Wild (11 page)

“You’re going to find out, though, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got to find out.” I looked at her. “It’s my neck if I don’t. It could be your neck, too.”

“You’re doing an awful lot for me.”

“For myself, too.”

“Yes, but for me.”

I reached over and took her hand. “I like doing it for you,” I said. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

A cab turned the corner down the street and lightly beeped its horn.

From a distance, roofing the cloud-darkening forenoon, the keening sound of a siren reached us.

Her fingers tightened on my hand. “Lee?”

“Yeah?”

“This is the first time I’ve ever felt secure, protected. It’s you, Lee. You’re such a wonderful guy.”

“I wish to hell you hadn’t said that.”

“It’s how I feel.”

“It’s going to be damned hard to live up to.”

“I mean it.”

For a minute, there, I thought the sun was shining. Then the cabby called to us. “You coming, or ain’t you coming?”

I
TOOK
I
VOR
H
ENDRIX
to a hotel called Vista Groves. It was a murky leftover of the twenties, hanging by dirty fingernails and threadbare carpets to the tarnished glitter of a vanished past. The four once-white clapboard stories hunched ghostlike in one of the more elderly residential districts. It was still inhabited by what remained of a few aged pioneering citizens with faces like yesterday’s paper dolls, limber only in their memories.

“This room gives me the creeps,” she said, looking around at the chairs with dusty antimacassars, the old spool bed, the gold-filigreed gingerbread-heavy dressing table with a mirror so clotted with bygone images it was too tired to reflect today. The room’s single bow to modernity was a clashing overhead light fixture. It was a large opaque white glass globe that looked somehow obscene against the cracked, yellow plaster of the ceiling. Around the edges of the ceiling were frescoed flowers. The flowers wept moisture down the high walls in places, like the sparse, crystal tears of the dying.

“You won’t be here forever,” I said. “And nobody’ll find you. That clerk downstairs doesn’t even know what year it is.”

She sat tentatively on the edge of the bed. We had stopped at Woolworth’s and bought two cheap cardboard suitcases. I‘d told the clerk she was my sister and that she had come to Florida for an indefinite stay. He was charmed. She had registered as Helen Spencer. It looked legitimate.

“What does ‘vine tree’ mean?” I said, standing by the door.
“I
heard you say it over the phone to Elk.”

Her face was blank. She shook her head slowly. “You must’ve misunderstood something.” She frowned.
“I
can’t imagine what it could have been. I didn’t say anything like that, I’m sure.”

“You feel any better? As frightened as you were?”

“You make me feel secure.”

We watched each other. I looked her over quietly, and her cheeks picked up some dusty pink. She lifted the edge of the dusty bedspread nervously, to be doing something, and looked at the sheet. She dropped the spread into place and looked up at me again. The eyes were very dark blue, almost black, and they looked hot. The shape of her mouth was suddenly soft and red. Her breasts moved richly with the way she breathed. The dress she wore was filled like a sunshot plum, and my throat thickened, watching her.

She could be a lot more than her sister. We both knew what we were both thinking.

“What’s the matter?” she said, knowing very well what was the matter.

I rubbed my hand across my face. “Nothing.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this. The police don’t like you now, do they?”

I didn’t speak.

“What will they do to you?”

“Christ knows,” I said. “I’ve played it all wrong. Instead of working with them, I’ve worked against them, and now I’m up to my ears.”

“Can’t you go to them and straighten it out?”

“It would leave me a lot worse off than I am.”

“I’d think they would understand if you explained.”

“Yeah. It’s a good clean way to think.”

“It seems awfully long since yesterday afternoon.”

“Doesn’t it?”

Her eyes lidded self-consciously. “What are you planning?”

I went to the door and took hold of the doorknob, hard. “Not what you think,” I said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

I looked back at her. She was staring at me wide-eyed. She half smiled. “I wish you’d explain that.”

“I’d like to hear myself, too.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

She brushed at the edge of her skirt on her knee with the backs of her fingers. “I don’t like staying here all alone. I’m frightened—something inside me keeps telling me something’s going to happen. Couldn’t you stay with me a while?” She looked at me crisply.

“That the only reason you want me to stay? Because you’re frightened?”

“I don’t think so.”

I opened the door.

“I think you’re terrific,” she said. “You’re a little crazy, too. Did you know that?”

“Somebody tells me that at least once every day.”

“I still think you’re terrific.”

I opened the door a little more, not feeling at all terrific. I felt lousy, even letting her say that. She didn’t know what a bastard I was. “I want you to stay right here,” I told her. “Don’t go any place. Sit here and wait.”

“Okay. You know something? You’re very tall and straight. It reminds me of the books I used to read about the pioneers and Indian hunters. Tall and straight as an arrow.”

