The Lenient Beast Page 4
“Don't worry,” I said.
I might have said a lot more than that. I might have told him that there wasn't any danger of my becoming an alcoholic because I couldn't afford it. One in a family is enough; somebody's got to earn the money to buy liquor.
I've never invited Red or any of the other boys home. Not that, at least half of the time, it wouldn't be all right for me to do so. But I never know in advance which time would be right and which time would be wrong.
Not usually, anyway. Tonight would have been a wrong time if I'd had any idea of letting Red drive me home and then asking him in. I'd phoned Alice this afternoon to let her know I'd be working late. The sound of her voice on the phone told me she'd been drinking fairly heavily already and that there wouldn't be any dinner ready for me even if I got home for it.
By now, I felt sure, she'd have passed out. I hoped so.
But that is none of anybody else's business and I'll say for her that she keeps out of trouble and nobody down at headquarters knows about it. I'll say more than that for her. It's crazy, but I still love her. After things that have happened I suppose I shouldn't. But I understand — in a dim sort of way. And isn't it always in a dim sort of way that we understand anybody?
Sometimes I wonder why people stay sober.
I have to. As Joe Friday says on television, I'm a cop. Maybe I don't feel the same degree of devotion about it that Joe does, but I try to do a good job, nasty as the job is to do sometimes. As a cop you see all the bad things, all the dirty messes people make of their own lives and others'.
But it's a job, and somebody's got to do it. It's a job like any job, and I've got twelve years' seniority at it now. I don't know any job that I'm any better fitted for. I've a fairly good education, but a general education, not specialized. I like good books and good music and I can tell Picasso from pistachio, but nobody pays you for reading or listening or looking. I had to leave college after two years, at nineteen, and go to work, and jobs I had the first three years made getting on as a rookie patrolman look like a big deal, and maybe it was. It was all right, anyway, and it was steady. I was thirty by the time I got out of uniform but a lot of cops never do. And I don't expect any more to set the world on fire.
I looked up at the clock and saw it was three minutes after ten. Approximately, that is. Has it ever occurred to you that no one can tell time except approximately? If you think “three minutes after ten,” the very act of thinking it takes time and the pin-point instant is lost somewhere, and you don't know just where, in the duration of your thinking. Or: “At the sound of the chime it will be exactly—?” Exactly? If it was, then you heard it a fraction of a second later, it took another fraction of a second for the sound to register and be translated into thought in your mind. Time never stands still to be named. Already it was four minutes after ten. Approximately, that is.
Jerry the bartender must have seen me looking at the clock for he came over and asked me, “Time for another?”
“Let you know in a minute,” I told him, and went to the phone booth. If Alice was home and still awake, I'd probably better go. I dialed my number and counted twelve rings, but there wasn't any answer.
I went back and ordered the drink. But it would have to be the last for tonight, I knew. If I ordered one more it would be all too easy to order ten more. Tomorrow was going to be a big day.
Or should be. We'd got nowhere today, except identification and a little general background. Still no autopsy, and I had a hunch we wouldn't get to first base in this case without it. Dr. Raeburn had promised faithfully, though, that he would make it his first order of business in the morning. We still hadn't found anybody who'd seen him since he'd left work at five o'clock, which was at least seven hours before he was killed, possibly as long as eleven hours. No one we'd talked to, including and especially Father Trent, could suggest any possible motive anybody on earth could have for wanting Kurt Stiffler dead. Most people we'd talked to had tended, when told we were the police and were investigating his death, to jump to the conclusion that he'd killed himself. God knows most suicides have less reason.
But he couldn't have, without an accomplice. And nobody commits suicide with an accomplice, unless it's a suicide pact, which didn't fit here.
Hell, I told myself; we haven't all the facts yet. Maybe when we have all the facts it'll begin to make sense. Maybe. Maybe there'll be pie in the sky by and by. Maybe the clear end of the stick is up There.
I walked home. The cool night air felt good, but I didn't.
