“Remove your hat.”
Farr took it off.
“Come to the point,” said the sergeant, scratching his nose.
Farr at last confessed to a crime.
“Such as what?” said the sergeant.
Farr’s lips twitched and assumed odd shapes. “I killed somebody.”
“Who, for instance?”
“My father.”
The sergeant’s incredulous look vanished. “Ah, that’s too bad.”
He wrote Farr’s name down in a large ledger, blotted it, and told him to wait on a bench by the wall.
“I got to locate a detective to talk to you, but as it happens nobody’s around just now. You picked suppertime to come in.”
Farr sat on the bench with his hat on. After a while a heavyset man came through the door, carrying a paper bag and a pint container of coffee.
“Say, Wolff,” called the sergeant.
Wolff slowly turned around. He had broad, bent shoulders and a thick mustache. His large black hat was broad-brimmed.
The sergeant pointed his pen at Farr. “A confession of murder.”
Wolff’s eyebrows went up slightly. “Where’s Burns or Newman?”
“Supper. You’re the only one that’s around right now.”
The detective glanced uneasily at Farr. “Come on,” he said.
Farr got up and followed him. The detective walked heavily up the wooden stairs. Halfway up he stopped, sighed inaudibly, and went up more slowly.
“Hold this,” he said at the top of the stairs.
Farr held the bag of food and the coffee. The hot container warmed his cold hand. Wolff unlocked a door with a key, then took his supper from Farr, and they went inside. The church bell in the neighborhood bonged seven times.
Wolff routinely frisked Farr. He sat down heavily at his desk, tore open the paper bag, and unwrapped his food. He had three meat-andcheese sandwiches and a paper dish of cabbage salad which he ate with a small plastic fork that annoyed him. As he was eating he remembered the coffee and twisted the top off the container. His hand shook a little as he poured the steaming coffee into a white cup without a handle.
He ate with his hat on. Farr held his in his lap. He enjoyed the warmth of the room and the peaceful sight of someone eating.
“My first square today,” said Wolff. “Busy from morning.”
Farr nodded.
“One thing after another.”
“I know.”
Wolff, as he ate, kept his eyes fastened on Farr. “Take your coat off. It’s hot here.”
“No, thanks.” He was now sorry he had come.
The detective finished up quickly. He rolled the papers on his desk and what remained of the food into a ball and dumped it into the wastebasket. Then he got up and washed his hands in a closet sink. At his desk he lit a cigar, puffed with pleasure two or three times, put it to the side in an ashtray, and said, “What’s this confession?”
Although Farr struggled with himself to speak, he couldn’t.
Wolff grew restless. “Murder, did somebody say?”
Farr sighed deeply.
“Your mother?” Wolff asked sympathetically.
“No, my father.”
“Oh ho,” said Wolff.
Farr gazed at the floor.
The detective opened a black pocket notebook and found a pencil stub.
“Name?” he said.
“You mean mine?” asked Farr.
“Yours—who else?”
“My father’s.”
“First yours.”
“Farr, Edward.”
“His?”
“Herman J. Farr.”
“Age of victim?”
Farr tried to think. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know your own father’s age?”
“No.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine, going on thirty.”
“That you know?”
Farr didn’t answer.
Wolff wrote down something in the book.
“What was his occupation?”
“Upholsterer.”
“And yours?”
“None,” Farr said, in embarrassment.
“Unemployed?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your regular work?”
“I have none in particular.”
“A jack of all trades.” Wolff broke the ash off in the tray and took another puff of the cigar. “Address?”
“80 South Second.”
“Your father too?”
“Yes.”
“That where the body is?”
Farr nodded absently.
The detective then slipped the notebook into his pocket.
“What did you use to kill him with?”
Farr paused, wet his dry lips, and said, “A blunt instrument.”
“You don’t say? What kind of a blunt instrument?”
“A window sash weight.”
“What’d you do with it?”
“I hid it.”
“Whereabouts?”
“In the cellar where we live.”
Wolff carefully tapped his cigar out in the ashtray and leaned forward. “So tell me,” he said, “why does a man kill his father?”
Alarmed, Farr half rose from his chair.
“Sit down,” said the detective.
Farr sat down.
“I asked you why did you kill him?”
Farr gnawed on his lip till it bled.
“Come on, come on,” said Wolff, “we have to have the motive.”
“I don’t know.”
“Who then should know—I?”
Farr tried frantically to think why. Because he had had nothing in his life and what he had done was a way of having something?
“What did you do it for, I said,” Wolff asked sternly.
“I had to—” Farr had risen.
“What do you mean ‘had to’?”
“I had no love for him. He ruined my life.”
“Is that a reason to kill your father?”
“Yes,” Farr shouted. “For that and everything else.”
“What else?”
“Leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m an unhappy man?”
Wolff sat back in his chair. “You don’t say.”
“Sarcasm won’t get you anyplace,” Farr cried angrily. “Be humble with suffering people.”
“I don’t need any advice on how to run my profession.”
“Try to remember a man is not a beast.” Trembling, Farr resumed his seat.
