A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (17 page)

She fetched his cheek with the tenderness of her hand. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “We’ll have time for greetings when we’re married. We’re just a golden world of two now. That’s paradise enough.”

She liked chop suey so they went to a Chinese restaurant Sunday night. She gifted Judd with all her cash—thirty-four dollars—because he’d exhausted his. Waiting for the food, she asked, “Remember telling me about Audrey Munson when we first met? She’s from around here, isn’t she?”

“Close. Up north, near Lake Ontario.” Judd bent over a match to light a cigarette.

“And how was it she tried to commit suicide?”

Exhaling smoke, he said, “Bichloride of mercury tablets.”

“Well, I was reading about them, and there are so many household uses! You can swish it in your mouth for gum diseases. You can swallow tiny amounts for chronic diarrhea and dysentery. It’s a skin lotion, a gargle—”

“And it’s poison,” Judd said. His face was a sheriff’s.

She smiled. “Oh. You caught on.”

“With jars on my hands, I could catch on.”

“But just think of all the accidents you could have with it if you weren’t careful.”

“Oh, Albert,” he said. “You poor bastard.”

“Won’t you take me seriously?”

Judd looked off to the kitchen. “Ah,” he said. “Our food.”

She watched him pour whisky into his water glass, then wedge
his cigarette into the notch of an ashtray. She ate in silence, fuming, and Judd fumed over that. A five-member band was there, playing hits like “Linger a While,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” and “There’s a Yes! Yes! In Your Eyes.” And suddenly Ruth grinned, with sparks in her own flashing, yes-yes eyes, as if her mood had been chemically altered. She said, “Hasn’t this week been heavenly? Please say this is how happy we’ll be from now on.”

Surprised, he said, “Yes. Always.”

She noticed that the dance floor was still empty, and when the band started “Somebody Loves Me,” Ruth stood and yanked at Judd’s hand, saying, “Okay, Bud. You’re up. We haven’t danced since we left.”

Judd joined her in a fox-trot, but the Chinese manager hurried over and told Judd, “There no dancing allow Sundays.”

Reddening with fury, Ruth screamed, “Why are you getting in the way, you
Chink?
Why can’t you let us alone for one night? Why are people always
interfering?”
She scurried over to their table, collected her muskrat coat and purse, and ran off, jaggedly crying, as Judd worriedly paid the bill.

But she was waiting for him just outside the front door. Ha-haing. “Wasn’t that
funny
?” she said. “See his face?” She squinted and formed buck teeth and skewed her face grotesquely.

“The fellow was just following rules,” Judd said.

She frowned in another kind of infuriation and said, “You can be so dull and disappointing, Mr.
Gray
.” She quickly stalked ahead of him on her clacking high heels toward the Onondaga and Judd did not want to tag along, so he found the Elks club, where he calmed himself with four rounds of liquor. An hour later, he let himself into the hotel room and found Ruth tilting into the telephone on the dresser. She genially wiggled her fingers at him in hello as she said, “Oh, that’s so nice, Lora! I’m so glad you had a good time. Mommy has, too. But I’ll be back home very soon.”

Albert was reading
Field & Stream
magazine in his attic roost when she concluded ten days with Judd on Wednesday evening. Although he noticed his wife’s ascent on the stairs, he just smoked his cigar and flipped the page on a freshwater fishing article. There was gray in his hair, and hours of squinting on the sea had caused wrinkles to flare out from those steel-blue eyes, but Albert seemed more handsome now than when he first halted in front of Ruth’s typewriter at
Cosmopolitan
and invited the pretty nineteen-year-old to dinner. She’d said yes and he’d swiftly left, and she grinned at the hoots and envy of the other office girls. All of them so ignorant of Galahads like him.

Albert finally seemed to notice her and inquired, “Was
Canada
all you dreamed it would be?”

She caught an insinuation in the question but airily answered, “It was lovely.”

“You’ll have to tell me all about it,” he said, still reading.

“Are you feeling okay now?” Ruth asked.

“It was just a bad cold.”

