Big Bill stood up lumberingly, half the whiskey in his glass splashing on the carpet. “Lou,” he said, in a loud, whining voice, as if she were much farther away from him than she was, “you know what this guy is accusing me of?” He turned his furious, narrow glare on his son-in-law. “You tell her!”
Louise had stopped motionless in the middle of the floor. She was wearing a little green coat tightly belted at the waist and her spunsugar Philip Treacy hat. Her face had gone as pale as paper. She looked quickly from her father to Glass and back again, scanning, assessing, calculating. David Sinclair, resembling today a sleek young priest, in a black silk suit and white polo-neck, took the shopping packages from her hands and set them with his own on a low table by the fireplace and turned back, smiling eagerly, avid for whatever might be coming next.
“Dylan Riley telephoned me on the day he was murdered,” Glass said, looking at none of them but conscious of their eyes on him. He could hear himself breathing, hisss- hiss, hisss -hiss. “He phoned twice, in fact. Only one of those calls reached me, in the office. The second time he called, he called here.” It was what he had remembered Captain Ambrose saying, that Riley’s phone had logged two telephone calls to him; what Ambrose had omitted to say, until Glass phoned him yesterday from Bridgehampton, was that the two calls had been made to different numbers, one at the office in Mulholland Tower, and the other here at the apartment. “What I’m wondering is, who took the second call?”
Mulholland lumbered a step forward until he was looming over his son-in-law. The knuckles of his hand that held the whiskey glass were white under the suntan. He swayed a little. “What are you trying to do here?” he asked, almost plaintively. “What kind of mischief are you trying to make?”
Glass lit a cigarette with a hand that shook.
“He’s saying,” David Sinclair said, still smiling, his eyes aglitter, “that a person in this room shot Dylan Riley- only he has the wrong person.”
“David!” Louise cried, and it was as if something had propelled itself out of her, a tangible fragment of woe, and then, “ Da vid,” she said again, softly. “Stop, please stop.”
Her son ignored her. He looked at Glass and his smile became almost tender. “But it’s true, isn’t it, Monsieur Poirot?” He stood with his hands lightly in the pockets of his jacket, his thumbs hooked on the outside, in the pose of an English royal. A knotted nerve was twitching at one side of his mouth. Big Bill gave a sort of groan, twisting up his lips as if at some awful taste, and set the tumbler down with a thud on the little table where the parcels were stacked. “This is crazy,” he said. “I don’t understand this.” He turned abruptly and shambled off, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. Louise spoke his name but he waved a hand behind him, shooing away her appeal in angry dismissiveness, and went on. At the door he paused for a moment, still with his back turned to the room, his head lowered, then softly he opened the door and went out and as softly shut it behind him again.
“Well well,” David Sinclair said into the silence of his grandfather’s departure, “and then there were three!”
Louise, as if coming suddenly out of a trance, put a hand to her forehead and shut her eyes briefly. “This is,” she said, “this is…” and could not finish. She opened her eyes and looked at her husband. “Why are you doing this? You don’t need to, you don’t need to… to…”
“ Need? ” Glass said. “Where does need come into it?”
“He doesn’t understand,” David said to his mother, as if to soothe her. “He’s just an old broken-down reporter who’s missed the story entirely.” He smiled again at Glass. “Haven’t you? Because you see, Dad, it’s Murder on the Orient Express. We all did it, all of us-including you.”
15
ALL IN THE FAMILY
T hroughout his life, so it seemed, John Glass had been running to women for solace. People had remarked when he was young on his closeness to his mother-one of his aunts used to say, with a sour little sniff, that he was more like her boyfriend than her son. Louise, too, he had looked to for reassurance and protection. He suspected it was mainly this that he had married her for, to be his shield against the world’s buffetings. And she, what had she hoped for from him?
When he stopped on Bleecker Street and pressed the doorbell the intercom did its rattle and squawk and then Alison O’Keeffe answered. He spoke his name. “How did I know it would be you?” she said, with rueful weariness. “How did I know that?”
Huddled in the doorway, misting the metal grille with his breath, Glass was reminded of sweaty sessions in the confession box, long ago. He said: “I need to talk to you.”
Another pause. “Well, you’d better come up, then.”
When he stepped out of the elevator she was waiting in the doorway in her painter’s dark blue smock. She led him upstairs to the little cold apartment, where she sat down in an armchair and lit a Gauloise. She blew an angry-seeming trumpet of smoke at the ceiling. “Well?” she said. “What is it you need to talk about so urgently?”
The sun of late afternoon shone in the mansard window above them, setting a beam of pale gold light to stand at a slant behind her chair. He lit one of his Marlboros.
“Do you know anything about quantum physics?” he asked. She said nothing. “Neither do I, or not much, anyway. But there’s an experiment scientists do, when they fire an atomic particle at a surface with two narrow slits in it, and wait for what will happen on the other side. What happens is that an interference pattern forms, as if the particle was not a particle but a wave. In other words, the single particle seems to go through both slits at the same time, and”-he laughed-“interfere with itself!” Alison watched him impassively. Billows of pale blue smoke from their cigarettes rolled and tumbled together in the sunlight behind her. “That’s strange enough,” he said, “but what’s stranger still is that the particle only behaves like that, like a wave, when it’s not being observed. When you’re looking at the particle it stays a particle, and when you’re not looking it becomes a wave.”
She waited. He drew on his cigarette, glancing vaguely here and there about the room and frowning. She asked: “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how hard it is to know anything for certain. I thought I knew who killed Dylan Riley, but I didn’t.”
A lengthy silence passed, then Alison gave a sort of laugh. “And I thought you had come here to talk about us.” She turned her eyes aside angrily. “So tell me,” she said, “who did kill him?”
“It doesn’t matter. I was wrong.” He looked around for a place to stub out his cigarette. “I should go.”
“Yes,” she said, her face still turned away from him. “You should.”
He walked the streets for a long time, as the day died and the million lights of Manhattan began to come on. He had never felt such a stranger to the city. He ducked into a dive on Broadway and drank whiskey, slumped at the bar in the amber and pink gloom surrounded by indistinct figures like himself, whose faces would materialize for a moment when they leaned down into the harsh white glare coming up from the strip-lighting under the rim of the bar to take a sip from their glasses and then retire back into the shadows. After the third shot he dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and hustled himself out into the night again.
When he got out of the elevator at his floor in Mulholland Tower he would not let himself look out of the big window at the end of the corridor, but inside his office, with its wall of glass, there was no avoiding the vertiginous city out there bristling on its stilts, sleekly bejeweled in the shining darkness. There was no avoiding Louise, either, sitting silently in the steel and leather chair where Dylan Riley had slouched that first day, when all that was to happen had not happened yet, and the world was different. She had not switched on a light, and in the gloaming she might have been a statue fashioned from steel, sharp featured, burnished, unmoving.
“The night man on the desk let me in,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
He was smoking a cigarette-he had lit it in the elevator, defying the smoke alarm, which anyway had failed to go off-and now he groped on the desk for an ashtray that was not there. He had to search for the switch of the desk lamp, too. It cast a cone of light downward, its penumbra illuminating the side of Louise’s face, an ear, an eye, a corner of her mouth.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“Oh, not long.” They were like two travelers stranded in a waiting room, at night, far from home. “I guessed
