The Seducer

17

Buddy sat in Maggie’s room and waited for Maggie to come back from wherever she was. He had been sitting there for a long time, but he didn’t care or even know that the time had been long, for he had no place else to go and nothing at all to do, and it was a great comfort to be there in the familiar stale litter where he had found, before things had changed and gone to hell, as much of happiness and peace as it was possible for him to know.

He loved Maggie in his own compulsive and destructive way, and he had been terribly lonely and strangely afraid without her. He did not think that he could bear the fear and loneliness much longer.

His world had reverted, in fact, to the conditions prior to Maggie’s entrance, a world of dark fantasy entailing fantastic threats to which he reacted with a bitter and brutal belligerence that was fear disguised. It was a world of reference and apathetic rage in which he felt compelled to do anything just to be doing something, although it was quite impossible in his lethargy to do anything whatever.

He had quit attending the classes he had been failing anyhow. Some days he took food, hardly knowing that he ate, and some days he fasted without awareness that he did. He drank cheap wine and got sick and made worse what was already intolerably bad.

He had come several times to see Maggie, to plead and threaten and do what he could to recover what he had lost, but she wouldn’t open the door and let him in, and he had finally been forced each time to go away.

Today, however, he had come and found her gone, her door locked, and he had let himself in with the blade of his pocketknife. Now he sat in her litter, drinking her wine, and waited for her to come home. It was light when he arrived at her door, but it had since grown dark. The date, although he didn’t know it, was the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine’s Day.

Secure and comforted in the dark room, he became a little drowsy under the influence of the wine, and he was fixed in a warm and wonderful suspension between sleeping and waking when Maggie opened the door and switched on the ceiling light.

She was carrying something in a brown paper bag, and she walked with the bag into her tiny kitchen and came back without it. Removing her cloth coat, she tossed it toward a chair, where it caught and held for a moment on the arm and then slipped off into a pile on the floor.

All the while she was doing this, walking into the kitchen and walking back and removing her coat, she glanced several times at Buddy as if he were no more than a part of the general litter that would probably eventually need cleaning up.

“How did you get in here?” she said finally. “It seems to me I locked the door when I left.”

“I used my pocketknife,” he said, “and I may use it on you before I leave if you don’t treat me any better than you have been.”

“In that case, you’d better use it on me immediately, because I don’t intend to treat you a damn bit better, and you’re leaving right away.”

“Am I? Try and make me,” he challenged, his brows drawing together above his eyes.

“I could call the police and have you arrested. Don’t you know it’s against the law to break into someone’s private place?”

“Go ahead and call the police. I dare you. I’ve been thinking about having a talk with them anyhow.”

She stood staring at him contemptuously, legs spread and hands on hips. Absorbed in her contemptuous appraisal, she seemed not to have heard his response to her threat.

“Who the hell told you that you could drink my wine?” she said.

“I’m not sure it’s yours. I think it may be some that I bought and left here myself.”

“Take it and get out, then. I don’t want it or you.”

“I’m not going until I’ve talked with you, and I may not go at all. I may just move in and stay. What do you think of that?”

“I think you’re sick, that’s what I think,” she said contemptuously. “You’ve always been crazy, of course. But now you’re crazier than ever. You ought to be in an institution.”

“You’re the one who ought to be in an institution. That’s where you’d probably be if everyone knew you as well as I do.”

“Why don’t you tell them? It would only prove, on the contrary, that you’re absolutely irresponsible and ought to be locked up where you can’t do anyone any harm.”

“You’re a fine one to be talking about doing someone harm,” he growled.

“Am I? Why? I haven’t harmed anyone that I know of. Am I to blame because you’re sick and keep imagining that you’ve been mistreated? Why don’t you simply go away and leave me alone and quit trying to impose yourself where you’re no longer wanted?”

“I wasn’t referring to myself,” Buddy muttered, his words insinuating some hidden and darker meaning.

“Weren’t you? Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell me who. I can’t think of anyone else I know who is baby enough to imagine such nonsense.”

“You needn’t act so innocent with me because I know what you are, and I know what you’ve done. It was damn convenient when old Cannon’s rich wife got killed just when she did, wasn’t it? I’ve been thinking what a strange coincidence it was. To happen, I mean, right after I went and told her about him and you.”

“So it was you who told. I thought it must have been, you sneaky son of a bitch.” Maggie’s lip curled and her eyes glittered with hate.

“Don’t call me names,” he said. “I won’t stand for it.”

“The hell you won’t! You’ll stand for a lot more than that before I’m through with you, if you aren’t careful. It’s a serious matter to accuse someone of killing his wife, especially when it had been proved impossible by reliable witnesses.”

“I didn’t accuse him of killing her,” Buddy said. “I only said her death was a remarkable coincidence, and it was.” He paused, watching her reaction with a sly expression. “I’ve been wondering if he hired someone to kill her for him. Did he? Doesn’t he tell you secrets when you’re sleeping with him?”

