by Zenith Brown
“I haven’t told her yet.”
“And Miss Fairlie? Have you see her?”
“I’ll see her when I’ve seen Ashton.”
Twohey put the Plumtree Cove file back in the drawer and pushed it shut. “I should have gone to her at once. But I frankly didn’t have the courage,” he said, taking his hat from behind the door. “Of course, I’m a very pedestrian person. Pedestrian means are all I have. I can only hope you and Sudley will be a little more careful. I understand you’re both threatening mayhem. If anybody happened to be listening in on the tirade he gave me to-night, it’s probably all over town by now. And after all, my father warned each of you, over and over again—you, Harland and Miss Fairlie. You’ve nobody but yourselves to blame. I’ll do my best, of course, but I trust all of you’ll remember that.”
He switched out his lights. Spig followed him downstairs to his car, and stood watching his tail lights disappear round the corner.
Nobody but yourselves to blame. It was a truth that only Nat Twohey was likely to find comfort in, a sort of blanket absolution the old judge had left him. What he’d left to O’Leary remained to be seen. Spig took the letter out of his pocket and moved over under the street light to break the seals. He had an idea that it had been a considerable relief for Nat Twohey to get it out of his possession—the pedestrian somebody had handed a time bomb on his morning walk. He broke one seal and stopped as a car coming from the other end of the square slowed down and pulled up. A woman leaned across the seat and looked up at the office windows. Spig slipped the letter out of sight into his pocket. There was too much light for him to slip out of sight himself.
“Oh, Mr. O’Leary!”
The old judge’s second wife might have only the normal dentitional complement, but she still had a lot of teeth when she smiled.
“My son’s gone, I see. But it’s all right. I was just checking.”
“Why?” O’Leary inquired. “Curfew rung?”
“I’m afraid you don’t realise that Nat’s not a well man, Mr. O’Leary,” she said cheerfully. A capable and efficient woman, she hadn’t aged a day in the seven years Spig had avoided her whenever possible. If she was any older than the man she called her son, she was too indestructible to show it.
“He’s not going to spend every night of his life down here the way his father did, killing himself with worry about that mad woman out at Eden. And you don’t look any too well yourself, young man. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll eat more liver.”
She shifted into gear and put her foot on the gas.
“And I’d be very careful about threatening to kill people, Mr. O’Leary,” she said briskly. “The judge would never have condoned murder, I can assure you of that. Not even for the sake of old Miss Celia Fairlie. If you get some sleep, you’ll feel better in the morning. Always try to look on the brighter side of things, Mr. O’Leary.”
She was gone then, and Spig moved along to his car. If the projected mayhem wasn’t all over town by now, it was off to a nice start, and it wasn’t the telephone operator who’d done the listening in on Sudley’s tirade. He caught a glimpse of himself in the side-view mirror. If liver wasn’t necessarily indicated, a good stiff drink and something to fill the void left by the hamburger he’d had for lunch clearly was. The letter could wait. Nathan Twohey II might be worried about its orthodoxy. For O’Leary the mere physical fact of its presence there in his pocket was in a sense a reprieve. He felt better than he had for several hours.
He drove out of town on to the highway, relatively quiet at ten-twenty Monday night, closing day for most of the taverns and eating spots. Except for the Three D. His Last Chance. It said so in red neon all over the place. He put his foot on the brake and pulled in—his second stop there that evening and the only two he’d ever made. He grinned as he got out. If he was going to be delivering vegetables there till Tip was old enough to drive, he might as well start now. Sudley’s sign was over in the corner of the field, the red neon making purple waves over the basic sapphire reflected from the blue glass octagon of the Three D. He read it again, without emotion. Maybe it was the sense of reprieve in the old judge’s letter, like an amulet in his pocket; or maybe he’d simply reached a point of anæthesia, too saturated to feel anything else that night.
He crossed the gravel, even Stan Ashton a sort of hiatus in his mind—until he saw the yellow midget sports car with red leather seats, edged unobtrusively along one of the Three D’s octagonal sides, below the line of the blue glass, so the light didn’t hit it. The absence of any other cars there gave it a furtive air, as if Dunning were afraid to be seen there, afraid to offend the Town Planner by catching a quick one out of bounds But it was like a match dropped on a pile of dead pine needles. O’Leary’s grey eyes flattened, his pulse racing. He took an abrupt step towards the door, a red neon flashing on in the saner part of his mind telling him to get back in his car and get the hell on home, that basically it wasn’t Dunning, it was simply O’Leary spoiling for a fight. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
“. . . get out! Keep out of my place!”
