bad memories Page 2

  Miller really didn’t want to talk, “you’ve spent a lot of time in the tropics,” he said.

  “You tell that in my skin, eh?” the man laughed.

  “Yes, once you get thoroughly burned by that tropic sun it does something to your skin that bad color is like a tattoo.” He narrowed his eyes. “Skin isn’t a superficial thing,” Miller said. He was thinking of the implications of his simple statement, wondering if the man caught them.

  “But I think it does something else to you too, something that the vision and senses can’t detect, you come near a cage of monkeys, they won’t show any reaction, but the awful yowl they’ll rise for someone who’s spent time in the rain forest country.” He broke off, and then slowly reminisced, alcohol plainly prompting his garrulity.

  “It’s odd, but the skipper of the tub in which I made one of my most interesting trips to South America is that follow sitting up there in front of us now, Daniels, Joseph Daniels.”

  He looked ahead to the girl and the one legged man, the tops of their heads above the seats, his voice took on a sharp tone. “We’re on our way to a house party up in Millersburg at Paul Allen’s. That’s the reason for this exchange of cordiality you see after not having crossed one another’s path for twenty years.” Miller knew Paul Allen; he lived in what was Millersburg’s largest mansion a grim pile overlooking the river. He studied his companion closely, wondering at the nature of the conflict of which the secret was buried in this man, could these be the people Albert Smith was planning to meet, he wondered.

  It was already getting dark when the train reached Millersburg, the homburg stranger, having no baggage, left his seat before the train stopped rolling and headed toward the front of the coach. Miller left by the other exit, and started up the platform toward the station. The right of way consisted of fore electrified tracks, two northbound and two southbound, an overhead footbridge connected the north and southbound platforms.

  Miller watched the homburg stranger alright from the train, having stepped to the platform he turned back to help the crippled sailor. This did not necessarily mean the bitterness between them was resolved. With the stranger on one side and the girl on the other, the one legged man swung down. The three started up the platform together as the train slid onto motion. Miller strode to the end of the platform and circled the station to the parking lot. But Albert Smith was not there just a lone cab was at the taxi stand.

  “Taxi, mister?”

  He shook his head, John might have been delayed, or perhaps the people he was to meet had changed their plans about coming, still gangling, conscientious Albert, Miller knew would have met him anyway.

  Miller waited till Captain Daniels, the girl and the homburg man finally emerged from the station. They showed no signs of expecting anyone to meet them. They got in the cab at the taxi stand and with a whirl of flying gravel, the taxi turned and sped off. Miller felt suddenly lonely. He started on his way turning a corner into the village. He was empty inside, his heart beating in a void. Julie would be feeling alone now; too would she go out to a bar as she had said? Had she done that before?

  The sycamores were getting bald with autumn. The spice of wood smoke and burning leaves sharpened the air. Residential Millersburg was the sort of haven where young married couples withdrew to have babies, raise flowers on tiny garden plots and enjoy the animal comfort of slippered evenings in seclusion. Miller had been in Millersburg before; he knew that a radius of a half mile would inscribe most of the village.

  He passed an undeveloped lot and came abreast of a weathered looking Norman house with gabled peaks and stucco walls with dark stained beams. A sign headed the walk curving to the house’s wisteria bowered entrance.

  Albert Smith M.D.

  Hours 1-2 8-9

  Miller looked at his wrist watch which told ten minutes of eight. The houses front door was three quarters open, he puzzled for a moment and walked in. He put down his suite case, rod, and creel box in the reception room. When Miller had been here before, a young nurse Margret Reed had sat behind the desk. But now there was nothing but chairs with an assortment of waiting room magazines.

  He looked at the desks empty chair an aura of too intense silence was about the place. The tick of the clock on the desk was too loud. How much quieter it was away from the city. Miller stood still, listening as he had back in the hallway of his apartment, just after he’d left Julie. He strained for sounds no normal sense could perceive, sounds he had too often heard, too clearly. A door led into the consultation and examining room, it too like the front door, was ajar. Miller took a hesitating step toward it.

