“I know he’s dead. So’s Hugh Lawson. I just saw him shot down in Stony’s place.”
“Leo’s boys think Hugh’s the one who killed Leo.”
“I know. That’s what the gunsel said.”
“Don’t you see what it means, darling? It means you and me in the open. You and me without a worry. We can go away for awhile. South, I think. Somewhere a long way south of the border.”
“Using what for money?”
She broke out of my arms then and went for her purse in a chair. It was a big job, almost as big as an overnight bag, one of these things on a strap that’s worn over the shoulder. She picked it up and brought it back and turned it upside down, and paper began to fall out. Green paper. I thought it’d never quit falling. It fell and spread and piled up around my feet.
I raised my eyes to her face, and it was still the loveliest face I’d ever seen, smooth and creamy under copper, with a bright and gifted mouth and smoky eyes.
“You,” I said. “You killed Leo and put the finger on Lawson.”
She shook her head. “No. I put the finger on Lawson, all right, but I didn’t kill Leo.”
“Lawson really did, then?”
“No. Neither me nor Lawson.”
“Who?”
She looked at me and smiled and said, “You did, darling.”
I reached out and took her by the shoulders and dug in. “What the hell’s this? I never went back there.”
“I know you didn’t. Look, Andy. When I was a kid on southside, I used to watch the fellows play ball in the street. One day a kid we called Fats got hit in the head with a bat. He was out for a few minutes, and his head hurt for a while, but pretty soon he started to play again, and it was almost half an hour later when he dropped dead. Concussion acts like that sometimes, and that’s the way Leo died. You remember how his head smacked the sharp frame of the sofa? He got up and chased us out, and he got ready for bed, and he dropped dead.”
“Wait a minute. The gunsel said his head was a mess.”
“That was just for looks, darling. He was already dead when I got back. If I’d left him the way I found him, it would’ve been easy to figure what had really happened.”
“So you mess him up and help yourself to his money and finger an innocent guy for the rap.”
“For you, darling. For you and me.”
“You think I’d touch the lousy money now? Or you?”
“Yes, darling. The money and me. Without us, it’s so much paper. With us, it’s more fun than you ever dreamed of in that place we’ll find below the border.”
I kept on looking at her, and I kept on wanting her, in spite of everything, and I told myself that there’s a point beyond which you can’t go. You can skirt the dark edge, you can do things that later make you sick to your stomach, but there’s a point beyond which you can’t go if your soul is ever to be your own again. That’s what I told myself, and I told myself that I had reached the point.
Now I’ll tell you something: it’s hot down here. It’s hot as hell below the border.
INSURANCE
(THE LONG WAIT)
(Originally published in Menace, January 1955)
HE RENTED this shack down the beach, and he lived there over a year. Very few people paid any attention to him. He told the man who rented him the shack that he was a writer looking for seclusion, and the word got around. He’d grown a beard for the part, and he’d even bought a second-hand typewriter to substantiate it.
The first six months were easy, because he didn’t expect anything to happen then. Afterward, it kept getting harder. Tension mounted as the days passed, and he walked down the beach to the town to meet all ships from the States. When a year had elapsed, he began to think that Ella was never coming, and he lay on the beach during the days and in the shack at night, cursing himself for a fool for ever having believed that she would follow him according to their plan, and then she finally came. It was exactly one year, six weeks and three days from the time of his own arrival.
She came in from the ship and walked right past him on the pier. He could have reached out and touched her, and he wanted like hell to do it, but he didn’t. Her eyes flicked over him and away without any signs of recognition, and he turned and followed her up across the beach to the hotel. She was wearing a white sharkskin dress that fit her like a glove, and the bright light of the sun made a pale fire of her hair. He’d never been so glad to see anyone in his life. It’s hard to keep an image clear and focused in the mind, and even in so little time he’d forgotten how beautiful she was. His stomach was like a clenched fist all the way to the hotel.
In the lobby, she registered and went up in the elevator, and he crossed over into the bar and crawled onto a stool. He ordered a daiquiri and sat there sipping it, the taste and touch of the rum and citrus juices cold and tart on his tongue. During the past year, he hadn’t thought much about the murder itself, only about whether Ella would ever come or not, but now, waiting for her in the final minutes of his waiting, it came back into his mind in detail.
They had this place outside the city that Ella had inherited. It was really a farm, but they didn’t do any farming. Not Ella and him. They liked their green stuff to come faster and easier than you could get it out of the ground. They had a few grand, and they wondered how to make it grow, and finally they decided it would be a good thing to invest it in an insurance policy on a dead man. Double indemnity, of course. They paid for twenty-five and planned to collect fifty. On him. He was the dead man. The insurance outfit didn’t know that, of course. They had him examined, and the doctor signed a paper that said he was alive. Only Ella and he knew that he wasn’t. For practical purposes, that is.
He kept looking for a guy who would do. He wanted someone in a hurry, because there wasn’t any sense in sinking too much in premiums. Finally, the guy just stumbled into the setup and practically asked to be used. He was in the city when this guy came, and when he got back that evening, a cold evening in January, Ella met him out by the barn where he’d put the car.
