by Jim Thompson
“I don’t believe I would, Lou. I really don’t think that’d be wise, at all.”
“You mean I should tell Bob, first? Oh, I intended to do that. I wouldn’t go over Bob’s head.”
“No, Lou,” he said, “that isn’t what I mean. Bob isn’t well. He’s already taken an awful pounding from Conway. I don’t think we should trouble him with anything else. Something which, as you point out, is doubtless of no consequence.”
“Well,” I said, “if it doesn’t amount to anything, I don’t see why—”
“Let’s just keep it to ourselves, Lou, for the time being, at least. Just sit tight and see what happens. After all, what else can we do? What have we got to go on?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “Probably nothing at all.”
“Exactly! I couldn’t have stated it better.”
“I tell you what we might do,” I said. “It wouldn’t be too hard to round up all the men that visited her. Probably ain’t more than thirty or forty of ’em, her being a kind of high-priced gal. Bob and us, our crowd, we could round ’em up, and you could…”
I wish you could have seen him sweat. Rounding up thirty or forty well-to-do citizens wouldn’t be any skin off our ass, the sheriff’s office. He’d be the one to study the evidence, and ask for indictments. By the time he was through, he’d be through. He couldn’t be elected dogcatcher, if shrapnel was running out of his eyeballs.
Well, though, I didn’t really want him to do it any more than he wanted to. The case was closed, right on Elmer Conway’s neck, and it was a darned good idea to leave it that way. So, that being the case, and seeing it was about supper time, I allowed him to convince me. I said I didn’t have much sense about such things, and I was sure grateful for his setting me straight. And that’s the way it ended. Almost.
I gave him my recipe for curing coughs before I left.
I sauntered down to my car, whistling; thinking of what a fine afternoon it had been, after all, and what a hell of a kick there’d be in talking about it.
Ten minutes later I was out on Derrick Road, making a U-turn back toward town.
I don’t know why. Well, I do know. She was the only person I could have talked to, who’d have understood what I was talking about. But I knew she wasn’t there. I knew she’d never be there again, there or anywhere. She was gone and I knew it. So…I don’t know why.
I drove back toward town, back toward the rambling old two-story house and the barn where the rats squealed. And once I said, “I’m sorry, baby.” I said it out loud. “You’ll never know how sorry I am.” Then I said, “You understand, don’t you? In a few months more I couldn’t have stopped. I’d have lost all control and…”
A butterfly struck lightly against the windshield, and fluttered away again. I went back to my whistling.
It had sure been a fine afternoon.
I was about out of groceries, so I stopped at a grocery and picked up a few, including a steak for my dinner. I went home and fixed myself a whopping big meal, and ate every bite of it. That B-complex was really doing its job. So was the other stuff. I began to actually look forward to seeing Amy. I began to want her bad.
I washed and wiped the dishes. I mopped the kitchen floor, dragging the job out as long as I could. I wrung the mop out and hung it up on the back porch, and came back and looked at the clock. The hands seemed to have been standing still. It would be at least a couple of hours yet before she’d dare to come over.
There wasn’t any more work I could do, so I filled a big cup with coffee and took it up into Dad’s office. I set it on his desk, lighted a cigar and started browsing along the rows of books.
Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science in itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow. So there was quite a bit of fiction on the shelves, and as much Biblical literature, probably, as a lot of ministers had.
I’d read some of the fiction. The other I’d left alone. I went to church and Sunday school, living as I had to live, but that was the end of it. Because kids are kids; and if that sounds pretty obvious, all I can say is that a lot of supposedly deep thinkers have never discovered the fact. A kid hears you cussing all the time, and he’s going to cuss, too. He won’t understand if you tell him it’s wrong. He’s loyal, and if you do it, it must be all right.
As I say, then, I’d never looked into any of the religious literature around the house. But I did tonight. I’d already read almost everything else. And I think it was in my mind that, since I was going to sell this place, I’d better be checking things over for value.
