The Last Night

The fog had come in off the bay at dusk and filled the streets of Pacific Heights to the second stories, and Martin Wells, standing in his doorway with the door open behind him, thought that Denise Marsh looked like a woman who had walked through something and come out the other side changed. She had no coat. Her dress was street clothes, not service clothes, and her hands were wrong, one clenched around the strap of a handbag and the other pressed flat against her sternum as though holding something in.

"Mr. Wells," she said, and then said the rest of it again — "Forgive me. I didn't know where else in the world to go." — the way a person repeats the only sentence she has carried all the way across town.

He brought her into the study and let her refuse the brandy, and then he sat across from her and waited, because a frightened witness tells you nothing until the fear has found its own order.

It took her a while. She was not a woman who cried easily; he had seen her meet the death of Vale's mother and the death of Vale's father with the same dry competence, and what shook her now was shaking her from underneath.

"You know the house, sir," she said at last. "You know the back wing. The room Dr. Vale had fitted out, the cabinet, he called it. The one with the steel door."

"I know it."

"He's shut himself in there." Her voice flattened, the voice of a recitation learned in the dark. "Locked in. Seven days, Mr. Wells. Eight, maybe. I've lost the count of the mornings. And the man who comes out of it at night, when he thinks I'm abed—that is not my master."

Wells put down his own glass. "Start at the beginning."

"The beginning was weeks back, after he took sick. His voice changed and his face changed and I thought it was grief over Dr. Reyes, and then it was more than a voice, sir. He stopped eating at table. He gave orders from the stairhead in the dark, orders I'd never heard from him in twenty years, about bolts and deliveries and no visitors. And then one night the steel door of the cabinet slammed and I heard the bolt go, and I thought, well, he's gone to his work and shut himself in, he does that. He had a tray that first night. And the next. And then the voice that called through the door for the tray was not his voice."

"Not his voice."

She looked at him with terrible patience. "I have heard that man talk in his sleep for twenty-six years. Sick talk, well talk, talk after his mother died. A voice is like a footprint. It fit his shoe or it didn't. This one didn't." Her hand rose and pressed the sternum again. "It was lower. And it never said my name. Twenty-six years, and it never once said Denise. It said woman. Put the tray down, woman, and go. And I went, sir, because what does a body do, and I told myself it was him grown strange with sickness, men grow strange, I've nursed them strange."

"And the man who comes out at night."

"That's the part I couldn't say to a priest and I can't say to you." She took brandy then, one swallow, like medicine. "He comes out when the house is dark. I hear him on the stairs, and I have learned his step, and it is a step that makes no sound until he wants the hall lamp on. I came up once with a poker in my hand, being past fear into something else, and I saw him at the end of the hall in the lamplight. He was dressed in my master's clothes, the gray suit, the one I had brushed and laid out for him the week he took sick. They didn't fit him. He's worn my master's clothes the way a scarecrow wears the farmer's coat. And his face, Mr. Wells—" she closed her eyes. "I couldn't tell you what was wrong with his face. Only that every feature was there and right, and the whole of it was wrong, and my body knew it before I did."

"What did he want of you?"

"The powder." Her eyes opened. "That's why I'm here. Two nights ago he stood on the stairhead and asked me, civil as a clerk, did I think he was a fool, and said the powder would have to come from a chemist, and said if it weren't on the tray by Friday he would come down and get what he wanted himself. And tonight is Thursday, and I sat with the paper in my hand, and I thought: one of them means to poison the other, and I have been feeding trays through a door to it. So I took a cab, sir, and here I am, begging you. Go into that room. Bring him out. I don't care what the law says about locked doors. There is a sick man behind that steel and a thing wearing his clothes outside it, and one of them has to be Dr. Adrian Vale, and I want mine back."

Wells was already reaching for the telephone. He called the number Inspector Naomi Merrick had left with his office a year ago and never let lapse, and she answered on the fourth ring with the flat vigilance of a woman who sleeps near her pager, and when he had said Vale's name and the words locked room she said, "Stay in the house. Don't touch the door. I'll be there in twenty minutes," and rang off before he could answer.

