And it hit me that she had told me to kill him this afternoon. And had that been in the back of my mind when I went to see him? Had I killed him because I actually wanted to? The money would be mine now—he wasn’t married yet, he had no will, I was his closest living relative. I realized just how much trouble I was in, because nobody would believe it was an accident now, even if I tried to say it was. I had too good a motive. But I hadn’t meant to kill him. It had been an accident.
Vee was a whole level below me. She pushed out onto our floor, and the door had already closed behind her when I got to it, but she had to wait at our room, because I had the key. She had her arms crossed just under her breasts as though she was cold, but really she had caught an unnatural case of modesty. She shoved me aside once the door was unlocked and was at the armoire already by the time I made it into the bedroom. She took out a skirt and a blouse and flung them on the bed.
“You’re really crazy, you know that? He could have killed us both. He probably will kill me. What am I to him? I’m just another whore.” She was getting dressed, not taking the time to hide her nakedness now. “He’s not so foolish to think I’m with him alone, but to have another man show up in his room. Like Samson and Delilah.” She had the skirt on now, and was zipping it up. Then she pulled it around so the zipper was in the back. “We need to get out of here.”
“Vee,” I said, and I don’t know what was in my voice, but she stopped and looked at me.
“What the hell happened to your arm?”
“Joe stabbed me with an ice pick.”
She got very calm. “You’re serious? You really killed him?”
I just nodded. I couldn’t talk then.
“S—t! S—t, s—t, s—t.”
“It was an accident.”
“Who saw you?”
I shook my head. “When?”
“When! When! Now, you idiot. Who saw you? Who’d you tell? What happened?” She started putting her blouse on, but her fingers were shaking so much as she tried to work the buttons that it took several attempts with each one.
“I don’t think anybody saw me. It was at his house. It was an accident.”
“Like anyone will believe that.”
“It was!”
“All right! Don’t yell at me about it. I believe you it was an accident. But who else will believe you!” She had her shirt mostly buttoned. Her face was bruising.
“I ran out. It was dark. I took a cab here, and I don’t know. I guess I came through the lobby.”
She gestured at my bloody arm with her head. “With that?”
“I had my jacket on.”
She paused. “Can we get back in the house? Is it locked?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Probably not. It never used to be.”
She went past me, finishing the last button and picked up the phone. “Yes, could you have Mr. Browne’s car around front please?” She paused. “Thank you, I’ll be right down.”
“What are you doing?” I said.
She picked up my jacket and pushed it at me, pushing me towards the door at the same time. “You go down the stairs and out through the back. Make sure no one sees you. Wait around the corner and I’ll be there to get you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Fix it. That’s what you wanted, didn’t you?”
“Vee, are you okay?”
Her face was purple and black, her eye had red in it. She looked like she was going to claw me. But instead, before I could say anything more, she was off to the elevators, striding away from me with all the assurance in the world.
I felt exhausted all of a sudden, and slumped against the wall. How could I get up? How could I ever walk again? My eyes closed and my head sagged. Quinn, I thought. Clotilde... Again the sight of Joe’s head flopped over on his neck came before me, and it made my stomach turn. But it got me going. I went back to the stairs, and went down, down in the fiery heat.
9.
Vee was angry. She kept her jaw set and her eyes on the road. We only spoke enough for me to give her directions. The city was asleep and we had the road to ourselves. “Are we close?” Vee said up around the train station where a handful of cabs sat out front waiting for a late train to come in.
“About halfway,” I said.
“Let me know when we’re close. We can’t park nearby.”
She was like that, all business, and I got the feeling that she wasn’t angry that I had killed Joe, not the killing itself so much, but angry at the annoyance of it. And of course she was really angry that I had gotten her in dutch with Carlton. Browne. Whatever his name was.
At the university I told her we were nearby and she pulled off on 34th Street, went over to Caroline, and turned the car back south. She found a spot about midway up the block. We got out and she came around the car. “Take my arm,” she said. “We’re just coming home from a night on the town.”
I led the way and the sweat was pouring off of me again. It had been a relief of sorts when Vee took over—that is what I had wanted—but now the idea of having to go back into that house again, of having to see him again, I wasn’t sure if I could do it. Things could be that way, a place you went to every day, so often you didn’t even see it anymore, you knew every inch of it so well, a place like that and a little time goes by, or something happens...well sometimes a place that was like home could suddenly feel like the strangest place in the world. And I started to feel that way as we were walking in the dark, in the shadows of the trees along the road with the lights out in all of the houses and not a single car on the street. It started to seem like I’d never been in Underwood before, hell, like I’d never been to Calvert City before.
But I had been. I’d been there nearly every day for over a year and more besides when I was courting Quinn and then after we were married. And it wasn’t the time. It was the thing. I had better look at it because I’d have to look at it soon enough. It was Joe being dead. It was why Joe was dead.
I must have faltered in my step, because Vee’s hand on my arm tightened to where I could feel her fingertips digging into my arm through my jacket, and she kept me moving. “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “You’re going through with this now or you don’t want to know what’ll happen.”
