Murder for the Bride (14 page)

“It’s a sad tribe, Bryant. You may have something there. What would you like to be?”

“A nice, clean animal. Always had a soft spot for possums.”

“Oh, they’re the ones with the cute black bandit masks, aren’t they?”

“Then I think we better skip possums.”

She came over quickly and sat beside me on the couch. “I want to tell you something, Dil. Maybe I won’t say it right. I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna. The first dirty assignment I got in the newspaper game. A dirty-fingered amateur abortionist and a dead fourteen-year-old girl on a kitchen table in a tiny apartment over in Irish Channel. That was when I wanted to resign from the human race. It made me ashamed to be a member. I went around in a blue funk. My copy was flat and horrid. The girl cynic. And then there was another story. A fat lady tourist went trotting across the tracks. She was taking a short cut to catch her train. The porter was
running after her with her bags. She jammed her foot in a switch. Couldn’t pull it out. A switch engine was backing toward her, fast. The porter dropped the bags, got hold of her ankle, wrenched her foot out of the switch, and threw her bodily out of danger. He got his own left foot clipped off at the ankle. The lady didn’t catch her train. She stayed in town until the porter got out of the hospital. She paid everything, deviled the railroad people into giving him a sitting-down job, got him fitted with a fancy artificial foot, and settled enough money on him so that he still gets a little income from it. It isn’t much, but the tourist lady didn’t have much. That sort of put me back in the human race, Dil. Nobody would have blamed him for jumping clear while he still had time.”

“What does it prove?” I asked her.

“Nothing, I guess. Just that people are good and people are bad.”

“Laura was bad. Not like the little girl with the curl—when she was bad she was horrid. Another kind of bad. Black bad. Stinking bad.”

She took my hand in both of hers. She pressed hard. I suppressed a wince. The knuckles were swollen and sore. “Oh, Dil! You found out something, didn’t you?”

I leaned back and closed my eyes. I was speaking more to myself than to her. I told about a girl named Tilda Renner, who paid a visit. I described the way it was, the way I could see it through the eyes of the fat little man who had died. I told about the fat little man, and what had happened to him when he had seen Tilda Renner and Ernst Haussmann walking safe and free on a New Orleans street, and how such a man could take justice into his own hands, knowing that most of the world had forgotten how it was with the fat little man. I left my own participation out of it. I told of the fat little man facing Haussmann, and the knife, and how, in that last moment, he had given Haussmann a quick and almost merciful death, only to die himself within fifteen minutes of the deed because of the strain on his damaged heart.

I opened my eyes then and looked at her. Tear tracks were shiny on her smooth cheeks. Her gray eyes were
far away, in another year, in another time. “And Laura was Tilda Renner,” she said softly.

“She was.”

Suddenly Jill stiffened. “Say! I almost forgot my profession. The second oldest, they call it.”

“The alley is dark. The odds are against anybody finding them yet.”

“The lady goes to work, Dil.”

“Now, wait a minute!”

“I can tip off Barney. Then, by the time I get there, the alley will be crawling with law.”

“And won’t Barney want to know how you happened to know?”

She frowned. “That’s a point.”

“And Barney will jump to the very reasonable conclusion that I was there and I came back and told you. That means I’ll have to find me another refuge at three-something Sunday morning.”

“But—”

“And the lid will be clamped onto this one just the same as with the girl in Paul’s apartment, and you won’t be able to write anything, anyway.”

She sat down again and pouted. “Damn it, Dil, this sort of thing is news. And exclusive news, at that. If I could only—”

“Suppose I give you something you can really cover. Call it a trade. And you’ll be doing some good in the world. You can’t cover it tonight, but you can find out the right evening next week and blow a large hole in a very dirty and very profitable little venture. The cops are interested in it, but they haven’t found it yet. Does it sound like a fair trade?”

“It better be pretty good, Dil. It better be as good as a murder.”

“That’s for you to judge.” She paced back and forth in front of me, not looking at me, as I told her where to find Abner, told her how I got the lead, described the layout, and left the actualities pretty much up to her imagination. As I talked, the look of distaste and disgust grew stronger.

