No Doors, No Windows

Eleven: Thicker than Blood

“No, no, no and no , Roger, we are not going to give you the twelve thousand dollars! We put you in business when you married Felice — because you married Felice — and we thought it was a bad investment then; you’ve only borne out our contention. I speak for Harold and Madge and Ralph, as well as myself in this. No money. Not a cent.”

Roger Singer stared moodily at his right shirt cuff. It was frayed. Only slightly, but it somehow seemed indicative: he was going downhill. He looked up at the florid man who had spoken.

“But, Uncle Bob, you’ve got to understand. I’m in debt twelve thousand dollars .”

The florid man nodded in annoyance. He sucked on the imported Cuban cigar between his lips, rolled it to the opposite corner of his mouth. “I know, I know, Roger. You’ve been saying that all evening … it seems to be the only thing you can say. And you’ve got to understand, too. You’re not getting the money from us. Just because we’re Felice’s brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, don’t think you can lean on us because of your own mismanagement.”

His deep-set black eyes flashed, and he removed the cigar, adding with vehemence, “And stop calling me Uncle Bob!”

Roger Singer ran a shaking hand through the short hairs at the back of his neck, feeling the loose hair from the barber shop; he had gotten the haircut specially; rented the evening jacket specially; invited the family to dinner specially. All for nothing.

He knew it was hopeless, all hopeless now. They would force him into bankruptcy; force, too, his working for someone else, probably the family. He would lose the linoleum shop, lose his independence, lose his integrity working for those filthy rich, filthy fat relatives of his — who hated him.

He stared across momentarily at Uncle Bob, sitting there with legs spread far apart because his belly got in the way. Uncle Bob looking fat and florid and surly because he’d had to refuse that wastrel Roger again.

Roger saw the gleam of pleasure in Uncle Bob’s eyes; they’d been waiting for this, waiting for him to get so far in debt he’d have to come begging, so they could refuse him.

“You — won’t — reconsid …”

Bob’s fat, oily hand came down on the kitchen table with a thump. “No! I will not! Now let’s get out of this kitchen, and back to the family. Thank God Penny is more like her mother … not like you. It’s the only reason I came tonight. To see Felice and the child.”

He rose heavily, straining against the fat, and waddled toward the living room of the apartment.

Roger watched him go for a moment, thinking. You can spare the money, you bastard! You just won’t, that’s all!

In the living room Harold and scrawny Madge and Ralph were coaxing Penny to do her imitation of Lily Tomlin. Roger stared at his stepdaughter from the doorway of the kitchen, and knew he couldn’t go in there immediately.

“I’ll be right in,” he said. “Just getting a glass of water.” He backed into the kitchen. He turned off the lights.

He stood in the darkness and let his hand glide over the angry sharpness of his jawline. It was all so futile, just when it could have been so right.

He flipped back through his memories of the past six years as he might have flipped a series of animation cards, letting sequence after sequence pop into sight before descending into blackness.

He had married Felice for her money. He had no compunctions about admitting it to himself; but he had been justified. There was no other way to get the money for the shop. And it wasn’t selfishness entirely; Felice’s first husband had been dead two years, and she had needed someone to lean on badly. Penny, too, had needed an object of male affection. It was so true; the way she called him “Daddy” and hung on him. Roger’s face quirked slightly at the nauseating thought of the nine-year-old girl hanging on him, literally begging for affection. So it had been a fifty-fifty bargain, and Felice had not come off badly at all.

In fact, it had been he who had come off badly. Those dollar-clutching relatives, with their millions. They had made his road as difficult as possible. They just hadn’t liked him. Right from the first.

Now they had their revenge.

He would lose the linoleum shop, and they would put him to work in some menial office job at the mill, or in the brokerage, or perhaps even in the shipping office of one of their many small businesses.

Perhaps he had handled the shop’s affairs a bit poorly. It had only been through over-optimism about the shop’s potential. Overbuying. Overstock. And then an extra-long slack season called Recession. Upper Amsterdam was dotted with linoleum shops; he should have realized it took a long, long time to build up prestige in a neighborhood. But he hadn’t, and now he was in trouble.

Would they help him … their Felice’s husband … when he needed it so desperately? They would not!

He let the last memory flick out of sight, and sighed wearily, sinking back against the wall. He had even tried to get Felice to cash in Penny’s bonds, but she had looked at him as though he were crazy. Penny. She was wealthier than him! Thoughts of the little girl annoyed him; he put her instantly from his mind.

He shoved back through the swinging door and joined the family in the living room.

“Oh, Daddy!” Penny smiled as he came into sight, running to him. “Let’s show Uncle Bob and Aunt Madge how I can swing from the door ledge. Lift me, Daddy!”

Roger felt an unreasoning fury rise up in him.

“Not now, Penny.”

“Pleeease, Daddy?”

“I said not now, Penny. Later.”

