Understudy for Death

by Charles Willeford

  If I had been the kind of reporter who is satisfied with secondhand information, I could have written enough copy to satisfy the M.E. every night without leaving my desk. Lake Springs was too small to support any full-time press agents, but I sometimes thought that every resident of the city spent all of his waking hours scheming of a way to get his name into the paper. If an old lady planned a weekend visit to a cousin in Orlando she would phone this earthshaking event in to the paper. And what was worse; if the item wasn’t printed she would call and again and demand to know why it wasn’t printed. Back during the hula-hoop craze, I had had fifteen calls one evening from idiotic mothers—each of them claiming the world endurance record in hoop-spinning for their insufferably well-coordinated brats!

  By six that evening I had turned over enough copy to Harris for the Monday A.M. edition to ease my conscience. The weekly stipend, small as it was, that Mrs. Mosby handed me every Saturday, always had the effect of making me do a little more work than I did on weeknights. In this respect, I was like the majority of the reporters I had known and talked to about this extra payday effort.

  All of us had a deep-seated but definite fear of being fired and blackballed—and ending up as an instructor of journalism at a junior college somewhere. This was a recurrent dream that every active reporter had to learn to live with. More than one night I had awakened from a dead slumber, perspiring, trembling and afraid, caught up in a vivid nightmare of screaming, pimply, junior college students.

  To sustain myself for another three hours I sent Blake, the Negro office boy, out for a container of coffee and two hamburgers. I worked until nine on my first article for the suicide series. This was a general piece on suicide, well-larded with statistics, both real and imagined, and I thought it read fairly well. With Mrs. Mosby’s help I dug through the negative morgue, looking for a photograph gruesome enough—that still wouldn’t offend anybody—to illustrate the article.

  There weren’t any decent shots of suicides, but I had a brilliant idea. There was an excellent art shot of a little girl bawling that one of the photographers had taken at Bersen’s Department Store a few years back. Actually, the little girl was crying because her mother had wanted her to sit in Santa Claus’ lap. But our readers were unaware of that fact.

  I cropped the 4 x 6 proof to show just the tearful eyes, runny nose, and anguished, open mouth, and asked Mrs. Mosby to have it blown up to a six-column cut. With a nice overline such as, WHY DID MY DADDY KILL HIMSELF?, very few readers would be able to ignore the accompanying article…

  Feeling well-pleased with myself I left the office, bought a pint of cheap bourbon at a package store, and drove to Mr. Jack Huneker’s residence. Either Jack Huneker held the key to his wife’s death or he didn’t, and the only way to find out was to pump him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I parked across from the Huneker residence and opened my bottle to take a nip before crossing the street. I changed my mind about the drink once the seal was broken, however, and replaced the pint in my jacket pocket. I had purchased Old Indian, a very cheap brand, and I thought it would be judicious to offer the first drink to Jack Huneker so he could take the fusel oil off the top.

  There was a view of the black lake beyond Huneker’s house and, where his lawn swooped down to the beach, there was a single pole light burning above his white, private boat dock. The Venetian blinds were down over the picture window facing the street, but some light shone through, and as I approached the narrow front porch I could hear dance music and the voice of a sports announcer competing against each other.

  The bicycle and toys were no longer on the porch. The front door was open, and through the aluminum screened door I looked into the living room which was lighted by a standing floor lamp and the blue television screen. For a moment, I hesitated, not seeing Huneker, and then I pushed the buzzer and waited.

  Huneker answered, calling from the depths of the house: “Just a minute!”

  And when he called, in a deep monotone, I had a momentary feeling of perplexing panic. I wanted to bolt and say the hell with it. My visit, I felt, was not only purposeless but an invasion of the man’s personal tragedy. At last, however, Huneker came to the door, and switched on the overhead porchlight from inside, activating a flutter of slumbering moths. He was a big man with dark curling hair, and a square, blunt-featured face in need of a shave. He wore a pair of gray wash-pants, sandals without socks, and a blue silk, short-sleeved sport shirt. There was a four-inch band of black silk basted onto the short left sleeve. In my sudden confusion I still had presence of mind, and I made a mental note of this mourning band. It was ludicrous, but oddly touching, to see a mourning band on a shiny electric blue sport shirt. This point would make good copy. Thinking this, I was ashamed…

  “Sorry you had to wait,” Huneker said, raising a plate of sandwiches he held in his right hand. “I was in the kitchen.”

  “My name is Hudson.” I took the pint out of my jacket. “I was in the neighborhood, and I thought I’d drop by and offer you a drink.”

  “That’s a switch,” he said mordantly, eyeing the bottle. “I’ve been overrun with neighbors the last couple of days bringing me food.” He smoothed his hair with his free hand. “They must think I’m starving or something; me with a freezerful of steaks.”

  “It’s an old Southern custom to bring food when there’s been a death in the family, Mr. Huneker.”

  “I remember you now,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “You’re a reporter. I saw you on the night—” He turned to put the plate down on the foyer table, and I noticed he was a little unsteady on his feet. “You can get the hell out of here!”

