Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  They decided to separate for a while, Bobby—wearing a blond wig—moving back to his sister’s home. The moment he came into her house, Red knew something terrible had happened. Bobby was never clever at concealing his emotions. He lay on the bed blankly, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep or eat. Red came and sat beside him, not knowing how to help him.

  Finally Bobby spoke. “Talk to me, Red,” he begged.

  “I want to. But I don’t know what to say.”

  “My brain is hurting, Red. Make it stop.”

  She touched her brother’s forehead tenderly.

  A week later the news broke in Houston newspapers of Gamino and Carpenter discovering the suspected murder gun in bushes near the home of Dr. John Hill. Bobby heard immediately and telephoned his sister at her place of employment. “I’ve gotta split for a while,” he said. “Tell Vicki I’ll be in touch. I’ll run it down to you later.”

  When he picked up Marcia, she was afloat in heroin. She had not used the drug since she once tried it as a teenager. Bobby slapped her across the room. “We’ve got a big enough load without that shit,” he said angrily. “Why’d you start up on that again?”

  “They just found your gun in a flower bed,” she said airily. “Seems like a good time.”

  “My gun? You’re the one who got it offa that nigger doctor.”

  Marcia giggled. What difference did it make now?

  With the $3,500, Bobby purchased a 1970 yellow and white Lincoln Continental, the perfect car for an inconspicuous drive to California, and economical, too, in a period when Americans were caught in a gasoline shortage. But when he sat in the car’s luxurious lap, it was better than the embrace of all the women he had ever known. They drove to North Hollywood without incident and rented a neatly furnished apartment. There they lived for a few weeks as recluses. It was a barren life of television and frozen dinners. Then the money played out, and Bobby rang up a contact in his traditional line of work. When he purchased brown cotton gloves and a ski mask, Marcia protested. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You don’t know the territory, and the L.A. cops are heavy. One bust will do it.” Pointedly, Bobby brought up Marcia’s increasing need for heroin. She was shooting up at least three times a day. Even Bobby had chipped a little on occasion, insisting that he could handle the drug without fear of addiction. If they needed money all that bad, countered Marcia, then she could go out and in one evening’s work earn it less dangerously than Bobby in his stupid ski masks. He refused. Their relationship was complex and deep, and although he would never openly confess that he actually loved Marcia, never admitting more than that he was bound to her in exile, he would not permit her to resume prostitution. Marcia well remembered some of the bothersome but at the same time touching things Bobby had done when he once functioned as her pimp. Although she was his principal wage earner, he interfered at every opportunity. Once he burned her spot book, apparently in hopes that she would abandon her work. On another occasion he came to the motel where she was working in North Texas and terrorized the night manager, posing as a vice officer, threatening to burn down the establishment unless all whoring stopped. Her strong suspicion was that he had some quirky, unexplainable attraction for her, and that it was best accommodated by bizarre behavior.

  Rather than get into another fight—their months together had been punctuated by frequent brawls, and both bore scars and enduring mementos from the sluggings—Marcia sighed and told Bobby to go out and do his work. The next day he returned with $750 and three color television sets. Los Angeles was ripe, he told her. The Hollywood Hills were full of rich homes hidden in canyons and cul-de-sacs, easy to pluck in broad daylight when the owners were away. Soon there came a day when Bobby revealed that he had been a participant in a bank robbery—the blowing up of a night depository—and the proceeds were $50,000. Marcia clapped her hands in excitement, but Bobby warned her to calm down. The money was not yet in his pocket. It was being divided; his share would be forthcoming. But it never was; his colleagues disappeared.

