Chapter 10
The murderer of Paul M. Wernitz mentally shook his head a little. It was a mistake to come down later than usual for breakfast. It was a mistake to do anything to call anybody's attention to the fact that he wanted time to be alone, to think, to calculate, and reflect over his errors, so he could retrieve them if necessary and guard against future ones. Above all, he had to act as if there were nothing special on his mind, act as normally and casually as he always acted. He had to forget the sound of old Wernitz's head as the iron bar hit it, not a loud sound, more like an eggshell as you closed your hand on it to crush it. But that was not why he'd spent so much time over his bath and shave. It was the unfortunate fact that in the average house the bathroom was the only place a man could lock the door and be alone without the risk of somebody walking in and surprising some expression that the most astute and carefully guarded mind might transmit unconsciously to the motor nerves and impulses controlling any man's face. He had seen something of it in his own face in the medicine chest mirror as he thought about himself, and the mistakes he'd already made, when he was wiping his face after he had rinsed off the shaving soap. But it wasn't Wernitz's eggshell skull he had been thinking about. He kept his eyes down on his plate as he thought about it all again.
Damn Janey Blake, he said quietly to himself. Who would ever have thought the little devil had that much guts? If he hadn't had the quick-wittedness to pick up the phone in Gus's den they might easily have gotten him. But they still wouldn't have been able to connect him with the Wernitz thing out at Newton's Corner. That was the one thing he didn't have to worry about. He had been too smart to leave any tracks behind him there. He frowned suddenly, and bit his lower lip, remembering he was supposed to appear as he always did. He relaxed and took up his coffee cup, took a swallow, and put it down calmly.
The Janey business was an error. He could see that now. Calling her up, and calling up out at Wernitz's to check on Gus and Lois, had seemed to make it easy going. It wasn't his fault she turned out to be so quick on the trigger, but it was the sort of thing he should have been smart enough to figure on.
I can't afford any more mistakes, he thought. Janey was his second, or third. No. His fourth. He had to be brutally honest with himself if nobody else. He had to see his mistakes and admit them, and above all not miss any of them.
It's a funny kind of thing, he thought, moving the newspaper so it shielded his face. It wasn't as if he'd acted on the spur of the moment. He'd known for some time he was going to kill Paul M. Wernitz. He had considered ways and means on what he might call an academic level for quite a while. The fact that Wernitz had forced his hand by suddenly letting it be known he was closing up shop and leaving Smithville, so that he had to use perhaps his least brilliant modus operandi, was unfortunate in one sense but very fortunate in another. Brilliance was likely to be involved, while in a murder at least simplicity and the presence of a natural and obvious suspect-especially if he happened to be an alien employee-was all to the good, if not egotistically so satisfying. He had been surprised himself at how neat the whole thing was-just as he was surprised now at how easy it was to carry on as if there nothing at all on his mind. He heard himself listening and talking as much as he ever talked while he was trying to read the paper at the breakfast table. It was almost as if he were two people existing in one body.
The only thing to watch, really, was that one didn't get confused with the other.
He turned the page of the paper, realizing that the page he was apparently so engrossed in had nothing on it but an ad for a special sale of women's fur coats. He turned to the financial reports. That was something he could be legitimately engrossed in, if anybody happened to notice.
Janey was a mistake. But Janey was only secondary, an effect following a cause, and the cause was his real mistake. It was just a piece of damned luck, is all it was, he told himself. But it wasn't true, and he knew it. If he had let the blasted thing stay where it was, he wouldn't have had any bad luck to complain about. Up to that point, everything was okay. Nobody could trace the calls he put in to get the service mechanics out of the place and off to the farthest corners of the county. He'd figured them out with a map, and gone to each place, to see for certain that Wernitz owned the machines there, get the names of the people who'd call in, and even listen to them to see what they'd say when they did call. He'd made a mistake about Heron Point, not checking up to find out it was closing down the day before. But even that had worked out all right, too, because Buzz Rodriguez, who took the call, hadn't remembered, either, until he was halfway there, so that he got to the basement only in time to get a crack on his head, too. All that, with the one slight mistake that hadn't mattered, had been carefully worked out and skillfully done.
The thing to do now was to sit tight; and there was one little trouble. He frowned down again at the small print of the stock market listings before he could catch himself. He had to get the thing he'd made the stupid mistake, his only serious mistake, of picking up off the dirt floor of Wernitz's cellar.
