Killing Cousins (5 page)

“I wish I could think so, but I can’t.”

“Come off it, Willie. You know very well that Howard is incapable of going through with it.”

“You think so? Maybe you don’t know Howard as well as you believe. He was always talking about walking off from everything and going somewhere to some island or something for the rest of his life.”

“Oh, I’ve heard him say such things myself, but I’m sure it didn’t mean anything. As a matter of fact, Marv talks like that sometimes, the idiot, but I don’t pay any attention to it. All husbands have such fancies, darling. They like to imagine themselves lying around on a beach drinking fermented coconut juice and diddling native girls night and day. It’s part of being a husband.”

“It’s kind of you to try to reassure me, Gwen, but I’m convinced that it’s much more serious in Howard’s case. He packed three bags and left and has been gone without a word ever since.”

“Since when?”

“Since right after I got home from the Club last night. You may remember that he came home ahead without me, and I was forced to catch a ride with his Cousin Quincy.”

“I remember. But why did he pack and leave? Damn it, Willie, even a husband doesn’t go off like that for no reason at all. What did you do to cause it?”

“It wasn’t anything I did. It was merely something he thought.”

“Please don’t be evasive, Willie. What did he think?”

“He thought I’d been outside doing something with Quincy. His own cousin, Gwen! Can you imagine?”

“Yes, I can, as a matter of fact. I’ve had experience with cousins myself, Willie, and I know what some of them are capable of. However, on second thought, I’m prepared to make an exception of Quincy. Cousin or not, he’s quite unthinkable as a person to go outside and do something with.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Quincy’s all right. You’ll have to admit that he’s exceptionally clever.”

“What on earth does being clever have to do with it? In the matter of choosing someone to do something with that would be likely to make a husband leave you, cleverness has no significance at all that I can see. Are you defending Quincy, by the way?”

“Why should I? It’s no matter to me what you think of him.”

“You did seem to be a little sensitive.”

Willie stood up and smoothed her Capri pants over her hips and looked bored. “I thought I could depend on you to be sensible, Gwen, but apparently I can’t. If you’re going to be ridiculous, I don’t believe I care to stay and talk with you any longer.”

“That’s all right, Willie. I feel like hell, and it would suit me fine if you were to go away.”

“In that case,” Willie said, “I’ll go.”

She went back along the hedge and into her own yard. She was proud of the way she had spread the idea of Howard’s desertion to Gwen beyond the hedge, who would certainly spread it a great deal farther as soon as her head quit bursting. Now Willie thought that she would like to go inside and have a sandwich and another Martini and a long nap, and that’s where she went and what she did.

SEVEN

 

In the meantime, as Willie did these things and spent the day, Quincy was happily engaged. He devoted himself to Willie’s problem, now that he had permitted himself through sentiment to become involved, with genuine enthusiasm. The truth was, he had always wanted to try his wits at something major that did not, at the same time, demand an excess of tedious labor. That had always been the difficulty with science and law and mathematics, any of the fields in which he might have excelled if he had chosen to apply himself. While certain elements tickled his brain, these elements always became so closely allied eventually with plain work that all the fun was taken out of them. It was a shame, really, that one couldn’t build a rocket or devise a serum without going through unconscionable labor in doing so. It was much more pleasant, in the end, to do nothing much about anything. Willie’s problem, however, was much to his liking. The consequences of failure would be unfortunate, to be sure, but the exhilaration of success would be enormous. Over all, the entire project should require only a short while, and the work involved would be exciting and different, and would not have time to pall and become tedious.

It would be necessary, first of all, to contact his cousin on his mother’s side, Fred Honeyburg by name. It might, moreover, take some time to make this contact, for Fred was a restless sort, always moving about, and could only infrequently be found in his pad in KC. After leaving Willie, therefore, Quincy had a late breakfast in the coffee shop of the Hotel Quivera and then drove immediately in his second-hand Plymouth to KC, a distance of about fifty miles, and through the city to Fred’s pad, which was on the third floor of a building on Troost. As he suspected, Fred was not there and had not been there, discernibly at least, according to the tenant of the pad adjoining, for some three days and nights. Quincy was a little disturbed by the fear that Fred might have gotten himself into jail again, just when he was badly needed, but the fear was easily allayed, for Fred was really ingenious at avoiding jails, and had never, except for the one unfortunate incident related by Quincy to Willie, had any intimate experience with them. Recalling Fred’s favorite bar in the downtown area, Quincy drove there and went in, and luck was with him, as it usually was, for there was Fred, sure enough, sitting on a stool at the bar and drinking Schlitz and watching the game of the week on television. There was an empty stool beside him, which Quincy claimed.

“Hello, Cousin Fred,” he said.

