Hard Case Crime: The Vengeful Virgin
Page 15
“Not right now.”
I was feeling the whisky good. I went into the kitchen and had another.
“Sure you don’t want a drink?”
She hesitated. “Maybe just a little one.”
I poured her a little one and took it in to her, and watched her sip at it. She watched me over the rim of the glass. I started back to the chair, and my gaze got stuck on that white leather bag with the money in it.
I got that chill.
I turned and went outside.
“Where you going?”
“Be right back.”
I went to the car. In the back of my mind there was always that threat, that they knew, and they were trying to find us. I had it all worked out, how as soon as I figured things had cooled down, we’d get out of here, get another car—steal one—and take a plane somewhere. Somewhere in the Southwest, maybe. And from there we would fly to Europe. I’d have to get papers rigged, but I knew I could do that. I could do anything with that money.
Only right now, there was the threat hanging over my head. I opened the glove compartment, and took out the P-38, and the shells. I loaded the gun, and put the shells back in the glove compartment. I took the gun inside and laid it on the mantel over the fireplace. I felt better.
“What’s that for? I didn’t know you had a gun.”
I had a good edge.
“I just feel better with it in here. Bought it the other day. You never know.”
“I don’t like guns around, Jack.”
“Well, it won’t bite you.”
I went over and stood in front of her. One of her breasts was bare outside the red housecoat. I don’t know. We’d been at it and at it, and she was terrific, but there was that money. And the getting away. And the knowing they were out there someplace, looking.
“You’re pretty, you know it?” I said.
“Am I?”
“Yeah. There’s nobody I’d rather be with.”
“Am I really pretty?”
She opened the housecoat and lay back on the couch.
She kept at me and kept at me, all day long. It was like some kind of marathon. And after a while you can wear anything pretty thin. It might have been different if we were in that big hotel down in Rio. But somehow, here, you were always listening. There would be the pulsing of the river, and the sound of the pines, and you would try to listen above that. Straining. Just a little bit.
But she was at me every minute.
Middle of the night.
“Tell me you love me.”
I told her a few times. I started to go to sleep, telling her, mumbling and drifting off. I came awake fast, with a yell. She was kneeling there beside me, beating me with both fists, her face all wrung up, shouting it at me.
“Tell me you love me! Tell me you love me!”
I took her in my arms. “Would I be here if I didn’t love you?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“We didn’t do anything tonight. We just came to bed.”
“Well, for cripes’ sake.”
“I mean it.”
“Okay.”
“Jack?”
“Yeah.”
She rolled over, with her back to me. “Nothing.”
I lay there staring at the dark. You could hear the river pulsing, and the trees moaning. The fire had died down in the other room. There was a lingering acrid odor of stale pine smoke.
“Shirley?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Shirley, what was it? What did you want to say?”
“Nothing. I told you. Nothing.”
I lay there. She didn’t move. Neither did I.
“Come on,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
She didn’t answer.
I thought after a while she went to sleep. I finally slid quietly out of bed and went into the kitchen. I didn’t turn on any lights. I got the bottle, and took a long drink. I carried the bottle into the other room, and sat down on the floor, on a blanket, and pulled down the white leather bag. I opened it; looked at the money.
Every time. The same thing.
I took a drink and looked at the money.
I sat there until the bottle was empty. I was drunk as all hell. I sat there staring at the money. I grabbed the bills in my hands and crunched them together in wads. They were crisp.
I got up and staggered over to the fireplace and put a log on the irons. It flamed up. I came back and sat with the money, looking at it, counting it.
I got that crazy feeling again.
Maybe we’d never get away. Maybe we’d be stuck here forever, or maybe they would get us. And we would never have a chance to spend any of it, live the high life, what I had wanted ever since I could remember.
I was really crocked.
Right now, the way things were, with the law alerted, the two of us could never make it.
But maybe I could make it alone.
I looked at the money. I guess that was the first time I had really thought about killing Shirley Angela.
Only I knew I could never kill her.
I just thought about it. How it would be. But I knew I couldn’t ever kill anybody. I knew that. Big brave me.
“Jack?”
I looked up. Shirley stood there watching me in the firelight. She was naked. I thought how it would be and knew it was crazy and that I could never do it. She swam around in my vision.
“You’re drunk, Jack.”
“So what?”
“Well, I’d like a drink, too. You might at least offer me one.”
“Okay, okay.” I got up and lurched out into the kitchen, found the other bottle of whisky. “Little one?”
“No. A big one.”
I poured her half a water glass full, splashed some water on top of it, and took it in to her. I drank another long one out of the bottle. It socked me hard. I sat down with the money. The whole room was going.
I heard a noise and looked up.
“You still here?” I said.
“Yes. I’m still here. Pour me another.” She handed me the empty glass.
“Well,” I said. “An old toper, eh?”
“No.”
