The Bitch (5 page)

I sat there.

The phone rang and rang and Janet brought her hand out of the sack with a banded sheaf of bills held between forefinger and thumb, like she was picking up a snake by the tail. She dropped it on the floor and put both hands against the sides of her face and stared at the money. She started to reach into the sack again.

“Answer the phone,” I said, speaking in a strained whisper.

She rose obediently and moved toward the desk, walking slowly, not looking at me. Her eyes were very wide and staring.

“If it’s anybody asking for me, I’m not here.” I stood up and grasped her shoulders and shook her hard and the phone shrilled, seeming to get louder and louder, the interval between the rings faster.

“You hear me!” I shouted at her. “Tell them I’m not here, I haven’t been here. Tell them I called early tonight and said I wouldn’t be home until late in the morning. Tell them anything, you hear! But do as I say!”

She just stared at me now. She didn’t nod, she didn’t speak. I gripped her shoulders still harder and suddenly knew I must be hurting her, yet there was no expression on her face—none at all.

“Tell them you were asleep, Janet.”

I hauled her over to the phone and she kept looking at me now, over her shoulder, with that half-startled half-hurt expression.

“Answer the God-damned phone!”

I grabbed her hand and forced it on the receiver, then I let go of her and walked away about three paces and stood with my back to her. I heard her lift the receiver.

“Yes?” she said. “Yes, this is Janet.”

It was Sam. I knew it was Sam.

“Yes,” she said. “No, he hasn’t come home.” Then she told him just what I’d told her to say, repeating almost my exact words in a monotonous tone of voice that had my stomach churning, and my head began to ache. Maybe it had been aching, but now I became conscious of that. “I thought he had to work tonight,” she said. She waited. Whoever was on the other end of the wire didn’t answer that. Then I heard the voice speaking and then it was silent again.

She said, “Is something the matter?”

Whoever it was blustered what sounded like assurance that everything was all right.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll call you if he comes home early. Yes.”

She hung up and I turned around and she didn’t look at me. She marched back across the room and knelt down again almost in the same position as before.

“I lied for you,” she said.

“Thanks.”

She began hauling sheafs of bills out of the sack, and dropping them on the floor. As she did this, her movements became slower and slower until she just sat there staring at the pile of money around her knees on the floor.

I watched her. I wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. The way she looked was pretty bad.

She turned her round eyes up to mine and as before, there was nothing at all on her face. Her breasts rose and fell in slow, deep breathing beneath the thin, nearly transparent fabric of the nightgown.

“You finally did it, didn’t you?” she said.

“Yes,” I told her. “I did it for you.”

Her face began to redden and for a moment I thought she would scream; the scream was there, behind her eyes, in her brain, working deep in her throat.

She didn’t scream.

“Who was that on the phone?” I said. “It was your brother.”

Not Sam—my brother. When she was this way, she always referred to him as my brother.

“What did he say?”

“Didn’t say anything. Tate—what have you done?”

“I’ve done something for you,” I said. “For you, Janet. For us, maybe—but mostly just for you.”

She looked down at the money again, and seemed to recoil. It was as if she had thought for a moment that she’d been dreaming, that it wasn’t really there at all. She backed away from it on the floor, and slowly came to her feet, still looking at the money. It was a frightening amount of money, piled there on the floor, scattered on the sand-colored rug, and you knew there was still more in the half-collapsed canvas sack.

I knew I had to get out of the apartment. I couldn’t stay here. There was no telling when they’d take a notion to come here. They might already be on their way. I wanted to see Morrell, and yet I couldn’t just leave Janet here like this.

“Tate—what have you done?” she said again. Her voice was loaded with grief now, and some of the shock of unknowing was gone from it. It was different, and she kept looking as if she were going to burst into tears, only she didn’t. It wasn’t like Janet to cry much. When she was really mad, or hurt, she didn’t cry—she just grieved like a lost soul, which was much worse.

