The Bitch (4 page)

“Get back you damned fool!” I called softly. “It’s the phone.”

He put on brakes, staring at me. His face was a fish belly, the eyes absolutely insane.

I grabbed the phone. It was Sam. My heart rocked and climbed and slid back and climbed again. I leaned against the wall, all the way out of breath.

“How’s things?” Sam said. “I’m hitting the sack, just thought I’d phone in and check.”

“Now what the hell for?”

I kept holding my breathing down. If I’d relaxed, it would have gusted into the phone like an air-pump.

“Damn it, Tate,” Sam said. “You’ve got to get rid of that defensive attitude. I called because I figured maybe we could at least talk over the phone. It might take some of the edge off it, not seeing each other when we talked.”

Gunnison stood at the end of the hall by the anteroom, staring at me with those damned eyes of his. His hair was all over the place, black and wild.

“Tate?”

“Yeah, yeah. Lemme sleep, will you?” I said.

“All right, Tate. Good night.” He hung up with a real hard slam.

Gunnison turned without a word and walked slowly back to the office and went on in.

Sam had really hung that phone up.

The sound of the explosion wasn’t loud. You couldn’t have heard it on the street. Where I stood by the door, looking toward the front gate, it was a heavy, blundering thud with a lot of rattles. I went back there fast. The excitement had me now.

Gunnison staggered into the hall, coughing. He reeled around and leaned against the wall, coughing to beat the band. He doubled over and his eyes stuck right out of his head like bloody thumbs. I thought for a minute he was going to heave all over the floor. He turned and braced both hands up over his head on the wall and sagged his head and coughed and sucked air and his shoulders shook the way they do. Pretty soon he quit that and without looking at me, went reeling back into the office. There was quite a bit of smoke tumbling out of the office door, and I breathed that and right away I had tickles in my throat and started hacking, too.

I went in there.

“Got it,” Gunnison said. He stood over by the safe. The safe door was open and there was smoke in the room and that was the only difference. I didn’t know how he’d done it, but he wasn’t so bad after all. He slung a canvas sack on the floor by his feet and went over and opened a window just a crack. Then he came back and closed the safe door.

“When do they pay off?”

“Some time in the afternoon,” I said.

“There’s the chance they won’t spot it.”

“You’re out of your head.” I reached for the canvas sack and he laid his hand on my arm, looking into my eyes, and right then I heard the shot. Then another. They were really loud, but you couldn’t tell where they came from.

Gunnison grabbed the sack and started running.

‘Wait, you fool!”

He didn’t say a word. He hit the hall and I went after him. I was sick all through me. I knew we were caught, and I kept trying to think of something to say, to explain it, excuse all this. There wasn’t anything. I ran after him down the hall. He turned away from the front entrance, drawing a gun and running toward the rear.

“Not that way!” I yelled at him. I didn’t give a damn about whispering anymore. I thought of my slicker hanging by the door. I thought of his hat back there on the floor, and the blue and gray satchel with the tools in it, and the smoke. I ran by the table in the anteroom and I was half-down the hall when I remembered the gun on the table back there. I kept going.

“Gunnison!” I yelled.

The door down there was wide open and you could see the night and you could smell it. Everything was wild. Gunnison hit the door’s opening running like hell, stepping high, and went on through into the alley.

I half-stopped. I didn’t know what to do. Then all it was, was get away—get away. I ran after him.

As I came through the door, I saw him get it in the alley. He was cut down with three shots. He stopped running on the first and the other two took him someplace in the chest—you could tell by the way he jerked and dropped the money sack and grabbed at himself. He let out a hell of a yell.

I was still running. I tried to stop. Somebody fired at me and I hooked my foot on something and sprawled onto the alley floor. I slid on the wet bricks, staring back. I had fallen over the body of Hornell, lying just beyond the doorway in the alley.

I heard a siren whining not too far away, high and smooth—and then angry.

Feet pounded away out there in the street beyond the alley entrance and I heard a car gun off fast, a door slammed.

I stood up, trying to get my breath, and looked at Hornell. He was dead. I had tripped over him just as somebody shot at me. A dead man had saved my life.

It began to rain.

