The Blunderer Read online

  38

  For the fourth time, Kimmel went to Bausch and Skaggs Opticians’ shop on Phillston Avenue and ordered a new pair of glasses. This time the young attendant not only smiled but laughed outright. “Dropped them again, Mr. Kimmel? You’d better tie a string on them, hadn’t you?”

  From the uncontrollable mirth in his voice Kimmel knew he knew why the glasses were broken. He had no doubt that the clerk told everyone he knew about Kimmel’s broken glasses. Kimmel would have ordered them from some other shop except that Bausch and Skaggs were the quickest, and he could depend on their getting the measurements right.

  “May I ask you for a deposit, Mr. Kimmel?”

  Kimmel took out his wallet and removed a bill from the right side of the bills, which he knew would be a ten.

  “They’ll be ready tomorrow morning. Shall I send them over?” the clerk asked with mock deference.

  “If you will. I’ll write you a check for the rest at the house.”

  Then, for the fourth time, Kimmel went out and crossed the sidewalk to the waiting car, though now it was not his own car with Tony in it; it was a taxi. Kimmel began to feel hungry as he drove towards home, really hungry despite his large breakfast an hour ago. He debated, examining his sensations of emptiness as if they were a palpable problem that he investigated with his fingertips. It evoked a vision of a liverwurst sandwich with sliced onion on rye bread and beer.

  “Driver, will you stop at—at Twenty-fourth Street and Exeter, please. The Shamrock Delicatessen.”

  In front of the delicatessen Kimmel hauled himself from the taxi again, crossed the sidewalk as cautiously as if it were a thoroughfare full of cars, and entered the shop. He ordered a liverwurst sandwich and several cans of beer. The sandwiches here could not compare with Ricco’s, but Kimmel did not go to Ricco’s any more. Tony fled when he saw him. His father no longer spoke to him when they passed on the street. Kimmel carried the sandwich and the beer back to the taxi, and told the driver to go to his house. He opened the wax paper to take a bite of the sandwich, but by the time he got home the sandwich was three-quarters eaten and he wished he had ordered two. The taxi meter said $2.10, according to the driver. Kimmel could not see it, and he did not believe the driver, but he paid it.

  Kimmel drank two cans of beer at home, ate the rest of the sandwich and a piece of bread with cream cheese, then sat down in the living-room to wait. He wished he could read, at least, but he couldn’t. There was nothing he could do but wait, wait for the glasses and wait for Corby to come and break them again. He thought of the broken window in his shop. Someone had thrown a brick at it last Friday, when he had been there. The brick hadn’t made a hole in the window, but there was a long crack going the whole way diagonally. Kimmel was afraid to stay there now during the daytime. Somehow he dreaded a fight in his shop more than in his house. Or maybe it was that everyone knew Kimmel’s bookshop belonged to Melchior Kimmel, but not everyone knew where he lived.

  Kimmel stood up and went back to the kitchen. He got a piece of the dressed pinewood which he bought from a lumberyard for his carvings, took it back to the living-room and began to whittle off a length of about seven inches. The wood was cut square. Kimmel made it round, like a cigar. He could not see enough to make decorations on it, but he could prepare it. He worked quickly with his sharp knife whose blade, though still strong, had been whetted so often that it was narrow and came to a long, rounded point that was as sharp as a razor.

  He thought of Stackhouse’s laughter again, and it was like a jolt to his brain, like a kick from Corby. His mind began to spin in a storm of anger. He could only think of crushing Stackhouse, stabbing him, when he thought of his laughter. Kimmel stood up and threw the knife and the wood on the sofa and began to walk around the room, his hands in the pockets of his voluminous trousers. He was torn in his mind between forgetting Stackhouse completely, as he had forgotten Tony, simply striking him out of his memory, or crushing him physically to ease his terrible hunger for revenge. Stackhouse was like a cowardly wretch who murdered, lied, laughed at his victims and went miraculously scot-free—even when his crimes were exposed. Corby had never laid a hand on him. And he had money as well! Kimmel pictured Stackhouse living on something approaching the category of an estate in Long Island, living in luxury with a couple of servants (even if they had quit him, Stackhouse could hire more) and perhaps a swimming pool in his back lawn. And the selfish, stupid ass had been too stingy to part with fifty thousand of it to save his own name from being made a little blacker! Kimmel was not only repelled by what he considered a stupid decision on Stackhouse’s part, but he felt that Stackhouse owed him fifty thousand dollars, at the very least, for the damage he had done his life.

