I left the sidewalk, waded through dew-dense grass to the side of the next house, and stepped over a low field stone wall into Kerrigan’s yard. The terraced lawn was splashed with light from the windows. There was a rumor of voices inside the house. The windows were too high for me to see through. I moved along the wall toward the front. There were two voices, a man’s and a woman’s. The man’s voice was pitched almost as high as the woman’s.
The front veranda was a deep railed platform partly shaded with split-bamboo screening. It was further shielded from the street by a great old monkey-puzzle tree that grew in front of it. I jumped for the railing, caught it, pulled myself up and over.
From where I stood in the corner of the veranda against the wall, I couldn’t see into the house. Moving across the light from the window, I reached the shelter of a green canvas glider. By pulling aside the canvas shade behind the swinging seat, I could see the interior of the room without being seen.
It was a beautiful room, white-carpeted and filled with the suave and fragile curves of eighteenth-century furniture. The airy white ceiling was supported on Ionic capitals, repeated in the pilastered marble mantel. Someone with Europe on his mind had tried to trap a dream of civilization in the room, and almost succeeded. Its present occupants were standing in front of the fireplace, telling each other that the dream was stone dead.
The woman’s back was to me, straight and tense. A pearl collar gleamed coldly on her neck, under the yellow hair. “What I had is gone,” she said, “so you’re running out. I always knew you would.”
“You always knew, eh?” Kerrigan stood facing her, leaning negligently against the mantel. One hand was in his pocket, the other held a short briar pipe. It was an actorish pose.
“Yes. I’ve known for a long time. For four or five years at least, since you took up with the Meyer woman.”
“That was over long ago.”
“So you let me believe. But you’ve never been honest with me.”
“I’ve tried. You want me to level with you? You want the honest truth?”
“You’re not capable of telling it, Don. You’re a helpless liar. You lied to me before we were married, about your resources, your prospects. Your alleged love for me.” Her voice broke scornfully. “Your entire life with me has been a lie. You haven’t even given me common fidelity.”
“Prove it.”
“I don’t have to. I know. You think you fooled me with your childish excuses, when you came home to my house with your clothes disarranged, your mouth red—”
“Wait a minute.” He pointed the stem of his pipe like a gun at her head. “Did you hear yourself, Kate? You know what you just said. Your house, you called it. Not our house. Yours. And you wonder why I feel like an interloper.”
“Because you are one,” she said. “You are an interloper. My grandfather built this house for my grandmother. They left it to my father. My father left it to me. It’s mine. The house is one thing you’ll never get your hands on.”
“Who wants it?”
“You do, Don. It was only the other day you were trying to persuade me to sell it and give you the money.”
“So I was.” He shrugged his shoulders, smiling crookedly. “Well, it’s too late now. You can keep your house and live in it by yourself. I never really lived in this house. I lived in the doghouse behind it, and you put me there. Keep the doghouse, too. You’ll need it for your next husband.”
“Would I be likely to marry again, after my experience with you?”
“It wasn’t as bad as that, now, Kate. You’re no tragic figure, don’t go dreaming you are. I admit I wasn’t in love with you when we got married. Hear me admitting it? I married you for your money. Is that such a terrible crime? Your hotshot friends in Santa Barbara do it every day. Hell, I thought I was doing you a good turn.”
“Thank you for your gracious kindness—”
“No, listen to me for a change.” His voice deepened, and he forgot his pose. “You were all by yourself. Your parents were dead. Your lover got himself killed in the war—”
“Talley wasn’t my lover.”
“That I can believe. Listen to me. You needed a man more than you needed money. Okay. I elected myself to fill the bill. I didn’t make it, but you’ll never know how hard I tried. I went into this thing to make it work, on a fifty-fifty basis. I couldn’t make it work. I had no chance to. You never trusted me. You never even liked me.”
“I loved you, though.” She turned away from him. Her hands went to her breasts and held them as if they ached.
“You thought you loved me, I’ll give you that much. Maybe you loved me in your head. Only what good is love in the head? It’s just a word. You’re still a virgin as far as I’m concerned. Did you know that, Kate? It’s been chilly work, trying to be your husband. You never made me feel like a man. Not once.”
Her face was drawn sharp over the harsh bones. She fingered the collar of pearls at her throat. “I’m not a magician,” she said.
He raised his eyes to the blank patrician ceiling. “What’s the use?”
“No use. It’s over and done with, if there ever was anything there. It only confirmed what I knew when I found you packing your bags. I wasn’t even surprised. I realized what was coming a month ago.”
“Last time it was five years.”
“Yes, but I kept hoping. When you broke off with Anne Meyer, or claimed you did, I thought perhaps our marriage had a chance. I was a fool to allow myself any hope, wasn’t I? I saw what a fool I was last month—the day I met you on the grounds of the Inn with that girl on your arm. And you pretended not to know me, Don. You wouldn’t look at me. You kept looking at her.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said without conviction. “I never was at the Inn with any girl.”
“Of course not.” She turned on him suddenly, clenching her hands. “Does she make you feel like a man, that little tar-haired creature? Does she build you up with flattery and give you delusions of grandeur and renew your youth for you?”
