361 - Donald E. Westlake [40]
Thursday night, I went out and got drunk. I barhopped out toward the air base. When I started a fight with a Staff Sergeant, the CID man came from out of the smoke and took me away. He drove a gray Ford, and he put me in it and took me back to the hotel. Before I got out, he said, “Don’t do what your brother did.”
I looked at him. “What did my brother do, smart man?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Whatever it was, you take warning.”
I said, “Go to hell.” I fumbled the door open and lurched into the hotel. I never saw him again. What -ever had bugged him, he’d either been satisfied or had given up.
In the room, I lay in bed, and for a long while I didn’t know what was wrong. Then I figured it out. I couldn’t hear the sound of Bill’s breathing in the next bed. I listened. He wasn’t breathing anywhere in the world. Poor sweet honest Bill.
I once read a book of stories by a man named Fredric Brown. In one of them he quotes the tale of the peasant walking through the haunted wood, saying to himself, I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me, then there isn’t any justice, and a voice behind him says, There isn’t.
The author didn’t say so, but I know. The peasant’s name was Bill.
I wished I could go talk to Kapp, but we’d decided it would be best for us to keep away from each other until all the cops went home. It would only complicate things to bring Kapp into it. Just as I said I was alone when I found Bill.
I got up and turned on the light. I went downstairs, but all the bars in Plattsburg were closed. I went back up to the room and turned off the light and sat up in bed smoking. Every time I took a drag the room glowed red and the covers moved on the other bed. After a while I switched the light on and went to sleep.
Friday afternoon, Uncle Henry showed up from Binghamton, and we had a fight. He wanted Bill’s body shipped to Binghamton, and I wanted it stuck in the ground here and now. It wasn’t Bill, it was just some meat. There wasn’t any Bill any more.
I won, because I was willing to pay. Then there was trouble with a priest named Warren because Bill committed suicide, so he couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. I said, “There are stupid policemen in your town, Father. Bill didn’t kill himself.”
He said, “I’m sorry, but the official view—”
I interrupted him, saying, “Didn’t you hear about the Constitution? They separated church and state.”
I said more than that, and got him mad at me. Uncle Henry was shocked, and told me so when we left: “The Church has its laws about suicide, and that’s—”
“If you say that word suicide once more, I’ll shove a crucifix down your throat.”
“If your father were alive—” And so on.
So Saturday six hired pallbearers carried the coffin from the funeral home. There was no stop at a church for the suicide; he went straight out of town to a clipped green hill with a view of Lake Champlain, and into a hole which no priest had blessed with holy water. He would have to make do with God’s rain.
Uncle Henry and I were the only ones beside the grave who had known Bill in life. The undertaker came over and wanted to know if we wanted him to say a few words. I had never known till then what a man would look like who had a complete and absolute lack of taste or sensibility. I looked at this wretch and said, “No. Not ever.”
After the funeral, I arranged for storage of Bill’s car. It was mine now, but I couldn’t drive it till the registration had been changed, which would take too long. No one can drive a car registered to a dead man.
Uncle Henry came back to the hotel room with me. He said, “Are you coming back home with me?”
“To Binghamton? I don’t have any home there.”
“You do with us, if you want. Your Aunt Agatha would be happy to have you stay with us.”
“I’ll be right back.” I went into the bathroom and sat on the floor and cried like a little kid. I wanted to be a little kid. The floor was all small hexagonal tiles. I counted them, and after a while I got up and washed my face and went back outside. Uncle Henry was standing by the window, smoking a cigar. I