Killy

by Donald E. Westlake

  Walter and I kept the vigil honest, but even Walter, eventually, began to yawn hugely and stretch his arms out. ‘This is enough for me,’ he said. ‘Nice to have met you, Alice. See you in the morning.

  Alice looked up. ‘What time is it?’

  Walter checked his watch. ‘Two-thirty.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens!’ She jumped to her feet. ‘I’ve got to get home.’

  Mr Clement, impervious to us all, kept right on mumbling and chuckling his way through the books. We finally got his attention, and told him we were leaving. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll have it written up in the morning.’ And he dove back into the ledgers.

  Walter and Alice and I went outside, into the darkness. It had cooled off nicely, and we paused to light a round of cigarettes. Then Walter said, ‘As we promised, Miss MacCann, Fleisch will never find out exactly how we got the books. We’ll keep your name out of it completely.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It was awfully nice to meet you, Mr Killy.’

  ‘Likewise, Miss MacCann.’

  They shook hands, and Walter went on into our unit. Alice and I got back into the Ford, and I drove her home.

  On the way, she said, ‘They’re nice people, aren’t they?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I was too tired to be much good at conversation.

  ‘They’ve all got a purpose,’ she said. ‘They’re dedicated. I bet that Mr Clement won’t sleep at all tonight.’

  ‘No bet,’ I said.

  She turned to me, her eyes glowing in the light from the dash. ‘Paul,’ she said, ‘I’ve done you all a favour tonight, haven’t I?’

  ‘You sure have. A big favour.’

  ‘Will you do me a big favour back?’

  ‘If I can.’

  ‘Take me back to Washington with you.’

  I stared at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Look at the road, she said. ‘Let’s not have an accident.’

  I looked at the road.

  ‘I want the union to give me a job,’ she said. ‘I can type sixty-five words a minute, I can take dictation at ninety, and I can keep financial records. When all of you go back to Washington, I want to go with you.’

  My feelings at that moment were too complex to be given in a single simple word or phrase. Alice wanted to come back to Washington with us, and I knew that that meant she would be available for me for the next six months. The prospect was pleasing. At the same time, it suddenly was brought home to me that Alice might very well be thinking of something a lot more permanent than a six-month affair. And the prospect of permanence of any kind, at least at this stage of my life, was far from pleasing. Besides, I hardly knew the girl. That may sound either ridiculous or callous, considering, but it is nevertheless the truth. I knew we were good bedmates. That, essentially, was all I knew, and it was hardly a broad enough foundation for marriage.

  Marriage. Good God, I hardly knew her! I did, I hardly knew her!

  ‘Well—‘ I said. ‘Well. I’ll talk to Walter in the morning.’ And Mr Clement isn’t the only one who’ll stay awake all night.

  ‘Thank you, Paul,’ she said. She smiled, and snuggled close to me, and I drove one-handed.

  When I stopped in front of her house, she said, ‘Do you want to come in for a little while?’

  ‘I better not,’ I said. ‘I ought to get back. We’ve all got a busy day tomorrow.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. She leaned close and kissed me, her tongue flickering out. ‘Come see me when you can.’

  ‘I will,’ I promised, and already I was regretting having refused to go inside with her now.

  She got out of the car, though, before I could change my mind. She waved at me, and started across the street, and I called out, ‘Hey, Alice!’

  She came back to the car.

  ‘We’ve been forgetting,’ I said. ‘He may be in there.’

  ‘Who? Oh.’ She looked across the street at the house. ‘You mean the murderer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll go next door. I can sleep on the sofa.’

  ‘Look. Go in your own house, and then around the back way. So in case he’s watching, he won’t know where you’ve gone.’

  ‘All right.’

  I got out of the car after all. ‘I better go with you, just in case he’s in there.’

  ‘Yes. Do.’

