by Gil Brewer
“Ralph.”
“I can’t help but be worried too, some, you see?”
“There are many things to be done, Steve,” he said. “We’ll have a good time, too. There’s no cause for you to worry about Ruby.”
“The doctor will want to see me,” I said.
“That’s good,” Angers said. “That’s fine.”
“So I could meet you later. Let’s say right here, in an hour. An hour from right now.”
He didn’t grin, he didn’t do anything. The urgency of this moment had me now. Maybe he would say O.K., all right. He stood there with the gun hanging at the end of his arm, his face pale white and shiny with sweat as though somebody had painted it on this cold marble with a brush. Not beads of sweat, just a cold film.
“I’ll see you, then,” I said. I turned away and started walking.
“Wait,” he said.
I didn’t stop walking. I just lounged along with every pump of my heart throwing hot blood up into my head and it was like a dam getting ready to burst.
I was passing some piled crates at the rear entrance to a restaurant when the gun blasted behind me. A slug ripped through some garbage in one of the crates and ricocheted off the brick wall, whining straight up into the sky. A little limp piece of lettuce flipped into the alley at my feet. I stopped and turned as he laughed.
It was the damnedest laughter you ever heard, wild and high and crazy as hell. It stopped cold. He looked the same as ever.
He came up to where I was standing. “Come on, pal,” he said. “Take it easy, now.”
We walked along down the alley.
“This is a grand gun,” he said.
We came out of the alley and turned right again and kept on walking along.
“How much money we got?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m broke.”
“I’ve got twenty-five, twenty-six dollars.”
“We’ll have to get some.”
“You just killed a man,” I said. “Do you know that?”
“Yes, sure.”
“They’ll be looking for you. You know that?”
“I know.”
“Everybody knows me in this town,” I said.
“Pal, have you got a car?”
“No.”
“We need a car.”
We came along by a gas station and cut over between the pumps, cutting the corner. The police cruiser came along swiftly and I saw it. There was only the driver in it and he saw us and slammed on the brakes and came out running. He knew who we were.
“Hold it there!” he called at us.
Angers stopped in his tracks and looked at the cop. He was a young cop with a ruddy face, wearing a short-sleeved gray shirt with the bright silver and gold badge pinned to the pocket on the left-hand side, like they do down here. His cap came off as he ran toward us. Then he saw Angers’ gun.
“Drop the gun!” he said, and he stopped running then and stepped onto the curb and you could see it in his face. He was very young and maybe right then he thought about his girl or his wife or his family, or maybe just of being a cop. Maybe he didn’t think anything. But as he tried to draw his gun he knew what was going to happen. He stood right in the open between two cabbage palms and Angers lifted the Luger and shot him in the face.
I whirled, running. I ran around the gas station, giving it everything I had. The attendant had been standing in the doorway by the garage part of the station. He made a flying dive at me and slid on his face along the grease-stained cement. He was some attendant, all right. He didn’t know.
There was a board fence behind the gas station. I hit it hard, running, and got hold of the top and dragged over. I was in a back yard, walled in by the high board fence and a maze of clothesline. At the rear of the yard by the garage was a gate. I went through the gate. The fence back here, except for the gate, was tight up against a brick-walled building, two of them. A narrow passageway ran between the two buildings. I ran on down there, slipping on tin cans and broken bottles. It opened into an alley.
I hit the alley running hard and turned right.
He was standing down there at the alley entrance, leaning against the corner of the building, watching me.
“Come on, pal,” he said. “We’re going over to my room.”
He slapped the clip back into the gun, rode the slide, thumbed the safety. He had reloaded the clip. He had fired three times so far and that had left three shells in the clip. Only he had checked that, too.
He was staying at The Palmdale. It was one of the best hotels in town. We walked in the front door past the doorman and on through the lobby to the elevator.
“I got my key,” he said. “I always carry my key, pal. I never leave it at the desk.”
