Murder in a Hurry (15 page)

“Don't try,” Pam said. “Of course. And don't go unless you want to.”

But Liza had gone. She had walked uptown, crossed through Madison Square, where the benches were filled with people sitting in the sun, collected mail at the desk of her apartment hotel, carried it up to her rooms and then, after riffling through it, tossed it aside unread. She threw open the single window of the living room and leaned out of it, looking down at the strangely distorted people so far below, moving so oddly, seeming to consist so primarily of outflung legs. She got out her drawing pad, then, and went over the sketches, now and then changing a line, deepening or lightening a shadow. But she got no feeling out of the sketches; they might have been by someone else, and after a few minutes she put the drawing pad aside. She showered again, after a time, and changed to a print dress and after that she merely waited for the telephone to ring. She waited a long time, and each new minute was more difficult to endure than the one just lived through.

It was after four when the telephone finally rang, when she finally heard Brian's “Liza?” and said, “Yes, Brian.”

“I've got to talk to you,” he said. “Shall I come around there?”

“Of course,” she said, but then she looked around the apartment. It had grown, during the two hours and more she had been waiting in it, intolerably cramped. “Some place else,” she said.

“My place, then?” Brian said and then, oddly, hesitated. “That is,” he said, “if you're not—not afraid of me, Liza?”

“Oh, Brian!” she said. “Brian! How awful!”

Then he would meet her there, he told her. Now he was in a telephone booth. He would get there about the time she did, say in twenty minutes? She agreed, replaced the telephone, refreshed lipstick and powder, leaning forward to peer into a mirror over the bedroom chest, indignant, as always, at the lack of light. She carried a light coat over her arm and found a cab quickly and something inside her kept saying over and over, “I'm going to see Brian. I'm going to see Brian, and I'm not afraid.” For the moment, that was enough. She could make herself believe it.

Brian Halder lived near Gramercy Park, in an old building converted into “studio” apartments. The “apartment” was almost entirely one room, but the room was large. Liza had been in the apartment only once and then briefly. “Want to see where I live?” Brian had asked, oddly diffident, when they were on their way somewhere and had a few minutes too much time. But they had stayed only a moment or two; he had been careful not to touch her, not even to stand close to her; his awareness of her and the awkwardness which went with it, had communicated itself to her, so that the time had had a strange quality, at once disturbing and exciting. Why, she thought now, as she hesitated before she pressed the bell at Brian's door, it must have been then that we both knew how we felt.

This memory, a sudden nostalgia for those moments (only ten days in the past, two weeks at most) filled her mind and she felt, for an instant, a kind of resentment that things could not be as they were then and, feeling that, realized how far she still was from recapturing the assurance about herself and Brian she had so briefly, as time went, attained. Now that she was here, she did not want to go into Brian's apartment; even shrank from going in. Yet, she told herself, she was not afraid. It was not so simple as that. Finally, she pressed the bell button.

Brian opened the door almost immediately; he must have been very close to it, almost with his hands on the knob. He opened the door and stood, unsmiling; looking down at her, his eyes searching her face.

“You came,” he said. “After all.”

“I said I would,” Liza told him. But that he seemed to brush aside; that was unimportant.

“I thought you'd be afraid,” he said. He continued to search her face.

“No,” she said. “I'm not afraid.”

But then, only then, she knew that what she said was not entirely true—was not yet true.

“You are a little,” Brian said. He spoke slowly, as if, even while he uttered the words, he fought against their truth. “
Liza.
”

She made herself smile up into his set face, then. It was not much of a smile; she knew it was not much of a smile.

“Not now,” she said. “Not—not when I see you.” And that was true; almost true. “Aren't you going to let me in?” Her tone, then, invited lightness. But Brian, his face unchanged, merely stepped back. “Come in, Liza,” he said.

The room was very large; there were two tall windows at the far end, and they were open, curtains moving a little in the breeze. Brian closed the door behind them. Liza walked a few steps into the room and then, because he did not seem to be coming with her, stopped and turned so that, again, she faced him.

