“You’re educated, aren’t you? I mean, you sound it.”
“I went to college, too. Only I graduated.” She tacked on a smile and eyebrow hike to this.
“What’d you study?”
“Psychology.”
“How’s that work for you?”
“I can read people pretty well. Now, Hank, he’s easy. You, not so much.”
“Always thought I wore it on my sleeve.”
“You might be wearing something, but it’s not you, Archer. Not by a long shot.”
“Why do you want to be around a man like that? He’s more than twice your age. And he’s married, too. Marjorie Pittleman seems nice and respectable.”
“That’s not my issue, that’s his and his wife’s. As to my reasons, Hank treats me pretty well for the most part. We go out, we have a good time, and then I have my own time.”
“Where do you live?”
“In a house on Eldorado. Number 27. Hank got it for me.”
“A house, huh, then you’re a kept woman of sorts.”
“You got that from a book, I think.”
“I think you’re right about that. You have long-term plans with old Hank?”
“I don’t really think past tomorrow. I only live in the moment. Spontaneous.”
He shook his head and finished his drink. “I don’t think I believe that.”
“Believe what you will or won’t. But let me give you an example.” She set her drink down, stood, and slipped off her jacket, revealing her dress straps and bare shoulders. She pulled down the straps, reached around to the back of her neck, undid a clasp there, pulled down the zipper, and commenced to wiggle herself free from the dress’s constraints while Archer could only watch with rapt attention. Finally, the fabric hit the floor. She stepped out of the pile of dress and stood there with not much on except her stockings, garter belt, and underwear.
Archer found he could not look away, not even if a regiment of Nazis were bearing down on him with Hitler leading the pack. He had seen naked or nearly naked women before, in four different countries. He had never seen one that stirred his heart like this woman. Her body was icy pale and soft in every place that mattered to a man. Her mouth was infinitely kissable. And her contrasting Veronica Lake dark peekaboo had never seemed more in reach for a man like him.
She put an exclamation point on this by twirling around for him.
“Are my intentions now made clear?” she said, coming to face him. “Because I’m not sure what else I can do, quite honestly.”
“I think I get the point.”
“I’m truly relieved.”
“And Hank?”
“He’s not here now, is he?”
“Do I have a say in this?”
Her face fell. “I think that’s a given, but if you’re not interested?”
She bent down to pick up her dress, but he gripped her by the shoulders, pulling her straight up.
“You’re taller without my shoes on,” she said, looking up at him.
“I suppose I am.”
“You have a nice mug, Archer. Good bones. Not too handsome and not too scary.”
“Moderation is a good thing.”
“But not all of the time.”
He looked down at her and noticed the bruises on her arms, upper thighs, and obliques.
His features darkening, he said, “What the hell happened there? You fall?”
She didn’t even look at where he was staring. “Nothing important, Archer. Nothing at all.”
“You sure? I mean, if Pittleman did—”
She put a hand over his mouth.
“Focus. I need you to focus. The night’s not getting any younger and neither are we.”
She stood on her tippy-toes and put her lips against his.
A moment later, they toppled, as one, onto the bed.
Chapter 13
WHEN HE WOKE EARLY the next morning, she was gone, and Archer wasn’t surprised. She seemed like a cat to him. Affectionate when she wanted to be, and off again when she had gotten her fill.
A loud noise from somewhere out in the hall had catapulted him groggily from his slumbers. He rolled out of bed and saw it. She’d left her flask behind, perched on the dresser. He hefted it and heard the slosh of contents inside. Maybe she’d left it here because she intended to come back and retrieve it at some point. That was a thought to both spur and trouble a man.
He washed up in the toilet down the hall, put on his new clothes, and stepped out of his room. Pittleman’s room was just down there. Archer wondered if that was where Jackie had gone for the duration of the night. The thought that she had left his bed to inhabit Pittleman’s gave him a pang of jealousy that within the span of two strides he decided he had no right to feel.
Still.
He walked briskly down the hall to Number 615 and was surprised to see the door slightly ajar. He gripped the knob and opened it just a crack, so he could see inside. With the light streaming in from the windows, he gazed around the room and saw Pittleman still stretched out on the bed. He smiled when he thought about the hangover the man was going to wake up to. But despite his earlier thoughts, there was no sign of Jackie. He was about to leave when he saw it. The towel on the floor. And next to it, something that glinted in the creeping glow of sunlight, but that he couldn’t make out precisely.
He gave a searching look up and down the hall. No one was about yet, for it was still early. He swung the door all the way in, stepped inside, and closed it behind him. The last thing he wanted was to disturb the sleeping man, but he thought of a ready explanation if Pittleman woke up and saw him.
He scurried over to the towel and squatted down. The object next to it was a switchblade, like the one he had seen Pittleman use at the bar to spear the twenties and not so subtly threaten him. The blade was open. Archer looked at the towel and knife more closely and then became rigid. They were both coated with blood. He stood, walked over to the bed, and looked down at Pittleman.
The man wasn’t asleep. Nor was he awake. He was just dead.
