Ray knew what awaited him at the garage at the end of the Manhattan to West Caldwell run, the good cheer from the maintenance crew, a twenty-second speech from the supervisor wishing him well in his retirement, maybe a bottle of booze thrust at him with some humorous words, a few silly passengers remarking on how they would miss the teddy bear he had affixed to the payment terminal for thirty-five years and how they delighted at his lighthearted patter during the forty-minute rides across the Meadowlands of New Jersey. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you look down, you will see the lights of Paris. We will be arriving shortly.” Ray’s announcements, offering varied visual highlights depicting arrival at European or Caribbean destinations, never failed to elicit a few laughs from the commuters on their way home, especially on dark, slushy winter evenings.
+++++At the terminal on this warm summer evening, Ray opened the folding door one last time and untied the teddy bear and stuffed it into his windbreaker pocket. A few stalwart passengers along with some mechanics and drivers clapped as he emerged from the bus. Lenny the bookie stood apart for he was a different kind of person, the guardian angel of everyone’s basest aspirations. His sad eyes and the reddened crease in his lower lip testified to afternoon drinking and the cigars he smoked in the city.
+++++The dispatcher ambled over, wielding a box in his arms and forcing a rare smile onto his rock-hard face.
+++++“I know Crown Royal is your favorite,” he said, handing over the box.
+++++“Well deserved,” Lenny added, clapping his puffy hands and then reaching for one of the cigars he knew he couldn’t light up yet.
+++++Ray expressed good cheer at the pleasure he would have imbibing the whiskey, a few of the other drivers and mechanics wished Ray good luck, and everyone dutifully laughed after each nervous joke. Finally, a funereal sadness descended upon the gathering for there was nothing more to say, and everyone dispersed quickly as though embarrassed at having witnessed something illicit.
+++++Ray walked to his car, and Lenny the bookie caught up with him. “Here’s my gift to you, Ray. Put a tenner on Nadine’s Rose to win in the fifth at Belmont tomorrow. It’s a sure thing. Put a hundred if you really trust me.”
+++++“What are the odds?”
+++++“Eighty to one, but that’s the gift part of it,” Lenny said. “She’ll come in.”
+++++Ray handed five twenties to the bookie. The only thing that troubled him was that so many of his bets lost while his wife Eunice’s bets had the unique ability to pay off. He handed the teddy bear to Lenny. “Throw this in the garbage, will you.”
+++++He didn’t expect a retirement party when he got home to the raised ranch he occupied with Eunice, and he was grateful that a crowd of people didn’t jump up from behind the sofa when he entered and threw his windbreaker over the back of a chair. In the forty years Ray had been married to Eunice, he had discovered that everything he did outside steering the commuter bus through traffic had been based on Eunice’s bridge parties, her country club charity events, and gatherings in front of televised sporting events at other people’s houses. The alienation he accepted ruled out any discord.
+++++One day, years earlier, a woman stepped onto his bus in Clifton, and, after giving her perfume time to intoxicate him, began a conversation about her lonely life and her part-time job as a buyer at Macy’s. The conversation carried over into the terminal and a week later to the cheap room in a single-room-occupancy hotel that Ray had rented. Situated three blocks from the bus terminal, the room provided a convenient place for them to meet on the afternoons Ray had a few hours’ layover. He remembered how the woman’s refined manner had delighted him on that first afternoon as they huddled together while the menacing cacophony of the hotel flowed through the narrow hotel corridors like swamp water. On that first afternoon together, in the confines of the dingy room, with bright sunlight streaming through holes in the green shades, they said not a word until the woman from Clifton doused the bare light bulb and whispered, “Okay, cowboy. I’m all yours.”
+++++These blissful interludes ended a few months later with a note the woman left for him on the lone lopsided bed in the room. She explained that she would no longer be taking the bus from Clifton. That was it. She offered no heartfelt sentiment, no explanation.
+++++“I’ve advertised for a housekeeper,” Eunice said that evening while they ate the special chicken pot pie she had made. She was a short woman and she had a way of bobbing her head when she spoke as if pecking at some ineffable source of inspiration. Her soft face displayed the placid contours of a marshmallow bronzed over a campfire and wobbling a little over its molten core.
+++++“We’ve never had a housekeeper,” he said. “Why now?”
+++++“You’ll be home more, most likely leaving clothes and dishes everywhere.”
