Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  He practiced the exercises that were automatic for him by now, turning the images that came to mind from color to black and white, then watching them fade to gray, willing them farther and farther away so that they grew smaller and smaller until they were vanishing pinpoints, gray dots on a gray field, disappearing into the distance, swallowed up by the past.

  When his coffee cup was empty he went into the Sundstrom bedroom and undressed, then showered in the Sundstrom bathroom, only to dry off with a Sundstrom towel. He went into the den, Harvey Sundstrom’s den, and took a Fijian battle-axe from the wall. It was fashioned of black wood, and heavier than it looked, and its elaborate geometric shape suggested it would be of more use as wall decoration than weapon. But Keller worked out how to grip it and swing it, and took a few experimental whiffs with it, and he could see how the islanders would have found it useful.

  He could have taken it with him to Egmont’s house, and he let himself imagine it now, saw himself clutching the device in both hands and swinging around in a 360-degree arc, whipping the business end of the axe into Egmont’s skull. He shook his head, returned the battle-axe to the wall, and resumed where he’d left off earlier, summoning up Egmont’s image, reviewing the last moments of Egmont’s life, and making it all gray and blurry, making it all smaller and smaller, making it all go away.

  In the morning he went out for breakfast, returning in time to see an ambulance leaving Sundowner Estates through the east gate. The guard recognized Keller and waved him through, but he braked and rolled down the window to inquire about the ambulance. The guard shook his head soberly and reported the sad news.

  He went home and called Dot. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “You’ve decided you can’t do it.”

  “It’s done.”

  “It’s amazing how I can just sense these things,” she said. “You figure it’s psychic powers or old-fashioned feminine intuition? That was a rhetorical question, Keller. You don’t have to answer it. I’d say I’ll see you tomorrow, but I won’t, will I?”

  “It’ll take me a while to get home.”

  “Well, no rush,” she said. “Take your time, see the sights. You’ve got your clubs, haven’t you?”

  “My clubs?”

  “Stop along the way, play a little golf. Enjoy yourself, Keller. You deserve it.”

  ______

  The day before his two-week rental was up, he walked over to the clubhouse, settled his account, and turned in his keys and ID card. He walked back to the Sundstrom house, where he put his suitcase in the trunk and the little stuffed dog in the passenger seat. Then he got behind the wheel and drove slowly around the golf course, leaving the compound by the east gate.

  “It’s a nice place,” he told the dog. “I can see why people like it. Not just the golf and the weather and the security. You get the feeling nothing really bad could happen to you there. Even if you die, it’s just part of the natural order of things.”

  He set cruise control and pointed the car toward Tucson, lowering the visor against the morning sun. It was, he thought, good weather for cruise control. Just the other day, he’d had NPR on the car radio, and listened as a man with a professionally mellow voice cautioned against using cruise control in wet weather. If the car were to hydroplane on the slick pavement, cruise control would think the wheels weren’t turning fast enough, and would speed up the engine to compensate. And then, when the tires got their grip again, wham!

  Keller couldn’t recall the annual cost in lives from this phenomenon, but it was higher than you’d think. At the time all he did was resolve to make sure he took the car out of cruise control whenever he switched on the windshield wipers. Now, cruising east across the Arizona desert, he found himself wondering if there might be any practical application for this new knowledge. Accidental death was a useful tool, it had most recently claimed the life of William Wallis Egmont, but Keller couldn’t see how cruise control in inclement weather could become part of his bag of tricks. Still, you never knew, and he let himself think about it.

  In Tucson he stuck the dog in his suitcase before he turned in the car, then walked out into the heat and managed to locate his original car in long-term parking. He tossed his suitcase in the back seat and stuck the key in the ignition, wondering if the car would start. No problem if it wouldn’t, all he’d have to do was talk to somebody at the Hertz counter, but suppose they’d just noticed him at the Avis counter, turning in another car. Would they notice something like that? You wouldn’t think so, but airports were different these days. There were people standing around noticing everything.

  He turned the key, and the engine turned over right away. The woman at the gate figured out what he owed and sounded apologetic when she named the figure. He found himself imagining what the charges would have added up to on other cars he’d left in long-term lots, cars he’d never returned to claim, cars with bodies in their trunks. Probably a lot of money, he decided, and nobody to pay it. He figured he could afford to pick up the tab for a change. He paid cash, took the receipt, and got back on the Interstate.

  As he drove, he found himself figuring out just how he’d have handled it if the car hadn’t started. “For God’s sake,” he said, “look at yourself, will you? Something could have happened but didn’t, it’s over and done with, and you’re figuring out what you would have done, developing a coping strategy when there’s nothing to cope with. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  He thought about it. Then he said, “You want to know what’s the matter with you? You’re talking to yourself, that’s what’s the matter with you.”

  He stopped doing it. Twenty minutes down the road he pulled into a rest area, leaned over the seat back, opened his suitcase, and returned the dog to its position in the passenger seat.

  “And away we go,” he said.

