Peg went into work the next day just like always. She packed her purse and her lunch and when she passed Jimmy’s dresser slid the drawer open and pulled out his favorite Italian stiletto. She had a feeling today. A different feeling, as if a timer had been set. As if the world was changing. Suddenly she didn’t feel so safe.
She went into work anyway. Times Square was already humming when she reached it, and Officer Paretti kissed her on the cheek. The store was quiet, as everybody waited by the radio for President Truman to make the surrender official. A few car horns broke the odd hesitation, but it was as if the city waited, too, holding its breath, the jubilation corked and pressing hard.
At 7 P.M. the world went mad. Even before President Truman finished telling the nation that Japan had surrendered, New York exploded in noise. In the butcher shop Peg could hear bells and whistles and horns. Shouts, singing, feet running past. She danced a jig with Mr. Goldfarb and Phil Dawson and Susie Beilstein, who ran the cash register out front. And then, with a big smacking kiss to the cheeks of the girls, Mr. Goldfarb told everybody to go home.
“It’s a day for celebrating,” he said, shooing them like recalcitrant children. “Go. Celebrate.” And for his contribution, he gave them all sirloin steaks for their parties.
Peg headed straight home. They’d been preparing a party on the block for the last two days, when the news seemed imminent. Peg carried her steaks as if they were the surrender agreement itself.
On her way, she shared the jubilation of her city. She laughed and danced with a couple of cops on Thirty-third and waved at the cars who passed, horns and radios blaring. She reached Times Square to see the news ticker proclaim JAPAN SURRENDERS, on a constant crawl around the building, and she stopped to savor her favorite place reacting to this moment of history. In the greater scheme of things, it didn’t matter what happened to her. The war had ended, and all the boys were coming home. All the mothers and fathers, the wives and children and cousins and friends around the country could take a good breath and rejoice.
She was standing there flat-footed when the sailor caught her. He was laughing, dancing down the street like Gene Kelly, grabbing any woman he could and kissing her. Grabbing Peg around the waist, he spun her, the bag of steaks hitting him on the backside. She couldn’t help laughing as she met him mouth to mouth. His hand supported her back and his nascent whiskers scraped her cheek. A puff of laughter, a cheeky grin, and he was off to another conquest.
The photographer, a tweedy, balding kind of man, flashed his own smile and followed. Peggy was still laughing.
Suddenly the laughter caught in her chest. When the photographer trotted by, she finally saw past him to where another sailor stood. But this sailor wasn’t laughing or dancing. He was just looking. At her.
Jimmy.
Standing not ten feet away, smiling as if he were in better spirits than anybody in the city. Maybe Peg was the only one who saw the murder in his eyes. Maybe she was just too familiar with it to miss it. She froze, the instinctive reaction of all hunted animals. She knew better than to look away. But a shriek behind her, then laughter, told her that the sailor had captured another partner. She couldn’t resist looking.
The photographer was there, too. Snapping as fast as he could, just beyond the couple. Peg couldn’t blame him. It was a great picture, like ballet, that girl in all white surrounded by the sailor in his dark navy blues. It was a picture she had once kept in her own mind of the future. Jimmy home from the navy, her proud in her nursing whites. She wanted so badly to not move, not let them out of her sight. Not lose that pretty picture she knew now would never come true.
Jimmy was home.
“What the hell ya doin’ here?” she heard just behind her and knew that he was there.
Run! her brain screamed. Her heart collided with her chest, right there between the fourth and fifth ribs. She had started to sweat, because she knew it was too late. It had been too late when she’d kissed that sailor.
“When did you get in, Jimmy?” she asked, turning to face him with her purse and lunch pail and sirloins clutched in sweaty hands. “I didn’t get another telegram from you. I didn’t know you were coming today.”
He stepped closer, his nostrils flaring as if he could smell the fear on her. The sailor and the photographer had moved on. Peg couldn’t hear the horns or bells anymore. She heard Jimmy’s breathing. Assessing it for change.
