“Not any woman. Not you.” His voice was soft with malice.
“No,” she said. “Not me. I don’t know who it is this time. But I can tell you one thing, it won’t last. It won’t last seven months.”
“That’s what you think.”
“I know it. You run through sex the way you run through money. They’re the same thing to you, something to soothe your itch and make you forget what a dismal loss you are.”
“You know it all, eh? All you know is what you read in your damn books. I’ll give you a little piece of information, Kate. This wouldn’t have happened if you’d given me a break when I asked you for it.”
“I’ve given you a lot of breaks, as you call them.” But she sounded a little defensive, for the first time. The lines of her back and shoulders softened, and she seemed to lean toward him. “Don? You’re in real difficulty, aren’t you? Is it really serious this time?”
“You’ll never know.”
“Couldn’t we be honest with each other, just this once? I’ll do what I can to help.”
“You will, eh?”
“Yes. Even if it did mean giving up the house. If that’s what you really need.”
“I don’t need anything that you have,” he said.
She recoiled as if from a blow. After a while she repeated his name. “Don. Why did Brand Church come here tonight?”
“Routine investigation.”
“It didn’t sound like that to me.”
“Were you eavesdropping?” He walked toward her.
“Certainly not. I couldn’t help overhearing your voices. You had a dreadful scene with him.”
“Forget it.”
“Don, was it about the murder?”
“I said forget it.” His fingers curled around the pipe and clenched, snapping the amber stem. His voice rose: “Forget all about me. I’m a dismal loss as you said. It’s not all my fault. There’s something wrong with this town, too. At least it wasn’t for me. And I had bad luck. If the government had gone through with the reopening of the Marine Base, the court would be coining money. I’d be rolling in it.”
She answered harshly, as if she had given him up: “You’d find a way to lose it. But blame the government if it makes you feel better. Blame me and the town and the government.”
He shook his broken-pipe at her. “A man can take so much. I’ve had my bellyful. I’m getting out.”
He started across the room toward the door. His wife called after him: “You don’t fool me. You’ve been planning this for weeks. You just don’t have the manhood to admit it.”
He stopped in his tracks. “Since when have you been interested in manhood? It’s the last thing that would appeal to you.”
“I’ve never been tested.”
“Take a look at me, then. Make it a good one. It will be your last.”
He thrust his face toward her, breathing heavily through distended nostrils. She laughed. It sounded like something delicate and brittle breaking inside of her.
“Is this what manhood looks like? Is this how it talks? Is this how a husband speaks to a wife?”
“What wife?” he said. “I don’t see any wife.” Kerrigan shaded his eyes with one hand and scanned the dissolving horizons of the room. Then turned, grinding his heel in the white carpet, and wrenched the door open. I heard his angry feet stamp up the stairs.
Kate Kerrigan drifted to the mantel and laid her head and her arm along its line. Her hair fell like ungathered sheaves across her face. I looked away from her.
The monkey-puzzle tree was sharply conventionalized against the red city sky. Below it Las Cruces lay tangled in its lights. The thickest, brightest cord in the net of lights was the yellow-lit freeway that carried the highway. The high-balling trucks and cars, from the distance at which I sat, were like children’s toys pushed without purpose across the face of midnight.
At the other end of the veranda a door opened. I pulled my legs up out of sight. Kerrigan stepped out, his shoulders bowed by a heavy leather suitcase in each hand.
“This is for good?” she said behind him.
“That’s for sure. I’m taking my own car, incidentally. And nothing else except my clothes.”
“Of course you’re leaving your debts.”
“The businesses ought to cover them. If they don’t it’s just too bad.”
She appeared in the lighted doorway, a pale figure holding out one tentative hand. “Where are you going, Don?”
He said with his back to her: “You’ll never know.”
“It’s strange that you’re able to walk away like this. Even you.”
“It’s better than being carried out on a litter,” he said over his shoulder. “So long, Kate. Don’t make trouble for me. If you do, you’ll get double trouble. I promise.”
She watched him go down the steps and along the walk to the street, where his car was parked. Her fingers clutched at her throat. They tore the pearl collar. The beads rattled like hail on the tiles.
Chapter 12
His double red taillight diminished down the slope, flashed at a boulevard stop, and disappeared. When I reached the boulevard, his car was a long block away, headed south toward the suburbs. I kept the block’s distance between us as far as the wye at the city limits. Then I closed in on him, cutting in and out through the highway traffic, past all-night businesses whose signs were like a neon postscript scribbled in the dirty margin of the city.
We were only a couple of miles from his motor court, and I thought that he was on his way there. Instead, he pulled out of the southward stream of traffic and turned in on the asphalt apron of a drive-in restaurant. Its parking space held two cut-down jalopies occupied by mugging couples, and a blue Buick coupe with battered fenders. As I went by, I saw Kerrigan draw up beside the Buick.
Next door to the drive-in stood a dark and unattended service station. I stopped beside its gas pumps. From where I sat, I could see the entrance to the drive-in and one glass wall of the building. A couple of car-hops, wan-looking under blue light, were talking behind the glass to a white-hatted short-order cook. Through the glass of the far wall, Kerrigan’s red Ford and the Buick coupe were dimly visible.
Kerrigan was standing between the two cars, talking to someone in the Buick. Its occupant, whose face was hidden from me, held out a package wrapped in dirty paper or newsprint. Kerrigan stuffed the package under his coat and returned to his car. The Buick’s headlights went on. It backed and turned toward the entrance. I caught a glimpse of a fur-collared leather jacket, a pale hard face framed in lank red hair. Bozey. A jet of adrenaline went through me. I followed him south out of town.
As the Buick fled into the dark perspective of the country, my excitement rose with my speed. I passed Kerrigan’s motor court at seventy. The speedometer climbed to seventy-five and held there. The Buick stayed in sight.
A few miles farther on, it slowed and seemed to hesitate, turned off the highway to the right. Its headlights swept a side road lined with cyclone fence. Then they were cut. I passed the intersection, slowing gradually, and saw its lightless shape crawling blind along the blacktop.
I braked hard, hit the dirt, cut my own lights and U-turned. When I rolled slowly back to the intersection, the Buick was out of sight and out of hearing. I turned down the blacktop after it and drove for nearly half a mile without lights.
The night was starless and moonless. A diffused radiance in the sky was enough to give me my bearings. The road ran straight as a yardstick between the high wire fences on either side. The sloping field to my left was gashed and plowed by erosion like a landscape on the dark side of the moon. The hangars of the disused air-base loomed on the other side. Around them concrete runways lay like fallen tombstones in the wild grass.