+++++No, I won’t, Ray thought. I’ll be down at Ambly’s Ale House. He decided not to argue. At some point during the past thirty-five years, Ray’s aspiration to do something great had become reduced to doing anything besides drive the bus, no matter what. Ray lived with the dream that he would someday open a tavern just like Ambly’s Ale House down on Main Street. Joe Ambly was considerably older than Ray, and maybe he’d die or, better yet, simply let Ray buy a share of the business in order that Ray could learn from a pro.
+++++Being a partner at the Ale House and pulling the beer tap all afternoon or mixing Manhattans on ladies’ night or talking about the Knicks or betting on the trifecta at Belmont became something to strive for.
+++++The next day, being Saturday, Ray decided to work in his garden as he did most weekends. He purchased two black currant bushes at the nursery and began digging at the far reaches of the yard behind the tall forsythia bush. He had set up a bench back there and had a small vegetable garden. He could sit on the bench on a Saturday or Sunday drinking a beer and reading the newspaper behind the sight-lines of the bridge party participants who would peer out the back window from time to time wondering where he was.
+++++Planting completed, Ray showered and put on fresh clothes. Eunice had gone to the club to engage in the usual chatter, fund-raising, and bridge playing that occupied her life. Ray thought he might go down to Ambly’s Ale House and check in with Lenny the bookie to see if the long-shot Nadine’s Rose came in. He thought he might make discreet inquiries about the state of Joe Ambly’s health, even directly to Joe if the old guy seemed in a good mood.
+++++The doorbell chime interrupted his plans. Ray opened the door to a man wearing dirty blue jeans and an untucked plaid shirt. “I want to talk to you about your landscaping,” the man said. His bleary eyes refused to settle on anything, and he seemed about to faint.
+++++Ray had seen the man before, sitting in an old blue and white Buick Roadmaster down the street for the past week, accompanied by a woman who reminded him of the woman from Clifton. Ray noted that the car had been parked in front of a different house each day.
+++++“I’m not interested,” Ray said.
+++++The man pushed his way into the house and withdrew a revolver from the back of his jeans.
+++++“I really want some money. Now fork over some coin, Pops,” he said.
+++++Ray stepped back. “I keep it in the kitchen for moments like this. Come right this way.”
+++++“No funny business,” the man said, following close behind Ray.
+++++Upon entering the kitchen, Ray snatched up a metal rolling pin his wife had left on the counter after making the crust for the chicken pot pie and smacked it across the man’s face. The man fell to the linoleum, still clutching the revolver. Ray jumped on the man and struggled to wrest away the weapon, wriggling between them like a hooked striped bass. The revolver discharged. Ray looked into the man’s eyes, which widened in surprise and then resignation, and Ray got up and with relief observed the small red stain on the man’s shirt.
+++++Ray placed the revolver deep in the utility drawer. He found a few dollars in one of the man’s jean’s pockets but no car keys. Those had undoubtedly been left with the girl who was waiting anxiously with the engine running for the wad of cash her hunter gatherer companion had been expected to find. The wallet, containing a Massachusetts license, revealed the man’s name was Calvin Douglas.
+++++“Well, Calvin, time to take a trip,” Ray said. “Let’s hurry before Eunice gets home.”
+++++The man still breathed, and the filthy plaid shirt he wore slowly dampened with blood.
+++++Grabbing Calvin’s shirt at the shoulders, Ray dragged the man out the back door, across the porch, down the porch stairs, and along the length of the lawn until he came to where he had just planted the two black currant bushes. Ray yanked the bushes out of the ground and began digging once again, making the hole wider and deeper. He then rolled the body of Calvin Douglas into the hole. Ray detected a pained sigh from the injured man. It sounded very much like his own sigh whenever he had sat in the bus seat for the morning commute. It was the sigh the bus made when he first released the emergency air-brake.
+++++He began shoveling dirt over the body. Who was going to miss some bum from Malden, Massachusetts, driving a beat-up Buick Roadmaster? Calvin Douglas hadn’t paid his dues by driving a bus into and out of Manhattan for thirty-five years. Calvin Douglas hadn’t paid any dues at all, Ray asserted to himself with each shovelful. Calvin Douglas and bums like him chose the easy way out, and it always led to disaster. Ray replanted the black currant bushes and tamped down the soil.
+++++Just as he completed his task, the woman he had been observing all week accompanying Calvin in the Buick Roadmaster appeared from around the forsythia bush. Slender and attractive, she wore torn jeans and a black T-shirt. Her shoulder-length blond hair looked freshly brushed. Judging by her tapered fingers and carefully applied red nail polish, Ray guessed that she had good manners and came from a good family. He was used to sizing up people quickly, attributing characteristics from the smallest bits of evidence, and he always trusted his first impressions. He wondered if she would call him Cowboy. Ray liked quality people. When he was a part-owner of Ambly’s Ale House, he would figure out a way to attract a quality crowd.
