A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women

by Elizabeth George

  I hate you, Uncle Paul. I’ll never be like you. Never.

  I walked over to the drunk, still sprawled on the platform. I was a sleepwalker; my arm lifted itself. I jabbed the butt of my gun into old, thin ribs, feeling it bump against bone. It would be a baseball-size bruise. First a raw red-purple, then blue-violet, finally a sickly yellow-gray.

  I lifted my foot, just high enough to land with a thud near the kidneys. The old drunk grunted, his mouth falling open. A drizzle of saliva fell to the ground. He put shaking hands to his face and squeezed his eyes shut. I lifted my foot again. I wanted to kick and kick and kick.

  Uncle Paul, a frozen lump of meat found by some transit cop on the aboveground platform at 161st Street. The Yankee Stadium stop, where he took me when the Yanks played home games. We’d eat at the Yankee Tavern, me wolfing down a corned beef on rye and cream soda, Uncle Paul putting away draft beer after draft beer.

  Before he died, Uncle Paul had taken all the coins out of his pocket, stacking them in neat little piles beside him. Quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies. An inventory of his worldly goods.

  I took a deep, shuddering breath, looked down at the sad old man I’d brutalized. A hot rush of shame washed over me.

  I knelt down, gently moving the frail, blue-white hands away from the near-transparent face. The fear I saw in the liquid blue eyes sent a piercing ray of self-hatred through me.

  If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk. Me too, Manny, I can’t stand women drunks either.

  The old man’s lips trembled; tears filled his eyes and rolled down his thin cheeks. He shook his head from side to side, as though trying to wake himself from a bad dream.

  “Why?” he asked, his voice a raven’s croak.

  “Because I loved you so much.” The words weren’t in my head anymore, they were slipping out into the silent, empty world of the ghost station. As though Uncle Paul weren’t buried in Calvary Cemetery but could hear me with the ears of this old man who looked too damn much like him. “Because I wanted to be just like you. And I am.” My voice broke. “I’m just like you, Uncle Paul. I’m a drunk.” I put my head on my knee and sobbed like a child. All the shame of my drinking days welled up in my chest. The stupid things I’d said and done, the times I’d had to be taken home and put to bed, the times I’d thrown up in the street outside the bar. If there’s one thing I can’t stand…

  “Oh, God, I wish I were dead.”

  The bony hand on mine felt like a talon. I started, then looked into the old man’s watery eyes. I sat in the ghost station and saw in this stranger the ghost that had been my dying uncle.

  “Why should you wish a thing like that?” the old man asked. His voice was clear, no booze-blurred slurring, no groping for words burned out of the brain by alcohol. “You’re a young girl. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

  My whole life. To be continued…

  One day at a time. One night at a time.

  When I got back to the District, changed out of my work clothes, showered, would there be a meeting waiting for me? Damn right; in the city that never sleeps, A.A. never sleeps either.

  I reached out to the old man. My fingers brushed his silver stubble.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Paul,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  New Moon and Rattlesnakes

  WENDY HORNSBY

  Wendy Hornsby (b. 1947) was born in Los Angeles and educated at UCLA and California State University, Long Beach. Since 1975, she has been a Professor of History at Long Beach City College. Her first novel, No Harm (1987), featured history teacher Kate Teague, who figured in one more case before she was succeeded by the better-known documentary filmmaker Maggie MacGowen in Telling Lies (1992) and several subsequent books. Though both series characters are technically amateur detectives, their law enforcement connections put Hornsby’s books into the police procedural category. Asked to identify influences, Hornsby pays obeisance to the California hardboiled triumvirate of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald but identifies as her real role model the wife of Macdonald, Margaret Millar. Outside the mystery genre, she noted in Deadly Women (1998), “As a kid I read my way through Dickens, a huge influence on a budding hard-boiled writer, and Mark Twain who is the master of characterization, and Ambrose Bierce because he was so wicked.”