I began to talk. I had to tell somebody, and I told her. The whole works spilled out and she just sat there and took it. I told it to her from the beginning. How I’d been hired to shadow Halquist’s wife, and how all the time, I’d been getting nowhere, and it had been riding me. How Morrell had checked on me and they had approached me about this job, being pretty sure of themselves from the start, and placing themselves in such a position so I couldn’t do anything about their proposition if I were against it. In fact, they held no unconsiderable amount of information over my head, that would probably break me out of the agency and ruin my brother’s chances of holding the agency, if they spilled it. Just my background, all filled with glaring errors—enough so it could be fairly well proved that I would be no good, and pretty untrustworthy as a private investigator. I was all of that. “So, I did it,” I told her. “It was my chance, Janet—to do something for you—to get us all we ever wanted, so we could go away and wipe the slate clean and start over. So you wouldn’t have the worrying anymore. Only it went wrong, Janet—I’ve got more than I bargained for and I don’t know what to do. But I did it for you—do you hear that, Janet?”

“My God,” she said. “You can’t help it, can you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You did it for me?”

“Yes.”

She sat down on the studio couch at the far side of the room and just trembled through the shoulders, staring at me. I went over to the wall switch by the bedroom hallway and flicked off the overhead light. There was no calmness in me, and I wanted to be calm.

I came back through the darkness and turned on the dim, saffron-shaded floor-lamp beside the bookcase across from the desk. Then I looked at her again. She hadn’t moved a muscle.

“You should have married Sam,” I said. “That what you’re thinking?”

“Yes, Tate—that’s what I was thinking. How can two men from the same family be so utterly different?”

“I don’t know.”

“Now, what can I do?” she said.

“You’ve got to help me, Janet.”

Now she began to laugh a little down in her throat. “Help you?” she said. “Murder and money.”

“I did it for you, Janet. Maybe you can’t understand that. Maybe you can’t understand how I feel. How it is, the way it’s been—knowing what you thought of me.”

“I married a prize,” she said. “A real prize.”

“All right.”

“Why didn’t you quit when you saw what was happening?” she said. “That was your chance and you didn’t take it. Tate, why didn’t you quit then? When you were still on top. Somebody would have gotten you off—somehow. Sam would have taken care of that, you know he would.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not? He always has, hasn’t he? Whenever you needed him, there he was—all ready to go to bat for you. He’s always gone to bat for you. Trying to help you to help yourself. And this is the way you pay him back. Tate, I really think you are hopeless. Sam doesn’t think that—he keeps trying. He believes in you. And look what you’ve done.”

“Yeah—look.”

She did. She began to see in sharp little flashes just exactly what I’d done. You could read it on her face, and it was the same with me. You don’t see it all at once, because you haven’t lived that way and it all happened so abruptly. Death and money. And little by little it would touch me—what I’d done.

“What are we going to do?” she said.

“We’re going to sit tight,” I told her. “For a little while. I’ve got to do something, find something out for myself—somehow. Then, we’re leaving, Janet. We’ll go away some place. Look, I know you can’t—”

She closed her eyes and just sat there with her hands in tight fists.

“Janet,” I said. “I want you to listen to me.” I went over to her and knelt on the floor in front of her and put my hands on her thighs and held her to me tightly; and she just sat there with her eyes squinched shut and her hands made into little fists. “Janet, listen,” I said as softly as I could. “I know you can’t understand now. It’s even hard for me to understand. But the money’s here and when will we ever get a chance to have that much money in one hunk again? Never. You know that. I didn’t kill anybody, Janet—I didn’t murder those two people. I stole the money. All right, it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong and I’m going to have a hard time getting so I can live with that. Just the same, it can be done—it’s got to be done.”

She began to beat at my head and face with her fists. She still held her eyes closed and I grabbed her wrists and held them tightly, coming up to my feet. I pressed her back against the couch, holding her down. I leaned over and tried to kiss her. Her lips were hot and dry and she kept turning her head wildly. She did not open her eyes.

“Don’t, Tate!”

I held her there. “Janet, listen. I’m going to leave the money here with you. I’m telling you right now—don’t call anybody. I’m going to hide it right here in the apartment, and you’re going to play along with me until I figure what to do. I’m in a jam. The worst one ever. You’ve been through a lot with me, and I’m going to end it—all of it. I’ve all our married life tried to do things right, and none of it’s ever come off. It always turned against me, and hurt you, and I don’t want it that way. I know all of this looks stupid, and that I made a terrible mistake. It’s worse for me than it is for you. I’ve got to live with it.”

