“What’s the matter?” I whispered.
“I don’t know. So long.… The … the ice going out, maybe?” She leaned back to give me a crooked grin, but the grin turned into the pinched child-face of tears. She went face down diagonally across the bed, hitting it hard enough to bounce a little. I sat beside her and didn’t touch her.
She couldn’t possibly feel the same. I sank into a grey swamp—loving and unloved. Then she defeated the tears, turned and curled, and snagged me and hauled me down. This one was a salty kiss. She put the words with it, and the words were fine. It had come true for her some months back and she had been carrying it around, waiting, without much hope.
We lay facing each other, noses touching, her eyes like sooty saucers. When she breathed I took her warm breath deep into my lungs. My hands were on the concave softness of her waist. Her fists lay against my chest. We told each other how wonderful it was. Everything slowly became more heated, crowded, excited. We had started up the slant of a dangerous spiral. I moved away from her.
We whispered until one. We fixed my bed, spare blankets on the floor under the windows, with a sheet and her winter coat over me, and her extra pillow under my head. I was all tucked in in the dark room when she came out of the bathroom, the light behind her. Her summer pajamas might have been hung between two shrubs by a self-respecting spider. She turned out the light and the floor creaked as she came over to me. She knelt and kissed me.
“Sleep well, darling,” she breathed against my cheek. She smelled of all the summer gardens of my childhood, with a dash of Pepsodent. I slid my arm around her waist. She pulled back a little.
Then leaning against my arm, she made a funny sound way down deep in her throat and came toward me.
It was a foolish and desperate chance, born of haste and greed. It could have been cheap. It could have spoiled too many things.
But it was magical.
chapter 8
I awakened in the high bed in the morning, awakened early for me, and without any shock of disassociation. I knew exactly where I was and why I was there and all about it. I knew she was behind me.
I rolled over with the greatest of care. The covers were over her shoulder and bunched under her chin. A good clean line went down from the point of her shoulder to the nip of her waist, then mounded up warmly over her hip. A strand of black hair lay across her cheek. Each soft exhalation stirred it. Her face was smooth, faintly dusky, without blemish or scar or mark of living.
The alarm clock behind me let off a horrid clanging. Eyes still closed she lunged for the alarm, sprawling across me. She gave a gasp of fright and shock and yanked herself back, eyes wide and dazed and uncomprehending. I turned and grabbed the metal beast and stilled its fury. When I turned back to look at her, her eyes were shut again.
“Don’t look at me,” she whispered.
“But I like to look at you.”
“Please. I feel so strange.”
I kissed her and tried to hold her. She pushed my hands away.
“Go in the bathroom,” she whispered.
I took my clothes in, dressed in there. I thought as I walked by the gossamer pajamas, crumpled on the floor near my makeshift bed, that they looked forlorn, betrayed. After quite a while she tapped on the bathroom door and I came out. She was in her woolly yellow robe and her hair was combed. She wouldn’t look right at me.
I took her by the shoulders and shook her gently. “Toni! What’s the matter?”
“I … I feel ashamed.”
I tilted her chin up with my knuckles. “There’s no need for that. Kiss me goodmorning.”
She dutifully allowed herself to be kissed. But she still wouldn’t look at me. It wasn’t until after she was dressed that she seemed to regain self-respect.
“Don’t make me feel that it was a mistake,” I pleaded.
She glowed then. “It wasn’t, Clint darling. I know it wasn’t. But … well, if you want to know, I never woke up with a man before. I guess it’s stupid. I feel shy or something. And Clint …”
“What?”
“I don’t want to do this again until … afterward.”
“All right.”
She looked at me dubiously. “You aren’t cross?”
“You’re lovely, Toni.”
“I’ve got to go to work.”
“Your boss won’t be in today.”
She stopped the nonsense and gave me my orders: leave the door locked; not a sound while she was gone; don’t walk, the floor creaks; don’t run any water; don’t put the blinds up; don’t cough or sneeze; if you snore, don’t take a nap.
