“Boyd’s a nice fellow, too. Aura took judo lessons from him at the Y. She liked him a lot. Nice fellow. Terrible temper, though. I’d hate to think what would happen if he found out anything like that about Lizzie. Well, listen, by the way, Pierce, any likelihood you’d be interested in letting go of that old rotted cabin up near Knoll Pond? Somebody mentioned they heard you were thinking of trying to get rid of it. I used to do a bit of fishing up there. Might be willing to take it off your hands.”
“What?”
“Fishing’s my love affair. Every man’s got to have one, right?”
Raleigh was blushing at his speech, hastily prepared on the way to the lobby. First of all, he was blushing because he always did when he lied, and, second, he expected Jimson to laugh at him and then reply, “No.” In fact, he looked forward to the rejection; it would mean that he had failed to carry out one of his father’s outrageous instructions, and so, having failed, need try no more. When Jimson, wiggling his long upper lip, turned without a word, walked to the abandoned shoeshine stand, climbed into one of its high seats, and put his feet on the iron shoerests, Raleigh assumed the merchant had found his proposal so great a social breach of their families’ longlived antagonism that he wasn’t even going to respond to it. He was certainly staring at Hayes with a disgusted, astonished look. The look intensified when Raleigh, blushing hotter, went on. “Matter of fact, it was Boyd Joyner I used to do a lot of fishing with, you know, back when we were kids. I haven’t done as much lately as I’d like.” (Indeed, Hayes hadn’t gone fishing once in the last five years.) “Just haven’t found the time, what with work and family.” He now tried a little humor of the Civitans sort in hopes of changing the terrible look on Jimson’s face. “What I can’t figure out, Pierce, is how these damn adulterers find the time.” As Jimson still sat there glowering, Raleigh decided to leave. “Well, think it over.”
“Just a minute.” Even lowered, the baritone reverberated in the big empty space. “Look here.”
Hayes turned back. “Sorry if I offended you, bringing this up, Pierce, but I figured you and I were adult enough not to be stopped by a bunch of foolish family emotion. I don’t pay any attention to my family in things like this, and naturally I assumed you felt the same. This was strictly a business deal.”
Jimson was staggered. He was shocked speechless by the certainty that a man like Raleigh Hayes (a Civitan, a church deacon, a former president of the Better Business Bureau) was blatantly blackmailing him with threats of exposing to her husband his illicit affair with Mrs. Joyner. That this was what was meant by all the veiled references not only to love affairs but to Boyd’s deadly martial skills, Jimson did not for a moment doubt. He was so obsessed with his infidelity that he assumed everyone else was too. What he wasn’t certain of were the blackmail terms. Hayes appeared to be selling his silence for a broken-backed shack near a weed-clotted pond, uncleared miles away from the old Hillston Road. Jimson wasn’t even sure exactly where. Annually he paid taxes on a thin strip leading on an unfarmable rise from the road to the knoll, having inherited the land from his father, who’d gotten it in some entangled financial fallout (he seemed to recall) with Raleigh’s grandfather. “Bunch of foolish family emotion?” he faltered.
Hayes nodded. “Far as I’m concerned. Why should we hang on to that old nonsense? They need never know.”
Jimson was awestruck by the until now utterly unsuspected depths of Raleigh Hayes’s jaded cynicism. The sanctity of marriage was old nonsense, foolish family emotion? Clearly, no appeals to the pain that knowledge would cause the innocent Mrs. Jimson and Mr. Joyner were likely to mean a thing to him. The man was a monster; he had to be placated. “Raleigh, you want to fish out there, you go right ahead. Be my guest. You don’t have to buy it.”
“Gosh, Pierce, that’s really very nice of you. I appreciate it. But the fact is, I want to buy that old cabin. It has, well, a sentimental significance of a nostalgic aspect.” Hayes could hear Aura saying, “Raleigh, you’re upset, aren’t you? You’re getting polysyllabic.” He took off his glasses so he wouldn’t have to see Jimson’s response to this latest fabrication. “It means a lot to me. Don’t you ever wish you could get back to feeling, well, innocent like you used to be?” Raleigh blushed brighter, as it all of a sudden struck him that he wasn’t lying; he actually had, long ago at the pond, felt, what? At ease. He actually could feel wriggling somewhere distant inside him an urge to feel that way again.