She sulked then, the way she always did, and he felt like slapping her, the way he had yesterday when she had washed his pipe, saying it was smelly. But he could see the annoyed expressions of the relatives. No need to get them any more rankled than they were. He lifted her, let her fingertips hook onto the ledge over the door to the dining room. Penny hung there an instant, then let go with a sharp squeal.

She fell to the carpet, and instantly the relatives were on their feet. Their darling niece , Roger thought sourly.

“She’s all right,” he said quickly.

Penny got up, shamefacedly, and brushed off her skirt. “I couldn’t hold on as good as I usually do.” She grinned.

The relatives grinned back.

Roger felt the depression of finality welling up in him.

The evening went badly.

Roger lay awake in his bed, thinking. Across from him Felice lay heavily on her back, the sharp, short wheeze that annoyed him so helping to keep him alert now; he wanted to be alert now.

There seemed no way out. The jobbers would take back the merchandise, and the shop owner would break the lease somehow. Shortly thereafter he would be back in servitude. To work under someone again, as he had six years before, seemed the most abhorrent of fates after being his own boss.

Then, as he lay there, from some unknown well of desperate resource … because he was desperate … something that Uncle Bob (no, not again, never again Uncle Bob; just Bob, that was all) had said when Penny got up from the floor, registered. Registered differently than the first time he had heard it.

We just wouldn’t know what to do if anything happened to our little Penny.

The first time, he had thought wryly that it would be delightful if something happened to the affection-hungry little brat. But now …

Now there was more to it, and a plan formed. Slowly, but with increasing clarity, till he sat up and thought about it coldly. Finally, he got out of bed and went to find his pipe. To think some more. Would it work? Could it work? Why not?

He examined it from every angle, playing devil’s advocate with the idea, posing every possible catastrophic fuck-up imaginable. But be was able to continue a way around each one; till it became obvious the plan was foolproof.

Revenge and a solution and everything all knitted together so beautifully he felt like clapping his hands in joy. But he stilled the happiness within him and looked at it again, exhaustively, from every fantastically improbable viewpoint of failure. There would be difficulties, but not nearly as many as he had first supposed. By doing it as simply and directly as possible, it would work.

He drew deeply on the pipe, sitting on the sofa, his feet up on the coffee table, staring at the redness of his heels in the bedroom slippers.

It would work. Dammit, it would work!

The next day he closed the shop at lunchtime and drove the pickup truck down onto 23rd Street, stopping at a likely pawn shop.

He bought the old office model Underwood typewriter for fifteen dollars, carrying it quickly to the truck, and leaving before the owner could remember who he was, or what direction he had taken.

Back in the shop he typed the note on a piece of plain paper napkin, taken from a Nedick’s orange juice stand in midtown Manhattan. He wore gloves.

The note was short and direct.

Then he waited three weeks, stalling off the bill collectors, telling them he was getting a loan from the bank.

Then the night arrived.

He waited silently, feigning sleep, till three-thirty when the night was at its most silent. Then, he dressed quickly and quietly, making certain Felice in the other bed did not waken. Then he took the rope and the gag and the many strips of adhesive tape he had secreted beneath his winter sweaters in the bureau, and crept silently into Penny’s room.

He had the ten strips of adhesive over her eyes, and the gag in her mouth, taped down, before her struggles grew violent. It was unnecessary to become brutal about it; just a light tap behind the ear, and she went limp.

He tied her securely, hands behind her back, and carried her down the service stairs to the street, making certain he had not been seen. It was perfect; not a soul in sight, and as moonless a night as one could wish, so the insomniacs in their nocturnal wanderings could not be sure of anything they saw.

The car was directly in front of the building. He had made certain of that. The drive out to Jersey was smooth and fast with traffic in the Holland Tunnel almost nonexistent. Penny lay silently under a blanket in the trunk.

He had scouted the area carefully, and found the abandoned farmhouse outside Red Bank, New Jersey with little difficulty. The weather-beaten, almost-collapsed tool shed was set back from the house, in a little hollow: cut off from sight from the road.

He put the flashlight on the shelf and shone it on the post he had driven into the ground the week before. He tested it again to make certain it was solid. It wouldn’t budge an inch, no matter how hard he struggled, and he tied Penny to it tightly, making certain the adhesive was still over her eyes. She came to, just as he was burning the gloves. She struggled and coughed, and tried to scream, but it did no good. She was secured. For two days, if all went well.

For an instant he had qualms about her starving, left alone for two days. He thought back and tried to remember if he had heard of two-day starvation. Nothing came to mind, and he dismissed the thoughts, making certain the gloves burned to ash …

He gathered the remains on a piece of newspaper and folded it together to be disposed of along the road back to New York.

