Bright Orange for the Shroud (26 page)

“Listen, I won’t do it! You
can’t
leave. It’s dangerous!”

“So are home-canned vegetables. Get the hat.”

I sat on a white stool and waited. Merry McGee, the valiant quipster, with a hole in his head and the horrid conviction it
was
bleeding in there. My precious, valuable, irreplaceable head. Under the bullet groove would be some little white needles of splintered bone, sticking down into the gray jelly where everything was stored, all those memories unique to me.

A fat nurse opened the door and said, “Mr. McGee? Come along.”

“I was told to wait here until they check something out.”

“Tests can be taken in the ward, sir.”

“Something about radiology.”

She frowned. “Seems odd. I better go find out what’s up.”

She bustled away. When I saw Arthur in the doorway, I heaved myself up and got out of there in my curious hitching gait, putting the baseball cap on as I went down the hall. I did my very best walking as we passed a woman at a desk near the main entrance. I waited in shadow by the curb, leaning against a tree. Arthur brought the car around, something he should have thought to do when he got the hat. I didn’t remark on it. He was managing better than I could have hoped.

“Clematis Drive,” I said as he got behind the wheel.

“But how can you …”

“Arthur, my friend, you will be orderly and agreeable and stop twitching. I want you near me. I want you to stay near me. Because I am highly nervous. And if I stop making sense, or my speech goes bad, or my leg and arm get worse again, you hurry me back there so they can saw a little round hole in my head. Otherwise, just take on trust the strange idea I might know what I’m doing, because I’m too pooped to argue. Just drive. And pray my hunch is wrong. What time is it?”

“Five something. Chook will be …”

“She’ll sweat it out.”

As we turned onto Clematis, I looked over and saw the first paleness in the east. The dark trees and houses had begun to acquire third dimensions as the first candlepower of Wednesday touched them. The Wattses’ house was lighted up again, almost completely. The big white convertible was gone.

“Turn into the drive … No, keep going, and put it in the driveway of the next house. Hurricane shutters are on. It’s empty for the summer. Turn out the lights before you turn in.”

As we started back down the sidewalk, I said, “If anything comes, car or bike or pedestrian, either way, help me hustle into the brush and flatten out.”

“Okay, Trav. Sure.”

Nothing came. We went around the side of the house. Waxwell had taken off with typical flair, wheels digging deep gouges in the soft lawn.

I tried the outside screen door of the cage. It was latched on the inside. As I wondered whether it was worth trying to call her I smelled, adrift in the predawn stillness, a faint stench of
fecal matter. I turned to Arthur and said, “When we’re in the house, don’t touch a thing unless I tell you. Stay away from the windows in the front of the house. Squat low if you hear a car.”

Bracing myself against the frame, I put a knee through the screen, ripping it. I reached through, unlatched it, and, when we were inside, smeared the metal handle where I had touched it, with the palm of my hand. The odor was stronger in the living room. The television set emitted a constant cold light, the random snow pattern after broadcasting is over. The odor was much stronger. Crane Watts had slid down between chair and hassock, half sitting, head canted back on the chair seat. His face was unnaturally fat, his eyes bugging wide, pushed out by pressure behind them. It was a moment or two before I found the point of entry, the charred ear hole. And I knew, I knew exactly what else I would find in the silence of that house. The husband had slept through too much. Too many empty evenings slack in the chair, while the wife’s heart grew more hopeless. But when Boo came in, came at her, she would have cried out to the husband. Many times, perhaps, before she knew it was too late, and he was too far gone and would sleep through every endless lift and stroke, every new and demanding invasion, every cuff and slap, every jolly instruction, every rough boosting and shifting of her into new postures for his pleasure. So, having slept, husband, sleep longer yet. Forever. I wondered if she remembered who had said a nonsense thing about a pistol barrel in the ear. And, accustomed only to the antiseptic violence of television and the movies, I imagined that the sudden ugliness had shocked her. After such a small tug at the trigger. The huge terminal spasm had flounced him off the chair, opened his bowels. And hydrostatic pressure
had bloated his face to an unrecognizable idiocy. I even knew what she would instinctively cry at such ghastliness. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” It would end her auto-hypnosis, the trance state of the amateur murderer, and leave her no choice at all but to do what I knew I would find.

