All These Condemned Read online

  “Suit yourself,” he said.

  I followed him down the long curve of the stone steps to the narrower terrace that sent the twin prongs of the concrete docks out eight feet into the lake. They were each ten feet wide and they were set about fifty feet apart, so that they carried out the basic U pattern of the big house on the rock ledge thirty feet above the surface of the lake.

  “Got her?” the trooper yelled toward the lights.

  “We got her, Joe,” somebody answered. And somebody said something in a low voice and there was a male snort of bawdy laughter, quickly stilled.

  “Get those floods on, Joe, so we can see where we’re coming in.”

  He asked me where the switches were. I said I would do it. I hurried up the steps and went to the box on the side of the house by the main terrace. I did not know which ones they wanted, so I turned them all on, all the batteries of sealed-beam lights that so brightly flooded the terraces and the twin docks and the house walls and the surrounding woods that the gray promise of dawn was suddenly gone and it was full night again.

  I hurried back down to be on the dock again when she was brought in. Judy Jonah was already there. Others were coming. Gilman Hayes, who giggled nervously. Mavis Dockerty, sobbing aloud again. Wallace Dorn, cloaked in solemn dignity. The lights on the boats were going out, one by one. But they did not head for home. They followed the boat in, the boat containing the body of my enemy.

  Steve Winsan climbed up onto the dock from another boat. He glanced at me. His good square face was pulled tight with strain. But even in the urgency of that moment he managed to put something into his look that was for me alone. And warmed me. The bier came alongside the dock. There were two old men in it. Twin Charons, with the reptilian wiriness of old men who do physical work. The trooper in the other boat bawled unnecessary instructions. Trooper Maleski and Steve Winsan knelt side by side to lift the body up. I moved close behind them. I could see down over the broad shoulder of the trooper. I saw her foot, very still and very white, projecting from under the edge of a greasy tarp. Wilma Ferris under a greasy tarp. I could imagine her nose wrinkled in distaste.

  “Hook catch her in the arm,” one of the old men said to all of us. “Slipped when she come up. Nearly lost her, but Jimmy, he grabbed her quick. She was about sixty feet off this end of the dock. I’d judge she were in forty feet of water.”

  There was a lot of awkward fumbling. The old men tucked the tarp around her and worked the body up to where Maleski and Steve could get hold of it. They had to move back to make room to put her on the dock, and in doing so the big trooper stepped on the trailing edge of the tarp and half stumbled backward, dropping her legs. Steve held onto the tarp and it came loose and she rolled out onto the concrete dock, white, flaccid, heavy. Her dark long hair was pasted to half her face, and the other half had a blue glow in the lights. I saw for the first time the rumored richness of her body and saw how, even in the looseness of death, her breasts were large and firm, her belly taut, her thighs like Greek marble polished by centuries.

  There was a silence there in the lights that was like a long exhalation. I saw then that her body was visibly changing color, visibly darkening. The trooper and Steve began fumbling with the tarp and Judy Jonah said in her harsh expressive voice, “Cover her up, for God’s sake, you pair of clowns!”

  They got the tarp over her. It was a dead thing. When it had been alive it had taken all I had. Using the weapons of money, of dominance, and of the body’s richness as they were needed.

  There was considerable argument as to whether it should be left on the dock for the coroner’s inspection, or if it could legally be taken up to the house. Boats began to pull away, outboard motors catching and then rattling their tin thunder off the dawn mountains, Deputy Sheriff Fish making a point of yelling his thanks at each boat. The coroner, an unexpectedly young man with overlong sideburns, settled the argument by arriving, shooing us all off the dock except the officials, and conducting his examination on the spot.

  I felt as if I had soiled myself by going down to look at her in death, and yet I had to be certain she was dead. I had needed an assurance based on more than being told. I looked in on Randy. He slept heavily, his mouth open. What would become of him now? Wilma had forced us to live up to an expected standard. So all we had left from the years of her were debts, a lease on an apartment too big for us, too many expensive clothes, and a large salary that had stopped when her heart had stopped. Somewhere he had to find the nerve, the guts to start again as we had once started together. But it was difficult to think of guts when she had so cleverly eviscerated him over the years, wrapping him in strand after strand before performing the brutal operation. Any single strand could have been broken. But not all of them. She had debased both of us.

