In the Still of the Night (22 page)

Mark was surprised to find her home. She had come in a few minutes ago, she said, and felt so miserable she decided to go right to bed. She reprimanded him for leaving the door half-locked.

“Isn’t that just like me?” he said. “And do you know where I was? I went looking for a locksmith. And by the way, it’s time we updated our security system.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek and said he was sorry she wasn’t feeling well. He even smelled like Judas, she thought, although she knew that what she smelled was the spice he chewed to cover the whiskey on his breath.

Kitty was scheduled for a breakfast meeting in Boston that Thursday. She had first intended to take the early shuttle flight but decided on Wednesday to go up that night and stay over at a hotel. She was not working well and she needed all her wits to try to salvage a contract a publisher claimed the author had violated. Going early meant she could not attend a dinner party Wednesday night for the benefit of the Writers’ Colony, an annual gala event at which she and Mark were often photographed as being among its celebrities. There was a time when missing it would have grieved her. Now she felt only a twinge of anger at not being grieved. Mark said he would put in an appearance at the dinner, and she immediately wondered if that meant he would go off somewhere with Wilczynski as soon as he could get away.

She stopped home to pick up her overnight case after speaking at the Columbia University seminar on “The Business of Writing.” The word
business
Mark had wanted out. He also seemed to have opted out of the office that afternoon as well. He was at his desk, the study door open, the wire basket at the side of his chair half full of typescript, where, for the sake of speed, he dropped each page as he read it.

“Is that you, Kitty?” he called out as she was locking the door behind her.

“Who else?”

She stopped for a moment at his desk, and they exchanged a few words about the seminar, Mark rhythmically, automatically, and blindly continuing to leaf the pages of manuscript into the basket.

“That must be a great book,” Kitty said.

Realizing what he was doing, he laughed and fished the unread pages out of the basket. “Monumental,” he said.

In the bedroom she noted that he had already put out his dinner jacket, dress shirt, and black tie, and for an instant she was tempted to reverse her plans again. A seesaw: Her life had become a seesaw, she on one end, Wilczynski on the other, Mark the hump in the middle. She put a fresh blouse in the case for the morning and closed it. If she hurried, she could get in a couple of hours at the office before leaving for La Guardia. She was touching up her makeup when the phone rang. Mark took the call on the third ring. He was still talking when she set down her purse and overnight bag outside his door.

All she heard at first was a couple of grunts, cheerful, humorous sounds. She had no doubt at all as to who was on the phone. Then Mark said, “As long as you’ve got a tux, wear it. But no sneakers, hear me, boy?” He saw Kitty then and finished off “Seven-thirty, just inside the Fifth Avenue door. Okay?”

“I’m not going,” Kitty said when he’d hung up the phone.

“You’re not going to Boston, is that it?” He glanced at her and quickly away.

“That’s it. So you’d better call him back and tell him you’re taking your wife to the dinner, not your mistress.”

Mark sat for a second or two, grappling with the concept. Then: “Jesus Christ!” He got up and went to the teacart, where he poured himself a drink. He did not want to look at her, not the way she was now, her face distorted and blotched with anger. “I could get down on my knees and swear,” he said. “But it wouldn’t do any good. You couldn’t believe, could you, that I had in mind how important it might be for him to meet the Colony trustees? He ought to try for a fellowship.”

Kitty hardly knew what she was doing. A raging instinct sent her to the manuscript box in which she had put away the knives on the morning he had not been able to go to the Cape. The hunting knife in hand, she meant to force her will upon him, nothing else. “Are you going to call him?”

Mark took his drink back to the desk, still averting his eyes from her. “I’m going to think about it,” he said and drank the whiskey down.

She even challenged him: “Look at me, Mark.”

He shook his head.

