The Blunderer (20 page)

Then he went to the telephone and called Ellie at the Three Brothers. He apologized for the length of time Corby had taken.

“What's happened now?” There was boredom and irritation in Ellie's voice.

“Nothing,” Walter said. “Nothing except that the potatoes burned.”

25

“I
was just about to go out,” Kimmel said, “If you—”

“This is extremely important. It won't take long.”

“I'm leaving the house now!”

“I'll be right over,” Corby said, and hung up.

Should he face it now or tomorrow? Kimmel wondered. He took off his overcoat, started mechanically to hang it up, then thrust it from him with a petulant gesture into the corner of the red plush sofa. He looked around thoughtfully at the upright piano and for a moment saw a ghostly form of Helen sitting there, drearily fingering “The Tennessee Waltz.” He wondered what Corby had to talk about, or was it nothing, like yesterday, was he just coming over to be irritating? He wondered if Corby had made enough inquiries in the neighborhood to find out about Kinnaird, that lout of an insurance salesman Helen had been fornicating with. Nathan, his friend who taught history in the local high school, knew about Kinnaird. Nathan had come in the shop that morning to tell him that Corby had been asking him questions. But Ed Kinnaird's name had not been mentioned. Kimmel scratched under his armpit. He had just come in from dinner at the Oyster House, and had intended to settle himself with a beer and his wood carving and listen to the radio for an hour or so before he went to bed with a book.

He'd get the beer anyway, he thought, and he went down the hall to the kitchen. The floor of the frame house squeaked with his weight. The doorbell rang as he came back up the hall. Kimmel let Corby in.

“Sorry to bother you at this time of night,” Corby said, looking not at all sorry. “My daytime's taken up with other work these days.”

Kimmel said nothing. Corby was looking over the living-room, bending for a close look at the dark-stained wooden objects, all intricately carved and joined together like sausage links, that stood on top of the long white bookcase. Kimmel had an obscene answer if Corby should ask him what they were.

“I've been to see Stackhouse again,” Corby said, straightening up, “and I found something very interesting.”

“I told you I'm not at all interested in the Stackhouse case or in anything else you have to say.”

“You're in no position to say that,” Corby replied, seating himself on Kimmel's sofa. “I happen to think you're guilty, Kimmel.”

“You told me that yesterday.”

“Did I?”

“You asked me if I had anyone else besides Tony Ricco to substantiate my alibi. You implied that I was guilty.”

“I think that Stackhouse is guilty,” Corby said. “I'm sure you are.”

Kimmel wondered suddenly if he carried a gun under that unbuttoned jacket. Probably. He picked up his beer from the low table in front of Corby, poured the rest of the bottle into the glass and set the bottle down. “I intend to report this to the Newark police tomorrow. I am not suspected or doubted by the Newark police. I am in very good standing in Newark.”

Corby nodded, smiling. “I spoke to the Newark police before I came to see you the other day. Naturally I'd ask their permission to work on the Kimmel case, since it's not in my territory. The police don't mind at all if I work on it.”

“I mind. I mind the privacy of my house being invaded.”

“I'm afraid there's nothing you can do about it, Kimmel.”

“You'd better get out of this house, unless you'd rather be thrown out. I've some important work to do.”

“What's more important, Kimmel? My work or yours? What are you doing tonight—reading the Marquis de Sade's Memoirs?”

Kimmel looked Corby's reedy body up and down. What could Corby know of such a book. A familiar confidence surged through Kimmel, a sense of immunity, powerful and impregnable as a myth. He was a giant compared to Corby. Corby would find no hold on him.

“Remember, Kimmel, I told you I thought Stackhouse did it by following the bus, persuading his wife to go to the cliff and pushing her over?”

Finally Kimmel said, “Yes.”

“I think you did something like that, too.”

Kimmel said nothing.

“And the very interesting thing is that Stackhouse guessed it,” Corby went on. “I visited Stackhouse last night in Long Island, and what do you think I found? The story of Helen Kimmel's murder, dated August fourteenth.” Corby opened his wallet. He held the piece of newspaper up, smiling.

