by Roy Huggins
“It was Blake when you knew me. Yours was Palmer.”
“And now we both have new names, is that it? I hope you didn’t spend too much locating me——”
“It wasn’t too difficult.”
“—because I’m afraid I haven’t any bonanzas . . . yet.”
Blake grinned with stiff lips. “Forty or fifty grand, according to Danny’s girl friend.”
Jane’s stomach pulled tight and a nerve began to jump visibly in her throat. The man was bluffing! He had never actually seen her with Danny. There was no connection between them and no way to make one! And she was suddenly without fear. The man was a criminal, and there was deep rebel in that knowledge, and strength.
She rasped, “Get out! I don t know anyone named Danny and I haven t any money.” Blake dropped the cigarette in the tray and looked at his watch. Jane repeated, “Get out! I swear I’ll scream to wake the dead if you don’t get out!”
Blake crossed his legs and said, “You’re right, you don’t have anything to worry about on Danny. You’ll never go to the gas chamber for what you did to him. But you will for what you did to your husband . . . I found his body.”
Jane was a long time responding. She had had to work it out. If Alan’s body had been found, it would be the police who would be after her, not Blake. She had been getting the Los Angeles papers. She’d have read of it.
The smile revived and warmed, and she said, “Where did you find him?”
“Right where you left him.”
She gave a throaty laugh and said, “I shall begin to scream in just ten seconds. I have a loud scream. It carries.”
She laughed again, and then Blake cut the laughter short, broke it abruptly, viciously, with a few cold words. “I let him,” he said, “drop back in.”
A pulsing, layered shadow closed over her mind, and for an endless moment she fought this fear with the even greater fear that she would betray herself. She heard herself whispering, “Drop . . . back . . . where?”
But even while she it, she knew that he had won, and she began to find solace in it, and respite. She would pay him, and so she would bind him. She would still be free. He had not answered. She rose and walked to the windows and pulled the blinds. The window was open and there was an odor of gardenia in the air. A few white clouds lazed low in the sky.
“How much,” she asked quietly, “do you want?”
“I’m not greedy. I’ll settle for half.”
“That would be about fifteen thousand.”
“I want twenty.”
“There was only thirty.”
“Twenty for mine. You’re lucky I don’t take it all.”
She turned and walked back to the center of the room. “I don’t have it here.”
“Go and get it.”
“You trust me?”
“Why not? You’re more anxious to buy than I am to sell.”
Jane nodded. “You’ll wait here?”
“Uh-huh. You won’t run away.”
She walked to a closet and brought out a hatbox. “It’s in twenties and fifties. The box is to carry it in.” Blake nodded distantly and Jane went out. Walking down the flight of stairs from lobby to street, Jane told herself that she must not complicate things. She must go to the bank. The doorman called up, “Coche?” and Jane nodded. She was in the cab now, and she was repeating to herself that she must go to her bank and get the money and pay the man. There was a hard and lucid simplicity about it. They shared the money and thus they shared the guilt. But Jane found herself telling the driver to take her to another place. It was a shop she had seen many times, a sportsman’s shop, a place to buy fishing tackle and riding equipment and guns.
The clerk was polite. The clerk agreed that the señorita might be wise to carry a small pistola. But before he could sell the señorita this, she must have a—He had difficulty finding the word and said, “Permiso para portar armas.” He shrugged and shook his head.
In the cab, Jane shuddered, and once more felt warm relief. She was glad she could not buy the gun. The near folly of it appalled her, and she closed her eyes. She was driven to the bank, where she counted the money into the hatbox and returned to the hotel.
The room was dark again. She closed the door behind her and caught her breath. The lights came on and Blake was standing by the wall, holding a tiny automatic in his hand. He grinned. “Silly, my being suspicious of you, isn’t it?”
Jane walked to the coffee table and dropped the box. “There it is,” she breathed.
He dropped the gun into a pocket and came around the love seat to take Jane’s purse and look into it. He took a quick glance at her trim figure and said, “No gun, Miss Petry? I feel almost slighted.” He opened the box and began counting, using only the fifty-dollar packets. “He counted it into two stacks, using only a small part of what was there. He looked up then and said, “It tempts me, but I guess that does it.”
Jane frowned and asked slowly, “What’s this all about?” Blake’s attitude had taken on a subtle change, the face suddenly tired and without expression, as if he had lost taste for his victory. He sat down.
