On the way out of the drugstore, I saw that the afternoon paper was already in the rack by the door. I grabbed a copy, paid the seven cents for it, and went out to the car. I had time left on the meter, so I sat there and looked for the story.
I found it on page three:
UNION TOUGHS QUESTIONED
IN HAMILTON SLAYING
by Sondra Fleisch
The investigation into the brutal slaying of Mclntyre worker Charles (Chuck) Hamilton (Work Boot) took a dramatic turn late yesterday when it was learned that two men, said to be ‘organizers’ for the American Alliance of Machinists and Skilled Trades (see Ralph Kinney’s column, page 6), had been apprehended at a motel just outside the city and taken to police headquarters for questioning. The two men, Walter Killy (38) and Paul Standish (24), both of Washington, D.C., were taken into custody after police, under the direction of Captain Edward Willick, learned from Charles Hamilton’s widow, Mrs Ellen Hamilton, that they had visited the Hamilton home at 426 4th Street shortly before the fatal shooting, demanding to see Mr Hamilton. Learning that Mr Hamilton was still at work, in Building Three (Work Boot), they allegedly made threatening statements and then left.
‘The two incidents,’ Captain Willick said in an interview, ‘may be no more than a coincidence. I am holding this man [Killy] until I know for sure that’s all it is.’
The other union ‘organizer’, Standish, upon his release early this morning, stated, ‘Those simpletons [the local police force] can’t hold Walter. I’m calling Washington.’ This and other vague threats were his only answer to the charges being considered against himself and his partner.
When asked why the sneering, defiant Standish had been released, Captain Willick stated, ‘We believe the other man [Killy] is the brains of the pair. Standish is a recent recruit for this (cont. page 11, col. 4)
QUESTION TOUGHS
IN SLAYING
(fr. page 3)
union, and probably doesn’t know the full story himself. At any rate, he’s being watched.’ Captain Willick added that if Standish were to try to leave the city ‘he won’t get far’.
The slaying of Charles Hamilton, the most vicious in the city’s history, occurred yesterday afternoon in the East Parking Lot at Building Three. Mr Hamilton, a Mclntyre employee for fourteen years and a veteran of the Second World War, was a local citizen who had lived his entire life, except for his Army tour, in Wittburg. ‘Chuck was one of the best guys at the plant,’ stated Robert Lincoln, a friend and co-worker of the murdered man, ‘and if those two union guys killed him they deserve to be hung.’ Henry Barton, a foreman at the Work Boot Section, stated that Mr Hamilton had always been ‘a willing worker’ and ‘a real good friend’. ‘He will be missed,’ said another of the murdered man’s friends, Stanley Macki, also of Work Boot.
The slaying reminded local citizens of the attempt made nine years ago by this same union to organize a local at the Mclntyre plant. Citizens recalled that threats and intimidation had been the main tactics employed by the union in the earlier unsuccessful attempt. ‘It didn’t work the last time,’ stated one worker, ‘and it sure won’t work this time.’
Leonard Fleisch, general manager of the Mclntyre plant, has announced that the entire plant will be closed a half-day tomorrow morning so that the many friends and co-workers of Charles Hamilton may attend his funeral at nine-thirty A.M. in the Bertoletti Funeral Parlours at 500 Sarah Street.
Eleven
Yes, it was red.
That old saying about seeing red when you’re full of anger is true. I crumpled the newspaper and threw it to the floor of the car and stared out through the windshield, wanting to kick some thing, and the whole sunny world had turned a bruised red, as though thousands of blood vessels had broken beneath the skin of the day. Windows and doors and moving people were edged in trembling red, and red motes danced at the corners of my vision.
I saw Sondra Fleisch scream and wave her arms as I hurled her from a cliff. I bayoneted her, I hit her with furniture, I smashed my heel against her face. Beneath my clenching hands, her throat felt like leather, and her face was old and vicious.
I clung to the steering wheel with both hands. It was as though winds were shaking me, shaking the car. I stared out at the reddened day, betrayed, monstrously betrayed.
