Three by Cain: Serenade/Love's Lovely Counterfeit/The Butterfly

by James M. Cain

  “Looks like we’re in.”

  “Looks like it. Four more years.”

  Again it was daybreak when Ben got home to his hotel, and he undressed slowly, with pauses while he scratched his head and frowned. Then, when the light was off, he lay there in the gray murk, staring at the ceiling, thinking, concentrating. Then his hand went up in the air, a thick middle finger met thick thumb and hesitated a fraction of a second. Then came the snap, like a pistol shot, and he reached for the phone.

  “We’re early birds this time, Mr. Grace.”

  “What time is it, by the way?”

  “I have five-thirty.”

  “O.K., we got the road to ourselves.”

  “And what is the big idea?”

  “Why would they put him in a barrel?”

  “Now that, I can’t even imagine.”

  “I couldn’t either, till a half hour ago. I heard about this concrete overcoat, as they call it. But then, when I got to thinking about it, the more I thought the dumber it seemed. I mean, it looked like going out of your way to be crazy, putting yourself to a whole lot of trouble and not getting any advantage out of it. But that’s one thing about friend Sol; he never does anything without a reason—unless he gets sore at you or something, and flies off the handle, but even then there’s generally something in it for Solly. So I thought and I thought. And the only case I could remember, I don’t know if I saw it in movies or read about it in the papers, was a bunch in New York that knocked off a guy and put him in concrete and dropped him in the East River. Does that mean something to you?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “They put him in concrete to sink him!”

  In the early morning light every grain of powder stood out on her face, and what seemed passably girlish at other times was now woman, squinting at him, trying to guess his meaning. Talking as he drove, he went on: “If it would stay down, there’s no place for a body like deep water, is there? But it won’t. Pretty soon it’s coming up, and ain’t that nice? But—imbedded in concrete it’ll stay down. Then it’s really out of sight, and I guess that’s why Lefty was bragging to me, how fine this guy was put away.”

  “… you mean the lake?”

  “It’s the only deep water around here.”

  He spoke with the exultant tone of one who has already solved his problem, but when they arrived at Lake Koquabit they both fell silent, their spirits somewhat dampened. It looked, indeed, quite big; certainly its five miles of length and two of width were sufficiently appalling if Ben had had some idea of dragging the bottom for one barrel of concrete. Slowly they began running past the cat tail marshes on the south shore. Then presently she asked, “How did they get it into the East River?”

  “Boat, I think.”

  “That would be pretty hard here.”

  “Why?”

  “Well—what boat?”

  “Sol has a boat.”

  “Is it big? Concrete is heavy.”

  “Big enough. It’s a cruiser.”

  “Where does he keep it?”

  “In front of his shack. Moored to a buoy.”

  “Then they didn’t use that.… To get it out to the cruiser they’d have had to put it in the rowboat, and that would have been impossible. Or else they would have had to run their car, with the barrel aboard, out on a dock, and run the cruiser around to meet it, and the only dock they could have used would have been the Lakeside Country Club dock, and they’d have run the risk of meeting late poker players, or the watchman, or yacht parties—they simply couldn’t have risked it. And besides, they were caught by surprise, from the way you said Lefty acted the other night. They had to get rid of this body in a hurry, and they had no time for a complicated maneuver with a car, a cruiser, and wharf, and I don’t know what all.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe they rolled it into the lake direct.”

  “How?”

  “Just push it to the top of a bank and let it go plopping down over the sand. Unless it hit rocks or something it would keep on rolling, even under water, for quite a way. Anyway, until it was out of sight.”

  “We’ll look for marks.”

  They rode along more purposefully now, their eyes staring at the shore. Once or twice, where the road ran out of sight of the water, she got out and looked, from the top of the bank. But at the end of a mile they had seen nothing, and hadn’t even come to a place where a barrel could have been rolled in, considering the problem of the marsh. Then they came to the bridge, and he instinctively pressed the brake, and they looked at each other.

  “This is it, Ben. This is where they got rid of it. It was right on their way out from town, and there was no other place. Especially not at night.”

