The Blunderer Read online

  And meanwhile, Walter thought, I’m the tortured guinea-pig. Corby was going to magnify the Stackhouse case and make a Kimmel case out of it. Walter waited attentively, unmoving. He was trying to be co-operative this time.

  “Kimmel’s a big fat fellow with a pretty well-functioning brain, though it’s got a touch of megalomania. He likes to make toadies of people around him, his inferiors. Worked his way up from the slums, fancies himself an intellectual—which he is, in fact.”

  The smile irritated Walter. It’s all a jolly game, Walter thought. Cops and robbers. It must take a mind that’s nasty or twisted somewhere, he thought, to devote itself exclusively to homicide, especially with the gleeful zest that Corby showed. “What do you expect Kimmel to do?” Walter asked.

  “Confess, finally. That’s what I’ll make him do. I’ve found out quite a lot about his wife, enough to tell me that Kimmel loathed her with a passion that probably wouldn’t be satisfied with—well, only a divorce. All this ties up with Kimmel’s character, which can’t be appreciated until one sees the man.” He looked at Walter, then stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and said, “Would you mind if I look around the house?”

  Guests had asked it in the same way, Walter thought. “Not at all.”

  Walter was going to lead him to the stairs, but Corby stopped in front of the fireplace. He reached out and picked up the glass in back of the ivy, turned its stem between his fingers. Walter knew there was lipstick on the rim. And still a few drops in the glass.

  “Care for a drink?” Walter asked.

  “No thanks.” Corby set the glass back and gave Walter a smiling, understanding glance. “You were seeing Miss Briess this evening?”

  “Yes,” Walter said expressionlessly. He led the way up the stairs. Corby hadn’t even called Ellie yet. Corby gave her a categorical name, Walter supposed: girl friend. Or mistress. The details didn’t matter.

  Corby went into the bedroom, strolled up and down the room with his hands in his pockets and made no comment. Then he strolled out, and Walter showed him the smaller room in the other front corner, which was supposed to be a maid’s room, though there was no bed in it, only a short sofa. Walter explained that their maid did not sleep in.

  “Who is your maid?” he asked.

  “Claudia Jackson. She lives in Huntington. She comes twice a day, morning and evening.”

  “Can I have her address?” Corby took out his tablet.

  “Seven seventeen Spring Street, Huntington.”

  Corby wrote. “She’s not here this evening?”

  “No, not this evening,” Walter answered frowning.

  “Guest room?” Corby asked as they went into the hall.

  “My wife never wanted one. There’s a room over here, a kind of sitting-room.”

  Corby looked into it without interest. They had never used the room, though Claudia kept it in order. It looked dead and horrible to Walter now, like a model room in a department store.

  “Are you going to keep the house?” Corby asked.

  “I haven’t decided,” Walter opened another door. “This is my study.”

  “This is nice,” Corby said appreciatively. He went to the bookshelves and stood with his palms against the small of his back, holding back his jacket. “Lots of law books. Do you do a lot of work at home?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Corby looked down at the desk. Walter’s big, dark-blue scrapbook lay at one corner. “Photograph album?” Corby asked, reaching for it.

  “No, it’s a kind of notebook.”

  “May I see it?”

  Walter gestured with a hand, though he disliked Corby’s touching it, disliked watching him. Walter felt for cigarettes, found he hadn’t any, and folded his arms. He walked to a window. He could see Corby in the glass of the window, bent over the notebook, turning the pages slowly.

  “What is it?” Corby asked.

  Walter turned. “It’s a kind of pastime of mine. Notes on people for some essays I have in mind to write.” Walter’s frown bit deeper. He came back towards Corby, searching for some phrase that would get him away from the notebook, from the finely written lines that Corby was making an effort to read. Walter watched him turn another page. There was a newspaper clipping lying loose. Walter looked at it. The size, the heavy print at the top was familiar. He couldn’t believe it.

  Corby picked it up. “This is about Kimmel!” Corby said incredulously.

  “Is it?” Walter asked in the same tone.

  “Why, yes!” Corby said, turning his amazed smile to Walter. “You tore it out?”

