He closed his hand on the ruined orchid.
“If she took his dough,” he said, “she could maybe get that band spot now, if the publicity worked out okay. Anyway, she’d be a lot closer to it. I keep thinking I ought to give her the money, back her—make it a percentage deal, if she wants it business. But I can’t do that. She’d go right away, then. She might say no, but that’s how it’d work out. If she stays around just a while longer, maybe she’ll get to liking me enough to—but if she finds out I’ve—”
He started to cry again. I looked at my glass.
“What is it I haven’t got?” he asked me. “It isn’t my face. I’ve seen guys with faces that would stop a clock walk off with swell girls. So I was worried about McElroy. I ought to have worried about you. You come along, looking like a tramp, and Sherry right away starts saying, good old Ed, he’ll understand, he’ll be nice.”
A plump hand moved across the bar and took my glass.
I said, “Pretty tough.”
He didn’t even hear me.
“It isn’t what you’ve got. It’s what I haven’t got. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m too nice. Maybe I treat ’em too good. It’s like cooking somebody swell meals, only without anything to drink. Then somebody else turns up with a bottle in his pocket. A bottle of what, Nick? What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sherry’s in love with you.”
“Think so?”
He pushed the refilled glass at me. “You had your chance. Nick, please, don’t stick around. Play it square, will you? Sherry was starting to like me. You don’t need her, you can get all the women you want. With me, I’ve got to do it the hard way. With me it takes a long time. Only once it clicks, maybe it’ll stay that way. Get out of here. Don’t come back. Don’t write her. Give me a chance.”
He was still crying. My mouth felt stiff.
“I told you I was heading east.”
“But you changed your mind. Didn’t you? You said that before you took Sherry out. You didn’t just talk to her last night. You’re a liar. I can tell that by looking at you. You figure on staying right here in Phoenix.”
“…No.”
“She won’t go away with you. She hasn’t got a cent. I don’t know what she told you, but she hasn’t got a red cent. She can’t go anywhere without any dough, can she? Tell me that.”
I didn’t say anything. He leaned forward, his eyes blurry.
“Can she?” he insisted.
“Why ask me?” I said.
“Everybody should have a chance,” he said. “Me. You. Everybody. You give me a chance and I’ll do the same for you. Listen. Are you going to get the hell out of Phoenix? Are you going east? Or—”
I looked at his red, swimming eyes and his fat face, and what I felt must have showed. I didn’t need to say anything. Gavotte’s mouth twitched.
He hesitated, weighed his drink in his hand, and tossed it off. Breathing hard, he watched me. Then he pointed to my glass.
I drank the whisky. That was my mistake.
Something red-hot and tight as a vise grabbed my stomach and squeezed. I heard my breath groan out. I doubled up so fast my forehead hit the bar. My fists slammed against my middle. All I could feel was the griping pain.
Then it was like spinning down inside a whirlpool. It was like a knockout punch. Some thoughts seemed to be floating past me, outside my head. I was thinking them, but they didn’t have anything to do with me. The bastard’s given me a Mickey. I hope to God it’s only a Mickey. The pain kept me clamped jackknifed against the bar, and then there was a voice.
“Got to get you out of here,” I heard Gavotte say. “The hell with McElroy. You’re the guy.”
I heard his footsteps, and I put my hand against the bar and shoved hard. My legs remembered how to work by themselves; I wasn’t telling them what to do. They carried me across the floor till I bounced off the wall. I tried to straighten up. I couldn’t, but I managed to lift my head. My teeth felt cold as I breathed.
Gavotte, holding the Old Crow bottle clubbed, was coming toward me, not too steadily. He had his face screwed up like a crying baby’s.
“You’ll go east,” he said thickly. “You’ll go east in a freight car.”
The bottle came down, clubbed, on my back. He hit me almost blindly, not really aiming, just putting all the power he had in the blow. I lurched forward a step, nearly going over on my face. The griping pain in my belly clenched with this new pain around my kidneys.