She took long strides for such a small girl. She stopped
and faced me. “I begin to understand why you’re a little fed up with the human race. All that and Haussmann too.”

“Is it good enough to take in trade? Is it good enough to cancel the call to Barney?”

“Let me do my pacing and my thinking, mate.”

She frowned as she walked back and forth. I knew that she became unconscious of my presence. The lightweight, loosely belted robe slipped open. She hung a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, took a kitchen match from a brass dish on the coffee table, and popped it on her thumbnail. She trailed a cloud of smoke, and she looked like next year’s debutante pretending to be a dead-end kid. Under the pajama top her breasts were high, conical, wide-spaced, quite startlingly abundant. I decided that for the few years I had known her, she must have been deceiving the public, and going around in considerable constriction and discomfort.

She stopped. “Dil, I am a kid who—” She glanced down quickly and yanked the robe around her and belted it firmly. “As I was saying, I am a kid who likes to have her cake and eat it too. Thanks for the information. I’m going to call Barney and ask him to meet me. I’m going to tell him that you phoned me and gave me a line on where Haussmann lives. That will put me in a position to cover it. I’ll let Barney find the scene of violence, and I’ll be there with my little notebook. In that way, you’re out of it. Now get up. I’ll make that couch into a bed and then call Barney.”

“Why don’t you have him pick you up here? That will keep him from suspecting that I’m here, and it’ll keep you off the dark streets in the small hours.”

“I’m not afraid of the dark, Dil.”

“I didn’t think I was, either.”

When I came out of the small pink bathroom, the bed was made, a glass of water and two pills were on the coffee table, and Jill was just putting the phone back on the cradle.

“Take your drugs, Junior,” she said. “Barney was pretty bitter about going back to work in the middle of the night, but he’ll be right over.”

She went into her bedroom to change. I slid under the
sheet in my underwear, took my pills, and turned out the floor lamp at the end of the couch. She came out wearing a tailored white suit, a big red purse slung over her shoulder. She came to the couch.

“Going to be able to sleep, Dil?”

“Like dead.”

She patted my cheek lightly. I caught her wrist, turned her hand, and kissed her palm. She stood stock-still, her hand trembling, before yanking it away. “Jack told you to be good,” she said.

Someone knocked at the wooden door at the end of the entrance hall. “ ’By now,” she whispered. Her heels tick-tocked down the hall. I heard the door open and a low male voice. Then the door closed. I turned and looked out through the glass into the court. The moon rode high enough to slant into the court. The leering cupid had acquired a silver highlight on its left cheek, shoulder, and buttock. The tape around my middle felt like armor plate. Sash weights hung on my eyelids. I tried to stay awake to think of Laura, to re-evaluate Laura. I kept dropping into blackness and then hauling myself back up to the edge of consciousness by my fingernails. I do not remember the last violent drop into a warm pool of sleep.

Coming awake was a slow process. The effect of the sleeping pills was still with me. It was like being washed in to shore. One wave would take me almost up onto the dry beach, then suck me back out. Finally I landed, high, dry, and awake. It was gray daylight. At first I thought it was dawn. My watch said twelve. I listened to it. It was still running. I had kicked the sheet off in the night. It was a long painful process to get out of bed. Each individual muscle had to do its share of groaning and screaming. My joints cracked. There was a dull throb in my knuckles and my ribs.

Jill’s bedroom door was shut. I padded over to it and put my ear flat against the panel. She wasn’t snoring. She was buzzing softly, like a bee full of honey. I went into the bathroom. A face stared at me out of the mirror. One eye was merely puffy. The other was puffy and purple. The little bandage was white in contrast to a shipwreck
growth of whiskers. The tape around my middle precluded a shower. The pink tub was one of those squatty ones that sit catty-corner. I ran in about six inches of water as hot as I could stand it, and lowered myself in to both scrub and parboil. Shaving was more difficult. All I could find was a miniature gilt razor with an imitation jade handle. Perfumed bath soap had to double as shaving soap. The little razor not only cut a narrow furrow, it took every second hair out by the roots. Sandpaper would have been equally effective.

Nothing much could be done about my clothes. The alley fracas had aged them considerably. I dressed and went out into the court and looked up. The air felt like moist gray cotton. Low fat clouds scudded overhead.

