by Gil Brewer
“Yeah,” Lenny said. “I seen you. Too hard, sometimes.”
She whirled. “What’s the matter with you? You’re nothing but a punk. Didn’t have to work hard on you.”
“Shut up!”
“I won’t shut up!” She tossed her head, her hair swirled about her shoulders, and I believed all those things I’d heard at the hospital about Leda Thayer. “I’ve got you, Eric. I’ve got all that money Frank sweated for, too.” She laughed, watching me, watching what was going on inside me. “You’re mad, aren’t you? Too bad—too damned bad for you, brother. Oh, boy, I had a time getting you here, didn’t I? Not much trouble making you stay long enough, though—eh?” She moved her hip once, very slightly and I hated her just a little bit more. “Yes, Eric, I planned it, with Lenny. Gave him a little money, too, so he could have some clothes for a change. Gave him a lot of things—didn’t I, Lenny?”
Lenny’s eyes were shining like wet Christmas tree bulbs.
“Frank was no good. She’s professional, Eric. You didn’t have a chance.”
She glanced at him, her eyes sly. “Don’t you wish you had a chance, though? You couldn’t buy it, Lenny. I gave you lots of mementos, but not the big one. Did I Lenny?”
I could see the fury mount in Lenny’s eyes. I wondered if she saw it. A dumb, harassed, knifelike fury.
She threw him a look from cold gray eyes and I watched her lips. They were very tight and there was a tiny rim of white around them. I wondered how such a beautiful woman could be so rotten inside. She sighed. “I had a hard time acting right with you, Eric. Plenty hard, but I came through.”
“You came through,” I said. “So you’ve got the money, Frank’s home, everything. You cleaned up and your hands are clean, I suppose?”
“Lenny killed Frank. He smashed his—his head.” She paused, and her face went a little pale, I knew she was remembering. “Yeah,” she said. “I got sick. That was legit. Lenny would have cut up the body for what I promised him.”
I waited, hoping. I knew that in the pocket of those overalls tossed across the back of a chair by the fireplace was my automatic. If I could reach it. But would I get a chance to use it? My eyes flicked just once toward the overalls. Leda caught the look and grinned.
“Oh,” she said. She moved lithely over to the chair, picked them up, tossed them over her shoulder. “I’m going to put something on,” she said, and went on into the bedroom. Her body looked as perfect as ever.
Lenny and I watched each other.
“I didn’t like doin’ that,” he said. “But hell, Eric. You didn’t like your brother, anyways.”
“He was a human being. You don’t just go around killing them, Lenny.”
The gun in his hand hadn’t moved an inch from my middle. I could feel the sweat dripping from my armpits. Lenny looked a little sad, but his eyes were harder now. Leda drifted back into the room. She wore a maroon corduroy man’s bathrobe and she had her hands jammed deep into the pockets. She stood over by the fireplace. There was about them both a look of expectancy.
“You see,” Leda said. “With Frank dead and you framed for the murder, I get the money.”
“We—” Lenny said. His lips jerked loosely.
She ignored him. “I had to be sure you’d go for me. But I wasn’t much worried. I’ve done the work.” She looked at Lenny. “You know that of course, Lenny. I sat outside that damned barn till he came home from swimming last night and found Frank, too. While you were drinking.”
“Sho. But who done it?” Lenny said.
She didn’t answer. They watched each other.
“So, now what?” I said. I wanted it all.
Lenny spoke. “This here wasn’t in the cards for sure,” he said. “An’ it’s gonna be hard.”
Leda wouldn’t look at me. She watched Lenny.
She said, “We only planned this part in case you took it into your head to investigate who’d done the murder. The law’s certain you did it. I’ve got the business, and I’ll sell. I’ve got the inheritance, all of it.” She paused, took a deep breath. “We also get the credit for catching you. Only you can’t tell about it. Because you’ll be dead, Eric, when we bring Burkette out here.”
“Who figured that one?” I tried to stay calm, to think, but that gun muzzle was steady.
“We did,” Leda said.
“She means,” Lenny said, “that she thought it up. She thinks of everything. She’s a smart one. I done told her she was.”
“Yes,” Leda said. “I’m a smart one. And I’m thinking right now, too.”
Lenny giggled. “I know what you think with, Leda. You told me.”
I had noticed plenty of antagonism between them. It kept getting stronger as the minutes passed.
“Well,” I said. “It’s a lot of money, nearly a million. But split two ways it’s not so much.” Perspiration covered me now. My palms were clammy and I was in the room with death.
“We’re stuck with it,” Lenny said. “Leda ain’t so bad. We’ll make out.”
“How do you know I’m not so bad?” she said. “You couldn’t know. I wouldn’t let you know.”
“You will, honey. You will, because that’s what we schemed up. Birds of a feather, baby, an’ all that there stuff. Remember? We’ll step out in the world, like we ought.”
“You’re one bird that’s molting before my very eyes,” Leda said.
