The Sixth Commandment (41 page)

“So? What did you hear?”

“On Friday, one of the regulars here told me he stood behind Constable Ronnie Goodfellow at the bank, and Goodfellow closed out his account. More’n three hundred dollars. Then that fellow from Mike’s Service Station, he told Millie Goodfellow that her husband had brought in their car for a tune-up. Then one of the clerks from Bill’s Five-and-Dime happened to mention that Ronnie Goodfellow stopped in and bought the biggest cardboard suitcase they got. Now you put all those things together, and what do you get?”

I grinned at him.

“A trip,” I said. “Constable Goodfellow is cutting loose.”

“Yeah,” he said with satisfaction, taking a sip of the coffee royal, “that’s what I figured.”

“Thanks for telling me,” I said. “Any idea where he’s going?”

“Nope.”

“Any idea who he’s going
with?”

“Nope, except I know it ain’t his wife.”

“Sam,” I said, “why would Goodfellow go about planning this trip so openly? He must know how people talk in this town. Is it that he just doesn’t give a damn?”

That seamed basalt face turned to me. He showed the big, yellowed teeth in what I supposed was intended as a smile. The old eyes stared, then lost their focus, looking inward.

“You know what I figure?” he said. “I figure it’s part what you say: he don’t give a damn. But why don’t he? I tell you, I think since he took up with that woman—or she took up with him—he ain’t been thinking straight. I figure that woman scrambled his brains. Just stirred him up to such a hot-pants state, he don’t know if he’s coming or going. I hear tell of them two …”

“All right,” I said, “that fits in with what I’ve heard. Sam, you think he’d kill for her? You think he’d do murder for a woman he loves?”

He reflected a moment.

“I reckon he would,” he said finally. Then he added softly, “I did.”

I froze, not certain I had heard him aright.

“You killed for a woman?”

He nodded.

I glanced briefly at his bookcase of romantic novels. I wondered if what he was telling me was fact or fiction. But when I looked at him again, I recognized something I had never before put a name to. That unreadable, inward look. Speaking with a minimum of lip movement. The ability to turn a question. The coldly suspicious, standoffish manner. Friendly enough, genial enough. To a point. Then the steel shutter came rattling down.

“You’ve done time,” I told him.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Eleven years.”

“Couldn’t have been manslaughter. Murder two?”

He sighed. “My woman’s husband. He was a no-good. She wanted him gone. After awhile, I wanted him gone, too. I’d have done anything to keep her. Anything. Murder? Sheesh, that wasn’t nothing. I’d have cut my own throat to make her happy. Some women can do that to you.”

“I guess,” I said. “Did she wait for you?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “She took up with others. Got killed when a dancehall burned down in Chicago. This happened a long time ago, whilst I was inside.”

He just said it, without rancor. It was something that had happened a long time back, and he had learned to live with it. Memories blur. Pain becomes a twinge. Can you remember the troubles you had five years ago?

“So you think Goodfellow would do it?”

“Oh, he’d do it; no doubt about that. If she said, ‘Jump,’ he’d just say, ‘How high?’ You think he did?”

I started to say yes, started to say I thought Ronnie Goodfellow had murdered both Ernie Scoggins and Al Coburn. But I shut my mouth. I had nothing to take to a D.A. Nothing but the sad knowledge of how a tall, proud Indian cop might become so impassioned by sleek, soft Julie Thorndecker that the only question he’d ask would be, “How high?”

We finished our coffee. I thanked Sam Livingston and left. He didn’t rise to see me out. Just waved a hand slowly. When I closed the door, he was still seated at the table with empty cups and a full ashtray. He was an old, old man trying vainly to recall a dim time of passion and resolve.

When I got up to the lobby, the desk clerk motioned me over and said I had a call at ten o’clock. A Miss Joan Powell had called.

I was discombobulated. Then insanely happy. Joan Powell? How had she learned where I was? What could she—? Then I remembered: it was the name Mary Thorndecker was to use.

“Did she say she’d call again?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Todd. At eleven.” He glanced at the wood-cased regulator clock on the wall behind him. “That’ll be about twenty minutes or so.”

I told him I’d be in my room, and asked him to switch the call. Upstairs, I sat patiently, flipping the pages of my Sunday newspaper, not really reading it or even seeing it. Just turning pages and wondering if I’d ever meet a woman I’d kill for. I didn’t think so. But I don’t suppose Sam Livingston or Ronnie Goodfellow ever anticipated doing what they had done.

