The Blunderer (2 page)

The woman had been brutally stabbed and beaten, but she had not been robbed. The police had no clues. She had been on a bus en route to Albany from Newark, had been missed after a rest stop, and the bus had gone on without her.

Walter wondered whether there would be anything in the story for his essays; whether the murderer had had some unusual relationship to the woman. He remembered an apparently motiveless murder he had read about in a newspaper that had later been explained by a lopsided friendship between the murderer and victim, a friendship like that between Chad Overton and Mike Duveen. Walter had been able to use the murder story to bring out certain potentially dangerous elements in the Chad-Mike friendship. He tore the little item about the Newark woman out of the edge of the paper and stuck it in his pocket. It was worth keeping for a few days, anyway, to see if anything turned up about the murderer.

The essays had been Walter's pastime for the last two years. There were to be eleven of them, under the general title “Unworthy Friendships.” Only one was completed, the one on Chad and Mike, but he had finished the outlines for several others—and they were all based on observations of his own friends and acquaintances. His thesis was that a majority of people maintained at least one friendship with someone inferior to themselves because of certain needs and deficiencies that were either mirrored or complemented by the inferior friend. Chad and Mike, for example: both had come from well-to-do families who had spoiled them, but Chad had chosen to work, while Mike was still a playboy who had little to play on since his family had cut off his allowance. Mike was a drunk and a ne'er-do-well, unscrupulous about taking advantage of all his friends. By now Chad was almost the only friend left. Chad apparently thought “There but for the grace of God go I,” and doled out money and put Mike up periodically. Mike wasn't worth much to anybody as a friend. Walter did not intend to submit his book for publication anywhere. The essays were purely for his own pleasure, and he didn't care when or if he ever finished them all.

Walter sank down in the car seat and closed his eyes. He was thinking of the fifty-thousand-dollar estate in Oyster Bay that Clara was trying to sell. Walter said a quiet little prayer that one of her two prospects would buy it, for Clara's sake, for his own sake. Yesterday she had sat for the better part of the afternoon studying the layout of the house and grounds. Mapping her attack for next week, she had said. She would sail into the prospects like a fury, he knew. It was amazing that she didn't terrify them, that they ever bought anything. But they did. The Knightsbridge Brokerage considered her a topnotch saleswoman.

If he could only make her relax somehow. Give her the right kind of security—he used to think. Well, didn't he? Love, affection, and money, too. It just didn't work.

He heard her footsteps—
tok-tok-tok
on the high heels as she ran—and he sat up quickly and thought, Damn it, I should have backed the car in front of the inn because it's raining. He leaned over and opened the door for her.

“Why didn't you put the car in front of the door?” she asked.

“Sorry. I only just thought of it.” He risked a smile.

“You could see it was raining, I hope,” she said, shaking her small head despairingly. “Down, darling, you're wet!” She pushed Jeff, her fox terrier, down from the seat and he jumped up again. “Jeff, really!”

Jeff gave a yelp of fun, as if it were a game, and he was up like a spring for the third time. Clara let him stay, circled him affectionately with her arm.

Walter drove towards the center of the town. “How about a drink at the Melville before we eat? It's our last night.”

“I don't want a drink, but I'll sit with you if you've got to have one.”

“Okay.” Maybe he could persuade her to have a Tom Collins. Or a sweet vermouth and soda, at least. But he probably couldn't persuade her, and was it really worth it, making her sit through his drink? And generally he wanted two drinks. Walter suffered one of those ambivalent moments, a blackout of will, when he couldn't decide whether to have a drink or not. He passed the hotel without turning in.

“I thought we were going to the Melville,” Clara said.

“Changed my mind. As long as you won't join me in a drink.” Walter put his hand over hers and squeezed it. “We'll head for the Lobster Pot.”

He made a left turn near the end of the street. The Lobster Pot was on a little promontory of the shore. The sea breeze came strong through the car window, cool and salty. Walter suddenly found himself in absolute darkness. He looked around for the Lobster Pot's string of blue lights, but he couldn't see them anywhere.

“Better go back to the main road and take it from that filling station the way I always do,” Walter said.

