Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 39, No. 5, November 1976

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.

His first close look at Ray Beamish came when he followed him to a bowling alley where Beamish bowled in a GE daytime league. Unnoticed in the back of the spectator seats, he watched him bowl. It was not until Beamish opened a can of beer that he felt any emotion. Jenkins clenched his jaw until a knot of muscle worked under his ear. For the first time since he learned of the accident taking Elissa Deane’s life, his smoldering hatred erupted into flame. He nearly leaped to his feet to confront the tall, dark-haired Beamish.

There was a metallic taste in his mouth from the flow of adrenalin as he watched the heavy-set man nurse the beer for an hour. Jenkins slumped in his seat. If Beamish had given up his heavy drinking habits, his actions would be more stable, more predictable.

After a month in the shadow of Ray Beamish, Jerome Jenkins believed he had enough information to conclude his mission successfully. He was about to activate the final phase of his plan when something happened which caused him to change his blueprint.

On a sunny mid-morning after he checked on Ray Beamish’s arrival home from his job, and Rose Beamish’s departure for the beauty shop, Jenkins drove by the Beamish home the second time that day. He scanned the front of the house carefully. A for rent sign had been placed in an upstairs window.

He went on by to a crossroad and out into the country where, allowing himself the luxury of some emotional stimulus, he drove to the winding road near Henderson where Elissa Deane had met her death. He pulled off on the shoulder where a stone bridge arched over a creek. He got out and sat on the bank. Autumn had already fired the hills with color but his mind was closed to beauty alive. All he could see was beauty broken and dead on the creek bottom. It was here the car had struck the abutment, rolled over and ejected Elissa.

The irony of her death and the needlessness of it struck him with fresh anguish. Her injuries, while serious, were not fatal, but she had been knocked unconscious and had drowned in less that a foot of water while Ray Beamish slept in drunken stupor on the creek bank. That was where a passing motorist found him, bleeding slightly from cuts on his hands.

As he sat there he thought of the gun hidden in the trunk of his car. With the cold self possession of an executioner honing his axe, he began to evolve in his mind a more fitting death for Ray Beamish — one which would wed poetry to justice.

That evening he phoned Rose Beamish after her husband had left for work, explaining that he had seen the sign in the window, and had made an inquiry to learn that she and her husband owned the building.

“I’d be interested in renting,” Jenkins said slowly, “if it’s furnished.”

“Yes, it is, and it’s vacant right now.” Rose Beamish sounded delighted, and when he said he would be away for a few days she agreed to let him stop by that night to see the apartment.

“It’s bright and sunny. Oh, you’ll like it.” She turned on the charm.

“I’ll be right out,” Jerome Jenkins said.

Rose Beamish was in her mid-thirties, short, and obviously cared too much for sweets and starchy foods. Her hair was short and was sculpted to her head so tightly it looked like a burnished red helmet.

Jenkins studied the room arrangement of the Beamish apartment while giving the impression he was absorbed in the woman’s gushing flow of talk. His engineer’s eye recorded the location and thickness of partitions. As they went up the back stairs, Rose Beamish asked about Jenkins’ type of employment.

“I’m an advance man doing a survey for the placement of fast food franchises in the upstate area. Probably I’ll be working out of here for the better part of a year. I’ll be in and out a lot. You’ll see me lugging boxes of research material. Occasionally I’ll be away for several days. I assure you I’ll be a quiet tenant.”

“Oh, I’m glad for that. My husband works nights and sleeps days. We’re looking for someone like you. Are you — are you married?”

Jenkins stared at her. “No. No wife, no children. Nothing to keep your husband from getting the sleep he surely deserves.”

She nodded like a small mechanical doll.

“The room arrangement seems much the same as in your apartment,” he said.

“It’s identical except our bedroom is under your dinette.” She paused. “It’s rare that the two of us are in the bedroom together.” Her voice trailed off and she blushed beneath her makeup. “I mean with Ray working nights and me busy days.”

He paid her the first month’s rent. Two days later he moved in with his luggage, timing his arrival after Ray Beamish was at home and in bed, and Rose Beamish was off to Castor to give feather cuts, rinses and wave sets.

Although the new plan would take months to complete, that same morning Jerome Jenkins drove out to the country and brought back his first load of rocks.

“It may take ten or fifteen tons,” he grunted to himself as he struggled up the creek bank and put them in the trunk, “so I guess I’d better get started.”

The next day he drove to a neighboring city, where he bought a hand drill and an assortment of bits, a magnetic stud finder, a length of garden hose and faucet fittings, hose clamps, a knife and epoxy. He nested the containers and put his purchases inside them for carrying up the back stairs when Beamish was asleep.

For the next two months he carried rocks diligently, scrounging cartons wherever he could and distributing the haul around the walls of his apartment. When the creek froze and winter snows came he was reduced to picking up broken pieces of pavement and such loose stones as he could find at construction sites abandoned for the winter. Old stone walls were fruitful but too many stones were larger than he could handle.