A smiling, crimson-lipped colored girl ran the elevator. When she moved, her starched white uniform hissed crisply. Her hair was well oiled and fixed in large tight rings, plastered to her skull.
No one spoke. We went up, with Angers still holding the gun down along his leg. Both of us were breathing heavily, only he looked exactly the same. We finally bumped to a cushioned stop on the eighth floor. The doors hummed open and we went out into the thick-carpeted hallway. We walked on down the hall.
“Here we are, pal,” he said. He opened the door.
I heard him close and lock the door behind us. I was looking at the girl who was stretched out on one of the twin beds. Seeing us, she made a wild grab at a sheet and yanked it up. She had been entirely naked.
She said nothing, just worked herself up on the bed until she was leaning against the head of the bed with the sheet pressed into the firm roundness of her breasts. Then she saw the gun in Angers’ hand and said, “Oh, God!”
“I forgot to tell you, Steve,” Angers said from beside me. “This is Lillian. I’m afraid she doesn’t like me. Or am I wrong, Lillian?”
“Stay away! Don’t!” She pressed herself back against the head of the bed. She was very beautiful, with thick mahogany-colored hair, cropped short, but very full. She was frightened as much as it was possible to be frightened. You could see her tremble beneath the thin damp covering of the sheet. Her dark blue eyes were big and round and her red lips formed a frantic O, behind which she swallowed. One long full-thighed leg lay outside the sheet and it kept moving slightly, jerking, with a life all its own. A fan whirred and buzzed at her from the top of the bureau by the foot of her bed, yet her forehead and upper lip showed fine beads of perspiration.
Her voice burst in the room, then, strident, afraid: “You took my clothes!”
“Yes, Lillian.”
“So I couldn’t leave! You took my clothes!” Her eyes flashed to me, frantic with mute appeal. Then she shook her head and turned face down on the bed.
“I hung the ‘Don’t Disturb’ sign on the door, too, Lillian,” Angers said. “You know the hotels obey that sign.”
The hotel room was a good one with twin beds, bureau, night stand, television, radio, and two comfortable chairs. It was quite large. The sheets on the bed opposite Lillian’s were twisted into long ropes and the mattress was half off the bed, on the floor. There were two whisky bottles on the bureau, one empty, one half full. The closet door stood open and it was empty in there except for a few cockeyed wire hangers.
Her face came up and she looked at us again.
“This is a friend of mine,” Angers said. “Steve Logan. Right, Steve?”
I nodded and her-eyes danced across toward me, touched with pleading and appeal, and danced back to Angers’ face.
“Lillian,” Angers said, “go on into the bathroom. Take a shower or something. I want to talk with Steve, here.”
“But I—”
“Hurry up.”
“I want my clothes!” She kept looking at him. Then she quit looking and got out of bed, trailing the sheet, and went into the bathroom. Her thighs flashed, her hips leaned in two fine half arcs as she vanished through the door.
She closed the door
until just a part of her frightened face peered through, her eyes on the gun in Angers’ hand. Then she shut the door. She was obedient, just like a well-behaved dog.
“Sit down, Steve,” Angers said. “I’ve got to tell you something.”
I was tired, sick, bewildered, and maybe more than a little crazy. I went over and sat on the foot of the bed, among the twisted sheets. He stopped by the bureau, laid the gun up there by the two whisky bottles, and turned to look at me. He hooked his elbows on top of the bureau and leaned back with his white marble face gleaming, his eyes still and vacant.
“What I have to say is this: Don’t try to run, Steve. You see? Please don’t try to run, or think of doing anything like that.” He paused and his eyes gave the lie to all the words he spoke. He didn’t know it, about his eyes. He probably thought he looked serious, talking to me, just like anybody else would. And maybe that was a good thing. Those eyes were dead bright mirrors. They were empty reflector cups. “I would kill you, pal. I would have to kill you, see? I honestly don’t want to kill you, pal. Honestly. You saved my life and we’re buddies and you’ve got to stick with me, pal.”
