Crime Story

by Gee, Maurice

  He closed the door, looked in the kitchen; and saw a plastic dish of dog biscuits by the pantry. He would have gone back to the door and out of the house if he hadn’t seen a basket by the window, lined with torn blankets and old towels. A chewed golf ball lay on the floor beside it. Small dog. Maybe another dachshund.

  ‘Hey dog, come here.’

  Everything was quality though. A big round table with six chairs filled the dining room. The pictures – he didn’t know about pictures but he’d bet the one of women in a garden drinking tea was worth a bit. And leather sofas in the lounge, and leather chairs, not two but four, and books, not library books, everywhere. The whole thing was spoiled by a bucket of water that smelled of disinfectant, with a rag torn off a sheet hanging over the side, and a wet patch on the carpet with the pile rubbed the wrong way. The dog had probably puked his caviare.

  ‘Hey dog,’ Rosser said. Then he ran upstairs. The woman had left the job half done, which meant she was coming back. Two bedrooms opened off the hall, with a third, the big one, at the front, running the whole width of the house. A waterbed, king size, took up half a wall. A scotch chest that would take a crane to lift filled the other. Bulging windows looked at the view. ‘Dressing table,’ Rosser breathed, and struck it rich at once. The thing was antique and carved with leaves and bunches of grapes, with hankie drawers beside the mirror – drawers that locked. But a key was fitted in the left hand one and in there, all alone, was a satin box embroidered with a dragon on the lid. He opened it and found a tangle of bracelets and necklaces and rings. ‘Gotcha,’ Rosser said. He had been around long enough to know that they weren’t fakes. Coloured stones. White stones. Some pearls down there, gleaming away. He only hoped the bitch hadn’t damaged them. He didn’t untangle them but lifted the box and checked the catch, then put it in his bag. He tried the right-hand drawer, which slid open without a key, and found some lacy handkerchiefs and shoelaces in a knot and nail files and clippers, and sitting neatly on its side a bundle of twenty dollar notes. Rosser felt its thickness. ‘Five hundred bucks.’ He grinned at himself in the mirror. Money was the best thing; Ponder never got a cent. He put it in his bag, then opened the rest of the drawers and felt in the clothes. Nothing. He liked the rub of cloth on his gloves. If he had more time he’d choose a blouse for Leeanne, although good clothes never looked right on her. But he had to hurry, and he went to the scotch chest and hunted through the drawers. Athol Peet, a passport said, lying in the top one. Old Athol had enough clothes to fit out a basketball team – sweatshirts, tracksuits, a drawer full of underpants, some still in their wrappings. But nothing Rosser wanted, nothing to go with the jewels. Quick and clean he put things back in place.

  He went to the wardrobe, felt along the suits – seven suits – and at the end struck it rich again. A wallet in the inside pocket held ten one hundred dollar notes. Athol’s emergency cash. Rosser dropped it in his bag. His head was light. Already he had seen the Reeboks lined up on the rack with the other shoes. He knew that they would be his size because everything in this house was his. He sat on the edge of the bed and slipped off his Lasers; the Reeboks were made for him. He walked across the room and looked in the mirror. ‘Rosser,’ he said, baring his teeth. He wanted to spread himself through the house, use the beds, eat the food, fuck the wife and daughters; but in the colder part of his mind he knew that he should get out now, while his luck was holding. He knew he shouldn’t let himself think about women.

  He took the Reeboks off and put them in his bag. It held enough, it weighed like groceries. ‘Get out,’ he said. Then time shifted back a step and he knew that he had stayed too long. The noise he hadn’t heard while grinning in the mirror became the rattle of a roller door. Sandals clattered on the porch.

  ‘Athol, is that you?’ the woman called.

  Okay, Rosser thought. He was calm. Speed became his weapon. He could move five metres to her one. He stripped his gloves off to be ready for the street. The door was open so he did not need his hands again. He got his Lasers tied with a flick. Out through the hall while she looked in the lounge, up the path, across the lawn – he’d vanish next door and she wouldn’t know she’d lost her jewels until she looked in her drawer. He picked up his bag and moved along the passage to the corner. He should hear her voice again and hear her moving about.

  Wrong, Rosser thought, something’s wrong. There was only silence.