“You’re gonna wake up in a freight car,” he mumbled. “Maybe you’ll think you ought to come back here. But you won’t feel good enough to try it. Not when I get finished with you. Maybe you won’t be able to walk. Maybe you’ll have a broken leg. When I get through, you won’t dare come back here, God damn you. I haven’t got it. I haven’t got it. The minute you—”
He was crazy drunk enough to kill me without knowing it. I saw that. I was scared. There wasn’t a thing I could do, with that fast-action Mickey holding me bent over, paralyzed with pain.
“God damn you,” he said, and suddenly reached out and broke the bottle against the edge of the nearest booth partition. I couldn’t straighten up, even when I saw the jagged glass coming toward my face as hard as Gavotte could swing it. I got out of the way somehow, with that awful cramp tearing the guts out of me, and the knife-edges whipped past my eyes. All I could see was Gavotte’s white, creased shirt, stretched tight over his fat middle where his coat hung open. By luck all my weight was on my right foot and my elbow was crooked and my fist doubled up, pressing hard against my belly. Things went into slow motion. I couldn’t see what Gavotte was doing. All I could see was that big white shirt, bulging out and moving a little like a cloud, just as slow.
I watched my fist sail forward and sink into the white shirt.
It was all still slow, slow as a cloud moving, and not even as real. The only real thing was the pain. I couldn’t straighten up at all. Gavotte suddenly began bowing to me; I kept seeing more and more of the shirt till I found I was looking at the top of his head. The shiny yellow hair was messed up in wiry strands, and there was a bald spot on the crown, pink and fuzzy. I couldn’t see the bottle, but I hadn’t heard it hit the floor. I could just see the edge of a roll of fat bulging over the side of his collar.
I had to stop him. There was one way I might do it, but it would hurt like hell. I’d have to straighten up a little. It would feel like tearing my own flesh, I knew. But even that would be a relief. For I couldn’t stand the pain any more unless it got better or worse. It didn’t matter which, as long as it didn’t stay as it was. I kept my left hand pressed hard on my belt, and twisted myself up till I was bent over to the left. My other arm went up at the same time. I hadn’t done this for a long while. But my body remembered. My elbow remembered to stay bent. My thumb remembered to stay stuck out. The pain was so bad now it couldn’t get any worse. It was a crescent-shaped pain, like a quarter-moon, with one point running way up into my armpit. I struck down as hard as I could.
I couldn’t feel his flesh at all, only the jarring shock that jolted up my arm to the elbow and paused and then the skin on the edge of my hand began to feel prickly, like pins-and-needles. I heard my own breath go out like a shouted grunt; Gavotte’s breath snorted through his nose. I folded up, squeezing my eyes shut, clamping my fists against the pain, grinning and not caring what happened next.
I lay down on the floor and stayed there for a while.
When the worst of the pain was over, I noticed Gavotte lying not very far away, on his side, facing me. He had one arm under him, and the other bent out, like an animal’s paw, the fingers curled. His blue eyes looked out of focus. His mouth hung sidewise.
I was breathing hard and sweating. I got up carefully, waiting for a streak of the pain to dig into me. It didn’t. I kicked Gavotte gently in the chest. He didn’t move. I went over behind the bar, saw a familiar label among the bottles lined up under the
mirror, and drank whisky without bothering about a glass. First it wasn’t so good, then it helped.
I figured the worst was over.
I went back to Gavotte. The broken fifth was on the floor beside him, and I kicked it away. I crouched down and put my thumb in his eye socket and pushed. He didn’t even groan. And when the nerve that runs up under the socket is pushed, only a dead man doesn’t move.
His head rolled, though. I’d broken his neck.
I found out I was swaying. The barroom was rocking gently, turning a little, back and forth. I couldn’t find the bar for a second or two. Then I located it, stumbled a few steps, and hung on to it. I was weaker than I’d known. There were shooting pains zigzagging through my stomach, and now that the bar was holding me up, I didn’t feel sure I could stand up by myself, if I tried. But I had to try. The only trouble was, I couldn’t think quite straight. My mind seemed greased. I couldn’t hang on to any ideas.
