The Blunderer

by Patricia Highsmith

  “We will,” Corby said.

  The man at the desk said,” Here’s her jewelry. Will you sign for it? One earring’s missing.” He pushed the heavy gold chain bracelet, the two rings, a pearl earring towards him in a heap, as Walter had often seen them lying on the dressing-table at home.

  Walter scrawled his name on the line. Then he put the jewelry in his overcoat pocket.

  “Before you go I’d like to ask you the usual question.” The young lieutenant’s small, eager blue eyes had been watching him. “Did she have any enemies that you know of?”

  “No,” Walter said. Then his mind flitted over the people who didn’t like her, the people she had antagonized since she had begun working. “Certainly no one who would have killed her.” Walter looked at the young man with more interest. At least he was going to ask a few questions, make some kind of an effort. He was no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, Walter thought, but he looked intelligent and efficient.

  Lieutenant Corby sat down on a corner of the police officer’s desk and folded his arms. “You went home after you left your wife at the terminal?”

  Walter hesitated a moment. “Yes. Not directly home. I was trying to reach a friend. In Long Island. I drove around for quite a while.”

  “Did you reach the friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was the friend?”

  Walter hesitated again. “Ellie Briess. A woman who lives in Lennert. You can—” Walter stopped.

  Lieutenant Corby nodded. “I might take her address.”

  Walter gave it, and her telephone number. He watched the lieutenant write it in a limp brown-covered tablet that he had taken from his pocket.

  “Would you like to see the cliff yourself?” Lieutenant Corby asked.

  Walter saw the big restaurant again, the garish lights. He thought suddenly, Clara knew the road: she had driven it often from Long Island to Harrisburg and back. She probably knew the cliff. “No, I don’t think I want to see it.”

  “I just thought you might.”

  “No,” Walter said, shaking his head. He watched the lieutenant’s pencil moving again on the tablet. Walter saw himself seizing Clara by the throat, pulling her down the cliff, saw both of them plunging off, down to the sharp-pointed rocks and brush below. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them the young lieutenant was looking at him.

  “Let’s wait and see what the autopsy reveals,” Corby said casually. “You don’t entirely rule out the possibility of suicide, do you?”

  The question sounded very unprofessional to Walter. “No, I don’t suppose I do. I just don’t know.”

  “Of course. Well, we’ll have the autopsy report by tonight, and we’ll call you about the results.” Corby held out his hand, and for a moment, as Walter shook it, his face became politely grave. Then he turned and walked quickly out the door of the room.

  “Can you tell us where the body is to be sent tomorrow?” the officer at the desk asked.

  Walter thought of the funeral home he drove by everyday on the cut-off from the highway into Benedict. “I’m not sure yet. Can I call you later today?”

  “We’re open day and night.”

  So was the funeral home. It said so in neon lights. “Is that all?” Walter asked.

  “That’s all.”

  Walter went out into the sunless afternoon. He had to think for a moment where he had put his car, and then walking towards it he remembered Clara’s suitcase. He turned back.

  The police officer told him that the suitcase had not yet been examined and that it would be sent tomorrow with the body. Walter felt the man was being deliberately stubborn and indifferent. The blue canvas suitcase, bulging with Clara’s belongings, stood against the wall only two yards from him.

  “But there aren’t any papers in it, there’s only clothes.” he said.

  “Regulations are regulations,” the officer said without looking up.

  Walter gave him a glowering look, then turned and went out of the office.

  He had started his car, when it occurred to him to warn Ellie. It was nearly four. She’d just be home. He opened the car door to get out, then closed it again. He realized he didn’t want the lieutenant to see him telephoning, though the lieutenant wasn’t in sight now. Walter drove a few blocks, and telephoned from a drugstore.

  He told Ellie that Clara was dead, and that the police thought it was suicide. He cut through her questions and said, “I’m in Allentown now. I told the police I saw you last night. They may call you to check on it.”

