by Marc Behm
‘Where are you, you sonofabitch?’ she whispered.
She saw several charter flight men drinking cans of beer, a man in an El Al uniform, a black reading Out, a man in a Chesterfield reading Playgirl, another man reading a paper, another smoking a pipe, another asleep …
She walked over to the man in the parka, squinted at him. Then she moved to the black and scrutinized him closely. He glanced up at her. ‘Anything I can do for you, ma’am?’ he asked uneasily. She walked on, passing the Eye, and stood before the man in the Chesterfield. He smiled at her politely. ‘I don’t think we’ll get out of here tonight,’ he said. She went back to her chair and sat down. She shrugged and ate the pear.
At ten o’clock the loudspeaker announced that there would be no more takeoffs until tomorrow morning. Joanna was asleep. A janitor woke her, rattling a mop and bucket in her ear. ‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘We’re closing up!’
‘Merry Christmas,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he growled.
She went outside. The young man who had to be in Washington D.C. by noon tomorrow was running around trying to find a taxi. ‘I’m going to catch a train,’ he told her.
‘Me too.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Baltimore.’
‘I’m heading in that direction myself. Be my guest!’
His name was Henry Innis. He was an antiques dealer from Alexandria, thirty-one years old, unmarried, and at the time of his death was carrying approximately twenty-nine thousand dollars in his briefcase, the tax-free commission of a furniture auction he’d negotiated that afternoon in Philadelphia.
Killing him was no problem. At a quarter to twelve they went to Penn Station and caught a Washington local. There were almost no other passengers aboard. They had a bottle of bourbon, and he died of arsenic poisoning somewhere after Wilmington.
The Eye was in the coach behind theirs, doing a crossword puzzle. At the Aberdeen stop he glanced out the window and saw her crossing the platform, going into the waiting room. The train was already moving. He ran up the aisle and jumped out the door.
It was three o’clock in the morning. She walked through the cold bleak empty streets, muttering to herself. She found a church that was open and slept in a pew until dawn. The Eye spent the rest of the night sitting on a bench in a transept, reading a prayerbook. There were a dozen other derelicts there – bums, drunks, nighthawks lighting candles, old women with rosaries, one fat man in a Santa Claus outfit snoring behind the altar. A roving dip moved in on Joanna. She woke just as he was reaching for her purse. She drove him off, then went back to sleep. A teenage fag tried to pick up the Eye.
‘Christmas Head?’ he whispered.
‘Get lost.’
The boy backed away into the shadows. The Eye looked up at the statues. St. Joseph, St. Anthony, St. Mary, St. Christopher … and one he didn’t recognise. He went over to it and read the name on the plaque. Saint Rita. He’d never heard of her. She was in a pale blue gown trimmed with silver. A golden flower glowed on her throat. She had a Modigliani profile. He dropped a quarter into the slot and took a candle from the rack. He lit it, fixed it before her O dark saint, he prayed. Protect my two girls. Don’t let the sharks eat them. Keep the fucking FBI away. And give Maggie shelter from the cold tonight.
And tell me – what is a goddamed capital in Czechoslovakia?
At six o’clock they caught a Greyhound back to Philadelphia. By nine they were in the airport again. Joanna ate an enormous breakfast – scrambled eggs, wheatcakes, a filet mignon, a salad, pie. Then she checked out her luggage and flew to St. Louis.
They rented two cars and followed the Mississippi south through Waterloo, Red Bud, Chester, Carbondale, Ware, and Thebes. She spent the rest of the year in a motel in a place called Mound City near Cairo. Her name was Victoria Chandler (blond wig).
On New Year’s Eve she went to a bar in Wickliffe, a rat-eared clip joint filled with tough-looking drunks. The Eye’s radar picked up the jinxed vibes and he tried to warn her about the place.
Get up and leave, Joanna.
Just a couple of drinks.
You’ve already had five.
Get away from me! Who are you anyway?
Go home to bed.
Who’s talking to me?
Come on, let’s split!
Leave me alone!
By two in the morning she was petrified. A jukebox was yowling country music. There were only a half-dozen hardcore boozers left at the bar. One of them, a big truckdriver type, closed in on her. He leaned across the table, took her by the shoulder, shook her. ‘Hey, blondie,’ he said. ‘Let’s go outside and get some air.’ She flopped and wallowed in her chair, trying to rise. He grabbed her arms, yanked her to her feet. He dropped her, and she slid to the floor. The jackals at the bar watched and cackled.
