“You’ll get a chance to tell us all about your hard times,” Hacker promised him. “I can’t wait to hear.”
P.T. was jigging up and down. “You boys do good work. By God, made me proud to be part of it!”
Hacker squatted beside Skovich, still sprawled half-sitting against the fence. “That was real teamwork up there, partner.” He leaned close in the dusk. “We held him and we got him.”
Skovich eyed him pleasantly. “Like to have a little talk with you, Terry. Remember up there? Remember hearing me say don’t drop him?”
Hacker looked puzzled. “I didn’t drop him. We all came down together.”
“Oh no. I distinctly felt you drop him, even after I asked you not to. Wanted to inflict pain, you said, if we caught him.”
“But he’s not hurt, Hank. Little shook up, but you saw me. I never laid a hand on him.”
“Inflict some pain. Well, you did. Forget about me getting through the toothache. You dropped him, Terry. On my foot.” Sadly, he indicated his left one. “I’m pretty sure it’s broken.”
Hacker sat down hard on the cement. “Aw, jeez.”
“Try to remember the next time,” Skovich went on patiently. “Listen when I tell you something, that’s all I ask. Just listen, okay?”
The Sleepwalker
by Donald Olson
© 1996 by Donald Olson
In this age of the personal computer few authors remain who still work on a typewriter. When EQMM asked Donald Olson for a computer disk and an extra “hard copy” of his latest story, we discovered that the author works on the machine he’s been using for decades and keeps only a carbon copy of the work. It seems fitting that Mr. Olson should do so, for his stories have an old-world charm.
Lyman Fox is dead. As I read his lengthy obituary in the Times, replete with fulsome testimonials to his worthiness, I recalled with a mix of emotions our last visit together.
“You’re looking well, James,” he’d said, and might have added, as the less tactful often do, “for your age.”
I’d been an occasional patient of Lyman’s for about two years, having sought him out for some trifling ailment. I’d cultivated his friendship and shared the infrequent drink or dinner whenever I was in town and he could spare the time from his busy practice and active social life.
I’d invited Lyman to dinner at a little Italian restaurant not far from his office, and once seated I said, “There’s something I’d like to show you, but first, if it won’t bore you too much, I’d like to tell you a little story from my past.”
Lyman Fox had a confident, incisive way of speaking that went with his mature good looks and faultless grooming. “Bore me? No chance, old boy. I know hardly anything about you. Most of my patients can’t wait to tell me their life stories, often at grueling length.”
“I’ll spare you that,” I promised. It was true, Lyman knew little about me aside from my being a retired college professor who spent most of my time at my cottage upstate. I hadn’t wanted to say anything about the subject that had occupied my mind for so long until I felt certain I wasn’t riding a lame hobbyhorse; it now seemed pointless to delay any longer.
I proceeded to tell him about my family, who had been very poor indeed, with little time or inclination for anything beyond the struggle to make ends meet, especially at the tail end of the Depression, the period of which I was speaking; circumstances being as they were, I’d had no hope whatsoever of realizing my ambition to go to college. At that time scholarships were not so readily available as they are now.
“One summer day,” I said, “soon after my high school graduation, a big black car — Packard, as I recall — pulled up in front of our little house on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. The chauffeur opened the door for a tiny gray-haired lady who marched up onto the porch where I was helping my mother shell peas for our supper. I can still remember the lilac pattern of the woman’s dress and her wide-brimmed white straw hat. She introduced herself and told us why she was calling.
“ ‘As you may know,’ she said, ‘I’m on the school board. James’s teachers have told me all about him. Now I’m a very wealthy woman thanks to my late husband’s enterprise, and I like to invest in promising young people. I understand you have no plans for college, James?’
“I was much too shy to say so; my mother was not. ‘We know how much James wants to go to college. We know how bright he is. But there’s no way on heaven’s earth we could afford to send him.’
“The woman nodded. ‘Well, that is why I’m here. I’m prepared to underwrite, wholly without obligation, four years’ tuition for James at the state university. I hope you’ll grant me this privilege.’
“We were stunned. I remember my mother’s astonishment and the struggle between her pride and her ardent desire for my advancement. My would-be benefactress quickly overrode Mother’s uncertainty. The verbal contract was agreed upon. ‘All I ask in return,’ said this fairy-godmother from across the tracks, ‘is that you apply yourself, James, and do your best to fulfill my faith in you.’ ”
In all modesty, I think I can say I kept my end of the bargain and can look back on a fairly distinguished career.
“I’ve never forgotten that woman,” I told Lyman Fox, “or the immense debt I owe to her. She was a truly remarkable person. If she hadn’t stepped out of that Packard on that long-ago June day, I might have spent my life in the juice-bottling plant, like my father.”
“Very inspiring,” agreed Lyman, sipping his Chianti. “Pity there aren’t more like her today.”
“Well, it’s different now. The most mediocre student usually has access to higher education.” I’d deliberately withheld the woman’s name, nor did I reveal it now as I told Lyman the end of the story — so far as it concerned my long-dead good angel.
“You can imagine how distressed I was when she died, some twenty years ago. You see, she was murdered.”
“Good God.”
“Yes. One might have expected her to be the least likely victim of murder, despite her wealth.”
Lyman clearly found this an intriguing twist to my story. He asked me how it had happened and I told him a young man had broken into her house in the middle of the night and stabbed her to death.
Lyman’s wine remained untasted now and his face grew solemn. “How ghastly. Robbery, was it?”
“No. Nothing was taken. There was no apparent motive.”
“Was the killer ever apprehended?”
“Oh yes. The very next morning.”
“Extraordinary.”
“More than that. Bizarre. If it happened today, the TV people would have a field day with it. This all happened in a little town on the Canadian border. There was a trial. The murderer, although clearly guilty, was acquitted.”
“Lack of evidence?” Lyman asked. “Legal technicality?”
“You might say that. The young man’s defense was that he committed the murder while sleepwalking.”
At this point Lyman’s rapt expression acquired a sudden guarded alertness, his dark eyes probing into me as if his field were psychiatry and he were trying to gauge the degree of my madness. “Surely not a viable defense,” he said flatly.
“On the contrary. The young man’s story was that he’d been afflicted with somnambulism all his life. Scores of witnesses and a string of eminent physiologists testified to this fact. As did his wife, of course. It was she who’d called the police. She’d awakened to find her husband asleep on the bed, fully dressed and covered in bloodstains. She knew that something frightful must have happened. As it transpired, the young man, who remembered nothing of the event, had risen in his sleep, dressed himself in shirt and jeans, took a butcher knife from a kitchen drawer and walked barefoot three miles to the old lady’s estate on the edge of town, crawled through an open window, and murdered her in her bed. No one heard a thing.”