Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 25, No. 3, March 26, 1980

How Do I Kill Thee? by Ernest Savage

It was the third time that day Phil Perkins had killed his wife...

Phil Perkins was driving down Main Street ten minutes from home when his wife stepped off the curb in front of his car. He hit her square and hard and her fat body sloshed off the upper edge of his windshield, soaring high in the air and coming down into the grille-work of the monstrous truck he could see in his rearview mirror, ricocheting like a rag doll and disappearing into the stream of opposing traffic — poof!

He drove steadily on, making the light at Seventeenth Street, proceeding six more blocks to Emerald, his street, and turning left as always. There she was again, in the guise of a boy standing in the gutter, and again she stepped in front of his car and was punched high into the thick greenery of the trees that arched over the street and made it one of the prettiest lower-middle-class streets in town.

It was the third time today he’d killed her, one of his more productive days. He’d been having a lot of productive days lately.

He turned into the drive of his home, parked in front of the garage out back, and walked into the house through the kitchen door with two heavy ledger books under his arm. Phil Perkins was a bookkeeper and a good one, one of the last of a dying breed in this computerized age. But he loved his work and still had as much of it as he could handle. He regarded a ledger sheet as one of the most beautiful printed pages man had yet devised, with its intricate and utterly logical network of intersecting lines. He loved the column headings: Salaries — Taxes — Rent — Utilities — Insurance — Maintenance — Phone. So sensible and concise. He loved the act of entering figures between the colorful vertical lines, felt an artist’s need to make them full, round, and important, lusted for the balance that was there to be found, that could elude him only for a while.

He put the books on the kitchen table and washed his hands at the sink, careful not to touch the dirty dishes heaped there. On the counter to his left two frozen Mexican dinners were slowly thawing, and Phil, a neat and orderly man — his tie was always firmly knotted and centered in his collar — lifted them and wiped the puddled water from beneath before drying his hands.

A car glides quietly down the street outside carrying two hell-born kids, one at the wheel, one in the rear seat with a rifle at the ready, its ugly snout drawing beads on windows as they pass — there is a tongue of flame, a pop, the sound of shattering glass, and Thelma is stretched out on the living-room floor, a bullethole between her eyes — poof!

He shook his bony, almost fleshless head. They were coming thick and fast today, his repertory drawing down; but, no — he had dozens of them, hundreds accumulated through the years, his private theater of dark and deadly deeds. Phil Perkins was fifty-four years old and was married to a woman he had first killed on the second night of their honeymoon in the summer of 1949.

Charley Randall, Phil’s next-door neighbor, framed in his kitchen window twenty feet away across the drive, cracked a can of beer and raised it in salute, and Phil, with nothing better in the house to drink — Thelma wouldn’t allow it — raised a half glass of water in response. They both smiled vivaciously, as neighbors do between two panes of glass, and both drank, Phil sparingly. Charley was a good neighbor. He kept his place tidy, his lawns green and cut, and his kids — in the old days — quiet and polite. Phil respected quiet and order above all things.

And now, suddenly, sharply, he wanted a drink — a real one — the incident with Charley having stimulated those quiescent glands. But it was a day early — Friday was his day to go up to Sully’s Rendezvous and get bombed — so he quelled the desire, a disciplined man.

He picked up his ledgers from the table, walked through the door to the living room where the TV was blasting away as usual, stepped over the body of his wife, a supine lump on the floor, and proceeded to his room, where for the next hour he’d do some work.

His bedroom was his office. Years ago he’d replaced the old double bed with a single to make room for his desk, files, and shelves. Approaching the open door (which should have been closed), he anticipated with an almost sensual pleasure the military neatness of the room, with the boxes of numbered ledger sheets carefully stacked, the brown folders, green folders, accordion folders each in its place, all the paper clips boxed.

He sat down at his desk and began to work, his mind at once absorbed, his carefully rounded figures accumulating in steady meaningful groups. But there was something wrong. He heard the muffled blare of the TV, the thrum of cars passing on the street, sounds normally blocked by his trancelike state. It was five-thirty. He’d been working less than a half hour and his mouth was dry, his need for a drink again suddenly sharp and cruel.

He got up, went into the hall and across the living room, stepped over his wife’s body again, and stopped in front of the TV. The news was on, the roving camera panning across the scene of a highway wreck, zooming in on one of the victims — who was Thelma. They were always Thelma: car, plane, or drowning victims, always Thelma.

He turned down the volume, knowing she would turn it up again; it was the only game they still played. He felt a draft of chill evening air, heard the swish of a car speeding by — the front door was ajar, open a foot. He hadn’t noticed before. He went over and closed it, went through the front hall door to the kitchen, poured himself a half glass of water, and stared at it a moment before putting it down again.

Thelma lurching up from her chair at the kitchen table, gripping her fat belly, terror in her eyes. Botulism! She stares at the half eaten fish on her plate, falls to the floor, and is gone — poof!

It was getting dark outside. Phil straightened his tie, checked his shirt cuffs for stains, and went out the kitchen door to his car. Charley Randall was watering a bed of flowers along the fence between their yards. He was smiling, as always — a happy man. “Hi, Phil,” he said. “How’s Thelma?”

Phil had his hand on the car door. He said “Eh?”, reconstituted the question from its echoes, and said, “Oh, fine... fine, Charley — thanks.”

He drove back up Emerald to Main Street, turned right without coming to a full stop, drove past a block of shabby storefronts, past the precinct station, and four more nondescript blocks to Sully’s Rendezvous, parking in the nearest open slot.

