by Jim Thompson
He looked up slowly until his eyes met mine. I shrugged. “Probably she didn’t fire all the shots at one time. She was shooting him while he was punching her. Hell, she’d hardly stand there and take it until he got through, and then start shooting.”
“It doesn’t seem that she would, does it?” he nodded. “Yet from the smattering of information I can gather, she must have done exactly that. She was still alive after he died; and almost any one—well, two—of the bullets she put into him was enough to lay him low. Ergo, she must have acquired the broken neck et cetera, before she did her shooting.”
I shook my head. I had to get my eyes away from his.
“You said you wanted reassurance,” I said. “You—you—”
“The genuine article, Lou; no substitutes accepted. And I’m still waiting to get it.”
“I don’t know where you get off at questioning me,” I said. “The sheriff and the county attorney are satisfied. That’s all I care about.”
“That’s the way you see it, eh?”
“That’s the way I see it.”
“Well, I’ll tell you how I see it. I get off questioning you because I’m involved in the matter. Not directly, perhaps, but—”
“But not indirectly, either.”
“Exactly. I knew you had it in for the Conways; in fact, I did everything I could to set you against the old man. Morally—perhaps even legally—I share the responsibility for any untoward action you might take. At any rate, we’ll say, I and the unions I head could be placed in a very unfavorable light.”
“You said it,” I said. “It’s your own statement.”
“But don’t ride that horse too hard, Lou. I don’t hold still for murder. Incidentally, what’s the score as of to date? One or two?”
“She’s dead. She died yesterday afternoon.”
“I won’t buy it, Lou—if it was murder. Your doing. I can’t say offhand what I will do, but I won’t let you ride. I couldn’t. You’d wind up getting me into something even worse.”
“Oh, hell,” I said. “What are we—”
“The girl’s dead, and Elmer’s dead. So regardless of how funny things look—and this deal should have put the courthouse crowd into hysterics—they can’t prove anything. If they knew what I know, about your having a motive—”
“For killing her? Why would I want to do that?”
“Well”—he began to slow down a little—“leave her out of it. Say that she was just an instrument for getting back at Conway. A piece of stage setting.”
“You know that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “About the other, this so-called motive—I’d had it for six years; I’d known about Mike’s accident that long. Why would I wait six years, and then all of a sudden decide to pull this? Beat some poor whore to a pulp just to get at Chester Conway’s son. Now, tell me if that sounds logical. Just tell me, Joe.”
Rothman frowned thoughtfully, his fingers drumming upon the table. “No,” he said, slowly. “It doesn’t sound logical. That’s the trouble. The man who walked away from that job—if he walked away—”
“You know he didn’t, Joe.”
“So you say.”
“So I say,” I said. “So everyone says. You’d say so yourself, if you didn’t know how I felt about the Conways. Put that out of your mind once, and what do you have? Why, just a double murder—two people getting in a brawl and killing each other—under kind of puzzling circumstances.”
He smiled wryly. “I’d call that the understatement of the century, Lou.”
“I can’t tell you what happened,” I said, “because I wasn’t there. But I know there are flukes in murder the same as there are in anything else. A man crawls a mile with his brains blown out. A woman calls the police after she’s shot through the heart. A man is hanged and poisoned and chopped up and shot, and he goes right on living. Don’t ask me why those things are. I don’t know. But I do know they happen, and so do you.”
Rothman looked at me steadily. Then, his head jerked a little, nodding.
“I guess so, Lou,” he said. “I guess you’re clean, at least. I’ve been sitting here watching you, putting together everything I know about you, and I couldn’t make it tally with the picture I’ve got of that guy. Screwy as things are, that would be even screwier. You don’t fit the part, to coin a phrase.”
“What do I say to that?” I said.
“Not a thing, Lou. I should be thanking you for lifting a considerable load from my mind. However, if you don’t mind my going into your debt a little further…”
“Yes?”
“What’s the lowdown, just for my own information? I’ll concede that you didn’t have a killing hate for Conway, but you did hate him. What are you trying to pull off?”
