I obeyed. As I did, I was aware that my shirt was damp with perspiration.
“Tell me,” he insisted, “why you came here.”
“I talked to your father, for one thing. And to—other people.”
“My father.”
“Yes.”
His eyes began to blink rapidly, their fixed, glassy film shattered, revealing a deep, desperate wound within. It was the mask’s second flaw, uglier and more decisive than the first.
“You didn’t know, then.” It was a harsh whisper. “Not for sure.”
I shook my head. “No, I didn’t know. I suspected. But I didn’t know.”
Sadly he smiled. He lowered the pistol until it rested in his lap. He looked down at the gun.
“You might’ve gone back to Los Angeles and never known.”
“No. When I first saw you, here, I knew.”
“You guessed,” he said, still staring down at the gun. “You didn’t know.”
I was too numbed to reply. Helplessly, as it had last night, my mind began revolving in wild, eccentric circles around something Larsen had said:
You’re like a kid playing blindman’s bluff.
Had Larsen predicted that I might be killed? Somehow it seemed desperately important that I remember—yet I couldn’t. I could only …
“When I was six or seven,” he was saying, “I can remember going to the park with my father. We used to play hide and seek. He never cared what people thought. He used to run with me and play tag.” He deeply sighed. His head was still bowed. He was holding the gun very loosely now in his right hand. With his left forefinger, slowly, he begin stroking the gun. The gesture had an odd, hypnotic compulsion. His caress was gentle: almost a lover’s touch.
“She hated him,” he said suddenly. “She killed him.”
“Killed him?” A sensation of shocked disbelief penetrated the numbing helplessness of my fear. “Is he dead?”
“No, he’s not dead. He’s still alive. But he’s dying. His soul is dying. For two years, he’s been slowly dying, inside. He’s a—a bum, now. A drunken bum. He was arrested a few months ago for stealing a bottle of muscatel wine from a grocery store. He went to the county jail for thirty days. Then, in jail, he couldn’t stand it, without liquor, and he—he cracked up. Went insane. They sent him to the county hospital, to the psycho ward. When they were ready to release him, they told him that he had cirrhosis of the liver and that he’d die if he kept on drinking. And then they gave him his clothes and told him to go.” He stopped speaking, staring down at the treasured gun. “That’s why it was so easy to kill Vennezio,” he said softly.
“Did your mother know you’d seen your father?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” It was a teen-ager’s expression, grotesquely incongruous. “I ask my mother to please pass the toast on Sundays—and once in a while I do her the favor of asking for money. But that’s all—everything. After sixteen years, all I can think about is subtle little ways to make her life miserable. It—it’s an obsession. A total obsession. I think about her constantly, planning what I’ll do to her next—how I can make her suffer, while I still seem to be a dutiful, devoted son. I suppose, really, killing Mr. Vennezio was a kind if an—extension of that same planning. It—it had the same feeling, planning to kill him. There was the same feeling that everything else was unreal and far away—everything else but the planning.”
“When did you decide to kill him?”
He frowned, thinking about it. Then he answered matter-of-factly, “about two months ago. Maybe a little longer.”
I must have almost smiled as I said, “You certainly had a lot of people fooled. Almost everyone thought it was a professional job.”
“When you don’t care about being punished,” he said slowly, “then there’s nothing to worry about. I can remember standing looking down at him. I could still smell the powder smoke. And I remember thinking that I’d been a lot more frightened as a kid, watching horror movies. I didn’t feel a thing. I wasn’t frightened, and I wasn’t hysterical. I wasn’t angry, and I wasn’t glad—I didn’t laugh, and I didn’t cry. I was just standing there.”
“How’d you happen to phone the police?”
He looked at me. “You seem to be fairly perceptive, Mr. Drake. Can’t you figure that out?”
“I imagine that you wanted them to arrive while your mother was there.”
“Yes.” He nodded gravely. “That’s exactly right.”
“Did you want to involve her in the murder?”
“No. I wanted to shame her. I couldn’t forget my father, in that psycho ward. It’s all I could think about. I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it.” As he spoke, his manner again became withdrawn, his tone again dreamily monotonous. “I’ve often thought, since, that the weeks I spent planning the murder were … He paused, searching for the word. “Exhilarating. It’s the only time I can remember feeling alive. Really alive.”
“How did you plan the murder?”
“It all started with a gardener we had here at the school. He was an eccentric, paranoid old man, and he only lasted a week or so. But he had several guns. Pistols. That’s one of the reasons he was fired, because he wouldn’t give up his guns. Anyhow, one day I was doing some sketching close to his little cottage. It was probably a week after I’d seen Dad, and already I was trying to think of some way I could kill Vennezio. It was mostly fantasy, of course—but the more I thought about it, the more the idea seemed to take on substance. So, when I saw that the gardener had been called to take a phone message down by the gate, I simply walked inside his cottage. I’m not sure I was even looking for a gun—at least not consciously. In fact, I remember that I was surprised to find myself inside the cottage. But there it was—” He lifted the small automatic, fondly. “—lying on a table. So I simply picked it up, put it in my pocket and walked out.”
