Nets to Catch the Wind Read online

  There was a film of sweat on the sick woman’s face. But no words came. She seemed stricken dumb, clutched by some emotion Amy could only guess at. Her skin was chalk white. Cords stood out in her throat. The hands seemed frozen, spread out on the rough sheeting.

  Amy stood up. She was disturbing this woman. In fact, if she hadn’t been so sure of the innocence of her errand, she might have thought that she was scaring Mrs. Tzegeti almost into a convulsion. “Believe me, the truth will be known someday. We’ll find out who killed your husband and mine on that train, and who thought up the filthy plot to blacken my husband’s name.”

  Mrs. Tzegeti made a choked sound of protest. The girl plucked at Amy’s sleeve.

  “I’ll see you again,” Amy promised, bending over the bed.

  She could not understand what Mrs. Tzegeti said in reply. The words were too stuttering, too garbled. But she could see the expression in the woman’s eyes. There was no invitation there for her return. There was a fear of the sort Amy had never seen before, naked, animal-like, appalling.

  Yes, Mrs. Tzegeti was ill. She was sick with fright. Amy even wondered if the woman weren’t a little crazy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE GIRL followed Amy into the front room. Amy said, “Do you and your mother have any money for living expenses?”

  “We are going to take in washing,” the girl answered, glancing toward the new washing machine.

  Amy looked at the machine too. It didn’t fit anything else in this house. It was new and sleek, one of the marvelous gadgets of the American scene, and the rest of the stuff was like that bed, big and dark and clumsy and too old to have come from anything but a junk store, or for free off the city dumps, or out of somebody’s stuffed attic for sweet charity’s sake.

  “It’s brand new, isn’t it?”

  The girl nodded slowly.

  “Do you have any idea what you should charge?”

  The girl’s eyes flickered. “No—no, we hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Get a laundry list from the nearest laundry,” Amy told her. “Study it and get the prices off it. Your work has to be as good or better, since you’re going to buck established competition, and your prices may have to be a little lower.” The words had a cruel taste in her mouth; she saw the bafflement on the child’s face; but all of this was true and these poor babes in the American woods had better be disillusioned at once. “If you want my advice, I’d stick to doing fancy things—blouses and frilly children’s things and fine lingerie. I think you’d have a chance there. Laundries don’t do handwork very well, and they’re tough on delicate fabrics.”

  “Thank you.” The girl seemed a lot more cheerful all at once. “I hadn’t thought of that, but it must be so.”

  “Yes, it’s so. Call me if your mother seems any worse, will you?”

  The girl nodded again. She touched Amy’s sleeve, a shy gesture of friendly good-by. “I’m glad you came to see us.”

  Amy went out on the porch, then turned back. “What’s your name?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  Amy was surprised. “That’s an English name.”

  “It was my grandmother’s. She was English.”

  “Good-by, Elizabeth.”

  “Good-by, Mrs. Luttrell.”

  Amy went down the steps, her head full of thought about kids from Middle Europe who turn up claiming English grandmothers. Elizabeth had scarcely any accent left, but of course she’d gone to school here for a couple of years; she’d associated with American children, learned their speech and their ways. There was still a foreign look to her, though. Perhaps it was because of the way she wore her hair, the prim braids without adornment.

  Amy got into her car, the small coupé, and then took another look at the clustering houses. They had an air of defense against a common enemy, she decided. Polack, or whatever—she kept remembering Fogarty’s phrase—and they were scared. They were afraid of a new world with too many cars, television sets, jet planes, and washing machines. And too much speed.

  She drove into downtown Lomena. The streets were wide and clean, the houses fresh with good paint, the yards uniform. It was a nice little town, and you didn’t think of the gambling palaces until you drove quite a way west, toward the beaches, and found them there all in a row.

  She had the address of the Schneider home. It wasn’t quite the place you imagined for a gambling lord. It was low and old-fashioned, a white house set inside a big yard. There was a steel-link fence, about seven feet high, and a couple of mean-looking chows. This was the only indication that visitors just couldn’t walk in.

