Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 6, June 1992

Who Is Jim Vogelbaugh? by D. J. Bart

Tuesday morning. Worst day of the week — ever notice how everybody has a certain day that’s their worst day of the week? — anyway, Tuesday morning and I’m walking to the curb with my mug of coffee, scanning the yard and curb for the possible landing site of the morning paper.

The paperboy’s running behind schedule... comes around the corner on his bike pumping like crazy, misses me by inches, and throws the paper into the neighbor’s yard, hitting Vogelbaugh; hits him right on the head with my rolled-up newspaper.

Oh, I forgot to mention... I’m an efficiency expert by trade. I do studies in offices to ascertain where people would be the most effective and where the traffic patterns are — stuff like that. Anyway, I like to minimize unnecessary movements and... well, the part I forgot, I was also watering the row of pansies along the walk with the hose while I was scouting for the paper. Efficient.

When my airborne paper was still a good ten feet from Vogelbaugh’s head — the trajectory was blatantly apparent — I let fly with a stream of water, inundating the paperboy, who immediately let out a stream of his own — mostly invectives.

“You sprayed me!” is about the only repeatable thing he said. He mentioned my mother, whom I was sure he didn’t even know. He seemed to question my children’s actual parentage, making a reference to the mailman.

“It’ll save you from showering,” I called, “if you ever bother.”

The kid held up a digital response.

Now, the reason my neighbor was out in his yard at the same I was is that he had this weird habit of monitoring everything I did so as not to be outdone by my actions, no matter how insignificant. I buy a new car, he buys a new car; we go to Acapulco, they go to Cancún.

Since I had already sprayed the paperboy, Vogelbaugh decided to let fly with my paper, which he had picked up after it hit him on the noggin. It completely missed the almost-gone kid, however, and hit the windshield of Mrs. Denner’s Volkswagen bus. She swerved and ran up onto the Samuelses’ yard, deciding at the last minute to park half-in, half-on their front porch, the flooring sticking up around the back of the car like a gray picket fence.

A week of litigation ended with lawyers exchanging bills and Vogelbaugh building the Samuelses a new porch. The Volkswagen was repaired by way of the benevolent restitution Vogelbaugh’s insurance company provided, just before they benevolently canceled his policy.

Another Tuesday. My wife sets coffee in front of me.

“Don’t you think this has gone far enough?” she asked.

You know how you’ll play with a person, pretend not to understand what they’re getting at... “What?” I inquired innocently.

She turned slowly and sipped her coffee; her eyes seemed to be steamed over from the hot beverage. Actually, though, she was conveying, the way a woman does, that she knew the game but was too old and wise to play it with me.

I shrugged and spoke at the same time — efficiently. “Hey, I’m just living my life. Vogelbaugh is the guy who insists on playing one-upmanship.”

She sighed as women are prone to do and shook her head, also a characteristic of a lot of women. “You know you just enjoy stirring people up,” she said.

“Oh, really?”

She nodded. “Yes, Harry, I think you just do it to make up for all the regimentation and efficiency you inject into people’s lives like some kind of mad scientist.” She pronounced the word efficiency like you would say “bug” if one had just flown in your mouth.

I was about to remind her that my work was what provided the beautiful house we were living in, but it wasn’t, the house was provided by her inheritance. My job paid well, but not well enough to live in Seven Hills.

I tacked. “Hey, you’re the one who said Vogelbaugh was a jerk,” I reminded her.

Rinsing out her cup under the faucet, she mumbled something that sounded a lot like: “...you were a jerk.”

Course, I can’t be sure.

Anyway (furthering the boating analogy), I decided to sail directly into the wind. “Mary,” I said quietly, “did it ever occur to you that I do what I do, as far as other people are concerned, to keep a semblance of sanity in a crazy world filled with crazy people?”

“No,” she said, “because that’s not the reason.” And then she walked from the room.

When most people are right, it really doesn’t bug me all that much because it happens so infrequently, but when Mary’s right, it really irritates me — like itching on the inside, impossible to reach. I was on my feet and following when I realized it was time for Jeopardy. I turned around and switched on the TV. Setting Mary right would just have to wait until after the show.

Twenty minutes later, the guy from a small town in Iowa and the woman pet-groomer from Northern California were both glaring at the third button pusher, a male librarian from St. Louis, as if they were considering contestantcide. The librarian hadn’t missed an answer. The pedantic little twit was beginning to bug me, too, but the show ended without bloodshed and I went to look for Mary.

