The Blunderer Read online

  Corby was moving about restlessly. He had lost the well-bred schoolboy look. He was like a long, limber wrestler maneuvering, ready to take an unfair grip. “You don’t think it’s the least bit unusual that Stackhouse had torn the story of your wife’s murder out of the papers and then followed the bus with his own wife on it the night she was killed?”

  “You told me Stackhouse’s wife was a suicide,” Kimmel said with surprise.

  “That has not been proved.” Corby drew on his cigarette and paced up and down between Walter and Kimmel.

  “Just what are you trying to prove?” Kimmel folded his arms in the white shirtsleeves and leaned against the wall. His glasses were empty white circles, reflecting the light over his desk.

  “I wonder,” Corby sneered.

  Kimmel shrugged again.

  Walter could not tell if Kimmel was looking at him or not. He looked down at the book spread open on Kimmel’s desk. The back of his neck ached as he moved. It was a very large old book with double columns on each page, like a Bible.

  “Mr. Stackhouse,” Corby said, “didn’t you think when you read the newspaper story of the Kimmel murder that Kimmel might have murdered his wife?”

  “You asked me that,” Walter said. “I didn’t think that.”

  Kimmel slowly reached for a leather humidor on the top of his desk. He removed its top, offered the humidor to Walter, who shook his head, then to Corby, who did not look at him. Kimmel took a cigar.

  Corby dropped his cigarette butt on the floor and ground it under his toe. “Another time,” he said bitterly. “Some other time.”

  Kimmel pushed away from the wall, and looked from Corby to Walter and back again. “We are finished?”

  “For today, yes.” Corby picked up his hat. Then he walked towards the door.

  Kimmel bent to pick up the cigarette butt that Corby had dropped, and for a moment he blocked Walter’s passage. He dropped the butt into the wastebasket by his desk. Then he stepped smartly aside for Walter to pass him, and followed them both to the front door. His huge figure had an elephantine dignity. He swept the door open for them.

  Corby went out without a word.

  Walter turned. “Good night,” he said to Kimmel.

  Kimmel’s eyes surveyed him coldly through the glasses. “Good night.”

  At the car Walter said, “You don’t have to drive me back. I can take a taxi from here.” His throat was tight, as if all his tenseness had suddenly gathered there.

  Corby held the door open. “It’ll be hard getting a taxi to New York tonight. I’m going back to New York anyway.”

  To call on some more of my friends, Walter thought. It had started to rain in thin drizzling drops. The dark street looked like a tunnel in hell. Walter had a wild desire to rush back into the bookstore and talk to Kimmel, tell him exactly why he had torn the story out of the paper, tell him everything he had done and why. “All right,” Walter said. He dived quickly into the car and struck his head so hard on the door frame that he felt dizzy for a few seconds.

  They said nothing to each other. Corby seemed to be fuming inwardly at the failure of his afternoon. They were back in Manhattan before Walter remembered that he had an appointment with Ellie. He looked frantically at his wrist watch and saw that he was an hour and forty minutes late.

  “What’s the matter?” Corby asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You had a date?”

  “Oh, no.”

  When Walter got out at the Third Avenue parking lot where he kept his car, he said, “I hope that this interview accomplishes what you expect it to.”

  Corby’s narrow face lowered in a deep, absent-minded nod of acknowledgment. “Thanks,” he said sourly.

  Walter slammed his door. He waited until Corby was out of sight, then he began to walk quickly. He tried again, now that he was free of Corby’s presence, to analyze Kimmel’s behavior. It wouldn’t have done Kimmel any good to betray him. But Kimmel hadn’t any reason on earth to protect him. Except blackmail. Walter frowned, conjuring up Kimmel’s strange face, trying to interpret it. The face was coarse, but there was a great deal of pride in it. Was he the type to try blackmail? Or was he only trying to keep his nose as clean as possible by telling as little as possible? That made better sense.

