The Sixth Commandment

by Lawrence Sanders

  “Frequently,” Koukla said—which, I reflected, is a little different from “regularly.”

  “His wife and son, also?”

  “They are members, yes.”

  “But not his daughter?”

  “Ah … no. She has her own religious preferences, I understand. Somewhat more fundamental than our teachings.”

  “Is Draper one of your members? Dr. Kenneth Draper?”

  “He was,” Koukla said shortly. “I have not seen him at services recently. But we do get many staff members from the Hall and the research laboratory.”

  All his answers were bright, swift, delivered with every appearance of openness and honesty. It was hard to fault this perky little man. I went at him from another direction …

  “Nurse Beecham told me that occasionally you are called to Crittenden Hall to provide spiritual comfort for some of the patients?”

  “When they request it, yes. I had a discussion with Dr. Thorndecker about the possibility of providing a regular Sunday afternoon service, after my duties here are completed. But so many of the guests are bedridden, it probably wouldn’t be a satisfactory arrangement. I do conduct a service in the Hall on Christmas and Easter, however.”

  “Reverend, I was surprised to learn that Crittenden has its own cemetery. When a patient dies, isn’t the body usually claimed by his family? I mean, isn’t he returned to his home for burial?”

  “Usually,” he said, “but not always. Sometimes the family of the deceased prefer burial on the Crittenden grounds. It’s very convenient. Sometimes the deceased request it in their wills.”

  “Do you ever, ah, officiate at these burials?”

  “Of course, of course! Several times. Sometimes the final service is held here at the church, and the casket returned to Crittenden for interment.”

  I nodded, wondering how far I might go without having my interest reported back to Dr. Thorndecker. The hell with it, I decided. Let Koukla report it. It just might stir things up. So I asked my question:

  “Didn’t attend the burial of a man named Petersen, did you? Chester K. Petersen?”

  “Petersen?” he said. “No, I don’t think so. When did he pass?”

  “Two nights ago.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “definitely not. My last funeral service for a Crittenden guest was about a month ago. But if the deceased was of another faith—Catholic, perhaps, or Jewish—naturally I wouldn’t be …”

  His sentence trailed off, in the approved Coburn manner. He had started his last speech with a confident rush, then slowed, slowed, until his final words were a doubtful drawl. I could almost see him begin to wonder if he wasn’t talking too much, revealing something (in all innocence) that the church’s “great friend” wouldn’t want revealed.

  I rose quickly to my feet, before he got the notion of asking what the death of Chester K. Petersen had to do with the Thorndecker grant.

  “Thank you very much, sir,” I said briskly, holding out my hand. “You’ve been very cooperative, and I appreciate it.”

  He hopped spryly off the workbench, and clasped my proffered hand in both of his.

  “Of course, of course!” he said. “Happy to oblige. If you’re still in town on Sunday morning, it would give me great pleasure to welcome you to our Sabbath services. I believe and preach the religion of joy. I think you’ll find it invigorating.”

  “I might do just that,” I nodded. “Well, I’m sure you’re anxious to get back to your carpentry. Don’t bother showing me out; I can find my way. Thanks again for your trouble.”

  “No trouble, no trouble!” he shouted, and waved a farewell.

  I walked noisily down the cement corridor, then tramped heavily up the iron steps. At the top, I opened and slammed shut the side door leading to the church nave. But I remained inside, on the stairway landing, standing, listening, wondering if the hammering would commence again. It didn’t. But I figured it wouldn’t. I had seen the telephone in the Reverend Peter Koukla’s workshop.

  I went slowly down those iron steps again, moving as quietly as I could. I didn’t have to go far along the cement corridor before I heard him speaking:

  “This is Reverend Koukla,” he was saying. “Could I talk to Dr. Thorndecker, please?”

  I slipped silently away, and went out the side entrance into the church nave, easing the door shut behind me. I didn’t have to listen to the rest of Koukla’s conversation. I knew what he was going to say.

  Walked out to my car, lighted a cigarette, took three fast, greedy drags. Nasty habit, smoking. So is drinking. So is burying dead men at two in the morning.

