“That’s the cab,” Emerson said. “I’d better run.”
“I hear it. Pretty good time, considering. Less than twenty minutes. I’ll see you to the door.”
“No. Don’t bother. I’ll get out all right.”
“You sure? Appreciate very much your driving me home. Wouldn’t want you to think I don’t.”
“It’s all right, Avery. It was nothing.”
“Contrary. It was a great deal. Fine act of friendship.”
“All right, Avery. Good-night.”
He let himself out the front door and ran for the cab and got in. He slumped back in the seat.
* * * *
There was still business in the bar, but the dining room was deserted. He went directly through into the kitchen, which was also deserted, and up the stairs from the kitchen to the apartment. Dropping his hat and coat in the living room, he crossed over into the bedroom, and there was a small lamp burning on a table beside the bed, and sitting up in the bed was Ed with a martini, and she was wearing the blue thing, the thing like smoke that looked as if it were about to drift off her entirely.
“Such a long time you took,” she said.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I’d almost decided to invite up a sub from the bar.”
“Roscoe?”
“Don’t sneer at Roscoe. Roscoe I love.”
“I’m not sneering at him. I love the old devil as much as you do.”
“Did you get Avery delivered all right?”
“Safe and sound. He’s going to Miami tomorrow.”
“Really? And you feeling sorry for him? When are we going to Miami, Ed?”
“Sometime. We could go tomorrow if we wanted to. With Avery. He asked us.”
“He must have been drunk!”
“He was drunk, all right, but I think he actually meant it. He was funny. All screwed up inside, I mean. He kept saying things it wasn’t like him to say.”
“What things?”
“Oh, crazy stuff. About why he never married and all. About not liking women. About how his mother slept with a Mexican musician once.”
“Maybe he has a psychosis or neurosis or something.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“His mother, you say? Really with a Mexican musician?”
“That’s what he said.”
“I wonder how a Mexican musician would be.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“Why? What makes you so sure?”
“Because you’ve been spoiled.”
“Well, such conceit! Are you having trouble with that shoestring?”
“Don’t get impatient, darling.”
“Maybe we should go to Mexico instead of Miami. Or maybe I could run down and back by myself while you’re getting that damn shoelace untied.”
“I’m stalling deliberately. You’re cute when you’re eager.”
“I’m perfectly calm.” She tossed her head. “There’s a martini left. Would you care for it?”
“No. I had a couple of bourbons at the bar and another one at Avery’s.”
“In that case, I’ll just drink it myself.”
But there wasn’t time, as it turned out, for the last martini. And for the next part of the evening, all romantic propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, there was no better place anywhere—not in Miami, not in Mexico, not anywhere on earth.
CHAPTER II
SECTION 1
The snow came down fiercely over the northern part of the state, and in Midland City, the state’s metropolis, it started falling shortly after dark and continued most of the night. The temperature fell slowly but steadily all that time. Between eight and midnight, the traffic squad of the city police had reports of twenty-three minor accidents, and an alcoholic who was hardly aware of the snow, or of anything else, lay down in a doorway on the lower south side and was found dead in the morning.
In the living room of a small apartment not far from the place where the alcoholic was dying, a young woman named Lisa Sheridan stood at a window and looked down into the narrow street below, and because she was lonely and depressed and felt that there was no security on earth, she was thinking of things that had happened to her in the past, not because there was anything particularly comforting in these things but simply because they were over and done with and not presently threatening. Many of the things that had happened to her were not really so much different, in fact, from the things that had happened to many other girls, but they had had vastly different effects and had come, or were coming, to vastly different ends, and she wondered why this should be so. It was a problem she was in no way equipped to solve, and it was not so much in the expectation of coming to a solution as for the simple relief she found in keeping her mind busy that she concerned herself with it at all.
Behind her in the room, sitting sprawled in an overstaffed chair with her legs spread out in front of her and a cigarette hanging from her lips, was the woman who shared the apartment. Her name was Bella Cassidy, and she had lived most of her twenty-nine years in overt conformity with one world and in covert allegiance to another. She had black hair cut short and rather shaggy, and her face was thin and swarthy with long, narrow eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. There was a natural grace in her slender body, a kind of suggested muscular toughness that was not actually evident in weight or bulges, and there was now, besides that, a quality of wariness in her whole attitude that was oddly inconsistent with her posture. Without touching the cigarette with her fingers, she drew a cloud of smoke into her lungs and released it. Through the smoke, she stared at the back of the girl at the window.
“For God’s sake, sit down,” she said. “It wears me out to watch you.”
The imperative nature of her words did not affect the timber of the voice in which they were spoken. She sounded as if, in spite of what she said, it really made no difference whatever to her if Lisa sat down or not. Without turning, Lisa said, “I don’t want to sit down.”