There was a drone high in the sky and I looked up. I saw a full moon, big and round and yellow, near the zenith and as I watched a jet bomber crossed it, perfectly silhouetted against it for a fleeting second. A rare thing, I thought, and then I wondered why; any plane in the sky on any clear moonlit night must at every instant be between the moon and some point on earth. But I had never seen such a transit before.
As I neared my house — mine if I keep up the payments another fourteen years or so — I saw that the kitchen light was on. That did not necessarily mean that Alice was in the kitchen, or even at home. And it meant neither, I found out when I let myself in and looked through the house, all four rooms of it. She'd gone out somewhere, probably to one of the two neighborhood taverns within walking distance, past the stage of wanting to drink alone, looking for company. But only to talk to; I felt sure of that. She hadn't taken the car, of course; she didn't know how to drive one. During the first year of our marriage, seven years ago, I'd tried to talk her into learning how to drive but she'd had some phobia against it, not about riding in cars but about driving one herself. I was glad of that now, of course. If it wasn't for those damned phobias of hers her drinking wouldn't have been increasing steadily for five years now; up to then her drinking had been normal, even less than mine. I've often wondered how much of it was my fault; not all of it, I knew; the seeds had been there all along. But neither was I completely blameless; there were things I should have done and didn't do, things I should not have done and did do.
Just the same I looked in the garage and in the car. One night almost a year ago, coming home after working late like tonight, I'd had a bad two hours worrying about her after one o'clock when the taverns close. I'd fought against phoning headquarters and I did phone the hospitals. At three in the morning I'd decided to drive to headquarters rather than phone there, to see if they had her or any report on her, and I'd found her curled up sound asleep in the back seat of the car. Later she hadn't remembered going there and hadn't been able to tell me why she had done so, but undoubtedly it had been the wish, in drink, to hurt me by making me worry about her. And she'd succeeded.
But tonight she wasn't there. The Old Gray Mare, as we call our '47 Plymouth, stood empty and alone. I went back into the house and looked around, making like a detective so I could judge, from what had happened, how rough a deal I was in for this time.
It wasn't too good. The bedroom was messy (Alice is a meticulous housekeeper when she isn't drinking) and the bed had been slept in, and for a fairish length of time. That was bad because if she'd had a few hours sleep and started over she probably wouldn't get sleepy again for a long time. And I wouldn't sleep, I knew, until she did and in all probability I was in for a pretty sleepless night.
The kitchen was a mild shambles. She'd done her drinking there. She'd killed one pint of whiskey and part of another and five cans of beer. But she hadn't gone out just to replenish stock because only about a third was gone from the second pint and there were still several cans of beer in the refrigerator. No indication that she'd eaten anything since breakfast; toast scraps from our breakfast together this morning were still on top in the step-on garbage can and the breakfast dishes were still unwashed. (It had been a perfectly normal breakfast. We hadn't quarreled and she'd seemed quite all right; there'd been no indication that she was about to start drinking again and maybe she herself hadn't known it then. The only way I might have guessed was from the fact that it had been several days since she'd done any drinking and currently she seldom stayed away from it longer than that. One day in three was about the average. Almost always starting early in the day when she started.) No sign that she'd eaten anything but she'd started to cook something and had never finished, never put it into the oven. But there was flour on the floor and on the drain board of the sink and a cake pan with some dough in it. The recipe book was open on the table and it was open to a recipe for upside-down cake. I wondered if there was subconscious — or even conscious, if drunken — symbolism in that. The world was upside down for Alice. Maybe she was waiting for the White Rabbit to come along and take a gold watch out his pocket and look at it, and then show her the way down the rabbit hole into schizophrenia. Maybe then, under treatment, something could be done about it. Not sooner; she flared into her worst spells of anger if I so much as mentioned psychiatry. Or became sullen if I tried to discuss her drinking with her, even calmly and as though it were a problem in itself, which of course it isn't. All problems form a continuous nexus and no problem is an island.
