Ride The Pink Horse

by Dorothy B. Hughes

  Most of all he liked his own soft answer. “You did.”

  The Sen wasn’t shriveled with fear yet. Because he didn’t know yet what Sailor knew, how much he knew. He thought it was an accusation, no more. He thought he could afford to pull his lips up in a sneer. “You won’t get anywhere accusing me.”

  Sailor said, “I think I might. If I told Mac the whole story.” He lit a cigarette, let smoke snort out of his nostrils. “Jerky wasn’t the only one whose plans hitched that night.”

  The Sen didn’t know of knowledge yet. But he burned. “You mean you had car trouble too? You were late?” He didn’t believe it. He was refusing to believe it.

  “Uh-uh,” Sailor said. “She was.” He let the Sen have it now, have it both barrels. Now was the time. “I got there the time you told me. Storm and all. I did it just like you said, pulled things around to make it look like a loot. And I had the lights out when the taxi drove up outside. Just like you planned it.”

  He was remembering it as he spoke. Not with any emotion, like something he’d seen in a picture show sometime. Kind of a dull picture. The Sen’s library there at the front of the house, books and couches and a desk. French doors opening out to a little yard. He’d come in the French doors like the Sen told him, they were easy to open. His hands gloved. Good grey suede gloves, soft, expensive. He’d pulled out papers from the desk, opened the wall safe. Like he was Jerky looking for blackmail and maybe a haul of easy dough.

  “I had Jerky’s gun all ready to let go when she came in. Only she didn’t get there the time you counted on. I guess she couldn’t get a taxi for a while account of the storm. She came in just like you said she would, front door, with the key she hooked. Only she hadn’t hooked a key; it was hers. She wasn’t Jerky’s dame. She was Mrs. Douglass.”

  The Sen’s mouth was so thin, the brush mustache hid it. He opened it only a slit to speak. “And so you killed her by mistake. But I protected you. I knew you never would have shot her if you’d known. It was an accident, a bitter accident.”

  “That’s what I thought, then,” Sailor said. Carefully he lit another cigarette from the stub of the first, not moving his tight right hand from his pocket. “There was a big slash of lightning right after I fired and I saw I’d made a mistake. An awful mistake.” He pulled in a lungful of smoke remembering the dread moment. The tall gray-haired woman, the horrified surprise on her face as she fell. “I didn’t know what to do.” Letting out the smoke fogged the small mean figure sitting there on the bed, sitting like a mummy not a man.

  “I didn’t know what you’d do. I started over to her, to see if I could do anything for her—” The remembered moment was stark again. “I heard a car come in the drive. I dropped the gun. And I got out quick.”

  The Sen said again angrily, “I took care of you. I didn’t mention you to the police. What’s the point of all this?”

  “The timing was wrong. You got home too soon. That was your car. I was outside the window.”

  The Sen’s rigidity was electric.

  “She wasn’t dead. She was pushing up, trying to get up. You picked up the gun and let her have it. You had your gloves on.”

  The Sen began to curse him, to curse and revile him with obscene eyes, a toneless throat. But the Sen didn’t move. He knew he was covered by Sailor’s right-hand pocket.

  Sailor waited until he was quiet. “I’m no killer,” he said. “I never killed anyone only in self defense. You knew you couldn’t hire me to kill your wife. You needed a triggerman. But you didn’t dare put one of those fellows on anything that important. I believed your bull about getting rid of Maudie Spizzoni before she landed us all in the Federal pen. I thought about it like it was self defense. She wasn’t any good to anybody. Even so I wasn’t a killer. I didn’t want even to kill Maudie cold like that. I wouldn’t have done it only for the chance to do something on my own. Only for the dough.” If Mac hadn’t talked like a preacher . . . “All right, so it was wrong. I shouldn’t have said I’d do it. But I didn’t know it was your wife you wanted killed.” His teeth were bare. “And I didn’t kill her!” He caught hold of himself. “All I want is five grand and you won’t ever see me again. Mac won’t ever find out what you and I know.”

  The Sen snarled, “It would be your word against mine.”

  “Mac’s not looking for me,” Sailor said. “He’s looking for the guy who killed your wife. The guy that got fifty grand for killing her.” He said harshly, “Five grand isn’t much.”

