Fletcher Flora

Death Is Her Bridegroom

Chapter I

Parked in the curved drive under the shadow of the huge portico, Jefferson Pitt’s modest jalopy assumed an appearance of weary decadence, as if it were about to collapse in a sad heap of defeated parts. And Jeff felt that he himself was in something the same shape. As he went up wide steps, his serviceable worsted seemed suddenly to become shrunken and shabby.

However, being the type of guy who could laugh at himself, he laughed silently and with wry humor. By the time the door chimes were answered by an ancient servant, he regained assurance, and was even feeling a little superior. After all, his services were in demand — he was needed and had been asked to come.

“My name’s Pitt,” he said. “Mr. Roman expects me.”

The servant nodded and stepped back.

Jeff moved past him into the hall that could have done service as a railroad terminal. Standing there with his hat in his hand, he felt the subtle depression which descends upon one in a place which has too much of everything.

From his position, he could detect in the half-light the dark faces of old paintings. Any one of them would have been worth a small fortune, and there were a dozen. Down the hall near the foot of the stairs that had more breadth than most rooms, there was, somewhat incongruously, a bright yellow splash of Van Gogh.

The servant moved around Jeff with cautious decrepitude. Jeff followed him down the hall, past the Van Gogh, and up the broad flight of stairs. On the second floor, the old man knocked discreetly upon the heavy walnut paneling of an immense door, and pushed the door inward without waiting for a response.

“Mr. Pitt has arrived, sir,” he said in a cracked, squeaky voice.

Obeying the servant’s gesture of invitation, Jeff entered the room, and immediately his whole attention was taken up with the initial shock of seeing the man who sat in a massive, high-backed chair awaiting him.

When Jeff had last seen Reed Roman, three years before, the fabulous millionaire had been a powerful, dominating block of man. Old, even then, but with the drive and aggression of youth still in him.

Jeff had read about his illness, the stroke, in the papers, but he hadn’t realized the extent of its ravishment. The old man sat twisted in his chair, his body betraying, even in repose, its partial impairment.

Only the eyes retained some of their former force, burning under craggy brows. His voice sounded, now, with an angry tremor, driven upward from its afflicted mechanism by a fierce exertion of will.

“Come in, Pitt. Come in and sit down.”

Jeff found a chair and sat with his hat on his knees, wondering if he should comment on the old man’s condition, deciding he’d better not. In the burning eyes there was suddenly a glint of cold humor.

“That’s right, boy. Be discreet. Sit there and act as if nothing had changed. They all do it. They all think the old man’s dying, and their fingers are itching like the devil for his money all the time the damned pious expressions are on their faces.”

He broke into a gusty wheeze of laughter, maliciousness gathering to bright, sharp points under bony overhang.

“I’ve got news for them. I’ve got news for the whole damned crew. The old man will be here like a lump in this chair for a long time yet. I’ll be right here watching them stew in their juice while they wait for me to die. Maybe I’ll even outlive a few of them.”

The aspirate laughter exploded again.

“You know why I called you here?”

“Not exactly, of course. I assume you have a job for me.”

“Brenda’s gone. Kidnapped,” the old man said abruptly.

Jeff’s rather amiable face hardened, taking on a rugged angularity that was not usually apparent.

“Snatched? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Naturally. I’ve kept it quiet. Get a lot of noisy police mixed up in it, anything might happen.”

“Sure. Anything. They might even get Brenda back for you.”

The old man’s stricken body jerked angrily. “The note said she’d be killed if the police were notified.”

“You’ve had a note, then?”

“Of course. Fifty thousand ransom. It’s here, if you want to see it.”

Slowly, with laborious effort that set his moving hand to trembling, he reached into the pocket of his robe and extended a folded piece of paper.

Taking the paper, Jeff turned it in his fingers, discovering that it was the cheap stuff for typewriters that can be bought in packets in any dime store. The kind that could never be traced. This piece had added stiffness, the result of paper pasted to the side folded in. Opening it, he found the expected — the crude newsprint pasted to form the message. Reading, he felt a certain incredulity, an inner urge to jeer at himself for taking seriously the hocus-pocus of a bad movie.

After he had finished reading it, he said, “It’s a queer setup. It has a phony ring.”

“All these things have a phony ring. Something that just doesn’t happen — until it does. You’re a detective. You ought to know that.”

Jeff shrugged. “You’re right, of course. There’s always an air of incredible melodrama about real evil. That doesn’t make it any less real. What do you intend to do?”

“I’ll pay the ransom, naturally. Not that she’s worth it. Brenda, I mean. She’s beautiful. She’s more beautiful than you’d imagine a woman could be, and she’s rotten as a stump full of termites. But that’s not a good analogy. It makes her sound soft, and she’s not soft at all. She’s hard as a diamond and filled with the same kind of fire. Cold as ice sometimes, sometimes hot as an inferno. And for me, no love. No love at all for the old man.”

The petulance in his voice was suddenly in danger of degenerating into self-pity, and becoming aware of it, he shook himself out of the mood impatiently.

“But maybe I’ve got it coming,” he said. “If so, all right. I’ve been hard myself. No pity or love in me when maybe there should have been. You don’t build up a fortune of millions with love and pity. Anyhow, it’s too late now for regrets. It was too late long ago. I’ll pay the ransom because she’s my son’s daughter. It’s pride. It’s the thick, sticky hold of blood. At any rate, it’s the last she’ll have from me, and maybe it’s cheap enough. Not another penny will she have.”

“You mean she’s out of the will?”

“That’s right. Out cold. She looks like an angel, but she’s got the instincts of a hellion, and she’ll have nothing of mine to dissipate on the frequenters of garbage heaps.” The explosive laughter burst past his bloodless lips again, but there was grudging admiration in the harsh lines of his face. “Not that she gives a damn. She’s got more guts than all the others put together. That much you can say of her. She told me I could take every cent I had to hell with me.”

“The note instructs you to get a man named Constance to act as contact. Cleo Constance. You been in touch with him?”

“Yes. He was here earlier today.”

“Will he act?”

“Yes.”

“Why him, I wonder. Why a particular man named Cleo Constance?”

“Probably it was Brenda’s suggestion. Constance is a private detective, like you. Brenda used him once. A matter of some stolen jewelry. He seemed efficient. Got the stuff back in a hurry.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know exactly. Not long ago. At the time, I was flat on my back with hell’s emissaries sitting on my chest.”

“There’s another thing. Constance must be known to the kidnapper. By sight, I mean. There’s no instruction, in the note, about identification. No special article of clothing to wear. No gesture or sign to make at a certain place or time. Nothing to point him out.”

“I thought of that. It isn’t unlikely that a private detective would be known. I should think you’d know him yourself, being in the same business.”

“It’s a big city. Private detectives aren’t like millionaires. They get lost in the crowd.”