  Amy rang a bell set into a gatepost. A buzzing noise answered. She looked around. Fixed to a standard was a small steel box. She poked up the lid and found a miniature telephone. A man’s voice spoke. “What do you want?” He didn’t make it sound rude, just hurried.

  “I want to see Mrs. Schneider.”

  “She’s not seeing anyone today.”

  “I’m Mrs. Luttrell.”

  “Who?”

  “My husband was killed last night, along with the man who was convicted of the murder of Mrs. Schneider’s husband.”

  “Just a minute.”

  She waited, looking at the sunny morning, the big blue sky, the fresh green lawns and the bright geraniums in Mrs. Schneider’s yard. It was going to be hot. There was little breeze, and already the lawns were giving off a lush heavy smell like mown hay. The chows had their mouths open, their eyes shut, and they lay in the shade of an oleander tree.

  A man came out on the porch of the white house and whistled to the dogs. They looked at him without getting up. He walked down the pathway to the gate where Amy stood. He was a tall man in an expensive suit. He had silver-gray hair and silver-rimmed spectacles, very modern spectacles with broad earpieces, and the hand he put on the gate lock had had a lot of manicuring. “You’re Mrs. Luttrell? Do you have any identification with you?”

  Amy took her driver’s license out of her handbag and showed it to him. He undid the gate and she went through. One of the chows stood up; there was some interest in his eye as he looked at Amy. She was reminded all at once of the charts on butchershop walls, with all the cuts of beef outlined so you knew which was where on a cow. She had a feeling that the chow was imposing some such chart on her anatomy.

  “Lie down, Tong,” the man said. The dog settled back into the shade. “Come this way, please, Mrs. Luttrell. About the identification—you understand that the newspaper people are clever and persistent. Since the murders on the train, they’ve been after Mrs. Schneider.”

  “She doesn’t wish to see them?”

  “She has nothing to say about the deaths of Tzegeti and your husband, Mrs. Luttrell, since she knows nothing.” He gave her a steady look through the silver-rimmed glasses.

  “I was hoping she might have some information for me.”

  “She has.” He opened the door and they entered a hall. The place was air-conditioned, startlingly cool after the warmth of the morning outside. The interior was spacious and somewhat old-fashioned, but not in the way the Tzegeti house was old-fashioned—the chairs were small and frail, the small tables against the wall were darkly polished and shining, the flowers were rich. Much money had been spent here. A door stood open at the right. Amy looked into the room beyond.

  Over by the windows, across an expanse of gray rug, was a settee upholstered in canary-yellow satin. A woman sat on it. She was not the kind of woman Amy had thought would have been married to Herman Schneider. She fitted this house, its delicate antiques, its cool fragrant air. Mrs. Schneider looked like a duchess.

  Amy walked across the gray rug and stood before her. Mrs. Schneider held out a hand. “Mrs. Luttrell? I am happy to know you.”

  Amy sized her up. Mrs. Schneider had on a plain black dress with a bit of silver lace at her throat. Her hair was silver too—it was, in fact, the exact color of the man’s, and Amy realized that they resembled each other.

  “You have already met
my brother, Vernon Wyse?”

  Wyse said, “I neglected to introduce myself. I was busy making sure Mrs. Luttrell hadn’t a dictating machine hidden somewhere.”

  She apologized. “The newspaper people have besieged us.”

  “I can understand that,” Amy said. “I had a caller at three o’clock this morning. A reporter named Fogarty.”

  “I have read his story.” Mrs. Schneider picked up a paper off a small table beside the settee and gave it to Amy. “Sit down, Mrs. Luttrell.”

  Amy sat down on the other end of the settee and looked at the headlines. She found Fogarty’s article. He had played up her belief in her husband’s innocence, stressing with a touch of irony (or condescension, she thought) the fact that the widow refused to accept her husband’s possible involvement with the people planning Tzegeti’s delivery, or even the existence of a gang bent on vengeance for Schneider’s murder.

  When she put the paper down, Mrs. Schneider said, “I found that article very interesting, Mrs. Luttrell. I am wholly in sympathy with your viewpoint.”

  “I’m glad to find someone who agrees with me.”