  “All right, Walter.”

  “I didn’t tell them when I saw you. Of course we’ll have to say it was after twelve.”

  “Does that matter?”

  He set his teeth, cursing his nervousness. Pete had seen him there after twelve, anyway. “No,” Walter said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll tell them that you came here around twelve-thirty,” Ellie said as if she expected him to contradict her. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Are you free now? Do you want to come here?”

  “Yes. I’ll come straight out.”

  “Can you leave your car and take a train?”

  “Leave it?”

  “You sound too upset to drive.”

  “I’ll be there. It’ll take me a couple of hours. Wait for me.”

  18

  “I can’t just say blithely that it’s not my fault,” Walter said, throwing his hands out. “I should have forced her to go to a psychiatrist. I should have insisted on going with her on this trip. I didn’t.”

  “Are you positive it was suicide?” Ellie asked.

  “Not positive. But it’s the most likely. And I should have expected it.” He sat down suddenly in the armchair.

  “From what you’ve said, everything in her life just now contributed to a suicide, even the car accident just a few days ago.”

  “Yes.” Walter had just told Ellie about the sleeping pills, too. Ellie had not seemed very surprised. Ellie seemed to know a lot about his relationship with Clara, either by intuition or by guessing. “But I’m not positive it was suicide. I just can’t imagine her jumping off a cliff. She’d do it an easier way.”

  “The police are going to investigate, aren’t they?”

  Walter shrugged. “Yes. As far as they’re able to.”

  “But you really can’t say it was your fault, Walter. You can’t force somebody to an analyst who doesn’t want to go.”

  Walter knew Jon would say the same thing.

  “Did she know anything about us?” Ellie asked.

  Walter nodded. “She suspected. Weeks ago, before I even noticed you. Accused me of being with you every time I spent an evening out.”

  Ellie frowned. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  Walter didn’t answer for a moment. “She had a pathological jealousy, even of my men friends,” he said quietly.

  “I’m sorry she suspected. It was one more thing to make her do it. Then the divorce—”

  “She never really believed I cared about you.” Walter got up to walk again. “She had to have someone or something to be jealous of. In this case she just happened to be right.”

  “Where did you tell the police you were last night?” Ellie asked.

  Walter hesitated. He wanted to tell Ellie. But he remembered Corby: his answers were all down in Corby’s tablet. “I told them first—I think I said I drove around for quite a while, trying to find you and waiting for you. Then I went home for a while. I went out again and spent most of the evening out.”

  Ellie brought a sandwich in on a plate and set it on the coffee table. She looked at him and said carefully, “I was thinking, if they—if they’re not sure it was a suicide, it could look as if you had a motive in killing her.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I mean—coming to see me. The whole picture.”

  “They’re not going to ask questions like that,” Walter said, frowning. “Corby
hasn’t even called you.”

  “They said it happened around seven-thirty, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you then?”

  Walter’s frown deepened. “I think I was home. I drove home after I put Clara on the bus.”

  “Gordon called you around seven-thirty. Nobody answered.”

  “Maybe I’d already gone out.”

  “He called you again at eight-thirty, too. I know because I was sitting by the phone then.”

  “Well, I certainly wasn’t home then.” Walter felt that his face had gone white. And Ellie was looking at him as if she saw it.

  “I just thought, in case they do ask, you’d better be able to say exactly where you were. Do you know exactly where you were at seven-thirty?”

  “No,” he said in a protesting tone. “Maybe I was in Huntington then. I had a bite to eat there. I wasn’t noticing the time. They’re not going to ask all that, Ellie.”

  “All right. Maybe they won’t.” She sat down on the sofa, but she still looked tense. She sat upright, with one leg bent under her. “Why don’t you have your sandwich?”

  Did she also suspect him, Walter wondered, by intuition?

  The telephone rang again. Ellie answered it.

