by Peter Straub
“You killed her,” I managed to say.
He lunged toward me, and I put my hands on his shoulders and tried to push him aside. John rode in under me, clamped his right arm around my waist, and pulled me into his shoulder. His head was a boulder in my side. I grabbed the brass plaque off the mantel and pounded it into his neck. Ransom pushed me backward with all of his weight. My feet vanished beneath me, and I landed on the marble apron of the fireplace so hard I saw actual stars. Ransom reached wildly up toward my head and got a hand on my face and pulled himself up onto my chest. Both hands closed around my neck. I bashed the plaque into the side of his head. Because of the way I was holding the award, I couldn’t use the edge, only the flat surface. I hit him with the plaque again. A creaky squawk came from my throat, and I merely tapped the plaque against the side of his head. My muscles felt like water. I used the last of my strength to bash the metal plaque against his head again.
John’s hands loosened on my throat. All the tension went out of his body. He was a huge slack weight pressing down on me. His chest heaved. Strangled, wheezing noises came from his mouth. After a couple of seconds, I realized that he wasn’t dying right on top of me. He was weeping. I crawled out from under him and lay panting on the carpet. I unwrapped my fingers from the plaque. John curled up like a fetus and continued to cry, his arms tented over his head.
After a little while, I got upright and slid along the marble apron and leaned against the edge of the fireplace. We’d been fighting for no more than a minute or two. Someone had been slamming a baseball bat into my arms, my back, my legs, my chest, and my head. I still felt Ransom’s hands around my neck.
John lowered his arms and lay curled up with his chest on the marble apron and his hips and legs on the carpet. An ugly wound bled down into his hair. He reached into his trouser pocket for a dark blue handkerchief and put it up against the cut. “You’re a real bastard.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Try to get in the truth this time.”
He looked at the handkerchief. “I’m bleeding.” He placed the handkerchief back over the wound.
“You can put a bandage on it later.”
“How did you know about Purdum?”
“I was sneaky,” I said. “Where is her car now, John?”
He tried to push himself up and groaned. He lay back down again. “It’s out there in a storage garage. In Purdum. April and I could have retired there. It’s a beautiful place.”
People like Dick Mueller moved to Riverwood. People like Ross Barnett retired to estates in Purdum.
John sat up, holding the handkerchief to the side of his head, and slid on his bottom until his back hit the other side of the fireplace. We sat there like andirons. He wiped his free hand down over his face and snorted back mucus. Then he looked at me, red-eyed. “I’m sorry I went for you like that, but you pushed my buttons, and I snapped. Did I hurt you?”
“Was that what happened with April? You snapped?”
“Yeah.” He nodded very carefully, wincing. I got another darting look from the red eyes. “I wasn’t going to tell you about any of this, because it makes me look so bad. But I didn’t invite you here to use you—you have to know that.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
He sighed. “You got a lot of it right. Barnett spoke to April confidentially about going into business in San Francisco. I wasn’t crazy about that. I wanted her to keep to the agreement we made—that she’d quit after she proved she could do a good job at Barnett. But then she had to prove she was the best broker and analyst in the whole damn Midwest. It got so I never saw her except on weekends, and not always then. But I didn’t want her to go to California. She could open her own office here, if that was what she wanted. Everything would have been all right, if it hadn’t been for that fourth-rate, womanizing twerp.” He glared at me. “Dorian had an affair with Carol Judd, the dealer who put him onto April, did you know that?”
“I guessed,” I said.
“The guy is slime. He goes after older women. I will never, never know what April saw in him. He was cute, I guess.”
“How did you find out about it?”
John inspected the handkerchief again. I couldn’t see the wound, but the handkerchief was bright with blood. “Could we move? I have to take care of this gash.”
I got up, all my joints aching, and held out a hand for him. John grabbed my hand and levered himself up. He steadied himself on the mantel for a moment and then began moving across the living room toward the stairs.
