THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror

by Thomas M. Disch

  What rankled even more than the windmill, the wound to his ego that wouldn’t heal, was an encounter that had taken place in the company parking lot a year ago, just before the murder. Sheehy’s mileage-conscious Japanese import had slid into the space beside Glandier’s imposing Chrysler, and there on Sheehy’s bumper was a fluorescent-orange sticker bidding the world to Save the Whales. Whales, for Christ’s sake! Whales, in Minnesota! Next thing, Sheehy would be going around with a surfboard.

  “Hey there, Mike,” Glandier had saluted his enemy as he was unfolding himself from behind the steering wheel. “If I see any whales in danger today, I’ll do what I can to save ‘em.”

  Sheehy emitted the dry, perfunctory chortle that was his standard response to Glandier’s jokes, a non-laugh that as much as said, You turkey. “You do that, Bob.”

  They moved toward the side entrance of Techno-Controls, shackled together by the force of their mutual resentment.

  “Not that I’ve seen all that many whales around here lately,” Glandier went on, rubbing it in.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that, Bob. You get out to Lake Minnetonka sometimes, don’t you? If that wasn’t you I saw out there last August, then I swear to God it must have been a small sperm whale.” With which, and a hearty all-in-good-fun slap on the back, they had parted.

  A dumb joke and a grudge scarcely worth bearing (there had been no witnesses) except for Glandier’s conviction that if Sheehy despised him as much as he despised Sheehy it would only be a matter of time before Sheehy used his leverage with Roy Becker to arrange his ruination the way he’d arranged Petersen’s.

  At eleven there was a valedictory gathering in the office of Petersen’s assistant, R.R. Welles. While Petersen, sober and subdued, tried to look politely shell-shocked, Welles kept steering the conversation away from the one relevant concern that Petersen’s friends shared that moment: their own necks, next on the line. Veer where he would, however, all detours led back to that highway, just as, nationally, all economic indicators were pointing to recession, cutbacks, layoffs, and further disaster and disgrace. No one lingered at the obsequies. Glandier shook his old buddy’s hand, muttered an obligatory bland denunciation of the triumphant Sheehy, and assented to Petersen’s politic lie that they would keep in touch. Welles loyally suggested a farewell lunch, but to everyone’s relief Petersen vetoed the idea.

  Back in his office on 2, where he’d gone to get his overcoat, Glandier found a message to call Joy-Ann Anker. “Urgent,” Miss Spaeth had written on the pad. What of any urgency could happen in Joy-Ann’s life—unless her cancer had branched out in some new direction? Or was that just wishful thinking? Whatever, he couldn’t risk forfeiting her goodwill at this juncture. He’d have to return the call.

  “Hi,” he said brightly, when she finally picked up the phone after seven rings. Joy-Ann was definitely slowing down.

  “Bob. I wouldn’t have called you at work, but I couldn’t get hold of you last night. Are you busy right now?”

  “Sort of. What’s up?”

  “Oh, this is so… darned embarrassing. There’s no one who can overhear us, is there? Your secretary?”

  “She’s at lunch. What is it?”

  Joy-Ann drew an audible breath. “Would you know anyone, maybe some young person there at your office, who uses—um, drugs?”

  “Drugs? What kind of drugs?”

  “What this is about, Bob, is that I need some marijuana.”

  Glandier guffawed.

  “No, honestly,” she insisted. She told him of Sister Rita’s visit the day before and of what she’d said concerning the beneficial results marijuana could have in combating the side-effects of chemotherapy.

  “Now I’ve heard everything. A nun who smokes pot. Jesus Christ.”

  Joy-Ann was silent long enough to imply a pro forma mortification, then plunged on. “That’s my reaction too, of course, but Sister Rita insists that it works. The thing is, Bob, I don’t know where to go to get… you called it ‘pop’ just now, didn’t you? See, I don’t even know what to call it. I wouldn’t know how to begin to buy any.”

