Devil Girls

by Ed Wood

  “Leave it!” snapped Lonnie.

  “Leave the motor running, man?” Danny was puzzled.

  “That’s what I meant.” Lonnie got out of the car. “You ain’t stayin’ tonight.”

  “I ain’t?”

  “You gettin’ deaf or somethin’? I said you ain’t stayin’ with us no more tonight.”

  “I’m beat, Lonnie. I want a fix.”

  “Then get one someplace else! Come on, Rick.”

  Rick got out of the car, but he was as puzzled about Lonnie’s attitude as Danny was, but he knew better than to ask too many questions.

  Danny finally shrugged. “Okay . . . if that’s the way the ball bounces.” He shifted into first, but kept his foot on the clutch. “Want me to pick you guys up in the morning?” Then a thought struck him. “Say . . . what do you play if the fuzz gets wind of this pad and start nosin’ around, and you guys ain’t got no wheels?”

  “One big reason I don’t want that rod around,” pushed Lonnie. “Ain’t no rod around, most likely ain’t nobody around. Besides, there’s a hundred cabins spotted all over the desert around here. Who’s gonna bother searchin’ all of ’em, even if they knew where in hell we liked to hole up? That Long bitch was here . . . any fuzz come buzzin’ around?”

  “Yeah, and she lived awhile,” chirped Rick. “No fuzz knows about this place. An’ if they did there’s plenty of holes we can duck to back in the old mine. Now beat it like Lonnie says.”

  “Pick us up in the mornin’,” said Lonnie, finally answering Danny’s question.

  Danny let his foot up on the clutch and his rod disappeared quickly in a cloud of desert dust while Rick and Lonnie entered the cabin. “Shade them windows so’s we can have some light,” ordered Lonnie and his henchman pulled the heavy drapes across the cabin’s two windows, while Lonnie snapped on the yellowed light behind the table they had previously used as a judge’s bench. Then he crossed the room to a far corner and stretched out on a canvas army cot. He put his hands under his head as he spoke. “Don’t put any snow in mine, Rick. I want peaceful sleep, not the highs.”

  Rick acknowledged Lonnie’s order with only the nod of his head as he started across the cabin to a dark corner, where he pried up a loose floorboard and took out two glassine envelopes of heroin and one of cocaine. Next he took out a spoon and holding it in his right hand he searched under the floor with his right hand for something else. He finally laid down on the floor so that his hand could reach further under the flooring. Lonnie, impatient, turned over to look at him. “You’re gonna grab a rattlesnake by the tail one of these nights doin’ that.”

  “I can’t find the candle.”

  “Everything’s right in that tin box.”

  “The candle ain’t.”

  “So maybe it’s in the table drawer.”

  “I always put things back in this tin box when we’re through. I always do.”

  “So how do you know what you really do when you’re all smashed up with H? Look in the table drawer like I told you.”

  Rick got up and carried the other things to the table and after putting them down he pulled open the drawer. His eyes showed honest surprise as he took the foot-long candle from the drawer. “Well, that beats me,” he said, then lit the candle and let a few drops of the tallow fall to the table so the candle could be affixed there.

  “Mix the stuff and quit soundin’ off about nothing,” mumbled Lonnie and rolled over on his back again.

  “We got any water?”

  Rick reached under the grimy pillow on his cot and took the glassine envelopes and dumped the half grain of heroin into the spoon, and while the concoction dissolved into a mixture he held it over the candle flame with one hand and reached into his pocket to produce two disposable syringes. A few seconds more and the mixture was ready. He sucked it up into the one syringe, then walked across to Lonnie who had tied an old necktie tightly to his arm, just over the muscle. The veins stood out firm on his forearm. He stabbed the needle into Lonnie’s arm several times, and withdrew it. “You got a couple of collapsed veins.”

  “Keep tryin’ until you get a hit. I need the stuff—and now. Right now.”

  Rick deftly inserted the needle again, and on the third try he knew he had made a hit as the liquid in the syringe started to turn pink with Lonnie’s blood. “There’s a hit,” he said lightly, and sent the fluid into the man’s bulging vein.

  Moments later Rick returned to the table and went through the same operation again, with the exception that he added a half grain of cocaine to his own mixture.

