“You can hear me, Selma,” he whispered. “Nod your head.”
She nodded. She made a muffled sound behind the gag. Her nude body was white, suety and unpleasant to him. He went to the closet and brought back a pale blue satin robe. “I’m going to untie your hands. Don’t reach for the blindfold. If you get a look at me, I’ll have to kill you. Do you understand?” Again she nodded.
He reached around her and released her hands. She rubbed them together. He put the robe in her hands, then realized he had to help her put it on. Once she was in the robe and seated again he said, “Now I’m going to let you talk. Don’t try to yell. There’s nobody to hear you.”
He pulled the gag from her mouth, dropped it on the floor. She made chewing motions and then licked her lips. “What the hell is going on? Who are you? Where’s Harry?”
“Harry is dead.”
“D’ya kill him?”
“He died of a heart attack or a brain hemorrhage or something.”
She swallowed. “Where … is he?”
“Don’t worry about where he is. I want you to answer some questions.”
“Go to hell,” she said weakly.
He slapped her, forehand and backhand. “You’ll answer some questions.”
“Okay.”
“When do you usually get up?”
“Me, around noon.”
“And Harry?”
“Earlier but not real early. Eleven maybe.”
“Do you both ever sleep later?”
“After a rough night sometimes. Maybe two in the afternoon.”
“Are there any sleeping pills around here?”
“In the bathroom cabinet. They’re yellow. In a square bottle.”
“How many does it take to knock you out?”
“I go out good on two.”
“You’re going to take four.”
“What the hell for?”
“Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to wake up very late. And you’re going to find out that Harry died in his sleep. You’re going to forget all about this, about my being here. Nobody would believe you anyway. Yell for the police, and you’ll get involved.”
“Is … is he in the other bed?”
“Yes. Right behind me. I’m sitting on the edge of it. He’s in his pajamas.”
“I dowanna sleep in here. Please, I dowanna.”
“Don’t try anything silly while I’m getting the pills, Selma. You can’t get your ankles untied in time. If you pull that blindfold loose, you’re going to take the whole bottle of pills. Then they can find both of you.”
“I … I won’t try anything. My God, that last record has played a thousand times.”
He found the pills, held the bottle in a towel while he shook out four of them. He filled a tumbler with whisky and ice and took it to her, put it in her hand. He thought she might try to fake taking the sleeping pills. But the nearness of the body had cowed her. She took them meekly. Afterward she sipped steadily at the whisky. Her mouth became loose. Her words blurred. Twice she started to sag and fought to sit up again. The third time she toppled over. He let the whisky spill and the glass roll under the bed. He tried to awaken her and could not. He slipped the robe off and hung it up. He took off the blindfold and released her ankles, and put her into bed, covered her over. He turned out the room lights and opened the blinds. When he stood in the doorway he could hear her deep breathing.
When he turned off the record player the music died surely in the middle of a bar. He turned out the other lights, closed the glass doors, moved silently away into the night.
9
In all nations, in all the times of history, there have been wanderers, the men without goal or purpose, the self-ostracized. They have never been a group animal, a herd creature. There is no pattern to the wandering.
In the beginning Lloyd’s wandering was flight. He had gained enough time so that he was able to withdraw his money from the bank of Oasis Springs. By nightfall he was five hundred miles from Oasis Springs, traveling northwest.
Had Charlie Bliss or one of his people found the body of Haynes, it is very probable that it would have been handled quietly, placed in some deep and unmarked grave out in sandy wastes. But the body was found by an old man who worked on the maintenance staff, a simple old man who despised the hotel, the guests, the gambling and all other employees. He looked with satisfaction at the body, covered it over again, put his broom away and went down to the town and made a report of murder to Carl Hand, the Chief of Police.
Even then it might have been handled in a different way, had Harry Danton been alive. Money can cause curious distortions of logic. With a few props, such as ladder and wrench, it might have been deduced that Haynes, while working on the overhead pipes, had fallen to his death, and perhaps bounced into the wheeled hamper. But Danton had died peacefully in his sleep, and Charlie Bliss did not have the executive talent to step in and secure official cooperation. As a matter of fact, the management of the Safari made it known to Hand that extreme diligence with the resultant bad publicity for the Hotel Green Oasis would not go entirely unrewarded. Had Danton been more generous with his partners, pressure might have been exerted from quite another direction.
But the deal at the Hotel Green Oasis had always been too fast and too tricky. And there were too many reputable and honest owners and managers of other hotels and casinos in the state—presuming, of course, that legalized gambling can ever be considered either reputable or honest—who saw in this incident a chance to make it nationally known that the gambling in the state is rigidly policed. State inspectors were happy to cooperate. Nobody of importance would be hurt. The various licenses were lifted—in fact, snatched. And it became illegal for the Hotel Green Oasis Corporation to conduct gambling, serve liquor, handle food or rent rooms. The career of Harry Danton, with emphasis on twenty-three arrests, five indictments, one conviction with suspended sentence appeared in both news and editorials. Herman “Tulsa” Haynes received almost equal coverage, though his batting average was much poorer. He had spent three and a half years in prison.
