Then there was a moment of silence and a sudden crash of sound that caught us both by surprise: that damned military salute. I heard Martha gasp. Her fingers dug into me convulsively and I felt her sway. I knew she was remembering a time not long ago when she’d been subjected to a similar loud noise and the weapon involved had not been aimed at the sky.
“Easy,” I whispered without turning my head.
“I’m all right. Can we go now?”
“Slowly. You’re supposed to drag it out just a little for the condolences, if you can manage.”
“God! All right, coach. Gotta win this one for ole daddy in Washington, right? And . . . and the poor guy in that crazy can over there. Matt.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t go away, damn you. Stick around for a change.”
“I’m right here.”
Then it was over and, shortly, I drove my rental car into the driveway, now empty, that looped up to the house through a bit of tricky desert-type landscaping involving rocks and gravel and cacti, and back down to the street again—actually a gracefully curving development-type road. This was one of the new mushroom suburban heavens with which I was not acquainted, moderately expensive, set in the rolling arid ranch country outside Santa Fe, where lots were measured in acres—well, at least fractional acres—instead of square feet. We do collect substantial danger pay and apparently Bob had saved a reasonable percentage of his and spent some of it to house his young bride and himself.
The lot was okay, with a spectacular view down the Rio Grande valley. The house itself, however, was fairly small and not very imaginative; a low, brown, flat-roofed, two-bedroom, cinderblock dwelling done in the pseudo-adobe style common out here in the dry southwest where the mud-brick hut is the ancient standard of architecture by which everything else is judged. There was the usual stylistic confusion between the old-fashioned round vigas, roof timbers to you, that stuck out picturesquely in true pioneer fashion, and the big modem picture window that would have given a true pioneer the shakes—think of trying to defend a window like that in an Indian raid!
Out here there was pretty good separation between the houses; and what with the hilly terrain and the winding road, or street, only a few of the neighboring residences were visible from where I parked the car directly in front. Getting out, I was aware that a tall blond woman in a pale green, long-sleeved blouse and well-fitted green slacks was watching us from the front door of a house directly opposite that seemed to be almost a duplicate of the Devine domicile. She did not wave a greeting; she simply watched. I couldn’t quite make out her face at the distance, but her drawn-back hair was smooth and bright and her figure was adult and interesting. I went around to help Martha out. She stood for a moment beside the car, breathing deeply as if she’d just come up for air after a long dive into cold water.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” she said. “Where are your things?”
“I’ve got a suitcase in the trunk,” I said. “I figured the timing was going to be close so I wore my one dark suit and didn’t take time to find a motel.”
“Bring your bag inside.”
I glanced at her quickly. “Is that such a good idea?”
“You don’t want to spoil her whole day, do you?” Martha’s head did not turn and her voice was quite even. “If you don’t give her something to gossip about, she might bite herself and come down with rabies. Bring it in.”
I said carefully, “Sure. If you know what you’re doing.” “I know what I’m doing; I’m doing her a favor. She’s been looking for a good reason to despise me and I’m giving it to her, okay?”
“Why should she want to despise you?” I asked as I opened the trunk of the car.
“That way she doesn’t have to despise herself.” Martha glanced across the street at last, and at me. “I thought you knew Bob pretty well.”
“Oh.”
She laughed. There was a little malice in the sound, but not enough to be disturbing; she was not really sneering at, or hating, the dead.
“Precisely, as Daddy would say. I gave him back something he’d lost. The coronary had undermined his confidence in himself, if you know what I mean. It really shook him very badly. He was afraid . . . afraid that since one important muscle had suddenly and inexplicably betrayed him, another might. I . . . I helped him determine that that did not seem to be happening at all. If you know what I mean.”
I said carefully, “It’s my impression that the organ in question isn’t basically muscular, but I get the general idea.”
She laughed again, a wry sound now. “And then, of course, having married him and made a new man of him, I assumed that he was my new man entirely. But I was wrong. I mean, I don’t have to tell you he was a damned nice guy in many ways; but I don’t have to tell you, either, that he had a compulsive need to prove himself. In every way. And after the scare he’d had, it wasn’t enough, in the end, for him to prove himself to me. With me. He had to check it out elsewhere, too.”
I slammed the trunk and joined her, suitcase in hand. “Um,” I said. “Like across the street?”
Martha nodded. “And since she’s slept with my husband, naturally our suburban Lorelei over there wants a good reason for hating me so she doesn’t have to feel cheap and guilty about her little neighborhood affair. So bring your suitcase along like a good boy and show her what a promiscuous worthless bitch I am, beneath contempt really; a wanton young wench who hauls another man into the house almost before her husband’s cold in his grave.” She took my arm, leading me toward the front door. “Just relax. It won’t hurt a bit. You’re doing your good deed for the day, okay? You’re soothing the poor bruised conscience of Mrs. Roundheels back there; you’re making it easy for her to live with herself again after her reckless fling at passion with the wonderful, exciting, dangerous married man across the street whose young tramp of a wife never appreciated or deserved him. . . .” The door closed behind us. Martha’s voice stopped abruptly. After a moment she said in totally different tones, “Phew! How’s that for prattling vivaciously? You didn’t know I was a compulsive chatterbox, did you, Matt? Just leave your bag right there. How about a drink?”
