Cry Hard, Cry Fast

by John D. MacDonald

  “That’s a notorious speed trap,” André said. “The AAA has it marked. That sounds like a good record to me, Mr. Jamison. Now, based on something Mr. Seiver told me on the way over, I must ask you another question. At the time of the accident were you… emotionally upset?”

  “I started on this… vacation because my nerves were bad. I lost my wife recently. I wouldn’t say that affected my driving, Mr. André.”

  “Precisely how did you lose control?”

  “When the tire blew it swerved the car to the right. There was traffic in the center lane. I swerved the car back a little too far and hit a curbing that runs down either side of the center strip. Once I hit the curbing the car was out of control. It was my fault in not having something done about the thumping sound.”

  André took his time lighting a cigarette. “Forgive me for saying this, Mr. Jamison, but you seem to be reaching for trouble. You had a mechanical failure. Just as if your steering failed, or your brakes failed. It was out of your hands.”

  “But I had fair warning.”

  “You knew a tire was going to blow?”

  “No. Of course not. I knew something was wrong with the car. I thought it was alignment.”

  “Have you thought of this? Maybe the thumping sound was due to faulty alignment. And the tire blowing was something else again.”

  “Do you think that’s at all probable?”

  André shrugged. “It could happen. And I would imagine that with the present condition of the car, it would be tough to prove it either way.”

  “What are you trying to prove anyway? I carry that much insurance to pay for anything I might do with the car. Now I’ve done it. The insurance is in force. I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  Seiver said hastily, “You’ve got the wrong slant on this, Dev. Hal can’t go around trying to pay out as much as possible. Hell, the insurance rates would go out of sight. He’s got to cut the claims down as far as possible.”

  “I’m to blame for this mess. I accept responsibility. I don’t approve of moving fast and bullying people into small settlements.”

  André flushed. “Jamison, I don’t like the inference. We represent you. We’ll settle all just claims without bitching. But we don’t cheat anybody—and neither will we turn into a charitable organization. Get that straight. You are not going to put us in the bag by going around beating your chest and yelling, ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa.’ Maybe it would give you a masochistic charge to do that, but we’re not in business to give you a stage setting as a suffering hero.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “Gentlemen!” Roger said, grinning uncomfortably. “Leave us settle down here. Nothing you can say, Dev, is going to stop Hal from investigating and handling any possible claims in the way he thinks best, in the way he’s been trained.”

  Jamison looked at him. “All right. And nothing can stop me from accepting financial responsibility for these people over and above the amount of any settlement André might make.”

  “Now hold it!” Seiver said sharply. “I’m your attorney, boy. I wouldn’t be happy about the legal aspects of that. If André got unconditional releases, payment in full of all claims, I don’t know how a court would consider any additional and subsequent payments on your part. They might be considered as opening it up again.”

  “We’d be in the clear,” André said. “There’s a precedent on that.”

  Jamison stared at André. “You don’t seem to realize that… well, take just one person. The Scholl girl. Her whole family is dead.”

  André smiled. “You’re breaking my heart, Jamison. Two months ago a big policyholder got taken drunk and went down a one-way street the wrong way and smacked a bicycle. The kid is eleven, and permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The judgment was a hundred and eighty-seven thousand six hundred dollars. I was there when our doctors went over the kid. And I have one boy ten and a girl twelve. Don’t try to break my heart, Jamison.”

  “And you tried your damnedest to make the judgment as small as possible.”

  “Naturally,” André said. “That’s my job. Mr. Seiver, this guy is a bleeding heart. I’ve got all I need. I’ll check back with you.” He walked out, his stride brisk, not looking back.

  After long moments Seiver said, “You’ve got to look at it this way, Dev. Take that Scholl family. When they went out on the highway they accepted an implied risk. If they weren’t willing to take that risk, they wouldn’t own a car, or take it on a vacation. Mechanical failure can happen to anyone at any time in fast traffic. And it can kill people.”

  Jamison shook his head. “I can’t look at it that way.”