The Eye came out of his corner. ‘Beat it,’ he told the trucker. ‘I’ll take care of her.’
The trucker pushed him away, ‘Buzz off, fuckhead! The broad’s with me!’ Luckily he was too drunk to hit anything. The Eye sidestepped the first two meat-cleaver blows and pounded him in the stomach. The truck driver went down, came up swinging murderously. The Eye caught a wild left across the cheek, jarring his teeth, then got behind him and clubbed him on the back of the neck, decking him again. This time he stayed down. Nobody else tried anything.
The Eye lifted Joanna, took her purse, pulled her to the door.
Outside he dragged her across the parking lot, found her keys in the purse, unlocked her car, heaved her awkwardly into the rear seat. He found her paperback Hamlet in the purse, too. He held it under the light and leafed through its pages. Hundreds of lines and passages were circled in red and Xed in orange and underlined in black and asterisked in green and blue and brown. He read a verse at random:
… from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
The drunks were stumbling out of the bar, howling and singing. He drove through the lot to the highway, honking his horn as he passed them.
‘Happy New Year!’ they shouted.
The rising sun woke her, burning through the windshield in a shower of pink lava. She sat up in the back seat, opened the door, peered around. The car was parked on the bank of the river. She climbed out to the ground, pulled off her wig, threw it aside. She leaned against the fender and held her head moaning. Then she whirled, snatched up her purse from the seat, searched it frantically. She found her money, counted it. It was all there. She sagged with relief, hanging on the door, her knees trembling. She sat down on the rocks, put her face in her hands. The tremors passed. She bit her left index, rubbed it against her knee. She looked at the sky, at the river. She kicked off her shoes. Lifted her skirt, removed her stockings. She rose, undressed, hung her soiled clothing across the hood. Nude, she waded into the icy water. She dived lithely into the swift current and swam in a wide semicircle away from the bank.
The Eye, standing in a copse up on the edge of the road, watched her, smiling ruefully.
He hoped she wasn’t planning to drown herself, because he didn’t know how to swim.
15
Joanna drove across western Kentucky to the Green River. In Rockport it was raining, and she skidded off the road into a fence. No real damage was done, but she was finally forced to do something about her myopia – contact lenses.
The Rockport Post Office provided Eye with her federal Wanted poster; he hadn’t realized just how hot she was. The composite ID portrait was an almost exact facsimile of her face. The nose strip was off, but the rest of her features were a perfect likeness. She was identified as Ella Dory AKA Mrs. Jerome Vight AKA Mary Linda Kane AKA Mrs. Rex Hollander AKA Ada Larkin. Ada Larkin! That really jolted him. It meant they’d probably traced her as far as Miami. How? The bastards, they’d probably checked the passenger lists of every flight out of Savannah the day Hollander’s forty-grand check was cashed. He had to hand it to the motherfuckers – they were really efficient. Would they uncover her Roxane Dev
orak and Victoria Chandler identities now and follow her to Michigan and Philadelphia and St. Louis? No, he didn’t see how they could do that. And yet …
In his hotel room that night he watched a TV movie about a convict, escaped from a chain gang, pursued by bloodhounds. He kept trudging through streams and swamps to throw the dogs off the scent, but then he had to cross a desert and the posse caught him. That was Joanna’s problem, too. Her trail was too obvious, and she was running out of water to cover her tracks. Changing wigs and names just wasn’t enough anymore.
She drove on toward Louisville – Dan ‘Ken Tuck’ Kenny’s former theater of operations. He tried to bring Kenny to mind but couldn’t recall his face. Christ! How long ago had that been? Fresno, LA, the bookstore, Ralph Forbes, the clinic, Jessica, the cemetery on the banks of the San Joaquin River … Had she killed Kenny? Yes … no … he’d died in the pen. They’d traveled down so many roads together, stopping at so many places! Now they were on Route 60, somewhere south of the Ohio River, passing through towns called Hawesville, Cloverport, Hardinsburg, Irvington …
It was a bright, windy January afternoon. A girl stood on the edge of the highway, hitchhiking. She wore jeans, GI shoes, a pointed cap, and a combat jacket. She was blonde, freckled, no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her name – he learned much later – was Becky Yemassee.
Joanna picked her up.
