Trevor sat hidden-faced and still. He wasn’t even breathing.
“Is that the way it happened, Trevor?”
He took his hands away from his face. It cost him an effort that made him gasp.
“More or less. It’s strange to hear it from the outside. You make it sound so crude and senseless.”
“It was really sensible and civilized?”
“Hardly. But let me ask you a question. What would you do if a pair of shakedown artists threatened the entire structure of your life, and you saw no way out?”
“Perhaps the same as you,” I said. “Then I would have to pay for it. Better to keep your nose clean in the first place.”
“You don’t understand.” I was hearing that from all sides. “You don’t understand how a man’s life can go sour. You start out with an innocent roll in the hay, and you end up having to kill people.”
“Twenty-odd years is a long time to be innocently rolling in the hay.”
“I see there’s no use trying to explain.” But he went on explaining: “I’m scarcely the bold seducer. Kitty was the only other woman in my life. I had no designs on her when she came into our house, though she was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. So fresh, so young. She was only eighteen. I kept my hands off her.”
“And that’s why you’re not here with her death on your hands.”
He hardly seemed to hear me. “She was the one who took pity on me. Sex is a dirty word to my wife: she lost a child in the first year of our marriage: after that I never slept in her room. I was still a young man when Kitty came to stay with us. She saw my need for her, and she took pity on me. She came to my room one night and offered herself to me.
“It wasn’t entirely a deed of charity. She was due to be married to Homer in a few weeks, and she was a virgin. She elected me to break her in. It doesn’t sound romantic, I know, but we caught fire from each other. I learned what it is to treasure a woman’s body. For a week or two of nights, I was back in Eden with the dew on the grass.
“Then Kitty missed a period, and got scared. I couldn’t catch her. I wanted to, of course. But I had a way to make, and a wife. Helen would have stripped me, with Homer’s willing assistance. I’d worked my way up from a twenty-dollar-a-week job in the Meadow Farms bank, and I couldn’t see myself starting all over again at thirty-two. We did the best we could with the situation. Kitty let Homer have her before their wedding and convinced him when the baby came that it was slightly premature.
“The next few years were rugged ones for me. It grew on me like a disease – the realization that I’d had the one thing worth having. A little warmth and companionship in the void. I’d had it and given it up, in favor of security, I suppose you’d call it. Security. The great American substitute for love.”
“But you went on seeing her.”
“No, I did not, except of course in the most casual way. She wanted to give her marriage a chance, she said. I found out years later that she was deeply offended with me for not divorcing Helen and marrying her.
“She was in love with me,” he said with mournful pride. “Naturally her marriage didn’t work out. I doubt it would have worked out if I had never existed. She and Homer lived like enemies, fighting over the child. My child. You know what Bacon has to say about your children: that they’re your hostages to fortune. It’s a grinding thing to know that and feel it, as I have, and be unable to do anything much about it. I sat on the sidelines watching them make a hash of Phoebe’s life as well as their own. The not so innocent bystander.
“That went on for nearly twenty years. Then, a couple of years ago, my heart went back on me. A close brush with death affects a man’s thinking. When I came out of it I determined to get something more out of life – something more than going up to the city and entertaining the right people and staving off the next coronary.
“I went back to Kitty. She was willing. Her marriage, as I said, had not worked out. She felt very much as I did, that she had missed the best part of life.
“She wasn’t the girl she had been. She’d aged and coarsened and lost some of her looks and most of her gentleness. There had been other men. Still we had something between us – something that was better than nothing. When we were together, at least we weren’t alone.
“She got a place where we could be together two or three times a month. Unfortunately she rented it through Merriman. I suspect from something he said that he had been one of the other men. He had an ascendancy over her–”
“Something he said when?”
“The night I killed him. He talked about her, as though she was a common whore. It was one of the reasons I killed him. Yes, I see the irony. I killed a man for defaming the character of a woman I had killed two months before.”
“You still haven’t explained why you killed her.”
“I can’t, really. I suppose the sheer involvement became too much for me. I tried to break away from her when Merriman and Quillan started to blackmail her. It looked as though I would be next, and the game wasn’t worth the candle any more. After her divorce she went to pieces very rapidly. She seemed to expect me to pick up the pieces. I had barely enough stuff to get through the motions of everyday life. I couldn’t take her on.”
“I thought you already had.”
“I mean in a full-scale way – divorce and remarriage and all the trimmings. I couldn’t face all that, and I told her so. She got more and more desperate, and more threatening. She was going to ruin me if I didn’t bail her out. The whole thing came to a head on that last day. Homer was leaving the country, rich and free; she was being swindled out of what money she had; she was under bad pressures. During the famous leavetaking in Homer’s stateroom, she was on the verge of blurting everything out.
“I went to see her that night, to try and make her understand what she was doing to me, to all of us. She wouldn’t listen to reason. Phoebe was coming to visit her, she said, and she intended to tell the girl the whole story. I tried to convince her that it was too late for that. When I couldn’t, I took the poker and silenced her, as you said. It was an ugly way for it to end.” He might have been criticizing a scene in a play.
“When did you undress her, and why?”
“She undressed herself. It was one of her means of persuasion which had worked on me in the past. But I felt no desire for her. For some time now the only real desire I’ve had is a desire for death. Darkness and silence.”
He sighed. “Everything was very silent for two months. I had no idea what had happened to Kitty’s body. I wasn’t even aware that Phoebe was missing. Normally I kept in some sort of touch with her, but I was afraid to do that now. I was afraid to do anything that might stir up the situation.
“Then Merriman called my office the other afternoon. He insisted I keep an appointment with him in Kitty’s empty house. You know the outcome of that. I searched Merriman’s clothes and car in the hope that he might have the tape with him. He hadn’t, but I found his gun, and the money.
“I had no intention of keeping the money for myself. If the other fellow – Quillan – tried to carry on the blackmail game, I thought I would use it to pay him off. I liked the irony of that.” He was making a desperate effort to hold his style.
“Why didn’t you do it if you liked it so much?”
“I tried to. I went to Quillan’s shop and tried to go through with the payoff. But he recognized the source of the money. He said things I couldn’t endure. I shot him with Merriman’s gun, as you guessed. It was a senseless crime, and I admit it. After I talked to Phoebe in Sacramento, I no longer had any real hope of pulling it out. I could have taken the money, I suppose, and left the country. But I had no heart for it.”