I turned and our eyes met.
She looked so lovely to me, like something I wanted and knew I could not have because she required a long and dull life, and all I had to offer was a short and not very merry one. I saw her fingers were trembling.
“I’m glad you came,” she said softly.
“There were no planes,” I put out my hand, she put hers in it.
“I know,” she said.
“You know?” I frowned.
She tried to smile. “I wanted to — to get away, too, Dan.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Are you?”
“Your hands are cold.”
“Yours are colder.”
She drew her hand away. The music stopped.
“Your fat friend must be a good dancer,” I said.
“He’s a school teacher,” she said with a laugh. “From out in Iowa.”
“He must be nice.”
“He is nice.”
“I’m glad you meet so many nice people.”
“Yes. I do. Don’t I?”
She put out her hand. The music started again. She smiled. In all my life I had never seen anyone make a smile seem so for you alone. “Aren’t you going to ask me to dance?”
I put out my arms, and I had never wanted anyone so badly in all my life. I wanted to kiss her until she was breathless and her mouth ached. I wanted to hold her close, I wanted to take her to bed with me.
I remembered the way Ray had looked, sprawled out there on Nebraska, his brief case broken open, papers strewn, papers that meant the things he was attempting would make his town a better place to live in. I remembered the way they had riddled him with bullets.
Her hand in mine was like ice and she shivered as though she was cold. I put my arm about her and I didn’t hear the music, but we were in the center of the room.
“Do you love me?” she said. She was close to me.
I nodded. It wasn’t something I could help, or conceal.
“Will you come with me to Pennsylvania?”
“It was a ship board romance,” I said.
“Say you will, Dan. I have something to tell you.”
“I can’t promise,” I said. “What is it you want to tell me?”
She shook her head. Her hand trembled in mine. “What’s the use? I’ll never tell you. You’re what you are all right. You’d even lie to me — but you won’t give up what you’ve started to do — there’s nothing I can say to change it — ”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
She nodded.
I don’t know how far out Grant Avenue we walked. There was a slight fog, and the streets were almost deserted. We went down hill a long way, and crossed the street and started up again, moving slowly through the mists.
I held her close to me and my hand up under her arm was warm. But I was cold. We said almost nothing. When we passed the lighted church again, I said, “Where are you staying?”
“At the St. Francis,” she said.
“I’ll walk over there with you.”
“Why do you want to?”
“Why not?”
“We can’t keep on saying goodbye like this, you know. Why don’t you leave me? Take a taxi, get away from me. Go back to your hotel. Sure, you’ll be all right, as soon as you’re away from me.”
“A ship board romance,” I said.
A taxi slid into the curb beside us. I was looking down at Dorothy.
The driver called, “Hey buddy. You want a taxi?”
I turned to him. “No,” I said.
Then I saw that he had an automatic leveled across the door at me.
Dorothy had pulled away from me, back against the darkened window of an oriental curio shop. I turned to face the armed taxi man when this sleek new convertible Cadillac pulled into the curb directly behind the cab.
The rear door of the taxi was thrust open and two men in dark suits piled out.
I turned my head to Dorothy. “Run,” I snapped at her, “run toward that church over there, and scream like hell!”
That was all for me. It was quick, the pain wasn’t even bad. It was sharp, and like exploding dynamite as they struck me behind the left ear. But it didn’t last long. The dynamite made a lovely blinding light behind my eye balls and I crumpled hard to the sidewalk, but I never knew when I hit.
CHAPTER NINE
MAYBE I NEVER did hit the sidewalk. Maybe I just floated and glided out into space, with a swift, cold wind in my face, and mists that kept falling away.
The blinding light stopped, but I kept gliding smoothly on upward. Then I began to wake up. The gliding ride was the Cadillac. The mist was the fog that slipped down behind us as we climbed hills, heading southward out of San Francisco.
