The Blunderer (30 page)

“I haven't left out anything.”

“These visits—”

“There were only three visits, the second with Corby himself who
knows
every visit I made!”

“Walter, it seems to me that something new is turning up every week. I'm suggesting that you get it all down in writing and swear to it and prove it.”

Now Walter heard the coldness in Jon's drawling words, heard the impatience and the withdrawing.

“If you're innocent,” Jon added casually.

“I suppose you doubt it,” Walter said.

“Listen, Walter, I'm only suggesting that you tell the whole story instead of parts—”

Walter hung up.

He was thinking of what some paper had said: that it was very strange, if Kimmel's story was
not
correct, that Stackhouse had chosen to go to an obscure bookshop in Newark for a book he could have got more easily at several New York bookstores.

Walter got the brandy bottle and poured himself a drink.

Where did they go with him from here? He could issue a statement to the press, all right. It would be the truth, but who would believe him? The truth was so dull, and Kimmel's story so spectacular.

He took Jeff out for a walk around the woods at the end of Marlborough Road. Jeff had stopped watching for Clara, but he was a sadder little dog. Even when Walter played his favorite game of swinging him out on an old rag until Jeff had shredded it completely with his teeth, Jeff's face never had the cocky, silly look it had used to have when Clara was alive. Ellie noticed it, and had offered to take Jeff if Walter no longer wanted to keep him. But Walter did want to keep him: he tried to take as good care of him as Clara had, give him a good run once a day, and Walter generally fixed his food himself, mornings and even when Claudia was there. But if something should happen to him, Walter thought, he ought to make sure Jeff went to Ellie, or to the Philpotts.

He made Jeff's breakfast of warm milk poured over a piece of buttered toast, and stood watching him eat it. His heel jittered on the linoleum floor, from tiredness. Jeff looked up from his breakfast at the sound, and Walter pressed his heels against the floor.

Walter heard the telephone.

It was Mrs. Philpott calling to ask if he would be able to see Mr. Kammerman, the furniture appraiser, right away. Walter said he would. Mrs. Philpott's still tranquil, polite voice baffled him. Then she said: “I hope you'll excuse me if I don't come after all, Walter. Something's just come up that I've got to attend to this morning.”

35

W
alter called the Newark police station from New York. They said that Corby was in Newark, but his exact whereabouts were unknown. Walter went on to Newark.

It was 1:15. It had begun to rain lightly.

Corby was not at the police station when he got there. An officer asked Walter his name, but Walter refused to give it. He got back in his car and drove to Kimmel's bookshop. The shop was closed. There was a long crack in one of the front windows, a crystalline scar in its middle where something hard had struck it, and seeing it, Walter felt a leap of blood lust in himself, glanced on the sidewalk for the brick, but it was gone.

Walter drove to a filling station, had his gas tank filled, and looked in a telephone book for Melchior Kimmel's address. He remembered it was not listed, but now he saw a Helen Kimmel entry on Bowdoin Street. The filling station attendant did not know where Bowdoin Street was. Walter asked a traffic policeman, who had a general idea, but when Walter followed it, he could not find Bowdoin. It made him so furious, he had a hard time controlling his voice when he asked a woman on the sidewalk where it was. She knew, exactly. He was four streets off.

It was a street of frame houses. The number was 245—a small, red-brown two-story house set back from the sidewalk by an extremely narrow strip of neglected lawn with a meaningless fence of low iron pickets around it. All the shades were drawn. Walter looked up and down the sidewalk. Then he got out of his car and walked up the wooden steps to the strip of porch. The doorbell made a shrill yelp. But there was no sound from inside the house. Walter imagined Kimmel was watching him from behind one of the drawn shades. A physical fear crept over him, and his body tensed to fight, but there was no one. He rang the bell again, louder. He tried the door. The corners of the metal knob hurt his hand. It was locked.

Walter went back to his car, stood by it a moment, feeling his fear turn to a frustrated anger. Maybe they were all at the Newark
Sun
again. Maybe that was where he should go, and make a statement in his own defence. They probably wouldn't even print it, Walter thought. He wasn't to be trusted any more. He would need Corby to back him up, a fine, upstanding, young police detective to corroborate what he said. He swung the car around and headed back for the police station.