Miles later they turned off the road into a narrow dirt track and disappeared into a wood. He stopped, afraid to follow them too closely. Where the hell were they going? Was there a village back there in the sticks? Or a farm? Or a house? He waited ten … fifteen … twenty minutes. He was just about to drive after them when the girl reappeared, running. An old Dodge Royal Lancer with a growling motor came speeding up the highway. A boy wearing a bowler with the brim cut off was driving it. He skidded over to the girl, opened the door. She jumped in beside him, and they zoomed away like Bonnie and Clyde.
The Eye drove into the track. He found Joanna’s car parked in a clearing. All her luggage was open and her clothing strewn about the ground. She was lying in the front seat, unconscious, the cut on her forehead a neat, professional knockout blow, probably from a sap. He cleansed it with after-shave lotion. Then he searched her purse, the bags, and the car. He couldn’t find any money. Bonnie Freckles must have taken it all.
She came out of the woods a half-hour later – on foot. She was wearing slacks, boots, and a sweater, carrying an airline bag strapped to her shoulder. She walked toward Irvington. She looked like a farmboy striding to town to buy a sack of oats. She’d removed her wig, and the wind blew her hair across her face. The blow on the forehead didn’t seem to bother her. Neither did the loss of her money. She was whistling … in fact, she was laughing. A mile past the track she stopped, picked up a rock, and dropped it into her bag. Then she began hitchhiking.
A Honda sedan picked her up. The Eye followed it. It turned north and drove along the Ohio. It pulled into a junkyard beside the ruins of a jetty. He watched the driver take her in his arms, watched them kiss, watched her strike him across the skull with the stone. She took his wallet, dumped him into a ditch on his back, then drove back to 60.
She turned into the dirt track, left the sedan in the clearing, and drove her own car out to the highway.
During the next two weeks she repeated the performance twelve times, hitchhiking back and forth from Louisville to Huntingdon and from Danville to Bowling Green. One busy afternoon on Route 68, between Campbellsville and Edmondton, she hit four men in a row. Only two of her victims died.
In late February, while every state trooper in Kentucky was looking for her, she slipped down to Nashville.
She was Nita Iqutos from Peru, with a wig of long black hair plaited in Indian braids. Her English had a warm cello accent. She was a reporter from some Lima or Quito or Santiago magazine, in town doing a series of articles on ‘the sound.’ She probably even had a press card, if anybody asked her for one. But nobody did.
Associating her with the hitchhiking bandit the Kentucky newspapers called ‘the highway Harpy’ was just unthinkable.
The Eye didn’t know how much money she had accumulated, but she was still drinking cognac and smoking Gitanes. And she gambled every night. She moved in with a folksinger named Duke Foote. He was the coyote-voiced balladeer whose jukebox favorite ‘Texas Freeways’ sold nine hundred thousand records. She hooked him as soon as they met because he was impotent and a fairly nice guy and, since he didn’t snort coke or debase minors, the fuzz left him alone. Their photo appeared in the Grapevine section of Playboy, which made their relationship more or less official:
Interviewed during a recent recording session in Nashville, big Duke admitted shyly that he was thinking seriously about ‘goin’ to see the preacher man one o’ these days ’stead o’ always shackin’ up like a dang sinner.’ Fiery and fiercely Catholic Nita is just the gal to lead him back to the path of righteousness.
The Eye cringed and compared her photo to the ID composite he’d stolen from a post office. But there was really nothing to worry about. Nita Iqutos bore no resemblance at all to Ada Larkin or those other women.
In the spring Duke went to New York, leaving her alone in his mansion in Franklin. The Eye had been living in a motel out on route 31, and now he visited her every night, like a lover, prowling through the gardens and looking through the windows, watching her cook supper and read and listen to records and, usually get drunk alone. One evening she pretended she was blind and groped through the rooms for hours, tapping a cane and holding out a cup for alms. And one Saturday night a pack of Duke’s turned-on friends showed up and staged an orgy. While they were carpeting the living room floor with their calisthenics, she sat by herself in another room listening to the ‘Emperor’ Concerto. One of the girls crawled out of the bodies and joined her. She was blond, freckled, winsome; her nakedness wasn’t yet altogether nubile, and she looked slightly lost. ‘Can I come in here with you?’ she asked. ‘I’m not into this group sex bit.’
It was Becky Yemassee.