  I decided not to wake him and tell him. He would know soon enough that they had found it. I went back down the hallway toward the living room. I wondered if Steve were in his room. His door opened so suddenly it startled me.

  “Noel,” he said, saying it, as he always does, with that special tone that is for me. “I thought that was your step. Nobody else walks quite that way.” He took my wrist and pulled me, unprotesting, into his room. He closed the door quietly.

  “What a mess!” he said. “God, what a mess! Is Randy carrying on again?”

  “He’s still sleeping. I gave him pills. He needs to sleep.”

  He had been washing his hands. His sleeves were rolled up. The crisp brown hair on his strong arms was matted and wet where he had dried hastily and imperfectly. He put his hands on my waist and they felt strong. I am glad I am slim for him. I am glad he likes shoe-button eyes, an upper lip that is a little too long, and my flavor of gravity. He pushed his mouth down hard on my lips, taking away my breath and my will.

  “This is still the same,” he said against my hair, still holding me.

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t the same. It was simple yesterday, wasn’t it? Everything was perfectly dandy.” I began to cry. I hadn’t wanted to cry. We sat on his bed, his arm around me.

  “You better tell me what you mean, Noel.”

  I had to explain it carefully. “Last night she was there. He had a place to go. Emotionally, I mean. That could be the end of it. With no regrets, because I finally stopped loving him. It took a long time to stop, but I finally stopped. She had become his whole life. And I was just such a little part of it, he would hardly have missed me. But now he needs me, Steve.”

  “That’s a trap,” he said. “Females fall into it all the time. Maternal stuff. Poor little man needs you. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “She turned him from a man into a flunky. He’s going to need help if he tries to turn back into a man.”

  “For richer and for poorer? In sickness and in health?” Steve said bitterly. I did not like the curl of his lip. It was contemptuous of me, of the person I am. And if he loves what I am, what I believe is a part of me … And he should not show contempt.

  “I only know what I have to do.”

  “Then I’m to consider this the brush-off.”

  It was not what I wanted him to say, God knows. I did not want such an easy and empty victory. It was his duty to talk me out of it, to give me all the reasons why I should leave Randy as we had talked about it last night. He should have given me all the reasons why he wanted me to leave the sinking ship that was Randolph Hess.

  But that was not the dreadful thing, the most dreadful thing. I am sensitive to people. I see little clues in their faces. And I saw, in Steve’s face, a concealed relief. As though something were going far easier for him than he had anticipated.

  I made myself test him. “Really, Steve, after all, haven’t we got just a little bit too serious about all this? I mean it made it more dramatic and all, but … after all, we are a couple of adults, aren’t we?”

  He looked at me in a startled way and then he laughed softly. “God, Noel, you’re a package of surprises. You’re right. We are all grown up.”

/>   I smiled. “And it didn’t mean as much as we said it did.”

  He ruffled my hair. “I guess not, kitten. But you’ve been awful good for me. I want you to know that. I mean just knowing somebody like you.”

  And that was the end of it, of course. I felt more soiled than when I had gone to look at her body. Than when I had sat and looked at the face of my sleeping husband, hating him. More soiled, because at least those emotions had been direct and honest. But this with Steve had been a cheapness. A baseness. Week-end entertainment, married-love variety. I sat and smiled at him and saw how he was. All the pose and the faking. Making his living from poses and fakings and posturings and lies so that there was no longer any Steve Winsan left at all. Maybe there had been such a man once. Now he was an attractive shell stuffed solid with press clippings.

  He kissed my ear playfully. It made my ear ring. His hand was on my waist. “Now that we understand each other, kitten, let us do some relaxing. Hell, I think I can steer some people to Randy if he wants to set up an office again. It would be nice to keep you right in New York.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” I said.

