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  Now it turned fully away from the house, into the McCarthys’ front walk, where, like a plump pedestrian, it made its way bumpily down a short flight of flagstone steps, and then—(oh, how beautifully her little car was behaving! Nancy heard herself emitting great gasping sobs that a stranger might have mistaken for lunatic laughter!)—it passed narrowly between that handsome pair of wrought-iron carriage lamps at the foot of the walk, and now it was in the McCarthys’ driveway. The car missed, by what must have been the tiniest fraction of an inch, Genny McCarthy’s pretty little jet-black Porsche that was parked there. But then, after such a long journey on which it had done so well, she saw with no doubt at all how its trip would end as the car, turned hateful and perverse, swerved and headed for the blue sedan owned by Genny McCarthy’s cleaning woman. There was a hideous, shuddering crash of steel crushing into steel, then silence.

  In tears now, she went running out into the street after it to meet her punishment.

  “Oh, I thought I had the brake on!” she sobbed to the cleaning woman, who, in a terrible screaming rage, had come running out of the McCarthys’ house at the sound of the collision, waving a dust-cloth in her hand like a flail. “Oh, it’s all my fault … your pretty car … all my fault,” she wept.

  Then there was a series of frantic telephone calls to be made. She called a wrecker to come and separate the enmeshed automobiles. She called a body shop to come and give her an estimate of the damage. She couldn’t for the life of her remember the name of their insurance agent and couldn’t seem to lay her hands on his card, and so she had a rather weird conversation with Myra Mirisch, trying to locate Charlie.

  “No. He isn’t here, Mrs. Lord.” Myra Mirisch sounded like one of the vaguest women in the world.

  “Has he been there?”

  “Well, no …”

  “But he has an appointment with you, hasn’t he? Isn’t he expected?”

  “Oh …” the woman’s voice said, and then there was a brief pause. “Oh, well I think perhaps so—yes.”

  “Well, will you please ask him to call home right away when he gets there?”

  “I’ll try. That is, I’ll try to remember to tell him,” Myra Mirisch said.

  Then, immediately after that, she found the insurance card right where she had been looking for it all along—right in her wallet with her license and registration. So she then called the insurance company (where the man she talked to kept saying, “Now just be calm … be grateful no one was hurt … be calm …”), and then went back to the McCarthys’ house once more to give the cleaning woman all the insurance information. Genny, thank God, must have been resting upstairs—though how she could rest through all the noise was a miracle; there was so much shouting, so much grating of tires, so much clanking of chains as the wrecking truck separated the cars, and inside Genny’s house the Labradors had set up a terrific howling. But at least Genny didn’t appear, and Nancy wasn’t ready to face Genny yet.

  “My insurance will cover everything,” Nancy said to the woman, an imposing Negro woman who was still looking at Nancy so fiercely that Nancy was afraid she was about to hit her.

  “My husband, he’ll just kill me!” the woman said. “You know that, I guess. But I guess you don’t care! You don’t care if he kills me.”

  “Tell him—”

  “And you don’t care I need that car to get to my jobs! How’m I gonna get to my jobs? You don’t care!”

  “Oh, I do—I do care terribly! I’m just so—”

  “You don’t care! That man, he say he’ll have to have that car four days to fix it! You don’t care if I miss four days of my jobs!”

  “Couldn’t you take taxis those four days? Or the bus?”

  “Taxis? You think I got the kind of money to pay on taxis?”

  “I mean I’d reimburse you for the taxis.”

  “Reimburse! How’m I gonna pay for those taxis till you reimburse me? You don’t care about that.”

  “If you’ll tell me how much it will be, I’ll pay you in advance for the taxis.”

  “You know how much it costs me in a taxi, my house to here? Four dollars each way! That’s how much! Eight dollars a day.”

  “It’s all right. I’ll pay for it.”

  “I only make fifteen a day. Eight dollars for taxis, that don’t make sense.”