  “Albert?”

  He glanced reservedly in though the door trying to see around it without opening it wider. He thought of Albert Smith’s expansive, welcoming nature of laughter starting far below the Adams apple, he was being unnecessarily timid.

  But where was Albert? He didn’t like these confining walls, being alone here.

  He didn’t like it.

  He walked quickly to the desk at the far side of the dusk dark room, behind the desk, opening into two other rooms, were doorways framed by bunched curtains. One room was an examination chamber equipped with the customary table, sink and wall cabinets containing instruments. The other room small and dark, was an x-ray studio.

  “Albert?”

  He shrugged and started back toward the reception room. Then he jerked short abruptly, his hands flying wide, like someone discovering himself on the brink of an abyss.

  “ALBERT!”

  He dropped to his knee, Albert Smith’s long thin bony face was translucently waxen, and his mouth hung partly open framing a glint of teeth. His eyes were unnaturally half-silted, no longer the eyes of a human being. Automatically Miller reached for a pulse and instantly, his hand came away with blood cold, jelled blood.

  A dead man was no longer a person; the person was gone. Miller heard the scream now, clear in his conscience, faint and distant, but clear the association of this death by violence was bringing back the memory of a death by violence in the past, as murders, supposedly, are troubled by past sins. He saw Alexander, heard Jennifer Davis’s death screams hurling down its corridors, wafting across its pavilions.

  New orderly buildings, an architect’s plan with the power house, the pine bordered athletic field. The staff residences, the bars patients behind latticed bars, lost faces, staring out of bars, “don’t let your mind hop off, John.” He heard Albert’s voice saying that. “Don’t be one of them.”

  Miller rose, he moved with despairing earnestness, pushed through the turbid nightmare. He found the wall switch. He waited till sanity leveled somewhat in his head, then he looked back at the figure on the floor, Albert Smith’s freakishly lean six foot six broken, his white doctor’s gown rumpled. A bloodied razor lay near Smith’s finger, red lines gashed his wrists, streams of blood had made ugly crisscross of rivulets in his cupped palms.

  Then with the calm and practiced hands of an experienced physician, Miller began the bruise on the forehead, the severed radial arteries, and the advancement of rigor, twice he almost fainted.

  Chapter Two

  Big things, important things struck John Miller slowly; a sense of loss had to incubate inside him before it would come alive. Then it did come with jarring impart. He could not believe that grasp the meaning of what that implied. Albert Smith was too vivid in his mind his gangling figure, his joking manner, the way he could laugh and kid, and playfully poke him in the ribs and dance away, his ridiculously long arms swinging, Albert’s acute devotion to fairness and honesty, his friendship these things could not vanish like a whim.

  Albert is dead, the voice inside his head said. Albert is dead; he didn’t answer the phone this afternoon.

  He’s dead but why is he dead? Why?

  The questions pounded futilely in his brain, a hammer on sensitive nerves; there was no beginning on which to take hold. He stood blocked by an unscalable wall. All the happenings of the afternoon at the laborat
ory, at home, at the station, on the train, jumbled there was no order or reason in any of it. A car ground to a screeching stop outside unintelligible voices shouted hurriedly, and then feet pounded on the curved walk and thudded inside the reception room. Someone cursed, stumbling over Miller’s suitcase his rod and creel box.

  A man, burly in the uniform of a state police sergeant, barged through the door, his small eyes wild. A pair of troopers pushed in after him, vaguely Miller glimpsed Margret Reed, face stiff with terror her slander girl’s hands clenched one to the other, as she wept hysterically.

  The beefy sergeant looked angrily, demandingly at Miller, drew up short at Albert Smith, his small dark eyes in his wind burned, flat face widened.

  “Christ!” He gasped. He stared at Miller, “and who are you?” He turned to a muscle bound trooper.

  “Sam, grab him!”

  Miller’s gesture of protest was ineffective. He felt the sergeant’s hand violently clamp his arms.