The house on Broadway stood with its windows lighted and its fanlight glowing the way it had glowed through all of Wells's adulthood, and it had never looked to him so much like a face wearing an expression. Denise let them in with her own key. In the hall the clock went, the stair runner lay in its rose pattern, everything in service order, a house kept by a good servant to the very lip of the pit.

Merrick was small and gray and unhurried, and she had a detective sergeant with her and a pry bar in the sergeant's hands, and she took the back wing corridor at a walk. The steel door stood at the end of it — a quieter twin of the door in Harriet Alley — flush in the plaster, steel painted the color of oxblood, without ornament, with a single interior bolt of the sort they put on cellars and strongrooms. It was the only door; the room's other walls were the outer walls of the house.

Merrick knocked, and called, "Dr. Vale. It's Naomi Merrick, San Francisco Police. Open the door, Doctor."

Silence, of the kind that has weight. Then, close behind the steel, a voice said, "For God's sake, don't let him in with you," and it was Vale's voice, and it was the ruin of Vale's voice, and Wells felt Denise Marsh's hand close on his sleeve.

"The bolt," Merrick said quietly, and the sergeant set the pry bar to the jamb.

They broke it in under a minute. The steel screamed off its frame and stood open on darkness and a smell that Wells would carry to his own grave, warm air and lamp oil and, underneath both, faint and bitter, the smell of almonds.

Merrick put her light through the doorway and stepped in, and Wells followed her because his legs decided it before he did.

The room beyond the steel door was not a laboratory. That was the first assault on him. It was comfortable. It was past comfortable; it was tender. A good carpet lay on the floor, and a bookcase stood filled, and a bunk with a real mattress was curtained in striped cotton like a ship's berth, and on a sideboard stood decanters and glasses and a cold tea tray with the cup not yet washed, and the walls were paneled in pale oak, and against the far panel stood a mirror. It was a large glass in a dark frame, full-length, the kind of mirror a dressing room has, and it gave them back the doorway and the lights and the four of them standing there with their mouths open.

The man in the gray suit was on his knees at the foot of the mirror. The coat hung off him like a borrowed overcoat; the collar stood away from a neck that had no meat on it. He had got one hand up, and his fingers were hooked toward the sideboard, toward an empty tumbler that lay on the carpet with its mouth ringed white, and his face was the face from the alley window seen through glass by two men on a Sunday: the features all present and all wrong, gray now, the lips going dark, sweat standing on skin that seemed to have come loose from the skull beneath it.

Denise Marsh made a sound behind Wells and did not come in.

"Poison," the sergeant said. "Glass on the floor. Call it in."

The man's eyes came to Wells. There was recognition in them, and behind the recognition something that was not quite relief and not quite appeal, and the lips moved, and what came out was one syllable, or less than one, a shape like Vale, or like help, or like only the last air leaving. Then the hand came down, and the body went over sideways with a softness that no living body has, and it did not stop going over.

Wells had seen men die. He was not prepared for this, and no one was prepared for this, and the sergeant, who had been in the army, turned his face to the wall. The body in the gray suit settled the way a load of wet sand settles when the sack splits. The frame of it lost its argument with itself. The shoulders that had been squared on the spine sank level, and the spine curved where it could not curve, and under the skin the whole architecture seemed to be giving up its partitions, running together, going slack and heavy and wrong. The face last. Wells watched the face last, watched the features slide out of their own arrangement like wax under a flame, not melting into nothing but melting into sameness, into a soft brown uniformity that pooled in the hollow of the cheek and dripped, slowly, from the jaw onto the carpet.

When it was over there was no man in the gray suit. There was the suit, inflated loosely where a man had been, and beneath it a dark, fine residue settling into the wool, and out of the fingers of one glove, through some tear in the stitching, a crumble of brittle brown material had pushed its way and lay on the carpet in little dry scales, like the leavings of a leaf that has been standing in a drawer since another autumn.

No one moved. The lamp hissed. The mirror at the far wall held all of it, the doorway, the lights, the emptiness in the suit, and gave it back without comment.

"Nobody touches that glass," Merrick said, in a voice she had used once before, in Wells's hearing, over the body of Judge Ashe. "Photograph everything. Sergeant, the doors. Nobody has left this room."

