The Blunderer Read online

  “Why didn’t you tell us after you found out your wife was dead? Your story of driving around Long Island, then, is a lie,” Corby said in his polite tones.

  “Yes,” Walter said. “It was very stupid of me. I was frightened.”

  Lieutenant Corby unbuttoned his jacket and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets. A university key dangled from a chain across his narrow vest. “Mr. De Vries tells me that the driver waited several minutes because your wife was missing, and that he remembers you standing near the bus until it left.”

  “Yes, I did,” Walter said.

  “What did you think had happened to her?”

  “I didn’t know. I thought it was possible she’d got out in Newark—changed her mind about taking the bus. I’d tried to dissuade her about taking the bus.”

  Corby was sitting on the corner of the desk, lifting and setting down various objects on it—the stapler, the ink bottle, a pen—with a possessive and satisfied air. A big name plate on the desk said CAPT. J. P. MACGREGOR.

  “I suppose you can go now, Mr. De Vries,” Lieutenant Corby said, smiling at him. “Thank you very much.”

  De Vries stood up and gave Walter a final lively glance as he walked to the door. “Good night,” he said to both of them.

  “Good night,” Corby replied. He folded his arms. “Now tell me exactly what happened. You followed the bus from New York?”

  “Yes.” Walter shook his head at Corby’s offer of a cigarette and reached for his own pack.

  “What were you so eager to talk to your wife about?”

  “I felt—I felt we hadn’t concluded something we were talking about at the bus terminal, so I—”

  “Were you arguing?”

  “No, not arguing.” Walter looked straight at the young man. “We’d better take this step by step. I saw the bus pull into the space in front of the restaurant for a stop. I stopped my car on the highway and walked back—”

  On the highway? Why didn’t you pull up by the bus stop?”

  All the questions were loaded. Walter answered slowly. “I shot past. I stopped as soon as I could and got out.” He waited, expecting to be challenged again. He wasn’t. “I don’t know how I could have missed her. I hurried up, but I didn’t see her in the bus or in the restaurant.”

  “It’s several yards from the highway to the restaurant. Why didn’t you back your car and drive up?”

  “I don’t know,” Walter said hollowly.

  “If she went straight from the bus to the cliff she could have jumped off within thirty seconds. Could have,” Corby repeated.

  “She knew the road,” Walter said. “She often made it by car. She may very well have known about the cliff.”

  “Had the bus stopped yet when you were walking towards it?”

  “Yes. People were getting off.”

  “And you saw no sign of her?”

  “No.” Walter watched him taking notes in the limp brown tablet. His bony hand moved quickly and with a heavy pressure. It was over in a few seconds, as if he used shorthand. Corby put the tablet away. “You found no suicide notes at home, I suppose?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Corby repeated. He looked up at a corner of the room, then at Walter. “May I ask what was your relationship to your wife?”

  “My relationship?”

  “Were you both happy?”

  “No, we were getting a divorce, in fact. We would have been divorced in another few weeks.”

  “Who wanted the divorce, both of you?”

  “Yes,” Walter said matter of factly.

  “May I ask why?”

  “You may ask why. She was a very neurotic woman, hard to get along with. We clashed—everywhere. We simply didn’t get along.”

  “You both agreed on that?”

  “Emphatically.”

  Corby was watching him, his hands delicately poised on his hips as he sat on the desk. The little mustache made him look absurdly young instead of older. To Walter he looked like an obnoxious young fop playing at being Sherlock Holmes. “Do you think the prospect of the divorce depressed her?”

  “I’ve no doubt it did.”

  “Was that what you wanted to talk to your wife about, the divorce? Is that why you followed the bus?”

  “No, the divorce was all settled,” Walter said tiredly.

  “A New York divorce? Adultery?”

  Walter frowned. “No. I was going to Reno. Today.” He took out his billfold. “There’s my plane ticket,” he said, tossing it down on the desk.

  Corby turned his head to look at it, but he did not pick it up. “You didn’t cancel it?”

