by Jim Thompson
He laid a hand on my arm. “You need not tell me that, Lou. I do not know why—what—but—”
“He felt lost,” I said. “Like he was all alone in the world. Like he was out of step, and he could never get back in again.”
“Yes,” he said. “But…yes. There was always trouble, and he seemed always at fault.”
I nodded, and he nodded. He shook his head, and I shook mine. We stood there, shaking our heads and nodding, neither of us really saying anything; and I wished I could leave. But I didn’t quite know how to go about it. Finally, I said I was sorry he was closing the restaurant.
“If there’s anything I can do…”
“I am not closing it,” he said. “Why should I close it?”
“Well, I just thought that—”
“I am remodeling it. I am putting in leather booths and an inlaid floor and air-conditioning. Johnnie would have liked those things. Many times he suggested them, and I suggested he was hardly fit to give me advice. But now we will have them. It will be as he wanted. It is—all that can be done.”
I shook my head again. I shook it and nodded.
“I want to ask you a question, Lou. I want you to answer it, and I want the absolute truth.”
“The truth?” I hesitated. “Why wouldn’t I tell you the truth, Max?”
“Because you might feel that you couldn’t. That it would be disloyal to your position and associates. Who else visited Johnnie’s cell after you left?”
“Well, there was Howard—the county attorney—”
“I know of that; he made the discovery. And a deputy sheriff and the jailer were with him. Who else?”
My heart gave a little jump. Maybe…But, no, it was no good. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t bring myself to try it.
“I don’t have any idea, Max,” I said. “I wasn’t there. But I can tell you you’re on the wrong track. I’ve known all those boys for years. They wouldn’t do a thing like that any more than I would.”
It was the truth again, and he had to see it. I was looking straight into his eyes.
“Well…,” he sighed. “Well, we will talk again, Lou.”
And I said, “You bet we will, Max,” and I got away from him.
I drove out on Derrick Road, five-six miles out. I pulled the car off on the shoulder, up at the crest of a little hill; and I sat there looking down through the blackjacks but I didn’t see a thing. I didn’t see the blackjacks.
About five minutes after I’d stopped, well, maybe no more than three minutes, a car drew up behind mine. Joe Rothman got out of it, and plodded along the shoulder and looked in at me.
“Nice view here,” he said. “Mind if I join you? Thanks, I knew you wouldn’t.” He said it like that, all run together, without waiting for me to reply. He opened the door and slid into the seat beside me.
“Come out this way often, Lou?”
“Whenever I feel like it,” I said.
“Well, it’s a nice view all right. Almost unique. I don’t suppose you’ll find more than forty or fifty thousand billboards like that one in the United States.”
I grinned in spite of myself. The billboard had been put up by the Chamber of Commerce; and the words on it were:
You Are Now Nearing
CENTRAL CITY, TEX.
“Where the hand clasp’s a little stronger.”
Pop. (1932) 4,800 Pop. (1952) 48,000
WATCH US GROW!!
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s quite a sign, all right.”
“You were looking at it, then? I thought that must be the attraction. After all, what else is there to see aside from those blackjacks and a little white cottage? The murder cottage, I believe they call it.”
“What do you want?” I said.
“How many times were you there, Lou? How many times did you lay her?”
“I was there quite a few times,” I said. “I had reason to be. And I’m not so hard up for it that I have to lay whores.”
“No?” He squinted at me thoughtfully. “No, I don’t suppose you would be. Personally, I’ve always operated on the theory that even in the presence of abundance, it’s well to keep an eye out for the future. You never can tell, Lou. You may wake up some morning and find they’ve passed a law against it. It’ll be un-American.”
“Maybe they’ll put a rider on that law,” I said.
“Prohibiting bullshit? I see you don’t have a legal type of mind, Lou, or you wouldn’t say that. There’s a basic contradiction in it. Tail we can do without, as our penal institutions so righteously prove; tail of the orthodox type, that is. But what could you substitute for bullshit? Where would we be without it?”
