The Brat (4 page)

It was like being cracked over the head with a rock again and again and again—because she meant it.

• • •

“Don’t tell me it won’t work, Lee. You’re a fool not to take the chance. The money’s lying right there in the safe.” In the middle of the night, talking softly across the warm darkness. “Look at it this way: no matter what you do, they’ve got you. You didn’t want it this way, but it
is
this way. I’m sick of it, Lee. You owe thousands. This is the only way you’ll ever pay it off.”

She ignored everything I said. I was mad as hell. But she had her damned plan and was determined I’d go along.

“In a business like our office, a big business, one man’s entrusted with opening the safe. That’s Ray Jefferies. He spends lot of nights working overtime. When there’s a mistake in the accounts, no matter how small, I have to find the error. You remember when I’ve worked till midnight, even, Lee.”

Then she sat up on the bed, there in the dark, and told me. “I’m going to falsify an error. Ray’ll be there with me. I always handle the money. The safe is open. Ray goes out for coffee for us every time we work late, and he leaves me with the money. You can meet me. It’s that easy, Lee!”

She wouldn’t stop. We fought and argued all night long and she wouldn’t listen. The law meant nothing. She kept hammering and hammering for days, until one hot midnight I just said, “Yes, okay.”

A woman can do that to you. There were times when it seemed the solution. Then it
was
the solution. It had to be. It had become a small matter of action in our minds. We’d talked the edge off it. We couldn’t see the woods for the trees.

We set the date. I didn’t excuse myself.

• • •

“It’s all ready to go, Lee.” The thought of that money was tamped down inside her, like some kind of lingering explosion. The deep blue eyes were even bluer now, the small, full lower lip pouted, and the cheek and jaw turned in a touch of defiance you couldn’t miss. All that crazy, mixed-up thinking inside her that you could do nothing about, because there was the outside.

There was what she could do to me—any time—with a look, a gesture, a word. A lust I couldn’t quit. Then rich ash-blonde hair. The movements of her body. A sheened and elegant grace with touches of that awkwardness that could stun. The sly movements of hands and hips, the boldness, the intense, savage loving.

“Yes.”

She thought we were buying time to get away before the deadline, before they clamped down on me. She began planning in her mind for what could come later …

… And I began to know we could never do this.

We’d been a couple of fools. We weren’t going to do it. She had to understand that.

I called her for lunch that day.

There was something crazy wrong with the way she’d been acting. It was more than just talk of money. She moved and looked and laughed as if she had all the Law in the world praying at her knees, as if that money were already hers—not even ours—just hers.

How do you deal with that when it’s the woman you love and want more than anything in the world? What do you do when just the touch of her sends you nuts, when you know she’s smart, you know she understands right from wrong? Suddenly the shield is too thick and you can’t break through and she’s back there laughing at you, maybe—but you can’t say for sure.

What do you do, knowing she’s not psychopathic, that she
feels
and
feels
and
feels
, but that she just doesn’t give a good God damn …

I figured it would be a bad time when I told her.

It was worse than bad.

It was crazy.

She had on a tight ice-blue sheath dress, and she looked beautiful as hell. We sat there in the restaurant and I told her how the cops in this town were hot as hell on the pettiest of thefts, how we weren’t going to do it. I’d turn her in first. I told her to think of Jefferies. She’d be hunted for the rest of her life. It didn’t crack the nut—it didn’t touch her.

“Evis, for that much money they’ll hunt us forever. You think the Law will sit by while this happens? While we walk off with over a hundred thousand dollars?”

She spoke in a rapid whisper, leaning across the table, her fingers crumbling a slice of pumpernickel. “You like to sleep with me, honey. You like what I can do—you like that a lot. Maybe I’m your wife, but I can keep you knocking on my door. Can’t I?”

“Knock it off, Evis.”

“No. You’ll do what we planned. I want that money. I want it so bad it’s an itch. You think I’m playing games, you’re crazy.” Her mouth was wet and red, her eyes were dark. “It’s the end of the month. Two more days and that money won’t be there. It’ll be in the bank, and another month to wait—maybe six months—for a pile like that. Ray’s going out for coffee, and
you’re
going to come in and we’re going to clean that safe out. And we’re going away—tonight!”

The clatter of lunchtime eating was remote.

“I’m leaving a note,” she said, “saying you picked me up. That we had to leave. That I finished my work, found the error. And I will have. He’ll have no reason to check the money. The money box will be there, so why should he look inside? He won’t. He’s stupid. Nobody’ll be there tomorrow or Sunday. By Monday we’ll have vanished. The cops will know we did it—but it will be too late.”

