Blue City (14 page)

“You want me to take over the club and the machines?” His voice was incredulous. “Jesus!”

“You’re the only man I’d trust,” she said earnestly. “If you’ll work with me, we can go places. You’re too big a man to spend your life in the small time. I can see that, even if you can’t.”

“Yeah, I know,” he admitted. “I been marking time, waiting for a break.”

“This is the break you’ve been waiting for. You can be top man in this town. Will you do it?”

“I’ll do it,” he said in a shy voice. “By Jesus Christ, I’ll do it!”

“I knew I could depend on you.”

There was another pause, ending in a long female sigh. “I love you, Joey.”

“You know how I feel about you, baby.”

“Can you get a gun today?”

“Yeah. But I was thinking. What about Rusty and Garland? When one of them isn’t with him, the other one is.”

“Leave Rusty to me,” she said. “I’ve seen the way he looks at me. I’ll give you a clear field. There’s one other thing you’ve got to do.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“You’ve seen the safe in Kerch’s office at the club?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s an envelope in it with my name on it. He showed it to me once. You’ve got to get it.”

“Christ, I can’t do that. I’ve never cracked a safe.”

“But you don’t have to crack it. I own the club. When Kerch is dead, I’ve got a right to open that safe. We can get a locksmith to drill it open. But you’ve got to get that envelope before anybody else gets it.”

“I’ll get it,” he said. “What’s he got on you, Floraine?”

“I can’t tell you now.”

“You don’t trust me, eh? I thought we were working together now. Tell me what he’s got on you, Floraine.”

“I’ll tell you when he’s dead.”

“It might take a while. I got to make plans, especially when I’m working in the dark like this.”

“It’s got to be today. You said today.”

“The hell I did. It could take a week for me to get a chance at him. I’ve got to think about a getaway, too.”

“I said I’d take care of Rusty and give you a clear field. If I do that, there’s nothing to stop you.”

“Christ, Floraine, you got to give me time—” The unfinished sentence was punctuated by a sharply indrawn breath.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered.

I thought he had heard my breathing, and I raised my gun and waited. But it wasn’t me that had taken the wind out of his words. None of the three of us had heard the front door open or anyone come in. But the door had opened and someone had come in. It was Kerch’s voice I heard next, speaking from the direction of the hallway:

“I sent Garland to bring you in, Sault. What a charming
excuse you have for not having come. You might as well frisk him, Garland, though I suspect he hasn’t the courage to carry a gun. Please don’t feel that it’s necessary to cover your breasts, my dear Floraine. Garland isn’t interested, Rusty won’t molest you so long as I’m here, and the sight of them continues to give me a certain aesthetic pleasure.”

She said one word: “Toad!”

“You women,” Kerch said pleasantly. “You women are always eager to be deluded by such nonessentials as personal beauty. Joe’s here, for example. He’s quite a nice-looking youngster, but he’s got the heart of a little slinking rat. Isn’t that right, Joey?”

Joey said: “Floraine—Mrs. Weather here—just called me up down at Malteoni’s, and I came over here to see what was bothering her. We just kind of got playing around, you know how it is—”

“Toads are hard to kill,” Kerch said sententiously. “He’s not carrying anything, is he, Garland?”

“No. John Weather took his knife off him before he left town.”

“See what a frail reed you’ve been leading on, Floraine? I really can’t commend your choice of partners.”

“He doesn’t look like a toad,” she said.

“As I do, of course? But then you didn’t choose me as a partner. I chose you. At any rate, there are uglier things than toads. I predict that when we’ve finished with Joey, he won’t be able to compete even with me in loveliness.”

“I wasn’t going to do it,” Joey said in a hushed voice. “I was just pumping her so I could give you the word. Christ,
I wouldn’t try anything on you, Mr. Kerch, we always got along great!”

“That seems to be finished, doesn’t it, Joey? Quite as finished as you will shortly be. Help him to stand up, Rusty, think we’ll go out to the Wildwood.”

“Take your hands off me,” Joey yelled. “You do anything to me and I’ll tear your setup wide open.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Joey.”

“You know what I mean. I know enough to pin murder on you, Kerch. If they can’t get you for murder, they can get you for accessory.”