  “Oh, yes, Jon!” Ellie turned and looked at Walter. “Good Lord! … No, I don’t, I’m afraid … You’re right, he shouldn’t be.”

  Walter walked with stiff steps around the coffee table, watching Ellie. It was in the evening papers, Walter supposed. Walter thought Ellie looked at him with amazing calmness. He’d expected more concern from her. And he hadn’t believed her capable of pretending so well as she was pretending to Jon now.

  “I’m sure with one of his friends,” Ellie said. “Yes, maybe the Iretons … I hope you do. Thanks very much for calling me, Jon.” Ellie put the telephone down. “I didn’t think I should tell Jon you were here.”

  Walter shrugged. “I wouldn’t have minded. Jon said it was in the papers?”

  “Yes, but he said Dick Jensen had called him up and told him this afternoon. Why don’t you call up the Iretons and ask if you can stay with them tonight? I don’t think you should go back to the house.”

  He would have liked to stay with her. He felt she didn’t want him here. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to go over it again with anybody. I’ll go home.”

  “Do you think you can sleep there?”

  “Yes. And I’ll be going now.”

  Her hand was firm on the back of his neck. She kissed his cheek. “Call me whenever you want to. Call me tonight if you want to.”

  “Thanks, Ellie.” He did not touch her. Suddenly he remembered he was supposed to call Allentown tonight and tell them where to send Clara’s body. “Thanks,” he said again, and went out.

  19

  There was a telegram at home addressed to Clara from Dr. Meacham, her mother’s doctor, saying that her mother had died at 3:25 p.m. Walter put it down on the hall table.

  It was midnight. He thought of calling Jon. But he didn’t want to.

  Betty Ireton telephoned. Walter spoke mechanically to her, thanked her for her invitation to come over and stay with them. Bill talked with him, too, and offered to come and fetch him, but Walter declined with thanks.

  Then he called the Wilson-Hall Funeral Home in Benedict. Walter said he wanted a cremation. Afterwards he called the Allentown morgue and asked about the autopsy report: no internal causes of death had been discovered, no causes other than injuries that would have been inflicted by her fall down the cliff. He told them where the Wilson-Hall Funeral Home was.

  That night Walter lay in his study listening to the silence in the house and thinking that it would never be broken again by Clara’s quick, angry footsteps in the hall, that she would never again invade the privacy of his study, and he felt strangely unmoved. He realized he had not shed a single tear yet. Because she had not been human herself, he thought. His tired mind saw her as a storm of violent and whirling movement, which she had shut off with a last violent act—bang! Like her mother’s lonely, dreary death, Clara’s seemed exactly fitting for her. The storm of Clara rose in his mind, swirling around a core of doubt and ambiguity, ambiguous as his own feelings about her. Somewhere in it he fell asleep.

  Walter awakened with a start at the sound of a door closing. Then he realized it was Claudia, faithfully arriving at seven. Walter pulled on a robe and went downstairs.

  Claudia was standing with the morning paper in the kitchen. “Mr. Stackhouse, I saw it last night—but I just can’t believe it!”

  Walter took the paper from her. It was the local Long Island paper and it was on the front page. There was even a picture, the smiling picture that Clara had given the newspaper a long time ago when she had been elected chairwoman of some Long Island club.

  BODY OF BENEDICT WOMAN FOUND IN PENNSYLVANIA

  He glanced through the story. Presumed a suicide, it said. There was a sentence about her suitcase being found aboard the bus, and about his having identified her.

  “You saw her, Mr. Stackhouse?” Claudia stood there as if paralyzed, her wide brown eyes oozing tears.

  “Yes,” Walter said. He thought the sentence about the suitcase was worded exactly the same way as the sentence in the Kimmel story. He hadn’t bought any newspapers last night. He had been too tired. Now it shocked him that he hadn’t. He put his hand on Claudia’s shoulder and pressed it. He did not know what to say. “Could you make me some coffee, Claudia? Nothing else.”

  “Yes, Mr. Stackhouse.”

