He took a sip of his drink and looked at me with a benign smile. “The modus operandi is somewhat involved, Mike. And we’d only bore Miss Holman, since she’s already familiar with all its ramifications. Suffice it to say that its axis, or focal point, is a real-estate transaction of a rather novel sort.”
“Who owns the real estate?” I asked.
“Miss Holman’s uncle.”
“And who’s going to buy it?”
He raised his eyebrows in gentle surprise. “Why, Miss Holman’s uncle, naturally.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “That was stupid of me. But what are you going to do if the uncle’s guardian catches you at it? I take it they must have him put away somewhere where he can’t hurt himself.”
“Miss Holman’s uncle is a banker, Mike,” he said, a little pained, “and a very astute businessman. As I remarked, the deal is a bit complicated, and, as any masterpiece, it suffers in condensation.”
I could see very well he wasn’t going to tell me anything unless I came in. Charlie was no fool. And I didn’t want to get mixed up in their shenanigan, whatever it was. What I wanted to do more than anything in the world was to get her alone for a few minutes, before this thing had me wondering who I was, and see if I couldn’t shake a little truth out of her. I’d never realized before just what a beautiful thing a simple, unvarnished fact could be—if I ever ran into one again.
Just then she looked at her watch and said, “I’m going to have to run. I’m expecting a telephone call at the hotel.” She stood up. “I’m very glad I met you, Mr.—ah—Belen.”
Charlie let me beat him to it, a little too obviously. You could see his angle. Let her work on me. “I’ll walk around with you,” I said. “Or get you a cab.”
“I wouldn’t like to trouble you,” she said.
“No trouble at all,” I replied. “It’ll be a pleasure.”
The rain had slowed to a fine drizzle. Instead of turning toward Canal as we came out, she went the other way, toward the French Quarter. I fell in beside her and took her arm. We walked in complete silence for a block and then turned off into a side street and went another block. I looked back. Charlie hadn’t followed us. We stopped under an awning, out of the misty rain that swirled beyond us under the cone of light from a street lamp. She looked up at me, big-eyed, her face still.
“All right, Miss Holman,” I said. “Make me cry.”
“Mike, please,” she said. “I didn’t know it was you. He said he had somebody in mind—to help us, I mean. A friend of his. But I had no idea who it was.”
“Never mind who I am,” I said. “I can still guess that—I think. What I want to know is which one of you erratic geniuses is the mother of Elaine Holman, and why?”
“Well,” she said hesitantly, “I am.”
So my hunch had been right. She was trying to sell Charlie a gabardine mink. I wondered if she had any idea of the probable odds on that. But it could wait.
“Well, look,” I said. “I suppose you can explain it Let’s give it a try. I mean, why you’re mixed up in something with Wolford Charles, and what the hell you’re trying to do.”
She hadn’t changed expression. She was still watching me quietly with those big brown eyes.
“Isn’t there anything you wanted to tell me first, Mike?” she asked softly.
“Such as?” I asked, trying to sound tough about it.
“Well, I’m glad to see you.”
“I’m always glad to see you, Mrs. Lane.”
“I’m not married any more, Mike.”
“Off again, on again, Flanagan.”
“Jeff was killed. Eight months ago, by a holdup man.”
“Oh.” I wanted to crawl down a sewer. “I’m sorry, Cathy. I’m sorry as hell.”
“It’s all right. You were right, anyway. We were about to separate.”
“It’s too bad.”
“I’ve missed you, Mike.”
“And I’ve missed—” I stopped. What was the use in digging that up again? I’d always feel empty when she was somewhere else, and we’d always fight when we were together. You couldn’t win. “But let’s get back to this Holman pitch,” I said briskly. “Start talking, Cathy.”
“Well, there is an Elaine Holman,” she said.
“I thought there might be. But where is she?”
“In New York. I met her last year. And she does have an uncle who’s a banker in a small town named Wyecross near the Mexican border.”
“But what are you up to?”
“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said quietly. “I’ve found Martin Lachlan.”
“You’ve what?” I grabbed both her arms.
“That’s right.”
“When?” I demanded. “And why didn’t you write me?”
“I didn’t know how to reach you.”
“Wait a minute,” I broke in. “This man in Wyecross—this banker—he’s Lachlan. Is that it?”
She shook her head. “Lachlan’s in Mexico.”
“Where in Mexico?”
“If I tell you, will you help me?”
“Look,” I said. “I’ve been waiting to catch up with Lachlan as long as you have.”
“All right. He’s in Lower California—fishing, at La Paz. But he has an apartment in San Francisco, among other places, and that’s where we’ll find him when we’re ready.”
“Ready, hell. We’re ready now.”
“No, we’re not,” she said. Then she looked up at me. “Unless—How much money do you have?”
“Thousand—eleven hundred dollars. About that.”
“Then we’re not ready. It’ll take a lot more than that even with what I have.”
I began to catch on. “Then you dreamed up this Holman thing to raise the money? You sold Charlie on it, and he’s going to split with you?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
“I see. The end justifies the means.” It always did with her. “Even if it means helping Wolford Charles swindle some man who never heard of Lachlan?”