“Do I snore?”
She looked away. “I was going to stay awake and sort of … watch over you, but I fell asleep.”
She left and the long day began. I heard people moving around the house, someone using a vacuum cleaner. I began slowly to starve. I was empty from collar to knees. I was a hollow tree, with squirrels enlarging the hollow. As a desperate experiment I ate a Kleenex; it didn’t help a bit. I wished I could risk using the little radio to find out what they were saying about me. The dull, interminable minutes went by. I stood at the window and looked out the crack between blinds and frame and watched the infrequent cars and local delivery trucks go by. Next door an old man, scrawny and withered as a dead chicken, guided an asthmatic power mower back and forth across the May grass.
I thought about my darling. Globe of firm breast, and the flexing satin of haunch. Furnace mouth and cool shoulders. All alive in the whispering darkness, all alive and for me and forever.
And I thought of other women. They seemed poor things in retrospect—flaky skin and sour hair, raddled thigh and suet breast. Not like my darling. Not firm and proud and tall in her skin, like my darling.
He came at three-seventeen. I heard his voice in the hall, suave and easy. “I know this is unusual, Mrs. Timberland, but it’s work she brought home from the office and we need it today. She said it would be all right if you’d unlock the door and watch me to make certain I don’t steal anything.” He laughed and the woman laughed.
A key nibbled metallically at the lock and she said, “I can’t seem to get the key in.”
“Let me try, will you?”
The key I had left in the door was forced out of the lock. It fell noiselessly to the rug. I came out of my stupor too late to take refuge in the closet. The door swung open and Paul France smiled politely at me. The landlady, a worn woman with a muzzle like a boxer dog, stared at me in shock which turned quickly to outrage.
“What are you doing in my house?” she demanded.
France touched her shoulder gently. “Now, now, Mrs. Timberland. I’ll take care of this. I’ll see that he’s out of your house in five minutes. We can’t have this sort of thing, can we?”
He bobbed his head and smiled at her and came into the room and pulled the door shut. She stood out there for a few moments and then went down the hall walking with a very heavy tread.
Still smiling, he said, “A six-state alarm and you hole up two houses away. My goodness.” He made a clucking sound with his tongue.
“How did you find me?”
“Your Mr. Wills cooperated with Mr. Pryor and gave me the run of the plant. Including your office. When I began to paw through your desk, the highly decorative young lady became very incensed, too incensed. So I began to look at her more closely. Shall we say she had a fresh high bloom about her? A dewiness? That sort of Joan-of-Arc look young ladies get when they perform a great sacrifice? Once I got her address from your personnel section, I was almost positive. The key on the inside of the door was the clincher, Sewell.”
“What do we do now?”
“The fearless investigator takes you in, thus earning his fee.”
“Do you think I did it?”
“They think you did.”
I moved a little closer to him. I hoped I was being inconspicuous about it. He backed off a little, stopped smiling. “Please don’t try anything, Sewell. I can guarantee
failure.”
I guess he could have guaranteed failure if his luck hadn’t been bad and mine hadn’t been very good. He made me stand in the doorway, my back to the room. I heard a faint creak and rustle and guessed that he was bending over to pick up the key. I swung my leg back hard. I did it with no anticipation of success, in the mood of a child kicking the wall when he’s been stood in a corner. There was a slight shock against my heel and a truly theatrical sound of falling. It was the same sound they use on radio after the ringing shot. I turned around. France lay on his face, his glasses a few feet from his head. Even as I looked at him, he grunted and moved his right arm. I picked up the key, went out in the hall, closed the door and locked it.
Mrs. Timberland was standing down in the hall, her arms folded, chin out. “Tell your friend she has to be out of my house tonight.”
I did not answer her. As I went out into the sunshine, I heard France begin to bang on the bedroom door. A grey sedan was parked in front of the house. I threw the room key into the shrubbery.
