A Bullet for Cinderella

by John D. MacDonald

“I guess he told you about how we were doing before he left.”

  “He said you had a pretty good business.”

  “This store used to be over on Delaware. We moved about six months ago. Sold the lease. Sold my house too. Still got the yard and this. The rest of it is gone.”

  I felt uncomfortable. “Business is bad, I guess.”

  “It’s pretty good for some people. What business are you in?”

  “I’m not working right now.”

  He smiled at me in a mirthless way. “And I suppose you plan on sticking around awhile.”

  “I’d thought of it.”

  “Did Fitz send for you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t know he was here.”

  “But you talked to him. He phoned me and said you’d probably be in for a little chat. And that you’re an old friend of Timmy’s. He’s been working for me for nearly a year. I don’t see how I can give you a job. There just isn’t enough coming in. I couldn’t swing it.”

  “I don’t want a job, Mr. Warden.”

  He kept smiling. His eyes were funny. I had the feeling that he was either very drunk or out of his head. “Maybe something nice out of the store? We still have some nice things. I could unlock the gun rack for you. Need a nice over and under, with gold inlay, French walnut stock? On the house.”

  “No thanks. I don’t understand, Mr. Warden. I knew Timmy and I thought maybe it would be the right thing to do to just stop in and chat.”

  “Sure. But you went out to the yard first.”

  “Yes. I went out there because I put my car in a garage here and I told the man I’d known Timmy in prison camp. He said there was another man here who’d been in the same place. Earl Fitzmartin. So I went out there and saw him. Then I came here. I could have come here first and then gone out there. I don’t know why you think you have to give me a job or a gun or anything.”

  He looked at me and then bent over and picked up the bottle again. He put some in both glasses. “Okay,” he said. “So it’s just like that. Pay no attention to me. Hardly anybody does any more. Except Fitz. He’s a good worker. The yard makes a little money. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  It wasn’t anything like the conversation I had expected. He was a strange man. He seemed defeated and yet amused, as though amused at his own defeat.

  “Timmy talked a lot about Hillston,” I said.

  “I guess he did. He lived here most of his life.”

  Though I didn’t feel right about it, I took the plunge. “We had a lot of time to talk. They made us go to lectures and read propaganda and write reports on what we read, but the rest of the time we talked. I feel as though I know Hillston pretty well. Even know the girls he used to go with. Ruth Stamm. Janice Currier. Cindy somebody.”

  “Sure,” he said softly, half smiling. “Ruthie Stamm. And it was Judith not Janice Currier. Those were two of them. Nice girls. But the last couple of years before he went away he stopped running around so much. Stuck closer to the business. Lots of nights he’d work on the books. He was getting almost too serious to suit me.”

  “Wasn’t there one named Cindy?”

  He frowned and thought and shook his head. “No Cindy I know of. Either of those other two would have made him a good wife. Ruthie is still around town, still single. Judy got married and moved away. El Paso, I think. Either one of them would have made him a better wife than the one I got stuck with. Eloise. He talk about her?”

  “He mentioned her a few times.”

  “She’s gone.”

  “I know. Fitz told me.”

  “Lovely little Eloise. Two-faced bitch. While you’re around, stop in again any time. We’ll have a nice little chat. I’m usually here. Hell, I used to have a lot of other things to do. Zoning board. Chamber of Commerce. Rotary. Always on the run. Always busy. Now I have a lot of time. All the time in the world.”

  I was dismissed. I walked back through the narrow store to the street door. The clerk leaned against one of the counters near the front, picking his teeth with a match. It felt good to get back out into the sunlight. The cheap liquor had left a bad taste in my mouth. It was too early to go after the car. I went into the nearest bar I could find and ordered an ale. It was a dark place, full of brown and violet shadows, with deer antlers on the wall and some dusty mounted fish. Two elderly men played checkers at a corner table. The bartender was a dwarf. The floor was built up behind the bar to bring him up to the right height.

