‘Lou will take his own fall, but it can’t happen like you planned.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of your father.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I think you do.’
She looked away a moment, sighed, looked back.
‘You mind sharing that cigarette?’
He got to his feet, walked to the bed, sat down beside her. He held the cigarette to her lips and let her take a drag. When he pulled the cigarette away her lipstick was smeared across the end of it. She exhaled.
‘We can go away,’ she said. ‘Together.’
‘I want to believe you.’
‘But you don’t.’
‘I don’t think you’re lying.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think if we do your plan your dad will know I know too much and want me dead. I think I’m nothing but some guy you met less than a week ago and no matter how much you protest he’ll still kill me. And I think that even if your dad by some miracle does let me live you’ve already destroyed my life once and no matter what you say now, no matter how sincerely, if we’re together for long enough you’ll do it again. I can’t let that happen.’
She looked at him with red eyes.
‘Give me another drag.’
He held the cigarette to her lips. She inhaled.
‘Is that it then?’
‘I guess it is.’
‘You’re making a mistake.’
‘I’m sorry, Evelyn.’
3
She opens her eyes to see a nicotine-stained wall. She smells cigarette smoke. The room is cool. Her right shoulder aches with a bone-deep pain. She’s confused, doesn’t know where she is. She tries to sit up, tries to reach out and push herself into a sitting position, but something holds her hands behind her back. After a moment she remembers. She rolls over and with her stomach muscles pulls herself up into a sitting position. She looks across the room. Eugene sits in a chair. A cigarette between his fingers sends smoke wafting toward the ceiling. He looks tired, haggard. She can almost feel sorry for him. She understands what he’s going through. She thinks she does, anyway, to some degree. But she can’t let him do what he plans to do. She isn’t even certain of what it is, but she knows she needs to stop it. It was her job to come out to the West Coast and clean things up; instead she only managed to smear the mess around.
She was stupid to think she could run away from the business, stupid to think she could shack up with some milkman.
Stupid to think she might love him.
For a brief time it made her into a child again. Those fantasies of the future were childish fantasies. She’d get bored with any life other than the one she now lives. No other life suits her. She can’t afford childish emotions like love.
Love? There’s sex and there’s marriage. She doesn’t even know what love is.
So he makes her heart beat faster simply by being near her. So he makes her palms sweat. So he makes her stomach feel funny. None of that means anything. She momentarily regressed into childhood, that’s all, into feeling that she needed someone other than herself to rely on. She momentarily allowed herself to go soft.
It won’t happen again.
Eugene takes a drag from his cigarette, then puts it out on the bottom of his shoe and sets the butt on the edge of the table.
‘Good morning.’
She doesn’t respond.
‘Do you need to pee or anything?’
‘What?’
‘Do you have to use the toilet?’
‘No.’
He nods. ‘Good.’
He slips a pair of leather gloves onto his hands, grabs the roll of tape from the table, gets to his feet. He picks up her panties from the floor and walks toward her. He shoves them into her mouth. They taste of laundry soap and of her sex. He shoves them down her throat, making her want to gag. She tries to spit them out, but it’s difficult, the dry fabric clings to the walls of her mouth, and before she can do anything more than ineffectively cough Eugene is wrapping tape around her head. She coughs a few more times, tears streaming down her face, before she gets the fabric out of her throat. She wants to rub the moisture from her eyes but her hands are still taped behind her back. Eugene must sense it. He wipes the tears away from her cheeks himself, smearing them away with his gloved thumb.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to choke you. I have to take care of some business. I’ll be back soon. With breakfast.’
He collects his own gun and hers, then walks to the door, grabs the doorknob, and pulls. He steps over the threshold. He closes the door behind him, leaving her alone.
Her first thought is to start banging against the walls, to get someone’s attention, but she needs to think of something better than that. That will result in the police being called, which is the last thing she wants. The police will ask questions.
What are you going to do, Evelyn? Think.
She falls back in bed and kicks her legs up. Starts working her taped-together hands around her naked backside, up toward the backs of her knees, squirming through the tight loop of her arms. If she can get her legs through, if she can get her hands in front of her, well, she isn’t sure what she’ll do, but it’ll be a start. And that’s what she needs: a start. A beginning.
She’ll think of something.
But first she needs to get her hands free.
4
He puts the Berretta into his motorcycle’s saddlebag and his own pistol down the front of his pants, then rides to a diner. He parks at the curb and steps into the place. It smells good, of coffee and bacon. The chatter of the patrons is pleasant. He walks across the black-and-white-checkered floor to the payphone in the corner and drops a dime. He listens for a moment to the tone, then dials. It rings several times. If this call remains unanswered Eugene doesn’t know what he’s going to do.
‘Hello?’
He exhales, relieved.
‘Fingers.’
‘Eugene?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What’s up, man?’
‘Last time we spoke you offered to help.’
A long pause, then, finally: ‘I did.’
