by Packer, Vin
As they came closer, Joseph heard the man in sunglasses saying, “Yes, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Anything’s possible,” said the other.
“Crust like I’ve never seen it on this stuff!”
“You ski, Paul? My kid’s started this year. Up in Vermont.”
Then the man with sunglasses was opening his side of the car, and the other was getting in behind the wheel.
The phone was ringing. Joseph let it ring five times, being sure the police car was well on its way down his drive before he answered it.
2
The truth was, Maggie was slipping. Tom Spencer was sorry about it, but “sorry” was not going to keep Picks Cigarettes happy with A. & F. Spencer should have known she was slipping long before this crisis in her life, but he had been a bit dazzled by old Mag, that was all. That weekend when Maggie had Miriam and him out, he had had the same feeling that client had about the commercial she had written for Picks, but he had just not been sure enough of himself to criticize it. In fact, he had gone overboard in the other direction. It was time now to stop pulling punches or playing pals-can-do-no-wrong. The client was right. A cigarette “sell” has to have power! That thing Maggie dreamed up about the whispering girl interrupting the three minutes of silence was cute, but it had no power! Worse, it was irritating, and if there was one word a cigarette sell should not call to mind, “irritating” was the word.
Tom Spencer was appreciative of the fact that Maggie had her troubles, but Tom Spencer was soon going to have troubles of his own if he and Maggie did not “get with it” on the Picks campaign. After that got rolling, he would play all the games of Dr. Freud-what-shall-I-do-about-Joseph that Maggie wanted to play, but right now Christmas was coming and there was a small matter of a big bonus in the offing.
It was ten minutes past five now, and Maggie was on the telephone again. Spencer sat with the Picks file on his lap, waiting for her to finish. It was snowing outside, and he was half-listening to Maggie, and half-having an imaginary argument with Miriam in his mind, over the fact she had probably not done anything today about getting the snow tyres on the car.
Maggie was shouting, “What do you mean? No, don’t hang up!” and Tom Spencer was giving Miriam hell in his mind, at the same time he was aware of the fact that he was displacing his anger from Maggie to Miriam.
Tom glanced down at the Picks file, and Maggie’s new memos on a proposed campaign. “Picks Has A Trick In It!” Another one of her cute ideas. She had sent some secretary out to research magician’s tricks, and with that material she had made up a campaign in which a magician would perform a trick, followed by an announcer saying “Picks Has A Trick Too! The trick of making truly good tobacco!” God! Anyone slightly inclined toward tongue-twisting could have the whole goddam Conley-Fast Cigarette Corporation sued for obscenity with that kind of slogan!
Maggie was holding the arm of the telephone now, staring at it dumbly.
“Finished?” said Tom Spencer sharply.
She put the telephone down and sat there. “Oh miGod.”
“Listen, Mag,” Spencer said, “no matter what it is, it’s got to go undiscussed for a time! I’ve got Harrison on my neck, Mag!”
“This is something, though. This is something!”
“Maggie, goddam it, we’ve got about two days! Two days! This stuff about trick and Picks and Picks with a trick in it is awful! It’s awful! It has no power!”
“Oh, do you sound like Harrison!”
“All right, I sound like Harrison! It’s about time I sounded like Harrison! I’m getting paid by Harrison, not Freud! Not Dorothy Dix! Not Norman Vincent Peale! Maggie, goddamn it, we’ve both got to forget our personal lives and get with business!”
“All right. All right.” But she sat back in her swivel chair as though someone had pushed her there; and Tom Spencer knew damn well her mind was as far from Picks Cigarettes as some dying cancer case’s.
“The thing is,” he tried, “Harrison wants power! Something that booms instead of titters, something that suggests bigness!”
“Umm, hmmm.”
“Something that will make people sit up and notice, and talk!”
“How about a nice juicy scandal about Amos Fenton and me?”
Spencer hit her desk with his fist. “Maggie! Will you get off it?”
“You know, Tom, if you were a priest you’d be the kind who would announce the time of the Ladies’ Sodality Bingo Game at a funeral.”
Tom Spencer sank back into his chair and put his hands over his face. “I quit! I quit! I quit!”
“Sorry to hear it. Funny thing, I never thought you’d quit until after you got your Christmas bonus.”
“Okay, Maggie, we won’t get nasty. We won’t. It’s not going to get us any place, and we’re not going to like each other the better for it. Okay. I’ll call Miriam and tell her I’m going to be late again, and you tell me what happened on the telephone. Then maybe we can consider Mr. Harrison’s wishes.”
“Tom, I’m not in a mood to consider Mr. Harrison or his wishes. Joseph has left me!”
“He’s what? Oh, my God!”
“I talked to him at noon. I called him to remind him the cat was out. He said he knew it, and he sounded perfectly okay, though he wasn’t very talkative, and then I went off to lunch with Amos to try and calm him down. He thinks the newspapers are going to involve him in this Duncan case.”
“What the hell does he care! What the hell does goddam Amos Fenton care!”