She started laughing again. “When I think of your brother,” she said. “And then how you came along and practically raped me. And I liked it.” She laughed again. “You did rape me, Tate. And I liked it. My God, and I married you. I married a fool—a wretched, horrible, bumbling fool!”

“Janet!”

She opened her eyes and stared at me and struggled angrily. I let go of her and stood up.

“Haven’t you caused enough trouble?”

I couldn’t argue anymore. I had to get out of here.

“Listen, Janet. You’ll get over it. A year from now, you’ll be playing with that money and you’ll love it.
Janet-
—you wanted money, damn it! You practically asked me to do something like this. I did it for you—so you could have what you wanted. I won’t be working for Sam anymore—you won’t have to complain anymore. You won’t—”

‘Tate! You fool—you crazy damned fool! I said all those things to spur you on into something good—of your own.” She ceased, sat there, staring as if she’d been clubbed. “You’re crazy,” she said. “Crazy—look what you’ve done.”

I stood in a daze. I heard my voice, thick and slow. “We’ve got the money now. That’s the way it is. I’m going out again. I’ll keep in touch with you. I won’t be long. I want you to be ready to leave when I tell you. I’ll arrange everything. Don’t pack any clothes. We’ll go just as we are. We can’t stay here. Start a new life. I love you, Janet.”

She wasn’t crying, she wasn’t laughing, she wasn’t anything.

She loved me and it was all right. I turned and went over by the closet and rammed the money back into the sack, and fastened the opening. It was like pulling a rope around my own neck and I knew that, but I couldn’t stop it. I had to have the money now. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. I knew it was all wrong, but I couldn’t stop.

I stood there a moment, trying to figure where to put the money. I knew I could trust her. She would do as I said. She might say she wouldn’t, but she would. I couldn’t take the money with me. I thought of both of us leaving, right now—only I couldn’t do that either. It was like being struck over and over again smack in the face. There were things I had to do, and I couldn’t even explain them to myself, but I had to do them.

We were on the top floor of the apartment house.

I opened the closet door and checked and the opening was there, closed off with a board trap-door. It would be one of the first places anybody would look, but it was the only decent place I could think of.

I got a chair and slid it into the closet and stood on it and opened the trap door. Then I got the money sack and tossed it up there. I grabbed the edges of the attic opening and kicked against the wall, and drew myself up.

The air was hot, fetid, damp. Rain poured in a steady drumming against the roof. Pale streaks of light seeped into the low attic from narrow slits of windows at either end. I picked up the sack and, bent far over, walked the beams to the far corner at the rear of the apartments. The attic had been insulated with heavy blankets of rock wool.

I tore some of this up carefully, flattened the sack, and laid it down between the beams, covering it with the batting-like insulation. I patted it down as well as I could, then went on back to the trap door and dropped through onto the chair again. I hauled the chair out of the closet and closed the door.

Janet hadn’t moved from her position on the couch.

It was quarter after two by the clock on the desk.

“Janet, honey?”

She looked at me.

I went over to the couch and stood above her. Then I sat quickly beside her and drew her into my arms and kissed her cheek. She turned and half-looked at me.

“I’m going,” I said. “Will you do as I say?”

She kept watching me. Then she nodded and her eyes kind of misted over.

“Yes, Tate,” she said. “I’ll do as you say.”

I didn’t know what to do about the car. All I knew was that I couldn’t drive it and I had to get another car. I had to have transportation.

I came down the back stairs of the apartment and stood in the garage doorway looking through the rain, across toward the fence behind which was the aluminum trailer, and the convertible. I wanted to be here with Janet, and still on my way to Morrell’s. I wanted to be taking Janet away, out of this, right now.

There was no car here that I could steal, without bringing still more hell down on my head. Then I thought about that for a minute. The garages behind the apartment house were lined with cars. I didn’t see why I couldn’t take one just for use now. I could get it back before morning.

I kept trying to think about the people who owned the cars, what their jobs were, whether they would be needing their cars early or not. It was like trying to think through a sea of mud. My mind was mired.

I stepped out into the rain and walked along the alley, glancing in at the garage doors.

The headlights swung into the alley fast, lurching.

