The Bitch (9 page)

The closer we got to the laundry shed at the end of the trailer row where Morrell was staying, the madder I became. It was as if something was being pumped into me. Maybe it was just the old adrenalin, but it felt like a lot more than that. I knew what they planned, and there didn’t seem to be much chance for me. It made me plenty mad that a guy like Morrell could do these things. Not that I hadn’t known about things like this, but I’d never been mixed up in them this way before.

Morrell sauntered along behind Stewart, the man called Bill, and myself. Stewart was big, Bill was medium. Bill hadn’t spoken yet, but if I was any judge, he was the one to watch out for. I tried to size them up as we walked along, but they were just guys, one on either side of me, a little overly nonchalant about this “laundry shed” bit. Perhaps because Morrell carried a gun, not in his hand, but in a holster, and was behind us to do something about the fact of my chance running.

“Don’t switch on many lights,” Morrell said. “Think you can go the rest of the way yourselves?”

“Oh, for cripes’ sake, Johnny!” Stewart said.

“Too many goofings of late,” Morrell said.

I stopped and turned and just looked at Morrell. There was no moonlight now. But the stars were shining down through a broad opening in the clot of boughs overhead and I could see him plainly.

“You’re wrong if you think this is going to work,” I said. “Dead wrong.”

“That’s the chance I take,” he said. “I don’t mean to act wise, but if this doesn’t work, we’ll think of something else. You don’t have to go through with it, Morgan—you can tell me what I want to know and pull out right now. I got nothing against you but that. If anybody’s playing it wise, you are. I’m just a guy, trying to make a buck—like you—like anybody. This isn’t my regular trade, and I’m trying to pull it off the best I can. I’m telling you straight, so you’ll know. For instance, I own this trailer park. It’s a nice one, don’t you think? Anyway—it’s one of the best in the South—the entire South. It’s the largest, bar none—maybe the largest in the country. Now that’s nothing to sneeze at. You’ve seen about a twentieth of this park, Morgan. Maybe later on sometime you can come back and have a look around. But that’s not the point. The point is, I’m trying to stay as legitimate as I can and—”

I started to laugh.

“All right, have your chuckle. I can understand that, too. But don’t go running around thinking you’re going to implicate me in this business. I’m sorry about those men that got bumped. But as I see it, it’s one of the things you got to contend with in a game like this. It’s not my game. I don’t like it any better than you. Now you know. At the same time, I’m not going to goof all the way and lose that money. And remember—three men are no worse than two.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Go on,” Morrell said, turning to Stewart. “Damned if I can watch this. The whole thing’s out of hand and I don’t like it.”

Stewart grabbed my arm and whirled me around. We moved on through the shadowed darkness, past the last of the parked trailers in this row and on down across a gardenlike piece of ground to a large stucco building that was done in a modernistic Spanish style. It lay squat and silent in a puddle of seclusion, with cane palms sprouting high and beautiful in small, neat clumps along the sides. There was a strong odor of night-blooming jasmine.

“We don’t like this either,” Stewart said. “Just to let you know. It’s not our line, but we can do it—only we don’t like it.”

“You can say that again,” Bill said.

We moved down a short stretch of flagged walk and up into the entrance of the laundry shed. There was, among the scent of jasmine, a pervading and elusive odor of soap.

“The execution chamber,” I said.

“Not quite,” Bill said.

He shoved at a large wooden door and stepped into jet blackness. “Where’s the damned light?”

“To your left,” Stewart said, taking a step. I whirled and took a long stride toward running, putting everything I had into it. Stewart came around and caught me solid in the gut with his right fist, chopped with both hands on the back of my neck and I went down. I sat there a moment, stunned. It was hell, all right.

“He started already?” Bill said.

“Yeah. Come on, get up, Morgan—Jesus Christ.”

I got up and looked at him. He grabbed my arm and gave me a strong shove. Bill grabbed my other arm and started dragging me into the laundry shed. Some shed. I had to go along with it, there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to stop them. I tried, but my feet slid on damp cement, and then Bill let go of me and turned around and closed the door.

He had lighted one stretch of neon lights along the top of one side of the wall in this room. The odor of soap was stronger here.

They looked at me and we were all breathing a little hard. None of us was in too good condition. I turned my attention to Bill, because I hadn’t got a good look at him before.

He was medium, but really heavy in the shoulders, and he was younger and more eager than Stewart. Stewart was easier-going, you could read that. Bill, on the other hand, had a temper, and you could see that, too. He was taking care of the temper because he didn’t exactly go along with this business, but he would—he would.

