by Thomas Perry
“Are you telling the truth?” he asked.
“Sure.” She patted his arm. “We’re each committed to what we’re doing—school for me, and for you, whatever—and a temptation came up to have some fun. I took the chance, and it worked out great. Now that it’s gone this far, I’ve gotten some worries behind me that only women feel. Trust is one. You’re not rough or weird or scary. You don’t act nice until you come, and then throw me out of bed or something. But now I have a new worry, which is that you’ll decide it’s mean to lead me on, and turn cold. So I’m making you a proposition. Your part of it is that while you’re around St. Louis, you’re mine. You take me to places like this, be sweet to me every day, whether we’re together or not. I won’t see you walking out of Nolan’s with one of the other girls.”
“And what’s your part?”
“I don’t pay attention to other men. Except for when I’m at work or in class, I’m available to you. . . . Completely,” she added with emphasis. “Now that I know what I needed to about you, I’ll do anything you want.” She smiled. “Maybe even some things you don’t know you want.”
His eyebrows went up.
“People who are interested in hurting you show it before this. And they don’t feel guilty about using people. I know you’re using me, and I’m using you too, in a nice way, to be happy. When it’s over, we’re both going to regret that it’s over, not that it happened. We’ll smile when we go. So?”
“That’s quite a proposition,” he said. “You’re my girl.” They ate in the restaurant and walked under the stars. The night was hot and the air was lazy, and the sounds of their footsteps seemed to be the only ones to reach their ears. They came back into the air-conditioning of the hotel lobby, had a drink in the bar, and went back up to bed.
For the next week, Prescott divided his time between Jeanie and Dick Hobart. When that week was over, another began and ended in a quiet, calm, and untroubled way. Hobart took each parcel of suspicious goods that Bob Greene brought him, sold it at the price he and Greene had agreed upon, and gave him the money in bills taken from the cash receipts at Nolan’s. Bob Greene was well liked, an increasingly familiar face in some of the most exclusive hotels and restaurants in St. Louis, and in one of the most obscure dives. There were times when Prescott almost forgot.
28
Varney felt as though he were underwater, swimming upward toward the light, holding his breath, trying to break the surface. The pressure in his lungs was unbearable, but the water level kept going up as he rose. When he awoke each morning, he would be relieved that it had not been real. Then he would remember what was real, and begin to feel hot panic. Each morning when he sat up, he knew that he owed Tracy and her sons one hundred for the apartment, three hundred for general services that amounted to no more than keeping his presence in Cincinnati a secret. He would look down at Mae’s head, her hair spread out on the pillow and her body an inert lump under the covers, and remember that she was part of it. Having her here was costing him not just the original five hundred a day, but now sometimes a fee to hire another girl to do whatever Tracy wanted done. Sometimes that was another five.
Varney had stopped adding up the money he had spent this way. He knew it was already so much that the number would have made him sick. He didn’t even count the money he had left from the visit to the safe-deposit box, because counting would have told him when he was going to run out again. He would not have been able to see the date on the morning newspaper without thinking about the final day, worrying about it, feeling its approach. None of this was his fault. Being here wasn’t self-indulgence, because that was a kind of weakness. This had been a calculated strategy made necessary by the intrusion of Roy Prescott.
It was Prescott who had done this to Varney. There was not a day when Varney didn’t go over the chances that he’d had to kill Prescott, wincing at the mistakes he had made, the opportunities he had not recognized until just after they had passed. He had not known Prescott was waiting outside the office building that night in L.A. until it was too late to kill him. At the storefront in Buffalo that Prescott had rented, he had not noticed that there was something wrong with the doorknob before the door had closed. He could have seen that it was a trap without opening the door at all and could have waited for Prescott outside the building with the rifle. He had not seen any of those things in time, and now it was too late. Prescott had become more than a person he hated. Prescott had begun to enter his dreams.