“I always knew you killed Jerry Weather,” Floraine said. “Now I’ve got something on you, Kerch.”

“Nobody’s got anything on me at all,” Kerch said. “Bring him along, Rusty. We want to get out to the Wildwood before it’s light.”

“If you do anything to me, I’ll sing,” Sault said.

I saw him led, struggling feebly, across the narrow section of the room that was visible through the crack. Rusty had his arm and Garland walked behind him in a death march.

“You won’t sing,” Kerch said, “if what we do to you shuts you up for good. Come along, Floraine. You’ll need a coat.”

“You can’t do without me,” she said. “You’re crazy if you think you can.”

“Perfectly true, my dear. I can’t do without you. But I can certainly do without Joey Sault. Come along.”

I stood where I was while Floraine got her coat and Kerch turned out the light in the front room. The front door closed behind them, and their footsteps receded on the walk. Kerch had been the last to leave, and I had missed my chance to shoot him. The thought of shooting him then hadn’t even occurred to me. New questions were rising in my mind like bubbles in a stirred drink, and the death of Kerch wouldn’t answer any of them. Besides, Floraine wanted him dead, which gave me a reason for wanting him kept alive. For a while, listening to Sault and Floraine, I had begun to believe that Floraine had killed my father and that Kerch knew of it, but what she and Sault said at the end made me doubt it again. Suspicion wavered but continually swung back to Kerch, like a compass needle to the north.

If only I could get Kerch alone, I thought as I pulled on my boots. Such smooth talkers were nearly always gnawed by internal weaknesses and fears. And I remembered what Carla had said about him. As soft as jelly. If I could get my hands on him. My bootlace broke, and I swore at it and tied it in the dark at the top of the stairs.

I remembered vaguely where the Wildwood was; it was
a roadhouse that my father had owned, six or seven miles north of the city. Too far to walk, and it might be dangerous to take a cab. But Floraine should have a car.

I went down the hall to the master bedroom which my mother had shared with my father before she left him. When I turned on the light I saw that it was Floraine’s now. Frilled curtains at the windows, mules under the chenille-covered bed, which I noticed hadn’t been slept in, a dressing-table with a triple mirror, a heavy odor of perfume, which grew heavier when I approached the dressing-table. There was a Corde purse on it, thrown carelessly among an array of bottles and jars. I unzipped the purse and found her car keys where I had hoped they’d be.

Just before I turned out the light, a picture on the wall above the bed caught my eye. It was a still life, crowded with brilliantly colored tropical flowers. My heart beat once and the picture wasn’t a still life after all, and the flowers weren’t flowers. They were hands and faces and other parts of human bodies, male and female. Another heartbeat, and they were flowers again. I turned out the light and left the house, thinking that my father’s last sexual fling had carried him a hell of a long way—a hell of a long way down.

The keys fitted the Packard roadster that I found in the garage. I backed it out slowly and headed north at a speed that wouldn’t be worth a policeman’s second glance. About five miles out of town I came to a gas station that contained a light and a man moving in front of it. I turned in and parked by the pumps. I didn’t need gas, and he’d be able to tell me exactly where the Wildwood was. I didn’t want to get there before I expected to.

A thin man in grease-stained dungarees came out of the station yawning, his face still caked with sleep.

“You want gas?”

“Not just now. Maybe you can tell me where the Wildwood is?”

“Yeah, but somebody gave you the wrong dope, brother. It’s been closed up since gas-rationing, and ain’t never been opened yet. I wish to hell they’d open it again—it used to make business for me.”

“A friend of mine told me he lives out past there. We’re going fishing.”

“What’s his name?”

“Piscator,” I said. “Peter Piscator.”

“Funny, I thought I knew everybody that lives out in that direction. But I never heard of this guy Piscator.”

“He’s a recluse. Now where’s the Wildwood?”

“Second road to your left. Go down a mile and you’ll see it on the right-hand side. I hope you find your friend O.K. If you don’t, come back here and I’ll see if I can find him in the phone book.” He was treating me with the respect my Packard deserved, but I’d have preferred a car that was less easily remembered.