There was one idea I had to hang on to. What the hell was it? Suppose I passed out? That was it. Suppose I dropped, right now? The police…
I let go of the bar. It wasn’t so bad. But I still couldn’t hang on to my thoughts. So I didn’t bother. I decided that I couldn’t stay on my feet by arguing with myself. If I passed out, it would be because I couldn’t help it. I stopped trying to think. I just let go of my mind, the way I’d let go of the bar, and started moving, not trying to plan ahead, just—watching myself. Kept moving.
Part of my mind stopped working and another part started. I watched myself pull a handkerchief out of my pants pocket, and wipe clean the bottle I’d drunk out of and put it back among the others. I looked at my hands while they took up the jigger glass I’d used, polished it, and let it fall in the tank of soapy water behind the sink. I heard it clink softly on other glasses down there. I saw my right hand, with the handkerchief wrapped around it, press down on the light switch at the front of the bar. My hand opened the door, let me out, and closed the door behind me.
The street was empty, though I thought I could hear footfalls a long distance away.
I got in the Buick and started the motor. I drove west. I didn’t pay much attention to where I was going.
But the dizziness kept coming back. I nearly went off the road a couple of times, and once I came within an ace of ramming something big—a truck or a bus. At last I didn’t even feel I was driving a car. I pulled off the road.
I guess I passed out.
The next thing I knew I was looking up at the stars through the windshield. My neck was stiff. I was curled up on the seat, and I hadn’t any idea how long I’d been there. I felt a good deal better, but I still couldn’t think straight, though the dizziness was gone except for a few mild spells.
The confusion wasn’t.
I thought: Nobody would believe me. And one idea kept hammering at me: Get back to the De Anza ranch. With any luck, nobody there had missed me. I started the motor and eased back on to the highway. Now all I had to do was keep going.
I thought: Why should anybody ever know?
A gray light was starting to show in the sky behind me. Pretty soon I passed a roadside shack on the left; it had an EAT sign on top of it and a gas pump in front.
Forget it.
This was the right answer, somehow. The part of my mind that was working told me that. And the other part was beginning to wake up now, too.
Forget about it.
Chapter 9
I went up the driveway without lights, cutting the engine down till it had just enough power to make the grade, and even then the purring sounded loud enough to wake everybody within five miles of it. My throat got tighter and tighter till I climbed high enough to see the house. There weren’t any lights on.
I eased the Buick into the garage, swinging around and backing so it was headed out, the way it had been before, and then I switched off the motor and listened to the silence roaring.
That didn’t help.
Finally I got out of the car and walked around the U into the patio. The door was still open, the way I’d left it. I tried to move quietly, but I could hear my joints cracking as I walked.
When I was back in my bedroom, I stood there in the dark for a long time, just listening. I didn’t hear a sound until some animal started wailing, very far away. But there wasn’t any nearer noise than that.
I took off my clothes and slipped between the sheets.
Then I started to think again.
Just how smart was I really being?
But how else could I have played it? Gavotte was dead, wasn’t he? I’d killed him, hadn’t I?
Yes. In self-defense.
Try to prove that.
But maybe I could have proved it. Suppose I hadn’t got panicky and run out? Suppose I’d phoned a hospital right away? They might have used a stomach pump on me and proved Gavotte had served me a Mickey.
It wasn’t a Mickey, though—not chloral hydrate. It was something else Gavotte had handed me. There was only one thing I’d ever heard of that could hit me the way that drink had. A medical student I used to drink with told me about it once. I remembered it now for the first time, and suddenly started to sweat. If I’d thought of it before, I guess I’d have headed for the nearest hospital. Because it could have been cyanide—a damn short shot, but cyanide.
