Something in the Shadows

by Packer, Vin

  Amos Fenton whistled. “Duncan Tondley! Nice! Where’d he get the Duncan from? How’s he going to explain that? How do you explain it, for that matter?”

  “I think he did meet this Duncan fellow, and they did have a fight. He was blotto, you know that yourself; he was looped, Amos! Well, he remembered the Duncan in his unconscious mind. That explains the Duncan. There’s a small matter of the Tondley, though, which I can’t explain, not unless you give me a lot of time, and a martini.”

  “Tondley? Didn’t he use that name Friday night at your place too?”

  “Freddy Tondley was the name of the electric-saw victim in the negligence case! Yes, he was yelling it around Friday night.”

  “For God’s sake! Maggie, are you going to sit there and say that two and two makes accident? Tondley was the guy he let die! Duncan Tondley! You said something about time and a martini explaining everything. I suppose he’s a Jekyll-Hyde. You going to tell me that? Duncan Tondley! Maggie, is it sinking in on you at all? This sounds like one hell of a goddam juicy scandal. Murder, and no kidding!”

  “I know how it sounds! But I can explain the ‘Tondley.’ We have to begin way back, Amos, with Joseph’s Siamese and a certain cat-hater who’s a mechanic at the New Hope garage. Are you ready to adjourn to a dark, private corner, say, upstairs in that French place across the street? I’m out of the mood for ordering up.”

  “Lord knows, I could use a drink.”

  “You should see Joseph,” Maggie said, pulling her pocketbook out of her desk drawer. “You wouldn’t know him any more.”

  “I never did.”

  “Well, even so. You’d see the difference in him. You’ll understand better when I tell you the whole story.”

  “You mean Joseph’s mixed up in it?”

  “Let’s say, he thinks he is. Well, he’s right too, in a way. But he’s not responsible for whatever happened to this Duncan. That’s what he can’t get through his head. So — he’s drinking.”

  “Good for him! That’s what I’d do.”

  “It’s not the drinking, Amos. Not just the drinking! It’s the change that comes over him when he drinks!”

  “What is he, violent or something? Abusive?”

  “Dear old Amos,” Maggie said crossing the room, straightening Fenton’s tie, “dear old Maggie, for that matter! We’re logical folk, that’s our trouble. If someone like Joseph were to drink, someone like Joseph would become violent and abusive, that’s the way we think. Well, the Josephs in the world are a little more complicated than that! Do you want to stop upstairs for your topcoat?”

  “No.” He opened the door of her office for her. “Well, what about Joseph when he drinks?”

  “He’s happy,” Maggie said, “he’s happy as a lark!”

  2

  Friday morning only one patient showed up at Lou Hart’s, an old woman suffering with giardiasis. Lou wrote out a prescription for Atabrine dihydrochloride and gave it to her, and she said she was sorry about all the trouble he was in.

  “That Duncan fellow’s probably out in the woods with a bullet in his head,” she said. “Some hunter probably mistook him for an animal, Doctor, now that’s what I think.”

  “You take these three times daily, five or six days,” Lou told her, “and if you have any upset, you take some sodium bicarbonate. I’ll give you some samples I have here.”

  She smiled and said, of course that did not explain how Duncan’s car got in his drive, “but he could have just parked it there now, couldn’t he, Doctor Hart? Just figured you were a doctor and one car more or less in your drive wouldn’t go noticed, now that’s what I think.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Sussman,” said Lou. “I hope you feel better.”

  “Is poor Mrs. Hart all upset, Doctor?”

  “No,” Lou lied. “Now, you let me know how you feel.”

  “And Tony? How’s little Tony?”

  “He’ll be home for the holidays,” said Lou.

  “All the way from Paris, France?”

  “Yes,” Lou said. “For Christmas.”

  “Coming all the way across the ocean, hmmm? Looks bad, don’t it?”

  “He was coming home for the holidays, anyway,” Lou lied again.

  “Well, don’t you worry, Doctor. Plenty of us around here think the world and all of you, no matter what.”

