1955 - You Never Know With Women

by James Hadley Chase

  The drink helped me and I went over to the stack of tools that stood in a corner. As I picked up a spade, the whole damned stack came crashing to the floor.

  I heard Veda call out. “Who is it?” Then the door jerked open and she stood there, her face white and her eyes startled, staring at me. I felt sweat running down my face and there was a tightness inside my head that bothered me.

  “It’s all right. Stay where you are.”

  “Floyd! What is it? What are you doing?”

  “Keep out of this!” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice. “Go back to bed and stay there. Keep out of this!”

  “Why, Floyd . . .” She was looking at the spade I held in my hand and her eyes widened. Then she turned swiftly to look at Max, but it was too dark to see him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Keep out of this, Veda! Leave me alone.”

  “What have you done?”

  “All right.” I threw down the spade. “What else could I have done? Keep out of it. That’s all I ask you. Keep out of it and leave it to me.”

  She walked to the lamp and lit it. Her hands were steady, but her face was as white as a fresh fall of snow. In the hard glare of the acetylene lamp the blood on Max’s shirt glistened like red paint.

  I heard her stifle a scream. She stared at him for a long moment of time, then she said quietly: “We said no. Why did you do it?”

  “Could you figure out any other way?”

  “If they ever find him . . .”

  “I know. You don’t have to tell me. Go back to bed. You must keep out of this.”

  “No. I’m helping you.”

  My nerves recoiled at the determination in her voice.

  “Leave me alone!” I shouted at her. “It’s bad enough to handle him without you being here. Leave me alone!”

  She ran into the bedroom and shut the door. I was shaking like a muscle dancer. Even another shot of Scotch didn’t help much. Without looking at Max, I went out into the darkness, clutching the spade.

  It was beginning to rain. We hadn’t had any rain for weeks, and it had to pick this night. I looked around in the darkness. No lights showed, no sound came to me, but the rising wind. It was lonely and wild: the right spot for murder.

  I went to the shed, put the spade in the back seat of the Buick, drove around to the shack door. It wouldn’t do to bury him anywhere near the shack. His last trip had to be a long one.

  I went into the shack. She was dressed and bending over Max as I entered.

  “What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”

  “It’s all right, Floyd. Don’t be angry.”

  I went closer.

  She had wrapped him in a blanket and had tied the ends together. He looked harmless now: a bundle of clothing going to the cleaners. She had done what I had been dreading to do.

  “Veda!”

  “Oh, stop it!” she said fiercely and stood away from me.

  “I can manage now. You mustn’t have anything to do with this. I want you to keep clear of it.”

  “I’m not staying here alone. And what does it matter? Do you think they’d believe I had nothing to do with it?”

  We looked at each other. The frozen look in her eyes worried me.

  “All right.”

  I took his shoulders and she took his feet. As we carried him out of the shack I thought of his pale, thin, shabbily dressed sister. Max is so wild. He might get into trouble. Well, he wouldn’t get into any more trouble after this.

  We drove across the foothills, through the rain and into the darkness. We had put him in the boot on the rubber mat, and I kept thinking of him and the way he looked when I had found him. Veda waited in the car while I dug. I worked in the light of one of the head-lamps and I felt her eyes on me all the time. We buried him deep. When he went into the hole the blanket slipped and in the light of the headlights we both looked into his dead face. I let go of him and stepped back. He thumped down in the wet soil, and was gone, but that dead face was with me then as it is with me now.

  We spent a lot of time in the pouring rain, replacing the turf and stamping it down. If the rain kept up all night it would wash away the traces of the digging by the morning. I didn’t think they would find him.

  We were wet and cold and very tired when we drove back. Neither of us could think of anything to say, so the drive back was in silence: There was blood on the floor to clear up and we both worked at it. We scrubbed the rubber mat in the boot, we looked carefully around for anything that belonged to him, and I found his limp wallet that had fallen under the table. There were some papers in it, but I didn’t feel like going through them just then and I put the wallet in my hip pocket. Finally we were through. Looking around the room, there was no trace of Max any more, yet the room was full of him. I could see him standing in the doorway, sitting at the table, smirking at us, lying back in the chair with his face bruised and bleeding, lying on the floor with the serene look in his eyes and the knife in his chest.

  “I wish you hadn’t done it.” The words came out of her as if she could no longer keep them in. “I won’t say any more about it, but I’d give everything I’ve ever had if you hadn’t done it.”

  I could have told her then. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I had made such a damned mess of my life, one thing worse didn’t matter; anyway, that’s the way I saw it then. With her it was different. She was going up; a thing like this could ruin her.

  “We won’t talk about it. Let’s have some coffee; and you’d better change.”

  While she was putting the kettle on, she said. “Will they come out here to look for him?”

  “I don’t think so. No one knows he’s out here. They’ll look for him along the coast if they look at all. They won’t take much notice of his mother. He’s not Lindsay Brett.”

  “Should we stay on here?”

  “We have to.”

  She gave a little shiver.

  “I wish we could go. I keep feeling he’s still here.”