  The Sen didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything he could say, he was caught. The way all the fellows hoped and knew he’d be caught some day. But none of them ever thought Sailor would be the one to catch him. Sailor never thought so.

  “After all I’ve done for you.” He’d turned on the music in his pipes. “Taking you out of the gutter. Educating you like you were my own—” The phone spoiled his art. Interrupting as it had earlier today. It rang short, then long. The Sen looked at it the same way Sailor was looking at it, as if it had no business sounding. As if its intrusion were insolent.

  The Sen reached out a withered hand. He said, “Hello,” and was silent. Sailor knew who was calling. The hopelessness that came over the Sen was the hopelessness of the damned. Even her voice couldn’t help him at this moment. He listened silent. When he spoke his voice was dry, old. He said, “I’m sorry. I’ll be down right away. I’m sorry, Iris.” There was no caress in the name. He replaced the phone.

  Sailor said, “Well.”

  The Sen moved unsteadily. Standing up from the bed, standing there as if he were a blind man in an unfamiliar room. Sailor’s hand gripped tight in his pocket. But the Sen only began to unbutton his shirt. He said, “You’ve got to give me more time.”

  Sailor was silent.

  “I promised my friends to go with them to the Procession. I have to dress and shave.” He might have been talking to himself, telling himself what was on his mind. “Dress and shave.” His eyes wavered across to Sailor. “You’ve got to give me more time.” He was querulous as a child. “The banks are closed. Tomorrow is a bank holiday. Labor Day. I can’t do anything until Tuesday.”

  Sailor stretched up from the chair. He was as sure and cold as steel was cold before a hand hotted it. “You got friends,” he slurred. “You’re a big shot. You’re Senator Douglass.” His voice cracked like a whip. “I’ll give you till midnight.”

  “I can’t—” The Sen was going to whine.

  Sailor cut him off. “Midnight. By Tio Vivo”—he translated—”the merry-go-round.” Pancho for bodyguard in case the Sen came out of his trance. “I don’t want Mac in on this any more than you do.”

  He walked sharp to the door while the Sen was pulling off his shirt. While his claws were caught in satin cuffs.

  “I won’t go to Mac unless you want me to.” Sailor gave the Sen a sudden grin as his left hand turned the knob.

  The Sen’s lips moved. He forced the word through them. “Guttersnipe!” It was more evil than the obscenities had been.

  4

  He would have sat down in the lobby. On a comfortable brown leather couch. Only he saw a Spanish hat with bobbles there. It wasn’t Mac but he remembered Mac. He walked out of the hotel. He didn’t want Mac around him tonight. While he was watching the Sen. The Sen wasn’t going to run out on him this night. The Sen wasn’t going to get by with any monkey business.

  He took his stand outside the display windows, next to the entrance arch. There were painted tin platters in the windows, kids’ chairs with red and blue roses daubed on them, a hideous wooden saint holding out a bleeding wooden hand, a couple of fat yellow painted pigs. A hodge-podge for the La Fonda rich guys to take back to civilization, to remind them of the Fiesta visit in a foreign country.

  He could stand there; no one cared. There were people standing all over the streets, leaning against shop windows, tired of making merry, tired of the music and the dance and the gimcracks, tired of a three-day Feast before the second day w
as done. Tired, just tired. In the feet and the eyes and the guts, leaning like warm wax against the windows and walls. The Plaza spun on in its tawdry tinsel cage. But it was tired too, the children’s voices on the merry-go-round were muted, the violin and guitar were faint music, even the leaves on the tall trees were still. Everything was quieted in the weary twilight. He could stand there as long as he wanted waiting for the Sen. With no one paying attention, no one knowing him, no one caring that the man in the rumpled suit with the hat pulled over his eyes was holding a gun in his pocket.

  Before the bells began to ring, he saw the shawled women moving towards the cathedral. He saw the gray stone mass of the cathedral overshadowing the little street, the purple clouds piling behind its squat towers, the black-shawled women and the children dangling from their hands, the church yard filling with men and women and children, quiet and dim as ghosts. Sunday night. Vespers and benediction. The old lady used to slip off and go to vespers when things weren’t too tough at home. The old man never went. By Sunday night he was sitting around in his dirty stocking feet, bloated with beer or red-eyed with whisky. The kids wouldn’t go to vespers, all the kids in the neighborhood went to the movies on Sunday evenings. But the old lady wanted to go, and she’d come home looking rested, almost as peaceful as she did years later when she was dead.

