Аврам Дэвидсон: Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

Sheriff Wade Illigan said, “To get any good out of a Purdley woman, you’ve got to be meaner than she is.” And the Sheriff didn’t think Will Garlan was that mean a man ...

The range of all his pleasures and satisfaction had narrowed in these past years until there were only the smallest things left-like trimming the big pepper hedge, standing on the stepladder before the sun got too high, working the clippers with a slow oiled snick, and making the top of the big hedge flat as a table. He could make the trimming last a long time, pausing to look out across the inlet where the tide ran smooth, where mullet leaped near the green-black shade of the mangrove islands. Afterward he would rake up the cuttings, load them in the old tin wheelbarrow, and take them out to the pile beyond the shed.

He was a big mild man in his middle sixties, his body thickened and slow, his face deeply lined. The fringe of white hair and his pale-blue eyes were in striking contrast to the deep tropic tan. He wore a faded sports shirt and shapeless denim pants. It was a still May morning, full of the first heat of a new summer. He braced himself on the ladder and started working the clippers.

He heard Sue coming toward him across the back yard, coming from the rear of the house. He could hear her, and he guessed the folks in the trailer park could hear her, and the men fishing in the skiffs on the far side of the inlet could hear her.

“Will!” she squalled. “Will Garlan!” After years of experimentation she had learned to pitch her voice at exactly that shrill and penetrating level which he found most distasteful. It made him hunch his shoulders, as though some angry sharp-beaked bird were diving at his head.

He laid the clippers on top of the hedge and turned slowly, careful of his balance, to watch his wife striding toward him, her thin face dull-red with anger, her features pinched into an ugliness of hate. She was a lean woman, forty-five years old. She wore frayed yellow shorts, too large for her, and a grimy white halter. She had fierce gray eyes and a sallowness the sun never touched. Her black hair looked lifeless in the morning sunlight.

She stopped abruptly ten feet from the stepladder. “I tole you and I tole you a hundred times maybe,” she yelled, “don’t you never leave this stinkin’ smelly thing in the bedroom, you hear?”

She held a shaking hand out, showing him the pipe he had left by accident on his night table.

“Sue, honey,” he said humbly, “I guess I just forgot...”

“Forgot! You damn ol’ man, you oughta be put away some place, the way you getting weak in the head. And this is the last time you get it back. Next time I plunk it right out in the bay, hear?”

As he started to say something, she drew her wiry arm back and hurled the pipe at him with startling force. He tried to duck but it struck him painfully under the left eye. He nearly lost his balance, but saved himself by grasping the top of the ladder. Through the immediate prism of his tears he saw her stalking back toward the house.

Suddenly he imagined himself grasping the wooden handles of the clippers, hurling it at her, saw it turn once, slowly, glinting in the sun, and chunk into her naked sallow back, points first, exactly between the bony ridges of her shoulder blades... He felt sweaty and cold in the sunlight. The screen door slammed.

When his vision cleared he got down from the ladder and started looking for the pipe. He looked for a long time. He finally saw it in the pepper hedge. When he reached in for it, the movement of the branches dislodged it and the pipe fell to the ground.

He squatted and picked it up. The grain of the bowl was a dark cherry-red. It had an even cake and a sweet taste, and smoked dry. He oiled the bowl on the side of his nose, burnished it on the faded shirt, put it in his pocket.

He climbed the ladder again and began to clip the tall hedge. Within five minutes he knew it was no good. The pleasure was gone too, like all the others. The thing that he had to do came back into his mind. For a long time it had been something he would think of in the middle of the night while Sue lay nearby, her breath a rasping, nasal metronome.

Lately it had begun to occur to him during the day. And now, quite suddenly, he knew the day had come.

He left the hedge half done. He put the ladder and the clippers in the shed. He got into the old gray sedan and managed to back it out to the road before Sue came running out of the house.

“Where you goin’?” she yelled. “Where you goin’, Will Garlan, damn you?”

He did not answer. He started up. She ran in front of the car to stop him, but he drove directly toward her, not fast. She scrambled back out of the way. He got a glimpse of her face, insane with fury, and heard her incoherent yelpings as he headed toward town.

Center Street stretched wide and sleepy under the heat of May, the parked cars glinting, the few shoppers moving slowly under the awning shade. He parked diagonally across from the Palm County Court House and walked around to the far side, squinting against the glare.

At the high desk a deputy told him that Sheriff Wade Illigan would be back in a few minutes. He sat on a scarred bench and waited. He felt very sleepy. He wondered if the sleepiness was a reaction to the decision he had made. He felt as if he would like to find a bed in some cool place and sleep for a week.

He jumped and opened his eyes when Sheriff Illigan said, “Hey, Will. How you?”

He stood up slowly and said, “Wade, I got to talk to you. You busy? It may take some time.”

Illigan looked at his watch. “I got nothing till noon, and that’s an hour. That time enough?”

“I think that’s time enough, Wade.”

They went into Illigan’s big cluttered corner office. The Sheriff closed the door. Will Garlan sat in a corner of the deep leather couch. Illigan sat behind his desk, tilted back, and crossed his tough old legs across a corner of the desk.

“You know, Will, we’ve done no fishing together in one hell of a while. Way over a year.”

“And we aren’t likely to ever go fishing together again, Wade.”

Illigan raised grizzled eyebrows. “How so?”

Will Garlan took his pipe out and studied the grain. “Lately I keep thinking how it would be to kill Sue.”

“No law against thinking.”

“It’s a thing I might do. I get a kind of blind feeling, Wade. My ears roar. I could get like that and... hurt her. So I want to fix it so I can’t. That’s why I came in. I think I hate her. That’s a terrible thing, I guess.”

After a reflective pause Illigan said, “I’ll talk straight, Will. Anybody that knows you two can understand hating that woman. She’s plain mean. All those Purdleys have always been mean as snakes. When you married her she was a beautiful girl, and on a girl like that it somehow looks more like high spirits than ugly spirits. When the looks are gone, you can see what it is, plain and clear. Sue hasn’t got a friend in Palm County, and that’s for sure. I’d say this, Will. If you’d been raised here, you wouldn’t have married a Purdley no matter if she did make a fellow’s mouth run dry a hundred yards off. But nobody knew you good enough to warn you, and I guess you wouldn’t have listened anyhow.”

“I wouldn’t have listened.”

“What I say, Will, you should just pack up and get out. You got good years left, and it just isn’t worth it living nestled up to a buzz-saw woman like that making every day miserable.”

“You make it sound easy, but it wouldn’t be easy. I can’t do it that way. I’ve got to do it my way.”