Death of a Citizen Read online

  Beth laughed. “Don’t ask him what name he writes under, Mrs. Loris, or he won’t be fit to live with the rest of the evening.”

  Tina was still smiling, watching me. “So you were in public relations during the war. That must have been quite interesting, but wasn’t it a bit risky at times?” Her eyes were laughing at me.

  I said, “Those jeeps we ran around in caused more casualties than enemy action, in our branch of service, Mrs. Loris. I still shudder when I see one. Combat fatigue, you know.”

  “And after the war you just started to write?”

  Her eyes did not stop laughing at me. She’d undoubtedly been supplied with my complete dossier when she received her orders. She probably knew more about me than I knew about myself. But it amused her to make me read off my lines in front of my wife.

  I said, “Why, I’d done some newspaper work before I went into the service; it had got me interested in southwestern history. After what I saw during the war, even if I never got into combat… Well, I decided that men fighting mud and rain and Nazis couldn’t be so very different from men fighting dust and wind and Apaches. Anyway, I went back to my job on the paper and started turning out fiction in my spare time. Beth had a job, too. After a couple of years, my stuff just started to sell, that’s all.”

  Tina said, “I think you’re a very lucky man, Mr. Helm, to have such a helpful and understanding wife.” She turned her smile on Beth. “Not every struggling author has that advantage.”

  It was the old behind-every-man-there’s-a-woman line that we get all the time, and Beth winked at me as she said something suitably modest in reply, but I didn’t find it funny tonight. There was that patronizing arrogance in Tina’s voice and bearing that I knew very well: she was the hawk among the chickens, the wolf among the sheep.

  Then there was a movement behind me, and Loris appeared, carrying his big hat and Tina’s fur wrap.

  “Sorry to break this up,” he said, “but we’re having dinner with some people across town. Ready, dear?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m ready, as soon as I say goodnight to the Darrels.”

  “Well, do it quick,” he said. “We’re late now.”

  He was obviously trying to tell her that something urgent required their attention; and she got the message, all right, but she spent just a moment longer adjusting her furs and giving us a pleasant smile, like any woman who’s damn well not going to let herself be hurried by an impatient husband. Then they were going off together, and Beth took my arm.

  “I don’t like her,” Beth said, “but did you pipe the minks?”

  “I offered you mink the last time we were flush,” I said. “You said you’d rather put the money into a new car.”

  “I don’t like him, either,” she said. “I think he hates small children and pulls wings off flies.”

  Sometimes my wife, for all her naive and girlish looks, can be as bright as anybody. As we walked together towards the front of the house, past little groups of people grimly determined to keep the party going no matter what time it was or who went home, I wondered what had happened to send Tina and her partner rushing off into the night. Well, it wasn’t my problem. I hoped I could keep it that way.

  6

  Fran Darrel kissed me goodnight at the door. Amos kissed Beth. It’s an old Spanish custom which Beth detests. Just about the time she outgrew the unpleasant chore of kissing her New England aunts and grandmothers, and could get a little selective in her osculation, she married me and moved to New Mexico, where, she discovered to her horror, it was her social duty to take on all comers.

  Amos, to do him justice, was one of the less objectionable male kissers of our acquaintance, satisfied with a token peck on the cheek. I think he made that much of a concession to local custom only because Fran had told him that he might hurt the feelings of some of her friends if he didn’t. In all social matters Amos took his cue from Fran, since it didn’t mean a thing to him, anyway.

  Afterwards, he stood there with his vague, bored look while the women went through their goodbye chatter; and I stood there, and found myself suddenly wishing he’d get the hell back inside and out of the light. A guy of his scientific importance ought to have more sense than to hang around in a lighted doorway below a ridge full of desert cedars that could conceal a regiment of expert riflemen. It was a melodramatic idea, but Tina and Loris had started my mind working in that direction. Not that Mac’s people were any threat to Amos, but their presence meant trouble, and once there’s trouble around, anybody’s apt to find a piece of it coming his way.

