Fury on Sunday (3 page)

He shook it off.

“Are we going to that party next Friday night at Stan’s?” he asked.

“It’s up to you, honey,” she said.

“Well, there’s no use lying; I don’t particularly want to go. Stan’s all right, but Jane gives me the creeps. I get the feeling she’s going to explode sometime right in my face; a million pieces of Jane Sheldon flying all over the apartment.”

“I get the same feeling,” she said. “At college, Jane used to throw herself around so much I wondered how she’d ever graduate.”

“Did she?”

“In the top ten per cent of the class.”

“My God. Wouldn’t you know it.”

He looked down at her and smiled as he stroked her soft hair. He shook his head slightly without her seeing it. How in hell she and Jane ever managed to stand each other’s company for three years at college, he’d never know. They were so utterly different. Jane was a hand grenade with the pin out. Ruth was…

No, you couldn’t pin a pat little metaphor on Ruth; she was too atypical.

Jane you could characterize. You could put her down in words. She was more like a taut spring than a woman, made of sharp lines and angles with no contour that was smooth or soft; stiff, high breasts, hips and buttocks flat and hard, and legs like taut pistons driving her on.

That was a woman, maybe, but not the kind of woman he wanted. It wasn’t that he’d been brought up so strictly; not that he was a momma’s boy who always sang within himself the old refrain of
I want a girl just like the girl
…

It was just that, after a man had lived a while, loved a while, been around a lot of women, he wanted a woman he could trust and be at ease with. One he could feel sensual heat with, sure; but not a heat that was so constant it started to consume. That was Stan’s trouble. You couldn’t burn at a constant heat without charring after a while.

No, you needed a girl you could relax with too. A marriage took place in all the rooms of an apartment.

Bob thought about the first time he’d met Ruth. He’d been doing publicity work on one of Vince’s concerts. One night Stan, Vince’s business manager, had held a party. One of those endless parties that seemed always to be going around Stan’s beleaguered head. It was there that he’d met Ruth.

He had liked her appearance; the neat, unaffected way she dressed, the well-scrubbed facade she presented. He liked her smile.

But the thing he’d liked most was her complete difference from Jane. Jane was tight and hard, always brittle, always dashing around the party from one person to another, cigarette in one hand, cocktail
in the other; always pushing so hard to be terribly clever and terribly sophisticated. It was against the aura of pseudo-smartness that Ruth had stood out so strongly.

Was there a word that typified his Ruth? It wasn’t
old-fashioned
because that had connotations of prudishness that didn’t apply to Ruth. Maybe
real
was the word. She didn’t try to impress anyone. And that was the secret of her impression on him. Even now, after three years of marriage, after long intimacies and discoveries, she was still something new and vital to him. And the fact that she carried within her a tangible part of him was something even more exciting and wonderful.

He tightened his arm around her and she grunted.

“Easy, strangler,” she said.

He chuckled. Yes, with a wife like this he could even stomach
Hilton, Hilton, Joslyn and Ramsay: Advertising
. He thought about his office there, bright and clean, the grey wall-to-wall carpeting, the soft lights.

Then, all of a sudden, he was back to that day when Vince had come there. He hissed in disgust at not being able to rid himself of the memory.

“What’s the matter, darling?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Thinking about Vince?”

He looked at her in surprise. “How did you know?”

“Expectant woman’s intuition,” she said, half in amusement.

He sighed.

“He was quite a boy,” he said, “I wonder what kind of a life you would have had with him.”

“I don’t even want to think about it. That temper…”

She slid her arms around him suddenly.

“I love you, Bob,” she murmured.

Just the music undulating in the air. Bob pressed his cheek against her hair.

“I know, sweetheart,” he said, “I love you too.”

They sat there on the big couch and listened to the record. Ruth looked around the room at the bookshelves, at the furniture. She kept trying to put Vince out of her mind. It was a terrible memory. She had been a small town girl fascinated by his lean good looks, by his smile, by his ability to play the piano. Only when she saw his
temper did she realize it could never work out. And then Bob had come along.

