Solomon's Vineyard (16 page)

“They turn their cash into big bills,” the Princess said, “and give
it up along with everything else when they come in.”

She began to sort out bills worth a hundred dollars or more. I helped
her, digging my hands deep down in the money. There was a lot of gold
there, but we didn't touch it. The bills crackled as we sorted them. We
worked for a long time. Once I thought I heard a noise. Our shadows
seemed to shiver as we listened.

“You're just spooked,” the Princess said scornfully.

We counted what we'd taken. There were twenty-five thousand-dollar
bills, thirty six-hundred-dollar bills, twenty-four two-hundred-dollar
bills, and sixty-three one-hundred dollar bills.

“How much?”

I said it came to fifty-four thousand, one hundred dollars. The
Princess started to pick up the money.

“Wait a minute.”

“I'll just carry it.”

“No, you won't,” I said.

I gave her twenty-seven thousand and tossed the extra hundred back in
the drawer. I put the rest in my pocket. It made quite a wad of money.
“Let's get the hell out of here,” I said.

“All right.”

We went out the door. The guard was still lying on the floor. I could
just see him by the broken chair. I blew out the two candles on the
candelabra, and put it in the vault. Then I fastened the padlock. I
turned around, and suddenly I noticed something queer about the guard.
He was lying in a strange sprawled-out way. I went over to him. There
was blood all around his head, and a deep wound on his temple.
Something had almost crushed his head in, a stone or an iron bar.
Something heavy.

The Princess stared at me.

“He's dead!” I said.

“Is he?”

“I don't sec ... did you kill him?”

“Oh, no.”

I held the candle over my head. In a corner of the room I saw a pile
of bricks. There were twenty or thirty bricks, left over from building
the temple. I went over and found one with blood on it.

“You lousy bitch,” I said.

“All right,” she said.

“You'll get us hung for this.”

“Don't be dumb.”'

“You may like hanging,” I said.

“Nobody's going to hang,” she said.

I was scared as hell. “We've got to get out of here.” I started for
the outside door.

“Wait.” She grabbed my arm. “We can make it look like an accident.”

“Don't be a damn fool. The cops'll see through anything we can do.”

“There aren't going to be any cops.”

She began to talk fast, in a low voice that was almost a whisper:
“You fool, the Vineyard will never call the cops. Not even if the
Elders think it was murder. They don't like cops.”

I thought this over. “How are we going to make it look like an
accident?”

She took the candle from me and held it high above her head. I saw
the brick walls, with no plaster on them, and the unfinished ceiling.
“See those bricks?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose some of them fell on him while he was sitting there?”

“They'd bust him good, all right.”

“Well...?”

I said: “But the bricks are still in the wall.”

“We have to make them fall.”

“It'll take a pick.”

“Come on.”

I knew I was a fool to follow her, but I was stuck. I was an
accessory before the fact. That would carry a first-degree rap. I might
as well be one after the fact, too. I couldn't do any worse.

She blew out the candle at the door. I felt surprised everything was
so peaceful outside. The moonlight was still bright, and there was a
breeze blowing from the east. We went from the shadow of the temple to
a line of thick bushes. We went past a small pool with water lilies
growing in it. The moon was like a smear of silver on the water and
some of the lilies were open. They were white. I heard a mousy squeak
and saw a couple of bats above the pool. The bats were feeding on night
insects.

I followed the Princess up a hill and into a clump of trees. The
grass was as soft and thick as a bathmat here, and it was dry. I guess
the trees had kept it from the dew. It was very dark under the trees. I
banged a toe against something hard and looked down and saw I'd hit a
tombstone. We were walking in a graveyard! I saw other tombstones, and
felt with my feet the raised sod over the graves. The Princess went to
the left, to an open grave. It had been freshly dug, and the shovels
and the picks of the gravediggers were still by the side. The Princess
picked up one of the picks and gave it to me.

