The Morning After

Dee And Gerald (in matching robes and pajamas) perched side by side at the breakfast bar in their kitchen, sipping coffee from monogrammed mugs. An average-looking young couple, except for an unused air about them. They were childless. They were healthy and gay. This morning Dee, her sun-streaked hair in a wanton tangle, had given it a lick and a promise with the brush, then capriciously tied it back with a large droopy bow of wrapping twine.

Gerald was just as careless. He had inherited the lumber companies which didn't need him at the head office, but he usually went anyway, simply to be with his neighbor husbands in the city and to drive home at the same cocktail hour. Not a friend in their community -- one of the richer Southern California ones -- hadn't envied the Porslins on occasion. And they had lots of friends.

"So much for the world of trivia." Dee dropped the last of the newspaper to the (continued on page 118) Morning After (continued from page 59) strewn floor, except Section A, which lay before her husband.

"I told you it was all on the first three pages. Most of the first three pages. Most of the Sunday paper is canned stuff, put together last week or even before."

The headlines were tall and black, but not in mourning. Rudy Brock Slain!

The last of fabulous Gang Figure Rudy Brock's notorious "nine lives" ebbed from him last night as he lay in a pool of blood in his furniture store at...

The rest of the copy was as royally purple, as the newspaper rushed to dump what looked like its entire crime morgue into the first three pages. But there was little actual news except the circumstances of the death and that a great police dragnet was rounding up all of Brock's "alleged" enemies for questioning. Brock had more enemies than the Porslins had friends.

"Nine lives," said Dee. "Bunk!"

"Fabulous," muttered Gerald. "How irresponsible can you get?" Meaning the newspaper.

The Porslins took themselves far more seriously than anyone guessed. But they knew their capabilities; in private they had assayed themselves and each other, and recognized how much was going to waste. Dee had underscored it in her questioning way the other night. "It's as if we're not accomplishing anything, isn't it?" Dee was generally first to vocalize a mutual thought, if only to find out how far Gerald was ahead of her.

"Not accomplishing anything for the community," he said. "This 'Know Thyself' business only takes a person so far."

• • •

The night before -- Saturday -- had been heavy with fog. The freeways into the city were canals of flowing phosphorescent lights. As he drove, Gerald kept wiping the inside of the windshield with the back of his gloved hand. They were cheap driving gloves, imitation kid, that he had bought last week, but they would look decent enough for this one outing. Both he and Dee wore reversible raincoats, white side out. Everything about them was as neat as could be, except for their usually spotless Corvette. The rear license plate bore two careful daubs of mud that altered the numbers entirely.

Dee wore white lace gloves and, beneath her open raincoat, a party dress that was memorable only at the neckline. She was quite blonde tonight, thanks to wigs being in fashion recently, and she had done her mouth in a bright tangerine color. As Gerald wheeled into the parking lot alongside the furniture store, she checked herself in her mirror. "If we meet anyone I know, I'll die."

"Please don't, dear. You'd only embarrass us both." Even he was surprised to hear the razor edge to his bantering voice. He hadn't realized there would be any strain to this.

"Should you take a tranquilizer, Gerald?"

"I don't think so."

Casually, the Porslins sauntered to the plate-glass front of the store and entered. They stood looking around. There were two sorts of salesmen on the floor, the usual harried kind and some large husky men in tropic-weight suits. Of the big men, the Porslins recognized a few from the newspaper photographs that accompanied all of the "Underworld Suspects" stories -- Flores, Gross, Picozzi...

Picozzi trudged toward them. "Can I help you?"

Gerald smiled amiably and nodded toward his wife. She said, "The little round man I spoke to last week? Oh, there he is!"

They deserted Picozzi, who was interested in the plunging front of Dee's dress, and made straight for Rudy Brock. He stood at the foot of the carpeted staircase, a balding man of medium height but stumpy-looking because of his fat. He too evinced a heavy-lidded concern with Dee's low neckline, which was its purpose.

She said, "I'm so glad you're here! I was in last week looking at highboys? Now if I could show my husband?"

Brock wiped back the few hairs on his damp scalp and did his best to remember. But when Dee scouted the store, she had looked quite different. "Why certainly, Mrs...."

"Atropos," supplied Gerald.

"Mr. and Mrs. Atropos, pleased to make your acquaintance." Brock led the way up the stairs to the mezzanine. Dee had chosen the ideal spot. The highboys lined a balcony overlooking the street floor but stood tall enough to provide absolute seclusion.

She caressed one of Sheraton design. "What do you think of this, dear?"

Gerald nodded. "It seems to fit in."

"It's a beautiful piece," Brock offered. "Reasonable, too. Not that we're running any bargain basement here, folks, but----"

"Are you positive?" Dee asked her husband. "We'll both have to live with it for a long while."

"I'm positive."

"Very well, here goes nothing." She gasped. "Oh, for pity's sake -- it's scratched!"

"Goddamn," growled Brock, shoving forward. "Where?" He bent over the spot where her white lace forefinger pointed.

His sports jacket stretched taut across the basin of his broad back. Gerald pulled the hunting knife from his raincoat pocket. Like the gloves, it was cheap, ordinary and serviceable. He hesitated, but not from lack of resolution. It was because Brock was too fat for his vertebrae to show, as Dee's had during rehearsals. He had to estimate.

"I don't see it," Brock complained.

"It's there," insisted Dee impatiently. "Right there!" Imploring, her eyes clung to her husband.

Gerald plunged the knife in up to its guard. Exactly, he hoped, between number six vertebra and number seven. When there was no more blade to sink, he released the hilt quickly.

Brock made no sound louder than a cough. He tried to straighten. Gerald caught him under the arms and lowered him to the floor on his side. Then he inspected his gloves. He couldn't see any flecks of blood. Even so, he gingerly peeled them off by the cuffs, turning them inside out in the process. He had practiced that, too.

