This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Gerald!”

  Then David stuck his hand under the fat jaw to feel for the more reliable pulse in the throat. There really was none, and he thought the skin felt even a little cool, not so cool as his own hands but not nearly so warm as a throat should feel. David looked off at the road, invisible except for its levelness and a short, snow-covered length of rail fence. Not a soul in sight, not a car. Turning, he stared for a moment at the edge of the quiet woods, a hundred yards away. David thought of taking Gerald to a hospital, which might be twenty miles from here, he didn’t know. Or the police. What should he do?

  Then as he shivered violently with cold, he realized that he would be blamed. He gave another bitter smile and shook his head, with a purely rhetorical exasperation.

  He went into his house and sat down, chafed his hands and stared at a radiator cover across the room. Of course, he could drive to some deserted spot miles from here, he was sure he could find one, and either leave Gerald parked in his car or send the car with Gerald in it over a cliff. He could say he never saw Gerald, at least not today. A terrible, terribly obvious question came to him: how had Gerald found the house? Who told him? Who knew?

  Wes?

  That meant Wes would have had to follow him here at some time. And how would Gerald have found Wes?

  Mrs. McCartney? Could she be indulging him in his fairy tale about visiting his mother every weekend? It seemed unbelievable.

  David got up restlessly, and another idea came to him: he was William Neumeister in this house. What was Gerald doing here talking to William Neumeister? He went to the front door, though he had been on his way to get a sweater, opened it, and saw that Gerald had not moved, but he went out anyway and this time only looked at his white face, the fat chin sunk down on the shirt collar, the heavy head pulling the body a little way from the seat back, as if in another few minutes the chest might fall against the steering wheel and keep the horn blowing forever. David pushed his shoulder. The whole body moved stiffly and remained in a precarious balance on the right haunch.

  He closed the car door and more hurriedly now went back into the house. He was debating going somewhere to call the police—he had no telephone—versus driving Gerald’s car, with him in it, to a police station. And he decided to do the latter, because he did not want any police in or around his house. Or he wanted at least to postpone that as long as possible. There would no doubt be an examination of the spot where it had happened, to see if his story held water. The story William Neumeister was going to tell would certainly hold water.

  David changed to an Oxford gray flannel suit, black shoes over which he pulled galoshes, and a dark blue overcoat. He also put on a hat. Then he reluctantly took a plaid steamer rug from the foot of the couch in his study upstairs, and carried it down to cover Gerald Delaney. He went back into the house: he had forgotten Annabelle’s photographs on the mantel. First he turned them down, but on second thought stuck them between books in a bookshelf. He drove Gerald’s car, with Gerald a hump in the front seat, to the next town, rather redundantly called Beck’s Brook, on the highway north, where there was a drugstore from which he could make a telephone call. David asked the operator the location of the nearest police station, and was told there was one in Beck’s Brook at Broadway and Horton Street.

  “Shall I connect you?” the operator asked. “Is this an emergency?”

  “No, I’ll just go there,” David said.

  He had taken the precaution of stuffing into his pocket some unimportant letters and an electric bill that had arrived at the house for William Neumeister, and of leaving his billfold at home.

  12

  David told his story in a simple, straightforward manner, and any nervousness, and he certainly had some, he thought could be attributed to the shock of the incident. He said that the man—whose name he pretended not to know, letting the police find it in Gerald’s wallet—had arrived at his house in a belligerent mood, addressed him as Parker or something like that, and eventually pulled a gun.

  “My fingerprints may be on the gun,” David added. “I put it back in his pocket.”

  The single shot had made a hole through Gerald’s overcoat, but Gerald had not been hit. David had frankly admitted that it was the push he gave him against his front step that had killed him.

