by Jim Thompson
There were a few more words, all of them completely inaudible to Lord. They got up from the lounge, then, and Lord eased the door shut and lay down again.
He was back in his stupor almost as soon as he touched the bed.
8
George Carrington, president and general manager of the Highlands Oil & Gas Company (a Delaware Corporation; business offices, Fort Worth, Texas) lingered in the hospital corridor while the nurse went on into 4-B, carrying his gifts of a dozen long-stemmed roses and a five-pound box of candy. He was a tall, perfectly turned out man, quick of eye and smile, distinguished, and capable-looking. Yet, for all his air of confidence and capability, there was something wistful about him; a silent pleading for understanding that was particularly attractive to women.
It was probably the one genuine thing about George Carrington, or at least, the most nearly. About a thousand per cent more genuine than say, his British mannerisms and speech. For Carrington did need understanding (to equate the term with sympathy). He stood constantly in need of it. He liked it and appreciated it, wherever it derived from. But he needed it most, to state an axiomatic paradox, from those who consistently withheld it from him. And since they did, his need—and his air of wistfulness—was constant.
The things truly important to George Carrington persistently went wrong for him. Even the relatively small things, the indirectly important.
Now, as the nurse emerged from 4-B, he saw that still another had gone wrong. With diffident apology, she extended the candy and flowers, holding them out to him yet also hanging onto them.
“I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Carrington. Mrs. McBride doesn’t feel that…well, she doesn’t want these.”
“Really?” Carrington simultaneously managed a grave frown and a warm smile for the nurse. “Well, well, now. Perhaps later, eh?”
“I’m afraid not, sir. She doesn’t want them at all. Shall I have them returned to your office, or…?”
Carrington said that certainly she must not return them. She must, on the contrary, retain them for herself, and he would be deeply offended if she did not.
“You’ll just convey my good wishes to our invalid, eh? A speedy recovery and all that. You do that for me, and I’ll be more than repaid for these trifles.”
“Why, I’ll be glad to,” the nurse beamed. “And thank you very, very much for—” She broke off, frowning. “But you’ll see her yourself, won’t you? I think you’d better, Mr. Carrington,” she added, unwillingly firm. “I really think you’d better.”
“But—but she’s not feeling well! Can’t be, you know. Obviously not at all fit, not at all herself.”
“She’s herself, all right,” the nurse said grimly. “At least, I’ve never seen her any other way. Just about driven us crazy to get you out here, and now that you’re here…”
She moved in front of him, blocking his way to the elevator. Carrington, with desperate dignity, unsuccessfully tried to move around her. Hands fluttering he fell back, declaring that he really didn’t like this, you know. Didn’t think it was at all wise to see Mrs. McBride at such a time.
“Love to, you know. Like nothing better. But must think of our invalid, eh?”
“That’s who I am thinking of,” the nurse said. “You go right on in, Mr. Carrington.”
Carrington went in, perforce. And as always, when he was forced to do something, he did his best to make the most of it. He entered the door, not lingeringly, with feet dragging, but with quick eager strides. His smile was turned on to its fullest, and his eyes glowed with warmth, and he approached the woman in the bed with both hands extended.
“Dear Mrs. McBride! How nice of you to let me call! I’ve been wanting to get out for days, but…”
“Be quiet,” said Donna McBride.
“Eh? Oh, now, really! Can’t talk like that, can we? Old friends together, and—”
He stopped talking; sat down, with a silent philosophical sigh, in the chair she pointed to. For he’d done his best, hadn’t he, and how could a chap do more than that?
For the next fifteen minutes, he remained in the chair, eyes bent attentively on Donna, nodding and shaking his head sympathetically, murmuring meaningless nothings as he seemingly drank in each word she said. Actually, he heard very little, his mind catching at only the most significant peaks of her talk. Actually, his absorption was not with her, but with himself. He was wondering how such a fine chap as he had become so hopelessly involved with such dreadful people.