“I’ll turn you in before I let it happen, Evis.”

“Like hell you will. Like hell—” She started to slide off her chair, then turned toward me. Her skirt was up over her round silken knees and a red-faced guy at the next table ogled her legs over a pastrami sandwich. She let him look.

She started to say something, then got up and stalked out of the place. It got jumbled then. I went after her. I had to pay the check. I saw her meet Ray Jefferies outside on the street. I called to her to wait. There was a sudden line-up at the cashier’s stall. I flung money into the girl’s lap and ran.

She waved at me, from Jefferies’ car, as he drove off into traffic.

• • •

I kept pouring the whisky down.

Sometime in the afternoon, I ran into Ed Fowler. He tried to get me to head for home and sober up. Said something about his heading for the West Coast. He kept asking me what was the matter.

“It’s the shop,” I said. “Don’t want to lose the shop. It’s got me down.”

“You’re lying in your teeth.”

I kept thinking how I was supposed to meet Evis at home for dinner. She’d said she would cook a big meal, so we wouldn’t have to worry about eating until later on.

“All right,” I said. “It’s not the shop. Something else. She fought alligators barehanded as a child.”

“Evis? What the hell you talking about?”

“She’s ashamed of fighting alligators barehanded. Running through the Spanish moss in her bare feet. Of eating fish. Swinging on the watermelon vines. All she ever wanted was to get out of that swamp.”

Ed kept staring at the wet wood of the bar. He had heavy brows, like a thick block of wood, and a nose that must have at some time been broken and reset off center. He was wearing an old blue sweater and white flannels.

“Like a disease, it was,” I said. “Like she was burning up with some kind of fever, and it would spread. Maybe it even spread to me. I don’t know. She had to get out of that swamp. But she’ll go back there, just to show them.”

“Show who what?”

“Her family, for Christ’s sake. Just show them, that’s all.”

He didn’t say anything and I shut up. Because that was the plan for tonight. She’d have to go back there. That was the one thing she had to do. Get the money and return to that God-damned misty place in the sun and just show them how rich she was. Then she’d be free. It wouldn’t matter any more.

Ed was gone.

The bar was dark, quiet, and I was talking fast and low with this tall blonde with the overabundant breasts who had miraculously appeared on the stool beside me. There were times when the blonde was Evis, except that Evis didn’t own a black dress with silver chains dangling. Evis didn’t own the make-up-hidden traces of a round black eye.

“Yeah,” she said, “that’s right, honey. Texarkana.”

“Well, all the way from Texarkana! What you doing here?”

She smiled with patience. “What in hell you think, honey?”

She went right on looking like Evis, turned on the stool and clamped her open knees against my thighs. There was that bold, almost sly and very professional look in her eyes as she put on the pressure and touched me with the backs of her fingers.

“Well?” she said.

Her lips were a blurred red promise.

“I’m getting a crick in my back,” she said. “Either say the word, or buy me a drink, or shove off.” She moved her knees against me. “My name’s Jean,” she went on, waiting and watching me with that good close look. “I’ve got a place to go.”

“Have you?”

She nodded. Her gaze knifed the barman between the eyes, then shot back at me, and she leaned over close. “Make up your mind, honey.”

“I’ll buy that drink.”

She shrugged, released the vise, and turned away. I bought the drink, then found myself wandering up Central Avenue. Moments later I opened the shop door and crawled up on the counter by the birthday card display. Mrs. Timothy and Art Salters had locked up and gone home for the night.

I kept fighting up out of sleep, finally made it, realizing I was supposed to be home. All the rest of it cropped in my mind now, bright and sharp.

And the hell of it was, Evis must have been killing Ray Jefferies right then, while I was two blocks away at the printing shop. Three explosions … the coffee containers flying from clawing hands …

T
HE COPS
had turned a couple of spotlights on the Braddock & Courtland Building. People began to appear from nowhere, sensing that something was up. I drove slowly until I reached a dark side street, then opened her up until I was on Ninth. I turned over toward the northwest section of town. There was no easy route out of the trouble. The Law was on it now. They probably already had names, were possibly at this moment checking on me, on Evis, on everyone connected with Braddock & Courtland.

It was me they wanted.

And I knew damned well, right there in the same part of my mind that didn’t want to believe, that she had done it purposely—framed me.

Christ, how she had wanted it.

Thoughts of that money and what could come afterward must have eaten at her like smoldering acid, chewed at her vitals, raged in her brain …

“We’ll get the money, Lee. Then we’ll just go.”

“Where?”

