“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.” He chewed on the cigar, puffed on it, blew out another cloud of smoke. We were riding two levels, I thought suddenly. There was something underneath everything he said, something I could only half hear. “She didn’t know I was guilty,” he said softly. “That’s it right there, in a nutshell. Now she knows.”
I didn’t have anything to say.
“She’s in a bad way, Bill. Maybe she’s worrying about what’s going to happen to me. Maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe she can’t accept the fact I killed Milani. Whatever it is, it’s changed her. And I don’t like it.”
“How do you mean?”
“She’s tense and nervous and depressed. The tension and the nervousness—that’s understandable, that’s not so dangerous. But the depression bothers me. I’m afraid of it.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid. Afraid she might—might do something rash.”
The counterman brought Murray’s coffee and my ham sandwich. I took a bite and sipped at my coffee. I put the sandwich down, turned, looked at him.
“I’ve only been out of jail a few hours,” he said. “Maybe things will change. I’ve tried to perk her up, tried to reassure her that there’s nothing to worry about, that Nester figures we have a good chance to get clear on temporary insanity. If she were just worried about me, I could probably talk her out of the mood she’s in. But I think there’s something else.”
“What?”
He took a long sip of coffee. He didn’t look at me when he talked. “Joyce came from a less than ideal background,” he said. “I suppose you know that.”
“I didn’t.”
“Well,” he said. “At any rate, she’s extremely conscious of social position, has been ever since we were married. I’m no psychiatrist, Bill, but I’ve got enough sense to know she feels insecure in the position she’s gained through marriage to me. And now she sees that position as shaky. She thinks we can’t hold up our head in this town any longer. She sees her whole world crumbling around her, and the result is a pretty terrifying depression. I’m afraid of it, to tell you the truth. Afraid of what she might do.”
I didn’t answer him. Everything had a funny ring to it, an odd feeling. I felt as though our roles had been reversed. I was supposed to be the one on the inside while he was swimming in dark waters. But everything was getting scrambled. I had the uncomfortable feeling he knew things I didn’t know, and that I was way off in a corner somewhere. Depressed? Anxious about her social position? It didn’t sound much like Joyce. Maybe she was putting on an act for his benefit, maybe he just had things ass-backwards. But I couldn’t help getting the impression he had somehow taken the ball away from me.
“Bill, I shouldn’t have bothered you. I don’t know what you can do—”
“That’s what I was wondering.”
“Unless you could talk to her,” he said. “You might have some influence over her.”
“Me?”
He nodded. “She seems to think a lot of you. You must have made a good impression on her.”
“I hardly know her,” I said.
He let that go right on by. “She has a bottle of sleeping pills,” he said. “Or had. I—I took them out of the medicine chest, spilled them into the toilet and threw the bottle away. That’s how worried I am.”
“You don’t think—”
“That she’ll kill herself? I certainly hope not. But I don’t know what to think any more, Bill.”
We batted it around for ten or fifteen minutes. The conversation ran out of gas and I made up something about another appointment and having to run. I caught the check, he argued, I paid, he left the tip, we left the restaurant. He crossed to his car and I to mine and that was that. I returned to my office long enough to cancel a couple of appointments and retrieve a few things I wanted from my desk. Perry Carver and I tossed some small talk at each other. Back at my place I broke the seal of a fresh bottle of Cutty Sark. Then I sat in a chair and tried to get some thinking done.
One fact emerged. I was finished with this town and it was finished with me, for all practical purposes. My working for Perry Carver had been a kick at the beginning, more because the job was something new than because of anything else. Now the job wasn’t new any more. And jobbing Murray Rogers had been exciting enough in a sort of scummy way, but that too was finished with now. He had been neatly boxed, and whether or not he got off without a jail sentence, Joyce would have what she wanted. She could divorce him with no trouble at all and could pick up a healthy settlement in the process.
And my part of the proceeds? Gone and forgotten, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want Murray’s money now and I didn’t want Murray’s wife. I wanted to do what a grifter does when the setting turns sour. I wanted to take off.
Hell, I could do it. Murray was nailed to his guilty plea, and to Joyce it didn’t much matter if I stuck around or not. A day, two days—time to clean out the bank account and pay off the money due on the Ford and straighten myself out with Perry Carver. And then I could leave. No hits, no runs, no errors—well, maybe a few errors, come to think of it. And a great many men left on base.
So I’d drive out Main Street in a day or two, and this time I would take that right turn at the Thruway entrance, and pick up the ticket, and drive the four hundred miles to New York. And after two hours making the rounds of a few right places I would make the proper contacts and work the proper connections and get ready to spend the rest of my life doing what I was evidently born to do—plucking pigeons and shearing lambs with false shuffles and crimp cuts and hold-outs and second deals.
But there was something I had to take care of first, a bridge that had to be burned correctly. I waited until it was about the right time. Then I picked up the phone and dialed the number.
She answered right away.
“Barbara,” I said. “This is Bill.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Are you busy tonight?”
“No.”
“Dinner? I’ll pick you up around six?”
“Fine,” she said.
I put down the phone and wondered just how I would tell her that she wouldn’t be seeing me again.
15
Barbara Lambert was such a very damned fine girl. If she had been aggressive or cheap or mercenary or a nymph or anything like that, then there would have been no need to tell her in the first place and telling her would have constituted no major problem. But she was a very damned fine girl, and I would have no fun telling her we were quits.
I told her at the end of the dinner. We went to the Evergreen and had rare steaks and baked potatoes, and I told her over coffee. I set my cigarette in the enameled ashtray and put my coffee cup in its saucer and spoke her name.
“Go ahead,” Barb said.
“Go ahead?”
“Go ahead and tell me,” she said.
She was especially attractive that night. The blond hair gleamed, the blue eyes struck sparks, the knit dress was tight around the soft curves of her body. But her lips were set now and her fingers gripped the cigarette she was smoking almost tightly enough to break it in half.
I said, “I’m leaving town in a few days.”
“For how long?”
“Permanently.”
She didn’t say anything. She nodded, digesting the information along with dinner.
“Why, Bill?”
“Reasons.”
“Reasons you want to talk about?”
“Well—”
“You don’t have to, Bill.”
This last said softly, quietly, with the head lowered and the sentence trailing off. “Oh, hell,” I said. “It’s no great secret. Things aren’t working out here, that’s all. I’m the old square peg in the round hole, that bit.”