Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 138, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 821 & 822, September/October 2011

Man Cave by Bill Pronzini

“Can doing first-rate work as consistently as Pronzini (Betrayers, 2010, etc.) really lie as effortless as lie makes it seem?” Kirkus Reviews asks in its review of Bill Pronzini’s latest kook in the Nameless series, Camouflage (Forge, July 2011). That seeming effortlessness is the mark of a master, “one of the best in the mystery and suspense field,” as the Washington Post Book World says. Mr. Pronzini is also currently collaborating with his wife, Marcia Muller, on a historical series starring characters he created.

It was the smallest room in the house, at the rear behind the kitchen and pantry. Katie’s room until her eighteenth birthday, when she’d moved to an apartment in San Francisco. The understanding had always been, or so Wyatt had believed, that when Katie left it would become his den. But Ruth said no, insisting they keep it the way it was “in case the silly girl decides to move back home.” That would never happen; like Tom before her, Katie had suffered too long under her mother’s grinding thumb ever to return to the nest. (Laura hadn’t waited until she was eighteen to gain her freedom; she’d gotten herself pregnant and then married at sixteen. She and the boy were now living in Minneapolis with a daughter and a son Wyatt had never seen.) But it was only an excuse anyway. The truth was, Ruth didn’t want him to have a room of his own.

“You don’t need a den,” she kept saying. “Isn’t the living room enough for you?”

No, it wasn’t. The living room wasn’t his, it was hers. So were the master bedroom and the kitchen and the never-occupied guest room (Tom’s bedroom) and her sewing room (Laura’s old room). And so were the rose garden and vegetable garden in the backyard, the flower beds and lawn in front. All Ruth’s. He had been reduced to the role of tenant, and not a rent-free one: It was his pension and Social Security checks that paid the bills.

He had no one to blame but himself, of course. He’d passively allowed her to take control of the house, the kids, himself. Mild-mannered, non-confrontational, easily manipulated, easily controlled — that was Wyatt Potter in a nutshell. He knew it, chafed at it, and yet his placid nature held him powerless. If you looked in the dictionary under the word milquetoast, Ruth had said to him once, it would be his photograph you’d find to illustrate the definition.

She was the exact opposite. Iron-willed, domineering, merciless in her need to have things her way, bend everyone to her will. She had not only alienated her son and daughters with her coldness, her inflexible rules and demands, but nearly all of a dwindling succession of friends. He would have fled from her, too, if only he’d had the gumption. Now it was too late. He was sixty-two years old, not in the peak of health, had been pensioned out of his assistant manager’s job at the bank just in time to collect Social Security, and none of his children was emotionally or financially equipped to care for him. He simply had nowhere else to go.

Thirty-three years — that was how long he’d been married to Ruth. It was difficult after so many years to remember what it was that had attracted him to her in the first place. Certainly not her looks; she was as plain as he was, and stout even before her eating habits added another fifty pounds. Her willful self-assurance, probably. The type of alpha female his sort of man naturally gravitated to.

Their first year together had been good, the next four tolerable until after Laura was born, and the rest... well, nightmarish was too strong a word, but peace and harmony had been virtually nonexistent in his life for the past two and a half decades. Katie had been unplanned, the result of one of the few times Ruth had grudgingly permitted him to satisfy what she referred to as his “carnal male appetite.” And the last. She blamed him for the “accident,” of course, and had refused to allow him into her bed since. Not that he’d asked very often, or cared to in so long he could barely recall what it was like to have a carnal male appetite.

Now, at sixty-two, he had only one appetite left: for the room of his own, where he could be alone to read, listen to music, and watch old movies and TV programs that interested him. (Ruth refused to look at anything other than soap operas, sitcoms, and gory crime shows on the new forty-inch flat-screen high-definition television set she’d bought without telling him. Whenever he turned on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel or an old black-and-white film, she immediately switched channels.)

“I’ve never asked you for much,” he said to her one evening, when his den-hunger had reached the critical point. “Please don’t deny me this.”

“You don’t need a den.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why? So you can hide in it, I suppose. Get away from me.”

“No,” he said. Yes, he thought. “It’s a matter of comfort. You like your TV programs, I prefer different ones. Or just to sit quietly and read.”

“Do I try to stop you from reading?”

