Oddments (6 page)

"Come on, honey. Jerry can't even bring himself to step on
a bug. And Verna's enough to drive any man a little crazy. Ei
ther she's mired in one of her funks or on a rampage about
something or other. And she's always telling him how worth
less and lazy she thinks he is."

"She has a point," Mary Ellen said. "All he does all day is
sit around drinking beer and staring at the tube."

"Well, with his back the way it is—"

"His back doesn't seem to bother him when he decides to work in his garden."

"Hey, I thought you liked Jerry."

"I do like Jerry. It's just that I can see Verna's side, the woman's side. He was no ball of fire before the accident, and he's never let her have children—"

"That's her story. He says he's sterile."

"Well, whatever. I still say she has some justification for being moody and short-tempered, especially in this heat."

"I suppose."

"Anyhow," Mary Ellen said, "her moods don't give Jerry the right to keep pretending he's killed her. And I don't care how harmless he seems to be, he could snap someday. People who have violent fantasies often do. Every day you read about something like that in the papers or see it on the TV news."

"'Violent fantasies' is too strong a term in Jerry's case."

"What else would you call them?"

"He doesn't sit around all day thinking about killing Verna. I got that much out of him after he scared the hell out of me the first time. They have a fight and he goes out on the porch and sulks and that's when he imagines her dead. And only once in a while. It's more like . . . wishful thinking."

"Even so, it's not healthy and it's potentially dangerous. I wonder if Verna knows."

"Probably not, or she'd be making his life even more miserable. We can hear most of what she yells at him all the way over here as it is."

"Somebody ought to tell her."

"You're not thinking of doing it? You don't even like the woman." Which was true. Jerry and I were friendly enough, to the point of going fishing together a few times, but the four of us had never done couples things. Verna wasn't interested.

Didn't seem to want much to do with Mary Ellen or me. Or
anyone else, for that matter, except a couple of old woman
friends.

"I might go over and talk to her," Mary Ellen said. "Ex
press concern about Jerry's behavior, if nothing more."

"I think it'd be a mistake."

"Do you? Well, you're probably right."

"So you're going to do it anyway."

"Not necessarily. I'll have to think about it."

Mary Ellen went over to talk to Verna two days later. It was a Saturday and Jerry'd gone off somewhere in their car. I was on the front porch fixing a loose shutter when she left, and still there and still fixing when she came back less than ten minutes later.

"That was fast," I said.

"She didn't want to talk to me." Mary Ellen looked and sounded miffed. "She was barely even civil."

"Did you tell her about Jerry's wishful thinking?"

"No. I didn't have a chance."

"What did you say to her?"

"Hardly anything except that we were concerned about Jerry."

"We," I said. "As in me too."

"Yes, we. She shut me off right there. As much as told me to mind my own business."

"Well?" I said gently.

"Oh, all right, maybe we should. It's her life, after all. And it'll be as much her fault as Jerry's if he suddenly decides to make his wish come true."

Jerry killed Verna three more times in July. Kitchen again, their bedroom, the backyard. Tenderizing mallet, clock radio, manual strangulation—so I guess he'd decided a gun wasn't the best way after all. He seemed to grow more and more morose as the summer wore on, while Verna grew more and more sullen and contentious. The heat wave we were suffering through didn't help matters any. The temperatures were up around one hundred degrees half the days that month and everybody was bothered in one way or another.

Jerry came over one evening in early August while Mary Ellen and I were having fruit salad under the big elm in our yard. He had a six-pack under one arm and a look on his face that was half hunted, half depressed.

"Verna's on another rampage," he said. "I had to get out of there. Okay if I sit with you folks for a while?"

"Pull up a chair," I said. At least he wasn't going to tell us he'd killed her again.

Mary Ellen asked him if he'd like some fruit salad, and he said no, he guessed fruit and yogurt wouldn't mix with beer. He opened a can and drank half of it at a gulp. It wasn't his first of the day by any means.

"I don't know how much more of that woman I can take," he said.

"That bad, huh?"

"That bad. Morning, noon, and night—she never gives me a minute's peace anymore."

Mary Ellen said, "Well, there's a simple solution, Jerry."

"Divorce? She won't give me one. Says she'll fight it if I file, take me for everything she can if it goes through."

"Some women hate the idea of living alone."

Jerry's head waggled on its neck-stalk. "It isn't that," he said. "Verna doesn't believe in divorce. Never has, never will. Till death do us part—that's what she believes in."

"So what're you going to do?" I asked him.

"Man, I just don't know. I'm at my wits' end." He drank the rest of his beer in broody silence. Then he unfolded,
wincing, to his feet. "Think I'll go back home now. Have a
look in the attic."

"The attic?"

"See if I can find my old service pistol. A gun really is the
best way to do it, you know."

After he was gone Mary Ellen said, "I don't like this,
Frank. He's getting crazier all the time."

"Oh, come on."

"He'll go through with it one of these days. You mark my
words."

"If that's the way you feel," I said, "why don't you try talking to Verna again? Warn her."

"I would if I thought she'd listen. But I know she won't."

"What else is there to do, then?"

"You could try talking to Jerry. Try to convince him to see
a doctor."

"It wouldn't do any good. He doesn't think he needs help,
any more than Verna does."

"At least try. Please, Frank."

"All right, I'll try. Tomorrow night, after work."

