After the First Death

15

I AWOKE WOOLLY-TONGUED BUT CLEABHEADED, IN BED, A PILLOW under my head, the blankets covering me. I got up. My clothes were still under the bed, still tortured by knots. I had evidently made no attempt to untie them and leave the room.

There was a bit of whiskey left in the bottle. I poured it down the sink and put the empty bottle in the wastebasket I unknotted my clothes, a difficult enough task now and one which would have been impossible for a drunk, and put them on. The cure seemed worse than the disease; my clothes looked as though they had been slept in by the India Rubber Man at Coney Island.

I took them off again and spread them out on the bed so that they would have a chance to return to their original shape. I showered and shaved and dressed again and went outside for breakfast. It was a little past noon. I had evidently had quite a bit of sleep, but I had no idea when I stopped drinking and went to bed. I had a hole where my memory was supposed to be. It was fairly evident that I hadn’t done anything and hadn’t gone anywhere, but I couldn’t remember much that had happened after the second drink. The alcohol washed the rest of it away.

I picked up a copy of the Times. There was a lengthier version of last night’s Post story, and a report that the Plymouth had been found with my prints on it. Fast police work. They knew now that I was back in Manhattan.

In the personal column, there was a legal notice stating that, his wife Petunia having left his bed and board, Peter. Porter would no longer be responsible for her debts. I wondered what on earth Doug wanted. He didn’t figure to be home, but I decided to waste a dime finding out.

He answered the phone himself. He said hello, and I said hello, and there was a dick somewhere as someone picked up an extension.

He said, “I had a call from your sister-in-law. She told me what she told you.”

“So?”

“Alex, I’ve been sick about it for years. It just happened. Kay and I were having some rocky times, and Gwen, there was always a strong attraction, it just happened, I don’t-”

“I’m right around the comer,” I cut in. “Okay if I come up?”

“Sure. Sure, you come right up, Alex.”

I broke the connection before the cop in the other room could trace the call. He was afraid of me, I realized. Sufficiently afraid to help set up a police trap. I left the booth in a hurry in case they had managed to run a trace in the few seconds we were talking.

I headed back to the hotel. I saw two soldiers in khaki, and somewhere a bell rang. I thought soldiers, soldiers, and something filtered in from the emptiness of last night’s blackout I don’t know where the original thought came from. Perhaps the memory of the three sailors I had victimized in the Village, perhaps the sailors I’d seen last night on Times Square. Whatever the original impetus, I’d worked up a plan in the gentle sea of last night’s whiskey, and these two soldiers had brought it back to me.

In my room, I stripped down again and got under the shower and washed all the gray out of my hair. I left the hotel, waiting by the elevator until the desk clerk was busy with someone else, then crossing the lobby in a hurry. I found a barbershop three blocks away and got a crew cut.

I let my fingers do the walking through the yellow pages, and then I let my feet do the walking to a theatrical costumer on West Fifty-fourth Street a few doors from Sixth Avenue. I told a longhaired large-eyed girl that I was supposed to be a major in a PTA play and that my old army uniform didn’t seem to fit me any more.

“I see,” she said. “What’s the play?”

“Oh. Uh, it was written by one of our members. It’s an original work. A fight comedy, really.”

“Would you want a dress uniform or a field uniform or what, exactly?”

I wasn’t sure what army officers wore on leave in New York. Civilian clothes, probably. “A dress uniform,” I said.

“I don’t know if I have the right insignia for a major.”

“Just so it comes close,” I said. “This is just an amateur show, after all.”

“I see.”

She went away and came back with a uniform. It fit almost perfectly, and looked better than my own wrinkled clothes. We found an officer’s cap in my size. I checked myself out in the mirror and decided I looked fine. It was still me inside the clothes and cap, but I somehow looked entirely different.

“When will you be doing the play?”

“Tuesday night.”

“Dress rehearsal Monday?”

“Yes.”

“Then would you want to pick it up Monday afternoon? I’ll reserve it for you.”

I hadn’t thought of all this. The girl asked questions I hadn’t anticipated, and I was poor at thinking on my feet. “I’d better take it now,” I said.

“But then you’ll have to pay a whole week’s rental, and you won’t really have any need for the costume until Monday night-”

“I don’t get into New York very often.”

“Couldn’t someone pick it up for you? After all, it’s senseless for you to be stuck for rental charges when you’re not using the costume-”

I blundered through the conversation, eventually taking the tack that I wanted to wear the costume through the non-dress rehearsals as well in order to get the feel of the role. I think I only succeeded in convincing her that I was slightly crazy, but she did see that I wasn’t going to change my mind. With a sigh she packed up the uniform and wrote out receipts and took my deposit-a large one, perhaps because I had convinced her of my mental instability. I gave my name as Douglas MacEwan out of sheer stupid inability to think of an alias promptly. It could have been worse; I could have said I was Alexander Penn. I went away with the uniform under my arm in a large cardboard box, and she went away shaking her pretty head.

I changed my clothes in a cubicle in the men’s room of a Forty-second Street movie house. I locked myself in, got out of my clothes, got into the uniform, settled the cap on my head, and packed the old clothes into the box. I was going to abandon them there, but the box had the costumer’s name and address on it, and my clothes had the labels and laundry marks that always mean so much to cops on television, so that course seemed dangerous. I left the theater and found a locker in the subway station. For a quarter I locked the clothes up. There was a notice stating that all lockers would be opened after twenty-four hours. I didn’t believe this, but I didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so I took the box with me-the clothes alone couldn’t tell them much. I stuffed the box in a trashcan and went back to Forty-second Street.

I felt as though everyone was staring at me, and I was sure I was doing something wrong. I dreaded running into some real soldiers and being saluted by them. I was sure I wouldn’t return the salute properly, or would otherwise find a way to reveal myself as an impostor. I forced myself to walk in a properly military manner, head back, spine ramrod-straight, shoulders set, covering the ground with long firm strides. After all those days of slinking along in the shadows, it was difficult to force myself into the role.

I went to another movie. It was mostly empty at that hour. I sat in the balcony and worked my way through a pack of cigarettes.

Uniforms are masks. Nobody recognizes a mailman in his off-duty clothes. All along they’ve seen the uniform first and the man within as no more than a supplementary decoration for the uniform. So it stood to reason that it would work the other way around just as well. If a uniformed man was hard to recognize in civilian clothes, then a civilian ought to become invisible when he put on a uniform. That, at least, was the theory, evidently worked out while under the merciful influence of alcohol, and somehow remembered the next day.

If I was going to get closer to the killer, I had to find out what the hookers knew about it, what one of them might have seen. I had to be able to roam Whore Row after midnight. I had to look as though I belonged there, and I had to look quite unlike Alexander Penn.

I sat in the balcony and worried a cigarette and began inventing some background material for myself. My name, my rank, my serial number. My outfit. My military experience. Where I was stationed. Such things.

It didn’t work. I was not an actor, and however elaborate a facade I worked up for myself, I was sure it would crumble at a touch. I gave it up and remained Major Anonymous. If anyone questioned me, if anyone suspected me, I would just turn around and run.