Murder for the Bride (21 page)

“That makes it tough, and expensive.”

“You’re driving the car, friend.”

He shrugged and put it in gear. The truck had brought us into the Broadmoor section. He drove over to Broad Street, headed up Broad to Bayou Road, and got onto Gentilly at the circle. I had half expected him to head that way. He didn’t go as far out Gentilly as I had. He turned right into the arched entrance drive of a walled court.

“Give me twenty bucks and stay right there,” he said. “I know this guy.”

He left the motor running and went into the office. He leaned on the counter and talked to a broad, bald-headed man. Beyond the bald head I could see the wall clock. It was a shock to me that it should say only twenty to twelve, that it was still Monday, that it was still the same day I had spent so restlessly at Tram’s house.

He came back out, whistling softly to himself, and drove into the court, looking for numbers on the small brown cottages. The place was planted with stubby palms. The fronds whispered against the side of the cab.

“Here it is. Number eighteen. Need any help with her?”

“Just go and unlock the door, friend.”

I took a five out of my billfold before picking up Jill and edging out of the cab with her. He had turned on an overhead light, inside. I handed him the bill. He went whistling down the steps and drove off.

I caught the door with my heel and kicked it shut. I carried her to a dusty couch and put her down. It was
a long narrow room with a draw curtain so that it could be changed into two rooms. The couch I had placed her on was of the kind that opens up to make a double bed. There was a double bed in the far end of the long room, and a bath that opened to the right near the bed.

It was an old place, stained with innumerable transients. It smelled of dust and damp rot. The walls were city-hall buff. I opened the door again, put the key on the inside of the lock, and locked the door. The place was hot and airless. But it was precious because it was refuge.

There was a bed lamp on the double bed. I carried her in and put her on the bed and turned on the bed lamp. I went back and turned out the overhead light, opened the two front windows, and pulled the draw curtain.

I went back and sat on the edge of the bed. The springs creaked loudly. I took her hand in mine. I didn’t like her color, and I didn’t like the way she breathed. Her pulse rate was an even fifty. Her hand felt as boneless as putty.

The sensible thing to do was get hold of that doctor she had called Jack. But she had never mentioned his last name.

Another choice was to let her sleep it off. That didn’t sound good either. I decided that maybe I could get her back to life enough so that she could give me the doctor’s name and number.

I unstrapped the sandals from her bare feet and set them on the floor. I took a look in the bathroom. There was a tub but no shower. I put the stopper in the tub and turned on the cold water. It ran out in a discouraged trickle, rusty against the stained porcelain. There were two discouraged towels, terry cloth with most of the little nubs worn off, gray rather than white.

The half blouse had three buttons at the side. When I had unbuttoned them, I pulled it off over her head. Her bra was so tight it cut into her back. I unhooked it and pulled it down over her limp, boneless arms. It left a depressed red line where it had encircled her. The Mexican skirt had one button at the left side and a concealed
zipper. I went to the foot of the bed and got the hem and pulled it down off her slim legs. The panties were pale blue, like the bra, with an elastic around the waist and a thin border of gay yellow lace around the legs.

I put her clothes neatly on the chair. Her body was quite astonishingly lovely, with no roughness or coarseness of skin, no flesh sag. Her skin was like cream and her breasts were tipped with delicate coral pink. I looked upon her, and felt no desire, no guilt for looking at her as I did, only a sick fear that too much drug had been given her. To many minds the mere thought of a “nekkid woman” is erotic. There was nothing erotic about my thoughts as I looked down on her and tried to decide whether the shock of the cool water would help her or harm her. I compromised by going in and getting one of the towels and dipping it in cool water, wringing it out, and bringing it back to the bed. With it I rubbed away the dirt, the dried oil of perspiration. I turned her face down gently, half smiling as I saw the small raspberry mark, the mark shaped like a half-moon, like a tiny scimitar.

As the towel became soiled, I kept refolding it to disclose clean surfaces. I used hot water on the gash in her cheek. Once the crust of dried blood was gone, it looked a good deal less important.

