The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Yeah.”

  He sprang to his feet, and for a man with a game leg he was remarkably agile. I backed off, but he didn’t come at me. He turned and hobbled off toward his kitchen, saying over his shoulder, “Wanna beer?”

  “Yeah,” I said, taking a deep breath.

  While he was engaged in the icebox I took stock of his living room, a tacky arrangement of second-hand items which could never have had any taste to begin with and now, in the absence of feminine management, had all gone to seed. Two atrocious Sears Roebuck murals, one a Rocky Mountain landscape, the other a trite New England pastorale, covered most of the available wall space. The only other picture in the room was a framed photograph, propped atop a mahogany chifforobe, of a young woman flanked by two small boys, towheads slightly cross-eyed. The ex-Mrs. Dall? All three of them were simple examples of Newton County homeliness, the mother especially, although none of them were quite as much an eyesore as Dall. In one corner of the room stood the inevitable television set, a twenty-one-inch Motorola. In another corner of the room was—wonder of wonders!—a bookcase. It was a small three-shelf affair made of black tin and brass wire, but what surprised me was that it was there at all. I inspected its contents. A number of police manuals; Sykes’s Crime and Society, Fink’s Causes of Crime, Blackstone’s Of Public Wrongs; Bolitho on Murder for Profit, Fisher on Detection, Hill on Sadists, Quentin Reynolds’ Headquarters, W. T. Brannon’s Crooked Cops. Sherlock Holmes, complete, and Ian Fleming, complete. The Fanny Farmer Cook Book. Manual of Small Arms. Manual of Large Arms. Dittman’s Insanity Laws. Les Giblin’s How You Can Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People. Judo, Jiu-jitsu and Karate. Vanderbilt’s Etiquette. Lindgren’s How to Live with Yourself and Like it. Palmer’s Understanding Other People. Making the Most of Your Face. How to Spot Card Sharps and Their Methods. How to Make Psychology Work for You. Sewing Made Simple. How to Train Dogs and Win Their Love. And others.

  Dall returned and placed two pilseners of beer down on an issue of Gun on the coffee table. I indicated his little library and asked, “Have you read all this stuff?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You want to sit in here or you want to go out on the porch?”

  “The porch,” I said. The afternoon was hotter than ever now; the interior of his small house was close and stuffy.

  He handed me a pilsener. “Here’s yourn,” he said.

  “Urine?” I said, my eyebrows arched.

  “Yours, dammit,” he said. We went outside and sat down in a couple of old rush-seat straight chairs on the porch. He said, “You’re a pain in the butt, Nub boy. You’re a real smarty-pants.”

  “Wasn’t I always?”

  “Yeah, I guess you was, at that. It’s a marvel to me how come you never got took down a peg.”

  “I’m so little there aren’t any more pegs to take me down to.”

  “Somebody ought to of knocked the everlastin horse-hockey out of you long ago.”

  “You tried,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah,” he said. We became silent. We drank our beer and watched a few cars pass down the street.

  After a while I observed, “Awfully hot for April.”

  He was squinting at the sky. “Might come a rain fore too long,” he said. Then he corrected me. “May,” he said. “Today is May Day.”

  I attempted some ice-breaking reminiscence. “Remember that time we had the Maypole dance in the seventh grade at West Side, and you got all hung up with Sissy Portis, and—”

  “I don’t rightly recall,” he said uncordially, so I shut up. Neither of us spoke for several minutes. Then in the tone of a pawnbroker or a loan shark, he said, “Well, what can I do for you?”

  “Dall, let’s talk about Margaret,” I entreated. Sure, he uttered, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his hands in a gesture of compliance. I began: “You said the other day that you don’t believe that she is crazy or anything, but I just wonder if she might’ve done anything…well, peculiar, you know, when you were around her.”

  “I don’t rightly recall,” he said, but then his face assumed a recollective expression, and after a moment’s thought he said, “Well, there was this time once when she was screwin her face all up—like this—like she had a bad toothache, and I asked her what in tarnation was the matter, and she just said she was writin a letter on the roof of her mouth with her tongue. But I don’t reckon that was so awful crazy. I seen worse.”

