This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Thanks a lot,” David said.

  The man nodded, shifting the noisy gears. “How far you going?”

  “Oh—the next town.”

  “Ryder?”

  David didn’t know if he meant a town or not. He said yes.

  “Have to let you off about a mile this side,” the man said.

  “That’s okay.”

  A police car passed them, a highway patrol car. But judging from the truck’s speedometer, the police car was going no faster than the prescribed rate of fifty miles per hour.

  They discussed apples. The man was an apple farmer. He told David about his orchards and how much better the apples had been two years ago and why. He was a thick-legged, red-faced man of forty or so, and he had a wife and three kids. His life sounded unbelievably uncomplicated and peaceful. David felt a little suspicious of it—as if the fellow were going to turn on him and point to him suddenly and say, “You’re David Kelsey, aren’t you?”

  He let David out at a turn-off, and David walked on. He loosened his collar and took his tie off. Ryder was a tiny town, everything was closed, and David felt highly conspicuous. In a drugstore, he learned that the next bus arrived in twenty-five minutes and went to Schenectady. It stopped just outside the drugstore. David thanked the man and ordered a cup of coffee. He took a Troy paper from the stack by the door, the same one he had delivered to his house on Sundays, removed the comic section and looked at the first page and the second, the third and fourth. Certainly nothing about a murder. But the paper had probably gone to press early last night, or even yesterday afternoon. David finished his coffee, got off the stool, and walked about the little drugstore, staring at lipsticks under a glass counter, at hideous birthday cards in a rack, wondering what he should do, and knowing very well he was not thinking.

  Suppose Wes had just gone into the bedroom, seen Effie unconscious—maybe she’d really been unconscious—and called the police in a panic? Wasn’t that most likely what he had done? David cursed his stupidity in abandoning his car. It would be found immediately, and the police would think David Kelsey was either off his rocker or that he knew he was guilty of murder. His picture would be in the papers, somebody on the Beck’s Brook police force would see it and say, “Why, that’s William Newmester, the man who had the fight with Delaney!”

  David debated going back for his car, hitching a ride back or hiring a taxi. His car was not fifteen miles away.

  The Schenectady bus arrived, and because it was standing there and promised movement, he took it. From Schenectady, he thought, there would be frequent buses to Troy.

  He reached Schenectady a little after twelve, and immediately asked about a bus to Troy. There was a bus at 2:20 P.M. If he wanted something earlier, he could try the trains, the ticket seller told him. David thought he would try the railroad station.

  As he was leaving the bus station, a newsboy approached him with a local extra, and David was about to shake his head when he saw the front page. She lay on the floor, her head awkwardly propped against the leg of a familiar chair. David reached for the paper.

  “That’s ten cents, sir.”

  David’s ears had begun to ring.

  “Ten cents, sir.”

  He pulled some coins out of his pocket and dropped them into the boy’s hand. Then he walked to a bench and sat down. He felt he was going to pass out, and he tried to concentrate for a moment on the figure of a man several yards away. Then he looked down at the paper. DRUNKEN WEEKEND LEADS TO MURDER, said the headline. “The body of Elfrida Brennan, 26, of Froudsburg, N.Y., gave mute testimony . . .” David skimmed down the two columns. Her neck had been broken. Wesley Carmichael, 32, a chemist employed by Cheswick Fabrics, Inc. of Froudsburg, and a friend of Kelsey and the murdered woman, said that there had been an argument, Carmichael had driven away in his car to cool off, and had returned to find Kelsey leaving the house in his car and Miss Brennan dead in the upstairs bedroom.

  David looked at Effie’s picture again, a close-up of her shoulders and her half-averted face, and tried to realize that when the picture was taken she was not alive, and that she had not been alive when he left the house, or that room.

