by Roy Huggins
“Have I got a choice?”
“No.”
“I’ll help.”
“You’ll never have a choice, Danny. If anything ever happens because of you, I’ll swear you were in it from the start. Do you think they’ll believe you or me?”
“Don’t rub it in.”
She helped him take the blue topcoat from Alan’s stiffening body and watched him put it on. She threw the hat to him and told him not to turn the brim down in back. He put it on.
“What do we do with that?”
She lifted the handbag over to him and told him what he would find in it, and gave him instructions. But she didn’t help. She had him remove the things from Alan’s pockets and put them in the bag, then he tied the weights and the fish line around the legs and arms. Jane took the boat to the center of the lake and waited until the other boats were a long way off. Then they picked Alan’s body up and lifted it over the side and lowered it slowly. The dark water closed round it silently.
She had Danny scrub the boat again and she gave him more instructions, telling him what to do if a dozen things, that would never happen, occurred. She warned him that Alan had left his cigarettes somewhere, perhaps at the fountain in the pavilion, and that he should keep to the right going through the pavilion and not hear it if anyone called to him.
Then they took the boat in. Jane got out first, smiled at the boy in the basque shirt and said,” I have something for you.”
His eyes bugged slightly and stayed on Jane’s face. He said, “Yeah?” Jane gave him a dollar and said, “That’s for getting us a boat so soon.” Danny had gone on up the stairs now. Jane paid for the boat and hurried after him. The girl at the fountain was busy, but she looked up and saw Jane looking at her and nodded. Jane smiled at her and went on out. Danny was at the wheel. They put the top up and drove to the Château Michel.
DANNY eased the nose of the car down the ramp slowly, ready to put the car in reverse and back out if Pete was too near the entrance. But Pete wasn’t in sight, and Danny pulled into the Palmer parking space and Jane jumped out. She walked down the long line of cars until she found Pete waxing an ancient black sedan. She called to him from the center of the aisle, so that he would have to come out where he would see the convertible with a man at the wheel and the sleeve of the familiar coat resting along the door. She said Mr. Palmer wanted to get the car waxed tonight if possible.
“Sure thing, Mrs. Palmer.”
“Fine.” She turned and nodded. That was Danny’s signal to back the car out. She called out, “Oh, Alan! Get some cigarettes while you’re there!” The sleeved arm waved and the car backed up the ramp and disappeared. She smiled at Pete and said, “He’s going down and see if he can talk the corner drugstore out of some after-hours whisky.”
Pete allowed that it probably wouldn’t be too hard to do. He excused himself and went back to work on the black sedan. Jane walked back down and took the elevator to the seventh floor. She knocked lightly at Kathy’s door.
The door opened and Kathy stood there looking very small and very sleepy.
Jane laughed. “Did I get you up?”
“No,” she smiled. “I was reading on the couch. Guess I dozed.”
Jane went in and sat down and said, “Alan’s gone down to the comer to get a quart. Will you have a nightcap with us?”
Kathy was touched. “Fine idea. Frankly, I was afraid you were miffed with me.”
“Don’t be silly.”
They sat, talking around the silences like people having difficulty keeping their footing on a hard climb.
Jane was watching the time. In twelve minutes she said, “Wonder what’s keeping him?”
“It’s after hours, Jane. He’s probably having a little trouble talking them into it.”
“I suppose that’s it.” She waited six minutes more and said, “Kathy, will you call the garage and ask Pete if he’s seen Alan.”
Kathy nodded, and Jane felt a sudden warmth of confidence and achievement. Having Kathy call was an added touch, a creative act that lifted and strengthened her.
Kathy came back and said, “Pete says he hasn’t seen him since he came in with you.” Jane looked down at the floor, trying to let the feeling of triumph die, so she could carry on with what she had to do.
She stood up and said, “I’m going to see if he’s in our apartment. I told him I’d be here with you.”
