The Blunderer (25 page)

“Do you think Stackhouse is guilty?” Corby asked.

Kimmel shrugged.

“What do you
think
? Everybody's got an opinion about Stackhouse.”

“My dear Lieutenant Corby,” Kimmel said grandly, “you're so convinced that everybody's fascinated by murder and can't rest until the murderer is brought to justice—by
you
! Who cares whether Stackhouse is guilty or not?”

Corby sat down on the edge of the wooden table and swung his leg back and forth. “What else did Stackhouse say?”

“That's all.”

“What else did he say?” In the empty room Corby's voice grated like a metal file.

“That's all,” Kimmel repeated with dignity. His plump hands twisted and twitched, touching fingertips lightly together below the bulge of his belly.

“It took Stackhouse nearly twenty minutes to apologize, then?”

“We were interrupted several times. He just stood in the back of my shop by my desk and chatted with me.”

“Chatted. He said, ‘I'm so sorry, Mr. Kimmel, to have caused you all this trouble.' And what did you say? ‘Oh, that's quite all right, Mr. Stackhouse. No hard feelings.' Did you offer him a cigar?”

“I told him,” Kimmel said, “that I did not think either of us had anything to worry about, but that he had better not come to see me again, because you would attach a meaning to it.”

Corby laughed.

Kimmel held his head higher. He stared at the wall, unmoving except for his twisting, lightly playing hands. He was standing on one leg, the other was gracefully relaxed, and his body was somewhat turned from Corby. Kimmel realized it was the same statuesque position in which he sometimes surveyed himself, naked, in the long mirror on his bathroom door. He had assumed it without thinking, and though in a secret part of his brain it made him feel shame, he felt it gave him a certain indestructible poise. Kimmel held the pose as if he were paralyzed.

“Guilty or not, I suppose you know that Stackhouse pointed the finger at you, don't you, Kimmel?”

“That is so obvious, I don't think it needs mentioning,” Kimmel answered.

Corby kept swinging his leg over the edge of the table. The brown wooden table suggested a primitive, filthy operating table. Kimmel wondered if Corby was going to fling him on to it finally with a ju-jitsu hold on him.

“Did Stackhouse explain why he had the newspaper clipping?” Corby asked.

“No.”

“Didn't make a complete confession, then, did he?”

“He had nothing to confess. He said he was sorry he had brought the police down on my head.”

“Stackhouse has a lot to confess,” Corby retorted. “For an innocent man his actions are very peculiar. Didn't he tell you why he followed his wife's bus that night?”

“No,” Kimmel replied in the same indifferent tone.

“Maybe you can tell me why.”

Kimmel pressed his lips together. His lips were trembling. He was simply bored with Corby's questioning. Stackhouse was being hammered at, too, Kimmel supposed. For a moment, a defiant sympathy for Stackhouse rose in him, tangled with his loathing of Corby. He believed what Stackhouse had told him. He did not think Stackhouse was guilty. “If you so doubt my report of what Stackhouse said to me, you should have sent a spy into the shop to listen!”

“Oh, we know you're an expert at spotting police detectives. You'd have warned Stackhouse and he would have stopped talking. We'll get it out of both of you finally.” Corby smiled and came towards Kimmel. He looked fresh and fit. He was working on a nightshift now, he had told Kitnmel. “You're protecting Stackhouse, aren't you, Kimmel? You like murderers, don't you?”

“I didn't think you thought he was a murderer.”

“Since finding the clipping, I do. I told you that as soon as I'd found it!”

“I think you think there is still ample room for doubt about Stackhouse, but that you will not
let
yourself be fair with Stackhouse because you have decided to break a spectacular case!” Kimmel shouted, louder than Corby. “Even if you invent the crimes yourself!”

“Oh-h, Kimmel,” Corby drawled. “I didn't invent the corpse of your wife, did I?”

“You invent my participation in it!”

“Did you ever see Stackhouse before I brought him to your shop?” Corby asked. “Did you?”

“No.”

“I thought he might even have come to see you,” Corby said speculatively. “He's that type.”

Kimmel wondered if Stackhouse had been stupid enough to tell Corby that he had come. “No,” Kimmel said, a little less positively. Kimmel took off his glasses, blew on them, reached for his handkerchief and not finding it, scoured the lenses on his cuff.