  This time Lou was able to get her coat on her, and propel her towards the door. She would pray for him, she said.

  As he held open the door for her, he saw Captain Plant from the State Police Barracks, waiting down the hall in the reception room. Mrs. Sussman’s eyes followed Lou’s, and she sucked in her breath with a little s-s-s-s noise and crept down the hall as though she were in danger of being arrested herself.

  Lou called out a “Come in, Captain,” and Plant put down a copy of Look magazine and lumbered towards Lou. He was a big man, wearing his official uniform complete with boots, and smoking a Cigarillo. Lou and he had known one another close to ten years; Plant’s daughter was Tony’s age. Up until this moment, other officers from the State Barracks had talked with Lou; this was Plant’s first appearance. He went through the usual amenities, then said abruptly, “Well, what have we got here, Lou?”

  “As far as I know you have a missing person.”

  “Yes. You never met Billy Duncan?”

  “I don’t remember meeting him, Jack. I guess I did, though, a week ago tonight.”

  “Alfred White says so, and T. W. Glover-Hadley says so, and a few others hanging around in Danboro. Then we got this report from The Washington Crossing Motel, near Trenton. You registered there as Duncan Tondley. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to tell me about that?”

  “The ‘Duncan’ was probably because I met this fellow Duncan, and his name stuck. The ‘Tondley' — well, I suppose it’s engraved on my unconscious. I suppose I still feel guilty about it. I just put the two names together somehow.”

  “You didn’t feel guilty about Duncan too, for some reason?”

  “Jack, I don’t know. I don’t remember! I’m probably implicating myself all to hell with this kind of admission, but that’s the truth. I don’t remember meeting Duncan. I don’t remember fighting with him. I don’t remember signing his first name on the motel slip. I don’t remember ever seeing his car before Monday noon, and his photographs don’t ring any bells.”

  “You were going at it pretty heavy, hmmm?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “A drunk doesn’t need a reason, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry about this, Lou, but it doesn’t look good for you.”

  “Let me ask you the same question you asked me, Jack. What do you think we’ve got here?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s a missing person. I think it’s a dead person. Billy Duncan’s been missing five days now. He’s not in the woods, we’ve combed the woods, and he’s not anywhere else. I’d say we got homicide here, murder or manslaughter — your guess is as good as mine; at least I don’t think it’s any better than mine.”

  “Homicide without a body, and I’m a suspect, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happens to me?”

  “Oh, I could arrest you on suspicion of murder, but you wouldn’t be convicted without the body. What happens to you? I guess time will tell. The body will turn up; then time will tell.”

  “I see.”

  “Meanwhile, questions. Lots of questions.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you busy tomorrow morning, for example?”

  “Would it make any difference?”

  “Oh, we’d fit it in with your schedule. It’s not that bad yet. Mrs. Duncan’s coming over tomorrow around noon. Could you be there then?”

  “At the Barracks?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, Jack.”

  “We could be all wrong, Lou,” Captain Plant said getting up. He stubbed out his Cigarillo in Lou�
�s ashtray. “I’m not a heavy drinker myself. Maybe I drink a bottle of whisky over a period of two months. I don’t know anything about these blackouts. I do know if I were in your shoes, Lou, I’d put on my thinking cap. Try to remember something. Hell, I don’t think you’d hurt a fly, intentionally. I just don’t! But then again, Billy Duncan wasn’t a fly, and neither was Freddy Tondley. I’m sorry, but it looks lousy.”

  “Tomorrow around noon,” Lou said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  During those five days, Joseph read “thrillers.” He bought them at the news-store in Doylestown, paperbacks which he read at the rate of five or six a day. Now that he was a murderer, it interested him to see how close an author could come to imagining how he felt, or to creating a murder scene in any way similar to last Monday’s scrimmage out behind the barn.

  He was sorely disappointed. Like love scenes in novels, murder scenes in mysteries more than often portrayed the hero as slightly tipsy. Only in cases of murder for financial gain or through passion or husbands trying to exterminate their wives did the hero seem to go on his own power. Even in some of those, the murder scene was preceded by one of whisky-drinking.

