Well, he would have a relapse, Kraft thought. He was doomed—the letter writer had ordained his death. He felt momentarily sorry for Claude Pierce, and then he turned his attention to the entries at Saratoga. There was a horse named Orange Pips which Kraft had been watching for some time. The horse had a good post now, and if he was ever going to win, this was the time.
Kraft went to the track. Orange Pips ran out of the money. In the morning Kraft failed to find Pierce’s obituary. When he called the hospital, the nurse told him that Pierce was recovering very nicely.
Impossible, Kraft thought.
For three weeks Claude Pierce lay in his hospital bed, and for three weeks Edgar Kraft followed his condition with more interest than Pierce’s doctor could have displayed. Once Pierce took a turn for the worse and slipped into a coma. The nurse’s voice was grave over the phone, and Kraft bowed his head, resigned to the inevitable. A day later Pierce had rallied remarkably. The nurse sounded positively cheerful, and Kraft fought off a sudden wave of rage that threatened to overwhelm him.
From that point on, Pierce improved steadily. He was released, finally, a whole man again, and Kraft could not understand quite what had happened. Something had gone wrong. When Pierce died, he was to receive a thousand dollars. Pierce had been sick, Pierce had been close to death, and then, inexplicably, Pierce had been snatched from the very jaws of death, with a thousand dollars simultaneously snatched from Edgar Kraft.
He waited for another letter. No letter came.
With the rent two weeks overdue, with a payment on the car past due, with the man from Superior Finance calling him far too often, Kraft’s mind began to work against him. When this man dies, the letter had said. There had been no strings attached, no time limit on Pierce’s death. After all, Pierce could not live forever. No one did. And whenever Pierce did happen to draw his last breath, he would get that thousand dollars.
Suppose something happened to Pierce—
He thought it over against his own will. It would not be hard, he kept telling himself. No one knew that he had any interest whatsoever in Claude Pierce. If he picked his time well, if he did the dirty business and got it done with and hurried off into the night, no one would know. The police would never think of him in the same breath with Claude Pierce, if police were in the habit of thinking in breaths. He did not know Pierce, he had no obvious motive for killing Pierce, and—
He couldn’t do it, he told himself. He simply could not do it. He was no killer. And something as senseless as this, something so thoroughly absurd, was unthinkable.
He would manage without the thousand dollars. Somehow, he would live without the money. True, he had already spent it a dozen times over in his mind. True, he had been counting and recounting it when Pierce lay in a coma. But he would get along without it. What else could he do?
The next morning headlines shrieked Pierce’s name at Edgar Kraft. The previous night someone had broken into the Pierce home on Honeydale Drive and had knifed Claude Pierce in his bed. The murderer had escaped unseen. No possible motive for the slaying of Pierce could be established. The police were baffled.
Kraft got slightly sick to his stomach as he read the story. His first reaction was a pure and simple onrush of unbearable guilt, as though he had been the man with the knife, as though he himself had broken in during the night to stab silently and flee promptly, mission accomplished. He could not shake this guilt away. He knew well enough that he had done nothing, that he had killed no one. But he had conceived of the act, he had willed that it be done, and he could not escape the feeling that he was a murderer, at heart if not in fact.
His blood money came on schedule. One thousand dollars, ten fresh hundreds this time. And the message. Thank you.
Don’t thank me, he thought, holding the bills in his hand, holding them tenderly. Don’t thank me!
Mr. Leon Dennison
When This Man Dies
You Will Receive
Fifteen Hundred Dollars.
Kraft did not keep the letter. He was breathing heavily when he read it, his heart pounding. He read it twice through, and then he took it and the envelope it had come in, and all the other letters and envelopes that he had so carefully saved, and he tore them all into little bits and flushed them down the toilet.
He had a headache. He took aspirin; but it did not help his headache at all. He sat at his desk and did no work until lunchtime. He went to the luncheonette around the corner and ate lunch without tasting his food. During the afternoon he found that, for the first time, he could not make heads or tails out of the list of entries at Saratoga. He couldn’t concentrate on a thing, and he left the office early and took a long walk.
Mr. Leon Dennison.
Dennison lived in an apartment on Cadbury Avenue. No one answered his phone. Dennison was an attorney, and he had an office listing. When Kraft called it a secretary answered and told him that Mr. Dennison was in conference. Would he care to leave his name?
When this man dies.
But Dennison would not die, he thought. Not in a hospital bed, at any rate. Dennison was perfectly all right, he was at work and the person who had written all those letters knew very well that Dennison was all right, that he was not sick.
Fifteen hundred dollars.
But how, he wondered. He did not own a gun and had not the slightest idea how to get one. A knife? Someone had used a knife on Claude Pierce, he remembered. And a knife would probably not be hard to get his hands on. But a knife seemed somehow unnatural to him.
How, then? By automobile? He could do it that way, he could lie in wait for Dennison and run him down in his car. It would not be difficult, and it would probably be certain enough. Still, the police were supposed to be able to find hit-and-run drivers fairly easily. There was something about paint scrapings, or blood on your own bumper or something. He didn’t know the details, but they always did seem to catch hit-and-run drivers.
