The Cemetery Man and Other Darkside Tales

Confession

The night is dark up here on the cliffs above Bodega Head, moonless, the stars hidden behind scudding clouds. Three A.M. dark, Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul. Bitter cold, too. The sea wind whipping across the deserted parking lot is fierce; it buffets the car, howls and whistles at the windows. In the blackness hundreds of feet below, I can hear the gale frothing the sea and hurling high waves in a constant pounding roar against the rocks.

Dark. Cold. But no darker and no colder than it is inside the shell of Lewis Everett.

Yet as I sit here recording these words, this confession, my voice is calm and I’m no longer afraid. This night has been coming for a long time, though I never expected it would happen on our anniversary, Alicia’s and mine. I bought the recorder on a whim some time ago, or so I told myself then, but it wasn’t a whim at all. In the back of my mind I’ve known all along what I would use it for.

My mind is empty now of all except dull resolve. And an awareness of one simple, inescapable truth, a lesson learned too late. Much, much too late.

You can’t get away with murder. Sooner or later, one way or another, you have to pay.

In the beginning I thought you could. I believed that if you planned carefully enough, took all the right precautions, never for a moment lost your cool before, during, and after the act, you could create the perfect crime. So did Alicia.

The two of us laboring under the same delusion, reinforcing it in each other.

But we were different people then. Arrogant, selfish, convinced that we were invincible. All things seem possible when you’re in love, or think you are, and hungry enough and bold enough to take the necessary risks.

I remember as vividly as if had happened yesterday the afternoon we first talked about killing Alicia’s husband, Jack Maitland. We were in bed together in an Inverness motel, lying close after a half hour’s frenzied passion had been spent, not talking in normal voices but whispering, as if the walls had ears or hidden microphones.

“We can’t go on like this,” I said. “He’s bound to find out, and when he does there’s no telling what he’ll do.”

“I know,” she said. “Beat me up, beat you up, maybe even kill us both. He’s capable of it, Lew. My God, you don’t know how mean he can be when he’s mad enough.”

“I’ve had a taste of his temper,” I said.

“I’ve had whole meals,” she said, “and I don’t want any more.”

“All right, then. There’s only one thing we can do if we want to have a life together and all that goes with it. It’s what we’ve both been thinking.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you hate him enough to go through with it?”

“More than enough. More.”

“You’re sure his will leaves everything to you, no other bequests?”

“Positive. He has no relatives and he’s never given a dime to charity. It’ll all be mine.”

“Ours,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “ours. But how can we do it without getting caught?”

“I’ve already thought of a way. A foolproof way, if we’re careful.”

“When? How soon?”

“As soon as we can arrange it,” I said. “After he’s dead, we’ll have to wait a few months to make sure we’re not suspected. Then we’ll have each other and everything we ever wanted.”

Each other and everything we ever wanted.

Jack Maitland was a big man in Los Alegres. Owned the only luxury car dealership in the area, served one term on the city council, knew everybody of any importance well and peddled influence in exchange for favors. Worth better than half a million by Alicia’s estimate — his business, a two-story Spanish style home in the best neighborhood, a portfolio of blue-chip stocks, cash in a pair of bank accounts in his name only and more cash that he hadn’t declared to the IRS squirreled away in a private safe.

Alicia was ten years younger than Maitland, a red-haired beauty by anybody’s standards. Bitter and full of hate for him because of the way he treated her, restless and hungry for the good things in life because he kept her on a short financial leash. I was her age, good-looking enough and smooth enough to attract her, and just as restless, just as hungry. Working as one of Maitland’s salesmen for a small salary plus commissions, a dead-end job. He seldom spoke to me after I was hired, hardly even noticed I was around. So wrapped up in himself he never suspected his wife was having a torrid affair with a man like me.

Maitland had two passions. One was making money, the other was driving back country roads at high speeds in his favorite of the three cars he owned, a souped-up Porsche 356. The race car driver mentality. He had insomnia and did his joyriding at night, usually late at night, because he claimed it helped him relax enough so he could sleep. And he always went alone.

A perfect set-up, the way I figured it, for the perfect crime.

All Alicia and I had to do was turn the Porsche into a death trap.

It wasn’t difficult to accomplish once I had the logistics of the plan worked out. Maitland kept the Porsche locked up tight in his garage when he wasn’t out joyriding or taking long road trips by himself; he drove a Buick to work and to meetings and such around town because Buicks and Lincolns were what he sold. It was too much of a risk for me to try to get into the garage and doctor the Porsche myself, so the first step in the plan was Alicia’s.

She knew a little about cars and how they run, enough so that when I showed her a schematic of the Porsche’s engine in a repair manual and explained to her what to do, she understood right away. It was a simple matter of replacing the condenser on the distributor with a faulty unit I’d picked up at a car dismantler’s in another town. The distributors are out in the open on a 356, easy to get at, and it doesn’t take a mechanic’s skill to make the switch.

She managed it with no trouble while Maitland was out of the house at a Chamber of Commerce meeting. What the faulty condenser did was to let the Porsche run okay at idle and low speeds, but then make it misfire at higher speeds — a problem that can drive even the best mechanics crazy trying to figure out the cause. When the engine started acting up, Maitland had no choice but to put the Porsche into the shop for repairs. I knew he’d pick the one at the dealership rather than a shop specializing in foreign cars because his head mechanic had worked on his Porsche before and it wouldn’t cost him anything.

I made sure I was hanging around when he told the mechanic about the engine trouble, and like a good little employee I stepped in and offered to pick it up at his house and run it in for him, save him the trouble. I was pretty sure he’d agree because Alicia told me he had a full schedule that day, and he did agree right away. To make sure the Porsche stayed in the shop overnight, I stalled around before bringing it in until it was too late in the afternoon for an engine check and the repair work to get done.

