by Gil Brewer
I parked in her drive, got out the tools, and went to the door. She opened the screen with her knee.
She whispered it. “I wore a skirt.”
“Well, keep it down,” I shot at her. “I want to be steady now.”
She was lovely. I wanted to stand there and stare at her. Her eyes were full of excitement, and her hair was brushed out thick and full. She wore a white blouse with a big curling starched collar, and a full, fluffed out print skirt, loaded with splotches of color.
His bedroom door was closed.
“Jack,” she said. “We almost fouled up.”
“How do you mean?”
“When I turned off the main switch, the TV set went off, too.”
It had completely slipped my mind. I broke out in a sweat.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I figured it out. I put the switch back on when he mentioned it, then just loosened the fuse for his section of the house. It’s marked on the box.”
“Good girl,” I said. “That was close.”
From then on, I intended to be a lot more careful. It showed me how easy it was to miss on some point, even when you were watching everything. It was an obvious point. That’s what made it so bad.
We went into his room. He lay there with his gray eyebrows snarling, and gave me the glad, “Hello, Ruxton. How’s the old son-of-a-bitch, today?”
I didn’t think he looked so hot. I hoped I was right. After he spoke, he just lay there, and watched, without much comment. The TV set was on, with the sound turned down. I thought how it would have been if I had plugged the TV into a socket in his room, instead of on a different line in the attic. She would never have figured it out. There would have been no way to turn off just the intercom alone.
“We’ll fix you up in a jiffy,” I said.
She stood behind me, watching. I knew she was nervous. He watched with those eyes, breathing sickishly. It got me nervous, too. I lit a cigarette, and uncovered the unit, and had a look.
“Blow a tube, Ruxton?” he said.
“Could be. We’ll see.”
I went around the house, and made as if I were checking all the units, after I disconnected the one in his room. I tightened the fuse in the fuse box in the utility room. Then I went back and picked up the unit in his room, and said, “Ah-ha! Here it is.”
So I soldered a .005 mfd coupling condenser to a grid terminal of a tube socket. The solder flowed like hot gravy. Not a slip-up. It was really a neat job of sloppy work.
I put the unit back together, flipped it on, and let him try it out. Then I turned it off. It would work for approximately ten seconds before heating up enough to expand the metal, make contact, and ground out. The clearance was so close that once it went out, it would stay that way for good.
I looked at him. He was staring at me.
“Questions?” I said.
He didn’t say anything, watching me.
“No, Ruxton,” he said. “No questions.”
I took another look at him, hoped it would be my last, and went into the living room. She was right there, showing me her skirt.
“I can’t hang around,” I said. “We can’t take any chances. Right now is when it’s easy to slip up, make some damned fool mistake.”
“Please, Jack—hold me.”
Well, I held her. I held her tight, and looked over her shoulder at his bedroom door.
I said, “Don’t call me unless something unforeseen comes up. Otherwise, I’ll read about it in the papers.”
“This is it, isn’t it, Jack.”
“Yeah, that’s for sure.”
“I mean,” she said. “You know, it isn’t a bad feeling. I mean, it’s exciting. There’s so much to come.”
“Let’s hope it’s all things we can handle. Don’t get cocky. Keep levelheaded.”
“I love you, Jack.”
“I love you, too.”
“Say my name.”
“Shirley.”
“It shivers me,” she said. “It’s going to be rugged, not seeing you.”
“That’s how it’s got to be.”
“Jack, I’m all yours. All of me. I just want to be yours.”
I said, “You know how it is. Neither of us would be worth a damn, without that money. That’s how it is.”
“I’m not forgetting that.”
I said, “You’re sure the money’s not tied up, so we can’t get at it.”
“It’s like I told you. There’s that in the bank, in cash. He does have some invested, but everything’s negotiable. There’s not a thing to stew about, believe me.”
“And you want to go through with this.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because now’s the time to say it.”
“I want to go through with it. God, how I want that.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’re on the way. This is it.”
I left, then. And, well, there was a look in her eye. I got to thinking maybe it wouldn’t be long before I spotted the story on the obituary page. I sure didn’t want to see it on page one.
Somehow I got through that first night. I kept hearing the phone ring. I would sit up in bed and stare at the dark, listening. There would be nothing. Once I got out of bed, tripped over a chair, scrambling for the phone, grabbed it up. “Hello—Hello!”
It hadn’t rung. There was nobody on the line. It was just me. Dreaming.
And the next afternoon, about two o’clock, I was in the store, changing some stuff around in the show window. I kept feeling this black shadow from the street. I’d felt it for quite a while, back and forth, but it hadn’t meant anything. I looked up and it was Shirley Angela, driving past in the black Imperial, her white face staring at me.
She motioned for me to come out, when she saw me look.
She was double parked, down a couple doors. “I’ve got to see you. Get in.”
“No,” I said. “Is it important?”