“All right. What’s more important, does he know you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“There’s a chance he might, but we’ll have to take it.” The old man paused, his chin sinking onto his chest, lids lowering over his smoldering eyes. He remained that way so long that Jeff wondered if he had sunk suddenly into a coma, but after a while, eyes still shut, he began to speak again. “Fifty thousand is a lot of money. To a lot of people, it’s a fortune. It might be quite a temptation to a private detective.”

“I can testify to that,” Jeff said, and he sat quietly, waiting for the old man to continue, thinking that they had come to the point at last.

“You read the note,” Roman said. “Constance is to get on the seven-thirty bus for Darrowville tomorrow night. He’s to have the fifty thousand with him in unmarked bills. It’s a local bus. One of these little lines that hang on for peanuts. It’s about seventy-five miles to Darrowville, and the bus makes a couple of stops between here and there. Somewhere along the way, the contact will be made. I want you to be sure the money is handed over.”

“You mean be sure that Constance doesn’t take a powder with it?”

The old man lifter his shoulders very slightly. “As I said, fifty thousand’s a lot of money.”

“What does Constance look like?”

“He’s tall. Broad shoulders and a thin, handsome face. There’s a feeling of coldness about him. Dresses like a banker. Homburg. Blues and grays. Good stuff, cut by a tailor who knows how. You’d never pick him for a detective.”

Jeff grinned. “Thanks,” he said. “You haven’t told how it happened. The kidnapping.”

The old man was slumped in his chair. Weariness covered him like a powdering of gray dust. He lifted his lids briefly and let them fall again of their own weight.

“Who knows? She left here two nights ago, going God knows where. She never told anyone where she was going, what she was doing. Never a damn word. She left here in a taxi, I’m told. The note is the only word I’ve had of her since she left.”

“Did she usually go out in a taxi? Why didn’t she drive?”

“Sometimes she drove. Sometimes she used a taxi. I guess it depended on where she was going. It doesn’t matter. All I want you to do is to see that the ransom is paid.”

“That may be a large order. The kidnapper’s no fool. You think he’ll approach your contact openly?”

The eyes flicked open again. Open and shut. “That’s your business, Pitt. You’ve done other jobs for me. You did them well, or you wouldn’t be here now. Do this one.”

The effrontery of wealth, Jeff thought. The damned bland presumption of millions. He stood up, waiting for the lids to lift again, waiting for an overt sign that he was free to walk away. When the sign failed to come, he left without it, letting himself out into the unperverted air. Breathing deeply, he stood for a moment in the drive beside his jalopy to think of a beautiful girl whose life depended on the delivery of fifty grand, and of a man in a homburg who was the delivery boy.

While Jeff stood beside his jalopy and thought about Brenda Roman and Cleo Constance, Cleo Constance drove across the city limit and thought about Brenda Roman and fifty grand. It was logical that he thought of Brenda and the fifty grand in association, since they came together. Either would have been a piece of loot a man would sweat for. Together they were almost incredible. Once-in-a-lifetime stuff.

He sat behind the wheel of his Olds with an odd, military stiffness that never left him. His gray homburg sat with conservative tilt the proper distance above his level brows. The eyes beneath the brows were pale blue, cold, and seemed to be covered by a thin film of ice. The nose and mouth were thin, rather patrician, conforming to the narrow oval face. As Reed Roman had said, handsome. A banker, he’d said. Actually, the face would have been more appropriate under a klieg light.

On the highway, out of traffic, he held the needle of the speedometer at fifty. Restraint was difficult to maintain. He felt a wracking inner compulsion to let himself go, to send the Olds booming down the highway as a symbol of the wild soaring of his imagination.

I knew it would come, he thought. The big break. The time that requires only guts and action to make it the beginning of the big life. Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Napoleon firing his cannon down a Paris street. It’s been worth waiting for, and I always knew it would come in time. I knew it even as a kid back home — that long ago — and even then it was a kind of compensation for an old man who was a pickled bum and an old woman who was a whining slattern. I’ve never lost sight of the big break. Not in reform school. Not during all the dreary, slimy leg-work for petty fees that goes with being a private eye. And now it’s here, and it’s only the beginning. With fifty grand to ride on and a sleek charmer like Brenda Roman to go along for the ride, the lid’s off for Cleo Constance. The sky’s the limit for Cleo.

Funny, how things begin. Just another caper, you think; a few grand in stolen jewels, and a servant begging for mercy. Just a few days to crack it. Then the note from Brenda asking me to call for my fee. I knew then that something was funny, because it would have been the normal thing just to mail it to the office. I knew the caper was taking a turn. Not that I objected. I was burning to see her again. Ever since the first interview, when she sat there in that suit with a skirt so tight that it showed all the long lines of her legs. Ever since I looked into that strange, beautiful face that makes you think of a fallen angel who has no regrets.

I’ll never forget the day I called for the fee. She had me come up to her room in that gloomy stack of old Roman’s, and the room was like another place entirely, with soft light coming out of nowhere and all the thick rugs and sleek furniture and the big bed in black silk. And there she was, in black silk like the bed, with her hair like a cloud of white fire.

“You’re a handsome guy, Constance,” she said. “You’re the handsomest, most aggravating species of male I’ve ever seen. What makes you nothing but a lousy private cop?”

And there it was, asking for nothing but guts and action to make something of it, and that was not the end at all, but only the beginning, and now it won’t ever end until we’re old, or burned out, or dead, and by that time we’ll have had all, the full, strong flavor of life, and it won’t matter.

Fifteen miles out the highway, he turned off in a northerly direction, following the course of a narrow gravel road. The tilt of the earth was generally upward, rising to the foothills of a sprawling range worn low by the action of geologic ages. Rock outcroppings and scrub oak were everywhere. The oaks, stripped of leaves, presented a gnarled and twisted hardiness, grim yet somehow exhilarating, that reinforced his soaring mood.

There was hunting here. Hunting and good fishing, with speckled and rainbow trout fighting the currents of clear streams. He had a cabin in the low hills, a two-room thing of logs, where he came now and again. It was a good place to come, he’d found, when the city closed in and the big dream seemed buried forever in steel and asphalt. It was a good place to come, too, when one had a girl to hide for the little while it would take to make the dream come alive at last.

Turning again, steering the Olds along hard ruts that ascended precipitately, he felt the automatic transmission shift down for its increased labor and saw ahead of him among the scrub oaks the brown bulk of the cabin against its side of hill. He pulled around the cabin and into a rough shed. Retracing his way afoot around the cabin, he crossed the small front porch and pushed open the door.

The attack was swift, without warning, as if a mountain cat had crouched waiting within the room. But it was an attack without fangs or talons, precipitated by a hunger that wanted to devour but not to destroy. Her arms were locked around his neck, and her body was straining against his. He was drowning, he felt, in the astringent scent of her pale hair. Her lips moved against his.

“Two days, Connie. Only two days, and it seems like two years.”