When I could, I caught hold of the rage and contained it, forcing it down inside me where it wouldn’t show. Reaching up, I turned the rear-view mirror till I could see my own reflection in it, to see if what I felt was successfully concealed. My face looked a little strained, my eyes somewhat unusually intense, but that was all. Satisfied, I climbed out of the Ford.
A woman was walking toward me, pushing a stroller. I wen) up to her, saying, ‘Excuse me.’
She stopped and looked at me blankly. ‘Yes?’
‘Do you know how I can get to Leonard Fleisch’s house?’ 1 gestured at the Ford. ‘I’ve got those samples he wanted, but I can’t find his house.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s the big yellow house on the hill.’ She pointed toward the workers’ village section. ‘You go right up Mclntyre Road,’ she told me, ‘right to the top. Just beyond 12th Street, you can’t miss it. The big yellow house. Used to be the Mclntyre place.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks a lot.’
‘You’re very welcome.’
I got back behind the wheel and pulled out of the parking space. I was facing the wrong way, so I decided to go around the Mock. As I was making the turn of Harpur Boulevard, I remembered that Jerry and Ben were still following me, and as I made the second right to the next block parallel to Harpur I saw their pale-blue Plymouth make the turn a block behind me.
They’d never let me get to Fleisch’s house. But I had to go, I hud to get my hands on Sondra Fleisch.
They were following me casually, unworriedly. I was an amateur, and they didn’t really expect me to try to evade them. But an amateur fed by rage is something else again. I drove straight for two blocks, going very slowly, so that I hadn’t even gone halfway down the first block when they made the turn behind me mid came into sight. As I’d expected, they slowed down to match my pace.
At the second intersection, I came to a complete stop and looked in both directions. Then I crawled around the corner. They had dropped to a block back again, and were barely moving themselves. The instant I was out of their sight, I tromped hard on the accelerator. I swung hard right into Harpur Boulevard, cutting off a Dodge that yapped at me, and raced back southward a block and made another hard right turn. Then I slowed to a more sensible speed, and when I turned back into the street where I’d last seen them, they were out of sight. Nor had they appeared at all in my rear-view mirror.
I turned left and drove deeper westward, into the local slum, and crossed the Black River at the last possible bridge. Then I tingled gradually back toward the section I wanted, eventually ruining down 7th Street to Mclntyre Road. I drove up Mclntyre Road to the top and saw the big yellow house off to my right, with curving blacktop leading through a stand of fir trees between it and the road. It was a huge house, bulging with bay windows, built in turn-of-the-century style and constructed of neat clapboard. A wooden sign on a post to the left of the black top turn-off read:
Private Road
No Thoroughfare
Behind it, another wooden sign, this one nailed to a tree, read:
No Trespassing
I made the turn, spurred on by the two signs, and followed the curve through the fir trees to the house. The black Lincoln ami a cream Thunderbird were already parked in front of it. I stopped the Ford next to them, gathered up the newspaper from the floor, folded it up carelessly, and climbed out of the car.
The mechanical work of driving, and the passing of time, had served to calm me down just a little. I was no longer feeling quite so unreasoning and total a rage. I burned now with a steadier fire, and so when I went up the steps to the broad front porch I didn’t bull on into the house, but stopped and rang the bell.<
br />
I’d expected a maid or butler to answer the ring, but the middle-aged woman who came to the door was too expensively dressed to be either. She looked out at me, vague and distracted, frowning slightly through the screen door at me, and said, ‘Yes? What is it?’
I had to gain entry. There was no sense shouting till I’d found the girl. As calmly as possible, I said, ‘Is Sondra at home?’
‘Who’s calling, please?’
Sondra and I had a dual relationship. I used the more innocent one. ‘I’m a classmate of hers.’ But then I couldn’t help adding, ‘Paul Standish.’
The name, surprisingly, meant nothing to her. Perhaps she didn’t read her daughter’s journalistic efforts, if this was actually Mrs Leonard Fleisch, Sondra’s mother, and I thought it probably was. She smiled cordially, and pushed open the screen door, and said, ‘Come in. Sondra’s just home from work.’
