Assassins Have Starry Eyes (2 page)

THREE

SHE LET THE door swing closed under its own power and came forward. I noticed belatedly that she was carrying an armload of flowers wrapped in tissue paper—it was difficult to see how I could have overlooked it, since the package was almost three feet long. Perhaps I had been thinking of other things than flowers.

“Ring for the nurse, will you, darling?” she said. “So I can get rid of this stuff. My God, they’ve really got you wired for sound.”

I found the buzzer and pressed it, saying, “They’re planning to fit me with the proper connections so that when I get home I can just shove the laundromat to one side and hook myself up to the Albuquerque water and sewage systems. Make a fine husband for some woman. She can plug me in the wall socket when she wants my company; switch me off and roll me back in the corner when she doesn’t. A great improvement over the old-fashioned kind of husband that’s always taking off for the office or duck blind or what have you.” A young nurse’s aide put her head in the door. I whispered, “Bring a bathtub or something, will you, please? We’ve got flowers.”

There followed the usual confusion that seems to be inevitable when a couple of females get involved with a bunch of flowers. They tried three different pots before the girl found a glass pitcher deep enough to hold Natalie’s contribution, and then they had to get the bouquet organized. The flowers were gladioli, of that red-orange shade that went nicely with the light-green living room walls back home. I told myself the color had no particular significance, although it was the color I had usually tried for when I figured we had fought long enough and it was time to quit.

Finally Natalie thanked the girl, saw her out the door, and turned to look at me again. “You don’t have to start right out being unpleasant,” she said. “You might appreciate me first, just for a minute or two. I’ve driven eight hundred miles since yesterday morning to get here.”

I shuddered at the thought. She had the quaint idea that a car was barely moving until the needle registered eighty. “Who’s being unpleasant?” I whispered.

“I didn’t like that crack about husbands and laundromats and other conveniences.”

“Sorry,” I whispered. “Meant to be funny. Consider it withdrawn. Thanks for the flowers.”

She remained by the door for a moment longer; a slight girl, no taller than average but somewhat straighter, with dark hair that she still wore quite long despite the current whacked-off styles. With her big eyes and big red mouth, the shoulder-length dark hair gave her the look of a prematurely sophisticated schoolgirl. She had been twenty when I married her; she was twenty-three now. The whole thing had been a mistake, of course, but I could still think of arguments in its favor.

She made a little gesture that covered the bed, the apparatus, and me. “How bad?” she asked.

“Think nothing of it. I can wiggle my toes and everything.”

“The paper said you were in a critical condition. It was last Sunday’s
Albuquerque Journal
somebody’d left in the hotel lobby; I was looking through it at breakfast just for old times’ sake. I expected to get here just in time to hear your last words.”

I whispered, “I’ve always been a disappointment to you, haven’t I, Natalie?”

“Go to hell,” she said, and grinned. “You certainly are a helpless-looking character in that bed.”

Then the grin faded, and she turned abruptly away to remove her hat and pick up the purse she had laid aside while messing with the flowers. I could see her both front and rear as she stood before the dresser mirror lighting a cigarette; her eyes were tired, but her navy-blue dress was fresh. She had obviously taken time to shower and change somewhere before hastening to my deathbed. I suppose any woman would.

She said, “I suppose it’s all right to smoke.”

“Sure,” I said. “But this kind of louses up your legal residence requirements, doesn’t it? I thought you weren’t supposed to leave Nevada for six weeks, or something.”

She said, “That’s gratitude for you. I practically kill myself to get here, and the man quotes the law at me.” She swung back to face me. “Aren’t you just a little bit glad to see me, darling?”

“I’m always glad to see you, darling,” I whispered. “Looking at you is the only thing that never ceased to be a treat—well, almost the only thing. But when people leave I kind of like them to stay left, if you know what I mean. What are you trying to prove, Princess?”

She drew on her cigarette, looked at it, and blew smoke at it. “What if I wanted to come back?”

I said, “I appreciate the thought, but you’re not Florence Nightingale. They’re taking fine care of me here. The fact that some damn fool shot a hole in me doesn’t change the situation at all, as far as I can see. If you couldn’t stand it before, what’s going to make you stand it now?”

“What,” she said, “if I told you how much I’d missed you?”

I said, “It’s sweet of you to say so, and I missed you, too. So what? If you’d lived three years with a dog, you’d miss it when it wasn’t around any more.”

“My God,” she said, “you are a bastard, aren’t you?”

“You’ve said so before.”