I sat there, listening, thinking about that girl in the bathroom. Who was she? She knew what he was, all right. She was scared all the way to the ground. There’d been no way for her to leave the room. He thought of everything, all right. But why was he holding her?
“They’re after us now,” he said. “They’ll kill us, only we’ll kill them first, see? Now I’ve got—” He paused.
From the bathroom we could both hear her sobbing.
“Shut up, Lillian,” Angers said. He said it smoothly and quietly, with no warning, with no particular inflection, and the sobbing ceased as if he’d turned off a faucet.
“I’ve got a lot of plans,” he went on, turning back to me. “And we’re going to go ahead with them. They don’t want me to. They never did want me to do anything, pal. It’s going to be hard, bucking them. Only I’ve got plans. You see?”
He stood there, thinking about his plans.
I watched him, thinking about Ruby now, over there in the hospital, wondering where I was, what had happened. He went right on talking.
“You saved my life,” he said. “I don’t want to have to kill you. So stick with me, will you? Don’t make me do that. It’s been rough,” he said, with his empty, lying eyes. “Five days in this room. Ever since we came down here. Thinking it over, working it all out. So will you stick with me? Share and share alike, pal?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll stick with you.”
“Fine.” He turned and held up the whisky bottle. “We’ll have a drink. Money’s no object, you know. Plenty of money. I was just testing you back there, when I said I was broke.”
And I knew what I was up against. Ralph Angers was a maniac. He was a psychopathic killer and his mind had snapped. There was no going back now. There was no nothing.
“I should really get over and see my wife,” I said.
He grinned, gave a little snort of a laugh. “Sure,” he said. “Sure. Here,” he said, handing me the bottle. “Take a drink.”
I took the bottle and sat there, holding it on my knee.
“You know?” he said, looking all around the room with those bright, empty eyes, and rubbing his together. “Things will work out fine now. Just fine!”
Chapter Five
RALPH.”
Lillian’s voice reached us from the bathroom.
“Ralph, may I come out now?”
Her voice was faint, dubious, constrained. It was also touched with a quiet hysteria born of clean-edged fear.
He stopped talking and turned toward the bathroom door. It was very quiet for a moment and out the window over there spring was beginning a sunny, blue-skied afternoon. He glanced back at me and shrugged.
“It makes me feel good, I tell you,” he said.
“Please, Ralph?”
I sat there on the bed with the bottle in my hand and watched him. It was a hell of a feeling, all right, because there was no telling what he would do next. Listening, I heard her breathing in there. You could tell she was listening, too.
“I have no clothes, Ralph,” she said from in there. I could almost see her pressed against the door, hoping, maybe even praying. Maybe we were both praying. It doesn’t have to be conscious and it doesn’t have to be words. Just a feeling; a realization.
“Ralph, get my clothes for me, huh?”
He was looking at me, shaking his head. Wasn’t she a card, though? The way she carried on?
“Did you take a shower, Lillian?”
“No, Ralph.”
“Well, go ahead and take a shower. You need one. You’ve been lying around too much.”
“All right.” There was a long pause, during which I knew she was waiting to add something. “Then—then will you give me my clothes? Will you, Ralph?”
“Sure.”
Almost immediately the sound of the shower hissed beyond the hum of the electric fan.
Angers was staring at the floor now, his face pale. How was I going to reach Ruby?
“We can’t stay here, of course,” Angers said.
“No?”
“Of course not. They’ll come around here soon. I don’t want to kill any more people than I have to. But they’ve got to learn, that’s all. We’re going through with this.”
“With what?”
“My plans,” he said. “You see, Steve, having a pal like you means plenty to me.”
“I see.” I took a drink from the bottle. It burned its way down my throat, into my empty stomach. I nearly gagged and my throat went dry at the smell of the raw whisky.