The sirens moaned to a halt at the far end of the alley, where the shots had come from. Doors slammed. I went over by Gunnison, moving in a sick kind of trance, and picked up the canvas money sack. Gunnison had rushed up against the wall and collapsed in a kneeling crouch, his head and shoulder pressed against the wall.

I stared stupidly at his body. It was like a statue. I could hear feet and voices at the far end of the alley, softly called orders out on the sidewalk, yet I couldn’t move. I could see where the rain puddled and mixed with Gunnison’s blood. A long string of already slightly coagulated blood purled down from his throat and met the ground, and it was as if this blood were a part of me.

“They’re not dead,” somebody said in a tight, frightened voice. “They can’t be dead.” It was a strange, horrified voice, but I recognized it with a slow shock. It was my own voice.

They were both dead. I hadn’t counted on death. Somehow death had never been a part of this to me, and now I saw the whole thing with me in the middle. I started to run.

I passed Hornell’s body, his face whitely gleaming in the rain, the rain splashing across his staring eyes. On the alley wall not far from the doorway to the plant, was a phone box. The receiver was dangling, swinging against the wall. Hornell must have called in the alarm.

Running, I looked back. Two cops were just entering the mouth of the alley. I got in close to the shadowed, rain-splashed wall and ran still harder. One of them shouted as I hit the sidewalk beyond the alley.

The canvas sack slapped against my legs, and suddenly I realized what I was doing. There was no turning back, and I couldn’t throw down the damned sack. What had happened had me blind. All I wanted to do was run, and I wanted the money.

I had to have the money. I had to keep it.

They were dead back there—both of them were dead: Two dead men, and I couldn’t get it out of my head—what it meant. What it was. Unreckoned with, and I suddenly realized I was sobbing. The money sack was like some huge block of lead banging against my knees, and I couldn’t let it go.

The alley I was in had a wing off to the right, downhill, the floor of dirt that right now was mud. I heard a police cruiser hit the alley I’d just left, engine churning, tires cutting into wet gravel. I was talking to myself, saying all kinds of things, cursing a lot. I couldn’t seem to stop that, either, running for where my car was parked.

I came out on the sidewalk. At the same time, I heard the cruiser hit the street in a wild tearing of rubber, across the other end of the block. I ran as hard as I could along the sidewalk, in against the front of an apartment building. There was nobody on the streets.

I crossed the street, and it seemed as if I were hemmed in by the angry searching sounds of sirens, like a madding rush of giant mosquitoes. From everywhere engines thrummed across the night.

I hit the street where the soft-drink plant was located again, and saw it down there two blocks. A police cruiser emerged from the opposite alley, coasted across the street and dipped into the alley by the plant.

The convertible looked a lonely, dripping thing, sitting there on the street.

It began to rain harder now.

• • •

They spotted me one block down from where I had parked. The sound of my engine starting must have warned them, because a cruiser shot out of the far street beyond the plant and nosed gleaming through the sudden, driving rain toward me. The siren rattled, then began to shrill, and the driver had it to the floor.

It was like a movie nightmare scene.

I took a fast left and the money sack rocked over against my leg. I hauled the convertible into the first alley on the left and set the accelerator to the floor. I was enclosed in a winding lane between high-roofed, windy-looking, wooden buildings. The lane dipped upward at a savage angle and the car struck loose boards across a rickety bridge and leaped off the far side. It dove downward. I stood up on the brakes and felt the brutal shocks as the car ripped through deep-shelved mud-sinks.

A spotlight swept across the end of the alley I was nearing, flickering against bricks that glistened in the rain. Another lane cut off to the right and I took this. It ran parallel with the stream I had crossed, but down a steep bank. To the left were the beginnings of the Negro tenement homes, rising like scattered shrouds against the haloed, raining night. Rain swept like a dragged curtain of broken glass, pounding against the convertible top.

The convertible burst out upon another dirt street and I cramped the wheels, sliding up across a grassy lawn. A dog leaped yelping out of the way and another car’s headlights swam blindingly in front of me. I cramped the wheel again, then straightened, figuring it was the cops.

It was a battered truck. Back on the road, I opened the car up again, the wheels slithering in rutted mud.