  “Sure. I don’t have any business here, and I apologize. Your wife just happened to be a friend of mine, and I only dropped around to pay my respects. Good night, Mr. Huneker.” As I turned away he unlatched the screen, door and pushed it open.

  “Just a minute, Hudson. You don’t have to get so damned huffy. At least you offered me a drink. Come in and I’ll buy you one.”

  I followed him into the living room. An announcer talked rapidly as he described a basketball game; his voice came from a small, red radio on top of the television set. The picture of the TV set was on, but not the sound, and cowboys galloped quietly across the scene. The music I had heard from outside issued from three strategically placed speakers, and I recognized the slow melody as one of Jackie Gleason’s arrangements.

  Huneker had had several, I figured, but he marched resolutely to the rattan bar in front of the imitation fireplace, and spoke over his shoulder. “What’ll you have? Name it, and I’ve got it.”

  “Bourbon and water.”

  “Then I guess you’ll settle for Jack Daniel. Black label,” he added, as he lifted the bottle.

  “You bet.” I sat down on the divan without being asked.

  “How come you just happened to drop around tonight?” Huneker frowned, as he handed me a tall one. “I don’t know you, Hudson, and the story’s all over with.”

  “I knew Marion fairly well,” I lied. “We were in the writing class together, at the Adult Education Center.”

  “Oh!” He nodded, apparently satisfied. “That’s a little different, then. Marion had a lot of friends here, more’n I knew she had. She told me she was taking some kind of night school course but I didn’t know it was writing till I saw it in the paper. That’s the kind of girl Marion was, always doing something different…but not for very long. That was her main trouble, boredom, and not sticking to anything long enough to like it. All this crap.” He shook the ice in his half empty glass to indicate the room or the fact that his glass was half empty. “Too much for her maybe.” He drained the rest, put two fresh ice cubes in the glass, and added whiskey.

  “You ought to put a little water in that,” I suggested.

  “Yes, I suppose I should,” he said reflectively, sitting down across the cocktail table from me in a deep chair. “But I like the heavy taste. It’s beginning to get to me anyway, so I
won’t have another till you finish yours…Take all night if you want; I didn’t ask you to slug it. Here,” he pushed the plate of sandwiches toward me. “Take one. Ham and cheese, with plenty of hot mustard.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Huneker bit greedily into a thick sandwich, and talked with his mouth full. “I didn’t eat nothin’ all day. Then I figured I’d better eat something whether I was hungry or not. The neighbors brought all kinds of stuff over; a whole ham, a big pot of baked beans. There’s a couple of pies and a chocolate cake in the kitchen if you don’t want a sandwich.”

  “The only reason I stopped,” I said, “was due to not seeing any cars parked out in front. If the house had been full of people, I’d’ve come by another time.”

  “There were all kinds of people here yesterday, and I didn’t know half of ’em, just like I don’t know you. But I kind of eased ’em all out. Thought I wanted to be alone. But I guess I’m not quite ready to be alone, after all.”

  Watching him closely to see what kind of reaction I would get, I said: “The choice wasn’t really yours, Mr. Huneker.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. Hudson? That’s like the car, right?”

  I nodded. “The same.”

  “Catholic?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “That’s me.” He wiped his mouth with the back of a hairy hand. “I’m not really a Catholic, Hudson. Marion refused to marry me until I took instructions, and I joined later on just to keep her mouth from flapping about it. But I never believed in it.”

  “You had an official Requiem Mass—”

  “That was for the benefit of her soul.” He smiled sardonically. “She would’ve wanted it that way. And it’ll probably cost me a stained glass window, too.” He shrugged indifferently. “But that can be deducted.”

  “Here,” I said, putting my pint on the coffee table. “Have one on me.”

  Huneker picked up the bottle and shook his head sadly as he read the label. “Old Indian…Jesus! I haven’t seen any of this stuff in years. But I used to drink it; I’ve drunk plenty of it! This stuff’ll kill you in the morning, Hudson.”

  “I know. But you don’t buy Jack Daniel’s whiskey on a reporter’s salary.”

  “You’re getting by, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m getting by.”

  “Then don’t bitch. Married?”

  “Yes, one child. A boy.”

  “My boy was eight. Tony.”

  “We call our son Buddy, but his real name is Theodore, after my wife’s father. A hell of a name, Theodore.”

  “You could call him Ted.”

  “Then the other kids would call him Teddy, and I prefer Buddy.”

  “You’re a Southerner, aren’t you, Hudson?”

  “This is my hometown, and I know all the words to Dixie.”

  “Tell me something,” he said seriously, frowning, and leaning forward in his chair. “Why in the hell do they call so many of the boys Bubba down here? I got three different men working for me named Bubba!”

  I laughed at his earnestness. “It’s usually a boy from a good-sized family, especially an older boy with two or three younger sisters. Young girls have a tendency to lisp more than young boys, and they call their older brother Bubba because they can’t say Brother. That’s all. And the name Junior isn’t popular in the South, so many Juniors are also called Bubba.”

  “I don’t give a damn what they call each other down here. I’m only making conversation; you know that, don’t you?” He shook his head, rattled the ice in his empty glass.

