Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“You shouldn’t have killed her,” he said to Wright’s corpse. Then, smiling privately, he slipped out the back door and walked off into the night.

Sometimes you justcan’t win for losing. Business was so bad over at Dettweiler Bros. Fine Fashions for Men that Seth Dettweiler went on back to the store one Thursday night and poured out a five-gallon can of lead-free gasoline where he figured as it would do the most good. He lit a fresh Philip Morris King Size and balanced it on the edge of the counter so as it would burn for a couple of minutes and then get unbalanced enough to drop into the pool of gasoline. Then he got into an Oldsmobile that was about five days clear of a repossession notice and drove on home.

You couldn’t have had a better fire dropping napalm on a paper mill. Time it was done you could sift those ashes and not find so much as a collar button. It was far and away the most spectacularly total fire Schuyler County had ever seen, so much so that Maybrook Fidelity Insurance would have been a little tentative about settling a claim under ordinary circumstances. But the way things stood there wasn’t the slightest suspicion of arson, because what kind of a dimwitted hulk goes and burns down his business establishment a full week after his fire insurance has lapsed?

No fooling.

See, it was Seth’s brother Porter who took care of paying bills and such, and a little over a month ago the fire-insurance payment had been due, and Porter looked at the bill and at the bank balance and back and forth for a while and then he put the bill in a drawer. Two weeks later there was a reminder notice, and two weeks after that there was a notice that the grace period had expired and the insurance was no longer in force, and then a week after that there was one pluperfect hell of a bonfire.

Seth and Porter had always got on pretty good. (They took after each other quite a bit, folks said. Especially Porter.) Seth was forty-two years of age, and he had that long Dettweiler face topping a jutting Van Dine jaw. (Their mother was a Van Dine hailing from just the other side of Oak Falls.) Porter was thirty-nine, equipped with the same style face and jaw. They both had black hair that lay flat on their heads like shoe polish put on in slapdash fashion. Seth had more hair left than Porter, in spite of being the older brother by three years. I could describe them in greater detail, right down to scars and warts and sundry distinguishing marks, but it’s my guess that you’d enjoy reading all that about as much as I’d enjoy writing it, which is to say less than somewhat. So let’s get on with it.

I was saying they got on pretty good, rarely raising their voices one to the other, rarely disagreeing seriously about anything much. Now the fire didn’t entirely change the habits of a lifetime but you couldn’t honestly say that it did anything to improve their relationship. You’d have to allow that it caused a definite strain.

“What I can’t understand,” Seth said, “is how anybody who is fool enough to let fire insurance lapse can be an even greater fool by not telling his brother about it. That in a nutshell is what I can’t understand.”

“What beats me, ” Porter said, “is how the same person who has the nerve to fire a place of business for the insurance also does so without consulting his partner, especially when his partner just happens to be his brother.”

“Allus I was trying to do,” said Seth, “was save you from the criminal culpability of being an accessory before, to, and after the fact, plus figuring you might be too chickenhearted to go along with it.”

“Allus I was trying to do,” said Porter, “was save you from worrying about financial matters you would be powerless to contend with, plus figuring it would just be an occasion for me to hear further from you on the subject of those bow ties.”

“Well, you did buy one powerful lot of bow ties.”

“I knew it.”

“Something like a Pullman car full of bow ties, and it’s not like every man and boy in Schuyler County’s been getting this mad passion for bow ties of late.”

“I just knew it.”

“I wasn’t the one brought up the subject, but since you went and mentioned those bow ties—”

“Maybe I should of mentioned the spats,” Porter said.

“Oh, I don’t want to hear about spats.”

“No more than I wanted to hear about bow ties. Did we sell one single damn pair of spats?”

“We did.”

“We did?”

“Feller bought one about fifteen months back. Had Maryland plates on his car, as I recall. Said he always wanted spats and didn’t know they still made ’em.”

“Well, selling one pair out of a gross isn’t too bad.”

“Now you leave off,” Seth said.

“And you leave off of bow ties?”

“I guess.”

“Anyway, the bow ties and the spats all burned up in the same damn fire,” Porter said.

“You know what they say about ill winds,” Seth said. “I guess there’s a particle of truth in it, what they say.”

While it didn’tdo the Dettweiler brothers much good to discuss spats and bow ties, it didn’t solve their problems to leave off mentioning spats and bow ties. By the time they finished their conversation all they were back to was square one, and the view from that spot wasn’t the world’s best.

The only solution was bankruptcy, and it didn’t look to be all that much of a solution.

“I don’t mind going bankrupt,” one of the brothers said. (I think it was Seth. Makes no nevermind, actually. Seth, Porter, it’s all the same who said it.) “I don’t mind going bankrupt, but I sure do hate the thought of being broke.”

“Me too,” said the other brother. (Porter, probably.)

“I’ve thought about bankruptcy from time to time.”

“Me too.”

“But there’s a time and a place for bankruptcy.”

“Well, the place is all right. No better place for bankruptcy than Schuyler County.”

“That’s true enough,” said Seth. (Unless it was Porter.) “But this is surely not the time. Time to go bankrupt is in good times when you got a lot of money on hand. Only the damnedest kind of fool goes bankrupt when he’s stony broke busted and there’s a depression going on.”

What they were both thinking on during this conversation was a fellow name of Joe Bob Rathburton who was in the construction business over to the other end of Schuyler County. I myself don’t know of a man in this part of the state with enough intelligence to bail out a leaky rowboat who doesn’t respect Joe Bob Rathburton to hell and back as a man with good business sense. It was about two years ago that Joe Bob went bankrupt and he did it the right way. First of all he did it coming off the best year’s worth of business he’d ever done in his life. Then what he did was he paid off the car and the house and the boat and put them all in his wife’s name. (His wife was Mabel Washburn, but no relation to the Washburns who have the Schuyler County First National Bank. That’s another family entirely.)

Once that was done, Joe Bob took out every loan and raised every dollar he possibly could, and he turned all that capital into green folding cash and sealed it in quart Mason jars which he buried out back of an old pear tree that’s sixty-plus years old and still bears fruit like crazy. And then he declared bankruptcy and sat back in his Mission rocker with a beer and a cigar and a real big-tooth smile.

“If I couldthink of anything worth doing,” Porter Dettweiler said one night, “why, I guess I’d just go ahead and do it.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Seth said.

“But I can’t,” Porter said.