John Irving - A Son of the Circus

It would never have occurred to the old steward that a woman —not even as vulgar a member of the species as Mrs. Dogar—could be the pissing culprit. But the killer was no amateur at foreshadowing. She’d been systematically murdering the bougainvillea for months. One of many things that the new Mrs. Dogar liked about wearing dresses was that it was comfortable not to wear underwear. The only thing Rahul missed about having a penis was how convenient it had been to pee outdoors. But her penchant for pissing on certain out-of-the-way plots of the bougainvillea was not whimsical. While in the pursuit of this odd habit, Mrs. Dogar had been mindful of her larger work-in-progress. Even before the unfortunate Mr. Lal had happened upon her while she was squatting in the bougainvillea by the fatal ninth hole (which had long been Mr. Lal’s nemesis), Rahul had already made a plan.

In her purse, for weeks, she’d carried the two-rupee note with her first typed message to the Duckworthians: MORE MEMBERS DIE IF DHAR REMAINS A MEMBER. She’d always assumed that the easiest Duckworthian to murder would be someone who stumbled into her in one of her out-of-the-way peeing places. She’d thought it would happen at night—in the darkness. She’d imagined a younger member than Mr. Lal, probably someone who’d drunk too much beer and wandered out on the nighttime golf course—drawn by the same need that had drawn Mrs. Dogar there. She’d imagined a brief flirtation—they were the best kind.

“So! You had to pee, too? If you tell me what you like about doing it outdoors, I’ll tell you my reasons!” Or maybe: “What else do you like to do outdoors?”

Mrs. Dogar had also imagined that she might indulge in a kiss and a little fondling; she liked fondling. Then she would kill him, whoever he was, and she’d stick the two-rupee note in his mouth. She’d never strangled a man; with her hand strength, she didn’t doubt she could do it. She’d never much liked strangling women—not as much as she enjoyed the pure strength of a blow from a blunt instrument—but she was looking forward to strangling a man because she wanted to see if that old story was true… if men got erections and ejaculated when they were close to choking to death.

Disappointingly, old Mr. Lal had offered Mrs. Dogar neither the opportunity for a brief flirtation nor the novelty of a strangulation. Rahul was so lazy, she rarely made breakfast for herself. Although he was officially retired, Mr. Dogar left early for his office, and Mrs. Dogar often indulged in an early-morning pee on the golf course—before even the most zealous golfers were on the fairways. Then she’d have her tea and some fruit in the Ladies’ Garden and go to her health club to lift weights and skip rope. She’d been surprised by old Mr. Lal’s early-morning assault on the bougainvillea at the ninth green.

Rahul had only just finished peeing; she rose up out of the flowers, and there was the old duffer plodding off the green and tripping through the vines. Mr. Lal was searching for a challenging spot in this jungle in which to deposit the stupid golf ball. When he looked up from the flowers, the second Mrs. Dogar was standing directly in front of him. She’d startled him so—for a moment, she thought it would be unnecessary to kill him. He clutched his chest and staggered away from her.

“Mrs. Dogar!” he cried. “What’s happened to you? Has someone… molested you?” Thus he gave her the idea; after all, her dress was still hiked up to her hips. Clearly distraught, she wriggled her dress down. (She would change into a sari for lunch.)

“Oh, Mr. Lal! Thank God it’s you!” she cried. “I’ve been… taken advantage of!” she told him.

“What a world, Mrs. Dogar! But how may I assist you? Help! ” the old man shouted out.

“Oh no, please! I couldn’t bear to see anyone else—I’m so ashamed!” she confided to him.

“But how may I help you, Mrs. Dogar?” Mr. Lal inquired.

“It’s painful for me to walk,” she confessed. “They hurt me.”

“They!” the old man shouted.

“Perhaps if you would lend me one of your clubs… if I could just use it as a cane,” Mrs. Dogar suggested. Mr. Lal was on the verge of handing her his nine iron, then changed his mind.

“The putter would be best!” he declared. Poor Mr. Lal was out of breath from the short trot to his golf bag and his stumbling return to her side through the tangled vines, the destroyed flowers. He was much shorter than Mrs. Dogar; she was able to put one of her big hands on his shoulder—the putter in her other hand. That way, she could see over the old man’s head to the green and the fairway; no one was there.

“You could rest on the green while I fetch you a golf cart,” Mr. Lal suggested.

“Yes, thank you—you go ahead,” she told him. He tripped purposefully forward, but she was right behind him; before he reached the green, she had struck him senseless—she hit him just behind one ear. After he’d fallen she bashed him directly in the temple that was turned toward her, but his eyes were already open and unmoving when she struck him the second time. Mrs. Dogar suspected he’d been killed by the first blow.

In her purse, she had no difficulty finding the two-rupee note. For 20 years, she’d clipped her small bills to the top half of that silver ballpoint pen which she’d stolen from the beach cottage in Goa. She even kept this silly memento well polished. The clip—the “pocket clasp,” as her Aunt Promila had called it—continued to maintain the perfect tension on a small number of bills, and the polished silver made the top half of the pen easy to spot in her purse; she hated how small things could become lost in purses.

She’d inserted the two-rupee note in Mr. Lal’s gaping mouth; to her surprise, when she closed his mouth, it opened again. She’d never tried to close a dead person’s mouth before. She’d assumed that the body parts of the dead would be fairly controllable; that had certainly been her experience with manipulating limbs—sometimes an elbow or a knee had been in the way of her belly drawing, and she’d easily rearranged it.

The distracting detail of Mr. Lal’s mouth was what caused her to be careless. She’d returned the remaining small notes to her purse, but not the top half of the well-traveled pen; it must have fallen in the bougainvillea. She hadn’t been able to find it later, and there in the bougainvillea was the last place she recalled holding it in her hand. Mrs. Dogar assumed that the police were presently puzzling over it; with the widow Lal’s help, they’d probably determined that the top half of the pen hadn’t even belonged to Mr. Lal. Mrs. Dogar speculated that the police might even conclude that no Duckworthian would be caught dead with such a pen; that it was made of real silver was somehow negated by the sheer tackiness of the engraved word, India . Rahul found tacky things amusing. It also amused Rahul to imagine how aimlessly the police must be tracking her, for Mrs. Dogar believed that the half-pen would be just another link in a chain of meaningless clues.

It was after Mr. Dogar had apologized to Mr. Sethna and retrieved his car from the Duckworth Club parking lot that the old steward received the phone call from Mrs. Dogar. “Is my husband still there? I suppose not. I’d meant to remind him of something to attend to—he’s so forgetful.”

“He was here, but he’s gone,” Mr. Sethna informed her.

“Did he remember to cancel our reservation for lunch? I suppose not. Anyway, we’re not coming,” Rahul told the steward. Mr. Sethna prided himself in his daily memorizing of the reservations for lunch and dinner; he knew that there’d been no reservation for the Dogars. But when he informed Mrs. Dogar of this fact, she surprised him. “Oh, the poor man!” she cried. “He forgot to cancel the reservation, but he was so drunk last night that he forgot to make the reservation in the first place. This would be comic if it weren’t also so tragic, I suppose.”