The Deceivers (24 page)

“The girl from the office …”

“I know. She’s a tall blonde with the same swim suit and the same taste in perfume. Anyway, I walked on down the road and had some coffee in that diner down there, and then I walked a little farther and I spot my own car parked next to a gas station, back in the grass off the apron. I couldn’t figure that for a while until I realized there’s only parking space here for one car per unit. Just luck that I happened to see it. They’d just opened up, so I showed the kid my registration and said I was picking it up for the lady, and he was suspicious until he saw that my key worked all right in it, so I drove it out and parked it around behind the bean wagon well out of sight and walked back up here. What did you do with her, neighbor? Boost her out the back window? Maybe she’s hitchhiking home, eh?”

“I … I …”

“God damn it, Carl, why did you do it? Why did you
do
it?” Bucky got up and went and inspected the rear windows. Carl heard him in the bathroom, opening and closing the bathroom window. He came back and sat in the chair again. Carl had not stirred.

“So,” Bucky said in a dull tone, no longer smiling, “she couldn’t leave. So she’s here. And there’s only one damn place left that she could possibly be.”

Both men sat in the long and unbearable silence that was finally broken by the forlorn and muted sound of her sobbing. Bucky closed his eyes. “So damn clumsy,” he said
softly. “So stupid. Book matches in the house. Cars in plain sight. Stupid lies. Jesus God, and all you had to do was use your house or mine.”

“We couldn’t,” Carl said.

Cindy rolled out from under the bed, got up onto her hands and knees and then got to her feet. She sat on the other bed, her face in her hands, shoulders shaking.

“Bitch,” Bucky said with artificial calm. “Sneaking, filthy, cheap bitch.” And the calm broke and his face contorted and he began to weep.

“Bucky …” Carl said.

“Shut up! Why did you have to do it?”

“It isn’t the way you think it was. We … we were in love.”

Bucky stared at him, eyes wild and glaring. “Love? Love!” He stood up. “You’re going to call it love? Why you simple-minded son of a bitch. Love! You mean your wonderful brains were in tune or something? This hasn’t got anything to do with love, buddy. This is a motel, remember? And I’m married to her. And she was hiding under a bed. Jesus! Love you call it. How come a quick piece of motel tail gets to be called love? How can you kid yourself?”

He took one more step toward Carl. Carl saw a flash of motion, but before he had time to duck, Bucky’s thick right fist smashed against the left side of his face. He fell across the bed with such force that he was overbalanced. His legs swung up and he toppled onto the floor on the other side and lay with his cheek against the nap of the rug, a sick-sweet flooding in his mouth, feeling all at once stricken, shocked, faint and outraged. He had not been struck in anger in over twenty years. He lay in such a way that he could look under the bed he had fallen across, and see Cindy’s sandaled feet and slim ankles, neatly side by side.

He pushed himself up from the floor until he was on one knee, his forearm on the bed, head sagging. He had not known that a blow could sicken him so, could shock him so utterly.

He stood up and turned. Bucky stood there, grinning widely. “Love,” Bucky said. “Undying love.”

And again there was the flare of motion, and this time a great force caved in his right side and, almost immediately, he was hit on the left side of his face and mouth again. He fell back against the wall and rebounded forward onto his hands and knees and balanced there precariously, looking dully down at the heavy carmine drops that fell from his
face to the rug. He sat back on his heels and felt behind him for the wall and worked his way up to stand again on mile-high legs in a buzzing place.

“Tell me of love,” Bucky said, and his voice seemed to be in a cave, far away.

Carl tugged the flimsy strings of the puppet that was his body, and pulled his arms up and took a wooden step and swung a drifting paper fist at Bucky’s smile. And was hammered back against the wall and tried to come out again, tried to sail the slow white paper fists like a child’s crude toys at a red face that looked wide as a wash tub, at the piano smile. And was trundled back against the wall and somehow held there while in a faraway, drifting and unimportant world, painless blows broke his body and rang his head, and a woman screamed and screamed, and there was hammering at a door he had never known, and then he dived down through the fabric of a thousand circus hoops, the fabric gray at first when he was falling slowly, but deepening as his speed increased until all the fabric was black and he was falling so rapidly it was a roaring in his ears.…

In a shifting queasy darkness something bit evilly up into his nose and into his brain. He tried to push it away and muttered in irritation at the persistence, but at last had to open his eyes. It took him long stuporous moments to realize that he was on a bed, that one eye would not open, that the two hard-faced bored-looking men in uniform beyond the foot of the bed were state policemen.

