You Can't Catch Me Page 12

  “What is it, Mr. Handelman?” Tristram asked, suddenly desperate. “Don’t you want to take the case after all?”

  But still, so very oddly, Handelman did not speak! In the awkward silence Tristram became aware of traffic noises lifting from the street, and of a woman’s high-heeled shoes clattering, and fading, in the corridor outside Handelman’s door, and, in the wall close beside him, a small, furious, scratching sound, as of a trapped animal.… Handelman carefully laid down the photograph of Markham, and picked up Tristram’s check, and stared at it, licking his lips. An expression of greed overlaid with regret—or was it regret overlaid with greed—showed in his face. For a long terrible moment Tristram was sure that Handelman was going to rip the check in two. “What is it?” Tristram asked. “Do you want more money?”

  Handelman shook his head almost irritably, as if the very question were an insult. “Not at all,” he said, swallowing hard, “—a deal is a deal.” In that instant it was decided: he flashed his quick bright brave smile, and rose from his chair to shake Tristram’s hand. “You are my client, Mr. Heade, in this ‘Markham’ business, and I am your man. Invincible and unbribable—the motto of Achilles!”

  Tristram, taller than the detective by a head, and heavier by one hundred pounds, could not help but wince at the ferocity of the little man’s handshake.

  Minutes later Tristram was waiting for the elevator, lost in thought—though what he was thinking of he could not have said, his brain so bedazzled—when a high-pitched voice rang out along the corridor, badly startling him. It was Handelman, who came limping (limping!) after him, brandishing Markham’s shiny black cane like a child’s sword.

  The detective had entirely regained his exuberance. “You don’t want to forget this, Mr. Heade!” he cried, his left eye screwed up in a wink.

  IV

  1

  And wilderness is Paradise enough.

  These words of Omar Khayyám’s rang in Tristram’s head as he climbed over the wrought iron fence at the rear of the Grunwald estate, and made his way through the shadows to the house itself, his heart beating pleasantly fast and his senses keenly aroused. It was an intermittently moonlit night; a night of winds; high-scudding clouds; breathlessness. Tristram could not have said if it were cunning, or instinct, or an admixture of both, that led him in the patchy dark to the window opening into Otto Grunwald’s study; his window; the window he had rendered safe for his entry.

  Hours before, at dusk, Tristram had taken a cab to Fairmount Park; to the northernmost corner of the park, a discreet distance from Burlingham Boulevard. He was dressed quite conventionally, in a suit and a tie, but carried a duffel bag containing the costume into which, in one of the park’s public restrooms, he quickly changed: dark gray gabardine trousers, black turtleneck jersey shirt, black tennis shoes, black beret. All these items, with the exception of the beret, Tristram had discovered in Markham’s largest suitcase. (The beret, purchased in a pricey gentlemen’s shop in the Hotel Meridian,—not in the Moreau, where the purchase might be traced—was Tristram’s own idea, or so he believed, since his hair had grown rather long, and was likely to call attention to itself in the dark.) He had a length of cord; a flashlight; a pair of kidskin gloves that fitted his hands nearly as tightly as a surgeon’s rubber gloves; and, of course, Markham’s finely honed dagger.

  (Perhaps it was Tristram’s imagination, but the dagger seemed sharper, and even a little larger, than previously. The mere weight of it in his hand, its physicality, its presence, helped to placate his fears, for he reasoned that a weapon that had performed well for its owner in the past could not fail to perform well for its owner again.)

  Tristram had little difficulty in forcing the window to Grunwald’s study, and scarcely more difficulty climbing through, though the maneuver was new to him, and would have been dauntingly tricky had he stopped and calculated how to do it instead of trusting to instinct. He might have thought himself too large and ungainly to fit through the rather narrow space; he would surely have bungled the upward-heaving of his body, which seemed to defy gravity, its weight concentrated for several astonishing seconds merely on his forearms, which rested on the windowsill. But his arm and shoulder muscles, and even the muscular tissue of his hands, were more powerful than he might have thought; and, where only a few days ago, in Richmond, he would have been seriously winded from such exertion, he now felt rather invigorated.

  “So this is what I have been cheated of, for most of my life!”

