The Blunderer Page 19

  “Walter-r,” Ellie said deprecatingly, trying to quiet him.

  Walter looked down at his napkin. His shaking hands embarrassed him. The sudden waiting silence of everybody embarrassed him. He wanted to blurt out that if you keep repeating the same story over and over, you finally begin to doubt it yourself, because the words stop making sense. That was an important fact, but he couldn’t say it because they would all make capital out of it. Even Ellie. Walter got up from the table and walked away, then turned around suddenly.

  “Bill, I don’t know if Corby told you also that Clara tried to kill herself last September.”

  “No,” Bill said solemnly.

  “She took sleeping pills. That’s why she had that stay in the hospital. She had suicide on her mind. I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but in view of this—these other facts—I think you ought to know about it.”

  “Well, we heard something of that,” Bill said.

  “We heard the rumor,” Betty Ireton corrected carefully. “I think it was Ernestine who told us. She thought so. Not from anything definite, but she’s very intuitive about things like that. She knew Clara was in a bad state.” Betty spoke with the sweetness and decorum befitting the dead.

  Betty and Bill still looked at him, expectantly. It took Walter aback. He had thought the sleeping pill episode would fairly prove that she killed herself. They were looking at him with the same question in their faces as before.

  “I wonder what I’m supposed to do?” Walter burst out. “Who’ll ever prove anything in a case like this?”

  “Walter, I don’t think they’re investigating you.” Betty repeated. “You shouldn’t feel so nervous—personally. My goodness!”

  “That’s very easy to say. I wouldn’t like to be up against Corby myself,” Bill said. “I mean—I see what he’s trying to do.”

  “I’m sure he explained it,” Walter said. “He explains it to everybody.”

  “I do want to tell you, Walter—not that I have to say it, I hope—that I told Corby I was absolutely sure you’d never do a thing like this. I know what they say about people who do. I mean that you never can tell about them. I feel differently about this.” Bill gestured with his open hands. It didn’t make his words any stronger. “Even though you didn’t get along, you never would have killed her.”

  To Walter it sounded like total nonsense, and insincere nonsense at that. He wasn’t even positive that Bill had said it to Corby. Walter swallowed down what he wanted to say about Corby, and came out with only a croaking “Thanks.”

  There was another silence. Bill looked at Betty. They exchanged a long, trout-solemn look, and then Bill stood up.

  “Guess we better be taking off. Let’s go, hon.” Bill often proposed leaving before his wife did.

  Betty hopped up obediently.

  Walter felt like holding them physically while he said one thing more, one thing that would make them believe him. These were supposed to be his best friends in the neighborhood! He went with them to the door, stiffly, his hands in his jacket pockets. They were ready to turn against him, already were turned against him. The old favorite sport of the human race, hunting down their fellows.

  “Good night!” Walter called to them. He managed to make it sound actually cheerful. He shut the door and turned to Ellie. “What do you make of that?”

  “They’re behaving like any other average people. Believe me, Walter. Probably better than most.”

  “Well, have you seen any worse—towards me?”

  “No. I haven’t.” She began to clear the table. “If I had I’d tell you.”

  From her tone Walter felt she wanted him to change the subject. But if I can’t talk to you, he thought, who the hell can I talk to? Suddenly he imagined Jon being told about the Kimmel clipping, and Walter felt a sickening in his stomach. He imagined that pushing Jon over a brink of doubt into certainty. He began to help Ellie with the things on the table. Ellie already had it nearly done. She knew where everything went. She was faster than Claudia. The coffee was already started in the Chemex. She was going to wash up the dishes, but he told her to leave them for Claudia tomorrow morning. By the time they had straightened the kitchen the coffee was ready, and they took it into the living-room. Walter poured it.

