So Dies the Dreamer
few blank inquiries on both sides the question resolved itself.Mrs. Carminio’s expert eye had seen through Lieutenant Welk’s civilian clothes, and she had thought him a “higher-up,” someone to check on the sergeant who had come the day before in response to her own report that the basement storeroom had been broken into.
“Or they tried to break in,” said Mrs. Carminio with a vengeful air. “That’s Mr. Carminio’s night to—his night off, but he had a little touch of the flu and he came back early, and he heard them all right. He’s got ears like a hawk. They was gone when he got there, but we can’t have that, not in this building.”
Sarah went on into the elevator, bemused at the suggestion that Mr. Carminio superintended other buildings in his spare time, and wouldn’t mind their being burgled at all. It must, she thought, be a delicate decision to make. On the heels of that came the reminder that she must, some day, do something about Charles’s things. She called them “things” to herself; she shrank away from the more exact itemizing. But what did people do? Give them to the superintendent? Call up a charitable organization?
In the apartment, by association, she went to the bedroom closet and took down Charles’s briefcase and opened it.
It was stamped C.T. in small gold letters. His office had sent it home after, presumably, extracting what was necessary to the firm. There were a number of old letters to and from writers, and there was the handsome engagement book Sarah had given him.
She had to steel herself to open it, but she needn’t have worried. Although she might have asked Charles to pick up bitters on his way home, or mail one of her letters, or do any other small personal thing, there was no trace of it here. This contained appointments and notes about appointments, and that was all.
“Photo Herzogs. With cats? Williamson. Mrs. Armstead lunch, new biog. See Henrick.”
There were a number of notes about Hollister, the bestselling inspirational writer on whose publicity Charles had worked so hard and so late during that last week. Or most of the time; on at least one occasion, the day he had told her he was going to Chicago to see Hollister, he had visited the psychiatrist instead. Sarah’s mind presented her cruelly with the memory of how serene he had been after that, and how soundlessly he had slept—not because of exhaustion, as she had thought, but because he had shifted his burden, and told his tale of terror to someone whose business it was to take terrors apart and show their harmless component parts.
It was hard to get used to the fact of her name in Vollmer’s full button mouth, the questions he must have asked Charles about her . . . No wonder Charles had given that hard explosive laugh when Sarah had asked him to see a psychiatrist, no wonder he had said, after his fourth cocktail, “Do you know, I think you’re the last person I’d tell?”
This wouldn’t do, it was only giving new life to the helpless bitterness she had thought was dead. Sarah turned a page as calmly as though she were being watched, and came upon “Lunch, H.” Or was it a careless “K”?
Harry Brendan? Hunter Gideon? Kate Clemence? It was the first use of an initial she had come upon so far; all the other names had related to business and were meticulously written out—for his secretary’s use, Sarah supposed. Her heart had begun to quicken, because this was the day of Charles’s death.
She must be mistaken about its being one of them, because no one had said anything about having seen Charles only hours before he died. And it would be instinctive to say it, in exactly that way: “But I saw him only that day, at lunch . . .”
Someone in the office, then, whom Charles lunched with so frequently that an initial sufficed. Harold, Henry, Karl, or possibly a surname.
There were three other names below that, or rather two; one had been crossed out. Reeves, and then the indecipherable scoring of black pencil, and then Elliot.
Reeves. Elliot. Something twitched at Sarah’s memory and then let go. For no good reason she thought of the woman murdered on the mink farm—but her name had been Braceway, and the man who had killed her was someone called Peck. Elliot was often a Christian name, but Reeves . . . betrayingly, her mind began to outfit them with other names and contexts, seen in the street or in newspaper ads. And who was the crossed-out man in between? Not that they mightn’t as easily be women, but Charles had written Mrs. Armstead and, in another place, Miss J. Wing.
Why was she sitting so transfixedly still, wondering whether the police had seen this particular page in their routine investigation? They must have; they would have wanted to know about Charles’s state of mind that day, and whether there had been any unusual development in that area of his life. And she already knew that they had checked with his office.
Nevertheless. . . it was not quite three-thirty. Sarah knew as she went to the phone exactly what she was doing: she was trying to get out from under. She wanted to prove, only to herself, that the thing Charles couldn’t face, the thing that had snapped his reason, lay much deeper than the episode on the bluff, and she had been only an unconsciously-furnished scapegoat. An old tragedy, perhaps, in which people named Reeves and Elliot had been equally involved; a scar of some kind that his stepmother’s death, and then the nurse’s, had reawakened. . . .
She said to the switchboard voice that answered her, “Miss Ehrhardt, please.”
Charles’s secretary had been with him a number of years and she was, perhaps understandably in view of the circumstances, disposed to be cool to Sarah. She said that Mr. Trafton hadn’t kept any lunch date that day