“Everything is going to be all right. Take a nap. I’ll phone your house and tell them we’re going to be out to dinner and a movie and we’ll be back late. Then I’ll phone Anderson. There’s a pay station down the street.”
“Anderson? Oh, Kyle, darling!”
She stretched out like an obedient child. I took off her shoes. “You’ll wake me up?”
“With kisses.”
I went down to the pay station. I phoned her house. Ed, barely able to talk, said that the ambulance was on the way to pick up Mom. I called a taxi and we went directly from my place to the hospital. Jo Anne looked like a blonde ghost. We found out from the doctor that Mom had know for seven months that she had incurable cancer, and had preferred to keep it to herself, to try to keep from collapsing until Jo Anne was married. Yes, she could be relieved of most of the pain and nursed at home. Daphne had turned back into a child. A frightened child.
Chapter Seven
On the following Tuesday, when Mrs. Lane was brought home from the hospital, Jo Anne was permitted by the insurance company to take a leave of absence.
After I saw Mrs. Lane, Jo Anne took a short walk with me while Daphne stayed with her mother.
“How long will she last?” I asked.
“They don’t know,” Jo Anne said in a dull voice. “She has a lot of vitality. Maybe as long as a year. I’ll stay with it. We can’t afford a nurse for that long.”
“She’s got a lot of courage. And so have you.”
She looked at me. “I’ve got no courage at all, Kyle. When this is all over, come back if you want to.” She put the ring in my hand.
I looked stupidly at it. “But, Jo Anne, we could …”
“Call on her once in a while. She’ll like that. Afterwards, if we can pick up the pieces of our own life, Kyle, well and good. I’ve held you tied for too long as it is. I know that now. Whatever happens, good luck.”
It was the moment for protestations. It was the time to tell her she was wrong, that it was a burden I could share. She would be hard to convince, but I knew that I could convince her.
I didn’t even try. I stood there, with a damnable hypocritical look of sorrow on my face, and back in my heart some evil little creature thought of Emily’s thighs of long sleek marble, and it danced and danced.
Wednesday I was waiting for Emily Rudolph when she came out of the bank. It was a sort of anniversary. I had first seen her two weeks before. June was now nearly over. The first time I had waited for her I had worried about the others seeing me. Now it didn’t make any difference. I fell in stride with her.
“Surprised you haven’t left town, Emily,” I said.
She stared straight ahead and did not answer.
“A girl like you should pursue luck. I’ve thought about you a lot.”
Still she didn’t answer. I kept pace with her, standing at her side as we waited for the lights. When she bought a newspaper, I waited patiently. At last, in the last block, there was no one within earshot of us for a few seconds.
“I was doing a little research,” I said, “When it’s winter here, it’s summer in Buenos Aires.”
She went on for four of those gliding steps of hers and then stopped absolutely dead. It took me by surprise. I continued on for a step or two and turned and looked at her. Her lips were parted and there were faint pink spots of color in her cheeks.
I looked at her steadily. I left no doubt of my meaning. She began walking again. And this time, she took my arm. I glanced at her. Something seemed to twist violently beneath the dark sheen of her eyes.
“Half an hour,” she murmured as she went up the stairs.
I showered, changed, filled the shaker, knocked on her door. The room was as before. She wore tailored green shorts with a white stripe down the sides, a high-necked cotton basque sweater of green and white stripes. Her hair was tied with a dark green strand of yarn. That outfit would have made another girl look like a member of the high-school field-hockey team. She looked unchanged. She sat down on the couch and rested her heels on the floor, legs straight, ankles crossed. Generally legs that white have an unpleasant, mealy look. Hers didn’t. They had a hard sheen, like polished wax.
“Glasses?” I said.
“Put the shaker in the refrigerator, Kyle. We’ll drink after we talk.”
I went back to her. “Don’t sit by me. That will come later too. Tell me how. Tell me clearly, Kyle.”
I pulled a chair close so I could keep my voice low. I lit our cigarettes. “O.K. There’s one way this can be done. It’s going to take a lot of organization and a lot of planning. But if our timing is right, it should give us plenty of time to get lost. We’re going to have to work together on it.”
“I guessed that much.”
“You handle all the checking accounts beginning with the letter M. Now, a lot of those accounts maintain a large balance at all times, to cut the cost of maintaining the account.”
I went on with the plan. I had been over it so many times that I could say it like a grade-school poem.
As I explained, I watched her face. For a time it would be like wax, like a death mask, then the lips would part and spots of color would come and go on her cheeks. When she breathed fast her breasts lifted hard against the basque sweater. The plan was giving her an excitement closely akin to sexual excitement. I could see that in the way her breasts had sharpened, in the almost imperceptible writhing movements of her hips.
The plan was simple. And it fitted the operations of our bank. It was merely this: She would bring home checks from the files. We would make forgeries. I would cash the checks as though they had come over the counter. When the forgeries got up to her, she would file them as though they were legitimate.
At the end of the month, she would make out two sets of statements for the accounts we had tapped. And we’d arrange that the phony statements got mailed out, so that the customers wouldn’t get wise.
We’d start right after the June statements went out, and operate for six weeks. Send out phony July statements.
