The Good Old Stuff (8 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said. She tried to smile. “You’re not a wailing wall.”

“Part of my official duties, sometimes.”

“Can they turn this into … nastiness?”

“They have no basis. He was of sound mind when he made the provisions. They’re getting enough. More than enough. Some people can never have enough.”

“I’d like to sign it over.”

“Your husband had good reasons for setting it up the way he did.”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you have anyone to help you?” he asked impulsively. He knew at once he had put too much of what he felt in his
voice. He tried to cover by saying, “There’ll be a lot of arrangements. I mean, it could be considered part of my job.”

He detected the faintly startled look in her eyes. Awareness made them awkward. “Thank you very much, Mr. Darrigan. I think Brad will help.”

“Can you get that woman over to stay with you tonight?”

“I’ll be all right.”

He left her and went back to the beach to his room. In the morning he would make whatever official statements were considered necessary. He lay in the darkness and thought of Dinah, of the way she was a promise of warmth, of integrity.

And, being what he was, he began to look for subterfuge in her attitude, for some evidence that her reactions had been part of a clever act. He ended by despising himself for having gone so far that he could instinctively trust no one.

In the morning he phoned the home office. He talked with Palmer, a vice-president. He said, “Mr. Palmer, I’m sending through the necessary reports approving payment on the claim.”

“It’s a bloody big one,” Palmer said disconsolately.

“I know that, sir,” Darrigan said. “No way out of it.”

“Well, I suppose you’ll be checking in then by, say, the day after tomorrow?”

“That should be about right.”

Darrigan spent the rest of the day going through motions. He signed the lengthy statement for the police. The Drynfellses were claiming that in the scuffle for the paper, Davisson had fallen and hit his head on a bumper guard. In panic they had hidden the body. It was dubious as to whether premeditation could be proved.

He dictated his report for the company files to a public stenographer, sent it off airmail. He turned the car in, packed his bag. He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, smoking cigarettes, looking at the far wall.

The thought of heading north gave him a monstrous sense of loss. He argued with himself. Fool, she’s just a young, well-heeled widow. All that sort of thing was canceled out when Doris left you. What difference does it make that she should remind you of what you had once thought Doris was?

He looked into the future and saw a long string of hotel
rooms, one after the other, like a child’s blocks aligned on a dark carpet.

If she doesn’t laugh in your face, and if your daydream should turn out to be true, they’ll nudge each other and talk about how Gil Darrigan fell into a soft spot.

She’ll laugh in your face.

He phoned at quarter of five and caught Palmer. “I’d like to stay down here and do what I can for the beneficiary, Mr. Palmer. A couple of weeks, maybe.”

“Isn’t that a bit unusual?”

“I have a vacation overdue, if you’d rather I didn’t do it on company time.”

“Better make it vacation, then.”

“Anything you say. Will you put it through for me?”

“Certainly, Gil.”

At dusk she came down the hall, looked through the screen at him. She was wearing black.

He felt like a kid trying to make his first date. “I thought I could stay around a few days and … help out. I don’t want you to think I—”

She swung the door open. “Somehow I knew you wouldn’t leave,” she said.

He stepped into the house, with a strange feeling of trumpets and banners. She hadn’t laughed. And he knew in that moment that during the years ahead, the good years ahead of them, she would always know what was in his heart, even before he would know it. And one day, perhaps within the year, she would turn all that warmth suddenly toward him, and it would be like coming in out of a cold and rainy night.

H
e held
the magazine up as though he were still reading it, but he watched her across the top of it, ready to drop his eyes to the story again should she look up.

For the moment the excitement, the carefully concealed anticipation, of the past month faded, and he wondered, quite blankly, why he was going to kill his wife. Myra had no major faults. In the eight years of their marriage, they had had no serious quarrels.

Peter Kallon looked across the small one-room apartment at her, and slowly the dislike and the determination built up again in equal quantity. It had started about six months before, and then it was only an intellectual game. How would a man kill his wife without fear of discovery? And, in the midst of the game, he had looked at Myra with the cold objectivity of a stranger and found that the eight years had changed her.

Eight years had thickened her figure, put a roll of soft tissue under her chin, but the years had done nothing to alter that basic untidiness which he had once found so charming.

Peter Kallon was a very tidy man. By day he entered neat columns of figures on pale yellow work sheets. His linen was always fresh, his razor in the exact same spot on the bathroom shelf, trees inserted in his shoes each night.

But Myra, even though childless, seemed to find it impossible to handle the housekeeping details of an efficiency apartment with its minuscule bath, cubbyhole kitchen, Murphy bed. Eight years of litter had worn away his quite impressive patience with the monotony of water dripping on sandstone.

The thought of being a widower was quite engaging. Peter Kallon had a passion for puzzles. Crosswords, cryptograms, contests. He attacked all with equal dry ardor. Murder became a puzzle.

And a month ago he had arrived at the final detailed answer.

He looked across at her. A strand of graying brown hair hung down her cheek. She sat with one leg tucked under her, an unlaced shoe on the swinging foot. She was reading a novel, and as she came to the end of each page she licked the middle finger of her right hand before turning the next page. That little habit annoyed him. Long ago he had given up trying to read any book Myra had finished.

It would be such a pity to have the answer and not put it into effect.

Lately he had been looking at the young girls on the street and in the office. There was the clean line of youth about them.

Myra set the book aside, smiled over to him, and scuffed her way into the kitchenette. He heard her fill a glass with water from the faucet, heard the small familiar sound she made in her throat as she drank. He knew that as she came back into the room she would be wiping her mouth with the back of her right hand. She was.

