The Good Old Stuff (36 page)

I was nine fathoms deep in a warm tank of oil, dirty oil that would raise hell with your ring job. I was swirled gently, end for end, in the depths of the oil tank. And then I stopped whirling and began to float slowly toward the surface, face down. Surface tension held me under, then let me up with a popping sound. Now I rested my cheek on top of the surface of the oil. And under my cheek the texture changed. From oil to hotel rug. The truck had run over my head with tire chains on.

I have a notoriously hard skull. In my school we used to have butting contests. Simon the Goat, they called me. Flushed with victory, I let a girl named Hortense tap me one day with the flat of a hatchet. She used both hands. I was punchy for three weeks but otherwise undamaged.

I had come recently from a place where, if you are knocked down, you do not sit up until reasonably certain that what you intend to sit on has not been shot off in the excitement.

Shoes whispered on the rug. Hard fingers got hold of my ear and twisted it. My head was lifted off the floor by the ear. When the fingers let go, I let my head bounce on the rug. I looked through the lashes of the eye closest to the rug. A large shoe was three inches from my nose. It went away. Beyond it I saw my girl. Not all of her. Just the pleasant curvature of her back as she lay face down on the floor. Her back moved just enough so that I could tell she was breathing.

And suddenly she was hauled out of sight. The window was over that way. I took a look. Barney the Beaver was dragging her to the window. I didn’t want my girl dropped out the window. My room was on the fourteenth floor. Barney had said we were going out hand in hand, not one at a time. Drop one first and somebody is going to look up in time to see the
second party get thrust out. But it was hell to keep my head down and wonder if he’d changed his plans.

His feet came over again. He hoisted my ankles and dragged me over to the window, face down. I let my head roll to the side. Warmth touched my hand. Warmth under the girl’s clothes. The window slip up. Nice and wide open. Probably the Beaver planned to put us face down over the wide sill, side by side, then upsy-daisy with our heels.

Thoughts and conjectures were roaring through my mind like trains heading through a tunnel. And before the sound of the opening window had completely ceased, it occured to me that the most natural thing for any man to do when planning to drop a heavy package out a window is to take a look down and make certain that there is nothing in the way of the drop.

I counted up to the square root of minus three and came up fast.

Maybe some character comes to rescue the girl on horse-back, waving the lance like crazy. And some other joker bares his manly fists and whips the seven villains while she looks on, her eyes glowing with girlish pride. Me, I merely put each hand firmly against the two hemispherical sections where his shabby pants were the tightest and gave a nervous shove. I think I also gave a nervous giggle. I didn’t feel heroic. I even felt it was a dirty trick.

He went out like the fat clown who always gets pushed into the swimming pool. His legs scissored through the open window without even brushing the sides.

He must have taken a big gulp of that cold night air as he went out. Because the whistling scream started immediately, and he screamed all the way down through the night, like one of those whistling skyrockets they used to shoot off on the fourth of July.

When the scream stopped, I looked out cautiously, gagged weakly, and sat on the floor.

My girl had blood in her hair. I pulled her head into my lap. I kissed her lips, nose, cheeks, forehead, and eyelids. I tried to pick her up, but she had gotten too heavy for me. I looked at her, and Marj was something that had happened to another guy in another country in another generation. I knew
that Skip would be very glad to know that this had happened to me, and I would tell her as soon as possible.

I struggled up with her and wavered over to the bed. There was a knock at the door. I opened it.

A chesty somebody beefed his way in and said, “You got some kind of fight going on in here, fellow?” As he asked the question, he was staring at Skipper.

My lovely sat up. Great girl. Bust her one on the head and she wakes up looking like a mattress ad.

“That is no woman, sir, that is—”

“Don’t give me no smart talk, bud.”

A siren moaned in the distance, drawing nearer. I said, “Excuse me, sir, but I’m afraid we dropped something out that window a few moments ago. It landed down by the streetlight.”

“Bud, there’s an ordinance against dropping stuff out hotel windows. If it was hotel property, you got to make it good.”

My cornflower blonde had begun to comprehend. Her eyes looked faintly sick, but at the same time awfully glad.