“Leave her out of this.”
“Why should I? Is she so sacred? Aren’t you going away with her? Isn’t that the big project for tonight?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Am I? You’re going away, aren’t you? You’re not the kind of man who goes by himself. You need a woman along to keep your ego wrapped in cotton batting. I don’t know what woman, I don’t care. For all I know, you’ve taken up with Anne Meyer again. Or maybe you’ve kept her on the string all along.”
“Now you’re really getting crazy.”
“Am I? You gave her the keys to the lodge last Friday. I heard her thank you for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was up at the lake now, waiting for you to join her.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I told you that was over. I don’t know where she is any more than you do.”
“She spent the weekend at Lake Perdida. Didn’t she?”
“All right. I told her she could have the lodge for the weekend. We weren’t using it. It was standing empty. I gave her the keys. Does that make me a criminal?”
“You’re going there now,” she said accusingly.
“I am not. Anne isn’t there anyway. I drove up to the lake on Monday to look for her, and she was gone.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know. Can you get that through your head? I don’t know.” The subject seemed to disturb him. “You’d think I was running a harem.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you were. You don’t even know you exist unless a woman whispers it in your ear. Any woman.”
“Not any woman. Not you.” His voice was soft with malice.
“No,” she said. “Not me. I don’t know who it is this time. But I can tell you one thing, it won’t last. It won’t last seven months.”
“That’s what you think.”
“I know it. You run through sex the way you run through money. They’re the same thing to you, something to soothe your itch and make yo
u forget what a dismal loss you are.”
“You know it all, eh? All you know is what you read in your damn books. I’ll give you a little piece of information, Kate. This wouldn’t have happened if you’d given me a break when I asked you for it.”
“I’ve given you a lot of breaks, as you call them.” But she sounded a little defensive, for the first time. The lines of her back and shoulders softened, and she seemed to lean toward him. “Don? You’re in real difficulty, aren’t you? Is it really serious this time?”
“You’ll never know.”
“Couldn’t we be honest with each other, just this once? I’ll do what I can to help.”
“You will, eh?”
“Yes. Even if it did mean giving up the house. If that’s what you really need.”
“I don’t need anything that you have,” he said.
She recoiled as if from a blow. After a while she repeated his name. “Don. Why did Brand Church come here tonight?”
“Routine investigation.”
“It didn’t sound like that to me.”
“Were you eavesdroping?” He walked toward her.
“Certainly not. I couldn’t help overhearing your voices. You had a dreadful scene with him.”
“Forget it.”
“Don, was it about the murder?”
“I said forget it.” His fingers curled around the pipe and clenched, snapping the amber stem. His voice rose: “Forget all about me. I’m a dismal loss as you said. It’s not all my fault. There’s something wrong with this town, too. At least it wasn’t for me. And I had bad luck. If the government had gone through with the reopening of the Marine Base, the court would be coining money. I’d be rolling in it.”
She answered harshly, as if she had given him up: “You’d find a way to lose it. But blame the government if it makes you feel better. Blame me and the town and the government.”
He shook his broken pipe at her. “A man can take so much. I’ve had my bellyful. I’m getting out.”
He started across the room toward the door. His wife called after him: “You don’t fool me. You’ve been planning this for weeks. You just don’t have the manhood to admit it.”
He stopped in his tracks. “Since when have you been interested in manhood? It’s the last thing that would appeal to you.”
“I’ve never been tested.”
“Take a look at me, then. Make it a good one. It will be your last.”
He thrust his face toward her, breathing heavily through distended nostrils. She laughed. It sounded like something delicate and brittle breaking inside of her.
“Is this what manhood looks like? Is this how it talks? Is this how a husband speaks to a wife?”
“What wife?” he said. “I don’t see any wife.” Kerrigan shaded his eyes with one hand and scanned the dissolving horizons of the room. Then turned, grinding his heel in the white carpet, and wrenched the door open. I heard his angry feet stamp up the stairs.
Kate Kerrigan drifted to the mantel and laid her head and her arm along its line. Her hair fell like ungathered sheaves across her face. I looked away from her.
The monkey-puzzle tree was sharply conventionalized against the red city sky. Below it Las Cruces lay tangled in its lights. The thickest, brightest cord in the net of lights was the yellow-lit freeway that carried the highway. The highballing trucks and cars, from the distance at which I sat, were like children’s toys pushed without purpose across the face of midnight.
At the other end of the veranda a door opened. I pulled my legs up out of sight. Kerrigan stepped out, his shoulders bowed by a heavy leather suitcase in each hand.
“This is for good?” she said behind him.
“That’s for sure. I’m taking my own car, incidentally. And nothing else except my clothes.”
“Of course you’re leaving your debts.”
“The businesses ought to cover them. If they don’t it’s just too bad.”
She appeared in the lighted doorway, a pale figure holding out one tentative hand. “Where are you going, Don?”
He said with his back to her: “You”ll never know.”
“It’s strange that you’re able to walk away like this. Even you.”
“It’s better than being carried out on a litter,” he said over his shoulder. “So long, Kate. Don’t make trouble for me. If you do, you’ll get double trouble. I promise.”