“Well,” I said, “I wouldn’t be listening to you.”
“But you’re going to listen to me, Lou. You’re going to sit right here and listen, and answer up promptly when the occasion demands. Get me? Get me, Lou?”
“I get you,” I said. “I got you right from the beginning.”
“I was afraid you hadn’t. I wanted you to understand that I can stack it up over your head, and you’ll sit there and like it.”
He shook tobacco into a paper, twirled it, and ran it across his tongue. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and seemed to forget about it.
“You were talking with Max Pappas,” he said. “From what I could judge it was a reasonably friendly conversation.”
“It was,” I said.
“He was resigned to the fact of Johnnie’s suicide? He had accepted it as suicide?”
“I can’t say that he was resigned to it,” I said. “He was wondering whether someone—if someone was in the cell after I left, and…”
“And, Lou? And?”
“I told him, no, that it couldn’t have been that way. None of the boys would be up to doing such a thing.”
“Which settles that,” Rothman nodded. “Or does it?”
“What are you driving at?” I snapped. “What—”
“Shut up!” His voice toughened, then went smooth again. “Did you notice the remodeling he’s doing? Do you know how much all that will cost? Right around twelve thousand dollars. Where do you suppose he got that kind of money?”
“How the hell do I—”
“Lou.”
“Well, maybe he had it saved.”
“Max Pappas?”
“Or maybe he borrowed it.”
“Without collateral?”
“Well…I don’t know,” I said.
“Let me make a suggestion. Someone gave it to him. A wealthy acquaintance, we’ll say. Some man who felt he owed it to him.”
I shrugged, and pushed my hat back; because my forehead was sweating. But I was feeling cold inside, so cold inside.
“Conway Construction is handling the job, Lou. Doesn’t it strike you as rather odd that he’d do a job for a man whose son killed his son?”
“There aren’t many jobs that he don’t handle,” I said. “Anyway, it’s the company, not him; he’s not in there swinging a hammer himself. More’n likely he doesn’t even know about it.”
“Well…” Rothman hesitated. Then he went on, kind of dogged. “It’s a turnkey job. Conway’s jobbing all the materials, dealing with the supply houses, paying off the men. No one’s seen a nickel coming from Pappas.”
“So what?” I said. “Conway takes all the turnkey stuff he can get. He cuts a half a dozen profits instead of one.”
“And you think Pappas would hold still for it? You don’t see him as the kind of guy who’d insist on bargaining for every item, who’d haggle over everything right down to the last nail? I see him that way, Lou. It’s the only way I can see him.”
I nodded. “So do I. But he’s not in a real good position to have his own way right now. He gets his job like Conway Construction wants to give it to him, or he just don’t get it.”
“Yeah…” He shifted his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. He pushed it across with his tongue, his eyes narrowed on my face. “But the money, Lou. That s
till doesn’t explain about the money.”
“He lived close,” I said. “He could have had it, a big enough part, anyway, so’s they’d wait on the rest. It didn’t need to be in a bank. He could have had it salted away around his house.”
“Yeah,” said Rothman, slowly. “Yeah, I suppose so…”
He turned back around in the seat, so that he was looking through the windshield instead of me—instead of at me. He flicked his cigarette away, fumbled for his tobacco and papers, and began rolling another one.
“Did you get out to the cemetery, Lou? Out to Johnnie’s grave?”
“No,” I said, “and I’ve sure got to do that, too. I’m ashamed I haven’t done it before.”
“Well—dammit, you mean that, don’t you? You mean every word of it!”
“Who are you to ask that?” I snapped. “What did you ever do for him? I don’t want any credit for it, but I’m the only man in Central City that ever tried to help that kid. I liked him. I understood him. I—”
“I know, I know,” he shook his head, dully. “I was just going to say that Johnnie’s buried in Sacred Ground.…You know what that means, Lou?”
“I reckon. The church didn’t call it suicide.”
“And the answer, Lou? You do have an answer?”