  Walter went into the bar of the Hotel Commodore. He didn’t see Ellie at any of the tables, and started to ask the head waiter if there was any message for him, but he gave the idea up. He walked up to the lobby, looking for her. He had given her up and was going out of the front door when he saw her coming in from the sidewalk.

  “Ellie, I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t able to reach you—stuck in a conference for three hours.”

  “I called at your office,” she said.

  “We weren’t there. Did you have anything to eat?”

  “No.”

  “We can get something here, if you’d like.”

  “I’m out of the mood,” she said, but she went with him down to the bar.

  They sat down at a table and ordered drinks. Walter wanted a double Scotch.

  “I don’t believe you were in a conference,” Ellie said. “You were with Corby, weren’t you?”

  Walter started, looked from her face to the silver pin in the form of a flaming sun on her shoulder. “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, what’s he saying now?”

  “More questions. The same questions. I wish you wouldn’t ask me, Ellie. It’ll blow over finally. There’s no use going over and over it.” He looked around for the waiter with his drink.

  “I saw him, too.”

  “Corby?”

  “He came to the school at one o’clock today. He told me about the clipping he found in your house.”

  Walter felt the blood drain out of his face. Corby hadn’t even bothered telephoning Ellie before. He had waited, to be able to tell her something like this.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” Ellie asked.

  “Yes it’s true.”

  “How did you happen to have it?”

  Walter picked up his drink. “I tore the piece out the way I tear a lot of newspaper items out. It was among some notes I had for the essays I’m writing. I have them in a scrap book at home.”

  “That was the night I waited in the Three Brothers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “Because the story Corby was making out of it was fantastic! It still is.”

  “Corby told me he thinks Kimmel killed his wife. He thinks he followed the bus—and that you did the same thing.”

  Walter felt the same resentful self-defence, the anger that he felt against Corby, rising in him now against Ellie. “Well, do you believe him?”

  Ellie sat there as tense as he, over the drink she had not touched. “I don’t quite understand why you had that story. What essays are you writing?”

  Walter explained it, and explained that he had thrown the piece away, and that Claudia must have found it and put it back in his scrapbook. “Good God, there was nothing in the newspaper about Kimmel following the bus! Corby hasn’t proved that Kimmel followed the bus. Corby’s got an obsession. I’ve explained the damned clipping to Corby, and if people don’t believe me, to hell with them all!” He lighted a cigarette, then saw that he had a cigarette burning in the ashtray. “I suppose Corby tried to convince you that I killed my wife and that you were one of my main motives, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes, but I can handle that all right because I expected it,” Ellie said.

  It was the clipping she couldn’t handle, Walter thought. He looked at Ellie’s intent, still questioning eyes, and it astounded Walter that she doubted him, that Corby with his wild illogical argument could have put doubt even in Ellie. “Ellie, his whole theory doesn’t make sense. Look—”

  “Walter, will you swear to me that you didn’t kill her?”

  “What do you mean? You don’t believe me when I tell you I didn’t?”

 
; “I want you to swear it,” Ellie said.

  “Do I have to take an oath to you? I’ve been over every step of that night with you, you know every move I made as well as the police.”

  “All right. I asked you to swear it.”

  “It’s the principle of the thing, that you even have to ask me!” he said vehemently.

  “It’s so simple, though, isn’t it?”

  “You don’t believe me either!” he said.

  “I do. I want to. It’s—”

  “You don’t, or you wouldn’t ask that!”

  “All right, let’s stop it.” She glanced to one side. “Let’s not talk so loud.”

  “Does that matter? I’m not guilty of anything. But you don’t believe me, that’s obvious. You choose to doubt me like all the others!”

  “Walter, stop it,” Ellie whispered.

  “You suspect me, don’t you?”

  She looked back at him just as fiercely “Walter, I’ll excuse this—put it down to nerves, but not if you keep on with it!”

  “Oh, you’ll excuse it!” he mocked.

