Two Trains Running
Page 40
* * *
1959 October 06 Tuesday 22:47
* * *
Sherman entered Ruth as gently as a man defusing a bomb. She opened delicately, a dewy blossom, offering the secret purity she had defended against the rapists of her childhood.
Like a key in a lock, radiated through Sherman’s mind. Only it’s me who’s opening.
Ruth whispered words no customer could ever have paid her to say. Then shuddered to an orgasm she didn’t believe could exist.
Sherman followed right after her, as they mated for life.
* * *
1959 October 06 Tuesday 23:12
* * *
“You think this’ll do the trick, Gar?” Rufus said to a bespectacled man standing at a workbench.
“It should,” the man said, cautiously. “It’s just physics. What we’re after is dissipation of force. We can’t build a thick enough wall, so we get the same effect with layers. Each one absorbs some of the energy, so, by the time you get to the last one, it holds.”
“How much is that thing going to weigh, brother?” Kendall asked, skeptically. “Remember, the boy got to walk in it.”
“He’s a strong young man,” Moses said. “And he won’t have to walk far.”
“Far enough,” Rufus said. “The Kings’ clubhouse is way over on—”
“We can drive him over,” Moses said. “Drop him off at the side.”
“That’s not the way it works,” Kendall said. “I was a gang fighter, in Detroit. Years ago, before I got . . . conscious. The leader has to lead. He’s got to walk at the head, all the way down to wherever the meet is.”
“If that boy’s got a strong enough rep—and my guess is that he does—he tells his men this is strategy, him coming in at the last minute—and they’ll buy it,” Rufus said.
“Long as he first across,” Kendall cautioned.
“I think it’s ready,” Garfield said, pointing to what looked like a thick blanket attached to heavy canvas straps.
“Let’s find out,” Darryl said, pulling a pistol from his coat.
* * *
1959 October 06 Tuesday 23:49
* * *
“Can you . . . can you do that thing you did before?” Tussy asked, as they approached her house.
“What thing?”
“You know. Go away and come back.”
“Yes.”
“Walker, I swear, how clear a picture do I have to paint for you?”
* * *
1959 October 06 Tuesday 23:57
* * *
“Is this how you imagined it?” Ruth asked. She was lying in Sherman’s arms, nude, the black lace teddy she had brought with her still in the trunk of her car—in a makeup case that also contained a pair of handcuffs and a black blindfold.
“I didn’t imagine it, I dreamed it.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I . . . never thought it could really happen.”
“I never thought a lot of things could happen. Good things, I mean. Bad things, those you can count on.”
“Not anymore,” Sherman said, grimly.
“What do you mean, Sherman?”
“You’ll see.”
“Sherman, don’t frighten me. Please.”
“Christ, I’m sorry, Ruth. I just meant from now on bad things aren’t going to happen to you.”
“Not when I’m with you, anyway.”
“More than just then,” the big detective said, his voice lush with love and menace.
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 00:54
* * *
Another man entering the back door to Tussy’s house would have seen only darkness. Dett’s nightman eyes quickly registered the vague shapes and outlines, and his memory supplied a map of the living room.
Tussy sat on the edge of the couch, knees together primly, hands in her lap. She was wearing a soft pink nightgown.
“Walker,” was all she said.
Dett approached the couch. He dropped to his knees next to her.
“I told you I was chubby,” Tussy said, throatily. “Do you still think you could pick me up and carry me?”
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 00:59
* * *
“Does it make you happy, putting criminals away?” Ruth asked.
“Happy? Not really. It’s a good thing to do, but it doesn’t mean much.”
“Why doesn’t it?” Ruth said, turning so she could watch Sherman’s eyes.
“Because fighting criminals isn’t the same as fighting crime, Ruth. It’s like . . . a garden, okay? If you have weeds, what do you do?”
“Pull them out.”
“Yeah. Pull them out. Not chop them off, because that wouldn’t do any good, right? They’d just grow back.”
Sherman rolled onto his back, then shifted position so that he was sitting up, his back against the headboard of the bed. Ruth spun onto her knees, facing him.
“You know what people say about Dobermans?” Sherman asked.
“That they turn on you?”
“Yeah, that. It’s a lie.”
“Why would people make up lies about a dog?”
“I’ll tell you why,” Sherman said, eyes glinting with unforgiveness. “A man gets a Doberman puppy. Now, he’s heard that Dobermans are really tough dogs, and he’s going to make sure this one knows who’s boss. So he beats the dog, that puppy. Until the dog does everything he wants it to.