“I can imagine Stackhouse coming to see you, looking you over—maybe even expressing his sympathy for you. He might have looked you over to see if you really looked like a killer—which you do, of course.”

Kimmel put his glasses back on and recomposed his face. But fear had begun to grow in him like a tiny fire. It made him shift on his feet, made him want to run. Kimmel had felt until Corby came that he had enjoyed a supernatural immunity, and now Corby himself seemed possessed of supernatural powers, like a Nemesis. Corby was not fair. His methods were not those commonly associated with justice, and yet he enjoyed the immunity that official, uniformed justice gave him.

“Had your glasses repaired?” Corby asked. Corby walked towards him like a little strutting rooster, his fists on his hips holding back his open overcoat. He stopped close in front of Kimmel. “Kimmel, I'm going to break you. Tony already thinks you killed Helen. Do you know that?”

Kimmel did not move. He felt physically afraid of Corby and it angered him, because physically Corby was a wraith. Kimmel was afraid in the closed room with him, with no help within call, afraid of being hurled to the hard tile floor that looked like the floor of an abattoir. He could imagine the vilest tortures in this room. He imagined that the police hosed the blood down from the walls after they worked a man over here. Kimmel suddenly had to go to the toilet.

“Tony's working on our side now,” Corby said close in his face. “He's remembering things, like your saying to him just a few days before you killed Helen that there were ways of getting rid of the wrong wife.”

Kimmel did remember that—sitting with Tony in a booth at the Oyster House, drinking beer. Tony had been there with some of his adolescent friends and had sat himself down in the booth uninvited. Kimmel had actually talked so boldly because he had been annoyed at Tony's sprawling himself down before he had been asked to sit down. “What else does Tony remember?” Kimmel asked.

“He remembers that he tried to come by your house after the movie that evening and you weren't home. You didn't get home until long after midnight that night, Kimmel. What if you had to say where you were?”

Kimmel gave a laugh. “It's absurd! I
know
that Tony did not try to come to see me. It's absurd to try to reconstruct the dullest, quietest evening in the world more than three months later when everybody's forgotten it!”

“The dullest, quietest evening in the world.” Corby lighted a cigarette. Then his hand flashed out suddenly, and Kimmel felt a sharp sting on his left cheek.

Kimmel wanted to take off his glasses before it was too late, but he did not move. The sting in his cheek continued, burning, humiliating.

“Getting hit is the only thing you understand, isn't it, Kimmel? Words and facts never bother you, because you're insane. You refuse to attach a meaning to them. You live in your own private world, and the only way to break into it is by hitting you!” Corby's hands came up again.

Kimmel dodged, but Corby had not struck him, was only removing the glasses that Kimmel felt suddenly yanked from his ears. The room jumped and became blurred, and Kimmel tried to focus the black smudge of Corby's figure moving towards the horizontal blur of the table. Quickly Kimmel put his spread hand before his face, saw it, and whipped it behind him, clasped with the other.

Corby came back.

“Why don't you admit that you know Stackhouse is guilty? Why don't you admit that he told you enough to make sure of it? You can't make me believe that you love Stackhouse so much that you're going to protect him, Kimmel.”

“We are both innocent men in very much the same position,” Kimmel said in a monotonous voice, “as Stackhouse pointed out. That's why he came to see me.”

Corby hit him in the stomach. It doubled Kimmel over, like the blow in his house. Kimmel waited for the hurling into the air, the crash to the floor. It didn't come. Kimmel stayed bent over, recovering his breath little by little. He saw black spots on the floor, more came as he watched, and then he realized that his nose was dripping blood. He had to open his mouth to breathe, and then he tasted it, a terrifying salty orange taste. Corby was walking around him and Kimmel turned with him, keeping his black figure always in front of him. Kimmel suddenly grabbed his nose and blew it violently, flinging his wet hand out to one side of him. “You should have blood on this floor!” Kimmel shouted. “You should make the walls run with it! Men you have tortured!”

Corby seized Kimmel by the shoulders and pushed his knee into his belly.

Kimmel was down on hands and knees, gasping for breath again, with a deeper pain than before.