“I’m glad.” She’d prepared for an inquisition but it seemed there would be none. “I hope you got my birthday card.”

“Yes,” Albert said, and as he took the cigar from his mouth he seemed to try to slay his wife with a scowl. “And you sent it Special Delivery? You seem to think I’m made out of money.”

“I felt so embarrassed about forgetting.”

He importantly tapped cigar ash into his chrome pedestal ashtray. “Well, you should be embarrassed, but not for that.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

There were mathematics in his smile. “Oh, whatever you like.”

After letting Ruth off on Wednesday evening, Judd headed to East Orange, feeling gloomier and more lost with each minute she
was gone. And he was surprised when he saw parked in front of his house the Cadillac V-63 that belonged to his sister’s husband, Harold Logan. Worrying that Isabel or Mrs. Kallenbach had died, Judd rushed into the house but found nothing wrong. And he hated himself for feeling let down.

Although Harold Logan was the general manager of the jewelry firm Judd’s father founded, he still fancied himself a handyman, and Isabel had called him over to fix a double-hung window that was seizing when she tried to lift it. Harold was now just reassembling the window sash. Judd watched him hammer the trim and lifted a five-pound, foot-and-a-half-long bar of pig iron with a broken eyelet on one end.

“What’s this, Harold?”

Harold glanced to Judd’s hands. “Old sash weight. You got one hiding on each side, hanging on pulley rope. Helps raise it up once you get it started.” Harold banged a nail into the trim, indenting the wood with his hammerhead. “There you go. Looks like hell, but it’ll work.”

Judd got out his wallet. “How much do I owe you?”

“Oh, just for the hardware. Eighty cents oughta do it.”

“We’ll say a dollar,” Judd said, but in retrieving the bill, Ruth Snyder’s wedding snapshot fluttered to the floor.

And Isabel was there to lift it up. She studied the face. “Who’s the girl?”

Judd pretended surprise that it was even there, and said, “Oh, that’s Maisie. She’s a clerk at a shop in Binghamton. She just got married and gave that to me as a memento.”

Isabel accepted that lie with the languid disinterest she’d adopted for all his job-related explanations. And yet as she went to the food that was steaming in the kitchen, Judd found himself wondering how it would have been had he told Isabel the truth. Would he have felt freedom and relief? But then he was fairly certain of the outcome: a financially ruinous divorce, ill fame in his job, his faithful little mother devastated.

Judd saw his brother-in-law grimly interpreting the situation. But Harold loftily quoted Jesus: “‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.’”

Albert went out on his regular bowling night on Thursday, October 28th, and when he got home excited Ruth by saying Harry Folsom invited them to join the Halloween festivities at his New Canaan address the next night. But Albert decided they weren’t going.

“Why not?”

Walking past her into the kitchen, he said, “Have you any idea how far New Canaan is from here? Thirty-three miles. Wearing humiliating costumes. Seeing people I despise.”

“Well, can
I
go?”

Albert shot a cold look. “With whom?”

“Kitty?”

Albert poured some of his homemade Pilsener into a porcelain Zimmerman stein. “Kitty wasn’t invited. Harry’s wife rightly distrusts her.”

“We’re just staying home then?”

Albert leaned back against the kitchen counter and swallowed some beer. “Try it,” he said. “You might like it.”

“You are so
frustrating
!”

“Yes,” he said. “Well …” But he found a new interest in his stein and failed to continue his thought.

She and Judd still regularly met at Henry’s or the Waldorf-Astoria lounge, Ruth rehearsing The Governor’s latest infamy and Judd criticizing the vileness she was forced to endure. And she was increasingly concerned about her cousin Ethel’s ill health and Ethel’s continuing failure to find grounds for divorce from her
Bronx policeman. “Eddie always had a thing for me. You know—I’d catch him catching a peek of the goods. So I told Ethel I’d get alone with him. Work him up for a telltale photograph.”

Judd fell back against a Waldorf sofa. “But that’s
insane,
Ruth! Ethel would gain an adultery charge against her husband, but Albert would also have photographic evidence of the same charge against you. You could get divorced but lose Lorraine.”