“What’d you do next?”
“Well, next, I began to plan it all in detail. I thought of several plans, of course. That was the worse part, in fact—trying to make up my mind between two or three alternatives. But finally I decided to do it on a Sunday night when I’d be visiting Mother. And after I decided, it all seemed to fall into place. It was all so simple, really. I just drove off Sunday night about 6:30, ostensibly going back to school, as usual. I knew that, about an hour later, she’d leave for the beachhouse. I’d followed her, you see. I knew. So I just drove out to the beachhouse, ahead of her. I got there just a little after seven thirty, as I remember. And I …” His voice drifted off. He seemed sunk in some private reverie. His eyes were shining, his lips slightly parted.
“I knocked on the door,” he continued, staring far beyond me. “And I heard his footsteps coming.”
“Did he open the door immediately?”
“Oh, no.” He seemed primly shocked. “No, no. He asked who it was, then he looked at me through the peephole. At first, I’d thought about shooting him through that peephole. I read a story, in fact, where that happened. But, this way, it was so much better. I had the gun in my right-hand jacket pocket. He let me in, of course. I said I had a message from Mother, and he let me in. I pretended to be worried; I think he was afraid of an accident. Anyhow, he let me in. And as soon as he did, I took out the gun. I—I’ll never forget his expression, when he saw it.” Deliciously, Johnny Hanson almost seemed to hug himself. “His eyes became absolutely like saucers. It’s a cliché, I know. But it’s true.”
“Then you shot him.”
He nodded. “Yes, I shot him. Three times. Without more than a second’s pause between shots. I remember being extremely conscious of time. It seemed as if every second was an eternity—another cliché. I don’t know whether you’ve ever smoked pot, but that was the sensation: the essence of being high. It was the end of everything—the absolute end. I remember, firing the third shot, that I felt as if I could die, right then. I realized that I’d never feel any more completely alive than I felt right at that moment.”
“Then what did yo
u do?” I asked. There was something in his macabre ecstasy that I couldn’t endure—yet which was completely absorbing.
“I left,” he said. “I left and got in the car and drove back down the road. It was precisely eight o’clock, I remember, when I phoned the police.”
“And then you drove to school.”
He nodded.
“Then what?”
“Then I replaced the gun in the book—” He gestured toward the desk. “—and I got a good night’s sleep. No nightmares. Nothing whatever unusual. Except that, the next morning, I remember waking early—you know, like you do sometimes on special occasions. Christmas, or your birthday. I remember lying in bed and wondering whether I’d committed the perfect crime. I didn’t really think I had, of course. I wasn’t that naïve. But I knew I’d come close. And …” He looked at me with a kind of fond vexation. “And until now, of course, it was the perfect crime. It could still be, with luck.” He looked down at the gun and then glanced at his wristwatch. “I think I’ll wait until about twelve thirty,” he said. “Or maybe quarter to one.” For a moment he gazed at me with a dreamy, faraway look. “I’ll hate to do it, really. You seem like a gentle man, Mr. Drake. That may have been the reason I didn’t hit you with the pellet gun, Monday. Subconsciously, I might not have wanted to. …”
Glass shattered; wood splintered. Two uniformed policemen were threshing in the curtains like fish caught in a net. Keystone cops, I remember thinking. Slapstick. Carrigan stood in the doorway, gun in hand trained at the boy still sitting on the bed—still with his legs crossed. Carrigan’s voice was deep and calm; his eyes were steady.
“Drop it, Johnny. Right now. On the floor.”
The policemen were inside the room now. A ribbon of blood flecked one policeman’s hand. Splintered glass littered the floor. Their guns, too, were trained on the slight blond boy.
“Drop it,” Carrigan repeated, still in the same calm, deep voice. I was helpless in my chair, watching. I was shaking violently.
The gun in the boy’s hand was moving—deliberately raised up, away from his lap.
“Don’t be a damn fool. Drop it.”
But still the gun moved—steadily, inexorably. The muzzle was pointed toward the wall adjoining my chair. Now the muzzle was moving up toward the ceiling, describing a slow, sure arc.
“Johnny. No. Please.” It was my own voice.
The muzzle was now coming down toward the blond head.
“Johnny. Don’t. You …”
The shot was muffled. The gun slipped to the floor. The body was slack, falling upon the bed. The clear blue eyes were staring directly into mine. A bright thread of blood flowed slowly down the pale, twitching cheek.
I wrenched out of the chair, stumbled and fell against the wall. Clutching my stomach with both hands, I began to vomit.
11
“ANOTHER ONE?” LARSEN HELD the coffeepot poised over my empty cup.
“No, thanks.”
For the past several moments we’d been sitting silently. It had taken me almost twenty minutes to tell Larsen the whole story. Not once had he interrupted, either to comment or to question. Now, quietly, he said:
“It’s not your fault, you know. Someone would’ve found out. And he still would’ve killed himself.”