  And now, as if in a dream, he found himself in Otto Grunwald’s study; in the man’s very house. And no one knew he was here.

  He switched on the flashlight, and shone a quick darting penetrating light into the corners of Grunwald’s study, illuminating in turn the fireplace and its marble mantel … shelves of books … the several glass-fronted cabinets … the twin skeletons wired to their poles … the desk, chairs, lamps, carpet … the closed door that led to the corridor. (Though he knew they were there, Tristram was momentarily startled by the sight of “Adam” and “Eve,” and nearly dropped his flashlight. How horrific, those eyeless grinning faces!—if, in the strictest sense, skeletons have faces.)

  As quickly as he could manage, yet not in careless haste, Tristram searched the drawers of Grunwald’s desk, finding, for the most part, little of interest; a good many financial records, and letters pertaining to business, philanthropy, and charity; collectors’ brochures and printouts, of the kind Tristram kept in his own desk, in Richmond; and, in one drawer, a folder stuffed with newspaper and magazine clippings dating back to the early 1960s—features on black-tie benefit dinners in Philadelphia, cocktail receptions, brunches, and the like. Photographed sometimes with other couples, sometimes by themselves, were “Mr. and Mrs. Otto Grunwald”: beautiful Fleur, looking very young, standing beside her husband with the faintest of posed smiles.… The sight of her pierced Tristram to the heart. How he loved her! Adored her! Mr. and Mrs. Otto Grunwald at the opening night of “La Traviata,” a benefit performance for the American Association for the Advancement of Mental Health … Mr. and Mrs. Otto Grunwald at the opening of the Van Gogh exhibit, at the Philadelphia Museum of the Arts.… A little further down, however, he discovered, to his disgust, that “Mrs. Otto Grunwald” did not necessarily mean Fleur Grunwald; a wife preceded her, and a wife preceded that wife, both of them young-looking, and beautifully dressed, but not, he thought, so beautiful as Fleur.

  Poor things! he thought, stung with pity. You had no “Angus Markham” to save you.

  Next, thinking to find a safe, Tristram removed a painting from the wall directly behind Grunwald’s desk, discovering instead a curious little lever which, after a moment’s hesitation, he turned; and to his surprise—unless perhaps it was not to his surprise—the wall panel slid noiselessly open, and another room was revealed. “This is it,” Tristram said, with a sharp intake of breath. “‘Master’s cave.’”

  It was supremely quiet. Only the mantel clock’s quiet ticking and Tristram’s own warm, rhythmic breathing sounded in his ears.

  The secret room was windowless, unlike the other, to which it seemed a sort of twin—having approximately the same dimensions as the other, and furnished and decorated in the same style. But how different this room was!—how frightful, and repulsive, to Tristram’s eye!

  The walls were almost completely covered with obscene works of art: paintings, drawings, etchings, photographs; all of them featuring women, naked or scantily clad women, in various poses of wantonness, shamelessness, seductiveness, humiliation, pain, ecstasy, bondage. So much flesh, and so lewdly exposed! In a corner of the room, discreetly hidden by a richly brocaded Japanese silk screen, was a leather table very like a doctor’s examination table, equipped with stirrups, straps, and buckles; and a cabinet of what appeared to be tattooing equipment. “So Zoe spoke the truth!” Tristram said aloud, directing his light, with a fascinated sort of dread, on shelves of sinister glittering needles, bottles of brightly colored dyes, and various clini
cal and pharmaceutical items. A sickish odor of chloroform overlaid with an odor of tobacco smoke pressed against his nostrils.

  “He is a beast after all.”

  And yet the flashlight, trembling in Tristram’s hand, illuminated still more horrors: a riding crop stained with blood … several pairs of handcuffs … a length of rope … leg-irons … chains of various sizes … a rack of wickedly gleaming scalpels, syringes, knives. There was a clear plastic container of swabs of cotton batting, into which used swabs had been carelessly tossed, their bloodstains faded to brown like autumn leaves. There was a shelf of books with such titles as The Ancient Art of Tattooing, 1001 Easy Designs for the Amateur Tattooist, “Forbidden” Tattoos of the Southsea Islands. Tristram examined the last-named, which opened readily to a lavish peacock-tail design, all brilliant blues, greens, and purples, a tapestry of tiny eyes lewdly tattooed on a woman’s body. The woman was kneeling, facing away from the camera, head bowed so dramatically low it seemed at first glance she might be headless.

