Vanish in an Instant

5

Loftus looked at the clock on the mantel. 6:10. So the clock was going, all right, time was passing, but slow and soundless. He missed the noise of ticking. The clock he had in his own room ticked so loud that it often kept him awake. Sometimes in the middle of the night he got up and covered it with a glass bowl that he’d bought in the dime store. The glass smothered the noise a little but didn’t obscure the face of the clock.

The room was quiet. Mrs. Hamilton and the blonde girl had gone to another part of the house, and the doctor had come, and, after a long whispered conference in the hall, had gone away again. There were only the four of them left, the two policemen, and Meecham, and Loftus himself.

“Loftus.”

Loftus turned. “Yes, sir.” He wasn’t sure if this was the way to address a sheriff. He had never talked to one before.

“When did you write this?” Cordwink said.

“This afternoon.”

“Why?”

“I thought it would be better to write it down myself, to get things very clear. They are, aren’t they? Clear?”

Cordwink made a noise in the back of his throat. “Clear as a bell. You thought of everything, Loftus.”

“I tried to.”

“It makes me wonder whether you might have had a little help with it.”

“Who would help me?”

“Well, now. Meecham over here is always willing to lend a hand, especially if...”

“You’re off your rocker, Cordwink,” Meecham said flatly. “I never saw the man before in my life.”

“No?”

“No. And just what do you mean ‘help’ him with it? You talk as if we’re a couple of school kids and I did his homework for him, or something.”

Cordwink rustled the papers he held in his hand. There were eight of them, closely written. By moving his head slightly Loftus could see the top sheet. It had been the most difficult to write. He had made so many copies that he knew it by heart: My name is Earl Duane Loftus. I am writing this without coercion or advice on the part of anyone, and with the full knowledge that it can be used as evidence in a court of law...

Cordwink was speaking. “This comes at a convenient time for you, Meecham. Your client’s in jail, a lot of evidence against her...”

“Circumstantial.”

“... and then out of the blue comes a nice pat answer to all your problems.”

“But it didn’t come out of the blue,” Loftus said, blinking his eyes nervously. “Not at all, sir. I intended to admit everything right from the beginning, but I needed some time. I had to do a few things first, personal things. I’m afraid I didn’t give much thought to Mrs. Barkeley being held in jail. But then it didn’t do her any harm, did it? She’s a little spoiled.”

“Is she?”

“I think so.”

Cordwink’s mouth tightened. “There’s nothing in what you’ve written here to indicate that you knew her before last Saturday night.”

“I didn’t know her, not actually. I saw her once, a little over a year ago. I had come to consult Dr. Barkeley, I was feeling so tired and heavy, and I minded the heat so much. I...” He paused, folding his arms to hide his belly. It was my belly that worried me, he thought. It had begun to swell, bigger and bigger. I had nightmares about being a hideous freak, the only man in the world who ever had a baby. It wasn’t a baby, but I was a freak, all right. I didn’t know it then. I said, it’s my nerves, doctor, maybe I need a rest, a change of climate. You need hospital treatment, he said. I went to him three times, and the third time he told me what I had. It was only a word to me then, a pretty word like a girl’s name, Leukemia, Leukemia Smith, Leukemia Ann Johnston. Chronic myeloid leukemia, he said. He didn’t tell me I was dying. But I knew, I knew. He never sent me a bill.

“Loftus,” Cordwink said.

Loftus jerked his head up. “Yes, sir.”

“Go on. You were saying?”

“I... oh, yes. Yes. I saw Mrs. Barkeley once when I went to the doctor’s office. She was in the yard raking up leaves.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“No, oh no. I just passed by.”

“Did she notice you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Have you ever talked to her?”

“Just on Saturday night, that’s the only time.”

Cordwink turned to the deputy he had brought with him, a young intense-looking man in a tweed suit. “Dun- lop, you’re getting all this down?”

“Yes, sir,” Dunlop said. “‘Just on Saturday night, that’s the only time.’”

“When Mrs. Barkeley came into the bar, Loftus, did you recognize her?”

“Of course. She’s a very pretty woman.”

“What was the name of the bar?”

“It’s in there, in my confession.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Sam’s Café.”

“Are you sure? I thought it was Joe’s.”

Loftus shook his head. “It was Sam’s. If you’re trying to confuse me, you can’t. I remember everything very clearly. I only had one drink, a beer. I was just finishing it when Mrs. Barkeley came up to the bar and sat down beside me. This is all written down, but I suppose you want me to repeat it, just to test me, is that it?”

“Go on.”

“She smiled at me and said hello. I was flattered, thinking she might have remembered me. Then I saw how drunk she was, eyes glassy and out of focus, and her smile not real at all, just sort of painted on like a doll’s smile.”

“What else did she say?”

“You mean her exact words?”

“Yes.”

Loftus thought a moment. “She said, ‘God, this place stinks.’”