  They asked for David’s name and some identification, and the letters seemed to do, for the nonce. David gave as his occupation “freelance journalist.” Quite by accident, David had put on cuff links with the initial N on them, which he had whimsically bought one day, and perhaps the police officer noticed it when he signed, in a stubborn backhand, the name “Wm. Neumeister,” and perhaps not. At any rate, the police seemed much more interested in the corpse, in finding what his motive had been, than in David. The police were two, an older man of some higher rank, and a younger, heavyset man with a simple yet alert face. And of course they wanted to go to the house to look around the scene.

  Riding back with them, pointing out the turns, David thought that his only mistake so far had been a trivial one; he had not known, and it had been obvious, whether today was Saturday or Sunday. It was Sunday. Now it was Sunday afternoon at four-ten.

  The tracks of Gerald’s car were quite clear in the snow, and the snow on the ground between where the car had stood and the house was torn up and scarred, the dark earth showing through, as if they had wrestled with each other violently. The blood was fresh and bright red in the snow below the first step.

  “You’re absolutely sure you never saw that man before?” asked the older man.

  “As sure as I can be of anything.”

  “And he never went in the house?”

  “No.”

  “Can we have a look inside, anyway?” asked the older man.

  David nodded solemnly, and pulled out a key ring on which only two keys were fastened, one for the front and one for the back door. He let the police precede him. The living room was in order.

  “Nice house,” said the older officer. “No phone, you say.”

  “No.”

  “Like to get away from it all when you write, eh?”

  “I suppose so.”

  The younger officer opened the front door. From the threshold they had a better view of the tracks to the garage, Gerald’s going all the way, David’s halfway, and the two sets merging in confusion near the house. David said that the man, when he arrived, had looked into his garage, and that David had then gone out to ask what he wanted.

  “Oh. Then you didn’t just open the door to him,” said the older man.

  “No. He knocked, and by the time I got to the door—because I was in the cellar—he was by the garage looking in the window. I went out to see what he wanted.” It wasn’t, somehow, the way he had told it at first, and the young policeman stared at him.

  “I thought you said the argument started on the front steps.”

  “We walked back toward the house. I wanted to get rid of him. He looked drunk. He wanted to come in the house to find Parker, he kept saying. We were on the front walk when he started threatening me with a gun.”

  The two officers seemed to ponder this, then the young one shook his head in a puzzled way.

  “Maybe he was looking in the garage to try to check on the kind of car you have. Maybe he was hired to kill you—or this Parker.”

  The older officer smiled a little at the younger. “Got any enemies, Mr. Neumeister?” he asked, pronouncing it “Newmester.”

  “Not enemies who’d kill me.”

  “Well—I guess this’ll have to be explained from the other side. We’ll see who Delaney knows in Connecticut. Mr. Newmester, we’ll put a guard on the house, have a man out there on the road in a car tonight and the next few days.”

  David nodded. “I’ll feel more comfortable with one there tonight. But I’ll be leaving early tomorrow and
I’ll be gone for a few days.”

  “Where?”

  “New York. I’m going there on business.”

  “Can you tell us where we can reach you?” asked the young officer, pulling a small notebook from his pocket.

  “I’ll be at a hotel, I can’t say which one. If you want me to keep in touch with you, it’s probably easier if I call you.”

  “What hotel do you think you’ll be at?”

  “I usually try for the Barclay,” David said very calmly, the vision of the Lexington Avenue corner gliding into his head as if the Barclay were an old haunt, though he had never paid any attention to the Barclay.

  “Can you call us around six P.M. Monday? Tomorrow?” asked the older man. “Here’s our number.” He handed David a small card printed like a business card. Beck’s Brook Police Headquarters, Broadway and Horton Street, Beck’s Brook, New York.

  Then the door closed with a solid, double impact, and David, instead of being relieved at his aloneness, felt confused and dangling. Suddenly he was shaking, every nerve jumping and twitching. He grabbed his head and sat down on the sofa, holding his head in his arms in an effort to steady himself. What if they should come back, he thought, and see him like this?