  “You’re all upset because it just happened yesterday. In a few days you’ll get your perspective back, Dev. Good lord, let the insurance company handle it. That’s why you carry so much, so they can take the load. From what you say, you’ll come out of this clean as a pin. There isn’t any possibility of a manslaughter charge against you.”

  “Dandy!”

  “And let me tell you one thing, Dev. You’re pretty well set, financially. Gina’s trust funds revert to you. If you start trying to pay off your conscience—and you have no cause for a bad conscience—by giving money to any of these people, they could get a shyster lawyer and milk you completely dry. I want you to know that.”

  “Right in the next room, Roger, there’s a woman who may live and may die. If she lives, she may never be right. I did that, Roger. She was minding her own business.”

  Roger frowned. “A woman? The Scholl girl is your only concern. That’s the only car you hit.”

  “But the other people were hurt because I hit that car.”

  “Oh, there’s no legal responsibility there, Dev. The law says they got into the mess because they didn’t have their cars under control. Hell, take those twenty-car crashes in the fog on the Jersey Turnpike. The lead car jams on his brakes. Then bang bang bang. Twenty cars. Every driver is responsible for the car he bangs into. Maybe the lead car caused it by stopping, but there’s no legal claim against him because he didn’t hit anything. He was hit. Good lord, if the lead car could be made legally and financially responsible for the entire amount of damage, nobody could afford insurance. The law says if you hit something, your car is out of control.”

  “You don’t have the faintest idea of what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Seiver looked away. “I don’t think you do either, Dev. I think you’re heading for a mess. I think you want to bleed. Maybe it has something to do with losing Gina. I wouldn’t know. But let me tell you that this can be one hell of an expensive way to punish yourself. Now, if you can leave here, let’s go get some lunch.”

  Frazier lay on his back on the lumpy bed of a six-dollar cabin, blowing smoke toward the ceiling. Before the new road had been put through, it was possible that the cabins had done a fair business. There were eight of them, arranged in a shallow semicircle behind a small greasy cafe. They were grimy white with green trim, steeply pitched roofs. The new highway came too close to them. He felt the thunder of the trucks in the bed springs. New pretentious motels had taken the cabin trade.

  The cabin suited him. The owner had been more interested in cash in hand than in the absence of car and luggage. The torn coat had been wedged under the mud of a steep ditch.

  He had walked to town, purchased cheap sport shirts, toilet articles, a cheap bright leather jacket. His mouth was still puffed. When in town he had located the Ace Garage. He had stood outside the fence and looked at the burned Olds. The trunk compartment had been jimmied open. It was a few inches ajar. He saw that the luggage was gone. The two tires were there. He rubbed his palms on the sides of his pants and went away.

  An article in the morning edition of one of the city papers had complicated everything. He picked the paper up and read it again.

  The head was, “STOLEN CAR BURNED IN CRASH.”

  State Police announced late yesterday that a green sedan which crashed and burned yesterday aft
ernoon in the accident near Blanchard has been identified as being stolen three days ago in Mobile, Alabama. On the same day that the sedan was stolen in Mobile, Mobile city police recovered an abandoned car which had been stolen the day before in Chiefland, Florida. The presence of stolen Florida plates on the car which burned here has led police to suspect that the men in the car may have been the daring bandits who committed the high noon robbery of the Williston People’s Bank in Williston, Florida, last Thursday, walking out with an estimated forty thousand dollars.

  A man and a woman, as yet unidentified, died in the flaming vehicle and another man escaped serious injury. He was helped out of the car by a passing motorist and later, after refusing medical treatment, escaped from the scene of the accident. He is described as being about thirty years old, medium build, dark hair and eyes, wearing a gray sports jacket with a torn left sleeve. As a result of the accident he had a bruised mouth and the knuckles of his left hand were scraped. The description matches that of one of the men who robbed the Williston People’s Bank. Two revolvers similar to those used in the robbery were found in the luggage compartment of the burned car. It is expected that experts will examine the ashes inside the car sometime today to determine if the bank loot was destroyed in the fire. Police say they believe the man to be in the area. The FBI is flying pictures of suspects here in hopes that those who saw the man at the scene of the accident can make identification.