Cousin Fred turned his head and looked at Quincy and immediately picked up his glass of Schlitz and drank deeply before answering, as if he expected a trying series of events to begin transpiring from this point and was preparing himself for them.

“Hello, Cousin Quincy,” he said cautiously. “What brings you to town?”

“I came to see you, as a matter of fact.”

“Is that so? Why?”

“Let’s move over to a table where we can talk confidentially.”

“Well, I don’t know, Cousin Quincy. The last time we had a confidential talk it cost me a hundred skins.”

“Forget that. I’ve got a proposition that will get your hundred back and a lot more besides.”

“What’s the pitch?”

“Damn it, Cousin Fred, I can’t talk about it here. Let’s move over to a table.”

Cousin Fred drained his glass and looked into it for a few seconds without speaking or moving. He obviously had an uneasy feeling that the series of events he had immediately anticipated at the sight of Quincy had almost immediately begun to happen. He had a notion that he should, if he were smart, extricate himself at the very beginning, but he had another notion that he wouldn’t. Quincy was a compelling little bastard when he wanted to be, and was not above exploiting family loyalty if it became necessary.

“Let’s take a couple of beers,” Cousin Fred said.

Quincy bought the beers, which were carried to a little table in a dark corner. The entire place was dark, so far as that went, for Cousin Fred was averse to light and preferred in his places of relaxation the soft comfort of shadows. Physically, he bore a superficial resemblance to Quincy, a common inheritance of certain attributes on the maternal side, but the resemblance was so thin that a third party would hardly have noticed it even if the light had been a great deal stronger than it was. Although they were of a size, rather under the average, Fred’s features were sharper and his eyes had acquired a furtiveness from looking into corners and over his shoulder that Quincy’s lacked. Quincy’s eyes, as a matter of fact, had an open and childlike innocence that was quite appealing, although deceptive.

Fortified by another large swallow of beer, Cousin Fred said, “Now, Cousin Quincy, let’s hear the pitch.”

“What I want you to do,” Quincy said, “is steal a car.”

“Cousin,” Fred said, “I use the word
appropriate.”

“I don’t care what you call it, so long as you do it.”

“Well, you must excuse me if I seem a little dubious, but this is the first time in a long career that I’ve had anyone
ask
to have a set of wheels appropriated. Already, Cousin, there’s something in this pitch I’m beginning not to like.”

“It’s perfectly simple. I leave the wheels, as you say, in a place we shall agree upon. At a time that we shall also agree upon, you make the appropriation and drive away. The only stipulation is, you must dispose of the car immediately. The profit is all yours. I ask for nothing but your service, and I appeal to you because I know you are an expert in these matters and have a sound knowledge of the market.”

“Those wheels of yours, Cousin? The profit wouldn’t pay for the effort.”

“Not mine.”

“Whose, then?”

“Never mind whose. The car, however, is a new Buick. The profit, even in your market, should be considerable.”

“I don’t like it. It’s too fat. You wouldn’t be trying to fix me with some kind of rap, would you, Cousin?”

“The trouble with you, Fred, is that the nature of your work has made you unnaturally suspicious. Would I play a dirty trick like that on the only son of my own mother’s sister?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let it go. I guarantee that there’s no risk to you whatever. The fact of the matter is, I’d be in far worse trouble than you if you were caught, which is a condition I naturally want to avoid.”

“Now I dig you, Cousin. Now I’m ready to believe. Why do you want these particular wheels appropriated?”

“The less you know about that, the better. I tell you there’s no risk and all profit.”

Cousin Fred drank beer and stared moodily at the thin foam on what was left. He couldn’t rid himself entirely of his uneasy feeling, but at the same time, like any businessman, he was tempted by a clear profit quickly acquired, and he was pretty certain now that this was part of a larger matter that Quincy could hardly afford to play fast and loose in. It was quite clearly something that Quincy wanted done quickly and expertly with no chance of detection.

“When do you want the wheels appropriated?” he said.

“Sometime early in the morning. After four o’clock, say.”

“Where will they be parked?”

“My idea is to leave the car in the municipal parking lot. I’ll leave the key in the ignition and the parking ticket in the glove compartment. All you’ll have to do is pay the parking fee and drive away. All perfectly overt and innocent. The attendant who takes your stub when you leave will be different from the one who gives me the ticket when I arrive, and so there’s no chance of arousing suspicion there. It’s doubtful that anyone would pay any particular attention to either of us, anyhow.”

“True, Cousin. I like the sound of it. It’s solid.”

“Do you agree to do it, then?”

“For the sake of our dear old mothers, I do.”

“Good. I knew I could count on the family tie.” Quincy drained his glass and stood up. “Any time after four, but you better hadn’t make it too long.”

“I dig you. My market stays open all hours.”

“Goodbye, Cousin Fred.”

“Goodbye, Cousin Quincy.”

