Look at the Birdie (23 page)

Charley Howes smiled feebly. Mark had just done him out of his one good clue. Mark’s father was maybe brave in a lot of ways, but there were two things he wasn’t brave about. All his life he’d been scared of Earl Hedlund and dogs. Earl Hedlund guffawed.

Charley sighed. “Thanks—thanks for the information, Mark,” he said. “You go on and carry the rest of your route now.” He was going to let it go at that.

But Earl wouldn’t let it go that easily. “Kid,” he said to Mark, “I hate to tell you this, but that father of yours is the biggest yellow belly in the village.” He put the paper aside and stood up, so Mark could see what a real man looked like.

“Shut up, Earl,” said Charley.

“Shut up?” said Earl. “A minute ago, this kid was doing his best to get me in the electric chair.”

Mark was flabbergasted. “Electric chair?” he said. “All I said was my father brought the paper.”

Earl’s piggy eyes glittered. The way those eyes glittered and the way Earl hunched over removed all doubt from Charley’s mind that Earl was a murderer. Earl wanted to kill the boy. He couldn’t do it with his hands with Charley there, so he was doing the next cruelest thing. He was doing it with words.

“Maybe your old man told you he brought the paper,” said Earl, “but I promise you right now he wouldn’t come near this dog for a million dollars, and he wouldn’t come near me for ten million!” He held up his right hand. “Word of honor on that, kid!” He didn’t stop there. He told Mark story after story about how Mark’s father had run or hidden or cried or begged for mercy as a boy—how he’d slunk away from danger as a man. And in every story danger was one of two things—a dog or Earl Hedlund. “Scout’s honor, word of honor, swear on a stack of Bibles—any kind of honor you want, kid,” said Earl, “everything I’ve said is true.”

There was nothing left for Mark to do but the thing he’d sworn never to do again. He cried. He climbed on his bicycle, and he rode away.

The dog didn’t chase him this time. Satan understood that Mark wasn’t fair game.

“Now you git, too,” Earl said to Charley.

Charley was so heartsick about Mark, he leaned against Earl’s house and closed his eyes for a minute. He opened his eyes and saw his reflection in a windowpane. He saw a tired old man, and he figured he’d grown old and tired trying to make the world be what ten-year-olds thought it was.

And then he saw the newspaper lying on the chair just inside the window, locked up nice and tight inside the house. Charley could read the date. It was Wednesday’s paper, open to the financial page. It was proof enough that Earl had gone to Providence to build an alibi—that he’d sneaked back Wednesday to kill Estelle.

But Charley wasn’t thinking about Earl or Estelle. He was thinking about Mark and his father.

Earl knew what Charley had seen through the window. He was on his feet, showing his teeth, ready to fight. And he held the dog by the scruff of his neck, getting the dog ready to fight, too.

But Charley didn’t close in for a fight. He climbed into the patrol car instead. “Be here when I get back,” he said, and he drove down the hill after Mark.

He caught up with Mark at the mouth of the road. “Mark!” he yelled. “Your father delivered the paper! It’s up there! He delivered it through the sleet, past the dog and everything!”

“Good,” said Mark. There wasn’t any joy in the way he’d said it. He’d been through too much to be happy for a while. “Those things Mr. Hedlund said about Father,” said Mark, “even if he gave his word of honor—they wouldn’t necessarily be true, would they, Mr. Howes?”

There were two ways Charley could answer. He could lie, say no, the stories weren’t true. Or he could tell the truth, and hope that Mark would catch on to the fact that all the stories made his father’s delivery of the paper to Earl Hedlund’s house one of the most glorious chapters in village history.

“Every one of those stories was true, Mark,” said Charley. “Your father couldn’t help being afraid, on account of he was born that way, just the way he was born with blue eyes and brown hair. You and me, we can’t imagine what it’s like to be loaded down with all that fear. It’s a mighty brave man who can live with all that. So just think a minute how brave your father was to get that paper up to Earl Hedlund’s rather than break a rule.”

Mark thought, and then he nodded to show he understood.

He was satisfied. His father was what a ten-year-old’s father has to be—a hero.

