The Sixth Commandment

by Lawrence Sanders

  “And don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault,” I warned her. “Don’t tell me that logically I have no business blaming myself. I don’t want to listen to any logic.”

  “I wasn’t going to serve you any,” she said quietly.

  “It goes beyond logic,” I said. “It’s irrational, I know. I just feel like shit, that’s all.”

  “Must you use words like that?”

  “You do,” I reminded her.

  “Not at the dinner table,” she said loftily. “There is a time and place for everything.”

  I poked at my food, and she stared at me.

  “Todd, you’re really hurting, aren’t you?”

  “He was such a sad schlumpf,” I groaned. “A little guy. And plain. His wife was plain, too. I mean they had nothing: no wit, no personality, and they weren’t even physically attractive. Do you think that affected my judgment?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  “You’re a big help.”

  “Do you want advice or sympathy?”

  “Neither,” I said. “But five minutes of silence would be nice.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “Must you use words like that?”

  “I told you, there’s a time and place for everything.”

  “Powell, what am I going to do?”

  “Do? You can’t do anything, can you? It’s done, isn’t it?”

  “How long am I going to feel this lousy? The rest of my life?”

  “Nooo,” she said wisely, “I don’t think so. A week. A month maybe. It’ll pass.”

  “The hell you say,” I growled. “Let’s go.”

  “Go? Where?”

  “Anywhere. I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “All right,” she said equably. “You owe me half a veal cutlet Parmesan.”

  “Put it on my bill,” I said.

  “You’re running up a big tab, buster,” she said. “I’m not sure you’re good for it.”

  If I had been in a better mood, I would have enjoyed that night: late September, with balm in the air over a little nip that warned of what was coming. I don’t know how long we drove—an hour maybe. No, it was longer than that. We went up to the George Washington Bridge, turned around, and drove back down to the Battery. Not what you’d call a restful, bucolic drive. But working the traffic helped keep my mind off my misery. I don’t think Joan Powell and I exchanged a dozen words during that trip. But she was there beside me, silent. It helped.

  After we watched a Staten Island ferry pull in and pull out—about as exciting as watching grass grow—I drove back up the east side to Powell’s home. She lived in one of those enormous high-rise luxury apartment houses that have an institutional look: hospitals, office buildings, or just a forty-story file cabinet.

  There were two below-ground parking levels. Powell didn’t own a car—didn’t drive, as a matter of fact—but after I started seeing her, dating her, spending time in her apartment, including weekends, I persuaded her to rent a parking space. It cost fifty a month, and I paid it gladly. A lot easier than trying to find parking space on the street in that neighborhood. Plus the fact that my hubcaps were relatively secure.

  Our parking space was down on the second level. A little like parking in the Lincoln Tunnel. It was a scary place: pools of harsh light and puddles of black darkness. Silent cars, heavy and gleaming. Concrete pillars and oil stains. I parked, switched off the motor. We lighted cigarettes, and were very alone.

  I went through it all again. The schlumpfy professor, his crazy scheme, his mousy wife. The glass of cranberry juice and cubes of cut-up Milky Ways. The amateurish home laboratory, and how I couldn’t understand what the hell he was mumbling about when he showed me his equations, demonstrated his equipment, and made an electric fan run on the power of a 100-watt lightbulb shining on a chip of white, glassy stuff.

  Joan Powell let me gabble. She sat apart, hugging herself against the basement chill. A cigarette burned down in her lips. Her sleek head was tilted to keep the smoke from her eyes. She didn’t say a word while I spun out my litany of woe and declaimed my guilt.

  I ended my soliloquy and waited for a reaction. Nothing.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  “You know what I think you need right now?” she said.

  “What?”

  “A good fuck.”

  “Oh my,” I said. “Listen to the lady.”

  We put out our cigarettes, turned to stare at each other. Powell was looking at me steadily, and there was something in her fine features I had never seen before: strength and knowing and calm acceptance. Maybe we’re all created equal, in the sight of God and under the law, but there is quality in people. I mean human character runs the gamut from slug to saint. I realized, maybe for the first time, that this was one superior human.