  “Anything else?”

  He pondered. “Aw, yeah, there was one other time. She come over here for supper one night—I invited her—and we was eatin spaghetti, cause that’s about the only thing I’m any good at fixin, and she took one of these long spaghettas—” he spread his hands two feet apart “—and tilted her head back and swallowed it whole like it was a snake or somethin, thout even chewin it.” He paused, reflectively, then went on. “But that don’t mean she’s crazy. Marge is a real bright old girl, she’s got all her marbles far as I’m concerned. Yeah, Nub, she knows all the answers.”

  After he had refilled our pilseners with beer, he seemed to open up on the subject, and we spent some time discussing the intellect and personality of Margaret Austin. We agreed that considering how crazy the mother was, there was always a possibility that such lunacy could be either hereditary or contagious, or that living in the same house with that woman for twenty-seven years would certainly have some damaging effect. Be that as it may, Dall remained convinced that Margaret was of such strong fiber that she had immured herself from the mother, had immunized herself against her.

  “Six or seven years back, when she finished out at the junior college,” Dall said, “she found out that she couldn’t get no scholarship to go on and do the other two years somewhere else—she told me she had wanted to go up to the University cause that’s where you was at—but her mother couldn’t afford to send her there, or anyway her mother’d said she couldn’t afford to send her up to Fayetteville, so Margaret had to get herself a job, and she got her one as a file clerk in one of them insurance offices downtown, and she figgered she’d move out of that goddamn house and get her a room of her own somewheres, so she did, but all she could afford out of what little salary she got was this closet-sized little hole in some old boardin house up on Louisiana Street, and she lived there in that place for near bout three months, while all that time her momma kept callin her up on the phone and sayin, ‘Why don’t you just save your money by living here with us?’ and Marge did her level best not to go back, but finally she figgered she wouldn’t never have no spare money as long as she had to pay rent and all, so finally she gave it up and went on back home.

  “Bout a year after that she took a notion to try and see if she couldn’t make out in some big city like New York. So she asked her mother to loan her a little money, just a hundred dollars or so, for the train ticket and to get started on and all, but her mother wouldn’t do it. Well, she asked her stepdaddy, Mr. Polk, and he thought it was a good idee and all, but he just didn’t have that much spare cash. She told im she’d work hard and pay im back in no time at all, but her momma said New York was ‘fraught with dangers’—that’s the way she put it, fraught with dangers—and there was just too many risks involved. So there just wasn’t a blessed thing that Marge could do. She couldn’t even get a bank loan. She’d lost that file clerk job, so she worked for a while in a supermarket, but never did learn how to operate the cash register. Finally she got that job at Alexander’s Shoe Shoppe, and somehow managed to keep it for five years. Trouble was, it didn’t hardly pay enough to cover her share of the groceries, and her clothes and all.

  “The day she told me about this, I offered to loan her a hundred or whatever she needed to get to New York on, and she said that was awful nice of me and she would keep it in mind, but she didn’t think much about New York any more, and even if she did go up there, her mother would keep tryin to get her back home, and besides, now that she had this part in Slater’s play, she didn’t really
care to go to New York anyway. What she meant was, I guess, was that Slater was more interestin to her than New York would be.”

  What hope, I asked Dall, had Margaret held out for Slater? If it were true that she was involved with him, or had been involved with him, did she think he would send her to New York to be in the theater? Or what?

  Dall was silent. He stared reflectively at the dregs of beer in the bottom of his glass. Then in a subdued tone he mumbled, “I think maybe Slater was fixin to marry her.”

  “What?” I said, astounded. “But what about his wife?”

  “Aw, she’s kind of pore and sickly, been in a wheelchair for God knows how long, and I reckon Slater was countin on her not lastin much longer.” Dall looked at me sideways and smirked mischievously. “Or maybe,” he said, “if Mrs. Slater lasted much longer, maybe Mr. Slater would of found some way to kind of dispose of her. Who knows?”

