The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online Page A

before him, and he let his eyes sweep rapidly over the first sentences of every story. Today in Gibraltar, in the presence of Foreign Secretaries, Hump-de-dump-de-dump, a new bilateral reciprocal agreement was signed by President Mugwump of Blotz…. Wife says, “He destroyed my love! I had to save my child!” … A grim story unfolded yesterday before District Chief of Police Ronald W. Friggarty. A young blonde woman, her blue eyes dilated with terror, told how her husband came home and beat her and her child regularly with a frying pan every evening at six…. Weather in South America growing ever more temperate, experts declare. A chance discovery of a tiny plastic meteorite on the left shoulder of Mt. Achinche in Bolivia has led climatologists to believe that in the next six hundred years chinchillas will be able to compute their own income taxes…. Radio-photo shows streams of shalluping mourners shuffling by bier of murdered Soviet explorer Tomyatkin in Moscow…. International Weaving Trades Fair to be inaugurated infamous Glass Receptacle at Cologne…. Walter smiled. He saw the item he had torn out about the woman murdered at the bus stop. The words did not come, but he saw the picture of her. She lay in some woods, and there was a bloody gash down her cheek from her eye to the corner of her lip. She was not pretty, but she had a pleasant face, black wavy hair, a strong simple body and a trusting mouth that would have opened in horror at the first threat from her assaulter. A woman like that wouldn’t have gone with a stranger any distance on a road. He imagined her accosted by someone she knew: Helen, I’ve got to talk to you. Come here.… She would have looked at him with surprise. How did you get here? Never mind. I’ve got to talk to you. Helen we’ve got to settle this. It could have been her husband. Walter thought. He tried to remember whether the paper had said where the husband was at the time. He didn’t think it had. Perhaps Helen and Melchior Kimmel had lived in a little hell together, too. Walter imagined them fighting in their home in Newark, reaching a familiar impasse, then the wife deciding to take a trip to see a relative. If the husband had wanted to kill her, he could have followed her in a car, waited until she got out at a rest stop. He could have said, I have to talk to you , and his wife would have gone with him, down to some dark clump of trees beside the highway….
    Thursday evening, Clara came in and sat for a few moments on the foot of his bed. She was afraid of catching the flu from him, and she had been sleeping on the couch in his study. Now that she had not come in contact with him for three days, Walter thought, she was positively blooming. He said very little to her, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was absorbed in new sales possibility on the North Shore.
    I hate her , Walter thought. He was intensely aware of it. It gave him a kind of pleasure to think about it.
    Later that evening, the sound of a car motor awakened Walter from a doze. He heard two voices on the stairs, one, a woman’s voice.
    Clara ushered Peter Slotnikoff and the girl called Ellie into the room. Peter apologized for not telephoning first. Ellie had brought him a large bunch of gladioli.
    â€œI’m not quite dead yet,” Walter said, embarrassed.
    Walter looked around for something to put them in. Clara had left the room—Walter knew she was annoyed because they had dropped in without calling—and there was no vase in sight. Peter got a vase from the hall and filled it in the bathroom. Walter lay back on the pillows and watched Ellie’s hands as she put the flowers in the vase. Her hands were strong and square, like her face, but gentle when they touched things. Walter remembered that she played the violin.
    â€œWould anybody like a drink?” Walter asked. “Or a beer? There’s beer in the refrigerator, Pete. Why