It would never do, he thought, to say, “Myra, I’m tired of being married.” Poor Myra. She would never be able to support herself. That would mean quite a drain on him, supporting two establishments. No. Murder would be tidy. Myra could die without knowing that he had grown to hate her and her ways with all the dry passion of a careful, fastidious man.

She turned on the transistor radio, spun the dial to a station. Myra continued to read.

“You’ve got two stations there,” he said.

She cocked her head on one side, listening. “But you can hardly hear that other one.”

He came angrily across the room and reset the dial. She never did anything crisply and purposefully. Never on time, never able to move fast.

Most murders were too hasty. The motive was too clear. Their few friends would never suspect him of having a motive
to kill Myra. He knew that their friends considered them beautifully adjusted.

When murders weren’t too hasty, they were too contrived, too full of details that the murderer was incapable of handling neatly.

The perfect murder, he had decided, could be quite detailed, if the details were handled by a man competent to do so. A man like Peter Kallon. He was the sort of man that no one had ever called Pete. Not even his mother or his sister.

He looked over at her again and saw that the book had sagged down onto her heavy thigh. Her head was tilted over onto her shoulder and she breathed audibly through her open mouth. Each night they stayed home it was the same. She would expect him to awaken her when he was ready to go to bed. Now there was no need to discipline his expression. While she slept he could look at her with all the naked, helpless fury at his command.

In that moment he made up his mind, finally and completely, with no possibility of changing it. Peter Kallon decided to make himself a widower and put into effect the plan he had worked out.

Friday he made her write the note.

He sat at the small desk, scribbling. He made frequent grunts of disgust, crumpling what he had written. She asked him what the trouble was.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said impatiently.

He wrote for a long time, then said irritably, “The hell with it,” crumpling what he had written.

“What is the trouble, darling?” she asked.

“Maybe you could help me. You see, I’ve got one account, a garage, that’s giving me a bad time. The man won’t keep the books the way I tell him to. We’ve quarreled about it. I’m trying to write a letter to him, but I can’t seem to get it right. If I could dictate it to you and you wrote it down … I always think better on my feet somehow.”

“Of course, darling,” she said.

He laid out a fresh sheet of her notepaper and put his fountain pen beside it. She took his place at the small desk.

“What’s his name?”

“Don’t bother with that, Myra. I’ll copy it over. Let me see now. First paragraph. ‘You know how hard I’ve tried to make everything work out. But there is no use trying any more.’ New paragraph. ‘Please don’t condemn me too much for taking this step. I am certain that you will be happier in the future because of it.’ There! That ought to do it.”

He leaned over her shoulder and read the words she had written in her childish scrawl. The words, as usual, slanted uphill to the right edge of the paper.

“Like that pen?” he asked casually. There was the coldness of sweat against his ribs.

“I like a heavier point,” she said. “You know that.”

“Just a habit. A fine point makes better-looking writing. Here, sign your name on that sheet. For my file.”

She obediently wrote “Myra.” He took the pen from her hand before she could write the last name. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Let me look at this. I think you were bearing down too hard on it.” He examined the point, holding it under the lamplight. “Get up a minute, dear. I want to try it.”

He sat down and wrote on another sheet.

“No, I guess it’s okay. Thanks, dear. I’ll recopy this letter and send it to the man. I think it’ll be all right.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. For a long time he did not risk looking at her. When he did he saw that she was engrossed in the novel again, without suspicion. Just to be certain, he copied the letter, using the actual name of one of his clients, making the contents a bit more businesslike. He showed it to her. She said that she guessed it sounded all right.

After she had fallen asleep he read the note over. Finger-prints on it were quite all right. He would just make certain that he found the note first.

A bit stilted, perhaps, but the intent was unmistakable. It was on her gray monogrammed notepaper. He put it with his business papers, knowing that she never looked at them. He wanted to take a long walk to get the tension out of him. But that might look a bit odd, and his plan didn’t call for it.

Instead he took out the manila folder containing the contest puzzles he was currently working on. Within fifteen minutes he was so deeply engrossed in the puzzle that he had actually forgotten his plan. The deadline of this one was near. It was a puzzle that assigned numerical values to letters of the alphabet, and the object was to fill out a grid with words in such a way that the highest possible total was reached.

At midnight he put his solution into the envelope and addressed it. Myra awakened by herself, yawned, and smiled sleepily at him. Trusting Myra! For a moment his resolve was weakened by pity. He thought of the envelope in his hand. The first prize was fifty thousand dollars. With fifty thousand dollars, life could be made bearable, even with Myra. Money would buy a certain amount of liberty from the married state.

But, as a winner of many very small prizes, he knew how remote his chances were.

He smiled back at her and they went to bed.

On Saturday afternoon he had, as he expected, an hour alone in the apartment. It was a ground-floor apartment in the back of the building, the windows half shadowed by cedars. That was a necessary part of the plan. He took the fishline from the closet shelf, cut off a ten-foot length and tied a loop in the end, made a slipknot. The windows were of the sort with a permanent screen, and they could be opened or closed by inside cranks. Each movement had been planned. The handles on the small gas stove pointed straight down. They turned in the right direction for his purposes. He slipped the noose over one handle, pulled it tight, ran the other end of the string to the window, and poked it through one of the meshes of the screen. The window was open a few inches. Then, carrying a screwdriver for the sake of appearances, he went outside and around the building to the window. He found the end of the string, pulled it slowly and firmly. It gave slightly and then came free. He
pulled it all the way out through the mesh, forcing the knot through, then pushed firmly against the window. As he had expected, the crank made a half turn and closed.

He hurried back into the apartment and found that the kitchenette was filled with the stink of gas. The burner, unlighted, was on full. He turned it off, opened the window to air the place.