Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

by Patricia Highsmith

  She made only a small “Ur-rk” sound.

  Clive squeezed her throat with his hands, stopping her voice. At last she slumped, and Clive dragged her into a dark, recessed corner to the left of the cloakroom as one faced that room, and he knocked an empty cardboard box of some kind over, but it didn’t make enough noise to attract the attention of the other two men.

  “Mildred’s gone?” one of the men said.

  “She might be still in the office.”

  “No, she’s not.” This voice had already gone into the corridor where Clive crouched over Mildred, and had looked into the empty cloakroom where the light was still on. “She’s left. Well, I’m calling it a day, too.”

  Clive stepped out then, and encircled this man’s neck in the same manner. The job was more difficult, because the man struggled, but Clive’s arm was thin and strong, he acted with swiftness, and he knocked the man’s head against the nearest wall.

  “What’s going on?” The thump had brought the second man.

  This time, Clive tried a punch to the man’s jaw, but missed and hit his neck. However, this so stunned the man—the solemn fellow, the snoop—that a second blow was easy, and then Clive was able to take him by the shirtfront and bash his head against the wall which was harder than the wooden floor. Then Clive made sure all three were dead. The two men’s heads were bleeding. The woman was bleeding slightly from the mouth. Clive reached for the keys in the second man’s pockets. They were in his left trousers pocket and with them was a penknife. Clive took the knife also.

  Then the taller man moved slightly. Alarmed, Clive opened the pearl-handled penknife and went to work with it. He plunged it into the man’s throat three or four times.

  Close call! Clive thought, and he checked again to make sure they were all dead now. They most certainly were, and that was most certainly real blood coming out, not the red paint of Madame Thibault’s Waxwork Horrors. Clive switched on the lights for the tableaux, and went into the exhibition hall for the interesting task of choosing the right places for the corpses.

  The woman belonged in Marat’s bath, not much doubt about that, and Clive debated removing her clothing, but decided against it, simply because she would look much funnier sitting in a bath with a fur-trimmed coat and hat on than naked. The figure of Marat sent him off in laughter. He’d expected sticks for legs, and nothing between the legs, because you couldn’t see any more of Marat than from the middle of his torso up, but Marat had no legs at all, and his wax body ended just below the waist in a fat stump which was planted on a wooden platform so it would not topple. This crazy item Clive carried into the cloakroom and set squarely in the middle of the desk, like a Buddha. He then carried Mildred—who weighed a good bit—onto the Marat scene and stuck her in the bath. Her hat fell off and he pushed it on again, a bit over one eye. Her bleeding mouth hung open.

  God, it was funny!

  Now for the men. Obviously, the one whose throat he had cut would look good in the place of the old man who was eating franks and sauerkraut, because the girl behind him was supposed to be stabbing him in the throat. This work took Clive some fifteen minutes. Since the wax figure of the old man was in a seated position, Clive stuck him on the toilet off the cloakroom. It was amusing to see the old man on the toilet, throat bleeding, a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, apparently waiting for something to eat. Clive lurched against the doorjamb laughing loudly, not even caring if someone heard him, because it was so ludicrous, it was worth getting caught for.

  Next, the little snoop. Clive looked around him, and his eye fell on the Woodrow Wilson scene, which depicted the signing of the armistice in 1918. A wax figure—Woodrow Wilson—sat at a huge desk signing a paper, and that was the logical place for a man whose head was split open and bleeding. With some difficulty Clive got the pen out of Woodrow Wilson’s fingers, laid it to one side on the desk, and carried the figure—they did not weigh very much—into the cloakroom where Clive seated him at the desk, rigid arms in attitude of writing, and Clive stuck a ballpoint pen into his right hand. Now for the last heave. Clive saw that his jacket was now quite spotted with blood, and he would have to get rid of it, but so far no blood was on his trousers.

  Clive dragged the second man to the Woodrow Wilson tableau, heaved him up onto the platform, and rolled him towards the desk. His head was still leaking blood. Clive got him up onto the chair, but the head toppled forward onto the green-blottered desk, onto the phony blank pages, and the pen barely stood upright in the limp hand.

