Too Late for Tears

by Roy Huggins

  “I’m fascinated,” he said cheerily. “I don’t like your setup, beautiful. It looks like a snipe hunt. I don’t like it at all. Try me again sometime.”

  For a panicked moment she thought he had hung up. She screamed, “Danny!”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Listen!” She had been standing. She stumbled over to the chesterfield, kicking the cord away from the stand, and sat down. “It’s not a trap or whatever you’re thinking. I had to pick a place where I knew . . . you couldn’t do anything but play fair with me. You know it isn’t a trick!”

  She could hear him breathing into the phone. “It’s too screwy to be a trick,” he said. “If you were setting traps for me, it would mean someone was in it with you. They wouldn’t rig up something like this. This could only be your idea, gorgeous. I’ll be there. Opposite the pavilion, under the pine tree, McPhearson Park, nine o’clock tonight.” He hung up.

  Jane sat holding the dead phone and staring at the door, trying to see behind it, to see if Kathy was still there. She stood up shakily and put the phone back on its cradle and went to the door.

  She hesitated a moment, then unlocked the door and opened it wide.

  Kathy was at her own door. She looked up and Jane asked her to come in. She came down the hall, putting her key in her purse, and went on in and sat down.

  “Why don’t you ask me,” Jane purred, “why the door was locked?”

  Kathy looked up, and Jane thought angrily that one never knew whether the girl was anxious or confused. Her expression always, perhaps deceptively, implied a little of both.

  Kathy said, “It didn’t occur to me, Jane, It’s certainly none of my business.”

  “That’s awfully virtuous, darling. But I don’t want you getting any mistaken impressions.”

  “I’m not making a virtue of it,” Kathy said quietly. “If I got any impressions, I’ve already forgotten them. Can’t we just leave it at that, Jane? I want you and Alan to . . . stay together, Jane. Always remember that.”

  “Do you think we’re planning to separate?”

  “No! What’s with you today, anyway?”

  Jane sat down. She was tight inside, and sick. She had to know. When it was all over, there must be nothing, not even a name. And she knew that Kathy had heard a name. “I suppose you heard me on the phone.”

  “I suppose I did. I heard you say ‘Benny’ or something. But it meant nothing to me, Jane. I don’t enjoy gossip, even if I thought I had something to gossip about.”

  Jane looked at her hands and whispered, “I did say ‘Benny.’ He’s someone I——”

  Kathy stood up quickly. She was frowning now. “Please, Jane. Don’t tell me anything. You don’t have to.”

  Jane smiled. “All right. It’s all over anyway, and it never really got started. I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

  Kathy looked relieved, and they talked for a while about nothing at all. Ten minutes later Alan was home and Kathy was leaving.

  When they were alone, Jane kissed him and smiled brightly and said, “Darling, take me out to dinner. Just the two of us.”

  “Again? Hey, take it easy.”

  She said, “Tonight’s special, lover. Please. We’ll have dinner somewhere not too expensive, and then go to the park again, like we did the other night.” He grinned. “All right, Jane. Out it is. What’s so special about tonight?”

  “I laid out some clean underthings and a shirt. And wear your dark suit. I like you best in that. It’s not really special. I just said that.”

  He shook his head at her, kissed her and went into the bedroom, and pretty soon she could hear the shower running. She opened the closet door, looked back toward the bedroom and listened. She stooped down and felt at the hem of the coat. The ticket had worked its way into the corner at the left front hem, crisp and square. She left it and straightened up and went into the kitchen to mix some drinks.

  She was in the living room, pouring the drinks from the frosted silver shaker. She could see Alan putting on the shirt she had laid out for him.

  She said, “There’s a Martini in here for you.” He answered that that was just what the doctor ordered, and pulled a maroon tie off the rack and began to tie it. The coat of the dark suit was lying on the bed, Jane saw him turn to the coat and pick it up. He moved to put it on, then held it out and looked at the lining.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “The label’s been taken out of the coat.”

  “Ye-ea,” Jane breathed. “I noticed that when it came back from the cleaner’s.”