Clara laughed. “And you've only been here five times, if not more!”

“What's the difference?” Walter asked with elaborate casualness. “We're in no hurry, are we?”

“No, but it's insane to waste time and energy when with a little intelligence you could have taken the right road from the start!”

Walter refrained from telling her she was wasting more energy than he. The tense line of her body, the face straining towards the windscreen pained him, made him feel that the week's vacation had been for nothing, the wonderful morning after the fishing trip for nothing. Forgotten the next day like the other wonderful nights, mornings, he could count over the last year, little oases, far apart. He tried to think of something pleasant to say to her before they got out of the car.

“I like you in that shawl,” he said, smiling. She wore it loose about her bare shoulders and looped through her arms. He had always appreciated the way she wore her clothes and the taste she showed in choosing them.

“It's a stole,” she said.

“A stole. I love you, darling.” He bent to kiss her, and she lifted her lips to him. He kissed her gently, so as not to spoil her lipstick.

Clara ordered cold lobster with mayonnaise, which she adored, and Walter ordered a broiled fish and a bottle of Riesling.

“I thought you'd have meat tonight, Walter. If you have fish again, Jeff gets
nothing
today!”

“All right,” Walter said. “I'll order a steak. Jeff can have most of it.”

“You say it in such a martyred tone!”

The steaks were not very good at the Lobster Pot. Walter had ordered steak the other night because of Jeff. Jeff refused to eat fish. “It's perfectly okay with me, Clara. Let's not argue about anything our last night.”

“Who's arguing? You're trying to start something!”

But, after all, the steak had been ordered. Clara had had her way, and she sighed and looked off into space, apparently thinking of something else. Strange, Walter thought, that Clara's economy extended even to Jeff's food, though in every other respect Jeff was indulged. Why was that? What in Clara's background had made her into a person who turned every penny? Her family was neither poor nor wealthy. That was another mystery of Clara that he would probably never solve.

“Kits,” he said affectionately. It was his pet name for her, and he used it sparingly so it would not wear out. “Let's just have fun this evening. It'll probably be a long time till we have another vacation together. How about a dance over at the Melville after dinner?”

“All right,” Clara said, “but don't forget we have to be up at seven tomorrow.”

“I won't forget.” It was only a six-hour drive home, but Clara wanted to be home by mid-afternoon in order to have tea with the Philpotts, her bosses at the Knightsbridge Brokerage. Walter slid his hand over hers on the table. He loved her hands. They were small but not too small, well-shaped, and rather strong. Her hand fitted his when he held it.

Clara did not look at him. She was looking into space, not dreamily but intently. She had a small, rather pretty face, though its expression was cool and withdrawn, and her mouth looked sad in repose. It was a face of subtle planes, hard for a stranger to remember.

He glanced behind him, looking for Jeff. Clara had let him off the leash, and he was trotting around the big room, sniffing at people's feet, accepting titbits from their plates. He would always eat fish from other people's plates, Walter thought. It embarrassed Walter, because the waiter had asked them the other evening to put the dog on a leash.

“The dog is all right,” Clara said, anticipating him.

Walter sampled the wine and nodded to the waiter that it was satisfactory. He waited until Clara had her glass, then lifted his. “Here's to a happy rest of the summer and the Oyster Bay sale,” he said, and noticed that her brown eyes brightened at the mention of the Oyster Bay sale. When Clara had drunk some of her wine, he said, “What do you say if we set a date for that party?”

“What party?”

“The party we talked about before we left Benedict. You said towards the end of August.”

“All right,” Clara said in a small, unwilling voice, as if she had been bested in a fair contest and had to forfeit a right, much as she disliked it. “Perhaps Saturday the twenty-eighth.”

They began to make up the guest list. It was not a party for any particular reason, except that they had not given a real party since the New Year's Day buffet, and they had been to about a dozen since. Their friends around Benedict gave a great many parties, and though Clara and Walter were not always invited, they were invited often enough not to feel left out. They must have the Iretons, of course, the McClintocks, the Jensens, the Philpotts, Jon Carr, and Chad Overton.