There was no other way out. Wells heard them establish it while he stood with his back against the steel door and breathed through his mouth. The paneling was checked, the floor, the bunk, the sideboard; the mirror was lifted from the wall and the wall behind it was sound plaster. One door, bolted from within, no key found in the room. A man had died in there of poison and the room had kept him, and whatever had walked the hall at night in the master's clothes had come from the room and returned to it, and now there was nothing in the room but a suit, a sludge, a handful of brown scales, and papers lying square on the writing table as though placed there by a hand that liked order even at the end.

Merrick put on gloves and read the top page, and read it twice, and then held it out to Wells without a word, and Wells read it standing in the doorway of the room built for a monster, in the smell of almonds.

It was a will. New, dated the previous Sunday, properly executed, witnessed by a name Wells did not know, signed in the hand he had known for thirty years and in the words he had drafted a dozen times for other men. It revoked all prior dispositions. It gave everything, the house, the company, the accounts, the residue and entirety of the estate of Dr. Adrian Vale, to Martin Wells, of the city and county of San Francisco, in trust, and the trust had one clause, and the clause said: to be used as in my letters.

Under the will lay two envelopes, sealed, squared to the table's edge. One bore a single line in the same hand: For Martin Wells. The other bore no name at all.

"Your friend has been busy," Merrick said.

Wells could not answer her. He was listening to the house. Somewhere above them Denise Marsh was moving from room to room with a lamp, calling her master's name down through the floors, calling it with the rising interrogative pitch of a woman who has not yet permitted herself the verb, and the house answered her with its own silence, and the fog outside stood against the windows like a wall of wool.

The manhunt widened before dawn. Wells followed it the way the city did, at his kitchen table, in the morning editions: Adrian Vale was a name in every doorway of the city: sought for questioning in the death of Judge Samuel Ashe, then wanted; his photograph lifted from the company's annual report; the brick building on Folsom Street sealed with yellow tape, and reporters standing all day in Harriet Alley under the steel door that opened for no one. The bulletins ran their list — airlines, marinas, border crossings, hospitals, morgues — and the list came back empty. No ticket, no witness, no trace that Adrian Vale had existed after a certain hour of a certain November night. The police surgeon weighed and sampled what had been gathered from the floor of the cabinet room and from the glove, and issued his finding in a language designed to keep his own name off the newspapers, and the newspapers printed only that human remains had been recovered, pending confirmation.

Wells confirmed it in the one way left to him, alone, at his own window, with the two envelopes squared on his desk before him like a man's last instrument laid out for probate. He had known his friend for thirty years, and he had watched him fall down behind a window on a Sunday, and he had watched what got up from the collapse of the body in the gray suit, and there was no one in the city he could tell, because the truth had no procedure. The truth was this: the man every patrol car in San Francisco was hunting for was the brown handful in the evidence jar, and the will on the table had been signed by the hand that dissolved, and somewhere in a sealed envelope marked in that hand, the whole of it was waiting for him, and he found that he was not ready, and that no morning was going to make him ready, and that he would have to read it anyway.

The envelope marked CLOSED he did not destroy. On Monday morning he carried it down California Street to Merrick's floor and set it on her desk without sitting down. She turned it over, read the word he had written across the back of it, and looked at him for a long time.

"Why now?" she said.

He opened his mouth and found the shelf where the answer was supposed to be, and it was empty. He stood there with his hat in his hands like a man in a church he no longer belonged to.

"Because someone finally died who wasn't supposed to," he said at last, and heard that it was true and insufficient, and that he was going to be living inside that gap for a long time.

She signed the card, and slid the envelope into her drawer, and did not thank him, and did not insult him by trying. The weight left his chest the way a tooth leaves the jaw — not gently, and not painlessly, but gone.

The wax-sealed envelope with the two interlocked Vs he did not open there. Its condition — only upon the death of Dr. Adrian Vale — was, he understood, now satisfied; he satisfied it alone in his office that evening, with a letter opener, and no ceremony worth the name. And the telephone rang once more before he could begin: Colin, from Nob Hill, his voice stripped of everything but the fact.

"I saw it too, Marty," he said. "Whatever they print, whatever you decide to do — I saw it too."

"I know," Wells said. "Hold on to that. I am about to need one witness who isn't me."