`Where's Tom?' he said. `Is he still upstairs?'
`I heard him go down the back stairs. I imagine Mrs. Perez is feeding him in the kitchen. He seems to prefer the kitchen to the sitting room. I suppose that's natural, considering his heredity.'
`We won't go into the subject of that, eh?'
Hillman went into the bar alcove and made himself a very dark-looking highball. He remembered to offer me one, which I declined.
`What did that policeman want?' Elaine asked him.
`He had some stupid questions on his mind. I prefer not to go into them.'
`So you've been telling me for the past twenty-five years. You prefer not to go into things. Save the surface. Never mind the dry rot at the heart.'
`Could we dispense with the melodrama?'
`The word is tragedy, not melodrama. A tragedy has gone through this house and you don't have the mind to grasp it. You live in a world of appearances, like a fool.'
`I know. I know.'
His voice was light, but he looked ready to throw his drink in her face. `I'm an ignorant engineer, and I never studied philosophy.'
Her needles went on clicking. `I could stand your ignorance, but I can't stand your evasions any longer.'
He drank part of his drink, and waved his free hand loosely over his head. `Good heavens, Elaine, how much do I have to take from you? This isn't the time or place for one of those.'
`There never is a time or place,' she said. `If there's time, you change the clocks - this is known as crossing the International Ralph Line - and suddenly it's six o'clock in the morning, in Tokyo. If there's a place, you find an escape hatch. I see your wriggling legs and then you're off and away, into the wild Ralph yonder. You never faced up to anything in your life.'
He winced under her bitter broken eloquence. `That isn't true,' he said uneasily. `Archer and I have been really dredging tonight.'
`Dredging in the warm shallows of your nature? I thought you reserved that pastime for your women. Like Susanna Drew.'
Her name sent a pang through me. It was a nice name, innocent and bold and slightly absurd, and it didn't deserve to be bandied about by these people. If the Hillmans had ever been innocent, their innocence had been frittered away in a marriage of pretenses. It struck me suddenly that Hillman's affair with Susanna had also been one of pretenses. He had persuaded her to take care of Carol without any hint that he was the father of the child she was carrying.
`Good Lord,' he was saying now, `are we back on the Drew girl again after all these years?'
`Well, are we?' Elaine said.
Fortunately the telephone rang. Hillman went into the alcove to answer it, and turned to me with his hand clapped over the mouthpiece.
`It's Bastian, for you. You can take the call in the pantry. I'm going to listen on this line.'
There wasn't much use arguing. I crossed the music room and the dining room to the butler's pantry and fumbled around in the dark for the telephone. I could hear Mrs. Perez in the kitchen, talking to Tom in musical sentences about her native province of Sinaloa. Bastian's voice in the receiver sounded harsh and inhuman by comparison: `Archer?'
`I'm here.'
`Good. I checked the matter of Dick Leandro's transportation, in fact I've just been talking to a girl friend of his. She's a senior at the college, named Katie Ogilvie, and she owns a Chevrolet sedan, this year's model, blue in color. She finally admitted she lent it to him last night. He put over a hundred miles on the odometer.'
`Are you sure she wasn't with him? He had a girl with him, or another boy, Daly wasn't quite sure.'
`It wasn't Miss Ogilvie,' Bastian said. `She was peeved about the fact that he used her car to take another girl for a long ride.'
`How does she know it was a girl?'
`The lady dropped a lipstick in the front seat. A very nice white gold lipstick, fourteen carat. I don't think,' he added dryly, `that Miss Ogilvie would have testified so readily if it wasn't for that lipstick. Apparently Leandro impressed the need for secrecy on her.'
`Did he say why?'
`It had something to do with the Hillman kidnapping. That was all she knew. Well, do we pick up Leandro? You seem to be calling the shots.'
`He's on his way out here. Maybe you better follow along.'
`You sound as if things are building up to a climax.'
`Yeah.'
I could see its outlines. They burned on my eyeballs like the lights of Dack's Auto Court. I sat in the dark after Bastian hung up, and tried to blink them away. But they spread out into the darkness around me and became integrated with the actual world.
Sinaloa, Mrs. Perez was saying or kind of singing to Tom in the kitchen, Sinaloa was a land of many rivers. There were eleven rivers in all, and she and her family lived so close to one of them that her brothers would put on their bathing suits and run down for a swim every day. Her father used to go down to the river on Sunday and catch fish with a net and distribute them to the neighbors. All the neighbors had fish for Sunday lunch.
