The Truth of the Matter (2 page)

“Alicia, Alicia, blonde Alicia, bleached and manicured and sunned to a golden brown. Well done.” He laughed and fumbled for a cigarette, lit it.

Alicia sat in the golden sling chair, where she belonged. “I’d say you were drunk.”

“You did say it,” Roebuck replied. “And if I’m any judge, you’re about half right. You mad?”

She laughed. “No, I can forgive that in you once in a while.”

“You can forgive me for anything.”

“Almost,” she said.

Roebuck drew on the just lit cigarette and snuffed it out in an ashtray. “You’re dependent on me.”

“I am,” she said, draining the martini quickly, as if she didn’t want him to get any. “I want to be.”

“I suppose you do,” Roebuck said.

“Do you want some coffee?”

“No.”

Alicia set the empty cocktail glass on an end table and clasped her hands over a crossed knee. “Something’s very wrong, isn’t it, Lou?”

“I quit my job.”

“How come?” No reaction, no flicker in those drained blue eyes.

“Because I knew that bastard Havers was about to fire me.”

“But why would he do that? Your work?”

Roebuck snorted. “I’m one of the best and he knows it. Now it’ll serve him right if his company never gets off the ground.”

“I thought you got along well with him.”

“I did,” Roebuck said, “until he found out I was a middle man in a certain firearms deal a few years back.”

“Firearms deal?”

“Just my luck,” Roebuck said, “that Havers’ family is Lebanese—and with a name like Havers! Must have been shortened.”

Two fine lines of curiosity rose parallel from the bridge of Alicia’s slender nose. “So what if he is Lebanese?”

“When he found out I was involved in a deal to sell guns to the Israelis he blew his stack. He said he’d blackball me from every advertising agency he could.”

“That doesn’t sound like Mr. Havers.”

“Who’d have thought he was Lebanese?”

“Listen,” Alicia said, “can’t the government do something? I mean, we were behind the Israelis in that thing.”

Roebuck shook his head. “The government will deny any knowledge of the deal if the question is put to them. That was part of the arrangement. I wouldn’t even be telling you if it weren’t for this.”

Alicia rose and walked into the kitchen. Roebuck knew she was going to get him some black coffee. She was so damned accommodating! Well, it didn’t matter now. She was part of his world that was crumbling, and after paying for the co-op apartment and the furniture she had only about three thousand dollars in the bank. Roebuck’s worlds had crumbled before, many times, and though he wouldn’t admit it now, even to himself, he knew deep in the core of him that he would rise as before, phoenix-like from the ashes.

“Drink some coffee,” Alicia said, returning with cup and saucer. She set the coffee on the table beside Roebuck and walked over to put some soft music on the stereo. The hell of it was that she knew he wanted the coffee.

Roebuck took one long sip and pushed the cup and saucer away. “I don’t feel much like coffee,” he said.

Alicia shrugged, and the soft Latin music that she liked began to drift from the six speakers spread throughout the apartment. “You can get a job in another city, can’t you?” she asked.

“I doubt it. That damn Havers has some pull, even though it is a small company. They stick together. The bastards stick together against a man.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” he answered, and he was wondering where to go.

“Two men called today,” Alicia said.

“Two men?”

Alicia nodded. “Bob—” she frowned—“Ingham, or something, and Ben Gipp. They said they were army friends of yours and they’d only be in town a short while.”

Roebuck knew at once who she meant. Ingrahm and Gipp. He hadn’t thought of them in a long time, not since Fort Leonard Wood. “What did you tell them?” he asked.

“I told them I was your wife,” Alicia said, “what you were doing and where you worked. The usual thing.”

Roebuck stood and began to pace. “Usual thing! Usual thing!”

“They said they were at the Crest Motel.”

“Usual thing!” Roebuck repeated. “Don’t you know better than to talk to strangers who say they’re out of my past?”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“You should have known better, after some of the things I’ve told you about myself.”

“For Christ’s sake, Lou, they said they were in the army with you. The one even said he knew you in college.”

“Ingrahm,” Roebuck said. “You didn’t even get his name right. He might not have even been Ingrahm. Did you think of that?”

Alicia sighed. “No. I’m sorry, Lou.”