  I sipped the ale and thought about Fitz, about my own unexpectedly violent reaction that had been made ludicrous by his superior strength. I had not thought that I cared enough. It was a long time since camp. But he had brought it all back. The time with him had not been pure fiasco, however. I sensed that I had won a very small victory in the talk that had followed the one-sided fight. He was not certain of where I stood, how much I knew. The talk with George had canceled that small victory. George puzzled me. There was a curious under-current in his relationship with Fitz, something I could not understand.

  Bartenders are good sources of information. I sensed that the little man was watching me, trying to figure out who I was. I signaled for a refill. When he brought my glass back from the beer tap I said, “What do people do for excitement around this town?”

  He had a high, thin voice. “Stranger in town, are you? It’s pretty quiet. Saturday night there’s things going on here and there. Not much on a weekday. There’s some that drive all the way to Redding. There’s gambling there, but it’s crooked. Then it’s easier to meet women there than here. You a salesman?”

  I needed a quick answer and I suddenly remembered something that Fitz had said to give me my gimmick, ready-made, and reasonably plausible. “I’m working on a book.”

  He showed a quick interest. “Writer, are you? What’s there here to write about? Historical stuff?”

  “No. It’s a different kind of a book. I was taken prisoner in Korea. Some of the boys died there, boys I knew. This book is a sort of personal history of those boys. You know, the way they lived, what they did, what they would have come back to if they’d lived. One of them is from this town. Timmy Warden.”

  “Hell, did you know Timmy? My God, that was a shame. There was a good kid.”

  “I’ve been talking to his brother, George, just down the street.”

  The little man clucked and shook his head. “George has just plain gone to hell the last year or so. He and Timmy had a pretty good setup too. Couple of good businesses. But then George’s wife left him. Then he got word Timmy was dead. It took the heart out of him, I guess. He’s got about one tenth the business he used to have, and he won’t have that long if he keeps hitting the bottle. Buck Stamm’s girl has been trying to straighten him out, but she’s wasting her time. But that Ruthie is stubborn. I tell you, if Timmy had made it back and if he’d waited until now, he’d have a long uphill fight. George has been selling stuff off and piddling away the money he gets. Lives in a room at White’s Hotel. Gets drunk enough to be picked up every now and then. For a while there they’d just take him home because he used to be an important man in this town. Now they let him sober up in the can.”

  One of the old men playing checkers said, “Stump, you talk too damn much.”

  “Watch your game,” Stump said. “Get some kings. Let smart people talk in peace, Willy.”

  He turned back to me and said, “How do you figure on writing up Timmy?”

  “Oh, just the way he lived. Where he was born. Interview his schoolteachers. Talk to the girls he dated.”

  Stump glanced at the checker players and then hunched himself over the bar and spoke in a tone so low they couldn’t hear him. Stump wore a sly smirk as he talked. “Now I wouldn’t stand back of this, and it isn’t anything you could put in your book, but I heard it from a pretty good source that before Timmy took off into the army, he and that Eloise Warden were a little better than just plain friends. Know what I mean? She
was a good-looking piece, and you can hardly blame the kid, if she was right there asking for it. She was no good, anyway. She took off with a salesman and nobody’s seen or heard from her since.”

  He backed away and gave me a conspiratorial smile. “Of course, George wouldn’t know anything about it. Like they say, he’d be the last to know.”

  “Are there any other relatives in town, beside George?”

  “Not a one. Their daddy died six or seven years ago. George got married right after that. Then the three of them, George, Timmy, and Eloise stayed right on in the old Warden place. George sold that this year. Man named Syler bought it. He chopped it up into apartments, I hear.”

  I talked with him for another half hour, but he didn’t have very much to add. He asked me to stop around again. I liked the atmosphere of his bar, but I didn’t like him. He was a little too eager to prove he knew everything, particularly the unsavory details.

