The Blunderer Read online

  The man nodded. The suspicion that Walter had imagined he saw in his face had been only apprehension, Walter thought, apprehension that he might not recover the $225 he had overpaid a gouging landlord in the last eight months. Walter watched him go down the hall to the elevator. Then he turned back into his office.

  Walter stared down at the two form sheets on his desk: one, the landlord case, the other, a case of unwarrantable detention for drunkenness. And that was all. The office was silent now. The telephone was silent. But this was only the eighth day, he thought. One couldn’t expect a landslide of clients in eight days, and maybe he had missed some calls, anyway, when he had been out two mornings at the library. Maybe there had even been a call from a student, asking to work for him. Maybe he should advertise again, put in a bigger ad than before.

  He looked at the folded newspaper on the corner of his desk and thought of the paragraph in the gossip column. Headed “Haunted House? … The mystery of a certain young lawyer’s part in the death of his wife remains unsolved, but there is no mystery as to his whereabouts. Apparently undaunted, he has set up business on his own in Manhattan. We wonder if clients are staying away in as big droves as they are from his Long Island mansion, now up for sale? Local folks say the place is haunted….”

  He really couldn’t do a much better job of advertising than that. Walter smiled one-sidedly, listening to the steps in the hall, steps that went by. He had hoped it was the mailman. He wondered what this morning’s mail would bring.

  Did Kimmel want to gouge him for money again? Or did Kimmel want to kill him? What was Corby doing? Corby had been silent for a week. What were Corby and Kimmel planning together? Walter lifted his head, trying to reason. He couldn’t. He felt there was a wall in front of his brain. He stood up, as if he could push it aside by movement, and began to walk in the small space around his desk.

  A flash of white dropped by the door. Walter jumped for it. There were four letters. He chose the plain envelope that was type addressed.

  It was a letter from a student named Stanley Utter. He was twenty-two and in his third year of law school, and he hoped his present training would be sufficient, because he was specializing in penal code. He asked for an appointment and said that he would telephone. It was a very serious, respectful letter, and it touched Walter as much as any personal letter he had ever received. Maybe Stanley Utter would be just the kind of young man he wanted. Maybe Stanley Utter would be worth ten other applicants.

  Walter laid to one side an envelope that looked like an advertisement, and opened the one with the Cross, Martinson and Buchman return address.

  Dear Walt,

  I think I ought to warn you that Cross is going to do all he can to get you disbarred. They can’t disbar you unless you’re proven guilty, of course, but meanwhile, Cross can raise enough smoke to ruin your new office. I don’t know what advice to give you, but I thought it only fair to tell you.

  Dick

  Walter folded the letter, then automatically tore it up. He had been expecting this, too. It would be like all the rest. They wouldn’t officially stop him from practicing, ever. Only unofficially. Only enough talk about disbarment to put him out of business.

  41

  Should he give them all one more chance?

  Walter laughed, a nervous laugh that made him hunch his shoulders in fear and shame as he walked in the room. He looked down at the floor, at the patterned red and green carpet.

  The room was waiting. The two high-backed chairs standing against the wall were waiting, the plain, empty bed, the ormolu clock that didn’t run was waiting for him. Everything was waiting except Jeff. Jeff slept in the seat of the armchair, just as he had always slept at home.

  But Ellie, Jon, Dick, Cliff. The Iretons and the McClintocks. They must be waiting, too, for something to happen, for him to admit he was whipped.

  “How’re you feeling, Walt?” Bill Ireton had asked three days ago. “Well, we’ll be seeing you some time.” Walter winced at the hollow, horrible words that had nothing but curiosity behind them, a lying hypocrisy safe at the far end of a telephone wire. He wondered if Bill would get curious enough to try it again.

  Walter stood looking at Jeff, trying to remember if he had fed him tonight. He couldn’t remember. He went into the little kitchen, opened the refrigerator and looked at the half empty can of dog food, which didn’t recall anything to him. He put some out in a pan, heated it, and took it in to Jeff. He watched Jeff eat all of it, slowly.

  He should go out and mail the letter to Stanley Utter, he thought. It lay ready on the foyer table.

  He wanted to call Jon. Not with any hope of anything, but just to say the last word that Walter felt never got said. Last week he had called Jon and apologized for hanging up when Jon had called him in Long Island. Jon hadn’t been angry, he had sounded exactly the same as the day he had called long distance: “When you calm down, maybe you can talk straight to me, Walter.” “I am calmed down. That’s why I’m calling.” And he had been about to ask Jon when he could see him, when Jon said:“If you’d stop being a coward about the facts, whatever they are …” and then Walter realized they were at the same place as before, that he was a coward about the facts, because he was afraid that Jon wouldn’t believe him even if he fought the whole long way back in words, because nobody else had believed him. “Let’s let it go?” Walter had said finally to Jon, and they had let it go, and hung up, and Jon had not called back.

  “Tell me what really happened, Walt,” Cliff had written last week. “Until you tell what really happened, there’s no end to this….”

  “Oh, yes,” Corby had said, “this’ll go on for ever, unless you confess.”