The music ended.

“Bed?” he said softly.

“All right.”

They rose leisurely and, while Bob turned off the phonograph, Ruth looked at what he’d been working on all night.

“Will it sell cars?” she asked.

“It better,” he said, “or we’ll have to put Giuseppe in an orphanage.”

“He wouldn’t like that.”

“That’s why this has to sell automobiles,” he said.

“It will, honey.”

Arms around each other they walked slowly across the room and he flicked off the light as they went into the bedroom.

Vince crouched over the body of the unconscious guard and jerked the heavy pistol out of its holster. It felt good to have it in his hands, a solid comfort. When a man was excited and nervous he needed a crutch, and a pistol could be that crutch. A gun made him strong and it would frighten people. Most important it would hurt Bob. It would leave him dead—suddenly and completely—the way Vince wanted him.

His face twitched and his finger almost tightened on the trigger, so urgent was his desire to empty the pistol into Bob. The fact that Bob was so many miles away made Vince tremble with frustrated hate.

He straightened up and moved for the office door, anxious to get to the subway.

It had been ridiculously easy to overpower the old guard. The man had been sitting at the office desk, half slumped over in sleep. Vince had only to pick up the lamp and smash it across his head. The old man had crashed back in the chair without a sound. Vince had dashed around the edge of the desk and now he was almost free.

He jerked at the heavy door that led to the outside hall. At first he couldn’t believe that it wouldn’t open. His eyes widened as if he
was surprised. A questioning sound filled his throat. He pulled harder, but the door remained fast. Vince’s breath caught and he almost lunged against the heavy metal.

Then he stopped and held himself. It was not the time for temper. He had to escape. He closed his eyes. Why didn’t the door open?

Then he opened his eyes. A key.

Now wasn’t that terribly difficult to deduce.

His lips trembled as he moved back for the office. Always the voice of Saul in the background like an inescapable prompter hissing his cues from behind the dark curtain. No matter where Vince went, no matter what he did, there was always some old remark of Saul’s that would fit the occasion. His teeth gritted together. If only he knew where Saul was, he’d kill him too.

Vince bent over the guard again and felt through his pockets until he found the ring of keys. Then he returned to the door. He kept listening carefully while he tried one key after another. The hallway was silent, but in his mind’s ear he could hear, ludicrously, an old movie house piano playing “escape” music. It taunted him while he sweated over the lock.

Then the door opened. He was free. All he had to do was get down the stairs and out of the building. No one could stop him now. He gripped the pistol tightly.

The heels of his shoes were hard leather and they clattered on the metal steps. He had to slow down and hold onto the railing to ease himself down as noiselessly as possible. He put the pistol into his side pocket. It made a comforting bulge. Vince liked the pressure against his right leg.

Third floor. He stopped suddenly and his face went blank. Quickly he leaned over the railing and looked down. A gasp cut short his breathing.

There was an old woman coming up the steps carrying a scrub pail and mop, a bandanna wrapped around her grey head. Vince stepped back hurriedly. If he went through the third floor door and waited there the old woman might go in there, too, and see him. He might even run into somebody else. But if he stayed on the steps, she might go up another flight and see him anyway.

Kill her!
He clutched down at the pistol.

Once more he caught himself.
Don’t be a fool
. A shot would arouse everyone. Especially in this stair well, it would echo all over the building. His head moved around as he looked for escape. A
rushing of notes hung in his head like the beginning of a wild cadenza. The steps came closer—weary, trudging steps on the metal stairs. He backed against the wall and almost screamed out in hate.

It had always been that way. His temper had come over him like this. There would be a particular phrase to practice and Vince would work it over on the keys again and again, but still it wouldn’t come. And his temper like steam building up in a boiler, would keep growing, and finally, in a great roar, it would break out in a scream of frustration and he would double his fists and drive them like pistons into the keys. He would smash down clusters of black and white keys, making an endless chain of dissonances that would ring out in the penthouse apartment. He’d keep hitting even though his hands were bruised on the edges of the ivory keys and started to ooze blood. And he’d keep doing it until Saul came rushing in, screaming louder than Vince. He liked to do that, upset Saul. And the only way he could do it was to place those hands of his in some peril. It was the only thing that mattered to Saul about Vince. About anything.

