The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  There was more of that in Judge Hilliker’s mordant and long-winded style, but Cornelius had no need to remember it. What he needed he now had, and very carefully he put the gun back in the drawer, slid the drawer shut, and locked it.

  Claire came in while he still sat brooding at the desk, and he forced himself to regard her with cold objectivity – this radiantly lovely woman who was playing him for a fool, and who now stood wide-eyed in the doorway with an incongruously large bag of groceries clutched to her.

  ‘I saw the car in the garage,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I was afraid something was wrong. That you weren’t feeling well …’

  ‘I feel very well.’

  ‘But you’re home so early. You’ve never come this early before.’

  ‘I’ve always managed to refuse invitations to midweek dinner parties before.’

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ she gasped. ‘The dinner! It never even entered my mind. I’ve been so busy all day …’

  ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Well, everyone’s off today, so I took care of the house from top to bottom, and then when I looked in the pantry and saw we needed some things I ran into town for them.’ She gestured at the bulky paper bag with her chin. ‘I’ll have your bath ready, and your things laid out as soon as I put this stuff away.’

  Watching her leave he felt an honest admiration for her. Another woman would have invented a visit to a friend who might, at some later time, accidentally let the cat out of the bag. Or another woman would not have thought to burden herself with a useless package to justify a trip into town. But not Claire, who was evidently as clever as she was beautiful.

  And she was damnably attractive. His male friends may have laughed behind his back, but in their homes she was always eagerly surrounded by them. When he entered a roomful of strangers with her he saw how all men’s eyes followed her with a frankly covetous interest. No, nothing must happen to her; nothing at all. It was the man who had to be destroyed, just as one would destroy any poacher on his preserves, any lunatic who with ax in hand ran amok through his home. Claire would have to be hurt a little, would have to be taught her lesson, but that would be done most effectively through what happened to the man.

  Cornelius learned very quickly that his plans would have to take in a good deal more than the simple act of waylaying the man and running him down. There were details, innumerable details covering every step of the way before and after the event, which had to be jigsawed into place bit by bit in order to make it perfect.

  In that respect, Cornelius thought gratefully, the Judge had been far more helpful than he had realized in his irony. Murder by automobile was the perfect murder, because, with certain details taken care of, it was not even murder at all! There was the victim, and there was the murderer standing over him, and the whole thing would be treated with perfunctory indifference. After all, what was one more victim among the thirty thousand each year? He was a statistic, to be regarded with some tongue-clicking and a shrug of helplessness.

  Not by Claire, of course. Coincidence can be stretched far, but hardly far enough to cover the case of a husband’s running down his wife’s lover. And that was the best part of it. Claire would know, but would be helpless to say anything, since saying anything must expose her own wrongdoing. She would spend her life, day after day, knowing that she had been found out, knowing that a just vengeance had been exacted, and standing forewarned against any other such temptations that might come her way.

  But what of the remote possibility that she might choose to speak out and expose herself? There, Cornelius reflected, fitting another little piece of the jigsaw into place, coincidence would instantly go to work for him. If there was no single shred of evidence that he had ever suspected her affair, or that he had ever seen the man before, the accident must be regarded by the law as coincidence. Either way his position was unassailable.

  It was with this in mind that he patiently and single-mindedly went to work on his plans. He was tempted at the start to call in some professional investigator who could promptly and efficently bring him the information he wanted, but after careful consideration he put this idea aside. A smart investigator might easily put two and two together after the accident. If he were honest he might go to the authorities with his suspicions; if he were dishonest he might be tempted to try blackmail. Obviously, there was no way of calling in an outsider without risking one danger or the other. And nothing, nothing at all, was going to be risked here.

  So it took Cornelius several precious weeks to glean the information he wanted, and, as he admitted to himself, it might have taken even longer had not Claire and the man maintained such an unfailing routine. Thursday was the one day of the week on which the man would pay his visits. Then, a little before the city-bound train arrived at the station, Claire would drive the station wagon into an almost deserted side-street a block from the Plaza. In the car the couple would kiss with an intensity that made Cornelius’s flesh crawl.

  As soon as the man left the car Claire would drive swiftly away, and the man would walk briskly to the Plaza, make his way through the cars parked at the curb there, cross the Plaza obviously sunk in his own thoughts and with only half an eye for passing traffic, and would enter the station. The third time Cornelius witnessed this performance he could have predicted the man’s every step with deadly accuracy.

  Occasionally, during this period, Claire mentioned that she was going to the city to do some shopping, and Cornelius took advantage of this as well. He was standing in a shadow of the terminal’s waiting room when her train pulled in, he followed her at a safe distance to the street, his cab trailed hers almost to the door of the shabby apartment house where the man lived. The man was sitting on the grimy steps of the house, obviously waiting for her. When he led her into the house, as Cornelius bitterly observed, they held hands like a pair of school children, and then there was a long wait, a wait which took up most of the afternoon; but Cornelius gave up waiting before Claire reappeared.

