When he got to the curb he discovered his bicycle had been stolen.
Buddy brooded resentfully for the rest of the afternoon, which he spent sitting in the office behind the closed door, ignoring the customers, if such there were, outside. Few cars sold themselves. Only one person breached his privacy. This fellow entered without knocking. He was young, with steel-rimmed glasses and a smirk.
“Hey,” he said brashly, “you know that thirty-seven Chevy two-door of yours—they got one in better condition at Loewenfels’, down on the Milltown Pike near the infirmary—for fifty dollars less.”
“Then you go over and scoop it up, fella.”
The young man’s smirk grew broader. “Oh, yeah? I figured we could do a little negotiating.”
“Take a look at the rubber on that baby.”
“The muffler’s rusted out, and the paint on the hood is shot: engine heat’s faded it.”
“I know the car,” Buddy said frostily. “You wanna make a quick deal, I’ll go down twenty-five.”
“I’m going to take another look at Loewenfels’,” said the guy. He hesitated at the door, waiting in three-quarter profile, one shoulder high, for another offer, but it being in Buddy’s psychological interest, which was predominant at the moment, to deny him, he heard nothing further, and left.
Buddy had the feeling that things were coming to a head. His decision, made as usual on impulse, to let Laverne stew in her own juice for a few days was in retrospect seen as impracticable, like an unenforceable law such as that, still on the books in some states, forbidding unorthodox sex practices even by spouses.
Already he felt a growing pressure in his groin. Unless his testes were regularly evacuated they became the seat of his central nervous system and sent throughout his body venomous communications in the forms of neuralgia, dyspepsia, and a twitching of the inner eyelid, maddening though not visible to others.
In this condition in the old days he would have gone instantly to the nearest woman and relieved himself inside her. He could not be resisted when under the force of this need, though several times it had happened that his partner, met but an hour earlier in one roadhouse and under the assumption she was being taken to another, interpreted as rape his assault on her in the parking lot—but dropped the charges long before his climax, which invariably succeeded two or even three of hers.
Such a measure was unthinkable now. A latecomer to monogamy, like all converts Buddy was a zealot. He could not abstain from Laverne, and he could not do otherwise with any other female.
To boot, in the area of his profession he was as it were emasculated by Leo’s defection: strange but true. By cracking up, Leo had stolen his thunder, had become the romantic, the focus of concern and attention. Leo might come out of it once his mother had been buried; but his potentiality for disorderliness under stress would not be forgotten. In a word, Leo, previously the soul of reliability, could never be trusted again.
Buddy seized the phone, called the authoress of all his ills, and listened hatefully to her pretentious announcement.
“Naomi Sandifer speaking. Hello.”
“Say, Nay,” Buddy said. “Leo Kirsch’s mom passed away yesterday. She’s laid out at his house. We better look in there about five-thirty, so hold the supper.”
“How dreadful,” said Naomi. “I gather it was unexpected.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Buddy said with an unusual display of open impatience. “You didn’t know the lady.”
“Still—”
Before she could make some fucking philosophical statement about death, Buddy said: “I got business to do, and I’m all alone here, but I’ll get away by five and pick you up.”
“I’ll be here.”
You could count on that. She would throw on a shapeless dress, powder her face sloppily, with a spill on the collar, and be ready. You never had to wait on the bathroom because of her: insufficient compensation for the embarrassment of escorting her into the world, if Leo’s living room could be called public.
“Okey-doke,” said Buddy and was about to hang up when he was halted by an unpremeditated thought. “Say, is Gladys coming this week?”
Her sister, who lived about ten miles away, was wont to visit Naomi once or twice a month, by bus. If the matter of departure escaped her mind until evening, she often stayed overnight. Despite Buddy’s business, her husband, a limp mailman, owned no car, but would take no favors from his brother-in-law. She was two years older than Naomi, freckled and sinewy, athletic in appearance and in action as well, had played volleyball in high school and nowadays bowled on some team of neighborhood women. She had by her own admission never come close to having a child, for reasons undisclosed. She was one of the few females with whom Buddy had had social contact and yet never thought about in positive sexual terms, Gladys being more masculine than her husband, against whom Buddy also had the moral bias of the self-made man when contemplating a Civil Service malingerer.