“Well, by God, you’re a greater menace even than I thought. There’s simply no telling what insane idea will get into your mind next. It’s the truth that I could have you committed if I wanted to go to the trouble. Perhaps he didn’t have to hire someone to kill her. Perhaps I did it for him myself out of friendship. How do you like that for an idea?”

This was an extremely precarious maneuver, and Maggie knew it. After executing it almost without thinking, with only the most fleeting notion that he would never suspect her of suggesting the truth, she waited anxiously for his response, her anxiety completely dissembled by the pose which she still held, legs spread and hands on hips, of aggressive contempt.

She could see instantly by the sudden stillness in his eyes and face that she had made a grave tactical error, to say the least. He didn’t dismiss her suggestion as sarcasm at all. He accepted it and considered it and seemed to be wondering why he hadn’t thought of it himself.”

“You could have,” he said, his eyes shrewd and speculative. “You’re capable of it. I guess I’m about the only person on earth, maybe except old Cannon, who knows that you’re capable of anything, even murder, if it suits your purpose. The reason I know is that I am, too.

People like you and me know about each other. We have a feeling.”

“Well, isn’t that the most precious notion!” She sneered and shrugged, abandoning at last her aggressive pose. “It might interest you to know that the only feeling I have for you is a sickness to my stomach. You make me sick, sick, sick!”

Buddy stood up all at once, apparently distracted, tipping the glass he had been holding and spilling the cheap dark wine out onto the floor. Looking slowly around the room, he seemed to have forgotten where he was and why he had come.

Finally, when he became aware again of Maggie, his face softened and saddened. In his eyes, where the slyness had been before, there was a bitter and supplicating tenderness.

“Let me stay here with you, Maggie,” he said. “Please do. Without you I’m lonely and afraid and simply don’t know what to do or how to get along. Don’t make me do something to hurt you. Please don’t.”

“What the hell could you do to hurt me? It strikes me that the shoe is on the other foot.”

“You know what I could do, and I’ll do it,” he retorted sharply. “I’ll tell the police about you and old Cannon.”

“God, you’re a sneak! You’re an absolute monster of deception.”

“It won’t do any good to call me any more names. If you won’t let me stay, I’d just as soon you’d hate me as not.”

He was sick and sly and capable of any treachery, and Maggie understood, at last, that he was a far greater menace than she had imagined. Staring at him with a fierce scowl, she wondered desperately what to do, and she thought that the best and safest thing would be to kill him.

She was certain that she could get away with it with no worse consequences to herself than a certain amount of inconvenience. He had forced his way into her room and made a nuisance of himself, and she would only have to call the police, after it was done, and say that he had attacked her, compelling her to kill him in self-defense.

It would really be quite simple to get away with it after it was done, but the trouble was in doing it, and the principle trouble was that there was nothing at hand to do it with.

She could hardly kill him with her hands, for he was very strong. Hitting him over the head with something like a heavy glass ash tray would entail such obvious movements that he would surely be able to see her intent and defend himself. There was, however, a sharp knife in the tiny kitchen. If she could get the knife, she could probably hide it at her side or behind her and get close enough to stick it into him quickly in a soft spot, like the belly, before he knew what was happening. Yes, she thought, the knife would be surest and safest if only she could get it.

“Well,” she said amiably, “I see that you have the better of me, and I might as well admit it.”

“That’s right,” he said, his taut face relaxing.

“What we had better do is talk it over reasonably and come to some agreement. First, however, I’d like to go into the kitchen and pour myself a small glass of wine. Excuse me.”

She walked casually into the kitchen and went directly to the drawer where the knife was kept. Opening the drawer, holding the knife at her side, she turned to pour the wine, to which she had committed herself, and there was Buddy behind her, standing in the doorway, having followed her so silently that she had not heard.

“What have you got there?” he demanded sharply.

“Nothing.”

“It’s a knife, isn’t it? You were going to kill me, weren’t you?”

“Don’t be absurd. You’ve got such a guilty conscience that you imagine all sorts of wild things.”

“You were going to kill me. Did you really kill Mrs. Cannon too? I guess you really did.”

She had been moving toward him slowly during this exchange, and now she was quite close, within striking distance. Suddenly she whipped the knife up from her side toward the soft place below his diaphram. It proved to be another mistake.

Quick as she was, he was quicker, and it was only a matter of seconds before the knife was shaken loose onto the floor. She clawed at his face with her other hand and tried to curse him, but she couldn’t curse because his fingers were around her throat, crushing the column of her neck, cutting off the precious air and she was dying.

Watching her stiffen and die beneath his throttling hands, her eyes tilting upward in her head, her face mottling, Buddy knew with deep despair and sorrow that he had killed his only hope — that from now on fear and loneliness would never end in his world.