“I liked you better the other way,” I said.
She didn’t bother to answer as she stopped to lean against the frame of the study door. The glare of the tilted desk lamp fell harshly across her pale, worn face.
“Let him clean up his own goddamned messes,” I said.
“I can’t,” she said. “What if you had felt that way about my mess?”
“That’s different,” I answered lamely, but she had already stepped into the study.
The angle of the light lowered, the line of shadow sweeping across the carpet toward the doorway, and the desk chair squeaked as if she were sitting down. I poured myself another splash of whiskey and went outside, switching off the deck lights as I stepped through the door. My .38 Airweight still huddled on the pad of the chaise lounge where the deputy had tossed it. I unloaded it and stuck it in my back pocket. A slice of moon like a hairline fracture opened the night sky, the dark bulk of the remainder clearly visible. As I stared at it, I heard Fireball whimper down on the lawn. I called him and heard his slow scuffle up the stairs. Up on the deck, he waddled over and climbed painfully up into my lap as I sat down on the lounge chair. His haunches were trembling furiously.
“That’s okay,” I said as I patted his head. “Everybody is gun-shy the first time.” The bulldog whined as I rubbed his neck until he stopped shaking. Then I sat him down and went back into the house. He followed, his nose brushing my heels.
Betty Sue still sat at the desk, her head in her hands as she leaned over the pile of tangled yellow pages. Her eyes were dry, though, when she glanced at me. Fireball walked over to her, and she lifted him into her lap. I went over too and leaned against the desk.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why did he try to kill himself?” “He can’t handle it, I guess.” “Handle what?” she asked as she wiped at her nose with the back of her hand.
“Love and forgiveness,” I said.
“I think I’m leaving him,” she said softly.
“That’s probably the best thing.”
“For whom?”
“Both of you.”
“You’re probably right,” she said. “It might be the best for everybody.” “Where are you going?”
She stared at me for a long time, then answered slowly, “I’m ten years late but I’m going home.” “At least I’ll know where to find you,” I said. “Don’t,” she whispered, “please don’t.” “Whatever you say.”
“And don’t worry about Hyland and the rest of the money,” she said. “I’ll take care of it somehow.” “Are you really leaving?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, then went out to the El Camino to pick up the checks and her five thousand cash.
“What’s this?” she asked, as I gave her the envelope. “Look at it,” I said.
“My god.” She sighed as she pulled the checks out. “Catherine?” “And his mother.”
“If they want him back this badly, I guess I have to let them have him,” she said, then handed me the checks and the cash. “Give the checks back to Catherine and the cash to Hyland,” she said. “I pay my own way.”
I folded up the checks and stuck them back into my pocket along with the five thousand in cash. “In the morning,” I said. “I’m going to the bank to cash this one for forty thousand, then I’m driving down to Denver and put it in their hands. Catherine can have your five thousand and these other two checks back.”
“Please don’t,” she pleaded.
“Listen,” I said, “you’re not the only one involved— my ass is on the line too.”
“I’m sorry,” she answered. “Thank Catherine for me—tell her I’ll pay her back.”
“You tell her.”
“I’ll be gone before daylight,” she said. “I’ve got a few things to pack up in the studio and a few clothes, then I’m gone.”
“I’ll be gone before that,‘“I said.
“Come here,” she said, and I leaned toward her. She slipped a hand behind my neck and pulled my face toward hers. Our lips brushed lightly. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for everything.”
“Do me a favor,” I said as I stood up.
“What?”
“When you go home, take that goddamned worthless bulldog with you.”
“Thank you,” she said again, a touch of laughter rising through a mist of newly born tears.
I touched her cheek with the fingers of my broken hand, then left her that way.
19••••
WHILE I WAS PACKING, I WENT INTO THE BATHROOM TO pick up my toilet articles and found the large mirror broken by the round Trahearne had fired through the floor. A large piece had fallen off it and crushed the slim vase with its burden of straw flowers and lonely women’s faces. I reached into the tangle of glass and pottery to pick out a large piece with a woman’s face upon it. I stared at it for a long time, then tossed it back on the counter and finished packing.
After I loaded the El Camino, though, I didn’t have anyplace to go. I drove down the gravel track to the highway, anyway, then turned right toward the mountains again. When I reached the crest of the first rise, I stopped and got out, lit a cigarette and opened a beer. The Trahearnes’ houses were dark, but a flood light spilled out of the studio up the hill from his house, and behind the windows, Betty Sue’s shadow walked back and forth briskly. In the darkness of the valley, the studio seemed like a crystal island in a sea of black water. I finished the cigarette and the beer, then drove on up to Moondog Lake to wait out the rest of the night.