Meecham made a sound like a laugh and covered it with a cough. Cordwink turned and stared at him. “Is something amusing you, Meecham?”

“No.” Meecham coughed again. “I have a slight cold.”

“Is that a fact? Dunlop.”

“Yes, sir,” Dunlop said.

“Read that back. Mr. Meecham wants a good laugh.”

Dunlop bent over his notes. “‘God, this place stinks.’”

“There. Is it as funny as you thought it was, Meecham?”

Meecham looked as if he intended to make a sharp reply but he held it back. “No.”

“All right then. What else did Mrs. Barkeley say to you, Loftus?”

“She said she wanted a drink but she’d left her purse in the car. I bought her a beer. She had just started to drink it when Margolis came in. He was an impressive-looking man. I’d seen him before at the county hospital where I go for my X-ray treatments and shots. His firm was building the new T.B. wing and he used to hang around a lot, talking to the nurses. Margolis remembered me too. I’m quite a — freak.” He looked down at the floor. “Margolis asked Mrs. Barkeley to leave. She said she didn’t want to go home, and why didn’t all three of us go to another place for a drink. Margolis humored her. When she started for the door he said I was to come along and he’d give me a lift home. I accepted. I wanted a lift home, but there was more to it than that. I was excited, thrilled as a high-school kid at suddenly becoming a part of all that — glamor, I guess you’d call it. I didn’t realize until we got out to the car that offering me a lift home wasn’t exactly a noble gesture on Margolis’ part. He needed me to help him handle Mrs. Barkeley. She passed out in the back seat. Margolis shook her and swore at her, but she was limp as a rag.”

He stopped to wipe the sweat from his face with his handkerchief.

“... and swore at her,” Dunlop said in his quick uninterested monotone, “but she was limp as a rag.”

Loftus appealed to Cordwink: “I’ve admitted everything. Why does he have to take all this down?”

“It’s routine, for one thing. For another, the statement you’re making now will have to be checked with your written confession for discrepancies.”

“But I’m guilty, I’ve...”

“No matter if you write five hundred confessions, you still have to be tried in a court of law to determine the degree of your guilt.”

“Yes. Yes, I see now. I didn’t realize.” I sound so meek, Loftus thought. I don’t sound like a murderer at all. Maybe I would be more convincing if I acted belligerent, but I hardly know how.

“Are you ready to continue, Loftus?”

“I... yes, of course. Margolis said he couldn’t take Mrs. Barkeley home in that condition, and he asked me if I’d mind helping him get her out to his cottage. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard of his cottage. There were rumors around the hospital... I was there so much that I got to know quite a few of the nurses, and that’s how I first heard of Margolis and his affairs.”

“The cottage was just outside the city limits, on the river. It didn’t look like much on the outside, but it was fixed up nice inside — leather furniture and a stone fireplace and some good reproductions hanging on the walls, a Van Gogh, I remember, was one of them.”

“Tell me more about the fireplace,” Cordwink said.

“Well, there were a pair of fishing rods, crossed, on the wall above it, and on the mantel itself there were several of those big German steins and two hunting knives in leather sheaths.”

“Dunlop...” Cordwink made a half-turn. “Was the inside of Margolis’ cottage described in any of the papers?”

Dunlop put down his pencil. “A couple of Detroit papers carried a shot of the outside, and the Tribune, I think it was, had a shot of the floor where Margolis was found — bloodstains, et cetera.”

“No fireplace in the picture?”

“No fireplace.”

Loftus smiled anxiously. “I don’t read the Tribune anyway, sir.”

“All right, go on.”

“I helped Margolis carry her inside the cottage and put her on the davenport. She was still out cold. Margolis was very angry by this time. I think the two of them must have been quarreling earlier in the evening, and that this was a final straw for Margolis. He began calling her names and shaking her again. It was an ugly scene. I thought of all the things I’d heard about Margolis around the hospital. I thought of — well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I went over to the fireplace. The fire was lit and the room was beginning to get very warm. I picked up one of the hunting knives and took it out of its sheath. Margolis wasn’t paying any attention to me. He’d forgotten I was there. I was just a bum, a nobody, a... well, then I did it. I stabbed him in the neck. I’m not very strong and I thought his neck would be the easiest place. It wasn’t easy. I had to stab him four or five times. He fell after the first stab, but he didn’t die right away. He kept sort of flopping around on the floor. The blood was terrible. It got all over me, my gloves and my coat and pants. And the smell — I began to retch. I ran for the door, and I kept on running. I lost my head, forgot about the girl, forgot about everything. All I wanted to do was get away from that blood, that smell. I went home by side streets. I don’t know how far I walked, two miles, three miles. No one noticed me particularly. It was late, and it was snowing, big feathery flakes of snow that clung to my clothes and hid the stains. The house was dark when I got home. I let myself into my room and took off the clothes that had blood on them and put them in the back of the wardrobe. That’s where they are now.”

