Judge Me Not

by John D. MacDonald

  “I think we’re supposed to try to retain the initiative. So we both go down. Follow pretty close.”

  Teed followed him. His foot scuffed a gun, knocking it from one step to the next lower one. He picked it up quickly, dropping the other. Armando went down the stairs with extreme caution, flattened against the wall. He stopped one step up from the third-floor level. Teed was behind him. Ahead was the blank wall of the other side of the corridor. To their left was the railing, the next flight going down to the second floor. To reach it without exposing themselves to anyone standing in the hall, they would have to go over the railing. Teed sensed that the knife wound had weakened Armando to the point where this would be difficult if not impossible. And his own wounded leg was growing less reliable with frightening speed.

  “Morrow!” someone called, surprisingly close.

  “What do you want, Raval?” Armando asked in a pleasant, conversational tone.

  They both heard the grunt of surprise, the soft scuffle as people moved back quickly.

  “Rogale,” Raval said, with the same casual confidence that Teed remembered from the terrace on a sunny morning, “what are we? Kids, yet? Buck Rogers, maybe? We have some hard boys here. You start shooting, they start shooting, and it makes trouble. We got Maria dead down here and one out-of-town boy, and two boys with holes in them.”

  “And two dead men at the head of the stairs,” Teed said tonelessly, “and a girl with a slashed face and a dead girl.”

  “Dead girl?” Raval asked uneasily.

  “Miss Dennison went out the window, Raval,” Teed said.

  Raval cursed softly. Then he said, “That tears it good, but we can still put a lid on it, boys. We can still stop going bang bang. I’ll give both you boys a good piece of change and then we can burn this place down. It will burn good. Tragic deaths in fire. There’ll still be a stink, but not so bad we can’t sit it out.”

  “Better listen to the boss,” a new voice said.

  “That’s Stratter,” Armando whispered to Teed.

  A car motor roared into life. They heard the wheels skid on gravel, the sound of the car fading rapidly away.

  “Well?” Raval called.

  “I’m ashamed of you, Lonnie,” Armando said. “A nice country-club member like you. A guy with his daughters in a fancy school. They say you’ve got thirty suits of clothes. Is that right? Nice going for a reform-school graduate.”

  Raval’s voice thickened. “Take your choice, boys. You burn with it if you don’t want to play.”

  “How is that going to read?” Armando asked. “Joint burns down. A joint owned, indirectly, by Lonnie Raval. Dead in the fire are prominent young attorney, the Assistant City Manager, the daughter of the City Manager, and a choice collection of assorted muscle men. You’re licked no matter how you play it, Lonnie. It’s gone too far already. The eastern syndicate is going to be very, very annoyed with you. Don’t you follow orders? I thought the policy was to go as legitimate as possible while all this Senate committee stuff is still hot. And here you are, kidnaping people, shooting people, burning people up. Tsk, tsk.”

  There was a mumbling whisper they couldn’t catch, then Stratter said, “You want it done, you do it yourself this time.”

  Another car left, noisily.

  Armando said, “Be smart, Stratter. The others are pulling out. Raval is through. And here’s something. We can’t get out, and neither can you. You can’t get to the stairs going down any more than we can. Slap him down, Stratter, and I’ll see that it counts in your favor.”

  “Get back, Stratter,” Raval said in a colorless voice. “Get back.”

  Someone ran noisily down one of the lower flights, raced across the lobby. A door slammed.

  “There goes some more,” Armando called, his voice joyous.

  “Ten thousand apiece,” Raval called, his voice full of shaky confidence.

  Teed heard the heavy tramp of slow footsteps coming up the stairs from the second floor. Armando gave Teed a puzzled look. Teed moved over to the railing and looked down, careful not to expose himself to the men who waited down the hall to catch them as they moved off the stairs.

  Mark Carboy was plodding slowly up the stairs. He was muttering to himself and he held the fantastic revolver in his hand.

  He glanced up at Teed with no recognition and continued up, his heavy breath wheezing with the effort of the climb.

  “Who’s coming?” Raval called nervously.

