dropped his lip to look contrite. “I know,” he said solemnly, and even felt a touch of sorrow. “Poor Paulie. Just the other day I took him on for a game, on the court. You know, for a kid his age he was real good—real strong arm muscles, had quite a smash. He must have put up a real fight with those fiends. I even asked him about buying a racket like his for Billy. Where’s Billy? Upstairs? How’s he taking it?”
“I tried to keep him distracted,” his mother said, drawing in her breath sharply. “But it was such an upsetting day I gave him his dinner upstairs. I’m taking Billy to Charlevoix first thing in the morning. I’m getting him away from here; there’s no telling what kind of madman is loose!”
At her words, Artie felt alive, glittery. On the table, they had their dessert: fresh strawberries. Mumsie hadn’t touched hers. “Hanging is too good for a fiend like that!” she was saying, her eyes fiery with indignation. “I don’t believe in capital punishment, but in a case like this, if they catch him, I think he ought to be tarred and feathered and then strung from a lamppost! Oh!” She shuddered at her own words. Artie reached for her dish and helped himself. “Artie!” But her little sigh admitted her adoration for her incorrigible Artie, admitted that she had ordered the early strawberries especially for him. “At least sit down! Did you have any dinner?”
“I ate at the house. I’m sorry,” he apologized to Horse-teeth. “I guess I was upset and excited about this case.” He told all about his frat brother, the reporter who had identified the body.
“Poor Mrs. Kessler, she’s prostrate, I read,” Lewis’s bride put in, her cowlike eyes on Mumsie.
Horse-teeth remarked that it was the war, the destruction that had taken place in the war. Life meant nothing any more.
“Sure, after all that mass killing, human life becomes only an abstraction,” Artie pronounced, feeling Jocko would have enjoyed this, and diving into a second dish that Clarice had set before him, without neglecting to brush her bosom close to his face.
“What do you know about mass killing?” Lewis, the war veteran, demanded of Artie. “You were just a kid.” Big hero.
“That’s exactly when the effect is strongest,” Artie replied, glittering at the guest. Bet she’d wet her pants before he was through. “What did we play?” he demanded rhetorically. “Kill the Huns! Mow them down! We even had a scoreboard at school, how many Huns were killed! Hey! I forgot to tell you—I’ve got the inside news! They arrested a couple of the teachers! Steger and Wakeman! It isn’t in the papers yet. Sid Silver told me.” He gazed around, reaping their reactions. “I think they’re on the right track. You better watch out for Billy, Mums. That school is full of perverts.”
“Kiddo! Watch it,” his older brother Lewis sniffed, while his father looked pained. James, however, gave him a funny, keen look. James knew too damn much.
His father reminded Artie that it was unfair to come to hasty conclusions merely because a teacher was being questioned. It could have been any stupid brute.
“Oh, no! Take the ransom letter in the paper,” Artie exclaimed. “That’s no illiterate crook! That’s the letter of an educated man, also of someone who can type. Say, they ought to check every typewriter in that school!”
And in that instant, Artie saw the goddam portable still sitting in Judd’s room. Gobbling a last spoonful of strawberries, he leaped from the table.
“Date?” his mother asked.
“Yah. Just remembered.”
“Lucky girl,” Mumsie smiled. “You at least remember your engagements with her.”
“That’s the way it is; we’ve got to resign ourselves.” Horse-teeth joined in a tolerant sigh over the younger generation.
“Myra?” his mother asked. “Or would it be violating the etiquette of our flaming youth for a mother to ask?”
“It’s a new frail; you don’t know her,” he said. And on the spur of the moment added, “Ruth Goldenberg.” That way she couldn’t check up. “Brilliant babe—all A’s, and a good dancer. Folks are nobodies.”
He rushed to the phone.
Only to hear Artie’s voice, breathless, talking in their private code, gave back to Judd a sense of life; even if there were danger, it relieved the caged feeling he had had at the table—the sense of being defenseless there, alone, open to be caught. “I saw a bargain in portable typewriters,” Artie was saying, and Judd felt alert again, to match Artie, to catch the hidden meaning. “Thought you might want to pick one up with me, two blocks south of Twelfth Street.” That meant two hours before twelve, Artie would be over. And portable typewriters? Judd gasped. Another error! His! And Artie had spotted it. The portable on which he’d typed the ransom letter, Artie leaning over him, suggesting phrases to make it sound real businesslike. The typewriter could give them away! If the glasses were traced to him, and the house searched, the portable found . . . They’d have to get rid of it tonight.
“Thanks,” he said. “I was thinking of getting rid of my old portable at that. Two south of Twelfth. I’ll go along with you.”
As Judd came back into the dining room, preoccupied, Max remarked, “Your chum again?” Max never let up about him and Artie. “You two guys are like a couple of gabby dames. Spend the whole day together and the minute they get home they’ve got to call each other up! I never could figure out what two guys have got to call each other up about all the time. Weren’t you with him all day today? And yesterday?” Max said it jovially, but there was that smutty look back of his eyes. Ever since a certain story had got out about Judd and Artie, a couple of summers before, at the Straus’s summer place in Charlevoix, Max had never let up. “What were you guys doing all day long?”
“We went birding.”
“I’ll bet. Chickens,” he said with his fat chuckle, but with an air of letting it go. After all, Judd would be off to Europe soon and that would finally separate him from Artie. Max put a big cigar in his mouth, like the old man, and the two of them resumed talking business.
Judd looked at them, his father and brother, feeling acutely the “who are you?” that he sometimes wanted to blurt out. When his mother had been alive, there had at least been someone for him, at the table, when the “men” got off on their business dealings.
Sure, that same old story about himself and Artie was why the old man had been so easy about the trip to Europe. What a joke it would have been on them if the ransom had been collected and Artie had joined him abroad! Not that Artie still couldn’t do it if he wanted to—Artie certainly had the money.
“Too bad Artie isn’t going with you,” Max’s voice banged in; it was frightening how that stupe seemed to sense his thoughts. “You two could have gone birding all over the place. I’ll bet you’d have picked up some rare specimens.”
Judd didn’t answer; but as Max, chortling, went back to the business talk, the whole scene of yesterday flooded Judd’s mind. Birding, yes, birding for a rare specimen. Parking the rented car under the tree shade where the branches hung low to give a natural cover, so that from the school entrance the kids could hardly see anyone sitting in the car. And sitting motionless, hushed, just as when birding, until you are part of the landscape itself—a bush, a tree, not hidden really, but a natural part of the environment. Sitting quietly in the car you became part of the street, and you waited for the flock to pour out of the school