  Dick Jensen, Ernestine McClintock and some of the other neighbors called him that morning. They were all sympathetic and offered their help, but Walter had nothing that he needed done. Then Jon called, and for the first time Walter broke down and wept. Jon offered to come and stay with him. Walter wouldn’t accept it, even though it was Saturday and Jon was free. But he agreed for Jon to come out that evening at six to have dinner with him.

  Just after two that afternoon Walter got a call from Lieutenant Corby in Philadelphia. Corby asked if Walter would be good enough to come to the Philadelphia Central Police Station that evening at seven.

  “What’s the matter?” Walter asked.

  “I can’t explain now. I’m sorry to bother you, but it would help us enormously if you’d come,” Corby’s polite voice said.

  “I’ll be there,” Walter said.

  He wondered if Corby had picked up a suspect, and found a man who had confessed. Walter found himself unable to imagine, really, almost unable to think. He had been jumpy yesterday, and today he felt everything he did was in slow motion.

  Walter called Jon and told him that he had to go to Philadelphia, and wouldn’t be able to see him until late. Jon offered to drive him there, or ride with him.

  “Thanks,” Walter said gratefully. “Can I pick you up around five at your apartment?”

  Jon agreed.

  Jon drove Walter’s car from New York onward. To Jon, Walter told the same story he had told Ellie. And Jon replied much the same as Ellie had, as Walter had known he would. But there was something more in Jon: an obvious relief, that showed under his seriousness as he talked to Walter in the car, that Clara was totally out of Walter’s life—and by her own actions.

  “Don’t feel guilty!” Jon kept saying. “I understand this better than you can right now. You’ll understand it, too, in another six months.”

  20

  Jon waited at the car, and Walter went into the building by himself. He asked a policeman at a desk where Lieutenant Corby was.

  “Room one seventeen down the hall.”

  Walter went to it and knocked.

  “Good evening.” Lieutenant Corby greeted him with a nod and a smile.

  “Good evening.” Walter saw a husky-looking man of about fifty, sitting on a straight chair, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. Walter wondered if he was the man.

  “Mr. Stackhouse, this is Mr. De Vries,” Corby said.

  They nodde
d to each other.

  “Have you ever seen Mr. De Vries before?”

  He looked like a laborer, Walter thought. A brown leather jacket, brown and gray hair, a roundish, not very intelligent face, though there was a brightness in his eyes now of interest or amusement. “I don’t think so,” Walter said.

  Corby turned to the man in the chair. “What do you think?”

  The grayish head between the hunched shoulders nodded.

  Lieutenant Corby leaned comfortably against a desk. His boyish smile had grown wider, though there was something ungenerous about his small mouth and his small regular teeth. Walter didn’t like the smile. “Mr. De Vries thinks you were the man who asked him how long the bus stop was in Harry’s Rainbow Grill the night your wife was killed.”

  Walter looked at De Vries again. It was the man. Walter remembered that round, nondescript face turning to him above the coffee cup. Walter wet his lips. He realized that Corby must have taken the trouble to describe him to De Vries because Corby suspected him.

  “You see, this is all by the merest accident,” Corby said with a laugh of pleasure that actually made Walter jump. “Mr. De Vries is a truck driver for a Pittsburgh company. Occasionally he makes the run back to Pittsburgh by bus. We know him. I was only asking him if he remembered seeing any suspicious-looking characters around the bus stop that night.”

  Walter wondered if that was how it had been. He remembered Corby yesterday: Did you reach the friend? Who was the friend? “Yes,” Walter said. “I was there. I followed the bus. I wanted to talk to my wife.”

  “And did you?”

  “No, I couldn’t find her. I looked everywhere.” Walter swallowed. “Finally I asked this man how long the bus was stopping.”

  “Don’t you want to sit down, Mr. Stackhouse?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us this?”

  “I thought there was a possibility I’d followed the wrong bus.”