Murder for the Bride

by John D. MacDonald

  Chapter Sixteen

  My watch would no longer run, and she had none, so I had no idea of how much time had passed before she began to walk supporting most of her weight, her chin a bit off her chest, her eyes still closed. And instead of groans she kept saying, “No. Lemme ’lone. Wanna sleep. No.”

  The last of the coffee I gave her was stone cold. I sat her on the edge of the bed and held her shoulders to keep her upright. She sighed heavily and her chin sank slowly back onto her chest.

  I put my lips close to her ear. “Can you hear me, Jill?”

  “Go ’way.”

  “Jill, listen to me! This is Dil!”

  “ ’Way,” she muttered.

  “Jill, honey! Where’s your clothes? I can’t find your clothes!”

  She didn’t stir. I was certain she had gone back to sleep. I held her shoulders and looked at her. Her right hand moved and went fumbling along her thigh. It slid up across her flat stomach to the warm well of her breasts.

  She took a deep shuddering breath. Her head came up slowly and her eyes opened. A frown slowly grew on her forehead, pinching the jet-black brows together. Her eyes held a baffled, puzzled look.

  “Dil!” she said thickly, drawling the one-syllable name.

  “That’s right,” I said loudly, cheerfully, grinning into her face. “Don’t you think you ought to help me find your clothes? Where did you lose them?”

  Her arms went into the instinctive and classic posture of modesty, left arm across her breasts, her right hand making like a fig leaf. Dismay slowly appeared in the dazed eyes. I could have screamed murder at her until I was blue in the face, and she would not have stirred from her semiconscious state. By alarming a very basic part of her nature, I had done more than the cold water, coffee, slaps, and interminable walking could ever have done.

  “What … you doing … here?” she demanded slowly and painfully. “Get out … of here!”

  I released her shoulders and backed away. She swayed, but remained sitting upright. Her mouth grew firm. “Get out!”

  “Not me, honey.”

  I respected her for the enormous effort it took her to get to her feet. She sidled carefully, glanced over her shoulder, and began to back to the bathroom door. The effort she was making and the shock to her emotions was bringing her out of it. I moved quickly and blocked her way, still grinning. She gave a cry of dismay, tottered to the bed, yanked the spread up, and crawled under it. She pulled it up to her chin and stared at me with wide, angry, blazing eyes.

  “Damn you!” she said. Her voice was still thick. Tears gathered in her eyes.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. She squirmed away from me. I said, “Look! You’ve got to wake up. This was the only way I could bring you out of it. You were drugged.”

  Her eyes grew dull again. “Drugged?” she said.

  “Yes. Can’t you remember your apartment? Can’t you remember being tied to the chair?”

  “Tied to the chair?”

  “For God’s sake, stop repeating every word I say! Wake up!”

  “Need … hot coffee, Dil.”

  “I’ll get you some if you promise not to go to sleep.”

  “Promise.”

  I was gone about ten minutes getting the second quart. When I came in the bed lamp was off. I cursed her with feeling.

  “I’m awake, Dil,” she said in a small voice. “I was afraid you’d come back while I was still getting dressed.”

  She turned the light on. She was sitting up in bed. The dirty blouse was back on. I glanced at the chair. Just the skirt remained. She took the container and sipped, holding it in both hands. Then she gave it to me. I took a quick swallow and set it aside.

  “Do you think you need a doctor?” I asked.

  “No. I’m getting clearer all the time. Someone called on the phone. They pretended to be you. It frightened me. As I started to leave, those men came in. One of them was the one I saw that day when I left Laura. He twisted my arm. It still hurts. They tied me to that chair and he hurt my arm again. He wanted to know about the paper they want.” She lifted her chin. “I didn’t tell them a thing.”

  “You didn’t know anything, did you?”