There was no place to go. All I could think of was those two bodies lying back there in the rain. The police would be hovering over them now, flashlights blinking, and by this time my name would have been spoken. Sam would have been warned. It was perfect.

Who had fired those shots and killed those men. And why? Whoever it was, the cops coming must have scared them away. They hadn’t had a chance to kill me, or get the money, if that’s what they were after. I had the police and maybe
them
to contend with. It was a bad thought.

I turned the car onto the main highway and set the gas pedal to the floor.

I had to hide the money.

But where?

I couldn’t think. It was like running frantically in front of a windstorm, knowing you had to stop, but being unable to stop. I didn’t know where to go.

There was a church up ahead on the corner, with a parking lane running up behind the building. I turned in there and drove up under a small shed and parked. It was a wooden-roofed room, cluttered with lawn-mowers and other grounds machinery—rakes, hoes, shovels. I cut the lights and sat there. Seeing the shovels made me think of burying the money. But I forgot it as quickly.

I could hear the sirens again.

My hands were frozen on the car wheel. I could feel the sloppy weight of the canvas money sack leaning against my leg. I flipped it across to the other side of the car, and sat there listening to my harsh breathing.

Christ, what was I going to do?

I knew I had to move. The entire area would be culled for this convertible in no time at all. A state wide alarm would be out. Road blocks would be set up. I didn’t know what to do. Where to go. My mind refused to come up with anything but the calm dredgings of death.

Somebody was walking down the lane behind the church.

I tried to see who it was. It was a man, a Negro, stooped behind a small wheelbarrow loaded with prunings from trees. He slopped along through the thin mud, rain dripping from a black hat. The streetlights shone gleaming on his black face. He looked toward the car. I ducked.

I waited.

The wheelbarrow ceased grinding in the mud. I could hear the steadied drip and fall of the rain. I kept absolutely still and there was no sound, nothing at all, but the rain, and the faraway call of the sirens. They were much fainter now.

He cleared his throat just above the car window.

I leaped back across the seat.

“That’s all right,” he said calmly. “I reckon you all got enough reason for setting there, ain’t you?”

I looked at him. The rain streamed around him. He wore a thick black raincoat, snapped high under his throat with heavy brass clasps. His teeth gleamed like carved soap.

“Ain’t you?” he said.

I still could not speak. There was a great patience in his face, the whites of his eyes showing in a bright flash as he looked off toward the rear of the church, then back at me.

“Why don’t you go home?” he said calmly, his voice deep and quiet. “What you running ‘round here for?”

“Nothing,” I said, too loudly. “Nothing. I was just sitting—out of the rain. The top leaks, you see?”

He did not so much as look at the top of the car.

“I reckon,” he said, standing there in the rain. “You hiding, ain’t you,” he said softly, stating it. “You running ‘way from something.”

I did not speak.

His great black hand clamped on edge of the door, glistening wet. The whites of his eyes flashed again.

“I was you,” he said. “I’d go on home. Running don’t get you no place—no place at all.”

His face was quite sober, watching me, the eyes blinking. He turned abruptly, sloshed back to the wheelbarrow. He hoisted the barrow handles and began trudging off along the lane, down toward the road.

I sat there a moment. Then I backed out of the lane, onto the road. The man was nowhere in sight. He had vanished.

I drove around past the front of the church and looked up across the lawn. I recalled it as a Negro church. The man must have been the caretaker, but what was he doing, wandering around at one in the morning? Where had he gone?

I didn’t know.

I did know he was right. I started for home. I took the back streets, and once I parked at a stoplight beside a police cruiser before I realized what I’d done. They didn’t seem to notice anything. As it drove on, I noticed that it was an out-of-town police car.

The idea was to hide the money in our apartment. I worked on that all the way home. It would be best that way. More and more now, thoughts of the money began to come to me: what it was I had in that sack. Two hundred and sixty-some thousand dollars. It kept seeming crazier and crazier to me. It was double the Halquist plant’s regular monthly payroll. Driving down the alley behind the apartment house, I kept bursting into laughter. It was not humorous. Because in my mind was a very real picture of those two dead men.

I knew I was running on fear. Fear in many different directions. I wondered if I was thinking clearly, and I couldn’t test myself in any way to find out.

