‘What difference does it make?’ said B-2, the butcher’s apprentice. ‘Whenever the day comes, he will be no better than his father.’
‘Aha,’ said D-4 triumphantly, ‘and there you are wrong. He has told my daughter that when he is landlord, everything will be different. There will be heat day and night. There will be painting—’
‘Two coats?’
‘Two coats of the very best paint. Or wallpaper for those who want it.’
‘Wallpaper!’
‘And,’ said D-4, ‘repairs to the plumbing when it leaks.’
They were all silent, awed.
‘May heaven speed the day,’ murmured C-1 at last, stroking his beard with trembling fingers.
The eyes of the fiery C-4 narrowed. He looked from one to the other. ‘Heaven?’ he said softly. ‘But why must it be left to heaven?’
For a moment his words puzzled them. Then understanding dawned. With it came a growing excitement. They knew that they all shared the same thought, and this gave them courage.
Yet some wavered.
‘It’s illegal.’
‘What if it is? Let’s not split hairs.’
‘It’s unkind.’
‘But to whom?’
‘It’s dangerous.’
‘No,’ said the fiery C-4 commandingly, ‘it is not dangerous.’
His tone swept all doubts away.
‘Listen,’ he said, as they gathered around him, ‘and I will explain what must be done.’
By the next day every tenant of Number 127 understood his role. By Saturday he was letter-perfect in it. All that day the wind howled and the snow piled high.
‘Good,’ said the tenants. ‘Tonight will be the night.’
Darkness came early. The children were fed their suppers and allowed to watch television. They liked especially to watch shows where cowboys and Indians fought in the desert under a blazing sun which made heat waves shimmer on the sand. Over the noise of television could be heard the sound of the front door opening and closing. Then footsteps ascending flight after flight of stairs.
‘He’s here,’ whispered the tenants to each other. ‘It’s the landlord’s son.’
‘Even weather like this couldn’t keep him away from her.’
‘What a monster his father is to treat him so cruelly,’ they whispered, hardening their hearts.
When the cowboy and Indian shows were over, the children turned to their mothers and fathers and said they didn’t want to go to bed, they wanted to watch more television.
‘All right,’ said the mothers and fathers, smiling. ‘Watch more television.’
‘What!’ said the children suspiciously.
‘Don’t argue,’ said the fathers sternly. ‘And turn up the sound so that we can all hear it a little better.’
The children put aside their suspicions and sat down again to watch a show about gangsters in Miami Beach where the sun beat down fiercely on palm trees.
A-3 was keeping his eyes fixed on the clock in his kitchen. At the appointed moment he took a bottle of whiskey he had brought from the restaurant where he was a busboy, and went down to the cellar. He knocked on the janitor’s door, and the janitor flung it open.
‘Come on!’ he shouted threateningly, putting up his fists. ‘One at a time or all together!’
‘No, no,’ said A-3. ‘I’m your friend. See what I brought you?’
He held out the bottle, and the janitor greedily snatched it from his hand. While A-3 watched in amazement, the janitor put the bottle to his lips, and throwing his head back he drained it to the bottom. With a wild cry he threw the bottle against the wall where it smashed to bits.
‘Come on!’ he said drunkenly, trying to raise his fists again, and then his eyes turned up in his head and he fell flat on his back to the floor. A-3 bent over him and poked him in the shoulder, but the janitor only lay still and snored so loud that it made the room shake.
A-3 left the room, closing the door tight behind him. Then he climbed to the top floor of the house and tapped on the door of D-4. The stout widow opened it.
‘Now?’ she said.
‘Now,’ said A-3.
As she followed him downstairs to the street hallway where a telephone hung on the wall, the other tenants joined them.
‘What about the landlord’s son?’ asked B-2, the butcher’s apprentice, with a touch of jealousy.
‘He and my daughter are sitting on the couch in their overcoats,’ answered D-4. ‘They are holding hands and looking at each other.’
‘Good,’ said the tenants.