  To him at least, her confidence didn’t seem at all farfetched. Koquabit, local philologists agreed, came from the Navajo “K’kabe-bik-eeshachi,” meaning silver arrow, and this is a fair description of the lake’s geography. The lake proper was shaped like an arrow’s point, with barbs and all. Making into it was a small lagoon, known as the Inlet, and shaped like the wedge to which the shaft is attached. And Lowry Run, emptying into the inlet, would make a sort of shaft. Connecting inlet and lake was a deep narrows, perhaps two hundred yards across, and it was over this that the bridge ran that they had now come to. It was, as she said, about the only place where a barrel of concrete could be conveniently disposed of, at least by a panicky crew of thugs anxious only to do their work and run.

  Ben started over the bridge in low gear, and they both saw the mark at the same time: a white, zigzagging scratch that would be just about the trail left by a heavy barrel if it were rolled over the concrete parapet. They stopped, counted spans, and then he raced for the end of the bridge, and presently for a side road that forked off the main highway, and made off through the trees.

  “You know where you are, June?”

  “Haven’t the slightest idea.”

  They had nosed up behind a pleasant shingled house, and stopped, and got out. “This is Solly’s shack.”

  “Oh, my—are we safe?”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Throwing off the burglar alarm. That’ll help.”

  He peered under the eaves of a garage, found a switch, and threw it off. Then he led the way, by a narrow board walk, around front, and then down to a boathouse at the water’s edge. “What in the world are you up to?”

  “You’ll see. We got to find that barrel.”

  Under the rubber mat he found a key, unlocked the little building, and they went inside. At the warm, stuffy smell he started to raise a window, but she stopped him. “I can stand a little heat, even if it’s not as fresh as it might be. This morning air has me shivering.”

  “O.K. Now if you’ll turn your back …”

  “I won’t look, but I refuse to go out.”

  Apparently in completely familiar territory, he took a pair of shorts from a rack, pitched them on a camp chair. Then he began dropping off his clothes, folding them neatly on another chair. In a moment or two he stood stark naked. Then he was in the shorts, finding a pair of canvas shoes to slip on his feet. “You’d better take your coat, Ben.”

  “Guess that wouldn’t hurt.”

  “While we’re paddling over, anyway.”

  “You handle a canoe?”

  “Oh, well enough.”

  The way she shipped the paddles, however, rolled back the front door, and helped carry the canoe down to the float, indicated she was more expert than she said. When the boat was in the water she had him hold it a moment, while she raced back for the bag of shot she had spied near the camp chairs. “If you’re going to be overboard, it’ll keep the bow down.”

  “You better take stern right now.”

  “All right, you sit forward.”

  He climbed in the bow, his light overcoat around him, she in the stern. It was less than half a mile, straight across the water, from the shack to the bridge, and it didn’t take
them long to get there. Presently he slipped his paddle under the strut, caught the abutment, dropped his coat, and stood up.

  “You getting out, Ben?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then move the shot bag.”

  Holding the gunwale, he reached for the bag of shot, caught it, and hefted it forward, clear into the bow. It brought the bow down, but when he stepped on the narrow ledge that ran around the abutment, the boat righted itself. He stood, looking first at the bridge above him, then at the water below, shivering only slightly, managing quite a businesslike air. She swung the boat under the bridge, out of his way and out of sight from above. Then, marking a spot with his eye, he went off.

  He was up in a flash, his eyes rolling absurdly, his breath coming in the gasps that only extreme cold can induce. Then a low moan escaped him, and he struck out for the ledge. A stroke or two brought him to it, and he tried to climb out, but couldn’t. There were no handholds by which he could pull himself up, and not enough space for his body while he drew up his legs. He gave one or two frantic kicks, as though he would throw himself out by main force. Then he turned and lunged for the boat. “Ben! Watch it!”

