by Mark Dunn
“Yes, what is it, Mr. Wachsel? Pearl, this is my super, Mr. Wachsel.”
“Hello there. If I might have a word with you, Mrs. Touliatos. It’s about Mrs. Lyttle in 8-E.”
“Is anything wrong? I just saw her last Friday night.”
“Well that depends on how you define the word ‘wrong,’ Mrs. Touliatos.”
“Has the bird—has Meshak, her parrot, died?”
“Yes, Mrs. Touliatos. But not recently. The bird I saw when I had to make an emergency visit to the apartment this morning has been dead for quite some time. He’s stuffed, Mrs. Touliatos. It looks like he’s been stuffed for years.”
“Stuffed, you say?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh.”
For a moment Leonora got very quiet. Finally she asked if everything was all right. “What kind of emergency was it?”
“An overflowing toilet. Your upstairs neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Carter, had themselves a little bathroom waterfall courtesy of Mrs. Lyttle.”
Leonora’s hand flew up to her mouth. Then she pulled it away to say, “Is Nancy—is Mrs. Lyttle still at work?”
“I would imagine. I had to use the passkey. If I had waited, the whole E line would have gotten flooded out—your bathroom as well. I took a minute to look through the rest of the apartment. There is no other bird. Just the stuffed one.”
“Oh my,” said Leonora.
Leonora didn’t speak to Nancy until she arrived at her door at the usual time the following Friday night. Nancy had prepared pepper-honey salmon steaks. There was no wine this night, but a nice pitcher of limeade Nancy had made from fresh-squeezed limes.
Leonora was not feeling herself. Each time the “parrot” spouted his depravities, she would cringe a little inside, but she tried her best not to let it show. She must have succeeded in hiding her concerns, because Nancy never said anything.
As the two women were making their way toward the front door at the end of the evening, Leonora said, as she always did, “Goodbye, Meshak.” Then she said, “Nancy, may I pet him?”
“I don’t think he’d mind. He didn’t seem to mind last week.”
Leonora held out her hand so that Nancy could take it and place it in the vicinity of the bird. Leonora felt for the feathers and then suddenly took gouging hold. She yanked the stuffed parrot from its perch and threw it to the floor. Then she stomped all over the floor, hoping to trample it.
There was a long, deadly silence. Then Leonora said, “It looks like I’ve killed your goddamned bird.”
Another silence. Then: “You can’t kill me that easy, you crazy blind bitch.”
Leonora went home unescorted that night.
1952
DOUBLY UXORICIDAL IN COLORADO
I’m not sure if it was Charlie who saw Bob first, or Bob who spotted Charlie. It probably doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t have been long after sitting themselves down at separate tables in the dining room of the Golden Lantern for each man to have gotten squarely into the other one’s line of vision, and neither man was simply going to ignore what he saw. Fate required that the two should meet. Fate and their own impetuous and curious natures. Because it isn’t every day you chance upon someone who looks exactly like you.
Neither man had been to Denver before. Charlie was there to meet with owners of a small company that was preparing to bring out their own automatic ranch gate. Charlie managed a construction supply company in Brooklyn—a company that didn’t want to get left behind in the automatic ranch gate boom. Bob was a freelance photographer who was just wrapping up a trip to the Colorado Rockies. He’d been taking nature shots for an iron lung-bound artist colleague who’d grown tired of painting objects in his room.
Let’s say that it was Charlie who made the initial approach. Let’s say that before he’d even placed his order with the waitress, he got up from his seat and crossed to Bob’s table on his own initiative. (Both were dining alone.) Without saying a word, Charlie, let’s say, sat down and the two took themselves a long silent moment to fully digest what each was seeing—to completely dismiss the possibility of hallucination.
