Murder for the Bride

by John D. MacDonald

  My conclusion was this: Laura and I had wanted each other, almost from the moment we met. We had been extraordinarily well mated physically. The endless wanting had resulted in something almost hypnotic. Yet the strength of it did not make it good, or even valid. It was far too much on the physical level. I could look back and see that though she was shrewd, clever, alert, she actually had little intellectual resource. She had read nothing. She could not talk abstractly. She ate and slept and cared for her body. Thus it could not be called love, in my understanding of the word, because love must also exist on an intellectual and a spiritual level, as well as emotional and physical.

  It took me long hours to decide that perhaps I had not loved her after all. I could not as successfully dramatize my personal position with that new knowledge in mind, and that made the conclusion more difficult. It had been a desperately strong case of physical infatuation.

  My conclusion did not in any way lessen my desire to get my hands on the person who had twisted the wire tightly around her throat. In fact, in a most odd way, it strengthened and reinforced my desire, because it made her more vulnerable.

  I slid through a wet darkness into nightmare. I was on a boat. I had caught Laura on a cruelly barbed hook. She flopped about, nude, on the floor boards of the boat in her death agony while the guide kept saying it was a common type of fish, but inedible.

  Chapter Six

  I slept until noon and awakened in that drugged state where dreams seem to cling to the fringes of the mind and cannot be dislodged. The dreams give everything a look of unreality, and make all past experience implausible. In that state it seemed incredible to me that I had been married to anyone named Laura, and more incredible that Laura could have been a notorious person named Tilda Renner. It all seemed like something from a very poor movie, the sort of movie where the characters are yanked around on strings in order to heighten melodrama.

  It is possible to understand, objectively, that there are Tilda Renners in this world, and Haussmanns and Glinkas. There is a sickness in the world, and such people are the symbols of the disease. Symptomatic. But it is far more difficult to understand such people in relation to your own life. Life is composed of small daily acts, small attitudes, small opinions. Insert the Renners and Haussmanns and Glinkas into your daily affairs, and the result is dangerously close to comedy. High, lusty comedy in the Shakespearean tradition. People who strut and bellow and wear false noses.

  Once I saw a Burmese hillside that stank because tanks with bulldozer blades had covered the Jap-made caves from which they had fired on us, and then the rains had come and had washed away the dirt mounds. At first glance, at first full comprehension, it was a complete horror. Then the mind veered away from comprehension and all that was left was the stink, a troublesome nauseous stink about which everyone complained.

  So it is with the Renners and the Haussmanns and the Glinkas. You comprehend them for a moment, and comprehension sickens you, and so you think of them only on the basis of their ability to complicate your own life.

  I sat on the bed and smoked the first cigarette of the day and tried to brush away the clinging bits of dreams, the same way you paw your face after walking through a narrow place strung with the webs of spiders.

  This day was going to be worse than all the others, I knew. The humidity seemed to have gone up to an impossible high. Sweat ran from my throat and down my chest. The pillow and the sheets were sodden.

  I went to the French doors and looked up at the sky. It was a pale brassy blue. I could feel the heat of the sun-drenched street against my face.

  I showered and shaved and picked the coolest outfit I could find: white sleeveless shirt, rayon cord slacks, sandals. I looked at myself in the mirror and remembered hearing once upon a time that children do not increase their ability to learn in a regular upward curve. The chart resembles stairs. At intervals there will be a sudden upward jump in the ability to learn. And I wondered if maturity for an adult comes the same way. Possibly I imagined it. There seemed to be a new maturity in my face, a lessening of the look of recklessness. Already, the man who had struck Harrigan, who had come flying back to stare down at the face of his dead wife, seemed to be a stranger.

  Plans for the day—none. I was a stalking horse. Make like a target and let the Jones boys stalk the stalkers.