“Sorry, your ass!”

She sat looking at him, the anger whitening her face beneath the healthy tan.

The telephone rang.

Roebuck walked slowly over and answered it.

“Lou?”

Something stirred in the depths of Roebuck’s mind.

“Lou Roebuck? This is Ingrahm, Lou. Bob Ingrahm.”

“Well…how you doing, Bob?” Roebuck lapsed into his “telephone voice.” “My wife said you called earlier.”

“I bet you were surprised, hey?”

“You know I was.”

“Benny’s with me. Benny Gipp. You remember him, don’t you?”

“Sure I do,” Roebuck said. Was Ingrahm crazy? “How long you going to be in town?”

“Have to leave tomorrow. Benny and I are partners in a construction supply business, and we have to get back to Little Rock. We’re here on business anyway, and we both shouldn’t have come.”

There was a pause.

“We went by where you work,”
Ingrahm said,
“but you weren’t there. We waited a while, then we had to leave!”

Roebuck felt the blood rush hot to his face. So that was it! That’s how Havers had gotten all those ideas about him.

“Lou?”

“Yeah, I’m still here.”

“We’re staying at the Crest…on Atkins Road.”

“I know where it is.”

“How about coming by tonight for a drink or two? We can meet you in the lounge. Old time’s sake and all that.”

Roebuck’s grip on the receiver tightened. “Okay, Bob. About nine?”

“Right. It’s been a while. Maybe you better wear a red carnation.”

Roebuck hung up.

“See.” Alicia smiled from across the room. “No harm done.”

Things were happening quickly, quickly. “Shut up,” Roebuck said. He pressed his fingertips to his temples.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Alicia said in an even voice. “They were who they said they were. It didn’t matter what I told them.”

“It might have.”

“Listen, Lou!” Alicia was on her feet, moving toward him. “Don’t take your frustrations out on me!”

“You could get me killed!” Roebuck almost shouted at her. “Don’t you understand that, you stupid bitch!”

“Oh, Christ, Lou, I’m fed up to here! You and your bullshit—”

He slapped her hard, high on the face across the cheekbone, before he even thought.

She stood staring at him, unafraid, very pale except for the red mark across her cheek, her eyes very steady.

Roebuck backed up a step.

“I don’t hit women…you know I don’t.”

Alicia might have smiled—or was she trying not to smile? “You just did, Lou.” She turned, walked into the bedroom and closed the door softly and deliberately. He heard the lock click.

“I don’t hit women,” Roebuck repeated to himself in a low whisper. He stared at the blank expanse of closed door. “You go to hell!” he shouted suddenly. Then he remembered that the expensive apartment was practically soundproof.
“To hell with you!”

He spun on his heel in the soft carpet and went into the kitchen. The shaker-f of martinis was in the refrigerator. He poured himself a drink in a water glass from the cabinet above the sink.

“To hell with her,” he said to himself as he leaned back against the breakfast bar. He finished the drink in three long swallows, picked up the shaker to pour another, then set it back down.

As Roebuck was walking across the living room, toward the front door, he realized he still had the empty glass in his hand. He stood still for a moment, then in a magnificent flurry of rage hurled the glass at the closed bedroom door. Instead of shattering as he had imagined, it merely bounced off the wood with a dull thunk. He thought of picking it up and throwing it again, then he decided against it and stalked to the door.

None of his neighbors were in the hall. He walked swiftly to the elevator, stepped inside and pushed the button for the garage. His hands clasped and unclasped on the steel wall rail as the elevator descended seven floors to the basement.

His black Thunderbird was parked where he had left it, shining jewel-like in the dim basement garage.
Thirty more payments
, Roebuck thought as he walked toward the car with echoing footsteps. He laughed to himself as he opened the door and settled back in the soft leather upholstery.

The engine caught immediately as he turned the ignition, and tires squealed as the big car shot toward the closed garage door, then braked to a halt. The power window on the driver’s side lowered smoothly and Roebuck inserted the key with which all the building tenants were provided into the small metal box on the post near the door. The overhead door went up slowly as he twisted the key, and the Thunderbird roared out into the warm evening mist. As he turned the corner onto Twelfth Avenue Roebuck hurled the key out the window and heard it bounce off the wet pavement.