When she came up behind him, he might have thought she would yank his head up by the hair again. Instead she plunged the knife into his back and left it there. He slumped forward onto the desk, and then when the swivel chair rolled out from under him, he fell to the floor. By then Kitty was at the door. She caught up her purse and overnight case only to set them down again twice, once to open the vestibule door and once to lock it behind her. There was no way she could stand and wait for the elevator. She ran down the stairs, floor after bare-walled floor, her knees buckling and then steadying sufficiently to carry her on. She stood at what she thought was the door entering onto the lobby and tried to pretend that it was all a nightmare, and that beyond the door she would wake up. She opened the door and found herself not in the lobby but in the basement, a few feet away from the laundry room, where she could hear the chatter of women and the raucous laughter of a neighbor whose voice she recognized. She went out the service entrance and then walked as fast as she could toward Columbus Avenue, a very long block from Central Park. The cold wind of February tore at the coat of her three-piece suit and then reached in to catch at her throat.

A crime of passion, a crime of passion: The words kept racing through her mind. I didn’t want to kill him, she tried to tell herself, but she did and she knew it. The very thought of him and Wilczynski going to the dinner set her aflame again. She began to feel justified and instantly then to wonder if it were possible to escape discovery. The doorman might not even have seen her come home. She had bussed down from Columbia and entered the building while he was putting someone in a cab. And no one had seen her leave just now. Only Mark knew that she’d come home. She looked at her watch. Well under an hour ago. If only she had not double-locked the door, she might get away free. She realized it was their very script that she was going over in her mind! The top lock was to be left off as though a burglar/murderer had been admitted by mistake and after the crime had simply walked out of the apartment and closed the door behind him. She had even followed the instructions about going down the stairs and, inadvertently, out through the basement. She turned back, determined to go in as she had come out of the building. If she were seen, she would brazen it out somehow. Her writers called her the great improviser. She expected Mark to be discovered by their cleaning woman in the morning, who would arrive at ten o’clock and let herself in, noting as she did so that the top lock was off again. A born tattler, she never failed to let Kitty know when Mr. Coleman had forgotten to double-lock the door.

Wilczynski, of course, might try to sound an alarm when Mark failed to show up at the Colony dinner. By then she would be in Boston, with only Mark and her secretary knowing where. The police would do nothing before morning.

She was unable to return to the building through the basement, because the entrance was locked from the inside. She stowed her overnight bag in one of the empty ash cans, where she could pick it up later and thus not be encumbered with it now. She went around the building to the corner of Central Park West, from where she watched with agonizing patience the doorman popping in and out. Then God—or the devil—was with her, for a school bus came and dispersed several children into his charge. Kitty went into the building by the side entrance as the youngsters were going around and around in the revolving center door. Mothers and nannies tried to snatch and sort them out. She reached the elevator ahead of all of them, pressed the number for the second floor below her own, and went slowly upward entirely alone. Entering her own vestibule from the stairwell instead of the elevator, she found it a foreign place. The naked aluminum coat rack—unused since the November party—made it seem a desolation. It would never be home again. The sorrow of it welled up in her, the tears making it difficult for her to see to put the key in the lock. She intended to go, having turned that one key, but the overwhelming feeling hit her again. She felt that once she opened the door, she would step out of the nightmare, home safe. But when she did open it, she knew the nightmare was forever: Mark, lying on the floor, had gathered himself to himself and died in the fetal position.

Kitty tried several times to dial Tom Wilding’s number but got it wrong each time. Finally, she simply dialed 911.

L
AURA SET HER WEEKEND
bag, her purse, and the gifts of chocolate creams—one for her aunt Mattie and one for her father-in-law—by the hall door. She tucked a scarf into the pocket of her reversible jacket where it hung on a hall tree and went to find her husband. You could smell the paint throughout the apartment, and God knows, the whole apartment needed painting. It was in anticipation of a financial gift from her aunt Mattie that they decided to go ahead with the paint job now. Tim wanted to see how much he could do himself while she was away.