“I sent it,” he said. “And I waited for you for fuckin’ hours. Hours, Peg.”
Peg could barely breathe. “I was working, Jimmy.”
“Yeah, that’s what Mrs. Peabody said. So I decided to come surprise you. Give you somethin’ to celebrate.” He swung an arm wide to take in the humanity around him. “Seems you found somethin’ else already, huh?”
It was all Peg could do to keep from flinching. Surreptitiously she looked around them, wanting only to get out of the middle of this crowd. If Jimmy really was in a mood, she didn’t want to be here.
“Oh, did you see the kids?” She tried to smile. “Haven’t they grown?”
But he wouldn’t be distracted. “We’re not talking about the kids here. We’re talking about you. And what you’ve been up to since I’ve been gone. Whatever it is, it stops now. You hear me?”
“I haven’t been up to anything but taking care of the kids and working, Jimmy. And Mr. Goldfarb already knows I’m quitting when you get home. But look.” Smiling again, she held up her booty. “He gave us a gift.”
He grabbed her by the arm. There would be bruises, she knew, angry red finger marks left behind on her Irish white skin. Her stomach roiled. Would he do it here? In front of all these people?
“Steaks?” he demanded, his breath accelerating, his fingers punishing. Reminding her who was in charge. Who was stronger. “Just what did you do to get those?”
He’d just gotten back, was all she could think. Couldn’t he have given her a day? Maybe a week when she could believe that maybe this time it would be different?
She wasn’t even going to make it home.
“I did my job,” she said, refusing to cower. Not anymore. Not one more time.
He almost spit in her face. “Bullshit. Nobody gives steaks away f’r nuthin’.”
He was dragging her over toward Forty-fourth. She let him. Even so, she lifted her head. Stared straight at him, where she never would have before. She wasn’t going to be ashamed anymore. “I. Did. My. Job. You’re the one with the dirty mind, Jimmy.”
He hit her. Nobody saw it; he caught her in the kidneys. Jimmy loved the kidneys, because nobody could see those bruises but him. Peg gasped and buckled. Her lunch pail hit the ground with a clang. But she held on to her purse. She held on to the meat, as if it were more important than protecting herself.
“I’ll just bet you did your job,” he rasped, dragging her along the sidewalk. “I saw you with that sailor back there. I hope you got a lot of money from all the sailors who were here when I wasn’t, cause you ain’t gettin’ any more. And if I think you’re bein’ free with anybody else, I’ll beat the crap out of you. And then I’ll take the kids away. See how you like that.”
She knew better. Still, she yanked back. “You’re not taking my kids anywhere.”
This time he broke a rib. A couple of people paused in passing, and he glared them down before shoving her into an alley by the Majestic. It just figured, she thought, struggling to breathe past the relentless agony in her side. He’s going to beat me to death in sight of Billy Bigelow.
“I’ll do whatever I damn well please,” he assured her, catching her by the hair and pulling, his mouth against her ear. “Don’t you get it? They’re my kids. You’re my wife. Je-sus, Peg, did you have to make me remind you this soon? Couldn’t you have let me have a little peace, a good home-cooked meal before you pissed me off?”
She tried to swing her purse at him. He belted her in the face. She could taste the blood pouring from her nose. “Don’t, Jimmy. What’ll the kids think?”
“They’ll think that you’ve been stupid again and I had to come home to stop that.”
She could smell the whiskey on his breath, which meant he’d been working on this mad all day. His control was already gone.
Did she have the guts to stick it out? She hurt so badly. She was so afraid.
“I’ve lived alone for three years, Jimmy,” she said, her voice nasal and high. “I’m not going back to the way it was. I’m not. I’ll take the kids and run if I have to.”
