Be sober and keep vigil,
The Judge is at the gate;
The Judge that comes in mercy;
The Judge that comes with might,
To terminate the evil,
To diadem the right.
Arise, arise good Christian,
Let right to wrong succeed;
Let penitential sorrow
To heav’nly gladness lead,
To light that hath no evening,
That knows no moon nor sun,
The light so new and golden,
The light that is but one.
O home of fadeless splendor,
Of flow’rs that bear no thorn,
Where they shall dwell as children
Who here as exiles mourn.
Midst pow’r that knows no limit,
Where knowledge has no bound,
The beatific vision
Shall glad the saints around.
Amen
Now, having suffered to do the will of God, the time had come for a terrible journey of faith.
The door to his office was open, and across the entrance hall one could see the aquamarine glow of the fluorescent lights in Helen’s fish tanks, which sat side by side on a table in front of the windows that opened from the dining room onto the side porch. The aerators in the tanks gurgled in the quietest hour of day.
Outside, the sky had begun to lighten. Sunrise, he knew, for he had planned this day to the last detail, would be at 6:36 A.M. Until then, there would be time for quiet reflection in the comforting gloom.
A shaft of white light glanced into the room, destroying reverie. John tensed with the day’s first unwelcome intrusion by the outside world. A car slowed at the upper end of the driveway, on the side of the house, where his office was. A newspaper thumped onto the ground somewhere in the general vicinity of the front steps.
This was not good. This was a hitch. He had phoned days ago to have the newspaper delivery stopped. But here it was again, and God knew how long it would keep piling up out there, drawing attention to the place. Later in the day, he would phone again to halt delivery.
John always read a morning paper, and in Westfield it was The New York Times. He had time to do so this day as well, for the plan was well laid and there was no sense of urgency. Outside, it was freezing. The temperature on the porch thermometer read twenty-eight degrees. A breeze from the northwest shook down some leaves that still clung stubbornly to a tree. John always put on his coat and hat when he went out, even if it was to fetch the paper from the lawn ten feet past the front door.
That day’s Times contained the usual blend of what would have been both informative and annoying to a man who had come to blame the media for fomenting much of what he found wrong with the country. The front page led with news of a 5.5 percent limit on employee wage increases as part of the federal government’s economic stability program. Five years ago, such news would have caused him severe consternation, but it was of little consequence now to a man without a job. The front page also carried a headline offering more disheartening proof of just how out of kilter John believed things had become in such a short time:
School Prayers
Blocked by House
By 28-Vote Margin
Street crime, so bad that the newspaper’s own drivers had held a one-day strike the previous day to protest the murder of one of their members near Times Square. Elsewhere, a particular bête noire: Dragging through the courts was the My Lai case, which John thought the media and antiwar protestors were trying to make criminals of soldiers he strongly believed were only doing their jobs. On page nine was a headline that would have seemed positive, if it wasn’t also a blunt reminder of the apparent interminability of a war that, in his opinion, the United States wasn’t being allowed to win:
U.S. Planes Raid
The North Again
And another outrage lay in the news section: A full-page photograph of the satanic, smirking Charles Manson in an advertisement promoting a book on the Manson case. Even the entertainment pages rankled: Ads for the blasphemous new Broadway musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar overwhelmed the notices for such wholesome shows as Fiddler on the Roof. The depraved Oh! Calcutta was in its “third big year!” Sex manuals with titles such as Any Woman Can and The Sensuous Man leered from ads on the book page. One of the biggest bestsellers of the year was called The Exorcist, a book that John had only needed to read a few pages of before denouncing it as a clever glorification of Satan.
John always perused the television page last before neatly rearranging the paper in the order in which it had come. Once, John had objected to television in his home, insisting that the set be turned off as soon as the evening news was finished. But with children around, it had wormed its way in. By now there were in fact four television sets in the house, two of them color: the one in Mother’s room and the one in the parlor. John sometimes let people know that his house had two color television sets in it.
But there wasn’t much point in checking the television listings now. There wouldn’t be any television that night in the List house.
Soon after daybreak, a faint rush of water through the pipes indicated that someone had just flushed a toilet on the second floor. It was about seven o’clock. Before long, the children would be down and on their way to school.
As a car edged down a neighbors’ driveway wheezing steam with another stirring of the day , John had the opportunity to go over his paperwork one more time. There was the US passport, issued in the name of John Emil List. He wouldn’t have any use for that document, but he wanted people to think that he might, so he would take it with him. The credit cards would stay behind. All they were good for lately was a rueful look from a cashier. The driver’s license would stay, of course. His billfold now held only a few dollars, but by afternoon it would have enough cash to tide him over for some time, if he watched his pennies.
He had packed a briefcase and a small suitcase. No heavy baggage, for once. Not even the raincoat and galoshes his mother would have insisted on. In every sense, emotionally as well as physically, John was ready to travel light.
Around eight, Patty came downstairs. As usual, she rummaged in the cupboard and shut the refrigerator with a whump after she looked inside for milk. There wasn’t any. The milkman was due later in the morning, John knew. Besides, the kids usually left the cereal soggy and half-eaten anyway.