“There’s a coincidence,” said Naomi, with her meaningless enthusiasm over a banal event. “She had intended to come today, but won’t be able to because of some breakdown, I believe, in the plumbing.”
Under stern control, Buddy converted his emotion into exaggerated sympathy. “Gee, that’s too bad.”
“Oh,” said Naomi, who was always vivified by an expression of regret, “it’s not a tragedy.”
“Huh,” said Buddy.
“It’s not life-or-death, by any means,” Naomi said.
Buddy hung up, went to the safe, then found a blank envelope in his desk and put the money therein. This sequence had been brisk, but he entered the garage in a dreamy fashion. Clarence was not in evidence. Probably he was out on the lot dusting the merchandise. Buddy put the envelope in the inside breast pocket of the old jacket, the lining of which was so frayed that towards the tail it hung in ribbons.
He headed back to the office, now in a saunter. He re-assumed his seat behind the desk. Unbeknown to himself, he began to work his face in a manner that looked to his employee Jack, who had heard about Leo’s loss at the gas station and come to the lot and opened the office door at this moment, like an epileptic fit. Being a devotee of first-aid tips in newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets given away free at drugstores, Jack knew the danger was that the subject would swallow his own tongue, and he loped towards Buddy, flexing en route the index finger he must thrust down his employer’s throat.
Since receiving Ballbacher’s sucker punch, Buddy had been instinctively on guard against another unprovoked, maniacal attack. Had Leo chosen to make one when in possession of the gun, he would of course have been helpless. Jack was another matter: a large man, but flabby and sissified; lumbering urgently but slowly, his hand clawed like a girl’s, he would go for the eyes.
Buddy grasped a heavy glass paperweight shaped like half an ostrich egg and prepared to let Jack have it with a roundhouse to the temple. His reaction was so quick and Jack’s advance so sluggish that there was even time to gloat:
“Come and get it, sucker.”
This and the raised paperweight put Jack on ice. He stopped and asked: “Are you O.K.?”
“You better believe it.”
Buddy knew instantly that he had mistaken Jack’s intentions. He however carried it off deftly. He lowered his hand and dropped the paperweight onto the desktop from a height of three inches. Hard upon the report, he said grinning, as if in farce: “Never know who might jump you these days.”
Jack peered anxiously at him. Buddy expatiated: “I oughtn’t joke about it though. Leo’s mom died yesterday and he has lost his marbles, I hope only temporary. He took my gun without permission and shot his parrot.”
“Maybe you should sit down again,” Jack said in concern.
Buddy said irritably: “I’m perfectly O.K., like I said. It’s Leo. His mother…” He went through it again, but this time added: “And he’s laid the old lady out on the living-room sofa, like she drifted off to sleep.”
Jack said: “I heard about hi
s loss, poor devil. He’ll be all right. Leo’s got his two feet on the ground.” He proposed their going in together on the flowers.
Buddy looked slightly indignant. “The wife and I already sent ours.”
Jack shrugged. “It was only a thought.” He had another: “We’ve—my wife and I—have been wanting for some time to ask you and Mrs. Sandifer to come see us. Maybe tonight after we all come back from Leo’s you would stop in for coffee.”
Buddy looked at his watch. “We’re going over there pretty soon now.”
“Oh,” said Jack. “Well then, maybe another time soon.”
“Sure thing,” said Buddy.
When Jack left, Buddy went into the garage again. Clarence was polishing a dark-green ’38 Packard, the best car currently on the lot. He was buffing the hood with a mitt made of sheepskin and looking at his reflection in green.
“Hi,” Buddy said almost shyly. “Did you look in your coat lately?”
Clarence stopped polishing, removed the mitt, went to the corner, took his jacket from above the oil drum, and found the envelope in the pocket. He took out the currency and counted it, provoking anxiety in Buddy.
“It’s all there. Come here. I want you to get this straight.”
Clarence was in no hurry. Having finished his deliberate count, he replaced the money in the envelope and the envelope in the jacket.
