Killer in Silk. H. Vernor Dixon
him another glass of milk from a chilled pitcher on the table. “But this level of yours—I don’t quite understand it. You must have some sort of skill, or trade?”
Morgan debated whether or not to tell her the truth. He saw his suitcase and portable typewriter on the floor near the dressing room. He assumed that the pawn tickets had been found in his pockets. Probably the butler had redeemed his stuff. Apparently, though, the suitcase had not been opened and his hostess had no inkling of his identity. Maybe it would be better to leave it that way. Quite often, with strangers, he would create entirely new lives for himself, lives with exotic backgrounds—test pilot, deep sea-diver, smuggler, bookie, or, one of his favorites, long-term criminal just out of prison and now determined to go straight. He dominated his audience, he played upon their sympathies, he stretched credulity to the breaking point. He had a wonderful time doing it and he always learned something that added grist to his mill. He had such a tremendous fund of spotty knowledge in so many fields that he never failed to make himself convincing. But he decided, on this occasion, to tell the truth. He was too weak and exhausted to play games for any length of time.
So he said, “My name is Morgan O’Keefe. Does that mean anything to you?”
She frowned and thought for a moment “No-o-o, I can’t say that it does. I saw M. J. O’Keefe on your pawn tickets, but it didn’t mean anything to me. Should it?”
“Not necessarily. If it meant something to everybody I asked I’d be famous and I wouldn’t be here accepting your charity. I’m a writer, you see. I write dreary little books about dreary little people that sell in the dreary hundreds instead of the thousands. My publishers should have stopped printing my stuff years ago—God knows they barely break even—but they keep on with me in the wildly insane hope that some day I may click.”
“If you could mention a few titles—”
“Forget it. You wouldn’t know my stuff. You belong to some book-of-the-month club and a local rental library and whenever you buy anything else you consult the bestseller lists. You won’t find Morgan O’Keefe in that company.”
She was slightly annoyed, principally because he was right. “Well, after all, I do try to read the best.”
“Of course you do. So, naturally, you haven’t read anything of mine.”
She stared at him and then burst out laughing. She stopped suddenly, obviously startled by her own outburst. Morgan wondered about it. Mrs. Wilson was evidently a woman who did not laugh easily, or often.
“Is that what you were doing down south, writing?”
“How did you know where I came from?”
“You told me when I first met you.”
“Oh.” He thought of what he had been doing down south and looked as if he might be sick. “Well,” he said, “the answer to that is yes and no. I wasn’t writing for the movies, if that’s what you’re thinking. I wanted to. I beat my brains out trying to get in, but they didn’t want me. I had exactly one chance all the years I was there. My Hollywood agent got me a deal with MGM at seven-fifty a week and an office in writers’ row. I thought I was set. Then the powers-that-be gave me some other author’s book to adapt for the screen. That was okay, too, except for one thing. The story was about the war and the main character was an officer who was a goddam lily-white hero.” He shook his head, clenched his fists until the knuckles were white, and closed his eyes.
Mrs. Wilson said curiously, “What was wrong with that?”
He kept his eyes closed. “It was the worst thing they could have handed me. I wound up in fifty-two in an army psycho ward, where I damned well belonged. I despise anyone in uniform and anything even remotely suggesting Army makes me deathly ill. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even force myself to read halfway through the book. So, naturally, I got drunk and I stayed that way. That ended my association with MGM, or any other studio.”
She said simply, “I’m sorry.”
He clasped his thin arms about his knees and looked away from her toward the sun streaming in through the windows. Mrs. Wilson was watching him closely. Her curiosity had given way to enthralled attention and she wanted something more of the man than simply a fragmentary picture. She wanted something she could use at the cocktail party that night.
“I don’t really mean to pry,” she said, “but is that why you left the south, when you lost that job? If I’m getting too personal—”
He looked back at her with a twisted smile. “Of course you’re prying and you’re getting too personal, but I have to repay you somehow or other. Don’t I? No, that is not why I left the south. Would you really like to know why I left?”
“Well—”
“I’ll tell you. I suppose you’ve guessed, or the doctor must have told you, that I’m an alcoholic. When something bothers me too much I go for the bottle. But I don’t drink like ordinary people. I drink to drown myself. I go on and on, day after day. I start with the best and when I run out of money I pawn everything the hock shops will take and switch to cheap sherry and muscatel and keep going until I finally drop from sheer exhaustion and wind up in a drunk tank and sometimes the county hospital. In Los Angeles I made the tank nine times. Nine times in three years.”
She dropped a solicitous hand to his arm, her dark eyes brimming with compassion. “Please. If you don’t care—”
“Hell,” he laughed, “I don’t mind. Maybe I even get some sort of perverse pleasure out of my little purges. Anyway, the last time I was in the L.A. tank was once too much. I was brought into night court. The judge remembered me and looked up my record. He gave me a long lecture and in the end he let me go, but he also gave me a warning. He said that if I was picked up once more I would get the full ninety-day treatment behind bars, which is par for the habitual. Ninety days behind bars, or even nine, would be the end of me. But I knew the threat wouldn’t stop me from another binge the next time I blew my stack. So I did the only thing possible. I ran. I figured I’d be safe here in San Francisco, where the police don’t know me.” He paused, and then added tiredly, “Now I’m on record already.”
Mrs. Wilson looked away from him. His words had evoked an image in her mind of Jay Wilson on one of his little binges. But Jay, even at his worst, had never been like this man. Sometimes, when he had gone out drinking, he had failed to come home until dawn, and then in a pretty sodden condition. But, still, he had always come home and for at least a day even the sight of a bottle of whisky could make him ill. Jay had been a heavy drinker, but not an alcoholic. Once again, as had happened so often during the past ten years, she was proven wrong. Oh, God, she wondered, how many more times must I be faced with my own stupidity?
She glanced slyly and curiously at Morgan, who had dropped to his back on the bed and was again staring at the ceiling. He didn’t look like an alcoholic, nor was he her idea of what a writer should look like. If he had said that he was in the advertising business, or sold used automobiles, or was perhaps a clerk in a department store, she would have believed him without question. But a writer—that seemed hardly to fit his highly strung nature and the glib way he talked about himself. He was probably lying to pass the time and because they were strangers. But then she noticed the sensitive mouth and the sharp alertness of his penetrating eyes, even in a weakened condition, and she had a feeling that, regardless of what his background might be, he was a man of unusual—and provocative—intelligence.
The discovery bothered her. For ten years she had been carefully avoiding unusual people, ruling out anyone who might be able to crash through the many barriers she had erected. Her days were planned, her life was serene, and she wanted nothing to alter the condition she had chosen. But give this man a little more time to get well and strong and he would probably enjoy punching holes in her defenses.
She got quickly to her feet and told him, “I must go and help Anna.”
“Anna?”
“Carl’s wife. She’s the housekeeper. I’m having a few friends in tonight for cocktails.”