He looked at his step-daughter for a moment longer, then edged the door open with his foot. As he did so, he looked down, and smiled at his cleverness in wearing a new pair of tennis shoes. Shoes that could be bought in any one of a hundred stores in Manhattan, but shoes he had bought two years before — and had never gotten to wear. They would go, too, as soon as he was in the car and driving back.

He didn’t bother to say goodbye to Penny.

No sense letting her know it was her “Dear, Darling Daddy” who had kidnapped her.

He edged the door closed securely, and went back to the car. The night was still moonless. Ideal for a late drive home.

It had all been easier than he’d thought.

He had made a point of sleeping late the next morning, waiting till Felice’s sharp, repetitive screams had brought him leaping from the bed. He had rushed into the small bedroom, seen Felice screaming over and over again, crying, moaning, beating at the pillow.

He had given close attention to the note, just like any terrified father, and read it over to himself, reveling in its simple wording as keynote of the entire scheme:

DELIVER 200 THOUSAND DOLLARS TO ME IN SMALL UNMARKED BILLS AT THE DOWNTOWN ENTRANCE OF THE 79TH ST IRT SUBWAY BY NOON TOMORROW OR YOU WILL NEVER SEE YOUR UTTLE GIRL ALIVE AGAIN. DO NOT CONTACT THE COPS OR SHE WILL DIE. WE WILL KNOW IF YOU CONTACT THEM.

He had called Bob immediately, reaching him at the brokerage. All the relatives had shown up an hour later, all terrified, all anxious to help, an anxious to kick in their share of the two hundred thousand dollars to get their darling little Penny back again.

Felice had had to be put under a sedative, and for a time Roger worried only about Bob’s suspicions nature. He knew the question would come up of why Penny had been singled out for kidnapping, but he pretended too much anguish to worry about trivial details, and the question passed unnoticed. So did all the others — how the kidnapper had gotten in, how he had left, what would happen if they did see the police — and finally, Bob and Ralph and Madge and Harold had called their lawyers for the money.

Two hours later the money arrived, and Roger was adamant about carrying the payoff. “After all, she is my little girl, even if she is my step-daughter!”

Three years in high school dramatics paid off handsomely. They believed him. He had the money.

The next day at noon, he took the envelopes of bills — which, under the pretense of being the distraught father, he had checked to insure against markings — and went to the subway, making certain he was not followed.

He left the money wedged behind the big candy machine bolted to the wall in the subway, and came home, describing a pock-faced man with hat pulled low who had disappeared into the subway immediately after telling him to go home and wait and to tell no one what had happened.

They believed him.

What else could they do.

He cried so damned convincingly.

The night was not moonless, but the overcast clouds blotted it so effectively, it might well have been. He drove to Red Bank with a light heart. He would wait an appropriate length of time before using the money he had retrieved from behind the candy machine. The money that nestled under the rubber matting of the car’s trunk. He would use small amounts to make token payments to all his creditors, to forestall them, and in a year he would have it all paid off, with enough capital to expand a bit.

Roger whistled merrily as he drove the endless night to the abandoned farm house.

Penny had worked steadily at the ropes. They were tight, but a nine-year-old girl’s fingers are small, and fingernails are sharp, and two days struggling, though producing bloody hands, could work wonders. It was night again. She could tell, because the owl in the tree somewhere outside to the left was hooting again in that frightening way.

Then, suddenly, the bonds were loose, and her numbed hands slipped free. She struggled with the tape over her eyes, ripping it off painfully. Then the tape from her mouth, and she spat out the gag with a strangled cough. It was so, so, so dark from behind the tape; she could see nothing. Then, as she fumbled with the ropes that bound her feet, the tool shed came into focus a bit.

She heard a car drive up outside, and stop. Then the crunch of footsteps approaching. Was he coming back? What would he do to her now?

Vague, formless terrors of childhood surrounded her: the devil, the bogey-man, the twitchee that Daddy said would eat her alive if she whined, all of them back to haunt her at once. Two days of terror mounted in her throat, and she turned like a caged animal, a small animal, seeking some way out. The door was the only way, and now she could hear the steps approaching the door.

She saw a flicker of lighter something in the dirt by the wall, and reached for it.

A pitchfork, broken off three-quarters of the way up the handle.

She hefted it, feeling the bits of dirt clinging to the wood. The rusty pitchfork felt terribly heavy in her tired arms, but she stood trembling, ready at least to scream and fight!

The footsteps began to hurry, almost run, as though the man was in a rush to do what he had come to do.

Then the door burst open, and a gigantic black shape was there, and Penny lunged heavily at it. The combined speed of the running man and the lunging child drove the rusty pitchfork deep, deep, deep into the black shadow, and the man screamed high and whining, the sound bubbling up in his throat.

Penny screamed, and shouted at the shadow, “You let me alone, let me alone! I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy!”

The shadow bubbled again, then fell.

The night was silent once more, save the hoot of the owl in the tree, and the soft moan of the little girl as she cried, over and over, “I want my Daddy …”