Jimson, however, interpreted Hayes’s remark about innocence as sadistic irony. He lifted his head from his arms and studied the blackmailer as if he were some horrific sideshow exhibit. “You really want to buy it? It’s not worth anything.”
Raleigh tried a companionable, shrewd chuckle. “Then I won’t pay much. But I will pay cash.”
Warily, Jimson climbed out of the shoeshine seat, so bringing himself physically down to Raleigh’s level. He felt defeated, but oddly relieved: everybody was immoral, sinners in league to protect their sins. Wouldn’t it have been worse if Hayes, in pure disinterest, had counseled him to stop seeing Lizzie? He became crafty and businesslike. “That’s it? That’s all you want? You’re sure? You just want that old cabin?”
“Well, and the land it’s on.” Hayes repeated the chuckle. For Pete’s sake, was Jimson really going to sell him that property, and if so, for whatever reason in the world? He merrily patted the merchant’s arm. “Don’t worry. I swear nobody’s discovered any oil out there, honest.”
That very thought had just crossed Jimson’s mind, but clearly a Machiavelli like Hayes would never have brought up the subject if such were the case. It was more probable that Hayes wanted a hideaway for some of his other nefarious enterprises. Something he didn’t want traced; why else offer cash? Heaven knows what the man was capable of. “Okay, Raleigh, you win. What do you want to pay for it?”
“Well, what are you asking?” stumbled Hayes.
Jimson put his hand in his pocket. His fingers touched the packet of new ribbed condoms he’d bought in Charlotte. Lizzie would be at the furniture warehouse in an hour. If he only had time to figure out what Raleigh was really up to, but he didn’t dare wait, not with the bubble of his reputation on the lips of so heartless a man. “How about three thousand, then?”
“Three thousand?” Excited, Hayes shifted his bag of pastries from one hand to the other. “Three? Are you kidding?” (He had hoped for six, and expected to hear seven or eight.)
“All right! Twenty-five hundred.”
“Sold!” cried Hayes, and set the bag down on the shoeshine stand to shake on the deal, but Jimson was already walking away. “Do we need, Pierce, do we need a lawyer?” he called after him. Jimson shook his head emphatically no. Raleigh turned his back, reached inside one of the buttoned pockets where he’d safety-pinned the envelopes of money, undid one, and ran after the merchant. “Hey, hold up, Pierce. Might as well take it now.”
Jimson stared as Hayes fastidiously removed twenty-five new one-hundred-dollar bills from a white envelope. He stared as Hayes scribbled in a small notebook: “Received of R. W. Hayes, $2,500.00 cash, in full payment for all property now owned by me in the area known as Knoll Pond, said property to include the remains of the cabin there, and the access lane from Hillston Road.” Hayes looked this over, then tore out the page. “No time like the present, Pierce. Sorry to rush you, but I may need to leave town, and I’d like to settle this. If you’ll just sign now, then your lawyer can fix it up legally.”
Jimson kept staring. “I don’t believe in hurrying business this way.…Maybe we should…” He backed away.
Hayes closed Jimson’s fingers around the pen. “Pierce, you can’t afford not to do this. Can you? You don’t know what might happen. I might come to my senses. Am I right?” He laughed, but couldn’t manage to sound even remotely sincere.
And with a long sigh, the adulterer signed, and crammed the money deep in his pocket beside the condoms.
“Oh, Pierce, by the way, now we’re doing
business, do you have a life insurance policy?”
Jimson wheeled around. “I’m already fully insured.”
“Good. You should be.”
“Meaning what?!”
“Everybody should be. Give my best to your wife.”
“Just don’t push too far, Raleigh, goddammit.”
“Pardon?” What a strange fellow, thought Hayes, as the lobby doors slammed on his question. Absolutely unpredictable.
