The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (26 page)

She shook her head violently from side to side. Her mouth was slack, her eyes wild, trapped-looking. “No!” she cried. “You’re wrong! It couldn’t be that. Ronny wouldn’t do that to me!” Her voice broke. “He loves me. We were going to be married in Mexico! You’re wrong, wrong, all wrong!”

“He never loved you,” I told her. “Or he wouldn’t have gotten you into this in the first place. A guy like Chernow isn’t capable of love, not real love. He liked you – he went for you – big, maybe. But not any more, Liz. He got tired of you. He was through with you. He wanted to get rid of you. This gave him an out on that, too.”

She had her face in her hands, now. Her soft, silky, honey-colored hair hung over her hands as she bent her head. I couldn’t hear her sobbing but I could see her shoulders shaking. I could see a vein standing out in her throat. She was pitiful. I felt a little sorry for her.

“Liz,” I said softly. “How could you get mixed up in a thing like this – with a big-mouthed, phoney louse like Chernow? How do these things happen?”

After a moment she got control of herself. She looked at me, her eyes raw-red from crying, her makeup smeared. “How?” she said. Her voice was ragged, bitter. “All right, I’ll tell you how. Maybe you’ll feel sorry for me. Maybe you’ll figure some way to give me a break.”

She told me. The beginning was an old story. Ronny Chernow was her boss. They worked late together a couple of nights. He bought her dinner. They had some drinks. It went on from there. She’d never known a man like Chernow, before. She was impressed, awed, overwhelmed by the way he dressed and the way he spent money, the places he took her.

“Places girls who work for a living, who are drab and plain, dream about, see in the movies, read about in the papers and that’s all,” she said. “The most expensive nightclubs. The clubhouse at Belmont. Flashy gambling places over in New Jersey. And Ronny – he was so smart about everything. He taught me how to fix myself up, how to dress. He made me –
pretty!
So that I felt as good as any of the women in those places. He drove me around in a Cadillac – a Caddy, Kip!”

“Didn’t you wonder where he got the money, how he did all that on his salary?” I asked.

“He told me he was very lucky at gambling and played the market shrewdly,” she said. “Listen, every night I was in such a dream world, I didn’t think, didn’t care
how
it was happening. Do you question miracles? Of course, in the daytime, at the office, I’d go back to my old personality. Ronny said it would be better that way, wouldn’t cause any talk.”

Then she told me how he trapped her. They went to Atlantic City for a weekend. He took a fifty-dollar-a-day hotel suite. He lost several hundred dollars at the race track there. When it was all over, he told her about the four fake artist’s checks that he’d put through and held out and cashed, how it was a plan he’d long had in mind. He told Liz Tremayne that she was going to have to cover for him.

At first she refused. She was horrified, sick over it. But he cajoled and threatened. He said if she didn’t cooperate with him and he got caught, he’d involve her, anyhow. He told her that it would just be this once and there was no possible way of it being found out for nearly a year. She gave in, then. She covered for him. Then she was trapped and it became a regular thing.

“I knew we were going to have to face the music at the end,” she finished. “But by then I didn’t care, Kip. I didn’t care. I was so damned in love with the man that I didn’t care about anything. Do you understand, Kip . . . But now he’s – done this – to me!”

She started to cry again, but suddenly jerked convulsively all over. She cut off the weeping. She forced a little half-smile around her mouth. The negligée was half falling away from one shoulder but she didn’t do anything about it, even though she was conscious of the way I was staring. I couldn’t help it. Even now, after all this, she was still breathtakingly beautiful.

“Kip,” she said. She started slowly toward me. “Kip, I–I can’t go to prison. I–I just
can’t!
Kip, I never noticed before, but
you’re
handsome, too. And you’re clever. You’ve got personality, too, Ronny Chernow isn’t the only one. You’d make out fine in Mexico, too. I’d help you, Kip; help you a
lot!
We’d make a striking couple!”

“Don’t be crazy, Liz,” I said. “I’ve got a wife, a family. Are you out of your mind? Stay away from me. It’s no good, Liz.”