“Yes.” Her face told me that. It was as if somebody had been clubbing her, or something. Not marked up. I mean, behind the eyes, in the expression.
“Meet me on the corner of Fourth and First,” I said. “Park the car and walk.”
I turned away and went on down to the drugstore and bought cigarettes, then came back to the store. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was afraid to speak to anybody, for fear I’d just talk a lot of mishmash. I went straight through the store, and the shop, and out back to the parking lot. I took the car and drove downtown. I had asked her to meet me on one of the busiest corners in town. I parked the car, and walked fast over there. She was walking up and down, waiting, working her fingers on a shiny black purse, as if she were playing a piano.
“Well,” I said. “I’ll be damned. You downtown, shopping?”
“Don’t fool with me, Jack.”
I shot it at her. “Make it seem like we met accidentally.”
Pedestrians streamed past.
“He wants to go to the hospital.”
“What?”
“Doctor Miraglia’s there right now,” she said. “I told him I had some shopping to do, that I’d only be gone a few minutes. I’ve been driving up and down past your darned store for over a half an hour.”
She was nervous and scared. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“You said not to call.”
“I told you if something unforeseen....”
She broke in. “All right.” She scraped at her lower lip with her teeth. “I was afraid to call, Jack. I didn’t know what to do. I thought if I could just catch your eye—I wasn’t thinking.”
I tried to act calm. “What do you mean, he wants to go to the hospital?”
“He’s been at me all day. How good he feels, stuff like that. He wants to go to the hospital for a complete physical check-up.”
“Can’t the doctor give that to him at home?”
“It’s not that. He doesn’t carry all the facilities around in his pockets. They use machines on him, all sorts of things.”
“That’s not all,” she said. “There’s more.”
“Naturally.”
“Doctor Miraglia talked with me privately. He says this is a miracle. He says it’s his chance—once he gets Victor to the hospital, he thinks he can talk him into staying there.”
I rubbed one hand across my face, hanging onto my jaw.
“Jack.” She whispered it tightly. “What will we do?”
“Easy, now,” I said. “Here’s what you’ll have to do. First, you get back there as fast as you can. And be sure to stop at the market and buy some stuff, so it’ll look as if you really went shopping.”
“Yes. But what—?”
“Ten to one, Miraglia will leave. He’ll plan to come back for him. Maybe an ambulance. Anyway, it’s up to you to get to Victor. He’s always been scared about hospitals. You’ll have to make him think that way again. Scare the hell out of him. Only you’ve got to do it so Miraglia won’t get wise. Play it careful—kid him, make it look good. If you fail, we’re done.”
She didn’t speak. She was staring at the front of a jewelry store, thinking. You could almost see the wheels winding up.
“All right,” she said. “I think I can do it.”
“But be careful.”
“Don’t worry.”
The way she said it, she would scare anybody.
“Jack,” she said, looking at me. “I love you so. Why must it be like this?”
“You know why.”
“I do love you so.”
“Easy. We’re on the street,” I said. “Now, get moving. And remember, I’m with you every minute.”
“It’s just that we have so much, so very much, Jack.”
“Yeah. Now, get—”
A horn beeped lightly by the curb. It was Mayda Lamphier, driving a dusty Pontiac convertible, with the top down. The maroon paint job was scratched, dented.
I spoke fast to Shirley from the side of my mouth.
“Make it look right. We met on the street.”
She looked a little worried, but otherwise okay. We went over to Mayda’s car.
“Well,” Mayda Lamphier said with a shade of insinuation. “What are you two doing downtown?”
I gave her the story of bumping into each other on the street. She believed it, but made with the eyes anyway. I didn’t like any part of it. She possessed that knack of being in the wrong place at the right time.
“I’m shopping,” Shirley said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to run along. I only have a few minutes. Bye, now.”
She was gone before either of us could speak.
“Busy girl,” I said.
“Yes, isn’t she?” Mayda said. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”
“I was on my way back to the store. Just had lunch.”
“Hop in, then.”
Horns blared behind her. She had begun to tie up traffic. We cut off down toward the bay. Things seemed just a little tense. Anything more I might say about “accidentally” meeting Shirley on the street would be punching a flat bag. I let it go and sat there worrying. If Mayda had any suspicions at all, it could go very bad later on.
“How’d you like to take a little ride?” she said.
There was something in her voice. She had on a red skirt. She had allowed it to creep up, revealing an inch of bare thigh above rolled stockings. Her legs were slim and racy looking. Her hair streamed in the wind as she eyed me.
I grinned. “Got to get back to the store.”
We stopped for a light. She didn’t touch her skirt. She didn’t look at me, either.
“I know a nice place,” she said. “We could take a quick little ride.” She looked at me and smiled with her teeth tight together, and it was in her eyes. Her idea of subtle suggestion was to hit you in the face with a bare breast.