  The eruption of fury he knew after that scene gave him the idea of staging the accident there on the city streets the next day, but Cornelius quickly dismissed the thought. It would mean driving the car into the city, which was something he never did, and that would be a dangerous deviation from his own routine. Besides, city tabloids, unlike his staid local newspaper, sometimes publicized automobile accidents not only by printing the news of them, but also by displaying pictures of victim and culprit on their pages. He wanted none of that. This was a private affair. Strictly private.

  No, there was no question that the only place to settle matters was right in the Plaza itself, and the more Cornelius reviewed his plans in preparation for the act the more he marveled at how flawless they were.

  Nothing could conceivably go wrong. If by some mischance he struck down the man without killing him, his victim would be in the same position as Claire: unable to speak openly without exposing himself. If he missed the man entirely he was hardly in the dangerous position of an assassin who misses his victim and is caught with the gun or knife in his hand. An automobile wasn’t a weapon; the affair would simply be another close call for a careless pedestrian.

  However, he wanted no close calls, and to that end he took to parking the car somewhat farther from the station than he ordinarily did. The extra distance, he estimated, would allow him to swing the car across the Plaza in an arc which would meet the man as he emerged from between the parked cars across the street. That would just about make explanations uncalled-for. A man stepping out from between parked cars would be more in violation of the law than the driver who struck him!

  Not only did he make sure to set the car at a proper distance from the station entrance, but Cornelius also took to backing it into place as some other drivers did. Now the front wheels were facing the Plaza, and he could quickly get up all the speed he wanted. More than that, he would be facing the man from the instant he came into sight.

  The day before the one he had chosen f
or the final act, Cornelius waited until he was clear of traffic on his homeward drive, and then stopped the car on a deserted part of the road, letting the motor idle. Then he carefully gauged the distance to a tree some 30 yards ahead; this, he estimated, would be the distance across the Plaza. He started the car and then drove it as fast as he could past the tree, the big machine snarling as it picked up speed. Once past the tree he braced himself, stepped hard on the brake, and felt the pressure of the steering wheel against his chest as the car slewed to a shrieking stop.

  That was it. That was all there was to it …

  He left the office the next day at the exact minute he had set for himself. After his secretary had helped him on with his coat he turned to her as he had prepared himself to do and made a wry face.

  ‘Just not feeling right,’ he said. ‘Don’t know what’s wrong with me, Miss Wynant.’

  And, as he knew good secretaries were trained to do, she frowned worriedly at him and said, ‘If you didn’t work so hard, Mr Bolinger …’

  He waved that aside brusquely. ‘Nothing that getting home early to a good rest won’t cure. Oh,’ he slapped at the pockets of his coat, ‘my pills, Miss Wynant. They’re in the top drawer over there.’

  They were only a few aspirins in an envelope, but it was the impression that counted. A man who was not feeling well had that much more justification for a mishap while he was driving.

  The early train was familiar to him now; he had ridden on it several times during the past few weeks, but always circumspectly hidden behind a newspaper. Now it was to be different. When the conductor came through to check his commutation ticket, Cornelius was sitting limp in his seat, clearly a man in distress.

  ‘Conductor,’ he asked, ‘if you don’t mind, could you get me some water?’

  The conductor glanced at him and hastily departed. When he returned with a dripping cup of water Cornelius slowly and carefully removed an aspirin from the envelope and washed it down gratefully.

  ‘If there’s anything else,’ the conductor said; ‘just you let me know.’

  ‘No,’ Cornelius said, ‘no, I’m a little under the weather, that’s all.’

  But at the station the conductor was there to lend him a solicitous hand down, and dally briefly. ‘You’re not a regular, are you?’ the conductor said. ‘At least, not on this train.’

  Cornelius felt a lift of gratification. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve only taken this train once before. I usually travel on the Broker’s Special.’

  ‘Oh.’ The conductor looked him up and down, and grinned. ‘Well, that figures,’ he said. ‘Hope you found our service as good as the Special’s.’

  In the small station Cornelius sat down on a bench, his head resting against the back of the bench, his eyes on the clock over the ticket agent’s window. Once or twice he saw the agent glance worriedly through the window at him, and that was fine. What was not so fine was the rising feeling in him, a lurching nervousness in his stomach, a too-heavy thudding of his heart in his chest. He had allowed himself ten minutes here; each minute found the feeling getting more and more oppressive. It was an effort to contain himself, to prevent himself from getting to his feet and rushing out to the car before the minute hand of the clock had touched the small black spot that was his signal.

  Then, on the second, he got up, surprised at the effort it required to do this, and slowly walked out of the station, the agent’s eyes following him all the way, and down past the station to the car. He climbed behind the wheel, closed the door firmly after him, and started the motor. The soft purring of the motor under his feet sent a new strength up through him. He sat there soaking it up, his eyes fixed on the distance across the Plaza.

  When the man first appeared, moving with rapid strides toward him, it struck Cornelius in some strange way that the tall, blond figure was like a puppet being drawn by an invisible wire to his destined place on the stage. Then, as he came closer, it was plain to see that he was smiling broadly, singing aloud in his exuberance of youth and strength – and triumph. That was the key which unlocked all paralysis, which sent the motor roaring into furious life.