  It was as he had the spoon over the flame that the candle suddenly began to splutter and send off a shower of sparks, much like a powder fuse. His eyes went wide in surprised alarm. Without taking his eyes from the unexpected sparkler, he said, “Lonnie . . . this candle is . . .”

  And it was as far as Rick got. The candle blew up in his face, in one tremendous explosion which destroyed the cabin with its force. Out on the desert highway Lila turned to Rhoda on the seat beside her. The sound of the explosion was a long way off, but it brought a pleased smile to Lila’s face. “I guess they lit the candle. Bet nobody ever flew so high.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Lila slept soundly, as if she hadn’t a care in the world, but Rhoda laid awake most of the night. Things were moving too fast for her. She had been present when Miss Long was killed, but she hadn’t actually participated, she had only been one of the spectators like many of the other gang members. She hadn’t bothered going with the gang when they took Miss O’Hara. But she had helped Lila put the wax around the stick of dynamite and adjust the fuse a half inch below the candle wick.

  Rhoda let her eyes drift across the bed to Lila’s sleeping face and remembered the final portion of the incident.

  “How do you know it will be Lonnie and Rick who come back here?” Rhoda had asked. “It might be some of the others.”

  “The more the merrier,” Lila had laughed, that crazed look filling her eyes. “But don’t worry. No junkie shares his stuff with nobody. That’s Lonnie’s tin box where we got the candle. It’ll be him or Rick that lights it up. You should feel proud of yourself because you snuck around the other night and saw where they hid their supply. Maybe I can persuade Lark to have a little surprise for you tomorrow.”

  Rhoda remembered the scene, over and over again. And the more she tried to put the picture out of her mind the stronger it came on, like cinemascope in the movies. She was frightened of Lila. Before she went to prison she had been tough, one to be reckoned with. But since her escape, she had been impossible. Nothing mattered to her. Somebody else’s life meant about as much as a rattlesnake and had to be dealt with. She’d do anything and she did it with a cold, unfeeling heart. No one was at all safe from her wrath. Rhoda wasn’t about to try her sister’s patience. She wanted no part of Lonnie and Rick’s liquidation, but Lila had ordered her along and that’s all there was to it. She went along and she helped to murder.

  As the dull sun came up and the room became lighter, her last thoughts on the subject were of the stolen car they had used, and the hope their fingerprints had been thoroughly cleaned off. Then her senses picked up the sounds of Mrs. Purdue moving about the hall, followed by the sounds of water running in the sink and the loud flush of their ancient toilet. It had always come through to her as a disgusting sound.

  She slowly, careful not to wake Lila up, sat up on the edge of her bed and lit a cigarette. But Lila did wake up. She reached around and took Rhoda’s cigarette. “Just like prison,” she mumbled, “up at dawn.”

  “Ma’s in the toilet. She woke me up flushing it,” Rhoda lied, then lit up another cigarette for herself.

  Lila leaned back on the pillow, one arm crooked under her head. She frowned at the taste of her cigarette. “You got any pot around?”

  “No!” Then she turned to look at her older sister. “I thought you got off the stuff?”

  “Ah, pot ain’t dope. Nobody gets hooked on the weed. On
ly when they go to the hard stuff, that’s when you’re hooked but good.”

  Rhoda put her cigarette into an ashtray, then slipped out of her nightgown. “Lotta’ the kids are mixin’ H with snow. That’s when they got enough scratch for both. Why’s that? Both of them?”

  “You sure do got a lot to learn, kid. Heroin makes ’em kinda’ dreamy, sleepy. Put the same amount of cocaine with it, mix it together, heat it and shoot up—you go higher than the astronauts, only they ain’t got no spaceship holdin’ them down,” Lila laughed. When she turned serious again, she said, “Look kid, get out and pass the word to your Chicks that I changed my mind about the meeting time. Make it like six-thirty, after dark.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “After last night’s action, I don’t want nobody accidentally wondering where the girls went so early. Besides, the closer to boat time, the less chance of a leak.”

  “Okay,” she said, putting on an old blouse and skirt.

  “Then nose around. See what anybody says about last night.”

  Rhoda crushed out her cigarette. “You’ll be here?”

