The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder (13 page)

“Let them.”

The fire would not spread to the house. There was no wind, and the barn was a good thirty yards away. John felt quite mad, like Helen, or the chickens, and was astonished by the reasonableness of his thought about the fire’s not spreading.

“It’s all over,” Helen said, as the last, not quite the last chickens wobbled out of the barn. She drew John closer by the front of his pajama jacket.

John kissed her gently, then more firmly on the lips. It was strange, stronger than any kiss he had ever known with a girl, yet curiously without further desire. The kiss seemed only an affirmation that they were both alive. They knelt facing each other, tightly embracing. The cries of the hens ceased to sound ugly, and sounded only excited and puzzled. It was like an orchestra playing, some members stopping, others resuming instruments, making a continuous chord without a tempo. John did not know how long they knelt like that, but at last his knees hurt, and he stood up, pulling Helen up, too. He looked out of the window and said:

“They must be all out. And the fire isn’t any bigger. Shouldn’t we—” But the obligation to look for Ernie seemed far away, not at all pressing on him. It was as if he dreamed this night or this dawn, and Helen’s kiss, the way he had dreamed about flying like Superman in the barn. Were they really Helen’s hands in his now?

She slumped again, and plainly she wanted to sit on the carpet, so he left her and pulled on his blue jeans over his pajama pants. He went down and entered the barn cautiously by the front door. The smoke made the interior hazy, but when he bent low, he could see fifty or more chickens pecking at what he knew must be Ernie on the floor. Bodies of chickens overcome by smoke lay on the floor, like little white puffs of smoke themselves, and some live chickens were pecking at these, going for the eyes. John moved towards Ernie. He thought he had braced himself, but he hadn’t braced himself enough for what he saw: a fallen column of blood and bone to which a few tatters of pajama cloth still clung. John ran out again, very fast, because he had breathed once, and the smoke had nearly got him.

In his room, Helen was humming and drumming on the windowsill, gazing out at the chickens left on the lawn. The hens were trying to scratch in the grass, and were staggering, falling on their sides, but mostly falling backwards, because they were used to shuffling to prevent themselves from falling forward.

“Look!” Helen said, laughing so, there were tears in her eyes. “They don’t know what grass is! But they like it!”

John cleared his throat and said, “What’re you going to say?—What’ll we say?”

“Oh—say.” Helen seemed not at all disturbed by the question. “Well—that Ernie heard something and went down and—he wasn’t completely sober, you know. And—maybe he pulled a couple of wrong levers.—Don’t you think so?”

Notes from a
Respectable Cockroach

I have moved.

I used to live at the Hotel Duke on a corner of Washington Square. My family has lived there for generations, and I mean at least two or three hundred generations. But no more for me. The place has degenerated. I’ve heard my great-great-great—go back as far as you like, she was still alive when I spoke to her—talk about the good old days when people arrived in horse-drawn carriages with suitcases that smelled of leather, people who had breakfast in bed and dropped a few crumbs for us on the carpet. Not purposely, of course, because we knew our place then, too, and our place was in the bathroom corners or down in the kitchen. Now we can walk all over the carpets with comparative impunity, because the clients of the Hotel Duke are too stoned blind to see us, or they haven’t the energy to step on us if they did see us—or they just laugh.

The Hotel Duke has now a tattered green awning extending to the curb, so full of holes it wouldn’t protect anyone from the rain. You go up four cement steps into a dingy lobby that smells of pot smoke, stale whiskey, and is insufficiently lighted. After all, the clientele now doesn’t necessarily want to see who else is staying here. People reel into each other in the lobby, and might thereby strike up an acquaintance, but more often it’s an unpleasant exchange of words that results. To the left in the lobby is an even darker hole called Dr. Toomuch’s Dance Floor. They charge two dollars admission, payable at the inside-the-lobby door. Juke box music. Puke box customers. Egad!

