The ball-point pen he used glided without a sound.
“It should be you, Mrs. Wherry, writing the statement,” I said. “You—in one part of this house while the tragedy began in another. You, determined to keep this house from being engulfed by its foundations of disease and sand. Carrying the body of the child away. Not knowing then what else you could do. Improvising. Determined to fight in every way you could.
“You knew when Wallace Tulman returned. You called the Yacht Club, talked to Newell, found Tulman had been drinking alone, that no one could say for sure what time he had left.
“The formless desperation in you began to shape into a plan. You knew Giles Newell could be bought. You would sacrifice Tulman. Only Tulman. Then it would all be over.
“But it wasn’t over. And you had to keep making the blood sacrifices to the idol of family pride you’d set up. First the Hofstetter woman. Then because her death scared her brother, Giles, you had to lure him from talking to me with an offer of untold wealth. Lure him to death, because you knew the remnants of the family would never be safe so long as he lived.
“You had a very efficient extension of yourself—Max the Giant. To slug me, try to scare me off, to run me down with a car.”
She looked at the mountainous mass of muscle and sinew with the pink seal’s head. “He never killed anyone, Rivers. I ask for nothing to be done that I cannot do myself. I went to the Hofstetter woman when she made her demands. I went to the Madeira Beach cottage with a gun. I’m very sorry Evie Grove walked into the picture.”
The pink seal’s head swung slowly back and forth on the massive shoulders. There were tears in his eyes. “Mrs. Wherry—”
“I’m sorry, Max. I fear Mr. Rivers is right. There is no end to the course I tried to chart. There is only one possible end.”
She watched Milt drop the ball-point pen on the desk. She watched me cross to the desk and pick up the written statement.
Then she called gently, “Bryan …”
He came out of the den. “Yes, Grandmère?”
“Come to me, child.”
He walked to her. She reached and took his hand.
“We must take a short trip, Bryan.”
“Must we, Grandmere?”
“Yes. Max will see that we’re not disturbed.”
The generations of the Wherry family walked out of the room quickly.
Milt raised his head. Then he leaped to his feet. Max hit him flush on the chin and Milt was out cold.
I realized what was happening then.
I tried to dodge around Max. He threw a hard blow at my face. It caught me on the cheek and knocked me down. The giant was invincible.
He aimed a kick at my stomach. I rolled away, gained my feet. I was trying to pull the .38 when he closed in on me. I lost the gun as we wrestled backward.
We fell over a coffee table. In falling, I twisted sideways. His grip broke and I was free of him.
I scrabbled toward the door.
I thought of the cruiser bobbing at the dock, and of the great, dark reaches of Tampa Bay, and of an old lady and a little boy marching to the cruiser.
Max the Giant grabbed my leg and dragged me down.
CHAPTER
21
THE WILD SWING of his fist ended against my rib cage. I felt as if every bone in my body had been broken. I jabbed his eyeballs with my thumbs and fought him back for a moment. I had to rise above the agony in my side.
While I had him off balance, I kicked him in the groin. As he tried to bring my neck into the crook of his elbow, I clamped my teeth into the flesh of his forearm. I heard the grinding of my teeth as they met.
He bleated softly with pain and rolled away. I was on my feet again.
He half-circled me, placing himself between me and the door.
His arms were hooked wide as he came in. His arms swept up. He threw a judo chop at the side of my neck, but he’d used that one on me before. I sidestepped that one and ducked the one that followed.
My hand went to the back of my neck and came down holding the knife.
He snatched at the knife. The edge of the blade wiped crimson across his palm.
“Stay back,” I said. “I don’t want to use it.”
The pink seal’s head moved back and forth. The great arms reached. I went back, but not fast enough. His arms closed on me.
We reeled and fell.
I felt the knife strike yielding substance.
I saw the light go out of his eyes. It flared high, briefly, a light of bewilderment and pain.
Then it was turned off forever.
I rolled away from him. Took hold of a chair. Pulled myself upright.
My knees were trembling. They wouldn’t hold me for a moment, and I had to stand holding to the chair.
Sweat rose about me like a thick, gagging steam. I took a step from the chair, another.
I was outside and moving toward the dock.
I couldn’t see their shadows. Then I heard the whir of the electric starter.
I forced myself to a run. The motor of the cruiser barked to life and settled to a soft run.
The boat moved away. I fell to my knees on the dock and watched it go.
The shadow of the boat receded rapidly, until there was no shadow left. Only the sound of the motor fading into the darkness.
Then the sound finally stopped altogether. The bay was very quiet. Even the pale, moonlit clouds seemed to have stopped their motion in the sky.
I heard the faint echoes of the splash. Carried a long way across the water. Then the second splash.
And I knew I would hear nothing else out there. I got to my feet and stumbled from the dock. I looked at the Collins house and wondered if he would ever have the strength to rise above all this.
I looked at the Tulman house and felt the pull of it carrying me in that direction.
Inside, I made my way to the living area and sank in a vast and comfortable chair. I sat there pulling breath in and out of my lungs. For a moment I wanted only stillness.