  It wasn’t the shriek of a girl afraid of a ducking. It was the low, vibrant command of a woman who remembered they were half a mile from car and clothes; that a canoe capsized with a bag of shot in the bow would certainly sink; that it would be no trouble for Mr. Caspar to guess what they were doing there; that life thereafter would take on a highly hazardous aspect. Her tone must have reached him, for the hand that was raised to grasp the gunwale didn’t grasp it. It slapped back into the water, and he went under, gulping. He came up driving with arms and legs for the shore.

  She shot the canoe onto the gravel just ahead of him, stepped to the bow, and jumped out. Seizing his hand, she ran him up and down the beach, until he was a little dry and a little pink, instead of blue. Then she whipped up his overcoat from the bow of the canoe, put it on him, and held it tight against him, her arms around his body. Only then did he begin to talk: a lame, chattering explanation of his sorry performance. It seemed that he had forgotten the peculiarity of the lake, that it remained at an icy temperature until Lowry Run dried up, in July, and the inflow of cold water stopped, giving the sun a chance. However, he said, just let him get his second wind and then he’d go down again.

  She listened, and when his shivering stopped they climbed into the canoe and shoved off. They paddled back to the spot they had left and sat silent, he trying to screw up his courage to drop off his coat again and go off. The boat began to shake, shiver, and twist, but he didn’t have the curiosity to look and see what she was doing back there. He stared vacantly, first at the sunlight that was now touching the hills back of the shore, then at the water. When the boat went down like an elevator, until the water was within a few inches of the gunwale, he gave a frightened yelp, and only then did he turn his head. The stern was sticking straight up in the air, and she was on the ledge, in pants and brassiere, smiling at him.

  “Hadn’t you better move aft?”

  “Guess that would be a good idea.”

  She was but a few feet away, and certainly quite an eyeful, but there was no desire in the look he gave her, after he had crawled aft, and adjusted feet, paddle, and coat to the feminine clothes that were draped over the strut. There was only relief; somebody else had taken over his dreadful task. She continued to smile, but checked all details in the boat with her eye, particularly that the shot in the bow made it easily manageable. Only when he was safely settled did she catch the truss above her, chin herself, pull up her feet, and complete the first stage of her climb. Then she reached the top of the parapet and stood there, a pink figurine in the pink morning sunlight, scanning the road for cars. His voice rumbled up, a little peevish: “Look, I’m getting dizzy. If you don’t turn around you’ll be going over backwards.”

  “I am going over backwards.”

  “You’re—what?”

  “Well, what’s the use of doing a front dive and winding up ten feet further out than I want to get? With a nice back dive I’ll half circle around and come right down on the barrel. You haven’t forgotten our darling little barrel, have you?”

  “If you come down on it.”

  “Oh, I’ll come down.”

  “Little cold down there, you’ll notice.”

  “Oh, for a man, yes.”

  “Oh, a woman don’t feel cold?”

  “Not the way a man does, I’ve noticed it often. I don’t care what the weather is, a man’s got himself all bundled up in exactly twice as many clothes as a woman wears. Why, look in any street car, and—”

  “You haven’t forgotten our barrel, have you?”

  “Oh, that.”

  A shadow crossed his face, and he looked up to see her in the sky, her arms out, her head back, her back arched in a perfect back dive. Then she floated over, and struck the water with a quick, foamy splash that shot high in the air. She was down a long time; then she came up, with gasps like the gasps that had shaken him. With one hand she pitched a barrel hoop into the canoe, with the other a lump of wet concrete.

  “Know what I’m thinking?”

  “Look, June, I’m thinking. Cut the comedy.”

  “I’m thinking how funny you looked. When you came up. And you started to snort. And your eyes started to roll. You looked like a wet puppy.”

  “O.K., so I looked like a wet puppy.”

  “A wet puppy.”

  It had been Ben’s turn to shoot the canoe up on the gravel, run the shivering swimmer up and down the shore, and wrap her in a coat. They had taken turns in the boathouse, to dress, and felt a little better when they were back in the car, their clothes on, the motor giving heat. But it wasn’t until they got their breakfast that they felt like themselves again. They came to a bar-b-q place, and being afraid to go in together, for fear they might be recognized, they ran a little past it, and Ben went back for hot dogs and pasteboard containers full of scalding hot coffee. Then they ran into a woods, stopped the car, and sat there munching like a pair of wolves. Then she began to talk. He tolerated her kittenishness for a moment or two, but quickly returned to the business in hand.