Forget it, he told himself. You are not a killer.
He didn’t forget it. For two days he tried to think of other things and failed miserably. He thought about Dennison, and he thought about fifteen hundred dollars and he thought about murder.
When this man dies—
One time he got up early in the morning and drove to Cadbury Avenue. He watched Leon Dennison’s apartment, and he saw Dennison emerge, and when Dennison crossed the street toward his parked car Kraft settled his own foot on the accelerator and ached to put the pedal on the floor and send the car hurtling toward Leon Dennison. But he didn’t do it. He waited.
So clever. Suppose he were caught in the act? Nothing linked him with the person who wrote him the letters. He hadn’t even kept the letters, but even if he had, they were untraceable.
Fifteen hundred dollars—
On a Thursday afternoon he called his wife and told her he was going directly to Saratoga. She complained mechanically before bowing to the inevitable. He drove to Cadbury Avenue and parked his car. When the doorman slipped down to the corner for a cup of coffee, Kraft ducked into the building and found Leon Dennison’s apartment. The door was locked, but he managed to spring the lock with the blade of a penknife. He was sweating freely as he worked on the lock, expecting every moment someone to come up behind him and lay a hand on his shoulder. The lock gave, and he went inside and closed it after him.
But something happened the moment he entered the apartment. All the fear, all the anxiety, all of this suddenly left Edgar Kraft. He was mysteriously calm now. Everything was prearranged, he told himself. Joseph H. Neimann had been doomed, and Raymond Andersen had been doomed, and Claude Pierce had been doomed, and each of them had died. Now Leon Dennison was similarly doomed, and he too would die.
It seemed very simple. And Edgar Kraft himself was nothing but a part of this grand design, nothing but a cog in a gigantic machine. He would do his part without worrying about it. Everything could only go according to plan.
Everything did. He waited three hours for Leon Dennison
to come home, waited in calm silence. When a key turned in the lock, he stepped swiftly and noiselessly to the side of the door, a fireplace andiron held high overhead. The door opened and Leon Dennison entered, quite alone.
The andiron descended.
Leon Dennison fell without a murmur. He collapsed, lay still. The andiron rose and fell twice more, just for insurance, and Leon Dennison never moved and never uttered a sound. Kraft had only to wipe off the andiron and a few other surfaces to eliminate any fingerprints he might have left behind. He left the building by the service entrance. No one saw him.
He waited all that night for the rush of guilt. He was surprised when it failed to come. But he had already been a murderer—by wishing for Andersen’s death, by planning Pierce’s murder. The simple translation of his impulses from thought to deed was no impetus for further guilt.
There was no letter the next day. The following morning the usual envelope was waiting for him. It was quite bulky; it was filled with fifteen hundred-dollar bills.
The note was different. It said Thank You, of course. But beneath that there was another line:
How Do You Like Your New Job?
With a Smile for the Ending
I had one degree from Trinity, and one was enough, and I’d had enough of Dublin, too. It is a fine city, a perfect city, but there are only certain persons that can live there. An artist will love the town, a priest will bless it, and a clerk will live in it as well as elsewhere. But I had too little of faith and of talent and too much of a hunger for the world to be priest or artist or pen warden. I might have become a drunkard, for Dublin’s a right city for a drinking man, but I’ve no more talent for drinking than for deception—yet another lesson I learned at Trinity, and equally a bargain. (Tell your story, Joseph Cameron Bane would say. Clear your throat and get on with it.)
I had family in Boston. They welcomed me cautiously and pointed me toward New York. A small but pretentious publishing house hired me; they leaned toward foreign editors and needed someone to balance off their flock of Englishmen. Four months was enough, of the job and of the city. A good place for a young man on the way up, but no town at all for a pilgrim.
He advertised for a companion. I answered his ad and half a dozen others, and when he replied I saw his name and took the job at once. I had lived with his books for years: The Wind at Morning, Cabot’s House, Ruthpen Hallburton, Lips That Could Kiss, others, others. I had loved his words when I was a boy in Ennis, knowing no more than to read what reached me, and I loved them still at Trinity where one was supposed to care only for more fashionable authors. He had written a great many books over a great many years, all of them set in the same small American town. Ten years ago he’d stopped writing and never said why. When I read his name at the bottom of the letter I realized, though it had never occurred to me before, that I had somehow assumed him dead for some years.
We traded letters. I went to his home for an interview, rode the train there and watched the scenery change until I was in the country he had written about. I walked from the railway station carrying both suitcases, having gambled he’d want me to stay. His housekeeper met me at the door. I stepped inside, feeling as though I’d dreamed the room, the house. The woman took me to him, and I saw that he was older than I’d supposed him, and next saw that he was not. He appeared older because he was dying. “You’re Riordan,” he said. “How’d you come up? Train?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pete run you up?” I looked blank, I’m sure. He said that Pete was the town’s cabdriver, and I explained that I’d walked.
“Oh? Could have taken a taxi.”
“I like to walk.”
“Mmmmm,” he said. He offered me a drink. I refused, but he had one. “Why do you want to waste time watching a man die?” he demanded. “Not morbid curiosity, I’m sure. Want me to teach you how to be a writer?”
