“Well, that means he’ll call here,” Bolton said. “Extortion, because he knows she has the money from Goodwin.”
My mind was working a little better now. And I was suspicious of Bolton again. “There’s just one thing I want to know,” I said. “What’s your angle this time? How much of this junk can I believe? You’ve just told me you were trying to scare her out of eight thousand dollars with Donnelly. Two hours ago you and Charlie were trying to swindle her out of sixty-five thousand with that game with Gerard. What are you trying to pull now?”
He stopped his pacing and ran a hand through his hair. “Does this look like an act?” he asked harshly. “For God’s sake, Belen, this is the truth. It’s on the level. Sure, I’ll admit I tried to swindle her. I’ll try it again if I get a chance. She’d do the same to me, and love it. But having her hurt is something else. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to her.”
“You couldn’t?” I asked. It was too much for me. “You’re lying.”
“No,” he said quietly, staring straight at me. “I’m not lying now, Belen.”
And I believed him. He was as crazy about her as I was. There wasn’t any way on earth to understand it, but there it was. Suddenly it occurred to me that they were just alike. I’d known her all my life and still I didn’t understand her as well as he did—as well as they understood each other.
But what difference did that make now? The chances were that neither of us would ever see her alive again. It had been—God, how long had it been? Where was she? She couldn’t be dead. She was so beautifully and brilliantly alive that you couldn’t conceive of her ever being anything else. I wanted to go to the telephone and throw it against the wall to make it ring.
I would walk toward it, then away from it. I would go clear across the room and try to shut it out of my mind to make it ring suddenly and surprise me. I went into other rooms. I stared out the window. Without even bothering to think about it, I saw Lachlan’s foreign roadster driven up from the garage and the Filipino and two bellboys loading it with bags, and then, suddenly, Lachlan leaping from a cab, climbing into the car, and driving away. He was gone. We had spent untold hours planning and rehearsing an act to make him do just that, and now that I saw him doing it, it meant nothing at all. I was waiting for a telephone to ring.
The sun was gone now, and fog was coming in over the hill. In a little while it would be dark. And in just a little while we could quit hoping.
I stopped abruptly and turned to listen. It was only a tiny sound, but it went through me like flying slivers of glass. It wasn’t the telephone. It was someone putting a key into the lock on the other side of the door. The door swung open and Cathy was standing there, with Donnelly and the big man behind her.
“Darling,” she said, “I hope you weren’t worried about me.
Nineteen
Donnelly shoved her. She shot into the room and tripped on her high heels and fell. I started toward her. The two men were inside the room now, and Donnelly took the automatic out of his coat pocket. “Uh-uh,” he said.
The humorist looked from Bolton to me with apparent relish. “How about these two clowns, Monk?”
“Shove ‘em in another room so we can talk to the babe.”
“Listen, you little punk—” I began.
He tilted his head sidewise and looked at me. “Yeah?” he asked. It was the motion-picture killer at his deadliest—detached, professional, utterly without emotion. And it was terrifying. Not because of that, but because he was as crazy as a loon.
Bolton tried it. “Donnelly, I think you’ve carried this stupid joke about far enough.”
Donnelly gave him the same stare, as impersonal as death. “Well,” he said. “A comic.”
Cathy was struggling to her feet. Donnelly held the gun in his right hand and shoved her again with the left. She staggered backward and fell onto the sofa.
He jerked his head toward Bolton and me. “Lock these clowns in the bedroom, Brock.”
The humorist took a sap out of his pocket and slapped it against his palm, listening to the meaty sound of it. “This way, boys.” He nodded toward the bedroom. “The quiz show is going on the air in this studio.”
I started for him. Donnelly jerked the muzzle of the automatic around. Brock feinted at my groin with a knee and as I doubled over involuntarily and swung aside, with my hands down, the sap flashed in the air.
I wasn’t knocked out. I was just incapable of movement, lying on the floor with a red ocean of pain sloshing around in my head while the apartment tilted and wheeled. I could hear a voice saying, “—and take this chunk of meat with you.” Then I was being lifted by the shoulders and dragged across the rug.
I was in another room. It was dark, but I could hear someone moving. A light switch clicked, and I saw I was lying on the rug beside the bed. My head was bursting and nausea was a snake uncoiling in my stomach. Bolton was bending over me. He had blood running down his face from a cut laid open on his forehead.
I pulled my way up the side of the bed and sat down. I was weak and shaking. And then I heard the sound from the living room, a sudden, sharp crack like a canoe paddle on water, and a gasp.
A voice I recognized as Donnelly’s was saying, “All right. You been stalling long enough. Where’s the money you took off the chump?”
Somehow I got off the bed and started for the door. Bolton caught me by the arm. I turned and looked at him. His eyes were terrible. I got to the door. It wasn’t locked, because the bolt was on this side, in the bedroom, but it opened the other way.
He shook his head. “The sofa’s against it,” he whispered. I had sense enough to know what he meant. All we had to do was push on it and shove the sofa back, with two men waiting on the other side with guns.
