The Wheel is Fixed

by James M. Fox

  “Uh-huh, with a baseball bat, you can.”

  Now she was laughing at me. “It doesn’t really matter, darling, does it? Not any more? Because I’m eloping with you, not with Stu Hitchcock. And the reason is not that I’ve always wanted a honeymoon in Bermuda.”

  “Does it have to be Bermuda?” I mumbled, biting my lip. But she didn’t even hear me; she was intent upon her pocket mirror, studying her face from a dozen different angles, like an art critic confronted by something in the neoclassicist school. “I think I got burned all right,” she said composedly. “That stuff I put on isn’t any use. Rick, it’s almost dark, we’ll have to hurry to be back in time for dinner.”

  I climbed to my feet and started packing up the picnic remains. “There’s still a lot I want to talk to you about.”

  “We’ll have a lot of time,” she reminded me fondly, and stood on tiptoes to kiss the lobe of my left ear. “Will you play for me every night, pretty music like yesterday’s?”

  “Sure, every night.”

  “You’re not worried again, are you, darling? About—little things, formalities? We can wait a few days, if there’s any trouble with the regulations or anything like that.”

  “There won’t be. Arizona doesn’t bother with tests or a waiting period. They don’t even care about parents’ consent, if you tell them you’re over eighteen.”

  She snuggled an arm under mine and smiled seraphically up into my eyes.

  “I’m over eighteen, darling,” she confided. “And I have no parents or family of any kind in the whole wide world.”

  Chapter Fourteen: BLOODY HANDS

  THE RHYTHM of the falls continued to drum through my head for most of the homebound ride, without ever succeeding in shutting out the cruel echo of her words. Dusk on the narrow mountain trail made further conversation easy to avoid; my silence did not become embarrassing until we were cantering side by side across the valley of the desert again, with our horses snorting eagerly for the stable. This time she made little effort to thaw me out. Once she mentioned, “I thought you wanted to talk,” and gave me a puzzled glance when my only reaction was a frown. Later, with the cluster of lights from the Hacienda del Sol spaced out before us under a slowly rising moon, she shyly reached to pat the pinto’s straining neck.

  “I must call Mr. Biedermayer right away.”

  “What for?”

  “The advertising pictures, silly. He’ll have to find another girl to pose for him.”

  It was an interesting point, and one that had not quite occurred to me before. I let it drift downstream; there did not seem to be much sense in arguing about it now. The date-palm orchards were already closing in around us, and a bowlegged stable hand was waiting for us at the corral gate, smirking up the sleeves of his tattered blue denims. My watch was still out of commission, but he told me it was seven o’clock. We’d made it in time for dinner after all.

  Our walk through the park amounted to something of an ordeal, in one of those bellowing silences peculiar to lovers in distress. On the porch steps of her bungalow she finally, halfheartedly, confronted me with it, anxiously watching me from the shadows, looking very small and frightened and submissive. “Rick, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing wrong. I’m tired, that’s all.”

  “Are you sure? Have I done something you—misunderstood?”

  “No,” I said flatly. “No. It would have been completely impossible to misunderstand you.”

  She touched my arm timidly, as if to reassure herself it was me. “You sound so strange, my love,” she told me, struggling hard for gaiety. “You’d almost have me believe that you rather regret what happened. Do you?”

  “No, of course I don’t.”

  “Want me to dress up and make myself look pretty for you?”

  “That would be nice,” I said, taking pains to suppress the croak in my voice. “You might give me a buzz when you’re ready. Don’t start packing yet; we can do that after we eat.”

  “All right.” She clung to me, her arms around my neck. “Tell me again, Rick? Please?”

  “I love you. Very much.”

  She sighed contentedly and brushed my lips and lightly ran up the steps.

  In my own quarters I sat on the bed for a while, smoking and brooding and still wearing Joe Cornero’s Stetson and his fancy high-heeled boots. The full-length mirror in the wardrobe door informed me that they suited me just fine. I was doing pretty well for myself with other people’s property, and no mistake. Maybe I should apply for a patent and go into business.