“You can turn your back on me,” Brian said. “It's safe.” And his tone was very bitter.

She merely spoke his name in answer; spoke it incredulously, her shock reflected in her tone.

“You stand there,” he said. “I love you very much. You think that last night I tried to kill you.”

It was a statement; there was no note of question in his voice. And yet all he said, all at that instant he was, put a question, demanded a decision. Liza stood, her lips just parted, her head back so that she could look up at him across the few feet between them. And now it was she who searched his face. But more than anything, Liza searched herself. Whatever happens afterward depends on now, she thought.

But when she decided, the decision did not seem to come from her mind, did not form itself into words. Her body made its own decision, acted for itself—of itself laid aside (for that moment) whatever remained of fear. Liza stepped toward Brian, her head still back, her eyes still seeking his, but now not searching. As she moved, she lifted her arms, only a little. But it was as if she, with even so small a gesture, abandoned all defense.

For only an instant did Brian hesitate, still seek something in her face. And then his arms were around her, she was held close to him. And then she was crying.

“I didn't—” he began. But she shook her head against his chest and said, the words muffled, “Be still. Oh Brian, be still.” Then he only waited, his arms close around her. After a time she was no longer crying; after rather a long time it was she who moved, stepping back.

“I love you very much,” she said then, using the words he had used, the same gravity in her voice there had been in his.

“And you're not—” he began, but she reached a hand up and then he kissed her.

“You do me good,” he told her, gravity still in his voice but not, for that instant, in his dark eyes. “You're very good for me. I was a fool.”

“How?” she said.

But he told her not to mind for the moment, and took her down the room to chairs and a low table near the windows and then said, “We need a drink on this,” and suggested a variety of things they could have. They had Scotch on the rocks. For a moment, the sun came out; for a moment they were merely young, together, at a good hour of the day. But then he put down his drink and, bending forward in his chair, looked at her.

“A fool to try to keep you out of it,” he said. “To think I could just—well, put you to one side, go on with it. Come back afterward and pick you up. But it made sense.”

“Not real sense,” she said. “Other people's sense.”

He hesitated a moment, then nodded.

“I thought you were all right last night,” he said. “Better than you were, I guess. And I did try to reach you.” He hesitated a moment. “I thought whoever hit you was still around the shop.” He looked away, then back at her. “Anyway,” he said, “you were pretty damned independent.”

She smiled at that, shook her head to dismiss it.

“All right,” Brian said, after a moment. “This guy Weigand. Does he think I hit you? Does he think I killed Dad?”

“No,” she said. “Of
course
not.”

He shook his head. He said there was no “Of course” about it.

“He doesn't,” she said. “He—he thinks you may suspect who did. He—he thinks you may have recognized, or perhaps only thought you recognized, whoever was at the shop last night. Whoever went into the area-way.”

“No,” Brian Halder said. “That's out. I'm not sure there was anybody, anyway. I thought I saw—perhaps felt is a better word—some sort of movement. I don't know who it was.”

“Didn't you guess who it—might have been?”

He shook his head, but he seemed to be only half attending to what she said.

She waited.

“Listen,” he said. “Listen, Liza. I'll tell you what's got me—got me going in circles. Do you want me to?”

“Of course,” she said. She sipped her drink, finding assurance in the tiny physical action.

But still he hesitated, still looked at her. When he spoke it was to ask her a question.

“We're together, aren't we?” he said. “I'm right?”

Men want things in words.

“Whatever happens,” she said, although the words added nothing.

Then he nodded, as if satisfied, and said, rather unexpectedly, that he should have known. Then he smiled and said that, of course, he had known, that it was a question of realizing what he knew, of applying it.

“To the situation,” he said. “I didn't. That's why I thought you could be kept out of it. That—well, that I could take it over, without you; that until it was worked out it needn't be a concern of yours. Do you see what I mean?”