  His square hand left my waist and gently pulled my sweater free of my skirt in back, crept up my spine to the fastening of my bra, and fumbled there a very short time before the fastening was released. It was something he had learned to do very well indeed.

  There is something perverse within you. It says that when you have been tricked and humiliated, you must seek further degradation. I sat in numbness, with his hands on me, perfectly willing to respond with completely faked emotions, perfectly willing to accept his meaningless and casual use of me, accepting him as a punishment, as ashes on the head of mourning. There was nothing at all left now, not even a way of escape.

  And there was a soft servile tapping at the door and the voice of Amparo, the sturdy and very lovely Mexican maid. “Meester Weensan?”

  He ceased his tactile deliberations. “What do you want?”

  “The policía, they say come right away, sir, to the beeg room, sir. Everywan.”

  He looked at me and raised his eyebrows and shrugged and called to her that he would be right along. We got off the bed. He rolled his sleeves down and put on his jacket while I fastened my bra and tucked my sweater back in. There was a crudeness in being there like that together, with the homely formulae of fixing our clothing—a crudeness and the death of magic.

  He opened the door and looked up and down the hallway and then said, “O.K., Noel.” As I started to go by him, out into the hallway, he clapped his square hand against my haunch in what I guessed was supposed to be rude affection and the affirmation of possession.

  But I have never liked to be touched except by those I love. I turned sharply and I do not know what my face looked like, but I do know that I made the quick sound of exhalation and warning that a cat will make as I raked at his face. He gasped with pain and jumped back. I went down the hallway alone.

  They were in the big living room. The lounge, as Wilma had called it. The big expanse of glass was gray. There was rose color outlining the eastern hills. I realized it was Sunday morning, and there was something shocking in realizing that.

  The two troopers, Carran and Maleski, were there, and the bulky officiousness of Deputy Sheriff Fish and the side-burned young coroner, all with the looks of ranks closed against us. José Vega, the butler-bartender-handy man, stood in a corner with the mild docility of the horse he so much resembled. His elder sister, the cook, Rosalita Vega, stood beside him. Amparo Loma, the pretty maid, sat uneasily on a chair as though she had been invited to sit down, had sat down obediently, and suddenly found herself to be the only servant seated and did not know quite how to terminate the embarrassment.

  My husband came into the room soon after I did. He was fusty with doped sleep, rumpled and vague-looking, yawning and nervous at the same time. He gave me a nod and sat over beside Judy Jonah and asked, too loudly, “What’s up, anyway?” Nobody answered him.

  Gilman Hayes, Wilma’s protégé, sat on the floor near the pale lamp wearing his Basque shirt and ragged shorts, long hard round brown legs crossed. He was looking with contempt at a book of reproductions. Wallace Dorn sat on the couch with the Dockertys. They talked in very low voices. Finally Steve entered the room. He gave me a sharp unpleasant look and sat as far from me as possible. He had two strips of tape on his left cheek. I felt a cold amusement.

  “That’s everybody,” Trooper Maleski said. “You want to take it, George?”

  Deputy Sheriff Fish looked both pleased and self-important. He took a step forward and cleared his throat. “We … I figured you people better all know the score just as soon as possible. When we got here last night, those of you we talked to give us the pretty clear idea of how it was an accidental drownding. Doc Andros here says she drownded, all right. That was the cause of death, he says. But he didn’t like the look of the pupils of her eyes, he says. So he gave her an extra good looking over and he finds out she was stobbed in the back of the head with something sharp. It punched a hole in her head bone and maybe if she wasn’t in the water she might of died of it eventually. But being in the water and still breathing, she just naturally drownded. We’ve been over that dock and those boats there with fine-tooth combs and there’s nothing she could have fell on to do that.

  “It was a round thing with a sharp point and she got stuck with it right here.” He turned around and pointed at his own head to show us. “So that can only mean one thing, and that’s a murder. Now Les Riley, the sheriff, is sick abed, but there’s going to be other people here that’ll want to talk with you folks about this thing. The county attorney—that’s J. P. Walther—and a lieutenant from the criminal-investigation part of the state police are both coming, and more than likely they’ll both bring along some people with them. In the meantime, by reason of the authority vested in me I’m here and now telling you folks that you all stay right here. Joe, you take up a collection of car keys and label them. I don’t want you down on the dock or out on the grounds. You stay right here in this house. That clear to everybody?”