“He was so awful young,” I said, “and he hadn’t ever had much but trouble. Maybe the church figured he’d been faulted enough, and tried to give him a break. Maybe they figured that it was sort of an accident; that he’d just been fooling around and went too far.”
“Maybe,” said Rothman. “Maybe, maybe, maybe. One more thing, Lou. The big thing…On the Sunday night that Elmer and the late occupant of yon cottage got it, one of my carpenters went to the last show at the Palace. He parked his car around in back at—now get this, Lou—at nine-thirty. When he came out, all four of his tires were gone…”
16
I waited and everything got pretty quiet. “Well,” I said, finally, “that’s sure too bad. All four tires, huh?”
“Too bad? You mean it’s funny, don’t you, Lou? Plumb funny?”
“Well, it is, kind of,” I said. “It’s funny I didn’t hear anything about it at the office.”
“It’d been still funnier if you had, Lou. Because he didn’t report the theft. I’d hardly call it the greatest mystery of all time, but, for some reason, you fellas down at the office don’t take much interest in us fellas down at the labor temple—unless you find us on a picket line.”
“I can’t hardly help—”
“Never mind, Lou; it’s really not pertinent. The man didn’t report the theft, but he did mention it to some of the boys when the carpenters and joiners held their regular Tuesday night meeting. And one of them, as it turned out, had bought two of the tires from Johnnie Pappas. They…Do you have a chill, Lou? Are you catching cold?”
I bit down on my cigar. I didn’t say anything.
“These lads equipped themselves with a couple of piss-elm clubs, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, and went calling on Johnnie. He wasn’t at home and he wasn’t at Slim Murphy’s filling station. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere about that time; he was swinging by his belt from the window-bars of the courthouse cooler. But his hot rod was at the station, and the remaining two stolen tires were on it. They stripped them off—Murphy, of course, isn’t confiding in the police either—and that ended the matter. But there’s been talk about it, Lou. There’s been talk even though—apparently—no one has attached any great significance to the event.”
I cleared my throat. “I—why should they, Joe?” I said. “I guess I don’t get you.”
“For the birds, Lou, remember? The starving sparrows.…Those tires were stolen after nine-thirty on the night of Elmer’s and his lady friend’s demise. Assuming that Johnnie didn’t go to work on them the moment the owner parked—or even assuming that he did—we are driven to the inevitable conclusion that he was engaged in relatively innocent pursuits until well after ten o’clock. He could not, in other words, have had any part in the horrible happenings behind yonder blackjacks.”
“I don’t see why not,” I said.
“You don’t?” His eyes widened. “Well, of course, poor old Descartes, Aristotle, Diogenes, Euclid et al. are dead, but I think you’ll find quite a few people around who’ll defend their theories. I’m very much afraid, Lou, that they won’t go along with your proposition that a body can be in two places at the same time.”
“Johnnie ran with a pretty wild crowd,” I said. “I figure that one of his buddies stole those tires and gave ’em to him to peddle.”
“I see. I see…Lou.”
“Why not?” I said. “He was in a good position to get rid of them there at the station. Slim Murphy wouldn’t have interfered.…Why, hell, it’s bound to have been that way, Joe. If he’d have had an alibi for the time of the murders, he’d have told me so, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t have hanged himself.”
“He liked you, Lou. He trusted you.”
“For damned good reasons. He knew I was his friend.”
Rothman swallowed, and a sort of laughing sound came out of his throat, the kind of sound you make when you don’t quite know whether to laugh or cry or get sore.
“Fine, Lou. Perfect. Every brick is laid straight, and the bricklayer is an honest upstanding mechanic. But still I can’t help wondering about his handiwork and him. I can’t help wondering why he feels the need to defend his structure of perhapses and maybes, his shelter wall of logical alternatives. I can’t see why he didn’t tell a certain labor skate to get the hell on about his business.”
So…So there it was. I was. But where was he? He nodded as though I’d asked him the question. Nodded, and drew a little bit back in the seat.
