood up. “Sorry for me?” he asked with a smile.

“You did say it,” Wes said to Effie, “so why deny it?”

David lit the cigarette now. Easy to see why Effie called it hopeless. Hopelessly in love perhaps he was, and that was why he'd never been able to look twice at Effie. “I'm going to marry the girl and that's that,” David said, interrupting Wes. “It's embarrassing to have one's private life discussed, but since you brought it up—”

“I didn't mean to embarrass you, Dave. I'm interested. Eff and I are both interested, because we like you. And Effie more than likes you.” He gave David a light, friendly pat on the shoulder.

“I don't want the girl I intend to marry to be discussed by anyone. I hope someday you'll meet her, but it'll be under my roof, our roof. We're going to be married in a very few months, maybe less than that, and anybody who says anything different just doesn't know what he's talking about.” David crushed the cigarette out quickly in an ashtray. His heartbeats shook his chest and even jarred his vision. “There never has been any doubt in my mind that I'd marry her,” he went on, though he did not even want to go on. He took a step toward Wes, who retreated a little. And now it was David who went on and on, talking over Wes's attempts to put an end to it, Wes's apologies, as if Wes's slight figure in the brown suit were an obstacle between himself and Annabelle that had to be crushed and swept away by words. Then he saw his own arm go out in a swing at Wes, and Wes ducked and stepped back, though David's fist had been at least a foot short of hitting him, and it hadn't been David's intention to hit him. His words suddenly stopped.

Wes's baffled, angry face weaved a little and turned away. Effie clung to David's arm, saying something to him, and David wanted to tell her that her concern wasn't at all necessary, but he felt in the grip of something, unable to move or speak, and his body was rigid and trembling.

“Just don't say anything else about her to me, ever,” David said, his voice shaking with fury. He reached for his glass, finished it, and looked back at Wes's scowling face.

“Boys, boys,” Effie murmured with a try at a smile. “I think I'll put on some coffee.” She went into the kitchen.

David kept looking at Wes, somehow expecting retaliation from him, either in words or in action.

“Well, how's anybody supposed to feel who's just been swung at?” Wes said resentfully.

David gave a little smile. “Let's have some coffee.”

But the resentment did not leave Wes's face. “I'll tell you one thing,” he said in a lower tone, “if you ever got that girl, you wouldn't be able to do anything with her. You're in such a state—You don't know it, pal, but you're all in knots.”

David couldn't believe his ears for a moment, then when it dawned on him what Wes meant, it was like an electric charge hitting him. “You dirty liar!” David said between his teeth. He walked past Wes to the front closet, not even hearing Effie's words behind him, only their high-pitched whine that was like a razor scoring the surface of his brain. “Good night and thanks, Effie,” he said quickly, plunging his arms into his overcoat, opening the door for himself.

The bang of its closing behind him was a sound of delicious finality. The unjustness, the stupidity of it! The vulgarity! The falseness!

“Take your watch, Dave!” Wes's voice called down the stairs.

David made the front door boom, too.

22

D
avid's anger stayed with him for days. It generated heat and energy, spoiled his sleep, and as he tossed in his bed, he tried to reason his anger away, went over Wes's words until they were drained of their emotional effect and became even meaningless, yet the core of his anger remained. He put his energy into arranging his things in his new house, and worked all night the second night. Yet the conversation of that evening kept going through his mind. Effie had said he was lucky. David could not see anything lucky about David Kelsey. Maybe William Neumeister was lucky. Effie was worried because they were still looking for William Neumeister, but William Neumeister's luck was not going to run out in a hurry. Effie's words acted on him as a challenge. He felt like calling up the Beck's Brook police and giving them a full account of Neumeister's doings since he had apparently disappeared. Oregon, the state of Washington, Texas, California—there was no telling where Neumeister's far-flung journalistic activities had taken him. David began to smile, and impulsively he reached for the telephone. But he had hardly picked it up, when he realized that the Beck's Brook police would most likely want to see him.

Very calmly, David changed into the Oxford gray suit he had worn as William Neumeister that memorable Sunday afternoon. He had not the cuff links with the
N
on them, because he had thrown them away when he was packing at the other house, but he had the same hat, and he even remembered the tie he had worn, but he chose another. He removed his driver's license from his billfold, just in case they would ask for that for identification, and he racked his brain for a way of identifying himself as Neumeister. He had destroyed every Neumeister bill and receipt. He'd have to bluster his way through it, he thought. This interview would either allay all suspicion or it would be the finish, and he was in the mood now, and the mood might not come again. No use waiting until tomorrow or the next day to get hold of some card or other to sign with Neumeister's name.

He would bluster through. And he would not forget to slump a little.

Beck's Brook was approximately ninety miles south, and he arrived at four-fifteen on Sunday afternoon. There was only one man, whom David had never seen before, in the station, and David had to introduce himself with considerable explanation. A good sign. The man picked up a telephone and called Sergeant Terry. David hoped the sergeant was unavailable, but he was at home.

“He'll be over. He wants to see you,” said the officer.