But she kept walking, slowly, provocatively, her hands running down over her own hips, pulling the negligée tautly over them, lowering it from the shoulder some more. Watching her, little electric shocks started shooting all through me. My breath seemed to catch and hurt in my chest. Her eyes had cleared from the crying spell, now. Her teeth were very white and even against the red lips as she smiled.

“Mexico, Kip,” she whispered. “You must’ve had dreams, too. I – I’ve got five hundred dollars in cash in my purse. That’s worth a lot more in Mexico. We’ve already got the ticket. The plane leaves at seven in the morning. You’re going with me, Kip. We’ll both put all the past behind us – all of it. We’ll start over.”

I tried to back away from her, but my legs bumped against the bed. She came right up close against me. The faintly musky scent of her filled my nostrils, my whole head. I began to tremble. She pressed against me and her long, carmine-nailed fingers grasped my lapels.

“Just you and me, Kip,” she said, her voice so low and throaty I couldn’t have heard it if her lips hadn’t been only an inch or so away from mine.

Her hands slid from my lapels up around my neck, then to the back of my head. They pulled my head toward her. Her mouth burned against mine and the lights in the room seemed to pinwheel. All thought, all reason went up in a burst of flame in my brain.

I found myself holding onto her by the upper arms, my fingers digging into their soft flesh.

And then the whole thing exploded. It was a muffled explosion, like clapping two thickly gloved hands together hard. Liz Tremayne went limp and, still gripping her upper arms, I was half pulled over with her. I looked at her face. Her eyes stared up at me, wide open and completely blank and horrible.

Her mouth hung slack and wet. I looked over her head toward the doorway.

Ronny Chernow was standing there. He was holding one of the pillows from the studio couch bent over double across one of his hands. For a second I wondered what he was doing with it. Then I saw the smoke wisping out from under the folded pillow. I couldn’t see the gun at all but I knew it was there.

My hands eased from Liz Tremayne’s arms and she went down to her knees and then toppled over onto one side. There was a very tiny black hole in the back of the negligée, near the left shoulder blade. Red shiny stuff was beginning to ooze out of it onto the floor.

“She’s quite a gal, eh, Morgan,” Chernow said. “She can really turn it on, can’t she? She was giving you full voltage. I taught her that stuff, Morgan. And all you jerks in the office thought she was such a pot, not worth a play. How wrong can you get?”

“Very,” I said. “Very wrong, Chernow. As wrong as you’ve gotten. Now, you’ve just committed murder on top of everything else.”

Ronny Chernow’s thick, masculine brows raised. His hair was still curly and tousled, boyishly. He was still the expensively dressed, handsome, arrogant man-about-town. If you didn’t look too closely. But now I could see the glassy gleam in his eyes, and there was a brutal twist to his thin, well-shaped lips. There was a nervous tic at one corner of his mouth. Maybe he didn’t realize yet but this was all having an effect on him.

“You’ve got it wrong,” he said. He gave a quiet, confident laugh. “
I
haven’t killed anybody. I didn’t embezzle all that money. I didn’t sign that confession that’s in the mail right now, will be in old Malkom’s hands, Monday morning. I didn’t come here and shoot Liz . . .
You
did all those things, Morgan. Don’t you see the way it is?”

I saw. There was only one way it could be, now. He was going to kill me, too. When Liz and I were found, coupled with the letter of confession, it would be a fairly simple thing for the police to figure. They’d find the plane tickets, figure we’d planned to skip, together. But at the last minute we’d had an argument, a fight about something. I’d killed Liz, then shot myself. That was the way the whole thing was going to figure.

I watched Ronny Chernow start toward me. He looked terribly big. Much bigger than he’d ever seemed to me before. He kept holding the couch pillow folded over the gun in his hand.

“Stand still, Morgan,” he said. The smile was gone from his face. His lips were flattened against his teeth. The tic at the corner of his mouth was leaping crazily.

Sure, I thought, stand still so that you can get close enough so that there’ll be powder burns on my shirt front. But I couldn’t seem to make myself move. I felt frozen, carved out of stone. I looked down on Liz Tremayne, sprawled there, her legs twisted under her awkwardly. She looked like a broken rag doll. I wondered if she was having any of those dreams now.

