And the words started flowing again.
And, finally, I gave her a smack. Openhanded, across the face, just to make her shut up.
Nothing that hadn’t happened a couple of times before.
Except she fell, and don’t ask me why because I didn’t hit her all that hard. And she landed wrong.
And now she was dead.
Did they still have the death penalty in Connecticut? I couldn’t remember.
It seemed to me there’d been a movement to abolish it, but I didn’t know if it got anywhere. I smoked a cigarette and thought about it. I remembered the bullets that Legs Diamond got, and I wondered how the state did it. A chair wired for electricity? A rope around your neck? A room full of gas?
Or just a lifetime in a prison cell?
Whether or not there was a death penalty, I didn’t have to worry about it. Not even a low-grade moron would plan to murder his wife by smashing her head in their own living room. There were plenty of rational ways to kill Ellen, and I’d had fantasies of most of them at one time or another, running them through my mind the way you do. Some were simple and some were elaborate, but none of them was anything like what had just happened.
So I had not committed premeditated murder. What would a jury call it? Second-degree murder at worst, temporary insanity at best, with some kind of manslaughter in the middle, and the most likely.
So I wouldn’t get the chair, or the rope, or gas, or life — whatever was dispensed in this state. I’d catch either a short-to-middling prison sentence or an acquittal. All I had to do was pick up the telephone and call the local police and inform them that I, Donald Barshter, had just accidentally killed my wife. They would do the rest. From that point on it would be out of my hands, a judicial tug of war between the district attorney’s office and my own lawyer. I could relax and let them figure out what they were going to do to me.
I reached for the phone, I held the receiver to my ear with my left hand and fitted my index finger into the little hole marked O for Operator. Then I took a deep breath.
And stopped cold. And took my index finger out of O for Operator and put the receiver back in the cradle.
This picture came to me. It was a picture of my little world with everything gone right — an acquittal, say, or the suspended sentence they give you that says you’re a solid citizen who made a mistake and please don’t do it again. I wondered how many people would be likely to buy an insurance policy from Donald Barshter, wife-killer. I wondered how many of the friends Ellen and I had shared would ask me over for a few drinks and a rubber or two of bridge. I thought about the way the good folks of the town would stare at me on the streets and the way the mothers would chain their daughters home when I was walking around.
I thought of courtrooms, jails and newspaper photos. I thought of all the little details that completed the picture. All I had to do was call the police and I would make that picture my life.
But what was the alternative? Ellen looked up at me with a flat empty stare. She was dead, I had killed her — and the dumbest cop in town could figure out that much with his eyes shut. I couldn’t get Ellen’s blood out of the carpet, couldn’t patch her head with plastic wood. I was her husband and that made me suspect number one from the start. No matter how cute an alibi I cooked up, the police would pick it to pieces and laugh in my face.
So I reached for the phone again. And stopped.
Donald Barshter, thirty-two-year-old representative for one of the country’s leading life insurance companies, was a goner. The life he had been living for those thirty-two years was over. He was finished, washed up, through.
Well, to hell with him. I still had a chance.
It was Friday night. In a little less than half an hour it would be midnight. Ellen had been dead almost an hour. Her skin was already growing cold. I still sat on the edge of our bed. I was working my way through the last cigarette from the pack.
I had picked a bad night to kill her. There was the unimpressive sum of fifty-three dollars in my wallet and a few bucks in change in various pockets here and there — which was not nearly enough.
I got rid of the cigarette, went to my desk and began adding up assets with paper and pencil. There was fourteen hundred in the checking account, thirty-five hundred in the savings account. There was the cash surrender value of a few life policies, a couple thousand tied up in stocks, a little more in mutual funds. But there was no time to surrender the insurance and no time to sell the securities. I had forty-nine hundred dollars in cash assets and I couldn’t get to them until Monday morning.
Since the banks opened at nine, I had fifty-seven hours to kill. Fifty-seven hours to spend at home with Ellen, who was dead.
I went downstairs and made myself a cup of instant coffee. I found a fresh pack of cigarettes and smoked one while I drank the coffee. Then I came back upstairs and returned to the bedroom. I picked up Ellen’s body and carried her to her closet. She was heavy but not hard to carry. I placed her on the closet floor and closed the door on her. The room was much emptier without her body in the middle of the floor. It also made her death that much less real. And thinking that much easier.
Fifty-seven hours. The daytime hours would be the hard ones, with the phone ringing and the doorbell ringing and too many people to talk with, too many explanations to invent. Nights would be easier.
And, because there was nothing else to do for the time being, I got into my own bed and slept. There was a lot of tossing and turning before sleep came. There were hectic dreams later, but when I awoke I couldn’t remember them.
There were two phone calls for Ellen Saturday morning and one during the afternoon. I told three women that she was out, that I didn’t know when she’d be back, that I’d have her call them. I made one call on my own. We were supposed to have dinner with three other couples Saturday night, after which we were scheduled to play bridge at somebody’s house and spend a dull evening with them. I called Grace Dallman and told her we wouldn’t be able to make it, that an aunt of Ellen’s in North Carolina had died and that Ellen was catching a train that evening for Charlotte. The funeral would be held Monday and she wanted to get there early.
It was a handy story. Ellen actually did have an aunt in North Carolina, a noisy and unpleasant woman who had never been sick a day in her life as far as I knew. But I liked the story and stuck to it that evening when a few more of Ellen’s friends called up. I told them all that she would be back Tuesday or Wednesday. They were all properly sympathetic.
So I spent Saturday night watching television and nursing a can or two of beer. I have no idea what I watched on the twenty-one-inch silver screen. It was a way to pass time and nothing more. For the time being I wanted to do as little thinking or planning as I possibly could. That would come later when my mind was a little looser and the fact of Ellen’s death a little further removed from reality. Any thinking now would be colored too strongly by fear, shot through too thoroughly by worry. There was time.
I went to sleep at two, with the fifty-seven hours pared to thirty-one. I slept until ten and cut the time down to twenty-three hours. We were getting right down to the wire.
I scrambled a pair of eggs and fried bacon for Sunday breakfast. I smoked the day’s first cigarette with coffee and thought about one thing I’d been consciously avoiding. Now it was time to think about it.
Because the killing of Ellen wasn’t manslaughter anymore. The killing wasn’t manslaughter and it wasn’t second-degree murder — it had ceased to be either the minute I stuffed Ellen’s corpse in her closet and decided to leave her to heaven. Now it was Murder One, the big one, and I was a murderer in the first and foremost degree.