“Here I drive across that damn desert a hundred miles an hour with tears streaming down my face…” She grinned abruptly. That grin always looked misplaced on her delicate face; it belonged on a tomboy. “Good old Greg. You don’t know what a relief it is to hear you talk like that. If you’d been gentle and grateful I’d have known you were dying. Do they let you kiss the patients in this institution?”

I whispered, “I don’t know. Try it and see.”

She leaned over the bed and touched her lips to mine chastely. I recognized her perfume as something I had given her, a local product called “Nightblooming Cereus,” made from the desert flower.

She looked down at me. “You ought to do something about those whiskers. Look, you
are
going to be all right, aren’t you? Greg, what the hell are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a complex situation.”

“It’s a very simple situation,” she said. “If you weren’t such a louse, and had a halfway civilized job in a halfway civilized place—”

I whispered, “New Mexico was settled while Massachusetts was still a howling wilderness, not to mention your home state of New York. And if there’s a more civilized job than mine, I don’t know what it is.”

“Then God help civilization,” she said and kissed me again lightly, and straightened up. “I don’t suppose you can get a drink around here.”

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

“And you couldn’t drink with me, anyway.”

“You might run over to La Fonda and bring back a pitcher of martinis,” I whispered. “Take a sip yourself, and pour a slug into this equipment for me. I think the mouth is over there.”

She laughed and stood looking at me for a moment; and said abruptly, “You
will
be all right, won’t you, Greg?”

I said, “The doctor claims the works are all there, if that’s what you mean. It may take a month or two to put them back together again, but that’s all. Why? Do I look that bad?”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s just—” She hesitated. “Maybe I just feel a little responsible. The minute I leave you, you wind up at death’s door.”

I said, “If you’re even toying with the notion that I went out into the woods and shot myself because I was so depressed over losing you, you’re crazy.”

She laughed. “Now I know why I went away,” she said. “It was because I knew you’d try so hard to make me feel good when I came back.” She turned away, got into her coat, found her gloves and pulled them on. Putting on a pair of gloves seems to be one of the most sophisticated routines a woman can perform, and Natalie was not one to slight her audience. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said when the show was over. “Having come this far, I might as well stick around to see how you make it…”

She had started for the door, but she stopped as it opened. It opened just enough to let a girl slip through the crack sideways, and closed again. Natalie glanced at me quickly, a little surprised. I had never seen the girl before.

I watched her put her back against the nearest available piece of wall, as if afraid something might jump on her from behind. She was about five feet six, a sunburned girl with blond hair cut boyishly short to show her neck and ears. She was wearing a boy’s shirt and one of those wide, yellow, pleated skirts that southwestern females have borrowed from the Indians. Why any girl would go out of her way to look like a squaw, I couldn’t tell you. My visitor was bare-legged and wore moccasins on her feet. One of the peculiarities of the natives of the region is that only the men wear high heels.

The girl kept her shoulders against the wall and watched us warily—I should say that she watched me, since she had given no sign of being aware of Natalie’s presence.

“Dr. Gregory?” she said. “Dr. James Gregory?”

I nodded. She licked her lips, which needed lipstick. What little she had was badly chewed. “I’m Nina Rasmussen,” she said. “You don’t know me, but I have a brother named Tony, and I used to have a fiancé named Paul Hagen but I don’t any longer. Thanks to you, Dr. Gregory.”

I started to speak, but thought better of it. There was, after all, nothing to say. The girl gripped her purse tightly, almost wringing it between her hands.

“Don’t bother to say it, Dr. Gregory,” she whispered. “It wasn’t your fault, was it? You were just defending yourself, weren’t you? Paul shot first. You can’t help it if an irresponsible fool can’t bother to distinguish between a man and a deer. So you put a bullet neatly through his head to teach him a lesson. You must be very proud of your marksmanship, Dr. Gregory! But if you’re such a wonderful shot, why did you have to kill him? That’s what I want to know, Dr. Gregory: why, why,
why?”

It was obviously no time to discuss the ballistic properties of the Winchester .270 cartridges. I did not like the look in the girl’s eyes. I moved my hand slightly. It was a mistake. The push button, at the end of its cord, was pinned to my pillow in plain sight. When my hand moved, Nina Rasmussen reached into her bag and brought out a .22 automatic pistol.

