A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

“I insist.”

“And you’d do likewise for me, right?”

“What?”

“Like if I insisted you do or not do something.”

“Certainly,” he said.

In mid-November Josephine was hired for a weekend job nursing an old woman, and Lorraine went off to a Saturday-afternoon birthday party with third-grade friends. Ruth found Albert lying on the sofa in the music room and announced she was going grocery shopping, but when he failed to reply she realized he was drunkenly asleep. She noticed, too, the floor pipe that fueled the zone heaters with natural gas. She went from room to room, fastening the windows shut, then hustled down into his shop and chose a monkey wrench. She got into her overcoat and hat and then crouched to quietly joggle and jam the joint of the floor pipe until it fell apart and she could smell the foul odor of rotten eggs streaming underneath the sofa. She held her nose as she walked out the front door, locked it behind her, and laid the monkey wrench on Albert’s garage workbench. She then went grocery shopping.

She was gone an hour. She didn’t worry that the natural gas would be ignited by a pilot light. She could fix that ruin. But she realized that she’d forgotten Pip in his golden cage in the sunroom, and she began to worry that the canary would die. She’d heard that canaries fell out of the air, dead, hours before humans in coal mines sniffed a problem.

She hailed a taxicab and was sitting in the back seat with two sacks of groceries when the cab turned onto 222nd Street. And there she was stricken at seeing Albert tottering on their front sidewalk, his hands on his hips and gasping for air. “Oh shoot,” she said.

She telephoned Judd in his office and confessed that homicide attempt as if it were funny. But he stiffly asked in his snooty way, “Are you aware they electrocute people for murder in New York?”

“Not if they don’t get caught.” And before he could say anything more, she shifted the conversation by inviting him to the house for a Wednesday luncheon. She’d be alone. She asked him to bring along twenty or so of the little one-shot bottles of various liquors that Benjamin & Johnes gave as treats to their lingerie buyers. She would be having family for Thanksgiving.

And so Judd walked over from the Jamaica Avenue bus stop in Queens, his filled briefcase clinking with liquors, and went up to the kitchen stoop, where he whistled the waltz tune to “Always.”

The kitchen door opened and Ruth happily greeted him by yanking wide her muskrat overcoat. She was naked underneath. Like the harlot he’d hired on 42nd Street. Judd worriedly glanced behind him, but she said, “Oh, don’t be such a scaredy-cat.”

She kissed him in the kitchen but removed his avid hands, then took his fedora and coat. Hanging them up in the foyer closet, she indicated the joint to the gas piping that she’d wrenched apart.

Judd found himself laughing at the outrageousness. “What a dolt!”

“Who?”

“The Governor. Could he really be that clueless?”

“Oh, he was so schnockered that morning he didn’t know what he did.” She hung up her fur overcoat and presented her gorgeous body to him, then took him up to Lorraine’s room.

Judd could later recall no precise time when he told Ruth he would help kill her husband. And if only for that reason he felt she’d hypnotized him. But he could recall mentioning sedatives that Wednesday afternoon with his feet hanging off Lora’s too-short bed, the hot breath of the furnace on their love-flushed skin, and Ruth cuddling into his chest, her right hand gently arranging his sleeping penis, then fondly holding his scrotum as he talked. “You could try to get a barbital,” he said. “The only brand name I’m familiar with is Veronal. Highly addictive and calms a person by quieting the respiratory system. Chloral hydrate works on the central nervous system. You could expect deep sleep in a half an hour. Whiskey exaggerates its effect. Chloral hydrate and whiskey is called a ‘Mickey Finn.’ I guess Mickey was a Chicago bartender who used the concoction to rob his customers.”

“Nice lesson. What else?”

His high school hankering to be a doctor was excited. “Well, there’s a variety of salts available from a pharmacist. Sodium bromide, potassium, ammonium—”

“Who’d need them?”

“Well, I believe bromides are used as anticonvulsants for those with epilepsy.”

“My father was epileptic. I could be, too.”

“But you’d need a doctor’s say-so. That’s the hitch with any sedative.”

She rolled onto him, her round breasts saucering at his waist. She folded her hands on his chest and rested her chin on them as she gazed up at him with dazzling, magnetic eyes. “Anything you don’t need a prescription for?”

“Well, chloroform. It’s an anesthetic.”

“Which means?”

“‘Without feeling.’ ‘Senseless.’ You can render a man unconscious with it. Even kill him with too much.”

“And it’s available?”

“Strangely, yes.”