In her apartment, Jane locked the door. That wouldn’t look good if Kathy came down, but it would look worse if Kathy found her putting the gun back and taking Alan’s wallet, pen and miscellaneous notes from her bag.
Kathy was making coffee when Jane came back. “He isn’t there.”
“Don’t worry about it. Why don’t you call the drugstore?”
Jane did that. The man at the drugstore said Mr. Palmer hadn’t been in at all that evening. Jane felt a moment of genuine surprise, then she laughed inwardly and thought, That’s the thing, believe it. Alan isn’t lying in the mud of a cold lake. He’s gone somewhere. He told me he was going after liquor, and it was a lie. He didn’t go. He has left me.
There was consternation and surprise and incipient anger in her face when she turned to Kathy and said. “He didn’t go to the drugstore at all.”
“Don’t worry about it, Jane. He hasn’t been gone a half hour yet. I’m making you some coffee.”
They sat and drank coffee, and the silence lengthened and became eloquent. Jane told herself that Kathy was accepting Alan’s disappearance, that she was attributing it to Alan’s having found out about the man she had heard Jane talking to on the phone.
Jane stood up and said, “What should I do?”
“You should go to bed and forget about it until you know something’s really happened, I’ll go help you.” That was fine. Jane would have asked her to come if Kathy hadn’t volunteered. Jane needed a witness to her going to bed. She would keep Kathy there for an hour or two and then send her home. Jane undressed and Kathy helped by hanging up her things.
Slipping into her negligee, Jane said, “Don’t leave, Kathy. I couldn’t sleep. Stay for a little while, will you?”
“Of course.”
Jane picked up the phone and carried it to the chesterfield and sat down with her feet tucked under her. “I keep thinking he’ll call.”
Kathy nodded. They talked about Alan then, and Jane found that she could talk about him and remember him and feel a warm sorrow. But it touched her only faintly and a little sadly and without remorse.
Almost an hour passed. Jane lifted the receiver and dialed the operator. She asked to be connected with police headquarters. She heard the whir of the phone at the other end, a girl answered, and Jane said, “My husband is missing and I——”
“One moment, please.”
The distant whir and a man’s voice saying, “Business office.”
“I want to get help to find my husband. He——”
“Lady, the Missing Persons Detail closes at five p.m.”
“But . . . you mean that you can’t do anything tonight?”
“How long’s he been missing?”
“Almost two hours. He was just going up to the corner.”
“Lady, there’s nothing we can do tonight except take your report. You come down here tomorrow and make a report in person—if he hasn’t shown up yet—and we’ll go to work on it.”
“Then you won’t even check on accidents or anything tonight?”
“We just haven’t got the staff for it, Mrs.—What is your name? I’ll be glad to take a report.”
So Jane made her report and hung up and forced herself to think bitter thoughts about the Los Angeles police because Kathy was watching her.
She told Kathy what had been said, and Kathy shook her head and asked, “Can I fix you something to drink, Jane?”
Jane nodded, looking sad, Kathy stood up and went into the kitchen. And Jane’s stomach suddenly pulled up into a tight and sickening knot, and she leaped up and stood with her fist
to her mouth, wanting to scream at Kathy to come back, wanting to wave her arm and wipe Katherine Palmer away. But it was too late. It was a little thing again, just a tiny thing that she had given no thought to. But it was an error, and it could kill—
She sat down again, cold and shaken, hearing the dainty sound of ice cubes dropped into glasses. She could see Kathy now, opening the cupboard and seeing the bottles there. There was everything there, the best. It had been one of the things Jane had spent the money on that Alan had complained of. Stocking their larder. She heard the sound of the siphon, then the rhythmic tinkle as Kathy carried the two glasses into the room.
Jane forced herself to look up, and to keep the terror from her eyes. Kathy was biting her lower Up with the earnestness of her effort to keep from spilling the drinks balanced on a tiny tray. Jane took one of the glasses, and the tray tipped up a little and some of Kathy’s spilled, Kathy laughed. So she hadn’t noticed. Sweet, kind, thoughtful, innocent Kathy hadn’t thought of it yet. But she would. She would. Oh, just give her time!