He wore a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled twice on the forearms, and grey flannel trousers belted with a thin leather strap. He was a redhead, and that redheaded look was in his eyes, the way redheads sometimes get when they’re irritated.

This did not mean that he was any great shakes as a fighter—at the same time, it didn’t mean he
wasn’t.

“We can drop all this,” Stewart said. “If you’ll just use your head and tell him what he wants to know. Me, I kind of like you, Morgan. You got a lot of guts.”

Bill wasn’t talking, just looking at me and breathing.

The room was cement, the walls white-washed, the ceiling the same. Rows of wooden-shuttered windows were on one wall, the front wall. Along all three sides of the room away from the windows, were washing machines and laundry tubs, and that was all. Nothing else. A coiled hose lay in one corner and I saw a broom and a pail in another corner.

In the exact center of the room was a drain. The floor sloped toward the drain, and descending toward the drain along the cement floor were tiny grooves to help take care of splashed water.

“Well?” Stewart said.

“Nothing doing,” I said.

Bill jumped me. I had suspected it, read it in his eyes. He wanted to get it over with, and he’d been truthful, he didn’t like it—like hell he didn’t.

I swung with all my might at his throat and caught him. It was maybe the neatest blow I’d ever landed in my life. It put him out of the picture for a few seconds, right there and then. I turned on Stewart, and he swung and I swung. I sat down hard on the cement and Stewart kicked at my head. I grabbed for his foot, caught it, and wrenched hard. It was something, the way he flipped and went down and his head hit the cement and he lay there. I came up fast and turned just as Bill came at me, still kind of strangling from the sock in the throat.

Everything inside me seemed to burst to the surface now and I just waited for him to come in. He came, hard, and I cut out at him. My fist caught his arm and he ducked and lashed at my gut. I caught his arm and started swinging him around. I knew this was my chance, if I could just nail him somehow. Stewart wasn’t doing anything—just lying there on the floor, one hand clawing a little at the cement. I thought how maybe I had smashed his head and let go of Bill. He stumbled and slid and started back at me.

I was pretty sure neither of them had a gun. They were earning their money the hard way, and they hadn’t expected anything like this. Neither had I.

“You killed him!” Bill said.

“Take it easy,” I said.

He paused for a second.

“Where will this get you?” I said.

He just kept looking at me.

“Come over here a minute,” I said, and walked past him.

I turned and he turned and I caught him full in the face with my right, and leaned with my left. The bone of my fist struck the bone of his head and it was like smacking rock. I kept hitting. He was trying to strike out, getting no place. I let him be and ran over to where I’d seen the broom and grabbed that and came back and he ran at me, cursing now.

He was really flipped. His eyes were as crazy as Gunnison’s had been. He dove at me and I let him have it with the broom handle, beating at his skull. He went to his knees and I kept right on smacking him till the handle broke.

He lay there, looking dimly up at me from the floor.

“All right,” I said.

I went over by Stewart. He was trying to sit up. He saw me and made a great effort and sprawled back on the floor again.

Bill was on one knee. He began to yell, calling to Morrell. I stepped over to him and place kicked at his jaw. His head snapped back and he was out.

Stewart began to yell. Not loudly at first, but with increasing strength. I headed for the laundry-shed door, got it open, slammed it shut and heard the inside latch click. Stewart’s voice wasn’t too loud yet, but it was getting there.

“Morrell!” he called. “Morrell!” Then he really yelled it.
“Johnny!”

I remembered the Chevvy and headed for that, cutting over another row of trailers, running like hell. I heard Stewart banging on the door of the laundry shed, and you could hear him yelling now, all right.

Looking over between the trailers, I saw a white suit flash by, running. It was Morrell.

I cut over behind him and ran for the lighted trailer.

• • •

In the Chevvy, I got it started and turned the wheel, pulling a U turn over between the row opposite Morrell’s trailer. I slammed against the side of an aluminum job, scraped the whole length of the car, and came out into the next row. I didn’t know which way to turn. I didn’t know whether they had another car here, but they must have had.

My head was aching, and my stomach was sick and sore. The side of my face burned, and for the first time I began to taste blood in my mouth. They had landed a few back there that I hadn’t even been aware of.

I didn’t know where to go, which way to turn. I tried heading back in the direction Thelma had driven in from and found nothing. The road turned away from the row of trailers, at right angles. I turned right and gunned the Chevvy. Shrouds of trees flicked by and I kept passing the far edges of parked trailer plots. I cut down a row to the right, went straight on through, really laying on the gas. I burst out onto another road and swung hard, sliding on thick grass.