  “I must have, but I don’t remember it.” Walter looked at Corby and in that instant something terrible happened between them: Corby’s face held simply a natural surprise, and in the surprise was discovery, the discovery of Walter’s deceit. For an instant, they looked at each other like ordinary human beings, and Walter felt the effect on him was devastating.

  “You don’t remember it?” Corby asked.

  “No. I never used it. I cut out a great many things from the paper.” He made a gesture towards the scrapbook. There were ten or twelve other newspaper items scattered through the book. But Walter was sure he had thrown the Kimmel clipping away.

  Corby glanced at the item again, dropped it where it had been, then bent over the book once more, reading the blocks of Walter’s handwriting, the typed and pasted-in paragraphs on the same page. Walter saw that they were the pages about Jensen and Cross. Nothing to do with Kimmel. Better if it had to do with Kimmel, Walter thought.

  “It’s a bunch of notes about—unworthy friends,” Walter explained. “Something like that. I probably tore that out thinking the murderer might be discovered later. And then I forgot the name. I was interested in the tie-up between the murderer and the victim. Nothing ever came out, though, and I suppose that’s why I forgot it. It is an amazing coincidence. If I’d—” Walter’s mind went blank suddenly.

  Corby was looking at him shrewdly, though some of the surprise was still left in his face, watching him as if he were only waiting, only had to wait, for Walter to say something that would clinch his guilt. Corby smiled a little. “I’d like to know just what did go through your mind when you tore the piece out.”

  “I told you. I was interested in who the murderer would be—eventually. Just as—” Walter had been about to mention that he had used a clipping about a murder in his essay on Mike and Chad, a murder resulting from such a friendship, but the clipping had long ago been thrown away. “I was interested in the connection between Helen Kimmel and the murderer.” Walter saw that Corby had picked up the Helen.

  “Go on,” Corby said.

  “There’s nothing more to say.” Part of Walter's mind was playing with the possibility that someone had planted the Kimmel piece in the scrapbook. But it was the very piece he had torn out. He recognized even its outline. Then suddenly he remembered: the piece of paper had fallen on the floor that day he threw it away. He’d been too lazy to pick it up, and then Claudia had found it. “Actually, you know, I threw—” He stopped as suddenly as he had started.

  Walter did not want to confess that he remembered that much about it. Damn Claudia, he thought. Damn her efficiency! Clara had put that into her. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  “But it might,” Corby said persuasively.

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Have you ever seen Kimmel, talked to him?”

  “No,” Walter said, in the next second wanted to change his answer. His mind see-sawed horribly between telling the whole story now, and concealing as much about Kimmel as he could. But what if Kimmel told it all tomorrow? Walter felt he was the victim of some complicated game, a slow gathering of nets that had suddenly dropped on him and drawn tight.

  Corby put a hand in his trousers pocket and strolled towards Walter, circling him, keeping a certain distance, as if to see him better in this new light.

  “You’re really obsessed with this Kimmel case, aren’t you?” Walter asked.<
br />
  “Obsessed?” Corby gave a deprecatory laugh. “I’m working on a half-dozen homicide cases at least!”

  “But where I’m concerned, you seem to be hipped on the Kimmel case,” Walter blurted out.

  “Yes. It’s the similarity of the cases that has reopened the Kimmel case, you might say. The Newark police had put it down as person or persons unknown, a maniac’s attack—hopeless. But you’ve shown us the way it might have happened.” Corby waited, letting it sink in. “Kimmel’s alibi isn’t the strongest in the world. Nobody actually saw him at the moment it happened. Did it occur to you that Kimmel might have killed his wife—either when you tore the story out or afterward?”

  “No, I don’t think it did. They said he—” He stopped. There was no mention of Kimmel’s alibi in the story Corby had looked at.

  “It’s just a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  Walter kept a sullen silence. It annoyed him that he couldn’t always tell when Corby chose to be sarcastic or not.

  “Do you mind if I take this?” Corby asked, picking up the newspaper piece from the scrapbook.

  “Not at all.”

