David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and '50s (Library of America) (31 page)

“Sit there,” she said. “Let’s see if we can cool off with some lemonade.”

He watched her as she walked away, moving toward the kitchenette, a little alcove all by itself. From where he was sitting, he couldn’t see her in the kitchenette. Now he began to get
all sorts of thoughts, and the thoughts jabbed at one another, and he told himself it didn’t make any difference now. No matter what the thoughts were made of, no matter what their sum, he couldn’t do anything with it. That was all right. He was even a little glad. All he wanted to do was sit here and wait for Martha to come back.

She came back with a tray. A pitcher of lemonade, a bowl of ice. And glasses. Lemonade filled a glass, and she offered it to him.

“Drink this,” she said.

“You make it sound as if I’m sick and you’re taking care of me.”

“Drink it.”

For a while all they did was sip lemonade. Then Vanning put down an empty glass and he looked at her and said, “Do you believe what I’ve told you?”

“Yes, Jim. Do you believe me when I say yes?”

He nodded.

She put her hand against the back of his head, patted him as if he were her little son. “Go home now. Go to your drawing board and finish that work you were telling me about. Get it all finished. Then go to sleep. And please treat me to dinner tomorrow night?”

“Seven.”

“Where?”

“I’ll meet you here. Good night, Martha.”

He walked out without looking back at her. Going back to his room, he walked rapidly. He was in a hurry to get at the drawing board.

F
RASER TOLD
himself it was a matter of selection. He stood outside the white dwelling and watched Vanning going away. He had placed a little more than twenty yards between himself and Vanning during the walk from the bar to here, and he had remained across the street as Vanning entered the place, and he’d been hoping a light would show in one of the front windows. When it failed to show, he wondered on the feasibility of going up and visiting the back rooms. Somehow it hadn’t seemed like a good idea. He’d had the feeling it wouldn’t give him anything solid.

And now he stood here and watched Vanning going away. He had the choice of following Vanning now or going up and trying the back rooms. He had his own system of questioning people so that they gave answers they didn’t think were usable but which Fraser was able to use. He would probably get something from one of those back rooms and yet he still had the feeling it wouldn’t be enough.

He decided to stay with Vanning. He lit a cigarette and followed his man to the place where his man lived. He saw his man entering the place, and then he crossed the street, went up to the room he had rented, seated himself behind the dark window, and waited.

And he saw the light arriving in Vanning’s room. He saw Vanning moving around in a preparatory sort of way. The binoculars picked up the bright spots and the shadows, and Vanning’s eyes were distinct, they were the eyes of a man in confusion, a confusion that had some strange happiness mixed in. Tonight there was something different in Vanning. The binoculars took it all in and clarified it, but it was clear only on the visual side, and not in the analysis. For some reason Vanning was hopeful and perhaps just a bit cheery, and Fraser began to use his imagination and kept it up until he disciplined himself, told himself imagination was no part of science. It was all right in art, but this wasn’t an art. This was on the order of mathematics.

The binoculars saw Vanning seating himself at the drawing board.
There were manipulations with a soft pencil. Vanning would never be a Matisse. He was much too precise. He went at it more like an engineer. He used a T-square and a slide rule. He leaned close to the work and studied it carefully after each small movement of the pencil.

It was interesting to watch him at his work. He had a cigarette going and the smoke of it shot a straight, rigid column of blue past his head, the column quite permanent because once the cigarette was lit he left it in the ash tray and paid no attention to it. When it was burned out he lit another and treated it the same way.

The pencil work completed, Vanning commenced mixing gouache pigments. This took a long time. Fraser sat there with eyes burning into the binoculars, telling himself three hundred thousand dollars was a fortune. A man with three hundred thousand dollars didn’t have to sit up all night with T-squares and gouache and shoulders bent over a board. It was something he had told himself many times, and this time it was in the nature of a conclusion.

