The Bad Seed (20 page)

When the child came into the breakfast room, Christine said, “I heard you and Leroy talking together. What did he mean by that peculiar sound he kept making?”

“You didn’t hear us talking
together,
” said the child primly. “You heard Leroy talking to me. I don’t talk to Leroy.”

“What did he mean by that hissing noise he made?”

“I don’t know what he meant. Leroy’s a silly man. I don’t listen to Leroy more than half the time.”

She sat at the table and unfolded her napkin, her face rested and untroubled, sleep still in her eyes. Then she yawned, covered her mouth daintily with her palm, and picked up her spoon. Christine, looking at her, thought:
She has no capacity for either
remorse or guilt. She’s entirely untroubled.
And afterward, when Rhoda was in the park, Mrs. Penmark went on with the cases. She paused from time to time to speculate on the odd mind of the criminal, to discover the lesson each taught for her own guidance. She wondered what force had caused these unusual people to become what they were. Was it the result of faulty training? Was it bad environment? Or was it some inborn, predestined thing which could at best be modified only a little?

These speculations so occupied her mind that later in the morning she telephoned Reginald Tasker for his opinion. Reginald said that for years he’d read, collected, annotated, and digested cases of the type in which they were now both interested, and it seemed to him that environment had little to do with its persistent appearance, although, conceivably, environment might modify its outward aspects. The simplest way to understand the type was to regard them as the normal human beings of fifty thousand years ago, before man began his task of civilizing himself, or built his code of axioms into the moral codes that govern us all.

In other words, most of us were able somehow, under the molding force of precept and example, to develop the strange thing we call conscience, to acquire a reasonably acceptable moral character; but others did not have this ability at all, no matter what benign influences they were subjected to. They were not even able to love another except in the crudest manifestations of the flesh. They had a mental understanding of the shadings of right and wrong, but none of them had the same moral understanding of these things. They were the true, inborn criminals that can neither be changed nor modified.…

When she turned from the telephone, Mrs. Penmark took up the folders and read again. She read on and on, but at last she came to a case marked in Reginald’s hand,
The Unparalleled Bessie Denker.
She held the folder limply in her hands, frowned,
and shook her head in puzzlement at the insistent familiarity of the name. The story was by Madison Cravatte, whose name was familiar to her by this time, and who wrote with that special sort of tittering wit so typical of his specialty.

He began:
Now, if I were commanded to pick my favorite murderess from the army of her talented sisters, it would not be the bleached Eva Coo, whose name was so soft, and whose heart was so hard; it would not be that simpering chocolate drinker, Miss Madeleine Smith, whom the British so wildly adore. It wouldn’t be our equally loved Lizzie Borden, who is now immortalized in doggerel, and who is said to have perfected her technique with the hatchet through chopping off the heads of her pet kittens; it wouldn’t be the handsome Lyda Southard, a lady who’s never received the plaudits due her from an unbelieving public; it wouldn’t be saintly Anna Hahn, who, in addition to a free use of arsenic, sleeping pills, and strychnine, introduced a new lethal agent into American letters: croton oil, of all things, my dears!

No, it would be none of these artistes in the art of murder, talented though they were. My choice for first place would be the unrivaled Bessie Denker, queen of them all: Bessie Denker, who had a built-in icebox for a heart, a steel rod for a spine, an instrument as accurate and impersonal as a comptometer for a brain. I make no secret of my admiration for this endearing lady. Bessie Denker was tops in my book. We’re going steady now. Bessie Denker is my sweetheart, and I don’t care who knows it.

At this point Mrs. Penmark made a gesture of distaste, put aside the folders, and went about her usual tasks. That afternoon, feeling a need to clear her mind, she took Rhoda to a movie. She sat in the darkened theater, trying to concentrate on the shallow story, but she could not. Afterward she and the little girl went to a pastry shop for ice cream and cakes. She did not look at the cases again until that night when Rhoda was asleep; then, turning quickly to the Denker case once more, she continued to read its dreadful details.