  I went to the bureau and distributed my belongings in my pockets. The cash situation was still healthy. I would have to get hold of a lawyer and make arrangements about Laura’s money. There was plenty of time for that. I picked up the key chain and looked at the small rabbit, remembering the way Laura had said, “You always give a husband a present.”

  I had told her it was a pretty symbolic present for a bride to give, and we had laughed. A small golden rabbit about three quarters of an inch high, sitting on his haunches, with little red stones for eyes, one ear lopped over, the ring for the key chain fastened to the tip of the upright ear. It was a fatuous-looking little rabbit—fatuous and at the same time debauched, hung over. It was the sagging ear that seemed to give that impression.

  I was halfway down the stairs when I heard my phone ring. I went back up three stairs at a time, fumbled the key into the lock, and got to the phone before it stopped ringing.

  “Hello, Dil? This is Betty.”

  The voice was vaguely familiar. “Betty?” I said.

  “Don’t be so dull, darling,” she said. There was annoyance in her voice and something else. Anxiety, maybe. The voice was oddly familiar.

  “Oh, Betty! Sorry to have sounded stupid. How are you?”

  There was relief in her tone. “I’m anxious to see you, Dil. It’s been so long, hasn’t it?”

  “It certainly has,” I said with feeling. I knew the voice. It was the knife-wielding gal from the Rickrack. She must be afraid, I decided, of a tap on the line. “I’m anxious to see you, too,” I said, giving it a certain emphasis.

  “Look, darling. I’m going to be terribly busy for a while. When do you think you can be free?” That was clear enough. Free meant without escort.

  “That’s hard to say. The last time I saw you, I think we both decided, Betty, that I wasn’t good for you. How do you know that won’t be true again?”

  “That’s something I’ll just have to risk, isn’t it?”

  “Of course, there’s a certain amount of risk on my part too,” I said, and forced a laugh.

  “Well, I guess you’re just too uncooperative, Dil. You seem to forget that a girl has some pride. I saw Monroe Wiedman at three o’clock yesterday afternoon and he told me you were in town. I’m sorry I listened.” There was a loud clack and the line was dead.

  I hung up slowly. She had been trying to tell me something. I’d never heard of anyone named Monroe Wiedman. I looked up the name in the phone book. It wasn’t listed. Yet I knew that it was the clue as to where to meet her at three o’clock. I went down to the heated tunnel of the street and found a place to have brunch. Coffee made my mind work better. I bought a city map at a newsstand, slipping it inside a magazine, and went back to the apartment. In Algiers, across the river, I found the intersection of Monroe Street and Wiedman Street. It was a quarter after one. That gave me an hour and forty-five minutes to shake off my friends and get over there. That is, if I wanted to shake off my friends. It made good sense to try to get in touch with them and tell them, or merely go on over and let them trail along.

  But behind the girl’s gay and casual voice I had detected fear. I wanted to think it a genuine fear. And if she wanted to lead me into ambush, this seemed a pretty awkward way to go about it. I decided on a compromise. I would shake off my friends, but try to do it in such a way that they could not accuse me of doing it on purpose. I shoved the map in my pocket and walked over to Canal. I went into a big department store and bought some shirts. I made no attempt to find out who was tailing me.

  I sauntered over near the elevators, and as one was about to close its doors I hurried over and got in. I got off at the third floor,
walked to the back of the store, and went down the stairs and out the fire door at the back. I walked through a parking lot to a parallel street and went down two blocks before turning back onto Canal Street. I took the Algiers ferry at the foot of Canal. There was a faint hot breeze on the Mississippi. At ten minutes of three I stood at the corner of Monroe and Wiedman, bundle in hand. Algiers is as complete a refutation of the romance inherent in the name as its African namesake. It is rough and dirty, with narrow potholed streets and bleary store windows.

  At a quarter after three, when I was beginning to wonder if I were getting a touch of heat exhaustion, she came up beside me. She was dressed in the same clothes she had worn in the Rickrack. Her dress was crudely pinned under the arm where I had torn it. There were purple patches of exhaustion under her eyes.