  But it was done. Clive stood back and smiled. Then he listened. Clive sat down on a straight chair somewhere and rested for a few minutes, because his heart was beating fast, and he suddenly realized that every muscle in his body was tired. Ah, well, now he had the keys. He could get out, go home, have a good night’s rest, because he wanted to be ready to enjoy tomorrow. Clive took a sweater from one of the male figures in a log cabin tableau. He had to pull the sweater down over the feet to get it off, because the arms would not bend, and it stretched the neck of the sweater but that couldn’t be helped. Now the wax figure had a bib of a shirtfront, and naked arms and chest.

  Clive wadded up his jacket and went everywhere with it, erasing fingerprints wherever he thought he had touched. He turned the lights off, and made his way carefully to the back door, which was not locked. Clive locked it behind him, and would have left the keys in a mailbox, if there had been one, but there was none, so he dropped the keys on the doorstep. In a wire rubbish basket, he found some newspapers, and he wrapped his jacket in them, and walked on with it until he found another wire rubbish basket, where he forced the bundle down among candy wrappers and beer cans.

  “A new sweater?” his mother asked that night.

  “Richie gave it to me—for luck.”

  Clive slept like the dead, too tired even to laugh again at the memory of the old man sitting on the toilet.

  The next morning, Clive was standing across the street when the ticket-seller arrived just before 9:30 A.M. By 9:35 A.M., only three people had gone in (evidently Fred had a key to the front door, in case his colleagues were late), but Clive could not wait any longer, so he crossed the street and bought a ticket. Now the ticket-seller was doubling as ticket-taker, or telling people, “Just go on in. Everybody’s late this morning.” The ticket man stepped inside the door to put on some lights, then walked all the way into the place to put on the display lights, which worked from switches in the hall that led to the cloakroom. And the funny thing to Clive, who was walking behind him, was that the ticket man didn’t notice anything odd, didn’t notice Mildred in hat and coat sitting in Marat’s bathtub.

  The customers so far were a man and woman, a boy of fourteen or so in sneakers, and a single man. They looked expressionlessly at Mildred in the tub, as if they thought it quite “normal,” which could have sent Clive into paroxysms of mirth, except that his heart was thumping madly, and he was hardly breathing for suspense. Also, the man with his face in franks and sauerkraut brought no surprise either. Clive was a bit disappointed.

  Two more people came in, a man and a woman.

  Then at last by the Woodrow Wilson tableau, there was a reaction. One of the women clinging to a man’s arm, asked:

  “Was there someone shot when the armistice was signed?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” the man replied vaguely. “Yes-s—Let me think.”

  Clive’s laughter pressed like an explosion in his chest, he spun on his heel to control himself, and he had the feeling he knew all about history, and that no one else did. By now, of course, the real blood had turned dark red. The green blotter was now dark red, and blood had run down the side of the desk.

  A woman on the other side of the hall, where Mildred was, let out a scream.

  A man laughed, but only briefly.

  Suddenly everything happened. A woman shrieked, and
at the same time, a man yelled, “My God, it’s real!”

  Clive saw a man climbing up to investigate the corpse with its face in the frankfurters.

  “The blood’s real! It’s a dead man!”

  Another man—one of the public—slumped to the floor. He had fainted!

  The ticket-seller came bustling in. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Coupla corpses here! Real ones!”

  Now the ticket-seller looked at Marat’s bathtub and fairly jumped into the air with surprise. “Holy Christmas! Holy cripes!—Mildred!”

  “And this one!”

  “And the one here!”

  “My God, got to—got to call the police!” said the ticket-seller Fred. “Could you all, please—just leave?”

  One man and woman went out hurriedly. But the rest lingered, shocked, fascinated.

  Fred had trotted into the cloakroom, where the telephone was, and Clive heard him yell something. He’d seen the man at the desk, of course, Woodrow Wilson, and Marat on the desk.