‘Thank you.’ I stepped across the threshold, and showed the newspaper. ‘I’ve been reading something she wrote.’
‘She’s very good, isn’t she?’ Sondra’s mother, surely.
‘Very good,’ I said.
‘If you’ll wait in the living room—? I’ll tell Sondra you’re here. Right through there. Paul, was it?’
‘That’s right. Paul Standish. Thank you.’
I went into the living room, an outsize room with bay windows In two walls. The walls were all complicated by mouldings and bric-a-brac, and sliding doors were closed in the wall to the right. Heavy maroon ceiling-to-floor draperies flanked the windows, and the carpet was busy dark Persian. But the furniture was foam-rubber modern, in shades of tan, with plain black iron legs. Whatever furnishings had originally been in this room, complementing the room’s style, had been gutted out, and this sleek fragile plain styleless junk put in its place. There wasn’t a stick of it that wouldn’t have looked perfect in Walter’s office, just as his trophy case would have looked perfect here, in the corner between the bay windows.
I didn’t sit down. I stood in the middle of the room, facing the entranceway through which I’d come and in which I expected to see Sondra any minute.
But she came in from the other direction, through the sliding doors. They rumbled apart and there she was, smiling there, like in elfin female Orson Welles. If I had expected guilty embarrassment or hot denials or fevered explanations or sullen defiance or Icy aloofness—if I had expected anything expectable—I was wrong. She stood posed for a second, slender well-groomed vixen’s body framed between the doors which her hands still held, her head ducked just slightly as she smirked at me, her eyes glittering at me through lowered lashes. Then in a voice hardly able to control its exultation, she half-whispered, ‘What did you think of it?’
Now I could explode, now. ‘You vicious little slut! You lying conscienceless—’
‘Shush shush shush shush.’ She fluttered her hands at me and came gliding the rest of the way into the room. ‘Don’t shout so, you’ll bring Daddy down on us.’ She slid the doors closed.
I inhaled, and started again. ‘You egotistical snob! You two-faced brat! You illiterate incompetent idi—’
‘Now, wait! Now, wait just a minute!’ Something in my tirade had finally hit home. ‘What do you mean, incompetent? You take that back!’
I waved the newspaper in her face. ‘You stupid nonsensical little bitch, don’t you realize you could be sued for something like this?’
‘Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong! I can’t]’ She chortled in her joy. ‘That’s the best part of it, don’t you see?’
The wall of my rage was breaking down, battered by a baffling indifference. I stared at her and said, ‘What in God’s name an you talking about?’
‘Give me that paper.’ She pulled it out of my hand, scattered the pages around on the floor, and retained only the sheet containing on one quarter page three and on another quarter page eleven. ‘Look at it,’ she said: ‘Show me one word that’s libellous or slanderous or any other kind of ous you can think of. Look for instance. “Sneering, defiant Standish.” You were sneering, darling, at all those awful clods of policemen. And you were certainly defiant. You still are. And you did call the polio simpletons and say they couldn’t hold your friend.’
‘I didn’t say anything about calling Washington.’ From belligerent rage, I had somehow been turned to a sullen defensiveness.
‘I bet you did, though.’ She looked up at my face, and laughed when she saw she’d been right. ‘You see? Now, admit it, isn’t that a first-class piece of writing?’
She was proud of it, actually proud of it, and she wanted me her victim, to compliment her on her skill. She gazed up at mi like a cross between a well-fed cat and a well-petted puppy, and she asked me to tell her how deftly and skilfully she had slipped the knife into my back.
I had come to this house boiling with rage, wanting only to shout at Sondra Fleisch till I felt better, and if I had been met by either guilt or defiance, in any of their forms, I could have accomplished my mission with no trouble at all. But the praise-demanding pride of hers, like one of those megalomania scientists pleased with his ‘clean’ bomb, had thrown me completely off the track. I think there must be many people like that In our world today, people who are not at all concerned with any moral judgement about the work they do but are interested only in how skilfully the work is done. And if the victim objects—particularly if he objects on some sort of quaint and antiquated grounds of morality—they are simply baffled by his bad form in not saying, instead, ‘Touche!’
