27

Oh! the horrors of carelessness!

James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1849

“Where is my sister?” The voice on the line was insistent. It was Arlene Pott’s sister Beverly, calling Ethel Harris from Abilene, Texas. Beverly had met Arlene’s neighbors, the Harrises, last year during her vacation trip to Massachusetts. “I keep calling Wally, and he keeps saying he hasn’t heard anything from her. But really and truly, Ethel, my sister wouldn’t just go off somewhere without letting me know.”

“I’m worried about her too,” said Ethel. “You know, Beverly, I hate to tell you this, but it’s plain as the nose on your face Wally is carrying on with another woman. There’s this practical nurse next door.”

The upshot of the telephone conversation between Ethel Harris and Arlene’s sister Beverly was that Ethel ran over to the Gibbys’ to talk to Imogene, and then Imogene Gibby called Homer Kelly, because it was common knowledge Homer had been a famous detective in days gone by.

Homer was sympathetic but cautious. “Have you called Peter Terry?”

“Who?” said Imogene.”

“The police chief, Peter Terry.”

“Oh, Homer, Arlene wouldn’t want us to do that. Maybe she’s just lying low so Wally won’t find her. You know what he does sometimes—he’s a wife-beater. I think she’s afraid of him. Really, Homer, some men!”

“Well, that’s possible, I suppose. You know, Imogene, a lot of wealthy women who disappear turn up later on, looking like movie stars. They’ve spent a couple of months at some health and beauty spa or some expensive ranch for alcoholics, and they come back all dried out and tucked up and bleached and dyed and curled and massaged and vitaminized, ready for a glorious new life, until the whole effect wears off and they’re overweight again or sozzled into another stupor. Alas for their bright dreams! Alas for womankind! Alas for all our hopes for regeneration, rebirth, redemption, transcendence, exaltation, glory! Doomed, that’s what we are, Imogene, doomed to the sordid grind, the ghastly plodding life of every day, the dismal windswept darkling plain, the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, at their return, up the high strand.…”

“Homer? Are you all right?”

“Oh, sorry, Imogene. Well, of course, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll go talk to Wally, if you like, and see if I can find out anything at all. Ed Bell told me he didn’t have much luck.”

“Oh, thank you, Homer,” said Imogene. “You’re a dear.” And Imogene hung up and ran next door, and then Ethel Harris and Imogene stared out the window at Wally Pott’s house. “The cactus,” said Ethel. “He used to put this big prickly cactus in the window whenever he wanted Josie to come over. But now it’s there all the time.”

Homer didn’t notice the cactus when he walked up to Wally’s house the next day, after parking his car in the woods a few hundred yards away. To his astonishment, he found the front door wide open, banging against the wallpaper in the front hall, tugged and released by gusts of early-September air.

Staring into the house, Homer rang the doorbell and listened to the chime. No one came. Wally didn’t seem to be home.

The temptation to walk in was very strong. Homer gave in at once.

As soon as his foot crossed the threshold, he was aware of the general sense of carelessness, of disarray. In the living room the flower arrangements were dead. Tumblers and empty bottles stood on the glass coffee table, which was littered with crumbs and sticky with rings. A sheet of newspaper blew aimlessly around the room in the draft from the open front door. It caught on a lampshade, then fluttered against a figurine on the mantelpiece. The figurine fell to the floor with a crash.

“Don’t blame me,” murmured Homer, feeling guilty just the same, staring around the room greedily, taking in the silk blouse on the back of a chair, the pink lipstick on the rim of a glass. To whom did blouse and lipstick belong? The platinum-blond nurse next door, the one Imogene Gibby had told him about?

Shrugging his shoulders, Homer walked up the carpeted steps in the stone tower and poked his nose into the four corner bedrooms. Three were neat and untouched, looking like flossy ads for expensive bedroom suites. The fourth was a mess. The lavender sheets on the bed were churned up. A baby-doll nightie lay on the floor. It didn’t look like a garment belonging to Mrs. Arlene Pott.

But the décor was obviously Arlene’s. Everything was lavender, the layers of draperies at the windows, the bedspread dragging on the floor, the boudoir chairs, the rug. Homer examined the objects on the dresser, the artificial flowers, the porcelain birds, the hand mirror. There was a jewel box overflowing with junk beads and bracelets. There was a plastic case wrapped around with an electric cord. Hot curlers, decided Homer, remembering a temporary aberration of his wife’s. The curlers were the secret of Arlene’s frizzy hair. If it was true that she had run out on Wally, why hadn’t she taken them with her?

Homer opened a drawer. It was jammed with lavender underwear, tightly packed. Closing the drawer, he had to stuff in the hems of slips. Abandoning the dresser, he turned to the closets.

