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Judd looked at the faint rise of the chest and answered, “I don’t think so.”
“He’s got to be dead,” Ruth said. “He saw us both. This has got to go through or I’m ruined.”
Judd said, “I’m already ruined.”
With cold efficiency, she went to the closet, carried back one of Albert’s silk, university-striped neckties, this one red and yellow, and commanded Judd, “His feet.”
Snagging off the chemist’s gloves and hiking up the white linens, Judd hitched the ankles together with the necktie as Ruth tore off strips of the cotton gauze, shook more chloroform on them, and shoved roots of them inside Albert’s nostrils with her little finger. She then stuffed his mouth with chloroformed cotton and flattened the chloroformed handkerchief on the pillow before rolling her husband so that his face was smothered by it. Tying his wrists behind his back with a white hand towel, Ruth told Judd, “Look for his handgun.”
That jarred him. “There was a gun?”
Worried that his rising
voice could be heard, Ruth scowled and shut the open window. He could be such a child. She instructed, “Look under his pillow first.”
The pillowcase was so soggy and reeking with blood that Judd had to turn his head. A Bien Jolie corset he’d given Ruth was on the floor, which meant she’d been wearing it. Which, in his drunkenness, pleased him. His fingers grazing a leather holster, he pulled it out and hinged open a .32-caliber revolver, pointlessly shook out three, but not all, of its bullets, imperfectly gripped Albert’s still-warm right hand around it, and flopped the pistol onto the bed next to Albert’s left elbow.
The police could construct no scenario in which that tableau made sense.
Ruth was in Josephine’s room, scouring Judd’s briefcase for something in the dark.
“I’m frazzled,” Judd said. “I need a cigarette.”
She gave him a scornful look but said nothing. She carried the coiled picture wire and Judd’s gold mechanical pencil into the bedroom. She wasn’t surprised that in spite of everything Albert was still very slowly and wheezily breathing. She could even admire him for that: a diehard. Wanting to be thorough, she jabbed an end of the picture wire under the cold skin of his neck, made a noose, snugged it and tied a granny knot, then twisted the noose so tight with Judd’s Cross pencil that Albert made a faint gargling sound and blood oozed over the indenting wire. Wife of his dying, she’d waited so long for this moment that she almost wanted it to linger. With her head just above his, she whispered, “How’s that, o mio babbino?” She turned an ear and listened until she was sure Albert’s breathing had ceased. And then she went out, forgetting the mechanical pencil, which the police would find and eventually match with the gold Cross fountain pen still snug in Judd’s inside jacket pocket.
Judd had gotten his Sweet Caporals and gone downstairs into the darkened music room. He’d wrenched his knee in the wrestling with Albert and his limp would make him far too noticeable all that Sunday. He sat on the Aeolian player piano’s bench, massaging his knee and watching gray smoke untangle from the fiery red ash. When the cigarette was so short it singed his bloodstained fingers, he left it in a tin ashtray on the keyboard, as unsecret as a clue in a children’s party hunt.
Ruth heard him heading upstairs as she went into the bathroom and switched on the light. Her hands were red with blood, and her nightgown was aproned with blood, and blood was trickling onto the floor in pennies of shining red. And then Judd was behind her. “My God,” she said. “Look at me.”
Judd inclined toward the mirror in his nearsightedness and found Albert’s blood on the front of his shirt. Sunday-school memories of Cain’s murder of Abel floated up: What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me.
She asked, “Can we wash out the stains?”
He remembered asking his mother that when he was socked by a bully at age ten, and Mrs. Gray had said, as he now said, “No.”
“Give me your shirt,” Ruth said.
He unbuttoned his gray vest, took off the shirt, and dully watched her hurry downstairs. He then slouched out of the bathroom toward the whisky, taking some swallows, then flopping down into Josephine’s chair with the Tom Dawson bottle cradled against his stomach. His head slackened so that his chin touched his chest and he fell asleep, waking to find Ruth in front of him in a green nightgown now, holding out one of Albert’s new blue shirts, which was still squarely pinned and wrapped in tissue paper. He asked her, “What did you just do?”
“I burned our things in the cellar furnace.”
Judd got into Albert’s shirt, thought it overlarge, and asked, “Could you cut a new buttonhole? This hangs like a horse collar on me.”
She sighed with impatience but got some scissors and soon the collar was fitting and he was tying his necktie in the bathroom mirror as if he were just setting off on his morning calls. Adrenaline or sheer brutality had slightly sobered him. “We still have to make it look like a burglary,” he said.
Ruth went into her mother’s room and quietly tossed it as she thought a burglar would. In the couple’s bedroom, Judd flung their purple armchair’s back and seat cushions onto Ruth’s twin bed. His forearm swiped across the chiffonnier and a hairbrush, perfumes, cufflinks, and pocket change flew. Judd failed to notice in the scatter Albert’s fine gold Bulova watch and his gold necktie stickpin with Jessie Guischard’s initials on it. J.G. Recalling that the Italian newspaper was wrapped on the sash weight, Judd found it and flung the pages up, watching them seagull down to the Wilton rug.
The widow returned to the couple’s bedroom, scowled at Albert’s corpse, and handed Judd some packets of sleeping powder, his sales route list with hotel addresses, her Croton cocktail watch, and a Midol box that she said contained bichloride of mercury tablets.
Judd hunted through The Governor’s suit and overcoat pockets and finally found the new wallet. He filched its contents of five twenty-dollar bills and a ten and flipped it onto the floor. Holding up the cash, he said, “You’ll need some of this.”
She shook her head. “The police will suspect something.” She was rooting through a jewelry case, snatching out expensive rings, earrings, and necklaces. She held their winking abundance out to him. “Could you take these with you?”
“Of course not.”
“But burglars would steal them, wouldn’t they?”
“Hide them then,” Judd said, and went out.
