Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll

by John Farris

  Then I took off trousers and shirt, looked back toward the house. There was no moon at the moment, few lights in the windows. I took off my shoes and socks and the sand was smooth against my feet. Then I removed my damp underwear and stood naked at the edge of the water for a few moments before wading thigh-deep and swimming slowly. Muscles relaxed as I eased over on my back and floated. The scraped places on my arms stung and throbbed. Once I heard a plopping splash nearby, and thought of fish.

  When I had cooled enough I swam back to the beach and waded in. I sat in the sand for a while, drying slowly in the humid air. The first time I heard the sound behind me I ignored it. When I heard it again — the sound of someone walking stealthily toward me in the sand — I rolled on my belly, gathered my legs beneath me and dived at an indistinct figure five feet away. We went down. There was a muffled sound of surprise that I didn’t make. My hand slid along a smooth curved thigh, touched rounded breasts and full nipples. I was holding a woman as naked as I was, and holding her damned tight, the weight of my body pinning her to the sand. She was rigid, apparently too shocked to struggle. I backed away from her fast and she sat up. I couldn’t see her well, but I knew she was beautifully proportioned, and I had an idea that her hair was blonde. She cried out again, reached toward her breasts with protective hands.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have come up behind me like that.”

  For a few seconds she didn’t speak. She sat in the sand, legs crossed at the ankles. “It’s... all right,” she said in a strained voice. “I’m sorry I... startled you.” Her hands came away from her breasts slowly and dropped to her knees. She sat very still, apparently looking toward me. I hadn’t held her long, but long enough for her to be perfectly aware I wasn’t dressed either. Not that it made any difference, in the dark.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “I’m Diane. You... must be Pete. Pete Mallory.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ve been swimming, too. I was in the water when you came down here.” She paused. “I don’t sleep well.”

  I swallowed something hanging in my throat. I could see just enough of her to make me wish I could see more. The face was probably beautiful. The bone structure seemed good. She made no effort to move further away from me.

  “How did you know me?”

  She turned her head so that I could see the curve of her throat. “I know everyone else who is here. I didn’t recognize you. Macy’s talked about you. He brought you here to find the person who’s going to kill him.”

  “Yes.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then, “Do you have a cigarette, Pete?”

  I went to my clothes and took a pack from the shirt, and matches. I returned to her, lit one, held it to her, seeing her features emerge in a scarlet glow. A fierce look narrowed her eyes as a hand hit the inside of my wrist hard, knuckles sharp against the tendons. The cigarette spun to the sand, glowed bravely for an instant, went out.

  “You don’t need to look,” she said crossly.

  I was surprised. She got to her feet stiffly. “I’ve seen it all before,” I told her.

  She stood for a long time without paying any attention to me, not even looking in my direction. I had been right in my guess. She was beautiful. The skin of her face was smooth and unlined, lips full and shaped for hungry kisses. Then she stretched, rising to her toes, and relaxed. Her voice was calm again.

  “Macy will tell you about me,” she said. “I’m supposed to be a little bit crazy.”

  “Are you?”

  She laughed girlishly. “I suppose so. I suppose I am. But I’m harmless. Macy must think I’m all right. He trusts me to take care of Aimee.”

  “Aimee? Who’s that?”

  “You’ll meet her in the morning. You’ll like her. She’s a lot like me. She has a wildness like me, tied down inside.” She turned toward the bay. “Right now I want to go swimming.”

  “You ought to wear more clothes around here,” I advised.

  She laughed again. “It doesn’t make any difference. Nobody will touch me. Macy wouldn’t let them. Besides, I told you I’m supposed to be a little bit crazy.”

  She walked close to me, and I felt her fingers light against my shoulders. I had the scent of her and my heart beat too fast.

  “I like you, Pete,” she whispered to me, and then she was gone, running through the sand to the water and diving in with a hushed splash.

  I pulled on my pants and slipped into socks and shoes, walked leisurely back to the house with my shirt over my arm.

