by Packer, Vin
“Sir?”
Joseph looked down at a young boy with a bag of newspapers over his shoulder. “Is anything wrong, sir?”
Joseph saw the church across the street, the bulletin board lighted up; but he had left his glasses back in the Y on the bureau. He was too far away to read the words; now he felt too weak to cross the street.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he told the boy, “but do me a favour, son?”
“Yessir, if I can. Are you sick?”
“No. I just wondered what that sign says in the church yard.”
“The whole thing?” “What does it say?”
“Well, it says: ‘Consider those O Lord who art not with thee. Christmas Services at 10:00 a.m.'.”
“Then I saw only parts of that sign,” said Joseph. “Sir?”
“Thank you. You see, I couldn’t see the whole thing from my room.”
“Is that all? Are you all right?” “Yes, thank you.”
So he had seen only one side of the bulletin board, and that, in parts, distorting it. Even the one clear side he could see was distorted. Had he also only seen one side of the whole mess he was involved in, and not even that too well? There was always too much to see, but when one saw it all put together like a jigsaw puzzle, the truth was so elementary and obvious and simple, one could feel little else but amazement that it had ever become so complex. Was that right? And if Joseph, by some magic, could see the full screen of events, summed up in some simple shot of his life, wouldn’t it be of him standing there with the rope in his hand, about to strangle Billy Duncan? Billy Duncan had always been there in the shadows at his side; he knew him as well as he knew his own soul. Hadn’t he always known that one day he would have to strangle Billy Duncan?
Laughter? Joseph leaned against the tree listening. He shut his eyes and suddenly he could see Louis. It was Louis laughing at him. It was Louis with a glass in his hand, toasting Joseph. “Thanks, Joe, for doing my murder for me. I told you once we were a lot alike.”
“No,” Joseph said in the darkness. He opened his eyes. “It was my murder,” he whispered.
He could see his own breath in the winter’s night. “Mine,” he said softly.
“Mine!” Louis’ voice teased in his mind. “You were just my murder tool, Joe.”
Chapter Nineteen
Captain Plant put out his Cigarillo stub, grinding it into the violet-coloured ceramic leaf. “Every year,” he said, “there’s some nut who confesses to a crime he didn’t do.”
Captain McGraw, from Trenton, played with the edges of the lace antimacassar on the davenport. “It’s psychological,” he said.
“That’s right,” said Plant. “It’s psychological.”
Muriel Duncan was cleaning her glasses on the corner of her housedress, standing by the television, which was on, with the sound turned down. She said, “Well, I was about to die last night! I mean, holy cow, he just says, ‘My name is Joseph Meaker, Muriel.’ Right away he calls me by my first name, like we was first cousins. ‘My name is Joseph Meaker,’ he says, ‘and I’m sorry to tell you I’m your husband’s murderer.’ Jeez!” She shook her head, and her face screwed up as though she were about to cry again. “I was — ”
“Try to get a hold of yourself, Mrs. Duncan,” McGraw said. “I know it’s hard, at a time like this, but it’s very important. Can I get you some coffee or a glass of water?”
“I’d sure like a can of beer from the refrigerator. I mean, I don’t drink in the morning or anything, but this morning — ”
“You don’t have to apologize, Mrs. Duncan. You’ve been through a terrible strain. I’ll get you a can of beer.” McGraw got up and went to the kitchen.
Mrs. Duncan drew a deep breath, then put on her glasses in a careful way, sniffed once or twice and held her hands tightly in front of her. “You see, Captain,” she said, “I just don’t know whether or not I can talk to him. Do I have to talk to him?”
“We’d appreciate it very, very much.”
“But if he’s a nut, what does it matter what he says?”
“Mrs. Duncan, his insistence over the telephone last night that Dr. Hart had nothing to do with this, might tip us off to something about Hart we don’t know. I guess you know we don’t believe Hart’s story.”
“Yes, I do. I liked the doctor.”
“He’s a very personable fellow, Mrs. Duncan, but many murderers are. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to use that word. I realize it doesn’t give you much hope for seeing your husband again, but I’m afraid we all have to start facing facts, Mrs. Duncan.”