Only I didn’t think Gavotte had intended to kill me. In a way, his coming at me with that broken bottle proved that. He’d wanted to mark me up and let me live. You don’t use a broken bottle on a corpse. But cyanide is something only a crazy man would slip in somebody’s drink, unless he was playing for keeps. Because only an expert can tell exactly how little of the stuff to use and no expert would take the chance. But a crazy bastard like Gavotte might have.
If it had been cyanide, then I couldn’t prove a thing. For, the way I’d heard, the only time cyanide leaves traces is when it kills somebody. If you get a small enough dose, and keep on living, there’s no trace at all. A stomach pump wouldn’t show a thing now. But if I’d phoned a hospital from Gavotte’s bar, then maybe…
Too late now. Unless I wanted to drive into Phoenix tonight and turn myself in. And if I did that, they might not send me to the gas chamber, but suppose they called it second degree homicide or manslaughter? After all, Gavotte owned a business and I was a tramp, technically speaking. Unless you’ve got good clothes, a job, and some dough in the bank, you’re walking on the edge of the curb, all the time. All it takes is one push.
In civilian life, it’s the same as the Army, except different people are on top sometimes. But when you see brass, you salute. And when brass gives an order, you obey it. There’s something called the Articles of War, and we’ve got it in peacetime, and we’ve always had it, only it’s never been written down and made into a law. The brass wins. You can carry an appeal to any court you want, and you’ll still lose. Either you’re an officer or you’re not, that’s all there is to it. If you’ve got enough stripes on your sleeve, that helps, but if you haven’t got any stripes at all, you salute fast.
Gavotte was no officer, but he had the stripes. His rating was a lot higher than mine. He owned a business. He had some dough. He wasn’t a floater. He’d been lucky, and I hadn’t.
One thing, the De Anzas were brass. They had money. I felt safer right here, in their house, than I’d have felt anywhere else. They were on top, because they were lucky, and some of that luck might stick to me, if I played it right.
I decided that I’d been smart, after all. The chances were I might not even be connected with Gavotte’s death, but if the Homicide Bureau did get interested in me, they’d figure they knew what it meant if I’d run away.
Nobody knew I was at the De Anza place. Suppose I stayed here? I could hide out…
Why the hell should I even hide out? There wasn’t any proof. Any panhandler could have walked into the Green Lantern, got in an argument with Gavotte, and slugged him. Nobody had seen us together.
I
tried to figure ahead. Suppose I should drop in on Sherry? That needn’t be suspicious. I’d just changed my mind about going on east. I’d run into a chance at a good job here, so I’d taken it. Even a cop wouldn’t wonder too much about that—Sherry used to be my wife. Naturally I’d look her up again. It’d smell worse if I stayed on near Phoenix and didn’t see her.
Then there was McElroy, Ted McElroy. With Gavotte dead, Sherry would probably be at loose ends. This was my chance to get her back. And I’d better not waste time, with that millionaire playboy tossing orchids around.
What I’d have to do was take it easy. Just wipe Gavotte out of my mind. I told myself I hadn’t seen Gavotte since I’d left the Green Lantern that first time Monday night.
Forget about it and act as if it hadn’t happened at all. That was the only safe way. Watch the newspapers, though. If I saw something about Gavotte being killed, then it would be natural for me to remember I’d met him, think about Sherry, and go to see her.
Or would it?
I decided to answer that later.
I rolled over in the bed and shut my eyes.
Then it was morning.
Ten o’clock was morning to the De Anza house. I got out of bed wondering how I’d feel. My stomach was still sore, and once or twice I felt a little cramping pain, but I knew the worst was over. Whatever Gavotte had given me, from here on I decided I could ignore it. I didn’t see myself going to a doctor now. I was a little weak, maybe, but that was all. I decided not to think about some things for a while.
By the time I’d showered, shaved and dressed, Benita had had time to make coffee, and when I got to the kitchen, Rafael was eating corn flakes and puffing at a cigarette at the same time. It was a Camel, though, not perfumed.
I said hello. Benita nodded shortly; Rafael beamed.
“Swell day, Nick. Gonna be hot. Sit down, have some coffee. You want breakfast?”
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