“Still, those were pieces she was crazy about. They get those ruby earrings?”
“Yeah, they went.”
“That’s a hell of a thing.”
“She’s not happy about it, I’ll say that much. What else? Her full-length mink’s in storage so they didn’t get that, but she had some other furs in the closet that I don’t know why she didn’t put in storage, and of course they’re gone now. They left the TV-stereo unit. You know the set, it’s a big console unit, and for once I’m glad I bought it that way instead of picking up separate components, because evidently they decided it would be too much of a hassle to cart it out. But they took a couple of radios and a typewriter and little odds and ends like that.”
“Hardly worth the trouble, it sounds like to me. What can you get for a secondhand radio?”
“Not much, I wouldn’t think. Isn’t that our turn coming up?”
“Uh-huh. So the jewelry was the main thing, right?”
I nodded. “They took a lot of stuff. They took one of my sport jackets, can you imagine that? I guess the son of a bitch saw something he liked and it was the right size for him.”
“That’s amazing. Which jacket?”
“The Black Watch plaid. The damn thing’s three years old and I was frankly a little sick of it, but I’m positive it was hanging in the closet when we left, so I guess some penny-ante burglar doesn’t care if he’s wearing the latest styles or not.”
“Amazing. You call the police?”
“I had no choice, Pete. I’ll tell you something, the worst part of all this isn’t what you lose when they rob you. It’s the ordeal you wind up putting yourself through. We walked in there tired out from all that driving and the place looked like a cyclone hit it, and I called the fellow who takes care of my insurance and he told me I had to report the burglary to the police. He said nothing would be recovered but unless the incident’s officially reported the company won’t honor a claim. So we had these two plainclothes bulls over for half the afternoon, and Roz was shaky anyway and the cops knew they had to go through the motions but also knew it was a waste of time, and they’re asking me like do I have the serial number from the typewriter, and who keeps track of that crap?”
“Nobody.”
“Of course not. Even if you wrote it down you’d never remember where you put it.”
“Or the crooks would steal the notebook along with the typewriter.”
“Exactly. So they’re asking me this garbage because it’s their job, and in spite of myself I’m feeling guilty that I didn’t know the serial number, and they’re asking about the bill of sale for this thing or that thing, and who’s got copies of things like that? Watch out, there’s a kid on a bicycle.”
“I see him, Eddie. You’re jumpy as hell, you know that?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know not to run over kids on bicycles and I knew it was our turn coming up. It’s not as if I never drove a truck before.”
I put a hand on his arm. “Sorry,” I said. “I am jumpy as hell and I’m sorry. Those cops, I finally told them enough was enough, and I poured drinks all around and everybody relaxed. They said off the record I could forget about seeing any of the stuff again, which I already knew, and I let them finish their drinks and got them the hell out of there. And I took Roz upstairs and got a handful of Valium into her.”
“Not a whole handful, I hope.”
“Maybe two pills.”
“That’s better.”
“And I had one more drink for myself and then I put the plug in the jug because I didn’t want to get loopy, not going out tonight. I almost called you and canceled out and opened the bottle again, but I figured that would be stupid.”
“You sure?” He looked at me. “I could turn the car around, you know. There’s other nights.”
“Keep driving.”
“You’re absolutely sure?”
“Absolutely. But can you imagine guys like that?”
“You mean the cops?”
“No, I don’t mean the cops. They’re just doing their job. I mean the guys who ripped us off.”
He laughed. “Maybe they’re just doing their jobs, too, Eddie.”
“That’s some job, robbing people’s homes. Can you imagine doing that?”
“No.”
“Roz kept saying how she’s always felt so safe and secure where we are, a good neighborhood and all, and how can she feel that way now? Well, that’s nonsense, she’ll get used to it again, but I know what she means.”
“It’s such an invasion of privacy.”
“That’s exactly what it is. People in her living space, you know what I mean? People in her house, getting dirt on her carpets, going through her things, sticking their noses into her private life. An invasion of privacy, that’s exactly what it is. And for what, will you tell me that?”
“For ten cents on the dollar, and that’s if they’re lucky.”
“If they get that much it’s a lot. If they net two grand out of everything they took off us it’s a hell of a lot, and in the process they gave us a bad day and put us to a lot of trouble and I don’t know what it’s going to cost to replace everything and clean up the mess they made. Going into people’s houses like that, and that’s nothing—suppose we were home?”
“Well, they probably were careful to make sure you weren’t.”
“Yeah, but if they’re sloppy enough to rob us in the first place, how careful do they figure to be?”
We kicked it around some more. By the time we got to the gate I was feeling a whole lot calmer. I guess it helped to talk about it, and Pete was always easy to talk to.
He pulled the truck to a stop and I got out and opened the padlock and unfastened the chain, then swung the gate open. After the truck was through I closed the gate and locked it again. Then I climbed back into the truck and Pete cut across the lot to the warehouse.
“No trouble with the key, Eddie?”
