The waitress returned with the order. Charlotte put her fork into the omelet; it was light and very fluffy, like fine foam. She pushed it away.
Easter hadn’t even noticed the indeterminate-looking chops that had been placed in front of him. He said, “The next picture is a close-up of Violet’s left hand—the right, as I told you before, was missing; it may have been eaten by a shark or amputated by the propeller of a big boat. Since it was obviously a postmortem injury we didn’t bother trying to fix the cause.”
Violet’s fist was clenched, and a long thread of sea-grass was caught between her second and third fingers. She still wore her wedding-ring.
“When we opened the fist,” Easter added, “we found a small pellet of tar from the underwater oil wells, and also deep indentations made by her finger nails on the palm of her hand. A drowning person clutches at anything. In the next picture…”
“Please. I don’t think I want to see any more pictures right now.”
“Sorry.” He put the photographs back in the briefcase. “I didn’t mean to spoil your lunch. We won’t talk about Violet until later.” He smiled, that oddly warm and unexpected smile that always surprised her, made her feel friendly when she was on the point of antagonism. “It’s funny, the only thing we’ve ever talked to each other about is death. I don’t know whether you go to the movies or what kind of books you like, or whether you clean your teeth before or after breakfast, or how you like your eggs fried.”
“Our relationship isn’t a personal one.”
“Perhaps not. But I think it is.” He hesitated, his fork in mid-air. “Well,
do
you go to movies?”
“When I have the time.”
“Would you go with me?”
“I don’t know,” she said, honestly. “I don’t really know.”
“Why not?”
“I feel that I shouldn’t.”
He broke open a roll and buttered it. He had immense hands that moved with precision. “I see. You’re being true to Ballard.”
“Bal…?” Her mouth opened, closed again. A pulse beat in her temple, fast and hard. “How did you—find out?”
“My Gestapo works night and day. Besides, you should be more careful to destroy his letters.”
“Letters?”
He took an envelope out of his coat pocket and flung it on the table with a gesture of contempt or of anger. “This was in the brown lizard purse last night. I removed it before anyone else had a chance to see it. Accept it with my compliments.”
It was the letter—the only letter—that Lewis had written to her while he was fishing in the Sierras. She had kept it in her purse to reread when she felt lonely, not thinking that the purse would be stolen, and that the letter had been written on Lewis’ office stationery.
Easter began to quote, word for word, his tone suddenly soft and venomous: “Charley dearest, what a rotten time I’m having without you. Everything is bleak and empty…”
She tore the letter into pieces. “Do you always read other people’s mail?”
“When I nave a reason.”
“You’re a fraud and a cheat.”
“I don’t think so,” he said simply. “I’m human, and I guess I’m suffering from a very common human frailty—jealousy.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “It’s a sucker’s racket, Charlotte—playing around with another woman’s husband.”
“It’s my business, not yours.”
“I’d like to know how Ballard did it. I might pick up a few pointers.”
“Pointers?”
“Oh how he got you to fall for him so hard, I meant I’d like to do the same thing.”
“You’re insulting…”
“I don’t intend to be. I admire you. You’re a strong woman. It would take a lot of strength to live with you. I have it. You’d never lean on me, but I don’t have to be leaned on to feel superior. I feel superior anyway.”
“And you always will,” she said bitterly. “Your ego will take care of that nicely.”
He looked grave. “It wouldn’t be very smart to latch onto someone without an ego. He’d make too many demands on yours.”
“I won’t—I won’t discuss the—the matter.”
“Very well. Just let it creep into your subconscious now and then. That’s good enough for the present.” The waitress came with the coffee. Easter changed the subject, his voice and glance impersonal again, as if he had the ability to turn her on and off in his mind like a faucet. “There was a wallet found in your purse too—no money left in it, of course. That accounts for the wine-party in the kitchen. Four glasses, four merrymakers; we can presume they were Voss and his wife and O’Gorman and the old man Tidolliani.”
“Voss and Tiddles hated each other.”
We have a great mutual hate
, Tiddles had told her the night they first met.
