Killing Cousins

Thirteen

It was about five o’clock when the phone rang. Mrs. Tweedy, who was just leaving, answered in the downstairs hall. She called up the stairs to Willie, who was in her room getting ready to go out to the Club to meet Quincy, and Willie took the call on the upstairs extension.

“Hello,” she said.

“Is this Mrs. Howard Hogan?” a voice asked.

It was a woman’s voice, but it did not sound like the voice of any of Willies friends or any voice that Willie had ever heard before.

“Yes,” Willie said, “it is.”

“This is Gertrude Haversack speaking.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve called to ask you to come and see me.”

“I think you must have the wrong person. I’m Mrs. Howard Hogan, Junior. Perhaps you want Mrs. Howard Hogan, Senior.”

“No. Not at all. You’re the person I want, Mrs. Hogan.”

“Have we met before?”

“No, we haven’t. You’ve probably seen me around town, but I doubt that you’d remember me.”

“In that case, why should I come and see you?”

“I think it’s time we became acquainted.”

“Do you? That’s very flattering, I’m sure, but I’m not so sure that I agree with you. Is there any particular reason why we should know each other?”

“I think so.”

“I’d be interested to know what it is.”

“Because I’m Howard’s mistress. Or was.”

It was a sneaky and devastating verbal punch. Not the light jab that old Howard had actually been crawling into bed with someone named Gertrude Haversack, which was in Willie’s opinion a minor aberrance that she could accept with no great sense of shock, but the thundering right cross of the changed tense. What did it mean? Did it mean only that Gertrude Haversack, whoever she was, had been Howard’s mistress but had now ceased to be for any one or more of the various reasons that women routinely cease to be mistresses or wives or whatever they were? Or did it mean, perhaps, that Gertrude had ceased necessarily to be a mistress because Howard had necessarily ceased to be a lover by reason of being dead and disposed of? But this was not possible. It simply was not possible for anyone except Willie and Quincy to know the truth about Howard. Standing silently with the phone in her hand, thinking with a kind of fierce intensity in the sudden and thunderous roaring of the live wire between her and Gertrude Haversack, Willie needed considerably more than the sporting ten seconds to recover from the blow she had received. Having recovered, however, she began to feel angry at Gertrude Haversack for playing such a damn dirty trick on her, even if inadvertently.

“Are you there?” Gertrude Haversack said.

“I am,” Willie said. “I damn surely am.”

“Do you agree now that you should come and see me?”

“Why should I?”

“Because I have something to tell you that you will be interested to hear.”

“I don’t think so. You are certainly a liar with something on your mind, although I can’t imagine what it is, and if you have anything to tell me you had better tell it now, on the telephone, for I’m going to hang up if you don’t.”

“You better hadn’t.”

“Tell me whatever it is you have to tell.”

“Not on the telephone.”

“Goodbye, then.”

“You’ll be sorry if you don’t come.”

“Will I? Why?”

“Because, if you don’t, I’ll have to go directly to the police.”

There was that sneaky punch again. Only this time Gertrude Haversack didn’t even bother to set Willie up with a jab first, damn her. She just hauled off and threw the bomb without any preliminary. Again Willie stood clutching the phone while the live wire roared in her ear, and it was a favorable reflection on her toughness that she was able to recover quickly from such an attack for the second time in as many minutes.

“What in the world do the police have to do with it?” she said.

“With what?”

“I’m not sure. Whatever you’re talking about.”

“You know as well as I what they have to do with it.”

“I really haven’t the slightest idea what you mean. Are you certain that you do yourself? Could it be that you’re crazy or something?”

“It could be, but I’m not.”

“In my opinion you are.”

“You’ll find out if I am or not when you come and see me.”

“I’ve already said that I won’t come.”

“I heard what you said, but I think you will.”

“You’re very sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

“I’m sure that you’re not such a fool as to let me talk to the police without finding out first what I have to tell them.”

“The truth is, I’m becoming rather curious about you. It might be rather interesting to meet such an accomplished liar.”

“I’ll be expecting you, then.”

“When?”

“I’m not far away. You could be here easily in fifteen minutes, but I’ll give you half an hour.”

“That’s very considerate of you, but I happen to have a previous engagement and can’t possibly come that soon.”

“I’d advise you to break your engagement, whatever it is. I have a strong feeling that I should go to the police directly anyhow, and if you’re not here within half an hour I’ll go.”