5
Evelyn lies on her back with her feet in the air. Her right shoulder is screaming with pain. She curses into the fabric shoved down her throat. Her breathing is jagged and short. If her feet weren’t taped together she could get her legs through one at a time, that would be far less painful, but her feet are taped together. That makes her task, as well as painful, nearly impossible. This is her third attempt. With her wrists at the backs of her ankles she draws her knees to her chest and tries, with a grunt, to force her hands over her heels. She feels a great tearing pain in her shoulder and screams into the wet fabric in her mouth. She rolls to her side. She closes her eyes and tears stream down her hot, sweaty face. She opens her eyes and finds herself looking, through a kaleidoscope of tears, at her hands. They’re held together as if in prayer.
She laughs through her pain. She did it.
She did it.
She sits up in bed, a wet clump of hair falling into her face, and reaches to the tape covering her mouth. She pulls down, pulls the tape down over her chin, and reaches into her mouth with her searching fingers. She removes the now-sopping panties, gags, almost vomits, and throws them to the floor. She allows herself to sit motionless and catch her breath. She can’t sit here doing nothing indefinitely — Eugene will return at some point, and she needs to figure out what she’s going to do about him — but she allows herself a moment.
She sniffles, brings her taped-together hands to her nose, wipes at it.
Okay. What next?
She turns her wrists in opposite directions to see how much movement is available, how much give the tape has. Not much. But, with luck, enough. With pain in her wrists she picks at the end of the tape with a fingernail, picks at the tape until almost a third of an inch has been pulled away. She brings her wrists to her mouth
and bites down on the tape end, then pulls her hands away, unwinding it.
In less than five minutes her hands are free.
A minute after that her feet are free as well.
She stands and walks to her purse. She finds her cigarette case, removes a filtered Kent, and lights it. She inhales deeply, coughs, looks around the room. She has no idea how long it’s been. Eugene could return at any moment. She needs to figure what she’s going to do when he does.
Her first thought is to call Lou, but there’s no telephone here. And anyway, she’d have a hard time explaining to him what she was doing in this room.
She could simply leave, find a phone, make an anonymous call to the police. Except she doesn’t want Eugene in police custody.
He can tell them far too much, and he would.
She takes another drag from her cigarette.
He has to die. That’s what Daddy would say, and Daddy’d be right. She has to kill him and get rid of the body. Drive it out to the desert, bury it. The police will still think he did the murders for which he’s been framed; they’ll just also think he got away with it, made it down to Tijuana where they’ll never catch up with him.
Why didn’t he go down to Mexico when she suggested it? She would’ve gotten money to him. Maybe they could have made a small life together down there. If he’d listened maybe the two of them would still have some small chance at something.
No more childish thoughts, Evelyn.
You would have gotten bored. It never could have worked out.
You have to kill him and you know it, so figure out how you’re going to do it and get ready. He might show up at any moment.
She nods at that.
You’re right. Of course.
It has to be something simple and brutal.
But first she has to get some clothes on. She picks her dress up from the floor and steps into it, reaching behind her to zip it up. She looks toward the panties on the floor, but refuses to put them on. This wrinkled, sweat-stinking dress alone will have to suffice.
She looks around the room for a weapon.
She has to be ready for him.
6
Eugene rides his motorcycle into the motel parking lot, steps off the bike, knocks the kickstand into place. He reaches into the saddlebag and removes a brown paper bag and, with the paper bag gripped in his fist, walks to his motel room. He keys open the door, steps inside.
First thing he notices is that the bed is empty. A wad of duct tape lies on the mattress, another wad on the floor by the foot of the bed.
His mouth goes dry. His heart knocks in his chest like a bad car engine. He reaches for the Baby Browning in his waistband, gets his hand around the cool grip, and is about to pull it out when he feels a dull thud at the back of his head and falls to his knees. He touches the back of his head and feels pain. He looks at his fingers and sees blood. He looks over his shoulder.
Evelyn stands behind him in the doorway, her red hair a wild mess, her brow furrowed, her eyes glistening. She holds in her hands a large stone with this motel room’s number painted on it, a white 13. She must have been waiting outside for his return, hiding around the corner or behind a car.
She steps into the room.
He crawls backwards, away from her, until he’s pressed against the bed and can crawl no further.
Then pulls the pistol from his waistband, aims it at her, gets to his feet.
‘Don’t take another step, Evelyn.’
She takes another step.
‘You’re not gonna shoot me.’
She raises the stone over her head and takes yet another step toward him.
He wills himself to shoot her. If he can’t do it now he’s never going to be able to do it, and it has to be done eventually. He has to do it now. If he doesn’t, she’ll kill him. And she won’t hesitate. He can think of a new plan, a new story that makes it all make sense. The point is living, and if he’s to live she must die.
The gun shakes in his hand. He looks past it to her face. He aims over her head. He pulls the trigger.
The stone splits into two big chunks, one in each hand, and rock shards and bits of lead scatter outward. Evelyn gasps and takes a staggering step backwards.
Eugene moves on her, raises the gun, and brings it down onto the side of her head.
