Whenever she argued with him, he beat her. He told her to meet him at the gas station at two in the morning, and she was too frightened to refuse; and when she arrived at the appointed hour, she found him bending over the owner’s body, searching the pockets for the cash-register keys—he had smashed the owner’s larynx with a tire iron. He emptied out the register, and they drove north in a car someone had left overnight in the gas station for a lube job. They left it parked on a side street in Trinidad, took a bus to Colorado Springs, stole a pickup truck out of a shopping-center parking lot, and drove through the night across the Rockies to Grand Junction, where a man spotted them having coffee in a diner and followed them outside. The man was from Miami.
They left with a squeal of tires, but the pickup was no match for the green Buick with Florida plates. The Buick followed them at a steady distance until they started up into the mountains toward Aspen; then it closed the distance and cut across a bend in front of them, crowded them away from the inside cliff, and forced them off the road. The pickup turned over twice before it hit the creek. She ended up crushed against her husband in the mangled wreckage of the cab. She was bleeding at her nose, in cuts on her shoulder and forearm, and between her legs.
The man from Miami came down the hill, scrambling in expensive shoes on the loose shale footing. She closed her eyes to slits and held her breath. He wrenched open the door and poked around until he was satisfied her husband was dead. Then he said, “You can open your eyes, I ain’t going to hurt you.”
Still she didn’t stir, and after he slapped her a couple of times he left, evidently satisfied she was unconscious and couldn’t identify him. She waited till she heard the Buick drive away, and then she dragged herself up to the road, bleeding, and waited for a car to come along.
In the clinic she told them a simpleminded story, some of it true. She said she came from Kentucky, she was an orphan, a man had got her pregnant and deserted her, she had been hitchhiking west to find some town where nobody knew her where she could have her baby. She had thumbed a ride with the man in the pickup truck, and he had lost control of it and gone over the rim. It was a simple, straightforward story, and she stuck to it when the police came and wanted to know how much she knew about the dead driver of the pickup. It seemed he was wanted for murder in New Mexico and several charges of auto theft and transporting stolen cars across state lines. She had thrown away her wedding ring in the woods along the road, and she played dumb with the cops, and after a while they left her alone.
She got out of the clinic after ten days, no longer pregnant; the wreck had made her miscarry. There were five forgettable months of hash-slinging in a diner, and then a man in a Lincoln took her away to Las Vegas for his pleasure. He was not a disagreeable sort, and for a day or two she even felt a small echo of the needs that had been deadened in her; but he went on to the Coast without her. She took jobs and survived, teaching herself to be hard. Now and then she dreamed in a far corner of her mind that one day, with someone, she would rediscover the frantic roaring tumult of eager happiness.
By the time she was nineteen, with her looks, her good body, she had climbed fast from a job in the pony lineup of a downtown Vegas dive to a good post as hostess in the show-bar room of a hotel on the Strip. And then one night she had come in to work and a man sitting at the bar had stared at her, then turned to talk rapidly to his companion. The man was the Buick driver from Miami.
The old terrors came back, froze her, put a sour knot in her throat. She was here, alive, and she was a witness to the murder he had committed. He wouldn’t do anything here, not in this crowd. But later, when she left, he would follow her. She began to think of how it must be done, how to elude him. She went through the motions of the job, guided people to their tables, and distributed menus, wearing a mechanical smile, keeping the man from Miami in sight in the corner of her vision. She would slip out through the kitchen, she decided, drive home, pack her things, and drive straight through the night to Los Angeles. Change her name again and get a different kind of job. She decided it all with numb resignation; there wasn’t any room for regret.
But then the man from Miami got up off the bar stool and headed for the door with his companion. The two of them stopped in the doorway and looked straight at her, with never a break in their expressions. His companion was a tall young man with a hard and handsome face, the eyes of a stalking predator; yet he was not a gangster like the one from Miami, she could tell that much. The face was lofty, self-assured, filled with cool ambition and arrogant intelligence. If he had been an actor he would have been singled out for “star quality.” He had a sensual presence, even across the room.
When the two of them walked out of the club, her dread returned. She got through the rest of her shift and walked out through the kitchen, concentrating her attention on the simple act of walking steadily. She said good night to the kitchen staff with a nervous smile; she came around the back of the hotel and swept the parking lot with a quick, frightened glance. No one was in sight. She hurried to her car and got in, and had to sit there motionless before she summoned the strength to start the car. Her nerves twanged with taut-drawn vibration; a red pulse thudded in her eyes. She shot out of the parking lot and drove fast through the back streets, taking a dark route home, knowing enough to choose the deserted streets so that she could see if she was being followed.
No one tailed her. She began to feel more calm; driving the last ten blocks, she was deciding exactly what things to pack and what things to leave behind. She pulled into the driveway of the little stucco house, switched off the headlights, and got out of the car, and for a moment stood by the spiked yucca plant in the dusty front yard to look both ways along the street. All the parked cars in sight were familiar. It was three in the morning; there were no pedestrians abroad. Presently she went up the gravel walkway, unlocked the front door, and went into the dark house. She flicked the living-room wall switch; the light came on, she turned into the room, and saw the tall young man with the hard arrogant face sitting in the armchair, smiling coolly.