  “No,” Walter said.

  “Why Reno? Were you in such a hurry, or wasn’t your wife willing?”

  Walter had braced himself for that. “No,” he said easily, “she didn’t want a divorce. I did. But she also knew there was nothing she could do to stop me from getting one—except kill herself.”

  Corby’s mouth went up at one corner, mirthlessly. “Wasn’t that pretty inconvenient for you, six weeks in Reno?”

  “No,” he said in the same tone, “my office had given me a six weeks’ leave.”

  “What was your wife going to do afterwards?”

  “Afterwards? I presume keep the house, which is hers, and keep her job.” Walter waited. Corby was waiting. “It’s a peculiar situation, I suppose, from your view, both of us living there together until the last minute. I was afraid to leave my wife alone, afraid of just this—suicide or something violent.” Walter had a sudden optimistic feeling that his story was beginning to make sense. But Corby was still looking at him with widened eyes, as if the circumstances of the divorce had opened a new path for his suspicions.

  “Did you have any specific reason for wanting a divorce just now? Are you in love with somebody else?”

  “No,” Walter answered firmly.

  “I ask that, because the kind of situation you describe between you and your wife is the kind that can go on a long time without anybody doing anything about it.” Corby smiled. “Probably,” he added.

  “That’s very true. We’ve been married four years and it’s—the last year that we began to talk about a divorce.”

  “You can’t remember what you wanted to finish talking about Thursday night?”

  “I honestly can’t.”

  “Then you must have been angry.”

  “I was not. I simply felt it hadn’t been concluded, whatever it was.” He felt violendy bored and annoyed suddenly, the way he had felt in the Navy a couple of times when he had had to wait too long, naked, for a doctor to come and make a routine examination. He also felt tired, so tired that it seemed even his nerves were spent and no longer kept him twitching, and he might have dropped on the floor and slept, except that he wanted to get out of the building.

  “Another question,” the lieutenant said. “I’d like to ask if you saw any odd-looking characters while you were looking for your wife?”

  Walter was sick of the young man’s smile. “I think my wife was a suicide. No, I did not see any odd-looking characters.”

  “You were not so sure yesterday that your wife was a suicide.”

  Walter said nothing.

  Lieutenant Corby got off the desk. “You’re unusual. Most people are never convinced their wives or husbands or relatives are suicides. They always demand that the police search for a murderer.”

  “So would I, under different circumstances,” Walter said. “I don’t suppose cases like this can ever be really proven suicides, can they?”

  “No. But we can eliminate the other possibilities.” Corby smiled and walked towards the door as if the interview were at an end, but he stopped short of the door and turned to Walter.

  Walter wanted to ask him if the fact that he had been at the bus stop was going to be put into the papers. But he didn’t want Corby to think he was afraid of it. “Is this the last of these interviews?” Walter asked.

  “I hope so. Just one thing mo
re.” Corby strolled back across the room. “Did you happen to hear of another death like this a few months ago? A woman who was found dead, beaten, and knifed to death near her bus stop at Tarrytown?”

  Walter was sure his face did not change. “No. I didn’t.”

  “A woman by the name of Kimmel? Helen Kimmel?”

  “No,” Walter said.

  “The murderer hasn’t been found yet. She was very definitely murdered,” he added with a pleasant smile. “But the similarity of the two cases struck me—that interval at the bus stop.”

  Walter said nothing. He looked straight into Corby’s blue eyes. Corby was smiling at him, in the friendliest way his anemic-looking, overbright schoolboyish face was able to smile, Walter supposed. It was not at all friendly. “Is that why,” Walter asked, “you take such an interest in this case?”

  Corby opened his hands. “Oh, I don’t take such an interest in this case.” He looked self-conscious suddenly. “This one happened in my state. I remembered the other case because it hasn’t been solved. It’s pretty recent, too. August.” Corby swung the door open. “Thank you very much for coming in.”

  Walter waited. “Have you come to a conclusion? Are you convinced my wife was a suicide?”

