They were in the hills above Altadena now, on a rough rutted road. Eddie looked around, seeing the sudden dropping away of lights. They had come to a section where new homes were being built. A cluster of red lanterns loomed up ahead, topping the piled earth of a new excavation. Eddie braked to a halt.
Karen roused and looked out. Some of the houses were just framework buttressed with chimneys, not roofed over. Others were almost completed. Karen said tonelessly, “Look, it’s a new neighborhood.”
“I’ve got to turn around, go back. We can’t get past that ditch.”
Karen was looking out now with a touch of interest. “No, let’s stop here for a while. We’ve got to wait somewhere. Do you think there’s a watchman out here?”
“I don’t know. Probably not,” Eddie answered, thinking of the times he and Skip had stolen things out of unfinished houses. Karen was opening the car door on her side. “Where are you going?”
She said, “I just want to get out of the car. I just want some fresh air.” She stood with her head back, looking at the stars, and then moved off across the dark, rubble-dotted ground. Eddie doused the lights, got out, shut the car door. It was quite dark here now; there were crickets in the distance that only seemed to emphasize the silence around them. The red lanterns at the excavations in the distance looked like glowing coals. He could make out Karen, a dim shape under the starshine, going toward a half-finished place with a big front porch. She sat down there facing the street, put her elbows on her knees, leaned her face on her palms. She looked small and unutterably lonely.
“Why do things happen . . . the way they happen?” she asked when Eddie sat down close beside her.
“Gosh, I don’t know. If I knew that, I’d be a magician.” Eddie thought it over some more. “I’d be God.”
The porch was brick, hadn’t been swept yet, and crumbs of mortar lay on it. The interior of the house behind them gave forth a strong fragrance of sawn wood, the smells of paint and putty. He saw that Karen had cupped her eyes with her hands and was crying again.
Eddie moved closer and put an arm around her. She moved her face against his jacket. “I didn’t even get to say good-by to her,” she wept. “I didn’t get to tell her . . . not even once . . . how I felt about living there all those years. And at the end she hated me. She hated me because I brought Skip and you to her house.” She choked over her words, and Eddie stroked her hair softly. “When I first met Skip and talked to him about the money, I just thought it was a kind of joke.”
Eddie was amazed at her idea. “Skip never thought money was a joke.”
She cried for a while against his coat, wiping tears away with the back of her hand. Then she said, “You’re different from Skip, Eddie. I’ll bet you don’t even know it, but you’re entirely different. There’s a kind of . . . gentleness about you, and Skip doesn’t have it. Not a bit of it.”
“Ah, Skip’s okay, I guess,” Eddie said uncomfortably.
“No, there’s something lacking. I used to think he was tough, awfully brave, and that what was inside him was strength. But tonight I saw that wasn’t it at all. Inside, Skip is—is kind of hollow. Not in a physical way. I don’t quite know how to put it.”
Eddie recalled something from the past. “When we were in high school I heard the principal raising hell with Skip once and he told Skip that he was immature. Something in him wasn’t growing up along with the rest of him. That’s all that’s wrong with Skip; he just isn’t all grown up yet,” Eddie said.
“He’s never going to grow up.” She waited then as if thinking, then said suddenly, “Let’s not go back for him!”
The treasonous thought was to Eddie like ice water thrown over his body. He began to protest.
“Well, we won’t argue about it,” she said quickly. She pulled herself closer, as if sheltering from a wind. “I don’t want to argue with you. I like you. If anything separated us I’d just die.”
She was awfully young and afraid—Eddie had sense enough to know this, to suspect that her clinging was based on the circumstances of the moment. But he could not help but respond to her softness, her nearness. All at once she lifted her face to his, and their lips met and clung.
She was warm and yielding. He found himself trembling. She whispered something against his face, her voice husky, almost drowsy. He spoke then, staccato, the words ripped off short with tension and urgency. “We won’t go back. You’re right. We’ll leave Skip where he is. And to hell with him.”