And when the screaming and the pounding were done and he sat there at the piano heaving with sobs and unable to talk, Saul would make him start in again and perfect that phrase. And he always did. “Master technician.” That was what the critics had called him. “The virtuosity of a Horowitz… No heart discernible but virtually unsurpassed for technique.”

All of this flooded through Vince’s mind as he pressed his lips together to keep the scream from flooding out. He was trapped. It was the feeling he always got. The world was closing in on him and he must kick and scream to be free of it.

Instinct drove him back up the steps to cower in the shadowed landing, half-way to the fourth floor. Instinct pressed him against the cold wall and snuffed out his breath.

Vince watched the old scrub woman push through the third floor door. He watched the door swing slowly shut and thud into its frame. A smile relaxed his features. His hands lost their rigidity.

One more how and then we’ll get home to work on that Mozart phrase you desecrated this evening.

He moved down the stairs quickly, eagerly. In a half minute he was down to the first floor. He pushed open the door cautiously but the hallway was empty. Vince hurried down the length of it and reached the door. He pushed out through it and was on the street.

At first he wanted to stand there and stretch out his arms to the moon. The air was cool and delicious to the smell. He could have sung out in joy.

But there was no time; there was a thing to be done. Bob was still alive and, as long as he was, Ruth would be waiting to be freed. Vince started walking rapidly down the block alongside of the bleak grey building. He shivered a little in the cold morning air. How cool and clean it tasted after the smell of the ward with its unclean beds and the smell of many bodies crowded together.

Poor Ruth, Poor Ruth, Poor Ruth
, his feet drummed on the sidewalk. He wondered if it was possible that Bob had drugged her. There had been that harmony teacher in Cincinnati, Vince remembered, who had kept his beautiful young wife under narcotics so she’d be faithful. His hands clenched together.

Ruth, Ruth! Her beautiful face twisted with pain, her lovely body profaned and—

He stopped thinking of that. He mustn’t think of Ruth that way. She was purity and thoughts like that would spoil the memory of her. She was above
that
. So was he. They would live like brother and sister. They would!

Suddenly he realized he was standing still on the street, holding himself stiffly. He hurried on. The subway, the subway, where was it? He’d only ridden it twice in his whole life. Once with Ruth just to see what it was like. Then another time when he and Saul had been stuck down in the Village somehow with no one to take them back to the penthouse and no cabs available.

Vince remembered that night as he walked along toward the corner. Saul had asked directions about ten times. And still they’d gotten lost and ended up in Columbus Circle. What a fool Saul was.

The cold began to seep through his flannel shirt. Suddenly he stopped again. What a fool he’d been not to take a raincoat! Not only was it cold, but someone might recognize the grey flannel uniform of the maid. And the pistol bulged in his pants pocket.

He looked around and saw some darkened brownstone dwellings to his right. He looked into the lighted lobby and then he found himself jumping up the steps two at a time. He had to have a raincoat.

The vestibule door was locked. He looked at the names.
Martinez
—
3B
,
Johnson
—
3A
. They were no good. Vince skipped the
names on the second floor too. He pushed the button under
Maxim
—
1A
.

He waited. There was no answer. They must be in bed, he thought. He pushed the button again, more impatiently. He
had
to have a raincoat. Still no answer. He began to wonder how he’d feel after he pushed the button to Ruth’s apartment. He wondered just how he’d feel as he rode up the elevator with the pistol gripped tightly in his hand. He wanted that time to come, wanted it desperately. He felt angry frustration that he’d have to wait so long before it came.

The buzzer sounded. Vince started nervously, but forgot to push against the door. He tensed violently and almost kicked in the thick glass. Then the buzzer sounded again and he lurched against the door and pushed through it.