“My guess is” Easter continued, “that Tidolliani was snooping and they found him snooping and decided to play it friendly, over three bottles of wine. They got the old man drunk, probably, but they got themselves drunk, too and the argument began about the purse. I think we can assume that Tidolliani found it where Voss or O’Gorman had hidden it, perhaps in the rubbish pile… I went to see Mrs. Voss early this morning.”
“So did I.”
“Is she putting on an act?”
“No,” Charlotte said. “She doesn’t remember anything about last night. She’s disoriented to some degree. She has an idea that she’s going to have her tonsils out and that Voss is coming to see her any minute.” She sipped her coffee, thinking of Mrs. Voss lying in the hospital bed, looking quite relaxed and contented, but with that strange vagueness in her eyes: Voss hadn’t deserted her, no, quite the opposite.
She
had deserted
him,
had come to the hospital like a real lady to have her tonsils removed, and Voss would come to see her during visiting hours. “I got bad tonsils,” she’d told the nurse.
Charlotte said, “Why did Voss want to steal my purse? I live way out on Mountain Drive, there must have been a hundred purses more readily available than mine.”
“They weren’t after your purse,” Easter said, but he refused to give his reasons for the statement.
Charlotte persisted. “It had something to do with Violet?”
“Yes.”
“But you think Violet killed herself, she wasn’t murdered?”
“That’s what the evidence says,” Easter replied with a shrug. “In addition to the external evidence I’ve given you, there were internal signs, too—foam in the windpipe and the bronchial tubes, water in the stomach, the lungs and the duodenum, water containing algae and other minute particles of sea life. Lungs distended, heart dilated on one side.”
“All that,” Charlotte said quietly, “isn’t evidence that she committed suicide. It’s only evidence that she died in the water.”
“You’re hard to convince.”
“Perhaps.”
“The final point is circumstantial evidence only—the fact that she was despondent over her pregnancy. She didn’t want the child.” He saw the question in her eyes. “It was a boy.”
A boy. She thought of the inexplicable craftsmanship that had gone into the making of that dead boy—the delicate precision of the cells, the network of nerves and veins, the interplay of glands, the gradual growth, just so much and no more, all marvelously balanced and molded from one tiny ovum and one infinitesimal spermatozoon.
Easter’s question came, as unexpected as a blow. “Who was the man involved with Violet?”
“I don’t know. How could I know?”
“She could have told you something.”
“Only that he was married, that he was away when she called him but that someone told her he was returning that night. She intended to see him.”
“Some day,” Easter said grimly, “I intend to see him myself.”
“If you find him.” (The father of Violet’s baby, she thought. The most important figure in the case, because without him there would have been no case—yet the most shadowy figure, unknown and unreal; perhaps even quite innocent of the train of events to which he had given the initial push.)
She repeated her thoughts aloud, but Easter said, “Innocence is no more of an excuse than stupidity or ignorance.”
“I see. You don’t make excuses for people?”
“Sometimes. But to excuse, to explain, isn’t enough. You don’t correct a neurosis by eliminating it, you have to offer an acceptable substitute. The positive approach: here’s a gumdrop, junior, now stay out of the ant paste.”
She raised her brows. “I didn’t realize you were a philosopher.”
“Philosophy is for poets,” he said curtly. “I deal with people, dead or otherwise.” He pushed his coffee cup aside and the muddy liquid splashed over the side like a wave breaking over a sea-wall. “I think the real reason you don’t want to believe that Violet killed herself is that it would leave a scar on your conscience.”
“That’s what a conscience is made of, scar tissue,” Charlotte said. Little strips and pieces of remorse sewn together year by year until they formed a distinctive pattern, a design for living.
“If Violet was murdered it was by someone she trusted—not Voss, who had no reason, not O’Gorman, whom she feared. O’Gorman had reasons to kill her, but fists are his weapons—there’s nothing fancy or subtle about Eddie. No. The person who might have murdered Violet would have to be someone she liked or trusted well enough to accompany out to the pier near the point where her purse was found. Someone like you, for instance.”
“She didn’t like or trust me. And you surely can’t be serious about suspecting that I…”
“I’m curious. I’m curious about the card she was carrying in her purse with your name and address typed on it.”
“All I can tell you is that I didn’t give it to her.”