  Ellie sat down and put her head back tiredly against the sofa pillow. The light from the end of the sofa lay on her curving, Slavic cheekbone. She was thinner than she had been in summer, and she had lost nearly all her tan, but Walter thought her more attractive now than before. As he bent over her she opened her eyes. He kissed her on the lips. She smiled, but he saw a wary, wondering look in her eyes, as if she did not know what to make of him. She put her arm around his shoulder and held him, but she did not say anything to him. Nor he to her. He kissed her forehead, her lips, drawing peace and a kind of animal comfort from her body in his arms. But it was wrong that they didn’t speak to each other, he thought. It was wrong that they kissed like this—he because she was there and available, and she because she wanted him, physically. He could sense it in her tense restraint, her held breath, and in the way she turned herself to him. It did not appeal to Walter, but still he held her and kissed her.

  When Ellie got up to get a cigarette Walter could feel her desire like a pull, a drain on him across the space that separated them. He stood up to light her cigarette. She put her arms around his neck.

  “Walter,” she said, “I want to stay here tonight.”

  “I can’t. Not here.”

  Her arms tightened around his neck. “Let’s go to my place, then—please.”

  The pleading in her voice embarrassed him. And then he was ashamed of his own asinine embarrassment. “I can’t, Ellie. I can’t—yet. Do you understand?” He took his hands from her.

  Slowly she picked up the lighter and lighted her own cigarette. “I’m not sure I do. But I guess I’ll have to try.”

  Walter stood there tongue-tied. It wasn’t the house or even his own indifference tonight that he should have explained, he thought, or should be explaining. What rendered him speechless was that he couldn’t even tell her that it would be different one day, that he had any plans at all where she was concerned.

  “It’d be nice some time if we’d coincide—about the way we feel,” she said, giving him a sidelong look. But she smiled and there was humor in the smile. “So—Boadicea and I’ll be going home.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I’d rather.” She was gathering up her pocket-book and her gloves.

  He was being unfair, he told himself, deliberately using her and hurting her. He followed her and went out to the car with her. She said a pleasant good night to him through the window, but she did not wait for his kiss.

  Walter went back into the empty house. Did he hang on to the house, he wondered, only because it kept a barrier between him and Ellie? The house didn’t depress him—it depressed Ellie, actually—but he knew he would never be at ease with Ellie here because Clara had been here, was still here. Upstairs, Claudia had rearranged the bedroom without his asking her to: the bed was in the rear corner, and Clara’s dressing-table, its top empty of perfume bottles, powder boxes and the photograph of her and himself, stood between the two front windows. But the closet was full of her packed suitcases, her coats that still hung. He must do something with her clothes soon, he thought, give them away, give them to Claudia to give to people she knew. He had been putting it off.

  The telephone rang. Walter was standing in the living-room. He had a feeling, as strong as if the telephone bell had been a human voice, that it was Corby calling him. On the fourth or fifth ring Walter made a start to go and answer it, but he didn’t. He stood in the living-room, rigid, listening, while the hair crept on the back of his neck, until, after about a dozen rings, it stopped.

  29

  About five hours later, Kimmel was awakened in his house by Lieutenant Lawrence Corby, made to dress and come to the 7th Precinct Headquarters in Newark.

  In
his haste to dress, Kimmel had not put on any underwear. The wool of his suit scratched the delicate skin of his buttocks, and he felt half naked. The police station was an ugly, square building with two outside flights of steps going up to the main entrance, steps that made the word perron spring to Kimmel’s mind, and Vienna’s Belvedere Palace, which had such steps—though the nineteenth-century hideousness of the building’s architecture made such an association ludicrous—and as he climbed the steps Kimmel was repeating the word in his mind, “Perron, perron, perron,” in a terrified way, like a kind of personal and protective incantation against what might befall him in the building. The basement room where Corby took him was lined with small hexagonal white tiles, like a huge bathroom. Kimmel stood under a light. The glare of the light on the tiles made his eyes sting. There was nothing in the room but a table.

  “Do you think Stackhouse is guilty?” Corby asked.

  Kimmel shrugged.

  “What do you think? Everybody’s got an opinion about Stackhouse.”

  “My dear Lieutenant Corby,” Kimmel said grandly, “you’re so convinced that everybody’s fascinated by murder and can’t rest until the murderer is brought to justice—by you! Who cares whether Stackhouse is guilty or not?”

