A Client Is Canceled Read online

  Where he went was almost into Pauline Barlow, who was just turning away from Eldredge. She must, I thought, know all she wanted to know about cows by that time. But then I looked at Eldredge and he didn’t look as if he’d been talking about cows; he didn’t look mild at all, but very serious and a little angry.

  Pauline smiled up at Craig, very pretty and fresh again—like, I thought, a nicely done milk-maid, but that thought was the result of association. She held out her glass to Craig, prettily, and then Ann said, “Oh, Dwight,” and Dwight turned back.

  “If you’re going to the bar,” Ann said, “would you bring me a scotch? A light scotch?”

  I didn’t, for a moment, know whether I was still on Ann Dean’s side or not and, for the same moment, Craig very evidently didn’t either. But then he got a wide smile on his lopsided face and, carrying Paulie’s glass, which he’d taken, came back and got Ann’s.

  “It’ll be light, Vix,” he told her, still with the grin which was somehow so like Ann’s own, and she said she supposed it would. Paulie came over to us and he went off to the bar. I got up while Paulie sat down. Then Craig came back and then the Pooh said, “We’ve got to go, Oh-Oh.”

  We didn’t, of course. We did get up and walk around for a while. It seemed that Eldredge wasn’t getting enough for his milk, although the cows were laying well—no, that’s chickens. It seemed that the Pooh simply had to see the wonderful fabrics Ann had brought over to show to Faye, but it seemed that now wasn’t the time she was going to see them; it seemed the Pooh thought Pauline had turned out to be such a lovely girl and that Uncle Tarzan accepted this as, under the circumstances, in the nature of things. It was half an hour after we’d got up that we did reach the edge of the terrace nearest It, which was standing where we had left it and glaring at us. Then we told George goodbye; Faye was sitting on a chaise talking to Uncle Tarzan and waved at us; Pauline had disappeared again; Dwight and Ann Dean were sitting, more or less facing each other, and talking without, so far as I could see, any animus. Ann waved at us too, and Dwight lifted one hand.

  It was, I thought, pretty optimistic of Ann to think she was going to get to sit there, since her car was immediately behind It, in the pushing position. But we decided to give It the benefit of the doubt again and got in and, just before the Pooh put our fate to the touch by stepping on It’s starter, we both looked back at the terrace. It was a very peaceful sight, with plenty of color and yet with repose. The sun had worked around so that Faye, on her chaise, was partly in sunlight and, just as the Pooh stepped on the starter, Uncle Tarzan took the end of the chaise and rolled her out of the sun. As I say it looked, from this little distance, serenely suburban, on the very well established side.

  It started. Perhaps It was impressed by the opulence of the surroundings; maybe It merely thought we were going home.

  3

  We also thought we were going home when we rolled down the Townsends’ drive, expecting that at any moment It would start tricks again. We had every intention of going home; we would, the Pooh said, go home and have sandwiches and a salad and another drink—perhaps—and then we’d see what we wanted to do. We’d gone almost a mile toward Mean Abode when we both remembered we had got a check that morning. When we remembered, we kept on going, past Mean Abode toward the Birch Hill Inn. Sandwiches were for non-check days.

  It was very hot still and we were driving west, into the sun, which was getting Saturday’s last shot at the part of the world it was blistering and was making the most of it. The sun beat into our faces and the heat of It’s motor surged up from the floor—It got very hot about doing very little—and the air that came in the windows was like the air one gets from a hand dryer in a public lavatory—air which parches but does not dry. The air didn’t dry me that evening; I was soaking. The Pooh wasn’t, of course; the Pooh was almost crisp, which seemed to me at the moment to be rubbing things in a little. I retaliated by calling her Winnie, from time to time, although I realized I was being unfair.

  Everything was fine again when the Pooh turned It north on the side road leading to the inn and everything was still finer when she had got It parked—facing down-grade on the inn’s sloping drive—and we were in what Birch Hill calls its tap-room. It was a good deal cooler there, since the tap-room is partly a basement. There were a couple of stools left on the short side of the bar and we went to them and began to eat peanuts. Sometime, the Pooh said, she was going to write a poem about peanuts; she said she couldn’t remember that anybody ever had. I said “two martinis, very very dry and very very cold and with lemon peel not olives” to the barman and watched him mix them. They were better than the ones we had had at Jovial George’s; a good professional’s always are, if you supervise him carefully.