Not Donna or her husband. McBride had been a terribly decent fellow; rather a bore, you know, but truly decent, and naturally she would hate to lose him. But the others, those responsible for the indubitable runaround she was getting—well! Really grim, you know. Oh, but grim! And being a fair-minded laddie, he could only blame himself for his entanglement with them.
“Should have spotted them, right off,” he thought wearily. “Should have known my luck was sour when the old witch bagged me.”
The old witch referred to was his dead wife, the widow of a Texas cattle millionaire. Carrington had met her in his job as shoe clerk in a fashionable Dallas store. Up until that time, or so he thought in retrospect, life had been very good to him.
He did a bit of photographic modeling, at quite attractive rates. The better-type women’s stores were eager for his services, knowing that he either had a following or would very soon have one, and they paid well for them. Then, along with his direct earnings, there were innumerable gifts. Cash, quite often—a few bills slipped unobtrusively into his pocket, or under his dinner plate. If not cash, jewelry, heavy gold items that could be readily negotiated for cash. And once he had gotten a gift certificate for a complete wardrobe.
Of course, there could be some pretty tiresome encumbrances to these gifts. The donors were not the young juicy types which George Carrington would have preferred to show around in public and lie doggo with in private. Rather, since the young juicy types either had no money or saw no reason to spend it for male companionship, Carrington’s bounty came from the definitely nonyoung and unjuicy. Not in their dotage, you know; still went in for a bit of guzzling, heel-kicking, and hanky-panky. But whether lean or fat, and they always seemed to be one or the other, their attractions did not include youth or juice.
Still, that was all right, wasn’t it? A fellow couldn’t have everything, now, could he? Particularly when the fellow in question was no longer quite so young himself, and whose depletion in juice was manifesting itself in an occasional twinge and increasing tiredness. On the contrary, such a chap should be thinking less about fun and more about the future. For if the last was taken care of, the first must follow as night does the day.
Thinking that way, and he was thinking that way more and more of the time, George was a sitting duck for the witch. She had him signed, sealed, and delivered to her lair before a lad could say knife.
He assumed naturally that he was entering a share-and-share-alike arrangement; each according to his need, and each according to his ability. The witch would toss her gilt into the connubial pot, and he would provide himself—jollying her by the hearthside during the long winter evenings, and bunting her about in the hay when the fever was upon her. Unfortunately, the witch had her own ideas about sharing.
“You’re a real amusin’ boy, Georgie,” she told him, “and I get a kick out of showing you off. It’s worth somethin’ to me, and you’re gonna get somethin’. A nice livin’ free gratis, and enough income to let you hold your head up. What you ain’t gettin’ is wrote into my will. And you ain’t gettin’ a free ride. Won’t ask much of you, ’cause you don’t have it to put out. But you are takin’ a job.”
Like many people from old cattle families, the witch, as her dead husband had been, was contemptuous of oil (“stinkin’ stuff,” they thought of it) and the oil industry, and they would not directly or deliberately involve themselves with it. With their extensive holdings, however, it was inevitable that they should become indirectly involved—if only, as in the case
of Highlands Oil & Gas, in the role of unwilling creditors. The widow owned Highlands, lock, stock, and barrel. She didn’t give a damn about it, and she was certain that it couldn’t be worse off under George’s management than it already was. So she turned it over to him.
George did his feeble best to make a go of it. He kept books, after a fashion. He kept the cubbyhole offices meticulously clean. Hunt and peck style, he typed out scads of letters, practically none of which needed to be written. In between these activities, he made frequent field trips. In those days, Aaron McBride constituted one-sixth of the company’s working force. He was doubtless bewildered by President Carrington’s “inspection tours” and “staff conferences,” but George remembered him gratefully as being consistently respectful and always helpful.
Thanks largely to McBride, Highlands began to improve its position. It still lost money but not as much as it had, and the witch was hopeful eventually of cutting off the dole which it presently needed to survive.