Finally, I stirred. I pulled Milt Collins’ statement from my pocket. It was wrinkled and damp with my sweat.
I sat holding it. Holding Tulman’s life in my hands. Wondering, if I could turn back the clock, if I would do it over again.
I knew that I would. And I knew it would turn out exactly this way.
Tulman would never know the animal vigor of her, for he could never arouse it.
But I would never know it, either. Except to know it was there. For I would never have her.
I knew that now. With this house around me—and my apartment on the edges of Ybor City waiting for me.
I knew it with the memory of her lips and the storm over us.
I knew it with the knowledge that I had aroused an elemental something that no other man would ever bring to life in her.
But Tulman possessed the civilized part of her, and in her that was the strongest part.
I heard a taxi stop outside. I uncoiled out of the chair, and when she walked in, I handed her Milt’s statement. I handed her back to her husband. And compared to this, everything else had been a breeze.
For this was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
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The Smasher
1
At the tail end of the day I went up to my hotel room. It was like a thousand other hotel rooms, each as barren as all the others no matter how fine the furnishings. It shared with all the others an aloofness, a loneliness, a feeling of being unoccupied even if someone were living in it.
I propped my brief case against the leg of the kneehole desk and dropped my hat and coat across the bed. I thought briefly of home; and then I sat down at the desk, opened the brief case, and got to work on the report.
It was a lengthy report and I lost track of time while I was working on it. Finished at last, I paused to light a cigarette. My eyes were gritty, my neck and back dull with fatigue.
As I leaned back in my
chair, I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the bureau mirror. I was just moody enough to study the mirrored face for a moment. I hadn’t really looked at myself in a very long time. Women know what they look like. Few men do. We shave—and see the whiskers. Few of us know honestly what we look like.
The tiredness in the face gave me a faint jolt. It wasn’t a face with greatness reflected in it, nor was it an evil face. The face of Mr. Everyman, who was five feet eleven, weight one-seventy. If there was deep tiredness in the face, there were also an open honesty and decency in the strength of jaw, chin, and forehead. A lock of black hair had fallen out of place and the gray eyes were squinted. The face was brushed with the day-end, black beard stubble.
I yawned, stretched, then turned my attention to the report again. I signed it: Steve Griffin.
I stood up, arching my back against the kink in it, and discovered that I was hungry.
It had grown dark outside while I’d worked, and with the darkness had come a fine rain, wet bits of anger against the windowpane.
I decided a shower would make for a more enjoyable dinner. While I got a fresh shirt from the bureau, I thought of Maureen and Penny and home. The three were components of a single unit in my mind. A wife, a fine little daughter, a comfortable living—I figured the loneliness and fatigue of the road work were worth while.
I was hungry for Maureen, for the warmth of her flesh and the passion I could stir in her.
And then the jangling of the telephone cut my thoughts short. I sighed, pitched my clean shirt on the bed, and walked to the small phone table at the head of the bed.
“Hello,” I said. “Steve Griffin speaking.”
“Long distance calling,” the operator said. “Just a moment, please.”
There was a pause. The operator said, “Go ahead, please.”
And Maureen’s voice came to me faintly, like the voice of a child lost in a long, dark tunnel. “Steve—I’m glad I caught you in!”
“Maureen!” I said. “This is a surprise. Wait a second. The connection seems bad. I’ll tell the operator …”
“The connection’s all right,” she said in a stronger voice.
I gripped the phone. “Are you ill?”
“No, I …”
“Then it’s Penny!”
“Penny’s all right. She’s watching some kid TV show.” I relaxed.
“The sound of your voice had me worried for a second.”
“Steve,” she faltered, “it isn’t a pleasure call.”
I sat down slowly on the edge of the bed. “If both you and Penny are okay, then it must be some other kind of trouble.”
“Yes, Steve. I want you to come home. Right away.”
“Tonight?”
“Leave this minute! Please, Steve!” Her voice moved up the scale. Then she said quietly, simply, “A man’s trying to kill me, Steve.”
She was not a woman given to hysterics or wild imaginings. There was a chilling, my-back’s-to-the-wall seriousness in her tone.
I sat a moment in shock.
“Did you hear me, Steve?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll leave here immediately.”
“Thank you, darling,” she sobbed. “He made the second attempt today. The first time might have been an accident. But not twice.”
Twice. Twice someone had tried to kill my wife while I’d been going about my business knowing nothing of it.
There wasn’t a reason in the world for anyone to want to do something like that.
“Are you certain, Maureen?” I asked, knowing that she wouldn’t have called me without being certain.
“Yes, Steve,” she said, her voice beginning to crack. “He’s trying to run me down. With a car. He’s trying to smash the life out of me, Steve!”
“Easy,” I said.
“He tried the first time two days ago. I’d been out to the plant nursery to get some shrubs for Dudley to set. The car came swinging into the intersection, tires screaming. He’d been waiting for me—in a heavy green sedan.”
We had a heavy green sedan.