“This goes on and on. But, one day, the dog realizes he’s not a puppy anymore. And when the man picks up the stick to beat him that day, the dog nails him. You know what the guy he bit is going to say? He’ll say, ‘My dog turned on me.’ You see what I’m telling you, Ruth? The dog didn’t turn on him. The dog was never with him. He was just biding his time, waiting for his chance.”
“Oh.”
“But if he had been good to that dog, from the beginning, I mean, the dog would never have done that.”
“And you think people are like that, too?” she said.
“No. People aren’t as good as dogs—some will turn on you. I see it happen in my job, every day. And there’s men I’ve known, they had every chance in life, but they were criminals in their hearts. Like rich kids who steal just for the thrill of it.
“But the thing is, the one sure thing is, the truly . . . sick ones, like the rapists and the child molesters, they all were like those Dobermans, once. Only once they got stronger, instead of turning on whoever hurt them, they went looking for weak people to hurt themselves. Like, once they learned how to do it, they got to love it.”
“Some people are just born mean,” Ruth said.
“That might be so,” Sherman said, “but I don’t believe anyone’s born to murder a whole bunch of people for the hell of it. You don’t get to be Charlie Starkweather from reading comic books, no matter what those idiot professors say.”
“I remember that. Everybody’s still talking about . . . what he did. You’re not saying a man like that, he didn’t deserve to die?”
“He deserved to die a dozen times over, Ruth. I’m just saying, well, he didn’t get that way overnight.”
“What about the girl? That little Caril?”
“What about her?”
“She went to prison. People say she did some of those murders, don’t they?”
“Yeah. And I don’t know what the truth of her is. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to know. Starkweather, he wasn’t one of the hard men, he was just a freak.”
“What do you mean, one of the hard men?”
“A professional. A man who does crime the way another man does whatever his job is. A man with . . . a code. If he’d been one of those, you can bet he would have taken the weight. Said it was all his fault, that he had forced the girl to go along. He was going to die anyway; he might as well have gone out with some class. Sat down in that chair and rode the lightning like a man. Starkweather, he was nothing but a degenerate. A piece of garbage like that, he doe
sn’t care what other people think of him, even his own kind.”
“You know what, Sherman?” Ruth said, curling into him. “Even if you’re right, even if his family did . . . horrible things to him, he didn’t have to do what he did. He had choices. Everybody has choices.”
“Everybody?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice as soft as gossamer. “Sometimes, the only choice is to live or to die. But you always have that. Like a bank account no one knows about, one that you can always go to if things get bad enough.”
“You’re not talking about Starkweather now, are you?”
“No, sweetheart. I was talking about that little Caril girl.”
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 02:02
* * *
“Are you sure?” Dett said. “You don’t even—”
“If I wasn’t sure, do you think I would dare to do it here? In my own house?” Tussy said, indignantly. “I already know you’re not going to be with me when I wake up.”
“But you’re . . . crying.”
“So what?” she said, defiantly. “Just because I’m a big enough girl to know my own mind doesn’t mean I can’t cry if I feel like it.”
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 02:09
* * *
“Night desk. Procter.”
“I’ve got a story for you.”
White male, mid-to-late-fifties, Midwest accent, but not local, flashed through the newsman’s mind, as he reflexively reached for his reporter’s pad. “Go,” he said.
“There’s a pay phone outside the Mobil station on Highway 109, just past the—”
“—exit. So?”
“I’ll give you an hour,” the voice said.
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 02:13
* * *
Tussy’s kisses tasted like peppermint and Kools. Dett was lost. He cupped her breast gently, as if testing its weight.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said.
“It sure looks like you do,” she chuckled, her hand trailing lightly between his legs.
“I don’t mean . . . that. But I never . . .”
“Oh, Walker,” she said, pushing him onto his back, “don’t tell me you’ve never been with a woman before.”
“Not with a woman I . . .”
“What?” she said, fitting herself over him.
Dett looked up at Tussy’s face, haloed in the reflected light from the hallway. His life fell into her eyes. “Love,” he said.
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 02:20
* * *
“Do you hate them all, Sherman?”
“Who, honey?” he asked.
“The . . . bad people, I guess you’d call them.”
“There aren’t that many truly bad ones, girl. Most of them, they’re just . . . dopes. You know how we catch them? They start throwing money around, brag to some girl they meet in a gin mill. Or one of them gets arrested for something else, and he turns informer to save his own skin.”
“Some of them . . . you know the kind I mean . . . they’re nothing but animals.”
“No, they’re not,” Sherman said, with sad certainty. “But they all practice on animals. When they’re still kids, I mean. Every single one I ever talked to, he started out hurting animals. They loved the feeling. So they went after more of it. They all loved fire, too.” Holden loves animals, flashed into his thoughts. And, just like them, he fears fire.