I picked her up in my arms and carried her into the bathroom, clumsily rapping her bare ankle against the doorframe. I knelt with her beside the tub, lowered her into the cool water and raised her out quickly, lowered her again so that the water covered her, then raised her out. Too late, I remembered my wrist watch. The damage was done, anyhow. I watched her face and kept repeating the process until my arms felt as though they were going to drop off. I let her rest in the water for a time, and then started again. When her fingernails and lips began to have a faintly blue tinge, I carried her back to the bed, got the dry towel, and rubbed her down so briskly that her skin began to glow pink. Just when I was about to give up, her slack lips stirred. She made a complaining groan and tried to turn her face away from
the light. I slapped the undamaged side of her face sharply. My fingers left red marks. She groaned again. She sounded like a cross child being awakened to catch the school bus.

No matter how I tried, I couldn’t bring her out of it any further. I left her there, walked a quarter mile to a bean wagon, and came back with a quart of hot black coffee in a container. I held her head up and got some of the coffee down her throat. She choked weakly. I set the coffee aside, pulled her onto her feet, and supported her there. When I tried to walk her, her feet merely dragged. After several more slappings, several more sips of coffee, I tried again. Her feet worked weakly. She was taking steps. She made groaning complaints constantly, her chin on her chest, head lolling. But I was persistent and I was merciless.

M
y watch would no longer run, and she had none, so I had no idea of how much time had passed before she began to walk supporting most of her weight, her chin a bit off her chest, her eyes still closed. And instead of groans she kept saying, “No. Lemme ’lone. Wanna sleep. No.”

The last of the coffee I gave her was stone cold. I sat her on the edge of the bed and held her shoulders to keep her upright. She sighed heavily and her chin sank slowly back onto her chest.

I put my lips close to her ear. “Can you hear me, Jill?”

“Go ’way.”

“Jill, listen to me! This is Dil!”

“ ’Way,” she muttered.

“Jill, honey! Where’s your clothes? I can’t find your clothes!”

She didn’t stir. I was certain she had gone back to sleep. I held her shoulders and looked at her. Her right hand moved and went fumbling along her thigh. It slid up across her flat stomach to the warm well of her breasts.

She took a deep shuddering breath. Her head came up slowly and her eyes opened. A frown slowly grew on her forehead, pinching the jet-black brows together. Her eyes held a baffled, puzzled look.

“Dil!” she said thickly, drawling the one-syllable name.

“That’s right,” I said loudly, cheerfully, grinning into her face. “Don’t you think you ought to help me find your clothes? Where did you lose them?”

Her arms went into the instinctive and classic posture of modesty, left arm across her breasts, her right hand making like a fig leaf. Dismay slowly appeared in the dazed eyes. I could have screamed murder at her until I was blue in the face, and she would not have stirred from her semiconscious state. By alarming a very basic part of her nature, I had done more than the cold water, coffee, slaps, and interminable walking could ever have done.

“What … you doing … here?” she demanded slowly and painfully. “Get out … of here!”

I released her shoulders and backed away. She swayed, but remained sitting upright. Her mouth grew firm. “Get out!”

“Not me, honey.”

I respected her for the enormous effort it took her to get to her feet. She sidled carefully, glanced over her shoulder, and began to back to the bathroom door. The effort she was making and the shock to her emotions was bringing her out of it. I moved quickly and blocked her way, still grinning. She gave a cry of dismay, tottered to the bed, yanked the spread up, and crawled under it. She pulled it up to her chin and stared at me with wide, angry, blazing eyes.

“Damn you!” she said. Her voice was still thick. Tears gathered in her eyes.

I sat on the edge of the bed. She squirmed away from me. I said, “Look! You’ve
got
to wake up. This was the
only way I could bring you out of it. You were drugged.”

Her eyes grew dull again. “Drugged?” she said.

“Yes. Can’t you remember your apartment? Can’t you remember being tied to the chair?”

“Tied to the chair?”

“For God’s sake, stop repeating every word I say! Wake up!”

“Need … hot coffee, Dil.”

“I’ll get you some if you promise not to go to sleep.”

“Promise.”

I was gone about ten minutes getting the second quart. When I came in the bed lamp was off. I cursed her with feeling.

