by T E. D Klein
The boardwalk on which he was retracing his steps appeared to reach to the horizon. He tore his gaze from the vanishing point in the distance, where all lines converged in the furnace of the sun, to stare at the beach beyond the boardwalk's iron railings. And as he did so, the memory leaped into focus.
Something, he remembered, had happened to him there, down on the sand; something had tripped him-a bump, a stone, a piece of drift-wood, an uprearing in the earth ....
No, that wasn't it; he remembered now. Just as the sky darkened, beneath the glare of eyes as big as galaxies, he had felt his foot slide, then sink into a hollow in the sand. And the sand had opened beneath him, then pressed in upon him, clutched him, dried to draw him in. As if the earth were yearning to crush him, smother him, blot out the very memory of him. As if the planet, all nature, all creation, the very fabric of reality, were inimical to breeds such as his.
And hadn't it all happened on this very stretch of beach? Wasn't this the very spot where, on that long-forgotten day, he'd first had an inkling of the truth?
All gods yielded before the implacable urgings of habit. Monday saw him back at the office, his schedule unchanged, dutifully laboring on the Holiday Farm account. He put in a full day on it, skipping his session at the gym and working right through lunch, his only departure from routine. It was as if, by sheer industriousness, he could shore up the props of his life that had begun to slip away. Even he was aware of it, at odd points in the day: pinning a selection of cherry-tree sketches to the cork board by his desk, he saw himself, for a moment, as a man frantically papering over the holes in his home, layer upon layer, while around him walls crumbled and fell. '
Those same walls trembled and nearly collapsed when, leaving work meticulously at five-thirty, pleased with the thought, that, on the way home, he would complete some early Christmas shopping before the stores closed, he rode down in the elevator crowded with lower-ranking members of the office staff and heard the new receptionist complain to one of the secretaries about the crank calls she'd been getting all afternoon. "And when I'd say hello, no one would answer. I don't know who they thought they were trying to annoy."
He felt more guilty than angry, like the father of a psychopath, a father who had failed to warn the world. He knew that the calls were meant for him, that Huntoon leered repulsively behind them, and that they'd somehow been provoked by his previous day's excur-sion. / never should have bothered going out there, he told himself. I'll have that creep pursuing me till the grave.
At work the next day Nadelman hurried past the receptionist, avoiding his usual small-talk. He felt sure that, face to face with her, he'd betray his guilty secret, and at the end of the day he refrained from asking her the question foremost in his mind: whether she'd received any more mysterious calls.
His question, nonetheless, was answered soon enough, for at din-ner that evening another such call to Nadelman's home. It was picked up in the kitchen by Michael, for whom answering the phone was still more an adventure than a chore.
"Hello?" The boy's voice, as always, was eager, as if a present awaited him at the other end of the line. Nadelman watched his son's expression nervously, waiting for the next response. The boy pressed the phone to his ear, then frowned, confused. "Hello?"
Nadelman was out of his chair and across the room in an instant, taking the phone from Michael's hands. "Hello!" he said sharply. The phone might as well have been dead. "Listen, Huntoon!" he yelled, aware that his wife and son were listening, "now you're really getting me angry! I wish you and your mother would just get the hell out of my life! I swear to God, you should be locked up!"
He slammed the phone back into its cradle; then, thinking better of it, he lifted it again and switched off the ringer. "Now at least we'll get some peace and quite around here."
And they did. Once more the world was kept at bay-until Thurs-day of the same week, when Nadelman's secretary buzzed him as he sat writing in his office, a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door, to tell him that a man was waiting to see him in the reception area.
"I don't see any appointments written down," he said crossly, already thinking of Huntoon and wishing there were a back way so he could sneak out.
"He doesn't have an appointment," said the secretary. Then, puzzled, relaying the message third-hand: "He says he doesn't need one. It's someone named Sergeant Berkey."
Could this be a joke? The only Berkey that Nadelman knew was an account executive at Kone, Ruderman, who'd been in charge of the Life-Saver campaign.
"Find out what he wants."
There was a pause. "Denise says he's a police officer."