  He made himself sit up straight, and slowly the seizure abated. He’d go to work tomorrow as usual. He’d call the police around six from some place in Froudsburg, and by then he’d know if they wanted to see him again, he thought. He would tell them he was at the Barclay, and if they tried to reach him there later, it would be awkward, they’d have caught him out in a lie, but it wouldn’t be a crime, after all.

  David got up and turned on another light. They would tell Annabelle tonight, in a matter of minutes, perhaps this very minute. David imagined the young policeman with Gerald’s driver’s license in his hand, asking the Hartford operator to give him the telephone number of the house in Talbert Street, and Annabelle answering. “You’re Gerald Delaney’s wife? Your husband has been killed, ma’am . . .” And Annabelle breaking down in tears, because whether she loved him or not, the news would be a shock. Would she immediately think he did it, because Gerald had been on his way to find him? Only for a second or two anyway, because the police would tell her the Neumeister story. Gerald dead. It didn’t register on him as yet. He could not take in what it meant to himself. One thing, however, he did see clearly: Annabelle must never know that David Kelsey had given Gerald that fatal push. Annabelle would never believe it had been an accident.

  13

  When David left the house the next morning at a quarter to eight, the police car—turned a different way from last night, and perhaps a different car—stood on the road that went to Ballard. David forced himself to stop and speak to the man in the car, and once he had begun telling him he was going to New York for a few days, he felt quite calm and at ease.

  “Yeah, the sarge told me,” the man said with a friendly smile.

  David drove on to Froudsburg. It was his habit to go by Mrs. McCartney’s Monday mornings to change from the clothes he had worn Friday to clean clothes for the factory. As he entered the house, Sarah was coming down the stairs with Mrs. Beecham’s breakfast tray.

  “Morning, Sarah,” David said.

  “Good morning, Mr. Kelsey. Oh!” She looked up at him, lipstickless, a pimple on her right cheek. “Did the man find you? The one who was here Sunday?” The mild interest on her inanimate face indicated an unusual excitement.

  “No. What man?”

  “I dunno who he was. He was asking everybody where you were.” She pushed the dining room door open expertly with her right elbow, tipping the tray not quite enough to make the dishes slide off, and she disappeared.

  David went up to his room. Perhaps the information hadn’t come from here, he thought. With his door closed behind him, he stood for a moment, hardly breathing, looking all around his room, finding no change in it. In spite of the cold day, he put on chino pants and a blue shirt, and took from his wardrobe a brown tweed jacket that in its four years had never been cleaned or pressed. He felt quite certain that Mrs. McCartney would be waiting for him in the front hall, and sure enough she was there, hovering by the wicker table.

  “Your friend didn’t find you Sunday, David?” she asked.

  “No. Who was he?”

  “Didn’t say his name, at least I didn’t hear it. Effie Brennan was here, and she told him where he could find you. We didn’t know, you see, and my goodness but he was persistent! It was very important, he said.”

  David stared at her. “Did he say what it was about?”

  “No, just that he had to find you. He wanted to know where your house was, and I kept telling him you visited your mother in a nursing home on weekends,” Mrs. McCartney said with a smile, but David thought he saw suspicion in her eyes.

  He frowned. “I never saw the man—”

  Here Mrs. McCartney broke out in a shrill laugh that seemed to David maniacal. “Between you and me, I think Effie told him a story. He’d been drinking. I could smell his breath. Smelled like whisky, it did indeed.”

  David also gave a laugh. “I suppose she did give him a story,” he said, and walked on. At the door, he turned and asked defiantly, “What did he look like, by the way?”

  “Oh—not very tall. About thirty, I’d say. Kind of ugly. Kind of fat lips.”

  David squeezed the oval doorknob, not yet opening the door. “And where did Effie say I was?”

  “Some town not far away, she said. I didn’t hear her, because she went out to the curb to talk to him. She’s a dear girl, isn’t she, David?”

  David nodded. “She is,” he said weakly.