He tangled his long fingers in the pale silk of her hair and drew her head back until her throat arched back at the tension. His mouth was hard against hers, until suddenly he released her and spun away, walking into the room with the precise military bearing that survived, rather ludicrously, even the swift, flaming attack. When he turned abruptly to face her, his pale eyes were still aflame, contradicting the effect of his conditioned reserve. It was this more than anything, he knew, that explained his strange and overwhelming fascination for her. This deep flame that broke through his chill restraint with the intensity and swiftness of heat lightning. She had the capacity to make it flare, and the knowledge, he realized, filled her with a shattering sense of excitement.

“It’s on the way, baby. Our way. The way you’ve got it planned.”

“You’ve seen grandfather?”

“I’ve seen him, and I’m in.”

“He’s a crafty old hellion, Connie. You don’t make millions by being stupid. You think he suspects anything?”

“Nothing. I’ll swear he suspects nothing.”

“He’s following the instructions? Even about the police?”

“Yes. He hates your guts, baby, but he admires you, just the same. With him, that’s probably better than love. He wouldn’t leave you a dime if he scorched in hell for it, but he’ll pay a fat ransom to keep anyone else from trying to hurt you.”

“I know. I told you it’d be like that. I’ve known the old devil for a long time, Connie. Is it going through tomorrow night?”

“On schedule. I’ll pick up the fifty grand at the old man’s place at six-thirty. From there. I’ll go to the bus terminal and catch the seven-thirty Darrowville bus. It’ll be a dry run to make the ride, of course, but I’d better make it for looks, just in case someone’s looking. When I get to Darrowville, I turn around and come back on the first bus. That’ll be next morning. I’ll still have the fifty grand. As far as anyone will ever know, the contact was made. Either somewhere along the way or in Darrowville itself.”

“When do I show up?”

“The next night. It’ll be a little rough. You’ll leave here after dark and walk to the highway. It’s a long way and tough going. You show up on the highway. Get yourself picked up. You’re in bad shape. You’ve been taken to a spot near the highway and released. You don’t know just where, because you were blindfolded. Say there were two men involved. Use your imagination when you describe them. Think you can do it? I’d pick you up here and drive you down near the highway, but it’d be too risky.”

She moved toward him and stopped, laughing.

“I can do it, all right,” she said. “Oil, I can do it.”

She stood there looking at him with her hands on her hips and her breasts rising against her blouse. The blood was burning in her cheeks.

Chapter II

When the bus was thirty-five miles from Darrowville and still ten miles out of Hogan, it began to rain. Water fell from an inky sky in a deluge that threatened to wash all traffic, including the clanking bus, off the highway. Sitting in his seat at the rear, Jeff Pitt looked out the window on his right and saw no farther than the streaming glass.

In his seat of authority, the driver hunched forward over the steering wheel, peering intently through the half-circle of windshield that was swept by the flapping wiper. Rain flooded in behind the rubber-edged blade, obscuring vision. The bus crept cautiously, the light of its headlamps beaten back. After about twenty minutes, there was a sharp downward tilt. For a moment, at the bottom, the ugly sound of rushing water swept under and around the bus, then the tilt was upward, the sound receding. Flash flood, Jeff thought.

Two rows forward and on the opposite side, Cleo Constance sat stiffly. He seemed a remote, self-isolated figure, forbidding approach. The gray homburg rode his head with unimpeachable correctness. His shoulders were rigid, square, under boxed blue tailoring. Most of the time his pale eyes were directed carefully ahead in a blind stare, but now and then his head turned briefly, showing a hard, flat cheek, a thin acquiline nose.

Pride, Jeff thought. Pride and arrogance to the degree of cruelty, sharpened by ambition and frustration. Well, one thing’s certain. He’s made no contact. Not yet. It’ll be at Hogan or Darrowville. Unless, of course, it’s made on the bus. And that isn’t likely. The kidnapper would have to expose himself openly that way. It isn’t at all likely. It’ll be arranged in a way to protect the kidnapper. I wonder if he’s waiting at Hogan? Or at Darrowville? Or is he on the bus? Besides Constance and me, four passengers. Could it be one of the four? Two men and two women. Could it be a woman? And why not? Not alone, of course. There’s a man in it somewhere. One or more. But a woman could make the contact. It’s been done before.

Across the aisle from Constance sat the fat little man who announced to Constance in a wheezy voice that he was Dr. Elliot Newman. Constance had responded with a cold nod and nothing more. A doctor. That explained the small brown bag he carried.

At the moment, Jeff could see only the back of Dr. Newman’s head. A brown felt hat was placed precisely level on the head. Between the hat and a thin ragged edge of gray hair was a strip of naked scalp. The little doctor had made no more gestures of friendliness after Constance’s obvious rebuff. Maybe he was sulking.

Up front, a couple of rows behind the driver, the young couple sat in heavy silence. If they had exchanged more than a dozen words during the ride, Jeff hadn’t noticed. The girl sat on the inside, next the window. Jeff could see only the top of her head over the high back of the seat. Her hair was mouse colored, stringy. It badly needed the benefits of one of the new shampoos. The new shampoos could work miracles, even with mouse-colored hair. Lady, you can be glamorous. Which side received the magic action? But probably it would be just as well to leave the hair as it was. Why take the mouse out of the hair when obviously nothing could be done for the mouse-like face, the gray little mouse-like soul?

The girl seemed to be sleeping. Jeff knew that she wasn’t. At the last stop he’d got off the bus for a stretch. Boarding it again, he’d noticed that the girl hadn’t moved. Her head was lying back against the seat, and he’d seen with a shock and a quick surge of compassion the open misery of her staring eyes. He’d seen also the indicative swell under her thin coat.

Married? he thought. I doubt it. Just trapped. Just trapped in one of life’s nasty little predicaments. How about the kid beside her? Papa? Probably, but fighting it. Trying to get out. He has the look. The sulky, trapped, resentful look. He hates her guts for looking like a mouse and acting like a woman. He’s a nasty little hunk. Slack mouth; could be vicious. The kind to use a shiv in a dark alley. But a kidnapper? It’s a hundred to one against, but you never can tell.

It’s dangerous to fall back on the old myth that you can tell a criminal, or his quality, just by the look of him. The same goes for the girl, if it happened to be the pair of them. What a beautifully classic case that would make for the records. The whole thing engineered by a pregnant mouse.

There was nothing mousy about the fourth passenger. The other woman. On the contrary, a bit brassy. Natural good looks underscored a little too heavily by cosmetics. Too lean, too tense and overdrawn, perhaps, for some tastes. But there was vitality in her bones and breath. In every glance and movement. Not contrived, either. Natural as sleeping. “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. Such men are dangerous.” Shakespeare, yet. How about a lean and hungry woman? Also dangerous? Kidnapper’s contact, maybe?