I could hear Brock. “How about me taking a turn at bat, Monk? Maybe she needs to be lifted a couple times.”
Pain was still pounding at my skull, but my mind was clearing a little so I could think. We had to keep our heads. If we let the sounds on the other side of the door push us over the edge and started going wild, we’d all be dead. She would break after a while and tell them where the money was, but maybe Brock wasn’t interested primarily in the money alone. You could see he got his fun in other ways.
I moved shakily to the window and looked out. It was totally dark now, and fog pressed in on the building like saturated gauze. Nine floors down the street lamp was faintly visible, while below and to the left the neon sign over the cocktail lounge was a diffused and watery splash of orange. I reached for the light switch and cut it and looked again. Beyond me to the left one of the big casement windows in the living room was partly open. The drapes were drawn but a little light escaped to seep futilely into the fog and lose itself. I strained my eyes downward and could just faintly see what I was looking for, a narrow ledge perhaps five inches wide running across the front of the building just below the windows.
Could I make it? The windows were a good six feet apart and each opened from the center, so I’d have to go around the one on the other end to get inside it, but by spread-eagling myself along the ledge I should be able to span the distance from one to the other. Bolton was beside me in the darkness, peering out.
I flicked the light back on. He shook his head. We moved away from the window so they wouldn’t hear us and he said, “Not with the two of them in there and the light on. They’d get you coming through the drapes.”
I knew that, but there was still one chance. There was a reading lamp on the night table beside the bed. I grabbed it up and pulled the plug out of the wall outlet. There was the stinging, sharp impact of flesh on flesh from beyond the wall and again that strangled intake of breath like a gasp, and we looked away from each other. My flesh crawled, and I couldn’t control the trembling of my hands.
I took the lamp in one hand and the cord in the other and jerked. The wires tore out of the base, one already bare on the end. I put the other between my teeth and bit down, yanking on it with my hands.
It cut my lip, but a little of the insulation was gone. I twisted the two bare ends together.
Bolton looked at me and shook his head. “If the lights in there are on a different circuit, you’re dead.”
We could hear Brock. “This won’t get it, Monk. I tell you. You want to hear her sing? Just yank off her blouse and that brassiere and hand me your cigarette.”
I stood up. “Wait till I get on the ledge and around the end of that other window. When I start to climb in, plug it back in the socket.”
“You’re still groggy. Let me go.”
“No,” I said.
Then I was outside and had my feet on the ledge. I had to lean outward over nine floors of empty fog to get around the edge of the open window. Now I was past it and could stand up against the wall, my face touching the bricks and my left hand holding onto the steel window frame. It was dark and everything was wet with the fog. I edged outward toward the right, inching my feet along with my heels extending out over space.
My left arm was straight out now, the fingers just gripping the window. The bricks were cold against my face. I put out my right arm and felt the fingertips just brush the edge of the other window. I couldn’t make it. I couldn’t get hold of both windows at once. My arms weren’t long enough.
I teetered precariously, trying to stretch out another inch, letting go a little with the fingers of the left hand until they were just braced against the window frame, balancing there with my face shoved against the wall. I still couldn’t hook the fingers of my right hand over the edge of the other one. I strained, trying not to think of the hundred feet of space between me and the fog-shrouded sidewalk below.
Then from inside the room I heard the sound of cloth being ripped and the little cry of terror torn from her as she began to break. I let go completely with the left hand, pushing, and swung across the wet, dark surface of the wall like an inverted pendulum. The bricks pushed at my chest, forcing me outward over nothingness, while I clawed wildly with my right. My fingers closed over the upper edge of the steel frame just as I started to drop and then I was hanging from it and pawing for the ledge with my feet. One of them hit and I pushed up with it as I pulled myself up and I was standing again, leaning outward to get around the edge. In a second I was around, with the angle of the steel frame behind me. Every muscle in my body was trembling.
I looked back and I could see Bolton in the light from the open window. He was watching me, and when I nodded, his head disappeared. I tried to pray. If the lights of the two rooms were on different circuits I didn’t have a chance. The bedroom fuse would blow when he plugged in the shorted wires, but I’d have to go through the drapes into the living room in full view of the two of them with guns.
I could hear the faint but terrible rustlings of impotent struggle and I could hear her beginning to cry. And then the lights chopped off. I clawed my way inside, fighting through the drapes.
The darkness was impenetrable, as black as the bottom of a mine. I heard Brock curse, “What the hell,” and I moved toward the sound of his voice with my hands out in front of me. I collided with somebody and we went down in a threshing tangle. All hell exploded at once. I heard a crash that sounded like glass breaking somewhere, in the darkness and then the scraping as Bolton fought at the bedroom door, shoving back the sofa. I knew it was Brock I had when a big fist crashed against my head. I swung wildly and hit the rug. I located his face with one clawing hand and swung at it with the other. He managed to land on me again, and then we were locked in a writhing mass of arms and legs. I got him by the throat and hung on, raging, not even feeling the blows battering on my face and chest.