The auditors wouldn’t catch it, because the bank copies of the statements would show the true balance of the accounts, and the phonies in the hands of the depositors would show a higher balance—higher by the amount we had taken out in each case.
Many other banks have too many people concerned in the preparation of statements. Authority in our bank had been delegated just a shade too much, just enough so that a teller-bookkeeper conspiracy, plus a little brass, plus timing, would put us out in front.
“Six weeks?” she said moodily.
“Sure. After the July statement we continue the process for the first two weeks in August. As far as I can see. it’s pretty certain that I, by asking now, can arrange my vacation for the last two weeks in August. You can give two weeks’ notice on August first and—”
“No. That means they’ll give me another girl to break in, and it means they’ll go over my accounts with too much care. I’ll give that nasty little Limebright a song and dance about having to take a quick trip to Chicago to see my doctor. I could tell him on a Friday, the last Friday before your vacation, and tell him I’ll be back Wednesday morning. That ought to give us enough time.”
“What do you think of it?” We were sitting with our heads almost touching. We were talking, even then, so that we could barely hear each other.
“I think I like it. It’s better than grab and run.”
“You’re familiar with the accounts. How does it look on quantity?”
“This is a very rough guess. I think we can take an average of five thousand apiece out of at least forty accounts.”
“The danger is being found out and grabbed. But we can limit that. We don’t touch that cash. If they grab us, we can make complete restitution. That always counts for you. Usually, with a hundred-percent restitution, all you get is a suspended sentence.”
“We can’t keep it here, can we?”
“We may have to. I don’t like it, though. Any ideas
?”
We sat in silence and our eyes met. I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. That whatever was between us, or would ever be between us, was not love, but something else that was not a basis for trust.
“Let’s wait until we get some of it. Then we’ll decide.”
“No. This has to be planned. Every part of it. New identities, new names with documentary proof of birth dates and so on. Every part of it. Or I don’t play.”
“The money will be bulky, won’t it?”
“Quite. Two hundred thousand in the size bills we want will fill quite a large suitcase.”
“How about this, Kyle? Are we going to go by car? I think that would be best. An inconspicuous car. Get it into Mexico. We can leave it there.”
“So?”
“You and that girl. Your five thousand. Can you get hold of enough of that to buy a car?”
“It’s a joint savings account. Yes, I can withdraw enough.”
“There must be garages to rent in the area. We can use the trunk compartment of the car for the suitcase. Keep it locked, keep the garage locked. When we have to put money in the suitcase, we can drive out into the country and do it, or just take it to the garage. Then, if we have to leave on short notice …”
I thought it over, nodded. “That’s smart.”
“What do I do first?”
“We’ve got to have a master record, so we won’t have to depend on memory, Emily. Check the bank statements. Make a list of the forty accounts we’re going to tap. Smuggle out signatures. We’ll get the first batch of checks made up. Varying amounts. You see, if I get big cash deposits one day, I can safely run through a big one.”
“Tomorrow I’ll make out the list and bring some checks out of the files.”
“We’ll have to get a car. I’ll get the money for it. Saturday I’ll take a train over to Syracuse and buy it for cash out of a lot.”
“Not in your own name, Kyle. We’ve got to have new names, new identities. Something sober and honest-sounding. Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Marshall.”
“Disguises?” I asked.
“They’d have to be terribly simple, Kyle.”
“I don’t think, for me, one is even necessary. I look like a million other guys. I’ve got a pair of glasses I used to wear before a small prescription change, when I got the heavy rims. The old ones are rimless. Make me look studious. I’ll be O.K. But how about you? You’re pretty unusual-looking. How do you feel about being a blonde?”
“Let me show you something.”
She went to the chest of drawers and then into the bathroom. It took her ten minutes. My jaw sagged as I stared at her. She had pulled her dark hair back tightly, fastened it at the nape of her neck. She had used her lipstick in a way that changed the shape of her mouth, and with eye shadow she had darkened her upper lids. The passive, brooding look was entirely gone. She looked older, less exciting.
“How do you do, Mrs. Marshall?” I said.
She smiled and I laughed. It was almost good laughter. Not quite. There was a nervous note in it and I heard it stop too abruptly.
When she came out again, looking as before, I said, “That will be enough. That will be excellent.”
“Can you establish identity soon enough to get the car on Saturday, Kyle?” she asked.
“Maybe not. I’ll try. If it turns out to be a week from Saturday, we can keep whatever money we get next week in my room or here.”
“Then we’re set,” she said.
“You sound as if you were talking about a plan to go to the movies.”
“Inside I’m not like that. Inside I’m all fluttering. Things running up and down my back. That’s the way luck feels.”
I slid my fingertips up the side of her cheek, into the dark hair. I clenched my hand in the dark hair, and it was crisply electric in my hand. I watched the way her face changed, watched the darkness come over it, the blindness. And it was like before. More explosive, if anything. Her frenzy gave her a madwoman’s strength. This wasn’t love. It wasn’t an emotion. She was a whip, fashioned of velvet and fine wire. I think she lost all sense of identity, time, location. It was as though we wished only to punish each other, to inflict a quick hurt.