  Chapter twenty-five

  Apparently there remained a good deal of explaining for Dall to do, and he, sensing this, broke down and invited me to have supper with him. He served spaghetti—properly al dente, I was amazed to notice—and a sauce he had made himself, along with a chef’s salad and plenty of beer. Between mouthfuls—or during them, all too often—he divulged most of what he knew.

  Preambling his disclosures, he said, “You mention one word of this to anybody, and I’ll whup the daylights out of you.” I gave him my oath.

  He had visited the Slater rancho on several occasions, he explained. The first time had been shortly after Margaret won the part in Slater’s new play, and she wanted her “best friend,” as she referred to Dall, to meet the playwright-director who had given her the role. Dall spent an afternoon with them out there getting acquainted with Slater. When they arrived Slater kissed Margaret. “It was just one of them how-do-you-do kisses,” Dall said, “but it kind of took me by surprise, so next time I got a chance I asked Margaret if Slater was on the make, and she said he was just being ‘affectionately avuncular,’ but that sounded pretty goddamn fishy to me, whatever it meant, and anyway he’s the kind of guy has a look on his face all the time like he was about to put his hand up somebody’s dress, you know what I mean, so right then and there I got kind of suspicious, and I aint stopped bein suspicious yet.”

  Slater, Dall opined, was a somewhat cocksure and smart-alecky individual, and had been rather condescending in his manner toward Dall. “Just like you,” Dall said. “By God, yes, I been tryin to think who he reminds me of. Just as smart-alecky as you.” He had heard of Slater before, had seen his picture in the paper a couple of times, but wasn’t prepared for what he would see in person. “You think I’m ugly?” Dall said to me. “Lordalmighty!” And he attempted to describe him, the bright red face, those bulging eyes, the crooked porcine nose, the slick sparse hair, the neckless head: a bestial fright, yet somehow having an emanation of gentility and superiority, enhanced by his clothes, the tweedy coat, the tieless blue silk shirt.

  “He’s one of them free-thinkers,” Dall stated. “Not a communist or anything, but pretty damn radical, and he’s always pokin fun at me, just like you. I cant say I blame him, cause I’m a pretty easy feller to poke fun at, but it does kind of rile me, sometimes, when he says things like, ‘Well, Sergeant, have you nabbed your quota of shoplifters today?’ or ‘Well, Sergeant, how’s your electric cattle-prod working these days?’ or when he calls me ‘the long leg of the law’ and crap like that. One day he was baitin me about somethin or other when Margaret spoke up—first time I’d ever heard her speak up without bein spoke to first, and it surprised me—she spoke up and said, ‘Jimmy, why don’t you leave Doyle alone?’ Embarrassin.

  “Anyway, I begun to get the notion that he was playin around with her, you know, and maybe even getttn into bed with her—long about that time she started going out there to spend the night, and Mrs. Slater tied down to a wheelchair and all, no tellin what kind of mischief they was up to. I’d ast Margaret if Slater was sparkin or spoonin with her, but she’d never say for sure. But one day me and her was talkin, and all of a sudden she says, ‘Now, let me ask you a question for a change’ and I said sure, anything, so she looks at me in this funny way, and says ‘What would you think if I were to marry Jimmy?’ Well, it took me a minute to get up off the floor, and then I said it wasn’t none of my business who she married, but if she wanted my personal opinion, I thought Slater was a pretty good old boy, smart and lively, but I didn’t much see how she could be happy with somebody twenty years older. Then it hit me that I ought to ask her how Slater aimed to marry her if he already had a wife, and she just said that Ethel Slater wasn’t expected to live much longer. Well, I’ve seen Mrs. Slater myself a couple of times, and unless she’s got a secret disease or somethin, she’s still gonna be rollin up and down the halls in that wheelchair when you and me both are long dead and gone.”

  Dall wasn’t so sure about Slater, but he had a hunch, and he had been keeping his eye peeled, waiting to make a move at the first sign of any perfidy on Slater’s part. Lately, for the past couple of weeks, there had been no new developments. Margaret no longer spoke of any potential marriage with Slater, and Dall began to suspect that she might have been making the whole story up—or imagining it, or simply saying it to poke fun at Dall. Still he felt a deep sense of personal guilt, because, after all, he had talked Margaret into joining the theater group in the first place, and he was, in a sense, responsible for her involvement with Slater. Now Dall had only one objective: to find some way, short of marrying her off to Slater, of getting her permanently away from her mother and out of that awful old house. He hoped I would help him.

