“No, hell. Hell, I’m smart. I’ve suddenly gotten very smart.” I kept my eyes on her as I moved back to the pile of clothing on the floor. I picked up my shirt and pulled it on. I started to button it quickly. My gaze drifted. I looked past her. At the window. At the rain. “Yeah,” I said. “Now that the heat is off, I’m brilliant. Now that I’ve had you, I’m a regular brain trust.”
Georgia shrugged again. “Some women have that effect, dearest. They’re beautiful until the moment you get them, then suddenly you notice you’re lying on top of a real witch.” She laughed. It was the same laugh of a moment before, fresh and lively, vibrant, young. But there was another sound mingling with it now, another sound lying just beneath it. It was not the sound of her cruelty. Not even the sound of her red-hot rage. It was the sound instead of a terrible emptiness: it was her sound, her final sound. “But you’re a little old to believe in witches, aren’t you?” she said. She laughed again.
“No,” I said. “Just old enough.”
Her tone grew thick with pity. “Oh, poor man. Did you get fooled by the bad lady?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I sat on the edge of the bed. I collected my cigarettes from the table. I pushed my shoes on. “I did that job for you.”
“You guys always do,” Georgia sang out on a note of triumph. And then with relish: “You make acting so easy. You turn me into something in your own dear little heads and then all I have to do is pretend that that’s what I am and … bingo. You’ll do anything. Anything. Paul Abingdon wants all the little girls to bow down and worship him, so he figures they must all want to, also. All I did was play along and until the moment he was satisfied, he would have sold his soul for me. That’s the way it works. The moment you fellows have had it, all your fantasies go back into your pants pockets and you toss the real thing away like garbage. But sometimes by then … it’s too late.”
I was still sitting on the bed. Just sitting there now. Just sitting and staring at her. The sight of her—still with that little smile, still with those hard, flat eyes—it made my heart feel like ashes: chill, gray.
“What about Wally Shakespeare?” I asked her. “I’m just curious. What about him?”
“He wanted someone to redeem,” she said.
“Yeah, but … what was in it for you?”
She made a loose gesture. “Oh, it was just a bet I made with my friends. They said I couldn’t get him to do it. I won the last few dollars I needed for my stake to New York.”
I nodded. I stood. My jacket was flung over a chair. I picked it up, tossed it over my shoulder. I walked around the bed until I was standing right in front of her. She grinned at me, lifting her chin, sticking her chest out as if she were daring me to hit her.
“And what about you, Johnny?” she said. “Who was I to you?”
I stared into that freckled midwestern face for a long moment. “Nothing fancy, kid,” I told her. “Just someone I know.”
I kept walking. I walked to the door.
“And just where are we off to now?” she called after me.
I paused in the doorway, turned to her. “To the Star. I’m on deadline, remember?”
“Oh yes. I remember,” she said. “But be careful now, Johnny. If you write nasty things about me, I’m going to say some very nasty things about you. Like that I never slept with Paul Abingdon—but that I did sleep with you. That you made the Abingdon story up just to blackmail me into bed with you … oh, there’s any number of things I can say now. All sorts of things that will make perfect sense to everyone—and believe me, I’ll have plenty of personal details to back them up. You go back to your newspaper, Johnny, you go back and write your story. But you write it my way. The way I told it to you. You write it my way, or I’ll show you just what newspapers can do to a person if he violates the great moral code.”
I went for her. She tried to hit me with her brush. I knocked it out of her hands. I grabbed the front of her dress in my fist. She spit in my face. I slapped her. Her head snapped back. She was quiet. She glared at me, her lips drawn up, her teeth showing.
“You think you’re high pressure, Ohio? You’re amateur night,” I said. “I’ve had the big monkeys on my back since this story began and I’ll tell you what: I’m sick of it. I don’t care what Bush wants or Dellacroce wants or Abingdon or you. I’m gonna write this story my way. I’m a reporter. That’s what I do with stories. I get them and I write them. You wanted ink, sister? I’m gonna give you ink. I’m gonna drown you in it.”