“No, but I can’t concentrate with the TV blaring—”

“Blaring? I suppose you think I turn the sound up on purpose to annoy you. Well, I don’t. My hearing isn’t what it used to be, you know that. Don’t be so inconsiderate, Wyatt.”

It was impossible to reason with the woman. She turned everything around so that she was right and he was wrong, she made the sacrifices and he was the thoughtless one.

He kept pleading with her just the same. “You have your sewing room. Is it really too much to want a private space of my own?”

“I won’t have you turning Katie’s room into a man cave.”

“A what?”

“You heard me. Man cave. That’s what they call them now.”

“A simple den, for heaven’s sake?”

“Den. Another word for cave. Smelly places men lock themselves into to avoid their wives and responsibilities. Next thing you’ll be wanting a computer so you can look at pictures of naked women.”

“I don’t want a computer. I don’t want to look at pornographic pictures. All I want is a comfortable chair, a small TV set, a CD player—”

“We can’t afford any of that nonsense.”

“—and all my books. Yes, we can. I’ll buy everything at garage sales or Goodwill.”

“No. I won’t have it.”

“Ruth, please—”

“No!”

The next morning she vacuumed and dusted Katie’s room, closed the blinds and frilly curtains over the window that overlooked the backyard, then made him watch as she locked the door and dropped the key into her pocket — the key she had used to keep Katie locked inside as punishment for real or imagined misbehavior as often as Katie had used it for personal privacy.

“There now,” she said. “That settles it.”

Yes, it did. But not the way she thought.

He had never before gone against Ruth’s wishes, and he was well aware of what was likely to happen if he did. But he was determined to have his den. If not with her permission, then without it, through daring and guile, and damn the consequences. And once he had it, he would keep it no matter what she said or did.

It didn’t take him long to develop a plan of action. What he came to think of as an adventure, a covert one that added a small but spicy element of danger to his quest.

Ruth did all their grocery shopping alone, claiming that he slowed her down by dilly-dallying and bought too many useless food and drug items — a pair of gross exaggerations. The next time she went, he called Katie in the city and told her what he proposed to do. She had no objections to the makeover of her old room, in fact encouraged him in the project. Out of spite for her mother, he thought, not because she cared whether or not he had his den. Katie had inherited some of Ruth’s less than endearing traits, though she would have thrown a fit if this had been suggested to her.

Wyatt’s next step was a search for Katie’s room key. Ruth hadn’t bothered to pick a clever hiding place for it; it took only a few minutes to find it, in the back of a drawer in her sewing table. For the time being he left it where it was.

Saturdays from eleven until five o’clock were reserved for Ruth’s weekly visit with her widowed sister Elaine in Bayport. Wyatt made prior arrangements with a locksmith to come by at noon the following Saturday, fetched the key to unlock the door before the man arrived, and then returned it to the sewing drawer. The locksmith replaced the lock with a similar one, after which Wyatt added its key to his key ring. There was virtually no risk in this maneuver. Ruth would have no reason to try to enter the room again during the next month — one cleaning-and-dusting was always good for at least four weeks. And once she laid down the law, she expected him to obey it implicitly.

Over the next few weeks, whenever Ruth was out shopping or away at her sister’s, he began making Katie’s room over into his. He boxed up the relatively few articles of clothing and other possessions that she’d left behind, added a scattering of toilet articles from the adjacent bathroom, and stored the cartons among others in the garage in case she wanted any of it someday. The bedside lamps and the fuzzy white throw rug also went into concealed storage. With the window blinds closed tight, there was no danger of Ruth happening to look inside while she was out puttering in her rose garden.

Seven days later Wyatt elicited the aid of Charlie Ledbetter, one of his few remaining friends, and together they moved out the remaining items. The bed, nightstands, bureau, and small writing desk went to a Goodwill donation center, the mattress and frilly window curtains to a local recycler. The room was then completely empty. Or it was until he and Charlie carried in the half-dozen boxes of books — travel, Western Americana, a complete set of the classics — that Ruth had made him put in the garage because she refused to have “all those dust catchers cluttering up my house.” Charlie, who understood electrical matters, also found a way to hook up the new TV set to the house cable line.

Wyatt made the rounds of thrift shops and the local flea market the following week. A small portable TV set and roller stand were his first purchases, then a combination radio and CD player that a vendor called a “baby boom box.” He returned home just in time to lock the last of the items in his den before Ruth came back.