Walter was told that Corby was in the building, but that he was busy.

“Tell him Walter Stackhouse wants to see him.”

The police sergeant gave him another look, then opened a door in the hall and went down some stairs. Walter followed him. They went down another hall and stopped at a door where the sergeant knocked loudly.

“Yes?” Corby's voice called muffledly.

“Walter Stackhouse!” the sergeant shouted against the door.

The bolt slid. Corby opened the door wide, smiling, “Hello! I was expecting you today!”

Walter came in, his hands in his overcoat pockets, and he saw Corby glance at them as if he suspected he had a gun. Walter stopped suddenly: Kimmel sat in a straight chair, his huge body twisted strangely as if he were in pain. Kimmel stared at him as if he did not recognize him at all. There was only a numbed, naked expression of terror on Kimmel's face.

“We are confessing today,” Corby said genially. “Tony has already confessed, Kimmel comes next, and then you.”

Walter said nothing. He glanced at the scared-looking dark-haired boy in the other straight chair. The room was tile-lined, cold and white and glaring with light. Kimmel's huge face was wet, either with tears or sweat. His collar was ripped open and his still-knotted tie hung down.

“Want to sit down, Stackhouse? There's nothing left but a table.”

Walter saw that the door was closed with a big sliding bolt on the inside, like the bolts on the inside of refrigerated rooms where butchers work. “I came here to ask you what happens next. I want a showdown. I'm perfectly willing to be tried, but I'm not going to take a bunch of lies from you or anybody—”

“You'd shorten everything if you'd only admit what you did, Stackhouse!” Corby interrupted him.

Walter looked at his conceited stance, his scowling, undersized face—little demagogue, safe behind his badge. Suddenly Walter grabbed Corby's arm and pulled him around, threw his other fist at Corby's jaw, but Corby grabbed his fist before it landed and yanked Walter forward. Walter slipped on the tile floor and would have fallen, except that Corby kept hold of his wrist and swung him up again.

“Kimmel's found out I can't be touched, Mr. Stackhouse. You'd better find it out, too.” Corby's bony cheeks had flushed. He moved his shoulders, readjusted his clothes. Then he took off his overcoat and tossed it on the wooden table.

“I asked you what comes next,” Walter said. “Or is that supposed to be a surprise? Who do you think you are, releasing lies to the newspapers?”

“There's not a lie in any paper. Only one possible untruth, which is stated everywhere as uncorroborated and therefore a possible untruth.”

A hell of a word, Walter thought, untruth. He watched Corby's lean, arrogant figure circle Kimmel's chair as if Kimmel were an elephant he had trapped, an elephant not yet dead. Kimmel's face and head were entirely wet with sweat, though the room was icy. Walter saw Kimmel flinch as Corby passed by him, and he realized suddenly why Kimmel looked so ugly and naked: he hadn't his glasses. Corby must have grilled him hard, Walter thought, probably all night. And after all Kimmel's good work at the newspaper offices! Walter's fists clenched harder in his pockets. Corby was glancing at him every lap he made around the chair. Then Corby said suddenly: “I've tried a quiet method with you, Stackhouse. It doesn't work.”

“What do you mean, quiet?”

“Not printing in the papers all that I might have. I wanted you to see the stupidity of concealing what you know to be true yourself. It didn't work. I'll have to use pressure. Today's papers are only the beginning. There's no limit to the pressure I can put on you!” Corby stood with his feet apart, scowling at Walter. A twitch in one lid of his straining eyes heightened his look of drunken intensity.

“Even you have superiors,” Walter said. “Maybe I should go and have a talk with Captain Royer.”

Corby frowned harder. “Captain Royer backs me completely. He's completely satisfied with my work, and so are
his
superiors. I've done in five weeks what the Newark police couldn't do in two months when the trail was fresh!”

Outside of Hitler, Walter thought, outside of an insane asylum, he had never seen anything like it.

“Tony here,” Corby said gesturing, “has agreed that Kimmel could have left the movie theater immediately after he saw him, at eight-five. Tony even remembers trying to find Kimmel at his house that evening after the movie and Kimmel not being there.”

