The Bitch

by Gil Brewer

  Then the laughter started again. It rumbled in my chest and I stood there trying to smother it. It burst behind my lips and my whole body shuddered. I couldn’t breathe. Finally the agony went away, and my eyes were wrung with tears.

  I listened. There was no sound. Down on the street a car ticked past, and I listened for Janet’s breathing. It came te me across the rooms, slow and steady.

  I went quickly, silently as possible, into the hall and carefully opened the closet door. The strong smell of woolen clothes and a faint odor of mothballs rose in the pitch darkness of the closet. I reached toward the right, dragging the money sack along the floor, pushing at the clothes, working as fast as I could. I was half in the closet, feeling something akin to success, when the living room overhead lights went on brilliantly.

  “What are you doing, Tate?” Janet said sleepily.

  I didn’t look at her. I just stood there. The sack was on the floor, half in the closet door. I lifted it and slung it back against the far right wall of the closet, then stepped out and closed the door. I looked at her then.

  “What was that?” she said.

  “What was what?”

  “Don’t be silly. What are you doing home?”

  “I just came home. Just got in.”

  “I know that. What time is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did you put in the closet, Tate?”

  “Boy, do you look sleepy.”

  She blinked at me and yawned, her gaze on the closet door. She yawned terrifically, standing there in a white shorty nightgown with tiny blue frills around the throat and hem. She stood with one foot on the other, rubbing the sides of her face with her hands, then scratching into the thick, shoulder-length mass of auburn hair. When she ceased yawning, her eyes watered, but she was still staring at that damned closet door.

  “Don’t tell me it’s morning already?”

  “Sure,” I laid. “It’s morning. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

  She stepped toward me, then stopped and grinned. Her eyes were a little sly, the way they sometimes get. Her eyes were a very dark, deep blue, with tiny spokes. They were very beautiful eyes, Janet’s eyes.

  I wanted to lead her into some other room, but I didn’t because the minute I left the room, she’d run over to the closet and have a look. I cursed myself for a fool, for bringing the money-sack here. That didn’t help.

  Fine panic drifted down through the walls. Slow-winged fright flapped through the apartment like a loathsome bird, its wings brushing lightly against my shoulders. For a brief moment, I was down—down as far as you can get.

  Every single thing that was against me at this moment stood out clearly in my mind. Every blessed little thing.

  And none of the feeling was really new. It was all old and stale and familiar. I’d been through it a hundred times. I’d made all the usual mistakes, and I was gradually ending up on the bottom of the pile. Just like always.

  I began to laugh, looking straight at her. I couldn’t control it. It burst past my lips and I sank back against the closet door, breathless with this silent, sick laughter.

  She stared at me.

  “Tate, are you drunk?”

  I quit that, sharply.

  “No. I’m not drunk.”

  I wanted to shout it all at her, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her a thing. I just stood there like a fool, looking at her, waiting for her to make her move. Waiting for her to speak—to say some of the sharp, biting, unkind things she always said when I fouled up. Because I had fouled up again.

  Her eyes were brighter now. She was coming awake.

  “I want to know what you put in that closet, Tate.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Tate.”

  I held my teeth together tightly. The sides of my jaw began to ache, the muscles seemed to catch in there.

  Janet looked at me, then walked across the room to the desk by the front window and picked up the small black leather traveller’s clock I’d bought her for the trip to Mexico that we never took. She checked the time and set the clock down without a sound.

  Then she looked at me.

  “Tate. Why are you home so early?”

  I just shook my head. It damned near tore the heart out of me, the way she said it. Very quiet and tentative now. Like a little girl, all scared and not wanting to be scared. Praying inside her that nothing was wrong, but knowing something was wrong.

  She knew something was wrong. We’d been through this very same act so many, many times before. It was old stuff.

  She sat down heavily in the white oak chair by the desk. She sort of collapsed. Not outside, just inside—you could see her go, piece by little piece.

  “What is it, Tate?” Her tone was resigned, but harder.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  What was there to say.

  “What’s that thing you put in the closet? That got anything to do with why you’re home?”

  “Oh, Janet—for cripes’ sake. Take it easy, will you?”

  “That’s our song, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t make myself move from in front of the closet door. It was like I was clamped there with steel bands. I felt as if I would fight for that damned closet. It swarmed all through me. Then it went out of me again as I recalled the two bodies lying in that rain-washed alley.

  “Tate,” she said. “I know something’s wrong. You’ve done something again. I wish you’d just tell me what it is, so we can get it off our minds and go to sleep. I’m tired. I know something’s wrong, Tate. So you may as well tell me.” She sighed, not looking at me, fooling with the hem of her nightgown.

  “It’s all right, Janet. I tell you it’s all right.”

  It hadn’t been what I wanted to say.

  I suddenly realized that I needed help of some kind. I couldn’t swing any of this alone. I had to see Morrell. I had to know about what happened, whether or not he had killed those men. If he had, or if some of his men had, I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  Janet came across the room.

  “What’s in the closet?”

