I crossed to the easy chair and sat down. “Why would I have bought a gun from you? I don’t get it. I hate guns.”
“About a year—no, a year and a half ago. There was a little crime wave out on the east side, your neighborhood. Several burglaries, several robberies, one within a block of your apartment.
“You came in to see me one day—I was working days then—and told me your wife, Robin, had been heckling you to get a gun to keep in the apartment, that you didn’t want one but you’d have to get one to keep peace in the family. You wanted to know if you needed a permit—I told you you didn’t as long as you didn’t carry the gun, just kept it on your own premises. Then you asked me if I knew where you could pick up a used one—and you said you didn’t care whether it would shoot or not because you didn’t expect to use it. You said if a burglar or robber did get in your place you and Robin would be a lot safer if you weren’t armed than if you were. And that even with the little crime wave going on there was only one chance in thousands of your apartment being picked—but that if it’d make your wife happier to think there was a loaded gun around you were willing to play along.”
“You mean the gun isn’t loaded now?”
“You didn’t even have any bullets for it. I offered you some but you wouldn’t take them. That gun shoots all right, but it jams once in a while. I’d had it to two gunsmiths but they couldn’t fix it so it wouldn’t jam maybe once out of a dozen rounds. So I sold it to you cheap, for fifteen bucks; I’d already bought myself a revolver and was carrying that. The automatic was just kicking around in my desk doing me no good.”
“It’s a thirty-two, isn’t it? The same kind as Grandma’s?”
“Yeah. And come to think of it, they’re both Colts. I’ll make sure.” He got up and started for the suitcase.
I said, “Don’t touch it till you are sure. I haven’t touched it—that’s why I asked you to come here instead of bringing it in. And if it is Grandma’s gun—”
He grunted and bent over the suitcase, a pencil in his hand. He picked up the gun by putting the pencil in the barrel and turned it around to look at what had been the under side.
“That little chip out of the handle—yeah, this is it.” He took hold of the gun by the handle and put the pencil back into his pocket. He slid out the clip and then pulled back the slide and locked it in the open position. He brought it over under the light and squinted into the barrel and then grunted again. “Full of dust and dirt. Hell of a way to take care of a gun. And the slide’s dirty too. This gun hasn’t had a cartridge in it since I sold it to you, let alone been fired. Now you satisfied?”
“Yes. Thanks a lot. Sorry I bothered you but I’m glad you came around. I was feeling lousy even before I found that gun, and it gave me a bad hour. Can I give you a drink?”
“No thanks. On duty. But you look as though one wouldn’t hurt you any, so go ahead.”
I decided he was right; what I’d drunk early in the evening was completely gone now. I was cold sober and a little shaky; one drink would do me more good than harm. I started to make one for myself.
Walter watched me. He asked, “Still got a sneaking suspicion somewhere that you’re a murderer? Or did this cure you?”
“I guess this cured me,” I told him.
“Quit even guessing. Listen, this gun isn’t doing you any good now. Want me to take it along and sell it for you? One of the boys might want it for a spare or to use on the target range. For practice shooting it doesn’t matter if a gun jams once in a while. I can probably get you your fifteen bucks back.”
“A deal,” I said. “Sell it for whatever you can get. On the condition that we spend the proceeds together when you have a night off. One thing puzzles me a little, Walter. Why would I have taken that gun along when I left—the apartment. I wouldn’t have wanted it.”
“That’s an easy guess. Your wife thought all along you were keeping it loaded. If you’d given it to her instead of taking it you’d have had to explain it wasn’t loaded and that you didn’t even have any bullets for it. Maybe that would have been a little embarrassing, especially if you wanted to stay on friendly terms with her and if she already had a down on you for other things.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “Walter, you ought to be a detective.”
He got up. “Just what I was thinking. I’d better get back down to the office and at least pretend to be one. So long—and quit worrying yourself to a frazzle.”
When he’d left I sat down with my drink. And thought about how sensible he was and how right he was. When I found the answers to the few things that still puzzled me about the night of the murder, they’d turn out to be as simple as the explanation of why I’d found a gun in my closet. The time from ten o’clock to eleven-thirty was easily enough accounted for; I’d been somewhere doing some solitary and moderately heavy drinking after leaving Vangy. If I never found or remembered the exact place where I’d done that drinking, what did it matter?
And if I ever remembered what it was, there’d be some simple and logical explanation of why I headed for Grandma’s after eleven-thirty. Probably to see Arch; I might or might not have known that he was in Chicago and if I had known it I might have forgotten the fact, in my cups. There didn’t even have to be anything I wanted to see him about. Maybe I’d simply been maudlinly lonely and wanted to talk to somebody, anybody, even Arch. And half past eleven isn’t a time when you go calling on people—unless you know, as I must have known about Arch, that they seldom turn in before one or two o’clock in the morning anyway.
I thought a while, wondering what I was wondering about, and then undressed again and got back into bed. I slept, finally, my eyes closed against the gray light of dawn that came in the windows.
When I woke it was almost noon and the windows were still or again gray; there was a drizzling rain. This was my last day before returning to work. And half gone already.