She sat hugging herself, directly across the aisle from Jeff. A peculiar mannerism, that. Her arms crossed in front of her body, one elbow fitted inside the other, her hands clutching her shoulders. Periodically, her body would shake visibly, and the forearms would press in against her breast, fingers digging into the shoulders like claws. Once he heard her teeth grinding. As if she were cold. But it wasn’t cold in the bus. Too hot, rather. Steamy hot. A chill, maybe. Fever and chills. Like Jeff had once had on an island he wanted to forget. She was a looker, all right, but not exactly in the chips. Fur coat ratty. Heels, if you bothered to notice, a bit run over. He wondered if she needed help. He wondered if he should offer.

With a start of surprise, he noticed that they had stopped. The bus had been crawling so slowly that the change was barely apparent. Leaning over to peer more closely out the streaming glass, he saw a watery yellow blur of light and knew that they had crept into Hogan.

Up front, the driver slipped out from under the wheel and turned.

“This is Hogan, folks. We’ll be here about five minutes.”

The doors folded back with a soft, pneumatic hiss, and he dove out, vanishing into the gray downpour. No one else made a motion to leave the bus. The mouse sat beside her companion, her head back, the dull misery in her eyes. The little doctor turned once to look over his shoulder and then settled a little lower, with obvious resignation, in his seat. The naked strip of scalp between hair and hat had a kind of subtle obscenity about it. Across the aisle, the lean and hungry and pretty woman hugged herself and shivered and ground her teeth.

Cleo Constance sat militarily erect with fifty thousand dollars in his pocket. Cold and remote. Spiritually exiled. Don’t touch me, peasants.

It was nearer ten than five minutes when the driver returned. He climbed in soaked, water running out of his shoes and clothes onto the rubber mat on the floor.

“Sorry, folks,” he announced. “We can’t go on tonight. The highway’s flooded between here and Darrowville. It’s a flash flood and will recede in a hurry when the rain stops. By morning, traffic should be going through.”

His voice had a relieved sound, and he was openly happy to escape the responsibility of more blind driving. In the bus, following his words, there was a hiatus of suspended sound and motion, and then the pretty woman jerked violently, as if she’d had a sharp, excruciating pain. An abbreviated cry of anguish burst from her lips.

“I must get to Darrowville. I must get to Darrowville tonight.”

The driver lifted his shoulders in an expansive shrug. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Himself, he was damned happy.

“Sorry, lady. Nothing’s moving on the highway.”

She huddled in her seat, hugging herself. Across the aisle, Jeff could hear her whimpering like a hurt pup.

Dr. Newman straightened. His voice was querulous.

“Are we expected to stay in this bus all night?”

“Not at all.” The driver gestured at the yellow blur outside. “This is the hotel. Only one in Hogan. It’s nothing fancy, folks, but there’s accommodation for everyone. If you’ll all unload, please. I’ll have to move the bus away from here.”

Another hiatus. Sullen reluctance to face the occasion. Then the little doctor got up briskly, retrieving his bag and moving up to the door. The rain swallowed him. The young guy up front followed, leaving the mouse on her own. She went down the steps into the rain slowly, clinging to the handrail with one hand, clutching her thin coat over the beginning swell of her belly with the other. Cleo Constance moved in behind her with measured precision and filled the exit briefly with his broad blue shoulders. The pretty woman whimpered in her seat, and Jeff stood beside her.

“May I help you off?”

She looked up with furtive, anguished eyes, and he saw that her teeth had brought blood to her lips. Staring down into the eyes, he understood finally that it was neither cold nor fever that fed her anguish, and he felt a vast compassion and a sickness that filtered through his guts.

She struggled for control. “No, thanks, I’m all right. I’m perfectly all right.”

Wrenching herself up and forward, she fled down the aisle as if she feared his pursuit. But it was more than him that she fled. Far more than a man.

Run, run, he thought. Run from the monkey. But it’s always there. Always on your shoulder.

And he was thankful, stepping from the bus, for the clean, cold wash of rain.

The lobby had a worn carpet on the floor and a sickly rubber plant growing in a wooden tub in a corner. The carpet still displayed, between large patches where the fiber backing was exposed, a pattern of roses that had once been florid and were now faded and dirty. A solitary and lethargic elevator served the three floors up.

Jeff arranged for a room with an adolescent clerk who was plainly stimulated by the unexpected influx of guests. He spun the register and extended a pen with a flourish. Jeff signed and received his key. Turning away, he saw across the room an entrance to a small and dimly lighted taproom. The light was not the calculated soft stuff that goes for romance in better places. It was only the result of low wattage. A short bar and a few tables and chairs were visible in the dusk. At the bar, separated by three vacant stools, were Dr. Newman and Cleo Constance. The other three passengers from the bus had vanished, presumably up the shaft in the reluctant elevator.

Jeff threaded his way through the litter of tables and chairs and chose the center one of the three vacant stools. Right in the middle, he thought. If these are the two, right in the middle. He ordered a bourbon with water, and was grateful for the warm diffusion through his insides. He relaxed a little.

“Tough luck,” he said.

Dr. Newman nodded curtly. “Damned nuisance.”

Cleo Constance said nothing. He lifted his glass and drained it, setting it empty on the bar and standing with that damned clipped motion of his. He left without speaking.

Jeff finished his bourbon. “Think I’ll turn in,” he said.

Dr. Newman shrugged, irritation manifest in his plump twitch. “Might as well. Be along myself shortly.”

Since he was only one up, Jeff walked. Coming off the stairs into the hall, he saw Constance unlock a door and disappear. Checking the tab on his key against door numbers, he discovered that he was beyond Constance about half the length of the hall. The door across from his was slightly ajar. He could hear, within the room, the desperate cadence of pacing footsteps, broken at brief intervals for the time it took to reverse direction. Back and forth, back and forth, across the trap of a room. Listening more closely, he detected with the sound of pacing the soft accompaniment of tortured animal whimpering.

Abruptly, on impulse, he crossed the hall and, without knocking, entered the room and closed the door behind him.

She had taken off the ratty fur coat and the jacket of her wool gabardine suit. She held herself, even walking, in that cross-armed embrace, and the pointed red nails of her fingers had ripped the thin stuff of her blouse where it stretched tight over her shoulders. When he entered, she stopped, twisting around from the hips to face him, her eyes bright and terrible, her lower lip fastened between her teeth.

“Go away,” she said. “Go away from me.”

He shook his head, wishing he could free himself of the compulsion to pity. Wishing he could always use the other side of the road and never give a damn. Knowing he never could.

“You need help,” he said. “Maybe I can supply it.”

She started her pacing again. “I just need to be let alone. Get away from me, I said. Get the hell away.”

He stood watching her. Her black hair looked soft and clean, shining under the light. Right now it was in a tangle from the frantic combing of her fingers. She rubbed her hands up and down her forearms, shivering. Her teeth began to chatter.

As she swung around from a wall, he said, “How long since you had one, baby?”

She was motionless, her eyes devouring him. “Who the hell are you?”