I tossed her back against the dresser. I turned and walked out of the room.
“It’s too late for that, Wells!” she shouted after me.
I went out the front door into the hall. She came into the living room behind me.
“You got what you wanted out of me,” she said, “and now the bill’s due. You’re gonna pay just like everybody else. Everybody pays, Wells!”
I started down the stairs. She followed me out the door. She stood on the landing above me.
“You write that shit about me, Wells, and you’re through. I swear it. I’ll finish you. I’ll finish you but good.”
She was still yelling at me when I reached the ground floor. Maybe she was still yelling when I stepped outside, but by then her voice was swept away by the steady patter of the rain.
25
Hammered by thunder, slashed by lightning, the rain came down hard. It stood like a curtain of running silver between the eye and the city. Everything faded into a blur behind it.
I stumbled down the stoop, barely able to see. I kept my chin tucked in, my collar pulled up around me. By the time I reached the corner of Irving, I was soaked. My hair was plastered to my head. My jacket hung heavy on me. I plunged down the street against the current, gasping at the blow of the water. I found the Artful Dodge and wrestled the door open. I tumbled inside, sopping. I sat behind the wheel, catching my breath, spitting rain.
The rain pounded on the old Dart’s roof. I started the engine. I slapped a cigarette between my teeth and lit it. The windshield was completely awash. I could see nothing through it but the shifting patterns of the water. I started the wipers. They shoved the patterns away but the rain fell too fast for them. The view was still obscured, still out of focus.
I pulled out and drove slowly to Gramercy, then out to Third. I headed uptown, leaning forward against the wheel, peering through the glass at the fuzzy glow of streetlights and stoplights, and the gray haze of the road underneath.
It took all my attention. I could not think. Not until I got to a red light. Then I stopped. Then I thought. I did not like it much. It was not pleasant.
I was finished. I was through. By the time Monday came, I would not have a job in the newspaper business. I was not sure I ever would again. Even Bush couldn’t have done that to me. Guys like that are powerful, but they’re not all-powerful. With my clips, my reputation, I’d have gotten a job somewhere no matter what he’d done. Abingdon, too, congressman that he was—he couldn’t have ruined me like this either. He might have lied his head off trying, but he’d have gotten caught up eventually. Dellacroce, Marino—they could have killed me. They might still. But I had a lot of friends in the business, and a lot more on the police force. A smart guy like Dellacroce, just out of jail, would tend to discipline his own troops, and let me be.
None of them could have ruined me like this, taken my work away from me. Not even Georgia. Not even her with all her plotting, all her acting. She could not have pulled this little triumph off alone. She needed help.
She needed help from me. Only I could have gotten myself into this fine mess. Looking in the wrong place for the wrong woman. Running too hard from the things that hurt and matter.
Lansing was right. I had it in for myself but good. I hadn’t even left myself a way out.
Smart girl, Lansing. That guy—the one who was rich and handsome and brilliant and young—he was lucky too.
The light turned green. I pushed on up Third through the rain.
I, on the other hand, was out of luck. Definitely. Finally. I had my story and I was going to write it. But with both Georgia and Abingdon denying it, and with Georgia revealing that she’d slept with me, it was not going to stand up too well. No. Only the photographs themselves would save me now, and they were evidence of a murder, not likely to show up soon.
The wipers swept to one side. I saw the light on the corner of Thirtieth turn yellow. It went dim as it was covered by the rain. The wipers brought it clear again. I slowed the car. Stopped as the light turned red. I took my cigarette from my lips. I smelled my fingers through the smell of smoke. They smelled of her. Of Georgia.
I thought: If Marino doesn’t have the pictures and Georgia doesn’t, and she hasn’t sold them to Abingdon, then where the hell are they?
Not that many people really knew the pictures existed. Georgia did. I did. Abingdon probably found out about them on the news like everybody else. So it was me and Georgia and Marino and Kendrick himself.
