Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

I was the only person on the planet who could set it off. I was not ready to set it off yet. This was not cunning on my part, as some people have said. It was my natural awe of an avalanche.

I walked home, a harmless little elf in his magic dancing shoes, to the Hotel Arapahoe. Much straw had been spun into gold that day, and much gold had been spun into straw. And the spinning had just begun.

There was a new night clerk, naturally, since Israel Edel had been summoned to Arpad Leen's. This new man had been sent over to fill in on short notice. His regular post was behind the desk at the Carlyle, also a RAMJAC hotel. He was exquisitely dressed and groomed. He was mortified, having to deal with whores and people fresh out of jails and lunatic asylums and so on.

He had to tell me that: that he really belonged to the Carlyle, and that he was only filling in. This was not the real him.

When I told him my name, he said that there was a package for me, and a message, too.

The police had returned my shoes and had picked up the clarinet parts from my bureau. The message was from Arpad Leen. It was a holograph, like Mary Kathleen's will, which I had in the inner pocket of my suitcoat — along with my Doctor of Mixology degree. The pockets of my raincoat were stuffed with other materials from Mary Kathleen's shoes. They bulged like saddlebags.

Leen wrote that the letter was for my eyes only. He said that in the midst of the confusion at his penthouse he had never gotten around to offering a specific job to me. He suggested that I would be happy in his old division, which was Down Home Records. It now included The New York Times and Universal Pictures and Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey and Dell Publishing, among other things. There was also a catfood company, he said, which I needn't worry about. It was about to be transferred to the General Foods Division. It had belonged to the Times.

"If this is not your cup of tea," he wrote, "we'll find something that is. I am absolutely thrilled to know that we will have an observer for Mrs. Graham among us. Please give her my warmest regards."

There was a postscript. He said that he had taken the liberty of making an appointment for me at eleven the next morning with someone named Morty Sills. There was an address. I assumed that Sills was a RAMIAC personnel director or something. It turned out that he was a tailor.

Once again a multimillionaire was sending Walter F. Star-buck to his own tailor, to be made into a convincing counterfeit of a perfect gentleman.

On the following morning I was still numbed by my dread of the avalanche. I was four thousand dollars richer and technically a thief. Mary Kathleen had had four one-thousand-dollar bills as insoles for her basketball shoes.

There was nothing in the papers about the death of Mary Kathleen. Why would there have been? Who cared? There was an obituary for the patient Sarah Clewes had lost — the woman with the bad heart. She left three children behind. Her husband had died in an automobile accident a month before, so the children were orphans now.

As I was being measured for a suit by Morty Sills, I found it unbearable to think of Mary Kathleen's not being claimed by anyone. Clyde Carter was there, too, fresh off the plane from Atlanta. He, too, was getting a brand-new wardrobe, even before Arpad Leen had seen him.

He was scared.

I told him not to be.

So I went to the morgue after lunch, and I claimed her. It was easily done. Who else would want that tiny body? It had no relatives. I was its only friend.

I had one last look at it. It was nothing. There was nobody in there anymore. "Nobody home."

I found a mortician only one block away. I had him pick up the body and embalm it and put it into a serviceable casket. There was no funeral. I did not even accompany it to the grave, which was a crypt in a great concrete honeycomb in Morristown, New Jersey. The cemetery had advertised in the Times that morning. Each crypt had a tasteful little bronze door on which the tenant's name was engraved.

Little did I dream that the man who did the engraving of the doors would be arrested for drunken driving about two years later, and would comment on what an unusual name the arresting officer had. He had come across it only once before — at his lugubrious place of work. The name of the officer, a Morris County deputy sheriff, actually, was Francis X. O'Looney.

O'Looney would become curious as to how the woman in the crypt was related to him.

O'Looney, using the sparse documents at the cemetery, would trace Mary Kathleen back to the morgue in New York City. There he would get a set of her fingerprints. On the outside chance that she had been arrested or had spent time in a mental institution, he would send the prints to the F.B.I.

Thus would RAMJAC be brought tumbling down.

There was a bizarre sidelight to the case. O'Looney, before he finally found out who Mary Kathleen really was, fell in love with his dream of her when she was young. He had it all wrong, incidentally. He dreamed that she was tall and buxom and black-haired, whereas she had been short and scrawny and red-haired. He dreamed that she was an immigrant who had gone to work for an eccentric millionaire in a spooky mansion, and that she had been both attracted and repelled by this man, and that he had abused her to the point of death.

All this came out in divorce proceedings brought against O'Looney by his wife of thirty-two years. It was front-page stuff in the tabloids for a week or more. O'Looney was already famous by then. The papers called him "The man who blew the whistle on RAMJAC," or variations on that theme. Now his wife was claiming that his affections had been alienated by a ghost. He wouldn't sleep with her anymore. He stopped brushing his teeth. He was chronically late to work. He became a grandfather, and he didn't care. He wouldn't even look at the baby.

What was particularly sick about his behavior was that, even after he found out what Mary Kathleen had really been like, he stayed in love with the original dream.

"Nobody can ever take that away from me," he said. "It's the most precious thing I own."

He has been relieved of his duties, I hear. His wife is suing him again — this time for her share in the small fortune he got for the movie rights to his dream. The film is to be shot in a spooky old mansion in Morristown. If you can believe the gossip columns, there is to be a talent search for an actress to play the Irish immigrant girl. Al Pacino has already agreed to play Sheriff O'Looney, and Kevin McCarthy to play the eccentric millionaire.

So I dallied too long, and now I must go to prison again, they say. My high jinks with Mary Kathleen's remains were not crimes in and of themselves, since corpses have no more rights than do orts from last night's midnight snack. My actions were accessory, however, to the commission of a class E felony, which according to Section 190.30 of the Penal Law of New York State consists of unlawfully concealing a will, I had entombed the will itself in a safe-deposit box of Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company, a division of RAMJAC.

I have tried to explain to my little dog that her master must go away for a while — because he violated Section 190.30. I have told her that laws are written to be obeyed. She understands nothing. She loves my voice. All news from me is good news. She wags her tail.

I lived very high. I bought a duplex with a low-interest company loan. I cashed stock options for clothes and furniture. I became a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Ballet, coming and going by limousine.

I gave intimate parties at my home for RAMJAC authors and recording artists and movie actors and circus performers — Isaac Bashevis Singer, Mick Jagger, Jane Fonda, G?nther Gebel Williams, and the like. It was fun. After RAMJAC acquired the Marlborough Gallery and Associated American Artists, I had painters and sculptors to my parties, too.