  When I got back to the garage a little after three my car was ready. I paid for the work. It ran smoothly on the way back to the motel south of town. Once I was in my room with the door shut I reviewed everything that had happened. Though I had told my lie about writing up Timmy on impulse, I couldn’t see how it could hurt anything. In fact it might make things a good deal easier. I decided that I’d better buy some kind of pocket notebook and write things down so that my story would stand up a little better.

  There was no reason why Timmy and the others like him shouldn’t be written up. I remembered that a magazine had done the same sort of thing with the progressives who refused repatriation. So why not the dead. They would be more interesting than the turncoats, who, almost without exception, fell into two groups. They were either ignorant and very nearly feeble-minded, or they were neurotic, out-of-balance, with a lifelong feeling of having been rejected. The dead were more interesting.

  My one abortive attempt to find Cindy had failed. Using the cover story of writing up Timmy, I should be able to find her. From what Timmy had said, she was a girl who would know of a special hiding place. And the money was there.

  Unless Eloise had taken it. I was puzzled by Fitz’s insistence that she hadn’t taken it.

  When I went back into town for dinner I bought a notebook in a drugstore. At dinner I filled three pages with notes. I could have filled more. Timmy had talked a lot. There hadn’t been much else to do. I went to a movie, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. The next person to talk to was Ruth Stamm. I could see her the next morning.

  But back in the motel room I took another look at Ruth Stamm. I took her picture out of the back of my wallet. Tomorrow, Friday, I would see her for the first time in the flesh. I had looked at this picture a thousand times. Timmy had showed it to me in camp. I remembered the day we sat with our backs against a wall in watery sunshine and he took the picture out and showed it to me.

  “That’s the one, Tal. I didn’t have sense enough to stay with her. That’s the good one, Tal. Ruthie Stamm.”

  They had taken my papers away from me, including the shots of Charlotte. I held the picture of Ruthie Stamm, turning it toward the pale sunshine. It was cracked but none of the cracks touched her face. It was in color and the colors had faded and changed. She sat on her heels and scratched the joyous belly of a blond cocker while she laughed up into the camera eye. She wore yellow shorts and a halter top, and her laughter was fresh and good and shared.

  In some crazy way it became our picture—Timmy’s and mine. I took it off his body after he died and it became mine. It represented an alien world of sanity and kindness and strength. I looked at it often.

  Now I took it out again and lay on the motel bed and looked at it in the lamplight. And felt a tingle of anticipation. For the first time I permitted myself to wonder if this pilgrimage to Hillston was in part due to the picture of a girl I had never seen. And to wonder if this picture had something to do with the death of love for Charlotte.

  I put the picture away. It took a long time to get to sleep. But the sleep that came was deep and good.

  • THREE •

  On Friday morning it was not until I opened the bureau drawer to take out a clean shirt that I knew somebody had been in the room. I had stacked the clean shirts neatly in one corner of the big middle drawer. They were scattered all over the drawer as if stirred by a hasty hand. I went over all my things and saw more and more evidence of quick, careless search. There was nothing for anyone to find. I had written down nothing about the elusive Cindy.

  It did not seem probable that the maid or the woman who had rented me the room had done this. Nor did it seem probable that it had occurred on the previous day while I was out. I checked the door. I distinctly remembered locking it. It was unlocked. That meant someone had come in while I had slept. Fortunately, from long habit, I had put my wallet inside the pillowcase. My money was safe. Some cool morning air came through the door, chilling my face and chest, and I realized I was sweating lightly. I remembered how Fitz could move so quietly at night. I did not like the thought of his being in the room, being able to unlock the door. I did not see how it could have been anyone else. I wondered how he had found the motel so easily. I had given the address to no one. Yet it could not have taken too long on the phone. Maybe an hour or an hour and a half to find where I was registered. It would take patience. But Fitzmartin had waited over a year.

  I had breakfast, looked up an address and drove off to see the girl of the cracked, treasured picture—the girl who, unknown to herself, had eased great loneliness, and strengthened frail courage.

  Dr. Buck Stamm was a veterinary. His home and place of business was just east of town, a pleasant old frame house with the animal hospital close by. Dogs made a vast clamor when I drove up. They were in individual runways beside the kennels. There were horses in a corral beyond the house.

