Hot Spot (23 page)

I had to live through Sunday afternoon with nothing more than that. I couldn’t go around asking everybody I met what they’d heard about it. I went back to my room, but in a little while I knew I’d go crazy there. The old man next door was reading the Bible again. I got in the car and drove over to the county seat to a movie. It was a long picture, or maybe it was a double feature and I didn’t realize it, and when I came back it was dark. There was still the night to get through. When I got back to town I went to the restaurant and forced down a little food. Tate had come back, somebody said, but he hadn’t talked about it. The man died of a gunshot wound. And there’d be an inquest Monday morning. That was all.

I sat on the bed smoking cigarettes in the darkness until after three, and when fatigue caught up with me and I dozed off I began having dreams. When I shaved, I could see it on my face. I couldn’t take much more. I held on to it all through Monday morning and into the afternoon, burying myself in paper work and going out on the lot now and then to go through the motions of demonstrating a car to faceless and unreal people.

I went up to the restaurant for a cup of coffee at three-thirty, and the waitress told me. She was just making conversation. She was bored, and it was something to talk about. Tate had been in. They’d held an inquest on that man, what
was
his name, the one who lived out by the oil well that had been found dead, remember—yesterday morning, wasn’t it—sure it was yesterday morning because that was Sunday and she was just
dead,
that dance Saturday night, honestly—but about the man, they had held an inquest, she thought that was what Tate called it, and the man had been shot through the head with a gun, wasn’t it awful, and Tate had told her the way it was—. Oh, the verdict?

It was accidental death. The man had shot himself cleaning a gun, wasn’t it silly.

I never did know afterwards how I got back to the lot. All I can remember is sitting there at my desk trying to get my mind to accept the news that I had done it, that we were free of Sutton forever, and that the danger was all past. It was just too much for me to take in all at once. I’d been living with the danger and the suspense for so long I couldn’t readjust that quickly.

Suddenly, I had to tell Gloria. I wanted to call her on the phone. I’d been avoiding her because of the pressure I was under, and now I wanted to see her and start making up for it. Then I stopped. What was I going to tell her? Sutton was something we didn’t talk about. And certainly not over the phone. But I wanted to call her anyway, and make a date to see her that night. We could go on now. Everything would be just the way it had been before, and somehow we’d break down that wall that had grown up between us. Some way I could make her understand it didn’t matter. But I wouldn’t call her; she was just across the street, and I wanted to see her. I had started out the door when the phone rang.

“Mr. Madox?” the voice said when I picked up the receiver. It was Dolores Harshaw.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called before, but I’m sure you’ll understand. I wanted to thank you for the flowers and for being so kind, and all. It was very nice of all of you.” She paused. Now, what the hell, I thought. Why so goody-goody? There must be somebody in the room with her, one of the neighbours, or the maid.

“Why, that’s all right,” I said. “It was the least we could do.”

“Well, it was awful nice. But what I wanted to talk to you about was the business. I know you’ve been wonderful about it; what my plans were, I mean. Do you think you could come over tonight, say around seven, so we could discuss it, you and Miss Harper both, I mean?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell her. We were wondering about it, as a matter of fact, but we didn’t want to bother you. Are you planning to sell out? Is that it?”

“Oh, no. I guess from what the lawyers say it’ll take some time for the whole thing to be settled, but I wouldn’t sell out anyway. I think I should try to carry it on—for George’s sake, you know. And of course I’ll want you and Miss Harper to go right on the way you have been. I’m sure it couldn’t be in better hands.”

There must be a dozen people in the room, I thought. She hadn’t even thrown in a nasty dig at Gloria just for old times’ sake. Maybe she’d decided to become a social leader, and pull down the shades before she turned in with her boy friends. Well, I didn’t care a damn what she did, as long as she paid my salary.

After she had hung up I sat there a few minutes letting it soak in before I called Gloria. It was wonderful to tell her.

I picked her up that evening and we started over. I thought of how much it was like that other time, when Harshaw had asked us to come over. And afterwards we could go out to the river, as we had then, and I could take her face in my hands and kiss her and we could break through to each other again. We would start all over. The past was gone. Sutton didn’t matter any more. I could make her see that. I knew I could.