And still shaking his head from time to time, Hayes rode the rattling elevator up to his office, where he found his note “Be Back Soon” still taped to the door. Bonnie Ellen! He’d forgotten to call her last night. Why hadn’t she called him? Why hadn’t she removed his note? And wasn’t she usually a little bit neater? For Hayes now noticed details in the anteroom where she had her desk, details that yesterday, in his distress about his father, he’d failed to see. (Not that he was ever, according to Aura, particularly observant where Bonnie Ellen Dellwood was concerned: Aura had told him her silly theory that Bonnie Ellen had a crush on him, adding, “I don’t blame her.” And when Raleigh’d dismissed this as preposterous, she’d further explained, “You probably subconsciously find her sexually attractive too—who wouldn’t, with those breasts and outfits—so you have to ignore her. You don’t notice her out of loyalty to me, but, honey, you don’t have to be blind to be faithful.” Raleigh’d replied, “Aura, please don’t tell me who I am and I don’t know it.”) However, he admittedly had ignored the fact that Bonnie Ellen was as untidy as her desk now appeared to indicate. White circles tracked the path of a paper Coke cup. Flies were crawling on a tangle of french fries. A crimson paperback titled Flame of Castle Fury sat with its spine cracked atop the typewriter; beside it, Hayes saw three letters he thought had been mailed a week ago. They were sprinkled with dirt from an overturned knobby cactus plant that lay on its back, roots up, like a crab. Dust balls had gathered on the floor, a spider had spun at leisure a substantial web in a window ledge. Maybe Bonnie Ellen (who periodically called in with bouts of flu—perhaps too periodically for a healthy young woman of twenty-three) had been taken ill while at the office and had gone home in a hurry. Still, she might have left a note, or had her husband call (if he was her husband—which Aura doubted). Admittedly, Hayes knew very little about Mrs. Dellwood, whom he’d hired as a temporary replacement six months ago, when Betty Morrow Hemans, his secretary for twenty years, had abruptly retired to devote herself exclusively to the novel she’d been writing since he’d met her. Had he, in fact, hired Bonnie Ellen for—and not in spite of—her flashy looks? What a horrible discovery, if true, which it wasn’t, of course, thought Hayes.
Seated behind his own meticulous desk, Raleigh took out his lukewarm coffee and his huge, clammy glazed pastries. Made reckless by hunger, he gluttonously devoured all five as he worked. He recalled having eaten such things for breakfast long ago, back in college, when obviously his stomach had been impervious to assault. Now horrible pains seized him. He was squeezing his sides when the phone rang. It was not Bonnie Ellen, but Aura.
“Where’d you go?” she said. “What about the afterglow?”
“What? Aura, it’s seven-o-five.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Sweetheart, have you by any chance bought a new watch lately? You keep wanting to tell me the time. Thanks for the flowers, by the way. What in the world are you doing? Are you kissing me through the phone? I find this new you absolutely fascinating.”
Hayes was licking from his fingers the glazed sugar that had webbed them together. “Don’t be silly. Did Bonnie Ellen call?”
“I see. Now you’ve had me, you’re after her.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“In the sack with her boyfriend, probably. It’s only, let me guess, seven-o-six.”
“Aura, do you mind? And I wish you wouldn’t say things like ‘in the sack’ at your age.”
“You want me to wait till I’m older?”
“Ha ha. What are you doing up? You never wake up by seven.”
“Mothers for Peace, remember? Today’s a big day for me. Besides, the phone woke me. Aunt Vicky wants you to come over right away. About your daddy.”
Hayes took his fingers from his mouth so quickly his cheek popped. “She’s got him?”
“No, no, he just called. Long distance. You know,” Aura yawned, “you’re starting to get like that guy in Victor Hugo.”
Raleigh stood. “I don’t have time to wonder what you could possibly mean.”
“You know.”
“Really?” he asked her smiling photograph.
“I mean, obsessed, like the detective after the man who killed his wife, in that TV series they stole from Les Misérables.”
“Aura, good-bye.”
“Yes, you better hang up. It’s probably seven-o-eight. But aren’t you going to ask me what I’m wearing? You were so into women’s clothing yesterday.”
“For God’s sake, I was not!”
“I’m au naturel. My, I’m in a French mood today, aren’t I? Well, bon whatever the word for morning is. Oh, matin. Listen, the girls won’t be home for supper and I may be late, but there’re plenty of leftovers. Wish us luck.”
“Aura, what are you talking about?”
“Really, Raleigh! M.F.P.! But let’s get to bed early. Ummmm.”