“Why couldn’t this Meaker have done it? That’s what I don’t get.”
“For one thing, Mrs. Duncan, he had no connection with your husband, and Dr. Hart did. For another, we were already aware of the fact Meaker was sort of an oddball. He was mad at Hart because he thought Hart killed his pet cat. Like Captain McGraw says, it’s psychological. Hard to explain. We talked to Mrs. Meaker this morning at her office. She said her husband was having a nervous breakdown.”
Muriel Duncan sat down in the rocking chair before the television set, twisting a wet handkerchief in her hands. “But how can you believe anything he says then?”
“Maybe we can’t, Mrs. Duncan. Then again, maybe something — some one thing he says to you, will break this case wide open. Now, he says he knows where your husband’s body is buried. I’m sorry, Mrs. Duncan, I have to talk this way.”
She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. “I know you do. It’s all right. I says to him when he says that, ‘Why don’t you tell the police?’ I says, and he says, ‘Oh, they’ll find out soon enough,’ he says.”
“Yes, I remember your telling me that, Mrs. Duncan. You see, he can talk to you, but not to us, I guess. That’s why we’re not going to just put him under arrest and take him for questioning. We don’t want Meaker, Mrs. Duncan. We want Hart. And in order to get anything on him, we’ll have to listen to all sorts of nuts probably. This time though, we need your help.”
McGraw appeared with a can of beer for her. “I couldn’t find a glass.”
“No, I never use a glass. Billy taught me that. Tastes better straight out of the can. You want any?”
“No,” McGraw said; and Plant shook his head. He looked at his watch. “Should be along any minute now. I’m going to dump this ashtray and get rid of my gloves over here. Mrs. Duncan, you should act just as you would on any morning, like you were watching TV and having a beer.”
“I don’t drink in the morning. I don’t ever. It’s just that this morning, I need this beer.”
“Last night he said something about the kids, didn’t he, Mrs. Duncan?” McGraw said.
“He says probably, he says — ” She was starting to cry again.
“He said probably you’d want to remarry, because you had all those kids, wasn’t that it?” “Yes.”
“Yes. Well now, the idea is to get him to talk, see? He’s got to feel easy, see? Now, he might notice the kids aren’t around. You just tell him you sent them to your mother’s for the day.”
“That’s the truth. I won’t get mixed-up if I tell the truth.”
“That’s right. And there’s no need to be afraid. These nuts who run around confessing to other people’s crimes, they never make trouble, Mrs. Duncan. He wouldn’t make trouble.”
“I seen some on television just scare me looking at them.”
“Well, that’s television. This fellow is a scholar!”
“My husband used to say I was. I had this year at business school. He says, ‘Well, Dr. Einstein, what’s for supper tonight? Alphabet soup?’ “ She gave a little laugh which exploded into a sob, and McGraw and Plant exchanged worried looks.
Captain Plant said, “All the while he’s here, ma’am, think of it as something you have to do for your husband. Will you do that?”
“Yes. I really will. After the telephone call last night, I says to myself, you got locks on the doors and the police are on the way, and you’re scared, Muriel D
uncan, and here Billy went off to war and he didn’t have nothing, just a gun with all those bombs going off. I says to myself, if you can’t be brave once in your life, what good are you anyway? Yes, I’ll try.”
“Anything he says about Hart, you lead him on, all right?”
“Yes.”
“All we have to do now is wait,” Captain Plant said.
2
The snowstorm last night was a piece of luck. Maggie must have stayed in the city because of it, so that when Joseph walked to the train station that morning, he found the car still there. He had thought he might have to get a cab to Lambertville, but he went instead in his own car, and the roads were not half as bad as he had expected them to be. By now, the police were probably well ensconced in Muriel Duncan’s house, waiting for him to appear. He wondered if they would stay hidden while he talked with her, or nab him the moment he came through the door. It was the chance he had to take. He hoped they would give him time to sit there on the davenport with the white lace antimacassars, and tell Muriel Duncan quite simply how it had all come about. He had stayed awake last night trying to plan the way he would tell her, so she would understand. It was important for her to understand, just as important as it would be for Maggie to understand, if it had been Duncan who had killed Joseph.