  He got up and walked from the station, crossed a street and kept on walking. Dead by his hand. Like Gerald. But Gerald had not been like this. He had been in his senses then, laughing at Gerald one minute, pushing him, and then Gerald had been dead. But this: he couldn’t remember having hit Effie, certainly couldn’t remember having throttled her or whatever it took to break somebody’s neck. And it was unspeakably more horrible to have caused a woman’s death than a man’s. He dropped down on a bench in a park and passed into a state that was not quite sleeping or fainting, though his thoughts stopped as if some mechanism had been turned off. He sat motionless until his mind filled with an abstract, imageless horror, and he jumped up and walked on. He remembered that the police were looking for him, and now he glanced around the little park and the adjacent sidewalks for a policeman, and if he had seen one, he would have gone up to him and identified himself and collapsed. It was all up, just as he had really known. He had known it from the time the skinny fellow in the motel had asked him if his name was Kelsey. It was another unforgivable blunder of David Kelsey. This time it would be blazoned in every newspaper. This time Annabelle would know all about it.

  David began to run, at first fast and then at a trot. He ran for three or four blocks, then walked, and finally stopped a man and timidly asked where the railroad station was. He walked in the direction the man had pointed.

  Without any forethought and without any plan, he caught a train for New York. He sat in a corner seat, closed his eyes to the green plastic seat back in front of him, and tried once more to think. But he fell asleep and dreamed that he was being sucked down a deep, blackish chasm that was part of a mine. Nothing pushed him, and his descent had nothing to do with gravity, yet he could not stop himself or reach the sides of the chasm to hold on to anything to stop himself, and his drifting, swirling fall produced a nausea that he fought as he had fought against fainting. Then he awakened, not knowing if he had slept two minutes or an hour. His watch said four-ten and meant nothing to him. He saw Annabelle’s face when she learned that Effie Brennan was dead and that she had been slain by David Kelsey. David squirmed in his seat and rubbed his moist palms together. William Neumeister would never have made such a stupid mistake. William Neumeister would have been cool and calm in the face of Effie Brennan’s maudlin protestations of her love. David saw himself again in Mrs. McCartney’s second-floor room, saw himself patiently sweeping the floor, quietly lying on the bed with a book, and very quietly standing by the triad of windows, looking out onto a winter view of leafless black trees. That man, too, was William Neumeister.

  David sat up and reached for the tie in his jacket pocket. He put it on and tied it, and glanced at his reflection in the window to see if it was straight. He would register in some hotel as William Neumeister tonight, and he thought he would choose the Barclay. A last gamble on William Neumeister’s luck. David smiled a bitter smile, and wished he had a cigarette with him. Smoking was permitted in the car he was in. David made a sudden grab for the newspaper, and looked over the double-column story again very carefully, not reading it, but looking for the capital of N of Neumeister. William Neumeister had not been mentioned.

  He got a shave in Grand Central Station, then walked up Lexington to the Barclay and registered. When they asked about his luggage, he said it was checked at Grand Central and that he was going to pick it up later. In his billfold he had seventy-nine dollars. His checkbook now, of course, was useless.

  His room was pleasant, extraordinarily pleasant to David. The heavy door made a deep, reassuring sound when it closed. The window looked on Lexington Avenue, and he was eight stories up. He ordered two martinis.

  He drank the first martini as he strolled about the room.
On the second, he toasted Annabelle and William Neumeister. Lucky William Neumeister! It wasn’t his fault that all this had happened. It was the fault of David Kelsey, that fool who had never done anything right, never had succeeded in anything—except perhaps passing exams in school—David Kelsey whom no girl looked at twice, except a girl like Effie Brennan! David had an impulse to crash his fist through the windowpane, and he turned suddenly away and set down his empty glass.

  “I’ll take a shower, Annabelle,” he said, “and then we’ll go out and have dinner. Where would you like to go?”

  Under the shower, he sang foolishly, as if he were much drunker than he was.

  “William Neumeister,” he said solemnly to himself. Then, “Mr. Neumeister! A letter for you!” He imagined an envelope addressed to William Neumeister in Annabelle’s handwriting. “Mr. Neumeister.” It was a pleasant, honest-sounding name, even when he heard it pronounced “Newmester,” as most people did pronounce it. It was a bit annoying that so many people said, “Is that N-o-y?” if they were starting to write it. Or had so many? David could recall only the police in Beck’s Brook doing that. The memory of Neumeister’s successful hurdling of the Delaney crisis came back, bolstering and cheering.

  David dressed, debated ordering another martini, and decided to get one at the restaurant. “Tomorrow, Annabelle,” he said into the mirror as he combed his hair, “I’ll buy a couple of shirts and maybe even a suit. I can’t go around New York in slacks and an odd jacket, can I? They might not let us in at El Morocco’s.”

