Night My Friend (23 page)

“Sure. I’ll have myself a dream or two about a castle in Spain.”

Outside, a January wind had come up, cutting through Dave’s jacket like a knife and driving him quickly to the shelter of a nearby bar. He ordered a beer, although he could have afforded whiskey, and carried it, foaming, to a damp cigarette-scarred table because he didn’t like to stand at bars.

He had been sitting alone for only a moment when a vaguely familiar woman with dark hair and pale eyes entered the place, and headed unhesitatingly for his table. “You’re Dave Krown, aren’t you?” she asked in a low voice he barely heard.

“I guess I am. You look familiar.”

“May I sit down?”

“Sure.” He half rose to pull out the opposite chair for her. But the first beginnings of something like fear were building within his stomach.

“I’m surprised you don’t remember me. You robbed me of nine thousand dollars just last night.”

He kept his hand steady on the beer, hoping his face didn’t reflect the sudden emotion that shot through him. “I guess you must have the wrong guy. I don’t know what you mean.”

She glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot. “Look, you can drop the act. I’m not going to yell for the police—not right now, anyway. I recognized you, even with the scarf over your face. I remember faces, and I remembered yours. I remembered you had been in for your plate the night before, and I remembered you had an odd name. I looked through the forms I had turned in, and I found yours. Dave Krown, with address. I was waiting outside, wondering what to do next, when I saw you come in here.”

She had fixed him with the intenseness of her deep pale eyes, and the fascination of it was enough to keep him from running. She was serious, and she had no intention of calling the police. Maybe she was just a girl out after kicks. Well, he’d see that she got them. “What’s your name?” he asked suddenly.

“Susan Brogare,” she answered.

“What do you want?”

“Just to know you, to know what kind of a man you are.”

“Come on,” Dave said, suddenly deciding on a course of action. He led her through the beaded curtains at the rear of the room, into a dim dining area of high-partitioned booths. In one booth a couple was kissing, leaving their beer untouched.

“Why back here?” she asked.

“It’s better for talking.” He slid into the booth opposite her. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

The pale eyes blinked. “You probably should know that I’ve left a very detailed letter with a friend at the office. In it I give your name, address, and description, as well as the license number and description of your car. I identify you as the holdup man, and I say that I’m going to confront you with the fact. I end up by saying that you’ll be responsible for my death if I’m killed.” She paused for breath and then hurried on. “That letter goes to the police if I die or disappear for more than a day.”

“Are you some kind of a nut or something?” he asked, baffled now by this strange woman. “Look, lady, if…”

“I said my name was Susan.”

“Look, Susan, if you think I’m some sort of criminal, you should call the police. If not, just let me alone.” He didn’t know if the part about the letter was true or not, but the cool brazenness of her approach made him willing to bet that it was.

“I’m sorry if I frightened you. Would you buy me a drink?”

“Sure. Beer?”

She shook her head slightly. “Vodka martini.”

While he was getting the drinks he considered the obvious solution—leave her sitting there, and be ten miles away with Helen before she caught on. But that was just the point. He wouldn’t be more than ten miles away before she had the police on his tail. He could lure her to the apartment and tie her up (or kill her?) but there still was the problem of the letter. Dave was not a man to spend the rest of his life hiding in alleys.

So he carried the drinks back to the booth as if the whole thing were the most natural situation in the world. Just a girl and a guy on a date. “Are you married?” he asked, because another thought had just crossed his mind. He’d read about women like that.

“I was. For a bit over a year. My husband was killed in a plane crash.” She played with her drink. “I know what you’re thinking—maybe I’m lonely. And I guess maybe I am. You’re the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in two years.”

By the dim indirect lighting of the back room, she might have been on either side of thirty. He guessed the far side, closer to his own age. She was about the same size and coloring as Helen, but there was a world of difference between them. “Isn’t it usually exciting on your job?” he asked, just making conversation while he continued to size her up.

