Nothing In Her Way (3 page)

He still looked like a corrupt and undernourished child, even in the baggy overcoat and with a gray snap-brim hat pushed back on his head. The dangling cigarette was gone now, but he carried the thin face tipped to one side as if the smoke still trailed up past the expressionless black eyes. As I watched him I was conscious of the odd impression that he looked like a gangster would who spent most of his time at crime movies studying the dress and mannerisms of hoodlums. He stopped and stood looking at us. Or rather, he was looking at Cathy. He gave me one negligent glance and forgot me, and appeared to have no interest in Bolton.

“I guess you forgot me,” he said. “In such a hurry to leave, you forgot all about me.”

“No,” she said. She put down the drink at last. “I didn’t forget.”

“Then maybe you just didn’t care.”

She was watching him the way a tiger eyes the man with the chair and whip. It wasn’t fear in her eyes, just watchfulness. “I think I told you once. I haven’t got that much money.”

“You can forget that dodge,” he said. “I know all about the insurance he left.”

Before she could say anything, Bolton spoke up. You could almost smell the fear in him. “I’m sure Mrs. Lane will pay you, Donnelly. It’s just that it takes time to get that much money.”

She gave him a quick, sidewise glance of contempt. “How about it?” Donnelly asked, ignoring him.

“I told you—” she began.

He moved a leisurely step nearer the table, leaned over it past Bolton, and his arm swung. The whole thing was so unhurried and deliberate it caught me by surprise and I sat there like a fool. His opened hand cracked against the side of her face with a sharp column of sound above the honeyed crooning of the juke. The arm came back and I caught it and turned.

It was like twisting a pipe cleaner. There was no strength or resistance in it at all. He half turned, with his elbow on the table, and looked at me utterly without interest as if I were a roach that had just crawled out of the woodwork.

“Who’s the strong boy?” he asked Cathy.

The barman was running up. I let the arm go and Donnelly straightened up. The side of Cathy’s face was stinging red, but she made no move to put a hand to it.

“What’s going on here?” the barman asked with a truculent glance at all of us.

Donnelly jerked a negligent thumb. “Beat it. We want anything, we’ll call you.”

“You want me to call the cops?”

“No,” Cathy said. “We’re all right.”

He went back to the bar, but kept watching us. Donnelly leaned on the table. “You better think it over, sweetie,” he said. “Don’t make me look you up again. You wouldn’t like it.”

He turned and started to go out, and then looked back. He nodded at me without even looking at me. “And if Strong Boy here is a friend of yours, you ought to tell him about putting his fat hands on people. I don’t like that rassling stuff.”

I started to get up to follow him to the door, but she gave me an urgent glance and shook her head.

He was gone. She picked up her drink and took a sip of it, then turned and looked at Bolton.

“You can finish your little drink now, dear,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll be back.”

I didn’t get much sleep that night. There were too many questions going around in my mind trying to mate with answers that weren’t there, and I was busy with twenty-three years’ accumulation of Cathy Dunbar Belen Lane. That was a large order of just one girl, I thought. Wasn’t it enough for one lifetime? Did we have to go around again?

If she was mixed up in something dangerous, was it any of my business any more? Who was this Donnelly, and what did he want? She’d only shrugged him off when I’d asked her. “A cheap hoodlum,” she said indifferently. “He has some stupid idea I owe him money.”

Then she turned and smiled charmingly in Bolton’s direction. “I do think it’s cute, though, the way he impresses Mr. Bolton.” If she got the knife in you, don’t think she wouldn’t turn it. She despised people she could walk on.

His face was red with impotent fury. “I tell you, Cathy, the man’s dangerous. He’s as deadly as nitroglycerin. He’s not all there.”

“I agree with you, dear,” she said sweetly. “If he thinks he’s going to collect money from me, he’s certainly not all there.”

Bolton didn’t add up at all. When you dipped into him, you came up with both hands full of nothing. It was easy enough to write him off as a coward, the way she did, but something said it wasn’t that simple. Why? There wasn’t anything you could put a finger on, for God knows his face and his voice had been rotten with that cringing before Donnelly. Maybe, I thought wearily, as I gave it up, he’s read Donnelly’s clippings and I haven’t.

It was strange, the way you couldn’t escape from the past. Or was it the past? Maybe she was the thing I could never get away from. I lit another cigarette and tried to think objectively about it. Of course I hated Lachlan; but why was it always intensified when I was with her? Just how often had I thought about him during the past two years?

No, I thought, that’s not right. I’m just trying to blame her for something I’ve got the same way she has. It’s all tied up with both of us and we’re all tied up with it and each other, and we always have been.

When she was four and I was six it was a white-nosed bear with a terrible voice and flashlights for eyes that made her tell stories and get into trouble. I believed it about the bear. She convinced me. It wasn’t that I lacked sophistication in the matter of bears, for I had seen them, in the Sierra Madre, with my father and hers; it was just that her bear was very real. You could almost see it yourself when she told you about it, and if it had flashlights for eyes—well, stranger things had happened. Stranger things had happened to her, anyway.