  And Ellie: “It’s the lies I can’t forgive … I can also say that I suspected you all along.”

  He wanted to call Jon. He would say: “I’ve been suspended. Let it all come down. Look at me! You can gloat! You can all congratulate yourselves! You’ve succeeded, I’m licked!”

  What became of someone like him?

  You became a living cipher, Walter thought. The way he had felt with Clara sometimes, standing on somebody’s lawn in Benedict with a drink in his hand, asking himself why he was there, and where he was going? And why? And never finding an answer.

  He looked at Jeff in the chair. I love you, Clara, he thought. Did he? Did a cipher have the capacity to love? It didn’t make sense that a cipher could love. What made sense? He wished Clara were here. That was the only definite wish he had, and it made the least sense.

  Walter took his overcoat from the closet and put it on quickly, realized that he had not put on a jacket, and let it go. He swung a woolen muffler around his neck, remembering mechanically and with complete indifference that it was very cold tonight. He picked up the letter to Stanley Utter.

  He walked westward, towards Central Park. He could see the dark mass of its trees, and it seemed to offer shelter, like a jungle. He kept his eye out for a mailbox, but he did not see any. He pushed the letter in his overcoat pocket and put his hands in his pockets because he had no gloves. If the park were a jungle, he thought, he would keep on walking deeper and deeper into it, so far that no one could find him. He would keep walking until he dropped dead. No one would ever find his body. He would simply vanish. How did one kill oneself so that there was no trace? Acid. Or an explosion. He remembered the explosion of the bridge in the dream he had had. It seemed as real as anything else that had happened.

  He entered the park. A path curved ahead of him, lighted by a lamp post, a finite length of curving gray cement. And around the curve lay another. It was so cold, there was no one in the park, he thought. And then he came on a couple sitting on a bench in a line of empty benches, embracing each other and kissing. Walter turned off the path and began to climb a hill.

  In the darkness, he stumbled over a rock. The wiry underbrush caught at his trouser cuffs. He kept walking in steady, climbing strides. He was thinking of nothing. The sensation was pleasant and he concentra
ted on it. I am thinking of the fact that I am thinking of nothing. Or was that possible? Wasn’t he really thinking of all the people and all the events that he was at this moment excluding? And if you thought of excluding something, weren’t you really thinking of it?

  He imagined he heard Ellie’s voice saying very distinctly, “I love you, Walter.” Walter stopped suddenly, listening. How many times had she said that? And what did it mean? It did not seem to mean half so much as Clara’s saying it, and Clara had said it, and in her way she had meant it. He began walking again, but almost immediately he stopped and looked behind him.

  He had heard the sound of a shoe stubbing on a rock.

  He stared into the blackness below him. He heard nothing now. He glanced around for a path. He did not know where he was. He kept on in the direction he had been going. Perhaps he had imagined the sound. But for an instant, he had been absurdly frightened, imagining Kimmel behind him, puffing up the hill, angry, looking for him. Walter made himself walk in long slow paces. The ground began to slope downward.

  A twig snapped behind him.

  Walter took the rest of the slope in leaping strides, and jumped finally down a rock face onto a path. He stepped quickly into the shadows of an overhanging tree. The path was only dimly lighted by a lamp several yards away, but Walter could see distinctly the high rock he had jumped down, and the gentler slope of ground on the other side of it, down to the path.

  Now he could hear steps.

  He saw Kimmel come to the edge of light above the rock, look all around him, then descend by the gentler slope. Walter saw Kimmel look in both directions on the path, then walk towards him. Walter pressed himself against the sloping rock face of the hill. Kimmel’s huge face turned to right and left as he walked. He held his right hand in a strange way, as if he carried an open knife whose blade he kept hidden in his sleeve. Walter stared at the hand, trying to see, after Kimmel passed him.

  Kimmel must have followed him from the apartment, Walter thought, must have been watching the building.

  Walter waited until Kimmel was too far away to hear his footsteps when he moved, and then he stepped out on the path and walked in the other direction. He took several steps before he looked behind him, but just as he looked, Kimmel turned around: Walter could see him very clearly in the light from the lamp post, and in the second that Walter stood still he thought that Kimmel saw him, because Kimmel started quickly towards him.

  Walter ran. He ran as if he were panicked, but his mind seemed to walk calmly and logically, asking: What are you running for? You wanted a chance to fight it out with Kimmel. This is it. He even thought: Kimmel probably hasn’t even seen me, because he’s near-sighted. But Kimmel was running now. Walter could hear the heavy ringing steps in the cement-paved tunnel he had just come through.

  Walter had no idea where he was. He glanced for a building that would orient him. He saw none. He climbed a hill off the path, clutching at bushes to pull himself up. He wanted to hide himself and he also wanted to see, if he could, where to get out of the park. The hill was not high enough to reveal any buildings above the dark wall of trees. Walter stopped, listening.

  Kimmel went by at a trot on the path below. Walter saw him, a huge dark shadow, through the leafless branches of a tree. Walter waited until he thought three or four minutes had passed, then he began to descend the slope. He felt suddenly spent, and more out of breath now than when he had been running.