Varney got up and slapped the part of the covers that he judged was Mae’s bottom. “How about some breakfast?”
She lay there for a second, then slowly stretched and rolled over to look at him. “What time is it?”
“Drag your ass out of bed and look at the clock,” he said. “I’m going out, and I want to eat first.”
She sat up, swung her legs out of the bed, and walked stiffly to the bathroom. She stood in front of the mirror, brushed her hair back, and then went out into the kitchen. Varney stood a few feet away, watching her impatiently. In a minute she had started the coffee and she was standing in front of the stove with a pair of frying pans on the burners with bacon and eggs popping and sizzling. When they seemed to be going the way they should, she set the table hurriedly, tossing the silverware into approximate positions, then pulled the pans off the stove. She came back with Varney’s plate. He was carefully moving the knives and forks to their correct spots. He sat down and she set the plate in front of him, poured a cup of coffee, and turned to go back to the bathroom.
“Aren’t you going to sit down?”
“I wasn’t going to,” she said. “You know I can’t stand the smell of all that bacon and butter and stuff when I just wake up. It makes me sick.”
He glared at her, and she came back and sat down across from him, holding the coffee just below her chin and sipping it now and then as she watched him. Finally, he put down his fork. “Don’t you think that for nearly a thousand a day, you could act like you want to be with me?”
“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” she murmured warily. “It’s just that you’re not nice to me sometimes. I had to brush my hair first, or you’d be finding it in your food. And I didn’t know you wanted to get up this early. I mean after last night . . .”
He rolled his eyes and shook his head slowly, then muttered, “Forget it.”
He had awakened in the middle of the night, thinking about Prescott. He knew that he’d had a dream, something about Coleman, maybe a job they had done together, but then Coleman had somehow stopped being Coleman. Varney had looked at him again, and he had become Prescott. It seemed that Coleman had been Prescott all along, watching Varney do the job, and so he knew everything. Varney had no way to slip away or hide or claim it was self-defense, because Prescott had been there.
Varney had jerked awake in a sweat. It had taken a few minutes to calm himself, but then he was alert. He had lain there for a few more minutes, but then it became an hour. He couldn’t get back to sleep. He had reached out and touched Mae. He had done it without any particular intention, but as soon as he had felt the small shoulder, and run his hand down her side to the thin waist and felt the curve of the hip, he had known. She had still been asleep, and the warmth of her skin felt comforting.
As consciousness had threatened her rest she had resisted, stiffening, then tried to shrug him away to preserve her sleep. That had changed everything. It had made him resentful. He had firmly pulled her to him, and in a moment she was no longer asleep, but trying to cut through the fog of sleep to full consciousness. She’d seemed to sense that something had begun before she’d been aware of it and she should have been aware, and she’d had to catch up with it. The look in her eyes had changed. He had seen them widen in the dark as he’d kissed her, hard, his hands already tugging the nightgown up to her neck.
He had probably been rough—had been rough—but it had been impossible not to be. Last night it had all seemed to come together in the simple, annoyed movement of her shoulder as she pul
led away from him in her sleep: being stuck here in Cincinnati with Tracy and her sons bleeding him to death instead of hiding him, everyone taking advantage of his sudden vulnerability, most of all Mae. If it weren’t for her, he would have burst through his lethargy and gotten out of here. When he had been feeling troubled and worried and sleepless she’d had no business jerking away from him like that. What was he supposed to do?
She seemed to see his resentment growing again. She said hastily, “Not that I didn’t like it. I did,” she assured him. “I always like to be with you. I just thought you would probably sleep late this morning, that’s all.”
“Forget it,” he repeated. He stood and went into the bedroom to put on his shorts and sneakers to begin his stretches. He was glad when she went into the bathroom for her shower, because he didn’t have to listen to her or feel her eyes on him. He cut the stretches short and walked toward the door. The telephone rang, and made him jump. He snatched it up. “Yeah?”
It was a man’s voice. “Is Mae there?”
