Deadly Edge p-14

by Richard Stark

  She didn’t understand the specifics of the threat, but knew it was a threat and had no doubt he would do it, whatever it was. have to move, she thought, have to do what be says. She took one step forward, and the second was easier, and she walked toward him, the bones of her face standing out prominently around deep-set eyes.

  He stepped to one side, grinning, bowing her into her living room. As she went by he lifted a hand, saying, “What’s in the cup?” He took it, tasted it, laughed in delight. “Son of a bitch, it’s teal Isn’t that cute? You take sugar in your tea, honey?”

  Under the things he said, things moved that he didn’t say. She shook her head. “No, I don’t.”

  “That’s too bad. Well, different strokes for different folks. Sit down on your sofa, honey, let’s talk. Here, take your tea.”

  She took the tea, went to the sofa, sat down. The fireplace was directly in front of her, with yesterday’s dead fire in it. The stones looked cold.

  He didn’t sit. He went over and stood at the corner of the fireplace, one foot up on the hearth, one elbow up on the mantelpiece with his hand dangling down, his other hand casually on his hip as he faced her. He said, “We’re looking for a friend of yours. Tell the truth, we thought we’d run into him here. When’ll he be back?”

  Cool, she thought. Cunning. She remembered what she’d said to Parker on the phone last night: “I know how to be a little mouse.” Did she? She was blinking again, very badly, and was afraid that would betray her; he’d see the blinking and know she was lying. But it wouldn’t stop, and she said, “I don’t know who you mean. I’m sorry, you have me frightened, but—” She raised her free hand and rubbed her eyelids hard with thumb and forefinger.

  “Nothing to be frightened of,” he said, but he used a voice full of laughter and meanness. He said, “We just want to see your friend, talk to him, maybe pick up a little something he’s got for us.”

  Her eyes hurt from the rubbing now, but the blinking went on. For an excuse to look away from him, and because she was afraid she would spill tea again, she half turned and put the cup on the end table, saying at the same time, “I live here alone.”

  “A head like you? Don’t do dumb lies, honey, we’ll just make you pay for them.”

  Now she did look at him, because what she had to say was technically true. “I’m a widow,” she said. “My husband was an airline pilot.”

  His expression became uncertain; he said, “What about Parker?”

  “Mr. Parker? I only—”

  “Mister Parker! God damn it, I don’t like jokes!”

  She was afraid he was going to rush at her and start punching and kicking. She cried, “I just take messages! That’s all, I swear that’s all, I almost never see him, he never comes here!”

  “You’re a goddam liar. If he never comes here, how does he get the messages?”

  “I call at a hotel in New York, and then he calls me back. Sometimes he comes out to pay me, but only two or three times a year.”

  “You call a hotel in New York. You mean where he stays?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t talk to him?”

  “No, I just leave a message with the desk.”

  “The message you get, you leave at this hotel desk?’

  “No. I call there, and I say I want to leave a message for Mr. Edward Latham. Then I just leave my name, and after a while he calls me back, and I tell him the message.”

  He was frowning, and he said, “That’s awful damn complicated.”

  “That’s the way he wants to do it.”

  Still standing in the same position, left leg up on hearth, right hand on hip, left elbow on mantelpiece, he gnawed a thumb-knuckle now and brooded. She watched him, watching him think about it and wondering whether the He Parker had worked out for her would hold up or not. What if he decided to call the hotel?

  “All right,” he said finally, and moved away from the fireplace. “What’s the hotel?”

  “The Wilmington.”

  “Move over.”

  The phone was beside her. She got up and moved to the other end of the sofa, and he sat down and said, “What’s the number there?”

  “I’ll have to look it up.”

  He frowned at her, with one hand resting on the phone. “Look it up? You call this number all the time, you don’t know it?”

  “Not all the time. There aren’t that many messages to pass on. And I’m terrible with numbers.”

  “Terrible with numbers. I think you’re lying, honey, and if it turns out you are, you’ll go out screaming.”

  He turned his back on her, and picked up the phone, ready to dial.

  In a small voice she said, “You have to dial one first.”

  He frowned at her again. “What?”

  “If you’re calling New York, you have to—”

  “Area code, I know.”

  “No, before that. You have to dial one first. You see, this is just a little phone company out here, it isn’t—”

  “Shut up.” He said it flat and cold, and sat looking at her with totally blank eyes. All the mean comedy was gone from his face now. He said, “I take very bad to frustration. I break my toys. You ought to be warned.”

  She nodded, birdlike, afraid to speak.

  He turned back to the phone and dialed one, and then the area code, and then a New York number. He waited, and his free hand tapped his knee. She looked at the hand, and it was stubby-fingered and thick, the backs of the fingers covered with burns and scratches as though he’d been doing carpentry work without gloves. The nails were wide and stubby and dirty. The hand looked strong and humorless and .mean.

  “Hello, Information? Yes, hello, dear, Manhattan. Wilmington Hotel. Okay, dear, thanks a lot.” He broke the connection, started to dial again, stopped, said, “Damn!” He started again; he’d forgotten to dial one, and he must have gotten the recorded announcement.

