We All Killed Grandma (19 page)

I’d left Vangy’s at ten and had decided—with damn good reason—to hang one on. But I hadn’t wanted to drink alone and I’d known that Harry lived only a couple of blocks away so I’d gone around to see if I could enlist him as a companion. And I’d done it right away; five or ten minutes after ten was perfect timing.

I looked at Harry. “Did I tell you where I’d been before that?”

He grinned at me. “You wouldn’t do a thing like that, Rod. You’re a gentleman. But you got to my place afoot; I just happened to be staring out of the window and saw you coming—and what direction you came from. And before we left my place to go to the tavern around the corner I gave you a couple of pieces of Kleenex and put you in front of a mirror to wipe the lipstick off your face. Now do you want me to put one and one together and tell you whom you’d just left?”

“No,” I said.

“All right, then, we won’t mention any names. Anyway I’d guess nothing much more than transfer of lipstick actually happened or you wouldn’t have left there by ten o’clock. I’d say a wheel came off.”

“Let’s stick to what happened after I got to your place, Harry. Did we leave right away for the tavern?”

“In about ten minutes. I had to dress. I wasn’t intending to go to bed yet; I was going to read a while. But I’d made myself comfortable by getting into pajamas; I was going to read in bed.”

“But you got dressed and went out with me?”

“You were in sad shape, pal. If ever a guy needed someone to drink with him, you did that night. You could have
walked under an angleworm on stilts. And you wouldn’t talk about it and get it out of your system. Not that I had to guess the reason—with your divorce coming up the next day. Of course I was a little puzzled about what happened between you and Vang—wups, I almost mentioned a name and we’re not going to mention names. But for whatever reason a wheel came off that choice of an anodyne, you picked whisky for next choice.”

“How drunk was I when I got to your place?”

“Not bad. Just a triffle pixilated, I’d say. The stage at which—normally—you’d have been feeling a little cheerful. The ten o’clock stage in an evening of what had been moderate drinking up to then.”

“You say, I wouldn’t talk about my troubles. What did I talk about?”

“For a while, ten minutes maybe, you talked about cars—that Lincoln of yours in particular. It was in a garage being fixed then; somebody’d sideswiped you while you were parked at the curb. I’m no bug on cars—never owned one—but I played along by asking questions to keep you talking, and you did all right for a while and then all of a sudden you ran down on talk and concentrated on drinking. I couldn’t get a word out of you except a
yes
or
no
when I asked you a question.”

“How much did I drink?”

“Plenty. I don’t know just how many shots. Does it matter? I can try to remember or figure back.”

“I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“We were sitting at the bar and you made the bartender leave the whiskey bottle in front of us. You were downing them, for a while, so fast you didn’t want to bother calling him over each time. And straight; you didn’t even touch the glass of water you had for a chaser.”

“My God,” I said.

“I tried to talk you into slowing down and then I decided what the hell, a little more and I could take you back around the corner to my place and pour you into my extra bed and you’d be out of your misery for the rest of the night. But then you stopped guzzling of your own accord and got your big idea.”

“What was that?”

“You wouldn’t say. But all of a sudden, around eleven o’clock, whatever the idea was, you got it. You said you’d just thought of something you had to do and you went out of there like you were jet propelled. The conversation had run down and you hadn’t said a word for ten minutes before that so I didn’t have a clue as to what you’d just thought of. But you seemed suddenly cheerful about it so I figured it wasn’t a sudden idea to go home and cut your throat, so I didn’t argue with you. I had a hunch that maybe you’d decided to go back to—uh, where you’d picked up the lipstick. And I thought that might be the best thing for you.”

“Did I just run off without even apologizing, after getting you to dress and go out with me?”

“Oh, you apologized, and you took time to pay for the drinks, but you got out in a hurry just the same. I asked if you wanted me to phone for a cab but you said you’d better walk at least part of the way to sober up.”

I nodded. That, assuming that my sudden decision had been to go to Grandma’s, cleared everything up to the time I got there. If I’d walked all the way downtown to help sober myself up I’d have reached the corner where Walter Smith had seen me at just about the right time. And if I’d have walked about ten or fifteen minutes more after that and then taken a cab for the final lap, it would have got me there just about the time I probably did get there.