  Kimmel opened the refrigerator and took out the plate with the half cervelatwurst, started to go to the breadbox for bread, but the spicy, smoky, smell of the cervelat was too tempting, and he picked it up and bit off a piece, working his teeth to get the inside without the skin. He took another can of beer out. Then he went back to his seat in the living-room, and picked up the knife and the wood again.

  He could go to another town, he thought. Nobody was stopping him from doing that. Corby would undoubtedly follow him, but at least for a while there could be no staring neighbors or the friends and acquaintances who didn’t speak to him when he saw them. If the new town—Paterson or Trenton—finally ostracized him, it would not be so painful as Newark, where his friends were of longer standing.

  He began to make crisscrossing cuts in the wood. He hoped Stackhouse was losing all his friends. Kimmel hollowed out circular pits with the rounded point of the knife. Then he made X’s in the pits, truing them up by feeling for the right angle with his thumbnail. He could not do any of the fancy braided designs without his glasses, but it amused him now to work only by the sense of touch. He was happy with his work, though as he worked more quickly and surely he began to feel angry and tense again. He was thinking that the only proper punishment for Stackhouse was castration. He was wondering how dark it was around Stackhouse’s house in Long Island. Kimmel snorted as he sank his knife into the wood. He realized that he had begun to assume Stackhouse was guilty, and that at first he had believed him innocent, but to Kimmel this shift seemed not important at all. Rather, whether Stackhouse had really killed his wife was of no importance at all. The curious thing about Corby, Kimmel thought, was that he apparently felt the same way. Kimmel distinctly remembered that Corby had thought Stackhouse innocent, even when he found the newspaper story about Helen’s death. Corby had only begun to say he thought Stackhouse guilty, and to treat him as if he were. The results were the same, Kimmel thought, whether Stackhouse was guilty or not: his wife was dead, it looked as if he had killed her, and Stackhouse had brought hell down on a man who had been living perfectly peaceably before. Kimmel was conscious that he preferred to think Stackhouse guilty, because Stackhouse’s guilt plus the immunity he enjoyed made him all the more loathsome. Kimmel imagined Stackhouse with a couple of his loyal friends—loyal with that supercilious, upper-crust loyalty that would pretend to believe a man like Stackhouse was incapable of as bestial a crime as murder—drinking good Scotch with him and trying to assure him that he had been the victim of a horrible plot, a most unfortunate set of circumstances. Maybe they even laughed about it! Kimmel suddenly realized that he had been cutting a deep gash around the middle of the piece, as if he were going to cut it in half. He stopped and began to smooth out the gash. But he didn’t like the thing now. He had really ruined it. Kimmel jumped as the doorbell rang.

  Kimmel had heard no step approach. The hall was dark to him, and he looked carefully around the edge of the door curtain, saw the blurred silhouette of a hat and shoulders and recognized them as Corby’s.

  “Open it, Kimmel, I know you’re there,” Corby said as if he could see him, and Kimmel was not sure he couldn’t.

  Kimmel opened the door.

  Corby came in. “I looked for you in your shop. You’re not working the
re any more? Oh, the glasses again!” Corby said, smiling. “Of course.” He walked past Kimmel into the living-room.

  Kimmel tripped on the rug. He went straight to the sofa, recovered first his knife and then his piece of wood, which he put in his pocket. He held the knife down at his side, its handle between his thumb and fingertips.

  “What’ve you been doing with yourself?” Corby asked, sitting down.

  Kimmel did not answer. Corby had seen him last night until 3 a.m. Corby knew everything he had done, everyone he had seen—which was no one—since the session they had had at the police station.

  “Stackhouse has opened a new office on Forty-fourth Street, all by himself. I went up to see him this morning. He seems to be getting along very well, considering.”

