The Price of Murder (7 page)

When he took hold of her she expected it, but not the quickness and the roughness of his grasp. She started to squirm and fight him, scared then, and thinking of Lee and of marriage and all that. She writhed away from him and half fell back and her shoulders crashed against the cabinets and she heard a dish fall inside. That was when he hit her with the back of his hand across the mouth and she
made a kind of moaning sound and fell into his arms. He half carried and half dragged her into the bedroom and she could not stop making that moaning sound, and her body felt all loosened as if all the tight muscles had come untied. He was rough and harsh and contemptuous with her, rougher than Lee had ever been. It was like being punished. But, when she could have sworn that she could not respond to treatment like this, her response came in a quick upward blinding spiral.

She lay there too exhausted to move and, with her eyes half shut, watched him fix his clothing, latch his belt tight, turn and stand over her and light another cigarette. He cursed her and he cursed himself. He labeled their foulness with words she had never heard before. He cautioned her about the envelope and he left. She heard his heavy step in the kitchen, the bang of the screen door, and a few seconds later, the slam of his car door and and the angry roar of the engine, the sudden yelp of tires as he started up.

A long time later she got up and put on her robe and phoned Ruthie and said she had a headache. She took a hot bath, and then put on different shorts and another halter and fixed the rumpled bed and got the board out again and did some more ironing. Every once in a while tears would start to run down her face. She didn’t feel as though she was crying. It wasn’t like crying. All of a sudden the tears would run again. It was like, long ago, when the dog, Taffy, was killed by a car. She wouldn’t even be thinking of Taffy. She would be doing her homework or she’d be talking to a friend on the phone and the tears would come out of no place and it was the tears that would make her remember Taffy.

After that she thought about Danny so much that it seemed to her that she thought about him every minute of the day. When she remembered what he had called himself and what he had called her, it gave her a hollow-tummy feeling of excitement.

But when he came back, the day before yesterday, came back while she was sitting on the front porch in the early afternoon reading a magazine, he nearly startled her out of her wits. He had come in the back and he came
through the house without the slightest sound to the open front door and spoke her name. Her heart fluttered and felt as if it were trying to jump out of her chest.

She went in, and felt too shy to look directly at him. He said, “I should have known it when I got my first good look at you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Of all the guys in the world, he’s the one who has to hook up with you, Lucille.”

She looked at him then. He was grinning at her, but it wasn’t a warm grin. “You made me do it.”

“That’s right, Lucille. I made you do it.”

“Why don’t you get your envelope and get out?”

“I don’t want it yet. I want you to keep this, too.” He handed her an unsealed envelope. “Go ahead. Look in it.”

She looked at the packet of fifty-dollar bills, then stared at him, her eyes wide. “What’s this for?”

“They’ve changed the name of the game on me. I got parole trouble. I’ve got to move a little different on my deal than I planned. There’s a thousand there. Sort of a down payment like. It’s traveling money, and the best place for it is here, I think. Here’s what will happen. If things go perfect for me, I’ll be back to pick up that other envelope and you can keep this one. If things go sour, I’ll be back to get both envelopes and I’ll be in a hurry. Put that one in that purse in the closet you showed me. If things go really sour, I’ll be dead. Then you keep the grand and give the other envelope to the cops.”

She told him she understood. She went into the bedroom. He followed and watched her hide the second envelope. She turned around and looked at him. She saw the contempt on his face. She jumped forward and locked her arms around his neck. He flung her about trying to shake her off, but she held tightly to him. And knew the instant when he changed his mind. It was just like the other time, only this time he didn’t say anything. He didn’t stand over the bed when he lit his cigarette. He turned when he was in the bedroom doorway and lit it there and looked at her nakedness the way a man would glance at dirt in the street, and then he was gone and this time the
screen door closed quietly and she heard no car motor. After she had her tub and fixed her bed and put on fresh clothes, she took the money and arranged it on the bed, arranged the twenty bills in all kinds of different patterns, hummed softly to herself and played with the money until it was nearly time for Lee to be home. This time there weren’t any tears, and she had the warm and satisfied little feeling that she had gotten even with Danny in some way, but she couldn’t understand just how that could be.