I said, “Thanks a lot, Harry. That clears up a lot for me.” He glanced at his watch. “We’d better get back to the Venusian zilch mines. We’re a few minutes late already.”

C
HARLIE GRAINGER
wasn’t at his desk when I got back to our office; I was ten minutes late and he’d already left for lunch at one.

I sat down at the desk and before I tried to get back on the track of Lee Hosiery for Christmas I let myself think a little more about what Harry Weston had just told me.

It filled in the gap and made the pattern of my evening clear right up to the time I reached Grandma’s. But it made one thing even more puzzling than ever—the reason why I’d gone there. What had my “big idea” been?

There’d been one possible reason which, until now, I’d been able to consider at least possible. I’d thought that perhaps lonesomeness had driven me there to look up Arch for companionship, since I could have forgotten—or never known—that Arch had gone to Chicago and since I knew that midnight was by no means too late to drop in on Arch. But I certainly would not have left Harry Weston flat in a tavern on the far side of town to look up Arch instead. Nor would I, for the purpose of seeing Arch, have worried about walking most of the way to sober up.

It
must
have been Grandma I was going to see. But I couldn’t think of even a remote possibility of what my “big idea” had been.

I shoved it aside. I started to work and worked hard.

Grainger came back from lunch and the phone on my desk rang just as he came in the door. It was Carver this time.

“How are you doing, Rod?”

“Fine, I hope.”

“Attaboy. Listen, I’m leaving pretty soon. Appointments with some clients. If you’ve got anything ready to show me and want to show it to me today at all, it’ll have to be now.”

“I’ll be right in,” I said.

“I don’t want to push you, Rod. If you’d rather wait till tomorrow—or next Monday—that’s all right. I just thought I’d tell you I was leaving soon so if you
do
have anything you want to show me today—”

“I do have,” I said. “I’ll be right in.”

I gathered up the stuff I’d done and took it into his office.

He waved me to a chair. “No hurry. I’ll look at it in a minute or two; let’s talk first. Getting oriented?”

“Feel at home already,” I said. “Everybody I’ve met’s
been swell. Maybe this’ll sound Pollyannaish, but I must have enjoyed working here. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed today. I should have come back sooner.”

“That calls for a drink, Rod. Whether you want one or not.” And, whether I wanted one or not, he made us a pair of drinks.

“Now let’s see what you’ve been doing.”

I showed him and, in general, he liked it. He liked some things better than others and pointed out which.

He chuckled over the risqué one. “Swell stuff,” he said. “Yes, they’re using
Esquire
and other men’s magazines in the campaign. If you don’t do anything else the rest of the day, polish up this one for a starter. Get it ready for art and layout and bring it in to me tomorrow morning early.”

“All right.”

“But don’t forget to slant some stuff for woman appeal, too. For the exclusively women’s magazines. Double angle there, if you can get it. Women give presents to other women. Also to make ’em want the stockings themselves.”

“How’s this for an angle? Give the gift you’d like to receive.”

“Fine, Rod. Only you should take time to think up things like that; not pop out with them spontaneously. Otherwise I’ll have to give you another raise and you shouldn’t have one coming for another month or so.”

I went back to my office feeling pretty good. The rest of the day went quickly. Once, about mid-afternoon, I met Vangy in the hallway. She said, “Hello, Rod,” even though she didn’t say it too enthusiastically and didn’t stop to talk.

That ended one mild worry I’d had about coming back to work, the possibility that Vangy might make things embarrassing by refusing to speak to me. As she had every right and reason to do if she felt that way. But I was glad she didn’t feel that way.

I got away as quickly as I could at five o’clock because I didn’t want to keep Dr. Eggleston waiting. It was rush hour and I’d have lost time trying to drive two blocks so I left my car in the lot next door and walked to the Union Trust Building. I found his office number on the building directory and went up.

He was waiting. He said, “Okay, Rod, strip to the waist. We might as well make this a good checkup while we’re at it.”

