I became aware of her because she wanted me to be aware of her. It was puzzling because I had appraised the motel as no hangout for hookers. Also, though she was apparently dressed and prepared for the part, her technique was spotty and inept. There are the ones who operate on the mark of their choice with the long, wide-eyed, arrogant-insolent-challenging stare, then properly leave it up to him to make the next move. There is the jolly-girl approach, the ones who say to the barkeep in a voice just loud enough to carry to the ears of the mark, “Geez, Charlie, like I always say, if the guy doesn’t show, the hell with him. I’m not going to cry my eyes out, right? Gimme another one of the same, huh.” Then there’s the fake prim, the sly sidelong half-shy inquisitive glance, and the quick turn of the head, like a timid doe. Or the problem approach, troubled frown, gesture to have the mark come over, and then the dreary little set piece: Excuse me, mister, this may sound like a crazy kind of thing, but a girlfriend of mine, she asked me to be here and tell the guy she had a date with she can’t make it, and I was wondering if you’re George Wilson. Or: Would you mind, mister, doing me a crazy kind of favor? I got to wait here to get a phone call, and there’s some nut that was bugging me before and said he was coming back, and if you’d sit next to me, then he won’t give me any problems, okay?
But this one didn’t have any routine to depend on. Her infrequent glance was one of a puzzled uncertainty. I decided that it was another instance of the courage of The Pill bringing the bored young wife out hunting for some action while hubby was up in Atlanta at another damned sales meeting. I wondered how she’d manage if I gave her no help at all.
What she did was get up and head for the women’s room. She had to walk behind me. So she dropped her lighter and it clinked off the tile and slid under my feet. I backed away so I could stoop and pick it up, but my heel came down on her sandaled toes. I recovered in time to keep from coming down with all my weight, but I came down hard enough to make her yelp with anguish. I turned around and she limped around in a little circle, saying, “Oh, dear God!” while I made apologetic sounds. Then we compounded it by both bending at the same instant to pick up the lighter. It was a solid, stinging impact, bone against bone, hard enough to unfocus her eyes and unhinge her knees. I caught her by the arms, moved her gently over, and propped her against the bar.
“Now I will bend over and pick up the lighter.”
“Please do,” she said in a small voice. She grasped the edge of the bar, head bowed, eyes shut.
I wiped the lighter off with the paper napkin from under my drink and placed it in front of her. “Are you all right?”
“I guess so. For a minute there my toes didn’t hurt at all.”
She straightened, picked the lighter off the bar, and made a rather wide circle around me and headed for the women’s room. I motioned the bartender over and said, “Amateur night?”
“New to me, sir. You got each other’s attention anyways.”
“House rules?”
“They say to me, they say, Jake, use your judgment.”
“So what do you say to me?”
“Well … how about bon voyage?”
“How was she doing before I showed, Jake?”
“There were two tried to move in on her, but she laid such a cool on them I cased her for strictly no action, that is, until she began to throw it at you.”
“She’s in the house?”
“I don’t know. I’d guess not, but I don’t know.”
When I heard the tack-tack of her heels on tile returning, I smiled at her and said, “I have liability coverage. Like for broken toes, concussion, lacerations.”
She stopped and looked up at me, head tilted. “I think it was a truck, but I didn’t get the license number. I could settle my claim for some medication, maybe. On the rocks.”
So I followed her and took the bar stool beside her and asked Jake for more of the same for two, and winked at him with the eye farther from her. Ritual of introduction, first names only. Trav and Penny. Ritual handshake. Her hand was very small and slender, fine-boned, long fingers. Faint pattern of freckles across nose and cheekbones. Perfume too musky-heavy for her, too liberally applied. I could detect no evidence of a removed ring on third finger left, no pale line or indentation of flesh.