“Yeah, but she can’t come to the phone now. Can I say who’s calling?”
“It’s Duane.” Varney knew who that was. He was one of the messengers that went around distributing stolen stuff all over the Midwest. About a month ago, when Varney had gotten into an argument with Tracy over her wanting Mae to work a party, Duane had been one of the ones the party was for. Varney glanced at the calendar. It was not about a month. It was exactly a month.
Varney said, “Wait a minute. I’ll tell her.”
He went toward the bathroom, his mind gnawing at him. Something was going on. He stopped before he got there, and returned to the phone. “Duane?”
“Yeah?”
“She says to come pick her up at eleven.”
“Really?” Duane sounded pleased. “Eleven? Where?”
“Here,” said Varney. “You know the address?”
“Yeah, I been there,” he said. “Thanks.”
Varney hung up the telephone and went back to stretching. When Mae came out of the bathroom, he had begun lifting weights. Her head gave a little jerk, as though she were surprised and a little frightened to see him there. She said, “I thought you were going out for your run.”
“I am,” said Varney coldly. “You lift, then you run.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said softly.
“Can you do me a favor this morning?”
“I guess,” she said. “What is it?”
“Go out to the Sportmart on the mall. I need a new pair of shorts like these—any color as long as it’s dark—and another twenty pounds of weight for this bar. See? Two ten-pound disks like this? They’re all standard, so you can’t screw it up.”
“Okay . . .” she said doubtfully. “They don’t have shopping carts at the mall. Will I be able to carry them?”
“Hell, yes,” he said. “You can carry twenty pounds. If you can’t, get the clerk to do it. The mall opens at ten, and I’d like you back by one.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go as soon as I’m dressed. I’ll be there when they open.”
He went into his sit-ups. When she left, she said, “See you later.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. He heard her steps on the stairway, then stood beside the window to watch. She went outside, got into the car, and drove off. He closed the window and lowered the shade. He changed his clothes, went to the closet, and took out the two bags he had bought a week ago from the hardware store. Mae had been begging him to brighten the place up a little, so he had bought what he needed to paint the kitchen.
He laid the plastic tarp on the floor, moved the furniture out of the way, set the two gallon cans on two opposite corners and the roller and pan on another, then sat down on the bed and waited patiently.
At exactly eleven he heard the car. He moved to the kitchen and listened carefully to the sound of the footsteps. They were quick and heavy, but there was only one set. He looked outside and saw the car, and verified that there was nobody waiting in it. He heard the knock and opened the door.
Duane was big, with a puffy pink face and a shock of blond hair that seemed to be duplicated on his thick forearms. He was wearing blue jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and a pair of wraparound sunglasses that were too small for his face, so they looked like the useless little masks across the eyes in drawings of comic-book superheroes. Duane stepped back and stood uncomfortably outside the doorway. “Hi, I’m Duane. Is Mae ready?”
“Just about,” Varney said. “Come in and sit down.” He set a chair in the center of the tarp.
“I’ll wait out here,” Duane said.
“Come in,” Varney repeated, his dark expression telling Duane he meant it. Duane looked at the tarp, pan, and roller. Varney said, “I don’t want people hanging around the hallway, spooking the neighbors.” Duane stepped in.
“I see you’re doing some painting,” said Duane, as he obediently sat in the kitchen chair.
Varney said, “Yeah,” as he went to the refrigerator and reached into the freezer. He could see that the sound of the freezer made Duane feel less awkward and worried. His shoulder muscles relaxed, and he reached up to take off his sunglasses. Before Duane’s hand could touch the frame of the glasses, Varney pulled the knife out of the freezer, turned, and shoved it up into the space below Duane’s ribs into the vicinity of his heart. Duane looked down, as though to see what the source of his sudden discomfort might be. He saw the darkening spot at the top of his paunch, gripped it with both hands, and lunged forward, his mouth open in a silent circle.