“Did—did Mr. Hedlund do the murder?” said Mark.

“Gosh amighty!” said Charley. He banged the side of his head with the heel of his hand to make his brains work better. “Forgot all about the murder.”

He turned the patrol car around and roared up to Earl’s house again. Earl was gone, and so was the dog. They’d taken off through the woods.

Two hours later a search party found Earl. He’d been heading for the railroad tracks, and Satan the dog had killed him. At the coroner’s inquest, all anybody could offer was theories about why the dog had done it.

The best theory was probably Charley’s. Charley guessed that the dog had smelled Earl’s fear and seen him running, so he’d chased him. “And Earl was the first person who’d ever let the dog see how scared he was,” Charley said at the inquest, “so Satan killed him.”

I was sitting in a bar one night, talking rather loudly about a person I hated—and a man with a beard sat down beside me, and he said amiably, “Why don’t you have him killed?”

“I’ve thought of it,” I said. “Don’t think I haven’t.”

“Let me help you to think about it clearly,” he said. His voice was deep. His beak was large. He wore a black mohair suit and a black string tie. His little red mouth was obscene. “You’re looking at the situation through a red haze of hate,” he said. “What you need are the calm, wise services of a murder counselor, who can plan the job for you, and save you an unnecessary trip to the hot squat.”

“Where do I find one?” I said.

“You’ve found one,” he said.

“You’re crazy,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “I’ve been in and out of mental institutions all my life. That makes my services all the more appealing. If I were ever to testify against you, your lawyer would have no trouble establishing that I was a well-known nut, and a convicted felon besides.”

“What was the felony?” I said.

“A little thing—practicing medicine without a license,” he said.

“Not murder then?” I said.

“No,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I
haven’t
murdered. As a matter of fact, I murdered almost everyone who had anything to do with convicting me of practicing medicine without a license.” He looked at the ceiling, did some mental arithmetic. “Twenty-two, twenty-three people—maybe more,” he said. “Maybe more. I’ve killed them over a period of years, and I haven’t read the papers every single day.”

“You black out when you kill, do you,” I said, “and wake up the next morning, and read that you’ve struck again?”

“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “No, no, no, no, no. I killed many of those people while I was cozily tucked away in prison. You see,” he said, “I use the cat-over-the-wall technique, a technique I recommend to you.”

“This is a new technique?” I said.

“I like to think that it is,” he said. He shook his head. “But it’s so obvious, I can’t believe that I was the first to think of it. After all, murdering’s an old, old trade.”

“You use a cat?” I said.

“Only as an analogy,” he said. “You see,” he said, “a very interesting legal question is raised when a man, for one reason or another, throws a cat over a wall. If the cat lands on a person, claws his eyes out, is the cat-thrower responsible?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Now then—if the cat lands on nobody, but claws someone ten minutes after being thrown, is the cat thrower responsible?”

“No,” I said.

“That,” he said, “is the high art of the cat-over-the-wall technique for carefree murder.”

“Time bombs?” I said.

“No, no, no,” he said, pitying my feeble imagination.

“Slow poisons? Germs?” I said.

“No,” he said. “And your next and final guess I already know: killers for hire from out of town.” He sat back, pleased with himself. “Maybe I really
did
invent this thing.”

“I give up,” I said.

“Before I tell you,” he said, “you’ve got to let my wife take your picture.” He pointed his wife out to me. She was a scrawny, thin-lipped woman with raddled hair and bad teeth. She was sitting in a booth with an untouched beer before her. She was obviously a lunatic herself, watching us with the harrowing cuteness of schizophrenia. I saw that she had a Rollieflex with flashgun attached on the seat beside her.

At a signal from her husband, she came over and prepared to take my picture. “Look at the birdie,” she said.

“I don’t want my picture taken,” I said.

“Say
cheese,”
she said, and the flashgun went off.

When my eyes got used to darkness of the bar again, I saw the woman scuttling out the door.

“What the hell is this?” I said, standing up.

“Calm yourself. Sit down,” he said. “You’ve had your picture taken. That’s all.”

“What’s she going to do with it?” I said.

“Develop it,” he said.