The slit under his throat was wide and deep. The person wielding the knife had driven the blade in to its full length, and then worked it jaggedly from side to side, like opening a can of soup. This wasn’t necessary to kill the man. It was done to mutilate, and that thought sickened Archer. The dead man, his clothes, and the bedcovers under him were soaked in dried blood. It must have been a gusher when the blade had hit the big arteries. He knew this for certain.
Archer had killed a German near Salerno in hand-to-hand fighting. He’d been lucky to get the advantage, and the German had been unlucky to lose his grip in what might have been the coldest winter Italy had ever seen. Though he hadn’t been nearly as vicious as the person who had dispatched Pittleman to the hereafter, Archer had slit the German’s throat from basically ear to ear, just as he’d been taught. That way you didn’t have to worry about your opponent’s having a second opportunity to take your life. Archer had been covered in the German’s blood when twin geysers had erupted from the severed arteries feeding his brain. He thought whoever had killed Pittleman would have the same foul coating.
His next thought was one of self-interest. He rummaged in the man’s pocket and pulled out the thick wad of cash, which seemed about as hefty as the last time Archer had seen it. Well, it didn’t look like robbery had been the reason to kill the man. And yet for Archer now to peel a few twenties off would not diminish it a jot. The man’s widow would have plenty left over. And Archer might have indeed done so, for he was no better than most when it came to levels of selfishness, but he made the mistake of looking at the man’s eyes.
They were wide open and seemed to be staring intensely up at him, carrying with them a look not of disapproval, but of betrayal. If a dead man’s eyes could really convey that emotion, they had just done so to Aloysius Archer.
He slowly put the wad back, with not a single twenty plucked from its hide, and then used his fingers to close the man’s flat, gl
assy eyes. Archer had done this very thing on battlefields more times than he ever cared to remember. It had been gospel among American soldiers that a dead comrade with open eyes could still see the violent carnage of his own death and would therefore never have a restful afterlife. Archer wasn’t particularly fond of Pittleman—he really didn’t know the man—and what he had learned about him was not especially heartwarming. Yet he could see no reason to deprive him an element of peace in death.
But then something occurred to him. He looked in the other pocket and pulled out the promissory note papers given by one Lucas Tuttle to, now, a dead man. He slipped these in his jacket pocket. They might come in handy down the road.
A moment later, and after fully realizing the peril of his current situation, Archer stepped away from the bed, backed to the door, and left the room of the murdered man, after giving another look up and down the hall.
Slightly dazed by what he’d seen, though he had viewed deaths far more horrible than Pittleman’s, and in far greater numbers, Archer hurried back to his room and had himself a nip from the flask. There was a difference between killing on the battlefield, where it was expected, and murder in a hotel room, where it wasn’t or at least shouldn’t be a common occurrence.
He took out the papers and studied the legal writing there. He looked at the amount owed and the signature of Lucas Tuttle. He flipped back to the page with the collateral listed and saw the Cadillac’s description. That collateral no longer existed, but that didn’t matter now. These papers were worth five thousand dollars plus interest to, he supposed, Pittleman’s widow, and at least sixty dollars to him. But Archer wasn’t sure what to do with them right now. He put the papers away in his jacket pocket.
His nerves steadied a bit, he walked down the stairs to the hotel lobby, sat in the same cane back chair Jackie had, stared at the empty fireplace, and thought about what to do.
There was one prime suspect, at least to his mind.
He knew that Jackie Tuttle was well aware of the dead man’s location last night, having helped transport him to that very spot. And Archer had no idea how early she had left his room, him being sound asleep after their lovemaking. And he had no clue as to how long Pittleman had been dead, though it was not a recent death, the blood having dried, and the body having cooled considerably. Archer knew that they had reached his room at just about the crack of eleven because a clock from somewhere outside had bonged the time. A few hours after that Jackie could have left Archer, done the deed, and departed to her home on Eldorado Street.
But why kill a man who had given her a house and money and all?
He walked over to the front desk, where a different clerk from the one who had signed him in was drinking a cup of coffee. He was small with thin cheeks and dark hair cut close to the scalp. His bowtie was green against a pale white shirt with a wool vest over it. His cheeks and nose carried the red sheen of a heavy drinker, and the heavy pouches under his eyes spoke of many nights with little or no sleep.
“Help you?” asked the man.
“Yeah. I was wondering if you saw a young lady leave early this morning?”
“And who are you?”
“Archer. I’m in Room 610.”
“And what young lady would that be?”
Archer described Jackie Tuttle but didn’t give her name.
The man looked back at him primly and said, “I didn’t see anyone.”
“You sure about that? What time did you come on duty?”
“You ask a lot of questions. What’s your business with this person?”
“Just making an inquiry about a lady. If you don’t know, you don’t know.”
“Would she have been coming out of your room this morning? This ain’t that kind of place, mister.”
“Well, thanks for telling me. And also thanks for nothing, pal.”