Except that it was a man’s voice and the accent foreign, the words, the pitch and the intensity behind them were such a galvanic repetition of Tip O’Leary with a clod in his hand that Spig came to a halt, his face lighted with an instant glow of happy malignance. He relaxed, grinning, closed the door quietly behind him, and looked around.
The section he was in was the bar. It was shaped like a wedge of bright blueberry pie, the bar counter V-shaped, the blue mirror-glass shelves behind it forming the partitions dividing it from the dine and dance areas through arches at either side. There were blue leather stools at the counter, blue leather banquettes around the outside wall at each side of the door, slot machines flanking them. Except for himself the bar was empty. Nick’s voice was coming through the arch at the left with a small, red neon sign, “Dance,” above it.
“This is my place. It’s a nice place. You keep out!” In the heat of the moment nobody seemed to have heard the bell ring as O’Leary closed the door. “I tell you! I tell you again! You keep out!”
“I won’t keep out and you can’t make me. You just try and you’ll see what happens!”
Spig O’Leary’s jaw dropped. The hand he was reaching with pleased nonchalance into his pocket to get a cigarette dropped, too.
“When you get a sign that says: ‘No Minors Allowed,’ then you can stop me, but not till you do! If I want to come in here, I’ll come. And try to stop me! I’ll make so much trouble for you you’ll wish you hadn’t! I’ll say you sold me liquor!”
“That’s a lie. I never sold you——”
“Who’d believe you? It’s me they’d believe. I wouldn’t tell my mother—I’d tell Mr. Cameron and Mr. O’Leary . . . they’d love an excuse to close you down.”
There was a subdued toot of a horn outside and quick laughter from the girl in the dance room.
“I was just waiting for Charlie, anyway. We’re not staying. Who’d stay in this gooney hole if they didn’t have to? And you dare tell Mrs. Sudley and we will make trouble. ’Bye now.”
Spig heard the gaily skipping feet and a door swish open and swish shut again. He went over to one of the banquettes and tilted the blue Venetian blind to look outside. Anita Ashton’s golden-haired child, Lucy, was in Dunning’s sports car, Charlie Sudley at the wheel. It was only the tail-end of the kiss she gave him that Spig saw. But it was enough. The movies could have been the textbook, but there’d been laboratory work on the side.
“Bless me,” O’Leary said, the years like great black oxen goading him suddenly from behind. “Well, well.”
Dunning’s car zipped around the gas pumps and into the road, across the parkway to the other lane. There was something in the way Charlie Sudley drove the yellow midget that made it obvious where his emotions lay. If his date had been on foot, Charlie would have been home in bed.
Spig let the blue slat of the blind fall back into place and turned. Nick Pappas was
coming through the archway. He was a short, stocky man in shirtsleeves, with a bar apron tied around his waist. The sweat stood in pinkish-purple beads where the light from the neon “Dance” sign caught the indoor pallor of his bald head above the rim of greying black hair. He saw O’Leary; and stopped in mid-step. He had looked unhappy before; he looked hopeless now.
“You come after Lucy, Mr. O’Leary?” he asked simply.
“No. I came after a drink and a steak, if I can get it,” Spig said.
“Okay.” Nick wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve and went behind the bar.
“Bourbon and water.” Spig came over and got on one of the blue leather stools.
“You want I should come after my Greg when I close up?”
“Why should you? He’s okay. And I want to thank you for Tip’s contract, Mr. Pappas. It’s swell. You really set him up.”
Nick blinked and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. Then he wiped his eyes. “It’s these kids,” he said. “They make the trouble. All the time trouble for everybody.”