  Chapter Six

  On the terrace I looked down the drive. Through the trees I saw a thin border of light in one window of the small gabled gatehouse. The thought of sleep wasn’t right for me yet and the thought of Elaine was a gathering misery deep in my stomach, so I walked down the drive and knocked at the door.

  “Who is it?” Rudy said. I told him. He came and opened the door timidly. He wore nothing but the old hat and a pair of underwear shorts pulled high over his sagging, stuck-out belly. In one hand he held an Italian automatic. His pinkish skin glistened wetly.

  It was hot in the one-room house. The windows were open but Rudy had drawn the blinds. A slow-turning fan kept the air from becoming stifling. On a hot plate coffee bubbled in a glass percolator.

  He offered me a chair and sat down in another, stuck the automatic into a shoulder holster hanging by the strap from the back of the chair.

  “Where’s the other fellow?” I asked Rudy.

  “Reavis? Up at the house. One of us always sleeps in the room next to Macy’s.”

  “Feel any better?”

  He shook his head. “I cleaned up. I won’t be able to move tomorrow.”

  “Thought you’d be in bed by this time.”

  He gave me a bleary look. “I don’t sleep much these days.”

  “That gate outside doesn’t look very sturdy to me. Fence wire won’t hold back anybody who wants in bad enough.”

  He chuckled and got to his feet. “Want to see something?” There was a small control panel with three knife switches beside the door. Rudy pried one up. He opened the door. Outside, tiny spurts of blue flame along the wires accompanied the crisp sounds of frying insects. Rudy shut the heavy door and locked it, turned off the electricity.

  “Enough juice to kill a cow,” he said. “There’s a fence operating on another circuit slung halfway around this island.”

  “Why no sleep, Rudy? You waiting for somebody to come along?” I was sorry for the cruelty in my voice.

  “Get off it, will you?” he said. His tone was defeated. “You saw what happened tonight. I almost got it tonight. You would have got it right along with me if I hadn’t been able to drag that carbine from under the dash.” He took the percolator from the hot plate and poured coffee. He had to hold the cup close to his face to keep from spilling too much as he drank. As it was, some of the coffee trickled through the discolored hairs of his chest and stomach. He didn’t bother to wipe the drops away.

  “You been around a long time, Rudy,” I told him. “You won’t be as easy to get to as the others were.”

  He banged the cup against the table. “This guy,” he said, swallowing hard, “this guy — ” His eyes wandered helplessly as he tried to find the right words to tell me what he was feeling, what had been building inside him as he saw himself earmarked for a quick, bloody death. “I been around too long, Pete,” he said. “I’ve slowed down. I’ve known too many other guys, quicker and smarter than me, who couldn’t find any place to hide once the finger was on them. Oh, he’ll get me, all right. He’ll get me.” His fingers touched the butt of the automatic, lifted convulsively. “Unless you—”

  “How many people in the house knew which road you’d take tonight?” I asked him.

  His shoulders lifted. “It was no secret around here that I was going to Orange Bay.”

  “Who’s living here besides Macy?” I thought of Diane, the girl I hadn’t been able to
see quite well enough. “He got a woman around?”

  “Macy? No. He don’t care nothin’ about women any more. Once in a while I guess he can use one. Like me. I got to rub up against one all night before I—”

  “There’s a girl I met on the beach a few minutes ago. She was swimming.”

  “Diane.”

  “That’s her name.”

  “She takes care of the kid. Aimee.”

  “Who is this Aimee?”

  Rudy scratched fingers through his hair. “Macy’s pet. A little nine-year-old girl. She’s Cuban, I think.”

  “How’d he come by that?”

  “You remember Chilly Rosales?”

  “Yeah.”

  “One of Chilly’s cousins was a Spanish Town whore. This Aimee was her kid. The whore’s husband may or may not have been her father. He wasn’t home much. One night when he was home he took a butcher knife and cut up the whore. Aimee was watching. Then he went after the kid and chased her down three flights of stairs. He got close enough once to take a swipe at her and opened one of her arms from the elbow down. So there they were, both of them bloody as Jesus and the girl screaming and running out into the street. A cop heard the screaming and shot the guy dead. Since the whore was his cousin, Chilly took care of the girl for a while, until he creamed himself and his Cadillac in an accident one night.”

