by Ron Hansen
Ruth heard him heading upstairs as she went into the bathroom and switched on the light. Her hands were red with blood, and her nightgown was aproned with blood, and blood was trickling onto the floor in pennies of shining red. And then Judd was behind her. “My God,” she said. “Look at me.”
Judd inclined toward the mirror in his nearsightedness and found Albert’s blood on the front of his shirt. Sunday-school memories of Cain’s murder of Abel floated up: What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me.
She asked, “Can we wash out the stains?”
He remembered asking his mother that when he was socked by a bully at age ten, and Mrs. Gray had said, as he now said, “No.”
“Give me your shirt,” Ruth said.
He unbuttoned his gray vest, took off the shirt, and dully watched her hurry downstairs. He then slouched out of the bathroom toward the whisky, taking some swallows, then flopping down into Josephine’s chair with the Tom Dawson bottle cradled against his stomach. His head slackened so that his chin touched his chest and he fell asleep, waking to find Ruth in front of him in a green nightgown now, holding out one of Albert’s new blue shirts, which was still squarely pinned and wrapped in tissue paper. He asked her, “What did you just do?”
“I burned our things in the cellar furnace.”
Judd got into Albert’s shirt, thought it overlarge, and asked, “Could you cut a new buttonhole? This hangs like a horse collar on me.”
She sighed with impatience but got some scissors and soon the collar was fitting and he was tying his necktie in the bathroom mirror as if he were just setting off on his morning calls. Adrenaline or sheer brutality had slightly sobered him. “We still have to make it look like a burglary,” he said.
Ruth went into her mother’s room and quietly tossed it as she thought a burglar would. In the couple’s bedroom, Judd flung their purple armchair’s back and seat cushions onto Ruth’s twin bed. His forearm swiped across the chiffonnier and a hairbrush, perfumes, cufflinks, and pocket change flew. Judd failed to notice in the scatter Albert’s fine gold Bulova watch and his gold necktie stickpin with Jessie Guischard’s initials on it. J.G. Recalling that the Italian newspaper was wrapped on the sash weight, Judd found it and flung the pages up, watching them seagull down to the Wilton rug.
The widow returned to the couple’s bedroom, scowled at Albert’s corpse, and handed Judd some packets of sleeping powder, his sales route list with hotel addresses, her Croton cocktail watch, and a Midol box that she said contained bichloride of mercury tablets.
Judd hunted through The Governor’s suit and overcoat pockets and finally found the new wallet. He filched its contents of five twenty-dollar bills and a ten and flipped it onto the floor. Holding up the cash, he said, “You’ll need some of this.”
She shook her head. “The police will suspect something.” She was rooting through a jewelry case, snatching out expensive rings, earrings, and necklaces. She held their winking abundance out to him. “Could you take these with you?”
“Of course not.”
“But burglars would steal them, wouldn’t they?”
“Hide them then,” Judd said, and went out.
Ruth shoved the jewelry between her mattress and box spring, where the Queens police found them on Sunday afternoon. She’d forgotten where she’d put the chloroform container and frantically searched the room in the faint arc light from the street until she found it beneath Albert’s sheets, against his right thigh. She then hugged herself as if with cold as she hovered over Albert’s head for a final confirmation of his extinction. She felt like hitting him again, just because, but said only, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“Shall we go?” Judd asked. He was swaying, but his suit coat and owlish eyeglasses were on; his hat, overcoat, and briefcase were in his hands.
She smiled and slid her left arm around his waist and she quietly helped Judd step downstairs. There, in his drunkenness, Judd yanked the chintz cushions from the sofa but did not steal Ruth’s fur coats and scarves in the foyer closet; he tipped over chairs in the dining room but did not steal the Chambly silverware. Crazily, he ransacked the kitchen.
Ruth had gone into the cellar to hide her blood-sprayed pillowcase in a hamper, hopelessly confusing the tale she would tell, and Judd followed her to burn up his sales route list. With exactitude he flicked chunks of coal into the furnace so he would make no noise and then broomed the floor wherever his shoes had been. She’d hidden the sash weight in a box of tools and Judd carried over some furnace ash to pepper it with so that the hardware would seem to have been there for weeks. But in the faint light he did not notice a spot of blood that was still on the sash weight; detectives did.
