Tears Are for Angels (18 page)

    "I feel a lot better," I said.

    "You haven't had a drink since we were married and you're clean again."

    I laughed. "As the driven snow," I said. "Just like a baby's breath."

    "When we do it you'll be all whole again. You'll be the man you used to lie again. You'll get it all out of you."

    I felt her hands moving on my chest now, and then they fumbled at the buttons of my shirt. Her lingers were cool and tingling on the skin of my chest and stomach. I felt her breath against my ear and her lips were hot on the back of my neck.

    I didn't move. All my shirt buttons were open now, and I heard her whisper: "Don't think about it, Harry. Think about me."

    I stood up then and pushed her hands roughly away and walked to the other side of the room. I stood there buttoning my shirt, and I could hear her breathe a little harder.

    "You don't have to throw me any more bones," I said. "I'm going to do it. It was my idea, remember?"

    I wasn't…

    I spun around and almost yelled at her.

    "All that nonsense!" I said. "About how strong I am. You were afraid I'd back out on you. So you thought you had to nerve me up a little, give me another little piece to urge me on. As if you hadn't given me enough already. Well, you can keep it, sister, from now on. I don't want it, not that way! Not any more."

    "You're wrong," she said. "You're all wrong."

    "Maybe I am. Maybe not. But don't worry about my backing out."

    There was a sick hurt in me for her to have been so obvious and raw about it. Somehow in the harsh daylight it seemed obscene and incredibly evil that she should sway her body against me to ensure that I would kill a man. It had not seemed so in the moonlight, in the soft and sighing night.

    Why did I have to fall in love with the bitch? I thought. Why couldn't it have been some simple uncomplicated girl with a home and babies on her mind, no thought of killing anybody or even hating anybody? What did she do to me that made me forget the ugly cancer between us and the reason behind her kisses and the thing she wanted from me all along?

    "I'm sorry you feel like that about me, Harry."

    "All right," I said. "Just let it go, will you?"

    She got up and walked steadily past me, out the door and on across the sand, and then she disappeared beyond the big dune. I went to the door and stood looking after her, and I never loved her so much as then. Because the lonely slump of her shoulders and the defeated way she walked told me what it was that made me love her. Not the nights, not the bodies entwined in passion, but the deep hurt and loneliness in her, the complete absence of hope, not bitterness, not anger, just final and irrevocable hopelessness.

    That was the thing in her that something in me answered, could not forget or ignore. That was the thing Dick Stewart had brought to her, and that was the thing-she thought I alone, and what I would do, could case.

    You poor kid, I thought. You haven't got a chance.

    

    

    My trip to see Stewart finished my part of it, except for one more little thing. I dreaded it. because after the talk we had had the other day, it was going to be hard to face Brax Jordan.

    But it had to be done. I had been in to see Stewart on Tuesday and set up the works for Friday night. So on Thursday morning, bright and early, I hopped in the old Chevrolet again and headed back to St. Johns.

    Brax kept an office on the second floor of a ramshackle building that housed a barbershop and a poolroom. It wasn't much of a building, but it was right in the center of town and Brax had always loved pool. He was the local champion.

    I closed the door behind me and leaned back against it and looked at him. He paused in his work, then took the spectacles from his nose and leaned back in the leather swivel chair. His face and eyes were quite blank and the cigar stub in his mouth was dead and unburning.

    "You were right," I said.

    He said nothing. He took the cigar stub from his mouth and tossed it across the desk to the floor. I almost grinned, it was such a familiar gesture. He kept no ash tray in his office, and the floor was burned and scarred in hundreds of spots where he had thrown still burning butts.

    But I kept the grin off my face. I was playing a part and my neck and hers could depend on it. Brax Jordan was my friend, but he was smart too, and he was honest, and he would be the first to turn us in if he found out what the game was.

    We would need him, the best lawyer in the eastern part of the state, after Friday night. I was gambling that he would do it, that he would go along with us, but I knew that if he knew the real scheme, including her part of it, he would never touch it.

    "I'm going to kill the bastard," I said.

    He grunted.

    "And you want me to get you off for it," he said.

    I moved away from the door and sat down in his visitor's chair.

    "You got me to thinking," I said. "I kept an eye on her. And I found out it's true."

    "When are you going to do it?"

    "The next time I catch them together."

    He snorted. "You ought not to have told me. That makes it premeditation."

    "They won't convict me for doing it. Not if I catch him with her."

    No. And not if I defend you. I could get you off, all right. The unwritten law hasn't ever been repealed in these parts. But premeditation makes it different."

    "The hell with premeditation. You can forget I was here."

    He nodded and put the glasses back on his nose.

    "I could. If I was going to defend you."

    That stopped me. I hadn't expected that from him.

    He leaned farther back in the chair and put his hands behind his head and his owl eyes bored into me.

    "I stood by," he said, "and let you sell off the best farm in this county and the house you and your dad were born in and your mother died in. I even helped you do it. I was a big enough damn fool to give away all your money for you. And all of that for a Yankee girl who killed herself and tried to kill you too. Sometimes I wish she hadn't been such a lousy shot."

    I sat forward in my chair and opened my mouth to speak, but his upraised hand stopped me.

    "I've been too lenient with you for too long now. After all that I just mentioned, I let you make an ass out of yourself and a drunken bum to boot for two solid damn years, and when some chippie comes along and grabs you off, for some ungodly reason the Lord Himself couldn't figure out, I even tried to overlook that too."

    "You better shut up," I said. The little bastard, I thought, I never saw him so mad before. If I lifted a hand he'd come flying over that desk at me like a fighting cock.

