I was fed up. The old cynical detachment that had carried me through so many of these tirades was beginning to crack, for some reason, and I was losing my temper like a chump. I didn’t understand it. This was Barney Godwin? Being needled by a corn-fed blonde? Why didn’t I just pack and get out? It wasn’t worth it. I finished the beer, turned out the light, and lay down on the couch, staring moodily at the silvery sheen of moonlight beyond the basement windows. It was a long time before I went to sleep.
I awoke to coolness and the faint, gray beginnings of dawn. Even before my eyes opened I was aware that it was someone’s moving inside the room that had waked me, and then something settled softly over my body on the couch. I turned my head drowsily and looked up. She was leaning over me in a sheer nightgown, tucking the sheet about me. Still half asleep and without conscious thought I reached up and put my hand gently against her check. She dropped to her knees beside me.
“Barney,” she whispered wildly. “Barney, why do I do it?”
My arms tightened around her and for an instant I was caught up again in that old, wonderful, eternal woman-feel of her, the way it had been at first. I held her roughly, almost fiercely, and then I was fully awake and it was gone. Clumsy, clumsy, I thought mockingly. There is no room in the higher echelons of industry for impetuous high-school boys. Move over, son; you’re not even on the payroll. I stood a little way apart and watched myself with professional detachment as I went about consolidating the advance position, reflecting at the same time that in courtship the male could suffer no greater handicap than sincerity.
When I left to go downtown at seven thirty she was sleeping peacefully beside the cool freshness of the open bedroom window while a mockingbird erupted with the glittering and showy repertoire of a concert violinist in the magnolia just outside. I whistled as I backed the station wagon out of the drive under the big oaks.
Wardlow’s business district consisted of one street three blocks long. The highway traffic ran through it, slowed by twenty-five mile-an-hour speed limit signs at the city limits and one traffic light in the center of town where the bank, Headley’s Drug Store, Woolworth’s, and Joey’s Cafe stood on the four corners athwart the intersection of Main and Minden Streets. Most of the residential area lay to the north and west, largely on this end of Minden Street.
There were few cars about this early in the morning. I crossed Main when the light changed and drove on to the store. It was two blocks farther east on Minden, near the railroad tracks. There was little else over here—a fruit-packing shed, Homer Jolinson’s body-and-fender shop, and a used car lot. The store was a long brick building in the center of an otherwise vacant lot that took up most of the block. Around the sides and in front the lot had been covered with white pea gravel for a parking area. I drove around to the right side and parked.
The building had originally housed an automobile showroom and garage. The dealer had given up the ghost during the war years when there were no cars to be had. McCarran bought it for a low figure just before his death of a heart attack in 1952. He was already retired then, having sold his hardware store and farm implement agency the year before because of bad health, but the inactivity bored him so he had opened the small tackle shop in the front of this old building, more for a hobby than anything else. He was fond of hunting and fishing, and the place made a good spot for old cronies to hang out and second-guess the shots they’d missed and the bass that got away. He’d been shrewd enough to see the growing boom in small boats and outboards that had started right after the war, but his health and the fact he already had it made had prevented his doing much about it. He sold a few motors, and that was about it. In two years I’d built it up to where it cleared seven thousand a year.
There were big plate glass windows in front on either side of the door. I unlocked the door and went in. There were no partitions inside except that enclosing the small office on the right about a third of the way back and the motor repair shop at the extreme rear of the building. Up front, next to the windows, were the glass showcases that held fishing tackle and miscellaneous skin-diving equipment. At the left, opposite the showcases, was a counter behind which were the guns, rods, and water-skis. From there on back to the doorway leading into the repair shop the whole floor area was taken up with boats and trailers and the stock of outboard motors we kept on hand.
We didn’t open until eight thirty. I closed the door behind me, leaving it on the spring lock, and went into the office. It was partitioned off from the rest of the floor by varnished plywood panels seven feet high, and there was a window I’d had cut through the outer wall for ventilation. I opened it now, switched on a light because the whole interior was somewhat dim until the big sliding doors on each side had been opened, and sat down at the desk to get out some letters.
I was just signing the last one when I heard tires crunch on the gravel outside. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to eight, a little early for Otis to be showing up. I shrugged and started pawing through the drawers of the desk for a stamp. Now where was it Barbara used to keep them? Maybe I d had sense enough to leave them in the same place. . . . I stopped and looked up. Somebody had rattled the front door.
It couldn’t be Otis. He had a key. I stepped out into the showroom. An old station wagon was parked in front of the near show window and a tall girl with tawny hair was just turning away from the door. She walked out to the car and started to get in.
I stepped up front and opened the door. “Hello,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
She turned. I didn’t know her. “Are you open?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “But if it’s important . . .?
“I was supposed to pick up some motors,” she said. It was a nice, throaty voice, down in that end of the contralto range actresses sometimes use for a burlesque sexiness, but there was none of that in it. There was nothing in it, in fact, except indifference, faintly tinged with sullenness. She was supposed to pick up some motors, but if she didn’t it was all right with her.
“Sure,” I said. “What were they? Repairs?”
She nodded slightly. “Nunn. George Nunn.”
“Oh. Then you’re Mrs. Nunn?”
“That’s right,” she said with the same indifference. If it turned out I was Mrs. Nunn she wasn’t going to raise a stink about it.
“I think they’re ready to go,” I said. “Come on in.”
I pushed the door back and stood aside. She stepped up on the concrete walk and went past me. She was quite tall. I’m six feet two, so in the scuffed spectator pumps she was wearing she must have been close to five eight. Her legs were bare. The predominantly blue cotton dress she had on was just another number off the rack, well worn and often laundered, and while it was somewhat tight across the chest for a couple of somewhat obvious reasons I noted it only in passing. Now that bust-line architecture has become a basic industry, like steel and heavy construction, all the old pleasant conjectures are a waste of time and you never believe anything until the returns are in from the precincts. The cascade of tawny hair fell to her shoulders, bobbing a little as she walked and framing a dead-white face on which there was no expression at all, unless utter stillness is an expression. The eyes were a smoky gray, fringed with dark lashes that were almost startling against the milk-white skin, and the mouth had been good to begin with but she’d overpainted it into a sullen smear with too much of the wrong shade of lipstick. Well, it was her mouth, wasn’t it?