The next two Saturdays, again with Charlie’s help, he bought and moved in a chair, two medium-size bookcases, and a small oriental rug. The chair was a brown Naugahyde recliner with a tom but reparable arm that cost him surprisingly little at a hospice thrift store. The bookcases, a matching pair stained a light walnut color that went well with the recliner, came from a garage sale. The rug, which looked expensive but wasn’t, had been an impulse buy at another thrift shop — three by four feet in size, an exotic wine-red color with a blue, green, and yellow design and fringed edges.

When he had everything arranged to his satisfaction, he sat down in the recliner and surveyed his domain. It might not be perfect, but it was his and it pleased him — so much so that he couldn’t stop smiling.

There was nothing more to be gained in keeping it a secret from Ruth, he decided. It wouldn’t be possible anyway if he was going to spend time in there. Might as well unveil it to her as soon as she came home. When she saw how simply and inexpensively furnished it was, how happy it made him, she might not even make a fuss.

He should have known better.

As soon as Ruth stepped into the den, she let out a screech like a wounded parrot. Her heavy body went rigid; she spun around glaring, bared her teeth in a wolfish snarl, and growled, “You deceitful sneak! How could you do a thing like this!”

“Ruth, please don’t be upset—”

“Upset? Furious is more like it. Defying me, skulking around behind my back, turning Katie’s room into a man cave when I told you to leave it be. How dare you!”

“I didn’t want to go behind your back, but you just wouldn’t understand how much a room of my own means to me. Don’t you think it looks nice now that it’s finished?”

“It’s hideous! That disgusting rug... I suppose you paid a fortune for it.”

“No, it only cost—”

“What did you do with Katie’s things?”

“Stored them in the garage, all except the furniture.”

“And I suppose you gave that to Goodwill.”

“Yes. As old and worn as it was, it didn’t seem to be worth keeping...”

She made a sound like a dog’s growl. “You’ve lost your mind, Wyatt Potter. Katie will be irate when she finds out.”

“She already knows. I called her before I started the makeover. She didn’t mind, she gave me her blessing.”

“Blessing! I don’t believe it.”

“It’s the truth,” Wyatt said. “She doesn’t care about any of the things she left behind. She’s never coming home again, we both know that—”

“I know no such thing. All I know is that you’ve deceived and defied me. I want all of this... junk taken out of here immediately. I want Katie’s things, what’s left of them, put back where they were.”

The path of least resistance had always been Wyatt’s choice when Ruth threw one of her tantrums. But not this time. Worms can turn if the stakes are high enough; he had already half turned by creating his den on the sly, and without even thinking about it he went the rest of the way.

“No,” he said.

“...What did you say?”

“I said no. The room is mine now and it’s going to stay the way it is.”

Ruth stared at him as if she had never seen him before. “I won’t stand for it! I won’t have it!”

Wyatt said resolutely, “But I will,” and closed the door between them and locked himself inside.

Over the next several days Ruth went through her entire repertoire of threats, taunts, fits of pique, crocodile tears, and refusal to cook his meals or do his laundry. All of these had bent him to her will at one time or another, but on the den issue he was unbendable. Whenever her tirades became too much to bear, he retreated into his den. With his headphones on, she could rant and rave and pound on the door until she was blue in the face; he wouldn’t hear her, wouldn’t even know she was there.

When he wasn’t in the den, he kept the door locked and the key on the ring in his pocket. At night he put the key ring under his pillow, in case she had any ideas of trying to appropriate it while he was asleep. Eventually she pretended to give in and settled into an icy, spiteful silence, but he wasn’t fooled. It was only a temporary cease-fire in the war of nerves.

He began spending more and more time in the den. Mainly listening to folk music and Dixieland jazz, his two favorites, and reading Hawthorne, Melville, Dickens. Alone, unbothered. Content.

Until he had the heart attack.

It happened one morning while he was boiling a breakfast egg for himself. When he finally managed to convince Ruth that the chest pains were more serious than indigestion, she drove him, grumbling, to the hospital. Doctors confirmed the cardiac episode and he was bedridden for three days while they ran more tests to determine the extent of the damage. It turned out to be relatively little; the attack had been mild, his body “delivering a warning,” as his cardiologist put it.

Ruth didn’t come to see him during his stay — his only visitor was Charlie Ledbetter — but she did deign to pick him up when he was released and drive him home. The whole way she wore an odd, satisfied little smile that puzzled him until a few minutes after their arrival, when he unlocked the door to his den and stepped inside.