“That isn’t quite the case. You haven’t asked me yet who this Wyecross man is.”
“Who is he?”
“His name is Goodwin.”
“What? Not that one!”
“Yes. Howard C. Goodwin.”
“You sure it’s the same one?”
“Mike, darling, I spent a week in Wyecross, doing a survey for—for—I’ve forgotten the name of the agency—I know everything there is to know about everybody.”
As I said, dullness wasn’t one of her faults.
I was still holding her arms. For some reason I’d forgotten to turn them loose. “Mike,” she whispered, “you’ll help us, won’t you? I need—I mean, we need you.”
There’s always a warning, if you’ll listen to it. It buzzes when you’re playing cards with strangers and get an almost perfect hand, and it’s always smart to listen. I could hear it now, but very faintly, as I thought of the law and of Wolford Charles and of the mess we could get into. But I was touching her and she was looking at me, and Lachlan was somewhere at the end of it. I couldn’t hear it very well.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m with you. Let’s get started.”
I should have turned up my hearing aid.
We flagged a cab and went around to her hotel. We’d go out somewhere for dinner, she said, and she wanted me to meet Judd Bolton, a friend of hers from New York. He was in the deal.
“Does he know who you are?” I asked. “I mean, what name do you use around him?”
She laughed. “I’ve known him a long time, and he knew Jeff. I asked him to help me, and he was the one who suggested getting Charlie. Charlie’s the only one who thinks I’m Elaine Holman.”
“If he does,” I said.
I was itching to find out what else she had learned about Martin Lachlan, and to get a line on this thing they had rigged for Goodwin, in Wyecross, but there wasn’t time to get much information out of her. She said Charlie’d brief me on the Wyecross deal in
the morning.
“They don’t know anything about Lachlan,” she said. “We do that alone.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Lachlan’s ours.”
He’d been ours for a long time. Except for the slight matter of finding him.
At the hotel she went up to the desk to call Bolton’s room. I watched her across the lobby, conscious that she was still one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen and thinking it was a shame more of them didn’t learn to walk. While she was talking, I drifted over to the newsstand to see if the Racing Form had come in. It hadn’t, and it was while I was standing there looking idly around the lobby that I discovered I wasn’t the only one watching her.
He was sitting like a limp doll in a big overstuffed chair near the doors with a paper in his hands, dark, thin-faced, a forgotten cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth. The paper was lowered into his lap and he was watching her with the unwinking intensity of a hungry child. In a minute she turned away from the desk and he put the paper up again. I stood there a minute, wondering about it. It was probably nothing. Everybody looked at her. It was just 1926 again and he was asking her if she’d ever seen the view from his apartment window, before going back to tomorrow’s selections at Hialeah.
Maybe, I thought uneasily. If that’d been spring in his face, they ought to get the women and children out before winter.
In a few minutes Bolton came down, and she introduced us. He was about thirty, big, expensive-looking, and tough in a civilized sort of way. Maybe it was the eyes. They were gray and they didn’t say anything, but you got the impression they could be hard as well as urbane. We got off to a bad start.
She explained who I was and told him I was in the act. He smiled at me, with not quite enough nastiness to pin down.
“Horses a little off their form, eh?” he asked. It wasn’t hard to translate. I was a broke horse player looking for a handout.
“Are they?” I said.
I could see dinner wasn’t going to be much if we had to have him along, but I was ready to try. We were going to be in this thing together, and we might as well make some effort to hit it off.
We went over into the French Quarter and stopped in a little hole in the wall for a drink while we made up our minds where to eat. There were some Navy uniforms up front at the bar, and a row of empty booths, and in the back a jukebox with colored lights was sobbing its heart out over something. We walked back to one of the booths, while the uniforms looked her over for spavin and bowed tendons, and she and Bolton sat down on one side and I got in across from them with my back toward the door. She ordered a Martini, and Bolton and I settled for Scotch.
The drinks came. The uniforms drifted out and the place was empty except for us. The flood of tears from the jukebox shut off and it shifted over to something by Vaughn Monroe. “Salud y pesetas,” I said to Cathy.
She started to raise the Martini and then stopped, as if she had run into an invisible glass wall. The door had opened and closed behind me, and now I heard footsteps coming along the row of booths, unhurried footsteps sounding like a sequence out of a B movie. Bolton looked up over my shoulder and I could see his face get dirty with fear. I turned my head to try to see what it was in the mirror behind the bar. It was the man from the hotel lobby.
He still looked like a corrupt and undernourished child, even in the baggy overcoat and with a gray snap-brim hat pushed back on his head. The dangling cigarette was gone now, but he carried the thin face tipped to one side as if the smoke still trailed up past the expressionless black eyes. As I watched him I was conscious of the odd impression that he looked like a gangster would who spent most of his time at crime movies studying the dress and mannerisms of hoodlums. He stopped and stood looking at us. Or rather, he was looking at Cathy. He gave me one negligent glance and forgot me, and appeared to have no interest in Bolton.
“I guess you forgot me,” he said. “In such a hurry to leave, you forgot all about me.”
“No,” she said. She put down the drink at last. “I didn’t forget.”
“Then maybe you just didn’t care.”
