Into The Night (11 page)

"Finally, I thought I had a way figured to frame him, pin something on him he didn't do. The details don't matter now anymore. But I needed some help. So I turned to this friend I had, who still had connections from the old days, even though he'd gone legit a long time ago, the way most of the smart ones have.

"To my surprise, he wouldn't have any part of it, and he talked me out of it and advised me to drop it. Those things always backfire, he said. They're never foolproof. You'll be the one to get hurt, Dell, not him. Let the guy go. Don't keep trying to get him back. He made a clean break of it. Let it stay that way. Leave him alone.

"That was the man's point of view, not the woman's. And I was wise to his little personal angle too; he was in love with me himself, and Vick had been too much competition for him. He'd had to take a backseat the whole time I was married to Vick. No wonder he liked it better this way, Vick safely out of the way.

"Well, I gave that particular project up as unfeasible, but I didn't quit for a minute. If he thought I'd quit trying, he didn't know me.

"Since I couldn't get at him himself, I decided maybe I could get at him through her. In fact the more I thought of it, the more I liked it. I decided this was the better way of the two. Do something to him, and he still had her to love him. Do something to her, and he didn't have anyone to love him. That hurt the more of the two ways.

"She had religion of a sort, more or less. I had ways of finding out things. I found out she always went to early morning mass on Sundays. Seven o'clock mass. He never went, and she never went herself any other time the week around. She always went to this same little neighborhood church, and to get to it she had to pass through this deserted side street. On early Sunday mornings it was practically dead, not a soul around. There was a new development going up, and the old buildings that were still standing had all been vacated and boarded up. I saw that for myself. You know how they do, whitewash X's marking the windowpanes. Then where the new construction was already well advanced, there was this long plank scaffolding to protect the sidewalk. Like they always put up, in case anything should fall from above. Walking along under it was almost like going through a long tunnel, it was so dim and walled in. And on Sunday morning no workmen would be around. She would be boxed in there, unable to advance, unable to retreat, if anyone caught her fairly in the middle of that confined place.

"Next I got hold of the addresses of a number of low-type dives or joints that were said to be hangouts for ex-cons and petty hoodlums and the like. For nearly a week straight each night after the show instead of going out on the town, I'd strip off the glitter, change to a plain black dress so I wouldn't attract attention, and put on a pair of dark glasses.

"Then I'd go to one of those places and hang around. Oh, there were plenty of passes made, but when they saw that wasn't the game, they gave up trying.

"Finally I made the sort of a contact I'd been looking for. Well, it was slow work. I had to be cagey. He had to be cagey. I had to build him up. He had to build me up. But after three meetings we were finally ready to get down to cases. In the meantime I'd had him checked thoroughly, knew where he was living, knew what his past record was, in fact knew much more than he knew I knew, so that he didn't stand a chance in the world of taking me.

"Once we understood each other, the rest of it went fast. It was just a matter of agreeing on a price.

"'I'm doing this for a friend,' I said.

"'Yeah,' he said, 'so am I.'

"'I got a friend who'd give anything if she knew somebody who'd let fly at a little twist that goes by a certain place every Sunday morning at six-thirty.'

"'Anything?' he said. 'How much is anything?'

"'Well, let's say five hundred.'

"That ain't anything,' he said. 'That's a quarter of anything.'

"'I'd have to take that up with her,' I said.

"'Let fly?' he said. 'Let fly what?'

"'Well, the whole trouble with her is she's too pretty. Now, a fist or a rock ain't going to change that. It comes right back again after she heals. It's got to be something that eats its way in slow. Then she stays like that for good.'

"'Acid,' he lip-read knowingly.

"'Does your friend want to get it, or should my friend get it?'

"'My friend can get the right stuff. He knows where. No problem there.'

"'I'll call and find out about the "anything."'

"I went into a phone booth, counted out what I had brought with me, and came out to him again.

"You get a thousand now, she says,' I told him. 'The baptism of fire comes off Sunday. You get five hundred more here, this same joint, this same table, on Monday.'

