"For me? Why?"
"I'm sure I don't know, sir. He simply said-"
I'd been through this same dialogue with one of her nice clean boyfriends. "Okay, okay. Where does he want to see me?"
She didn't quite point because anybody knows that's bad manners, but made a sort of indicative gesture toward the south.
"His office is upstairs over the storerooms, sir."
Upstairs, naturally. With Private on the door. I smiled at the bright little thing and looped my arm in hers.
"Show me, huh?"
You'd have thought I had pinched her where I shouldn't.
"Please, Mr. Thaxton! That sort of familiarity isn't necessary."
I decided she was a little college thing. They usually don't know a term like familiarity in highschool. That was my top-of-the-head thought. My sub-level thought was more basic, more home-truthish. It was this:
You're dated, boy. You're age-lagging. Once past thirty you enter the anachronism stage. The young tasties are starting to think of you as Uncle Thax.
You want the truth? It hurt when she backed off from me. That's a funny and goddam tragic thing about a man. No matter how old or how wise he becomes he still needs to feel that every good-looking female between fifteen and fifty is instantly attracted by his magnetic personality. When they aren't-he dies.
"Forgive me," I said with a bitter smile (bitterness usually rouses the mate sympathy in a female). "Now and then I encounter an honest to God virgin and I forget how to act."
This was the cynical, world-weary bit which had always found great success in my past. Today it fell flat on its face. The nice clean little thing with the pretty legs looked at me as if to say 'You really shouldn't drink so much, Mr. Thaxton.'
"You'll find Mr. Franks' office just around the corner, sir," she said in a voice you could starch a stuffed shirt in.
I gave up. I nodded and turned away. Then I looked back and said, "Hey. How old are you?"
"Eighteen." Still starchy about it.
"That's what I thought."
I went around the corner and entered the building with the word Private on the door.
Billie was coming down the stairs and she stopped and smiled and said, "Thax."
And suddenly I was seventeen again and standing fifteen years back in an Ohio stream up to my ankles and a very pretty young girl was standing on a log above me and looking down at me in a way that can only happen the first time, and nothing in this entire goddam atomic bombhaunted world was relevant. Only that girl and myself and our picnic by a lonely Ohio stream.
I went up the steps and took Billie's hand.
"Billie-you just reminded me of the first time I fell in love. I was seventeen and she was sixteen, and it was the year I ran off to join a circus."
Billie's smile deepened. She was looking into my eyes.
"Thax, you're an incurable romantic daydreamer."
"Well-"
"No," she said. "Don't say it doesn't matter. It does matter, darling. It does."
Then she kissed me.
I just stood there. There's no other way to describe it. I just stood there. Billie squeezed my hand.
"Wait for me behind the nautch show tonight." She went around me and started down the steps. Then I woke up.
"Hey. What's with you and Franks?"
She looked up at me and her face, for all its inherent sensualness plus beauty-parlor perfection, seemed bright and innocent. Nice and clean-to coin my own phrase.
"I just gave Franks my two weeks notice," she said. "I'm quitting. Tell you tonight."
Her spikeheels clit-clattered down the rest of the steps. The door marked Private swung closed in her faint perfumed wake. I stared at it.
Quitting? No more Billie? Just two weeks? I was no longer the boy standing in the Ohio stream. I felt like an old overworked anachronism again. I went upstairs and knocked on the landing door. Franks' voice told me to come in.
The business manager's office was done in the same motif as May's suite. Swedish modern. It wasn't bloated with a lot of satin cushions though.
The bluff-faced Mr. Franks was just closing his safe and he stood up in his two-hundred dollar suit and came around his driftwood-Rez desk to offer me his hand. We shook and he asked me how Neverland was treating me, and I said, "Fine," and asked how it was treating him, and he chuckled and said, "Fine, just fine," and I reminded him that he wanted to see me.