The beef trust waddled over and stuck his head and shoulders out the window. He stiffened, and his wet lips made flapping sounds in the night. I paused behind him and looked, with a tinge of regret I must admit, at the general area where his pants were the tightest.

I put my hands firmly in my pockets. You’ve got to watch a thing like that. It can turn into a compulsion neurosis.

My lovely lassoed me with her big shining eyes, and I didn’t hear a yammering word the beef trust said, even though he was jumping clean off the floor every time he took a breath.

S
he was
a plump blonde, and she lay dead in the trail on her back. There were streaks of drying mud on the right sleeve of her pale yellow sweater. There was more mud on her freckled right arm. Death had flattened her body to the ground. Her tweed skirt was pushed up halfway between knee and hip. Her heels rested in the mud and her brown sandals toed in.

The black trees, stripped naked by autumn, stood high around her, and the chill wind off the lake hurried the dry brown leaves across the trail. A leaf had stuck to her hair over the right temple, where the hair was sticky with new blood.

I would have guessed that when she was alive she was pretty and vivacious. Her lids were half closed, showing a semicircle of glazed bright blue.

Her husband, Ralph Bennison, or more accurately, her widower, had phoned Burt Stanleyson from the nearby village of Hoffwalker. Burt and I had climbed into the white County Police sedan and driven to Hoffwalker, where Bennison had been waiting in his car.

He had stopped on the state road opposite that part of Lake Odega where summer camps are clustered along the lakeshore.

We had followed him down the trail to the lakeshore, seeing ahead of us the spot of color against the brown earth—her yellow sweater.

I leaned against a tree and Ralph Bennison sat on a rotting log, his face hidden in his hands. Burt Stanleyson stood beside the body of Mrs. Bennison, staring down at it, while he chewed a kitchen match.

I couldn’t help noticing the differences between my friend Burt and Ralph Bennison. They were both big men. Burt wore a wrinkled gray suit and still managed to look as if he belonged in the woods. Perhaps it was the way he moved and the weather wrinkles that lined his brown face.

Bennison wore a red-and-black wool shirt with matching breeches and high shoes. But his face was white and he moved quickly and nervously. He had the city label on him, all the way from his big shiny fingernails to the bright new leather of his knife sheath.

Suddenly Bennison lifted his blotched face out of his hands and said in a tight voice, “Why are you standing around staring at her? Why aren’t you across the lake trying to find out who fired the shot?”

Burt gave him a steady look and then knelt beside the dead woman. He fingered the hair around the wound, dislodging the crisp leaf. I could see the hole in her head, neat and round. Burt reached down and gently pulled the tweed skirt down to cover her knees. He stood up again and poked with his toe at the mud caked on the sides of her brown shoe. He sighed. The wind swirled a dancing funnel of leaves down the trail.

If it happened in the summer, there would have been a crowd of summer folks standing around. But in November the camps are empty except for a few hunters, and they were still out in the woods after their deer.

Bennison stood up and glared at Burt, then scuffed the hard ground with the toe of his spotless high shoes.

“Look here,” he said. “Alice and I were walking down the trail with the lake at our right. She was ahead of me. The trail is muddy and uneven, and I was watching my feet, like I told you. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her fall on her face. I jumped toward her, thinking that she had tripped. As I jumped, I heard a distant noise like a shot. I rolled her over and held her head in my arms. I saw she was dead, and realized that she had been killed by a stray shot. Then I came after you. Why aren’t you after those people across the lake?”

Burt said patiently, “Mr. Bennison, there are two dozen hunters in there. It’s four o’clock now. We couldn’t round ’em up before dark, and most of them will be cutting back to the
other road and driving out of the woods. They’d deny firing high toward the lake. We’d have to take their guns away from them and fire a sample slug from each one. Then we’d have to dig the slug out of your wife’s brain and send the slugs down to a comparison microscope. It would be a colossal job. We’ll just have to give it a lot of publicity and hope that some man’s conscience will punish him.”

“The bullet sort of came down on her, didn’t it, Burt?” I asked.

“That’s right, Joe. Thirty-caliber. From better than a half mile, or it would have gone right through her.”