‘Yes,’ said D-4, ‘they’re living in a dreamland. Nothing can distract them from each other.’
She picked up the telephone and called the landlord’s number.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘This is your tenant D-4 in Number 127.’
‘Who?’ said the landlord, and then one could almost hear him licking his lips. ‘Yes, yes, you’re the one with the daughter.’
‘Right. That’s what I want to talk to you about.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean my daughter,’ said D-4 loudly, ‘and your son.’
‘What? What was that?’
‘You heard me.’
‘I must have heard wrong,’ said the landlord. ‘My son has no time for girls. He’s in his room every night of the week studying books on real estate. He is there at this very minute.’
‘Is he?’ said D-4. ‘Well, I will wait while you see for yourself that he is not.’
In two minutes the landlord was back at the telephone.
‘He is gone!’ he said in a fury. ‘Where is he?’
‘Here with my daughter.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘Do you have to ask?’ said D-4 in a suggestive voice.
‘Then it’s your daughter’s fault. I knew the first time I saw her the kind of girl she was!’
‘Ha ha.’
‘She wants the money he’ll inherit!’
‘Ha ha.’
‘Don’t laugh,’ the landlord said, beside himself. ‘I’m coming there to put a stop to this myself.’ Then he groaned. ‘But how can I? With this snowstorm I can’t even get my car out of the garage. I can’t even take a bus, because the buses have stopped running.’
‘Walk.’
‘Walk?’
‘Why not?’ said D-4 mockingly. ‘Your son did.’
That was all the landlord needed. ‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. Then you’ll see what’ll happen.’
‘You’d better hurry,’ said D-4. ‘Otherwise you may be too late.’
All the tenants waited in the hallway. At last the landlord came through the front door, stamping his feet and beating the snow from his shoulders. He looked astonished at the sight of the tenants gathered there.
‘What is this?’ he demanded of D-4. ‘Do you want the whole world to know our business?’
‘Believe me,’ she told him, ‘not a word of it will ever be heard outside Number 127.’
‘Not a word,’ said all the tenants.
‘Well, I’m grateful for that much,’ said the landlord sarcastically. He looked around. ‘What is that noise? I never heard such a racket.’
‘The children are watching television.’
‘Are they all deaf? I can hardly hear myself think. And where is my son? Lead me to him at once.’
‘Down there.’
‘In the cellar?’ said the landlord. ‘I don’t believe you.’
The tenants surrounded him and pushed him down the cellar steps.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘Stop pushing me! Where is my son?’
‘Never mind your precious son,’ the tenants said.
They gathered around him before the furnace. Some held him tightly. Others neatly spread newspapers on the floor. B-2, the butcher’s apprentice, unrolled a long cloth which contained shining knives and cleavers.
‘Please be careful with these,’ B-2 warned the tenants. ‘They must be b
ack in the shop tomorrow morning.’
The landlord watched all this with mounting horror.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked in a frightened voice.
‘You’ll soon find out. Now please take off your coat.’
‘Never.’
They removed his coat.
‘But it’s cold here,’ the landlord pleaded. ‘I can’t stand such cold.’
‘You’ll soon be warm.’
‘Help!’ the landlord shouted. ‘Help!’ But all that could be heard in answer was the snoring of the janitor asleep in his room.
After a while the mothers went upstairs.
‘That’s enough television,’ they told the children. ‘Go to bed.’
‘But we want to watch more television.’
‘That’s enough for now,’ the mothers said affectionately. ‘Tomorrow is another day.’
Later the men came upstairs rolling down their sleeves. There was not a sound to be heard in Number 127 as they all waited.
Then they looked at each other.
‘Listen, do you hear it?’
‘This radiator is growing hot.’
‘This one, too.’
‘Be careful not to burn yourself on that pipe,’ C-4 warned his wife who always had a cold in the head.
The elderly C-1 sniffed through his beard. ‘There seems to be a slightly unpleasant odor in the hallway.’
‘I’ll put more coal on the fire,’ said A-3. ‘The smell will soon go away.’
