Murder is the Pay-Off

by Leslie Ford

  “I’m going with you, Gus. Come on, let me drive you.”

  She was at the car door, holding it open, bending forward as she talked to him. Janey moved back. They hadn’t pushed her away, not physically, but the effect was the same. Her long black velvet skirt brushed the dry leaves in front of the hedge, her high heels tottered on the uneven bricks. Connie had low-heeled shoes on and a tweed coat lined with fur.

  “You go back home, Connie.”

  Janey heard him, but she heard Connie, too.

  “I’m going with you,” she said coolly. She laughed. “A reporter’s place is at her editor’s side. I’ve never been in on a murder, Gus, and it’s good experience, and I’m going, whether you like it or not. I’ve got a press card, too. You’d better let me drive you. I can make better time than you can and not have a flat halfway there.”

  She pulled the door back with a determined hand. “Come on, Gus. Don’t be a stubborn ape. We’ve got to hurry.”

  Janey put her key into the lock and held on to the doorknob for a moment, her eyes closed, trying to swallow down the hollow sick waves of despair coming up from inside her stomach. Gus was gone, in Connie’s car. It was her own fault. He’d much rather drive himself than have even Connie drive him, but what she’d said about a flat was true. He had to drive at a snail’s pace on the graveled corduroy roads out in the country. They could have had new tires—they could have had a new car—if it hadn’t been for her.

  She let her burning forehead rest on the cold white surface of the door. How much was it? A thousand dollars? It couldn’t be. There wasn’t that much money in the whole world. It couldn’t be a thousand dollars. That was crazy. She couldn’t possibly have written that many checks, for ten dollars, or twenty dollars. There had to be something wrong somewhere. She raised her head, shook it violently to shake off the sick, horrible web of fear weaving itself around her mind, and turned the key in the lock. It was true, of course. There was no use denying it, no use lying to herself, pretending what was true couldn’t be true.

  It came again, the horrible sickening moment of torture as the truth flashed nakedly and clearly into her mind, before the intensity of it numbed and paralyzed her so that she could go on living with it inside her until it came again, suddenly like this, or earlier when the jack pot fell there at the Maynards’. She clenched her fists and pressed her head harder against the wood of the door. “Oh, no, no,” she whispered. “It can’t be.” It couldn’t be a thousand dollars. It couldn’t possibly have added up to that much in the ten- and fifteen- and once in a while twenty-dollar checks she’d written and cashed at the Sailing Club and the Country Club. There had to be something wrong somewhere. The bank balance would have showed it over the last five months. The scribbled check stubs she’d torn out and stuck in her pocket, put away then and only got out and added up the week before, must be wrong. She must have made duplicates of some of them. That had to be it, or they’d have been turned in to the bank and showed on her balance. She’d kept telling herself that, half believing it at first, sharply repressing the whispering doubt telling her it was more likely to be the other way, that these weren’t all, there were others she’d written and forgotten about and hadn’t put down. More than a thousand dollars— It couldn’t be. She’d kept telling herself that, with only a few icy prickles in her heart to tell her the truth, multiplying every time she added the check stubs again, until they’d turned suddenly into a freezing, sickening deluge there was no possibility of denying—and with it had come the paralyzing horrible fear weaving its web around her. It was true, and there was nothing she could do about it. The money was gone, there was no way to bring it back.

  She knew it was true, and she’d even known it would be true, since she’d first started playing the slot machines in June, the month after Constance Maynard came back home and started working with Gus on the paper. She’d known it but she hadn’t cared, at first. There was something about yanking down the iron handle of the machine that seemed to take the sickening loneliness out of her life. Every time she yanked at it she was yanking at Constance Maynard; every time she put in a quarter, or a half dollar, and yanked the iron handle she was transferring unhappiness, and resentment, and fear, from Gus and the woman who was the cause of it to the blatant inanimacy of the machine. It didn’t matter if she won or lost. At least she wasn’t at home, alone, while Gus and Connie covered the water-front—the sailing races, the stock shows, the tobacco auctions, the city council, and county commissioners’ meetings— Gus conducting a private school of journalism with the owner’s daughter as sole pupil.

