Nothing In Her Way

by Charles Williams

  It was a game. It was the most fascinating game in the world, and it was the money. I thought of the way she had been ever since we had started to work on Lachlan, the preoccupation, the tense excitement showing in her eyes, and the way she would sometimes forget I was there. It had been there all the time for me to see, and now that I couldn’t evade it any longer I knew I had been seeing it in spite of trying so hard to look the other way. She had smiled with that hard, bright look in her eyes when I’d warned her Lachlan was no sucker and that it wouldn’t be easy. She didn’t want it to be easy. The more difficult it was, the better. It was a challenge. That was what made it fun.

  She’d not only been willing to swindle a man who’d never done anything to her, knowing he wasn’t the Goodwin we were after, but she had made up that story about Elaine Holman for the sheer pleasure there was in knowing she had swindled Charlie too. She didn’t stand to get any more money out of it that way; it was just the secret satisfaction there was in outfoxing the fox, of getting him to do the work, and of being able to laugh at both him and Bolton afterward, because no matter what happened, the police would never be able to touch her, because she hadn’t taken any part in it.

  It was strange, as I thought about it now—about the way she had lied to me about Goodwin—that there wasn’t any anger. When I’d left her in El Paso I’d been in a rage, on the ragged edge of hurting her, but now there wasn’t anything except a sort of sadness. She couldn’t help it. Maybe she’d been made that way by what Lachlan had done when we were children. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.

  I tried to straighten out the way I felt about it, but it was all mixed up, and the only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want any more of it. I was just sick of confidence games. I was sick of double crosses and double double crosses and of wondering who somebody really was and what he really meant when he said something. I reminded myself that I wasn’t in a very good position to be pointing the finger at her from a moral standpoint; I hadn’t had any qualms about helping to swindle Lachlan, and I didn’t have any now. All I needed was to have the other fellow do it first. Maybe that was the exact point at which we divided. I had to have that justification, or that excuse, and now she didn’t any more.

  I sighed. I knew there wasn’t any use, but I had to try. The twenty-three years were talking.

  “You know what I’m going to do with the rest of it, don’t you?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. She did know. I could see it in her face.

  “I’m going to send it back to Goodwin. Do you want me to, or don’t you?”

  “Send it back to Goodwin? Mike, are you crazy?”

  I stood up. “I just wanted to know how you felt about it,” I said. “And I think you know you can’t stop me, so let’s don’t make this any rougher than we have to.”

  I went into the bedroom and pulled my two old suitcases out of the closet and started packing them. I didn’t get half my stuff, and I didn’t pay any attention to what I did pack because I was in a hurry. I was started now, and if I kept going, fast, without thinking too much about it, I could do it. She could go with Bolton; they understood each other. That was the way it had to be. But there wasn’t any fun in thinking about it or in knowing that someday she was going to wind up in prison. When I came back out into the living room she had quit raging at me and there were tears in her eyes. She turned to Bolton.

  “Can’t you stop him from doing a crazy thing like this?”

  Bolton shook his head, and looked at me and smiled. We both knew what he meant, and maybe she did too. If I wanted to cut my throat, why should he try to stop me?

  He lit a cigarette and said with urbane amusement, “Belen appears to have done a little soul-searching and come up with the decaying remains of some sort of peasant morality. I think you’d do better to leave him with it before he starts trying to share it with you.”

  She turned abruptly away from him before he had finished. “Mike,” she said, “please—”

  “Maybe you’d both better come with me,” I said, “so there won’t be any doubt as to what I did with the money. It won’t take long.”

  I carried the bags and we went down front and got a cab. She sat between us as we rode down the hill. We were all very silent. We stopped at the airline terminal while I took the bags in and checked them and bought a ticket to Las Vegas; then we went on down to Market.

  We got out in front of the branch bank that stays open at night. They came in with me and watched, saying nothing, while I bought a cashier’s check for $65,000, made out to Howard C. Goodwin. Bolton didn’t want to stop me and she couldn’t, because a scene would only bring the cops. We walked over to a drugstore and I bought an envelope and a stamp. I addressed it at the counter, put the check in, and sealed it. In the upper left-hand corner I wrote one word: Reichert. We went out on the sidewalk.

  It was foggy down on Market now. We walked slowly along the sidewalk, with Cathy in the middle, and none of us said anything. There was a mailbox on the next corner. I handed her the envelope. When she looked up at me I saw she was crying. She shook her head and handed it back to me.

  “No,” she said. “I’d rather you did it. Maybe it means something to you. I’d only feel like an idiot.”

  I dropped it in the slot and let the metal lid clang.

  “You’re a fool, Belen,” Bolton said.

  “Shut up,” she said tonelessly. And then, “Get a cab. And wait in it. I’ll be there.”

  He flagged one and got in. She stared at me silently for a moment. And then she said, “I guess you know now, Mike, why I kept putting you off when you asked me to marry you again. I knew this was going to happen sometime, and it’s simpler this way, isn’t it?”

  “Do we have to do it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “You know that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it just wouldn’t work any more. We both know it, don’t we?”

  “Yes. I guess we do.”

  “But it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Remember?”

  “I’d rather not.” I wanted to get going while I could.

  She tried to smile. “Let’s don’t kiss each other good-by. I’ll just go now. But, Mike, we did get even with Lachlan, didn’t we?”

  I thought about Lachlan. He had ruined more than Dunbar & Belen when he pulled off that scheme sixteen years ago.

  “No,” I said. “But if I were you I wouldn’t worry about it any more.”

  She had started toward the cab, but now she turned and looked back.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because we never will,” I said.

  THE END