  Frequently, Marcia telephoned to her mother’s home near. Dallas and received reports on her son. Once she spoke with the little boy and hung up, crying bitterly. Bobby wanted to know the reason for her tears. “My child,” she said, “has just been selected out of the entire school to represent the first grade in a program. He is the best reader on his level.” Morose, Marcia shot up and stayed in a heroin fog for several days. When she awoke from a long sleep she found Bobby gone. He was away for almost a week, and in his absence terror mounted within her. She suspected that the Houston police had her name, that the gun registration had been traced to the black doctor from whom she had taken the gun. Now Bobby was gone, and she had no money to run. When he returned, a few dollars in his pocket from a penny-ante burglary, she railed at him. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to sit in this cheap shit apartment and wonder what’s happened to you? You could be in the Hollywood jail for all I know! It drives a person crazy!”

  His response was to walk out, slamming the door. Marcia screamed in his wake, “I won’t be here when you get back.” “Yes, you will, ding,” yelled Bobby through the door. “I locked up your clothes.” Marcia ran to the closet and yanked at the knob. A new police lock glistened at her. Naked, she sat down cursing and crying.

  A few mornings later, when Bobby was out casing a new score, Marcia took the five dollars she had stolen from his pockets while he slept and took a taxi to the Hollywood-Burbank Airport. There she telephoned collect to a pimp friend in Las Vegas who wired her an airplane ticket. The pimp, a black man named Sparks, met her at McCarran Field and expressed dismay over Marcia’s appearance. Her hair was unshaped, her face pale, her body stringy from the heroin and the abstinence from most food save candy and colas. “Give me an hour,” she said. “You got some working clothes?”

  By midafternoon Marcia was wearing a hot pink pants suit and was at her familiar stand, Cleopatra’s Barge, in Caesar’s Palace. She had been there but ten minutes when a middle-aged man sat down beside her. An hour after that she flew with him to Palm Springs for a sexual matinee, and by suppertime she was back in Las Vegas with $800. At the end of a week she had $6,000. She telephoned Bobby in Los Angeles and taunted him. “Just go ahead and keep stealing,” she said. “That’s your habit the way some people have dope habits. But don’t expect me to sit around wondering whether you’re alive or dead.”

  “Where the fuck are you?” Bobby demanded gruffly.

  “Alive, baby. Alive.”

  But by deep November, Marcia was in despair. Every time a door opened or the telephone rang, her heart jumped. When she walked, she looked both ahead and behind at every step. When she drove, her eyes were riveted to the rear-view mirror. It was but two months after the murder of John Hill, and she knew that the state of Texas was boiling with police in pursuit of her. She had thousands of dollars in gambling chips scattered around her apartment, and a purseful of high-grade heroin, barbiturates, and amphetamines. In her closet were a dozen spectacular outfits. But none of it was what she wanted. She cursed Bobby Vandiver. She wanted him and his droopy mustache and his lean hard arms, and she wanted her son, and she wanted to push back the clock to when she was fifteen—when she decided that all she needed was herself. For most of the day before Thanksgiving she wept, watching her make-up drip off her face in fascinating rivulets. Then she went to the Desert Inn, threw away all of her money on blackjack tables, took the few dollars that remained, and rented a room. There she sat down on the bed and placed seventy-two tiny red barbiturate pills in a neat row around the pillow. Ceremoniously, without hesitation, she ate each of them until the border was bare. Then she injected two grams of heroin into her arm. As the narcotics rushed over her senses, it occurred to Marcia that this was one scene she would have liked to play before an audience. Where was the gown of a thousand mirrors? She should spin and fall in her final exit, feeling the eyes of the spectators locked to the power and beauty of her farewell. Their applause would be the l
ast sound she heard. Stumbling, fighting to sustain a shred of rationality to guide her steps, she left the room and took an elevator to the hotel lobby. The casino was a carnival, spinning and blurring like an insane kaleidoscope about her. She caught a final glimpse of herself in a mirror, and the reflection was that of a fool.

  With that she fell to the carpet. “Ace deuce,” she murmured, welcoming whatever was in store for her.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Bobby stood over her hospital bed in Las Vegas, grinning helpfully. He had thrown away his blond wig and his hair was darkening again, with his melancholy mustache in place. He looked once more exactly as he had looked in the last hour of John Hill’s life. “Well, ding,” he said in greeting, “you blew that too. Now are you ready to come home?”