  Carboy reached the hallway, turned to the right, toward Raval and Stratter. He lifted the revolver and fired. The explosion in the confined place seemed to lift them into the air. Teed was deafened. There was a hard, persistent ringing in his ears. Carboy sat down like a fat baby, spraddle-legged. Teed saw two little puffs of dust leap out from the front of his dark overcoat. He held the gun with the muzzle resting against the floor. His face was bland, unalarmed. He bit his lip and tried to lift the gun. He got it up a few inches, but the muzzle sagged back. He grasped it with both hands. As he tried to lift again, a round black dot appeared on his forehead, above his left eye. He leaned slowly forward, both hands still on the gun. The muzzle slid along the rug.

  Raval vaulted the body, dived down the stairs. He managed to keep his feet. They heard his hand slap hard against the wall at the landing and then he was gone. Teed had been too frozen to fire at him.

  Armando moved cautiously into the hall. He turned back at once. “Scratch one Stratter, Teed. Christ, what a cannon!” He pulled it out of Carboy’s dead hands. “There’s still three in it.”

  They went down the stairs. Castle Ann seemed to be deserted. A starter began to whine. The motor churned over and over and over, but didn’t catch. The sound stopped. A wide-eyed girl bounced into the hall, stared at them, darted back into her room and slammed the door.

  Teed’s leg had begun to grow weaker. He began to limp as he went down the stairs. A lot of blood had been lost. The world seemed to rush toward him for a moment of sparkling, incredible clarity, and then recede again into remoteness.

  Armando sat down suddenly on the stairs and coughed. Bright blood spilled over his lips, splatted on the bare wood.

  “I think it touched a lung,” he gasped. “My breathing has been sounding funny.” Again he touched the dark haft of the knife with his fingertips, almost tenderly.

  Teed left him behind. He walked across the lobby. The starter of the car whined again, fruitlessly. A car door slammed and there were hurrying footsteps on the gravel. Raval, full in the lights from the bar window, came trotting around the corner of the building on Teed’s right. He no longer looked bold and confident and overpowering. He was a frightened man who ran with hunched shoulders, underlip pulled grotesquely down.

  In the distance the high wild sweet song of a siren drifted across the night fields. Trees had begun to stand out against a hard metal grayness in the east.

  Raval tried to stop too quickly, and fell to his hands and knees, dark metal skittering out of his hand, whispering along the gravel. He pounced toward the gun. He was a tiny figure, a thousand miles away. He was a bug under a thick gray lens that was full of wavering imperfections. The gun in Teed’s hand recoiled twice and Teed did not hear the shots. A giant reached down from the gray sky and swung a flabby finger against Teed’s shoulder. It spun him around and dropped him on his face, gravel smashing his lips and grinding against his teeth. After a long time he got up onto his hands and knees. The night was full of a screaming that he could not identify. The corner of the building was at the other end of the world. He crawled there. He shut his eyes and rammed his head into the side of the building. He sat back stupidly, corrected the course.

  She lay against the side of the building where she had been roughly tumbled off the hood of the big car. The impact had dished it deeply, sprung the front of the hood up. She lay on her side, the sleazy yellow satin house coat balled in the small of her back.

  He grunted busily to himself as he spread the house coat out. He rolled her onto it a
nd pulled it around her. The zipper started at the bottom hem. It was hard to get it started. He clucked and muttered and finally the small metal teeth meshed. It made a purring sound as he pulled it up to her throat, covering the whiteness that was not smashed, not bleeding—just subtly wrong, obscurely out of proportion.

  He wormed around on his haunches until his back was against the thick front bumper, against the bug-dotted sparkle of the chrome, and then he eased her head into his lap.

  When the spotlights centered on him, he squinted into them, lips drawn back in an uncomprehending, death-head grin. His tongue fumbled loosely and heavily with the words as they bent over him. “Top floor. Girl.”

  In some bright place, much later, Leighton’s cadaverous face slid down from a blazing sky of a dozen suns and loomed over him. The thin lips wormed and the words all leaned wetly against each other so that there was no meaning. “WasRavalshot? Washehurt?”

  “Later, later, later,” a shiny voice said.

  “Was Raval hurt?”

