The Bitch (10 page)

I laid the gun on the desk.

“That’s the way, Tate,” Sam said. “Just keep right on doing like I say.”

I heard him close the door. I turned around and looked at him standing there. He looked tired as hell and I figured he had every right to be. But I didn’t like the thought of what he was doing here, not with those cops outside. If I was crazy before, I was clean gone now. There was nothing left, nothing to do, no way to turn, and he just kept on standing there watching me with that damned expression on his face, like I had shot him in the stomach, maybe—or shoved a knife into his back.

“There are cops out there,” I said.

“I know it, Tate.”

“Did you bring them?”

“They’ve been watching the apartment for some time, Tate—waiting for you to come back here.”

“But when—?”

“Where’s Janet, Tate?”

“What?”

“The money—Janet? Where’s Janet, Tate?” He moved a step and touched the toe of his foot to the dead man’s head. “Did you kill him, Tate?”

“No!” I shouted. “God damn you!”

“Where’s the money, Tate?”

“I haven’t got the money—what in hell do you think I’m doing here?”

“Don’t lie, Tate.”

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Come off it.”

“Where’s Janet? If you’ve hurt her—did you? Where is she, Tate? Did you hide her someplace with the money? That it? And then you came back and found this man here going through the apartment and shot him. Right?”

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him.

“Well, didn’t you!”

“No.”

“You’re lying, Tate. You lie all the time—your life is a string of lies.” He stepped across the dead man’s head and walked toward me and stopped in the center of the room and looked around and kept the gun on me. “Move away from the desk,” he said.

I moved away toward the torn studio couch. He stepped up to the desk and took up my gun. He looked at it and sniffed at me and grinned slowly, and put the gun in the pocket of his trenchcoat. He sighed deeply and turned and looked down at the dead man, then turned back to me.

His voice was tense with the strain inside him.

“I want you to tell me where Janet is, Tate. And the money. You hear?”

I didn’t answer him.

“This apartment building is surrounded.” He reached up with the barrel of his gun and pushed his hat back on his head. “Schroeder is out there. He knows you’re in here. He
watched
you come in, see?”

I still said nothing and he waited quite a time before he went on.

“Schroeder let me come in here this way—alone. I talked him into it, and it wasn’t easy. You know what they wanted to do? They wanted to come in blasting, honest to God, I swear that. They think you’re out of your head. And you are. But I told them different. They’ve given me a chance, Schroeder has, anyway—he’s given me the chance to try and end this my way, and that’s what I’m going to do. I can save the agency, Tate—that’s all I want—is to
save the agency!”

I waited.

“Don’t get any ideas that I’m here to save you, Tate. I don’t give a damn what happens to you. We’ll all be a lot better off without you, or anything like you. There’s one thing that means something to me—that’s the agency, Tate—I’ve built it up and Schroeder has agreed to give me a chance to save it if I can get that money.
You hear me?”

“Go to hell.”

“It might have been your chance to get out of it clear and clean, Tate.” He stood there with that expressionless face of his and just said the words. The words were all full—loaded with emotion, but his face said nothing. Just the words coming out of that mouth of his and the eyes watching me the way they did. “But now there’s this.” He pointed to the dead man. “You can’t explain that away. You’ve killed—you’ve committed murder. I don’t care who he is, but you know my feelings about a killer. So maybe you can save yourself a little bit—maybe preserve some small particle of your name, anyway.
Now where’s the money?”

I said nothing.

For a long time we stood there and looked at each other, and something came into the room more and more—some slow tense waiting and patience, and it seemed as if everything inside of me was being drawn out and out and out like a thick rubber band, stretched and stretched, slowly….

Sam’s voice was cold monotony now.

“The money, Tate.”

I shook my head.

“I’m not leaving here until I have the money.”

He was slipping in the head, he was insane. I could read it in his eyes. All the years and years of building to arrive somewhere, the quiet planning, the careful, careful years of waiting to at last be something and then not being really very much—and to have that snatched out from under him … it had done something bad to him. He was gone—it was like he was hopped to the ears.

