The Blunderer Page 16

  “Are you getting frightened, Kimmel? I have only circumstantial evidence, but he’ll confess the rest. Not you, though. I’ll have to get more proof about you and break down your alibi. Your friend Tony means well, and he thinks you were in that movie all evening, but he could just as easily be persuaded to think differently, if I talk to him enough. He’s just a—”

  Suddenly Kimmel flung his glass at Corby’s head, grabbed Corby by the shirt-front and pulled him up over the table. Kimmel drew his right hand back for a neck-breaking blow, and then he felt what he thought was a bullet in his diaphragm. Kimmel lunged out with his right hand and missed. Then his arm was jerked down with a sharp pain; his feet left the ground. At the sickening heave in his stomach he closed his eyes and felt himself sailing in the air. He landed on one hip with an impact that rattled the windows. Kimmel was sitting on the floor. He looked at Corby’s fuzzy, elongated figure standing above him. Kimmel’s fat left arm rose up independent of his will, like a floating balloon. He touched it and found it had no sensation.

  “My arm’s broken!” he said.

  Corby snorted and shot his cuffs.

  Kimmel turned his head in both directions, looking around the floor. He got on to his knees. “Do you see my glasses?”

  “Here.”

  Kimmel felt the glasses being poked into the fingers of his left hand that was still poised in the air, and he closed his fingers on the thin gold earpiece, then felt it slipping, heard it fall, and he knew from the sound that the glasses had broken. “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, standing up. He swayed towards Corby.

  Corby stepped sideways, casually. “Don’t start it again. The same thing’ll happen, only worse.”

  “Get out!” Kimmel roared. “Get out of here, you stinking—You cockroach! You fairy!” Kimmel went on into the sexual and the anatomical, and Corby stepped quickly towards him, raising a hand. Kimmel stopped talking and dodged.

  “You’re a coward,” Corby said.

  Kimmel repeated what he thought Corby was.

  Corby picked up his overcoat and put it on. “I give you warning, Kimmel, I’m not leaving you alone. And everyone in this town is going to know it, all your little friends. And one of these days I’ll come walking into your shop with Stackhouse. You two have a lot in common.” Corby went out and banged the door.

  Kimmel stood where he was for several moments, his flabby body as taut as it could be, his unfocused eyes staring before him. He imagined Corby going to the librarian, Miss Brown, going to Tom Bailey, the ex-alderman, who was the most intelligent man Kimmel knew in the neighborhood, whose friendship Kimmel had striven hardest for and rated highest. Tom Bailey knew nothing about Helen’s affair with Ed Kinnaird, but Kimmel had no doubt that Corby would tell everyone about it once he found out, give every sordid repellent detail of it, of her picking him up on the street like a common prostitute, because Lena, Helen’s best friend, knew that. Helen had boasted of it! Corby would put doubt in all their minds.

  Kimmel suddenly began to walk, a matter of toppling forward and catching himself, feeling his way down the hall walls to the kitchen, where he washed his face with cold water under the tap. Then he felt his way back to the telephone in the living-room. It took him a long while to dial the number, and then it was wrong the first time. He dialed it again.

  “Hello, Tony, old boy,” Kimmel said cheerfully. “What are you doing?” … Good, because the most terrible thing has just happened to me. I broke my glasses, tripped over the rug and probably broke some other things, but the glasses are in smithereens. Come over and see me for a while. I can’t read or do anything tonight.” Kimmel listened to Tony’s voice saying he would, in just a few minutes, when he had finished doing something else that he had to do, listened patiently to the dreary, modest voice while he reviewed with pleasure the services he had done for Tony, the time three years ago when Tony had got a girl pregnant and had been desperate for an abortionist. Kimmel had found one for her in a matter of minutes, safe and not too expensive. Tony had been on his knees with gratitude, because he had been terrified that his very religious family, not to mention the girl’s family, might have found out.