The realization that Sondra was one of these conscienceless moderns—and that my rage could never do more than baffle her jolted through my mind, and for a second I was all at sea. I didn’t want justice in this house—I knew better than that, at least—but I did want revenge. I had wanted to make Sondra Fleisch understand just how heinously she had acted, so I could leave with the satisfying knowledge that she would now be gnawed by a bad conscience. But that goal, now that I had seen her, was obviously unattainable. Still, I wanted revenge, and suddenly I saw how to get it. Only one of my invectives had really stung her, only one.
All right. There’s more than one way to get even with a cat. ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘that wasn’t a first-class piece of writing. I’d say it was a little closer to fourth-class.’
Her smile flickered and faded, and she stepped backward a pace from me. A shadow crossed her eyes as she studied me, trying to see if I really meant it. Then the shadow left, and she laid, ‘Oh, you’re just miffed.’
‘No, really,’ I said, now all calm and helpful, no longer the Indignant moralist. ‘Here, let me show you.’ I took the paper buck from her, scanned the article, and pointed. ‘Here, for instance. Look at this. “This, and other threats, were …” You ice? You got the person wrong. It should be this was, not this were.’
She frowned at it, trapped, and then shook her head impatiently. ‘It reads better the other way,’ she said.
‘No, it doesn’t. It caught my eye right away. Oh, and another part.’ I adjusted the paper. ‘Here in the first paragraph, where you meant to say that Walter and I threatened Mrs Hamilton, hut where you really say the police threatened her.’
She read that paragraph over and over, and now vertical lint had appeared between her brows, and all at once her cheekbone seemed more prominent. She slapped at the paper with her hand finally, and turned away from me, saying, ‘That’s just being picky. You can see what I meant.’
‘It’s sloppy writing,’ I told her. ‘It doesn’t matter if people can figure out what you were trying to say or not, the important thing is it’s sloppy writing.’ I turned the paper around, to page eleven. ‘And the same over here, where you say, “The slaying of Charles-Hamilton, the most vicious in the city’s history …” Vicious what?’
She turned back, frowning more deeply, not knowing what I was talking about.
‘You say that Charles Hamilton is a vicious something.’ I told her, ‘but you don’t say what.’
> All of her pleasure had been wiped away by now. ‘What arc you, some sort of language purist?’
‘Well, if you’re going to write, you really ought to get your sentence structure straightened out.’ I could risk a smile now. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter much on a little paper like the Beacon,’ I said, ‘but you wouldn’t want to try for the big time yet. In fact, maybe you shouldn’t paste this story in your scrapbook.’
I had hit home. She yanked the paper out of my hand and threw it to the floor. ‘You better get out of here,’ she said. ‘If I told Daddy who you were—’
‘Maybe you ought to do a second draft from now on,’ I said.
‘I did three drafts on that,’ she said angrily, and then caught herself. ‘I’m going for my father,’ she said.
‘I’ll leave.’ I glanced at the paper scattered all over the floor. ‘You can have that copy,’ I told her. ‘I’m all done with it.’
I turned away and started out of the living room, almost bumping into a man on the way in. He was perhaps in his late forties, a stout jovial man with pale kindly eyes. He looked at me, smiling in polite surprise, and said over my shoulder to Sondra, ‘Well, now. Who’s this?’
‘Daddy,’ she said, and her voice was acid, ‘I’d love you to meet Paul Standish.’
The name didn’t connect for just a second, and in that second 1 stuck my hand out and smiled and said, ‘I’m very glad to meet you, sir. I’m a classmate of Sondra’s.’
‘Well, well,’ he said, smiling more broadly, and took my hand. Then the smile started to falter, and he looked at me more closely.
Killy Page 9