“He’s here,” she said. “A young guy on the tramp. He asked for food and he wants to sleep in the barn. About your height and weight and age. He’s perfect.”
“How about his teeth?”
“No work on them at all. Just like yours. I told him you were in town to the dentist, and he said he’d been lucky. Said he’d never been to a dentist in his life.”
“Neither have I. You’re smart, honey. Beautiful and smart. Where is this guy?”
“In the kitchen eating.”
“Okay. I’ll go look at him.”
She moved in against him, and the breath of her whisper was hot on his face. “Tonight, Steve. Make it tonight.”
They lost time, the way they always lost time when she came at him like that, but after a while he went up to the house and into the kitchen where the young drifter was sitting.
Like Ella said, he was perfect. Steve told him it was okay to sleep in the barn, and when he’d finished eating, he took him down there. Inside the barn, in the darkness, it was easy to slip a leather strap around the drifter’s neck, but it was a lot harder to hang on when the guy understood what he’d walked into. He threshed like a maniac and tried to twist around to get at Steve with his hands, but he couldn’t keep it up long with the strap cutting into his throat, and pretty soon he was dead.
Steve improvised some braces and managed to prop the body upright in the opening of the stall where Reuben was kept. Reuben was a horse, a vicious devil, a fine killer. Steve went into the adjoining stall and, reaching over the partition, rammed him brutally in the flank with the handle of a fork. The horse lashed out with his hind legs, and one hoof caught the body of the drifter in the chest. The body was hurtled all the way across the central aisle of the barn. It smashed against the planking on the other side and bounced half way back before it hit the ground. Steve left it lying there and returned to the house.
Ella was waiting in the kitchen. She had a bag
already packed and sitting on the linoleum by the door. Her cheeks were hot, and her eyes were bright with excitement. She looked as if she were burning up inside with a high fever. It made her more beautiful than ever. God, she was beautiful.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s done.”
“You’d better get away, Steve. You’d better start the fire and leave.”
He took her by the shoulders and let his hands slip in upon her throat. “Don’t forget to come, honey. And just don’t forget to come.”
“I’ll come, Steve. You know I’ll come. Just as soon as everything’s settled.”
“Sure, honey, I know. But it’ll be a long time. A long, long time. Can’t you tell a guy good-by?”
So they said good-by in a way he thought would last him through all the time of waiting, and then he took the bag she’d packed for him and went back down to the barn. He scattered some kerosene around, putting quite a bit on the drifter’s body, and then lit a lantern. He smashed the lantern on the planking where the body had struck and let it fall. Flames leaped up like spits of hell. He went out to the back side of the barn and ran with long, regular strides down the cowpath to the pasture. Behind him, he could hear old Reuben raising hell, could hear the crashing of his hooves against the stall.
He ran through the pasture to the creek, and, walking then, he followed the creek a couple of miles to a three-lane highway. He caught a ride on a pickup truck into the city, and next day he caught a bus to another city, and not long after that he caught a boat to another country, and so here he was, one year, six weeks and three days later, sitting in a bar with a daiquiri in his hands and Ella upstairs and the long wait almost over.
In about half an hour, she came. He could see her enter the room behind him, growing larger in the mirror, and she crawled onto a stool with one empty between them. She ordered a daiquiri of her own, and he watched her from the corners of his eyes, all the details once more sharp and clear that had been blurred by waiting too long on a beach, the sleepy eyes and red, sulky mouth, the body that even touching hardly made credible, the long twin sheens of nylon crossed at the knees. He thought of the way they’d said good-by, and he began to think that it was time to say hello, and as he sat there thinking about it, his pulse accelerated, and his heart knocked painfully at his ribs.
After a while, a guy angling for a pickup, he turned on his stool and said, “May I buy you a drink?”
She glanced at him and smiled a little and shrugged her shoulders. “Why not?”
He shifted over onto the intervening empty and told the bartender
two more daiquiris. Understanding that business was going forward, the
bartender supplied them quickly and faded. He was a good bartender. A guy sensitive to a situation.
“It’s been a long time,” Steve said softly. “I thought you were never coming.”
“I almost missed you on the pier, darling. The beard makes you look older.”
“How did it go?”
“There was a hassle. An investigation. They thought it was funny, a guy walking in behind a vicious horse like that. They paid off, though. Double. Fifty grand.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Upstairs, darling. Hidden in my baggage in a way it could never be noticed. Up there waiting for us, like we’ve been waiting for each other. When the three of us get together, that’s when we start living.”
“That’s now, baby. There’s you and me and the money and nothing left between us.”
She lifted the daiquiri to her lips and her eyes to the mirror, and it was then he got the feel of something wrong. An unease in her manner, an uncertainty in her voice. A last remnant of left-over fear.
“I’m worried,” she said. “I’m worried to hell.”
“What’s the matter?”
She lowered her glass to the bar and sat looking down into it, twisting it slowly by the stem between the scarlet tips of her fingers. “A man. He came down on the boat with me. I’m positive he’s an insurance dick.”
“You mean he’s following you?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think he’s a dick?”
