Villiers Touch (24 page)

He always made her vividly aware of the past she didn't want to remember. She remembered the sagging clapboard Victorian farmhouse with its paint long gone, weathered to a splintery gray. Kentucky, childhood, endless cuddlings by numerous “uncles.” Her father had been an unidentified sailor who had spent one night in Lexington on his way to New London. About the only home she remembered was the old farmhouse, with a rusty De Soto up on blocks in the yard, a sagging washday line hung between house and tree, chickens and dogs, two rusty truck fenders, and a dented galvanized milk can. They were on the relief rolls, recipients of charity packages of clothes and food at Christmastime. Her mother had been a sleazy middle-aged bag of Southern discomforts, too distracted by sex and alcohol to mind living in lackluster filth.

She remembered herself, a child of nine, curiously watching through an open window, seeing her mother step out of her clothes and leave them on the floor while a man, whose two-and-a-half-ton truck sat warm-hooded in the drive, came into sight putting a can of beer to his lips, wiping his mouth, brutally crushing the empty can in one hand. She remembered the torn undershirt, a wedge out of the cloth open and flapping at the side, revealing the man's hirsute pelt. The man tossed the mangled can away and reached impatiently for her mother's sagging naked body. The clatter of the can on the linoleum floor, the resigned flatness of her mother's withdrawn face, the man's blasphemous laughing remarks, and then the crash and squeak of the bed.

One day her mother had gone down to the crossroads to get a bottle of whiskey. She hadn't come back. Somebody said she took up with a salesman driving through. Carol had been twelve then; she remembered teen-age boys sneaking looks at her legs, a teacher who'd fondled her developing breasts, the groping hands of the men folk of the hill families who'd passed her from hand to hand after her mother ran off. She had done chores, now and then gone briefly to school. One seventeen-year-old had taken her to a boondock party, and he had put something in her drink that had made her feel good all over. Whatever it was, it ran her up the walls. She had stayed with him in the woods for four days. Afterward someone said something, and the boy's father horse-whipped her off the farm.

At fifteen she was slinging hash in a crossroads tavern. The cook's young brother came home from the Army, he was a smiling dandy with worldly charm, and they were married in the spring by a circuit preacher. Their sensuous delirium had lasted almost a week, after which Floyd had turned sulky and cross and dragged her off with him, to Concord and then to Pensacola, and then to Houston, on the trail of elusive wealth: “You want to eat beans the rest of yo' life?” He had borrowed money to open a Japanese car franchise, but it had failed; he had wildcatted an oil field and hit a dry hole; he met some gamblers, and they went to Miami.

He had become rough and cursory in bed, mounting her and pumping his spurt into her and leaving her hung up dry. She learned to make her body a nerveless thing, without shame or sensation, a bitter insensitive receptacle for his absentminded pleasures. He was making enemies then, with his surly ways, and they were not the kind of enemies a man could afford. He had already become a compulsive loser; now he ran his gambling debts up so high there was nothing to do but run for it. By then she had a spiderweb of scars on her buttocks from his tantrums. He refused to leave her behind; they left in the middle of the night, traveling in a car he had stolen, driving across the South by night, holing up by day. She was sixteen then, pregnant, and terrified. They fled into the Southwest and ditched the stolen car in Amarillo, hitchhiked to Albuquerque, and stopped there. He found work pumping gas in a filling station and began to lay plans to rob the till.

Whenever she argued with him, he beat her. He told her to meet him at the gas station at two in the morning, and she was too frightened to refuse; and when she arrived at the appointed hour, she found him bending over the owner's body, searching the pockets for the cash-register keys—he had smashed the owner's larynx with a tire iron. He emptied out the register, and they drove north in a car someone had left overnight in the gas station for a lube job. They left it parked on a side street in Trinidad, took a bus to Colorado Springs, stole a pickup truck out of a shopping-center parking lot, and drove through the night across the Rockies to Grand Junction, where a man spotted them having coffee in a diner and followed them outside. The man was from Miami.