Yeah, I was going through with it, because I had already, hadn’t I? I’d gone about as far through with it as you could, and it was my deal. The whole neighborhood looked foreign to me, but I knew right where I was going, and I’d better get there.
“Can we come up from behind the place? That would be better.”
I didn’t answer, but I took us around the block where we would come up on the side of the house near the driveway and the servants’ entrance. I didn’t know that it would be open, but when we tried the door it was unlocked.
It was dark inside, but we only needed to make our way up the stairs, and then... I was more lost in the house than I had been outside. It somehow felt as though it were expanding and contracting at the same time if you can imagine that. Like the house was the whole world, so huge I couldn’t ever hope to get through it in a hundred thousand lifetimes, but also so small that I was trapped inside, unable to move, the very walls crushing in on me, choking me, my throat, my shoulders, my chest, my heart, all of it pulling in. This wasn’t Quinn’s house. This wasn’t the place where I once walked around completely naked, the time the Hadleys were off on a cruise and Quinn and I crashed on our way to New York or from New York or somewhere anyways. This wasn’t the place where old man Hadley had put his arm around me in his office and told me that he didn’t trust me but that his daughter was sure stuck on me and so he couldn’t but give us his approval. No, this couldn’t be that house, because this was the house in which Joe and I had fought. This was where I chased him and then he tried to push me or I pushed him or, somehow I got cut, and I, or Joe, yeah, this was where it happened, so it couldn’t be that other place from long ago.
“Come on,” Vee said, pushing me from behind.
“We don’t have all night. The faster we are the better. And keep away from the windows.”
I started forward, although I don’t remember moving, and I took her into the kitchen and nothing had changed, he was lying there on the floor with his head bashed in and the ice pick near his hand. I went numb. Vee ducked down, squatting, and hissed at me, “Get down.”
I did, and I didn’t have any trouble after that. I was shut off. I was a million miles away.
“You got some blood on the floor here,” Vee said, on her hands and knees. “Wipe it up.” She went over to where his body was, and that’s all it was now, just a thing. “We’ve got to wipe the ice pick and put that back.” She looked back at me. “Well, hurry.” I must have looked confused. “Use your sleeve.” I started to reach. “No, your shirt sleeve. The one that’s already got blood on it.”
I took off my jacket, and I bent down to wipe up the spot of blood. I wouldn’t have even noticed it, it was so small. It had dried so I wet my finger with spit and then rubbed at the spot until it was gone and wiped my finger on my shirtsleeve near the cut. Vee handed back the ice pick and I did the same with that, wetting it and rubbing it on my sleeve, wetting it and rubbing. It was a tedious job and I thought, why couldn’t I just use the sink. That’s really what I was thinking. Not that I was cleaning up my blood, because I couldn’t think of that, you see. But why couldn’t I use the sink. Of course, Vee was probably right about the windows.
While I was doing that, Vee was looking around, examining everything. She tried to lean Joe forward, but the body was already set up some, and it was heavy, so it just sort of slid to the side. She looked at me, and I was just watching her. “Well, are you finished? Put that back, and come over here and wipe this counter and cabinet. We don’t want any blood down here.”
Down here? Where else were we going? But I crawled over to the refrigerator and slid the ice pick back where Joe had taken it from as nearly as I could tell, and then I crawled over beside him and Vee. If a place turns all funny once you’ve killed a man, just try crawling around in one. It’s a whole new room.
“Couldn’t I use the sink?” I said, looking at the few smudges of blood.
“Just hurry.” She was exasperated. And her face really looked terrible, the bruise spread now from over her eye all along the side and across the cheekbone. It must have hurt to talk. “Take a picture, why don’t you? I should have come done this myself, but I wouldn’t be able to carry him alone.”
So I reached up to the sink, still on the floor, and wet the edge of my sleeve, and then I wiped up the blood on the edge of the counter and the front of the cabinet. There wasn’t much, like I said, and I had that pretty much cleaned up, and Vee started tugging on Joe’s body, getting him over on his side. The sound of his shoes scuffing on the floor was about one of the worst things I’d ever heard. Because I’d seen a body in worse shape once, although I didn’t like to think of it, but the sound of the shoes, that was, well, that was sort of normal, and nothing about any of this was normal, so it kind of got to me. Maybe I was just loopy, so you can’t understand, but that’s the way I felt, I’m telling you.
“Turn off the light,” Vee said, “and then help me with this.”
I crawled over to where the light switch was, and I saw the broken glass that was still on the floor against the wall, so I went over towards that, figuring we ought to clean that up too.
“What are you doing!” Vee snapped. “I said get the light.”
“But the glass—”
“Leave it. That’s a good thing. See, he was drunk, right?, and upset. So he threw his glass at the wall, right? So when he passes out with a lit cigarette in his hand, it makes it look better.”
“What do you mean with a cigarette?”
“Would you just turn out the light? You think the sun’s going to stay down forever? How long do you think I can have Carlton’s car out? Now move. Can you do that? I need you to move.”
So I moved. I got the light out, and Vee stood up immediately, and went around the body. “You get him under the arms, I’ll get the feet.”