  “But I said I’d pay for that—”

  The woman paused, frowning, her hands on her hips. “That just don’t make sense. It don’t make no sense at all,” she repeated. And then, with a sideways look at Nancy, she said, “I lose four days of my jobs. You oughta pay me for those days!”

  “All right, all right,” Nancy said desperately.

  “You will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Four days, that’s sixty dollars. You’ll pay me that—plus the taxis.”

  “What? No, I didn’t say that! If you’re not going to go to your jobs, why do you need taxis?”

  “What if one of my ladies she say, ‘Blanchette, I need you to come that day! You just be here that day, Blanchette!’ What about that?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Nancy said. Why was this woman being so impossible? Was this behavior the result of some new edict from the NAACP? “Look,” she said, “as soon as the insurance inspector has checked the damage—”

  “Inspector! I got to have my car inspected? Oh, no! Now that’s another day I’m gonna lose!”

  “I don’t see why,” Nancy said frostily. “My insurance man said he’d send an inspector right away, probably this afternoon.”

  “No you don’t see why! Cause you don’t care!”

  “I’ve said I’ll pay the sixty dollars for four days’ work,” Nancy said. “On those four days, of course, if you want to, you can take taxis—or a bus—to your jobs, where you can earn sixty dollars more. I don’t see how I can be more generous than that.”

  “No, you don’t!”

  “Well, I’m afraid sixty dollars is the most I can offer you.”

  “How’m I gonna get home tonight? How about that?”

  “All right! I’ll give you sixty-four dollars—for four days and one taxi. But that’s absolutely all!”

  The woman glared at her for a moment. Then she muttered, “Well, all right. But just you don’t forget. You promised.”

  “I won’t forget. I’ll go home and write out the check right now.”

  “Check! How’m I gonna cash a big check like that? Oh, no. A check’s no good to me.”

  “Well, I’m afraid it will have to be a check,” Nancy said. “I obviously can’t get to the bank without a car, and I don’t have that much in cash.”

  “Well … all right,” the woman said and turned away. “Oh, but you’ll probably forget. You will because you don’t care. You don’t care my husband’s going to kill me.”

  Nancy left the scene of the accident for the last time and crossed the street again to her own house. There she was startled to see a uniformed policeman standing on her front step.

  “Oh, officer,” she said quickly, “there’s been an accident, but it’s all straightened out now. I really don’t think we need you now. It was entirely my fault, and—”

  “Are you Mrs. Lord?” he asked her.

  “Yes, it was my car that—”

  “There was an accident?”

  “Yes, but no one was hurt. The cars have both been towed away, and my insurance man is sending—”

  “I’m not here about an accident, Mrs. Lord,” the officer said. “I’d like to talk to you, if I may, about another matter.”

  “Oh?” she said, suddenly frightened. “Oh?”

  “May I come in?”

  “Why yes, of course.” And then, trying to make her voice light and gay, she said, “Goodness me, what else have I done wrong today?”

  Charlie Lord was sitting in a bar, talking to his friend, the man with the heavy wrists. “And when I was in the army,” Charlie was saying, “just a few days before I was to be discharged, the CO called me i
nto his office and said, ‘Lieutenant, you’re just the caliber of man we need in the Regular Army. You’d make a fine career officer, and you’d have a fine career. Why don’t you stay with us, lieutenant? Don’t take this discharge. Enlist for another term.’ This was after I’d spent two years just waiting to get out of the damned army. But you know something? Maybe I should have taken his advice. Maybe that’s what I should have done—become a career officer in the United States Army. By now I’d be at least a—oh, probably a lieutenant colonel. At least.” He smiled grimly and took another swallow of his drink.

  His friend with the wrists (There had been some discussion about the wrists awhile ago, hadn’t there? Something about the man having to have his shirts custom-made because his wrists were so large?) sat very still for a moment, then shifted his weight on the stool. He looked at Charlie heavily and nodded gravely several times. “The fucking you get isn’t worth the fucking you get,” the man said finally.

  “Exactly my point,” Charlie said. “Or I think it is. I think I see what you mean.”