  “Beast. Bastard.”

  The flashlight’s beam lifted to the walls, to expose in sequence a framed reproduction of Peter Paul Rubens’s “Angelica and the Monk” … a Japanese woodcut of naked females busily engaged in lesbian orgies … a luridly colored photograph of a whipped black girl hanging by her bound wrists from a beam, bleeding from dozens of long snaky red-glistening wounds … drawings and paintings of wicked nymphs, coy madonnas, slyly beckoning odalisques, aloofly erotic “chimeras” … sphinxes, witches, Venuses, femmes fatales both fleshy and cadaverous, salacious and mock-chaste, gorgeous and repulsive … reproductions of nudes by Goya, Boucher, Toulouse-Lautrec, Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Picasso, Salvador Dalí.… Tristram’s cheeks burned. He felt an adolescent’s puritanical anger; and an adolescent’s immediate sexual arousal.

  And then he was thinking of Fleur; and of Zoe. How the woman had coiled her bare arms around his neck, and pressed her eager, heated body against his; how she had allowed him to bury his face in her neck, and kiss her lips; running his hands over her smooth naked body … her hips, her thighs, her breasts, her belly … the barbarous tattoos stitched in her very flesh, ineradicable. Ah, Tristram had been mad for her! Mad, crazed, frantic with desire!

  Of course, Tristram thought, trying to calm his excitement, she was not to blame.

  Not to blame for tempting him, tormenting him with lust.

  No reasonable man could blame Otto Grunwald’s wife for bizarre behavior; for unnatural behavior of any kind. Victimized as hardly more than a child by the brute’s sick appetites, systematically terrorized, disfigured, humiliated, debased.… But, ah, that teasing maddening singsong!—Zoe’s lascivious knowingness sounding in the bell-like purity of Fleur’s innocence.

  Be still says He and you will not be hurt.

  Hideous. Filthy. Unspeakable.

  And yet …

  Tristram recalled uneasily that Zoe had hinted (or had she more than hinted) that Fleur was an accomplice of a kind in these perverted practices; and had not Grunwald hinted, or charged, more or less the identical thing? Grunwald had accused Fleur too of spreading slanderous tales about him in Philadelphia, in the hope of getting a larger divorce settlement than the law would probably have granted; and of having a lover. A man met at the racetrack at Saratoga.

  “But I am that man,” Tristram said aloud. “Am I not that man?”

  He was staring at the reflection of a pale, angry-looking stranger in a mirror tilted above the examination table; a man who resembled him, but wore a black beret that covered most of his longish blond hair, was perspiring visibly, and had the jaws of a predator.

  The stranger grinned at him. He had found the evidence, hadn’t he! The woman had spoken the truth! No further proof was required: the next step was to climb the stairs to the second floor, and seek out Otto Grunwald in his bed, and murder him as he slept. Or should the monster be awakened first, and then murdered? Taking yourself by surprise you take your quarry by surprise as well.

  Except …

  And yet …

  Suppose it were true that Fleur Grunwald, in her innocence, had acquiesced to her husband’s wishes? That, having married a much older and very wealthy man, presumably not for love (Tristram winced at the thought), the young woman had … if not exactly brought her fate upon herself, at least invited it? Collaborated in it? In all fairness it must be said that Fleur’s intensely feminine passivity might well have provoked Grunwald’s “masculine” sadism. In which case, was Grunwald guilty? or, in his own way, innocent? Guilty of unspeakable, vile behavior; yet innocent too … in a way?

  Or might both be guilty, and both innocent?

  Tristram recalled, however, from law school, that certain crimes remain crimes even if the victim allegedly consents. Thus, to aid and abet a suicide is to violate the statute against manslaughter; to kill someone who asks to be killed is to commit murder nonetheless.

  Tristram dared not meet his own impatient stare in the mirror. “If only I knew. If only I … could be certain.”