Even though Charlie may or may not have made the first move, it was Bob who broke the ice with the following observation: “Mom told me about you. I never quite believed her until now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My mother. My adopted mother. She sat me down one day. I was a pretty big boy at the time—maybe twenty-two. She told me that there was something she’d never told me before—something about my adoption. I had a twin, you see. Our birth mother put us both up for adoption before she croaked from whatever street drugs had eaten that big hole in her brain. Why my adopted mother told me this, I don’t know. I really had no desire to go looking for you. I knew the odds were slim that I’d be able to find you, even if you really existed. Who knew that dumb luck would do all the work for me?”
“So you think we’re twins?”
“Can it be anything else? Separated at birth, my friend. Why? I don’t know. It would have been nice to have had a brother all those years.”
Another silence passed, each man studying the face of his biological mirror image. Finally, Charlie reached out his hand and said, “I’m Charlie. Charlie Towers.”
And Bob took the hand and said, “Bob Fletcher.”
And then the waitress interrupted to ask if Charlie would be returning to his table, and Charlie said no. “I didn’t think so,” replied the waitress. “What happened? You two brothers have a fight and now you’re making up?”
Bob didn’t answer. Charlie smiled. “Making up. Yeah, that’s it. My brother and I are making up…for lost time.”
Bob handed the waitress his menu. “I’ll start with the Seafood Louis cocktail and the apple-marshmallow salad—whatever the heck that is. Then give me the pork tenderloin with the whipped potatoes.”
The waitress shook her head. “No potatoes.”
“It’s on the menu.”
“Well, there still aren’t any spuds to be had, so I’d recommend the buttered new peas and the creamed coleslaw. You get double vegetables without the potatoes.”
Bob sighed. “I miss potatoes.”
Charlie nodded. “Me too. But look on the bright side: they say the shortage will be over when the new crop comes in. This isn’t the Irish potato famine we’re talking about here…brother.”
As Bob was left to consider the marvelous implications of that wonderful word, Charlie placed his order and the waitress disappeared and the two long-lost siblings got down to brass tacks. Bob didn’t know much more than what he’d already said. Charlie didn’t know anything at all. The two thirty-five-year-old brothers, both a little guarded with one another initially, soon began to relax, soon began to open themselves up to discovering how very different they were in terms of the life paths they’d chosen for themselves, but also how very similar certain aspects of their lives had turned out to be.
Both men, for example, had insufferable wives—grasping harridans (their own words) who refused to grant their longsuffering husbands divorces out of spite, or rather because of the presence of the prettier, newer, much less insufferable model who waited impatiently and amatively in the wings.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that Hitchcock picture that came out last year: Strangers on a Train,” said Bob. “How convenient it would be to find some stranger to do in the little woman. Now just what if the stranger you happen to meet ends up being your very own identical twin brother? What an additional convenience that would be!”
“How do you mean?” asked Charlie, digging his spoon into the syrup-glazed mound that was his butterscotch sundae. “I mean, how’s that going to work—the stranger I get to kill my wife looks just like me? Would you consider this one of your better ideas?”
“Wait, hear me out. Say, let’s blow this place. Where are you staying?”
“The Brown Palace.”
“Good. We’ll go there. I’m at a bedbug motor court on 85.�
��
The two men went to the Brown Palace. They held up in Charlie’s room in the company of a fellow named Jack Daniel who had long been a friend to them both.
For the first three hours of that long, sleepless night, the men traded stories from their own lives—from the life of the twin who was the shrewd and calculating businessman with hopes of some day taking over his uncle’s construction supply house, and from the life of the artist with a camera who created works of beauty on Kodak paper when he wasn’t taking incriminating snapshots of adulterous spouses and their future divorce court corespondents.
The rest of the night was spent plotting the murders of the women who held them back—the women who carped and whined and pinioned their husbands unmercifully.
Because what had started out as mere whim had, in that long night, transformed itself first into distinct possibility and then into glorious reality.