They left with a squeal of tires, but the pickup was no match for the green Buick with Florida plates. The Buick followed them at a steady distance until they started up into the mountains toward Aspen; then it closed the distance and cut across a bend in front of them, crowded them away from the inside cliff, and forced them off the road. The pickup turned over twice before it hit the creek. She ended up crushed against her husband in the mangled wreckage of the cab. She was bleeding at her nose, in cuts on her shoulder and forearm, and between her legs.

The man from Miami came down the hill, scrambling in expensive shoes on the loose shale footing. She closed her eyes to slits and held her breath. He wrenched open the door and poked around until he was satisfied her husband was dead. Then he said, “You can open your eyes, I ain't going to hurt you.”

Still she didn't stir, and after he slapped her a couple of times he left, evidently satisfied she was unconscious and couldn't identify him. She waited till she heard the Buick drive away, and then she dragged herself up to the road, bleeding, and waited for a car to come along.

In the clinic she told them a simpleminded story, some of it true. She said she came from Kentucky, she was an orphan, a man had got her pregnant and deserted her, she had been hitchhiking west to find some town where nobody knew her where she could have her baby. She had thumbed a ride with the man in the pickup truck, and he had lost control of it and gone over the rim. It was a simple, straightforward story, and she stuck to it when the police came and wanted to know how much she knew about the dead driver of the pickup. It seemed he was wanted for murder in New Mexico and several charges of auto theft and transporting stolen cars across state lines. She had thrown away her wedding ring in the woods along the road, and she played dumb with the cops, and after a while they left her alone.

She got out of the clinic after ten days, no longer pregnant; the wreck had made her miscarry. There were five forgettable months of hash-slinging in a diner, and then a man in a Lincoln took her away to Las Vegas for his pleasure. He was not a disagreeable sort, and for a day or two she even felt a small echo of the needs that had been deadened in her; but he went on to the Coast without her. She took jobs and survived, teaching herself to be hard. Now and then she dreamed in a far corner of her mind that one day, with someone, she would rediscover the frantic roaring tumult of eager happiness.

By the time she was nineteen, with her looks, her good body, she had climbed fast from a job in the pony lineup of a downtown Vegas dive to a good post as hostess in the show-bar room of a hotel on the Strip. And then one night she had come in to work and a man sitting at the bar had stared at her, then turned to talk rapidly to his companion. The man was the Buick driver from Miami.

The old terrors came back, froze her, put a sour knot in her throat. She was here, alive, and she was a witness to the murder he had committed. He wouldn't do anything here, not in this crowd. But later, when she left, he would follow her. She began to think of how it must be done, how to elude him. She went through the motions of the job, guided people to their tables, and distributed menus, wearing a mechanical smile, keeping the man from Miami in sight in the corner of her vision. She would slip out through the kitchen, she decided, drive home, pack her things, and drive straight through the night to Los Angeles. Change her name again and get a different kind of job. She decided it all with numb resignation; there wasn't any room for regret.

But then the man from Miami got up off the bar stool and headed for the door with his companion. The two of them stopped in the doorway and looked straight at her, with never a break in their expressions. His companion was a tall young man with a hard and handsome face, the eyes of a stalking predator; yet he was not a gangster like the one from Miami, she could tell that much. The face was lofty, self-assured, filled with cool ambition and arrogant intelligence. If he had been an actor he would have been singled out for “star quality.” He had a sensual presence, even across the room.

When the two of them walked out of the club, her dread returned. She got through the rest of her shift and walked out through the kitchen, concentrating her attention on the simple act of walking steadily. She said good night to the kitchen staff with a nervous smile; she came around the back of the hotel and swept the parking lot with a quick, frightened glance. No one was in sight. She hurried to her car and got in, and had to sit there motionless before she summoned the strength to start the car. Her nerves twanged with taut-drawn vibration; a red pulse thudded in her eyes. She shot out of the parking lot and drove fast through the back streets, taking a dark route home, knowing enough to choose the deserted streets so that she could see if she was being followed.