“I heard what Lucy said. I wouldn’t worry if I were——”
“You wouldn’t worry?” Nick’s hand and voice both shook. “You wouldn’t worry? You don’t know. They get down on you and you got trouble. My oldest boy—I say he can’t run with ’em. He says, ‘Dad, I don’t run with ’em and you got rocks through your blue glass.’ He says, ‘Relax, Dad, this is America.’ All the time tellin’ me this is America. In America you don’t push the kids around. No. It’s the kids push you around.”
His voice rose excitedly. “Plenty places round here got back rooms. Not me. I won’t have no back room. And Mrs. Sudley, she comes in. She says I let her Charlie boy in here and she sees the commissioners don’t give me no liquor licence and nobody leases me a slot machine. And I say, ‘Charlie, you keep out,’ and Charlie says, ‘Nuts.’ You tell their parents and they say, ‘You’re a liar, Nick.’ That little Lucy . . .”
The headlights of a car poked blue lines of light through the slats of the Venetian blinds. Nick broke off, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt again.
“I get your steak. How you want it?”
“Medium.”
“Okay. I fix you a table in here and a nice Greek salad, special. Okay? No business Monday night, don’t make enough to pay the cook.”
He gave Spig’s order through the speak-box behind him.
The door opened and a man in a turquoise and orange silk shirt, tail out over green slacks, came over to the bar. “Change for twenty, Mac. Dimes. Rye and water.”
“Sucker bait,” the woman with him said. She wore blue shorts and a bra top. “Give me a pink gin.” She sat there on the stool, staring moodily into her glass, listening to the empty clatter of the lemons and an occasional cherry chink of the proceeds of a cherry or two falling into the pan. “Sucker bait,” she said again. She opened her canvas beach bag. “Ten,” she said. “Half-dollars. Waste your goddam strength on dimes.”
She was back for her fourth gin and fourth ten when Spig’s steak and salad came. When he’d finished she’d dropped thirty more and was eating a hamburger, morosely ruminant, watching the man work doggedly through his third twenty at the dime machine.
“Good night, Mr. O’Leary.” Nick came to the door with him. The music of the iron maidens had cheered him if not his customers. “Don’t say nothing, will you? I just got all excited. You know how it is, Mr. O’Leary.”
“Sure,” Spig said. “I know.” He went on outside.
A car was parked alongside of his, a man saying, “. . . don’t need another drink, honey. And you’ve lost all your money . . .”
“Nick’ll cash me a cheque. I’ve got a right to have a little fun, haven’t I? It’s my money, isn’t it? I make it, don’t I? You go on home if you don’t like it.”
The girl slammed the car door and ran across the gravel. Spig, stopping to light a cigarette, heard the man’s door bang shut and his feet scrunching after her. He glanced up as he heard a heavier, slower step approaching him from the side. It was Harlan Sudley, coming from his field. Sudley saw him and stopped, obviously embarrassed, his face plethoric in the blue and purple light.
“You been in the Three D, Mr. O’Leary?”
His voice was soft but he had to clear his throat before he spoke.
Spig nodded.
“Was—was my boy Charlie in there?”
“No. Nobody in there but another couple and those two.”
“Those two got no right to be. They’re head over heels in debt already.” Sudley moved to go back. “If Charlie was there, I’m not saying it’s wrong. It’s just his mother, is all. Every once in a while she gets an idea.”
“That’s bad.”
“It is that,” Sudley agreed soberly. “She thinks Charlie’s white with a blue rim around him. If I catch him playing the slots, I’ll whale him within an inch of his life.”
As he started away Spig stopped him.
“I’m sorry about this evening, sir,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry, too, Mr. O’Leary. You seen Ashton?”
“I saw him, but I didn’t talk to him. I’ll try again in the morning.”
“Well, I’m willing to change my mind if he changes his.” It was a soft-voiced concession Spig hadn’t expected. “Mr. Cameron was over to-night. It’s what I told him. And I told him I’d help see if we could put through a zoning plan. I guess you can’t count on people acting right without a law, the way you used to. Well, good night, Mr. O’Leary.”
He went back to his fence, climbed over it and headed slowly up across the field towards the house.