I took it, looking at the open grave. There was something funny about
it. Suddenly I knew what it was. It already had a stone. That was
strange. I never heard of them putting up the stone until afterwards. I
bent over and read the inscription by the light of the moon. It said:

PENELOPE GRAYSON

(1917-1940)

Her Soul Rests With the Lord It was a little bit like seeing your own
name on a tombstone. It was also a hell of a lot like a very bad
nightmare. I blinked at the stone, and then I dropped the pick and
grabbed the Princess's arm.

“Is she dead?”

“What do you care?”

“I asked you if she was dead?”

“Not so loud.”

“Answer me, or I'll break your goddam neck.”

She tried to get loose, and I shook her. She cried out with pain. I
shook her again.

“She's not dead,” she said.

“Then what's this for?”

“Let me go.”

I shook her, my fingers digging into the muscles of her arm. She
said: “It's for her after the Ceremony of the Bride.”

“They die?”

“Yes.” She slipped out of my hands and pointed at some graves by the
open one. “Look.”

I looked at the stones. Anette Nordstrom (1911-1939); Grace Robins
(1913-1938); Tabitha Peck (1920-1937), and Mary Jane Bronson
(1910-1936). All young, and all dying in order: 1936, '37, '38, '39,
and now '40. I looked again at Tabitha Peck. The poor kid was only
seventeen. That was a funny name, Tabitha.

“Now you know all about it,” the Princess said. “Come on.

I got the pick. We went back to the temple. She lit the candle. He
was lying just where we'd left him. I started to work on the wall,
making as little noise as possible. The bricks came out easily.

I'd made quite a hole in the wall and the ceiling by the time my
hands began to hurt. I rested for a minute. I was sweating hard. I
wiped my face on the sleeve of my blouse. The Princess was standing by
the vault door, holding the candle.

“Don't you think that's enough?” she asked. “We got to make a big
pile,” I said.

I rested a while, and then I picked up the pick. It felt slippery in
my hands. The Princess held up the candle. I saw something glitter in
the corner. I went over and picked it up. It was some kind of a metal
disk.

“What are you doing?”

“I thought I saw something.”

“What?”

“A coin or something.” I put the disk in my pocket. “It was just a
piece of chipped brick.”

“Oh.”

I went to work on the wall again.

From the door I looked back at him. I'd brought down so much stuff he
was hardly visible. All I could see was a shoe. He was lying on the
wrecked chair, just as if he'd been sitting there when the wall fell.
There were bricks and plaster all over him, and all over that side of
the cellar. It looked as though there'd been an earthquake. It wouldn't
fool anyone with any sense, I thought, but it might fool the Brothers.
Particularly if they wanted to be fooled. I thought they would be,
since the door of the treasure vault was still closed, apparently just
as it had always been.

The Princess was standing by the body, holding the candle for me to
get to the door. The light made her hair look like spun gold, as they
say. I lit a match and she put out the candle and threw it by the body,
like we agreed. She walked towards me, coming straight for the burning
match. I smelled her when she got to the door, and I began to feel
excited. We went outside.

I took the pick back to the hill with the graves, wiped the handle
with my blouse, and dropped it by one of the shovels. The open grave
looked black and mysterious. The moonlight was coming at such an angle
the light didn't reach the bottom. It could have been twenty feet deep.
The Princess waited for me at the corner of the temple. We walked back
to the women's building, keeping in the shadows.

The moonlight was still pouring into her bedroom, making the bed look
big and white. I washed my hands and found the bottle of brandy and had
a long drink. It was funny, but I could hardly feel the stuff. I waited
a minute, and then I had another drink. My throat felt numb.

She had taken off her robe and got in bed. I sat in a chair and had
another drink. I felt her watching me. I had been sweating, and I kept
on sweating. I wasn't used to working with a pick. I sat for
a
long time, drinking and sweating. I took off my blouse. The air felt
good on my bare skin.

“Honey,” she whispered; “what's the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Come over here with me.”

“No.”

I had another drink. Then she said: “I'm sorry I killed him.”

“This is a hell of a time to be sorry.”

“I got frightened, thinking what would happen when he told the
Elders. They'd have caught us sure.”

“Maybe.”

“Oh, yes. We're really better off with him dead.”