  “And you think I do?”

  “You know more people.”

  “Not those people.”

  “Haven’t you ever tried it yourself?”

  “No, certainly not.”

  Which wasn’t entirely true. He’d had the stuff three or four times in his college days in the early ‘60s and thought it an inferior substitute for getting drunk. By the ‘70s, when grass had got to be almost as common as lawns, even in Willowville, Glandier was already committed to a life-style on the other side of the generation gap.

  “Don’t you know someone you could ask? It couldn’t hurt to ask.”

  “Here at the office?”

  There was a long silence. Glandier reminded himself of the mortgageless house and the fact that Joy-Ann was very nearly dead.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He made the promise without any intention of keeping it, but then—this was Tuesday—as he was heading in to the Bicentennial it occurred to him that either Libby or Sacajawea would be able to supply him with whatever proscribed drug he might want. Hookers were all supposed to be addicts, so nothing could be more natural. Even so, when the moment came to pop the question he felt as shy about it as the first time he’d asked the price of a blow job.

  Sacajawea didn’t seem to notice his awkwardness. She just shook her head resignedly and said, “Things are tight right now, very tight.”

  Glandier, relaxed and good-humored, with his attention still focused on sex, considered making a pun but thought better of it. “I’d be willing to pay a little extra.”

  “So would I.” She laughed. Then, just as he’d promised Joy-Ann and just as unhopefully, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  CHAPTER 12

  But no, it had not been Bob. It was only the clock in the bedroom, striking four.

  Valves had dilated and she had felt the mix of her blood darken with a familiar fear. Only now, only here in the grave, secure against the influence of all the predatory forces in the world above that made fear rational and necessary, only now, only here, could she smile, though facelessly, at the memory of what she had seen when she had entered the bedroom, drawn by the summons, the warning, of that clock: His face floating disembodied on the glass oval of the dresser, framed in a metal frame, but living, the eyes alert, the lips released from the long enchantment of their smile—it was a wedding photograph—to curl up in the asymmetric sneer that prefaced his major pronouncements.

  “Giselle!” the photograph said, seeming more surprised than she. And then, more lingeringly, “Giselle.”

  If she had made no reply it was not through doubting the reality of the apparition.

  “Giselle, honey, come here and gimme a kiss. I’ll tell you a secret if you do. I’ll read your fortune.”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t, then. I’ll read your fortune anyhow.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “The next time we meet, sweetie, I am going to kill you. Sure as hell, I’m going to strangle you. With these two hands.” The face in the photograph looked annoyed; it had no hands with which to threaten her. With sadness, with even a touch of resignation, it resumed the false smile of their wedding day and spoke no more. It was only a photograph again, inert, a piece of paper covered with glass.

  She knew that what she’d just witnessed wasn’t, in some sense, real, just as the flames about the boy’s head and the black emanations from her purse must have been unreal. But she believed the photograph’s prophecy no less because it was the product of her own imagination, and she began at once to act on that belief. Trusting in God, as the ribbon over the temple on the five-dollar bill had instructed her, she removed the fuzzy slippers she’d been wearing and got into a pair of sneakers, a relic of high school, that she dug out of the back of the closet. (Bob disapproved of sneakers.) Balanced on one knee and then on the other, she tied the
laces with a sense of wonder at her own purposefulness. Then, rising to her feet, she almost lost her new-formed purpose in the glistening pool of the most potent illusion she’d yet encountered, as it floated, wraithlike, in the dresser mirror.

  Often in that very mirror, and more often in others, she had debated with herself whether she was beautiful or only pretty. After so much scrutiny those features ought to have seemed familiar. Yet now the face in evidence before her was a stranger’s—and grotesque, a Halloween mask of old habits and artifices through which the eyes of her awakened soul glinted wonderingly. The Ankers had had a spaniel when Giselle was a girl, Ginger, named for the dancer Ginger Rogers. Ginger had been similarly credulous in front of mirrors, always persuaded that her image was an autonomous being, a friend, an enemy.

