The Blunderer Read online

  ALSO BY PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

  The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

  A Suspension of Mercy

  Strangers on a Train

  People Who Knock on the Door

  The Glass Cell

  Deep Water

  This Sweet Sickness

  A Dog’s Ransom

  Small g: A Summer Idyll

  Little Tales of Misogyny

  The Animal-Lover’s Guide to Beastly Murder

  Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

  The Black House

  Mermaids on the Golf Course

  Carol

  The Talented Mr. Ripley

  A Game for the Living

  The Cry of the Owl

  The Two Faces of January

  Those Who Walk Away

  The Tremor of Forgery

  Eleven

  Ripley Under Ground

  Ripley’s Game

  Edith’s Diary

  The Boy Who Followed Ripley

  Found in the Street

  Ripley Under Water

  Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

  The Price of Salt (as Clare Morgan)

  The Blunderer

  Patricia Highsmith

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For L.

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  1

  The man in dark-blue slacks and a forest-green sportshirt waited impatiently in the line.

  The girl in the ticket booth was stupid, he thought, never had been able to make change fast. He tilted his fat bald head up at the inside of the lighted marquee, read NOW PLAYING! Marked Woman, looked without interest at the poster of a half naked woman displaying a thigh, and looked behind him at the line to see if there was anyone in it he knew. There wasn’t. But he couldn’t have timed it better, he thought. Just in time for the eight o’clock show. He shoved his dollar through the scallop in the glass.

  “Hello,” he said to the blonde girl, smiling.

  “Hello.” Her empty blue eyes brightened. “How’re you tonight?”

  It wasn’t a question she expected to be answered. He didn’t.

  He went into the slightly smelly theater, and heard the nervous, martial bugle call of the newsreel that was just beginning. He passed the candy and popcorn counter, and when he reached the other side of the theater, he turned, gracefully despite his bulk, and casually looked around him. There was Tony Ricco. He quickened his step and met Tony as they turned into the center aisle.

  “Hello there, Tony!” he said in the same rather patronizing tone he used when Tony was behind the counter of his father’s delicatessen.

  “Hi, Mr. Kimmell” Tony smiled. “By yourself tonight?”

  “My wife’s just left for Albany.” He waved a hand, and began to sidle into a row of seats.

  Tony went on down the aisle, closer to the screen.

  The man squeezed his knees against the backs of the seats, murmuring “Excuse me” and “Thank you” as he progressed, because everyone had to stand up, or half stand up, to let him by. He kept on going and came out in the aisle along the wall. He walked down to the door with the red EXIT sign over it, pushed through two metal doors, and came out into the hot sultry air of the sidewalk. He turned in the opposite direction of the marquee and almost immediately crossed the street. He walked around a corner and got into his black two-door Chevrolet.

  He drove to within a block of the Cardinal Lines Bus Terminal, and waited in his car for about ten minutes until a bus marked NEWARK-NEW YORK-ALBANY pulled out of the terminus, and then he followed it.

  He followed the bus through the tedious traffic of the Holland Tunnel entrance, and then in Manhattan turned northward. He kept about two cars between himself and the bus, even after they had left the city and the traffic was thin and fast. The first rest stop, he thought, should be around Tarrytown, perhaps before. If that place wasn’t propitious, he would have to go on. And if there wasn’t a second rest stop—well, right in Albany, in some alley. His broad, pudgy lips pursed as he concentrated on his driving, but his tawny eyes, stretched wide behind the thick glasses, did not change.

  The bus stopped in front of a cluster of lighted food stores and a café, and he drove past and stopped his car, pulling in so close to the edge of the road that the twigs of a tree scraped the side. He got out quickly and ran, slowing to a walk only when he reached the lighted area where the bus had stopped.

  People were still getting off the bus. He saw her descending, caught the clumsy, sidewise jerks of her stocky body as she took the few steps. He was beside her before she had walked six feet.

  “You!” she said.

  Her grey and black hair was dishevelled, her stupid brown eyes stared up at him with an animal surprise, an animal fear. It seemed to him that they were still in the kitchen in Newark, arguing. “I still have a few things to say, Helen. Let’s go down here.” He took her arm, turning her towards the road.

  She pulled away. “They’re only stopping ten minutes here. Say what you have to say now.”

  “They’re stopping twenty minutes. I’ve already inquired,” he said in a bored tone. “Let’s go down here where we won’t be overheard.”

  She came with him. He had already noticed that the trees and the underbrush were thick and high on the right, the side near his car. Just a few yards down the road would be—

  “If you think I’ll change my mind about Edward,” she began tremulously and proudly, “I won’t. I never will.”

  Edward! The proud lady in love, he thought with revulsion. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said in a calm, contrite tone, but his fingers tightened involuntarily on her flabby arm. He could hardly wait. He turned her on to the highway.