If the police were to grab him as he stepped inside the Duncan house, well, it would be a sort of proper homecoming. Perhaps he did not deserve a chance to tell Muriel Duncan the whole story. Instead, he would have to tell the police, in some cold-feeling room, sparsely furnished, official-looking, their faces watching him as he spoke, faces that practised no show of emotion, blank, casual — “And then, Mr. Meaker? Did you bury him then?” No, he didn’t want it to be that way. He wanted to watch a real face, wanted to see it take in his words and register their meaning, wanted to see it show surprise, sympathy, the beginnings of knowledge. In a way, Joseph Meaker wanted to teach that morning, to teach by telling everything that had come to him under the tree, down from the Y, in Trenton, New Jersey.
If it went well for him (And wasn’t the car being at the station a good omen? Wasn’t the fact that the roads were clear, a good omen?) the newspapers would tell the story. How would Louis Hart feel then? Oh yes, victorious, free, but perhaps slightly let down too? It was all Joseph’s murder, like the legendary bullet that hit the certain soldier of war, Joseph’s name was on this murder. He had been going in the direction of it all his life. He had been neither tricked into it, nor had he stumbled into it; it may as well have been meticulously planned for all the years he could reason. There was a certain sadness attached to the fact he had not always recognized that person beside him in the shadows, but how many people in life at least saw once, face to face, their shadow partner, and grappled with him? Not Louis, certainly — Louis had ahead of him years of misery; well, didn’t most people? Joseph’s life was complete; it had gone a full circle exactly. Wasn’t there a beauty in that? For most people, life was going around and around in circles. Joseph had read a poem once about that; he remembered that it ended: “… and the secret sits in the middle and knows.”
At the white wooden bungalow on Landers Lane in Lambertville, Joseph pulled the Consul to the kerb. Not a sign of a police car anywhere. He smiled. Were they inside behind the curtains with drawn guns? He got out, straightened his tie, and walked up the winding slate-stone path. There was a pink wooden crane stuck into the ground near bushes by the doorstep. Joseph shook his head. Well, that was what he had been spared in life — pink wooden cranes; one never saw the decor in one’s shadows, that was something to be thankful for!
He punched the bell three times fast, then waited for this woman who could well have been his wife, had fate pushed him a little this way, a little that.
She appeared then behind the storm door, her glasses mixing in with the glint from the glass windows which the noon sun struck.
“I’m Joseph Meaker,” he said when she opened the storm door.
“Come in.”
He wiped off his feet on the doormat, which had a green turtle woven into it. He was spared a green turtle as well as a pink crane; there were many things to be thankful for, yes. He was spared many, many things. A tin umbrella stand painted gold with FOR A RAINY DAY embossed across it; a china duck with a cactus plant for a tail; Reader’s Digest on the end table on top of a copy of the official American Legion Magazine; a large black satin pillow with gold tassels hanging off it, CAMP CROWDER embroidered on it in orange; and then — then the antimacassars. He sat down on the davenport.
“Antimacassars,” he said. “Do you know why they’re called that, Muriel?”
She was turning off the television set. (“Keep your television set on,” the police must have said, “make believe it’s like any other day.”) She did not look him in the eye, but kept her eyes down on the rug. Spared: one rug, brown and gold, with kittens tangled in yarn woven into the pattern.
“They’re called antimacassars because men used to wear an oily hair tonic called Macassar. It left stains on the furniture. Thus, antimacassar.” He smiled at her, but she turned her eyes away from his, and sat in the rocking chair twisting her handkerchief.
So he was not going to be nabbed right away! Good!
“Muriel,” he said, “I’m very much like your husband. You don’t realize that, do you?”
“No.” Barely a whisper.
“No. I didn’t realize it for the longest time myself. A lifetime, as a matter of fact. A lifetime. Oh, you should have known me only a few months ago, before I knew myself. I was a very tense person. People thought I was shy, reclusive, do you understand? I was very tense. My wife used to say I was always holding myself in.”
