Someone Is Bleeding (15 page)

And, despite all that, she had not changed.

And I knew later—not then because I could do nothing but stand there mutely—that Jim loved her. In a way that I and my sort of person cannot understand, much less appreciate. In the old way. The unquestioning way. Defying the traditions of society rather than losing it. Loving in a way that even allowed a man to kill for his love. Right out of the middle ages. Yet, something strangely and perversely noble there.

At least there seemed a sort of quiet unassuming nobility to Jim as he stood there by the silent Peggy. The frightened and weak Peggy who would never in her life be able to face the world without help even if she feared that help above all else.

“Just for the record,” Jim said to me, “I had both Albert and Dennis killed.
Both
. Do you hear me?”

I knew he hadn’t. He’d had Dennis killed. But Albert had died at another’s hands. The hands of a girl I had loved and who, even now, was my wife. But I was too dazed to think of that.

Jim turned to her then. His eyes were on her only and his mind and heart held her alone.

“Come away, my dear,” he said.

And led her out of my life forever.

The police came soon. I hadn’t left. They picked me up on a morals charge. Later they called Santa Monica and fortunately Jones was _still alive. He gave them the facts and they released me and started after Peggy and Jim. But they didn’t catch them.

And one day I saw Jones and he told me they’d caught the man who’d attacked Peggy at
Funland
.

“I don’t understand,” I said, “Albert . . .”

“Grady didn’t do it,” Jones said.

“But . . . the scratches,” I said, in a last confusion about my Peggy Ann, “She said she’d scratched the man who’d tried to rape her. And Albert’s face was covered with scratches.”

“That’s right,” he said, “they both were scratched.”

I looked at him a moment and then I lowered my head. And I whispered, “God help her.”

That’s about all. I finished my novel and sold it and made $I700 on it. I talked Audrey into going back to her family in Pennsylvania. I met some people and laughed again and pretended that everything was status quo again.

I read the papers.

Maybe you read the story, too. It was about a month ago. When they found Jim and Peggy in a Kansas City hotel room. And when they took away the thing that Peggy was fondling in her lap she said they mustn’t.

She said they had to let her keep his head because she loved the man.

THE END