A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (23 page)

Judd fell off him onto the floor.

“Is he dead?” Ruth asked.

Judd looked at the faint rise of the chest and answered, “I don’t think so.”

“He’s got to be dead,” Ruth said. “He saw us both. This has got to go through or I’m ruined.”

Judd said, “I’m already ruined.”

With cold efficiency, she went to the closet, carried back one of Albert’s silk, university-striped neckties, this one red and yellow, and commanded Judd, “His feet.”

Snagging off the chemist’s gloves and hiking up the white linens, Judd hitched the ankles together with the necktie as Ruth tore off strips of the cotton gauze, shook more chloroform on them, and shoved roots of them inside Albert’s nostrils with her little finger. She then stuffed his mouth with chloroformed cotton and flattened the chloroformed handkerchief on the pillow before rolling her husband so that his face was smothered by it. Tying his wrists behind his back with a white hand towel, Ruth told Judd, “Look for his handgun.”

That jarred him. “There was a
gun
?”

Worried that his rising voice could be heard, Ruth scowled and shut the open window. He could be such a child. She instructed, “Look under his pillow first.”

The pillowcase was so soggy and reeking with blood that Judd had to turn his head. A Bien Jolie corset he’d given Ruth was on the floor, which meant she’d been wearing it. Which, in his drunkenness, pleased him. His fingers grazing a leather holster, he pulled it out and hinged open a .32-caliber revolver, pointlessly shook out three, but not all, of its bullets, imperfectly gripped Albert’s still-warm right hand around it, and flopped the pistol onto the bed next to Albert’s left elbow.

The police could construct no scenario in which that tableau made sense.

Ruth was in Josephine’s room, scouring Judd’s briefcase for something in the dark.

“I’m frazzled,” Judd said. “I need a cigarette.”

She gave him a scornful look but said nothing. She carried the coiled picture wire and Judd’s gold mechanical pencil into the bedroom. She wasn’t surprised that in spite of everything Albert was still very slowly and wheezily breathing. She could even admire him for that: a diehard. Wanting to be thorough, she jabbed an end of the picture wire under the cold skin of his neck, made a noose, snugged it and tied a granny knot, then twisted the noose so tight with Judd’s Cross pencil that Albert made a faint gargling sound and blood oozed over the indenting wire. Wife of his dying, she’d waited so long for this moment that she almost wanted it to linger. With her head just above his, she whispered, “How’s that,
o mio babbino?”
She turned an ear and listened until she was sure Albert’s breathing had ceased. And then she went out, forgetting the mechanical pencil, which the police would find and eventually match with the gold Cross fountain pen still snug in Judd’s inside jacket pocket.

Judd had gotten his Sweet Caporals and gone downstairs into the darkened music room. He’d wrenched his knee in the wrestling with Albert and his limp would make him far too noticeable all that Sunday. He sat on the Aeolian player piano’s bench, massaging his knee and watching gray smoke untangle from the fiery red ash. When the cigarette was so short it singed his bloodstained fingers, he left it in a tin ashtray on the keyboard, as unsecret as a clue in a children’s party hunt.

Ruth heard him heading upstairs as she went into the bathroom and switched on the light. Her hands were red with blood, and her nightgown was aproned with blood, and blood was trickling onto the floor in pennies of shining red. And then Judd was behind her. “My God,” she said. “Look at me.”

Judd inclined toward the mirror in his nearsightedness and found Albert’s blood on the front of his shirt. Sunday-school memories of Cain’s murder of Abel floated up:
What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me.

She asked, “Can we wash out the stains?”

He remembered asking his mother that when he was socked by a bully at age ten, and Mrs. Gray had said, as he now said, “No.”

“Give me your shirt,” Ruth said.

He unbuttoned his gray vest, took off the shirt, and dully watched her hurry downstairs. He then slouched out of the bathroom toward the whisky, taking some swallows, then flopping down into Josephine’s chair with the Tom Dawson bottle cradled against his stomach. His head slackened so that his chin touched his chest and he fell asleep, waking to find Ruth in front of him in a green nightgown now, holding out one of Albert’s new blue shirts, which was still squarely pinned and wrapped in tissue paper. He asked her, “What did you just do?”

“I burned our things in the cellar furnace.”

Judd got into Albert’s shirt, thought it overlarge, and asked,
“Could you cut a new buttonhole? This hangs like a horse collar on me.”

She sighed with impatience but got some scissors and soon the collar was fitting and he was tying his necktie in the bathroom mirror as if he were just setting off on his morning calls. Adrenaline or sheer brutality had slightly sobered him. “We still have to make it look like a burglary,” he said.