She was watching him the way a tiger eyes the man with the chair and whip. It wasn’t fear in her eyes, just watchfulness. “I think I told you once. I haven’t got that much money.”
“You can forget that dodge,” he said. “I know all about the insurance he left.”
Before she could say anything, Bolton spoke up. You could almost smell the fear in him. “I’m sure Mrs. Lane will pay you, Donnelly. It’s just that it takes time to get that much money.”
She gave him a quick, sidewise glance of contempt. “How about it?” Donnelly asked, ignoring him.
“I told you—” she began.
He moved a leisurely step nearer the table, leaned over it past Bolton, and his arm swung. The whole thing was so unhurried and deliberate it caught me by surprise and I sat there like a fool. His opened hand cracked against the side of her face with a sharp column of sound above the honeyed crooning of the juke. The arm came back and I caught it and turned.
It was like twisting a pipe cleaner. There was no strength or resistance in it at all. He half turned, with his elbow on the table, and looked at me utterly without interest as if I were a roach that had just crawled out of the woodwork.
“Who’s the strong boy?” he asked Cathy.
The barman was running up. I let the arm go and Donnelly straightened up. The side of Cathy’s face was stinging red, but she made no move to put a hand to it.
“What’s going on here?” the barman asked with a truculent glance at all of us.
Donnelly jerked a negligent thumb. “Beat it. We want anything, we’ll call you.”
“You want me to call the cops?”
“No,” Cathy said. “We’re all right.”
He went back to the bar, but kept watching us. Donnelly leaned on the table. “You better think it over, sweetie,” he said. “Don’t make me look you up again. You wouldn’t like it.”
He turned and started to go out, and then looked back. He nodded at me without even looking at me. “And if Strong Boy here is a friend of yours, you ought to tell him about putting his fat hands on people. I don’t like that rassling stuff.”
I started to get up to follow him to the door, but she gave me an urgent glance and shook her head.
He was gone. She picked up her drink and took a sip of it, then turned and looked at Bolton.
“You can finish your little drink now, dear,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll be back.”
Three
I didn’t get much sleep that night. There were too many questions going around in my mind trying to mate with answers that weren’t there, and I was busy with twenty-three years’ accumulation of Cathy Dunbar Belen Lane. That was a large order of just one girl, I thought. Wasn’t it enough for one lifetime? Did we have to go around again?
If she was mixed up in something dangerous, was it any of my business any more? Who was this Donnelly, and what did he want? She’d only shrugged him off when I’d asked her. “A cheap hoodlum,” she said indifferently. “He has some stupid idea I owe him money.”
Then she turned and smiled charmingly in Bolton’s direction. “I do think it’s cute, though, the way he impresses Mr. Bolton.” If she got the knife in you, don’t think she wouldn’t turn it. She despised people she could walk on.
His face was red with impotent fury. “I tell you, Cathy, the man’s dangerous. He’s as deadly as nitroglycerin. He’s not all there.”
“I agree with you, dear,” she said sweetly. “If he thinks he’s going to collect money from me, he’s certainly not all there.”
Bolton didn’t add up at all. When you dipped into him, you came up with both hands full of nothing. It was easy enough to write him off as a coward, the way she did, but something said it wasn’t that simple. Why? There wasn’t anything you could put a finger on, for God knows his face and his voice had been rotten with that cringing before Donnelly. Maybe, I
thought wearily, as I gave it up, he’s read Donnelly’s clippings and I haven’t.
It was strange, the way you couldn’t escape from the past. Or was it the past? Maybe she was the thing I could never get away from. I lit another cigarette and tried to think objectively about it. Of course I hated Lachlan; but why was it always intensified when I was with her? Just how often had I thought about him during the past two years?
No, I thought, that’s not right. I’m just trying to blame her for something I’ve got the same way she has. It’s all tied up with both of us and we’re all tied up with it and each other, and we always have been.
When she was four and I was six it was a white-nosed bear with a terrible voice and flashlights for eyes that made her tell stories and get into trouble. I believed it about the bear. She convinced me. It wasn’t that I lacked sophistication in the matter of bears, for I had seen them, in the Sierra Madre, with my father and hers; it was just that her bear was very real. You could almost see it yourself when she told you about it, and if it had flashlights for eyes—well, stranger things had happened. Stranger things had happened to her, anyway.
It was a long way back to those days when we were a couple of imaginative and bilingual kids playing with real Indians and imaginary bears, when the construction firm of Dunbar & Belen had built a lot of bridges and dams in the republics south of the Rio Bravo. That was before the firm had become Dunbar, Belen & Lachlan, and then had become nothing at all with the devastating suddenness of a dam going out. That was what it had been, a dam. And when it collapsed, it took Dunbar and Belen. It didn’t take Lachlan.
It was a long time before the whole story was pieced together, and when it was, it didn’t matter very much. Dunbar was dead—he died two years after they were released from prison—and while my father was still alive, he never seemed to take much interest in the fact. It wasn’t that there had been any loss of life in the disaster; as they said afterward, that was their only piece of luck. It hadn’t killed anybody. It had just cost them their company and their good reputations and two years of their lives.