“Oh, come on, Tom! Lou Hart is on a truth kick; the truth as he remembers it, and something just might come up about Amos and me being alone downstairs, and Joseph misinterpreting it. Oh, I’m tired. I’m just tired!”
“Well, finish the story, Maggie. What next?”
“Next? You were here when the phone rang ten minutes ago. It was Joseph. He’s in Trenton. He says he’s leaving the car there at the station for me. He says he’s not going home. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I’m not going home again.’ I said, ‘Let me meet you and talk with you.’ And do you know what he said? He said, ‘I’m leaving you, Maggie. You’ll find someone to marry you again. Some women are too homely, but you’re not.’”
Tom Spencer got up and went around to Maggie’s side. “Maggie,” he said, “I’m a goddamned, pig-headed, selfish huckster! I’ll call Miriam. You spend the night with us, okay? Maggie, good Lord, I’m sorry.”
“He’s somewhere sick, Tom. That’s what keeps going through my mind. He’s somewhere sick, and I don’t think he realizes how sick!”
Maggie Meaker began to cry, and Tom Spencer felt as though he were watching the Rock of Gibraltar crack in half and crumble. He reached inside his coat and took out a slim cigarette case he kept next to a package of Picks.
“Pull yourself together, Maggie,” he said, offering her a Kent.
Chapter Eighteen
He left the car at the train station in Trenton, for Maggie. Then he walked to the corner and checked in at the Y.M.C.A. He asked for directions to the nearest liquor store, went out in the snow and bought a bottle, and took it up to his room. Outside in the halls Christmas carols were playing, pumped in from some central point. “Silent Night,” “Jesus, Tiny Infant,” along with “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” From the vent in his door, he could hear them. He pulled a chair over to the window, watched out, and sipped the gin from a water glass. He would never go back to the house on Old Ferry Road. He was not sure yet where he would go, but the next day, or the day after that, he would walk back down the block and get on a train. For all practical purposes, he was a man who was leaving his wife. He knew full well it would cast suspicion on him, but if he were to run, after the police interviewed him, he would look even more suspicious.
Before he had left the house he had gone out behind the barn. The wood pile was intact and snow-covered, and the cat’s interest had simply been in one log, which she had been using to sharpen her cl
aws. He had actually begun to have delusions that the cat was against him, that she was intent on exposing him to the police. Well, it was time to clear out of there, was all, before there were more delusions, before fear got a grip on him and he could no longer control the crazy impulses that had wanted to overtake him when the police were in his driveway. He had figured it out clearheaded and with considerable thought.
He had written the following note to Maggie, not unaware of the fact the police would probably be interested in its contents.
“Dear Maggie,
“In the past few weeks we’ve talked a lot about your suspicions that I am jealous of Amos. It is not so much jealousy (though I was surprised when Louis blurted out that Amos was your lover, and Amos reacted by hitting him) as it is logic that leads me to this decision. “Logically, you are more suited to a man who is aggressive and strong, and who loves advertising as you do. I guess I am an eccentric of some sort, proven by my devotion to a cat, and my anger when I thought Louis ran over the cat. If I had been paying more attention to you, perhaps this whole thing between you and Amos never would have happened. Logically, it did, and I am going away, because it is the only way out for you. I expect I’ll travel to New England, where I was raised, and in those serene surroundings, try to figure out what I will do next. After the holidays, I’ll be in touch with you, and we can go over the practical business of separation and divorce.
“With high regards for you,
Joseph.”
Maggie would not want to show that note to the police. She would not want to involve Amos Fenton. But Joseph knew Maggie well enough to be positive that she would ask Tom Spencer’s opinion. Joseph knew full well how Tom Spencer felt about Fenton. “You can’t withhold any information from the police, Mag,” Spencer would advise, in his kindest tone, his head spinning with dreams of getting Fenton’s job, once poor old Amos was removed because of the scandal.
If things got bad, they would go that way. Farther and farther away from suspicion of Joseph having any connection with Billy Duncan. Maggie would undoubtedly embellish the whole affair with her personal analysis, in the most up-to-date psychological terms, of Joseph’s pitiful guilt feelings over Louis’ troubles — And Louis’ troubles? Joseph had read enough “thrillers” to reckon that Louis’ troubles amounted to a bag of beans, so long as Billy Duncan’s body remained where it was. Without a body, the Billy Duncan case had no real pulse to it. Certainly under the circumstances, the police were not going to put out a drag-net for Joseph. Tomorrow, or the next day, Joseph would head south, and stay there until the whole thing petered out.
He sat looking out the window of his room in the Y. He was sad, but he knew that it was the gin, and that the sadness was a sort of lightheaded one, not heavy gloom. It was a sadness over little things. He could not remember Ishmael at all, for example, and on the drive to Trenton, he had seen hunters coming from a woods in the snow, and they had not irritated him in the least. He had only noticed that one of them was not wearing gloves, and he had thought that he was glad he had remembered to pack his own gloves. Was he without feeling? He poured more gin into the water glass. He had gone away and simply left the Varda file in his desk drawer, on top of the paperback novels. Before he had packed, he had thought of taking something from the file with him, but when he tried to pick out something he particularly liked, he could find nothing. It was like trying to find a fascinating passage in some favourite book, read when you were very young, only to discover you no longer had whatever it was you had taken to that book, and that now you could get nothing for nothing — the book was strange — you told yourself: “It didn’t hold up.”