“Did you come here to tell me that?” Joseph wished she would not be so nervous, twisting that handkerchief in knots. He wished he could make her feel at ease.
He said, “No. I came here to tell you that Louis Hart is innocent.”
“How do you know Dr. Hart is innocent?” She was barely able to talk. Joseph felt sorry for her. Those glasses would never do either. She would have to pull herself together, if she were to marry again.
“I told you last night. I murdered your husband.” He saw her tighten up, her back went rigid, and the veins in her arms stood out as she clenched her hands together. “Muriel, listen, in a way Billy and I were brothers! He was the same kind I was! Was, I mean I’m not — ”
She interrupted him. “What about Louis Hart? Dr. Hart?”
“Him! He wanted to murder your husband, I think. I’m not sure, but I think he did. I didn’t think so until last night. Last night everything was very clear to me. Did you ever have a moment of absolute lucidity, Muriel? When everything was clear?”
But she was simply not interested. That was the crazy part; she was simply not interested in what Joseph had to say.
She said, “Why would Louis Hart want to kill my husband?”
“They had a fight in Danboro, didn’t they?” “Do you know about it?”
“Muriel, I’m the murderer, not Louis Hart. Aren’t you interested in me?”
“I just wondered what the fight was about? Between Dr. Hart and Billy?”
“Oh, God knows, Muriel, what that was about! Probably more of Louis’ theories about this and that! I think he told Billy to park his car out in the patients’ parking lot, that’s the way I see it. As I reconstruct it, Billy was worried about this pheasant he lost, you see? And he wanted a safe place to park his car.”
Muriel Duncan said, “How did you know about the pheasant?”
“I took it from his car.”
“I remember now,” said Muriel Duncan. “He told me someone took his pheasant! I remember him saying that Saturday morning. He says, ‘Someone stole my pheasant, Mure. Someone stole my pheasant.’”
“Sure,” Joseph smiled. “That was me.”
“You took his pheasant?”
“Sure. And I murdered him Monday morning, Muriel. I suppose Louis is getting credit for t
aking the pheasant too. No, that was me. Billy’s buried right by that pheasant, Muriel. I buried him with his deer — ” but Muriel was weeping now, very loudly, her head down in her hands. Joseph got up off the davenport to go across to her, and then the policemen appeared.
Joseph said, “Good morning, Officers.”
“Good morning, Meaker,” one said. A New Jersey policeman. The other was from Pennsylvania.
Muriel was being led from the room by the New Jersey policeman. “I remember about the pheasant now,” she was crying. “Billy said, ‘Mure, someone stole my pheasant!’ “ The New Jersey policeman was calming her, and the other policeman was taking some cellophane off a Cigarillo.
He said to Joseph, “I’m Captain Plant from Doylestown.”
“How do you do?”
“You don’t seem very surprised, Meaker.”
“I knew you were there.”
“So you’re Billy Duncan’s murderer, hmmm?”
“Yes. He’s under the woodpile, out behind my house.”
“Uh-huh. Sure, Meaker.” Captain Plant smiled pleasantly, sucked on his Cigarillo and regarded Joseph with an amused expression.
Joseph shook his head sadly. “Captain, do you think I’m out of my mind?”
“Do you think you are, Meaker?”
“Not out of it, in it, in a sense. In it, for the first time!”
“Well, Meaker, you can come along with us and we’ll have a long chat about it.”
“All right.”
“McGraw, I’ll wait out in the car with him. I’ll bring it around out front.”
McGraw walked back into the room. “Why don’t you take him in? I’ll stay here with her until we get someone else over here. She’s afraid, I think. Is someone picking up Hart?”
“Yes.” Captain Plant knocked an ash from his Cigarillo into a plastic ashtray, shaped like a top hat.
“What has Louis got to do with this any more?” said Joseph. “You mean she’s still afraid of Louis?”
The police officers ignored him. They were talking together now, leaving him to stand there in the middle of the living room, unguarded.