Angers watched me intently. “Nobody believed in me,” he said. “Even back there, nobody believed. They don’t care about saving people. They just want to make money. That’s all they think about. It doesn’t matter if people are in want, in need.” He grinned. “But now you’ll help me.”
I set the bottle on the floor and rose. “Why don’t you and Lillian get cleaned up, then?” I said. “I’ll run over to the hospital and see how Ruby is. Then I’ll meet you.”
“But they’ll understand when it’s done,” he said, still looking intently at me. He either hadn’t heard what I said, or chose to ignore it, knowing I’d understand what he meant. I understood.
Just then the bathroom door opened a crack and Lillian stuck her head out, smiling. It was a brave smile and she was trying something new now. At least new to me. She said something but the sound of the shower drowned it out.
“Turn the water off, Lillian,” Angers said.
Her chin jiggled a little, bunching up, and I thought she was going to cry. But she went away from the door and the hissing shower ceased.
“Ralph, honey,” she said, “would you toss me some clothes, huh? You wouldn’t want me to come out there the way I am.” She smiled at him through the crack in the door. I knew she must have worked on that smile in front of the mirror, building it up, praying it wouldn’t wash out.
I went over and sat in a chair beside the bed. The fan hummed and buzzed, and far away, down on the street, a car’s horn blatted shave-and-a-haircut.…
“Sure, Lil,” Angers said. He glanced at me, shook his head again. Wasn’t she the damnedest, though? He started for the door.
My heart flickered dry and light, like a woodpecker on a thin, loose plank, then I felt it beating right up into my throat. He paused with his hand on the knob, then turned and went over to the bureau and picked up the gun.
“No telling who I might meet out there,” he said.
Lillian’s eyes were at the door crack. He didn’t look at either of us. He went on over and unlocked the door, vanished into the hall, closed the door. I heard him walking down the hall.
I came out of the chair fast and grabbed the doorknob. He’d locked it, all right. I headed for the bathroom.
“Quick!” I said. I flung the door open. “Listen, we’ve got to get out of here!”
&nbs
p; She stood there looking at me. I held to the bathroom door, holding it open. She was very pretty; large-breasted, long-legged, and afraid. She grabbed up a wet towel, shielding herself with it. “It’s no use. Are you in this with him?”
“In what?”
“I know, I know.” Her voice became strident and wild and the words came fast. “He’s insane—insane!”
“Hang on. We’ve got to do something.”
“Please, please, do something!”
“Fire escape.”
“No, no.” She laughed in her throat. “There isn’t any. It’s just a platform out there. The fire escape’s down the hall.”
“Who is he?” I said.
“He’s crazy. What’s he got the gun for? He didn’t have a gun.”
“He’s killed two people in the last hour,” I told her.
She stared at me. Her fingers gripped white on the wet towel. She moved slowly backward and sat down inside the shower on the wet tile. The red and white shower curtain rustled against her shoulders.
“The phone!” I said. I whirled and saw the phone on the floor between the two beds.
The door opened and Angers came back in. He carried a valise in one hand with a huge, cumbersome roll of paper beneath that arm. The gun was in his other hand. He glanced at me, grinned, closed the door, and locked it.
“Get to know Lil?” he said.
“No. Hardly.”
I eyed the phone and cursed myself for not having used it right away when he left the room. It might have been the one chance. I could have got the desk and had them send for the police. It could be we might have made it.
Angers came over to the bed, looked into the bathroom. She hadn’t moved. The door was still open and she was seated on the floor of the shower, watching us with round blue eyes. Her mahogany-colored hair was partially wet from the shower and long curls clung to her face.
He dropped the valise and papers and rushed into the bathroom. “You didn’t fall, did you, Lillian?”
“No. No, I didn’t fall.”
He shrugged, came out, and went over to the bed. He took the large roll of paper and placed it on the chair and opened the suitcase.