“What’s the date, please,” a crisp voice on his left said. The eye on that side was the one that wouldn’t open. He rolled his head slowly. The speaker was a young man with a narrow olive face, eyes closely set, a great shaggy mustache, and a sports shirt patterned with palm trees. Beyond him stood the motel manager, an obelisk of massive indignation.

“Sunday. The … twenty-first of July.” His mouth felt as if it had been torn out and replaced upside down. His voice was gritty and bulbous.

“Name and address, please.”

“Carl Garrett. Ten Barrow Lane. In Crescent Ridge.” He saw one of the officers write in a pocket notebook, and it was that ominous action that brought back the memory of where he was, the memory of Bucky and Cindy. He tried to sit up and the mustachioed young man pushed him back gently.

The young man reached down on the floor somewhere and put a loop around his head, folded a mirror down in front of his eye, and shone a bright light into Carl’s eye. “Look directly at my eye,” he said. He took the apparatus off after a few moments.

“What’s the word, Doc?” one of the officers asked.

“I better take him on home and get some cranial plates and set that nose and stitch his mouth there.”

“He okay now for questions?”

“Try to make it fast, Al.”

“Sure thing. Who beat up on you, Garrett?” The notebook was poised and ready.

“I … I fell.”

“Sure. You fell and you couldn’t stop bouncing. Come off it, Garrett. Who was it?”

“I fell.”

“What do you do for a living, Garrett?”

“Assistant to the plant manager at Hillton Metal Products.”

“How come if your name is Garrett you registered as Garroway? Don’t you know that’s a misdemeanor?”

“I … I think it’s done all the time.”

“Who was the blond cookie the manager here give us a description of?”

“I … I never got her right name.”

“You just happened to meet her in a bar some place and you said how’s about it and she said okay so you came here. Is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“Only it turned out she had a husband and he beat up on you good. He did a dandy job.”

“I fell.”

The one the doctor had called Al shrugged and put his notebook away. “There’s nothing here,” he said to his partner. He turned back to Carl. “Look, Mr. Garrett. We know from your wallet you got a wife and a couple of nice-looking kids. And you got a good job. What’s the percentage in you messing yourself up like this, I ask you? Why mess around with a married woman? You got enough dough to buy something safe and pretty right down in Hillton. There won’t be any stink this time on account of I know why you don’t want to press charges, and you are maybe lucky enough not to get hurt bad. But a man like you just ought to have more sense, somehow.”

“Wait a moment, gentlemen,” the manager said. “We have some extensive damages here.”

Carl sat up and this time the doctor did not restrain him. He closed his eyes against sudden dizziness, and when it had gone he said, “Make out an itemized bill and I’ll mail you a check.”

“There are blank checks in the office, Mr. Garrett. I believe I’ll hold your motor vehicle until your check clears.” “Can he do that?” Carl asked the officers. “I’m not going to stop him,” Al said. Both officers looked extremely unfriendly.

“You won’t need your car right now anyway, Mr. Garrett,” the doctor said. “I’ll take you to my place in my car. I wouldn’t want you trying to drive just yet anyway.”

Al said, “Thanks, Doc. See you around.” They left without another glance at Carl.

“Do you think you can make it out to my car?” the doctor asked. “Don’t try to rush it. A physical beating is no joke at your age. It’s no joke at any age. It can be a hell of a shock to your system. Do you want me to … uh … phone your wife, or would you like to?”

“She’s in … County Memorial Hospital,” Carl said. It seemed, under the circumstances, a particularly shameful confession.

He stood up and when he wavered and felt faint, the doctor caught his arm quickly and strongly, supporting him. The swarming black dots faded away and Carl said, “I’m okay now.”

The door was held open for him. The doctor’s car was parked beside the Ford wagon. It was a three-year-old Cadillac, a baby blue convertible. Carl moved like a fragile old man to the car and got in when the doctor held the door for him.