Then I saw them. I was coming straight along a road behind the laundry shed. I saw the white suit and Morrell standing out there, and he knelt down and took aim and began firing at the car’s tires.

I whipped the car past him close and he leaped out of the way. Stewart ran toward the car and stopped with a foolish expression on his face as the headlights sliced across him. I saw Bill standing outside the laundry room, just watching.

Then they were in back of me. Morrell fired once more and I heard the slug ricochet off a trailer, and its wild whine sounded above the roar of the car’s engine.

I came past Morrell’s trailer again with a sick feeling that I’d never hit the right road, and then I remembered that Thelma had come up to the trailer from behind.

I turned left on the road when I reached it and a moment later saw the gate. It was still open. I drove through, came onto the street and started across town on Sixteenth toward home.

I figured they would try to follow me, and I had to move fast now.

They might not know where I went, but then again, they might figure right and head for my apartment.

Right then something came into my mind. I don’t know what made me think of it, but it was there and that was enough—plain. Sam talking on the phone when I was with him. And just like that, I knew damned well he hadn’t been talking with Lieutenant Schroeder at all.

Why would Schroeder call him again, just after he’d left the office? Sam had lied to me. Why would he lie?

For Janet. Janet had called him. I was certain she had. But why? If she told him about the money—but she wouldn’t—she wouldn’t do that to me. She had promised.
Only had she promised?

It had been her on the phone, all right. Only I was pretty sure she hadn’t told Sam about the money, because otherwise Morrell wouldn’t have heard that story about me from the police, through his department leak.

I glanced to the gas-gauge on the Chevvy, out of habit, and the bright silver needle was locked down on
EMPTY.

It was a shock. It meant valuable time. There was nothing I could do about it, because I still had a long way to go.

Turning into the first station I spotted that was lighted, I drew up to the pumps. It was an all-night Shell Station. The attendant was asleep in a chair inside the glass-enclosed office and he didn’t stir as I crossed the rubber lead and tripped the bell.

I tapped lightly on the horn and sat there.

He didn’t move.

I got out and ran inside.

“Service!” I called.

He hit the floor and staggered around, trying to get his eyes open. He lurched toward the door.

“Yes-sir!
Yes-sir!
Right there, all right,” he said.

I opened the apartment door and looked down at the dead stranger at my feet.

I had never seen him before. That didn’t mean anything, except that I was unable to connect him up with anybody at first. Then it came to me that he might be one of Morrell’s men, and I kept standing there looking at him with that same stupid feeling I’d had during the past hours.

“Janet?” I said.

I kept looking at the body of the man.

He was a carbon copy of Morrell, only a bit heavier. He had on a gray gabardine suit and the front of the jacket and trousers was sprinkled and splashed with dark bloodstains. He lay on his back, with his head toward the door, his eyes half-lidded—I should say, his eye. He only had one. The other wasn’t an eye anymore. It was a black hole where the slug had struck him, the right eye. I knew what the back of his head must look like. He lay in a thick pillow-like pool of his own blood. His mouth was open and a burned-out cigarette still hung on his lower lip. He’d got it fast, without expecting too much, although there was a gun in his hand, hanging by the guard to his index finger. He was crumpled backward over his feet, his legs and feet jammed up under him—and all that blood.

I don’t know how long I stood there like that, just looking, not feeling anything but this numb stupidness.

“Janet?” I heard myself say.

Then I came out of it.

I’d had the impression about the apartment. Now I was fully conscious of it. It was wrecked, literally and completely, and horribly. I’d never seen such absolute destruction.

“Janet!”

I went from room to room, looking for her and there was no sign of her anywhere; and then I was in the closet.

The trap door hung askew over the hole. The chair I had used before to stand on was in there. The clothes were torn off their hangers, piled on the floor.

I hit the chair and grabbed the trap, and hauled myself up there and of course, I knew right away that the money was gone. $200,000. Gone. Rock wool was everyplace.

I walked slowly across the beams and looked at the place where I’d hidden the sack. I looked down at bare plaster and lath. I knelt there and felt of it with both hands, and it was still bare plaster and rough lath and nothing else. Nothing at all.

I looked around, searching the gloom, and didn’t see anything. Then I remembered again and went over and dropped through the trap onto the chair.

Just to see it like that. It really got me. It hit me all the way through, down from the head, into my insides.

The chairs and the couch had been ripped open, the upholstery torn off, the cushions slashed with a knife.

“Janet,” I heard myself say again.