Her voice was throaty like she had a cold. It made me feel queer. I
could see her body under the silk sheet. She hadn't put anything on. I
saw the mound her breasts made under the silk, and her hair on the
pillow, yellow even in the moonlight.

She whispered: “Honey.”

“What?”

“Are you afraid of me?”

“No.”

“Then come over. You have to sleep.”

I went over, but we didn't sleep.

IN THE MORNING I caught a street-car into town. The motor-A man
stared at me, but he didn't say anything. It was nine o clock and the
sun was high in a blue sky. I got off at the square and walked to the
Arkady. I had the blouse and pants I'd used during the night wrapped in
paper, and in the clothes was the dough.

I went up to my room and dumped the money out on the bed. It made
quite a heap. Twenty-seven grand! That was more dough than I'd ever
seen at one time in my life. I got my knife and made a slit in the
under side of the mattress on the spare bed. It was a lousy
hiding-place, but it would do for
a
while. I stuffed twenty
thousand dollars through the slit and smoothed out the bed. The rest I
put in my pants for pin money.

I pulled the disk I'd found in the temple out of my pocket. It was an
American Legion identification tag. It said
Post 23, St Louis.
Below that was a number, 8,834. I wrote out a wire to Legion
headquarters in St Louis, asking for the name and address of the
Legionnaire with that number. I gave the wire to Charles, the Negro, to
send. He rolled his eyes when I told him to keep the change from a
ten-dollar bill. Jesus! I felt rich.

At the same time I was plenty scared. I sat on the bed and thought
what a jam I was in. It was bad from every angle. I stood at the head
of the line for a murder rap, to say nothing of grand larceny, and
housebreaking. There were a few other things, too. A very tough
gangster was trying to make up his mind whether or not to kill me. My
partner had been murdered and I wasn't doing anything about it. I had
taken six grand from a client without a chance in hell of doing what I
had told him I would do.

I
did
have to get that girl out of the Vineyard. Even if it
was only long enough for her to miss the ceremony that was due in two
nights now. I thought; it all
must
be phony. It was a human
sacrifice; the kind of thing you read about happening in Africa and
didn't believe. And here it was in a dopey town almost in the centre of
the United States. Things like that didn't happen! Like hell, they
didn't! I thought of the Halls-Mills case, the Wyncoop case in Chicago,
the case of the two women tourists murdered on the Arizona desert. They
happened.

I wondered how the Brides were killed, and who killed them. I
wondered if they were slaughtered on Solomon's casket. One of them had
been named Tabitha. That was a funny name. The poor kid! Only
seventeen!

I looked at my watch. It was ten o'clock. I had a lot to do, only I
was pooped. I lay back on the bed and pushed off my shoes. I thought I
would nap for an hour.

At one o'clock the phone rang. It was Carmel's brother. He said she
was going to be buried at eleven o'clock the next morning at Temple. He
seemed to take it for granted I would be there.

“Ginger said she'd come, too.”

“Fine,” I said. “Have you got a minister?”

“Not yet.”

“Get one. I'll pay for him.”

“Thanks, Mr. Craven.”

I hung up, and then I called down for Charles. I wrapped the bracelet
in a newspaper and gave it to him. I told him to take it to Ginger.

“Ask her if she'd like to drive me to a funeral tomorrow.”

He thought that was a joke.

“No,” I said. “Ask her.”

It didn't seem like I'd slept at all, so I lay back on the bed again.

The phone rang at three-fifteen. “Western Union,” a man said. “For
Karl Craven.”

“Okay, Western Union.”

“Legionnaire 8,834, is Oscar K. Johnson, 4582 Waverly Street, St
Louis. Do you want me to repeat it?”

“No, I got it.”

When the phone rang again it was six o'clock. McGee's nasal voice
came over the wire. “I want to see you, Craven.”

“I'm in bed.”

“You'll have to get up. It's very important.”

“All right. Are you at your office?”

“Yes. I'll wait for you.”

There was a click at the other end. I wondered what had happened. I
went to the bathroom and washed my face, and then I got dressed. The
phone rang again.

The Princess said: “Hello, honey.”