She tore the letter into pieces. “Do you always read other people’s mail?”
“When I nave a reason.”
“You’re a fraud and a cheat.”
“I don’t think so,” he said simply. “I’m human, and I guess I’m suffering from a very common human frailty — jealousy.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “It’s a sucker’s racket, Charlotte — playing around with another woman’s husband.”
“It’s my business, not yours.”
“I’d like to know how Ballard did it. I might pick up a few pointers.”
“Pointers?”
“Oh how he got you to fall for him so hard, I meant I’d like to do the same thing.”
“You’re insulting...”
“I don’t intend to be. I admire you. You’re a strong woman. It would take a lot of strength to live with you. I have it. You’d never lean on me, but I don’t have to be leaned on to feel superior. I feel superior anyway.”
“And you always will,” she said bitterly. “Your ego will take care of that nicely.”
He looked grave. “It wouldn’t be very smart to latch onto someone without an ego. He’d make too many demands on yours.”
“I won’t — I won’t discuss the — the matter.”
“Very well. Just let it creep into your subconscious now and then. That’s good enough for the present.” The waitress came with the coffee. Easter changed the subject, his voice and glance impersonal again, as if he had the ability to turn her on and off in his mind like a faucet. “There was a wallet found in your purse too — no money left in it, of course. That accounts for the wine-party in the kitchen. Four glasses, four merrymakers; we can presume they were Voss and his wife and O’Gorman and the old man Tidolliani.”
“Voss and Tiddles hated each other.” We have a great mutual hate, Tiddles had told her the night they first met.
“My guess is” Easter continued, “that Tidolliani was snooping and they found him snooping and decided to play it friendly, over three bottles of wine. They got the old man drunk, probably, but they got themselves drunk, too and the argument began about the purse. I think we can assume that Tidolliani found it where Voss or O’Gorman had hidden it, perhaps in the rubbish pile... I went to see Mrs. Voss early this morning.”
“So did I.”
“Is she putting on an act?”
“No,” Charlotte said. “She doesn’t remember anything about last night. She’s disoriented to some degree. She has an idea that she’s going to have her tonsils out and that Voss is coming to see her any minute.” She sipped her coffee, thinking of Mrs. Voss lying in the hospital bed, looking quite relaxed and contented, but with that strange vagueness in her eyes: Voss hadn’t deserted her, no, quite the opposite. She had deserted him, had come to the hospital like a real lady to have her tonsils removed, and Voss would come to see her during visiting hours. “I got bad tonsils,” she’d told the nurse.
Charlotte said, “Why did Voss want to steal my purse? I live way out on Mountain Drive, there must have been a hundred purses more readily available than mine.”
“They weren’t after your purse,” Easter said, but he refused to give his reasons for the statement.
Charlotte persisted. “It had something to do with Violet?”
“Yes.”
“But you think Violet killed herself, she wasn’t murdered?”
“That’s what the evidence says,” Easter replied with a shrug. “In addition to the external evidence I’ve given you, there were internal signs, too — foam in the windpipe and the bronchial tubes, water in the stomach, the lungs and the duodenum, water containing algae and other minute particles of sea life. Lungs distended, heart dilated on one side.”
“All that,” Charlotte said quietly, “isn’t evidence that she committed suicide. It’s only evidence that she died in the water.”
“You’re hard to convince.”
“Perhaps.”
“The final point is circumstantial evidence only — the fact that she was despondent over her pregnancy. She didn’t want the child.” He saw the question in her eyes. “It was a boy.”
A boy. She thought of the inexplicable craftsmanship that had gone into the making of that dead boy — the delicate precision of the cells, the network of nerves and veins, the interplay of glands, the gradual growth, just so much and no more, all marvelously balanced and molded from one tiny ovum and one infinitesimal spermatozoon.
Easter’s question came, as unexpected as a blow. “Who was the man involved with Violet?”
“I don’t know. How could I know?”
“She could have told you something.”
“Only that he was married, that he was away when she called him but that someone told her he was returning that night. She intended to see him.”
“Some day,” Easter said grimly, “I intend to see him myself.”
“If you find him.” (The father of Violet’s baby, she thought. The most important figure in the case, because without him there would have been no case — yet the most shadowy figure, unknown and unreal; perhaps even quite innocent of the train of events to which he had given the initial push.)
She repeated her thoughts aloud, but Easter said, “Innocence is no more of an excuse than stupidity or ignorance.”
“I see. You don’t make excuses for people?”
“Sometimes. But to excuse, to explain, isn’t enough. You don’t correct a neurosis by eliminating it, you have to offer an acceptable substitute. The positive approach: here’s a gumdrop, junior, now stay out of the ant paste.”
She raised her brows. “I didn’t realize you were a philosopher.”
“Philosophy is for poets,” he said curtly. “I deal with people, dead or otherwise.” He pushed his coffee cup aside and the muddy liquid splashed over the side like a wave breaking over a sea-wall. “I think the real reason you don’t want to believe that Violet killed herself is that it would leave a scar on your conscience.”
“That’s what a conscience is made of, scar tissue,” Charlotte said. Little strips and pieces of remorse sewn together year by year until they formed a distinctive pattern, a design for living.
“If Violet was murdered it was by someone she trusted — not Voss, who had no reason, not O’Gorman, whom she feared. O’Gorman had reasons to kill her, but fists are his weapons — there’s nothing fancy or subtle about Eddie. No. The person who might have murdered Violet would have to be someone she liked or trusted well enough to accompany out to the pier near the point where her purse was found. Someone like you, for instance.”
“She didn’t like or trust me. And you surely can’t be serious about suspecting that I...”
“I’m curious. I’m curious about the card she was carrying in her purse with your name and address typed on it.”
“All I can tell you is that I didn’t give it to her.”
“Some day,” he said, “I’ll find out who did. It might be interesting.” A fly circled the table, came to rest on his knuckles. He didn’t brush it off. He watched it explore the hill of one knuckle and walk gingerly into the valley between his fingers. “Have you ever walked out on the pier late at night?”
“Sometimes.”
“I went down there last Friday after midnight looking for a fisherman who’d stabbed a man in a bar. I didn’t find him. I didn’t find anyone, in fact. There wasn’t a soul on the pier and every boat was dark. But it was noisy. The sea was noisy and the wind was noisy and there was a loose piling that kept rubbing against the planks at every wave and shrieking like a gull. A good place for a murder. A push, a drop of fifteen feet into the water, perhaps a scream. But, as I said, there are natural noises out there. They might cover the scream as the night would cover the murderer.” He had been sitting, tense, on the edge of the seat as he described the pier. He leaned back now, visibly relaxing. “Well, that’s what could have happened. And probably didn’t.”