The back of my head was still numb where I had been sapped. It had been done by an expert, I thought, and opened my right eye enough to see the softly glowing speedometer. We were doing ninety.
I stirred a little. It hurt so badly when I moved my head that I groaned involuntarily. A very familiar voice came to me from a long way off.
“How do you feel, Henderson?”
I pressed my right hand over the crown of my head to keep it from flying off.
“Where is she?” I mumbled. “Where’s Dorothy?”
The familiar voice was very smooth. “The young woman who was with you? She is quite all right. She ran toward the church. We let her go. After all, it was you we wanted, Henderson. And quietly.”
Clark’s eyes were fixed on the dark road winding upward ahead of him. His profile was very straight. His forehead was high, his moustache closely clipped. I thought of his fine home in Hyde Park, his two kids in college. I never saw a more respectable looking rat.
“The great Clark,” I said. “So now Nelson sends you. Somehow I expected Buster.”
Phillips Clark kept his eyes on the road.
“You’ve put up a good fight,” he said. “Of course if I’d been in Honolulu instead of Lungs, you’d never have gotten away in the first place. I should have gone. We all think that now. And so I’m here, Henderson.”
“What’s the pitch?” I said.
His voice was low. “You killed Lungs, Henderson. Henry Nelson thought a lot of Garcia. He never had a more loyal man.”
I could hear the buzzing in my head clearer than I could hear him.
“He tried to kill me,” I said. “It was self defense. No angle you can think of will change that, Clark,”
“We considered that. I could have had the police arrest you, you know. On suspicion.”
I laughed bitterly.
“But you knew I’d talk, didn’t you, Clark? You knew the smell would get all over Henry Nelson now, didn’t you? You knew you couldn’t link me with that killing at sea, without linking Garcia to Henry Nelson. What’s your better idea, law boy?”
“Never forget, Henderson,” Clark said quietly, “you’re an ex-cop, you never were anything but a cop in plain clothes. I don’t want you to think we’re not going to take care of you.”
“I never have forgotten who I am,” I said softly. “It looks to me like it’s you boys who have forgotten. When did you ever send out Lungs Garcia to do a job a hopped-up gun punk could do? When did you start flying three thousand miles to take care of an ex-cop, Clark? I think things are getting pretty hot for Nelson. I think it’s you who have forgotten.”
For a moment, Phillips Clark was silent. He was a handsome man, distinguished looking, with iron gray hair. He was a big man, too, and he looked capable and intelligent.
While he was silent, I looked beyond him. The big car rounded a curve. There was a sheer drop beyond parkways built on the brink of the cliffs. Out below, the lights of San Francisco blinked like fireflies in wells of darkness. We rounded such curves every few minutes, going between eighty and ninety, as we ascended the mountains.
“All right, Dan. This is it. There is some pressure on Nelson. His ward bosses have warned him. The death of your brother Ray was a bad mistake — ”
“Amen,” I said evenly.
“Don’t get the idea that I admit complicity for our political body in that crime! I’m only telling you that that’s the way it is. Somebody in Tampa is going to have to take the rap for that business, though. There’s no doubt that you’ve stirred up attention with your dogged efforts to find your brother’s murderer. You’ve done a fool thing, even fighting your own police department. But it’s just the crazy kind of thing that idiots take to heart.
“If you’d been killed in Honolulu, mixed up with a woman that could have been painted pretty rotten, or if you’d been sentenced there for her murder, that would have been the end of it. If you had been lost overboard in the gale that raged two days in the Pacific, that would have been the end of it.
“But you’re here. You have even bought plane tickets for Tampa for tomorrow morning’s flight. You have a nuisance value, Henderson, and that’s all.”
I laughed grimly. “I’m not that dumb, Clark. I know better. I know that men, even inside Nelson’s own mob, are laughing at him because Connice played him for a sucker, and ran away and left him. She was murdered. No matter who confessed out there on the Island, Nelson is still all wrapped up in it. She made a fool out of him. And not many men can respect him anymore.