  “Don’t know,” Teed said. “Don’t know. Don’t know.” He stopped saying it, but it went on and on in his mind until the words had no meaning. Where Leighton’s face had been there was a tunnel. It slid down and sucked against his lips. In the tunnel the unspoken words whined emptily off the sides, echoing into forever: “Don’t know. Don’t know. DON’T KNOW!”

  And then, running down toward him, down the slant of the tunnel toward him, she came running, running, gladness in her throat and in her eyes a joyousness too great to be born. He stood arms outstretched for her to run into his arms. And she ran against him and he shuddered because she was formed of cold stone and she wore Barbara’s face on her broken body.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The nurse had a face the color of wet wash and hair like copper wire. She was slat-bodied and smelled of talcum.

  She rolled the chair close to the bed and beamed at him. “Today we can spend some time on the sun porch. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  He looked at her. “Just too gay.”

  The smile slid off her face. “Now turn and get your hands on the arm of the chair. I’ll steady it. Lower yourself into it, please.”

  He did as she told him. He came down into the chair with more force than he had expected.

  “Would you like to take something along to read?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She came around the chair and stared at him. Her blue eyes were severe. “Mr. Morrow, a large part of rapid recovery is the patient’s attitude. I think you ought to let those people come and see you. I’m sure it would cheer you up.”

  “Would it?”

  “See how sour you talk to me?”

  He took a deep breath. “Look, Miss Mission. Sooner or later I’ll have visitors. At the moment I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to read the papers. I don’t want to do anything except listen to the world go around and the grass grow.”

  “It was bad, wasn’t it? That poor girl and the way…”

  “And I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve told you that before.”

  “Mr. Seward is very insistent. He comes twice a day, Mr. Morrow.”

  “Tell him to kindly go to hell, Miss Mission. Now wheel the wheel chair.”

  Her shoulders slumped. Her uniform made a starchy rustle as she shrugged. She pushed the chair out through the room door and down to the elevator. The elevator took them to the top floor. The sun porch was having a busy morning. All conversation stopped as he came in and he saw the avidity of their eyes. The victim of a real honest-to-Gawd gun battle. Sure. He’s the one. Two slugs in him. Come in here with about a pint of blood left. They give him plasma all the way to town in the ambulance. Found him rocking that dead girl and talking to her.

  “Over there in the corner,” Teed said.

  She left him. “I’ll be back in an hour. If you want anything, that nurse over there will get it for you.”

  Her heels made dull sounds on the composition floor as she walked out, distributing her professional smile on all and sundry. The silence lasted for just a few more moments and then the others started talking in low tones. Teed grasped the wheel rails and turned the chair so that his face was in the sun, his back to the room.

  He could not stop thinking of his life as a chart on a wall in the back of his mind. The level line had reached placidly to that Sunday, three weeks ago, when he had awakened in the camp, had heard the sound of Felice’s shower. Then the line had begun to waver. It had fallen off for the next week, and then it had stopped. Now there was no line at all. Not depression. Just a nothingness. Somehow life had changed from a pleasant game where you’re all right if you keep your guard up to a mess where your guard didn’t help a bit. And once you knew that, none of the old rules were any good any more.

  The only visitors had been Leighton and the police stenographer. It had been impossible to keep them out. Later the stenographer had come back with the stack of copies of his statement, and he had scrawled his name in the indicated places.

  “They got Raval,” the stenographer said.

  “That’s nice,” Teed said tonelessly.

  “Picked him up at Tampa International Airport. He had a ticket to Mexico City. He’ll be inside until he falls over his beard.”

  “That’s nice,” Teed said. The stenographer gave him a curious stare and left.

  In an hour the redheaded nurse came back. In the elevator going down she said, “A Miss Dennison is waiting to see you, Mr. Morrow.”

  “Tell her to… no, I’ll see her.”

  Marcia came into the room. She wore black. She sat primly, quietly, on the chair beside the bed. “Teed, I want to know what your plans are.” He nodded.

  “Daddy is quitting. He can’t stay here, now. The University wants him back. Everyone is willing for you to take his place. If you don’t want it, he wants to look for another man.”

  “I haven’t decided, Marcia.”

  “Could you decide right now? It would help him. He… needs help. He’s a defeated man, Teed.”