‘Yes,’ said C-1. ‘And while you’re at it, stir the fire with the poker. Give it a good stirring. It must need it by now.’
In D-4 the beautiful daughter looked at the landlord’s son with wide eyes.
‘I must be dreaming,’ she said in wondering tones. ‘It seems to be getting so warm here.’
‘You are not dreaming,’ he assured her. ‘I suppose the janitor became so drunk that he built up an extraordinarily big fire. How lucky for us on such a bitter night.’
‘But it’s not bitter any more,’ she said, putting her arms around him. ‘It’s like springtime now.’
And all through Number 127 the radiators sang like birds.
Death of an Old-Fashioned Girl
The knife was an old carving knife pressed into service as an artist’s tool, used for trimming canvas, for shaping wedges for stretchers, for a dozen other duties. Its blade, honed to a razor edge, had been driven up to the handle into the woman’s body, the impact of the blow so unexpected and violent that she had not even had time to scream under it. She had simply doubled over and fallen, her face a mask of horror, and then she had lain still, her blood puddling on the floor.
She must have died almost at once. I had never seen death by violence before, but I needed no past experience to tell me that the abrupt relaxation of those limbs and the graying of that horror-stricken face meant death.
So, as the police knew at a glance, the knife had been the weapon. In view of that, one could hardly blame them for their skeptical manner toward us. And note as well that this was Greenwich Village, home of the emotional and irrational, that there was every evidence in the studio of a liberal consumption of alcohol, that the walls around were hung with paintings capable of baffling the canniest policeman – and there you have all the grounds you need for official hostility.
The one painting I would except was the huge nude on its slab of masonite hanging almost directly over the lifeless body on the floor, a fleshy, voluptuous nude which even a policeman could appreciate, as all these so evidently did.
There was – although they did not know it yet – a relationship between that nude and the body on the floor. The model for the picture had been Nicole Arnaud, first wife of Paul Zachary, the man who had painted it. The blood-soaked body on the floor had been Elizabeth Ann Moore, second wife of Paul Zachary. I have known cases where a man’s first and second wives managed a sort of amiable regard for each other, but they were the rare exceptions to the rule. The case of Nicole and Elizabeth Ann was not among the exceptions. Fearing each other desperately, they had naturally hated each other virulently. It was their misfortune that Paul Zachary was as talented and attractive as he was. One or another of those endowments should be enough for any man. Put them together so that you have a superb painter with an immediate and magnetic appeal for any woman in his ken, and you have the makings of a tragedy.
There were five of us to be questioned by the police: my wife Janet and myself, Sidney and Elinor Goldsmith who ran the Goldsmith Galleries, and Paul Zachary. Five of us, any of whom might be regarded as capable of murder. We had motive, we had means, and we had certainly drunk enough to enter the necessary mood.
The officer in charge was a lieutenant of detectives, a sharp-featured man with cold grey eyes, who surveyed us with a sort of dour satisfaction. There on the floor was a dead woman. Nearby lay the knife that had butchered her, still stained with her blood. And here were the five of us, birds in a coop, one of whom was certainly due to be plucked and roasted very soon. The victim’s husband, dazed and incoherent, sweating and blood-spattered, was the prime suspect, which made it that much easier. It was now four in the morning. Before sunrise our stories would be out, and the case would be closed.
Therefore, the lieutenant made it clear, the immediate objective was to separate us, to prevent any collusion, any conspiracy against the truth. There was a stenographer present to take our statements, but until they were dictated and signed we were not to communicate with each other. And, he added, with a bilious look at the litter of empty bottles and glasses on the scene, if we needed sobering up before the questioning, he would see to it that we were supplied with sufficient black coffee to do the job.
The studio was on the upper floor of Paul’s duplex. Of the host of men in it, fingerprinting, photographing, and examining, two were delegated to accompany us to the apartment below. In the living room there they dispersed us well apart from each other and then stood at opposite ends of the room, eyeing us like suspicious proctors.