  He put the coat on and came in and picked up his Martini. “Nice. Just right, Janie.” He winked at her.

  She breathed again and said, “Yes, I made it with dry sherry instead of vermouth. Don’t you think it’s better that way?”

  “Much. Where’s your coat?”

  “You go ahead. I’ll put it on.” She turned abruptly and walked into the bedroom, trying hard to keep from running, wondering what to do if he followed. She couldn’t let him help her with the coat. He’d feel the weight of the gun. And she had to get her handbag. In the bedroom she turned and looked back. Alan had gone to the hall closet. Her heart was pounding. It was a small thing, but she had overlooked it! She hurried into the coat and brought the handbag out of the drawer, lifted it up and put it carefully under her arm, and walked out to the door. Alan was putting on the topcoat. It wasn’t a new coat. It was something he had had before the war, a dark blue material with a lighter blue check running through it. It was a college boy’s coat, the kind of coat people would notice.

  She said, “Sweetheart, you looked so nice the other night wearing a hat. Wear it tonight, will you?”

  He glanced at her sharply and said, “You’re not serious?”

  “But I am. Please, do it for me.” The look was puzzled now. He said, “What’s up, Janie?”

  “How do you mean, Alan?

  “I don’t know. That peculiar call I got at the bank yesterday. You and the excursion to the lake. And now a hat! You wouldn’t be throwing some kind of a surprise party or something, would you?” He grinned.

  “It’s just that you’ve grown up, darling. You don’t look dressed without a hat, and tonight I feel festive.”

  “If it makes you happy, bring on your damned hat.”

  They went to Pasquale’s for dinner. It was a small, one-room place on Melrose, but not an inexpensive place to eat. It was crowded and they had to wait for a while. It was something Jane hadn’t planned, having to stand in a crowded restaurant. She stood stiffly, seeing nothing, the whole world a gun in her pocket and a handbag that weighed a ton. It was warm in the place, and she knew that Alan was going to tell her to take off her coat. He was going to want to hold it for her, and she was going to have to keep him from doing it.

  Alan turned to her and said, “Janie, you look pale. Anything wrong?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “They ought to turn on some heat in here.”

  “Wh-what, Alan?”

  “It’s cold in here.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  The headwaiter came and led them to a booth. When they reached it, the handbag under her arm was suddenly an alien thing. What did one do with a handbag? Hold it on one’s lap? Put it on the table? Or on the bench, out of sight? She sat down and laid it beside her gingerly and dropped the coat from her shoulders. The waiter was taking their order and Alan was suggesting something to her. She didn’t hear him. But everything was all right again.

  She nodded and said, “That would be fine.”

  They left Pasquale’s at seven-thirty. She had had to fight off the supplications of the waiter and Alan’s bantering to keep from eating a dessert. Pasquale’s pastries were the specialty of the house. But Jane wasn’t eating dessert. It was important. At five after eight they were in the pavilion at McPhearson Park, and Jane was telling Alan that she was sorry now she hadn’t eaten a dessert, she was hungry again.

  So they had two hot-fudge sundaes
served by the girl with the apple cheeks. Jane talked with her, and the girl remembered them and asked if they expected to be steady customers.

  Alan said they might, and the girl smiled and said, “You two don’t fit. In the daytime we have married people with kids, and at night we have the kids.” She grinned and added, “Grown up a little, of course.”

  Then they were down on the landing and Alan was talking to the boy in the basque shirt and they were waiting. It would be longer this time, possibly twenty minutes. That was because Jane had insisted on having one of the big boats. “I want to stretch my legs. I was cramped last time.” The handbag was a monstrous thing that grew heavier with every moment, and her arm and shoulder were numb and the muscles along her left side burned. Alan was talking too much to the boy. The boy liked to talk, and he liked Alan. She could see that. He would be waiting for them to come back. “Alan, come and look at the ducks.”

  The boy jumped forward and guided one of the large boats alongside. Two girls with sloppy sweaters and two boys with dull eyes and stains on their mouths stepped out.

  The boy in the basque shirt nodded to Jane. “It’s yours,” he said.