He went over me with a stethoscope and a few other things and asked a few dozen questions. He said finally, “Okay, you can dress again. I’ll write that prescription for sleeping powders while you’re doing it. They’ll be capsules; try to get by with one if you can; a second won’t kill you if the first doesn’t put you to sleep within a reasonable time. Now about the amnesia—any faint glimmers of memory?”

“Not a glimmer.”

“Funny, a few things ought to have started coming back by now. There’s a block operating somewhere, I’d guess. One log that’s jamming the rest of them. By the way, you’re eating in restaurants, aren’t you?”

“Yes; is that bad?”

“It isn’t good, but I wasn’t thinking about your health. When I found I was going to stay late at the office to see you I phoned my wife not to hold dinner for me. We have guests coming this evening and I knew she wanted to get dinner out of the way early so I told her I’d grab something downtown. Unless you already have a dinner date we might as well eat together.”

I told him it was a good idea. I finished dressing while he wrote out the prescription.

We went to Gus’s; we were both hungry enough that German cooking sounded good. We ordered wiener schnitzel and ate bread sticks and butter while we waited for it.

Dr. Eggleston said, “Rod, about that psychic block. I still think you should see a psychiatrist. There’s some one thing that you don’t
want
to remember and that’s the fact that’s causing the log jam.”

I said, “Maybe if I don’t want to remember it, I’ll be happier if I don’t.”

“I—don’t—know. Frankly, I suspected at first that you just might have been guilty of murder. That would be a sufficient exciting cause to have given you amnesia: I’ll admit that I talked personally to Walter Smith and to
your friend next door, Vincent Henderson. And you couldn’t have done it, Rod.”

“I’m convinced of that myself, finally,” I told him. “I’ve even gone a little further in finding myself an alibi than Walter did; I’ve found out what I did all that evening up to the time he saw me downtown.”

“That’s good. I’m glad you feel that way. But, Rod, there’s
something
you don’t want to remember. There must be. If it was simply shock because you were the one who discovered the body it should have begun to wear off by now. There’s some one memory which your subconscious mind holds back from your conscious one, and that’s what’s doing the dirty work. Until you drag it out into the light and spit in its eye you won’t get your memory back. And you don’t want to go through the rest of your life not remembering a single thing about the first part of it. You don’t want to lose twenty-eight years of your memory.”

He leaned forward earnestly. “Rod, when you get older you’ll learn how important memories are, what a big part they play in your happiness, your contentment with life. You’re just living from day to day without them.”

I’d been living just from day to day already, I thought.

But I thought, My God, I’m so head over heels in love with Robin now, how much worse would it be if I had my memories back, my memories of the touch of her body as well as the sight of it, memories of her loving me, of sleeping with her for two years; wouldn’t that make the way I feel now a thousand times worse?

He said, “Rod, I know you don’t want to see a psychiatrist. But you should. No matter what it is that you don’t want to remember, you’ve got to remember it and face it before you’ll be whole again.”

I thought a minute, a full minute before I answered. I said, “Even if—in some way we can’t see from here—I am guilty of murder? Would I be happier to know that?”

“You aren’t—All right, let’s take even that. Yes, in the long run you’d be better off to know it. Because, whatever it is, your subconscious mind knows it now. Knowledge as bad as that, buried in your subconscious—But that’s ridiculous;
it can’t be as bad as that. Here’s one possibility; suppose you did kill your grandmother, but accidentally. Your mind didn’t want to face the fact—but something like that would be a fact that’s faceable. And if it’s that or something like that you’d better learn it and face it.”

“How could I have killed her accidentally? Did I eat the gun?”

He waved a hand impatiently. “I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t think that’s what happened; I was just suggesting it as an example.”

I said, “You started to say something before, Doctor, and didn’t finish. You said, ‘Knowledge as bad as that, buried in your subconscious—.’”

“All right, I’ll finish it—could drive you insane, eventually.”

My wiener schnitzel tasted like breaded shoe leather.

I nodded. “Especially, I suppose, with a hereditary tendency toward it.”

He looked at me, mildly surprised. “Surely you don’t consider your grandmother more than eccentric, Rod. That’s no inheritance of insanity. She was, as people put it, ‘crazy like a fox,’ which is something else than being crazy.”