Authors: John D. MacDonald
As he drove down the dark highway with the girl sitting passively beside him, he suddenly thought of one possible situation which could make her feel that she was rotten. She had spent months as a prisoner. What if one of them, one of the village boys, had taken pity on the little upperclass
pollita
? Some young and gentle lad, who had treated her with a natural kindness, smuggled better food to her, saved her from the more brutalizing kinds of labor. He knew the capacity for warmth and gentleness the young village men of his country often had. A young boy, perhaps as young as she. In her anguish and despair, she might well have responded to him, willingly. But she could not realize that both she and the young militiaman were both victims of the merciless random patterns of history. She would know only that she had given herself to the Enemy, that out of a weakness and helplessness she would misinterpret as callousness and lust, she had lain with the murderer of father and brother. Then, after her rescue, having not the ability to physically
kill herself, perhaps because of the mandate of the church, she had killed the guilty Francisca and had become someone else.
At first he thought the diagnosis fanciful, but there was too much weight of detail to support it, and indeed he could not think of any other factor which could have so distorted a person of her strength, spirit and intelligence. A lesser woman could have devised useful rationalizations for indulging herself with the Enemy. To the daughter of Don Estebán, the sister of Enrique, it would be a matter of personal honor, and an insupportable memory. Such a woman could live only with the memory of never having been taken except by force.
He sensed the ultimate irony, that what she thought of as rottenness was in truth a measure of her great worth.
“You’ll give Mrs. Harkinson notice?”
“Tomorrow I say it. I work what she say. One week. Two.”
“You don’t owe her anything.”
“I do what is right.”
“I will send a letter to California tonight to tell them I accept. When you tell me when you can leave, I will tell the paper. If you can leave soon, we will drive.”
“If you say it.” Her voice was listless.
He parked outside the gate, walked her to her stairs. She turned, leaned against him, sighed heavily and touched her soft mouth to the side of his chin. “We are in love,” he whispered.
“If you say it.”
As he turned around and drove out he thought of the pale car. It was still there. He had seen it for an instant when he had turned off the highway. His lights had touched it as he turned. It was fifty yards south of the road to the Harkinson place, on the same side, and backed into the semi-concealment of a small grove of trees. There had been no need to mention it to Francisca. It would only worry her. He had not needed to prove to her that he was possibly in danger.
He was no longer as proud of his device of the posthumous publication. If they had learned of this attachment, and had identified her, they would need only to pick her up and take her into the city and hide her, and Raoul Kelly would do anything they asked of him.
He turned south rather than north and as soon as he was around a long curve and out of light and sound, he found a place to pull off the highway. He took the revolver from the glove compartment, left the dark and silent car and crossed the highway and soon came upon a fence. He waited as they had taught him until his eyes adjusted to the night. The loaded weapon in the side pocket of his unbuttoned jacket nudged him from time to time as he walked north, paralleling the highway. Something went scuttling away from under his feet, thrashing off into the grass, giving him a horrid start.
Warrior type, he thought. Cover and concealment. Deadly weapon. A man should have the looks to go with the game. John Wayne would move like a tiger. He’d never turn his ankle and walk into a tree trunk. I am marked by the long-ago movies, Abbot and Costello. I am Lou Costello, whose every venture ends in a prat-fall.
He reached the grove and he could see the pallor of the car. He moved closer and saw the gleam of the rear-view mirror on the driver’s side. He saw a dark bulk of someone slumped behind the wheel. Just as he was close enough to the rear of the car to touch it, the door opened and a man stepped out. Raoul’s palm was sweaty on the serrated wood of the grip. When he got over the fright of thinking the man was coming after him, he was pleased to see that the stranger was not as huge as imagination had created him. The man stretched, grunted audibly, lifted his knees high in a slow, in-place march.
BANG, YOU’RE DEAD! Raoul thought. He took two steps forward and said, “Don’t turn around. I’ve got a gun. Take it slow and easy.”
After a silence of at least five seconds, the man said, “What do
you want?” The accent was not strong, but it was of some other region. It reminded Raoul of one of the CIA people at the training area, a young man from Oklahoma.
