“We came the second we woke,” Charlie said.
The old man fumbled for the drinking glass in the porcelain rack beside the medicine cabinet. Charlie grabbed the glass, rinsed it, filled it with water.
The old man washed his mouth out, gargled noisily, his mouth a sunken, wrinkled hole in his face. His skin held a grayish cast. A bundle of dried sticks inside the old-fashioned nightgown, the old man was a terrifyingly cadaverous comment on the mortality of human flesh.
“I’ll get the doctor,” Laura said.
“I don’t want the doctor,” the old man said, pulling away from them belligerently and shuffling toward his own bed, across the room.
“It must have been those pickles at dinner,” Charlie said.
“I’ve eaten pickles before! I know what made me sick!”
Charlie and Laura looked at each other, then at the old man wavering toward the bed.
“What, sir?” Charlie asked.
“I know,” the old man said ominously. “I got a good stomach. I don’t get sick easy. I know what caused it. ”
The old man crawled into bed and pulled the covers over his head. Laura touched Charlie’s arm. They slipped out of the room. In the hallway, she whispered, “You can’t do much with him when he sets his mind this way.”
“How about the doctor?”
“I’m sure he’s all right, Charlie. It was those pickles. You go on back to bed. You’ve got to work tomorrow—today. I’ll listen for him.”
Charlie didn’t think he would get back to sleep. He lay and smoked, thinking of Laura in the chair she’d drawn close to her father’s door.
He’d thought he had a full awareness of the circumstances when he married Laura. An only child, she’d cared for her father a long time, since the death of her mother. She’d explained that she wanted to keep her father with her, and Charlie had said okay. It wasn’t, after all, as if they were a pair of teenagers running away to get married. Both were in their thirties.
Charlie’s first wife had accidentally killed herself nearly ten years ago, rushing home from a bridge game late one icy afternoon. Laura had never married, never had much chance to know men, for that matter.
She and Charlie had met prosaically enough in a supermarket. They were, he guessed, prosaic people. Laura was no raving beauty, though she was well built and had a pleasant face framed in brown hair. Charlie was a tall, pleasant-looking man, a little on the thin side, who looked as if he worked long hours at a desk in a large office, which was exactly the case.
The old man’s strenuous objections had marred what should have been one of life’s more perfect moments. Charlie had regretted this more for Laura’s sake than his own. He’d figured he understood the old man and was old enough himself to overlook the shortcomings of a close, demanding in-law.
But now, after only a few weeks of marriage, Charlie wasn’t so sure. There was a point where churlishness became too barbed for comfort, where a martyred air of being persecuted permeated the whole house.
Charlie napped finally, awoke too quickly, and dragged through the day. Driving home, he hoped Laura’d had a chance to catch a nap this afternoon. She’d looked plenty bushed when he left the house this morning.
Old man Emmons was in the living room, cackling toothlessly at a TV run of an old W. C. Fields comedy. Charlie spoke cordially, and the old man speared him with a look from his cavernous eyes. “You back?”
Charlie let it pass. “Where is Laura?”
“Gone to the store,” the old man said. “Can’t you keep still while the movie’s on?”
With a sigh and shake of his head, Charlie passed through the house, crossed the rear yard and entered the garage. He was outfitting a wood-working shop, using one side of the garage. The place was chilly. He turned on the butane heater and began to tinker with a drill press, setting it in position and bolting it down.
He was spending more and more time out here, he realized. The thought caused him to drop his wrench, sit on a saw horse, and light a cigarette. He wondered if he were already in the process of becoming one of those hobbyist husbands, shunted out of his own house by an in-law.
He threw the cigarette on the floor and ground it under his heel. Damn it, that old man was going to have to change his ways, and that’s all there was to it.
Charlie went back into the house. The living room was empty. Laura was home—there was a bag of groceries on the table just inside the front door.
Then Charlie heard their voices, hers and her father’s, in argument, from the old man’s bedroom.
“He hid my pills, I tell you!” the old man said.
“No, father,” Laura said patiently, “they were right there in the cabinet where you put them—behind the soda box.”
“You’re working hand in glove with him!”
“Father…”
“I can see it now! He’s turning you against me.”
“No, father. We both love you and want you to be happy. We want to take care of you. ”
The old man snorted in disbelief as Laura came into the living room, picked up the groceries, and started toward the kitchen.
“I’ll hurry dinner up, Charlie. I was late getting to the store.”
Laura’s worn look caused Charlie to put off what he’d intended to say.
“I’ll give you a hand,” he said.
The right emotional distillation didn’t again take place inside of Charlie, and he didn’t speak his mind during the following week.
Then on Tuesday Laura called him at the office. The old man had fallen down the basement steps and would Charlie please hurry home?
He explained briefly to his boss, ran to the parking lot, and fought traffic out to the development Laura met him at the door.
“How is he?” Charlie asked.
“He’s all right.” She passed the back of her hand over her forehead. “I guess I shouldn’t have called you, Charlie, but when I heard him go tumbling…”
“I know. What does the doctor say?”
