With a glare, Albert added, “And seventy-five dollars.”
A fascinated Ruth was on the sofa with Lorraine, watching the argument restart and wondering if it helped or hindered the night’s plot.
Offended once again, George said, “Well, it’s pretty small business to accuse a party of friends of such a thing.”
“Says you,” Albert said.
And George Hough fell back into grammar school. “Darn right, says me,” he said. “Would you like to try and stop me?”
Albert sneered. “I could be coaxed.” But he was so drunk he had difficulty in getting up from his chair and dropped back into it again.
“Here now!” Milton said. “We don’t want any fisticuffs.”
“I’m fine with it,” Albert said.
“Me too,” said George. Words were failing him.
Serena cautioned her brother. “We can’t have the police here again.”
Cecil Hough had gotten up from the folding table and was crouched so he could talk sternly into his brother’s ear. George listened and was helped up from his chair by Cecil and Howard and guided over to the sofa, falling down into it and against Ruth. Albert failed to notice because Milton was humoring him with flattery about his musculature and boxing skill.
Woozily, George Hough glanced up at Ruth and managed to say, “Are you treated right at home?”
She shook her head just a little, as if she were afraid to say more.
“Somebody oughta kill that Old Crab,” he said.
She smiled.
Judd wakened to a hand shaking his shoulder and heard the bus driver instruct him that this was the Queens Village stop he’d wanted. And then he found himself with rain hitting his face on the sidewalk of Jamaica Avenue at the corner of 222nd Street. Still tipsy, he tilted off balance but caught himself on the arc-light pole before he could fall. His briefcase surprised him by being firmly gripped in his left hand. He patted his overcoat pockets and found his buckskin gloves tucked inside them. The pair had cost him eleven dollars. Couples were hurrying by him in the rain, but he was, he knew, the sort of insignificant fellow that people failed to notice, and so he felt safe in strolling the few blocks north to the Snyder residence.
And then he just stood in front of the cream-yellow corner home for a while, seeing lights on in the kitchen, the music room, and the second-floor hallway, and watching for movement. She’d said Josephine would be nursing in Kew Gardens. The large white Colonial door that faced west would be locked, Ruth had said, and he drunkenly remembered he was to go to the kitchen door on the south, next to Albert’s one-car garage. Albert’s Buick wasn’t inside it.
On the kitchen porch, his shin banged the hinged wooden milkman’s box and he ouched, then checked the neighborhood to see if he’d been heard. The households were sleeping.
Judd tried the side door and found it unlocked, just as Ruth had promised. On the kitchen table she’d placed a fresh pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes—she’d forgotten his favorite brand—which was to have been a signal to him that the family was not at home. Or did it mean just the opposite? He listened and found that the house was silent but for the faint whisper of the furnace consuming coal just below him. Still he hushed himself when a kitchen chair shrieked as he yanked it out to heavily sit on. His head ached. He hunched forward with his elbows on his widened knees and held his face in his hands. Sleep would have been so nice.
But the canary Pip cheeped from his cage in the front of the house, waking Judd enough that he stood and stared at the cigarette pack: Lucky Strike: “It’s toasted.” And I’m toasted, he thought as he swayed there. Remembering that Albert smoked only cigars and would notice it, Judd pocketed the cigarette pack, then trudged up the oaken stairway between the dining and music rooms, teetering on some steps, and at the upstairs hallway went down it into the bathroom to urgently urinate. His face in the medicine cabinet mirror was so shaded, sickly, and gruesome that he felt pity for its owner and smiled at his joke. He tilted back down the hallway for Ruth’s mother’s room above the foyer and front door, his right shoulder banging and sliding along the floral wallpaper. Heat was breathing through the vents and the house was hot as blood. Remembering not to switch on Josephine’s ceiling light fixture, he struggled out of his fedora, overcoat, and gray woolen suit coat, threw them with aggravation into Josephine’s closet, and fell down on the soft velour chair beside the white Swedish bed. With effort he checked the Ingersoll clock on Josephine’s vanity table, twisting the clock’s face to catch some of the hallway light and guessing that the hands illustrated that it was about one o’clock on Sunday morning.
