Show Red for Danger Page 9

  It was a great deal worse now than it had been the night before, when she had so resolutely put her mind to it. Now she had had it and let it get away, which was infuriating. It was a dream, Susan told herself—just a dream, in which only dreams are solved. And what possibly could Colonel have had to do with it? Colonel came out, tongue hanging, and flopped in the shade, with the air of a dog who has just completed a hard day’s work. After a few seconds of quiet, he snorted.

  “Go—” Susan began, and realized that that was where Colonel had come into it; a snort, an injunction to go to sleep. After which she had gone to sleep herself—gone to sleep with the consciousness of something solved. Colonel had wakened her from half sleep by snorting and—

  No, that wasn’t it. She had wakened herself by talking in her sleep; the sound of her own voice had wakened her. And, in half wakefulness, she had been dimly surprised that she had heard not only her own voice, but the words she had used. Had, then, the feeling of something accomplished, something solved, resulted from whatever it was she had said, aloud, in sleep?

  She told herself to skip it She told herself that if she left it alone it would not go away, but would come back. Quit trying to remember and it jumps into the mind.

  Finish your coffee. (Finished.) Light a cigarette. (Lighted.) Lie back and make the mind blank. (Blank; full of irritation.) You said something and waked yourself up and Colonel snorted—presumably in answer—and you told him to go to sleep and—“bad color.” My God, Susan thought, sitting upright, my-God-it-worked! Now she had only to remember what she had meant by it Bad color of what? Or, of whom?

  Of, it was uglily possible, the dead. Of, it was certainly true, blood. She had dreamed red all night until she had—what? Decided that red was a bad color? That was absurd. Colors are not bad, or good. Except—except in relationship to one another, this color wrong with that color. (And even that, nine times out of ten, was untrue; was something which people who did not really see colors had been taught, had taught themselves, to see.) Red is, of course, a little tricky; red is a noisy color, a bully of a color. A “wrong” color, sometimes. And what, my girl, has that got to do with anything, and don’t now—it’s daylight now—fill your mind with that picture in which the red is blood.

  And Merton—how could I ever have thought of calling him Ricky?—is perfectly capable of solving whatever there is (if anything) to solve without my having notions. Without, for heaven’s sake, a woman’s intuition. If—

  It was in his studio. That’s where there was something wrong about it; something that jarred, that was wrong in the picture. And, I won’t be able to think of anything else until I know what it was. So the thing to do—

  The Inn thought Captain Heimrich had gone out, and Sergeant Forniss with him. The Inn would check. The Inn did check. Both gone, whereabouts unknown. So she could not ask him if, assuming she drove over to the Collins house, she would be able to get into it, and go to the studio and see if she could find, again, what was wrong in it. She put the telephone receiver back. The thing to do was to forget the whole business, and do around the house those things which were always waiting to be done. So—

  So Susan Faye put on a linen dress instead of shorts and shirt (since it was, after all, Sunday) and got into her car and drove toward the hilltop house of the late Brian Collins. If she couldn’t get in, she couldn’t get in, and no harm done, and it was somewhat cooler driving. If she could get in, she would look around the studio—nobody had died in the studio; shed blood there—and find it or not find it.

  Colonel, drooling slightly and looking as pleased as it was in his face to look—his sin, whatever it was, had apparently been forgiven—rode on the seat beside her. Seated so, he was considerably taller than Susan. Now and then he put his head out the window for the breeze. Susan drove up Sugar Creek Lane to its abrupt ending and started up the narrow, hilly drive (lane, really) to the glass and redwood house. She had gone up it about two hundred yards and was just starting around one of its corners when a horn sounded warning. Susan sounded back, and stopped. The car coming down slowed. It was a Buick station wagon, driven by a man—a tall man. That much Susan noticed; then, as the Buick stopped, sunlight reflected from its windshield, and she could no longer see the driver.