It was a long way back to those days when we were a couple of imaginative and bilingual kids playing with real Indians and imaginary bears, when the construction firm of Dunbar & Belen had built a lot of bridges and dams in the republics south of the Rio Bravo. That was before the firm had become Dunbar, Belen & Lachlan, and then had become nothing at all with the devastating suddenness of a dam going out. That was what it had been, a dam. And when it collapsed, it took Dunbar and Belen. It didn’t take Lachlan.

It was a long time before the whole story was pieced together, and when it was, it didn’t matter very much. Dunbar was dead—he died two years after they were released from prison—and while my father was still alive, he never seemed to take much interest in the fact. It wasn’t that there had been any loss of life in the disaster; as they said afterward, that was their only piece of luck. It hadn’t killed anybody. It had just cost them their company and their good reputations and two years of their lives.

Lachlan was the junior member of the firm, both in years and in seniority. He had been in residence on that job in Central America, in charge, with a second in command by the name of Goodwin. Of course, Dunbar and my father had been there a dozen times or more, but you can’t see everything, especially when you trust the man who’s doing the job. And when the dam folded up like water-soaked cardboard, they flew in in a chartered plane. Police were waiting for them at the airport.

Lachlan hadn’t sold any of the reinforcing steel. That would have been too easy to spot. But with Goodwin in charge of the concrete work, government inspectors for sale, and native labor who didn’t know a mix specification from the second chorus of “The Peanut Vendor,” it was just stealing candy to divert around a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of the cement into his own channels. Most of the proceeds had gone into the campaign fund of another eager beaver on the make—an army colonel who had his eye on the presidency. The two of them pulled it off. About a week before the dam folded, the colonel had taken over the government in a palace revolution. How could Lachlan lose? He didn’t. Dunbar and Belen went to jail, while Lachlan and the colonel took over what was left of the firm and only God knows how much of the damages collected by the government. You’ll never go broke taking it out of one pocket and putting it in another.

That was in 1936. I said I’d kill Lachlan when I grew up. Cathy said I’d have to get there first, because she was going to kill him. She was ten years old.

We grew up that way, the two of us with that shared obsession for revenge. After a while, of course, we gave up the childish and impractical idea of killing him, since that wouldn’t prove anything at all and would probably land us in the electric chair besides. What we were going to do was more poetic. We were going to take him the way he had taken our fathers. It was a large project for a couple of kids.

I ground out the cigarette and lay looking up at the dark. We knew where he was at last. But could we do it? How could we do it? Lachlan would be nearly fifty now; he’d been everywhere and done everything; and he was a swindler himself and knew all the angles. It was still a large project, and I didn’t know.

And then it occurred to me that I didn’t even know yet what this plan was they had cooked up for Goodwin.

I found out in the morning. Charlie told me. And it was sweet.

He was staying at the Roosevelt. When I go over to his room around eleven a.m. Cathy and Bolton were already there. Charlie was still in a silk dressing gown, the plump, angelic face pink from fresh barbering, and was just finishing a breakfast consisting of a Persian melon and a large pot of cafe Creole in the living room of his suite. He lighted one of his precious Havana cigars with slow, loving care and leaned back to smile benignly at me.

“Ah, come in, Mike,” he said. “I see that Miss Holman’s powers of persuasion are somewhat better than my feeble efforts.”

Did he really think she was Elaine Holman? I wondered. But we had to keep up the act. I looked across at her. She was very lovely and chic in a brown suit with a fur piece dangling in casual elegance from her shoulder.

“If that puzzles you, Charlie,” I said, “take a look at yourself and then at Miss Holman.”

She smiled at me and said, “Thank you, Mr. Belen.”

I still wondered about it. Nobody had kidded Charlie about anything since he was five. But, actually, what difference did it make whether he thought she was Elaine Holman or Florence Nightingale? He could still run out with all the money either way.

Bolton and I nodded curtly to each other to get it over with for the day. I thought about last night, and wondered if she still had the harpoon in him. She seemed to despise him—but why was she mixed up with him?

Maybe it was an act for my benefit, I thought suddenly. Maybe there was more to their “business” relationship than met the eye. I stopped, silently cursing myself. What was I getting jealous for? We weren’t married any more, were we? What did she mean to me? Nothing at all, I told myself. Nothing.

“Well, I’m here, Charlie,” I said. “I take it I’d only be wasting time trying to get you to raise your offer of fifteen per cent.”

“A very sound hypothesis, Mike,” he agreed, “if a little weak in the statistical department. The figure was ten per cent.”

I shrugged resignedly. I’d known it was ten, of course, but to make it look good I had to haggle a little.

“All right,” I said. “Just when and how do we sandbag Miss Holman’s uncle?”

He winced. “Mike!”

“O.K. But how? Remember, I know nothing at all about it. What do I do?

He removed the cigar and looked at it thoughtfully. “Ah, I intended to ask you last night, Mike. Did you ever study chemistry?”

“In high school,” I said, puzzled. “By the time I got to college I knew better. Why?”

