I refolded the certified copy of the marriage license. I put it back in my pocket.
“Sure that’s the way you want it?” I asked him.
“That’s the way everybody wants it.”
“Good.” I stood up,, “I guess I was a fool to try to play it this way. Being a big time publisher and having the brains to go with it—if it takes any—you might have assumed I didn’t come out here just to play the heavy. I didn’t revive ancient history or spend my own money to get the facts just to twist them around somebody’s neck. I didn’t investigate Paul Marston because the Gestapo murdered him, because Mrs. Wade was wearing the wrong badge, because she got mixed up on her dates, because she married him in one of those quickie wartime marriages. When I started investigating him I didn’t know any of those things. All I knew was his name. Now how do you suppose I knew that?”
“No doubt somebody told you;” Spencer said curtly.
“Correct, Mr. Spencer. Somebody who knew him in New York after the war and later on saw him out here in Chasen’s with his wife.”
“Marston is a pretty common name,” Spencer said, and sipped his whiskey. He turned his head sideways and his right eyelid drooped a fraction of an inch. So I sat down again. “Even Paul Marstons could hardly be unique. There are nineteen Howard Spencers in the Greater New York area telephone directories, for instance. And four of them are just plain Howard Spencer with no middle initial. ”
“Yeah. How many Paul Marstons would you say had had one side of their faces smashed by a delayed-action mortar shell and showed the scars and marks of the plastic surgery that repaired the damage?”
Spencer’s mouth fell open. He made some kind of heavy breathing sound. He got out a handkerchief and tapped his temples with it.
“How many Paul Marstons would you say had saved the lives of a couple of tough gamblers named Mendy Menendez and Randy Starr on that same occasion? They’re still around, they’ve got good memories. They can talk when it suits them. Why ham it up any more, Spencer? Paul Marston and Terry Lennox were the same man. It can be proved beyond any shadow of a doubt.”
I didn’t expect anyone to jump six feet into the air and scream and nobody did. But there is a kind of silence that is almost as loud as a shout. I had it. I had it all around me, thick and hard. In the kitchen I could hear water run. Outside on the road I could hear the dull thump of a folded newspaper hit the driveway, then the light inaccurate whistling of a boy wheeling away on his bicycle.
I felt a tiny sting on the back of my neck. I jerked away from it and swung around. Candy was standing there with his knife in his hand. His dark face was wooden but there was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen before.
“You are tired, amigo,” he said softly. “I fix you a drink, no?”
“Bourbon on the rocks, thanks,” I said.
“De pronto, senor.”
He snapped the knife shut, dropped it into the side pocket of his white jacket and went softly away.
Then at last I looked at Eileen. She sat leaning forward, her hands clasped tightly. The downward tilt of her face hid her expression if she had any. And when she spoke her voice had the lucid emptiness of that mechanical voice on the telephone that tells you the time and if you keep on listening, which people don’t because they have no reason to, it will keep on telling you the passing seconds forever, without the slightest change of inflection.
“I saw him once, Howard. Just once. I didn’t speak to him at all. Nor he to me. He was terribly changed. His hair was white and his face—it wasn’t quite the same face. But of course I knew him, and of course he knew me; We looked at each other. That was all. Then he was gone out of the room and the next day he was gone from her house. It was at the Lorings’ I saw him—and her. One afternoon late. You were there, Howard. And Roger was there. I suppose you saw him too.”
“We were introduced,” Spencer said. “I knew who he was married to.”
“Linda Loring told me he just disappeared. He gave no reason. There was no quarrel. Then after a while that woman divorced him. And still later I heard she found him again. He was down and out. And they were married again. Heaven knows why. I suppose he had no money and it didn’t matter to him any more. He knew that I was married to Roger. We were lost to each other.”
“Why?” Spencer asked.
Candy put my drink in front of me without a word. He looked at Spencer and Spencer shook his head. Candy drifted away. Nobody paid any attention to him. He was like the prop man in a Chinese play, the fellow that moves things around on the stage and the actors and audience alike behave as if he wasn’t there.
“Why?” she repeated. “Oh, you wouldn’t understand. What we had was lost. It could never be recovered. The Gestapo didn’t get him after all. There must have been some decent Nazis who didn’t obey Hitler’s order about the Commandos. So he survived, he came back. I used to pretend to myself that I would find him again, but as he had been, eager and young and unspoiled. But to find him married to that redheaded whore—that was disgusting. I already knew about her and Roger. I have no doubt Paul did too. So did Linda Loring, who is a bit of a tramp herself, but not completely so. They all are in that set. You ask me why I didn’t leave Roger and go back to Paul. After he had been in her arms and Roger had been in those same willing arms? No thank you. I need a little more inspiration than that. Roger I could forgive. He drank, he didn’t know what he was doing. He worried about his work and he hated himself because he was just a mercenary hack. He was a weak man, unreconciled, frustrated, but understandable. He was just a husband. Paul was either much more or he was nothing. In the end he was nothing.”
I took a swig of my drink. Spencer had finished his. He was scratching at the material of the davenport. He had forgotten the pile of paper in front of him, the unfinished novel of the very much finished popular author.
“I wouldn’t say he was nothing,” I said.
She lifted her eyes and looked at me vaguely and dropped them again.
“Less than nothing,” she said, with a new note of sarcasm in her voice. “He knew what she was, he married her. Then because she was what he knew she was, he killed her. And then ran away and killed himself.”
“He didn’t kill her,” I said, “and you know it.”