Suddenly there was a light. I managed to swing my head a little and saw it was Cathy holding a cigarette lighter. “Put that out!” I screamed. “Donnelly! The gun!”
“He won’t shoot anybody,” she said, and just then Bolton came running past her. He appeared to take something out of her hand and then he was kneeling beside me. His arm swung, there was a meaty crunch, and Brock went limp. I looked at it. It was Donnelly’s gun.
I got unsteadily to my feet and held onto a chair. I’d taken a beating and I was weak. In the faint light I could see Donnelly lying on the rug with a broken table lamp beside him and Cathy herself holding up the cigarette lighter. Her hair was wildly tousled, her blouse was torn, and I could see the stinging red on her face where she’d been slapped, but she was unmarked. She swayed a little and tried to smile.
“I socked him,” she gurgled ecstatically. “I hit him with the lamp.”
I caught her just as she started to fall. The darkness closed in around us and I heard Bolton saying something about the fuse box. I sat down on the floor and just held her in my arms. I knew it was the last time I ever would.
* * *
It was a half hour before things quieted down. We got the lights on again, and when Donnelly and Brock started to come around Bolton pointed toward the door with the gun.
“In just three minutes, I’m going to call the police,” he said. Donnelly was crying, and Brock was looking at him with contempt as they left.
Cathy had changed clothes. We sat in the living room with drinks in our hands. She rattled the ice in her glass and glanced across at me and smiled.
“Mike, darling,” she said happily, “do you realize we’ve done it? At last. After all those years.”
“Yes,” I said. I got up and walked over to the window and looked out at the fog.
“You don’t have to worry about it, Mike. He was so scared when he left here he’ll never see through it. It was beautiful, wasn’t it?”
“I know,” I said. “He’s already gone.”
I didn’t feel anything about him at all. I don’t know what I had expected, but there just wasn’t anything. What he had done couldn’t be wiped out by what we had done. I didn’t feel any remorse for having swindled him. Not him. And I didn’t feel any pride in it, or satisfaction. I tried to think of some reaction, but the only thing I could come up with was that I was just tired of him. I was sick of the sound of his name, and I didn’t even want to think about him any more.
“It was beautiful, Judd,” she was saying to Bolton. “When we have time, I want to tell you just how we did it.”
It had been coming ever since I’d picked up that letter on Lachlan’s desk. I didn’t want it to. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it. The confusion and excitement and the worry about her had kept putting it off, but it was here now. I turned around and faced her. “What do you think we ought to do now?” I asked.
“Why don’t we go to Acapulco for a few weeks?”
I shook my head. “I mean after that. Remember, we haven’t got Lachlan to look forward to any more.”
“Oh,” she said cheerfully, “I’ve got loads of ideas. Some even better than this one. But this was beautiful, wasn’t it? It was just so perfect, Judd. I mean, for Lachlan. You see, Lachlan is essentially a wise-guy type, a pseudo sophisticate, and the thing we had to do—”
I walked slowly over and stood in front of her. Bolton stopped listening to her and watched me. “Cathy,” I said, “where did you hide that money?”
She smiled. “In one of your suitcases.”
“How about bringing it out here?”
She looked at me questioningly, but got up and went into the bedroom. She came out in a minute with the envelope in her hand. Bolton was staring now.
“What are you going to do, Mike?” she asked curiously.
Without answering, I sat down at the coffee table, slid the bills out, and began counting. It took quite a while. All seventy of them were there. The room was very quiet when I had finished. I put them in two piles, sixty-five in one and five in the other. Then I passed the five to her.
She was staring at me. “Mike, what on earth—”
I put the sixty-five one-thousand-dollar bills into the envelope and shoved it in my pocket. “You spent a week in Wyecross, investigating, didn’t you?” I asked her. “And you told me H
oward C. Goodwin was the one who’d worked for Lachlan.”
“Yes.” She was hardly breathing as she watched me.
“Well, I spent a lot longer than a week there, and I went ahead and helped swindle him. So I guess neither of us has very much to be proud of. Do we?”
“What do you mean?”
“It makes you a liar, and it makes me stupid for believing you.”
“No,” she said defiantly. “I tell you—”
“It’s no use, Cathy,” I said. I told her about the letter in Lachlan’s apartment.
“All right,” she said hotly. “I did know it. But, Mike, I went out there in the first place because his name was Goodwin, and because Elaine said he had been in Mexico.”
“And you found out he wasn’t the one. But when I asked you, that night in New Orleans—”
“But don’t you see, Mike?” she said frantically. “I had to tell you that. We had to have you. Could I give up the chance at Lachlan we’d waited for all our lives?”
That was it, I thought. I felt rotten as hell. It was always Lachlan, and still it wasn’t Lachlan at all—or it hadn’t been for a long time. He was an excuse, or maybe he had started it in the beginning, but he really didn’t have anything to do with it any more. She had needed him, maybe, to rationalize it up until now, but that was all over.