The Blunderer

by Patricia Highsmith

  “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.”

  Corby wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Get over there by Kimmel.”

  Walter turned slightly, but he did not walk. Corby walked closer to Kimmel, still keeping the gun on Walter. Walter thought: there is no real way out of here, because Corby is a madman with a gun.

  Corby rubbed his jaw with his free hand. “Tell me how you felt this morning when you saw the papers, Stackhouse.”

  Walter didn’t answer.

  “Tony here—” Corby gestured with the gun. “It made him see the light. Tony decided it wasn’t too impossible that Kimmel could have murdered his wife. In the same way you did.”

  “When he saw the papers?” Walter gave a laugh.

  “Yes,” Corby said. “Kimmel meant to expose you, but it backfired on him. He showed Tony what might have happened. Tony’s been a very bright and co-operative boy,” Corby said smugly, strolling towards Tony, who looked like a scared wretch.

  Walter laughed louder. He bent back and roared out a laugh, and it roared back at him from the walls. He looked at Tony, whose doltishly anxious expression had not changed, and then at Kimmel, who was now beginning to look offended, personally offended at his laughter. He felt as insane now as any of them, and he began to laugh at the insane sounds of his own laughter. He rocked on his feet, though a part of his brain that remained perfectly steady was thinking that he laughed only from nerves and tiredness, and that he was making an idiot of himself as well as a blunderer. He was thinking, Corby no more represented the law than Kimmel or Tony did, and he was a lawyer and he could do nothing about it. That impartial judge that Walter had imagined—a calm, wise man with gray hair and a black robe, who would listen to him and hear his story out to the end, and then pronounce him innocent—that figure existed only in his imagination. No one would ever hear him out before an army of Corbys interrupted, and no one would believe what had really happened—or what had not happened.

  “Why do you laugh, you idiot?” Kimmel asked, standing up slowly from his chair.

  Walter watched Kimmel’s flabby face hardening with wrath, and Walter’s smile diminished. He saw the righteousness, the adamant resentment that he had seen the day he came to Kimmel to tell him he was innocent. He felt suddenly afraid of Kimmel.

  “Look what you have done, and yet you laugh!” Kimmel said, still in the adenoidal tone. His hands trembled and their fingertips played together in curiously childlike and dainty movements. Yet his pink-rimmed eyes bored their shocked hatred into Walter.

  Walter looked at Corby. Corby was watching Kimmel, with a look of satisfaction, as if his elephant were performing properly, Walter thought. And he realized that Corby’s objective was to goad Kimmel into more and more hatred against him, to make Kimmel attack him physically if he could. Walter saw in Kimmel’s face the maniacal conviction of his own innocence, of the injustice of the fate that had befallen him, and Walter felt suddenly ashamed, as if he actually had drawn an innocent man into a trap from which he could not hope to escape. Walter wanted to leave, to say a few words of apology that didn’t exist, and back out of the room and flee.

  Kimmel took a step towards him. His huge body seemed to topple and catch itself, though he still held to the back of his chair. “Idiot!” he shouted at Walter. “Murderer!”

  Walter glanced at Corby and saw that Corby was smiling.

  “You may go now,” Corby said to Walter. “You’d better.”

  Walter hesitated a moment, then turned and with a crushing sense of shame and of fleeing walked to the door. The bolt did not slide at once, and he worked with another lever underneath it, worked frantically as the sweat broke out and he imagined Corby leveling the gun behind him, or Kimmel advancing behind him. Then the bolt slid, and Walter yanked the door open by the knob.

  “Murderer!” Kimmel’s voice roared behind him.

  Walter ran up the steps to the main hall. His knees wobbled. He went down the outside stairs, then stood for a moment, holding to the cold iron knob at the end of the banister. He had a feeling of suffocating, or being paralyzed. It was like a dream, the paralyzed end of a dream. There was insanity behind him in the basement room. And he had laughed at it. He remembered Kimmel’s passionate face when he had laughed, and then he pushed off from the banister, frightened, and began to walk.

  36

  “You don’t seem to understand me yet,” Ellie said. “If you had killed her—I could even imagine that and maybe I could even forgive it. That’s not impossible for me to imagine. It’s the lies I can’t forgive.”

  They were sitting side by side in the front seat of her car. Walter looked at her steady eyes. They were calm and clear, almost as he had seen them many times before, almost as they had always looked when they looked at him. But not quite. “You said you didn’t believe Kimmel’s story,” Walter said.

  “I certainly don’t believe you went and discussed murder with him. But you’ve admitted the visits.”

  “Two,” Walter said. “If you could only realize, Ellie, that this is a series of circumstances—accidents. That it all could have happened and I’d still be innocent—” He expected her to protest that she did believe him innocent of murder, but she didn’t.

