“What did you think of the verdict, Nancy?”
“I don’t want to think about it,” she said slowly. “The nightmare is over, that’s all.” Then she smiled and tapped her cigarette ashes into the ash tray. “You’ve been so good for me, Jim. I don’t know how I’d have gone through all this without you.”
He knew she meant it, and he knew she had not intended it as an opening. “Made any decisions yet? Like where you’re going to live, and so on?”
“I’ll stay where I am for a while, anyway. Eventually, I suppose, I’ll sell the house and take an apartment in town.”
Layton picked up his teacup. “Any idea yet how Tutter was fixed? I mean, how he left you?”
“Tutter’s lawyer says I don’t have anything to worry about. I won’t know the details of the will till after the funeral.” She tamped out her cigarette. “I think, Jim, I’d like to go.”
“Sure.”
She drove him to Joe’s. The new windshield had been installed.
“We picked it up secondhand for forty bucks,” Joe said. “Plus twelve-fifty for labor, and I put in new wiper blades. This be a charge, Mr. Layton?”
“Who carries all that cash?” Layton grinned. “Thanks, Joe.”
“I still think you’re nuts,” Joe said.
When he had walked back to the Jaguar Layton said, “The buggy’s all set, Nancy. You’re a doll to have waited.”
“Will you be at the funeral?”
“My editor told me to cover it. Sort of a wrap-up.”
Nancy King bit her lip. He had to force himself to look away. What a rotten thing to have said to her, he thought. And he thought, Those lips of hers.
“I’m sorry, Nancy. I don’t want the assignment. I want to forget Tutter King. I want to forget you were ever Tutter King’s wife. I want...” It poured out in spite of him.
“Jim, Jim,” she said, in a kind of pain. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the old fear in her eyes, the fear he had seen the instant he spotted her in King’s studio. “I know what you want. I know.” Her gloved hand on his felt like a branding iron.
“And what do you want?” Layton asked roughtly.
“I can’t... I mustn’t... tell you.”
“You’ve told me!” Great joy flooded him. “Nancy, let me come with you. I want to touch you, hold you, spend all night just looking at you—”
She threw him a wild, tender, confused smile and stepped on the gas. But she had to stop for some passing traffic before she could pull out into the street, and he stood there like a yokel, the carbon of the charge slip fluttering unnoticed from his fingers, gaping at her profile. That exquisite profile. Caught in a cameo moment...
Cameos yet.
Layton came to himself.
There was no way out.
He was finally, irrevocably, painfully, ecstatically in love.
17
Layton loved-hated every second of it.
The usual hundreds of rubbernecks surrounded the funeral home. Most of them were teenagers. The police had stretched ropes along each side of the walk from the curb to the entrance and they were busy pressing the crowds back. Put an emcee here with a hand mike and a faceful of teeth, Layton thought, plus a couple of those blockbuster searchlights, and it might just as well be a Hollywood premiere or a supermarket opening.
The mortician’s assistants and the police were doing the usual quiet, efficient Los Angeles job of screening would-be-gate crashers and giving them the usual quiet, efficient bum’s rush. As Layton came up, a dilapidated blonde with blood in her eye was being escorted by a police officer from the inviting open walk into the jam behind the ropes.
“But I tell you Mrs. King is a close personal friend!” the woman was yelling.
“Sure, lady, sure, that’s why you don’t know her address.” The officer grabbed Layton with his free hand. “Hey, bud, where do you think you’re going?”
Layton showed his press card. The officer let go, and Layton trudged up the walk and had to produce his card again, and finally he achieved the sanctuary.
An usher with a trained voice — ten to one he’s on the books of Central Casting, Layton thought — directed him to the main chapel. “The left two front rows are reserved for the press,” the usher said in soft, reverent tones.
“Lucky press,” Layton said. The man looked at him, startled. Layton shrugged and stepped into the chapel. It had a capacity of over two hundred, but large patches of empty seats told him that in Hollywood’s view the Tutter King funeral was a bright area. King had died under a cloud. The Hollywood that counted disliked clouds. And the great majority of King’s friends — the only friends he had apparently had — who could have filled a hundred chapels twice the size, were not being allowed in.
Layton looked through the occupied seats for Nancy. He saw Hubert Stander and, surprisingly, Mrs. Stander; he saw George Hathaway; he saw young Wayne Mission and Nora Perkins, presumably privileged because of their fan-club status; he saw Hazel Grant, dabbing at her eyes (but she had had a new rinse for the occasion, merrily blue as the sky); he saw a few of the KZZX technical staff, and a morose-looking man in rumpled clothing he recognized as the top-flight press agent who had handled Tutter King’s account; but Lola Arkwright was not there, and of Nancy there was no sign.
Of course, he thought. They’ve put her in the “family” room, for privacy. She won’t come in until just before the service starts.
The temptation to join her became so strong that an ache developed in his groin. To discipline himself he walked down to the front of the chapel and deliberately stopped before the casket.
It was set in a forest of flowers. The headpiece had been removed, and Tutter King was looking at the ceiling.
It was queer to think of a corpse looking at a ceiling when the lids had been forcibly shuttered over the eyes. But it was really no queerer than those ancient Roman statues with blanks where the eyes should be — blanks that looked at you quite as convincingly as the real thing.
It was even queer to think of Tutter King in relation to this waxworks figure in the bronze casket. This was the Tussaud dummy in the mould of a man that Nancy had fondled and warmed and been fondled and warmed by for ten years. This thing, when it had blood in its veins instead of embalming fluid, stuck an ice pick into its living heart. Saith the state of California. Saith Jim Layton of the Los Angeles Bulletin: This thing was foully done in by a grand larcenist of its breath and being who’s getting away with it.
And I’m inheriting its wife.
And I’m glad. Jim Layton, the last honest man, is so damn full of gladness it’s become a hurt in the groin.
Layton started at a tap on his shoulder.
“Looks pretty good, doesn’t he?” said the dry sotto of Sergeant Harry Trimble.
“Hello, Sergeant.”
“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to say over the bum that’s been degutted and laid out, isn’t it?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’m kind of at loose ends. I don’t like loose ends, Layton.”
“Neither do I.”
They stared down at what was left of Tutter King.
“This one’s going to haunt me till I’m lying where he is,” the one-eyed detective muttered, “Ah, let’s sit down.”
Layton slipped into the aisle seat in the row immediately behind the press section. His colleagues gave him a unified glare, then turned back to their chores.
The sergeant sat down beside him.
The hell with them, Layton thought. The hell with you, too, he said silently to the detective at his side. I know what I want and, I’ve got it... He grinned deeply inside. He could imagine what the boys of news town would be saying when Lonesome Jim Layton took unto his bosom the midnight-haired widow of Tutter King.