“Are you a man?” Wolff asked slyly.
“No, I have failed.”
“Then you are a beast?”
“Insofar as I am not a man.”
They stared at each other. Wolff flattened his mustache with his fingertips. Suddenly he opened his drawer and took out a picture.
“Do you recognize this woman?”
Farr stared at the wrinkled face of an old crone. “No.”
“She was raped and murdered on the top floor of an apartment house in your neighborhood.”
Farr covered his ears with his hands.
The detective laid the picture back in the drawer. He fished out another.
“Here’s a boy aged about six or seven. He was brutally stabbed to death in an empty lot on South Eighth. Did you ever see him before?”
He thrust the picture close to Farr’s face.
When Farr looked into the boy’s innocent eyes he burst into tears.
Wolff put the picture away. He pulled on the dead cigar, then examined it and threw it away.
“Come on,” he said, tiredly rising.
The cellar was full of violent presences. Farr went fearfully down the steps.
Wolff flashed his light on the crisscrossed pipes overhead. “Which one?”
Farr pointed.
The detective brushed aside some cobwebs and felt along the pipe with his fingers. He found the loose asbestos and from the wool inside p
lucked forth the sash weight.
Farr audibly sucked in his breath.
In the yellow glow of the hall lamp upstairs the detective took the sash weight out of the bag and examined it. Farr shut his eyes.
“What floor do you live on?”
“Fourth.”
Wolff looked up uneasily. They trudged up the stairs, Farr leading.
“Not so fast,” said Wolff.
Farr slowed down. As they passed the third-floor window he looked out to sea, but all was dark. On the next floor he stopped before a warped door with a top panel of frosted glass.
“Inhere,” Farr said at last.
“Have you got the key?”
Farr turned the knob and the door fell open, bumping loudly against the wall. The corridor to the kitchen was black. The detective’s light pierced it, lighting up a wooden table and two wooden chairs.
“Go on in.”
“I’m afraid,” whispered Farr.
“Go on, I said.”
He stepped reluctantly forward.
“Where is he?” said the detective.
“In the bedroom.” He spoke hoarsely.
“Show me.”
Farr led him through a small windowless room containing a cot and some books and magazines on the floor. Wolff’s light shone on him.
“In there.” Farr pointed to the door.
“Open it.”
“No”
“Open, I said.”
“For godsake, don’t make me.”
“Open.”
Farr thought quickly: in the dark there he would upset the detective and make a hasty escape into the street.
“For the last time, I said open.”
Farr pushed the door and it squeaked open on its hinges. The long, narrow bedroom was heavy with darkness. Wolff’s light hit the metal headboard of an old double bed, sunken in the middle.
A groan rose from the bed. Farr groaned too, his hair on end.
“Murder,” said the groan, “terrible, terrible.”
A white bloodless face rose into the light, old and staring.
“Who’s there?” cried Wolff.
“Oh, my dreams, my dreams,” wept the old man, “I dreamed I was bein murdered.”
Flinging aside the worn quilt, he slid out of bed and hopped in bare feet on the cold floor, skinny in his long underwear. He groped toward them.
Farr whispered wild things to himself.
The detective found the light chain and pulled it.
The old man saw the stranger in the room. “And who are you, might I ask?”
“Theodore Wolff, detective from the Sixty-second Precinct.” He flashed his shield.
Herman Farr blinked in surprise and shame. He hastily got into the pants that had been draped across a chair and, stepping into misshapen slippers, raised suspenders over his shoulders.
“I must’ve overslept my nap. I usually have supper cookin at six and we eat half past six, him and I.” He suddenly asked, “What are you doin here if you’re a detective?”
“I came here with your son.”
“He didn’t do anything wrong?” asked the old man, frightened.
“I don’t know. That’s what I came to find out.”
“Come into the kitchen,” said Herman Farr. “The light’s better.”
They went into the kitchen. Herman Farr got a third chair from the bedroom and they sat around the wooden table, Farr waxen and fatigued, his father gaunt and bony-faced, with loose skin sprouting gray stubble, and on the long side of the table, the heavyset Wolff, wearing his black hat.
“Where are my glasses?” complained Herman Farr. He got up and found them on a shelf above the gas stove. The lenses were thick and magnified his watery eyes.
“Until now I couldn’t tell the nature of your face,” he said to the detective.
Wolff grunted.
“Now what’s the trouble here?” said Herman Farr, staring at his son.
Farr sneered at him.
The detective removed the sash weight from the paper bag and laid it on the table. Farr gazed at it as if it were a snake uncoiling.
“Ever see this before?”
Herman Farr stared stupidly at the sash weight, one hand clawing the back of the other.
“Where’d you get it?” he cried in a quavering voice.
“Answer my question first.”
“Yes. It belongs to me, though I wish to Christ I had never seen it.”
“It’s yours?” said Wolff.
“That’s right. I had it hid in my trunk.”
“What’s this stain on it here?”
Farr gazed in fascination where the detective pointed.
Herman Farr said he didn’t know.
“It’s a bloodstain,” Wolff said.