She watched him go down the steps and along the walk to the street, where his car was parked. Her fingers clutched at her throat. They tore the pearl collar. The beads rattled like hail on the tiles.
CHAPTER 12: His double red taillight diminished down the slope, flashed at a boulevard stop, and disappeared. When I reached the boulevard, his car was a long block away, headed south toward the suburbs. I kept the block’s distance between us as far as the wye at the city limits. Then I closed in on him, cutting in and out through the highway traffic, past all-night businesses whose signs were like a neon postscript scribbled in the dirty margin of the city.
We were only a couple of miles from his motor court, and I thought that he was on his way there. Instead, he pulled out of the southward stream of traffic and turned in on the asphalt apron of a drive-in restaurant. Its parking space held two cut-down jalopies occupied by mugging couples, and a blue Buick coupe with battered fenders. As I went by, I saw Kerrigan draw up beside the Buick.
Next door to the drive-in stood a dark and unattended service station. I stopped beside its gas pumps. From where I sat, I could see the entrance to the drive-in and one glass wall of the building. A couple of car-hops, wan-looking under blue light, were talking behind the glass to a white-hatted short-order cook. Through the glass of the far wall, Kerrigan’s red Ford and the Buick coupe were dimly visible.
Kerrigan was standing between the two cars, talking to someone in the Buick. Its occupant, whose face was hidden from me, held out a package wrapped in dirty paper or newsprint. Kerrigan stuffed the package under his coat and returned to his car. The Buick’s headlights went on. It backed and turned toward the entrance. I caught a glimpse of a fur-collared leather jacket, a pale hard face framed in lank red hair. Bozey. A jet of adrenaline went through me. I followed him south out of town.
As the Buick fled into the dark perspective of the country, my excitement rose with my speed. I passed Kerrigan’s motor court at seventy. The speedometer climbed to seventy-five and held there. The Buick stayed in sight.
A few miles farther on, it slowed and seemed to hesitate, turned off the highway to the right. Its headlights swept a side road lined with cyclone fence. Then they were cut. I passed the intersection, slowing gradually, and saw its light-less shape crawling blind along the blacktop.
I braked hard, hit the dirt, cut my own lights and U-turned. When I rolled slowly back to the intersection, the Buick was out of sight and out of hearing. I turned down the blacktop after it and drove for nearly half a mile without lights.
The night was starless and moonless. A diffused radiance in the sky was enough to give me my bearings. The road ran straight as a yardstick between the high wire fences on either side. The sloping field to my left was gashed and plowed by erosion like a landscape on the dark side of the moon. The hangars of the disused airbase loomed on the other side. Around them concrete runways lay like fallen tombstones in the wild grass.
There was a break in the fence. I stopped in the ditch beyond it, and twirled the chamber of my .38 special to make sure that it was fully loaded. It was. I got out of the car. Except for the rusty sighing of cicadas, the night was very still. My footsteps made distinct sounds in the grass.
A double wire gate about thirty feet wide stood open in the fence. Its padlock bar had been filed through. I felt the sharp edges with my fingers. A concrete road ran through the gate and merged with one of the runways. The door of the nearest hangar yawned open. The Buick was standing beside it.
I started toward it, across two hundred yards of open concrete. There was no other movement anywhere unde
r the heavy sky. I felt small and expendable. The revolver in my hand was cold comfort. The high whistling whine of a starting Diesel penetrated the silence. Headlights flared inside the cavelike hangar. I broke into a run, hoping to get there before the motor warmed. But it must have been primed with gasoline. The truck rolled out of the building, pulling its huge aluminum semi-trailer. Its headlights swung toward me. A white face gleamed in the darkness of the cab.
As the truck bore down on me, I took careful aim at the lower left-hand corner of the windshield and fired twice. Cracks spiderwebbed the glass, but it didn’t shatter. Without swerving or slackening, the truck roared directly at me.
When it was almost on top of me, I stepped to one side and ran away from it. Its multiple tires growled in my ear. Something tugged at my trouser leg and spun me. I got a tight grip on air and hit the concrete like a sack of sand. Slid down its deadend street to the rough edge of unconsciousness and went over.
It was a long fall straight down through the darkness of my head. I was a middle-aging space cadet lost between galaxies and out of gas. With infinite skill and cunning I put a grain of salt on the tail of a comet and rode it back to the solar system. My back and shoulder were burned raw from the sliding fall. But it was nice to be home.
I sat up and looked around. There was nothing to see except the bare concrete, the open hangar, the abandoned coupe beside it. From somewhere and everywhere the cicadas chided me: you should have waited and followed, hated and swallowed, waited and followed. I got to my feet and searched for my gun and found it. It was a long walk back to my car.
I backed in through the open gate and drove to the front of the hangar. My headlights stabbed the darkness of its interior, shining on a pool of oil where the truck had stood. There was nothing else in the place but an empty Coke-bottle, years’ accumulation of dust drifted along the walls, some spatters of aluminum paint on the concrete-slab floor. I touched one metallic droplet with my finger. It wasn’t quite dry.
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