Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘All of it.’ The Inspector tamped the tobacco into the bowl with his little finger. He seemed to be studying one of the odd inky prints the cops had taken. I was still having trouble breathing, and I wasn’t sure my knees were going to hold me; at such times I resented my gentility, yet understood that often as not it had spared me worse. ‘Be sure to get the angle of penetration.’

‘I’ll help with that, Fred,’ said Bob, tucking his tools in his armpit.

‘Careful, it’s hot …’

‘I want to thank you for coming in,’ Pardew said as they left. He settled his pipe in under his drooping moustaches (I heard a glass break, laughter, someone said: ‘Don’t try to explain …’), fumbled in his pockets. ‘It’s been good to have someone to talk to, someone who understands …’

‘Well, I only—’

He smiled. ‘You’ve been more help than you know. Got a match?’

‘No, sorry …’ I slapped my ribs pointlessly.

He poked about the shelves, the worktable, finally lit his pipe from a Bunsen burner. I mopped my brow with the handkerchief I realized too late had been the one used by the Inspector, thinking (not for the first time at a party like this): I should make better use of my time than this. ‘Like all intellectual pursuits,’ he said around start-up puffs (there seemed to be a growing agitation outside, as though to set off the deep stillness here in my study), ‘this is a lonely and thankless profession, a daily encounter with depravity, cruelty, and sudden—’

Fred burst in, looking sweaty, his eyes popping: ‘ They’re trying to take the body away! ’ he cried, then rushed out again.

‘ What —?! ’ the Inspector roared, rearing up, his moustaches bristling.

‘It’s probably only the ambulance men,’ I offered, but he pushed me aside and strode out in the wake of his assistant, his fists clenched and jaws set, white scarf fluttering.

People — some of whom I didn’t even know — were piling down the stairs, thumping out of the kitchen, rushing for the living room where there was a great commotion. ‘ Stop them! ’ they cried. ‘ Oh my god! ’ ‘He was using a hammer on her mouth! ’ In the middle of the room, two white-jacketed men and Jim were trying to lift Ros’s body onto a stretcher, but the two police officers, grabbing a limb each, had engaged them in a kind of grisly tug-of-war. ‘ The Inspector — grunt! — says she stays! ’

‘ Sorry, pal! We got orders! ’

‘ Oof! ’

‘ Do something, Gerry! I can’t take this!’

Talbot and Fats and some guy in a gray chalkstriped suit with a lilac shirt (he was familiar, I’d seen him somewhere before) were already trying to do something, struggling clumsily with the two policemen (‘Talbot! You come out of there right this minute!’ Wilma fussed from the sidelines), and Pardew now stepped into the melee on the other side, straddling one of Ros’s arms (her hands were wrapped now in plastic bags, I saw, her feet as well, and her front was splotched with drying plaster as though someone had hit her with a custard pie), a long finger jabbed at Jim’s lapel: ‘I must warn you that any further interference will be viewed as a criminal breach of the law! ’

‘I’m not interfering, damn you, I’m trying to —’

But just then Vic strolled in (‘Oh boy! look out!’ squawked Yvonne, ‘it’s the Grim Raper!’), walked serenely up to Fred in time to the dance tune playing on the hi-fi, and chopped him — kthuck! — in the back of the neck. ‘ Yow! Crikey, you didn’t have to do that! ’ Fred howled, crumpling.

Bob let go of the body, whipped out his revolver, backed off in a crouch: ‘ Anybody move—! ’

Vic smiled, showing his teeth, then turned and walked nonchalantly away toward the dining room, his back to the cop. It was so quiet you could hear ice clinking somewhere in an empty glass. ‘Jeez,’ Fred whimpered, all curled up on the floor, hands behind his head (Jim, also ignoring the drawn weapon, knelt to examine his neck), ‘we’re only doing our job, for cripe’s sake!’