As one of the salesmen I had a key to the lot gates, and it was easy enough to filch one of the spares for the shop when no one was looking. That night after midnight I slipped in and gimmicked the brakes. Porsche 356’s have master cylinders tied to all four brake lines, so one defective line affects the whole system. Cut the line outright and there’d be no pressure almost immediately; but puncture any one line with the tip of an icepick, just a tiny hole, and the brakes will hold at low speeds and a light touch on the pedal, while hard pumps at high speed will cause the line to rupture. When you’re traveling at seventy or more on winding country roads at night, the gearbox alone isn’t enough for even an experienced driver to maintain control.

We didn’t have long to wait once the faulty condenser had been replaced. Two nights later, the night of May 12, Maitland wrapped the Porsche around a tree on Chileno Valley Road, traveling at a speed estimated at eighty when the brakes went out. Dead on impact, his body so badly mangled that he had to be buried in a closed casket.

Just another tragic accident.

Alicia and I waited six months, still meeting on the sly in places far from Los Alegres, before we started seeing each other openly. Us dating didn’t raise any eyebrows; nobody suspected a thing. After two months, we went up to Reno and got married. And then we had each other and Maitland’s business and Maitland’s house and Maitland’s money — every thing we’d ever wanted. Top of the world, Ma.

Only it didn’t last very long. Not very long at all.

The money just seemed to evaporate. My fault as much as Alicia’s. Expensive sailboat, expensive clothes, expensive jewelry, expensive gadgets. Trips to Las Vegas, New York, Hawaii. Catered parties at home with French champagne and gourmet food, lavish meals in the best restaurants in San Francisco. And I listened to somebody’s can’t-miss recommendation on a stock that had just gone public and took a flyer and lost a bundle.

Maitland’s blue chips went next, at a loss in a buyer’s market. It wasn’t long before the money from that ran out, too. And then we lost the business because of poor management and a lousy economy that kept people from buying luxury cars. I didn’t know or care anything about running a large dealership and the man I hired as manager proved to be incompetent and a crook besides; I found out too late that he’d been knocking down a percentage of every sale on the sly.

The bankruptcy forced us to sell the house, and we didn’t get anywhere near what it was worth or realize much profit once the balance of the mortgage and the realtor’s fees were paid. And when the money from that was gone, we were right back where we’d started. Or rather I was. I had to go to work as a used-car salesman to pay the bills, and at that we almost went under. All that saved us was Alicia grudgingly taking a job selling cosmetics.

That was when I knew for sure that there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. That there are other kinds of punishments besides prison and the death penalty. That you can pay and keep on paying in installments, a little at a time over a period as long as a jail sentence.

I don’t know why Alicia and I stayed together after we lost the house and the last of the good life disappeared. It wasn’t love; that ended as soon as things started going bad. Not sex, either; we quit sleeping together early on and went our separate ways when itches needed scratching. Inertia had something to with it, I suppose. And guilt. And the subconscious desire to hurt and be hurt. But the main reason was the fear that if we split up, one of us would be vindictive enough to take revenge on the other, no matter what the cost. We were tied tight together by the invisible strings of what we’d done, and by love’s flip-side replacement, hate.

I thought of ways of cutting those strings. So did Alicia, I’m sure. But both of us were too beaten down, too scared, too dependent, too gutless to do anything about it. We just went on and on and on in the mire of our shared misery.

Until tonight.

Until our anniversary.

We fought constantly after everything went to hell. Just about every day, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries included... no truces, no cease fires. Verbal battles, mostly — name-calling, accusations, recriminations, empty threats. But every now and then things erupted into violence. She’d slap me, I’d slap her back. Once she threw a dish that opened a gash on my forehead; another time in the heat of rage she tried to stab me with a paring knife. I hit her with my fist that time and knocked her down, and just barely managed to stop myself from doing what Maitland had done on a couple of occasions, hitting her again and again, beating her bloody.

The fight tonight started because I made the mistake of mentioning the anniversary, I don’t know why except that I’ve always had a good memory for dates. It set her off on an immediate tirade. One of those that went on and on, an endless rehash of what crap our life together had turned out to be, how killing Maitland had all been for nothing and losing everything was my fault. She wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop, the words that rolled off her viper’s tongue growing uglier and uglier until my nerves were raw wounds and my fury was even greater than hers and I... I don’t know, I guess I snapped. Finally snapped.

I have only a vague memory of rushing into the bedroom, yanking my revolver out of the closet, then running back into the living room shouting “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” and pointing the gun at her and pulling the trigger. But that’s what I did, just what I did. I shot Alicia dead and shut her up forever.

Murder number two.

If I’d had the courage then, I might have turned the gun on myself. But I didn’t; my hand was shaking so badly I couldn’t even hold onto it. I staggered out to the car and drove around and around, going nowhere, until I calmed down enough to think clearly. I knew then what I had to do. And I drove straight here to Bodega Head, a place we went to now and then in the beginning to be alone together and look at the ocean and make some of our plans.

But the nights were never so cold back then, the sky never so dark.

The wind is louder now, the noises it makes like the screaming voice of a woman. Like Alicia’s voice, just before I killed her.

No, you can’t get away with murder. Sooner or later, one way or another, you have to pay.

My confession is nearly finished. In a minute or so I’ll get out of the car and walk as steadily as I can to the cliff edge and then step off into the dark — make the final payment for my two murders.

The one I committed on May 12, 1964.

And the one I committed tonight, on the fiftieth anniversary of the first.