  In recent times, the distinctions between tough and cozy, masculine and feminine approaches to crime fiction have become less pronounced and in most cases less important than they used to be. Hornsby’s “New Moon and Rattlesnakes” is a noir-ish story that would have been right at home in the great 1950s digest Manhunt, a periodical to which few women writers contributed.

  Lise caught a ride at a truck stop near Riverside, in a big rig headed for Phoenix. The driver was a paunchy, lonely old geek whose come-on line was a fatherly routine. She helped him play his line because it got her inside the air-conditioned cab of his truck and headed east way ahead of her schedule. “Sweet young thing like you shouldn’t be thumbing rides,” he said, helping Lise with her seat belt. “Desert can be awful damn dangerous in the summertime.” “I know the desert. Besides…” She put her hand over his hairy paw. “I’m not so young and there’s nothing sweet about me.” He laughed, but he looked at her more closely. Looked at the heavy purse she carried with her, too. After that long look, he dropped the fatherly routine. She was glad, because she didn’t have a lot of time to waste on preliminaries. The tired old jokes he told her got steadily gamier as he drove east out Interstate 10. Cheap new housing tracts and pink stucco malls gave way to a landscape of razor-sharp yucca and shimmering heat, and all the way Lise laughed at his stupid jokes only to let him know she was hanging in with him. Up the steep grade through Beaumont and Banning and Cabazon she laughed on cue, watching him go through his gears, deciding whether she could drive the truck without him. Or not. Twice, to speed things along, she told him jokes that made his bald head blush flame red. Before the Palm Springs turnoff, he suggested they stop at an Indian bingo palace for cold drinks and a couple of games. Somehow, while she was distracted watching how the place operated, his hand kept finding its way into the back of her spandex tank top.

  The feel of him so close, his suggestive leers, the smell of him, the smoky smell of the place, made her clammy all over. But she kept up a good front, didn’t retch when her stomach churned. She had practice; for five years she had kept up a good front, and survived because of it. Come ten o’clock, she encouraged herself, there would be a whole new order of things.

  After bingo, it was an hour of front-seat wrestling, straight down the highway to a Motel 6—all rooms $29.95, cable TV and a phone in every room. He told her what he wanted; she asked him to take a shower first.

  In Riverside, he’d said his name was Jack. But the name on the Louisiana driver’s license she found in his wallet said Henry LeBeau. He was in the shower, singing, when she made this discovery. Lise practiced writing the name a couple of times on motel stationery while she placed a call on the room phone. Mrs. Henry LeBeau, Lise LeBeau…she wrote it until the call was answered.

  “I’m out,” Lise said.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Not me,” she said. “Penalty for lying’s too high.”

  “I left my best man at the house with you. He would have called me.”

  “If he could. Maybe your best man isn’t as good as you thought he was. Maybe I’m better.”

  Waiting for more response from the other end, she wrote LeBeau’s name a few more times, wrote it until it felt natural to her hand.

  Finally, she got more than heavy breathing from the phone. “Where are you, Lise?”

  “I’m a long way into somewhere else. Don’t bother to go looking, because this time you won’t find me.”

  “Of course I will.”

  She hung up.

  Jack/Henry turned off the shower. Before he was out of the bathroom, fresh and clean and looking for love, Lise was out of the motel and down the road. With his
wallet in her bag.

  The heat outside was like a frontal assault after the cool dim room; hundred and ten degrees, zero percent humidity according to a sign. Afternoon sun slanted directly into Lise’s eyes and the air smelled like truck fuel and hot pavement, but it was better than the two-day sweat that had filled the big-rig cab and had followed them into the motel. She needed a dozen hot breaths to get his stench out of her.

  The motel wasn’t in a place, nothing but a graded spot at the end of a freeway off-ramp halfway between L.A. and Phoenix: a couple of service stations and a minimart, a hundred miles of scrubby cactus and sharp rocks for neighbors. Shielding her eyes, Lise quick-walked toward the freeway, looking for possibilities even before she crossed the road to the Texaco station.

  The meeting she needed to attend would be held in Palm Springs, and she had to find a way to get there. She knew for a dead certainly she didn’t want to get into another truck, and she couldn’t stay in the open.