  “But I just got here.” They wouldn’t find out about his past, there was no police record of it. “I just got here, and he-he’s been dead an hour at least.”

  “What?” The sergeant roared foggily then, “God damn it, will somebody shut up that girl out there!” The second trooper went out and the sergeant unlimbered a flashlight, thrust its probing beam at the dead doctor’s wrists, at the razor and then at the face. Miller watched the man’s brutishness, his callousness; he was desecrating Albert’s body with that stabbing light. Albert was the only friend Miller had in ten years, asking nothing, giving what he could, when Miller had been in trouble, Albert had fought for him at the risk of his own reputation and future. Miller had been ill and Albert’s understanding had saved him from complete breakdown.

  The sergeant’s dark eyes stared, “looks like suicide, the damn crazy fool killed himself!”

  “Suicide?” Miller said as he stared at the trooper.

  He felt trooper Sammy relax the iron grip on his arms. The sergeant stalked to the desk, he moved to pick up the phone, hesitated he took a handkerchief from his pocket, spread it over the phone and then picked it up, dialed a number.

  “Sergeant Sam talking!” His voice jarred Miller. “Better get the wagon over here to Doctor Smith’s, coroner, Albert Smith kicked the bucket…you hears me, Smith just snuffed his lamp.”

  The sergeant thrust the phone down “one less doc in town more patients for Watson.” He jerked a laugh. “Coroner Watson was the only doc here before Smith came.” He walked back toward the body.

  Miller faced him, “Trooper,” the sergeant yelled. This cop had probably never handled any crime more serious than theft; Doctor Smith didn’t kill himself, Miller thought to himself

  “Huh?” The sergeant said.

  “He didn’t kill himself, he was murdered.” Miller said. Didn’t this red necked fool understand that? Could he be so completely stupid? The sergeant stiffened, the nostrils of a nose that had been broken many times grew wider, and the bone was white in his florid face. “Look at the bruise on his head.” Miller said with his parched lips. “He was slugged; he had no reason for wanting to kill himself.”

  Sergeant Sam’s face bored close to Miller. The nurse in the next room was again hysterical; the trooper whirled away glared out the door. “F’christ’s sake, John shut that girl’s yap, can’t you?”

  He whirled back, glanced at the body, “a bruise, yeah.” He needed his head, stepped gingerly about the body, keeping his distance from it, as if he were frightened of it.

  “Look at the bruise,” Miller began again, the burly officer turned on him shouting; “Stay back now! Don’t try to touch anything; I didn’t say this wasn’t murder! Now how is this again? What in hell did you say you were doing here? What’s your name?”

  A policeman bullied a crowd back at the scene of an accident when he was helpless to do anything more important. Sergeant Sammy was shouting that way.

  “I’m John Miller, I’m from New York. I just got in, came here doctor Smith and I were going away on a fishing trip, I came in and I…” “Oh, what was the use! Albert was dead.”

  “There’s no signs he was going on a fishing trip, where’s his stuff?” the sergeant glared with fierce cunning. “Was the doc a friend of yours, mister?”

  A car braked at the curb outside, a lean dark over coated man hurried up the curved walk. Moments later, he materialized through the door. A young sober faced catholic priest. A square of stiff white collar was at the notch of his high buttoned black vestment.

  “The coroner told me,” He began then saw the body.

  “Just don’t touch anything, father.” The sergeant said.

  From a book the priest took out a purple ribbon. He draped it over his collar, knelt beside the body. Other men arrived, among them an elderly official with a Prince Albert beard whom Sammy called “coroner”, and whose hat band bore the gold lettering! Doctor J.E. Watson, with Watson was a man carrying a camera; still another newcomer clutched a quantity of folded, yellow typewriter sheets in one hand, a pencil in the other.

  Sergeant Rossi took command. “Take him in the other room John,” He said to the strong arm trooper holding Miller. “Have Jerry keep him with the girl till we get things straightened out in here, and see that he doesn’t touch anything.”

  Miller let himself be led out. John standing in the reception room, had a round doltish face and a receding chin, he was looking with irritation and reproof at the young nurse.