    "And now you have the colossal gall-and after I warned you what was coming and you ran me off what you call your place-to walk in here and tell me you're deliberately planning to murder a man for seducing this chippie and ask me to get you off from the electric chair, which is the best place I can think of for a bird-brain like you."

    "All right," I said, standing up. "If that's the way you feel about it, I can't help it." How can I get him to come around? I wondered. I never figured this, that premeditation angle. If he wants to, he can get me fried now. He's got to come around.

    "Sit down," he said. "I'm not through with you yet."

    I stood looking at him, my arm hanging motionless at my side, my empty left sleeve neatly tucked in my coat pocket.

    "I never broke the law in my life," he said. "I have too much respect for it. At least I had, up until you went haywire."

    He swung himself forward and his short legs dangled and then his feet touched the floor and he got up and went over to the big old safe standing open in the corner. He knelt down and took out a big envelope, bound with a rubber band.

    "That's the worst thing I let you do to me," he said. "I broke the law for you."

    He had me genuinely puzzled now. "I don't get it, Brax."

    "I disposed of your holdings," he said, "and I gave all the money to the polio foundation. Only I juggled the books around a little bit and held out this. Ten thousand dollars."

    He tossed the envelope at me and I caught it and looked inside. I didn't count it, but I knew there was at least that much there.

    "I could have gone to jail for that, because I knew if I asked your permission you'd say no, and so I had to fix it up so there wasn't any record of it. That's why it's in cash. You don't even have to pay tax on it."

    "I still don't understand."

    "You wouldn't. But maybe I can spell it out for you. There's enough there for you to catch the first train out of here and go about a thousand miles away from here and settle down somewhere and forget all this and get started again. Buy one of those artificial arms. There's nothing here to hold you."

    "Except Stewart."

    "Not even him. Because all he's done is grab that girl away from you and you never had her long enough to worry about that, if you use a little common sense about it. Which is, I suppose, asking a lot of you."

    "I could just take the money," I said. "It's mine."

    "No. Because I've got those bills numbered and I can prove you stole them from me if I want to. If I juggled them out of your accounts I can sure-God juggle them right into mine, any time I feel like it. You couldn't, but I could."

    "All right. I believe you." I tossed the envelope back across the desk to him. "That's your lee. For defending me for shooting Dick Stewart."

    "I'll be goddamned," he said, and flopped back in the chair again.

    "Listen," I said. "I never asked much out of life. But what I had, what I wanted most, was Lucy, and the Lord took her away from me. He took my arm away from me too. And now I've found something else I want, something I thought could make up for Lucy and for my arm, and now Stewart's taken her away from me. I couldn't do anything about the Lord, but I can about him, and I'm going to."

    I felt cheap saying it; I felt dirty and treacherous. Because I knew I was deliberately trying to get him to do it for her; I was playing on the friendship and affection I knew he had for me to save her neck. Because if it was just my neck, I wouldn't be planning to risk it any more. I was risking mine for her and I was asking him to go against all his principles for her. I was using the grimy trick of arousing his pity to get him to do it.

    I couldn't look at him then and I got up and turned my back to the big desk and looked out the window at the desolate, sun-swept street below.

    For a long time he didn't say anything and the silence in the office grew thick and miasmic and I felt it coming up off the rug and choking me. Why doesn't he say something? I thought. Why doesn't he just go on and tell me to get the hell out or something, not just sit there and keep me sweating like a field hand picking cotton?

    "All right," he said, his voice dull and fiat. "If you do it, I'll get you off. On one condition."

    "Name it." I was facing him now, but I still did not meet his gaze.

    "When it's done, you take this money and get out of here, like I said, and make something out of yourself again."

    "What about her?"

    He laughed, short and sharp.

    "If you're going to kill a man for her, I don't expect you to toss her out. Not you."

    "All right. I'll do it."

    "Listen, Harry. I know how you feel. I can imagine if it were my wife. But it won't help any. Murder never helped anybody."

    "I have to do it, Brax. It's like I can't help myself."

    I almost gagged on the words.

    "All right. I know you have to do it. Now get out of here. Just go on and leave me alone."

    I walked out and on down the stairs. I didn't thank him. That would have been the final blow, because I knew he was also just doing what he had to do, what his whole life as an honorable man who stood by his friends had forced him to do. I didn't thank him for throwing aside everything else that same life had taught him for that principle of standing by a friend.

    So now it was all ready, the trap was set, the trigger was ready to be pulled. We had laid a trail of lies and deception. I would shoot him and then we would go to court and the man I had pulled into our scheme of deceit and death would swear with us that what we had done was justifiable in the sight of God and we would go free.

    And I didn't even want to do it any more. Maybe I never really had. But I would do it, and I would draw him into it with me, because it was what she wanted and, God help me, it was what I meant for her to have.

    

    

    The sun was already beginning to sink in the sky when I drove the Chevrolet out of the rutted road that led from our little shack out through the trees to the bigger road. Instead of turning right when I reached that road and driving on to the paved highway that led into St. Johns, I wheeled the car to the left.

    The dirt road upon which I drove was a connection between the highway through St. Johns and another paved highway that led into Belleview. a much larger town, about thirty miles away in an adjoining county. From the shack to the Belleview highway, it was about eight miles.

    The road was seldom traveled, for it ran through the poorest farm region of the county and only one or two small houses were located along it. The dairy truck came by each morning, and a few mule wagons and an occasional car moved over it in the daytime. But at night, any vehicle was a rarity on that road. That was what made it the perfect place for what we had in mind.