Nadelman felt his insides knot. Bodies in the morgue, grainy photos in the Post-he could already picture them: Rhoda, Michael, smiling the inane, pathetic smile of the world's front-page victims. He swallowed, wondering which one it would be.
"Send him in."
He went to his office door and opened it, then sat down again to wait, already seeing himself as the father, the husband-the one who is told the terrible news. Sharon was returning, leading a middle-aged man in a blue patrolman's uniform. Nadelman's heart beat faster.
She ushered the man into the office and closed the door behind him. Once he saw the man's distracted smile, Nadelman knew he had nothing to fear. The other stood with cop's hat in hand, gazing out the window past Nadelman's head.
"Nice view," he said with just a touch of envy, sinking heavily into one of the low leather chairs facing the desk. He studied Nadelman's face. "I'm Sergeant Berkey. We tracked you down here from the address on your stationery."
Stationery? How had the police seen his stationery? But the officer was peering at a black leatherette notepad. "The reason I'm here, Mr. Nadelman, is that we've found the bodies of two friends of yours-" He flipped a page. "A Mr. Arlen Huntoon and a Mrs. Lonee Huntoon."
"My God!"
So the Post had claimed someone after all. Relief flooded through him-relief that, if someone had to die, it had been those two-followed immediately by guilt. The poor old woman!
"When?" he asked, "How?" Hadn't the mother said something about an ex-boss of Arlen's, someone he'd quarreled with? Or had those downstairs neighbors finally come back for revenge? The Huntoons had seemed to have a lot of enemies.
Berkey shock his head. "That's not for me to say, Mr. Nadelman. But I'll tell you this much, the guys out in Long Beach came across the two of 'em by accident, in the course of an entirely separate investigation-or at least they thought it was."
"What sort of investigation?"
The other looked down for a moment, tracing his finger around the sweatband of his hat. "I'm not really at liberty to say. The God's honest truth is, I'm here to see if you could answer a few questions."
"Of course." Nadelman waited, expecting the man to whip out a laminated card and read him his rights, but instead the other merely withdrew a ball-point pen from his shirt pocket and opened the pad to a fresh page.
"Did you know the deceased?"
"Only slightly." Keeping his voice low, lest his secretary hear, Nadelman recounted some of the events that had led to his visit there this past weekend. There was no sense lying about it, hell, if the police already had possession of his letters, they certainly must know the main facts of the story.
"So why exactly was it you went out there?" Berkey sat forward, pen poised.
Nadelman shrugged. "Because 1 felt I was getting harassed by this guy-" Whoops, that sounded too hostile! "I mean I felt he was a nuisance for my family and me-" He saw the lawman laboriously
writing down "nuisance," and felt better. "And since he didn't seem to own a phone, I figured I'd have to go out there and talk to him. Believe me, it was the one and only time I ever met him."
The officer finished writing-were these guys really dumb, he wondered, or did they just play dumb, like Colombo?-and slipped the pen back in his pocket.
"Don't worry, Mr. Nadelman, you're not on the suspect list. We got a description of the guy, and it
's nothing like you. A big galoot, I hear. I'm just checking up on a few facts." He flashed a smile; he had probably had a course or two in human relations. "We gotta do our job, you know? It's what all of us pay taxes for."
Nadelman tried to remember his final goodbye to the Huntoons, his march downstairs, hurrying outside to breathe the good air. He had left them both alive and smiling, unprotected. Had the murderer been watching, even then? Waiting, perhaps, for him to leave?
"As I mentioned," he said, "the last time I spoke to Huntoon was Tuesday night-even though he didn't speak back. And when were the bodies discovered?"
Berkey scratched his thinning hair. "Wednesday morning, I think."
"So they couldn't have been dead for very long."
"I guess not. Lucky thing the cops out there were in the building, otherwise it could've been weeks. I get the impression those two didn't have many friends."
Nadelman nodded. "I got the same impression myself."
He hadn't been a friend of theirs tixhtr-friends with those creeps? you've got to be kidding-bvt for the rest of the day, after Berkey had fortified himself with one more envious glance out the office win-dow and had departed, Nadelman felt as if he had lost two old and well-loved comrades: a little eccentric, perhaps, but valued nonetheless. He was downcast.