  The lacquered hair, brittle as a bouquet of dried flowers; the waxed lips that were the color of a Ritz cracker box; the pink plastic buttons clipped to her ears; the black lines traced around her eyes. All so strange! And even stranger now, knowing that the rosy original of that mask had vanished as irrecoverably as the image from the mirror. Here in its grave it moldered and shriveled, like food dropped behind a stove, a pervasive, inescapable presence.

  So sad, so fascinating: no wonder she had hovered over it then, trying to teach the waxy lips to smile, the clenched jaw to relax, the pinched nostrils to accept a deeper, livelier breath. But the poor raddled creature would not be instructed, would not be pitied. “Leave me,” the red lips insisted. “Now.”

  So, with a kiss, they had severed.

  There was something still to be done before she left the house, but what? She returned to the kitchen, where the seven talismanic Magnapads hung on the refrigerator door. Three of them, the Rainbow Assortment, she remembered were to be a gift. She took them, certain again of her purpose, and set off through the front door and down the flagstones to the gravel-glittering street. Her cotton-polyester housedress fluttered about her thighs. Lawns of comfort and luxury quivered with green life. A woman like the woman in the mirror looked up from the flower bed by which she was kneeling and said her name, “Giselle,” waving a claw of crimson metal. She waved the Magnapads in reply. Behind the next house the whirling vanes of a windmill quickened, squeaking, and veered southwestward, showing her the direction she must take.

  CHAPTER 13

  Alice Hoffman squinted disapprovingly at the little glass pipe with the floral decal. “I swear I can’t feel a thing.”

  “It sneaks up on you,” Joy-Ann said, “like a Manhattan.”

  “The power of suggestion, that’s all.”

  “I can’t explain it, but it seems to work. I’m not sick to my stomach all the time, the way I was. That’s the main thing.”

  “Aren’t you afraid the police will find out somehow and arrest you?”

  “I was a little nervous at first, but if you think about it, why would the police come here. They’ve got better things to do.” Joy-Ann lifted the glass pipe to her lips, held a forefinger delicately over the other end, and sucked. “Drat, it’s out again.”

  “No more for me, anyhow,” Alice declared, fending off temptation with palm upraised.

  Joy-Ann tapped out the ashes into an ashtray and refilled the bowl from the half-depleted Baggie. “Life,” she said, and shook her head.

  As that might prove to be an awkward subject with Joy-Ann, Alice could come up with no rejoinder. She thought it inconsiderate of her friend to be dying at home instead of in a hospital, inconsiderate but also interesting. If someone had been hit by a car outside her house, Alice would have had to go out and take a closer look. By the same token she couldn’t resist dropping in on Joy-Ann from time to time to marvel at her strange new glamour—the weight she’d lost, the wig she had to wear now, all the clothes. Except for the dark rings under her eyes, which the makeup didn’t quite disguise, and a slight trembling at times in her fingers, she seemed to be in A-1 condition. The house was another story. The house was a mess, but then it usually had been, even before her cancer.

  “I think I told you about that book Sister Rita brought me. You know me, I’m not much of a reader, but when the—” She paused uneasily before the forbidden word, like someone just learning to swear. “—the marijuana turned out to be such a godsend, I thought it would only be fair to read some of the book. So—” She put a match to the bowl of the pipe, drew in a breath, and let out the smoke in a whooshing sigh. “I started it, and it—was—a-mazing. The basic idea, you see—”

  “You’ve told me all this already, Joy-Ann.”

  “But it’s so true: the basic idea is that death is a blessing in disguise.”

  Alice nodded in pious, resentful concurrence. “Mm, yes, of course.”