  In New Mexico he got off the Interstate and followed the signs to an Indian pueblo. A plump woman, her hair braided and her face expressionless, sat in a room with pots she had made herself. Keller picked out a little black pot with scalloped edges. She wrapped it carefully for him, using sheets of newspaper, and put the wrapped pot in a brown paper bag, and the paper bag into a plastic bag. Keller tucked the whole thing away in his suitcase and got back behind the wheel.

  “Don’t ask,” he told the dog.

  Just over the Colorado state line it started to rain. He drove through the rain for ten or twenty miles before he remembered the guy on NPR. He tapped the brake, which made the cruise control cut out, but just to make sure he used the switch, too.

  “Close one,” he told the dog.

  In Kansas he took a state road north and visited a roadside attraction, a house that had once been a hideout of the Dalton boys. They were outlaws, he knew, contemporaries of the Jesse James and the Youngers. The place was tricked out as a mini museum, with memorabilia and news clippings, and there was an underground passage leading from the house to the barn in back, so that the brothers, when surprised by the law, could hurry through the tunnel and escape that way. He’d have liked to see the passage, but it was sealed off.

  “Still,” he told the woman attendant, “it’s nice to know it’s there.”

  If he was interested in the Daltons, she told him, there was another museum at the other end of the state. At Coffeyville, she said, where as he probably knew most of the Daltons were killed, trying to rob two banks in one day. He had in fact known that, but only because he’d just read it on the information card for one of the exhibits.

  He stopped at a gas station, bought a state map, and figured out the route to Coffeyville. Halfway there he stopped for the night at a Red Roof Inn, had a pizza delivered, and ate it in front of the television set. He ran the cable channels until he found a western that looked promising, and damned if it didn’t turn out to be about the Dalton boys. Not just the Daltons—Frank and Jesse James were in it, too, and Cole Younger and his brothers.

  They seemed like real nice fellows, too, the kind of guys you wouldn’t mind h
anging out with. Not a sadist or pyromaniac in the lot, as far as he could tell. And did you think Jesse James wet the bed? Like hell he did.

  In the morning he drove on to Coffeyville and paid the admission charge and took his time studying the exhibits. It was a pretty bold act, robbing two banks at once, but it might not have been the smartest move in the history of American crime. The local citizens were just waiting for them, and they riddled the brothers with bullets. Most of them were dead by the time the shooting stopped, or died of their wounds before long.

  Emmett Dalton wound up with something like a dozen bullets in him, and went off to prison. But the story didn’t end there. He recovered, and eventually got released, and wound up in Los Angeles, where he wrote films for the young motion picture industry and made a small fortune in real estate.

  Keller spent a long time taking that in, and it gave him a lot to think about.

  ______

  Most of the time he was quiet, but now and then he talked to the dog.

  “Take soldiers,” he said, on a stretch of 1-40 east of Des Moines. “They get drafted into the army, they go through basic training, and before you know it they’re aiming at other soldiers and pulling the trigger. Maybe they have to force themselves the first couple of times, and maybe they have bad dreams early on, but then they get used to it, and before you know it they sort of enjoy it. It’s not a sex thing, they don’t get that kind of a thrill out of it, but it’s sort of like hunting. Except you just pull the trigger and leave it at that. You don’t have to track wounded soldiers to make sure they don’t suffer. You don’t have to dress your kill and pack it back to camp. You just pull the trigger and get on with your life.

  “And these are ordinary kids,” he went on. “Eighteen-year-old boys, drafted fresh out of high school. Or I guess it’s volunteers now, they don’t draft them anymore, but it amounts to the same thing. They’re just ordinary American boys. They didn’t grow up torturing animals or starting fires. Or wetting the bed.

  “You know something? I still don’t see what wetting the bed has to do with it.”

  Coming into New York on the George Washington Bridge, he said, “Well, they’re not there.”

  The towers, he meant. And of course they weren’t there, they were gone, and he knew that. He’d been down to the site enough times to know it wasn’t trick photography, that the twin towers were in fact gone. But somehow he’d half expected to see them, half expected the whole thing to turn out to have been a dream. You couldn’t make part of the skyline disappear, for God’s sake.

  He drove to the Hertz place, returned the car. He was walking away from the office with his suitcase in hand when an attendant rushed up, brandishing the little stuffed dog. “You forgot some-thin’,” the man said, smiling broadly.

  “Oh, right,” Keller said. “You got any kids?”

  “Me?”

  “Give it to your kid,” Keller told him. “Or some other kid.”

  “You don’t want him?”

  He shook his head, kept walking. When he got home he showered and shaved and looked out the window. His window faced east, not south, and had never afforded a view of the towers, so it was the same as it had always been. And that’s why he’d looked, to assure himself that everything was still there, that nothing had been taken away.

  It looked okay to him. He picked up the phone and called Dot.

  She was waiting for him on the porch, with the usual pitcher of iced tea. “You had me going,” she said. “You didn’t call and you didn’t call and you didn’t call. It took you the better part of a month to get home. What did you do, walk?”

  “I didn’t leave right away,” he said. “I paid for two weeks.”

