The Blunderer (19 page)

“Perfectly all right,” Walter said.

Corby looked all around him as they went into the living-room. He laid his coat and hat down across a chair, and strolled on towards the fireplace. He stopped, and Walter saw that he was looking straight down at the ashtray on the end table that held a couple of lipstick-stained cigarettes.

“I've interrupted you,” Corby said. “I'm awfully sorry.”

“Not at all.” Walter put his hands in his jacket pockets. “What did you want to talk about?”

“Oh—routine questions.” Corby dropped to the sofa and crossed his thin legs. “I've been talking to some of your friends in the neighborhood, so you may hear about that. We always do that.” He smiled. “But I've also spoken to this man Kimmel.”

“Kimmel?” Walter tensed, expecting Corby to say that Kimmel had told him he had come into his shop.

“You know, the one I mentioned whose wife was murdered in the woods near Tarrytown—also on a bus trip.”

“Oh, yes,” Walter said.

Corby took one of his filter-tipped cigarettes. “I'm so convinced this man is guilty—”

Walter took a cigarette, too. “You're working on the Kimmel case?”

“As of this week, yes. Of course I've been interested in the Kimmel case since August. I'm interested in any case that hasn't been solved. Maybe I can solve it,” he said explanatorily with his boyish smile. “After meeting Kimmel and learning a little of the circumstances, I'm very interested in Kimmel as a suspect.”

Walter said nothing.

“We haven't the right evidence yet about Kimmel.
I
haven't,' he added with an unconvincing modesty, “and I don't think the Newark police have been working on it very hard. You don't remember the Kimmel case, do you?”

“Only what you told me. Kimmel's wife was murdered, you said.”

“Yes. I don't think Kimmel has so much to do with you, but you may have a lot to do with Kimmel.”

“I don't understand that.”

Corby leaned his head back against the sofa pillow and rubbed his forehead tiredly. There was a pink crease across his forehead from his hatband and faint sinks under his blue eyes. “I mean Kimmel is very upset by the Stackhouse case, more upset than he shows. The more he's upset, the more he'll betray himself—I hope.” Corby gave a laugh. “He's not the kind to betray himself very easily, though.”

And meanwhile, Walter thought, I'm the tortured guinea-pig. Corby was going to magnify the Stackhouse case and make a Kimmel case out of it. Walter waited attentively, unmoving. He was trying to be co-operative this time.

“Kimmel's a big fat fellow with a pretty well-functioning brain, though it's got a touch of megalomania. He likes to make toadies of people around him, his inferiors. Worked his way up from the slums, fancies himself an intellectual—which he is, in fact.”

The smile irritated Walter. It's all a jolly game, Walter thought. Cops and robbers. It must take a mind that's nasty or twisted somewhere, he thought, to devote itself exclusively to homicide, especially with the gleeful zest that Corby showed. “What do you expect Kimmel to do?” Walter asked.

“Confess, finally. That's what I'll make him do. I've found out quite a lot about his wife, enough to tell me that Kimmel loathed her with a passion that probably wouldn't be satisfied with—well, only a divorce. All this ties up with Kimmel's character, which can't be appreciated until one sees the man.” He looked at Walter, then stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and said, “Would you mind if I look around the house?”

Guests had asked it in the same way, Walter thought. “Not at all.”

Walter was going to lead him to the stairs, but Corby stopped in front of the fireplace. He reached out and picked up the glass in back of the ivy, turned its stem between his fingers. Walter knew there was lipstick on the rim. And still a few drops in the glass.

“Care for a drink?” Walter asked.

“No thanks.” Corby set the glass back and gave Walter a smiling, understanding glance. “You were seeing Miss Briess this evening?”

“Yes,” Walter said expressionlessly. He led the way up the stairs. Corby hadn't even called Ellie yet. Corby gave her a categorical name, Walter supposed: girl friend. Or mistress. The details didn't matter.

Corby went into the bedroom, strolled up and down the room with his hands in his pockets and made no comment. Then he strolled out, and Walter showed him the smaller room in the other front corner, which was supposed to be a maid's room, though there was no bed in it, only a short sofa. Walter explained that their maid did not sleep in.