  How? He suggested that I “take up” with her. By that I assumed he meant the same thing she had meant: set up cohabitation in some local hotel or motel. He said he didn’t care what I did with her, so long as I got her away from her mother. I reminded him that I was a married man. He snorted derisively and reminded me that I was not a very happily married man. I said I didn’t know if I could “take up” with her very comfortably, because if it were true that she had been—or perhaps still was—potentially self-destructive, then I would be to blame if anything happened to her during the time we were staying together. He replied that if I were very nice to her, and showed her a lot of attention, she wouldn’t even contemplate any self-destructive act.

  I asked him why he didn’t “take up” with her himself; he seemed so absorbed with her already and involved in her life. He reminded me that he was a policeman and just doing his duty as the law gave him the light to see that duty, etc. Besides, he had already tried. For a period of one week back in March, he explained, shortly after he had met her and shortly before she tried out for the play, she had stayed at his house. He was trying to get her away from her mother. It didn’t work. The mother made such a nuisance of herself, by calling the police station every day to ask them what luck they had had in finding her kidnaped daughter, that finally he had had to let her go back. But it had been a nice week. Dall saw the way I was looking at him, and he hastened to explain that he had been a complete gentleman—sleeping on the sofa and letting her have the bedroom. Flirting was out of the question.

  “When I think of her,” he said, “I remember that old house a little ways up Viney Creek from where your grandmaw lives in Parthenon, you know that old brick house, it’s the only brick house in that part of Newton County, and even though it’s old it’s got a kind of forever-new look to it, but the shutters is always closed and you never can see who lives there. Well, that’s Margaret.”

  The ringing of the telephone followed this metaphorical speculation.

  “Yeah?” he grunted into it, annoyed. Then he said, “This is Hawkins.” Then he clamped his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered to me, “Slater!” “Yeah,” he said, listening to the phone. “No foolin?” he said to the phone. “Well, how about that!” he said. Then he said, “No, I haven’t seen her since…since last Monday afternoon, it was. But I called her up early yesterday mornin
g, though, so I know she was there then.” A pause. “Yeah.” Another pause. “Yeah, well, that’s for sure.” Then: “She’s just bound to turn up before then.” And finally: “Well, look, let me hunt around some, and then I’ll call you back later, okay?” Then he hung up.

  “That was Slater,” he said to me. “He says Margaret didn’t come to rehearsals yesterday afternoon or this afternoon either, and he’s been callin her house ever since last night, but there’s not any answer. He’s awful worried that somethin has happened to her, and the play is supposed to open tomorrow night, and of course she’s got to be there for the opening.” He scratched his head, looking awful worried himself. “I wonder where the hell she could be. When did you see her last?”

  “Yesterday morning,” I said.

  “Did she say anything about where she was going or anything?”

  “No, but as I was leaving, her mother was taking her off to a psychiatrist, and that’s the last I saw of her.”

  Taking her off to a what?”

  “A psychiatrist. You know. Fellow named Dr. Ashley.”

  Dall gave me a queer look. “Ashley aint no psychiatrist,” he said quietly in a tone of disgust. “He’s a preacher.”

  Aha. Fancy that. Typical of the mother, that she would put the needs of the soul before the needs of the emotions. “Oh well,” I said. “Mrs. Austin took her off to see him, and that’s the last I saw of her.”

  “How come you didn’t mention this before?”

  “Well, I was going to, but then you started talking about Slater, and about how Margaret is a brick house in Parthenon and all that stuff, so I—”

  “Nub, just tell me how come was it her mother took her to see that preacher. Margaret aint religious.”

  “She was upset. Very upset.”

  “Who? Margaret?”

  “Her mother.”

  “Yeah? How come?”

  “Margaret messed up her room.”