Tears Are for Angels (6 page)

    My head was pounding steadily now, and slowly I put the gun down and placed my hands flat on the floor and pushed myself to my feet. I stepped carefully around it and slowly moved across the room to the bathroom.

    My face, in the medicine-cabinet mirror, was unchanged. Look at you, I thought-betrayed, slugged, your wife dead. And not even a wrinkle on your face that wasn't there before. How can so much happen so quickly and leave no mark? Deep-set eyes, bloodshot above a broad, blunt nose, stared back at me from the mirror.

    I knew he must have hit me with something, for my exploring fingers found a small lump high on the side of my head. The skin was not broken. I washed my lace in cold water. Using my two hands for a cup, I gulped mouthfuls of it down my dry, evil-tasting throat.

    And then, in the first clarity of the clean, sweet water, cool against my face and in my mouth, it hit me. I straightened up and looked in the mirror again and consternation stared back at me.

    Without drying my face or hands I wheeled around and stepped quickly back into the bedroom. Nothing had changed. It still lay there inert, the overturned chair beside it no more lifeless than she. Rain whispered at the windows.

    Stewart's clothes were gone too. The rumpled bed jeered at me. The gun lay where I had left it. One bed-lamp burned brightly on a small table and shadows were soft on the walls.

    No. Nothing had changed. Nothing, except that the invisible atmosphere in the room was no longer the scent of the unknown. It was now the smell of danger. For Dick Stewart was gone and I knew there was no trace of him remaining. The rain would have removed his footprints from the earth, it was as if he had never been there.

    And I was alone with Lucy. I was alone with the gun that had killed her-my gun. My linger must have performed the physical act that had pulled its trigger. Her body lay in our bedroom. I had returned unexpectedly from a fishing trip plenty of people knew I was planning. And my reputation for violent temper had been well known since the first day I entered grade school.

    There was danger in that room, all right. Danger of a jury of twelve and bars of iron and the electric chair. Danger of all that for me.

    I glanced at the clock. It was eleven-thirty. It had been maybe a little after ten when I had returned. The hands of the clock told me time was short.

    I sat down on the bed and my brain began to accept and reject, almost automatically. I hardly gave a thought to telling the truth, as it had happened, as much of it as I knew. I could never make it stick. Stewart would be even now sealing up an alibi with the credit-bound Negroes who traded at his general store. The room showed no trace of his having been there.

    No. Even with his reputation, it would never stick.

    All right, I thought, so I get the chair. So all right. I did pull that trigger, didn't I? It's what you get for murder, isn't it?

    And every fiber in me sang into protest. No, by God, I thought. Goddamnit, no! I will not go to the chair for this, no matter who pulled the trigger. As sure as she lies there, that sonofabitch is responsible. She's dead because of him. And he's the one who's got to pay out for it. He's the one who's going to pay.

    I would have to make him pay it out. But I couldn't do that in jail. You couldn't do anything in jail, or after they strapped you in the chair. I had to get out of it, too. I had to get clean and then there would be all of my life to make the bastard pay and pay and pay.

    I looked at it again, at the long, slim legs. The substance of them had lost all beauty, even all ugliness, and merely sprawled. But I could close my eyes and conjure them up, and the rest of her, the way they had been. I could remember the long nights and the hot fires bright in us, and the hands, moving then, the legs violent and seeking, the breasts against me, soft and round and big, and the moist lips I had thought were only mine.

    I could remember that and, remembering, I could hate, hate with a rage that burst from some dark recess inside me, hate for the man who had killed all that, not only killed it but taken it from me before the act of killing. I could hate for that, and maybe a little bit just for Lucy's sake, who no longer could hate or love or laugh or cry or anything, only sprawl inert upon the patient floor.

    And something else, too. Something else was in me, and I looked at it and examined it and knew it for what it was. My wife had been taken in my own bed by a man about whom I had often joked, in company with others, a man whose eyes and hands coveted all women and possessed many.

    And I knew I was not enough of a man, I didn't have the guts to face what I would get if I told it, to hear the quick, muffled snickers, to see the eyes, amusement veiled only a little in them, the hush of voices when you entered and they were talking, the insistent whispers. I knew it would be that way. I had seen it before, I had been a part of it. If I told it I knew it would be that way.

    So, even if I could have made it stick, I knew that I would never tell the truth of what had happened in that room that night. Had I killed him, the county would have respected that, sympathized with it. But he had got away, and I didn't have what it took to face it.

    So I had to be free of it too. Then there would be just the two of us, and a way could be found. A way could always be found.

    I got up and went across the room. I closed my eyes and leaned over and put my hands beneath the arms. Already, it seemed to me, the clay chill was on the flesh.

    I dragged it, limp and sprawling, across the room and put my leg behind the dressing-table chair and let it down into it. At first it kept slumping forward, and then I gritted my teeth and put my hand under the chin and tipped the head back. Sightless eyes fixed on the ceiling. The arms dangled loosely on either side of the chair, but it stayed upright and I moved away.

    The robe lay on the floor where I had flung it. I picked it up and brushed it carefully. The reminiscence of her clung to it. I folded it across my arm, carefully, and went slowly back to the dressing table.

    It was hard to get the arms into it, but I managed. I had to manage. More than once my hand brushed across the breasts, each time shock coming at me that I should touch them without the answering rush in my veins. I pulled the robe closely about it, finally, and put it back into the chair and lipped the head back again. The arms still dangled.

    I looked at it carefully. There could be no other chance if I fouled it up now. The bullet had entered the forehead above the right eye, angling toward the center of the head, and powder stains smoked the edges of the dark wound. That was the only blessing I could see' in the whole business. It could make no difference to her now if the gun had been one foot or twenty feet away.

