11:55 p. m.—Queer Deeps
Roberts went indifferently to the chair that Jane had been using and
sat down. Lieutenant Valcour drew another up beside her. He began with
the usual distant skirmishing before launching the main body of his
attack.
“I will explain why I wanted to see you,” he said. “It’s concerning
Mr. Endicott—concerning his condition.” He noted the sudden reflex
from tension on the part of her hands as he summed up concisely the
statement made to him by Dr. Worth. “I understand,” he concluded,
“that Mrs. Endicott is under the influence of a narcotic and will not
be available before to-morrow morning at the earliest. Dr. Worth
naturally wants to prevent all risk, and so we’ve turned to you.”
He felt her staring through him, as if by some fourth-dimensional
process his being had been erased from her vision.
“Mr. Endicott has very few friends,” she said.
“You are taking the word at its literal meaning.”
“Oh, quite. His acquaintances are numerous and transient.” She
focussed him into an entity again. “They are mostly women. I don’t
suppose one of them would do?”
Lieutenant Valcour smiled slightly. “Not if their status is so
uncertain—their emotional status, I mean.”
“Exactly.” The masked effect of her attitude remained unchanged as she
asked with almost perfunctory detachment, “Would a man do?”
“Why not?”
“Because there is one man of whom Mr. Endicott speaks quite frequently
as being his ‘best’ friend.”
“Here in town?”
“In a bachelor apartment on East Fifty-second Street.”
“You have his exact address?”
“It is in the memorandum book beside the telephone in Mrs. Endicott’s
room.”
Lieutenant Valcour grew markedly casual. “A mutual friend, then?”
“One couldn’t say.”
“He is your only suggestion?”
“He is the only man to whom I have heard Mr. Endicott refer in terms
of friendship and of intimacy.”
“Then there really isn’t any choice.”
Roberts’ smile signified nothing. “No choice.”
“Have you ever seen this man?”
“His name is Mr. Thomas Hollander. I have never seen him.”
“Has anyone in the household ever seen him, to your knowledge?”
“I dare say. I don’t know. One could inquire.”
Lieutenant Valcour recognized the rising inflection at each period
mark, a habit so much in vogue among certain types of English people
when they wish to be mildly disagreeable. He felt a Gallic insistence
to retaliate even at the expense of chivalry. At the worst, he
thought, he would only be living up to the popular conception of the
men in his profession. And there _was_ some link of peculiar intimacy
between this woman and Endicott. . . .
“If we cannot get hold of Mr. Hollander,” he said, “would you consider
it advisable for the post to be taken by yourself?”
He repented instantly at the sight of her deadly whiteness. It seemed
impossible that blood could drain so swiftly from the skin. His own
face blazed like fire from the slap of her hand across his cheek. He
noticed, as he sat very still, the strange terror that hid beneath her
bitter, staring eyes: it wasn’t any terror of the law, the cheek of
which she had symbolically in his person just so vigorously slapped;
it wasn’t any terror of what he or the machine he represented could do
to her—what anyone or anything could do to her. . . . It was baffling;
baffling as the undiscoverable source of any intense emotional
reaction is baffling—something that drew its sustenance from roots
imbedded not in the immediate present but in the past. . . .
“You will permit me to offer my apologies?” he said.
She returned vividly to the moment, and her colour swept back in a
succession of bright waves.
“I am not usually so unmannerly,” she said.
“Nor usually subjected to insult. The fault was mine.”
Her laugh was quite harsh. “On the contrary, Lieutenant, I am
accustomed to insult.”
“Then why do you stay with Mrs. Endicott?” he said softly.
“Because there are some people, Lieutenant, who can only find their
happiness in hell.”
“Martyrs.”
“Not martyrs, precisely.”
“Just what, then, precisely?”
“It’s a sharing, if you wish—sort of a sharing of torture.”
Vague—vague. Lieutenant Valcour felt quite convinced that he would
shortly begin to gibber, if the mysteries of hearts, of minds that he
had dipped into during the past few hours, did not soon coalesce
within the mould of reason. He began to envy his sterner compatriots
on the force who confined their processes to the comfortable fields of
hard, cold facts—the “did you at five-forty-five this afternoon place
the silver teaspoon on the pantry shelf, or did you not?” sort of
facts. He conceded that their wholesome, plein-air tactics were quite
right, and that his own, in spite of their usually successful results,
were hopelessly wrong. They at least were never called liars, or
slapped in the face, or found themselves helplessly swirling in a sea
of metaphysics with a splendid chance of being thoroughly drowned. He
forced himself to concentrate. What was it that slash of pale lips had
been saying? A sharing of something . . . Of course, of torture.
“You mean,” he said, “a sharing that is now going on?”
“Perhaps—but especially in the past. Do you believe, Lieutenant, that
the dead remain in emotional touch with the living?”
“And that, my poor fish,” he told himself severely, “is what your
interminable probing into people’s souls has got you into.”
“I have never thought about it. But I should like to believe that it
is true. I should like to believe in anything that offers
corroborative proof of immortality.”
“You are convinced of the finality of death?”
“It is a dread, not a conviction.”
Roberts nodded her head swiftly. “And with me—with me—if I could only
_know_.”
“So that you would be quite certain that your sacrifice is not being
made in vain.” Lieutenant Valcour spoke very softly. He was
approaching, he felt, no matter how grandiloquently, that goal toward
which he had been aiming: the answer to the amazing look she had given
him in Mrs. Endicott’s room.
The mood broke. She stood up abruptly.
“You wished that address book?” she said.
It was of no great matter. Moods, at least, did not die. They were
always there—somewhere—waiting to be recaptured.
“If you will be so kind,” he said.
She went to the door of Mrs. Endicott’s room, opened it, was swallowed
up. Lieutenant Valcour waited outside. The case was becoming mired in
evasions. That was the trouble with cases whose milieu rose beyond a
certain social and mental level. They invariably grew kaleidoscopic
with overtones. Crime in the lower strata was noteworthy for its
crudenesses rather than its subtleties: an intrigue among animals,
with the general patentness of some jackal filching its prey. But
breeding and intellect generally presupposed masks: the inbred
defensiveness of manner and social combativeness with the world which
offered barriers most difficult to pierce. Roberts opened the door and
handed him the small leather reference book Mrs. Endicott had used
when verifying the telephone number of Dr. Worth.
“Thomas Hollander,” she said. “The names are listed alphabetically.”
The door closed even in that short second which preceded his thanks.
It was a gesture of retreat from hinted intimacies. It wasn’t so much
the door of the room she had closed as it was the door guarding her
secrets. He felt that she wanted to show him she had already repented
of having gone so far—not that she _had_ gone any distance, really,
but there were beacons, faint pin points of light toward which he
would chart a course over the surface of her troubled seas.
He took the reference book and sat down. He began with A and started
to go systematically through it. At H he fixed in his memory the
street and telephone number of Hollander’s house. He continued without
interest to turn the pages.
At the end of the M’s he came, to his marked bewilderment, upon the
address and telephone number of Marge Myles.