I found her mothering some small plants that were growing out of the ground, as plants often do. She didn’t look up even when my shadow darkened her work area.

“An incompetent military leader with an ego the size of Utah,” I said. Making up Jeopardy answers is one of my favorite pastimes. I stared at my wife until she responded.

“I don’t want to play. Anyway, that’s a dumb question.”

“It’s not a question, it’s an answer,” I explained. That same explanation had been offered many times before.

“I don’t care, Harry,” Mary said as she stabbed the ground next to a plant with a tiny little shovel. Or miniature spade; I don’t know much about gardening.

“Who is Saddam Hussein?” I explained, in the form of a question.

Even though I couldn’t see her eyes I knew she had rolled them. After twenty years of marriage you just know.

The next day we were burglarized. Mary was at her t’ai chi class, and I was efficiently pursuing my chosen line of work. Without forewarning or even a prescient feeling, we were suddenly VCR-less, stereoless, and missing various other small items including two one hundred dollar bills I kept ingeniously hidden under the VCR. I kept that cash because of all the hours I spent at my grandfather’s knee as a child, being lectured about the Great Depression. Which I always considered a contradiction in terms; I mean what’s great about a... well, anyway, I kept the two hundred in cash as a sort of memorial to the old man, who wasn’t in any way at fault for being abysmally boring.

Believe it or not, two days later the Vogelbaughs announced to the neighborhood that they too had been burglarized.

I wondered how they’d managed it.

“We think it was the same guy that stole your stuff!” Sissy, the wife, said excitedly. Her eyes were bright with the reflection of a stage light only she could see.

I’ve noticed that my kids, when they’re telling lies, get this glazed over, starry-eyed expression, as if it were necessary to tune out a little to pull off the prevarication. Sissy looked like that as she listed the booty scored by the villain in this alleged robbery.

“...VCR, stereo, some other things, just like with your burglary. But he got over five hundred in cash from us.” Her eyes were incandescent now, we could have roasted marshmallows in the glow. I knew she was as full of hot air as a balloon that people with a death wish insist on riding under.

Her husband Jim was unable to contribute to the conversation; his mouth was too full of gloat. He did grin a lot, though; Cheshireish.

In his mind, he was one up.

As criminals often do, the genuine burglar returned to our house for a second go-round. The cops told me as they were carrying him out on the stretcher that crooks frequently return to the house they have just burglarized, knowing that the owners will have replaced the stolen items.

Unfortunately for this burglar, I had come home ten minutes prior to his break-in to get an office layout I needed for an afternoon meeting.

“You won’t shoot,” said he.

“Oh, yes, I will,” said I.

He turned to leave. It was probably the smirk on his face that did it. Made me shoot him, I mean. Dead center, too, but they told me he’d be good as new by the time he was to pay his debt to society.

Of course, three days later, Vogelbaugh killed the guy who broke into his house. Shot him six times, reloaded, and shot him four more. Seemed a little like overkill to me.

“Guess it wasn’t the same guy after all,” Vogelbaugh said to me, the intermittent flash of red from the patrolman’s car flickering across his pale features as if he were blushing erratically.

I nodded slowly, wondering if I should tell him what a jerk he was, and then I remembered he had shot the guy ten times.

“Must not have been,” I told him quickly, mustering as much conviction in my voice as was possible. Then I got the hell out of his yard and headed for my house. My neighbor was obviously unstable.

That night was unseasonably cool with low humidity; we left the bedroom window open for the fresh air we both preferred over air conditioning. A light cover and a light breeze had me hovering on the brink of dreamy sleep within minutes.

The Vogelbaughs’ bedroom was about ten feet away and below us, also opened to the night air. We might as well have had an intercom: the ever-increasing volume of their argument soon had us both staring at the barely visible ceiling of our bedroom. Now, instead of the edge of sleep, I was hanging on the palpable pause between Jim or Sissy’s next outburst.

“Yeah, he was out of work, but my brother wouldn’t have broken into any house, let alone his own sister’s,” Sissy screeched.

Something hard hit something harder.

I heard Mary turn toward me in the darkness. “The guy he shot was Sissy’s brother?” she asked. This was the first time she had spoken to me since I shot “the poor guy” who had broken into our house. She was a proponent of the sanctity of life and all that garbage.