  I pitched the hat into a corner, as if that would do any good, and jerked off the boots, and stalked into the bathroom, turning the shower on full strength. I was still punishing myself with a towel when the knocking started.

  The knocking was rapid, persistent and urgent, and much too furtive for a maid on a mission to turn down the sheets, or a bellhop with a message. It was the kind of knocking that sounds worse than a scream in the night, the kind only country doctors are likely to hear more than once in a lifetime. It froze me to the spot for quite a spell before I could so much as catch my breath. Then I used up some of that to swear, and the rest for racing like a maniac across the apartment to the door.

  There was blood on her hands. Not a lot of it, but the smears were fresh and scarlet-bright. She was still in her riding-togs, and holding herself erect with an almost casual gracefulness, as if she’d merely called to borrow a cake of soap. Her complexion was a dull, shadow-flecked ivory.

  “Could you come to my place for a moment?” she asked me in well-bred, carefully modulated tones, like a little girl reciting on daddy’s birthday. She did not even see me, or the towel around my loins.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Oh, no. I’m perfectly all right, thank you.”

  “Wait inside. Close the door,” I snapped and dashed back into the bedroom for my clothes. Dressing must have taken me all of thirty seconds, with the knowledge of impending disaster clawing at my nerves. When I returned she was exactly where I’d left her, still standing up straight on the porch, one bloodstained hand half-lifted to the very point where her knock had been answered by me. I shuddered and slapped her face, twice and not gently. “Snap out of it, will you! What’s going on?”

  She blinked back the tears that wanted to flow, and her shoulders sagged into sudden dejection, but the razor edge of hysteria had been blunted. “Please, Rick, come quickly. I need your help.”

  It was twenty yards to the bungalow next door; she’d left the lights on in the living-room, the front door ajar. I covered the distance in five or six bounds, gained the porch in one jump, and stopped short in my tracks on the threshold.

  The room was not badly disturbed. It was the same impersonally cheerful copy of my own that had somehow upset and excited me on my visit the afternoon before. There was still Harper’s Bazaar on the coffee table, and the bottle-green leather purse and gloves on the couch. The carpet had been scuffed a little, here and there, and a chair overturned as if by accident, and the long, ornamental brass poker from the French provincial fireplace stand had been dropped in the middle of the floor.

  On the edge of the heavy green chenille rug, near the Mexican archway to the bedroom, slumped the body of Stuart Hitchcock.

  He was lying on his back, legs scissored out in yards of light-gray flannel slacks, trunk askew at an oddly unnatural twist in its jacket of crumpled blue suede. His arrogant young head wasn’t blond any more. I had seen heads like that before, by the dozen, and I wasn’t much impressed by the remnants of the dainty little first-aid kit with which she’d tried to fix up the deal. I snatched for his pulse and couldn’t find any; his shirt popped a couple of buttons while my fingers groped for a heartbeat. The skin felt hot and dry, and between the ribs I caught a slight, irregular flutter.

  “Is it—bad?”

  She’d come in after me and stood beside me, watching helplessly. I got up and glanced at the phone in the bedroom and said grimly, “Six miles to the n
earest hospital. He’ll never make it, but we’ll have to try. If he forced you to hit him, why couldn’t you have used that gadget over there?”

  Her flashy little silver-plated riding-crop was on the coffee table, on the copy of Harper’s Bazaar. It couldn’t have done any real damage, but its blow would have served to discourage the attentions of a drunken longshoreman. She looked at it, and at me, and at the poker on the carpet, and said, “Oh!” blankly, as if I’d just explained about the atom bomb.

  Stu Hitchcock stirred an arm and produced a grating noise in his throat. His pale, bloodshot eyes were suddenly open and staring at her with a waspish malignancy. It was the kind of stare that will focus on a pin point and observe almost nothing else; I am convinced he was never aware of my presence in the room. He licked his lips and spoke up clearly, in surprisingly loud, vigorous tones. “You!” he said, and added a single word, the one he had flung in my face four days ago, when my car got in his way. Before I had a chance to stop him he managed to lift himself a few inches on one elbow; the rug slipped under him, and his head struck the hardwood floor with a soggy thump. This time I tore the shirt in my haste to check on his heart. The flutter had disappeared.

