Nets to Catch the Wind Read online

  NETS TO CATCH THE WIND

  DOLORES HITCHENS

  LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS

  Copyright © 1952 by Dolores Hitchens, renewed 1980 by Patricia Johnson and Michael J. Hitchens. Used by permission of the Estate of Dolores Hitchens.

  Published by The Library of America,

  14 East 60th Street, New York, NY 10022.

  All rights reserved.

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  eISBN 978–1–59853–485–6

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Biographical Note

  Vain the ambition of kings

  Who seek by trophies and dead things

  To leave a living name behind,

  And weave but nets to catch the wind.

  —JOHN WEBSTER

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE TRAIN for San Francisco and points north was late in leaving the station that evening. This was warm and muggy weather, the middle of August, and the dark settled in over the city without any stirring or cooling of the air, so that the people in the train gradually became impatient, restless, their nerves worn with the combination of delay, heat, and enclosure. In the chair cars there was much movement and much noise. Babies cried, and adult passengers rattled papers, and a very old lady made a series of trips to the lavatory to dampen her wrists and to remove one by one her collection of petticoats.

  In the Pullman section things were quieter, but it was an exhausted quiet. Children were stretched out along the seats, sleeping or just lying still, while their mothers fanned them. Other passengers read or smoked, and stared in rebellion at the lights outside that didn’t recede; and the only one in motion was the porter, passing through the cars on various errands. In the compartments there was silence. Here at the end of the train the only thing to be seen was the quiet, dim-lit corridor, the only thing to be heard was the hum of the air-conditioning units tuning up for the hours ahead.

  None of the other passengers saw the manacled man and his guard enter the train. They came quickly, and not by the usual entrance. The manacled man was small and dark; he had a habit of listening to what was said without speaking in return, and he met the conductor’s examining stare firmly, his own eyes bright, fixed, and filled with sardonic humility. The guard was a tall man; wariness was built into his face as if it had been born there. He spoke to the conductor. “Which door?”

  The conductor threw open the door of the last compartment. It was large, roomy, and well-fitted, though stuffy now from being shut so long. The conductor stepped in swiftly to adjust the air-conditioning vent, then returned to the corridor, walking in a way that kept him from getting close to the manacled man and so that the police detective remained between them. The prisoner looked into the room; his eyes kept their mask of mock subservience, but there was something new too—a flicker that might have been fear. He drew in a breath and his shoulders jerked, narrowing as if at the touch of a cold wind.

  The detective, too, examined the room. “Okay, Tzegeti.”

  The prisoner entered the compartment; the detective followed, then a porter carrying a couple of bags. The conductor made a notation in his book. The porter withdrew, pocketing a tip, and the detective shut the door. In the corridor the conductor heard the rattle of leg chains.

  The prisoner, now manacled hand and foot and chained to one of the steel supports forming the berth, sat close to the window and looked out at the night. He could see a ramp, a diminishing line of pillars, and a row of lights, and a lonesome dog who ran here and there as if sniffing out the steps of a vanished master. The concrete of the ramp was gray and dirty, so that the small dog had a brilliant whiteness. His quick motion, his searching friendliness, brought out sharply the lifelessness of the empty concourse. No sound entered; the little dog acted out his part in noiseless pantomime. The man at the window watched the dog and then looked at the pillars, ticking them off with his eyes to the end, where closed doors shut off the way into the lighted, crowded station. There was no expression on his face beyond the faint mockery, no expectation, no hope nor anger. The detective stood on the other side of the room under a wall light, examining a gun.

  The train moved, an abrupt jerk. The detective’s head snapped up; he kept the gun in his hands; his eyes went from the prisoner to the dark window. After a moment he said, “Too bad we didn’t rate the streamliner.”

  The prisoner made no reply beyond a slight, half-apologetic smile. He went back to watching the dog, who had shied from the moving train, tail tucked under, his eyes rolling and afraid. The prisoner puckered his lips slightly; there was an almost soundless whistle, not a calling signal, but a salute, a farewell. The dog, of course, didn’t hear. He put his nose down in a new spot farther from the puffing engine and went searching again for the footsteps that were lost.

  The detective slipped the gun into the holster under his coat, patted the coat into place, then sat down on the seat facing the prisoner. He examined the small slight man, the masked eyes, the expressionless mouth. “Fred Tzegeti,” he said, as if reading the name out of his mind. Then: “Have you figured out what you’re going to say up there?”

  The prisoner opened his manacled hands and looked into their palms as if surprised at their abject emptiness.

  “This will be your chance,” the detective went on. “The last one, perhaps.”

  Now the prisoner’s lips moved. His voice was soft, inflectionless. “I can only say what I have told before.”