  “Why don’t you leave the kid with your mother, Janey, and go down to the Club with Orvie? Connie and I’ll join you for dinner when we get back. You’d be bored stiff, Janey. It’s just a demonstration of contour plowing.” If it wasn’t contour plowing it was something else she wouldn’t be interested in. “Why don’t you go with Orvie on his boat, Janey? All they do at the finish line is sit around and have another drink, and you don’t drink, Janey.” And in August they’d decided they’d put out a Centennial edition of the Smithville Gazette. “Where’s Orvie, Janey? He’ll take you to the dance. We’ve got to work tonight.”

  “And I’m not married to Orvie—I’m married to Gus!”

  It was a hurt, passionate protest that pulled her sharply up, bringing her back face to face with another reality that the jingle, clank, and whirr of the slot machines helped her momentarily to forget.

  “Oh, I wish I were—” She didn’t say the rest of it. Some kind of primitive fear that the spoken wish had a magic power of its own stopped her. You had to be sure before you said what you wished, sure it was what you really wanted. But it was what she wanted. Not because of the slot machines and the thousand dollars. If it hadn’t been for all the rest of it there’d never have been any slot machines. She’d never played them, or wanted to play them, until everything else went out of her life when Constance Maynard came back into Gus’s.

  He should never have married me. I should have known I wasn’t good enough for him. A thousand dollars— Her mind flashed back to it. Real and tangible as it was, it was more than just a thousand dollars; it was a symbol into which she had translated all her loneliness and despair. Oh, I wish I were dead—

  She had said it. You say things, and it’s one step further. She clutched the small black velvet bag tighter in her hand, her lips suddenly dry as ashes. Inside it, there was another step. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment. Then she raised her chin, opened her eyes, and took a long breath of the cold November air. Her mother was staying with little Jane. She couldn’t let her mother see, and she had a way of seeing when things were wrong.

  She opened the door. “Hello, Mother. It’s me.”

  She called up the stairs, expecting her mother would be there in the living-room, dozing in front of the fire over her knitting. It was a small house in the center of the town, old brick, two rooms deep, three stories high, set back from the street behind a high privet hedge, with a long narrow back yard; the kitchen and dining-room on the first floor, the living-room and Gus’s study on the second and their bedroom in front, little Jane’s in back on the third, with a bathroom in between at the head of the narrow, crooked staircase up the side of the house. It was a good house if a crazy one, built by a man who wanted to have a small grocery store on the ground floor and rooms to live in above, that Gus had found, and that had become to Janey the core of a vivid rainbow dream—a dream that had started changing five months ago, slowly at first, and gathering speed until at last it had broken into a nightmare of despair and disillusion.

  “Mother!” she called again. The double doors from the hall into the dining-room were open, and the other door leading into the pantry. The light in the kitchen was on. Her mother came bustling happily out, wiping her hands on a yellow-and-white-checked dish towel.

  “I thought I’d just make you children a coffee cake after little Jane went to sleep,” she said briskly. “I didn’t exp
ect you home this early.” She stopped wiping her hands, the smile on her face fading. “Why, Janey, what’s the matter?” She put the dish towel down on the pantry table and came through the dining-room. “What is it, Janey?”

  For an instant the tenderness and anxiety in her mother’s face almost betrayed her. She turned quickly and took off her evening wrap. As she dropped it on the chair she saw her mother’s old gray coat on it, neatly folded across the back. Her black cotton gloves and worn black handbag were on the table. A thousand dollars— It was almost half of what her father made in a year at the Rogers plant— and with that and what her mother had made sewing and renting the spare room to a foreman in the shipping department they had brought Janey up and owned their own house, and even had a secondhand car now that Janey was married. They’d even saved something for their own kind of social security.

  “It’s nothing, Mother.”

  Her mother was still standing there looking at her.

  “Where’s Gus, Janey?”

  Janey put her hand on the chair to steady her knees.

  “He had to go out in the country.” She moistened her lips so she could speak. “Some man was killed. A man named Doc Wernitz—”

  “I know,” her mother said. “I heard it on the radio.” Her voice was brisk and matter-of-fact again. “He was a gambler. He ran all these machines—supposed to give you something for nothing and never do. The Smithville Recreation Company. If that’s what they call recreation. Janey!”