  He thought of signing a large check to the hotel in William Neumeister’s name—what else could he do, anyway, if he stayed here very long?—thus getting some extra cash. He could write his bank and tell them to honor checks signed by William Neumeister and to take the money out of Kelsey’s account, Kelsey being a dead duck. It rather pleased him to think of exploiting Kelsey and leaving him flat broke. Or perhaps he could risk signing a large check to Neumeister with Kelsey’s endorsement and, if the hotel said anything, tell them it was another David Kelsey who had signed it. Kelsey wasn’t such a rare name. David lit a cigarette (he had bought some from a machine in the barbershop) and continued strolling about his room. It had occurred to him that the murder story might be forgotten in a few days, a thought that brought delicious relief to his mind. He was beginning to see it objectively: murders, deaths, fatal accidents came by the dozens every week. He had been making entirely too much out of it. Rather, David Kelsey had. William Neumeister knew how to assess such things. David decided it would be quite possible to make out a large check to William Neumeister and sign it David Kelsey. If the hotel wanted to wait a few days before they gave him the money, since it was on a bank in another town, let them take a few days.

  “Tomorrow,” he said briskly. “Tomorrow morning.”

  He went to a small but substantial-looking restaurant off Lexington Avenue, the sort of place where he thought his tweed jacket would not be conspicuously inappropriate, and ordered two martinis. The waiter put them in front of him, but David pushed the salt and pepper shakers to one side and set the other glass opposite him.

  “William Neumeister salutes you,” he said quickly as he lifted his glass. “My darling Annabelle, I’m glad you like the room.”

  28

  The next morning William Neumeister was mentioned in the Tribune. David was breakfasting in bed as he read it, and he read it with a profound sadness and regret. It had all come about through Wes Carmichael. He stated that David Kelsey had said “Call me Bill” the day that Elfrida Brennan was slain, and William Neumeister was the name of the owner of the house on whose steps Gerald Delaney had been killed last January. The police, the paper said, had looked for Neumeister for several weeks following the death of Delaney, but had been unable to find him. Wesley Carmichael—the obtuse ass, even Effie had been brighter—had stated that Kelsey denied knowing Neumeister, yet Carmichael had once seen Kelsey entering his house in Ballard. It was astounding to David that Wes had not yet put one and one together, astounding that nobody else had, and common sense told him that somebody would in a matter of time, perhaps a matter of hours, perhaps now. Annabelle would, David thought. Naturally, the police were now looking for William Neumeister.

  David got out of bed. He had known that his days were numbered, but he had not thought the number would be this small. He got some writing paper from the table in the room and wrote to his insurance company, advising them of the change in the beneficiary of his policy. That had been his number-one morning chore, really his only chore for that day. He would have to buy a long envelope to mail the policy back in, and he put the policy and his letter in his jacket pocket so he would not forget to take care of it when he went out.

  “Neumeister, chin up,” he said into the mirror. “After a shave and a haircut, you’ll feel better.” He turned to smile at his imaginary Annabelle, knowing she was imaginary, and yet feeling, as he had never felt it before, her presence in that empty space between himself and the corner of the room where a beige armchair stood, seeing her more clearly than he had ever seen her before, in a blue robe whose details he could not see, but she was in it and what else mattered? He kissed her before he went into the bathroom to shower.

  It just might be, he thought as he rode down in the elevator, that the police would be entering the hotel lobby now.

  But they were not, and David left his key at the desk and went out.

  He had certainly enough cash to buy a couple of shirts, but he was reluctant to part with his cash. And Neumeister still seemed a far safer name to sign than David Kelsey. He had a brief fantasy of being accosted by the police and of protesting that he was William Neumeister and that David Kelsey was a friend of his. Oh, a sad fellow, Kelsey, always getting himself in messes. But what had Neumeister done to get himself in trouble with the law? Nothing. Sorry, but he could not direct them to David Kelsey, hadn’t heard from David in weeks.

  David would have gone to Brooks Brothers, but the substantial facade of the store suggested to him that they would ask for some identification, a driver’s license, for instance, if he tried to sign a check. Smaller shops were less strict, he thought. At a small shop, he chose two white shirts, one of them the kind that was said to need no ironing, and asked the salesman if he would accept a check. The salesman said he would, if he could show some identification. David pretended to search for his driver’s license in his billfold, though William Neumeister had never had a driver’s license. And suddenly he came upon the little square card from the Beck’s Brook library. He had forgotten to throw it away. A piece of luck—Neumeister luck!