At dawn an early loon filled the far end of the small lake with his maniac gibber. I kicked out my poorly tended campfire and headed back toward Cauldron Springs.
When I reached the edge of town, I stopped at an outdoor telephone booth to call Torres to tell him that I had his money, then I eased through the waking town, searching for a cup of coffee. Everything was still closed, though. I toured the town aimlessly, the only person awake except for an arthritic old man shuffling from a cheap motel toward the hulk of the hotel and its hot spring waters. I stopped to offer him a ride, but he refused, cackling as he told me that he needed the exercise. I drove slowly on past the hotel and as I turned, I saw Betty Sue’s VW parked in the alley behind the pool house and the tennis courts. Staring at it, I went past, then turned around and eased down the alley to park behind her car, which was stuffed with her
gear.
The back door was unlocked, but when I went inside the pool house, the waters lay flat and empty, filled with a luminous viscosity from the underwater lights, a light as ashen as that seeping through the skylights. I walked over to the pool and shouted her name, but her naked body floated face down in the pellucid waters, her right arm draped over the small body of the bulldog, as if she had tried to protect him from the bullets. Three black holes clustered in the middle of Betty Sue’s back, and another glowed like a coal behind Fireball’s ear. Below them, the .45 nestled like a poisonous sea plant against the bottom of the pool, and a cloud of blood, undissipated in the still water, surrounded the bodies like a hazy halo around a dark moon.
It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but what I had to do. I went back outside to open the hood of the El Camino and remove the air cleaner. I hid the checks and the cash inside the paper element of it, then went back inside and over to the hotel. The old man who had refused a lift and an even more crippled and older desk clerk were discussing their ailments. I let the conversation die a natural death before I told the desk clerk to call the sheriff’s office.
The first thing Sheriff Roy did, of course, was arrest me. I spent two weeks and three days in the Logan County jail without saying a word to anybody except my public defender lawyer, and I only told him that I didn’t have anything to say. If the Trahearnes didn’t push, the county attorney had no case, so I kept my mouth shut, and they didn’t push. They came once, though, Catherine an
d Trahearne, to visit me in jail. We sat at the end of a long table, my attorney at the other end. Trahearne looked downcast, but Catherine smiled as she told me that I wasn’t going to be charged.
“Thanks,” I said.
“We told them about those people in Denver,” Catherine said, “but of course they all have iron-clad alibis.”
“Those sort of people always do,” I said. “What happened to the money?” she asked casually. “It’s in a safe place,” I said. “Do you want it back?” “You’ve earned it,” Catherine said, smiling.
“Right,” I said.
Trahearne started to say something, but Catherine reached over to press her fingers to his mouth. I assumed that she was living in his house again, comforting him, protecting him.
“I hope it was worth it,” I said, then stood up and went back out into the hallway to pick up my jailer.
That afternoon as I drove out of town, Sheriff Roy followed on the tail of my El Camino. He flashed his
headlights at me, then when I wouldn’t stop, switched on his spinning blue lights. I didn’t even slow down, not even when he opened up his siren, and ten miles out of town, he cut it all off and left me alone. When he stopped to turn around, I stopped too and backed up. We both climbed out and met midway between our cars.
“You got a lot of guts, boy,” he said. “And you’ve got a lot of gall,” I answered. “I just didn’t want you making the mistake of coming back up here to straighten things out,” he said.
“What things?”
“Person or persons unknown,” he said. “Leave it at
that.”
“They paid me more than you,” I said, then headed back toward my pickup.
“They didn’t pay me nothing,” he claimed behind me, and I believed him.
In jail, I had missed the funerals, but when I got to California, I saw the graves. Betty Sue had been buried between her brothers in one of those modem, tasteful cemeteries, nothing but lawn and flat stones. It keeps the upkeep down. They can mow right over the headstones. Right over the rotting meat. Oney and Lester had dug right through the concrete and buried Fireball in front of the doorway of Rosie’s place, then poured a new concrete plug upon which his name and dates were scrawled in a drunken scribble.
The afternoon I got to Sonoma, Rosie and I were sitting on the front steps, looking at his grave, Lester and Oney flanking us with the beers I had bought them.
