And now I knew why Sutton had waited all that time to put the squeeze on me. He hadn’t even been there at the fire; or at least he hadn’t seen me. She’d told him. When I’d given her the brush-off, she’d merely gone back to him, and because there wasn’t any other way to get even with me she’d told him the whole thing. And now he was dead because he thought he could cash in on it, and she knew I’d killed him, and why.
“Don’t you feel well, Mr. Madox?”
I tried to come out of it. She was looking at me with the dead-pan innocence of a baby. All the ash-blonde curls were burnished and glinting in the lamplight, and the shiny black dress looked as if it had been packed by hand. She was in deep mourning from the skin out and laughing inside like a cat up to its whiskers in cream. I’d given her the brush, and now she could hang me. All she had to do was pick up the phone and call the Sheriff.
Is she stupid, or what? I thought. Doesn’t she know I’ll kill her? But then I knew the answer to that, too. She wasn’t stupid. She’d asked Gloria to come, hadn’t she?
“Oh,” I said. “I’m all right. I feel fine.”
There was nothing showing on the surface. Gloria couldn’t suspect anything at all. We went over and sat down, Gloria in a big chair and I on the sofa across from her, while Dolores Harshaw leaned back in a platform rocker. We were all grouped around the coffee table.
“I know you’ve been wondering,” Dolores said, “I mean, about the business. I would have called you sooner, but it’s been such a blow, you know—.”
She went on giving us the brave little widow bearing up under everything. I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was too busy with the physical strain of keeping my face from showing anything and trying to find the answer to the question that went around and around in my mind in a kind of endless nightmare. What was she going to do?
I could hear her voice going on, like a radio in a burning house. “—what poor George would have wanted. He thought a great deal of both of you. So of course I couldn’t sell out. I’m going to try to carry on just the same.”
She had the rope around my neck, and when she got ready she’d drop the trap. With Gloria here I was helpless. And she knew that, of course, so whatever it was it was going to be done now, before we left and I got a chance to get her alone.
She was picking up an envelope which was lying on the coffee table. “It must have been terrible,” she went on, “because I think he knew in his heart it might happen any time. Ever since we came back from Galveston he had a little notebook that stayed right by his side all the time, and he kept writing down his ideas about the business and the things he wanted to be sure would be carried on just—” Her voice broke a little. She was tremendous as the brave little widow. She gathered herself up with a pitiful smile and went on. “—just in case it did happen. I’ve written it all out, and I thought Mr. Madox should read it, since he’ll be in charge. And of course you too, Miss Harper, if he thinks you should.”
She handed it over to me. There was nothing in her face but that same dead-pan innocence. Gloria was watching her, and then me, with only polite curiosity. She probably thought she’d been working for Harshaw long enough to know his politics.
I opened the envelope and slid it out. It was a carbon copy, two pages single-spaced on a typewriter. I looked at the heading of it, and I knew where the original was. It was in a safe-deposit box somewhere or in some lawyer’s office, where I’d never get to it. And I knew that I wasn’t going to kill her. As long as both of us lived, the safest place she would ever be was with me, and I was going to hope she went on living for a long, long time.
“This statement is to be turned over to the District Attorney’s office after my death,” it began, and she had it all there. She hadn’t left out a thing. She admitted lying about my being there at the fire right after it broke out, and described the way I had driven up and hurried into the crowd thirty minutes later. She told them about my having been in the building before, and how she had told Sutton all of this, and of her recognizing me in the lightning flash when the storm broke that night. The clincher was at the end, and it was something I hadn’t known before. She’d gone back down there just after daybreak, after the doctor had left the house. She had to know what had happened, because her purse and things were there. And when she found Sutton dead and the purse gone she had it all.
I read it all the way through, cold as ice and seeing the walls rise up around me. I could quit looking for a way out. There wasn’t any. As long as she was living she could turn me in any time she felt like it, and the minute she died of anything at all they’d have that statement. It wasn’t witnessed, of course, and maybe it wasn’t legal, but it didn’t have to be. It put the finger on me, and the weight of all the other evidence would be overwhelming. They’d get it out of me. Of course, if she turned it over to them while she was still alive, she might be in trouble herself—but that was a laugh, or would have been if I hadn’t felt more like screaming. I’d go to the electric chair, and she might get a few months’ suspended sentence.
I folded it up very slowly and slipped it back in the envelope while they watched me. I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t trust my voice. Somehow I managed to keep my face utterly blank as I dropped it on the coffee table and looked at her. She had me and she knew it. I waited.
And then she let me have it, without saying a word to me. She was talking to Gloria.
She leaned back in her chair and lighted a cigarette. She was friendly, and quite sympathetic. “Now, about the shortage in your accounts, Miss Harper,” she said. “I know you’ll understand that Mr. Madox was only doing what he believed was right when he told me about it. And of course I wouldn’t think of bringing charges. You can continue right on the way you have been until it’s all taken care of, and you’ll still have your job afterwards if you want it. I want you to know, dear, that we’re your friends, and that he hated having to do it as much as I hate having to mention it now. And he insisted that you be given another chance—.”