  “I won’t even get dressed. It’s me for this nightie and bed all day. See you when you get back.”

  There wasn’t much trouble in finding the girls to give them the changed information, so with that done she moved about town listening to any conversation she could hear, but it was little more than she was able to read in a newspaper. Miss O’Hara had lived, although she was in the hospital in bad shape, and hadn’t regained consciousness. And the second heading told of Rick and Lonnie’s accident. The article read as if the boys had been fooling around with dynamite in an abandoned mine cabin. So far everything had worked out in Lark’s favor.

  Just before sundown Rhoda stopped to watch a hearse and a few cars of the funeral procession pass and she guessed it was old man Hemp going to Boot Hill. Reverend Steele rode in the family car, but he didn’t see her.

  And back in her room as the sun light faded she undressed to change out of her sweaty clothing and told Lila all she knew. “What do you know about that?” she laughed and the laugh was apparently too loud.

  First there was the knocking, then Mrs. Purdue’s angered voice came through from the other side of the door. “Rhoda! Who are you with in there?”

  Panic captured Rhoda’s eyes as she was lighting up a cigarette and she looked from the door to Lila, then back to the door again. Rhoda put her cigarette immediately into an ashtray. Lila quickly got up off the bed. She absently put her cigarette in the ashtray beside Rhoda’s. “Well answer her, you dope,” she whispered hoarsely.

  Rhoda fought to control her voice. “Ain’t nobody here, Ma. Go away.” She snapped up her slip from a chair and put it on over her head. “Stop bothering me.”

  “Stop bothering? I’m your mother. I should stop bothering you? I should hear laughs in your room that ain’t yours and I ain’t supposed to know who? Why the door is locked all the time? You unlock it right now, or I will.”

  “She musta’ rattled that door fifty times today, but she didn’t come in,” whispered Lila, then ducked behind a dressing screen at the far end of the small room.

  Rhoda went to the door and unlocked it. “From your own mother you keep the door locked?” the old woman said immediately on entering, and her troubled eyes searched the room while Rhoda slipped into a brown skirt.

  “Ain’t nothin’ in here for you to see, Ma.”

  “So there’s nothing for me in here to see? So why is it I find a locked door to hide something that ain’t here?”

  Rhoda spoke angrily. “So maybe I lock it just to keep you out.”

  Mrs. Purdue raised her voice. “You speak in better tones to your Ma—you hear me?”

  “The whole neighborhood is hearing you.”

  “Your own mother! Your own mother! Listen to the way you speak to your own mother.”

  Rhoda slipped a white, long-sleeved cashmere sweater over her head. “Ahh, go slice some salami.”

  “If your father, God rest his dear soul, were alive you’d never dare talk to me like this. It’s the punks you run around the streets with that put such filth in your head. You was such a pretty child, such a nice girl once. Now you are getting to be a tramp, like them others. The way we slaved, your Pa and me, to bring you up decent.”

  “Ahh, cut it out and and beat it, Ma.”

  But Mrs. Purdue was not about to be silenced. “LILA KILLED YOUR FATHER! She becomes a jailbird for the rest of all her life and you with them tramps are going right along in her footsteps.”

  Rhoda laughed a strange laugh, one of remembrance, but filled with disgust. “Poor Pa. Twenty-five years ago he started slicin’ and wrappin’ salami in this hole. He died in the same place doin’ the same thing.” She moved in close to her mother and looked her straight in the eyes. “And so will you, Ma. Slicin’ and wrappin’ salami for the creeps in Almanac.” She paused and turned to retrieve her cigarette at which time she neared panic again as she saw Lila’s burning butt side by side with her own. She blocked the ashtray from view with her body and put one of the cigarettes out, and put the other in her mouth before she turned back to Mrs. Purdue. “I want more out of life than playing nursemaid to a kosher dill pickle.”

  A sudden sadness came over Mrs. Purdue. “Once Lila said that to me. What has she got now?”

  “Maybe more than you think!” Rhoda caught herself. She hadn’t meant to say that. But the words seemed to fall on unsuspecting ears. “Ahh, beat it, Ma. I gotta get dressed. I got things to do.”

  “With the tramps?”

  “With my friends.”