Lenny looked a question.
“I don’t need you any more, you pig,” Leda said. “I had a husband once. He’s dead, so I can do it all right. I know I can do it and stand it.”
They had forgotten me. But still that gun muzzle did not stray and Lenny’s eyes were quick now. I was caught cold, flat.
“You don’t need me not more?” Lenny said.
She shook her head. “I’ve got the money and I’m in the clear. Eric forced me to come here, you see?”
“Forced you to come here?” Lenny said. He snorted. “Don’t kid me!” He laughed outright. “That sure is a hot one, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” Leda said. She took a single step forward, her long white thigh parting the folds of the bathrobe. Just once her tongue flicked across her lips. “And here’s another hot one—just for you.”
Lenny stood with the gun in his hand one minute. The next instant he bowled backward into the kitchen. Three explosions slammed inside the cabin.
Leda’s hand was in the pocket of that bathrobe and flame spat through the pocket. Three solid bucking times.
Lenny clutched his stomach with his left hand and sat down hard. He brought his gun up carefully, struggling. He was gasping with the effort and the pain inside him. There was a look of absolute stricken wonder on his face. He fought with that gun, trying to get it up.
“Did you hear that hot one?” Leda asked. Her voice was a bright whisper and there was something of hot satisfaction in it, of unpleasant, wild relief. “Did you feel it, Lenny? No more pouring over the collection now, no more additions—And no me, ever!”
Lenny fought with the revolver. He was dying and he knew it. It was all over for him. Only one thing was left and he wanted very much to do that one thing. She could have ended it there, but she didn’t. I watched her face and it was taut. She began breathing faster and faster, her lips parted, her breasts thrusting almost convulsively.
Lenny fought with the gun. Then he squeezed the trigger, just once. The lead slug tore through his foot and into the floor. He fell back dead.
Leda shuddered and relaxed. She breathed deeply. “Geez,” she said. “That did something to me.”
I couldn’t look at her sagging lips. Leda was no longer sane, something had gone bang inside her, now. Her eyes were glassy.
“You see, Eric,” she said. “I could never split the money. And—and I couldn’t let him—”
“It’s funny,” I said. “But they never seem able to split the money.”
She swallowed, glanced at Lenny, then turned her gray eyes toward me again. I kept trying to tell myself
that here all pride and defiance were gone. That only emptiness remained, emptiness behind a shell of beauty. A clay shell. I tried to tell myself that was all she was—nothing but clay and clay could be smashed. Lenny had smashed clay. I tried to tell myself that. But I had loved this woman and even now—after thinking the things I had, after seeing the things I’d seen her do and heard her say, after I had watched the vicious turbulence within her—I couldn’t help wanting her still.
I was as bad as she. Worse, perhaps. She was all wickedness combined; all the dirt of many gutters—a murderess and one who could not love. But had she loved? I still wanted her—I knew I could not have her. . . .
Her voice was soft now. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to do.” She was pulling herself together after discovering that killing Lenny hadn’t been the easiest thing in the world to do after all. But Leda was Leda, my Leda, and she did pull herself together. “I’ve got to kill you,” she said. She drew the forty-five from the pocket of her bathrobe and it looked terribly large in her white hand. The pocket was burned.
And I knew the weaknesses of man. I didn’t want to die. That was one weakness. I still wanted this woman. And that was the other weakness.
Death was big but it was also final.
I leaped for her. The automatic bucked in her hand once again and the cabin rocked with explosion. But she had missed and the gun was empty. I was on my hands and knees.
“Leda!”
She whirled, ran for the kitchen. The rear door slammed. I went after her, stubbed my foot on Lenny’s body and sprawled across the floor.
Lenny’s revolver was caught under my chest. I scrambled up with the gun in my hand and headed out the back door after her.
In the shallow gray light of morning I glimpsed her flashing legs, the auburn hair, and that maroon bathrobe flapping along the river bank.
“Leda!” I shouted. From in front of the cabin I heard the abrupt sound of a car’s engine, the quick slew and rumble of tires gripping the muddy road. I paid no attention, ran on toward the spot where Leda had vanished.
Chapter 21
Wet grass along the steep crumbling bank of the river showed me her path. I followed, running, knowing I had to reach her. Then I saw her.
“Leda!”
She turned, looked at me. She was standing on the river bank, grasping a low long waving branch of a live oak. Moss tumbled over her shoulders as she half crouched, watching first me, then the rushing waters below. She stood half naked, the maroon bathrobe fell from her body.
“Eric,” she said, and I rushed her.
For a long moment we tangled on the bank’s crumbling lip. She fought wildly, passionately. The gun fell from my fingers as I grasped her arms. Her smooth white body was lush, savage, but not with love—never with love.
With fear, now.
“I loved you,” I said. “Did you ever love me?”
Her right hand raked red-tipped nails across the side of my face and her teeth gleamed white between her lips. I held her to me, felt all the lithe tortured length of her body and again her nails raked me. Across my neck, my shoulders. She writhed, cursed.