I killed the other half by going to the public library and skimming through the few recent books they had on advertising copy writing. It sounded simple and familiar; I felt I wasn’t going to have any trouble getting back into the swing of my job.
It was five o’clock when I left the library and I called Pete Radik to see if he could eat dinner with me. He was apologetic as hell because he couldn’t.
“Damn it, Rod, I wish I could but this other date is important. And I’d ask you along but we’re going to talk business and you’d be bored stiff.”
“That’s all right, Pete. Some other time.”
“It’s a publisher’s representative from New York on a field trip. I’m working on a book, psychology of course. He read my opening chapters in his hotel room last night and we set up the dinner date tonight to talk them over. I don’t even know yet whether he likes them or not. And here’s why it’s important—if he’s at all enthusiastic I want to try to talk him into an advance on the book. It’ll let me work on the book full time all summer if I can get one, even a couple of hundred bucks. Otherwise I’ll be taking over some summer-term classes and will have to keep plugging on it evenings only. I can maybe finish the book if I have the whole summer free.”
I said, “I can lend you a couple of hundred, Pete, if you don’t get the advance. I’m starting back to work tomorrow so I won’t even have to draw against the estate to do it.”
“Thanks, but no. I don’t want to go into debt just to get the summer off. An advance would be different; I wouldn’t have to pay that back. It’d come out of the proceeds of the book—and besides it would mean practical certainty that the book was going to be accepted when I finished it. But thanks a lot for offering it. And to a guy you’ve seen only once in your life, as far as you can remember. Or are you beginning to remember any little things?”
“Not a thing, yet. Still a blank wall. Well, I’ll call you some other time, Pete.”
“Wait a minute. Have you any plans for the evening after dinner?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, I don’t kn
ow for sure whether I’m scheduled to spend the evening, after we eat, with this guy or not. I have a hunch not; he’s spending only a few days here and seeing a lot of people so he probably will give me the brushoff right after we eat because he’ll have somebody else lined up to see then. And we’re eating fairly early, at six, which makes that look even more likely. So there’s a good chance I’ll be home by—oh, say half past eight, or maybe even sooner. If you’re free then, if you still haven’t tied yourself up elsewhere for the evening, why not give me a ring then? And then come on around if I’m home.”
“Okay, Pete,” I said. “I’ll probably do that.”
After I’d hung up I wondered who else I could find to eat with. I thought of Andy Henderson; I’d enjoyed having lunch with him a few days ago. But he had a wife and it was after five o’clock now. It was too late to call anybody, really, so I decided to hell with it. And I was hungry because I’d had only a breakfast around noon so I ate alone. Then I wandered around downtown until I found a movie that didn’t look too bad, and went in. The movie killed time for me until a few minutes after eight and when I came out I phoned Pete again.
“Just got home,” he said. “Glad you tried calling earlier than I said. Come on right around.”
“Shall I bring a bottle of champagne to celebrate?”
“You can bring a bottle of beer to condole.”
“That bad?”
“Not quite; I’ll tell you about it when you get here.”
“Seriously, shall I bring something to drink?”
“Not if you’ll settle for beer. I’ve got half a dozen cans of that in the icebox and I’d rather stick to that myself. Got to work tomorrow.”
“So do I,” I said. “Okay, we’ll drink your beer.”
I brought the Linc back from the parking lot where I’d left it and drove to Pete’s. I waited until we were comfortable and had glasses of cold beer in our hands before I asked him details about his interview with the publisher’s representative.
“He was encouraging, really. Liked the five chapters I have written and said there was an excellent chance they’d take the book when I finished it. Made me promise to give them first crack at it. But he said he didn’t have the authority to give an advance on a book just on one reading—the part I had done would have to be approved by one of the officers. His own position is like that of a first or second reader; he can read something and pass it on with his approval and recommendations but he can’t actually buy. And giving an advance is equivalent to buying—even riskier, because I might have a good start and still louse up the book in finishing it.”
“Or get hit by a truck.”
“Or get hit by a truck. He offered to take my five chapters back with him to New York and see if he could get me an advance, but—”
“Why not?”
“It’s first draft, yellow paper, and I didn’t make a carbon. I wouldn’t want to let it that far out of my hands because it’s several months’ work—and if it got lost I’d have it to do all over again. Besides, without it to refer back to I couldn’t go ahead and work on it, and God knows how long they’d hold it before they’d decide.”
He knocked out his pipe and started refilling it. “I suppose I could retype those five chapters now, with a carbon, and do some polishing on them but it’d be waste motion, just to promote an advance. I’d have to rewrite them again when I had the book finished because I’m not ready yet to do the final version. Oh well, it won’t hurt me to teach some classes this summer. And I can keep plugging on the book on the side.”
I said, “If you don’t want to borrow money why not let me buy an interest in the book? That way you wouldn’t owe me anything until and unless the book sold and it came out of the proceeds, and still you’d have money to let you work on it full time this summer.”