  There was a short, sharp silence. Vernon Wyse had picked up a small card and was studying it, smoking a cigarette, his face blank. Mrs. Schneider seemed embarrassed. “That wasn’t quite what I meant.”

  Amy felt her face grow stiff. “You mean that you believe that my husband was selling Tzegeti to a gang?”

  “No, no. Of course I don’t believe it. I knew your husband, Mrs. Luttrell—he came here during the investigation of Herman’s murder. I could never think that he was involved in the delivery of his prisoner. But I believe an offer was made.” Her softly modulated voice took on a hint of emphasis. “It must be true that an effort was made to bribe him.”

  “And my husband—did what?”

  “He was found with twenty-seven hundred dollars in his hand. That suggests, doesn’t it, that he was attempting to trap these men? That he was pretending to dicker in an attempt to gain time? He wanted to keep them there until help came. No doubt he knew what they intended doing with my husband’s murderer.”

  “You mean—kill him?”

  Mrs. Schneider’s fine eyes took on an expression of cynical surprise. “No. Did I imply it? I’m sorry if I did so. I meant—to reward Tzegeti for the job he had done. Free him, take him somewhere else where he would be safe, and useful again, perhaps.” She accepted a cigarette her brother had lit for her and began smoking it quietly.

  Amy indicated the newspaper. “It isn’t what Mr. Fogarty thinks.”

  “Mr. Fogarty doesn’t impress me as being particularly well informed,” Vernon Wyse put in. “After all, there is little he could know about the details of the crime.”

  “He was on the train when the crime occurred. He was one of the first of the passengers to reach the compartment where my husband and Mr. Tzegeti lay dead.”

  “Oh?” Behind the broad-banded lenses, Wyse’s glance seemed shocked and incredulous. “Yes, I guess he would rush in.”

  “He found the money.”

  Mrs. Schneider was shaking her head gently. “Of course he has to promote a theory which will help his editor sell papers. Revenge is a fine exciting element—so Tzegeti’s killers were bent on vengeance. And police corruption is sure-fire. People love to see those in authority discredited. Your husband’s reputation is to be sacrificed on that score.”

  Amy felt her shoulders droop. “It isn’t just the papers. Even the officers who had worked with my husband——”

  Mrs. Schneider broke in. “Don’t listen to them.”

  “And then what proof is there that Tzegeti was a member of any gang? His background must have been searched before his admittance to this country. They screen D.P.s pretty carefully.”

  “We haven’t any way of knowing what went on in those concentration camps,” Mrs. Schneider insisted. “Identities have been exchanged before. Tzegeti could have been anyone.”

  Amy recalled Tzegeti’s pictures in the paper at the time of his trial. He had seemed a humble, rather lost little man. And Robert Luttrell had had a frustrating conviction that Tzegeti had been innocent of Schneider’s murder. She asked finally, “Was your husband suspicious of Tzegeti?”

  “Oh no—but then . . . Herman——” Mrs. Schneider made a dismissing gesture. “He was suspicious of no one.” For just an instant her eyes seemed to dwell on her brother with a flicker of irony. “For a gambling man, Herman was exceptionally trustful. He had his faults, of course, but an excess of caution was not among them.”

  “You believe, then, that your husband was murdered by Tzegeti as part of a plot, and that Tzegeti was paid for the job?”

  “Paid?” Mrs. Schneider put a peculiar emphasis on the word. “I don’t know. Perhaps the crime was a part of the price the man must pay for being admitted here. Perhaps no money changed hands.”

  “The widow and child seem without funds.”

  The smoke that drifted in the air was no more silver-gray than Mrs. Schneider’s bent head. “I don’t know them. But I suspect that their knowledge of Tzegeti’s doings was greater than they pretended.”

  Vernon Wyse broke in now. “My sister doesn’t want you to take her word for this. There is someone else you must talk to—Herman’s lawyer. He’s here in town. You might even know him. His name’s Cunninghan. Jeff Cunninghan.”

  Amy said, “No, I don’t——”

  “You mustn’t let his appearance frighten you,” Mrs. Schneider interrupted. “He’s a very good lawyer. He has some information about Herman’s death that will interest you. It’s not anything we could give the papers. But when Vernon mentioned your name, and that you wanted to see me, I thought of Jeff and the information he has.”

