by Keene, Day
“So did I. But I’ve been thinking.”
“So you said.”
“And I don’t think I want to get married, anyway not to you.”
“Why not? I mean outside of not wanting to tie yourself down to one man. Suppose you be a little more specific.”
Dona looked at him over the rim of her glass. “Well, after all, you’re only a lieutenant of detectives.”
“Only?”
“You don’t make very much money.” Dona gestured with her free hand. “You couldn’t give me anything like this.”
“That’s understood. But I didn’t think it mattered. I’ve saved enough to make a substantial down payment on a house and to furnish it.”
“A bungalow in a development, filled with cheap furniture. A baby every year and us having to watch every penny we spend.”
Charles seemed to grow in size. His shoulders strained the seams of his coat. His shirt collar was too tight. His natural color deepened. The laugh lines left the corners of his eyes. “You seemed to find it attractive enough when I proposed.”
“That was then.”
Charles reached for his glass, then set it back, untouched. “Well, this is rather sudden, but if that’s the way you feel — ”
“It’s the way I feel,” Dona said. She didn’t want to go through this again. She wanted the break to be complete. She wanted Charles to despise her. “But just because I don’t want to marry you is no reason we can’t be sweethearts.” She toyed with his hand for a minute in unmistakable invitation.
“Cold turkey. Just like that.”
“Don’t you want me?”
“No.”
“Not even one last time?”
Charles stood up. “Thanks, but no. Not under the circumstances. I thought we were in love. I know I’m in love with you. I wanted a home and kids. But if a roll in the hay is all you’re interested in, I’ll be damned if I’ll play stud to a spoiled rich brat.” He picked his hat from the chair. “I suppose I had this coming, reaching up out of my class, thinking the daughter of a three-thousand-dollar-a-week entertainer would be content to marry a cop.”
The door closed and he was gone. Dona sat very still for a long time, torn between grief, revulsion and desire. She’d done what she had to do.
She straightened her disordered skirt with a swift brush of her hand and drank the drink Charles had mixed and then made another. Perhaps if she got drunk she could cry.
She was still sitting on the couch when Estrella came home. As Estrella dropped her mink cape on the chair, she asked the obvious. “Still up, baby?”
Dona studied her mother through a shimmering scrim woven of Scotch and soda. It was almost as if she was seeing her for the first time. The soft throaty voice irritated her. Her sequinned gown was cut too low. Her perfume was too obvious.
Estrella glanced at the bottle on the coffee table, as she sat down beside her. “What’s the idea, baby? You gone dipso on me? This bottle stuff is strictly for the chumps.”
Dona forced herself to speak calmly. “I know what I’m doing.”
Estrella lighted a cigarette. “I wonder. How was your date with Charles?”
“He only stayed a few minutes.”
“How come.”
“I broke our engagement.”
“Oh,” Estrella said softly. “I see. I’m sorry, baby.”
“It’s a little late to be sorry, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is. What did you tell Charles?”
“What could I tell him? The truth?”
Chapter Three
WITH THE lamp on the night-stand by the bed turned off, the only light in the old hotel room came from a yellow slit in the cracked bathroom door and from the traffic light, alternating from green to red, outside the screened window.
Still amorous, Jack Ames kissed Dona’s bare shoulder. “How old are you, sugar?”
“Eighteen,” Dona said. “Why?”
“I just wondered.”
“Oh,” Dona said.
The hot night pressing through the windows fondled her spent body with moist fingers. She could smell flowering magnolia and freshly-popped corn. Young people called to each other in the nearby courthouse square. Every time the traffic light changed a bell clanged.
She’d been mad to do this thing. Bernie would be ashamed of her. Father Ryan, her mentor at St. Patrick’s, would be ashamed of her. She was ashamed of herself.
There was a dresser at the foot of the bed. Dona opened her eyes and looked at her dimly reflected image. She couldn’t be the girl in the mirror. Dona Santos didn’t do such things. But now she knew that her secret was safe. That no man could guess the truth.
The bed springs squeaked as Ames got to his dresser. “How about a drink, sugar?”
Dona rolled her head on the pillow. “No, thank you.”
Ames mixed one for himself with the last of the rapidly melting ice. “Better change your mind.”
“No, thank you,” Dona repeated.
Ames brought his drink back to the bed. “Know somethin’, sugar?”
“What?”
“You’re the nicest thing that’s happened to me since I won fourteen Circuit Court cases in a row.” He set his drink on the night table and lighted two cigarettes. “How far did you say you drove today?”
“From Natchez.”
“That’s a far piece of road for a mite of a girl like you. You’re from Chicago, eh?”
“That’s right.”
Ames gave her one of the cigarettes he’d lighted. “And now you’re here, what do you think of us?”
Dona puffed at the cigarette. What did she think of Blairville? What did she think of the deep South?
Dona closed her eyes and was back in the convertible.
She’d driven Estrella to the airport. She’d kissed her mother goodbye.
“You’re all right, now?” Estrella had asked her. “You sure, baby? Because if you aren’t, to hell with M.G.M. We’ll go away somewhere together — to Bermuda, Paris, Cannes. You have to know it, child. You’re all that matters to me. You’re all that ever mattered. I’ve wanted to lie down and die a hundred times but I couldn’t. Because I wanted things to be right for you.”