  “That didn’t get you anywhere at the trial.”

  The prisoner looked at the window. They were leaving the shelter of the big metropolitan station now. Suddenly houses and streets appeared, snapping past. Wigwags and flashing red lights sprang at them out of the dark. The sky above held the last pale vestiges of twilight; toward the horizon it was milk-green and the tall buildings outlined against it had a marching look. The prisoner began to speak carefully. “Then if no one believed me in the courtroom——”

  The detective shook his head. “We knew better than that.”

  Again there was the faint, disparaging smile. Some minutes passed in silence.

  The detective asked, “Isn’t there anyone you’d like to have know the truth?”

  He saw a slight change in
the prisoner, a momentary shifting and stiffening; but Tzegeti recovered quickly.

  “Your wife and kid?” the detective suggested, frowning.

  The prisoner shrugged. He moved his feet, and the chains clanked.

  The detective rubbed his cheek. “Oh, of course we tried all that. We worked on you with that angle until our tongues were hanging out. Your kid’s just fifteen, just getting along in school where it might hurt like hell to have the others know that her old man’s doing time in the pen for murder. And your wife’s all alone and has to make her living and the kid’s, plus being kind of sickly and not speaking English very well.”

  “They were satisfied with what I told,” said Tzegeti carefully, looking into his palms.

  “And the fix it leaves them in doesn’t matter.”

  The train slowed for an intersection. A red light swam up and shone in the prisoner’s face, flickered in his eyes—for an instant he floated there in the half-dark, outlined in fire, a fit creature for hell, and the detective moved his glance uneasily away.

  The train crept across the intersection. A line of cars waited, their lights diminishing in the distance. Some stores were open, and people walked in and out or loitered on the sidewalk looking at the bright windows. The last of the pale green was dying on the horizon. A few clouds were scattered there, dull, dark, the color of thick smoke. The prisoner drew a breath in through his teeth. “For all my life,” he said.

  The detective couldn’t figure out what Tzegeti meant. You never got inside Tzegeti or knew what made him tick. He was too quiet, too self-contained. Or too scared. He never let you see behind the humble, dryly apologetic mask. And half the time he seemed to be talking to himself.

  The detective fished some cigarettes from his coat pocket. “Want to smoke?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” Tzegeti leaned forward, took the cigarette between his lips, drew deeply on it as the other man held the match. He relaxed on the seat cushion. Some tenseness went out of his face, as though he had passed some test, some point of danger. The clicking of the wheels on the steel rails beneath was the only sound in the little room.

  The detective was looking out at the flashing scene, the streets, the rows of stores and houses. “Good old L.A.,” he said as if to himself.

  Tzegeti, too, had his eyes there. “The country of the blind.”

  “Some of them are pretty sharp.”

  “Yes, in some ways.” Tzegeti didn’t specify which ways; his tone held little interest. Since his arrest, and all through his trial, he had had somewhat the manner of a spectator at another’s misfortune. He was a polite and mildly apologetic onlooker. The detective knew it was a mask, some kind of defense—against what?

  There was a rap at the door. The detective got to his feet, turned on the overhead light, reached in under his coat and kept his hand there as he touched the lock. “Who is it?”

  “Porter, sir.”

  The detective put his foot about two inches from the wall, let the door swing in to touch it. The Negro porter stood in the corridor.

  “I’ve brought you some towels.”

  “Okay. Put them here.” The detective thrust his arm through the opening; the porter draped the towels over it.

  “Is everything all right, sir?”

  “We’re doing fine.” Tomorrow we’ll be in Sacramento, where the governor’s committee on crime will try to pry from Tzegeti the things we couldn’t sweat out of him, the detective added to himself, seeing the curiosity in the brown face before him. “If we need anything, I’ll give you a ring.”

  “You do that, sir.”

  The detective shut the door and bolted it. The prisoner hadn’t moved; his hands lay passive and the cigarette burned in one corner of his mouth.

  The detective adjusted the towels on their racks.

  There was a second rap at the door. A voice said, “Sorry, sir, I forgot to give you these.” The detective reached for the door and opened it again.

  It had been timed and planned perfectly. There had been no more than a few seconds since the porter’s visit. The voice, its tone and inflection, was exactly right, carrying the proper mixture of authority and a desire to serve. The rap was exactly the same—two small taps with an instant of hesitation between.

  For a moment as the door swung wide the two men in the compartment stared at the figure on the threshold.

  His gun was almost in his hand when the detective’s body jumped under the impact of bullets; he turned on his heels, made grabbing motions toward the edge of the lounge, then slid to the floor. He took on the heaviness, the fluidity, of meal inside a sack as he flattened in that small space.

  The prisoner still had not moved.