Chapter Fifteen
SKIP STOOD in the shadows beside the back door for several minutes, listening. When he had first emerged from the shrubbery and stolen toward the porch it had seemed as if a sound reached him, not the sort of sound somehow that he connected with the bouncing and yapping of the dog upstairs. But now that he had waited and listened there was nothing; the house was empty and still and something in its stillness had the feeling of death about it.
Skip went into the screened porch, passing the tubs and the washing machine, on into the kitchen, then the hall. The door of Stolz’s room stood open, and for a moment this startled him; but then, thinking back, he couldn’t remember whether it had been closed or shut when they had fled from the house. He went into Stolz’s room and pushed the door shut, not quite catching the lock. Stolz’s room was his objective. Mulling things over in the diner, it had occurred to him that finding the money behind the canned dog food might have a different meaning than the one he had put on it.
Old Mrs. Havermann might have hidden the money in the kitchen before she’d thought of putting the new locks on Stolz’s room. After the new locks were installed, she could have reclaimed the treasure from the cupboard and returned it to Stolz’s room—somewhere they hadn’t thought to look. Skip remembered looking under the bed, but not in it.
Could the money have been carefully hidden between the covers, or under the mattress, spread out thin so it made no bulge or wrinkle?
He meant to find out.
Skip went to the bed and stripped back the covers, pulled them off into a heap on the floor. Nothing. He lifted the mattress at the head of the bed. Beneath the mattress were the springs, not enclosed like box springs but the older coil type, so that Skip could see through them to the floor. There was a little dust on the floor, some rolls of cottony fuzz, and that was all. Skip dropped the mattress into place. His conviction that the money must be in Stolz’s room was beginning to weaken.
He was careful about touching anything which would retain a print. He’d forgotten the rubber gloves, left them on the shelf back of the car seat along with Eddie’s.
He started to take out cigarettes and matches, and then with a muttered “Oh, what the hell,” went to the foot of the bed and flipped up the other end of the mattress and for a moment felt a great leaping shock of joy. There was a white-wrapped bundle there, not big; it could be a part of the money. Skip dropped the cigarette in his fingers. His hands were shaking. But then the moment he touched the wrapped object he knew it wasn’t bills.
He undid the white cloth, which turned out to be a pillow slip. Inside was a gun. It was quite small and flat with an extremely short barrel. It looked like a toy. Skip had trouble breaking the cartridge clip loose. But when he had it out, it proved to be full of neat little bullets.
For a moment he was so taken with the tiny, deadly-looking gun that he almost forgot the money. He lined up the sights, squinting at himself in Stolz’s mirror across the room.
“Neat,” he said, examining the weapon. “Real neat.”
He put it into his pocket and then couldn’t leave it there. He took it out again and kept it in his hand while he looked over the rest of the room. He found nothing, and everywhere he searched, he and Karen and Eddie had searched before.
He stood in the middle of the floor, thinking. He couldn’t understand why Big Tom and his friends hadn’t shown up, and then he remembered the way the house had looked, all lit up, when they had seen it across the vacant lots. To Big Tom and his friend
s the effect would have been the same as if the place had been on fire. Skip grinned to himself. Well, leaving the lights on had been smart . . . for a time. But now it was better to turn them out. Somebody besides Big Tom might take notice. Skip clicked off Stolz’s light as he went out, circled back to the kitchen, doused the lights there, then clicked off all but one in the lower hall. He darkened the rooms where Eddie had searched and then went softly up the stairs.
He felt funny about going up here, so near the dead woman, but he wanted one more glance around. He had the gun in his hand; he liked the feel of it, the compact deadly weight of it, like a pair of brass knucks that spit fire. He passed close to Mrs. Havermann’s door, and then from within the room he heard a slight noise.
The dog? Skip froze to listen. No, the dog was still down the hall, yapping and bumping around, nowhere near Mrs. Havermann’s bedroom.
Mrs. Havermann . . . Hell, she wasn’t dead then! She’d revived somehow. What was she doing in there?
