“Writer-Boy,” Loris said softly, “don’t get independent, Writer-Boy. You were big stuff once, she tells me, but the war’s over now. You do as you’re told, Writer-Boy, and you’ll be all right.”
Then he hit me. His eyes gave no warning at all—if the man knows his business, they don’t. I shouldn’t have been watching his eyes, anyway, but I was still full of peacetime trust and goodfellowship. In peacetime, people don’t haul off and poke in you in the diaphragm for no reason at all, and they don’t crack you across the back of the neck as you double up, or kick you in the side as you hit the floor…
“Just a sample, Writer-Boy. Just do as you’re told. You’ll be all right.”
His voice reached me only dimly. I wasn’t interested in his conversation. I was concentrating on making it look good. The blow just below the breastbone, while half-paralyzing, made a good excuse for bringing my hands to my midsection as I lay curled up on the floor, writhing in agony with my best Grade A writhe. One hand got the shirt open and the other got a firm grip on the butt of the Woodsman pistol. I heard him move towards the door. The doorknob rattled. I sat up with the gun in my hand and aimed it carefully at the place where his spine joined his skull. He never even looked around. A darning needle will kill in that spot, let alone a .22 bullet.
I sighed and lowered the pistol, watched the door close behind him, and listened to his footsteps dying away outside. He’d keep. I had enough dead bodies on the premises already. I got up slowly, and glanced at Tina. Her posture was a little peculiar. She’d slipped the glossy, satin-lined mink stole off her shoulders and was holding it, with both hands, as a bullfighter would hold his cape. Obviously she’d been prepared to fling it over my head to blind me, if she thought I was really going to shoot. It occurred to me that she was getting more mileage out of those furs, in more different ways, than the furrier had ever dreamed of.
She shook her head quickly. “Chéri, don’t look like that. We need him.”
“I don’t need him,” I said. “I plan to do without him, completely, as soon as it can be conveniently arranged. And I don’t need you, either, sweetheart. Goodbye.”
She looked at me for a moment. Then she shrugged and threw the minks back around her shoulders. “If that is how you want it,” she said. “If you are quite sure that is how you want it.”
I looked at her narrowly. “Spell it out, Tina.”
“I would think carefully, amigo mio. I would not let my intelligence be warped by the jealous actions of one big fool.” She moved her hand casually towards the bathroom door. “There is still that to consider.”
Slowly, I put the .22 back under my belt. “I think,” I said, “it’s about time you told me what this is all about. Who was Barbara Herrera, what was she up to here in Santa Fe, and why did Mac order her killed? How does he get away with killing people in peacetime, anyway?” I grimaced. “When you’ve finished that little chore, you can go on to tell me why she had to be killed in my studio with my gun...” I broke off. Tina was laughing. I said, “What’s so damn funny?”
“You are, Liebchen,” she said, reaching out to pat my cheek. “You wiggle so amusingly, like the fish on the hook.”
“Go on,” I said, when she paused.
She smiled into my eyes. “But it is your studio, my dear, and your gun. And you heard Loris, all the dead girl’s belongings are now in your truck. And if I walk out and leave you now, it’s your baby.”
“Go on,” I said.
“I’m afraid you don’t appreciate me, chéri,” she said. “It was really very nice of me to come back to help you. I would not have done it for anyone else. Loris knows it; that’s what makes him wild with jealousy… Of course, you can make things easier for us, if you cooperate.” She laughed at me, softly. “Think, Eric! A writer—an unstable person, of course—reports finding a pretty girl, whom he just met at a cocktail party, with whom he was heard to discuss an assignation after the party... this girl he now claims to have discovered shot to death, oh, much to his surprise, in his private writing place. But who will believe his astonishment and horror? The murder gun is his! Come now, come now, Mr. Helm”—her voice deepened and took on a masculine quality—“we are all men of the world here! Why don’t you just admit that you slipped Miss Herrera the studio key and told her to wait for you, you’d be out—to read her manuscript, of course!—as soon as your wife was asleep… That’s what they’ll say to you,” Tina murmured, still smiling, “if you call the police. And what will you say, my dear?”