John waited quietly until he heard her go to the hall closet for her black leather coat. She left by the back door and presently came around the side of the house. Impassively, he stood by the slightly parted curtain at his window and watched her make her way down the long driveway.
She kept her head down against the cold, and hugged her schoolbooks to her chest. Long, wispy blonde hair trailed behind her. Her hair had been so curly when she was a tot. “Shirley Temple!” the ladies in Inkster would coo when he took the baby out in the carriage. This was the baby that liked to laugh, just loved it. A mildly funny face would do it. She would giggle, and if you scrunched your face a little more, she would laugh herself silly, with those pudgy little hands raised in delight.
Now she was almost an adult. In a minute, a late-model car stopped and she got in. Pat never had a problem getting a ride to school. In Westfield, where money was easy, there was always a boy with a car.
Soon the two boys were down.
Once, there would have been lively voices, laughing, teasing, a wail of injured protest, a clatter of bowls and spoons, the hiss of a faucet, the scrape of chairs on the floor. What a long time ago that was. But now mornings were subdued. There wasn’t any chatter. At twenty minutes past eight, the boys gathered up their school things and stomped down the back steps.
They trudged along the drive past his office window in their bulky coats with knit ski caps pulled down on their heads. Young John carried a blue and white gym bag with “Westfield” lettered on it. John had really shot up the summer. He was going to be a six-footer or better, Johnny was.
Would. Freddy still looked like a little Cub Scout. “Little towhead,” his grandma called him when he was a baby, stroking his thick hair. His bangs, darker now, spilled out from the blue cap over a ruddy child-face.
He was proud of the boys. The boys, true to the Boy Scout oath that John had insisted they memorize, still believed that they must do their best to do their duty to God and country, to help other people at all times, to keep themselves physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
Morally straight? Where tranquil tree-lined streets led to moral deviation? Where the danger zone began at the curb?
There was insolence in John already, at fifteen, in the flash of those dark, defiant eyes. In Freddy, at thirteen, a close observer could detect the faint hint of slackness, of lack of resolve. Temptation would have no contest here. Evil was only a phone call away, a short drive in a car, a whistle in the night. There was would be nothing he could do, once it came, as it would.
Yes, there was a fortress. And this fortress was impregnable. But, O God! it was humble. That is what John had finally come to realize. The fortress was just too small. It only had room for one.
I love thee, O Lord, my strength.
The lord is my rock and my deliverer,
My God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
My shield, and the horn of my salvation.
The boys waited for a few minutes down by Hillside Avenue. Their breath made little vapor trails in the cold. It would not do for them to be late for school. The last thing John felt like dealing with was a phone call from the school. Finally, their regular car-pool ride, Barbara Baeder, a neighbor with a son Fred’s age, pulled up. The boys got in. As the car drove off, brittle brown leaves skittered behind in the street.
Once the house was silent again, John went to a file cabinet where the label “Guns and Ammo” was affixed to a drawer, which he slid open. Inside were the two pistols, one a little 22-caliber automatic, so small it could almost hide in the palm of a hand. That gun, a Colt, had been his father’s. And the other was a beauty, the Steyr 1912 automatic he had brought back from World War II, where he bought it from a soldier, a classic model that had been carried by officers of the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I and was refitted by the Nazis in World War II to take a certain cartridge known as the 9-millimeter parabellum. The cartridge’s name was derived, John knew, from the Latin motto si vis pacem, para bellum. “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Both pistols accepted magazines that held eight rounds each. The weapons lay on the desk gleaming with oil.
A few minutes after eight-thirty, Herbert Arbast, a milkman, drove his truck up the drive at 431 Hillside, and parked behind the house. As was his custom twice each week, he entered the house through the unlocked back door and walked across the kitchen to the adjacent butler’s pantry to check the note which Helen usually left taped to the refrigerator. Most times, the List order was for six quarts of milk and some butter and eggs. Arbast set his carrier on the floor by the refrigerator. Oddly, the note was from John, not Helen. It said to stop deliveries “until further notice” because the family was going on vacation. John would call to resume delivery when they returned. The milkman shrugged. He didn’t see anyone else around. With bottles rattling in his carrier, he left by the back door and returned to his truck, where he made the appropriate note on his clipboard to halt deliveries to 431 Hillside Avenue until further notice.
At the window of his office, John watched quietly until the truck turned onto the street.
Within ten minutes, Helen came down, filled the kettle, and banged it on the stove. John’s office had once been the library at Breeze Knoll. It was the front room on the left side of the house. Behind it were a parlor and then the ballroom. One door of the office opened onto the center hall, where the twin staircases swept up on each side. Beyond the hall, through an open door toward the rear of the right side of the house, lay the kitchen. It was a commodious room with knotty-pine cabinets and countertops that held a toaster, an electric frying pan, a juice squeezer, and a blender.
Since they barely acknowledged each other’s presence anymore, Helen would have made no attempt to ascertain her husband’s whereabouts when she came down wearing her bathrobe. He had always disapproved of appearing downstairs in nightclothes. There was so much John disapproved of. Helen had tried to be accommodating. But perhaps because she had spent so much time sick in bed, she had always had a much less formal attitude about attire.