She collapses to the floor.
He steps forward and looks out into the parking lot, sees a couple people wandering out of their rooms to find out what that noise was. Someone asks him did he hear that, too. He says, yeah, think it was only a car backfiring, and pushes the door closed. He looks down at Evelyn. She’s unconscious. Blood trickles into her hair. He swallows, then reaches down to pick her up.
7
Evelyn awakens in bed. She feels slightly disoriented. She blinks at Eugene. He’s once more sitting at the table. He looks at her for a long time. Then nods his head toward a paper bag sitting beside him.
‘I got us some breakfast,’ he says.
FORTY-FIVE
1
Carl sits in a chair in the corner of the room and stares at the wall, disoriented. He must have nodded off there for a minute. He blinks and looks down at his arm. A bead of blood rests in the crease on the inside of his elbow. He imagines a small green stem growing from it, from some subcutaneous seed, and thorns emerging from the stem, and leaves, and then a red flower, a red rose, and the red rose opening like a fist unclenching. It would be beautiful. He lazily reaches over with an arm that weighs twice what it should and smears the blood away with an index finger. He looks at the red on his fingertip and unthinkingly licks it off.
Okay. Time to get to work.
He pushes himself from the chair. He unrolls his shirtsleeve and buttons his cuff. A dot of blood appears on his shirt. Apparently he didn’t wipe all of it away. It doesn’t matter. No one will see it. He slips into his coat. He picks up his fedora from the bed and sets it upon his shower-wet hair after combing his fingers through it. If his hair’s still wet, thin as it is, he didn’t nod off for too long. That’s good.
And that’s it. That’s what he gets for the daylight hours. He’s using no more till he gets off work. He’s taking nothing with him. He doesn’t want to be tempted. And he will not call his man in the hop squad because his man in the hop squad doesn’t know how to keep his goddamn mouth shut. He’ll be a little shaky toward the end of the day, a little sweaty, but he thinks he can make it. He made a promise.
Just enough to get him through. No more.
He steps out of his room, making sure the door is locked behind him, then walks downstairs and into the cool morning air, which wraps itself around him. He stands still on the front porch and inhales its scent.
If his wife were alive, this moment, even without her in it, would be perfect. The simple knowledge that she was alive would make it perfect.
But she isn’t. And it isn’t.
Still, it’s pretty nice, and he stands there a moment before walking to his car.
2
He sits in a chair beside Friedman and looks across a cluttered desk to Captain Ellis. He thought he and his partner had an understanding. He thought they’d worked it out yesterday evening. They would finish this case, they’d get Eugene Dahl into custody, and then he’d take time off from work to get clean. None of the brass would have to find out about his problem. He’d get clean on his own, come back to work, and everything could go back to the way it had been before he started using.
He thought he and Friedman had an understanding, but if so why did Captain Ellis call them into his office and shut the door?
He closes his eyes a moment, preparing himself for what he fears is coming. He knows he deserves to lose his job, but he knows too it’s the only thing he has left. It’s an ineffective distraction, but it’s something. He wants to continue this investigation. He has ideas. He has thoughts. Instead of focusing on himself, he’s begun to focus on this case again. He’s begun to focus on it like he used to focus on cases before Naomi
died. He doesn’t want to lose that now. He has a tenuous grasp on reality and he wants to use it to pull himself out of the nightmare he’s been living in. Maybe he could even fix things with Candice eventually — once he gets cleaned up.
If he gets fired he doesn’t know what he’ll do.
‘The district attorney was murdered last night,’ Ellis says.
Carl opens his eyes. ‘What?’
‘He was beat to death in front of the Pink Flamingo.’
‘Beat to death — with what?’
‘Fists,’ Ellis says. ‘Things have really turned to shit lately.’
Friedman nods. ‘Ever since that grand-jury investigation of James Manning was announced.’
‘That was my thinking. But you two like Eugene Dahl as your killer.’
‘We do,’ Carl says, pushing thoughts of everything else out of his mind — he’s not getting fired, Friedman hasn’t said anything — forcing himself to focus only on the investigation. ‘But I’ve also come to believe James Manning is involved somehow. I’m almost certain of it.’
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know exactly. But I was up last night thinking about it, and it seems to me he almost has to be involved. There’s someone I want to talk to about it, someone in town, but I’m not sure he’ll spill, so I also want to visit hotels, check hotel registries, see if any of James Manning’s known associates have recently arrived in town. If we had more men at our disposal we could even check passenger lists — see who’s come into town through Los Angeles Airport, Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank, and Union Station. If we’re thorough I’m almost certain we’ll get something.’
‘I’ll get you your men. Be here at one o’clock to get them going. I’d also like you to keep Detectives Pagana and Schwartz apprised of your progress. They’re investigating the district attorney’s murder out of the Rampart division, and if you find a connection between your case and theirs they need to know about it.’
‘Yes, sir. In the meantime is there any chance we can take the unit off Eugene Dahl’s apartment?’
The Last Tomorrow Page 30