  Vernon Wyse stepped toward her, offering the card. “Go see him.”

  Amy looked at the strip of white cardboard. It contained Cunninghan’s name and office address downtown.

  Mrs. Schneider rose now, took Amy’s hand. “Before you leave, Mrs. Luttrell, I want to express my sympathy. I, too, lost my husband unexpectedly and violently. I know what grief and shock must be yours.” Her fingers felt cool and strong, the flesh of her palm firm. There was no trace of tremor, of uncertainty. She was a woman with a lot of self-possession. The façade of a duchess had been acquired a long time ago. “And do come back sometime soon. We won’t be harried then by newspaper people. We’ll have time for a real talk.”

  Amy saw that she was being dismissed, passed along to the lawyer named Cunninghan. “Thank you. I’ll remember that.” She wondered if her voice sounded false, as Mrs. Schneider’s had not. Neither of them meant the things they said, she reminded herself. Mrs. Schneider’s interest was not in the death of an obscure police detective. She had wanted a look at the widow, obviously, and perhaps she had seen the opportunity to air a theory of her own.

  Vernon Wyse escorted Amy down the walk under the steady gaze of the two chows, let her out, relocked the gate. A man got out of a car parked in the shade of a tree across the street and walked rapidly toward them. “Wait a minute!” he said. Wyse turned to give him a glance. Amy knew the voice. It was Fogarty.

  She walked away quickly, thinking that he hadn’t recognized her. He stayed at the gate, trying to argue his way in to see Mrs. Schneider. Wyse was rebuffing him with polite monosyllables.

  Amy glanced at the card still folded in her hand. They wanted her to go to see the man named Cunninghan. Probably he would elaborate and bolster up the ideas expounded by Mrs. Schneider, the theory of the gang who had smuggled Tzegeti into the country for its own purposes, had tried to reclaim him from his prison sentence, had somehow accidentally slain him in the compartment with Luttrell. Amy believed none of it without being able to say, exactly, what it was that gave the thing an air of phantasy. She decided suddenly that Mr. Cunninghan would wait. There was someone else she could talk to first. Old Pop Bronson, the retired chief of police—who had a mind like a cross-filed index. He’d know things about the Schnei
der case which no one else would know.

  She stuffed Cunninghan’s card into her purse, got into her car, and drove west.

  It was late twilight when she reached home. The vacant lots had begun to smell of dew. She let the car drift into the driveway and then sat in it, not wanting to move. The house was empty, the barren spots which had represented choosing and planning to fill now meant only lost hopes, an ugly futility; in her mind’s eye she saw the plain, barely furnished rooms. Last Saturday, shopping late, she and Robert Luttrell had seen a picture in a furniture-store window, a vivid desert scene painted in tans and browns. They’d argued about getting it; she recalled all the things he had said, her answers, the final decision to look at the picture again a week later, to see if they still liked it. The week was passing. Next Saturday night the same store would be lit, open, and someone would be looking at the painting. But not them. She leaned her head on the wheel, on her clenched hands, and fought to keep back the tears.

  It would be better to go in at once, to get it over with.

  She put the car into the garage and walked to the kitchen door, fitted the key, went inside. The interior was shadowy, silent, echoing her footsteps like a whisper from room to room. She and Luttrell had been pleased once with the house’s removal from its neighbors, its privacy. Now it just seemed lonely.

  She clicked on the kitchen lights, aware all at once of hunger, remembering that she had had nothing to eat since the hurried toast and coffee that morning. In the icebox was a leftover chop, some soup, a couple of tomatoes, a dish of pudding. For a moment she debated returning to town. A café would be bustling and cheerful. Then she thought, I’m too tired. She put the meat and the soup on the range to heat, then went into the bedroom to leave her hat and purse.

  When she had finished eating and clearing the dishes, she returned to the bedroom again for the notes she had made at Pop Bronson’s and put into her handbag.

  It was dark now. There were faint cricket noises from the night outside, the faraway hoot of a train.