“He didn't—he didn't say he tried to,” Kimmel protested nervously in a strange adenoidal voice. “He didn't say he
went
—”

“Kimmel, you're so guilty, you stink!” Corby shouted, his voice rasping in the hollow room. “You're as guilty as Stackhouse!”

“I didn't, I didn't!” Kimmel said in the pattering, nasal voice, thick with a foreign accent that Walter had never heard in it before. And there was something pathetic in Kimmel's desperate denials, like the last twitching of a body in which every bone might have been broken.

“Tony knows your wife was having an affair with Ed Kinnaird. Tony told me this morning. He's heard it from all the neighbors by now!” Corby yelled at Kimmel. “He knows you'd have killed Helen for that and for a lot less, wouldn't you? Didn't you?”

Walter watched aghast. He tried to imagine Tony on a witness stand—a terrified, unintelligent hoodlum who looked as if he would say anything he had been paid to say or terrorized into saying. Corby's methods were so crude, and yet they got results. Kimmel looked as if he were wilting, melting, like a huge gob of grease. Then he said again, in a high voice:

“I didn't, I didn't!”

Corby suddenly kicked at Kimmel's chair, and when he failed to kick it from under him, reached down and wrenched the two back legs sideways, so that Kimmel rolled with a thud on to the floor. Tony half stood up, as if he were going to give Kimmel assistance, but he didn't. Corby shoved Kimmel with the flat of his shoe, and Kimmel slowly got up, with the exhausted dignity of a wounded elephant. Corby's voice went on and on, exhorting Kimmel to confess, hammering into him that he hadn't a leg to stand on. Walter knew exactly what Corby was going to say when his turn came: he would go over the visits to Kimmel, he would pretend he believed Kimmel implicitly about the discussion of murder, his confession to Kimmel later, pretend to believe that everybody else believed it, too, and that his position was as hopeless as anyone's could be. Walter watched Corby gesticulating, coming towards him, rasping out as if to a huge audience: “—
this
man!
This
man brought it all down on you, Kimmel! Walter Stackhouse—the blunderer!”

“Shut up!
” Walter said. “You know that I'm not guilty! You said so once, twice, God knows how many times! But if you can invent a spectacular story and win a pat on the head from some stupid bastard above you, then you'll lie and perjure a thousand times to prove your cock-eyed idea is right!”

“Your
cock-eyed idea!” Corby said, not at all ruffled.

Walter swung at him. His fist cracked against Corby's jaw and he saw Corby's legs flying in the air against the white of the wall for an instant, and then Corby on the floor, tugging at his jacket. Corby leveled a gun at him and slowly stood up.

“Another move like that and I'll fire this,” Corby said.

“Then you'd never get your confession,” Walter said. “Why don't you arrest me? I've struck an officer!”

“I wouldn't arrest you, Stackhouse,” Corby snarled. “That would give you too much protection. You don't deserve it.”

Corby was standing still, but he kept the gun leveled at Walter. Walter studied his tight little face again, the icy pale-blue eyes, and wondered if Corby could possibly really believe he was guilty? And Walter decided that he did, for the negative reason that there was no possible chink left in Corby for any doubt of his guilt, whatever fact might turn up on the side of his innocence. Walter looked at Kimmel: Kimmel was staring at him with an absolutely blank and exhausted expression. Corby had driven him insane, Walter thought suddenly. They were both insane, Corby and Kimmel, each in his own way. And that half-wit boy sitting in the chair!

Walter said, “I'm either arrested, or I'm getting out of here.” He turned and walked to the door.

Corby jumped between him and the door with the gun. “Get back,” he said close in Walter's face. There was sweat on his bony, freckled forehead and a pink spot on his jaw where Walter had hit him. “Where do you think you're going to, anyway? What do you think there is for you outside, freedom? Who's going to talk to you? Who's your friend now?”

Walter did not step back. He looked at Corby's face, intense and rigid as a madman's, and was reminded of, Clara. “What are you going to do? Threaten me with a gun to make me confess? I'm not going to confess even if you shoot me.” That unnatural calm that always came over him when Clara raged at him had come over him now and he was no more afraid of the gun than if it had been a toy. “Go ahead and shoot,” Walter said. “You'll get a medal for that. Certainly a promotion.”