I shook my head, but I managed a smile as I said, “Have you got a job for me?”
She took that as rejection, of course, I could see it in her hurt reaction, but it wasn’t, that’s not what it was meant to be. It was just part of seeing clearly. We don’t have the luxury of sentiment now, Hallmark cards. At this moment, in this condition, in this situation, we have to see clearly, there’s no other choice.
I turned back to Quinlan. I said, “There’s nothing out there but me and the competition, and I have to beat the competition. I have to. Whatever it takes.”
But we were getting too close to reality here, the new reality, my own personal way of dealing with the competition. I’d followed the new line of reasoning all the way to the end, and acted on it, but I didn’t want anybody else doing that, not around me. Certainly not these two, not Marjorie or Quinlan. So I added, “It’s may the best man win, now, and all I can do is hope I’m the best man.”
That was the end of the session. Quinlan had let it run on, it seemed, an extra five minutes. And when we left, I thought he looked very closely at me, trying to understand.
Better not to understand, Mr. Q.
Down off the bridge; Kingston. I turn south, toward Sable Jetty.
33
She isn’t mowing the lawn today. The garage door is closed, and no one is in sight. He’s home, then, and probably she is, too.
How do I get at this man? You cannot approach that house unobserved, you just can’t. It’s as though he’s still a Marine, and placed himself where he has the advantage of the terrain; the slope up to his place, the clear line of fire, the inaccessibility from anywhere except the front.
I drive around the neighborhood, and the next time I pass the house, at 11:50, the garage door is open, the garage empty. He’s gone again, and I’ve missed him again.
This is no good, I’m not accomplishing anything. I drive away, southbound, back to that scenic view from Monday, and I sit there brooding, staring without seeing at the river as it marches endlessly by, like weary soldiers under heavy packs, blue-gray soldiers in blue- gray uniforms bent low under the weight of blue-gray packs, marching in their tight masses downstream.
The resumé. The resumé itself; can I use it? I put my ad in The Paperman, I got my responses, I did my winnowing, I used the addresses from the resumés, but that’s all. Is there a way to use the ad itself, the fact of the ad? If I can’t get at him when he’s home, or find him, or follow him from home, can I send him somewhere, and then follow him?
I begin to see how it could be done. I must go home, get back to the office, think this thing through.
But first I need a restaurant.
B. D. INDUSTRIAL PAPERS
P. O. BOX 2900
WILDBURY, CT 06899
June 11, 1997
Mr. Hauck Exman
27 River Rd.
Sable Jetty, NY 12598
Dear Mr. Exman:
Three months ago, we ran a help wanted ad in The Paperman, to which you responded. At that time, I must admit, you were not our first choice for the position. However, since then, to our chagrin, it has become apparent that our initial decision was in error.
If you have not as yet found other employment, would you be available on Friday, June 20th, to meet with our Personnel Director, Ms. Laurie Kil-patrick, who will be interviewing in the western New York region?
We would suggest lunch at one PM at the Coach House in Regnery, which I believe is not too far from your residence. The reservation will be in Ms. Kilpatrick’s name.
Please fill out and return this letter in the enclosed stamped envelope, to let us know your availability. Since the gentleman to be replaced is still on the premises, a phone call might create unnecessary distress.
If we do not hear from you, we will understand that you are no longer interested in the position.
Thank you for your time.
Benj Dockery III, Pres.
I am available
I am not available.
I must suggest an alternate date. ________
Signature ______________________
BD/VK
34
This is a very dangerous letter to send. For the first time, I’m leaving a trail—other than the bullets from the Luger, I mean—and for the first time I’m doing something that might warn my resumé that he’s in danger.
The phone number, that’s the problem. Though contact with prospective employees is often made by this kind of letter, there’s always a phone number on the letterhead, and almost always the employer asks you to respond by phone. Explaining that the unsatisfactory hire is still there, and a phone call might make trouble in the shop, should—I hope—calm HCE’s suspicions before they arise. But what if he notices there’s no phone number on the letterhead?
I thought of putting a fake number on it, any number at all, but what if he disobeyed the letter and made the call? That’s unlikely, since job hunters don’t disobey prospective employers, but what if he did? He would not reach B. D. Industrial Papers. And, no matter what happened in the course of that call, I could be sure his next call would be to the police.
He and they would probably suspect a con game of some sort, and they would follow the trail of the letter to my post office box, where the postmistress would certainly give them a description of me. She’s seen me several times, so the description would probably be a good one.
Also, since the letterhead would lead them into Connecticut, how long would it be before it connected them with Detective Burton, the man investigating the coincidental murders of two unemployed paper mill midlevel managers? Come to think of it, what are the odds that HCE applied to Willis & Kendall for that can-label job? Which would mean Detective Burton has already interviewed him.
But the telephone number is the only problem. The meeting I’ve arranged isn’t unheard of, and shouldn’t raise suspicion. Personnel directors do sometimes go on the road, to meet with a number of applicants in the same geographical area, and one of the appointments each day will include lunch, or otherwise lunch is a waste of time.