  “It was sweet of you to come,” Fran was saying. “I do wish you wouldn’t rush off. Matt, you have a nice trip, hear?”

  “The same to you,” Beth said.

  “Oh, we’ll see you again before we leave.”

  “Well, if you don’t, I hope you have a wonderful time. I’m green with envy,” Beth said. “Good night.”

  Then the Darrels were turning away and entering the house together, and nothing whatever had happened to either of them, and we were walking towards Beth’s big maroon station wagon where it stood gleaming with approximately four thousand dollars worth of gleam in the darkness.

  I asked, “Where are they going?”

  “Why, they’re going to Washington next week,” Beth said. “I thought you knew.”

  I said, “Hell, Amos was in Washington only two months back.”

  “I know, but something important has come up at the lab, apparently, and he’s got to make a special report. He’s taking Fran along, and they’re going to visit her family in Virginia and then have some fun in New York before they come back here.”

  Beth’s voice was wistful. To her, real civilization still ended somewhere well east of the Mississippi. She always had a wonderful time in New York, although the place always gives me claustrophobia. I like towns you can get out of in a hurry.

  “Well, we’ll try to make New York some time this winter, if things go well,” I said. “Meanwhile we’d better settle on a place to eat tonight. If we take our time, maybe Mrs. Garcia will have the kids in bed when we get home.”

  We had dinner at La Placita, which is a joint on the narrow, winding, dusty street sometimes known as Artists’ Row by people who don’t know much about art. There were checked tablecloths and live music. Afterwards we got back into Beth’s shining twenty-foot chariot. If Beth had married a New York broker and settled in a conventional suburb in her native Connecticut, I’m sure she’d have become an enthusiastic Volkswagen booster. It would have been her protest against the conformity around her. In Santa Fe, where they never heard of the word conformity, and with a screwball author for a husband, she needed the Buick to keep her sense of proportion. It was a symbol of security. She glanced at me quickly as I drove past our street without turning in.

  “Give them a little more time to go to sleep,” I said. “Don’t you ever put gas in this bus?”

  “There’s plenty,” she said, leaning against me sleepily. “Where are we going?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know. I just knew I didn’t want to go home. I could still see Tina’s black-gloved hand gracefully giving me the old stand-by signal. If I went home, I’d be expected to make myself available, somehow—take a walk around the house to find the cat, have a midnight burst of inspiration and dash out to the studio to get it down on paper.

  I was supposed to place myself alone so they could reach me, and I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to be reached.

  I took us through the city through the sparse evening traffic and sent the chromeplated beast snarling up the long grade out of town on the road to Taos, sixty miles north. There should have been a release of sorts in turning loose all that horsepower, but all it did was remind me of the big black Mercedes I’d stolen outside Loewenstadt— it was the assignment after I’d kissed Tina goodbye and lost track of her—with a six-cylinder bomb under the hood, a four-speed transmission as smooth as silk, and a suspension as taut and sure as a stal
king tiger. When I’d glanced at the speedometer—on a dirt road, yet— the needle was flickering past a hundred and eighty kilometers per hour, which translates to a hundred mph and some change. And I’d thought I was kind of babying the heap along.

  It almost scared me to death, but for the rest of that job I was known as Hot Rod, and all driving chores that came up were left to me without argument, although I could get an argument from that bunch of prima donnas on just about any other subject… Well, I never saw any of them again, and some of them hated my guts and I wasn’t very fond of theirs, but we moved our sniper into position and made our touch on schedule, so I guess it was a pretty good team while it lasted. Mac didn’t believe in letting them last very long. One or two assignments, and then he’d break up the group and shift the men around or send them out to lone-wolf it for a while. Men—even our kind of men—had a perverse habit of getting friendly if they worked together too long; and you couldn’t risk jeopardizing an operation because, despite standing orders, some sentimental jerk refused to leave behind another jerk who’d been fool enough to stop a bullet or break a leg.