The hotel has six floors, and I usually take the elevator, or the lift as people say lately, imitating the English. Why climb those grimy cement air shafts, or creep up staircase after staircase, when I can leap the mere half-inch gap between floor and lift and whisk myself safely into the corner beside the operator at the controls? I can tell each floor by its smell. Fifth floor, that’s a disinfectant smell since more than a year, because a shoot-up occurred and there was lots of blood-and-guts spilt smack in front of the lift. Second floor boasts a worn-out carpet, so the odor is dusty, faintly mingled with urine. Third floor stinks of sauerkraut (somebody must have dropped a glass jar of it, the floor is tile here) and so it goes. If I want out on the third, for instance, and the elevator doesn’t stop there, I just wait for the next trip, and sooner or later I make it.

I was at the Hotel Duke when the U.S. Census forms came in in 1970. What a laugh. Everybody got a form, and everybody was laughing. Most of the people here probably haven’t any homes to begin with, and the census was asking, “How many rooms in your house?” and “How many bathrooms have you?” and “How many children?” and so forth. And what is your wife’s age? People think that roaches can’t understand English, or whatever is the going lingo in their vicinity. People think roaches understand only a suddenly turned-on light, which means “Scram!” When you’ve been around as long as we have, which is long before the
Mayflower
got here, you dig the going yak. So I was able to appreciate many a comment on the U.S. Census, which none of the cruds at the Duke bothered filling out. It was amusing to think of myself filling it out—and why not? I was more of a resident by hereditary seat than any of the human beasts in the hotel. I am (though I am not Franz Kafka in disguise) a cockroach, and I do not know my wife’s age or for that matter how many wives I have. Last week I had seven, in a manner of speaking, but how many of these have been stepped on? As for children, they’re beyond count, a boast I’ve heard my two-legged neighbors make also, but when it comes to the count, if the count is what they want (the more the merrier, I assume), I will bet on myself. Only last week I recall two egg capsules about to be delivered from two of my wives, both on the third (sauerkraut) floor. Good God, I was in a hurry myself, off in pursuit—I blush to mention it—of food which I had smelled and which I estimated to be at a distance of one hundred yards. Cheese-flavored potato chips, I thought. I did not like to say “Hello” and “Good-bye” so quickly to my wives, but my need was perhaps as great as theirs, and where would they be, or rather our race be, if I could not keep my strength up? A moment later I saw a third wife crunched under a cowboy boot (the hippies here affect Western gear even if they are from Brooklyn), though at least she wasn’t laying an egg at that time, only hurrying along like me, in an opposite direction. Hail and farewell!—though, alas, I am sure she did not even see me. I may never again see my parturient wives, those two, though perhaps I saw some of our offspring before I left the Duke. Who knows?

When I see some of the people here, I count myself lucky to be a cockroach. I’m at least healthier, and in a small way I clean up garbage. Which brings me to the point. There used to be garbage in the form of breadcrumbs, an occasional leftover canapé from a champagne party in a room. The present clientele of the Hotel Duke doesn’t eat. They either take dope or drink booze. I’ve only heard about the good old days from my great-great-great-great-grandmothers and -fathers. But I believe them. They said you could jump into a shoe, for instance, outside the door, and be taken into a room along with the tray by a servant at eight in the morning, and thus breakfast on croissant crumbs. Even the shoe-polishing days are gone, because if anybody put shoes outside his room these days, they’d not only not be polished, they’d be stolen. Nowadays it’s all you can hope for that these hairy, buckskin-fringed monsters and their see-through girls will take a bath once in a while and leave a few drops of water in the tub for me to drink. It’s dangerous drinking out of a toilet, and at my age I won’t do it.

However, I wish to speak of my newfound fortune. I’d just about had enough last week, what with another young wife squashed before my eyes by a lurching step (she had been keeping out of the
normal
path, I remember), and a moronic roomful of junkies licking up—I mean this—food from the floor as a kind of game. Young men and women, naked, pretending to be handless for some insane reason, trying to eat their sandwiches like dogs, strewing them all over the floor, then writhing about together amid salami, pickles and mayonnaise. Plenty of food this time, but unsafe to dart among those rolling bodies. Worse than feet. But to see sandwiches at all was exceptional. There’s no restaurant anymore, but half the rooms in the Hotel Duke are “apartments,” meaning that they have refrigerators and small stoves. But the main thing people have in the way of food is tinned tomato juice for vodka Bloody Marys. Nobody even fries an egg. For one thing, the hotel does not furnish skillets, pans, can openers or even a single knife or fork: they’d be pinched. And none of these charmers is going to go out and buy so much as a pot to heat soup in. So the pickings is slim, as they say. And that isn’t the worst of the “service” department here. Most of the windows don’t shut tightly, the beds look like lumpy hammocks, straight chairs are falling apart at the joints, and the so-called armchairs, maybe one to a room, can inflict injury by releasing a spring in a tender place. Basins are often clogged, and toilets either don’t flush or keep flushing maniacally. And robberies! I’ve witnessed a few. A maid gives the passkey and someone’s in, absconding with suitcase contents under an arm, in pockets, or in a pillowcase disguised as dirty laundry.