  “Hello, Wilmington Hotel? Do you have a Mr. Latham registered there, Edward Latham? Yeah, I’ll wait.”

  The stubby fingers tapped the rough cloth over his knee. His face was turned away from her, and the wild-haired back of his head told her nothing except that she should be afraid of him.

  “Hello? Thursday? Hold on, there’s somebody wants to leave a message for him.” He got to his feet, turning in a half-circle so he could extend the phone receiver over toward her. “You want him to call you right away.”

  She leaned leftward, taking the receiver, trying to think. What message would sound realistic to this man? What name should she use? The name on the mailbox, wouldn’t that be safest? “Hello?”

  The voice of the disinterested desk clerk seventy miles away spoke in her ear: “Yes?”

  “I have a message for Mr.—Mr. Latham.”

  “Yes?”

  “Would he call Mrs. Willis as soon as possible.”

  “Mrs. Willis was that?”

  “That’s right. He knows the number.”

  “Very well. Call Mrs. Willis as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She started to get up to hang up the phone, but he took it from her hand and cradled it himself, then sat down on the sofa again beside her. “Now we wait,” he said. The dancing movements were starting in his eyes again. He patted her knee. “We wait and talk,” he said. “We get acquainted.”

  He kept touching her, quick brief taps at her elbow, her knee, the back of her hand. It was sexual, the whole atmosphere of the situation was sexual, yet at the same time there was something remote and impersonal about his manner toward her. The thin humming aura of rape was in the air, but it was as though it would be rape without desire. A little later he would attack her, not because he wanted her in particular but simply because the situation seemed to him to call for it.

  And in the meantime he sat beside her on the sofa and encouraged her to talk, about her parents, her upbringing, her dead husband, all sorts of things; and while she talked he kept touching her, small point
less taps at her elbow, her knee, her hand.

  After a while she offered to make a fire, as an excuse to get up from the sofa, and he said sure, that was a fine idea. He didn’t offer to help, but watched her crumple the paper and spread the kindling and carry in the logs from the porch, and all the time he watched her he had a happy smile on his face, as though she were doing something nice, especially for him.

  She lit the fire, and he beamed at it and said, “You know how to live. Away from the hassle, away from the whole thing.”

  “Yes, it’s nice.” She hoped he wouldn’t notice that she’d chosen to stay on her feet, over by the fire, rather than sit down again on the sofa beside him.

  “Yeah, this is what I want sometime. A house just like this. A nice fire, everything. Come sit down.”

  She’d been holding the poker. Could she hit him with it? “It’s time for my pill,” she said. She put the poker down, leaning against the stone side of the fireplace.

  “Pill? Birth control?”

  “No, it’s medicine. I’m supposed to take it every four hours.” She looked at her watch, and it was almost four o’clock. “I’m due now.”

  “Medicine?” He was frowning all over his face. “What kind of medicine?”

  “I don’t know what it’s called, it’s a prescription.”

  “What’s it for?”

  She allowed her nervousness to show, masking as embarrassment. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  He got to his feet, his frown deeper. “What the hell you talking about? Where is this medicine?”

  “In the bathroom.”

  “Let’s go.”

  She led the way down the hall toward the kitchen. The other one—Manny, this one had called him—was still lying in bed, facing the windows and the lake. He didn’t deem to have moved in the last two hours.

  There were two ways into the bathroom: a door from the bedroom and another from the kitchen. To avoid entering the room with Manny, Claire continued on down the hall and through the kitchen.

  She remembered the bottle as being in the medicine chest; but what if she’d thrown it away? When she’d first come north from Florida to look for a house, a couple of months ago, she’d come down with some sort of flu, and a doctor in New York had given her a prescription for medicine. She tended to keep things like that around, just in case the same kind of illness should come back, but she wasn’t entirely sure this bottle had survived the transition from the hotel in New York out here to the house.

  Yes. She opened the mirrored door, and recognized it at once: a small clear plastic bottle with a white cap, up in a corner of the top shelf. The drugstore label on it looked nineteenth-century baroque. She took the bottle down and closed the door again, and he reached past her to pluck it out of her hand, saying, “Let’s see that.”

  She stood beside the sink and he stood between her and the doorway, frowning at the label on the bottle. She knew what it said: “Mrs. Willis—one every four hours— Dr. Miller.”

  He looked at her, looked at the bottle. “It’s a drugstore in New York,” he said.

  “I didn’t want anybody around here to know about it,” she said. It was a relief to be able to show how nervous she was, to use the true nervousness as a verification of the lie she was building.

  “Every four hours,” he said, reading the label again. Then, “Hey, this thing’s two months old!”

  The date. Down at the bottom of the label were the prescription number and the date; she’d forgotten about that. She stammered as she said, “It’s taking a while to cure it.”

  “Cure it?” He frowned at her some more, and she could see him turning it over in his mind, not trusting it, not understanding what she might be up to and yet instinctively not trusting it. I can’t fool him, she thought. And because I tried to, he’ll kill me. She remembered what Parker had said when he’d called, about his friend having died of a painful illness, and all at once she was full of second thoughts. She should have taken Parker’s advice and gone away from here. She shouldn’t have tried this stunt with the medicine. It was going to end very, very badly, and it would be all her fault.