  Kimmel continued to stand, waiting. He was used to these visits from Corby, to these bits of information dropped like bird dung.

  “Your denunciation of Stackhouse didn’t do you much good, did it, Kimmel? No money from him, you have to close your shop because of some new enemies, and Stackhouse is able to open a new office under his own name! Kimmel, the luck’s just not with you, is it?”

  Kimmel wanted to hurl the knife into Corby’s teeth. “It’s of no interest to me what Stackhouse does,” Kimmel said coldly.

  “Can I see your knife?” Corby asked, reaching his hand out.

  It irritated him to see Corby slouched on his sofa, to know that if he did lunge at him Corby could probably parry it. Kimmel handed him the knife.

  “It’s a beauty,” Corby said with admiration.” Where’d you get it?”

  Kimmel smiled a little, grimly, yet with pleasure. “In Philadelphia. It’s an ordinary knife.”

  “Good enough to do plenty of damage. It’s the knife you used on Helen, isn’t it?”

  Oh, yes, Kimmel wanted to say casually. He said nothing. His heavy lips pressed together. He stood waiting, outwardly calm, though the anger within him churned like a poison and actually made him feel a little dizzy, a little sick at his stomach. He was anticipating the next minutes, Corby standing up to strike him in the face, to strike him in the stomach, and, if he retaliated in any way, Corby would strike him harder. Kimmel liked to imagine getting his hands on Corby’s throat, even one hand. If he ever did, he would never turn loose, no matter how or where Corby might hit him. He would never turn loose, and perhaps that might happen today, Kimmel thought, taking a little solace from the hope. Or it would be so simple to stab Corby in the back of the neck as he was leaving. Or would he be lying as usual in a throbbing heap on the living-room floor by then?

  “Don’t you think that’s interesting about Stackhouse? Doesn’t seem to have hurt his popularity at all.” Corby was opening and closing the knife.

  In Corby’s hands the familiar sound of the knife was hateful to Kimmel. “I’ve told you, I don’t care!”

  “When do you get your glasses?” Corby asked indifferently.

  Kimmel did not answer. This would make $260 that Corby’s destruction of his glasses had cost him.

  Corby got up. “I’ll be seeing you again, Kimmel. Maybe tomorrow.” Corby walked out of the living-room.

  “My knife!” Kimmel said, following him.

  Corby turned around at the door and handed it to him. “What would you do without this?”

  39

  On the following night, Kimmel took his car and drove out to Benedict, Long Island. He drove to Hoboken first, caught a ferry at the last minute, and then in Manhattan took an extremely circuitous route up the west side and down Park Avenue before he cut over east to the Midtown Tunnel, in an effort to shake off the Corby man whom he knew would be following him from his house. Being followed irritated him, almost as much as Corby’s face-to-face insults irritated him. Whenever he spotted the man—and he often did, though Corby changed his man all the time—on his way to the shop or on his way to the grocery store, Kimmel flushed with anger, he squirmed, though at the same time a surge of dignity went through him to confuse him and prevent him from doing anything about the man, or even feeling anything about him except a quiet and murderous desire to twink out the man’s life with his fingers, if he ever got within range, as he would the life of a mosquito. He did not see his trailer the night he went to Benedict, but he imagined him, even after he was logically sure he should have shaken him, and that was irritating enough. Kimmel was in a morose and restless mood.

  He had obtained a map at a filling station, but it was not detailed enough to include Marlborough Road in Benedict. Kimmel made an inquiry at a delicatessen in a shopping center outside the town. The man knew where Marlborough Road was, and he did not seem at all interested in his question, Kimmel thought. The potato salads and rollmops and sausages behind the glass counter looked particularly fresh and attractive, but Kimmel found himself without hunger and he did not buy anything.