Now, with all the polish removed, she began to paint the toenails of her right foot, starting with the little one. She sat in a limber way, without strain, the inside of her sharply crooked knee warm against the side of her face. Her dressing table had a center mirror as well as two side mirrors at an angle. She heard him and glanced into the side mirror on the right and saw him in the doorway, leaning against the frame, hand in the pocket of the faded khakis, his expression cold and thoughtful.

She looked back down at her foot and started on the nail of the third toe, working carefully. “It looks like your brother is in some kind of trouble,” she said.

“He’s got trouble. Maybe we’ve got trouble, too.”

“How could we have trouble?”

She heard him cross the room behind her, heard the sound of the bed as he sat on it. When he spoke the harshness of his voice startled her. “Stop that damn nonsense and turn around. I want to talk to you.”

“Just a minute till I finish.”

“Now, damn it!”

She put the brush back in the bottle, sighed audibly, swiveled around so that she faced him. “I don’t know what you got to get so hot about,” she said, keeping her face still but searching his face for proof that Keefler could have told him anything.

“Why don’t you put some clothes on?”

“Do I look disgusting or something?”

“Stop fencing with me, Lucille. Put some clothes on.”

She gave him a mocking look. A sexy mocking look, like Grace Kelly had used in that picture where Cary Grant was a jewel thief, and he was being blamed for the way jewels were being stolen because they were using his
methods, but he’d given up stealing long ago and he had to prove it wasn’t him. She and Ruthie had practiced that look, and she had got it down just right, Ruthie said. You put your eyelids part way down and looked slantwise and smiled in a way that sort of turned one comer of your mouth down. She leaned over, a long lithe stretching, and caught the sleeve of the beach coat and pulled it to her and slipped into it, and turned the collar up the way it looked the best and said, “Better, darling?” drawling the words out slow.

“You lied to Keefler,” he said.

She felt uncertain then. He didn’t look like Lee at all. He didn’t look friendly. He was more like Danny all of a sudden. Her voice was pitched higher. “If that man told you something about me, he was lying!”

Instead of looking angrier, Lee suddenly looked very tired. “Seel, I don’t expect you to understand this. But I’m going to take a stab at it. We’ve got security. Whether you believe it or not, I’ve got a certain position, and I’m given a certain amount of respect.”

She caught at the opening for counterattack, an opening too wide to ignore. “Yes, you’ve got everything. You’ve got a big deal. In ten years maybe you’ll be making as much as a good carpenter. I can’t even buy a lipstick without your showing me all the figures about how much it costs to …”

“Shut up, for God’s sake. And listen. Keefler isn’t normal. There’s something twisted about him. He treated me as if … as if I was some petty thief in a lineup.”

“Didn’t you explain how you’re a big important man around Brookton Junior College, dear?”

“That doesn’t work with Keefler,” he said, ignoring her obvious sarcasm. “I never thought it was a mistake coming back here until now. I didn’t plan on a Keefler. If he wants to make trouble for me, he can. He can use Danny as a lever. And he can use … something else that happened a long time ago. He can make it look bad. As long as we stay clean, he won’t bother, I don’t think. But it’s damn important that we stay clean. He’ll pick up Danny, or somebody will, and then Keefler will be off our neck. It’s a bad break for Danny, and I’m damn sorry about it,
but it’s his own fault. I sat there, Seel, and I saw you lie to him. I know when you lie. I’ve proved that to you before. You’re a poor liar. A lot of time I don’t bother. It isn’t worth the squabble we have about it. But this time it’s important. Get that through your head. This time it counts. When did you see Danny last?”

“Just like I told Mr. Keefler. The day after your birthday.”

“Come off it, Lucille. You’ve seen him since then. And I have to know about it. Right now.”