  “And you wanted to make sure you got your money’s worth.”

  “I thought it’d be suspicious, leaving early. ‘Oh, I remember that guy, he left four days early, right after Mr. Egmont died.’ ”

  “And you thought it’d be safer to hang around the scene of a homicide?”

  “Except it wasn’t a homicide,” he said. “The man came home after an afternoon at the golf course, locked his door, set the burglar alarm, got undressed and drew a hot bath. He got into the tub and lost consciousness and drowned.”

  “Most accidents happen in the home,” Dot said. “Isn’t that what they say? What did he do, hit his head?”

  “He may have smacked it on the tile on the way down, after he lost his balance. Or maybe he had a little stroke. Hard to say.”

  “You undressed him and everything?”

  He nodded. “Put him in the tub. He came to in the water, but I picked up his feet and held them in the air, and his head went under, and, well, that was that.”

  “Water in the lungs.”

  “Right.”

  “Death by drowning.”

  He nodded.

  “You okay, Keller?”

  “Me? Sure, I’m fine. Anyway, I figured I’d wait the four days, leave when my time was up.”

  “Just like Egmont.”

  “Huh?”

  “He left when his time was up,” she said. “Still, how long does it take to drive home from Phoenix? Four, five days?”

  “I got sidetracked,” he said, and told her about the Dalton boys.

  “Two museums,” she said. “Most people have never been to one Dalton boys museum, and you’ve been to two.”

  “Well, they robbed two banks at once.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. You ever hear of Nashville, Indiana?”

  “I’ve heard of Nashville,” she said, “and I’ve heard of Indiana, but I guess the answer to your questions is no. What have they got in Nashville, Indiana? The Grand Ole Hoosier Opry?”

  “There’s a John Dillinger museum there.”

  “Jesus, Keller. What were you taking, an outlaw’s tour of the Midwest?”

  “There was a flyer for the place in the museum in Coffeyville, and it wasn’t that far out of my way. It was interesting. They had the fake gun he used to break out of prison. Or it may have been a replica. Either way, it was pretty interesting.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “They were folk heroes,” he said. “Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson.”

  “And Bonnie and Clyde. Have those two got a museum?”

  “Probably. They were heroes the same as the Daltons and Youngers and Jameses, but they weren’t brothers. Back in the nineteenth century it was a family thing, but then that tradition died out.”

  “Kids today,” Dot said. “What about Ma Barker? Wasn’t that around the same time as Dillinger? And didn’t she have a whole houseful of bank-robbing brats? Or was that just in the movies?”

  “No, you’re right,” he said. “I forgot about Ma Barker.”

  “Well, let’s forget her all over again, so you can get to the point.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure there is one. I just took my time getting back, that’s all. I had some thinking to do.”

  “And?”

  He reached for the pitcher, poured himself more iced tea. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the thing. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “I was going to retire a while ago,” he said. “Remember?”

  “Vividly.”

  “At the time,” he said, “I figured I could afford it. I had money put aside. Not a ton, but enough for a little bungalow somewhere in Florida.”

  “And you could get to Denny’s in time for the early bird special, which helps keep food costs down.”

  “You said I needed a hobby, and that got me interested in stamp collecting again. And before I knew it I was spending serious money on stamps.”

  “And that was the end of your retirement fund.”

  “It cut into it,” he agreed. “And it’s kept me from saving money ever since then, because any extra money just goes into stamps.”

  She frowned. “I think I see w
here this is going,” she said. “You can’t keep on doing what you’ve been doing, but you can’t retire, either.”

  “So I tried to think what else I could do,” he said. “Emmett Dalton wound up in Hollywood, writing movies and dealing in real estate.”

  “You working on a script, Keller? Boning up for the realtor’s exam?”

  “I couldn’t think of a single thing I could do,” he said. “Oh, I suppose I could get some kind of minimum-wage job. But I’m used to living a certain way, and I’m used to not having to work many hours. Can you see me clerking in a 7-Eleven?”

  “I couldn’t even see you sticking up a 7-Eleven, Keller.”

  “It might be different if I were younger.”

  “I guess armed robbery is a young man’s job.”

  “If I were just starting out,” he said, “I could take some entry-level job and work my way up. But I’m too old for that now. Nobody would hire me in the first place, and the jobs I’m qualified for, well, I wouldn’t want them.”

  “ ‘Do you want fries with that?’ You’re right, Keller. Somehow it just doesn’t sound like you.”

  “I started at the bottom once. I started coming around and the old man found things for me to do. ‘Richie’s gotta see a man, so why don’t you ride along with him, keep him company.’ Or go see this guy, tell him we’re not happy with the way he’s been acting. Or he used to send me to the store to pick up candy bars for him. What was that candy bar he used to like?”

  “Mars bars.”

  “No, he switched to those, but early on it was something else. They were hard to find, only a few stores had them. I think he was the only person I ever met who liked them. What the hell was the name of them? It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  “Hell of a place for a candy bar.”

  “Powerhouse,” he said. “Powerhouse candy bars.”