We made the casual talk that is on one level, while we made speculative, sensual communication on the second level. Humid looks from the lady. Pressure of round knee against the side of my thigh when she turned to talk more directly to me. Parting of lips and the tongue tip moistening. But she was too edgy, somehow, too fumbly with cigarettes and purse and lighter and drink. And her component parts did not add up to a specific identity. Wig, makeup, and perfume were garishly obvious. Dress, manicure, diction were not.
So Trav was in town to see a man interested in putting some money in a little company called Floatation Associates, and Penny was a receptionist-bookkeeper in a doctor’s office. Trav wasn’t married, and Penny had been, four years ago, for a year, and it didn’t take. And it sure had been a rainy summer and fall. Too much humidity. And the big thing about Simon and Garfunkel was the words to the songs, reely. If you read the lyrics right along with the songs while the record was on, you know, the lyrics right on the record case, it could really turn you on, like that thing about Silence especially. Don’t you think, honest now, that when people like the same things and have enjoyed the same things, like before they ever met, Trav, it is sort of as if they had known each other a long time, instead of just meeting? And people don’t have enough chance to just talk. People don’t communicate anymore somehow, and so everybody goes around kind of lonesome and out of touch, sort of.
So I played out the charade and walked her out, her elbow socketed in the palm of my hand, and she was thinking out loud of maybe some other place we could go, and rejecting each one for one reason or another as soon as she mentioned it, and I drew her into a dark alcove near the grinding roar of the central air conditioning, and after a sudden and startled rigidity and instinctive defensive tactics, she somewhat hesitantly made a presentation of her mouth, which somehow imitated avidity yet tasted prim, then she let herself be guided to 109 and ushered in, her voice getting too shrill and tight in her effort to stay loose.
“Gin?” she said. “That’s your drink, isn’t it? I adore it, but I don’t like to drink it in public because I get too wildly happy and loud and everything. But could we have some, darling?”
There was a double handful of melting cubes afloat in ice water in the bottom of the ice bucket. She decided she did not want any mix with hers either. We clinked glasses and she smilingly fluttered her long plastic eyelashes at me. She took a hummingbird sip and sat and put the drink down on the rug and slipped her left shoe off and tenderly squeezed her bruised toes.
I had taken a mouthful of the Plymouth. I am a taster when I like the taste. But it was subtly wrong, just wrong enough so I knew that the hunch had been right. A bad Penny. Under pretext of taking a second swallow, I let the first slide back into the glass. It left me with an astringent prickling of the membranes of the mouth and a slight aftertaste of dust.
“Excuse,” I said, and went into the bath. There, behind the closed door, I dumped the drink into a pocket I made in a face towel. It saved the ice. I rinsed glass and ice and made myself some tap water on the rocks. I flushed the toilet and stood for a few moments assembling the pieces of the procedure before I went back out. She hadn’t been near the opened bottle of Plymouth, at least on this visit to my quarters.
So she or some associate had done the doctoring. Then she was there to make sure I had a drink, to take the chain off the door if necessary, assuming there was an associate in their venture. And unless you wanted to risk putting somebody so far under they might not make it back up again, it was efficient to be there to know when it took effect.
I went back out and noticed that two thirds of her drink was gone. Back among the melting cubes, I assumed. She had both her shoes off. She was sitting with he
r legs crossed. The hem of the white dress was hiked to midthigh. She was a little long-waisted girl. Her legs could have been called chunky had they not been beautifully shaped.
“Am I supposed to drink alone?” she asked, pouting.
“Never compete with a gulper,” I said, and drained the tap water potion. I went over to the counter where the bottle and ice were and said, “In fact, I will have another one down the hatch before you finish that little piece of gin you’ve got left, angel.”
She came over in considerable haste and came up behind me and wrapped her arms around me. “Darling, let’s not drink too much, huh? It can spoil things for people, you know. I think we’ve both had … just exactly the right amount.”