Then, the widow died, and the dole ended with her life. George would receive a modest income from her estate. Highlands could either go under, or it could get by without assistance, and beloved husband George was welcome to it either way.
The witch was really rather unsporting, Carrington felt. Rather like endowing him with what the little boy shot at. Then, while he was considering junking the company, selling off its well-worn equipment for what it would bring, the grim chaps had appeared.
Not that they seemed grim at the time. Really quite jolly, as a matter of fact. They had heard a lot about George and Highlands, and they liked what they had heard, and they were ready to back their liking with money. George could have all he needed, within reason. If it went down the drain, okay; there was such a thing as a tax loss, and there would be no kicks. If it made money, that was okay, too. They’d divvy it up on some mutually satisfactory basis.
Now, they would want to recommend a good bookkeeper to him. George’s time was obviously too valuable to be spent at pencil pushing. Moreover, they would doubtless have helpful suggestions for George occasionally. But the company was to be strictly his baby. He would be the boss. He would remain the sole owner of record.
It seemed like a very nice arrangement to George; really not half-bad. What it amounted to actually was that they’d provide the money—toss it into the old fiscal pot, you know—and he’d provide himself; and they’d all live happily ever after et cetera.
It occurred to him later that he had once before entered a similar arrangement that had proved to be a snare and delusion. But by then the trap was sprung. He was bagged, even as the witch had bagged him. And compared with them, his latest captors, the witch seemed quite jolly.
He could not walk out on them, as he had threatened to with her. He could not get grim or haughty with them, as he had with her. Oh, he could, but it didn’t get him anything. Nothing that a chap would exactly cherish, or care to have repeated.
The most worrisome feature of the arrangement was the fact that he seldom understood the import of the “suggestions” given him, and which he was required to pass on. Nothing was ever explained to him. No one would tell him why he should do this and why he should not do that. He did know that McBride didn’t like them. So he surmised that putrid things were afoot. But the extent of their putridity, and how much else there might be that neither he nor McBride had contact with…
He didn’t know. By Jove, he just didn’t know. He only knew that he was in the midst of some pretty grim goings-on—McBride’s death could be one of them—and that he, George Carrington, would be the ideal patsy if the old axe fell.
“Mr. Carrington! Mr. Carrington…!”
“What? Yes, my dear?” The glaze fled from George Carrington’s eyes. “You were saying, Mrs. McBride?”
Donna stared at him steadily, her small jaw set. She looked him over, very carefully, a frown spreading over her face. Her anger and exasperation slowly dissolved, to be replaced by puzzlement.
“Mr. Carrington,” she said, “do you really run Highlands Oil & Gas Company?”
Carrington had expected the question. He had seen that same look on the faces of others, and he had subsequently had the same question asked him. A rather unflattering question, when you stopped to think about it. But just how to answer it, at once plausibly and prudently, was something he had never figured out.
“Well, really,” he laughed brightly. “President and general manager, you know. Says so right on the stationery.”
“You seem to be pleasant and well-meaning, Mr. Carrington. I hoped you were just a figurehead. Otherwise, you must know why my husband’s murder is being covered up.”
“M-murder? Oh, now…”
“Murder. You haven’t been listening, Mr. Carrington. I couldn’t get hold of you, and I couldn’t get any satisfaction out of the Big Sands sheriff’s office. So I hired a private detective.” Donna paused for emphasis. “My husband’s gun had been emptied, every bullet fired. And the slugs from them—excepting the one that killed him—were all within firing range of where he died.”
Carrington looked blank. “Uh, well, now. Strange, isn’t it? Mmm, yes. I see what you mean.”
“Then, you know, he must have been murdered. He wouldn’t have stood there firing aimlessly around the countryside and then put the last bullet in his brain.”
Carrington shook his head wisely. He said it didn’t seem likely, now, did it, yet one never knew, did one? “Very shrewd chaps, these detectives. Like to talk to a chap like that myself.”