Upstairs again, Judd got a fresh quart of Tom Dawson whisky from a sideboard, filled a water glass with it, and fell down into a chair in the kitchen, sliding a dollar bill under the quart bottle to pay for what he took. She sat with him, rehearsing the tale she would tell. He half-finished smoking a Sweet Caporal, but the night was graying and she worried that the milkman would soon be on the kitchen porch, so she took Judd upstairs and into Josephine’s room.
“You have to slug me,” she said.
“I can’t do that, Ruth!”
“But I have to say the burglars gave me an awful whack on the head and knocked me out.”
“Still, I couldn’t ever hurt you.”
She smiled and petted his sweet cheek and said, “Oh, you. What a sweet boy.” She turned and he tied her wrists behind her back with clothesline rope, then he over-tied her ankles, and he lifted her like a new bride, laid her down on her mother’s bed, and softly cupped her right breast through her nightgown as he tenderly kissed her good-bye.
He felt he was in a movie romance as he said, “You won’t see me for a month, two months, perhaps ever again.”
Ruth took up the same tone. “Oh, no, don’t say that!”
Judd straightened, got into his herringbone overcoat, and fixed his fedora at a rightward cant. “Remember, if the police catch up to me before I get back to Syracuse, I have no excuse for being here.”
She said she’d die before giving up one word against him. She said she still had a capsule that had enough poison to kill a dozen people and that particular one she was going to keep for herself, just in case. And then, as he was exiting, she told him, “Unlock the baby’s door as you go out.”
He forgot.
And now thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
SEVEN
THE ENDLESS DESOLATION OF THE SOUL
She heard the milk truck and fell asleep again, and then she heard a creaking of the door. Ruth lifted up from Josephine’s bed and saw Albert hunching against the frame, his head hideously swollen and purple, his flannel nightshirt soaked in blood, his handgun dangling from bloody fingers. Wads of cotton spilled from his mouth as he said, “Look what you did to me, Root.”
And then she really did wake and Albert was not there. She looked to the Ingersoll clock and saw it was almost half past seven. The hands tied behind her back were tingling. She swung her clotheslined legs to the floor, knelt beside the bed as if childishly praying, and then rocked from knee to knee in an awkward waddle to the hallway and south to her daughter’s room. She fell to her side there and felt her green satin nightgown was hiked up but could not arrange it. She caught her breath and softly thudded the oaken door a few times with her head as she called, “Lora. Lora, it’s me.”
Anyone who saw Henry Judd Gray on Sunday seemed to remember him. At five minutes to six in the morning, an old man named Nathaniel Willis walked up to the bus stop at the major intersection of Springfield Boulevard and Hillside Avenue in Queens Village and saw a man in a gray fedora and herringbone overcoat buttoned up to his chin as if it were below zero. Swaying as he stood on
the corner, that man asked, “Any idea when the bus gets here?”
“Seems to be late,” Willis said, and then he noticed Officer Charlie Smith, a member of the New York City Police Department, sweeping out his traffic booth. Willis kidded him about cleaning house so early in the morning. The officer ignored him as he collected the night’s beer bottles from the sidewalks and streets, stacked them on a curb thirty yards away, crossed to his booth, and took his handgun from its holster. Willis thought he saw Judd flinch. And then, not four feet from Judd, Smith half-turned in an official way, with his left hand on his hip and his right arm and revolver extended, and fired, his right hand jerking up with each of five ear-ringing shots at the beer bottles. He smashed all five. Woke the neighborhood.
Judd Gray remarked to Willis, “I would hate like hell to face him in a firing squad.” He meant it in the friendliest way, the innocent jest of an ordinary fellow just waiting for a bus, but his throat was so tight with tension that he squeaked like a juvenile, and so he was stared at by both men and later recalled.