  Jane sat at the stern while Alan guided the boat out toward the dark center of the lake. She had put the bag down beside her and the gun was heavy on her thigh. She wanted to rub her arm and shoulder, but she couldn’t. In the center of the lake, Alan shut off the quiet motor and turned and grinned at her. She could see the whiteness of his teeth and the soft red lights from the shore dancing in his eyes. He took off the hat and tossed it onto the seat beside her. She saw him look off to the left where the lights of other boats moved dimly. The sound of the mallards was quiet and sleepy.

  Jane glanced at her watch. Thirty minutes. There was infinite relief in that. Thirty long minutes of respite. She looked up at Alan again, and he was still lost in the things seen dimly across the lake. And as she watched him, slowly something gave way within her and she found that there was no drive, no clarity, no conviction, no cold rod of resolve to sustain her. She knew abruptly that she could not kill Alan. She had known it all along. These last few days had been a hoax played upon herself, an elaborate subterfuge, an escape, to put off for as long as possible the need to face that which she could not face: the loss of the round bright future, the return to Burbank or to the dark river lapping with cold tongue at the piers of Tulsa. She could not kill Alan.

  “You’re so quiet tonight, Jane.” He was smiling. He raised a hand and put it inside his coat. He brought it out and patted the topcoat pockets and said, “Damn. Left my cigarettes up there.” He leaned forward. It was too late. There was nothing she could do. He reached out and took hold of the handbag, and his hand came up an inch and stopped. The hand pulled, and the bag moved sluggishly, and from it came the soft sound of heavy metal falling against metal.

  Alan looked up slowly. “What’s in your purse?”

  “Nothing.” Her voice was as dry as pulp. “It must be caught on something. There—there aren’t any cigarettes in it.”

  He moved closer and opened it and put in a hand. He brought it out again empty, and he didn’t move. He was half kneeling, half sitting, staring down at the dark bag as if there were something unfolding there from which he could not look away. And then he slowly raised his head, and his eyes looked into hers and held them. The eyes were inside her, opening dark doors within her and beyond her, and the things behind the doors were things she had never seen and could never see.

  She felt the weight of the gun in her hand, and she brought it down out of the dark, heavy with agony and terror; brought it down again and again; even when she knew it no longer carried the thing with which it had begun.

  Alan was dead. There was blood. Blood on her right hand and blood on the gun and on the sleeve of her coat, and a black and gleaming stain of blood where Alan’s head lay on the bottom of the boat. Jane knew that this was the first moment in a new time. This was the moment of commitment from which time each act was an apogee. She pushed the body away from the blood toward the end of the boat. He moved reluctantly, fighting her now as he had never done in life. She took the little flashlight from her pocket and put the light on Alan’s coat. No blood on the coat. No blood on the sides of the boat. She put the light back and raised herself and put her hand up under her dress. She unhooked her half-slip and let it fall. She put it over the side until it was wet through, and cleaned her hand and sleeve and the gun and the floor of the boat.

  She looked at her watch. Ten minutes till nine. She wet the slip and scrubbed the floor of the boat again. She rinsed the slip out in the water and rung it out and rolled it into a tight ball and pushed it into the pocket of her coat. Alan was dead.

  The boat had drifted toward the west end of the lake, and a small boat was moving toward her, going nowhere. Traffic on the boulevard rolled by in distant silence. Jane pulled the switch, and the boat began to move slowly toward the shore. She could see the tree, tall in the moonlight, and with a thick darkness beneath it. She hung around and came down slowly, close to the shore. When the boat was several yards from the tree, she looked at her watch. One minute after nine, she threw off the switch, and the boat hewed and the water lapped silently against it as the boat drifted. She rowed it closer to the bank, only inches away, and pointed the flashlight toward the darkness under the pine and put the light beam out briefly, twice.

  She waited. No shadows moved, nothing stirred in the darkness under the tree. She flashed the light again, swinging it in an arc. No one came. She tried it again. She waited five minutes, then ten. No one came.