  I looked at her. I went over and sat in the chair by the desk and watched her open the closet door and haul the canvas sack out. I didn’t move, and right then for a time, I didn’t think about anything. I just watched her.

  She stood there staring at the sack. It didn’t say anything on it. It was gray-blue. It had brass grips across the opening and it was tied together with something that looked like clothesline.

  “Go ahead,” I heard myself say. “Open it.”

  She glanced at me and wiped her nose with her finger, then looked down at the sack. She knelt beside it on the floor. I looked at her, not the money-sack. At the fine flowing lines of her body through the thin nightgown, the ripe curves I knew so very well. At the hair, and the shape of her face. The little quirk to her eyebrows that was quite natural, at the inquisitive lift to the corners of her lips. And I thought about all that was inside that head of hers, and all the love that she had held for me.

  And I thought about how I wasn’t worth a nickle’s worth of that.

  She fumbled with the rope, got it undone, and finally drew it through the brass catches.

  It was like some horrible kind of slow motion. She wasn’t actually working slowly, but that’s the way it appeared to me. The way she looked. She couldn’t seem to just open the sack—she had to fumble and monkey around with the damned thing until it had me crazy. I kept trying to think what I was supposed to do now? How was I ever going to explain this to her.

  She pulled at the top of the sack and it popped open. She spread the opening and looked down inside and on her face was that expression of small children peering into a Christmas stocking, getting ready to haul the next present out. Only it wasn’t going to be a present for Janet. Not the kind of person Janet was. That was for sure. She could stand shock about as well as thin glass smacked with a sledge.

  Sh
e looked over at me. Her lips formed a round O.

  She reached in with her hand and just let it stay that way.

  She looked at me again, and her face began to smudge. It was a little like you might take your thumb and press it down on a piece of fudge. The chin drew up a little, crinkling, and something pretty awful came into her eyes. It was a kind of pain I’d never ever really seen there before.

  It was all hell.

  “Go ahead,” I said, my voice choked with it.

  She kept staring at me. It began to get me crazier and crazier, because I had no idea what I was going to do with her now. Thick curving waves of rich auburn hair swung down across her cheek, and only one of her eyes stayed staring at me, all full of accusation and she still didn’t bring her hand out of the sack.

  From outside, you could hear the rain beating in erratic wind-washed splashes against the windows, driving against the sides of the apartment building.

  “Janet, for God’s sake!”

  The telephone on the desk at my elbow began to ring.

  CHAPTER 7

  I sat there.

  The phone rang and rang and Janet brought her hand out of the sack with a banded sheaf of bills held between forefinger and thumb, like she was picking up a snake by the tail. She dropped it on the floor and put both hands against the sides of her face and stared at the money. She started to reach into the sack again.

  “Answer the phone,” I said, speaking in a strained whisper.

  She rose obediently and moved toward the desk, walking slowly, not looking at me. Her eyes were very wide and staring.

  “If it’s anybody asking for me, I’m not here.” I stood up and grasped her shoulders and shook her hard and the phone shrilled, seeming to get louder and louder, the interval between the rings faster.

  “You hear me!” I shouted at her. “Tell them I’m not here, I haven’t been here. Tell them I called early tonight and said I wouldn’t be home until late in the morning. Tell them anything, you hear! But do as I say!”

  She just stared at me now. She didn’t nod, she didn’t speak. I gripped her shoulders still harder and suddenly knew I must be hurting her, yet there was no expression on her face—none at all.

  “Tell them you were asleep, Janet.”

  I hauled her over to the phone and she kept looking at me now, over her shoulder, with that half-startled half-hurt expression.

  “Answer the God-damned phone!”

  I grabbed her hand and forced it on the receiver, then I let go of her and walked away about three paces and stood with my back to her. I heard her lift the receiver.

  “Yes?” she said. “Yes, this is Janet.”

  It was Sam. I knew it was Sam.

  “Yes,” she said. “No, he hasn’t come home.” Then she told him just what I’d told her to say, repeating almost my exact words in a monotonous tone of voice that had my stomach churning, and my head began to ache. Maybe it had been aching, but now I became conscious of that. “I thought he had to work tonight,” she said. She waited. Whoever was on the other end of the wire didn’t answer that. Then I heard the voice speaking and then it was silent again.

  She said, “Is something the matter?”

  Whoever it was blustered what sounded like assurance that everything was all right.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll call you if he comes home early. Yes.”

  She hung up and I turned around and she didn’t look at me. She marched back across the room and knelt down again almost in the same position as before.

  “I lied for you,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  She began hauling sheafs of bills out of the sack, and dropping them on the floor. As she did this, her movements became slower and slower until she just sat there staring at the pile of money around her knees on the floor.

  I watched her. I wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. The way she looked was pretty bad.

  She turned her round eyes up to mine and as before, there was nothing at all on her face. Her breasts rose and fell in slow, deep breathing beneath the thin, nearly transparent fabric of the nightgown.

  “You finally did it, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Yes,” I told her. “I did it for you.”