  He looked around the corner. She was standing in bare feet on the landing. He saw her sandals just inside the door.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said, with her blue eyes wide.

  Rosser moved fast. ‘Out of my way, lady.’ But she turned, fast herself, and went ahead of him down the steps, crying, ‘Liv.’ She filled the stairway, blocking his escape. Fear made Rosser agile. He found himself doing what he did. Later he would recall the moment by a memory in his muscles and his joints. ‘I didn’t mean to do that,’ he said.

  His sole was on her back and his knee opened out. She flew down the steps; and if he slowed her movement down, put her in slow motion, he saw her leaning flatter as she fell. She touched the floor as lightly as a dancer but her upper body had the weight of lead. She struck the door edge with her face. It was rigid at the impact but swung against the wall as she slid down.

  Rosser jumped and ran at her. Blood was springing from her slanted mouth. He stepped across her middle part, high like a dancer, not to touch. Her eyes seemed to open wide at his moving shape. He told her, saying nothing, that she shouldn’t have come back. Then he saw a girl half risen on the porch steps. Her green school uniform made her look swollen. She watched him coming at her, dropped her bag and turned side on. He ran by without touching her, although his own bag thumped her on the arm. He went up the path, found the gap in the hedge, ran back parallel, not more than two metres from her, invisible; and heard her say ‘Mum’, in a rising voice. The woman wasn’t hurt too bad, he thought. She’d need some stitches in her face. It would take them ten minutes to get themselves organised. By then he would be gone down The Terrace, in town. He was pleased at how quickly he was calm. Walk out the gate, don’t run, he said.

  The street was quiet. One or two cars were parked in the Residents Only zone. He walked down at what his mother would call a medium pace. Everything should be medium – except that now and then you had to move fast. He had been fast. He smiled at that, but pulled a face at the blood. She’d bled a lot, real quick, so the door, maybe the tongue in the lock, must have cut her deep. It served her right for coming back and breaking the rules. And she should have gone into the lounge and taken the girl with her so he could get out of the house without being seen. That was how he would have arranged it. It spoiled his perfect record, being seen. But what was he – a nose, a mouth, some eyes? Identikits were a joke, kids could draw better.

  He wasn’t pleased about it all the same. He wasn’t pleased about kicking her. It counted as assault with the cops, and that made them just a bit more keen. Okay, he thought, from now on no one sees me.

  He turned down steps to the lower road. Trees leaned over, making a cave. Wellington was perfect for dropping out of sight. You came out on a new road, on a different level of the world. He crossed among cars and felt their wind on his face. A bus went by with people looking down. Their eyes stopped short of him or moved on past. The bag, weighing heavy in his hand, seemed to pull him out of sight.

  He walked among students on the footpath. A lecture had come out, maybe. Rosser felt he’d like to stay and swim around amongst them. His heart was going easily, at its normal pace.

  On the far side of Kelburn Parade he stopped and looked back. The hill stepped up sharply, with houses lit on one side by the sun and trees frothing out and insulators shining on telegraph poles. A stretch of white railing showed like a lookout platform. He saw the first woman walking by, trailing her dog chain. She had wrapped it round her fist and left half a metre free. The dog must be loafing along behind. She turned and waited for it, resting her elbow on the rail. Go ho
me, Rosser thought, your neighbour needs you.

  He went through the bicycle barrier into the university. The girl in the school uniform would be phoning for the cops. By the time they got a car out he would be in the James Smith carpark, in his own. He grasped the bar to lever himself round. Then a memory came up through his palm. His heart gave a kick. He felt a pressure in his head, as though part of his brain was sucked away from the skull. The stair rail! Fucking stair rail! He had put his hand on it. When he shoved his foot in the woman’s back his hand had come down, whole grip, for balance on the rail.

  ‘Shift it, mate,’ someone said, banging with his hip.

  ‘Sorry.’ Rosser felt his palm burning, his forehead prickling with shame.

  He went through the quad. He walked like any student. But he knew that people could see him now. He’d marked himself and must go home and lock himself in.

  Everything was turned around to face the other way.