“At the Motor Vehicle Bureau? Are you kidding? A job’s a job.”

“So now that you’ve met me, you’re looking for more excitement. Is that it?”

“I told you, I just wanted to see what sort of man you were. I’ve known lots of people, but never an armed robber. And the way you went about it was quite experienced. The police are properly baffled.”

“Thanks. But I’m still not admitting anything.” He had read somewhere about miniature tape recorders hidden in women’s purses.

“Are you going to run away now?”

“Maybe.”

“Alone, or with a girl?”

“There’s a girl,” he admitted, thinking this might discourage her seeming advances.

“Do you love her?”

“How do I answer that? I’ve lived with her for two years now.”

“I suppose she’s waiting across the street.”

“Yes.”

Presently they ordered another drink, and the talk drifted almost imperceptibly to their past lives. He found himself (fantastically) listening to her account of college days with all the interest of a fellow on a first date, and it was only with an effort that he managed to pull himself back to the fuzzy reality of the situation.

It was almost midnight when he returned to the apartment, and he did not mention the encounter to Helen, though his exact reasons for not doing so were unclear even to himself. She was already in bed, not yet asleep, and as he entered she said, “I called the garage. You weren’t there.”

“I stopped for a drink and got talking to a guy.”

Helen seemed to accept the explanation. She rolled over on her wrinkled pillow and said, “I was afraid the police had picked you up.”

“Not a chance.”

“We’ve got to get out of it, Dave. I can’t take the worrying any more. I think that’s why the dreams are coming harder.”

“That last one was a beauty. Come up with a few more like that one.”

“What about Florida, Dave?”

“I’m remembering.”

“I hope you are.”

The following night he met Susan Brogare again in the dim room behind the bar. This time they left quite early and drove out along the river in her car, because he feared that Helen might discover them at the bar.

“You’re a strange woman,” he told Susan once, while they parked by the river watching fat white snowflakes drift aimlessly down from the darkened sky.

“I just want to get something out of life, that’s all.”

“By blackmailing me into making love to you?”

“I’m not blackmailing you. You’re free to leave any time you want.”

“But you know I won’t,” he said quietly, wondering in that moment where it was all going to end.

They never spoke of the holdup after that first night; not directly, though it often intruded onto the fringes of their thought and conversation. He learned more about this strange girl with the pale eyes than he had ever known about Helen, and found himself at the same time telling her things he had never spoken of to another person.

By the end of their third night together, he knew he was going to leave Helen.

“Do you know what today is?” Helen asked him in bed the next morning.

“Sunday, isn’t it?”

“But it’s Groundhog Day too! And the sun is shining. What does that mean?”

He rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but it was useless. “All right,” he said finally, “I’m awake. And the sun is shining.”

“Dave?”

“What now?”

“When are we going to Florida?”

He was silent for a long time as he puttered about the bedroom in his bare feet and pajamas. Finally he said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Helen.”

“About what?”

“Florida and all. I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time we split up. You know, went our own ways for a while.” He saw the expression on her face and hurried on. “I’d give you your cut from the job, of course. I’d even give you an extra thousand just to get settled.”

Her face was frozen into a pale mask. “Two years, Dave? Is this all I get after two years?”

“Just for a while, that’s all. Maybe we could get together again in six months or so.”

“You’d leave me, just like that?”

“Don’t make it sound like something—dirty. We’ve had two good years together.”

“Where do you think you’d be without me, Dave? Without my dreams?”

“Maybe I’ve got to find out. At least you’ve got those dreams. They’re always with you.”

She looked away suddenly. “Dreaming is a pretty lonely thing when there’s nobody to tell them to.”

“You’ll find somebody.”

“No I won’t.” She seemed suddenly decided. “Dave, I won’t let you leave me like this. I won’t let you.”