So I reached down a big leather-bound concordance to the Bible and blew the dust off of it. And I carried it over to the desk and opened it up; it kind of slid open by itself when I laid it down. And there was a picture in it, a little two-by-four snapshot, and I picked it up.
I turned it around one way, then another. I turned it sideways and upside down—what I thought was upside down. And I kind of grinned like a man will, when he’s interested and puzzled.
It was a woman’s face, not pretty exactly, but the kind that gets to you without your knowing why. But where the hell it was, what she was doing, I couldn’t make out. Offhand, it looked like she was peering through the crotch of a tree, a white maple, say, with two limbs tapering up from the bole. She had her hands clasped around the limbs, and…But I knew that couldn’t be right. Because the bole was divided at the base, and there were stumps of chopped off limbs almost tangent to the others.
I rubbed the picture against my shirt, and looked at it again. That face was familiar. It was coming back to me from some faraway place, like something coming out of hiding. But it was old, the picture I mean, and there were kind of crisscross blurs—of age, I supposed—scarring whatever she was looking through.
I took a magnifying glass and looked at it. I turned it upside down, as it was supposed to be turned. Then, I kind of dropped the glass and shoved it away from me; and I sat staring into space. At nothing and everything.
She was looking through a crotch, all right. But it was her own.
She was on her knees, peering between them. And those crisscross blurs on her thighs weren’t the result of age. They were scars. The woman was Helene, who had been Dad’s housekeeper so long ago.
Dad…
12
I was only like that for a few minutes, sitting there and staring, but a world of things, most of my kid life, came back to me in that time. She came back to me, the housekeeper, and she had been so much of that life.
“Want to fight, Helene? Want to learn how to box…?”
And:
“Oh, I’m tired. You just hit me.…”
And:
“But you’ll like it, darling. All the big boys do it.…”
I lived back through it all, and then I came to the end of it. That last terrible day, with me crouched at the foot of the stairs, sick with fear and shame, terrified, aching with the first and only whipping in my life; listening to the low angry voices, the angry and contemptuous voices, in the library.
“I am not arguing with you, Helene. You’re leaving here tonight. Consider yourself lucky that I don’t prosecute you.”
“Oh, ye-ss? I’d like to see you try it!”
“Why, Helene? How in the world could you do such a thing?”
“Jealous?”
“You—a mere child, and—”
“Yes! That’s right! A mere child. Why not remember that? Listen to me, Daniel. I—”
“Don’t say it, please. I’m at fault. If I hadn’t—”
“Has it hurt you any? Have you harmed anyone? Haven’t you, in fact—I should ask!—gradually lost all interest in it?”
“But a child! My child. My only son. If anything should happen—”
“Uh-huh
. That’s what bothers you, isn’t it? Not him, but you. How it would reflect on you.”
“Get out! A woman with no more sensibilities than—”
“I’m white trash, that’s the term, isn’t it? Riffraff. I ain’t got that ol’ quality. All right, and when I see some hypocritical son-of-a-bitch like you, I’m damned glad of it!”
“Get out or I’ll kill you!”
“Tsk-tsk! But think of the disgrace, Doctor…Now, I’m going to tell you something.…”
“Get—”
“Something that you above all people should know. This didn’t need to mean a thing. Absolutely nothing. But now it will. You’ve handled it in the worst possible way. You—”
“I…please, Helene.”
“You’ll never kill anyone. Not you. You’re too damned smug and self-satisfied and sure of yourself. You like to hurt people, but—”
“No!”
“All right. I’m wrong. You’re the great, good Dr. Ford, and I’m white trash, so that makes me wrong…I hope.”
That was all.
I’d forgotten about it, and now I forgot it again. There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living. And somehow I did want to; I wanted to more than ever. If the good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we’ve got the least excuse for it.