I heard the dry gagging behind me and saw Arthur with his back to the body, hunched over, hands to his mouth. I bumped him away, saying, “Stop it! Not in here, you damn fool!”

With a struggle he gained control. I sent him to wait out in the screened cage. I hobbled into the kitchen and, with my thumbnail, turned the lights off. It’s what they so often do in the night. Maybe some forlorn fading desire to keep the darkness back. But if they could turn on all the lights in the world, it wouldn’t help them. I knew where I’d most probably find her. She was in the empty tub, and had slid almost flat, head over on her shoulder. She wore a floor-length orange housecoat, with white collar and cuffs, buttoned neatly and completely from throat to hem. It had been a good vibrant color for her swarthy handsomeness. She had fixed her hair, made up her mouth. The dark stain between her breasts, and slightly to the left was teacup size, irregular, with one small area of wet sheen remaining. I bent and put the back of my hand against her calm forehead, but there was no warmth. The weapon, a 22 caliber Colt Woodsman with a long target barrel lay against her belly, the butt under her right wrist. She was barefoot. Though she had fixed herself up for dying, there were marks she could not conceal, swollen lips, blue bruise on the cheek, long scratch on the throat—marks of that long hard use.

I sat on the edge of the tub. Dishonor before death. And more effective with that popgun than she would ever know.
Two shots, even with the barrel against the target, seldom kill two people. Her death was not as messy as her husband’s. Heart wounds give a tidier result. To prove a guess, I went to the shower stall. The soap was moist. There were water droplets on the shower walls. A big damp yellow towel had been put neatly on a rack. So, after she had heard Boone Waxwell drive off, she had dragged herself out of bed and plodded in and taken a shower, probably just as hot as she could endure it, scrubbing herself mercilessly. Dry off. Go take the pretty housecoat from the closet and put it on. Sit at your dressing table, and fix your hair and your bruised mouth. The mind is numb. Get up and walk through the house, room to room, turning on the lights. Stop and look at the snoring husband. Breadwinner, mate, protector. Pace some more. Reach deep for the rationalizations. Women have been raped before. It hasn’t killed them. There is a legal answer. Let the police handle it. Turn him in.

“Now let me get this straight, Mrs. Watts. Waxwell was there from ten something last night until two or three this morning? And you claim that during that time you were repeatedly raped, during that whole time your husband was sound asleep in front of the television set? And Waxwell was a client of your husband? And you had met him before? And he left his car parked at your house, a very conspicuous car, all that time?”

So she paces and tries to think clearly, and she knows that if she does nothing, Waxwell will be back. Next week or next month, he will be back, again and again, as he promised he would.

And that brings her to the thing she has been trying so desperately to force out of her mind. Had he taken her quickly,
she could have merely endured him, been a helpless vessel for him. But he was so damned sly and knowing, so crafty and so patient that each time, even the last time, he had awakened the traitor body so that while the soul watched, the body gasped and strained to hungry climax, to dirty joy, grasping powerfully.

So she would pace and stop to look at the husband who had let that hunger in her grow so big she could betray herself. And then …

I found the note on her dressing table. Her personal stationery, monogrammed. A downhill scrawl with an eyeshadow pencil. “God forgive me. There is no other choice left. My darling was asleep and felt nothing. Sincerely, Vivian Harney Watts.”

On the other side of the room, beyond the plundered bed, the lowest drawer of his chest of drawers was open. Cartridges a-spill from a red and green cardboard box. Extra clip. Little kit with gun oil and collapsible cleaning rod. The shells were medium longs, hollow-point. So, with luck, the one she used on herself might not have gone through her to chip or stain the tub. I went back in and cupped the nape of her neck and pulled her up far enough to see. The back of the orange housecoat was unmarked. I made my gimpy hitching way out to the screened cage.

“She’s dead too. I have some things to do. I’ll try to make it fast.”

“D-Do you need help?”

