Soft touch (13 page)

When I woke up at noon it took me a few moments to figure out where I was, and then another ten seconds for all of the smashing weight of memory to fall upon me. I could not have done those things. I could not have killed her and buried her and killed Vince and sunk his body in Morning Lake. Not Jerome Durward Jamison. Not me. Not with these familiar hands. The hands looked just the same. In the bathroom mirror, the face looked just the same, except for the welts along my hairline left by the black flies.

Everything had seemed very clever and efficient and logical last night. Now I had the feeling that it was all full of holes, and people could look through the holes and see just what happened and why it happened. I could not think with any pleasure of the money under Camp Sootsus, or of the money down in the cellar. Plans were changed. I was going to have to find a new place for the money. A good place. And leave it there, untouched, for a long time . . . until it was accepted that Lorraine had run away with Vince and neither of them could be found Then, and only then, could I think of going away. 98

I showered and shaved and put on a robe and went downstairs. Irene was sitting in the kitchen reading her Bible. She looked up and closed it and stood up.

"You'll be wanting breakfast now, Mr. Jamison?"

"Please, Irene. Mrs. Jamison isn't home."

"I saw her car gone."

"She won't be back, Irene. She's gone for good."

She thought that over and nodded her acceptance of it "It's God's will," she said.

"And Mr. Biskay has gone too. They went away together."

She registered slight shock. Not very much. Her lips tightened. "She is the whore of Babylon, Mr. Jamison. I see more than folks intend me to see. But it's not my business to speak of it. It's been good to work for you. Will you be wanting me to stay on?"

"I don't know whether I'll try to keep up the house. Until I decide, if you could come in the morning and get my breakfast and clean the place up, that would be enough. I'll eat the other meals out."

She nodded and set about preparing my breakfast. The phone rang. She called to me and said it was Mrs. Pierson.

"Good morning, Mandy."

"My God, you certainly sound sour on such a handsome day! Did our little girl roll in too boiled to read the note you left? I gave up at midnight."

"I don't know what condition she was in. She came back while I was out. She packed her bags, left me a note and took off for good. With Vince. . . . Mandy?"

"I'm still here, darling. I'm trying to digest the entire morsel. Poor Jerry."

"And poor Lorraine."

"In a sense, yes."

"I don't want her back, Mandy. I've had it."

"And though she is one of my dearest friends, I must say she can be very naughty, and you've been more than patient. I give her about two weeks. And then she'll be back, very tragic and mysterious and contrite. And she will want to patch it all up."

"It won't work," I said. And I had a vision of her coming hop hop hop through the night in that tarp, with dirt clods falling from it, and I shuddered.

"She'll probably send me some gay mad postcard. Will you want to know where from?"

"Her people will. You can skip me."

"What are you going to do, darling? Sell the house and move into some grim little furnished room?"

"I don't think I can sell it without her signature. Maybe I can rent it. I don't know. I'll have to ask Archie Brill."

"He's quite good on divorce stuff, I hear. You could charge desertion, couldn't you? Or is adultery easier?"

"I don't know. I'll have to ask."

"Poor Lorraine. That friend of yours is certainly a yeasty item. Shall Tinker come comfort you in your loss, dear?"

"Now just a moment."

"I'm sorry. That wasn't in very good taste, was it? Darling, is this all over town already, or am I, for once, going to be the one to ride up and down the streets, clanging my little bell? You don't want it kept a secret, do you?"

"No. It doesn't matter."

"Then let us get off the line, pet, so I can get right back on. I shall spend the rest of the afternoon listening to assorted girlish squeals of shock."

My breakfast was ready. As Irene served it, I told her that Mrs. Jamison had left the bedroom in a mess and she might as well get it cleaned up. I asked her if she had seen the note I had left for Mrs. Jamison. She had thrown it away. She brought it to me, smoothing it out. I put it with Lorraine's green-ink note in the desk drawer in the living room.