  We searched the house, but it was empty except for ourselves. Alice began to think sexually again, but by this time I actually was too exhausted to follow my inclinations. We turned off the lights, and I watched as she crept out the back door and across the lawn to the right. ‘You go on now,’ she whispered back to me. ‘I’ll be all right, I really will.’

  ‘I’ll wait till your neighbour lets you in.’

  ‘You will not! What would they think?’

  I gave in, and closed the back door and went on through the dark house and out the front way and across the street to the car. I sat behind the wheel and lit a cigarette and yawned and drove back to the motel.

  Walter was in bed, and the lights were out. I thought he was asleep, so I undressed in the dark, but as I was getting into bed he said, soft-voiced. ‘That’s quite a dish you’ve got there, Paul, that Alice MacCann.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t expect you back here tonight.’

  ‘Walter, for Pete’s sake, her grandfather died this morning.’

  He chuckled. ‘Paul, sweetie,’ he said, ‘you’ve got all the marks of a boy who’s been breaking his fast.’

  ‘Good night, Walter,’ I said. I was angry, and let it show.

  He was instantly contrite. He sat up, over there in the other bed, and said, ‘Paul, I’m sorry. I was kidding you. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, grumpily.

  ‘She looks like a very nice girl,’ he said. ‘I mean that sincerely, Paul.’

  ‘She wants to come back to Washington with us,’ I said. It just popped out, without my intending to say it.

  ‘She wants to do what?’

  ‘She wants the union to give her a job. In return for her getting the books. She can type, and take dictation, and keep financial records.’

  ‘How about a job with the local here, once we get it going?’

  ‘No, she said she wanted to come back to Washington with us. She wants to get out of Wittburg.’

  ‘I don’t blame her. Okay, sure. Tell her she’s on the payroll. I can hire her on as our field secretary now, and when we get back to the city she can go into the steno pool. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, a little dazed. It was all decided. I didn’t have to stay awake all night worrying after all. But I did, anyway.

  Twenty Seven

  I awoke late, to find myself alone in the room. I didn’t know exactly what time it was, but the sun was high and my stomach was empty, so I thought it must be around eleven o’clock. I wandered around, washing and dressing, with a wan kind of empty feeling, mopish and wistful. I couldn’t figure out at first what was wrong with me, what this feeling reminded me of, and then at last I got it. It was end-of-the-semester blues. I was breaking-up-that-old-gang-of-mine lonesome.

  Once, during my stint in the Army, I was given temporary duty, a special assignment to a normally empty Army camp near Cincinnati, Ohio. Our particular numbered Army Corps was preparing its budget submission for the Congressional Armed Forces Appropriations Committee for two fiscal years hence. We made up maps of all the posts in the Corps, we had lists of all buildings on each post, and all equipment in each building, and value of this and value of that. And we had our requests for new buildings and new equipment, and eight-or ten-page justifications for every request. Lists were adjusted and justifications were rejected and rewritten, maps were found faulty and redrawn, columns of figures were added and added again, and we had ten days to finish the job. There were about forty of us, officers and enlisted men, working twelve and fourteen hours a day. In my own group, from St Louis, there were two captains, a bird colonel, a Specialist 3, and
two PFC typists. I was one of the PFC typists. We lived an odd life in those ten days, disjointed and crowded and filled with a sort of jerry-built camaraderie. There was so much work to be done, and so many other things to think about, that Army rank and protocol seemed to fade into the background. Only three buildings had been opened for us, so officers and enlisted men lived unusually close together, working together and eating together and—on Sundays, our one day off—going into town and getting half-smashed together. There’s an awful lot of talk about teamwork today in government and in big corporations, but mostly it’s just talk, mostly it’s just a way of sugar-coating authority. During those ten days at that condemned and abandoned Army post, we forty actually did become a team, in the true sense of the word. And on the last day, I think we all felt a little forlorn and wistful and empty, at having to break up the team and go back to the regulated abstractions of reality. The bird colonel was no longer the man who had introduced me to Cardinal Puff, a drinking game guaranteed to leave the neophyte a sodden mess under the table. And I, to him, was no longer the youngster who had taught him one riotous lunch-time the words to ‘The Bastard King of England’. The protocols were back, the herd defences were up again; I was a PFC, and he was a colonel, leaving neither of us with any more individuality than a vacuum tube. I think that’s the acid test of a true team: it accentuates individuality.

