The Bitch (13 page)

Morrell drove fast. Nobody spoke for some time. We came onto the main highway and moved through the night with the engine close to wide open, behind the winking red tail-light of the Lincoln up ahead. The rain lessened as we drove, but it was coming down steadily and it looked as if it would rain all night.

The sleep seemed to have done me little good. I was in the midst of a confused exhaustion. In the back of my mind, I knew Janet would contact me somehow, but if I could only know that she was all right.

And then something else struck me. There was that chance that Morrell had found Janet and the money. Maybe he was taking me someplace, planning something for me, only because of the death of Alex Morrell, his brother. I didn’t like to think that way, but I knew I had to face every possibility.

It was sweet—all the way.

I wanted to find Janet—I had to find her. And how could I do anything now that I was in Morrell’s hands? Trying to get away from him now would be next to impossible. I knew that, and yet I couldn’t keep my mind from scheming every angle, and failing dismally at each. I thought of leaping from the car.

And how they would turn around, come back and pick up my broken body.

I thought of trying to jump Stewart and maybe get his gun—it would take Morrell a little time to stop the car. Only I knew it wouldn’t work.

I thought of lots of ways. None of them were any good.

Morrell’s voice was quiet and contained.

“Morgan, it can go hard with you now. You got away from us once. That won’t happen again. You see, I know you know where that money is. Your denying it doesn’t help. Anything to say?”

I didn’t answer him.

“We’re going to find out this time,” Morrell said. “My God, why do you make us do this?”

“I’m not making you do anything.”

“Did you mention my name to your brother, Morgan?”

“No.”

“The story’s in the papers. Did you know that? All about everything. Your wisest move would be to run—only why haven’t you run?”

I didn’t answer that, either.

“Where’s your wife, Morgan?”

I listened carefully to his voice. It didn’t tell me anything. And I wasn’t going to tell them anything, either. If they did have Janet someplace, then that was that. If somebody else had her, or if she was on her own, then they didn’t know about her—and that, too, was that.

I couldn’t forget the possibility that Morrell might have found Janet and the money and was only doing this because of his brother.

“I hate to keep harping,” Morrell said.

“Look,” I said. “It’s true. I had the money. I looked at it—took it out of the money-bag. It looks beautiful. It’s a hell of a lot of dough. But I put it back in the bag and I left the bag someplace. Now, I’m telling you the truth. I’m not going to tell you where I left it, because it no longer matters. But when I came back for it, it was gone. So I’m in the same boat you are.”

“You believe that, Stewart?” Morrell asked.

“I don’t believe anything this guy says. It’s only natural he’d keep on trying to cover. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Morrell said. “I really don’t know. It’s a lot of money, true—but he has imagination, hasn’t he?”

Stewart did not laugh. The car was very silent save for the sound of the racing engine.

“What’ll we do?” Stewart said.

“Well,” Morrell said. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that, and it’s a problem. You guys aren’t any match for Morgan—not even the state he’s in right now.”

“He got in a lucky punch—using that damned broom, like I told you. I slipped and cracked my head on the floor. I’m a match for Morgan alone—any day.”

“You talk real tough,” Morrell said. “But you’re not so tough. None of us are. This isn’t our racket. Of course, we can get tough. But I don’t want to kill him—I just want to make him talk.”

“I can think of some good ways,” Stewart said.

“Bet you can.”

I looked out the side window of the car at the rushing night and the rain. They were trying to work the psychological gimmick on me now, trying to scare me, and it was no use. The scare part of me was worn out from overuse—they should have reckoned about that. I just didn’t want to get killed. And that was a laugh. It struck me really funny, that did. Because it was the paramount thing in my mind—to reach Janet before I died, and somehow—anyhow—explain to her about everything.

Explain.

What was there left to explain?

And that was a laugh, too.

“You thinking about things, Morgan?”

“Yeah.”

• • •

On the Gulf beaches beyond Clearwater, they drew up and parked with their front wheels nosing the hard-packed sand. You could smell the salt and hear the water coming in out there. Far out a beacon blinked and blinked through the steadied fall of crystal rain. Windy Australian pines tossed behind us at the ground line above the beaches, and the air was colder here.

The two cars were parked close together and nobody had spoken for about a half an hour. I had asked a couple questions of Morrell, but they were pulling the silent treatment.

Then I thought how I had to take the chance about it being just the money. We were sitting there, not talking. I hit the door handle hard and went out running.

Bill came out of the Lincoln at a dead run. I dodged him.