There it is, I told myself. There’s that other life you missed by getting married and settling down. There’s Miss Manhattan At Night-time. There’s your glittering, crowded smoky hotspots and the throbbing, pulsing music and riding through the night in an open Caddy convertible, with a beautiful girl beside you. There’s the easy, crazy, enticing, live-for-the-moment way. Lying there dead with a bullet in her back . . . And coming toward you, a killer, with all those turning, tossing, conscience-stricken nights behind him, with the cruel desperation etched into his face, with fear like little maggots in his brain all the time.

He
had all that stuff. He didn’t settle for your life, the drudgery, monotony, the bills, the skipping the new suits and the beautiful shirts and ties because there was another baby coming, the long bus trip back and forth, kids squalling or sick or worrisome in some other way. But look at him. On the ragged edge of mania. He can’t keep killing and killing.

“That’s right,” Chernow said in the quietest voice I’d ever heard him use. “Stand nice and still. Nice – and – still . . .”

I had to stop watching him come toward me. My eyes swiveled to an electric clock on the dresser. I watched the second hand sweep around, knocking off the remaining seconds of my life. It was quarter to ten. I wondered what Fran was doing. The kids would be in bed. Fran would be out in the kitchen probably, ironing. Or else she’d be watching television in the living room, remembering things about the programs to tell me about when I got home. Or maybe she was over at the Haggards next door, gabbing with Helene, or playing Canasta. When I got home, she’d have the latest community gossip, and she’d brag about how much she’d won from the Haggards . . .
When I got home?

Ronny Chernow was only a step away from me, now. Quicksilver seemed to run all through me. The freeze left me. I screamed it: “I’m not going to die! I won’t!
I won’t!
”

I lunged toward him, slammed into him, knocked him off balance. There was a clicking sound. It wasn’t until long later that I realized the gun had jammed on him, that possibly material of the cushion had caught the hammer or something. Right now I only wondered why didn’t he shoot – get it over with. Why didn’t I hear that muffled clap of sound again and feel the hurt and burn of the bullet striking me, the flood of pain or the nothingness or whatever it was happened when a bullet pumps into your heart and you die.

At the same time, I got halfway past him before he wrenched the gun – from the cushion, tossed the cushion to the floor. I could hear someone shouting, screaming, cursing. For a second I didn’t even realize it was my own voice. Then, as I started toward the door, I looked back. Chernow was right behind me. He had the gun raised. It was a small, nickel-plated revolver. He caught me with the barrel right across the top of the forehead. I went off balance and staggered, crashed against the wall and went down. My eyes wouldn’t focus. The walls and ceiling of the room were tilting, tipping, rolling lazily around and around my head.

As though from a great distance, I heard someone pounding fiercely on the door and rattling the knob. I tried to get to my feet to hold onto the wall. But it kept wheeling away from me. Finally it slowed and stopped. I leaned against that wall, sort of crawled up it and got to my feet. I shook my head, looked around. Liz Tremayne was still on the floor, dead. The nickel-plated revolver was lying near her feet. There was now a terrible thumping, shattering noise coming from the door, outside, leading to the hallway. I looked for Chernow but he wasn’t there.

I walked over and picked up the revolver from the floor. I didn’t have any clear idea why. I was still dazed. But I must have reasoned that I was in danger, needed protection. A gun was protection. Still holding it, I staggered out into the living room, just as the front door of the apartment crashed open and a man half fell inside.

He was short and bull-shouldered. He was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of wrinkled, soiled slacks. His arms were thick and muscular and black with hair. His square-jawed, beetle-browed face looked nervous, hesitant.

“What’s going on in here?” he said. “I heard screaming and before that what sounded like a shot. I live next door. Where’s Miss Tremayne?”

I started to jerk my thumb toward the bedroom, to say, “In there – dead.” But something stopped me. This thing was getting worse instead of better. Sure, Ronny Chernow had fouled-up on killing me. I was still alive. But there was still that confession he had mailed, there was still a dead woman – the one mentioned in the confession – in that other room, dead by the gun which I held in my hand. Chernow was gone. He was out of it. There was only me. And the neighbor from next door to testify to the police about breaking in and finding me with the murder gun in my hand.

I said. “You back up, feller and get the hell out of here, quick!” I jerked the gun toward him. He turned and squeezed back out past that half broken-in door like a snake slithering out of a trap.