I tried to dodge. It was useless. There was a fence on one side of me and closed garage doors on the other. I ran for the open doorway of my own garage, but I didn’t make it. The car lurched in the alley and the engine roared.

Maybe it was just a drunk, coming home.

I flattened myself against the garage doors, blinded by the headlights. The car swooped toward me, and the driver applied brakes. The tires didn’t squeal, or anything like that. The car stopped very quietly and rocked to a halt beside me.

I knew it was all up with me. And then my brother, Sam, said:

“Come on, Tate—get in.”

The engine turned over slowly, and I could see his face in the opening of the window on the driver’s side. Sam drove a Buick two door hard-top.

“Come on, Tate,” Sam said again.

For a moment I could not move. I knew he had outguessed me, it was that obvious, and it hurt, knowing it.

His voice was edged tightly now. “Tate, get in the car with me, you hear? I’ve got a gun, and I’ll put it on you if you want. Is that what you want?”

I walked around toward the rear of the car.

“The other way, Tate.”

I paused, then went on around, cutting through the brilliant swatch of rain-freckled brightness from the Buick’s headlights. Sam leaned over and flicked the door open, and I got in and slammed the door and looked at him.

He didn’t look at me. He started the Buick and drove hard out of the alley, made the turn into the street and stepped on it up two blocks, still without speaking. Then he drew up carefully to the curb and stopped.

“Where’s your car—the convertible, Tate?”

“Back there. I left it behind the fence.”

He sat there a moment, staring at the windshield. Then he nodded to himself, started the Buick again, and drove off.

I looked across at him. He was wearing a trenchcoat and a hat. His face was pale and his profile sharp in the light from the dash. He drove hard, but not too fast. It was as if he were taking something out on the car in a slow, hard manner—moving brutally, deliberately.

He had outguessed me. He had moved right along with my own thinking, just like always. I should have known it would be this way with Sam. I should have remembered the way he worked.

It was sickening to realize the way things were now.

He must have suspected something from the way Janet spoke over the phone.

“Don’t try anything, Tate. I won’t kill you, but I’ll hurt you—I promise that.”

“Why won’t you kill me? Why not?”

“You talk like a fool, too,” he said.

I didn’t answer him.

“You have a gun, Tate?”

“No.”

“It would have been smart to have one, wouldn’t it? You might have got the drop on me.”

“Sure.”

He stopped by a light at a crossing. We sat there. He was looking straight ahead. I looked casually across at him, at the way he wore the trenchcoat. I knew he wore his gun at his left shoulder. He had the flap of the trench coat buttoned across his throat.

I slapped down on the door handle and pushed out. I felt the barrel of the gun ram into my back, hard. It struck my kidney and the pain lanced up into the back of my head.

“Get back into the car, Tate.”

The pain was really bad. He had rammed that gun barrel as hard as he could straight into my back. He’d known I was going to try for it, and he’d been ready. I couldn’t move for a minute, half out on the street, banging to the door, letting the pain seep away.

The light turned green. A car passed us on my side and still I couldn’t drag myself back into the car. Sam reached across and grabbed my shoulder and hauled me back into the car. He started up fast, gunning it, and the door slammed shut. I leaned back against the seat.

“My gun was right on the seat beside you, Tate,” he said, looking straight ahead, tooling the car with that same deliberate brutality. “You think I had it holstered, where I couldn’t get at it?”

“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t make a slip like that, would you?”

“On the defensive again,” he said. “Well, you’ve got good reason for that. You’ve really done this up fine and forever, tonight.”

I straightened in the seat. The pain had gone away now.

“Where’s the money, Tate?”

I looked over at him, then straight ahead again.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll see. You didn’t take it home with you, did you? That would have been a damned silly thing to do.”

I still said nothing. There wasn’t anything to say, not now. I didn’t want to talk with him, and yet I knew I would have to. He had me really fouled up inside now and I kept trying to figure a way to get free of him. There wasn’t any way. You had to go along with a thing like this and that was that.

Only now there was a feeling of slow desperateness coming into me. I thought of Janet back there, going through her private little hell over this. And she didn’t know that Sam had picked me up and it was all over so soon.

“Where you taking me?” I said finally.