I dressed and just as I was about to leave I remembered all the money I had folded and stuffed into the pockets of the hunting pants. It was a good thing I had remembered. The efficient Irene would have decided they should be cleaned, and she would have received a great shock when she emptied the pockets. I gathered all 100

the bills together. Counted them. One hundred and ninety-nine hundred-dollar bills. Fifty had gone to the doctor. One had been burned. I remembered how we had laughed, Vince and I.

I was too concerned about getting out to Park Terrace to bother about a good place of concealment. I put two bills in my wallet and put the rest of the stack in the second drawer of my bureau, under a pile of clean sports shirts.

I parked on the job and walked up the line. They had finished pouring on two of the houses. They were pouring the third. The men were finishing off the slab on the second house. I looked at the raw wet cement that covered her grave. I wondered who would live in that house. And suddenly I wondered what would happen if it was never finished, if E. J. went broke. I had visions of another crew coming in. Another builder. Smaller lots. Smaller houses. "Break up that slab and move that fill out of there." And the dozer blade tilting the body out of the earth . . .

"Heard about your bad luck," Red Olin said. "Sorry, Jerry."

He startled me. He moved quietly for such a big man. "Thanks."

"I was remembering that first time we ever seen her."

"Over on Ridgemont Road."

"Sure is a pretty woman. Hard to figure women. Can't ever tell what they're thinking inside. Some of them just.. . take off. Never makes much sense."

"I guess it doesn't."

"You going to stay with the outfit?"

"For a while, I guess. I don't know."

"Think she'll come back, Jerry?"

"I don't know. I don't think I care much."

"I know how you feel. I know how I'd feel."

Then we talked about the job. Afterwards, I drove down to the office. E. J. and Eddie were out. Just Liz and the bookkeeper. I took her back to the familiar booth in the drugstore. She seemed subdued.

"It's . . . sort of simplified now, isn't it?" she said.

"It seems to be."

"She was no good, Jerry. Everybody knew that. No loyalty, Jerry. To you."

"I know."

"You act so strangely. You did say you . . . got what you went after on your trip."

"Yes, I did."

Her smile wasn't quite convincing. "When do I pack?"

"Not quite yet, Liz. I'll let you know."

She touched my hand. "We'll go away and it will be good, Jerry. It will be very good for both of us. We'll never look back. Never."

"As soon as we can."

When I went back to the house, it seemed very empty. Eight years form strong habits. Lorraine seemed to be just around every corner. I expected to hear the sound of her shower, and hear her "shower song"—"Frankie and Johnny" sung loudly. There were ghosts of her perfume in the silent air. Irene had tidied the bedroom.

I sat on my bed. I had a curious and vivid impression of the little copper-colored Porsche tooling west through the hot afternoon toward the mountains, with Lorraine at the wheel, her back hair snapping in the wind, teeth so white when she would turn and give Vince a quick bawdy smile. Their luggage was stacked behind them. The black tin suitcase was there. Vince lounged beside her, that indolent and arrogant half-smile on his brown face.

It seemed so vivid for a few moments that I thought it had to be real. Like puppets that come to life.

But the cement was hardening over her grave. And a curious fish was nosing the closed window of the Porsche.

I got out of the bedroom. There was too much of her still there.

I went down to the living-room desk and got out a sheet of paper and doodled aimlessly while I tried to devise a good place to put over three million six hundred thousand dollars in cash. A good safe place. A place I wouldn't have to worry about. And when I wanted to 102

leave, I wanted to be able to get it in a hurry. It might remain hidden for six months or a year. It had to be safe from dampness and fire. It should be simple and easy, not involving a lot of work that might be noticed. The great bulk involved made the problem more difficult. I discarded the idea of renting large safety deposit boxes. I did not want to keep the money in the house, even sealed behind a partition.

If it could be handled casually, as though it were not money . . .

The idea began to take shape. I had to make a decision about the house. In anticipation of that decision, what could be more natural than to put a lot of my personal stuff in storage? A crate of books, say. A storage warehouse was a safe place. Get hold of a crate. Money in the bottom, perhaps wrapped in packages of three bricks each so as to look like books or records of some kind. When I was ready to go I could get the crate out of storage. Or even have it expressed from the warehouse to a new address. . ..

