The Spiked Heel

by Ed McBain

  “I should have offered a penny,” he said, smiling. He took one hand from the wheel and found her hand, squeezing it.

  They drove onto the Belt Parkway, flushed with amber lights, the tires humming secretly under the weight of the car. McQuade kept the radio going, the music mingling with the rush of the wind, carried away behind on the concrete, dropped onto Grand Central Parkway, and then Southern State. They did not talk much.

  She began to think about patterns. The pattern of her life, primarily, and the pattern of good and bad, and then the pattern of the trees bordering the winding road, and then the pattern of the stars and the sky and growing things. She saw the large sign announcing JONES BEACH STATE PARK, and for a moment she was transported back to that sixteen-year-old summer at Taka-Manna, and the glistening white sands on the shore of the quiet lake, and the kisses in the barn, and her first kiss, who, who?

  They drove past Jones Beach, and past Tobay, far out to a lonely spot of sand covered with patches of driftwood, the sandgrass tall and wavering. The surf thundered against the beach, receded drunkenly to gather its strength and then rolled forth again in majestic, bursting, bubbling white froth. There was a cool wind, and the wind lifted her skirts as they went out onto the sand, McQuade carrying a blanket he’d taken from the trunk of the convertible. She lifted one foot to remove her shoe, and the wind caught her skirt and swept it up over her thighs, and she could feel his eyes hot on her legs, but she was neither frightened nor apprehensive and she did not move to flatten her skirt. She waited until the sea wind momentarily died, and then she took off the shoes and the peds, and she walked barefooted to where the surf angrily lashed the beach.

  McQuade spread the blanket, but she did not go to it immediately. There was time. Unafraid, resigned, she knew there was time.

  She stood at the edge of the beach where the sand was wet and cold, where the last rush of the waves caught at her toes and then tried to suck her back into the vastness of the ocean. The wind was strong in her hair and in her skirt. She felt it rushing against her face and her naked legs, rushing with a curious sense of inevitability. She did not want what was coming, but she knew she would not resist it. She felt rather young, and rather alone, and rather innocent, standing there on the edge of the world, the kiss of salt on her mouth. Very, very young all at once, all at once and with a sudden poignancy, as young as the girl who’d once admired the spread wings of a yellow butterfly in a Nature Shack so long ago.

  She felt like crying.

  McQuade padded up to her softly and-stood beside her. He did not touch her, but she felt his presence as if he had already invaded her. Curiously, a chill ran up her spine.

  “Something powerful about it, isn’t there?” he said, looking out over the ocean, his voice a whisper.

  “Sad,” she murmured. “Something sad.”

  “There’s nothing sad about power,” he said flatly.

  They stood silently, watching the ocean. He had still not touched her, but still she felt him there, immense behind her.

  “We used to go down to Savannah sometimes,” he said idly, a trace of wistfulness in his voice. “I didn’t get to see the ocean except when we got down to Savannah. Where I lived, there wasn’t any ocean.”

  “What was there?” she asked, not really interested, making conversation only because she wanted to hold off the inevitable for a while.

  McQuade snorted. “Dirt,” he said. He said the word harshly, and then he stopped, and she assumed he was finished until the next bitter flow of words came from his mouth. “There are places in Georgia,” he said, “that aren’t fit for pigs. I was born in one of those places. I was raised in one of those places. Oh yes, my father was a wonderful man.” He laughed a short sardonic laugh. “A wonderful man who had two weaknesses: expensive liquor and cheap nigra women. He couldn’t afford the liquor, but the nigras were a dime a dozen.” He stopped abruptly, as if to clear away a bad memory, and then said, “Come on, let’s go to the blanket.”

  “No,” she answered. “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to. Yet.”

  He stepped out from behind her and his eyes caught hers. A knowing smile flicked across his mouth, as if he too had recognized her resignation to the inevitable and was quietly amused by it. The smile did not amuse her. It sent a new chill rocketing up her back.

  “Whatever you say, of course,” he assured her.