"I'll check,' he said. He didn't even bother pretending the phone bit. He just went into the men's room, stayed a short while, came out again putting a comb into his pocket, and said, 'On Monday another thousand, and it's in the works.' Well, there was another phone in there (I imagine), if one wanted to be technical about it.

"It's in the works,' I said. I gave him the first thousand under the table then and there.

"'What's this?' he asked, and read the little piece of paper I'd had on top of it.

"'That's the real name and present address of your "friend," I told him. 'I know he can change his address easy between now and Sunday, but the info about him can also follow him to the new place just as easy. He's done time in prison in the past. He's got a two-strike against him.'

"He looked at me a long time. Not sore or frightened, just admiring me, like.

"Then he showed the edges of his teeth a little. 'Smart,' he said.

"I agreed with him. 'Yes, she is. Very.'

"The thing would have come off perfect, without a hitch, only I started celebrating a little too early and a little too hard. I came home right after my Saturday night show and started drinking. My friend, the one I mentioned, was here in the apartment with me. I'd lift my glass each time and say something like, 'Here's to somebody I know that's not going to look so good to somebody else I know, around this same time tomorrow night.' And I started singing, 'What a difference a day makes, twen'y-four little hours'--and looping it up altogether.

"Last thing I remember was him going in to use my phone and closing the door after him. But I didn't think anything of it, he was the kind of a guy just as apt to make a phone call at three or four in the morning as at twelve in the afternoon.

"When I woke up, it was early afternoon. He was still around. We were making a long weekend of it. I yawned and stretched enjoyably and said, 'Well, it's all over with by now. I wonder how she likes the new face she's breaking in today? Above all, I wonder how -he- likes it. I bet he can't look at it without turning green around the gills himself.'

"'She's not breaking in any new face,' he told me. 'She's still wearing the same face she wore yesterday, and the day before, and she'll keep on wearing it.'

"I sat up sudden and wide awake. 'What do you know about it?' I asked sharply. 'How do you come in it?'

"He jiggled the hand he was holding a glass of tomato juice in, by way of stirring it up. 'I sent a couple of boys I know over there bright and early, five-thirty, six this morning, to look him up where he was posted waiting for her. They did what I'd told them to; took him with them a considerable distance out of town, beat the living jazz out of him, and told him if he ever showed his face around again they'd finish up on him.'

"My good thousand dollars!' I squawked, and clapped my hand over my eyes.

"'Here's your thousand dollars,' he said, and took it out of his pocket and handed it back to me still in the envelope in which I'd originally given it to the guy. They found it still on him. Evidently doesn't trust banks or mattresses.

"'Next time you're willing to put up that much,' he added, 'why don't you put it into something more constructive?"

"And then you gave up trying," Madeline prodded.

"You don't know me," Dell said meaningfully. "You don't know me at all."

God, I wouldn't want her down on me! Madeline thought.

"For the second time I switched. Just like I'd switched from him to her, at first, so now I gave up trying bodily harm. I saw that wouldn't work. I switched instead to character damage.

"I got me a private detective. I got him out of the fine-print ads in the back of a disreputable magazine. You know the type thing. 'Do you feel unsure of your mate's loyalty? Call on us. Strictly confidential.'

"He was a darb. He didn't have an ethic to his name. I wouldn't have even minded that if he'd only been personally clean. He hadn't changed his shirt in a week and his socks in a month. You could've told which part of a room he was in even with the lights out. But I always say, Get a dirty guy to do a dirty job. A decent guy wouldn't have handled an assignment like that in the first place. See, it wasn't to save a marriage, protect it from an intruder, a third person. I was paying him to deliberately break up a perfectly good marriage, and not my own but somebody else's. That was what I was hiring him for.

"I laid it on the line to him. My fist looked like a head of cabbage, the way bunched greenbacks were coming out between all the fingers. No wonder they've got that nickname for it, cabbage.