  At any rate, I suppose this sad empty feeling is common in such situations. Whenever men have worked together with such intensity and single-mindedness on a particular job, the completion of the job and the dispersal of the team is a sad thing. And it was this kind of sadness and loneliness and forlorn emptiness that was plaguing me this morning, though there was no sense in it. The team had been created, perhaps, but far too recently to have yet become welded into the kind of group I mean. Besides, the job wasn’t ending. It was, in fact, barely beginning. So why the blues? Walter wasn’t around—I supposed he was off with Fletcher and Mr Clement to see Fleisch—but so what? There was no sensible reason for the blues, which I told myself, but I had them anyway. I washed my face with cold water, twice, and I still had them. So I got dressed and went next door.

  Phil was sitting yogi-legged on one bed, playing solitaire. George, of course, was supine on the other, studying the ceiling. They both looked over at me when I came in, and Phil said, ‘Sleeping Beauty.’

  ‘You were supposed to come in and kiss me,’ I told him. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Eleven-twenty.’

  ‘The others gone off to see Fleisch?’

  ‘Yowzah.’

  George reared up and gazed at me. ‘You hungry?’

  ‘Starved.’

  ‘Let’s go eat.’ George heaved himself up off the bed, shook his shoulders a little, and said to Phil, ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ll hold the fort,’ Phil told him. ‘Three meals a day’s enough for me.’

  ‘Huh,’ said George. ‘You’re skinny.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Phil. ‘You ain’t.’

  We went outside. The Ford was gone, and George handed me the keys to Fletcher’s rented car, a new Chewy. ‘You drive, little friend,’ he said. ‘I got no licence any more.’

  ‘All right.’ We got into the Chewy and I backed around and headed for the City Line Diner. ‘What happened to your licence?’

  ‘They took it away.’ He smiled as he said it.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I tried to run over this guy. I missed him, but a cop seen me on the sidewalk, and they got me for reckless driving and resisting an officer and a couple other things. So they took away the licence.’

  ‘You tried to run him over?’ I wasn’t sure whether George was kidding me or not. His huge face was creased in the same dreamy smile he always wore.

  ‘I didn’t see the cop,’ he explained. He shifted around, looking out the side window. ‘I like this town,’ he said. ‘I’d like to live in a little town some day.’

  ‘I suppose it’s all right,’ I said.

  He looked at me again, with that sleepy big-dog smile. ‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Not you, little friend. You’re a big-city boy. You gonna stick with the union?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’ll do good,’ he said. ‘Whatcha gonna do to Killy?’

  ‘Walter?’ I took time out to pull into the parking lot next to the diner. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I figured you’d do him like you did that girl yesterday,’ he said.

  ‘Sondra? What for?’

  ‘Yeah, that chick at the printer’s.’

  ‘George, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He shrugged, and got out of the car. ‘I been wrong before,’ he said. ‘Let’s eat, little friend.’

  We ate, and George told me about his experiences as a sparring partner for heavyweight contenders. He’d never been a sparring partner for a champion, only for contenders. I asked him once or twice what he’d been talking about there in the car, but he slid away from the questions, acting big and dumb and friendly and full of anecdotes. He did a Yiddish fight manager from Detroit in a three-way argument with a Negro sparring partner from Louisiana and an Italian gambler from the Bronx that was really pretty funny. But he didn’t answer the questions.

  When we got back to the motel, Walter was there, looking like a Marlboro ad. He wore a dark grey suit and an expensive white shirt with button-down collar and a thin black tie. The slender suit and slender tie detracted from his halfback’s physique, making him look narrower, but still healthy and well-physiqued. He sat in the easy chair, relaxed and smiling. His suit jacket was open, his legs were stretched out in front of him with the ankles crossed, and his right elbow was on the chair-arm as he held a cigarette in the air. The Marlboro ad, complete, except that he smoked Newports.