“You boys go on inside,” she said, and they did. “I thank you for all your trouble,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“At least I saw her that once,” she said, “and that’s 28
better than nothing.” Then she paused to hit on her beer bottle. “She told me about … about everything, ” she said softly, “but I just don’t understand why they had to kill her. She would’ve paid the money back, you know that, or if they could’ve waited, her husband would’ve paid it—he told me that when he came down with the body—they didn’t have to kill her.” “No,” I said.
Then she turned to me, saying, “I don’t reckon I could hire you again to … to take care of those people out in Denver … would you?”
“No,” I said, “you couldn’t hire me, and it wouldn’t do any good anyway.”
“The man who killed her, he probably didn’t even know … didn’t even know her … didn’t even know why …” she stammered, then dropped her head into her arms.
“That’s right,” I said, letting her think it had been that way.
“I won’t cry yet,” she said as she lifted her head quickly.
“Will you do me a favor?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve got some of Betty Sue’s money,” I said, “and I know she’d want you to have it.” I dug the five thousand out of my hip pocket and handed it to her. I had already sent Torres his money. If he was afraid to cash the check, that was his problem. “Why don’t you get on an airplane and go to Hawaii or some goddamned place? I could run the place for you.”
“That’s too much to ask,” she said as she slapped the sheaf of bills against her thigh.
“Do it,” I said, sounding angrier than I meant to. “You sure?” she asked.
“Dead sure.”
“I’d rather fly back to Oklahoma to see some of my kin,” she said quietly.
“Stay as long as you like,” I said, and finally Rosie turned loose the tears. When she stopped, she went back to the trailer to pack, and Lester and Oney used my pickup to take her over to San Francisco and the airport.
While she was gone, I tended the bar, ran the place, and spent my days waiting for him to show up.
It took him a week, but finally, on a Thursday afternoon, Trahearne showed up, rolling through the front door like a drunken bear. He paused long enough to exchange boozy condolences with Lester and Oney, then he ambled back to the far end of the bar, where I waited. As he shuffled onto a stool, I walked back down the bar, cracked two beers for the boys and a third for the old man.
“How you doing, boy?” he said as I sat it in front of him.
“Better than you, old man,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“My conscience is clear.”
“Yeah, I know,” he mumbled. “If I hadn’t been so broke, none of this would’ve happened. That Hyland son of a bitch!”
“Who?”
“Hyland,” he answered. “That son of bitch down in Denver.”
“He was dead when we left the house,” I said.
Trahearne didn’t say anything for a moment, then he said, “You don’t know that. He might have talked his way out of it or something. You don’t know
that.”
“I saw the body, old man.”
“Then it must have been that big ugly son of bitch,” he said.
“It was a big ugly son of a bitch,” I said, “but he didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger.”
“What’s that?”
“He got his ex-wife to pull the trigger,” I said.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“She pulled the trigger,” I said, “but you put the gun in her hand. And all for nothing, old man. Betty Sue was gone, already gone.”
“Oh, come on, boy, you’ve got to be kidding,” Trahearne said, then laughed hollowly. “Let me buy you a beer, boy, before I take off? I’ve got to get home, you know, get back to the old desk. Like you said, I’ve been standing too far from it. So get yourself a beer,
boy.”
“Go home,” I said as I jerked his bottle out of his hand. “Get your ass home, old man.”
“Come on, boy, gimme my beer,” he whined.
I threw it on the duckboards beside me.
“Okay, if you feel that way, boy, I’ll take off,” he said.
“When you get home,” I said, “I want you to do me a favor.”
“What’s that?” he asked as he stood up, drawing himself up like a wounded man.
“Wait for me.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, confused, rolling his head.
“Go home and wait for me,” I said. “I’ve got a brand new elk rifle, a 7rnm magnum, old man, and some afternoon, some afternoon, you’re going to step out on your front deck after a day of scribble, scribble, scribble, and I’m going to put a 175-grain hunk of lead right through your gut.”
“Always with the jokes, Sughrue,” he said as he stumbled back from the bar.
“Go home, old man,” I said, “go home and wait for me and try to work, old man.”
“Come on,” the big man pleaded as he banged into the pool table.
“You’re dead,” I said. “Go home before you start to
stink.”
I guess he did. The last I saw of him, he was hurrying out of Rosie’s place, stumbling over Fireball’s grave.
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
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