Tomorrow's Crimes

by Donald E. Westlake

  The dock read 9:58. Now he was telling her. Now he was giving her a drink to calm her. Now he was phoning the police. Now he was talking to her about whether or not to admit their affair to the police; what would they decide?

  “NOOOO—OOOOO!”

  The clock read I0:07. What had taken so long? Hadn’t he even called the police yet?

  She was coming up the stairs, stumbling and rushing, she was pounding at the door, screaming my name. I shrank into the aimers of the room, I felt the thuds of her fists against the door, I cowered from her. She can’t come in, dear God don’t let her in! I don’t care what she’s done, I don’t care about anything, just don’t let her see me! Don’t let me see her!

  Greg joined her. She screamed at him. He persuaded her, she raved, he argued, she demanded, he denied. “Give me the key. Give me the key.”

  Surely he’ll hold out. Surely he’ll take her away, surely he’s stronger, more forceful.

  He gave her the key.

  No. This cannot be endured. This is the horror beyond all else. She came in, she walked into the mom, and the sound she made will always live inside me. That cry wasn’t human; it was the howl of every creature that has ever despaired. Now I know what despair is, and why I call my own state mere truculence.

  Now that it was too late. Greg tried to restrain her, tried to hold her shoulders and draw her from the room, but she pulled away and crossed the room toward. . . not toward me. I was everywhere in the room, driven by pain and remorse, and Emily walked toward the carcass. She looked at it almost tenderly, she even reached up and touched its swollen cheek. “Oh, Ed,” she murmured.

  The pains were as violent now as in the moment before my death. The slashing torment in my throat, the awful distension in my head, they made me squirm in agony all over again; but I could not feel her hand on my cheek.

  Greg followed her, touched her shoulder again, spoke her name, and immediately her face dissolved, she cried out once more and wrapped her arms around the corpse’s legs and clung to it, weeping and gasping and jabbering words too quick and broken to understand. Thank God they were too quick and broken to understand!

  Greg, that fool, did finally force her away, though he had great trouble breaking her clasp on the body. But one succeeded, and pulled her out of the room, and slammed the door, and for a little while the body swayed and turned, until it became still once more.

  That was the worst. Nothing could be worse than that. The long days and nights here—how long must a stupid creature like myself haunt his death-place before release?—would be horrible, I knew that, but not so bad as this. Emily would survive, would sell the house, would slowly forget. (Even I would slowly forget.) She and Greg could marry now. She was only thirty-six, she could still be a mother.

  For the rest of the night, I heard her wailing, elsewhere in the house. The police did come at last, and a pair of grim silent white-coated men from the morgue entered the room to cut me—it—down. They bundled it like a broken toy into a large oval wicker basket with long wooden handles, and they carried it away.

  I had thought I might be forced to stay with the body, I had feared the possibility of being buried with it, of spending eternity as a thinking nothingness in the black dark of a casket, but the body left the room and I remained behind.

  A doctor was called. When the body was carried away the room door was left open, and now I could plainly hear the voices from downstairs. Tony was among them now, his characteristic surly monosyllable occasionally rumbling, but the main thing for a while was the doctor. He was trying to give Emily a sedative, but she kept wailing, she kept speaking high hurried frantic sentences as though she had too little time to say it all. “I did it!” she cried, over and over. “I did it! I’m to blame!”

  Yes. That was the reaction I’d wanted, and expected, and here it was, and it was horrible. Everything I had desired in the last moments of my life had been granted to me, and they were all ghastly beyond belief. I didn’t want to die! I didn’t want to give Emily such misery! And more than all the rest, I didn’t want to be here, seeing and hearing it all.

  They did quiet her at last, and then a policeman in a rumpled blue suit came into the room with Greg, and listened while Greg described everything that had happened. While Greg talked, the policeman rather grumpily stared at the remaining length of rope still knotted around the beam, and when Greg had finished the policeman said, “You’re a close friend of his?”