David thanked him and sat down. A certain arrogance that he had felt since he had decided on this expedition rose in him more strongly now, and he struggled to put it down. He must appear somewhat solemn, even slightly depressed, and above all cooperative.

The sergeant arrived after David had been waiting perhaps fifteen minutes. “Well, Mr. Newmester. I'm glad to see
you
again,” he said as he approached David with slow, heavy strides.

David stood up. “How do you do, sergeant?” he said pleasantly. “I was in the neighborhood and I remembered I'd never called Mrs.—the woman in Hartford. I don't have her address. Delaney, isn't it? But I've forgotten the first name.”

“Gerald,” said the sergeant. “Where've you been?”

“I've just made a trip to California and back,” David replied. “Why?”

“Well, Mrs. Delaney wanted to talk to you. We were doing our best to find you.”

“Oh. I didn't realize that. What's the trouble?”

“No trouble. Just that Mrs. Delaney wanted to talk to you. She wanted to see you and ask you just what happened that day,” the sergeant said somewhat reproachfully. “I don't know what papers you work for, but they're not in the state of New York.”

“Well, a couple are,” David said with a slight smile. “I supply science editors with material for their articles. Not very often I have anything under my own name in the papers.”

“I see,” said the sergeant, his doubt, or annoyance, still apparent. “Well, Mrs. Delaney would like to see you.” He moved behind the desk, at which the other man sat watching them both over his newspaper, and pulled out a drawer. From a folder he took a sheet of paper and copied something from it on a slip of paper. He handed the slip to David.

“Thank you,” David said. It was Annabelle's address and telephone number.

“Where you living now, Mr. Newmester?”

“I'm not settled anywhere just now. I'll be in New York for a while, and I expect to go abroad in a month or so,” David replied, remembering what he had said to Mr. Willis about traveling.

“Yes, so your rental agent said. You know, we couldn't even find the two people you gave Willis as references. Patterson and—What was the other?”

“John Atherley,” David said promptly, confident suddenly that the name was Atherley and not Asherley. “Have you tried South America?” he asked with a reckless inspiration.

“No,” the sergeant replied, straightfaced.

“I had a letter from John a couple of months ago. They're both in Cali, Colombia, doing organizational work for a mining concern. They're industrial consultants.”

“Oh.”

“But what's the trouble? Why did you want to reach them?”

“Thought they could help us find
you
.”

“Gosh—if I'd known you were going to all that trouble—There wasn't anything in the newspapers, was there? I'm a pretty thorough reader of the papers.”

“Oh, no, we didn't put anything in the papers,” the sergeant said, shaking his gray head slowly, still looking dubiously at David. “We thought your references might know where you were, and when we couldn't find them, we began to think something was fishy.”

David smiled, and looked surprised. “Sergeant, I'm sorry you had such difficulties. It's my fault, I suppose, for not contacting Mrs. Delaney as soon as that other officer mentioned it—that day I was packing. To be honest with you, I wasn't looking forward to it, and I put it off and then it went out of my head. I thought she'd be hysterical or even blame me for it. Does she?” he asked anxiously.

“I don't think so,” the sergeant said. “She's a pretty level-headed woman. She just wants a firsthand account of what happened.”

“She'll get it,” David said with resignation. He watched the sergeant move toward the telephone on the desk. If the man was going to ask him to talk to her now, David thought, he would claim an urgent engagement elsewhere.

But the sergeant turned and said, “Is this why you moved out of your house so soon? This Delaney story?”

“No,” David said. “I admit it upset me a little. Maybe it did make me move sooner than I'd intended, but I'd been planning a couple of years' work that would keep me traveling, and that's the reason I got rid of the house.”

The sergeant nodded, and stared at him. “Would you like to talk to Mrs. Delaney now?”

David gave a little shrug and was about to say he might as well talk to her in person, but the sergeant had already picked up the telephone. The folder with Annabelle's telephone number was still open on the desk, and the sergeant read it to the operator. In the interim of waiting for the telephone to be answered, David said as casually as he could, “Or you might set a time when I could come to see her. I'm pretty free tomorrow and Tuesday.”

The sergeant did not answer. He frowned attentively as if he were listening to something. The moments passed. Was she not at home? Or had the Hartford operator even begun to ring? Sergeant Terry was patient. David slumped, his tense shoulders aching, and turned a little, just as Sergeant Terry said, “I see. Thank you, operator.” He hung up. “She's not in,” he said.

“I'll call her tomorrow,” David said with a sigh. “I'm sure I can manage to see her.”

“Do that. And by the way, Mr. Newmester, give us one place—one specific place you can be reached or where there's somebody who knows where you can be reached. Just in case this slips your mind again.”

David smiled a little. “I'm really not as invisible as you think, sergeant. Tonight I expect to be at the Hotel Wellington in New York, Fifty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue. And—at the
Times
office in New York, there's a Mr. Jason McLain who knows where I am ninety percent of the time. Want to write that down?”

Sergeant Terry wrote it down. “Mr. Newmester, we have nothing against you and we don't
want
to have anything against you, but we're going to find out if you contact Mrs. Delaney, and if you don't—Well, that's all we want from you and all
she
wants from you.”