  Janey was staring at her, her eyes drained of color. The Smithville Recreation Company. The words were an inaudible whisper scarcely moving her lips. That was what was stamped in red on the back of many of the ten- and twenty-dollar checks she’d written to the Sailing Club that the bank had returned with her statements the first of the month. Pay to the Smithville Recreation Company. It was stamped in red letters on the back—of a few hundred dollars’ worth of all the checks she’d written.

  “Janey, what is the matter with you?” her mother demanded. “Everybody knew Mr. Wernitz was the Smithville Recreation Company.”

  Everybody but Janey. It went slowly through her mind. I didn’t know.

  “And now they’ve murdered him.” It was a statement of simple fact, the event neither surprising nor regrettable, the way her mother said it. Then, as if she had not meant it to sound as callous as it did, she said, “But it’s a pity all the same. I’m sorry for the poor man. He wasn’t a bad sort, just by himself. Dad’ll miss him dropping by the plant on hot nights, to visit out on the pier.”

  Janey swayed dizzily. Her mother’s voice seemed a long way off, reaching her through a swarm of angry bees buzzing in red stamped letters around her. It seemed as if her mother was saying her father knew Doc Wernitz, and Doc Wernitz used to visit with him. But it couldn’t be. She was too dazed to hear.

  “In fact, he was a lonely sort of man, your father always said.” Her mother went over to the chair and took her coat. “His people came from the same place in the old country Dad’s came from. I guess Dad’ll miss him, if nobody else does. I guess your father was the only friend he had. Real friend, I mean.”

  She put on her coat. Janey stood motionless. The swarming bees had gone away. Everything seemed curiously quiet and very clear. Doc Wernitz was the Smithville Recreation Company. He was the one who cashed checks for the Country Club and the Sailing Club when the banks were closed and they’d run out of silver. He was a friend of her father’s. He hadn’t banked all of her checks he’d taken. That explained why so few of them showed on her monthly statement from the bank. The cold fear caught again at her heart. What did it mean? Had he just kept them, because her father was his friend?

  She went uncertainly through the doors into the cool shadows of the dining-room and let herself down into a chair, holding tightly to the edge of the table to keep from missing the chair and falling to the floor. Had he told her father? What if some of her checks, the ones he had not taken to the bank, were out at his house? What if Gus found them? What if Connie Maynard, out there now with Gus, found them? As she closed her eyes she could feel herself thinking, If only I didn’t have to open them again, and ever look at anyone again—

  “Janey.” Her mother had started to the front door, but she came back into the dining-room. Her shadow in front of the lamp on the hall table threw a merciful darkness across the table where Janey sat.

  “Yes, Mother.” How could she sit there in the crumbled ruins of her small universe and say, “Yes, Mother,” as if nothing had happened and nothing mattered?

  “I don’t know what’s the matter, Janey, but I know you don’t act like yourself anymore, so it must mean you and Gus are having trouble. It’s what Dad and I were afraid was going to happen when you were so bent and determined on marrying him. There was nothing anybody could say to you, you were so crazy in love with him. Dad wanted you to marry Orvie Rogers, because Orvie is a good boy, even if he didn’t want you at first to run around with Orvie’s crowd instead of boys of your own kind and condition. And Dad never thought Gus would marry you, Janey. The way you were, blind and deaf and dumb to everything else, Dad and I were worried sick all the time. You were so crazy mad after him. And if Constance Maynard hadn’t gone off and left him the way she did, there’s no telling what would have happened. She was the one he was in love with. Everybody in town knew that. He was never any part as crazy about you as you were about him.”

  “I know it.” She tried to speak it, but no sound came. She knew it very well. It was that other reality she faced and tried desperately to forget each time she yanked down the handle of the slot machine. It was the thing she knew each time Gus said, “Why don’t you get Orvie to take you?” It was the answer, every time she cried out to herself in protest that it was not Orvie but Gus she was married to.

  She moistened her lips again. “I know it, Mother. You don’t have to remind me.”