Then we all looked at the gun, which seemed suddenly to dominate the white room. Even the girl looked at it, as if a little startled to find herself holding it. It was the low-priced Hi-Standard model with four-and-a-half-inch barrel and fixed sights. It had been shot a lot by somebody, from the looks of it; and the steadiness of her hand indicated that Nina Rasmussen might have done some of the shooting. You can usually tell, with a pistol particularly, when they know something about it. I had a disturbing mental picture of this girl, her brother, and Paul Hagen innocently camping out in the woods and tossing tin cans into the creek to shoot at…

“Miss Rasmussen—”

I did not know what I was going to say; and she did not allow me to finish. “I know why you did it,” she breathed. “I know why you shot to kill, deliberately. Because you people think you can make your own laws. Don’t you? You come out here and spoil our country and poison our air with your horrible experiments, and nobody’s got a right to protest because you’re supposed to represent scientific progress or something. And when a man fires a shot at you by mistake, you turn and calmly blast him out of existence. You’re above the law, above justice, above mercy, above humanity. Well, you’re not above death, Dr. Gregory!”

The gun steadied. I saw her thumb move the safety down. It was the second time in a week that I’d looked a gun-barrel in the eye; and just as at the first time, I could not quite believe that it was happening to me, even as I tried to roll myself aside and heard the sharp and nasty bark of the .22 cartridge, very loud in the small room. I could not seem to find any strength or leverage. Then I was still lying there unharmed; and Nina Rasmussen was pawing aside the navy-blue purse Natalie had thrown with force and accuracy to spoil her aim. The girl looked around in time to catch the big pitcher of gladioli alongside her head, and crumpled to the floor in a mess of water, broken glass, and red-orange flowers.

FOUR

ONCE IT WAS over, it developed some of the elements of comedy. Everything was pretty wet including Natalie herself; and there were gladioli all over the room. Drawn by the shot, Van Horn’s men came charging with ready guns, and one of them slipped on the wet rubber tiles and did as pretty a sit-me-down as you could ask. After that, however, it became less funny, since the Rasmussen girl turned out to have concussion and a bad cut on her head. Blood in large quantities has a way of taking the humor out of any situation. In the midst of all the fuss something started to happen to me, and I felt myself go out and down, almost without warning.

It was damp and dark down there, and it hurt; they came down after me and hauled me back, but it took a while—several days, in fact. When I opened my eyes again to daylight, Natalie was sitting in the chair by the window, wearing her big horn-rimmed reading glasses and reading a book. There were lots of things to be said against the girl, but in her favor was the fact that she could and did read. Maybe it would have been better if she had spent her time in front of the television set. Being an egghead myself, in the modern terminology, I wouldn’t have much missed a wife who entertained me at breakfast by telling how Lucille Ball made out the night before. Besides, she was always getting herself into a fine state of indignation at the affairs of the world. Nobody could run the planet for thirty seconds to suit her.

I watched her now for a while, reflecting that it was funny all the commotion people raised about love. There had never been much question about the fact that we loved each other, from the time we first met at an official cocktail party given by somebody important at the University of Chicago. That was while the Project was in its preliminary stages, before it had even been given a home of its own. I was in town seeing about getting Larry DeVry to work with us—they were letting me pick my own team, as they called it—and she was in town with her father, who was being hit for money by some scientific foundation connected with the University, and had flown out from New York to see what he was being asked to buy.

I suppose most men and their wives sometimes reflect upon the random combination of circumstances that brought them together; and I guess our combination was as random as any. Larry and Ruth had to go to the function since the math department was involved; and I was staying with them as I always did when in town, so they dragged me along. If you know the University, all modern Gothic, you know what the building looked like. The shindig was in one of the big reception rooms downstairs. I was talking to some man from Columbia—I’ve forgotten his name and the subject of the conversation—when I saw her enter.

If you’ve met the average faculty wife, you’ll have some notion of how conspicuous Natalie looked in that place. I wasn’t the only man who noticed her, by any means; but the competition wasn’t serious. Most of it was married, and the rest was dedicated to science. There’s a race of eager young research men who simply can’t believe that the whole world, pretty girls included, isn’t just as fascinated by their chosen fields as they are. Personally, I like to leave the stuff in the lab when I’m not working on a specific problem; and when I am, I particularly dislike talking about it except to people who know what I’m talking about. Perhaps that’s why I never was worth much as an instructor.

Anyway, a couple of these dedicated characters had her pinned in a corner when I made my approach; they were trying to explain to her some abstruse theories and effects they should probably not have been mentioning in public.

She sent one of them for a drink and the other for her purse, which she claimed to have left on a chair somewhere. Then she looked at me and said coolly, “You look almost human. I’ve had about all the isotopic increment of the reactor frequency I can stand. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Sure,” I said, “but what about your purse?”

She showed it to me, concealed under the furs draped across her arm. She grinned her surprising, tomboyish grin. “Don’t be a wedge.”

I played up. “What’s a wedge?”