“I understand,” David said, making an effort to hide a surge of resentment. After all, it was almost over. The sergeant was walking with him to the door. David waited for the sergeant to say good-bye first.

“I'll call Mrs. Delaney early tomorrow and tell her you came in,” said Sergeant Terry. “Good-bye, Mr. Newmester.”

“Good-bye, sergeant,” David replied with a wave of his hand.

And when he drove away, he turned in the direction of New York, even though the sergeant might not have been watching. It occurred to him now that it would be wise to trade in his car for one of a different make and color, in case Sergeant Terry had noticed it when he came in, and in case David Kelsey had any more dealings with the Beck's Brook police. But having to trade in his car was a small nuisance compared to the achievements of the day, he thought. Sergeant Terry had seemed a little suspicious, no doubt of that, but it was nothing serious, or he would have been questioned a lot more thoroughly and perhaps held at the station. He would write to Annabelle in lieu of seeing her, and he felt sure that the letter he would write would satisfy her. Annabelle, alas, wanted to hear about
Gerald
, not necessarily see Neumeister in the flesh. He had imagined going home to write the letter, but that made no sense, if he would have to go to New York to mail it. He continued in the direction of New York. He could borrow a typewriter at a hotel, he thought, the Wellington Hotel, where he would register as William Neumeister, and he hoped the Beck's Brook police would call him there to check on his whereabouts. If they didn't, perhaps he would call them. David began to whistle. Annabelle might get his letter Monday, if her mail came in the afternoon, but most likely she would get it Tuesday. If the police got upset because he didn't speak to her Monday, he would say he hadn't been able to fit Hartford into his schedule on Monday, and that he had written her an explicit letter.

He arrived in New York at midnight, put his car in a garage off Eighth Avenue, and walked to the Hotel Wellington. No luggage, he told them, he would be here just overnight. He asked if he could rent or borrow a typewriter for an hour or so. When they brought one up to his room, he sat down at once, while still as much in the mood as he would ever be, to write the letter to Annabelle, which would be only half deceitful after all, he thought. Without pausing, he wrote two full pages on the hotel's stationery, leaving in fact little room for Neumeister's backhanded signature. Then he took some stamps from his billfold, marked the letter airmail, and dropped it down the chute in the hall.

Then he was suddenly tired. He blotted his perspiring forehead with a handkerchief. Lies, he thought. He had been lying steadily since four o'clock that afternoon, and he had done it with surprising ease. Standing in the middle of his room, he felt a little faint. It was as if he beheld for the first time a criminal side of himself that he had not known existed. Nonsense, he thought, and began to undress. It had all been necessary; if he hadn't lied, Annabelle or the police would have lied in accusing him of murdering Gerald, and wasn't his the lesser of the evils? He felt faint only because he had forgotten to eat any dinner. But now he had no desire to play any more with the Beck's Brook police. Annabelle would probably tell them the letter had been written on Hotel Wellington stationery, and that was good enough. He fell into bed.

The next morning, Monday, he breakfasted in the hotel, paid his bill, and checked out. He bought a few phonograph records, and in the early afternoon saw an Italian movie. He considered looking at cars in Manhattan, but the thought bored him, and he decided he could risk getting one in Troy. He started for home. Tuesday morning in Troy, he chose a light blue Dodge convertible, two years old and a year younger than his black two-door Chrysler. The car would be delivered next Monday. Annabelle, he thought, might like light blue, though he really didn't know. The rest of Tuesday he spent on the house, and that evening, when he thought the house seventy-five percent presentable, he telephoned Annabelle.

A man answered, and David asked to speak to her.

“Who's calling?”

“David Kelsey.”

A moment passed, and then Annabelle's voice said, “Hello, Dave,” warmly and happily, as if she were glad he had called.

“Hello, darling. I called to—to give you my new phone number.” The presence of the man in her apartment threw him off. “Got a pencil?”

“Yes, in just a minute. Dave, I heard from Mr. Neumeister today.”

“You did?” For an instant, it had actually taken him by surprise. “You saw him?” he asked more carefully.

“I had a letter. A very nice letter. I'll let you see it. He sounds like a very nice person and—well, I feel so much better, I can't tell you.”

“What did he say?”

“He just told me what really happened. In detail. That's all I wanted to know. Mr. Neumeister's in New York now. He's just back from a trip to California.”

“Oh. Did you learn anything new?”

“Of course. Well, maybe I didn't, but I was glad to hear it from him. He was at the Beck's Brook police station Sunday. He hadn't even known we were trying to find him.”

“I told you you should've had something put in the newspapers and you might've heard from him sooner.” David stopped, his easy flow of words shut off. “Can you get a pencil?” he asked. When she got one, he gave her his number and address and the address of Dickson-Rand. The man with her was murmuring something, rudely, while she was trying to write, but David could not hear what he said. “I was wondering when you might be free to visit me. I've got the rest of this week free and next weekend, too. I could drive over tomorrow and pick you up.”