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“Another matter has come up. You are also a friend of the American Thomas Reepley?”
You see, we are trying to find Thomas Reepley. We think he may be dead.” “Dead? Why?”
“You were with him on a trip to San Remo in November, were you not?” They had checked the hotels. “Yes.” “Where did you last see him? In San Remo?”
old believe-it-or-not Ripley’s
you think I am, a small-town hick who doesn’t know about such things?
He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new. His tears fell on Dickie’s blue-and-white-striped shirt that lay uppermost in the suitcase, starched and clean and still as new-looking as when he had first taken it out of Dickie’s drawer in Mongibello.
Being Tom Ripley had one compensation, at least: it relieved his mind of guilt for the stupid, unnecessary murder of Freddie Miles.
POLICE SEARCH FOR MISSING AMERICAN Dickie Greenleaf, Friend of the Murdered Freddie Miles, Missing After Sicilian Holiday
Marge chattered to him as they walked, giggling because she had broken a strap of her bra and had to hold it up with one hand, she said. Tom was thinking of the letter he had received from Bob Delancey this afternoon, the first word he’d gotten from Bob except one postcard ages ago, in which Bob had said that the police had questioned everybody in his house about an income tax fraud of a few months ago.
opened his eyes. Marge was coming down the stairs, barefoot. Tom sat up. She had his brown leather box in her hand. “I just found Dickie’s rings in here,” she said rather breathlessly. “Oh. He gave them to me. To take care of.” Tom stood up. “When?” “In Rome, I think.” He took a step back, struck one of his shoes and picked it up, mostly in an effort to seem calm. “What was he going to do? Why’d he give them to you?”
There was an elderly Englishwoman on board the ship, traveling with her daughter who herself was forty, unmarried, and so wildly nervous she could not even enjoy the sun for fifteen minutes in her deck chair without leaping up and announcing in a loud voice that she was “off for a walk.”
Did the world always mete out just deserts? Had the world meted his out to him? He considered that he had been lucky beyond reason in escaping detection for two murders, lucky from the time he had assumed Dickie’s identity until now. In the first part of his life fate had been grossly unfair, he thought, but the period with Dickie and afterward had more than compensated for it.
and on the will, and they gave him the electric chair—could that death in the electric chair equal in pain, or could death itself, at twenty-five, be so tragic, that he could not say that the months from November until now had not been worth it? Certainly not.
During the ten-day voyage Tom lived in a peculiar atmosphere of doom and of heroic, unselfish courage. He imagined strange things: Mrs. Cartwright’s daughter falling overboard and he jumping after her and saving her. Or fighting through the waters of a ruptured bulkhead to close the breach with his own body. He felt possessed of a preternatural strength and fearlessness.
The police were waiting on the dock. He saw four of them, standing with folded arms, looking up at the ship. Tom
had guaranteed his innocence. It meant not only that he was not going to jail, and not going to die, but that he was not suspected at all. He was free. Except for the will.