  “More of his wife. She works for me, I own The Bibelot, an antique shop out on the New York Road.”

  “Mm. Why on earth did you let her in here?”

  Greg smiled; a sheepish embarrassed expression. “She’s stronger than I am,” he said. “A more forceful personality. That’s always been true.”

  It was with some surprise I realized it was true. Greg was something of a weakling, and Emily was very strong. (I had been something of a weakling, hadn’t I? Emily was the strongest of us all.)

  The policeman was saying, “Any idea why he’d do it?”

  “I think he suspected his wife was having an affair with me.” Clearly Greg had rehearsed this sentence, he’d much earlier come to the decision to say it and had braced himself for the moment. He blinked all the way through the statement, as though standing in a harsh glare.

  The policeman gave him a quick shrewd look. “Were you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was getting a divorce?”

  “No. She doesn’t love me, she loved her husband.”

  “Then why sleep around?”

  “Emily wasn’t sleeping around,” Greg said, showing offense only with that emphasized word. “From time to time, and not very often, she was sleeping with me.”

  “Why?”

  “For comfort.” Greg too looked at the rope around the beam, as though it had become me and he was awkward speaking in its presence. “Ed wasn’t an easy man to get along with,” he said carefully. “He was moody. It was getting worse.”

  “Cheerful people don’t kill themselves,” the policeman said.

  “Exactly. Ed was depressed most of the time, obscurely angry now and then. It was affecting his business, costing him clients. He made Emily miserable but she wouldn’t leave him, she loved him. I don’t know what she’ll do now.”

  “You two won’t marry?”

  “Oh, no.” Greg smiled, a bit sadly. “Do you think we murdered him, made it look like suicide so we could marry?”

  “Not at all,” the policeman said. “But what’s the problem? You already married?”

  “I am homosexual.”

  The policeman was no more astonished than I. He said, “I don’t get it.”

  “I live with my friend; that young man downstairs. I am—capable—of a wider range, but my preferences are set. I am very fond of Emily, I felt sorry for her, the life she had with Ed. I told you our physical relationship was infrequent. And often not very successful.”

  Oh, Emily. Oh, poor Emily.

  The policeman said, “Did Thornburn know you were, uh, homosexual?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t make a public point of it.”

  “All right.” The policeman gave one more half-angry look around the room, then said, “Let’s go.”

  They left. The door remained open, and I heard them continue to talk as they went downstairs, first the policeman asking, “Is there somebody to stay the night? Mrs. Thornburn shouldn’t be alone.”

  “She has relatives in Great Barrington. I phoned them earlier. Somebody should be arriving within the hour.”

  “You’ll stay until then? The doctor says she’ll probably sleep, but just in case—”

  “(X course.”

  That was all I heard. Male voices murmured a while longer from below, and then stopped. I heard cars drive away.

  How complicated men and women are. How stupid are simple actions. I had never understood anyone, least of all myself.

  The room was visited once more that night, by Greg, shortly after the
police left. He entered, looking as offended and repelled as though the body were still here, stood the chair up on its legs, climbed on it, and with some difficulty untied the remnant of rope. This he stuffed partway into his pocket as he stepped down again to the floor, then returned the chair to its usual spot in the comer of the room, picked the key off the floor and put it in the lock, switched off both bedside lamps and left the room, shutting the door behind him.

  Now I was in darkness, except for the faint line of light around the door, and the illuminated numerals of the clock. How long one minute is! That clock was my enemy, it dragged out every minute, it paused and waited and paused and waited rill I could stand it no more, and then it waited longer, and then the next number dropped into place. Sixty times an hour, hour after hour, all night long. I couldn’t stand one night of this, how could I stand eternity?

  And how amid I stand the torment and torture inside my brain? That was much worse now than the physical pain, which never entirely left me. I had been right about Emily and Greg, but at the same time I had been hopelessly brainlessly wrong. I had been right about my life, bur wrong; right about my death, but wrong. How much I wanted to make amends, and how impossible it was to do anything anymore, anything at all. My actions had all tended to this, and ended with this: black remorse, the most dreadful pain of all.