  I remembered solving that little problem the hard way, the one time it came up in a group of mine. After all, nobody’s going to hang around in enemy territory to watch over a dead body, no matter how much he liked the guy alive. I’d had to watch my back for the rest of the trip, of course, but I always did that, anyway.

  “Matt,” Beth said quietly, “Matt, what’s the matter?”

  I shook my head, and spun the wheel to put us onto the unpaved lane that feeds into the highway at the top of the hill. The big station wagon was no Mercedes. The rear end broke loose as we hit the gravel, and I almost lost the heap completely—power brakes, power steering, and all. For a moment I had Buick all over the road. It gave me something to fight, and I straightened it out savagely; the rear wheels sprayed gravel as they dug in. I took us up on the ridge, with those soft baby-carriage springs hitting bottom on the bumps, and swung in among the pinons and stopped.

  Beth gave a little sigh, and reached up to pat her hair back into place.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Lousy driving. Too many Martinis, I guess. I don’t think I hurt the car.”

  Below us were the lights of Santa Fe, and beyond was the whole dark sweep of the Rio Grande valley; and across the valley were the twinkling lights of Los Alamos, in case you were interested, which, unlike Amos Darrel, I was not. They no longer make so many loud disturbing noises over there, but I’d liked the place better when it was just a pinon forest and a private school for boys. Whatever it was Amos had turned up in his lab, and was rushing to Washington to make his report on, I had a hunch it was something I could have lived quite happily without.

  Looking the other way, you could see the shadowy Sangre de Cristo peaks against the dark sky. They’d already had a sprinkle of snow up there this fall; it showed up ghostly in the night.

  Beth said softly, “Darling, can’t you tell me?”

  It had been a mistake to come up here. There was nothing I could tell her; and she didn’t belong to the catch-as-catch-can school of marital relations. In my wife’s book, there was a time and a place for everything, even love. And the place wasn’t the front seat of a car parked a few feet off a busy highway.

  I couldn’t talk to her, and I wasn’t in a mood for anything as mild and frustrating as necking, so there wasn’t a damn thing to do but back out of there and head for home.

  7

  Mrs. Garcia was a plump, pretty woman who lived only a few blocks away, so that, except in bad weather or very late at night, she did not have to be driven home. I paid her, thanked her, saw her to the door, and stood in the doorway watching her walk along the concrete path to the gate in our front wall. Like many Santa Fe residences, ours is fortified against invasions of our privacy by six feet of adobe wall ten inches thick. After she’d gone, closing the gate behind her, it seemed very quiet.

  I listened to Mrs. Garcia’s receding footsteps and to the sound of a lone car going past outside the wall. There was no sound inside and no movement except for our large gray tomcat—named Tiger by the children despite a total lack of stripes—who made a quick, silent pass at the door, hoping to slip inside unnoticed. I closed the screen in his face, locked the door, and reached for the switch to turn out the yard lights. They could be controlled from the front door, the kitchen, the studio, and the garage, and they had cost a pretty sum to install. Beth could never understand why we’d had to spend the money. She’d never lived in such a way as to consider it a luxury, at night, to be able to hit a single switch and determine, at a glance, that there was no enemy inside the walls.

  I let my hand fall from the switch without pressing it. Why should I make life easy for Tina and her friend? When I turned away, Beth was watching me from the arch of the hallway that led back to the children’s bedrooms.

  After a moment, she said, without mentioning the lights, “All present and accounted for. Where’s the cat?” If not exiled at night, the beast will hide under the furniture until we’ve retired, and then jump in bed with one of the kids. They don’t mind in the least, not even the baby, but it seems unsanitary.

  “Tiger’s all right. He’s outside,” I said.