She learned that Bessie Denker had been born Bessie Schober in 1882, on a farm in Iowa, the eldest child of Heinz and Mamie (Gustafson) Schober. She had had a brother and sister, both younger than herself. The little boy died from an accidental dose of arsenic which Bessie had, in her seven-year-old innocence, spread on his bread and butter, mistaking it for sugar. The little girl, while helping her sister draw a bucket of water, somehow fell in the well and was drowned. Years later, when Mrs. Denker was charged with other crimes, and on trial for her life, it was said by neighbors who remembered the family, at that time, thanks to Bessie’s energy and determination, entirely extinct, that her Grandfather Gustafson had been shot one Sunday afternoon as he nodded in his rocking chair on the back porch. Nobody had ever known how it happened, or who had done it. Certainly, at that time, nobody has suspected quiet, wide-eyed little Bessie Schober, who had been alone with him, and who was only eleven years old in those days.

Mr. Cravatte apologized for his inadequate presentation of these early, speculative affairs that concerned his ideal; but if the reader wanted a more detailed picture, a truly profound study of the early years of Bessie Schober Denker, he referred them to the remarkable series of articles by the late Richard Bravo, who had reported Mrs. Denker’s trial, and who had studied her life in the minutest detail; who was, in fact, the acknowledged authority on her early antics.

Mrs. Penmark’s hands were sweating; they shook as she put aside the folder and lighted a cigarette. She wondered why her father had never spoken of the Denker case, if he were the recognized authority on certain aspects of it, as he’d spoken of other affairs of his time in which he’d played a journalistic part. Or had he spoken of it, and had she, being uninterested, merely heard and forgotten? If the latter were true, she could understand why the names Denker and Schober and Gustafson seemed so familiar to her now, as though she’d known them all in some distant time
in the past, why she could at this moment, even before she’d read the facts, anticipate some of the things that were to happen later on. She did not know. And suddenly she did not want to know. She felt that she’d been unwise in reading these cases of calculation and cold greed. Really, they served no purpose. The whole idea had been a mistake. She’d read no more.

But, against her will, she kept remembering the Denker case, and saying to herself, “There was a boy called Sonny, I think. Was his real name Ludwig, do you suppose? There was another boy, older than Emma, named Peter.… Yes, I’m sure his name was Peter. And there was another girl, the youngest of the Denker children, but I can’t remember what her name was now, although I certainly knew it at one time.”

She went to her mirror and stared at herself in astonishment, thinking:
Have I lost my senses? How could I have ever known such people?
Then she told herself she’d read no more. She meant it this time. She’d return the files to Reginald the next morning. She would dismiss from her mind those implications that struggled so strongly to be recognized. She glanced at her clock, and seeing it was after midnight, she went to bed, although again she was restless and could not sleep. She said to herself, “How can Bessie Denker concern me? I don’t want to know anything more about her. I have my own problems to solve.”

On July tenth, Mrs. Breedlove and her brother Emory Wages closed their apartment in town and went each year to the
Seagull Inn for the days that remained in that month, and for the entire month of August. Usually, before departure, Monica gave a big buffet supper at the country club, as though to console her friends for the loss of her society over such an extended period. This time she planned her supper for the Fourth of July, since an elaborate display of fireworks was scheduled at the club that particular year, a display which, she felt, she and her guests might as well take advantage of and enjoy. She’d been making plans for the party since middle June. She’d discussed matters exhaustively with Mrs. Penmark, debating with her the appropriate drinks to be served, the proper dishes to be ordered from her caterers this year.

She was a little surprised, therefore, when, on the morning of the Fourth, Christine telephoned to say she couldn’t come, after all, she wasn’t well, as Monica knew. Then, too, Rhoda was something of a problem. Mrs. Forsythe had been so kind in the past about looking after her, that she couldn’t possibly ask her to do it again.… Of course, she could call in a regular babysitter, but for reasons of her own, which she wouldn’t go into at the moment, she didn’t want to do that, either.