+++++“I’m not surprised to see you,” he said to the woman. “Are you looking to join him?”
+++++“I heard the shot,” she said. “I don’t think anybody else did. I’ve been watching.”
+++++He knew she had been the brains behind the failed operation. And now he detected threat in her blue eyes.
+++++“You did me a favor,” the woman said. “He was a pain right from the start.”
+++++He set aside his shovel and noticed that a little spot of blood had found its way onto the front of his clean shirt. He stared at the woman, sure she wanted something from him.
+++++“Now I can do you a favor,” she said.
+++++“What’s that?”
+++++“I want you to hire me as your housekeeper. Your wife put up a sign over at the supermarket.”
+++++“You do your research,” he said. He wanted her to say more, to reveal herself, but she remained silent.
+++++“My wife might want a say in who is hired as housekeeper,” he said.
+++++“What happened to the man who makes quick decisions and buries someone alive?” she said. “Do you really need to wait for your wife to see if I’m suitable to dust the sills.”
+++++She stared at him, and her stare communicated a threat.
+++++“I rode your bus one day. Into Manhattan and back again. I could feel the heat of your internalized rage. And I did not say hello to your dumb little teddy bear. I didn’t fall for that one.”
+++++He knew he was no match for her. She looked inside him, and he was afraid how little she might see there.
+++++“Come on. Let’s walk up to the house,” he said. He thought he could retrieve the revolver from the utility drawer and shoot her, but that would necessitate digging another grave and by that time Eunice might be home.
+++++“I can start work tomorrow,” she said.
+++++“My wife wants someone who can make tea sandwiches and mix drinks. She thinks she’s the Queen of England.”
+++++“I have a good upbringing,” she said. “I can do all that. Come on, Ray. You need me.”
+++++“How do you know my name?”
+++++“It’s right there in the bus. I’m Cathy, by the way. The man you buried was Cal. He had the misfortune of being lazy and dumb. There were easier marks than you, Ray. I cased this neighborhood. Plenty of people would have handed over their cash and jewelry, but I chose you, Ray, because I knew you had too much anger percolating inside to tolerate Cal’s nonsense. You proved me right.”
+++++“I’m honored,” he said.
+++++They walked into the kitchen. Ray felt relieved that there were no blood smears on the floor.
+++++“Why do you want this job?” Ray asked.
+++++“I need to get my feet back on the ground,” she said. “And besides, I wanted to team up with someone like you, Ray.”
+++++He began to feel as though she were a disease or parasite that resided inside him and needed to be expunged.
+++++Ray knew he wasn’t going to get an opportunity to buy into Ambly’s Ale House if he couldn’t figure out what this woman wanted and somehow get rid of her. “What is it you really want?” Ray asked. “You didn’t succeed in robbing me. Who are you going to try to rob next?”
+++++“Ray, I had no intention of robbing you. I used you to get rid of Cal, and you did a bang-up job, excuse my pun.”
+++++“Now what?”
+++++“I’m going for the easiest mark of all. Lenny the bookie, of course. He keeps scads of cash in his house. Your wife has been quite friendly with him in case you haven’t noticed.”
+++++Now he began to understand. Maybe Eunice was having an affair with Lenny. She got the really hot tips, Ray only got the lukewarm ones.
+++++“You’d better get out of here now. Come back at nine tomorrow ready to work. Tonight, I’ll tell Eunice I hired you.”
+++++“I’ll expect you to keep your word,” she said. “See you then.” She turned to go, flashing a knowing smile at him.
+++++“Where do you live?” he called after her.
+++++“In a crummy motel out on Route 220. I have a good discount. In time, maybe I’ll get to move in with you and Eunice. You have a lovely guest room, I’m sure.”
+++++“You come from a good family,” he said. “Why are you being like this?”
+++++“Like what?” she asked, but she got into the blue and white Buick Roadmaster and drove away, not giving him a chance to explain.
+++++The next morning, just before nine o’clock, Ray saw Eunice and Cathy speaking out on the driveway. When he had informed Eunice the evening before that he had hired Cathy as housekeeper, she accepted his decision with no complaint. It occurred to him that the two women might be colluding against him.