“Down to the office, Tate. How’s Janet? Did you tell her about this? You tell her you killed two men and robbed a payroll we were under contract to guard? Under honor? Did you tell her?”

“I didn’t kill anybody.”

“Did you tell her?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Where’s that money, Tate?”

I shut up tight then, and tried to think calmly. I still had the money, and there had to be some way of keeping it. I wanted it more than ever now. There was something about Sam that always made me want to strike out, to rebel against him. I knew what it was. He was always so right, and I was always so wrong.

• • •

I don’t know. You do something and you’re caught and then you’re caught again and again, and the feeling inside you is hell. It’s something you cannot combat, cannot deal with, sometimes. I knew I was rattled. I knew I hadn’t been able to think right since that moment when we heard the shot at Halquist’s soft-drink plant, and that crazy-eyed Gunnison took off down the hall, running with the money sack, running stupidly, and as fast as he could go, straight into the waiting arms of death. But he hadn’t suspected death out there in the alley. He had run to it without care, with hope—need, even. That part was plenty puzzling, and I couldn’t deal with that, either. Anymore than I could deal with myself.

We turned onto the bayside road, the boulevard that winds proudly along Tampa Bay, past the stately royal palms that have for decades stood in the face of hurricanes, lost fronds, but returned to grandeur with such seeming ease. It was difficult for a human being to react like nature. Maybe it was crazy thinking again.

Sam drove easily and without speaking again. I had no idea what he was trying to do, and that worked on me too. The unknown was only a little worse than the known tonight, though. It was beginning to equalize, in its own fashion. I had finally reached some kind of apex, or something. Traveling the middle road—all that. What a middle road I had discovered for myself!

Maybe that was it. Maybe this is what I should have done so long ago, instead of fooling around with minor bits of business. I should have gone out and robbed a bank and shot a couple tellers in the head, or murdered Janet, or something. Then it would have been over long ago. Because Sam could have caught me and put an end to it—and an end to me, too. Because that’s what it would be.

Raiford would be the spot. I could visualize the bars, and maybe even the endless finally retrospective years purling off into the darkness, one by solemn one, regular and faithful and without speed, yet with haste. It was funny, in a way, if you looked at it right.

A fool, she had said. Well, she was right.

Everybody and everything was right, but me.

You can take some guys and give them a dollar bill and say, “Go on out into the world, now, and make your fortune.” And in a little while they would return, all smiling, and bulging with lucre and satisfaction and pay you back your dollar, and maybe rob you of your bank account—nicely, but winningly, all the same. Because they were the on the hill of success, or something. They knew how to climb.

Only that wasn’t me.

So where did I fit? And the warm, unpleasant rain of remembering the detective agency, and what it stood for; the calm, unhurried days of a steady job, the growing respect of those about me—it came to me, that way. I knew that I could this moment be seated behind that table in the anteroom at that god-damned soft-drink plant, keeping a weather eye on the bastardly two hundred thousand dollars, drinking the thoughts of it, but not doing anything about it.

And there you are, too. I had done something about it.

“What’s so funny?” Sam said.

I quit laughing.

He turned the car up Central Avenue, away from the bay. The yellow taxi-cabs were lined and clotted and waiting like a herd of impatient, sleepy animals, around the Greyhound bus station as we came by. The rain was mist now, misting down upon the sleeping city.

“How do you feel now, Tate?”

“How am I supposed to feel, according to your righteous book?”

“All right,” he said.

He turned off Central, and drew up at the side entrance of the building that housed our office.

“Get out, Tate.”

I got out and he slid across the seat and stepped out behind me. The mist of rain sifted down out of the pink-tinged, cloudy sky, and the air smelled fresh and clean and damp.

• • •

“Somebody’s in the office,” I said.

The lights were lit and I saw the shadow of a man against the frosted glass of the hall door.

“Yeah.” Sam turned to me. In the hall you could smell the cold marble floors, the stale, not unpleasant odor of years of hustle-and-bustle and office routine. “Whoever it is,” he said, “let me do the talking.”

I looked at him.

“I’m the only one who knows you did it, so far,” Sam said, and then he opened the door. Lieutenant George Schroeder glanced around at us. Lieutenant Schroeder from Homicide.

It was all I could do to follow Sam inside. He had said nobody knew….