  She was blinking again, forcing herself to meet his eyes, and she wished there was some way to make the blinking stop, it would betray her yet.

  At last he looked down at the bottle again. “Cure it,” he muttered, and snapped the lid off the bottle, and shook out three or four of the pills into the palm of his hand. They were smallish, round with beveled edges, robin’s-egg blue. He shook the pills in his palm, watching them rock, and then lifted the plastic bottle and sniffed at the open top, like a wine connoisseur smelling the cork.

  She watched him, tense and afraid. She knew what she wanted him to think, eventually, getting to the idea himself—but what was he thinking now? What was going on in his mind?

  He lowered the bottle again, looked at the label, shook his head, eased all but one of the pills from his palm back into the bottle. Then he said, “Fill that glass with water. No, just half full. Put it on the counter there.”

  She put the glass on the glass counter under the medicine chest, and stepped back, and he came forward and dropped the pill into the water. It sank slowly, and they both watched it, and nothing happened.

  This is comic, she thought. This is hilarious. We’re looking at a pill do nothing in a glass of water.

  She felt she was going to start laughing, and dug her nails into her palms to keep it from happening. Because if she laughed he would be very angry and would do something to her. And because if she started to laugh she wouldn’t be able to stop, and the laughing would become screams, and she wouldn’t ever be able to make it stop.

  The pill began very slowly to dissolve, like a fresh hairdo in a breeze, wispy lines of robin’s-egg blue drifting upward.

  He picked up the glass, shook it, smelled it, tasted the water very gingerly. Then he frowned, tossed the water into the sink, slapped the glass down on the counter again, went on holding the glass, stared grimly at it, and said, “I want to know what those things are for. I don’t want any more hacking around.”

  “I was sick. It’s a prescription for being sick.” She didn’t want to say it to him, she wanted him to get to it himself; he would believe it more easily that way.

  He turned his head slowly and looked at her, and for the second time she saw his eyes flat and blank and expressionless. “I’m running out of patience, honey,” he said. “What do you mean, sick?” Then his eyes narrowed and he said, “Wait a minute. You mean the clap?”

  Finally he’d come to it. But now there was another problem: the date on the bottle. She didn’t know that much about gonorrhea, but she had the vague idea it didn’t take two months to cure it. She said, tentatively, “Well, something like that. That’s why I didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Something like that?”

  “It takes longer. To be all right again.”

  “Christ,” he said. He was disgusted, but her impression was that his disgust was caused by fastidiousness rather than disappointment; once again there was no feeling of any true sexual interest from him.

  “That’s why I went to New York,” she said. “Because I didn’t want anybody around here to know.”

  “You got it around here,” he said. “How the hell’d you manage that?”

  She couldn’t think of an answer right away, and just stood there helplessly.

  He shook his head. “Don’t tell me your story, honey, I don’t want to know. Here, take your pill.”

  Her hand trembled as she took the bottle from him. She shook out one pill into her other palm, put the bottle away, refilled the glass, took the pill. He stood watching her, and when she put the glass back in its holder, he said, “All right, come on.”

  He had her walk ahead of him, and they left the bathroom and went through the kitchen and down the hall. He couldn’t see her face now, and it could relax into whatever expression she wanted, and she was astonished to find that she was smiling. />
  Smiling? I can handle him, she thought. Managing the stunt with the illness had given her a sudden confidence, had given her back the self-assurance she’d had when she’d talked to Parker last night. These people were strong and mean and deadly and probably armed, but she was cleverer than they. The clever little mouse. She could play the dangerous game, after all, tiptoe between the lines of their understanding and never be seen.

  And yet there was another feeling in her, too, stranger than the urge to smile and pat herself on the back. Coming along the hall, she could feel his disapproval as he walked behind her, and even though it was stupid and silly to think this way, she found herself hoping there’d be a chance later on to tell him the truth, that she didn’t really have any kind of venereal disease, that it had only been to keep him from raping her that she had led him to believe it. No matter the situation, no matter the consequences she had escaped or the cleverness she had used, the fact of his disapproval and his belief in the reality of her illness hurt her pride, and she needed to believe she could rectify it later.

  They were just entering the living room when the phone rang. At once he grabbed her elbow from behind and said, low-voiced in her ear, the words fast and urgent, “You pick it up after the third ring. Right after the third ring.”

  “All right.” His fingers were painfully tight on her arm.

  “And don’t say anything stupid. Remember, he’s there and you’re here.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  He released her elbow and gave her a push into the living room. Without looking back, she knew he’d headed the other way; there was an extension phone in the bedroom, he’d listen there.

  The phone rang for the second time as she hurried to the sofa. Was it going to be Parker? If not, would it be Handy McKay or somebody else who knew Parker lived here, and would they say something wrong? And if it was Parker, would be say something wrong?

  In the silence between the second and third rings, she sat on the sofa and rubbed her knuckles into her eyes;