  “Oh, not like that. What she said, the author, is that a dying person might as well forget the things other people ordinarily worry about, ‘cause there’s nothing anyone can do about any of that, and instead concentrate on the things you really love. Flowers, for instance.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Except in my case I’ve never cared all that much for flowers. But I do love music. So yesterday I did what she said in the book, I went down to the basement and I dug out the box with all my old seventy-eights that I hadn’t listened to in years—”

  “Joy-Ann, really! You shouldn’t be going down in the basement.”

  “No, the book says don’t coddle yourself. Anyhow, what do you think I did then?”

  What Alice thought Joy-Ann should have done was to straighten up the mess in her living room. Or, supposing that was too much effort, she could have started work on the needlepoint pillow kit Alice had given her for Christmas and that still hadn’t had its cellophane wrappings taken off. However, she was too polite to say so. “I couldn’t imagine.”

  “I danced.”

  “You danced?”

  “First to ‘Black Magic,’ and then ‘Blue Skies.’ My two favorite songs. I hadn’t heard either for years, I guess, and there they were, just gathering dust. I should lend you the book.”

  “Joy-Ann, I think you should think twice before you use any more of that marijuana. Dancing, in your condition!”

  “Oh, but Alice, it was nice. I didn’t exert myself. I just sort of floated around. Very gently. I felt better than I’ve felt in months. Anyhow, the point I was getting to… Isn’t it a lovely day?”

  “Isn’t it,” Alice agreed with a crisp little smile, as though acknowledging a personal compliment.

  “So do you think we could go for a drive? You did say, last week, that you’d take me out to the cemetery as soon as the weather got warm enough.”

  “Oh but Joy-Ann. The cemetery?”

  “I never did see where they put her. The funeral was all I could handle. And there’s no one else I can ask, certainly not Bob.”

  “But it’s certain to be upsetting.”

  “On the other hand—” Joy-Ann set down the glass pipe beside the toaster in a manner expressive of obstinacy and inner peace. “—it might be a great comfort. Another thing the book says is put your house in order.”

  “Well, that’s true enough,” Alice said, with a significant glance toward the living room.

  “Meaning, that a person should take care of all those things that keep getting put off till next week. The book says, ‘Let next week be this minute.’ I’d get out there by myself if I had a car and knew how to drive. I suppose I could take driving lessons. The book says it’s never too late to learn a new skill. There was a woman in Toronto who learned French well enough to speak just four weeks before she died.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I think she had relatives who were French. Anyhow—would you?”

  “Oh, I suppose.”

  Alice tried to sound put-upon, but in fact she was grateful for the opportunity to pry a little deeper into the scandal surrounding Giselle Glandier’s death. Alice was Joy-Ann’s oldest neighbor. She’d babysat for Giselle; scolded her out of trees, gone to her high school graduation and he
r wedding, visited her when she moved out to Willowville, and sent her a Christmas card every year. But when she’d suddenly disappeared into the blue, Joy-Ann had been strangely reluctant to discuss what might have become of her daughter or where she could have gone to.

  To Las Vegas it had turned out—but why? For the gambling, like her father? Joy-Ann swore that Giselle had next to no interest in gambling. To see her brother, Bing? Joy-Ann, who hadn’t had anything to do with her son since he’d left home in 1966, said the police had told her that Bing hadn’t even known his sister was living in Las Vegas.

  Alice had her own explanation, which was Sex. Sex would account not only for the way she’d run off but for the way she’d been found as well, strangled to death and raped in the bathroom of her efficiency apartment in the Lady Luck Motor Lodge.

  Alice could understand her friend’s reluctance to dwell on so painful a subject, but it was aggravating to be living next door to a genuine murder mystery (Alice had read practically every word that Erle Stanley Gardner had ever written) and not to know any of the details, not to be able to talk about it.

  But on the drive to the cemetery Joy-Ann fell into one of her moods, and even when Alice accidentally went through a red light she couldn’t be roused from her dazed admiration of dead lawns and leafless trees silhouetted by the sky’s bright, uniform blue.