  “Were you … were you poor?” she asked, attempting to get him back to talking about himself again, stalling for time now, and not knowing why she was stalling.

  “Poor?” He seemed to weigh the word carefully. “Do you mean did I have enough to eat?”

  “Welt, I don’t know what I exactly …”

  “There was always enough to eat,” McQuade said. “My mother saw to that. We lived in a shack, you understand.” He saw the look on her face. “Does that surprise you? Yes, we lived in a shack, and I use the word advisedly. When I say ‘shack,’ I don’t say it the way Texans do, to indicate a forty-room château someplace. When I say ‘shack,’ I mean wood and tarpaper and broken windows and noisy beds, and a stinking outhouse in the back yard. Shack. And shack is synonomous with dirt.”

  “I had no idea …”

  “But I was never poor, understand that, too. Inside, I was never poor. My mother saw to it that I was well fed, and even though I ran around in torn, outgrown pants with my behind sticking out, I was never poor. Even though I cursed my father for his laziness and for his nigra women and for what he was doing to my mother, I was never poor. Inside I was rich because I knew that some day I was going to be somebody. Some day, I was going to wipe the mud off my face. Poor? No, I was never poor. Only weaklings are poor. Weaklings and cowards.”

  Cara smiled. “And you are certainly neither a weakling or a coward.”

  “If you’re laughing at me,” he said tightly, “don’t.”

  “I’m not laughing,” she said, somehow frightened by the tone of his voice.

  “Too many people laughed at me back home. Because of my damn no-good father, and because I was white trash, Jefferson McQuade, the piss-poor kid with the nigra-lover father and the high-and-mighty name.” He paused. “I made them stop laughing. I couldn’t do it with my head so I, did it with my body. Do you know what shoved me through high school and into the University of Georgia?”

  “What?” she said.

  “Football, naturally. My body again. That’s when I became an equal. I wasn’t white trash on the ball field. I was strength, and people admire strength. Nobody noticed that I got out of Georgia U. cum laude. They only noticed that I was a football hero. Muscle. Sheer muscle. Six fraternities wanted me, do you know that? Six God-damned fraternities. And only because I was eight feet tall and because I slaughtered the opposition on the ball field. Once I had that ball tucked under my arm, there was no stopping me. Nothing could stop me. They could have thrown up the Maginot Line, and it wouldn’t have stopped me. So six fraternities wanted Steamroller McQuade; but McQuade told them all to go to hell. Six fraternities wanted the boy who hadn’t owned a pair of undershorts until he was fifteen years old.”

  Cara laughed spontaneously, and then cut herself short when she felt McQuade’s silence. His silence was huge and terrible. It mushroomed about her like a darkly wrathful thing.

  “Fraternities,” he said bitterly. “Kid stuff! I was a hundred years old when I was ten! Every time I heard those bedsprings creaking in the next room, everytime I smelled a nigra woman in the house, I got older and older, and older! What did the dear brothers know about lying in the fields with the sun hot overhead, and looking down at the dirt and filth, and hungering to get out of it, hungering until your belly ached, knowing you had to get out. I was the lanky bastard from the shack, I was the big lout in the too-small clothes, I was the town’s laughing boy, the kid whose father lay with nigras. And now they were crawling to me! On their hands and knees, they came to me, and they begged me to join their little-boy
clubs, and I told them to go to hell, and this time I was laughing.” He paused, reflecting. “Have you ever heard the laughter of a small town, Cara?”

  “No,” she said, listening to his voice. The man speaking no longer sounded like the McQuade she knew. The speech was more Southern somehow, more sharply accented. There was no polish to this speech, and no politeness. She had accepted the other McQuade, and now there was a new man to contend with, and this new man frightened her.

  “I very rarely laugh,” he said. “Laughter is an ugly sound. Laughter was reserved for use against the McQuades in my town. But one McQuade made them stop laughing. One McQuade stood up, and they saw that he was strong, and they were afraid, and so they stopped laughing. They used to laugh at Titanic, too, you know—but they don’t any more. They don’t laugh at Titanic, and they don’t laugh at me. Now they’re on their hands and knees to me, and now I take what I want, and when I’ve got it, I own it! I own it completely, it’s mine.” He laughed suddenly. “Do you know how I got to be a major in the army?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and she did not want to know.