They wouldn’t figure I would head for home. They’d have no idea where I was headed.

I parked the car on the opposite side of a fence across the alley from the apartment, beside a weathered aluminum trailer that had been there for some time. The convertible wasn’t easily seen.

Our rear windows could be seen from down here and they were dark. I knew I could leave the money down here someplace, but I didn’t want to. Something drove me to take it along up there. Something else told me I had to tell Janet about it now, only I knew I wouldn’t do that.

I got the money sack. It seemed heavier than before. I hurried across the alley and took the back stairs through the garage up to where we lived on the third floor.

I had already settled on the hall closet. Back in the right hand corner, where our winter clothes were racked. We never went back there for anything during the warmer months.

• • •

The apartment was dark. I let myself in as quietly as possible. It seemed as if everything inside of me had gone to mush. Once inside, I could hear Janet breathing from the bedroom. The steady rise and fall of sleep.

The instant I was inside, with the door closed, standing in the gray darkness of the living room, I knew I shouldn’t have come. I had the same feeling here as I’d had when that colored man had told me to come home. He had been right, and not right.

Then the laughter started again. It rumbled in my chest and I stood there trying to smother it. It burst behind my lips and my whole body shuddered. I couldn’t breathe. Finally the agony went away, and my eyes were wrung with tears.

I listened. There was no sound. Down on the street a car ticked past, and I listened for Janet’s breathing. It came te me across the rooms, slow and steady.

I went quickly, silently as possible, into the hall and carefully opened the closet door. The strong smell of woolen clothes and a faint odor of mothballs rose in the pitch darkness of the closet. I reached toward the right, dragging the money sack along the floor, pushing at the clothes, working as fast as I could. I was half in the closet, feeling something akin to success, when the living room overhead lights went on brilliantly.

“What are you doing, Tate?” Janet said sleepily.

I didn’t look at her. I just stood there. The sack was on the floor, half in the closet door. I lifted it and slung it back against the far right wall of the closet, then stepped out and closed the door. I looked at her then.

“What was that?” she said.

“What was what?”

“Don’t be silly. What are you doing home?”

“I just came home. Just got in.”

“I know that. What time is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did you put in the closet, Tate?”

“Boy, do you look sleepy.”

She blinked at me and yawned, her gaze on the closet door. She yawned terrifically, standing there in a white shorty nightgown with tiny blue frills around the throat and hem. She stood with one foot on the other, rubbing the sides of her face with her hands, then scratching into the thick, shoulder-length mass of auburn hair. When she ceased yawning, her eyes watered, but she was still staring at that damned closet door.

“Don’t tell me it’s morning already?”

“Sure,” I laid. “It’s morning. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

She stepped toward me, then stopped and grinned. Her eyes were a little sly, the way they sometimes get. Her eyes were a very dark, deep blue, with tiny spokes. They were very beautiful eyes, Janet’s eyes.

I wanted to lead her into some other room, but I didn’t because the minute I left the room, she’d run over to the closet and have a look. I cursed myself for a fool, for bringing the money-sack here. That didn’t help.

Fine panic drifted down through the walls. Slow-winged fright flapped through the apartment like a loathsome bird, its wings brushing lightly against my shoulders. For a brief moment, I was down—down as far as you can get.

Every single thing that was against me at this moment stood out clearly in my mind. Every blessed little thing.

And none of the feeling was really new. It was all old and stale and familiar. I’d been through it a hundred times. I’d made all the usual mistakes, and I was gradually ending up on the bottom of the pile. Just like always.

I began to laugh, looking straight at her. I couldn’t control it. It burst past my lips and I sank back against the closet door, breathless with this silent, sick laughter.

She stared at me.

“Tate, are you drunk?”

I quit that, sharply.

“No. I’m not drunk.”

I wanted to shout it all at her, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her a thing. I just stood there like a fool, looking at her, waiting for her to make her move. Waiting for her to speak—to say some of the sharp, biting, unkind things she always said when I fouled up. Because I had fouled up again.

Her eyes were brighter now. She was coming awake.

“I want to know what you put in that closet, Tate.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Tate.”

I held my teeth together tightly. The sides of my jaw began to ache, the muscles seemed to catch in there.