I’ve made the personnel director a woman, with a name that suggests she’s young, and I’m hoping that the prospect of a good meal (the Coach House has a first-rate reputation) with an attractive young woman (he’ll naturally assume she’s attractive), one that could lead to a prime job, will throw enough dust in his eyes to keep him from thinking about telephones.
Still, it’s frightening. At this point, so many things could go wrong. For instance, I’ve told him to countersign the letter and send it back, so it won’t be found among his effects after I kill him, but what if he makes a copy, what if he’s that kind of completist? (I reassure myself that, if he’s that kind of completist, there’ll be so much paper bumf stored among his effects that no one will ever look through it all.)
I’ve also done the best I can with both envelopes, the one I’m mailing to him and the one included for his return. I had a few sheets of my fake letterhead copied onto extra-heavy paper, and then, carefully, with a straight-edge and a razor blade, I cut out the letterheads from three sheets and glued them as the return address on both envelopes and the destination address on the inner envelope. They do look like printed labels.
This whole move scares me. I’ve been very careful up till now, I’ve done my best to control the situations, to keep myself anonymous and separate. Now I’m, at least potentially, leaving a trail. But what can I do? I’m so close to the finish, so close. HCE is all that stands between me and Upton “Ralph” Fallon, who will be easy, easy, easy.
Now I’m desperate. I can’t use the gun, and I can’t get at, or even find, HCE. I have to try something, anything, and this is all I can think of. So I drive up to Wildbury, to the mailbox outside the post office, and I send the letter, and I’m terrified.
B. D. INDUSTRIAL PAPERS
P. O. BOX 2900
WILDBURY, CT 06899
June 11, 1997
Mr. Hauck Exman
&n
bsp; 27 River Rd.
Sable Jetty, NY 12598
Dear Mr. Exman:
Three months ago, we ran a help wanted ad in The Paperman, to which you responded. At that time, I must admit, you were not our first choice for the position. However, since then, to our chagrin, it has become apparent that our initial decision was in error.
If you have not as yet found other employment, would you be available on Friday, June 20th, to meet with our Personnel Director, Ms. Laurie Kil-patrick, who will be interviewing in the western New York region?
We would suggest lunch at one PM at the Coach House in Regnery, which I believe is not too far from your residence. The reservation will be in Ms. Kilpatrick’s name.
Please fill out and return this letter in the enclosed stamped envelope, to let us know your availability. Since the gentleman to be replaced is still on the premises, a phone call might create unnecessary distress.
If we do not hear from you, we will understand that you are no longer interested in the position.
Thank you for your time.
Benj Dockery III, Pres.
I am available
I am not available.
I must suggest an alternate date. ________
Signature
BD/VK
From time to time, the next few days, I’ll drive over to Sable Jetty and go past HCE’s house. And if I see a police car parked outside, I don’t know what I’ll do.
35
I sit in front of the Wildbury post office, Tuesday, the 17th of June, at the wheel of the Voyager, and I hold the letter in my hands. It has orbited back to me. I look at what HCE has written there, along the bottom, and the letter feels warm, heated by his hunger.
He sent it back immediately, the instant he got it. Clearly, he didn’t worry about telephone numbers or anything else.
Another possible snag, I’d realized after I sent the letter, was that he might cut off the bottom part of it, the part for him to fill out, and just send that back, retaining the main body of the letter for himself—and the police. But HCE wants this job; he snapped at the bait like a trout.
Now that my gamble seems to be paying off, I can admit the other aspect of this move that I don’t like. I have killed people. I’ve hated doing it, but I had to do it, and I did it. But I haven’t been cruel to them, I haven’t toyed with them. In a way, I’m toying with HCE, I’m tantalizing him with a nonexistent job interview with a nonexistent attractive woman. I’m sorry to do that, I wish there’d been some other way.
The letter got back to Wildbury yesterday, but I couldn’t check the box until this afternoon, because yesterday was Billy’s day in court. We had to be there, Marjorie and I, of course. We were scheduled for ten, and we arrived a few minutes early, with Billy, to find Porculey the lawyer waiting for us. His suit this time was not maroon, thank God, but a neutral gray. It was his tie that was maroon, with little white cows jumping over little white moons. He shook our hands, Marjorie’s and mine, and said, “We think it will work out here,” and took Billy away for a discussion with the judge.
A lot has happened in the two weeks since Billy’s arrest. It turned out that Billy’s partner in crime, somebody named Jim Bucklin, had been less quick-witted than we, and so had his parents. In the police car after his arrest, he’d said things that might be construed as confessions that he’d robbed that same store several times before, and apparently he’d said similar things to other detectives at the police station, and kept blabbing away until finally, the next day, he met the lawyer his parents had hired (unlike Billy’s poor needy folks, the Bucklins didn’t qualify for Legal Aid). That lawyer finally got Jim Bucklin to shut up.