When I came home the next sweltering evening, one of the Macklins was sitting slumped on the front porch. But it wasn't Jerry, it was Verna. Head down, hands hanging between her knees. It surprised me so much I nearly swerved the car off onto our lawn. Verna almost never sat out on their front porch, alone or otherwise. She preferred the glassed-in back porch because it was air-conditioned.

The day had been another hundred-plus scorcher, and I was tired and soggy and I wanted a shower and a beer in the worst way. But I'd promised Mary Ellen I'd talk to Jerry—and it puzzled me about Verna sitting on the porch that way.

So I went straight over there from the garage.

Verna looked up when I said hello. Her round, plain face
was red with prickly heat and her colorless hair hung limp
and sweat-plastered to her skin. There was a funny look in
her eyes and around her mouth, a look that made me feel un
easy.

"Frank," she said. "Lord, it's hot, isn't it?"

"And no relief in sight. Where's Jerry?"

"In the house."

"Busy? I'd like to talk to him."

"You can't."

"No? How come?"

"He's dead."

"What?"

"Dead," she said. "I killed him."

I wasn't hot anymore; it was as if I'd been doused with ice
water. "Killed him? Jesus, Verna—"

"We had a fight and I went and got his service pistol and
shot him in the back of the head while he was watching TV."

"When?" It was all I could think of to say.

"Little while ago."

"The police . . . have you called the police?"

"No.

"Then I'd better—"

The screen door popped open with a sudden creaking sound. I jerked my gaze that way, and Jerry was standing
there big as life. "Hey, Frank," he said.

I gaped at him with my mouth hanging open.

"Look like you could use a cold one. You too, Verna."

Neither of us said anything.

Jerry said, "I'll get one for each of us," and the screen door
banged shut.

I looked at Verna again. She was still sitting in the same
posture, head down, staring at the steps with that funny look on her face.

"I know about him killing me all the time," she said. "Did you think I didn't know, didn't hear him saying it?"

There were no words in my head. I closed my mouth.

"I wanted to see how it felt to kill him the same way," Verna said. "And you know what? It felt good."

I backed down the steps, started to turn away. But I was still looking at her and I saw her head come up, I saw the odd little smile that changed the shape of her mouth.

"Good," she said, "but not good enough."

I went home. Mary Ellen was upstairs, taking a shower. When she came out I told her what had just happened.

"My God, Frank. The heat's made her as crazy as he is. They're two of a kind."

"No," I said, "they're not. They're not the same at all."

"What do you mean?"

I didn't tell her what I meant. I didn't have to, because just then in the hot, dead stillness we both heard the crack of the pistol shot from next door.

J
ohnny Shade blew into San Francisco on the first day of summer. He went there every year, when he had the finances; it was a good place to find action on account of the heavy convention business. Usually he went a little later in the summer, around mid-July, when there were fifteen or twenty thousand conventioneers wandering around, a high percentage of them with money in their pockets and a willingness to lay some of it down on a poker table. You could take your time then, weed out the deadheads and the short-money scratchers. Pick your vic.

But this year was different. This year he couldn't afford to wait around or take his time. He had three thousand in his kick that he'd scored in Denver, and he needed to parlay that into ten grand—fast. Ten grand would buy him into a big con Elk Tracy and some other boys were setting up in Louisville. A classic big-store con, even more elaborate than the one Newman and Redford had pulled off in
The Sting,
Johnny's favorite flick. Elk needed a string of twenty and a nut of two hundred thousand to set it up right; that was the reason for the ten-grand buy-in. The guaranteed net was two million. Ten grand buys you a hundred, minimum. Johnny Shade had been a card mechanic and cheat for nearly two decades and he'd never held that much cash in his hands at one time. Not even close to that much.

He was a small-time grifter and he knew it. A single-o, traveling around the country on his own because he preferred it that way, looking for action wherever he could find it. But it was never heavy action, never the big score. Stud and draw games in hotel rooms with marks who never seemed to want to lose more than a few hundred at a sitting. He wasn't a good enough mechanic to play in even a medium-stakes game and hope to get away with crimps or hops or overhand run-ups or Greek-deals or hand-mucks or any of the other shuffling or dealing cheats. He just didn't have the fingers for it. So mostly he relied on his specialty, shade work, which was how he'd come to be called Johnny Shade. He even signed hotel registers as Johnny Shade nowadays, instead of the name he'd been born with. A kind of private joke.

Shade work was fine in small games. Most amateurs never thought to examine or riffle-test a deck when he ran a fresh one in, because it was always in its cellophane wrapper with the manufacturer's seal unbroken. The few who did check the cards didn't spot the gaff on account of they were looking for blisters, shaved edges, blockout or cutout work—the most common methods of marking a deck. They didn't know about the more sophisticated methods like flash or shade work. In Johnny's case, they probably wouldn't have spotted the shade gaff if they had known, not the way he did it.

He had it down to a science. He diluted blue and red aniline dye with alcohol until he had the lightest possible tint, then used a camel's hair brush to wash over a small section of the back pattern of each card in a Bee or Bicycle deck. The dye wouldn't show on the red or blue portion of the card back, but it tinted the white part just lightly enough so you could see it if you knew what to look for. And he had eyesight almost as good as Clark Kent's. He could spot his shade work on a vic's cards across the table in poor light without even squinting.