  “By killing more people than anybody else. By cracking skulls. I was Steamroller McQuade again, only this time we weren’t playing a game. I killed more goddam men …” He stopped. “Do you want the secret, Cara? Would you like to know the secret of success? I’ll tell you. Smile. Smile—and crack skulls. Crack them, but smile while you’re doing it. I learned how to smile when I was a boy, I had to know how to smile. I didn’t learn the other half of the secret until my body began to catch up with me. But now I know. And nobody stops me. Nobody.” He paused, and was silent for a long time. His hand came up then, and she felt his fingers touch the back of her neck.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Cara,” he whispered. His voice carried none of its previous anger now. It was a tender caress, but despite its gentleness, it filled her with dread. She was suddenly frightened. She did not want this man. She was afraid of this man and of what he would do to her.

  “Am … am I?” she said, and she hoped her voice had not trembled.

  His arms were around her suddenly, swiftly, roughly. They closed like the steel jaws of a trap, and she felt the fierceness of his lips on her throat, smothering the small beauty spot, and then his mouth found hers, and he drank from it wildly, twisting his head and his lips.

  She thought only of escape. She had to get away from him, had to get away before he possessed her, had to get away before Cara Knowles vanished, before Cara Knowles became nothing, nothing. She twisted away from him and he yanked her back, and then he was lifting her, lifting her, and she felt the cold wind on her legs, felt the sinewy strength of his arms, felt the jostle of each long step he took toward the blanket.

  She began to struggle. She felt as if she were being sucked into a deep black whirlpool, and she knew that if she succumbed to this man it would be the end for her. This was the end of the road: Jefferson McQuade. She sensed this with the violent purity of sudden truth, and so she struggled when he threw her harshly onto the sandy blanket, struggled against the big hands pinning her shoulders, struggled against the immense figure towering above her.

  The pattern, she thought wildly, the familiar pattern, but this time there was a quietly shrieking terror behind it. He must not have me! The pattern of water rushing against sand, a sky wheeling overhead, I’m frightened, good Lord I’m frightened, good Lord help me, the roughness of the blanket, the harsh uneven breathing of the man above her, stop, stop, please stop, the ragged breath merging with the roar of the surf until they were one, crashing against the lonely spit of sand, the stars pinwheeling overhead, the wind on her legs, and on her naked thighs, a cold cold, wind, naked, naked, please, please, the wind rushing up to embrace her, and his fingers following the wind, strong demanding fingers, cold fingers of fire, and the violation of her breasts, and the violation of her mouth, his hand forcing her lips open, helpless in the grip of his hands and the grip of his body, pain darting into her face where his fingers clenched her tightly, pain, pain and the knowledge that this was the end for her, that this was the final and complete act from which there was no turning, fighting it, fighting as he forced her legs, forced her mouth, and then weary at last, and sad, so tired, so tiredly parting her lips and drawing him into her with her kisses, and knowing, knowing that under the hands of Jefferson McQuade she would at last know utter and absolute degradation.

  15

  McQuade was not smiling.

  Manelli was smiling, but McQuade was not. McQuade looked as if he had never smiled in his life. Griff sat in the easy chair and watched both men. The office was very hot, and a large electric fan in the corner did not reduce the heat; it only rearranged it. He could see the droplets of sweat on Manelli’s nose, and above that the round circles of his eyeglasses, and below that the small circle of his mouth, opening, opening.

  “Mac’s had an interesting idea,” the mouth was saying.

  Griff said nothing.

  Manelli shrugged, as if the idea were simply too fantastic, something unheard of. “He thinks we can do without a Cost Department.”

  The sound of the electric fan was suddenly very loud, and the room seemed hotter all at once. Griff looked at Manelli, and then at McQuade. McQuade raised his head, but his eyes were hooded with a thin layer of ice, and when he spoke he did not address Griff. He spoke to the wall behind Griff.

