The Thousand-Mile Grave

Trwin clark, a slow but painstaking reader of the crime news for many years, tried to analyze the case as if he were a district attorney. Cui bono?--he was proud of being able to apply such a professional term. Who benefited when the old bastard vanished from the face of the earth? Well, the answer was mildly discouraging: Irwin did. Not very much, though, just to the extent of half interest in an old-fashioned hardware store that cleared, at best, about $8000 or $9000 a year. And, furthermore, Irwin would have to wait seven years to get that, the statutory seven before a missing person is declared legally dead. The ones who get caught, Irwin had observed, are the ones who work fast for a big profit. Irwin had been fitting his plan together for the past five years. It was almost finished. It had to be soon, or else Irwin would blow right through the top of his skull one of these days.

Of course, there wouldn't be any body found. He knew that you didn't have to have a body to prove a murder, but it did make things a lot tougher for the law. A strange, cranky old man just ups and walks off one fine day. Nothing else to go on. Irwin Clark, as the imagined D. A., shook his head, baffled.

The thing that really burned Irwin's ass was having to live with the old man and having to watch the same little scene before dinner every night. Irwin had married Adele in the first place because even though she was homely, she had a nice, loose-jointed kind of sexy look to her. It had something to do with her long legs, slim waist and the way she walked. It gave a man the itch.

But maybe the wrong man. In the course of the first couple of years of marriage, Irwin had begun to wonder. After work, the old man would sit down in the big overstuffed chair and Adele would say, "Poor Daddy, all worn out! Him needs a drink!" Then, playing the little girl, she would fix a highball of old Barker's favorite rye whiskey and water and take it to him in the living room. small daughter taking Daddy a cool refreshment, being careful not to spill a drop--but the sway of her hips was definitely big-girl.

Then she sat down on Daddy's lap and Irwin--after he'd got over taking it as a joke--didn't much like the way she nuzzled her breasts up against her father's chest, nor the way she kissed him and bit his ear, nor the way he put his hand on the inside of her thigh. Nor the way they laughed when they did this. All in all, it was a lousy little act and Irwin had to suffer through it every evening.

Maybe it was living so close that was to blame. They had moved into the Barkers' 60-year-old bungalow down by the C & L warehouse right after the wedding. It was a well-worn house with a sagging screened porch over which a lot of rusty ivy crawled. Adele and Irwin had the third-best bedroom, upstairs front, which was darkened by the shade of two large deodars in the yard.

As for Mrs. Barker, the old lady never said a word that wasn't necessary. Lifelong bullying by the old man had made her into a kitchen and vegetable-garden slave without a thought of her own. The garden stuff and the game--Barker was an ardent hunter on weekends--went into a huge old freezer in the basement. It was full of plastic-wrapped vegetables and packages of venison, rabbit flesh and fish--all of which Irwin found a little nauseating. The only good thing about all this was that Barker was off in the woods a fair amount of the time, murdering the fish and the animals.

The old man had started as a clerk in the hardware store as a boy, 40 years ago. Eventually, he had saved enough money--by dipping into the cash register now and then, Irwin suspected--to buy the business. If you didn't count the little games of feelie with Adele and the hunting and fishing, Barker's only relaxation was Saturday-night poker with a bunch of his old pals.

Irwin did most of the work in the hardware store. He was the salesclerk, deliveryman, janitor and accountant--and always the one to take the blame when a customer complained. Old Barker paid him $40 a week and a promise. The promise was that someday the store--flies, dust, unsalable merchandise, accounts overdue--would belong to Adele and Irwin. Even so, Irwin wanted it.

They had a queen-size bed, bought at auction, and that was the scene of another long humiliation for Irwin. Adele nagged him a lot in her raspy voice during the day, but at bedtime she took to being coy. She always lay on her back, hair curlers glinting, nightgown pulled up nearly to her neck. As soon as Irwin got into bed, she would grab him and roll him into the saddle, whether he had the itch or not. And then she went powerfully to work. And even if Irwin had the itch, as he sometimes did after he'd sneaked a postsupper slug from the old man's bottle of rye out in the kitchen, eventually he began to think of the picture of Daddy with his hand up Adele's skirt--and this made him go limp. It was a strange thing, but in all their years of marriage, Irwin had never been blessed with an orgasm. But Adele had, even without his help. Loud, gasping ones, almost every night. Then she would pat him as if he were a dog.