“Where do you live?”

“On West Olive Street. The Cibola Apartments in the 700 block. Apartment 310.”

“Well, I may come and I may not. I’ll think about it.”

“Do as you please. As I said, you’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

“Whether I don’t or do,” Willie said softly, “it may be you who is sorry in the end.”

She hung up and wondered what to do, but all the time she knew that she was going to see Gertrude Haversack simply because she did not dare to refuse. She couldn’t imagine what was on the woman’s mind, but it was clearly related to Howard, whatever it was, and for a breathless moment or two of terror Willie wondered if she and Quincy could have been observed in the act of disposing of Howard, by Gertrude Haversack herself or someone else who had told her about it, but this seemed so fantastic and remote a possibility that it was surely absurd to become excessively disturbed about it. She must go and find out what this development was all about, of course, for the suspense and uncertainty would be unbearable if she didn’t, but she wished desperately that there was time to talk with Quincy first, and perhaps there was, on the telephone, if she could only catch him at home or at the Club without delay. She dialed his home number, but there was no answer, and then she dialed the number of the telephone in the bar at the Club. The bartender said Quincy wasn’t there, but might be outside, and went to look. After a minute or two he came back and said Quincy wasn’t there at all, inside or outside, and so he hadn’t arrived yet, and there was nothing for Willie to do but go ahead to Gertrude Haversack’s without talking with him.

She drove in the station wagon to West Olive Street and along the street to the 700 block, and in the middle of the block, standing flush with the sidewalk and rising four stories above it, was the buff brick Cibola building. Parking at the curb about fifty feet beyond the building, she walked back and into a small lobby with a self-service elevator standing idle in its shaft behind closed doors. She entered the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor, and she was, while rising in the shaft, surprisingly detached and oddly curious. At this time, she was more interested in seeing what kind of woman old Howard had been sleeping with, or more exactly what kind of woman had considered sleeping with old Howard a pleasure, than she was in the vastly more serious question of what Gertrude Haversack knew that she thought might concern the police.

In the third-floor hall, she looked right and left and then walked right, and Apartment 310 was the third door down on the side overlooking the street. She pressed a little button set into the wall beside the door and stood listening to the buzzer inside the apartment. In order to establish a kind of imperious position, which might be a psychological advantage, she kept her finger on the button constantly until the door was opened suddenly by Gertrude Haversack, who was, Willie thought, just about the type you would picture in connection with sleeping with Howard, Willie herself excepted. She was taller than Willie and heavier, although her figure wasn’t bad in an ample sort of way, and she had medium brown hair, braided and wrapped around her head, and a rather long face which, like her figure, wasn’t bad or really good, and it was in fact the kind of face you’d expect to see on a woman who would make a good thing out of understanding another woman’s husband. Willie wasn’t sure, actually, that such a woman could be expected to have a certain kind of face, but if she could be, at any rate, the face would surely be like this one. It was the face of a woman who would try to make adultery seem like spiritual therapy.

“Are you Gertrude Haversack?” Willie said.

“That’s right. I recognize you, Mrs. Hogan, even if you don’t me. Please come in.”

Willie walked past her directly into a small living room, and there on a little table at the end of a sofa was a picture of Howard with his shirt open at the throat and a smile on his fat face that was plainly meant to be virile but only managed on him to look foolish. It was a shock, nevertheless, to see the picture, and Willie turned her back to it, pretending that she hadn’t even seen it, and faced Gertrude Haversack, who had closed the door and come back into the room a couple of steps.

“Please say whatever you have to say,” Willie said, “for I’m in a hurry.”

“Well, you may as well sit down and be comfortable,” Gertrude Haversack said.

“No, thank you. I don’t intend to stay that long.”

“I’ve just made some tea in the kitchen. Will you have a cup?”

Willie, who might have been seduced by a Martini, was not even tempted by tea. She shook her head and began to tap the carpet with the toe of one shoe to demonstrate her impatience.

“I don’t care for any tea. I didn’t come here on a social call, as you know. I’ve come only out of curiosity because I’m sure you must be out of your mind.”

Gertrude Haversack shrugged and sat down in a chair facing Willie and crossed her legs. She took cigarettes and paper matches out of the breast pocket of her blouse and lit one of the cigarettes with elaborate slowness, as if she thought this would irritate Willie, which it did. She blew out a cloud of smoke and waved it away with a languid motion, her hand flapping back and forth on a limp wrist.