Ruth went into her mother’s room and quietly tossed it as she thought a burglar would. In the couple’s bedroom, Judd flung their purple armchair’s back and seat cushions onto Ruth’s twin bed. His forearm swiped across the chiffonnier and a hairbrush, perfumes, cufflinks, and pocket change flew. Judd failed to notice in the scatter Albert’s fine gold Bulova watch and his gold necktie stickpin with Jessie Guischard’s initials on it. J.G. Recalling that the Italian newspaper was wrapped on the sash weight, Judd found it and flung the pages up, watching them seagull down to the Wilton rug.

The widow returned to the couple’s bedroom, scowled at Albert’s corpse, and handed Judd some packets of sleeping powder, his sales route list with hotel addresses, her Croton cocktail watch, and a Midol box that she said contained bichloride of mercury tablets.

Judd hunted through The Governor’s suit and overcoat pockets and finally found the new wallet. He filched its contents of five twenty-dollar bills and a ten and flipped it onto the floor. Holding up the cash, he said, “You’ll need some of this.”

She shook her head. “The police will suspect something.” She was rooting through a jewelry case, snatching out expensive rings, earrings, and necklaces. She held their winking abundance out to him. “Could you take these with you?”

“Of course not.”

“But burglars would steal them, wouldn’t they?”

“Hide them then,” Judd said, and went out.

Ruth shoved the jewelry between her mattress and box spring, where the Queens police found them on Sunday afternoon. She’d forgotten where she’d put the chloroform container and frantically searched the room in the faint arc light from the street until she found it beneath Albert’s sheets, against his right thigh. She then hugged herself as if with cold as she hovered over Albert’s head for a final confirmation of his extinction. She felt like hitting him again, just because, but said only, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“Shall we go?” Judd asked. He was swaying, but his suit coat and owlish eyeglasses were on; his hat, overcoat, and briefcase were in his hands.

She smiled and slid her left arm around his waist and she quietly helped Judd step downstairs. There, in his drunkenness, Judd yanked the chintz cushions from the sofa but did not steal Ruth’s fur coats and scarves in the foyer closet; he tipped over chairs in the dining room but did not steal the Chambly silverware. Crazily, he ransacked the kitchen.

Ruth had gone into the cellar to hide her blood-sprayed pillowcase in a hamper, hopelessly confusing the tale she would tell, and Judd followed her to burn up his sales route list. With exactitude he flicked chunks of coal into the furnace so he would make no noise and then broomed the floor wherever his shoes had been. She’d hidden the sash weight in a box of tools and Judd carried over some furnace ash to pepper it with so that the hardware would seem to have been there for weeks. But in the faint light he did not notice a spot of blood that was still on the sash weight; detectives did.

Upstairs again, Judd got a fresh quart of Tom Dawson whisky from a sideboard, filled a water glass with it, and fell down into a chair in the kitchen, sliding a dollar bill under the quart bottle to pay for what he took. She sat with him, rehearsing the tale she would tell. He half-finished smoking a Sweet Caporal, but the night was graying and she worried that the milkman would soon
be on the kitchen porch, so she took Judd upstairs and into Josephine’s room.

“You have to slug me,” she said.

“I can’t do that, Ruth!”

“But I have to say the burglars gave me an awful whack on the head and knocked me out.”

“Still, I couldn’t ever hurt you.”

She smiled and petted his sweet cheek and said, “Oh, you. What a sweet boy.” She turned and he tied her wrists behind her back with clothesline rope, then he over-tied her ankles, and he lifted her like a new bride, laid her down on her mother’s bed, and softly cupped her right breast through her nightgown as he tenderly kissed her good-bye.

He felt he was in a movie romance as he said, “You won’t see me for a month, two months, perhaps ever again.”

Ruth took up the same tone. “Oh, no, don’t say that!”

Judd straightened, got into his herringbone overcoat, and fixed his fedora at a rightward cant. “Remember, if the police catch up to me before I get back to Syracuse, I have no excuse for being here.”

She said she’d die before giving up one word against him. She said she still had a capsule that had enough poison to kill a dozen people and that particular one she was going to keep for herself, just in case. And then, as he was exiting, she told him, “Unlock the baby’s door as you go out.”

He forgot.

And now thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

   SEVEN   

S
he heard the milk truck and fell asleep again, and then she heard a creaking of the door. Ruth lifted up from Josephine’s bed and saw Albert hunching against the frame, his head hideously swollen and purple, his flannel nightshirt soaked in blood, his handgun dangling from bloody fingers. Wads of cotton spilled from his mouth as he said, “Look what you did to me, Root.”

And then she really did wake and Albert was not there. She looked to the Ingersoll clock and saw it was almost half past seven. The hands tied behind her back were tingling. She swung her clotheslined legs to the floor, knelt beside the bed as if childishly praying, and then rocked from knee to knee in an awkward waddle to the hallway and south to her daughter’s room. She fell to her side there and felt her green satin nightgown was hiked up but could not arrange it. She caught her breath and softly thudded the oaken door a few times with her head as she called, “Lora. Lora, it’s me.”