  “Somebody’s got to remind you. I’m not doing it just to hurt you. You’ve got little Jane to think of, Janey. I’m glad to come and sit here when you and Gus want to go out and Dad’s at work. I like to do it. But not if it makes you forget Gus has his work and you have yours. And that’s most likely what’s the matter with you right now, with that Maynard girl working on the paper and all. I guess you’re worried, worried sick, Janey. But Gus is your husband. I don’t think he’s apt to forget as easy as you think. Gus never looked to Dad and me like a man that lets anybody pull him around by the nose.”

  She patted Janey’s shoulder. “What if I worried all my life because there were a lot of pretty girls working the same place Dad worked? Good night, Janey. You better go and see that little Jane hasn’t kicked the covers off. It’s cold tonight.”

  The front door closed behind her. Janey listened to her step on the frosty pavement until it was gone and the house was silent except for the hum of the oil burner in the basement and the icebox motor coming on and going off.

  “You’ve never thrown away a thousand dollars,” she whispered. “You’ve never wished you could go to bed and go to sleep and never have to wake again—”

  She pushed her chair back from the table and got to her feet. The black evening bag was on the table in the hall. Her feet were like blocks of frozen wood as she went over to it and picked it up. She held it for a moment and opened it. There were the thirty-two dollars in bills on top, that Constance Maynard had stuffed in there, with her handkerchief, and some quarters that dropped on the table as she took the bills out. One of them was the gilded quarter that Jim Ferguson had put in her bag. Somebody’s lucky piece. Her lucky piece, Jim had said. She turned it over in her hand, dropped it back in the bag, and put the other quarters with the bills on the table.

  The other thing was in the bag, too. She shivered as she took it out. It was a piece of yellow cleansing tissue, the corners twisted together to make a small pouch. Her fingers trembled as she untwisted it and held it open in the palm of her hand under the lamp on the table. A dozen small oblong capsules glitt
ered up at her, a dozen small evil orange-colored eyes. Go to sleep and never have to wake up again— She stared blindly down at them. Then she raised her head, listening up the stairs, and drew a sudden breath of sharp and passionate decision. She jerked her hand back and flung them violently away from her, knocking her bag after them onto the rug. The evil orange eyes rolled off the rug onto the waxed pine floor and lay winking up at her. The gilded lucky piece flew out of the bag, rolled off in a crazy half-circle and back near her feet. It winked up, too. She bent down breathlessly and picked it up. Maybe it really was her lucky piece. She pressed it in her closed palm an instant before she picked up her bag and dropped it in. Then very slowly she gathered up the orange-colored capsules and put them back in the square of tissue. She got to her feet and counted them. There were only eleven. She got down again to look for the twelfth. It must have rolled into the dining-room. She turned on the light and looked there, but it was nowhere in sight and she was suddenly too tired to look any more.

  In the morning. She folded the eleven up in the tissue and picked up her bag, too tired to find the last one now, too tired even to go out and turn off the kitchen light. She put her foot on the first step, and on the second. A thousand dollars— She might as well have flushed it down the bathroom drain, the way she was going to do with the orange-colored capsules. She clutched them a little tighter in her hand. A thousand dollars— It couldn’t be. It couldn’t possibly be.

  FIVE

  GUS BLAKE SHIFTED his hundred and ninety pounds from his left haunch to his right. He was trying actually to shift his mind so he could concentrate on the garishly lighted room he was now in, to get rid of the image in it, of the basement downstairs and the little man lying in front of the fuse box, the side of his head smashed in, the blood drying on the earth floor, oozing out of his head again as Swede Carlson, chief of the county police, turned him over. And his face—the black cobwebs plastered to it, covering it like a filthy obscene veil. The fuse box was above him on the grimy whitewashed stone foundation walls. The center fuse that had been taken out was back in again. It had controlled the center lights in this room. Gus squinted up at them now, and looked about the room. This was the battered roll-top desk where Wernitz had been sitting. A cigarette just lighted had burned down to an unbroken column of gray ash in the copper tray. An opened fountain pen lay on a paper beside it, the high-backed swivel chair was quarter-turned, facing the hall door. Doc Wernitz had been working there when the three lights in the room went off, leaving the hall light on. He had put down his cigarette and his pen and gone through the hall and down the basement steps with no idea that the momentary easily repaired darkness he’d left would turn in one instant to another irreparable darkness. It was ruthlessly and hideously simple.