  “So cheer up,” the man said. “It’s spring.”

  “This morning,” Charlie said slowly, “spring crept over my windowsill, and crapped.”

  Charlie Lord was drunk. He hadn’t intended to get drunk. He hadn’t even intended to go into this bar, which he remembered vaguely was in some corner of Grand Central. But, getting off the train that morning, he had seen the bar, had looked in, and had been surprised to see—at such an early hour of the day—what a brisk business it was doing, filled for the most part with well-dressed and reasonably dignified-looking men, many of whom had snappy black attaché cases on the floor beside them, having breakfasttime martinis, old-fashioneds, and Scotches and soda. And so here he was, with his new friend with the extraordinary wrists.

  He had had to get out of the house, that was all there was to it. And so he had said to Nancy the night before, “I’ve got to go to New York tomorrow to pick up some new canvases and brushes.”

  “Oh, darling,” she had said, “I meant to tell you! There’s a marvelous art-supply place right in the village. They’ll have everything you need. Just jot down what it is you want, and I’ll pick it up for you first thing in the morning.”

  But he had simply had to get out of the house. For the past few weeks the house had seemed to be slowly closing in around him. “Well, I also have to see Myra Mirisch,” he said. “She wants to see me.”

  Charlie looked now at his new friend, who seemed to be undergoing some brief gastric disturbance. But was this the same friend? All at once the man looked quite different from the way Charlie had remembered him looking a few minutes ago. The face was unfamiliar and so was the suit, and even the wrists seemed to have been reduced to routine size. Had his first friend been replaced with a new one who had picked up the conversation where the former had left it off? Had there been some mysterious switch involving bar stools, or were false faces being used? At some point, he remembered dimly, there had been handshakes and an exchange of names, and it seemed to him that at one point this man—or the man this man had replaced—had mentioned that he was a salesman of some product and that he came from some other city. Akron came to mind. So did Atlanta. But Charlie had forgotten the name the man had given him, and so there was no way now of checking to see whether this man possessed the same identity. Charlie tried focusing and refocusing his eyes. “So you’re from Albany,” he said at last.

  “Nope. The fair city of Minneapolis, in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.”

  “Oh, yes,” Charlie said. But the mystery of a possible interchange of persons was still not solved. “I am very much afraid,” Charlie said slowly, “that I am very drunk.”

  “Are you a fagot?” the man asked.

  “No. And I certainly hope you’re not, because if you are then our fine relationship may have been based on some sort of—uh—misunderstanding.”

  “No, I’m not one,” the man said. “But the reason I asked is, I come into this place a lot when I’m in town. And lately I’ve noticed a lot of the fagots have been coming in. It kind of spoils a place, if you know what I mean.”

  “I agree.” Charlie nodded.

  “So you’re an artist,” the man said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “An artist at the acne of his success.”

  “Let’s see you draw something,” the man said and pushed a paper napkin across the bar toward Charlie. “Go ahead. Draw something on this.”

  Charlie studied the napkin, turning it this way and that. It was emblazoned with the words “The Oyster Bar, World’s Most Famous Seafood Restaurant, Serving All Favorite Seafood Dishes.” He shook his head. “I only paint little girls’ heads,” he said finally.

  “You mean you paint ladies’ rooms?”

  “No. But that’s not a bad idea. And that reminds me. I must make a brief journey. I shall return.” He got cautiously off the bar stool and walked carefully down the length of the bar to the men’s room. Inside, he allowed his forehead to rest for a blessed moment against the cool, hard tile of the wall.

  When he came out his friend was sitting in the same spot. “We meet again,” Charlie said, taking the stool beside him.

  “Let me describe the watch to you once more, Mrs. Lord,” the policeman said. “The face is surrounded by fourteen small square-cut diamonds, and these are flanked by two large emerald-cut diamonds, one at each pole, and the bracelet is composed of thirty-two small marquise-cut diamonds.”