I’d been expecting that question since the night I’d talked to him. I had the answer all ready.
“The money was supposed to be a payoff to get her out of town. Conway was paying her to go away and leave Elmer alone. Actually—”
“—Elmer was going to leave with her, right?” Rothman got up and put on his hat. “Well, I can’t find it in my heart to chide you for the stunt, despite its unfortunate outcome. I almost wish I’d thought of it.”
“Aw,” I said, “it wasn’t nothing much. Just a matter of a will finding a way.”
“Ooof!” he said. “What are Conway’s feelings, by the way?”
“Well, I don’t think he feels real good,” I said.
“Probably something he ate,” he nodded. “Don’t you imagine? But watch that stuff, Lou. Watch it. Save it for those birds.”
He left.
I got the newspapers out of the yard—yesterday afternoon’s and this morning’s—poured more coffee, and sat back down at the table.
As usual, the papers had given me all the breaks. Instead of making me look like a boob or a busybody, which they could have done easily enough, they had me down as a kind of combination J. Edgar Hoover–Lombroso, “the shrewd sheriff’s sleuth whose unselfish intervention in the affair came to naught, due only to the unpredictable quirks of all-too-human behavior.”
I laughed, choking on the coffee I was starting to swallow. In spite of all I’d been through, I was beginning to feel nice and relaxed. Joyce was dead. Not even Rothman suspected me. And when you passed clean with that guy, you didn’t have anything to worry about. It was sort of an acid test, you might say.
I debated calling up the newspapers and complimenting them on their “accuracy.” I often did that, spread a little sunshine, you know, and they ate it up. I could say something—I laughed—I could say something about truth being stranger than fiction. And maybe add something like—well—murder will out. Or…the best laid plans of mice and men.
I stopped laughing.
I was supposed to be over that stuff. Rothman had warned me about it, and it’d got Bob Maples’ goat. But—
Well, why shouldn’t I, if I wanted to? If it helped to take the tension out of me? It was in character. It fitted in with that dull good-natured guy who couldn’t do anything bad if he tried. Rothman himself had remarked that no matter how screwy things looked, seeing me as a murderer was even screwier. And my talk was a big part of me—part of the guy that had thrown ’em all off the trail. If I suddenly stopped talking that way, what would people think?
Why, I just about had to keep on whether I wanted to or not. The choice was out of my hands. But, of course, I’d take it kind of easy. Not overdo it.
I reasoned it all out, and wound up still feeling good. But I decided not to call the newspapers, after all. The stories had been more than fair to me, but it hadn’t cost ’em anything; they had to fill space some way. And I didn’t care too much about a number of the details; what they said about Joyce, for example. She wasn’t a “shabby sister of sin.” She hadn’t, for Christ’s sake, “loved not wisely but too well.” She was just a cute little ol’ gal who’d latched onto the wrong guy, or the right guy in the wrong place; she hadn’t wanted anything else, nothing els
e. And she’d got it. Nothing.
Amy Stanton called a little after eight o’clock, and I asked her to come over that night. The best way to stall, I figured, was not to stall; not to put any opposition to her. If I didn’t hang back, she’d stop pushing me. And, after all, she couldn’t get married on an hour’s notice. There’d be all sorts of things to attend to, and discuss—God, how they’d have to be discussed! Even the size of the douche bag to take along on our honeymoon! And long before she was through, I’d be in shape to pull out of Central City.
After I’d finished talking to her, I went into Dad’s laboratory, lighted the Bunsen burner and put an intravenous needle and an ordinary hypodermic on to boil. Then, I looked along the shelves until I found a carton each of male hormone, ACTH, B-complex and sterile water. Dad’s stock of drugs was getting old, of course, but the pharmaceutical houses still kept sending us samples. The samples were what I used.