She’d hung up. Perhaps Aura had precipitously entered a midlife crisis. Perhaps for women they took this distinctively carnal cast. Look at Vera Sheffield. And, apparently, Lizzie Joyner. Perhaps in addition to their politicking against nuclear war, they’d all joined some local consciousness-raising group that encouraged this aggressive kind of sexual behavior. Hayes, soliloquizing, prepared his own mail. Then he telephoned Bonnie Ellen’s apartment. The woman who answered the phone said her name was Mrs. Hannah Pruck. She said, “I rent them my upstairs and it’s a mess. I’m up here now. I’m as disgusted as I can be.”
“I’m sorry. This is Mrs. Dellwood’s employer, Raleigh W. Hayes? I’m sorry to disturb you so early.”
“I can’t sleep nights,” the woman told him proudly. “I’ve been up since the crack of dawn for ten years.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Is Bonnie Ellen sick or something? She left work yesterday without saying anything.”
“You don’t know? Well, that takes the cake. Young people don’t have the manners of a hog. They went to California, and didn’t tell you, me, or the lamppost. Never even mind the holes in my walls.”
“I beg your pardon?” Raleigh began to monitor his pulse with his thumb. “California?”
“Her husband—that’s a laugh, between me and you—stuck a note on the door. With a nail!” added Mrs. Pruck. “About how a job had come up in California and they both had to leave right away and they’d be in touch, according to this note, but don’t make me laugh.”
“I don’t believe it.” Hayes could find no pulse on either wrist.
“You wouldn’t put it past them you took a good look at this room. My husband died in this room, and look at the way they’ve treated it. First of the month, every bit of theirs goes in the trash. I’d be ashamed to take it to Goodwill, and so would you.”
Hayes hung up and said to someone, “Ha ha. Thanks a lot.” Now, he would have to beg Betty Hemans to set aside her novel and return to work until he could find a new secretary. A flood of anger against Chinese food lifted Raleigh from his chair and swept him to the door. He had the unassailable feeling (simultaneously discounted as absurd) that had he never opened that fortune cookie at the Lotus House yesterday, Fortune would never have gotten loose to play these kinds of tricks on him, like a genii on a rampage—out of her bottle after a million years.
But Fortune, unbound by the human limits of even the most dyspeptic irony, knew tricks Hayes was certainly not imagining as he hurried down the hall past the supplies closet, in a corner of which Bonnie Ellen Dellwood had been lying unconscious for an hour. If Hayes had only left the coffee shop five minutes sooner, he would have
seen Eddie Dellwood rush panicked through the lobby, convinced that he’d accidentally murdered his young wife. If Hayes had only opened his office door twenty minutes earlier, he would have heard Bonnie Ellen yell at Eddie that she wasn’t even sure she wanted to go to California, that she refused to clear out her office without even writing a note to Mr. Hayes, who had treated her so decently, and that she “sure as shit” was not about to tell Eddie the combination to Mr. Hayes’s safe. At which point Hayes would have heard a scuffle, followed by a thunk, followed by a crash, as Mrs. Dellwood was shaken by her husband, slipped, hit her head against the corner of her desk, and fell to the floor.
But Hayes was twelve floors below, ordering pastries, and, therefore, he concluded that Bonnie Ellen was a very thoughtless, irresponsible young woman, and he never should have allowed Betty Hemans to persuade him to hire her. That’s the kind of trick of which Fortune is capable.
At the elevator, Hayes took from his seersucker jacket Mingo Sheffield’s little black .22 pistol. Its solidity was strangely comforting. He pressed the barrel first against his head, then against his heart— not in any serious way, just theoretically. Then he aimed at the elevator doors, and mentally shot them for not opening. At that moment, they did. Behind the old-fashioned sliding iron grille was a big pushcart crammed with buckets, mops, and brooms. Behind the cart was the Forbes Building janitor, Bill Jenkins, a heavyset black man. He wore a white mustache of Teutonic flavor and had one withered hand. For those two reasons he had been nicknamed “Kaiser Bill” by some now long dead Thermopylae wag.
Staring at Hayes, Bill was motionless as an overweight rabbit with no hope of successful flight, his huge brown eyes on the gun pointing at him, his large ears twitching as he more and more rapidly chewed on a cheekful of gum.
“Are you coming out or going down?” Raleigh finally asked impatiently.
“Whichever you say, Mister Hayes. Bill’s not fixing to get in your way at all.” (As if inspired by his imperial alias, the janitor always referred to himself in the third person.)
Handling Sin Page 8