He fumbled for a pack of cigarettes and wondered why the thing was suddenly being so difficult. For two years of wanderings, she had been nothing but a woman, a paid companion who ate with him and slept with him and remembered her dreams. He had always been the boss of the situation, always knowing in the back of his mind that the day of their parting would sometime come. He had needed her, but only because there was no one else for him to need.

“What will you do about it?” he asked, suddenly angered at her resistance.

“I think I’d turn you in to the police before I’d let you go, Dave. I really mean it.”

And he could see by her eyes that she did.

The next two nights were difficult ones for Dave. He was still meeting Susan Brogare secretly, but there was a feeling about the thing that made him think of a water-soaked log being pulled slowly into the vortex of a whirlpool. He knew now that this girl—this woman—would accompany him anywhere, to Florida or the moon. And he knew, just as certainly, that Helen Reston would not simply pack up and leave. He was involved, deeply involved, with two women, and both of them had the knowledge to destroy him.

But he’d known, almost from their first meeting, that the strangeness of Susan would attract and entrap him. She was fascinating and mysterious, with a sense of reckless adventure that matched his own. And it was to Susan that he brought his problem on that fifth night. “I can’t shake her,” he said. “She’s threatening to tell the police.”

But the dark-haired girl only looked at him through half-closed eyes, and blew smoke from her nose like some dragon of old. “You ought to be able to think of something,” she said quietly, and he wondered what she might have been implying. Neither of them dared to put the thought into words, but that night in bed, Dave Krown dreamed about the service station attendant he had shot back in Illinois.

The next day Helen was calmed down a bit, and, for the first time, made no mention of their long-delayed journey to Florida. She left for work early, and he didn’t see her the rest of the day. He began to feel good, so good that he even ventured a stroll past the firehouse for the first time since the holdup. An unusual February warmth was in the air, and a few of the firemen sat outside talking and waiting, as firemen do. Dave nodded to them as he went by.

And later that night, in his car, he told Susan, “She’s better today.”

“Do you think she’ll let you go?”

“Well… no.”

“Then something has to be done.”

“We could just leave.”

“And have her tell the police?”

“She would be implicating herself if she did,” he argued, but he knew deep within himself that such a possibility would not deter Helen. In the two years they’d traveled together, he’d come to know the streak of unreasoning vengeance that slept just beneath the surface of her personality. She was not always the simple, stupid girl she seemed.

Susan stubbed out her cigarette. “I want you, Dave. All my life I’ve had the things I really wanted taken away from me. I knew I wanted you from that first moment in the firehouse, and I’m not going to lose you.”

“You won’t,” he said. “I’ll think of something.”

Helen was quiet that night, preoccupied. And the following day was much the same. She puttered about the apartment for a time, and once asked him if he had decided what to do. He replied that they would be moving on soon, and left it at that. But he found himself watching her when her back was turned, watching and nurturing the growing hatred within him.

“Dave,” she said to him suddenly, “I’m tired of sitting around this apartment alone every night. I want you to take me out to dinner.”

“Dinner? When?”

“Tomorrow night. And at some nice place out in the country. The Willow Grove, maybe.”

“I don’t even know if they’re open in the winter.”

“They’re open.”

“O.K. We’ll see.”

He told Susan that night, explaining his commitment for the following evening. They were at a little neighborhood bar on the far side of town, a place she had introduced him to a few nights before. She was impatient, constantly lighting cigarettes and stubbing them out only half-smoked.

“You’ve got to do something, Dave. I can’t stand this town any longer.”

“Just be patient, will you? We’ve hardly known each other a week.”

“I’ve known you for a lifetime,” she said, and lit another cigarette.

After a time a thought crossed his mind, and he asked her, “Did you ever destroy that letter? The one you left in the office?” It was the first time he had referred to it since she’d told him about it.

“I’ll bring it along when we leave this town,” she told him. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not.”

She rested her hand on his. “Dave—if it has to be done, please do it. For me.”

He knew what she meant, and somehow the cold calculation of her voice did not surprise him. He was in so deep already that nothing surprised him any longer.