2
LEANING OVER to let the blood drip into the sink, John dipped a washcloth into the stream of cold water and dabbed at the inch-long abrasion on the side of his head, where his hair began to get thin. It didn’t look so bad now that it was clean. He had placed a square white bandage on the edge of the sink. I was sitting on the tub, looking up at him and holding a wad of folded tissues.
“April told me she was working late at the office. Just to see if she was telling me the truth, I called her line every half hour for three hours. Every half hour, on the button. Maybe six times. She was never there. Around eleven-thirty, I went up to her office here and looked in the file where she kept her charge slips and credit card records. Okay.”
He held out his hand, and I passed him the tissues. He clamped them down on the gash to dry it and then tossed them into the wastebasket and snatched up the bandage square. He centered it over the wound, pushed wisps of hair out of the way, and flattened it down on his scalp. “That’ll do. I guess I won’t need any stitches.” He turned his head to see the bandage from different angles. “Now all I have is one hell of a headache.”
He opened his medicine chest, shook two aspirin tablets onto his palm, and swallowed them with a gulp of water from a surprisingly humble red plastic cup.
“You know what I found? Charges from Hatchett and Hatch. She bought clothes for that little turd.”
“How do you know they weren’t yours?”
He sneered at me in the mirror. “I haven’t bought anything there in years. All my suits and jackets are made for me. I even get my shirts made to order at Paul Stuart, in New York. And I order my shoes from Wilkes Bashford in San Francisco.” He lifted a foot so that I could admire a dark brown pigskin cap-toe. “About all I buy in Millhaven is socks and underwear.” He patted the bandage and stepped away from the sink. “Could we go downstairs so I could get a drink? I’m going to need one.”
I followed him into the kitchen, and he gave me a chastened look as he opened the freezer. Now that his father was gone, the three-hundred-dollar bottle was back in the vodka library. “I’m not going to run away or anything, Tim, you don’t have to act like my shadow.”
“What did you do when she finally came home?”
He poured about three inches of hyacinth vodka into a glass. He tasted it before answering me. “I should never put ice cubes in this stuff. It’s too refined to dilute—such a delicate flavor. Would you like a sip?”
“A sip wouldn’t help me. Did you confront her directly?”
He took another taste and nodded. “I had the charge slips right in front of me—I was sitting out there in the living room, and she came in about a quarter past twelve. God, I almost died.” He looked up at the ceiling and let out a nearly soundless sigh. “She looked so beautiful. She didn’t see me for a second. And as soon as she noticed me, she changed. All the life went out of her. She might have just seen her jailer. Right up until that moment, I was still thinking that there could be another explanation for everything. The clothes could have been for her father—he used to like that store. But the second I saw her mood change like that, I knew.”
“Did you lose your temper?”
He shook his head. “I felt like someone had just shoved a knife in my back. ‘Who is it?’ I said. ‘Your little pet, Byron?’ She said she didn’t know what I was talking about. So I told her I knew that she hadn’t been at her office all night, and she gave me some kind of story about n
ot answering the phone, about being in the copy room, in another office … so I said, April, what are these charge slips? and she kept giving me lies, and I kept saying Dorian, Dorian, Dorian, and finally she plunked herself down in a chair and said, okay, I’ve been seeing Byron. What’s it to you? God, it was like she was killing me. Anyhow, she got less defensive as we went along, and she said she was sorry I had to find out like this, she didn’t like being underhanded, and she was almost glad I’d found out, so we could talk about ending our marriage.”
“Did she mention the job in San Francisco?”
“No, she saved that for the car. I want to go into the other room, Tim. I’m a little bit dizzy, okay?”
In the living room, he noticed the bronze plaque on the floor and bent down to pick it up. He showed it to me. “Is this what you were clobbering me with?” I said that it was, and he shook his head over the irony of it all. “Damn thing even looks like a murder weapon,” he said, and put it back on the mantel.