I poured her another big one and she took it and drank it. I looked at the money and heard a crash. I looked up. She had thrown the glass into the fireplace. She stood there grinning at the fireplace.
“Watch it,” I said, “You’re getting plastered.”
She turned and looked at me, and her eyes were glazed a little.
“Jack, let’s go to bed.”
“I don’t want to go to bed. The hell with it.”
“Not even with me?”
“Not right now. Jesus Christ, lay off, will you?”
“I just asked you to come to bed.”
“I want to sit here.”
I looked up at her. She was glaring at me. She was mad as hell. I thought, The hell with it, then.
“What I wanted to tell you,” she said. Her voice was flat and level. “When you went out to the store. I saw a car.”
“Good for you. Good eyes. Take care of ’em. Precious possession. You’ll never know when you need a good pair of eyes. Saw a car—what kind of car?”
“A yellow hardtop.” She came closer. “Jack, I swear it was the same car I saw going up and down past the house the other night. The one I told you about.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
None of it was coming through very well. I fought to clear my head, but it only became worse.
“Jack?”
“Yeah? What now?”
“Who is it owns a yellow car? You know somebody who owns a yellow hardtop. I think it’s a Buick. Who?” She paused and I tried to hold my head up, but I couldn’t seem to do it. The hell with it. I was stoned.
“It’s that Grace, isn’t it,” she said. “She owns a yellow hardtop Buick, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess?”
“Shirley?”
I felt panic. My head was bad. I came to my feet, running, calling her name.
“Shirley. What was that about a yellow car?”
She wasn’t in the bedroom.
I ran back across the living room, jumped the pile of money, then damned near fell over the bottles. They were on the floor and they were both empty. The last one had been nearly full, I remembered that. I knew I hadn’t drunk it all.
She must have.
And right then I remembered something she’d said a long time ago, it seemed like years. “When I drink, it makes me go out of my head.”
I went outside. It was misty and chill with morning, but the sun was coming up over there, a yellow ball. I could feel the faint warmth of the sun.
“Shirley!”
Nothing. She wasn’t around. The car was there.
I ran on around the outside of the cabin, and down along the riverbank.
“Shirley?”
There was no sound except the dark purling of the water and the slow wind in the pines. High in the pines. I thought I saw something. I moved on down along the riverbank, calling her name, feeling the panic.
She had said something about a yellow car. Only what? There was one yellow car. Grace’s.
“Shirley?”
She didn’t answer. I kept moving along the riverbank.
Then I remembered, all right. She had said she’d seen a yellow hardtop Buick when I was over at Wilke’s Corners.
And she had said something about knowing it was Grace.
It couldn’t have been.
But I wouldn’t put anything past Grace.
If it had been Grace, then we had to get out of here. We had to leave right away.
I turned and looked back toward the cabin. Smoke was coming out of the chimney.
“Shirley?”
She didn’t answer.
I started back toward the cabin. I don’t know what made me run, but I did. I ran back along the riverbank, my feet sliding in the grass and mud. You could hear the black water pulsing against the banks. No other sound. Just my breathing and my feet pounding.
“Shirley?”
The cabin door was open.
I went up on the porch and inside.
She was in front of the fireplace, naked, and she was very drunk. You could see that right away. She didn’t stagger, but she was wild-eyed drunk.
The fire was the biggest we’d had, the flames leaping savagely up the chimney. The whole fireplace was a blazing sheet of white flame.
“Shirley?”
“Yes, Jack?”
She stood there in front of the fireplace. I looked over at the shiny white leather suitcase, at the pile of money.
The money wasn’t there. I looked around. The money wasn’t in sight anywhere. She must have put it in the suitcase.
“Where’s the money?” I said.
“I burned it.”
“You what!”
“In the fireplace,” she said. She turned and pointed at the flames. “In there, Jack. I burned the money. See it? It’s burning right now....” I went straight out of my head. I ran to the fire and sprawled across the hearth. I heard myself cursing, and above the cursing I heard the way she laughed. It was something terrible to hear. Then she didn’t laugh anymore.
I lay there on my belly, with my face thrust into the flames, scrabbling with my hands. The fire seared my hands and wrists and arms, but I kept snatching and scraping at the flames.
There were a few loose bills strewn around the hearth. But you could see all the rest of them in there, curling and seething and shriveling in the white flames. Crisping and roaring up the chimney flue. The chimney roared and shook, and it was a kind of wild laughter, too.
The heat drove me back. It became more intense.
I turned in a crouch.
“Don’t Jack. Don’t come near me.”
She stood across the room, facing the fire and me, and she had the P-38 in her hand.
I heard myself say it, but it didn’t really sound like me at all. “What are you trying to do?”
There was no expression in her voice, and none at all on her face.
“You don’t love me,” she said. “I know that now. If I’d only known it before, this would never have happened. You don’t love me. You love the money.”