The general feeling was that all of Bucklin’s earlier loose talk would not be admissible in court, and after the lawyer arrived, Bucklin too started to claim that this burglary was his very first, so that he and Billy were at last telling the same story.
Which broke down when the police searched the Bucklin house (the same time they were searching ours) and found all that computer software.
Of course, they hadn’t found any illicit software at our house. So, if finding stolen goods at Bucklin’s house meant Bucklin was lying, then not finding them at Devore’s house must mean Devore was telling the truth, or at least that’s what Porculey was maintaining, and why he was doing his best to sever the two cases. Let Bucklin, the long-term master criminal, fend for himself, while Billy, the innocent youngster lured into a life of crime by Bucklin, faced the judge alone.
In chambers. We weren’t there for it, having to sit out in the corridor, but apparently it went well. Over the assistant district attorney’s ferocious objections—I saw her, from a distance, a hawklike woman in her thirties, thin and sharp-faced and ruthless—the judge did agree to separate the two cases, and to proceed in chambers with Billy’s case.
By then, a jail term was no longer at issue. In fact, as Porculey later explained it to us over diner coffee, the issue had become whether or not Billy would have a felony conviction on his record. He had never been in trouble before, he was a good student in school, he had a bright future, and he came from poverty. (Ah, well.) In chambers, Porculey had suggested the possibility of a sealed indictment, and the judge had said he’d think it over.
Over that coffee, as it cooled, all of us too keyed up to add caffeine to our systems, he’d explained what a sealed indictment was, and it’s an unexpected bit of mercy in the judicial system. If the defendant would plead guilty, and if the circumstances warrant giving him a second chance, the judge can choose to seal the indictment, keep it unpublished and unacted-upon, in his court, for whatever length of time he decrees; usually a year. If, in that time, the defendant is arrested for another crime, the indictment is unsealed and he faces prosecution for both the old crime and the new one. If, however, he stays clean until the term is up, the indictment is quashed as though it had never been. There is no police record; the defendant walks away pure.
Well, that’s what we were hoping for, of course, and Porculey expected we’d know before the end of the day, but first the matter of Jim Bucklin had to be dealt with. We stayed away from court during that time, but apparently Bucklin’s lawyer joined the assistant district attorney in struggling to keep the two cases together, and the argument was a lengthy one. He wanted his client, of course, to coast along on Billy’s cleaner coattails.
But eventually the judge ruled against both the defense lawyer and the assistant district attorney, and Bucklin’s case was held over alone for trial—or a plea bargain later on, more likely—and at three in the afternoon we were brought back in. Marjorie and Billy and I stood before the judge, who was a different one from that original bail hearing, in a different but similar courtroom. And again it was exactly like some religious ritual, full of arcane language, and we the penitents before the high priest.
Porculey had advised us against talking to Bucklin’s parents, so we’d avoided them, though they desperately wanted to talk to us; to convince us to re-yoke our boy to their doomed son, no doubt. I was aware of them at the back of the courtroom when our session began, remorseful, resentful and reproachful. I didn’t look back at them.
The judge sealed the indictment. I thought Marjorie would fall down when she understood what he’d just said, and I held tight to her arm. The judge spoke severely to Billy about his thoughtlessness—lovely word—and Billy kept his head bowed and his responses short and respectful, and soon it was over.
At twenty to four yesterday afternoon, Billy’s troubles with the law were done. So long as he stays honest from now on, that is. And there isn’t much doubt of that. This experience has frightened him, and he’s aware of just how lucky he is. He has the vision of Jim Bucklin right in front of him, to show him how serious it might have been. And he’s grateful to us, and doesn’t want to let us down.
We shook hands with Porculey, and tried to express our gratitude, and our awareness that we might well have drawn a much worse attorney, and then I took Marjorie and
Billy home. What a relief it was, almost as big a relief as if I’d finished all this other business and had my real job back. And what it showed me was, if you just keep going, keep determined, don’t let the system grind you down, you can prevail.
I will prevail.
Well, that experience used up all of yesterday, and today was another counseling session. Today I kept my mouth shut, since I’m worried I might have exposed myself a little too much last week and I don’t want to risk doing that again. Quinlan tried to probe into me two or three times, I could sense his curiosity about the direction we were heading last week, but I gave him flat answers, greeting card answers that he couldn’t do a thing with. And Marjorie wanted to steer the conversation toward our roles within the marriage, which was what we were supposed to be there for anyway, so I think I did myself no damage.
When we got home, I did something I’ve been planning for a while, and now I think the time is right. I prepared seventeen of my resumés, my own resumés, addressed seventeen envelopes to paper mills I’d already approached in the past, plus Arcadia Processing, and I wrote a covering letter to each, saying I’m still here, I’m still available, just in case any job has opened up since you last heard from me. If the timing is right, my resumé will be the most recent one in Arcadia’s files, and possibly still fresh in Arcadia’s personnel director’s memory, when a job over there unexpectedly does become available. And since I’m sending this whole batch out, and it’s a week or two before URF’s death, there shouldn’t be any suspicion raised.
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