The world looked different to me. The new and special relationship with Toni had given me a great deal of optimism. False optimism. Up there in the room, with memory so bright and so recent, I had begun to feel that there was good will in the world, that Kruslov would listen, that all could be explained.
But I had left my confidence up in that room. Running down the stairs, I had planned to go turn myself in. That plan evaporated in the sunlight. A woman stared at me from her front porch, then turned and went into her house. I lengthened my stride. If I turned myself in, they would have all they needed. Every bit of it. The joy of a newfound love had affected my judgment. Toni had been brighter about it when she spoke of trying to get me away. I knew that I had to get myself away. I had about twenty dollars on me, a stubble of beard, and the clothes I walked in.
I decided that I would get out of town, somehow. I could contact Tory and he could mail cash to a general delivery address somewhere. I felt as I had in the side lot that night after Yeagger had been knocked out. All the houses had eyes and all the eyes watched me.
I would go far away from them, and later I could get in touch with Toni and she could come to me. I was in panic. My hands were sweaty. I walked as fast as I dared, turning corners not quite at random, heading southeast, knowing that I would hit a main route at the southeast corner of the city. I went through meager neighborhoods, passed candy stores thronged with school children. I turned my face away from traffic, and the impulse to keep glancing behind me was almost ungovernable.
The houses began to thin out. Weeds grew high in vacant lots. Junked cars rusted behind small service garages. Finally I came to the end of a dead end street. The pavement was heaved and cracked. People had dumped rubbish at the end of the street.
I looked south and saw fast truck traffic a quarter mile away and knew that was the highway I was looking for. I cut across lots where the ground was marshy. At one place I had to jump from hummock to hummock. I slipped and went into black mud well over my shoes. I wiped my feet on the grass. Halfway to the highway I came across a young girl and a boy who had made a nest for themselves on a blanket in the tall grasses. After the first glance I did not look toward them. They did not move or make a sound.
At the highway I stopped behind a billboard and tried to regain some confidence. I wanted to crawl into the thick grass and hide there. It was far too easy to think of how they would kill me, quite legally, if they caught me. I walked across the highway, stood on the shoulder and began to thumb the eastbound traffic.
Cars went by at high speed, swirling heated winds around me. Sun glinted off the chrome. Trucks snored by. In between the clumps of traffic, I walked east, keeping my head well down so that traffic headed into the city could not see my face.
I passed a drive-in. Fear had destroyed hunger. Yet even had I been hungry, I could not risk wasting that much time. I kept remembering what France had said about a six-state alarm.
A half mile beyond the drive-in, as I walked, I heard a car coming behind me. I turned with upraised thumb and false smile. It was a highway patrol car. I whirled around, realizing as I did it that my quickness in itself would be cause of suspicion. The car sped by and just as I began to feel better about it, brakes screamed the tires on dry pavement. I saw that it was going to make a U turn as soon as traffic permitted. I turned and leaped the ditch, vaulted a low fence and ran across a cultivated field. As I reached a fringe of woods I looked back. The patrol car was stopped on the shoulder. A man stood by the fence, another near the car. The man by the fence was very still. Something whizzed near my head. A cut leaf circled slowly down. I heard a thin distant cracking sound, and then another.
I dived into the shelter of the woods and ran in terror. I tripped and fell and rolled to my feet and kept running. Branches stung my cheeks. I lost all sense of direction. I knew only that people who wanted to kill me were after me. When I fell the second time it knocked the wind out of me. I lay where I had fallen and listened. I could hear traffic sounds far away. I heard a bird near by, a bird with a fluid intricate call. A jet went over, too high to see, rumbling faintly.
After that I went on more slowly. The woods ended. There was a wide field, a dirt road beyond it. I squatted and watched the road for a time. Nothing came along. I started across the field toward the road. Ten steps from the shelter of the woods, I heard a car coming. I scrambled back. The car stopped a hundred yards down the road and let a man in uniform out. The man stared toward the woods. I knew he couldn’t see me, but he seemed to be looking directly at me. I saw him sit on a fence and light a cigarette, still watching the woods.