Anyway, about a week ago I was in a temporarily vacant room at the Duke, scrounging about for a crumb or a bit of water, when in walked a black bellhop with a suitcase that smelled of
leather
. He was followed by a gentleman who smelled of aftershave lotion, plus of course tobacco, that’s normal. He unpacked, put some papers out on the writing table, tried the hot water and muttered something to himself, jiggled the running toilet, tested the shower which shot all over the bathroom floor, and then he rang up the desk. I could understand most of what he was saying. He was essentially saying that at the price he was paying per day, this and that might be improved, and could he change his room, perhaps?

I lurked in my corner, thirsty, hungry, but interested, knowing also that I would be stepped on by this same gentleman if I made an appearance on the carpet. I well knew that I would be on his list of complaints if he saw me. The old French window blew open (it was a gusty day) and his papers went in all the four corners. He had to close the window by propping the back of a straight chair against it, and then he gathered his papers, cursing.

“
Washington Square!—Henry James would turn in his grave!
”

I remember those words, uttered at the same time as he slapped his forehead as if to hit a mosquito.

A bellhop in the threadbare maroon livery of the establishment arrived stoned and fiddled with the window to no avail. The window leaked cold air, made a terrible rattle, and everything, even a cigarette pack, had to be anchored down or it would have blown off a table or whatever. The bellhop in looking at the shower managed to drench himself, and then he said he would send for “the engineer.” The engineer at the Hotel Duke is a joke on his own, which I won’t go into. He didn’t turn up that day, I think because the bellhop made the final bad impression, and the gentleman picked up the telephone and said:

“Can you send someone sober, if possible, to carry my suitcases down? . . . Oh, keep the money, I’m checking out. And get me a taxi, please.”

That was when I made up my mind. As the gentleman was packing, I mentally kissed good-bye to all my wives, brothers, sisters, cousins, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and then climbed aboard the beautiful suitcase that smelled of leather. I crawled into a pocket in the lid, and made myself snug in the folds of a plastic bag, fragrant of shaving soap and the aftershave lotion, where I would not be squashed even when the lid was closed.

Half an hour later, I found myself in a warmer room where the carpet was thick and not dusty-smelling. The gentleman has breakfast in bed in the mornings at 7:30. In the corridor, I can get all sorts of things from trays left on the floor outside the doors—even remnants of scrambled eggs, and certainly plenty of marmalade and butter on rolls. Had a narrow squeak yesterday when a white-jacketed waiter chased me thirty yards down the hall, stomping with both feet but missing me every time. I’m nimble yet, and life at the Hotel Duke taught me plenty!

I’ve already cased the kitchen, going and coming by lift, of course. Lots of pickings in the kitchen, but unfortunately they fumigate once a week. I met four possible wives, all a bit sickly from the fumes, but determined to stick it out in the kitchen. For me, it’s upstairs. No competition, and plenty of breakfast trays and sometimes midnight snacks. Maybe I’m an old bachelor now, but there’s life in me yet if a possible wife comes along. Meanwhile I consider myself a lot better than those bipeds in the Hotel Duke, whom I’ve seen eating stuff I wouldn’t touch—or mention. They do it on bets. Bets! All life is a gamble, isn’t it? So why bet?