  That afternoon, there was a local newspaper on the counter in the factory’s cafeteria. David was alone, having avoided Wes and a couple of other men with whom he sometimes lunched, by going down late. He found it on page four:

  MYSTERIOUS CALL RESULTS IN DEATH FOR HARTFORD MAN

  Ballard, N.Y., Jan. 19—— Gerald J. Delaney, 31, an electrician of Hartford, Conn., was fatally injured yesterday when his head struck the brick steps of a house during a fistfight with William Neumeister, 30, of this town.

  Neumeister, a freelance journalist who claims never to have seen Delaney before, stated that Delaney called at his house on County Road at approximately 2:30 P.M. Sunday, and shouting a name resembling “Parker,” made threatening remarks to Neumeister and finally pulled a gun.

  In the course of a struggle on the front walk, Delaney was knocked down and his skull fractured on one of the front steps of the house. Neumeister drove the dead man in the latter’s car to the police station at Beck’s Brook and reported the incident.

  According to a medical report issued by Dr. Serge Oskin of Beck’s Brook, Delaney had been drinking, though not enough to have incapacitated an average man, unless Delaney was a type particularly susceptible to alcohol.

  Delaney is survived by a wife, Annabelle, 24, and a son, Gerald J. Delaney, Jr., seven weeks old. Police are still trying to clear up the mystery of his actions.

  David refolded the paper and put it back where it had been on the counter. Was it reassuring or not? It was not reassuring that the police were still trying to clear up the mystery of his actions. Wouldn’t the police ask to see David Kelsey? Annabelle would certainly tell them Gerald had left Hartford to talk to David Kelsey, and the reason that wasn’t in this paper, David thought, was that they hadn’t had time to get that information before the paper went to press.

  He went out of the cafeteria, down some stairs to a hall lined with green lockers, to a telephone booth. A vision of Annabelle in tears had suddenly forced him to move. He thought he knew her number, but he was not sure enough of it, and he asked the operator for information in Hartford. He had been wrong in two digits.

  A woman’s voice answered, but it was not Annabelle’s voice. While he wait
ed, he heard an unintelligible conversation in the distance, women’s voices, whether in the apartment or over the switchboard, he could not tell.

  “Hello?” Annabelle said.

  “Annabelle, it’s Dave. How are you, darling?”

  “Oh, Dave!” she gasped. “I’m alive, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “I just saw a paper—”

  “Dave, he was going to see you. I tried to stop him—but he went out Sunday morning, just to see Ed Purdy, he said, but I knew. That’s where he got the gun—at Ed’s—and the liquor.”

  “Ed gave him the gun?” David asked.

  “He knew where Ed kept it and he took it. Ed said he asked for four drinks and drank them right down, and he’s not used to drinking.”

  “Well—he was going to shoot me?”

  “I just can’t believe that,” she said, breaking into tears. “He wanted to give you a warning, that’s all. He saw your letter. I told you, Dave—that’s what caused it all.”

  Her accusing tone froze him. “I’m sorry, Annabelle,” he said contritely. “I’m very, very sorry.”

  “It’s too late now. Gerald loved me. That’s what you never understood.”

  “I do understand.”

  “But you didn’t. I called you to try to make you understand. All you could say was ‘I have a right to write you’ or something like that. Now you see what it’s brought on, don’t you? Are you still there, Dave?” she asked in a child’s voice, full of tears.

  “Oh, Annabelle, I’m here and I love you!”

  “I’ve got to go now, Dave.”

  And before he could say anything else, she had hung up.

  That evening, David made a call to Joseph Willis, his real estate agent, and told him he wanted to sell his house.

  “I heard about the trouble Sunday,” Mr. Willis said. “That’s not what—” He stopped.

  David remembered Mr. Willis’s habit of leaving sentences unfinished. And of calling him “Newmaster.” “No. I’ve been thinking of it for quite a while. I’m going to be traveling—abroad—and the house would just be an expense.”