  Clive thought it was time to drift out, so he did, sidling his way through four or five people who were peering in the door, coming in maybe because there was no ticket-seller.

  That was good, Clive thought. That was all right. Not bad.

  He had not intended to go to work that day, but suddenly he thought it wiser to check in and ask for the day off. Mr Simmons was of course as sour as ever when Clive said he was not feeling well, but as Clive held his stomach and appeared weak, there was little old Simmons could do. Clive left the store. He had brought with him all his ready cash, about twenty-three dollars.

  Clive wanted to take a long bus ride somewhere. He realized that suspicion was likely to fall on him, if the ticket-seller remembered his coming to Madame Thibault’s very often, or especially if he remembered his being there last night, but this had little to do with his desire to take a bus ride. His longing for a bus ride was simply, somehow, irresistible and purposeless. He bought a ticket westward for something over seven dollars, one way. This brought him, by about 7 P.M., to a good-sized town in Indiana, whose name Clive paid no attention to.

  The bus spilled a few passengers, Clive included, at a terminal where there was a cafeteria and a bar. Clive by now was curious about the newspapers, and went at once to the newsstand near the street door of the cafeteria. And there it was:

  TRIPLE MURDER IN WAXWORKS

  MASS MURDER IN WAXWORKS MUSEUM

  MYSTERY KILLER: THREE DEAD IN WAXWORKS MUSEUM

  Clive liked the last headline best. He bought the three newspapers, and stood at the bar with a beer.

  This morning at 9:30 A.M., ticket man Fred J. Keating and several of the public who had come to see Madame Thibault’s Waxworks Horrors, a noted attraction of this city, were confronted by three genuine corpses among the displays. They were the bodies of Mrs. Mildred Veery, 41; George P. Hartley, 43; and Richard K. MacFadden, 37, all employed at the waxworks museum. The two men were killed by concussions to the head, and in the case of one also by stabbing, and the woman by strangulation. Police are searching for clues on the premises. The murders are believed to have taken place shortly before 10 P.M. last evening, when the three employees were about to leave the museum. The murderer or murderers may have been among the last patrons of the museum before closing time at 9:30 P.M. It is thought that he or they may have concealed themselves somewhere in the museum until the rest of the patrons had left . . .

  Clive was pleased. He smiled as he sipped his beer. He hunched over the papers, as if he did not wish the rest of the world to share his pleasure, but this was not true. After a few minutes, Clive looked to right and left to see if anyone else among the men and a few women at the bar were reading the story also. Two men were reading newspapers, but Clive could not tell if they were reading about him necessarily, because their newspapers were folded. Clive lit a cigarette and went through all three newspapers to see if there was any clue about him. He found none at all. One paper said specifically that Fred J. Keating had not noticed any person or persons entering the museum last evening who looked suspicious.

  . . . Because of the bizarre arrangement of the victims and of the displaced wax figures in the exhibitions, in whose places the victims were put, police are looking for a psychopathic killer. Residents of the area have been warned by radio and television to take special precautions on the street and to keep their homes locked . . .

  Clive chuckled over that one. Psychopathic killer. He was sorry about the lack of detail, the lack of humor in the three write-ups. They might have said something about the old guy sitting on the toilet. Or the fellow signing the armistice with the back of his head bashed in. Those were strokes of genius. Why didn’t they appreciate them?

  When he had finished his beer, Clive walked out onto the sidewalk. It was now dark and the streetlights were on. He enjoyed looking around in the new town, looking into shop windows. But he was aiming for a hamburger place, and he went into the first one he came to. It was a diner made up to look like a crack train made of chromium. Clive ordered two hamburgers and a cup of coffee. Next to him were two Western-looking men in cowboy boots and rather soiled broad-brimmed hats. Was one a sheriff, Clive wondered? But they were talking, in a drawl, about acreage somewhere. Land. Money. They were hunched over hamburgers and coffee, one so close his elbow kept brushing Clive’s. Clive was reading his newspapers all over again, and he had propped one against the napkin container in front of him.