  “Mel, I don’t want to go so far away from the—”

  He lunged against her, bouncing her deep into the underbrush at the side of the road. He nearly fell himself, but he kept his grip on her wrist with his left hand. With his right, he struck the side of her head, hard enough to break her neck, he thought, yet he kept the grip on her left wrist. He had only begun. She was down on the ground, and his left hand found her throat and closed on it, crushing her scream. He banged her body with his other fist, using its side like a hammer in the hard center of her chest between the mushy, protective breasts. Then he struck her forehead, her ear, with the same regular hammerlike blows, and finally struck her under the chin with his fist as he would have hit a man. Then he reached in his pocket for his knife, opened it, and plunged its blade down—three, four, five times. He concentrated on her head because he wanted to destroy it, clouting the cheek again and again with the back of his closed fingers until his hand began to slip in blood and lose its power, though he was not aware of it. He was aware only of pure joy, of a glorious sense of justice, of injuries avenged, years of insult and injury, boredom, stupidity, most of all stupidity, paid back to her.

  He stopped only when he was out of breath. He discovered himself kneeling on her thigh and took his knees from her with distaste. He could see nothing of her but the light column of her summer dress. He looked around in the dark, listening. He heard no sound except the chanting whir of insects, the quick purr of a car speeding by on the highway. He was only a few steps from the highway, he saw. He was quite sure she was dead. Positive. He wished suddenly that he could see her face, and his hand twitched towards his pocket for his pen flashlight, but he did not want to risk the light being seen.

  He leaned forward cautiously, and put out one of his huge hands with the fingers delicately extended, prepared to touch, and felt his loathing swell as his hand went closer. As soon as his fingertips touched the slippery skin, his other fist shot out, aimed directly beneath the fingertips. Then he stood up, b
reathing hard for a moment and thinking of nothing at all—only listening. Then he began to walk towards the highway. In the yellowish highway light he glanced at himself for blood, and saw none except the blood on his hands. He wiped his hands together, absently, as he walked, but they became only stickier and more disgusting, and he longed to wash them. He regretted that he would have to touch his steering wheel before he washed his hands, and he imagined with a fastidious exactitude how he would wet the rag under the sink when he got home and would wipe the entire surface of the steering wheel. He would even scour it.

  The bus was gone, he noticed. He had no idea how long it had taken him. He got back in his car, turned it around and headed south. It was a quarter to eleven by his wrist-watch. His shirtsleeve was torn, and he would have to get rid of the shirt, he thought. He reckoned that he would be back in Newark just after one.

  2

  It began to rain while Walter was waiting in the car.

  He looked up from his newspaper and took his arm from the window. There was a peppering of darker blue on the blue linen sleeve of his jacket.

  The drumming of the big summer drops grew loud on the car roof, and in a moment the arched tar street became wet and shining, reflecting in a long red blur the neon sign of the drugstore a block or so ahead. Dusk was falling, and the rain had cast a sudden deeper shadow over the town. Down the street the trim New England houses looked whiter than ever in the greying light, and the low white fences around the lawns stood out as sharply as the stitching on a sampler.

  Ideal, ideal, Walter thought. The kind of village where you marry a healthy, good-natured girl, live with her in a white house, go fishing on Saturdays, and raise your sons to do the same things.

  Sickmaking, Clara had said this afternoon, pointing to the miniature spinning wheel by the fireplace of the inn. She thought Waldo Point was touristy. Walter had chosen the village after a great deal of forethought because it was the least touristy of a long string of towns on Cape Cod. Walter remembered that she had had quite a good time in Provincetown and she hadn’t complained that Provincetown was touristy. But that had been the first year of their marriage, and this was the fourth. The proprietor of the Spindrift Inn had told Walter yesterday that his grandfather had made the spinning wheel for his little daughters to learn on. If Clara could for one minute put herself—

  It was such a little thing, Walter thought. All their arguments were. Like yesterday’s—the discussion of whether a man and woman inevitably tired of each other physically after two years of marriage. Walter didn’t think it was inevitable. Clara was his proof, though she had argued so cynically and unattractively that it was inevitable. Walter would have bitten his tongue off before he told her that he loved her as much physically as he ever had. And didn’t Clara know it? And hadn’t that been the very purpose of her stand in the argument—to irritate him?

  Walter shifted to another position in the car, ran his fingers through his thick blond hair, and tried to relax and read the paper. My God, he thought, this is supposed to be a vacation.

  His eyes moved quickly down a column about American army conditions in France, but he was still thinking of Clara. He was thinking of Wednesday morning after the early trip out in the fishing boat (at least she had enjoyed that fishing trip with Manuel because it had been educational), when they had come home and started to take a nap. Clara had been in a rare and wonderful mood. They had laughed at something, and then her arms around his neck had slowly tightened….

  Only Wednesday morning, three days ago—but the very next day there had been acid in her voice, that old pattern of punishment after favors granted.

  It was 8:10. Walter looked out of the car window at the front of the inn that was a little behind him. No sign of her yet. He looked down at his newspaper and read: BODY OF WOMAN FOUND NEAR TARRYTOWN, N.Y.

  The woman had been brutally stabbed and beaten, but she had not been robbed. The police had no clues. She had been on a bus en route to Albany from Newark, had been missed after a rest stop, and the bus had gone on without her.