But he finally did recall the functional plot in Ruth’s letter to him of a week earlier. Which he’d burned. He lifted Josephine’s pillow with interest and found underneath it, as promised, electrician’s pliers, the five-pound window sash weight, and a half-pint bottle of rye whiskey that Judd unscrewed and sniffed. She’d meant it for Albert, just in case, and she’d spiked it with bichloride of mercury. The chemical scent put him off and he instead discovered that Ruth, sweet lady, had left on the floor by the pink velour chair a new bottle of Tom Dawson whisky, one of five quarts she’d purchased for next Saturday’s party on the eve of her thirty-second birthday. Judd cracked it open and took some swills of that, tasting the Scotch flavors of iodine and seaweed, his throat burning in just the right way. Although he was instructed to use the electrician’s pliers to cut the telephone wires, when he tried to stand up from the chair he flopped against the wall in his drunkenness and slid to the floor like a rag doll, losing the pliers under Josephine’s bed.
Judd tilted the bottle and the whisky had some more of him. Soon his shirt was soaking with sweat. Waiting made him think of fishing with his father and sister, the glub of water under the boat as he bobbed and watched his line bleed across Lake Skaneateles. A nibble, a yank, and then nothing. Everything was fuzzy now but for the fact that he was there to murder a man he’d never even met, whose first name he could not then remember. The Governor; that was all. His willingness to kill for Ruth mystified and scared him, just as it had earlier in the month. The Ingersoll clock read two o’clock. Soon the family would be home and he would have to go through with it or Ruth would give up on him and find a stronger man. And then he had a wild impulse to run away and he tried to, fighting hard to scrabble upright and forgetting his things as he fled downstairs. But he’d gotten only onto the landing when he heard a rare automobile on 222nd Street and saw its high beams sling yellowish light across the dining room windows. Judd clawed and stumbled back up the stairs in a panic.
The coroner would find that Albert Snyder’s blood-alcohol level was .3 percent, almost four times the police department’s measure for intoxication. Had Ruth and Judd done nothing at all, Albert may have died in his sleep. But still he insisted on driving his wife and daughter home, gloomily silent as he wove his big Buick down the streets, just missing other cars and overcorrecting on his turns as Ruth quietly offered him needed directions like the most forgiving of wives. At their house he swerved a hard right toward the one-car garage and banged into the curb. Albert gave Ruth a vengeful stare, as if daring her to criticize him.
“We’ll get out here,” was all she said, and Albert said nothing as she got a sleeping Lorraine out of the back seat. The girl was, at nine, too heavy to carry, but Ruth let her huddle under her arm as she helped the girl to the front door. Ruth unlocked it and hesitated in the foyer, listening for Judd, but there was no sound but the tick-tocking grandfather clock and Pip chirping his hello.
Ruth took off her black satin turban and lynx-trimmed polo coat and hung them in the foyer closet. She said, “Let me get you some water, Lora,” and went into the lighted kitchen without her. She saw the cigarette pack was gone, a kitchen chair turned out. She filled a water glass from the faucet and carried it back to the foyer with her. Lorraine’s school shoes were off and her new lamé and fur-trimmed coat was pooled at her feet. She was wobbling there with her eyes shut, close to fainting with exhaustion. She’d sleep through anything now. “Will you climb the stairs for me, baby? I can’t lift you.”
Lorraine held on to the handrail and on to her mother’s waist as she trudged upstairs just as Judd had. “Where’s Granny?” she asked.
“Working,” Ruth said.
“Oh. Right,” the girl said. She angled straight into her bedr
oom without switching on the ceiling light.
Ruth rested the water glass on the vanity. “Will you get into your pajamas, please?”