  Kimmel parked his car on the main street near the turn-off into Marlborough Road, locked it, and began to walk. It was a dark dirt road with only two or three houses on it so far as he could see in the darkness. He could see no numbers on them at all, but with his pen flashlight he saw the names on the mailboxes at the edge of the road. Neither of the names was Stackhouse, and Kimmel went on towards the white house behind the trees. Kimmel looked behind him. There was no car light and no sound. He got to the mailbox and flashed the thin light on it. W. P. Stackhouse. Not a window was lighted in the house. Kimmel looked at his watch. It was only 9:33. Stackhouse was probably out for the evening, with one of his loyal friends. Still he approached the house cautiously across the lawn. He went on tiptoe, his great weight throwing his body from one side to the other, and yet there was an oily grace in his progress, much more grace than when he walked. He bent smoothly to avoid a low-hanging vine in the garden and went on, circling the house. There was no light.

  Kimmel stood again before the front door. He debated ringing the bell. It would be pleasant to irritate Stackhouse, to start him seriously worrying about his physical welfare. Stackhouse wasn’t nearly worried enough. He could even kill Stackhouse tonight, now that he had shaken off his shadower, and to hell with an alibi. He would leave no traces. He would lie again. Kimmel trembled as he thought of crushing Stackhouse’s throat between his hands, and then suddenly he realized where he was standing, where Stackhouse might conceivably see him against the slightly light strip of road, realized that he had come tonight only to satisfy his curiosity as to where Stackhouse lived. Stackhouse was most probably not at home. He should consider himself lucky that Stackhouse was not at home, because he could get a much better look at the house now.

  Slowly he went close to the front door, stuck his flashlight against the glass in its upper part and looked in. The light shone on part of an empty hall, a shining dark floor. The hall looked absolutely empty, though the beam did not go farther than four feet. He found a window at ground level on one side of the house. He pointed his light. The beam picked out a white wall, an empty floor. And there were no curtains. It dawned on Kimmel that Stackhouse could have moved out, and a sudden vexation swung him around and made him walk briskly back to the front door.

  He pressed the doorbell. It made a soft chime sound. He waited, then pressed it again. He felt annoyed and angry. He was angry because he felt now that he had made the long tedious drive for nothing, and that Stackhouse had given him the slip, and he was as resentful of it as he would have been if Stackhouse had vanished with all his possessions only five minutes ago as he approached the house. Kimmel leaned on the doorbell, pressing it with a rhythmic pumping, filling the black, empty house with the repeated, banal tune of the chimes. He stopped only when his thumb began to hurt, and turned around, cursing out loud.

  If he wanted to see Stackhouse, he thought, he could, and no one could stop him, not even Corby’s men. Stackhouse’s old office would be glad to give out his new office address. He could imagine Stackhouse’s face when he saw Kimmel waiting for him downstairs, waiting to follow him where he lived. Stackhouse could be scared. K
immel had seen that ever since the day he had come into his shop. Kimmel wanted to scare him thoroughly, and then perhaps kill him, on some night like this, somewhere. It was a real pity Stackhouse was not here tonight, Kimmel thought. All of it might have happened tonight.

  Kimmel suddenly strode away from the door, across the lawn, his head indifferently up and his heavy arms swinging. Just the kind of place he had expected Stackhouse to live in, ample and solidly expensive as a book bound in white vellum, yet without being ostentatious—Stackhouse was so much the man of taste, so smugly within his rights behind the barrier of his money, his social class, his Anglo-Saxon good looks. Kimmel stopped at one of the willow trees beside the road and urinated on it.

  40

  Walter picked up the telephone. “Hello?”

  “Hello. Is this Mr. Stackhouse?”

  “Yes.” Walter glanced at the man who was lingering inside the door.

  “This is Melchior Kimmel. I should like to see you. Can you make an appointment with me this week?”

  Walter wished the man would go. They had finished talking, yet he lingered, watching him. “I have no time this week.”

  “It’s important,” Kimmel said with sudden crispness. “I’d like to see you one evening this week. If you don’t, I’ll—”

  Walter put the telephone down slowly, cutting off the voice, and stood up slowly and approached the man at the door. “I’ll be able to get the case in court the first part of next week. I’ll let you know as soon as there’s a decision.”

  The man looked at him as if he could not quite believe it. “The people tell me, never fight with a landlord. They say, don’t try it.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. We’ll try it, and we’ll win it.” Walter said, opening the door.