The inside of the house was pleasant enough if you didn’t take your interior decoration seriously. I mean, the furniture made no particular statement, it was simply comfortable-looking with a sprinkling of the heavy, dark, Mexican-style pieces that are nowadays produced on both sides of the border. There were some pretty good Indian rugs on the floor and some pretty standard prints on the walls, mixed up with a few original landscape paintings by our local artists specializing in aspens. I guess in New England it’s the birch with its gleaming white trunk; here in New Mexico it’s the aspen with its golden autumn foliage. Well, I’m old-fashioned enough, artistically speaking, to prefer a good aspen or birch to a bad cube or tetrahedron. Leaving my suitcase in the front hall, I followed Martha into the living room. There was a small bar of sorts in the comer. She gestured toward it.
“Martini, right?” she asked, and when I nodded, she said, “Maybe you’d better make it yourself. I open a mean beer but I don’t guarantee my mixed drinks. And a little Scotch for me. I’ll get some ice.”
Then we were sitting down with our drinks. It seemed as if I’d been going at a dead run ever since leaving Mac’s office, but of course it was nothing to what she’d just been through. From the massive Mexican armchair I watched her settling into a corner of the husky Mexican sofa, discarding her gracious-young-widow act like a used Kleenex, letting the strain show at last, unconcerned now about the ladylike disposition of her limbs or the graceful arrangement of her dress. I noticed—her careless posture made it obvious—that she was wearing sheer black pantyhose; and I realized that it was permissible for me to notice this now that Bob Devine was properly interred. Permissible but, perhaps, premature. She saw me looking, and gave me a small, amused grin. She flicked her pretty black dress down to where, propriety said, it belonged. Okay, premature.
“
Thanks for the helping hand, Matt,” she said calmly. “I didn’t really know if I was going to survive today. It’s been pretty grim. I was afraid I’d make an awful spectacle of myself before it was over. Thanks for helping to preserve the brave image.” She sipped her Scotch, watching me over the glass. “But now tell me what you’re really here for.”
It was a little frightening. The girl had grown up. Not that she’d been painfully juvenile when I’d last seen her; but there had been a hint of baby-softness to her figure, and more than a hint of brash and youthful cocksureness in her attitude. Now she was a mature young woman with a calm assurance that came, not from a lot of self-righteous theoretical beliefs, but from a practical awareness of her own abilities. She’d had some tough years, but she’d used them well. She was leaner, smarter, and more experienced than the girl I’d once known; she was also considerably more attractive.
“What are friends for,” I asked, “but to rally around in times of trouble?”
She laughed. “Bullshit. You’ve acted as if Bob and I had the plague for three years—or is it four now? I forget. Bob was even kind of hurt; we’d hear you’d been in town but you never came around. What kind of a friend is that?” “You didn’t used to be stupid, doll,” I said.
“What. . . oh.”
“I didn’t know the situation,” I said. “I didn’t know how much you’d told him; I didn’t know how you wanted to run this marriage of yours. When I finally heard of it. I was off somewhere when it happened. And if he’d seen us together, he’d have known, wouldn’t he? There’s no sure way of hiding that, ever, not when it happened so recently. Not from an observant guy like Bob. We’re neither of us good actors. I didn’t know all your special problems, but it just seemed better to stay the hell away.”
Martha nodded slowly. “All right. Sorry. I’ll buy that. As a matter of fact I didn’t tell him. He . . . we had enough to handle without comparing old loves and old lovers. So it could have become a sticky scene and you were right not to risk it. But I still don’t believe you came here today just to hold my trembling hand and wipe my runny nose.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But before I answer the question, there’s something I’d like to know. Why the hell did you marry him in the first place?”
Her eyes wavered. “Well, he was sick—”
“Cut it out, Martha,” I said. “Your Florence Nightingale complex isn’t that strong. And even if it were, you could have found a worthy invalid to marry who hadn’t spent all those years working for your daddy in an organization whose purposes and methods you detest.”
She licked her lips. “Well, it was your fault, really. On that crazy trip we took. You turned everything upside down for me. Everything I believed in. And after you were gone I discovered a dreadful thing. All my past was filmed in dull black and white, except that part of it we’d just been through. That was recorded on my memory tapes in living, vibrant color, as they say. And it stayed that way. Am I making sense?”
I grinned. “Hell, it’s the only part of your lousy little life you’d spent alive. Hunting and being hunted. Loving and being loved, if I may dignify our tricky relationship with such an important little word. What did you expect? All the rest of your girlish existence, like everybody else, you’d spent trying to be safe and secure and comfortable the way you’d been told since childhood your beautiful life was supposed to be. Jesus! A whole damn nation brought up to do nothing but be safe! No wonder it needs a few nasty unsafe guys like Bob and me to protect it. So you got your lovely comfortable safe security back and it didn’t feel so lovely any longer. Big deal.”