At least he was until he got home that night and discovered Huntoon's final message.
Rhoda had taken Michael to a classmate's eighth birthday party and had left Nadelman some ham and cheese in the refrigerator for his dinner. The day's mail lay in a pile on the kitchen table, a scrap of paper atop it with the message, in Rhoda's jubilant handwriting: Another one from Guess Who? Nadelman immediately recognized the address label and its tiny red lobster.
Except in cases of extreme curiosity, such as he'd experienced that previous Sunday in the Long Beach luncheonette, Nadelman, as a rule, did not read the Post or the Daily News except over people's shoulders on the subway. Their stories seemed too transient to waste time on; even his reading of the Times was, on weekdays, usually confined to the front page (if there were no gigantic headlines, the world was safe for another twenty four hours), the opinion pages, and the business section for news about the advertising world. And so it wasn't surprising that, until he tore open Huntoon's final envelope, he hadn't seen the item it contained, a clipping cut from Tuesday's Post that Huntoon must have mailed the very day he'd been murdered.
L.I. DUMP GRAVE FOR SLAIN COUPLE.
A posed photo showed a workman in overalls, his face shadowed by the hardhat he wore, pointing to an equally shadowy depression in the mound of rubbish he was standing upon. "The bodies of an unidentified man and woman were discovered Monday morning by landfill engineers working at the county dump in Oceanside, Long Island," the article said. It noted that the bodies had been described by police as those of "an elderly white couple, apparently in their seventies," and that workmen had also found, lying beside them, "a large dog, probably a terrier."
It was the mention of the dog that did it. Nadelman, sickened, saw how naive he'd been. He remembered the smell from Huntoon's closet, and realized that what Huntoon had left out at the dump that morning had not been the creature at all.
It was them, it had to be. The old couple from downstairs.
He knew now why the police had paid a visit to the Huntoons' apartment yesterday. They'd obviously had time to identify the dead as Mr. and Mrs. Braverman.
Judging by the state of decomposition, the article said, the pair had not been buried long; the deaths were believed to have occurred over the weekend. The bodies had been, in one detective's phrase-which the Post repeated as the article's subhead-"slashed to ribbons."
Nadelman remembered the broken glass on Huntoon's roof, and shuddered.
Written at the top, in Huntoon's heavy hand-the crazy, boastful creep!-was, "Don't worry I'd never let it hurt YOU."
Standing beneath a Second Avenue streetlight, his shoulders hun-ched against the evening's chill, Nadelman peered hurriedly through the News and the Post he'd just bought. He felt like a fugitive, fur-tively scanning the pages for an affirmation of his crime.
The report in the News was restrained, almost disappointingly so.
HUNT FOR MURDER CLUES YIELDS TWO MORE DEATHS!
Nassau County police, attempting to identify the elderly man and woman whose bodies were discovered Monday in a dump outside Oceanside, L.I., yesterday stumbled upon two more bodies in the course of the investigation, police spokesmen said. The first vic-tims have been identified as Leo Braverman, 76, and his wife Flora, 73, of Locust Court in Long Beach. The two most recent victims were Lonee Huntoon, in her late 70s, and her son Arlen, 33, fellow tenants in the same apartment building.
The Post put it more flamboyantly-
SOUTH SHORE SLASHER CLAIMS VICTIMS 4 & 5!
- and it included a photograph of the Bravermans, both of them small, plump, and white-haired, taken on what looked like a Miami Beach vacation. The woman was smiling, though her smile hadn't saved her; the man appeared more grave, as if he'd known where the photo would someday appear. "The bodies of the Long Beach couple, along with their pet dog, were found Mon-day morning by workers in the Oceanside town dump," the article said.
Nadelman was puzzled by the headline-how had the body count reached five?-until his eye fell on a later paragraph identifying the first victim as "Esteban Farella, 46, chief dispatcher at the Val-U-Rite Delivery Service in Valley Stream, whose headless body was found last week."