Five minutes later she was fighting for consciousness. He hadn’t just beaten her. He’d kicked her in the jaw. She wondered if it was broken. She curled into herself to try to protect her belly, her hand in her pants pocket.
“Bastard,” she moaned, struggling to get up onto her elbow, her other hand tucked against her stomach. “I’m not standing for this anymore. I am... not... teaching my kids that this is... okay.”
Jimmy bent all the way down and dragged her up. “You stupid bitch. Don’t you get it? I could kill you and nobody would care.”
Odd, she thought, blinking her one open eye. I could do the same thing.
So she did. Jimmy never heard the snick of the blade. He was focused on the hands he had around her neck. By the time he realized that this time she wasn’t so helpless, Peg had driven the razor-sharp eight-inch blade deep into his chest, right between the fourth and fifth ribs as if she was cutting out a rib eye. The blade went in so cleanly she didn’t even feel the scrape of a rib. She just felt a few pops, as if she’d broken through tough membranes. She hoped to hell she had.
She was holding herself up on him, and he was staring down at the knife in his chest as if he couldn’t comprehend it.
“That’s... mine.”
She didn’t answer. She just turned the knife and drove it in deeper. His eyes widened. His mouth opened. And then he simply collapsed in on himself.
He fell right on top of Peg. She couldn’t move; not while he gasped out his last breaths or while his heart faltered to a stop, never to start again. Her face was only inches from his staring, astonished eyes, and she waited, still not sure he wouldn’t wake and go after her again. She struggled to get air in past her broken nose and ribs.
She couldn’t stop shaking. She couldn’t believe it. She’d hoped. She’d prayed so hard that his time away would have made him a better man. Would have washed away his need to hit and hurt. She’d sure had her answer, hadn’t she?
She needed to do something. The kids were waiting back at the Peabodys’. No more than half a block away, New York was dancing. And she was lying here under a man whose blood was seeping out onto the asphalt, his body a dead weight.
She could feel the bruises swelling on her face. Her right eye was completely closed, and her lip was split. Blood stained her poplin shirt all the way to her waist, and she had to struggle to get enough air in.
“Help!” she screamed, finally pushing at Jimmy. “Oh, God, help! My husband!”
With a lurch, she pulled herself free of him, only to land on her knees. Her head spun. Her heart was thumping like a bass drum. She knew she was going to be sick. But she had to get to Officer Paretti. She had to...
“Hey, what’s going on?”
She caught a blurry glimpse of a couple of Marines shadowed at the Forty-fourth Street end of the alley.
“Please. We’ve been mugged. Help my husband.”
Officer Paretti came running. Bending down next to her, he cradled her poor face in his hands and sighed. “I told you it wasn’t safe.”
“Somebody came... came and tried to steal... I think they’ve hurt my husband... with his own... knife.”
“You sure?” one of the Marines asked. “We didn’t see nobody.”
Officer Paretti laughed. “You have any other ideas? You think what, that Mrs. O’Toole beat herself up and then stabbed her husband? Look at her.”
And Peg felt the gaze of the Marines, who took in her tiny frame and battered features and gasping breath.
“Yeah,” one of them muttered. “I guess so. Sorry, ma’am.”
Peg blinked up at them. “I tried so hard,” she whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I really did.”
“We know you did, Mrs. O’Toole,” Officer Paretti said. “Now, boys, you go find me some help. And tell ’em to bring an ambulance. I’ll stay with the victims.”
He waited until the sound of the footsteps faded. Then he made it a point to give Peg a gentle frown. He looked over at Jimmy, who lay curled around the lethal knife that stuck from his chest. He looked at the blossoming damage on Peg’s face. He took one more look at the angle of the knife, the design of the cut, the way Peg was shaking.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Toole,” he said, his voice even gentler than his hands. Peg could see every thought going through his head. She saw him reach over, pull his handkerchief from his pocket, and wipe off the handle of the knife. “Whoever attacked you killed your husband. Little thing like you. Lucky you’re alive.”
