Murder for the Bride (22 page)

I thought I had seen the very best of her blushes. But this one was the color of mashed tomatoes. Her eyes were wide. “Jumping Judas,” she said softly and with great awe.

I caught her hands. I said, “Look. When you dropped me at Tram’s Sunday night, you were sore, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I was the dumbest guy in the world. I didn’t have the faintest idea why you were sore.”

She looked away from me. “Didn’t you?”

“No. Do you know what I had to do? I had to wade across a pond by lantern light and see you unconscious in that bunk before it began to make sense to me. I saw you there, and I remembered that cat you told me about. What was his name?”

“Oliver.”

“And then I remembered a lot of funny things that should have been more evident to me. What a hell of a life for a one-man woman, watching the man go marry a thing like Laura!”

The blush remained in undiminished intensity, and she wouldn’t look at me. “Did I say you were the man?”

“You don’t have to say it. After that feeble kiss in your hallway, the only time I ever tried to kiss your lips, I had to say that the next guy would do better. That’s what hurt you, isn’t it?”

“How did you find out?” she whispered.

“Just by looking at you in that grubby hole of a hideaway and realizing what would be left of me if you were dead. Not a hell of a lot. A funny thing to find out at this point. A kid sister, you were. So now you creep up on me.”

“Pity, Dil?” she asked, not looking at me.

“You’re a very special person, Miss Townsend. Too special, I think, to get messed up with old Try-again Bryant.”

She was looking over into the corner of the room, at something that wasn’t there. The light touched the clean and pure line of her cheek. Her dark hair, where I had got it wet, had started to curl tightly.

“Don’t run yourself down, Dil.”

“Oliver, the cat, had sense. He picked you. You’ve got no sense.”

“But I’m just as stuck as Oliver was.”

“Then it’s the only thing I can do, isn’t it? Under the circumstances. How do you like tired old words? Song words? Movie words?”

She swung her eyes slowly around to meet mine. The blush had faded to pallor. Cool fingertips touched my cheek. “Old words are good words.”

“I love you.”

“Thanks for not qualifying it. Thank you, Dil, for just saying it. It probably sounds stiff and funny to you, hearing your own lips say it to me. But not to me. I’ve said it too often, said it too often to you. So it’s familiar, and very dear. I love you, Dil.”

She held her arms up like a child. The kiss began awkwardly. Noses in the way again. Her lips tightly compressed. According to the books it should have changed. But it didn’t. I tried to make it change. She tried to conceal the involuntary flinch from the touch of my hands. She was tensed. It just wasn’t any good. I let go of her. She sank back onto the pillow and looked up at the ceiling.

“No good,” she said. “No good at all.”

“Don’t let it worry you. Things will improve.”

“You … suppress something too long. What happens to you, Dil? What is it that happens? Inside me is a spring wound tight. It should come loose, but it’s caught.”

“There’ll be plenty of time.”

“And if the spring never came loose, would you stay around?”

“Of course.”

“And end up hating me. Female icicle. Woman who endures patiently, and hates every minute of it. The world is full of women like that.”

“They’re like that because they want to be like that.”

“Please, Dil. Try again.”

I tried. I tried to carry it further, tried to carry it up to and beyond the point where she’d break. But I just succeeded in feeling like a heel. She tried too. But she couldn’t even come up with an imitation of pleasure. I stood up. She lay looking at the ceiling, tear tracks on her cheeks, her face expressionless. I lit two cigarettes from the fresh pack I’d got with the coffee. I handed her one. She took a deep quivering drag on it and closed her eyes.

She said, “Let’s just forget our little conversation.”

“Not yet.”

“My adoring Oliver is pretty indicative. Don’t old maids love cats?”

“Don’t forget I’ve been reviewing the merchandise. That would be too much of a waste to contemplate. Just let me chip away at that rusty spring.”

“It won’t work.”

“This was a silly time to try, anyway. How do you know what that drug may have done to you? And there’s another thing. My marrying Laura. That could make with quite a psychological quirk, you know.”