Mrs. Breedlove laughed at the suggestion of a babysitter for Rhoda, a child so poised, so calmly mature in outlook. The idea seemed faintly absurd. If anything, it should probably be the other way round! She said, “Don’t worry about Jessie Forsythe. She adores Rhoda. She’ll jump at the chance of having her to herself for a few hours. She told me just the other day she enjoyed talking to Rhoda more than anybody she knew. I wanted to say, ‘But don’t you find her a little advanced for you, Jessie dear?’ but of course I didn’t. Her own grandchildren can’t abide the poor woman, and they make fun of her to her face. But of course Rhoda, being such a little lady, has more tact and consideration for older people.”

“Perhaps so. Perhaps you’re right, Monica.”

“The truth of the matter,” said Mrs. Breedlove cheerfully, “is that you’re brooding too much. You’re neglecting your social obligations so much lately that even Emory, who notices nothing at all as a rule, remarked on it. Now, you must disregard your little depression of the moment and come to the party, even if you don’t feel up to it. You’re sure to be the belle of the ball, as you always are, with the settled married men yearning at you, and wishing their horrible wives looked more like you. Just leave everything to me, dear Christine; all you have to do is look your prettiest. I’ve got to be at the club early to see about the decorations, but Emory has been instructed to pick you up around six.”

At the party, Mrs. Penmark sighted Reginald at once, and pushed her way through to him. They sat on the terrace together beside the open French doors, and he asked her how she was getting on with the case histories. She said she’d got into the Denker case a little way; she’d read a few pages of it, but it disturbed her so she’d had to put it aside. She paused, shook her head in puzzlement, and said, “Did you ever go to a strange place, or meet a strange person, or even hear a conversation for the first time with the feeling that everything that was happening then had happened before?”

“Yes, fairly often. There’s a name for it, but I’ve forgotten what it is.”

“Well, as silly as it sounds, I have the feeling about Bessie Denker. I don’t understand it.”

“You’ve probably read the case before, and just forgot it.”

Christine said after a moment, “I was surprised to find my father’s name mentioned in the case. I didn’t know he’d ever met these people.”

“Maybe that’s why the case seems familiar to you. He probably talked about it when you were a kid.”

“I don’t think so. It’s something else, I’m sure.”

Reginald said enthusiastically that Bravo’s reports of the trial had been far more than the accurate reporting of journalism; they’d been little chiseled essays, really; and already they’d become classics of their kind. Her father had set a standard in the Denker case which other reporters had imitated, but never equaled.

“I’m always finding out things about him I didn’t know before.”

Reginald nodded in agreement, finished his cocktail, and said, “How far did you get into the Denker case before you put it aside?” And when she told him, he said he’d save her the trouble of reading the earlier aspects of the case, some of which were entirely incredible, by telling them to her.

He took another cocktail, closed his eyes for concentration, and said in his light, rather rapid voice, that Bessie’s father, old Heinz Schober, had died oddly in an accident which had involved a threshing machine, an accident never adequately explained. Later on—years later—Mrs. Denker’s admirers had seen significance in the fact that Bessie was working beside her father at the time, but if she was involved in his death, such an involvement was never established. At any rate, the old man had left his widow comfortably fixed. Bessie was about twenty years old in those days and eager to embark in earnest on a career already auspiciously, if haphazardly, begun. But she felt she could do better in a city, and already her thoughts turned toward Omaha, Nebraska.

But she remained on the farm for a time, to look out for her mother, who’d suffered from indigestion since her husband’s death; then, when her mother died on schedule, and Bessie had the farm and the insurance money for her own, she sold out and moved away. In Omaha she married a man named Vladimir Kurowsky, a man of considerable substance. At the insistence
of his bride, he had himself heavily insured. He left his widow of less than a year to her grief and quickly earned possessions. So the Widow Kurowsky cashed in her policies, sold her property, and moved to Kansas City. Not long afterward she met and married a young farmer named August Denker. He came of a well-to-do family, although his particular branch of it had little. When Mrs. Denker closed her Kansas City residence, and embarked with her new husband for his farm, she began the major phase of her career, the phase that was later to both delight and astound her contemporaries.