She looked at him solemnly. “Are you telling me not to do it? Because if you insist, I won’t do it.”

“I insist.”

“And you’d do likewise for me, right?”

“What?”

“Like if I insisted you do or not do something.”

“Certainly,” he said.

In mid-November Josephine was hired for a weekend job nursing an old woman, and Lorraine went off to a Saturday-afternoon birthday party with third-grade friends. Ruth found Albert lying on the sofa in the music room and announced she was going grocery shopping, but when he failed to reply she realized he was drunkenly asleep. She noticed, too, the floor pipe that fueled the zone heaters with natural gas. She went from room to room, fastening the windows shut, then hustled down into his shop and chose a monkey wrench. She got into her overcoat and hat and then crouched to quietly joggle and jam the joint of the floor pipe until it fell apart and she could smell the foul odor of rotten eggs streaming underneath the sofa. She held her nose as she walked out the front door, locked it behind her, and laid the monkey wrench on Albert’s garage workbench. She then went grocery shopping.

She was gone an hour. She didn’t worry that the natural gas would be ignited by a pilot light. She could fix that ruin. But she
realized that she’d forgotten Pip in his golden cage in the sunroom, and she began to worry that the canary would die. She’d heard that canaries fell out of the air, dead, hours before humans in coal mines sniffed a problem.

She hailed a taxicab and was sitting in the back seat with two sacks of groceries when the cab turned onto 222nd Street. And there she was stricken at seeing Albert tottering on their front sidewalk, his hands on his hips and gasping for air. “Oh shoot,” she said.

She telephoned Judd in his office and confessed that homicide attempt as if it were funny. But he stiffly asked in his snooty way, “Are you aware they electrocute people for murder in New York?”

“Not if they don’t get caught.” And before he could say anything more, she shifted the conversation by inviting him to the house for a Wednesday luncheon. She’d be alone. She asked him to bring along twenty or so of the little one-shot bottles of various liquors that Benjamin & Johnes gave as treats to their lingerie buyers. She would be having family for Thanksgiving.

And so Judd walked over from the Jamaica Avenue bus stop in Queens, his filled briefcase clinking with liquors, and went up to the kitchen stoop, where he whistled the waltz tune to “Always.”

The kitchen door opened and Ruth happily greeted him by yanking wide her muskrat overcoat. She was naked underneath. Like the harlot he’d hired on 42nd Street. Judd worriedly glanced behind him, but she said, “Oh, don’t be such a scaredy-cat.”

She kissed him in the kitchen but removed his avid hands, then took his fedora and coat. Hanging them up in the foyer closet, she indicated the joint to the gas piping that she’d wrenched apart.

Judd found himself laughing at the outrageousness. “What a dolt!”

“Who?”

“The Governor. Could he really be that clueless?”

“Oh, he was so schnockered that morning he didn’t know what he did.” She hung up her fur overcoat and presented her gorgeous body to him, then took him up to Lorraine’s room.

Judd could later recall no precise time when he told Ruth he would help kill her husband. And if only for that reason he felt she’d hypnotized him. But he could recall mentioning sedatives that Wednesday afternoon with his feet hanging off Lora’s too-short bed, the hot breath of the furnace on their love-flushed skin, and Ruth cuddling into his chest, her right hand gently arranging his sleeping penis, then fondly holding his scrotum as he talked. “You could try to get a barbital,” he said. “The only brand name I’m familiar with is Veronal. Highly addictive and calms a person by quieting the respiratory system. Chloral hydrate works on the central nervous system. You could expect deep sleep in a half an hour. Whiskey exaggerates its effect. Chloral hydrate and whiskey is called a ‘Mickey Finn.’ I guess Mickey was a Chicago bartender who used the concoction to rob his customers.”

“Nice lesson. What else?”

His high school hankering to be a doctor was excited. “Well, there’s a variety of salts available from a pharmacist. Sodium bromide, potassium, ammonium—”