The light turned green. I barely noticed it. I kept my foot on the brake. The car stood still. Another car went around me to the right. One went by me to the left. Then there was a lull as I sat there, thinking. The windshield wipers whisked and squeaked. The rain tattooed the roof.
But then maybe there was someone else, I thought. Someone else who knew about the photos. Someone Georgia or Kendrick told.
A car honked loudly. A truck let fly with his bullhorn. I roused myself and pulled the Dodge to the side.
Blackmailers. Mrs. Abingdon had said she would not let her husband be ruined by some dime-store blackmailers. More than one. Georgia approached them for hush money after her run-in with Marino. But what about Kendrick? Maybe he’d gone into business for himself. Maybe when I turned down the photos, he figured the only way he’d make real money was to blackmail the candidate, sell them to Abingdon. But then Kendrick would have blabbed about it when Marino came to call.
Unless Marino hadn’t killed him. Maybe Georgia paid the call to Kendrick. Maybe she did sell the pictures to Abingdon …
I rolled down the window. I stuck my head out. I was soaked by the steady downpour as I looked back down Third Avenue. The traffic coming up was sparse. I waited for an opening. I pulled out and ran the Dodge up the avenue to Thirty-second. I made a right and slogged through the gathering flood to Second. Turned right again at the corner. Rolled downtown. Back to Georgia’s.
The thunder seemed directly overhead now. It pounded like a fist on the rooftops of Manhattan. The lightning made long jagged streaks connecting heaven and the skyscrapers. The rain beat down on the cars, on the buildings, on the pavement. It beat down in wave after wave.
The light, what light was left, was dying as I reached Gramercy again. Behind those black clouds, the sun was falling. The rain had changed from streaks of silver to sheets of gray. The day seemed to fold in upon itself, narrowing down to a dark center of oncoming night and the rain.
I double parked across the street from Georgia’s building. I turned on my flashers. I pulled up my collar. I stepped out into the storm.
I came around the Dodge. A Volks came trundling down the street. I waited for it to pass so I could cross. I looked up at Georgia’s building.
I saw it through the water and through the haze of dusk. I saw the bay window. I saw the streaks of rain on the glass.
There was an electric snap. The pane went white. I saw a fork of lightning reflected on it. It died and I saw Georgia standing there, standing in the bay with her back to me.
The thunder came. A great clap that shook me. Georgia seemed to float closer to me as I watched. She seemed to become magnified behind the rain on the window. Then the window itself seemed to enlarge and expand.
The lightning flashed again. The window shattered. Georgia Stuart tumbled backward into the downpour. She fell four stories, her body turning and turning in the air.
She struck the sidewalk as the thunder struck. Her body bounced a little. It rocked. It settled. I ran across the street toward her. As I came on, I saw the blood begin to run out onto the pavement from beneath her head. It ran thickly, a broad pool of it, deep red. And then it grew thinner, and the color lightened to pink.
And then it was washed away completely by the rain.
26
I knelt beside her. She was staring up at me, up into my eyes. She was not pretty anymore. The fall had bruised and broken her.
But it had not killed her. She was dead all right, but she had died as she staggered back through the window. Died of the bullet that made her stagger when it drilled its hole in the center of her forehead.
The rain that pounded on my back dampened her hair, plastered it to the pavement around her. It washed her face, rinsed the blood from it in rivulets until the hole in her brow stood out naked, black and jagged. I hurt, looking at her, as if her flesh and mine were still connected.
I looked up and down the street for help. There was no one in sight. Not even a car passed under the sycamores. The sycamores waved and bowed and trembled under the storm. I was alone with them.
And then the door to the brownstone opened.
The killer was a shadow. He was hidden by the downpour. He stood at the top of the stoop and I could only make out the shape of him through the darkness and through the silver rain that streaked the darkness. I could see him pause there, stone still, as if stunned. I could see him hunch his shoulders, hang his head. I could see the shape of the long-barreled gun that dangled loosely from the hand hanging at his side.