And discovered that he didn’t have a den anymore.

The room was empty.

He swung around to see Ruth standing in the hall behind him, her arms folded across her chest, the satisfied smile wider on her mouth now. No, not satisfied — gloating. A smile of gloating triumph. And he realized she’d resorted to the same key trick he had, but with malice rather than necessary deception: taken the key while he was in the hospital, unlocked the door, then returned it to his key ring so she could savor his reaction.

“My den,” he said. “You stole my den.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. All I did was clean out a pest hole.”

“Pest hole? My books, my chair, my TV—”

“Rubbish, the lot of it. I had it all hauled away.”

“Hauled away where?”

“To the dump, of course. The only fit place for rubbish.”

She turned away from him, still smiling, and waddled into the kitchen. Wyatt followed her, confronted her again in front of the stove. His hands were shaking; he had never before been this angry.

“You had no right,” he said. “No right.”

“I had as much right as you did to sneak around and destroy Katie’s room in the first place.”

“It’s not Katie’s room, it’s mine.”

“Oh no, it isn’t. If you have any idea of building another man cave to hibernate in, you’d better forget it. The room is mine now.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Mine. I’ve decided it’s too late to put it back the way it was, so I’m going to make it into an indoor garden. Orchids, schefflera, and the like. Once those window blinds are taken down, there’ll be more than enough light.”

“No,” Wyatt said. “No, no, no.”

“Yes,” she said, still smiling. “Yes, yes, yes.”

A thickening red mist formed behind his eyes. Her face shimmered in it, was consumed by it. Dimly he heard a thudding sound. Another. And then the mist was gone and he saw Ruth lying on the floor at his feet, felt the weight of an iron skillet in his hand. He didn’t remember picking up the skillet or hitting her on the head with it, but that was what he’d done: the left side of her skull was crushed.

His first reactions were shock, horror, remorse, but none of them lasted long. A strange sort of calm descended on him. He put the skillet back on the stove, bent to feel for a pulse that wasn’t there. Then he went to what had been his den and locked himself inside.

He knew he should call 911. Or Ruth’s sister Elaine or Charlie Ledbetter. Or drive to the police station and turn himself in. Something. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the empty, ravaged room, not even for a few seconds.

He was still there two days later, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, when Elaine came and found the body and called the police.

Wyatt made a full voluntary confession. The detectives who questioned him were dubious at first when he told them why he had killed his wife. But when he explained in detail the manner in which she’d stolen the one thing that mattered most in his otherwise empty life, they seemed to understand.

He was held in custody in the crowded county jail before and after his arraignment, where he was charged with murder in the second degree. Tom and Katie came for brief visits; Laura called from her home in Minneapolis. They, too, seemed to understand that he’d been driven to do what he’d done, but their expressions of support were tepid and dutiful. They resented him for not being there for them while they were growing up, he knew, and always would. The chasm between him and his children that Ruth had created, and his passivity had widened, was too great ever to be bridged.

The trial went swiftly. The young public defender did his best against an uncompromising prosecutor, calling Tom and Charlie Ledbetter to testify as character witnesses in an effort to gain the jury’s sympathy. But the evidence against Wyatt was irrefutable. The jurors deliberated for less than an hour before returning a verdict of guilty without recommendation for leniency.

The judge gave him the maximum punishment of twenty years, which, of course, amounted to a life sentence. There was, however, one tempering factor in the judgment. Because of his age, his heart condition, and lack of a prior criminal record, Wyatt was remanded to one of the state’s minimum-security prisons.

He thought he would be unhappy in prison, but he wasn’t. Just the opposite. He adjusted quickly to the routine, and over a period of time grew comfortable with it.

At first he had to share space with another inmate, but because he was a model prisoner, quiet and cooperative, he was soon given a private cell and permitted a television set and a CD player with headphones. His job in the prison library allowed him unlimited access to books and CDs, and eventually the warden rewarded his good behavior by allowing him a small secondhand armchair. He was required to leave his cell, which was almost exactly the same size as his den had been, for only a few hours each day — meals, work in the library, a short stay in the exercise yard. The rest of the time he was left alone. That was the best part — no one bothered him while he was locked up tight in his cell.

The room of his own at home hadn’t been perfect, but all things considered, this one was. About as perfect a man cave as Wyatt Potter could ever have hoped to have.