In the kitchen, the kettle made a shrill whistle, then pitched down as Helen turned off the flame and took it from the burner.
John stood, the Steyr in his right hand. He was calm and alert as he stole out of his office and across the center hall. Helen sat with her coffee at the table on the far side of the kitchen, beside a window where the morning sun streamed in through canary yellow curtains. Silently, John approached from behind, just a bit to the left.
As he raised the barrel of the Steyr about eighteen inches from his wife’s head, she sensed movement just over her shoulder and turned her head slightly, with her chin tilted up just a bit, the way a woman would to be kissed on the cheek at a party. John fired. The bullet hit her in the jaw and knocked her to the floor with its force. The amount of blood pooling at her head told him it had been quick, final. Without taking aim, John fired several more quick shots that slammed into the wall beyond the table. One bullet ricocheted off a radiator into the next room.
The kitchen stank of gunpowder. Helen lay motionless, face down in the blood that spilled across the broad striped pattern of the lineoleum floor.
Now he scrambled up the gold-carpeted back stairs to the third floor. For the first time in his life, he didn’t knock before entering his mother’s quarters. Barging in, he found her in the small kitchen holding a plate that had a pat of butter on it, waiting beside the toaster, her silver-gray hair untidy from sleep. Alma looked startled as he moved toward her. “What was that noise downstairs?” she asked. In reply, he raised the gun and shot her once above the left eye at point-blank range. The plate smashed to the floor as the gunshot blew the old woman off her feet. Involuntarily, John squeezed off two more shots that smacked into the wall. Alma was sprawled on the checkerboard tile in the kitchen, quite still. On the counter beside the sink, her toast popped up.
He had planned to drag her downstairs, but quickly realized that the task was impossible. She was a large woman, not fat but big-boned and tall. He couldn’t move her that far. But he couldn’t just leave her lying there in the middle of the kitchen. He looked around desperately, then remembered the long plastic carpet runner she kept by the door in the sitting room. That would do it. He brought it beside her and, sweating, unmindful of the blood that drenched her housedress, pushed his mother’s body onto the runner and dragged her to the narrow hallway just off the kitchen. Still struggling, he forced the body into the hall near a cistern that provided an auxiliary water supply for the house, and crammed the bloody runner in behind her.
As best he could, he cleaned the floor, wiping up the blood with dampened sections of the Sunday newspaper she had placed in a trim pile on a table. He found an old towel and used that, too. It wasn’t perfect housework. He wasn’t trying to hide anything. It was more of a gesture toward propriety, a respectful nod at the neatness his mother insisted on.
He hurried back down to the kitchen to ponder the problem of how to move Helen. Finally, he simply grabbed her feet and dragged her, struggling at first and then moving more smoothly as momentum eased the way, across the center hall into the other side of the house, through the entrance of the ballroom. The path from the kitchen to the ballroom was marked now with a forty-foot-long trail of blood.
John left Helen on the ballroom floor and took the steps down to the billiard room. He came back with three rolled-up sleeping bags in his arms. He knelt on the oak parquet floor to unfasten the square knots on the cords that held the fat round bundles in place. He unzipped two of the sleeping bags all the way around, opening them side
-by-side like beach blankets. The other he did not open fully. This one he lay perpendicular to the two.
He rolled Helen’s body onto that one, face down, with her feet to the wall where a small pool table was piled with clutter, including some stacks of Styrofoam cups from the Halloween party, some artificial flowers, and a game called Where’s Willie? that Freddy had long since grown out of. The forest green sleeping bags were official Boy Scouts of America equipment, with the Boy Scout insignia and the motto “Be Prepared” repeated on their inner lining. As usual, John had bought quality, even when he couldn’t afford it.
The light pouring down from the skylight showed the walls of the ballroom cracked and badly in need of attention. A good plasterer could have fixed the whole room in a couple of days. Had John and Helen managed to continue their renovations, they would have hired one. On the wall just above the children’s pool table was the bare spot where a painting of Hessian soldiers had hung during the halcyon days when the room housed the Wittke art collection.
John arranged Helen’s bathrobe to cover her legs. She was wearing only a red satin teddy underneath the robe. He found a bath towel and covered her body with it, and placed a kitchen towel over her face.
He used a roll of paper towels, and when he had gone through that, newspaper to wipe up the blood around the spot where Helen lay atop the sleeping bag. Sunlight streamed through the multicolored skylight down onto her.
He knew he was badly soiled. On his way to the bathroom on the second floor, John stopped first in Helen’s bedroom—he hadn’t really considered it his and Helen’s bedroom for months—and did something that had not been part of his plan. He wiped his bloody hands on the sheets on her unmade bed. Again and again, he streaked the bedsheets with his grisly message, until he was convulsed with rage and nausea. He ran to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet, leaving a bloody palm print where he had leaned on the porcelain lid. Then he showered and scrubbed his hands and nails, and put on clean clothes. It didn’t matter that he left his dirty clothes and blood-spattered shoes in the open in the bedroom. He wasn’t trying to hide anything. He combed his hair neatly and went back down in a business suit with his necktie neatly adjusted.
Death Sentence Page 10