“Out of the country. South America. Isn’t that where they go? We can live there as well as here. Especially with the money. We’ll act fast. They’ll never get us. First we’ll go to my home, Lee. Then we’ll leave. We can fly. We can wait down home till everything cools off.”

“You talk like an old hand.”

“That’s the way I feel …”

And now there was murder.

She had deliberately set it up for me.

My wife….

I kept trying to force my mind around. Suppose both of those notes she’d left were on the up and up? Suppose she really had left with a headache? But what about the car?

No matter how I figured it, I was in the middle, put there by her. I caught myself working my hands on the steering wheel, flexing the rim, working with my shoulders, wanting to tear the God-damned thing out by the roots.

I stopped at a bar called The Sponge, out in the suburbs, and called home. Of course, I thought as the buzzing sounded, that was the way she’d work. She’d left that note at the house to lead me straight into it. God damn her! God damn her! I kept hearing her voice and remembering the feel of her body and what we had.

No answer. She’d gone ahead without me.

I turned the car and headed for Corey Causeway, driving toward the beaches, in nightmare now.

Ed Fowler lived out there. He was going to hear it now, all of it. I needed somebody to talk with, somebody who might come up with an idea. Someone who’d listen.

By now they probably had out an alarm for this car.

My nerves began to let go.

A
DIM LIGHT
glowed in one window of Ed Fowler’s cabin. The place was called The Old Sol Motel. It was a series of varnished-log guest houses, ranged in a broad semicircle around a shell-coated driveway. There were a few plumosas scraggled against the night sky. Ed’s cabin was the one nearest the beach.

I tried the door. It was locked.

“What you doing there?”

I looked around. A rangy fellow in overalls and a battered straw hat approached me out of the darkness. He quickened his pace, feet crunching on the shell as he neared. His eyes were boldly nasty below the flapping rim of straw and he was chewing gum, his jaws working steadily.

“Looking for Mr. Fowler.”

“Eh?”

“He’s a friend of mine. There’s a light in …”

“Get away from that door.”

I stepped back on the small cement stoop and looked at the man. He stopped about two yards away, cocked his head, and stared at me, still chewing. He shoved the straw hat back on his head, then rammed his hands into the breast-high pockets of his bibbed overalls.

“Get away from that door.”

“Sorry. I was just looking for Mr. Fowler.”

“Heard you the first time.”

“Well?”

“He ain’t home.”

He took another step toward me. “I said, he ain’t to home. Better get, now.”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know who you are, but …”

“I’m the owner here. Pearson’s my name.”

We watched each other and he chewed.

“We’re going to clean up in there,” Pearson said.

“Clean up?”

“I said Fowler ain’t to home. He’s gone.”

“I see. Well, then …”

“Right. Good night to you.”

He turned and looked at the convertible parked on the shell drive, spat close to one of the tires, and walked off. I started after him, then stopped.

“Mr. Pearson?”

He halted abruptly, turned. “What?”

“You sure he’s gone? I mean, for good?”

“Said something about California.”

He turned and walked off again. Across the drive, far at the end, a tub of a woman waddled toward him, her feet shuffling rapidly. She held a towel in her hands and kept tugging it across her front.

“What’s that, Henry?”

“Shut up,” Henry said.

“I want to know. What’s that?”

“I told you to shut your blamed mouth.”

She twisted the towel into a rope. “You can go to hell, you dirty old man.”

I moved over to the convertible and was sliding under the wheel when Henry Pearson paused and turned to look back at me. His wife stopped waddling. She wore a red polka dot dress that looked slept in.

“What’s
he
want?” she said.

“Shut your yap, woman,” Pearson said. “Now,” he said to me. “I told you to get. Don’t want drunks hanging around my place.”

I shut the door and drove off around the court, following the shell drive onto the highway. I drove down about two hundred yards, beyond Pete’s Package Store, until I came beneath a row of Australian pines.

Parking the car off the highway, I sat there a moment, gripping the steering wheel much too hard. My palms were sweating and my brain was empty. I thought about how the dust showed on the windshield as cars passed.

I could smell the salt much stronger now and it was pleasant. I looked off between the pines across the knee-high-grassed low dunes. Far out across the night water a red channel marker blinked monotonously.

Cars drifted past. Radios played. Music trailed across the dark.

I got out of the car, slammed the door, then reached back inside and switched off the lights and ignition and took the key. There wasn’t much traffic tonight.

I walked around the car, between the pines, down through the grass toward the beach. Sand was soft and oozing underfoot. It poured into my shoes. Sand spurs snagged at my legs and ankles. I kept taking long deep breaths and my chest felt hollow, tingling.