“That my father is a very lucky man, or indestructible.” Her face twisted, giving it a strange expression Charlie had never seen before. “The doctor just left.”
“Is he coming back?”
“Not today. He wants me to bring father into his office tomorrow morning, just for a check-up. ”
She’d need the car, then. That meant riding the bus to work. Schedules out here put Charlie either fifteen minutes late or forty-five minutes early to the office.
He sighed. “Well, I guess I better look in on him.”
“Charlie—”
“Yes?”
“Don’t get him…I mean…”
“I’m the soul of patience,” Charlie assured her, a touch of bitterness in his voice.
Charlie opened the old man’s bedroom door softly and stepped inside. The old man had his eyes closed. His bones made creases in the covers and that was all.
As Charlie neared the bed, the old man opened his eyes and looked at him.
“How are you, sir?”
“I’ll survive,” the old man said softly. “I’ll survive a long time.”
“We hope so. How did it happen?”
“I fell down the basement steps.”
“I know. Laura told me that on the phone.”
“I could have been killed.”
“But you weren’t, and we’re grateful for that. The doctor said you’re fine.”
“Could have been killed…” the old man said, as if Charlie hadn’t spoken. “All because there was a carton of old shoes on the steps. Right near the top. ”
Charlie tried to understand the old man’s feelings. “I meant to take them down last night.”
“But you didn’t,” the old man said in that soft voice that sounded like a whisper from an eternal tomb.
“No, I… Laura asked me to… Listen, what am I explaining every detail to you for!”
He caught the glint of warped satisfaction in the old man’s eye. He felt awkward and foo
lish. His quick anger drained to be replaced by something else.
“You hate me,” the old man whispered.
And it was true. For the first time, Charlie knew it was true. The old man seemed to have a profound knowledge of it.
“You’re a little upset,” Charlie said through stiff lips. “You know we care greatly for you.”
He turned and went out. He found refuge in the shop, turning on a lathe and letting the chips fly.
Finally, he realized that Laura was calling him from the house. He switched off the lathe, turned off the heater, and hurried across the backyard. He had no right to act childishly toward her, to pity himself because he lacked the manhood to be the head of his own house.
He waited until late that night, until he was certain the old man was asleep and wouldn’t come creeping in. He cut the legs for a cocktail table without his mind being on the task. When he came into the house, he washed his hands in the kitchen, thinking of what he would say.
Laura was on the end of the couch, feet curled under her while she watched TV. Charlie felt a great reluctance inside of him as he approached her. The word “showdown” came to his mind, frightening him a little.
He eased down beside her. She looked at him and smiled. He really did love her, he thought. Under different circumstances, with some kids around…
“How’s the table coming, Charlie?”
“Fine.”
“Can I have a look tomorrow?”
“Sure, if you want Laura…”
Thundering hooves and banging six-guns filtered into the space between them.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said, his collar feeling tight.
“About father,” she said “Yes, I guess so.”
“You want him out.”
“I’m afraid I do,” he said.
“Why be afraid, Charlie?” she asked, almost gently.
He stared at her, again with that feeling of strangeness.
“I’m not afraid, Charlie. I’ll be glad when he’s dead.”
“Laura…”
“Why deny it? You feel the same way. I’m not surprised. He taints and kills everything he touches. ”
“Then we’ll put him in a home?” Even with her attitude, which had surprised him so, the words sounded callous, cruel.
“No, Charlie, we won’t put him in a home. I knew from the beginning this was something we’d have to discuss.”
“But if we keep him here…”
“That’s what we’re going to do, Charlie.”
“But you just said…”
“That I’d be glad when he’s dead? I mean it. We’re going to keep him right here, right with us, until the day he dies.”
“I see,” he said glumly, although he didn’t see any solution at all.
“You think I’m choosing between duty to a father and love for a husband, Charlie?” She stirred with a faint rustling sound of her clothing against the couch upholstery. Her hand reached to touch his cheek.
“I love you, Charlie. And I don’t feel any duty toward him. His miserliness and meanness killed my mother and ruined my childhood. If the question were so simple, there wouldn’t be any problem. ”
“I don’t think I understand, Laura.”
“Of course you don’t. You’ve never been told that he’s a rich man.”
“Rich?”
She leaned toward him slightly. “He’s worth over a quarter of a million dollars, Charlie.”
“But that gloomy old barn you lived in before we were married!”
“I know. But it isn’t so strange or unusual. Not as extreme as those cases you read about where some recluse dies in filth, with a million dollars glued under the wallpaper or tucked under the mattress. My father’s a miser and always has been. I didn’t know he was worth so much myself until my mother died. There were some papers I had to sign. I made inquiries, and when I found out—well, Charlie, right then and there I began waiting for him to die. I’m his only heir, you know. It will all come to me. ”
The walls seemed to tilt a little, and the TV was a crazy, animated painting by Dali. Charles wiped his hand across his face. It came away wet. The discovery of the old man’s wealth was not the real shock. This new side of Laura—that’s what took him a moment to absorb.
“You think I’m evil, Charlie?”