  I had all night to think, and to feel the pains, and to wait without knowing what I was waiting for or when—or if—my waiting would ever end. Faintly I heard the arrival of Emily’s sister and brother-in-law, the murmured conversation, then the departure of Tony and Greg. Not long afterward the guest room door opened, but almost immediately closed again, no one having entered, and a bit after that the hall light went out, and now only the illuminated dock broke the darkness.

  When next would I see Emily? Would she ever enter this room again? It wouldn’t be as horrible as the first time, but it would surely be horror enough.

  Dawn greyed the windowshade, and gradually the room appeared out of the darkness, dim and silent and morose. Apparently it was a sunless day, which never got very bright. The day went on and on, featureless, each protracted minute marked by the dock. At times I dreaded someone’s entering this room, at other times I prayed for something, anything—even the presence of Emily herself—to break this unending boring absence. But the day went on with no event, no sound, no activity anywhere—they must be keeping Emily sedated through this first day—and it wasn’t until twilight, with the digital clock reading 6:52, that the door again opened and a person entered.

  At first I didn’t recognize him. An angry-looking man, blunt and determined, he came in with quick ragged steps, switched on both bedside lamps, then shut the door with rather more force than necessary, and turned the key in the lock. Truculent, his manner was, and when he turned from the door I saw with incredulity that he was me. Me! I wasn’t dead, I was alive! But how could that be?

  And what was that he was carrying? He picked up the chair from the comer, carried it to the middle of the room, stood on it—

  No! No!

  He tied the rope around the beam. The noose was already in the other end, which he slipped over his head and tightened around his neck.

  Good God, don’t!

  He kicked the chair away.

  The instant I kicked the chair away I wanted it back, but gravity was turning my former wish to its present command; the chair would not right itself from where it lay on the floor, and my thirteen stone eleven would not cease to urge downward from the rope thick around ray neck.

  There was pain, of course, quite horrible pain centered in ray throat, but the most astounding thing was the way my cheeks seemed to swell. I could barely see over their round red hills, my eyes staring in agony at the door, willing someone to come in and rescue me, though I knew there was no one in the house, and in any event the door was carefully locked. My kicking legs caused me to twist and rum, so that sometimes I faced the door and sometimes the window, and my shivering hands struggled with the rope so deep in my flesh I could barely find it and most certainly could not pull it loose.

  I was frantic and terrified, yet at the same time my brain possessed a cold comer of aloof observation. I seemed now to be everywhere in the room at once, within my writhing body but also without, seeing my frenzied spasms, the thick rope, the heavy beam, the mismatched pair of lit bedside lamps throwing my convulsive double shadow on the walls, the closed locked door, the white-curtained window with its shade drawn all the way down. This is death, I thought.

  HYDRA

  “I’m afraid that’s the church again,” Carrie Morton said. “Greg, push on.”

  “That’s all right, I like it,” Fay White told her, being polite, but Greg Morton had already pushed the bar on the slide projector—chip-clock—and after a brief interval of rectangular white, the wall reblossomed into yet another view of the same small concrete-block church roughly painted in pastels, glistening like a week-old wedding cake in the bright southern sun.

  “Oh, dear,” Carrie said. “Too many of the same picture. But I just loved that church.”

  “I’d be fascinated by those colors, too,” Fay said, hating herself for her spineless politeness but helpless to change her manner. A dozen years ago in college it had been like this, Carrie blithe and uncaring while Fay smiled and said it was all right; and now here they were again, just the same.

  Chip-chip-chip-chip—“The people are so primitive,” Carrie said, as Greg struggled with the machine and they all stared at the white-again wall. “They’re alleged to be Christians, but what went on in that building seemed awfully jungle-jungle to me.”