“No, sir.”
“Want to do my biography? I’m dull and out of fashion, but some fool might want to read about me.”
“No, I’m not a writer.”
“Then why are you here, boy?”
He asked this reasonably, and I thought about the question before I answered it. “I like your books,” I said finally.
“You think they’re good? Worthwhile? Literature?”
“I just like them.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“I’ve never kept score,” I answered.
He laughed, happy with the answer, and I was hired.
There was very little to do that could be called work. Now and then there would be a task too heavy for Mrs. Dettweiler, and I’d do that for her. There were occasional errands to run, letters to answer. When the weather turned colder he’d have me make up the fire for him in the living room. When he had a place to go, I’d drive him; this happened less often as time passed, as the disease grew in him.
And so, in terms of the time allotted to various tasks, my job was much as its title implied. I was his companion. I listened when he spoke, talked when he wanted conversation, and was silent when silence was indicated. There would be a time, his doctor told me, when I would have more to do, unless Mr. Bane would permit a nurse. I knew he would not, any more than he’d allow himself to die anywhere but in his home. There would be morphine shots for me to give him, because sooner or later the oral drug would become ineffective. In time he would be confined, first to his home and then to his room and at last to his bed, all a gradual preparation for the ultimate confinement.
“And maybe you ought to watch his drinking,” the doctor told me. “He’s been hitting it pretty heavy.”
This last I tried once and no more. I said something foolish, that he’d had enough, that he ought to take it with a little water; I don’t remember the words, only the stupidity of them, viewed in retrospect.
“I did not hire a damned warden,” he said. “You wouldn’t have thought of this yourself, Tim. Was this Harold Keeton’s idea?”
“Well, yes.”
“Harold Keeton is an excellent doctor,” he said. “But only a doctor, and not a minister. He knows that doctors are supposed to tell their patients to cut down on smoking and drinking, and he plays his part. There is no reason for me to limit my drinking, Tim. There is nothing wrong with my liver or with my kidneys. The only thing wrong with me, Tim, is that I have cancer.
“I have cancer, and I’m dying of it. I intend to die as well as I possibly can. I intend to think and feel and act as I please, and go out with a smile for the ending. I intend, among other things, to drink what I want when I want it. I do not intend to get drunk, nor do I intend to be entirely sober if I can avoid it. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mr. Bane.”
“Good. Get the chessboard.”
For a change, I won a game.
The morning after Rachel Avery was found dead in her bathtub I came downstairs to find him at the breakfast table. He had not slept well, and this showed in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.
“We’ll go into town today,” he said.
“It snowed during the night, and you’re tired. If you catch cold, and you probably will, you’ll be stuck in bed for weeks.” This sort of argument he would accept. “Why do you want to go to town, sir?”
“To hear what people say.”
“Oh? What do you mean?”
“Because Rachel’s husband killed her, Tim. Rachel should never have married Dean Avery. He’s a man with the soul of an adding machine, but Rachel was poetry and music. He put her in his house and wanted to own her, but it was never in her to be true, to him or to another. She flew freely and sang magnificently, and he killed her.
“I want to learn just how he did it, and decide what to do about it. Perhaps you’ll go to town without me. You notice things well enough. You sense more than I’d guessed you might, as though you know the people.”
“You wrote them well.”
This amused him. “Never mind,” he said. “Make a nuisance of yourself i
f you have to, but see what you can learn. I have to find out how to manage all of this properly. I know a great deal, but not quite enough.”
Before I left I asked him how he could be so sure. He said, “I know the town and the people. I knew Rachel Avery and Dean Avery. I knew her mother very well, and I knew his parents. I knew they should not have married, and that things would go wrong for them, and I am entirely certain that she was killed and that he killed her. Can you understand that?”
“I don’t think so,” I replied. But I took the car into town, bought a few paperbound books at the drugstore, had an unnecessary haircut at the barber’s, went from here to there and back again, and then drove home to tell him what I had learned.
“There was a coroner’s inquest this morning,” I said. “Death by drowning induced as a result of electrical shock, accidental in origin. The funeral is tomorrow.”
“Go on, Tim.”
“Dean Avery was in Harmony Falls yesterday when they finally reached him and told him what had happened. He was completely torn up, they said. He drove to Harmony Falls the day before yesterday and stayed overnight.”
“And he was with people all the while?”
“No one said.”
“They wouldn’t have checked,” he said. “No need, not when it’s so obviously an accident. You’ll go to the funeral tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t go myself.”
“And I’m to study him and study everyone else? Should I take notes?”
He laughed, then chopped off the laughter sharply. “I don’t think you’d have to. I didn’t mean that you would go in my place solely to observe, Tim, though that’s part of it. But I would want to be there because I feel I ought to be there, so you’ll be my deputy.”
I had no answer to this. He asked me to build up the fire, and I did. I heard the newspaper boy and went for the paper. The town having no newspaper of its own, the paper he took was from the nearest city, and of course there was nothing in it on Rachel Avery. Usually he read it carefully. Now he skimmed it as if hunting something, then set it aside.