I thanked him and drove away. When I left the concrete at the second turning to the left, I drove even more slowly than before, with my eyes straining ahead past the white fan of the headlights. It was a gravel road with woods on both sides, and completely deserted. It was too late even for parking couples. I could see Kerch’s point in taking Sault to this godforsaken neck of the woods. I switched off the lights and drove by the faint light of the stars.

My mileage had increased six tenths of a mile since leaving the main road when I came to a dirt lane leading into the woods. I went up it a hundred yards or so, past the first turning, and parked in the ditch after turning the car around. A weather-beaten sign nailed to a tree said: “Five Hundred yards to Wildwood Inn—Steaks and Cocktails—Never a Cover Charge.”

After a quarter of a mile of cautious walking in the ditch I saw ahead of me a black car parked under a tree against the fence. I took out my gun and approached it as noiselessly as I could. I didn’t need the gun: the car was empty. The engine was warm, though, and it looked like the car I had seen Garland driving on Fenton Boulevard.

I had scarcely left it when I saw a dim yellow light shining through the trees on the right side of the road. I slipped through the wire fence and circled the light, staying in the cover of the woods. It was light, second-growth timber, easy to make my way through, and the damp spring earth muffled my footfalls. My eyes were becoming adjusted to darkness, and I could make out the main outlines of the building I was circling, a long, low building with its length parallel to the road, fronted by a gravel square for drive-ins. A short wing surmounted by a wide chimney jutted out the back at the rear end, and that was where the light was coming from. A shadow moved across the cracked, yellow blind, and I thought I recognized the shape of Kerch’s shapeless body.

I cut deeper into the woods and, walking a little less cautiously, widened my circle to the rear. Finally I came out in a clearing where there were several piles of cordwood. A
path led from there to the back of the inn, probably to the kitchen. I followed it till I saw the light again, shining through an unblinded window at the back. My right hand hugged the butt of my gun, and my thumb took off the safety almost by instinct.

The howl that a coyote raises to the moon can be disturbing, but it’s a mindless lamentation, which really bothers only the superstitious. The scream of a hurt cat is ugly too, but it doesn’t echo long in the emotions. There are a lot of cats, and they do a lot of yelling, and one of them is always getting hurt. Of course, there are a lot of men, more than two billion of them, and one of them dies every second, or whatever the figure is. I had seen a hundred corpses lying in a field at once, and another hundred half-gone and making a noise about it. Still, when a man screams in agony, it shakes more than the eardrums.

I was at the window before the scream ended, careless about whether I’d be seen or not. The screams had divided the night into two countries, with a deep gulf between. I was on the side of the man who was being hurt, and the people who were hurting him were on the other.

Joe Sault was in the kitchen chair half-facing me, with Kerch in front of him and Rusty behind him holding his arms. His left ear hung down like a red rag, dripping blood rhythmically onto his stylish collar. His mouth was ragged and spongy. His body was naked from the waist down, and his shirt had been rolled up under his armpits. His lean belly, bisected by a line of dark hair, trembled steadily like a beaten dog’s. His genitals were blue and shrunken with fright.

Floraine was sitting with her fur-coated back to me, almost against the window. She didn’t move and she didn’t say a word. Garland was standing beside her, but all I could see of him was the gray elbow of his coat. The vibrating white light of a gasoline lamp on the table gave the room an ugliness as precise as a raw photograph.

Kerch put down the heavy iron spoon that he had been balancing in his hand, and picked up a paring knife from the table. Before he began to move, I sensed that he was going to turn, and ducked out of sight.

“You’re insane,” she said—“insane with vanity and jealousy.”

“Not at all, my dear. The regrets with which I look back to the handsome days of my youth are thoroughly wistful and mild, I assure you. And surely I couldn’t be jealous of an aging slut like yourself, could I?”

“You’re eaten up with jealousy,” she said. “Did you ever imagine I took pleasure in having a diseased thing like you crawl into my bed? Why do you think I left you in the first place?”

“You’re singing a new song, my dear. You have quite a repertory.”

“Toad!”

“You’ve become insolent, lately, haven’t you? You need a stern lesson, Floraine. Now take this knife and do what I tell you.”

“Toad!”

“I’ve tried to be agreeable to you for nearly two years. You can expect much more severe disciplining in the future.”