  Not that it mattered. Susan’s was, as the upbound car, obviously “it.” She backed down the hill again, backed slowly and with care. The Buick edged down after her. At the road again, she backed toward the road’s ending, toward the sign which said, so advisedly, “Stop.” The Buick reached the driveway’s end, turned sharply to the left down Sugar Creek Lane, and hooted its thanks. Colonel, for reasons of his own, leaned out and barked at it. Susan turned back into the driveway and went up it, with no great confidence. For all she knew, there might be half a dozen cars up there, all planning to come down.

  There was only one car on the turnaround—a state police car. It was empty. After a moment a young trooper came around the house and up to Susan’s car.

  Colonel pricked up his ears; he made a soft bleating sound, as if he were trying to purr. He made movements, as if to get out of the car. He had, after too long a time, met again one of his chosen. “Hi-yah?” the trooper said, to Colonel, and reached in and scratched behind one of the large ears. He spoke more formally to Susan Faye. He said, “Morning, Mrs. Faye. The captain isn’t here.”

  (It occurred to Susan, briefly, that Merton Heimrich himself apparently was the only person who did not make the connection.)

  “Oh,” she said. “Mr. Crowley. I didn’t think he would be. Is it all right for me to go in?”

  “Why,” Raymond Crowley said. “Sure, I guess so, Mrs. Faye. I don’t see why not.”

  And, Susan thought, wondered why. It seemed rather a long, vague thing to go into.

  “Mr. Collins,” she said, “did a design he wanted me to look at. Yesterday—you know I was with the captain when—when we found them?”

  Crowley did. He said it was a bad thing to walk in on.

  “I only glanced at what Mr. Collins had done,” she said. “The design. Is it all right if I go look at it again?”

  It was of course all right. Unless she wanted him, however, Trooper Crowley would not go in with her. She knew her way. Also, any time now, the reporters and photographers could be expected. The captain had promised them they could look at the house, inside and out; take what pictures they wanted. Crowley unlocked the glass door.

  There was nothing to show where the blood had been. The chair Collins had died in had been removed. (Which would, Susan suspected, disappoint the press.) There was a chalk outline to show where the girl had lain. Susan went along the corridor to the studio. It was as it had been the evening before, except that now the light was much better. Brian Collins must, she thought, have done most of his work in the morning.

  The nude portrait of Peggy Belford was still on the easel, but covered. At least, she supposed it was the same, and lifted enough of the shrouding canvas to make sure it was. But the “wrong” thing didn’t, she was sure, lie in the nude. She had looked at it carefully; if what she sought was here, it was something she had glanced at quickly, seen with half her mind. What else had they done here?

  He, of course, had looked for, and found, the design. He had turned several canvases toward her and she had glanced at them, not bothering to see them, until prompted, he had looked for, found the right thing. Had there been something wrong about one of the canvases? And, if there had, could it have any possible bearing? She stood and looked around and shook her head, all expectation draining out of her mind. A chase of the wild goose, obviously. A search for will-o’-the-wisp. She should have stayed home and washed stockings. Customers of fabric shops expect young women running them to wear stockings.

  Unless—She moved canvases on stretchers; found the design that yesterday—and how long ago that seemed!—she had come to look at. She moved it out into the light and propped it on a chair, facing the light, and moved away from it. And red jumped out at he
r.

  The less adequate light of the evening before, her own preoccupation with things most hideously immediate, explained it—had to explain it. But even making those allowances, it was difficult to see why she had not at once remembered the red that jumped from Brian Collins’s free-form design. The red so utterly “wrong”; so glaringly, insolently, bullying the muted tones among which it was supposed to live. A red so wrong that it was—why, it was almost a joke!

  What on earth had come over Brian Collins? Sudden colorblindness? Or had it all been planned as a meaningless, rather cruel, joke on her—on a person he barely knew?

  She turned others of the paintings which were stacked against the wall, reassuring herself about Brian Collins. He had been a painter; he had seen color. She did not like all the canvases—the several canvases—she glanced at, but that meant nothing, except that some of them she did not like. In all of them, he had been a painter.

  Had somebody else daubed red, “wrong” red, on the design as a kind of sabotage? Peggy Belford? With only the intention to annoy? It was hard to believe; it was impossible to believe, to explain on what she knew. Or—someone else? Someone unknown, for reasons unguessable?