  “Suits me. I haven’t got anything else to do.”

  “Fine. Believe I will try some of your Old Indian, but for this stuff I will add a little water!”

  “It’s even better with Coca-Cola. Then you can hardly taste it.”

  Huneker smiled. “You’re all right, Hudson. Give me your glass and I’ll freshen it. With Jack Daniel’s, not the Old Indian.”

  As Huneker replenished the glasses I realized that there was something about the man that I liked. He was more human, now, than he had been on the night of his wife’s death. Talking to the detective, he had been cool and collected, he had shown no emotion whatsoever. I had attributed his assured manner to numbness at the time, but now—maybe because he had had a few drinks—he seemed like any normal guy who was a little lonely when the wife was away for a few days.

  “I’d better slow down a little,” he said, after a perfunctory taste of the Old Indian and water. He wet his lips, put the glass down, and shoved it away from him. “I keep trying to think about something else, anything else, but it isn’t easy.” He looked at me belligerently, and lifted his square prognathic chin. “If you’re like everybody else around town, you’ve got some kind of a theory, or real reason why my wife killed herself—haven’t you?”

  “No, not really,” I said easily, “except that she may have killed herself because she found out about you and Helen Devereaux.”

  I fully expected him to take a swing at me, after a remark like that; but I didn’t mind a fight, and I was confident that I could take him without too much trouble. And beside, a good rough-and-tumble might have cheered the poor devil up considerably. His reaction was the opposite of what I expected, however. The corners of his mouth turned down, and he looked at me with puzzled bewilderment.

  “That’s a damned rotten thing to say, Hudson.”

  “You brought it up,” I shrugged indifferently. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Well, no matter what you happen to think, that isn’t true! I’ll tell you exactly what killed Marion. Prosperity. It’s like the difference between drinking good whiskey and Old Indian. Jack Daniel’s and Old Indian are both whiskey, and you can get just as drunk on one as you can on the other. The difference is that when you can afford to drink Jack Daniel you can afford to drink it all the time. But when you have to drink Old Indian, it’s an occasion—and you wouldn’t want it around all the time.”

  “I may be dense, Huneker, but I don’t follow that line of reasoning. If you’re trying to tell me that Marion was an alcoholic, I won’t buy it. I know that she wasn’t.”

  “Maybe I can put it another way.” He shook his head, and pursed his lips in thought. “I’ve been thinking of nothing else for two full days, Hudson. Hell, I haven’t been in bed or slept morn’n an hour or so since it happened, and my head’s going around and around. But now, I think I know most of the answers. Marion wasn’t even close to being an alcoholic—I didn’t mean that. She’d have been better off if she had taken a few too many drinks once in awhile. It helps to blow off steam sometimes, but I may be wrong there, too. But I do know this: the first three years we were married we were happy.

  “We lived in a trailer, and it was a practical way to live, because I was following construction jobs all around the country. Then, after Tony was born, Marion got the idea that a trailer camp was no place to bring up a child. To please her, I eventually got enough dough together to come down here and go into business for myself. As for myself, I liked construction work better, but you’re a married man and you know what a wife’s pressure can do sometimes. Building roads, excavation work, that was my line; I was a heavy equipment operator, and I liked it because I felt like I was doing something worthwhile. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean. So far.”

  “Maybe I can sort it all out. I’m not a good businessman, but I’ve made good money anyway. I don’t have any business education to begin with, just high school, and I didn’t graduate. But perhaps because I didn’t respect my business, I’ve felt contempt for all the money I’ve made right from the start. The more I made, the more reckless I got with it, not giving a damn. And that made me more money again. That’s the secret to my success here, and a lot of people hate my guts for it. I took bids a hell of a lot lower than I should have, but I still made money, and did a good job, too. All of a sudden I had a good reputation, and people started b
uying from me because they knew I didn’t cheat and did a good job on my materials. After the first year and a half I couldn’t handle all of the orders I was getting so I jacked up my prices to cut down the volume. But the stupid bastards were willing to pay the higher prices, so I was forced to expand. It’s all a little crazy…”

  “What’s this got to do with Marion?”

  “She had it too good, that’s all! Too easy, not enough to do; and because I was busy all the time, I bought her presents and gave her a big bank account and all…” He nodded, sipped from his glass. “What I should’ve done was to belt her once in awhile, knock a little sense in her head.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I said disbelievingly.

  “I know it! I’m selling out here, Hudson, lock, stock and barrel. I’m going to buy me a flashy trailer and a good pick-up truck and hit the road; start working with my hands again.”

  “And what about your little girlfriend? Helen?”

  “How’d you happen to find out about her, anyway?” he asked curiously, but I didn’t detect any resentment in his voice.

  “This is a small town; small for a man who gets around the way I do.”

  “Then you must know that Helen is just another bang around town—so why are you trying to make something out of it?”

  “Because of the children, that’s why. When your wife killed herself, that was her right and privilege. But she also killed your children, and that’s a form of feminine revenge. And I’m inclined to think that she was trying to get even with you for stepping out of line. I don’t know what else to think.”