  Corby laid the piece inside his wallet, fastened the wallet snap and put it back in his inside pocket. Walter wondered what Corby was going to do—show it to Kimmel?

  “You may find some other interesting items in the papers about Melchior Kimmel before long,” Corby said with a smile, “but I sincerely hope I don’t have to bother you again—like this.”

  Walter didn’t believe a word of it. He had no doubt the story of his having the Kimmel clipping would go into the newspapers now, too. He followed Corby out of the room.

  Corby went to his coat and hat on the chair. He lifted his narrow head. “Something burning?”

  Walter hadn’t noticed it. He went into the kitchen and turned the oven off. It was the potatoes. He opened a kitchen window.

  “Sorry to spoil your evening,” Corby said when Walter came back.

  “Not at all.” He walked with Corby to the door.

  “Good night,” Corby said.

  “Good night.”

  Walter turned from the door and stared at the telephone, listening to Corby’s car start, wondering how he could explain it to Ellie. Or to anybody. He couldn’t. Walter frowned, trying to imagine the story of tonight in the newspapers. They couldn’t convict a man just because he had a newspaper clipping! They hadn’t indicted Kimmel yet, either. Maybe Kimmel wasn’t guilty. So far only Corby seemed to think he was. And himself.

  Walter ran upstairs quickly. He had remembered something else. From the back of his desk drawer he took a flat ledger book in which he sporadically kept a diary. He hadn’t written in it for weeks, but he had written something, he remembered, in the days just after Clara’s recovery from the sleeping pills. There it was, the last entry:

  It is curious that in the most important periods of one’s life, one never keeps up a diary. There are some things that even a habitual diary-keeper shrinks from putting down in words—at the time, at least. And what a loss, if one intends to keep an honest history at all. The main value of diaries is their recording of difficult periods, and this is just the time when one is too cowardly to put down the weaknesses, the vagaries, the shameful hatreds, the little lies, the selfish intentions, carried out or not, which form one’s true character.

  It was preceded by a gap of over a month, a month of strife with Clara and then her suicide attempt. Walter tore out the page. If Corby ever found this, Walter supposed, this would absolutely finish him. Walter started to burn the page with his cigarette lighter, then picked up the diary and took it downstairs. The fire was full of hot embers. He ripped the whole book apart in three sections, laid them on the embers, and put on more wood.

  Then he went to the telephone and called Ellie at the Three Brothers. He apologized for the length of time Corby had taken.

  “What’s happened now?” There was boredom and irritation in Ellie’s voice.

  “Nothing,” Walter said. “Nothing except that the potatoes burned.”

  25

  “I was just about to go out,” Kimmel said, “If you—”

  “This is extremely important. It won’t take long.”

  “I’m leaving the house now!”

  “I’ll be right over,” Corby said, and hung up.

  Should he face it now or tomorrow? Kimmel wondered. He took off his overcoat, started mechanically to hang it up, then thrust it from him with a petulant gesture into the corner of the red plush sofa. He looked around thoughtfully at the upright piano and for a moment saw a ghostly form of Helen sitting there, drearily fingering “The Tennessee Waltz.” He wondered what Corby had to talk about, or was it nothing, like yesterday, was he just coming over to be irritating? He wondered if Corby had made enough inquiries in the neighborhood to find out about Kinnaird, that lout of an insurance salesman Helen had been fornicating with. Nathan, his friend who taught history in the local high school, knew about Kinnaird. Nathan had come in the shop that morning to tell him that Corby had been asking him questions. But Ed Kinnaird’s name had not been mentioned. Kimmel scratched under his armpit. He had just come in from dinner at the Oyster House, and had intended to settle himself with a beer and his wood carving and listen to the radio for an hour or so before he went to bed with a book.

  He’d get the beer anyway, he thought, and he went down the hall to the kitchen. The floor of the frame house squeaked with his weight. The doorbell rang as he came back up the hall. Kimmel let Corby in.

  “Sorry to bother you at this time of night,” Corby said, looking not at all sorry. “My daytime’s taken up with other work these days.”