Eddie and
the Monkey Robberies

E
ddie’s job was to open doors. Formerly, he had been cup-shaker for a record-player named Hank, a young man who hadn’t been able to subsidize his poetry writing sufficiently by tootling, and it had been difficult to keep Eddie in the face of complaining landlords, so Hank had passed Eddie on to a girlfriend called Rose, to whom he had just said good-bye, and had taken a job. And Rose knew Jane, and Jane was an ex-convict, which was why Eddie was now opening doors of strange houses.

Being a young and clever Capuchin, Eddie had learned his new job quickly, and often approached doors gaily waltzing and swinging himself from any nearby object, such as a newel post or the back of a straight chair, towards his goal: the knob of a Yale lock, a button that undid a bolt, maybe a chain and bolt also. His nimble fingers flew, undoing everything, or experimenting until they could.

Thus he would admit the husky blonde woman called Jane, whose ring or knock he had usually already heard. Sometimes Eddie had the door open when Jane was still climbing the front steps or walking up the front path, her reticule in hand. Eddie would have got in through a window. Jane always paused for a moment on the threshold, and mumbled something, as if addressing someone standing in the house. Then she would come in and close the door.

Ka-
bloom
! This particular house was a solid one, and had a pleasant smell to Eddie, for there was a big cluster of yellow roses in a vase in the downstairs hall.

From the pocket of her loose coat, Jane produced a banana, its partly opened peel limp and blackening. Eddie gave a squeak of thanks, ripped the rest of the peel off and handed it back to Jane, who pocketed it. Jane was already walking towards the back of the house, towards the kitchen and dining room.

She opened a drawer in the dining room, then a second before she found what she wanted, and at once began loading her reticule with handfuls of silver spoons, forks and knives. She took a silver salt and pepper set from the dining room table. Then she went into the living room, went at once to the telephone table, where a silver-framed photograph stood. This she put into her bag, and also a handsome paper knife which had what looked like a jade handle. By now barely three minutes had passed, Eddie had finished his banana, Jane whispered his name, opened her coat, and Eddie leapt. He clung to her big sweatered bosom with his twenty fingers and toes, aided also by his long tail, as he had clung to his mother when he was small.

They were out of the house. To Eddie, the hum of the car grew louder, then they were inside the car, Jane sat down with a thump, and the car moved off. The women talked.

“Easy, very easy, that one,” Jane said, getting her breath back. “But I didn’t bother with the bedrooms.”

“Silver?”

“You bet! Ha-ha!—Ah, a nice whiskey’ll taste good!”

Rose, younger than Jane, drove prudently. This was their seventh or eighth robbery this summer. Rose was twenty-one, divorced from a first marriage, and she’d fallen out with her boyfriend two months ago. Someone like Jane, a little crazy excitement, had been just what she needed. But she had no intention of doing a stretch in prison, as Jane had done, if she could help it. “So? The Ponsonby place now?”

“Yep,” said Jane, enjoying a cigarette. For two weeks, they had made telephone calls now and then to the Ponsonby house, and no one had ever answered. Two or three times in the last week, Jane and Rose had cruised past the big house, and had not seen any sign of life. Tommy, their fence, hadn’t watched the house, hadn’t had the time, he said. Jane thought the people were away on vacation. It was July. Lots of people were away, with only one neighbor or maybe a cleaning woman coming in to water the plants. But had the Ponsonbys a burglar alarm, for instance? It was a very swank section. “Maybe we ought to phone one more time,” Jane said. “Got the number handy?”

Rose had. She stopped the car in the parking area of a roadside bar-and-steakhouse.

“You stay here, Eddie,” Jane said, sticking Eddie under a disorder of plastic shopping bags and a raincoat on the back seat. She gave him a rap with her heavily ringed fingers to let him know she meant it.

The rap caught Eddie on the top of the head. He was only slightly annoyed. The two women were back before long, before it became unpleasantly hot in the car, and they drove on for a while, then stopped again. Eddie was still sitting on the back seat, hardly conspicuous in the debris except for the white cap of fur on the crown of his head. He watched as Rose got out. This was the way things always went when he had a job to do: Rose got out first, came back, then Jane put him under her coat and took him out of the car.

Jane hummed a tune to herself and smoked a cigarette.

Rose came back and said, “No window open and the ones in back are locked. Nobody home, because I rang the bell and knocked front and back.—What a house!” Rose meant that it looked rich. “Maybe breaking a back window is best. Let Eddie in that way.”