“I’m awake, Dil,” she said in a small voice. “I was afraid you’d come back while I was still getting dressed.”

She turned the light on. She was sitting up in bed. The dirty blouse was back on. I glanced at the chair. Just the skirt remained. She took the container and sipped, holding it in both hands. Then she gave it to me. I took a quick swallow and set it aside.

“Do you think you need a doctor?” I asked.

“No. I’m getting clearer all the time. Someone called on the phone. They pretended to be you. It frightened me. As I started to leave, those men came in. One of them was the one I saw that day when I left Laura. He twisted my arm. It still hurts. They tied me to that chair and he hurt my arm again. He wanted to know about the paper they want.” She lifted her chin. “I didn’t tell them a thing.”

“You didn’t know anything, did you?”

“I had a funny hunch Monday morning, Dil. It came from some little things rattling around in my mind. Little things that didn’t fit. Like Laura saying that about things not being what they seem. And that rabbit she gave you and the way she bought it being so sort of coy, and not like her. So I went to that jewelry store, the big one there on the corner, and I talked to the manager and I described the rabbit. He said they’d never had anything in stock like that ever. Just in case you had the wrong store, I went to the others in the neighborhood. They’d never had any rabbits like that either. Dil, have you got it?
I’m almost certain that’s what they want.”

“Sure I’ve got it. But she came out of the store with it all gift-wrapped.”

“That was window dressing, Dil. She bought something else and switched them before she gave you the package.”

I took the rabbit out of my pocket. My key chain was through the loop on the top of his straight ear. I looked at every part of him. He looked solid. Jill reached over and took him. She paid close attention to the base, turning it this way and that in the light.

Her voice was excited. “Look at the base carefully, Dil. There’s a little round depression there. You can’t see it unless the light strikes it properly. Like a hole about a quarter inch in diameter had been drilled and then filled up again.”

“But that’s crazy! If she was planning to trade her information for security, why let me trot around Mexico with it?”

“One, she probably had it memorized anyway. Two, would you have been likely to lose a gift from your bride, along with the key to her apartment?”

“Whoever wanted it while I was in Mexico would have had to kill me to get it.”

“Exactly. Laura was a lot of things, but not a fool. Not ever a fool, Dil.”

“Then all the time their hunch was right, that hunch that I had what they wanted. Why wasn’t Haussmann after it too?”

“I don’t know where he fits. I only happened to get his name.”

“He and Laura were both trying to trade this information for security.”

“Probably he had it memorized too.”

Her fingers closed around the rabbit. “What can it be, Dil? What can it be that’s so important?” Suddenly she stiffened. “Wait! I’m still groggy. I’m taking too much for granted. Where are we? What is this dreadful room? How did you get me away from them?”

I had to start with Tram. As I expanded on what I
had seen him do, and the conclusions I had reached, her eyes narrowed and she began to nod.

“What are you nodding for?”

“Another hunch, Dil. You see, Barney told me something that I didn’t tell you. He told me not to tell you. I asked him why, but he just smiled in that dusty way of his. He told me that if by any remote chance—and he spoke sarcastically—I happened to be letting you hide at my apartment, it would be nice if I urged you to go stay with Tram. I asked him if that was so he could catch you easier and he told me that I should just trust him and believe him. Do you see what my hunch is?”

“That they
wanted
me to go to Tram, all of them. That means Tram may have been under suspicion. What could they prove by my being there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the house was wired for sound, or something. What happened after you saw Tram talking on the dead line?”

I went on from there. I put in my own guess about Sipe, that he had operated a hideout for wanted people for a long time, and that Talya’s friends probably put Jill there as a first step in taking over the entire operation. I told of the end of Sipe and of Straw Hat. I told of the car and how it turned over, and shooting the dog, and then about the truck driver and the taxi driver.

I said, “And that’s how we got here.”

“More detail, please. What did you do after you brought me here?”

“You gave me a bad time. I got your clothes off and gave you a cold sponge bath and then took you in and swashed you up and down in the tub about a hundred times, then poured coffee down you and walked you a couple of hundred miles. We got here before midnight. When I got that last batch of coffee, it was a little after three.”