I don't know why the hell it worries me the way it does. He could say that again, the way he'd said it to himself when he'd almost nicked his jawbone shaving. The chances were a hundred to one, a thousand to one more likely, that nobody but himself knew anything about it, or could even connect him with Wernitz by means of it. Wernitz was close-mouthed, solitary to a psychotic degree. Afraid of the dark, blinding himself with glaring white lights, superstitious as a root-and clay-painted aborigine clutching on to his tribal talisman. But a talisman lost potency if other tribesmen knew about it. Even Achilles probably never went around bragging about his heel.
He quit reading the market reports and took another swallow of coffee. It was cold now, but he hardly noticed it. The palms of his hands had broken out in cold sweat. He unobtrusively wiped them off on the napkin in his lap. A hundred to one or a thousand to one, he had to get Wernitz's talisman back, the gold-washed lucky quarter that he could have known Wernitz would reach for when the lights went off, to hold in his hand to come down into the shadow-filled basement and put in a new fuse. It must have been in his hand, to fly out and land, glittering like an evil eye there on the dirt floor when the iron bar came down on the eggshell skull.
Why did I have to pick it up? Why didn't I leave it there?
He knew the answer to that, too. It had appealed to a kind of grisly sense of ironic relief, all of a sudden. It had even been grimly comic. "Who ever called this thing a lucky piece?" Wernitz had been almost fanatically dependent on it.
He took the last bite of his toast and the last sip of cold coffee. It was entirely by accident he'd learned about it himself. Some perfectly minor and unimportant piece of business that needed Wernitz's signature. He had said yes, in the clipped laconic way of speaking he had, and then put his hand in his pocket, taken something out, put it on the table under his hand and peered at it. He said yes again. Then, as he'd started to put it back in his pocket his elbow struck the chair and the thing fell on the floor. He went after it in a flash. It was the gilded quarter. Funny, all of it, in one way, but not in another. Not the way Wernitz's dry face had broken out with sweat as he retrieved it and put it back in his pocket. "No," he said then. "I don't sign." And he didn't. "Bad luck," he said. That finished it. And as a matter-of-fact, it had turned out that way. He'd been right for whatever wrong reason. And now the thing had dropped on another floor. If he believed in bad luck he might well break out into sweat again. He wiped his palms again on his napkin, though there was no need to. He was a damn fool for ever picking it up off the dirt floor, a worse fool for putting it in his trouser pocket just for the ironic devil of it-as well as to have it where nobody cleaning his desk or dresser drawer might come across it and wonder-but the worst stupidity of all was forgetting it and reaching in his pocket and dropping it in the slot machine-and never thinking about it until it came rolling along across the floor until Lois put her foot out and stepped on it.
I should have got hold of it then, he thought. He could easily have done it. If, in fact, he had simply said, "That's mine," nobody would ever have thought of it a second time. Instead, it had suddenly seemed a good idea to be rid of it, get it away from him so he wouldn't make another mistake of the same kind. It wasn't until it was in Janey's bag-or not even then, not until she burst into tears and was running past him up the steps-that he realized if the hundred-to-one chance came through it was the only thing that could tie him to Wernitz's house and the Wernitz murder.
His palms were clammy and moist again.
I've got to get it. As he got up from the breakfast table he knew that as clearly as he knew the sun was shining outside and that Paul M. Wernitz was dead, in the infinite darkness of eternity. Not that he was superstitious, even if the thing did seem suddenly imbued with a malignant animate perversity all its own. Otherwise how had it got into the tube or into the jackpot? That was another hundred-to-one chance. Why hadn't it gone down to the box behind, and lain there, safe and hidden, until a month later when they emptied the box, and nobody would be there to see it, or notice it, or remember anything about it? It looked like a conscious chain of animus, trying to get him all tangled up in what he knew was the perfect crime.
He moved his chair back from the table. Janey Blake had it now, and he had to get it. He couldn't afford to take any chances now, not even a hundred-to-one chance, or a thousand-to-one. He'd figured all the chances, prepared for them intelligently and carefully. This was an off chance he could never have foreseen. And he had to move fast. Not even Janey Blake, not Janey or anybody, was going to stand in his way. He knew more about Janey now. He was prepared to deal with her if he had to. What was Janey or Janey's life even when his own was hanging precariously in the balance?