Skulldoggery

16

It had been ever so much easier than she had thought it would be. Indeed, the ease with which things had developed had quite restored her old self-confidence in such matters, and it just showed you that there really wasn’t much difference between what you could do successfully at forty-two and what you had done at twenty, except that you were naturally compelled to do it with older men. Not that it had gone as far now as it sometimes had then, but it was clearly not a question of intent or objective. It was merely a question of time. One simply slowed up a bit as one grew older.

The time, Flo thought, might be at hand. And she wondered, if it was, what she should do. Hester had assured her that it would be unnecessary to reduce old Brewster to his underwear, but nothing had been said, conversely, about being reduced by old Brewster to hers. He was, to be sure, a lively old shyster. It made her wonder what he had secretly been up to all these years. Because he did not drink or smoke or swear, she had assumed that he wasn’t interested in other forms of entertainment either, and this had been a mistake at best, and might turn out to be a tactical blunder.

It had all started, after she was goaded into it by Hester, with an invitation to lunch, instigated by Flo. In the beginning, Brewster had been the same cranky old devil as always, as sour and suspicious as an owl at noon, but he relented a little with the corned beef and cabbage, and by the time they had come to coffee, he was as loquacious and oily as if his cup were filled with gin. It was positively astonishing, the change in him. Or, if not the change, the revelation of his secret self. The man was, she saw, an absolute menace. Anyhow, she was into it, and had to go on, and after the luncheon there were other dates for this and that, and finally there had been, just day before yesterday, a trial assignation in his quarters, a sort of dry run to see how things might go with live ammunition. Or had it been? Brewster had made the supreme concession of serving her martinis while he had grape juice, and this had the effect of making her drunk while he remained sober, which was, as anyone could see, a risky situation. She did not wonder until later if he had arranged it on purpose, the sly old rake, and the big question was what had happened along toward the end when everything had gone foggy and couldn’t be remembered exactly afterward. Well, whatever it had been, it was all for the children, as well as for herself, and there was even, when you stopped to think, a kind of nobility in it. At any rate, Hester certainly couldn’t accuse her again of being a slacker.

Especially, she thought, after tonight Tonight there was a little dinner in Brewster’s quarters, and anyone with half a brain knows that little dinners in such circumstances frequently last until breakfast. She had thought twice about coming, but far too much had been gained to be lost now by an excess of propriety, and it wasn’t so much propriety, anyhow, as a reasonable fear that Brewster, abed, left his teeth on the dresser. Oh, well, it was too late now. She had just left the cab at the curb, and now she was in the elevator, which was stopping at the proper floor, and down the hall, just around the corner, was Brewster’s door.

At the door, she rang, but no one came, which was exasperating. Under the circumstances you would think that old Brewster would be eager, and consequently prompt. Perhaps, though, he was off somewhere in the apartment with a door closed, and did not hear the bell. She had suspected several times that he was somewhat deaf, and once, in a movie, had practically had to shout a diplomatic intimacy that she had meant to whisper. After ringing again without response, she turned the knob and opened the door, expecting to see soft lights and drawn drapes and other licentious arrangements. Instead, she saw nothing. The room was dark.

Reaching around the door jamb, she found a switch and turned on the ceiling lights. And now she was really exasperated, for it was instantly apparent that Brewster had made no arrangements at all, licentious or otherwise. It looked, in fact, like Flo would even have to do without her dinner. But her exasperation was not unqualified. Her feelings were, to be exact, ambivalent. She didn’t know whether to feel reprieved or offended.

Where could Brewster be? Obviously, wherever he was, it was elsewhere. Could he have forgotten about their date for dinner? Well, hardly. Flo was not ready by at least a decade to admit any such radical diminishment of her powers. Could he have been unavoidably detained somewhere by important legal business or something? This was possible, but surely, in that case, he would have phoned. Could he, being a deceptive and ornery old curmudgeon, have deliberately stood her up after craftily leading her on? Pride answered no. So did eros. Hers in the first instances, his in the second. He was not likely to abandon a program in which she was prepared, at some sacrifice, to perform in a style he had not known since when, if ever.

Should she, she asked herself, wait? She decided that she shouldn’t, and old Brewster could damn well whistle for his dinner, and for anything else he wanted and wasn’t going to get. One sacrifice was more than enough, even though it hadn’t actually got beyond a good intention. Before she left, though, she had better make a quick tour of the apartment, just to be sure that he wasn’t around somewhere after all. It would be just like him to have gone off for a nap, anticipating an exhausting evening, and to have slept right on without waking. Men as old as Brewster, while capable of periodic vitality, were notoriously short-winded in the long run.

With this in mind, she began her tour in the bedroom, walking there directly from the door, but Brewster wasn’t on the bed, or under it, or anywhere else in the room. Just to be methodical, she looked next in the bathroom, hoping earnestly that Brewster wasn’t lurking in there nude, which would have been, all in all, a more horrific and astonishing sight than it was to find him lying on the floor behind the sofa, which is where he was and where she found him when she returned to the living room.

It was a very queer place to take a nap, she thought.

She prodded him in a thigh with her toe, and decided that he was not napping, but dead.

