Then it occurred to me that Hogan might give me a rough time once he realized he was cornered, so I drove by my house first and got my forty-five caliber revolver from my dresser drawer.
They were sitting in lounge chairs alongside the pool when I approached, Adelaide leaning forward and Hogan rubbing suntan lotion onto her back.
“How’s the water?” I asked calmly.
They whirled, surprised, then Hogan smiled. “It’s great,” he said jauntily. “I’ve invited Adelaide over here before for an early morning swim, but this is the first time she’s come.”
“I know better,” I said, watching Adelaide trying to control the fear and guilt that marked her features. At last she managed a facsimile of a poker face.
“Know better?” Hogan was still playing innocent.
“Yes, and now there are a few things I want you to know. There was a burglary committed night before last in the west end. No clues yet.”
Hogan appeared puzzled. “So what? I was home in bed all that night.”
“For the last several weekends I’ve been spying on you from that hillside,” I said. “Lieutenant Faber gave me infrared binoculars to use at night. I’m going to swear that I saw you leave and return at the time that burglary took place.”
“You can’t!” Adelaide said in a high voice.
“Quiet, dear.” I looked again at Hogan. He was grinning.
“Your word against mine, old pal. I’ve beat that one before.”
“I believe you lost your initialed gold cigarette lighter,” I said. “It has your fingerprints on it and it’s going to be found at the scene of the crime.”
Now anger showed on Hogan’s handsome face. “By Lieutenant Faber, would be my guess.”
“Your guess is correct. We’re framing you and sending you to prison, to put it plainly.”
“As I’ve always put it, huh?”
I nodded and couldn’t help a faint, gloating smile. Hogan’s game and he was getting beat at it. “Lieutenant Faber told me you were one of the world’s takers,” I said. “Well, I’m one of the world’s keepers. I don’t give up what I have easily.”
“Faber was right about that,” Hogan said frankly. “I’m a taker. I can’t see something of value without taking it.”
“Something like Adelaide?”
“Exactly.”
“Your mistake,” I said tauntingly, “was in trying to take something from me. I’ll think of you from time to time when you’re in prison.” I turned to go home, leaving Adelaide to return when she felt like it.
“It won’t work,” her voice said behind me.
I turned around and saw that the fear and surprise had left Adelaide’s face completely to be replaced by a look of determination.
“And why won’t it work?” I asked.
“Because I’ll swear in court that I spent that entire night with Jack.”
I started to laugh incredulously at her, but the laugh wouldn’t come out. “But you were at home.”
“Alone,” Adelaide said. “You could never prove it. I’ll swear I was here instead.”
“You’d swear to that in a courtroom, under oath?” I stared at her, feeling the sun on the back of my moist shirt. “But why?”
“I don’t think you’d understand.”
“Now listen!”
“Nothing more to listen to, or say,” Adelaide said, and as a pretense for getting away from me she turned and walked toward the diving board.
Hogan lowered himself into the shallow water with an infuriating smile. “Nothing more to say, old pal. Sorry.” And he actually looked as if he might be sorry, the gracious winner.
The sun seemed to grow hotter, unbearably hot, sending beads of sweat darting down my flesh inside my shirt. I looked up and saw Adelaide poised gracefully on the end of the diving board, tanned and beautiful in her tiny swimming suit as she carefully avoided a glance in my direction.
How the revolver got from my pocket into my hand I honestly don’t know. I have no recollection of it, a magician’s trick. And I don’t remember pulling the trigger.
Adelaide was raising her arms, preparing to dive, when the gun roared in my hand as if of its own will. I saw Adelaide’s body jerk, saw the spray of blood, heard the scream as she half fell, half jumped awkwardly from the diving board, arms and legs thrashing as she struck the water. Then there was a choking sound and she stopped thrashing and floated motionless face up.
Hogan stroked toward the ladder, a look not of shock or horror on his face, but an expression that suggested he might be very sick. “Oh, God, Smathers!” he said as he started to climb the chrome ladder. I let him get to the second step before blasting him back into the pool.
I stood there then, pulling the trigger automatically, emptying the revolver into their bodies.
Considering how large the pool was, it was amazing how quickly all the water turned red.
So now I’m sitting here awaiting trial, writing this to kill time, though I’m sure the hour will come when I’ll pray I had this time back. There isn’t any doubt in my mind that I’ll be convicted. They have my full confession, and now they’ll have this.
What concerns me is that all my life I’ve tried to be a decent sort of man, hard-working, industrious. I’m not very religious, but I have tried to live by the ten commandments, breaking them every now and then, of course, like everybody else. And yet if you went back and read over this again you could put your finger on spot after spot until you’d realize that between the four of us, me, Adelaide, Jack Hogan and Lieutenant Faber, in one way or another we’ve broken every single commandment.
Evil spreads, I suppose, like the red through the water in Hogan’s swimming pool.
EFFECTIVE MEDICINE
B. Traven
One afternoon, on coming home from the cotton field where I had worked all day long, I noted, outside the barbed-wire fence of the bungalow I was living in, a Mexican peasant squatting on the bare ground. I did not know him because, as I learned later in the evening, he was from another village six or seven miles away. He was very poor and all in rags.
Having greeted me he waited patiently until I had dismounted from the burro I had been riding home on. When I had taken off the saddle and the burro had gone its way looking for cornstalks in the yard, the Mexican entered the front yard, came close and began talking.
He talked rapidly and in a confused manner. For a moment I thought him to be on the high – that is to say, that he might have smoked more marijuana than he could digest. However, though he was now telling the end of his story, now the beginning, now the middle, all in confusion, I soon noticed that he was neither drunk nor doped, only very ignorant and evidently suffering from a nervous breakdown – as far as this can happen to a Mexican of his kind.
It was difficult for me to make sense of his story and for a long while I was unable to see which part of his story was the end and which the beginning or the middle. The farther he came in his story the more was he swept away by his emotion until he only blubbered or shouted absolutely incoherent phrases. Never once did he fully end his tale. Whenever I thought him close to the end and I was trying to catch up with the full meaning, I realized that he was already telling his story from the middle backwards to the start again. In this confused way he told me his story more than a dozen times and always with the same words, out of a vocabulary which barely consisted of more than three hundred different words. His mood changed constantly. Each time he started as if he were telling the story of somebody else, yet invariably he ended up crying almost hysterically.