The paint bucket gave a perilous shudder as he came down the ladder. Much better for her nerves, Laura thought, that she was getting out of the house. Tim stooped low and Laura stood on tiptoe to kiss him. He was a tall man and she had to stretch to make five feet two. They were both crowding middle age, married for almost twenty years. No children. Alas! both of them always added. Tim worked variously in the entertainment field, a magician who built his own illusions, a folk singer who improvised modern metaphors on old legends. He made most of his living in summer camps. He was what those with scorn for the race—or so much pride in it they could not abide mere affinity—called a professional Irishman. Laura was a lay teacher of English and music at a convent school just up the Hudson River from New York. The Mallorys owned the apartment on the Upper West Side, partnered to be sure with Chemical Bank. Large and high-ceilinged, it was full of books, the tools of Tim’s trades, and quite a number of things having nothing to do with modern employment, such as a spinning wheel, a loom, and a butter churn streaming now with ivy. Laura would be driving home from Vermont with the grandfather clock that had been in her family for more than a hundred years. It was a trip she cherished. She loved to drive. Tim was barely tolerant of her Honda, a 1993 Accord LX coupe, feeling it was built for Japanese midgets. He liked to say that if they had put the front seat in backward, and he lowered the back of the rear seat so that he could extend his legs into the trunk, it would just about fit him. Otherwise that convenience was great for a Christmas tree or, in the present circumstances, for the grandfather clock.

“You have the map and a flashlight,” Tim started his usual rundown. “Take the cellular phone. I’ll only get it all paint if you leave it here.”

“I don’t need it, Tim. Aunt Mattie would say it’s an affectation.”

“So is a grandfather clock.”

“Tim …”

“Okay, okay. Just drive carefully. It’s a car, not a palomino pony you’re driving. If it starts to rain skip the hospital. You can call them when you get to your aunt’s. And call me when you get there. Promise?”

“On my palomino,” she said.

When they reached the door he said, “Give Dad my love. I’ll write him soon. And mind you don’t commit us with the hospital people, not yet.”

“Wasn’t it decent of them to let me come today?” Laura said.

“They can’t wait to see you,” Tim mocked. “I’ll expect you back Sunday night.”

Laura had taken that afternoon and Friday off. Friday was St. Patrick’s Day and most of the school was going to the annual parade on Fifth Avenue. She tried not to show how eager she was to get away. “I wish you were coming with me.”

“To watch the speedometer,” Tim said.

He waited at the apartment door until the elevator arrived, an ancient carriage of brass and wood paneling. A prickle of anxiety caught at Laura as she touched the lobby button. It passed with the door’s closing and she put it out of her mind.

Once in the car she was in her element, secure. She made a U-turn out of the parking space and headed for the West Side Highway, accelerating to beat the first traffic light. The car seemed to anticipate her, leaping ahead. “Go for it, baby,” she said, and patted the puffed-up center of the steering wheel, fat thing. It carried its air bag like a pregnancy.

The river was pewter gray and choppy with only occasional tugboat and barge traffic. Most of the pleasure boats were still in dry-dock. She could remember snow on St. Patrick’s Day. This part of the drive was familiar, her school-day route. Yet she rarely drove it without seeking something new to weave into the pattern of her day’s work. It was not easy to match imaginations with the young.

When she passed her usual turnoff, her mind went solely to the first stop on her journey. Tim didn’t have to tell her not to commit them to the care and guardianship of his father. Guardianship? He hadn’t used the word but it had occurred in their communication with the hospital. She and Tim had talked for years about the possibility of taking his father into their home when the authorities considered it feasible. When Aunt Mattie decided to give them their inheritance before her demise, they could no longer weigh their finances into the decision. The moment of truth was near. She was not afraid of the old man; nor was Tim. If Tim feared anything, it had to do with being his father’s son. Joseph Mallory had killed a man and had been confined for the past fifteen years in a psychiatric hospital.

Word would get out that Joseph Mallory was living with them. It had been a well-known case at the time. She had sat in the courtroom among a passionate lot of Mallory partisans. They brought him oranges and cigarettes, and the bailiffs allowed the gifts to be passed along. The courtroom had to be cleared when Mallory was found not guilty by reason of insanity. They had wanted him exonerated.

By the time she turned off the Taconic Parkway the sky had grown lumpy with clouds too swift for the rain, too heavy for the sun to part. The hills were a tawny stubble, patched with the brown of early plowing, the green of winter wheat. Greening willow trees hung over the reservoirs. It was almost spring.