  “That pocket mirror of yours,” I said dully. “Give it to me.”

  She nearly dropped it; she was trembling all over now, and crying quietly, hiding behind a wad of Kleenex. I pushed her into a chair and tried the mirror, a small plain disk of stainless steel. It refused to cloud, and the bleeding had slowed to a trickle.

  “How did he get in?”

  She did not hear me, and I had to shout at her. Then she could only mumble at me, about maybe forgetting to lock up that morning. It didn’t make much difference, he could have got a passkey for the asking. I started to pace the room, wrestling with the ghastly mess she was in. I didn’t even stop to consider my own position, simply because that would have complicated things to a point where I needed a slide rule and a carload of blueprints.

  The cops were out, I knew that much. Under different circumstances she might have come out on top, on a plea of self-defense, or at worst they’d have put her in storage for a year or two and tipped the parole board to leave the key in the mailbox. As it was, with her background and everything, she’d be lucky to draw five to ten, and luckier still if she made it to Tehachapi alive. No two ways about it, her only chance was to pass the dice, and to me. Remove Stu’s body, take it through the back door to my place, clean up hers and exchange pokers. I could make a run for it, draw all suspicion away from her. I knew the ropes, and I’d move quickly; if they caught me in the end it wouldn’t matter a lot, not any more. I didn’t get much of a kick from the idea, or any romantic notions about knight-errantry. It just seemed as if I owed her that much, to make up for what I’d let myself be talked into doing to her, regardless of whether she was good, bad, or indifferent.

  I’d have to have money, though, and plenty of it. Without money I couldn’t gain time, and time was the essence of the deal—time for the dust to settle, and for her to collect her wits, and for everybody’s memory to grow a little shorter, a little less alert. As long as I could keep them chasing after me, time would be running in our favor. I glanced at the electric clock over the mantelpiece; it startled me to see the hands still short of seven-thirty. There was a slip of paper on the marble shelf under the clock. It looked like a message from the front-office desk that had been pushed under the door, picked up, read, and put aside there. I looked at it myself, and dropped it in her lap. Miss Ryan: Mr. Vanni phoned at 9:45,10:30, and 11 a.m. He wants you to return his calls as soon as you come in.

  “What are you waiting for?” I asked her carefully.

  She stared at the message between sobs, as if she had never seen it before.

  “Go on, call him back,” I said. “Get him to hurry over right away, alone. Tell him to bring ten grand, to take care of a real emergency. I’m picking up the check for you, and I’ll need the dough to keep moving.”

  She instantly caught the play; it woke her up like a shot in the arm. She was out of her chair and had a double handful of my coat before I’d finished. The hysterics were over—she knew I wouldn’t stop for anything but sober, air-conditioned reason.

  “Rick, you can’t! I won’t let you do it. I won’t, do you hear?”

  “You’ll have no choice. Not the way I’m stacking the cards. If you throw in your hand after that we’ll both of us be crucified.”

  She began to push me to the door. “You’ve got to get out of here. Please, darling. I’m going to call the police.”

  It was quite a switch, and the joke was on me. I had to lay it on the line but fast, shock her into accepting the situation. “Know who he is?” I pressed her, pointing with my chin.

  “Of course I do. Rick, listen to me—”

  “No, you don’t. He’s the only son of the biggest racketeer west of Chicago, and you’ve just booked yourself a nice cold drawer in the county morgue. I happen to know it because I was hired by him five days ago to slam the lid on your sisterly affections for his precious boy. You see, he doesn’t approve of you at all, and he figures it might be a little expensive to buy you off the track.” She kept clinging to me; she’d buried her face in my shoulder and I couldn’t make out if she was crying or laughing. “Sure, it’s funny,” I said. “All of it is. The way I’ve fallen for you like a ton of bricks, and we were going to be married tonight and live happily ever after, just like in the story books. We’d have made such a charming couple, you and I—the fancy lady of a rich Italian roué, and a penniless, neurotic mobsters’ stooge! Now will you be sensible and get on that phone, or do I have to call the guy myself?”