  When the bells began to ring the cathedral doors opened like a kid playing church-and-steeple with his hands. Standing there Sailor could see into the lighted nave, see all the way to the altar with its burning candles. He didn’t know vespers were part of Fiesta, not until the Sen came hurrying towards the church. He almost missed the Sen in the depth of twilight and him watching the shadows gathering on the church terrace. He might have if she hadn’t been beside him.

  He followed the pale white froth of her skirts. Even as he followed he didn’t believe they were heading for the church. Catching the Sen in church would be like catching the Devil in a prayer book.

  He almost didn’t keep on when they walked up the steps towards the open doors. He hadn’t been inside a church since the old lady died and he didn’t want to go in one again. A lot of pious talk, a lot of praying, a lot of that turn-the-other-cheek, love-your-enemies stuff. Nothing about how to get out of a Chicago slum into the Gold Coast. He’d learned that in a pool hall. The church had never done anything for him.

  But he followed. He wasn’t going to lose sight of the Sen. The Sen didn’t know Sailor was trailing, there were too many in the church yard besides him. The Sen went on in as if he weren’t something to be exorcised with holy water. Sailor let some of the crowd go first.

  When he got inside, his eyes found the white mist, the silver-gold hair, down in front with the wine velvets and gold chains. The black velvet beside her was still the Sen.

  Sailor slid into a back pew where he could watch them. The cathedral was big and tall and wide, dim even with its lights. It looked old and sanctified. It wasn’t packed but it was pretty well filled. A lot of fancy costumes, yet it wasn’t all Fiesta. There were the mourning women in their black dresses and black shawls. There were men in old jeans and blue work shirts; and old men in their Sunday bests, their netted brown faces peaceful under their white heads. There were brown children kneeling rigidly, like wooden images.

  He didn’t pay any attention to anything but the white-and-silver girl down in front. She belonged here; she was something holy, like one of the altar candles, like an angel. He didn’t pay attention to the altar. There were priests up there chanting the litany; their white-and-gold benediction vestments draped over the red velvet chairs. There was a choir of seminarians singing. Singing the responses. Their faces were foreign like the town; brown Mexican faces, somber, and their voices, unaccompanied, were like a heaven choir. He didn’t care about that. He hadn’t come here to pray; he’d come with a gun to keep his eye on a rat. He wasn’t going to be sucked in by holiness. He kept his mind and his backbone rigid when the golden censers swung the musk-scented smoke, when the organ and choir blazoned together the O Salutaris Hostia. He got on his knees only because everyone else did, because he didn’t want to be conspicuous. Even the Sen was on his knees down there in front.

  He didn’t know why the dim perfumed cathedral didn’t belch the Sen out of its holy portals. But looking down the long aisle to the lighted altar, up to the high vaulted roof, he did know. The church was like the stone of its walls, like the stone of the woman. It was too strong, too fast, too great to be aware of a small crawling thing like the Sen. The Sen was dwarfed to unimportance, he was without identity here.

  God on the high altar could strike the Sen down in his mockery of prayer. God wouldn’t. God had infinite patience. He had infinite mercy. He had infinite justice as well. The finality of Justice. Someday the Sen would pay.

  The choir”s voices lifted in the Laudate and everyone rose. It was over. Sailor was ready to get out quick, to take his stand near the door, shadowed, to watch the Sen and the girl leave. But a monk in brown robes was speaking from the altar. Something about the formation, Sociedad this, Sociedad that. The ushers were passing candles. The Sociedads were lifting painted satin banners on golden poles. The church bells began to ring out above the organ. Outside a band faltered into a hymn.