I put the concordance back on the shelf. I took the picture into the laboratory and burned it, and washed the ashes down the sink. But it was a long time burning, it seemed like. And I couldn’t help noticing something:
How much she looked like Joyce. How there was even a strong resemblance between her and Amy Stanton.
The phone rang. I wiped my hands against my pants, and answered it, looking at myself in the laboratory door mirror—at the guy in the black bow tie and the pink-tan shirt, his trouser legs hooked over his boot tops.
“Lou Ford, speakin’,” I said.
“Howard, Lou. Howard Hendricks. Look. I want you to come right down…down to the courthouse, yeah.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I kind of—”
“She’ll have to wait, Lou. This is important!” It had to be, the way he was sputtering. “Remember what we were talking about this afternoon? About the—you know—the possibility of an outside party being the murderer. Well, you, we were dead right. Our hunch was right!”
“Huh!” I said. “But it couldn’t—I mean—”
“We’ve got him, Lou! We’ve got the son-of-a-bitch! We’ve got the bastard cold, and—”
“You mean he’s admitted it? Hell, Howard, there’s always some crank confessing to—”
“He’s not admitting anything! He won’t even talk! That’s why we need you. We can’t, uh, work on him, you know, but you can make him talk. You can soften him up if anyone can. I think you know him, incidentally.”
“W-who-yeah?”
“The Greek’s kid, Johnnie Pappas. You know him; he’s been in plenty of trouble before. Now, get down here, Lou. I’ve already called Chester Conway and he’s flying out from Fort Worth in the morning. I gave you full credit—told him how we’d worked on this idea together and we’d been sure all along that Elmer wasn’t guilty, and…and he’s pleased as punch, Lou. Boy, if we can just crack this, get a confession right—”
“I’ll come down,” I said. “I’ll be right down, Howard.”
I lowered the receiver hook for a moment, figuring out what had happened, what must have happened. Then, I called Amy.
Her folks were still up so she couldn’t talk much; and that was a help. I made her understand that I really wanted to see her—and I did—and I shouldn’t be gone too long.
I hung up and took out my wallet, and spread all the bills out on the desk.
I hadn’t had any twenties of my own, just the twenty-five Elmer’d given me. And when I saw that five of them were gone, I went limp clear down to my toenails. Then I remembered that I’d used four in Forth Worth on my railroad ticket, and that I’d only broken one here in town where it would matter. Only the one…with Johnnie Pappas. So…
So I got out the car, and drove down to the courthouse.
Office Deputy Hank Butterby gave me a hurt look, and another deputy that was there, Jeff Plummer, winked and said howdy to me. Then Howard bustled in and grabbed me by the elbow, and hustled me into his office.
“What a break, huh, Lou?” He was almost slobbering with excitement. “Now, I’ll tell you how to handle it. Here’s what you’d better do. Sweet talk him, know what I mean, and get his guard down; then tighten up on him. Tell him if he’ll cooperate we’ll get him off with manslaughter—we can’t do it, of course, but what you say won’t be binding on me. Otherwise, tell him, it’ll be the chair. He’s eighteen years old, past eighteen, and—”
I stared at him. He misread my look.
“Oh, hell,” he said, jabbing me in the ribs with his thumb. “Who am I to be telling you what to do? Don’t I know how you handle these guys? Haven’t I—”
“You haven’t told me anything yet,” I said. “I know Johnnie’s kind of wild, but I can’t see him as a murderer. What are you supposed to have on him?”
“Supposed, hell! We’ve got”—he hesitated—“well, here’s the situation, Lou. Elmer took ten thousand bucks out there to that chippy’s house. He was supposed to have taken that much. But when we counted it up, five hundred dollars was missing.…”
“Yeah?” I said. It was like I’d figured. That damned Elmer hadn’t wanted to admit that he didn’t have any dough of his own.
“Well, we thought, Bob and I did, that Elmer had probably pissed it off in a crap game or something like that. But the bills were all marked, see, and the old man had already tipped off the local banks. If she tried to hang around town after the payoff, he was going to crack down on her for blackmail.…That Conway! They don’t put many past him!”
