Something in the Shadows (16 page)

Sunday, life went on while Joseph stayed in bed. “Life” was Maggie on the telephone, and the television playing across the room from Joseph. Joseph watched two Swedish sopranos sing duets from Rossini and Dvorak, while downstairs Maggie’s conversation with Amos Fenton drifted up piecemeal. There were a lot of “miGods!” and “don’t worrys,” and she was no sooner finished with that call than she was jiggling the tone button for the long distance operator again. Her call to Tom Spencer lasted through “U.N. In Action,” and the second half of a two-part discussion on Mr. Lincoln and the Bible. Joseph caught very little of the conversation, since Maggie was practically whispering (which was anyone else’s normal conversational pitch) and the cat had removed herself from the top of the television set where the speaker was, increasing the volume.

Joseph was suffering from palpitations; his heart seemed about to tear through his chest, and everytime he took his eyes off the television screen, he saw the eyes of the cat studying him. He had tossed a pillow at her just as Mark Van Doren started a poem about Lincoln. Now she was sitting on the bureau looking at him. He shut his eyes and saw her eyes there in the dark. It had been his own idea to keep the cat in all day. He knew dogs dug things up from the ground and he was taking no chances with this cat. He took a long breath, opened his eyes, and looked straight into hers.

“Get out of here!” he shouted. The cat did not even blink, and the effort cost him a clear head. The ache began by his temples and then encompassed his head like a bandeau. When Maggie shouted from downstairs, “Anything wrong up there?” he could only manage a resigned, “No.”

He heard her say, “I know it’s the cat bothering him,” and he supposed now Tom Spencer was giving her some sage advice about what to do next. Somehow he slept through the “Bell Telephone Hour” and half of a programme called “Celebrity Golf.” He had dreamed, They were together in the same hide-a-bed she had ten or fifteen years ago when Joseph was dating her. He had told her in the dream that several days ago he had been listening to
Christ Lag in Todesbanden
and that afterwards he had killed a deer. “You would not kill a fly,” she had laughed. He had run to get the fly-swatter from his kitchen to show her that he would most certainly kill a fly, but she had only laughed harder.
“Es war ein Traum,”
she had told him. “It was a dream, Joseph.” He had awakened at that point, and there was the cat. He imagined that the cat was smiling at him now, a lopsided, insinuating smile. When Maggie brought his supper tray, he told her he wanted the cat out of his sight. Maggie was doing everything he asked her to do today, treating him as though he were a heart case, or some sort of certifiable psychotic who would go to pieces if his coffee was over-sugared.

“Ed Sullivan,” and “G. E. Theatre,” “Jack Benny” and “Candid Camera.” Palpitations and the headache, much worse now. At eleven o’clock he took two strong sleeping pills. It was raining out. Just as Joseph was straightening the bed sheets he heard a man’s voice come over the television.

“Do you want to tell us about it, Mrs. Duncan?”

Joseph turned around and looked at the set. A slim fellow holding a microphone was kneeling by the old davenport with the antimacassars, and there was Muriel. The lights from the television camera caught the reflection of the glasses, so that her face seemed to give off sunrays, and on her lap, a child, who could be no older than two, also wore glasses, causing more sunrays.

“… believe. So that’s the way it is,” she was saying.

“You don’t know what to believe?”

“No.” Her voice broke at that point, and she put her hand up near her glasses, while the baby in her lap pulled up her skirt. She smoothed it down and the reporter turned around in his squatting position and faced the camera. He said, “If any of you can offer any information about the whereabouts of this man, please call your local police.” Then there was a gruesome likeness of Billy Duncan on the screen. Joseph walked across the room and turned off the set.

Behind him, Maggie in her nightgown said, “I suppose the police will be coming around here soon.”

In the night, the rain had turned to snow. Maggie’s ride tooted for her shortly after seven-thirty, and vaguely, Joseph recalled her exclaiming over the snow, over the fact the cat had been out all night. Joseph must have rolled over and gone back to sleep, for when he woke up a second time, the sun was very bright in the bed room, and there was a strange stillness, broken only by a crunching sound. Joseph sat up in bed. A car was coming down the drive, was that it? He went to the window, and then he saw them. They had pulled up outside the garage. They wore dark blue uniforms with light blue patches, caps, holsters with guns in them.
Guns?
Routine, Joseph’s brain went over and over the word monotonously, routine, just routine, routine business, only routine.

The window in the bedroom was still open from the night, and Joseph knelt down under it, out of sight, listening.

“Side door,” one said.

“Real crust on this stuff.”

The noise of their footsteps in the snow was like strips of canvas being ripped down the middle; then there was the sound of stomping on the wooden porch. Knocking. Pounding. Joseph stood up and went and sat on the bed, pulling the robe around him.

Of course he had expected them; it was inevitable. He would only have to go down and let them in, tell them yes, Louis Hart was here the Friday before last; yes, there had been a little scuffle; yes, he had given Louis a book called
The Unknown Murderer
because he had thought Louis had killed his cat. Routine, routine; yes, to everything. Easy. He pulled the robe tighter around him, sat perfectly still. The pounding seemed more insistent.

“Tracks on the driveway, Paul. Maybe they’re gone.”

“Yeah.”

More pounding. “Try them tonight?” “Yeah.”

More strips of canvas being ripped, then, “Lookit!” “Yeah. Rabbit.”

“Naw, a cat! Goddam cat! Lookit it leap!”

Joseph got up and sneaked to the side of the window. He could see the men standing, facing the barn. Then he saw Yillah chasing around behind the barn. Her legs sunk down into the snow, surprising her, so that she jumped even higher. The police officers stood there chuckling.

“What is it, Paul, one of those Minx or Manx cats?”

“Siamese! Siamese — this Meaker’s supposed to be some kind of cat nut.”

“Siamese, huh? Looks like a rabbit. Get itself killed in small game season, bet.”

“Not around here. You get a load of those signs he’s got under the No Gunning ones?”

“No.”

“Oh, this you got to see! Look, one on the barn. C’mon.”

Joseph watched while they tramped back towards the barn. Then they stood directly under the sign Billy Duncan had stood under; one with his hands on his hips peering up at the sign through his sunglasses; the other standing beside him, shoving his hands into large gloves. For a while, they stood back there talking. Joseph watched them, his heart worse now than it had been yesterday, knocking, knocking, just the way those two had been knocking moments ago on his back door. Joseph saw Yillah again, jumping past the police, running around the barn like a crazy thing, and they were calling her. Then they went behind the barn, out of Joseph’s sight.

Joseph knew a dog could dig up the hard ground, but not a cat. Not a cat! He felt perspiration break out under his pyjamas, and he was breathless now. He had no idea how much of the woodpile had been covered by the snow; and his next thought was that of a strange dog (never mind the cat) entering the yard at some point, doing exactly what Joseph was sure a cat would not do. He imagined some of the wood toppled over where the dog had started the digging; he imagined a hand. A hand sticking out of the ground. His knees felt as though they would give under him, and he held on to the sides of the bureau, and he told himself one slight giving-in to the panic could ruin him. All sorts of things occurred to him, a series of mad impulses which all logic and control made him squelch; but they were on his mind; he could stick his head out of the window and shout, “I knew a man once did a man in!” He could walk calmly down, put on his overcoat over his pyjamas, go out and get in their car, then drive it straight back and into the woodpile. “Let’s get to the bottom of things,” he might say as he stepped out of the car. “Shovels, gentlemen?” Or — he could just begin screaming, the way he felt like screaming, just start screaming as though the top were off his head and the noise inside was let go. They were coming from around behind the barn now. Joseph studied their faces, their gaits, looking for a sign of something unusual. There was nothing. But would they show it?
They
would, Joseph thought — wouldn’t they?

As they came closer, Joseph heard the man in sunglasses saying, “Yes, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Anything’s possible,” said the other.

“Crust like I’ve never seen it on this stuff!”

“You ski, Paul? My kid’s started this year. Up in Vermont.”

Then the man with sunglasses was opening his side of the car, and the other was getting in behind the wheel.

The phone was ringing. Joseph let it ring five times, being sure the police car was well on its way down his drive before he answered it.

The truth was, Maggie was slipping. Tom Spencer was sorry about it, but “sorry” was not going to keep Picks Cigarettes happy with A. & F. Spencer should have known she was slipping long before this crisis in her life, but he had been a bit dazzled by old Mag, that was all. That weekend when Maggie had Miriam and him out, he had had the same feeling that client had about the commercial she had written for Picks, but he had just not been sure enough of himself to criticize it. In fact, he had gone overboard in the other direction. It was time now to stop pulling punches or playing pals-can-do-no-wrong. The client was right. A cigarette “sell” has to have power! That thing Maggie dreamed up about the whispering girl interrupting the three minutes of silence was cute, but it had no power! Worse, it was irritating, and if there was one word a cigarette sell should not call to mind, “irritating” was the word.

Tom Spencer was appreciative of the fact that Maggie had her troubles, but Tom Spencer was soon going to have troubles of his own if he and Maggie did not “get with it” on the Picks campaign. After
that
got rolling, he would play all the games of Dr. Freud-what-shall-I-do-about-Joseph that Maggie wanted to play, but right now Christmas was coming and there was a small matter of a big bonus in the offing.

It was ten minutes past five now, and Maggie was on the telephone again. Spencer sat with the Picks file on his lap, waiting for her to finish. It was snowing outside, and
he
was half-listening to Maggie, and half-having an imaginary argument with Miriam in his mind, over the fact she had probably not done anything today about getting the snow tyres on the car.

Maggie was shouting, “What do you mean? No, don’t hang up!” and Tom Spencer was giving Miriam hell in his mind, at the same time he was aware of the fact that
he
was displacing his anger from Maggie to Miriam.

Tom glanced down at the Picks file, and Maggie’s new memos on a proposed campaign. “Picks Has A Trick In It!” Another one of her cute ideas. She had sent some secretary out to research magician’s tricks, and with that material she had made up a campaign in which a magician would perform a trick, followed by an announcer saying “Picks Has A Trick Too! The trick of making truly good tobacco!” God! Anyone slightly inclined toward tongue-twisting could have the whole goddam Conley-Fast Cigarette Corporation sued for obscenity with that kind of slogan!

Maggie was holding the arm of the telephone now, staring at it dumbly.

“Finished?” said Tom Spencer sharply.

She put the telephone down and sat there. “Oh miGod.”

“Listen, Mag,” Spencer said, “no matter what it is, it’s got to go undiscussed for a time! I’ve got Harrison on my neck, Mag!”

“This is something, though. This is something!”

“Maggie, goddam it, we’ve got about two days! Two days! This stuff about trick and Picks and Picks with a trick in it is awful! It’s awful! It has no power!”

“Oh, do you sound like Harrison!”

“All right, I sound like Harrison! It’s about time I sounded like Harrison! I’m getting paid by Harrison, not Freud! Not Dorothy Dix! Not Norman Vincent Peale! Maggie, goddamn it, we’ve both got to forget our personal lives and get with business!”

“All right. All right.” But she sat back in her swivel chair as though someone had pushed her there; and Tom Spencer knew damn well her mind was as far from Picks Cigarettes as some dying cancer case’s.

“The thing is,” he tried, “Harrison wants power! Something that booms instead of titters, something that suggests bigness!”

“Umm, hmmm.”

“Something that will make people sit up and notice, and talk!”

“How about a nice juicy scandal about Amos Fenton and me?”

Spencer hit her desk with his fist. “Maggie! Will you get off it?”

“You know, Tom, if you were a priest you’d be the kind who would announce the time of the Ladies’ Sodality Bingo Game at a funeral.”

Tom Spencer sank back into his chair and put his hands over his face. “I quit! I quit! I quit!”

“Sorry to hear it. Funny thing, I never thought you’d quit until after you got your Christmas bonus.”

“Okay, Maggie, we won’t get nasty. We won’t. It’s not going to get us any place, and we’re not going to like each other the better for it. Okay. I’ll call Miriam and tell her I’m going to be late again, and you tell me what happened on the telephone. Then maybe we can consider Mr. Harrison’s wishes.”

“Tom, I’m not in a mood to consider Mr. Harrison
or
his wishes. Joseph has left me!”

“He’s what? Oh, my God!”

“I talked to him at noon. I called him to remind him the cat was out. He said he knew it, and he sounded perfectly okay, though he wasn’t very talkative, and then I went off to lunch with Amos to try and calm him down. He thinks the newspapers are going to involve him in this Duncan case.”