name was Steger. He had soft, red cheeks, and he spoke in a somewhat breathless voice. He went on talking, it seemed to me almost defensively, mentioning how he had noticed the kids after school yesterday at their ball game as he was going home.
Indeed, several of the teachers seemed to be dropping alibis into their remarks, telling, as though accidentally, what they had done last night, whom they had been with. And they seemed to be breaking away from one another, under the uneasy, spreading suspicion. How could anyone know what was inside the mind and heart of his nearest colleague? Speech, and what was visible, could lie. Beneath all human communication there was a dark ocean, lava-like—the real human action lay there, the force we could not measure, nor check, nor even detect from the surface.
Steger mentioned a book he had been reading last night, talking so insistently that it seemed, when the police car pulled up, that he had by some compulsion drawn the whole thing upon himself. We all saw the car halting directly in front of the door. A silence fell. Two of the plainclothes men I had seen at the Kessler house now entered the school.
The sprightly young woman spoke to them. “But, officers, police were here this morning. We’ve all been questioned, we’ve told all we know.”
One of the detectives looked at his notebook. “There a teacher named Wakeman here?” Wakeman had gone home. The detective went on, “Anybody named Steger?”
“That’s me,” said Steger softly. “Paulie was in my English class. But I’ve already—”
“We’ve got instructions to take you along, Mr. Steger.”
There was a gasp again, in the group, and a half gesture from one or two of them, as to intervene, to explain. And then the falling back, the not looking at Steger.
What Steger would have to go through, in the coming weeks, I suppose can be called an inevitable by-product.
The teachers were suddenly quiet. Without talking further to me, they went their ways, in pairs, singly. I started back to the Kessler house.
LEAVING ARTIE WAITING in the Stutz, which they had picked up on their way downtown, Judd drove the rented Willys into the garage of the Drive-Ur-Self. He got out of the car and stood leaning against its door while the manager walked around the vehicle, glancing at the fenders.
Judd looked away from the car; he would not let himself think of the spots on the rear floorboard. The manager would never inspect the rear. If he did, Judd was prepared to make the remark about the spilled wine, to hint about laying a broad back there—boys will be boys, what’s a car for, ha ha.
But the nausea invaded him again. It pulsed up in him like a pulsing flow of blood. Blood on the ground, blood when his fingers touched his forehead, and he was shrieking . . . wrestling on the lawn with his big brother Max, his forehead cut on a stone, and Max at first concerned and then getting sore . . . “Stop crying. Stop bawling. That’s enough! Boys don’t cry. What the hell are you, a girl? A girl?” And his own shrieking—“I’m not a girl! I’m not a girl!”—while Max taunted, Max laughed . . . Max laughing at him, Max making fun of him, his big brother Max, he couldn’t stand it; it was worse than the pain, the bleeding. Then he had known he had to hide everything inside himself, hide from Max. Keep Max outside himself, keep everybody outside himself—they could hurt too much. A man didn’t let anything hurt. And he was no girl. He was no girl to cry at blood. And his mother had come out of the house and folded his face in her skirts. A girl. A girl.
Judd shut it off. To fill the mental void came the image from yesterday. He had not counted on the blood. In all the months of planning, he had seen the thing as perfectly clean. They had even talked of it as neat, clean, talked of using the ether. And he had taken along the ether, yesterday morning, as if for his bird collecting, taken two whole cans, enough for a thousand birds. And put the two small cans into the side pocket of this car . . . Judd’s mind leaped back to the immediate scene—the cans! Had he forgotten them there, since they hadn’t been used? No, he knew for certain he had taken them out and placed them back on the shelf in his room. Late last night. Yet it was all Judd could do now to restrain himself from opening the door and checking.
At least, he noted, this sudden scare had ended his nausea . . . And why hadn’t they used the ether? To put the boy cleanly to sleep, and in his sleep to do as planned—in his deep sleep to slip the rope around his throat, Artie and he each holding an end of it—to pull, with equal force, equal participation, forever linked in that way, he and Artie. Instead, it had all happened so quickly once the kid was in the car. The car had scarcely turned the corner. It had happened while Judd had still been feeling that perhaps the whole final deed would not take place at all . . . Could Artie have sensed this last hesitation in him, and jumped the deed the way you ought sometimes to jump a girl before she can gather her resistance?
The rental man was putting his head inside to check the mileage. So outside nothing showed. They had washed it well enough. But it was a damn stupid thing. That damn stupid Emil had to come along offering the Gold Dust. It was a damn stupid thing to have taken the car into the driveway to wash. For that, Judd blamed himself. Last night’s washing should have been enough without the second going-over in the morning. Modern version of Lady Macbeth . . . out, out, damned spot!
What was the use of taking all the trouble to establish a fake identity, with hotel registrations and all that stuff, so as to rent a car and not use your own car, and then the next thing you do is let some dumb Swede chauffeur see you with it and tie you up with the strange car?
The only safety was, the question must never arise. For right now this car was being returned to anonymity; tomorrow it would be out in someone else’s hands.
“Fifty-three miles, Mr. Singer,” the rental man said. “Want to check it?”
Judd smiled, feeling refreshed. How natural the name sounded! This part—the carefully established false identity, the car—it was all his idea and it had worked perfectly. Artie would have to give him credit for that much. “What about the gas I bought?” Judd said. “I filled up the tank.” And he wished Artie had come in with him to savor this moment, to observe his complete self-possession. It was all there, the evidence of their deed was registered in the atoms of the vehicle, this inanimate object had experienced what they had experienced—the man had it standing before him as Judd stood; yet he could tell nothing, from either.
“Did you get a slip for the gas?”
“No, I didn’t bother, but you can see it’s practically full.” He had filled it at home from the pump in the driveway just before they had started out to find the victim; at least Emil hadn’t walked in on that.
With an air of creating good will in a customer, the man agreed to allow for a couple of gallons. “Call on us again,” he said, his upper lip folding back over his toothbrush mustache in a smile.
“I will,” said Judd, wishing Artie could hear that one.
“What took you so long?” Artie demanded before Judd could climb into the roadster.
“I made him give me an allowance for the gas.”
Instead of laughing, Artie snapped, “The longer you gab the better he knows you, you sucker.” Judd was getting in from the driver’s side, making Artie push over. And in that instant, in Artie’s anger, Judd suddenly felt the failure of the entire venture. It came over him blackly, fully—a grief, an anguish that nearly brought tears.
It was all closed now. They had turned in the car. The whole thing was a failure. The killing itself had been wasted. Even if the killing