“Whose idea was it to go for a ride?”
John looked slightly peevish for a second, but no more than that. “I’m not used to being grilled. This is still a very touchy subject.”
He went to the couch. The cushions exhaled when he sat down. He drank and held the liquid in his mouth for a moment as he looked around the room. “We didn’t break anything. Isn’t that amazing? The only reason I know I was in a fight is that I feel like shit.”
I sat down on the chair and waited.
“Okay. I got everything I thought about that weasel, Dorian, out of my system, and finally I started telling her what I should have said at the beginning—I said I loved her and I wanted to stay married. I said that we had to give ourselves another chance. I said she was the most important person in my life. Hell, I said she was my life.”
Tears spilled out of his eyes. “And that was true. Maybe I wasn’t much of a husband, but April was my whole life.” He got his handkerchief halfway to his face before noticing its condition. He checked his trousers for bloodstains and dropped the handkerchief in a clean ashtray. “Tim, do you happen to have …?”
I fished mine out of my pocket and tossed it to him. It was two days old, but still clean, mostly. John pressed it to his eyes, wiped his cheeks, and threw it back to me.
“Anyhow, she said she couldn’t sit still any longer, she had to go out for a drive or something. I even asked if I could come along. If you want to talk to me, you’d better, hadn’t you? she said. So we drove around, I don’t even remember where. We kept saying the same things over and over—she wouldn’t listen to me. Finally, we ended up somewhere around Bismarck Boulevard, on the west side.”
John pushed out air between his lips. “She pulled over on Forty-sixth, Forty-fifth, I don’t remember. There was a bar down at the end of the block. The Turf Lounge, I think it was.” He looked at me, and his mouth twitched. His glance shot away again, and he made a wild inventory of the things in the room. “Tim, you remember how I kept looking for a car following us, after we dropped off my parents? I think someone was following April and me that night. I wasn’t too straight, you know, I was really screwed up. But I still pick up on things, I haven’t lost all the old radar. But sometimes I get that feeling, and no one’s there, you know? Doesn’t that happen to you?” I nodded.
“Anyhow, there wasn’t anybody else on the street. All the lights were out, except in the bar. I was begging for my life. I told her about this place I found in Purdum, good price, fifteen acres, a pond, a beautiful house. We could have had our own art gallery there. I got done telling her about it, and she said, Ross might want me to go to San Francisco. I’d head my own office, she said. Forget that stuffed shirt Ross, I said, what do you want? I’ve been thinking of taking it, she said. I said, Without discussing it with me first? And she said—I didn’t see any point in bringing you into it. Bringing me into it. She was giving me broker talk! I couldn’t help myself, Tim.” He sat forward and stared at me. His mouth worked while he figured out a way to say it. “I couldn’t help myself. Literally.” His face reddened. “I just—smacked her. I reached up and belted her in the face. Twice.” His eyes got swimmy, bleary with tears. “I, I felt so shocked—I felt so dirty. April was crying. I couldn’t take it.”
His voice crumbled, and he closed his eyes and reached a big pink hand out toward me. For an odd second I thought he wanted me to grasp it. Then I realized what he wanted and passed him my handkerchief again. He held it over his eyes and bent forward and wept.
“Oh, God,” he said at last, sitting up. His voice was soft and cottony. “April just sat there with tears all over her face.” His chest was jerking, and he mopped his eyes until he could speak again. “She didn’t say anything. I couldn’t sit in that car anymore. I got out and walked away. I’m pretty sure I heard a car starting up, but I wasn’t paying attention to things like that. I didn’t think I was going up to the bar, but when I got to the door, I went inside. I never even noticed if anyone else was in the place. I put down about four drinks, boom boom boom boom, one right after the other. I have no idea how long I was in there. Then this sumo wrestler type of guy was standing in front of me, telling me that they were closing and I had to pay up. I guess he was the bartender, but I couldn’t even remember seeing him before. He said—get this—”
John’s chest and belly started jerking up and down again. He was laughing and crying at the same time. “He said, ‘Don’t come back here again, pal, we don’t need your business.’ “It took him a long time to get the sentence out. He passed my handkerchief over his face. His mouth flickered in and out of a crazy grin.