  “I know. So do I. But we have to stay. There’s nowhere else to go. We’ve been safe here up to now.”

  The dawn was coming up over the hills as we finished the coffee. I thought of the long day before us. Both with our secret thoughts. It came to me suddenly that it wouldn’t be the same again. She thought I had killed him; I knew she had. No, it wasn’t going to be the same again. Women are funny animals. You never know with them. Love between a man and a woman is a brittle thing. If ever she fell out of love with me, my life would be in her hands. Looking at her now I wasn’t sure if she had already fallen out of love with me. It worried me. It was another step down. Another low spot. It was down now all the time.

  During the next three days everything we had built up between us crumpled away. It started with small things. We suddenly found we hadn’t much to say to each other; talking was an effort, but we made the effort, and living the way we did there was nothing to talk about at the best of times, except the things two people talk about when they are in love. Well, we didn’t talk about those things: we talked about the rain, and whether we had enough food, and would I get some more logs and would she fix a hole in my sock. She didn’t come into my bunk anymore; and I didn’t want her to. She’d be undressed and in her bunk by the time I had made up the fire in the outer room. I didn’t have to torment myself by watching her take of her clothes, knowing the way she felt; there was no point in that. Once or twice I touched her and she suppressed a shiver, so I quit touching her. Max was with us twenty-four hours of the day. Neither of us could get him out of our minds. During those three days a tension began to grow that only needed a spark to touch it off. But there was no spark. We were both very careful about that.

  At night when I had snuffed out the candle I kept thinking of her as she had seemed to float into the room with her eyes closed, looking beautiful. And below me, as she lay in the darkness, I knew she was thinking about me; imagining me sneaking out there to knife the little punk who had his h
ands tied behind him. I guessed the image kept growing the more she thought about it until I must have seemed to her to be some kind of monster.

  I was turning all this over in my mind and feeling pretty low as I made up the fire for the night. She had already gone into the inner room and I could hear her as she undressed. I locked the front door, turned out the light and gave her a few more minutes before going in there. She was already curled up in her bunk, her back turned to me as I came in. That’s the way it was now: she couldn’t bring herself to look at me.

  “Good night,” I said and rolled into my bunk.

  “Good night.”

  “Going down all the time,” I thought. “All low spots now. Veda slipping away from me like water through my fingers. Max’s dead face. Gorman jeering at me. Material for nightmares.”

  I didn’t know how long I slept but I woke suddenly. Since Max’s death I had slept badly and the slightest sound would bring me upright in bed. I woke now to hear someone moving in the room. It was dark: I couldn’t see anything. The stealthy sound sent my heart racing and a chill up my spine. I thought of Max as I slid out of the bunk and I began to shake. More movements, the sound of even breathing, close: too close. I pressed the button on the flashlight.

  I don’t know how I missed her in the darkness. She was standing right by me. Her eyes were closed and her black hair framed her face that was peaceful in sleep, and she looked lovely. I moved away from her, my heart racing. She had a knife in her hand; the knife I had used to make clothes pegs for her when Max had surprised us. I watched her touch the blankets in my bunk. I saw her raise her hand and bury the knife to the hilt in the blankets and mattress where but a second or so before I had lain.

  “You’ll be all right now, darling,” she said, and a little smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. “You won’t have to worry anymore.”

  She climbed back into her bunk, drew up the blankets, and settled down. Her breathing was as undisturbed and as even as a child’s in its first sleep.

  I left her there and went into the outer room. The fire was dying down and I put on another log, careful not to make a sound. Then I sat before the fire and tried to stop shivering.

  I didn’t sleep anymore that night.

  chapter fifteen

  When the sun came up behind the hills I went into the inner room to get my clothes. She had been up, for the blind was drawn and the window was wide open. I looked quickly to see if she was awake, and she was. She lay in the bunk, the blanket pushed back. They say love and hate are separated by the thickness of a hair. After what had happened last night my love for her had been badly shaken. I was scared of her, and that’s not far off hate. As I looked at her she turned her head. Her eyes were feverish.

  “I didn’t hear you get up,” she said in a flat voice.

  “I didn’t make much noise. I couldn’t sleep.”

  She watched me as I picked up my clothes. I knew it wasn’t far off now. I could feel it. We were sparring for an opening.

  “You stay where you are,” I went on. “It’s early yet. I’ll make some coffee.”

  “Don’t be long. It’s time we had a talk, isn’t it?” She sounded as polite as a collector of alms, and as sincere.

  There it was. I didn’t let her know I had come to the same conclusion.

  “I’ll be back.”

  While the water boiled I dressed, and took my time over a shave. My hand was unsteady; I was lucky not to cut myself. When I made the coffee, I poured two fingers of Scotch into a glass and drank it. I might have been drinking fruit salts.

  She had combed her hair and put on a silk wrap and was curled up in the bunk by the time I returned. She didn’t look well: too fine-drawn and her colour was bad. There was a brooding expression in her eyes I didn’t like.

  “The rain’s stopped,” I told her. “It’s going to be fine.” A brilliant remark considering the sun was shining through the open window, but I had to say something.