“I’m happy not to return the compliment, if that’s what it was, and it shouldn’t be. I’ll be back for you soon.”

“You’d better,” she said. “Know what I mean?”

“I’ll take a wild guess and say yeah.”

“Will you get a shave before you come back?”

“Do I need a shave?”

“Yes.”

“Indian hunters never shaved. You want me to get a shave?”

“No.”

This could go on all night. I went out into the hall and closed the door. I closed it gently. Then I walked down the hall. I didn’t see or recall a single thing until I stood outside on the sidewalk.

Asa and Ivor. A pair of sisters if ever a pair was.

M
Y HEAD
began to pain worse than yesterday. I started walking for the nearest U-Rent-It car emporium. A thin sticky mist fell from the dark blanket of sky. Everybody on the street had suddenly become an informer to the police. They all knew I was trying to hide. The sound of a radio or TV was a siren. I was a mess.

I dodged into a stand-up lunch counter, ordered coffee and a hamburger that should have been used as a tire on a foreign sports car, and swallowed four more of the yellow tablets the drugstore pharmacist had sold me for my head. Nothing seemed to happen.

There was a round mirror behind the coffee urn. I got a look at myself. I looked as if I’d been shot out of a cannon and the powder charge was a bit heavy.

My eyes were like fifty-caliber bullet holes in a cypress plank. I had been wearing a tie. The knot was swiveled up under my collar wing. The collar itself looked as if some patient ghoul had rubbed tobacco juice into it over a period of days. I started combing my hair with my fingers, struck a tender spot and nearly collapsed with the pain.

Leaning against the counter, I clawed two more of the yellow tablets from the bottle, and fondly gulped them with the last of the coffee. I lit a cigarette, took two drags, and suddenly couldn’t see anything. Everything was totally dark. My ears rang. I was stone blind.

I held to the counter, tried not to panic.

In the midst of this I knew what had become of the body. There was no thought to it. It simply struck me, and there it was. Don’t tell me the subconscious can’t carry its share of the load.

“Something wrong?” somebody asked.

“No,” I said. “Just thinking. I’m fine.”

They didn’t speak again. I would never know who it was. I wouldn’t care a hell of a lot, either.

Vince Gamba had found the body. He had been in love with Ivor, worried about her being mixed up in something bad, and taken the body someplace. It had to be that.

I stood there. The world was an underground midnight. I had to move. I couldn’t move. I tried to be nonchalant about the whole thing.

I had no head again. I couldn’t see, but of course you have to pay for small considerations. There was no pain anywhere in me. I was as light as a feather, with a sense of well-being like these guys lying in an alley propelled to the other side of paradise on canned heat.

“You better call the hospital,” somebody whispered. A corner of light winked in my left eye. A shade began to go up. I began walking blearily, as fast as I could.

“Sir?” somebody called. “Sir?”

I kept walking, out into the street, down in the general direction of the U-Rent-It place. As I walked, my sight cleared and I could see again. Maybe not as well as formerly, but then, what can you expect?

I laughed sharply, took out the bottle of yellow tablets and shot the bottle high out over Central Avenue. I heard it bong off the top of a car, then smash on pavement. I felt better.

I had a pale chance. Anemic, in fact. If either the police, or watermelon-head got to me first, I was cooked crisp. It was probably watermelon-head who had called Ivor on the
Carol
. Only how had he known she was there?”

Elk Crafford? I didn’t think so. I could be wrong.

Two cops conversed on the corner of Seventh and Central. Another directed traffic a block down. Still another scooted along the curb on a white kiddy-car, with a long chalk-stick, marking cars’ tires.

I reached the U-Rent-It place, bought myself a day’s worth of Ford sedan, color blue, and hit the road.

• • •

The pink Cadillac was parked in front of the Crafford residence. I pulled into the drive behind it and got out. The front glass door swung open. The man who’d been seated on the steps last night stood on the porch, frowning at me.

“Mr. Crafford?”

He nodded. He was bigger than I recalled, standing, with shoulders like a bear under the white jacket that looked as if it had been slept in. His shirt collar was unbuttoned. He had on a wrinkled pair of light blue trousers. His dark hair was longish and sparse, pink skull showing through. His face was meaty and mottled, the eyes sunken, harried, the mouth a broad straight line across the face like a knife gash that wouldn’t bleed. It was a mouth that would reveal very little of what went on inside the man.

I told him who I was.

“I’ve heard about you,” he said. He had been drinking, but not enough to count. He had the look of a lush.

He was going to ignore the fact that we’d more or less met last night. He brought out a curved-stem black pipe and stuck it in his mouth, chewing the stem.