And yet there was another consideration, and it was evolved from the way Vanning addressed himself to his work. The thorough, accurate method, the painstaking manner in which he mixed the paint, the slow, careful application of paint to rough paper. Again Fraser said it to himself. An engineer, he said, a patient calculator. Perhaps a fanatic for doing things in a precise way. Doing this sort of thing, anyway. And the possibility of his doing other things in the same way could not be completely disregarded.

Fraser sat there and watched. And the longer he sat there, the longer he watched, the more subjective he became. The more subjective he became, the more he began to doubt himself. There was so much he didn’t know. About zoology, even though he had read many books. About crystallography, even though at one time he had taken a course at the museum. About judo, despite having been taught by one of the true experts. About Vanning, even though he’d been telling himself he knew Vanning.

And about psychology, and neurology, and man’s way of thinking, doing things, reacting. The books were all good books and represented a great deal of study and experimentation and summaries
based on years of formularizing. But the field was still in its infancy. There was so much as yet unlearned, even by the top people. And the top people were Fraser’s tutors, and Fraser told himself he was a novice. If he’d been someone else examining Fraser, he would have called Fraser a naturally humble man. But he was Fraser. And he was calling Fraser a fool for having considered Fraser a walking textbook on Vanning.

There was so much he didn’t know about Vanning. There was so much a man didn’t know about other men. Conversation was an overestimated thing. Such a large part of conversation was merely a curtain for what went on in the mind. So many madmen were walking around and fooling people. It wouldn’t be ridiculous to ponder the possibility that Vanning was a victim of dementia praecox, extremely shrewd about hiding it, underneath the disease a good man, but dominated by the disease, a murderer and a terror. Ponder that, Fraser told himself.

And ponder the other roads. Because there were many roads. The road he had selected could be the wrong road. And it was as though he was in a car and he was going up that road, and the farther he traveled, the more he worried about its being the wrong road. But like any man behind a steering wheel, he tried to tell himself he was steering straight. Rationalizing, he knew he was rationalizing. But he couldn’t do anything about that. All he could do was sit there and worry about it.

In the binoculars,
Vanning labored with a paintbrush. The interior of the binoculars gradually became a magnetic little world. Fraser became a magnetized object being drawn into the little world. And as he arrived there, he talked to Vanning.

He said, “Tell me about yourself.”

Vanning’s lips did not move. He was concentrating on the drawing board. But somehow he said, “I’m a man in a lot of trouble.”

“I know that,” Fraser said. “Tell me about it.”

“Why should I? Would you help me?”

“If I believed you deserved help.”

“How can I make you believe?”

“Just tell me the truth,” Fraser said.

“Sometimes truth is a very odd thing. Sometimes it’s amazing and you refuse to believe it.”

“
The front of this thing is amazing. I’ll understand if the background’s the same way.”

“I don’t think you would,” Vanning said. “I don’t think any man would.”

“Try me out.”

“No,” Vanning said. “I’m sorry but I can’t take the chance.”

“Don’t you want to get out of this mess?”

“Getting out of it is very important to me. Staying alive is more important.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“I’m in a position where I can’t trust anyone.”

“Is that all?” Fraser said.

“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry.”

Fraser was about to ask another question, but just then the little world was blanketed with darkness. It became a black, meaningless thing until he took the binoculars away from his eyes and realized he’d been watching Vanning in the process of leaving the drawing board, getting into bed, switching off the
light.

The room across the street was dark, a room of sleep, and Fraser liked the idea of getting some sleep himself. He liked the idea very much. He smiled wistfully at the idea, brought his chair closer to the window, leaned an elbow on the sill and sat there with his eyes half opened, waiting.

T
HERE WAS
a feeling that sleep would come easily tonight. When it finally reached Vanning it was like a vapor closing in on him. He rolled around in it, he floated down through it, down and down, going through the endless tides of thick slumber. And somewhere down there the tide twisted, started up in an arc, brought him toward the surface. He attempted to fight the tide, but it kept pulling him up in that circle. When it had him on the surface, when his eyes were wide open and he was staring at the black ceiling, he tried to continue the circle, go down again. But he couldn’t close his eyes.