He smiled and didn’t answer. She leaned against the wall, her head thrown back, the embrace of her arms locking tighter. Tears seeped from under her lids and ran down her cheeks. After a few seconds, she began to sob. The sobs were deep upheavals, tearing at her chest. He stood waiting until they ceased.

“There’s a doctor downstairs,” he said.

“Doctors,” she said. “Damned doctors.”

“It’s a doctor’s business to relieve suffering. Did anyone ever suffer more than you are right now?”

She didn’t reply. The sobbing was ended, but the silent tears still ran down her cheeks.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and turned and went out.

Downstairs, Dr. Newman was just coming out of the taproom with his bag in his hand. Jeff waited for him to come even, turning back up the stairs at his side.

“You got morphine in your bag, Doctor?”

The little medico shot an oblique glance at him from under a cocked brow. “The pretty woman in the fur coat?”

“Yes. She’s tearing herself to pieces.”

“I suspected it.”

They went on up the stairs and stopped at the head. Dr. Newman looked down at the floor, pursing his lips. He looked, Jeff thought, remarkably like a toad.

“I’m not supposed to do it, you know.” He stood without moving a moment longer, and then said abruptly, “To hell with it. Which room?”

They went down and in without bothering to knock. The little doctor dropped his bag on a chair and snapped it open, barely glancing at the woman who stood pressed against the wall.

“Roll up the sleeve of your blouse,” he said.

Jeff turned back into the hall, waiting there until Newman came out a few minutes later.

“Thanks, Doctor,” he said. “For her, I mean.”

The ugly medico looked up with a twisted smile. His right hand crept over in a gesture of which he seemed unaware, to rub gently his left forearm. His eyes, turned inward, were characterized by an odd vacuity.

“You ever read Whitman?” he said. “If you don’t, you should. He wrote something once; I am the man. I suffered. I was there. Greatest line of poetry ever written. Good night, son.”

Chapter III

He went down the hall with choppy strides, his bag swinging, and Jeff crossed to his own door. Inside, he left the door cracked and the light off. Removing his outer clothing, he shoved the room’s one overstuffed chair into position before the crack and sat down. Damned foolishness, he told himself. No kidnapper would openly approach a contact in a hotel room. A kidnapper would always work under cover. But no matter. Jefferson Pitt had been hired to do a job. The job was to keep an eye on Cleo Constance. He sat in the chair patiently, looking down the hall at the door through which Constance had vanished.

He was aware, after a while, of the murmur of voices. Twisting, looking up at an angle over the back of his chair, he saw a rectangle of weak light high in the wall behind him. Then he saw that it was not really in the wall at all. The light came through an old-fashioned transom above a tall, narrow door. The door obviously led to the next room and had apparently been locked and nailed shut to make two singles out of a double.

Getting up, he fumbled in darkness for a straight chair and carried it over to the door. Standing on the chair, he could look through the transom into the next room. Up there, with his ear near the crack along the bottom of the rectangle, he could even distinguish words.

The mouse stood looking out the window into the rainy night. She had taken off her dress and had on a sleazy pink slip. On the bed behind her, her companion on the bus lay in pants and undershirt, looking at the ceiling. His hands were under his head. A cigarette hung from his slack lips.

Pretty soon the mouse turned away from the window to look at the sprawled figure on the bed, and Jeff saw that her eyes were red and swollen. Her voice was pleading.

“It won’t be so bad, Dickie. Honest, it won’t. We can get a justice of the peace to do it in Darrowville tomorrow.”

He didn’t answer.

“We can get an apartment, Dickie, and maybe after a while we can buy a little house of our own. And some furniture. I’ll work, Dickie. After the baby comes, I’ll get a job right away.”

The cigarette bobbled. “Yuk, yuk, yuk. For God’s sake, shut up.”

“It could be fun, Dickie. It could be fun, if only you’d let it.”

“Fun. Oh, for God’s sake.”

“You didn’t talk like that when you were talking me into it.”

“I was drunk.”

“Don’t hate me, Dickie. It wasn’t my fault. Please don’t hate me.”

“Hate you? Hell, yes, I hate you. I hate your ugly face, and your skinny body, and most of all I hate your damned whiney voice. How the hell I was ever nuts enough to get in a fix like this with a dame like you, I’ll never know. Times sure must’ve been hard.” He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. “I’ll get hitched, all right, because I see I’ve got to. And like you said, right after the kid comes you can get a job. At least you better, because I’m taking off. That’s as long as I stick around, see? Just till the kid comes. Maybe, if I’m lucky, you’ll both die.”

She didn’t flinch. There were no more tears. She just stood there against the window with the black rain outside, and Jeff got down off the chair in a hurry. His pulses hammered. He stood spraddle-legged in the darkness with sickness rising to make him dizzy. A drop of cold sweat fell away from his armpit and ran down his ribs.

It would be so easy to kill, he thought. Sometimes it would be so easy.

He sat in the chair again and stared blankly. The rectangle of light behind him winked out. Outside the cracked door, the shabby hall stretched silent and empty. His mind functioned now with a kind of cold clarity, receptive to intuition. An ugly little medico who quoted Whitman, remembered hell, and practised compassion. A pretty junkie now at peace. A mouse whose gray little life had reached the incredibly bleak point of being dependent on a pimply punk kid for pity. Kidnapper? Contact for a kidnapper? No. They were all on other business. The errands, the flights, the ceaseless, senseless motion between dark and dark.

And so, stepping on flotsam, he came back to the central figure. Cleo Constance, private detective. A handsome, cold fish. A man isolated, thinking his own thoughts, going his own way. Going his own way with fifty grand in his pocket.

He’s a bad one, Jeff. Under the cold correctness, the clipped aloofness, there’s an unplumbed potential for evil. A queer, cold fish; one of earth’s eternal exiles.

And there’s been no contact. You can’t prove it, of course. Somewhere along the way, in some unobserved fashion, the pass could have been made. But it wasn’t made, and it won’t be, because the ransom is already paid. It was paid in the house of Reed Roman hours ago. It was paid to a queer, ascetic-looking kidnapper with ice water in his veins, and right now he’s got it in a shabby room right down the hall.

Take it from the beginning. From the moment you knew immediately that it was all wrong, there in the house of the old man yesterday afternoon. Contact specified in the ransom note. Has it ever happened before? Kidnapper specifying himself as contact. Dammit, the guy must be nerveless. He must be put together differently from the rest of us. And it builds. The jewel case. The chance to initiate an acquaintance. Maybe more. A cold, handsome devil like that might make a hellish appeal to a wild dame like the Roman. The birth of an idea. The birth and slow growth and icy, calculated consummation.

So what do you do? Somehow you make him break. Somehow you crack that stony, satanic arrogance. Now. Right now. Because morning will be too late. Let’s see. It’s nearly two. Human resistance is at its lowest ebb at two in the morning. The time for ghosts and fear of hell.