They drove three miles farther east on the turnpike, and then turned north and drove another two miles to the village of Aldermon. Carl had been through it before and remembered it as a pleasant town. They turned into the drive of a white colonial house set well back from the road, with big elms shading the front law. A small white sign in the front yard said
Dr. Omar Kacharian. Office hours 10-12 2-5
.

“Nice place,” Carl said.

“I’ve been here three years. The village elders still think I’m some kind of foreign devil, but they haven’t much choice in the matter. I’m the only one they’ve got handy.”

“I hope this isn’t inconveniencing you.”

Dr. Kacharian stopped the car and turned off the motor and turned toward Carl. “The state cops use me a lot, because I manage to come every time I’m called. It is a slight inconvenience to be called out on a Sunday morning. Allow me to say that even though I am making absolutely no moral judgments on your … predicament, it does give me a nice justification for giving you a tidy bill. In exchange you can be assured that I’ll hemstitch your mouth expertly.” And a white smile gleamed under the shaggy mustache.

When he walked with the doctor to the office wing of the house he felt slightly stronger, but sharp pains in his right side prevented him from straightening up. The small treatment room was well lighted and well equipped. After he had taken off his bloody clothing, Dr. Kacharian had him climb onto the table and lie flat, with a folded sheet across his
loins. A chunky and pretty redhead came in and was introduced as Mrs. Kacharian. She assisted the doctor with a quiet efficiency that spoke of nursing training.

“First off,” the doctor said, “we’ll get some pretty pictures with the handy dandy here, Then we’ll do the mouth and then the nose.”

He wheeled the X-ray into various positions, going behind a lead screen each time to activate it. His wife went off with the plates. Carl felt nauseated by the blood he had swallowed. The doctor injected him with a local anesthetic and when the lower half of Carl’s face was numbed, he wheeled a light into a better position, worked quickly and deftly with a curved needle, then packed the left cheek with gauze. There was a painful grating as the broken nose was shifted back into position. With quick and gentle fingers, Kacharian taped it in place, humming to himself as he worked.

“Now try to keep your tongue away from the stitches, and try to keep from stretching your lips until the numbness wears off. After it wears off you won’t stretch them because it will hurt when you do. Now hold on tight because I want to get a look at that eye you can’t open.” He gently pried the puffed and blackened flesh aside and shone a light down into the eye, then gave a grunt of satisfaction.

“You’re not as bad as you looked, Mr. Garrett. Now just lie there and take it easy for a while until I get a chance to look at the wet plates.”

Carl could not estimate how long Kacharian was gone, how long he lay there listening to the dull throbbing of various aches and pains. His sense of time had been disturbed by violence. He could not bring himself to think of the implications and the eventual complications of what had happened to him. He was content to lie like an injured animal, conscious only of immediate misery, staring up with one eye at the featureless pale green ceiling.

Kacharian came back and said, “You seem to be all in one piece except for a pair of cracked ribs on the right side. This may hurt a little.” He probed at Carl’s ribs with questing fingers and Carl could not restrain a gasp of pain. The woman unrolled strips of wide tape and tore them from the reel and Kacharian took them and taped his side firmly.

“Now tell me how you feel.”

It was difficult to articulate with any distinctness with the numb mouth and the gauze. “Tired, I guess. And sick to my stomach.”

“Try to control that if you can. You’ll rip the stitches. Bonny, bring me a robe, please.”

He was helped into a robe and helped off the table. He was given a pill which he swallowed with difficulty. He was led to a smaller room which contained a hospital bed. The woman closed the blinds of the single window and closed the door quietly when she left. Within minutes he began to feel the black furry tugging of the pill, trying to pull him down into blackness. He knew he shouldn’t sleep. When he didn’t show up at the hospital or send a message, Joan would become frantic with worry. He decided to get up and go find the doctor. But even as he was contemplating it, all pain faded and he seemed to float for a time in blissful ease, and then slid over an oiled edge down into the darkness of the pill.

   He came awake fractionally, a little at a time, reluctantly taking a long time to identify the doctor and the small room. He felt utterly relaxed. There was no nausea. The pain had become manageable. His mouth felt as if it were filled with crinkled bits of wire.