I moved back until I could no longer see him. I traveled in a line parallel to the road. Soon I came upon another man who waited as patiently as the first. I turned back the way I had come. The woods had seemed vast at first. Now it was a skimpy patch of brush, affording no good place of concealment. It did not take long to find they were on all sides of me. The sun was nearly gone. I knew I could run no longer.
I remembered Toni and I realized I had been in an unthinking panic. France would report where I had hidden. Toni might be in custody already, charged with aiding me. This was a man hunt, and anyone who had assisted me would suffer.
I came out of the woods at dusk, back by the main highway, my hands held high. Three patrol cars and two Warren police vehicles were there. I was nearly sick with exhaustion. Kruslov was there. They searched me and put me in a car.
Back at police headquarters I was booked, photographed, searched again. They took everything from my pockets, plus my belt and shoelaces and necktie, and put me in a dingy cell. A half hour later I was taken out of the cell and upstairs to a small bare room with barred windows, a spavined conference table, six chairs, a spittoon, a wall clock and another girlie calendar. It was the same set of impossibly lush thighs, but this time a wind, rather than barbed wire, had lifted her skirt.
A young sandy-haired, lantern-jawed patrolman guarded me. He sat on the table and chewed gum and watched me out of colorless eyes. When I asked him for a cigarette, he said he didn’t smoke. There was a phone on the corner of the table. A piece of the earpiece had been chipped off.
Fifteen minutes later Kruslov, Hilver, a strange civilian and a male stenographer came in in quick single file, banging the door back against the wall. Kruslov ordered the guard out. They all took chairs. Kruslov put thick hands on his hips and looked down at me.
“Well, damn it, you didn’t get very far. Hid out in your girlfriend’s room and then tried to hike out of town. Not smart, Sewell.”
“Where is she?”
“I ask the questions.”
“She didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Did you spend the night in her room?”
“That has no bearing on this, Captain.”
The back of his hand was like a board. It cut the inside of my mouth and rocked me so far over I nearly fell off the chair. He smiled, almost genially. “I am going to ask a
lot of questions. I want a lot of answers. I have missed a lot of sleep. I am impatient. I do not want smart answers, or a smart attitude. I want a little humility, Sewell. You killed a society girl and you did it very neatly and damn near got away with it. Smart police work caught you. We looked in the trunk of the car of everybody connected with this thing, and in your car we found proof you had her body in there. You ran and you didn’t run good enough so you’ve lost all the way around. You outsmarted Paul France, which is something nobody does very often. That was the last piece of luck you had, the last piece of luck you’re going to get. Now I’ll ask questions and you answer them. Why did you kill her?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
He struck me again, in the same place. I wiped my mouth and said, “I want a lawyer.”
“You’re here for questioning. We haven’t placed a formal charge yet. When we place a formal charge, you’ll be entitled to an attorney. In the meantime, you can refuse to answer questions. Naturally, we’ll have to accept your refusal, but we’ll keep asking them. When I’m tired, somebody else will ask them. Where did you kill her?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
This time I was knocked off the chair. The others watched without any great show of interest.
“You don’t want to be stupid about this, Sewell. You see, we can prove you had the body in the back of your car.”
“I know I did.”
“That’s cooperative. Let’s have a little more cooperation. If you admit that, then will you admit killing her?”
“But I didn’t kill her.”
He smiled at me. “I know. The body came in the mail. Special delivery. Or you found it under a bush. Where did you get the body, Sewell?”
“Somebody brought it in in the night and put it in my closet. Mary had a key. I gave it to her so she could wake me up if I was still asleep when she came to get me to go up to the lake Sunday. After your men left I found the body. I was scared. So I got rid of it.”
You Live Once Page 11
