Chapter XIII

SURE I know him,” The little checker girl was saying. She had black tangled hair, enormous dark eyes, and wore huge gold buttons in her ears. “I always thought he was nice, you know what I mean? Sure, I saw him. That’s him, isn’t it? But I didn’t see no green paper bag. It wasn’t in with his groceries. He didn’t have no green paper bag. See …” She moved closer to the tall policeman and looked up at him almost yearningly. “We aren’t busy so close to lunch. We never are. So I seen him come in. Right in that door. He didn’t look good. He looked like he was sick or something. I seen his bare hands. If he had it, then he musta had it in his pocket. Did you look in his pockets?”

“Did you look in your pockets?” Rosemary flashed around and seemed to bear down upon him. (She wasn’t anybody he knew.) Then the policeman seemed to be searching him while Mr. Gibson stood helpless as a dummy or a small child whose elders don’t trust the accuracy of his reports.

The checker girl said, almost weeping, “Why’d he want to do a thing like that? Gee, I thought he was nice… . I mean some customers aren’t so nice, you know, but he was nice.” She used the past tense as if he had died. Nobody answered her.

“And listen,” she sobbed. “I didn’t put no green paper bag in with anybody else’s stuff, either. Only been three or four people through my stand. It isn’t here. Probably he never had no poison.” She peeked at Mr. Gibson fearfully.

“If it isn’t here,” said Rosemary, tensely, “it must be on the bus.”

“Wa-ait a minute,” the policeman said. “Now—” His eyes were cold. They fixed upon Mr. Gibson as if he were an object and an obstacle. One could tell that he was used to obstacles. “You are positive that you had this green paper bag with this poison in it when you got on the bus?”

“Yes, I am positive,” said Mr. Gibson with perfect composure.

“And when you got home?”

“It wasn’t there.”

“You were emotionally upset?” the policeman said. “You think you forgot it on the bus, then?”

“I ‘forgot’ it,” said Mr. Gibson, “because, I suppose, subconsciously I did not really want …” The words were coming out of him as from a parrot.

Rosemary took his arm rather roughly. “Do you want a stranger to die?” she cried at him.

The knife went in. “No,” said he. “No. No.”

“Well, then!” said Rosemary with a curious air of triumph. “You see. it isn’t true!”

Paul said, “Wait a minute. What are the police doing?”

The policeman said. “They are after the bus, all right. And we are broadcasting. I’ll search this building thoroughly, now, just in case …”

“What do you think the chances …?”

The policeman shrugged. He didn’t think much of them. He was a sad man. He’d seen a lot of trouble. He did his best and let it go at that. “Whoever might find a bottle—looks like it’s olive oil—might throw it away,” said he. “Might take it home—use it. Who can say what people are going to do?”

Ethel can, thought Mr. Gibson, and for a moment feared he might whinny this forth nervously.

“Can’t we find the bus?” Rosemary was urging.

“Gee, Rosie, I dunno,” said Paul. “Are you sure he shouldn’t be seeing a doctor …” Paul jittered.

Rosemary said, “Hurry, hurry …”

The checker girl said, “Oh gosh, I hope you find it! I hope nothing bad is going to happen!” She peered at Mr. Gibson from her eye corners. “Look, you’re all right now, aren’t you?” She seemed to care.

Mr. Gibson couldn’t answer. What was it to be “all right,” he wondered, with a shadowy sadness.

Then they were back in the car, as before.

“Number Five. That is the bus that goes on out the boulevard?” asked Rosemary.

“Yes.”

“But how will we know which one? Did you notice any number on it?”

“No.”

“But the police could get the number of the right bus, couldn’t they? Since they know the time you caught it downtown, the time you got off at the market.”

“Maybe.”

“Then, maybe they have caught it already. They must have. It’s two fifteen.”

Rosemary was babbling! It was vocalized worry. Mr. Gibson was answering in monosyllables. Paul was driving the car. He wasn’t driving it very well. The car jerked and jittered. The man was nervous. Mr. Gibson—so curiously removed from self by his ruination (which was complete)—found his serses able to perceive. He felt a resurgence of an old power. He was no longer cut off. Paul, he realized, shrank from him as evil. Paul was almost superstitiously afraid of a man who had intended to kill himself.

