The three stared at the prints.
“Don’t you see?” Davis’s voice was low, tense. “Look, clear as can be. There she is. Look at her face, the contortion. You can almost hear her saying what she did say — and I heard — and that was, ‘Jump, you son of a bitch!’ So he did.”
McGraw picked up the prints, tore them into tiny pieces and scattered them in a large wastebasket. Then he walked slowly back to his desk, inserted some copy paper and typed out a name and address.
“Just lucky none of the cops up there heard her,” Davis said.
“Angie,” McGraw said, his voice barely under control. “I have an assignment for you tomorrow.” He handed her the folded copy paper. “I want you to see this man and have a talk with him. I’ll call him beforehand so he’ll know what it’s all about. Now, you’d better head home — take a cab and charge it — and get some rest.”
The three watched her go, then Davis said to McGraw:
“You’re not going to give her any more assignments after that, are you?”
“Not an assignment, really,” McGraw said. “More like an appointment. With the best psychiatrist I know.”
Sticks and Stones
by Alvin Fick
Jenkins pursued his revenge with methodical perfection — but method doesn’t always pay off.
It was with a feeling of exhilaration that he carried the first two hundred pounds of rocks up the stairs leading from the back porch to his apartment. The strain of his back muscles as he struggled under the weight of the cartons was part of a fierce joy.
When he finished, the man weighed the rocks on a bathroom scale and wrote the weight and the date in a pocket notebook. The two-story house on the outskirts of the small town of Castor was adjacent to woods on the east and in the rear. There were no near neighbors on the west side. Shielded as he was from the road by the house itself, no one saw him in his apparently innocent task.
From where he sat resting in the living room, the man could see the rocks in a corner of the dinette off the kitchen. For the hundredth time since he had decided eighteen years ago to kill Ray Beamish, he took a brittle, yellowed newspaper clipping from his wallet. It was dated June 18, 1958.
Jerome Jenkins knew the story word for word. The picture of the death car Beamish had been driving was seared in his mind, as was the picture of Elissa Deane.
Jenkins read the caption — Young high school senior auto crash victim on eve of graduation.
He remembered the scalding tears as he stood over Elissa Deane’s fresh grave on a perfect June day coined of rich green grass, sunshine and birdsong — tears for a love unspoken for a slender girl with tawny hair and laughing eyes. Stories circulated among the high school crowd of a wild ride in the country with a drunken Beamish at the wheel. Beamish told the sheriff’s deputies that the girl had been driving. When they couldn’t prove otherwise, he got off without a charge.
Jerome Jenkins remembered long after the rest of the people of Henderson had forgotten because the aching void within him had never been filled.
The raw hurt drove him inward, turning his college years into lonely, secluded study which earned him recognition on campus as “the little hermit,” and a master’s degree with top honors in mechanical engineering.
Once, after he moved to the West Coast, where he changed his name, he had taken a girl to dinner. She worked in the secretarial pool of the consultant engineering firm where he worked. The fragrance of her perfume, the sound of her laugh like leaf rustle and the gentle curve of her put him awash in memories so painful he feigned illness and took her home early. The incident ended his attempts at social life.
His family had lost touch with him. He never wrote or called. He never went back to Henderson. Burying himself in work seemed the best way to dull the saw edge of pain.
After nearly twelve years with his company, Wiley Associates, he was ordered to make a business trip to New York. On the morning of the day he was to return to Oregon he had a few hours before plane departure at Kennedy. It was then that something occurred to put the pink of new hurt into the old scar.
On his way back to the hotel after a walk, he stopped on impulse at a news kiosk which sold papers from the upstate area. He bought a copy of the Henderson Record and, while sitting on the edge of the bed after packing, read a news item which described plans for the upcoming reunion dinner and dance of the Class of ’58 of Henderson High.
He sat for a long time without moving. Finally he tore out the brief story, shoved it into his pocket and went down to the lobby, where he made a call from a pay station.
“Mrs. Kenyon?” Jenkins said into the phone. “I learned that you are co-chairperson of the Henderson High School Class of ’58 reunion. I’m trying to locate an old friend who graduated from Henderson that year — name of Ray Beamish. Can you give me his address from your mailing list?”
Back in his room he wrote a letter of resignation to Wiley Associates, and another to his bank asking that his money be sent to him at the hotel. He canceled his flight from Kennedy.
Then he went out to buy a gun.
He bought a box of .38 caliber ammunition, feeling that the exorbitant price he paid for the gun was well spent in view of the anonymity which prevailed in the transaction.
The days of waiting for the money passed swiftly. Much of the time was spent reviewing his plans. He would go to Castor, where Ray Beamish now lived. He felt sure he would not be recognized there since Castor was fifty miles from Henderson. He doubted that old acquaintances in Henderson would know him now.
He studied his appearance in the mirror. The premature baldness never bothered him. The companionship of women was self-proscribed and with it all traces of the vanity which sometimes accompany it. As part of shedding his old identity, he had worn a mustache from the time he went to the West Coast.
The loss of the thirty-five pounds of excess weight which had made him self conscious and reluctant to ask Elissa Deane for dates in high school gave him a nearly ascetic appearance. His fringe of hair was already iron gray and the glasses he wore — courtesy of years hunched over a drafting board and computer printouts — served to complete the transformation.
Jerome Jenkins doubted that his own mother would recognize him, if she were still living. And if his mother wouldn’t know him, neither would Ray Beamish. Beamish, the big football and basketball jock, never knew he existed among the three hundred students in their class.
When the check arrived from Oregon he cashed it at Chase-Manhattan and bought a bus ticket to Albany. From the Trailways terminal on Broadway in Albany he took a taxi west on Central Avenue, where he bought a used car. At first he thought of buying a station wagon, but changed his mind when it occurred to him that it would be more difficult to conceal a body in a station wagon than in the trunk of a sedan.
He drove to Castor with little feeling other than an awareness of order, of dimension, a fitting together of component parts which satisfied his engineer’s mind. At Castor he drove slowly past the Beamish home, a squarish two-story frame dwelling.
After taking a motel room twenty miles away, he began his campaign to gather information about Ray Beamish. Made discreetly and in an offhand manner, his inquiries showed that Beamish was employed in Schenectady at the General Electric plant, where he worked a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, a job he had held for thirteen years. His wife operated a beauty parlor in Castor.
All this he confirmed by observation. From a distance he watched them come and go. It gave him satisfaction to learn that the Beamishes were regular in their habits, even methodical.