  Frazier grunted and threw the newspaper aside. It was getting entirely too warm in the area. It would be smart to make tracks. They might check all transient registrations. But the forty thousand was there, nearly in plain sight. One stinking wire fence. He remembered how Charlie had crabbed about stuffing the money in the tire. But it hadn’t taken long, and were they stopped for a casual search, it was a good place. Damn it, it was still a good place. He decided the practical attitude was to stop thinking of it as forty thousand dollars. Just think of it as stealing a tire. It had gotten too warm to keep thinking on the basis of wandering in and buying it. Yet the fence was high, and there were a lot of street lights around. He felt bitter amusement. No great problem in cracking a bank, and stopped by the vast problem of stealing a tire from a car that was a total loss.

  He got up restlessly and went to the cabin door and looked out through the screen. In another hour it would be time to eat lunch at the greasy spoon out front. Traffic blared and blasted by, swirling hot air across the parched ground in front of the cabins.

  A girl sat on the single step of the cabin directly across the way. She was hefty but slim-waisted. She wore white shorts and a red halter. Her round heavy legs, exposed to the sun, gleamed with tanning lotion. She wore dark sunglasses and her dark hair was frosted over the temples. He recognized her as the girl who had served him breakfast that morning and dinner the night before. She had seemed willing to be friendly, and not overly bright. He looked at his watch, shrugged, and pushed out through the screen door. He put his hands in his pockets and sauntered over to where she sat.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Oh, hello there.”

  “Getting some sun?”

  “Trying to get some tan, darn it. But you just watch. In five more minutes he’ll be bellering out that back door and I’ll have to change and go to work.”

  “You live right here?” he asked. She moved over on the step and he sat down beside her.

  “If you can call it living. I got stranded here. How I let him talk me into working for him, I’ll never know. The tips, he says. The tips will pick up, he says. In that joint a dime is a big situation.”

  “I left you two bits.”

  She grinned at him. “Exception. I put it in my hope chest. My hope is I hope I get out of here. Say, my name is Donna. Donna Heywood.”

  He had no difficulty remembering the name he had registered under. “I’m Stan Kenton, just like the band leader.”

  “Hey! How about that! I bet you take an awful ride, having the same name.”

  “I get kidded some,” he said.

  “Got a cigarette? Thanks. Now how come you’re stuck here?”

  “I’m waiting for a job to start. Construction. I got here too early, so I have to hang around. I was down the road, but it was too expensive. So I moved out here.”

  “Al said you don’t have any luggage.”

  “Oh, I checked that down in the bus station. I just brought a toothbrush out here. I didn’t know if I could sleep, with its being so close to the road. So I didn’t want to go lugging my stuff all over.”

  “Sure. That’s smart. I didn’t sleep worth a damn at first, but now I don’t hear a thing. This crummy job is just temporary with me. Joey, she’s my girl friend, and I, would you believe it, we started out from Brockton, Mass., way last January, headed for Las Vegas, and this is as far as I got. She’s been out there a couple of months already. I got stuck on account of Miranda.”

  “Miranda?”

  “My car, forgive me if I use the expression. She’s sitting in a garage down in town until I can get her out of hock. She used to belong to both of us. We chipped in and bought her for the trip. Boy, did we ever take a reaming. It’s a fifty-six Studebaker. It broke down last January right in Blanchard. There was no point in us both staying here. We flipped and I lost. I had to buy out her share. She went on by bus.”

  “Is it all fixed?”

  “Oh, sure. And the bill is down to about thirty-five bucks. In about one month I ought to be on my way again. Joey’s got a job lined up for me. Heck, I tried to sell Miranda but I had to take too big a loss. I guess I should have, way back in the beginning, but I’ve been hanging on this long, I might as well go the rest of the way.”

  He kept his voice level as he asked, “What garage is she in?”

  “Oh, the biggest one in town. The Ace Garage.”

