More drawers! Be quiet, be curious, be careful, he told himself.
At the bottom of the eighty-fifth drawer he found gloves.
“Oh, my Lord, my Lord!” He slumped against the bureau, sighing. He tried the gloves on, held them up, proudly flexed them, buttoned them. They were soft, gray, thick, impregnable. He could do all sorts of tricks with hands now and leave no trace. He thumbed his nose in the bedroom mirror, sucking his teeth.
“NO!” cried Huxley.
What a wicked plan it had been.
Huxley had fallen to the floor, purposely! Oh, what a wickedly clever man! Down onto the hardwood floor had dropped Huxley, with Acton after him. They had rolled and tussled and clawed at the floor, printing and printing it with their frantic fingertips! Huxley had slipped away a few feet, Acton crawling after to lay hands on his neck and squeeze until the life came out like paste from a tube!
Gloved, William Acton returned to the room and knelt down upon the floor and laboriously began the task of swabbing every wildly infested inch of it. Inch by inch, inch by inch, he polished and polished until he could almost see his intent, sweating face in it. Then he came to a table and polished the leg of it, on up its solid body and along the knobs and over the top. He came to a bowl of wax fruit, burnished the filigree silver, plucked out the wax fruit and wiped them clean, leaving the fruit at the bottom unpolished.
“I’m sure I didn’t touch them,” he said.
After rubbing the table he came to a picture frame hung over it.
“I’m certain I didn’t touch that,” he said.
He stood looking at it.
He glanced at all the doors in the room. Which doors had he used tonight? He couldn’t remember. Polish all of them, then. He started on the doorknobs, shined them all up, and then he curried the doors from head to foot, taking no chances. Then he went to all the furniture in the room and wiped the chair arms.
“That chair you’re sitting in, Acton, is an old Louis XIV piece. Feel that material,” said Huxley.
“I didn’t come to talk furniture, Huxley! I came about Lily.”
“Oh, come off it, you’re not that serious about her. She doesn’t love you, you know. She’s told me she’ll go with me to Mexico City tomorrow.”
“You and your money and your damned furniture!”
“It’s nice furniture, Acton; be a good guest and feel of it.”
Fingerprints can be found on fabric.
“Huxley!” William Acton stared at the body. “Did you guess I was going to kill you? Did your subconscious suspect, just as my subconscious suspected? And did your subconscious tell you to make me run about the house handling, touching, fondling books, dishes, doors, chairs? Were you that clever and that mean?”
He washed the chairs dryly with the clenched handkerchief. Then he remembered the body—he hadn’t dry-washed it. He went to it and turned it now this way, now that, and burnished every surface of it. He even shined the shoes, charging nothing.
While shining the shoes his face took on a little tremor of worry, and after a moment he got up and walked over to that table.
He took out and polished the wax fruit at the bottom of the bowl.
“Better,” he whispered, and went back to the body.
But as he crouched over the body his eyelids twitched and his jaw moved from side to side and he debated, then he got up and walked once more to the table.
He polished the picture frame.
While polishing the picture frame he discovered—
The wall.
“That,” he said, “is silly.”
“Oh!” cried Huxley, fending him off. He gave Acton a shove as they struggled. Acton fell, got up, touching the wall, and ran toward Huxley again. He strangled Huxley. Huxley died.
Acton turned steadfastly from the wall, with equilibrium and decision. The harsh words and the action faded in his mind; he hid them away. He glanced at the four walls.
“Ridiculous!” he said.
From the corners of his eyes he saw something on one wall.
“I refuse to pay attention,” he said to distract himself. “The next room, now! I’ll be methodical. Let’s see—altogether we were in the hall, the library, this room, and the dining room and the kitchen.”
There was a spot on the wall behind him.
Well, wasn’t there?
He turned angrily. “All right, all right, just to be sure” and he went over and couldn’t find any spot. Oh, a little one, yes, right—there. He dabbed it. It wasn’t a fingerprint anyhow. He finished with it, and his gloved hand leaned against the wall and he looked at the wall and the way it went over to his right and over to his left and how it went down to his feet and up over his head and he said softly, “No.” He looked up and down and over and across and he said quietly, “That would be too much.” How many square feet? “I don’t give a good damn,” he said. But unknown to his eyes, his gloved fingers moved in a little rubbing rhythm on the wall.
He peered at his hand and the wallpaper. He looked over his shoulder at the other room. “I must go in there and polish the essentials,” he told himself, but his hand remained, as if to hold the wall, or himself, up. His face hardened.
Without a word he began to scrub the wall, up and down, back and forth, up and down, as high as he could stretch and as low as he could bend.
“Ridiculous, oh my Lord, ridiculous!”
But you must be certain, his thought said to him.
“Yes, one must be certain,” he replied.
He got one wall finished, and then …
He came to another wall.
“What time is it?”
He looked at the mantel clock. An hour gone. It was five after one.
The doorbell rang.
Acton froze, staring at the door, the clock, the door, the clock.
Someone rapped loudly.
A long moment passed. Acton did not breathe. Without new air in his body he began to fail away, to sway; his head roared a silence of cold waves thundering onto heavy rocks.
“Hey, in there!” cried a drunken voice. “I know you’re in there, Huxley! Open up, dammit! This is Billy-boy, drunk as an owl, Huxley, old pal, drunker than two owls.”
“Go away,” whispered Acton soundlessly, crushed.
“Huxley, you’re in there, I hear you breathing!” cried the drunken voice.
“Yes, I’m in here,” whispered Acton, feeling long and sprawled and clumsy on the floor, clumsy and cold and silent. “Yes.”
“Hell!” said the voice, fading away into mist. The footsteps shuffled off. “Hell … ”
Acton stood a long time feeling the red heart beat inside his shut eyes, within his head. When at last he opened his eyes he looked at the new fresh wall straight ahead of him and finally got courage to speak. “Silly,” he said. “This wall’s flawless. I won’t touch it. Got to hurry. Got to hurry.