He had had so many, many feelings; where were they now? He had been full of wonderful, exalted thoughts that sometimes made him soar, and now where were they? What were they, that they could go like that, with the snap of a finger, the passing of a day? Joseph leaned forward in his chair, not believing what he saw. In the distance was a church, with its glassed-in announcement board near an iron fence in the yard. He stared at the words, spotlighted in the evening. They ran in a straight line downward. They said:
CONSIDER
THOSE
AS
VICES
“Oh, no,” Joseph said aloud, “not vices. They were true feelings!” He shut his eyes and drew a long breath, then opened them.
CONSIDER
THOSE
AS
VICES
“Am I mad?” He laughed, but it was because he knew he was not mad, and there was that sign. It was nothing from any scripture, it meant nothing, did it? Except to Joseph, who had been asking questions of the night, from his window there in the Trenton Y.
He decided to go out and investigate the sign. He needed food — a hamburger, cup of coffee, and he would walk down toward that church and try to find a lunch stand, or a restaurant of some kind. He put on his coat, and finished the finger of gin in his glass, then opened the door to his room and he was flooded with a chorus singing “Rocking Round the Christmas Tree” over the Y’s public communications speaker. Going down in the elevator he remembered a line from La Rochefoucald’s Reflections. “Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.”
Passing through the lobby, he saw a copy of a Trenton newspaper. He stopped and flipped through it, but there was nothing in it about Billy Duncan. On the reading table, there were other newspapers and he walked over, and stood there with his coat on, going through them. One of the small-size New York dailies ran a picture of a young man carrying a suitcase, a cross expression on his delicate countenance. The headline said: “SON OF DR. HART HERE FROM PARIS.”
“Tony Hart, 19, son of Dr. Louis Hart whose name has been prominent in the case of the missing war hero from Lambertville, New Jersey, arrived from Paris last night. Claiming that his return has nothing to do with his father’s alleged involvement in the Duncan affair, the young artist snapped at reporters waiting at Idlewild Airport.
“The reporters were there to greet Mindy Hill of Hollywood fame, returning from Rome with her new husband, Pierre Rosenbach. When it was learned that Dr. Louis Hart’s son was also aboard the Convair, some interest was centred on the youth.
“ ‘My visit is a normal Christmas call on my folks,’ the boy insisted, ‘and I wish you would leave me alone!’ When one reporter asked him if he thought his father had any real connection with Billy Duncan’s disappearance, young Hart responded, ‘Mind your own damn business!’ Duncan, who mysteriously disappeared one week ago, left his home for a hunting trip in Bucks County. His car was found in Dr. Hart’s driveway. Hart has since corrected his original story that he did not know Billy Duncan. When it was revealed that Duncan and he had a fight in a bar near Duncan’s home, the Friday before Duncan’s disappearance, Hart admitted that there was a possibility he met him that night. He insisted he could not remember meeting him. Police are busy with the investigation of the war hero’s disappearance.”
Joseph closed the newspaper and walked out of the Y. For the first time he wondered if there actually were a possibility that Louis had known Billy Duncan. He could see how stupid Billy Duncan might just park his car in Louis’ drive and go off to hunt, but these reports about the fight in the Danboro Bar were an enigma. As Joseph walked along the snowy block toward the church, he played with the idea that Louis might actually have wanted to murder Billy Duncan. Perhaps he had known him; they had had a fight. Perhaps Louis had told Duncan to park in his drive the first day of the deer season. Louis could have gone into Tidd’s Woods with a gun, and stayed there waiting for Duncan. He could have planned to kill him, then sneak back and wait until Duncan’s body was found. His story could have been that he had given Duncan permission to park there, and that he supposed some hunter had killed Duncan by accident, without even knowing it. Neat and perfect. Over that weekend he had drunk for courage; he had signed the register in the motel when he was thoroughly intoxicated, his mind on only one thing: murder. Therefore, the Duncan Tondley. He may we
ll have purposely delayed answering the Tondley call five years back, too; a murderer at heart, was all. Everything would have been all right if it had gone as Louis had planned it. More investigation went on in the case of a missing man than it did in the case of a man accidentally killed hunting. Was that the truth of the whole matter, that Louis had planned to murder Duncan And by a fluke, Duncan had wandered into Joseph’s yard, and perhaps, even as Joseph was pulling the rope tightly around his neck, Louis was watching the scene from behind a tree in the woods. Joseph had committed Louis’ murder for him!
This thought made Joseph’s head spin. At the corner of the street he had to stop and rest his hand against a tree to support his body. Just as easily as that theory could be the truth, so could it be the truth that Louis was behind the wheel of his car that Sunday night the cat was killed. Who had checked on this story of the garage mechanic from New Hope?
“Oh, God!” Joseph said.