  Then why not photograph that, Fay thought, sipping gamely at her pre-dinner drink. She and Carrie and Greg all held tiny glasses of a heavy, too-sweet South American liqueur the Mortons had brought back, while Fay’s husband, Reed—no spineless politeness for him—sat contentedly with a glass of beer.

  I wish I were more like Reed, Fay thought. Self-confident and serene. I wish liked my friends more.

  Clock. Four smiling children shyly posed in that same harsh sunlight beside a rusted, springless, dark green American car. “So childlike,” Carrie said, comfortably smiling.

  “Well, they’re children,” Fay said, looking at the vulnerable little faces, the knobby brown knees.

  “No, all of them, I mean.” Carrie laughed. “Such sweet people, but so naïve!”

  “Ripe for agitators,” Greg said.

  The picture on the wall trembled, and Fay frowned at the children. A withered arm! And wasn’t that—“Wait!” she said, but chip-clock, and they were looking now at a placid man walking down a dirt road, a large earthenware jug balanced on his shoulder. The road was dry and dusty, the land to both sides a sunbeaten brown. “Oh, it’s Hoo-lee-oh!” Carrie said happily.

  “Was that—Was one of those—” Fay looked across the projector’s beam at Carrie, blond and sweet and recently maternal. “Was one of those children blind?”

  But Reed was saying. “Agitators. Greg? Down there, too?”

  “It’s the same old story,” Greg said, while Carrie turned her open smiling face to listen. “The big American company comes in, brings prosperity, jobs, consumer goods, education—medical cart, for Christ’s sake—and the first thing you know the locals think it’s all theirs.”

  “Hoo-lee-oh was our houseboy,” Carrie said, smiling at Fay. “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is, being where there’s no servant problem.”

  “Hoo-lee-oh?”

  Carrie spelled it out, and it turned out to be Julio. “He made the most delicious wine,” Carrie said, “and used to bring us just jugs of the stuff. Not grape wine, from flowers or something. I never could understand how he grew anything at all—just look at the ground. When I think of my poor little kitchen garden; hopeless, tomatoes like acorns.”

  “Miserable soil,” Greg said, “but naturally the politicals carried on all the time about pollution.”

  ‘It’s the same up here,
” Reed said. “Love Canal, all that. Mountains out of molehills.”

  “Exactly,” Greg said. “People make mistakes, we’re all human, but you’d think it was deliberate. We aren’t barbarians, for Christ’s sake.”

  Fay twisted around to look at Greg. “I read about some valley in Brazil,” she said, “where there’s so much industry now, so much pollution, nothing grows anymore. And birth defects, and—”

  Greg nodded, mouth expressing disapproval. “The dead valley, I know. Believe me, the politicals beat us over the head with that one, even though it isn’t American companies, it’s all multinationals, European, South American. But they did go too far there, no question, we all know there have to be some controls. But what we have to realize, every one of us right here in the U.S.A., the world is going to pass us by.”

  “I don’t follow,” Reed said.

  Chip-clock. Julio and his jug became a very pregnant Carrie, in voluminous white top and pink slacks, blooming and beaming in front of their neat white modular company cottage. In the background, black lines like the smoke in a child’s drawing squiggled upward from the tall metal stacks. “I wore pink the whole time,” Carrie said, “so I’d have a girl.”

  “Vickie’s such a little doll,” Fay took her.

  Greg was saying to Reed, “If it weren’t for U.S. government regulations, PetChem wouldn’t have moved down there back in the sixties. I’m all for the environment—I mean, for Christ’s sake, we all breathe the same air—but you’ve got to weigh the factors. These countries in the south, they want our business, they’re ready to make an accommodation.”

  “How far along were you?” Fay asked.

  “Six months.” Carrie smiled dreamily, reminiscently, at the image of her pregnant self. “I carried so big, for a while I thought I was having triplets.”

  “Of course, they breed like rabbits,” Greg said, “so they hardly show. The women. Walk along the road, you wouldn’t know they were pregnant at all. Squat, and poof.”