“Ah, so it is,” sighed Herman Farr, his mouth trembling. “I’ll tell you the truth. My wife—may God rest her soul—once tried to hit me with it.”
Farr laughed out loud.
“Is this your blood?” asked Wolff.
“No, by the livin mercy. It’s hers.”
They were all astonished.
“Are you telling the truth?” said Wolff sternly.
“I’d give my soul if I only wasn’t.”
“Did you hit her with it?”
Herman Farr lifted his glasses and with a clotted yellow handkerchief wiped the tears from his flowing eyes.
“A sin is never lost. Once, in a drunken fit, enraged as I was by my long-lastin poverty, I swung it at her and opened a wound on her head. The blood is hers. I could never blame her for wantin to kill me with it. She tried it one night when I was at my supper, but the thing fell out of her hand and smashed the plate. I nearly jumped out of my shoes. Seein it fall I realized the extent of my wickedness and kept the sash weight hid away at the bottom of my trunk as a memory of my sins.”
Wolff scratched a match under the table, paused, and shook it out. Farr smoked the last cigarette in his crushed pack. The old man wept into his dirty handkerchief.
“I have deserved a violent endin of my life if anybody ever did. In my younger days I was a beast—cruel, and a weaklin. I treated them both very badly.” He nodded to Farr. “As he more than once said it, I killed her a little every day. Many times—may the livin God keep torturin me for it—I beat her black and blue, once bloodyin her nose on a frosty morning when she complained of the cold, and another time pushin her down a flight of stairs. As for him, I more than once skinned his back with my belt buckle.”
Farr crushed his cigarette and snapped it into the sink.
Wolff then lit a cigar and puffed slowly.
The old man wept openly. “This young man is the livin witness of my terrible deeds, but he don’t know half the depths of my sufferin since that poor soul left this world, or the terrible nature of my nightly dreams.”
“When did she die?” the detective asked.
“Sixteen years ago, and he has never forgiven me, carryin his hatred like a fire in his heart, although she, good soul, forgave me in his presence at the time of her last illness. ‘Herman,’ she said, ‘I’m goin to a place where I would be ill at ease if I didn’t forgive you,’ and with that she went to her peace. But my son has hated me throughout the years, and I can’t look at him without seein it in his eyes. ‘Tis true, he has sometimes been kind to a helpless old man, and when my arthritis was so bad that I couldn’t move, he more than once brought a plate of soup to my bed and fed me with a spoon, but in the depths of his soul my change has made no difference to him and he hates me now as he did then, though I’ve repented on sore knees a thousand times. I have often said to him, 4What’s done is done, and judge me for what I have since become’—for he is an intelligent man and reads books you and I never heard of—but on this thing he won’t yield or be reasoned with.”
“Did he ever try to hurt you?”
“No more than to nag or snarl at me. No, for all he does nowadays is to sit alone in his room and read and reflect, although his learnin doesn
’t in the least unbend his mind to me. Of course I don’t approve him givin up his job, because with these puffed and crippled hands I am lucky when I can work half time, but there are all sorts in the world and some have greater need for reflection than others. He has been inclined in that direction since he was a lad, although I did not notice his quiet and solitary ways until after he had returned from the army.”
“What did he do then?” said Wolff.
“He worked for a year at his old job, then gave it up and became a hospital orderly. But he couldn’t stand it long and he quit and stayed home.”
Farr looked out the dark fire-escape window and saw himself walking along the dreary edge of a desolate beach, the wind wailing at his feet, driftwood taking on frightening shapes, and his footsteps fading behind, to appear on the ground before him as he walked along the vast, silent shore …
Wolff rubbed the cigar out against the sole of his shoe. “You want to know why I’m here?” he said to Herman Farr.
“Yes.”
“He came to the station house around suppertime and made a statement that he had murdered you with this sash weight.”
The old man groaned. “Not that I don’t deserve the fate.”
“He thought he actually did it,” Wolff said.
“It’s his overactive imagination on account of not gettin any exercise to speak of. I’ve told him that many times but he don’t listen to what I say. I can’t describe to you the things he talks about in his sleep. Many a night they keep me awake.”
“Do you see this sash weight?” Wolff asked Farr.
“I do,” he said, with eyes shut.
“Do you still maintain that you hit or attempted to hit your father with it?”
Farr stared rigidly at the wall. He thought, If I answer I’ll go crazy. I mustn’t. I mustn’t
“He thinks he did,” Wolff said. “You can see he’s insane.”
Herman Farr cried out as though he had been stabbed in the throat.
Farr shouted, “What about that boy I killed? You showed me his picture.”
“That boy was my son,” Wolff said. “He died ten years ago of terrible sickness.”
Farr rose and thrust forth his wrists.
The detective shook his head. “No cuffs. We’ll just call the ambulance.”
Farr wildly swung his fist, catching the detective on the jaw. Wolff’s chair toppled and he fell heavily to the floor. Amid the confusion and shouting by Herman Farr that he was the one who deserved hanging, Farr fled down the ill-lighted stairs with murder in his heart. In the street he flung his coins into the sky.
The Complete Stories Page 14