I mixed up an intravenous of the ACTH, B-complex and water and put it into my right arm. (Dad had a theory that shots should never be given on the same side as the heart.) I shot the hormone into my hip…and I was set for the night. Amy wouldn’t be disappointed again. She wouldn’t have anything to wonder about. Whether my trouble had been psychosomatic or real, the result of tension or too much Joyce, I wouldn’t have it tonight. Little Amy would be tamed down for a week.
I went up to my bedroom and went to sleep. I woke up at noon, when the refinery whistles began to blow; then, dozed off again and slept until after two. Sometimes, most of the time, I should say, I can sleep eighteen hours and still not feel rested. Well, I’m not tired, exactly, but I hate to get up. I just want to stay where I am, and not talk to anyone or see anyone.
Today, though, it was different; just the opposite. I could hardly wait to get cleaned up, and be out and doing something.
I showered and shaved, standing under the cold water a long time because that medicine was really working. I got into a clean tan shirt, and put on a new black bow tie, and took a freshly pressed blue suit out of the closet.
I fixed and ate a bite of lunch, and called Sheriff Maples’ house.
His wife answered the phone. She said that Bob was feeling kind of poorly, and that the doctor thought he’d better stay in bed for a day or two. He was asleep, right then, and she kind of hated to wake him up. But if there was anything important…
“I just wondered how he was,” I said. “Thought I might drop by for a few minutes.”
“Well, that’s mighty nice of you, Lou. I’ll tell him you called when he wakes up. Maybe you can come by tomorrow if he’s not up and around by then.”
“Fine,” I said.
I tried to read a while, but I couldn’t concentrate. I wondered what to do with myself, now that I did have a day off. I couldn’t shoot pool or bowl. It didn’t look good for a cop to hang around pool halls and bowling alleys. It didn’t look good for ’em to go into bars. It didn’t look good for them to be seen in a show in the daytime.
I could drive around. Take a ride by myself. That was about all.
Gradually, the good feeling began to leave me.
I got the car out, and headed for the courthouse.
Hank Butterby, the office deputy, was reading the paper, his boots up on the desk, his jaws moving on a cud of tobacco. He asked me if it was hot enough for me, and why’n hell I didn’t stay home when I had a chance. I said, well, you know how it is, Hank.
“Nice goin’,” he said, nodding at the paper. “Right pretty little piece they got about you. I was just fixin’ to clip it out and save it for you.”
The stupid son-of-a-bitch was always doing that. Not just stories about me, but everything. He’d clip out cartoons and weather reports and crappy poems and health columns. Every goddam thing under the sun. He couldn’t read a paper without a pair of scissors.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said, “I’ll autograph it for you, and you keep it. Maybe it’ll be valuable some day.”
“Well”—he slanted his eyes at me, and looked quickly away again—“I wouldn’t want to put you to no trouble, Lou.”
“No trouble at all,” I said. “Here let me have it.” I scrawled my name along the margin, and handed it back to him. “Just don’t let this get around,” I said. “If I have to do the same thing for the other fellows, it’ll run the value down.”
He stared at the paper, glassy-eyed, like maybe it was going to bite him. “Uh”—there it went; he’d forgot and swallowed his spit—“you really think…?”
“Here’s what you do,” I said, getting my elbows down on the desk and whispering. “Go out to one of the refineries, and get ’em to steam you out a steel drum. Then—you know anyone that’ll lend you a welding torch?”
“Yeah”—he was whispering too. “I think I can borry one.”
“Well, cut the drum in two, cut it around twice, rather, so’s you’ll have kind of a lid. Then put that autographed clipping inside—the only one in existence, Hank!—and weld it back together again. Sixty or seventy years from now, you can take it to some museum and they’ll pay you a fortune for it.”
“Cripes!” he said. “You keepin’ a drum like that, Lou? Want me to pick you up one?”
“Oh, I guess not,” I said. “I probably won’t live that long.”
11
I hesitated in the corridor in front of Howard Hendricks’ office, and he glanced up from his desk and waved to me.
“Hello, there, Lou. Come on in and sit a minute.”