  “Then Macy took her in,” I said, grinning crookedly.

  “Well,” Rudy replied, “he said she needed to have somebody. She was wild as hell when he latched onto her. Diane toned her down. Took a long time.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said, shaking my head in astonishment.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who else is around, then?”

  “Well, Diane and Aimee. Macy’s brother Owen, too. He’s supposed to be manager of the hotel but he don’t do nothin’ but booze and paint those pictures of his. Charley Rinke’s here, too, with his wife.”

  It was a new name. “He’s sort of like you used to be,” Rudy explained, “except he ain’t big enough or mean enough to handle the contact work. Rides the books, mostly. There’s something about him I don’t like much. He struts, you know, like he was real dangerous, especially around people who don’t know no better, but any trouble and he’s the first to find some place where it’s safe to watch. I don’t think even his wife likes him. She’s been laid by some of the boys in town, especially Reavis. He does most of the heavy work these days, like collecting.”

  I felt the first quieting nudge of sleep, and stirred sore muscles in getting up. “I think I’ll turn in. See you in the morning, Rudy.”

  He went to the door with me. “How did you ever happen to go to work for Macy, Pete?” he asked suddenly.

  I considered that for a while. “I guess Aimee wasn’t the first lost kid Macy ever took in,” I said, and walked outside.

  Going up the hill, I thought about the way it had been; coming home from the war with each nerve bare from the endless nights of patrol and attack and retreat to find Jean, the wild beauty I had married at the end of college, slowly becoming a hopeless paretic. And nothing, nothing could stop the pitting of the brain that gradually turned her into a strange creature, with a halting walk and thick speech and weird hallucinations. I lasted long enough to see that she would be taken care of in the best institution I could afford. Then I cracked up. There were no memories for a while, not until Macy found me in some rathole, half-dead from whisky and grief, and flew me south to a small island in the Caribbean where I had the chance to start living again if I wanted to take it.

  I remembered the day I stood high on a cliff, a storm blowing toward me from off the choppy sea, the wind high. Macy was yelling in my ear, his coat and tie whipping, hair in his face. He had a bottle in his hand and as he argued with me he raised his arm and threw the bottle over the cliff.

  “You want another drink? If that’s what you want, go get it! I’m tired of fooling around with you. You got any guts, go get that bottle!”

  And I stood there, shaking, cold, squeezing my face with my hands, wondering why it was so hard for me to take those steps that would end it. I stood there a long time until I wasn’t trembling any more. Then I turned and walked away from the edge of the cliff. I didn’t feel good because I was doing it. I didn’t feel as though I had won any great victory over myself. I didn’t feel anything.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Macy had said with a grin.

  I turned and looked back at him. “With you, if you want me. If not, I don’t know where.”

  But too many wires had pulled loose for me to hope that I could live normally again before many years. I needed the feeling of danger that the job with Macy offered me — until the healing was complete. Then I left him.

  Chapter Seven

  A woman was asleep on my bed when I opened the door of the room. Apparently she had been sleeping fitfully because she sat up, squinting painfully, as soon as I turned on the light. She seemed to be about thirty years old, small and tightly knit, with hair like dull gold. Without the puffiness under the eyes and the tension lines on her face, she would have been beautiful.

  “Please turn it out,” she said, almost moaning. “It hurts my eyes.”

  I turned off the overhead, switched on a small pin-up lamp over the dresser, throwing long searching shadows through the room.

  “I didn’t know anyone was using this room,” she said, blinking. She sat tensely on the edge of the bed, as if constantly aware of some internal tightening. She wore a filmy pale green nightgown that dropped like a curtain from the mounds of her breasts to her lap. Her nipples showed prominently through the material. Glancing down, she became aware of her body and, without any fuss, took a robe from the floor and put it about her shoulders, drawing it shut indifferently, as if it didn’t matter whether I looked or not.