“It’s tonight,” Buddy said. “I got it all worked out. I want you to listen.”
Clarence ambled back. He wore an exceptionally stupid expression, his mouth slack and the lid of his good eye three-quarters shut. He returned the mitt to his right hand and began again to rub the gleaming hood.
“Knock that off,” said Buddy. “Listen to this.” Clarence kept his sheepskin-covered hand on the hood, but stopped moving it in circles. “You go around the back of the house. There’s this outside door to the cellar. I’m gonna unlock it. Soon as you get in, there’s the stairs to the upstairs on your left. At the top of them there’s a door to the hall. Now, in the hall, first door on your right’s the bathroom. A few feet further along, only across on the left side, is the bedroom where she’ll be.”
He peered into Clarence’s wooden face. “I better make a map.” He trotted about the garage, looking for a piece of paper, but the place was neat as Leo’s kitchen. At last in the oil drum that served as a trash barrel he found a crumpled brown bag. He smoothed it out on the hood of the Packard, produced a pencil, and avoiding the grease spots on the paper, made a sketch of the ground floor of his residence.
“Here you go.” Buddy used the pencil as pointer. Clarence moved around to the other side of him so as to employ his good eye. Buddy indicated the murder route with a series of tiny arrows. “This room here is the boy’s.” He put the pencil point onto the square next to that which symbolized the master bedchamber. “He sleeps like a log.”
He realized the Negro smelled of perfume. No, make that sweet soap: Cashmere Bouquet, to be exact. Buddy’s nostrils were acute to scents. Laverne bathed with this very brand. Call it perverse, but Buddy was reassured by the identification, though reacting with superficial annoyance. He reared back and asked sharply: “Are you getting all of this?”
Clarence nodded.
Buddy left the map on the car and strutted to the back of the garage and its wall-mounted workbench. He soon found what he was looking for, and touched it with the point of his pencil. “Come here…. This here monkey wrench. Take it. Screw the jaws closed. Yeah, that’ll do it.”
Clarence swung the big Stillson at the end of his arm and looked appraisingly at Buddy.
“One good shot of that…” said Buddy. He shut his eyes and shook his head. He was no sadist. It would be over in an instant, she being asleep at the time. Back at the car he seized the map again and waited for Clarence to join him.
“Here, I’ll put in the location of the bed.” He drew a rectangle and flanked it with two tiny squares. “Night tables, see. She sleeps on the inside, away from the door, so this table is hers. It’ll have a lamp on it and maybe a glass of water and a few hairpins and whatnot. Don’t lean on it or something might fall off. Afterwards we’ll mess up the whole room.”
“We?” Clarence asked.
“Yeah,” said Buddy, and then, as if he were explaining it to himself: “It’s the only way to be sure. I been over and over it. If I was out, like at a meeting or something, how would I be sure she went to bed same as usual? And there ain’t no meetings of anything I belong to tonight, the Kiwanis or Masons or whatnot. If I was out in a bar with somebody, it’d look phony because I never go to bars with guys, and my goose would be cooked if I went with a woman, wouldn’t it?”
He looked pleadingly towards Clarence though not at him. “I got to be at the scene, and I certainly don’t relish it. I got to be in my pajamas, in that room, in bed or pretending I was in bed and asleep when he comes in and opens the dresser, and she wakes up and screams and he lets her have it with the wrench, and I wake up and struggle with him and get hurt bad enough to make it believable that he could get away.”
Clarence asked: “You gets hurt?”
Buddy winced. “I ain’t looking forward to it, but I think my left hand oughta get broke maybe. I need everything else that would be likely to be busted in a fight in the dark with a killer.” He would also mess up his hair and tear his pajamas, but before that he would open the dresser drawers and throw their contents to the floor, having already, when Naomi was asleep but before the intruder arrived, quietly extracted the items of burglarable value, a modest string of pearls, earrings, and his own gold cufflinks and stickpin, and flushed them down the toilet.