In the darkness, he stood up and dressed. His shoulder holster, nesting its .38, went under his coat. Moving swiftly, without noise, he went down to Constance’s door and knocked softly. Waiting a few seconds, he knocked again. The door swung inward away from his knuckles.

Constance was still fully dressed. He hadn’t even removed the perfectly tailored coat of his dark suit. He stood there without speaking, his pale eyes still and wary, the planes of his thin face stonelike in the dim light.

Jeff made a half-gesture toward the room. “I’d like to come in.”

Constance moved back, and Jeff moved in. The door clicked shut. Constance came back past him and turned.

“Yes?”

Jeff grinned. “I want in, Constance.”

“You are in, my friend.”

Jeff kept the grin. It was work, but he kept it. “I don’t mean in the room, Constance. I mean in the act.” He waited, tension drawing to a throbbing point of pain in his chest. “About halfway in fifty grand, let’s say.”

There was no change in the face. The voice became a little softer, slightly more clipped. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No?” Jeff shifted weight, lifted his shoulders. “Don’t be a fool, man. You think old Reed Roman’s lost his marbles? If you do, you’re making a mistake. He saw the possibilities in this thing from the start. Naming yourself as contact, for instance. A little obvious, really, to a sharp old bird like Roman. He had me on your tail before you’d been gone an hour. Fifty grand might seem like a lot of money to a private detective, he said. He seemed to think it might be a temptation. His only mistake was, he forgot I’m a private detective too. Fifty grand looks just as big to me as to the next one. Even twenty-five looks big. That’s all I’m asking. Just an even split. In return, I put you solid. I verify the contact.”

Constance’s lips moved stiffly. “You’re mad.”

“No.” Jeff shook his head. “Why don’t you give up, man? You’ll split or bum, and it’s as simple as that.”

He couldn’t tell if it was working. Constance just stood there, hardly touched. His lips twitched spastically, betraying inner tension, that was all.

“Conceding what you say is true, what makes you think I’d carry fifty grand around like car fare?”

“In case of emergency, maybe. In case, for some reason, you couldn’t anticipate, you had to produce it. Like now, I mean.”

“You guessed wrong, friend. I didn’t anticipate having to produce it.”

“You picked it up at the old man’s at six-thirty. You had to make it to the bus station in an hour. That didn’t leave you much time.”

“Time enough. It’s waiting for me in a tight spot.”

So it was true. Constance was the man, carrying the whole deal through in lonely arrogance. The sharp pain of tension behind the hard bone of Jeff’s chest was almost unbearable. In his head there was a thin, wild singing.

“It can wait for me just as well. Half of it, I mean. I’m in no hurry.”

The lonely, proud, ambitious man. Maybe it was because the years had been too long, the cold veneer of his reserve wearing too thin for the persistent erosion of frustration. Maybe, after all the waiting and the final exhilaration of the big dream consummating, the sudden threat of disaster was the final impetus to hysteria. However it was, it was certain, now, in the end when he most needed to do what was exactly right, that he did the worst possible thing. Jeff had no warning. There was no gradual disintegration of the cold veneer. There was only a swift white flame of madness in pale eyes and a gun leaping as if by magnetic attraction from under the dark blue coat.

Jeff spun away with the sound of thunder in his ears, and something hammered at his right shoulder, slamming him against the wall. He thrust himself sideways in a reflex motion as he fell, rolling into cover behind a heavy chair. A slug thumped into upholstery, beating out a thin cloud of dust.

Using his left hand, Jeff reached his .38 and got it out. He was not ambidextrous, and the shot he returned around the edge of the chair was wild. He heard the shattering of glass and thought for a moment his lead had gone through a window. Then he heard the sound of feet on the iron fire-escape, and he knew that it was Constance that had gone through.

Jeff pulled himself up behind the chair, his shoulder a mass of fire, and lurched across the room. Glass fragments grated under his feet. He was remotely aware that the rain had diminished, falling now in a soft cloud that seemed, against the street lights below, hardly more than a mist. The fire-escape went down against the brick wall to the ground, reversing the direction of its angle with each floor. Below, leaping three steps at a time, Cleo Constance had almost completed the descent.

Jeff wasted no shot. Stretching flat across the platform outside the window, he braced his inadequate left hand against iron, taking aim on the spot where Constance must leave the fire-escape. When the big figure came across the sight, he fired once, the gun leaping in his hand. The sound bounced off old brick and came crashing back around him.

Far below, Cleo Constance stopped and stood rigidly, a grotesque parody of a man being shot, like a kid playing cops and robbers. Then he pitched sprawling on the wet pavement, his arm flung wide for something that wasn’t there.

He had to get up, had to get up, had to get up. It seemed to him that he lay on the wet pavement in the gray soft rain for long, precious minutes, repeating the injunction. Actually, he had hardly fallen before he was clawing at asphalt, scrambling to his knees, to his feet, lurching ahead. Another shot ricocheted with an angry whine off the pavement ahead of him, and he kept moving.

At the comer, around the edge of the building, he hesitated, looking around wildly. Across the street, idling in front of an all-night short-order joint, a Buick Roadmaster waited with the yellow glare of its eyes projecting through the wet darkness. A break. A great, good break.

Holding his left elbow tucked into his guts and his smashed left shoulder pulled forward, he lurched across to the Buick and got in. With a desperate, instinctive concern for small matters that had assumed overwhelming importance, he noticed that the needle of the gas gauge showed almost a full tank on the face of its lighted dial. The big motor roared under his heavy foot, the car leaping ahead.

The sodden night went past him. That was the way it seemed. He sitting idle in the big immobile car while the night went past. The needle of the speedometer wavered at eighty, but surely the speedometer lied. He was sitting still while everything went past him. Everything, everything, all the wide world.

The wound hurt. It was alive and insatiable, tearing at him with hooked talons. It seemed lower than he’d thought at first. Farther in, too. Not really in the shoulder at all, but in the chest. His shirt was warm and sticky against his body. Blood, his bright, bright blood, seeping away in a cursed car that wouldn’t move while the whole wide world rushed by.

The Buick hit the edge of the highway and leaped into the air, coming down with a tremendous jolt and a long sickening skid on the muddy shoulder. The impact drove him forward, the lower arc of the wheel ramming into his guts to send a great sheet of fire searing upward across his vision. He jerked his head up, fighting for breath and sight, heaving at the wheel. The car came back onto the highway rocking, two wheels elevated in a terrible moment of suspension. Then the wheels dropped, and the big Buick hurled itself forward.

Close. Too close. For some reason, he had trouble seeing. Everything seemed blurred, wavering in a kind of fog. The rain! The rain, of course. He felt a vast, consuming relief that made him want to shriek with laughter. For a moment, he’d thought it might be the effect of the wound.