Mr. Gibsor wondered if he ought to try to explain. The trouble was … he could not now remember how it had gone all his reasoning. He thought it odd to be sitting in the middle with the two of them so bent on preserving him from the doom of becoming a murderer. Doom … ah yes, that was the word. Now he remembered.…

“I was going to write a letter,” he said out loud. “I was going to explain … At least, I—”

“Well, don’t” said Rosemary vehemently. “Not now. Just don’t talk about it. Whatever you thought, whatever it was, whatever it is. Now, we have to find that terrible stuff and stop it from hurling anyone. Afterward,” she said grimly. “you can talk about it if you want to. Paul, can you drive faster?’”

“Listen,” said Paul, nervous and sweating. “I’d just as soon not wreck us, you know …”

Rosemary said, “I know. I know,” and she pounded with her small female fists the side of Paul’s car. “But I am to blame for this,” said Rosemary.

Mr. Gibson tried to protest but she turned and looked fiercely into his eyes. “And you are to blame. We are to blame. That has to be true. I’ll prove it to you. I’m tired,” she cried. “I am so tired—”

Paul said, “Don’t talk, Rosie. He must have been crazy. Let it go and say he was crazy.”

But Mr. Gibson had a strange feeling of solidity. He thought, Yes, of course, I am to blame.

The boulevard was a divided street. In the weedy center space there lay old streetcar tracks, now superseded by the bus line. The boulevard was lined with little low apartment buildings, arranged in the charming California style, around grassy courts, and in a gay variety of colors … pink ones, yellow ones, green ones … all sparkling clean and bright in the light of this fine day. Like big beads on the pretty chain, there came from time to time the shopping centers. A huge food market, with banks of red and yellow and orange fruit along the sidewalk, its bulk like a mother hen beside its chicks—the drugstore, laundromats.

After ten minutes of going, the boulevard lost its center strip and became just a street curving off through residential patches into a long valley, where houses became smaller and shabbier and more countrified as the city frayed about the edges. Mr. Gibson, sitting in the middle, looked at all this scenery as if he had come upon a new planet.

They passed one bus going their way, and, after a while, another. Neither could be the right one.

It was Paul Townsend, now, who was doing the talking. “Number Five turns around at the junction, I think Let’s see. If you got off about one forty-five, then it would get to the end of its line around two forty or a bit after. We might meet the right bus, coming back. What is it now? Two thirty.”

“I can’t tell the right bus,” Mr. Gibson said.

“The police can. Watch the other side of the street …”

Mr. Gibson’s brain, although feebly, was turning over. “Whoever found the bottle,” said he with detached composure, “may have gotten off the bus at any stop along the way.”

“Yes, but—” Paul’s eye flirted nervously toward him. Paul wanted to worry out loud, but not this much.

“In fact, once the bus has turned around to come back—that means that every person who was on it while I was on it, must not be on it any more.”

“Maybe whoever found it turned it over to the driver. Maybe they have like a lost and found department …”

“Maybe,” said Mr. Gibson stoically.

“Who’s going to take and eat food that he just found?” said Paul. “Especially if it looks as if it has been opened. Did you break a seal?”

“No seal. It was a question of turning the cap …”

“How full was the bottle?”

“Full enough.”

“It wouldn’t pour quite like olive oil.”

“It’s oily enough,” said Mr. Gibson. “The bottle will smell of olive oil.”

“Listen—” said Paul, “even if we don’t find it … don’t forget the police are putting the alarm on the air. That’s what he said.”

“Not everyone,” said Mr. Gibson, “Listens constantly to the radio.”

Rosemary said, “And we should face the facts, shouldn’t we?” She turned her head and looked fiercely at him as before. Her eyes were such a fierce blue. Mr. Gibson realized that inside the body of Rosemary—behind the face of Rosemary—within all the graces of Rosemary, which graces he loved there was somebody else. A fierce angry determined spirit he had never met and never known. This spirit said boldly, “If anyone dies of that poison, you’ll go to jail, I suppose?”

“I suppose,” he said and felt indifferent.

“In any case, you’ll lose your position?”

“Yes.”

“People will know …”

The people in the market, the people on the bus, the police, the neighbors, the puolic. Yes, thought Mr. Gibson, everyone will know.…

“But if nobody dies and we find the poison,” said Rosemary, “everything else we can bear. Isn’t that a fact?”

Mr. Gibson put his hand up to shield his eyes. It was a fact, as far as he could tell.

“Keep your chin up,” said Paul nervously. “Who knows? What time is it? Ten of three—the bus has turned around.”

“Look!” said Rosemary. “Look … up ahead! There it is! There it is!”