  “I had a funny hunch Monday morning, Dil. It came from some little things rattling around in my mind. Little things that didn’t fit. Like Laura saying that about things not being what they seem. And that rabbit she gave you and the way she bought it being so sort of coy, and not like her. So I went to that jewelry store, the big one there on the corner, and I talked to the manager and I described the rabbit. He said they’d never had anything in stock like that ever. Just in case you had the wrong store, I went to the others in the neighborhood. They’d never had any rabbits like that either. Dil, have you got it? I’m almost certain that’s what they want.”

  “Sure I’ve got it. But she came out of the store with it all gift-wrapped.”

  “That was window dressing, Dil. She bought something else and switched them before she gave you the package.”

  I took the rabbit out of my pocket. My key chain was through the loop on the top of his straight ear. I looked at every part of him. He looked solid. Jill reached over and took him. She paid close attention to the base, turning it this way and that in the light.

  Her voice was excited. “Look at the base carefully, Dil. There’s a little round depression there. You can’t see it unless the light strikes it properly. Like a hole about a quarter inch in diameter had been drilled and then filled up again.”

  “But that’s crazy! If she was planning to trade her information for security, why let me trot around Mexico with it?”

  “One, she probably had it memorized anyway. Two, would you have been likely to lose a gift from your bride, along with the key to her apartment?”

  “Whoever wanted it while I was in Mexico would have had to kill me to get it.”

  “Exactly. Laura was a lot of things, but not a fool. Not ever a fool, Dil.”

  “Then all the time their hunch was right, that hunch that I had what they wanted. Why wasn’t Haussmann after it too?”

  “I don’t know where he fits. I only happened to get his name.”

  “He and Laura were both trying to trade this information for security.”

  “Probably he had it memorized too.”

  Her fingers closed around the rabbit. “What can it be, Dil? What can it be that’s so important?” Suddenly she stiffened. “Wait! I’m still groggy. I’m taking too much for granted. Where are we? What is this dreadful room? How did you get me away from them?”

  I had to start with Tram. As I expanded on what I had seen him do, and the conclusions I had reached, her eyes narrowed and she began to nod.

  “What are you nodding for?”

  “Another hunch, Dil. You see, Barney told me something that I didn’t tell you. He told me not to tell you. I asked him why, but he just smiled in that dusty way of his. He told me that if by any remote chance—and he spoke sarcastically—I happened to be letting you hide at my apartment, it would be nice if I urged you to go stay with Tram. I asked him if that was so he could catch you easier and he told me that I should just trust him and believe him. Do you see what my hunch is?”

  “That they wanted me to go to Tram, all of them. That means Tram may have been under suspicion. What could they prove by my being there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the house was wired for sound, or something. What happened after you saw Tram talking on the dead line?”

  I went on from there. I put in my own guess about Sipe, that he had operated a hideout for wanted people for a long time, and that Talya’s friends probably put Jill there as a first step in taking over the entire operation. I told of the end of Sipe and of Straw Hat. I told of the car and how it turned over, and shooting the dog, and then about the truck driver and the taxi driver.

  I said, “And that’s how we got here.”

  “More detail, please. What did you do after you brought me here?”

  “You g
ave me a bad time. I got your clothes off and gave you a cold sponge bath and then took you in and swashed you up and down in the tub about a hundred times, then poured coffee down you and walked you a couple of hundred miles. We got here before midnight. When I got that last batch of coffee, it was a little after three.”

  I thought I had seen the very best of her blushes. But this one was the color of mashed tomatoes. Her eyes were wide. “Jumping Judas,” she said softly and with great awe.

  I caught her hands. I said, “Look. When you dropped me at Tram’s Sunday night, you were sore, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was the dumbest guy in the world. I didn’t have the faintest idea why you were sore.”

  She looked away from me. “Didn’t you?”

  “No. Do you know what I had to do? I had to wade across a pond by lantern light and see you unconscious in that bunk before it began to make sense to me. I saw you there, and I remembered that cat you told me about. What was his name?”

  “Oliver.”

  “And then I remembered a lot of funny things that should have been more evident to me. What a hell of a life for a one-man woman, watching the man go marry a thing like Laura!”