  And because I was feeling so deeply it embarrassed me, I had to say something brittle and smart-alecky. But I never did get it out. I choked on the words, and just came apart. I don’t apologize for it; it had been coming on since I heard of the professor’s messy death. But I wasn’t mourning just for him; I was crying for all the sad, little schlumpfs in the world. For all of us. The losers.

  Powell was holding me in her arms then, and I was gasping and moaning and trying to tell her all those things.

  “Shh,” she kept saying. “Shh. Shh.”

  I remembered she stroked my hair, kissed my fingers, touched my lips. She held me until I stopped shivering, pulling my head down to her warm breast. She rocked a little, back and forth, like a mother holding an infant. She smelled good to me, warm and fragrant, and I nuzzled my nose down into her neckline and kissed the soft skin.

  It all went so slowly. After awhile it went in silence. I had the feeling, and I think she did too, that we were alone on earth. We were locked in a car, in an underground garage, the weight of an enormous building above, the whole earth below. We were in a coffin in a cavern in a mine. I had never known such sweet solitude, closed around like that.

  And I had never known such intimacy, such closeness, not even naked on a sweated sheet. Without speaking, we opened to each other. I could feel it, feel the flow between us. My anguish was diluted by her strength; I suppose she took some of my hurt into her. Sharing eased the pain. When I kissed her, it was almost like kissing myself. A strange experience, but there it was. She was me, and I was her. It was peace. That’s the only way I can describe it: it was total peace.

  Well … that happened two years previously. I was convinced that night was going to remake my life, that I would suddenly become saintly and good, full of kindness and understanding. I didn’t change, of course. The next day I was my normal shitty self, and a week later I had forgotten all about the dead professor, and a week after that I had forgotten all about an hour of total peace in an underground garage with Joan Powell when we had done nothing but hold each other and share. If I remembered it at all, it was to wonder why we hadn’t screwed.

  Now, two years later, sitting in a lonely room in Coburn, N.Y., the memory of that night came back. I knew what had triggered it: those few moments alone in the car with Millie Goodfellow. I had felt the stirring of the same emotion, the feeling of closed-in intimacy, of being the only survivors in the world, everything blocked out but the two of us, comforting, consoling.

  I had been deceiving myself to think I was the only comforter, the lone consoler. She had given warm assurance to me as well, and when I waved goodby, the lights of her car fading into the black night, I was sorry to see her go. Because then I was really alone. And I was afraid.

  I knew what it was. It all came back to Thorndecker. I could hear the name itself, boomed out by the Voice of Doom, with deep organ chords in the background: “Thooorn-deck-er. Thoorn-deck-er.” It was like the tolling of a mournful bell. And even when I was in bed, covers pulled up, anxious for sleep to come, in my fear I heard that slow dirge and saw a dark funeral procession moving across frozen ground.

  The Fourth Day

  I
WOKE SUDDENLY, TASTING my tongue, smelling my breath. I stared at the crackled ceiling and wondered how long I had been buried in Coburn, N.Y.

  I had been through that mid-case syndrome before. In any investigation, the disparate facts and observations pile up, a jumble, and you’d like nothing better than to walk away whistling, tossing a live grenade over your shoulder as you go. Then you close the door carefully and—boom!—all gone.

  I think, in my case, the discouragement comes from a hopeless romanticism. I want people to be nice. Everyone should be sweet-tempered, polite, considerate, and brush their teeth twice a day. There should be no stale breaths and furry tongues in the world. I like happy endings.

  I stared morosely at my sallow face in the mirror of the bathroom medicine cabinet, and I knew the Thorndecker investigation wasn’t going to have a happy ending. It saddened me, because I didn’t dislike any of the people involved. Some, like Stella Beecham and banker Art Merchant, left me indifferent. But most of the others I liked, or recognized as fallible human beings caught up in fates they could not captain.