I straightened things up a bit and put the unbaked cake in the refrigerator. Tomorrow she'd no doubt be surprised to find it there but she could decide then whether to throw it away or to try baking it.
Alice, Where Art Thou? Nine to one she was at one of the two relatively nearby taverns, but it would relieve my mind a little to know for sure. I couldn't go around to them — it would just start an argument with her if I found her; it would probably antagonize her to the point where next time she'd take a taxi and go farther afield. But I knew the proprietors of both places and I could phone. Harry's Tavern was the mote likely of the two so I tried it first.
Harry himself answered and I said, “Harry, this is Ramos. Is Alice there? Don't tell her
I'm calling if she is.”
She must have been within hearing distance of the phone because he said, “Yes, Bill.” He knows my first name well enough.
“Good,” I said. “How she doing?”
“Well, pretty fair.”
“Okay, Harry. Phone me if you need me. I'll be home from now on. I'll be there at one if I haven't heard from you sooner. And thanks.”
She might or might not resent my picking her up at closing time but I'd rather take a chance on that than on her walking home alone at that time, even thought the neighborhood's a pretty safe one. At the worst, even if she refused to get in the car and insisted on walking, I could keep her in sight on the way. That would give her something to fight about after we got home but if she was in that bad a mood, she'd find something else to start a quarrel about anyway.
I stood and stretched and looked at the clock. Almost half past eleven. No reason why I shouldn't set the alarm for twelve forty-five and get in an hour's sleep or better. No reason except that, tired as I was, I wasn't sleepy now; I'd just lie there and think, and I didn't want to think.
Nor drink, nor read, nor listen to music. Not serious music, anyway; maybe something light would help time move a little faster.
Most of what lighter music I have is on ten-inch LFs, so I turned on the phonograph to warm up and started looking through the stack of ten-inch records. Medley from South Pacific. No Medleys, thank you. One a day is enough. I do not love thee, Doctor Fell; the reason why I cannot tell. I do not love thee, Mister Medley — But what rhymes with Medley? Nothing that I could think of, and to hell with it.
Songs by Tom Lehrer. That would do it, and I hadn't listened to them for a couple of months now. Macabre as a charnel house and funny as hell. I put the record on.
The Irish Ballad started:
About a maid I'll sing a song
Who didn't have her family long,
Not only did she do them wrong,
She did every one of them in.
Her mother she could never stand,
Sing rickety-tickery-tin,
Her mother she could never stand,
And so a cyanide soup she planned.
The mother died with a spoon in her hand,
And her face in a hideous grin, a grin,
Her face in a hideous grin.
Very lovely stuff. I began to relax enough to realize just how tired and tense I'd been.
She set her sister's hair on fire,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
She set her sister's hair on fire,
And as the smoke and flame rose high'r,
Danced around the funeral pyre,
Playing a violin, — olin,
Playing a violin.
I felt relaxed enough now to sip at a can of beer so I turned up the volume enough to hear while I went out to the kitchen and got one.
She weighted her brother down with stones,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
And sent him off to Davy Jones.
All they ever found were some bones,
And occasional pieces of skin, of skin,
Occasional pieces of skin.
I found myself chuckling a bit, all to myself.
One day when she had nothing to do,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
One day when she had nothing to do,
She cut her baby brother in two,
And served him up as an Irish stew,
And invited the neighbors in, — bors in,
Invited the neighbors in.
And just then I thought of a word that rhymed with Medley. Deadly. But why? And why couldn't I accept John Medley at face value, as everyone else did? People don't kill without reason — except homicidal maniacs and Medley wasn't one — and what possible reason could he have had for killing, of all people, Kurt Stiffler? And why couldn't I stop thinking about it now, on my own time? Avaunt, John Medley. Let me alone, at least until I start working again tomorrow.