“When they were kids?”
“Yeah. And, sometimes, even after. You show me a kid who tortures animals and sets fires, I’ll show you a man I’m going to have to hunt someday.”
“You think they’re born like that?”
“No,” he said, watching the candlelight dance in Ruth’s dark hair. “It takes a lot of work to make them turn out that way.”
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 03:01
* * *
Procter pulled into the Mobil station with eight minutes to spare. He left his car at the pumps and walked inside. “Where’s the restrooms?” he asked the attendant, covering his tracks to the pay phone.
“Around the side,” the young pump jockey told him, pointing.
“Thanks. I’ll just get some gas first.”
“I can fill it for you, mister,” the kid said. “If you’re not back, I’ll just pull it over in front for you, okay?”
“You got a deal,” Procter said.
He ambled out of the station, walked around to the side of the cement-block building and into the darkness between the two restrooms.
The pay phone was hanging on the wall, sheltered by the overhang of the flat roof. Procter lit a cigarette, hunched his shoulders, and waited.
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 03:03
* * *
“Oh God!” Tussy moaned, falling face-first against Dett’s chest.
Dett’s arms encircled her, as rigid as steel bands, but not quite touching her back.
“It’s all right, Walker,” she whispered against him. “Come on.”
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 03:08
* * *
When the pay phone rang, Procter snatched it before the pump jockey could react. As he lifted the receiver to his ear, he heard, “That was a nice piece you did for The Voice of Liberation.”
“Oh, you’re the guy who read it,” Procter said.
“How come you never did another?”
“I didn’t care for the company.”
“You knew they were Commies before you—”
“I drove a long way,” Procter said. “So where’s the big story you promised, whoever you are?”
“You never wrote another article for them because you found out that the man in charge of that paper wasn’t Khrushchev, it was Hoover,” the voice said. A statement, not a question.
Procter felt the hair on the back of his neck flutter, and he knew it wasn’t the night breeze.
“Want more?” the voice said.
“Not on the phone, I don’t,” Procter said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out with the heel of his shoe.
“They ran you off once,” the voice said. “But I’ve been studying you. And I don’t think they could do it again . . . if the story was big enough.”
“You’re doing all the talking,” Procter said.
It was another few seconds before he realized he had been speaking into a dead line.
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 03:21
* * *
Alone in his room, Carl angrily tore another sheet of heavy, cream-colored stationery into strips. It has to be perfect!
He stood up, went to his closet, and spent several minutes precisely aligning his clothes until a familiar calmness settled over him. Then he sat down and began to write.
Mein Kommandant, I am yours to . . .
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 03:59
* * *
As Ruth and Sherman slept in each other’s arms, Walker Dett slipped through the darkness behind Tussy’s house to where he had hidden the Buick and a change of clothes.
Driving back to his two-room apartment, Procter was thinking, This one’s no crank. And he knows about that time the G-men paid me a visit in Chicago.
Holden felt the darkness lifting around him, felt the night predators retreating to their dens, felt the forest respond to the not-yet-visible sun. He checked his notebook one more time, then headed back to his cave.
A maroon Eldorado crept around the corner on Halstead, then turned up the block.
“One more pass,” Rufus said to Silk. “Then we’ll have it all mapped out.”
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 06:11
* * *
“You’re up early, Beau.”
“I can sleep when I’m dead, Cyn.”
“Why do you always have to say things like that?”
“I’m sorry, ho
ney. I just meant there’s so much to do and there’s never enough time.”
“I know.”
“And I’m never really sleepy, you know? A couple of hours, that’s all I ever need.”
“At least have a good breakfast, for once. I’ll make some bacon and eggs, and maybe some potato pancakes?”
“I’m really not so—”
“You know how much Luther loves it when we have breakfast together, Beau. We can all eat at the big table. What do you say?”
“Sounds good,” Beaumont said, smiling at his sister.
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 07:12
* * *
“What?”
“Oh, Walker, I’m sorry! I woke you up, didn’t I?”
“Tussy,” Dett said, as if to reassure himself. “I thought it was . . . business. No, you didn’t wake me up at all. Is anything wrong?”
“No! Nothing at all. I was just . . . I . . . well, I remembered you were staying at the Claremont, and I don’t have to be at work until three, so I thought . . . I mean, I know you’re busy, you have business and all, but I thought, I mean, if you wanted to come over for lunch, I could . . .”
“I never wanted to leave,” Dett said.
* * *
1959 October 07 Wednesday 07:13