“Stop him,” Morrell said, not loudly.

I started down the beach.

Morrell gunned the Olds out across the sands and the headlights glared brightly all around me. I started to turn toward the line of pines and then realized how useless it all was.

I quit running and turned and faced the oncoming car.

He stopped the Olds lightly.

Bill was bringing the Lincoln up behind the Olds.

Morrell got out and walked over to me. Stewart was with him and Bill stood by the Lincoln, looking out over the water.

“We wanted to see if you’d do that,” Morrell said. “Now everybody knows how everybody feels about everything.”

I waited.

“Get the rope,” Morrell said. “Bill!”

Bill went up to the Olds and got the key out of the ignition and went back and opened the trunk. He was whistling softly to himself.

“Well?” Morrell said, looking at me, standing there in the bright wash of lights from the Olds. “Got anything to say?”

I looked out across the water.

“Morgan?”

The beacon was flashing out there. The gentle rains fell down and down, freckling the surface of the slow, oily, black Gulf. The water palmed the beachline, rustling like leaves, then receding, then coming up again, pushing a small thin line of white foam along with it. High up in the pines along the groundline the wind drew fitfully, but none of the wind was on the water.

“Morgan?”

I heard Bill walk up to Morrell and they were silent. I knew they were looking at me. The lights from the cars were very bright and white on the beach and the sands looked white in the night and the rain came down very gently, flowing out of the sky like soft silk. There was the strong urgent need for something other than this emptiness I faced. Because I wasn’t going to tell them, not if they did kill me. I had made up my mind about that. If I told them Janet had that money, they would find her.

I knew they would find her.

It was hellishly hopeless. I tried to think of some way to lie my way out of this one, but there was no way.

There was only a great nothing.

I turned and looked at Morrell.

“I’m not going to tell you anything,” I said. “So it won’t do you any good—whatever fool thing you’ve planned.”

Morrell sucked a deep breath, glanced down, then up.

Bill held a coil of rope.

Stewart moved uneasily and looked out across the Gulf.

The wind drew through the pines.

“I wish you would,” Morrell said. “Morgan, listen to me—will you please listen? I’m as serious as I’ve ever been in my life. I’m never going to be this serious again. There’s all that money—I want it. It’s that simple. I’ve got to have it for a lot of reasons. It’s not just money to me—it’s maybe even you might say life. So you can understand that, can’t you?”

“Yes. I understand. But it’s no go.”

He cursed. He just stood there and cursed, working himself up to something he really didn’t want to do. He
was
just a guy. Only it didn’t do any good about that.

“All right,” Morrell said. “Tie his feet.”

Nobody moved.

“Tie his feet,” Morrell said softly.

I turned on Bill as he advanced. “Nobody’s tying anything,” I said.

Bill kept coming. I stepped toward him and I heard and saw Stewart move at me from the side and behind and his arm came out with his gun. I tried to stop him, get my arm up, but the trenchcoat stopped that and for one flash I thought of how Sam had been wearing this trenchcoat when I fought with him and he hadn’t any chance—then the gun slammed into my head.

I lay there on the sand and my feet were tied. I started to sit up. A foot came out and jammed at the side of my head, shoving me back flat.

I looked up. Morrell was looking down at me, the headlights glaring on his white suit.

“Well?” he said.

I didn’t speak.

He turned sharply away. I heard the car door slam and tried to sit up. I got to my knees, my feet tight together, bound with the rope. I saw the rope snaking out down toward the cars.

Morrell gunned the engine of the Olds and for a moment I thought he was going to run me down. He came nearly straight at me. Somehow I was on my feet, hopping with that rope around my ankles, frantically trying to get out of his way.

The Olds swept past me in an angry leap across the sands.

“Take it, then, Morgan!” Morrell yelled as he roared by behind the wheel.

Instantly I knew what they’d done. But it was too late for anything.

The fiendish slam of the shock knocked me flat on my back and there wasn’t even a second’s repose before I was sliding wildly off across the sands, gaining speed, the sand already hot, then burning through my clothes. I whirled around and around on the end of the strong towline attached to the rear bumper of the Olds. He kept gunning the engine faster and faster and I was blind and insane now, screaming with the crazy burning that scalded me from head to toe.

