“Well Gwen said you were a lousy lay, killer. Do you always crap out like that? Is that what happens with the whores? You use the knife when you can’t get it up?”
“I never killed those girls,” I said quietly. I got up from the floor. “I never killed anyone. But just now I came within two inches of killing you, Linda. I hope you got your kicks.”
“I got all the kicks you could ever give me, killer.”
I looked at her. I couldn’t even hate her any more. It was all gone, and I felt nothing more than a nugget of shame for having briefly wanted her.
“You can put the knife away,” I said. “I just became immune to you.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“My baby sister had a lover.”
“I don’t care.”
“She told me all about it.”
“I don’t care.”
“She wasn’t in love, though. It was purely for sex. You couldn’t keep her happy in that department, killer.”
I turned away from her. I walked back into the living room and she followed after me. I got dressed. She didn’t.
“I know who it was.”
“I didn’t ask his name. Partly because, at the moment, I don’t think I really cared. Partly because I had the feeling she would tell me anyway. I had challenged her to stick the knife in again, and she had to prove she could do it, so she would tell me.
“Don’t you want to know?”
“What’s the difference?”
“It was someone you know.”
I dressed slowly and deliberately. I wanted more than anything on earth to get out of there and away from her, but I took my time and dressed slowly and carefully, turning my socks right side out, before putting them on, knotting my tie neatly, all of that.
And she said, “It was Doug MacEwan.”
13
I DISAPPOINTED HER. SHE WANTED A REACTION AND I SIMPLY didn’t give her one. Not, I must admit, because I was too drained and dispassionate and dull to be surprised, but because I very simply did not believe her. It was too obvious a line.
“You really are immune, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“My mistake, then. I should have told you in bed. That was my Sunday punch; I was saving it from the minute you started asking, and I thought I’d hold it right until the end, but-”
“Earlier,” I said, I might have believed it.”
She took a step back, placed her hands on her hips, and flashed me an astonished smile. “Oh, beautiful,” she said. “You don’t believe it?”
“Of course not.”
“Then maybe you’re not immune after all.”
“You’re wasting your time, Linda.”
“Am I? Okay, killer, let me cite chapter and verse. Easter time, the same year you killed the girl, Gwen told you she was going with me to see Uncle Henry, who was supposed to be dying. He wasn’t. The same weekend your friend MacEwan had a convention in St. Louis. He didn’t You can even check all of this out you silly bastard. About a week after their weekend Gwen didn’t come home one night She said she was with me; I was drunk and trying to kill myself. You offered to come over and she wouldn’t let you. MacEwan had a story for Kay that night, too. Then a week after that-”
She went on, and she documented everything quite perfectly, and after a while I stopped listening. I felt strangely numb. I wanted to go away. I wanted to be alone someplace dark and quiet and warm.
“Still think you’re immune, killer?”
I looked at her. “Get dressed,” I said “You look lousy naked.”
“I asked you a question.”
I turned from her, walked toward the door.
“Do you think he framed you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You just can’t admit that you killed those girls yourself, can you?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t say anything. I opened the door, I walked outside into fresher air, I closed the door after me. And walked down the path to the sidewalk with the sound of her laughter ringing metallically in my ears.
I must have walked around blindly. I thought I was taking the right route back to the train station, but evidently I made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up lost. By the time I realized this my sense of direction was completely out of whack, and I ultimately circled around half the city and came up behind the railroad terminal from the far side.
Which was just as well.
Because I had made one mistake. I had never thought to rip the bedroom telephone out of the wall, or to incapacitate Linda, and she had decided to use the knife one final time. There were police cars all over the place.
14
I SLIPPED BACK INTO THE SHADOWS, TURNED THE CORNER, WALKED quickly away. The train was clearly out, and it stood to reason that the bus depot would be similarly guarded. The highways out of town would be patrolled, and if I tried to hitchhike a cop would pick me up.
The gray in my hair would not help. Linda had no doubt described my current appearance when she sounded the alarm. I turned another corner, leaned against the trunk of a tree and tried to catch my breath. A wave of bright fury came suddenly and went as suddenly. I thought of going back to her house and getting her car keys, but it stood to reason that the cops would have her place staked out for the next few hours, and perhaps throughout the night Even if they didn’t, she would know better than to open her door a second time.
I kept walking. It did no good to hate Linda, I realized. One might as logically hate a cat for killing birds. It is part of the essence of catness to slaughter warblers, just as it is part of the essence of Lindaness to decorate the walls of her psychic trophy room with male genitalia. It is a trait of the species; however deplorable, one can expect no better.
I moved steadily away from the center of town and walked in darkness down quiet residential streets. Every family seemed to have two cars, and often only one was kept in the garage, sharing that space with bicycles and toys and power lawn mowers and such. The second car, ungaraged, was parked either in the driveway or at the curb.
Many of these cars, I discovered, were not locked.
This was an interesting revelation, but I wasn’t sure just what I could do with it. There is a way of starting a car without a key, I understand; I believe it involves the use of some apparatus called a jumper cable or wire or something which is affixed to the terminals of the ignition switch. I’m not quite sure how it goes, and have no idea how one does it.
It would seem an art worth knowing. All of those unlocked cars began to drive me to distraction. Better by far if the cars were locked up tight with their keys left in the ignition. Any fool can break a window.
Hide-A-Key-
I remembered, suddenly, the brilliant little device sold through the mails and at hardware stores and gas stations, a magnetized box in which a spare key could repose beneath a fender, theoretically available whenever needed. I’d bought one myself once, years ago, and had dutifully tucked an extra key into it and slapped it onto the underside of a fender. It was months before I needed it, and sometime during those months it had fallen off and was lost forever.
Did people still use them? I wondered. And I checked a variety of cars, looking in the logical places, on the undersides of the fenders, front and back, and felt foolish the first time, and felt like an idiot by the time I was key-hunting on the tenth or twelfth car. But ultimately I found a year-old Plymouth convertible whose owner had responded to the Hide-A-Key sales pitch. He had evidently bought the thing about the same time he had bought the car and had never touched it since. The Hide-A-Key was rusted and grime-covered. But it slid properly open, and the key fit quite neatly into the ignition.