“The simplest tool known to man. This room is full of simple tools, and I don’t care if they are loaded down with Phi Beta keys until they walk bowlegged.” She looked at me for a moment longer. I noticed that her eyes were greenish brown, called hazel. “Come on,” she said, taking my arm. “I’ll buy you a drink at the nearest bar, if you’ll promise not to split a single atom, not even a little one.”

Three weeks later we were married; and three years later I was still in love with her, and I thought she was still in love with me; and what good did it do us if we couldn’t manage to figure out a way of living together under the circumstances my job required? I watched her now as she turned the page, big-eyed and studious; and I wanted her back more than I cared to admit, but what the hell? I had my work to do; and you can’t have everything.

She looked up quickly. “Well, it’s about time you woke up,” she said, removed the glasses and dropped them into her bag, and rose and went out of the room, returning with the nurse who asked me the usual silly questions and took the routine readings.

“You can say hello to your wife, but she’d better leave in five minutes,” the nurse said. “She’ll be back tomorrow, won’t you, Mrs. Gregory? We don’t want another relapse, do we?”

We waited until she was gone. “Hello,” Natalie said.

“Hello,” I whispered. “How long have you been sitting there?”

“A couple of days, off and on. I’m staying at the hotel. My God, what a bunch of men in this town! They’re either so artsy-craftsy they’d turn your stomach, or they wear high heels and smell of cows, or they’ve been associating with uranium so long they glow in the dark. Half a dozen characters have tried to pick me up in the bar; and each one of them started out by bringing out a piece of rock and juggling it casually for a while and then shoving it quickly under my nose and saying, ‘Lady, do you know what that is? That’s pure horsematite; runs umpteen per cent uranium oxide!’”

I laughed. There was a funny kind of awkwardness between us. It’s hard for two people to talk in a relaxed way when they don’t know if they’re going to stay married or not.

Natalie said, “Your homicidal girl friend’s in a room downstairs, under observation. There’s a policeman in front of the door. She seems to be doing all right. No skull fracture or anything. I asked.”

“Have you heard what they’re planning to do with her?”

“Well, there was some talk of preferring charges as soon as you are well enough to testify.”

“Charges?” I whispered. “What charges? She was trying to sell me a secondhand gun, since I’m interested in guns. Some fool had left a shell in the chamber and it went off. The noise startled her so she slipped and knocked over a pot of flowers. Why, you saw the whole thing with your own eyes.”

Natalie lit a cigarette, and blew smoke in my direction. “If that’s the way you want it, darling.”

“I had it coming,” I whispered. “I shot her boy-friend. I’m not apologizing, under the circumstances, but the girl was right in a sense: I made a decision nobody’s got a real right to make. The least I can do is accommodate myself to the fact that some people aren’t going to like me for it, and not mess up their lives any more than I’ve already done. She’s got it out of her system; it seems unlikely that she’ll try again. Tell them to let her go, Princess. They won’t get any testimony out of me.”

Natalie watched me for a moment longer. I could not tell what she was thinking. She was wearing a gray-green cashmere sweater and a pleated plaid skirt that involved a good deal of the same color among several others. She looked like a college girl. The skirt rippled nicely when she moved. I’m a sucker for pleats. The sweater was a loose fit, and she put no severe strains on it; however, I have never understood the current fad for outsize bosoms. If I want milk I can always buy a cow.

She said, “For a cold-blooded scientific bastard, you’re a surprisingly nice guy. Sometimes.” She stepped forward and leaned down to kiss me, holding the cigarette aloft. “I can hardly taste the man for the whiskers,” she said, smiling. “You look like Ernest Hemingway; you’re even getting some gray in spots.”

“Well, you know who put it there.”

“I suppose I ought to be jealous. Would you turn me loose if I tried to shoot you?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “You’re dangerous.”

“Don’t underestimate that girl just because she’s a blonde and doesn’t know how to dress.”

“Underestimate her?” I whispered. “You sound as if I was planning a long and happy relationship with the kid.”

“Kid, hell,” Natalie said. “She’s a couple of years older than I am. That robust type doesn’t grow up before forty.” She grinned her mischievous grin. “And how would I know what you’re planning? Well, I guess my tune’s up. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Toward the end of the week it was decided that I was strong enough to have a little more work done on the interior; I spent the morning in surgery and had no visitors that day. The following day it started snowing and Natalie called up from Albuquerque where she had gone to pick up some clothes and stuff; she left a message with the nurse that the roads were too bad for her to make it back, which I could well believe, looking at the white stuff falling past the window. Our friends in the east seem to labor under the delusion that we live in a tropical climate; they forget that Albuquerque is five thousand feet in the air, and Santa Fe, seven thousand. You get some weird scenes around here in the winter, with all the desert country and its spiny vegetation covered with snow. There’s nothing more unlikely-looking than a snow-covered cactus.