Willis and Judd and a janitor got on the same westbound bus and Willis noticed the limp of the man in the finely tailored clothes as he edged down the aisle. Judd got off near Jamaica Station on Sutphin Boulevard with the intent of riding the Long Island Rail Road west into Manhattan, but three policemen were standing just inside the station entrance, holding coffee mugs and seriously conversing. Judd looked to the street.
A teenage Yellow Cab driver with a face like an altar boy’s was waiting outside the Jamaica railway station when a soused man in a herringbone overcoat fell into the taxi’s back seat. In an evasive maneuver Judd soon realized was pointless, he told the driver to go to Columbus Circle at 59th and Broadway. Otherwise nothing at all was said, though Paul Mathis remembered that as they crossed over the East River the passenger rolled down the window to feel the cold and sobering air on his face. The final fare was $3.50 and Judd tipped him just a nickel. Mathis scowled at him in the rearview mirror and said, “Thanks a heap, pal.”
Judd simply clutched his tan, Italian-leather briefcase to his chest, floundered outside, took a southbound bus to 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, and walked east to Park Avenue and Grand Central Station. There his hunger overwhelmed him and he went into a railway diner for his first real meal since lunch on Saturday. Waitress Becky Sinclair recalled a hungover man in owlish spectacles confessing, “I’m ravenous,” and ordering enough breakfast for three. But he hunched over his food with a fork in his hand and finally did not eat, just swishing coffee in his mouth before he wearily paid and walked out. It was eight o’clock.
About that time on Sunday, Haddon Jones was entering room 743 in the Onondaga Hotel. He fully twisted the white porcelain bath handle labeled Hot and let the faucet gush as he jerked the coverlet, blanket, and linens around, swatted the pillows, and yanked a bath towel off its rod. On a hotel envelope, he penciled a note: Bud: Perfect. Call when you are ready. Had. He tucked the left edge of the note into the frame of the bathroom mirror so Judd couldn’t fail to see it, noticed that bathwater was nicely wetting the floor, and turned off the faucet. Exiting the room, he tossed the blue “Do Not Disturb” sign inside, then locked the door with the hotel key. Haddon left the Onondaga without being seen, got some gas for his Studebaker, and whistled “Blue Skies” as he drove home.
At eight thirty, Judd boarded Pullman car 17 of the New York Central Railroad’s train number 3, which was heading for Chicago. Though he was the only passenger in the car, Judd examined his ticket, properly took chair number 1 in the sleeper compartment, and found in his overcoat pocket the pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes that Ruth left for him in the kitchen. Sash weight + Albert + lucky strike. He finally caught Ruth’s joke but found it not funny. He lit a cigarette.
Colonel Van Voorhees, the New York Central’s chief conductor, walked down the main aisle ahead of the Pullman conductor and took Judd’s ticket from him. Looking at it, he asked, “Are you going through to Syracuse with us, or do you intend to stop at Albany?”
“I’m going through to Syracuse,” Judd said.
“Well, the Pullman won’t go there. You’ll have to change to a coach.”
“Right.”
The conductor so seriously stared at him that Judd forced a smile. “I’m memorizing your face,” Colonel Van Voorhees said. “That way I can keep your railroad ticket and wherever you are in this car afterward, I’ll remember you.”
“Nice to know,” Judd said.
Twenty minutes after the train left Grand Central Station, he got up to flush the packets of sleeping powders and poison down car 17’s toilet, but he found in the lavatory mirror that there was a handprint of Albert’s blood on his vest that was just concealed by his overcoat. And he felt so condemned by it that he kept the poisoned rye whiskey just in case suicide seemed the only option later. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Returning to his seat, he folded a New York Times to the section that carried the crossword puzzle and only then noticed that his Cross fountain pen was there but his mechanical pencil was missing. Wondering about that was too tiring for him. And in his fuddle and exhaustion, the puzzle was too hard for him and he discovered he could neither read nor sleep, so he just stared outside at the cool and misty countryside.
In Queens Village then, Assistant District Attorney William Gautier was inviting a gum-chewing teenage stenographer into Lorraine’s bedroom to record Mrs. Snyder’s initial statement. Ruth smiled in kinship as she told the girl, “I was a stenographer once. At Cosmopolitan magazine.”