  The blush remained in undiminished intensity, and she wouldn’t look at me. “Did I say you were the man?”

  “You don’t have to say it. After that feeble kiss in your hallway, the only time I ever tried to kiss your lips, I had to say that the next guy would do better. That’s what hurt you, isn’t it?”

  “How did you find out?” she whispered.

  “Just by looking at you in that grubby hole of a hideaway and realizing what would be left of me if you were dead. Not a hell of a lot. A funny thing to find out at this point. A kid sister, you were. So now you creep up on me.”

  “Pity, Dil?” she asked, not looking at me.

  “You’re a very special person, Miss Townsend. Too special, I think, to get messed up with old Try-again Bryant.”

  She was looking over into the corner of the room, at something that wasn’t there. The light touched the clean and pure line of her cheek. Her dark hair, where I had got it wet, had started to curl tightly.

  “Don’t run yourself down, Dil.”

  “Oliver, the cat, had sense. He picked you. You’ve got no sense.”

  “But I’m just as stuck as Oliver was.”

  “Then it’s the only thing I can do, isn’t it? Under the circumstances. How do you like tired old words? Song words? Movie words?”

  She swung her eyes slowly around to meet mine. The blush had faded to pallor. Cool fingertips touched my cheek. “Old words are good words.”

  “I love you.”

  “Thanks for not qualifying it. Thank you, Dil, for just saying it. It probably sounds stiff and funny to you, hearing your own lips say it to me. But not to me. I’ve said it too often, said it too often to you. So it’s familiar, and very dear. I love you, Dil.”

  She held her arms up like a child. The kiss began awkwardly. Noses in the way again. Her lips tightly compressed. According to the books it should have changed. But it didn’t. I tried to make it change. She tried to conceal the involuntary flinch from the touch of my hands. She was tensed. It just wasn’t any good. I let go of her. She sank back onto the pillow and looked up at the ceiling.

  “No good,” she said. “No good at all.”

  “Don’t let it worry you. Things will improve.”

  “You … suppress something too long. What happens to you, Dil? What is it that happens? Inside me is a spring wound tight. It should come loose, but it’s caught.”

  “There’ll be plenty of time.”

  “And if the spring never came loose, would you stay around?”

  “Of course.”

  “And end up hating me. Female icicle. Woman who endures patiently, and hates every minute of it. The world is full of women like that.”

  “They’re like that because they want to be like that.”

  “Please, Dil. Try again.”

  I tried. I tried to carry it further, tried to carry it up to and beyond the point where she’d break. But I just succeeded in feeling like a heel. She tried too. But she couldn’t even come up with an imitation of pleasure. I stood up. She lay looking at the ceiling, tear tracks on her cheeks, her face expressionless. I lit two cigarettes from the fresh pack I’d got with the coffee. I handed her one. She took a deep quivering drag on it and closed her eyes.

  She said, “Let’s just forget our little conversation.”

  “Not yet.”

  “My adoring Oliver is pretty indicative. Don’t old maids love cats?”

  “Don’t forget I’ve been reviewing the merchandise. That would be too much of a waste to contemplate. Just let me chip away at that rusty spring.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “This was a silly time to try, anyway. How do you know what that drug may have done to you? And there’s another thing. My marrying Laura. That could make with quite a psychological quirk, you know.”

  “I can’t even kiss you,” she said in the forlorn tone of a lost child.

  I bent over and rumpled her damp hair. “Forget it. Let’s sleep. I’ll take the couch over there. We can’t do anything tonight, about our little present for the Jones boys. If you’re right about people wanting to steer me to Tram’s place, then all this man-wanted stuff is window dressing.” I kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Have a good sleep.”

  I pulled the draw curtain across, found sheets in a bureau drawer, and made up the couch. I heard a lot of sloshing around in the bathroom and wondered what she was doing. As I was wondering, the sleep of utter exhaustion reached up with a black velvet hook and yanked me under.