He looked at her and shook his head. He said she didn't. She started to protest, but he shook his head again.

“Maybe you do,” he said. “It's taken me—well, quite a while. Maybe I merely don't want to admit you're—quicker.” He looked at her again, intently. “You see,” he said, and spoke slowly, picking words. “I thought this—whatever it is—this community wouldn't begin until we—well, until we were actually married. That you were still just a girl I was in love with. That until then you didn't have to get involved in things that involved me. Only—it isn't that way. Not for me.”

It's going to be complicated being married to Brian, Liza thought. So complicated. Such fun. When—

“Not for me,” she said, her voice as grave as when she had said, “Yes.”

“It's going to be all right,” he told her. “Isn't it?”

“It's going to be fine,” she said.

He continued to look at her and now, she thought, he's finding what he wants. As he ought to, she thought.
Oh, as he ought to
. But how
much
he wants!

Then Brian Halder picked up his glass and seemed surprised to find it empty and looked at hers. She finished what remained and smiled up at him and nodded. He refilled the glasses. “Water in mine this time,” she told him. “I didn't have any lunch that I can remember.”

He said, “My God,” and looked around the room helplessly, as if expecting manna. She laughed; said it didn't matter; that after a bit he could take her to dinner. “If you can?” she added. He said, “Of course,” to that, as if it had all along been arranged between them. But then he looked pleased, went to a cupboard across the room and came back with a box of saltines. They had, she found on biting into one, been there for some time. He looked at her anxiously. “Fine,” she told him. “Wonderful.”

If it could only stay this way, Liza thought. If only we could go on eating soggy crackers and talking about us!

But they couldn't. After a few minutes it came back to them, but now, although it was still serious—still, when she picked it up again, frightening—there was not the tension there had been. They had what mattered cleared away; it would stay cleared away.
Oh, please
, Liza, thought, praying to the optimistic gods of youth and at the same time knowing, because she needed to say the prayer, that she was beginning to be not quite so young.

But Brian appeared to have no doubts. He appeared to regard that as settled. Men
believe
in words, Liza thought, and looked at Brian and said, without forming the words, “I love you very much.”

“The point is,” Brian said, and spoke suddenly, as if he were going head first into cold water, “the point is—
I'm
afraid. That's the whole point. That's why I didn't go on into that passage by the shop. But not the way I told Weigand, let him believe, anyway. Not of getting hurt.”

“He knew that,” Liza said.

“Did he? I suppose he did. And probably he knew what I was afraid of. You know?”

“I can guess, Brian.”

“Of finding the—the wrong person,” he said. “Damn it all, Liza. What are we going to do? I was afraid it was—Pine.” He looked at her and shook his head. “It's a hell of a thing to be saying,” he said. “That's why I had to be sure about us. Because—” He broke off and shook his head. Then he started again. “You see what it means if it was Pine?” he asked.

She saw, clearly enough. She nodded slowly to show she saw.

“You know Dad was at dinner Monday night?” he said, then. “The night he was killed? That he—that for some reason he left early? Or didn't you know?”

She said she had heard Weigand say something about it.

Again Brian Halder hesitated for words. When he spoke it was, seemingly, to go off on another tack.

“My mother's a young woman,” he said. “Comparatively. It's hard to realize.” For a moment the two in their early twenties tried to imagine that anyone of forty could still be, even by the most favorable of comparisons, young. “She looks it, doesn't she?” Brian asked, and Liza nodded. “She's lovely,” Liza said.

“It's partly because she seems young I call her Mary,” Brian said. “More often that than Mother. You know she's more than thirty years younger than Dad—was? Younger than either Jas or Barbara?” He looked at her, asking her to share the surprise of this. “Sometimes,” he said, “she didn't seem any older than I was. I mean, when I was much younger.” He broke off again, began again. “Damn it,” he said. “I
like
her, whether she's my mother or not.”