One Night Stands and Lost Weekends

One Night Stands and Lost Weekends Page 24

Interestingly enough, his late work actually decreased once he was settled in the apartment. Perhaps he had only developed the need to work late out of a larger need to avoid going home to Carolyn. In any event, now that he had a place to go after work, he found it far less essential to stay around the office after five o’clock. He rarely worked late more than one night a week—but he always spent three nights a week in town, and often four.

Sometimes he spent the evening with friends. Sometimes he stayed in his apartment and rejoiced in the blessings of solitude. Other times he combined the best of two worlds by finding an agreeable Village female to share his solitude.

He kept waiting for the double life to catch up with him, anticipating the tension and insecurity which were always a component of such living patterns in the movies and on television. He expected to be discovered, or overcome by guilt, or otherwise to have the error of his dual ways brought forcibly home to him. But this did not happen. His office work showed a noticeable improvement; he was not only more efficient, but his copy was fresher, more inspired, more creative. He was doing more work in less time and doing a better job of it. Even his home life improved, if only in that there was less of it.

Divorce? He thought about it, imagined the joy of being Roy Baker on a full-time basis. It would be financially devastating, he knew. Carolyn would wind up with the house and the car and the lion’s share of his salary, but Roy Baker could survive on a mere fraction of Howard Jordan’s salary, existing quite comfortably without house or car. He never relinquished the idea of asking Carolyn for a divorce, nor did he ever quite get around to it—until one night he saw her leaving a nightclub on West Third Street, her black hair blowing in the wind, her step drunkenly unsteady, and a man’s arm curled possessively around her waist.

His first reaction was one of astonishment that anyone would actually desire her. With all the vibrant, fresh-bodied girls in the Village, why would anyone be interested in Carolyn? It made no sense to him.

Then, suddenly, his puzzlement gave way to absolute fury. She had been cold to him for years, and now she was running around with other men, adding insult to injury. She let him support her, let him pay off the endless mortgage on the horrible house, let him sponsor her charge accounts while she spent her way toward the list of Ten Best-Dressed Women. She took everything from him and gave nothing to him, and all the while she was giving it to someone else.

He knew, then, that he hated her, that he had always hated her and, finally, that he was going to do something about it.

What? Hire detectives? Gather evidence? Divorce her as an adulteress? Small revenge, hardly the punishment that fit the crime. No. No, he could not possibly do anything about it. It would be too much out of character for him to take positive action. He was the good clean-living, midtown-square type, good old Howie Jordan. He would do all that such a man could do, bearing his new knowledge in silence, pretending that he knew nothing, and going on as before.

But Roy Baker could do more.

From that day on he let his two lives overlap. On the nights when he stayed in town he went directly from the office to a nearby hotel, took a room, rumpled up the bed so that it would look as though it had been slept in, then left the hotel by back staircase and rear exit. After a quick cab ride downtown and a change of clothes, he became Roy Baker again and lived Roy Baker’s usual life, spending just a little more time than usual around West Third Street. It wasn’t long before he saw her again. This time he followed her. He found out that her lover was a self-styled folksinger named Stud Clement, and he learned by discreet inquiries that Carolyn was paying Stud’s rent.

“Stud inherited her from Phillie Wells when Phillie split for the Coast,” someone told him. “She’s got some square husband in Connecticut or someplace. If Stud’s not on the scene, she don’t care who she goes home with.” She had been at this, then, for some time. He smiled bitterly. It was true, he decided; the husband was really the last to know.

He went on using the midtown hotel, creating a careful pattern for his life, and he kept careful patterns on Stud Clement. One night when Carolyn didn’t come to town, he managed to stand next to the big folksinger in a Hudson Street bar and listen to him talk. He caught the slight Tennessee accent, the pitch of the voice, the type of words that Clement used.

Through it all he waited for his hatred to die, waited for his fury to cool. In a sense she had done no more to him than he had done to her. He half-expected that he would lose his hatred sooner or later, but he found that he hated her more every day, not only for cheating but for making him an ad man instead of a writer, for making him live in that house instead of a Village apartment, for all the things she had done to ruin every aspect of his life. If it had not been for her, he would have been Roy Baker all his life. She had made a Howard Jordan of him, and for that he would hate her forever.

Once he realized this, he made the phone call. “I gotta see you tonight,” he said.

“Stud?”

So the imitation was successful. “Not at my place,” he said quickly. “One-nine-three Christopher, Apartment one-D. Seven-thirty, no sooner and no later. And don’t be going near my place.”

“Trouble?”

“Just be there,” he said, and hung up.

His own phone rang in less than five minutes. He smiled a bitter smile as he answered it.

