Transgressions Vol. 3: Merely Hate/Walking the Line/Walking Around Money

by Ed McBain

  He did a run of the cards on the living room coffee table, a little more hastily than usual, to be done before Janet got home. He wasn’t embarrassed by the cards and his daily consultation of them, he could certainly do anything he damn well pleased in his own home, but it just felt a little awkward somehow to shuffle the deck and deal out the cards if he knew Janet could see him.

  Nothing much in the cards today. A few strangers hovered here and there, but they always did. Life, according to the tarot deck, was normal.

  He put the deck away, neatly aligned in the drawer, and when Janet came home a quarter hour later he was sprawled on the sofa, watching the early news. She took the sunglasses off right away, as soon as she walked in the door, to spite him. He squinted at her, and that shouldn’t look that bruised, not four, five days later. She must be poking her thumb in her eye to make it look worse, so he’d feel bad.

  You want somebody to poke a thumb in your eye, is that it? Is that what you want? “How was your day?” he said.

  “I caught a fish.” She’d been speaking to him in a monotone for so long he thought it was normal. “I’ll see about dinner,” she said, and went on through toward the kitchen.

  Watching antacid commercials on television, Twilley told himself he knew she was up to something, and the reason he knew, she didn’t fight back anymore. She didn’t get mad at him anymore, and she almost never tried to boss him around anymore.

  Back at the beginning of the marriage, years ago, she had been an improver and he had been her most important project. Not her only project, she bossed everybody around, but the most important one. She’d married him, and they both knew it, because she’d believed he needed improving, and further believed he’d be somebody she’d be happy to live with once the improvement was complete.

  No. Nobody pushes Roger Twilley. Roger Twilley pushes back.

  But she wasn’t pushing any more, hardly at all, only in an automatic unguarded way every once in a while. Like a few days ago. So that’s how he knew she was up to something. Up to something.

  “Is Frank there?”

  14

  Since he didn’t plan to stay overnight in the city this time, Querk didn’t borrow Claude’s van but drove his own old clunker of a Honda with the resale value of a brick. But it would take him to New York and back, and last as long as he’d need it, which wouldn’t be very long at all.

  Three o’clock. He walked from his parked heap to the entrance to Dortmunder’s building and would have rung the bell but Kelp was just ahead of him, standing in front of the door as he pulled his wallet out. “Whadaya say, Kirby?” he said, and withdrew a credit card from the wallet.

  A credit card? To enter an apartment building? Querk said, “What are you doing?” but then he saw what he was doing, as Kelp slid the credit card down the gap between door and frame, like slicing off a wedge of soft cheese, and the door sagged open with a little forlorn creak.

  “Come on in,” Kelp said, and led the way.

  Following, Querk said, “Why don’t you ring the doorbell?”

  “Why disturb them? This is just as easy. And practice.”

  Querk was not pleased, but not surprised either, when Kelp treated the apartment door upstairs the same way, going through it like a movie ghost, then pausing to call down the hallway, “Hello! Anybody there?” He turned his head to explain over his shoulder, “May doesn’t like me to just barge in.”

  “No,” agreed Querk, while down the hall Dortmunder appeared from the living room, racing form in one hand, red pencil in the other and scowl on face.

  “God damn it, Andy,” he said. “The building spent a lot of money on those doorbells.”

  “People spend money on anything,” Kelp said, as he and Querk entered the apartment, Querk closing the door, yet wondering why he bothered.

  Dortmunder shook his head, giving up the fight, and led the way into the living room as Kelp said, “May here?”

  “She’s doing a matinee.” Dortmunder explained to Querk, “She likes movies, so if I got something to do she goes to them.”

  “You don’t? Like movies?”

  Dortmunder shrugged. “They’re okay. Siddown.”

  Querk took the sofa, Dortmunder and Kelp the chairs. Kelp said, “So here we all are, Kirby, and now you’re going to ease our minds.”

  “Well, I’ll try.” This was going to be tricky now, as Querk well knew. He said, “Maybe I should first tell you about the other person in this.”

