He’d at least be doing something he loved.
He arrives at the house, walks to the front door, knocks. Seymour told him the place would be empty, told him the occupants would be meeting with him fifteen miles away, but one must be cautious in moments like these.
No one answers his knock.
He turns away thinking he’ll walk around the house and find a window to crawl through, and wishing he hadn’t worn a suit for this job, but turns back only a moment later. He might as well try the knob. He has no hope for it, but should make sure before resorting to anything else.
He turns the knob and the door unlatches. He pushes and the door opens. He glances once over his shoulder and sees no one and nothing but empty street. He steps into the house and closes the door behind him.
He looks around the living room, a small room with white-painted pine floors. A couch sits in the middle of the room on a brown rug with tattered strings hanging from its edges. A small Philco television sits against the wall opposite the couch, an empty bottle of beer on top of it, resting directly in front of a coat-hanger antenna.
He walks deeper into the house, wondering where the compromising photographs might be hidden, still having no idea someone else is here with him.
3
Vivian stretches out her right leg, resting her foot on the protruding bathtub faucet, the dull gray metal hot against the arch of her foot. She soaps her leg up, covering it in a film of lavender-scented bubbles, and gets to work with one of Leland’s Gillette safety razors. She starts with her toes, scraping the small brown hairs from the knuckles, and then works her way up her leg, dragging the blade toward her knee, then over her knee and up her thigh. Occasionally she stops to rinse the blade in the tub, shaking it around in the water. Short nubs of hair, not much bigger than grains of sand, float on a scrim of soap which lines the water’s surface.
Her father forbade her to shave her legs while she lived under his roof, nor would he allow her to wear makeup. The only book he allowed in the house was a bible. This book contains everything worth knowing; you start lookin for answers outside the bible, what you’re really lookin for is trouble.
She went out and looked for trouble, anyway, and if she couldn’t do the things she wanted while living under his roof, she wouldn’t live there. She ran away at sixteen and never regretted it, not even during the hardest of times.
She pauses with the blade halfway up her leg, tilts her head to listen. She could have sworn she heard something, a knock at the front door maybe. All she hears now though is the water running.
She sets the razor down on the edge of the tub and turns the water off. Now all she hears is the drip. . drip. . drip of the faucet. If someone was at the door they must have left, for there isn’t a second knock. Not that she would answer the door if there were. She’s in the middle of a bath and isn’t about to run soaking wet to the front door just so she can tell a salesman she isn’t interested in his full set of stainless-steel cookware or his amazing bottle of stove cleaner, you’ll never have to scrub again.
She’s reaching forward to turn the water back on when she hears the floor creak.
Her first instinct is to call out to Leland, you home already? But she knows it isn’t him. He should just be arriving at his appointment. She sits perfectly still and listens. The floor creaks again. She gets to her feet, the splashing water sounding very loud in her ears, though she attempts silence. Water drips from her body. She steps from the tub, moving slowly. She dries herself with a towel.
Someone’s going through the dresser in the bedroom now. She can hear wood sliding against wood as drawers are opened and closed. She feels very naked. She walks to her nightgown and slips back into it. It clings to her still-damp body. The bathroom door is cracked. She walks to it and looks through the crack in the doorway. A man in a suit, a bald man in a suit, not your typical burglar, is digging through her dresser, pulling the clothes out and setting them aside before replacing them neatly. Her first thought is that he’s a pervert looking for panties to sniff while he plays with his thing, but that isn’t right. It isn’t panties he’s after. He’s searching for something else and isn’t finding it.
She turns back to the bathroom looking for a weapon of some kind. At first she sees nothing of use. A toothbrush. A tube of Pepsodent toothpaste. A yellow latex douche/ enema bag flung over the shower rod.
The shower rod.
She pulls it from the wall and walks once more toward the bathroom door. She pulls open the door and stands silently in the doorway a moment, watching the man now pulling open the bottom drawer of her dresser.
She opens her mouth but nothing comes out. She’s afraid to speak. Part of her thinks it might be best if she said nothing at all. She could step back into the bathroom and close the door, lock it, wait for him to leave. That might be the best thing to do. It might be the safest thing to do.
But she won’t simply allow this man to dig through her belongings. She can’t.
She grips the rod in her fists tightly, her knuckles going white. She swallows. Her hands feel cramped from the tension in them.
Finally she finds it within herself to speak.
‘Find what you’re looking for?’
4
Barry turns around to see a doe-eyed brunette woman standing in an open doorway. She wears a wet nightgown which clings to her skin, the shape of her breasts and her hips clearly visible beneath its thin fabric. She holds a metal rod in her hands like a baseball bat.
He blinks at her, unbelieving. The house was supposed to be empty. Seymour promised him it’d be empty. He knocked and there was no answer. So why is someone standing across the room from him with a weapon gripped in her fists?
‘What?’
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
She takes a step forward. Barry takes a step back.
‘I think there’s been a misunderstanding.’
‘Misunderstanding? Did you accidentally break into my house?’