  Heat blazed down from the sky, bounced up off the pavement, and caught her both ways. Lise began to panic. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, under the sun and she knew she would be fried. But it wasn’t the heat that made her run for the shelter of the covered service station. After being confined for so long, she was sometimes frightened by open space.

  The Texaco and its minimart were busy with a transient olio show: cranky families in vans, chubby truckers, city smoothies in desert vacation togs and too much shiny jewelry, everyone in a hurry to fill up, scrape the bugs off the windshield, and get back on the road with the air-conditioning buffering them from the relentless heat.

  As she walked past the pumps, waiting for opportunity to present itself, an old white-haired guy in a big new Cadillac slid

  past her, pulled up next to the minimart. He was a very clean-looking man, the sort, she thought, who doesn’t like to get hot and mussed. Like her father. When he got out of his car to go into the minimart, the cream puff left his engine running and his air conditioner blowing to keep the car’s interior cool.

  Lise saw the man inside the store, spinning a rack of road maps, as she got into his car and drove away.

  When she hit the on-ramp, backtracking west, she saw Mr. Henry LeBeau, half dressed and sweating like a comeback wrestler, standing out in front of the motel, looking upset, peering around like he’d lost something.

  “Goodbye, Mr. LeBeau.” Lise smiled at his tiny figure as it receded in her rearview mirror. “Thanks for the ride.” Then she looked all around, half expecting to spot a tail, to find a fleet of long, shiny black cars deployed to find her, surround her, take her back home; escape couldn’t be this easy. But the only shine she saw came from mirages, like silver puddles splashed across the freeway. She relaxed some, settled against the leather upholstery, aimed the air vents on her face and changed the Caddy’s radio station from a hundred violins to Chopin.

  Her transformation from truck-stop dolly to mall matron took less than five minutes. She wiped off the heavy makeup she had acquired in Riverside, covered the skimpy tank top with a blouse from her bag, rolled down the cuffs of her denim shorts to cover three more inches of her muscular thighs, traded the hand-tooled boots for graceful leather sandals, and tied her windblown hair into a neat ponytail at the back of her neck. When she checked her face in the mirror, she saw any lady in a checkout line looking back at her.

  Lise took the Bob Hope Drive off-ramp, sighed happily as the scorched and barren virgin desert gave way to deep-green golf courses, piles of chichi condos, palm trees, fountains, and posh restaurants whose parking lots were garnished with Jags, Caddies, and Benzes.

  She pulled into one of those lots and, with the motor running, took some time to really look over what she had to work with. American Express card signed H. G. LeBeau. MasterCard signed Henry LeBeau. Four hundred in cash. The wallet also had some gas company cards, two old condoms, a picture of an ugly wife, and a slip of paper with a four-digit number. Bless his heart, she thought, smiling; Henry had given her a PIN number, contributed to her range of possibilities.

  Lise committed the four digits to memory, put the credit cards and cash into her pocket, then got out into the blasting heat to stuff the wallet into a trash can before she drove on to the Palm Desert Mall.

  Like a good scout, Lise left the Caddy in the mall parking lot just as she had found it, motor running, doors unlocked, keys inside. Without a backward glance, she headed straight for I. Magnin. Wardrobe essentials and a beautiful leather-and-brocade suitcase to carry it consumed little more than an hour. She signed for purchases alternately as Mrs. Henry LeBeau or H. G. LeBeau as she alternated the credit cards. She felt safe doing it; in Magnin’s, no one ever dared ask for ID.

  Time was a problem, and so was cash enough to carry through the next few days, until she could safely use other resources.

  As soon as Henry got himself pulled together, she knew he would report his cards lost. She also knew he wouldn’t have the balls to confess the circumstances under which the cards got away from him, so she wasn’t worried about the police. But once the cards were reported, they would be useless. How much longer would it take him? she wondered.

  From a teller machine, she pulled the two-hundred-dollar cash advance limit off the MasterCard, then used the card a last time to place another call.

