by Leslie Ford
He said it very much as if it were a personal accusation. Orvie waited, half expecting, from long experience, that his father would go on and say, “If you’d had the gumption of a wet muskrat you’d have married her before Blake did.” He didn’t mind it anymore. Things would have been different if he had married her—or if she would have married him.
“And I suggest you let Blake get out of the way before you go there,” his father said. “I’ve got some idea that what Gus doesn’t know about this won’t hurt him. I dare say most of us are fools when we get out off our own field. I learned that when we had to convert the plant at the beginning of the war.”
At John Maynard’s house in town his daughter, in a tailored suit and white blouse tied in a flat bow at the neck, ready for a day’s work at the Smithville Gazette, jabbed viciously into the grapefruit in front of her as she waited for her father’s footsteps on the stairs. At last she put her spoon down impatiently and pressed the bell under the table. When the colored boy came she said, “Lawrence—go upstairs and find out what in God’s name is keeping my father. Bang on the door. Maybe he’s slipped in the shower.”
She picked up her spoon again. “Never mind. Here he comes.”
She raised her voice. “Daddy, if you don’t hurry you’re not going downtown with me.”
Then she realized that he was not coming. He was going into the library first. She looked at her watch. She was in a hurry. Gus always got to the office earlier than anybody else, and she had some unfinished business with Gus that she wanted to get on with. Her father was coming now. She looked up expectantly at him. Then she frowned. He wasn’t smiling his slow, easy smile, as he usually did.
“What’s the matter, Daddy?”
“Nothin’, honey.”
John Maynard came around the table and kissed her on the top of her head. He went to his place at the end of the table, waiting until the colored boy had gone out of the room.
“Connie, you haven’t done anythin’ foolish, have you honey?” he asked gently.
“Lots of things, I guess, Dad. Why? What particular one do you want to know about now?”
“I’m not jokin’, honey. I’m talkin’ about those checks I showed you last night. Did you take ’em out of the drawer in there?”
Connie Maynard stared at him. “Good heavens, no. Why should I do that? They’re not— Do you mean they’re gone?”
“That’s what I mean, Con. They’re gone. The whole lot of ’em. I was goin’ to take ’em around after Gus left home this mornin’ and have a little talk with Janey.” He looked past her out of the window for a few moments. “I’m tryin’ to think who was in there last night. Who’d want to take ’em, I mean, Connie.”
He shrugged and picked up his napkin, the old smile coming back on his handsome, rugged face. “It was mighty nice little Janey won the jack pot last night.”
Connie was watching him intently across the table.
“Daddy,” she said sharply. She put down her coffee cup. “Just how well did you know this Doc Wernitz who was killed last night?”
John Maynard smiled at her. “Now, honey.” He wiped his broad mouth with the corner of his napkin. “Now, honey, if I was you, I’d just keep my little nose out of things that don’t concern me. It’s always best. Usually I’ve always found it was safest, in the long run, too.”
TEN
THE MURDERER OF PAUL M. WERNITZ mentally shook his head a little. It was a mistake to come down later than usual for breakfast. It was a mistake to do anything to call anybody’s attention to the fact that he wanted time to be alone, to think, to calculate, and reflect over his errors, so he could retrieve them if necessary and guard against future ones. Above all, he had to act as if there were nothing special on his mind, act as normally and casually as he always acted. He had to forget the sound of old Wernitz’s head as the iron bar hit it, not a loud sound, more like an eggshell as you closed your hand on it to crush it. But that was not why he’d spent so much time over his bath and shave. It was the unfortunate fact that in the average house the bathroom was the only place a man could lock the door and be alone without the risk of somebody walking in and surprising some expression that the most astute and carefully guarded mind might transmit unconsciously to the motor nerves and impulses controlling any man’s face. He had seen something of it in his own face in the medicine-chest mirror as he thought about himself, and the mistakes he’d already made, when he was wiping his face after he had rinsed off the shaving-soap. But it wasn’t Wernitz’s eggshell skull he had been thinking about. He kept his eyes down on his plate as he thought about it all again.