  She let go of my coat and looked up at me. It was a curiously steady gaze, unclouded by emotions—searching, perhaps, but surely unafraid. The tears had gone and left few traces of their passage; she appeared to me more beautiful, and more heartbreakingly desirable in those brief moments than she ever had before. As it is, I shall probably never find out what she meant to do. Time had run out for us; the fates had kept their final irony in store. I did not even hear the front-door lock snap back, but the sudden cold draft from the evening breeze swept my neck and twisted me around.

  Steve Kovacs carried a small black satchel, the kind some of the more old-fashioned banks still get their payroll messengers to use. He put it down, and pushed his hat back for an inch or two on his shinily pomaded gigolo curls, and buried his hands in the bulky slash pockets of his stylish yellow camel’s-hair swagger. The gesture conveyed no particular menace. He was plainly amused with me and prepared to make allowances.

  “Hello, piahno player,” he said, and the sneer he gave me was almost indulgent.

  Chapter Fifteen: MORTICIAN’S PROSPECT

  THEY came trooping in behind him through the door in a grim sort of conga line, stepping on each other’s heels and hunching their shoulders, as if they were already bringing in the coffin. I wasn’t even very much surprised to see them, and none of them paid much attention to me. The market in stooges had collapsed around my ears.

  The big fellow himself pushed past me without seeming to notice any of us at all. He stood squarely on the edge of the rug, thumbing his bushy gray field marshal’s mustache and dispassionately watching Kovacs, who had squatted by the body of his son and was examining it with the swift dexterity of a trained interne. It confused me that none of them gave evidence of being shocked; apparently they had arrived expecting nothing less than what was there for them to find. Max Gonzalez, the Tahquitz Casino handy man, was resting his back against the doorpost and smiling absent-mindedly—his long, swarthy, handsome-gorilla mug looked vaguely pleased, and when I caught his eye he actually winked at me. The Irish pug with the groggy bass had hooked a leg over one corner of the couch and displayed an air of stolid boredom. His chauffeur’s uniform was dusty, and the black whipcord cap he wore at a jaunty angle had its visor dented and a three-inch tear in the crown.

  Of the whole bunch, only Mr. Alfredo Va
nni showed any signs of being ill at ease. He looked smaller and chunkier still, and all his thespian self-assurance had been drained away from him; the only gestures he was permitting himself had to do with mopping up the rush of sweat across his olive brow. He kept staring at the poker at his feet, as if the damned thing had managed to fascinate him beyond measure; he never once so much as glanced at Lorna or at me. I couldn’t think what he was doing there. His arrival with the others made about as much sense as bringing Figaro on stage in the last act of Gotterdammerung.

  It didn’t take me long to find out all about it. Steve Kovacs got up, brushed the lint off his knees, and shrugged. He saw the message on the floor and snatched it off the carpet like a hawk diving on pigeon. I felt suddenly a little dizzy taking in the pitch, dizzy with incredulous relief and quick bewilderment. They suspected the Italian, not the girl! They had known this would happen, somehow, and they’d come all the way from the city to pick up the pieces. It occurred to me then that Lorna had never admitted striking the boy. She might have come in and found him there, and wasted ten minutes or so on trying to patch him up with her silly little bandages and vials of antiseptic, before she’d got panicky and run tome for help.

  And I’d stopped her from calling the cops. We needed them now, worse than we needed food and water for the next six months. We needed a yacht, and a million dollars, a trip to the moon, and a company of United States Marines. We needed to live for another half an hour.

  The big fellow was reading the message and scowling at it. He seemed to be keeping his temper nicely under wraps. I didn’t like that, and I didn’t like the dull-red flush below his tan, or the throbbing little veins in his temples. The harsh, rust-brown eyes had a glassy squint in them that did not look quite sane. Even Max dropped his meaningless smirk in a hurry when he saw it. Steve Kovacs sneered at Vanni and spoke the first words to be uttered by any of us since they’d walked in.