Death's Sweet Song (21 page)

“It's Paula, isn't it?” I almost yelled at him. “What's she going to do? What's she got in that hard little brain of hers?”

But I already knew. It was in Sheldon's eyes, gleaming there in the twin small seas of pain. Paula was going to kill my father. He knew too much about her, so she was going to kill him.

I should have guessed. I should have known when I first saw that look in her eyes the night before. That was when she had made up her mind.

I felt sick. All day she had been planning it. She had made up that story about having to go after medicine, knowing that I wouldn't have the guts to face my father myself, now that he knew all about us. She was going to murder him. Right this minute she was on her way. '

It seemed like a lifetime as I stood there, my fist doubled, ready to hit Sheldon again. I thought: She must have known that I'd find out. She couldn't keep a thing like this a secret. How she meant to explain it to me, I couldn't guess—but she would think of something. I knew her well enough for that. With the help of that ripe mouth and soft body she would think of something, and make it sound logical enough, when the time came.

But the time would not come. I was almost sorry as I thought it. The end had already arrived.

I let Sheldon go and he fell to the floor, still whimpering. I could have killed him without a qualm, as easily as stepping on a spider, but there was no time for it. I was out of the cabin and racing through the night toward my car.

I drove like a crazy man, deaf and dumb, blind to everything but the grayish highway and the dazzling lights that rushed at me from the darkness and then fell swiftly behind. I assaulted the night with speed, split it open and made it scream. Past the floodlighted oil-field supply houses, the wind rushing. Past the big motels and the crumby shacks. Past the towering grain elevators; pale, unbelievable giants in the darkness, topped with blinking red lights. Over the railroad overpass and down the breath-taking slope on the other side to Creston.

How I got there, I didn't know. But I was there. I had not passed the Buick—that was one thing I was sure of—and that meant that Paula had reached Creston before me. I drove as though each second were a matter of life or death. And it was. I skirted the heart of town to avoid traffic. Maybe, just maybe...

The tires screamed as I took a corner too fast, too sharp. There was a spine-shattering jar as the front wheel hit the curb. The explosion blew a ragged hole in the night, in my hopes. The right front tire went out and the Chevy careened sideways, jumped the curb, crashed into a squat cement marker, and came to a shuddering halt.

The starter wouldn't work. I jabbed it and there was nothing but silence. Up and down the street doors came open, people came out to see what the noise was about. The car wouldn't start. Maybe it was a battery cable broken loose, maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, I didn't have time to look into it. I got out of the car and began running.

People were pouring into the street. I ignored their shouted questions. I ran.

Through alleys, up streets, across yards, over hedges I ran. From one end of town to the other, almost, I ran, with fire in my lungs and ice in my belly. I almost forgot why I was running. The muscles in my thighs quivered, my knees wanted to buckle. Just a minute, I thought. Rest just a minute. Give yourself a chance to breathe. And then I would remember and keep going.

The Buick was the first thing I saw. I passed the church and the Langford house, and then I wiped the sweat from my eyes and there was the blue Buick parked at the curb in front of my father's house. How long it had been there, I didn't know. But not too long. Paula would have taken it easy on a strange street in a strange town. She couldn't have driven so very fast. Whether or not it had been fast enough, only time would tell.

I almost fell on my face when I reached the car. I couldn't get enough air into my lungs, no matter how hard I tried. Then I saw that the car was empty, and that gave me a new strength. I staggered like a drunk man, a straw man, an empty shell of a man. I shoved the front gate open and stumbled up the walk to the front porch. The porch light was on. The front door was open, because of the heat, and there was a light in the front room. There was also a light on the south side of the house, in my father's bedroom. I noticed all this as I stumbled toward the porch. And then I saw Paula.

She was standing almost in the center of the front room, calm and erect, with no flicker of emotion on her beautiful face. In her hand was Sheldon's .38 revolver and it was pointed at the door of my father's bedroom.

An ocean of hopelessness washed over me. I was too late. I wanted to let go and sink to the bottom depths and never look up again.

And then I heard my father calling, his voice muffled, “Just a minute. I'll be with you in just a minute.”

Thank God! My heart took up its beating again, and now I could see the situation as it was. My father had been napping, probably—about the only kind of sleep he got. Obviously, Paula had got here just ahead of me. She had stepped into the front room and called out, and now...

And now the nightmare was reality. My father would open the bedroom door. Perhaps he would get one startled look at Paula and the gun, and then he would be dead. Panic and exhaustion held me frozen. I tried to call out to Paula, and no sound came from my throat.

The door to my father's bedroom opened. He stood framed in the doorway, wearing a faded blue bathrobe and ragged carpet slippers. His thin hair was tousled, his eyes swollen with sleep, and I don't think he even saw Paula's gun before the sudden blast cracked the night.

I stood there, my throat swollen with a yell that would not come out. My father did not fall. Startled, he jerked to one side. With wide, unbelieving eyes, he stared at Paula as she took one step toward him, then another....

Slowly, languidly, gracefully—almost beautifully—she died.

She seemed almost to melt to the floor. There was hardly a sound as Paula went down to her knees, and then she fell over on her shoulder and lay staring blankly at the front wall of the room. The thing I noticed was how cold and beautiful she looked. Her mouth seemed brazenly red.

Not until later did I realize that I had taken my own .38 from my waistband, and that the barrel was hot, and that a whisper of burned powder had become mingled with the clean smell of the summer night. Perhaps several seconds went by before I realized fully that Paula was dead and that I had killed her.

There seemed nothing to do after that. Nothing I wanted to do.

I sat on the front porch and held my face in my hands, and after a while the Sheriff came.