He seemed to be going maybe seventy or eighty when he began to swing the wheel. I fought with everything I had to sit up, because you fight for something at a time like that. I felt the horrible wrench and swoop as I swung in toward the groundline, saw the bank coming at me, then the line straightened and I began to go the other way, down toward the Gulf waters, every inch of me searing, my lungs and eyes filled with sand and he swung again and I whipped into the water at eighty or ninety miles an hour. All he’d had to do was swing the wheel a little, but I rode hard and wide and the water was like striking cement, skimming out across it, then yanked brutally back. Then nothing….

I came to again, still dragging on the sands. My arms were wrenched back over my head and first I was on my face, then my back, and I no longer cared whether I lived or died or anything as I vomited my life out across the sands and the rope began to jerk and snap at my legs, the sockets cracking, and then it stopped and it didn’t change a thing, it was the same as if I were spinning along and then there wasn’t anything at all again.

• • •

I heard a car door slam and tried to see, only I couldn’t see anything.

“He all right?” somebody said through a horrible roaring and roaring. “He all right?” And it seemed to echo and echo and I knew it was inside my head and that I was crazy. The voice went on and on, saying those same words over and over and gradually new words were added to the first. They boomed and roared in my head through awful sounds, gaining faster and faster on me.

“He all right?”

“All right all right all right?”

“He all right alive all right all right alive is he?”

“Give me a hand is he all right alive?”

“All right?”

“Is he dead?”

“Alive or dead?”

“Is he all right can you tell is he alive or dead?”

The echoes and the loud voices became louder and louder until I knew I screamed lying there on the sands, choking and burning. The voices went on and on in my head, and the scream was added to them, the loud pounding echoes, and then laughter was added, and more words, until inside my head words leaped and fought and howled amid screaming and laughter….

“Hahahahahahahahah is he all right is he alive? Give me a hand get him to talk he’s alive he’s all right shall hahahhahaha where’s that money Morgan Morgan Morgan come on sit up and is he all right hahahahaha Morgan Morgan …”

• • •

Far away I heard the faint screaming and the voices howling, very, very faraway as if they were in a canyon many miles from me, in the long, dark canyon of my head, where my head lay long and empty and dark and hollow with the booming back there.

• • •

Whispering, the laughter and screams.

• • •

Silence. The soft wash of water on the sands. Silence and emptiness and exhaustion and nothing and darkness.

My feet gently moved to and fro and up and down. And there was a great empty dark silence.

• • •

My feet moved up and down slowly and there was the soft washing of water on sands and my left arm rose and fell gently, up and down. I began to cough. Pain flashed through me and water rolled into my throat and I coughed again, spewing water and pain and sand into the darkness.

I tried to roll away from it. My whole body lifted and fell and I rolled quickly the other way and kept on rolling and then lay still. I began to feel rain coming down, like millions of pins pointing into my face, peppering me with cool pain and I just lay there in the very blessed silence with the darkness like a wet, hollow shroud.

• • •

There was nobody left in the world but me.

The farmhouse was empty.

I broke in.

I was clothed in strips of torn wet cloth.

I turned on lights—lights everywhere … and saw the man in the mirror.

He laughed at me—he screamed with laughter and then he began to cry and then he laughed again.

He went away.

I could hear him talking, but I could no longer see him.

I could hear him walking through the farmhouse behind me, always just a little behind me, his feet dragging on the rough boards, his footfalls echoing like drumbeats on a big bass drum—
boom—boom—boom
—he walked.

I knew it was me.

I knew the man was me but I kept hearing him.

• • •

Somebody yelled something. I rolled off the bed and fell to the floor and lay there. I listened, but it was quiet, the room was dim with dawn. I tried to get up, moving stiffly, coughing. I came to my feet and couldn’t remember where I was.

I walked on wooden floors.

I was in a house. I came into the kitchen and then I realized that I was dressed in overalls and a blue denim shirt. There was a large mirror on the kitchen door and I saw myself. My face was bloated and splotched with bruises, but there was no blood on me. I found the bathroom and found traces of blood in the tub and on a towel and my clothes, what was left of them, were piled in a wet stack on the bathroom floor.

I returned to the kitchen and called out. “Hello?”

Nobody answered but the echo.

It began to return to me, and I sat down on a chair by the kitchen table. They had left me out there because they either thought I had died, or gone insane. I guessed I had gone insane. For a time. I vaguely recalled walking through endless fields, along dirt roads. I had no idea where I was, except that I was in a house. My arms and legs moved gratingly and there was dull pain all through me. But I was alive and sane again.

There was a sheet of paper on the table, a paper made from tearing a brown grocery sack apart. Words were written on it. I read them.