  Ellie jumped up suddenly and slid out from the table. Walter had a glimpse of her flying coat hem disappearing around the door. He stood up, fumbled for his billfold, threw down a five-dollar bill, and ran out.

  “Ellie!” he called. He looked into the jumble of lights and traffic of 42nd Street, across the street to the corners. She’d go to Penn Station to catch a train home, probably, since she hadn’t brought her car. Or would she? Where did Pete Slotnikoff live? Somewhere on the West Side. To hell with it, Walter thought. To hell with her.

  He walked back to the Third Avenue parking lot. He headed into the old homeward groove of the East River Drive.

  The willow trees that overhung Marlborough Road, near the house depressed him, made him think of the dreary winged figures that hover over tombstones and deathbeds in Blake engravings. He put the car in the garage. The sound of a twig breaking under his own foot made him jump. He picked up the loose bottom rail of the gate carefully, instead of kicking it aside as he usually did, and propped it up on the crosspiece.

  Walter awakened the next morning at six, from nerves and the pangs of hunger. He dressed in old manila pants and a shirt and the flannel lumberjacket he wore on fishing trips. He got a piece of bread and cheese as he passed through the kitchen, then went out to the toolshed next to the garage. He was going to fix the gate.

  He had to saw a piece of firewood as a brace to go under the broken rail, but the firewood was the same kind of wood as the gate rail, and he was satisfied with the job when it was done. It was patched, not perfect, but it wouldn’t drag the ground any more. It was still only twenty to seven, when he usually arose, so he got some white paint and a brush from the garage and gave the kitchen steps a few strokes where the paint had begun to wear. He was just finishing up when he heard a step at the end of Marlborough Road. She gave him a smile that he could see from where he was, and called out: “Morning, Mr. Stackhouse!”

  “Morning, Claudia!” he called back. The author of all his troubles, Walter thought. At least, of the worst of them. She was carrying a bag of groceries, for him.

  “You’re up early this morning,” Claudia said. She looked happy to see him pottering around in old clothes.

  “I thought it was high time I fixed that gate. Watch the bottom step here. It’s wet.”

  “Isn’t that fine!” Claudia said cheerfully. She stepped over the step and went into the kitchen.

  Walter took the paint back to the garage, cleaned the brush with turpentine, and went back to the house. He went to the telephone in the upstairs hall and called Ellie. He wasn’t entirely sure she would be home. The telephone rang about five times before she answered it. Ellie said she had been taking a bath.

  “I’m sorry about last night, Ellie,” Walter said. “I was very rude. I want to say that I do swear it—what you asked me last night. I swear it, Ellie.”

  There was a long pause. “All right.” Her voice sounded very low and very serious. “It’s impossible to talk to you when you’re like that. You make everything look much worse for you than it is. You give the impression of fighting against something that’s got you completely terrified.”

  It sounded as if she were waiting for him to protest some more that he was innocent, waiting for him to prove it all over again for her. He still heard a lurking doubt in her voice. “Ellie, I’m sorry about last night,” he said quietly. “It’s never going to happen again. Good lord!”

  Another silence.

  “Can I see you tonight, Ellie? Can you have dinner with me over here?”

  “I have to be at rehearsals until eight.”

  They were starting the Thanksgiving Day play rehearsals at her school, Walter remembered. “Afterwards, then. I’ll pick you up at school at eight.”

  “All right,” she said, not at all enthusiastically.

  “Ellie, what’s the matter?”

  “I think you’re acting very strangely, I suppose.”

  “I think you’re making something out of this that isn’t there!” Walter replied.

  “There you go again. Walter, you can’t blame me for asking the simple questions I do when I’m confronted with someone like Corby yesterday—”

  “Corby’s off his head,” Walter interrupted her.

  “If Corby does question you, I don’t see why you have to lie about it.You’d make anyone think there really is something you’re trying to conceal. You can’t blame me for asking simple questions when a man like Corby confronts me with a story he seems to believe and that is possibly—-just possibly possible as far as the facts go,” she finished in an arguing tone.