  “I don’t know how familiar you are with the Titanic Shoe setup, Griff,” he said.

  He calls me Griff. The son of a bitch hates me, and he has the gall to call me Griff, the way my friends do.

  “Not very,” he replied.

  “No, I didn’t think you were,” McQuade said. He cleared his throat. “We’ve found, over the years, that once an average cost has been established for a pair of shoes, that cost—with slight variations—can serve as the basis of our operation thereafter.”

  “I don’t understand,” Griff said.

  McQuade flicked sweat from his brow. He moved majestically, almost as if he first shoved back his crown before performing the simple earthy task of pushing the sweat away.

  “It’s really quite simple,” he said. “Let us assume the average cost of a pair of shoes has been calculated to be … oh, four dollars. Using that average cost as our basis, Titanic can estimate its future budget fairly accurately. At least, that’s the way it’s worked for us in our other factories.”

  “I see,” Griff said. The room was oppressively hot. He wanted to get out of that room and away from McQuade.

  “Oh,” McQuade went on, “the cost may vary five or six cents in any given year, but it still serves as a good starting point, and the five or six cents is really negligible in a large-scale operation.”

  “What do you think of that, eh?” Manelli said, smiling.

  “Well …” Griff started.

  “Joe,” McQuade interrupted, “was good enough to let me see the figures you submitted from your cost card, data for the past year. The figures showing cost without profit, cost with—”

  “Yes, I know the ones you mean,” Griff said sourly, remembering the foolhardy job, and still resenting it.

  “Very well,” McQuade said, ignoring Griff’s tone. “From those figures, by the simple process of long division, I was able to compute an average cost of any pair of shoes that leaves the factory.”

  “Last year’s average cost, you mean,” Griff said.

  “Yes, of course.” McQuade scratched his jaw. “It comes to seven dollars and twenty cents.”

  “You realize—”

  “Our selling price on a pair of shoes varies,” McQuade said. “Sometimes I find the factory making a ten per or even twelve per cent profit, which is well above the six per cent return we normally expect. In other cases, unfortunately, our profit barely comes to two and a half per cent.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re driving at,” Griff said.

  McQuade folded his hands patiently. “We have now established,�
� he said, “an average cost of seven twenty per pair. That means that every pair of shoes which went through this factory in the past year cost us exactly seven twenty to make.”

  “That’s not true,” Griff said.

  McQuade arched one eyebrow. “Oh, isn’t it?”

  “No. In the first place, it’s an estimated cost. And in the second place, it’s not a true one. An alligator may have cost us, say, sixteen dollars to make and a sandal may have cost us … well, I don’t know, maybe two dollars … and another shoe may have cost us three dollars. If you add those costs and divide them by three, you’ll get an average cost of seven dollars, but it’s not a true cost.

  “Seven dollars and twenty cents, to be specific,” McQuade said, “and no one is inquiring into the truth or fiction of the cost. We are labeling it average cost, and surely you are not disputing the fact that it is an average cost.”

  “No,” Griff said, “but it’s still an est—”

  “The point is this,” McQuade said. “Once having established an average cost, seven twenty in this instance, the factory could then add its six per cent profit, and it would even be possible to maintain an average selling price which—”

  “You mean you’re going to sell an alligator pump for the same price you’re going to sell a sandal? Really, that’s—”

  “I did not say that, Griff,” McQuade said. “We will add our six per cent profit to the average cost and then sell every shoe we make to the Sales Division, at an average selling price.”

  “The Sales Division?”

  “Yes. They will be billed for the shoes, which will remain in our stock room until delivery is called for. We will be paid for the shoes when they are billed. All on paper, of course.”

  “I see. But—”

  “After that, the Sales Division can put whatever goddam selling price they want to on a shoe. If they want to merchandise an alligator pump at ten cents, that’s their business. But at the end of the year, the factory will be showing a profit, and if Sales is showing a loss, they’d damn well better be ready to account for it.”