I told him no. I went back and looked for signs of Waxwell. He would not go without leaving some trace. Like a dog, he would mark the boundaries of the new area he had claimed. But I found nothing, decided I needed nothing. First, on a
table by the bedroom door, I made a little pile of things to take away. The note, the gun, the other things from the drawer that belonged with the gun. By the time I had gotten her half out of the tub, I wished I could depend on Arthur to help me with this sort of grisly problem. She was a very solid woman. She had not begun to stiffen. Death gave her a more ponderous weight. Finally I was on my feet with her in my arms. Her dead forehead lolled over to rest against the side of my chin. Carefully bracing the bad leg, and willing the bad arm to carry its share, I hobbled into the bedroom with her. I put her on the bed. Out across the backyard the morning was a pearl pale shade of gray. I closed the draperies. She was on her back on the bed. I grasped the hem of the housecoat and with one hard wrench tore it open to the waist. Fabric ripped, and the small white buttons rattled off the walls and ceiling. I tucked the bottom of the housecoat up under her, pulled it up around her waist. She lay in dead abandon. On the white of her hips and upper thighs were the myriad blue bruises left by Waxwell’s strong fingers. Begging silent forgiveness, I thoroughly tousled the black hair and, with my thumb, smeared the fresh lipstick on her dead mouth. She had gotten all prettied up to die. In the bedroom lights I could see little segments of dark blue iris where the lids were not quite closed. Sorry I ruined the housecoat. Sorry they’ll see you like this, Vivian. But you’ll like the way it works out. I promise you, honey. They’ll pretty you up again for burying. But not in orange. That’s a color to be alive in. To be in love in. To smile in. They won’t bury you in it.

I tipped the dressing table bench over. Using a tissue, I picked up a jar of face cream and cracked the dressing table mirror. I turned the other lights out, left just one of the twin
lamps on the dressing table on, and shoved the shade crooked so that it shone toward her, making highlights and deep shadows on the tumble of dead woman.

I crammed the stuff from the table into my pockets. I left one light on in the living room, a corner lamp with an opaque shade. Day was beginning to weaken the lights. With my thumbnail I turned the sound control on the television until the hiss of non-broadcast was loud. We left. I saw no one on the way to the car, or when Arthur drove us back up Clematis Drive.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“She didn’t live long enough to have her chance to decoy him off his place. I’ve given her a chance to do it dead.”

On the north edge of town, up the trail, I had him pull over and park near a phone booth near the curbing, at a gas station showing only a night light. I had one dime in change. Just enough.

The sergeant answered by giving his name. I pitched my voice lower than usual. “Look, you want to do me a favor, you write down a license number, okay?”

“Give me your name, please.”

“I shoulda phoned you hours ago. Look, I can’t sleep. Maybe it’s nothing. But the thing is, I don’t want to get mixed up in anything. I don’t want to get involved, see?”

“If you’d tell me where you’re calling from.”

“Knock it off, Sergeant. Write down the number, hey?”

“All right. License number what?”

I gave it to him and said, “A white Lincoln convertible with the top down, this year’s maybe. The other two cars, I figure they
belong
there, see?”

“Belong where?”

“At this house I’m telling you about. The Lincoln was on the lawn over to the side. Listen, I’m just passing through and I don’t want to get involved in anything. When I get a little buzz on, I got to walk to clear my head, okay? So I went over and found some damn back street. I looked at the street sign later. Clematis Street, or Drive, I think. Yeah, it was Drive. I parked and started walking. You know, you walk around a couple of blocks, you feel better in the morning. Right?”

“Mister, will you get to it?”

“What do you think I’m doing? It was hours ago. Maybe around three sometime. I didn’t check close. Okay from this house comes this sound of a broad screaming. Honest to God, my blood runs cold. I’m right in front of the house. Then I hear a kind of sharp crack, not like a shot but sort of like a shot, and the scream stopped like her throat got cut. Maybe the crack was her old man giving it to her across the chops. What I did, I turned around and headed back to my car, and I made a mental note of the license number. You can tell the house because of the other two cars, one is a little light color Mercedes and the other is a tan Plymouth. Tan or gray. So maybe you should check it, I don’t know. I just got a feeling about it somehow.”

“And can you give me your name?”

“John Doe, Joe Citizen, Jesus, Sergeant, I just don’t want to get mixed up in anything. I don’t know the house number. I couldn’t see it. But it’s not what you’d call a mile long, that street.”