Janet looked at me, then walked across the room to the desk by the front window and picked up the small black leather traveller’s clock I’d bought her for the trip to Mexico that we never took. She checked the time and set the clock down without a sound.

Then she looked at me.

“Tate. Why are you home so early?”

I just shook my head. It damned near tore the heart out of me, the way she said it. Very quiet and tentative now. Like a little girl, all scared and not wanting to be scared. Praying inside her that nothing was wrong, but knowing something
was
wrong.

She knew something was wrong. We’d been through this very same act so many, many times before. It was old stuff.

She sat down heavily in the white oak chair by the desk. She sort of collapsed. Not outside, just inside—you could see her go, piece by little piece.

“What is it, Tate?” Her tone was resigned, but harder.

“Nothing,” I said.

What was there to say.

“What’s that thing you put in the closet? That got anything to do with why you’re home?”

“Oh, Janet—for cripes’ sake. Take it easy, will you?”

“That’s our song, isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t make myself move from in front of the closet door. It was like I was clamped there with steel bands. I felt as if I would fight for that damned closet. It swarmed all through me. Then it went out of me again as I recalled the two bodies lying in that rain-washed alley.

“Tate,” she said. “I know something’s wrong. You’ve done something again. I wish you’d just tell me what it is, so we can get it off our minds and go to sleep. I’m tired. I know something’s wrong, Tate. So you may as well tell me.” She sighed, not looking at me, fooling with the hem of her nightgown.

“It’s all right, Janet. I tell you it’s all right.”

It hadn’t been what I wanted to say.

I suddenly realized that I needed help of some kind. I couldn’t swing any of this alone. I had to see Morrell. I had to know about what happened, whether or not he had killed those men. If he had, or if some of his men had, I didn’t know what I was going to do.

Janet came across the room.

“What’s in the closet?”

I looked at her. I went over and sat in the chair by the desk and watched her open the closet door and haul the canvas sack out. I didn’t move, and right then for a time, I didn’t think about anything. I just watched her.

She stood there staring at the sack. It didn’t say anything on it. It was gray-blue. It had brass grips across the opening and it was tied together with something that looked like clothesline.

“Go ahead,” I heard myself say. “Open it.”

She glanced at me and wiped her nose with her finger, then looked down at the sack. She knelt beside it on the floor. I looked at her, not the money-sack. At the fine flowing lines of her body through the thin nightgown, the ripe curves I knew so very well. At the hair, and the shape of her face. The little quirk to her eyebrows that was quite natural, at the inquisitive lift to the corners of her lips. And I thought about all that was inside that head of hers, and all the love that she had held for me.

And I thought about how I wasn’t worth a nickle’s worth of that.

She fumbled with the rope, got it undone, and finally drew it through the brass catches.

It was like some horrible kind of slow motion. She wasn’t actually working slowly, but that’s the way it appeared to me. The way she looked. She couldn’t seem to just open the sack—she had to fumble and monkey around with the damned thing until it had me crazy. I kept trying to think what I was supposed to do now? How was I ever going to explain this to her.

She pulled at the top of the sack and it popped open. She spread the opening and looked down inside and on her face was that expression of small children peering into a Christmas stocking, getting ready to haul the next present out. Only it wasn’t going to be a present for Janet. Not the kind of person Janet was. That was for sure. She could stand shock about as well as thin glass smacked with a sledge.

She looked over at me. Her lips formed a round O.

She reached in with her hand and just let it stay that way.

She looked at me again, and her face began to smudge. It was a little like you might take your thumb and press it down on a piece of fudge. The chin drew up a little, crinkling, and something pretty awful came into her eyes. It was a kind of pain I’d never ever really seen there before.

It was all hell.

“Go ahead,” I said, my voice choked with it.

She kept staring at me. It began to get me crazier and crazier, because I had no idea what I was going to do with her now. Thick curving waves of rich auburn hair swung down across her cheek, and only one of her eyes stayed staring at me, all full of accusation and she still didn’t bring her hand out of the sack.

From outside, you could hear the rain beating in erratic wind-washed splashes against the windows, driving against the sides of the apartment building.

“Janet, for God’s sake!”

The telephone on the desk at my elbow began to ring.