She stood perfectly still. Her heart crashed alarmingly. She felt faint with dread, tightened her muscles against it, gave him a stare as cool and hard as his own, not wanting to give anything away.
He seemed in no hurry to speak. Finally, broken by the silence, she breathed, “How did you get here?” and realized immediately it was a stupid thing to say.
“Rocco dropped me off,” he replied in a reasonable, resonant voice. “Which is why you didn’t see a strange car outside. Take it easy, Rocco’s not here.”
“How did you find this place?”
“I own a piece of the hotel. It was no trick to find out where you lived.”
She took a deep breath. “All right. What do you want?”
“Easy—gentle down. Why don’t you have a drink?”
“I don’t want a drink. What do you want of me?”
“You’re lovely,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard the question. “You’ll have to study voice modulation, of course—that hill-country twang won’t do. You’ll need to learn how to walk and turn like a model, how to smile and pose. How to do things in bed. Or do you already know that much?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I bought you from Rocco,” he said. “You belong to me now.”
She stared at him, full of bewildered dread. She had to put a hand against the wall to steady herself.
He crossed his legs and selected a cigarette from a silver case. “I’ll explain it very clearly, just once,” he said, “so that you’ll never need to ask questions. Pay attention.”
She watched him with terrified fascination. “I hope you start making sense,” she said, fighting back the impulse to scream.
He said, “You’re going by the name of Carol McCloud now. It’s not the name you started out with. You were Minnie Jackson until you got married, and that made you Minnie Bragg. Floyd Bragg was into the loan sharks in Miami—Rocco claims he ca
rried Floyd longer than his mother did. You and Floyd ran out on Floyd’s debts, which is always a mistake, particularly when you’re dealing with people like the crowd Rocco works for. You dropped out of sight for a while, but then Floyd killed a man in New Mexico. The police found his fingerprints all over the tire iron. The alarm went out, and Rocco’s people came in on it. It wasn’t too hard to trace you two from there—it was mainly a question whether the police or Rocco and his friends would find you first. I won’t bother with the rest of it—I’ve only gone over this much of it to convince you I do have all the facts, I’m not just bluffing.”
“Go ahead,” she said in a thin voice. “You’ve got the floor.”
He said, “You were in that gas station with Floyd when he killed the owner. How much do you know about criminal law? If you’re involved in a crime like robbery, and somebody gets killed in the process, all parties to the lesser crime are equally guilty of felony murder, no matter who did the actual killing. Do I make it clear to you? There’s still a warrant out on Minnie Bragg for first-degree murder, they still have the mandatory death penalty for felony murder in New Mexico, and there’s no statute of limitations on a charge of murder. You’ll never get off the hook, Minnie—your head’s on that chopping block for the rest of your life. That’s why Rocco isn’t here—you can’t threaten him, not without admitting who you are and going back to Albuquerque to stand trial for murder.”
She whispered, “I wasn’t even there.”
“Where?”
“When he killed the man. I wasn’t there.”
“Legally it doesn’t matter. Get that through your head—you shared in the proceeds of the robbery. That’s all it takes to prove you’re guilty of felony murder. They don’t even have to prove whether you were there or not.”
“How do I know you’re not lying?”
“Call a lawyer. Go down to the library in the morning and look it up. Ask somebody you trust. Do I look stupid enough to lie to you about something you could verify that easily?”
His eyes were locked on hers; she felt her face flaming. She looked away. “What do you want of me? Who are you?”
“My name is Mason Villiers.”
The greater part of communication between people, she had learned, was nonverbal. It was in gestures and expressions, postures and physical movements; in the tone of a voice, even in the pace and depth of a person’s breathing, the pinched-artery throb of a crossed leg, the way he moved his hands through his hair—things seen and absorbed, even if not recognized consciously for the signals they were.
What made it impossible to detect Mason Villiers’ emotions was not his choice of words, the carelessly insulting diction, or the sometimes brutal impersonality of his sentences, but rather the control he exercised over all his physical responses. He let no clues escape. Rarely was he caught off guard; rarely were his reactions not studied and deliberate. Even his rages were not genuine: they were calculated for their effects. Sometimes he appeared to inflict outrageous insults on people just to see what the response might be.
Trying to understand him was like trying to hit him—something she did just once. Her fist cracked against the taut muscles and stopped cold, penetrating no farther, doing no damage, achieving nothing except to make him laugh at her.
He bedded her often, sometimes with drive and fury, but no one could have called it making love; sex was like food to him—something to nourish physical needs, not emotional ones—and if it gave him pleasure he made no indication of it. She was never sure how he really felt about her, if in fact he had feelings about her at all. She was useful to him, that was all: useful with men from whom he needed favors, men to whom he owed favors, men he wanted to control with infrared photographs. He told her once that the world was filled with women of glamour and beauty but she had something unique: “You make them think of Marlene Dietrich,” he said. “Call it mystery.” There were stag parties in expensive hotels. There were weekends for which johns paid fortunes. Three thousand dollars for a six-day cruise. Villiers never bought her gifts that were not part of the role he created for her, and he never paid her except in clothes, books, coiffures, training in voice and body movement—none of it given personally. He made her pay her own way from the start; he made it clear he was not going to keep her.