He looked interested for moment and then shook his head. “Too big a gamble for both of us even to guess what fraction of the proceeds to sell for how much. It might never sell and if it does it might make only a few hundred dollars, in which case you’d be gypped, and it might hit the best seller lists—it’s written for laymen so it could—in which case you’d be getting thousands of dollars back for a couple of hundred and I’d be gypped. Wait a minute, though, I’ll tell you a gamble I’ll take with you. Even odds, double or nothing. I take your two hundred; if the book sells you get back four hundred.”
I said, “You’re overestimating the odds against its selling, Pete. But if you want me to have a chance for profit to offset the possibility that I might take a loss I’ll give you the two hundred and take back two-fifty if it sells.”
We settled, finally, on three hundred. And I thought he was being cheated and he thought I was, and that’s the way a bargain ought to be, I guess. Anyway he’d be able to put in full time on the book during the summer vacation. Which was what he wanted to do.
We opened another can of beer apiece on it.
For maybe a minute we were quiet and then I said, “Pete, mind if I go back to the old deal, asking questions about myself?”
“Shoot. What do you want to know?”
“Well—this is minor as hell but Arch got me curious telling me I had crazy opinions on politics. I can’t remember what they were—and my opinions on everything else seem to be the same as they used to be. I didn’t get around to asking Arch because we got on to something more important, but I’m still a little curious.”
“I think you can answer your own questions, Rod. What do you think about politics? Wait, let me give you a lead-off by making the question more specific. Which do you think is the best system among, say, socialism, capitalistic democracy, and communism?”
“Do you spell that communism with a small c? I mean, communism considered abstractly, not what the capital-C Communists have made out of it?”
“Right. Small c.”
“Then I don’t see that it makes much difference. Any one of them can be made to work and any one of them can be corrupted into a tyranny. As Stalin has done with communism, as Hitler did with socialism. And as has been done here with democracy—only on a small scale, when a political boss manages to take over a town or city and run it. It’s never happened on a large scale here, but it could—if we ever get hungry and desperate enough. No, I don’t see that the system matters; it’s how well the system’s run. If I’ve got any bias in favor of democracy it’s simply because that’s the system we’ve got and it makes more sense to go ahead and make it work than to go through the throes of switching to something else that can go wrong just as easily.”
Pete chuckled. “You sound like a playback of yourself. That’s what you thought before all right. Arch, by the way, has believed in each of those three systems—and sometimes pretty rabidly at one time or another—but it’s always one at a time and he can’t possibly understand anyone being even tolerant of all three at once. Me, I’m somewhere in between, so I don’t know which of you is crazy.”
“What’s Arch now?”
“Haven’t talked about such things with him recently—but now that he’s got twenty thousand bucks or so in capital I could make a good guess. He’s in favor of the system that lets him hang onto it. All right, next subject.”
I’d been stalling, of course. I lighted myself another cigarette to stall some more.
Then I said, “Pete, tell me how far the best current opinion goes—one way or the other—on whether insanity can be inherited.”
“That’s not a question about you.” He held another match to the bowl of his pipe and looked at me over the flame of it. “Or—wait a minute, is it?” He didn’t draw on the pipe. He waved out the match and put it and the pipe down on the table beside his chair. “I remember now, you asked that same question once, over a year ago. Only you asked it pretty casually and—yes, you sandwiched it in with some other questions on psychology. What’s the score, Rod?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “But answer the question first, will you? Preferably the same way you answered it last
time. Unless you’ve learned something new about the subject since.”
“No, there’s nothing new about it. I’d have told you that insanity isn’t inherited, but a tendency toward it can be. Nobody’s born insane—although of course one can be born with insufficient brain development, causing feeblemindedness, Mongolism, things like that. But I take it that’s not what you’re interested in.”
“No, it isn’t. Go on.”
“The acquired types of insanity—schizophrenia, paranoia, the various psychoses—come from morbid pressures in the life of the individual. But it’s proved and accepted that we can inherit a strong tendency to succumb to those morbid pressures. Probably at least half of the definitely insane, those in asylums, let’s say, were born with a direct or collateral hereditary tendency toward insanity, a predisposition to manifest mental symptoms in the presence of morbid pressures. And if the predisposition is strong enough they’ll find morbid pressures among the everyday troubles that the rest of us take in stride. Is that enough of an answer, or shall I go on?”
“That’s enough of an answer,” I said.
“Your interest is personal?”
I said, “I’d rather not—Hell, why shouldn’t I talk about it? Pete, my mother died in an insane asylum when I was only a year old.”
“What type of insanity?”
I told him what little I knew, about the catatonic states and the suicide attempt.
“Manic-depressive, maybe,” he said. “You don’t know whether she had periods of elation and excitement, do you?”
“No, I don’t. Would it matter whether it was manic-depressive or schizophrenia?”
“Well—no, I guess it wouldn’t.”
I said, “Pete, I know now what could have happened between Robin and me. Part of it, anyway. I don’t think I knew about my mother when Robin and I were married; I learned it afterward. Robin probably wanted children and after I learned that about myself I wouldn’t have, couldn’t have.”
“Would you have explained that to Robin?”
We All Killed Grandma Page 13