  I felt I was running one of those Victorian garden mazes, my movements all false starts and retracings. The box hedges walled me around, higher than my head, and all I could do was wander, trying to find the center where I might be rewarded with a candy apple, or the hand of a princess and half the kingdom. I told you I was a closet romantic.

  I was floundering and thinking crazy; I knew it. All I had was a hatful of suspicions, and there wasn’t one of them I couldn’t demolish with a reasonable, acceptable, legal explanation. I tried to convince myself that my mistrust was all smoke, and the smart thing for me to do was to stamp Thorndecker’s application A-OK, and say, “Goom-by” to Coburn, N.Y.

  So why did I sit in my car shivering, and not only from the cold? The hand holding the cigarette trembled. I had never felt so hollow in my life. It was a presentiment of being in over my head, up against something I couldn’t handle, wrestling with a force I couldn’t define and was powerless to stop.

  I started the car and drove along Cypress Road, away from the business section. I left the heater off and cranked the window down a few inches, hoping the cutting air might blow through my skull and take the jimjams along with it. I drove slowly until the houses became fewer and fewer. Then I was in a section of scrabby wooded plots and open fields that looked like they had been shaved a week ago.

  I drove past a sign that read: NEW FRONTIER TRAILER COURT, and kept on going. Then I braked hard, backed up, and read the smaller print: “Trailer parking by day, week, or month. All conveniences. Reasonable rates.” In Coburn, N.Y., they still called it a “trailer court.” The rest of the country called them “mobile home communities.”

  But it was on Cypress Road, and Al Coburn had said his old buddy, Ernie Scoggins, had lived in a trailer on Cypress Road. So I followed the bent tin arrow nailed to a pine stump, and rattled and jounced down a rutted dirt road to a clearing where maybe twenty trailers, camper vans, and mobile homes were drawn up in a rough circle. Maybe they were expecting an attack by Mohawks on the New Frontier.

  I parked, got out of the car, looked around. God, it was sad. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, and under that mean sky the place looked crumbling and abandoned. Maybe the Mohawks really had come through, scalped all the men, carried off the women and kids. Fantasy time. There were overflowing garbage cans, and lights on in some of the vans. People lived there; no doubt about it. Although “lived” might be an exaggeration. It looked like the kind of place where, if all the TV sets konked out simultaneously, they’d go for each other’s throats. Nothing else to do.

  I wandered around and finally found a mobile home that had a MANAGER sign spiked into the hard-scrabble front yard. There was another sign over the door with two painted dice showing seven, and the legend: PAIR-O-DICE. Those dice should have shown crap.

  The steps were rough planks laid across piled bricks; they swayed when I stepped cautiously up. I knocked on the door. From inside I could hear the sound of gunfire, horses’ hooves, wild screams. If it wasn’t a TV western, I was going to skedaddle the hell out of there.

  I knocked again. The guy who answered the door looked familiar. I had never met him, but I knew him. You’d have known him, too. Soiled undershirt showing a sagging beer belly. Dirty chinos. Unlaced work shoes over gray wool socks. A fat head with a cigar sprouting from the middle. An open can of a local brew in his hand. He wasn’t happy about
being dragged away from the boob tube. It was filling the room behind him with flickering, blue-tinted light, and the gunfire sounded like thunder.

  “Yeah?” he said, glowering at me.

  “Who is it, Morty?” a woman shrieked from inside the room.

  “You shut your mouth,” he screamed, not bothering to turn his head, so for a moment I thought he was yelling at me.

  “I understand there’s a trailer out here for sale,” I began my scam, “and I was—”

  “What?” he roared. “Iola, will you turn that goddamned thing down? I can’t hear what the man is saying.”

  We waited. The gunfire was reduced to a grumble.

  “Now,” he said, “you want a place to park? We got all modern conveniences. You can hitch up to—”

  “No, no,” I said hastily. “I understand there’s a trailer out here for sale.”

  His piggy eyes got smaller, if possible, and he removed the sodden cigar from his mouth with an audible plop!

  “Who told you that?” Morty demanded.

  “Fellow I met in the bar at the Coburn Inn. Name of Al Coburn. He says a friend of his, name of Ernie Scoggins, lived out here. That right?”

  “Well … yeah,” he said mistrustfully. “He did.”