“No, I realize…I mean, years of living with him wouldn’t endear him to anyone…”
“He’s never suspected my feelings. Isn’t that a greater, more laudable sacrifice than acting out of pure love?”
“Yes.” Charlie said, his voice hoarse and quick. “Yes. It is, Laura.”
“If we throw him out, there is the chance a nurse will marry him for all that money.”
“Yes, there is a strong chance.”
“Or out of spite, he’d will the money to some charity. I know he’d do that, Charlie.”
“I’m pretty sure of it myself, knowing him.”
“So we don’t have any alternative, do we?”
“Not that I can see.”
She smoothed the hem of her dress over her knees and stared thoughtfully at the carpet.
“A quarter million, Charlie.”
“I can’t imagine that much honest-to-goodness money.”
“Trips around the world. Good clothes. Thumb your nose at the mortgage company. Think in those terms, Charlie. When he is at his most trying.”
“I’ll do that.”
She raised her eyes slowly to his. “We’ll earn the money, Charlie.”
“I guess we will.”
“We must always be kind to him. As long as he lives.”
“Yes. Kind.”
“Are you afraid, Charlie?”
“Of taking care of an old man until he dies?” he laughed softly. “No, I’m not afraid, Laura.”
Charlie felt five years younger when he woke the next morning. He hummed while he shaved. His undreamed-of good fortune caused him to look at himself in the mirror “Old pal,” he said to his image, “you’re going to be a rich man.”
A feeling of love and respect for the old man surged up in Charlie. When I spend that money, Charlie thought, I want it free and untainted. I want you to know that its mine by right. I want to remember that I eased your last days, Father Emmons.
* * * *
The old man noticed the change. Two days later when Charlie brought him a box of his favorite sugar stick candy, the old man’s eyes seemed to sink in even deeper depths, cloaked with caution.
They were in the old man’s bedroom, the nice, sunny room. “Charlie,” the old man said, “what are you up to?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Father Emmons.”
“This business of holding a chair for me, of calling me father, of bringing me stuff like this candy.”
“Why, I…”
“And no accidents, Charlie, for the last couple days.”
“Accidents?”
“You know what I mean,” the old man said softly. “Nothing in my food to make me sick. No hiding of my pills. No boxes on the basement stairs.”
“Just accidents, that’s all,” Charlie said. “I hope you like the candy.”
“Here,” the old man said suspiciously, “you eat a piece of it” Charlie stared at him. Then he took a stick of candy from the box. “Not that one,” the old man said, grabbing the candy away. “I’ll eat this one.” He pulled a piece from the box and thrust it at Charlie. Charlie took a bite while the old man watched him closely.
“Is the candy good, Charlie?”
“Sure, but if I had your…”
“What was that? You meant to say something, didn’t you, Charlie. If you had my what? My what, Charlie? If you had my what?”
Charlie swallowed. “If I had your taste, I’d try some better candy.”
“I like this candy,” the old man said.
He remained standing there, just staring, until Charlie finally said awkwardly, “well, it’s pretty good candy at that.”
He went
to his own room and closed the door. He leaned limply against it. The first misgiving since his talk with Laura came to him. Already he suspects that I’m planning something…that I know about his money…that I’m going to kill him.
Kill him.
Charlie put his hands over his ears, went in the bathroom, and took two aspirin. Through the small window, he saw the old man puttering in the backyard, nibbling at his stick candy.
Charlie was in the living room trying to concentrate on the newspaper when the old man came back in. The old man stood holding his candy. He was stringy inside his heavy sweater and baggy pants. “Have some candy, Charlie.”
“No, thanks, I—”
“It’s real good.”
The overture seemed genuine enough. Charlie took a stick of candy, and the old man went to his room and closed the door.
Charlie carried the candy to the kitchen and dropped it in the garbage can.
“Dinner in a few minutes, Charlie,” Laura said, busy at the stove. “Sure,” he said absently.
He stepped out of the kitchen, crossed the yard, opened the shop door, and clicked the light switch.
The small room was full of butane from the heater’s open pet-cock. The electric spark and the butane produced a chemical reaction that sent the garage mushrooming into the twilight sky. A piece of the garage knocked down an antenna across the street. A woman in the next block went hysterical when she heard the explosion and screamed something about the Russians. Charlie had barely time for one last thought: “Old Man Emmons had it all worked out. Blast him, but he’s blasting me right out of his money!”
PRECIOUS PIGEON
Originally published in Manhunt, April 1963.
The motel was an old one, located on a once-busy highway that had been by-passed by the new city expressway.
The number of cars in the parking area indicated occupancy of about half the units. I slid my car to stop beside a four-year-old Chevy.
It was a hot, humid autumn evening, the last growl of summer. In the drab unit at the far end a baby was crying fretfully.
My own reaction to the surroundings was one of sharp distaste. I knew how Constantine must be chaffing, anxious to get on the final phase of the task we had planned. Constantine was living, I knew, only on the hope of escaping this and similar places forever.
The Talmage Powell Crime Megapack Page 15