  She kept her eyes turned on him, alertly, not moving.

  “You can’t believe I’m guilty of murder, Ellie!” he burst out.

  “I’d rather not say anything.”

  “You have to answer me that!”

  “Let me have that privilege at least,” she retorted. “I’d rather not say anything.”

  Walter had wondered at her calmness on the telephone that morning when he called her, at her willingness to make an appointment with him. Now he knew she had decided yesterday when she saw the papers how she felt and how she was going to act.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I could probably have taken all of it, if you’d only been hone
st. I don’t like this, and I don’t like you any more.” She was sliding her thumb back and forth on the leather keycase in her hands, as if she were eager to be off. “It can’t be too upsetting to you. You’ve never made any plans about us anyway, certainly not about marriage.”

  Walter thought suddenly, she holds that last night against me, too, that last night at her house. The very night he had intended to tell her that Kimmel’s exposé in the newspapers was coming. Walter wondered now if he hadn’t concealed what he knew that night, and hadn’t made love to her, only so that she would react like this now, and he would lose her. He knew he had never even made up his own mind about marrying her. And yet he remembered poignantly now his elation after the first night with her, when in spite of the barriers all around him, he had been convinced that they would finally be together because they loved each other. He remembered his own conviction that he loved her—that night he had called her from The Three Brothers, when he had been unable to see her. He remembered his pride because she was so near to the ideal he had always imagined—loyal, intelligent, kind, and simply, in contrast to Clara, healthy. Now it seemed to him that he had played every card wrong, and moreover, deliberately. Or as if Clara’s negative, inimical volition had made itself felt and had dominated, even now that she was dead.

  “I suppose this is the last time we’ll see each other,” Ellie said in a quiet tone, as deadly and quiet as a surgeon’s scalpel cutting through a heart. “I’m moving next week—somewhere in Long Island but not in Lennert. I want to get out of that apartment.”

  Walter’s restless fingers touched the dashboard of her car. “You said you didn’t believe Kimmel. Is that true?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “That’s the only thing that happened yesterday. That’s the only thing that’s changed anything!”

  “No, it isn’t. That’s my point. You admit that you saw him early October, so you lied to me.”

  “But it’s not my point at the moment. I asked if you chose to believe Kimmel—about Clara—after all I’ve told you about Kimmel.”

  “Yes,” she said softly, still looking at him. “I can also say that to some extent—I suspected you all along.”

  Walter stared back at her, thunderstruck. He saw a different expression growing in her face now: fear. She looked as if she were afraid of a physical retaliation from him. “All right,” he said through his teeth. “I don’t care any more. Do you understand that?”

  She only looked at him. Her tense, full lips looked as if they were even smiling at the corners.

  “I’d like to make that clear to you and to everybody,” Walter said. “I’m sick of it! I don’t care any more what anybody thinks. Do you understand that?”

  She nodded and said, “Yes.”

  “If nobody understands the truth, then I’m tired of explaining. Do you understand that?” He opened the car door and started out, then looked back. “I think this—this last meeting of ours is absolutely perfect. It fits in with everything else!” He closed the door after him, and strode across the street towards his own car. He was staggering from weakness as if he were drunk.

  37

  The office was simple, wonderfully simple. Walter just walked into George Martinson’s office—it was one of the days Willie Cross was not in, though Walter wished he had been—and announced that he was leaving, and Martinson gave his assent with a minimum of words. Martinson looked at him as if he were amazed that he was still, at least to the eye, a free man.

  Everybody looked at him that way, even Peter Slotnikoff. Nobody said anything but a mumbled hello to him. Everybody looked as if he were waiting for somebody else to take the initiative and spring on him and hold him, or put him in jail. Even Joan looked afraid of him, afraid to say one friendly word. Walter didn’t care. Something—his indifference that had become total and genuine or his physical exhaustion that felt like a kind of drunkenness—gave him a sense of wearing an armor that protected him against everyone and everything.

  Dick Jensen came into his office while he was clearing out his desk and collecting his books. Walter straightened up and watched him approach, his chin sunk reflectively down on his collar, the morning sun glinting handsomely on the gold-coin watch fob that hung out of his vest pocket.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” Walter began. “It’s perfectly all right.”

  “Where are you going?” Dick asked.

  “To Forty-fourth Street.”

  “You’re starting the office alone?”

  “Yes,” Walter went on with his drawer-emptying.

  “Walt, I hope you understand why I can’t come in with you. I’ve got a wife to support.”