It was a helpful clue. If the idea of my having two alarmed her, then it had to be fast-acting. But I thought I might quite plausibly give her a little lesson in anxiety before I faked being overcome. So, instead of making the drink, I turned and began chuckling and wrapped my arms around her. She stood very small in her stocking feet. She tried to seem cooperative until I found the zipper at the nape of her neck and opened it in one tug all the way down to the coccyx. Chuckling blandly, I peeled the dress forward off her shoulders, and she became nervously agitated, hopping and struggling, saying, “No! No, darling! Let’s be … Hey! More leisurely … Hey!… Please!” I pulled the dress sleeves down her arms, inhibiting her struggles. She wore a pale yellow bra with white lace. “You’ll tear my … Wait! Don’t …” I found the bra snap and got the edge of a thumbnail under it and popped it open, and the bra straps slid down her arms. “No! Dammit! Hey! Please!”
She got one arm out of the sleeve and tried to pull her dress back up, but as she did so I pulled the other arm free, then caught both wrists in one hand, put the other around her waist, and lifted her off the floor. When I shook her a little, still chuckling, the dress and bra slid off her and fell to the floor, and I swung her in the air and caught her. an arm around her shoulders, the other under her knees, and chuckling inanely, toted her over to the bed. She had begun a silent battle, in deadly earnest, to retain the little yellow matching panties, and finally I took pity on her and groaned as hollowly as I could and toppled heavily across her, my chest across her sturdy agitated thighs.
She was breathing hard. She pushed at me. “Hey! Wake up!” I did not move. She caught a fold of flesh on the side of my throat under the ear and gave a painful, twisting pinch. Then she pulled my hand toward her and put her fingertips on my pulse. Satisfied, she pushed at me and wormed her legs out from under me. She grunted with the effort. I kept my eyes closed. The bed shifted as she got off it. In a few moments I heard the little clicking snap of the bra catch and soon the almost inaudible purr of the nylon zipper, the rezipping divided into three segments, as it was hard to reach. Then a faint thudding of her footsteps became audible and I knew she had put her shoes back on.
She picked up the phone on the bedside stand and dialed for an outside line. She dialed a number. She waited a few moments then said, “Okay,” and hung up. Clack of her lighter. Huff of exhalation. Smell of cigarette. I identified the next move as her unlatching the door, probably to leave it ajar for whoever had the word that things were now okay in 109. The edge of the bed had caught me across the lower belly. My toes rested on the rug.
“Come on!” she whispered. “Come on, Rick darling.”
Make it six or seven minutes from phone call to arrival. Male voice, after the door was gently closed. “Everything okay, honey?”
“No problems.”
“Nice work. I hated the idea of you coming to his room. I was afraid maybe he’d decided he didn’t want a drink, and then he’s such a big, rough-looking son of a bitch, I was afraid—”
“Just like I hate the idea of your sleeping with your dear wife, Janice, every damned night, darling?” Her voice was bitter.
“And you know why it has to be that way.”
“Do I?”
“No time to open the same damned old can of worms, Penny. Let’s see if we’re going to do any good.”
He took me by the belt and pulled me back off the bed. I let myself tumble, completely slack. I ended up on my side, knees bent, cheek against the bristle of the rug. He pulled at my shoulder and I rolled slowly onto my back. He rolled me another half turn, facedown, and I felt him work the wallet out of my hip pocket, heard the distinctive sound as he sat on the bed. Sizable, I guessed. Young voice. Physically powerful.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Not in this. Pockets of his jacket?”
“Just this stuff. Nothing.”
“I better check the side pockets of his pants.”
“Would there be anything in … in the lining of anything, or in his shoes?”
“I don’t know. I’ll check it if we draw a blank. The thing that bothers me is that this son of a bitch doesn’t have enough on him.”
“What do you mean, dear?”
“The average guy has pieces of paper on him. Notebook, notes, addresses, letters, junk like that. McGee here has got car rental papers, a plane ticket to Lauderdale, keys, drivers license, and a half-dozen credit cards and … a little over eight hundred in cash. Here. Take these two fifties.”
“I don’t want the money!”