“I put a fifty-dollar bill on the bar and walked out. April was gone, of course—I hardly expected her to be waiting for me. It took about an hour to walk home. I was making all these speeches in my head. When I got here, her car was right out in front, and I thought, Oh God, at least she’s home. I went upstairs, but she wasn’t in the bedroom. I checked all over the house, calling her name. Finally I went back outside to see if she was still sitting in the car. When I opened the door, I almost fell over in a faint—there was blood all over both seats. A lot of blood. I went crazy. I ran up and down the block, thinking I must have hurt her a lot worse than I had imagined. I could see her getting out of the car and collapsing on someone’s lawn. Jesus. I went all over the neighborhood, twice, out of my mind, and then I came back inside and called Shady Mount and said that I’d seen a dazed, bleeding woman walking down Berlin Avenue, and had anyone brought her to the Emergency Room? This very suspicious woman said she wasn’t there. I didn’t think I could call the cops—my story would have sounded so fishy! Down deep, Tim, down deep, I already knew she was dead. So I put a towel over the driver’s seat and took the car to Alan’s and put it in his garage. A couple of nights later, when I knew I’d really be in trouble if anyone found it, I went back there in the middle of the night and cleaned it up. That night, I went home and waited to hear something. Finally I just went to bed—well, actually, I slept on this couch here. I wasn’t sober. But I don’t suppose I have to tell you that. The day before you came, I took her car out to this place in Purdum.”
He noticed the handkerchief balled up in his hands and unfolded it and blew his nose in it. Then he dropped it in the ashtray on top of the bloody one.
“At the time, I thought, after Vietnam, this must be the worst night I’ll ever have, all my life. Little did I know.”
“And the next day, the police called.”
“Just after noon.”
“When did you learn about the slogan, or the signature, or whatever it is?”
“At Shady Mount. Fontaine told me. He asked me if I had any idea what it meant.”
“You didn’t tell him about April’s project?”
He shook his head. He looked stunned and resentful. “She wasn’t sharing a lot with me by that time.” The resentfulness went up a notch. “All I knew was that it was something that creep started her thinking about.”
“Dorian’s
father was one of Bill Damrosch’s old partners.”
“Oh? I suppose that would be interesting, if you cared about that sort of thing.”
He grabbed his drink, swallowed, moaned, and fell back against the cushions. Neither of us spoke for a time.
“Tell me what you think happened after you went into the bar.”
John pressed the cold glass against one cheek, then another. Then he rolled the glass back and forth across his forehead. His eyes were slits. “First, I have to know that you believe me. You know I couldn’t have killed April.”
This was the question I had been putting off. I answered the only way I could. “I guess I do believe you, John.” As soon as I spoke, I realized that I had told him the truth—I guessed that I did believe him.
“I could have sweetened it up, Tim. I could have said that I just got out of the car and walked away as soon as she started crying. I didn’t have to tell you I hit her. I didn’t make myself sound any better than I was.”
“I know that,” I said.
“This is the truth. It’s ugly, but it’s the truth.”
“Do you think you were right about being followed?”
“Sure I was right,” he said. “If I hadn’t been so screwed up, I would have been paying more attention.” He shook his head and groaned again. “Here’s what happened. Someone parked about a block away from us and waited. They must have been surprised when I got out of the car—maybe they even thought I spotted them. That’s why they started their car. They saw me go into the bar. When I didn’t come right out with a pack of cigarettes or something, they went to the Mercedes and—and did what they did. So if I hadn’t hit her—if I hadn’t been so stupid I had to leave her alone—”