Phil grabbed the kid by his lapel. “What do you mean by that crack, punk?”
“The situation is getting much too grave. Can we cool it, pops? I’m just trying to get back to my pad, catch a few zees. I’ve been out all night on Bleecker Street.”
“You live in this building?” He suddenly realized the kid’s identity. “You called Woody?”
“I don’t want no trouble.”
Phil laughed and let go of the boy’s jacket. “Sure, Woody, go on home.” All the way uptown he could not keep from chuckling to himself. The kid could barely sprout a whisker, let alone satisfy Bunny. That’s who Jerry thinks is fooling around with his wife? She wouldn’t give a kid like that a second look. Bunny was right: Jerry was some kind of psycho nut job, and she deserved better. In Chelsea, he stopped in a shop where he had been told someone might sell him a gun.
? ? ?
Downstairs the cat clunked the empty saucer across the kitchen tiles, but I dared not move a muscle to see what he wanted. As a matter of fact, I could barely move at all, given the crowd in the tiny bathroom. Who designed such small claustrophobic spaces? Or were people smaller, more compact in their needs and movements at the time this house was built? A good old house, in many ways, but at other times, the shortcomings obverted its charms. I should expand the room or add another powder room downstairs, perhaps off the kitchen. How did the previous owners deal with such inadequacies? Bachelard, I believe, had an interesting passage on the ghosts of former inhabitants of old homes, but I cannot look it up because someone has taken my Poetics. Perhaps the cat is to blame. I could hear him creeping about.
On the hot June morning that Phil brought over the gun—a Smith & Wesson revolver, a “.38 Special”—Bunny showered him with kisses and in the bedroom let him do that thing he had always wanted to do to her. Drenched in sweat afterward, they positioned themselves in front of an oscillating fan and let the intermittent breeze dry their skin and cool down their overheated bodies. The gun sat on the end table like a menacing wood and nickel hawk. Bunny rolled over onto her stomach to let the air ride over her legs and back. She could better see his face in profile, the beak of his nose and the pointy cleft chin. His lashes grew longer than hers and curled naturally. “I called her yesterday,” she said. “Claire.”
He turned partially toward Bunny but found her face too close to focus upon. “Why would you go and do a thing like that?” She had anticipated some anger, but his voice was tired and calm.
“To invite her to lunch, silly. We haven’t seen each other since the wedding, your wedding, and I mentioned that Jerry had bumped into you last fall and thought we should all get back in touch.”
Raising himself halfway, he rested on his elbows and considered her backside. “I thought we were going to wait—”
“I’m tired of waiting, Phil. There’s no reason they both can’t die one on top of the other. In fact, the more coincidental, the less likely the police will suspect they had anything to do with each other. I’m meeting Claire day after tomorrow at Moran’s, and I read about this drug in an Agatha Christie novel. Imitates food poisoning, but you end up dead. Everyone will think it’s bad clams.”
“Jeez, Bun, that’s not part of the plan.”
A fit of giggles passed back and forth between the two, leaving them breathless. Bunny slid from the sheets and hobbled to the end table for a cigarette, and as she exhaled the first puff of smoke, she heard the front door swing open and Jerry’s ring of keys jingling like sleigh bells.
They glanced into each other’s panicked eyes. “Shit,” she said, and he rolled off the mattress, desperate for his pants.
“Bun-ny,” her husband called from the foyer. No doubt he saw the man’s hat on the sideboard, for he did not call again and did not immediately approach the closed bedroom door at the end of the hallway. There was no time to think. Like a fool, Phil was trying to get dressed. His tie was already roped around his neck. Ripping the sheet from the bed, Bunny wound it around her naked body and then picked up the gat. As Jerry burst into the room, she let him have it, firing aimlessly, the bullet catching him in the right thigh.
He squealed like a schoolgirl at the pain and then clutched at the red carnation blossoming on his seersucker trousers. It never happened like that in the movies. The stiffs usually fell after the first shot—blam—and they were dead, but he was hopping around like a Mexican jumping bean. “What, are you crazy? What are you doing, Bunny?”
She lifted the piece and fired again, this time shattering the lamp on the bureau.
“Bun-Bun, stop. It’s me, Jerry. Stop what you’re doing. Stop shooting.” Jerry sensed the presence of another person in the room and saw the man in trousers and necktie, but no shirt, at the foot of the bed. The sheet was slipping from his wife’s shoulders. “Phil? Phil Ketchum?”