The neighborhood was residential and expensive, the lawns generous, the trees tall. Rose and Jane were parked, as usual, around the corner from the house they were interested in.

“Any sign of life in the garage?” Jane asked. They had thought that there might be a servant sleeping there without a telephone, or with a different telephone from the Ponsonbys’.

“Of course not or I’d have told you,” said Rose. “Have you emptied the tapestry bag yet?”

Jane and Rose did this, using the old gray raincoat to wrap the lot of silverware and the other objects up in, and this they put on the back seat, without themselves leaving the front seat.

“Why don’t we try Eddie down a chimney?” Jane asked. “It’s so quiet here, I don’t like the idea of breaking a window.”

“But he doesn’t like chimneys,” Rose said. “This house has three storys. Pretty long chimneys.”

Jane thought for a moment, then shrugged. “What the hell? If he doesn’t like going all the way down, he can come up again.”

“And suppose he just stays up there—on the roof?”

“So—we’ve lost a good monkey,” said Jane.

A few weeks ago, they had practiced with Eddie at a Long Island house which belonged to a friend of Jane’s. The chimney top had been only twelve feet from the ground because it was a one-story cottage. Eddie hadn’t liked going down the chimney, but he had done it two or three times, with Rose on a ladder encouraging him, and Jane waiting to give him raisins and peanuts when he unlocked the front door for her. Eddie had coughed and rubbed his eyes, and made a lot of chattering noises. They’d tried him again the next day, tossing him onto the roof and pointing to the chimney and talking to him, and he’d done it well then, had come down and opened the door. But Rose remembered the worry wrinkles around his brows that had made him look like a little old man, remembered how pleased he was when she’d given him a bath and a brushing afterward. Eddie had given her a most endearing smile and clasped her hands. So Rose hesitated, wondering about Eddie, worried about herself and Jane.

“Well?” said Jane.

“Chi-chi,” said Eddie, knowing something was up. He scratched an ear, and looked attentively from one to the other of the women. He preferred to listen to Rose, her voice being gentler, though he lived with Jane.

Things got moving, but slowly.

Jane and Rose maintained an air of calm. Rose, in case of any possible interference at the door, someone asking what was her business, was prepared to say she was offering her services as a cleaning woman for four dollars an hour. If anyone accepted, Rose gave a false name and made a date which she never kept. This had happened only once. It was Rose who kept track of the houses they had robbed, and of the one house where someone had come to the door to answer her knock, even though no one had answered the telephone in that house just five minutes before. After they had robbed a certain neighborhood, sometimes three houses in one hour, they never went back to it. In Rose’s car, they had gone as far as a hundred and fifty miles from their base, which was Jane’s apartment in Red Cliff, New Jersey. If they had to separate for any reason, they had a roadside café picked out or a drugstore somewhere, as a meeting place, the one who was carless (Jane) having to make her way there by taxi or bus or on foot. This had happened also only once so far in their two months of operations, one time when Rose had been perhaps unnecessarily anxious and had driven off. Today their rendezvous was the bar-and-steakhouse where they had just been to ring the Ponsonby house.

Now Jane, with Eddie under her lightweight woolen coat, walked up the rather imposing front path of the Ponsonby mansion. Such goodies in there Jane could scarcely imagine. They’d certainly be more than she could carry away in the reticule she called her tapestry bag. Jane rang, waited, then knocked with the brass knocker, not at all expecting anyone to answer, but she had to go through the motions in case a neighbor was watching. Finally Jane went round by the driveway to the back door, with Eddie still clinging to her under her coat. She knocked again. Everything was as quiet as could be, including the garage with its one closed window over the closed doors.

“Eddie, it’s the chimney again,” Jane whispered. “Chimney, understand? Now you go right up! See it?” She pointed. Great elm trees sheltered her from view from any side. There seemed to be at least four chimneys projecting from the roof. “Chimney and then the door! Right, Eddie? Good boy!” She released Eddie on to a drainpipe which went up one corner of the house.