As soon as he started walking to the door of the hotel, Archer could feel the man’s gaze on his back. He wished he hadn’t said what he had. Now there would be a direct line among him, Jackie Tuttle, and the dead Pittleman. As a scout in the army and as an inmate in a prison, Archer had never made an error like that, and he wondered why he had in Poca City of all places. Well, maybe he knew why. A woman was involved. Archer just had a weakness there that disrupted his otherwise flawless instincts at self-preservation.
He walked along, hands drilled into his pockets, wondering if he should break his parole and make a run for it now. Archer decided against that and made a detour after asking a man for directions. Eldorado Street was about a half mile away, nearing the edge of Poca’s compact downtown. It was a neighborhood of quaint small homes that looked like something you’d see in a Hollywood picture.
Number 27 was maybe the nicest of them all, he thought, with pretty little white shutters and flowers in both pots and dirt beds already looking for sun at this hour and no doubt thirsting for water. The brick siding was painted white, and the front porch had a little overhang with a metal chair and matching table set near the front door. Unlike some of the other homes, there was no automobile parked in the short gravel driveway.
Archer observed as much of the house as he could, checked around for folks who might be watching him, saw none at this still early hour, and headed up to 27’s front door.
He knocked, waited, and knocked again. Then he heard feet padding toward him. The door was opened and there stood Jackie in a thin, form-fitting bathrobe that looked to Archer like something out of Chinatown in New York. It was crimson and had dragons and elongated masks and symbols of other such Oriental influence emblazoned across the fabric. She was barefoot, her face puffy and free of makeup, and her hair looked slept on.
She rubbed her eyes and exclaimed, “Archer, what in the world are you doing here?”
“You were gone when I got up.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to spend the night there.” She smiled. “Did you like it so much last night that you came around here for more?”
“Can I come in?”
“I suppose. You want some coffee? Now that I’m up, I intend to brew some.”
“That’ll be swell, yeah.”
She led him into a small living room and pointed to a chair.
“Black or something in it?” she asked.
“Just black.”
She left, and he looked around. He didn’t know if the furniture had come with the place; but it looked like it had. It was stuffy and old and downtrodden, and he couldn’t imagine the stylish young woman picking it on her own. A few minutes later she came back with a small wooden tray holding two cups of coffee perched on delicate saucers. She handed one to him and took the other. On a plate on the tray were also a couple pieces of toast, buttered.
“Help yourself,” she said, yawning. “You look hungry. For food or something else?” she added enticingly.
“Food will do for now.” He sipped the coffee, which was hot and strong and bitter, just the way he liked it. And the bread and butter felt good going down with the coffee and helped to settle his rumbling stomach.
“What time did you end up leaving my room?” he asked.
“What? Why?”
He shrugged. “Just wondering. Didn’t hear anything when you went.”
“Well, I was quiet. Didn’t want to wake you. You were sleeping so good.” She smiled and stroked his arm. “I wonder why?” She let her hand drop and added, “You were really something last night, Archer. Compared to Hank, well there was no comparison. But he’s old.”
And not getting any older, Archer thought.
“You check on him before you came here?”
She took some of her coffee and a bite of toast. “Check on him? What for? He was dead asleep when we left him.”
Archer managed not to wince at the unintended irony of her word. “Just wondering. You would’ve passed right by his door and all.”
“I came straightaway here and fell into bed. You wore me out.”
He abruptly took off his hat and drank his coffee fast enou
gh to where it burned going down.
“You thought any more about how to get that debt paid?”
“Yeah, you can go back home to your daddy.”
“Any other way? Because that’s not an option.”
“Was it really that bad there?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m just trying to understand things.”
“No, you just want your crummy money.”
“Okay, that’s part of it. And I can understand why you want to be on your own. But your daddy seems nice, when he’s not pointing his Remington at you.”
“You met my father exactly once. How in the world could you possibly think you know him?”
“That’s fair enough. I know you loved your mother. Desiree told me that. Even showed me her picture.”
Archer thought this would please the woman, but by her flushed face and angry features, this had been a serious miscalculation on his part.
“I don’t like the fact that you’re snooping around my business, Archer.”
“See here, I didn’t ask the woman to tell me that or show me her picture. She just did. And your mom was beautiful. You take after her, not your dad.”
Jackie’s features softened. “I do take after my mom. And she was beautiful. On the inside, too.”
“I can see that. There was a lot of sweetness in the picture.”
“But she could get angry, and she never shrank from giving her opinion on anything.”
“Like mother, like daughter.”
She smiled at this and Archer, heartened by how the conversation was going now, followed that up with a question which he regretted as soon as it left his mouth.
“So how’d your mother die then?”
The flush came back to the face and in her anger Jackie stood and glared down at him.
“Why in the hell does that have anything to do with you? What right do you have to even ask it?”
“I’m…I’m sorry. I have no right at all to ask it. And I didn’t mean to—”
She cut him off. “I don’t want to talk about it, Archer. And if that’s the reason you came, then you can finish your coffee and get the hell out.”
One Good Deed Page 11