  “On the other hand,” the Pooh said, when I told her this, as an observation on life appropriate to the circumstances, “on the other hand, George probably runs a better advertising agency. Clients beat a path to his door. Like Uncle Paul.”

  Uncle Paul, I told her, seemed at the moment more likely to be beating George’s door in or, alternatively, George’s brains out and she said, “Oh, you thought that too?”

  I had thought that too. I had also thought that George, and Dwight Craig—although Craig was of two minds, one of them concerned with Ann—didn’t like it at all, whatever “it” was. I said that, on the whole, I regarded her uncle as improbable, if not impossible.

  The Pooh agreed to that, not being a girl to defend indefensible relatives and, while we ate peanuts and drank martinis, we took apart the rest of the people who had been on the Townsends’ terrace. We agreed that Ann was very nice, and that it was considerate of us to agree on this since she had befriended us. I said that Pauline was, at any rate, pretty, and the Pooh said “Oh yes, in a way” and had I noticed she had fallen for Dwight Craig? I said I hadn’t.

  “The trouble with you,” the Pooh said, “is that you don’t see people. You just sit there making them up. Particularly when you’ve had a couple.”

  This was perfectly true, of course. I do make them up a good deal, that being part of the trade. In the trade I can’t use them as they come, and nobody in the trade can from pulp writers like me on up to anybody you want to pick as tops—Shakespeare comes to mind, so far as I am concerned. All of us sit around making them up, or making them over—simplifying them or complicating them—as a kind of finger exercise. I hadn’t made Pauline part of a triangle which would include Craig and Ann, but I told the Pooh I wasn’t averse to the idea. I said I’d buy it, if she would buy that her cousin was at the moment annoyed at Uncle Tarzan.

  “Everybody was,” the Pooh said, finishing her drink. I nodded to the barman and put one hand on the rim of the bar to steady myself. I was perfectly sober and coherent, but the muscular displacement involved in nodding to the barman a little unsteadied me. The Pooh suggested that perhaps we had had enough, but she didn’t suggest it with any determination. I said it was too soon to tell and agreed that Uncle Tarzan, although there was a general feeling of brass bands playing in his honor on the Townsend terrace, didn’t seem inordinately popular. Even the cow man had been cross with Uncle Tarzan. I told the Pooh what, apparently, was the cause of that crossness and she said, oh yes, she remembered something about it.

  “Considering how much money Uncle Paul has, he isn’t very popular,” the Pooh said. I said Faye seemed to like him. The Pooh said she had given up trying to tell anything about Faye; she said she would leave Faye to me to make up. She agreed Faye seemed to get along all right with Uncle Paul.

  “As for Mr. Craig—” the Pooh said, and then stopped abruptly and said, “Why, hello. I was just talking about you.”

  Dwight Craig said, “Oh, hello,” and pulled out a stool, just around the corner of the bar from us, for Ann Dean. I had a feeling that he had no great enthusiasm about finding us there and that, if he had noticed us before he’d committed himself to those particular stools at the bar he would have tried to find others. I had a feeling
he had planned to be with Ann and nobody else. But, after the first doubtful instant, he smiled pleasantly enough and Ann, saying merely “Hello,” grinned at us. Craig ordered them scotches. Ann inquired about the health of It. We reported.

  The four of us drank and talked for a while about nothing in particular and then John began to hover with the inn’s big menus and the Pooh nodded at him. We asked Craig and Ann if they wouldn’t join us and both said they couldn’t; Craig “had to get back” and Ann, less convincingly, had to get home. We ordered and had parts of new drinks at the bar, and then carried the other parts to a table against the wall. As soon as we had left, Ann and Craig began talking very busily, making up, I thought, for the time out our being there had cost them. We had finished vichyssoise and were working on lobster when Ann and Craig slid off their stools and went out. At the door, Craig put an arm around Ann’s shoulders and she didn’t, while they were in sight anyway, make any effort to shrug it off.