  “I understand this Scoggins took off, and his rig’s up for sale.”

  He rubbed his chin with the back of his beer-can hand. I could hear the rasp of the stubble.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I ain’t even sure he owned the thing. He’s got debts all over town. He took off owing me a month’s rent. I’m holding the rig and his car until I get mine.”

  “Maybe we can work something out,” I said. “The bank’s holding the title. Al Merchant’s willing to work a deal if I decide to buy. All I want to do is take a look at the thing.”

  “Well …” He couldn’t decide. “What the hell you want Scoggins’ pisspot for? It ain’t worth a damn.”

  “Just for summer,” I said hurriedly. “You know—holidays and weekends in the good weather. I figure it would be cheaper than buying a cottage.”

  “Oh, hell,” he said heavily, “it’d be cheaper than buying an outhouse. Well … it’s your money. It’s that gray job over there. The one with the beat-up VW parked alongside. Take a look if you want to; the door ain’t locked.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said, turned carefully on those rickety steps, started down.

  “Hey, listen,” he called after me, “if you decide to buy, I got to get that month’s rent he owes me.”

  “Off the top,” I promised him, and he seemed satisfied. He went back in, slammed the door, and in a few seconds I heard the thunder of gunfire again.

  I took a look at the VW first. Either Scoggins had been a lousy driver, or he had bought it fourth-hand after it had endured a series of horrendous accidents. You could see the geography of its history: dents, scars, scrapes, nicks, cuts, patches of several-colored paints, rust spots, places where bare metal showed through. All the hubcaps were missing. The front trunk lid was wired shut to the bumper with a twisted coat hanger.

  I looked through one of the dirty windows. Nothing to see but torn upholstery, rags on the floor, some greasy road maps, and a heap of empty Copenhagen snuff tins. I would have liked to unbend that coat hanger and take a look in the trunk, but I was afraid Morty might be watching me from one of his windows.

  Scoggins’ trailer was exactly that: a trailer, not a mobile home. It was an old, old model, a box on wheels, narrow enough and light enough to be towed by a passenger car on turnpikes, highways, or secondary roads. It was a plywood job, with one side door and two windows that were broken and covered with tacked shirt cardboards.

  It had been propped up on cement blocks; the wheels were missing. A tank of propane was still connected, and a wire led to an electrical outlet in a pipe that poked above the ground at every parking space. There was a hose hookup to another underground pipe, for water.

  There were no stairs; it was a long step up from ground to doorway. The door was not only unlocked, it was ajar an inch or so. I pushed it open, stepped up and in. A cold, damp, musty odor: unwashed linen and mouldering furniture. There was a wall switch (bare, no plate), and when I flicked it, what I got was a single 60-watt bulb hanging limply from the center of the room.

  And it was really one room. There was a small alcove with waist-high refrigerator, small sink, a grill over propane gas ring, plywood cupboard. No toilet or shower. I hoped the New Frontier offered public facilities. The bed folded up against the wall. Mercifully, it was up. Judging by the rest of the interior, I really didn’t want to see that bed. One upholstered armchair, torn and molting. A twelve-inch, portable TV set on a rusted tubular stand. A varnished maple table with two straight-back kitchen chairs. An open closet with a few scraps of clothing hanging from wall hooks. A scarred dresser with drawer knobs missing.

  That was about all. The World War I helmet was still where Al Coburn had said it was, atop the TV set. There were some unwashed dishes in the sink, clotted and crusted. Brownish water dripped from the tap. The plywood floor squeaked underfoot. The only decoration was last year’s calendar from Mike’s Service Station, showing a stumpy blonde in a pink bikini. She was standing on a beach, one knee coyly bent, with palm trees in the background. She had an unbelievable mouthful of teeth, and was holding a beachball over her head.

  “A little chilly in here, honey?” I asked her.

  Compared to that place, my room at the Coburn Inn was the Taj Mahal. I looked around, trying to imagine what it was like for old Ernie Scoggins—wife dead, son dead, daughters moved away—to do a hard day’s work at Crittenden Hall, and then to lump home to this burrow in his falling-apart VW. Take off his shoes, fry a hamburger, open a beer. Collapse into the sprung armchair in front of the little black-and-white screen. Drink his beer, munch his hamburger, and watch people sing and dance and laugh.