  Except Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker. I couldn’t see him as a willy-nilly victim. The man was master of his soul; that much was obvious. But his motives were wrapped around. At that dinner party—his youthful vigor and raw exuberance. A part he was playing? And then, in his study, another role: the serious, intent man of science, with a politician’s use of charm and a secret delight in the manipulation of others. Which man was Thorndecker? Or was there another, another, another? A whole deck of Thorndeckers: Jack, Queen, King, and finally … the Joker?

  I showered, shaved, dressed, and had a terrible desire to telephone Joan Powell, that complete woman. Not even to talk. Just to hear her say, “Hello?” Then I’d hang up. I didn’t call, of course, I just mention it here to illustrate my state of mind. I wasn’t quite out of the tree, but I was swinging.

  Sam Livingston took me down in the ramshackle elevator. We exchanged mumbles. We both seemed to be in the same surly mood. If I had given him a bright, “Good morning, Sam!” he’d have kicked me in the jewels, and if he had sung out, “Nice, sunny morning,” I’d have delivered a sharp karate chop behind his left ear. So we both just mumbled. It was that kind of a morning.

  I saw Millie Goodfellow behind the cigar counter, and was pleased to know she was still alive. She was in one of her biddy’s costumes again: a ruffled blouse cut down to the pipik, wide black leather belt, short denim skirt with rawhide lacing down the front, like a man’s fly. She was also wearing dark, dark sunglasses.

  I bought another pack of cigarettes I didn’t need.

  “Incognito this morning, Millie?” I inquired casually.

  She lifted those dark cheaters, and I saw the mouse: a beauty. She had tried to cover it with pancake makeup, but the colors came through: glistening black, purple, yellow. The whole eye was puffed and bulging.

  “Nice,” I said. “Did you collect that at Red Dog Betty’s?”

  “No,” she said, replacing the glasses, “this one was home-grown. I told him what I thought about him and his fancy lady.”

  I really didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t know if she was lying. I didn’t know what the truth was. And on that feckless morning, I didn’t care.

  “See you around,” I said, and started away.

  A hand shot out, grabbed my arm.

  “Remember what you promised last night?” she whispered.

  That was last night, in another mood, another world, and before I knew her husband got physical.

  “What?” I said. “Oh. Sure.”

  I stared at blank glass, not seeing her eyes.

  “I remember,” I said with a sleazy grin, more determined than ever to get my ass back to civilization as soon as possible.

  I had another of those big, bulky country breakfasts. This one involved pancakes and pork sausages. I don’t know what it did for my cholesterol count, but at least it took my mind off such topics as hanging, cyanide, and a long walk off a short pier. When I returned to the city, I decided, I’d diet, join a health club, exercise regularly, manufacture a hard stomach, and put the roses back in my cheeks. Is there no end to self-delusion?

  On the way out, I detoured through the bar. Jimmy was behind the taps. I nodded at him. I didn’t see anyone else, until I heard a rasped, “Todd. You there.” I turned, and there was old Al Coburn sitting alone in a booth. He had a beer in front of him. I walked over.

  “May I join you, Mr. Coburn?” I asked.

  “No law against it,” he said—as gracious an invitation as I’ve ever had.

  I slid in opposite, called to Jimmy, pointed at Coburn’s beer, and held up two fingers.

  While we waited for our drinks to come, I said to him, “What’s it like outside? Is the sun shining?”

  “Somewhere,” he said.

  That seemed to take care of that. I stared at him. Have you ever seen bald land after a bad drought? Say the banks of a drained reservoir, or a parched river bed? That’s the way Al Coburn’s face looked. All cracks and lines, cut up like a knife had been drawn deep, the flesh without juice, squares and diamonds of dry skin.

  But there was nothing juiceless about those washed-blue eyes. Looking into those was like staring into the Caribbean off one of the Bahamian cays. You stared and stared, seeing deep, deep. Moving things there, shifting shadows, sudden shapes, and then the clean, cool bottom. A few shells. Hard coral.