She said, “Howard? I was wondering, you’re not coming home tonight, are you? You’ll have to stay at your hotel in town?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of work, but I hate to be away from you so much. Maybe I’ll let it slide for a night—”

“No!” He heard her gasp. Then she recovered, and her voice was calm when she spoke again. “I mean, your career comes first, darling. You know that. You shouldn’t think of me. Think of your job.”

“Well,” he said, enjoying all this, “I’m not sure—”

“I’ve got a dreary headache anyway, darling. Why not stay in town? We’ll have the weekend together—”

He let her talk him into it. After she rang off, he called his usual hotel and made his usual reservation for eleven-thirty. He went back to work, left the office at five-thirty, signed the register downstairs, and left the building. He had a quick bite at a lunch counter and was back at his desk at six o’clock, after signing the book again on the way in.

At a quarter to seven he left the building again, this time failing to sign himself out. He took a cab to his apartment and was inside it by ten minutes after seven. At precisely seven-thirty there was a knock on his door. He answered it, and she stared at him as he dragged her inside. She couldn’t figure it out; her face contorted.

“I’m going to kill you, Carolyn,” he said, and showed her the knife. She died slowly, and noisily. Her cries would have brought out the National Guard anywhere else in the country, but they were in New York now, and New Yorkers never concern themselves with the shrieks of dying women.

He took the few clothes that did not belong to Baker, scooped up Carolyn’s purse, and got out of the apartment. From a pay phone on Sheridan Square he called the air terminal and made a reservation. Then he taxied back to the office and slipped inside, again without writing his name in the register.

At eleven-fifteen he left the office, went to his hotel and slept much more soundly than he had expected. He went to the office in the morning and had his secretary put in three calls to New Hope. No one answered.

That was Friday. He took his usual train home, rang his bell a few times, used his key, called Carolyn’s name several times, then made himself a drink. After half an hour he called the next door neighbor and asked her if she knew where his wife was. She didn’t. After another three hours he called the police.

Sunday a local policeman came around to see him. Evidently Carolyn had had her fingerprints taken once, maybe when she’d held a civil service job before they were married. The New York police had found the body Saturday evening, and it had taken them a little less than twenty-four hours to run a check on the prints and trace Carolyn to New Hope.

“I hoped I wouldn’t have to tell you this,” the policeman said. “When you reported your wife missing, we talked to some of the neighbors. It looks as though she was—uh—stepping out on you, Mr. Jordan. I’m afraid it had been going on for some time. There were men she met in New York. Does the name Roy Baker mean anything to you?”

“No. Was he—”

“I’m afraid he was one of the men she was seeing, Mr. Jordan. I’m afraid he killed her, sir.”

Howard’s reactions combined hurt and loss and bewilderment in proper proportion. He almost broke down when they had him view the body but managed to hold himself together stoically. He learned from the New York police that Roy Baker was a Village type, evidently some sort of irresponsible artist. Baker had made a reservation on a plane shortly after killing Carolyn but hadn’t picked up his ticket, evidently realizing that the police would be able to trace him. He’d no doubt take a plane under another name, but they were certain they would catch up with him before too long.

“He cleared out in a rush,” the policeman said. “Left his clothes, never got to empty out his bank account. A guy like this, he’s going to turn up in a certain kind of place. The Village, North Beach in Frisco, maybe New Orleans. He’ll be back in the Village within a year, I’ll bet on it, and when he does we’ll pick him up.”

For form’s sake, the New York police checked Jordan’s whereabouts at the time of the murder, and they found that he’d been at his office until eleven-fifteen, except for a half hour when he’d had a sandwich around the corner, and that he had spent the rest of the night at the hotel where he always stayed when he worked late.

That, incredibly, was all there was to it.

After a suitable interval, Howard put the New Hope house on the market and sold it almost immediately at a better price than he had thought possible. He moved to town, stayed at his alibi hotel while he checked the papers for a Village apartment.

He was in a cab, heading downtown for a look at a three-room apartment on Horatio Street, before he realized suddenly that he could not possibly live in the Village, not now. He was known there as Roy Baker, and if he went there he would be identified as Roy Baker and arrested as Roy Baker, and that would be the end of it.

“Better turn around,” he told the cabdriver. “Take me back to the hotel. I changed my mind.”

He spent another two weeks in the hotel, trying to think things through, looking for a safe way to live Roy Baker’s life again. If there was an answer, he couldn’t find it. The casual life of the Village had to stay out of bounds.

He took an apartment uptown on the East Side. It was quite expensive but he found it cold and charmless. He took to spending his free evenings at midtown nightclubs, where he drank a little too much and spent a great deal of money to see poor floor shows. He didn’t get out often, though, because he seemed to be working late more frequently now. It was harder and harder to get everything done on time. On top of that, his work had lost its sharpness; he had to go over blocks of copy again and again to get them right.