Centuries of June (36 page)

“Wait just a minute, Bun.… You’re asking me to kill my wife?”

“No, silly.” She rolled over and lay on top of him. “You kill Jerry, and then we get rid of Claire. You could divorce her if you had Jerry’s money to look forward to.” She sat up suddenly and wondered if he would actually leave his wife for her. She broke into a toothy grin and straddled him. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Staring up at her, luxuriating in the touch of her fingers, Phil could not help himself. His body betrayed his true feelings.

D
own in the backyard, a tomcat yowled, and I could tell by the length and timbre of the call that Harpo had returned and was announcing his presence. Had I left the cat flap unlatched?

Alice went to the window and peered into the abyss. “What on earth made that hellish cry?”

“You, my dear witch, of all people, should know,” the old man said. “It is a cat.”

The mention of a cat in such proximity caused quite a stir in the room. In the small space, they kept bumping into one another in a kind of flustered, mild panic. Adele could not stop shaking her head in disbelief, and Marie was ready to tear out her hair. Flo and Jane huddled near the door, debating escape. Alice approached the old man
and grabbed him by the lapels of his robe. “Nobody said nothing about any cat.”

The old man stood and addressed the crowd. “I have spoken to your man here about the filthy beast, and he has assured me that said cat will stay in the bottom of the house while we occupy the top. There’s no need in getting yourselves in an uproar, ladies.” His speech mollified them to the point where everyone returned to their places. From the corner of his mouth, he muttered to me, “Allergies.” With a nod of his fez, he indicated to Bunny that she might resume, and so she did.

T
hings went on as they had been going with Phil and Bunny, as though the subplot had not been introduced to the everyday drama of sneaking around to be with each other. She did not mention murder at their next tryst, but thought instead to treat him to his favorite sexual favor. “I want more than this,” she said to him as he left the apartment. Over the next few weeks, she repeated the performance, always with the same bittersweet good-bye at the door. Only gradually did she let him know how disappointed she was in his lack of will, canceling dates at the last minute or leaving earlier than planned or not being so compliant. But her strategies failed to work, for he took her actions as a sign of diminishing interest on her part, and she found the plot drifting away. It took an accident, an unexpected bit of bad luck, to lead him to change his mind.

Going to the icebox for some ice for Jerry’s nightly Cuba libre, she pulled too hard on the handle of the stuck door, which then flew open and smacked her squarely in the face, blackening her eye and splitting her lower lip. The poor dumb thing took care of her as best he could, a steak for the contusion and a cold compress for her mouth, and she almost felt a twinge of affection for the mug, but Jerry fell asleep on
the sofa watching
Playhouse 90
, so she stole away to the telephone. “He suspects something, Phil. He hit me again.” On the other end of the line, he groaned. She managed to cry a little bit, too, and have him promise to come over on Friday morning.

The tenderness of his touch surprised her, as he ran his fingertips over the yellow and plum circle around her eye. Phil kissed her gently and withdrew when she winced and held her hand to the sore spot. Instead of taking her to bed, he made a pot of coffee, cracked a soft-boiled egg on toast cut into bite-sized pieces. Like a pair of newlyweds, they sat across the breakfast table and stared at each other. Bunny told her story of how Jerry had accused her of stepping out with Woody Pfahl, a fella who lived down in 2A, and when she asserted her innocence, her husband had struck her twice with the back of his hand. “He knocked me to the floor with the second one,” she said. “And called me a slut and a whore and said that he’d kill me if he ever so much as caught me talking to him.”

“Who is this Woody Pfahl?”

“Just some kid. A folksinger or a beatnik or something. You know the type.” She hid her face behind her hands. “You must think I’m hideous.”

He grabbed her by the wrists and wrestled her hands away from her face. “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll kill the bastard. We’ll make it look like an accident or someone else did it. Maybe that Woody Pfahl.”

Her lip began to bleed again when she cracked a smile. “You will?”

“I could strangle him right now.”

“And then we can take care of Claire, and be together.”

Tamping a cigarette on the edge of the laminated tabletop, he seemed to be considering the proposition beat by beat. “Right. Jerry first, and then we just have to wait till it all blows over.”

“A little while, and then you leave her.”

There was a pause, a beat too long. “Sure,” he said.