“We want him to think he had a ball. Here, dammit!”
“All right. But I can’t see why he’d—”
“Win, lose, or draw, we rumple the hell out of that bed, rub lipstick on the pillow, squirt some of your perfume on him, undress him, and leave him in the bed. And dump the rest of that bottle into the john.”
“Okay. But you know, he didn’t seem like somebody who’d—”
“For chrissake, Penny!”
“All right. I’m sorry.”
“We knew it was a big man. We know he was from out of town. We know he went to see Pike.”
He checked the other pockets. Then the girl asked about the shirt pocket. He rolled me onto my back again. She was standing close. I opened my eyes just far enough to make out the shape and distance of his head as he bent over me. I hit him solidly in the side of the throat with my right fist, rolling my body to the left as I did so to give it more leverage, and then swung my legs in a wide arc at floor level. I clipped her right at the ankles and she landed flat on her back with a very large thud for a girl that size. Her friend had rolled over onto his back and back up onto his knees. He got up just as I did. He was making gagging, strangling sounds. Eyes bulged. Mouth hung open. Sandy-blond with a lot of neck, shoulders, and jaw. Look of the college lineman six years later, twenty pounds heavier, and a lot softer.
But as he got his back against the wall, he pulled a blue-black and very efficient-looking revolver out of somewhere and aimed it at my middle. I stopped very suddenly and took a cautious step backward, and raised my arms, and said, “Easy now. Easy does it, friend.”
He coughed and gagged and massaged his throat. He spoke in a rasping, traumatic whisper. “Back up and sit on the edge of the bed, smart-ass. And hold the back of your neck with both hands.”
I obeyed, slowly and carefully. Penny was still on her back on the floor. She was making a horrid articulated sound with each inhalation. She had hiked her knees up. Her clenched fists were against her breast. The fall had knocked all the wind out of her.
He went over and looked down at her. Her breathing eased. He gave her his hand and he pulled her up to a sitting position, but she shook her head violently and pulled her hand away. That was as far as she wanted to go for the moment. She hugged her legs, forehead on her knees.
“Two hours you said,” he whispered. “Or three.”
“He … he must be resistant to it. He had enough for … a full-grown horse.”
With his eyes on me, he moved the straight chair over and placed it about five feet from me, the back toward me. He straddled it and rested the short barrel on the back of the chair, centered on my chest. “We’ll have a nice little talk, smart-ass.”
“About what? This lou
sy setup? I’ve got eight hundred on me, so take it. Wear it in good health. Leave.”
She got to her feet, took one step, and nearly went down again. She hobbled over toward the head of the bed, her face twisted with pain.
“My ankle,” she said. She was having a clumsy evening.
“We are going to have a little talk about Dr. Stewart Sherman, smart-ass.”
I frowned at him, my bafflement entirely genuine. “I never heard of the man in my life. If this is some variation of the badger game, friend, you are making it too complicated.”
“And we are going to talk about how you are putting the squeeze on Tom Pike. Want to deny seeing him today?”
“I went to see Maurie and Biddy, the two daughters of Mick Pearson, a friend of mine who died five years, nearly six years ago not that it is any of your business.”
There was a look of uncertainty in his eyes for just a moment. But I needed more advantage than that and, remembering their very personal little squabble, and remembering how she had reported having no trouble at all with me, I thought of an evil way to improve the odds.
“Like I said. Take the eight hundred and leave. Your broad was pretty good, but she wasn’t worth eight hundred, but if that’s the going rate, let me pay.”
“Now, don’t get cute,” he said. His voice was coming back.
“Man, the very last thing I am going to be is cute. My head hurts from whatever she loaded my drink with. We had this nice little romp and then, instead of settling down, she wants to go out to some saloon. She said we could come back afterward. So I get dressed and she wants a drink, so I fix two drinks and I drink mine, and the last thing I remember is seeing her watching me in a funny way as she’s putting her clothes on. Then the lights went out.”
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper Page 8