  She put the canvases back where she had found them. I’ve run out of guesses, she thought. She looked at the design again, and again red leaped at her eyes, clawing. There could be no doubt that it was “wrong.” Anybody not blind would know it wrong. She looked more closely, trying to decide whether the red patches—there were three of them—had been painted, daubed on, more recently than the other colors. She could not be sure; she doubted whether anybody could be sure. He had used gouache, which dries quickly, which is opaque.

  She was suddenly sure of one thing. Brian Collins had not used this color, if it was he who had used it, by accident. If he had used it it was for some purpose. To—red is the color of blood. It is also the color of danger!

  She heard voices; a good many voices. They came from the main part of the house. That would be, she decided, the press.

  They didn’t, she thought, know that she had been with Heimrich when he found the bodies. At least, she hoped they didn’t, because if they did they would want what they called an “eyewitness.” A role she had no desire to play.

  There was a door in the studio which led out to the garden. She remembered that; found that; went out through that. The turnaround in front of the house, when she went around the house to it, was crowded with half a dozen cars. A number of men were in the house, to be seen through the glass wall. Flashlight bulbs were going off briskly. Her car, probably, would be blocked off and—

  It was not. Trooper Raymond Crowley evidently had seen to that.

  She took the way out, crept down the long, precipitous driveway and did not encounter anybody coming up it. She turned down Sugar Creek Lane, driving slowly, her mind puzzled. She had found out one thing; there could be no doubt of that. But what she had found out seemed only to make things dimmer.

  She went around a corner, and the rear of another car was disappearing around the next corner. A wagon. The Buick? No, that was absurd. The Buick would be miles away, by now. Another Buick wagon, obviously.

  “Woof,” Colonel said, casually, from the seat beside her.

  Heimrich was asked if he had ever tried to get reaction out of a piece of putty. He was told that that was what it came to, always came to.

  The man who asked, without expecting an answer, who told what it always had come to, was dark and wiry and violent—violent in quick movements of hands and body, in explosive voice. A wedge of black hair jutted down his forehead; the hair bristled like the fur on the spine of an angry cat. The man strode back and forth across what the Cold Harbor Motor Lodge likes to think of as “the patio.” Anton Zersk was staying at the Cold Harbor Motor Lodge because he got enough of actors on the set. This was one of the first things he told Heimrich, at a little before eleven on Sunday morning. The next thing he told him was that if they could get one—just one—morning without this haze—this damn haze—they could finish up and pack up and get the hell out of there.

  He told Heimrich also, in bursts, that he hadn’t had the faintest idea that Brian Collins was in Van Brunt Center the day before, since he hadn’t been there himself; that he had heard Peggy Belford say something about going to Collins’s for a swim and that he hadn’t cared where she went as long as she was, even briefly, out of his hair. He hit his bristling hair angrily, to show what he meant, or to brush vestiges of Peggy Belford’s past occupancy out of it. He said he was damn sorry about Collins, who was too good a man to throw himself away on anything like Peggy Belford.

  “You knew him?” Heimrich said.

  “Not him,” Zersk said. “His stuff. Some of it was damn good stuff. And for that little bitch he shoots himself. For that!” Zersk managed, somehow, to make “that” a harsher epithet than the other. Then he stopped in his pacing. “Or didn’t he?” Zersk asked.

  “Everything indicates he did,” Heimrich said, mildly. “We’re more or less picking up the pieces, Mr. Zersk. See that there isn’t anything left over. You didn’t like Miss Belford, evidendy.”

  Zersk sat down suddenly. He did everything suddenly. He had bounced out of his room suddenly when Heimrich knocked on the door, asked to talk to him.

  Now he said that Peggy Belford had been a pain, and said where. And was asked why.

  “Unscrupulous litde gold digger, for one thing,” Zersk said. “And don’t look so damn hopeful. She didn’t dig me. Because there isn’t any gold for one thing, and she knew I was on to her for another. So?”