He paused at the door of the bar, acutely aware of a broken pattern. He should not be here until tomorrow. He was a man of discipline, of principle, and he considered his drinking a disciplined pleasure, the way a pleasure should be, carefully controlled. But it was an inexpensive recreation, he reminded himself, debating the problem, because he always solicited Sully’s business when he went there. He would say as he settled onto one of Sully’s comfortable stools, “Sully, how about letting me do your books?” and Sully would answer, playing the game, that he did his own (“on the back of an envelope”), and the ten-dollar bill that Phil laid on the bar could be called a legitimate business expense.

Sully usually had his first martini ready for him as he settled in and the flow of them was steady after that until he was as drunk as he wanted or needed to be, the catharsis complete once again, the desire for his wife’s death given voice, his fantasies fleshed out before Sully’s eyes, or the eyes (and ears) of the guy next to him at the bar, who usually also wanted to kill his wife — or mother, or boss, or kid, or someone. Sully understood that most of his clients were potential murderers (“As who is not?” he would say) and it was best that they get their killing done here instead of at home or the office or plant. So the liver goes eventually, he would say, but that’s better than twenty to life in the pokey, ain’t it?

Phil braced himself and pushed through the door, anticipating and answering Sully’s opening remark: “What the hell — did I lose a day?”

“No, I found one,” he said, sitting down, throat parched until the first nepenthean flow of gin.

The guy on the stool next to his was a stranger — a Thursday man. He began talking at once about the lousy police protection in this town, about the murder yesterday afternoon in broad daylight of a local housewife, the third in the last ten days, some junkie busting in to swipe twenty bucks’ worth of something for a fix and knocking off the lady of the house while he’s at it. They oughta stand them bastards up against a wall a hundred at a time and shoot ’em. The guy rambled on, airing his own scenes of violence, of vengeance, of retribution.

They’d spent their honeymoon at Yosemite in June of ’49, and in those days they had a special evening event there called the “Fire Fall.” He didn’t know if they still held it and didn’t care, but in those days the park people would build a huge bonfire on top of the sheer stone cliff behind the hotel and when the night was good and dark they’d push the entire thing down the two- or three-thousand-foot face of the cliff like a falls, only of fire. He and Thelma had stood there with the others and watched it, her pudgy hand tentatively — like a nervous pet mouse — in his, the disaster of their nuptial night less than twenty-four hours old. As the first tendrils of fire came over the edge of the cliff, he saw her body in amongst the sparks, whole at first, then in parts, aflame, dwindling to fiery ash at the bottom of the cliff, and the mouse in his tightening fist squealed and withdrew itself and never put itself back there again. It was the first time he’d killed her.

“She must be a slob,” the man said.

Phil stared at him, puzzled for a moment; so he’d said it aloud, had he? The vision so fixed in his mind all these years had finally been given voice. He’d never told anyone that before. “She put on,” he said, “ten pounds the first week we were married.”

“Don’t worry,” the man said, “the heart’ll take her out one of these days. Triglycerides in the veins — thick as sludge in a sewer pipe. The heart can’t handle that.”

But it couldn’t have been the heart, not with those popping eyes, and there was no bullethole in her head, and the front window wasn’t broken, so she couldn’t have been shot from the street. And her neck was bruised, he remembered now, along with the popping eyes.

He drank half the fresh martini Sully’d put before him and wondered: Did I strangle her? Did I ever strangle her in all these years? The man next to him was blathering on, unheard, and Phil thought: No, it was always a thing that killed her: a car, poison, a bullet, fire, never my hands. He studied them, the long clean fingers — artist’s hands, they’d been called. And now — killer’s hands? I mean real killer’s hands?

Where was I, he thought, panicky, this afternoon? He’d picked up Fetter’s books at two-thirty and then stopped by Dunphy’s for his check, and then? He’d gotten home around five — but what about the two hours between Dunphy’s and then? He frowned, his mind gone blank for a moment, a chill working up his back. Ah! the stationer’s! He’d stopped by the stationer’s to order a supply of number ten ledger sheets — or was that yesterday? He felt sweat pop on his brow and saw with his mind’s eye, in kleig-lit detail this time, the great mound of her lying there, the doughlike face where once the frightened, pretty girl had lived.

“I myself never married,” the guy next to him said, and Phil, as though conducting a dialogue half in silence, thought: Nor should I have. He remembered sharply the mousy little hand in his that night, nearly crushed to mush. And so little touching since then: none, in fact. She’d been afraid; and he — what? — too fastidious, too tidy.

“Otherwise,” the guy said, chuckling, “I don’t suppose I’d mind if some hophead busted in one day and wiped her out. Most married guys I know—” He rambled on again.

Of course! Phil thought. That’s what happened — some junkie broke in — the open door — strangled her, and then ran. Just before he got home. The thought relaxed him for a moment. But having wished her death all these years, he argued with himself, would it be just that someone else obliged him? His orderly mind rejected random chance. You do not balance books that way. But had he done it — with these hands — or, having killed her a thousand times, had random chance been his ally on the thousand and first? It needed sorting out, the facts columniated in tidier groups. He pushed money across the bar and ordered another drink.

It was coming clearer, the outline of a decision hovering into view. He would stop by the precinct station and make a statement. He liked that — a statement; like a financial statement, with all the figures neatly tabulated and a balance struck. There must be a balance, he thought, always a balance, between debit and credit. Between good and bad. His bookkeeper’s heart relaxed. He put more money on the bar. “Buy everybody a drink,” he told Sully, “and yourself too.”

He would get good and drunk — a final catharsis — and then get on with the books. No balance had ever eluded him yet.