On the beach, I paused on hard-packed sand, leaned over and plucked sand spurs. I kept my mind closed. I moved in a kind of dream now. There was light here on the beach, reflected by the water. The sky was black and gray and blue and red, fading to the dark, unseen horizon. Ship’s lights showed far out. A mullet jumped close to shore. The sand spurs were hellish. I finally cleaned the cuffs of my trousers, my sock, then emptied my shoes of sand. I froze my mind.

I looked back toward the road after I’d finished emptying my shoes, saw the black outline of the convertible above the bristling grass beyond the pines.

The lights were bright on the inner circle of The Old Sol Motel. There were no cars. It was off-season, and Pearson probably wouldn’t have many guests there. He probably didn’t deal with the quick-jump trade.

I paused behind the hump of shelved earth and grass. A short space of well-cared-for lawn stood between myself and the cabins.

A path laid with white duckboards led through the grass from the beach. Wooden chairs and two folding umbrellas were on the beach, the umbrellas rustling faintly in the slow wind.

I started up the duckboards. Pearson and his wife were arguing somewhere, their voices rising in the distance. Then that ceased. I saw Ed’s cabin and started toward it.

There was a small back stoop with a wooden railing. I went up on the stoop by the back door. A short length of clothesline sagged between the house and one of the porch-roof supports above the railing. A man’s swimming trunks, and a woman’s one-piece suit hung salt-stiff on the line, flapping gently.

Dim light from inside flashed against a drawn shade over the back-door window. I tried the door. It was locked. I stood there a moment looking at the woman’s bathing suit again. I had to go in there.

I stepped off the stoop into a bed of crisping flowers by the first window. It was wooden casement, open a finger’s breadth. I yanked and felt the lever catch on the sill clamp. I reached in and felt the screen.

I jammed my thumb through the screen, ripped it, reached through and lifted the lever so the window opened. With one foot on the edge of the stoop, knees on the outer window sill, I tore the hell out of the screen and went inside.

It was a bedroom. I went into the next room, the kitchen, with my stomach muscles aching and rigid. Yellow light poured from a doorway down the hall, between the kitchen and living room. It was the bathroom. Against the wall by the shower was an orange crate filled with magazines. On the floor in front of the crate was a ruled pad, written on, and a pencil stub. Looked as if Ed did much of his work here.

I couldn’t turn on any other lights without drawing Pearson over to see what was up.

There was the queer sensation of wanting to be here. I still kept my mind out there, away from it, concentrating on little things—doors, walls, floor, furniture.

A typewriter stand stood in the middle of the living room. It was Ed’s machine. He wouldn’t have left without it. The light was dim, but bright enough to make things out. I went back through the hall and kitchen into the bedroom, moving fast now.

The bed was unmade, the spread and sheet rumpled across the floor over the foot. Something was wadded in the center of the bed, mashed into a bulging heap. I reached toward it and my hand touched something smooth, silken. A pair of black lace pants. I dropped them and picked up the wadded cloth.

It unfolded in my hands. It was a dress.

Heart hammering now, I walked out into the kitchen and down to the bath, carrying the dress as if it were poison ivy. I leaned against the doorjamb and looked at the dress.

It was ice-blue. She’d been wearing it this noon when we had lunch.

I went out of my head.

Things in the bathroom told me, even her special toothpaste, the type of brush she used, ribbons she used in her hair—all uniquely Evis. Everywhere I looked there were signs of her.

I pounded through the house, dragging the dress behind me. I found a lot of things. She’d spent plenty of time out here with Ed Fowler. It twisted up through me. I remembered how they used to look at each other.
Now
I remembered. I’d been blind—a cockeyed fool.

Then I found her engagement and wedding ring lying on the bureau, twinkling—the rings I’d bought her.

Standing there in the dim bedroom, able to smell the perfume now, conscious of that and everything else … of what these walls had seen … of that note she’d left at the house, telling me to pick her up at eight-thirty, so I’d be in time to find murder and maybe with luck even be caught on the scene by the cops … and of all the hellish rest of it, too … I cursed her and tore that dress to shreds.

It was like tearing
us
apart. I had to demolish every last stitch of cloth, scattering what remained of the dream across the floor of the room where a ghost of her still moaned and writhed in ecstacy.

They were gone. The two of them.

He was sucked into it now. I wanted to laugh at the son-of-a-bitch, but I couldn’t. She was vicious. She was an animal. She’d done this to me. She’d ripped me apart ever since I’d known her.