  Chapter Two

  The dog was half dachshund and half pug, a mix that denied it both intelligence and charm. Gwen Peet, who liked birds – free birds – lizards, weasels, possums, mice, and cats when independent, in descending order, and dogs hardly at all, was not able to be kind to the animal. Smelly, overfed, useless – tugging it along. She dragged it away from fences and hurried it up and down kerbs with her shoe. If it were left to her she would ban dogs from the streets or make special neighbourhoods where they and their owners must live, and mark the boundaries with some dull dog-turdy colour or dog-turd sign and fine anyone who stepped outside.

  Would Olivia go there, with her Butch, or would she choose people?

  Gwen walked the dog each day as a favour to Olivia. Now and then she called it a contribution. Grandma did this for me, she imagined the girl saying, and saw her slip each favour like a coin into her purse. She did not think of it as buying love. A contribution, a necessary chore, like spooning Farex into her not so long ago. She did not want love from Olivia, liking would do – for the reason, she agreed, that she did not love the girl herself, but merely liked, and liking was much to be preferred. It was nourishing and steady, while love was always too much or too little and made one overcertain or uncertain, never sure.

  So, the dog was a mongrel. And Gwen was a divorcée, not a wife. Although she could look younger, she was sixty-four. She lived in the Kelburn house (not worth half a million, but $300,000 perhaps) which her husband had left her when he left. It was all she had apart from a small investment that earned enough for food and electricity and the rates. She had no car but rented her garage to a neighbour for forty dollars a week. She bought, when she had to, good clothes and shoes, because they lasted longer and worked out cheaper in the end. Carefulness was something she had learned, it did not come naturally to her and she committed extravagances that did not reveal themselves at once but drove her to arithmetic when she could not sleep in the night. Four a.m. was her bad time. The house creaked and the walls found new alignments and sets of figures moved like draughts about the room. Curtains stirred and lifted in her mind. There was darkness outside, no bright day, and past and future were alike, without significance. It sometimes helped her then to think that people she was attached to were next door, sleeping on a level with her – even if the filthy dog had left his basket for a place on Olivia’s bed. ‘Smelly thing,’ she muttered, and touched its hind parts with her toe, making it scuttle out of range.

  Gwen walked to the top of the cable car and round the bus roundabout and back to Central Terrace and so home every weekday, wet or fine, but did not go into the gardens because the dog spoiled them. She walked there in the mornings and on cool late afternoons. She thought about many things – money, food, the mountains, being alone, being further south, down where it snowed, with nothing but grey oceans between her and Antarctica; and of a little house in the bush, up from Karamea perhaps, and no one there with her, not even a dog, just the birds and the river and the weather and the sky – lovely, she imagined, knowing it would suit her for a day or two; and she thought of people she had known, and still knew but did not see for this reason or that, and those she did see and still enjoyed, and those she could not get out of her life without causing pain. How many friends could a person have – half a dozen perhaps? And what could be done with the others, who knocked against one, claiming, importuning?

  She thought of the future often, and of what Ulla called her ‘lot in life’. The two would not come apart. Her lot in life determined all the things that she would do. Oh no, she said, not everything, not all. There were so many freedoms she could claim – freedoms of the mind. There was nowhere she could not travel in there – except, she conceded, those places put off limits by race and gender, by language and by temperament, by prejudice, belief. Oh dear, dark continents, she thought, but was not distressed because it was the same, or much the same, for everyone. It was still huge, was limitless, the world outside her ‘lot in life’.

  All the same, she thought of that and of how it constrained her. Boundaries had been changed by her divorce, but boundaries were not done away with. A huge natural feature was removed. The sun shone longer; at night more stars were in the sky, and she could stride on paths closed off before; but in the end day and night remained much as they were, just more of them, or less, and hotter, brighter, colder than before. Eating, sleeping, ageing still went on, and the house still creaked and the garden grew and prices rose and shoes wore out and Gwen Peet was altered here and there but was recognisably the same. There were boundaries she still couldn’t cross.