“And I can tell you something else. If I get back there, there’s going to be a scandal. And you know it. I’ll give my life to kill Nelson for the hell he’s put me through — and that’s more scandal than even the City of Tampa can stomach!”
Phillips Clark had taken his foot off the accelerator. The car eased down. The road was almost deserted. I’ve never seen a night darker.
“You aren’t going back, Dan.”
“Are you going to stop me?”
“I’m not a man of violence, Dan. That’s why I brought you out here. I want to make an appeal to your reason. I hope to God, for your sake, you’ll listen to me.”
“There’s nothing you can say, Clark. I’m going back.”
“To what, Dan? A bullet in your head? Death in some dark and littered alley? A stone about your neck and trip to the bottom of the Hillsborough river?”
“Save it. You guys took the beauty out of living for me a long time ago.”
“You got a rotten deal, Dan. Will you believe me sincere when I say that?”
“And you’re not even saying part of it,” I replied. “But don’t worry about me, mister. I’ve written off Lungs. And I’m going back.”
“Listen to me, Dan.” His voice was slow and deep and persuasive, and the car had almost ground down to a halt. We idled along the dark highway. “Even if you could get back — and believe me, you can’t, but even if you could — your life ends there. You’ll never accomplish what you started out to do. And you’ve given your own life.”
“I don’t want much,” I said. “Five minutes alone with your boss.”
“Even if we could grant it, Dan, we wouldn’t.”
“Remind me, mister. I won’t ask permission.”
“Dan, I’ll have you held here for vagrancy. I’ll have you stripped of every means of identification. I’ll put you through so much red tape here in California, inside jail houses, behind stone walls, where your voice won’t carry no matter how loud you yell, until you’ll be a wreck before you get out, the scandal down home will be blown over, and you can come back then, if you still want to. We’ll be ready for you.”
I laughed now. “You really are scared of me, aren’t you, Clark? You, Nelson and Eddington, scared in your guts!”
“There’s a lot at stake down there, Dan. All Nelson has worked for all his life. Free, you are a dangerous man. But you’re a dangerous little man, Dan. That’s all I’m trying to tell you.”
I sat up straight in the seat. “All right,” I said. “Get me committed, Clark. I don’t doubt you can do it. I could jump out of here and run. But I couldn’t run fast enough, could I?”
“No.”
“If I ever do get out, Clark, I’m coming back. I’m on my way to Tampa. I’m going to get there — if it takes all the rest of my life.”
“We don’t care about that, Dan. It’s right now we’re thinking about.”
We were silent. At last I said, “Then why did you bother to tell me about it.”
“Because money talks better than force, Dan.”
“What does that mean?”
“You beat the rap in Honolulu. There’s a hundred to one chance you’d get out here. Just one. But I don’t want to give you that one, if I can help it.”
“Then why didn’t you let your thugs kill me? That’s the quickest.”
“People know you’re alive, Dan. It’s not the little idiots at home I mean. There’s a fight for power in Tampa. It goes on all the time. Right now there’s been too many killings — even a disappearance — yours, might force us out. I told you, man. That’s why I am here. If this thing can be done quietly, we’re willing to deal with you, and give you the best of it.”
I snorted. “You already owe me five thousand dollars,” I told him. “Five thousand dollars for finding Connice Nelson. Five thousand so you could put a bullet through her head. Well, you meant to screw me out of that five grand — mister, I don’t want any more deals with you tramps.”
He faced me then, for the first time. In the vague light of the car, he looked old.
“That was strong arm stuff, Dan. Buster and Lungs had the inside then. Nelson listened to them. All right, he never meant to pay off. But I’m here, I will pay off. And I’ll buy that plane ticket from you — for another twenty-five thousand. You can take that money — and you can go anywhere in the world — except Florida.”