“None.”
“Good. What’d they do at your place, kick the door in?”
“Forced the lock with a crowbar, something like that.”
“Slobs, it sounds like.”
“Yeah, that’s what they were. Slobs.”
He maneuvered the truck, parking it with its back doors up against the loading dock. I climbed down and opened them, and while I was standing there the automatic door on the loading dock swung up. I had a bad second or two then, as if there’d be men with guns up on the dock, but of course it was empty. A second or two later the night watchman appeared through a door a dozen yards to our left. He gave us a wave, then took a drink of something from a brown paper bag.
Pete got out of the truck and we went over to the old man. “Thought I’d run the door open for you,” he said. “Have a little something?”
He offered the paper bag to us. We declined without asking what it was and he took another little sip for himself. “You boys’ll treat me right,” he said. “Won’t you, now?”
“No worries, Pops.”
“You didn’t have no trouble with that key, did you?”
“On the gate? No, it was a perfect fit.”
“Now when you go out you’ll break the chain so they won’t know you had no key, right?”
“Takes too much time, Pops. Nobody’s gonna suspect you and if they do they can’t prove anything.”
“They’re gonna ask me questions,” he whined.
“That’s how you’ll be earning your money. And they’ll ask you questions whatever we do with the lock.”
He wasn’t crazy about it, but another sip from his bottle eased his mind some. “Guess you know what you’re doing,” he said. “Now be sure and tie me tight but not too tight, if you know what I mean. And I don’t know about tape on my mouth.”
“Well, that’s up to you, Pops.”
He decided on the tape after all. Pete got a roll of it from the truck, along with a coil of clothesline, and the three of us went inside. While Pete tied the old fellow up I
got started stacking the color TVs in the truck. I made sure I arranged them compactly because I wanted to fit in as many as the truck would hold. It’s not going to be a cinch, replacing all the jewelry Roz lost.
When This Man Dies
The night before the first letter came, he had Speckled Band in the feature at Saratoga. The horse went off at nine-to-two from the number one pole and Edgar Kraft had two hundred dollars on him, half to win and half to place. Speckled Band went to the front and stayed there. The odds-on favorite, a four-year-old named Sheila’s Kid, challenged around the clubhouse turn and got hung up on the outside. Kraft was counting his money. In the stretch, Speckled Band broke stride, galloped home madly, was summarily disqualified, and placed fourth. Kraft tore up his tickets and went home.
So he was in no mood for jokes that morning. He opened five of the six letters that came in the morning mail, and all five were bills, none of which he had any prospect of paying in the immediate future. He put them in a drawer in his desk. There were already several bills in that drawer. He opened the final letter and was at first relieved to discover that it was not a bill, not a notice of payment due, not a threat to repossess car or furniture. It was, instead, a very simple message typed in the center of a large sheet of plain typing paper.
First a name:
Mr. Joseph H. Neimann
And below that:
When This Man Dies
You Will Receive
Five Hundred Dollars
He was in no mood for jokes. Trotters that lead all the way and then break in the stretch do not contribute to a man’s sense of humor. He looked at the sheet of paper, turned it over to see if there was anything further on its reverse, turned it over again to read the message once more, picked up the envelope, saw nothing on it but his own name and a local postmark, said something unprintable about some idiots and their idea of a joke, and tore everything up and threw it away, message and envelope and all.
In the course of the next week he thought about the letter once, maybe twice. No more than that. He had problems of his own. He had never heard of anyone named Joseph H. Neimann and entertained no hopes of receiving five hundred dollars in the event of the man’s death. He did not mention the cryptic message to his wife. When the man from Superior Finance called to ask him if he had any hopes of meeting his note on time, he did not say anything about the legacy that Mr. Neimann meant to leave him.
He went on doing his work from one day to the next, working with the quiet desperation of a man who knows his income, while better than nothing, will never quite get around to equaling his expenditures. He went to the track twice, won thirty dollars one night, lost twenty-three the next. He came quite close to forgetting entirely about Mr. Joseph H. Neimann and the mysterious correspondent.
Then the second letter came. He opened it mechanically, unfolded a large sheet of plain white paper. Ten fresh fifty-dollar bills fluttered down upon the top of his desk. In the center of the sheet of paper someone had typed:
Thank You
Edgar Kraft did not make the connection immediately. He tried to think what he might have done that would merit anyone’s thanks, not to mention anyone’s five hundred dollars. It took him a moment, and then he recalled that other letter and rushed out of his office and down the street to a drugstore. He bought a morning paper, turned to the obituaries.
Joseph Henry Neimann, 67, of 413 Park Place, had died the previous afternoon in County Hospital after an illness of several months’ duration. He left a widow, three children, and four grandchildren. Funeral services would be private, flowers were please to be omitted.