+++++Entering the house, Eunice said, “She’ll work out fine. I sent her out for some sandwich things. I’ve got the bridge club coming over this afternoon. What are your plans?”
+++++Ray had no plans other than going down to Ambly’s Ale House in the afternoon. “Maybe work in the garden a little,” he said.
+++++“I’ll have to check on those currant bushes you planted,” she said.
+++++“There’s nothing much to see,” he said. “They won’t bear fruit until next July and then not much.”
+++++She looked at him disparagingly, and he wondered if she knew anything he didn’t want her to know. He retreated to the garage to retrieve his gardening tools before walking to the end of the yard to make sure the burial ground was secure.
+++++Later, Ray observed that Cathy had done a nice job making tea sandwiches and cocktails for the bridge club. Five card tables had been set up in the living room. Cathy lingered in the kitchen awaiting any instructions that might issue from the din of chatter and bidding. Ray slipped into the kitchen to grab one of the extra sandwiches.
+++++“Your wife is happy with me,” Cathy said.
+++++“Don’t fool yourself,” he said. “She’s as threatening to you as Cal was to me. She’s drawing you close so she can do something horrible. You still have a chance to drive off and never return.”
+++++“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere until I get some of Lenny the bookie’s cash. He keeps a large amount of cash at his house. He launders some through the Ale House. I bet you didn’t know that, Ray. I’ve been watching. Even your wife is part of his operation. Those charity functions of hers are just laundry operations. Did you know that, Ray?”
+++++Ray shook his head. In all the years he had been driving a bus back and forth, his wife inhabited a world that grew and flourished outside his scope of understanding. Whenever Cathy spoke, he felt his ignorance biting him in his soul.
+++++After the bridge party, when Ray presumed Cathy had gone back to her motel or wherever she intended to do her spying, Eunice spoke to him as they ate leftover sandwiches for dinner.
+++++“I know all about the body back in the garden,” she said in an ice-water voice. “An innocent man,” she added.
+++++“He came here to rob me,” Ray said. “He had a revolver.”
+++++“Why didn’t you call the police?”
+++++“So they could ask me all sorts of questions on my first day of retirement? No thanks.”
+++++“And that girl you hired. I know you two are in cahoots. Do you think you could fool me? I wouldn’t be surprised if these sandwiches are poisoned.” She took a declarative bite and washed it down with a sip from her fifth highball of the day.
+++++“You can fire her if you want,” he said.
+++++“Fire her?” she snapped, getting up from the table. “Come with me into the guest room. I’ll show you what I did. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
+++++Together they walked down the hallway to the guest room. In the doorway, Eunice motioned to the twin bed farthest from them. Cathy reposed upon the bed, on her back, eyes shut, face placid.
+++++“She’s dead, Ray. I had to do it, just like you took care of that horrid friend of hers.”
+++++His initial shock at seeing the body of Cathy turned to relief that Eunice and he were now in this together. Evidence of each other’s crime reduced the likelihood of either of them going to the police. He could get his hands on some of the money she earned laundering cash for Lenny the bookie. He could invest in the Ale House and become an integral part of the operation. This was all going to work out beautifully.
+++++“I guess I’ll have to bury her then,” he said.
+++++“No, Ray, that won’t work,” she said. She swung a cast-steel pipe wrench, a lovely old tool that Ray had picked up at a yard sale, and hit Ray in the side of the head. Guided by Eunice’s sturdy hands, he dropped onto the unoccupied twin bed. Eunice hit Ray’s head again with the pipe wrench, and fireworks flashed in his vision and then faded like dying embers in a nighttime sky.
+++++“By the way,” he heard Eunice say, “Nadine’s Rose won by a length. I’ll enjoy that nice payout.”
+++++He struggled to see life again, blue skies, tall glasses of beer, the expectation of a strange, cultivated woman in a dark, intimate room smelling like soiled clothes, and in the final sliver of consciousness allotted to him, he looked toward Cathy, lying on the other twin bed. He noticed that she had turned her head toward him. Her eyes were now open. She winked and mouthed the word “sorry,” and that was the last thing he saw.

[Image Credit : Photo by Mohammadreza Charkhgard on Unsplash ]

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Chris Fortunato

Chris Fortunato is a former editor at Bantam Books. His first collection of stories, Deadly Guests, will be released in February 2024. In a pre-publication review, Kirkus called Deadly Guests, "devilishly entertaining. A gritty, impressive collection of dark tales."

Latest posts by Chris Fortunato (see all)

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