Paul Theroux - Murder in Mount Holly

I just wanted to let you know that he’s safe in the hands of an old friend and that there’s no need to get all flustered and call the Missing Persons Bureau! Ha-ha! And that I look forward to more happy days like the ones we spent at the Barracuda Beach Hotel back in ’62.

Your old friend,

Nettie

“Perfect,” was all Mr. Gibbon said.

“I feel as if I know her,” Miss Ball said.

The letter was sent special delivery (“What’s thirty cents,” Mrs. Gneiss said), without a return address, in a plain envelope. Mr. Gibbon estimated that it would be in Ethel Potts’s hands before noon.

“What about Warren’s nearest of kin,” Mrs. Gneiss asked.

“His nearest of kin? Well, that’s me, I guess, and I know where he is!” Miss Ball said. She did not say it with regret; but there was no joy in her voice either. Miss Ball did not quite know what to think about Juan’s death. He had been very pleasant — if a bit jumpy — at first. Only lately had he been asking for more pin-money. He had also recently demanded to move in with Miss Ball, but she had discouraged that. He had a good heart. He had bought things for Miss Ball. He was constantly surprising her with little mementos like the framed picture of Clark Gable or the doilies — he adored doilies for a reason Miss Ball could not even guess at. He had “been with” Miss Ball for about ten months and had never once shown the sort of jealous rage that had prompted him to stab Harold Potts to death.

Juan would have died violently sooner or later. It’s in the blood. Better he died in the privacy of Miss Ball’s own home than in the gutter. And then maybe Mr. Gibbon was right: maybe Juan was a communist. He was certainly dark, a Puerto Rican, there was no denying that! Mr. Gibbon was more familiar with the You-Know-Whos than Miss Ball. She knew that. He knew what he was doing. So goodbye, Juan, hasta luego and sleep well, Miss Ball thought.

Meanwhile, Mr. Gibbon was getting impatient. “An itchy trigger-finger,” he said. Sooner or later Ethel Potts would start wondering who in Sam Hill was Nettie and might turn the letter over to the police. This would ruin Mr. Gibbon’s timing. Floor plan or no floor plan, they would have to rob the bank quickly — at least in the next week or so. Here Herbie was out of boot camp, on his way to the front lines — probably he had nailed a few dozen commies already. A greenhorn! And here was Mr. Gibbon with only these two rather unimportant fellow travellers to his credit.

Mrs. Gneiss agreed. She said she was getting edgy. She didn’t enjoy getting edgy. If the robbery was to be done, it should be done as speedily as possible, so that they could all relax and enjoy the rewards and fame the robbery would bring them. She for one didn’t want Ethel Potts going haywire and accusing them of killing her husband. But as usual she said nothing more. Charlie knew best. She would wait until he gave the word. The whole thing was his idea, he was the brains and should make the decisions.

“I’d just like to have a look around the bank tomorrow before we go ahead with it,” Mr. Gibbon said. Miss Ball should not come along. They didn’t want to arouse any suspicions. He and Mrs. Gneiss would just sort of mosey around the bank, seeing what they could see and getting the general layout of the place and, in short, “casing the joint.”

Miss Ball said that suited her fine. They sat around the house reading and puttering around for the rest of the afternoon. Mr. Gibbon attended to his long-neglected paper bags; Mrs. Gneiss watched TV. But Miss Ball sat and scowled. Her brow grew more and more furrowed as the afternoon wore on. By five o’clock she was genuinely distressed. Something had just occurred to her. No one took any notice of her, not even when she scribbled a little reminder on the notepad, which she always carried in her apron.

Miss Ball kept looking into store windows. Before each one she paused, touched at her hair, pressed her lips together and, reasonably satisfied with the reflection that stared out at her from the foundation garments or baked goods, she walked on toward the doctor’s office.

She had begun to worry. She had read of a man who woke up one morning with the beginnings of a sixth finger; she had heard of a lung ballooning to twice its normal size when it had to do the work of two. And there were tonsils, adenoids, and the appendix, which often grew back if they were not watched properly and nipped, so to speak, in the bud. It was her operation that was making her jittery. How could she be sure that her insides wouldn’t grow back when so many other things grew back?

Nature was hard to understand. You clip grass and trim bushes and pluck hairs and what do you get? More grass, stray branches and bushy eyebrows. Miss Ball found that she could not cope with nature. Nature was always ahead of her, ahead of everyone she knew.

Miss Ball had been a farm girl. She could remember seeing her father pushing whole barrows of nourishing dung across rotting boards to the fields. She had peeled potatoes, she had awakened in a musty room covered with a damp quilt. That’s how it was when you lived close to the ground. It was damp and you were always kicking plants and dirt back into place, sifting stones, building walls, rocking on the porch and watching the crops fail. This was where Miss Ball learned Mother Nature’s spiteful ways.

But her operation had cost her a pretty penny and now, with her childhood thoughts of crabgrass and her recent discovery that lungs ballooned and adenoids reappeared, and — most discouraging of all — that Juan had been extremely, shall we say, virile, and now was dead, Miss Ball could not remember if the doctor had given her a warranty.

She had gotten one with her Snooz-Alarm — it was a big green-edged one-year warranty that looked like a savings bond. And she had gotten one with her hair dryer, her mixer, her vibrator and her juicer. If anything went wrong she didn’t have to raise a fuss. She just told the clerk that it was not in working order and she would get a new one, a new dryer or juicer. But she hadn’t got a warranty from the doctor.

She had asked herself many times if she needed one and had always decided no. But she had not yet realized her power over men. She had thought she was too old for that sort of thing. She could always reassure herself that Juan was doing it for the money. Was she too old? Harold Potts didn’t think so. And that’s finally what scared her.

“You look marvellous!” the doctor said with professional enthusiasm as Miss Ball seated herself on the other side of the desk.

“That’s the outside you’re looking at. It’s the inside I’m worried about.”

“There’s not much left to worry about,” the doctor said. He was going to say ha-ha, but he changed his mind when he saw the expression on Miss Ball’s face. He decided to reassure her. “What I mean is, you’re empty. So why worry?”

“Empty? That doesn’t sound too medical to me.”

“I try to simplify things for my patients.”

“I’m not stupid, doctor. You can talk plain to me.”

“I’m talking plain, Miss Ball. Now what’s wrong?”

“I want a warranty and I want it now.”

“A what?”

“A warranty. I haven’t had a wink of sleep for the past two days. All I could think of was my things, the things you say you removed, only God knows whether you did or not.”

“Miss Ball, I’m a medical doctor. I have taken the Hippocratic Oath. Every doctor takes it — it’s part of being a doctor.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Miss Ball snapped.

“About the guarantee. .”

“Warranty.”

“As far as the warranty goes. Why, I can’t imagine why you’d want something like that.”