  Walter wondered whether there would be anything in the story for his essays; whether the murderer had had some unusual relationship to the woman. He remembered an apparently motiveless murder he had read about in a newspaper that had later been explained by a lopsided friendship between the murderer and victim, a friendship like that between Chad Overton and Mike Duveen. Walter had been able to use the murder story to bring out certain potentially dangerous elements in the Chad-Mike friendship. He tore the little item about the Newark woman out of the edge of the paper and stuck it in his pocket. It was worth keeping for a few days, anyway, to see if anything turned up about the murderer.

  The essays had been Walter’s pastime for the last two years. There were to be eleven of them, under the general title “Unworthy Friendships.” Only one was completed, the one on Chad and Mike, but he had finished the outlines for several others—and they were all based on observations of his own friends and acquaintances. His thesis was that a majority of people maintained at least one friendship with someone inferior to themselves because of certain needs and deficiencies that were either mirrored or complemented by the inferior friend. Chad and Mike, for example: both had come from well-to-do families who had spoiled them, but Chad had chosen to work, while Mike was still a playboy who had little to play on since his family had cut off his allowance. Mike was a drunk and a ne’er-do-well, unscrupulous about taking advantage of all his friends. By now Chad was almost the only friend left. Chad apparently thought “There but for the grace of God go I,” and doled out money and put Mike up periodically. Mike wasn’t worth much to anybody as a friend. Walter did not intend to submit his book for publication anywhere. The essays were purely for his own pleasure, and he didn’t care when or if he ever finished them all.

  Walter sank down in the car seat and closed his eyes. He was thinking of the fifty-thousand-dollar estate in Oyster Bay that Clara was trying to sell. Walter said a quiet little prayer that one of her two prospects would buy it, for Clara’s sake, for his own sake. Yesterday she had sat for the better part of the afternoon studying the layout of the house and grounds. Mapping her attack for next week, she had said. She would sail into the prospects like a fury, he knew. It was amazing that she didn’t terrify them, that they ever bought anything. But they did. The Knightsbridge Brokerage considered her a topnotch saleswoman.

  If he could only make her relax somehow. Give her the right kind of security—he used to think. Well, didn’t he? Love, affection, and money, too. It just didn’t work.

  He heard her footsteps—tok-tok-tok on the high heels as she ran—and he sat up quickly and thought, Damn it, I should have backed the car in front of the inn because it’s raining. He leaned over and opened the door for her.

  “Why didn’t you put the car in front of the door?” she asked.

  “Sorry. I only just thought of it.” He risked a smile.

  “You could see it was raining, I hope,” she said, shaking her small head despairingly. “Down, darling, you’re wet!” She pushed Jeff, her fox terrier, down from the seat and he jumped up again. “Jeff, really!”

  Jeff gave a yelp of fun, as if it were a game, and he was up like a spring for the third time. Clara let him stay, circled him affectionately with her arm.

  Walter drove towards the center of the town. “How about a drink at the Melville before we eat? It’s our last night.”

  “I don’t want a drink, but I’ll sit with you if you’ve got to have one.”

  “Okay.” Maybe he could persuade her to have a Tom Collins. Or a sweet vermouth and soda, at least. But he probably couldn’t persuade her, and was it really worth it, making her sit through his drink? And generally he wanted two drinks. Walter suffered one of those ambivalent moments, a blackout of will, when he couldn’t decide whether to have a drink or not. He passed the hotel without turning in.

  “I thought we were going to the Melville,” Clara said.

  “Chang
ed my mind. As long as you won’t join me in a drink.” Walter put his hand over hers and squeezed it. “We’ll head for the Lobster Pot.”

  He made a left turn near the end of the street. The Lobster Pot was on a little promontory of the shore. The sea breeze came strong through the car window, cool and salty. Walter suddenly found himself in absolute darkness. He looked around for the Lobster Pot’s string of blue lights, but he couldn’t see them anywhere.

  “Better go back to the main road and take it from that filling station the way I always do,” Walter said.

  Clara laughed. “And you’ve only been here five times, if not more!”

  “What’s the difference?” Walter asked with elaborate casualness. “We’re in no hurry, are we?”

  “No, but it’s insane to waste time and energy when with a little intelligence you could have taken the right road from the start!”

  Walter refrained from telling her she was wasting more energy than he. The tense line of her body, the face straining towards the windscreen pained him, made him feel that the week’s vacation had been for nothing, the wonderful morning after the fishing trip for nothing. Forgotten the next day like the other wonderful nights, mornings, he could count over the last year, little oases, far apart. He tried to think of something pleasant to say to her before they got out of the car.

  “I like you in that shawl,” he said, smiling. She wore it loose about her bare shoulders and looped through her arms. He had always appreciated the way she wore her clothes and the taste she showed in choosing them.

  “It’s a stole,” she said.

  “A stole. I love you, darling.” He bent to kiss her, and she lifted her lips to him. He kissed her gently, so as not to spoil her lipstick.

  Clara ordered cold lobster with mayonnaise, which she adored, and Walter ordered a broiled fish and a bottle of Riesling.

  “I thought you’d have meat tonight, Walter. If you have fish again, Jeff gets nothing today!”