But, as he'd found out, not even that made Adele happy. In the darkness, she would whisper the things she wanted him to do to her--and the things she'd like to do to him. Such matters as Irwin had never even heard of--he was flabbergasted. Where had she learned all this? Later, their nighttime differences had turned into sullen silence on his part and hate on hers. He would lie motionless on his side of the bed as she jabbed his ribs with a sharp finger and thought of everything she could possibly call him: fag, square, ladyfinger, jack-off, and a lot of others Irwin didn't care to remember, they were so bad.

• • •

There was a freeway being carved through the shabby neighborhood around the hardware store. It would pass within a block of Barker's business. Irwin had a notion that it might be a godsend. If they put up a sign near the new road, drivers might turn off to buy a hammer or a gallon of paint; fishermen might stop to buy some tackle. But Irwin had begun to catch some hints, from a few things that Barker let slip, that the old man was thinking of selling out and retiring. In that case, Irwin would be cheated out of the only legacy he had ever been able to dream of. It was a crime. As Irwin considered the situation, his five-year-long dream of action began to harden into a real possibility.

One morning, from the office window, he watched the behemoth concrete spreader down at the end of the slope as it inched in the direction of the grave he had picked out. R.I.P., Max Barker, under a 1000-mile slab that would stretch all the way to the Mexican border. An endless stream of cars running over the old son of a bitch night and day. The idea made Irwin feel good. Who would ever dig up 1000 miles of concrete looking for old Barker?

Irwin had a wooden box hidden away in the storeroom. It contained a plastic dropcloth in which a body could be wrapped neatly. There were also a baseball bat, a ball of heavy cord and (continued on page 136) Thousand-Mile Grave (continued from page 128) a pair of rubber gloves. On the lading platform at the back of the store was a heavy crate that had once contained a small refrigerator. A good-sized shovel rested against the wall nearby. Method and simplicity, he'd once read, are the heart of a good crime.

• • •

About four in the afternoon, Irwin called Adele. As the phone rang, the thought that had been half formed in his mind all day now came clear. Tonight was the night. "Del, listen," he said, "we've got to work on the inventory tonight, so don't wait dinner for us."

"Well, I know that," she said impatiently. "I'm going to bring you some sandwiches." Irwin would have liked to have kept her away, but he had the sudden picture of a large, somber detective asking him why--"Why, Mr. Clark, did you discourage your wife from coming to the store?"--so he agreed quietly and hung up.

Just a little before five o'clock, he took the pickup truck and made a delivery--planned and timed to take him back after the work crew had left the highway-project site. It was a cold and smoggy twilight with visibility no more than 100 yards. The big slash of the freeway had done away with the streets of little frame houses in the vicinity and Irwin, as he took out the shovel and began to dig, was alone in the desolation of raw ground and mist. He dug rapidly and efficiently, not too narrow and not too deep, just beyond the big snout of the construction machine. Finished at last, he laid the shovel nearby, wiped his hands and drove back to the store.

"Took you forever," said Barker as Irwin came in. He was sitting at the desk wearing a green eyeshade and smoking one of his stinking cigars. But the complaint was routine and Irwin didn't bother to answer; he went up to the front of the store and locked the door and closed the Venetian blinds.

"This is the day you wind the clock," Irwin said when he came back.

"Later," Barker said. Irwin knew that the old man would stubbornly refuse to do anything Irwin suggested at the time he mentioned it. He hated to seem to be taking orders from his son-in-law clerk. The clock struck six. Around seven, Adele would come with the sandwiches.

Old Barker was counting the hammers on the display shelves and checking the invoices. "Goddamn unsold stock. Goddamn taxes," he said.