“It looks like they’ve put a few past me,” I said.
“Now, Lou”—he clapped me on the back. “There’s no reason to feel that way at all. We trusted you implicitly. But it was Conway’s show, and—well, you were there in the vicinity, Lou, and…”
“Let it go,” I said. “Johnnie spent some of the money?”
“A twenty. He broke it at a drugstore last night and it went to the bank this morning, and it was traced back to him a couple hours ago when we picked him up. Now—”
“How do you know Elmer didn’t blow in the dough, and it’s just now beginning to circulate?”
“None of it’s shown up. Just this one twenty. So—Wait, Lou. Wait just a minute. Let me give you the whole picture, and we’ll save time. I was entirely willing to concede that he’d come by the money innocently. He pays himself there at the filling station, and oddly enough that pay comes to exactly twenty dollars for the two nights. It looked all right, see what I mean? He could have taken the twenty in and paid himself with it. But he couldn’t say he did—wouldn’t say anything—because he damned well couldn’t. There’s damned few cars stopping at Murphy’s between midnight and eight o’clock. He’d have to remember anyone that gave him a twenty. We could have checked the customer or customers, and he’d have been out of here—if he was innocent.”
“Maybe it was in his cash drawer at the start of his shift?”
“Are you kidding? A twenty-dollar bill to make change with?” Hendricks shook his head. “We’d know he didn’t have it, even without Slim Murphy’s word. Now, wait! Hold up! We’ve checked on Murphy, and his alibi’s airtight. The kid—huh-uh. From about nine Sunday night until eleven, his time can’t be accounted for. We can’t account for it, and he won’t.…Oh, it’s a cinch, Lou, any way you look at it. Take the murders themselves—that dame beaten to a pulp. That’s something a crazy kid would lose his head and do. And the money; only five hundred taken out of ten grand. He’s overwhelmed by so much dough, so he grabs up a fistful and leaves the rest. A kid stunt again.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess you’re right, Ho
ward. You think he’s got the rest cached somewhere?”
“Either that or he’s got scared and thrown it away. He’s a set-up, Lou. Man, I’ve never seen one so pretty. If he dropped dead right now I’d consider it a judgment from heaven, and I’m not a religious man either!”
Well, he’d said it all. He’d proved it in black and white.
“Well, you’d better get busy, now, Lou. We’ve got him on ice. Haven’t booked him yet, and we’re not going to until he comes through. I’m not letting some shyster tell him about his rights at this stage of the game.”
I hesitated. Then I said, “No, I don’t reckon that would be so smart. There’s nothing to be gained by that…Does Bob know about this?”
“Why bother him? There’s nothing he can do.”
“Well, I just wondered if we should ask him—if it would be all right for me to—”
“Be all right?” He frowned. “Why wouldn’t it be all right?…Oh, I know how you feel, Lou. He’s just a kid; you know him. But he’s a murderer, Lou, and a damned cold-blooded one. Keep that in your mind. Think of how that poor damned woman must have felt while he was beating her face in. You saw her. You saw what her face looked like. Stew meat, hamburger—”
“Don’t,” I said. “For Christ’s sake!”
“Sure, Lou, sure.” He dropped an arm around my shoulders. “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that you’ve never become hardened to this stuff. Well?”
“Well,” I said. “I guess I’d better get it over with.”
I walked downstairs to the basement, the jail. The turnkey let me through the gate and closed it again; and we went down past the bullpen and the regular cells to a heavy steel door. There was a small port or peephole in it, and I peered through it. But I couldn’t see anything. You couldn’t keep a light globe in the place, no matter what kind of guard you put over it; and the basement window, which was two-thirds below the surface of the ground, didn’t let in much natural light.
“Want to borrow a flash, Lou?”
“I guess not,” I said. “I can see all I need to.”