I heard the front doorbell. It was twenty minutes of five. The man on the front porch wore a tired tan suit, a white shirt with a frayed collar, a soiled panama hat pushed back to uncover a broad and placid forehead. He was stocky and his shoulders were enormous. His expression was one of patience and weariness and a kind of resignation. And he looked very familiar.

"Remember me, Jerry?"

"I . . . think I do. I'm sorry that I can't . . "

"Nineteen forty. West Vernon High. Paul Heissen."

"My God, I'm sorry about being so stupid. Come on in." I hadn't known him well. In my last year at West Vernon High School, Paul Heissen, a sophomore, had become a first string center. We had certainly needed him. He was seventeen then, five feet eight, two hundred and five pounds. On defense they couldn't move him. I was defensive fullback, handling the linebacker slot behind the center of the line. Nobody made a nickel trying the center of our line all season long.

He came into the living room, filled a chair from arm to arm and dropped his hat on the floor.

"Can I get you a drink?"

"A beer if you've got one."

"Coming up."

"No glass. The can or the bottle is okay, Jerry."

I brought the two beers in. He took a long drink from the can, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and belched. I had the idea from the look of him that he might be job-hunting.

"What can I do for you, Paul?"

"I guess you'd call this an official visit. E. J. Malton has been riding the chief all day about his missing daughter. So I got sent out to ask some damn fool questions."

"You're a cop?"

"Lieutenant Heissen. Overworked and underpaid. I was in the M.P.s in the war and I kind of drifted into it. I've seen you around town plenty of times, Jerry, but not to talk to."

"What do you want to know?"

He leaned sideways and pulled a dime notebook out of his pocket, clicked a ballpoint pen and turned to a clean page.

"She left last night. Know what time?"

"Sometime between ten and four in the morning. I think I got back around four. That's when I found the note. I went up and told E. J. I ... I was pretty well loaded."

"Got the note?"

I got it from the desk and handed it to him. He copied the text of it into his notebook, chewing his lip as he did so. I handed him my note to her and said, "When I went out at ten I left this note for her." He copied it in the same stolid, methodical way.

"What threat?" he asked.

"She said she was going to leave me."

"You had a fight?"

"Yes." I decided that there was almost no likelihood of E. J. having told what I had told him about Lorraine and Vince. "A fight over our house guest. She . . .

seemed to be too friendly with him. They left together."

"How do you know they left together?"

"Paul, I don't know for sure. But when I came back they were both gone and so was her car and their luggage. He's very attractive to women. And Lorraine has been . . . restless lately."

"Restless?"

"Drinking too much. Playing around a little. Frankly, the marriage was going sour."

"No kids?"

"No."

"I've got four and another one on the way."

"It might have been different if there'd been kids. She had too much time on her hands."

"Now, how about this Biskay? How old?"

"About our age."

"Married?"

"No."

"What does he do for a living?"

"I'm not clear on the details, but I think he was working as an aide and pilot to some South American industrialist."

"Where did you meet him?"

"During the war. We were in the same O.S.S. unit. He was my c.o. He stopped by in April. He looked me up, stayed here a couple of nights. He said he had to have an operation. Something to do with his shoulder. About that time I quit my job. A disagreement with E. J. Malton. I took a trip, looking for a job. I looked in on Vince. He didn't have a very good setup. So I brought him back with me."

"Where did you find him?"

"In ... in a borrowed apartment in Philadelphia."

"What was the address?"

"I can't remember. A street that had the name of a tree. Walnut or Chestnut or Maple. He told me that was where he'd be. He gave me the address when he was here in April."

"Because he knew you'd come and see him?"

"No. He had a proposition for me. I wasn't interested.

He told me if I changed my mind, I could write himi there."

"What was the proposition?"

"Some work in South America. He was evasive about it. It didn't sound quite right. He's ... a pretty wild type. I have a feeling he'd operate pretty close to the edge of the law. That isn't my style."