Into the Night

“‘Next time you’re willing to put up that much,’ he added, ‘why don’t you put it into something more constructive?’”

“And then you gave up trying,” Madeline prodded.

“You don’t know me,” Dell said meaningfully. “You don’t know me at all.”

God, I wouldn’t want her down on me! Madeline thought.

“For the second time I switched. Just like I’d switched from him to her, at first, so now I gave up trying bodily harm. I saw that wouldn’t work. I switched instead to character damage.

“I got me a private detective. I got him out of the fine-print ads in the back of a disreputable magazine. You know the type of thing. ‘Do you feel unsure of your mate’s loyalty? Call on us. Strictly confidential.’

“He was a darb. He didn’t have an ethic to his name. I wouldn’t have even minded that if he’d only been personally clean. He hadn’t changed his shirt in a week and his socks in a month. You could’ve told which part of a room he was in even with the lights out. But I always say, Get a dirty guy to do a dirty job. A decent guy wouldn’t have handled an assignment like that in the first place. See, it wasn’t to save a marriage, protect it from an intruder, a third person. I was paying him to deliberately break up a perfectly good marriage, and not my own but somebody else’s. That was what I was hiring him for.

“I laid it on the line to him. My fist looked like a head of cabbage, the way bunched greenbacks were coming out between all the fingers. No wonder they’ve got that nickname for it, cabbage.

“I told him the grubby industrial town she was born in. I said, I want you to go there, and I want you to stay there, until you’ve dug up something on her. Something that’ll make her as sooty as the town is. If you can dig up something big, all the better. If you can only dig up something little, never mind, we’ll blow it up into something big. Don’t leave a stone unturned—”

Just like I did, Madeline thought parenthetically, only in reverse. Mine was benevolent, hers was malevolent.

“It’s on me, I said to him. The whole thing’s on me. I’m footing the bill. I don’t care if you stay there six months. I don’t care how you pad your expense account. I’ll pay for it. I don’t care if you have a broad in your room every night, a case of Carstairs in your room every night. I’ll pay for it. It’s worth it to me. Just so long as you come up with something on her. I’ve never enjoyed spending my money half as much as I’ll enjoy spending it now. Ask around. Dig up the kids she went to school with. Look up doctors. Maybe she had a miss once. Maybe there was syph in her family. In the old days, when it presented a problem. Or insanity, or a criminal record. Check on her birth certificate, they must have it on file there, find out what that can tell you.

“Get something on her. I don’t care what it is, but get something on her.”

And even in the repetition, her voice was a terrible thing, a thing such as Madeline had never heard before. It wasn’t a voice, it was hate incarnate.

She spoke more quietly again. “About three months after he went there, he rang me up one night long-distance. Reversed charges, of course. When I heard what he had to tell me, I was in ecstasy. I’d never expected anything like it in a million years. All I’d hoped for was to find a little mud that I could sling at her. Instead, he’d dug up an entire tar pit. I rolled over and over on the bed, carrying the phone with me up to my ear. Then when the wire started to pull up short, I rolled over and over back again the other way until it was freed again.

“It was like dropping some kind of a bomb in between them. It blew them so far apart they could never get back together again, not in this lifetime. I bet from then on if either one of them ever saw the other, they’d start running for dear life, they couldn’t get away fast enough.”

“But what?” Madeline asked. “What was it?”

Dell dropped her eyes, with self-satisfaction but also with guile. “That’s as far as it goes,” she said inflexibly. “Beyond that, we don’t talk about it in this house.”

One day the phone rang while Madeline was there. Dell got up and went inside to it. It was just past the doorway. Madeline went ahead tapping single notes and writing them down on the score sheet.

After a few intimately indistinct phrases, she heard Dell say, “A friend.”

Then she added, “Of course a girl. What do you think I do, entertain men here behind your back? I wouldn’t last long that way.”

Then she went on, “What do you mean, how do you know it is?”

Then she concluded, “Because I say so, isn’t that enough?”

Suddenly she called, “Mad, come here a minute.” Madeline got up and went in there. Dell thrust the phone out toward her, but without relinquishing it. “Say hello into this,” she instructed.

“Hello?” Madeline said uncertainly.

Dell immediately took it away again, so that Madeline had no chance to hear what was said in return. Madeline went back to the piano. “Satisfied?” Dell was saying. “You sure take a lot of convincing.”