  A great roaring woke me up. It scared me so that I bounded out of bed, right in the middle of a seminightmare about being trapped in a tunnel with a train roaring down on me. It took long befuddled seconds to realize that it was raining so hard that the palm fronds were sounding like the steady crash of surf. I sat on the edge of the bed and had a cigarette while my pulse gradually slowed down. I went to the window. Beyond the steady curtain of rain was a faint grayness. The rain bounded on the window sill, and spattered cold on my thighs. There was no way of telling what time it was. Already the road in front of the place was a small lake. Deluge. Time to build the ark. Maybe too late to build the ark.

  Just when it seemed that no rain could fall harder, the tone deepened and it came down so fast that the meager gray faded perceptibly. The air was cooler. I wondered if Jill, in her exhausted sleep, had kicked off the sheet and might be getting chilled. I padded around the edge of the curtain. I shut my eyes hard and opened them again. It didn’t work. The bed was still empty. The bathroom door was open onto darkness.

  I went to the bed and clicked on the bed lamp. It was watery yellow against the cheerless gray of the windows behind the bed. The note was on the pillow, the pencil stub beside it. The pencil had been on the tray on the bureau, I remembered. She’d used paper from one of the drawers for the note.

  Darling,

  I’ve decided that the safest way is for me to take friend bunny to the proper people. Please stay right here and maybe before you even wake up the authorities will be here presenting you with medals. I’ve borrowed money from you, which you may even get back. I’ll make myself presentable and go see Barney first. I’ll be terribly busy, darling, turning out scads of copy on all this, and I think that as soon as the formalities are over for you, you should let Sam send you back down with Paul. When you’re in town again, don’t forget to phone. People say odd things when they’re utterly exhausted. I hope neither of us took it very seriously. Thanks for everything, Dil.

  Love,

  LITTLE SISTER

  Chapter Seventeen

  I don’t know how long I stood there with the oversized note in my hand, with the rain roar filling the room.

  I had no way of knowing when she’d left. I didn’t like it. She had entirely too much confidence in he
rself, too much sense of safety and security in this city of hers, too much reliance on the meager invulnerability of her position. The events of the previous evening should have given her a more lasting case of nerves.

  But somehow she had pulled herself together, set her jaw, and gone striding out to shoulder what she considered to be her share of the job. A perky, gutty little damosel and, I was afraid, not a very wise damosel. I knew at once that her failure to respond to me had something to do with her action. In a funny way, she was probably proving something.

  The bad part of the note—the part that gave me the chills—was that bit about making herself presentable. That meant clothes. And that meant her apartment. She had had no purse when I found her. Then I remembered the key that was still on the chain affixed to the rabbit. I trotted back in and went through my pockets. The chain was still there. Her key and the rabbit were gone. The clothes I had borrowed from Tram were ruined anyway. Some rain wasn’t going to make any difference. I dressed quickly. The revolver was going to get wet tucked in the front of the shirt. I swung the cylinder out. Three loads left. I put the hammer down on an empty chamber. I looked in the wallet. I had seven dollars left.

  My shoes, soaked from Sipe’s swamp, had dried enough to pinch. I tried to go out the door. Jill had locked it behind her. I yanked the window up, kicked out the screen, and stepped over the sill into water that came up over my shoes. I hunched my shoulders and splashed toward the arched entrance. Within seconds I was as wet as if I had rolled instead of walked. There was no one in the office. The night light was still on and there was a sign on the door telling which button to push to get service. The water loosened up the shoes so they didn’t hurt any more. The clock in the office said ten after seven. The big road was a young river. Early traffic was creeping along, making waves like so many speedboats. Some cars and a city bus were stalled on the other side of the road. Headlights gleamed pallidly into the rain curtain. This rain was going to finish the world. In a few hours there’d be nothing but some heads bobbing around. I could feel the steady pressure of the rain on my shoulders. It was the kind of rain we had had in North Burma during the monsoon season. It hit you as if it had been dropped out of a bucket from a third-story window.