"We ought to have a sale and clean house of some of this crud," Irwin said. "Make inventory a lot simpler." The old man grunted.

Irwin took the clock key from a drawer and set up a frail aluminum stepladder. It was the $5.98 special--the kind angry customers were always returning. He knew that Barker was watching him out of the corner of his eye, because the clock was a kind of fetish with Barker. It was an old Seth Thomas he'd won in a poker game years ago and he sometimes remarked, "That's my good-luck charm." Alongside the clock was pasted a notice that read, Hands off this clock. To be wound only by me. Max Barker. Since just the two of them worked in the store, Irwin considered the notice an insult aimed at him.

Irwin put the ladder in place and stood looking up at the clock, as if he were giving some thought to the winding problem. Just as he'd expected, this brought the old man to his feet. "You know better'n that, boy," Barker said, removing his eyeshade and taking the key from Irwin's hand. Irwin was making that trait of stubbornness work in his favor and this first successful move made him suddenly feel calm. Now he was in charge of things.

He held the ladder as Barker climbed, opened the glass front and inserted the key. Irwin had timed the winding process at three minutes and 20 seconds as first the clock and then the chimes' mechanisms were wound. The old man always put a lot of concentration into the job.

That gave Irwin the opportunity to get the dropcloth and the baseball bat and to put on the rubber gloves. He spread the dropcloth on the floor and held the bat behind him with his right hand, waiting for Barker's customary grunt of satisfaction when the winding was completed.

Then Barker started down the ladder. Irwin swung at his head--not a homerun swing, just a good, sharp single to center field was all he needed. There was a heavy thunk; Barker slumped forward, as if trying to embrace the ladder; then the ladder tipped over and Barker was on the floor.

Irwin stared for a moment. The old man lay with his cigar still clamped in his mouth, his eyes closed and his face a knot of concentration, as if he were thinking of something bad enough to call Irwin. But blood was oozing out of his ears and Irwin felt sure he was dead.

It took Irwin a couple of moments to see that something unexpected had just happened--something that hadn't been in his plan. In falling, old Barker must have reached out to grab something and what he had grabbed was his precious old Seth Thomas clock. It still lay, clasped in his arms, with the glass broken and the case split up the side.

Irwin's first thought was to take it from the corpse; then it occurred to him that a broken clock would lead to a lot of questions he didn't want to try answering. Maybe the best thing would be just to let the old man take it with him.

He put the bat alongside Barker and made a fairly neat package of the body by means of the dropcloth and the heavy cord. It took a few minutes to drag the body out to the lading platform, slide it into the refrigerator crate, nail the crate and put the load into the pickup. Then he went back to the store, folded up the stepladder and put it away and saw that everything seemed neat again. The only oddity was the lighter spot on the wall, where the clock had ticked away all these years. He turned out the lights in the store but left the office lights burning. Then he drove down to the highway project.

With his headlights off, he had a little trouble finding the exact spot he'd picked out, but the warning flashers up the road helped a bit and he soon found the dark, monstrous shape of the construction machine. After that, it was heavy work but no great trouble to drag the crate out of the truck and to slide it into the hole.

His measurements had been perfect; the grave took the coffin with only an inch or two to spare on the sides. Irwin got some heavy two-by-four pieces from the pickup bed. He got a small spade--something like an Army entrenching tool--from where he'd stowed it under the driver's seat. He took them with him into the grave, where he carefully lodged the ends of the two-by-fours into the earthen walls on either side, making a kind of frame that would bear a great deal of weight.

Once that was painstakingly done, he refilled the hole quickly and easily. The part that took the most time was the tidying-up process--tamping down the crushed rock so that it would look undisturbed and, by means of a well-shielded pencil flashlight, making sure that footprints were all rubbed out. The only other thing was the tire tracks, but that worried him very little, because trucks, cars and graders had been along the roadside for days, making the ground a mass of ruts.

When he was finally back in the store, he was astonished to note that the whole plenting of old Barker had taken just 31 minutes. In all his years of night dreaming and daydreaming, the event had seemed to take endless time. It had always been a terrifying, slow-motion labor. Now, in fact, it had turned out to be as simple as the quick packaging of a bulky order and a speedy delivery.