“Who is your maid?” he asked.

“Claudia Jackson. She lives in Huntington. She comes twice a day, morning and evening.”

“Can I have her address?” Corby took out his tablet.

“Seven seventeen Spring Street, Huntington.”

Corby wrote. “She's not here this evening?”

“No, not this evening,” Walter answered frowning.

“Guest room?” Corby asked as they went into the hall.

“My wife never wanted one. There's a room over here, a kind of sitting-room.”

Corby looked into it without interest. They had never used the room, though Claudia kept it in order. It looked dead and horrible to Walter now, like a model room in a department store.

“Are you going to keep the house?” Corby asked.

“I haven't decided,” Walter opened another door. “This is my study.”

“This is nice,” Corby said appreciatively. He went to the bookshelves and stood with his palms against the small of his back, holding back his jacket. “Lots of law books. Do you do a lot of work at home?”

“No, I don't.”

Corby looked down at the desk. Walter's big, dark-blue scrapbook lay at one corner. “Photograph album?” Corby asked, reaching for it.

“No, it's a kind of notebook.”

“May I see it?”

Walter gestured with a hand, though he disliked Corby's touching it, disliked watching him. Walter felt for cigarettes, found he hadn't any, and folded his arms. He walked to a window. He could see Corby in the glass of the window, bent over the notebook, turning the pages slowly.

“What is it?” Corby asked.

Walter turned. “It's a kind of pastime of mine. Notes on people for some essays I have in mind to write.” Walter's frown bit deeper. He came back towards Corby, searching for some phrase that would get him away from the notebook, from the finely written lines that Corby was making an effort to read. Walter watched him turn another page. There was a newspaper clipping lying loose. Walter looked at it. The size, the heavy print at the top was familiar. He couldn't believe it.

Corby picked it up. “This is about Kimmel!” Corby said incredulously.

“Is it?” Walter asked in the same tone.

“Why, yes!” Corby said, turning his amazed smile to Walter. “You tore it out?”

“I must have, but I don't remember it.” Walter looked at Corby and in that instant something terrible happened between them: Corby's face held simply a natural surprise, and in the surprise was discovery, the discovery of Walter's deceit. For an instant, they looked at each other like ordinary human beings, and Walter felt the effect on him was devastating.

“You don't remember it?” Corby asked.

“No. I never used it. I cut out a great many things from the paper.” He made a gesture towards the scrapbook. There were ten or twelve other newspaper items scattered through the book. But Walter was sure he had thrown the Kimmel clipping away.

Corby glanced at the item again, dropped it where it had been, then bent over the book once more, reading the blocks of Walter's handwriting, the typed and pasted-in paragraphs on the same page. Walter saw that they were the pages about Jensen and Cross. Nothing to do with Kimmel. Better if it had to do with Kimmel, Walter thought.

“It's a bunch of notes about—unworthy friends,” Walter explained. “Something like that. I probably tore that out thinking the murderer might be discovered later. And then I forgot the name. I was interested in the tie-up between the murderer and the victim. Nothing ever came out, though, and I suppose that's why I forgot it. It is an amazing coincidence. If I'd—” Walter's mind went blank suddenly.

Corby was looking at him shrewdly, though some of the surprise was still left in his face, watching him as if he were only waiting, only had to wait, for Walter to say something that would clinch his guilt. Corby smiled a little. “I'd like to know just what did go through your mind when you tore the piece out.”

“I told you. I was interested in who the murderer would be—eventually. Just as—” Walter had been about to mention that he had used a clipping about a murder in his essay on Mike and Chad, a murder resulting from such a friendship, but the clipping had long ago been thrown away. “I was interested in the connection between Helen Kimmel and the murderer.” Walter saw that Corby had picked up the
Helen.

“Go on,” Corby said.

“There's nothing more to say.” Part of Walter's mind was playing with the possibility that someone had planted the Kimmel piece in the scrapbook. But it was the very piece he had torn out. He recognized even its outline. Then suddenly he remembered: the piece of paper had fallen on the floor that day he threw it away. He'd been too lazy to pick it up, and then Claudia had found it. “Actually, you know, I threw—” He stopped as suddenly as he had started.