I had to find her. I had to get away and stay away. My only chance was to find that crazy bitch and get the money back. Somehow. And I knew where she’d be—Christ, yes. There was only the one place she would go and even Fowler and all the God-damned gold in the world wouldn’t stop her….

They’d be laughing. Right now. Squirming together someplace on the dark highway, laughing. Poor Lee. Poor Sullivan. By now the cops probably have him. He’ll never talk his way out of it….

I grabbed the rings off the bureau and hurled them at the wall. They flashed and rattled around the room. I turned for the kitchen. The kitchen door slammed back against the wall and Pearson came charging in, his straw hat flapping.

“What’s this?”

I walked into the kitchen. He switched on the kitchen light, staring at me.

“Henry?” his wife called from outside.

“It’s all right,” I said. I must have looked plenty bad, because his face changed into a kind of wild eagerness. “I was supposed to meet Mr. Fowler here. Guess he got held up.”

He choked a little, unable to talk. He whirled at the door and shouted.

“Marjorie! You get to the office an’ call the police! Y’hear? Get a wag on, now. Tell ‘em to get right out here—I got ‘im, by the gods!”

He snatched a look at me, standing hard against the doorjamb.

“Got who?” I said.

“You know who, you son-of-a-bitch!”

I heard Marjorie thumping off around the side of the cabin, then across the driveway toward the office.

“Who?” I said again. “You’ve got something all wrong, Pearson.”

“Ain’t got nothing wrong. We caught you at last, didn’t we?”

He slowly sidled toward the open drawer by the kitchen sink. He probably was after a weapon, a knife maybe.

“Thieving son-of-a-bitch,” he said in a whisper. “You robbed your last place. We know who you are now—”

“There’s a mistake,” I said.

“No mistake! Every motel along here’s been hit. I been keepin’ an eye out for you, don’t worry. Never seen the likes—going to the front door, like you did.”

I had to get out of here. If his wife called the cops, it wouldn’t take them long to get here. There was a twenty-four-hour beach patrol, and they worked with radio.

I stepped toward him.

“Don’t you try it,” he said. He sure had a bold front.

“Believe what you want,” I said, “but answer a question. Did Fowler have many lady visitors?”

He stared at me.

“Answer me,” I said. “Or maybe when the cops get here they’ll only find you—all alone—and you won’t be able to tell them anything.”

I moved still closer to him and he was against the wall beside the sink, his eyes bright and wide under the straw brim of his hat. Time was running out.

“One,” he said. “Said she was his wife.”

“Oh.”

“Said they were visiting her folks in town. Only he couldn’t stand her folks, so he stayed out here. He was a writer. She’d stay with him once in a while. They swum a lot.”

“What’d she look like?”

He began to relax. But he didn’t forget about the drawer. He moved a scant inch toward it. You could read the eagerness in his eyes again.

“She was some looker. One of these blondies you see in the newsreels. Moved like a cat, she did.”

I heard Marjorie running across the shell driveway, heavily. “I called ‘em, Henry!” she shouted, from out there.

“I’m leaving,” I told Henry Pearson. “I don’t advise you to try and stop me.”

He let go a tiny sob and came at me head down. I hated to do it, but there was no other way. Then I wanted to do it. I let him come and swung. He caught my right fist with his left arm and swung at me, a roundhouse that struck my shoulder and bounced off. He didn’t have much. I grabbed the front of his overalls and pushed one into his chin with everything I had. His head cracked back and I hung onto the overalls and did it again. There was a lot of anger at everything behind the blow, and it took the spit out of Henry Pearson. He sank limply back against the wall, slid down, and sat on the floor, softly moaning.

I went on out the back door, as nervous as hell, and loaded with a wild urgency. Marjorie was at the corner of the house. I turned and ran at her, bulling at her—she went gallumphing off across the shell toward the office. I headed back across the springy turf of the lawn into the dunes, with the sand spurs snapping at me, toward the convertible under the pines.

• • •

I drove through St. Petersburg Beach like an antagonized beetle, without flushing a police cruiser. Then I look the causeway, wide open, heading back toward town.

They might not have out an alarm for the car. I had no way of telling. It all depended on who they got to first, who they questioned. One thing was certain—those notes had them after me.

It was as if my mind focused on her, beamed on her. And mixed up with all the hate, fused with it, was what she did to me—When I found her I’d have to be close to her again.

I had to get out of this section. Whether I ever found her, or not, I had to run. Sure, I thought. Try telling them Try explaining how you didn’t shoot Jefferies. You didn’t know anything about that. Or the money. Or anything.