I remember meeting a grunt in Vietnam, a very shy, religious guy who told me that during training he had given the matter a great deal of painful thought, and had decided that if he got in a firefight, he’d shoot over the heads of the enemy. He just believed it was morally wrong to kill another human being.

Then, less than a week after he arrived in Nam, his platoon got caught in an ambush.

“How long did it take you to change your mind?” I asked him. “Five minutes?”

“About five seconds,” he said sadly.

I grabbed up the phone after the first ring. I might have had my fingers crossed.

“Samuel Todd,” I said.

“This is Joan Powell,” Mary Thorndecker said faintly. “How are you, Mr. Todd?”

“Very well, thanks. And you, Miss Powell?”

“What? Oh yes. Fine. I’m going to church this morning. The Episcopal church. The noon service, and I was wondering if you were planning to attend?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. The noon service at the Episcopal church. Yes, I’ll be there.”

“Then maybe I’ll see you.”

“I certainly hope so. Thank you, Miss Powell.”

I hung up slowly, and thought about it. I decided she was a brainy woman. A crowded church service would offer a good opportunity to talk. There’s always privacy in mobs. I glanced at my watch and figured I had about forty-five minutes to kill.

I wandered out to the vacant streets of Coburn. A drizzle was beginning to slant down from a choked sky. I turned up my collar, turned down the hat brim. It seemed to me that my boots had been damp for a week, and soggy pant and sleeve cuffs rubbed rawly. I passed a few other Sunday morning pedestrians, hunched beneath black umbrellas. I didn’t see any cars moving. The deserted village.

I walked over to River Street, stood at the spot where Ronnie Goodfellow and I had paused a week ago to watch the garbage-clogged water slide greasily by. Then I turned away and went prowling through the empty streets. There were some good storefronts beneath the grime. A few bore the date of construction: 1886, 1912, 1924.

A paint job and clean-up drive would have done wonders for Coburn. Like putting cosmetics on a corpse. I had told Goodfellow that if history teaches anything, it teaches change. That people, cities, nations, civilizations are born, flourish, die. How fatuous can you get? That may be the way things are, but knowing it doesn’t make it any easier to accept. Especially when you’re a witness to the senescence of what had once been a vital, thriving organism.

Coburn was dying. Unless I had misread the signs, Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker was dying. If he went, the village would surely go, for so much of the town’s hopes seemed built on his money, his energy, his dreams. They would vanish together, Thorndecker and his Troy.

I shouldn’t have felt anything. This place meant nothing to me. It was just a mouldering crossroad on the way to Albany. But once, I suppose, it had been a busy, humming community with brawls and parades, good times, laughter, a sense of growth, and a belief it would last forever. We all think that. And here was Coburn now, the damp and the rot crumbling away brave storefronts and streaking dusty glass.

If this necropolis and the sordid Thorndecker affair meant anything, they persuaded me to feel deeply, cherish more, smell the blooms, see the colors, love, laugh at pinpricks and shrug off the blows. What do the Hungarians say? “Before you have time to look around, the picnic is over.” The picnic was ending for Coburn. For Thorndecker. Nothing but litter left to the ants.

I plodded back to the Coburn Inn. I had a sudden vision of this place in twenty years, or fifty. A lost town. No movement. No lights. No voices. Dried leaves and yellowed newspapers blowing down cracked pavements. Signs fading, names growing dim. Everyone moved away or dead. Nothing but the rain, wind, and maybe, by then, a blank and searing sun.

You’re as old as you feel? Bullshit. You’re as old as you look. And you can’t fake youth, not really. The pain is in seeing it go, grabbing, trying to hold it back. No way. Therefore, do not send to ask for whom the ass sinks; it sinks for thee. Forgive me, Joan Powell. I cast you aside not from want of affection, but from fear. I thought by rejecting an older mate I might stay young forever: the Peter Pan of the Western World. Why do we think of the aged as lepers when we are all registered for that drear colony?

So much for Sunday morning thoughts in Coburn, N.Y. Gloomsville-on-the-Hudson. But I met this emotional wrench with my usual courage and steadfastness. I rushed up to Room 3-F and had a stiff belt of vodka before setting out for the noon service at the Episcopal church.

My nutty fantasy of the morning had been the right one: I should have stood in bed.

I was a few minutes late getting to the church. But I wasn’t the only one; others were hurrying up the steps, collapsing their umbrellas, taking seats in the rear pews. I stood a moment at the back of the nave, trying to spot Mary Thorndecker. A robed choir was singing “My Faith Is a Mountain,” and not badly.