  One of the men asked for a napkin and disturbed Clive, but Clive smiled, and said in a friendly way:

  “Did you read about the murders in the waxworks?”

  The man looked blank, then said, “Saw the headlines.”

  “Someone killed the three people who worked in the place. Look.” There was a photograph in one of the papers, but Clive didn’t much like it, because it showed the corpses lined up on the floor. He would have preferred Mildred in the bathtub.

  “Yeah,” said the Westerner, edging away from Clive as if he didn’t like him.

  “The bodies were put into a few of the exhibitions. Like the wax figures. They say that, but they don’t show a picture of it,” said Clive.

  “Yeah,” said the Westerner, and went on with his hamburger.

  Clive felt let down and somehow insulted. His face grew a little warm as he stared back at his newspapers. In fact, anger was growing very quickly inside him, making his heart go faster, as it did when he passed Madame Thibault’s Waxwork Horrors, though now the sensation was not at all pleasant. Clive put on a smile, however, and turned again to the man on his left. “I mention it, because I did it. That’s my work there.” He pointed at the picture of the corpses.

  “Listen, boy,” said the Westerner, chewing, “you just keep to yourself tonight. Okay? We ain’t botherin’ you, and don’t you go botherin’ us.” He laughed a little, and glanced at his companion.

  His friend was staring at Clive, but looked away at once when Clive looked at him.

  This was a double rebuff, and quite enough for Clive. Clive got his money out and paid for his unfinished food with a dollar bill and a fifty-cent piece. He left the change and walked to the sliding door exit.

  “But y’know, maybe that kid ain’t kiddin’,” Clive heard one of the men say.

  Clive turned and said, “I ain’t kiddin’!” Then he went out into the night.

  Clive slept at a YMCA. The next day, he half expected he would be picked up by any passing cop on the beat, but he wasn’t, and he passed a few. He got a lift to another town, nearer his home town. The day’s newspapers brought no mention of his name, and no clues. In another café that evening almost the identical conversation took place between Clive and a couple of fellows around his own age. They didn’t believe him. It was stupid of them, Clive thought, and he wondered if they were pretending? Or lying?

 
Clive hitched his way to his hometown, and headed for the police station. He was curious to see what they would say. He imagined what his mother would say after he confessed. Probably the same thing she had said to her friends sometimes, or that she’d said to a policeman when he was sixteen and had stolen a car:

  “Clive hasn’t been the same boy since his father went away. I know he needs a man around the house, a man to look up to, imitate, y’know. That’s what people tell me. Since fourteen, Clive’s been asking me questions like, ‘Who am I, anyway?’ and ‘Am I a person, mom?’ ” Clive could see and hear her already in the police station.

  “I have an important confession to make,” Clive said to a guard, or somebody, sitting at a desk at the front of the station.

  The guard’s attitude was rude and suspicious, Clive thought, but he was told to walk to an office, where he spoke with a police officer who had gray hair and a fat face. Clive told his story.

  “Where do you go to school, Clive?”

  “I don’t. I’m eighteen.” Clive told him about his job at Simmons’s Grocery.

  “Clive, you’ve got troubles, but they’re not the ones you’re talking about,” said the officer.

  Clive had to wait in a room, and nearly an hour later a psychiatrist was brought in. Then his mother. Clive became more and more impatient. They didn’t believe him. They were saying he was a typical case of false confessing in order to attract attention to himself. His mother’s repeated statements about his asking questions like “Am I a person?” only seemed to corroborate the psychiatrist and the police in their opinion.

  Clive was to report somewhere twice a week for psychiatric therapy.

  He fumed. He refused to go back to Simmons’s Grocery, but found another delivery job, because he liked having a little money in his pocket, and he was fast on his bicycle and honest with the change.

  “You haven’t found the murderer, have you?” Clive said to the psychiatrist, associating him, Clive realized, with the police. “You’re all the biggest bunch of jackasses I’ve ever seen in my life!”