by Orrie Hitt
“Hell,” I said, pulling myself up out of the water. “I didn’t see you there. Sorry.”
She laughed and curled her toes.
“I just wanted to get wet,” she said. “Now I won’t have to go to the trouble of going in.”
I stood up on the platform, and I could hear the water dripping down onto the boards. She was very short, just a little over five feet. Everything about her, the shape of her head, the cut of her nose, the small mouth, was dainty and petite.
“You’re the fellow who took the cabin on the hill?”
I nodded.
“It’s nice up there.”
“Yeah.”
“Last summer I knew a fellow who had that place,” she said.
“Oh, you’ve been here before?”
“This is my third season.”
“You must like it.”
She reached down and loosened the bathing suit from around her thighs.
“I sure do,” she said. “Better than Philly.”
“What’s wrong with Philly?”
“Nothing that being away from it three months a year won’t cure.”
“Some of our best people come from Philly,” I told her.
She kicked her toes into some of the loose sand lying on the boards. A lot of it flew up and stuck to my wet legs. My bathing trunks kept leaking water like I was the most careless guy in Pine Valley.
“Oh, my God!” she said suddenly, her face alarmed.
“What now?”
“You’re Mr. Weaver, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.” ’
“Gee, I’m sorry!” She came over and put a hand on my arm. She had a nice, soft, warm hand, and the rest of her was all right, too. Only she was so small. So small that she looked as though one night of fun would kill her. “There was a phone call for you, Mr. Weaver. I forgot to tell you.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know. I just heard that new girl at the desk — Sally-telling about it.”
I had no idea who it might be. I had left the phone number of the hotel at the office, but I was pretty sure that no one there would try to call me. The boss was never sober enough to carry on business over the week-end. Unless, of course, Irene Schofield had called the office and someone there had —
“Thanks,” I said to the redhead. Then, hurriedly, “See you around.”
I left her there by the pool and walked to the front of the hotel. People were scattered around on the porch, reading the Sunday papers. I got past some kids, jumped over the latest issue of Dick Tracy, and went into the lobby.
“Hello, Tarzan,” Sally said, as I came up to the desk. “What gives with that get-up?”
“I am Tarzan,” I told her, grinning. “I heard my mate calling.”
Her face got red.
“How are you doing, Sally?”
She looked away from my chest and back at my face.
“Fine. And I have the nicest room!”
“That’s good.” She had on a striped dress that threw all of her curves into high gear. “Was there a phone call for me?”
“Billie told you?”
“I don’t know who she was. She looked like a little kid.”
“That’s Billie. She’s nice, Nicky. I share the room with her. I’ve got the number right here.”
She went over to the switchboard and I didn’t miss a move. I was still trying to figure out how she could have such soft, round hips and full breasts and hardly any middle at all, when she came back and handed me a slip of paper.
“That’s the number.”
“Okay,” I said.
“There’s a phone booth at the end of the lobby.”
“Okay.”
I started to move away.
“Nicky?”
“Yes?”
“Nicky — I won’t be busy tonight.”
I looked straight into her eyes and I knew what she was thinking. Any other time it would have been fine with me, but there were some things I had to get straight first. I had seen Sally’s kind before. They were nice girls and they played for keeps. A guy had to be sure he had an extra shirt before he sat down at the table with them.
“Well, I may have to go into town,” I said. That was the truth, or close to it, because I didn’t know what this phone call was about. “I might not get back early.”
Her eyes registered hurt.
“I’ll be here,” she said, her voice small. “If you want me.”
I found the phone booth and crawled inside. I was lucky that it wasn’t a pay phone or I’d have had to go back and borrow a nickel from Sally. I raised the operator all right, gave her the number and sat there smelling the wet wool of my trunks.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Yeah,” I said. It was a man’s voice. “Who’s this?”
“Dell.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Nicky?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Say, Nicky, about that money you said I could — say, I’m glad you called, fellow!”
“What about it?”
“Nicky.” His voice was desperate; I could almost hear him clutching the words. “You meant that, Nicky, didn’t you?”
I thought about it. This dough would have to come out of the bank in Brooklyn. I thought about how it had been earned and the price I had paid for it. I wondered if I was getting the same as the rest of them, blowing it away, like water dropped on a hot stove lid.
“I meant it,” I said. “How much?”
“Four hundred.”
That wasn’t so bad. I could take a note from him and later on, when he got straightened out and had another job, perhaps I could get him to borrow from some finance company and pay me back that way.
“When would you want it, Dell?”
“How about this afternoon? I could drive out to the hotel-say, around four — and meet you in the bar.”
“All right.”
There was a slight pause.
“Jesus, Nicky, thanks!”
“I’ll be here,” I said, and hung up.