  Marcia stretched out her arms and pulled Bobby against her chest. “Just get me out of this fuckin’ hospital,” she said, starting to cry. “They keep coming in here and telling me how lucky I am to be alive. They said by all rights I shoulda died.” Her mouth and throat ached, from where the doctors had put the tube down to her stomach to pump out the poisons.

  They drove to Palm Springs, where a character friend had offered his house. En route, Bobby filled her in on details of the unsuccessful suicide. “I hear it was the best floor show the Desert Inn had in years,” he said. “Sirens, ambulances, dudes runnin’ in with stretchers, women screaming. You really pepped up an otherwise dull afternoon.”

  The other news was that there was no news from Texas. Bobby said he had called Lilla long distance but she hung up on him. And the case was off the front pages, only a little mention now and then.

  Bobby’s new plan was to lie low here for a few months, collect a little money here and there, and buy false identification documents through an outfit in San Francisco that provided phony passports. Marcia could spin the globe and put her finger on it to stop, and wherever that was, they would find it. Content, and for the moment secure, she snuggled close and told herself that nothing else mattered. She was with Bobby, and what happened yesterday, or what might happen tomorrow, did not count.

  In Palm Springs, Marcia regained her strength and announced that she would cook a belated Thanksgiving dinner. This came as startling news to Bobby as he had seen Marcia encounter difficulty in peeling off the aluminum foil from a frozen enchilada dinner. But he bespoke encouragement and waited. For an entire day Marcia domestically tended the bird, consulting the wrapper that had contained it and cookbooks, singing merrily all the while. Her major mistake was cooking the turkey upside down in an irregularly heated oven, and at day’s end the bird emerged not golden brown and juicy but tough, dry, and dead gray. Bobby laughed, and in anger she snatched up the spoiled turkey and threw it at him. He threw it back, and for a time they played an absurd game of football. Finally Marcia hurled her disaster into the swimming pool, pushed Bobby in after it, and thus did a much-wanted killer and his lady pass another day in a sun-warmed city of the old and bored and rich.

  Christmas was a time of pain, for Marcia marked it as the first one she had not spent in the company of her son. She telephoned the child at her mother’s home outside Dallas and tried to keep her voice under control. “Mama’s fine, honey,” she said. “I have to work out here for a while, and when I get home we’ll go to Six Flags.” The little boy always talked of the day he had spent with his mother at the amusement park between Dallas and Fort Worth.

  When Bobby telephoned his sister on the holiday he spoke briefly, then hung up in despair. Vicki had miscarried and lost his son. He swallowed a few barbiturates and sat stonily silent for the rest of the day, while carols from the radio filled the bleak room.

  In January 1973, once again in Los Angeles—four months after the murder—Marcia grew restless and walked out on Bobby. He was running with a new pack of thieves, and the risks he was taking alarmed her. She had heard from a girl friend in Dallas that the two Houston detectives who were looking for her had grown fanatical in their search, rousting prostitutes from their beds, squeezing snitches for shreds of information. The relationship with Bobby was sour; she could no longer bear his moods, his temper, his wrath when he took off his shoes and his rings and squared off for a fight with her. He always said he couldn’t hit a woman, but he could sure wrestle with Marcia. She loved him every day, or at least she needed him every day, but he was in the grip of forces she could not anticipate or accommodate. “I can’t take this shit off of you any more,” she yelled. Bobby made an ushering gesture with his hands, showing her the door.

  Hurrying to Las Vegas, she set up shop at a Strip hotel and became reaffiliated with Sparks, the black pimp. His apartment was a treasure cache of drugs. But within a few weeks she fell ill with fever, nausea, and chills. When her eyes turned yellow, she knew it was hepatitis—from injecting heroin with a dirty needle. “If I’m fixin’ to die,” she told herself, “then it’s gonna be at my mama’s house.” Terribly ill, she flew to Dallas and fell into her mother’s embrace. That night, fearful of touching her son and giving him the disease, she bade the little boy sit across the room from her bed and read to her from his primer. She fell asleep, happy.