Corby was holding the paper out to him. Kimmel took it and held it close to his eyes. He recognized it as one of the earliest reports of the murder. “Am I supposed to believe that? I don't believe you.” But he did believe him. It was the stupidity of Stackhouse he couldn't believe.

“Ask Stackhouse, if you don't believe me,” Corby said, replacing the paper in his wallet. “Wouldn't you like to meet him?”

“I have no interest
whatsoever
in meeting him.”

“However, I think I'm going to arrange it.”

It hit Kimmel like the dull blow of a hammer over his heart, and from then on he began to feel his heartbeats thudding in his thick chest. Kimmel opened his arms in a gesture that said he was quite willing to meet Stackhouse but that he saw no purpose in it. Kimmel was thinking that Stackhouse might crack up right in his shop, or wherever it was. Stackhouse would say that he had come to see him before, might even accuse him of having confessed to him how he killed Helen, of having explained to him how to do it. Kimmel could not predict Stackhouse at all. Kimmel felt himself trembling from head to foot, and he shifted and turned nearly around, staring sightlessly in front of him.

“I know a little about Stackhouse's private life. He had sufficient motive to kill his wife, just as you did—once you got mad enough. But some of your motivation was pleasure, wasn't it? In a way?”

Kimmel played with the knife in his left-hand pocket. He could still feel his heartbeats. A lie detector, he thought—He had been sure he could weather a lie detector, if they ever subjected him to one. Perhaps he couldn't. Stackhouse had guessed it, Kimmel thought, not Corby. Stackhouse had had the appalling stupidity to leave his trail everywhere, bring it right to his door! “You have all the proof you need about Stackhouse?” Kimmel asked.

“Are you getting frightened, Kimmel? I have only circumstantial evidence, but he'll confess the rest. Not you, though. I'll have to get more proof about you and break down your alibi. Your friend Tony means well, and he thinks you were in that movie all evening, but he could just as easily be persuaded to think differently, if I talk to him enough. He's just a—”

Suddenly Kimmel flung his glass at Corby's head, grabbed Corby by the shirt-front and pulled him up over the table. Kimmel drew his right hand back for a neck-breaking blow, and then he felt what he thought was a bullet in his diaphragm. Kimmel lunged out with his right hand and missed. Then his arm was jerked down with a sharp pain; his feet left the ground. At the sickening heave in his stomach he closed his eyes and felt himself sailing in the air. He landed on one hip with an impact that rattled the windows. Kimmel was sitting on the floor. He looked at Corby's fuzzy, elongated figure standing above him. Kimmel's fat left arm rose up independent of his will, like a floating balloon. He touched it and found it had no sensation.

“My arm's broken!” he said.

Corby snorted and shot his cuffs.

Kimmel turned his head in both directions, looking around the floor. He got on to his knees. “Do you see my glasses?”

“Here.”

Kimmel felt the glasses being poked into the fingers of his left hand that was still poised in the air, and he closed his fingers on the thin gold earpiece, then felt it slipping, heard it fall, and he knew from the sound that the glasses had broken. “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, standing up. He swayed towards Corby.

Corby stepped sideways, casually. “Don't start it again. The same thing'll happen, only worse.”

“Get out!” Kimmel roared. “Get out of here, you stinking—You cockroach! You fairy!” Kimmel went on into the sexual and the anatomical, and Corby stepped quickly towards him, raising a hand. Kimmel stopped talking and dodged.

“You're a coward,” Corby said.

Kimmel repeated what he thought Corby was.

Corby picked up his overcoat and put it on. “I give you warning, Kimmel, I'm not leaving you alone. And everyone in this town is going to know it, all your little friends. And one of these days I'll come walking into your shop with Stackhouse. You two have a lot in common.” Corby went out and banged the door.

Kimmel stood where he was for several moments, his flabby body as taut as it could be, his unfocused eyes staring before him. He imagined Corby going to the librarian, Miss Brown, going to Tom Bailey, the ex-alderman, who was the most intelligent man Kimmel knew in the neighborhood, whose friendship Kimmel had striven hardest for and rated highest. Tom Bailey knew nothing about Helen's affair with Ed Kinnaird, but Kimmel had no doubt that Corby would tell everyone about it once he found out, give every sordid repellent detail of it, of her picking him up on the street like a common prostitute, because Lena, Helen's best friend, knew that. Helen had boasted of it! Corby would put doubt in all their minds.