The conviction that Mrs. Havermann had made the faint sound, like a slow-moving person shifting some article in the room, was so strong that no thought of Big Tom intruded to warn him.
I’ll scare her with the gun, Skip thought. Nobody else is here now to interfere. I can beat her up a little. She ought to be plenty ready to talk by this time. He threw open the door and started inside.
Big Tom was across the room beside the open closet. He had entered the room only a minute before, had seen the woman sprawled under some fallen clothes. In that instant his mind had gulped in a vast lump of knowledge: the punks had been here; they’d bungled it; they’d run out in a panic just as he would have expected, and his own situation here in the house with a corpse was the kind of thing he dreamed about on the bad nights when he suffered from nightmares.
He ripped off his right-hand glove and bent forward to touch her, not through any instinct of mercy or a desire to revive her, but rather to convince himself that this ultimate boobery on the punks’ part had actually happened, and at the same moment he heard someone come into the room behind him. His hand clawed for the gun in his belt, the big heavy gun, and then he had pulled it free and was ready to fire even as he swung around to face the room. The Luger spoke, but at this instant fiery gnats were stinging his flesh. There was no sense of impact or penetration; it all seemed to lie in his skin, a spray of needles. The bullet from the Luger entered the floor at Skip’s feet. Big Tom folded forward slowly and struck the rug with his head.
Skip stood near the doorway. His expression was one of surprise, as if things had happened too quickly to be believed. The gun in his hand had seemed to act of itself. It was a very clever, quick, and willing little gun. He gazed at it and then at the big man convulsing on the floor, as if wondering at the connection between the weapon and the condition of the man.
Skip waited. Big Tom quit writhing and jerking so badly and tried to get his fingers on the fallen Luger, so Skip walked over and kicked it into the closet with the dead woman. Big Tom tried to prop himself up by means of an outspread right hand, and when the hand moved it had left a print in blood, quite distinct on the polished light-colored wood, and Skip regarded it with interest.
“You give me ideas, old man,” he said. He put his own weapon in his pocket, grabbed Big Tom by the arm, pulled him nearer the closet, and then, holding Big Tom’s palsied fingers outspread, he made a big beautifully distinct print on the white-painted door.
Big Tom’s breathing sounded as if he were doing it through a ten-foot length of hose. “Goddamn . . . goddamn punk . . . I told Willy——”
“Shut up.” Skip went to the closet and got Mrs. Havermann, brought her out and laid her beside Big Tom, and then, using Big Tom’s hand as he would a paintbrush, he daubed and smeared her with his blood. “That ought to do it.” He went to the door, clicked off the lights, ran down the stairs and out through the rear of the house. He was positive he hadn’t left a print on any surface which might retain it. Nobody was going to raise any prints on old lady Havermann except the bloody ones of Big Tom’s fingers. Skip felt like whistling.
He waited in the trees above the vacant road. The night faded toward midnight, and a sense of danger stole over him. All at once some sixth sense told him what had happened to Eddie and Karen. Skip’s reaction was not one of anger. He had the only amount of loot the night had produced, some three or four thousand dollars at a guess, and he had no wish to share it with them.
He left the trees at the far end of the block and walked rapidly down to the cross-town boulevard, where he caught a bus for Uncle Willy’s. He was busily packing his belongings—all of them, this time—when Willy came in.
Big Tom awoke and looked at the dark, and the phantoms fled from his brain. He knew where he was, he even knew what the thing was lying next to him, the thing whose inert pressure he felt whenever he moved. He recalled Skip at the doorway. He had not seen any gun in Skip’s hand and so the source of the bullets confused him, though he had no doubt of their reality. They nested in his flesh now like fiery eggs. He was light headed, almost drained dry of blood, and he had to get out of here.