I took a step toward him and he didn’t seem to notice.

“Where is it, Tate?”

“You’ll wear yourself out saying that.”

“Where’s Janet?”

“I don’t know!”
I shouted.

“Don’t be so loud,” he said. “The police aren’t in the hall, and I don’t want them to come up and be out there in the hall. Because I don’t want them to hear all the things I’m going to tell you about yourself.”

“Shut up, will you?”

“Give me the money. Is it in the apartment?”

“Does it look that way?”

“How do
I
know what you’d do?”

“I didn’t kill that man, Sam. Honest to Christ, I didn’t kill him.”

“Are you pleading with me?”

“No!”

“Don’t.”

“You won’t have to worry about that.”

He nodded. “You’re pleading with me. You want me to play the big brother again, and smooth everything out for you, like I’ve always done. Ever since you were a kid. That right? Lie for you—like I lied when we were home? Lie to Mom and Dad? Lie so Dad wouldn’t give you the strap, like you should have had—like I had? Is that what you want?”

“You didn’t lie for me,” I said. “You told the police.”

“Yes. I had to, Tate. I had to tell them. Because there was nothing left for me to do …”

“That phone call at the office wasn’t Schroeder, was it? It was Janet?”

“So you figured that out? Finally? How could I have ever thought you’d make a good investigator? I didn’t—not really. I knew I was just making myself believe you’d come around and use your head someday.” He paused. “Sure, it was Janet. She was alone. You’d left her alone. I would never have left her alone, Tate—not if I married her.”

“But you didn’t,” I said. “She married me, remember?”

“Why?” he said. “And what have you done for her?”

“The hell with you.”

“She called—and I came by here and talked with her.”

He took a step toward me now. We were standing about three feet apart, breathing at each other, both of us all filled with hate and pent-up emotions—looking into each other’s eyes and hating mutually everything we saw.

“I came by and we sat on the couch over there and talked. About you, Tate—and she told me how she believed in you. Really believed in you. And I comforted her.”

“You
—comforted
her.”

“Yes. That’s right. One more time I sat there and tried to explain all those things that even you don’t understand. How you didn’t ever mean to hurt her. How you really loved her and were trying to make good—but it was in your own way—and it would take time. She told me about what you’d done. I didn’t tell her, Tate. She told me how you came in and showed her that money and took it away with you. Now where is it?”

I began to laugh. His eyes kind of veiled over and he brought the gun around in a vicious arc, slammed it against the side of my head. I reeled in the midst of the laughing and something burst in my head and I dove at him. I struck the gun with my left hand, hit it hard, and it left his fist, spun across the room and crashed to the floor.

“Now,” I said. “Damn you!”

He kind of put his head back, with his eyes squinched half closed and his mouth—the lips drawn back across his teeth—he swung, coming at me.

He caught me on the side of the jaw and I figured that was the end of my jaw, right there. It was like being hit with a railroad tie. It was the worst I’d ever got It moved me off the floor a little, even, and I piled across the room and hit the wall and slid down it. And he came right at me again, not bothering about the gun. He didn’t want to use a gun anymore than I did.

I got my foot up fast and caught him in the crotch hard and he kind of whipped with the pain, his mouth open to yell, only he didn’t yell He just buckled over on top of me and rolled across the floor, hugging his middle, moaning and cursing to himself, rolled up into a ball, like an animal.

I waited. I was hurt bad from the one on the jaw. It had jarred something in my head. It was like paper crackling inside my head and I could feel the blood trying to flow and failing, cropped in the veins until I thought my head was going to bust open and something was wrong with my eyes.

Sam and I both stood well over six feet. We both weighed, or always had, just around two hundred. Sam was a little heavier now, and that was all. Our family had all been big. Big boned, and heavy muscled, and none of it fat. Even now there was no lagging fat on either Sam or me. When we were young and for lots of years, Sam and I had fought and fought. In fun. And in plain madness, too. I’d always beat him because he would lose his head.

But that was a thing of the distant past.