  “Keep an eye on this one, too John,” The sergeant said. “I’m going back on the important work.” John made a menacing horseplay gesture with his fist.

  “They treat me like an old lady.” The young trooper complained to Miller. They always leave me on the outside of things. Miller sat down in one of the corner chairs tense; he bit hard at a finger nail, why had Albert called him? Had Albert known of a threat to himself? He had said something incongruously strange about a big fish to be caught, yet there was no apparent evidence here that he was preparing to go on a fishing trip.

  Time slowed for Miller, as he sat waiting it was as if there were a period of blankness, like a screen suddenly white in a movie theater; but the sound track continued. There were voices, movements, thumping’s and footsteps in the next room. Consultations and cross arguments, there were hours of it, then it was done, and Sergeant Sammy was beside him, his face not so red anymore, his broken nose was again as intense white in his pan flat face, like the gristle tip of a chicken’s fleshless breast.

  “Come along,” he said tiredly. He took Miller’s are, “We’re going to the barracks. There were several men in the room in the frame building where they questioned Miller; they hung silently about the room’s periphery, like background figures in a dream. Sergeant Sammy asked the questions, a trooper sat beside him scratching notes on a stenographic pad.

  It was not murder; they insisted the coroner’s examination and medical report proved that. Alongside the slashes on Albert Smith’s wrists were other tiny “trial” or “test” cuts characteristic of the marks a suicide made, hesitantly trying out a blade before he got up the courage to end his life. In murder there would have been none of these indecisive slashes.

  Miller recognized the logic of that, but he knew Albert never would have committed suicide. If there were “test” marks on his wrists they must have cunningly been planted there as a false clue.

  Time slowed again in Miller’s mind. There was the blurred memory of hours of questioning, questions which by their very nature seemed to prove the police were not sure of what the coroner’s report attested, questions Miller could not answer because if he did they would know what he had been, what he had done in the past.

  It was that evasive reticence that further roused their suspicions, and Miller’s insisting it was murder made Sammy and his aides tenacious bulldogs. Miller shook them off, they had no right to hold him in their fingers, scrutinizing, passing upon it. He himself tried not to probe into it, there were parts of him that were locke
d, closed, forgotten. It was no longer him, John Miller. They must not look at it and say it was him. Neither must they hear the voices nor the accusing cries in his mind that he alone heard. Otherwise they might know his past and say, once a man has killed, he may kill again. And then out of the blackness that closed him in like the iron lid on an iron pot came the words, “Suicide…release him.”

  “You can go now, Mr. Miller,” Sergeant Sammy’s voice said. “The coroner’s handed in his final verdict, and that closes the book. John Miller stood up, “Suicide!” he said aloud, and walked out of the room.

  A girl was sitting on a wooden bench in the outer room of the police house, Miller stopped he thought I am having delusions? She can’t be following me. It was the blonde, dimpled girl from the train, Sally Daniels. For one second her gem green eyes met his. The dimples came faintly into her cheeks and her mouth quivered, and then Sergeant Sammy’s voice said, “Okay, lady.”

  She rose, went into the room which Miller had just left, he heard the door close. Outside the wind came from the north-west, it went through Miller’s coat and bit into his bones, as he picked his way to the railroad station.

  Chapter Three

  New York seemed strange, unreal when John Miller returned. He felt like a displaced man walking in a scene in which he did not belong in them; here lived his wife but she was a stranger. He did not turn on the light in the dark apartment. He was momentarily aware that he was returning with something lacking, then he remembered that he had left his rod, reel and suitcase at Albert’s.

  He slipped out of his clothes and into his pajamas. As he crawled into the bed in which a figure slept, the bedspring grated, the figure stirred and sat up.

  “John? Is that you?” The woman’s hand fumbled for the lamp on the night table, Julie Miller had gone to sleep without putting up her hair, she combed back thick blonde tangle with her fingers, her face especially under the eyes looked tired and swollen, and her lips were as colorless as the lace of her night gown.