He opened the door and went into his own offices.
He saw Helen sitting at her desk. She was crying quietly but with hysterical insistency, a balled handkerchief held pressed to her face. On the desk stood a glass of water someone had brought her. Untasted. Someone who hadn’t had time to remain long enough, himself, to see that she drank it.
“Helen,” he said in an urgent undertone, looking around as if to see whether he were being observed or not. “Helen.”
She turned and raised bleary eyes to him, but she went ahead crying.
“Helen,” he said. “Helen.”
“Weren’t you here?” she said, through the handkerchief and all. “Didn’t they tell you yet?”
“Somebody down on the street told me an accident. Was it in here?”
“It wasn’t an accident,” she said, catching her breath manfully. “We were told not to tell anyone outside the office. They didn’t want anyone except those of us who were in here to know, that’s all.”
“I’ve been... I’ve been away to lunch. I just got in this minute.”
“You’re lucky,” she said. “I was right here at the desk. Just today I had to come back early from lunch. As a rule I’m the last one to get in, you know that yourself. I was the one who had to send out for them.”
She held the balled handkerchief close to her face again; this time without further sobbing, rather as if nauseated.
“Mr. Ponds,” she said muffledly. “He shot himself in there.”
Marshall was leaning over before her, at the side of the desk, his palms spread paper-flat to its corners. His head went down a notch at this. The head goes down like that, with an abrupt dip, when one is stricken. But it also can go down like that when one feels a vast relief.
“I heard this crash through the door, and I thought the window-rope gave way or something and the whole sash came down, in there, like it happened that other time, remember? Right after that I got a call on the board, and automatically, I answered it. I heard his voice. He sounded calm. He said, ‘Helen, send for the police.’ Just like he was asking me to get out a file or something.
“I said, ‘Mr. Ponds, what was that? Was that in there, where you are?’
“He said, ‘Helen, don’t come in here. Send them in when they get here, but you stay there where you are.’
“By the time they got here, he was dead.”
Marshall didn’t say anything, not a word.
“Wise,” she said in a horror-stricken whisper.
Marshall didn’t say anything, not a word.
“He wasn’t one of us at all. He was an investigator, it turns out. A private detective.”
Marshall just looked steadily down at the floorboards, palms flat to the top of her desk.
“He’s been missing since late last night. They found him dead at about nine this morning, lying in the bottom of a ravine, halfway between here and that roadhouse where the beefsteak dinner was given. His head had been crushed with a big rock. They noticed the empty car standing up there all by itself on the road, that was what first called their attention. I heard them talking about it; they don’t know if he slipped and lost his footing in the dark, and loosened the rock in falling, and it rolled down on top of him, or if he was pushed over and then the rock purposely sent down after him.”
“But Ponds?”
“Mr. Ponds must have been the one Wise was sent here to investigate. Maybe he was doing something he shouldn’t have all along with the funds. The head office — or one of the clients — got suspicious...
“I don’t care,” she said loyally. “Poor Mr. Ponds. I’ve known him since I was seventeen. I’ve been working here for him since I was sev—
“Sh,” she warned suddenly, and turned her head away.
One of the plain-clothesmen who had been to see Ponds that morning had just come out of the private office, was coming toward them.
“You were asked not to talk this over with anybody, miss,” he reminded Helen disapprovingly. “Your name?” he said to Marshall.
“Prescott Marshall.”
“Take a seat, please. Over there. Don’t talk to anyone. We may want to ask you a few questions, later on.”
He didn’t sit as he had, at that same desk, only that forenoon. He didn’t sit even as he had in the railway station waiting room.
He sat relaxed, indolent, at perfect ease. Rolling a little pencil back and forth across the surface of his desk, over and over again, under the fingers of one desultory hand. Letting it go just so far, and then recalling it toward him each time.
He lolled there, in a vacuity of patience that nothing could wear thin, no matter how long they might take to get around to him and then send him on his way.
25
Sorenson didn’t keep his word.
There was a ring on their bell while they were still sitting at the supper table. Unguardedly, he let her rise to answer it. She was always quicker on her feet that way than he, anyway. Most women are.
When she came back to the room there was fright written all over her face. Fright of a sort he’d never seen there before, in just that way. Shock, as when the walls have suddenly crumbled all about you. As when the roof has suddenly come down upon your head. As when you suddenly find you have no home any more.
“Who was it?” he asked.
“There was a young couple standing out there,” she said on quick breaths, with that chalky look livid on her face. “Sorenson was with them. He wanted to — he’d brought them around to look at our flat...”
He folded his napkin into meticulous quarters, then folded the quarters into compressed eighths. It seemed vital to get it just even.
“I told him to. We’re giving up. We’re going to San Francisco.”
The fright didn’t lessen. It wasn’t the superintendent at the door who had frightened her. But he had known that anyway. It was this, now, of which the superintendent had been a harbinger.
She still couldn’t breathe right. And she hadn’t run, and she hadn’t hurried. Just stepped out to the front door and back.
“Why? Why...? Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he drawled. He was drawing invisible diagrams with the edge of his fork now.
“But you have to know,” she contradicted him sharply. “This is something you have to know. And I do too.”
“Well, it’s hard to put into words...”
“But you must put it into words!”
“Sit down—”
“No.” She remianed clutching at the back of her chair, slightly crouched above it in intensity.
“Ponds is gone now, and it won’t be the same. Why stay on?”
“But someone will take his place. The organization won’t be dissolved. The others aren’t leaving.”
“I know. But he dipped into the funds pretty deeply. It may fold, for all we know. Or they may cut down. Why wait for that to happen?”
She opened her palm, then clenched it to the chair again. “Well, why not wait for it to happen? It hasn’t yet. Every additional week’s salary you receive, is that much more. Leave after, but why before?”
“I’m tired of it here. I want to go to some new place.”
“But you’re not a child. You’re a married man. You have me, you have a home. You can’t just... just quit cold and move on, every time you tire of a place.”
“Well, I’m me,” he said absently. The diagram seemed to require a deeper stroke, he shifted to the blade of a knife now.
“Yes, you are,” she agreed, leaving her meaning hidden.
He didn’t answer that. “Every young couple moves about at first, as we have, in the early years of marriage. Some a little more, some a little less. It’s not so serious, it’s not so sinful.”