She hadn’t told Sam where the money was. She’d stuck here and something awful had happened. Something had happened to her. I knew it.

The rugs were ripped off the floors. The desk drawers were out, tipped here and there. I went into the bedroom, realizing it all now, but still in a kind of daze.

The bedroom was still worse.

I returned to the body and knelt down and went through pockets. The billfold said the dead man was Alex Morrell.
In case of accident, notify John Gregory Morrell.
It gave a home address in Sarasota, and two business addresses, one of which was Lazy Hours Trailer Park—where I’d just come from. This dead man was Johnny Morrell’s brother, which would not make Johnny very happy, I decided.

I glanced along the floor and saw another gun. It was a short-barreled .38. I went over and picked it up and read my initials carved into the butt, and ran my thumb along the notches that meant rattlesnakes I’d shot when folks called in and found them in their gardens. One big notch was a wild hog that had attacked a man out by Lake Seminole after it had eaten a good share of his father’s left leg. His father had been drunk and fallen asleep in the yard.

My harness was on the floor by the desk.

It began to come to me slowly. Like water running down an obstructed drain, like shooting a BB into the air and listening for it to land—not even knowing if it would, and being a little afraid you wouldn’t hear it and then damned certain you wouldn’t hear it. And then you did hear it.

The picture formed in my mind. Janet maybe had gone out someplace. Meanwhile this Alex Morrell had come in for a brief inspection, probably under orders. She had caught him and they argued. Somehow she got to the gun and shot him—killed him.

Fear caught her up. Or was it fear? This last part was the real BB, just ready to land, you see?

It landed.

She had taken off with that money on her own.

She’d always wanted a pile. She’d told me a hundred thousand times how wonderful it would be if we had a million dollars. It had been a crazy joke. She’d complained for a long time. All her life she’d had it easy with her family and then I had come along and put her into a great big nothingness, and now this. Oh, great, great, great—“I
just wanted to spur you on!”
She just wanted to spur me on, all right—until I did something like this so she could have her chance. And she had taken it. I could see her sitting here with that promise of waiting on her mind all the time, waiting for me to call, or come along—and I didn’t come. And it got worse and worse, waiting, and looking up there at the ceiling, thinking what was up there … and Janet was all too human.

Cut it out! I told myself. You’re going nuts!

I did. I went kind of crazy.

Then I thought how maybe I’d been right the first time. She had shot this guy and killed him and got scared and grabbed the money and ran. I had to be right. She just ran with the money, because that was the only thing she could think to do.

Only where did she run?

Then I thought of how there was the chance that Morrell might have followed me here—or at least come here on a guess. Because he surely had sent his brother here, and he must have expected word from him.

Why hadn’t he told me that?

I went straight out of my head.

I started at the side wall of the apartment by the door and began searching for something, anything, that might tell me where she’d gone. There had to be something.

Anything …

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

And my gun had killed Alex Morrell.

I was still toting the gun around in my hand. I quickly checked the chamber. Two shots were gone. I sniffed it. It stank.

I laid it on the desk and kept moving.

I covered that apartment. I looked everywhere and then I thought how if Janet had left, even in a hurry, she would want to take something with her. Find a woman who’ll leave her home without taking something—clothes, anything.

I looked in the bedroom closet and I saw this letter on the floor, or a sheet of paper and an envelope, anyway. It had been folded and then unfolded, not creased, just gently folded.

I turned away and started into the living room, working fast, and then I rushed back and picked up the paper.

It was a half-begun letter. The envelope was addressed. It was to Janet’s mother, where she lived up on the Tulatchee river, on U. S. 19.

I read what was written.

And that was all. It was written fast in Janet’s handwriting. Then I checked the date. Tuesday. Yesterday, today, whenever. I glanced at the window and while the sky seemed paler, it was still night.

But it was paler.

And standing on the roof of the building across the back alley, beyond the fence, was a cop. He stood up there outlined against the sky, and I ducked. I watched over the edge of the bed, reached for the wall switch and got the lights off. He was standing on the roof talking to someone and his back was this way, then he turned and walked to the edge of the roof and stood there looking at this apartment.

He’d just got there.

I stood up. He couldn’t see me now. I jammed the letter into my pocket and ran to the other window and looked out and down. Cops stood in the alley, two of them, conversing. I went into the living room and looked out there. A police cruiser was parked down in the street on that side.

The place was surrounded.

I went over to the desk and started to pick up my gun, when the apartment door opened.

“Put the gun down, Tate,” Sam said, stepping into the room. “Hurry up—put the gun down.”