“Suit yourself, of course. I’m prepared to be congenial, but it really makes no difference to me if you prefer it otherwise.”

“Why did you ask me to come here?”

“As I told you on the phone, I was Howard’s mistress. ‘Mistress’ is such an absurd word, though, to call oneself. I don’t like it at all, do you? Maybe you’d rather I called myself his girl. I like that much better.”

“I don’t care in the least which you call yourself, for you are probably a liar in either event.”

“Why should I lie about it? What’s to be gained?”

“That’s what I’m waiting to find out.”

“I was his girl. I’ve been his girl for almost a year, and you may as well accept it.”

“To tell the truth, I couldn’t care less. It may be true, I admit, for there’s no accounting for the tastes of some men.”

“You needn’t be insulting. It won’t help you. Do you realize how sick Howard had become of you in the last year or two?”

“I wasn’t greatly concerned about it.”

“I guess you weren’t. You were probably too concerned about other men. Howard said you were always getting laid by someone. He said you were no better than a whore.”

“Is that so? Well, at least I was a better whore than the one he took up with.”

Gertrude Haversack flushed angrily and bit her lower lip, and Willie had the satisfaction of knowing that she had finally scored. She owed this bitch a jolt or two, that was certain, and she might be able, before this was over, to think up something exceptionally unpleasant to do to her later.

“You might be interested to know that we were going away together,” Gertrude Haversack said. “We had it all arranged. Last Friday he got together all the money he could, which amounted to about twenty thousand dollars, and Saturday evening he was coming by to pick me up. I was all ready to go, all packed and everything, and I kept waiting and waiting for him, but he didn’t come, and finally I decided something had happened to change the plans, and that he would call me his first chance to explain what it was, but he didn’t call either. The next day, Sunday, I waited again to hear from him, and then, in the afternoon, a friend who knew about us called to tell me that she’d heard from someone or other that he’d left town suddenly Friday night. That’s the story that’s going around, that he left last Friday night and won’t be back, but it’s a lie. He didn’t leave then because we had planned to leave together on Saturday, as I said, and he had made all the arrangements, even to getting all that money together, and he would never have gone off without me like that at the last moment. No one knew we planned to go except him and me and this one good friend of mine, and what I want to know now is what happened to him.”

“In my opinion,” Willie said, “you have simply made all of this up, and what you have in mind to gain from such a fantastic lie is more than I can see. Do you just want to make trouble for me?”

“I wouldn’t mind making trouble for you.”

“Even if what you say is true, which I doubt, it’s obvious that he merely decided to go without you. Chances are he never had any intention of taking you in the first place. As I’ve recently learned, Howard could be very deceptive. I’m beginning to think he probably told lots of women lies in order to get what he wanted from them.”

“You’re only trying to be vindictive. He was happy with me, which he never was with you, and he wanted us to be together the rest of our lives. We were going to Mexico to live, at least until we got tired of it, and he was going to get a Mexican divorce while we were down there.”

“He may be going to Mexico, at that. I had a letter from him today from Dallas, Texas. Isn’t that on the way to Mexico, more or less?”

“You had a letter from him?”

“That’s what I said. From Dallas, Texas.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true whether you believe me or not.”

Gertrude Haversack stood up suddenly, and Willie thought for an instant that she would have to defend herself, but then the other woman became completely quiet, not moving in the slightest for several seconds, and there was an expression of slyness in her eyes.

“You could have written it yourself and had someone mail it from there. Is that what you did?”

“You really are crazy, aren’t you? I see that there’s no use at all in trying to talk reasonably with you.”

“I’m not crazy enough to believe for a moment that Howard would make all those careful arrangements to run away with me and then go off alone in the end. No one else will believe it, either. The police won’t.”

“Wont they? I’m not so sure. You would have to prove first that he actually made such arrangements. I think you’re a liar, and the police may too.”

“This friend of mine knew all about it. She’ll swear it’s true.”

“It isn’t difficult to get a friend to lie for you. She’ll only incriminate herself.”

“Think as you like. I know Howard didn’t go off voluntarily without me, and I’m sure I can be convincing enough to make the police suspicious. Then they’ll start asking a lot of questions they haven’t asked, and start checking a lot of things they wouldn’t otherwise check. Do you want that? I don’t think you do. I think, in fact, that you’d do a great deal to prevent it.”