Roebuck drove idly down Twelfth Avenue, listening to the rhythm of the Thunderbird’s wipers as they swept the mist from the wide windshield. He looked at the dashboard clock. Seven forty-five. Not too early to drive to his meeting with Ingrahm and Gipp. The Crest Motel was way on the other side of town, almost an hour’s drive if he stayed at the speed limit.

Making a careful left turn on the slick pavement, Roebuck thought of the last time he’d seen Ingrahm. It had been how long…? Almost ten years ago in Little Rock, when Roebuck had been there and on impulse had looked up Ingrahm in the phone book. He hadn’t seen Gipp in over twenty years, but Roebuck remembered him. Gipp was one of those people who stuck in your memory, like a tiny splinter imbedded deep in the flesh of your hand, felt only when you bent a finger a certain way.

Twenty years…that was a long time. Odd that they even remembered each other, or cared if they did remember. The three of them hadn’t really been friends in the true sense of the word. It was the army that threw them together. The army will do that to people. And the truth was that the three of them were misfits in one way or another, and misfits will band together, especially in the army.

They were clear in Roebuck’s mind now, Ingrahm, tall, slender, even-featured, with dark hair brushed straight back. Gipp had been a little man, with rimless glasses that were forever catching the light in front of his pale gray eyes. A little man, but with a curious hardness about him, in the sure movements of his square, bony hands, in his walk, in the muscular line of his jaw, but most of all in the way he looked at people. There had been an unyielding directness to Gipp’s stare, as if he were looking at an inanimate object instead of a person.

Roebuck had known Ingrahm in college, where they were both journalism majors before the army claimed them. They hadn’t known each other well, and in fact from what Roebuck had seen of Ingrahm at college he hadn’t liked him very much. There was a conceited self-assurance about the man, and a slyly depreciative way of talking that in a woman one might describe as cattiness.

Ingrahm had been like that in the army too, always cutting people down in his subtle, smiling way. The only man who hadn’t fallen victim to his cunning devaluation had been Gipp, and that might have been because Gipp practically worshiped Ingrahm, and Ingrahm needed that.

Gipp seemed to have admired Ingrahm’s smooth charm, his ease with other people. Gipp himself was a strange type of man, remote. He had wanted to be an artist of some kind, Roebuck remembered, a sculptor. And then later he’d decided to become an accountant. That was damn odd, Roebuck thought, that a man who wanted to sculpt would suddenly turn to something as dry as accounting. But then Gipp was damn odd.

For all the time the three of them had spent together Roebuck never got to know Gipp well. Even when talking about the most personal subjects Gipp seemed to be drawn into himself, as if there were something about himself that he would not share or reveal. Roebuck had always had the feeling that Gipp vaguely resented him.

Eight months was all the time they spent at that miserably cold camp, with its lettered streets and its drab buildings with their hand-fired furnaces. The unit was transferred out then, just after Roebuck was given his discharge after cursing out that asinine colonel in the canteen.

Roebuck smiled as he thought of that. What had been the colonel’s name? Tarkington, that was it. Colonel Tarkington had been surprised when Private Roebuck stepped right in front of him in the line to the cash register.

“In a hurry, Private?”

“If I wasn’t, sir, I wouldn’t have taken your place in line.”

“That’s not the way we act in this man’s army, Private.”

“Your army, sir, not
this
man’s army.”

The canteen had suddenly quieted as everyone realized what was happening.

“What’s your name, Private?”

“Duck, sir. Donald Duck.”

There had been no laughter, no reaction at all from the rest of the men in the canteen.

The colonel had stared at Roebuck for a full half minute in disbelief and anger.

It was Roebuck who ended the silence.

“Screw you, Colonel.”

The colonel started to answer, then spun and walked out the door.

Gradually conversation picked up again, with a few brief uneasy glances at Roebuck. Well, Roebuck knew what he could do, he knew how to get out of
this
man’s army.

At one of the tables sat a sergeant he had always disliked, a big, beefy ex-policeman with a tendency to bully. Roebuck purchased a chocolate malted milk, then he walked to the sergeant’s table, from an angle where he wouldn’t be noticed, and calmly poured the malted milk down the sergeant’s back.