  He heard Kimmel coming back. Walter was almost down the slope. He clung to the branch of a tree for a moment, his shoes sliding, listening to the steps that were coming straight towards him, only a few paces away, and he knew there was no hiding now, that Kimmel would surely see his feet, or hear him if he started climbing again. Walter cursed: why hadn’t he kept on going across the hill? He tensed himself, ready to spring on Kimmel, and when he saw the dark figure just below and in front of him, Walter jumped.

  They both crumpled with the impact and fell. Walter hit with all his strength. Half kneeling on him, Walter hit his face as fast and as hard as he could, then lunged for the throat and held it. He was winning. He felt intensely strong, felt that his arms were strong as iron and that his thumbs were driving into the throat as deep and hard as bullets. Walter lifted the heavy head and banged it again and again on the cement path. He lifted and threw down the head until his arms began to ache and his movements grew slower and slower and there was a pain in his chest so sharp he could hardly breathe. He flung the head down for the last time and sat back on his heels, taking slow gulps of air.

  He heard a step and staggered to his feet, prepared to run. But he stood without moving as the tall figure approached him.

  It was Kimmel.

  A wave of sickness and terror broke over him. He took a step back, but could not make himself run as Kimmel came towards him, lifting his huge right arm to strike him.

  Kimmel struck him across the side of the head, and Walter fell. The hard-shins of the dead man were under him, and Walter scrambled to roll away, but Kimmel crashed down on him and held him down like a black mountain.

  “Idiot!” Kimmel said. “Murderer!”

  Kimmel’s fist smashed against his cheek. Walter could smell, like another complicated world in the cold air, the musty, sweetish smell of Kimmel’s shop, Kimmel’s clothes, Kimmel. Walter’s arms twitched unavailingly, and he felt Kimmel’s hand grappling for a grip on his throat, taking it. Walter tried to scream. He saw Kimmel’s right hand rise, and then in his open mouth felt the sting of a knife blade through his tongue, felt the sting again in his cheek, and heard the blade’s grate against his teeth. The hot pain in his throat spread down into his chest. This was dying. A thin coolness flashed across his forehead: the knife. He heard a roaring in his ears like a steady thunder: that was death and Kimmel’s voice. Calling him murderer, idiot, blunderer, until the meaning of the words became a solid fact like a mountain sitting on top of him, and he no longer had the will to fight against it. Then he seemed to glide away like a bird, and he saw the little blue window he had seen with Ellie, bright and sun-filled, and just too small and too far away to escape through. He saw Clara turn her head and smile at him, a quick, soft smile of affection, as she had smiled in the first days he knew her. I love you, Clara, he heard himself say. Then the pain began to stop, swiftly, as if all the pain in the world were running out through a sieve, leaving him empty and pleasantly light.

  Kimmel stood up, looking all around him, mashing his slippery knife clumsily shut, and trying to listen for sounds above the roar of his gasping. Then he faced the darker direction and began to walk. He did not know where he was going. He wanted only to go where it was dark. He felt extremely tired and contented, just as he had felt after Helen, he remembered. He recovered his breath carefully, still listening, though by now he had assured himself that no one was around him.

  Two corpses! Kimmel almost laughed, because it was almost funny! Let them figure that one out!

  There was Stackhouse, anyway! Enemy number one! Corby was next. Kimmel felt a surge of animosity go through him, and he thought, if Corby only were here, he would finish him off tonight, too.

  Kimmel saw the lights of some windows in a building ahead of him.

  “Kimmel?”

  Kimmel turned around and saw about ten feet away the figure of a man, saw the dull shine on the barrel of a gun pointed at him. The man came closer. Kimmel did not move. He had never seen the man before, but he knew it was one of Corby’s men: the paralysis had come over him already. In those seconds that the man advanced, he knew he would not move, and it was not because he was afraid of the gun or of death, it was something much deeper that he remembered from his childhood. It was a terror of an abstract power, of the power of a coordinated group, a terror of authority. Kimmel realized it intensely now, and he had realized it a thousand times before, and reasoned with himself that despite terror, he ought to act, but now he could not any more than at any other time. His hands raised automatically, and this Kimm
el hated more than anything, but when the man came very close and motioned with the gun for him to turn and walk, Kimmel turned with absolute calm and with no personal fear at all, and began to walk. Kimmel thought: This time I am finished and I shall die, but he was not at all afraid of that, either, just as if it did not register. He was only ashamed of being physically so close to the smaller man beside him, and ashamed that they had any relationship.

  PRAISE FOR PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

  “For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

  —Time

  “Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing … bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental … Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any recourse to supernatural machinery.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition.… It is Highsmith’s dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose which puts one in mind of those authors.”

  —Newsday

  “The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined. The deadly games of pursuit played in [Highsmith’s] novels dig down very deeply into the roots of personality…. She has produced work as serious in its implications and as subtle in its approach as anything being done in the novel today.”

  —Julian Symons, The New York Times Book Review

  “Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic … has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”