Crimes of passion are best done in haste, while the heat of the moment bubbles in the blood. Too much planning for the perfect crime often leads to overanalysis and weakens the nerve necessary to make the kill. Instead, they dithered. For months, they went over possible scenarios of how Phil might stage an accident. A push from the subway platform into an oncoming train was dismissed over potential witnesses. In April, they thought of poison and nooses, razors and piano wire, a fall from a tall building, a safe falling on him from a tall building. By May, they were discussing the merits and drawbacks of arson, leaving the gas oven on all night, an electric hair curler dropped into the bathtub, and an overdose of sleeping pills. They debated smothering and strangling, knives and ice picks. On Memorial Day, they nearly agreed upon a blow to the head with a blunt object. Whenever she brought up the subject of divorce, he changed the subject back to murder. As the weather improved and all through springtime, all they talked about was murder, murder, murder.

A
rumba came over the radio, and the girls twirled their highballs, twisted their hips, and tapped their toes. The baby shook his rattle like a maraca.

I
t took another accident, another random bit of cosmic mashup, to move from the discussion stage to the execution of the plan. Quite simply, Phil met Woody Pfahl. Standing outside of Bunny’s apartment building one morning, wondering whether to take the train uptown or hail a cab or just walk the dozen or so blocks to his office. He’d lit another cigarette and was trying to clear Bunny from his mind, having just left her bed after a particularly athletic romp. Funny how the talk of homicide
really revved her motor. Up the block comes this kid, no more than twenty he’d guess, dark shades, wispy beginnings of a goatee, sucking on a Pall Mall like it was an all-day lollipop. The kid seemed lost in thought because he crashed right into Phil despite the lack of foot traffic at that hour.

“Hey man,” the kid said, “why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

Phil brushed the ash from his sportscoat. “You were barreling down the sidewalk like a bull. I was just standing here minding my own business.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, man. I didn’t realize it was you.”

With one hand on the beatnik’s chest, he stopped the boy. “What do you mean by that? Do we know each other?”

“Look, man, I don’t want no trouble. You’re just the cat comes sniffing round here every once in a while.”

Phil grabbed the kid by his lapel. “What do you mean by that crack, punk?”

“The situation is getting much too grave. Can we cool it, pops? I’m just trying to get back to my pad, catch a few zees. I’ve been out all night on Bleecker Street.”

“You live in this building?” He suddenly realized the kid’s identity. “You called Woody?”

“I don’t want no trouble.”

Phil laughed and let go of the boy’s jacket. “Sure, Woody, go on home.” All the way uptown he could not keep from chuckling to himself. The kid could barely sprout a whisker, let alone satisfy Bunny. That’s who Jerry thinks is fooling around with his wife? She wouldn’t give a kid like that a second look. Bunny was right: Jerry was some kind of psycho nut job, and she deserved better. In Chelsea, he stopped in a shop where he had been told someone might sell him a gun.

•   •   •

D
ownstairs the cat clunked the empty saucer across the kitchen tiles, but I dared not move a muscle to see what he wanted. As a matter of fact, I could barely move at all, given the crowd in the tiny bathroom. Who designed such small claustrophobic spaces? Or were people smaller, more compact in their needs and movements at the time this house was built? A good old house, in many ways, but at other times, the shortcomings obverted its charms. I should expand the room or add another powder room downstairs, perhaps off the kitchen. How did the previous owners deal with such inadequacies? Bachelard, I believe, had an interesting passage on the ghosts of former inhabitants of old homes, but I cannot look it up because someone has taken my
Poetics
. Perhaps the cat is to blame. I could hear him creeping about.

O
n the hot June morning that Phil brought over the gun—a Smith & Wesson revolver, a “.38 Special”—Bunny showered him with kisses and in the bedroom let him do that thing he had always wanted to do to her. Drenched in sweat afterward, they positioned themselves in front of an oscillating fan and let the intermittent breeze dry their skin and cool down their overheated bodies. The gun sat on the end table like a menacing wood and nickel hawk. Bunny rolled over onto her stomach to let the air ride over her legs and back. She could better see his face in profile, the beak of his nose and the pointy cleft chin. His lashes grew longer than hers and curled naturally. “I called her yesterday,” she said. “Claire.”