  “You’re worried,” she said into the receiver. “You have that meeting tonight, and I have distracted you. You have a problem, because if I’m not around to sign the final papers, everything falls apart. Now you’re caught in a bind: you can’t stand up the

  congressman and you can’t let me get away, and you sure as hell can’t be in two places at once. What are you going to do?”

  “This is insane.” The old fury was in his voice this time. “Where are you?”

  “Don’t leave the house. Don’t even think about it. I’ll know if you do. I’ll see the lie in your eyes. I’ll smell it on every lying word that comes out of your mouth.” It was easy; the words just came, like playing back an old, familiar tape. The words did sound funny to her, though, coming out of her own mouth. She wondered how he came up with such garbage and, more to the point, how he had persuaded her over the years that death could be any worse than living under his dirty thumb.

  The true joy of talking to him over the telephone was having the power to turn him off. She hung up, took a deep breath, blew out the sound of him.

  In the soft soil of a planter next to the phone bank, she dug a little grave for the credit card and covered it over.

  After a late lunch, accompanied by half a bottle of very cold champagne, Lise had her hair done, darkened back to its original color and cut very short. The beauty parlor receptionist was accommodating, added a hundred dollars to the American Express bill and gave Lise the difference in cash.

  Lise had been moderately surprised when the card flew through clearance, but risked using it one last time. From a gourmet boutique, she picked up some essentials of another kind: a few bottles of good wine, a basket of fruit, a variety of expensive little snacks. On her way out of the store, she jettisoned the American Express into a bin of green jelly beans.

  Every transaction fed her confidence, assured her she had the courage to go through with the plan that would set her free forever. By the time she had finished her chores, her accumulation of bags was almost more than she could carry, and she was exhausted. But she felt better than she had for a very long time.

  When she headed for the mall exit on the far side from where she had left Mr. Clean’s Cadillac, Lise was not at all sure what

  would happen next. She still had presentiments of doom; she still looked over her shoulder and at reflections of the crowd in every window she passed. Logic said she was safe; conditioning kept her wary, kept her moving.

  Hijacking a car with its motor running had worked so well once, she decided to try it again. She had any number of prospects to choose from. The mall’s indoor ice-skating rink—bizarrely, the rink overlooked a giant cactus garden—and
the movie theater complex next to it, meant parents waiting at the curb for kids. Among that row of cars, Lise counted three with motors running, air-conditioning purring, and no drivers in sight.

  Lise considered her choices: a Volvo station wagon, a small Beemer, and a teal-blue Jag. She ran through “eeny, meeny,” though she had targeted the Jag right off; the Jag was the first car in the row.

  Bags in the backseat, Lise in the driver’s seat and pulling away from the curb before she had the door all the way shut. After a stop on a side street to pack her new things into the suitcase, she drove straight to the Palm Springs airport. She left the Jag in a passenger loading zone and, bags in hand, rushed into the terminal like a tourist late for a flight.

  She stopped at the first phone.

  “You’ve checked, haven’t you?” she said when he picked up “You sent your goons to look in on me. You know I’m out. We’re so close, I know everything you’ve done. I can hear your thoughts running through my head. You’re thinking the deal is dead without me. And I’m in another time zone.”

  “You won’t get away from me.”

  “I think you’re angry. If I don’t correct you when you have bad thoughts, you’ll ruin everything.”

  “Stop it.”

  She looked at her nails, kept her voice flat. “You’re everything to me. I’d kill you before I let you go.”

  “Please, Lise.” His voice had a catch, almost like a sob, when she hung up.

  She left the terminal by a different door, came out at the cab stand, where a single cab waited. The driver looked like a cousin of the Indians at the bingo palace, and because of the nature of the meeting scheduled that night, she hesitated. In the end, she handed the cabbie her suitcase and gave him the address of a hotel in downtown Palm Springs, an address she had memorized a long time ago.

  “Pretty dead over there,” the driver said, fingering the leather grips of her bag. “Hard to get around without a car when you’re so far out. I can steer you to nicer places closer in. Good rates off season, too.”