  Walter crushed down what he wanted to reply to that. And in the next moment he was frantic to think of something to say to allay her suspicions, to hold on to her because he felt she was slipping away. “Corby’s story is not possible,” he began calmly, “because I couldn’t have done what Corby says I did and then hang around the bus stop for fifteen minutes, asking every Tom, Dick and Harry where the woman I murdered is!”

  She was silent. He knew she was thinking: he’s up in the air again, and what’s the use?

  “I’ll see you tonight,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”

  He wanted to go on with it. He didn’t know how. “All right,” he said. Then they hung up.

  27

  Walter lingered at the corner and looked around him, looking for Corby.

  An old man, holding a small child by the hand, crossed the street. The cobbled pavement of the street looked filthy with grit and time and sin, like the soiled buildings that surrounded him. Walter started into the block and stopped, staring at a swaybacked horse pulling a wagon full of empty crates. He could still telephone, he thought. His first idea had been to telephone, but he was afraid Kimmel would refuse to see him, or hang up as soon as he heard his voice. Walter went on. The bookshop was on his side of the street. Walter passed a small shop with upholstery materials in the window, then a dingy jewelry repair shop. He saw Kimmel’s projecting front window.

  The shop was better lighted now than the other times Walter had seen it. Two or three people were looking at books at the tables, and, as Walter watched through the window, he saw Kimmel come forward and speak to a woman who was handing him some money. He could still leave, Walter thought. It was a reckless, stupid idea. He had left work undone at the office. Dick had been annoyed with him. He could start back and be at the office by 4:15. Walter looked into the shop, wondering. Leave, he told himself. But he knew he would go back to work, back home, and the same arguments and urges would torment him again. Walter thrust the door open and went in.

  He saw Kimmel glance at him, look away, and then back again suddenly. Kimmel adjusted his glasses with his fat fingers and peered at him. Walter approached him. “Can I see you for a few minutes?” he asked Kimmel.

  “Are you by yourself?” Kimmel asked.

  “Yes.”

  The woman from whom Kim
mel had taken the book looked at Walter, but without interest, and turned to the table again.

  Kimmel went to the back of the store with the book and the woman’s money.

  Walter waited. He waited very patiently by another table, and picked up a book and looked at its cover. Finally Kimmel came up to him. “Do you want to come back here?” he asked, looking down at Walter with his cold, nearly expressionless tan eyes.

  Walter came with him. He took off his hat.

  “Keep that on,” Kimmel said.

  Walter put his hat on again.

  Kimmel stood behind his desk, huge and hostile, waiting.

  “I’d like you to know that I’m not guilty,” Walter said quickly.

  “That’s of great interest to me, isn’t it?” Kimmel asked.

  Walter thought he had prepared himself for Kimmel’s hostility, but, face to face with it, it flustered him. “I should think it would be of some interest. Eventually it will be proved that I’m not guilty. I realize that I’ve brought the police down on your head.”

  “Oh, do you?”

  “I also know that whatever I say is inadequate—and ridiculous,” Walter went on determinedly. “I’m in a very bad position myself.”

  “You are in!” Kimmel said more loudly, though he still, like Walter, did not raise his voice enough to attract the attention of the people in the shop. “Yes, you are,” Kimmel said in a different tone, and there was a note of satisfaction in it. “You are far worse off than I am.”

  “But I’m not guilty,” Walter said.

  “I don’t care. I don’t care what you’ve done or haven’t done.” Kimmel leaned forward with his hands on his desk.

  Kimmel’s fat mouth with the heavy seam along the heart-shaped upper lip seemed to Walter the most vulgar thing he had ever looked at. “I realize you don’t care. I realize all you wish is that you’ll never see me again. I came here only to—” Walter stopped as a young man came close to the desk and asked: “Do you have anything on outboard motorboat machinery?”