“How well do you know your wife’s sister?” I said.

“If you expect to shoot questions at me, you may as well quit, right now.” He lifted the eyebrows tiredly, and lowered them as if they were too heavy for words. “If you get me,” he added.

“Wanted to ask a favor of you. If you’d answer the one question.”

“I know her well enough.”

“May as well tell you,” I said. “I know you kept her on your schooner last night—that you tried to help her. I’ve just left her.”

He reached up and took the pipe from his mouth. He frowned with that same tired expression, moved down two steps, and stood there looking at me. He turned and glanced back at the house door, then at me again.

“She all right?”

“You think a lot of her.”

“Maybe.”

“She’s okay.”

He said nothing.

“Don’t you want to know where she is?”

He gave with the eyebrow lift again. Now it was as if he tried to hold himself up with the eyebrows. “What use asking?” he said. “You choose to tell me, you will.”

“Are you in love with her?” I watched him closely.

He stared at me, put the pipe in his mouth again, and sat down on the steps, and stared at his hands. He did not speak.

I looked at him, debating. I had to trust someone. Her safety was important in a way beyond these offenses of murder and robbery, in a way I didn’t quite understand as yet. It was a selfish and personal importance. At the same time, if her husband or some confederate did discover her, that importance might be nullified. There was no doubt in my mind as to the desperation
somebody
was experiencing at this moment. Your hundred thousand dollars had slipped through somebody’s fingers, and they were more than troubled.

I had the strange feeling of being close to some sort of revelation.

Maybe an opiate dream induced by the yellow H-bombs.

I said, “You’ve accepted the way I’ve been probing around pretty decently. It’s not always that way.”

He moved his fingers in a gesture of unconcern.

“I’m on a strange kind of case,” I said.

“I know about it,” he said. “I wish I could help you. It doesn’t seem as if I’m even suspect. I sort of wish I were. I seem to be standing in the middle of everything. It’s the story of my life. I’m involved in everything, yet I’m only a bystander. It has a strange twist of humor, if you regard it from the proper angle.”

“I imagine so,” I said. “You have any stray thoughts? Bystanders sometimes see things.”

He looked at me. “I’m loaded with stray thoughts,” he said. “Stray thoughts and alcohol. That’s about the extent of it, I’m afraid. You’re in a jam, aren’t you? I mean, with the city police—the sheriff’s department. It’s a crazy sort of thing, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t ring up the usual case against possible suspects, because motivations don’t necessarily jibe.”

“There’s always motivation for murder,” I said

“Well, I don’t know of anyone who’s messed up in this who wouldn’t have reason to kill somebody else concerned. Me included,” he said. “And not alone for that money.” He rolled up eyes upward. “That is one hell of a lot of money.”

“Isn’t it?”

He looked at me and shook his head. “It’s all on television,” he said. “The whole business. You, the police, the bodies, the bank robbery. The works. Christ, they’re troubled about you. Really, you know? I don’t see how you stand a chance. How the hell you’ve eluded them so far is beyond me. They’re after you, chum.”

“You could turn me in.”

“I’m a bystander, remember?” He coughed lightly. “I don’t turn people in.”

I said, “Listen, I’m going to tell you something, that’s why I’m here.” I told him where she was and asked him to keep it to himself. He didn’t say anything. “I wanted to tell somebody. She’s registered under the name Helen Spencer.”

“Thanks for the trust. You probably shouldn’t have told anyone. Since it’s me, you haven’t any worries. I guess Carl flipped his stupid lid.”

“Did Ivor tell you about this Vince Gamba?”

He nodded. “Pretty broken up about that.”

I said, “Somebody called her at the
Carol
. They threatened her. They said they were calling for Carl. How would anyone know she was there?”

“You’ve got me. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“You don’t seem concerned.”

“I’m a—”

“You’re a bystander, remember—yeah.” I began to wish I hadn’t told him. “You’re not a bystander where she’s concerned. Don’t kid me.”

“Yes, I am. Whether I like it or not.”

I looked up and saw Asa Crafford coming down the inside hall, walking fast. She must have heard our voices.

“I’m moving on,” I said.

He’d caught the movement of my eye. “Yeah. Good luck.”

I walked over to the car. As I backed out of the drive, Asa Crafford flourished onto the porch. Elk turned and stared at her, then down at his hands again. She watched me get the Ford in motion as I went down the street.

It had begun to rain. It was the same vertical mist of yesterday. The streets were mirrored and slippery.

My windshield shattered. Something smacked into the back of the seat beside my shoulder. Dust puffed. The car slid out of control for a moment.

It took me a full three seconds before I realized I’d been shot at.

Then I saw the maroon Olds.