  I tried to imagine all that, but it didn’t work. It was like trying to imagine what war was like if you had never been there.

  I went through the Grand Rapids dresser but found nothing of interest. A pair of torn longjohns, some gray, unpressed handkerchiefs, a blue workshirt, wool socks that needed toes, junk. I figured Constable Goodfellow or Al Coburn had taken the old man’s papers away, if there were any. I found nothing.

  I poked around in the cabinet over the sink. All I found were a few cockroaches who stared at me, annoyed at being interrupted. One interesting thing: there was an eight-ounce jar of instant coffee, practically new, with no more than one or two teaspoonsful taken out. The jar still bore the supermarket pricetag: $5.45. Odd that a poor old man would take off for parts unknown and leave that treasure behind.

  I didn’t unlatch the bed, let it down, and paw through it. I just couldn’t.

  So that was that, I figured. Nothing plus nothing equals nothing. I stood in the doorway, my finger on the light switch, taking a final look around. My God, that must have been a cold place to live. There was a small electric heater set into one wall, and I suppose he used the propane stove for added warmth, but still … The chill came right up through that bare, sagging plywood floor and stiffened my toes inside my boots.

  Maybe the trailer had been carpeted when it was new. But now the only piece of rug was under the old man’s armchair. It was about a three-foot square, with ravelled edges. It looked like a remnant someone had thrown out, a piece left over after a cheap wall-to-wall carpeting job had been completed.

  I stared at it, wondering why I was staring. Just a ragged piece of rug in a shit-brown color. It was under the armchair and stuck out in front where his feet would rest when he gummed his hamburger and watched TV. Keep his tootsies relatively warm while he stared at young, handsome people winning Cadillacs and trips to Bermuda on the game shows.

  It made sense; that’s why the rug was there. So far so good. But why wasn’t the rug scarred and scuffed and stained in front of the armchair, where his feet rested and he dribbled food while guf
fawing at the funny, funny Master of Ceremonies? It wasn’t scarred or scuffed or stained. It looked new.

  I took my finger off the light switch. I went back to the armchair, got down on my knees, peered underneath. The portion of the rug under the chair was scarred and scuffed and stained.

  “Shit,” I said aloud.

  I stood, lifted the armchair, set it aside. He could have turned the rug, I acknowledged. Shortly before he departed, he noticed the rug under his feet was getting worn and spotted. So he just turned it around. Then the worn part would be under the chair, and he’d have a nice, new, thick pile under his feet in front of the chair.

  Except … Except …

  There were special stains on the portion of the rug that had been under the armchair. I got down on my knees again, put my nose right down to them. They didn’t look like food stains to me. They were reddish-brown, crusted. There were several heavy blobs with crowns of smaller stains radiating around them. Like the heavy blobs had fallen from a distance and splashed.

  I smelled the stains. It wasn’t a scientific test, I admit, but it was good enough for me. I knew what those stains were. They weren’t Aunt Millie’s Spaghetti Sauce.

  I replaced the armchair in its original position, switched off the light, got out of there. I didn’t look toward the manager’s mobile home. I slid into the Grand Prix, jazzed it, spun away.

  They didn’t have much time: that’s what I was thinking as I drove back to the Coburn Inn. They were in a hurry, frantic, afraid of being seen by Manager Morty or some other denizen of the New Frontier Trailer Court. So they did what they had come to do. And then they got him out of there—what was left of him—with some clothes thrown hastily into his old suitcase, trying to make it look like he had scampered of his own free will. And because the blood was ripe and thick and glistening in front of the armchair, they had turned the rug around so the stains would be hidden under the chair.

  Time! Time! They were working so fast, so anxiously. Maybe even desperately. They just wanted him snuffed and out of there. What about his car? Maybe it was one killer, and he couldn’t handle the VW and the car he came in. Maybe it was two killers, and one couldn’t drive. Fuck the car. And fuck the helmet; they didn’t know it was his most prized possession. And they didn’t have time to search the place and find that almost-full jar of coffee. They didn’t have time, they didn’t plan it well, they weren’t thinking. Amateurs.