This was a perfect chance to reassure her there was nothing between Shirley and myself. She wasn’t Shirley, but on the other hand, she wasn’t repulsive, either. If I didn’t go with her, she would add things up damned quickly.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s. I think I’d like it.”
“I know I will.”
She drove away from the light. I turned toward her, reached over and ran my palm up her thigh, under her skirt, squeezing the flesh. She began to move her hips and she really laid on that gas pedal.
“Don’t,” she said. “I can’t stand it. Wait’ll we park. I’ll smash into something.”
I took my hand away.
“I couldn’t be sure,” I said.
“Well, you can be sure, now.”
She drove hard and reckless, down along the bay, till we were on the outskirts of town. Then she took a dirt road and parked the car in the first thick clump of trees we reached, along the shore of the bay. She came into my arms with a hot little moan.
We never got out of the front seat of the car. I didn’t think about Shirley even once, and we were there over an hour. Sometime along in there, she stripped herself naked, and she sure as hell was starved for it.
She didn’t know what she was saying half the time.
“Kiss me,” she’d say. Then she’d say, “Marry me, marry me, marry me....” She carried on a lot, and it was a hot time, and it was good.
Finally we just sat there, smoking, staring out at the bay. She talked a little about her husband, and how much she missed him. She said that when I’d come over to fix her TV set that night, it was all she could do not to ask me straight out.
“It would’ve saved some time,” I said.
She laughed. She wasn’t half bad, but she scared me a little because she was a wise one. You could see her thinking behind the eyes. Finally she said, “Shirl couldn’t give you that—the way we just had. She’s too young—she hasn’t been around enough.”
I didn’t say anything. It was then I first thought, What if Shirley ever found out? What if Mayda goes and tells her? It would be just like her.
Only I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t tell her to keep her mouth shut.
I checked my watch.
“Cripes,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to the store, right away. I’m late and there’s a big deal cooking. I can’t afford to miss out.”
“Damn,” she said. “I thought we could make a night of it.”
I told her I was sorry, that I’d like it, too.
“Maybe some other time?” she said.
“We’ll try and work something out.”
She looked at me and didn’t say anything. She got dressed. I couldn’t think of anything but Shirley Angela and Victor. Shirley had said Victor felt great. Maybe he was doing calisthenics in his bedroom, waiting to run off to the hospital. And now Mayda. Why had her husband gone off to Alaska at a time like this? Maybe to recuperate.
We didn’t talk much on the way back through town. She finally readied the alley behind the shop, drove in, and parked. She obviously knew where the store was. I didn’t like that, either.
I got out. She twisted on the seat, and eyed me.
“Shirl’s not having all the fun, now,” she said.
“Okay. Quit riding me.”
“Is she any good?”
“I damned well wouldn’t know.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll stop. I believe you.” She smiled, then said. “Will we get together again?”
I grinned at her. “It’s possible,” I said.
“You know it,” she said.
I told her I had to get into the shop. I banged the car with my fist, and turned away.
“I’m not forgetting,” she called.
I waved back at her. She drove off. As soon as she was out of sight, I walked down the alley, hailed a cab, and had the driver take me downtown to where I’d parked my car.
Driving back to the store, I went through two red lights. I had to know what went with Victor. I couldn’t go out there. I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t anything I could do but wait.
At twelve-thirty that night the phone rang.
“Jack? I had to call you.”
“Glad you did.” I’d just made up my mind I would have to go out there and rap on her window, or something. “How is it?”
Her voice sounded pooped. “It’s all right, I think. I kidded him about the way he’d been acting. It wasn’t easy, Jack. It was a little pitiful. He felt so great, and I had to tear him down. It worked, though. He told Miraglia he’d changed his mind. I thought he was going to have another attack.”
“He didn’t let on you’d changed his mind for him?”
“No. He’s too egotistical for that. But Miraglia was angry. He hardly spoke to me. I tried to tell him I’d done everything I could to keep Victor thinking the right way. He left in a snit.”
“Where you calling from?”
“The house. But it’s all right. He can’t hear me.”
“Are you all right, Shirley?”
“It’s just I want to see you so badly.”
“I know.”
“I hope you know. Jack—I love you so.”
“We can’t see each other now. We shouldn’t even be talking on the phone.”
“Thank God he’s going to die. Maybe you don’t want to see me. Maybe it’s only the money. Maybe after we do it, you’ll only want the money.”
“Christ almighty,” I said.
“Well—?”
“Shirley please.”
“All right. Only you can’t begin to imagine.”
“Yes, I can. Take it easy and hang on.”
“All right, Jack.”
“We’d better cut this off.”
“Jack?”
She had something else on her mind.
She said. “How did you make out with Mayda?”
My heart struck hard twice in my chest. “Make out?”
“When she drove you back to the store, I mean.”
I tried to tell myself there was nothing strange about her tone of voice. “She just drove me back, is all—then I went down and got my car.”
“You didn’t go anywhere with her, did you?”