Barry cannot think of a response. He’s not a stupid man, but he feels stupid right now. His mind has failed him. He wants to run, but she’s standing between him and his way out of here. And he still hasn’t found any pictures. It could be that there aren’t any. It could be that Seymour now has them all. But he’d feel better about coming to that conclusion if he had time to finish searching.
The woman takes another step toward him.
He has to get out of the house. If he gets out of the house and gets to his car he’ll be fine. He can forget about it. The pictures are Seymour’s problem, not his own, and he can walk away without a worry. He stole nothing. No one will investigate. She probably won’t even call the police. If he gets away he’ll be fine.
Goddamn it, the house was supposed to be empty.
‘You better say something.’
‘The. . the door was unlocked.’
‘The door was unlocked?’
She raises the pole in her hands.
He swallows, glances from her to the doorway. There’s a moment during which neither of them moves. Then he runs for it.
As he rushes past her she swings, bringing the pole down fast at a diagonal.
It connects with the side of his head, sending a great ringing through the hollows of his skull, and sending him to the floor. He blinks, disoriented, and rolls over. He looks up to see the woman stepping toward him, brow furrowed, arms swinging again. The pole comes chopping down toward his face like an axe. Once, against the forehead. Twice, he reaches out and manages to catch it. There’s a terrible stinging in the palm of his hand, sharp and somehow acidic, like a slap. He ignores it and pulls the pole from her hand, yanking her forward with it till she loses her grip. He gets to his feet.
Fear flickers in the woman’s eyes and it’s her turn to take a step back.
It does something to him, the fear visible on her face. As does her subtle retreat. It erases all thought of leaving. He could now simply turn and walk away, and everything wou
ld be fine. There may or may not be more pictures, but the house was supposed to be empty. It’s no longer his responsibility.
Except the woman backing away pulls him toward her, as if there were some invisible cable connecting them to one another. She moves back so he moves forward. It’s as simple as that.
‘Where are they?’
‘Where. . where are what?’
‘The pictures.’
TWENTY
1
Lou steps off an elevator and walks down a corridor that stinks of the cigarettes smoked behind the doors lining the walls on either side of him. He can see a cop standing in front of the door he wants to walk through. The cop is about twenty-three years old and wears a heavily starched uniform. His red hair is cut short and freckles dot his cheeks. His hands are clasped behind his back and he stares straight ahead at the wall, mouth a soggy teeter-totter drooping over his chin. Lou’s guessing this young cop used to be a marine. It’s in his posture. His older brother saw combat, has stories about storming the beach at Normandy, battling on vast fields of blood, bayoneting teenage warriors and feeling no remorse, for it was us or them, and we had God on our side. He’s unhappy that he was too young to join before the end of World War II and was unlucky enough to be discharged before the Korean War began. Probably he left to join the police force after two years at Camp Gordon, Georgia, or some other place equally as boring, hoping for action in the city if not on the battlefield. He wants to taste blood. That’s what Lou sees as he walks toward this young cop. That’s what he sees, but he hopes he’s wrong, because if he’s right it might mean trouble.
He approaches the cop, walking casually, hands in pockets. The hand in his right hip pocket grips the cool handle of a switchblade knife. If things had gone to plan, there’d be an identical knife in the milkman’s apartment. Evelyn bungled it, but he still wants to use the knife here; a gunshot will give Teddy Stuart too much warning. The cop looks toward him without moving his head. His eyes shift left, that’s all. Lou smiles at him and gives him a small nod. The cop does not return Lou’s smile.
Instead he says, ‘I think you’re on the wrong floor, sir.’
‘No, it’s all right, I’m just going-’
And then Lou’s upon him. He moves quickly, pulling both hands from his pockets simultaneously. With the left he reaches out and grabs an ear and pulls down, bending the cop forward. With the right, before the man can recover, before the hat which has fallen from the cop’s head has even hit the floor, he flicks open the switchblade and plants it in the back of the cop’s neck, slamming it straight down, aiming for the spinal cord. The cop crumples to the ground, unsheathing the blade now dripping with blood, nothing remaining of him but a pile of blue laundry, no sound escaping him but the single grunt he made when Lou grabbed him by the ear.
His blue hat lies on the floor a few feet away.
A strange chuckle escapes Lou’s throat. He’d thought the cop might be trouble but he wasn’t any trouble at all. If the police were going to use such an incompetent to protect Teddy Stuart they should have just left him unattended. It would have saved a life, and while Lou doesn’t get emotional about murder, not at this point, he sees no reason to commit the act unless it’s necessary. It is, after all, a messy and dangerous affair. Especially when the victim’s a cop.
He wipes the blade off on the cop’s uniform and puts it away. Later he’ll throw it into the ocean and have an ice cream at Santa Monica pier. But for now he must get on with business. He reaches into his coat pocket and grabs a pair of leather gloves. He slips his hands into them, removes the milkman’s revolver from his waistband, thumbs back the hammer.