He said, "Yes," in a somewhat distracted manner and went back to his desk and picked up the phone and asked the exchange for Mrs. Cochrane's suite in the Queen Anne Cottage. He smiled at me while he waited for a connection and said:
"Sit down, Thax, sit down."
I sat down in a chair that felt like it had been growing on one of our hardwood ridges when Columbus missed America.
"May?" Franks said into the phone. "Thaxton's here now. Can you come over?"
He winked at me while he listened to her reply, to show me that it was really nothing serious-just the usual female nonsense.
I didn't believe his wink any more than I believed his Swedish modern office. He was a natural-born yes-man who tried to cover it up with a hearty show of efficiency.
"Well," he said as he parked the phone back in its cradle.
That didn't mean much to me, so I said so.
"Well what?"
He raised his eyes inquiringly. "Pardon me?"
"You said well," I told him. "That usually means well something or other. I'm waiting for the something. The other you can keep."
His bluff fuse broke into a Babbitt smile and he sat down. We looked at each other across his massive driftwood-Rez desk.
"I simply thought it was time we had a little talk, Thaxton."
"We? Why invite my ex-wife into our little talk then?"
He fussed with his pens and pencils on his uninked desk blotter, arranging them just so.
"Well-" he said, "I thought it would be better if she were here. Because it more or less concerns her, you see?"
I said, "If you mean the murder of her husband-I suppose it does more or less concern her."
He frowned and made a geometrical pattern with his pens and pencils.
"You're a part of this show, Thaxton," he said gravely. "And you were once Mrs. Cochrane's husband. I should think you would be willing to see us through this trying time."
"Um. As long as this trying time doesn't pin a rose on me."
He looked at me quizzically.
"Ferris is now toying around with two ideas," I told him. "One-I helped May knock over Cochrane, for money. Two-I did the deed on my own, for revenge."
Franks broke up the geometric pattern with his desk set by placing a pen perpendicular to a pencil.
"Is that a fact," he said solemnly. "I didn't know that."
I grinned at him. "Don't let it give you ideas. I ain't about to become the patsy for this smear."
He gave me an owlish look. "I can assure you, Thaxton-"
The inner door opened without a preliminary knock. May stood framed in the doorway for a moment, very dramatic looking in a silver skintight outfit. Like a redheaded shark, if you can imagine such a predatory creature.
"All right, May," I said. "Close the door and finish your entrance. You're on stage now."
She didn't get mad, which was out of character for her. She closed the door and approached me with a little girlish look of appeal.
"Darling," she said. "I need your help."
It was time to duck. I could hear the beautiful diamondback shaking its rattles. I took another try at making her mad.
"What is it? Another corpse you want moved?"
"Darling," May said, "that's really very funny. That's the one thing I always liked about you-your wonderful sense of humor."
"Sit down, will you, May?" I said. "You make me feel like a rabbit in a cornfield with a hawk hovering overhead."
She was too nervous to sit down. She started to pace Franks' office. We both watched her. It was a beautiful th
ing to see. She had the body for it and the body had the rhythm. But I had seen it all before. I let Franks watch by himself. I took out a cigarette and rolled it between my fingers. Franks remembered his social manners and struck his desk lighter for me.
"Darling," May said, "you've heard what they're trying to do to me around here." Her inflection said it wasn't a question.
"You mean murderwise?"
She came to roost by the arm of my chair and said "Um" She took the cigarette out of my hand the same way she always used to do and started to take a drag. Then she hesitated and glanced at it and at me, as if wondering if I had something I should see a doctor about. I took my smoke back.
"Everybody thinks I murdered Rob," she said. "It's all over the lot. Every last mother's bastard out there-" she made a broad arm gesture encompassing Neverland- "who takes my money is saying it!"
"Now, May," Franks said soothingly. "Not everyone."
"Be quiet, Lloyd," May snapped. She looked at me. "Well, you can't deny it, can you, Thax?"
"Uh-uh. But you can't blame 'em either, May. You're a natural for it. Look at the motive. Money money money."