“In the wardrobe,” Cordwink said.

“Yes, 611 Division Street, the left front room. It has its own entrance, that’s why the landlady calls it an apartment.”

“What did you do on Sunday?”

“I was very weak, I had to stay in bed.”

“Didn’t see any papers?”

“Not until early Monday morning, that is, this morning. As soon as I read that Mrs. Barkeley was being held, I went down to the jail to see you. You were busy, and I waited in the corridor. Mr. Meecham saw me there.”

Meecham nodded. “Yes, I saw him.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Cordwink said. “What happened, Loftus? Lose your nerve?”

“No. I suddenly realized, as I was sitting there, that there were a lot of things I hadn’t attended to, and that I’d never get a chance, once I’d confessed. So I walked out again.”

“A lot of things you hadn’t attended to, such as what?”

“Personal things. I closed my bank account, and sold my car, things like that.”

“Listen to this, Loftus.” Cordwink turned over the pages until he found what he was looking for. “ ‘I stabbed Margolis deliberately and with intent to kill, and not to protect Mrs. Barkley or myself.’ You still claim that?”

“Better think before you answer,” Meecham said. “That deliberation and intent business will...”

“Keep out of this, Meecham,” Cordwink said, scowling. “You’re not his lawyer.”

“He needs one.”

“He’ll get one.” Cordwink faced Loftus again. “Have you any money?”

“A little, yes. The past few months I’ve been able to work. I’m an accountant. That’s what my treatments have been for, not so I could live longer, but so I could carry on with my job, live more efficiently.”

“How much money? Two thousand? One?”

“Oh, not that much.”

“Lawyers come high. The more crooked they are, the bigger their price. That’s how they stay out of the booby hatch, by rubbing the lesions on their conscience with greenbacks.”

Loftus looked a little puzzled. “Well, if I have to have a lawyer, Mr. Meecham will suit me fine. He’s been very kind.”

“Kind?” Cordwink raised his eyebrows, exaggeratedly. “This I must hear.”

“When he thought I was just a bum, he offered me two dollars.”

“Well, well. Where’d you get the two dollars, Meecham, selling phony oil shares to war widows?”

Meecham’s smile was a little strained. “I object to the question on the grounds that it is intimidating and forms a conclusion.”

Dunlop put down his pencil, and said, with a faint whine, “When everybody keeps talking like this, I don’t know what to write down. Everybody shouldn’t keep talking like this.”

“Don’t write anything,” Cordwink said. “Call a patrol car and take Loftus down and book him.”

I’m going to jail, Loftus thought. But he still couldn’t quite believe it. Jail was for criminals, for thieves and thugs, for brutal angry lawless men. He said, with the surprise and disbelief evident in his voice: “I’m going to... to jail?”

“For the present, yes.”

“Why do you say, for the present?”

“We have no facilities at the jail for looking after a dy— a sick man. There’s a prison ward at the County

Hospital. You’ll be transferred there eventually.”

“The County Hospital.” Loftus laughed, holding his hands over his belly. It hurt him to laugh, but he couldn’t help it. “That’s funny, isn’t it? The final irony. After all that’s happened, I’ll end up where I started — in a ward at the County Hospital.”

The sound of his laughter faded, though his mouth kept grinning. He saw Cordwink and Meecham exchange uneasy glances. “You’re uncomfortable, aren’t you? — disturbed? — you wish you’d never seen me? Yes, it’s the same everywhere I go, I make people uncomfortable. I don’t have any friends. No one wants to be near me, people are afraid to be near a man who’s walking a step ahead of death. I make them too conscious of their own fate, and they hate me for it. I’m not blaming them, no, I understand how they feel. I loathe myself more than anyone could loathe me. I loathe this decaying body that I’m trapped inside, hopelessly trapped inside. This isn’t me, this grotesque body, it is my prison. What prison have you to offer that could be half so terrible?”

He didn’t realize that he was crying until he felt the sting of salt on his lips. He sometimes cried when he was alone at night and the hours seemed so ironically endless; but never in front of anyone, not even his wife on the day she left him. He wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve, ashamed that he had broken down in front of these three men.

Cordwink stared out of the window, motionless, his face like granite. Inside, he felt something begin to move, like a steel claw, reaching out and clutching his stomach, squeezing. It could be me. Or Alma and the kids. Don’t let it happen. Me or Alma and the kids.

A pair of headlights swerved up the driveway. He glanced across the room at Loftus. Loftus had slumped forward in his chair, his hands covering his eyes. The back of his neck looked very young, a boy’s neck, thin and vulnerable and white as wax.

“Loftus.”

There was no reply, no stirring in response to his name.

“Loftus,” Cordwink said again. “The car is here.”

Loftus raised his head slowly. He seemed dazed, as if he’d flown his prison, had gone miles and years away, and was now returning, like a soul to hell.

“I’m ready,” Loftus said.