“Of course I’m all right,” she’d assured her mother. “I was just hysterical last night.”
“Things look a little brighter this morning?”
“A lot brighter,” she’d lied.
When Estrella had boarded the plane she’d gone back to the apartment and packed her bags and driven directly south. The names of the towns she’d passed through were indelibly etched on her mind. Nashville to Memphis to Natchez, through various small towns, into Blairville.
Inside the limits of the town, there had been the cloying sweetness of magnolia mingled with the indescribable smell of poverty rising from the clusters of sway-backed, unpainted Negro shacks that fringed the outskirts of every southern town like the hem of a black petticoat showing under a white silk dress.
What did she think of Blairville?
Dona temporized. “It’s a little early for me to tell.”
“It is, at that,” Ames agreed.
It was hot under the sheet. Dona kicked it down to the foot of the bed and was immediately sorry she had. She started to say “Please,” and thought better of it. She probably should feel grateful that Ames was attracted to her. She lay looking up at the ceiling fan. “I wonder — ”
“You wonder what?”
“If you know a local man named Blair Sterling.”
Ames rested an arm on either side of her. “Where’d you hear ‘bout Blair Sterling?”
“From a woman I know.”
Ames’ cigarette bobbled in his lips. “Excusin’ I use the word, Dona. But there is one free-wheelin’ bastid I purely can’t abide.”
“He’s that bad?”
“Worse.”
“In what way?”
“Well, let me put it this way. Blair’s out of step with the times. He’s Iivin’ back in the days of m
oonlight an’ magnolia.
“Blair’s given the whole county a bad name an’ the N.A.A.C.P. enough ammunition to gun every planter in the South. He’s been in Federal Court twice for peonage. He refuses to pay the legal minimum wage. He thinks he’s Gawd Almighty sittin’ on a chamber pot. He works his colored hands like slaves an’ treats them like dogs. An’ at the same time, he boasts he was most man-size afore he knew that white girls were formed the same as colored ones.”
“Oh?”
“From what I hear, even now Blair’s pushin’ fifty, a likely lookin’ bright-skin or high yellow has to be able to run like a deer to keep away from the old massa.
“Now tell me, why’s a doll like you askin’ questions about Blair Sterling?”
“I have no interest in him,” Dona lied.
“Good,” Ames approved. “Then what do you say we forget about him and get back to us?”
The traffic light turned red, then green. The bell clanged metallically. In the heat and silence that followed, Dona felt as if she were suffocating. She could no longer feel the ceiling fan. She tried to respond but every nerve in her body protested.
Ames traced a wet path across her cheek with his finger. “Honey — ”
“I’m sorry,” Dona said, meekly.
The weight lifted. The ceiling fan resumed its lazy revolutions. When she opened her eyes again Ames was standing beside the bed fully dressed. His white silk suit was well-cut. The broad-brimmed panama in his hand looked expensive. He was obviously what he claimed to be, a wealthy local attorney and land owner.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Dona repeated.
Ames sat on the bed beside her. The last trace of whiskey was gone from his voice. “So am I. If I hadn’t been in liquor, I’d have known from the start you were just pretendin’ to be somethin’ you aren’t. You don’t make a practice of this, do you?”
“No.”
“First time it’s ever happened? I mean a cocktail lounge pick-up?”
“Yes.”
Ames’ voice was gentle as his fingers smoothing Dona’s hair back from her forehead. “Life can be a mess, sometimes.” He picked up her hand from the sheet and looked at Charles’ ring. “What is it, sugar? Tryin’ to forget a man?”
“In a way.”
“Anythin’ I can help you with?”
“No.”
Ames hesitated, then took two bills from his wallet and laid them on the night-stand. “Not in pay. Just in case your trouble is part financial. An’ if there’s anythin’ else I can do, I’ll be in town. Anyway, a few miles out. Like I told you in the lounge, I live here.”
He looked up and down the hall to make certain it was empty, and closed the door softly behind him.
Dona lit the bed lamp and looked at the bills. Both of them were fifties. They made her feel like a whore.
The traffic light went out, shut off for the night, and the bell stopped clanging. Far out in the heat-drenched countryside, a train whistled, a pack of hound dogs bayed and a whippoorwill cried.
Dona swung her bare feet to the floor and opened the larger of her two suitcases. The revolver she’d purchased from Bernie had gotten oil on her best sheer nightgown. She laid the revolver on the dresser and carried her nightgown into the bathroom.
After showering and removing her make-up, she combed her hair and brushed her teeth. She slipped the nightgown over her head and scuffed back into the bedroom. The still heat of the summer night made even the film of silk unbearable. The gown smelled of gun oil. Dona stripped it off and stood looking at the ring Charles had given her.
Because of her behavior tonight she really had no right to the ring. On impulse, she sat at the writing desk, took an envelope from the drawer and addressed it:
Lieutenant Charles Mercer
Detective Division
Police Headquarters
1121 South State Street
Chicago, Illinois.