“All right. Stand up, then. Be as childish as you like.”
“I’m not being childish.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Can’t you do anything but make denials? Denying a thing doesn’t alter the truth, you know. The truth is, you’ve decided that everything is over between us, that I’ve spoiled everything, and nothing I can say will make any difference.”
“How do you expect me to feel?”
“I expect you to be sensible, but I see that you won’t.” Lisa turned and stood with her back to the window, looking at Bella with eyes that betrayed her depression and fright. She was somewhat under average height, eyen for a woman, but her body was so slim and straight that she did not seem to be. Her hair was soft and fine and a very pale gold, almost silver, parted in the middle and drawn back behind her ears into a knot. There was about her, in her face and the rest of her, an effect of cold delicacy that approached frailty, and she was, in fact, within the limits imposed by the coldness and fragility, very lovely. Pale gold against the dark glass, thought Bella, and the words came into her mind simultaneously with a kind-of catch in her heart that was for a moment ecstatic pain, and for the duration of the moment she regretted the choice she had made and the line of action she was now following.
“Is it sensible to blackmail my own family?” Lisa said.
“Why not? They’re wealthy and can afford it, and it’s certainly the only way you’re ever going to get anything out of them.”
“I don’t want anything from them. It’s you who wants it.”
“I want it for both of us. I told you that. It’s entirely unnecessary for you to make an issue of it.”
“But when it comes to a choice between me and the money, you choose the money.”
“That’s your fault. There is no neces
sity, as I said, to make a choice at all. Since you’re determined that I must, however, it has now become a matter of principle. I don’t choose to be a fool just because you’re one.”
It was not the first time Lisa had been called a fool. Another girl had called her that once, but it had been a long time ago, and it was something she did not now want to remember or to think about.
“Perhaps I’m a fool,” she said, “and perhaps I am many things worse, but at least I’m not a blackmailer.”
Bella shrugged and sucked her cigarette. “If it makes you feel better to call me names, go ahead.”
“It doesn’t make me feel better. Nothing in the world will ever make me feel better again. I’m sick and frightened, and I wish I had never met you.”
“Now you’re simply being dramatic.”
“Blackmail is a crime. You can be sent to prison for it.”
“There’s no danger. Your family are cowards, like all people who think the world will end if their precious respectability is compromised. They won’t risk any publicity, darling.”
“Suppose they don’t pay. Would you do as you threatened?”
“Tell their friends about you? I’m afraid I’d have to.” Bella removed the cigarette from her mouth and crushed it in a tray and laughed shortly. “Let me tell you something, darling. You had better quit being so concerned about your family, for all they wish for you in their hearts is that you had never been born or had died before you became what you are. They hate you and can’t understand you and will consider you a menace as long as you are alive, and the only hope for you and me on earth is to be found in one another and in others like us.”
“Did you talk with my brother?”
“Yes. He was quite indignant.”
“Carl can be very hard when he wants to be. He may go to the police.”
“I tell you that he won’t. The risk is too great. He said he would come here tonight with the money, and he will.”
“I don’t want to see him.”
“Well, you’ll have to reconcile yourself to it. It was part of the agreement. Apparently he wants to talk with you, and I had to promise that you would be here in order to get him to come.”
“You had no right to do it.”
“So you have told me at least a dozen times. You even concealed your family’s wealth from me for a long time, didn’t you, darling, in fear that I would be tempted do do something like this? I’m still a little angry about it. And now you have threatened to leave me and you’re afraid that you must do it, even though you don’t want to. Well, I will tell you something that you may not know. I will tell you that you are making me a little sick to my stomach, and perhaps I would be better off without you.”
Lisa turned and looked down again into the narrow street. Her depression was now so complete and unqualified that it afforded her a kind of sickly immunity, and Bella’s words, deliberately cruel, were no more than a sequence of sounds with no particular significance or effect. The snow had accumulated, she noticed, on the sill outside, and had drifted in places across the street. Looking down, aware of details with a peculiar detachment that was part of her depression, she saw a man cross under the light at the corner, leaving behind him in the snow the prints of his passing. Shoulders hunched into his overcoat collar upturned against the wind and falling snow, he came on at an angle across the street and was swallowed by the shadow of the building in which Lisa stood.
It was her brother Carl. She had not seen him or heard from him for a very long while, and now, seeing him from above against the cold white earth, she thought that he looked small and pitiable and somehow vulnerable. And she was sorry that she had brought him trouble and was now, though she didn’t wish it, bringing him trouble again. A sudden nostalgia stirred in the gray stillness of her depression, an intense longing for a status long lost in a time long past, and she wondered if it would be possible to regain, not physically but mentally and emotionally, the particular point and condition in time when she had started becoming what she was instead of what she might have been. If this were possible, she thought, the person that she was might be rejected and left dead in a very real way, and the person she might have been could at last start becoming. This thought appealed to her; it was something to support her in the tense waiting for her brother’s approach, and she did not release it until she heard his footsteps on the stairs outside.