The coffee was brought, steaming hot and acid strong, and because it was offered to us we drank it, the clink of cup against saucer sounding loud in the deathly silence of that room. Then a uniformed man appeared at the kitchen door, and Paul was removed.
Now there were four of us left to sit and look at each other numbly and wonder how Paul was describing what had happened. I had a part in that explanation. One hour ago Elizabeth Ann had been standing here before me, very much alive, and I had been the one to speak the words which started the clock ticking away her last minutes.
Not that I was entirely to blame for what had happened. There was in Elizabeth Ann a fatal quality. She was, as she herself chose to put it, an old-fashioned girl. This is a phrase which may have many meanings, but there was never a doubt about the exact meaning it held for her. During her brief lifetime she must have ingested enough romantic literature and technicolored movies to addle a much larger brain than hers, and in the end she came to believe that human beings actually behaved the way the heroine of a melodrama would. Perhaps – because whenever she looked into a mirror she saw how golden-haired and blue-eyed and beautiful she was – identification with her wish-fulfillment heroine came that much easier.
So Elizabeth Ann became that heroine and played her role, although neither she nor the times were quite suited to it. She should have given thought to that before the murderous knife-blade plunged into her – should have considered that times change, that poets no longer need to scratch their verses on parchment, nor painters smear their paints on canvas. Times change, and it may be dangerous to act out your little role as if they don’t.
Across the room Sidney Goldsmith looked at his watch, and, involuntarily, I looked at mine. It had only been five minutes since Paul was closeted with his inquisitors. How much longer would it take? Sooner or later it would be my turn, and I could feel my stomach churn at the prospect.
From the room overhead came sounds of heavy-footed activity; from the d
ark street below, a radio in one of the police cars parked there squawked something unintelligible. Later, I knew, there would be newspapermen and photographers, avid curiosity seekers and inquisitive friends. Afterward, all our lives would be changed and redirected – as if Elizabeth Ann had the power to manipulate us even from the grave.
Would a policeman be interested in that? Not likely. Yet, if I were to tell the story my own way, that would be part of it – a closing note, perhaps. As for the beginning, it would have to be the day, long, long ago, when I first met Paul Zachary.
We met that chill, damp Parisian day twelve years ago in Michelette’s, the cafe on the corner of Rue Soufflot near the University where art students, especially homesick American art students, congregated. Possibly because we were so dissimilar, Paul and I took to each other at once. He was a big, handsome, easy-going North Carolina boy, soft-voiced, slow-speaking, someone who, I suspected, would rather have cut out his tongue than to say anything unkind to you, no matter how justified unkindness might be on occasion. I learned that, watching him under provocation. He had a temper which was slow to heat, but when heated it would roar up in a blaze of physical rage, an overturning of a table, a smashing of a glass against the wall, but never the spoken insult.
As for me, I was small and aggressive, a born New Yorker with, I suppose, the New Yorker’s sharp tongue and touchy ways. To Paul this was as intriguing as his country ways were to me. More important, we honestly admired each other’s talents, and that is not as usual among artists as you might think. Making pictures may be art, but it is also a brutally competitive business for those engaged in it. There are just so many patrons and fellowships to support an artist, just so much space on gallery walls to display his work, and until a painter’s reputation is assured beyond a doubt he is the rival of every other painter, including masters long dead and gone.
The meeting in Michelette’s led very soon to our sharing a combined bedroom-studio on Rue Raspail, since such sharing is a natural way of life for students with little money. But there was one thing I could not share with Paul, no matter what I would have offered for it in those days. That was Nicole.
He had met her at Au Printemps, the big department store on Boulevard Haussmann, where she was a salesgirl. How to describe her? The best way, I think, is to say that she was a true Parisienne. And there is in every Parisian woman I have known a special quality. Beautiful or plain, she is always fully alive, always mercurial. Opinionated, too, for that matter, but what she does succeed in communicating to her man is that he is the one who has quickened her spirit this way.
The Specialty of the House Page 42