And when it was through, we lay as though we had fallen from a great height, as though our bodies lay smashed at the base of a cliff. She came back in her robe and sat beside me. She brought the shaker from the refrigerator, poured the two glasses.
“We’ll finish these drinks, and then no more, Kyle.”
“No?”
Our voices were dead. “We want nothing that will weaken us or confuse us. No more drinks. Lots of sleep. No more sex. It’s like … like a fight we’re going to have. When I was a little girl, twelve, I guess, there was a man in the neighborhood. Every chance he got, he’d put his hands on me. I went into training for him. I practiced. I found an old stocking in some trash and put a stone in the toe. The next time he reached for me I hit him. He fell down and I kept hitting him. Later I was glad it wasn’t a bigger stone, because I would have killed him before they pulled me away.”
“Sounds like a lovely neighborhood.”
“There were seven kids. I don’t know where any of them are, or even if they’re all alive. This thing we’re going to do, Kyle. Somehow, to me, it’s like hitting that man. Can you understand that?”
“I can see some reasons for a Spartan existence for the next six weeks, but not too Spartan.”
“Look at us now, Kyle. Dead. Dull.”
I pulled her down and kissed her. “Not too dead.”
She pushed herself up angrily. “I don’t like being kissed. I don’t like silly little affectionate gestures. Don’t kiss me or pat me when I walk by or try to hold my hand or any of that sort of thing.”
“O.K., O.K.,” I said, a little hurt. We each had one drink. She poured the rest down the sink and handed me the shaker.
“Run along, Kyle. Weve got a lot to think about. We can think about it apart, better than together. Try to think of all the things that can go wrong. Like somebody deciding to close out his account at the wrong time. Or Mr. Nairn seeing you take money. Or Limebright getting curious about the statements I happen to spoil.”
I went down to my apartment. Memory of the long lines of her was becoming part of my hands. My eyes knew the precise relationship of form and mass—the abrupt line of breast, the belly’s flatness, the top line of thigh. My nose had learned of the spice, and the woman scent. But these were reflective things, learned afterward, sedately. Not while it was going on—because there no senses functioned. It was only a blinding darkness, a narcotic, a thing now started that could not be stopped.
Chapter Eight
Thursday, after work, she tapped on my door, handed me a list of accounts we could tap, and told me to come up to her apartment later.
I locked the door. It was one thing to plan it out, as though it were some kind of game. It was another thing to have the list in your hand. It was like looking up from the book and seeing the murderer standing there.
Nobody can stick you in jail for thinking. Not in this country. And I suddenly recognized the deep canyon between the thought and the deed.
And they couldn’t jail me for making little marks on a list. So I checked it over and eliminated the risky ones, the ones who had their fingers in so many pies that they might decide, all of a sudden, to wipe out their own cash position overnight for the sake of a gamble in real estate or the market.
I couldn’t decide what I was actually doing. If this was only a little mental exercise, then I was dragging it out as long as possible before doing anything criminal. I was making the planning stage last a long time while I had her as often as possible, in the hope that the having of her would loosen her hold on me.
Against that was the knowledge that each time with her had been more climactic than the last time.
I checked the list quickly and went up. I tapped on her door and listened. I could hear the sound of her shower. I tried the
knob and it was unlocked. I went in and the shower noise was louder. I locked the door behind me. I sat to wait for her and I thought of how she would look, lean marble in the small stall, and desire was like a wave that smashed over me and rolled me under.
I went in blindly and shoved the curtain aside and caught her gleaming wetness in my arms and pulled her out. I broke her lips with my mouth and pulled her down and made her cry out, there in the cramped space between the stall and the washbowl, cold floor tile against her back, rumpled bath mat under her hips, while, from an enormous distance, came the faint sound of the shower, like the sea heard from far away.
When she came out in her robe much later, I handed her the list. She looked at it. I had totaled what I thought we could safely take. Two hundred and sixty thousand, out of thirty-eight accounts. An average of two thousand a check meant a hundred and thirty checks. A great many to handle. Almost too many.
She had brought back five canceled checks.
I took the shade off a floor lamp, put it on its side on the floor, and shoved the bulb end under the plate glass of the coffee table. First I practiced tracing a signature from one of the checks on scrap paper until I was reasonably fluid. Then I placed a new blank check over the canceled one. R. V. McKnight. Check for cash. Twenty-two hundred dollars. Dated July 2. Next Tuesday. She watched, with nothing moving in her face, watched with her bruised lips motionless.
I handed it to her. “Good!” she whispered. “Better than I had hoped.”
“It doesn’t have to be perfect. It will never be projected on a courtroom screen.”
“It’s good.” She felt it as though it were silk.
I made out twelve checks in all. She watched patiently. I put them in my wallet.
“Monday we’ll start, Kyle?” she said.
“Monday.”
“You’re so smart, Kyle.”
“Not very. I hope I’m going to be smart enough.”
She sat beside me on the couch. She pushed me back, made me put my legs up, lie flat. She moved up so that her hip touched my waist. She put her hands on either side of my head and looked down into my eyes, her hair falling toward my face, touching my cheek lightly.
Weep for Me Page 7