He turned partially toward Bunny but found her face too close to focus upon. “Why would you go and do a thing like that?” She had anticipated some anger, but his voice was tired and calm.

“To invite her to lunch, silly. We haven’t seen each other since the wedding, your wedding, and I mentioned that Jerry had bumped into you last fall and thought we should all get back in touch.”

Raising himself halfway, he rested on his elbows and considered her backside. “I thought we were going to wait—”

“I’m tired of waiting, Phil. There’s no reason they both can’t die one on top of the other. In fact, the more coincidental, the less likely the police will suspect they had anything to do with each other. I’m meeting Claire day after tomorrow at Moran’s, and I read about this drug in an Agatha Christie novel. Imitates food poisoning, but you end up dead. Everyone will think it’s bad clams.”

“Jeez, Bun, that’s not part of the plan.”

A fit of giggles passed back and forth between the two, leaving them breathless. Bunny slid from the sheets and hobbled to the end table for a cigarette, and as she exhaled the first puff of smoke, she heard the front door swing open and Jerry’s ring of keys jingling like sleigh bells.

They glanced into each other’s panicked eyes. “Shit,” she said, and he rolled off the mattress, desperate for his pants.

“Bun-ny,” her husband called from the foyer. No doubt he saw the man’s hat on the sideboard, for he did not call again and did not immediately approach the closed bedroom door at the end of the hallway. There was no time to think. Like a fool, Phil was trying to get dressed. His tie was already roped around his neck. Ripping the sheet from the bed, Bunny wound it around her naked body and then picked up the gat. As Jerry burst into the room, she let him have it, firing aimlessly, the bullet catching him in the right thigh.

He squealed like a schoolgirl at the pain and then clutched at the red carnation blossoming on his seersucker trousers. It never happened like that in the movies. The stiffs usually fell after the first
shot—blam—and they were dead, but he was hopping around like a Mexican jumping bean. “What, are you crazy? What are you doing, Bunny?”

She lifted the piece and fired again, this time shattering the lamp on the bureau.

“Bun-Bun, stop. It’s me, Jerry. Stop what you’re doing. Stop shooting.” Jerry sensed the presence of another person in the room and saw the man in trousers and necktie, but no shirt, at the foot of the bed. The sheet was slipping from his wife’s shoulders. “Phil? Phil Ketchum?”

Phil grinned and waved meekly.

“Oh jeez,” Jerry said. “I only came home because I forgot my wallet. Oh jeez. Bunny, what have you done?”

The shock had worn off, and she found she could now aim straight and true, so she squeezed the trigger and put the third bullet in his chest. Jerry bounced off the edge of the bed before hitting the floor like a sack of potatoes, just like in the movies.

After the noise from the gunshots, the shouting voice, the bodies in motion, after the chaos subsided, they stood quite still, afraid of what might happen next. The droning fan swept back and forth, but the rest of the world went mute for a few seconds, allowing them to catch their hearts from beating through their ribs, to slow the pulse, to steady the heavy breathing. A weak moan floated from the floor.

“Shit,” Bunny said. From her side of the bed, she marched round, past the stunned boyfriend, and stopped directly above the victim. She waved the gun at Phil. “See if he’s dead.”

“Do I have to? I don’t want to touch him.”

“For cripes’ sake, Phil, do I have to do everything myself?”

Since he had only managed to find one shoe, he limped over to the body, which was arranged awkwardly, facedown and partially under the bed. Phil tugged the corpse and rolled him over. A bright red stain
seeped through his shirt, and a trickle of blood ran from his mouth. His eyes were open, staring accusingly, but no breath passed his lips and there was no pulse at the carotid artery. He was quite deceased.

“B
lood is a dead giveaway,” the old man said. “Reminds me of a certain someone.”

I reached back to the site of the hole in my head, but there was no blood. From the living room, the cat let loose a plaintive meow. It was only a matter of time before he would come seek me out. I checked my watch, but the hands had not moved.

T
hey wrapped him up like a mummy in a blanket, got dressed, and went to the kitchen to strategize. Phil’s hands shook like a dope fiend’s when he tried to light a pair of cigarettes. Bunny put on the percolator and grabbed some eggs from the icebox. “Hungry?”