“I can’t even kiss you,” she said in the forlorn tone of a lost child.

I bent over and rumpled her damp hair. “Forget it. Let’s sleep. I’ll take the couch over there. We can’t do anything tonight, about our little present for the Jones boys. If you’re right about people wanting to steer me to Tram’s place, then all this man-wanted stuff is window dressing.” I kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Have a good sleep.”

I pulled the draw curtain across, found sheets in a bureau drawer, and made up the couch. I heard a lot of sloshing around in the bathroom and wondered what she was doing. As I was wondering, the sleep of utter exhaustion reached up with a black velvet hook and yanked me under.

A great roaring woke me up. It scared me so that I bounded out of bed, right in the middle of a seminightmare about being trapped in a tunnel with a train roaring down on me. It took long befuddled seconds to realize that it was raining so hard that the palm fronds were sounding like the steady crash of surf. I sat on the edge of the bed and had a cigarette while my pulse gradually slowed down. I went to the window. Beyond the steady curtain of rain was a faint grayness. The rain bounded on the window sill, and spattered cold on my thighs. There was no way of telling what time it was. Already the road in front of the place was a small lake. Deluge. Time to build the ark. Maybe too late to build the ark.

Just when it seemed that no rain could fall harder, the tone deepened and it came down so fast that the meager gray faded perceptibly. The air was cooler. I wondered if Jill, in her exhausted sleep, had kicked off the sheet and might be getting chilled. I padded around the edge of the curtain. I shut my eyes hard and opened them again. It didn’t work. The bed was still empty. The bathroom door was open onto darkness.

I went to the bed and clicked on the bed lamp. It was watery yellow against the cheerless gray of the windows behind the bed. The note was on the pillow, the pencil stub beside it. The pencil had been on the tray on the bureau, I remembered. She’d used paper from one of the drawers for the note.

I
don’t know how long I stood there with the oversized note in my hand, with the rain roar filling the room.

I had no way of knowing when she’d left. I didn’t like it. She had entirely too much confidence in herself, too much sense of safety and security in this city of hers, too much reliance on the meager invulnerability of her position. The events of the previous evening should have given her a more lasting case of nerves.

But somehow she had pulled herself together, set her jaw, and gone striding out to shoulder what she considered to be her share of the job. A perky, gutty little damosel and, I was afraid, not a very wise damosel. I knew at once that her failure to respond to me had something to do with her action. In a funny way, she was probably proving something.

The bad part of the note—the part that gave me the chills—was that bit about making herself presentable. That meant clothes. And that meant her apartment. She had had no purse when I found her. Then I remembered the key that was still on the chain affixed to the rabbit. I trotted back in and went through my pockets. The chain was still there. Her key and the rabbit were gone. The clothes I had borrowed from Tram were ruined anyway. Some rain wasn’t going to make any difference. I dressed quickly. The revolver was going to get wet tucked in the front of the shirt. I swung the cylinder out. Three loads left. I put the hammer down on an empty chamber. I looked in the wallet. I had seven dollars left.

My shoes, soaked from Sipe’s swamp, had dried enough to pinch. I tried to go out the door. Jill had locked it behind her. I yanked the window up, kicked out the screen, and stepped over the sill into water that
came up over my shoes. I hunched my shoulders and splashed toward the arched entrance. Within seconds I was as wet as if I had rolled instead of walked. There was no one in the office. The night light was still on and there was a sign on the door telling which button to push to get service. The water loosened up the shoes so they didn’t hurt any more. The clock in the office said ten after seven. The big road was a young river. Early traffic was creeping along, making waves like so many speedboats. Some cars and a city bus were stalled on the other side of the road. Headlights gleamed pallidly into the rain curtain. This rain was going to finish the world. In a few hours there’d be nothing but some heads bobbing around. I could feel the steady pressure of the rain on my shoulders. It was the kind of rain we had had in North Burma during the monsoon season. It hit you as if it had been dropped out of a bucket from a third-story window.