  So minutes passed, in indecision. The more Tristram pondered the ambiguity of the situation, the subtleties and contradictions of the moral issues involved, the more distracted he became, until he was oblivious of his surroundings, and of the danger of his position. He was standing with his back to the door, his eyes half shut; more anxious, more apprehensive, than he had been while breaking into Grunwald’s house. Like a man straddling a wall who has forgotten in which direction he is heading he truly did not know what to do next. There was Fleur, whom he hoped to marry; but there was also Zoe, whom, perhaps, he rather dreaded. And there was Otto Grunwald, admittedly a monster, and undeserving of life, yet, if one were to be fair-minded, perhaps he too was a “victim” … a “victim of his own desires” as the popular phraseology would have it.

  And hadn’t Grunwald been extremely friendly to Tristram; like an uncle, or an older brother? Like a father? Call me Otto, please call me Otto, why cannot you bring yourself to call me Otto?

  Poor Tristram was overcome by these thoughts when, with no more warning than a quick scuttling sound behind him, he was struck a blow to the back of the head with what felt like a hammer, and staggered, and reeled, and—and did not quite lose consciousness; but managed to push off his assailant who was (or so it appeared: in the struggle the flashlight had gone flying) Otto Grunwald himself.

  There followed then one of those brief yet prolonged episodes of a kind that determine a life; desperate, even frenzied, yet in a dreamlike way coolly performed. There was no light except the faintest, gauziest light, a mere nimbus of light, since Tristram’s flashlight had rolled to a far corner of the room, and cast its most concentrated beam merely against a wall; and the struggle, for all its violence, took place without words.

  Though the larger of the two men, and, with his newly hardened muscles, certainly the stronger, Tristram was so stunned by the blow to his head that he could not wrestle his opponent away from him, in order to strike him, or to pull Markham’s dagger out of his pocket. Grunwald (or the man Tristram presumed to be Grunwald) had, in the struggle, dropped his weapon, but was so ferocious in his attack, so intent upon beating Tristram into unconsciousness, it seemed initially that he might win … and would then (of this, Tristram had no doubt) have the privilege of finishing off his opponent.

  (I have violated the man’s inner sanctum, Tristram thought. He would rather die, and would far rather commit murder, than have it be known.)

  Groping about behind him, Grunwald snatched up the riding crop, and struck Tristram a stinging blow to the side of the head; and Tristram, now desperate, seized Grunwald about the hips, and threw him backward against the examination table. Grunwald groaned in pain and surprise: one of the stirrups must have caught him in the small of the back. But in an instant he was on Tristram again … embracing him and wrestling him to the floor … where, rolling over and over, striking out wildly with their fists and elbows, pummeling, kicking, gouging, ch
oking, ferocious but uncoordinated as children, the men struggled together for what seemed like a very long time but could not have been more than two or three minutes. Tristram had by now forgotten the dagger in his pocket; had forgotten his sacred mission; had forgotten who he was, and what force had brought him to this strange place where he was fighting to the death with a man whose face he could not see clearly, a man who seemed intent upon killing him. How was it possible? Was it possible?—With a crash, the Japanese screen was knocked over, and a metal stand holding trays of tattooing equipment went skidding into a wall, and the glass front of a cabinet shattered loudly—all of which, Tristram thought, in a normal household, would have drawn the servants. But Grunwald’s staff must have been conditioned to ignore, perhaps not even to hear, strange noises rising from Master’s cave.…

  By degrees Tristram’s superior strength and weight took their toll. Grunwald began to tire, breathing so laboriously, giving off such desperate heat, Tristram worried he might have a heart attack or a stroke: which would, in this context, constitute murder if he were to die. Tristram panted, “Let me go! And I promise not to hurt you!” But the elder man lashed out savagely at him, and would have closed his fingers around Tristram’s neck had not Tristram caught his wrists, and shoved him backward. His head struck something on the wall, and glass flew out into Tristram’s face, momentarily blinding him. In the confusion of the moment Tristram thought, It is the madman’s glass eye, and now he will be stopped.

  The fight did in fact end shortly, with Grunwald too exhausted to continue, slumped on the floor, and Tristram able at last to make his retreat. With no thought for his purpose in having come here he snatched up the flashlight, and ran blindly away: running, it seemed, for his very life.