He inched and wriggled his way across the room to the door, out into the hall. Then he slithered down the stairs. The lower hall had one light burning in a bracket beside the front entry. He looked up at it and it swam, exploded into a red and purple nimbus, and blacked out. Big Tom lay on his face, thought and consciousness gone, and Mrs. Havermann’s big clock, the one she had brought from France when she was twenty-seven, ticked lonesomely in the silence.
When he roused again he forced himself to his knees and reached for the front doorknob. He fell down again before he could get hold of it. He tried to figure out another way to open the door without reaching the knob, and failed. Then he remembered seeing a telephone inside the door of the parlor. He turned and crawled toward the open door across the hall.
There was enough light; he could see the phone on its little spindling table, a doily under it, lace hanging down around the rim of the table. The doily pulled off with the phone, fell on his face. It smelled of ironed starch and dust. It seemed an eternity while he fought to lift his hand, to get it away from his mouth and nose so that he could breathe again.
When he had dialed, when the phone at the other end of the wire had rung six or seven times, Harry answered. Harry sounded cross and sleepy. “Yeah? Yeah?”
“Say . . . Harry.”
“Who is it?” Harry yawned. “Speak up. Say something.”
“Tom. This is Tom.”
“Oh.” Harry seemed to withdraw slightly from the receiver. “Well, where are you? What’s cooking?”
“Need . . . help.”
Harry took even longer to think about this. “You calling from a public phone, huh? A bar or someplace?”
“Hav . . .” Big Tom had to stop, to catch himself against the little table. He was only half propped up; now he lay flat on the floor, the phone on the floor beside him. “Havermann house. My car’s on the boulevard, near a dru . . . a drugstore.” Each word involved the effort of thinking about it, forming it with his lips, summoning the breath to speak. He lost all sense of what he had said; the present word was the aim, the hope, the hurdle.
“You sound sick,” Harry said. “Something happen t’ you?”
“Shot.”
“Man, oh man. You better get out of that house.”
“Going to try.” Big Tom’s senses faded; fear that he would black out again, lose the phone connection, lose Harry, washed through him like an icy pulse. “Can you meet me? Drive . . . car?”
Harry wasn’t willing; the silence, the waiting told Big Tom that. But finally Harry said grudgingly, “Now where did you say the car is?”
Big Tom tried to think of the name of the big boulevard. He grappled with his memory. It supplied names, other streets, other towns. Now this one—— Suddenly he had it, he said it into the phone, and Harry, still unwilling, promised to meet him at the car.
No use asking Har
ry to come here to help him. Harry wouldn’t do it. And the refusal would harden him and then he’d refuse to wait at the car. I’ll make it alone, that far, Big Tom promised himself. He dragged his drained, burning body back to the front door and tried again for the knob. He passed out there, still trying.
When he became conscious again, he stared around him in amazement. This was a miracle! He was far down the sloping lawn of the Havermann grounds, almost to the curb. He had no memory of opening the front door, getting down off the porch, or inching across the turf.
Could someone—Harry? Benny?—have found him, helped him? He looked all around, but he was alone. Back across the shadowed lawns, the Havermann house looked tall and lonely. The front door stood open, the beams of the light in the bracket shone out upon the porch. The rest of the place was dark.
He felt a renewal of confidence and strength. He pulled himself to his knees, and then on hands and knees he traversed the two blocks, long vacant blocks, to the boulevard. And then it was time to rise up and to walk.
He squeezed himself over against a building, out of the light, and forced his body slowly upward. There were strangenesses: odd tremors and loosened joints and a tearing sensation all through the middle of his lungs, as if his lungs were made of tissue paper and the breath trapped in them was forcing a hole slowly wider and wider. Sweat came out all over him; he tottered off balance; a great roaring filled his ears.
“Walk, feet.” Had he said it aloud? No matter. There was no one about now; the drugstore had closed. Passing, he could see inside it, the night light above the prescription counter glowing ruby red in an enormous jar of colored liquid. And then by another miracle he was at the car. He slid inside and fell across the seat.
A long while later he heard a whispering voice. It insinuated itself into his brain, rousing him from the compulsion to sleep.
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