“Well, you won’t be able to talk to this one. I got that one item of information from him; then he dropped the case. He came back here, closed his offices, and left town.”
“Oh? Dashed peculiar, eh?”
“I’d say he was either scared off or bought off. Perhaps both. And I don’t think you can help me find out why, can you, Mr. Carrington? It was a waste of time to have you come out here.”
It was a simple statement of fact; not bitter, not rude. Yet Carrington found himself cringing, felt a hot flush of shame spreading over his pinkish, massaged face.
“Don’t think I’d say that,” he said rather stiffly. “Always willin’, you know. Shoulder to the wheel, and all that sort of thing.”
“Well…I suppose you could get me a gun.”
“A—a gun? But—”
“But you won’t, will you? Even that’s too much for you. How did you manage to live this long, Mr. Carrington? Why did you want to?”
She turned on her side, turning her back to him.
Carrington grimaced with an attempt to smile. He tried to say something, to protest, to explain, but he could find nothing to say. He made another futile try, rising shakily, taking a half-step toward her bed. Then, his shoulders unaccustomedly squared, he pivoted and strode out of the room.
9
August Pellino’s house was an old-fashioned, two-story brick in a good but by no means exclusive section of Fort Worth. It had a deep, wide lawn, with a croquet layout and a two-seat platform swing. August spent much time on the lawn; clipping the grass, sipping beer in the swing, or playing croquet. He was frequently joined in this last pastime by neighborhood children, who addressed him familiarly by his first name and whom he invariably stuffed with delicacies from his wife’s kitchen.
Mrs. Pellino spoke little English, and she and her husband were seldom seen together except when they attended church. People guessed that he was probably a very lonely man. He owned a small string of service stations, but they seemed pretty well to run themselves. Now and then he had out-of-town visitors—simple, comfortable men like himself. But their stay was always brief, and August was soon alone on his lawn again.
Because of the visitors’ coloring and other physical characteristics, it was generally assumed that they were his wife’s relatives. For August’s appearance held little hint of his heredity. His close-cropped hair was so blond that it seemed gray; and his massive neck flowed down into a body like a beer barrel. Built as
he was, and with his huge red face and whitish hair, he looked to be sixty. Actually, he was twenty years younger.
About as slow-moving as a jet plane, that was the real August Pellino (alias Fat Gus Parkini, alias Augie the Hog). About as harmless and good-natured as a rattlesnake.
August liked children; there was no pretense about that. But if he had not liked them he would have seemed to; managed a thoroughly convincing masquerade. August always did whatever was necessary, and he did it well. His record for performance, regardless of its nature, was well-nigh perfect.
August was proud of his reputation, proud of his ability to obtain financing and well-heeled entrepreneurs for almost any scheme he cared to propose. But the responsibilities that went with such a reputation were always in the forefront of his mind, and he was always nagged by the prospect of failure.
He needed to have just one, only one, and the near-perfect record would be meaningless. Never mind the past. The past was past. The present was all that counted. As the instigator of an enterprise, August guaranteed its success. If his associates lost money on it, or were embarrassed or endangered by it, it was August’s responsibility.
That was the inflexible code. He had enforced it with others, and he could not quarrel with it. But that made the ever-present threat no easier to bear. And when it began to gather substance, as it seemed to be now, when it came out of the hazy realm of potentiality and became an imminent possibility.…
With a sudden savage movement, August took a straight-down swing at a croquet ball, then grinned angrily as the ball split in half and the mallet handle broke in three places. He heard the slam of a car door, looked up. A cab was just wheeling away from the curb—a goddamned circus wagon coming to his house!—and George Carrington was moving purposely toward the gate.
Still grinning, a fat, hard hand extended, August walked toward him.
“Well, George,” he said, taking firm possession of Carrington’s hand, holding onto it as he urged him up the walk. “I guess I’m slipping in my old age. Didn’t remember at all that I’d asked you to come out here.”