  Corby sat down on the edge of the wooden table and swung his leg back and forth. “What else did Stackhouse say?”

  “That’s all.”

  “What else did he say?” In the empty room Corby’s voice grated like a metal file.

  “That’s all,” Kimmel repeated with dignity. His plump hands twisted and twitched, touching fingertips lightly together below the bulge of his belly.

  “It took Stackhouse nearly twenty minutes to apologize, then?”

  “We were interrupted several times. He just stood in the back of my shop by my desk and chatted with me.”

  “Chatted. He said, ‘I’m so sorry, Mr. Kimmel, to have caused you all this trouble.’ And what did you say? ‘Oh, that’s quite all right, Mr. Stackhouse. No hard feelings.’ Did you offer him a cigar?”

  “I told him,” Kimmel said, “that I did not think either of us had anything to worry about, but that he had better not come to see me again, because you would attach a meaning to it.”

  Corby laughed.

  Kimmel held his head higher. He stared at the wall, unmoving except for his twisting, lightly playing hands. He was standing on one leg, the other was gracefully relaxed, and his body was somewhat turned from Corby. Kimmel realized it was the same statuesque position in which he sometimes surveyed himself, naked, in the long mirror on his bathroom door. He had assumed it without thinking, and though in a secret part of his brain it made him feel shame, he felt it gave him a certain indestructible poise. Kimmel held the pose as if he were paralyzed.

  “Guilty or not, I suppose you know that Stackhouse pointed the finger at you, don’t you, Kimmel?”

  “That is so obvious, I don’t think it needs mentioning,” Kimmel answered.

  Corby kept swinging his leg over the edge of the table. The brown wooden table suggested a primitive, filthy operating table. Kimmel wondered if Corby was going to fling him on to it finally with a ju-jitsu hold on him.

  “Did Stackhouse explain why he had the newspaper clipping?” Corby asked.

  “No.”

  “Didn’t make a complete confession, then, did he?”

  “He had nothing to confess. He said he was sorry he had brought the police down on my head.”

  “Stackhouse has a lot to confess,” Corby retorted. “For an innocent man his actions are very peculiar. Didn’t he tell you why he followed his wife’s bus that night?”

  “No,” Kimmel replied in the same indifferent tone.

  “Maybe you can tell me why.”

  Kimmel pressed his lips together. His lips were trembling. He was simply bored with Corby’s questioning. Stackhouse was being hammered at, too, Kimmel supposed. For a moment, a defiant sympathy for Stackhouse rose in him, tangled with his loathing of Corby. He believed what Stackhouse had told him. He did not think Stackhouse was guilty. “If you so doubt my report of what Stackhouse said to me, you should have sent a spy into the shop to listen!”

  “Oh, we know you’re an expert at spotting police detectives. You’d have warned Stackhouse and he would have stopped talking. We’ll get it out of both of you finally.” Corby smiled and came towards Kimmel. He looked fresh and fit. He was working on a nightshift now, he had told Kitnmel. “You’re protecting Stackhouse, aren’t you, Kimmel? You like murderers, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t think you thought he was a murderer.”

  “Since finding the clipping, I do. I told you that as soon as I’d found it!”

  “I think you think there is still ample room for doubt about Stackhouse, but that you will not let yourself be fair with Stackhouse because you have decided to break a spectacular case!” Kimmel shouted, louder than Corby. “Even if you invent the crimes yourself!”

  “Oh-h, Kimmel,” Corby drawled. “I didn’t invent the corpse of your wife, did I?”

  “You invent my participation in it!”

  “Did you ever see Stackhouse before I brought him to your shop?” Corby asked. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought he might even have come to see you,” Corby said speculatively. “He’s that type.”

  Kimmel wondered if Stackhouse had been stupid enough to tell Corby that he had come. “No,” Kimmel said, a little less positively. Kimmel took off his glasses, blew on them, reached for his handkerchief and not finding it, scoured the lenses on his cuff.