There were two of them, his and hers. Like her drawers, Arlene’s closet was crammed with clothing. Her taste ran to polyester dresses in big flowery patterns. The floor was littered with her shoes, two pairs deep. Wedged into a corner were three sleek lavender suitcases and a matching cosmetic case. If Arlene had gone away, why hadn’t she used her luggage? Then Homer thrust his big face into the perfumed silky mass of Arlene’s dresses and pushed his arms through to the wall at the rear. Instantly he found what he was looking for, her collection of pocketbooks, hanging on hooks at the back. Dragging them through the dresses, he laid them on the bureau for inspection. There were six of them.

1. A black patent-leather pouch with a gold chain, empty.

2. A brown leather-like receptacle with silver clasps, empty.

3. A big straw satchel, empty.

4. A beige monster with buckles, zippers, and straps, empty.

5. A heavy canvas bag with zipper pockets, empty.

6. A half-size purple briefcase with wooden handles, bulging.

Eagerly, Homer unstrapped the purple briefcase, and Arlene Pott herself swelled up from the interior, unfolding in the spreading scent of her perfume. Chiffon scarves and a linen handkerchief with a crocheted border billowed out of the bag.

Homer dumped everything out on the dresser, then examined the tumbled pile. There was a lipstick, a powder compact spilling lavender powder, a blue pearl earring, a container of pills (One tablet three times a day for depression—oh, poor Arlene), a bangle, a bent spoon, a collection of supermarket coupons, a pocket hair spray, a hairbrush, a comb with two missing teeth, a card case with credit cards and a driver’s license (photograph of a lugubrious Arlene), a glasses case with gold-rimmed bifocals, a packet of tissues, a ballpoint pen, a broken pencil, a lottery ticket, a wallet with twenty-seven dollars in it, a change purse with three pennies and a button, a pamphlet on The Power of Prayer, and another pamphlet, Taurus: What to Expect in August. Inquisitively, Homer flipped open the astrological pamphlet to August first, the day Arlene Pott was supposed to have walked out on home and husband and gone off into the world alone. On August first all the men and women under the broad overarching protection of the constellation Taurus had been urged, “Stay at home, avoid long journeys, cherish your loved ones.”

Homer dropped the pamphlet on the pile of Arlene’s belongings, and stared at the litter on the dresser. If the woman had gone away to Reno or Honolulu or Los Angeles or Phoenix of her own free will, then she must have taken with her an identical collection of possessions in another bag—another driver’s license, another Visa card, another pair of glasses, another container of pills, another wallet. It seemed highly unlikely that she would possess duplicates of all these things. Homer clicked his tongue in pious disbelief.

Then he cocked his doggy head and listened sharply as a crash shook the house. Good God, what was that? Moving cautiously to the window, Homer peered down through the layers of curtains. A car had run into a corner of the garage. Curses boiled up. A woman laughed. Then she got out of the car. She had bright blond hair and white trousers. It was Mrs. Hawk’s nurse from the neighboring house. Wally Pott got out of the car too and walked ahead of her, carrying a paper bag.

If they found Homer inside, it would be a clear case of breaking and entering, even though he had merely walked in the open front door. Clumsily, Homer scrambled Arlene’s things into her pocketbook, then thrust the whole collection back through the slippery soft dresses in her closet.

Downstairs there were fumblings, hangings, the woman’s tipsy laughter. Loud talk drifted up the stairs from the direction of the kitchen. They had run out of bourbon, decided Homer. They had driven away on an errand so urgent they hadn’t even bothered to close the front door.

Softly he made his way out of the bedroom and examined the stairway. The stair carpet was thick. The house was new. There would be no telltale squeakings of treads or shiftings of supporting joists, even though Homer’s six feet six inches were fleshy with middle age. Creeping downstairs, he was grateful for the hilarity in the kitchen. “Whoops,” screeched the woman. There was a tinkling crash, then screams of laughter and loud guffaws. Poor Wally, thought Homer sympathetically, slipping out the front door, poor grieving abandoned husband, sucking his lonesome claws in solitude forlorn.

So far, so good. Now it was merely a matter of ducking under the kitchen window and dodging past the vegetable garden into the safety of the hemlock grove.

Homer’s wife, Mary, was often distressed by her husband’s rude habit of staring, by his manner of swinging his big head from side to side to sweep his surroundings with a prying eye. Homer had a truly embarrassing inquisitiveness, a nosy way of sticking his finger in the hole where the stuffing was coming out of the sofa, or the kapok from some wretched person’s pride. Now, as he crouched past the vegetable garden, his attention was caught by the thick growth of weeds. Tsk, tsk, thought Homer, comparing Arlene’s garden with Mary’s vegetable patch at home. Mary’s was weedy too, but not like this. Here were bushes six feet tall springing up around the poles of the bean vines. Homer paused in his flight and leaned over the chicken-wire fence. It was clear that someone had cared for this garden in the beginning and then had stopped caring for it. Surely it was the missing Arlene who had planted the green peppers and the sprawling squash, who had so carefully tied up the now shriveled beans who had sown the seeds of the late-summer lettuce, bolted now into bitter towers.