For a while I succeeded in not thinking, just listening. Through the rest of The Irish Ballad, The Hunting Song, about the hunter who bagged two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow; My Home Town, featuring among other homespun characters the druggist on the corner who killed his mother-in-law, ground her up real well, “And sprinkled just a bit, Over each banana split,” and now he was singing my favorite:
I hold your hand in mine, dear, I press it to my lips ...
And on to:
The night you died I cut it off, I really don't know why. For now each time I kiss it, I get bloodstains on my tie... .
After the Lehrer songs the other records I played seemed dull, but I played some and finally started to get sleepy, but too late now to sneak in that nap; it was only twenty-five minutes short of one o'clock. And the phone rang. I shut off the phonograph and went to it.
It was Harry. “Sorry, Frank, but I think you'd better come get Alice.”
“Okay,” I said. “She pass out?”
“No, nowhere near it. But she's getting — well, I'm afraid she might start trouble with a couple here; she's getting pretty proddy. She's back in the can right now, so I had a chance to call you.”
“I'll be there right away,” I said. Thanks, Harry.”
I put my suit coat on again and went out, back to the garage. I opened the door but before I went in to get into the car I found myself staring up at the moon again. The same moon but now, well down from the zenith, looking even bigger and rounder.
No plane crossed it this time, nor a pterodactyl nor a sparrow. But why did it make me think of the round bland face of John Medley? Am I getting an obsession?
FOUR
JOHN MEDLEY
As always in a dream, part of my mind knew that I was dreaming. But it never helps; it makes things more horrible to know, for I am struggling to escape to wakefulness, and I cannot. The dream holds me and will not let me go. Perhaps it is only for a moment, but it is a frozen moment that seems an eternity. How many eternities can a man go through?
Dierdre, Dierdre my beloved. It is always Dierdre.
God, I pray, she is at peace. She is with You. Will You not let her be at peace also in my mind and in my dreams? Have I not yet served You, acted as Your Instrument, enough times? Through me, you are merciful to others. How long, O God, before You extend that mercy unto me? If not to let me die, at least to take away these dreams, these mares of Hell that ride me in the night. I know You do not send them, but will You not stop the one who does, release from bondage to him the part of my soul that he holds and torments in the night?
How many times will You let him make me kill Dierdre again, and in how many ways?
This time it is the pistol and I hold it to the back of her head as she looks unsuspectingly from the window, and then I pull the trigger. The gun explodes deafeningly in the room and I see the tiny mark where it entered. But she does not fall.
She turns back toward me and her face is gone. It is a red, bloody oval out of which one eye stares at me and from which the other eye dangles horribly. Her lipless mouth is open and she screams, she screams.
Forever. Though I know I dream, though I know this is not real, it is horrible and it is, or it seems, forever.
But thank You, God, that it only seemed. It is gone now.
She is gone.
As I lie wide awake now I hear the clock in the living room strike once. What time is it? Half past something, but half past what? Why do I wonder; what does it matter to me? It could be one o'clock, of course, but I do not think so; I came to bed at midnight and feel that I must have slept for longer than an hour before the dream wakened me.
Those half-hour single chimes! How often have I heard them in the night and thought of getting a different clock, one that does not chime the half hour, or one that chimes a number first and then, after a pause, the single chime that indicates the half. By day, of course, it does not matter. One has rough track of time in mind and can judge. But by night a single chime arouses curiosity and does not satisfy it.
It should not matter, but it does. I want to know how many hours of the night are gone and how many remain and that there is no good reason for my wanting to know does not stop the wanting.
Now I must either turn on a light or lie here until the clock chimes the next hour. And tonight I do not want to turn on a light because the police, even though they seemed to suspect nothing, might be watching the house, and knowing that I had awakened and turned on the light, might think that I lie sleepless because of guilt and fear. And they would be right, though wrong; I feel no guilt for killing Kurt Stiffler and no fear of consequences. My guilt is for a real crime and my fear is of dreams. I have no fear that the police will seriously come to believe that I killed that boy, but I do not want them even to suspect that I might have, for then they would become annoying. So I shall not turn on my light.