She broke in on my thoughts. “Harry,” she said, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you. I’ve been trying to all week, but I want to tell you now.”

“We’ll go somewhere afterwards and talk,” I said. “Then you can tell me, if you think you have to.”

“Yes. I have to. It’s about Sutton.”

I stared ahead into the lights, trying to keep my face still. “Sutton’s dead. Nothing matters about him any more. Nothing at all. You believe me, don’t you, honey, that it doesn’t matter now?”

“This does, Harry. I’ve got to tell you. You see, I thought all week that he had gone away. Because—. Well, you see, I gave him that five hundred dollars. After you told me not to. I took it out there and begged him to leave. So now it’s going to take us that much longer—.”

I reached out and patted her hand. “It’s all right,” I said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

It was a strange thing for her to say, I thought. Why bring up that one part of the whole mess, if we were going to ignore it? I should have got it then, but I didn’t, for we were turning in the driveway and I didn’t think about it any more. I stopped by the side porch and we got out. The light was on and as we rang the bell and stood there waiting I looked at her, thinking how pretty she was. She had on a yellow summer dress with big fluffy bows or something on the shoulders, and her stockings were some dark shade. She seemed to like dark-coloured nylons—.

I was staring. I couldn’t say anything, and the skin on the back of my neck was tightening up into gooseflesh like frozen sandpaper. I got it now, when it was forever too late.

It was what she was wearing on her feet. They were wedgies. They were wedgies with grass straps.

D
OLORES HARSHAW CAME TO THE
door then and let us in. I was numb. I was operating on pure reflex, trying to keep going and cover up. Somewhere far off I could hear them giving it the how-nice-you-look and what-a-lovely-dress routine while the wreckage fell all around me and I could see what I had done. There was no escape. There wasn’t any way to go back, so all I could do was walk the rest of the way into it and pray. It was all dangerous now, and I knew it, but I wondered if she did. We were standing hip-deep in gunpowder and she might not have any more sense than to reach for a match. I’d killed Sutton, and she was the only one on earth who knew it. Did she realize what that meant? All the time I’d thought it was Gloria, and Gloria didn’t know anything. She was standing there in the magazine with us, and no matter what happened I had to be sure she was out before it blew up.

There was too much of it and it was coming at me too fast to see the whole picture at once. Crazy pieces of it kept flashing up in the sick confusion of my thoughts, and then they’d be gone and there’d be something else. There was Harshaw. I didn’t have to wonder any more why he’d had a heart attack and fallen down the stairs at a crazy hour like that. Had he just happened to catch her coming in at three in the morning barefoot and naked except for a dress half torn off by the underbrush and stuck to her with the rain, or had she done it deliberately? Nobody would ever know, and they couldn’t touch her. Maybe he had given her that bruise on the shoulder, or maybe she’d got it when she fell over us back there in the shack. But what difference did it make? She knew I’d killed Sutton and I had to shut her up, but how?

And now I knew why Sutton had waited all that time to put the squeeze on me. He hadn’t even been there at the fire; or at least he hadn’t seen me. She’d told him. When I’d given her the brush-off, she’d merely gone back to him, and because there wasn’t any other way to get even with me she’d told him the whole thing. And now he was dead because he thought he could cash in on it, and she knew I’d killed him, and why.

“Don’t you feel well, Mr. Madox?”

I tried to come out of it. She was looking at me with the dead-pan innocence of a baby. All the ash-blonde curls were burnished and glinting in the lamplight, and the shiny black dress looked as if it had been packed by hand. She was in deep mourning from the skin out and laughing inside like a cat up to its whiskers in cream. I’d given her the brush, and now she could hang me. All she had to do was pick up the phone and call the Sheriff.

Is she stupid, or what? I thought. Doesn’t she know I’ll kill her? But then I knew the answer to that, too. She wasn’t stupid. She’d asked Gloria to come, hadn’t she?

“Oh,” I said. “I’m all right. I feel fine.”