“Now we’re coming to something, aren’t we? You haven’t told me yet just what it is you want, and it’s time you did.”

“It’s not so much what I want as what Howard would want. I was very fond of Howard, and I’d like to remember in the future that his wishes were considered.”

“Really? I’m touched. What were his wishes, exactly?”

“Well, it’s obvious, since he was going to take care of me, that he wanted me taken care of.”

“What would you consider being taken care of?”

“He had about twenty thousand dollars. We would have shared it.”

“I see. You are trying to blackmail me for ten thousand dollars.”

“Nothing of the sort. I’m only saying that it would be no more than fair to consider Howard’s wishes and take care of me as he planned.”

“Blackmail is blackmail, whatever you call it. Perhaps it’s I who should go to the police.”

“Go ahead.”

“Did you really expect to get away with this? If you did, there’s one thing you forgot to take into account.”

“Is that so? What is it?”

“That I’ve done nothing to be blackmailed for.”

“Oh, I expected you to say that, of course. You’d hardly admit anything. If you’ll think about it, though, you may decide that it’s worth something to you to avoid a great deal of unpleasantness.”

Willie walked to the door and turned. She was a perfect picture of composure, and on her small gamin’s face, as she stared back at Gertrude Haversack, there was an expression of fastidious disdain. She was aware of this herself, having accomplished it only by the greatest effort, and she was quite proud that she was able to dissemble so well the fear and uncertainty that she really felt.

“Have you said all you have to say?” she asked.

“For the present. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

“Don’t wait too long.”

“I won’t. If I haven’t heard from you by tomorrow night, I’ll go to the police the next day. I want to give you every chance to do the right thing, of course.”

“Thank you so much,” Willie said. “It’s very good of you.”

She went on out and downstairs to the street. In the station wagon, she began to tremble so violently that it was impossible to drive, and so she lit a cigarette with the dash lighter, holding the lighter in her right hand and her right hand for support in her left hand. She sat there smoking the cigarette and gradually became calmer, but she was very cold in spite of the warm evening, and her hands and feet felt numb from the cold. It was essential to think clearly and to assess without panic the extent of the threat that Gertrude Haversack posed, but Willie’s thoughts could not be restrained or organized and kept flying off in all directions on tangents of the most terrible possibilities, and the only consistent thought she had, which did not help at all, was what a damn crying shame it was to have something like this arise just when everything was going so beautifully and looked like ending so well. Then, after the cigarette was finished, she thought that she must go at once to see Quincy, who would be at the Club now if he had not become tired of waiting and gone away again. Quincy was clever and full of plans. He had known what to do before, and he would know what to do now.

She felt compelled to hurry, to get to Quincy before he went away, but she drove out to the Club slowly, nevertheless, for her hands still trembled a little on the wheel, and her vision, for some reason, did not seem to be very clear. Parking in the lot in front of the Club, she walked around to the back terrace, descending a flight of outside steps to the lower level. The pool was deserted, the lifeguard reading a book in his elevated seat on one side. At one end of the terrace, an elderly couple were eating hamburger sandwiches and drinking beer and staring silently out across the golf course toward a little lake a hundred yards or so away. No one else was on the terrace or in sight, except the guard, so Willie walked over to the rear door of the Club and looked through the glass into the bar, but Quincy wasn’t there either, and Willie began to tremble again in rising panic, as if her life depended upon finding Quincy at this moment and not a minute or an hour or any time later. She opened the door and entered the bar, and then she heard a familiar sound that gave her hope. Passing through the bar and around a corner, she came to the slot-machine room, and there, sure enough, was dear little Quincy with a glass in one hand and quarters in the other. She walked across from the door and stopped beside him, and he glanced at her sidewise before depositing another quarter and pulling the handle and watching the drum whirl around.

“What’s the matter, Cousin?” he said. “You look shook.”

“I’ve just had a very unpleasant experience,” she said.

“Did you see old Howard’s ghost or something?”

“Damn it, Quincy, please don’t joke. You’ve got to listen to me.”

“I’m listening, Cousin. Go ahead.”

“Do you know a bitch named Gertrude Haversack?”

“No. Gertrude’s a bitch I’ve missed. Do you recommend her?”

“God damn it, Quincy, you simply must be serious.”

“Sorry, Cousin. Who’s Gertrude Haversack, and besides a bitch, what?”