During days of bad weather he studied the house construction, locating every nail, boring test holes in the floor quietly and with great care, taking advantage of times when the Beamishes were not home. He had noted when paying his rent that the first floor rooms had block ceilings suspended on a steel grid. No telltale dust or chips sifted below. Cracks in the old plaster were not visible.

Jenkins worked feverishly on his figures, using one of the more sophisticated calculators. Each day incoming rocks were weighed and the information recorded in his notebook. All variables such as stud spacing, floor joist and nail placement were taken into account.

He paid his rent punctually, always taking the cash downstairs in the evening after Beamish left for work. To minimize any inference that he might be avoiding Beamish, he staged a few hails and hellos from a distance as he drove away from the house.

Sometimes, tired from carrying stones in the spring after the ice was out of the creek, he stood by the kitchen window, watching Beamish work among the flowers in the garden bordering the driveway. He wondered about the irony of such a seemingly gentle man who handled flowers lovingly being a killer marked for death himself. Jenkins asked himself if the flowers knew or cared, or grew stunted and gnarled when tended by bloody hands. If that were the case, he mused, why were Beamish’s tulips, jonquils and daffodils the loveliest in Castor?

On May 27, with a newly purchased electric drill, an extension and some spade bits, he drilled a row of three-quarter inch holes through the oak flooring, the sub-floor and edges of some of the joists, waiting until the Beamishes were away from the house.

The stress and shear factors were changed so radically it took him several days to recalibrate his formula. From some wood trellis material he bought at a lumber yard he built a scale model of the house, which he used to make strength and breakage tests.

On a warm evening in mid-June, so quiet he could hear moths fluttering against the window screens, Jenkins sat on the kitchen floor, examining a collapsed section of his model home.

“I am ready,” he said softly.

He went downstairs to pay his rent to Mrs. Beamish, catching her just as she was walking out the door with some luggage.

“Oh, Mr. Jenkins,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you before I leave. I’m going to visit my sister in Buffalo for a week, and I want to be sure everything is all right in your apartment.”

“Fine — everything is fine, Mrs. Beamish.” Jenkins struggled to subdue the elation in his voice.

On the morning of June 15, after Ray Beamish was let off in front of his house by his car pool driver, Jerome Jenkins waited two hours until he was sure Beamish was in bed. He stood by the kitchen sink, looking back at the piles of loose stones and boxes of rock which nearly obscured the dinette area.

He turned on the faucet and timed the flow into a quart measure. In three days the trash barrels would add eleven hundred and twenty-five pounds — give or take a little for variation in barometric pressure from the 30-inch norm.

He nodded his satisfaction. The floor would go with the addition of six hundred and fifty pounds, just before noon on Friday, while Beamish slept. He attached the hose, taping the faucet open with a tiny stream flowing. He walked around the outside wall of the kitchen and descended the back stairs gingerly.

On the way to the Albany airport Jenkins passed a sprawling auto graveyard which marched through acres of head high weeds and brush, down into ravines and over wooded knolls. On a side road he found a back entrance. He drove his car among some rusted and partially dismantled veterans of the arterial wars. His car blended so well that by the time he walked out to the road he could not make it out among the hundreds of other abandoned vehicles.

After he picked the burdock burrs from his clothes, he went out on the main highway to hitchhike to Albany.

At 8:05 on June 18 Jerome Jenkins looked at his watch. He was seated in the outer office of Henry Wiley of Wiley Associates in Oregon. He took out his billfold, removing from it a brittle, yellowed newspaper clipping. He read it slowly, as if for the first time, then tore it into tiny pieces which he dropped into the wastebasket beside Helen West’s desk.

“Oh, it’s good to see you back, Mr. Jenkins,” Henry Wiley’s secretary said for the third time. “Mr. Wiley will be delighted.”

On June 18 at 11:06 a.m., Eastern time, 17,212 pounds of stones, broken concrete and rubble, and water, tore through the floor of a large two-story house on the outskirts of Castor, New York, taking with it the refrigerator, a table, some chairs, a planter and a large portion of the floor from the second floor apartment. The debris struck with such force that most of the first floor bedroom area with all it contained were plunged into the cellar in a tangled mass of jagged floor joists, shattered boards and mangled furniture. The rumble of the collapse was heard by residents a halt mile away in Castor.

After the last object to fall — a breadbox which slid from a tilted kitchen counter top — had tinkled tinnily into the gaping hole, the only sound above the pall of dust was a trickle of water flowing from a hose dangling from the ceiling above.

At 11:09 on June 18, some fifty miles away in Henderson, Ray Beamish knelt, and through a haze of tears placed flowers from his garden on the grave of Elissa Deame, just as he had done every June 18 for the past seventeen years. As always, he was so overcome with emotion he scarcely noticed the warmth of the sun and the singing of the birds in the trees.