  “I can imagine Stackhouse coming to see you, looking you over—maybe even expressing his sympathy for you. He might have looked you over to see if you really looked like a killer—which you do, of course.”

  Kimmel put his glasses back on and recomposed his face. But fear had begun to grow in him like a tiny fire. It made him shift on his feet, made him want to run. Kimmel had felt until Corby came that he had enjoyed a supernatural immunity, and now Corby himself seemed possessed of supernatural powers, like a Nemesis. Corby was not fair. His methods were not those commonly associated with justice, and yet he enjoyed the immunity that official, uniformed justice gave him.

  “Had your glasses repaired?” Corby asked. Corby walked towards him like a little strutting rooster, his fists on his hips holding back his open overcoat. He stopped close in front of Kimmel. “Kimmel, I’m going to break you. Tony already thinks you killed Helen. Do you know that?”

  Kimmel did not move. He felt physically afraid of Corby and it angered him, because physically Corby was a wraith. Kimmel was afraid in the closed room with him, with no help within call, afraid of being hurled to the hard tile floor that looked like the floor of an abattoir. He could imagine the vilest tortures in this room. He imagined that the police hosed the blood down from the walls after they worked a man over here. Kimmel suddenly had to go to the toilet.

  “Tony’s working on our side now,” Corby said close in his face. “He’s remembering things, like your saying to him just a few days before you killed Helen that there were ways of getting rid of the wrong wife.”

  Kimmel did remember that—sitting with Tony in a booth at the Oyster House, drinking beer. Tony had been there with some of his adolescent friends and had sat himself down in the booth uninvited. Kimmel had actually talked so boldly because he had been annoyed at Tony’s sprawling himself down before he had been asked to sit down. “What else does Tony remember?” Kimmel asked.

  “He remembers that he tried to come by your house after the movie that evening and you weren’t home. You didn’t get home until long after midnight that night, Kimmel. What if you had to say where you were?”

  Kimmel gave a laugh. “It’s absurd! I know that Tony did not try to come to see me. It’s absurd to try to reconstruct the dullest, quietest evening in the world more than three months later when everybody’s forgotten it!”

  “The dullest, quietest evening in the world.”
Corby lighted a cigarette. Then his hand flashed out suddenly, and Kimmel felt a sharp sting on his left cheek.

  Kimmel wanted to take off his glasses before it was too late, but he did not move. The sting in his cheek continued, burning, humiliating.

  “Getting hit is the only thing you understand, isn’t it, Kimmel? Words and facts never bother you, because you’re insane. You refuse to attach a meaning to them. You live in your own private world, and the only way to break into it is by hitting you!” Corby’s hands came up again.

  Kimmel dodged, but Corby had not struck him, was only removing the glasses that Kimmel felt suddenly yanked from his ears. The room jumped and became blurred, and Kimmel tried to focus the black smudge of Corby’s figure moving towards the horizontal blur of the table. Quickly Kimmel put his spread hand before his face, saw it, and whipped it behind him, clasped with the other.

  Corby came back.

  “Why don’t you admit that you know Stackhouse is guilty? Why don’t you admit that he told you enough to make sure of it? You can’t make me believe that you love Stackhouse so much that you’re going to protect him, Kimmel.”

  “We are both innocent men in very much the same position,” Kimmel said in a monotonous voice, “as Stackhouse pointed out. That’s why he came to see me.”

  Corby hit him in the stomach. It doubled Kimmel over, like the blow in his house. Kimmel waited for the hurling into the air, the crash to the floor. It didn’t come. Kimmel stayed bent over, recovering his breath little by little. He saw black spots on the floor, more came as he watched, and then he realized that his nose was dripping blood. He had to open his mouth to breathe, and then he tasted it, a terrifying salty orange taste. Corby was walking around him and Kimmel turned with him, keeping his black figure always in front of him. Kimmel suddenly grabbed his nose and blew it violently, flinging his wet hand out to one side of him. “You should have blood on this floor!” Kimmel shouted. “You should make the walls run with it! Men you have tortured!”