  “I couldn’t sleep in my room,” she said. “I walked around the house and came in here and just lay down.” She looked at me. “I’m Evelyn Rinke,” she said.

  I put my shirt over the back of a chair. “Pete Mallory.”

  Her eyes inspected me openly and with great care. She seemed to have no embarrassment. The set of her mouth and sleepy eyes reminded me of a hungry young bird. “Yes,” she said. “I knew you were coming. I’ve heard them talk about you.”

  She got up slowly, walked toward me and around me. “I guess you want to go to bed. You must be tired.” She tilted her head slightly, looked up at me. Her lips parted and I saw her tongue against her teeth. She stepped closer to me, her fingers grasping my arms, sliding over the elbows, along the flat muscles. Her fingers were long and hard, hot and dry. They tightened, relaxed. She drew her body against me, the material of the nightgown rasping softly. There was no softness about her body, no fleshiness. It was as hard as the fingers, had a feeling of strength, as if it could be used again and again with no slackening of the lean tight muscles. I could feel her trembling, feel her warm, vaguely sweet breath come in gusts. It wasn’t passion that made her tremble. Her eyes were restless and wild. She wanted me to put my hands on that body and gentle it, and then do with it as I pleased.

  “Let me go to bed with you,” she said. “Let me sleep with you. I really need to. I need to sleep next to a man for a change.”

  I took her arms and moved her away from me. She was beginning to perspire lightly. Tiny drops appeared on her forehead. Her fingers squeezed once again, then she backed away still more. Her eyes were cloudy. She didn’t seem upset that I had refused her, just disappointed. In withdrawing her fingertips, she touched the scraped places along my forearms. I looked at them. They were stippled with dried blood. Most of it had washed off during my swim.

  “You’re hurt,” she said. “How did that happen?”

  “I was trying to run away. Somebody was shooting at me.”

  Her expressive eyebrows pressed down. “Does that happen often?”

  “No. It hasn’t lately. Not since the war.” She wasn’t standing still now, but movi
ng as though something inside was whipping at her. She breathed deeply.

  “What’s your trouble?” I asked. “Nerves?”

  “God, yes.” Her fingers clenched. “God, yes.”

  “I know,” I said. “I had the same trouble once. The war did it to me.”

  Mrs. Rinke smiled painfully. “Wars always end. I wish something that simple could help me. I’d drink, if it didn’t make me sick. How I’d drink!”

  She looked at the pavement burns on my arms again. “I’ll get something for those,” she said, and left before I could protest. She was back before long with a white metal first-aid kit. She used an antiseptic on the scrapes, doctored them with iodine.

  “Better not bandage them,” she said. “They’ll heal faster.”

  I looked up to see a man standing in the doorway. He wore loose pajamas and no robe. Evelyn Rinke was too engrossed in repacking the first-aid kit to notice him. He was a little man, slightly built, with pale hair in a crew cut and thick glasses that made his grayish-purple eyes round and staring. His ears were big and his jaws long and hollowed beneath strong wide cheekbones. The mouth was too large for his face, and folded down at the edges when it ran out of room. The upper lip was thin and almost bloodless, slanted down from the cleft, corners fitting into deep pockets. His lips had a certain acid primness, like those of an obnoxious preacher. But his voice was firm and soft and polite, betraying no irritation from finding his wife in my room.

  “I missed you, Evelyn,” he said. He was looking at me. “You weren’t in your bed.”

  She was startled. She jerked around, pulling the robe together. Her fingers clamped tightly together at her belly. The small pleasure she had taken from helping me cleanse my scraped arms fled.

  “I... couldn’t sleep, Charley. It was warm, and... I couldn’t sleep. Mr. Mallory was hurt. I...”

  Rinke walked toward me and offered his hand. He apparently wasn’t bothered by the fact that his wife’s body had been prominently visible through the nightgown under the carelessly worn robe.