That was the end, and that was the way she did it. Just one clean swing of the axe. And it was something I hadn’t even thought of. She had told Sutton about me, and then Sutton had told her. They must have had a wonderful time. And I’d had them both dead to rights in the shack that night, and had let her get away. I didn’t want to think about it. I’d go crazy.
Gloria sat straight upright in her chair, saying nothing, and when she turned to look at me her face was pale and her eyes were unbelieving and they were waiting for me to say something, anything at all, even one word, or to say it with my eyes if I couldn’t open my mouth, and then after a long time she quit waiting and turned her face away. It was very simple. I had just watched myself die.
I didn’t have to let her believe it, of course. After all, I had a choice. I had a lovely choice. I could have told her the truth.
She was magnificent. I think I loved her more at that moment than I ever had before, but maybe it was just because she was gone forever now and I was thinking about that. She got up with her face very still and controlled, and said politely, “Yes, I understand, Mrs. Harshaw. And of course it will all be paid back. So if there isn’t anything else, you don’t mind if I go now, do you?”
Dolores got up and said sweetly, “Of course not, dear.”
Before I thought, I stood up. “Wait,” I said. “I—I’ll drive you home.”
“Thank you,” she said, looking at the place I would have been standing if I had existed. “I’ll walk.”
She went out, and the screen door closed behind her, and I heard her going down the steps and along the gravel of the drive.
After her steps had died away there was silence in the room and I turned around and looked at this woman I was tied to for as long as I could go on living. She was leaning back in the platform rocker with her legs crossed and one foot swinging, and she was smiling.
“Harry, darling,” she said, “I don’t think you’ll ever have much luck explaining to her.”
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I thought of how near I had been to winning, every step of the way, and how I’d just missed it every time because of her. I could have stopped Sutton without killing him if she hadn’t told him about the bank, because Sutton was afraid of me until he had that. And if she hadn’t been there in the shack that night, if I’d sense enough to know it had to be her—. I thought of Gloria walking home alone in the dark believing that I had sold her out for this sexy tubful of guts and her money, believing it and forever, because I could never tell her.
The room was filling with that same red mist there’d been that night I’d killed Sutton. What did it matter now if they sent me to the chair? I’d lost it all. I’d lost everything because of her. I walked slowly over and stood looking down at the sensuous and slightly mocking face and the white column of her throat.
“You’ll have to beg now,” she said. “You had your chance, but you threw it away because you wanted that little owl. I’m going to enjoy hearing you beg me to marry you. You see, you have to look after me, Harry. Something might happen to me—.”
“Yes,” I said. “Something might.”
Maybe she heard the murder in my voice, because she quit smiling and her eyes went wide. I reached down and caught the front of the black dress. It ripped loose at her belly and everything from there on up came off in my hand, but she came up out of the chair with the force of it and stood there swaying, the scream beginning and then chopping suddenly off as I put my right hand on her throat and threw her across the coffee table on to the sofa. I went across it after her just as she wiggled off the sofa on to the floor, still trying to get her breath to scream, and then I was on her. I got both hands on her throat and there was nothing inside me but the black madness of that desire to kill her, to close my hands until she turned purple and lay still and there’d be an end to her forever. Let them send me to the chair. Let ’em burn me. All they could do was kill me.
It’s like committing suicide by holding your breath.
I relaxed my hands and turned her loose.
“You see, Harry,” she said. She looked down at the wreckage of her clothing and the big, spread-out breasts, and then at me, and smiled. She’d been right the first time, and she knew it.
“Kiss me,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. We were lying against the edge of the sofa and her hair was mussed and she was half naked and I could smell the perfume she always wore.
The smile broadened and she put her arms up around my neck. “Yes, what?”
I knew the answer now.
“Yes, dear,” I said.
That was almost a year ago. We’re married now, and I go to work every morning at nine, and sell cars, and lend money, and make more than I know what to do with. I belong to the Chamber of Commerce, and the service clubs, and even the Volunteer Fire Department. I like to think that some day I might be a director of the bank, because that would be the final, supreme laugh of them all when I’m lying awake at night. It’s something to look forward to—not much, but something—and maybe some day I’ll make it and become the only bank director in the world who started at the bottom by robbing the bank and worked his way up by becoming indispensable to a bitch, and the only one anywhere who has twelve thousand three hundred dollars of his bank’s assets buried under six inches of slowly rotting manure in a collapsing barn on a sandhill and who intends to let it stay there until the barn rots and the money rots and he rots himself, because if he ever dug it up and looked at it he’d go crazy and kill himself. It’s an ambition, and everybody should have one, even if it’s only a good laugh in the middle of the night when he has a little trouble getting to sleep because he’s worrying about his wife. She might be tiring of him, or catching cold.