“Some day,” he said, “I’ll find out who did. It might be interesting.” A fly circled the table, came to rest on his knuckles. He didn’t brush it off. He watched it explore the hill of one knuckle and walk gingerly into the valley between his fingers. “Have you ever walked out on the pier late at night?”
“Sometimes.”
“I went down there last Friday after midnight looking for a fisherman who’d stabbed a man in a bar. I didn’t find him. I didn’t find anyone, in fact. There wasn’t a soul on the pier and every boat was dark. But it was noisy. The sea was noisy and the wind was noisy and there was a loose piling that kept rubbing against the planks at every wave and shrieking like a gull. A good place for a murder. A push, a drop of fifteen feet into the water, perhaps a scream. But, as I said, there are natural noises out there. They might cover the scream as the night would cover the murderer.” He had been sitting, tense, on the edge of the seat as he described the pier. He leaned back now, visibly relaxing. “Well, that’s what could have happened. And probably didn’t.”
The fly had discovered the coffee cup and was walking cautiously around the rim like an explorer at the edge of a crater.
“As for the old man,” Easter said, “there’s no question of murder.”
“No
question?
”
“His death was natural. No signs of any blows or wounds. He died of an acute peptic ulcer that eroded through a blood vessel and caused a fatal hemorrhage. The argument he had with Voss and O’Gorman probably precipitated the hemorrhage but there’s no way of proving that. Voss and O’Gorman are technically innocent as lambs.”
She looked incredulous. “You mean you’re not even going to try and find them?”
“Oh, there’s a warrant out for their arrest, certainly. But not in connection with Violet’s death, or the old man’s. We can’t prove anything there; we can’t prove any charge of attempted extortion; we can’t even prove they locked Mrs. Voss up in the attic. All we have on them is suspicion of armed robbery in connection with the purse they stole from you. Sad, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no justice. Go on, say it.”
“There’s no justice,” she repeated. “But there should be.”
“Certainly there should be,” he said ironically. “There ought to be a law. Say that one, too—there ought to be a law.”
“Well, there ought to be!” She spoke in such a loud, angry voice that the man in the next booth turned to stare at her, half anxious, half hopeful, as if he’d like to witness a good quarrel, providing it didn’t get too rough.
“Looking for someone?” Easter asked.
“Me?” The man coughed. “Well, no. Not at all.”
His head disappeared like a turtle’s.
“Nice girls don’t raise their voices in public,” Easter said. “Or tangle with blackmailers. Of course, there’s always the possibility that you’re not a nice girl, that my eyes have been bedazzled. They are, you know. Absolutely bedazzled. It’s the damnedest thing. Are you interested?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t have to blush if you’re not interested.”
“If I’m blushing, it’s because I’m embarrassed by your impudence.”
He smiled. “Blushing or unblushing, you look fine… Where was I? Oh yes, at my bedazzlement. Well, that covers everything, actually. There you have it.”
“What am I expected to say?”
“Oh, you don’t have to say anything. Just blush now and then. It encourages me.”
“You’re—you’re insufferable.”
“Only at first glance,” Easter said, patiently. “Second and third glances reveal my sterling, less obvious qualities.”
“I don’t care to see them.”
“You will, though. I’ll be around.”
She looked at her watch, attempting to appear cool and indifferent. “I have to get back to my office.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t bother driving me. I can walk.” She got up. “Thank you for the lunch.”
“I hope there’ll be others.”
“That’s unlikely.”
“Other autopsies, other lunches,” Easter said. “By the way, there’s one thing I forgot to mention.” “What is it?”
“Any time you and Ballard need a chaperon, give me a call.”
At five o’clock Miss Schiller started making preparations to go home. Ever since lunch, when she’d read in the newspaper about Violet’s death, she had been talking continually to a succession of patients, enlarging now and then on the truth: “There she stood in the doorway, looking so
alive,
you know what I mean? Yet I knew, I
knew
by her eyes that something was up.”… “It’s a blot on the city, but then of course she wasn’t a
native.
She came from a little town in Oregon, it says in the paper.”
A rich, a full, a satisfying afternoon, marred only by an occasional black look from Charlotte and the fact that some patients selfishly preferred to discuss their own symptoms.