  “It doesn’t do any good to keep describing it to me!” Nancy said. “Because I have simply never laid eyes on it.”

  The officer nodded and penciled a notation on the pad on his knee.

  “And may I say that I think it is terribly—nasty!—of Mrs. Willey to sic you on me, to accuse me of something like this, to treat me as though I were some sort of common—”

  “Mrs. Lord,” the officer said, “no one has accused you of anything. No one has accused anyone of anything. But in a case like this, where a theft appears to have taken place, it is simply routine for an officer to interview all individuals who were on the premises at the presumed time of the disappearance.” He had a habit of speaking to her as though he were reading rules to her out of a book. “Now,” he said, “when you were in Mrs. Willey’s dressing room that evening, you were accompanied by Mrs. McCarthy. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. I’ve told you that.”

  “And when you were in Mrs. Willey’s dressing room—”

  “And I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about when I was in Mrs. Willey’s dressing room, as though I were loitering in there or something! I’ve told you, Mrs. McCarthy was taking me on a tour of the Willeys’ house. We went in and out of the dressing room, just as we went in and out of all the other rooms.”

  “Very well,” he said. “Now, while you were in Mrs. Willey’s dressing room, did Mrs. McCarthy leave your presence for any time?”

  “No.”

  “To—uh—go to the bathroom or anything?”

  “No.”

  “I see. Now, while you were in Mrs. Willey’s dressing room, did you leave Mrs. McCarthy’s presence for any time?”

  “No. If she didn’t leave my presence, how could I have left hen? What a stupid question.”

  “Very well. Now, while you were in Mrs. Willey’s dressing room, Mrs. Lord, did you notice any signs of a disturbance—as though the place had been ransacked? Anything like that?”

  “No. Everything was neat as a pin.”

  “Did you, while you were in Mrs. Willey’s dressing room, open any cupboards or closets or drawers?”

  “No. Or rather yes. Or rather Genny did—just to show me how the storage space was arranged, the towel dryers, things like that.”

  “You say it was Mrs. McCarthy who opened these cupboards.”

  “Yes, but just very quickly—just to give me a look.”

  “Mrs. Lord, would you say that Mrs. McCarthy seemed to have an unusual familiarity with the interior of Mrs. Wille
y’s house?”

  She hesitated. “Now, look,” she said, “if you’re trying to get me to say something incriminating about Genny McCarthy, you can just stop. Mrs. McCarthy knows the house—she’s lived next door to it for years, and she and Jane Willey are old friends. She’s very proud of the things Jane Willey has done to that house.” She hesitated again. “As proud as if it were her own house,” she said.

  “I see,” he said and made another note. “Now, did you make any further trips to Mrs. Willey’s dressing room during the course of the evening?”

  “No.”

  “Or to the second floor of the house?”

  “No.”

  “Did Mrs. McCarthy?”

  “I doubt it. All the other ladies there had seen the upstairs of the house. I was the only one who hadn’t. That was the whole point of Genny’s taking me up—to show me the house. Not to steal diamond bracelets.”

  “This was a lady’s wristwatch. Did anyone else make a trip upstairs that you knew of?”

  “No. Someone may have, of course, but I don’t see why anyone should have gone up. There’s a powder room on the ground floor.”

  “Did your husband go upstairs, Mrs. Lord?”

  “No—at least I don’t think so. I wasn’t with him throughout the entire evening, but I’m sure he didn’t. I’ll certainly ask him, though.”

  “We may want to talk to your husband too, Mrs. Lord,” he said.

  “Oh, go right ahead! Feel free to put us all through this third degree!”

  “Let me ask you just one more question,” he said. “Do you recall whether either you or Mrs. McCarthy were carrying a purse or a handbag while you were making this tour of the upper floor of Mrs. Willey’s house?”

  She couldn’t resist it. She leaned forward and said sweetly. “But officer, don’t you know? It’s very bad form, it’s very middle class, for a woman to carry her handbag around with her in someone else’s house. It implies that you don’t trust your hostess.”