She became wholly professional about it. For her it wasn’t hard, she didn’t have to learn that most toads were not Prince Charmings in camouflage, they were just toads. She studied Villiers and by emulating him taught herself to close her mind to all feelings when she went through the ritual stag body grinds, pulling her dress slowly over her head until her breasts popped out, servicing panting drunks with no more feelings about it than she would have devoted to the act of feeding pigs at a trough. She invented an elaborate litany of self-justification (It pays well; everybody sells himself for something; what harm in taking a sucker if that’s what he wants? Might as well get paid for what you’d give away anyway.) but she soon discovered that all these rationalizations were part of the standard lexicon of every prostitute. Every whore had an excuse. After she learned that, she stopped trying to defend herself. No apologies necessary, thank you very much. Perhaps there was something wrong with her. Her conscience didn’t trouble her; she wanted only to be safe—she just didn’t want to be caught and sent back to Albuquerque. Whatever it took to ensure that, she would do. She became neat, calm, careful. She prepared for the worst; it was possible some freak accident could happen someday, someone would find her out, New Mexico would extradite her. Not likely, perhaps, but possible. With that in mind, she had made plans accordingly. Over the years she had set aside a growing emergency hoard, though it hadn’t been easy. Her high prices had to include the expenses of a considerable overhead—the grease sheet: bell captain, house dick, elevator boys, the cop on the beat, the precinct captain, two assistant district attorneys; and the weekly medical checkup, clothes, high rent. But she had saved enough to pay the highest fee of the country’s best trial lawyer. Before a jury, a good lawyer, together with her own good looks and acting ability, would be more than a match for any hick district attorney who might try to put her away. And so, slowly and deliberately, she was paving a path out of Mason Villiers’ trap.
He arrived promptly at seven; he said very little; he only watched her unbind her breasts and mounted her with unusual frenzy, spending himself in a harsh impersonality of pounding lust, sinking back afterward to lie in hard-breathing satiety.
She said, “Either you haven’t had a woman all week or it’s a very big business deal.”
“You know me too well,” he growled, and rolled off the bed to get dressed.
It was strange, she thought; he still had the capacity to terrify her, and yet in some utterly unlikely way she had become fond of him. She lay watching the light change on the hard planes of his face as he moved around the room; unaccountably she said, “Have you ever had anything close to you but your shirt, Mason?”
For a brief moment his hands became still. He did not glance at her, but she saw that she had scored a point and she took momentary satisfaction from it. Then he brought himself around, under rigid control, to look at her; he said, “Your concern is most touching.”
“Have you ever loved anybody?” she said, and was alarmed by her boldness.
It made him laugh. “After all the things that have happened to you, you can still ask a question like that.” He shook his head. “You’ll never grow up as long as you believe in love, Carol.”
“Oh, I believe in it. I believe in money, too. Some people have it, some people don’t.”
“Keep talking like that, and you’ll end up looking like a fool,” he told her.
She laughed, suddenly and with wild abandon; she could see it disturbed him, and that was what she wanted. He almost allowed his anger to show. She said demurely, “Yassuh, boss.”
He rammed his shirttail into his trousers and planted his feet and gave her his undivided attention. “You’re uncommonly impertinent a
nd independent tonight.”
“Am I? Never mind. Tell me something—with all the respectable women you can get for a snap of your fingers, why keep coming back to me?”
“Because I taught you to be the best.”
“That’s not quite what I was fishing for—I was hoping you might admit it was because you like me.”
His head lifted slightly; lamplight reflected from his eyes. “I don’t dislike you,” he said. “I don’t dislike anybody, as long as they don’t get in my way.”
“At least I’m not in your way.”
“You make me wonder about that.”
“Do I? It’s probably good for you.”
“Have you been smoking pot?”
“No. Only thinking.”
“Don’t think, Carol. It’s not your strong point.”
“What would you say if I told you I was thinking of retiring?”
“You?” He became amused. “You, Carol? A few more years of ringside tables and sable coats and you’ll be too whipped and worn-out to make expenses at a plumbing-supply convention in Rapid City. You’ll get passed down the line from hand to hand until some smart guy comes along and takes you on a little vacation to Hong Kong, and then they’ll cop your passport and unload you into a crib, where you’ll get slapped down so far you won’t even want to come home.”
She stood up, full of languid grace, her hair fanning down her well-shaped back; she smiled frostily. “What a pig you can be.” She went into the bathroom, showered, and put on beige lace undies and a careful dose of scent, and emerged to find him smoking a cigarette, going through her closet with one hand. He was holding out the sleeve of a full-length Schulman Emba mink coat. “This is new,” he observed.
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