“No one can say that for sure. Besides, who would’ve found out?”
“Carrigan,” he answered promptly. “Carrigan is an easy guy to underestimate. But you can take my word for it: he’d’ve found out. After you phoned yesterday I did some checking, just out of curiosity. And I discovered that Carrigan had been assigned to the Vennezio murder. Very quietly. He was working completely alone, as I understand it, so as to protect himself from any kind of political pressure or local interference.”
“Maybe he’d’ve found out, maybe not. But no one’ll ever know whether the kid would’ve killed himself.”
“Do you think Mrs. Hanson knew the boy was guilty?” he asked, obviously to change the subject.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I think she might’ve guessed.”
He nodded thoughtfully. Then, lightly bantering, he asked, “Did you get the rest of your money?”
“Not yet.”
“Did you ask for it?”
“I already told you: I just got back to the motel and packed my bag and left. No phone calls, nothing. I even forgot my toilet kit and my dirty laundry.”
“In other words, Russo didn’t know whether you’d left town or not.”
“I’m sure he knew. But I didn’t tell him.”
“What’re you going to do, send Aidia Vennezio a bill or something?”
“I suppose so.” Wryly I smiled. “I’ve still got time. It’s not the end of the month.”
Larsen smiled in return and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Well,” he said finally, “I think you’re very, very lucky. Of all the conceivable combinations of all the people who might’ve killed him, for all the possible reasons, it couldn’t’ve worked out better for you. You might not even be sitting here right now if it had turned out to be Russo or Sabella or Mrs. Vennezio’s dwarf, not to mention Angelo. And, as far as that’s concerned, I don’t think anything but the boy’s suicide would’ve done you much good, either. I’m completely convinced that, once you discovered the murderer’s identity and told Russo, he’d’ve ordered you to get on the plane for San Francisco and not to tell a living soul.”
“I suppose you’re right.” I began gathering up my cigarettes and matches. I knew Larsen was anxious to get back to fiber-glassing his boat. And confirming the thought, Larsen rose to his feet with me, leaving his coffee half-finished.
“What I still can’t figure out,” he said as we walked out into the back yard, “is why Johnny would’ve volunteered all that information in the first place—about knowing who the murderer was, then refusing to identify him, yet still insisting he knew. It’s very strange. It was so contradictory that it was sure to arouse suspicion eventually.”
“I think it’s got something to do with the criminal’s urge to confess. I’ve heard you talk about that often—like in Crime and Punishment, which I understand psychologists still quote as a classic example.”
Thoughtfully Larsen nodded. “You could be right. Bravado—the so-called superman complex—is really just the other side of the urge to confess. Like leaving evidence, unconsciously. That happens all the time.”
“There’s something else, too, about Johnny’s so-called tip to me. He identified the murderer as his mother’s secret lover. Yet, thinking about it, I’m not completely sure that he knew Russo was even involved with his mother.”
“But Russo said that he’d seen Johnny out at the beach cabin.”
“Yes, but Johnny didn’t see Russo. And, what’s more, it wouldn’t proven anything if he had seen him. They were just two guys in two cars, parked beside the ocean.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t add up, that way. I think Johnny might’ve had a feeling that she had another lover, but I don’t think he was sure.”
“Well, obviously, he thought he’d divert suspicion from himself if he named another suspect.”
“Maybe so,” I replied doubtfully. “But you said it yourself: coming out with it like he did, so strangely, he’d’ve been better off to’ve kept quiet.”
“How do you figure it, then?”
“I figure,” I said slowly, “that, again, it was a kind of an unconscious confession. He was naming his mother’s secret lover as the murderer—which was, in fact, the unconscious truth. He was naming himself.”
Larsen sighed. “The faithful old Oedipus complex. I’ll be glad when it goes out of style. The way it is now, everything’s so predictable. Besides, I thought you said the kid was queer.”
“That was just an impression. He was screwed up, obviously. And, as far as that goes, Oedipus and homosexuality are supposed to be pretty close.”
Larsen nodded. Obviously, he was losing interest in the conversation. “I wonder,” he said m
usingly, “how things’ll work out with Russo and Sabella.”
“I figure Sabella’ll get transferred to the Des Moines office. At least.”
Larsen smiled, and we stood in silence for a moment.
“You want any help fiber-glassing?” I asked.
“No, thanks.” He smiled and clapped me lightly on the shoulder. “Besides, you need a vacation. If I were you, I’d take off for a long weekend. Go down to Carmel or somewhere.”
“If I could find someplace where I didn’t have to stay in a motel,” I replied, “maybe I would.”
“I see what you mean.” Again he smiled, said good-bye and turned toward the garage.
I got into my car and drove slowly away, aimlessly. I switched on the radio and found some loud rock music, but the noise didn’t help. I couldn’t forget the bright ribbon of blood trickling down the pale, twitching cheek—and the eyes that seemed still alive, staring into mine.
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Copyright © 1968 by Collin Wilcox
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