I had also written my address along the bottom of the paper. I found a pencil and crossed out the repititious words and left the letter there.

Pick-up truck. It must be that I’d never made it.

I glanced once again at the window. It wasn’t getting any lighter out.

I wasn’t hungry.

What I had to do flooded through me and I just sat there staring at the top of the old kitchen table. There was an odor of stale coffee and food in the kitchen.

Janet.

There was only one thing that could save me now. The truth. I stood up, deciding to go to Zachary Halquist first and tell him the truth, because he deserved it first. Perhaps I could get his help somehow, and take the consequences.

I had to find Janet. There was nothing else to do.

• • •

The pick-up truck was in the garage. I crossed the ignition wires and got it started, backed out of the farmyard and started driving on a dirt road. It wasn’t long before I realized that it was night coming on, not morning. I’d been out for many hours.

Pretty soon I began to recognize the country. I headed for the main road and started toward home. It was dark as I drove the truck along U. S. 19 again, and all that had passed was a dark nightmare in my head.

I had lied to everybody and there was nothing left worth lying about now. I knew that it was all done, and that I was done along with it and then very gradually it kept coming to me more and more how I had to find Janet.

There was that and nothing else.

I pushed the truck as fast as it would go. I thought of a lot of things driving through the night like that. It frightened me to dwell on what had happened out there on the beach with Morrell and his two men. I wondered what it had been that had kept me alive?

• • •

“Tate!”

Thelma stood in the doorway. Quickly, she stepped outside and closed the door. She clung to the door, staring at me under the dim saffron glow from the porch light.

“I want to see your husband,” I said.

“No, Tate—don’t go in there. It would be all up with you—you know that. Where have you been? It’s been two days.”

“Two days?”

She nodded. “What’s happened to you?”

“Haven’t you talked with Morrell?”

She shook her head. She was wearing a black housecoat, the cloth shining softly in the porch light, gleaming in her thick ash-blonde hair. She looked just like she always looked, beautiful and composed. There was no fright in her now.

“You turned Morrell loose on me,” I said. “Why did you give him that letter?”

“I don’t know.” She pushed back against the door, looking first at me, then at the clothes I wore, then at my face again. She swallowed. She wanted to say more about how I looked but she didn’t dare. I knew my head and face were swollen badly and when I tried to grin at her, it was stiff-muscled and very sore. I could imagine what that grin must look like.

She swallowed again and turned her eyes away.

“You—you hadn’t better come in.”

“Why did you give Morrell that letter, Thelma?”

She did not answer.

“You’ve given up on getting the money?” I asked. She said nothing.

“You can’t quit, can you? Only now that I look the way I do, you don’t want me anymore. Right?”

She would not look at me. She turned quickly and opened the door, rushed inside. She tried to close the door, but I leaned against it. She fought, trying vainly to close the door.

“Go away, Tate! You can’t come in! I won’t let you!”

I shoved the door and she fell back.

“Where’s Zachary?”

“What do you want him for?”

“Where is he?”

“You can’t see him, Tate—I won’t let you see him.”

I turned on her there in the hall. I reached over and slammed the door shut, and it was like a gunshot. I looked into those lying eyes of hers and she began to back away from me. I stalked her. She backed until she was over against the wall and I thrust my face close to hers.

“I’m going to tell him the truth, Thelma,” I said.

Her mouth came open and her eyes widened and that was all. Her skin was smooth and very beautiful there in the light in the hallway.

There was no sound in the house. Then I heard him call from upstairs, his voice sounding distant and weak.

“Thelma? Who’s there?”

“He listens now,” she said.

“It’s about time, honey. And he’s going to listen to something else in just a minute. I’m going to tell him all about you. All about everything. But I want you to know something.”

“Yes?” She said it weakly, plastered back against the wall, like that, her red lips forming the word slowly.

“I’m not doing it to get back at you, or at anybody. I’m doing it because I have to. Just remember that. You’re involved and that’s the only reason. I don’t really hate you, Thelma—nobody could ever really hate you—except maybe him—up there.”

She tried to twist away, but I caught her arm and held her tightly. I turned her slowly until she faced me and she half-smiled up at me, but it was a weak attempt at something she had no heart for right then.

She was frightened now.

“Don’t, Tate,” she said. “Please don’t tell him.”

“Do you know where my wife is?” I said.

“No—no, I don’t know anything.”

I turned and started walking toward the stairs. She ran along beside me, pulling at my arm.