  Marcia refused to go to a hospital, even the one where her mother worked as a nursing aide, for fear that her heroin addiction would be discovered and that in turn would bring the police. She insisted on staying at home, in her old bed, peering out the window every time a car threw gravel on the road in front of the small house. After a few weeks the yellow tinge to her skin and eyes cleared, and she felt her strength returning. She wanted to confide in her mother, for the old woman did not know the trouble her daughter was in, only that the Houston police had come looking for her. But Marcia could not summon the courage to make confession. Instead, she threw herself into an exhausting spurt of housework, as if she needed clean labor, scrubbing floors, washing windows, moving furniture around, promising to pay for a total redecoration once she was able to get out and work. Then, as abruptly as she had come home, she left again, muttering something about a job in West Texas. Her mother protested, but Marcia was gone.

  For a time Marcia worked the “spots” in West Texas, staying a day or so in San Angelo, moving on to Lubbock or Odessa. Then she telephoned home and her mother had disturbing news. The Texas Rangers had come looking for her, and the Houston homicide detectives had called to warn that Marcia was in danger of being killed by “characters” unless she contacted them.

  “Why don’t you at least call them and see what they want?” urged her mother.

  “I know what they want,” said Marcia. She hung up quickly and packed, running to the bus station, not knowing that within an hour Gamino and Carpenter would be in her very room, cursing the whore who had taken her place in the bed.

  In early April she slipped back into Dallas for her son’s birthday, and the day before the event, while she was wrapping presents, the telephone rang. It was Bobby. He was still in Los Angeles, he said. He asked if she was all right. And was she ready to come back to him?

  “You’re really crazy, Bobby,” she answered. “We can’t make it together. Don’t you understand that it’s a whole lot easier to be miserable without somebody than with somebody? Let’s blow it off permanently.”

  Bobby persisted. But his voice did not have the faraway crackle of a long-distance caller. The connection seemed nearer. Marcia grew suspicious. “Where are you?” she demanded.

  “L.A.”

  “I don’t believe you, Bobby.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you hesitated before you answered. That always means you’re fixin’ to lie.”

  Bobby laughed. And surrendered. “As a matter of fact, I’m about seventeen hundred miles from L.A.”

  Marcia was startled, and ired. “Then that puts you in downtown Dallas at this very minute. Now I know you’re crazy. Get out of my life.”

  The next day, after the children went home full of cake and ice cream, Marcia drove to a nearby grocery to buy food for the evening meal. While t
here she telephoned home to ask if her mother had thought of anything else the pantry needed. Her mother spoke urgently. Ten minutes after Marcia left the house, a car of Texas Rangers had driven up, demanding to know her whereabouts. They even arrested Marcia’s sister and old antagonist, Linda, mistaking her for the woman they wanted. “They know you’re in town, honey,” said the mother. “They want you real bad. What happened? For God’s sake tell me what’s going on.”

  In panic, Marcia ran to a motel and took a room, trying to calm herself. She thought of a hundred solutions, but they all dovetailed back to Bobby. She needed him. And she had an idea how to find him. Wearing dark glasses and a wig, she went to a bar called the Painted Duck the next afternoon. Hardly had she taken a seat in the gloom than Bobby came in. “Hello, ding,” he said. “You come here often?”

  She told him of the fires licking at her. He shrugged. What else was new? A better idea was to drop by her motel room and talk horizontally. Marcia shook her head in disbelief; the entire state of Texas was bent against her and all Bobby wanted was to attend his crotch. “If you have any notions whatsoever about us getting back together again, then forget it,” she said. “I’m leaving town. Dallas is a bad place for either of us to be.”

  Word was around that the Houston cops now finally knew Bobby’s last name. Another snitch had told Carpenter.

  “Calm down, ding,” soothed Bobby. “Just where you fixin’ to go to?”