“Sure! But if you can stick him over this business I’m on, what’s the difference? He’s in jail, just the same. What’s the difference what he goes up for?”
He kept looking at the ceiling. He said, very softly: “We’ve got gas in this state. I want to have him wait to go in that chamber and I want to see him every day while he waits. I want him up for murder. That French girl may be it. It may not be, I don’t know. But I can’t lose, can I?”
“I think it’s working out, Macintosh.”
He stood, said: “Watch yourself. Don’t trust that girl, unless you’re sure. Or Martin. Hell, man, in this business you can’t trust anybody. I wouldn’t even trust that guy I was working for if I was you. He’s such a damn fool he can’t see we’re trying to help him.”
“He’s not bright. Kewp’s all right; I think I’ve got the answer on that business of him being here. He smokes hay and was buying.”
“Of course I don’t blame Wendel for trying to straighten things with his wife. A man should do that.”
I didn’t think about how he could take it. I said: “A lot of trouble could be saved if this family trouble was straightened out when it started.”
He got white around the lips and said: “Yeah! That’s right, I guess. A lot of trouble.”
I saved it some with: “He wouldn’t have had to come out here and she’d have been saved all this divorce trouble. Everybody would have been ahead.”
He said: “Be seeing you,” and went out the door. He walked with a little roll, like a punch-drunk fighter. That birthday was bothering him as much as it was the landlady, and I don’t think I ever felt as sorry for a man in my life as I did for him right then.
Chapter Eighteen
I called Spanish and told her I’d pick her up in half an hour. She said:
“That’s fine. Are you bringing your friend?”
I said: “Friend?”
“Well, Hazel’s friend. She’s here now.” I said I guessed maybe I could and called Lester and told him to meet me at the corner below his hotel. That we were going calling. He brightened up, until I told him who we were calling on and then he said, in a scared voice: “Ugh... maybe I’d better not go tonight, Shean. You know I don’t drink and... well... maybe I’d better not go.”
“The big gal’s got you scared, hunh?”
“It... it isn’t that. But she gets drunk and what can I do with her? She keeps calling me all the time. I... ugh... I think I’ll stay home.”
“Suit yourself. She’s your gal.”
He said: “Wait a minute,” and then: “I’ll meet you. Right away?”
“Yeah!”
I could hear a bunch of noise in the room and had a notion what had happened. Joey had gone in, probably with a bunch of drunken companions, and the kid had decided one woman, even if she was as big as a small pony, was easier to handle while drunk than Joey.
Just the lesser of two evils. I picked him up at his corner and he told me I’d guessed right. He said: “You know, Shean, Hazel’s a lovely girl but she drinks too much. She’s really nice except for that one thing.”
“Why don’t you reform her?”
He said earnestly, and meaning it: “D’ya suppose I could? She told me the only reason she does it is because she’s so lonesome. Because of feeling so badly over this divorce. Her husband was a brute to her.”
I asked: “Which one?”
“What d’ya mean?”
“Which husband? She’s had a lot of them, hasn’t she?”
He said: “She’s had a lot of trouble in her life,” and sighed, and I said: “For Christ’s sake, kid. You’re not taking the big wench seriously, are you?”
“We’ve spoken of marriage, Shean.”
He tried to make this grown-up and all it did was sound silly. I laughed. He got red in the face and said: “What’s funny about that? I’ve always thought a man who didn’t marry was losing a beautiful experience.”
“Look around you and prove that,” I said. “He’s losing a chance to pay out every crying dime he makes for alimony, you sap. Grow up, kid.”
“Age doesn’t make any difference if there’s real love between you.”
I stopped the car in front of the Spanish’s house. I said: “Now look. In the first place, you’re not old enough to get married. This gal is old enough to be your mother. She’s practically a professional at this getting married; she’s got too much experience for you. And besides that. She’s too big for you; she’d grapple with you and take you two falls out of three. Why, my God, kid, you could have her, another cow, and a dozen milk bottles and start a dairy route. Now lay off.”
“You shouldn’t speak like that about her, Shean. She’s really nice.”
I said: “Oh nuts. Come on in the house.”
We got out of the car and I remembered what Macintosh had said about Spanish and who’d introduced me to her. I took my gun out and held it under my coat and said to Lester: “Keep to the side and back of me. We might be walking into a plant.”
“Hunh?”
“She might be Rucci’s girl. I don’t know.”
He handed me back what I’d given him. He said: “And you talk to me about being foolish about women. And then go ahead like this.”
I knocked on Spanish’s door and my face was red. She opened it and said: “Come on in,” and we did.
The two girls were alone in the front room, anyway, and I made an excuse to follow Spanish out to the kitchen while she mixed drinks. Just to be sure nobody was hiding there. She had her back turned and I started to put my gun away, but I was clumsy about it and she turned and saw it slide in the clip. She made her eyes wide and said:
“You’re carrying a gun, Shean.”
“It’s an old habit,” I told her.
“I knew something was wrong.”
“There’s nothing wrong, babe.”
“I thought about it all day. That’s why I went out to the Three C this afternoon. That’s where I met Hazel and Mrs. Wendel.”
“That right?”
“Hazel came back with me but Mrs. Wendel waited there for her lawyer, Crandall.”
“That right?”
“He came out with Rucci’s brother. Just as we left.”
I said: “Oh, oh!”
“He’s very nice.”
“I heard that.”
“Mrs. Wendel told me about you and her husband breaking in her house last night. She doesn’t have any more use for him at all. She won’t even talk to him.”
“I noticed that.”
“I think she’s foolish. He’ll just fight her alimony if she treats him like that.”
“Maybe so, hon.”
“I heard Rucci ask her if she’d talked to him and she said ‘Of course not.’ ”
She stopped shaking drinks then and put the shaker down. She came over to me and snuggled up and said: “I’d always talk to you, honey.”
“Even if you were divorcing me?”
“Of course.”
“It seems funny that she doesn’t talk to him, don’t it?”
She snuggled closer. “Shean, you’re in trouble. Is it over that woman?”
“Sort of, hon. Her old man’s a friend of mine. Get the idea?”
“I don’t like her. Hazel does, though. They had a long talk before Crandall came out.”
“What about?”
“I didn’t hear. They were over at another booth. Probably about Mr. Crandall, don’t you think?”
“Probably. Let’s go back in the front room.”
She pouted and said I never wanted to be alone with her. I said she was crazy and that was probably the reason I was so mad about her. She said that I never acted as though I wanted to be alone with her. I said that proved right there she was crazy, but that I hated to leave Lester alone with Hazel; that they were both just young and foolish kids and might not be responsible for what they did. She giggled and said Hazel was looking for a husband. I said that Hazel had not only been looking for a husband for the last twenty-five years but that she’d been finding them and trading them in on new models as fast as she got them. She said she wasn’t that type; that she was a one man woman and that I was the man. I said: “What are you going to do with those drinks? Let ’em stand there on the shelf and melt until they’re no good?”