Rocking up over the brow of a hill, the Buick boomed down. Ahead, abruptly, the highway disappeared, and the light of headlamps lay yellow across swirling water. It was too late to slow down, and he ploughed in, water fanning up and out from the shuddering car in a giant V. The sudden retardation of speed again hurled him brutally against the wheel. Again the sheet of fire, the lurid pain. But even in the midst of it, at its most terrible intensity, he thought with despair of the motor. He heard it cough and sputter on the edge of death, and finally, with that vast, hysterical relief, heard it catch fire and resume its steady roar.

That guy in the bus. That tall, lanky guy in the rear seat. There’d been a feeling about him from the beginning. One of those things. One of those odd little threats of danger that seem to come like faint electrical impulses from certain people. He’d felt the guy’s eyes on him during the ride. Like two hot projections burning into his skin just where the hair feathered on his neck. As if the sun had been focused there through the magnifying glasses.

For Jefferson Pitt, whose name he didn’t even know, he possessed a virulent hatred that worked on him with a physical ravishment that was almost equal to that of his wound. Damn the guy! Oh, damn him, damn him, damn him! The curse repeated itself over and over in his mind with the effect of an evil incantation. Pray for his damnation. Pray, pray to the devil.

After a long time, he saw ahead of him the sign of the by-pass, a detour established for traffic that Wanted to circle the city. It rejoined the highway beyond the limit on the other side. At the junction, with the instinctive caution of a wounded and hunted animal, he wheeled the Buick onto the by-pass. Probably there was no immediate danger in the city. Probably the heavy rain had interrupted telephone service out of Hogan. But you couldn’t be sure. Maybe not. Maybe the news had gone ahead of him.

He was driving now with one hand. His left lay useless in his lap. His torso was gutted and drained and he seemed to be sitting in a puddle of something warm and wet. It was, moreover, increasingly difficult to think. He was unable, somehow, to give proper consideration to the details of escape, which were things he should certainly be considering. Funny, the curious coloring the night had acquired. It was more red, now, than black, as if the world were ending in the fulfillment of fiery prophecy.

Brenda. Brenda would know what to do. Brenda was a kind of beautiful panacea, and he had only to reach her to make everything right again. He saw her quite clearly in a pink froth, and he fought for the vision, shutting everything else out. He did recall briefly, however, the fifty grand that was, contrary to what he’d said, still in his pocket He thought of the money only because it had become in his mind her constant associate. He would take the money to her, and she would get them safely away, because she was beautiful and clever and all things were possible to her.

They’d go south, maybe. To the hot countries. Mexico, Brazil, Argentina. He’d never cared for the tropics. Colder climates for him. Climates of energy and drive and ruthlessness. But with Brenda it would be all right. With Brenda, all things would be all right. That fool back there. That lanky fool. Thinking he had kidnapped Brenda. Thinking he could do it. Hot and cold, tender and cruel, complex, contradictory, beautiful, beautiful Brenda.

He never knew when he regained the highway. Nor when he turned off into the hills on the narrow gravel road. At the end, he was only dimly, redly conscious of turning up the sharp climb to the cabin, of the Buick’s skidding out of control and slamming into a stand of scrub oaks.

Opening the door, he pitched out. He lay on the wet mat of dead grass and leaves for several minutes, sobbing with pain. Finally he crawled erect and continued afoot, elbow in guts, shoulder crumpled forward. Slipping and sprawling, always regaining his feet by a fierce exertion of will. Up the slope and across the cleared area in front of the cabin. Up the steps onto the porch. Three steps. Three, arduous, body-wracking, heartbreaking miles. Clawing at the plank door, beating at it desperately with the meaty side of a clenched fist.

A light came on inside, and the door opened. He plunged headlong into the room, and Brenda stood looking down at him with her breath caught in a hard, hurting knot in her throat.

“Connie,” she said. “Connie.”

Chapter IV

He was heavy. She had not dreamed that he was so heavy. Tugging, straining, staining herself with his blood, she got him onto a leather sofa and stripped him naked to the waist. She saw with a black wave of despair that the wound was bad, that he was barely alive. His chest heaved. Pink bubbles formed and broke on his lips.

Working like an automaton, not stopping to wonder what had gone so wrong, she did what she could with hot water and towels and an inferior antiseptic she found in the bedroom. It wasn’t much. His heaving chest quieted, his breath becoming dangerously shallow. The pink bubbles formed more slowly, growing gradually in dimension to the bursting point, inflated gently by his diminished breath.

It was only after she had done all she could for him that she thought of the money. She took it from the inside pocket of his sodden coat and stood holding the thick packet in her hands. It was smeared with blood. Connie’s blood. She stood here for a long time, looking down at the fifty grand, the stained stuff of the big plan, balancing in the mental columns of her own perverted accounts the green against the red. With a sudden, violent backhand motion of her arm, she threw the packet away from her. It struck the opposite wall and flew apart, the green leaves fluttering to the floor. Her voice came up on a dry, rasping sob.

“Connie,” she said again. “Connie.”

Kneeling beside the leather couch, she laid her face against his naked body below the wound, and it was several minutes before she realized that he was dead. Then, in spite of a grief that was real, she began to think, with the predatory coldness that had always been independent of her emotions, of her own survival. She understood that money would be essential, and she got up and began gathering the scattered notes. She was engaged in this when the door swung open, and a tall man stood in the opening. In a kind of strange immunity to shock that was the effect of too much already, she was not frightened, nor even startled, and she saw that this man, too, had been shot. His right arm hung stiffly at his side. In his left hand was a gun. His eyes moved from her to Connie’s body on the sofa and back again.

“He’s dead?”

“Yes.” And then, quickly, “I didn’t kill him.”

“I know you didn’t. I did.”

At his words, hate flared within her, a hot blue flame, like the flame of an acetylene torch. So this was the man. This was the man who had done it. The intensity of her emotion made her feel scorched and withered inside, but with craft born of danger she gave no sign. This was a man. Whatever else he might be, he was still a man. And men were to use. They were to be used for chosen ends in whatever methods were necessary at the moment.

“I don’t understand.”

“I shot him at Hogan, and how he ever lived this long to drive a car this far is God’s own miracle.” The lips moved again, giving the angular, face no warmth. “I thought he was a kidnapper. I see now that he wasn’t. I see now that he was only the partner in a conspiracy. In a way, I can’t blame him. A woman like you. The old man told me you were beautiful, but the word isn’t good enough.”

Casually, she drifted a little left, her body lithe in its sheer gown, between him and the kerosene lamp.

“Who are you?” she asked him very quietly.

He moved, coming farther into the room.

“My name’s Pitt. Jefferson Pitt. I’m a private detective, like him.” His eyes slanted off again to the body on the sofa. “The old man hired me to keep an eye on the fifty grand. Your grandfather, I mean. Tonight, in Hogan, the thing broke wide open. Constance shot me. I shot Constance. He stole a car and got away. I bullied a cab stand down the street into letting me take a cab to follow him. But he was away. He must have driven like a maniac. I drove all the way to the city without catching sight of him.