  Mrs. Purdue looked silently at her daughter who put out her cigarette, then turned and left the room. Rhoda closed the door and turned to face Lila as she came out from behind the screen, stripping off her own night dress. “I hate that old witch,” she said as if she were talking about slime. “If she knew I was here, she’d scream COP faster’n you could blink an eye.”

  Rhoda took a clean slip from the dresser drawer and gave it to Lila, who put it on quickly. “Why did you come back to Almanac, Lila?” She paused as the older girl looked to her. “It’s bound to be they’re lookin’ for you here.”

  “If it’s any of your business I had things to finish up here before takin’ off for parts unknown.” She selected a pale green cardigan and a black skirt which she hastily got into.

  “Ma is my business,” Rhoda said slowly and softly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You came back to kill Ma!”

  Lila stopped the sweater-buttoning action. She stormed across to Rhoda and took her roughly by the shoulders. “Don’t try to outguess me, punk,” she stabbed harshly, then her eyes snapped up to Mrs. Purdue who stood in the doorway.

  “You must go back!” Mrs. Purdue’s words were a simple statement of what she believed to be fact.

  Lila dropped her hands from Rhoda’s shoulders. “How’d you know I was here?”

  “Where else would you be? I hear the radio! I see the police cops! I see the bed slept in by two people! Two cigarettes in the ashtray, Rhoda tries to hide. A wastebasket that’s got bread and baloney leavings. Wine bottles when my Rhoda don’t eat baloney or drink wine.” Then with utter contempt she said. “Who else but my Lila who is escaped from prison? Who kills her own father. Who kills a nurse lady who is kind to her. You must go back, Lila, my child.”

  Rhoda stepped in beside Lila. “Ma, how can you talk like that to your own daughter?”

  “THAT you stand next to is no daughter of mine. Ahh, she came joyously from my womb. But the joy has long since turned to pain. It is no daughter of mine who stands here. Only out-and-out tramp I look at.”

  “And if anybody knows about tramps, it’s you, old woman. You ever get around to tellin’ Rhoda how you and Pa used to con the merchants for credit? You jazzin’ the boy tradesmen and Pa takin’ on the . . .”

  Mrs. Purdue’s hand lashed viciously across Lila’s face to cut off
her words. The blow was delivered with such force Lila fell backwards onto the bed.

  “You cruddy old bitch!” Lila screamed and her hand shot under the pillow to come up with a pistol which she levelled directly at her mother’s heart. “You cruddy old bitch!” she repeated as she got to her feet. “I’ve killed for less than that!”

  “Sure! You kill! So why not shoot me? One more! Who is to say how much more pain it can cause?”

  Rhoda tried to step in between her mother and Lila. “Ma,” she said protectingly. “She means it, Ma.” And at the same instant, Lila stepped in roughly and pushed her aside.

  Mrs. Purdue forced a quick, dry laugh. “Means it? Sure she means it. My Lila, child of my womb, would kill her own ma with no more heart than she did her father.” She looked to Rhoda sadly. “And you are with her, Rhoda?”

  “You damned well right she’s with me. You think she wants to hang around this salami factory all her life?” Lila put the pistol into Rhoda’s reluctant hands. “Keep it on the old bitch.” Then she turned back to her mother. “Don’t get any ideas she won’t use it. She ain’t got nothin’ more to lose now than I have. She helped kill a coupla’ guys last night. That makes us good sisters again. She ain’t interested in seein’ the inside of a prison, and that’s just what she’ll be doin’ if she don’t do just like I tell her to do.”

  Rhoda gasped at the frankness of Lila’s words, but she knew they were true. She grabbed the pistol so tightly her knuckles turned white. “I gotta do it this way, Ma!” she said to the stunned woman.

  Lila let a pleased smile cross her features, then she took her rope ladder from under the bed, and moved to the window where she secured its hook and tossed the free rope end out into the alley below. When she turned to face Mrs. Purdue and Rhoda again, the smile was gone from her face. In its place was a glare of pure hatred. “Now, old woman, you join the old man. Gimme the gun, Rhoda.”

  Rhoda’s head twitched nervously. She was not at all interested in what Lila had in mind. She fought for time. “People will hear the shot.”