  Steve spoke up. “It’s clear, sir. I’m sure we’ll all cooperate. My name is Winsan. Steve Winsan. As a public-relations counselor, I’m used to dealing with the press. In fact, Mrs. Ferris was a client of mine. Miss Jonah and Mr. Gilman Hayes are also clients. They have reputations to protect, sir. I’m asking you to let me handle the working press on this whole matter. With people like Judy Jonah and Wilma Ferris and Gilman Hayes involved, they’re going to swoop down on this place like locusts. It will require careful handling.”

  “Now, I just don’t know about that,” the deputy sheriff said dubiously.

  Steve interrupted to say, “And by the way, I’d like to write down your name, your full name, so the papers won’t get it wrong. And the names of these other gentlemen, of course.”

  “I guess it’s a smart thing to use a man who knows his business,” Fish said, looking questioningly at the troopers.

  “This whole place will be a three-ring circus before noon,” Steve said.

  I was perfectly aware that I was going to be violently sick. I did not know how much time I had. As I walked toward the door, Fish said, “Where are you going, lady?”

  “To lie down,” I told him. I did not look back. No one stopped me. I made our room in time.

  I was sick and then I washed and then I stretched out on my unused bed. I tried to think coherently about myself. God knows I had seen enough sharpies in the past few years. I’d seen more than enough slick ones. I’d seen Randy moving ever closer to filth and had kept a certain pride in keeping myself clean. And then I had been taken like a schoolgirl by one of the worst ones. By one of the ones who cultivate a hearty honest manner.

  Wilma’s death no longer seemed important to me. She had died a long time ago.

  I slipped sideways into dreams that moved like acid across my mind, awakening in sweat only to slip back again, helpless against my exhaustion and
my regret.

  Two

  (PAUL DOCKERTY—BEFORE)

  IT WAS A THREE-HUNDRED-MILE DRIVE to Wilma’s place at Lake Vale, and in spite of the work I had piled up, Mavis, my wife, absolutely refused to arrive Saturday instead of Friday. She said that she had accepted the invitation and promised we would arrive Friday in time for cocktails.

  And then she gave me that bland look which is such an infuriating copy of Wilma’s and said, “But, darling, you work for her, don’t you? I should think it would be important to you.”

  Yes, I worked for Wilma Ferris. There was no denying that. But my lovely wife couldn’t seem to get it through her thick head that I also had a reputation in the field to uphold. Before I had gone with Ferris, Incorporated, I had been a senior consultant with Ramsey and Shaver, Management Engineers. I had specialized in revamping the sales set up of the client firms. The works. Distribution, outlets, advertising, market surveys.

  And it was a black day indeed when I resigned from Ramsey and Shaver and went to work for twice the money for Ferris, Incorporated. I made the change after she spent a whole morning sitting across a desk from me and making good hardheaded sense. The company certainly wasn’t sick. It was highly profitable. But not what it could be. She gave me the entire picture. The factory was in Jersey. They had two lines of cosmetics. The Ferris line was the specialty-shop line, high-priced. Symbol of luxury. The Wilma line was the bread and butter. The chain-store stuff, big quantities, low profit margin. But distribution on both lines was a shambles. Sales had started downward. The sales manager had recently done the firm a favor by dropping dead. She wanted the sales trend healthy, the whole sales end revamped. She offered a good salary. I talked it over with Mavis. I accepted it.

  Because, you see, Wilma Ferris had talked hardheaded sense. At one point her voice got throatier, huskier, and she looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t ever try to kid me about the business, Paul. I started it with these two hands in a fourth-floor walkup. I started with Ferris Kreme. I mixed the glop up in a vat. I bought the jars wholesale. I designed the labels and stuck them on. I filled the jars and capped them and peddled them and collected my own accounts. Don’t ever try to kid me.”