  For all the times he had lived the scene in his mind’s eye, Cornelius was unprepared for the speed with which it happened. There was the man stepping out from between the cars, still blind to everything. There was Cornelius’s hand on the horn, the ultimate inspiration, a warning that could not possibly be heeded, and more than anything else an insurance of success. The man swung toward the noise, his face all horror, his hands outthrust as if to fend off what was happening. There was the high-pitched scream abruptly cut off by the shock of impact, more violent than Cornelius had ever dreamed, and then everything dissolving into the screech of brakes.

  The Plaza had been deserted before it had happened; now, people were running from all directions, and Cornelius had to push his way through them to catch a glimpse of the body.

  ‘Better not look,’ someone warned, but he did look, and saw the crumpled form, the legs scissored into an unnatural position, the face graying as he watched. He swayed, and a dozen helping hands reached out to support him, but it was not weakness which affected him now, but an overwhelming, giddy sense of victory, a sense of victory heightened by the voices around him.

  ‘Walked right into it with his eyes wide open.’

  ‘I could hear that horn a block away.’

  ‘Drunk, maybe. The way he stood right there …’

  The only danger now lay in overplaying his hand. He had to watch out for that, had to keep fitting piece after piece of the plan together, and then there would be no danger. He sat in the car while a policeman questioned him with official gravity, and he knew from the growing sympathy in the policeman’s voice that he was making the right impression.

  No, he was free to go home if he wished. Charges, of course, had to be automatically preferred against him, but the way things looked … Yes, they would be glad to phone Mrs Bolinger. They could drive him home, but if he preferred to have her do it …

  He had allowed time enough for her to be at home when the call was made, and he spent the next fifteen minutes with the crowd staring at him through the window with a morbid and sympathetic curiosity. When the station wagon drew up nearby, a lane magically appeared through the crowd; when Claire was at his side the lane disappeared.

  Even frightened and bewildered, she was a beautiful woman, Cornelius thought, and, he had to admit to himself, she knew how to put on a sterling show of wifely concern and devotion, false as it was. But perhaps that was because she didn’t know yet, and it was time for her to know.

  He waited until she had helped him into the station wagon, and when she sat down in the driver’s seat he put an arm tight around her.

  ‘Oh, by the way, officer,’ he asked with grave anxiety through the open window. ‘Did you find out who the man was? Did he have any identification on him?’

  The policeman nodded. ‘Young fellow from the city,’ he said, ‘so we’ll have to check up on him down there. Name of Lundgren. Robert Lundgren, if his card means anything.’

  Against his arm Cornelius felt, rather than heard, the choked gasp, felt the uncontrollable small shivering. Her face was as gray as that of the man’s out there in the street. ‘All right, Claire,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go home.’

  She drove by instinct out through the streets of the town. Her face was vacuous, her eyes set and staring. He was almost grateful when they reached the highway, and she finally spoke in a quiet and wondering voice. ‘You knew,’ she said. ‘You knew about it, and you killed him for it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cornelius said, ‘I knew about it.’

  ‘Then you’re crazy,’ she said dispassionately, her eyes still fixed ahead of her. ‘You must be crazy to kill someone like that.’

  Her even, informative tone fired his anger as much as what she was saying.

  ‘It was justice,’ he said between his teeth. ‘It was coming to him.’

  She was still remote. ‘You
don’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t understand what?’

  She turned toward him, and he saw that her eyes were glistening wet. ‘I knew him before I ever knew you, before I ever started working in the office. We always went together; it didn’t seem as if there was any point living if we couldn’t be together.’ She paused only a fraction of a second. ‘But things didn’t go right. He had big ideas that didn’t make any money, and I couldn’t stand that. I was born poor, and I couldn’t stand marrying poor and dying poor … That’s why I married you. And I tried to be a good wife – you’ll never know how hard I tried! – but that wasn’t what you wanted. You wanted a showpiece, not a wife; something to parade around in front of people so they could admire you for owning it, just like they admire you for everything else you own.’

  ‘You’re talking like a fool,’ he said harshly. ‘And watch the road. We turn off here.’

  ‘Listen to me!’ she said. ‘I was going to tell you all about it. I was going to ask for a divorce. Not a penny to go with it, or anything like that – just the divorce so that I could marry him and make up for all the time I had thrown away! That’s what I told him today, and if you had only asked – only talked to me—’

  She would get over it, he thought. It had been even more serious than he had realized, but, as the saying went, all passes. She had nothing to trade her marriage for any longer; when she understood that clearly they would make a new start. It was a miracle that he had thought of using the weapon he had, and that he had used it so effectively. A perfect weapon, the Judge had said. He’d never know how perfect.

  It was the warning clangor of the bell at the grade crossing that jarred Cornelius from his reverie – that, and the alarming realization that the car’s speed was not slackening at all. Then everything else was submerged by the angry bawling of a diesel horn, and when he looked up incredulously, it was to the raging mountain of steel that was the Broker’s Special hurling itself over the crossing directly ahead.