Strangers on a Train
by Patricia Highsmith

Twenty-five

 

“I don’t give a damn what you think!” Bruno said, his foot planted in his chair. His thin blond eyebrows almost met with his frown, and rose up at the ends like the whiskers of a cat. He looked at Gerard like a golden, thinhaired tiger driven to madness.

“Didn’t say I thought anything,” Gerard replied with a shrug of hunched shoulders, “did I?”

“You implied.”

“I did not imply.” The round shoulders shook twice with his laugh. “You mistake me, Charles. I didn’t mean you told anyone on purpose you were leaving. You let it drop by accident.”

Bruno stared at him. Gerard had just implied that if it was an inside job, Bruno and his mother must have had something to do with it, and it certainly was an inside job. Gerard knew that he and his mother had decided only Thursday afternoon to leave Friday. The idea of getting him all the way down here in Wall Street to tell him that! Gerard didn’t have anything, and he couldn’t fool him by pretending that he had. It was another perfect murder.

“Mind if I shove off?” Bruno asked. Gerard was fooling around with papers on his desk as if he had something else to keep him here for.

“In a minute. Have a drink.” Gerard nodded toward the bottle of bourbon on the shelf across the office.

“No, thanks.” Bruno was dying for a drink, but not from Gerard.

“How’s your mother?”

“You asked me that.” His mother wasn’t well, wasn’t sleeping, and that was the main reason he wanted to get home. A hot resentment came over him again at Gerard’s friend-of-the-family attitude. A friend of his father’s maybe! “By the way, we’re not hiring you for this, you know.”

Gerard looked up with a smile on his round, faintly pink-and-purple mottled face. “I’d work on this case for nothing, Charles. That’s how interesting I think it is.” He lighted another of the cigars that were shaped something like his fat fingers, and Bruno noticed once more, with disgust, the gravy stains on the lapels of his fuzzy, light-brown suit and the ghastly marble-patterned tie. Every single thing about Gerard annoyed Bruno. His slow speech annoyed him. Memories of the only other times he had seen Gerard, with his father, annoyed him. Arthur Gerard didn’t even look like the kind of a detective who was not supposed to look like a detective. In spite of his record, Bruno found it impossible to believe that Gerard was a top-notch detective. “Your father was a very fine man, Charles. A pity you didn’t know him better.”

“I knew him well,” said Bruno.

Gerard’s small, speckled tan eyes looked at him gravely. “I think he knew you better than you knew him. He left me several letters concerning you, your character, what he hoped to make of you.”

“He didn’t know me at all.” Bruno reached for a cigarette. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this. It’s beside the point and it’s morbid.” He sat down coolly.

“You hated your father, didn’t you?”

“He hated me.”

“But he didn’t. That’s where you didn’t know him.”

Bruno pushed his hand off the chair arm and it squeaked with sweat. “Are we getting anywhere or what’re you keeping me here for? My mother’s not feeling well and I want to get home.”

“I hope she’ll be feeling better soon, because I want to ask her some questions. Maybe tomorrow.”

Heat rose up the sides of Bruno’s neck. The next few weeks would be terrible on his mother, and Gerard would make it worse because he was an enemy of both of them. Bruno stood up and tossed his raincoat over one arm.

“Now I want you to try to think once more,” Gerard wagged a finger at him as casually as if he still sat in the chair, “just where you went and whom you saw Thursday night. You left your mother and Mr.Templeton and Mr. Russo in front of the Blue Angel at 2:45 that morning. Where did you go?”

“Hamburger Hearth,” Bruno sighed.

“Didn’t see anyone you knew there?”

“Who should I know there, the cat?”

“Then where’d you go?” Gerard checked on his notes.

“Clarke’s on Third Avenue.”

“See anyone there?”

“Sure, the bartender.”

“The bartender said he didn’t see you,” Gerard smiled.

Bruno frowned. Gerard hadn’t said that a half an hour ago. “So what? The place was crowded. Maybe I didn’t see the bartender either.”

“All the barmen know you in there. They said you weren’t in Thursday night. Furthermore, the place wasn’t crowded. Thursday night? Three or 3:30?—I’m just trying to help you remember, Charles.”

Bruno compressed his lips in exasperation. “Maybe I wasn’t in Clarke’s. I usually go over for a nightcap, but maybe I didn’t.

Maybe I went straight home, I don’t know. What about all the people my mother and I talked to Friday morning? We called up a lot of people to say good-by.”

“Oh, we’re covering those. But seriously, Charles—” Gerard leaned back, crossed a stubby leg, and concentrated on puffing his cigar to life—“you wouldn’t leave your mother and her friends just to get a hamburger and go straight home by yourself, would you?”

“Maybe. Maybe it sobered me up.”

“Why’re you so vague?” Gerard’s Iowan accent made his “r” a snarl.

“So what if I’m vague? I’ve got a right to be vague if I was tight!”

“The point is—and of course it doesn’t matter whether you were at Clarke’s or some other place—who you ran into and told you were leaving for Maine the next day. You must think yourself it’s funny your father was killed the night of the same day you left.”

“I didn’t see anyone. I invite you to check up on everyone I know and ask them.”

“You just wandered around by yourself until after 5 in the morning.”

“Who said I got home after 5?”

“Herbert. Herbert said so yesterday.”

Bruno sighed. “Why didn’t he remember all that Saturday?”

“Well, as I say, that’s how the memory works. Gone—and then it comes. Yours’ll come, too. Meanwhile, I’ll be around. Yes, you can go now, Charles.” Gerard made a careless gesture.

Bruno lingered a moment, trying to think of something to say, and not being able to, went out and tried to slam the door but the air pressure retarded it. He walked back through the shabby, depressing corridor of the Confidential Detective Bureau, where the typewriter that had been pecking thoughtfully throughout the interview came louder—“We,” Gerard was always saying, and here they all were, grubbing away back of the doors—nodded good-by to Miss Graham, the receptionist-secretary who had expressed her sympathies to him an hour ago when he had come in. How gaily he had come in an hour ago, determined not to let Gerard rile him, and now—He could never control his temper when Gerard made cracks about him and his mother, and he might as well admit it. So what? So what did they have on him? So what clues did they have on the murderer? Wrong ones.

Guy! Bruno smiled going down in the elevator. Not once had Guy crossed his mind in Gerard’s office! Not one flicker even when Gerard had hammered at him about where he went Thursday night! Guy! Guy and himself! Who else was like them? Who else was their equal? He longed for Guy to be with him now. He would clasp Guy’s hand, and to hell with the rest of the world! Their feats were unparalleled! Like a sweep across the sky! Like two streaks of red fire that came and disappeared so fast, everybody stood wondering if they really had seen them. He remembered a poem he had read once that said something of what he meant. He thought he still had it in a pocket of his address case. He hurried into a bar off Wall Street, ordered a drink, and pulled the tiny paper out of the address-book pocket. It was torn out of a poetry book he had had in college.

 

THE LEADEN-EYED by Vachel Lindsay

 

Let not young souls be smothered out before

They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.

It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,

Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,

Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,

Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,

Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

 

He and Guy were not leaden-eyed. He and Guy would not die like sheep now. He and Guy would reap. He would give Guy money, too, if he would take it.