house. He was explaining something to her. She kept nodding, but I saw the stiffness of her shoulders and knew his being here had worried her.
In a few minutes she was back. “There was nothing I could do,” she said. “He showed up and I never knew he was coming back. Said he was passing by the house, so he decided to drop off a fresh supply of medicine. Then I had to tell him about you being here, and he wanted to meet you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s perfect. Just keep acting natural. Think like I told you. Everything on the up and up.” Some of the tightness went away from around her eyes. She relaxed and gave a little sigh. “Jack,” she said, “I’ve just got to know how we’re going to do this. It keeps hanging over my head.”
“What ideas you got?”
She lowered her voice. It was coming into midtwilight now, and she looked terrific. The sun had turned into reds and purples out there over the Gulf, with long shooting lines of crimson, like wild fire up across the skies. Some of the colors got into her hair, and played along her body, accentuating the curves. I wanted to take her in my arms, and just hold her and feel the way she’d stir against me. I wanted her bad again. It was primitive and hot. Her lips were parted a little and I knew how they would be.
She said, “I can read you like a book.”
“Start wearing a barrel, then.”
“Maybe I’d better.” She moved her hip a little, and it was worse than before.
“Cut it out,” I said. “I’ll throw you on the ground.”
“Wish you would.”
I took hold of the ladder, looking up at the palm tree.
She said, “If you say the TV set on the ceiling is out, then all right. I just don’t go for this ‘no air’ idea of yours. I was thinking maybe he could take a bad fall. Something not so obvious.”
“It’s got to be obvious. That’s the angle.”
“But don’t you see? I mean—unless I broke a leg and couldn’t get to him, how would it work? It’s my job to watch him, Jack—all the time.”
“Yeah.”
“Unless we bolixed up the oxygen tanks, somehow. Maybe that would be good.”
I shook my head. “You wouldn’t last a minute. And I’m damned if you’re going to break one of those legs.”
“All right, Einstein—how, then?”
I said, “Walk toward the house. I’ll carry the ladder. I want to put a speaker on the side of the house, anyway—so I can check there. Now, listen. It’s going to be perfect.”
“It’s got to be perfect.”
“Yeah. First of all, there’s going to be a patsy—somebody with the blame on him. That’s the best way, see? Because then they won’t look any further. If they know how it happened and who actually caused it, then it’s all over. Right?”
“I don’t believe I understand, Jack.”
“The blame’s going to be on me,” I said. “It’s as simple as that.”
She stopped walking. “On you?”
We had reached the house. I stuck the ladder up and crawled up two rungs, speaking low. “I’m not taking any real chance. Unless something goes wrong. And I don’t see how anything can go wrong. It’s going to be obvious you’ve done everything you can for Victor. You’re fixing him up with television, and the house is wired so you can hear him calling no matter where you are. So what’s the obvious thing?”
She stared up at me. “I can’t hear him?”
“Right.” I came down by her again. “You don’t hear him. He’s calling weakly. I heard him call, remember. It’s faint. If you’re not damned close by, you’ll miss it. Out here, for example. So that’s how come the intercom, and he’s using the intercom. As far as anybody’s concerned, you never heard a thing. You can be standing there looking at him, for all it matters. We’ll work that out. But it’s going to be that clean.”
“I don’t understand at all, Jack,”
“I’m going to fix that unit by his bed so it goes on the blink. And it’ll be my fault.”
“But they’ll find it.”
“Certainly they’ll find it. But it’ll be fixed in such a way that it won’t be on purpose. See? Just plain carelessness on my part. A mistake. They can’t hang you for making a fool mistake, can they? Sure, they’ll raise hell, and you’ll raise hell, and there’ll be talk, but so what? He’ll be dead. Don’t worry, I can do it.”
“How?”
“First of all. I’ll put the units in, and we’ll let them go for a couple of days so he can wear the newness out of it, get used to it. He’ll be using it all the time, calling you, talking to you. It’s always that way when people first get them in their homes. Then it’ll die off. You can maybe work in a word to him, ask him to use it only if he has to. Like if he has an attack. He won’t mind, after he’s played with it for a while.”
“Will you please tell me how you’ll work it? It sounds complicated.”
“It’s perfect. Look, it’s going to be careless soldering. A condenser’s going to go bad and I’ll have to put a new one in.”
“What’s a condenser?”
“Never mind. The point is this. It’s a coupling condenser, and it’ll be soldered to the grid terminal of a tube socket. Now, when I solder it in I’m going to do a sloppy job. I’ll know it’s a sloppy job, but I’m in a hurry—I’ve got another call. So I try the intercom and it works. So I say to hell with it.”
“If it works, what good is the idea?”
“Here’s the idea. When the unit’s turned on for any length of time, the metal on the grid will expand from the heat. It’ll ground out. That means the unit won’t function. It’s that simple.”
“But if he calls me, he isn’t just going to sit there and wait for metal to expand.”
“Shirley. It will only take a minute. And you’re forgetting this is staged for them when they look around. They’ll find him dead. You’ll make absolutely sure he’s dead before you do a thing. Like, if he uses the intercom to call you when he has an attack, and it works, you’ll just have to hold off going in to him till he dies. The unit will go off. It could go off the minute he turns the thing on.”
“Suppose it doesn’t go off?”
“But it will, Shirley.”
“Suppose he just uses it to call me. Maybe he just wants me to bring him something. I mean, before he has an attack, and it goes off? What then?”
“I thought of that, too. You just stick within hearing distance, like you do now, until the time comes when you know he’s having an attack. He’ll never know whether the unit’s working or not. See? There’s nothing can go wrong. Just the same, I’ll go over every point a hundred times, before we pull it.”
“I’m beginning to see. It’s good, Jack—it’s good.”
“Sure. So they find him dead. The intercom’s turned on. Obviously he was trying to call you. Only you were out here, sitting by the Gulf, and you didn’t hear a thing. You’re all broken up. The unit’s inspected. They find what? They find I did a careless soldering job. The set grounded out. He was trying to get you, but the unit wasn’t working. It’s my fault. I’m to blame. But did I actually kill him? Nobody’ll ever go so far as to say I did. It’s a human error.”
“Isn’t that taking an awful chance?”
“Sure. But you think of a better way, and tell me about it. Don’t you see? I’ll be sick about it, I’ll feel like hell. But what can I do? Resurrect him?”
“Jack—it’s really good.”
“Sure.” I motioned with my head. “We’d better get inside. It’s getting dark, and I’d better take off. It’ll look better if I come around in the morning, work in the daytime. We can iron out any snarls then. You try to think of flaws, all night, and I’ll do the same. Try to think of anything that could go wrong.”
“All right.”
We moved around the side of the house. “I wish you could stay,” she said.
“I can’t. We’ve got to take it real easy.”
We walked up the ramp onto the front porch. The front screen door opened, and a woman stepped out on the porch. She was very thin, with long blonde hair, and she was wearing a pair of dungarees and a loose white blouse.