He put three hundred dollars in his checking account and two hundred dollars in his wallet. He made his payment on the car, paid his rent, cleared up a handful of small bills. The mess in his desk drawer was substantially less baleful, although by no means completely cleared up. He still owed money, but he owed less now than before the timely death of Joseph Henry Neimann. The man from Superior Finance had been appeased by a partial payment; he would stop making a nuisance of himself, at least for the time being.
That night, Kraft took his wife to the track. He even let her make a couple of impossible hunch bets. He lost forty dollars and it hardly bothered him at all.
When the next letter came he did not tear it up. He recognized the typing on the envelope, and he turned it over in his hands for a few moments before opening it, like a child with a wrapped present. He was somewhat more apprehensive than child with present, however; he couldn’t help feeling that the mysterious benefactor would want something in return for his five hundred dollars.
He opened the letter. No demands, however. Just the usual sheet of plain paper, with another name typed in its center:
Mr. Raymond Andersen
And below that:
When This Man Dies
You Will Receive
Seven Hundred Fifty Dollars.
For the next few days he kept telling himself that he did not wish anything unpleasant for Mr. Raymond Andersen. He didn’t know the man, he had never heard of him, and he was not the sort to wish death upon some total stranger. And yet—
Each morning he bought a paper and turned at once to the death notices, searching almost against his will for the name of Mr. Raymond Andersen. I don’t wish him harm, he would think each time. But seven hundred fifty dollars was a happy sum. If something were going to happen to Mr. Raymond Andersen, he might as well profit by it. It wasn’t as though he was doing anything to cause Andersen’s death. He was even unwilling to wish for it. But if something happened . . .
Something happened. Five days after the letter came, he found Andersen’s obituary in the morning paper. Andersen was an old man, a very old man, and he had died in his bed at a home for the aged after a long illness. His heart jumped when he read the notice with a combination of excitement and guilt. But what was there to feel guilty about? He hadn’t done anything. And death, for a sick old man like Raymond Andersen, was more a cause for relief than grief, more a blessing than a tragedy.
But why would anyone want to pay him seven hundred fifty dollars?
Nevertheless, someone did. The letter came the following morning, after a wretched night during which Kraft tossed and turned and batted two possibilities back and forth—that the letter would come and that it would not. It did come, and it brought the promised seven hundred fifty dollars in fifties and hundreds. And the same message:
Thank You
For what? He had not the slightest idea. But he looked at the two-word message again before putting it carefully away.
You’re welcome, he thought. You’re entirely welcome.
For two weeks no letter came. He kept waiting for the mail, kept hoping for another windfall like the two that had come so far. There were times when he would sit at his desk for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, staring off into space and thinking about the letters and the money. He would have done better keeping his mind on his work, but this was not easy. His job brought him five thousand dollars a year, and for that sum he had to work forty to fifty hours a week. His anonymous pen pal had thus far brought him a quarter as much as he earned in a year, and he had done nothing at all for the money.
The seven-fifty had helped, but he was still in hot water. On a sudden female whim his wife had had the living room recarpeted. The rent was due. There was another payment due on the car. He had one very good night at the track, but a few other visits took back his winnings and more.
And then the letter came, along with a circular inviting him to buy a dehumidifier for his basement and an appeal for funds from some dubious charity. He swept circular and appeal into his wastebasket and tore open the plain white envelope. The message was the usual sort:
Mr. Claude Pierce
And below the name:
When This Man Dies
You Will Receive
One Thousand Dollars.
Kraft’s hands were shaking slightly as he put the envelope and letter away in his des
k. One thousand dollars—the price had gone up again, this time to a fairly staggering figure. Mr. Claude Pierce. Did he know anyone named Claude Pierce? He did not. Was Claude Pierce sick? Was he a lonely old man, dying somewhere of a terminal illness?
Kraft hoped so. He hated himself for the wish, but he could not smother it. He hoped Claude Pierce was dying.
This time he did a little research. He thumbed through the phone book until he found a listing for a Claude Pierce on Honeydale Drive. He closed the book then and tried to put the whole business out of his mind, an enterprise foredoomed to failure. Finally he gave up, looked up the listing once more, looked at the man’s name, and thought that this man was going to die. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? They sent him some man’s name in the mail, and then the man died, and then Edgar Kraft was paid. Obviously, Claude Pierce was a doomed man.
He called Pierce’s number. A woman answered, and Kraft asked if Mr. Pierce was in.
“Mr. Pierce is in the hospital,” the woman said. “Who’s calling, please?”
“Thank you,” Kraft said.
Of course, he thought. They, whoever they were, simply found people in hospitals who were about to die, and they paid money to Edgar Kraft when the inevitable occurred, and that was all. The why of it was impenetrable. But so few things made sense in Kraft’s life that he did not want to question the whole affair too closely. Perhaps his unknown correspondent was like that lunatic on television who gave away a million dollars every week. If someone wanted to give Kraft money, Kraft wouldn’t argue with him.
That afternoon he called the hospital. Claude Pierce had been admitted two days ago for major surgery, a nurse told Kraft. His condition was listed as good.