The wall clock in the Sheriff's office said seven o'clock. We had been there almost eight hours, Otis, Ray King, and a county stenographer taking down everything I said. The Sheriff didn't know it, but he was doing me a favor by keeping me there. I didn't want to be left alone. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Paula. I could imagine what it would be like if I tried to sleep. A great numbness had taken hold of me now, and that was the way I wanted to keep it. I was a hollow man, without feelings, without conscience, with sensibilities, but I knew that wouldn't last if they left me to myself.

Otis Miller, his thick face beginning to sag with weariness, sat staring at me with red-rimmed eyes. Unbelieving eyes. He had known me all my life, I guess. Doc Hooper's boy. Tackle on the high-school football team, soldiered with a tank outfit in Africa and France. A little erratic, maybe, but would settle down eventually and marry Steve Langford's girl. That was the way he'd had me pegged, more than likely, before the robbery. He was trying to figure out what would make a boy like that turn to robbing and killing.

He wasn't having much luck. Fatigue had dulled the edge of his imagination. He had all the facts before him— I had given them to him, almost gladly—but they were just the bare facts and didn't tell the whole story.

I was guilty, all right. There was no doubt in the Sheriff's mind about that. It was the
 
why
 
of the thing that stumped him.

“All right, Hooper,” he said heavily, “let's hear it again.”

He wasn't giving up yet, and I was glad of that. I wanted to keep talking, I wanted to have people around me. That was the important thing. I just didn't want to be taken to a cell and left to myself.

“All right, Otis. What do you want to know?” My voice sounded lifeless. I felt lifeless and hollow. It was a strange, cold feeling.

“First,” the Sheriff said, “let's get the main facts straight again. Is it true that on the night of the fourteenth you and this Karl Sheldon robbed Max Provo's box factory?”

“It's true.”

Like a wooden dummy talking.

“And on that same night you killed old Otto Finney and disposed of the body in the lake?”

“True.”

A wooden dummy. You put your hand inside the hollow dummy, and you press on something, and its mouth comes open and it seems to talk. That was the way it seemed to me. The words just came out and I had nothing to do with them at all.

“Who helped you dispose of the body?”

Something went wrong with the dummy. The mouth came open but the words wouldn't come out. I couldn't make myself say Paula's name.

“The woman?” the Sheriff said. “The Sheldon woman?”

I nodded.

“Then what happened?”

“That's about all. We split the money and they went away.”

“Where did they go?”

“Somewhere in Texas, I think.”

“All right. We have all the details about Bunt Manley and the Sheldon woman. You killed them, too; is that right?”

I nodded.

“The stenographer has it all down. Do you have anything to add to your original statement concerning the deaths of Manley and the Sheldon woman?”

“I guess not.”

He turned to the stenographer. “For the record, you'd better put in that this confession was not obtained through duress or force. Is that right, Hooper?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“Do you have anything else to add to the statement before it's typed up?”

At some point during the night Otis had dropped his toughness. He was almost gentle now. “Do you want to talk to a lawyer before signing the statement?”

Sheldon was still alive and would talk his head off, and I knew it. I said, “A lawyer couldn't help me.”

Otis gave the signal and the stenographer gathered up his notes and left the room. The Sheriff and his deputy sat there staring at me.

It was all over. Otis said, “Well, Hooper, we might as well go over to the jail.”

For the first time in eight hours a real emotion went to work on me. Fear. Fear of being put in a cell and left to, myself.

Ray King said, “Is there something else you want to say?”

Suddenly I felt an insane urge to laugh. “We almost got away with it.” I heard myself saying. “We came so close!”

“You're wrong, Hooper,” the Sheriff said. “You couldn't be more wrong if you tried.” Suddenly he pushed himself back from his desk, still not satisfied with the bare facts. He still wanted an answer, but he wasn't sure of the question. He said, “You never had a chance, Hooper. We're not completely stupid down here. We had you nailed to that box-factory job and, in spite of what you think, we could have made a good case in court. But we also knew you didn't pull the robbery alone. I figured Bunt Manley helped you, but I was wrong in that. Anyway, we didn't want to pull you in until we found out who was in it with you. With all the circumstantial evidence we had on you, do you think we'd just forget about you?”

He snorted. “We had you watched day and night, Hooper. Ike Abrams or one of my deputies reported every move you made. You thought you were going to leave this town scot-free, didn't you? Well, let me tell you, you couldn't have got away in a Patton tank. We were just waiting for you or the Sheldons to make a mistake, and when you did make one it was a lulu!”

I stared at him. “You had Ike spying on me all the time?”

“You're a murderer, Hooper. Ike was doing a
 
job for the Sheriff's office. And it didn't take him long to tie you up with Sheldon's wife. After that it was just a matter of waiting. There's one thing I'm curious about though. Why did you kill her?”

I closed my eyes and there she was.

I could almost feel sorry for Sheldon; he wouldn't die easy in the chair. Maybe I wouldn't, either, but the prospect was not frightening now. I had died the instant my finger had pulled the trigger on that .38. With a woman like Paula it seemed ridiculous to think such thoughts—but I had loved her. I must have loved her to have done the things I had done.

Ray King said, “Maybe I'll never understand it, Joe, but I'd like to try. You threw over a fine girl like Beth Langford, then turned to robbing and murdering because of a woman like Paula Sheldon. Why?”

I thought of the cell that was waiting for me. When I reached it I wanted to be able to drop into dreamless, thoughtless oblivion—and the time was not yet.

I looked at them and they were waiting for the answer. They wanted a simple, clear-cut answer and there wasn't any.

It was a long story. Almost a month ago, I thought; that was when I saw her for the first time. That was when the Buick stopped on the highway in front of the station. Less than a month ago it had been. It seemed like a thousand lifetimes.