  It was only an aura of terror at first, bright and cold and without form. She pushed the switch blindly and guided the boat away from shore. She thought of nothing. A small boat went by and someone laughed as it turned sharply and sent waves rocking against the boat.

  She sat in the bobbing darkness and slowly let the thought sicken through her. Danny had changed his mind. He hadn’t come and he wasn’t coming. She stared down at Alan’s dark and huddled body. The boat rocked gently, seeming to move, and moving nowhere. Another boat glided by off to the right, and the sound of music danced sweetly across the water.

  PART THREE

  SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING INSTALLMENT

  Driving rebelliously homeward, beautiful, callous JANE PALMER told her ex-Navy flier husband, attractive, mild ALAN, now clerking in a small bank, that she was leaving him. Fearing he would wreck the car, she reached for the ignition key, but turned off the headlights. This apparently was a signal; a bag holding a large sum of money was thrown into their car from another car which it passed them. Jane decided they would keep the money, and she would stay with Alan. Alan, however, at first wanted to call the police; he weakened the next day and decided to hold the money for a time. He checked the bag at the Union Station, said a few words, which Jane could not hear, to the attendant, and put the check in his topcoat pocket, from which it dropped into the lining. They breakfasted with Alan’s pleasant sister, KATHERINE, who noticed that a mysterious constraint had come between them. Later, Alan grew fearful again; he insisted that the bag be sent to the police with a note, and Jane was filled with fury. She thought of getting rid of Alan, and the arrival of lean, seedy DANNY FULLER, a minor gangster to whom the money belonged, hardened her reserve. She decided to use Danny, and made a dale to meet him at a lake in the public park that night. She removed the labels from Alan’s clothes and bought wire and sash weights; after dark she talked Alan into taking her for a boat ride on the lake. She killed him and removed his topcoat. Then she went to the place where she was to meet Danny, but he wasn't there.

  NO more than Alan, did Jane move or think or feel. She was waiting, giving no thought to what she would do, because she did not accept the necessity of it. Danny would come. She raised her arm to look at her watch, and put her arm down again. Minutes later she realized she hadn’t looked at the watch. She raised her arm again. It was nine-thirty-five. She looked off in the direction of the pi
ne. The darkness under it was as cold and comfortless as the tomb. Slowly and without conviction, she pulled the switch and started back toward the tree.

  She came in close to the bank and turned on the flashlight and left it on and swung it in a wide arc. Something moved. A part of the shadow separated itself from the darkness and moved toward her and became a man. Danny Fuller was stepping into the bout. Jane was at the wheel, Alan’s body beside her. Danny stumbled and sat down on the cushion in the stern, and Jane threw the switch and turned the boat toward the center of the lake.

  She loved Danny. She wanted to throw her arms about him and tell him so, to tell him that he was joy and humor and the breath of life!

  She said, “Where were you?”

  “I don’t just walk into things, beautiful. I had to check on—What’s that?”

  “My husband. He’s dead. Don’t move, Danny. I have a gun pointed at your stomach.”

  Danny Fuller gasped.

  “It’s all right. I’m not going to kill you. You’re going to help me.”

  “Like hell I am! Listen. I don’t want the money any more. Do you take me back to shore or do I swim?”

  “If you move. I’ll shoot you. Then I’ll tell them you killed my husband. Perhaps that’s the best way to do it.”

  Danny Fuller said nothing at all. Jane flashed the light, on him and saw that he was sitting stiffly with his hands at his sides. She said, “Pull your coat aside . . . Now the other side. That’s fine. Now the pockets . . . Good. You don’t carry a gun, Danny?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to use it.”

  “I want you to know something. I need you. Not only now but later, when we have the money.”

  “If you want my help, let me off this scow.”

  “Stop it, Danny. You haven’t anything to worry about, I need you. And no one is ever going to know about this. I’ve worked it out to the last detail. My husband and I took this boat out a little more than an hour ago. He and I will get off again in just a few minutes. You’ll be wearing his coat and hat. I’ll pay for the boat and you’ll go on up the stairs and out to the car. My husband won’t disappear until some time later. Are you going to help?”