Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  “We’ll work it out then,” Querk said. “Listen, I better get on my forklift, I wouldn’t want to get fired before vacation time.”

  He nodded a farewell and walked toward the loading bay, while Dortmunder and Kelp turned around and headed out. As they walked toward the public street, Kelp said, “Maybe the dollars should come up before the siapas go down.”

  “I was thinking that,” Dortmunder said. “Or maybe one of us rides shotgun.”

  “You mean, go to this place?” Kelp was astonished. “Would you wanna do that?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said. “I said, ‘one of us.’”

  “We’ll see how it plays,” Kelp said. They turned toward the intersection, and he said, “I talked to Seven Leagues.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Her name is Janet Twilley. She’s bossy, and she’s got a black eye.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Dortmunder was surprised. “Querk doesn’t seem the type.”

  “No, he doesn’t. I think we oughta see is there a Mr. Twilley.”

  13

  Roger Twilley’s shift as a repairman for Darby Telephone & Electronics (slogan: “The 5th Largest Phone Co. in New York State!”) ended every day at four, an hour before Janet would close her travel agency, which was good. It gave him an hour by himself to listen to the day’s tapes.

  Twilley, a leathery, bony, loose-jointed fellow who wore his hair too long because he didn’t like barbers, was known to his co-workers as an okay guy who didn’t have much to say for himself. If he ever were to put his thoughts into words (which he wouldn’t), their opinion would change, because in fact Twilley despised and mistrusted them all. He despised and mistrusted everybody he knew, and believed he would despise and mistrust everybody else in the world if he got to know them. Thus the tapes.

  Being a phone company repairman, often alone on the job with his own cherry picker, and having a knack with phone gadgets he’d developed over the years on the job, Twilley had found it easy to bug the phones of everybody he knew that he cared the slightest bit about eavesdropping on. His mother, certainly, and Janet, naturally, and half a dozen other relatives and friends scattered around the general Sycamore area. The bugs were voice-activated, and the tapes were in his “den” in the basement, a room Janet knew damn well to keep out of, or she knew what she’d get.

  Every afternoon, once he’d shucked out of his dark blue Darby Telephone jumpsuit and opened himself a can of beer, Twilley would go down to the den to listen to what these people had to say for themselves. He knew at least a few of them were scheming against him—mom, for instance, and Janet—but he hadn’t caught any of them yet. It was, he knew, only a matter of time. Sooner or later, they’d condemn themselves out of their own mouths.

  There are a lot of factors that might help explain how Twilley had turned out this way. There was his father’s abrupt abandonment of the family when Twilley was six, for instance, a betrayal he’d never gotten over. There was his mother’s catting around for a good ten years or more after that first trauma, well into Twilley’s sexually agonized teens. There was the so-called girlfriend, Renee, who had publicly humiliated him in seventh grade. But the fact is, what it came down to, Twilley was a jerk.

  The jerk now sat for thirty-five minutes at the table in his den, earphones on as he listened to the day the town had lived through, starting with Janet. Her phone calls today were all strictly business, talking to airlines, hotels, clients. There was nothing like the other day’s “wrong number,” somebody supposedly asking for somebody named Frank, that Twilley had immediately leaped on as code. A signal, some kind of signal. He’d played that fragment of tape over and over—“Is Frank there?” “Is Frank there?” “Is Frank there?”—and he would recognize that voice if it ever called again, no matter what it had to say.

  On to the rest of the tapes. His mother and her friend Helen yakked the whole goddam day away, as usual—they told each other recipes, bird sightings, funny newspaper items, plots of television shows—and as usual Twilley fast-forwarded through it all, just dropping in for spot checks here and there—“. . . and she said Emmaline looked pregnant to her . . .”—or he’d be down here in the den half the night, listening to two women who had raised boringness to a kind of holy art form. Stained glass for the ear.

  The rest of the tapes contained nothing useful. Twilley reset them for tomorrow and went upstairs. He sat on the sofa in the living room, opened the drawer in the end table beside him, and his tarot deck had been moved. He frowned at it. He always kept it lined up in a neat row between the coasters and the notepad, and now all three were out of alignment, the tarot deck most noticeably.

  He looked around the room. Janet wouldn’t move it. She wouldn’t open this drawer. Had somebody been in the house?

  He walked through the place, a small two-bedroom Cape Cod, and saw nothing else disturbed. Nothing was missing. He must have jostled the table one time, walking by.

  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 any more. She didn’t get mad at him any more, and she almost never tried to boss him around any more.

  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 Coun
ty 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.