‘He’s going to go too goddamned far if he doesn’t watch out,’ Noble grumbled to Eileen, standing listlessly by. ‘What?’ she asked absently, and picked up Vic’s drink, which he’d left behind. Bob fired, shattering the glass: Noble threw himself down heavily behind the couch, and someone screamed, but Eileen seemed not to notice what had happened, staring in bruised puzzlement at her dripping hand and what was left of the glass. ‘Give that boy a silver dollar!’ Yvonne applauded from the couch, and Talbot in his drunken stupor (Wilma seemed to be feeding him aspirin by the spoonful) joined in, slapping his hands together loosely like a trained seal. ‘I’m sorry,’ Eileen said, and Fats, watching Bob warily, lit up a thick black cigar. ‘Or maybe … maybe I’m not sorry …’

‘Please,’ I urged, but no one seemed to be listening. I felt locked into one of Pardew’s space — time configurations, where the only thing moving was my perception of it. The Inspector had knelt beside Jim and the injured officer (Jim was fitting him with a kind of neckbrace, using a pillow from the couch and attaching it with a woman’s garter belt — might have been my wife’s), and Bob, covering us with his gun, now loped over to join them, leaving the two ambulance men free to carry on with removing Ros’s corpse. But even as they heaved the body onto the stretcher (so light: she seemed almost to float, her torso rising and falling airily), Regina appeared in the doorway with her friends Zack Quagg, the playwright-director, and the actor Malcolm Mee, Quagg with his famous purple cape pulled on over a white unitard, Malcolm in faded blue jeans and a striped sailor shirt. Quagg was normal enough (not that my wife thought so: once in a performance he had stepped down into the audience and slapped her face with a dead fish), but Mee always struck me as dangerously homicidal. Just the parts he tended to play maybe, but his cold glassy stare and the scar on his cheek always sent a chill down my spine. Regina, hand to mouth and face averted, was pointing across the room at Ros, long white finger quivering, and Quagg, following it, swept into the room, his eyes ablaze. ‘What kinda two-bit tank show is this?’ he cried, shoving the ambulance men aside. ‘That’s my star! ’

‘Hey, wait a minute—!’

‘Get these greaseballs outa here!’ Quagg yelled, swinging wildly, but before he could hit anything, Fats locked him in a bearhug: ‘Whoa! Cool it, Zack!’

‘Whose company you in , Fats?’ Quagg grunted, as Talbot staggered blearily away from Wilma and threw himself at everybody: Mee, his face icily deadpan, lashed out with a whistling left hook and knocked him cold. Anatole was there too now, thin and pale in his all-black get-up, Earl Elstob grinning stupidly at his elbow with his fists cocked. On the hi-fi, somebody was singing something about ‘needing someone to talk to,’ and I thought: maybe it would help if I just changed the record. ‘The doc wants her tucked away outa the lights, Zack — it’s no good for her here!’ Fats gasped around his cigar, and the woman in yellow came up and kicked him in the shins. ‘ OW! ’

I stepped forward to explain, somewhat disquieted by the odd sensation of walking through a grid of intersecting vectors, just as Bob sprang up out of his half-crouch next to Fred, swinging the butt of his pistol: he’d have got me had not Ginger at that same moment crossed between us, wobbling on her high heels and holding the tattered remains of her costume together with both hands, and short-circuited the cop, who fell between her legs like trapped game. I ducked and they struck Anatole in their fall, propelling him into a scuffle between Mee and one of the ambulance men (‘Stop that! Stop that!’ I could hear Patrick shrieking over the uproar). Ginger, when she hit the carpet with Bob on her, squeaked airily as though getting her noise button squeezed, the officer cursing when his head knocked bonily on hers. ‘Yuh huh,’ said Earl Elstob, stumbling over Talbot, tangled up in Quagg’s cape. Dolph wandered in sleepily, wearing one of my ski sweaters and opening a beer can: ‘Christ, what’s been going on down here?’ Leonard, who’d been taking cheesecake shots of Daffie straddling the back of an easy chair as though horsed over it, turned away to get one of Ginger with her eyes crossed, lips puckered, and skinny legs straight up in the air like spiky red signposts, Bob between them seemingly humping away, but really just trying, in vain, to get his short leg under him. Daffie slid off the chair, walked over (Noble from behind the couch was telling someone to shut up), and kicked the cop in the face, and his gun went off again, shooting the cigar out of Fats’ mouth.