(continued on page 196) Thousand-Mile Grave (continued from page 136)

He straightened things in the store once again, stared for a few moments at the clockless wall, washed the rubber gloves and put a price tag on them before he returned them to the stock. He was working at the adding machine when he heard the sound of the old Studebaker Adele drove.

Irwin had his back to the door when she came in and he didn't look up. "Max?" he called. "Back already?"

"No," she said, "it's me and the sandwiches. Where did Daddy go?" She put her basket and Thermos down on the desk.

"Poker game, no doubt," said Irwin. "You know how he is about telling people his movements. Even when he's going fishing for three days."

"I know. He must have just left, though. I can smell his cigar smoke in here."

"Delicious, ain't it?" said Irwin. "By the way, Del, why in hell would he take that old clock of his with him?"

"The old Seth Thomas? How should I know? He doesn't tell me things much more'n he tells you." She paused and thought a minute. "Mmm--he won it from a sailor in a poker game one time; calls it his good-luck piece."

"Hell, I know that," Irwin said, "but that don't explain why he took it down off the wall, come off the ladder without a word and left here with his arms wrapped around the thing."

"Listen, was he drinking at all this afternoon?"

Irwin considered the possible answers for just a second and, praying mightily that he'd grabbed the long straw, said, "I seen him in the cellar with that old canteen he keeps stashed away. Smelt his breath, too. You know how he hates inventory."

"Well, now and then, Daddy used to take a snort or two and go off to a poker game with the old clock under his arm. Said it always brought him luck--but he wouldn't do that when he was dead-sober. You know where he went?"

"He got a call this afternoon. I picked up the phone first, then called him. It wasn't one of his buddies. I didn't recognize the voice a-tall."

Irwin opened one of the wax-paper wrappings and looked at a sandwich. He nearly gagged. "Oof! Deer meat," he said. The meat was a deep-red color, nearly raw. "Look, Deal, let's go over to the Mother Goose Diner and have some ham and eggs. I'm not in the mood for these sandwiches."

"You had your hand in the till?" she asked in a voice that sounded almost like old Barker's.

"Lady gave me three bucks for carting away some rubbish in the truck day before yesterday." That was true.

Actually, Adele was happy to go along. She didn't get many chances to eat out and the diner was a fairly good observation post for checking on couples who had gone to the early movie at the Rialto. Thus, it was after nine when they finished coffee and drove back to the store.

"Daddy!" Adele called as they entered. But there was no reply, so she went back and looked in the toilet cubicle. Irwin sat down and began to work methodically at the adding machine. In a few minutes, she returned. "Maybe he went over to North Branch to the V.F.W. club," she said, picking up an old magazine.

"Could be," Irwin answered.

He worked and Adele read until just before 11. Then he yawned and suggested that it was time for bed. Apparently, she had resigned herself to the idea that her father was going to be late that evening and she went along without any protest.

As he was undressing for bed, Irwin decided to take a shower. For a moment, as he reached inside the old-fashioned circular curtain above the bathtub to turn on the spray, he felt guilty. His schedule for baths or showers was Wednesdays and Saturdays--Barker always made sure that there was no lavish use of hot water in the house. But Irwin felt nearly invisible roadbed grime clinging somewhere, some microscopic trace of blood on his body. "By God, I will," he thought, stepping into the tub.

The hot water felt grand. To Irwin, it was like the sound of freedom in the house. He was suddenly beginning to get used to the idea that Max Barker, the stubborn old negative of his life, was really gone. He felt so liberated that he began to sing On the Road to Mandalay.

Things were sure going to be different around here from now on, he thought. With the old man gone, Adele would have to do what Irwin said. He was in charge, no doubt about it. And she could forget those ideas of doing fancy things in bed the way they did in Hollywood or someplace. No, ma'am.

• • •

The next morning, there was a strange, easy air about the house. Irwin slept much later than usual--until seven--and when he woke up, sunshine filled the room. Downstairs in the kitchen, Adele was already getting breakfast and he could smell the bacon and eggs frying.