Doing anything in a strange kitchen takes a lot of time. By the time I had her tray ready, with juice, toast, and coffee, I was hungry enough to eat the top off the electric stove. I took the tray to her bedroom door, shifted it to my left hand, turned the knob softly, and stuck my head in. I reacted like a turtle yanking his head back into his shell. I closed the door. By shutting the door, she had eliminated any hope of cross ventilation. Necessity had been the mother of ventilation. I swallowed hard and knocked on the door.

“Nguh, goway!” she mumbled.

“Breakfast, ma’am!”

“Whassat?”

“Breakfast.”

“Minute. Jussa minute!”

I waited patiently until she said it was O.K. I went in. She was propped up in the double bed on two pillows. She had the pajamas back on, and the sheet was pulled up almost to her chin. The tray had little legs you could pop down with your thumbs. I set it across her lap. She didn’t look radiant in the morning. She looked warm and tousled and sleepy and kitten-languid.

“Time, one o’clock. Weather, murky,” I said.

She stared at me. “Good morning, waiter. I got in at seven. You snore.”

“You make a weird buzzing sound.”

Pink ran up her throat and exploded in her cheeks. “Did you look in and hear me?”

“I put my ear against the door.”

She picked up the juice and the pink faded. “Oh,” she said. She took a tentative sip. “Funny thing. I woke up with the horrid feeling that you’d been in here.”

“I guess you dreamed it,” I said. I backed toward the door. “My breakfast is out on the table. You know, I kind of resent the implication that I’d march into a lady’s bedroom.”

“I’m sorry, Dil.”

“Psychopathic modesty. That’s what you have.”

“Probably. I said I was sorry.”

I had reached the door. I grinned back at her. “Besides, if you ever have amnesia, they can prove who you are by that little crescent-shaped raspberry mark.”

I thought she had blushed before. This one was so thorough that her face seemed to bulge. She made an incoherent sound and threw the empty juice glass at me. I reached out and caught it before it smashed against the wall by my head.

“When you’re through with the coffee, throw the cup.”

“Get out of here, damn you, Dillon Bryant!”

I was on my second cup of coffee when she stalked out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, clothes over her arm, nose in the air. She slammed the door. I finished the coffee, went in and got the tray, and washed the dishes before she came out. She wore a starched white blouse with short sleeves and ruffles at her throat and a tan tropical skirt.

“There’s enough hot coffee for two more cups,” I said. “Sit down.”

She sat at the table with enormous dignity. I filled the dean cup. “Thank you,” she said coldly.

“Funny how when you stare at a scene for no longer than one fifth of one second, a detail will stand out in your mind afterward.”

“One fifth of one second?”

I shrugged. “Maybe even a tenth. Hell, I had the tray in my hand.”

“And from the door? Not from in the room?”

“From the door. Feel better?”

“A little.”

“I don’t know why I’m humoring you, Miss Townsend. Any other gal of equal scenic value would be disappointed that I didn’t come in and pull up a chair.”

The blush was a little under control. “I can’t help the way I am. I’ve always been that way. My God, the agonies I’ve gone through in shower rooms at college, in hospitals, in doctors’ offices. When I go on the beach, I can just barely make myself leave the locker and walk out where the people are.”

“Marriage ought to be quite a problem for you.”

“I dread that part of it. Maybe then it will be all right.”

“Enough of this clinical chatter. What happened last night?”

“I don’t know whether Barney fell for it or not. He seemed to. But he’s a very sharp little man. I don’t think he asked enough questions about how you came to call me. He’s annoyed at you, and even afraid for you, Dil. Every hour you stay out of touch strengthens Captain Paris’ suspicions of you. The alley was pretty messy. Barney got hold of a cruiser and the men kept the people away while he went and got in touch with those federal people. That gave me my chance to nose around. Dil, did Siddman, the little man who killed him, search Haussmann’s body?”

“He didn’t touch it after it fell.”

“Somebody did. They used a knife. All the pockets were slashed, and his clothes were cut away so that probably a money belt could be removed. And his shoes were gone.”

“Some sneak thief that found him, you think?”