The Blunderer (33 page)

He had obtained a map at a filling station, but it was not detailed enough to include Marlborough Road in Benedict. Kimmel made an inquiry at a delicatessen in a shopping center outside the town. The man knew where Marlborough Road was, and he did not seem at all interested in his question, Kimmel thought. The potato salads and rollmops and sausages behind the glass counter looked particularly fresh and attractive, but Kimmel found himself without hunger and he did not buy anything.

Kimmel parked his car on the main street near the turn-off into Marlborough Road, locked it, and began to walk. It was a dark dirt road with only two or three houses on it so far as he could see in the darkness. He could see no numbers on them at all, but with his pen flashlight he saw the names on the mailboxes at the edge of the road. Neither of the names was Stackhouse, and Kimmel went on towards the white house behind the trees. Kimmel looked behind him. There was no car light and no sound. He got to the mailbox and flashed the thin light on it. W. P. Stackhouse. Not a window was lighted in the house. Kimmel looked at his watch. It was only 9:33. Stackhouse was probably out for the evening, with one of his loyal friends. Still he approached the house cautiously across the lawn. He went on tiptoe, his great weight throwing his body from one side to the other, and yet there was an oily grace in his progress, much more grace than when he walked. He bent smoothly to avoid a low-hanging vine in the garden and went on, circling the house. There was no light.

Kimmel stood again before the front door. He debated ringing the bell. It would be pleasant to irritate Stackhouse, to start him seriously worrying about his physical welfare. Stackhouse wasn't nearly worried enough. He could even kill Stackhouse tonight, now that he had shaken off his shadower, and to hell with an alibi. He would leave no traces. He would lie again. Kimmel trembled as he thought of crushing Stackhouse's throat between his hands, and then suddenly he realized where he was standing, where Stackhouse might conceivably see him against the slightly light strip of road, realized that he had come tonight only to satisfy his curiosity as to where Stackhouse lived. Stackhouse was most probably not at home. He should consider himself lucky that Stackhouse was not at home, because he could get a much better look at the house now.

Slowly he went close to the front door, stuck his flashlight against the glass in its upper part and looked in. The light shone on part of an empty hall, a shining dark floor. The hall looked absolutely empty, though the beam did not go farther than four feet. He found a window at ground level on one side of the house. He pointed his light. The beam picked out a white wall, an empty floor. And there were no curtains. It dawned on Kimmel that Stackhouse could have moved out, and a sudden vexation swung him around and made him walk briskly back to the front door.

He pressed the doorbell. It made a soft chime sound. He waited, then pressed it again. He felt annoyed and angry. He was angry because he felt now that he had made the long tedious drive for nothing, and that Stackhouse had given him the slip, and he was as resentful of it as he would have been if Stackhouse had vanished with all his possessions only five minutes ago as he approached the house. Kimmel leaned on the doorbell, pressing it with a rhythmic pumping, filling the black, empty house with the repeated, banal tune of the chimes. He stopped only when his thumb began to hurt, and turned around, cursing out loud.

If he wanted to see Stackhouse, he thought, he could, and no one could stop him, not even Corby's men. Stackhouse's old office would be glad to give out his new office address. He could imagine Stackhouse's face when he saw
Kimmel
waiting for him downstairs, waiting to follow him where he lived. Stackhouse
could
be scared. Kimmel had seen that ever since the day he had come into his shop. Kimmel wanted to scare him thoroughly, and then perhaps kill him, on some night like this, somewhere. It was a real pity Stackhouse was not here tonight, Kimmel thought. All of it might have happened tonight.

Kimmel suddenly strode away from the door, across the lawn, his head indifferently up and his heavy arms swinging. Just the kind of place he had expected Stackhouse to live in, ample and solidly expensive as a book bound in white vellum, yet without being ostentatious—Stackhouse was so much the man of taste, so smugly within his rights behind the barrier of his money, his social class, his Anglo-Saxon good looks. Kimmel stopped at one of the willow trees beside the road and urinated on it.

40

W
alter picked up the telephone. “Hello?”