  “I’m sorry about your cousin,” I told the Pooh.

  “I can’t be sorry for anybody while I’m eating lobster,” the Pooh said, and extricated the tail meat. It was amazing how pretty the Pooh can look while eating lobster, an activity which seldom brings out the best in anyone.

  Our evening was to have ended there, It permitting; we were to have finished dinner, had coffee—and perhaps a small brandy each—and driven home to sit on our own terrace—so much smaller than the Townsends’, but a pleasant size for two—and eventually gone to bed. We hadn’t made those plans formally, but we hadn’t needed to. They were understood. And then, just on the brandies, we met some people.

  The people, as such, don’t come into the murder, except that they kept the Pooh and me from going home as we planned. They were people we knew and liked—four of them, to start with, and after a bit we were back at the bar again, starting all over with a new party; with, I’m afraid, one of those parties which keep getting bigger and bigger, and vaguer and vaguer, with new people coming in and old people falling out. Two of the four we had started with disappeared some time during it, and three people we’d never met before—although they all knew people we knew, and we’d all been hoping to get together some time—came in and along about eleven practically everybody in the tap-room was part of the party. (The few who weren’t smiled at us tolerantly.) I lost the Pooh for quite a while, and found her again sitting in a corner writing a poem on an old envelope (she tore it up the next day) and we ended, a little after midnight, talking about prize cattle with a man who raised them. One keeps running into cows in that part of the country—cows and cow people. I was carefully calling the animals cows, out of perversity, I guess. The cow man kept calling them cattle. He was pretty interesting about the cows, as a matter of fact. He showed us pictures of a prize bull. It was a Black Angus and appeared to have practically no legs, although otherwise a well-endowed animal. The Pooh said it was a perfectly beautiful cow, and then I decided it was time we did go home.

  It started again, which didn’t surprise either of us; we were both, if not tight—we’d been drinking very moderately after dinner, and very slowly, so that I was by then only normally ambivalent—in one of those moods when people expect things to go along smoothly. It may have noticed this, and decided to acquiesce. Perhaps It merely started because, the night being what it was, it had never had a chance to cool off.

  The night was hot; it did not seem any cooler than the afternoon. Almost always in the country it does cool off at night, but a few times every summer something happens that not even grass and trees and all the things that make the country cooler than the city can cope with. This was one of those nights, and now even the Pooh ran her fingers through her white hair, pushing it back, lifting it up from the nape of her neck. She said she wished we could put the top down and just drive around until it got cooler.

  We couldn’t put It’s top down, of course; It’s top hadn’t been in a condition to lower for years. And there was no sense in pressing our luck too far; It was behaving all right for the moment, but it was nothing in which to go on a long, carefree ride. I was the one who suggested we could drive up the back road to George Townsend’s pool and cool off in it. We had a standing invitation to use the pool whenever we liked, but up to that night we never had. It seemed, I told the Pooh, like a good time to start.

  “If there’re people there we’ll have to have suits,” the Pooh pointed out, but turned the car toward the Townsends’ all the same. I said that if there were people there, we probably could promote suits.

  We drove along the back road, which doesn’t go near the Townsend house but comes quite close to the partly natural, partly artificial, swimming pool George had had built where the brook widens. The back road was narrow and deserted and It, although it snorted and backfired a good deal, lurched along it well enough. Just before we got to the pool It backfired furiously, for no reason at all—we were going on a perfectly level stretch, in which there was nothing to frighten an automobile. The Pooh backed It up a little bank, facing down toward the road, and I blocked the wheels with stones, since the parking brake didn’t work any more. Then we went down to the pool, which was partly in moonlight and partly shadowed by trees and looked, I’m sure, just as the landscape architect who had planned it for George had hoped it would. There weren’t people there. The Pooh and I undressed beside the pool, in the moonlight. In the moonlight, with her hair whiter than ever, the Pooh looked like something in a very exquisite dream. (I just looked like a medium-sized guy with no clothes on, which couldn’t be helped.) We walked up to the diving board on the grass along the side of the pool, and we walked with the fingers of her left hand just touching the fingers of my right, because it seemed nice that way. The Pooh went out on the board first, and stood there for a moment in the moonlight. She was actually very brown everywhere, but standing there for the second before she dove she was that wonderful, soft white people are in moonlight, and so lovely I wanted to cry because people like the Pooh don’t live forever. Then she went in in a nice arc, remembering everything I’d taught her and not spoiling things by doing a belly-whopper. It was one of those moments when, for only a moment, of course, people get the best of life, aren’t made ridiculous and incongruous by it. After she had popped up and turned to float on her back, I dived in after her. I dived deep down into the coolness, and that was perfect too, in another way.