Nadelman stiffened, remembering the story he'd read Sunday. He had failed to make the connection, but obviously the authorities had not-though they were clearly on the wrong track. "Police are still investigating a suspected gangland motive," the paper said.
Despite the headline, slasher victims three and four were not pic-tured, but the story described Huntoon as "a former Val-U-Rite employee laid off last August."
Nadelman did no more than skim the rest, if only for self-protection - "the widowed mother . . . mangled remains . . . work of one man . . . reports of a figure seen leaving the building that night . . . " - but he froze when he came to the story's final line: "Police said the bodies were discovered locked in the younger Huntoon's closet."
He closed the paper with trembling hands. His fingertips felt dirty. What was it Huntoon had said that day on the roof? Something about the servant preferring to take orders from Nadelman himself?
Yes, that's what he'd said. Nadelman remembered well enough.
But he didn't icmember precisely what he himself had yelled into the phone two nights ago, at what he'd thought was Huntoon-and was iust as happy he did not.
The idea that anyone could be afraid of a dachshund was ridiculous, especially one as small as Nadelman's. She was called Brownie-the name, of course, had been given to her by Michael, who as yet had no stake in being ciever-and she was a good-humored, comical little creature, trotting briskly up the sidewalk with the complacent smile of a young PTA mother. So it seemed extremely odd to Nadelman that one night during the week of Thanksgiving, as he walked the dog along Seventy-sixth Street, a clear plastic Baggie in hand, he saw two male pedestrians coming his way stop, squint at him, and scat-ter. One of them crossed to the other side of the street; the other turned and hurried back the way he'd come.
Puzzled, Nadelman wondered if they had been terrified of Brownie ... or of him. Fancy, grown men so scared of a dachshund! Suddenly a third alternative dawned on him; but when he turned and scanned the sidewalk behind him, there was no one there.
On Wednesday afternoon of that same week-really the mere stump of a week, with only three days of work to endure-Rhoda took the car and drove up to Westchester with Michael and the dog. They would spend the night with her parents; Nadelman would join them on Thanksgiving Day. He'd claimed he had a Thursday morning meeting with an important soft-drink client who'd be flying into New York for the long weekend and had insisted on squeezing in some business obligations. In truth, he knew that Cele would be avail
able-uniquely so: because she was a foreigner the holiday meant little to her; she would simply be having dinner at a friend's.
"Some people have such a nerve!" said Rhoda, helping Michael pack on Wednesday morning.
"It'll only be an hour or so," said Nadelman. "Just one of those stuffy breakfast meetings at the Carlyle, with the sixteen-dollar scrambled eggs. I'll take the train up afterward, and you can pick me up at the station."
"Just leave room for the turkey," said Rhoda.
"And just you be sure to call me tonight before bedtime," he said, kissing her fondly on the cheek as he left for work.
He lingered at home that night until ten-thirty, when her call came. After chatting with her about the tram schedule, he hung up and, leaving the phone off the hook, took a taxi down to Cele's.
Their night together was not all that Nadelman had hoped. Maybe it was nerves, or simple guilt, as if the unhooked phone back in his apartment were still sounding warning beeps in his ear.
He felt even more disturbed the next morning when, as Cele unlat-ched the front door and prepared to kiss him goodbye, she suddenly wrinkled up her delicate Slavic nose.
"Ugh, the people in this building, they are so disgusting!"
She pointed to a small irregular puddle in the hall just in front of her door. Nadelman, gingerly stepping over it with his overnight bag in hand, intent on getting to Grand Central in time, smelied a sour, fishy smell and thought for a moment of the house in Locust Court. But that was an idea he immediately cast back into the pile. In truth, Cele's building was a bit shabby.
It was only when he was on the train to New Rochelle and had laid aside his Advertising Age and Fortune to watch the fleeting scenery that, as if suddenly touched by a trickle of ice water, he was struck by a vision of what might have left the puddle-something, he suspected, that had waited patiently by their door all night. But here on the train, with well-groomed suburban lanes rolling by beyond the window and the smell of the snack bar to whet his hunger, such visions were hard to believe in.
Still, he was glad that his own building had a doorman.