Funny, Spig thought, as he drove on home. We’re all in the same conspiracy. You know damn well Charlie and Lucy ought to be jacked up sharp. So does Nick. But nobody wants to be a heel. Nobody wants to make trouble. The mores of the first grade. Nobody wants to be a tattle-tale. So what happens to Charlie and Lucy? They got a right to have a little fun, haven’t they? All he could see was the woman in the blue shorts, morosely chewing her hamburger. Sucker bait. He grinned suddenly as the car bumped over the rugged lane through the woods. O’Leary and the second Mrs. Twohey ought to get together, hell-bent on good works, and institute a military bed-check for curfew time in Devon. And begin at home . . .
His spine tensed sharply and his grey eyes flattened again. He was coming out of the lane into the open, the windows in the entrance hyphen dimly lit in the O’Leary’s house ahead of him, before his own long lights scoured it and swung around, the shadows of the trees running before them as they caught a flash of faded blue denim moving off, instantly lost in the heavy shadow under the oaks down along the river bank. It was Art Dunning, in person this time. His back was all Spig could see, but it was enough. Dunning sneaking away in the dark of the night.
It was only the brilliance of the headlights contrasting with the pale moon glow that made it look like the dark of the night, and only the quickly moving beam rounding the circle, losing him as instantly as it had picked him up, that gave the impression of haste. But O’Leary didn’t stop to think of that. Nor to remind himself he’d been spoiling for a fight. Nor to examine the strange new compound of bitterness and frustration unleashed inside him. It was eleven thirty-five, the house was dark, Dunning was leaving it. It added up to something it could never have added up to any other day in the twelve years of his marriage. He was angry, bitter and hurt. The living-room lights blooming suddenly, softly aglow as he crossed the drive, were like a knife in his throat.
CHAPTER VII
“HI, DARLING!”
Molly called to him as he opened the screen door and stepped inside. She didn’t come out of the living-room. He crossed over to the door. She was pushing back the chairs from in front of the fireplace, a couple of ash-trays in her hand. “Just straightening up a——” She turned to smile at him and stopped, her face blank. “Why, Spig . . . What’s . . . what’s the matter, darling?”
She stopped quickly and put the ash-trays on the coffee table.
“Spig!” She took a step towards him and stopped, a white line around her lips and her eyes amber pale. “What’s happened?”
“Dunning making another psychological pass at you? And you needn’t tell me he wasn’t here. I saw him leave.”
His voice was harsh. For an instant a stunned silence hung there before him. Then it exploded in a searing flash as Molly was transformed into blue ice and golden flame.
“I’ve no intention of telling you he wasn’t here. He was, and we’ve been sitting out on the terrace waiting for you to come home.” Her eyes were molten fire as she turned swiftly and picked up the ash-trays again. “I don’t know where you’ve been, but wherever it is you’d better go back and stay there. I’m sick of all this. Anybody speaks to me, they’re making a pass at me. If Art Dunning’s making them that’s fine with me. Look up there.”
She flashed her hand at the corner of the ceiling. “He mixed paint this morning and covered the whole stain you’ve been promising to fix ever since the gutter you promised to clean out last fall ran over and soaked through and wrecked it. If that’s a pass, I like it. And he took the crab grass out of the terrace that you were going to do on Saturday and went fishing instead. And you come in to-night sore as hell because Tip’s selling his vegetables to a Greek you don’t like and don’t even notice the crab grass is gone—or that Art put a new wheel on the terrace table for the one you broke.”
“So you’ve got yourself a handy man, and you don’t see what he’s trying to do is wreck the whole place,” Spig said angrily. “You don’t care about that. You don’t stop to see why Tip’s throwing clods at him . . .”
“I know very well why Tip’s throwing clods,” Molly said hotly. “Tips just like you. He’s jealous of anybody that comes around here and does pleasant things for me. You both want your whole world fenced and nobody allowed in it. You want me to sit here alone while you spend your evening in town. You’re all alike—you and Joe Cameron and Phil Potter and all the rest of you. Just because Art isn’t seven feet tall and paints pictures and can talk about something besides the market and boats and horses you all hate him. And I’m going to bed and the less I see of you the better I’ll like it. You can turn off the oven and give your casserole to the cats. And you don’t have to put the pan under the sink tonight. Mr. Sudley fixed that for me when he brought Tip and Greg home in his truck this afternoon. I suppose Mr. Sudley’s making passes at me, too. He pumped out the well pit you’ve been going to do the last three weeks.”