  “What day is today?”

  “Saturday.”

  “You have another meeting tonight?”

  “The last of the campaign.”

  “Where?”

  “Municipal Stadium. We were going to have it at Civic Auditorium, but we’ve been drawing so much bigger crowds lately that we decided to make it a big outdoor rally.”

  “Then spill it.”

  “You’re sure we found what we were looking for?”

  “A barrel don’t prove it yet. Maybe somebody else rolled a barrel down there, or one fell overboard while they were building the bridge. But it’s as good as we can do, and sooner or later we got to take a chance.”

  “I was going to, anyway.”

  “Then I’ll call the Pioneer.”

  “Beforehand?”

  “Oh, I don’t tell them all of it. I just say it’s their pal Jack Horner again, and Rossi’s body has been found, and you’ll tell where at tonight’s meeting. It’ll build up the crowd.”

  “So I know what to tell the reporters.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “I said you looked funny.”

  “Some people got a funny sense of humor.”

  She reached out with her finger and smoothed the crease between his brows, imitating what he had once or twice done to her. However, he caught her hand and put it aside. “You ought not to be laughing at people. You’re an idealist, or supposed to be.”

  “Can’t an idealist think a chiseler looks funny?”

  “That don’t work.”

  “It might.”

  “No.”

  C H A P T E R

  5

  Lights were pleasantly soft in the big room at the Columbus, and humors were high, almost hectic. Sol had visitors: his wife, rather dressed up, and looking a
little queer, with her old-world face under a stylish hat; Inspector Cantrell, of the city police, a dapper man in a double-breasted suit; a florid blonde named Irene, in a black satin dress, who had come with the Inspector; and Giulio, a barber. Giulio still wore his white coat, and had come, as a matter of fact, toward the end of the afternoon, to trim Sol’s hair. But he had been prevailed upon to stay for dinner and a bellboy had been sent for his accordion; accompanying himself on this, he now gave a series of vocal selections, in a high tenor voice that kept breaking into grace notes. But he would get only two or three numbers sung when Sol would say: “Sing the Miserere,” and he would have to launch into Trovatore, becoming chorus, soprano, tenor, and orchestra all rolled into one. It is only fair to say that this simplification of the number seemed to improve it.

  Ben sat in the shadows, as did Lefty, Bugs, and Goose; they said little and laughed much, as befitted their rank. When eight o’clock came, Lefty tuned in the Municipal Stadium, and cheers came out of the radio, as well as hints by the speakers of disclosures to come. Sol began to clown the discovery of Rossi’s body, under the piano, in the radio, behind Giulio’s chair. Once, when he yanked open a closet door, Mr. Cantrell’s eyes narrowed suddenly at the unmistakable sheen of rifle butts. At each antic the blonde would scream with laughter, say, “Ain’t he the limit,” and pick up her highball glass. It would be hard to say what lay back of these monkeyshines; whether the whole Rossi question was absurd, whether June was thus due to make a fool of herself, or whether they covered real nervousness. At any rate, Sol was loud, silly, and irritating, for the grins around him were masks. Underneath, these revelers were worried.

  Presently, to a volley of comedy from Sol, June was introduced and came on. She took perhaps five minutes on the subject at large, on teamwork, organization, getting voters to the polls next Tuesday, the necessity for electing Mr. Jansen. Then quietly she said she would tell why it was necessary to elect Mr. Jansen, and began to talk about Arch Rossi. She told of her visit that day to Mrs. Rossi, the boy’s mother, and to his sister and three little brothers. She told what a good boy he had been, on the testimony of all, until he fell in with the Caspar gang. She told about the Castleton robbery, and the part Arch had played in it, of the way he had been shot, and how he had been brought to the Globe Hotel. She told how he had called up Bob Herndon, and had himself brought to the Columbus, so he could see Caspar, and ask for some decent medical attention.