“Hello. Is this Mr. Stackhouse?”

“Yes.” Walter glanced at the man who was lingering inside the door.

“This is Melchior Kimmel. I should like to see you. Can you make an appointment with me this week?”

Walter wished the man would go. They had finished talking, yet he lingered, watching him. “I have no time this week.”

“It's important,” Kimmel said with sudden crispness. “I'd like to see you one evening this week. If you don't, I'll—”

Walter put the telephone down slowly, cutting off the voice, and stood up slowly and approached the man at the door. “I'll be able to get the case in court the first part of next week. I'll let you know as soon as there's a decision.”

The man looked at him as if he could not quite believe it. “The people tell me, never fight with a landlord. They say, don't try it.”

“That's what I'm here for. We'll try it, and we'll win it.” Walter said, opening the door.

The man nodded. The suspicion that Walter had imagined he saw in his face had been only apprehension, Walter thought, apprehension that he might not recover the $225 he had overpaid a gouging landlord in the last eight months. Walter watched him go down the hall to the elevator. Then he turned back into his office.

Walter stared down at the two form sheets on his desk: one, the landlord case, the other, a case of unwarrantable detention for drunkenness. And that was all. The office was silent now. The telephone was silent. But this was only the eighth day, he thought. One couldn't expect a landslide of clients in eight days, and maybe he had missed some calls, anyway, when he had been out two mornings at the library. Maybe there had even been a call from a student, asking to work for him. Maybe he should advertise again, put in a bigger ad than before.

He looked at the folded newspaper on the corner of his desk and thought of the paragraph in the gossip column. Headed “Haunted House? … The mystery of a certain young lawyer's part in the death of his wife remains unsolved, but there is no mystery as to his whereabouts. Apparently undaunted, he has set up business on his own in Manhattan. We wonder if clients are staying away in as big droves as they are from his Long Island mansion, now up for sale? Local folks say the place is haunted….”

He really couldn't do a much better job of advertising than that. Walter smiled one-sidedly, listening to the steps in the hall, steps that went by. He had hoped it was the mailman. He wondered what this morning's mail would bring.

Did Kimmel want to gouge him for money again? Or did Kimmel want to kill him? What was Corby doing? Corby had been silent for a week. What were Corby and Kimmel planning together? Walter lifted his head, trying to reason. He couldn't. He felt there was a wall in front of his brain. He stood up, as if he could push it aside by movement, and began to walk in the small space around his desk.

A flash of white dropped by the door. Walter jumped for it. There were four letters. He chose the plain envelope that was type addressed.

It was a letter from a student named Stanley Utter. He was twenty-two and in his third year of law school, and he hoped his present training would be sufficient, because he was specializing in penal code. He asked for an appointment and said that he would telephone. It was a very serious, respectful letter, and it touched Walter as much as any personal letter he had ever received. Maybe Stanley Utter would be just the kind of young man he wanted. Maybe Stanley Utter would be worth ten other applicants.

Walter laid to one side an envelope that looked like an advertisement, and opened the one with the Cross, Martinson and Buchman return address.

Dear Walt,

I think I ought to warn you that Cross is going to do all he can to get you disbarred. They can't disbar you unless you're proven guilty, of course, but meanwhile, Cross can raise enough smoke to ruin your new office. I don't know what advice to give you, but I thought it only fair to tell you.

Dick

Walter folded the letter, then automatically tore it up. He had been expecting this, too. It would be like all the rest. They wouldn't officially stop him from practicing, ever. Only unofficially. Only enough talk about disbarment to put him out of business.

41

S
hould he give them all one more chance?

Walter laughed, a nervous laugh that made him hunch his shoulders in fear and shame as he walked in the room. He looked down at the floor, at the patterned red and green carpet.

The room was waiting. The two high-backed chairs standing against the wall were waiting, the plain, empty bed, the ormolu clock that didn't run was waiting for him. Everything was waiting except Jeff. Jeff slept in the seat of the armchair, just as he had always slept at home.

