Pity Him Afterwards

When he was washed and shaved and dressed, he closed the suitcase again, left it in the hall, and went into the bedroom where the bodies were. He found the key ring in the old man’s right-hand pants pocket, and then carried the suitcase downstairs. He picked up the wallet and cards, put them all together again, and stowed the wallet in his hip pocket. Then he looked at the old man’s keys, and smiled happily when he saw the silver key with GM on it. An automobile ignition key. Still smiling, he left the house.

He found the car, a five-year-old Chevrolet, parked beside the garage. He dropped the suitcase on the back seat and slid behind the steering wheel.

It had an automatic gearshift, which was a good thing. It had been a long, long time since he had driven a car, and most of his knowledge of driving had faded with the rest of his older memories. But with an automatic gearshift, he would be all right.

Nevertheless, he drove very jerkily at first, and it was a good thing there weren’t any other cars on the road. It took him about ten minutes to get used to the accelerator and brake, but finally he got the car under control.

Once the car was running the way it was supposed to, he had leisure to remember that he had neglected to get the money from the garage cash register. He got angry at himself for that, and pounded his fist on the steering wheel. But he didn’t want to go back. The forty-three dollars would have to last him. When it was gone, he could always get some more.

The narrow blacktop road wound among the hills for a long time, and finally deposited him in a small town where he found a turn-off that took him to a divided highway, the same one he’d been on before. The place where he’d killed the actor was about fifteen miles back the other way.

He drove all night, too excited to feel tired, and at eight-thirty in the morning he came to a medium-sized city and found a photographer’s shop, where the owner was just opening for business. He went in, carrying one of the dead man’s pictures, and said, “Can you make me some pictures just like that?”

The photographer looked at the picture and said, “Sure. You an actor?”

“Yes. How fast can you make them?”

“I should be able to have them ready by Thursday.”

“Oh, no! This morning.”

“This morning? Listen, I’ve got too many rush orders as it is. I’ve got a one-man operation here, my friend, and I—”

“But I need them this morning.”

Then the photographer looked sly. The madman saw it, and felt the anger rising in him, but forced it down out of sight. The photographer said, “A real hurry job like that, my friend, that’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

“How many copies you want?”

“Ten.”

“Fifty dollars.”

“All right,” said the madman, knowing then he would have to kill the photographer. For being sly, and unfriendly, and unwilling to help his fellow man for the simple reason that we are all human beings together. Even if he’d had enough money to pay the photographer, he would still have had to kill him.

He posed in the same position as the dead actor in the other picture, and the photographer gave him the same kind of dramatic lighting. Then the photographer told him to come back in three hours, and he went away and had a big breakfast of pancakes and coffee, and took a nap in the car, which was parked on a residential side street. A small boy awoke him at eleven o’clock by banging on the fender of the car with a stick, and he got out of the car and took the stick away from the boy. He had the boy’s shoulder in his left hand, the stick in his right hand, and the anger was building in him, but then he saw two women with shopping carts walking toward him, and he knew he didn’t want to have to run away until he got the pictures, so he let the boy go.

The photographer had the pictures ready when he got back, and they weren’t as good as the other ones had been, but they would do. He and the photographer were alone in the shop, so when the photographer asked for his fifty dollars the madman jumped on him. He’d forgotten to bring a rock or any kind of weapon with him, but he managed to break the photographer’s left elbow-joint very early in the fighting, and that drained the photographer of strength, and then it was simple to strangle him.

He went back to the car and looked around, but the boy was nowhere to be seen, and there wasn’t time to look for him. He got into the car and stowed the new pictures in the suitcase and drove to the bus depot and left the car in a parking lot across the street. The attendant gave him a yellow ticket stub with red numbers on it. He carried the suitcase and ticket stub across the street with him and then threw the ticket stub away. He knew about license numbers and automobile descriptions, and he knew it would be dangerous to drive that car any farther.