Walter did not want to confess that he remembered that much about it. Damn Claudia, he thought. Damn her efficiency! Clara had put that into her. “Nothing. It doesn't matter.”

“But it might,” Corby said persuasively.

“It doesn't.”

“Have you ever seen Kimmel, talked to him?”

“No,” Walter said, in the next second wanted to change his answer. His mind see-sawed horribly between telling the whole story now, and concealing as much about Kimmel as he could. But what if Kimmel told it all tomorrow? Walter felt he was the victim of some complicated game, a slow gathering of nets that had suddenly dropped on him and drawn tight.

Corby put a hand in his trousers pocket and strolled towards Walter, circling him, keeping a certain distance, as if to see him better in this new light.

“You're really obsessed with this Kimmel case, aren't you?” Walter asked.

“Obsessed?” Corby gave a deprecatory laugh. “I'm working on a half-dozen homicide cases at least!”

“But where I'm concerned, you seem to be hipped on the Kimmel case,” Walter blurted out.

“Yes. It's the similarity of the cases that has reopened the Kimmel case, you might say. The Newark police had put it down as person or persons unknown, a maniac's attack—hopeless. But you've shown us the way it
might
have happened.” Corby waited, letting it sink in. “Kimmel's alibi isn't the strongest in the world. Nobody actually saw him at the moment it happened. Did it occur to you that Kimmel might have killed his wife—either when you tore the story out or afterward?”

“No, I don't think it did. They said he—” He stopped. There was no mention of Kimmel's alibi in the story Corby had looked at.

“It's just a coincidence, isn't it?”

Walter kept a sullen silence. It annoyed him that he couldn't always tell when Corby chose to be sarcastic or not.

“Do you mind if I take this?” Corby asked, picking up the newspaper piece from the scrapbook.

“Not at all.”

Corby laid the piece inside his wallet, fastened the wallet snap and put it back in his inside pocket. Walter wondered what Corby was going to do—show it to Kimmel?

“You may find some other interesting items in the papers about Melchior Kimmel before long,” Corby said with a smile, “but I sincerely hope I don't have to bother you again—like this.”

Walter didn't believe a word of it. He had no doubt the story of his having the Kimmel clipping would go into the newspapers now, too. He followed Corby out of the room.

Corby went to his coat and hat on the chair. He lifted his narrow head. “Something burning?”

Walter hadn't noticed it. He went into the kitchen and turned the oven off. It was the potatoes. He opened a kitchen window.

“Sorry to spoil your evening,” Corby said when Walter came back.

“Not at all.” He walked with Corby to the door.

“Good night,” Corby said.

“Good night.”

Walter turned from the door and stared at the telephone, listening to Corby's car start, wondering how he could explain it to Ellie. Or to anybody. He couldn't. Walter frowned, trying to imagine the story of tonight in the newspapers. They couldn't convict a man just because he had a newspaper clipping! They hadn't indicted Kimmel yet, either. Maybe Kimmel wasn't guilty. So far only Corby seemed to think he was. And himself.

Walter ran upstairs quickly. He had remembered something else. From the back of his desk drawer he took a flat ledger book in which he sporadically kept a diary. He hadn't written in it for weeks, but he had written something, he remembered, in the days just after Clara's recovery from the sleeping pills. There it was, the last entry:

It is curious that in the most important periods of one's life, one never keeps up a diary. There are some things that even a habitual diary-keeper shrinks from putting down in words—at the time, at least. And what a loss, if one intends to keep an honest history at all. The main value of diaries is their recording of difficult periods, and this is just the time when one is too cowardly to put down the weaknesses, the vagaries, the shameful hatreds, the little lies, the selfish intentions, carried out or not, which form one's true character.

It was preceded by a gap of over a month, a month of strife with Clara and then her suicide attempt. Walter tore out the page. If Corby ever found this, Walter supposed, this would absolutely finish him. Walter started to burn the page with his cigarette lighter, then picked up the diary and took it downstairs. The fire was full of hot embers. He ripped the whole book apart in three sections, laid them on the embers, and put on more wood.