“I saw him once before. I’m sure he’s the one. There was another dick out to the farm on the investigation. Later, in town, I happened to see him with this guy who came down on the boat. They were having some beers in a bar. I followed them when they left, and they went to the offices of the insurance company. I know damn well he’s a dick, Steve. I’ll swear he’s the same guy.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Look in the mirror, you can see for yourself. He’s at a table behind us. Tall. Black hair. Wearing a white suit.”
Steve lifted his eyes and sorted the dick out. He was concentrating on his drink, something in a tall glass with a peel curled over the edge, but Steve had the strange feeling that he was a guy trying too hard not to look at someone he wanted like hell to look at. A handsome guy. A tall, smooth, easy-to-look-at guy. Inside, Steve felt shrunken and icy cold, deadly with the pointed, purposeful deadliness of someone who’s waited too long.
“He shouldn’t have followed you,” he said. “He never should have come.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll have to kill him, of course. I’ll kill him fast, and we’ll move out of here.”
“No!” Her whisper possessed a desperate urgency. “No, Steve!”
“Why not? We killed once. This time it’ll be easier.”
“That’s just the point. Each time it’ll be easier. We can’t go on killing forever.”
“Who said forever? Just twice. After this one, nobody’ll ever find us.”
“Look, Steve. There’s another way. A better way. Give me a chance to convince you.”
“When?”
“Tonight. Just as soon as I can get to you after dark.”
He thought about the two of them on the dark beach after so long a time, and again his pulse was an acute and throbbing pain. “Can you shake the dick?”
“Leave it to me.”
“Okay. I’ve got a shack down the beach. There’s an outcropping of rock, jutting into the sea. The shack’s the first one beyond it.”
“I’ll be there, darling. Wait for me. Wait just a little bit longer.”
“Okay. For you and the money. Don’t forget to bring it with you.”
“I’ll bring it.”
He slipped off the stool and smiled at her like a guy who’d invested a drink in a project he intended to finish later. Without looking at the black-haired man in the white suit, he went out of the bar and the hotel and back down the beach beyond the outcropping of rock to the shack. He lay on his back in the sand with one arm bent up over his eyes to reinforce the thin, inadequate defense of his lids against the glaring white light, and all the tension that had mounted within him during the past half year seemed to dissolve and disappear, leaving his body relaxed and his mind functioning with a kind of dispassionate clarity. He lay without moving for a long time, until at last he became aware of a sudden chill in the air, and he opened his eyes to see the sun plunging into the sea. Almost before he could get up and go into the shack, the black, obliterating night had fallen with incredible suddenness and silence.
Inside the shack, he lit an oil lamp, turning the wick low. From his bag under the cot he slept on, he got a .38 revolver. He slipped the revolver under his belt, beneath the loose tail of his shirt, and sat down on the cot to wait some more. From his position, he could look through the open door of the shack and down across the beach at an angle to the mass of rock lapped by the sea. Once, after about half an hour, he got up and found a bottle and took a long pull from the neck. Then he resumed his seat on the cot and didn’t move again until, such a long time later that he’d become unable even to estimate the time, he saw Ella coming up across the sand from the rocks in the first light of the moon.
He stood up to meet her, and regret twisted within him like a sharp knife that there would be no time to say hel
lo as they had said good-by. She came in through the door and into his arms, and the weight of her body against his pressed the .38 into his flesh until it felt like a belly cramp.
She felt the steel in her own flesh and arched back in his arms. “A gun, Steve? Why?”
He released her with one arm and took the gun out of his belt. He lifted it. “For you, honey. For you and your black-haired lover.”
The hot blood drained out of her face, and the smoke cleared from her eyes on a bitter wind of fear. She put a palm flat against his chest and tried to push away, but he held her trapped tightly against him with one arm.
“What’s the matter with you, Steve? You gone crazy?”
He laughed softly. “Maybe a guy who waits too long develops a lot of peculiar twists you could call crazy. One thing, he gets sensitive. He develops what the skull-shrinkers call ideas of reference. Everything seems to point at him. Everything has significance. Most of all, he doesn’t believe in coincidence.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Steve. I swear to God.”
“Don’t you, honey? I’m talking about your phony insurance dick. I’m talking about your just happening to see him in town. About your just happening to tail him right to the insurance company’s offices. About how he just happens to be a tall, sleek guy. Just the kind of guy you’d like to buy with a hunk of fifty grand. But more than anything else, I’m talking about how you don’t want me to kill him. Don’t you remember me, honey? I’m the guy who killed for you once before. I’m the guy who remembers how you could hardly wait until I got the job done. Since when have you become so sensitive?”
“You are crazy, Steve!” She leaned against him again, letting her lips brush his in the formation of her words. “I’m here, aren’t I? Why would I have come, if I’d wanted to double-cross you? All I had wanted to do was stay away.”
He laughed again, feeling the soft, wet stirring of her lips, the stronger stirring inside of an almost sickening desire to believe her. “Why? I’ll tell you why, honey. Because you’re a gal who wouldn’t want to spend the rest of her life expecting someone she didn’t want to see. Because you knew damn well I’d come back eventually and find you. The only way to prevent that was to come down here to kill me. You and lover-boy.”
Short stories collection Page 6