The key element in the planning was the creation of high-profile, indisputable alibis for each of the two brothers. Just as it was proposed by the character of Bruno in Strangers on a Train, each man would be committing the other man’s murder. (Under some sort of disguise, of course, bowing to the slim possibility that one or both of the brothers might be seen going to or coming from the scene of the crime.) But here was the beauty of the entire setup: each brother would be quite some distance from his wife at the time of her murder, with a perfectly engineered and strongly corroborative alibi.
It seemed like a perfect plan. All of their adopted parents were dead. No one else knew of their true biological origins. Charlie’s friends and relatives were as ignorant of his roots as he had been. Bob was certain that his younger sisters in Philadelphia had never been told about Charlie. Why should they have been? Bob’s mother hadn’t seemed all that eager to tell him, and the confession had come almost as an afterthought from her deathbed. (“Be good to your sisters, don’t spend your inheritance all in one place, and, oh, you’re adopted.”)
Charlie’s alibi was this: a birthday party for a country club chum. It was a party which Charlie’s wife Edna had no desire to attend. She loathed the man. She even hated his parvenu wife. The to-do was scheduled for Friday night, March 28, at the country club. The murder (strangulation was thought best; Edna had a pencil-thin neck that wouldn’t take much torque to successfully wring) would take place during the party. At least thirty people who knew Charlie would see him there at the time of the murder.
Knowing that in spite of the soundness of the alibi there might be need by the police authorities to keep Charlie from leaving town for a few days (even suspects with rock-solid alibis can remain persons of interest), Bob would have to wait until sometime in the summer to have his own wife, Mitzi, cross-dispatched by his brother. There was simply no way to commit the murders simultaneously or even within a few days of each another, and Bob lost the draw.
The first murder went off without a hitch.
As predicted, the air had cleared by midsummer. In fact, by the date of Bob’s own agreed-upon alibi event, the 1952 All-Star Game at Shibe Stadium—a game that Bob was set to attend with several of his baseball buddies, some of whom had yet to see Jackie Robinson play—the air had cleared quite nicely. Thanks to Bob’s inspired decision to open a box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes over his murder victim’s head, police psychologists rapturously surmised that Edna’s strangler was signaling his intent to kill again and again. Cereal killer—therefore—serial killer.
On July 8 in Philadelphia, it rained off and on. Bob sat in the sodden stadium with his sodden friends, wondering if the All-Star Game would be cancelled.
Bob was lucky. The game started late, and though it went only five innings, that was more than enough time for Charlie to slip into Bob’s row house in South Philly and slit the throat of Bob’s wife, Mitzi. And besides, regardless of the length of the game, Bob and his pals almost never went home right after their baseball outings. By custom they usually gathered at some agreed-upon drinkery and wet their collective whistles with a couple rounds of beers first. As Bob was listening to his buddies argue the merits and demerits of various Philadelphia-area saloons, the conversation taking place in the middle of the torrent that would eventually put an asterisk next to this particular All-Star Game in the stat books, he couldn’t help smiling. To think that it was now done. Bob and his brother Charlie, having successfully deconcatenated their respective balls and chains, were now free to marry the women they were always meant to wed. For Charlie, this meant the shapely bookkeeper for his company, and for Bob, a fellow artistic free spirit with a penchant for bedroom acrobatics.
At least this is the way it was supposed to go.
Bob kept smiling. And then in that next instant, he stopped smiling. Few of the All-Star fans had left the stadium. Most were waiting for the rain to let up a little before trooping out to their cars. Like Bob and his baseball buddies, people stood huddled in small groups under awnings and overhangs. One man in Bob’s line of vision stood alone. His look was familiar—frighteningly familiar. Because he looked exactly like Bob. And, by natural extension, Charlie.
“Double cross” was the first thing that insinuated itself into Bob’s thoughts. That he had held up his end of the bargain while his brother had reneged. And reneged in a big way. And for what reason? Blackmail? Bob had no money. It was Charlie who had the fat income, the country club membership, the big house in Riverdale. (Bob knew the house well. He’d strangled his sister-in-law in the largest of its four bedrooms.)