And Peg, who had survived, closed her eyes.
It was sixty years before she finally told the true story. She had just taken her granddaughter to the theater to celebrate her getting her master’s degree in nursing. Her granddaughter was named after her, although this one was called Mags, a girl with Peg’s red hair and Jimmy’s brown eyes, who had always told Peg she wanted to be a trauma nurse just like her.
Well, she was now, and a good one. Which was why when they returned to Peg’s retirement apartment in Brooklyn, Peg poured them both beers and asked Mags to listen to a story.
At first the confession was met by silence. Mags wouldn’t even look at her. Peg had never felt so tired in her life.
Finally Mags looked up at the black-and-white photo that hung over Peg’s head.
“You killed Granddad.”
Peg picked up her beer with shaking hands and took a sip. “I needed somebody to know.”
Somebody she trusted to understand. Somebody who saw the legacy of violence every day.
For a long moment, Mags looked out the front window. “Grams?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Did you carry that knife knowing he was coming home?”
“I did.”
Her granddaughter’s eyes grew pensive. “And he’d beaten you before.”
“Yes.”
There was a nod, and Mags took a sip of her own beer. “Then I think it was a lucky stroke that you found that butchering job. Otherwise you might not have had the strength to gut the old bastard.”
Peg almost smiled. She had looked for that job for six months. “Honey,” she said, the confession finally complete. “Luck had nothing to do with it.”
DAVID EDGERLEY GATES
The Devil to Pay
FROM Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
Tommy meadows was coming back down from Riverdale, where he’d gone to see his grandma, who was up there in an assisted living facility since May. Not the worst, either, the nursing staff cheerful, familiar with everybody by name, the meals okay, even if the food was mostly stuff you could gum, and the lawns sloped down to the Hudson, so if the weather was nice, you could take the old girl outside for a turn around the grounds in her wheelchair. But when it was rainy or too cold, all the alter kockers were lined up in the day room, watching Judge Judy, with blankets over their knees and oxygen feeds in their noses.
Better than state correctional, you might say.
Tommy had just done fourteen months in Dannemora, and he was out on probation but living with his mom, so although he had to make the weekly meet with his PO, at least he didn’t have to get an actual job. His old lady was letting him stay in the apartment over the garage, and as long as he forked over four hundred a month, it didn’t bother her where the money came from. She was long past caring how Tommy made the vig. He’d been in and out of Juvie since he was fourteen, and done hard time twice as an adult. For his part, he let her self-medicate with Old Mr. Boston, which was her idea of a hot date, and they got along j
ust fine.
He was in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, the seafood pan-roast combo and a glass of white wine. He’d started out on cherrystone clams and a bloody mary shooter, and he was thinking he’d finish off with a half-dozen local bluepoints.
A couple of stools down, two guys were talking.
“You know what a pack of smokes goes for in New York these days? Ten bucks.”
“You couldn’t buy toenail clippers for less than ten bucks, and that’s cheap,” the other guy said.
“You know what a carton of smokes costs down South, one of the tobacco-growing states? Thirty bucks. You load up a truck, you double your money, you sell it under the counter.”
“If you don’t get caught with North Carolina revenue stamps on the product.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You just keep talking out your ass,” the other guy said.
The first guy dropped his voice. “This is money in the bank,” he said. “You make the investment, pay off the truck and the driver, it’s gonna return fifty large, no downside risk.”
If it’s not your money, Tommy thought.
That’s what the other guy thought, too. “Looks good on paper,” he said. “But the plain fact is, you’ve got nothing but a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.”
“Let me talk to my guy, Jack, see what he’ll do for us.”
“You do that,” Jack said. He got up.
Tommy had made this kind of pitch himself. He knew it was a hard sell. Guys like Jack were at the top of the food chain and didn’t need bottom feeders. It was the same the world over.
Tommy decided to order the bluepoints.
The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Page 8