  “Is she parked out in the back?”

  “I guess so. If she was in inside storage those buggers would be charging me for it.”

  He felt a good warmth in the pit of his stomach. Luck had looked bad. All of a sudden it had changed. All you had to do was wait, and luck flipped right over on the other side.

  He looked at her in the intent way that he had learned was generally successful and said, “Honestly, Donna, I couldn’t figure what a girl like you was doing in a joint like this. That’s why I wandered over, just to find out.”

  Her brown eyes wavered and fell. “A great line, Stan.”

  “It’s no line. I mean it. I knew it had to be some kind of crazy setup. I knew that as soon as I saw you last night. Hell, on construction work I roam all over the country. I can size up people. I see a lot of them. I knew you didn’t fit in this place.”

  She smiled, pleased. “Well, like the man said, it was the only game in town. It isn’t bad, really. The rent is for free. That’s what usually eats up your pay, buying a roof.”

  “Isn’t that the truth? You should see the slobby women they usually have in greasy spoons like this. Now take you. You got a cute figure and nice eyes and… well, you’re just a darn good-looking girl.” He looked at her earnestly.

  “I think you’ve been in Blanchard too long.”

  “Maybe I have. There certainly isn’t much to do, that’s for sure. You know, I’ve been wondering whether I should just take off. This would be a long job, once it starts, and I can’t see spending a year in this place.”

  “Haven’t you got a wife or anything?”

  He looked beyond her, making his face stern. “I had one once, Donna. I wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

  She touched his arm quickly. “Gee, you poor guy. Some women can be awful tramps.”

  “You wouldn’t be like that.”

  “No, I… say, what are we getting into here?” She laughed nervously.

  “I was saying that maybe I wouldn’t hang around.”

  “Where would you go?”

  He looked at her until her eyes fell again. He said softly, “I might even try Las Vegas.”

  “Now ba
ck up, brother. Hold it. This is moving too fast for Donna.”

  “Well, why don’t we talk it over?”

  “What’s there to talk over?”

  “What time do you get off tonight? I can pick up some cold beer from the man and we can sit out here in front of your place and knock off the beer and count up our money and see if we can plan anything.”

  “Maybe you’ve got me wrong, mister. Maybe you think I’m something I’m not. Just because I work in a…”

  He held his right hand up. “Hush now. I’m not thinking what you think I’m thinking. This would be a business deal.”

  “Oh, sure!”

  “It would, I swear.”

  She studied him, then grinned. “Okay, Stan. I get off about ten. It won’t hurt to talk, anyhow. And make that ale.”

  The man opened the back door of the cafe. “Donna! What the exact hell is holding you up?”

  “Coming, coming!” she yelled back, and whispered, “What a jerk! I got to go in and change now.” Five minutes later, as he stood in his doorway, he saw her walk toward the restaurant in her green seersucker uniform. She looked toward his cabin, smiled and waved. He waved back. She walked on, with a slightly exaggerated motion of her abundant hips.

  Frazier stretched out on his bed again. He blew smoke at the ceiling. The plan was beginning to form. He’d tell her he had a few hundred bucks. He’d go down there with her and use thirty-five of his funds to pay the balance of the bill on the car. The rest wrote itself. “Honey, I better check this thing over. Give it a good going over. These boys will let me borrow tools. Why don’t you go buy something pretty for the trip. It’ll take a half-hour maybe. I’ll pick you up over at the drugstore.”

  With a free half-hour in the yard, there would be the right moment. Put the tire in the Studebaker. He could tell her he bought it. Maybe it would be smart to actually leave town with her. Yes. That would be best. Protective coloration. She would wonder about his luggage. He’d think up something to tell her. He’d have to buy some kind of bag to hold the money. As soon as they got in the first big city, it would be no trick to walk off. Maybe, if he used the time and the beer right tonight, she’d be so damn happy and friendly he could get away with telling her practically anything. It sometimes worked that way. The blonde had been a lot better-looking. He wondered, idly, what the blonde’s last name had been.