He pulls back with his right foot and kicks. The door-jamb cracks but doesn’t give completely; he kicks again, it splinters, and the door swings open. He grabs the cop by the back of his collar and drags him into the room, which appears to be empty. No sign of Teddy Stuart. He dumps the cop just inside the door. Then he grabs the hat from the hallway floor and throws it on top of the corpse. It flips off the body and onto the carpet, where it lies upside down. He closes the door. It won’t latch, but at least it’ll provide a temporary barrier if Teddy Stuart makes a run.
‘Now,’ he says, taking a step deeper into the room, ‘if I were a rat, where would I hide? Under the bed, maybe.’
He leans down and looks. There’s nothing there but floor.
‘Maybe the armoire,’ he says. ‘Rats like the dark, don’t they?’
2
Teddy sits in bed wearing nothing but pants and an undershirt. He has a couple days of beard-growth on his face. He’s been stuck in this hotel room for four days and each day he feels less inclined to groom than he did the day before.
First couple days he got up early, showered, shaved, put on a suit — and spent the rest of his daylight hours sitting alone in this goddamn prison of a room. Last two days he hasn’t really bothered. There’s no point in hygiene. Hygiene is for other people and right now there are no other people.
He looks through the newspaper absently, reading headlines, sometimes the first paragraph of a story, but mostly he flips through pages simply to be doing something. His thumbs are black from the newsprint rubbing off on them. Nothing interests him. Each day he’s here he fades a little more out of existence. Soon he’ll go transparent and shortly after that will cease to exist altogether. Air will fill the space he once displaced.
He needs to go for a walk. He needs to grab a hamburger at a hamburger stand and eat it while making small talk with the man perched next to him. He needs to smile at pretty girls and feel the sunshine on his face. Only four days and he’s tired of being protected. He isn’t sure how much more he can take.
This thought, then a sound just outside his door. A grunt. Then another sound. The heavy thud of a man collapsing to the floor. His first thought is that the cop guarding his door fainted, but he knows that isn’t right. One doesn’t grunt before fainting; one grunts while being knocked unconscious.
The Man has come for him. The Man has sent someone to kill him. He knew this might happen, knew it probably would happen, and now that it is happening the biblical corner of his mind which before was preaching so loudly has gone silent. That feeling of fading from existence is also gone. He feels fully in himself, fully alive, and his only concern now is for survival.
He lifts his heavy frame from the bed, cringing as the springs creak, wishing he hadn’t let himself get so fucking fat. He pads to the bathroom, eye on the door, every moment expecting it to open, to see a killer revealed. His first thought is that he can hide behind the shower curtain, but as soon as his feet are on cold tile he sees there is no shower curtain. The shower’s enclosed in glass. He knew that. He’s been here for days.
Why didn’t he-
Someone in the corridor kicks at the door and the doorjamb cracks without giving completely. A few jagged splinters of wood fall to the carpet.
He pushes the bathroom door shut, knowing he’s only delaying the inevitable, knowing it but not having the courage to face head-on what’s coming.
Another kick at the room door and this time it swings open.
Death has just walked in, but he’ll not greet it. Every second he can cling to life is a second he wants, filled with terror though it might be. It’s a second that belongs to him rather than God.
3
Lou pulls open the armoire. Empty wood hangers line the length of the warped dowel, interspersed like crows on a telephone line. On the left side of the dowel, a coat, a few shirts, a few pairs of pants. Two black shoes sit on the floor, empty of feet.
He pushes the door shut and turns around.
A smile touches his lips.
‘You’re in the bathroom, aren’t you, Teddy?’
He walks toward the door, stepping slowly, moving fluidly. He knows that Teddy Stuart’s behind that door. There’s nowhere else for him to be unless he’s not here, and he is here. The cop was guarding the door because of what was on the other side of it.
Though he remains calm and his actions deliberate Lou knows he needs to get this done quickly. He called the police before taking the elevator up, called them from the lobby and said he needed to report a murder, told them that Teddy Stuart had been killed, and now he must make that killing happen and get out of here before the police arrive.
He reaches the door and toes it open.
It swings wide, revealing the man whose life he’s to end. He stands barefoot on the bathroom floor in a pair of wrinkled slacks and a Dago T-shirt. He holds in his hands the heavy lid of the toilet tank. He holds it over his head, ready to swing it down — except Lou is not within swinging distance. His eyes are red, face unshaven and tired-looking. Lou can almost find it in himself to feel sorry for the son of a bitch.
Almost.
He raises the gun.
‘You had to know the Man would send someone,’ Lou says. ‘He liked you. He trusted you. And you betrayed him.’
4
Teddy looks through the doorway and down the barrel of a gun. Behind the gun, the skeletal face of a killer. He thinks of his ex-wife. They lived together unhappily for a decade, but she was the only person he ever loved. He wonders why he couldn’t find happiness. He’s going to die now and he never knew happiness. A few good and true moments, yes, but it wasn’t enough.
The Last Tomorrow Page 15