"I told him the grubby industrial town she was born in. I said, I want you to go there, and I want you to stay there, until you've dug up something on her. Something that'll make her as sooty as the town is. If you can dig up something big, all the better. If you can only dig up something little, never mind, we'll blow it up into something big. Don't leave a stone unturned--"

Just like I did, Madeline thought parenthetically, only in reverse. Mine was benevolent, hers was malevolent.

"It's on me, I said to him. The whole thing's on me. I'm footing the bill. I don't care if you stay there six months. I don't care how you pad your expense account. I'll pay for it. I don't care if you have a broad in your room every night, a case of Carstairs in your room every night. I'll pay for it. It's worth it to me. Just so long as you come up with something on her. I've never enjoyed spending my money half as much as I'll enjoy spending it now. Ask around. Dig up the kids she went to school with. Look up doctors. Maybe she had a miss once. Maybe there was syph in her family. In the old days, when it presented a problem. Or insanity, or a criminal record. Check on her birth certificate, they must have it on file there, find out what that can tell you.

"Get something on her. I don't care what it is, but -get something on her-."

And even in the repetition, her voice was a terrible thing, a thing such as Madeline had never heard before. It wasn't a voice, it was hate incarnate.

She spoke more quietly again. "About three months after he went there, he rang me up one night long-distance. Reversed charges, of course. When I heard what he had to tell me, I was in ecstasy. I'd never expected anything like it in a million years. All I'd hoped for was to find a little mud that I could sling at her. Instead, he'd dug up an entire tar pit. I rolled over and over on the bed, carrying the phone with me up to my ear. Then when the wire started to pull up short, I rolled over and over back again the other way until it was freed again.

"It was like dropping some kind of a bomb in between them. It blew them so far apart they could never get back together again, not in this lifetime. I bet from then on if either one of them ever saw the other, they'd start running for dear life, they couldn't get away fast enough."

"But what?" Madeline said. "What was it?"

Dell dropped her eyes, with self-satisfaction but also with guile. "That's as far as it goes," she said inflexibly. "Beyond that, we don't talk about it in this house."

One day the phone rang while Madeline was there. Dell got up and went inside to it. It was just past the doorway. Madeline went ahead tapping single notes and writing them down on the score sheet.

After a few intimately indistinct phrases, she heard Dell say, "A friend."

Then she added, "Of course a girl. What do you think I do, entertain men here behind your back? I wouldn't last long that way."

Then she went on, "What do you mean, how do you know it is?"

Then she concluded, "Because I say so, isn't that enough?"

Suddenly she called, "Mad, come here a minute." Madeline got up and went in there. Dell thrust the phone out toward her, but without relinquishing it. "Say hello into this," she instructed.

"Hello?" Madeline said uncertainly.

Dell immediately took it away again, so that Madeline had no chance to hear what was said in return. Madeline went back to the piano. "Satisfied?" Dell was saying. "You sure take a lot of convincing."

She rejoined Madeline a few moments later, poking her thumb resentfully over her shoulder. "That guy!" she steamed. "He sure gives me trouble. It's getting so I'm afraid to go out on the street with him anymore, for fear my agent might pass and tip his hat to me, or the club manager might go by and give me a hello, or I might get a nod from somebody who once worked the same spot with me ten years ago. That's all it takes, and I find myself explaining and trying to square myself all the rest of the evening. And then when I get all through he still doesn't believe me, anyway." She held one hand to the side of her face as though it hurt her there, and took a few short steps this way and that. "I'd have to be quadruplets, and all four of us working on a double shift, to be able to crowd in all the cheating he gives me credit for."

Madeline just looked at her solemnly, taking the tirade in. She didn't ask who he was, and Dell didn't say. She had a fairly good idea Dell wouldn't have told her even if she had asked, and that was one of the principal reasons she hadn't.

A few weeks after that, just as she was about to put the key Dell had given her into the outside door of the apartment, she held back, thinking she heard a voice somewhere on the inside. She inclined her head toward the door, but the sound didn't repeat itself. But some cautious instinct made her put the key away and ring instead. She didn't want any possible third party to know she had a key to the apartment in her possession, although she couldn't have said why. In the final analysis it was no one's business but Dell's and her own.