Due to his love for his fantasy comic books, Benny Bernholz had the secondary nickname of “Monster.” This nickname appeared in the news items about him, without any explanation, permitting the reader to draw his own inference. The Monster was missing, and presumed dead. The publicity made a threatening motion in the direction of Charlie Bliss, but was quickly diverted by those who recognized Charlie’s future value to other similar organizations. Old pictures of Sylvia appeared, along with cheesecake publicity poses of Selma, taken at the time she was doing an inept and lethargic strip on Burgundy Street. This was gang war, crookedness, lechery and murder, and must be stamped out. The big broom swept energetically. The Hotel Green Oasis was an echoing emptiness. Virtue had triumphed.
No sooner was it empty than the cautious negotiations began. This was a prize to be purchased cheaply. With a new name, a new corporation, new influence, it could one day be reopened, and would be reopened. It was unthinkable that it should not be used again.
Even the most lard-headed village cop would have begun to look for Robert Rose. He had left the hotel without notice. He had drawn a startlingly large amount of cash out of a checking account. They picked up three fair prints and one partial thumb print from his room. An artist made a sketch of him that seemed to satisfy the people who had worked with him. The sketch was enough to give tiny children the horrors. The make of car and license number was known. In view of the head start he had managed, a ten-state alarm went out.
He knew they were after him. He felt almost indifferent to the chase. Flight was automatic. Had he been frightened, he might have made mistakes. Being indifferent, he reacted with guile and intelligence. The beard was the most distinguishing characteristic. He shaved that off in cold water under a small California bridge. He abandoned the car by driving it into a large used car lot, removing the plates, folding them twice into a small packet and dropping them into a trash ca
n a block away. That night, in a Los Angeles hotel, he used peroxide sparingly on his hair and brows until they grey blended with the lighter color, until the white patch was less obvious. He studied his face in the mirror. The naked face looked battered and savage, with a telltale pallor where the beard had been.
From there he moved north, making short trips by bus and train. He had destroyed all identification as Robert Rose. During that time he was nameless. When he arrived in Portland on a weekday morning, he looked up the address of the Wescott Lumber Company in the phone book, and took a taxi. When he went in he saw Tom standing in a doorway in his shirt sleeves, arguing with a man in work clothes. Lloyd waited until his brother turned to go back into his office and then said, “Tom.”
Tom was older and heavier and not as tall. He stared at Lloyd. “Do I know you?”
Lloyd walked up to him. “You used to know me pretty well.”
Tom stared. His face changed. “Lloyd,” he whispered. “For God’s sake. What … Come in.”
He closed the office door. They shook hands. “We all decided you were dead. My God, I even paid a detective agency and they got noplace. What happened to you?”
“I was in a bad accident. Amnesia.”
“Wasn’t there any identification on you?”
“Apparently not.”
“Have you tried to get in touch with mother?”
“I came here first.”
“Dad died last year. She’s living with us now. She’s always talking about you, wondering what happened to you. She was the only one who wouldn’t believe you were dead. This will … mean a lot to her.”
And it meant a lot to her. He lived with them for three weeks. The house was not large enough for four adults and four children. He knew that Marge, Tom’s wife, resented his presence. He knew he was not a good guest. There was no lightness in him. He could not make conversation. The children seemed wary of him. When Tom and his mother asked questions, he answered vaguely. There was both a restlessness and an emptiness in him. He could not feel close to these people. Tom and his mother loved a man who no longer existed. He sensed that Tom resented having the entire burden of the support of their mother.
He left without saying goodby. He left a note for Tom, and a note for his mother. With the note for Tom he left a shoe box containing twenty-five thousand dollars. He wrote, “In order to avoid questions, you probably should keep this in a safe place and feed it in as you need it. Don’t worry about the source of it. I have no idea of where I will go or what I will do. Perhaps I should not have come back. Sometimes life reaches a dead end before you realize it or expect it.”
And so another man joined the thin ranks of the wanderers.
Many knew him in far places, and wondered about him. When a man has gone beyond the point where he can feel fear or hope, there is a quality about him that sets him apart from others. There is an ominousness in his silences, and a hint of savage violence kept under careful control. The non-conformist is always suspect. Men saw the capacity for violence. Women saw lostness in the eyes, imagined a softness that hid behind the shattered face with its marks of mending.
A tall man with a ruined face worked in the Salinas Valley crops until he was brown as any Mexican.