Budddy had used his time well while sitting alone and grimacing in the office. “But,” he concluded, uncomfortably eying the monkey wrench in Clarence’s brown fist, “I don’t want to get hit with that thing. I’ll close a drawer on my hand or something.”
He put the pencil again to the flattened paper bag. “Now, you got everything but the time. She generally goes to bed around eleven, give or take a quarter hour. Sometimes I go then. Sometimes I stay up a little while longer, make myself a cup of Postum or something. Tune in to Moon River, you know, try to relax because I don’t always sleep too good. She falls right off though, soon as she hits the pillow.
“Now, tonight I’m going to bed when she does. Before I do I’ll make sure that cellar door is unlocked. The door at the top of the stairs can’t be locked; there ain’t no key for it. I figure you show up at two sharp—you got a watch?”
Clarence shook his head in negation, then showed a questioning smile. What a moron he was. But all he had to do was follow Buddy’s precise orders.
“When I’m finished you go down the street to Ziegler’s and buy a dollar Ingersoll. We got to get the time straight because I’m laying there awake for one, two”—he counted on his fingers—“three hours.”
Clarence shifted the Stillson to his left hand and extended the right, palm upwards.
Buddy sneered. “For Christ sake…” But at last he shook a dollar loose in his pants pocket and surrendered it to the Negro. Clarence took it to his jacket, from which he removed the envelope. He put the bill with the others therein and returned the envelope to the interior pocket.
“All right,” Buddy said irritably. He looked at his wristwatch. “It’s twenty to five already…. Now, you show at two A.M. The police cruiser makes their rounds at midnight and then they go back to the station and stay till morning unless called out. What I mean is, you shouldn’t have no trouble being a colored person in a white neighborhood. Nobody’ll see you at that hour.”
Clarence’s good eye seemed to revolve. Buddy went through the route and the time schedule again. Then he squeezed the paper bag into a tight ball.
“This goes down the crapper. I’ll hear you tonight when you come into the hall. One more thing—you bring a flashlight.”
Clarence put his hand out again. Buddy cursed, but gave him an extra fifty cents.
Buddy ha
d got almost all the way back to the office when he remembered the only thing he had left out, and it was a wow. He returned to Clarence.
“You know where I live?” But how would he? “Well shit,” Buddy said, “and you never asked. Two-two-two Sycamore. Two twenty-two Sy-ca-more, like the tree. Know how to find it?” He told him.
What he did not tell Clarence was where, when, and how he would give him the rest of the fee; nor did the ex-boxer ask for that information. From the beginning Buddy had intended to arm himself against the possibility that killing one white person would send the Negro into a sharklike frenzy for more of the same color of blood, an animal instinct that might overrule his greed for mere money.
Buddy therefore intended to keep the pistol at hand throughout the proceedings in the bedroom. It had also occurred to him that if subsequent to Naomi’s death he killed Clarence, he would not only save money but also insure a perfect alibi for himself.
chapter 10
WHEN RALPH RETURNED to the store Bigelow denounced him for taking almost an hour to make three deliveries and showed no sympathy when informed of the theft of the bike.
“Should of locked it. A nigger’ll take anything that’s not nailed down. They come over here from the West Side and raid this neighborhood. Other night, one or more threw a brick through my cellar window.”
He failed to mention the money tied to it. Ralph took dull notice of this omission, but was not nearly as interested as he would have been were he not still under the spell of L. Lorraine, L. Linda, L.L.L. He was weirdly thrilled that his bike had been stolen outside her house, as if it were a sacrifice to love.
“Whatchoo gonna do now?” asked the grocer. He held another bag ready for delivery and poked it.
“Walk, I guess.”
Bigelow enlarged his piggy eyes. “If it took you that long on a bike, the milk’ll sour by time you walk.”
“Then,” Ralph said ebulliently, “I’ll run!” Bigelow frowned at this, and Ralph added: “Tomorrow I’ll borrow a bike.” He felt so good he could not bear to mention the breakage. He realized this was a failure of character, but he was indulging himself in his intimate memories of Laverne: she had no need of those items, having broken off with her boy friend. Going through the possible reasons for the rupture, Ralph could only conclude that, she being perfect, the man must be a louse.