Jane tasted the drink, and it was flat and without warmth. Kathy sipped at hers and talked about things that could have happened to Alan that were not at all serious. Jane put her halffinished drink aside behind the lamp, out of the way. Why didn’t Kathy finish hers? Why did she sit there sipping at it, holding it up in front of her face like a simpering schoolgirl? Why didn’t she drink it, get it out of the way, forget it?
It was a long time before Kathy finished. And Jane hadn’t thought of what she would say when it finally got through to Kathy that she had mixed two highballs out of good bonded bourbon.
Kathy stood up and said, “Where’s your glass?”
“Oh, right here. I guess I didn’t finish it. I don’t care for another.”
Jane took the glass out from behind the lamp and handed it to Kathy. The girl gave her a puzzled look and stepped over to take it. She froze, her hand outstretched. It dropped slowly to her side, and she stood staring down at Jane. Jane was fighting the terror that was rising in her, telling herself that it didn’t prove anything, that she was stronger than Kathy. She looked up and met Kathy’s dark eyes, that were round and full of doubt and slow fear.
Kathy’s voice was high and small and pinched. “Why should Alan have gone for a bottle of something? You have everything in there—everything!”
It was Jane who looked away. “You’re right,” she whispered, and put a note of wonder in her voice. “It means he never intended to go to the drugstore.”
Kathy sat down slowly and waited until Jane looked at her again. She said, “Where’s Alan, Jane?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Are you trying to tell me that both of you forgot you had a cupboard full of liquor?”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything. Why should I? Alan told me he was going after a bottle. It just didn’t occur to me that we didn’t need it!”
Kathy said nothing.
“What did you mean by asking me ‘Where’s Alan?’ ”
“I don’t know, Jane. I’m sorry. I got excited.”
Jane stood up. “I’m going to bed. I know nothing’s happened to him now.”
“Yes.”
They said their good nights and Kathy was gone. Jane stood and glared at the door. Kathy. What was she thinking? What could she possibly suspect? Forget it. Kathy was the kind the world turned out by the millions, like things turned out on a machine, the female equivalent of Alan, conforming, cowardly, without strength. Jane remembered that yesterday she had cried. She had cried because she believed that she was going to kill Alan. And she had killed him, irrationally, in terror, out of the idiocy of accident. But the thing she had done had given her a renewed strength, a renewed awareness. She had rediscovered herself, and she knew that she would never cry again.
SHE dressed in the darkest clothes she could find, put the things from Alan’s pockets into a paper sack and the service automatic into her handbag. She pulled on gloves, turned off the lights and listened carefully at the door. She opened it quietly, stepped out and walked down the six flights of stairs and out by the side entrance. She walked rapidly up Farrel to the place where she had told Danny to take the car. She knew Danny would be there, because Danny wanted his money. And she knew that he wanted all of it.
The car was there, tucked in neatly between the board and the building. But Danny wasn’t in it. She slid under the wheel to wait. It didn’t worry her. Danny was being cautious again. He would be around. Fifteen minutes later, the door opened and Danny was standing there with a hand in the pocket of Alan’s coat, pushing it out at her. There was something else in the pocket too. That was what he was pointing at her through the cloth.
He said, “All right, tiger, give me that canister you were waving around down at the lake.”
“Canister?”
“The gun, and I’ll take it butt first.” Jane laughed lightly. “Danny, you haven’t got a gun in that pocket, and I haven’t got a gun with me to give you. So stop being silly and kiss me.”
“First I’ll have the gun.”
“I don’t have one. Do you want me to get out and let you search me?”
“That might be fun.”
“Except that we have a lot to do tonight if you want that money. I can’t take a chance on being gone too long.”
Danny pondered that. Then he grinned and took his hand out of his packet. There was a bent stick of wood in the hand. He looked at it wryly and said, “Can’t do much with this, anyway.” He threw it away and got into the car. He pulled Jane against him and she let his lips have their way with her for a while, then she pushed him away and said, “Danny, wait. We’ve got a lifetime ahead of us. But right now every minute counts.”