She folded a sheet of paper around the ring, enclosed it in a second sheet for safety, and sealed the ring in the envelope. Then she laid it on the dresser.
According to the lighted clock in the courthouse tower it was eighteen minutes after twelve. Most of the store fronts were dark. There were few cars and fewer pedestrians on the street.
Her cheeks felt flushed. Despite the cold shower she’d taken, her body was beaded with perspiration. She hadn’t known such heat existed. There was something insidiously lush and evil about it.
She wished she could cry, really cry. She hadn’t been able to cry since Estrella had told her. The future frightened her. Only one thing was real. That was her hate for the man who had done this to her. She looked from the night-filled square to the revolver on the dresser.
In the morning she would go to her Blair Sterling. She would be calm and matter of fact about it, as Estrella had been. She would tell him who she was and why she had come to Blairville.
Then she would pull the trigger of the revolver as many times as was necessary.
Chapter Four
THE NIGHT grew older and hotter. Breathing was a conscious effort. As Dona studied the dark square, a group of laughing young people emerged from the hotel cocktail lounge and got into a bright red Buick. Dona hoped the boy behind the wheel could drive better than he could walk.
Watching them reminded her of the bottle of bourbon Jack Ames had insisted on buying. She suddenly wanted a drink. She wanted to stop thinking, for this one night, at least. She picked up the phone and called the desk.
“Would you please send a pitcher of ice to 214?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the night clerk said. “As soon as I kin locate Beau.”
“Thank you.”
Dona took a pastel negligee from her bag and laid it over a chair. Beau was an odd name for a bell boy. The bed lamp hurt her eyes. She switched it off and sat on the edge of the bed, waiting, swinging her feet in the narrow river of light escaping from the partly opened bathroom door.
There were many firsts in a girl’s life. It was the first time she’d ever been deep South. It was the first time she’d ever been cheap.
She poured a stiff drink into one of the water glasses on the dresser and attempted to drink it straight. The undiluted whiskey burned her throat. She added melted ice water from the pitcher and drank as she studied her reflection in the mirror. This constant looking in mirrors had to stop. No one could tell. Jack Ames was proof of that.
“Hi, beautiful,” he’d said. Then he’d called her “sugar.”
The diluted drink tasted good. Dona mixed a second one and carried it to the bed, where the ceiling fan stirred a faint breeze. She re-fluffed the crumpled pillow and sat trying not to think.
The whiskey eased her hurt and rounded the sharp edges of her problem. She lifted the glass to her lips and was surprised to find it empty. She mixed a drink that would last and returned to the cool of the fan. The air from the blades stroked her flesh with a slow, almost sensuous deliberation that reminded her of Jack Ames. She wished she could stop thinking of Ames, but she couldn’t. He was too recent, too vital.
She stretched her legs in front of her and looked at them. They were nice legs. Everything about her was nice. Her toes and the tips of her fingers tingled. The angular outlines of the room began to blur. Perspiration beaded on her face and body faster than the ceiling fan could dry it.
The cloying sweetness of magnolia sickened her. The heat-drugged silence made her head ache.
After she’d shot Blair Sterling, what?
In Chicago, in the first heat of her revulsion, it had seemed so simple. Dona brushed her hair out of her eyes. Now she wasn’t so certain. She couldn’t just drive somewhere and shoot a stranger without any apparent reason. If she did she would be held and questioned. They would take her to an interrogation room like those on the fourth floor of Chicago police headquarters and cold-eyed, over-polite detectives like those on Charles’ squad would question her. A detective would ask, “What’s your name, Miss?”
“Dona Santos.
”
“Where did you come from?”
“Chicago.”
“When?”
“Yesterday evening.”
“And when did you first meet Blair Sterling?”
“I’d never met him before.”
“Then why did you shoot him?”
“Because he’s my father.”
“Go on.”
“Because he raped my mother eighteen years ago right here in Blairville. At least, on his plantation. On the floor of a cotton gin.”
Then another detective would take over.
“You say this happened eighteen years ago? How do you know?”
“She told me. She was only fifteen. Her mother had sent her on an errand to the cotton gin and Mr. Sterling was there and he forced her to submit to him.”
“You were the result of this rape?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So eighteen years later, you drive a thousand miles to kill Blair Sterling. Why?”
“It’s difficult to explain.”
“Try.”
“I felt it was the only way I could get even for what he did to me.”
“To you?”
“Well, to my mother.”
“What’s your mother’s name?”
What could she tell the detective then?
If she lied, the law would ferret out the truth. It would be only a matter of hours or days.
She would be forced to say, “She calls herself Estrella Santos.”
“The good-looking Spanish singer?” The detective would describe Estrella with his hands. “The gal who’s appeared on all the big TV shows?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why do you say she calls herself Estrella Santos?”
“Because it isn’t her right name. The name by which she was known here in Blairville is Beth Wilbur.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. We still have a warrant for her, a warrant charging assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill.”
Then what would they do to her, to Estrella?
Dona realized she was holding her breath and exhaled slowly. Revenging herself on her father wasn’t going to be as simple as she had thought it would be. She would have to be subtle about it. She couldn’t tear down the whole pattern and structure of life Estrella had spent eighteen years in erecting.