  Joseph began to think of these sodden villains as “outside men.” They were nice guys until they drank; and when they were not nice guys, they were at least passing as nice guys; but drink did it. Joseph thought of all the “outside men” pouring liquor down their throats into the mouths of little “inside men.” Then the insiders grew bigger and stronger and ultimately powerful enough to overtake their benefactors. They would emerge, murder, and shrink back inside; some to die there, some to stay docile and undemanding until the next heavy supply of kill-energy.

  From there Joseph went to the possibility of “inside men.” Wasn’t that what he had always been? Holding himself back always? Varda had told him he kept his thoughts in “the big bottle,” never mind Maggie’s never-ending lectures on his over-control! He was an “inside man,” and by staying so inside of himself, he had forced himself out. Now, to force himself back in again, he must stay outside. Drink might do it, he thought, and when Maggie came home nights, Joseph began having three or four martinis before dinner. The first night — Monday — Maggie had said things between them were the way she had always dreamed they might be. Joseph had regaled Maggie with stories of the strange hill called the Hexenkopf, in Northampton County, ten miles north of Haycock Mountain. The name meant Witch’s Head, and the neighbourhood abounded with hexerei and stories of witches’ doings. Joseph told her about the short life span of trees on the Hexenkopf, and of the holes in the ground near the dying ones, said to have been “stung” by hoopsnakes, who rolled up and down the Hexenkopf. He told her of the fruits of the Hexenkopf, more bitter and strange tasting than the same fruits grown in Haycock or Buckwampum, and he told her of the strange lights on the old hill, the punky wood of old tree stumps glowing with phosphorescence. Joseph walked about while he told her these things, his cheeks burning with the warmth of the gin, his glass raised in his hand, his voice loud and confident; and Maggie actually laughed at the way he made some of the stories so spooky — and afterwards, when she was asleep, he smoked a cigarette in his study and read a poem from the Varda file, shed a tear and smiled and felt a tenderness towards life.

  He liked being an “outside man.” He wished that all the other Josephs everywhere were just a little bit high, as he was. It wouldn’t do them any good to keep holding everything in that way; he wished there were some way he could tell them that.

  The next morning he had a hangover. He did not get up to have breakfast with Maggie, and when he breakfasted by himself, he felt sullen. He thought of Billy Duncan’s ugly face and he was glad he had killed him. When Louis called shortly after one in the afternoon, and explained that it was a garage mechanic who had killed Ishmael, he thanked Louis very solemnly for the information and hung up without the predictable exchange of “I’m sorry I thought it was you” and “I can see how you would think it was me” and the rest of the apologies. He realized he could not even recall one of the little, lovely memories of the cat, which had been both a comfort and a pain to him in the days since the death of his pet. He felt nothing. Was that it? Once the “inside man” like Joseph lets go, an apathy is released with the violence. “I don’t care,” Joseph said aloud. His own voice sounded like a stranger’s.

  That day he read the usual amount of “thrillers” and some of the greats who wrote about murder as well. The Greeks, and dreary, moralizing Shakespeare, then Eliot. Then he found “Fragment of an Agon,” and he could not stop rereading it. There were marvellous lines like:

  “I knew a man once did a girl in,

  Any man has to, needs to, wants to

  Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.”

  In a way, he envied that murderer. A crime of passion, probably. Classic! Not low, like his. Not with a Billy Duncan for a victim! A Billy Duncan was not good enough for murder. He should have been run over by a bus, or drowned in the children’s section of some community centre pool, attempting “the crawl.”

  Still, the poem was good; it said it best! Joseph walked about the house saying some of the poem’s lines aloud, changing “girl” to man in the verse, reciting it while he made another pot of coffee for his headache: “I knew a man once did a man in.”

  Carrying the coffee over to the kitchen table, he paused to look in the mirror by the coat rack. His reflection was matter-of-fact as he recited:

  “I gotta use words when I talk to you

  But if you understand or if you don’t

  That’s nothing to me and nothing to you

  We all gotta do what we gotta do.”