I laughed without mirth. With twenty-five thousand I could give Dorothy everything she wanted. I could have her. I could live again.
I felt an ache in my chest, like something burning.
“No matter where I started,” I said at last, “I’d end up in Tampa.”
“Take the money,” he said in an odd voice.
I began to feel cold. I knew then what he meant. The minute I had that thirty grand on me, I could pull the double cross, I could do anything I wanted. They had me then. Anybody would kill me for thirty grand.
Boy, he had played it smooth!
He had even suspended breathing as he waited for my answer. I didn’t keep him waiting.
“There’s only one thing you can do,” I said. “Take me back to the cops. Get your red tape started. The answer is no, mister.”
He looked at me, his face twisted with hatred. He spun the car about in the middle of the road so hard that the tires screamed on the pavement.
He said nothing else. I knew what was ahead for me. We’d held poor devils in Tampa who didn’t want to be held. For a long time. For a long, rough time.
He pressed the gas accelerator to the floor. The wind whistled cold and sharp about my face as we started down the hill back toward the city. We whipped past several cars, parked and dark in the parkways over the bluffs. People in love. Kids. About ready to start with apartments and installment payments and more kids.
I began to be made. Those were little people necking out there in those parkways. Little people like me. People who wanted a chance to live, and raise a family in dignity and decency. And beside me, tooling the big car down the hills, was one of the rats working for the men who wanted to own little people’s souls, and squeeze the last ounce of hope out of them.
“You’re a bastard,” I said aloud.
He didn’t even bother to get mad.
“But I’m a rich bastard, Dan. I own things. There are nine bedrooms in my house in Hyde Park. One of my kids is graduating at the top of his class at Harvard. I worked my way through the University of Florida. I lived like a tramp. But I don’t live like a tramp anymore.”
“Want your kid to grow up like his old man, huh?”
He was silent. We whipped down the hill.
“Maybe he’ll learn how to throw a guy in a jail three thousand miles from ho
me, and keep him there. You’ll be proud of him, huh?”
“I offered you money, Dan.”
“And bullets in the back to go with it. All you did, was wash your hands, and maybe get the money back in the long run. There are legal ways to reclaim money, aren’t there?”
“The money was yours, Dan.”
“Sure. So was the five grand. I trusted you things once. But I’ve been under your rock now, Clark. I know what goes on. You couldn’t buy me for a million of that kind of money. You’re going to have to whip me down again, Clark. Rubber hose, every day.”
“All right, Dan. You asked for it.”
I sat there, tense, watching as the curve loomed up ahead, with its sightseer’s lane, its sheer cliff, and its blackness beyond.
I did three things at once.
I stomped my left heel down hard on Phillips Clark’s fine shoe and drove the gas accelerator to the floor.
I yanked viciously to the left on the steering wheel.
And, with my right hand, I slapped down on the door handle.
The door flew open wide, the momentum and pull of it carried me after it, and flung me out.
The sleek gray convertible hurtled out over the side of the cliff. Its fish fins flailed outward as its tail end sailed over.
If Clark screamed, I didn’t hear him.
I went sailing outward toward that brink myself. And then I landed hard, raking my clothes, cutting deep gashes down my face when I landed, belly flat against the embankment at the side of the road. I came down with my hands out, but the force of the speeding car sent me rolling over and over.
I didn’t go out. I just kept telling myself as I was sliding, ripped and gashed from head to foot on the rocks and stones, that I had to get up and get away from there before the first car arrived.
I stopped rolling at last. Get up, I screamed at myself, get up and run. Run down the side of the mountain. Run down the road. Run anywhere. But get out of there. And get out fast.
But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t even get up, and I knew the only way I’d get out of there was to be carried out.
• • •
I LAY THERE, fighting to get up, listening to the cars screeching to stops along the highway.
“A wreck!” a woman’s voice wailed. “It’s been a wreck! Somebody has gone off the road.”
Slay Ride for a Lady Page 13