  Her face began to redden and for a moment I thought she would scream; the scream was there, behind her eyes, in her brain, working deep in her throat.

  She didn’t scream.

  “Who was that on the phone?” I said. “It was your brother.”

  Not Sam—my brother. When she was this way, she always referred to him as my brother.

  “What did he say?”

  “Didn’t say anything. Tate—what have you done?”

  “I’ve done something for you,” I said. “For you, Janet. For us, maybe—but mostly just for you.”

  She looked down at the money again, and seemed to recoil. It was as if she had thought for a moment that she’d been dreaming, that it wasn’t really there at all. She backed away from it on the floor, and slowly came to her feet, still looking at the money. It was a frightening amount of money, piled there on the floor, scattered on the sand-colored rug, and you knew there was still more in the half-collapsed canvas sack.

  I knew I had to get out of the apartment. I couldn’t stay here. There was no telling when they’d take a notion to come here. They might already be on their way. I wanted to see Morrell, and yet I couldn’t just leave Janet here like this.

  “Tate—what have you done?” she said again. Her voice was loaded with grief now, and some of the shock of unknowing was gone from it. It was different, and she kept looking as if she were going to burst into tears, only she didn’t. It wasn’t like Janet to cry much. When she was really mad, or hurt, she didn’t cry—she just grieved like a lost soul, which was much worse.

  I began to talk. I had to tell somebody, and I told her. The whole works spilled out and she just sat there and took it. I told it to her from the beginning. How I’d been hired to shadow Halquist’s wife, and how all the time, I’d been getting nowhere, and it had been riding me. How Morrell had checked on me and they had approached me about this job, being pretty sure of themselves from the start, and placing themselves in such a position so I couldn’t do anything about their proposition if I were against it. In fact, they held no unconsiderable amount of information over my head, that would probably break me out of the agency and ruin my brother’s chances of holding the agency, if they spilled it. Just my background, all filled with glaring errors—enough so it could be fairly well proved that I would be no good, and pretty untrustworthy as a private investigator. I was all of that. “So, I did it,” I told her. “It was my chance, Janet—to do something for you—to get us all we ever wanted, so we could go away and wipe the slate clean and start over. So you wouldn’t have the worrying anymore. Only it went wrong, Janet—I’ve got more than I bargained for and I don’t know what to do. But I did it for you—do you hear that, Janet?”

  “My God,” she said. “You can’t help it, can you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You did it for me?”

  “Yes.”

  She sat down on the studio couch at the far side of the room and just trembled through the shoulders, staring at me. I went over to the wall switch by the bedroom hallway and flicked off the overhead light. There was no calmness in me, and I wanted to be calm.

  I came back through the darkness and turned on the dim, saffron-shaded floor-lamp beside the bookcase across from the desk. Then I looked at her again. She hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “You should have married Sam,” I said. “That what you’re thinking?”

  “Yes, Tate—that’s what I was thinking. How can two men from the same family be so utterly different?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Now, what can I do?” she said.

  “You’ve got to help me, Janet.”

  Now she began to laugh a little down in her throat. “Help you?” she said. “Murder a
nd money.”

  “I did it for you, Janet. Maybe you can’t understand that. Maybe you can’t understand how I feel. How it is, the way it’s been—knowing what you thought of me.”

  “I married a prize,” she said. “A real prize.”

  “All right.”

  “Why didn’t you quit when you saw what was happening?” she said. “That was your chance and you didn’t take it. Tate, why didn’t you quit then? When you were still on top. Somebody would have gotten you off—somehow. Sam would have taken care of that, you know he would.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? He always has, hasn’t he? Whenever you needed him, there he was—all ready to go to bat for you. He’s always gone to bat for you. Trying to help you to help yourself. And this is the way you pay him back. Tate, I really think you are hopeless. Sam doesn’t think that—he keeps trying. He believes in you. And look what you’ve done.”

  “Yeah—look.”

  She did. She began to see in sharp little flashes just exactly what I’d done. You could read it on her face, and it was the same with me. You don’t see it all at once, because you haven’t lived that way and it all happened so abruptly. Death and money. And little by little it would touch me—what I’d done.

  “What are we going to do?” she said.

  “We’re going to sit tight,” I told her. “For a little while. I’ve got to do something, find something out for myself—somehow. Then, we’re leaving, Janet. We’ll go away some place. Look, I know you can’t—”

  She closed her eyes and just sat there with her hands in tight fists.

  “Janet,” I said. “I want you to listen to me.” I went over to her and knelt on the floor in front of her and put my hands on her thighs and held her to me tightly; and she just sat there with her eyes squinched shut and her hands made into little fists. “Janet, listen,” I said as softly as I could. “I know you can’t understand now. It’s even hard for me to understand. But the money’s here and when will we ever get a chance to have that much money in one hunk again? Never. You know that. I didn’t kill anybody, Janet—I didn’t murder those two people. I stole the money. All right, it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong and I’m going to have a hard time getting so I can live with that. Just the same, it can be done—it’s got to be done.”