She started pacing again, saying, "But dammit, I didn't do it! Why should I? Rob gave me everything."
"Uh-huh, but maybe you wanted everything except a sixty-year-old Irish husband. Maybe you wanted to marry some husky young buck who didn't have a dime and Cochrane said no divorce. Hell, I don't know."
May came back to my chair with little red glints in her eyes.
"So that's what they're saying about me now, hm? The dirty-"
"May," Franks said. "Now, May."
She whirled on him. "Will you for godsake shut up, Lloyd! Will you just do that kind little thing for me, sweetie? I'm trying to talk to Thax."
Franks' flaming expression seemed to say it wasn't fair of May to talk to him that way in front of an outsider. After all he was her business manager, wasn't he? He was just trying to be helpful and now May went and threw that kind of crap in his face.
"All I'm trying to say, May, is that it won't help us progress by losing our temper. We must remain rational and-"
"Rational!" May cried. "My God, look what they're doing to me! Can't you understand? I'm being framed for murder! My knife, my earring, my husband. My God, I'm as good as convicted!"
I stood up and mashed out my cigarette on a desk tray.
"Well," I said, "this has been pleasant, but I'm supposed to be out on the lot earning the salary you good people pay me."
May dropped her anger and switched back to feminine appeal.
"Darling-I really do need your help."
"Mine?"
"Um. If I ever meant anything at all to you, sweetness, I only want you to do one little thing for me."
I could have told her what she had meant to me but I decided I'd better not. I looked at her askance.
"What is the one little thing?"
"I want you to help me by not telling the law all about our private life. I mean back when we were married. I'm in deep enough, darling, without having all the gory details of the past thrown at me too."
"Ferris already knows we were once married, May."
She shook her head impatiently. "I don't mean that. I mean, for example, that little incident in Decatur."
That little incident in Decatur had damn near cost me my life. That was the night I caught Bill Duff and May making like Ferris' crossed fingers in Duff's trailer. The night Duff lost his eye-tooth. May and I had pitched a beauty when we got back to our own trailer, and then May had pitched a knife at me and thank God I had decided to sit down on the bed just as she did or I would have had a new hole where I didn't need one.
It was pretty plain that a story like that wouldn't do her present situation much good. I grinned at her.
"You mean you want me to withhold evidence?"
"No, no," Franks said hurriedly. "What you mistakenly call evidence isn't germane to Mr. Cochrane's death. It isn't relevant in any sense, except perhaps-"
"Except that it will give the DA a dandy chance to establish May's behavior pattern of throwing knives at her husbands," I said.
Franks looked slightly annoyed. "All Mrs. Cochrane is asking of you, Thaxton, is not to volunteer an old story like that if you don't have to. You see?"
"Uh-huh. Just a slight omission on my part."
"Exactly. And-" he took time out to clear his throat- "Mrs. Cochrane would of course be very appreciative. I-uh, understand you arrived here somewhat strapped for money?"
I cocked my head at him.
"You're offering me a shot at blackmail, Mr. Franks?"
"No," he said. "No no no. Please do not use that term, Thaxton. I had in mind a bonus. After all, you do work for Mrs. Cochrane, and-"
"Oh for godsake, Lloyd." May looked disgusted. "Thax wasn't born yesterday. He called it by its right name the first time." She looked at me. "Will you take it and keep your mouth shut?"
I was almost at the point of asking how much It was, exactly. But I backed off like an honorable little man.
"This may come as a jolt to you, sweetie," I said to her. "But the only money I'm going to take from you is what I earn on the lot. But don't sweat it. I won't tell Ferris you once tried to use me as a bull's-eye." I winked at Franks. "See you two very nice people later."
May followed me to the door. When I got it open she leaned her lithe body against the edge and placed a silvertipped hand over one of mine. She looked up at me with her best, practiced, feline, look.
"Like Lloyd said, darling, I am very appreciative." Her voice was pure cat's purr.