  “It’s not for me to come to a conclusion!” Corby said with another laugh. “I don’t know if we’ve got all the facts yet.”

  “I see.”

  “Good night,” Corby said with a deep nod.

  “Good night,” Walter said.

  It was going to be in the papers, anyway, Walter thought. He had the feeling Corby was going to put it in all the papers. Walter told Jon what had happened. The only thing he lied about was his reason for following the bus: Walter said he had wanted to finish something he and Clara had been talking about.

  “It’s a piece of real bad luck,” Jon’s deep voice said. “Is it going to get in the papers?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “You should have.”

  “I should have done a lot of things.”

  “Are they convinced it was suicide?”

  “I don’t think so. I think it’s still open. Open to some doubt.” He didn’t want to tell Jon just how openly suspicious Corby had been. Walter realized that Jon could be just as suspicious as Corby—if he chose to be suspicious. Walter looked at Jon, wondering what he was thinking. He saw only Jon’s familiar profile, a little frowning, the underlip pushed out.

  “It might not get in the papers, even if you’re possibly under suspicion,” Jon said. “In a few days, something conclusive might turn up, proving it a murder or a suicide. Personally, I believe it’s suicide. I wouldn’t worry about the papers.”

  “Oh, it’s not that that I’m worried about!”

  “What is it then?”

  “The shame, I suppose. Being caught in a lie.”

  “Take a nap. It’s a long way to New York.”

  Walter didn’t want to sleep, but he put his head back, and a few minutes later he did doze off. He woke up when the car made a swerve. They were driving through a gray section of warehouses—watertanks on stilts, a gin factory that looked like a glass-fronted hospital. It struck Walter that he had made a very stupid mistake in being obviously resentful of Corby’s questions. Corby after all was only doing his job. If he met Corby again, he thought, he’d behave very differently.

  “Where’ll it be?” Jon asked. “My house or yours? Or do you want to be alone tonight?”

  “I don’t want to be alone. My house, if you don’t mind. I wish you’d spend the night.”

  Jon drove to his garage in Manhattan to pick up his own car. Before he got out of Walter’s car, he said, “I think you’d better be prepared that this can get into the papers, Walt. If there’s anybody you want to tell it to before it does, maybe you ought to, tonight.”

  “Yes,” Walter said. He would tell Ellie tonight, he thought.

  21

  It was nearly 11 p.m. when they got to Benedict, but Claudia was still there. She had stayed to take the telephone messages, she said. She had a handful for him. Ellie had called twice.

  Walter told Jon to see what he could find to eat in the refrigerator, then he drove Claudia into Benedict so she could get the eleven o’clock bus for Huntington. On the way back, he stopped at the Three Brothers Tavern and called Ellie.

  “Claudia didn’t know where you were,” Ellie said. “Why didn’t you call me all day?”

  “I’ll have to explain when I see you. Is it too late for you to come over to the house? Jon’s here and I can’t come to you.”

  Ellie said she would come.

  Walter drove home and told Jon that Ellie was on her way over.

  “Have you been seeing much of Ellie?” Jon asked him.

  “Yes,” Walter said stiffly. “Now and then I see her.” He made himself a drink, and picked up one of the roast beef slices that Jon had put out on a plate. He was conscious of Jon’s silence. Walter didn’t want the roast beef. He gave it to Jeff, who was prancing nervously around the room, then went to the telephone to call Mrs. Philpott, whose message had an underlined Please call on it.

  Ellie arrived while he was talking to Mrs. Philpott, and Jon opened the door for her. Mrs. Philpott had nothing of any importance to say, and after a moment Walter realized she was drunk. She was praising Clara extravagantly. She commiserated with him. He had lost the most brilliant, the most charming, attractive, liveliest creature in the world. Walter wanted to crush the phone in his hand. He tried several times to get away, and kept interrupting her with thanks for her call. Finally, it was over.

  Jon and Ellie stopped talking as he came back into the living-room. Ellie looked up at him anxiously.