  “I’m not,” Heimrich said, even more mildly than before, “accusing you, or anybody else, of anything. You objected to her lack of scruple?”

  Then Zersk laughed. He laughed explosively, also.

  “Heimrich,” he said, “I had to direct her. Otherwise, I didn’t give a damn what she was. She could make a million or drop dead. Anything, so long as I didn’t have to try to get a performance out of a wooden Indian. Or a piece of putty. You ever try to get a reaction out of a piece of putty?”

  Heimrich said he hadn’t.

  “This one’s the third time,” Zersk said. “Three times—three times. Yelling at her, pleading with her, saying, ‘Nice Peggy, pretty Peggy. Listen Peggy. You loved this man. This man is dead, Peggy. D-e-a-d. You’re sorry, sweetheart. You’re all broken up, darling. You loved him and now he’s dead and you haven’t got anything more to live for. All right, lover, if that’s too hard—that stinking little pooch of yours has been run over and he’s dying and he looks up at you with those idiotic goddamn eyes and you’re sorry, baby. Just think about the poor, dying little pooch—’” He broke off. “So,” he said, “she pouts, like always. And, I give you my word, the pooch did get run over and you know what she actually did? She pouted. Just like always.”

  “But,” Heimrich said, “you seem to have kept on giving her parts.”

  Zersk leaped out of the chair. For a moment, it appeared that he was about to leap at Heimrich. Instead, he shouted at Heimrich.

  “Me?” he shouted, “I gave her parts?”

  “Somebody. Not you?”

  “Listen, Heimrich. They hire me to direct. They say here’s the usual corny script and here’s the half-witted actors and you’ve got so many weeks for this and so many for that and we expect a masterpiece or anyway a few million dollars’ profit.” He stopped suddenly. “All right,” he said. “Take part of it back. Frank Dale’s a hell of a good actor and George Latham’s learning to do what he’s told. And the script’s no worse than most. I’ll get a picture out of it and—Paul Marley hired her. It’s the third time he’s hired her. No—fourth. One of them Micky Fowler got stuck with.”

  “All right,” Heimrich said. “Why? If she was as bad as you say.”

  “Shape,” Zersk said. “Men drooled. And women—I guess women put it up to their husbands. ‘See what a decent dress will do for a girl? Buy me a decent dress, you no-count.’ Thinking they’d look
like Peggy if they had the clothes Peggy always got in the last reel. No, last but one, usually. So, box office. That enough explanation?”

  “Is there more?”

  “Only,” Zersk said, “that Paul’s had a thing for her for years. Even before Gertrude died.” He stopped. “There was a woman could act,” he said. “God how she could act.”

  “Miss Belford didn’t—respond?”

  “Miss Belford,” Zersk said, “was the marrying kind. Married where it would do the most good. My guess is that she was cold as a fish.”

  Heimrich raised his eyebrows.

  “If you mean by that, did I try?” Zersk said. “No, I never tried. I’ve been married ten years—make it almost eleven—to a real live woman. Put on a few pounds after the first kid and maybe a few more after the girl came, and she’s a real live woman, and when she’s unhappy she cries and when she’s happy she laughs and if anybody ever suggested she ought to be an actress she’d laugh like hell.”

  He looked at Heimrich rather balefully.

  “I see,” Heimrich said. “But Mr. Marley couldn’t marry Miss Belford, since he was already married. So?”

  “Casting her? I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t give up. Maybe he figured he’d keep her sweetened up on the chance things might—change. She was pretty sure to come unmarried at intervals. And—well, Gertrude was a good deal older than Paul.” He got up and began to walk back and forth on the grass of “the patio.” He said, “I sound like a heel all at once. Paul’s a good enough guy. And, except for this Peggyitis, a pretty good producer. An all-right man to work with.”

  “Mr. Zersk,” Heimrich said, “Mrs. Marley died about eighteen months ago, I understand. Some months before Miss Belford divorced Fielding?”

  “Fielding?” Zersk repeated. “Oh—that outside guy. Automobiles or something, wasn’t it?”