With rising anger, Bob Fletcher stepped away from his rain-drenched companions. He pushed past all the people who stood between him and the object of his ire. The man noticed Bob coming toward him. He smiled. He smiled in the same way that Charlie had smiled when the two brothers first discussed the possibility of ridding themselves of their unwanted marital appendages.
But that man wasn’t Charlie.
The man who wasn’t Charlie was still smiling as Bob reached him and grabbed him roughly by the arm. “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Where am I supposed to be?” asked the man, his smile dissolving into a look of genuine perplexity.
“Did you do it? Or did you come here to tell me you couldn’t do it? Answer me!”
The man didn’t seem to know what to say. He looked at Bob, disconcerted, helpless.
Bob seemed equally helpless. “I beg you. Go. Get out of here.”
The man, as if wishing to be accommodating, took a step back, and then another, but had he wished to leave, circumstances would not have allowed it. Because at that moment Bob’s friends joined him, and one in that group did not hesitate to exclaim, “Bob, you ol’ son of a bitch—you never told us you had a brother.”
“A twin brother!” marveled another.
“He isn’t my twin brother,” said Bob, all color having left his face.
“He’s right,” said the man. “We aren’t twins. We’re part of a trio. Triplets.” And turning to Bob: “Have you met up with our other brother yet? My adopted mother told me I was one of three. I never quite believed her until today.”
I know this story well, because I am that third brother. I didn’t want to speak of myself in the first person until now, so as not to spoil the ending of the story. And of course, to be fair, the logical ending to this story should include my attendance at the executions of my two brothers for the insensate, cold-blooded crisscross murders of their respective sisters-in-law. But as I write this, two years after my chance meeting with my triplet brother Bob at Shibe Stadium (I can still hear the crack of the bat that sent Jackie Robinson around the bases), my brothers’ convictions are still working their way through the appeals process. So they’re both still very much alive. And I get to pay them visits every now and then. That is, when my wife lets me out of the house. Should I tell you about that smothering, nagging shrew? Oh, please don’t make me.
1953
PHARISAICAL IN WYOMING
Everybody laughs when Billy Sherman, the de
ntist’s boy, nudges his friend, one of the Hollis twins—I think it’s Casper, although it could have been Jasper—and points to one of the Abernethy ranch hands who are in town on some errand or another for his employer and goes, “Shane! Come back!”
Shane has just opened at the town picture show and everybody just has to see it because it’s set on the high plains over by Jackson Hole, though somebody said most of the movie was actually shot in California—which isn’t anywhere near Wyoming. Anyway, it has Jean Arthur in it and Cornelius (that’s my dad) likes Jean Arthur, and so Cornelius and I have seen it twice already, which means that Cornelius laughs harder at Billy’s little Shane funny than anybody else.
It’s Cornelius and me and the two boys and Mrs. Sherman and Mr. Reese, who has the sugar beet farm south of town, and then a uranium man I don’t know, and an evangelist who’s in town for a tent show that nobody’s been going to, because Riverton folks don’t much go in for Bible thumping and holy rolling.
The evangelist’s name is Proctor.
So it’s all of us standing in line at the Riverton Bank and Trust, and two tellers in their cages, and Mr. Lanell, the bank manager, and Mr. Lanell’s secretary, Miss Philpot, and the security guard whose real name I don’t know, because most everybody just calls him Pops.
It’s about twelve-thirty in the afternoon and everybody’s in a good mood because the weather’s started to warm up and everything’s budding and blooming, and another devil-hard Wyoming winter has been happily put out to spring pasture.
The preacher named Proctor says, “That’s a good one!” to Billy Sherman, although he was probably preaching just last night, in fact, about the “sin” in today’s “cin-ema.” Then, not to be outdone in the way of comical observations, Reverend Proctor starts singing his own version of “Shall We Gather at the River,” which starts off:
Shall we gather at the RivertonBankandTrust.
The beautiful,
The beautiful
RivertonBankandTrust.
Gather with the depositors at the RivertonBankandTrust