Damn Janey Blake, he said quietly to himself. Who would ever have thought the little devil had that much guts? If he hadn’t had the quick-wittedness to pick up the phone in Gus’s den they might easily have got him. But they still wouldn’t have been able to connect him with the Wernitz thing out at Newton’s Comer. That was the one thing he didn’t have to worry about. He had been too smart to leave any tracks behind him there. He frowned suddenly, and bit his lower lip, remembering he was supposed to appear as he always did. He relaxed and took up his coffee cup, took a swallow, and put it down calmly.
The Janey business was an error. He could see that now. Calling her up, and calling up out at Wernitz’s to check on Gus and Connie, had seemed to make it easy going. It wasn’t his fault she turned out to be so quick on the trigger, but it was the sort of thing he should have been smart enough to figure on.
I can’t afford any more mistakes, he thought. Janey was his second, or third. No. His fourth. He had to be brutally honest with himself if nobody else. He had to see his mistakes and admit them, and above all not miss any of them.
It’s a funny kind of thing, he thought, moving the newspaper so it shielded his face. It wasn’t as if he’d acted on the spur of the moment. He’d known for some time he was going to kill Paul M. Wernitz. He had considered ways and means on what he might call an academic level for quite a while. The fact that Wernitz had forced his hand by suddenly letting it be known he was closing up shop and leaving Smithville, so that he had to use perhaps his least brilliant modus operandi, was unfortunate in one sense but very fortunate in another. Brilliance was likely to be involved, while in a murder at least simplicity and the presence of a natural and obvious suspect—especially if he happened to be an alien employee—was all to the good, if not egotistically so satisfying. He had been surprised himself at how neat the whole thing was—just as he was surprised now at how easy it was to carry on as if there were nothing at all on his mind. He heard himself listening and talking as much as he ever talked while he was trying to read the paper at the breakfast table. It was almost as if he were two people existing in one body. The only thing to watch, really, was that one didn’t get confused with the other.
He turned the page of the paper, realizing that the page he was apparently so engrossed in had nothing on it but an ad for a special sale of women’s fur coats. He turned to the financial reports. That was something he could be legitimately engrossed in, if anybody happened to notice.
Janey was a mistake. But Janey was only secondary, an effect following a cause, and the cause was his real mistake. It was just a piece of damned luck, is all it was, he told himself. But it wasn’t true, and he knew it. If he had let the blasted thing stay where it was, he wouldn’t have had any bad luck to complain about. Up to that point, everything was okay. Nobody could trace the calls he put in to get the service mechanics out of the place and off to the farthest corners of the county. He’d figured them out with a map, and gone to each place, to see for certain that Wernitz owned the machines there, get the names of the people who’d call in, and even listen to them to see what they’d say when they did call. He’d made a mistake about Heron Point, not checking up to find out it was closing down the day before. But even that had worked out all right, too, because Buzz Rodriguez who took the call hadn’t remembered, either, until he was halfway there, so that he got to the basement only in time to get
a crack on his head, too. All that, with the one slight mistake that hadn’t mattered, had been carefully worked out and skillfully done.
The thing to do now was to sit tight; and there was one little trouble. He frowned down again at the small print of the stock market listings before he could catch himself. He had to get the thing he’d made the stupid mistake, his only serious mistake, of picking up off the dirt floor of Wernitz’s cellar.
I don’t know why the hell it worries me the way it does. He could say that again, the way he’d said it to himself when he’d almost nicked his jawbone shaving. The chances were a hundred to one, a thousand to one more likely, that nobody but himself knew anything about it, or could even connect him with Wernitz by means of it.
Wernitz was close-mouthed, solitary in a psychotic degree. Afraid of the dark, blinding himself with glaring white lights, superstitious as a root-and-clay painted aborigine clutching on to his tribal talisman. But a talisman lost potency if other tribesmen knew about it. Even Achilles probably never went around bragging about his heel.