She looked at him and she saw the clear purpose in his eyes. She realized, with consternation, that she would have to tell him something. It was unthinkable that she should try to tell him the whole thing. It had to be just enough to satisfy him. And there would have to be enough detail to make it sound right. She felt, for the first time, a really sharp stab of guilt for what she had done with Danny. It was really a terrible thing. It was his own brother. You couldn’t twist it all around like in a movie and make it seem better. It was something she hadn’t done before, and hadn’t planned to do. Ruthie talked about it a lot, but with Ruthie it was all talk. In a way it was Lee’s fault it happened. He seemed to think he could stick her in this crummy little house on Arcadia Street and keep her on a silly budget and have her be happy forever. When you were used to a lot of things going on, a lot of laughs and so on, you couldn’t be expected to adjust to a life where a faculty tea was a big deal.

“Come on,” Lee said insistently. “Out with it.”

Her mind moved quickly, sorting, editing, discarding. “Well, I did see him. But I made a promise.”

Lee sighed. “The whole story. Come on.”

“Well, it was two weeks ago yesterday. I only saw him that one time. It was in the morning and I was ironing and he came to the back door. He seemed worried about something. I told him you weren’t here and he said he wanted to ask a favor of me. He said he was in some kind of trouble. He wanted me to keep something for him, to hide it here in the house. He said he didn’t want to ask you to do it because you’d have a lot of questions and so on. So I promised him I would.”

“Did he come back for it, whatever it was?”

“No. He was just here that one time. I’ve still got it.”

“Go get it.”

She stood up, thinking of going to the kitchen, to the canister of flour, and she remembered how insistent Danny had been about not opening it, and his promise about what he would do if she did. So she turned instead toward the closet, pushed the clothes aside, took the envelope of money from the brown purse and, in a sudden rage at her own stupidity in not taking any of the money out, she flung the envelope at Lee. The money spilled in the air and fluttered down around him, on the bed and on the floor, and she wanted to laugh at his dazed expression.

He picked the money up slowly, counted it and put it back in the envelope. “A thousand dollars,” he said. “What for?”

She sat on the bench again. “He said he was in trouble and it was getaway money if things didn’t work out right. But if they did, we could keep it. And if he got killed, we could keep it.”

“He didn’t say what kind of trouble?”

“You know how he is.”

“And that was all?”

“He gave it to me to hide and told me not to tell you about it and then he left.”

“Did he park his car in front?”

“No. I don’t know where he left it. He came to the back door. I was in the kitchen ironing. He went out the back door when he left.”

“Have you told anybody about this? Did you tell your friend Ruthie?”

“No. I haven’t told anybody.”

Lee sat, frowning, and he rapped the envelope against the knuckles of his other hand. It was the same gesture Danny had used.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m trying to guess how Keefler would react if I told him what …”

“But it’s your own brother!”

“I’m aware of that, Seel. I’m very aware of that, believe
me. But I have to be sure Keefler won’t get on the trail of this … incident. I guess we have to take a chance.”

“Shall I put it back?”

“I’ll take care of it, thank you. Seel, why couldn’t you have told me about this when it happened.”

“I promised Danny. I gave my word.”

“You’re married to me. I don’t like Danny roping you in on something like this.”

“Where are you going to put it? Suppose he comes after it when you aren’t home?”

“You tell him to wait and you phone me at the school and I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

“Suppose he’s in a hurry?”

“That is going to be too damn bad. I want to know what the hell is going on.” He walked toward the bedroom door, turned and said, “I’ve got a meeting at seven.”

“I don’t know how you expect to use up all the time there is asking me all kinds of questions and then think I can push a magic button and have a meal pop out of the wall or something in two seconds. I was real stupid. I was thinking it was Saturday night and maybe it wouldn’t be too much to expect to get taken out, maybe, and even …”

“Skip it, skip it,” he said. “I’ll get a sandwich on the way.”

When he came back into the bedroom she was working on the other foot. He showered quickly and changed. By the time he was ready to leave she had nearly finished shaving her legs.

“I’ll be back about eight-thirty,” he said.

“Oh, goody,” she said, not looking up.

“Maybe we could go out to the drive-in.”