Quincy went outside and back to his Plymouth. He was confident that Cousin Fred would dispose of the Buick expertly and expeditiously; he felt no concern about that. The problem would be, of course, to get it out of Howard’s garage and out of Quivera without detection, but this should also, because of the detached and woody character of the neighborhood, be accomplished without untoward incident; he had no less confidence in his own cleverness than in Fred’s. In the Plymouth, he drove north across the Sixth Street Trafficway to the Municipal Airport. He parked the Plymouth and went inside and inquired at an airlines desk about flights to Dallas, Texas. He was not in the least surprised to learn that there was an available seat on a plane leaving early the next morning, but not so early that he couldn’t catch it after completing his necessary tasks. He was not surprised because he had that feeling of quiet elation which comes with the assurance that everything is going right, just right, and the feeling was even more secured by the information that he could catch a plane back that would land him in KC tomorrow night, the night of the same day of his departure. He bought a round-trip ticket in the name of Elton E. Smallwood and went back to the Plymouth and started home. There remained, of course, the small risk that someone from Quivera who knew him might be on the same plane to Dallas. Citizens of Quivera were not flying out of the airport every day, however, or even a substantial percentage of days, and so the risk was hardly a material danger, and it only added, even if it was, a little salt to the sauce. He did not question his capacity to handle the situation if it developed.

There was now the letter to think about, and he thought about it earnestly on the way to Quivera. He felt that a husband’s farewell letter to his deserted wife, written at the beginning of a great adventure, between one life and another, should have the quality of artistic excellence. He felt, moreover, that he was just the fellow to achieve the quality, but he was handicapped by Howard’s limitations. Unfortunately, in spite of a certain shrewdness in certain matters, Howard had been barely literate. It would never do to give the letter the polish it deserved, for then no one would ever believe that old Howard had written it. He would have to be satisfied, Quincy thought, with achieving a clumsy intensity—a kind of appropriate lubberly pathos. And this, to be sure, would be challenge enough to ingenuity.

The letter would have to be typewritten, of course. He could not, even if he had time to practice, which he didn’t, duplicate Howard’s scrawl. He wondered for a moment if it would be readily accepted that such a personal letter would be written on a typewriter, and he decided that in Howard’s case it would. It was well known by nearly everyone that old Howard, because his writing was practically illegible, wrote everything on a typewriter, hunt-and-peck style. He had a Royal portable in his bedroom at home, as a matter of fact, and this would have to be disposed of, along with Howard and the three bags, to support the deception that he had taken it with him and had used it in Dallas to write the letter. There was almost no chance that there would be any sample of the machine’s typing about, for Howard never wrote anything important enough for anyone to keep, and even if there were it wouldn’t really matter, for there was also almost no chance, the way matters were going so smoothly, that any investigation or comparison would ever be made. Still, for perfection’s sake, the letter must be written on Howard’s machine. What he would do, Quincy thought, was write it out in longhand this afternoon and then type it tonight when he went to Willie’s.

Back in Quivera, he had lunch in the hotel coffee shop and a couple of beers afterward in the hotel taproom. While drinking the beers, he carried on a lively conversation with the bartender, who was a frustrated philosopher, and when he left he was, consequently, in a cheerful and creative frame of mind. He went immediately to his small apartment and began to compose on plain paper, sitting at a table by a window overlooking the front yard and the street, the letter from Howard to Willie. He enjoyed the task so hugely that he was tempted to write pages, but he was compelled by the character of Howard to reject the temptation. It was certain that Howard had never in his life subjected himself to the ordeal of writing more than a few lines at a time, and so Quincy, now Howard’s proxy, kept the letter short and the words small and the punctuation restricted to capitals and periods. When he was finished, he read what he had written with satisfaction:

D
EAR WILLIE:

I’m gone and I won’t be back. Don’t try to find me because you can’t and even if you could I wouldn’t come back anyhow. I drew out all the money in the savings account and cashed all the government bonds but you can have everything else and welcome except the Buick which I’m driving.

I know what you thought. I know what everyone thought. You and everyone thought I was just a kind of good natured common guy who didn’t ever want to be anyone or anything but someone around Quivera but you were all wrong. All my life ever since I was a kid I’ve had a secret notion to run off somewhere a long way off and live the way I want to and now I’m going and gone forever. Maybe I’ll paint pictures or something like Gauguin.

I’m not mad at you. I’m not mad at anyone. If this makes you unhappy or causes you any trouble I’m sorry but I’ve got a notion you won’t miss me much. If you want to do me a favor you can tell Mother and Father goodbye for me. I didn’t see them before I left because I was afraid I’d get weak and not go.

Goodbye forever.

H
OWARD

 

After reading the letter over, Quincy struck out the line about maybe painting pictures like Gauguin. He considered it extremely unlikely that Howard had ever heard of Gauguin.