“Don’t tell him, Tate. Don’t you see? Then he’ll divorce me. He’ll have perfect grounds for divorce then—don’t you see? I won’t get anything—I won’t get anything at all from him if you tell him.”

I kept walking toward the stairs.

“Tate!” she whispered, her voice frightened and filled with anguish. “Listen Tate—I don’t care how you look. You’re hurt, is all. Johnny thought he killed you. But nobody can kill you. Listen, Tate—if you don’t tell him I’ll go away with you.”

I started up the stairs. She held to my arm, pulling at me. I yanked my arm free of her and she just stood there at the foot of the stairs.

“Don’t you hear me?” she said, whispering it. “Don’t you hear what I said?”

I kept on up the stairs. Then I turned and looked at her and she was huddled on the bottom step, watching me and there was a very curious look in her eyes.

Then slowly her eyes moved along the stairs and I followed where she was looking.

Zachary Halquist stood on the balcony overlooking the hall. He leaned with both hands on the railing, wearing his white pajamas, looking very neat, but a little drunk. He was watching her and nodding.

“I heard,” he said. “I heard what you said, Thelma.”

She collapsed on the stairs, her face in her arms.

I went on up and he had gone to his room. I went into his room and he was just getting into bed again. He did not so much as look at me until he was in bed and under his sheet. He reached across to the night table and picked up a tall glass with a glass straw in it. The glass looked as if it contained red port wine. He sipped once, then looked over at me.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat down in the same chair I had been sitting in the other day, just before everything started. He kept looking at me and then he looked away and took a sip of the wine.

“Have you been to a doctor?” he said.

“No.” I cleared my throat. “There’s something I’d like to tell you, Mr. Halquist.”

He nodded. “You should go to a doctor as soon as possible. You look pretty bad to me. I’m just a little drunk, you know? My doctor allows me a small glass of port every day. He knows I’m going to die anyway, and I know it. So I take a full bottle every now and then. Tonight is one of those nights when I feel I’m entitled to a full bottle, you see? Not just because you’re here—not really. Mostly because I have a thirst. That’s the real reason. Now, what was it, Morgan?”

I stared at him.

“The money?” he said. “What does money really mean to a dying man, Morgan? Tell me that?”

I just kept on staring.

“Of course, I want to hear your story. I was hoping I would hear it before I died—so go ahead.”

I told him. There was nothing to it. He sat there sipping his wine, listening. He nodded now and again, and that was all. Once he smiled. It was when I told him I was sorry about my part in hurting him. “And now I’ve got to find my wife,” I said. “Can you understand that?”

“Of course I can. You love her, don’t you? You’ve just discovered that fact.” He set his empty glass over on the table and looked at me again. “Of course you want to find her. I don’t blame you, Morgan.”

“And that’s all you have to say?”

“You’ve punished yourself enough for what you’ve done. And if I have any imagination, I believe you’re due for still more punishment.”

I stood up.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose you have to go.”

“Did you call the police?” I said, glancing toward the telephone, half hidden by a bottle of port wine on the table.

“No. I thought of it, naturally. But I didn’t do it. As I told you, I’m dying. I’d like to know how this all finishes. But I’d like to see it finish right—I don’t want to finish it myself.”

“I see.”

“I don’t really believe you do, Morgan. Not yet. But you will—in time—perhaps even tonight.”

“I really don’t have your money, Mr. Halquist.”

“I believe you. That I do believe.”

“Has my brother been to see you?” I asked.

He nodded. He did not speak.

“What did he have to say?”

“Probably you could figure that out for yourself. He said he was doing everything he could to stop you—he said there was the chance that you had left the country with the money and that we’d never hear of you again. He’s quite a man, your brother is.”

“Yes.”

“Belligerent type.”

“Yes.”

“Slow and methodical,” Halquist said. “Very slow and very methodical. A methodical man. Stolid. Very honest and truthful.”

“Yes. He’s all of those things.”

“True.”

Halquist was grinning. He kept watching me and smiling and grinning and he began to chuckle and suddenly I knew what he was chuckling about. I stood there watching him and it was like being shot.

He was laughing loudly. “You’ve guessed!” he said.

I couldn’t speak.

“You’ve got it!” he laughed, choking a little now. “You’ve hit on it, Morgan,” he said. “I figured it out yesterday. I’ve waited and waited. And now you’ve got it!”

I turned and left the room. He was choking back there—choking and coughing and laughing.

“You finally figured it out!” he shouted.

I ran down the stairs. Thelma had not moved. I went past her and on out the door into the night.