“You’re drunk—you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“You’ve always loved only the money, and you can’t have the money. Don’t you know that? That’s how it works, Jack. See?”
“Put down that gun, Shirley.”
“No.”
I looked at my hands. They were burned badly, and beginning to pain. I was clutching two or three one hundred dollar bills.
“You may as well throw them into the fire with the rest of it,” she said. “They’re not going to do you any good. You’ll never be able to spend them.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re coming after us, Jack.”
I stood up very slowly, watching her. Her eyes shone, glistening in the fierce light from the fireplace.
“It’s the whisky, Shirley. You’ve done this because you’re drunk.”
“Maybe. I told you about that, but you kept offering it to me. I warned you. But I was going to do this anyway.” She paused. “It came over the radio, Jack. I was right. That woman of yours was here. She followed us—she ran back and got her car and followed us, when we left town that day. Jack—she’s been hanging around outside, hiding ever since we got here. Isn’t that rich?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“On the radio, while I was burning the money. While you were outside. She told the police, and they’re on the way here right now. They didn’t say where we were, but they know. We can’t get away.”
“They can’t know.”
“She told them. Want to know what she said? She told them the truth, what I suspected, Jack. God, and I loved you—I love you, Jack. I believed in you. She told them you had done this because you loved her. She said you pleaded with her to stay with you, and that you told her you were working a deal where you’d have a lot of money, so you and she could go away together. But when she realized what you had done, she couldn’t bear knowing.” She took a step toward me. “So she told them. Isn’t that just too rich for words, though?”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Yes. I do believe it, Jack. I’ve had tiny doubts about you all along. Now I know. You never loved me. It was a way to get money, that’s all.”
She breathed deeply, and her breasts rose and fell. I saw the way her belly worked. She didn’t move that gun, either, and she was just as beautiful as ever, the way she stood there.
“Jack. I’ve a confession, I want you to know. I had never had a man before. All that was talk. I did it to impress you, because you were the kind of guy you were. I had to be like you—your type, so you’d like me. See?” She took another step toward me. She looked like a savage. “But, I loved you. There’s that for you to remember. I really did love you—with every bit of me.”
“This is all a lot of—”
“No, Jack. I’m going to kill you. Then I’m going to take my own life, too. Because, that’s how I want it. I’ll have that much, anyway. I won’t go back there and face them, have them look at me with dirty eyes and hear them talk. They’ll never know how cheap and false and empty all this was. I’ll have that.”
“Shirley, listen to me. You’re wrought up. You’re thinking all wrong. You’ve got to listen to me. We can get away, if we leave right now. We’d have each other.”
“Don’t lie to me! No!”
&nb
sp; “Shirley, please.”
“Jack, Victor was right. You’re a son of a bitch. That’s all you are. Not a good son of a bitch. A bad son of a bitch. You didn’t even take my word on anything. A girl named Veronica Lewis told the police you had her check on Victor’s bank account. Was she another hot number, Jack?”
I dropped the bills from my hands. They fluttered to the floor at my feet, on the blankets. My hands burned horribly now and the pain seethed up my arms. I had to reach her, somehow. Maybe I could jump her and get that gun away from her. Because she was mad!
“There’s lots more,” she said. “But why talk about it?”
“Shirley. Honey.”
“It’s a suicide pact,” she said. “That’s what it will seem. I’ve left a note outside, tacked to the door,explaining it. The note is a lie. Like everything else is a lie, since I met you. I told them we burned the money together, because we couldn’t have it, and nobody else would. I told them it was a symbol of our love. Isn’t that rich, Jack? A symbol of our love. But they’ll never know what that really means—how it means emptiness and nothingness. We knew we couldn’t escape the law. So we burned the money and killed ourselves. We would be together. We would never return to be sullied by the world.”
I stared at her. Then I leaped at her.
She fired. She fired the gun four times, and she hit me three out of the four. I never reached her. I stumbled with the pain in my legs and my side, and sprawled across the blankets. The pain was bad.
“Shirley!”
I was bleeding. I lay there and watched the bleeding and the pain was much worse than I thought pain would ever be. I hadn’t thought pain came so swiftly. But it did. It came in blinding white sheets, in hot waves, up and down my body.
I tried to move toward her. I couldn’t move. I was too weak and there was too much pain. I lay there looking at her through the reddish film that seemed to spread all through me and I knew that I would die.
She stood looking at me, holding the gun.
Then she stepped softly toward me and knelt on the blankets. Her face was hell to see. She reached out and touched my head, then snatched her hand away. All I could do was look at her. I kept trying to say her name.
“Goodbye, Jack. You son of a bitch.”
She thought I was dead.
She put the muzzle of that gun to her head and pulled the trigger. For a long moment she just sat there with half of her head torn away. I heard myself scream. It didn’t do any good. I couldn’t move.