I said, «What about the shower bit? I never knew Giles to shower in the middle of the day.»
«You don’t know much,» said Eunice. «He’d shower anytime if he had a woman with him.»
I paused a moment. «Are you suggesting he had a woman with him, and he took a shower and fell and killed himself?»
«Why not? And the woman, not wanting to be involved, for which one can’t blame her, quietly eases out and lets someone else find him.»
«And his clothes,» I said. «Would she scatter them around, after he had taken them off and folded them all neatly? Why improve on him?»
«Because the poor mutt might have thought that he folded everything neatly to make an impression on her and that if he had been taking a shower by himself, he would have thrown them about. So she threw them about to make it look as though no one had been there but Giles.»
I was rattled. My God, it made sense. «Do you think that happened?»
«Not really. Any woman who knew Giles would know that was how the clothes were supposed to be, and any woman who didn’t know Giles would be far too panicky to fool around with the clothes. She would just get the hell out of the room.»
«Then all this stuff about a woman with him doesn’t amount to anything. Why do you bring it up?» I was irritated.
«Because any lawyer would, and by the time he was through, your notion of deducing murder from messed-up clothes would be shredded into nonexistence. I’m showing you. Besides—»
«Yes.»
She seemed lost in thought for a moment, then she said, «Besides, I don’t think poor Giles had a girl with him anyway. It is very hard for him to find anyone to cooperate with him. Except me, of course.»
The natural question would have been: Why not? I hung back, though, and didn’t ask it. For one thing it would have been a clearly prurient intrusion on someone’s private sex life, and for another, I wasn’t sure I cared to know.
But Eunice laughed and exercised her frightening ability to see what I must be thinking. «Of course,» she said, «you want to know what I’m talking about, but you feel it isn’t gentlemanly to ask. Don’t hesitate. I don’t give a damn whether you know or not. In these rotten permissive days, it doesn’t matter if everyone knows.
«Look, when I met Giles, he was a virgin. He was incapable of sex in the ordinary routine sense of the word—I’m using ‘routine’ to cover a broad territory—and he’s still incapable of it. He had to be babied into it, and I mean that literally. We stumbled onto that fact more or less accidentally as a result of what teenagers might call ‘fooling around’ and it worked so well that we got married.
«The thing is, he has to be undressed while he moves his arms and legs aimlessly and makes little gurgling sounds. Except that I guess I should use the past tense. It wasn’t easy, but he moved his body in such a way as to help, though he pretended he wasn’t. I had to make soothing noises to him and take him to the bathroom and bathe him carefully, sometimes by shower, sometimes in the tub, depending on how much time we had. Afterward I had to dry him, powder him, right down to the Q-sticks for the folds in his outer ear. I had to pretend to suckle him and then, finally, he’d be ready for sex in the ordinary sense of the word. He could be pretty good at it if all the preliminaries went well.»
I sat there frozen with horror. The man had occupied an adjacent bedroom to mine for over two months—and I had babied him, too, in my way. He had come in for help, like a little boy to his father, and, intellectually, I had fathered him as, more physically, Eunice had mothered him.
A big hulk like that, with a mustache like a black forest.
God, height and weight and size and bulk could be as great a burden as lack of all of them. What was it like to look out over the heads of the world and to reject the role that sheer size had thrust upon you?
Eunice said, «For God’s sake, Just, don’t sit there looking censorious. If you want to know, I liked it. I liked every bit of it; it turned me on, too. Even if I hadn’t, the end paid off. So what’s to complain about? Since it’s between consenting adults, who’s hurt? Your sense of propriety? How do you get to the point? A drink, a giggle, a kiss on the shoulder, the slipping of fingers up a thigh?»
«I don’t drink,» I said. «Listen, is this the way Giles would want it with anyone?»
«It’s the only way. Nothing else will interest him. Nothing else will bring him to the point.» She grinned sourly. «If you know what I mean.»
«Well, then, if you undress him, what do you do with the clothes?»
«I thought you’d ask. I fold them neatly in a cute little pile. Otherwise, he cries; I mean cries. I suppose it all traces back to his real mother, to the kind of compulsively neat object she was, and to whatever games they played.» She sighed. «The hell with it.»
«And he never went to a psychiatrist?»
«Why should he? It gave him pleasure and it didn’t hurt him, or get in his way, either personally or professionally. Would you go to a psychiatrist to be cured of your vile impulse to eat when you’re hungry?»
«And you liked it all?»
«Who knows what you like?»
She was right. I had to stop playing Puritan.
I said, «But what went wrong? If you like the game and he likes the game, why is he a son of a bitch now? Has he changed?»
«Of course he’s changed. He found out he likes variety. You have to go through the same routine every time, but he likes to have different mothers, to experience different touches, different mouth odors, different nipples, who knows what? There was that bookstore owner downtown, the broad one. Now there’s a motherly type for you.»
Look who’s getting into the judgment business now, I thought. And then it occurred to me that Eunice and Roseann were alike in many ways. If Giles liked one, why not the other?
I said, «You mean that they played the game, too?»
«I didn’t take photographs, Just, but let’s say they did. Bronstein, that’s her name. Yes, they did. I’m satisfied with the evidence, even if a jury might not be.»
«Do you think Roseann Bronstein might have been here in the room with him?»
«Is she at the convention? She’s a bookseller; she ought to be.»
«I met her in the hotel yesterday,» I admitted.
«Then she might have been.»
I said, «But she’d know enough not to mess up the clothes, whether he died by accident or she killed him.»
Eunice said, with sour reluctance, «Yes, I suppose she would.»
Then she said, «Well, never mind that. After Giles discovered the pleasure of variety, Bronstein didn’t last long with him either. He left her and went after anything female, I think. And it was only after he was frustrated by enough refusals that he turned to me.»
«Was he always refused?»
«Just about always. Eventually, though, he discovered he could buy cooperation and for the last six months he never turned to me once. The son of a—»
She let the phrase hang and sat there, shaking her head.
I said, «Does he always play the game the same way, all the way, with everybody?»
«What do you mean?»
«Well, look, suppose he found someone at the convention. There are bound to be some who wouldn’t mind.»
«Yes,» she said, «some of us crazies. Yes.»
«Very well. He got some girl at the last minute, but he hasn’t cleared the situation very well with her; he might even have brought back a professional. Would he be desperate enough to accept some shortcuts? I mean, would it be all right to undress him but not to fold his clothes, as an example?»
«I’ve never witnessed the game with anyone else,» said Eunice, «so I can’t give strong evidence. I’m pretty sure that he wouldn’t play. He would cry and he wouldn’t go to the bathroom and you can’t take him to the bathroom if he doesn’t want to go.»