    Again I slowly crossed the room. I picked up the gun and took out my handkerchief and spent a good five minutes patiently wiping prints from its surface. Then I trudged the long distance back to the dressing table, carrying the gun in my handkerchief.

    I took the limp right hand in mine and closed it about the butt. The hand was small and the index finger barely spanned the distance to the trigger.

    I raised the hand, still clutched on the pistol, until the barrel pointed exactly into the wound a few inches away.

    Then I let the hand fall and the gun clattered on the floor.

    You're good, I thought. Boy, you're good. For an amateur you're doing all right. You ought to be a pro.

    So that was that and I only had to touch it once more. I got another handkerchief from the dresser and, wearily now, I walked out of the bedroom and into the hall and on down it toward the dark living room. I went over to the desk from which I had taken the gun.

    Her portable was there, the battered old Underwood she had brought with her and used for the voluminous correspondence she had carried on with old friends. With a handkerchief in each hand, I picked it up, careful not lo touch it, and carried it back to the bedroom.

    I returned again to the living room and opened a drawer and, again with a handkerchief, picked up a sheet of typing paper. I went back to the bedroom and rolled the paper into the machine.

    Still using the two handkerchiefs, I picked the typewriter up again and carried it over and put it down in the lap. I squatted at the left side and steadied the machine on the sprawled legs with my left hand. I reached across it with my right and took the right arm and pulled it into its lap. Then I took the right index finger in my hand.

    The slow, solemn tap-tap-tap was ominous in the stillness of the room. I felt profuse sweat on my brow and my head was aching badly now. But I kept on punching the lifeless finger at the keyboard until I had spelled out, all in capital letters:

    HARRY IS UNFAITHFUL. I JUST CAN'T TAKE IT.

    I let the right hand fall back to its side and I took the two handkerchiefs again and picked up the portable and put it on her dressing table. That was all right because she used it in here often, as well as at the living-room desk.

    I put one of the handkerchiefs in my pocket and carried the other one to the bathroom and dropped it in the clothes hamper. And then it was done.

    But there was still time. I had to be sure. One mistake was all it would take. One mistake could fry me in that evil little armchair up at State Prison. One mistake and Dick Stewart would go free forever.

    I sat down on the bed and put my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands. I studied the whole thing out, the way it was, and the way it would look to them. I turned it in my mind and I started right from the beginning and went through it to the end and tried to see the loose ends dangling. My aching head didn't make it any easier. But I forced myself to think it through.

    It's a good thing I did. Because I had made two mistakes. Two glaring boners. Maybe more, too, but I couldn't find them, and just the two were bad enough.

    The first would be easy to fix. I had wiped the gun absolutely clean of fingerprints and had put hers on it. It didn't stand to reason that my prints wouldn't also be on my own pistol, a souvenir I had lugged back with me from Italy. So that had to be done all over.

    I sat there, staring at the second mistake. It was on the white rug, a little brown stain of blood I hadn't even seen until now, ten feet away from where I had placed the body. I could drag the body back over there to the blood, but it wouldn't look as good, as real as I had made it.

    I thought about it until the way came to me. It came to me how I could fix it up about the blood and at the same time seal the case up tight, remove any doubt there might be in their minds when they came.

    I got up and got the handkerchief out of the hamper and went back over to the dressing table and picked up the typewriter and put it in the lap again, and held it the same as before. And then I took the finger and punched out another line, beneath the first one:

    NOW WE'LL BE TOGETHER FOREVER.

    I put the typewriter back on the dressing table. I stood up, walked around the chair, and picked up the gun. I went back to the bathroom and dropped the handkerchief back in the hamper. I came back into the bedroom and, with the other handkerchief, wiped the gun.

    I handled it, carelessly, all over, clicking the safety on and off, touching the barrel, just the way you might handle any gun if it was yours and you were used to it.

    Then I went over and stood by the blood spot on the rug and held the gun in my right hand, at arm's length, and pointed it back toward my left arm. I took a full minute getting the aim just as it had to be.

    Gently, I squeezed the trigger.

    

    

    I caught one in the war, too, so the shock of it slamming into the muscle of my arm didn't surprise me, or the force with which I spun half around.

    But no matter how often you've been hit, the pain is just as bad. It was just as bad then, maybe worse, and I reeled and funny lights came on in my head. The gun fell out of my hand and I dropped on my knees to the rug.

    There was plenty of blood and I slowly stretched out and let it run and cover up the little brown spot on the rug. I began to feel better lying there. I was warm and the pain began to go away and I wanted to lie there forever and just let it all go, and never get up.

    But I watched the blood, pumping regularly from the upper part of my arm, and knew I had to get up. Using my good arm, I pushed myself to my knees and staggered up. I stood there swaying and the pain was back. I reached over and pulled the edges of cloth away from the wound and bit my lip sharply. I steadied myself.

    I tore the sleeve off, at the shoulder seam, with one hard jerk. I wrapped it around my arm, tightly, and the blood flow began to slow up. I stood there and tried to think. There was something else, something final that had to be done.

    Then I remembered the gun and that was it. Slowly, I went down on one knee and picked it up. I had to stay down there and breathe a minute before I could get back up.

    But finally I made it and then I lurched across that wide room and knelt once more by the body. The blood dripped behind me, but I didn't care.

    Let it drip, I thought. Let it run all over the floor.

    This time I didn't have the strength to raise the arm. But I got the gun in the hand, somehow, and pressed the stiffening fingers around it and let it fall.

    Now, goddamnit, I thought. It's done. It's finished.

    I went back across the room and out into the hall again and staggered on back to the kitchen. I smeared blood all over the clean white cabinets, but at last I got the bottle down from an upper shelf and pulled the cork out with my teeth and took a long, long drink. It exploded in my stomach, and when I went back into the hall, I was stronger, if not steadier.