  “I seem to have left my license at home. Will this do?”

  The salesman looked at the card with its countersignature of the librarian, smiled, and nodded. “I guess so. Will there be anything else, sir?”

  “I could also use a suit.”

  The check came to $138.14, and of course was absolutely useless, as Neumeister’s account in Beck’s Brook had been closed, and this was a Troy bank anyway. David thought that in due time David Kelsey might reimburse the shop. He would keep the sales bill.

  He got a shave at a barbershop in the Fifties. The barber bent to look at him in profile. He smiled. David found him tiresome, though at least he did not try to make conversation. When the shave was finished, the barber picked up a tabloid that he had been reading when David walked in, and pointed to a picture in it. The picture looked very familiar, but it took David a second or two to remember what it was: Effie’s sketch of him.

  “You look like this fellow,” the barber said, smiling. “Don’t you think so?”

  David smiled a little, too. “I see what you mean,” he said calmly and reached for the money to pay. “But my name’s Neumeister.”

  “Oh,” said the barber. And he said nothing more.

  David bought an envelope at a stationery store, addressed it with a pen the
re, and mailed off his insurance policy. Then he walked back toward his hotel. He felt better with his shave, and a clean shirt would pick him up still more. He imagined Annabelle waiting for him in the hotel room, looking at his new shirts, telling him which she preferred him to wear today. Then they would discuss what they would do with the rest of the morning and where they might have lunch. Perhaps at the Museum of Modern Art, David thought, after they had browsed through the exhibition for an hour or so. He would tell her about his new suit—she might not like it, after all—that needed an alteration in the back of the jacket and would be ready that afternoon. Feeling mildly curious about the picture of David Kelsey, he bought both tabloids at a newsstand near the hotel, and took them up to his room.

  First, he opened the box with the shirts. He did not really speak to Annabelle now, but he imagined a conversation between them. Annabelle smiled, and pointed to the shirt with the buttoned-down collar, the one that needed no ironing. He put it on, propped his two pillows side by side against the bedstead, and lay down with the tabloids.

  SKETCH IN MURDERED WOMAN’S FLAT

  MAY BE MAIN AID IN KELSEY QUEST

  And here was all the dreary story of Elfrida Brennan’s hopeless love for the indifferent young man who was destined to kill her. David glanced over the story, looking for William Neumeister’s name. Again it was not here. But that was just a matter of time too, he thought: the Beck’s Brook police would be able to identify the sketch as William Neumeister. Why hadn’t he realized that as soon as he saw the sketch in the barbershop? It was just as Effie had predicted, the sketch was going to betray him. Effie was going to get her revenge, all right. He looked at the paper again and made himself read every word. David Kelsey’s car, a light blue Dodge convertible, had been found yesterday on a road off the highway south of Ryder, New York. Darius McCloud, 68, proprietor of the Sunrise Motel on Highway 9, stated that Kelsey had spent Saturday night at his motel, but had registered under another name that he was unable to remember. Kelsey had dashed away, etc., etc., when McCloud had identified his license number as that of David Kelsey. They had interviewed his former landlady, Mrs. Ethel McCartney of Froudsburg, who said she was “shocked and just couldn’t believe it.” He had been a “model lodger.” At midnight Saturday, Kelsey had called at the boardinghouse and transferred his life insurance to Mrs. Molly Beecham, 88, another boarder who had lived in the house for eleven years. David Kelsey was described as a brilliant but eccentric young scientist, “a recluse” who had spent his weekends for nearly two years in solitude while giving out a story that he was visiting an ailing mother in a nursing home. The brutal, hit-or-miss harshness of the prose made David feel he was reading about someone else, a case history in a textbook of abnormal psychology. David was more affected by Dr. Osbourne’s simple words than by anything else he read: “I knew David was dangerously strained because of personal problems. He mentioned a girl he intended to marry. In the last weeks, I repeatedly suggested that he take a rest from his work. He did not choose to. It is regrettable that such a talented young man has so damaged his future.”