How could the woman run away from a garden into which she had poured such devotion? Arlene should have stayed at home to harvest the zucchini before it grew so monstrous, she should have plucked the tender young lettuce, she should have picked the ripe tomatoes—if there were any tomatoes, only Homer couldn’t see any. It struck him as odd that there were no tomatoes, and he craned his neck, looking for them, then moved cautiously around the chicken-wire enclosure.

How could anybody grow vegetables without growing tomatoes? Great juicy beefsteak tomatoes, delicious mouthfuls of cherry tomatoes, tomatoes for spaghetti; sauce, tomatoes for sandwiches, tomatoes for— Ah, there they were, on the other side of the garden. But what had happened to them? Arlene Pott’s tomato plants were wizened and drooping. They were dying. Most of them were dead. They looked as though their young lives had been interrupted, as though they had all perished suddenly in the midst of a hearty prime.

Homer glanced up at the house. From here he could see the open casement windows of the kitchen and hear the blare of the stereo. But the garden was to the north of the house and the kitchen windows looked out on the woods to the east. Unless Wally and his girlfriend moved their festivities into the living room, they would not catch a glimpse of the interloper bumbling around in the garden. Boldly, Homer stepped over the fence and trampled across the weed-engulfed squash vines to the rows of pole beans. Jerking a tall pole out of the ground, he carried it to the tomato bed, poked it gently into the dry earth, then shoved it straight down.

The pole stopped. Something was obstructing its thrust. Then, sickeningly, the obstruction gave way. Up through the pole a shuddering certainty transmitted itself to Homer’s fingers. Slowly he withdrew the pole and looked at it. Fifteen inches of it were grimy with dirt, but the end was sticky with some other substance. Homer sniffed the end, then turned his head away and closed his eyes in sorrow, his stomach heaving.

Arlene Pott had not gone to Reno or Phoenix or Honolulu. She was not being transformed into a new woman at a beauty spa. She was right here at home, decomposing beneath her own vegetable garden. Her husband had murdered her, and then he had dug up the tomatoes and laid her down in the dirt and covered her over and replanted the tomatoes right on top of her, only he didn’t know how to plant tomatoes, so they had all died. Poor Arlene. How had he killed her? With a gun, with a knife, with a hatchet?

Merriment was still issuing from the kitchen window, horselaughs from Wally Pott, soprano convulsions from the nurse with the mop of platinum curls. Filled with pity for the woman with the flowery dresses and the sad eyes, the woman who had felt the need of prayer, who had sought the blessings of Taurus, who had not lived to bring her tender seedlings to fruitful maturity, Homer carried the bean pole through the woods to his car. Opening the trunk, he laid the pole carefully across the spare tire. Then he drove slowly in the direction of the Nashoba police station, in the Town Hall.

The man was stupid, that was his problem. Careless and stupid. Too stupid to get rid of his wife’s pocketbook, too dumb to throw out her suitcases, too feebleminded to know how to transplant a tomato. Homer didn’t know which was more horrifying, Wally’s brutal murder of his wife or his slipshod failure to cover up the crime.

An hour later, they were all together in the kitchen, Wally Pott and Josie Coil, Homer Kelly and Peter Terry, along with a couple of young guys from the department who doubled as firemen when the need arose. The young guys had already dug Arlene’s strangled body out of the vegetable garden and wrapped it in one of her lavender sheets and laid it in the back of the police van.

“Don’t look at me,” cried Josie, backed up against the sink, her voice shrill in the accusing silence. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”

Wally Pott was beside himself. Addled by the sudden fall of the thunderbolt, he stared at Josie and whimpered, “But you said I had to do something. Soon, you said. This guy Victor, you said—” Wally could still see Victor in his mind’s eye, looming up as threateningly as ever, Victor at the modeling agency, Victor with his cleft chin, Victor with his eyebrows that met in the middle.

“Victor?” cried Josie harshly. “Who’s Victor? I don’t know any Victor. It’s all in your own mind, Wally Pott.” She screamed at him, “You’re crazy. You’re just incredibly insane. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

Wally did not come peaceably. He was still shouting and struggling when they dragged him out of the van and pulled him into the police station. In the firehouse across the street, one of the volunteers was hosing down the hook-and-ladder truck. He dropped the hose and lent a hand.