  She took the mug of coffee and was careful not to look at me.

  “Please sit down.”

  It didn’t seem possible that a couple of days ago we had been lovers. Voices are funny things; they can tell you more than an expression on a face if you listen: And I was listening very attentively. There was no point in kidding myself any longer. This was it.

  I sat away from her. The gap between us was about as great as the gap between our minds.

  “Do you remember what you said when we were talking about Max?” she asked abruptly.

  “I said a lot of things.”

  “About making a difference.”

  I sipped my coffee and frowned at the floor. So that was how she was going to handle it.

  “I guess so. I made quite a speech. I said: “Suppose I kill him. You and I will know, even if no one else does. We have to live with each other, and knowing I killed him will make a difference. We might not think so at first, but it will.” That’s what I said.”

  “So you’ve been thinking about it, too?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It has made a difference, hasn’t it?”

  “I said it would. All right — it has.”

  There was a pause. I could feel her uneasiness as I could feel the cold draught from the open window.

  I had a dream last night. I dreamed I killed you.” No regret; just a statement of fact.

  “Well, you didn’t,” I said, but I couldn’t look at her.

  There was another pause.

  “It’s time we left here,” she went on. “There doesn’t seem much point in us keeping together any longer — not now, I mean. It would be easier and safer for you to get away if you were alone.”

  Well, it was nice of her to think of my safety, but I hadn’t expected this. If it was to happen I should be the one to break it up. I was getting tired of being brushed off by my women. It was getting to be too much of a habit.

  “If that’s how you feel.” I finished my coffee and lit a cigarette. My hands were still unsteady.

  “Don’t let’s pretend. It’s the way we both feel. You don’t seem to realize the sense you talked when you said it would make a difference.”

  “I have prizes for talking sense. One day someone’s going to collect my bright remarks and put them in a book.”

  “I guess I’ll get dressed.”

  That was her way of saying there wasn’t anything more to discuss. There wasn’t.

  “Right,” I said and went out of the room.

  Standing before the fire, watching the flames without actually seeing them, I wondered what it would be like without her. This was a stage I usually reached with a woman, only I had thought it would be different with Veda. I didn’t expect it would come to this. I knew it would happen sooner or later with the blonde who had given me money, and the redhead who had dug her nails into my shoulders and the rest of them, but somehow – not Veda. I knew I was going to miss her. She had a place in my life and there’d be a gap when she had gone.

  After a while she came in, carrying her bags. She was wearing her canary-coloured slacks and sweater in which I had first seen her. It seemed a long time ago. In spite of the drawn look and her colour, she was still lovely to look at.

  “Where are you going?” I asked. “There’s no point in rushing into trouble. They’re still looking for us.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m going after Gorman. Until I’ve proved he killed Brett, I’m still in a jam. If the police pick you up, you might talk. That’s how it is.”

  “They won’t pick me up. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry. Until I’ve fixed Gorman you must be somewhere where they can’t find you. You’re going to Mick’s place.”

  “No.”

  “That’s where you’re going, Veda.”

  “I said no.”

  We stared at each other. The spark we had guarded against so carefully was now in the powder.

  “When I’ve f
ixed Gorman you’ll be as free as the air. That’s the way it’s going to be Veda, and you’d better make up your mind to it.”

  “You want to murder me as well, don’t you?” Her voice was shrill.

  That was something I hadn’t expected. She was full of surprises this morning.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You want to murder me as you murdered Brett and Max.”

  “Don’t start that again . . .”

  The table was between us, otherwise I would have beaten her to the jump, but she got the .25 first. It was still on the mantel, and I’d forgotten about it. She snatched it up, whirled around and pointed it at me as I threw the table out of my way. The look on her face brought me to an abrupt stop. I was looking at a stranger: fierce, hard and dangerous.

  “That’s how you planned it, isn’t it?” she cried. “First Brett, then Max, now me! You fooled me all right. I believed all that stuff about Gorman killing Brett until you killed Max. You cold-blooded brute! No one but a killer could have done what you did. He was defenceless; his hands were tied and he was asleep. How could you?” her voice shot up. “How could I ever trust you again? I’m in your way now, aren’t I? I know too much! Your precious friend, Casy, would keep me until you were ready to kill me. But not this time.”

  “You’re crazy! I didn’t kill Brett!”

  “Go on – say it! Tell me you didn’t kill Max either.” Her jeering little laugh set me raging. Then I let her have it.

  “That’s right – I didn’t kill him. It was you! You – in your sleep. How do you like that? You – walking in your sleep – did it! I saw you!”

  Contempt and loathing showed in her eyes.

  “And to think I loved you! Boyd said you were a cheap crook, and you are. You’re worse than that – you’re despicable.”

  “All right, I’m despicable.” I was shouting at her now. “But that’s how it happened! I wasn’t going to tell you, but you’ve asked for it! You went out there—”

  “Do you think I believe it?” she screamed at me. “Do you think anyone would believe it? Only a dirty warped mind like yours could have thought up such an idea. You don’t frighten me! I’m through with you! Do you hear? I’m through with you!”