"Luck," he murmured to Dee. Slapping the gloves jauntily against his left hand, he strolled out onto the main mezzanine. Nothing was new on the floor below. Except that Picozzi was starting up the stairs. Gerald started down on the same side, remembering not to touch the banister.

Dee knelt down by Brock and opened her purse. Then it was her turn to hesitate until she decided to get the worst out of the way first. She lifted Brock's hand and pressed her mouth to the back of it. When she dropped it again, there was a gaudy tangerine lip print. Brock had a very hairy hand and she nearly gagged.

Next she produced from her purse four Chinese yen and lined the coins neatly in front of his open mouth. She had clipped them off an antique sachet basket before throwing it into the trash. From her purse, too, came the strip of six postage stamps that she licked from one end to the other. She pasted the stamps to his forehead.

Gerald said, "Mister," to Picozzi.

Picozzi stopped, midway on the staircase. "What do you want?"

"I'm curious about the price on that sectional over there. The one near the wall. The queer-colored one."

Picozzi still couldn't tell which one he meant. He followed Gerald down the stairs again and through the maze of living-room suites. Gerald sat down on a sectional near the side door to the parking lot. "This one."

"Here's the tag," said Picozzi. "You must have been looking on the wrong end. $899.95."

"That's a stupid price," Gerald smiled at him.

"I don't get you."

"Why don't you people come right out and say $900?" He got to his feet with a sigh. "Well, let's hear my wife's opinion on the subject."

He waved to Dee who had appeared at the top of the stairs. She waved back and trotted down gracefully. Picozzi was pleased to see her. Gerald patted the sectional cushions. "I was wondering----"

"Dear," she said, "one thing at a time. Besides, it would never go without recovering."

Gerald shrugged. "Thanks, anyway," he told Picozzi. The Porslins went out the side door. Dee's gloved hand opened it.

Gerald drove out of the parking lot the back way, through the freight alley and onto a residential street. "Mailed to hell, I trust."

"With utmost dispatch." Between corner lights, she plucked his hat off his head and tossed it behind the seat, unpinned her gleaming wig and stuffed it in the dashboard compartment. Then, squirming about, she reversed her raincoat so that it was blue with a white lining. (Once home, she would replace her wig in its plastic case in the depths of her dressing-room wardrobe; he would hose off the raincoats, both sides, on the patio flagstones, shake them out and hang them in the entry closet where they served in emergencies for guests.) "Three minutes away," she announced.

He pulled into the curb. As he got out of the car, he left his raincoat behind on the seat. With the cleansing tissue Dee had handed him, he swiftly erased the mud daubs from the rear license plate. When he returned to the wheel, his coat was reversed for him, ready to slip into. They set off for home, by way of the coast route.

"You know, I practically threw up? I'm glad you're not all primitive and hairy." Dee's voice was a little garbled, for she was wiping her mouth clean of the last traces of tangerine shade. She rolled down the window and let the tissue fly out onto the fogbound highway.

"But you didn't."

"Of course not. We left enough meaningless motifs lying about, didn't we? I don't believe in excess. Poor police ..."

"Kiss mark, coins and stamps. Well, if they can locate a female Chinese postal employee with hoodlum connections, more power to them."

"Please -- I'll laugh in a moment." By compact and dashlight, Dee was redrawing her lips in their usual pale coral.

"Nine minutes away," warned Gerald.

She emptied her purse in her lap, magically reversed it, too, then replaced everything but two small round stones. She dropped one of these in each of Gerald's gloves to serve as weights. Peering out her window, she waited. When they came to the long bridge over the estuary, she sailed the gloves out into the sea water. "All done." She nestled against her husband.

"Nice pitching. Now will you tell me where on earth you got that vulgar dress?"

"You liked it well enough when I wore it to Rona's party. Of course, tonight I have it on backward ..." She muffled her peals of overwrought laughter against his sleeve.

When the Porslins were 13 minutes away, a janitor discovered Rudy Brock's body, their gift to the community.

• • •

"The -- exquisite? -- part is," decided Dee, "who would ever come looking for us?"

"Actually no one," Gerald said. "I read somewhere that the best thing is to do good yet be evil spoken of. Epictetus." He nudged his coffee mug nearer to her. "Refill, please, or I'll go back to bed."

"Then I'll have to settle for second best. We did good, didn't we? A purely philanthropic boon to mankind? And we don't care to be spoken of at all, do we?"

"Scarcely."

Dee poured. The steam rose about their faces like the brightening Sunday-morning fog outside. "The uninvolved Porslins ... Certainly those ridiculous clues we planted, pointing in all directions, will keep any innocent person from becoming involved?"

"Certainly. The police always maintain secrecy over a couple of items like that, when they can, just to weed out the crackpots who enjoy confessing. Of course, there's always the chance that they might invent their own case. Against someone like Mr. Picozzi, for example." He tested his coffee; the mug was too hot to handle.

"Then what would we do, dear?"

"I think that would come under the heading of Killing Two Birds."

"I see. I didn't care for him, either." Dee rested her tousled head against his shoulder. After a while, she murmured, "Quite a sensation, eliminating someone so totally depraved. Do you suppose we'll ever do it again?"

Gerald dared a sip of his coffee. Then he sucked his scalded tongue thoughtfully. "It's possible."

"I've been wondering, dear. I mean, what would be the sensation, what would it feel like, if next time it were someone totally good?"

He looked down at her. She rolled her eyes up to meet his. In them he saw a faint flicker of evil, a glitter like red tinsel. He didn't know whether it was born there or whether it might be the reflection of his own glance.

Dee took a deep sweet breath. There was no reason for him to reply. He had been wondering, too.