John D. MacDonald
The Impulse
After it was over, they wanted to find out more about the man who had done this thing. They wanted to know how the mind had become twisted, how one human could wish such a violent, shattering death on another — selecting the victim by whim, on impulse. But little could be learned about him after his death. Certain bald facts were ascertained, but they yielded no clue to what had transpired in the stilled brain.
His name was Howard Elser. He died three weeks before his forty-first birthday. For the nine years before his death he had worked as a machinist at Bacon-Held, a firm that made cheap automotive parts for sale through accessory stores. He was five feet, eight inches tall, and weighed a hundred and fifty-five pounds. He had a wide, colorless, unmemorable face, small features, black thinning hair, rather large hands.
He had no friends. He was known to the men he worked with as a silent, competent man. They called him Elser. He lived alone at 1881 Bernice Street, in a small frame house in a decaying neighborhood in the north end of the city. Some of his neighbors knew him by sight, and some knew him by name. He had no car. The house had a large sturdy garage.
The first man to enter the garage after Elser’s death was Patrolman George C. Holmar, age twenty-four, Fourth Precinct. He died instantly in the violent explosion that distorted the garage roof, shattered windows in neighboring houses, and put a hot, jagged piece of steel in the left thigh of the sergeant who was ten feet beyond the open garage door.
After the demolition experts made sure that a trip-wire booby trap had caused the explosion, the investigation proceeded. Ancient metalworking equipment, carefully restored to good condition, was bolted to the cement floor of the garage. It was a well-equipped shop, small and flexible.
Among Elser’s papers they found his service record. He had enlisted in 1942 in Dayton. Ohio, had been assigned, after training, to an Ordnance Heavy Maintenance Battalion, and had been honorably discharged in 1945 as a Technical Sergeant. Social Security and personnel records at Bacon-Held showed he had worked at several large plants before the war.
Also among his papers were found three patents taken out at considerable expense during the past nine years. They were for intricate jig and fixture arrangements for machine tools. There had apparently been no attempt to market the patents, though an expert said they seemed feasible, if somewhat too intricate.
His house was quite bare, extremely clean and neat. He had an extensive library of technical books. In a savings account he had a little over eleven hundred dollars. In his home there were no personal letters, no photographs, no pictures, no radio, no television set.
With just these facts there would be no clue, even for the clinical psychiatrists. In a lockbox under his bed, however, they discovered something which gave them an opportunity to use the convoluted words of their profession.
It was a large scrapbook. The first clipping had been neatly pasted into the scrapbook nearly five years before. The last clipping was from the Ledger-Record of the day before Elser’s death.
Every clipping was about Charles Walker Wylie. Many of the clippings, particularly those including cuts of Mr. Wylie, were decorated in colored crayon with obscene drawings. Charles Walker Wylie, ex-Mayor, Chairman of the State Democratic Committee, owner of Station KKTV, director of several local corporations, stated that he had never heard of Elser, and could not imagine why Elser should have borne him any ill will.
Yet Elser was undoubtedly the man who phoned Charles Walker Wylie at his home at 8 P.M. on Thursday, June 24, and stated that Mr. Wylie would be killed the next day. And hung up.
The psychiatrists said that Elser very probably had no logical basis for his hatred of Wylie. They said that Wylie, with his position in the community, had become a symbol to Howard Elser. They spoke of transference, of father-image.
But as far as Jane Ann Kimball was concerned. Elser did not even know her. He did not know her name. He had never seen her, until he stood close behind her in that elevator in the Shannon Building.
Some of it was known. Some of it could be guessed.
It was known that Howard Elser phoned Bacon-Held on that Friday morning at nine-thirty and reported himself sick. It was the first workday he had missed in nine years. A housewife, sweeping her front porch, saw Elser walking toward the bus stop shortly after noon.
He was next seen on the top floor of the Shannon Building at about ten minutes of five. His thoughts during that June afternoon will never be known. Perhaps he walked through the city. Perhaps you saw him. a subtly shabby man in a gray suit, a brown felt hat with sweat-stained ribbon, a white shirt with a collar a bit too large for him, a clip-on bow tie, blue with a small white check pattern, black shoes with a high shine, though cracked across the instep. His hands were large, the nails rimmed with the ineradicable black of the machinist. He carried death in his pocket.
Charles Walker Wylie’s suite of offices on the top floor of the Shannon Building was his base of operations. He had a second office on the other side of town, an office with a glass slot that ran the length of one wall through which visitors could look down on the floodlighted organized confusion of the main studio of KKTV. As an ex-mayor of the city he had the use of a third office in the City Hall. But the southwest corner of the top floor of the Shannon Building was his business home. He was a likable, ambitious, excusably ruthless man who had once been the youngest mayor in the city’s history, and thought of himself as one of the city’s leading citizens.
His accountant and bookkeeper was in the adjoining office on one side, with his confidential clerk in the next office beyond. One girl, a Miss Moyer, performed all their secretarial duties. On the other side of Wylie’s office was the office of Miss Caroline Principi, his private secretary, confidante, and friend.
At quarter of five on June 25, Miss Moyer, a sallow and nervous girl, came in to chat with Caroline Principi. Through the open door to Mr. Wylie’s office, both girls could see the studio technicians preparing for Mr. Wylie’s midnight television broadcast.
Miss Moyer said, “Caroline, do you think maybe it’s a gag, all this threat business?”
“It’s no gag, Betsy. He wouldn’t do anything that cheap. Besides, it kind of worried him. You can’t tell what some nut will do.” She giggled, then, and shook her dark curls. “Anyhow, I bet a lot more people will stay up and tune in just to see if he’s all right.”
“You don’t seem worried.”
“I’m not. He called Chief Pepper last night. He’s had plain-clothes men with him all day long.”
“Who’d want to take a shot at him?”
Miss Principi looked darkly mysterious. “Oh, he’s stepped on a few toes.”
At that moment the corridor door opened and a man came in. brown felt hat in his hand.
Miss Principi surveyed the cheap gray suit, the cracked shoes, and. in half a second, had placed the man neatly in one of her many categories. “Yes?” she said.
The man pulled a package out of his pocket. “I’m supposed to put this on his desk,” the man said. Later Miss Principi described the package as being about the size of two packs of king-sized cigarettes laid side by side. It was in gray or pale blue paper, and tied with white string.
“Has it got something to do with the broadcast?”
“I guess so. They sent me over with it.”
“Well, go in and leave it, then.”
“Okay,” the man said. He trudged toward the open door to Wylie’s private office. Just as he reached the doorway, he turned and glanced at the two girls. Later Miss Principi said that his eyes looked wild when he turned.