Eddie managed well, slipping a few inches here and there, but he had no trouble in getting a hold on the somewhat rough exterior brick. Suddenly he was up, for a second silhouetted against the sky, leaping, and then he vanished.

Jane saw him jump to a chimney pot, peer down, hesitate, then run to another. She was afraid to call encouragement. Were the chimneys stopped up? Well, wait and see. No use worrying yet. Jane stepped back to see better, did not see Eddie, and made her way to the front door again. She expected to hear Eddie sliding bolts, but she heard nothing at all. She rang halfheartedly, for appearance’s sake.

Silence. Had Eddie got stuck in a chimney?

A passerby on the sidewalk glanced at Jane and went on, a man of about thirty, carrying a package. A car went by. Rose, in the car, was out of sight around the corner. Eddie might be stuck, Jane supposed, might have been put out of commission by soot. And the minutes were passing. Should she play it safe and leave? On the other hand, Eddie was damned useful, and there were a good two more months of summer to operate in.

Jane went to the back of the house again. She looked up at the roof, but saw no sign of Eddie. Birds cheeped. A car shifted gears in the distance. Jane went to the kitchen window at the back, and at once the monkey leapt on to the long aluminium drainboard. He was black with soot, even the top of his head was dark gray, and he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. He tapped on a pane and hopped from one foot to the other, wanting her to open a window.

Why hadn’t they trained him for windows? Well, they’d have to get on to that. Just a matter of unscrewing—even from here, Jane could see the mechanism. “Door!” said Jane, pointing towards the kitchen door, because any door would have done, but Eddie had the habit of going to front doors.

Eddie sprang down, and Jane heard him pulling bolts.

But the door did not open. Jane tried it.

Jane heard his “Chi-chi-chi!” which meant he was annoyed or frustrated. The bolts were stiff, Jane supposed, or it was a mortise lock, requiring a key from inside to open. And some bolts took strength beyond Eddie’s. Jane felt suddenly panicky. Ten or twelve minutes had passed, she thought. Rose would be worried. Maybe Rose had already gone off to the roadside steakhouse. Jane wanted to go back to Rose and the car. The alternative was breaking a window, and she was afraid to make that much noise and still get away with Eddie on foot.

Again making an effort to appear unhurried, Jane went down the driveway to the sidewalk. Around the corner, Jane saw with relief that Rose was still waiting in the car.

“Well,” said Jane, “Eddie can’t get a door open and I’m scared. Let’s take off.”

“Oh? Where is he? He’s still
in
?”

“In the kitchen in back.” Jane was whispering through the car’s open window. She opened the door on her side.

“But we can’t just leave him there,” Rose said. “Did you see anybody—watching you?”

Jane got in and closed the door. “No, but let’s get going.”

Rose was thinking the police might connect a monkey with the robberies they’d done. How could anyone explain a monkey in a closed house? Of course, anyone who found Eddie might not at once telephone the police, might just give him to the S.P.C.A. or a zoo. Or mightn’t Eddie break a window and escape—and then what? Rose realized she wasn’t thinking logically, but it seemed to her that they ought to get Eddie out. “Can’t we break a back window?” Rose’s hand was already on the door handle.

“No, don’t!” Jane made a negative gesture, but Rose was already gone. Jane sat rigid. She’d get the blame if someone saw Rose breaking in. Rose would talk, Jane thought. And Jane had the police record.

Rose was forcing herself to walk slowly past a young man and a girl who were arm in arm, talking and laughing. The Ponsonby house. It was so grand, it had a name: Five Owls. Rose went into the driveway, still calm but not wanting to go through the motions of ringing the front doorbell, because she did not want to waste the time.

Eddie was in the kitchen, squatting on a table (she saw him through a side window), shaking something that looked like a sugar bowl upside down, and she had a brief impression of something broken, like a platter, on the yellow linoleum floor. Eddie must be desperate. By the time Rose came round the corner of the house, Eddie was on the drainboard just behind the back windows. Rose made an effort to raise a window and gave it up. She extricated a cuff of her white trousers from a rosebush. Almost at her feet, she found a rock the size of her fist, and tapped it once against a rectangular pane. She struck again at some jagged pieces of glass at the edges, but Eddie was already through, chattering with joy.