He turned to Bennison and asked a blunt question. “Did you folks come up here to do some hunting?”

Bennison sat down again on the log. He didn’t seem angry any more. “Yeah. We rented the Tyler camp for a week. I was going to do the hunting.”

“Where’s your gun?”

“Back in the camp.”

“Have a gun for her?”

“I told you I was doing the hunting.”

“I was just wondering. I notice she’s got a little bruise under her right eye as if a gun stock had slapped against her face.”

Burt pulled the sweater away from the rounded white right shoulder. There was a purplish bruise there too. He covered the shoulder again.

“She did some target practice with my gun,” Bennison said. “She bruised easily.”

I couldn’t figure what Burt was driving at. He’s never been one to ask useless questions. He’s too lazy. It was obvious to me that the shot had come from a greater distance than a man can aim.

“What’s your business?” Burt asked.

“Well … nothing at the moment. I used to be in the investment business.”

“Married a gal with money, hey?”

“Look here, Stanleyson, I resent this questioning. What’s that got to do with finding out which one of the hunters across the lake shot her?”

“Then she did have money?”

“Suppose she did? We both had money.”

Burt sighed again and turned away from the body. He walked toward the lakeshore and then looked back. A big tree grew close to the rocks along the shore. He squinted up at the tree. Then he ambled down the bank, squatted on a big rock, and stared moodily at the water. Bennison shrugged helplessly and looked at me.

Burt came back up the bank and said, “Let’s go back to the spot where you did this target practicing. Behind the Tyler camp, wasn’t it?”

Bennison stood up, and we all walked back down the lakeshore trail. Once Burt stopped and looked back at the dead woman and said, “Guess there’s no need to move her just yet.”

They had been firing at tin cans propped against a high bank behind the camp. Burt grunted and squatted and picked up a dozen or so of the gleaming brass cartridge cases. He examined them carelessly and stuffed them into his pocket.

Bennison seemed to have gotten tired of trying to figure out what the big man in the wrinkled gray suit was trying to do. He leaned against the cabin and stared out across the lake.

“You only brought this one gun of yours up here?” Burt asked.

“That’s right,” Bennison said in a flat tone.

“Mind if I look around the camp?”

“Go ahead.”

We walked in and Burt picked up the Remington rifle that stood in a corner of the front room. He glanced at it and put it back. Next he went under the camp to the workshop that old Tyler used to use before he died two years ago. Bennison seemed to be getting more irritable.

Burt glanced at the top of the work bench near the vise. He took the kitchen match out of his mouth, scratched it on the underside of the bench, and then ran the flame back and forth, an eighth of an inch above the surface of the bench.

At last he grunted and turned to Bennison, who was leaning against the wall, his arms folded.

“Well, mister,” Burt said slowly, “I guess we’d better drag the lake beyond that tree and get the other rifle.”

I stood with my mouth open as Bennison whirled and leaped
through the doorway. Burt was right behind him. It took me a couple of seconds to wake up. I ran after the two of them. Outside, I saw that Bennison was running at full tilt up the trail toward the road. Burt had grabbed the Remington out of the corner. He leveled it, drew a deep breath, then squeezed the trigger.

The flat explosion of the shot echoed through the clearing. Bennison fell and rolled through the dry leaves. When we reached him, he was clawing with his fingers at his shattered leg, and his face was the face of a madman. He was trying to curse Burt, but only guttural sounds issued from his throat.…

After the details had been cleaned up, the dead girl’s relatives notified, and Bennison put in the hospital, I sat in Burt’s office, drinking bourbon with him and waiting for him to tell me in his own way.

“You see, Joe,” he said, “I never would have tumbled to how Bennison did it, if he’d acted right. Maybe you didn’t see it, but he was out of character. Any guy who loves his wife shows it in more than one way—even if she has died suddenly and violently. If he was on the level he would have yanked that skirt down himself. No fellow who loves his wife wants a couple of strangers seeing too much of her, even if she’s dead. Also, he didn’t object when we walked off and left her dead in the mud there. A normal guy would have wanted her moved and covered up.”