  “Come quickly,” she said.

  I walked down a number of side streets with her. She kept her eyes downcast. She walked as though she were unutterably weary.

  “In here,” she said. It was a coffee shop. Octagonal tile floor, wire-legged tables and chairs, a smell of disinfectant and burned grease. The only other customer was an old man with his head cradled in his arms on the table. He could have been sleeping or dead. She led the way to a table that was around a jog in the wall, out of sight of the front windows. A ceiling fan creaked slowly overhead.

  She sat down and shut her eyes for long seconds. I asked if she wanted some iced coffee. She nodded without opening her eyes. The shuffling waitress set the two glasses down on the imitation marble with more force than was necessary.

  The girl opened her eyes and looked at me. I had not been able to see the color of her eyes in the Rickrack. They were green, with small flecks of brown in the iris, close to the pupil.

  “You did very well,” she said. “I had to watch and make certain you weren’t followed.”

  “What is this all about?” I asked.

  “I thought it would be so simple. Now I don’t know how to say it. I called you because there is no one else. No one to help, and the trouble is your fault.”

  “My fault! Look, I didn’t ask you to …”

  “Please. I have been up all night and I am not thinking clearly or saying things well, Mr. Bryant.” She opened her purse, took something out, and handed it to me. I looked at it under the edge of the table. It was a shoemaker’s awl with the metal spike cut off to half its length and resharpened to a needle point.

  “What’s this?”

  She sighed. “Mr. Bryant, I had my orders. I was to put my arm around you. We had to use care in following you, because the others were following you. It could be done in any dimly lighted place where you would sit down. If you stood at the bar, I was to go to you there and get you to sit at a table. I was ordered to put my arm around you. That instrument would be in my hand. There is a place right there.…” She leaned over and touched the nape of my neck right at the base of my skull. “A small hollow. I was taught about it very carefully and made to practice how it is done. It is very quick and very good. You wouldn’t cry out. You would slump as though falling asleep. When my companions saw that, one of them would join us and we would take everything from your body and leave you there.”

  I stared at her. “Lovely people you run around with!”

  “Please. It would have been very easy but somehow I could not do it. I tried to do it my own way. I did not follow orders. That is a very serious thing. It is something we are not permitted to do. When it failed, I knew I was—as dead as they wished you to be. I didn’t want to die. So I ran. Now there is no one I can get to help me. Except you. Maybe you can do nothing. I must have a place where I can sleep, where no one knows I am there. After I have slept, maybe I can start to think again, think how to save myself.”

  “What kind of a stupid joke is this?” I demanded.

  She looked at me, her eyes steady. She said softly, “You can go. Please go now. There is no point in your staying.”

  I put a quarter on the table for the coffee and got up and walked toward the door. I looked back. Her eyes were closed again. She sat slumped in the uncomfortable chair.

  I went back. “Suppose I can find you a safe place. What then?”

  Her lip curled. “Someday you people will learn that there is no safe place in all the world. The days of safe places have gone by.”

  “Do you want help, or don’t you?”

  “Only if you are willing to help, Mr. Bryant.”

  I got change from the cashier, looked up a number, and shut myself in the airless, breathless phone booth. It took a long time before I heard Sam Spencer’s rumble.

  “Sam, this is Dil Bryant. I want—”

  “You ready to give up gumshoeing and get back on the job, boy?”

  “Not yet, Sam. I need help. Look, have you got any visiting big shots staked out in Paul Harrigan’s apartment over on Loyola? Expecting any?”

  “There’s nobody there now, but in about ten days I expect—”

  “I’m coming after the keys, Sam. And don’t ask me any questions. Just trust me. Better yet, have your girl seal the keys in an envelope and leave them with the cashier at that drugstore diagonally across the street from you. Have her tell the cashier a Mr. Robinson will pick up the keys. Can you do that right away?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Thanks, Sam,” I said, and hung up. Paul Harrigan can afford to keep the apartment in town because Trans-Americas uses it for a billet for visiting brass and pays Paul for its use. It’s over in the university section, a ground-floor apartment with a private entrance at the rear of an old, ugly house.