“Well, among other things, it seems that she was Howard’s mistress.”

“Mistress? Howard’s? Come off, Cousin. With apologies to present company, who the hell in her right mind would want to share a bed with old Howard?”

“I just told you. Gertrude Haversack did.”

“All right. So she did. Are you disturbed? After all, Cousin, you never seemed to put a high value on marital fidelity. What’s sauce for the goose, as the saying goes, is sauce for the gander.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Quincy. You’re far too clever to say such foolish things just when I need your help. It makes no difference to me what Howard did, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst is, Howard had planned to run away with her. They were going to leave Saturday evening for Mexico. That’s why he’d drawn out the money and cashed the bonds and done all those things, and now she is threatening to go to the police and tell them about it, and you can see yourself what the consequences will be. It’s hardly likely that Howard would have made such elaborate plans and then simply gone off without her. It will at least make the police suspicious and troublesome.”

All this time he had been feeding quarters into the machine, pulling the handle and watching the drum spin, but now he stopped, staring at two oranges and a plum. After several seconds had passed, he took a drink from the glass in his left hand and deposited another quarter from the supply in his right.

“Correct, Cousin,” he said. “It will at least make them suspicious and troublesome. Perhaps you had better relate your unpleasant experience with Gertrude Haversack from the beginning.”

So she did this, trying to remember every detail and every word that had been said, and in the meanwhile, as he listened, he continued to play the machine as if she were telling the most unimportant story that was hardly worth his attention, but the whir of the spinning drum and the occasional rattle of coins served the purpose of making it impossible for her to be overheard by anyone who might come in or pass by the open door, and perhaps this was what Quincy intended, being clever and almost always anticipating contingencies.

“It’s simply the rottenest kind of luck imaginable,” Willie said in finishing. “Whoever would have expected Howard to behave that way, the bastard. Not only did he help himself to practically all our money, but he was planning to spend it on this Gertrude Haversack in Mexico. By God, Quincy, I’ve never encountered such deception before, and all I can say is, he deserved the bitch he picked, and that’s the truth. Here she was, telling me over and over how fond she was of Howard and all that, and all the while she didn’t really care in the least what might have happened to him if I would only agree to give her ten thousand dollars. It was disgusting, that’s what it was.”

“Oh, well,” Quincy said, “you mustn’t be indignant. You’ll have to admit that we’re not in a particularly good position for throwing stones, and what we’d better think about is what must be done, if anything, with Gertrude Haversack.”

“That’s why I came out here immediately to see you. You always have such good ideas.”

“Ideas are the products of brains, Cousin. You can’t have one without the other. As I see it, we have four alternatives, which we’ll consider. First, we could dispose of Gertrude as we disposed of Howard, but it hardly seems advisable. You can’t go on disposing of people indefinitely without expecting to get caught, and, besides, there is this unidentified friend of Gertrude’s who apparently knows what’s going on. She would certainly run directly to the police if Gertrude were to disappear suddenly, and we would only have made worse what is already bad enough.

“Let’s pass on, therefore, to the second alternative, which has, I confess, a quality of boldness that appeals to me. You could go to the police yourself and accuse Gertrude of trying to blackmail you. This would attract attention to you, of course, but it would give you a psychological advantage of acting like an honest woman with nothing to fear, and if Gertrude does go to the police, as she threatens, attention will be attracted to you anyhow.

“Next, you could pay the ten thousand. Against this are the indignity of submission, the tantamount confession of guilt, and the considerable cost, which is no small item.

“Finally, Cousin, we could do nothing. There’s always the chance that Gertrude is bluffing, and if she is, it would be unfortunate, as well as humiliating, to be tricked into drawing attention that could have been avoided. And in the final analysis, you have the comfort of knowing that not a damn thing can be done by the police or anyone else, whatever Gertrude says, unless someone comes up with old Howard himself, which is not probable. My advice, Cousin, is to do nothing and let Gertrude do what she will.”

Willie sighed and shook her head slowly in admiration and gratitude. She was vastly reassured by Quincy’s brilliant analysis, especially the bit about Howard himself being necessary to any action by the police, which was a point she had not given sufficient attention, and it was, she thought, simply incredible how this lovable and handy little devil could make everything seem all right, or almost all right, that had seemed all wrong before.

“Quincy,” she said, “how can I ever repay you?”

“There are ways,” he said, pulling the handle of the slot machine, “which we will go into in good time.”