Joanna locked the door and slapped her. Becky screeched. But everybody was screeching. Her cry of terror sounded like just another orgasm.
‘What did you do with my goddamned money, you fucking brat!’
‘Moby took it!’
‘Who’s Moby?’
‘My guy. He said he had to go up t’ Terre Haute and he cut out and left me in Shelbyville and he took all the bread with him ’cept two hundred dollars he give me and that was the last time I ever seen him!’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Becky Yemassee. And you’re Nita, Duke’s chick?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t recognize you. What’s with your hair, like?’
‘It’s a wig.’
‘Yeah? Can I try it on?’
Joanna pulled off the wig and handed it to her. Becky put it on her head, walked over to the mirror. She looked like an Aztec sacrifice. ‘I’m goin’ to get me one,’ she chattered. ‘Wearin’ this hustlin’ my ass, I can charge the motherfuckers a hundred bucks a throw.’
‘Hustling your ass? Is that what you’re doing?’
‘No way, I’m going to be a singer. As soon as I can find a good secondhand gittar not too expensive. I only hustle when I gotta.’
‘Sing something for me.’
And Becky sang ‘I Heard the Crash on the Highway but I Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray.’
Joanna’s verdict was merciful. ‘Nifty peachy,’ she said dryly.
‘Kind of jagged,’ Becky admitted. ‘But that can be fixed when it’s recorded. Listen to that!’ In the other room the crowd was making zoo noises. ‘That’s the real Nashville sound!’
‘Come and take a shower,’ Joanna said. ‘You smell like an alligator.’
It began to rain.
Later the Eye climbed up the veranda lattice to the bedroom window. They were sitting on the bed, nude. Joanna was holding Becky on her knees, hugging her to her breast,
rocking her gently. They were both sobbing. He watched them and thought, By what way is the light parted? Hath the rain a father? Out of whose womb came the ice? He wondered where the hell he’d heard that before.
Becky was from Charleston, South Carolina. Her real name was Azalea Goche. ‘My ma come from Orangeburg,’ she explained. ‘That’s how I got that shitty name Azalea, from the Edisto Gardens there, full o’ azaleas. And Goche. Shit! How do you like that! Azalea Goche! I changed it when I took off. Did you ever read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier? I read it twice. Did you ever see the movie on TV with Joan Fontaine? She’s probably one of the most beautiful things on earth! I was almost goin’ to call myself Rebecca Fontaine, but it sounded too phony. I picked Yemassee instead. It’s a little town down near the Georgia borderline. It makes me keep rememberin’ where I’m from.’
Her mother had worked all her life in whorehouses in Walterboro, Charleston, and Folly Beach. ‘That’s where I grew up. In bordellos. By the time I was ten I knew fifty different ways to give hand jobs. I used to jerk off marines for a quarter. “You watch it,” Ma used to say. “One of ’em may be your daddy.” That was her idea of witty repartee.’
Her mother died when she was eleven. ‘A couple o’ shitheads from Parris Island took her swimmin’ one Sunday. She was bombed and as soon as the waves hit her she dropped dead.’ Becky ran away to Columbia, then to Charlotte, then to Knoxville. ‘I jerked off guys all the way across three fuckin’ states. In railroad stations, in Johns, in airports, in parkin’ lots, in Greyhounds, in drive-ins, in movies, once in the back of a hook-and-ladder with a fireman. In Charlotte I raised my price to a buck and a half. But I never went down on them, because I can’t take that stink. Puttin’ it in my mouth would be like eatin’ moldy baloney. I couldn’t do it even with Moby. He smelled particularly foul down there.’
She met Moby in Knoxville, and he took her to Indianapolis. ‘He was a baseball player. A shortstop for the Yankees, but they bounced him for snortin’ coke. He was also on sugar and copolots and Emma and you name it. He was like zonked out forever in perpetual Happy Landingville. He thought up the hitchhiking gimmick with a blackjack. We tried it out a couple of times in Indiana, then came down to Kentucky where I met you and hit the big loot. When you picked me up that afternoon near Irvington I said to myself. “Jesus H. Christ! She’s prettier than Joan Fontaine!” I didn’t belt you too hard – I hope you appreciate that. I didn’t want to leave a scar on your forehead. Afterwards I told Moby, the prick, “Shit! I hope she forgives me.” You do forgive me, don’t you, Nita?’