“I’m giving you,” be whispered, “a strict accounting of your funds. You see, I needed some money, and I had to know for sure that Alan Palmer was in the lake.”
Jane sank slowly to the love seat, feeling the muscles about her mouth begin to pull and stiffen, She waited for what was coming.
“I hadn’t thought,” he said quietly, “that I would feel any qualms. I had planned to enjoy this, to play cat to your mouse, to have a kind of sanguine bacchanal. But I’m not enjoying it . . . You’re going back, Mrs. Palmer.” Inside her now was a cascading chaos, a drawing sickness reaching through her and pulling with sharp, cold fingers at her throat. The feeling of having known Blake, of having known him long and well, lay heavily over her.
She breathed deeply and tried to make the words come out strong and cold, but her voice was a tiny thread of sound. “You can’t take money and then——”
“The first stack is for a man named Montenegro. He has an army of detectives here in Mexico. That was why I let you go to the bank alone. The other stack is for a man named Hoxie. He owns McPhearson Park Lake.” Jane sat silent and bewildered, shaking her head as if she were denying something.
“I’ve got to have someone to watch you,” he explained, “while Hoxie brings up Alan’s body and I get our overworked constabulary moving. Montenegro has that job. You’ll probably try to run away. I expect that, but you’ll be wasting your time. Better stay here and enjoy the week you have left.” He stood up then and pocketed the two stacks of money. He looked briefly at Jane once more and walked toward the door.
“Wait!” Jane shrilled, standing and almost stumbling after him. He turned and she stopped a few feet from him, feeling his unimpassioned contempt like a cold wave. “Please! Are—are—you——”
“No, Mrs. Palmer. I’m not the law, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then—But her mouth pulled spastically down away from her tongue, and what she had tried to say was gibberish. She stepped forward and took hold of his arms and shook her lovely golden head in frenzied agony until tears began to fall. And with the tears came release, and she cried, “Please! I’ll give you the rest! There’s almost forty thousand dollars! It’s yours! All of it’s——”
He took her hands away from his arms. His face was pale, immobile, blank. “You can’t see it, Mrs. Palmer,” he said, “but I’m riding a great white horse. These are boar-hide walls and I’m jousting with Evil.”
Jane stared, trying to think of what he was saying, searching for hope or a promise in it. And then she saw the familiar thing in his eyes again, and she cried, “Who are you? Damn you, who are you?”
“Someone who couldn’t let you get away with it, Jane. A killjoy.”
Jane threw her hand out sharply, as if she were brushing something aside. What was he saying? What was he talking about? She whispered, “Why?” and her voice choked off an
d the tears came again. She repeated brokenly, “Why?”
Blake studied her with a distant detachment, and over Jane’s hopeless foreboding rose a faint anticipation of victory, and she smiled. She summoned all her flagging will and subtle artistry for that smile. She made it sweet and swift, and brave and pleading. And Blake’s expression changed and he seemed to make up his mind about something.
He said coldly, “The name is Blanchard. Does it mean anything to you?”
Jane moved back slowly, the smile a wooden painted thing across her face. She put out a pink tongue tip to wet her lips, but they remained as they were, hot and dry.
“I once married a man,” she croaked, “named Blanchard.”
“Yes. And you also killed him,” he replied.
He seemed suddenly to move, and Jane stumbled back. And then she knew he had not moved. The room had moved. It had become a bright hot void without dimension or perspective. She felt the hideous smile clinging relentlessly to her face.
He was talking again in a kind of monotone, “I was overseas when I heard of it. I knew he hadn’t killed himself . . . even then. He was my father, and vanity wasn’t one of his faults. He wouldn’t have given a damn for failure.”
Jane’s eyes were just dead flesh now. She stared beyond him, beyond the wall, even beyond her fate. He turned and walked to the door, then looked back at her.
“Don’t think,” he said slowly, “that this was all a vendetta, Jane. Revenge is a tawdry spur. You inspire far more epic motives.”
The words gathered inside her and echoed down the long bare corridor of her mind, round and hard and brittle, like the rapping of judgment. He opened the door, and she tried to move, but could not. He closed it quietly behind him without looking back, and left her standing and grinning emptily at nothing.
He walked down the cool, scented ball, and in the shadow there a little dark man nodded as be passed. In a far comer of the lobby Kathy waited with a pale, strained face. He found her there and smiled.
“It was a short honeymoon, angel,” he said, “We’re going home.”
THE END