  Howie had said, ‘Take it. You’ve earned it,’ and meant no criticism of himself. It was, of course, already in her name, and she would have had it anyway. Her house. ‘My house.’ But let him think it lay within his gift. Too much energy would be spent in making him understand that he had never lived in it. And pleasure outweighed her bitterness. She made him a cup of coffee and put a little Scotch in – the last of his Scotch – and waited for him to become sentimental, and thought that his face was redder and fatter, all in a month, while his body was leaner, perhaps to facilitate new pleasures of the bed. Be careful Howie, she thought of saying, don’t overdo things; but her own happiness wouldn’t allow it and she found herself thinking, Go for it, old boy, get in there.

  He would, of course. All her men were greedy, Howard, Athol, Gordon: grabbers and getters. But Howie was a natural, born with a money scoop for a hand and a reach like a praying mantis, while his sons, her sons – it amazed her, men from her body – paused too often and thought too much. She was afraid for them. She did not like them. Against her mature judgement, she still liked Howie. Being divorced from him was better than being married, though. (‘Take your maiden name again,’ some of her friends had insisted. But no, she would stay Peet because it took her life in. Let Howie take a new name, he was the one who wanted to put those years aside.)

  She turned in the roundabout, let the dog pee, then walked back towards Upland Road, past the doctors’ rooms and the reassuringly scruffy seven-day dairy. The gallery – another station on her dutiful way – came next, with new paintings in place, ugly and bright. Deliberately ugly? There was a lot of that about, and now and then she saw the point. Deliberately beautiful never had anything to say, or even show, when you got down to it. She did not tie the dog up and go in, had not sufficient strength of mind for glum women with shopping bags and jowly Roundtablers – were they? – even in paint. She did not want to know about hunger and poverty, either of the body or the mind, not just now. There were times for being angry and times for fear, and the air was fresh this afternoon, the wind lifting petrol fumes into the upper air. She did not want her easiness disturbed.

  ‘Come on, mongrel,’ she said, and crossed the road against the flow of students; climbed up, climbed down, into Central Terrace, and paused for the distant mirror glass and the soaring cranes. The tallest of them stood on the site Howie had failed to secure; but he was busy down the Quay with another deal, a better site. There was al
ways better, and there was great. ‘Good’ never described a project – it was too tame. ‘Best’, too, had little use. It suggested an end, and Howie and his mates meant to go on for ever. One more time was built into them like a sense, and no more than an animal – no more than this dog snuffling in the puha, and surely within a year or two of pegging out – did they seem to have any sense of death. Or was that to assume too much? Did they, did Howie, have bad times at 4 a.m.? Did the swinging cranes rust in their moving parts, the foundations fill with water and grow weeds, the mirror glass crack? It had all run down for Gordon, it had finished for the players who had failed to – what was it? – dictate each event of the day to a secretary, and notarise it and put it in the lawyer’s safe? Cover themselves. Howie had, Gordy hadn’t. So the father was busy on the Quay, putting a new deal together, while the son sat in Auckland in a courtroom and heard the prosecution lawyers call him ‘a man greedy to the very marrow of his bones’. It wasn’t true; Gordy was a dupe and not greedy in that way. He wanted simply to play with the big boys and was not bright enough or quick enough – and nowhere near long enough in the arm for it.

  Not true, not fair, she said, but with no strength, for anger was educated out of her now, and pity for Gordon was as much as she could feel. Pity for him; admiration for Howie, with some contempt. But for Athol – anger, yes, anger and dislike. If she loved him a little more she would also hate him. If she loved him as she had when he was a child …

  Gwen unfastened the lead from Butch’s collar. He was tired and would waddle along without leaving the footpath. She could go at her own pace and seem not to know him, and if the chain hanging from her fist gave her away she was far enough ahead to make it seem she was not aware of his comfort stops. One day she would come down with a bucket of hot water and Sunlight soap and a scrubbing brush and scrub the path clean – had not ruled it out as an eccentricity for her old age. Her seventies perhaps. Sixty-four could not get away with it; her mind still sharp, some few expectations still in place, rules to obey. Sons to nudge along and raise her voice against; Ulla to watch, Ulla to be eyes and ears for, and home and nation; Olivia; Damon: all these a consequence of Gwen and Howie meeting and marrying. They were now her lot in life, or a part of it. Not a part of Howie’s, of course. Howie did not have a lot in life. He simply had opportunities. Down there a city block emptied out, and down there a shining tower rose in Howie’s mind, to take its place.