  After Kimmel hung up, he picked up the table which had been knocked over, set up the bridge lamp and removed the broken bulb from its socket. There was a limit to how much damage a man’s fall could make a room. Then he stood by the bookcase, playing with his carvings, moving their parts at various angles and observing the composition. He could see them fuzzily against the light-colored bookcase, and the effect was rather interesting. They were cigar-shaped pieces fastened invisibly together, end to end, with wire. Some looked like animals on four legs; others, of ten pieces or more, defied any description. Kimmel himself had no definite name for them. To himself, sometimes, he called them his puppies. Each piece was differently carved with designs of his own invention, designs somewhat Persian in their motifs, their brown-stained surfaces so smoothed with fine sandpaper they felt almost soft to the touch. Kimmel loved to run his fingertips over them. He was still fondling them when the doorbell rang.

  Tony came in with his hat in his hand, and awkwardly plunged himself in a chair before Kimmel could ask him to remove his overcoat. Tony was always flattered to be asked to Kimmel’s house in the evening. It had not happened more than three or four times before. Tony sprang up to help Kimmel find a hanger in the closet for his coat.

  “Would you like a beer?” Kimmel asked.

  “Yeah, I’d like one,” Tony said.

  Kimmel went with dignity, half sightless, down the hall and felt for the kitchen light. Tony was too ill at ease, he supposed, to volunteer to get the beer. Tony’s stupidity disgusted Kimmel, but Tony’s awe of his erudition and his manners, plus his beer-drinking good fellowship, which Kimmel knew to Tony was an unusual combination, flattered Kimmel, too.

  “Tony, I’d be much obliged if you can manage to come over tomorrow morning and drive my car for me to the optician’s,” Kimmel said as he set the beer and the glasses down.

  “Sure, Mr. Kimmel. What time?”

  “Oh, about nine.”

  “Sure,” Tony said, recrossing his legs nervously.

  Amazing, Kimmel thought, that this insignificant wretch of a boy, pockmarked and devoid of any character in his face, could actually get a girl pregnant. Tony had never given the matter a thought, Kimmel felt sure, didn’t have the faintest idea of the processes involved. Which was why it was so easy for him. Kimmel supposed that Tony had a girl every week or so. Tony had a regular girl friend, but he knew she was not one of the girls of the neighborhood boys slept with. Kimmel often eavesdropped on their conversation from a window of his shop which gave on an alley. A girl named Connie was the neighborhood favorite. But Tony’s girl Franca had never even been mentioned, though Kimmel always listened for her name. “What have you been doing lately, Tony?”

  “Oh, same old thing, working the store, bowling a little.”

  It was always the same answer. But Kimmel always asked out of politeness that he knew was unappreciated. “Oh, Tony, by the way, there may be some more questioning by the police in the next few days—or weeks. Don’t let it rattle you. Tell them—”

  “Oh, no,” Tony said, though a little frightened.

  “Tell them exactly what happened, exactly what you saw,” Kimmel said in a light, precise voice. “You saw me at eight o’clock taking my seat in the movie theater.”

  “Oh, sure, Mr. Kimmel.”

  26

  “Lieutenant Corby to see you, Mr. Stackhouse,” Joan’s voice said over the speaker on his desk. “Shall I tell him to wait or will you see him now?”

  Walter glanced at Dick Jensen, who was standing beside him. They were busy with a tax case brief that had to be ready by five o’clock. “Tell him to wait just a minute,” Walter said.

  “Shall I leave?” Dick asked.

  Dick probably knew who Corby was, Walter thought. Dick and Polly must have had a visit from Corby—the Ireton’s had had two—
but Dick had said nothing about it. “I suppose I’d better see him alone, yes,” Walter said.

  Dick picked up his unlighted pipe from Walter’s desk and walked to the door without a word or a glance.

  Walter told Joan he was ready, and Corby came in at once, brisk and smiling.

  “I know you’re busy,” Corby said, “so I’ll get to the point. I’d like you to come over to Newark with me this afternoon to meet Kimmel.”

  Walter stood up slowly. “I don’t care to meet Kimmel. I’ve got work that has to be—”

  “But I want Kimmel to meet you,” Corby said with his mechanical smile. “Kimmel is guilty, and we’re winding up his case. I want Kimmel to see you. He thinks you’re guilty, too, and it’s got him scared.”

  Walter frowned. “And you think I’m guilty, too?” he asked quietly.

  “No, I don’t think you are. I’m after Kimmel.” Corby’s smile brightened his blue eyes with a completely false cheer. “Of course, you can refuse to go—”

  “I think I do.”

