But time off was time in which to think and remember. And remembering was no good. It couldn’t bring her back.
In World War II. Malden had been a young sergeant assigned to the Counter-Intelligence Corps. He had liked the C.I.C. work and had done well at it. After his discharge he took police courses at Northwestern University, under the GI Bill. After he was graduated he spent a year on a big-city police force, then obtained a job with a national detective agency. Shortly after he went with them he married Dorothy Blackson, a stenographer in the home office. He did so well with the agency that, when the Florida Protection Committee asked for a fulltime operative, Malden was given an indefinite leave of absence to work for the Committee.
The Florida Protection Committee, even though financed and operated by private citizens, carried considerable weight in Tallahassee, and with the city governments of large cities in the state. It was formed by hotel owners, real estate operators and the owners and operators of legitimate tourist attractions. These men knew that too often the criminal element made deals with local enforcement agencies. Should that situation get out of control, Florida would be overrun by an element which could readily destroy the reputation the state was trying to establish and drive away the sound and respectable people who were contemplating retirement in Florida. Gambling, prostitution, dope peddling and the resultant theft and violence could never be completely eliminated. But, with proper investigative procedures and pressure applied at the right places, it could be held to a reasonable minimum.
Steve Maiden’s job was to establish sources of information, pay for information, protect informants, shadow suspects, observe illegal operations whenever possible and turn over thoroughly documented reports to the Committee for action on the state or municipal level.
The first year was a good year. Steve and Dorothy took a small house in Winter Haven. It was a central location for him. They were very much in love. She was a thin, blonde, luminous girl who gave an entirely erroneous impression of fragility. He knew she worried about him during his trips. He took her along whenever he could. The work was demanding and quite often exciting. The pay was good, and he knew the Committee was well satisfied with him. When he could steal a day, they would drive over to the beaches and swim and soak up the sunshine, then eat a dinner of the stone crabs she loved and find a motel. It often seemed to him that it was a honeymoon that would not end. They were suited to each other, enjoying the same things, laughing at the same things.
During that first year, he managed to obtain information on a new bolita ring operating in Tampa. Bolita is a variant of the numbers racket. The information Malden supplied was accurate; the ring was broken up and the court was unusually harsh with the offenders.
It was during his second year, five years before, that Steve Malden decided he could safely steal another day with Dorothy. They decided to drive over to Reddington Beach near St. Petersburg. It was a hot July day with thunderheads in the east. The rain held off until three in the afternoon. They stayed on the beach in the drenching rain, enjoying the coolness of it. Dorothy had taken on a lovely honey-tan in the hot months. After they ate, instead of finding a place to stay, Steve decided to check with an informant in Ybor City, a suburb of Tampa. He didn’t want to combine business with pleasure, but it was a very simple matter he wanted to check. The informant was a clerk in a cigar store, an elderly man with the thumb of his right hand missing. The man seemed very nervous. He refused to impart the information he had promised. Steve had left Dorothy in the car a block and a half away. It was a dark night, with thunder in the air and the threat of rain.
He walked back, puzzled and disappointed. Just as he reached the car he heard the scuff of a footstep close behind him. He had opened the car door. He whirled just as the shotgun blast tore a red hole in the night. The impact knocked him down and half stunned him. The pain in his arm was enormous. He tried to get up twice and fainted.
When he awakened in the hospital, he knew that he had been heavily drugged. His thoughts were blurred, his body heavy. When he thought of Dorothy there was a quick shrillness of panic, like a flash of light in a darkened room. But each time the light would fade because the drugged mind could not hold to any thought consistently.
Later, after he had slept and awakened again, they told him Dorothy had been hurt. They told him about his arm. The biceps had been torn, the bone splintered. On the operating table they had pinned the bone and sewn the muscle tissues. He would eventually regain full use of it.
There were police interviews, and they told him Dorothy had been seriously hurt, that she was on another floor of the hospital. He told the police that he had not seen the man behind the gun. He told them nothing else. On the third day, he got out of bed and refused to get back in until he had seen his wife. The doctor came and had him sit down and told him that the portion of the charge which had missed his arm had torn the throat of his wife, and she had died before the ambulance had reached the scene.
It was as though his life had stopped. The mechanics of living went on, but the essential substance was gone. His arm mended. The Committee offered him leave. He said he preferred to work. He disposed of Dorothy’s things. He moved heavily, stolidly, through the days that seemed to stretch out endlessly in front of him. He lost the gift of lightness, banter, casual conversation. For a time he drank heavily when he was off duty. He drank without pleasure, with a dogged desire to drug himself so that sleep without dreams would become possible. Then he found that he had somehow dulled his mind and his memories so that sleep could come, a dark animal sleep. He was without friends. For a time there were those who tried to bring him out of it, but they soon tired of thankless effort.
He ate and slept and worked. And he was able to accomplish a great deal. He moved through the state like a nemesis, always growing more crafty in blending with the background. His disguises were simple and effective. Tourist, sailor, fisherman, salesman. His reports were detailed, explicit, and the Committee translated them into action.
But the work was without joy. He spent uncounted hours in trying to find out who had fired the shot. The body of the informant was found in Tampa Bay a month after the shooting. And that was finally the end of the trail.
Five years had passed. Now you were thirty-two instead of twenty-seven. You would become forty-two and fifty-two, and she would stay back there in the past, still twenty-four, forever slim, clean-limbed, fragrant. Forever three months pregnant.
Malden knew that he would never have consented to this vacation had not something been slowly changing within him of late. It was as though some part of him was trying to lift the dark burdens he had carried so long. Some rebellious part that wanted to see the light again. This unexpressed yearning to come alive again was painful. It was like blood returning to a numbed limb. He preferred to move in the half-light of his chosen world. Her face was not clear to him any more. Time had begun to blur it. And it was less and less often that his heart gave its hard and sorrowful thrust when he saw a girl on a city street who moved like her, walked proudly as she had walked.
This then was the time of reassessment. This was vacation. He drove north on Route 19 through the hurricane rains, so accustomed to driving that it required but the slightest fraction of his attention. And because he was — or had been — a sensitive and perceptive man, he fought with a new demon on this day — one that he had at last faced squarely. The demon stated its case in the form of a question: Steven Malden, has this five years of darkness been the result of a legitimate grief, or has it been a time of self-indulgence? Have you been standing apart and admiring the dark and monstrous picture of your own heartbreak — indulging yourself in bathos and thinking it pathos? Have you fallen in love with the dreary picture of your own withdrawal from life, thinking it dramatic, a thing of splendor? Are you ready to raise your head a little and start to live again in any emotional dimension? Or are you so pleased with your own strength that for the rest of your life you shall refuse to share it with anyone?