“Why have you been parked here all this time?”
“What’s that to you?”
Impasse. Raoul had a picture of himself taking another step, hammering the gun down smartly against the back of the neat sandy skull, revealed by the courtesy light which had turned on when the car door had been opened. Then you squat by the victim, get his wallet, look at his papers … But he could imagine too vividly the sound of steel against meat and bone.
“Are you an officer of the law?” the fellow asked.
“I’ll ask the questions around here, buddy.” And what do I ask next?
With no warning the car door slammed, and for an instant Raoul stood in total darkness, his night vision stolen by the courtesy light. Then something hammered a monstrous blow into the pit of his stomach. He was turned and his hand was rapped against the side of the car. The gun fell from his numbed hand. He was hit in the throat, and on the cheek and on the chin. The last blow felt very soft, as though it had come through a pillow. He faded, light as a balloon, onto his knees. Hands fumbled at him. He crawled slowly away, stopped and threw up.
In a little while he edged sideways, got hold of the slender trunk of a tree, climbed it hand over hand until he was up on his feet. He turned and leaned his back against the tree. A flashlight shone in his face. He put his arm up to shield his eyes. When the brightness went away he could see the man sitting sideways on the front seat of the car, feet on the ground, revolver resting between his thighs in the glow of the courtesy light. He was pushing the cards back into the pocket of Raoul’s wallet.
“How do you feel, Mr. Kelly?”
“I’ve had better evenings.”
“Come on over here and set for a spell.”
Raoul got in on the passenger side. His wallet was handed to him. He leaned forward and worked it back into his hip pocket. He said, “Where’s the other one?”
“What other one?”
“There’s just you?”
“Just me.”
“Then I better be glad there aren’t two of you.”
“It’s the adrenalin. A man with a gun on him better move fast or not at all. Here you go. It’s empty now. Put it in that side pocket. Put these shells in the pocket on the other side. Newspaperman. Last thing I expected. But I guess it’s reasonable to expect that a reporter, if he’s bright enough, if he did some digging, would take an interest in Crissy Harkinson these days.”
“Who are you?”
“I’ll return the favor,” the man said. He took out a billfold, unsnapped a card case, handed it over. Raoul looked at the cards. His mind seemed to move slowly and reluctantly. His face hurt. A lawyer from Texas. Samuel Boylston. It made no sense. Boylston. Something about the name. Then he remembered it was the name of the boat guest. A Miss Boylston.
“The girl on the Muñeca was related to you?”
Boylston was looking at him with what seemed to be a new interest. He answered in rapid, fluent border Mexican. “She was my sister. It gives me a very special interest in the entire affair. You might be of some help to me.”
The verb forms were simplified, and he used the familiar form of address, as though talking to a servant. It irritated Raoul, the accuracy of the guess as well as the manner.
“Mr. Boylston, I suspect that my Cuban Spanish might create problems for you. And my English is a little better than your
Mexican Spanish. I do not believe I can be of any help to you. A young lady from Cuba works for Mrs. Harkinson. I visit her often. That’s all.”
“I see. Did you drive in with her not long ago in a green Ford and then come out and turn south?”
“Yes.”
“Then it seems a little strange that you should come sneaking up on me with that gun, just because I happened to be parked here.”
“Strange? All Cuban exiles are conspiratorial and paranoid, Mr. Boylston. Haven’t you heard?”
“Have you met Crissy Harkinson?”
“No. I’ve seen her, but not near by.”
“How long has your girl worked for her?”
“Not long. She’ll be quitting soon.”
“Why?”
“Mr. Boylston, you ask a lot of questions. She’s going to California with me. I have a new job out there.”
“Who is the kid in the rusty blue car?”
“Perhaps a friend of Mrs. Harkinson. Or maybe he’s doing some work for her. I wouldn’t know. I don’t talk about Mrs. Harkinson with my friend. She wouldn’t know much anyway. She hasn’t got very much English.”
“Does Mrs. Harkinson go out much in the evening?”
“Very rarely. Can I leave now?”
“You claim to be a newspaperman?”