He let go of her slowly, “I didn’t know they made ’em as beautiful as you, tiger,” he said huskily. “I didn’t know they made ’em as hard as you either.”
Jane wasn’t listening to what he said. She backed the car out, dropped down to Sunset by a side street and turned west. She drove slowly, stopping clean for all signals, slowing almost to a stop for the yellow lights. By the time they reached Bel-Air, it was well after midnight and the traffic had dropped away to nothing.
Danny said, “Don’t tell me you buried the dough.”
“What else?”
“Almost anything else.”
“You’ve never told me, Danny, how you happened to know we had the money.”
“I didn’t know for sure. I knew I didn’t get it. I was in the car that followed you down the hill.”
“Where did it—I mean, how did—it happen that way?”
“I’ll tell you that when I see the dough.”
At Belagio Road she swung right and started up the grade into the hills. There were great, shrub-hidden houses along here set about two hundred feet apart, but as the road climbed higher they became fewer, and then there was a mile of twisting road cut out of the hillside, with a sheer drop to the right, and here there were no houses at all. The car picked up speed.
Danny had fallen quiet and Jane could feel him begin to stiffen. Silently the tension grew inside the car, and Jane knew that she must think of something to dispel it, to get Danny relaxed and off his guard. She glanced at him and smiled, but he didn’t see it. He was staring out at the dark road, his jaw set, a few tiny beads of sweat standing on his brow.
The road turned back on itself and leveled out, and below them in the distance stretched the long straight prongs of light that marked Wilshire and the other boulevards that forked out from the city toward the sea. Here there were more houses, smaller, set down from the road with their backs turned to it aloofly. The road turned sharply again and a big sleek car loomed up broadside before them. Jane drove her foot against the brake and the car lurched upward, tires screaming, and jolted to a stop. The big car was pulling out of one of the driveways, and it was almost facing them now.
There was a sudden movement beside her, and Jane turned and saw Danny Fuller going o
ut.
He slammed the door and turned and shouted, “Not this time, tiger! Not Danny Fuller! I’ll see you sometime when there’s daylight, and a million people around! And I’ll get my dough! Don’t worry about that!”
He was off down the road, running fast, and the big car’s lights were on him and on her. There was nothing she could do. The car roared by, lighting the way in the direction Danny had gone. But she knew Danny hadn’t stayed on the road. There was no use turning, no use searching. He was gone.
She sat and looked out across the long hood at the blue infinity of sky and let her mind turn slowly. And she knew that she felt only warm relief. Let him go. She had thought it necessary that Danny should die. And now she wondered at herself and was appalled. There was no menace in him. He would never tell. He would make no move against her until he knew where the money was. And before he knew that, she would be gone from here. She would be in Mexico. She shook her golden head slowly, and she almost smiled. She doubted that she could have killed Danny anyway. Let him go.
And then quite suddenly the whole dark vault of the night closed in on her and smothered her, an emetic that sickened through her and twisted her as hands tore at the key and feet jabbed wildly to start the car, to make it move, to carry her out of there, back down the road. To find Danny Fuller, who was wearing a dark blue topcoat, who carried in the lining of that coat the key to a dream.
TWO hours later Jane gave up. She had no choice. There were things to be done. She drove down to Pacific Palisades and turned onto Chautauqua, which dropped abruptly down onto the highway. The ocean was rough and noisy and menacing. Jane drove along beside it, feeling the bitter cold of it and yet being quieted by it. Its dark and lonely bulk belittled her and her problem. And she drew strength from it, and hope. There was a chance that Danny would do nothing with the coat just yet. He wouldn’t just throw it away, because he was involved in Alan’s death. He would want to be rid of it safely. That might take time. And Jane had the number he had given her. She would find him. She would give Danny half the money, if necessary. She would find him.