  Maybe it was those pork sausages bubbling in my gut, but I felt uneasy. I felt there was more to Al Coburn than I had reckoned. I had misread Millie Goodfellow; there was more to her than the frustrated wife, the Emma Bovary of Coburn, N.Y. There was more to Al Coburn. If that was true, then it might be true of Agatha Binder, Art Merchant, Constable Goodfellow, Stella Beecham, Dr. Kenneth Draper—for the whole lot of them.

  Maybe I was making an awful mistake. I was seeing them all (except Dr. Thorndecker) as two-dimensional cutouts. Types. Cardboard characters. But the longer I stayed around, the deeper I dug, the more they sprouted a third dimension. I was beginning to glimpse hidden motives and secret passions. It was like picking up Horatio Alger and finding William Faulkner. In Coburn, N.Y.!? A boggling thought, that in this brackish backwater there were characters who, if they didn’t qualify for a Greek tragedy, were at least a few steps above, or deeper, than a TV sitcom.

  We sipped our beers and looked vaguely at each other.

  “How you coming?” Al Coburn asked in his scrawly voice.

  “Coming?” I said. “On what?”

  He looked at me with disgust.

  “Don’t play smarty with me, sonny,” he said. “This Thorndecker thing. That’s what I mean.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That. Well, I’m making progress. Talking to people. Learning things.”

  He grunted, finished his old beer, started on the new.

  “He’s doing all right, ain’t he,” he said. “On Coburn land. Got a nice business going.”

  “It appears to be prosperous,” I said cautiously. “Yes. I looked it over.”

  “That’s what you think,” he said darkly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Mr. Coburn?”

  “The death of a man?” he said. “The world’s heart don’t skip a beat.”

  I shook my head, bewildered. I grabbed at a straw, and came up with nothing.

  “Are you talking about Petersen?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Chester K. Petersen.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “All right,” I sighed. “You’ve lost me completely.”

  We drank awhile in silence. He glowered at his glass of beer, almost snarling at it. What a cantankerous old geezer he was. I watched him, damned if I’d give him another opening. If he had something to say, let him say it. Finally:

  “Was he another?” he said.

  “Petersen? I don’t know. Another what?”

  “Heart attack?”

  “He died of congestive heart failure.”


  “Who says?”

  “The death certificate says.”

  He smiled at me. I hope I never see another smile like it. It was all store teeth and blanched lips. A skeleton could smile with more warmth than that.

  “The death certificate says,” he repeated. “You believe that?”

  This isn’t original with me; I remember reading somewhere that the worst American insult, absolutely the worst, is to say, “Do you believe everything you read in the papers?” Al Coburn’s last question had the same effect. I immediately went on the defensive.

  “Well, uh, of course not,” I stammered. “Not necessarily.”

  “Tell you a story,” he said. More of a statement than a question.

  I nodded, waved for two more beers, and settled back. I had nothing to lose but my sanity.

  “Feller I knew name of Scoggins,” he started. “Ernie Scoggins. We was friends from way back. Grew up together, Ernie and me. His folks had a sawmill on the river, but that went. They had an ice house, too. That was before refrigerators, you know, and them with all that sawdust to pack it in. Cut it on Loon Lake in the winter, and cover it over with burlap and sawdust in the ice house. Ernie and me used to sneak in there in the summer and suck on slivers of ice. I guess we was two crazy kids.”

  I could feel my eyeballs beginning to harden, and knew I was getting a glassy stare. I wanted to yelp, “Get on with it, for God’s sake!” But Al Coburn wasn’t the kind of man you could hurry. He’d just shutter on me, and I’d never learn what he had on his mind. So I let him yabber.

  “Bad luck,” Coburn said. “Ernie sure had bad luck. His son got killed in Korea, and his two daughters just up and moved on. His wife died the same year my Martha went, and that brought us closer together, Ernie and me. Something in common—you know? Anyway, the sawmill went, and the ice house, of course. Ernie tried this and that, but nothing come out good for him. He took a lick at farming, and lost his crop in a hailstorm. Tried a hardware store, and that went bust. Put some money in a Florida land swindle, and lost that.”

  “Bad luck,” I said sympathetically, repeating what he had said. But now he disagreed.