  “—but I can make your own situation several times as unpleasant as it is for you now.”

  Walter’s thumbs gripped the edge of his desk. He had been congratulating himself that Corby hadn’t released the story of the Kimmel clipping to the newspapers yet, had even entertained some hope that Corby had realized it might all be a series of coincidences and that he could be innocent. Now Walter realized that Corby meant to hold the Kimmel clipping over him. “What’s your objective in all this?” Walter asked.

  “My objective is to get the truth out,” Corby said, smiling self-consciously. He lighted a cigarette.

  Suddenly Walter thought: his objective was to advance himself, to trap two men instead of one if he could, to win commendation or a promotion for himself. Suddenly Corby’s ruthless ambition struck Walter as so patent, he was amazed he hadn’t realized before that it was Corby’s only motivation. “If you’re talking about publicizing the Kimmel clipping episode,” Walter said, “go ahead, but I don’t care to meet Kimmel.”

  Corby looked at him sharply. “It’s more than just a story, just an episode. It could ruin your whole life.”

  “I fail to see the picture as clearly as you do. You haven’t yet proved Kimmel guilty, much less guilty of the particular actions that you seem to think both of us—”

  “You don’t know what I’ve proved,” Corby said confidently. “I’m reconstructing exactly what happened between Kimmel and his wife just around the time she was killed. When that’s spread out in front of Kimmel he’s going to break down and confess exactly what I’m accusing him of.”

  Exactly what I’m accusing him of. His arrogance stunned Walter to silence for a moment. The implication was that Kimmel’s confession—or Kimmel’s retaliatory statement that he had visited him in his shop last month, which Kimmel might already have made—would drag himself down in the same guilt, make him confess, too.

  “Do you agree to come? I’m asking a favor of you. I can promise you, if you do, that nothing of it will get in the newspapers.” Corby’s voice was eager, supremely confident, and to Walter appalling.

  After he saw Kimmel it wouldn’t need to get in the papers, Walter thought. Maybe Kimmel had already told Corby that he had been to his shop. Why wouldn’t Kimmel have told him? Corby looked as if he knew, as if he were waiting for him to admit it now. If he refused to go Corby would bring Kimmel to the office, Walter supposed. Corby would force the meeting one way or another. “All right,” Walter said. “I’ll go.”

  “Fine,” Corby smiled. “I’ll be back around five. I’ve got a car. We’ll drive over.” Corby waved a hand and turned to the door.

  Walter kept on gripping the desk after Corby was gone. What terrified him was the fact that Corby believed him guilty now, too. Until five minutes ago Walter had dared to believe that Corby didn’t, or at least that Corby was willing to hold his attack in abeyance until he was sure. Walter felt he had just agreed to walk straight into hell.

  “Walter!” Dick snapped his fingers. “What’s the matter? In a trance?”

  Walter glanced at Dick, then looked down at the stapled papers on his desk that were labeled “Burden of Proof.”

  “Listen, Walter, what goes on with this?” Dick nodded towards the door. “The police still questioning you?”

  “One man,” Walter said. “Not the police.”

  “I don’t think I told you,” Dick said, “Corby came around to see Polly and me one night at the apartment. He asked me questions about you—and Clara, of course.”

  “When?”

  “About a week ago. A little longer.”

  It was before Corby found the Kimmel clipping, Walter thought. The questions must have been mild. “Asked you what?”

  “Asked me frankly if I thought you were capable of it. He doesn’t mince words, apparently. I told him emphatically no. I told him how you reacted when Clara came out of the coma. A man doesn’t react the way you did if he wants to kill his wife.”

  “Thanks,” Walter said weakly.

  “I didn’t know Clara tried to kill herself, Walter. Corby told me that. I can understand the whole thing a lot better, knowing that. I can understand that Clara—well, that she killed herself the way she did.”

  Walter nodded. “Yes.You’d think everybody would be able to understand it.”

  Dick asked in a lower voice, “You’re not in any particular trouble, are you, Walt—with this detective Corby?”

  Walter hesitated, then shook his head. “No, no particular trouble.”

  “Any kind of trouble?”

  “No,” Walter said. “Shall we get back to work?” Walter wanted to get the job done so he could be downstairs to meet Corby at five.