I went in, nodding to his secretary, and pulled a chair up to the desk. “Just talked to Bob’s wife a little while ago,” I said. “He’s not feeling so good.”
“So I hear.” He struck a match for my cigar. “Well, it doesn’t matter much. I mean there’s nothing more to be done on this Conway case. All we can do is sit tight; just be available in the event that Conway starts tossing his weight around. I imagine he’ll become resigned to the situation before too long.”
“It was too bad about the girl dying,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know, Lou,” he shrugged. “I can’t see that she’d have been able to tell us anything we don’t already know. Frankly, and just between the two of us, I’m rather relieved. Conway wouldn’t have been satisfied unless she went to the chair with all the blame pinned on her. I’d have hated to be a party to it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That wouldn’t have been so good.”
“Though of course I would have, Lou, if she’d lived. I mean, I’d have prosecuted her to the hilt.”
He was leaning backwards to be friendly since our brush the day before. I was his old pal, and he was letting me know his innermost feelings.
“I wonder, Howard…”
“Yes, Lou?”
“Well, I guess I’d better not say it,” I said. “Maybe you don’t feel like I do about things.”
“Oh, I’m sure I do. I’ve always felt we had a great deal in common. What is it you wanted to tell me?”
His eyes strayed a second from mine, and his mouth quirked a little. I knew his secretary had winked at him.
“Well, it’s like this,” I said. “Now, I’ve always felt we were one big happy family here. Us people that work for the county…”
“Uh-huh. One big happy family, eh?” His eyes strayed again. “Go on, Lou.”
“We’re kind of brothers under the skin.…”
“Y-yes.”
“We’re all in the same boat, and we’ve got to put our shoulders to the wheel and pull together.”
His throat seemed to swell all of a sudden, and he yanked a handkerchief from his pocket. Then he whirled around in his chair, his back to me, coughing and strangling and sputtering. I heard his secretary get up, and hurry out. Her high heels went tap-tapping down the corridor, moving faster and faster toward the woman’s john until she was almost running.
I hoped she pissed in her drawers.
I hoped that chunk of shrapnel under his ribs had punctured a lung. That chunk of shrapnel had cost
the tax-payers a hell of a pile of dough. He’d got elected to office talking about that shrapnel. Not cleaning up the county and seeing that everyone got a fair shake. Just shrapnel.
He finally straightened up and turned around, and I told him he’d better take care of that cold. “I’ll tell you what I always do,” I said. “I take the water from a boiled onion, and squeeze a big lemon into it. Well, maybe a middling-size lemon and a small one if—”
“Lou!” he said sharply.
“Yeah?” I said.
“I appreciate your sentiments—your interest—but I’ll have to ask you to come to the point. What did you wish to tell me, anyway?”
“Oh, it wasn’t any—”
“Please, Lou!”
“Well, here’s what I was wondering about,” I said. And I told him. The same thing that Rothman had wondered about. I put it into my words, drawling it out, slow and awkward. That would give him something to worry over. Something besides flat-tire tracks. And the beauty of it was he couldn’t do much but worry.
“Jesus,” he said, slowly. “It’s right there, isn’t it? Right out in the open, when you look at it right. It’s one of those things that are so plain and simple you don’t see ’em. No matter how you turn it around, he just about had to kill her after he was dead. After he couldn’t do it!”
“Or vice versa,” I said.
He wiped his forehead, excited but kind of sick-looking. Trying to trap old simple Lou with the tire tracks was one thing. That was about his speed. But this had him thrown for a loop.
“You know what this means, Lou?”
“Well, it doesn’t necessarily mean that,” I said, and I gave him an out. I rehashed the business about fluke deaths that I’d given to Rothman. “That’s probably the way it was. Just one of those damned funny things that no one can explain.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Of course. That’s bound to be it. You—uh—you haven’t mentioned this to anyone, Lou?”
I shook my head. “Just popped into my mind a little while ago. ’Course, if Conway’s still riled up when he gets back, I—”