I glanced at her claws and drew my hand out and gave her a pat on the behind.
"Better save it for the jury sweetness," I said. "You just might need it."
I went down the stairs with May's parting comment in my ear.
"Bastard."
9
A fog-mist rolled in from the sea that night. It was damp but not cold. It felt good on your skin, tingly and clean. It looked nice on the young girls' hair and on their outthrust sweaters. It put a spectacular halo around the high arc lights and made them a bluewhite. It was ghostly. It seemed to make the voices of the children more shrill. People moved through it like stalking specters desperately trying to seek entertainment, excitement, escape.
It was a good night for it. A good night, in fact, for a couple of ideas I had in mind.
The Viking horn went hooo like a dismal foghorn and I gave away my last three orchids to three sad spinster looking females who had librarian or schoolteacher stamped on their tragically plain faces. They were very embarrassed and delighted and childlike about it. Then I felt sad.
I wondered why everybody couldn't be beautiful. If everybody was beautiful, then we would all be so busy making love to one another we wouldn't have time to be frustrated. Then we wouldn't jack-roll or riot or declare war. Maybe we wouldn't even drink ourselves to death.
Nut, I told myself. I closed up my stand and went over to have a smoke with Gabby. He said, "Hop in and have a drink."
I climbed over the counter and helped him close up. A single, naked 200-watt bulb made the place look like an interrogation room. The little white rabbits at the far end appeared to be frozen in their tracks with terror.
At least there were no effigies of Mao or Castro to shoot at. It used to bore me to hell to have to shoot at Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito all the time when I was a kid and would go to a shooting gallery during the war.
Gabby drew a pint from under the counter and passed it to me. It was Scotch and it was good. I passed it back and said, "Coincidence. I was just wondering if beautiful people ever drink themselves to death, and now you tempt me."
"Don't sweat it. You ain't beautiful."
"My mother thought so."
"Mothers are nuts. There ain't any beautiful people."
I think he had something there, as far as the outer flesh goes. Usually the people the world considers as beautiful are sin ugly inside. Like May.
But I don't know; I've seen some nuns who looked beautiful and I have an idea they were the same inside. Maybe not. Maybe they were frustrated like any spinster.
"Jesus," I said.
"What?"
"People," I said. "Life. Crazy. All crazy."
"Bet your ass."
"Well," I said, "it doesn't really matter."
Gabby took a good one and wiped his mouth and looked at me.
"Got any ideas?" he asked.
"Um-hm. I'm gonna go look her up in a minute."
"I mean about Rob Cochrane."
"Why should I have ideas about that?"
"Because I understand The Man has started to switch his sights from Mrs. Big to you."
I looked at him. He passed the bottle but I didn't take one.
"Where'd you hear that?"
Gabby shrugged. "Word gets-"
"Yeah, yeah. It gets around. I know. But who gave it to you?"
"Duff. Said it was from the horse's mouth."
I didn't much like the idea that other people besides Ferris were starting to look at me askance, or that Bill Duff was going around saying so.
"I just might decide to send Bill to the dentist again," I said.
"Somebody did that a couple of months ago."
"Yeah? Who?"
"Mike Ransome. They were over at the gambling room and Duff was on the sauce and he started to tell the boys an off-color story about him and May Cochrane. Nobody wanted to hear it because they all liked Rob, but Duff wouldn't knock it off. So Ransome put a fist in his big mouth."
"Huh. Ransome doesn't look like he could whip a Girl Scout."
"You ain't seen him in action. He's fast. Duff has the muscle and meanness but he had no more chance of landing one on Mike than I have of crawling in bed with Sophia Loren."
I said huh again. Then I switched the subject.
"Where is the gambling den? I'd like to look in some night."
"In the basement of Dracula's Castle. But they won't let you within ten foot of a cardtable. Not with your educated mitts."
"I know it. I just like to watch."
Carny kill Page 7