  Dr. Stamm came out into the waiting-room when the bell on the door rang. He was an enormous man with bushy red hair that was turning gray. He had a heavy baritone voice and an impressive frown.

  “We’re not open around here yet unless it’s an emergency, young man.”

  “No emergency. I wanted to see your daughter for a minute.”

  “What about?”

  “It’s a personal matter. I was a friend of Timmy Warden.”

  He did not look pleased. “I guess I can’t stop you from seeing her. She’s at the house, wasting time over coffee. Go on up there. Tell her Al hasn’t showed up yet and I need help with the feeding. Tell her Butch died in the night and she’ll have to phone the Bronsons. Got that?”

  “I can remember it.”

  “And don’t keep her too long. I need help down here. Go around to the back door. She’s in the kitchen.”

  I went across the lawn to the house and up the back steps. It was a warm morning and the door was open. The screens weren’t on yet. The girl came to the back door. She was medium tall. Her hair was dark red, a red like you can see in old furniture made of cherry wood, oiled and polished so the sun glints fire streaks in it. She wore dungarees and a pale blue blouse. Her eyes were tilted gray, her mouth a bit heavy and quite wide. She had good golden skin tones instead of the blotched pasty white of most redheads. Her figure was lovely. She was twenty-six, or perhaps twenty-seven.

  There are many women in the world as attractive as Ruth Stamm. But the expression they wear for the world betrays them. Their faces are arrogant, or petulant, or sensuous. That is all right because their desirability makes up for it, and you know they will be good for a little time and when you have grown accustomed to the beauty, there will be just the arrogance or the petulance left.

  But Ruth wore her own face for the world—wore an expression of strength and humility and goodness. Should you become accustomed to her loveliness, there would still be all that left. This was a for-keeps girl. She couldn’t be any other way because all the usual poses and artifices were left out of her. This was a girl you could hurt, a girl who would demand and deserve utter loyalty.

  “I guess I�
��m staring,” I said.

  She smiled. “You certainly are.” She tried to make smile and words casual, but in those few moments, as it happens so very rarely, a sharp awareness had been born, an intense and personal curiosity.

  I took the picture out of my pocket and handed it to her. She looked at it and then looked sharply at me, eyes narrowed. “Where did you get this?”

  “Timmy Warden had it.”

  “Timmy! I didn’t know he had this. Were you at—that place?”

  “In the camp with him? Yes. Wait a minute. Your father gave me some messages for you. He says Al hasn’t showed up and he needs help with the feeding. And you’re to phone the Bronsons that Butch died during the night.”

  Her face showed immediate concern. “That’s too bad.”

  “Who was Butch?”

  “A nice big red setter. Some kid in a jalopy hit him, and didn’t even stop. I should phone right away.”

  “I would like to talk to you when you have more time. Could I take you to lunch today?”

  “What do you want to talk to me about?”

  The lie was useful again. “I’m doing a book on the ones who didn’t come back. I thought you might help fill me in on Timmy. He mentioned you many times.”

  “We used to go together. I—yes, I’ll help all I can. Can you pick me up at twelve-fifteen here?”

  “I’ll be glad to. And—may I have the picture back?”

  She hesitated and then handed it to me. “The girl in this picture was eighteen. That’s a long time ago—” She frowned. “You didn’t tell me your name yet.”

  “Howard. Tal Howard.”

  Our glances met for a few seconds. Again there was that strong awareness and interest. I believe it startled her as much as it did me. The figure in the picture was a girl. This was a woman, a fulfillment of all the promises in the picture—a mature and lovely woman—and we were shyly awkward with each other. She said good-by and went into the house. I drove back into town. For a long time I had carried the picture in the photograph in my mind. Now reality was superimposed on that faded picture. I had imagined that I had idealized the photo image, given it qualities it did not possess. Now at last I knew that the reality was stronger, more persuasive than the dreaming.