I’ve given up trying to find out where the original of that statement is, and I know I’ll never get my hands on it, the same as I know I’ll never have the nerve to take a chance and run. Of course she probably wouldn’t do anything. A dozen times I’ve almost made it. I get in the car and think that all I have to do is drive, and keep on driving, and the chances are she wouldn’t do a thing. Why should she? She’d only get herself in trouble for abetting a crime and withholding evidence, and I’d be gone, and when they did get me back all she’d have would be a corpse with a shaved spot on his head and a couple of them on his arms, and that wouldn’t be of much use to a woman who needs them living.
I know a way to make her talk, and I’ve tried it twice, and asked her, and she told me everything except where that statement is, and I know that if she wouldn’t tell me then she’ll never tell me. It was a good idea, but it didn’t work, and I’ll never try it any more because the second time she stopped right in the middle of gasping, “Oh, God, please, please, darling, please,” and got out of bed and went downstairs naked and when she came back holding her hands behind her I didn’t know it was an ice-pick she had until she had put it through my neck. It went in a little off centre and missed the jugular vein by a good three-quarters of an inch, and came out under my ear. A little iodine fixed it up and it didn’t even get infected, but I never tried that again. She was in a position of strength, as lawyers say, and she wouldn’t tolerate work stoppage or breach of contract in mid-term.
She did tell me about the silver money clasp. When Gloria went out there in the afternoon she had the five hundred dollars in it, and when Sutton saw it he demanded it as well as the money. And then he told Dolores about it, and showed it to her, and she wanted it. He wouldn’t give it to her, though, and she’d left it lying there on the table, intending to slip it into her purse when he wasn’t looking. And if I hadn’t just happened to pull the purse around that final inch, looking behind it for the ash-tray—but I never go much beyond that with it. You can take just so much might-have-been.
She’d been really scared, of course, when she went back a little after daylight that morning to get her stuff and found Sutton dead. She knew, because the stuff was gone, that I’d found the money clasp and thought it was Gloria, but she also knew I’d get wise to my mistake sooner or later, and that I’d have to kill her to cover it up. So she had written out that statement as soon as she got back to the house, plus a letter to the lawyers to tell them where to find it—along with her will—in case of her death. The only thing she had to do then was to make sure I read a copy of it before I got my hands on her.
Gloria had no choice but to believe what she told her. After all, I didn’t deny it. She gave me every chance to say it wasn’t true, and I couldn’t even look at her. And to make it worse she already knew I had changed somehow and even seemed to avoid her from the very night Harshaw died. Naturally, she had no way of knowing it was also the night Sutton died, and that he was what was on my mind, and I couldn’t tell her.
Not that I know what she really thinks, or that I’ll ever know. We work together from nine until five and she is very efficient and does a beautiful job and she says, “Yes, Mr. Madox,” and “No, Mr. Madox,” and in her eyes there’s nothing but polite reserve and behind that nothing but blankness, an impenetrable wall of it. Beyond that—. Who knows? Maybe there’s no feeling at all, not even contempt. Probably there’s only a big calendar pad of so many months, so many more weeks, and days, and hours, that she has left ahead of her until she can put the last penny back and balance the books and be free.
And I can’t even help her. I’ve got plenty of money, enough to put it all back at once, and I love her enough to want to give her the only thing she probably lives for—the day she can tear the last page off that calendar and go away forever—and I can’t shorten her sentence one day. Dolores knows too well just how much is left and how long it will take. But even if I could help her, she wouldn’t accept it. It’s something she has to do.
But that still isn’t the terrible part of it, the thing that will drive me crazy some night if I don’t find some way to quit thinking about it. The final, ghastly joke of the whole thing is that she’s paying back five hundred dollars she doesn’t even owe, and there isn?
??t any way in the world I can tell her. It’s the five hundred I took out of Sutton’s wallet that night. So how can I stop her?
But in the final analysis her sentence will soon be over, and I’m the one who is doing life. In a little over two months now she’ll be free and can walk out of the office for the last time and go on with a life of her own. I think she and Eddie Something date a lot now that he’s home from college, and nothing is hopeless or irrevocable when you’re twenty-one. I’m the one who couldn’t make it. I had a try-out in the big leagues, but I didn’t have the stuff, and they sent me back. I’ve found my own level again, and I’m living with it.
Maybe it’ll be better when she’s gone, and maybe it’ll be worse. At least I get to see her now. I ask her if she knows where this paper is, or that paper, and she says, “Yes, Mr. Madox,” and I look at her, thinking of that morning a little less than a year ago, in this same office, when I saw her for the first time, very fresh and lovely and looking like a long-stemmed yellow rose, and I have to fight down that almost unbearable longing to cry out to her and ask her if she ever thinks of it, or remembers it, or the day Spunky was lost and I held her face in my hands and kissed her, or the night on the bridge when she said she loved me.
But I never ask it. There’s no need to, because I know what she would say.
“No, Mr. Madox.”