  At five o’clock, Corby repeated his offer to drive Walter to Newark and back in his car, and Walter accepted it. They rode in silence to the Holland Tunnel. In the middle of the tunnel, Corby said: “I realize you’re going out of your way to help me, Mr. Stackhouse. I appreciate it.” Corby’s voice had a vibrant, buried sound in the tunnel. “I expect this to have some results, though they may not show up right away.”

  Corby drove the intricate way to the bookshop as if he had driven it many times. Walter had slipped unconsciously into a role of pretending he had never seen the place before, though he asked no questions. The smell of the shop—stagnant, dusty, permeated with the sweetness of dry-rotting pages and bindings—seemed intensely and terrifyingly familiar to Walter. There was nobody else but Kimmel in the shop. Walter saw Kimmel get slowly to his feet behind his desk, like an elephant rising, on guard.

  “Kimmel,” Corby said familiarly as they approached him, “I’d like you to meet Mr. Stackhouse.”

  Kimmel’s huge face looked blank. “How do you do?” Kimmel said first.

  “How do you do?” Walter waited tensely. Kimmel’s face was still expressionless. Walter could not decide if Kimmel had already betrayed him to Corby, or if he was going to, in a cold quiet way, as soon as Corby asked the proper questions.

  “Mr. Stackhouse has also had the misfortune of losing his wife recently,” Corby said, tossing his hat on to a table of books, “and by a catastrophe at a bus stop.”

  “I think I read of it,” Kimmel said.

  “I think you did,” Corby said, smiling.

  Walter shifted, and glanced at Corby. Corby’s manner was an unpleasant, unbelievable combination of professional bluntness and social decorum.

  “I think I also told you,” Corby went on placidly, “that Mr. Stackhouse was also acquainted with the story of your wife’s murder. I found an August clipping about her murder in Mr. Stackhouse’s scrapbook.”

  “Yes,” Kimmel said solemnly, nodding his bald head a little.

  Walter’s lips twitched in an involuntary, nervous smile, though he felt panicked. Kimmel’s tiny eyes looked completely cold, indifferent as a murderer’s eyes.

  “Does Mr. Stackhouse look like a murderer to you?” Corby asked Kimmel.

  “Isn�
��t that for you to find out?” Kimmel asked, placing the tips of his fat, flexible fingers on the green blotter of his desk. “I don’t understand the purpose of this visit.”

  Corby was silent a moment. An annoyed frown was settling in his eyes. “The purpose of this visit will come out very soon,” he said.

  Kimmel and Walter looked at each other. Kimmel’s expression had changed. There was something like curiosity in the little eyes now, and, as Walter watched, one side of the heart-shaped mouth moved in a faint smile that seemed to say: We are both victims of this absurd young man.

  “Mr. Stackhouse,” Corby said, “you don’t deny that Kimmel’s actions were in your mind when you followed the bus your wife was on, do you?”

  “When you say Kimmel’s actions—”

  “We’ve discussed that,” Corby said sharply.

  “Yes,” Walter said, “I do deny that.” In the last seconds a sympathy for Kimmel had sprung up in Walter so strong that it embarrassed him, and he felt he should try to conceal it. He was positive now that Kimmel had never told Corby about his visit to the shop, and that he was not going to.

  Corby turned to Kimmel. “And I suppose you deny that it crossed your mind that Stackhouse killed his wife the same way you did when you read about Stackhouse’s being at the bus stop?”

  “It could hardly have failed to cross my mind, since the newspapers either implied it or stated it,” Kimmel answered calmly, “but I did not kill my wife!”

  “Kimmel, you’re a liar!” Corby shouted. “You know that Stackhouse’s behavior has betrayed you. And yet you stand there acting blank about the whole thing!”

  With magnificent indifference, Kimmel shrugged.

  Walter felt a new strength flow into him. He took a deeper breath. It occurred to him now that Kimmel had been afraid he would betray the visit, practically as afraid as he had been that Kimmel would betray it. Kimmel evidently intended to reveal as little as he could to Corby. Suddenly it seemed so heroic and generous on Kimmel’s part that Kimmel appeared a shining angel in contrast to a diabolic Corby.