  Then for ten or fifteen minutes it was merely a lot of fun, although quietened a little, hushed, by the moonlight, by the dark shadows the big trees around the pool laid on the water and by the stillness which only our splashings—and now and then our voices—interrupted. We didn’t talk a great deal, and then softly, and what we said has nothing to do with anyone but the Pooh and me. We didn’t cavort around as much as we sometimes did in the water; perhaps we felt we were intruding enough already; perhaps we were afraid something would break. It was a fine quarter of an hour.

  We were cool enough at the end of that time, and didn’t—this was tacit—want to stay until the perfection went out of it. So we swam, gently, toward the edge of the pool and started to get out. But then we didn’t want to leave, either—we knew we should, we knew it couldn’t get any better, but still we couldn’t admit it was over.

  “I want to dive once more,” she said, and turned and began to swim toward the board, shining in the water. I swam after her.

  She went in as cleanly as she had before, and went, I realized, deeper, because she was longer in coming up. She came up quite a distance down the pool, after swimming under water and when she did come up there was something different in her face. I saw that even before she said anything and then all she said, at first, was “Oh!” which was more a kind of little cry than a word. Then she said, “Down there—I’m afraid—”

  I was almost to her by then, and she said again, “Down there—some—” and stopped. I jackknifed and went down, pulling myself hard to get depth.

  There wasn’t light enough to see clearly, and what I saw seeme
d to quiver in the water. But there was no doubt what it was. I reached for it and then the Pooh came down to us—to me and what was on the bottom of the pool. It wasn’t nice any more, then; we’d certainly had our turn at getting the best of things. This was nasty and difficult and it kept trying—seemed to keep trying—to slip away from us. But finally we got it to the edge of the pool and the Pooh held it while I scrambled out and began to haul.

  We got Uncle Tarzan’s body out that way—pushing and hauling, grabbing it where we could; it was a kind of hideous wrestling match there in the moonlight and I’ve no doubt that, if there was anything off somewhere watching us it was all pretty ludicrous to whatever had the aisle seat. Anyway, we got Uncle Tarzan ashore. He had been wearing swimming trunks when somebody had shot him in the back. The bullet had come out in front, the way bullets sometimes do, if they’re fired from fairly close on. My guess was he hadn’t been dead very long, but that was only a guess.

  I rolled the body over on its face, because it wasn’t so bad that way—a large calibre slug makes quite an exit wound, sometimes—and stood up. The Pooh was standing there, looking at it, and shivering. She was shivering all over, convulsively. She said, “Ugly, so ugly, so—” and I went to her and took hold of her face in both hands and turned her away from it. She was shaking under my hands.

  I said, “Quit it, Pooh. Snap out of it!” and when she didn’t seem to hear me, or to know I was there at all, I took her shoulders and shook her. She looked at me then. She said, “Everything’s so ugly. It’s all so ugly.”

  It was that, all right. Things had caught up with us. They had with Uncle Tarzan too, but he didn’t know it any more, and we did.

  She kept on shaking. I got my shirt and did what I could to get her dry, which wasn’t much—the shirt hadn’t been very dry to start with. Then I got her to put on her clothes; she was still shaking, and she moved mechanically, but we got on the pants and bra and dress she’d been wearing, and her shoes. That was all she had, and she kept on shivering. I put my jacket on her, which wasn’t much help—it wasn’t intended to be warm—and put on my shorts and slacks and socks and shoes. She kept turning to look at what had been Uncle Tarzan and I kept talking to her, telling her not to. After a little she wasn’t shaking so much any more, and then she said, “I’m all right now” and was, or almost. She kept on shivering, but she said it was just because she was cold. It did seem to have got a lot cooler.