“Admit that you know Stackhouse is guilty!”

Kimmel simply ignored it. His mind was entirely occupied with feeling sorry for himself. Even the recovery of his breath was an involuntary process, a series of painful, sob-like gasps. Then Corby kicked him or pushed him in the hip, and Kimmel fell suddenly to the floor. He lay on one hip, his head raised.

“Get up, you old bitch,” Corby said.

Kimmel didn't want to get up, but Corby kicked him in the buttocks. Kimmel got on to his knees and slowly hauled himself erect, his head up, though he had never felt weaker or more passive. The closer Corby strutted around him, the flabbier he felt himself, as if Corby hypnotized him. He ached, he stung in a dozen places. Kimmel was aware that he felt intensely feminine, more intensely than when he spied upon his own sensuous curves in the bathroom mirror, or when he read books sometimes and for his own diversion, imagined, and he was aware that it gave him pleasure of a kind he had not felt in years. He waited for the next blow, which he anticipated would strike his ear.

As if Corby understood him, he struck the side of Kimmel's head.

Kimmel screamed suddenly, releasing in one shrill blast a frantic shame that had been warring with his pleasure. He heard Corby's laugh.

“Kimmel, you're blushing!” Corby said. “Shall we change the subject? Shall we talk about Helen? About the time she threw out your
Encyclopaedia Britannica
out of sheer malice? I heard you paid fifty-five dollars for that set second-hand, and at a time when you really couldn't afford it.”

Kimmel heard Corby bouncing on his heels, triumphantly, though Kimmel was still too ashamed to look at him. He made a tremendous effort to think who could have told Corby about the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, because it had happened way back in Philadelphia.

“I've also heard about the time Helen was manicuring her friends' fingernails for pin money. You must have loved that—women coming in and out of the house all day, sitting around gabbing. That's when you decided you could never educate Helen up to your level.”

But the manicuring had lasted only a month, Kimmel thought. He had stopped it. Kimmel looked off to one side, though he was still wary of a darting attack from Corby. Kimmel felt goose-pimples under his trousers, as if he was naked and a cool wind was blowing on him.

“But even before that,” Corby went on, “you'd reached the point where you couldn't touch her. She was loathsome to you, and gradually the loathing transferred itself to other women, too. You told yourself you hated women because they were stupid, and the stupidest of all was Helen. That was strange for you, Kimmel, who'd been so passionate in your youth! Did you begin to get it all out of pornographic books?”

“You disgust me!” Kimmel said.

“What could disgust you?” Corby came closer. “You married Helen when you were twenty, too young really to know anything about women, but you were very religious in those days, and you thought you ought to be married before you enjoyed their—You must have a name for it, Kimmel!”

“It fits you!” Kimmel spluttered. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Do you want your glasses?”

Kimmel took them and put them on. The room and Corby's thin face came into focus again. Corby's lips were sneering under the little mustache.

“Anyway, it was a sad day for Helen when she married you. Little could she know—a simple girl out of the Philadelphia slums. She made you impotent, you thought. That wasn't so bad, because you could blame it on Helen and enjoy hating her.”

“I didn't hate her,” Kimmel protested. “She was actually feeble-minded. I had nothing to do with her.”

“She wasn't feeble-minded,” Corby said. “Well, to continue this, a woman you had a big fiasco with came and told Helen about it and Helen began to taunt you.”

“She did not! There was no woman!”

“Yes, there was. Her name was Laura. I've talked to Laura. She told me all about it. She doesn't like you. She says you gave her the creeps.”

Kimmel stiffened with shame, seeing it again as Corby told it, the furtive afternoon in Laura's apartment when her husband was at work—he'd always told himself it was the furtiveness that had caused everything that day, but, whatever had caused it, he had never had the courage to try again after that—seeing Laura climbing the stairs of his own house the next day to tell Helen. Kimmel had not seen her climbing the stairs, but he always imagined it very clearly, because Laura limped in one foot and had to pull herself up by banisters. Kimmel could see the two women laughing at him, then covering their mouths like idiot children, ashamed of what they had said. Helen had told him about Laura's visit that very night, and Helen had still then been giggling about it, peering at him. Helen had murdered herself that very night with her insane jeering!