I went out the side entrance and across the lawn to the path that led up to the cabin. I walked along slowly, getting the smell of the summer morning, thinking about the insurance business and guys like Dell. There were a lot of guys like Dell in the business, guys who made good money and couldn’t make ends meet. Pretty soon they started taking money out of their collections, at first trying to make it up the next week, and later just hoping to Christ that they didn’t get caught by an audit before they latched onto a big policy and a big commission and squared everything away. There were a lot of ways that they did it. They collected payments on policy loans from policy holders and never turned them into the company. Sometimes they collected the loans in full, never turned them in, and paid the interest themselves. Or they got real cute and gypped everybody a week when they credited the dividends in the premium receipt books. The amounts were never large and the methods they used were always dumb and petty. They were senseless. The stakes were never high enough.
About two o’clock that afternoon I went down and had lunch in the grill room. Most of the guests ate in the main dining room, so the bartender on duty took turns pouring drinks for a couple of janes at the bar and jumping tables with an occasional sandwich. Along about the end of my coffe the place was deserted except for a tall, lanky man who had come in and plopped himself down at the end of the bar. He had a highball in front of him and he kept looking at it like it was the last one in the world.
“Who’s the great thinker over there?” I asked the bartender when he came back with my change.
The bartender remained dumb until I slipped him a buck.
“Oh, him? Some artist from down in the valley.”
I looked at the tall man closely.
“Many artists around here?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Would his name be Schofield?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” The bartender looked at the fifty cent
s still lying on top of the table. I slid it across to him. “I remember him from last summer. He was always in here with some guy who takes pictures for magazines. This is the first he’s been around this year.”
“Thanks.”
“You should see those pictures,” the bartender said, grinning. “Christ, but they were something!” I didn’t say anything.
“I’ll show them to you sometime, if I can find them,” he said.
Schofield downed his drink and rapped his glass on the bar. The bartender said something under his breath and went over there in a hurry.
I sat for a while, watching Schofield, studying him. He didn’t appear to be as tall as I was, but he was tall enough, although his shoulders were only about half as broad. He’d been out in the sun plenty because his hands were burned brown, but the skin on his face wasn’t any darker than some girl who had just rubbed on liquid make-up. He looked like a sick man on a vacation.
For a while he kept the bartender busy pouring drinks. But after the fifth one he slowed up and when I saw that he wasn’t trying to knock himself out as quickly as possible I got up and went over to the bar.
“Old Forester and water,” I told the bartender.
I drank that one by myself, keeping quiet, and thinking about this guy down at the end of the bar. When my second glass of water came up, I nodded toward Schofield and asked:
“Have a drink?”
“Why not?” he wanted to know.
After we’d lifted glasses and taken a belt, I picked up my change, cigarettes and booze and moved down to the stool beside him.
“On vacation?” he inquired.
I noticed that his voice was low and husky, almost like some night club thrush who was warming herself up for a good blues song.
“No,” I said. “I’ve got the cabin on the hill.”
“The high one?”
“Yes.”
“Nice view.”
We finished our drinks and he waved at the empty glasses.
“I’m with the Great Northern,” I said. “I work in town.”
“What’s that?”
Things were going pretty good. I’d wanted to meet him, maybe stick a bard into him about some insurance. Once I’d done that it would be easy for me to drop around to his house and give him a sales talk with all the trimmings. In that way, his wife wouldn’t be dragged into it.
“Life insurance,” I said.
“Never heard of them.”
“We aren’t as big as the Met or the Pru,” I said. “But we’re growing.”
“Beats hell how they do it.”
“Do what?”
“Grow,” he said, rattling the ice in his drink. “Poorest investment this side of the casket.”
At least I knew how he felt about it.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “There’s more to it than the investment standpoint. You married?”
He nodded.
“Any kids?”
He shook his head.
“Well, even so,” I said, “a guy ought to have some coverage.”
When an insurance man gets down to making a statement like that, that’s just about his last gasp. Of course, I wasn’t canvassing this guy, only feeling him out, but when it got right down to it they were one and the same thing. If I didn’t make any headway with him now, it was going to make it real tough on me when I did get over to his place to see him. Of course, we were drinking and you say things that aren’t too important when you’re doing that. But some of them stick. The things that don’t do anybody any good.
This time the bartender came over and poured the drinks without being asked. Schofield still had half of one in front of him, because he was giving me a lecture how the insurance companies loaned money to the big companies and not the smaller ones and he didn’t have the time to take care of the business at hand.
“They’re even in the freight car business,” he complained. “I see where they build them and rent them out to the railroads.”
“Somebody’s got to build them.”
“That’s up to the railroads,” he said. “What would you think of a bank building houses?”