“A car exactly like ours,” she said. “I jumped aside, and he missed me. It shook me—but I didn’t think it was deliberate until today, Steve, when he had his second go at me. I went to the supermarket. I parked on the street instead of using the parking lot because the lot was jammed and hard to get into and out of. When I stepped from the curb, he came from nowhere. The same car. Heavy green sedan, turned into a monstrous weapon… .” Her words ended in a choked sound.
“My God, Maureen! Why?”
“Why?” she said. And she began crying. It wasn’t like her. Maureen never cried, except over a homeless kitten or a sentimental story. It hit me suddenly that she wasn’t crying because somebody was trying to kill her. She hadn’t started crying until I’d asked that simple question, probed for the reason.
“I should have told you everything days ago, Steve,” she said. “I wanted to. I’ve resolved to tell you, countless times—but when the moment came I never could get the words out. I haven’t been very brave, Steve. I thought that time would swallow up the whole thing and I could get by without hurting you and Penny. And when you start hiding a thing, it gets harder and harder to drag it out into the light.”
“Maureen—nothing could hurt me so much as having you in serious danger.”
“Thank God for you, Steve! I’m ready to go to the police. But I want you here. I need you with me when I tell them.”
“Tell them what, Maureen?”
“That I …”
“Yes, Maureen?”
“When you get home,” she said very softly. “Hurry, darling!” The line went dead.
A hundred miles of blackness and rain. I was driving a coupe that belonged to the sales department. It was light, but I pushed it to the limit, skidding on the curves and chancing speed traps in the small towns I whipped through.
The night held an unreal quality. As unreal as our first meeting. That had happened in Korea, in the first weeks of the police action. Holding a commission in the reserves, I’d been recalled and shipped out when the Commies rolled over the 38th parallel.
Maureen was with a USO troupe, and when the Commie plane came over, a propeller-driven fighter of World War II vintage, Maureen and I had landed in the same ditch.
It was a muddy ditch, but as the strafing guns burped closer, I slammed her down and threw myself across her. Some wicked chunks of steel were sailing around in the air for a while, and a siren was wailing.
Maureen was far from relaxed, but she wasn’t trembling, either. “Pardon me,” she squeezed out, “but you’ve got your elbow in my mouth.”
“Sorry,” I said, and shifted my arms a little as the sound of the plane became a high-pitched scream.
I could hear his guns. I could sense the lacy pattern his bullets were making on the ground. I felt their hot fire stitching across my back.
It was over in seconds. The plane went away and activity returned to the ground. There was a lot of confusion. A strafing was the last thing expected in the area, and the job in Korea was still so new that a lot of people hadn’t learned that the only predictable thing about a Commie is his unpredictability.
“Hey, soldier,” Maureen tapped my shoulder, “he’s gone.”
I looked at her, a dumb grin on my face. I was grayed-out from shock.
“Get off me, you big lummox!” she said. She wriggled free of me, outraged, disgusted, and then she saw my back. “Blood,” she said, and went green.
She bounced out of the ditch and came back with two guys who had a stretcher between them. They lifted me out of the ditch. She ran alongside as we jogged toward the ambulance.
She looked small and breathless, and the breeze feathered her short, curly blond hair.
“I’ll come to the hospital to see you, soldier,” she said as they slid me into the ambulance.
“Swell,” I said, speaking through my teeth because the numbness was going away.
She was b
owed and penitent as she took a last look at me before they closed the ambulance door. The attendants were going around the ambulance to get into the seat. Then I saw her face framed in the rear window. Her eyes were wide. “What’s your name?” she yelled.
The motor of the ambulance started. “Steve Griffin,” I said. I wondered if she’d got it over the surge of the motor.
She’d got it. She was at the hospital when I came out of surgery, and every day afterward as long as she was in the area. Later, I tried to remember what we’d talked about. I couldn’t. But I could remember that we were both eager to talk, interrupting and laughing.
I promised to look her up if I ever got back stateside.
My wounds were not serious in themselves. They healed quickly. But the aftermath was a muscle a bit too tight here, another slightly loose there. I felt fine and looked the same as ever, but the doctors said I’d never do any pick-and-shovel work.
The Old Man read me out of the service with a crack about needing weaker minds and stronger backs. Then he forgot his rank, shook hands, and I was booked for passage home. I’d had my war—without ever coming face to face with a Commie.
I kept my promise to look Maureen up when I got back. We were both unattached. We went around together for a while. It wasn’t a violent courtship. We were good company and enjoyed being together. We didn’t have to do a lot, or chase to a flock of expensive places, to have a good time.
We were lonely. The things we’d seen overseas had changed us. We needed something. We decided it was each other.
One night we went to a party, and when it was over neither of us wanted to go home. We drove the rest of the night, crossed a state line, and got married early the next morning.
We rented a suite in a good hotel, had breakfast sent up, and later, when I held her in my arms, her eyes were deep, her body yielding.
“Steve,” she whispered, “there’s one more vow I’d like us to make.”
“What is it?” I said.
“To work at making our marriage a success. So many people go into it nowadays expecting some kind of magic, expecting it to work automatically. A good marriage is something that has to be built.”
The Killer Is Mine Page 14