He came forward. He descended to the sidewalk step by step. The rain drenched my face as I looked up at him. I blinked and gasped. He turned—to see her one more time, I think. Only then did he notice me. He moved toward me slowly until his features were clear. I already knew who he was from the outline of him. But he seemed surprised to see me.
He licked his lips. He brought his free hand up to brush the damp hair from his forehead. The sky lit up above us. Thunder struck.
“Mr. Wells?” he said.
I sighed. I stood up. “Wally.”
We faced each other across the body of the murdered girl. He stared at me, waiting for me to speak. I could not think of anything to say.
“I came to bring mercy,” Wally Shakespeare said, “but I had to bring justice instead.”
“Why?” I shouted it above the storm. “Why the hell did you have to do that?”
He gazed down at her. He shook his head. “She wasn’t pure,” he told me, disappointed.
I closed my eyes a moment. I nodded slowly. I understood.
I wanted to be angry at him. I wasn’t. I was just sad. I felt for him with his dream of her, and for me with mine. And I felt for her, with her dream to be in the dreams of millions.
“I came here tonight to forgive her,” said Wally. “I explained that to Susan. That’s why Susan told me, finally, where she lived. I came to forgive her for the weakness of all women. Since Eve, Mr. Wells. I knew when I first saw that terrible man with his terrible pictures, I knew he was the serpent in the garden. I knew what I had to do.” The rain poured down his cheeks. I couldn’t tell it from the tears. “But I would have forgiven her!” he cried. “And then I came here and she was with another man.”
I closed my eyes. I heard the thunder crash. Not as loudly as before. It was moving on.
“I saw them,” Wally said, “I saw them together through the window of her room. So I waited. I waited till I saw him leave. It was raining so hard by then, I couldn’t even make out his face. I don’t even know what he looked like.”
I stared up at him. “Why didn’t you kill him, too?”
“Him?” he said, surprised. “It wasn’t his fault. He was … he was tempted … by Eve. The devil tempts the woman. The woman tempts the man. That’s how it works.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d always wondered how it worked. Now I knew.
His eyes were wide. “Everything that is impure,” he explained to me, “infects everything else. It seduces e
verybody else. It makes us desire it. That’s why we have to get rid of it—of impurity—wherever we find it. We have to snuff it out before it pulls us in. Pollutes us. That’s why nothing can be left alone that is not pure or we’re all done for. Do you understand? Do you understand now?”
He leaned toward me, eager-eyed. The pistol patted impatiently against his thigh. I wanted to say something. I really did. Standing there in the midst of that torrent. Standing there with Georgia lying twisted and dead on the pavement between us, I wanted to say: She had it right, my friend. We made her what she was. She seduced us because we wanted her to. We wanted her to, so we turned her into what we loved. Listen to me, I wanted to say, listen to me because I understand. If she deceived us, if she was impure, it was because she let the image of our need dance over her like a mirror. But that was no reason to kill her. Better to take a good long look at the reflection she was showing you. Better to get to know that need and know it well. Otherwise, you can curse her all you want, you can gun her down a hundred times, and it’s still a good chance you’ll wake up one morning in bed with her, in some bed, anyway, with someone like her, some bed you made yourself the night before and all the nights before.
I wanted to say that. But it was late. We all had things to do. I figured I’d let it pass.
Anyway, Wally Shakespeare wasn’t listening now. He was gazing off into the distance, into the lightning flashes on the far sky. His mind was on Cod knows what mission of purity and judgment.
“Well,” he said, and the thunder and the patter of the rain nearly drowned him out. “Well, I’ve got to go now.”
He stepped forward. He stepped over the body of Georgia Stuart. He lumbered by me, the pistol at his side. I turned and followed his progress. He headed down the street into the shadows under the trees. Soon, the rain obscured him. The darkness swallowed him. He was gone.
The Rain Page 18