  Back at the table I wiped my face with paper napkins from the table dispenser. “It’s all set. Ready to go?”

  She fell asleep in the taxi that took us from the foot of Canal Street to the drugstore and from there to the apartment. I unlocked the door and she went in ahead of me. The apartment had been redecorated since the last time I had been in it. The dark woodwork had been painted white, the walls done in cool greens and blues.

  She let me guide her back to one of the two bedrooms. She sat on the edge of the bed and I went around the room, opening windows, drawing draperies. I started the fan and adjusted it. When I looked around she had lain back on the bed.

  I spoke to her and she didn’t move. I slipped her shoes off and swung her legs up onto the bed. She mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I shook her until her eyes opened.

  “Wha’?” she said.

  “I’ll come back around midnight. That’ll give you nearly eight hours’ sleep. I’m taking the keys. Do you need anything?”

  She frowned. Her voice was far away. “Dress. Toothbrush. Comb. Lipstick. And …”

  I waited and then looked at her again. She was sound asleep, breathing heavily through parted lips. I stood looking down at her in the darkened room. The fan made a soft purring sound. It seems a violation of privacy to look upon a sleeping stranger. In her sleep she rolled over onto her left side, her right leg drawn up, her hands, palms together, under her cheek. It is the classic pose of a sleeping woman. It exaggerates the curve of hip. Something about her weariness and helplessness brought on desire. Her body had a look of strength. I stood and the blood hammered in my ears louder than the sound of the fan. Then I turned and left. My palms were wet and my hands trembled as I locked the door behind me.

  Chapter Seven

  New Orleans has its own unique adjustment to the heat of summer, at least in the Quarter, where the buildings stand shoulder to shoulder. The sidewalks are roofed by galleries supported by iron posts near the curbing. These roofed sidewalks are called, locally, banquettes. The galleries provide a place for out-of-doors living for the people on the second floor. They in turn are roofed. The railings are of ornamental iron patterned in the shape of leaves, usually, because leaves have a look of coolness. Vines grow up the second-floor posts, entwining themselves among the iron leaves, providing the illusion of privacy. There is never a water shortage. It is simple enough to wet do
wn the gallery floor and the casual pedestrian had best keep a wary eye cocked upward for the deluge.

  After making the purchases for the girl and putting them in the apartment where she still slept, I walked back into the Quarter, into the long shadows of evening. I saw the galleries and reconstructed in memory the front of the Rampart Street apartment on the edge of the Negro section, and knew that with care those galleries that stretched almost to the corner would give me a chance to shake off my attentive friends.

  Barney Zeck was sitting on the top stair when I went up to the third floor. The perennial toothpick was in the corner of his mouth. The heat seemed to affect him not at all.

  “Having fun?” he asked mildly as I came slowly up the flight.

  “Oh, dandy!”

  “The town is full of big-time law brass, Bryant.”

  “So I’ve noticed. Come on in and have a drink.”

  He followed me in. I turned on the fans and brought him his drink. He held it up to the light. He looked like a wise and dusty elf.

  “Ramifications,” he said softly. “That’s the word. A thing like this, it has ramifications. But not for us. Not for me. I see it simple. Dead woman. So catch the killer. Standard procedure. This is off the record, Bryant. ’Way off the record. I’m a sucker to trust you, maybe. But I’m browned off enough not to care. The orders came down from on high. Drop it. Forget it. Nice, isn’t it?”

  I looked at his cold nailhead eyes. There was anger there. “Why?” I asked.

  “Apparently this is some kind of an international deal. And we’re just locals. We can fumble the ball. So they whistle us over to the side lines.”