  “I understand,” Walter said evenly. He stood up and took out his billfold. “Before I forget, I want to give you back your share of the rent. Here’s a check for two hundred twenty-five.” He laid it on the edge of the desk.

  “I’ll take it on condition that you take the Corpus Juris,” Dick said.

  “But that’s yours.”

  “We were going to use it together.”

  The Corpus Juris was at Dick’s apartment, part of his private library. “You’ll be needing it one day yourself,” Walter said.

  “Not for a long time yet. Anyway—I’d like you to have it. And the State Digests, too. They’ll be way out of date before I open an office.”

  “Thanks, Dick,” Walter said.

  “I saw the notice about the office in the paper this morning.”

  Walter hadn’t seen it yet. It was the little notice he had put in defiantly on Saturday morning, just before he went to Newark. “I was careful not to mention our names,” Walter said. “Your name. I’ll have my own name on the second ad this week.”

  Dick’s big, soft brown eyes blinked. He looked surprised. “I wanted to say, Walt, that I admire your courage.”

  Walter waited, hungry for something else. But apparently Dick was not going to say anything else. Walter watched him pick up the check and fold it. “I’ll be glad to come and get the books sometime myself in the car. Some evening when it’s convenient for you. I’m going to be living in Manhattan now, starting today. I’ll still consider the books just a loan until you need them.”

  “Oh, I’ll bring them over some time during office hours,” Dick said. “I’ll bring them to your office.” He moved towards the door.

  Walter followed him, involuntarily. In spite of Dick’s wordless backing out on him, Dick’s reluctance to say what he was thinking, Walter couldn’t end four years of friendship like this. “Dick,” he said.

  Dick turned. “What?”

  “I want to ask you—Do you think I’m guilty? Is that it?”

  Dick frowned and wet his lips. “Well, I—I guess I just don’t know, Walter. If you want me to be perfectly honest—” Dick looked at him, still embarrassed, but he looked straight at Walter, as if he had just said all that Walter could expect anybody to say.

  And Walter knew it was so, and that he could not blame Dick for what Dick couldn’t help. But as he stared at Dick, he felt that the last remnant of their confidence in each other, their loyalty, their promises to each other, had been suddenly swept away, and that there was an ugly, bitter emptiness in its place.

  “You’re going to fight back, aren’t you?” Dick asked. “What is going to happen?”

  “I am innocent!” Walter said.

  “Well—aren’t you going to make a statement at least?”

  “Do I have to prove myself innocent?” Walter burst out. “Is that the new system?”

  “All right,” Dick said. “Your principle is absolutely correct, but—”

  “Do you think if I were guilty I’d be standing here? They haven’t even enough to indict me.”

  “But a lot of people like me—”

  “Be damned to the people like you! I’m good and sick of them, and sick of talk with no facts behind it! I don’t give a damn any more what anybody says!”

  “I hope you survive,” Dick said,
but in an extremely cold tone. He turned and went out of the door.

  Walter went back to his desk and continued stacking his papers.

  Joan came in just as he was about to leave. She closed the door behind her. “You’re leaving today?” she asked. “Starting the new office?”

  “Yes.” He saw she was embarrassed, and to help her he said, “I understand, Joan. Don’t feel you have any obligation to me. I mean, as far as working for me goes.”

  She hesitated. For a moment, he thought she was going to say in her quiet, even voice that she still believed in him and that she still wanted to come and work for him, because she believed he would come through all this. For a moment, he dared to hope it. Then she said: “I thought I ought to tell you that I’ve changed my mind about leaving the office—this office. I think I prefer to stay here.”

  He nodded. “All right.” He kept staring at her, waiting for her to say something stronger, something more precise. She had given him two years of her loyalty. He felt suddenly as embarrassed as she. “It’s perfectly all right, Joan. Don’t worry about it.” He walked past her to the door. “You’ve been a very fine secretary,” he added.

  Joan said nothing.

  Walter turned quickly and went out.

  This was the way it would go, he thought, one after another. Like his friends when Clara was alive. This was like the quintessence of Clara. Isolation! Pretty soon he would know what isolation was. Soon it would be total. He didn’t really believe any young man would apply for a job in his office, not after he found out his name. He was only going doggedly about a task he had set himself, just as he had doggedly gone about the task of dismantling the house, and just as he would this afternoon set about finding himself an apartment hotel to live in, and pay a month or two’s rent in advance, with no anticipation at all of being there more than a week or so. Some kind of end would surely come: a hand would fall on his shoulder, a gun would point and a bullet fly out of the darkness at him. Or Kimmel’s hands would close around his throat. But before that, everyone would have drawn back from him. There would be no one who would speak to him. The earth would become like the moon, and he as lonely as if he was the only man on it.