It was unfortunate and somewhat sad, she thought, that he had died just when she was making life a little more interesting for him.

She bent closer, seeing the back of his head, and decided that he had not died at all, at least not without assistance, but had been killed.

She was naturally somewhat confused by this unexpected development, and she didn’t quite know what to do. Should she call a doctor? Or the police? Or both? Or neither? The first seemed unnecessary, and the second inadvisable. What seemed advisable, now that Brewster’s whereabouts had been established, was to put herself somewhere else as quickly as possible, and that’s what she did, or started to do, turning off the lights on her way out.

On the street, she found a cab and was going home in it when it occurred to her that she ought to be going, instead, to Hester’s. If anyone were at home, it would probably be only Lester, and Lester, although a dear boy, would be of no value in a crisis like this, and might actually, on the contrary, be a positive hindrance. Hester, however, was another proposition entirely. Hester was cool and clever and thought of things. Flo was about to lean forward and give the driver new directions, but she realized then that there was no justification for assuming that Hester would be at home this time of night, since she rarely was, and it would be better, on second thought, to call and find out before going there. If Hester were at home, she might even be prevailed upon to come to Flo’s instead of the other way around.

Hester, as it developed, was not at home. She was right at Flo’s all the time, which just shows you that it is possible for things to break good right in the middle of breaking bad. Hester and Lester, neither having anything better to do, were drinking gimlets and listening to recordings on the stereo. This wasn’t much to be doing, admittedly, but Hester, who had been busy, had simply neglected to make proper arrangements, and Lester, who had been in communication with King Louie again, couldn’t think of any other place that would be safer under the circumstances. When Flo entered, Hester rolled off her stomach and sat up on the floor, where she had been lying.

“Mother,” she said, “where have you been?”

“Hello, darling,” Flo said. “You can’t imagine how glad I am that you are here. I’ve been to dinner with a man.”

“In that case, why are you home so early? You must have eaten and run.”

“I ran without eating, to tell the truth, and that’s what I want to talk with you about!”

“There’s no good in talking with me about it. You simply have to run from some men, that’s all. Unless, of course, you choose to be agreeable. I must say, however, that most of them can at least wait until after dinner.”

“That’s not what I mean, Hester.” Flo sat down and took a deep breath and held it several seconds, which was a little trick she practiced to calm her nerves. “This man was hardly in a condition to make advances.”

“Why not? He must have been dead.”

“That’s exactly what he was. How on earth did you know?”

“Oh, come, Mother. Why must you exaggerate everything? Tell me the truth.”

“Hester, you can’t exaggerate death. It’s impossible.”

“What man are you talking about?”

“Willis Brewster.”

“Brewster!” Lester, who had been brooding silently to the accompaniment of a piano and a clarinet and a bass fiddle, turned his head and stared at Flo owl-eyed. “You mean you went to dinner with old Brewster!”

“That’s what I said. Lester, why don’t you listen? I’m not in a humor to repeat everything.”

“By God, it’s incredible. Why would you go to dinner with old Brewster? For that matter, why would anybody?”

“Well, it’s all the fault of you and Hester. You kept egging me on to corrupt him for the good of the family, and I’ve been trying. With surprising success, too, I might add.”

“We didn’t egg you on to have dinner with him. That’s a bit too much to ask of your own mother.”

“Oh, he wasn’t too bad, really. Quite lively and full of interesting ideas. Anyhow, Brewster is dead. I went to his apartment to have dinner, and there he is at this instant lying behind the sofa with his head knocked in.”

“His head knocked in!” said Hester. “Killed?”

“That’s what I said. Didn’t I? At least, I meant to say it.”

“Mother, don’t you have any restraint whatever? You didn’t have to go to the extreme of having dinner with old Brewster, as Lester said, but what’s more to the point, you didn’t have to kill him.”

“I didn’t kill him. Why should I?”

“For the same reason anyone else might have,” said Lester. “Because he was a sour old devil who frequently needed it.”

“However that may be, I didn’t do it.”

“If you didn’t,” Hester said, “who did?”

“I don’t know. Someone else.”

“I wonder,” Lester said, “if it could have been Uncle Homer? He was always threatening old Brewster with some kind of violence.”

“If so, Homer will simply have to get out of it the best he can. I am concerned with getting out of it myself.”

“You’re already out of it, aren’t you? Did anyone see you there, or anything?”

“I don’t think so. After I decided not to call the police, I just came away. Was it the right thing, Hester?”

“We will see in good time whether it was or not. Mother, I wish you wouldn’t get into such difficulties. I have enough to think about as it is.”

“I was only trying to help. It’s unkind of you, Hester, to criticize me for doing what you and Lester kept urging me to do.”

“Well, you might have used a little more discretion about it. However, there is no good in crying over spilled milk.”

“What I want to know is what else I should do. Is there anything?”

“Not that I can think of. Old Brewster will be found after a while, and we will see what develops then. What worries me is that everything seems to be getting out of hand. In the beginning, Senorita Fogarty was the only one we wanted eliminated, but everyone else is being eliminated, one by one, instead. It’s all very confusing, I must say.”