  Kimmel said nothing. Corby was looking over the living-room, bending for a close look at the dark-stained wooden objects, all intricately carved and joined together like sausage links, that stood on top of the long white bookcase. Kimmel had an obscene answer if Corby should ask him what they were.

  “I’ve been to see Stackhouse again,” Corby said, straightening up, “and I found something very interesting.”

  “I told you I’m not at all interested in the Stackhouse case or in anything else you have to say.”

  “You’re in no position to say that,” Corby replied, seating himself on Kimmel’s sofa. “I happen to think you’re guilty, Kimmel.”

  “You told me that yesterday.”

  “Did I?”

  “You asked me if I had anyone else besides Tony Ricco to substantiate my alibi. You implied that I was guilty.”

  “I think that Stackhouse is guilty,” Corby said. “I’m sure you are.”

  Kimmel wondered suddenly if he carried a gun under that unbuttoned jacket. Probably. He picked up his beer from the low table in front of Corby, poured the rest of the bottle into the glass and set the bottle down. “I intend to report this to the Newark police tomorrow. I am not suspected or doubted by the Newark police. I am in very good standing in Newark.”

  Corby nodded, smiling. “I spoke to the Newark police before I came to see you the other day. Naturally I’d ask their permission to work on the Kimmel case, since it’s not in my territory. The police don’t mind at all if I work on it.”

  “I mind. I mind the privacy of my house being invaded.”

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do about it, Kimmel.”

  “You’d better get out of this house, unless you’d rather be thrown out. I’ve some important work to do.”

  “What’s more important, Kimmel? My work or yours? What are you doing tonight—reading the Marquis de Sade’s Memoirs?”

  Kimmel looked Corby’s reedy body up and down. What could Corby know of such a book. A familiar confidence surged through Kimmel, a sense of immunity, powerful and impregnable as a myth. He was a giant compared to Corby. Corby would find no hold on him.

  “Remember, Kimmel, I told you I thought Stackhouse did it by following the bus, persuading his wife to go to the cliff and pushing her over?”

  Finally Kim
mel said, “Yes.”

  “I think you did something like that, too.”

  Kimmel said nothing.

  “And the very interesting thing is that Stackhouse guessed it,” Corby went on. “I visited Stackhouse last night in Long Island, and what do you think I found? The story of Helen Kimmel’s murder, dated August fourteenth.” Corby opened his wallet. He held the piece of newspaper up, smiling.

  Corby was holding the paper out to him. Kimmel took it and held it close to his eyes. He recognized it as one of the earliest reports of the murder. “Am I supposed to believe that? I don’t believe you.” But he did believe him. It was the stupidity of Stackhouse he couldn’t believe.

  “Ask Stackhouse, if you don’t believe me,” Corby said, replacing the paper in his wallet. “Wouldn’t you like to meet him?”

  “I have no interest whatsoever in meeting him.”

  “However, I think I’m going to arrange it.”

  It hit Kimmel like the dull blow of a hammer over his heart, and from then on he began to feel his heartbeats thudding in his thick chest. Kimmel opened his arms in a gesture that said he was quite willing to meet Stackhouse but that he saw no purpose in it. Kimmel was thinking that Stackhouse might crack up right in his shop, or wherever it was. Stackhouse would say that he had come to see him before, might even accuse him of having confessed to him how he killed Helen, of having explained to him how to do it. Kimmel could not predict Stackhouse at all. Kimmel felt himself trembling from head to foot, and he shifted and turned nearly around, staring sightlessly in front of him.

  “I know a little about Stackhouse’s private life. He had sufficient motive to kill his wife, just as you did—once you got mad enough. But some of your motivation was pleasure, wasn’t it? In a way?”

  Kimmel played with the knife in his left-hand pocket. He could still feel his heartbeats. A lie detector, he thought—He had been sure he could weather a lie detector, if they ever subjected him to one. Perhaps he couldn’t. Stackhouse had guessed it, Kimmel thought, not Corby. Stackhouse had had the appalling stupidity to leave his trail everywhere, bring it right to his door! “You have all the proof you need about Stackhouse?” Kimmel asked.