“Then I gambled. If he’d taken another way, or if he’d gone on into the city, I’d lost him. But I figured he might have taken the by-pass around the city. If he had, I might be able to cut straight across and pick him up at the junction on the other side. It was a good gamble. I’d only been at the junction a few minutes when he came roaring off the by-pass. I couldn’t catch him, but I managed to keep his taillight in sight most of the time. I was lucky to see it when he turned off into these hills. Finally I found the stolen car smashed up in a stand of oaks down below. I saw the light up here, and here I am.”

She was caught, and she knew it. Connie was dead, and she was caught, and to make an issue of it now would only be to concede her most potent weapons. Not to antagonize him, that was the idea. He’d come this far in his own way, and the thing from this point was to make him continue in her way. The way she had planned for Connie. It was quite a trick, but it could be done. By a beautiful woman in a sheer gown in an isolated cabin in the hills, it could be done. And there was another factor on her side. A factor that could be decisive. Fifty grand in crisp green, slightly bloodstained.

“You’re hurt,” she said.

“Not much.”

“I can’t do much. Hot water and antiseptic. I’ll rip up a slip for the bandage.”

He looked at her, admiration stirring in his eyes, softening for a second the haggard harshness of his face. He moved across the room, past the body of Cleo Constance that was now, in death, only a little colder, a little more remote, than it had been alive. Laying his gun on a table with an awkward southpaw motion, he removed his coat carefully. She went over and unbuttoned his shirt, her pale, astringent hair a soft and heady cloud just below his bold nose. When she was finished, she went off into the tiny kitchen to heat more water on the kerosene stove. In a chair, fighting dull pain and fatigue, he saw that she had laid the money on the table beside the gun. They lay there in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp with ugly, primitive life of their own, symbols of the present issue.

She returned with the water and worked at his wound. Her fingers were swift, gentle, sure. The smell of her was good and clean and pungent, sharp in his nostrils. He let his head fall back against the chair, his eyes closed. His face, she saw, was a different face in repose, marked by the signs of a strange, half-reluctant gentleness. He displayed no concern about the gun. Because he was too tired to care? Or because he understood that it was hot her purpose to use it? Her early, hot hate was gone. This man had killed Connie, but now, after a lapse of minutes, she didn’t care. Things go and things come. You say goodbye and you say hello.

She finished dressing the wound and put her mouth down upon his.

“Jeff,” she whispered, a second later. “Jefferson Pitt.”

His eyes opened, staring up into hers. Then, because she possessed always a hard capacity for realism, she began to understand that this was one engagement she couldn’t win. Not that the eyes rejected her coldly.

They rejected her gently, with reluctance and sorrow.

“A woman like you,” he said, as he had before. “What more could a man ask?”

She said hotly and quickly, “And fifty grand, Jeff. A woman like me, and fifty grand.”

He put his unhurt arm around her and stood up, holding her tight against him with her feet off the floor. Holding her like that, he kissed her. Then he released her and moved away, not looking at her as he spoke, answering his own question.

“What more? Nothing, you’d think. Nothing that any rational man would dream of. But some men aren’t rational. Men like me. They adhere all their lives to a kind of personal law that leaves them always behind in a shambles of lost chances. It buys them nothing on earth and nothing after. Even after they no longer believe in the old myths of reward and justice, they still hang onto the old law, because it’s something they have to have to go on living.”

He turned to look back at her, and said, “You’d better get dressed.”

She went into the next room and dressed swiftly, thinking swiftly. Conceding defeat in respect to him, she still thought of the money. He had been, at most, as Connie had really been before him, only incidental. Dressed, wearing a fur coat, she took a gun out of her purse and went back into the other room with the gun in her hand.

He was standing with his back to her. The money and his gun were still lying together on the table, and she thought that he must be a bigger fool than any other man alive. Walking over to the table, she swept the notes into her purse as he turned to watch her.

“You don’t need the gun,” he said.

“It comes in handy for persuasion when other methods fail.”

“You don’t need it. You can walk out of here anytime you want to. Take the car I came in. The taxi. You can leave it wherever you catch the train or plane or bus.”

She looked at him as if he were mad. “You’re crazy. You’re a crazy guy.”

“Why? The old man would never let you stand trial. Why bother to take you back?”

“What about the fifty grand? He’ll give you hell for letting it get away.”

“Let him.”

“But why? Why let me take it?”

He shrugged, and he was again haggard and tired. “Maybe because, like you say, I’m crazy. Maybe because I think he owes it to you. There’s never been anything in the world he didn’t think he could buy for cash. Whatever relief he needs from the guilt he shares in making a woman like you out of the woman you could have been, he can buy with the fifty grand. But it doesn’t matter. Just take the money and leave.”

At the door, she turned. “What about you?”

“I’ll walk to the highway and catch a ride.”

“With that shoulder?”

“I’ll manage.”

“You could ride in with me.” And then with an aching urgency that she couldn’t understand, “Please come.”

He returned her look, sensing the urgency. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for the offer.”

“I’ll let you know,” she said, and started toward the waiting taxi.

He sent for the body and went to the doctor, slept and went back to the old man. He stood there in the big room, and told the story. The invalid watched him with venomous eyes.

“So they were both in it. The pair of them together. And he’s dead, you say?”

“Yes. I killed him.”

“Good. Where’s Brenda?”

“I don’t know. I hope I never know.”

“You let her get away?”

“More than that. I helped her.”

“With my money?”

“Yes.”

“What was your cut?”

Anger stirred faintly, quickly subsiding. “Nothing.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t give a damn whether you do.”

“I could have you jailed.”

“Go ahead and do it.”

The old man sat there twisted and still, and slowly the venom drained from his eyes. “All right, boy. What’s fifty thousand? Just tell me why you did it.”

He wished he knew. He wished he could state it clearly, even to himself. “I’m not sure. Last night I met some people I’ve been meeting all my life. One of them I killed, and I’m sorry now I did it. You get sick of it. You get sick of pushing people around because they’re lost in the crazy maze that someone says we’ve got to find out way through like white rats in a laboratory. Things just happen to people, that’s all, and one of the things that happened to Brenda is you. Whatever she is, you’re part of it. You can buy your peace with the fifty grand.”

The old eyes were closed in the semblance of slumber. The voice came up muffled from his chest. “All right. Get out. Send me your bill.”

“There’s no bill,” Jeff said.

He went out of the room and down the stairs past the Van Gogh and outside to his jalopy in the drive. He sat quietly under the wheel, thinking of a slim woman with pale hair somewhere in the hot countries.

She’d “let him know,” she’d said... Well, maybe, just possibly, she might. And if and when she did, he might — again just possibly — be able to raise the fare.

Savagely, Jeff cursed. “Good God, will I ever grow up?” he said aloud. There was an embarrassed grin on his homely face as he drove away.

Content

Fletcher Flora
Death Is Her Bridegroom

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV