The end of the night (17 page)

And so, deep in the fury of concentration, he was not quite sane. But he was using himself utterly, and that was all he could do.

A bright, round, flawless sim came up out of the Atlantic on the twenty-seventh day of July. An enormous and stationary high pressure area covered all of the Northeast and the Middle Atlantic states, and reached as far west as Illinois. Vacationers congratulated themselves on having selected that segment of the summer which included these perfect days. Those whose vacations were over wished they had waited. Those who had not yet gone, hoped the weather would hold.

The newspapers which thudded against front doors and were stuffed in rural tubes, dropped in heavy l^ndles on street comers, inserted in store-front racks, yelped and thumped and yammered about the Wolf Pack. The early commentators said, with mock regret, that the criminals were still at large. On buses and subways, over breakfast tables and lunch counters, around office water coolers and factory Coke machines, the nation talked about the Wolf Pack and Helen Wister.

"It's a terrible, terrible thing. Her poor parents.—If a guy was going to steal him a blonde, he couldn't do better, hey,

Barney?—Mark my words, when they capture those fiends, they'll find they have been drinking alcohol, Mary.—You know, that's the kind of deal Bugsie would pull, he had the nerve.—This is another example of the accelerated decay of public morals, gentlemen.—The broad with the knife, that's the one for me, Al. I go for the mean, gutsy ones.—You can't teU me it wasn't all planned between her and those thugs. I'll bet you she paid them to kill that boy friend of hers on account of he was blackmaihng her with that architect. Had enough money, didn't she? Didn't put up any fight, did she? Well?

The sun climbed high and bright toward noon. Four hundred and thirty miles north-northeast of Monroe, up in the western end of the state of Pennsylvania, was the small resort community of Seven Mile Lake. The whole south shore of the lake was a long strip of tawdry honky-tonks—ice-cream stands, boat rentals, shooting galleries, lunchrooms, cabins, cottages, beer joints. It was the height of the vacation season. Jukes whined and thumped. Boats roared up and down the lake, towing water-skiers. The pebbly beaches were half paved with the baking, simmering flesh of the sunbathers. Squalling children dropped ice cream in the dust.

In the middle of the commercial area were the Lakeshore Cottages, managed this season by Joe Rendi and his wife, Clara. They handled the rental of the cottages and operated the small ice cream and sundries store at the roadside, on a percentage basis. Joe got up, surly as usual, at eleven. He went down the street for breakfast and then walked slowly back to the store. There were no customers at the moment Clara was washing glasses.

"What the hell was the night bell last night?" he demanded.

"You heard it? You mean you really heard it? Tanked on beer so bad you snore like a walrus couldn't sleep in there too, and you heard it?"

"Cut the goddam comedy. What was it?"

"I rented number four, that's all."

He sat down heavily on the stool and stared at her. "Oh, great! Oh, fine and dandy and nifty! You rented number four. Bully for you! And tomorrow comes those people for all the way up to Labor Day and a hunnert twenny-fi dollars a week and a fifty-dollar deposit we got already and you can say sorry, we're full up."

"So you're so smart, why didn't you get up?"

"It wasn't so hot, I'd clout you in the mouth one, Clara."

"If you're so smart, how'd you get us stuck in a deal like this, working like a dog all summer and for what?"

"So the take is little, so you cut it down."

"So I increase it, wise guy. Somebody has to get smart around here."

"So how do you increase it?"

She straightened up with her hands on her hips. "One night only. He swore it. I believe him. Just before dawn, he rang the bell. Two couples, he said. Twenty-five bucks, and they'll leave tonight, he said. It don't go on the books, Joe. This one is all ours. I'll clean it up before the Shoelockers get here tomorrow. Honest to Christ, stop looking so confused. And don't think you'll get aholt of that money. You can twist my arm right the hell off, and I won't tell you where it is."

"Suppose they don't get out?"

"He said they would. A nice-talking fella, he is. I had him sign a card. He didn't want to look at number four first. I tore up the card already. So what skin is off you.'*

"They better get out," Joe said darkly.

*They wiUl They will! They will!"

"So stop yelling at me, can't you?"

"Go fix the lock on number eight. It's loose. All it needs is a screw driver, and they can't do it themself for some reason."

Joe Rendi walked by number four on his way to fix the lock. A dark-blue Buick was parked close beside the side steps, heading out. The blinds were closed. The place looked very still. What a way to use a vacation, he thought. Drive all night, sleep all day. Twenty-five bucks is twenty-five bucks. She could have got thirty, maybe.

It was one of the big cottages. There were six big ones and eight little ones. The big ones had a sitting room, bathroom, screened porch and two bedrooms and a tiny kitchen in one comer. The little ones had but one bedroom. They were old, flimsy frame cottages, dressed up for summer in new paint— bright yellow with bright-blue trim and red front doors.

Number four was silent throughout the long, hot day. Children yelped in the dusty areas between the cottages. Insects keened in the afternoon heat. The noise of fast boats was unending.

Later, as the dusk deepened, neon came on, up and down the strip, and day noises faded as the night sounds began.

At eight-thirty, when it was dark, Joe Rendi got nervous about number four. He strolled back there, wondering if he would have to remind them of their promise to check out He stared, turned and hurried back to the store.

"Hey, they're gone!" he said.

"Who's gone, stupid?"

"The people in four."

They said they'd go, din they?"

"Yes, but . . ."

"Go to SchUler's, see can you buy a box of sugar cones off that robber. I'm almost outa cones here."

"Okay! Okay!"

"Now who's yelling? Here's two dollars. Don't stop for a beer."

NINE

DEATH HOUSE DIARY

This morning I have been conjecturing about how long it will take me to be totally gone. By that I mean more than death. I mean the amount of time before no one will give me one single specific thought, no matter how fleeting. In a sense this is a discussion of limited immortality, a very contradictory phrase. Immortality is an absolute, not subject to limitation. The old man and Ernie will remember me, of course. I think she'll last longer than he will. She's pretty tough. She's forty-seven now, and I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and say she'll Hve to be ninety. That will take me a little past the year two thousand. That salesman named Horace said his youngest was eighteen months. I can assume his wife will teach his kids to use our names as curse words, and I will assume that the youngest will remember my name, and live to be ninety, so that extends awareness of Kirby Palmer Stassen up to 2050, approximately. I can't stretch it and extend it to the salesman's grandchildren. I suspect it won't mean a damn thing to them. They will know vaguely that their grandfather was murdered,

but that's all. Taking it to 2050 takes it well beyond the span of anyone I know, of course.

Now consider physical things. Matter cannot be destroyed. It is a curious thing to realize that there is still in existence, somewhere, every cinder I have ever had in my eye, every paring of fingernail and toenail, every stone that has bruised me. My physical being will continue to exist. It will be tucked out of sight in Memorial Grove at Huntstown. It will be a very, very private funeral, I am sure, with no brave stirring words spoken. There will be a marker, of course. Ernie will insist upon that. Something very small, but it will bear the name Kirby Palmer Stassen. I could cheat on this game and say the marble will last a thousand years, but if the name means nothing to anyone who reads it, then I am truly and totally gone. The scandal will stay alive in Huntstown. I think I can assume that there will always be old ladies who recount the black deeds of past generations, so I will stretch a little and say that in 2100 they will still retain some dry morsel of information about this.

As far as possessions are concerned, I imagine Ernie and the old man will get rid of mine as quickly and quietly as possible, diverting them to the anonymity of the village dump and the Salvation Army. Ernie will save a few things, I imagine. Baby shoes. Pictures. But she won't dare look at them when the old man is around.

The third aspect of this conditional immortality is a chancy thing. The crimes and the way they were done and the trial have, I suppose, some meaning to sociologists. They stimulate themselves with case histories. I shall appear, I am sure, in some laborious texts. I will doubtless be called K. S. or Kirby S. or perhaps simply S. But in this game I can count that, because they will be discussing me. This journal I am writing, should it get into the right hands, might possibly cue a very exhaustive study. Yet, in most cases, these books die when the professor who insists his students buy them dies. On that basis I can assume a half-life only until—say—the year 2000. But there is an imponderable here which cannot be measured. It is possible that my case might be written up by someone capable of turning out a classic. If it is very, very good, if it is a work of art, it could well last three hundred years. I would say that would be the outside limit, due to the continuing change in the language. So genius is my only hope of outliving gossip. This could take me up to 2260, a very science-fictiony sort of date.

And on one day in that year the last man will read of me, of a crime three hundred years old, and discard the last book, and then I will be gone as completely as though I had never lived at all. The final ultimate rest

Isn't three hundred years a vast span of time? It is one ten milli onth of the estimated life span of the planet to date. Or it is the same ratio as is three seconds to one full year. And on the same scale, my life span has been one quarter of one second

Riker Deems Owen came in at the end of the morning and did his usual splendid job of boring me wretched. At least, this time, he spared me the presence of the nubile, self-conscious Miss Slayter. They took me down to the carefully engineered Httle conference room to meet with him. We talk into microphones and are separated by two thicknesses of bulletproof glass. He seems quite unaware of having made a thorough ass of himself in court. He is a pompous, pretentious, slack-witted little man. He spoke today of the complexity of appealing this case, of his hopes of obtaining a stay of execution. I suspect constant pressure by my male parent. It is useless, of course. Riker Owen knows it and I know it, but he beams at me in a glassy way in an effort, I suppose, to build up my morale. One can only exist in places like this when all hope is gone. Hope is an ennervating weakness that makes adjustment impossible.

He said again that they would like to see me, Ernie and_the old man, and that it could be arranged, but once again I told him that it was not my pleasure to see them. It could not possibly do any of us any good. He asked if I would write, at least. I told him to tell them that I am well and in reasonably good spirits, that I am given anything within reason that I ask for. I told him that I am writing a record of my experiences and that I have been assured that it will be passed along to them after I have been put to death.

Right here is as good a time as any to insert my personal note to you, Ernie and Dad. I do not expect you to understand aU this I am writing. I do not expect you to try to understand me. I have very little understandiog of myself. You could read it and save it, and one day you might find a very wise man, someone you can trust, who will read it and tell you why all this happened, and tell you that in most basic ways I am no different from the sons of your friends. All of them are.

potentially, exactly like me. They have been favored by the enduring of lesser crises.

Let me say also that I am not trying to wound you through frankness. Were I to write only what I suspect you might wish to read, there would be no point in writing this at all.

I had carried my account as far as Chubby*s Grill on Route 90 on the outskirts of Del Rio. I have devoted a lot of time and space to the Kathy Keats episode. It is not an episode, or an aside, or a digression. What happened there, to her and the relationship between us, is close to the very heart of all that came after.

It was a Sunday afternoon. Sandy Golden had jeered at me, but not in a way that made me angry. It was in the tone of his voice, a sort of lift of nervous excitement.

I smiled over toward the dingy comer where the voice had come from, then bought a bottle of cold ale at the bar and carried it over, ale m one hand, suitcase in the other.

*'Every college boy likes to be recognized immediately as a college boy," he sad. "It's Hke scratching a dog behind the ear. Have you been dude ranching, man? You aren't wearing your Marshal Dillon threads."

"It's a new kind of ranch kick, man," I told him. "Nobody wears anything. They kept us on health food. You had to carry your own horse."

"Sit, college boy," he said. "Meet Nan and Shack. What's your name?"

"Kirby Stassen."

"Sit, Kirboo, and well talk up a storm. I've fallen among dull comrades. I'm Sander Golden, poet, experimenter, cultural anthropologist. I dig the far pastures of the spirit. Sit and browse."

I sat My eyes had adjusted to the dimness. Shack was an ugly-looking monster. Sander Golden was a soiled, jxmipy and amusing phony, a little older than the rest of us, close to thirty I decided. His heavy glasses were repaired with tape, and sat crooked on his thin nose. His teeth were not good and he was going bald. Nan was a sulky, sultry broad with too much hair and a practiced way of staring directly into your eyes. It was a comer table with four chairs.

In trying to write this down, I find that there is one special problem I cannot solve. I cannot put down the unique flavor of Sandy's conversation. When I try to put down his words, they