I lay in bed and tried not to feel neglected, and fell asleep doing it. A knock on the door awakened me.

“Come in,” I said.

It was one of Van Horn’s men. “Do you want to see a young fellow named Rasmussen, Dr. Gregory?”

“A fellow named Rasmussen? Not a girl?”

He shook his head. “Her brother. After the hassle last week the desk figured they’d better clear with us. Should I tell him to go roll his hoop?

I said, “No, send him up. Without a gun.”

“Don’t worry. He’ll be safe as a little white mouse.”

He went out; a few minutes later there was another knock, and a boy came in. I would not have recognized him on the street, although I had seen him once before up in the mountains. If there was any resemblance to his sister at all, it was in the mouth and eyes. This was a slender dark youth with olive skin, wearing dark, pleated slacks, a pink sports shirt, and a straight light jacket with a zipper down the front, which was open. He stopped just inside the door.

“I didn’t mean to panic the joint, Dr. Gregory,” he said. “I just… I mean, Nina wanted me to thank you. For getting her released. She just blew her top there for a while. She’s all right now. I mean, there won’t be any more trouble.”

I said, “How is she feeling?”

He grinned, showing very white teeth against his dark face. “Lousy. They shaved off half her hair. She won’t be fit to live with till it grows out.” His grin died. “I guess the whole thing was pretty much my fault, Dr. Gregory. I was…well, when something like that happens to a friend of yours you like to blame it on somebody; and I guess I just shot my mouth off too much around the house. Don’t pay any attention to anything she said in here; she was just quoting me and my big mouth… I still can’t figure it, Dr. Gregory. Paul taught me how to handle a gun; he was always bearing down on how you should be careful. Well, I guess it was just one of those things. Well, Nina just wanted me to thank you. I guess I’ll be running along.”

When he opened the door, I caught a glimpse of Van Horn’s man waiting outside. I suppose I should have been grateful for the protection, but the fact is that being under surveillance, even for my own good, is something I never get used to. Besides, who’s kidding whom? You know damn well that if I didn’t have some things in my head considered of value to the country I could hire myself out as a duck in a shooting gallery and no voice would be raised in protest. This business of having my brain and its contents considered public property, and myself only a kind of unreliable and possibly subversive custodian, gets irritating in the long run.

It wasn’t irritating enough to keep me awake, however; and I slept through the afternoon and evening except for the usual breaks imposed by the hospital routine. Some time in the night I awoke suddenly, aroused by a sound outside. It was dark in the room except for the glow through the frosted glass of the hall transom. Then I heard a kind of scuffle beyond the door; and abruptly the door swung open, letting light pour in. I saw two silhouettes, one kind of pulling at the other, and heard a nurse’s voice:
“Please,
Mrs. Gregory! Visiting hours are over. I assure you he’s perfectly all right—”

“You’d say that if he was dead and buried!” Natalie’s enunciation was not quite as clear as usual. “Everybody in a hospital always says everybody’s all right. Even when they’re dying… Greg?”

“Yes,” I said.

She pulled herself free and came running across the room, a little unsteadily. The light came on abruptly, and I saw that she was wearing slacks and her mink coat; her head was bare and her long hair was a little untidy. There was more color in her face than usual, from the cold outdoors and from whatever she had been drinking; she looked very pretty.

“Greg, are you okay?” she cried. “Darling, I had the most horrible feeling—”

I said, “That’s nothing to the feeling you’re going to have tomorrow morning, Princess.”

She stopped beside me, and giggled suddenly. Then she went to her knees beside the bed, put her face against the covers, and began to cry. The nurse was still standing by the light switch, looking stern and disapproving. One of Van Horn’s men was at the door; maybe the one I had seen that afternoon, maybe not. I never bother to learn their names or remember their faces.

I said to both of them, “Get the hell out of here.”

They went. Natalie said in a muffled voice, “That’s telling the old bitch.” Then she cried a little more. I patted her head in a gingerly fashion. After a while she said, “That damn house just got on my nerves, darling. Nobody in it but me. I made up a pitcher of martinis for company. Then I started… started worrying. I called the hospital long distance and they said you were doing fine, just fine, in that damn insincere voice they use for reassuring the family and friends… I had another drink and was sure you were dying and I couldn’t stand it any longer and I threw my coat on and got in the car and came on up. Fellow at a gas station said I couldn’t make it without chains, but they just think in terms of Detroit iron. They don’t know what baby can do… Well, here I am. Are you really all right?”