“I don’t love you now. Hear me, Leda? Hear?”
She cringed back, bending, her lips parted, her eyes black-pupiled and afraid.
“But I want you! Hear me?”
I heard my own voice, shouting, harsh.
I had to hurt her. Nothing mattered but that. I had to hurt her for real just as she had so perfectly wrecked me.
Her lips were parted as I grabbed for her. All the hell-hate in her snapped across her eyes. For a second, as I moved, she crouched, wild-eyed. Then she leaped.
She struck at me, then turned and ran stumbling along the bank away toward denser woods.
I sprawled on the ground, half over the bank, knowing the sure fate that lay in the swollen mad river beneath me. Scrabbling back, I found the gun and went after her.
The bank rose on a gentle incline, walled with twisted roots.
“Leda!” Her naked body flashed against the morning. I fired the gun twice into the soggy earth. She whirled, her mouth wide and soundless. Then she screamed.
Her long nakedness thrashed for a brief instant as the bank crumbled beneath her feet. She vanished into the black waters of the river.
It was much swifter than it looked. As I came up to where she’d fallen something swirled in a rush against the surface, already far downstream. Her face, maybe, then an arm, a leg, very white and small and moving away.
I stood on the bank, watching, while mudclots broke off beneath my feet and splashed in the wild water. I couldn’t move.
And that was all. Quickly gone. I saw no more of her and the river was the same. Leda Thayer was gone. She had found escape through death. No one could live where she was now.
I walked back to where we had fought. Trampled into the wet grass at my feet was the maroon bathrobe. I dropped the gun into the folds of blood-colored cloth.
“Eric.”
I glanced around. Coming through the grass toward me was Norma. She still wore the red shorts and the white sweater and her hair was very golden. Clyde Burkette stalked behind her with two other men. One of them was Gallagher.
“Hello,” I said to Norma. All right. They were here and it was over and I was it. Leda’s scream still echoed in my mind. But Leda was gone.
Norma stood facing me as Burkette, Gallagher, and the other man came up.
Norma and I stared at each other. Yes, I was it.
“We saw it,” Norma said. “Most of it. We found Lenny, Eric.”
I could never explain Lenny’s death.
Burkette shoved past Norma and strode up to me. His face was haggard, his gray Stetson grimed with mud.
“We been trying to catch you,” he said. “We trailed you from your car, last night. Old man with the load of chickens on his truck reported the accident, Eric.” He glanced down at his mud-caked shoes. If it hadn’t been for Burkette’s knowledge of the trail, his being a born backwoodsman, he might never have found me. He did not pick his teeth. Somehow his attitude had changed. “Soon as I realized where you were headed, I sent Gallagher back to town. He brought another man and the car up the back road. Met us down yonder a piece.” He waved his arm vaguely.
Gallagher and the other man stood in the grass. Gallagher didn’t look very grim any more.
I didn’t feel anything. Just tired, now—tired and empty. I didn’t want anything any more, not anything.
Burkette cleared his throat. “You been through a heap, I reckon. Reckon mebbe I had you wrong, Eric.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Eric, the girl—Norma, there. She saw it—saw him back there—” he gestured toward the cabin beyond the tangled undergrowth, “when he killed Frank. She come to the barn and saw it through the window. Didn’t know what to do, I reckon. Excited. Finally made up her mind to tell you, but she missed you. Listen,” he said. “We been chasing you ever since. Trying to tell you. You was jamming yourself up, Eric.” He coughed, swallowed. “Owe you an apology, Eric.” His gaze dropped. “You’ll be a big man in these parts from now on.”
I’d heard it all. It didn’t make sense, yet it had to be true. I looked over at Norma. For a second her face was rigid, then slowly she smiled and there was something in her eyes that was very different from something in another pair of eyes I remembered so well. She nodded, stepped toward me.
“That’s right, Eric. I was with the sheriff at the Hewitts when you drove in.”
“But you fired at me. . . .”
Burkette shook his head. “In the air, figured it’d maybe stop you.”
“Then you know I didn’t kill my brother?”
“Knowed it for hours.” He shoved his hat back. “The one in the cabin,” he said. His hand flicked toward the river. “She did that?”
I nodded.
He started to turn, paused. “Body’ll snag at the bend. Best we get on down there.” He glanced at Gallagher and the oth
er man. “Least the body’ll make the bend if the river says so. I wouldn’t want to swim in there.” The three of them waded through the grass.
Norma was tired. But she smiled again. The river moved sluggish and certain toward the bend. I couldn’t smile right then.
Norma kept watching me. I wanted her to go away, to leave me alone. I was sick right now, but someday it would be all right.
“It’s all right, Eric,” Norma said. “I know what it is to be lonely.”
We stood that way for some time. Both of us knew what the other thought. And it was my turn to understand.
THE END
of a novel by
Gil Brewer