No one tailed her. She began to feel more calm; driving the last ten blocks, she was deciding exactly what things to pack and what things to leave behind. She pulled into the driveway of the little stucco house, switched off the headlights, and got out of the car, and for a moment stood by the spiked yucca plant in the dusty front yard to look both ways along the street. All the parked cars in sight were familiar. It was three in the morning; there were no pedestrians abroad. Presently she went up the gravel walkway, unlocked the front door, and went into the dark house. She flicked the living-room wall switch; the light came on, she turned into the room, and saw the tall young man with the hard arrogant face sitting in the armchair, smiling coolly.

She stood perfectly still. Her heart crashed alarmingly. She felt faint with dread, tightened her muscles against it, gave him a stare as cool and hard as his own, not wanting to give anything away.

He seemed in no hurry to speak. Finally, broken by the silence, she breathed, “How did you get here?” and realized immediately it was a stupid thing to say.

“Rocco dropped me off,” he replied in a reasonable, resonant voice. “Which is why you didn't see a strange car outside. Take it easy, Rocco's not here.”

“How did you find this place?”

“I own a piece of the hotel. It was no trick to find out where you lived.”

She took a deep breath. “All right. What do you want?”

“Easy—gentle down. Why don't you have a drink?”

“I don't want a drink. What do you want of me?”

“You're lovely,” he said, as if he hadn't heard the question. “You'll have to study voice modulation, of course—that hill-country twang won't do. You'll need to learn how to walk and turn like a model, how to smile and pose. How to do things in bed. Or do you already know that much?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I bought you from Rocco,” he said. “You belong to me now.”

She stared at him, full of bewildered dread. She had to put a hand against the wall to steady herself.

He crossed his legs and selected a cigarette from a silver case. “I'll explain it very clearly, just once,” he said, “so that you'll never need to ask questions. Pay attention.”

She watched him with terrified fascination. “I hope you start making sense,” she said, fighting back the impulse to scream.

He said, “You're going by the name of Carol McCloud now. It's not the name you started out with. You were Minnie Jackson until you got married, and that made you Minnie Bragg. Floyd Bragg was into the loan sharks in Miami—Rocco claims he carried Floyd longer than his mother did. You and Floyd ran out on Floyd's debts, which is always a mistake, particularly when you're dealing with people like the crowd Rocco works for. You dropped out of sight for a while, but then Floyd killed a man in New Mexico. The police found his fingerprints all over the tire iron. The alarm went out, and Rocco's people came in on it. It wasn't too hard to trace you two from there—it was mainly a question whether the police or Rocco and his friends would find you first. I won't bother with the rest of it—I've only gone over this much of it to convince you I do have all the facts, I'm not just bluffing.”

“Go ahead,” she said in a thin voice. “You've got the floor.”

He said, “You were in that gas station with Floyd when he killed the owner. How much do you know about criminal law? If you're involved in a crime like robbery, and somebody gets killed in the process, all parties to the lesser crime are equally guilty of felony murder, no matter who did the actual killing. Do I make it clear to you? There's still a warrant out on Minnie Bragg for first-degree murder, they still have the mandatory death penalty for felony murder in New Mexico, and there's no statute of limitations on a charge of murder. You'll never get off the hook, Minnie—your head's on that chopping block for the rest of your life. That's why Rocco isn't here—you can't threaten him, not without admitting who you are and going back to Albuquerque to stand trial for murder.”

She whispered, “I wasn't even there.”

“Where?”

“When he killed the man. I wasn't there.”

“Legally it doesn't matter. Get that through your head—you shared in the proceeds of the robbery. That's all it takes to prove you're guilty of felony murder. They don't even have to prove whether you were there or not.”

“How do I know you're not lying?”

“Call a lawyer. Go down to the library in the morning and look it up. Ask somebody you trust. Do I look stupid enough to lie to you about something you could verify that easily?”