A tall man worked the night trick at a fleabag hotel in Chicago, and left when the manager became too curious about his background.
For five months he helped a lonely woman run a North Carolina motel, sharing her drudgery, sharing her bed—and left one day without warning, leaving half the money he had saved in an envelope for her. She looked down the road in the direction he had gone, and knew she would never forget him or stop wondering about him.
As a vagrant in Georgia, a man who spoke in a manner that betrayed an education in contrast with a work-hardened body and a broken face, worked thirty days on the road.
He swung west, through the south, taking work that punished his body. But exhaustion could not blunt memory. And finally one day he knew where he was going and knew what would become of him, knew the meagerness of his own destiny.
A tall norteamericano walked through the mountain villages. His clothing was ragged and he carried a pack of great heaviness, the shoulder straps stained with his sweat. He had a great russet beard, and he spoke in the dialect of the mountain people of Queretaro. He was not like the turistas. He knew of the small customs and courtesies, and in return for food and a place to sleep, he would do the work of two. This was a strange one, with a manner of sadness. He followed the mountain trails rather than the highways.
At last, on a clear cold April day, after following the half-remembered trail past the places where steepness made the breath shallow and the heart fast, he rounded the rock shoulder and saw the huts and the steep slant of the fields, and women washing clothing in the stream below the waterfall. They were far below him, and tiny as small brown dolls.
Though he was weary, he quickened his pace. He reached the settlement. They gathered around him. He towered over them, smiling, walking slowly among them to the hut, to his own place. One of the women struck the iron bar that called the men back from the field.
Isabella was unchanged, and yet seemed a stranger to him. The child was three, a daughter named Carmencita, very shy of the tall stranger. And Isabella, too, was shy. There was news. There were four new huts. Now the settlement numbered thirty-five, soon to be thirty-six when Concha bore the child of Armando. Accompanied by Roberto, Rosario and Armando, he had to make a tour of the settlement to inspect the gifts he had sent which had so enriched them, had made life in this hidden and primitive place so much more endurable. The most appreciated gift was the box containing the school supplies, the many books and writing materials. Now there was a school, and the children would not grow up in ignorance.
They had a tact and understanding which not only prevented them from showing surprise at his return, but from either commenting on the surgery that had repaired his face, or the length of his absence. He knew they would ask no questions of him.
Isabella was more shy of him than she had been as a bride. The greatest liberty she permitted herself was to touch his face lightly with her fingertips, the tip of his nose, the reconstructed cheek, the diminished scar and say, “It is like a miracle.” And then turn abruptly away.
They ate. He went with Roberto, Rosario and Armando to the flat rock, with a bottle of the mescal, and they sat where they could watch the blue dusk shadows fill the valley.
Roberto talked extravagantly of the great adventures of the twenty-three packing cases, of the electric excitement in the settlement as each was opened and the miracles displayed. He said, “With such luxuries, and with a school, it became necessary for this place to have a name, so that it may be thought of as a village instead of a hiding place. Much thought was given to the name, and of many choices, it was voted, we name it Nuevo Pinal Blanco. And, in the voting, Armando became mayor.”
“A good choice,” Lloyd said.
There was silence. The bottle was passed around. Roberto cleared his throat and said, “How long will you stay with us?”
“Toda mi vida,” Lloyd said. All my life. “If it is permitted.”
“We are pleased and honored,” Armando said. “We are honored that you choose this small place over the comforts and excitements of your own land.”
“My wife and my child are here. I went back and did what had to be done. One had died. Now the other three are dead.”
“That is good,” Rosario said.
“For a time I did not think to return here. But then it became necessary to me. It is satisfying to me to work with my hands. It is satisfying to me to sit here in this manner and drink from this bottle and talk with friends.”
When he walked back through the night to his home, Isabella was waiting for him. She unrolled the pallets and fixed the bedding. He lay beside her in the darkness, not touching her. He told himself that he had retreated from life, that life had defeated him.
Yet he knew he had been draw
n back here. Perhaps these mountains had marked his soul as deeply as they had marked his face. Armando had talked of the comforts and excitements. Spurious excitements of television and cinema. Dubious comforts of spoiled women.
For a long time he had kept something locked deeply inside him. He lay beside Isabella and he felt something inside him struggling to be free. It broke free, and there was a warmth in him, a warmth that filtered up and became tears to sting his eyes and thicken his throat.
He turned abruptly to her and gathered her roughly into his arms, and he could not control the hoarse sounds he made, the frightening sounds of the sobbing of a grown man.
She held him and soothed him and after a time he became aware of what she was saying to him, and when he heard her words he knew the depth of her understanding, and sensed how rewarding their life would be.
“It is all over now,” she kept saying. “You have come home. It is all over now.”
Of all the far places of the world, this was home.
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
The Empty Trap Page 15