I lay there on the floor with my head against the baseboard on the wall and watched him. He kept moaning softly with real pain and hanging onto himself like that. I hoped to Christ I had maimed him. Maybe that was wrong, maybe some people wouldn’t understand how I felt. I wanted to kill him. And at the same time, I had to get away—get out of here—and find Janet.

I watched him.

He quit the noises and just lay there, and then he began to ease himself straight, letting himself straighten out slowly—letting his legs to the floor. He lay there on his back, still with his face twisted a little.

The blood pounded in my head and my head ached like a black wrath. The crackling went on in my head. It was bad. With every crackle a flash of white would show behind my eyes, and I figured he had really hurt me—maybe a lot worse than I’d hurt him.

He lay there breathing slowly, looking straight up at the ceiling, still with the trenchcoat on. His hat was over there on the floor now. It was taking advantage of him, with him still wearing that coat. Now, wasn’t that something to think of?

I didn’t even realize he was moving. He rolled over and came at me in a running crouch. He dove at me and he was pounding at my head before I could even lift my arm. He had my head jammed in against the baseboard, and he kept slamming me with his right fist. He had his left hand jammed down into my neck, not really trying to choke me, but choking me just same. He wanted to hit and he kept hitting.

His face was hell to see. He was laughing deep down.

I got my hands up and his fist came into my palm and I grabbed with everything, forcing all my energy into that fist—or it seemed like that, anyway—and I got hold of the fist with my other hand then, and twisted hard. It got him off me and he piled across the room, rolling again, with that damned coat. I jumped for him and he tried to pull that same kick on me that I’d given him, but I had my knee in and landed on him. He plowed up with his fist and caught me in the gut, and I could feel it sink in, the pain really rugged and no breath. So with no breath, gagging for it, I caught his ears and began slamming his head on the floor and he started to stand up. He didn’t try to fight for a moment, just to stand up, with me hanging onto his ears.

We rolled. We rolled like that, clear across the room, over the dead body of Alex Morrell, and it meant less than nothing.

Then we were like before and I held to his ears. I let go my left and socked him in the kidney and he kept trying to get up on his feet. Lifting me. The both of us. I sunk my fingers into that ear and hung and kept socking him in the kidney. He suddenly stopped and looked at me and tore his head hard—brutally to the right and I pulled the other way with everything I had and there was half his ear hanging. His ear had ripped. He bellowed with the pain from that. The ear hung like that. I let go.

He was arched off the floor, on one hand, still trying to get up. He let loose of the floor and swung a crazy roundhouse. At the same time, his head bounced on the floor and I brought one from way up all the way down and landed on his jaw. Then I just kept pounding, and pretty soon Sam lay there.

He was out.

• • •

In the bathroom I washed the blood away the best I could. He had cut me bad in a lot of places and my jaw was really blowing up on the left side. I would wash, then run in and look at him lying there with the dead man. We had really raised hob with Alex Morrell’s body. Then I would go into the bathroom and wash some more.

I had to get out of here. How?

I hung onto the sink and stared at the wild apparition in the medicine-chest mirror. There were cops out there. It was a wonder they hadn’t come in yet, but Schroeder believed in Sam, I knew that. Sam had a solid reputation in this town, brother or no brother.

I had to get out.

So I stood there and hung onto the sink and kept running my head under the faucet, trying to think. It came to me that Janet must be at her mother’s. That’s where she would be. Where else?

She had written that letter maybe last night after I’d left her, and then realized she had to go without even mailing it after she caught the guy in the apartment and killed him. I hated to think of how she felt right now. With that money.

And then I kind of went dead inside wondering if Morrell could have got his hands on Janet?

I dried off and found some iodine in the cabinet, and used a little of that, and combed my hair. Then I went back to the living room and looked at Sam. He was still out.

I grabbed his wrist and he had a pulse, so he was all right. I didn’t want him dead anymore. I’d got over that feeling.

I stood there, trying to figure. I went over and got Sam’s gun and stuck it in my belt and buttoned my jacket over it and glanced out the window. The police cruiser was still down there in the street.