There was a little silence. She found cigarettes in her purse. I let her light her own. When she looked at me again, the smile was gone; and when she spoke, her voice was low and intense.
“What will you say, Eric? The war is a long time ago. How long does it take to forget? Thirty years, twenty, or perhaps only fifteen or twelve? There was never any oath of silence, was there; never any stupid oath of loyalty? Mac always said that the person who needed to swear an oath was the person who would break that oath. We fought together at Kronheim, Eric. We loved together. Will you give me to the police now?”
She waited. I didn’t speak; it was her show. She drew on her cigarette and blew out the smoke in that proud, surprised way that almost all women use, that looks as if they’re forever congratulating themselves on not strangling on the stuff.
She looked at me, and murmured: “I take back the threats, my dear, and apologize for them. For you, there are no threats. I will tell you: I killed this girl, I, Madeleine Loris, Tina, killed her. Under orders, I killed her, because she deserved to die, because her death was thought necessary to prevent another death, perhaps more than one—but I killed her. We guessed, after she talked to you so long, that she might come here to wait for you; we got here first. It was a gamble, and we won. Loris was waiting behind the door. It is the one thing he knows, and he does it well. But she was still alive when he carried her in there. It was I who found your pistol—the only locked drawer in the place, chéri, and what a pitiful little lock!— and it was I who shot her to death, as she had shot others. Do you think she carried a knife and gun for adornment? Do you think we are the only ones who know how to kill?” Tina drew herself up. “But call your police and I will tell them, I will confess my crime. I will not make you pay for it. And I will go to the electric chair, and I will not talk, because I do not need an oath of silence to keep my lips forever sealed. But I will remember that you, who send me to my death now, were once the only man I ever worked with, whom I wanted to… to play with, afterwards. But I will not hate you. I will only remember that beautiful week in London, so long ago...” Her voice stopped. She drew on her cigarette again, and smiled at me pleasantly. “I’m pretty good, don’t you think, baby? I should be in the movies.”
I drew a deep breath. “You should be anywhere but in my studio, damn you. Where’s a rag so I can mop my eyes, and what do you want me to do?”
I mean, no matter what heart-throbs she’d put into it, what she’d said was quite true. I couldn’t very well give her to the police, and I couldn’t talk. It didn’t leave me much choice.
12
Ten minutes later, we had the pickup ready to roll. You could look inside the rear canopy and not see a thing except camera equipment, luggage, and camping gear.
Unless you knew too much already, you wouldn’t be likely to look close enough to discover that the luggage wasn’t all mine.
I found myself crouching to peer underneath, I suppose to check that no blood was dripping out of the truck bed, no dead white hand dangling, no long dark hair. The years of peace had drawn the hard temper of my nervous system, and I guess you take corpses more seriously in peacetime, anyway. Hell, you’ve got to. During the war, in enemy territory, caught with the goods, there was always a possibility that you could shoot your way clear; but I couldn’t quite see myself whipping out a gun and burning down a bunch of worthy local cops named Martinez or O’Brien.
I helped Tina to join her silent traveling companion inside. She
had to hitch her cocktail dress hip-high to make the tailgate; I heard her swear feelingly in a language I did not understand.
“What’s the matter?” I whispered.
“It’s nothing, chéri. Just a run in one of my best nylons, that’s all.”
“The hell,” I said, “with your best nylons.”
I raised the gate, hooked the retaining chains in place, and brought down the canopy door, which opens upwards like a station wagon transom. Before closing it, I stuck my head inside.
“Get over on that mattress and hang on,” I said. “And you’d better stick your false teeth in your purse so you don’t swallow them. They forgot to supply springs with this thing.”
I closed the door, and started to turn away. Then a screen door slammed at the house, and I saw Beth come out of the kitchen and start across the flagstone patio in the glare of the lights. Well, she could have come at a worse time. I locked the truck canopy and went to meet her.