  “Would you rather be alone, Walt?” Jon asked.

  “No, thanks,” Walter said. “Ellie, I have to tell you something I’ve already told Jon. Last night—Thursday night—I followed Clara’s bus. I followed it to the place where she was killed, where she jumped off the cliff. I was looking for her and I never found her. It must have happened just before I got there. I waited and looked all around for her until the bus left, and finally I came back.”

  “She was missing and you knew it?” Ellie asked incredulously.

  “I wasn’t absolutely sure. I thought she might have got off the bus somewhere else without my seeing her. Or I thought I might have been following the wrong bus.”

  “And you didn’t tell anybody?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t absolutely sure that it was Clara who was missing.” Walter said impatiently. “I was about to report it to the police yesterday morning after I called Harrisburg and found she hadn’t arrived, but the police notified me first—that they’d found her body.” Walter looked at Elbe’s puzzled face. He knew there was no explanation but the real one: that he’d felt guilty even as he had waited around the bus, that he had even had some crazy hallucination afterwards, driving back to New York, that he had taken her into the woods and killed her. He picked up a glass from the coffee table and drank. “Well—this evening I went to the police in Philadelphia. I was seen around the bus stop. I was identified. It’ll probably be out in the papers. I don’t think I’m suspected of murder. It’s still considered a suicide. But if they do want to make anything of it in the papers—well, they could, that’s all.”

  Jon sat with his head tipped back against the sofa pillow, quietly listening, but Walter had the feeling Jon didn’t like his story, was beginning to doubt it.

  “Who identified you?” Ellie asked.

  “A man named De Vries. Corby—either the man remembered me because I looked strange, walking up and down the restaurant looking for Clara, or Corby really suspects me and took the trouble to describe me to this fellow. De Vries was one of the passengers on the bus.”

  “Who is Corby?”

  “A detective. From Philadelphia. The one I talked to when I identified Clara.” Walter managed to keep his voice steady. He lighted a cigarette. “According to him—at least what he s
aid at first—Clara was a suicide.”

  “If the man saw you the whole time—”

  “He didn’t,” Walter interrupted her. “He didn’t see me when I first arrived, when Clara must have jumped off the cliff. He saw me waiting in the restaurant afterwards.”

  “But if you’d done it—killed her—you wouldn’t have waited around the restaurant looking for her for fifteen minutes!”

  “Exactly!” Jon said.

  “That’s right.” Walter sat down on the sofa. Ellie took his hand and held it between them on the sofa.

  “You’re afraid aren’t you?” Ellie asked him.

  “No!” Walter said. He saw that Jon saw their hands, and he pulled his hand away. “But it couldn’t look worse, could it? A thing like this never can be proven one way or the other, can it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jon drawled impatiently. “They’ll hammer at you for a while, they’ll get more facts, then they’ll decide that it’s suicide, that it couldn’t have been anything else.”

  Walter looked at Jeff, curled up asleep in the armchair. Whenever a car rolled up, Jeff was at the door, looking for her. Walter jumped up to get another drink. He had loved Clara once, too, he thought. Nobody seemed to remember that he had loved Clara except old Mrs. Philpott. He smiled a little bitterly as he shot the soda into his glass. When he turned around, Ellie was looking at him.

  Ellie stood up. “I’ve got to be going. I have to get up early tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Walter asked.

  “To see Irma—my friend in New York. I’m going to drive her out to East Hampton. She has some friends there and we’re invited for lunch.”

  Walter wanted to beg Ellie to stay a little longer, and he didn’t dare in front of Jon, didn’t even have the courage for that. “Will you call me tomorrow?” he asked. “I’ll be home all day—except between three and five.” Between three and five was the funeral ceremony at the church in Benedict.

  “I’ll call you,” Ellie said.

  He walked with her out to her car. He sensed a coolness in her that he felt helpless to do anything about. Then she said through her car window: “Try not to worry, Walter. We’ll come through all right.” She leaned towards him, and he kissed her.