When Mrs. Barker sat down at the breakfast table, she asked, "Max didn't come home last night? I thought you was doing inventory at the store?"

"Oh, Daddy went out last night," Adele said. "He was heading for a poker game, looks like, but my guess is that he got hooked into some fishing trip or something and we won't hear from him for a few days." Her voice was cheerful and unconcerned.

"Did I ever tell you about the time when I was carrying you, big as a house I was, and Max went off on hunting trips three, four times? I had to clerk at the store while he was away. My, how the customers stared!"

"Well, this time he was running out on the inventory business," said Adele. "He can't stand it. Left poor Irwin to do it all alone."

Irwin felt a sudden happy warmth. She was criticizing the old man and sympathizing with Irwin in the same breath! He should have swung that baseball bat years ago. "Aw, it's OK," he said. "I can work better without hearing him bitch about taxes and the Government and how much everything costs."

It was a pleasant, talkative breakfast. They each had an unaccustomed extra cup of coffee. Suddenly, Adele said, "Ma, he took that old Seth Thomas clock with him. His good-luck clock. Irwin and I can't quite figure out why."

Mrs. Barker dipped a doughnut into her coffee. "Maybe it had got out of kilter," she said. "Maybe he aimed to get it repaired today."

"Oh, no," Adele said. "It's sound as a dollar; keeps good time. Why, that clock was built to last forever. Daddy told me that it used to be on a battleship and it was built really sound and strong because of all those big guns they fire off. Wherever it is, it's still sure to be running."

Irwin had never heard that little fact before. It was like the cold edge of a knife pressed against the back of his neck. He got up in a hurry. "I just remembered," he said. "Customer coming in with a big order before eight this morning." He looked at his watch and saw that it was already 7:45.

He ran out of the house, got into the pickup, started it with a shaking hand and drove as fast as he dared down the street. There was just enough traffic to slow him up and, at one corner, he had to wait for a stop light. He felt the sweat beginning to pop on his forehead and in his armpits.

By the time he got to the construction site, the men were just starting work. Three or four of them were gathered around the concrete spreader and a fresh load was ready to be poured. "Oh, God, get that machine started," Irwin breathed to himself. He parked fairly close, but not too close to call special attention to himself. His truck had been seen around the site before, when he'd carried some small order down to a foreman--usually a tool that was needed right away.

The foreman was motioning and the workmen were now stepping back; the operator was about to start his machine. Irwin glanced at his watch. The hands were on the verge of eight.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Hollow-sounding, somewhat muffled by its earthen cover, but still stout and true enough to withstand the salvos of 16-inch guns or a fall from a step-ladder, the old Seth Thomas boomed the hour--but only in Irwin's imagination. Before it could strike, he struck, pushing the horn button of the old truck down hard and setting up a nasal blast that drowned out every other noise.

He held it to a slow count of ten while the foreman gestured at him and one of the men threw a clod of dirt at his radiator. Then he released the pressure and drew away his trembling fingers. The last-minute inspiration had worked; the world was silent. With his sleeve, Irwin wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. That was when he saw the old black Studebaker parked behind him.

In the mirror, he watched Adele get out of the car and walk up to him, smiling an ugly smile. She stood on the driver's side and stared into his guilty eyes.

"Guess you believed all that junk about the battleship," she said. "Thought it might give you the idea of giving that clock another whack. Don't worry--the busted old thing will never strike again. And, all in all, I ain't too sorry. I won't breathe a word. That is, unless you forget just once to do every little thing I say from now on."

Irwin nodded humbly. "Just as you say, sweetheart. You hold all the cards. Please, let's go home now."

Yes, she'd hold the cards for just a little while. As Irwin turned the truck to leave, he heard the engine of the concrete spreader come to life. He'd bungled the whole thing and the escape had been narrow, but live and learn, he thought. He was already beginning to figure out what might be a good spot for Adele. Maybe about four miles down, where the new freeway was laid out to run through a fairly dense and secluded stretch of woods.