He quit reading the market reports and took another swallow of coffee. It was cold now, but he hardly noticed it. The palms of his hands had broken out in cold sweat. He unobtrusively wiped them off on the napkin in his lap. A hundred to one or a thousand to one, he had to get Wernitz’s talisman back, the gold-washed lucky quarter that he could have known Wernitz would reach for when the lights went off, to hold in his hand to come down into the shadow-filled basement and put in a new fuse. It must have been in his hand, to fly out and land, glittering like an evil eye there on the dirt floor when the iron bar came down on the eggshell skull.
Why did I have to pick it up? Why didn’t I leave it there?
He knew the answer to that, too. It had appealed to a kind of grisly sense of ironic relief, all of a sudden. It had even been grimly comic. “Whoever called this thing a lucky piece?” Wernitz had been almost fanatically dependent on it.
He took the last bite of his toast and the last sip of cold coffee. It was entirely by accident he’d learned about it himself. Some perfectly minor and unimportant piece of business that needed Wernitz’s signature. He had said yes, in the clipped laconic way of speaking he had, and then put his hand in his pocket, taken something out, put it on the table under his hand and peered at it. He said yes again. Then, as he’d started to put it back in his pocket his elbow struck the chair and the thing fell on the floor. He went after it in a flash. It was the gilded quarter. Funny, all of it, in one way, but not in another. Not the way Wernitz’s dry face had broken out with sweat as he retrieved it and put it back in his pocket. “No,” he said then.
“I don’t sign.” And he didn’t. “Bad luck,” he said. That finished it. And as a matter of fact, it had turned out that way. He’d been right for whatever wrong reason.
And now the thing had dropped on another floor. If he believed in bad luck he might well break out into sweat again. He wiped his palms again on his napkin, though there was no need to. He was a damn fool for ever picking it up off the dirt floor, a worse fool for putting it in his trousers pocket just for the ironic devil of it—as well as to have it where nobody cleaning his desk or dresser drawer might come across it and wonder—but the worst stupidity of all was forgetting it and reaching in his pocket and dropping it in the slot machine—and never thinking about it until it came rolling along across the floor until Connie put her foot out and stepped on it.
I should have got hold of it then, he thought. He could easily have done it. If, in fact, he had simply said, “That’s mine,” nobody would ever have thought of it a second time. Instead, it had suddenly seemed a good idea to be rid of it, get it away from him so he wouldn’t make another mistake of the same kind. It wasn’t until it was in Janey’s bag—or not even then, not until she burst into tears and was running past him up the steps—that he realized if the hundred-to-one chance came through it was the only thing that could tie him to Wernitz’s house and the Wernitz murder.
His palms were clammy and moist again.
I’ve got to get it. As he got up from the breakfast table he knew that as clearly as he knew the sun was shining outside and that Paul M. Wernitz was dead, in the infinite darkness of eternity. Not that he was superstitious, even if the thing did seem suddenly imbued with a malignant animate perversity all its own. Otherwise how had it got into the tube or into the jack pot? That was another hundred-to-one Chance. Why hadn’t it gone down to the box behind, and lain there, safe and hidden, until a month later when they emptied the box, and nobody would be there to see it, or notice it, or remember anything about it? It looked like a conscious chain of animus, trying to get him all tangled up in what he knew was the perfect crime.
He moved his chair back from the table. Janey Blake had it now, and he had to get it. He couldn’t afford to take any chances now, not even a hundred-to-one chance, or a thousand-to-one. He’d figured all the chances, prepared for them intelligently and carefully. This was an off-chance he could never have foreseen. And he had to move fast. Not even Janey Blake, not Janey or anybody, was going to stand in his way. He knew more about Janey now. He was prepared to deal with her if he had to. What was Janey or Janey’s life even when his own was hanging precariously in the balance?