“Well, all right,” I said.
I was getting God-damned sick of him already. It wasn’t so much about what he said, because neither one of us knew enough about it to discuss the situation intelligently. It was his voice that got me. It got worse and worse as he kept running up the mileage on it. He was forcing the words out, the way people do when they have a sore throat. It made my eyes sting just listening to him.
I was damned glad when I saw Dell walk in through the archway and look around.
“Excuse me,” I said to Schofield. “I’ll be right back.”
He mumbled something and I got down off the stool. If I had my way about it I wouldn’t see him again until I had to. I picked up my change and cigarettes off the bar and walked over to Dell.
“Jesus, Nicky,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.”
We sat down at a small table. The bartender started to come over, but I waved him back.
“Four enough?” I wanted to know.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll give you a check,” I said, getting my wallet out. “Then tomorrow we can fix up a note.”
“Sure, sure.”
I wrote out the check and handed it to him. He looked at it, thanked me again and stuck it in his pocket.
“I’ll get it back to you, Nicky.”
“All right.”
We stood up.
“Drink?” I asked him.
He shook his head.
“I’ve got some work to do on the book,” he said. “I’d better have a clear head.”
He was right about that, so I told him maybe some other time. He said yes, thanked me again, and went on out. For some reason, I felt a little better for what I had done.
“Hey!”
I turned around and the bartender was waving at me to come over to the bar. He had a big grin on his face.
“Show him one of those pictures,” he said to Schofield as I came up.
“Maybe our friend wouldn’t be interested,” Schofield said, glancing at me.
“Sure, he is. He ain’t dead, is he?”
I sat down on the stool and watched the bartender slip me another Old Forester.
“The boys go for some of my pictures,” Schofield said. “Yeah?”
“Not paintings. I do some of that, but I take pictures, too.” He looked at me closely. “You know.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“They come in sets,” the bartender said.
“There’s ten in a set,” Schofield said. “All different.”
“Well, show him one,” the bartender said.
Schofield hesitated a moment, then reached into his inside coat pocket. He glanced around, saw that we were by ourselves, and slid the picture over to me.
“I get five dollars a set,” he said, his voice twining sharply. “Of course, there are cheaper ones, but — why not the best?”
I took the picture and turned it over. I wasn’t conscious of putting the drink down, but I heard it hit the corner of the bar hard.
I just stared at the picture.
She was naked and her lines were good and full and there had been just enough light thrown on her to show up all the things that a man might want to see. It wasn’t the usual run of picture, where the girl holds her hands over the right places. This hit you right between the eyes because there wasn’t anything to guess at. The only thing lacking was the flesh itself.
“The series goes further than that,” I heard Schofield saying. “There’s several series — all different.”
I gave him a hard look and he stopped talking. He reached for his drink and I glanced back at the picture. It was Irene all right.
“You want a set?” he asked.
I turned the picture over and slid it back toward him. Then I put my drink away with one gulp.
“
I could leave it here with Jack, and you could pay him.”
“No,” I said.
He picked the picture up and held it an angle so that I could see her again.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t.”
The bartender’s eyes bulged as he stared at her body.
“The rest of the series is better,” Schofield said. “As I said, each picture moves along — ”
“I don’t want any,” I said, my voice strangely tight.
Jack glanced at me, but I guess that Schofield didn’t have any idea how I felt about this. He put the picture back in his pocket and smiled.
“Some men,” he said, “find it possible, just by looking at the series — that is, starting at the front and going through it, taking their time — looking at her body, to have an — ”
I came rolling off the stool, following my right all the way over to him. I’ve hit some pretty good men with that right. I’ve hit them hard. But I’ve never hit a worse guy or hit a man harder than I hit that son-of-a-bitch. I heard something snap and crack as my knuckles ground into his flesh, but I couldn’t be sure whether it was his jaw or one of my fingers that had given way.
“Holy Jesus,” Jack said.
Schofield was down on the floor, between a couple of tables, looking like a sack of potatoes with the ends torn out.
“Holy Jesus!” Jack repeated, coming around the bar. “What did you do that for?”
“You know why.”
“Maybe you’ve killed him,” Jack said. He bent down and turned Schofield over. “Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing?”
There was some blood on Schofield’s face; maybe he had some loose teeth, but he was breathing all right.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “He won’t die.”
“How do you know, mister?”
I stopped at the door and gave Jack a wink.
“A guy only dies once,” I said. “Bastards like him are born dead.”
CHAPTER VII
IT STARTED TO RAIN ABOUT EIGHT o’clock that night, hard and steady. After a while the wind came up and the lightning cut yellow gashes across the dark sky. The thunder boomed in the hills, echoing from each valley and rumbling off into the storm again.