Turning, she said, “It’s Carl. I saw him under the light in the street.”
Bella leaned forward in her chair, listening to the footsteps ascend the stairs and approach in the lull, sitting fixed through a hiatus of silence until there was a sudden knocking at the door. Then, with a sigh, she stood up. There was a surety, a fluid ease of motion in her hard body.
“Perhaps I was wrong,” she said. “Perhaps he wants to save you after all.”
Her voice was colored by a curious mixture of irony and anger, and she stared at Lisa intently, as if she thought Lisa’s reaction might be tremendously significant. But Lisa was still supported by the despair that is acquired in the ruins of the last sanctuary, and there was no discernible reaction at all. Bella shrugged, her thin lips shaping in her dark face a smile that was decisive and cruel.
“You can go to hell,” she said. “You can bloody well go to hell.”
The knocking was repeated, and she went quickly to the door and opened it. Carl Sheridan, across the threshold, looked at Bella and beyond her, his eyes probing the room. He was wearing a navy blue overcoat, the shoulders frosted with snow, and he was holding a gray homburg squarely before him, much in the manner of a man standing uncovered in respect or reverence. His face was drawn stiffly over its bones. His blond hair was thinning and receding and lay limply on his skull. Lisa, seeing him from her place by the window, thought that he looked as if he had been very ill and was at this moment very tired.
Bella retreated and said, “Come in. You see that I’ve kept my word. Lisa is here to meet you.”
Carl stepped into the room two precise paces and stopped, his eyes finding Lisa. Still holding his homburg, he stood for a moment watching her, and then he made the kind of formal little bow from the waist that he might have made in acknowledging an introduction to someone he had never seen before.
“Hello, Lisa.”
“Hello, Carl,” she said.
His lips worked, and she thought at first that he was trying to speak again and couldn’t, but apparently it was only a kind of nervous reaction, for he turned abruptly to Bella and spoke without difficulty.
“I’ve brought the money. Five thousand dollars.”
She walked across to a small table beside the chair in which she had been sitting and picked up a pack of cigarettes. She extracted a cigarette and dropped the pack and began tapping the cigarette on a thumb nail.
“It’s what we agreed on,” she said.
“Yes. Exactly. Before I give it to you, however, I want to warn you against trying this again. It won’t work. You are a blackmailer, guilty of a crime, and next time I’ll see that you are sent to prison. I’m prepared to accept whatever publicity you can give to this affair, and if it means trouble for Lisa, she must be prepared to accept it too.”
“All right. A lecture is not necessary. I’ve already told you that I don’t believe in making a bad thing out of a good one.”
“I see. Well, then…” He released the homburg with one hand and removed a thin sheaf of bills from an inside pocket of his coat. Extending the bills, he said, “Probably you will want to count it.”
“No.” She shrugged her indifference. “You would hardly try to cheat me in a transaction like this. Just put it down somewhere.”
He tossed the money at the chair by which she stood, and it struck the overstuffed cushion and bounced off onto the floor. Bella did not stoop to pick it up but struck a match and lit her
cigarette and drew smoke into her lungs deeply. Expelling the smoke, she watched it rise and thin, and appeared to have lost all interest in what went on in the room.
“So it has come to this,” Carl said. “To blackmail. To crime. Is this what you wanted, Lisa?”
He was not looking in her direction when he began talking, and Lisa was a little startled to discover that he was talking to her. She was conscious of the heaviness of his words, their almost comic ponderousness, as if he were reading lines from a bad melodrama, but she was not impelled to laugh.
“I didn’t want it, Carl. The blackmail. I tried to stop it.”
“But you couldn’t. You’ve started much that you can’t stop, Lisa. Is that true?”
“I guess so. I guess I’ve started it. Anyhow, one way or another, it has got started.”
“What do you intend to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you stay here? With this woman?”
“No. I’ve only stayed this long because she said you wanted me here when you came.”
“Yes. I made that stipulation. Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you any money?”
“A little. I’ve been working. I had a job in a shop, tut I’ve quit.”
“Do you think you could give this up? This kind of life?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“It’s impossible to know. I suppose there is no way to make you understand that, but it’s true.”
“It’s difficult. I admit it. To understand this kind of thing, I mean. But I’ve tried. If you think I was ever able to dismiss you from my mind and forget you entirely, you’re mistaken. I…I’ve been reading about it, books about it, and perhaps I’ve learned a little.”
Desperate Asylum Page 4