  The man in the doorway had a silk stocking pulled over his face, spots cut out for eyes, his old-fashioned cap pulled low, the beak casting a shadow to his chin. “Tzegeti?” he whispered, with the hint of laughter.

  Tzegeti did the futile and habitual thing, looking down into his hands as if surprised yet at how little he had to offer. He was still looking down when the bullets tore into his head.

  The sound of the shots did not penetrate beyond the vestibule of the last car. It was some moments before the occupant of another compartment put his head into the corridor to see what might be the matter. Since the porter was lying unconscious in the men’s room, and the door of the last compartment had drifted almost shut, there was not much to be seen. There was a lot of smell, though, a terrific odor of gunfire, and it was this which finally sent the passenger in search of the conductor.

  In the Pullman section things were improving rapidly. The air conditioning had swung into high gear; the kids were waking up and looking around and asking questions; a few card games had sprung up; and a man who had served in the State Senate from west Orange County was giving his opinions on the current crime investigations. In the chair cars the situation was even gayer; there was almost a party spirit. The evening was young and so were most of the passengers. The soft-drink and sandwich bar had opened and was doing a brisk business. The old lady of the petticoats—actually the only old person in that car—had gone peacefully to sleep in spite of the noise and the lights.

  Such was the situation when the murders of Fredric Louis Tzegeti and Robert Louis Luttrell were discovered. The men had these two things in common—a middle name, and Death.

  The first story was telephoned in by a reporter named Fogarty, who had been on the train, having missed the streamliner which had left earlier, and on his way to Sacramento to cover the hearing at which Tzegeti was supposed to be a witness. The facts released by the police were meager. Luttrell and his prisoner were dead. There had been no arrest. There was a witness—of sorts. The identity of the witness was a secret. A sum of money had been found in the compartment with the dead men; this fact was admitted only because Fogarty, rushing in during the first few minutes of confusion and excitement, had found it himself, rolled together and pressed to the floor by Luttrell’s outstretched right hand.

  Within a few hours the picture began to shape up, and it was not pretty. All the evidence pointed to an agreed delivery of the prisoner which had not come off. The price, perhaps, had not been that which Luttrell had expected. In the negotiations, necessarily hurried and full of tension, nerves had snapped and tempers exploded. Luttrell had been beaten to the draw. The prisoner had died in the cross fire, had been abandoned then by his would-be deliverers.

  The amount which Luttrell held in death—a down payment, perhaps—was exactly twenty-seven hundred dollars. Not a round sum, and one which pointed the way to the disagreement which had ended in the double murder.

  At eleven o’clock that night, in the hall of the police station in Lomena, the widow of the detective passed the widow and the child of the prisoner. There was no recognition; these people did not know each other. The widow of the detective was a slender blond woman, somewhere past twenty-five but not yet thirty; she seemed stunned and lost, and her eyes passed over the two on the bench without any
particular notice. Tzegeti’s widow and his daughter wore shawls; they looked quite foreign; and though they were not really touching each other, there was the impression that they clung together in the midst of holocaust.

  Amy Luttrell was taken into the office of the chief of police and asked to make a statement. She was treated with consideration, even kindness; but shortly she understood where the questions were leading. It was assumed that her husband might have dropped some hint concerning his coming good fortune; he could have made up a lie or he could have let her in on the truth.

  Amy Luttrell leaned across the desk of the police chief and told him in distinct words what she thought of his theory. This marked the end of the official efforts to gain her confidence and to trick an admission out of her.

  It did not mark the end of Amy Luttrell’s interest in clearing her husband’s reputation.

  She awoke sometime past the middle of the night. After the long heat of the August day, the thick warmth lasting almost to midnight, a coolness had begun to set in. She reached down, searching for the blanket she had folded at the foot of the bed. With her movement, the bed squeaked, a familiar noise, reassuring in the empty dark. Then through a crack at the edge of the blind a ray of light from the street struck her eye. She got out of bed and went to the window. A car was sitting at the curb in front of the house, its lights on, its motor running. She waited, expecting some movement, some indication of life; but nothing happened. There was a slight foggy haze, brought on by the day’s heat, and this clouded and fuzzed the headlights, though not enough to conceal any human figure if there had been one. Amy Luttrell waited for another minute or so, then crossed the room to the dresser and examined the little clock there. Phosphorescent numerals and spidery hands glowed in the dark. It was a quarter of three.

  She went back to the window. The car was there, as before. The smell of the fog seeped in through the open half of the window, all the weed-grown lots of this half-built subdivision yielding up their essences of dead grass and dust, with overtones of the sea a few miles beyond. Amy Luttrell shivered. It was a crazy hour for a car to be sitting at her curb. And tonight . . .