We tried it like that a couple of times, but it wasn’t going to work. His body was in a weird position, which threw the weight off, and Vee wasn’t too strong. So at last, I pulled him up as best I could and flung him over my shoulder in a fireman carry. I staggered and started to feel lightheaded immediately, but I had him up.
“Do you know which one’s his room?”
“I think,” I managed.
“Okay,” Vee said and started out ahead of me. Only, wait, she must have picked up my jacket, yeah, because she gave it back to me upstairs. But I wasn’t really seeing where we were going or even thinking much about what we were doing anymore. I was just trying to get one foot in front of the other and not drop him as I held my breath under the exertion, only able to take quick pants every few seconds or so.
Vee turned off the lights ahead of me as we went, asking, “This way? This way?” And I would just nod, and she would turn off a light, and we got to the foot of the stairs, and I said, “There’s a light up front.”
“Leave it,” she said. “Only the ones going up to the bedroom.”
The stairs were brutal. I staggered to get my foot up on the first step, and I almost dropped him and I banged into the banister, which gave a little under the weight but held. So Vee rushed back around behind me, slipping past in the tight space, and she pushed me up from behind, and that actually did the trick, taking just enough weight off of me so that I could manage one step at a time, resting for a minute against the wall at each step. Vee kept saying, “Okay? Okay?”, nervous, but I needed to take a rest. I wasn’t sure if I was even going to make it at all.
We got to the top of the stairs, and I almost dropped him then, but managed to say between my teeth, “I can’t hold it much longer.” I took a few rushed shuffling steps into the room immediately to the right at the top of the stairs and was relieved to find that it was still Joe’s room. It didn’t look that different from when he had me up in it as a boy once when Clotilde and I laid over in Calvert on a trip to France.
I staggered across the room, and the light went out when I was only halfway to the bed, and then I dropped him there, the bed creaking and banging against the wall at the headboard. I fell down on the bed on top of him for a moment, and it was all I could do to breathe, there were black-and-white stars before my eyes and my head felt so heavy, and there was a pain in my neck and the cut on my arm.
Vee pulled at me, trying to get to Joe. At last I was able to focus enough to realize I was lying on top of a dead body—on top of my son’s dead body!—and my stomach turned over and I rolled off of him onto my back and tried to get to my feet, but had to just lie there.
Meanwhile, Vee went through his pockets. “Where does he keep his cigarettes? Help me.”
I started to roll to my feet, trying to remember if Joe smoked, but she didn’t need my help by then. She had the cigarettes and was looking for the matches, running her hands over his body in the dark, with just barely some light coming in from outside, or maybe my eyes had just gotten used to the dark.
She felt her way along the bedside table and then opened the top drawer, and I could hear her messing through various things, scraping the wood in the drawer, and at last the sound stopped, and there was a flicker, and her face was suddenly illuminated. It was a Zippo. The light went out. I was blinded again. She turned the pack of cigarettes over in her hand, got one out, put it in her mouth, and the flame again.
She stood there, crouched, smoking for a moment.
“What are you doing,” I hissed, although there was no reason we had to worry about being quiet.
She whispered back, “It’s got to be smoked down a little. You never know how much things are going to burn.”
“Burn?” But I guess I sort of got what she was planning then, and it didn’t seem too crazy. It seemed like it just might work. Because why couldn’t I have left, and then a couple hours late
r, Joe throws a glass against the wall, goes upstairs, turns off the lights as he goes—he’s drunk so he leaves lights on in the other rooms—manages to light a cigarette and then pass out, and then the bed catches fire. You hear about that all the time, why they’re always saying you shouldn’t smoke in bed, and every time you do it, you think, that’s never going to happen to me.
Vee put the cigarette near Joe’s hand, still burning. Then to make sure, she took the Zippo, and held it to the comforter near the cigarette, waiting for it to catch. It flared up almost immediately, and then died down a little, and we stood there watching it, the orange glow of the flames lighting the room immediately and then growing, and soon there was some heat you could feel too.
Vee wiped the Zippo against the bed on all sides and then holding it by her fingernails, she tossed it at the bedside table where it struck and fell on the floor. That seemed to satisfy her. She turned. “Come on.”
But I stayed still, watching. I hadn’t really known this man. I’d known him as a boy, or at least had an idea of him then when I’d see him every few months. Okay, at least once a year. But he had been right. I didn’t know him. And so, in some ways, it was like being at a funeral for a stranger. You felt crummy, but you didn’t really care all that much. No, that’s not true, because I cared way the hell too much. I cared so much that I didn’t care.
The flames had really spread, and there was smoke in the air. Vee yelled, “Shem! Come on. Now!”
She grabbed at my shoulder, and I let her pull me away. We went back the way we had come, down the stairs, down the back stairs to the servants’ entrance, out into the hot night, and back around the corner, and Vee had her arm looped in mine, and was setting a leisurely pace.
“You don’t have to worry,” she said, and she sounded relieved herself. “It’ll be fine now.” I didn’t say anything. And then she hit my arm, a slight slap. “You goddamn bastard. You rich goddamn bastard. Two million dollars!”
The Twenty-Year Death Page 41