“I brought you some coffee,” she said as we stopped, facing each other.
I took the cup and drank from it. The coffee was hot and strong and black, obviously designed to jolt me sober and keep me awake on the road. The coat she’d thrown over her shoulder and the sturdy moccasin shoes into which she’d stuck her bare feet made her blue angel-robes look flimsy and inadequate. There’s supposed to be something very sexy about a woman running around outdoors in her nightie—magazines catering to the male taste seem to be full of these elfin creatures—but it just looks kind of drafty and ridiculous to me. Her face looked sleepy and sweet in the floodlights.
“I took time to duck into the darkroom and load up some film holders for the big 5x7,” I said, lying unnecessarily, like any dumb criminal. “I hate to do it in a changing bag when I don’t have to. Why aren’t you asleep?”
“I heard the motor running,” she said, indicating the truck, still idling noisily. “I thought you’d already left, and I was lying there wondering what it was. Then somebody parked in the alley for a while, probably just some kids necking, but I... I get a little nervous when I’m alone in the house. By the time they drove off I was wide awake. Be sure to lock the gate behind you, or they’ll be using our compound for a lover’s lane next.”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, thanks for the coffee. I’ll try to phone from San Antone—as we Tejanos call it.”
We stood looking at each other.
“Well, be careful,” she said. “Don’t drive too fast.”
“In this relic?” I said. “It would be a miracle. Well, you’d better get back inside before you catch cold.”
I was supposed to kiss her, of course, but I couldn’t do it. The masquerade was over. I was no longer M. Helm, Esq., author, photographer, husband, father. I was a guy named Eric with a knife and two pistols, intentions unreliable, destination unknown. I had no right to touch her. It would have been like making a pass at another man’s wife.
After a moment, she turned and walked away. I climbed up into the cab of the truck and drove it out into the alley. I climbed down again and closed and padlocked the big gates. As I walked back to the pickup, the yard lights went out behind me. Beth never could stand to see a light burn unnecessarily…
The truck is a 1951 Chevy half-ton job, with a four-speed gearbox and a six-cylinder engine developing a little less than ninety horsepower, and it’ll shove any of your three-hundred-horsepower passenger cars right off the road, backwards, from a standing start. It has no damn fins over the tail-lights, or sheet metal eyebrows over the headlights, and it was built in that happy postwar era when they didn’t have to sell cars, all they had to do was make them and call up the next guy on the list. There wasn’t any sense fooling with pretty colors under those conditions, and all Chevy’s commercial vehicles came through in the same shade of green, which, as far as I’m concerned, is as good a color as any, and a lot better than some of the emetic combinations adorning Detroit’s latest rainbows on wheels.
It’s a real vehicle, and you can do anything with it. I’ve hauled a thirty-five-foot house trailer, climbed Wolf Creek Pass in a blizzard, and dragged a Cadillac out of a ditch with it. Anything, as long as you’re not in a hurry and don’t mind getting half beat to death in the process. Beth claims riding in it gives her a headache, but I don’t see why it should: it isn’t her head that takes the punishment. She can’t understand why I cling to it, instead of trading it in on something newer and faster and more respectable. I tell her that her Buick takes care of our respectability, and I don’t want to go any faster. It’s almost the truth.
The fact is that before the war, as kids will, I used to play around with some fairly rapid machinery. I raced some and covered other races with my camera; and during the war, as I’ve already mentioned, I had occasion to do a little driving under fairly hectic conditions. Afterwards, happily married, I said to hell with it. I wasn’t going to be that kind of guy anymore. It was like hunting. I wasn’t going to tease myself by sneaking out to murder a harmless little deer once a year, after spending four years stalking game that could shoot back. And I wasn’t going to tempt myself by putting something low and sleek and powerful in the garage, and then using it to commute to the grocery at a legal twenty-five miles per hour. I was going to give the beast inside nothing to feed on. Maybe I could starve it to death. Down, Rover, down!