Kimmel suddenly began to walk, a matter of toppling forward and catching himself, feeling his way down the hall walls to the kitchen, where he washed his face with cold water under the tap. Then he felt his way back to the telephone in the living-room. It took him a long while to dial the number, and then it was wrong the first time. He dialed it again.

“Hello, Tony, old boy,” Kimmel said cheerfully. “What are you doing?” … Good, because the most terrible thing has just happened to me. I broke my glasses, tripped over the rug and probably broke some other things, but the glasses are in smithereens. Come over and see me for a while. I can't read or do anything tonight.” Kimmel listened to Tony's voice saying he would, in just a few minutes, when he had finished doing something else that he had to do, listened patiently to the dreary, modest voice while he reviewed with pleasure the services he had done for Tony, the time three years ago when Tony had got a girl pregnant and had been desperate for an abortionist. Kimmel had found one for her in a matter of minutes, safe and not too expensive. Tony had been on his knees with gratitude, because he had been terrified that his very religious family, not to mention the girl's family, might have found out.

After Kimmel hung up, he picked up the table which had been knocked over, set up the bridge lamp and removed the broken bulb from its socket. There was a limit to how much damage a man's fall could make a room. Then he stood by the bookcase, playing with his carvings, moving their parts at various angles and observing the composition. He could see them fuzzily against the light-colored bookcase, and the effect was rather interesting. They were cigar-shaped pieces fastened invisibly together, end to end, with wire. Some looked like animals on four legs; others, of ten pieces or more, defied any description. Kimmel himself had no definite name for them. To himself, sometimes, he called them his puppies. Each piece was differently carved with designs of his own invention, designs somewhat Persian in their motifs, their brown-stained surfaces so smoothed with fine sandpaper they felt almost soft to the touch. Kimmel loved to run his fingertips over them. He was still fondling them when the doorbell rang.

Tony came in with his hat in his hand, and awkwardly plunged himself in a chair before Kimmel could ask him to remove his overcoat. Tony was always flattered to be asked to Kimmel's house in the evening. It had not happened more than three or four times before. Tony sprang up to help Kimmel find a hanger in the closet for his coat.

“Would you like a beer?” Kimmel asked.

“Yeah, I'd like one,” Tony said.

Kimmel went with dignity, half sightless, down the hall and felt for the kitchen light. Tony was too ill at ease, he supposed, to volunteer to get the beer. Tony's stupidity disgusted Kimmel, but Tony's awe of his erudition and his manners, plus his beer-drinking good fellowship, which Kimmel knew to Tony was an unusual combination, flattered Kimmel, too.

“Tony, I'd be much obliged if you can manage to come over tomorrow morning and drive my car for me to the optician's,” Kimmel said as he set the beer and the glasses down.

“Sure, Mr. Kimmel. What time?”

“Oh, about nine.”

“Sure,” Tony said, recrossing his legs nervously.

Amazing, Kimmel thought, that this insignificant wretch of a boy, pockmarked and devoid of any character in his face, could actually get a girl pregnant. Tony had never given the matter a thought, Kimmel felt sure, didn't have the faintest idea of the processes involved. Which was why it was so easy for him. Kimmel supposed that Tony had a girl every week or so. Tony had a regular girl friend, but he knew she was not one of the girls of the neighborhood boys slept with. Kimmel often eavesdropped on their conversation from a window of his shop which gave on an alley. A girl named Connie was the neighborhood favorite. But Tony's girl Franca had never even been mentioned, though Kimmel always listened for her name. “What have you been doing lately, Tony?”

“Oh, same old thing, working the store, bowling a little.”

It was always the same answer. But Kimmel always asked out of politeness that he knew was unappreciated. “Oh, Tony, by the way, there may be some more questioning by the police in the next few days—or weeks. Don't let it rattle you. Tell them—”

“Oh, no,” Tony said, though a little frightened.

“Tell them exactly what happened, exactly what you saw,” Kimmel said in a light, precise voice. “You saw me at eight o'clock taking my seat in the movie theater.”