Worry was doing this. It couldn’t be anything except worry. He was in her apartment again and he could hear himself talking to her, he could hear the replies she was making. And dancing around somewhere in there was an unsatisfactory element, and he wondered what it was.

All at once he jumped out of bed and switched on the light. On a
Governor Winthrop desk the alarm clock announced three-fifteen. He remembered leaving her apartment at nine-thirty or thereabouts. He measured it with his fingers. An intervening time of
approximately six hours.

That was a long time. It was too long. It was time wasted, and he had to stop making these errors. Especially the kind of errors that concerned a woman. He had started out tonight on a mechanical basis and that was good, and he had allowed himself to fade from the mechanical to the emotional and that was very bad. She had given him nothing, anyway nothing that he could use. And he had given her plenty. He had given her everything. If she felt like using it, there was no limit to what she could do with it. And she could do a great deal in six hours.

He didn’t bother to tie his shoelaces. He tripped once going down the stairway, saved himself from a complete fall by grabbing the rail. On the street he started out with a fast walk, ended up with what amounted to almost a sprint. And then he was panting as he stood outside the white brick house on Barrow Street.

The
button was beside her name on the panel, and it was a shiny
button and it was tempting. But he found himself thinking in terms of an alley. He walked around the side street at right angles to Barrow, and there was a narrow alley and the first thing he saw against the blackness of the alley was a light showing from a rear window on the third floor of a house facing Barrow.

Without counting the houses he knew it was that house.

Moving down the alley, he was figuring at first on a rear entrance, and wondering how he would get past the lock. And then he noticed a garden court, one of several garden courts at the other side of the alley, and the trees came into focus, and a few of them were quite high. One in particular was getting considerable play from the light that flowed out through the window. The light dipped and hopped through the upper branches of the tree, made puddles of silver on black leaves.

He walked up to the gate that separated the alley from the garden court. For a few moments he stood there, looking up at the shining leaves, rubbing his hands together, and then lightly, quickly, he climbed over the gate, he approached the tree. Again he looked up. Again he rubbed his hands together. Then he took off his coat.

It wasn’t an easy climb. This was a very big tree, big in every way, particularly in the thickness of the trunk. In several places the trunk was much too smooth, and he felt himself slipping, felt the strain on his legs, told himself to stop being in such a hurry. He rested awhile, then went on climbing, took hold of a branch, pulled himself up, and now he was going up through the branches, the leaves swishing against his face.

A few thin branches gave him trouble, and he had to come in toward the center of the tree, where there was more thickness. Then up a couple more feet, and a couple more, and just a couple more. He turned slowly, to face the lighted window.

He saw her in there. She no longer wore the blue quilted satin bathrobe. Now she was wearing a yellow dress trimmed with green. There was a cigarette in her mouth and she had a highball glass in her hand. She moved toward the window and turned so that her back was to the window. Then she moved again to the side, and he couldn’t see her. There was only the lighted window and the motionless room beyond the window. And Vanning waited.

A shadow fell across the light. Vanning leaned forward. He saw her again. She was back at the window, and he saw her in profile. She was smiling. Her lips were moving. She took a drink from the highball glass. She took a puff at the cigarette. Vanning’s fingers twisted, pressed into the branch that supported him. He saw her gesturing with the cigarette. Then once again she walked away from the window.

There was another wait. It lasted a few years. Then the shadow again, falling across the light. And Martha again, leaning against the window sill. And then another shadow, falling across Martha, remaining there.

And then a hand, holding a highball glass. A man’s hand, a man’s coat sleeve. Cigarette smoke between Martha and that hand. And no motion now, nothing, only another wait. But suddenly a quick movement on the part of Martha. She was going away from the window. The other things remained there, the man’s hand, the highball glass, the coat sleeve. And gradually the coat sleeve moved out across the lighted space, and there was a coat, and a shoulder, and a man’s head, turning slowly and getting into profile. And there he was.

John.