  “Aren’t we all.”

  She looked at him with the level eyes, her father’s eyes. “Did you love her so very much, Teed?”

  “That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about. I didn’t love her at all in the way you mean. Not as a woman. I… keep thinking of what I should have done that would have prevented it.”

  “You couldn’t do anything.”

  “It was my fault that the whole thing started in that way. I gave them the handle to use on Jake.”

  “They would have found some other way. Don’t torture yourself by blaming yourself. Jake… wouldn’t want you to.”

  He smiled at her. “Powell used to try to get you and me together. I was the son-in-law elect.”

  She stood up, pulling her black gloves nervously through her fingers. “That sort of thing is done. I’ll stay with him. I shan’t marry anyone.”

  “That’s what you’ve been all along, isn’t it, Marcia? A cool-eyed martyr looking for a stake to be tied to.”

  She looked down. “Don’t spoil it, Teed. Please. When they made me, they… left something out. Jake had it all. I used to resent her. Almost hate her at times. That’s my guilt, Teed.”

  “Tell Powell I’ll take over just as soon as I can get out of here.”

  “Mr. Trim is cooperating. The grand jury will be set to go. Daddy has new information and we ought to get a return of indictments on fourteen men in the city government. Then he’ll leave it in your hands.”

  “In a year I’ll have it running the way it should. Then I’ll find somebody who wants to stay in one place and turn it over to them.”

  She stood by the bed. “Get well soon, Teed.”

  “I’m too tough to kill,” he said. She took his hand, then bent over and kissed him on the forehead. After her footsteps were gone he still felt the cool impression of her lips. Viking woman. She of the sturdy thighs, of pelvic width for the bearing of children, of breasts meant to sweeten
and flow. This would be a waste, just as the death of Jake was a waste. The years would dry and harden her, and the juices of youth would parch in the wind of barren years. In a way it was a little death, and he wondered if, in part, it were her penance for Jake’s death.

  The lunch tray came. His appetite was getting better. Even the drab hospital food, attractive in color rather than taste, was welcome.

  The nurse came to take the tray. “Is Barbara Heddon still in the hospital?”

  The nurse started so violently that the empty dishes rattled. “Uh… yes.”

  “Why did you jump?”

  “I just happened to be thinking about her when you asked me that. That’s all. I was wondering about it. You never asked about her before, and she never asked about you. That’s all. It seemed funny. So I was thinking about it.”

  “Has she had visitors?”

  “Her people, from Baltimore. That’s all. Nobody local.”

  “Was Armando Rogale discharged?”

  “After four days. A fat woman came and took him home with her. Mrs. Ferma or something.”

  “Can I see Barbara Heddon?”

  “I’ll ask the doctor. She’s not supposed to move.”

  “Let me know.”

  Late in the afternoon Barbara’s doctor came in and pulled up a chair. “You want to talk to the Heddon girl, eh?”

  “If it’s all right. How is she?”

  “Apathetic. And that’s good. I like that. I don’t want that face wrinkling up with a lot of emotions. Not until healing is further advanced.”

  “Will she be… badly scarred?”

  “She thinks so. I don’t. The left eye was ticklish. Thought at first it would have to go. But I did a hemstitching job on those eye muscles. Proud of it. Going to write it up. Like sewing a pair of wings back onto a housefly.”

  “How about the scars?”

  “It was a nice sharp edge. Clean slashes. Right side already O.K. But there was tissue loss on the left side. Her left arm is straight up over her head now. I’m telling you this in a way you can understand it. Cut a flap from the underside of her left arm, gave it a half turn and used it as a patch on the left cheek. Left it fastened to the left arm until the graft is far enough along. Then we’ll cut it free and do some trimming. A face like that, it’s a pleasure to do cosmetic surgery. Damn good bones. Be a pretty woman when she’s sixty. I won’t say you won’t be able to see hairline scars in a bright light when she isn’t wearing make-up. I let her folks see her. Had to chase them out when she started getting a little upset. No smiling and no frowning for that young lady until I’m certain those healing muscles won’t tear under the strain. That’s why you can’t see her. Not for ten days, Morrow.”