“Humpty-Dumpty Ford,” he said, “sitting right on top of the labor temple. And how or why he got there doesn’t make much difference. You’re going to have to move, Lou. Fast. Before someone…before you upset yourself.”
“I was kind of figuring on leaving town,” I said. “I haven’t done anything, but—”
“Certainly you haven’t. Otherwise, as a staunch Red Fascist Republican, I wouldn’t feel free to yank you from the clutches of your detractors and persecutors—your would-be persecutors, I should say.”
“You think that—you think maybe—”
He shrugged, “I think so, Lou. I think you just might have a little trouble in leaving. I think it so strongly that I’m getting in touch with a friend of mine, one of the best criminal lawyers in the country. You’ve probably heard of him—Billy Boy Walker? I did Billy Boy a favor one time, back East, and he has a long memory for favors, regardless of his other faults.”
I’d heard of Billy Boy Walker. I reckon almost everyone has. He’d been governor of Alabama or Georgia or one of those states down south. He’d been a United States senator. He’d been a candidate for president on a Divide-the-Dough ticket. He’d started getting shot at quite a bit about that time, so he’d dropped out of politics and stuck to his criminal law practice. And he was plenty good. All the high mucky-mucks cussed and made fun of him for the way he’d cut up in politics. But I noticed that when they or their kin got into trouble, they headed straight for Billy Boy Walker.
It sort of worried me that Rothman thought I needed that kind of help.
It worried me, and it made me wonder all over again why Rothman and his unions would go to all the trouble of getting me a lawyer. Just what did Rothman stand to lose if the law started asking me questions? Then I realized that if my first conversation with Rothman should ever come out, any jury in the land would figure he’d sicked me on the late Elmer Conway. In other words, Rothman was saving two necks—his and mine—with one lawyer.
“Perhaps you won’t need him,” he went on. “But it’s best to have him alerted. He’s not a man who can make himself available on a moment’s notice. How soon can you leave town?”
I hesitated. Amy. How was I going to do it? “I’ll—I can’t do it right away,” I
said. “I’ll have to kind of drop a hint or two around that I’ve been thinking about leaving, then work up to it gradually. You know, it would look pretty funny—”
“Yeah,” he frowned, “but if they know you’re getting ready to jump they’re apt to close in all the faster.…Still, I can see your point.”
“What can they do?” I said. “If they could close in, they’d be doing it already. Not that I’ve done—”
“Don’t bother. Don’t say it again. Just move—start moving as quickly as you can. It shouldn’t take you more than a couple of weeks at the outside.”
Two weeks. Two weeks more for Amy.
“All right, Joe,” I said. “And thanks for—for—”
“For what?” He opened the door. “For you, I haven’t done a thing.”
“I’m not sure I can make it in two weeks. It may take a little—”
“It hadn’t better,” he said, “take much longer.”
He got out and went back to his own car. I waited until he’d turned around and headed back toward Central City; and then I turned around and started back. I drove slowly, thinking about Amy.
Years ago there was a jeweler here in Central City who had a hell of a good business, and a beautiful wife and two fine kids. And one day, on a business trip over to one of the teachers’ college towns he met up with a girl, a real honey, and before long he was sleeping with her. She knew he was married, and she was willing to leave it that way. So everything was perfect. He had her and he had his family and a swell business. But one morning they found him and the girl dead in a motel—he’d shot her and killed himself. And when one of our deputies went to tell his wife about it, he found her and the kids dead, too. This fellow had shot ’em all.
He’d had everything, and somehow nothing was better.
That sounds pretty mixed up, and probably it doesn’t have a lot to do with me. I thought it did at first, but now that I look at it—well, I don’t know. I just don’t know.
I knew I had to kill Amy; I could put the reason into words. But every time I thought about it, I had to stop and think why again. I’d be doing something, reading a book or something, or maybe I’d be with her. And all of a sudden it would come over me that I was going to kill her, and the idea seemed so crazy that I’d almost laugh out loud. Then, I’d start thinking and I’d see it, see that it had to be done, and…
