“Well, then,” said the portly man, “I suppose I’ll just have to talk to you myself.” And before I knew what was going on he had slipped past me and was standing in the living room, looking around with a great display of admiration and murmuring, “Lovely, lovely. A really lovely room.”
“Now, see here—” I began.
“Sampson,” said the portly man, extending a firm plump hand. “Encyclopedia Universicana. Little woman at home?”
“She’s sick,” I said, ignoring the hand. “I was just fixing some broth for her. Chicken broth. Perhaps some other—”
“I see,” said the portly man. He frowned as though thinking things over, and then smiled and said, “Well sir, you go right ahead. That’ll give me a chance to set the presentation up.”
With that, he sat himself down on the sofa, right where Janice had been when I first came in. I opened my mouth, but he opened his briefcase faster, dove in, and emerged with a double handful of paper. Sheets and sheets of paper, all standard typewriter size, all gaily colored in green and blue, prominently featuring photographs of receding rows of books. SAVE! roared some of the sheets of paper in block print. FREE! screamed others, in red. TRIAL OFFER! shrieked still more, in rainbow hues
Portly Mr. Sampson leaned far forward, puffing a bit and began to arrange his papers in rows upon the rug, just in front of his pointed-toe, highly polished black shoes. “Our program,” he said, smiling at me, and lowered his head to distribute more sheets of paper over the floor.
I stared at him. Not five feet from where he was sitting my late wife lay sprawled upon the kitchen floor. In the bedroom chaos was the order of the day. In just under an hour I would be leaving here to catch my train back to the city. I would leave the pistol — wiped clean — in some litter basket in town, knowing full well some enterprising soul would shortly pick it out again, and that by the time the police got hold of it, if they ever did, it would have committed any number of crimes past this current one. And then I would fly to Chicago and see Karen. Lovely Karen. Dear darling Karen.
And this miserable man was trying to sell me encyclopedias!
I opened my mouth. Quite calmly I said, “Get out.”
He looked up at me, smiling quizzically. “Eh?”
“Get out,” I said.
The smile flickered. “But — you haven’t seen—”
“Get out!” I repeated, this time a bit louder. I pointed at the door, my forearm upsetting a table lamp. “Get out! Just — just — just get out!”
The miserable creature began to sputter: “Well, but — see here—”
“GET OUT!”
I dashed forward and grabbed all his papers, crumpling them this way and that, gathering them in my arms and hurried with them to the front door. In turning the knob I dropped a lot of them, but the remainder I hurled outside, and they fluttered leaflike to the lawn. I kicked at those that had fallen around my feet, and turned to glare at Mr. Sampson as he scuttled from the house. He wanted to bluster, but he was a bit too startled and afraid of me to say anything.
I slammed the door after him and took a deep breath, telling myself I must be calm. I lit a cigarette. I lit another cigarette. Irritably I stubbed the first one in a handy ashtray and lit a third. “Tcha!” I cried, and mashed them all out, and stormed back to the bedroom, where I tore into the closet with genuine pleasure. Once the closet was a hopeless wreck I ripped the covers from the bed and dumped the mattress on the floor. Then I stood back, breathing hard, to survey my handiwork.
And the doorbell rang.
“If that is Mr. Sampson,” I muttered to myself, “by heaven I’ll—”
It rang again. We had an incredibly loud doorbell in that house. Odd I’d never noticed it before.
It rang a third time as I was on my way to answer, and I almost shouted at it to shut up, but managed to bring myself under control by the time I reached the door. I even remembered to open it no more than an inch.
A tiny girl in a green uniform stood looking up at me; she bore a box of cookies.
Life, I reflected at that moment, is unkind and cruel. I said, “We already bought some, little girl,” and softly closed the door.
And the telephone screamed.
I leaned against the door and let my nerves do whatever they wanted. But I knew I couldn’t stay there; the phone would only make that noise again. And again. And again and again and again until finally I would have to give up and answer it. The only sensible move would be to answer it right away. Then it wouldn’t make that noise any more.
A good plan. I was full of good plans. I went over and picked up the phone.
“Hiya, neighbor!” shouted a male voice in my ear. “This is Dan O’Toole, of WINK. Can you Top That Mop?”
“What?”
“This is the grand new radio game everybody’s talking about, neighbor. If you can Top That—”
I suppose he kept on talking. I don’t know. I hung up.
I caught myself about to light a cigarette, and made myself stop. I also forced myself to be calm, to think rationally, to consider the circumstances. The house, except for my own ragged breathing, was blessedly silent.
With waning fervor I studied once more the tableau I was leaving for the police. The dead woman in the kitchen, and the ransacked house. All that remained was to fix the back door to make it look as though the burglar had forced his way in.
It seemed as though my plan should work perfectly well. It really did seem that way.
Slowly I trudged out to the kitchen. For some reason I no longer believed in my plan, but was merely going through the motions because there was nothing else to do. All of life was involved in a great conspiracy against me, and I didn’t know why. Could every day be like this in the suburbs? Was it possible that Janice’s reckless spending had simply been a form of escape, a kind of sublimated satisfaction in lieu of biting people like Mr. Sampson and Top That Mop?
At the back door I paused, listening for doorbells and phone bells and church bells and jingle bells, but there was only silence. So I opened the door, and a short round woman was standing there, her finger halfway to the bell button. She was our next-door neighbor, she wore a flour-stained apron, and she had an empty cup in her other hand.
I gaped at her. She looked at me in puzzled surprise, and then her gaze moved beyond me and came to rest on something behind me, at floor level. Her eyes widened. She screamed and let go of the empty cup and went dashing away.
I went rigid. I stared at the cup, watching it in helpless fascination. It seemed to hang there in midair for the longest while, long after its owner had run completely out of sight, and then, quite slowly at first, it began to fall. It fell faster, and faster, and at long last it splattered itself with a terrible crash on the patio cement.
And when that cup splattered, so did I. I went all limp, and sat down with a thud on the kitchen floor.
And there I sat, waiting. I sat waiting for the census taker and the mailman with a Special Delivery letter, for the laundry man and the Railway Express driver, for the man from the cleaners, a horde of Boy Scouts on a paper drive, a political candidate, five wrong numbers, the paper boy, the police, the milkman, a lady collecting for a worthy charity, a call from the tax assessor’s office, a young man working his way through college selling magazines...
Good Night! Good Night!
Pain.
Pain in his chest, and in his stomach, and in his leg. And a girl was singing to him, her voice too loud. And it was dark, with shifting blue-gray forms in the distance.
I’m Don Denton, he thought. I’ve hurt myself.
How? How have I hurt myself?
But the girl was singing too loudly, and it was impossible to think, and figure it out. And his terrific visual memory — so great a help to him as an actor — was of no help to him now. He felt himself falling away again, blacking out again, and with sudden terror he knew he wasn’t fading into sleep, he was fading into death.