  Sailor slid over to the side pew. A pillar protected him from the eyes of those moving up the aisle. The old men and the little children. The rich and the poor. The alien and the native, the magnificent and the black shawls. The monks and the choir and the Sociedads, a slow-moving, silent procession to the open cathedral doors, out again into the night. Candles flickered like fireflies from all the vasty corners of the cathedral. When the Sen and the girl passed, Sailor moved up the side aisle fast. But he couldn’t follow. He had to wait to press into the line; balked, impatient, he had to wait. By the time he reached the open doors he had lost the Sen, lost him completely in this, the Procession to the Cross of the Martyrs. The town had been blacked out, no neons, no shop fronts, candle flame alone, flickering from the hands of those who walked to the cross. Down the long street rounding the Plaza, he could see only the twin lines of moving light in the unaccustomed depth of dark. The silence was deep as the dark; silence deeper than the choir chant, the somber hymn of the band, the tinkle and strum of the tamed Mariachis breaking their hymn against the brass, the shuffle of feet. No voices.

  Sailor fell in with the right-hand line, his lighted candle in his left hand, his right hand where it belonged. He didn’t know when his candle had come to light. As in a dream he remembered a Spanish voice speaking while he had been blocked in the side aisle. Beyond that no memory.

  He maneuvered forward in the line because he knew how, because he’d trailed men before and in Chicago crowds. Snaked forward until he saw the white girl again, in the left-hand line, forward. The width of street separating, and the dark. The Sen was behind her.

  The slow procession wound the Plaza when even the garland-colored bulbs that crowned Fiesta were dark. Around the square, turning up the wide lightless street where last night the cacophony of Keen’s Bar had smeared the night. Those doors too were dark, shuttered. Up the street, past small wood fires burning at the intersection, to circle a park and its dark massive building. The Federal Building park where the girls and their chosen had lain last night. Deserted now. Another narrow street lit by small fires and candle flame, a bridge ahead, across it the pinpricks of light winding up a hill, clusters of candlelight atop the hill. Against the sky, a wide white cross. The sky was blue black as the night, the stars were distant, flickering like the candle flames. Across the band of naked horizon a zigzag of lightning ran through far violet clouds. And a wind came up as out of the lightning, wavering the candles.

  Sailor couldn’t see the Sen as he toiled up the hill but he could see the misty white skirts. He kept his eye on the skirts. The Sen’s velvet was blacked out in the night. He wouldn’t lose the Sen if he watched Iris Towers.

  He hadn’t known there would be such a crowd until he too reac
hed the top of the hill. This wasn’t just for church people; this was Fiesta and everybody of Fiesta was there. He’d lost the skirt and he had to push through massed humanity before he found its whiteness again. There was a brown monk standing up in front of the cross talking through the loudspeaker. Talking of an ancient vow. The vow Don Diego de Vargas Zapata Lujan Ponce de Leon had made when he reconquered the ancient pueblo of Sante Fe. The old unforgotten vow.

  Sailor didn’t care about old vows, about old Spanish and Indian wars; he’d lost the girl in the shifting of the dark, candle-pricked mass. He edged quickly towards where he’d last seen white and again the veil of it fluttered behind a blurred wall of man shapes. As he shifted to keep the white in his view, someone’s elbow caught him under the shoulder bone. He growled, “Watch where you’re going,” but his words were broken by a sword of lightning cutting the sky. In the flash he saw the face of the girl in white. It wasn’t Iris Towers.

  Impotent rage filled his mouth and with it the pain thrust. A shaft of pain under his shoulder. With the pain the lightning of fear. He dropped his lighted candle as if it burned. His hand went slowly under his coat, touched the pain and returned to sight. The hand was wet with blood. He’d been knifed. He swiveled slowly, ready to kill, his trigger finger itching to kill. Behind him were the brown listening faces of grave men and women, their eyes lifted to the monk at the white cross. They hadn’t seen who’d jostled past in the crush. You didn’t turn around and catch a knifer wiping blood from a blade. Only a dope would expect that.

  Only a dope would seek in the quiet brown faces a face with secret triumph on it, with the laughter of hate distorting it. Would, with the pain thrumming now, stalk the silent circle of faces for a face. Sailor’s hand gripped the gun and the force opened the slant wound. He felt the flesh pull apart, felt the slow trickle of blood. Whoever had cut him, behind him in shadow stood the Sen. This was the Sen’s answer to Sailor’s demand. He should have expected it. He should have known the Sen wouldn’t wait to bring out his killers from Chicago; he’d use the local thugs. Every town had its killers; the Sen knew how to find them. The Sen knew all the root paths of evil.