“Chad?” Clara asked.

“Yes. Why not? I think we owe him something, don't you?”

“I think he owes us an apology, if you want my opinion!”

Walter took a cigarette. Chad had come by the house one evening, just dropped in on the way back from Montauk, and somehow—Walter didn't even know how—had taken on enough martinis to pass out on their sofa, or at least to fall deeply asleep. No amount of explaining that Chad had been tired from driving all day in the heat had been of any use. Chad was on the blacklist. And yet they'd stayed at Chad's apartment several times on nights when they went to New York to see a play, when Chad, as a favor to them, had spent the night at a friend's in order to give them his apartment.

“Can't you forget that?” Walter asked. “He's a good friend, Clara, and an intelligent guy, too.”

“I'm sure he'd pass out again, if he were in sight of a liquor bottle.”

No use telling her he'd never known Chad to pass out before or since. No use reminding her that he actually owed his present job to Chad. Walter had worked at Adams, Adams and Branower, Counsellors at Law, as Chad's assistant the year after he graduated from law school. Walter had quit the firm and gone to San Francisco with an idea of opening his own office, but he had met Clara and married her, and Clara had wanted him to go back to New York and keep on in corporation law, which was more profitable. Chad had recommended him more highly than he deserved to a legal advisory firm known as Cross, Martinson and Buchman. Chad was a good friend of Martinson. The firm paid Walter a senior lawyer's salary, though Walter was only thirty. If not for Chad, Walter thought, they wouldn't be sitting in the Lobster Pot drinking imported Riesling at that moment. Walter supposed he would have to ask Chad to lunch some time in Manhattan. Or lie to Clara and spend an evening with him. Or maybe not lie to her, just tell her. Walter drew on his cigarette.

“Smoking in the middle of your meal?”

The food had arrived. Walter put the cigarette out, with deliberate calm, in the ashtray.

“Don't you agree he owes
us
something? A bunch of flowers, at least?”

“All right, Clara, it's all—
right.”

“But why that horrid tone?”

“Because I like Chad, and if we keep on boycotting him the logical result is that we'll lose him as a friend. Just as we lost the Whitneys.”

“We have not lost the Whitneys. You seem to think you've got to lick people's boots and take all their insults to keep them as friends. I've never seen anybody so concerned with whether every Tom, Dick and Harry likes you or not!”

“Let's not quarrel, honey.” Walter put his hands over his face, but he took them down again at once. It was an old gesture he made at home, and in private. He couldn't bear to do it at the end of a vacation. He turned around to look for Jeff again. Jeff was way across the room, trying his best to embrace a woman's foot. The woman didn't seem to understand, and kept patting Jeff's head. “Maybe I ought to go and get him,” Walter said.

“He's not harming anything. Calm yourself.” Clara was dismembering her lobster expertly, eating quickly, as she always did.

But the next instant a waiter came up and said smilingly, “Would you mind putting your dog on a leash, sir?”

Walter got up and crossed the room towards Jeff, feeling painfully conspicuous in his white trousers and bright blue jacket. Jeff was still making efforts with the woman's foot, his black-spotted face turned around and grinning as if he couldn't quite take it seriously himself, but Walter had a hard time disengaging his wiry little legs from the woman's ankle. “I'm very sorry,” Walter said to her.

“Why, I think he's adorable!” the woman said.

Walter restrained an impulse to crush the dog in his hands. He carried him back in the prescribed manner, one hand under the dog's hot, panting little chest and the other steadying him on top, and he set him down very gently on the floor beside Clara and fastened the leash.

“You hate that dog, don't you?” Clara asked.

“I think he's spoiled, that's all.” Walter watched Clara's face as she lifted Jeff to her lap. When she petted the dog her face grew beautiful, soft, and loving, as if she were fondling a child, her own child. Watching Clara's face when she petted Jeff was the greatest pleasure Walter got out of the dog. He did hate the dog. He hated his cocky, selfish personality, his silly expression that seemed to say whenever he looked at Walter:
“I'm
living the life of Riley, and look at
you!”
He hated the dog because the dog could do no wrong with Clara, and he could do no right.