  ‘Hiya, Paul,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’re a heavy sleeper.’

  ‘How’d it go?’ I asked him.

  ‘Like a breeze,” he said. ‘Like a charm. When you get an idea, Paul, it’s a dilly.’

  George made a comment about his digestive processes, and lay down on the nearest bed.

  I said, ‘He gave in, huh?’

  ‘Sure he did. Fletcher played him like a piano. Fleisch bluffed this way and bluffed that way, and Fletcher knocked him down at every turn.’

  I sat on the other bed, cross-legged, the way Phil played solitaire. ‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

  He was glad to. He had, I was sure, just been sitting here waiting for me to get back so he could tell me about it. That was a part of Walter’s charm—his natural charm, I mean, not the painfully false charm that went with his conception of a businessman—the fact that his enthusiasms were essentially childlike. He didn’t hop around in his enthusiasm to tell me the story, the way a child would, but that was only the external, anyway. His desire, if not its expression, was simple and uncomplicated and childlike.

  Walter was full of contradictions like that. No, that’s wrong. It wasn’t that Walter was full of contradictions, it was that my view of him was full of contradictions. I saw him as a big healthy boy, as a child, and at the same time he made me feel like an even younger child in his presence. And though I looked up to him and considered him more capable and knowledgeable than I, at the same time I felt—this is a strange word, and not quite accurate, but it’s the closest I can come to the feeling—I felt somehow more sophisticated than Walter. These contradictions were not in him—he was not an obscure or heavily complex personality, by any means—but in me, in my view of him, and my recognition of that fact was itself one of the contradictions.

  At any rate, he told me the story.

  ‘We went in,’ he said, ‘Fletcher and Clement and me, and right off the bat Fleisch was full of bluster. He thought we wanted to make a deal of some kind, without any ace in the hole, and he wanted to be on top of the bargaining right from the beginning. Well, Fletcher let him go on for a minute or two and then he said, “That’s not exactly why we’re
here.” And he told him about the embezzlement. It’s a hefty chunk of money, by the way. Clement worked it out last night. The thing’s been going on for a year and a half, and the guy’s pulled down about forty-five thousand so far.’

  ‘Son of a gun,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, isn’t it? Anyway, Fleisch got rattled for a minute, because he didn’t know anything about any embezzlement, and then he started to pull the stall bit, all about how he’d look into it and see if there was any truth in the charges, and if there was, he’d get in touch with us and we could talk it over some more. Fletcher’d already mentioned the Mclntyres, just kind of casually, saying we thought it was better to tell Fleisch about the embezzling than go to the owners. So Fleisch knew the score, and, just the way we figured, he tried to stall us off while he cleaned it up quick and quiet all by himself.

  ‘So then Fletcher told him we had the books.’ Walter grinned at the memory of that, and leaned over to get rid of his cigarette in the ashtray on the writing table. ‘He hollered like a virgin,’ he said.’ “I’ll have you people put in jail for theft! You stole those books!”’ He didn’t have George’s flair for mimicry, but I got the idea. ‘So Fletcher picked up the phone on his desk and said, “Mr Fleisch wants to call the police. Put the call through at once, please.” Then he turned to me and said, “Walter, you better go call Bobby Mclntyre, after all.” And then he handed the phone to Fleisch. So I started for the door, and Fleisch shouted into the phone, “Cancel that call!” And he hollered at me to stay where I was.’

  ‘Who’s Bobby Mclntyre?’

  ‘Who knows? One of the owners.’ He lit himself a fresh cigarette, and went on. ‘So Fleisch blustered awhile about how we couldn’t threaten him, and Fletcher just sat there and waited. And when Fleisch slowed down a little, Fletcher handed him Clement’s facts and figures, and then we started to deal.’