But if I came back it would be the same hideous thing over again. Your temper, your
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inflexibility, your suspicion. Your son returning, as he will, and your inability to see how insanely he hates me for taking his mother’s place, how he will work and work until he succeeds in poisoning your mind about me. And I’m no saint myself. I admit that. My habits, my outlook, my demandsam I cruel to say that you are too old for them?
No, we would only hurt each other the worse. I don’t want that, for you or for myself. So I can’t come back.
I’m going away for a while, I don’t know where, or if I did know I wouldn’t tell you, because you might not stop pleading with me and that would be too hard to bear. I don’t want to see you again. Not for a long time, at least, ‘til our wounds have scarred. I’ll get an attorney to settle the business part with you. I wish you everything_good. Won’t you wish the same for me? Goodbye, Aaron.
Lisette
Yamamura stared into emptiness. / wonder what she’ll think when she learns what this letter drove him to do.
She may even have counted on it.
He put the sheet back approximately as he had found it, and unconsciously wiped his fingers on his trousers. In his need to keep busy, he squatted to examine the evidence on the table. His nose was keen, he could detect a slight acrid-ness in the smell about the glass. The bottle from the drugstore held sleeping pills prescribed
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for Cardynge. It was half empty. Barbiturates and alcohol can be a lethal combination.
And yet Yamamura got to his feet. He was not unacquainted with death, he had looked through a number of its many doors and the teachings of the Buddha made it less terrible to him than to most. But something was wrong here. The sense of that crawled along his nerves.
Perhaps only the dregs of the nightmare from which Cardynge had roused him.
Yamamura wanted his pipe in the worst way. But better not smoke before the police had seen what was here … as a matter of form, if nothing else. Form was something to guard with great care, on this night when chaos ran loose beyond the walls and the world stood unmeasur-ably askew within them.
He began to prowl. A wastepaper basket was placed near the couch. Struck by a thoughthis logical mind functioned swiftly and unceasingly, as if to weave a web over that which lay below he crouched and looked in. Only two items. The housekeeper must have emptied the basket today, and Cardynge tossed these in after he got back from his office. He wouldn’t have observed the holiday; few establishments did, and he would have feared leisure. Yamamura fished them out.
One was a cash register receipt from a local liquor store, dated today. The amount shown corresponded to the price of a fifth such as stood on the table. Lord, but Cardynge must have been drunk, half out of his skull, when he prepared that last draught for himself!
The other piece was an envelope, torn open
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by hand, addressed here and postmarked yesterday evening in Berkeley. So he’d have found it in his mail when he came home this afternoon. In the handwriting of the letter, at the upper left corner, stood Lisette Cardynge and the apartment address her husband had given Yamamura.
The detective dropped them back into the basket and rose with a rather forced shrug. So what? If anything, this clinched the matter. One need merely feel compassion now, an obligation to find young Bayardno, not even that, since the authorities would undertake itso, no more than a wish to forget the whole business. There was enough harm and sorrow in the world without brooding on the unamendable affairs of a near stranger.
Only . .. Cardynge had wakened him, helplessly crying for help. And the wrongness would not go away.
Yamamura swore at himself. What was it that looked so impossible here? Cardynge’s telephoning? He’d spoken strangely, evenor especially for a man at the point of self-murder. Though he may have been delirious. And certainly I was half asleep, in a morbid state, myself. I could have mixed his words with my dreams, and now be remembering things he never said.