I finally saw her, sitting about halfway down on the aisle. Next to her were Dr. Kenneth Draper, Edward Thorndecker, and Julie.
Julie?!
I couldn’t figure out what she was doing there, unless she was screwing the choir.

I noticed Mary was turning her head occasionally, glancing toward the rear of the church, searching for me. I moved over to one side, and the next time she looked in my direction, I raised a hand and jerked a thumb over my shoulder. I thought she nodded slightly. I went back outside. I wasn’t about to sit through the service. If Mary could get out while it was going on, so much the better. If not, I’d wait outside until it was over.

I stood on the pillared porch, protected from the rain. I lighted a cigarette. The Reverend Peter Koukla had practically said it was a sin to smoke on church grounds. But it wasn’t a 100 mm. cigarette, so it was really a
small
sin.

I was leaning against a pillar watching the rain come down—almost as exciting as watching paint dry—when an old guy came around the corner of the church. Another of Coburn’s gnarled gaffers. He had to be 70, going on 80. Coburn, I decided, had to be the geriatric capital of the U.S.

This ancient was wearing a black leather cap, rubberized poncho, and black rubber boots. He was carrying a rake and dragging a bushel basket at the end of a piece of soggy rope. He was raking up broken twigs, sodden leaves, refuse, and dumping all the slop in his basket.

When he came close to me, I said pleasantly, “Working on Sunday?”

“What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” he snarled.

It was a stupid question I had asked, so I was willing to endure his ill-humor. I pulled out my pack of cigarettes and held it out to him. He shook his head, but he dropped rake and rope, and climbed the steps to join me on the porch. He fished under his poncho and brought out a blunt little pipe. The shank was wound with dirty adhesive tape. The pipe was already loaded. He lighted it with a wooden kitchen match and blew out an explosion of blue smoke. It smelled like he had filled it with a piece of the wet rope tied to his bushel basket.

“No church service for you?” I said.

“Naw,” he said. “I been. See one, you seen ’em all.”

“You’re not a religious man?” I asked.

“The hell I’m not,” he said. He cackled suddenly. “What the hell, it don’t cost nothing.”

I looked at him with interest. All young people look different; all old people look alike. You see the bony nose, wrinkled lips, burst capillaries. The geezer sucked on his pipe with great enjoyment, looking out at the wet world.

“How come you ain’t inside?” he asked.

“Like you,” I said, “I been.”

“I got no cause to go,” he said. “I’m too old to sin. You been sinning lately?”

“Not as much as I want to.”

He grunted, and I hoped it was with amusement. At that moment, a religious nut I didn’t need.

“You the sexton?” I asked.

“How?”

“Sexton. Church handyman.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I guess you could say that. Ben Faber.”

“Samuel Todd,” I said.

His hands were under his poncho. He didn’t offer to shake, so I lighted another cigarette and dug my chilled hands back into my trenchcoat pockets.

“You don’t live hereabouts?” he said.

“No.”

“Just passing through?”

“I hope so.”

He grunted again, and then I was certain it was his way of expressing amusement.

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s a pisser, ain’t it? Going down the drain, this town is. Well, I won’t be here to see it.”

“You’re moving?”

“Hell, no,” he said, astonished. “But I figure I’ll be six feet under before it goes. I’m eighty-four.”

“You look younger,” I said dutifully.

“Yeah,” he said, puffing away. “Eighty-two.”

I was amazed at how this chance conversation was going, how it seemed a continuation of my melancholy musings of the morning.

“It doesn’t scare you?” I asked him. “The idea of dying?”

He took the pipe out of his mouth long enough to spit off the porch into a border of shrubs tied up in burlap sacks.

“I’ll tell you, sonny,” he said, “when I was your age, it scared me plenty. But don’t worry it; as you get along in years, the idea of croaking gets easier to live with. You see so many people go. Family. Friends. It gets familiar-like. And then, so many of them are shitheads, you figure if they can do it, you can do it. Then too, you just get tired. Nothing new ever happens. You’ve seen it all before. Wars and accidents. Floods and fires. Marriages. Murders. People dying by the billions, and billions of babies getting born. Nothing new. So just slipping away seems like the most natural thing in the world. Naw, it don’t scare me. Pain, maybe. I don’t like that. Bad pain, I mean. But as for dying, it’s got to be done, don’t it?”