“It isn’t a claim. It’s what I am.”
“You don’t do well in poker games, Kelly.”
“That’s a flat statement, eh? A judgment from on high. All right. I lose. And I am not so great with a gun, either. What’s your point, Boylston?”
“A reporter would try to pump me, my friend. What in the world is this man doing watching the Harkinson place? What’s that got to
do with his sister being lost at sea? Not you. All you want to do is get away from me. You didn’t ask the right questions. So I have to assume you didn’t ask them because you know the answers. And if you do, you are part of the whole stinking game too. So you are coming along with me and we’re going to have a long talk.”
“Coming where?”
“Just lean forward and keep both hands braced against the dashboard, Mr. Kelly. No. Higher, so I can see them out of the corner of my eye. Fine.”
Boylston was staying in a poolside cabana at a second-class mainland motel. There were only a few cars at the motel proper. Boylston turned the lights on, pulled the double thicknesses of draperies across the window wall facing the pool. He pulled a straight chair closer to where Raoul sat, sat astride it, his folded arms resting on top of the back, chin on his forearm. There was a taut agility about the way he moved, a look of power under careful control, which made Raoul uneasy. And the man’s eyes were as cold as a cat’s.
“We have to find out if you are an animal, Kelly.” His tone was uncommonly gentle. “Even if we have to hurt you to find out.”
Raoul shrugged. “Bad poker player, yes. Bad with a gun, yes. Does pain bother me? Yes. Will it break me? No. I have had some. I have endured some things. Bay of Pigs. Isle of Pines. Maybe a man should have some of those things, to find out about himself. But maybe there is no point in telling you that. Harlingen it said on the card. Border Texas, I believe. So to start with, in your eyes, I am—what are people of Latin American blood called there? Spic? So you can start with an assumption I am less as a human being than you are. It could be wrong.”
Boylston looked thoughtful. “Correction. I’ve never faulted you people on guts. In other ways? Yes. But—recently I’ve been
reconsidering a lot of old attitudes. It’s possible I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. But that’s neither here nor there.”
“We’re lazy people, Lawyer. We drowse in the sun. We strum guitars and sing about broken hearts. We get very passionate and stick knives in each other. We lie a lot. Okay?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
“I think you were being honest. It was very refreshing. Perhaps I don’t think very quickly after being hit in the face. Perhaps I don’t react the way you think I should. But I am not mixed up in anything. You’ll have to take my word for that.”
“When a man acts in an implausible manner regarding something of importance to me, I have to know why. We have to find out some way of trusting each other, maybe.”
“A lot would depend on what you are trying to do, what you’re after.”
“I want to be absolutely certain of something. Not legal proof. I don’t think I’m going to get legal proof. Just proof enough to satisfy me. And then I am going to arrange to have Staniker and whoever was in it with him taken quietly to some out of the way place. And the last thing I am going to do with them is toast their rotten hearts over a slow fire on a sharp stick.”
It was said with a deadly and absolute conviction which took all melodrama out of it. Raoul had heard the expression about something making the blood run cold. He had never experienced it before. The eyes and the quiet voice filled the room, and he managed, with great effort, to stop looking at Boylston. He felt that humming sensation which precedes a dead faint. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, swallowed, and said, “You convince me,
Señor
.”
“Are you glad you’re not one of them?”
“I will be very glad if I can convince you I’m not. If you had talked about legal proof, about police, then I would not tell you a certain story about a young woman of aristocratic birth. But now
perhaps it is very necessary to tell you. First, does the word
pundonor
mean anything to you?”
“Point of honor? Of course. That’s another thing I respect about the latinos.”
“Enough to observe the custom?”
“Enough to be honored to be asked to observe it.”
“Then, Mr. Boylston, I will tell you everything I know or suspect. And you, in turn, will promise not to go near Francisca, or take any action which will cause others to go to her and question her.” As Boylston started to speak, Raoul stopped him and said. “And whatever you do, or however you do it, you will do it in such a way she will not be involved in it, in publicity, in questions, anything.”
“I swear I will do my best—but if I find out you have held anything back or changed the facts in any way, the bets are off.”