Luckily, it turned out that the Brills lacked handyman skills. When the first frost came, they telephoned Junior to say that the heat wasn’t working, and Junior had to drive over and bleed their radiators. He could have shown them how to do it themselves, but he didn’t. He went around to every room with a radiator key, and when he was finished he slipped the key back into his pocket and told the Brills to call him again if they had any more trouble. Pretty soon he was stopping by on a more or less weekly basis. The windows—outsized—required special screens and storm windows with finicky hardware, and he was the one who arrived spring and fall to supervise their installation. Like a love-struck groomsman who hangs around the bride long after the wedding, he kept inventing excuses to pop in. He dropped off a can of touch-up paint and then half a box of leftover floor tiles. He double-checked a lock that he had oiled just the week before. He came and went at all hours, using his own keys if nobody was home. Any telltale sign of wear he discovered sent him into a tizzy—a chip in the plaster or a hairline crack in a bathroom sink. He behaved as if he’d merely lent the house out and the borrowers were mistreating it.
One of Red’s earliest memories, dating from age three or so, was of clambering down from his father’s truck while Mrs. Brill stood waiting on the back stoop, a cardigan clutched around her shoulders. “Don’t you go running off again if you don’t hear it first thing,” she told his father in a shrill voice. “I just know it’s going to get quiet the minute you step inside.” That had been a squirrel in the attic, Red recalled. “She was a real nervous Nellie,” he said. “She thought every animal she met was out to get her, and she was always smelling smoke, and she was scared to death of break-ins. Break-ins! On Bouton Road!” Most damning of all, she never really warmed to the house. She complained that it was too far from downtown, and she missed their old apartment with her ladies’ club a stone’s throw away. Granted, there was a ladies’ club on Roland Avenue, but that wasn’t quite the same thing.
What made it worse was that Mr. Brill traveled frequently on “bidness,” as Junior called it, leaving Mrs. Brill with no protection but their two spoiled boys. (Junior attached the word “spoiled” to the Brill boys every time he mentioned them, although he never offered any concrete examples of spoiled behavior.) The boys were in their teens and weighed at least as much as Junior did, but it was Junior Mrs. Brill telephoned whenever she heard a noise in the basement.
And Red could just about bet that Junior wasn’t paid for his trouble. The Brills took him for granted. They addressed him by his first name while they remained “Mr.” and “Mrs.” Mrs. Brill descended on him each Christmas just as she descended on her yard boy and her cleaning girl, arriving at his door in her puffy fur coat with a basket of store-bought preserves. Her car purred out front; she never stayed to visit, although she was always invited.
Junior lived in Hampden, mere blocks away from the Brills but a world apart in atmosphere. He and Linnie rented a two-bedroom house that sat several feet below the level of the street, which gave it a huddled look. They had two children: Merrick (a girl) and Redcliffe. Oho! this might lead some to say. Was it possible that the Whitshanks’ mysterious family origins might have included some Merricks? Or Redcliffes? But no, those were just Junior’s notion of names that sounded genteel. They implied illustrious forebears, perhaps on the mother’s side. Oh, Junior was forever thinking up ways to look like quality. And yet he kept them in that sad little house in Hampden, which he didn’t even bother fixing up although he could have done it better than anyone.
“I was biding my time,” was how he explained it years later. “I was just biding my time, was all.” And he went on changing the fuses in his beloved Bouton Road house, and tightening its hinges, and chasing off various birds and bats without the least sign of impatience.
One cold evening in February of 1942, Mrs. Brill arrived on the Whitshanks’ front stoop with both of her boys in tow. None of them wore coats. Mrs. Brill had been crying. It was Linnie who opened the door to them, and she said, “What on earth …?” Mrs. Brill grabbed Linnie’s wrist. “Is Junior here?” she asked.
“I’m here,” Junior said, appearing next to Linnie.
“The most awful thing,” Mrs. Brill said. “Awful, awful, awful.”
Junior said, “Why don’t you come on in.”
“I walked into the sunroom,” she said, staying where she was. “I was planning to write some letters. You know my little writing desk where I conduct my correspondence. And there on the floor by my chair I saw this canvas bag, like a tool bag. That kind with the jaws that open? And it was open all the way, and I could make out these burglar tools inside.”
“Huh,” Junior said.
“Screwdrivers and a crowbar and—oh!” She slumped sideways toward one of her boys, who stood his ground and allowed it. “On top,” she said, “a coil of rope.”
Linnie said, “Rope!”
“Like what you would tie someone up with.”
“Oh, my heavens!”
“Well, now,” Junior said, “we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
“Oh, would you, Junior? Please? I know I should have called the police, but all I could think was, ‘I just have to get out of here. I have to get my boys out.’ And I grabbed up the car keys and ran. I didn’t know who else to turn to, Junior.”
“Now, you did exactly right,” Junior said. “I’m going to take care of everything. You stay here with Linnie, Mrs. Brill, and I’ll have the cops make sure it’s safe before you go back in.”
Mrs. Brill said, “Oh, I’m not going back. That house is dead to me, Junior.”
At this point, one of her sons said, “Aw, Ma?” (History’s only recorded comment from either of the Brill boys.)
But she repeated, “Dead to me.”