“And then what?” I said.

“Paste it in our picture album,” he said, “in our treasure house of golden memories.”

“Is this some kind of blackmail?” I said.

“Did she photograph you doing anything you shouldn’t be doing?” he said.

“I want that picture,” I said.

“You’re not superstitious, are you?” he said.

“Superstitious?” I said.

“Some people believe that, if their picture is taken,” he said, “the camera captures a little piece of their soul.”

“I want to know what’s going on,” I said.

“Sit down and I’ll tell you,” he said.

“Make it good, and make it quick,” I said.

“Good and quick it shall be, my friend,” he said. “My name is Felix Koradubian. Does the name ring a bell?”

“No,” I said.

“I practiced psychiatry in this city for seven years,” he said. “Group psychiatry was my technique. I practiced in the round, mirror-lined ballroom of a stucco castle between a used car lot and a colored funeral home.”

“I remember now,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “For your sake, I’d hate to have you think I was a liar.”

“You were run in for quackery,” I said. “Quite right,” he said.

“You hadn’t even finished high school,” I said.

“You mustn’t forget,” he said, “Freud himself was self-educated in the field. And one thing Freud said was that a brilliant intuition was as important as anything taught in medical school.” He gave a dry laugh. His little red mouth certainly didn’t show any merriment to go with the laugh. “When I was arrested,” he said, “a young reporter who
had
finished high school—wonder of wonders, he may have even finished college—he asked me to tell him what a paranoiac was. Can you imagine?” he said. “I had been dealing with the insane and the nearly insane of this city for seven years, and that young squirt, who maybe took freshman psychology at
Jerkwater U, thought he could baffle me with a question like that.”

“What
is
a paranoiac?” I said.

“I sincerely hope that that is a respectful question put by an ignorant man in search of truth,” he said.

“It is,” I said. It wasn’t.

“Good,” he said. “Your respect for me at this point should be growing by leaps and bounds.”

“It is,” I said. It wasn’t.

“A paranoiac, my friend,” he said, “is a person who has gone crazy in the most intelligent, well-informed way, the world being what it is. The paranoiac believes that great secret conspiracies are afoot to destroy him.”

“Do you believe that about yourself?” I said.

“Friend,” he said, “I
have
been destroyed! My God, I was making sixty thousand dollars a year—six patients an hour, at five dollars a head, two thousand hours a year. I was a rich, proud, and happy man. And that miserable woman who just took your picture, she was beautiful, wise, and serene.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“Too bad it is,
indeed
, my friend,” he said. “And not just for us, either. This is a sick, sick city, with thousands upon thousands of mentally ill people for whom nothing is being done. Poor people, lonely people, afraid of doctors, most of them—those are the people I was helping. Nobody is helping them now.” He shrugged. “Well,” he said, “having been caught fishing illegally in the waters of human misery, I have returned my entire catch to the muddy stream.”

“Didn’t you turn your records over to somebody?” I said.

“I burned them,” he said. “The only thing I saved was a
list of really dangerous paranoiacs that only I knew about—violently insane people hidden in the woodwork of the city, so to speak—a laundress, a telephone installer, a florist’s helper, an elevator operator, and on and on.”

Koradubian winked. “A hundred and twenty-three names on my magic list—all people who heard voices, all people who thought certain strangers were out to get them, all people, who, if they got scared enough, would kill.”

He sat back and beamed. “I see you’re beginning to understand,” he said. “When I was arrested, and then got out on bail, I bought a camera—the same camera that took your picture. And my wife and I took candid snapshots of the District Attorney, the President of the County Medical Association, of an editorial writer who demanded my conviction. Later on, my wife photographed the judge and jury, the prosecuting attorney, and all of the unfriendly witnesses.

“I called in my paranoiacs, and I apologized to them. I told them that I had been very wrong in telling them that there was no plot against them. I told them that I had uncovered a monstrous plot, and that I had photographs of the plotters. I told them that they should study the photographs, and should be alert and armed constantly. And I promised to send them more photographs from time to time.”

I was sick with horror, had a vision of the city teeming with innocent-looking lunatics who would suddenly kill and run.