Sitting prissily on a too-small, straight-backed chair, the girl asked, “Where’d you learn?”
“Berg’s Business College.”
“Me too!”
Attorney Gautier interrupted to say, “Shall we continue?”
The girl flipped open a stenographer’s pad and Ruth got more upright on the child’s bed, shifting to pillow her spine. “Where do I begin?”
He prompted, “You went out into the hallway …”
“Then a giant man with a mustache grabbed me,” she stated. “He looked like an Italian. He whispered, ‘If you yell, I’ll kill you.’ Then he hit me a whack over the head and I know nothing more until morning when I came to and called my daughter.”
About the time Judd’s train was rolling through Ossining, a hearse was taking Albert Snyder’s remains to the Harry A. Robbins Morgue at 161st Street, Jamaica. When Judd was outside Poughkeepsie and saw the Hudson River lazing along below the railroad tracks, Ruth’s jewelry was being discovered underneath her mattress. Judd frantically yanked down the window and got up to fling the briefcase containing the chemist’s gloves, chloroform bottle, and bloodstained Croton wristwatch out into the weather, poking his head outside like a scamp so he could watch the Italian leather briefcase splash into the green water, rock on it awhile, and sink. Ruth’s Moroccan leather address book was found in a Windsor desk. And as Judd changed railway cars in Albany, Queens police found a freshly bloodstained pillowcase in the basement hamper and weekly twenty-dollar canceled checks made out to the Prudential Life Insurance Company, seeming to communicate that Mrs. A. E. Snyder would be the beneficiary of a great deal of money.
At five p.m. in Queens Village, police detectives conveyed Albert Snyder’s widow to the Jamaica precinct house. She discovered that Milton and Serena Fidgeon and their bridge party guests were gloomily there for questioning. She accepted their sympathy for her great loss. And then Commissioner McLaughlin courteously invited the widow into his office. Agitated but not grieving, she would be there, off and on, for eight hours.
In Syracuse, it was snowing. Judd arrived in his room at the Onondaga Hotel and found Haddon’s note on the bathroom mirror. He tore up the note and his Pullman ticket stub and threw them in the wastebasket, which he’d later regret, then telephoned Haddon at home.
Mrs. Jones answered. She said Haddon had spent his day dismantling the two-tone Studebaker’s hood, fenders, and doors for painting and was “too pooped to pop,�
� so he was napping. Judd said he envied him. She hoped Judd was still coming over.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Judd said. Rooting around in his Bien Jolie sample case, he found a fresh quart of Scotch whisky that he’d forgotten was there and he filled a water glass twice with it as he took a hot bath, and filled the glass once more as he paced room 743 and hatched a plot to hire a car and kill himself in a fatal wreck off the highway to Auburn or Lake Skaneateles. At five forty-five, when he was telephoned in his hotel room, Judd was freshly attired but spent. He hadn’t slept in thirty-four hours and was focused on the half-pint flask of rye that she’d poisoned with bichloride of mercury tablets. Hearing the hotel’s room phone ringing, he thought of Isabel for the first time that weekend, and he was tentative as he lifted the telephone earpiece. “Hello?”
But it was not his wife. “Would you still like to come over for supper?” Haddon asked.
He had a mental stammer and finally said, “I have forgotten your address.”
“Two hundred seven Park Avenue.”
The hint had failed. “Will you come and get me?”
“My Studebaker’s still laid up,” Haddon said, and he heard Judd sigh. “But I’ll have a friend drive me down.”
The friend was Harry Platt, another insurance salesman and a fat, gray-haired, half-bald man with circular spectacles. He’d joined Haddon in the elevator lift up to Judd’s room on the seventh floor and Judd affably invited both of them in for a highball. Harry would testify that Judd was “nervous and excited.” After introductions and getting out of their overcoats and hats and slouching down on the sofa with Scotch whisky and seltzers, Judd swiveled a desk chair around and straddled it and said, “I have some ’fessing up to do.”