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Jencks soon returned. “Not at all, my day’s free. This miserable cold,”
Jencks explained, coughing back phlegm, poking himself in the chest with his thumb. He waited for Bassett to explain why they’d come.
“We were wondering if you could tell us anything else.”
“The night in question. Mr. Jencks.”
“I don’t know him well, like I told you. Like I told you, when I see him , I speak. He does in addition. The Lawrences keep to themselves. So do I. Pleasant, I can say. Quiet. Always considerate.
That’s how I’d describe them both. Others should as well. I don’t mind going so far as to say that if you meant to find one person in the building to speak against either one of them, you’d have a job.
Is she going to be all right? I saw her face as they were wheeling her out. It gave me quite a turn, I don’t mind admitting. What an awful thing, what happened!” He shook his head at the memory. “Strange. Couples never see it coming, do they.” Jencks coughed.
“Sir?”
Judah looked around. Jencks’ Kew Garden flat was furnished in the shabby genteel style of men who divorce after years of being married. There was a shortwave radio on the table. There was a broken grandfather clock beside it that had probably set on a mantelpiece when the family was together.
You knew you were seeing what he got in the settlement, Judah
thought, a long dead overstuffed divan that sagged in the middle, a standing lamp with a tasseled shade, a threadbare oriental rug that seemed to be dying of thirst. All this Victoriana had more to do with a woman’s taste than it ever had to do with his own, and you knew how it came to be there without needing to ask. At some point he’d probably thrown up his hands and said, Hell, I’m too tired to quarrel, it’s only furniture, let’s just get on with this—If it’s really that important to you, then take what you want and leave what you don’t!
“Well, I can’t see how it would matter--There is one thing though.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Well, they had a dog. Jigs, I think its name was. A long haired thing, Red dachshund? It got so it couldn’t be apart from the wife.
Don’t ask me why. It would howl when she left in the morning and whine and scratch at the door. Someone complained, I suppose. I think they made her get rid of it, I think that’s what he said. He thought the best thing to do was to have it put down. His idea, not hers, you see. We had a dog once, you see. I had to do the dirty work. Kidneys in our case. It was the right thing to do, but they blamed me just the same. God knows why, that’s what happened though.”
“What brings this to mind, Mr. Jencks, can you tell us?”
“Well Mr. Bassett, it was something he said. We talked about it once, Mr. Lawrence and me. He told me his story and I told him mine. Said it might have been harder, said it was small dog, not a big one, said it wasn’t such a hard thing to do. Putting it down, he meant. I thought that was odd, don’t you? It’s just me, maybe, but I wouldn’t think its size would matter, not when you were putting it down.” He coughed. “But that isn’t what you asked me, is it. What was it again you wanted to know?”
He poked himself with his thumb some more and it was there all right, thought Bassett, just where he pointed, only over to the left a little, for you knew what was wrong without being told. You could hear it. You could even hear it coming. It was something he’d noticed the first time they’d talked. It began as a kind of dull, wet rolling somewhere in his middle, a running toilet kind of sound, which was just about right. There was plumbing inside that just didn’t work, and tubes that needed help. That rattle in his chest came from fluid in those tubes that had no business being there and if he was sitting when a coughing spell commenced it could double him over. A look came across his face when he couldn’t stop coughing. Part apology, it was something else in addition. You’d have thought he’d been kicked in the belly, judging from his expression. He got that same half-day/half-night look on his face of a man who’s been kicked in the belly in a fight, Bassett thought to himself.
“Have you had it for long, sir?” asked Bassett. “It sounds worse than a cold.”
“This? It’s seasonal, it’s nothing. Gets worse this time of year. By spring I’ll be fine. It’ll be out of me by spring.”
After Jencks, there were others to see.
*
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