There was nothing showing on the surface. Gloria couldn’t suspect anything at all. We went over and sat down, Gloria in a big chair and I on the sofa across from her, while Dolores Harshaw leaned back in a platform rocker. We were all grouped around the coffee table.

“I know you’ve been wondering,” Dolores said, “I mean, about the business. I would have called you sooner, but it’s been such a blow, you know—.”

She went on giving us the brave little widow bearing up under everything. I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was too busy with the physical strain of keeping my face from showing anything and trying to find the answer to the question that went around and around in my mind in a kind of endless nightmare.
What was she going to do?

I could hear her voice going on, like a radio in a burning house. “—what poor George would have wanted. He thought a great deal of both of you. So of course I couldn’t sell out. I’m going to try to carry on just the same.”

She had the rope around my neck, and when she got ready she’d drop the trap. With Gloria here I was helpless. And she knew that, of course, so whatever it was it was going to be done now, before we left and I got a chance to get her alone.

She was picking up an envelope which was lying on the coffee table. “It must have been terrible,” she went on, “because I think he knew in his heart it might happen any time. Ever since we came back from Galveston he had a little notebook that stayed right by his side all the time, and he kept writing down his ideas about the business and the things he wanted to be sure would be carried on just—” Her voice broke a little. She was tremendous as the brave little widow. She gathered herself up with a pitiful smile and went on. “—just in case it did happen. I’ve written it all out, and I thought Mr. Madox should read it, since he’ll be in charge. And of course you too, Miss Harper, if he thinks you should.”

She handed it over to me. There was nothing in her face but that same dead-pan innocence. Gloria was watching her, and then me, with only polite curiosity. She probably thought she’d been working for Harshaw long enough to know his politics.

I opened the envelope and slid it out. It was a carbon copy, two pages single-spaced on a typewriter. I looked at the heading of it, and I knew where the original was. It was in a safe-deposit box somewhere or in some lawyer’s office, where I’d never get to it. And I knew that I wasn’t going to kill her. As long as both of us lived, the safest place she would ever be was with me, and I was going to hope she went on living for a long, long time.

“This statement is to be turned over to the District Attorney’s office after my death,” it began, and she had it all there. She hadn’t left out a thing. She admitted lying about my being there at the fire right after it broke out, and described the way I had driven up and hurried into the crowd thirty minutes later. She told them about my having been in the building before, and how she had told Sutton all of this, and of her recognizing me in the lightning flash when the storm broke that night. The clincher was at the end, and it was something I hadn’t known before. She’d gone back down there just after daybreak, after the doctor had left the house. She had to know what had happened, because her purse and things were there. And when she found Sutton dead and the purse gone she had it all.

I read it all the way through, cold as ice and seeing the walls rise up around me. I could quit looking for a way out. There wasn’t any. As long as she was living she could turn me in any time she felt like it, and the minute she died of anything at all they’d have that statement. It wasn’t witnessed, of course, and maybe it wasn’t legal, but it didn’t have to be. It put the finger on me, and the weight of all the other evidence would be overwhelming. They’d get it out of me. Of course, if she turned it over to them while she was still alive, she might be in trouble herself—but that was a laugh, or would have been if I hadn’t felt more like screaming. I’d go to the electric chair, and she might get a few months’ suspended sentence.

I folded it up very slowly and slipped it back in the envelope while they watched me. I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t trust my voice. Somehow I managed to keep my face utterly blank as I dropped it on the coffee table and looked at her. She had me and she knew it. I waited.

And then she let me have it, without saying a word to me. She was talking to Gloria.

She leaned back in her chair and lighted a cigarette. She was friendly, and quite sympathetic. “Now, about the shortage in your accounts, Miss Harper,” she said. “I know you’ll understand that Mr. Madox was only doing what he believed was right when he told me about it. And of course I wouldn’t think of bringing charges. You can continue right on the way you have been until it’s all taken care of, and you’ll still have your job afterwards if you want it. I want you to know, dear, that we’re your friends, and that he hated having to do it as much as I hate having to mention it now. And he insisted that you be given another chance—.”