  “Rodrigo, you mean,” Kelp said.

  “No, the travel agent.”

  “That’s right,” Kelp said, “you said there was a travel agent, he’s the one gonna ship the siapas south.”

  “She,” Querk corrected him. “Janet Twilley, her name is. She’s got a travel agency, up there in Sycamore.”

  “Oh, ho,” said Kelp. He looked roguish. “A little something happening there, Kirby?”

  “No no,” Querk said, because he certainly didn’t want them to think that. “It’s strictly business. She and I are gonna split our share, the same as you two.”

  “Half of a half,” Kelp said.

  “Right.”

  Dortmunder said, “You trust this person.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Querk said.

  Dortmunder said, “Without anything special between you, just a business thing, you trust her.”

  Treading with extreme caution, Querk said, “To tell you the truth, I think she’s got an unhappy marriage. I think she wants money so she can get away from there.”

  “But not with you,” Kelp said.

  “No, not with an ex-con.” Querk figured if he put himself down it would sound more believable. “She just wants to use me,” he explained, “to make it so she can get out of that marriage.”

  Dortmunder shrugged. “Okay. So she’s the one takes the siapas to Rodrigo. You trust her to come back with the dollars. But we still got the same question, why do we trust her?”

  “We talked about that,” Querk said, “Janet and me, and the only thing we could come up with is, one of you has to travel with her.”

  Kelp nodded at Dortmunder. “Told you so.”

  “See,” Querk said, hurrying through the story now that they’d reached it, “she’s putting together this travel package, I dunno, fifteen or twenty people on this South American bus tour. Plane down, then bus. And she’ll have the boxes in with the whole container load of everybody’s luggage. So what she can do, she can slip in one more person, and she’ll get the ticket for free, but you’ll have to tell me which one so she’ll know what name to put on the ticket.”

  Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other. Kelp sighed. “I knew this was gonna happen,” he said.

  Querk said, “It won’t be bad. A few days’ vacation, and you come back.”

  Kelp said, “Can she promote two tickets?”

  “You mean, both of you go down?”

  “No,” Kelp said. “I mean my lady friend. I could see myself doing this, I mean it would be easier, if she could come along.”

  “Sure,” Querk said, because why not, and also because this was turning out to be easier than he’d feared. “Just give me her name. Write it down on something.”

  Dortmunder, rising, said, “I got a pad in the kitchen. Anybody want a beer?”

  Everybody wanted a beer. Dortmunder went away, and Kelp said to Querk, “Her name is Anne Marie Carpinaw. Your friend—Janet?—they’ll like each other.”

  “I’m sure they will,” Querk said. Then, because he was nervous, he repeated himself, saying, “It won’t be bad. A few days’ vacation, that’s all. You’ll have a good time.”

  “Sure,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder came back with a notepad and three unopened beer cans. “Here, everybody can open their own,” he said.

  Kelp took the pad and wrote his lady friend’s name on it, while the other two opened their beer cans, Dortmunder slopping beer onto his pants leg. “Damn!”

  “Here it is,” Kelp said, and handed
the slip of paper to Querk,

  “Thanks.” Querk pocketed the paper and lifted his beer. “What was that toast of yours? To crime.”

  Kelp offered the world’s blandest smile. “To crime, with good friends,” he said.

  “Hear, hear,” Dortmunder and Querk said.

  15

  Wednesday. The last thing Janet did before shutting Seven Leagues for the day was cut the two tickets, in the names of Anne Marie Carpinaw and Andrew Octavian Kelp, JFK to San Cristobal, Guerrera, change in Miami, intermediate stop in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, departure 10 P.M. tomorrow night, arrival 6:47 A.M., first leg Delta, second leg the charter carrier InterAir. She tucked these two tickets into her shoulder bag, put on her sunglasses, locked up the shop, took a last long look at it through the front plate glass window, and drove home to the rat.

  At almost the exact same instant Janet was opening the door of her hated home, Kelp was opening the driver’s door of another O’Malley special (small but spunky) rented with another short-life-expectancy credit card. Dortmunder tossed his bag in the back and slid in beside Kelp.

  Kirby Querk, being on vacation along with the entire workforce of Sycamore Creek Printery, spent the afternoon fishing with a couple of friends from the plant, well downstream from town. (It was while fishing this part of this stream, almost a year ago, that he’d first met Janet, beautiful in her fishing hat and waders.) The unusually high water made for a rather interesting day, with a few spills, nothing serious. The influx of water from the opened dam starting last Saturday had roiled the streambed for a while, making turbid water in which the fishing would have been bad to useless, but by Wednesday Sycamore Creek was its normal sparkling self and Querk spent a happy day playing catch and release with the fish. There were times he almost forgot his nervousness about tonight.

  Roger Twilley watched television news every chance he got, a sneer on his face. He despised and mistrusted them all, and watched mainly so he could catch the lies. A lot of the lies got past him, he knew that, but some of them he caught, the blatant obvious untruths the powers that be tell to keep the shmos in line. Well, Roger Twilley was no shmo; he was on to them, there in their 6:30 network news.

  Meanwhile Janet, allegedly in the kitchen working on dinner, was actually in the bedroom, packing a small bag. Toiletries, cosmetics, a week’s worth of clothing. She left much more than she took, but still the bag was crammed full when she was finished, and surprisingly heavy. She lugged it from the bedroom through the kitchen, out the back door, and around to the side of the house where a band of blacktop had been added, for her to keep her car. (His car got the attached garage, of course, which was all right in the summer, less so in the winter.) She heaved the bag into the trunk, which already contained her fishing gear, and went back into the house to actually make dinner, asking herself yet again, as she did every evening at this time, why she didn’t just go ahead and poison the rat. But she answered the question, too, as she always did, with the knowledge that she’d simply never get away with it. A battered wife and a poisoned husband; even a Darby County cop could draw that connector.

  Using the same credit card that had promoted the rental car, outside which now Dortmunder was stretching and groaning and wailing, “Why me?” Kelp took two adjoining rooms in the Taconic Lakes Motel, just about twenty miles north of Sycamore. It was not quite 7:30; even leaving the city in the middle of rush hour, they’d made good time.

  Querk ate a bland dinner (meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, water) with Cousin Claude and Eugenia and the two kids, then went into “his” room and packed his own bag. His years of being in and out of various jails had left him a man of very few possessions, all of which either fit into the bag or he wouldn’t mind leaving behind. He put the bag on the floor next to the bed, on the side away from the door, and went out to watch television with the family.

  Dortmunder and Kelp, after resting a little while in the motel, drove down to Sycamore and had dinner in the Italian restaurant by the traffic light there, the printery’s forest crowding in on it from two sides. Dinner wasn’t bad, and the same credit card still had some life in it. After dinner, they strolled around town a while, seeing how absolutely dense and black that forest was. There was some traffic, not much, and by evening the other joint in town, Sycamore House, where they’d had that lunch they were trying to forget, turned out to be where the rowdies hung out, the kind of place where the usual greeting is, “Wanna fight?” Their bark was presumably worse than their bite, though, because there was absolutely no police presence in town, neither around Sycamore House nor anywhere else, nor did it appear to be needed. Maybe on weekends.

  When Janet washed her hair, which she usually did about three evenings a week, she was in the bathroom absolutely forever: This was a one-bathroom house, so Roger complained bitterly about the time she hogged in the bathroom, forcing him to go outside to piss on the lawn, but secretly this was the time he would take to search her possessions. Sooner or later, she would slip, leave something incriminating where he could find it.

  And tonight, by God, was it! His hand shook, holding the airline tickets, and something gnawed at his heart, as though in reality he’d never wanted to find the proof of her perfidy after all, which was of course nonsense. Because here it was. She was Anne Marie Carpinaw, of course, a stupid alias to try to hide behind. But who was Andrew Octavian Kelp?

  Cousin Claude and his family were early to bed, early to rise, and usually so was Querk; jail does not encourage the habit of rising late. This evening, as usual, the entire household was tucked in and dark before eleven o’clock, but this evening Querk couldn’t sleep, not even if he wanted to, which he didn’t. He lay in the dark in “his” room, the packed bag a dark bulk on the floor beside the bed, and he gazed at the ceiling, thinking about the plan he and Janet had worked out, seeing how good it was, how really good. They’d gone over it together he didn’t know how many times, looking for flaws, finding some, correcting them. By now, the plan was honed as smooth as a river rock.

  Janet almost always went to bed before Roger, and by the time he got there she would be asleep or at least pretending. Tonight, without a word, she went off to the bedroom and their separate beds just as he started watching the eleven o’clock news. He listened, and when he heard the bedroom door close he quietly got up, went to the kitchen, then through the connecting door to the garage. There was an automatic electric garage door opener, but it was very loud, and it caused a bright light to switch on for three minutes, so tonight Roger opened his car door to cause the interior light to go on, and by that light he found the red-and-white cord he could pull to separate the door from the opener, designed for emergencies like the power being off. Then he lifted the door by hand, leaned into the car to put it in neutral, and pushed it backward out of the garage. There was a slight downhill slope from garage to street, so the car did get away from him just a little bit, but there was no traffic on this residential side street this late at night, so he just followed it, and it stopped of its own accord when the rear wheels reached the street. He turned the wheel through the open window, and wrestled the car backward in a long arc until it was parked on the opposite side of the street one door down. A dark street, trees in leaf, a car like any other. Janet would have no reason to notice it. He went back to the house, into the garage, and pulled the door down. He could reattach the cord in the morning.

  11:45 said Querk’s bedside clock, red numbers glowing in the dark. He got up, dressed quickly and silently, picked up his bag, and tiptoed from the house. Tonight, he had parked the Honda down the block a ways. He walked to it, put the bag on the passenger seat, and drove away from there.

  In their separate beds in the dark room, Janet and Roger were each convinced the other was asleep. Both were fully clothed except for their shoes under the light summer covers, and both worked very hard to breathe like a sleeping person. They had each other fooled completely.

  Every time Janet, lying on her left side, cautiously opened
her right eye to see the table between the beds, plus the dark mound of Roger over there, the illuminated alarm clock on the table failed to say midnight. She had no fear of accidentally falling asleep, not tonight of all nights, but why did time have to creep so? But then at last she opened that eye one more time and now the clock read 11:58, and darn it, that was good enough. Being very careful, making absolutely no noise—well, a faint rustle or two—she rolled over and rose from the bed. She stooped to pick up her shoes, then carried them tiptoe from the room.

  The instant he heard Janet move, Roger tensed like a bowstring. He forced himself to keep his eyes shut, believing eyes reflect whatever light might be around and she might see them and know he was awake. It wasn’t until the rustle of her movements receded toward the bedroom door that he dared to look. Yes, there she goes, through the doorway, open now because it was only shut if she was in bed while he was watching television.

  Janet turned left, toward the kitchen, to go out the back door and around to the car. It was too bad she’d have to start its engine so close to the house, but the bedroom was way on the other side, with the bulk of the house and the garage in between, so it should be all right. In any case, she was going.

  The instant Janet disappeared from the doorway, Roger was up, stepping into his loafers, streaking silently through the house to the front door, out, and running full tilt across the street to crouch down on the far side of his car. Hunkered down there, he heard her car motor start, saw the headlights switch on, and then saw the car come out and swing away toward town, which is what he’d been hoping. It meant his car was faced the right way. He let her travel a block, then jumped into the car, started it, didn’t turn the lights on, and drove off in pursuit.

  12:20 by the dashboard clock, and Querk parked in the lot next to Sycamore House. There was no all-night street parking permitted in Central Sycamore, but there were always a few cars left at Sycamore House, by people whose friends had decided maybe they shouldn’t drive home after all, so the Honda wouldn’t attract attention. He got out and walked down the absolutely deserted silent street to the traffic light doggedly giving its signals to nothing, then crossed and walked to the entrance to Sycamore Creek and on in.