Well, it worked up to a point, but some time during the evening I had passed that point, and now, picking my way sedately out of Santa Fe in the dark, I no longer found any satisfaction in the practical aspects of the strong and solid and durable old vehicle beneath me. I could no longer kid myself that I really enjoyed having a truck as my private transportation, not even as a kind of one-man protest against the bloated and over-decorated machines driven by everybody else.
All I could think of was the fact that we sure as hell weren’t going to run away from anybody, no matter what happened. Oh, I’ve worked her over a bit from time to time, when I’ve felt like getting my hands greasy. She’ll still hold sixty-five all day and do eighty in a pinch, but it had damn well better be a long, smooth, straight stretch of road when you wind her out, and you’d better get off the go-pedal in plenty of time before the next curve, or you’ll never make it. They build trucks to haul pay-loads, not to run the Grand Prix of Monaco.
Any family sedan built within the past five years could catch us, even those underprivileged heaps with just one exhaust pipe, one measly little single-barrel carburetor, and poor-man’s gas in the tank. A souped-up police car would be knocking on the tailgate before its automatic transmission kicked into high. We were practically a standing target, should anybody want us for anything. I’d had the same naked feeling in those damn little planes they’d sometimes used to ferry us across the Channel, the ones that had to move aside for any southbound flock of geese in a hurry.
I just wasn’t hardened to it any more, and I drove very slowly and carefully, keeping an eye on the outside rearview mirror; and when Tina rapped sharply on the glass behind me, I almost lost my dinner.
The front window of the canopy matches up with the rear window of the pickup’s cab, but neither of them open, so you can’t say there’s any real communication. I drew a long breath, turned on the dome light, and glanced around. Her face showed up white and ghostly through the two panes of glass. She had her little pistol in her hand. With it, she beat again on the glass, and gestured vigorously towards the side of the road.
I pulled over, jumped out, hurried to the rear of the truck, and unlocked and opened the door.
“What’s the matter?”
“Get it out of here!” Her voice, out of the darkness, was harsh and breathless. “Get it out, or I will shoot it!”
I had a wild gruesome thought that she was talking about the girl she’d already killed once. I had visions of Barbara Herrera rising up with blind eyes and clotted hair... Then there was a silent movement in the opening, and our gray tomcat stood there, its green eyes slitted against the street lights and its fur on end:
apparently it didn’t approve of its company, either. It meowed at me softly. I picked it up and tucked it under my arm.
“Hell,” I said, “it’s just the cat. He must have jumped aboard while we were loading up. He likes to drive. Hi, Tiger.”
Tina said from the darkness, in a choked voice: “How would you like to be locked up with a dead person and have that… I can’t stand them, anyway. They give me the creepies, the sneaky things!”
I said, “Well, we sure don’t want to give you the creeps, do we, Tiger? Come on, boy, let’s get you home.”
I scratched the beast’s ears. It’s not my favorite animal by a long shot—we’d only got it because the kids needed a pet and dogs are too noisy for a writer to have around— but in Tiger’s book I was a cat man from away back. We were soul-mates, and to prove it he was now purring away like an amorous teakettle.
Tina had made her way to the rear of the truck, with some difficulty, since there wasn’t room for her to stand up under the canopy and she wasn’t exactly dressed for making progress on hands and knees.
“What are you going to do with it?” she demanded.
“I’m going to take him home,” I said, “unless you think we should keep him with us for company.”
“Go back? But that is crazy! Can’t you just—”
“What? Turn him out here, five miles from the house? Hell, the poor damn fool can’t even find his bowl of milk in the morning if you happen to move it across the room. Anyway, he’d get himself run over sure, and the children would miss him.”
She said sharply, “You are being sentimental and stupid. I absolutely forbid—”
I grinned at her. “You do that, honey,” I said, letting the hinged door drop. She must have pulled back in time; I didn’t hear it hit anything on its way down. I set the latch, got into the cab, waited for a lone car to go by, and swung back towards town.
Death of a Citizen Page 6