But Ellie, Jon, Dick, Cliff. The Iretons and the McClintocks. They must be waiting, too, for something to happen, for him to admit he was whipped.

“How're you feeling, Walt?” Bill Ireton had asked three days ago. “Well, we'll be seeing you some time.” Walter winced at the hollow, horrible words that had nothing but curiosity behind them, a lying hypocrisy safe at the far end of a telephone wire. He wondered if Bill would get curious enough to try it again.

Walter stood looking at Jeff, trying to remember if he had fed him tonight. He couldn't remember. He went into the little kitchen, opened the refrigerator and looked at the half empty can of dog food, which didn't recall anything to him. He put some out in a pan, heated it, and took it in to Jeff. He watched Jeff eat all of it, slowly.

He should go out and mail the letter to Stanley Utter, he thought. It lay ready on the foyer table.

He wanted to call Jon. Not with any hope of anything, but just to say the last word that Walter felt never got said. Last week he had called Jon and apologized for hanging up when Jon had called him in Long Island. Jon hadn't been angry, he had sounded exactly the same as the day he had called long distance: “When you calm down, maybe you can talk straight to me, Walter.” “I
am
calmed down. That's why I'm calling.” And he had been about to ask Jon when he could see him, when Jon said:“If you'd stop being a coward about the facts, whatever they are …” and then Walter realized they were at the same place as before, that he
was
a coward about the facts, because he was afraid that Jon wouldn't believe him even if he fought the whole long way back in words, because nobody else had believed him. “Let's let it go?” Walter had said finally to Jon, and they had let it go, and hung up, and Jon had not called back.

“Tell me what really happened, Walt,” Cliff had written last week. “Until you tell what really happened, there's no end to this….”

“Oh, yes,” Corby had said, “this'll go on for ever, unless you confess.”

And Ellie: “It's the lies I can't forgive … I can also say that I suspected you all along.”

He wanted to call Jon. He would say: “I've been suspended. Let it all come down. Look at me! You can gloat! You can all congratulate yourselves! You've succeeded, I'm licked!”

What became of someone like him?

You became a living cipher, Walter thought. The way he had felt with Clara sometimes, standing on somebody's lawn in Benedict with a drink in his hand, asking himself why he was there, and where he was going? And why? And never finding an answer.

He looked at Jeff in the chair.
I love you, Clara
, he thought. Did he? Did a cipher have the capacity to love? It didn't make sense that a cipher could love. What made sense? He wished Clara were here. That was the only definite wish he had, and it made the least sense.

Walter took his overcoat from the closet and put it on quickly, realized that he had not put on a jacket, and let it go. He swung a woolen muffler around his neck, remembering mechanically and with complete indifference that it was very cold tonight. He picked up the letter to Stanley Utter.

He walked westward, towards Central Park. He could see the dark mass of its trees, and it seemed to offer shelter, like a jungle. He kept his eye out for a mailbox, but he did not see any. He pushed the letter in his overcoat pocket and put his hands in his pockets because he had no gloves. If the park were a jungle, he thought, he would keep on walking deeper and deeper into it, so far that no one could find him. He would keep walking until he dropped dead. No one would ever find his body. He would simply vanish. How did one kill oneself so that there was no trace? Acid. Or an explosion. He remembered the explosion of the bridge in the dream he had had. It seemed as real as anything else that had happened.

He entered the park. A path curved ahead of him, lighted by a lamp post, a finite length of curving gray cement. And around the curve lay another. It was so cold, there was no one in the park, he thought. And then he came on a couple sitting on a bench in a line of empty benches, embracing each other and kissing. Walter turned off the path and began to climb a hill.

In the darkness, he stumbled over a rock. The wiry underbrush caught at his trouser cuffs. He kept walking in steady, climbing strides. He was thinking of nothing. The sensation was pleasant and he concentrated on it.
I am thinking of the fact that I am thinking of nothing.
Or was that possible? Wasn't he really thinking of all the people and all the events that he was at this moment excluding? And if you thought of excluding something, weren't you really thinking of it?