“Yeah,” I replied simply. I could be laconic, too.

Vogelbaugh was shouting now. “Hey, the guy was a loser, you said it yourself. Hell, he drove an American car, for Pete’s sake.” Vogelbaugh loved his “Beemer.”

That irked me a little. It seemed somehow insensitive. Irrationally, I guess because I was on the verge of sleep, I wondered if my two-year-old Buick down in the garage had overheard him.

From below, Sissy took her turn. “I went along with you putting that jerk Harry in his place, but this is just too damn much. He was my brother!”

Jerk Harry!

It was just a few minutes later that I got the idea. The rest of the night I listened to Jim and Sissy and slowly, carefully, efficiently perfected the Plan.

“I’m fine, Harry, how are you?” my wife asked, from two thousand miles away at her folks’ house. Then more banalities and I listened to the kids for another ten minutes and hung up.

She’d be another week or so, she had said. I looked out the window and, predictably, there was Vogelbaugh, watering the row of flowers at the back of his lawn.

I went outside and over to the redwood fence. He saw me, turned off the hose, and walked over, the fence between us. His light hair was plastered to his head, little wet curls on his high forehead; he looked a little like Caligula.

“Haven’t seen your wife around lately,” he declared.

I motioned him to come over to the back yard patio as I looked furtively toward his house. Instead of walking a mere six feet to the gate, he climbed clumsily over the fence, scraping an already sunburned leg on the rough ends of the boards.

We sat at the metal table. “Can I tell you something?” I asked.

Jim nodded, rubbing his leg.

I looked at him through squinted eyes, hoping my acting was good enough for the task. “First, let me ask you something, Jim. How’re you and Sissy getting along?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

“You guess?”

Pale blue eyes locked on me, and for a moment I felt as if I were in a rifle’s crosshairs. He studied my face; more accurately, he mined my face for any trace of possible ridicule. After a couple of long moments, he merely shrugged again — as miserly with words as he was with good judgment.

“Well?” I insisted. “You get along or what?”

He scratched his stubbled cheek so fiercely I thought he’d start a fire. “Well, hell, Harry, you know how it is. You can hear us arguing, I guess.”

I sat there for twenty heartbeats before saying anything. Leaning forward, I waited until he looked at me.

“I killed my wife,” I said quietly, allowing just a hint of pride to surface in my voice, as a lure rises in water just ahead of an ascending fish.

Jim looked at me, not with the expected alarm but with a look of internal calculating, as if he were balancing some kind of weird books he kept inside his head. I knew that his discomfiture was due not to my allegation of murder but to the sudden drop of his self-worth on whatever demented scale by which he measured it. After all, I had killed a wife, but he hadn’t. Without a word he rose and walked back to his yard, crossed it without a backward glance, and went inside.

I saw his wife Sissy just once more, late that night standing in front of the bathroom window, facing the mirror above the sink, and she looked scared.

During the following week, before my wife returned, it was as if Sissy had just disappeared from the face of the earth. Normally, she could be seen so often throughout the day that a glance out the window at any time would as likely reward the viewer with her return or departure as not. Darren Vogelbaugh, their son, told me out by the garbage that Jim said their mother had left them for another man. He had sent the daughter, Tina, to stay with in-laws for awhile.

Jim had avoided me like a toxic waste dump. I knew what he had done, and I figured he thought of me as a co-conspirator and that he should avoid contact for awhile.

“How was your drive back?” I asked my wife as I followed her up the walk to our house, luggage hanging from most of my extremities. The kids were already inside, one on the phone and the other paying homage to the TV.

“Good,” she replied in her usual laconic manner.

As she held the door for me, I glanced over to see my competitive neighbor glaring out his bedroom window. Boy, if looks could kill.

Hell with him if he can’t take a joke.

Later that evening. Kids in bed, Mary on the couch, squirming under the weight of something yet to be spoken...

“Harry,” she began finally, “I’ve been thinking—”

I interrupted. “A guy who’s so naive he’ll believe anything I tell him and is so competitive he’ll kill to keep up with me.”

As usual, Mary opened her mouth to protest that she didn’t want to play Jeopardy with me. But then her eyes widened, focusing on something behind me. I turned around to see my neighbor standing there staring at me, eyes flat and humorless.

“Who is Jim Vogelbaugh,” he said quietly as he raised the gun and pointed it at me.