  She watched me cross the room to her without smiling or speaking. The light was soft on her upturned face. There’s something very nice about a pretty woman at the end of a party evening when, you might say, she’s well broken in. She no longer looks and smells like a new car just off the salesroom floor. Her nose is maybe just a little shiny now, her hair is no longer too smooth to caress or her lipstick too even to kiss, and her clothes have imperceptibly begun to fit her body instead of fitting some mad flight of the designer’s fancy. And in her mind, you can hope, she’s begun to feel like a woman again, instead of like a self-conscious work of art.

  I pulled her to me abruptly and kissed her hard, trying to forget Tina, trying not to wonder what Mac wanted with me after all these years. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be nice. It never had been. I heard Beth’s breath catch at my roughness; then she laughed and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me back just as hard, playfully wanton, coming against me shamelessly and fitting her mouth to mine with deliberate disregard for whatever lipstick she had left. It was a game we sometimes played, pretending to be real wicked, uninhibited people.

  “That’s better,” she whispered a little breathlessly. “You’ve been looking like a thunderstorm all evening. Now let me go and… Matt, don’t!”

  It was a game, and I was supposed to know the moment to take time out and let her escape to the bedroom and make a quick change into a pretty nightie, but I couldn’t seem to make myself abide by the ground rules tonight. I heard her gasp with surprise and apprehension as I swung her around and let her down on the nearby sofa, following her down and lying against her. But her lips were soft and unresponsive now. Her breast was remote behind layers of clothing.

  “Please, darling,” she whispered, turning her face from me, “please, Matt, my dress…”

  There are times when a husband can’t help remembering that he’s a fairly large man and his wife’s a relatively small girl and that if he really wants to… I put the thought aside. I mean, hell, you can’t go around raping people you love and respect. I got up slowly and took out my handkerchief and scrubbed my mouth. I walked to the front door and stood looking out through the glass at the lighted yard, hearing her rise behind me and go quickly out of the room.

  Presently I heard the bathroom door close. I turned and walked into the empty bedroom and started to pull off my tie, but changed my mind. My suitcase was already packed, standing by the foot of my bed. Like most old southwestern houses, ours was built with a complete lack of closet space and we’ve never quite made up the deficiency; in consequence, such things as camping clothes and equipment have to be stored out in the garage and studio. Part of what I needed had already been loaded in the pickup, the rest was ready and waiting for me. By morning I coul
d be in Texas. Normally, I have a good New Mexican’s aversion to that loudmouthed state and all its residents, but at the moment it seemed like a fine place to be.

  I carried the suitcase to the kitchen door, deposited it there, and stepped down the hall to look in on the baby. Further down the hall there was Matt, Jr., aged eleven, and Warren, aged nine, but they were getting a little too big to get mushy about at night. But you never quite get used to the sight of your own babies, I guess; they always seem like a cross between a practical joke and a miracle from heaven. Our youngest, Betsy, sound asleep, had wispy blonde baby-hair and a square, pretty little face that was lengthening out now as she got her first teeth. She was not quite two. Her head still looked too big for her body, and her feet looked too small for anything human. I heard a sound behind me as I covered her up, and turned to face Beth.

  I said, “Shouldn’t she have a sleeper on?” When you’ve nothing whatever to say to your wife as man to woman, you can always fall back on acting like a parent.

  “There aren’t any; she wet the last pair,” Beth said. “Mrs. Garcia washed it out, but it isn’t dry yet.”

  I said, “I think I’ll throw my gear into the truck and take off. I can be halfway to San Antonio by morning.”

  She hesitated. “Should you? After all those Martinis?”

  This wasn’t, I suspected, exactly what she wanted to say, but it was what came out.

  “I’ll take it easy. If I get sleepy, I can always pull off the road and take a nap in back.” It wasn’t precisely what I wanted to say, either, but we seemed to have lost the knack of accurate communication.

  We looked at each other for a moment. She was wearing something filmy and pale blue with a negligee of the same stuff, and she looked like an angel, but the moment was past, and I could work up no real interest in nylon angels, not even when I kissed her lightly on the lips.