Varney’s knee came up quickly and snapped the sunglasses neatly at the bridge of Duane’s nose, so that the glasses came apart, dangling from Duane’s ears. Varney gripped Duane’s hair with his left hand, brought the knife across Duane’s throat, and shoved him down so that his face hit the pan on the tarp.
Duane’s heart was still pumping, but only half the blood seemed to be spurting into the pan. Varney judged that the rest of it was leaking into Duane’s chest cavity or out onto his shirt. Varney raised his knife to the side, spun it in his fist, and exerted his right arm muscles hard to drive the blade through the thin wall of bone into Duane’s temple. Duane’s body jerked once more and went limp.
Varney stood and looked around him. There were no blood spatters on the floor or walls. He heard no sound of footsteps. It had been unusually quiet. Varney moved the kitchen chair off the tarp, waited a few minutes, then checked Duane’s carotid artery. He had no pulse, and his skin was already beginning to feel cooler to Varney than it had at first. He dragged the head back, and saw that the blood that was dripping now was just running down from Duane’s chin. The roller pan held only about two quarts, and the overflow had pooled under and around Duane, soaking his clothes.
It took Varney a few minutes to clean the knife, return the paint cans and roller to the closet, pour the pan out into the sink drain without getting much on the porcelain, and wash it too. He used a few week-old newspapers to soak up the pools of blood on the tarp.
He took Duane’s wallet, removed $620 from it, and then found his car keys in his pocket. Varney went downstairs, moved Duane’s car to the back of the building beside the door, and lined its trunk with plastic trash bags.
When Varney returned, he was pleased to see that most of the blood had soaked into the clothes or the old newspapers or thickened and begun to dry a bit. He rolled Duane up in the tarp, tied it securely with twine, and then ran duct tape around the ends to hold it. It occurred to him that Duane looked like a big blue sausage, and he laughed. He put a trash bag over Duane’s top, and another over the bottom, tugged them until they met, and secured them with more duct tape.
Varney moved all of the furniture back into the kitchen, took a last look around to be sure there was nothing he had forgotten to clean, then knelt and used his legs to raise Duane to his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
He staggered getting Duane up, then steadied himself and stepped out the door. He could feel the strain of the extra weight on
his back and knees as he went down the stairs, but he breathed deeply, kept his shoulders flexed and his back straight. When he bent his knees to shift Duane into the trunk of the car, then straightened, he felt as though he were rising into the air. He was proud of himself: there weren’t many men his size who were strong enough or in good enough shape to do that. He was sweating a bit, but he wasn’t strained or winded.
Varney drove to the south for an hour before he saw the right kind of wooded area. He used the knife to loosen the top layer of leaves and dirt, then dug a bit more with a spare hubcap he found in the trunk. He worked hard, dug two feet down before he went back to get Duane. He unrolled the tarp so that only Duane and his glasses went in, then gathered the tarp, knife, and newspapers into one of the trash bags and tied it shut. He filled in the hole, covered it with leaves again, and took the trash bag with him to the car.
Varney drove back to Cincinnati, stuffed the bag into the bottom of a dumpster, then parked the car on the street five miles from his apartment. He searched it for any paper that might tell the police anything, but found none. He wiped the prints off the door handles, steering wheel, and trunk, walked the first two miles, then jogged the rest of the way home. He was back at one, but he could see that Mae had not returned from the mall. He took his clothes off, put them into the washing machine and started the load, then got into the shower.
When he got out, he heard Mae laboring up the stairs. When she was outside the door, he heard a rustle, then a heavy clank as she set the weights on the floor and put her key into the door. It swung open, and he saw her raise her hand to push a strand of black hair out of her eyes. She looked beautiful to him, and he discovered he was not angry at her anymore.
It was five days later that he had to go into the office and pay Tracy for the next two weeks. He walked into the building, climbed the steps to the second floor, and stepped into the big wholesale office.