“It isn’t important. You’re a chemical engineer in this little venture we have in mind, and a slight knowledge of chemistry would, of course, be no great liability.”

“I’m glad you told me,” I said. “I used to know that salt was sodium something. Remind me to look it up sometime.”

He smiled soothingly. “As I say, it doesn’t matter. The secret of a thing of this kind, Mike, is never to talk shop with people who do know. And, since you are to conceal the fact that you’re a chemical engineer, you should encounter no difficulty.”

“Then there’s nothing to it,” I said. “It’s easy. I’m not a chemical engineer, but I’m pretending to be one, so I can pretend I’m not one. Is the rest of the scheme that simple?”

Bolton was boredly reading a copy of
Fortune
. Cathy was listening and watching us, but without much interest. They both knew the whole thing by heart, of course.

Charlie delicately tapped the long ash from his cigar. “A quite—ah—understandable bewilderment, Mike. At first glance it might seem a little involved, but there is a very good reason behind it. Now, to begin with, you go to Wyecross alone. The entire first act—aside from what has already been done—is yours, and I need not add, of course, that the success of the whole venture depends upon you. Miss Holman is driving to San Antonio tomorrow to visit friends, and no doubt she would be glad to have your company for that part of the journey. Beyond San Antonio, I suggest you travel by bus. Mr. Bolton and I shall be in Houston until later developments necessitate our appearing on the scene. You will, of course, have our address.

“Now, to get to the core of the matter. Mr. Goodwin, who is a man of about forty, is cashier of the Stockmen’s Bank, the only bank in Wyecross. From his father he inherited a large block of the bank’s stock, in addition to some fifteen thousand acres of land lying just east of Wyecross. Practically all this land is utterly unfit for anything, being nothing but a sort of Sahara in miniature, an endless waste of sand dunes. I have observed it from the club car of the train, Mike, and a more utterly desolate landscape I never hope to see. My only hope is that, since you will be there some time, you don’t go stark mad.”

“Never mind the description,” I broke in. “What’s all this got to do with it?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Everything, my boy. Now, upon your arrival in Wyecross, you will go to Frankie and Johnnie’s Kottage Kamp.” He closed his eyes and shuddered slightly, and then went on. “You will go to this revolting caravansary and engage a room, or a court, as I believe it is called.”

He went on talking, and he told it well. After a while I began to see the basic pattern of it, and had an idea of what he was aiming for, and it was a sweet piece of work. There was one hitch to it, however, and that was I couldn’t make out where the money came in. The way it was set up, it didn’t make sense. I broke in and asked him, and when he told me, I saw the poisonous beauty of it all at once like a light coming on. It was really rigged.

It wasn’t just a simple matter of having it explained to me once. I had to be coached in it. We went over it for hours. We adjourned for lunch, and then came back and went at it again. I went out in the afternoon and visited the bank, and bought the few props I’d need, and returned to my hotel to pack.

Bolton disappeared somewhere. Charlie and I took Cathy out to dinner, and I stayed with her until she was back in her hotel. I was still thinking of Donnelly. We didn’t see anything of him.

We left early in the morning. She was driving a ‘51 Cadillac, and she rode it hard. We talked very little. She was concentrating on the driving, and I was trying to stay off the “do-you-remembers.”

Once she said, “You’re not sorry, are you, Mike?”

“About what?” I asked.

“That you came in with us?”

“No. Of course not. I want Lachlan as badly as you do. And Goodwin too, for that matter.”

“That’s the only reason, then?”

I turned and looked at her. “I don’t know,” I said.

“We had a lot of fun, didn’t we, Mike?”

“And a lot of fights.”

“Do you know why I’m going to San Antonio?” she asked.

“Why?”

“We might get to see each other once in a while. It’s not too far to Wyecross. And, of course, I couldn’t stay in Wyecross with you, because Charlie thinks I’m Goodwin’s niece.”

“You hope.”

We got into San Antonio around eight p.m. She went to a hotel, while I took my bags around to the bus station and checked them. The next bus going west was at ten-forty-five. I met her in the lobby and we went out for dinner, both of us a little quiet.

Afterward we climbed down the steps at the end of one of the bridges and walked along beside the river. It ran through the middle of the city in a series of little pools and falls, with stone walks and benches along the banks. The night was brilliantly clear and a little frosty, and straight up beyond the glow of the city you could see the cold shine of desert stars.

She was wearing a gray fur coat with the collar turned up against her cheek, and a crazy little hat was perched on one side of the tousled red hair with a sort of schoolgirl carelessness. She was very lovely.

We stopped and watched the shine of lights on the water.

“Mike, do you remember—” she began.

“No,” I said. “I have a poor memory.”

“Why?

“It broke down. Overload, I think.”

“It’s too bad.”

“Isn’t it?”

According to the best scientific theories, a girl has no glamour, enchantment, mystery, or attraction for the man who has known her since she was three years old and who has fought with her and played cowboys with her and swum off sand bars with her under the blazing sun on tropical rivers the color of coffee and who has been married to her and has fought with her again and who has been divorced from her and has forgotten her entirely in two years. It’s very scientific. I made myself watch the lights.