She made a face at me. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe when you’ve run with the wolves—hi, wolf—you kind of lose interest in cocker spaniels, bright and docile and well-trained though they may be. I kept meeting all these wonderful spaniel-men who bored me stiff. I kept thinking, if you’ll excuse it, how every damned one of them would have shit his pants full if they’d been where you and I once were with people shooting at us.” She shook her head. “And then Daddy took me to see Bob in the hospital and he was a mess, but he was not a spaniel, dammit. And he was a nice guy and he needed me and . . . and I knew what he’d done in the past but that was over. He was out of it now, so I didn’t have to reconcile his lousy work with my conscience. And I was lonely and I needed him, too, I really did. So I married him and it was rough for a while, while he was getting well, but then it was very good for a while. Very good. And then he disappointed me badly, hurt me badly; badly enough that I did something I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing to God I hadn’t. I spilled it all girlishly to somebody I trusted. I was a weepy little creep with too many drinks inside her, whining because her man had gone astray. My God, I knew the kind of guy I was marrying, didn’t I? Hell, you could tell just by looking at him that he could be relied on in every way but that way. Did I expect him to turn into a goddamned monk just because . . . Matt.”
“Yes?”
“Did they tell you how it was?”
“You mean the shooting? Not in detail.”
She drew a long, ragged breath. “We were hating each other, you understand,” she said. “Now we both had reasons: his roving eye and my blabbing tongue. So we went out to dinner hating each other but trying to be civilized, trying to retrieve something very important to both of us that had gotten lost; but cold, cold, cold. No real give on either side. And we came out of that restaurant without touching each other—you know the place on the Trail with the parking lot in back—and, as we headed for the car, there was a sound in the alley. I saw Bob start to throw himself down and aside. He could have made it, I think, he was very quick; he could have been safe on the ground behind a parked car. But he remembered me, the wife he hated, the wife who’d tattled about things that were none of her damn business, still standing there dumb and paralyzed. I guess I was thinking of my nice slacks and my pretty blouse and how dirty the ground was and how silly I’d look if. . . . He checked himself and took time to give me a great big sideways push that sent me sprawling. And the shotgun fired.” She cleared her throat. “When a guy does that for you, thinks of you first at a time like that, you kind of forget whom he slept with that he shouldn’t have.” She cleared her throat again. “Your turn.”
After a moment I said, “I’m here to help you if I can, of course. But I’m also here to see that you don’t take any embarrassing action.”
“Action?” She glanced at me and laughed, but her eyes were not quite candid. “You mean, like revenge? But how in the world could I? . . . I mean, even if I wanted to, even if I were capable of . . . I only caught a brief glimpse of the man in the alley. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea of how to go about finding him and I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him. He was just something moving in the dark.”
I said, “We weren’t thinking of the man.”
She shook her head quickly. “Really, Matt, how melodramatic can you get? You know me. You know how I feel about. . . about guns and violence. Even now after what’s happened. You mean, little nonviolent Martha taking the law into her own hands and making some kind of a stupid vendetta? How could you, or Daddy, think I could possibly . . .” Her voice trailed off. I didn’t say anything. I waited. At last she licked her lips. When she spoke her voice was almost inaudible. “All right. I’m not fooling anybody, am I? But it’s necessary, Matt. You must see that it’s necessary. Nobody can be allowed to do what she did to us. To me. Nobody. Oh, publishing it, if she’d found it all out somewhere else, all right. She was supposed to be my friend, but I guess she has a job to do, so all right. But coming here and accepting our hospitality and taking what I told her in confidence when I was all broken up like that, using it like that. . . .”
There was a little silence. A car went by outside. Daylight was fading from the picture window.
“Have you got a copy handy?” I asked. “I’ve got one in my bag but I haven’t had a chance to do more than glance through it.”
“It’s right here.
I wouldn’t be without it. I’ll treasure it the rest of my life. Maybe it will teach me to keep my damned mouth shut.” Her voice was grim. She opened the little black purse she’d put on the cocktail table and took out some stapled-together and folded-up magazine pages and held them out. “Here. I don’t have to read it again, actually. I know it by heart.”
I took the pages she held out and unfolded them. There was the standard dramatic closeup picture of a giant hand holding a giant gun aimed directly at the reader, supposedly threatening; but those magazine people don’t ever know anything about guns. They don’t realize that a Colt .45 automatic isn’t really much of a threat until you cock it. The hammer was down. And the old .45 is too bulky and clumsy and noisy for our purposes, anyway. But the page had a lot of impact if you didn’t look at it too closely or think about it too hard.
THE U.S. MURDER MACHINE
by Eleanor Brand
Case History #1: He is a husky, rather handsome man with bright blue eyes. He is married to an attractive, dark-haired girl, considerably younger. They live together in a conventional home in a conventional development outside Santa Fe, New Mexico; but Robert Wilson Devine is not really a conventional man. Until he retired with a heart ailment a few years ago he was a top professional assassin in the employ of the United States of America. . . .
The Revengers Page 2