My chance of grabbing a cab was just as good as my chance of spreading my arms and flying. At the next bus stop a crowd was huddled under shelter, gleaming with pliofilm, staring at the world as though they wanted to trade it in on a new one.

I walked beyond the bus stop and up to the next light. I watched the cars at the red light until I found my man. He was hunched over the wheel, staring at the miserable world through thick lenses. His chin was a halfhearted suggestion. I opened the sedan door and slid in as he gave me a wide startled look. I chunked the door shut and beamed at him. “Nice of you to give me a lift on a morning like this.”

“You’re getting the seat all wet!” he said.

“I guess the damage is all done. Say, you got a green light.”

He licked his underlip, put the sedan into gear, and moved slowly on, muttering softly to himself. He was probably a very nice guy. Candy for the wife and presents for the kiddies. A pat on the shoulder from the boss. “Nice reports this month, George.” Maybe he had little daydreams where he repulsed rough strangers, cowed holdup men, and rescued blonde maidens. But
he couldn’t quite bring himself up to the point of ordering me out of his car. Later he would tell himself that it was a public-spirited thing to pick up a sodden stranger on such a morning.

He drove cautiously down Canal. I said, “Say, you can help me a lot if you make a left into the Quarter.”

“I turn right on South Claiborne,” he said haughtily.

“It’s just a few blocks over. Everybody’ll be late to the office this morning. Bet some of them won’t get there at all.”

He kept on mumbling, but he did edge over toward the center island. He trundled the car across the tracks, paused for traffic, and went down a narrow street of the Quarter. Day had turned to dusk. The rain churned the deep water in the streets and bounced high off everything that was out of water. New Orleans, through strenuous effort, has managed to keep its feet dry most of the time. But the subsurface water is always there. There’s no good place for a heavy rain to go. It has to be pumped out of the drainage system over the levees and into the river. When it rains too fast for the pumps, you have a situation.

“How far?” George asked crossly.

“Oh, six more blocks.”

“You’re making me very late,” he said.

“You’ll never know how much I appreciate this.”

He let me out a block from Jill’s place. He could have got closer, but with the one-way streets, this was quicker. I got out and thanked him and walked ahead. George gunned it and smacked me with a solid sheet of water. I couldn’t get sore at him. He had to get one inning.

A blonde girl, student type, was walking in the rain in a thin dress. She walked slowly, as if in a trance. Her hair was plastered flat and the dress was like a heavy coat of paint. Rain was doing something to her. She looked at me with a sort of remote ecstasy, and mouthed something that I couldn’t understand because of the rain sounds. Maybe she thought I was a kindred spirit. I was moving slowly too, because I didn’t want to go barging up to Jill’s door without knowing who was around and
about. I prayed that Jill had had the good sense to phone Barney Zeck before returning to the apartment.

I walked on. I glanced back over my shoulder. Student Type was standing, looking after me, her hands on her hips, feet planted wide. Not today, honey. Not any day, honey. Go get some sleep.

Nobody seemed to have any special interest in Jill’s door. I gave a long ring and turned my back to the door and waited. Student Type came and struck her pose in front of me.

“God! The rain,” she said.

“Go away, will you?”

“You love it, too. I know you do.”

“Beat it, Sis.”

“This is a day for madness. For rain goddesses. For a dark splendor.”

“You better go dry off. You’ve got a fever.” I turned and punched the bell button again.

She moved closer to me. She said, “They’re watching you from across the way, Bryant. That’s why I’m standing in front of you, you damn fool.”

I took a better look at her. There was a quick, sharp intelligence in her eyes.

“Who’s across the way?”

“Today we’re making a clean sweep, Bryant. I’m short-handed because the Townsend girl came here, and my partner had to cover her. Some of the cars have stalled out. It’s a mess. And that business last night was bad. You’re making us move too fast.”