Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

And so, in terms of the time allotted to various tasks, my job was much as its title implied. I was his companion. I listened when he spoke, talked when he wanted conversation, and was silent when silence was indicated. There would be a time, his doctor told me, when I would have more to do, unless Mr. Bane would permit a nurse. I knew he would not, any more than he’d allow himself to die anywhere but in his home. There would be morphine shots for me to give him, because sooner or later the oral drug would become ineffective. In time he would be confined, first to his home and then to his room and at last to his bed, all a gradual preparation for the ultimate confinement.

“And maybe you ought to watch his drinking,” the doctor told me. “He’s been hitting it pretty heavy.”

This last I tried once and no more. I said something foolish, that he’d had enough, that he ought to take it with a little water; I don’t remember the words, only the stupidity of them, viewed in retrospect.

“I did not hire a damned warden,” he said. “You wouldn’t have thought of this yourself, Tim. Was this Harold Keeton’s idea?”

“Well, yes.”

“Harold Keeton is an excellent doctor,” he said. “But only a doctor, and not a minister. He knows that doctors are supposed to tell their patients to cut down on smoking and drinking, and he plays his part. There is no reason for me to limit my drinking, Tim. There is nothing wrong with my liver or with my kidneys. The only thing wrong with me, Tim, is that I have cancer.

“I have cancer, and I’m dying of it. I intend to die as well as I possibly can. I intend to think and feel and act as I please, and go out with a smile for the ending. I intend, among other things, to drink what I want when I want it. I do not intend to get drunk, nor do I intend to be entirely sober if I can avoid it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mr. Bane.”

“Good. Get the chessboard.”

For a change, I won a game.

The morning afterRachel Avery was found dead in her bathtub I came downstairs to find him at the breakfast table. He had not slept well, and this showed in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.

“We’ll go into town today,” he said.

“It snowed during the night, and you’re tired. If you catch cold, and you probably will, you’ll be stuck in bed for weeks.” This sort of argument he would accept. “Why do you want to go to town, sir?”

“To hear what people say.”

“Oh? What do you mean?”

“Because Rachel’s husband killed her, Tim. Rachel should never have married Dean Avery. He’s a man with the soul of an adding machine, but Rachel was poetry and music. He put her in his house and wanted to own her, but it was never in her to be true, to him or to another. She flew freely and sang magnificently, and he killed her.

“I want to learn just how he did it, and decide what to do about it. Perhaps you’ll go to town without me. You notice things well enough. You sense more than I’d guessed you might, as though you know the people.”

“You wrote them well.”

This amused him. “Never mind,” he said. “Make a nuisance of yourself if you have to, but see what you can learn. I have to find out how to manage all of this properly. I know a great deal, but not quite enough.”

Before I left I asked him how he could be so sure. He said, “I know the town and the people. I knew Rachel Avery and Dean Avery. I knew her mother very well, and I knew his parents. I knew they should not have married, and that things would go wrong for them, and I am entirely certain that she was killed and that he killed her. Can you understand that?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied. But I took the car into town, bought a few paperbound books at the drugstore, had an unnecessary haircut at the barber’s, went from here to there and back again, and then drove home to tell him what I had learned.

“There was a coroner’s inquest this morning,” I said. “Death by drowning induced as a result of electrical shock, accidental in origin. The funeral is tomorrow.”

“Go on, Tim.”

“Dean Avery was in Harmony Falls yesterday when they finally reached him and told him what had happened. He was completely torn up, they said. He drove to Harmony Falls the day before yesterday and stayed overnight.”

“And he was with people all the while?”

“No one said.”

“They wouldn’t have checked,” he said. “No need, not when it’s so obviously an accident. You’ll go to the funeral tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t go myself.”

“And I’m to study him and study everyone else? Should I take notes?”

He laughed, then chopped off the laughter sharply. “I don’t think you’d have to. I didn’t mean that you would go in my place solely to observe, Tim, though that’s part of it. But I would want to be there because I feel I ought to be there, so you’ll be my deputy.”

I had no answer to this. He asked me to build up the fire, and I did. I heard the newspaper boy and went for the paper. The town having no newspaper of its own, the paper he took was from the nearest city, and of course there was nothing in it on Rachel Avery. Usually he read it carefully. Now he skimmed it as if hunting something, then set it aside.

“I didn’t think you knew her that well,” I said.

“I did and I didn’t. There are things I do not understand, Tim; people to whom I’ve barely spoken, yet whom I seem to know intimately. Knowledge has so many levels.”

“You never really stopped writing about Beveridge.” This was his fictional name for the town. “You just stopped putting it on paper.”

He looked up, surprised, considering the thought with his head cocked like a wren’s. “That’s far more true than you could possibly know,” he said.

He ate a good dinner and seemed to enjoy it. Over coffee I started aimless conversations but he let them die out. Then I said, “Mr. Bane, why can’t it be an accident? The radio fell into the tub and shocked her and she drowned.”

I thought at first he hadn’t heard, or was pretending as much; this last is a special privilege of the old and the ill. Then he said, “Of course, you have to have facts. What should my intuition mean to you? And it would mean less, I suppose, if I assured you that Rachel Avery could not possibly be the type to play the radio while bathing?”

My face must have showed how much I thought of that. “Very well,” he said. “We shall have facts. The water in the tub was running when the body was found. It was running, then, both before and after the radio fell into the tub, which means that Rachel Avery had the radio turned on while the tub was running, which is plainly senseless. She wouldn’t be able to hear it well, would she? Also, she was adjusting the dial and knocked it into the tub with her.

“She would not have played the radio at all during her bath — this I simply know. She would not have attempted to turn on the radio until her bath was drawn, because no one would. And she would not have tried tuning the set while the water was running because that is sheerly pointless. Now doesn’t that begin to make a slight bit of sense to you, Tim?”

They put her into the ground on a cold gray afternoon. I was part of a large crowd at the funeral parlor and a smaller one at the cemetery. There was a minister instead of a priest, and the service was not the one with which I was familiar, yet after a moment all of it ceased to be foreign to me. And then I knew. It was Emily Talstead’s funeral from Cabot’s House, except that Emily’s death had justice to it, and even a measure of mercy, and this gray afternoon held neither.

In that funeral parlor I was the deputy of Joseph Cameron Bane. I viewed Rachel’s small body and thought that all caskets should be closed, no matter how precise the mortician’s art. We should not force ourselves to look upon our dead. I gave small words of comfort to Dean Avery and avoided his eyes while I did so. I sat in a wooden chair while the minister spoke of horrible tragedy and the unknowable wisdom of the Lord, and I was filled with a sense of loss that was complete in itself.