ELEVEN
WHEN GUS BLAKE got downstairs his breakfast was on the side of the gas stove keeping warm for him, the percolator in front of his place set on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth on the counter in front of the window. Janey and little Jane were through, their dishes washed and on the drain board to dry. He could see them through the window in the back yard, Janey in a red sweater, the sleeves pushed up above her elbows, settling the little Dane in her white picket play pen with her sandbox, building-blocks, and doll’s house and the narrow street Janey had constructed among them so she could wheel her dolls around. She was bundled up in a blue snow suit and white hood and mittens, rosy-cheeked and laughing in the crisp November morning. Gus watched her tumble and right herself, and set off to her busy work at the sandbox. He smiled and poured himself a cup of coffee.
I’m a hell of a father, he thought. It was supposed to be his job to get up in the morning while Janey got breakfast and put little Jane out in her yard so Janey could get on with her own busy work, but it had been over a month since he’d done it. He’d been sweating over the Centennial edition half the nights, and now with the Wernitz business on top of all of it he’d been pressed even harder. And it wasn’t only the Wernitz business. He poured another cup of coffee, got his plate from the stove, and sat down at the counter table, his eye still on the yard.
He was worried about Janey. She wasn’t acting like herself at all, except when she was with the little Dane. She was all right when she was with her, but not with anybody else. Not with him, certainly. It had been slowly dawning on him for a week or so. He watched her catch the rubber ball little Jane threw from the sandbox and toss it back. She was shaking her head then, shivering, pretending she was cold, and running back toward the steps, laughing and waving back at the little Dane. Almost at the brick walk by the side of the house she stopped abruptly, looking down at the ground. Gus craned his neck to see what it was. He thought, Oh, hell. It was a bare damp place where the water from the downspout at the corner of the house collected, that he’d promised to fix and never got around to. It hadn’t rained for three days. The little Dane wasn’t likely to get her feet muddy or slip on it—not when she was in her pen, at least.
Janey was still looking at it. He saw her go over and pull four thin bamboo stakes out of a clump of chrysanthemums in the side border, and start back to the bare patch in the grass. She turned then and looked up at the house, at the upper windows, before she looked at the kitchen window and saw him. He grinned and waved, but she didn’t smile back. She just stood there a moment, tossed the stakes over on the border again, brushed her hands lightly together, and came on toward the back door, looking around casually as she came. Gus swore a little. He’d get somebody to c
ome and fix the blasted drainpipe and patch up the triple-blasted lawn if that was what she was sore about. Or he’d go do it himself. There was probably grass seed in the garden box in the basement. This was the one place he’d ever lived in or worked in where what you needed any given moment was right there where it was supposed to be.
Now if Janey could only read and write, she’d be a hell of a lot more use around the Gazette than Connie Maynard or anybody else he could think of just offhand. He watched her run back and pick up the little Dane, who’d pitched over with her doll buggy and was yelling bloody murder one second and laughing her head off the next. He sat down again and looked at his watch. It was time to be shoving, but he had to talk to Janey. She’d left the play pen and gone down toward the end of the yard, just sort of mooning around, he thought irritably; it wasn’t quite the weather to be out looking for crocuses or whatever, with only a light sweater on. Then suddenly it struck Gus Blake that she wasn’t coming in. Something else struck him at the same time, a non sequitur in one sense, sequitur as hell in another. It was something Connie Maynard had said as they’d got to her house when he drove home with her at two-thirty that morning. He could still hear her saying it.
“Gus—I don’t want to louse up any of your illusions, precious, but hasn’t it ever occurred to you that maybe your Janey just a little tiny bit regrets not marrying Orvie Rogers instead of you? She’d have a cook and maids and clothes and she wouldn’t have to get up and cook your breakfast and wash your clothes. You’re wonderful, of course, dear, and amusing and terribly intelligent—but it’s all on a special level that Janey must find pretty rotten dull at times—if you don’t mind my saying so. After all, she’s young and she could easily like to have a little fun once in a while. But I’m sorry, angel. I shouldn’t have said it. But you are a little self-centered, aren’t you? I mean—”