  That was right. We all have to do what we have to do.

  Tuesday night he was gay with gin again.

  He had this conversation with Maggie:

  “What made you suddenly take up drinking, Joseph?”

  “Oh, it was high time. High time!”

  “Was it because of what I told you Monday night? About Louis Hart and the Tondley boy?”

  “No, Maggie dear, it was just as I said. High time!”

  “It was because of that. You feel guilty about giving Louis that book. Now it’s worse, because you know he didn’t even kill Ishmael.”

  “Worse? You said yourself, last night, that things were fine between us. That things were the way you’d dreamed they’d be! Maggie, remember saying that last night?”

  “Yes, yes, I remember. But things are serious for Louis, Joseph. You know that. I think you feel partially to blame, that’s the reason for this false euphoria.”

  “Spinoza said: ‘He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.”

  “Never mind Spinoza, Joseph, that’s your fourth martini you’re pouring.”

  Joseph said, “We all gotta do what we gotta do.”

  Later that night Maggie drove to the Harts. She suggested that Joseph come along. When he refused, she said she could understand his embarrassment, but he would have to face Lou Hart one day, he may as well get used to that idea. Joseph chuckled over that thought while he got out his paints. He was no longer interested in Louis Hart, not in the least bit interested in him. He knew exactly how stupid Billy Duncan’s car had been left in Louis’ driveway, the same way stupid Billy Duncan had wandered into Joseph’s yard, by accident. Duncan was a blundering buffoon, the sort who left his hat under a seat at the theatre and walked off without it, or forgot which dry cleaner had his best suit. Dumb! Dumb Billy Duncan, little Billy dumb Duncan, lost his car at the doctor’s house, lost his pheasant, his deer, his car, then his life — Joseph poured himself a little more gin and began to sketch the living room fireplace. Once, during college, he had played with the idea of being an artist. His sense of colour was excellent. Another student in his painting class had once mistaken one of Joseph’s oils for a Henner — so long ago, everything so long ago. His shoulders and arms were very tired and the sketch was affected
as a result. His shoulders and arms had ached ever since he had made Billy Duncan’s grave. The fireplace looked like a huge mouth, open and waiting and insatiable. The mouth of the “inside man?” Across the page Joseph scribbled INSIDE OUT. He remembered an old silly poem by a woman with a silly name; what was her name? The poem was about the inner half of clouds being bright and shining — “I therefore…. I therefore….” Then he remembered:

  “I therefore turn my clouds about

  And always wear them inside out

  To show the lining.”

  By Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler. Ha!

  That’s what I’m doing, Joseph thought happily as he reached for his gin — wearing my clouds inside out.

  Then Wednesday. Another hangover and the depressing announcement from Maggie that she was not going to work that day.

  “You mean you’re going to desert Picks Cigarettes and Risestaver Coffee and Amos Fenton?” said Joseph.

  Maggie was pulling on her red gondolier pants from Bonwit’s, while Joseph watched her from bed, feeling the same sullen way he had yesterday morning.

  Maggie said, “You know, I don’t think I like your new personality.”

  “Going to the Harts’ again? A little Hart-to-Hart talk again today?”

  “Joseph!” Maggie said, “whether you realize it or not things are in a mess! Last night you were too sleepy to listen, but it seems now that Lou did know this Billy Duncan!”

  Then she told him the whole story, and Joseph listened as though someone were reading a story to him; as though he were not involved in any of it.

  Maggie finished by saying, “It’s crazy, but that’s the way it is! The police are actually suspicious of Lou! Jan’s so worried she’s cabled Tony to come home.”

  “What has it all got to do with us, Maggie?” Joseph said.

  “Oh my God, I wish you’d get analyzed!” Maggie shouted at him.

  When she left the house Joseph wandered up to his study. He had been reading some more from the Varda file last night, had he? He leaned down and picked up a piece of yellowed paper from the floor where it had fallen. The poem “Dear” — he looked at it.